22. Sol
I don’t have time to overthink it. I don’t have permission either. Jack takes my hand and pulls me out of the bathroom, and he’s not gentle about it.
Bare feet on the floorboards.
Steam clinging to my skin.
Jack shoulders his bedroom door open and propels me inside, and my back is to the old wood he kicks shut before I can take a breath.
He grips my face again—his favourite thing and I’ll never get bored of it. Or of how he looks at me now, eyes dark, jaw set, breathing rough. “No noise.” A whisper too harsh to be delicate. “Don’t think about anything but this…please?”
Please. Gods. It’s my undoing. Or maybe it’s the beer and rum I’ve put away this evening. Either way I’m as weak to that plea as I’ve always been, and I fall headlong into everything he asks of me.
Jack tugs me from the door and crowds me to the bed. I go down easy and he looms above me like a fighter who knows he’s going to win, pulling his shirt over his head like every wet dream I’ve ever had.
I’m naked. Still wet from the shower. Yet, for the first time since forever and a day, he doesn’t seem to notice the water beading onto his sheets. He only sees me, and knowing for sure he likes what he sees—loves it, even—it’s…something else.
“What do you want, Jackie? Cos you’re looking at me like you wanna eat me alive.”
He almost smirks. But that’s not Jack. And the stare he gives me is feral. “Sol, I want to fuck you.”
My mouth dries. Pulse kicks up. I’m not shocked—I saw it in him the moment I stepped out of the shower.
But it still hits like the sweetest sucker punch.
Like, how is this happening? Bad luck follows me around.
Misfortune and wicked twists of fate. This, every fantasy unfolding on Christmas Eve… this isn’t my life.
It can’t be.
And yet, I watch with building heat in my belly as my best friend strips, showing me every inch of his muscled, inked frame, and it’s all real.
Him.
Me.
Us.
Jack kicks aside the last of his clothes and comes to the bed, covering me with his body, fists either side of my head. “I want to fuck you,” he repeats, lower this time, as if he’s speaking to the part of me that needs to hear it most. “Teach me how.”
My legs are already curling around him, hooking him to me, my body way ahead of my brain. I slide my hands up his bare back and arch my neck to lick the seam of his mouth. “You don’t need lessons. Fuck me how you blow me—slow, deep, hard.”
“You want this?”
“You can’t tell?” I flex my hips a little, letting my dick press against his, breath catching at the sensation.
I’m so hard.
So is he, and it’s no joke. Jack isn’t small, and it’s been a hell of a long time since I let someone bang me.
Because every man who came before was just proof it’s always been him. And by the way Jack’s consuming me tonight, he wants it to be him too. But…I have to be sure. “Do you want this, Jackie? You want to fuck me?”
“Yes.” Jack leans down and bites my neck. “Yes.”
How am I awake? This has to be a dream. But like the night he first kissed me, and the night he seemed to know how bad I needed him to take me apart with his hands and mouth, he’s too hot and earnest to speak anything but truth.
He shuts me up for a while. Urgent, pulsing heat takes over and he retraces the steps of all that’s come before. With his mouth. With skilled fingers that don’t need a map to find their way home.
He remembers.
And he cares, about getting it right. About turning me into a sweaty, panting mess, devoid of coherent thought and speech beyond yes every time he reiterates consent.
I grip the bedframe.
Jack lies over me, chest to chest, so wrapped up in each other we share oxygen with every breath. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
“You won’t.” I nuzzle his neck, hoping he feels how steady I am beyond the shivering across my overheated skin. “If you go slow.”
An instruction Jack doesn’t need. He’s used to holding the line and he presses in deep with careful—brutal—patience, his focus so absolute he couldn’t cause me pain if he tried.
And yet…it’s a lot. I need a minute as he stretches me open, breath catching, eyes burning. Hands releasing the bedframe to clamp onto his shoulders, digging in as Jack stills. Reading me. Knowing me, even though we’ve never known each other quite like this.
“Sol?”
“I’m okay.”
He doesn’t move. Doesn’t push. Just touches his forehead to mine and waits, breathing hard through his nose, fighting for the restraint I need. The restraint I’ll happily boot into the sea when my body can take the heat.
That minute I need expands. But it works. I adjust, acclimate. Let the tension bleed from my stressed muscles and welcome Jack home. Let the ache settle into something that turns pain into pleasure as I release a steady breath, aware of Jack’s fixation with my mouth. “Now,” I whisper. “Fuck me.”
Jack snatches a rough inhale and something in his gaze breaks open. Relief. Hunger. Need. He rolls his hips, a cautious drive intense enough to drag a groan from me that has him cursing and pressing that wicked forearm to my throat.
