Lovely

“That’s good, baby,” he says, like he’s commenting on the weather.

Then his hand finds your hip.

“Come here.”

Not a question. Just a tug—fingers hooked into the waistband of your bikini bottoms, pulling you toward his chair instead of the empty one next to him. You go, because of course you do, settling between his legs with your back against his chest. He’s warm—not just from the sun. He runs hot anyway, and the weed makes it worse. You can feel the heat of him through your whole back, radiating through the thin fabric of your bikini top.

He passes you the joint. You take a small hit, hold it, and cough on the exhale—not as bad as you used to, but still enough that he huffs a quiet laugh against your shoulder.

“Getting better,” he says, mouth still on your skin. He takes it back, hits it without effort, and the smoke curls up past both of you and disappears into the afternoon.

Neither of you says anything for a minute. Just the pool filter humming. Someone’s music a few houses over, muffled by the wall—something with a bass line, unidentifiable. A dog barking somewhere far enough away that it sounds more like atmosphere than noise. The high hasn’t hit you yet, but you can feel it at the edges—that first loosening, the way the light starts to look thicker, the way his heartbeat against your back starts to feel like something you could fall asleep to.

His fingers are moving. Your hip, your side, the tie of your bikini bottom. Not going anywhere. Just moving.

Then he starts talking.

———

“Did you know,” he says, and you’re already smiling because nothing good has ever started with Joe Burrow saying did you know while high, “that octopuses have three hearts?”

“I did know that, actually.”

“Three,” he repeats, like you didn’t hear him. His fingers are tracing your arm now, slow and aimless. “And when they swim, one of them stops beating. Just shuts off. So they don’t like swimming because it literally exhausts their heart.”

“That’s why they crawl.”

He goes quiet for a second, and you feel him nod against the top of your head. “That’s why they crawl,” he confirms, like you’ve both arrived at something important.

You take another hit. Smaller this time. Hold it longer. The exhale comes easier, and the high is starting to settle in now, warm and loose, like the sun got under your skin and decided to stay.

“I think about that sometimes,” he says.

“About octopuses.”

“About having three hearts.” His hand has moved to your stomach, palm flat, thumb dragging a slow line above your belly button. “Like, what would you even do with three. That seems like a design flaw. Too many things to break.”

“Or maybe it’s a backup system,” you say. “You lose one, you’ve still got two.”

He’s quiet long enough that you think he’s moved on. Then his arm tightens around you—just barely, just enough to feel.

“That’s a better way to look at it,” he says. Softer now. Not stoned-philosopher soft. Just soft.

The music from the neighbor’s yard has changed to a slower tempo. The ice in your glass is melting. His chest rises and falls behind you in a rhythm that feels like it’s pulling yours along with it.

———

The high is fully in you now. Everything is warm and slow and a little bit golden, like someone put a filter over the whole afternoon. You can feel your own pulse in your fingertips. Every place his skin touches yours buzzes.

He’s been quiet for a while. Not gone—you can tell by the way his fingers keep moving, still tracing those aimless patterns on your stomach. But he’s somewhere in his head, the way he gets when the weed pulls him down instead of out.

“I don’t think about football out here,” he says.

You don’t respond right away. Not because you don’t know what to say, but because you know how rare that sentence is. Joe doesn’t talk about not thinking about football the way other people do. For him, it’s not a complaint. It’s a confession.

“Like, at all?” you ask.

“Not the way I do at home.” His voice is low, unhurried. “In Cincy, it’s always there. Even when I’m not watching film or at the facility. It’s just—running. This background thing that never turns off.”

His thumb has stopped moving on your stomach. He’s pressing his palm flat against you now, like he’s grounding himself through the contact.

“Out here it’s quiet,” he says. “I just wake up, and it’s Tuesday or whatever, and I don’t have anywhere to be, and I just...” He trails off. You feel him exhale against your hair. “I didn’t know I could feel like this.”

