Chapter 29 Jack #2
“Back at you.” I echo his earlier words as I finish fumbling the clasp on his wrist. Mal is going to have a grand old time when he clocks us, but I don’t care.
And for a moment, everything is easy. Light.
Then the reason I dragged him out of the kitchen snaps back into my head and I take a seat on Sol’s bed, a place I’ve spent more hours this week than all the time we’ve lived here. “How was Oscar?”
Sol’s still studying the bracelet. “He’s good. I thought he’d be hopping mad at me, but he wasn’t.”
“Why do you always think everyone’s angry with you?”
Sol laughs, but without a shred of humour this time. “Can’t keep everyone happy, eh? But it was because I’d pissed off Oscar that we wound up so far out. Maybe if we’d been closer to shore when that squall hit…I don’t know.”
“It’s not your fault the weather gods chose violence that day.”
“No, but it’s my fault we were late out.”
“Dav’s bullshit is never your fucking fault.”
“What about my bullshit, Jackie?” Sol wedges a hand into his messy curls and leaves it there. “And what about your right to be angry with me?”
“I’m not angry with you.”
“Yes, you are. You told me that.”
“No. I told you I was fucking fuming, but it didn’t matter because I was in love with you.”
Sol blinks. “What?”
“At the hospital. You…fuck. You don’t remember?”
The shock on Sol’s face answers for him. The disbelief. He drops his hand from his hair and searches my face, as if the words might be written on my skin. “You said that?”
“Aye.”
“When?”
“When you got upset. That’s not why I said it, though.”
“Why did you say it?”
“Because it’s fucking true.”
Sol stares at me harder, a deep frown I’d be proud of creasing his face. Thinking, thinking, thinking, as he tries to reach through fog for a memory he might never find. Then he groans and covers his face with his hands. “My wildest dreams came true and I missed it.”
“You didn’t miss it.” I reach for him and haul him between my legs. “You’re just hearing it twice.”
Sol slowly lowers his hands and his gaze is as wild as those dreams he’s talking about. “I used to say that to you…back when you hadn’t been awake long. You told me to fuck off.”
“What an arsehole.”
“Never. But Jackie…do you mean it? Really? I let you suck my dick and think it was the first time.”
“So? I’d forgotten anyway. It was always going to feel like the first time.”
“That’s a generous way of looking at it. Generous to me, at least. You don’t feel manipulated? Like I took advantage of you?”
I have no clue how he’s managed to twist the most enlightening and empowering moments of my life into that fucked-up shape.
It’s cerebral acrobatics I’m not capable of, and I don’t want to be.
“Sol, you’ve spent years caring for me without jumping my fucking bones. Without me even knowing you wanted to.”
“I should’ve told you the second you started acting like maybe you wanted me again.”
My heart contracts. “Maybe,” I allow. “But you didn’t drag me down this path. And I know what a minefield I am to be around, even on a good day.”
“Jack—”
“No. I am. And you walked straight into it from the moment I woke up. But for the record, I might not remember the first time we were together, but I remember the second, and the third, and every fucking time after that.”
Sol tears his gaze from where it’s become fixed on some spot beyond me. “Do you remember the last time?”
My blood heats even before my brain bombards me with image after image of the night we spent together before the storm hit.
Skin on skin.
Sol trembling beneath me as I slid inside him.
The raw pleasure on his face as we came together.
“I remember.”
“Did you like it?”
It’s my turn to snort. “If you hadn’t almost died immediately after, it would be all I could think about.”
Sol wets his bottom lip. An unconscious swipe of his tongue that has my hands sliding from his waist to the swell of firm muscle below. “I thought about it in the water. After the Sirona went down and I lost Oscar in the waves. But it didn’t seem real.”
“It was real.”
“I know, Jackie. I can feel it thrumming between us now I can keep my eyes open long enough.”
“You feel it, eh?”
“You don’t?”
“Sol, I fucking feel it.” He’s still between my legs. I take full advantage of it and tumble him to the bed before he knows what’s happening.
I’m gentle, though.
Sol likes my weight on him. My rough touch.
But he’s still battered and bruised. Still fragile, even if he doesn’t know it.
And so I let instinct guide me and roll him gently onto his back before I give in to the consuming need to kiss him.
Reclaim him, from the ocean, the gods he believes in, and the royal mess other people’s bad choices have made of his life.
The thrumming he’s talking about fast becomes a burning throb. We grind and kiss, grind and kiss, and I steal his clothes piece by piece, tasting every inch of him before I slide down the bed and swallow his cock.
Sol curses, arching from the bed. His leg curls around my neck and I like it.
I like it a lot.
And I fucking love how he grips my hair. How he rocks deep into my throat, as if he lost the restraint he’s carried all these years to the storm.
He swells in my mouth and I taste his need on my tongue. Feel it in his trembling legs, and the warning he chokes out through a groan.
“Jack, I’m gonna come.”
Nope.
Not yet.
I pull off and lever myself back up the bed. “Can I fuck you?”
