Chapter 33
Jesse
Long after Tris fell asleep, splayed out across my chest with his head tucked beneath my chin so that the minty, vanilla-peach scent of his silky hair filled my senses with each breath, I’ve lain awake.
I keep my touches soft and so light I know I won’t risk waking him, but as he sleeps, I run my fingers over the slopes of his shoulders, across the slim plane of his back, over the satin-soft skin across his collarbones, as everything he told me tonight plays on repeat through my head.
He trusts me. I make him feel safe. He wants us to be together.
It doesn’t matter how many times I think it. Each time, a rush of elation pours through me, just as overwhelming and thrilling as when he first said it tonight, and it’s all I can do not to wake him by laughing out loud or tugging him up to my lips to kiss him all over again.
Those few words he’d told me mean so very much.
At first glance, knowing what to say seems to come so easily to Tris.
When I first met him, I’d been dazzled by his easy teasing and effortless ability to always be ready with the perfect words.
What I’ve realized as I’ve come to know him is that this is only on the surface.
A performance to keep people from breaching his carefully constructed walls.
His deeper truths have to be coaxed from him, unless he blurts them in an unguarded moment.
Then, when he does, he always gets that look, the one that had been written so deeply over his face tonight that I’d wanted nothing more than to kiss it away until it vanished forever.
Guarded. Wary. Ashamed. The way he’d looked when he’d told me about—
Jesus fucking Christ— Josh.
I am not an angry person. Certainly never a violent person. Nevertheless, what Tristan told me about that fucking bastard has my muscles twitching and my vision blurring with rageful fantasies of ripping him limb from limb. Slowly.
It doesn’t matter how much I’d guessed and supposed that Tris had been through something like what he’d finally admitted. Hearing it from him was so infinitely worse than even my most catastrophic imaginings, and now I can’t stop remembering the flat, broken sound of his voice as he’d told me.
No matter how many times those waves of protective, vengeful fury wash through me though, the warm, surprisingly dense weight of Tristan’s slim body draped over mine is my anchor.
The even rise and fall of his chest and the whisper-soft brush of his breath across my skin are all I need to ground me; a reminder that nothing matters at this moment except for the fact that, if I have my way, no one will ever make him feel anything less than brilliant and worthy and safe ever again.
Still, out of all the things Tris told me, even more than the gut-churning, blood-boiling thoughts of Josh, I keep circling back to the last thing he said before falling asleep.
I missed you too. So fucking much.
Maybe I’m wrong and those words really were all he’d meant. Christ, even if that’s the case, I’ll take it. Somehow though, for all my hallmark pessimism, I can’t ignore how much I’d sensed hung unsaid between them.
When I finally do feel myself drifting off to sleep, it’s with my cheek resting against the satin warmth of the top of Tristan’s head, wondering if any of what he held back could possibly resemble the unspoken feeling that’s growing stronger in me with every beat of his heart against mine.
Getting used to this would be absurdly easy.
I haven’t even opened my eyes, and already, the thought has me grinning into my pillow. My pillow that now carries a faint sweetness of peach and vanilla that has me drawing in another long, deep breath.
One of Tristan’s arms is draped over my back, and against my side, his naked skin is warm and smooth. The even, slow sound of his breath tells me he’s not yet awake, and the awareness that he’s curled around me in his sleep makes my heart leap and my stomach soar.
God yes, I could get used to this. And yet, I could never take it for granted.
When I turn my head to the side and open my eyes, dim light filters through my thin curtains from outside.
It’s an early, grey sort of light that matches the faint pattering sound of rain striking against the glass and makes the comfortable heat of Tris’s body pressed close against mine all the more perfect.
For a while, I just drift, halfway dreaming fantasies of a life where every morning begins this way.
Then, just when I think there’s nothing in the world that could possibly make me move from here, inspiration hits me, fully formed and impossible to ignore.
A passage from a fifteenth century text I’ve read over once or twice flashes through my mind, connecting a string of dots I’ve been trying to force together for the last three months.
The timing is so miserable that, for a moment, I try unsuccessfully to shut off the unasked-for burst of inspiration, but ideas continue to untangle themselves in my mind, details so nuanced that I know what I have to do if I don’t want the finer points to start fading away.
With a silent groan, I slip out from under Tris’s arm. Force myself to scoot carefully away from him to sit at the edge of the bed, away from the distracting temptation of his body.
For a beat, I almost don’t let myself turn and look back. I can’t afford to get sidetracked by the fact that the most gorgeous man I’ve ever seen is currently in my bed.
Naked. Jesus—
So then of course I have to look, and, as always when it comes to Tristan, looking turns to staring.
And Christ, he’s gorgeous. Fast asleep with his head pillowed on the arm he’s thrown back behind it, his face relaxed and soft with a little smile playing across his lips and his thick lashes making perfectly feathered crescents on his sculpted cheeks, he looks like a Renaissance painting of a Greek god at rest. A black-haired Eros come to life.
Though we’d fallen asleep wrapped together in the blankets, sometime over the course of the night, they’d slipped down to reveal the gorgeous expanse of Tris’s torso. As I watch him now, he rolls from his side onto his back.
I hold my breath, body tingling and dick thickening between my legs as the blankets slide lower at his movement, exposing the jut of one of his hip bones and the toned, lean line of the side of one of his thighs where the sheet’s been pushed aside.
Startlingly dark against his pale skin, thick black tattoos sweep down from his collarbone on the left, across his chest, and halfway down his side; curling, sinuous lines like a wild hybrid between waves and vines and Celtic knots.
They look like his music sounds, and Jesus Christ, I want to touch them.
I want to run my fingers and—oh god—my tongue along them, tracing them like a maze until I’ve mapped out every last inch of darkness marking his skin. Over and over and over again.
Swallowing hard, I let my eyes drift down to his flat stomach.
With each breath he takes, the movement shows off the faint yet unmistakable outline of his abs shifting just beneath his smooth skin, and I have to force my eyes back up and away from it to stop them from catching on the thin line of hair—a few shades lighter than the purply-black hair on his head, but still so dark in contrast with his pale skin—that runs down his lower stomach, disappearing under the edge of the blanket.
Last night was a blur of need and touching before the weight of the conversation we’d had drew away all attention from anything else. Though we’d spent so much of the evening naked, there’d been nowhere nearly enough time for me to take in the beautiful perfection of Tris’s body.
Now, all I want is to slip back into bed and soak him in, and it’s only the dismal truth that I’ve written practically nothing in weeks that holds me back.
Cursing myself, my research, and the entire damn UW history department, I force myself to stand up, to creep away from the bed as silently as possible.
After tucking my far too hopeful dick into a pair of pajama pants and throwing on a shirt, I grab my laptop and settle into my chair, turned resolutely away from the image of temptation personified currently sprawled out across my bed.