Chapter 11 Jack
ELEVEN
Jack
Tian was right there.
Standing by a couch with some guy draped over him, and all I could picture was Tian’s mouth on his, their bodies pressed together, my jealousy spiking hot and filthy, my brain painting them tangled up in bed and me locked out of it.
My fists curled with the insane urge to smash something, jealousy roaring hotter than the jet lag.
Something black and ugly welled up inside me as his gaze caught mine.
Six goddamn months I’d been fooling myself, building castles in the sky about what we’d had, and for what?
It had just been sex. Insanely hot sex, yeah, but nothing more, and I hated myself for believing it could have been.
Any hope I’d clung to was ash in my mouth.
We’d promised each other two weeks—sun, sea, and fucking—and nothing beyond that.
Why the hell would he want me again? Of course, he’d find someone else.
Someone his own age, someone easier. The pain stabbed like a shiv in my gut, sharp and merciless.
I tore my gaze from him and stalked toward the reception desk, Starry still yammering about rooms with views and fuck knows what.
“Jack O’Leary,” I barked at the young lady behind the desk. Her dark eyes flared. Starry elbowed me in the side. Hard. The jab in my ribs soothed the jealousy and pain throbbing in my breast. “Sorry, long flight. We’re checking in. Jack O’Leary and Pete Starkinski.”
He’d found someone else.
I meant nothing to him.
“Yes, sirs, tired is always happening,” the desk clerk replied in English heavily accented with Italian.
Something kept prodding me to turn around.
Look again. Maybe that was just some fan being overzealous.
Cursing myself for my weakness, I glanced over my shoulder as Pete tried to talk up the reception desk gal as if she hadn’t already dealt with loud Americans all day.
I stared at the small fountain, two tall women in Olympic jackets chatting, and unbidden, my gaze fell on Tian.
The asshole who had been hanging on him like a wet cape on a hook was sitting down.
Tian’s gaze was hot, and not in the I-want-your-body way but in the I-am-pissed-off way, which seemed unfair to me as he was the one with a blond bimbo feeling him up not ten seconds ago.
He jerked his head to the left, then stamped off in that direction to slam through a door without even looking back to see if I was following him.
Fuck that. I was not going after him. He’d found another man. Some twinky shit who didn’t have the manners to know not to be all PDA on him in public. Nope, I was not going after him. He made his twinky bed, let him lie in it.
“Can you get the key cards? I want to go check out the hotel pool,” I said to Starry, then left him to deal with the check-in process.
My carry-on was still in my hand. I chugged through the vast lobby, sidestepping luggage and athletes, then bulling through a door that led to what seemed to be meeting rooms. Nothing unusual in that.
Hotels held conferences all the time. Probably we’d be in one later in the week to watch videos or hobnob with Olympic VIPs.
I had no clue. Maybe we wouldn’t enter one at all.
I paused as I tried to sniff out which way Tian had gone as if I were a damned bloodhound or something. To my right, a shape appeared, gave me a shove around a corner, and then planted his feet to block my escape.
“What the fuck was that?” Tian asked in a sharp but low growl.
“Get off me!”
“Are you too good to even say hello to me?”
Fuck, he looked sexy—his lips swollen and begging to be bitten, thighs taut in those jeans, every line of his lean body screaming to be touched—and it took everything in me not to slam him against the wall and grind into him right there.
But I wouldn’t let that derail my righteous anger.
“Looked to me like you were too busy letting your new boyfriend climb all over you.”
He blinked. “What?”
“I’m not doing this,” I snapped, and pushed him away, using all my best moves to stop him from touching me, but he was wily and quick and back in front of me in a second.
“Seriously?” He snapped. “That’s what this is all about? You’re jealous?”
My temper flared even brighter. I was sick that I’d built anything in my head with him, and sick that I hadn’t listened to my gut. I was older, stupid, and he was this young kid. Of course, he didn’t want me.
“Fuck that. I am not jealous. I couldn’t care less. What we had was just two weeks of fun and sun, right?”
