Chapter 29
ZANE
My lips remained melded to Jakob’s during the final moments in which my cock plunged into him.
Jakob’s hands locked behind his head, practically shoving our faces together, as the tension between his legs reached a fever pitch.
He continued until the tension grew too great to manage.
Upon climax, I felt like the floodgates had opened.
I grunted as my cock spurted inside him.
Jakob squeezed me and locked his legs around my waist, like doing so would force me to fuck him a little harder.
When I pulled out, I rolled over and stared straight up at the ceiling.
Sweat covered my body, which was par for the course in our romps, but I also found myself winded.
Look, I resolved to become a professional athlete sooner than later and should’ve gone the distance with no skin off my nose.
I’d never felt so gassed after sex with anyone.
Not that I considered sex with Jakob a chore, not at all, but I couldn’t deny that my team’s bitter rival had knocked the starch out of me.
Jakob also looked deliciously tired, too.
Something about the sex felt different, wrong.
No, not wrong. I didn’t really mean to call it that.
Before, the guy had infuriated me. I’d wanted to bash his face in.
No, I’d wanted to obliterate him. Now, I wanted nothing more than for us to spend every waking moment together.
The sex still felt magical but tempered.
It no longer provided the highlight of my time spent with Jakob.
My eyes remained fixed on the ceiling as his hand found mine.
An accident? I didn’t think so. Our hands fumbled over one another, as if engaging in a wrestling match, until it finally settled.
Normally, I didn’t do that sort of thing.
Like, I normally rolled out of bed after sex, ready to hit the showers, and take some time for myself.
But now, I could think of no better place on earth than under the sheets with Jakob Martin.
I rolled over and kissed Jakob’s lips. They tasted as warm and moist as they had for our very first kiss.
I stared into his eyes and swore I’d drifted off to paradise.
God, just saying those words told the whole story of change within me.
I wasn’t the guy I’d been a few months before, to say the least. That I could handle so long as I could spend eternity in this paradise.
Though Jakob hadn’t expressed it in words, I knew he felt the exact same way. Before, he too would’ve rolled out of bed and moved on the moment our climaxes had ebbed away. That’d changed. Like me, he seemed only too happy to stay in bed and savor the moment.
When I beheld Jakob, I saw something or someone different, depending on how you looked at it.
Instead of seeing my steady piece of ass, I found someone I couldn’t live without.
I don’t say things like that lightly. In fact, I lose a piece of myself every time I make those admissions, but I honestly felt like I couldn’t let him out of my sight.
“You’re still here,” I said, smiling at him.
“I could say the same about you. Shouldn’t you be showered and dressed by now?”
I refused to roll my eyes, partly to deny him the satisfaction of seeing that, but also because it would make me look weak. The longer I stayed in bed with him, the more the feeling inside me ballooned. Much more of this and I would burst.
Unless I spoke my mind.
The feeling that burned inside of me all but cried out to be put into words. In fact, it seemed like a crime to keep it bottled up.
My lips remained shut regardless.
“Jakob?”
“What?”
“Can I ask you something?”
“No, I can’t let you have another shot at my ass yet. I still feel a little sore from the first go-around, so you be patient like a good little boy, okay?”
“That’s not what I’m talking about, you idiot. I want to talk to you about something far more serious.”
I understood that I could well spend the next forty or fifty years striking back at Jakob’s incredible (and often intentional) stupidity. It would probably take years off my life. Even that dreadful thought couldn’t deter me from continuing the conversation.
“What do you want to talk to me about?” he asked.
“You wanted me to talk about what comes next. I’m sorry I wasn’t exactly receptive to it before. You just caught me off guard.”
“Because you’d never thought about it?”
“Right.”
I stopped myself short of saying he’d been my steady piece of ass or maybe just my curiosity. Both possessed some grains of truth but were also totally wrong. Makes perfect sense, doesn’t it?
At the very least, Jakob had been part of my obsession, though even that fell short of an accurate description.
Obsession had always been part of my nature.
I get preoccupied by what I want. It drives me, just like winning hockey games.
Now I found myself fixated on Jakob, but it felt different than the usual infatuation.
“We’ve already said that we’re boyfriends,” Jakob asked.
“Yeah, but I didn’t really believe that.”
