I’m…not straight. Clearly. But it’s not a me thing—it’s aSolthing. I’ve been around naked men my entire adult life. Apparently I spent six months in a ditch with Folk Whitlock. I live with Skylar, and I’ve only slept with women, right?
That’s the box for me.
Except Sol doesn’t fit in it.
And I don’t want him to. I want this and only this, and I don’t know when it changed. When that shift inside me every time he’s close became my entire personality, pressing at my ribs, desperate to get out.
I pull back just enough to look at him, his cock so hot and hard in my hand. Mine in his. I don’t know how this works. The literal mechanics.
But I know I want to figure it out.
I know I want?—
“I want you in my mouth.”
The unfiltered truth spills out of me. Sol’s jaw unhinges, but a sharp knock on the bedroom door obliterates the moment.
Skylar.
I know his knock. I also know he’ll only barge in if he thinks I’m alone—if he hasn’t figured out that Sol’s with me.
He knocks again. “Jack?”
Fuck. Sol squirms beneath me. We disentangle and I roll off him and out of bed, tucking my dick away with more grace than I probably deserve.
Skylar grows fed up of waiting. The front door opens and closes a moment later, but it doesn’t sound like him leaving.
Sol staggers out of bed, joining me in the middle of the room, shoving a hand through his mussed hair. “You should go after him. Mally might need you.”
Mal’s out with Fiadh. I saw him on the beach when I took my meds. With Folk Whitlock’s family and Ariel, Fiadh’s pup. But that was a while ago—I think.
I glance at the window, trying to gauge the time.
“It’s two o’clock,” Sol supplies.
“In the afternoon?”
“Yeah, Jackie. Did you think it was nighttime?”
I don’t know what I’ve been thinking as it slowly dawns on me that I haven’t opened the pub. Haven’t cleaned the lines, stacked the barrels, or checked the cleaner who comes through every morning has done everything I need her to…
Fuck.
A thousand other things pile on top of me. I swing back to the door, but my brain is too busy to make my feet move.
Sol loops an arm around my waist, standing close, pressed to me from his unbruised shoulder to his hip. Quieting the racket by existing. “Oscar opened up for us.”
“Oscar?”
“Yeah, he’s done it before, remember? The old geezers love him.”
Everyone loves Oscar.Ilove Oscar, even if I sometimes wonder how he can spend so much time with Sol and not feel how I’m feeling right now.
You did it. For years you spent every waking moment together without mauling him in your bed. What changed, Jack?
I don’t know who’s asking me that question. If it’s the version of Sol who lives rent free in my head, or my own subconscious. And I don’t know the answer either. Just that I’m tired of thinking and I’ve only been awake…fuck. I don’t know that either. “Don’t pay Oscar with boat money.”
Sol takes a breath.