Chapter 9
I was wrong about not wanting your help.
Sol doesn’t immediately know what I mean.
Then he does and the disbelief marring his face has me wanting to pitch myself out of the nearest window.
Christ, I’ve messed this up. But I’ve said it now and I can’t take it back. I can only flail in mortified silence until he finds his voice in the dark.
“To be clear…are we talking about the thing you’ve been fretting over a while now? The thing I knew nothing about?”
“That’s a pretty vague way of asking for clarity.”
Sol chuckles, and even though it’s strained, it’s like nectar to me. I love his laugh. His smile. The lines it carves into his face and the light in his eyes. “All right, but if I say it, and I’m wrong, you have to promise we’ll never speak of it again.”
An easy promise, because he’s not wrong, and the throbbing heat that’s plagued me all evening flares with fresh purpose, like it did when I heard his footsteps on the stairs.
When I pictured him in the shower. When he slid into my bed smelling of the ocean, spiced rum, incense, and home. “I promise.”
Sol screws his lovely face into a cringe.
A rough exhale escapes him. Then it’s gone.
All of it. The apprehension, the awkwardness, and whatever else my fuckery is making him feel.
Like he’s taken an invisible pill and washed it away, so he can turn his head with a clear gaze, wide open and so fucking present I don’t know what I ever did to deserve him.
“You’re scared to feel pleasure,” he says, softly enough that it’s almost a dream. “Because for so long you’ve only known pain, and Jackie, I’ll do anything to help you with that. Just tell me what you need.”
“I don’t know what I need.”
“Okay…” He rolls onto his side again, facing me with his bare chest, his tattoos more vivid in the murky light than any of mine. “You want to talk about it, so we can figure out what you’re really afraid of?”
“You know what I’m afraid of. I told you already.”
“Didn’t rationalise it, though, did we?”
“There’s nothing rational about fucking seizures.” I hate the bitterness that spills out of me. Sol doesn’t deserve it any more than Aras. But I can’t keep apologising to him. It upsets him—and fuck, I can’t make him cry again. Not tonight. Not ever, though I know I surely will. “I—uh…”
Fucking hell. Where am I going with that? As my mouth stalls out and my brain spins, I tell myself I’m not sure. But it’s a lie. I am sure. I’m just fucking scared and I shouldn’t be, not with Sol.
Breath snarled, I try again. Dig deeper for the truth. “I don’t remember anyone I’ve been with before, or what it felt like to be with myself, and I don’t want to. I just know that it used to feel good, and…”
Sol swallows. Hard. As if his throat is too tight for air. “And what?”
“I can’t face living without it forever, but…I don’t want to do it alone.”
Silence cocoons us again, but it’s different this time. Thicker, and humming with tension from a truth that barely scrapes the surface of how I feel. Of what I want. What I need. Of all the things I’ve said tonight and all the things I haven’t.
Sol isn’t breathing.
Isn’t moving, isn’t blinking.
Panic-laced regret ploughs through me, but he snaps to before it finds purchase, and if there’s one thing I appreciate about my broken brain—right now, at least—it’s the gift of dropping emotions at the side of the road as if they were never mine to begin with.
Sol draws a slow inhale and it consumes my every faculty. His gaze flickers over my face like he’s searching for the punchline to a joke, or a version of me that existed before my skull got split open. But he’s out of luck. This is what I am and I’m not fucking laughing.
He takes another breath. “Are you saying you want me to stay with you while you get off? So you feel safe if anything happens?”
No.
That’s not it, but it’s close enough to the ten-ton truth I find myself nodding, even though I’m so afraid he’ll agree to this ludicrous notion.
That he won’t.
Sol expels the breath he took a moment ago. Quiet and long, but it feels louder. As if we’re already closer, which is fucking stupid. All that’s happening here is he might stay while I have a wank—because that’s what he thinks I’m asking for.
What I have asked him for without saying any of the words that might’ve made this less about mechanics and more about the fact that thinking about him and sex in the same breath has brought me back to life in ways I have no hope of ever explaining to him.