You turn your head enough to see his jaw. The clench that usually lives there is gone. Has been gone for weeks, actually, but right now—high and warm and holding you in the sun—it’s so absent it’s almost startling. Like looking at a different version of him. Not a new one. Just one he doesn’t get to be very often.

“Like what?” you ask, quietly.

He doesn’t answer right away. His fingers start moving again—your hip this time, tracing the string of your bikini.

“Easy,” he says. “I feel easy.”

———

You don’t say anything back. You just settle heavier against him, letting your head fall back onto his shoulder, and his mouth finds your temple like it was already on its way there.

His hand is still on your hip. Still tracing the bikini string. But it’s different now—not aimless the way it was before. His thumb is following the line of it with something closer to intention, dipping just under the fabric, dragging along the crease where your thigh meets your hip.

He might not even know he’s doing it. That’s the thing about Joe when he’s high—his hands get ahead of him and starts doing things his brain hasn’t signed off on yet. And by the time he catches up, he doesn’t stop. Just commits.

You shift against him. Not a lot. Just enough that your hips press back into his, and you feel his breath change against your neck.

“You’re doing that on purpose,” he says. Low. Not a complaint.

“Doing what?”

His fingers tighten on your hip. “Moving like that.”

“I’m just getting comfortable.”

“Mhm.” His mouth drags from your temple down to the spot below your ear. Not a kiss. Just his lips, parted, resting there. Breathing you in the way he does when he’s high—like your skin is something he needs to memorize. “Real comfortable.”

The hand on your hip slides forward. Slow. Over your stomach, down, fingertips brushing the top edge of your bikini bottoms. He stops there. Not teasing—waiting. Letting the weight of his hand sit just above where you want it, his palm warm and heavy on your skin.

You exhale. 

“Joe.”

“Hm?”

“We’re outside.”

He leans in closer, mouth at your ear. “It’s my backyard.”

His fingers slip under the fabric. Not fast—nothing about him is fast right now. Just a slow drag down, and your breath catches hard enough that he feels it against his chest.

“There it is,” he murmurs. Mouth still at your ear. Smug and lazy all at once.

Your hand finds his thigh, gripping, because you need something to hold onto, and he’s all there is. The sun is still on both of you—your skin hot and damp, his chest slick against your back. Everything feels magnified. The calluses on his fingers. The chlorine smell off the pool. The bass line still thumping from somewhere over the wall, low enough that it almost matches your pulse.

He’s not rushing. He’s not even trying to get you there—not yet. Just touching you like he wants to know how you feel right now, in this exact moment, with the sun and the high and his hand between your legs. Curious more than urgent. Like he’s cataloging what makes you shift, what makes you hold your breath, what makes your nails dig into his thigh.

“You’re so warm,” he says against your neck, almost to himself. “You feel different when you’re high. Softer. Like everything’s—” He stops. Presses his mouth to your shoulder. “I don’t know. More.”

You can’t respond. Not with words, anyway. Your hips move instead, pressing into his hand, and he groans—quiet, low, more vibration than sound.

“Yeah,” he breathes. “Like that.”

His other arm wraps around your waist, pulling you tighter against him, and you can feel him hard against your lower back. He doesn’t do anything about it. He doesn’t shift or adjust. He just lets you feel it while his fingers keep moving—slow circles, no pressure, then more pressure, then less again. He’s paying attention the way he always does, reading you like something he wants to get exactly right, except the weed has stripped out all the urgency and left nothing but patience.

Your head drops back against his shoulder. Your eyes are closed. The sun is red through your eyelids, and his breath is hot on your throat, and his hand is moving so slow you could scream.

“Joe.” It comes out broken. “Please.”

“Please, what?”

You reach back, fingers sliding into his hair. “More. I need—”

“I know what you need.” His voice is thick. Honey-slow. “I’ve got you.”