Perfect pressure.
No pain.
Not a punishment, but a warning.
Shh.
Then he moves in earnest and the room disappears. The ceiling. The walls. The mattress at my back and the air in my lungs.
Jack’s rhythm is deep and relentless.
He pushes my limits without even trying, because he knows me, and what starts as careful missionary fast becomes this clawing, shunting thing that has no hope of being quiet.
Jack slaps his hand over my mouth. But it slides off as sensation overwhelms him and he bites off a rough groan that makes me grateful the living room lies between this room and where Mal and Skylar sleep.
He fucks me harder and I wind up contorted against the headboard. The wall. Half hanging off the bed as Jack loses whatever hold he’s had on his composure.
On that restraint.
He drags me back like I weigh nothing. Hauling me until I’m flat on my back again, prone beneath the hard line of his body, my dick trapped between us. His teeth find my throat, my jaw, my lips, biting, then kissing as he drives into me again and smothers my groan, trying to keep us both quiet.
Jack fails at that and that alone, but I can’t find the will to care.
Not when he’s owning me—ruining me—with something he’s supposed to be learning for the first time, all the while there’s nothing uncertain in how he fucks me.
Jack moves inside me like he’s always known how.
Like he’s been dreaming of it for years, and now it’s happening, he won’t let it end until we’re both shattered into a thousand shards of who we were before.
He grips my wrists and pins my hands above my head again. Only this time, there’s nothing to hold onto. He has me exactly where he wants me and I love it as much as I love him.
My breath stutters, stretched thin with the strain of him breaking me open. “Jack—fuck, Jack.”
In answer, he thumps into me, endless and hard, and it’s perfect. His gaze locks on mine and there’s a wildness to it, a primality, that tips me closer and closer to the edge.
Another part of me breaks. As he releases my hands, I leave the pieces in the sand, gripping any part of Jack I can reach. His shoulders, his arms. The back of his fragile skull as he amps up the blunt pressure of his cock so deep inside me.
“Yeah? This is okay?”
“Yeah—yes. Fuck.”
Jack growls, the last of his control thinning around the edges. His breathing is rough, every fibre of his broad frame strung so tight I know it’ll be the end of me when he snaps.
He kisses me like he’s drowning and I’m the only air left in the room. Fucks me like I’m all he’s ever wanted. Takes what he wants—what he needs—and the sheer physicality of it, the heat and the force, has release bearing down on me with a savage flash of ecstasy.
“I’m gonna come.”
Jack raises off me just enough that we can both see my dick compressed between his abs and mine, sliding through the mess of arousal already there. “Fuck. Sol. That’s so fucking hot.”
Still can’t believe he’s saying that about me. About us. But I’m so beyond thought I can only arch my back and chase the friction that’s going to kill me.
Gods, this isn’t sex. This is—
“Tell me,” Jack cuts off wherever that unhinged thought was going. “Tell me if I’m hurting you—”
“You’re not. Don’t stop. Fuck, Jack. Don’t stop.”
I haven’t cursed so much since the night Skylar collapsed in the hallway. But I don’t fight it. I let it happen, all of it, and whatever Jack sees in me, it makes his eyes flash. Makes him drive into me harder, faster, and only his unyielding grip on my jaw keeps me in place.
He wants me wrecked.
In the very best way, and instinct tells me he won’t stop until I am. Won’t give himself what he needs. And so I surrender to it. I let him have me—all of me—and he watches it happen as though it’s the most wondrous thing he’s ever seen.
He watches me come, then he surges inside me, his mouth fused to mine, and this emotion, this mind-bending bliss…it’s like nothing I’ve ever known.
For a few charged seconds, there’s nothing but a shimmering afterglow. The receding thud of my pulse, the tremor in my limbs. Jack’s weight over me as we both breathe as if we’ve been dragged from the raging sea.
He’s shaking too. But he doesn’t let me go—not yet. He clings on and he laughs, low and so full of awed disbelief. “I was right to be fucking scared of this.”
His dazed words yank me from the abyss, reminding me how different this is to anything we’ve done before. To blowing him and him blowing me. This was both of us out of our minds at the same time and as the heat drains from my blood, the sudden blankness in his eyes reminds me how dangerous that is.
I hold him against me. “You’re all right, love. I have you.”
For another long moment, Jack doesn’t answer. Because he’s not here. But the absence seizure is brief. Doesn’t even drop his head before it scatters.
“See?” I kiss him. “Nothing to be scared of.”