He stepped back, his face suddenly blank.
For a heartbeat, I thought I saw a flicker of shock, something raw and unguarded, but it disappeared in an instant, shuttered behind that fierce mask he was wearing so well right now.
“Right. We fucked,” he said in a dead tone.
Then he stabbed me with a pointed finger, dead center in the US flag on my chest. “You want to forget it, fine, but at least have the decency to look at me!”
I was speechless. He thought I wanted to forget it. Was he bonkers?
“What? I don’t want to—”
“Don’t you dare dump your regrets about fucking me all over me now!
” Tian shouted, his temper causing his cheeks to flush and his eyes to brighten with emotion.
Lord, he was so beautiful, even prettier than I’d recalled.
I fisted my hands to keep from reaching for him.
Unsure now of how to reply, I sucked in a shaky breath and shook my head.
“You have no reply? Nothing?” He seemed unbelieving, but he should know I was a man of few words.
“What about you and that tall bastard that you were with when you exited the elevator?”
That snapped me out of my mental fog. “Starry’s a teammate. Not that it matters.”
“Brett is a teammate as well!”
“Yeah, but a little too fucking friendly,” I snapped, the words ripping out of me before I could stop them.
My temper was unleashed now. “Not that it matters because we mean nothing to each other, right?” I went for the jugular, and he hissed then stabbed a finger at me again.
I caught it and gripped his hand hard, but he yanked it away.
“If you think that, then why are you yelling at me about my teammate?”
That about finished me off, and suddenly, all sense of what I was supposed to say flew out of the window. “I don’t know!” I yelled in his face. “Maybe because I can’t stop thinking about you, and that makes me edgy as fuck!”
His eyes flared. My fingers clenched tighter. The atmosphere in that tiny alcove shifted from red-hot anger to a foggy gray of uncertainty.
“Jack—”
“All I think about is you! Day and night. You’ve never left my mind since we left the cay behind.
I dream about being inside you and wake up sweaty and sick with want.
From the moment the coach told me I made the team, all I could think of was kissing you again and making love to you.
And then when I first see you you’re with some jerk, and I want you so much, so I didn’t want to say anything because it hurt I wasn’t enough for you to want me as well. ”
“Stop—”
I couldn’t stop. The words kept pouring out, sharper and louder with every breath. “You’d obviously moved on!”
“I haven’t moved on!” Tian shot back, his voice cracking under the strain.
“Well, how the hell would I know that? We promised radio silence, no texts, no calls, nothing!” My chest heaved, fury boiling over. “What did you expect me to think, huh?”
“I know what we said! I was there, Jack!” he shouted, eyes wild. “This is insane—why are we tearing each other apart in a fucking hallway?”
The door across the hall flew open, and an older woman in a sedate blue dress stalked up to us, her face pinched, the room behind her filled with people with papers in front of them.
She then dressed us down in flowing Italian that neither of us understood, but we nodded along.
Her gist was pretty clear. Shut the fuck up, you dumb, loud Americans, we’re trying to have a meeting.
With that dictate delivered, she stormed back into the conference room and slammed the door in our faces.
“Whoa shit,” Tian whispered.
My temper subsided in an instant. “She should be a hockey coach,” I muttered, my gaze refocusing on Tian. My beautiful Tian.
We were both breathing hard, as if we’d just gone twelve rounds in the ring, and all I could think about was dragging him somewhere dark and tearing into him again.
The softer fantasies—anything more than raw sex—died in my throat, choking me, because I hated myself for wanting more when my body just screamed for him.
“I missed you,” Tian confessed on a shaky breath, but what I really heard was the echo of all the nights I’d missed the sex, the heat, the way he made me lose control.
But he sounded vulnerable. Sad. And the admission gutted me.
It shredded any lingering envy, littering the bits on the wet tile floor under our shoes.
Now it was my turn.
“I missed you too, so damn much,” I revealed, opening up as he had.