His fingers push into you, and your spine arches off his chest. He catches you—arm tight around your waist, pulling you back against him, mouth open against the curve of your neck.

“Fuck,” he whispers. “You feel—”

He doesn’t finish. Just curls his fingers and lets the sound you make finish the sentence for him.

The lounge chair creaks under both of you, and neither of you cares. His fingers are moving with that same unhurried focus—in, curling, dragging out slow enough to make you dizzy. His thumb finds where you need it and presses, and your whole body jerks against him.

“Easy,” he says. The same word he used before, but it means something completely different now. “I’ve got you. Just feel it.”

And you do. You feel everything. The high has turned your skin into something electric—every point of contact between his body and yours is buzzing. His chest against your back. His thighs bracketing yours. The arm locked around your waist, forearm pressed flat to your stomach, holding you against him like he thinks you might float away.

You’re making sounds you’d be embarrassed about if you could think. But you can’t think. His fingers won’t let you. Every time you get close to a coherent thought, he changes the angle or the pressure, and it falls apart.

“You’re shaking,” he says against your ear. Not concerned. Pleased.

“Whose fault is that?”

He laughs—low, quiet, stoned. “Guilty.”

Your hand is still in his hair, gripping hard enough that it has to hurt, but he hasn’t said a word about it. His hips are moving in these slow, barely-there rolls against your back, like he can’t help it, like his body is chasing something his brain hasn’t caught up to yet.

“I want—” you start, but your voice dies when his thumb presses harder.

“Tell me.”

“I want you.”

“You have me.”

“Joe.” You tug his hair, pulling his face closer. “I want you.”

He goes still. Just for a second. His fingers stop, buried in you, and his breathing is ragged against your neck. You feel the moment he decides—the way his whole body tenses and then lets go, like something he was holding onto just snapped.

“Turn around,” he says. Rough. Not a request.

You pull away from his chest, and he lets you—barely. His hands stay on you the whole time, guiding your hips as you shift on the narrow chair, turning to face him, your knees on either side of his thighs.

And there he is.

Red-eyed. Flushed. Lips parted. His hair is a mess from your hands, and his shorts are doing nothing to hide how hard he is. He looks wrecked already, and you haven’t even touched him yet.

He looks up at you, and his hands settle on your thighs. Heavy. Warm. His thumbs pressing into the soft skin on the inside, just above your knees.

“There she is,” he says. Half-smile. Completely gone.

Something about the way he says it—like he’s been waiting for you to face him this whole time—cracks you both open. You laugh first, and then he’s laughing too, low and stoned and shaking under you.

His hands slide up. Slow. Over your thighs, your hips, your waist. He pulls you down onto his lap until there’s nothing between you but fabric and heat and the fact that neither of you has moved to fix that yet.

“You’re so pretty,” he says, squinting up at you against the sun behind your head. “It’s stupid. It’s stupid how pretty you are.”

“That’s the weed talking.”

“That’s me talking. The weed just let me say it out loud.”

His fingers find the tie at the back of your bikini top. He doesn’t pull it. Just holds the string between his fingers, rolling it, waiting.

“Can I?”

You nod.

One tug and it falls. He catches the fabric before it drops, pulls it away from you slowly, and tosses it somewhere behind the chair without looking. His eyes don’t leave your body. He stares—openly, unhurried, with none of the composure he usually wears like armor. The weed and the sun and the want have stripped all of it out, and what’s left is just him, looking at you like he’s trying to figure out how you’re real.

His hands come up to your waist. He pulls you closer and presses his mouth to your sternum. Just rests there. Breathing. His thumbs are tracing the underside of your breasts, barely touching, like he’s got all day and plans to use every second of it.

“Joe,” you whisper. Your hands are in his hair again.

“I know.” He kisses your chest. Then lower. Then the curve of your breast, open-mouthed, tongue dragging slowly across your skin. “I know. I’m getting there.”

“You’re taking forever.”

