Chapter 13 Jack
The wait for Sol to wash the sea from his skin is endless and yet, I don’t mind it. I don’t fear it. My brain is forever flawed, I know that. But it doesn’t cross my mind for a single second that Sol won’t come to me. There’s no room for that in how right this feels.
And so I stand in the dark by my bedroom window, listening to the shower run, drawing a slow breath when it shuts off. I’m ready when Sol slips into my room and shuts the door behind him.
He’s carrying a damp towel and wearing the loose cotton trousers that make him look like he should be dancing in the starlight at a hippie music festival, a memory I still own, but he was so fucking young—we both were.
I haven’t felt young for a long time. But Sol…aside from the frown threatening his face and the thicker stubble on his jaw, he looks the same as he did when we were twenty.
He doesn’t frown much. I hate that he’s frowning now. I go to him without thought, but I leave space between us this time, a narrow gap that seems to add weight to whatever’s troubling him.
Hate that too.
Feels like death.
“Where’s Fiadh?”
His voice startles me, and it shouldn’t. I hear it in my fucking dreams. “With Mal.”
“Is he—”
I silence Sol with a finger to his lips.
I don’t want to think about my brother. About Skylar or Folk Whitlock, or even the silver dog who saves my sanity every moment Sol’s not here to ground me.
I want to think about him—about him and me—and at least try to figure out why it’s taken me so long to do it.
Why haven’t I kissed him before?
Now I know how it feels, it makes no fucking sense.
Sol has his back to the door, his bare skin against the old wood, his curly hair as dry as he’s ever going to get it without me bossing him around.
I reach for him, ease him away from it, and bring him close enough to me that my own skin jumps with anticipation, a sensation I’m starting to realise is pure desire—pure want—flooding my senses.
My finger is still pressed to his soft lips. I let it fall and the text message I thumbed out on Skylar’s phone comes back to me.
I can’t stop thinking about kissing you.
It was true then, and it’s true now. And I don’t care that Skylar probably saw that message when I gave him the phone back. I don’t care about anything except Sol, and the sudden fear that maybe the apprehension in his gaze exists because he doesn’t want this.
Because he doesn’t want me.
I’m so close to kissing him again, though what comes next, I have no fucking idea. But I hold myself still and ask, because I have to know. “Am I forcing this on you?”
It’s not quite what I mean to say, but it’s out in the wild before my brain and my mouth have another chance at communication. And Sol…
His entire being recoils like I’ve hit him. “What?”
I shake my head, so he knows this isn’t coming out how I want it to. Find his hands and squeeze them so he knows I’m trying. But as sharp and alive as I feel, the right words don’t come and I don’t want any more wrong ones loose.
“Easy.” Sol grips my hands as tight as I grip his. “You’re not forcing anything on me. I just…why? Why now?”
I don’t know. Everything and nothing between us has changed, but I don’t know when or why or how.
Just that it has. That it is, and I know with more certainty than I’ve ever known anything that it won’t change back.
“I don’t know why.” I speak the thoughts aloud.
Let them grow. “It’s like I woke up one day with a lit firework inside me, but at the same time, it doesn’t feel that sudden, because it’s you—because it’s us, Sol, and it feels so fucking right. ”
Sol’s eyes redden. He turns away, squeezing them shut, and it scares me worse than anything.
I bring my hand to his jaw again, like I did in the hallway, and honestly, I don’t mean to be as rough as I am. But my clumsy touch seems to ignite something in Sol. A tortured sound escapes him and he opens his eyes, bringing that bronze-brown gaze back to me.
“Which part, Jack? Which part of it feels right?”
“All of it.”
“All of it?”
“Aye. You don’t believe me?”
For a long moment, Sol says nothing, and even as the sky outside bleeds from black to blue his face is hard to read. Then he leans into my touch and his tongue snakes out, catching the inside of my wrist with a barely there swipe that almost takes my feet from under me. “I believe you.”
Relief batters me. But it’s eclipsed as fast as the space between us and we come together again, entwining, tangling, his hands on my chest, mine at his throat and his jaw as if they’ve always been there.
I crowd him without meaning to. Pull him from the door and spin us so he’ll tumble onto my bed if I can’t control myself.
My bed.
Fuck.
Arousal pummels me and we’re not even kissing. And then we are and I’m not entirely sure how it happens. Just that it does and it heals me as much as it wakes me the fuck up.
I kiss Sol harder than I did in the hallway.
