Always Together
They share a shower; it's faster and easier and tonight they're too tired for lovemaking, even while high on the Drift-hangover.
Steam billows – Mako likes her showers scalding and Raleigh doesn't seem to mind – and they lean against each other in the hot spray as though holding each other up. His back his warm and broad under her am, rising and falling with every heaved breath, and the keloid ridges of his scars fascinate her fingertips. His arm presses deep along the dip of her spine, and she drops her head back against the fingers that splay to cradle her nape.
Mako reaches up to scrub at a spot of oil that somehow splashed up near his temple, a darker smear in the bright of his hair. He holds still, eyes closed against the water's pulse only turning his cheek to rub against her wrist when she murmurs, "All clean."
"Thanks."
Slick hands skim crisp-scented soap across themselves and each other. Mako presses her fingers into the worst of his knots, he rubs his palms down the line of her spine. Raleigh combs his fingers through her hair to help get the water through, and bends down to steal a kiss – if it can be called stealing, since she kisses him back.
"Better not," he mutters, breaking away so their cheeks press together instead. "Or we'll end up on the cold tile again."
The laugh bubbles up. "You mean you will end up on the cold tile!"
"That's what I said."
But if they're too tired for sex, they're not too tired to stand there, wet and tender, held and holding, always together in the water's deluge and out of it.