“We’ve got forever.” He says it into your skin, simple and stoned and certain, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world.

You reach between you. His stomach tenses under your fingers—a sharp breath, his abs contracting when you trace the line of hair below his belly button and keep going. Your palm presses over him through his shorts, and his head drops back against the chair.

“Fuck,” he breathes. Eyes closed. Jaw slack. His hips push up into your hand without permission, just once, and then he catches himself. Tries to.

“Don’t do that,” you say.

He opens his eyes. “Do what?”

“Hold back.” You press harder. Watch his throat work. “You don’t have to out here.”

Something moves across his face. That same recognition from earlier—like you’ve named a thing he didn’t know he was doing. His hands flex on your hips. His jaw loosens.

“Yeah,” he says, voice rough. “Okay.”

You lift up enough for him to push his shorts down, and he does—just enough, shoving the waistband past his hips with one hand while the other stays on you. Like he can’t not touch you for even the two seconds it takes.

You push your bikini bottoms to the side. His eyes drop to watch, and the sound he makes—low, almost pained—hits you right in the chest.

“Come here,” he says. Both hands on your hips now, pulling you forward. “Come here, come here.”

You sink down onto him slowly. The high makes everything louder—the stretch, the heat, the way his fingers dig into your hips hard enough to leave marks neither of you will notice until tomorrow. His mouth falls open, a strangled groan caught in his throat, and his head drops forward against your collarbone.

“God,” he manages. “Oh, my god.”

You don’t move. Neither does he. Just both of you breathing, adjusting, feeling everything at twice the volume. The sun is hot on your back. His chest is hot against yours. The lounge chair groans under the shift of your weight, and somewhere a car door shuts, and a bird is going off in a tree, and the world is still happening out there, on the other side of the wall, while you sit in his lap and feel him pulse inside you.

His hands slide up your back. Slowly. Fingers spread wide, pulling you into him. He tilts his head up and kisses you—sloppy, stoned, all tongue and no coordination. You can taste the pineapple juice and the weed, and underneath it, just him.

“Move,” he whispers against your mouth. “Baby, please move.”

You do. Slow. A roll of your hips that barely counts as movement, but his whole body responds—hands tightening on your back, breath punching out of him, his hips lifting to meet yours like he couldn’t stop himself if he tried.

“Just like that,” he says. Barely words. More air than voice. “Fuck. Just like that.”

The pace stays slow because neither of you can make it anything else. The high has turned everything syrupy—your limbs, your thoughts, the rhythm between you. Every time you rise up and sink back down, it feels like it takes a full minute. Like time is moving through honey, and you’re both stuck in it, and neither of you wants out.

His mouth is everywhere. Your throat. Your collarbone. The swell of your breast. He’s not kissing so much as tasting—open-mouthed and wet and unfocused, dragging his lips across whatever skin he can reach. His hands are the same. Roaming. Restless. Up your spine, down your sides, gripping your ass, then back to your hips to pull you down harder.

“You feel—” He shakes his head against your chest. “I can’t. I can’t describe it. Everything is just—”

“I know,” you whisper. Because you do. Your skin feels like it’s humming. Every nerve is dialed up and spread out at the same time, like the weed took everything your body can feel and turned the volume all the way up.

You plant your hands on his chest and push yourself upright. His eyes open—heavy, glassy, red-rimmed—and he looks up at you with an expression so open it almost hurts. No filter. No composure. No, carefully constructed anything. Just Joe, high and sun-drunk and buried inside you, looking at you like you’re the only thing that exists.

“Don’t stop,” he says. His voice cracks on it, and he doesn’t care. “Don’t stop, don’t stop.”

You roll your hips again. Deeper this time. His head falls back against the chair, and his hands clamp down on your thighs—hard, bruising, holding on like the chair might tip and take both of you with it.

The lounge chair is creaking in a rhythm now. Steady and obscene, and you’d laugh about it if you could think about anything other than the way he feels inside you—thick and deep and hitting the exact right place every time your hips meet his.

