Page 166 of Jax
The bathroom door opened, and he lowered me onto the edge of the tub with the care of someone who knew I might fall apart again if he moved too quickly. Once he knew I was not going to topple over, he set about lighting candles and turning on the water to fill the tub. Steam began billowing around me,carrying the fragrance of the bath bomb he tossed into the near-scalding water.
And then he sank to his knees. Jax, always choosing to bow when it mattered most. His fingers brushed mine, the question so soft it barely needed words. “Can I undress you?”
The nod came without hesitation, but it felt like more than permission. It felt like surrender, like the last of my armor falling quietly to the floor between us. My body responded before my mind could panic, though the fear still crept in, tight in my chest, clawing at my ribs. The memory of other eyes, other hands. The kind that tied me to chairs and took my life from me. I felt the echo of those ghosts for half a second… until Jax touched me like I was art, not aftermath.
He peeled the fabric from my body slowly, as if each piece held a weight he was honoring. My shirt. My bra. The lace clinging damp between my thighs. He didn’t look away. He took me in completely: every rope mark, every pressure bruise, every shiver in my skin. His gaze was ocean-deep and fire-warm, the kind of stillness that follows a storm but leaves the air reverent and alive. “You are…” His voice faltered, his throat working around the words. “Fucking breathtaking. Not just like this. But because of this. Because you let me see all of it.”
He didn’t touch me then. He helped me into the water first.
The heat curled around my sore limbs like a balm for overstimulated nerves. I sank into it with a gasp that wasn’t quite pain, wasn’t quite relief, just something whole and overwhelming. I curled into the warmth, let my head fall back, and allowed the ache in my bones to dissolve into stillness.
Jax moved as though time didn’t apply to him. He rolled up his sleeves, dipped a cloth into the bath, and began to bathe me, but what he did wasn’t washing. It was devotion. His hands moved with the knowledge of a man who had witnessed every place I’d broken, and touched each one with grace. He movedthe cloth across my body as if revealing something sacred he had made in the dark, and was now bringing fully into the light. His thumb grazed the hollow of my throat, trailed lower, sweeping over the curve of my breast, every motion slow and sure.
When he reached the places most tender, where the rope had bitten into my arms, where faint marks still mapped the story of what I had carried, he bent to press his mouth against them. No ceremony. No sound. Just lips on skin, reverent and raw. And I cried again, though not as before. These weren’t screams but softer tears, washed free of fear.
“I want you in here with me,” I whispered, reaching through the steam.
He didn’t pause. He stood and stripped, baring skin marked with memory and strength, his body a map of survival, and the softness he’d reclaimed inside it. When he stepped into the tub, the water rose like it welcomed him.
Then he was holding me again. My back to his chest. His thighs beneath mine. One arm across my belly, the other wrapped over my heart like he knew how to cradle even the parts of me I still held gently. He didn’t speak. He just breathed, our ribs rising and falling in quiet rhythm, our bodies floating in a silence that felt like understanding. The water stilled around us as if even it knew we were something sacred now, soaking in the hush that follows ruin.
His lips found my shoulder, then my neck, then the hollow beneath my jaw. Each kiss was soft enough to break me all over again. Not from pain. From the proof that gentleness could still undo me. But beneath that sweetness, I felt the tension in him—not loud, but humming. In the way his fingers flexed against my ribs. The shift of his hips beneath mine. The breath he didn’t quite release near my ear. It lived in the quiet, unspoken, waiting for one of us to reach for more.
And still, I hesitated. Not out of fear. But because I wanted him too much. Because asking for more in a moment already this tender felt like tempting the spell to break. What if I shattered what we’d built just by wanting more than he was ready to give? What if the door only stayed open as long as I didn’t push it wider?
But I was done shrinking around my longing.
So I turned. Slowly. My legs slid over his lap as I straddled him, water cascading between us as our bodies aligned, mouth to mouth, chest to chest, breath to breath. Everything in me pressed against everything in him.
“Take me again,” I whispered, voice soaked in truth. “But this time… don’t fuck me like I’m breaking. Love me when you do it.”
His breath shuddered against my skin.
“Stella.” My name sounded like sin in his mouth. Like salvation. Like the thing he hadn’t dared pray for, but found anyway. “I already do.”
His hands came up to cradle my face, thumbs swiping over wet cheeks, and then his mouth was on mine.
It wasn’t a kiss made for lust. It was the kind of kiss vows were made for. Mouths open, tongues tangled, breath stolen and shared. He kissed me like the world had stopped outside this room, and the only thing left was us—this heat, this water, this ache.
When he entered me, it wasn’t frantic.
It wasdeep.
A slow stretch that stole the air from my lungs and left something holy in its place. I sank onto him with a moan that was part sob, part prayer, partfinally, and he held my hips like I was something wild and sacred, something to be cherished and ridden until I forgot my own name and remembered onlyhis.
“You feel like fire,” he rasped, jaw clenched. “Like I could die inside you and it would be worth every second.”
I moved with him—slow rolls of my hips, the drag of wet skin, the ache of pleasure turning sharp at the edges. His hands slid up my back, down again, tracing every place I’d loosened for him, every part of me that had opened, bloomed,broken.
“I’ve got you,” he murmured, again and again, like a litany. “I’ve got you, I’ve got you, I’ve got you.”
And when I shattered for the second time that night, I did it wrapped around him, sobbing into his mouth, my body trembling from the sheer force of being loved so deeply I couldn’t hold my shape.
I wasn’t just falling apart. I was being rewritten. Every sob that broke through my chest carved a space for something new. With every breath he gave me back, he stitched something torn. I didn’t just climax, Isurvivedit. I lived through the letting go.
He came with a growl buried in his throat, arms locked tight around me as he poured everything into that moment—heat, hunger, grief, and reverence. Every inch of him claimed by the act of loving me as I was.
When it was done, we didn’t move. Not right away. He held me in his lap, the water cooling around us, his lips brushing whatever skin they could find—my shoulder, my temple, the corner of my mouth.
