Chapter 25 Galen
Galen
Something inside me has given way.
Like that bastard river when it finally cracks every spring.
I should feel worse—I do feel like shit. My shoulder throbs, my muscles ache, and my chest burns if I breathe too deep.
But it’s superficial.
Physical.
Because everything else?
Everything else is as perfect as it can be, and after a shaky turn in Sab’s shower, I let myself become one with his cosy couch while his family Christmas unfolds around me.
While I surrender to the laughter. The love.
The scent of good food, and Esme’s soft chatter as she brings me wild and random things all day.
I eat a lot.
Nap even more.
I let myself belong, and it’s evening when I rouse myself to the news pinging through from the station that the last coach crash victim has been discharged from ICU. That somehow, against all odds, a Christmas miracle has occurred and there are no fatalities.
“It’s not a miracle.” Bhodi glances up from a similar message on his phone, cute as a pretty button, as if he’s just woken up too. “You and D’Marco pulled eighteen people from that wreck.”
D’Marco.
Sonny.
Conflicting emotions hit me, a full-on heart stomp and a soul-healing balm all rolled into one.
I still see him thrashing in that black water, panic tearing his face apart. Feel the weight of him clinging to me. But he didn’t die. No one did, and I’m fecking proud of him.
The need to tell him consumes me.
So I do.
Then I ditch my phone and rub my eyes, letting Sab’s cosy home wrap around me again.
Sab.
Esme.
Even Tam as he slides me a cheeky apple brandy while Nurse Bhodi isn’t looking.
Sab’s brother hasn’t said much to me, but as he takes a seat beside me on the couch, his rabid hamster squirrelling at his feet, I get the sense that’s about to change.
“We share some mutual friends.”
I sip at the brandy, trying not to recall what a twat I was last time I drank it. “Thought we might. You know Locke Halliwell?”
Tam shakes his head. “Not really. I was done with the life before he came along. The O’Brians and Nash, though, they’re my friends. I have a lot of love for them.”
“Me too.”
“It’s mutual, in case you didn’t know. My phone was blowing up last night with Rebel Kings looking for you.”
“That’s what that was?” Sab says this from the floor, where he’s lying on his front with Esme on his back while she watches one last run of cartoons before she goes to bed. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Tam shrugs. “I didn’t want you to freak out that his friends were as worried as you were.”
Sab growls something French and sexy.
At least, it’s sexy to me. Tam rolls his eyes and grumbles back, and as much as he rocks the biker vibe, it doesn’t have the same effect on me.
I step outside to call my old dear. She’s not one for deep conversations—funny that—so it doesn’t take long. A few soft words, some heckling from my siblings, and it’s done. I talk longer with my step-dad. Let him ground me in ways I’m sure my real dad never did.
But when I slip back inside, Sab’s nowhere in sight, and his absence does a number on me.
I feel wobbly as feck, like the floor’s tilting beneath me, until I hear his voice, his laugh, upstairs, and I wonder if he has any idea how safe he makes me feel.
How much I want him as a different ache blooms in my bruised and broken body—a different need.
Sab laughs again, and Christ, I want to follow the sound, climb the stairs, and kiss him until there’s no doubt left for either of us how we really feel.
I want it so badly I have to lean against the banister, and rub a hand over my face for the hundredth time today.
But it doesn’t soothe the ache.
If anything, it deepens to something I hardly recognise. A desire that’s been dormant in me a long time, and I’m all up in my feelings about it when he comes back downstairs.
When he fills the space behind me and circles an arm around my waist. “All right?”
“Yeah.”
“Sure? You know…uh…”
I turn to face him as he fumbles his words. “What is it?”
“I don’t know.” Sab scrubs his free hand over his short hair. “I guess I’m trying to say you being here today doesn’t mean I expect anything from you.”
Ouch. Pretty sure it’s not a dig, but if it was, I deserve it.
Sab, though. He doesn’t deserve to feel anything but loved and wanted, and I open my mouth to tell him how much of both I have for him. But Tam calls his name, and the moment passes.
Later.
Whatever that means. You know what it means. And as the evening unfolds with more love and laughter, the more sure I become.
Tam and Bhodi eventually go home, leaving their vehicles behind and tramping through the snow.
I watch them go from the doorway with Sab, and as they disappear into the frostbitten night, he turns to me with that question in his eyes again. One I answer with one of my own. “Can I stay with you tonight?”
Sab’s face does something beautiful, something fecking wondrous. “You want to stay with me? In my bed?”