“Baby,” he grits out. His stomach is tensing under your palms. His breathing has gone short and ragged. “Baby, I’m—”

“I know.” You lean down, mouth against his ear. “Me too.”

His arm locks around your waist. Pulls you flush against him so there’s nothing between you—chest to chest, skin to skin, sweat and sunscreen and chlorine. His hips start moving faster, taking over, fucking up into you with a desperation that doesn’t match anything else about this lazy, hazy afternoon.

“Look at me,” you say, and he does. Immediately. No hesitation. His eyes find yours and stay there—blown wide, barely any blue left, and so completely unguarded that it feels like seeing something sacred.

He comes first. You feel it—the stutter in his rhythm, the way his whole body locks up, his arm crushing you against him as he groans into your neck. Not loud. Just wrecked. A sound that starts in his chest and gets caught somewhere in his throat, and his hips jerk once, twice, and then he’s pressing as deep as he can get and holding you there.

That’s what tips you over. The feel of him letting go—the sound, the grip, the way his face looks when he’s not holding anything back. It rolls through you slow and devastating, starting low and spreading outward until your thighs are shaking against his hips and you’re gasping into his hair and everything goes white and warm and infinite.

———

The pool filter hums. The bird is still going off in that tree. The bass line from the neighbor’s yard has changed to something you almost recognize but can’t name and don’t care enough to try.

Neither of you moves.

His arms are still around you—loose now, heavy, his fingers barely twitching against your lower back. His face is buried in your neck, and his breathing is slow and damp against your skin. You can feel his heartbeat through his chest, still coming down, still faster than normal.

Your forehead is on his shoulder. Your legs are jelly. The sun is on your back, and his hands are on your skin, and you’re pretty sure if someone asked you your name right now, you’d get it wrong.

He speaks first. Barely.

“I can’t feel my legs.”

You laugh—weak, shaky, muffled against his shoulder. “Good.”

“No, like—” He shifts under you and winces. “I think the chair ate my spine.”

“That’s what you get for not going inside.”

“I’m not apologizing for that. I’m never apologizing for that.” His arms tighten. A lazy squeeze. “That was—”

He doesn’t finish. Just exhales. Long and slow and satisfied, the kind of breath that carries the last of the tension out with it.

You lift your head enough to look at him. He’s a mess. Hair going in four directions. Eyes barely open, so red they’re almost pink. There’s a mark on his shoulder that you don’t remember making and a sunburn starting across his nose.

He looks like the happiest person on the planet.

“What?” he says, catching you staring.

“Nothing.” You brush his hair back from his forehead. It’s damp and warm and sticks to your fingers. “You just look really good right now.”

“I look destroyed.”

“Same thing.”

He grins. Slow and crooked and so completely stoned. His hand comes up and tucks a strand of hair behind your ear, then stays there—palm against your cheek, thumb tracing your bottom lip.

“Stay,” he says.

“I’m literally on top of you.”

“No, I mean—” He blinks. Slow. “Out here. Don’t go inside yet. Just stay.”

You settle back against his chest. His arms fold around you again, easy, automatic, like his body already knows the shape of this. The lounge chair groans under the rearranging but holds. His chin rests on top of your head, and his thumb draws slow circles on your shoulder.

The sun is lower now. Not setting yet, but getting there—that golden hour light that makes everything look like a photograph. The water in the pool is still. The music has stopped. Even the bird has finally shut up.

“Hey,” he says after a while. His voice is thick with sleep.

“Hm?”

“The octopus thing.”

You smile against his chest. “What about it?”

“Three hearts.” His words are starting to slur, going slow and heavy at the edges. “But they only need one to crawl.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” His arms tighten one more time. His mouth presses to the top of your head.

“One’s enough,” he says.

He’s asleep before you can answer. You close your eyes. The sun keeps going. You stay.