Page 154 of Puck the Coach's Son
“Maddox.”
“Mm.”
My hand flattens over his sternum.
“I like who I am here.”
He turns around in my arms.
His eyes are wet. Not from the water.
He doesn't say anything. He puts a hand on the back of my neck. He leans his forehead against mine. The water is hitting the side of his shoulder now and spraying out across the tile, and it's warm and loud and close, and he just stands there and holds my face to his face until the wet in his eyes isn't separate from the water anymore.
“I like who you are here,” he says.
“Yeah?”
His nose brushes mine.
“I like who you are anywhere, Theo. Here's just easier.”
“Yeah.”
His hand slides down my spine. His other hand finds mine and pulls it against the tile above our heads, palm flat, and his mouth is on my jaw, my ear, my throat. His hand that's holding mine flat against the tile goes tight. His other hand slides down the inside of my thigh and he lifts it onto his hip and he is already hard against my hip and he has been since I came into the bathroom, and I wrap my leg around him the way I have learned to, and I wrap my arm around his neck and I let him press me back against the warm wet tile.
“We did this this morning,” he says against my mouth.
“Do it again.”
His teeth catch my lower lip.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
The thing we have now. This. The bottle is on the shower shelf where we keep it because this is a thing we do. His fingers are careful, slow, patient. He watches my face the whole time. He has never stopped watching my face. Not in Frosthaven. Not in Blackridge. Not in a shower in a rented apartment in July with a dog we own on the other side of the door and a man on the other side of a phone sayingI'll think about it.
He slides into me. The tile is warm against my back. His forehead comes to my forehead. His hand behind my head cradles the back of my skull so the tile can't touch it. He has been doing that, the skull-protection thing, since we moved here. Small courtesies I didn't notice until I did. His other hand slides under my thigh to hold me open and steady.
He moves.
Slow. Close. He kisses me while he does it. He says my name into my mouth and I say his name into his mouth and he says, “I love you,” at a volume only I can hear, and I say it back without stopping what we're doing, because we say it every morning now the way some couples saypass the milk,and the saying of it has gone down into a deeper place in my body than it started.
I come against his stomach with his hand on me and his mouth on mine, and he comes inside me with my name in his teeth, and we stand there propped together against warm tile with the water going over both of us for a full minute after, breathing.
He's the one who finally moves. He reaches back and turns the water down cooler. He rinses us both. He washes my hair with the hand that isn't holding me up, because he knows I forget to when he's distracted me, and he rinses it with his fingers through, and he kisses my temple.
“Breakfast.”
“Yeah.”
He wraps a towel around my shoulders before his own.
“Pancake's going to shred a couch cushion if we don't get out here.”
“Let him.”
“No.”
