said. “It takes a lot of hard work to be so consistently miserable, you know. It’s so much easier to just smile.”
“Taking the easy way out is what’s wrong with the world today. The easy way is rarely the right way.”
“You sound like an old ass man. Like you’re about two seconds from pulling a camo-print Vietnam Veteran cap out of your back pocket and plopping it on your head while blaming all your bullshit problems on Michelle and Barack Obama.”
“Like I said, the easy way is rarely the right way.”
“Because the right way is obviously to walk around spitting poison in everyone’s eyes.”
“Obviously.”
“Who broke you, Aries?”
Jack’s eyes fell back to the TV, and the slow smile that had been spreading across his face fell with it.
“Ah.” Nina watched it happen, tossing wipe after wipe, all of which were soaked in his blood. “Is it the same woman you’re running from? Is she the one who broke you?”
His lips tightened.
“If you had any idea how much your face talks, you wouldn’t work so hard shutting the whole world out. Your face just welcomes it right back in. Your face snitches on you.”
He sighed.
“What’s your face telling me? Well, I’m glad you asked, Aries.” She ripped open the largest bandage in the tin. “Your face is telling me that you found yourself a woman just like me. A cyclone who swept in unforeseen, and wiped you out. A natural disaster who managed to blast open your hard shell just enough to get a peek at the pearl gleaming underneath. And, for whatever reason, she threw it back.”
Slowly, he lifted his eyes back to hers.
“And you don’t have the damnedest clue why.” She began easing the bandage over as much of the cut as she could, careful not to catch his hair. “Do you?”
Jack lifted his eyebrows.
“Don’t move your face,” she warned.
“Please finish.”
“Have I struck a nerve?”
“Only every single nerve that has ever existed inside of me since the day I was born. Twice.”
She laughed.
***
After tending to that petulant Adonis and his oozing wound, Nina couldn’t help moaning as the hot shower water smashed against her skin. It felt like heaven on earth as it soaked her hair, flattening it to her face and seizing every inch of her body. She closed her eyes and stepped directly under the spray, trying to push the vision of that Aries lawyer—and the white towel clinging to his strong waist by a hair—out of her mind.
She couldn’t. After soaping her hair and body from head to toe, washing the residue of the day’s events away, she went to work trying to get rid of the residue that man had left on her from the moment she’d laid eyes on him. There wasn’t enough soap in the world to get that job done, let alone in the half-full shower dispenser that was one good swipe from coming off the grimy tiles of that shower wall completely.
Bracing her hand on the wall, she allowed her eyes to flutter shut as the shower water splattered her face, and she pushed her fingers past her belly button and over the lips of her pounding pussy.
She bit her bottom lip as she pushed her fingers inside, letting them slide over her slippery walls. The pleasure claimed her as she pictured the unsmiling face that had left her so wet and ready. As her orgasm built with each stroke, she couldn’t help but wonder if the moisture on her forehead was a result of the hot shower water or the natural condensation that accompanied her orgasm, so powerful it hit her like a bulldozer and nearly brought her to her knees.
***
After brushing her teeth with the plastic wrapped, mini toothbrushes in the bathroom, Nina carefully put the brush back in the plastic and emerged. She caught eyes with Jack across the room. He’d switched out the towel for his black boxers, and hadn’t thought it necessary to put on his undershirt. In the midst of hanging their wet clothes in the closet,
Rebecca Hamilton, Conner Kressley