I can do that.
16SOL
Jack slips back into the room like he never left. I’m on the edge of his bed. Reeling from what’s been. Bracing for what’s to come.
There has to be something.
There’s no way he tells me he wants my dick in his mouth and the world just keeps turning.
Jack shuts the door. Feels loud, but I reckon that’s because it’s my turn to spin and spin and spin until someone catches my hands and ties me down to this world. And that someone—whether he remembers or not—it’s always been Jack.
He waits a beat. Watches me. His green eyes sharpen with every breath, like he’s lining up a shot. An action—a contact—he won’t get a chance to second guess.
Then he closes the distance between us in two strides and plants that possessive hand on my jaw again. As if he knows it cranks my blood to a temperature that blasts all rational thought clean out of my skull.
“I meant what I said.”
My lips part, but nothing coherent comes out. My heart is too loud. My skin too tight. Jack has this sorcerous thumb—I’ve learned since we crossed this line. It presses deep in randomplaces, like the hinge of my jaw, and draws a live-wire current to the surface.
I swallow hard. “I know you meant it. Doesn’t mean you have to do it.”
“I want to.” He speaks with no hesitation. No doubt. Just eviscerating certainty that should feel too good to be true. “Tell meif you don’t.”
I search his face for cracks. For breaks. Confusion. Flickers of retreat he’s not aware of yet. But like his deep and steady voice, I find nothing but the focus he embraces when he really wants something—when he wants todo it, and nothing, not even a life-changing brain injury, is going to stop him.
So I give him the truth. Let it spill through the storm-wrecked barricade around my stupid heart. “I want it too.”
Something eases in Jack. He lets his hand slide from my jaw to my bare shoulder, rough fingers tracing the muscles in my upper arm, before he grips my bicep, as if he’s making sure I’m solid and real, before he steps closer, and lowers his broad frame to the floor.
And gods, I’m not ready for the sight of him on his knees in front of me. All that strength and presence. All the poise and grace he thinks he’s lost. It’s all right there, at my feet, channelled into the care and attention he’s blazing at me through the sage-green eyes I’ve been lost in since I was a boy.
“Still okay, Sol?”
Beyond words, I nod. Then I find some. “I’ll tell you if I’m not, I promise.”
The only promise I can keep right now. But in this sacred and stolen moment, it’s the one he needs, and if I thought Jack’s expression was open and wanting before, I had no idea.
I need to kiss him.
To connect with this—with him—before the sands beneath us shift again.
I lean forward and claim his mouth, caution-laced urgency fuelling my lips as I fuse them to his. As I chase the oxygen he’s already siphoned from my lungs, my fingers digging into his shoulders, every cell in my body resenting the clothes he’s wearing. “Take this off?”
Jack’s always been good at the one-armed man strip. He does it now and the t-shirt ends up somewhere behind me on the bed.
I swallow an aroused knot in my throat. I’m not going to survive this. Of all the things about him and me that might’ve killed me, it’s going to be this.
I’m so hard. And Jack’s about to find out, and it’s okay—it’s okay—he’s seen my dick before. He’s touched it, worked it, made me come. But nerves hit me like a train anyway and I snatch a sharp inhale.
Jack hears.
Jack sees.
He moves closer again and this time the kiss we share is sweet, almost tender. “Breathe properly.”
I try.
I do.