The thought staggers as I try to stand it upright. It’s such a fucked-up thing to be clear-headed one minute and utterly lost the next. To be scared of thinking too hard in case my head spins off my shoulders.
“Hey.” Sol really does move closer this time—close enough that his body heat hits my flank, seeping into my already simmering blood. “This doesn’t have to happen, tonight or ever. And it doesn’t have to be a thing. I can wait outside your door—”
“Fuck that.”
Sol purses his lips and I can’t tell if he’s jarred or amused. Or if I’m out of my mind for what I say next.
“I need you near me.” I almost look away as I say it, but in the dark of my room, as heavier rain lashes the windows, the wind howling louder than it has all night, breaking his gaze feels worse than death. “I don’t know why…I just do.”
“Then that’s where I’ll be.” Sol knocks his head against my shoulder. “Just tell me where and when.”
“When?”
Sol blinks. And then it hits him, and hits me too, that this isn’t a vague moment far off in the future. One I’ll forget about before breakfast tomorrow. Or ask for in a few weeks’ time when it might feel less momentous and altering. This is now—it has to be now, and somehow we both know it.
Fuck. My pulse erupts, hammering in my ears, loud and volcanic as Sol’s fingers curl into the sheets as if he’s trying to anchor himself to the sea bed.
He takes another breath, quiet…careful. As if he’s testing the strength of the truth I’ve dumped on him tonight.
And too late, I worry that I’ve chucked a bomb on our friendship.
That of all the shit he’s done for me, for every brick he’s cemented in the solid wall he’s always been, this is where he breaks.
But me and Sol. We’ve never been just friends. And we’re not brothers. We’re something else, and it makes me think of a quote one of Mal’s mates once bellowed at him from across an aircraft hangar in Libya.
To define is to limit.
Mal called Raven a nerdy melt that day. Can’t remember why.
Just that I laughed and it was the last time I saw my brother for a while.
But that quote, it comes back to me now, and I stop trying to cage how I feel about Sol.
How he feels about me. And it comes so easy that I know it’s right, and I try to nail it down, so I remember it later.
“Jack.”
“Hmm?”
Sol grasps my shoulders with both hands and eases me off my belly and onto my side.
We’re in bed and my dick is tucked into my waistband.
If Sol can tell without looking that I’m already hard, it doesn’t show on his face.
He stares at me with the same focus he has when I’m doing other things that scare him.
Lifting weights.
Breaking up fights downstairs.
Facing the men who came to tell me my brother had been injured in combat without him or Skylar at my side.
This isn’t any of that. And I hate that he’s nervous of whatever’s about to happen. I hate that I am too, when Sol narrows the space between us a little more, then stops as if he’s not sure of his path or mine.
“How close do you want me?”
I can’t answer that question. I just know if he backs off another piece of me will die. That I need his hands on my shoulders and his gaze pinning me in place. I need him, and fuck, my dick hurts. “Don’t go.”
“I won’t, love. I promise.”
He’s made that vow before and he’s never broken it, no matter what I’ve thrown at his feet, in his face, and something inside me gives way.
Capitulates.
Surrenders.
I edge closer to Sol and press my forehead to the side of his face as my hand finally lowers to where I need it most.
I’m so fucking hard.
Part of me is scared to touch myself. What remains is so desperate for relief my hand shakes, and though Sol can’t see it, he knows.
“You’re all right,” he murmurs. “Just breathe and let it happen.”
“I can’t…fuck—” A groan escapes me, and not the good kind. “Sol, I need you.”
“I’m here.”
“No, I mean, I need you. I can’t do it.”
I hate how unhinged I sound. But Sol doesn’t look at me like I’m less than I’ve ever been. He holds my panicked stare as if I’m a star burning itself alive, and even through whatever mess I’ve thought myself into, I see it—I feel it, that line we’re about to cross and never come back from.
Sol moves so slow I nearly combust for real. He shifts and his thigh nudges mine, his breath warm on my cheek as he brushes his lips over my skin in a whisper too featherlight to call a kiss. “I’ve got you. Tap out at any time, okay? But Jack?”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t fight it. Don’t hold back. This only works if you let yourself feel.”