He moved like lightning, coming into my arms with a speed that shunted me back into wall with a grunt.
His mouth crashed over mine, tongues colliding, teeth nipping, both of us rough and desperate, needing each other’s bodies more than breath.
I cupped his ass and moaned at the familiar feel of his body tight to mine.
I slid my tongue into his mouth, licked and sucked, nipped at his lower lip, then kissed the place where I had tugged.
He held my face, fingers carded into my beard, his mouth just as hungry and hot as I remembered. “Tian…”
“Jack, shit. Shit,” he panted, as we ravaged each other’s mouths. “Jack, my foot… ice… floor… missed this.” My hip impacted a laundry cart, sending stacked towels to the tiles. I rubbed my teeth down along the side of his throat. “Jack, we can’t… we can’t do this here.”
“Sure, we can,” I growled across his thumping jugular. “Didn’t you ever read Tennant Rowe’s autobiography?”
“Tennant Rowe?”
More kisses. “Railers—”
“I know who Tennant freaking Rowe is, Jesus.”
“Well, he and his husband went at it all over the Olympic Village, and they were on different teams.”
“Why would I read that book? I’m a snowboarder,” he replied as I lapped at his collarbone.
“Because Rowe is an icon.”
“I know, but…” He groaned into another kiss.
“You taste so good, Tian,” I coughed out just as the door from reception opened to swat Tian in the back.
He huffed in pain. My head snapped up as I readied myself to rip whoever had interrupted us a new asshole.
Starry stood there, eyes wide, room key cards in one hand, his carry-on bag over his shoulder.
“Oh, oh shit. Sorry, sorry! Sorry, oh shit, so sorry. I just… you’ve been gone for twenty minutes.
I thought maybe you fell into the pool and drowned.
Right. Well, here’s your key. See you in the room.
Hi.” He nodded at Tian, tossed the key to the laundry cart, and then backed out, his face as red as the sleeve on our jackets.
“Fucking A,” I mumbled, the fire starting to wane now we’d been busted so horribly. I relaxed my grip on Tian, letting his feet touch the floor. “Be careful. I don’t want to be the reason you twist your knee and can’t compete.”
“You would never be the reason anything bad happens to me,” he said, stealing a kiss, his fingertips combing through my beard as he stared into my soul. “We need to talk. There’s so much going on here.”
“Here in Milan or here in this nook?”
I dragged my hands down his sides, rougher than I meant to, every nerve begging me to grind him into the wall, nails itching to scrape skin, hands too eager, barely held back by a shred of restraint.
I’d have to take a cold shower the moment I got to my room.
What I’d say to Starry remained to be seen.
“We might be able to sneak some alone time—lock a door, ignore the curfews, get loud, fuck each other stupid until we can’t walk straight.
” Just the thought of it had my cock aching, my blood rushing hot—I was already halfway there just looking at him.
“My training schedule, and yours probably, is chaos times ten, but competition hasn’t started yet, so maybe tonight we could slip away. ”
“Yeah, yeah, I’d like that.” I also liked the way my fingertips bumped along his ribs. He was so lean yet muscular. My fingers hadn’t forgotten the feel of his warm flesh. Touch craved more skin…
“Cool. I’ll text you later. I think we can do this.” With that perplexing comment, he stole a fast kiss and then wiggled free. “Later.”
He slipped away, leaving me hard as a telephone pole and dazed as hell.
I removed my TEAM USA jacket, tied it around my waist backwards, and headed to my room to dive into that cold shower, then take a nap, if I could fall asleep.
I was pretty wound up, but the dreams of what tonight might bring would be incentive enough to drop my head to a pillow.
I’d built a world where there was more of Tian, even romance, but if all there was on offer was sex in dark corners…
Was I ready for that?
Of course I was.
Starry raised an eyebrow when I slunk in. “You wanna talk about…?”
No fucking way.
So, I did what every sane grown man does when faced with his whole world slipping on its axis. I hid in the shower.