Jakob’s eyes widened. “What do you mean you don’t really believe that? I didn’t hear any argument from you when the topic came up.”
“That was because…”
Because, at the time, I really had considered Jakob a steady piece of ass, at least in my conscious mind.
Yeah, I didn’t care if it lasted or not, because Jakob hadn’t grown on me.
I hadn’t seen the guy he truly was. And I certainly hadn’t fallen…
I’ll get to that shortly. I might’ve sensed feelings that would eventually flower, but they didn’t overwhelm me at the time.
“Look, the more time we spend together, the more I want to make sure nothing ever changes between us.”
“Same here, dude.”
“I just don’t know how something like that is going to work. I mean, I’ve got the team breathing down my neck.”
“Me too.”
“What, you’ve got the Larkin Lions on your case nonstop?”
“No, I mean I have the Remington Riptides on my case nonstop. God, I swear the goons you call teammates were targeting me specifically in that last game.”
Hearing that felt so much like a hook to the gut that I nearly cradled my stomach. I needed to steer the conversation back on track before I wound up spilling the tea about my teammates’ antics.
“The season’s only so long,” I said. “We’ve got to hang on, but not forever. I want to take a big leap after it’s all said and done.”
“What does a big leap look like to you?”
“We can have a real relationship, that’s what.”
“I thought we had a real relationship as it was. You agreed to us being boyfriends, right?”
“I said what I had to at the time.”
Normally, I would’ve scolded myself for revealing so much truth, but that’d been no accident. I could’ve lied, but I wouldn’t. I couldn’t. I wanted to be honest with him because that was how healthy relationships worked. Any other attitude would’ve been one hundred percent wrong.
“Listen,” I said, “it’s not as bad as it sounds. I said what I needed to say, at the time, mostly because I was under pressure. I can’t just give you the perfect answer I know you’ll want to hear on the spot, so I said what I needed to say to hold me over.”
“Hold you over to what? Actually saying the stuff you really wanted to say?”
“The stuff I really wanted to say and do. I needed to do that in my own way and my own time. I don’t apologize for feeling a little hesitant. The situation is new for me and I’ve had to find my way around—and you know that.”
“Same for me, dude.”
“Then you should definitely understand why it isn’t a cinch for me to just come out and say we’re boyfriends—or anything else I can’t take back once it’s left my mouth.”
Jakob’s eyes fell shut for a moment and he snuggled up closer to me, as if to remind me of what I would lose if I fucked this up. My life had changed so fast I swore my head was spinning. Part of me wanted to cling to the life I knew but my gut told me to let it all go.
I knew what I wanted to tell Jakob. In fact, I worried I would explode if I didn’t expel the words from my mouth. That was what he wanted me to do, right? Come right out and say it?
“Jakob, I want to tell you something.”
“What?” His voice diminished to a whisper.
I didn’t answer him right away. I knew what I wanted to say, and yet I couldn’t form the words. I didn’t even know the exact right words to use.
“Jakob, I want to be with you forever.”
Those weren’t my intended words, but they carried plenty of truth. I did want to be with Jakob until the end of time, no matter how much crap we would both have to endure to make it successful.
He squeezed my hand, saying, “I want to be with you until the end of time, too.”
When I sat up, I stared down at Jakob and wondered why saying something so powerful yet simple could feel so threatening.
“But that’s not all,” I said. “There’s something more.”
“Tell me.”
I’d said it to women tons of times, probably because I’d needed to say something to quell them, too.
They usually said it to me first, and then I reciprocated, because I knew what kind of hell I would catch if I didn’t.
But this was night-and-day different. If I form the words, I would actually mean them this time.
Have you ever tried to squeeze out toothpaste remains from the tube but come up woefully short?
We all have, I’d bet.
That was how I felt at that exact moment.
“I’ll tell you later,” I said.
Jakob’s eyes snapped open like he thought I couldn’t be serious.
“Wait a second,” he said, “you fed me all this bullshit about how you have something really important to tell me, and now you’re going leave me hanging?”
I rolled out of bed, stepped into my underwear, and pulled them up to my waist. That was the only way I could stall.
Like I said, actually saying it was harder than squeezing the last remaining toothpaste from the tube. Deep down, I knew that Jakob had landed in the exact same position.