Christ, I’ve messed this up. But I’ve said it now and I can’t take it back. I can only flail in mortified silence until he finds his voice in the dark.
“To be clear…are we talking about the thing you’ve been fretting over a while now? The thing I knew nothing about?”
“That’s a pretty vague way of asking for clarity.”
Sol chuckles, and even though it’s strained, it’s like nectar to me. I love his laugh. His smile. The lines it carves into his face and the light in his eyes. “All right, but if I say it, and I’m wrong, you have to promise we’ll never speak of it again.”
An easy promise, because he’s not wrong, and the throbbing heat that’s plagued me all evening flares with fresh purpose, like it did when I heard his footsteps on the stairs. When I pictured him in the shower. When he slid into my bed smelling of the ocean, spiced rum, incense, and home. “I promise.”
Sol screws his lovely face into a cringe. A rough exhale escapes him. Then it’s gone. All of it. The apprehension, theawkwardness, and whatever else my fuckery is making him feel. Like he’s taken an invisible pill and washed it away, so he can turn his head with a clear gaze, wide open and so fucking present I don’t know what I ever did to deserve him.
“You’re scared to feel pleasure,” he says, softly enough that it’s almost a dream. “Because for so long you’ve only known pain, and Jackie, I’ll do anything to help you with that. Just tell me what you need.”
“I don’t know what I need.”
“Okay…” He rolls onto his side again, facing me with his bare chest, his tattoos more vivid in the murky light than any of mine. “You want to talk about it, so we can figure out what you’re really afraid of?”
“You know what I’m afraid of. I told you already.”
“Didn’t rationalise it, though, did we?”
“There’s nothing rational about fucking seizures.” I hate the bitterness that spills out of me. Sol doesn’t deserve it any more than Aras. But I can’t keep apologising to him. It upsets him—and fuck, Ican’tmake him cry again. Not tonight. Notever, though I know I surely will. “I—uh…”
Fucking hell. Where am I going with that? As my mouth stalls out and my brain spins, I tell myself I’m not sure. But it’s a lie. Iamsure. I’m just fucking scared and I shouldn’t be, not with Sol.
Breath snarled, I try again. Dig deeper for the truth. “I don’t remember anyone I’ve been with before, or what it felt like to be with myself, and I don’t want to. I just know that it used to feel good, and…”
Sol swallows. Hard. As if his throat is too tight for air. “And what?”
“I can’t face living without it forever, but…I don’t want to do it alone.”
Silence cocoons us again, but it’s different this time. Thicker, and humming with tension from a truth that barely scrapes the surface of how I feel. Of what I want. What I need. Of all the things I’ve said tonight and all the things I haven’t.
Sol isn’t breathing.
Isn’t moving, isn’t blinking.
Panic-laced regret ploughs through me, but he snaps to before it finds purchase, and if there’s one thing I appreciate about my broken brain—right now, at least—it’s the gift of dropping emotions at the side of the road as if they were never mine to begin with.
Sol draws a slow inhale and it consumes my every faculty. His gaze flickers over my face like he’s searching for the punchline to a joke, or a version of me that existed before my skull got split open. But he’s out of luck. This is what I am and I’m not fucking laughing.
He takes another breath. “Are you saying you want me to stay with you while you get off? So you feel safe if anything happens?”
No.
That’s not it, but it’s close enough to the ten-ton truth I find myself nodding, even though I’m so afraid he’ll agree to this ludicrous notion.
That he won’t.
Sol expels the breath he took a moment ago. Quiet and long, but it feels louder. As if we’re already closer, which is fucking stupid. All that’s happening here is he might stay while I have a wank—because that’s what he thinks I’m asking for.
What Ihaveasked him for without saying any of the words that might’ve made this less about mechanics and more about the fact that thinking about him and sex in the same breath has brought me back to life in ways I have no hope of ever explaining to him.
The thought staggers as I try to stand it upright. It’s such a fucked-up thing to be clear-headed one minute and utterly lost the next. To be scared of thinking too hard in case my head spins off my shoulders.
“Hey.” Sol really does move closer this time—close enough that his body heat hits my flank, seeping into my already simmering blood. “This doesn’t have to happen, tonight or ever. And it doesn’t have to be a thing. I can wait outside your door?—”
“Fuck that.”