BeforeJackis on me as if he’s tumbling me to a bed in a place so far from here it’s hard to believe it was ever real.
I close my eyes, pretending I taste rum and Guinness on his lips. Pretending his claiming kiss will last forever and this crazed moment will never end. I kiss him back without restraintand Jack growls into my mouth, pressing harder against me.Grindingagainst me, stealing every sound I make.
We’ve done this before.
Upstairs.
Somewhere else, way back when.
But this…it feels different.
So different, I break away to look at him. To see his face in the murky light of the cold room. To utter words I haven’t thought of yet. To lose myself in the swirl of arousal I see in his face. Untamed desire that matches the riot going on in my veins.
“I want you.” Jack speaks before I can. “I don’t know what any of this means or where it’s going to take us, and I’m fucking sorry I’m not better at this—that I haven’tbeenbetter—but there’s nothing about you I don’t want. Even the shit I’ve never done before.”
He means sex.
I think.
But the heady combination of rum andJackoverwhelms me and I can’t think beyond how much I need whatever he wants to give me.
I tell him the truth. “I want that too.”
Without warning, Jack spins me around, moulding his body to my back, his thick, hard length where I need it most. “I think I’ve dreamed about it like this, but I can’t remember if you’ve ever told me what you like…with other people.”
Other people.
Othermen.
I can’t forget the nights I spent in Cam O’Brian’s bed, but only because, for as long as it lasted, that long, hot summer was the closest I’d ever been to how I’d felt about Jack for years by then.
So many years.
Too many to live without the raw need in his touch as he grips my hip and the back of my neck. As I tell him another truth. “No one else matters.”
Jack breathes another rough sound, unchecked and wild, and that clatter in my pulse becomes a speeding gallop. One that has me bowing my head and bracing my forearm on the door. He’s not going to fuck me in this cold, dark kitchen. Whichever version of Jack this is, I know he’s not going to do that. But, gods, I’d let him?—
A sharp thud against the door makes me jump out of my skin. In a flash, Jack has me away from it and behind him, shielding me with his body as someone—the newest bar girl, maybe—calls his name.
Jack plants a hand on the door. “Yeah?”
“Uh, sorry. Someone stole the charity box and Oscar said to get you.”
The air deadens.
Jack exhales, forcing all that coiled intensity back under control. “I’m coming.”
I wish he was.
Thatwewere.
But even with the promise oflaterin the simmering glance he sends over his shoulder, a promise that curls low and hot in my belly, I know whatever almost just happened in this kitchen, for now, at least, it’s over.
I trail Jack upstairs, fully expecting to find him holding my dad by the scruff of the neck, the stolen charity box at his feet.
As it happens, he’s alone by the time I reach the tourist bar on the other side of the Joker, frowning at the broken chain where the box began its day. “It was here earlier. I saw someone scrunch a fiver into it.”
“Maybe someone else did too.”