Chapter 11
DAMIEN
I wasn’t a particularly light sleeper, and since my body probably could have used a solid twelve hours of catch-up sleep even before I’d had my entire world shift on its axis last night, I figured I had every reason to be out for the count…
but also one beautiful, sweet, compelling one to snap awake at the crack of dawn, the instant my boy’s warm, pliant body shifted in my arms.
“Jack?” I asked, my voice deep and crackling with the sleep we should both still be enjoying.
The gray light filtering in around the edges of the curtains told me it was far too early for either of us to be getting out of bed, and the insistent pressure of my boy’s morning wood against my thigh confirmed that.
“Sorry, Daddy,” he whispered, freezing in place.
I ran a hand down his back, cupping his ass. “Nothing to be sorry about, sweet boy. But we should get more sleep.”
Or, my cock insisted, fuck again. But—
“I… I have to pee?”
I grinned in the near-dark. “Is that a question?” I teased, leaning in to steal a slightly sour and utterly addicting kiss from his warm mouth.
He giggled. Goddamn adorable. Then squirmed. But then, as if all the light had been sucked out of the sun, he suddenly went still again. “It’s morning.”
“Barely,” I said, holding him tighter as my heart started to race, already suspecting where he was going with this. I cleared my throat. “Do you have to get home?”
He’d said he was mine, dammit. Now that his paid time was, I assumed, up, I wanted to press him to confirm it, no matter how goddamn crazy it sounded in the almost-light of day.
I still meant it. I would still move heaven and goddamn earth to make it happen.
But the boy had to have a life, people, responsibilities.
I needed to know what those were and what he truly wanted in order to figure out how to take care of him properly and make this into something permanent, but that didn’t mean I was a goddamn caveman who couldn’t acknowledge that he—fucking hell—probably did need to leave me, temporarily at least, now that the night was over.
Instead of answering, though, he went even more still, if such a thing was possible, seeming to shrink in on himself as his breath hitched and stuttered and then broke.
“Baby,” I said sharply, rolling over and pinning him under me. I couldn’t see him well enough, godfuckingdamnit, but I also wasn’t going to fuck around with taking time to turn on a light. “Talk to me.”
If his home life wasn’t safe—and I didn’t want to make blanket assumptions about sex workers, but all signs already pointed to someone having mistreated him in the past—then fuck him going back home.
Or at least not without me right there with him, making sure nothing, fucking nothing, ever hurt him again.
“I… I don’t have to get home,” he finally whispered, his whole body trembling underneath me, but not in the sexy way I’d become addicted to. “I don’t, um, I don’t really have one?”
“What?” I said, something inside my chest breaking a little. “What does that mean, baby?”
He sniffled. Oh hell. He was crying again, slow and quiet and almost without any sound, and it hurt something inside me that anyone else who knew me, anyone but Marcus, at least, would probably have sworn I didn’t even have.
“Jack,” I said as gently as I could, propping myself on my elbows so I didn’t crush him and cupping his face.
Brushing the tears off his cheeks. Leaning in to kiss him until the tears finally stopped and he was clinging to me again, exactly as he should.
“Sweetheart, talk to me. I’m your Daddy.
It’s my job to fix whatever is making you cry, but I can’t do that unless I understand. ”
“You’re… You’re still my Daddy?” he asked, holding me so tightly he might leave a mark.
Let him. Whatever he needed.
“I want to be,” I said carefully, reminding myself not to get pushier than that, no matter how much my instincts were driving me to answer with a hell-fucking-yes.
For all that it felt like lightning had just struck me, a normal person—one who hadn’t been repressed and yearning his whole damn life and who was now finally, fina-fucking-ly, free—might find my conviction that Jack was it for me, mine in all the ways that counted despite me still having no fucking clue about his life outside this room, a bit…
much. Then again, I wasn’t at all sure that the way Jack had melted so perfectly in my arms, the way he truly was my perfect, needy boy, necessarily qualified him as any more “normal” than me, so I went ahead and added, “I meant everything I said to you last night, sweetheart. I’m sure there will be details to work out, but I… already care. Let me keep you.”
“Please don’t be lying,” he whispered, his face hidden in the crook of my neck as his body trembled against me.
The room had brightened a bit now, giving me just enough light to see the color of those beautiful liquid-silver eyes of his when I tipped his head back and made him look at me.
“Jack. John Patrick Healy. Sweetheart. I’m not lying.
I want you to be my boy. Please stay with me and let me take care of you.
Not just this morning, but always. Let me—”
Could I say it after just one night, or would that scare the sweet boy away?
Fuck it. I’d spent too many years hiding the truth. Too soon or not, I wasn’t going to do it with this one.
“—let me love you, baby. Let me be the one who’s always there for you, who takes charge so you don’t have to, who gives you everything you need. Let me be your Daddy, sweet boy. I’ve been waiting for you my whole damn life.”
Those pretty eyes of his got as big as saucers, but then the sun came out, Jack’s smile almost blinding in the dim morning light. “You remembered my name.”
I laughed, the relief that surged through me enough to have brought me to my knees if I’d been standing. That smile was a yes. My boy was going to say yes. “I remember everything about you, baby, and I always will.”
He ducked his head for a moment, then looked up at me through his lashes, his smile shy this time. Kryptonite. “I… I still don’t know yours?”
“It’s Damien,” I told him. “Damien Walker. And Jack?”
“Yes, Daddy Damien?”
Oh hell, that smile? He had my heart. All of it. There was no going back now, and I suspected there never had been, not from the moment he’d first shown up at my door. “You do have a home now, sweetheart. It’s me. It will always be me, if that’s what you want.”
“Yes,” he said, blinding me again. “Yes, please, Daddy. I want it. Keep me. I want to be yours. I want it for—”
He snapped his mouth closed mid-sentence, a hot blush blooming on his cheeks.
“Forever?” I guessed, my voice husky with emotion. Could it really be this easy to have everything I’d ever wanted?
Jack nodded, trembling again as he looked at me, his eyes brimming over with nervous hope.
I brushed his hair back from his forehead. He was beautiful. “That’s perfect, baby. Because forever is exactly how long I plan on keeping you.”
And then I kissed him, because the answer was yes.
Sometimes, this time, it really could be that easy.
All it had taken was finding the boy who was perfect for me…
and when Jack melted against me and kissed me back with his entire heart on display, I knew exactly how I wanted to spend the rest of that forever I’d just promised him: as his Daddy, doing my damnedest to be perfect for him, too.
Every single day.
For the rest of my goddamn life.
- the end -
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