I am feeling. So fucking much. But I absorb the direction with a shaky nod and bite my lip as Sol slides a hand between us and curls his hot fingers around my wrist.
Guiding me.
Steering my hand to my dick.
Easing my clothes off and nudging me to wrap my fingers around myself.
Soothing me as heat detonates in every nerve, a familiar coil of pleasure, and yet…
it doesn’t feel like mine. Not until Sol tugs my wrist, encouraging me to move and set a rhythm that has my breath running away from me in two seconds flat.
Christ, I can’t do this.
And yet…I am, and a throttled moan gravels from deep in my throat. Deep in my fucking soul—
But not deep enough.
The warning is distant, drowned out by the unbearable rise in my spine. Pressure, pleasure, it’s all so messy. Sensations spike too fast to discern and I lose the connection with my hand. I mean, I don’t. Nothing happens. But I lose track of it and I just…I fucking can’t.
“Fuck.” I sink into Sol’s shoulder, breathing too short and too hard, and even with him holding my wrist, my grip slips away. Fingers limp and useless, a spasm shooting through my arm and into my neck, my thready composure snapping like frayed rope. “I can’t do it.”
Sol brings his free hand to grasp the base of my skull. He doesn’t say anything. Just breathes, in and out, a steady cadence that feels like home, until he finds his voice in the dark. “I’m here.”
He sounds winded.
Pained.
I raise my head, but his gaze is clear by the time I find it, and he brushes that soft nearly-kiss to my cheek again.
“Tell me what you need.”
I need him. But my brain glitches and the words falling from my lips are a torn plea. “Help me.”
A thudding heartbeat passes, the air between us heavier than it’s ever been.
Sol searches my face. “Are you sure? You want me to touch you?”
It’s more than want. It’s a life force I can’t describe. “I want it, Sol. Please?”
I’ve never begged for anything in my life. Even when I wanted the doctors to put me out of my misery. When I asked Sol to do it over and over, until he cried and I hated myself. But I feel like I could beg now.
Maybe I already am.
Regardless, Sol hears me anyway. He believes me, and with a low groan of his own, he releases my wrist and fists his calloused palm around my cock.
Fucking Christ. I’m a different person the second he makes contact. The second his rough skin scrapes my dick and a new heat incinerates my spine. A shaking fervour that has nothing to do with my damaged body and everything to do with the wicked touch of my forever best friend.
“Fuck.” I curse for the thousandth time tonight, but it’s a weaker beast now, shocked and pliant as my body falls into Sol’s rhythm before I know it’s happening.
Slow with a twist.
Harder, and yet so fucking tender my eyes roll as it all blends together in a heady ride of perfection.
Minutes pass.
Hours.
I’m not sure.
I’m overwhelmed.
Consumed.
But for the first time in a while, I’m not fighting with my body. With my feelings for Sol. I’m at peace with the freight train en route to mow me down flat. With how my breath falls apart and my hand flails at his bare torso.
I find his warm skin.
Feel the clatter of his pulse—or maybe it’s mine.
I need to know. My whole body jerks as I raise my head again and force my eyes open enough to see him, his face inches from mine, lush lips parted, eyes hooded and heavy as he shifts the rhythm of his hand to one that severs something inside me.
A clean break that sends every fear and panic I brought to this bed, to this night, running for the fucking hills.
“Sol.” His name is a prayer on my lips.
“Jack.” He’s so warm against me as he brings us together again, his head to mine. “Let it go, love. It’s okay.”
It isn’t.
How can anything that feels like this be safe?
But Sol’s my sanctuary, even as he holds my skull in a tighter grip. And my dick…fuck. My whole body bows to him, chasing the sensation he’s dragging out of me in waves too strong for whatever vessel is left of me.
Too strong to ride.
To endure.
A peak hits like lightning and I shatter as he holds me through every violent tremor and sound escaping my flayed lungs. As he slaps a hand over my mouth this time to contain my splintered groan.