59. Jay
Chapter fifty-nine
Jay
J ay jerked away from the blast of the door shutting, sharp as a starter’s pistol. He hadn’t relaxed Henry, not even a little bit. If anything, he’d made Henry more tense and angry. Or—
Scared?
Maybe he wasn’t an expert seducer, but he was earnest and eager to please. He’d never needed to be more than that for Henry to love him. And Henry had seemed into it until he suddenly wasn’t. Like, at all .
Jay curled his fingers toward his palms, lying face-up on his thighs. A bassy laugh, a low growl, a hand thrust into the hair at the back of his neck—any of those would’ve been expected when he made a move to get in Henry’s pants.
But he’d made Henry safeword.
Henry didn’t have a special word; his stop meant stop .
His cock wilted in fits and starts. The rug grew hundreds of needles that scratched at his legs. The itchy, crawling tingles climbed his chest and down his arms and spread into his head, buzzing like angry bees. Henry had told him to wait here. If he couldn’t do anything else right, he would at least kneel in this empty bedroom where his thoughts echoed until Henry returned.
“Still have some work to do on the whole taking initiative thing.” The whisper crackled in his dry mouth. Danny hadn’t promised every time would go perfectly. The wedding photos had been a win. Calling Alice on Thursday had been a win. Seducing Henry had been like standing in the way of a falling tree and getting kicked in the nuts while he lay pinned under the trunk. “Not really a win.”
He’d gathered important information, though. Sex was one hundred percent not the way to relax Henry right now. He could let Alice know before she tried it and got rejected too. “Silver lining.”
He did the breathing exercises, the ones with the long breaths out to empty his lungs and force his muscles to let go of the buzzing. Should’ve tried that with Henry. Should’ve— “Okay, brain, we’re not doing that. That’s one of those well-worn paths we don’t want to go down again. Things went wrong. That doesn’t make me wrong.”
The simplest things to say were the hardest to believe. Therapy was a workout, a strength-training session for muscles people didn’t even know they had.
The house was warm—warm enough he’d kicked free of the sheets last night and held nothing but Alice—but he shivered anyhow. How could waiting feel so good in a scene and so awful now? Maybe—no, it had probably only been minutes. And sticking his head out the door to check would mean more than leaving the waiting pose Henry had left him in. It would mean getting dressed again and trying to hide the tears he’d scrubbed off his cheeks. He didn’t have a poker face; whoever he ran into outside would know something was up.
The door slammed open so hard it bounced off the stopper that kept the handle from making a divot in the wall.
Jay’s back tensed, but he held his pose: knees spread, cock deflated, head bowed.
Two sets of feet stampeded toward him. Henry sank to the floor in front of him, knees touching knees, and cupped Jay’s face in shaking hands.
“I am so sorry, my love.” Henry lifted Jay’s chin, until Jay couldn’t avoid the green gaze. Henry’s cheeks wore tear tracks too. His eyes were still wet, spilling over like the creek flooding its banks when spring melt coursed down the mountain. “I have handled everything so poorly, most especially you. If I had listened to you, we wouldn’t be where we are. I should think”—Henry choked on a laugh-sob—“I would have learned by now that you arrive directly by the heart’s path at the place Alice and I eventually discover by the twisting maze of the mind.”
Henry spoke in mazes all the time. But Jay didn’t have to solve them to take their meaning. He breathed out slow. When saying a scary thing, start from a calm place. That was Henry’s rule, too, not just Danny’s. “I wish you’d let me drive you up here the very first night.”
Pressing a kiss to Jay’s forehead, Henry nodded. “I wish that, too. I wasn’t myself. No—” He drew back, frowning, and ruffled his fingers through Jay’s hair on either side, tucking the longer strands behind his ears. “I was a version of myself that I haven’t been in many years, longer than you’ve been alive, and I couldn’t see it. I wouldn’t let myself see it. And because of that, I have hurt you, and I have hurt Alice, and I have hurt my mother, and…” Henry laughed with air alone. “I owe Will an apology, and probably Emma by extension. I will have a fair bit of work to do to make all of this right.”