Rougher.
I take the towel from his hands and grip his jaw tighter, and it’s deliberate this time, even if I don’t know it. Even if I have no clue how deep Sol’s snatched breath is going to hit me.
Christ, it’s like my body has been waiting my whole life for him to make that low, wrecked sound.
For it to show me a truth about myself I’ve never thought to look for.
I back him to the bed and he goes down with the fluidity and grace I’ve been hooked on our whole fucking lives.
Gravity takes me with him and falling onto his hard, masculine frame is the best thing that’s ever happened to me.
He feels so good beneath me.
So strong and warm as energy crackles between us like dry tinder about to spark.
I’m so hard.
So is he, and it feels…I don’t know. I flex my hips on instinct and groan. Fuck. Yeah. Okay. That feels fucking good too.
We’re still kissing, lip-locked as if air means nothing to us. To me, anyway. I don’t want to suffocate Sol. I break away so he can breathe and get my reward in his flushed face and wide eyes dark with want.
I brace a hand on the mattress, fighting to keep steady. Skim his bare chest with the other, skating lower with each pass, ghosting down his abdomen. “Can I touch you?”
Sol swallows. “You don’t have to do that.”
“I fucking want to.”
He tugs at my t-shirt. I take the hint and yank it off, tossing it to the floor, and it feels like stripping another layer of murky film from my brain.
We’re skin to skin.
Breathing hard.
Kissing again as Sol winds his arms around me, his palm coming to the base of my skull, fingers rubbing through my short hair—I cut it while he was gone, a fact that falls out of my head as his hypnotic touch does me in.
He hasn’t answered my question.
I force my eyes open and find his gaze. “I want to,” I tell him again, in case he didn’t get it the first time. “I want to make you feel good.”
Sol is shaking, trembling in my arms.
Or maybe it’s me.
Maybe it doesn’t matter.
Maybe we are each other’s skin and bone, coiling and dancing together until whatever happens next is inevitable.
I have Sol sprawled out beneath me on the bed.
My bed.
Slowly, I grasp his bicep and pin his arm over his head. I push my hips into his as I do it and absorb the whole body shudder passing through him. Watch his teeth dig into his bottom lip and his eyelids flutter.
He likes that.
I like it too and it helps me bypass the fact I’ve never been with a man.
More than that, I don’t even think about it.
I follow the map of Sol’s inked skin as if it were made for me.
I bite his neck. Kiss his chest. And finally, finally, I slip my hand beneath his waistband and wrap my fingers around his cock.
Holy shit.
I’m not ready for how he jerks and gasps, his spine arching from the bed, a rare dirty curse falling from his lips.
“Fuck, Jackie. Fuck.”
I shift so my own dick finds friction against his thigh and bury my face in his neck. Why is this so fucking good? How is it? Somewhere beneath dizzying want, shock ripples through me. Then Sol’s dick contracts in my hand and I forget all about it.
His dick is in my hand.
That should shock me too, but I’m consumed by the rapid rise and fall of Sol’s inked chest. The sweat rising on his skin and his hooded gaze searching my face.
He’s afraid.
I tighten my grip on him.
His eyes flutter and another snatched gasp escapes him.
“Look at me.” My voice pitches low. “Sol.”
I still have his arm pinned over his head. I release it and Sol’s hands instantly find my shoulders. He grips them hard enough I realise I like that kind of pressure too, but the fear in his eyes…it’s too real for me to contemplate much else.
What are you so scared of?
I should know. Perhaps I do. But any wisdom I’m still capable of feels a long way from where we are now. He’s hot and heavy in my hand, pulsing in my palm. I kiss Sol as I squeeze him and swallow his moan.
“Relax,” I whisper against his lips. “Nothing bad’s gonna happen.”
Sol holds my gaze for the longest moment, his jaw tense like he’s biting back words. Or reaching for them. Then his eyes fall shut and he kisses me back, and whatever argument he’s having with himself, his body doesn’t lie.
I chase a rhythm and his hips rise to my tightening grip. Breath shallow, he lets go of my shoulders to grasp the bed frame above his head and I drink in the sight of him. Drown in the soft, desperate groan he makes as I find the cadence that works for him.
Christ, he’s so beautiful. I’ve always known it, but like this…
fuck. I can’t look away. I don’t look away.
I hold that steady beat and track his stacked breaths, every inhale and exhale warming my lips.
