Chapter 16 Galen #2
I shift onto my back, taking him with me. Snag a sheet and tug it over us. It’s the closest I’ve ever come to truly sharing my bed with someone, and stop the fecking lights, it feels good.
Too good, a voice in my head whispers. He’s not yours to keep.
But Sab Dubois, he has the power, and I shove those thoughts aside to bask in the weight of him against me. The sheer warmth. I let myself trace him, with my eyes, and the lightest sweep of my thumb over his cheekbone.
Christ, he has long lashes and a mouth so kissable it hurts.
That velvet jaw.
The subtle divot between his dark brows.
He was built to be admired. To be worshipped. My hands wander without thinking, stroking through his short hair, skimming his strong shoulders and smooth back, muscles still jumping, even as he sleeps.
Even as he hums and shifts closer.
Lord, he’ll probably never know how rare this is for me.
That if I’m honest, how fecking new. I love sex—I’m good at it, maybe.
But satisfaction doesn’t come close to the alien emotion rolling through my veins as we lie together in the dark.
Him in dreamland, me bewitched by the kind of contentment that rewrites a man, claiming parts he never meant to give away.
I’m happy, I realise, and I cling to the feeling for the hour or so Sab sleeps in my arms. I’m right there when he wakes up, to catch him as his eyes spring open to unfamiliar surroundings.
“Easy. You’re in my bed. It’s not that late, your phone’s quiet, everything’s fine.”
Sab blinks, gaze darting around before it lands on me, awareness washing over him. “I have no idea where my phone is.”
“It’s on the floor by your socks. Hasn’t made a sound.”
I loosen my hold so he can check.
He doesn’t move. Just stares at me, before sweetly nuzzling my cheek. “I didn’t mean to pass out on you.”
“I liked it.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I, uh, I don’t usually bring people to my actual bed.”
“That couch has seen some action, hein?”
“Oui,” I say in my thickest Kerry accent. “But this is better. I should do it more often.”
With him is what I mean to say. But though I wasn’t lying when I told Sab it wasn’t that late, it’s not early either, and he made me come like the apocalypse was bearing down on us. My brain is mush and I don’t realise what I’ve said until Sab shifts away from me.
The movement is subtle. I can’t be sure it’s even happened, but fear that he’s about to leave hits me like a fecking freight train. Has me tugging him tighter against me so I can rub my jaw along his. “You’re so pretty when you sleep.”
Sab snorts, scepticism creasing his face.
I don’t push it.
I take his hand. “Take a shower with me?”
An invitation I can only extend thanks to Nash. One I’m not sure Sab will accept, until he does and we’re naked together under the hot spray, getting as dirty as we are clean.
I make him come again and it gets impossibly hotter every time.
Then he pushes me onto my mattress on the floor and shows me the first time he obliterated me with his mouth was no fecking fluke.
I’m in bits after. And it really is late. Sab’s going to leave soon, I can feel it—I hate it. But for a little while, we lie together, legs entangled, sharing sweat and the kind of lazy, sated kisses I never knew existed until now.
Until him.
I’m so hooked on his big brown eyes.
On his gentle hands as he does something to my shoulder that has me groaning with the sweetest pleasure-pain.
“Can I ask you something?”
My eyes have rolled shut. I force them open. “As long as it’s not my name. I forgot it the first time you blew my brains out.”
“How do you really know Bhodi? He gets this look on his face when he talks about you, and…I don’t know, it feels like something about you meant something to him.”
He’s not asking if I’ve fucked his brother-in-law.
He’s asking what happened to put me in his path, and it shouldn’t be this hard to tell him.
Then I realise, I’ve never really told anyone.
Everyone I’ve ever talked to about it was there, or someone else told them for me.
I’ve never had to explain the nightmare that nearly killed me two Christmases ago. “I, um…you know what a flashover is?”
Sab shakes his head, shifting a little closer, scratching blunt nails down my forearm, grounding me as if he feels every spiked and hazy memory tumbling through my mind.
“A flashover is like, the perfect storm in fire terms. When every combustible surface ignites at the same time and the whole shebang goes up at once. It’s fast and fecking hot.
Your gear can’t protect you from that kind of heat, from that kind of smoke, and my mask…
I’d knocked it on the way in. Just a fraction, but that’s all it needs to be to burn your lungs. ”
“That’s what happened to you?”
I nod, slowly, tasting smoke on my tongue. “Industrial fire. A big one. We were the first crew in and it absolutely battered us.”
“Are you okay now?”
“Mostly.” I rub my chest, an absent gesture that became a tic for a while. “I didn’t work for a year and a half, though. And I get more knackered by it all now.”
Sab doesn’t say anything for a minute. Just keeps grazing my arm with his nails. “Did Bhodi look after you? In the hospital?”
“Fecking saved me more like. Lung injuries get worse before they get better. A&E nearly sent me home. Next thing I knew I was in ICU and he was the only thing between me and the grim reaper.”
I try for a smile, but I know it’s weak.
Sab doesn’t smile either. Despite the lingering heat on his skin, he shivers.
“It’s not the same, but there was a night, a long time ago, when I was using—I just couldn’t stop.
I got so high I nearly jumped off a bridge, but a stranger talked me out of it.
Some bloke with a van full of weird furniture and a dormant booze habit.
Took me a while to get my shit together after that, but I never forgot him. Still hear his voice sometimes.”
“That’s heavy,” I say, as if it comes anywhere close to describing the wrench in my gut at thinking of him so sad and unwell. “Bet he never forgot you either.”
