Chapter 18 #2
“It’s not okay. You deserve someone who knows what he’s doing. Not a fifty-one-year-old broken-down vet who’s just now figuring out that the reason he can’t stop thinking about his friend is because…”
His jaw was clenched so tightly that the muscles jumped. His hands were in fists at his sides. He was fighting himself, fighting the words, fighting the vulnerability of standing in a kitchen and dismantling his own walls in real time.
“Because what?” I asked softly. Not pushing. Inviting.
Mac looked at me, and I saw him. All of him.
The blue eyes, the silver hair, the scars, the jaw.
But also the man who’d built me a chair, who’d painted my porch and taught my son to hold a brush, who’d come to my other son’s game and who had called me at his most broken and held me steady at mine.
The man who kept coming down the mountain. For me.
“Because it’s not friendship,” he said. “What I feel for you. It’s not friendship.”
I moved first. One step, then two, until I was standing in front of Mac, close enough to feel the heat radiating off his body, close enough to see the pulse hammering in his throat.
I looked up at him, and I let him see everything.
Every wall I’d built, every fiction I’d maintained, every week of carrying this alone—I let all of it fall away and showed him what was underneath.
“It’s not friendship for me either. It hasn’t been for a long time. Maybe never.”
Something broke in his face. The granite fractured, the way it had when I’d told him I trusted him with my boys, except this was deeper, more fundamental, the last wall giving way. His eyes went bright and his breath caught.
His hand came up to my jaw, his fingers curved along the bone, and his thumb found my cheekbone, the same spot where he’d wiped the paint, like his hand remembered and had been waiting to come back. His other hand landed on my hip, pulling me half an inch closer, and then his mouth was on mine.
He kissed me.
Mac was kissing me.
It wasn’t smooth. It wasn’t polished. It was slightly off-center and harder than it needed to be, and Mac made a sound against my lips that was half breath and half something else, something raw and involuntary that I felt in the base of my spine.
He kissed me like a man who hadn’t kissed anyone in years and was remembering how in real time.
It was raw and imperfect, and it undid me completely.
I kissed him back.
My hands found his chest, the solid warmth of him through the Henley, the heartbeat hammering beneath my palms. I let him set the pace, let him lead, let his mouth find its rhythm against mine.
And when it did, when the kiss softened from the initial collision into something deeper, slower, his lips parting against mine, his hand sliding from my jaw to the back of my neck, the sound I made was pure need.
It was surrender. After weeks of carrying and managing and filing and suppressing, the kiss shattered every container I’d built, and what poured out was the full, unfiltered, terrifying truth of how much I wanted this man.
The wanting had grown so large that it had become the heartbeat of my days, the thing I woke up to and fell asleep with and couldn’t escape no matter how hard I tried.
The kiss lasted long enough for the kitchen to disappear, for the sounds of the house to fade into something distant and irrelevant. Long enough for Mac’s hand on my neck to become my center of gravity, the fixed point around which everything else orbited.
We slowly pulled apart, and Mac’s forehead came to rest against mine.
His breathing was ragged. His hand stayed on my neck, his thumb tracing a small arc behind my ear.
I could feel the tremor in his fingers and knew it wasn’t fear.
It was the same thing I was feeling, the aftershock of something seismic, the body catching up to what the heart had already decided.
“I’ve never done that before,” he said. His voice was wrecked. “With a man.”
“I know.”
“Was it…?”
“Yeah, Mac. It was.”
A breath. His forehead against mine, his eyes closed. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“You’re doing fine.”
“You keep saying that word.” The ghost of something in his voice. Not quite a laugh, but the place where a laugh might live over time. “Fine.”
“This time I mean it.”
His eyes opened. Blue and close and stripped of everything, every defense, every wall, every layer of granite he’d spent fifty-one years building. “I should go,” he said. But he didn’t move. His forehead stayed against mine and his hand stayed on my neck, and neither of us made a move to separate.
“Yeah,” I said. “School night.”
“School night,” he agreed.
Another moment.
Mac pulled back. His hand slid from my neck, and the loss of contact was physical, a cold spot where warmth had been. He looked at me, and I looked at him, and we stood in my kitchen with charged air between us, the taste of each other on our lips, and no idea what came next.
“Goodnight, Arek,” he said.
“Goodnight, Mac.”
He walked to the door, then stopped and turned back. And the thing his face did, this war between granite and vulnerability that I’d watched so many times, resolved into something new. A smile. Almost shy, definitely careful, but a smile nonetheless, steady and deliberate.
Then he left.
I touched my mouth. My lips were warm and slightly swollen and my hand was shaking.
I was standing in my kitchen at eight-thirty on a Tuesday night, and I had been kissed by Macallister Heald.