Jack rubs his thumbs over my sternum. “He said Folk knew me too well…I think. And he noticed, but his own head was too fucked to see what that meant, even when Folk all but admitted it to him a while back.”
“Folk told him?”
“No, not exactly. I think he left enough clues for Mal to figure it out, but it didn’t happen. So he left it, and life keeps going, doesn’t it?”
It sure does. “How do you feel about it?”
“About what?”
“All of it. Does it piss you off no one told you?”
Jack nods, and perversely, the fraught energy in his brain starts to recede. “I’m not a fucking child.”
“That’s not why?—”
“Iknow,” he cuts in. “And I wasn’t a cunt about it to their faces, but I don’t need protecting. If something’s going to fuck with my head, it just has to happen.”
The nausea from this morning comes back, expanding in my gut like a spider stretching its legs. This is it, the moment where my confession makes the most sense. But as my lips part to take a breath, Jack claims them for himself.
He kisses me. With that purpose again, and damn if he doesn’t nearly sweep me off my feet. As if he doesn’t wipe my brain clean of anything and everything except the raw need to kiss him back.
I don’t feel sick anymore.
No fear licks at my insides.
I justfeel, and…
Jack’s grip on me tightens, hauling me against him with enough possession to soften my knees. He deepens the kiss. Digs his teeth into my bottom lip. We presscloserand the thrumming in my ears goes wild.
I could drown in this and not care.
Maybe I will.
I slide my hands up Jack’s arms, his biceps an anchor I don’t want, and yet I lose myself in his unyielding flesh and bone. In his rough, low groan as he breaks the kiss to move down my body with his tongue and teeth. To take a sharp breath and lick?—
Jack pulls back. “I can’t do this.”
I go utterly still, white noise an instant assault on my ears, a clutch of my darkest fears surging to the surface, every certaintythat I’ve misread him and led him down a path he never wanted to tread rushing up on me in a dizzying wave.
My lungs are marble.
I don’t move.
Don’t breathe.
I die a slow, excruciating death as Jack growls a curse, his hands as frozen as my entire soul, as if he hasn’t realised he’s stopped touching and kissing me.
Or he’s forgotten why he did.
“Fuck,” he says again. Then he raises his gaze to meet mine, and he frowns with unfiltered focus. “That’s not—Sol, that’s not what I meant.”
What did you mean, Jack?But I can’t form the words. My heart is still trying to riot its way out of my chest. I can only wait for him to string a sentence together that won’t kill me.
“I meant I can’t put my hands on you like this until I know you’re okay.” His thumb brushes my jaw, careful now, demanding something more than the physical capitulation I crave so much. “Where did you go today?” he whispers. “Tell me, Sol. Please?”
Please.
The gravelled plea does me in. Something inside me gives way and I sag forwards, head dropping to my chest before Jack catches my chin and forces it up again.