“You forgot someone.” Longer than Jay had been alive meant Henry had been a kid. “In your list.”
“Did I?” Confusion looked odd on Henry. Most of the time he knew all the things, and it was rare that Jay could surprise him. But his eyebrows dipped together, and his lips pushed out. “Who else have I hurt, my brave boy?”
“You.”
“Ah.” Closing his eyes, Henry laid his head on Jay’s shoulder. Shudders rippled through him. Harsh breaths broke the silence of the bedroom.
Jay lifted his gaze to Alice, crouching on one knee beside Henry, whose breaths gusted against Jay’s chest. More questions bombarded him than mouthing or gesturing could get across. If she could beam the answers straight into his head, that would be awesome. What the hell had happened?
He’d had moments like this—during nightmares, or when he’d tried to push himself for something he wanted and set himself back instead. Times when his body froze and his mind blanked and every drop of blood in him rushed like a freight train past his ears. But this was a first for Henry. At least the first time he’d seen Henry this way. Alice wore the dazed stare of a marathoner stumbling around at the finish line.
He carefully slipped his arms around Henry, twitchy-alert for any sign of stop . Alice added her hand, rubbing Henry’s back below Jay’s grip. She squeezed Jay’s forearm in three little pulses, smiling at him like he’d done a good job. Obviously Henry hadn’t told her how lousy the seduction had gone.
“Henry?” Alice pitched her voice low, the way Henry did when he was reading to them. “I’m thinking we need to have some knowledge-sharing, so we’re all on the same page.” She met Jay’s eyes, and hers held a painful forest of thorns and bramble patches that hadn’t been there when she’d gone to fetch the walkie-talkie. “And then I think we need to sleep. Before we do that…” Her mouth twitched in a tiny sideways tug. “If you need to look in on her, I’ll go with you.”
Henry sat up slowly. Jay let his arms fall, but Henry snatched his hands and held them tight. “No.” His voice was hoarse. “Thank you, Alice. I think you have the right of it. Better to break the pattern.”
“I think it’s gonna be a year for breaking patterns.” Laying her hand on Henry’s shoulder, Alice kissed the top of his head and pushed to her feet. She unhooked the walkie-talkie from her pants and set it on the nightstand. On her way to the closet, she stripped all the way down to her underwear. She came back wearing Jay’s lounge-around-the-house tee and holding the shorts he’d brought as pajama bottoms. Kneeling beside him, she palmed his ear on the opposite side, her fingers rocking in his hair. She pressed kisses above his near ear.
“I steered you wrong, sweetheart, and I am unbelievably sorry for that. We’re gonna talk about it, okay?” Her sigh tickled. “But as fabulous as this rug is, I think we should move this conversation to the bed. I could really go for soft pillows and cozy blankets right now.”
She and Henry levered themselves up in sync, and they both reached a hand down to him. He didn’t actually need one; he could hold waiting pose way longer than this without his legs falling asleep. But he took hold of both, because their shaky faces said they needed him to. And maybe, a little, because he needed to.
He skimmed the shorts she handed him up and over his legs. Henry sat on the walkie-talkie side of the bed and leaned back against the headboard, tipping his face toward the ceiling. Alice nudged Jay to join him, and he nudged her back. “I’ll fill the water glasses first. You climb in.”
Her eyes flickered, but she didn’t fight him. She scooted into the center and stuffed her pillow vertically behind her while he distributed water glasses. Not that he didn’t want to sit between Henry and Alice. The middle was the best. Not always for sleeping, since he kinda flung his limbs out and took up more than his fair share. But for snuggling and sex, the middle couldn’t be beat.
That was the problem. His dick was earning a doctorate in dangling for now, but if he got in the middle? A conversation that made Henry cry and Alice hurt was not the place for a hard-on. He tossed his pillow to the foot of the bed and sat cross-legged facing them both, balling the pillow in his lap as an armrest. “So I guess I missed a lot. Who wants to start?”