Sab hums. “I never told Tam about that night. Bhodi either. I’ve never told anyone.”
“Well.” I lean in and kiss his cheek, something I’ve done before, but for some reason feels more intimate tonight. “Thank you for telling me.”
Sab stays quiet.
I rub my fingers through his short hair, addicted to the bashful grin I get in return, praying I’m not about to obliterate it. “Can I ask you something?”
Wariness creeps into Sab’s gaze, but there’s openness too. “Of course.”
“Where’s Esme’s ma?”
Sab expels a slow breath. “I was wondering when you’d ask me that.”
“You don’t have to tell me. It’s just…she’s not around, and I don’t get the feeling she’s dead.”
“She’s not. She’s, uh, in prison.”
“Oh.”
“Oui. Oh. We’re not together. Haven’t been since Esme was a baby.”
“What did she do?”
“Franchement?…sorry, honestly? I don’t know all of it.
Back then, ce n’était pas ma priorité. I just needed to convince the social I was done with her and Esme was safe with me.
I know there were a lot of drugs in the house when the raid happened.
Enough to put her down for a good stretch.
I don’t know what the conviction was, though. Je préfère ne pas savoir.”
I love how he doesn’t notice half the time that he’s weaving between languages. How his face is honest enough that I don’t need to speak French to get the gist of what he’s saying. The maths of his sobriety, though…it doesn’t add up with drug busts and prison time.
Questions bubble up my throat.
Sab cuts them off. “I’d moved out by the time it all went down. Charmaine had been knocking off some bloke down the gym. Had been all along, and I fucking know it was him stashing whatever in my loft space.”
“Did he go down too?”
“I don’t know. I don’t care. All I’m sure of is that Charmaine went out and banged him the same night I told her I might be fucking bi.”
“Nice of her.”
“Yeah.” Sab seems to come back into himself, glancing around the room. “I should go.”
I don’t want him to. I want him to stay all night, safe and warm in the heady nest we’ve made in my makeshift bed. I want to talk more. Fuck around more. All of it. I want it.
But Sab…he’s done for the night, I feel it, and I open my arms, letting him go.
I go downstairs for water, giving him a few minutes to find his clothes and put himself back together. I figure he’ll follow me. When he doesn’t, I go looking and find him at my bedroom door, rehanging it like a boss with the tools I’d abandoned on the landing.
Feck my life. Could he be any hotter?
He tests the door.
It’s perfect, obviously, and I treat him to a stare that does nothing to hide how much I want him. Competence is my kryptonite. Who knew?
Definitely not Sab. He looks confused as I fecking devour him with my eyeballs. “I can do the other doors, if you want?”
“You could,” I say slowly, measuring my words so I don’t sound too crazy, “but then I’d never let you leave and Esme needs her da.”
Sab makes a sound low in his throat, one that lets me know how I’m looking at him isn’t entirely passing him by. “Thanks for tonight.”
“You don’t need to thank me.”
“I feel like I do.”
“Why?”
He shrugs, setting the tools aside and dusting off his hands. “You’ve helped me so much with this.” He gestures between us. “With all of it.”
“All of what?”
Sab’s gaze darts around before he seems to force it back to me. “The man sex thing.” He laughs a little. “I’m more at peace with it now than I ever fucking dreamed I could be.”
Man sex.
Not Galen sex.
My rational brain knows they’re just words. That maybe Sab isn’t thinking that hard about what he’s saying. But all I hear is a reminder that this is temporary. That I’m a stepping stone in whatever journey he’s on and he’s not mine to keep.
I find a smile from the pit of my stomach. It’s bitter on my tongue. “That was the plan, wasn’t it? Get you to a place where it’s easy, eh? Then you won’t need me anymore.”
Sab’s brows pull together.
Idiot that I am, I plough on. “And I reckon you’re the perfect fella for someone out there.”
“Someone?”
No. Absolutely fecking not. But what am I supposed to say? That just someone isn’t good enough? That there’s no one out there better for him than—
Who?
You?
Laughter echoes in my head and it’s not pretty. But it’s on the money. I don’t do relationships. Never have—and more than that, no one’s ever asked me to and I’m willing to bet there’s a reason for that. I’m the fun one, right? The one you practice with until you’re brave enough for something real?
And where’s the harm in that? It’s all I’ve ever wanted. All I’ve ever asked of anyone in return. So why does my gut feel like I’ve swallowed glass?
It takes a split second for those thoughts to spiral through my mind. Long enough for Sab to retreat another few steps and head for the stairs.
I follow him, stone-heavy silence stretching out as he finds his shoes and plugs his feet into them.
His house or mine, this is usually the moment we come together on the doorstep.
Lingering touches. Eye contact so intense it feels like he’s a living, breathing part of me.
But somehow tonight, between us, we’ve nuked it.
Sab’s gaze flickers anywhere but me, and I’m standing there like an eejit with the Grinch in my throat.
It staggers me that we’ve gone from the bliss we found in my bed to something as painful as this. But I don’t know how to fix it. If it even can be fixed when all we’ve done in the clusterfuck the last five minutes have been is acknowledge reality.
Sab finally looks at me. For the first time in forever, his gaze is unreadable. And he doesn’t reach for me. He opens the front door and turns his head enough that my neighbour’s security lights flare in those dark eyes. “Night, Galen.”
“Night,” I echo, as if we’re already miles apart. As if we really are hookups saying goodbye with no inclination to see each other again.
I hate it.
I hate it.
But he’s gone before I can speak, leaving me alone on my doorstep, stark-bollock naked and telling myself this is what I wanted all along.