My pulse misfires. Savage frustration rips me apart, but I swallow it and kick the trousers away.
It leaves me in my underwear, a scenario so frequent it feels like it happens every day. Butagain, this time feels different, heavier, and I wonder if that’s how it’s going to be now. Ifsomething has shifted too far from reality and we’ll never get it back.
Grief-laden anxiety grips me. I can’t even say what’s changed. Only that it has and I hate and love how Jack’s looking at me right now. How Iwanthim to look at me, when really, he needs me to get warm. So I can get dry and he can go back to his life.
I slide my hands to my waistband. Jack tracks the motion. Barely. But it happens, and my skin tingles, my throat tight, and gods how I wish he had a single clue what he does to me. That he craved the hitch in my breath and the zip in my blood. The heat that’ll pool in my dick if I don’t catch it in time.
Look away.
I need him to.
I’ll die when he does.
“Sol.”
My own stare has hazed out.
I wrestle it back and realise Jack has moved beyond the doorway. That he’s closer, and in the cramped bathroom it means every breath I take is his oak and musk scent. It means the warmth touching my bare shoulders isn’t mine—it’s his—and I’m losing the will to recover even an illusion of self-control.
That’s not fair.
It’s not. I’ve spent a lifetime locking this down. Endless days and nights soul-to-soul with him, through the good times, the bad, and the times so brutal and awful I thought each breath would be his last.
Storms and terrors.
And yet somehow we’re still here.
Somehow I’m basically naked with Jack Gallagher bearing down on me and I have to find yet another way to survive.
Don’t say my name again.
Gods, please don’t say my name.
He doesn’t. He stops in front of me and slowly raises his arm, a subtle tremor in the hand he presses to my chest, palm splayed over my racing heart. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
Jack’s thumb traces a line of ink, a faint brush along a shadowy sea sprite. “For being weird.”
“You’re not weird, Jackie.”
His gaze flashes from my skin to my eyes and we’re back where I imagined we were that night in the kitchen. “Ifeelweird.”
“How?”
“I don’t know.” His thumb stills and I steel myself for the gut-wrenching sensation of him reclaiming his hand.
But that doesn’t happen either.
A heartbeat passes.
Two.
Then he speaks. “I hate it when you’re cold.”
“I’m not cold.”
“You are sometimes, and you don’t know it, and I fuckinghateit.”