I kiss him, slow and deep, and spin out as Sol arches into it—into me and what I’m doing to him, spine bowing off the bed for a split second before he wrestles himself back under control.
I don’t want that. Him thinking so hard that he’s capable of putting a lid on this. I want him undone, like I was the other night. I want him messy and loud. Even if this moment is all I can ever give him, I want him to be free.
Sol, I want you to fly.
I need more contact than his dick. His jaw calls to me again and I wrap my free hand around it, my forearm to his throat, his pulse hammering so hard I feel it against my skin, as I press closer, looming over him, making room for myself between his thighs.
Sol groans. “Jackie…”
What? What do you need?
But I’m beyond words. Beyond reason. Beyond everything except the battle my best friend is still fighting beneath me.
He’s losing, I know he is.
But it’s not enough. His body is showing me the truth, but the resistance thrashing his head from side to side, it has to go.
I slow, deliberately, giving him an out.
Sol’s eyes fly open and I grip his jaw harder, applying heavier pressure to his throat.
“Tell me you want this. Fuck, tell me you need it, Sol. Let me fucking hear it.”
The growl spills out of me as if we’re long-time lovers. Irrepressible instinct.
And Sol…he melts into it, flexing into my still-pumping hand as he labours for breath. “I want it—I need it. Don’t stop, Jackie, I need you—”
His confession cuts short with a strangled, pleasured groan. Soft enough for the walls of my bedroom to contain. Loud enough to echo in my cavernous brain until the end of time.
I love that fucking sound.
And it’s all the answer I need.
Sol’s resistance dissolves, into me, into the sheets beneath us, blurring the line we’ve crossed. The bedframe creaks as his grip tightens and his body arches, and he says everything I need to hear all over again.
“Don’t stop. Jack.”
My full name on his lips does something primal to me. Something ancient. I hold him down, pin him with that pressure on his throat again, and work him with an intensity that feels fucking reverent.
I drink him in, my own cock aching with need and my mouth craving something that blows my fragile mind.
I stroke him with my hand over and over, seeking the same friction from his clothed thigh, deep groans snarled in my throat.
And I don’t look away, don’t blink. I don’t miss a second of it—of him, coming undone beneath me.
The way his breath stutters and his face twists, not just with release but relief.
Sol comes as though I really am setting him free, and as scalding warmth coats my hand, and his low wrecked cry shatters the air, something sacred slots into place.
We were made for this.
A thought I can’t shake as Sol trembles in the aftermath of release, chest heaving, lashes a mile long against his flushed cheeks. Ruined, real, and impossibly beautiful.
I did that.
The ruined part. And I like it—I love it—even as reality starts to bite the edges of the glorious fucking mess we’ve made of my bed.
I hover over Sol, as if I don’t trust the ground not to give me a hard landing. To not shift so fast it shatters what we’ve done.
I’m crushing him. I ease back, releasing his jaw and his throat from my weight, giving him space without breaking the thread between us. My hands fall away, but I don’t like how the cold air hits him, so I stay close as we tumble into the kind of silence that kills things.
The room hums with it.
We hum with it.
Sol stares up at me, dazed, as if he’s surfaced from the deepest ocean, but it’s not only me making him feel like that. He’s tired too, I see it in his heavy blink and reddened eyes, in the slow way he moves his mouth, like whatever he needs to say can’t take the weight of his fatigue.
I’m familiar with that feeling.
Too familiar.
So is Sol, but from the other side, and it fucks with my head to see what he’s seen since I came home with a hole in my brain. To feel how much it hurts.
I reach over him to the towel I abandoned on the bedside table before I toppled us onto my bed. Wipe my hands, slow and careful, and brush his messy hair out of his eyes, hair damp with sweat and heat and intimacy too profound to name.
Sol sighs, a long loose breath that seeps out of him as if he’s set down a back-breaking weight.
For a heartbeat, I think he might fall asleep on me for the first time in years.
His eyes slide shut and his body slackens, shifting closer to me in a way that makes something warm and protective unfurl inside me.
I bend my head to kiss his temple, and—
The alarm system screams from the hallway, an ugly bleat that snatches peace from us like the devil claiming the dead.
Sol jolts beneath me, wide awake before my brain knows what’s happening.
The rest of me, though—I’m in motion before I comprehend what’s happening, and the world feels instantly wrong. Like the walls have thinned and the sky is lower, and the gossamer web of bliss around us shatters like paper thin glass.
Someone’s here.