Sol’s already shoving at the clothes I’m still wearing. I lost my shirt a while ago and he makes short work of the rest. Wraps his hand around my dick and my eyes roll to the back of my fucking skull.
“That a yes?”
“Yes. Fuck me, Jack. I need you so much.”
He doesn’t have to need me. I’m right here. In his bed, sheets already twisted around us, pillows everywhere.
Sol’s bed is shoved into the corner of his room. I grab lube from his bedside table and roll him to face the wall, bracing my palm on the painted bricks.
He goes with it so easily. Breath catching as I align us and inch inside him from behind, careful until I feel him relax around me, curving around him from our feet to where I bury my face in his neck.
And then I fuck him with the slowest grind of my hips, holding him pinned between me and the wall. Keeping him steady while the bed shifts beneath us. Deep inside him. Deliberate. Only pressing harder when he asks me to. Only fucking him faster when his cock begins to pulse in my hand.
The wall keeps me from crushing him.
But only just.
Because despite my best intentions, what Sol seems to want—what his body keeps straining for—is the weight of me. The pressure. The certainty that I’m here and not going anywhere.
So I give it to him, roll him onto his belly, and hold him there as I keep driving inside him until the world disappears. Until he comes with a shiver and a low, wretched cry that sends me tumbling into the sweetest abyss.
Sweet because he’s right there with me. His body is so tired, but something happens as we come. New magic coalesces and we fall into mind-blowing sync.
I don’t know when it ends.
Just that it doesn’t for the longest time and when I drift back to earth, I’m still inside him.
Still on top of him.
I kiss his neck and ease back, tipping him over so I can see him.
His face.
His eyes.
His dazed smile that turns speculative the longer he shines it at me.
“What are you smirking about?”
“I’m not smirking. I’m thinking—” Sol yawns. It’s so sudden it seems to shock him, but I’m too curious to laugh at him.
“Thinking then. About what?”
“About how you’re so good at man sex when you’ve barely ever done it before.”
“Good, eh?”
“Beyond good, Jackie. Trust me.”
I do trust him. And I don’t even mind that he has a lifetime of fucking other people to compare it to. Reckon I know the answer to his pondering too. But first, I want to know something from him. “What did we do? That first time?”
Sol’s eyes are heavy. And the sweat on our skin is cooling fast. He slips away to the bathroom, then comes back to bed.
I drag the rumpled sheets over us and wait.
Sol nuzzles my cheek and finally—finally—lets go of what he’s been holding all these years.
“We kissed a lot. Then you asked me to teach you how to suck my dick. So I did, and eventually we had the most banging sixty-nine. I thought I died when I came. Thought I’d dreamed it, but you were so chill the next morning.
You had to go, war was always calling you somewhere else, but you said we’d figure it out, that you wanted to, and that kept me breathing until the sky fell in on us. ”
He says it all in one breath and I can see he’s different after. That maybe he’s no longer afraid. And I love that too. “Can’t believe I forgot my first blow job.”
“First dude blowjob.”
“I think it might’ve been my first blowjob ever.”
Those bronze-brown eyes widen a touch. “You’ve never said that before. I thought you did everything with women.”
“Nope. The more I think about it, the more I remember I barely did anything. I know I’m broken now, but I feel like the sex part of me never worked properly until this. Until you.”
Sol looks like he might cry. But it passes and he smiles, and I come back to what led us here. What he wants to know. “I can’t be sure, but I bet I left your bed that morning and tumbled myself down a rabbit hole of research. So I was ready for whatever happened when I next saw you.”
“Because you wanted to come home and fuck me?”
“No, Sol. Because I was always going to come home and love you, even if I don’t remember it.”
He does get emotional then, and I hold him while it flows through him. Because this is Sol. And I love him so fucking much.
“Can I ask you something?” he says after a while.
I’m not asleep. But I reckon I will be soon, if we stay here in this bed that smells of him. And of us. “Aye, of course.”
“You said you were fucking fuming, but you never told me why. Or with who.”
And he wants me to tell him now. So I force some energy into my brain and try. “I can’t bring it all together anymore. But I think it was because you never believe your heart matters. You’d leave it by the bins for someone else’s sake and it drives me fucking crazy.”
“So…you were angry with me?”
“Huh. Maybe.”
I kiss him to let him know whatever I felt, it was temporary. Passing through while I searched for my real emotions. It’s gone now and I feel nothing for him but decades of love that has morphed into something so precious and vital I can’t look away from him.
Sol smiles against my lips. I get the sense he has something to say, but slackness seeps into his limbs, and I soak in a feeling I’m still getting used to—the one of him falling asleep in my arms without fear something terrible will happen while he’s gone.
It’s unfair that he had to be so badly hurt to find that peace, but I can’t fight what’s already happened.
I can only hold him, and rub my cheek on his sex-warm hair, and die the sweetest death as his sleepy murmur reaches me.
“For the record, Jackie. I’m in love with you too.”