Because he’ll help me. He’ll give me every penny he has and the shirt off his back to save a house I’m beginning to believe is cursed and there won’t be a thing I can do to stop him.
And so I deflect.
I change the subject to one I know will break his stare, and maybe even have him pulling away from me; a pain I brace for. “Are you ready to finish the conversation we started the other day?”
Jack grimaces, loosing a low rumble from the base of his throat. He presses his face into our joined hands and guilt licks at me with the spiked tongue of a spriggan. “I was, until I saw you.”
“What were you going to say?”
“Can’t remember.” He raises his head to give me a dry look, acknowledging the obvious lie. “But…”
“But?”
He growls again and shifts his weight a little. “I haven’t thought about sex in forever. Now I can’t stop and I don’t know why.”
A truth he rakes from his own personal abyss. One that has fear rising from mine—a feeling I have no right to claim. Not about this. “What kind of sex are you thinking about?”
Jack heaves a sigh. “I have no idea. It’s not specific…it’s, like…fuck, I don’t know. Just feelings, and I can’t tell if they’re mine.”
I’m too sleep-deprived to decipher a sentence like that. But I try anyway, for Jack’s sake. So he doesn’t have to do it himself. To say it twice and trip over the repetition.
Think, man.
I do and it finally clicks. He can’t tell if what he’s feeling is a memory or a present-day desire, but in the time it’s taken me to figure that out, he’s hyper-focused on my raw knuckles again. Tender fixation unleashed on me with no warning and I’m ludicrously aware of how it would feel if he ever looked at me like this if we were in bed for different reasons. Aware because I’ve felt itbeforeand I lost it.
Gods.
Too many emotions flame my body. Jack drags his thumb over some broken skin and I shut my eyes, searching for the shallow pain of a silly injury. Anything to mask the deeper wounds we both carry.
“Sol?”
I open my eyes to his earnest stare, dark brows pulled together as he zeroes in on me as though everything else on this earth has evaporated. As though he’s trying to solve me and we’ll both vaporise if he doesn’t. “Yeah?”
Jack’s still on his stomach. Still holding my hand. He lets go and reaches for my face, but his fingers tremble, and he changes his mind, tucking his hand away.
We’re not touching anymore.
Feels sensible.
Feelswrong.
But like everything I hate, I’m a slave to it. I lie like a corpse as he withdraws and let it break me, piece by cracked piece.
Come back, love. I miss you.
“I was wrong the other day.”
“Hmm?” I blink as if I’ve been asleep for a week, when the truth is I can’t remember the last time I shut my eyes for longer than a couple hours. “About what?”
Jack moves, bracing his fists on the bed and hopping over me, bare feet to the wood floor before I comprehend what’s happening.
He leaves the room.
Comes back a moment later with the first aid kit Skylar keeps stocked.
My knuckles.
He’s not done with them.