I nod, emotion squeezing my heart. “Aye. More than anything.”
Sab’s bed smells like him. pinewood and vanilla. His sheets are soft and worn and I’m so comfortable, I can’t believe I’m still conscious as he pads around upstairs, checking on Esme, shutting doors. As he brings a baby monitor to the bedside table.
I’m sprawled on my back like I own the place.
He gives me a prolonged once-over, shyness creeping into his dark gaze. “I’ve never had a bloke in my bed before.”
“You should try it. I hear it’s fun.”
Sab rolls his eyes, but there’s no sting in it.
He peels off his t-shirt and tosses it aside.
He’s been wearing pyjama trousers all day, soft grey cotton sitting low on his hips.
I wonder if he might leave them on, but he doesn’t.
He pushes them down and steps out, leaving him in dark underwear that clings to his junk, and I try my hardest not to stare.
Okay. Maybe not my hardest. And by the time he slips under the covers, everything feels different. His bed is big enough for both of us to stretch out, but Sab lies close, skating a hand over my shoulder. “Are you warm enough?”
“You’re here. ‘Course I’m fecking warm.”
He smiles in the low light of the room, unguarded and soft. “That’s sweet, but Bhodi said you’d probably feel cold for weeks.”
“Bhodi didn’t factor you into the equation.”
His answering flush is subtle, but I catch it. The way his dark lashes lower and lips twitch, like he doesn’t know whether to smile or cringe.
I don’t call him on it, though. Instead I haul my sore body closer until that warmth surrounds me and my head finds a home on his shoulder, at one with the steady rise and fall of his chest.
And Christ, it feels different up here, in his room.
It feels better.
Not like the mattress on my floor, or those nights on my couch and his, where neither of us stayed ’til morning. This is Sab’s home, his safe place. It’s not lost on me what a privilege it is to be here. To want to be here.
In his bed.
In his arms.
I breathe him in, eyes heavy, body straining with bruises that scream if I move too fast. But there’s that ache too. Deeper. Sharper. Fuelled by his body shifting against mine, all heat and strength, as he presses his lips to my temple.
A light kiss. Absent, almost, but it stirs that restless hungry feeling inside me, and I tilt my head, craving the sensation of his velvet beard against my skin.
Craving his mouth on mine, if I’m being honest, but I’m okay with him holding me tonight, and any night he wants to. And that’s how I know how real this is.
I don’t need frantic greedy sex.
I need him.
And I think he knows it. The flush is still there, high on his cheeks, but so is something else.
Desire.
Want.
Sab holds my gaze in the soft amber glow, as if he’s waiting for permission.
And I’m here for the shift in dynamic. I sink into it and let my head fall to one side, taking a shallow, shaky breath as his hand curves around my tender skull, cradling me like I’m made of glass.
As he presses his lips to my throat in a gentle, unhurried kiss that has a raw groan rumbling from my chest.
I catch it in time.
Just.
Then I surrender to Sab as he licks a path from the hollow behind my ear, to my jaw, to my mouth.
As he kisses me for real and every stupid thing I’ve said and done since I met him fades, every throttled emotion burned to a crisp in the slow fire that builds between us.
A smoulder that has us writhing on his bed, the sheets kicked away, any chill in the air overwhelmed by the flames, the one blaze on this earth I’m happy to let burn.
We lose the last of our clothes, and bare to each other, we roll, we shift, we move, finding comfort in the familiar.
But somewhere in the tangle of limbs, in the haze of searching hands and wet mouths, Sab pauses, staring down at me as his body stretches over mine, his weight balanced to avoid where I’m hurt, a fist rooted to the pillow by my head.
Breathing heavy, his cock so hot and hard against mine, Sab bores his dark gaze into me. “Tu as l’air tellement vulnérable, ce soir. What do you need?”
I know the answer, but the question still knocks the air from me. Eviscerates the power of speech as I absorb the tremor in his body.
The restraint.
I swallow, belatedly realising my leg is already hooked over his hip, giving me away long before I find my voice.
But still I say it. Because I know Sab needs to hear it. “I need all of you.”
That flush comes back again, creeping up Sab’s bare chest. His throat. But it isn’t shyness this time. It’s anticipation, and I feel the same heat to my goddamn core.
Sab opens a drawer in his bedside table and rummages around, digging out supplies from the very back.
I don’t pay much attention to the items he drops on the bed. I’m too lost in him. Couldn’t break his gaze if I tried.
Time seems to blur.
He takes me apart with pure instinct.
His fingers.
His teeth and tongue.