Chapter 20 #2
It made me happy for him that he’d had that, that he’d been loved and supported by his parents.
“My parents are…complicated. They’re supportive of me being gay, they say, but it doesn’t truly feel that way.
My mother is the queen of the veiled barbs, so subtle that you never know if she’s being intentionally mean or not. ”
“Do they live close?”
“No, thank god. They moved to Florida when they retired, so we’re about as far apart inside the US as we can possibly manage. I’m not sad about it.”
The sun dropped behind the ridge, and the valley filled with blue shadows as we devoured the homemade pasta Mac had served.
Our conversations slowed, the pauses slowly growing charged.
When the air cooled, and I was sitting in my chair with an empty plate and a glass of the wine Mac had opened, the current that had been humming under my skin all day became a steady, insistent pulse.
Mac stood and collected the plates. I followed him inside, carrying the glasses. When Mac set the plates in the sink and turned around, I was right there.
We stood in his kitchen, closer than the space required. His back was against the counter and my chest was six inches from his, and the air between us had gone thick the way it always did—the porch step, the hallway, the kitchen kiss—except this time, neither of us was going to pull back.
“The boys are at the Marshes,” I said.
“Ah.”
“I brought a bag.”
“I saw, but that explains why.”
“It’s okay if you’re not—”
Mac’s hand came up to my face, cutting me off.
His thumb traced my jaw, rough and slow, and his eyes tracked the path of his own touch with the focused intensity he brought to everything.
I held still and let him look, let him explore because this was Mac learning.
This was the man who built cabins by hand, applying the same meticulous attention to the architecture of my face, and the care of it was almost more than I could bear.
“I’ve been thinking about this,” he said in a low, sexy rumble. “All week.”
“So have I.”
“I don’t know exactly what I’m—”
“Mac.” I put my hand on his chest. His heartbeat slammed against my palm, fast and hard. “Just be here.”
Something released in his face—the tactical assessment shutting down, the strategic mind stepping aside. What was left was the man without the armor, with those blue eyes, silver hair, and a mouth that had kissed mine in my kitchen, which I’d been thinking about every night since.
He kissed me. His mouth found mine with precision, and his hand slid from my jaw into my hair. His other hand gripped my hip and pulled me flush against him, and the sound I made when our bodies aligned—chest to chest, hip to hip, all of him against all of me—wasn’t dignified. Not that I cared.
He kissed me like he’d been rehearsing, like he’d spent the week thinking about how mouths worked together and had arrived at conclusions he was now testing empirically.
His lips parted mine, and the kiss deepened, and I tasted coffee, wine, and Mac.
My hands fisted in the front of his Henley because I needed something to hold on to, or my knees were going to give out.
I’d been kissed before. Many times, by many men, in bars and bedrooms and hotel rooms in cities I barely remembered.
None of it, not one single second of it, had felt like this.
Like being unmade. Like every kiss before had been a rough draft and this was the final version, the one that meant something, the one that counted.
Mac broke the kiss long enough to breathe. His forehead came to rest against mine, our breath mingling, and I could feel the tremor in his hands.
“I want…” he started, and his voice was wrecked. “Arek, I want…”
I pulled back enough to look at him. His eyes were dark, the pupils blown wide, and his cheeks were flushed above the silver of his beard. He looked like a man on the edge of something vast and unknown and wanted. “Yes.”
I didn’t care what the question was. The answer was yes.
His hands moved to the hem of my shirt. He stopped.
I answered the unasked question by pulling the shirt over my own head.
Mac’s eyes dropped to my chest, and he looked at me with a long, thorough gaze that started at my collarbones and moved down with the focused attention of a man committing terrain to memory.
I was lean, not built, with the body of a forty-five-year-old who’d been too busy to exercise regularly and ate too many granola bars, but Mac was taking me in like I was something extraordinary.
His hand came to my chest. Palm flat, fingers spread over my sternum. My heartbeat kicked against his palm, and his expression shifted into something raw and wondering.
“Your turn,” I said. My voice didn’t sound like mine.
Mac reached behind his head, grabbed his collar, and pulled his shirt off in one motion with the practiced, efficient undressing of a man who’d spent two decades in the military, removing a garment quickly and functionally, without any thought for aesthetics.
My breath left me. He was lean and hard, built from years of physical labor, every muscle defined not by vanity but by use.
His chest hair was dark and silver, spreading from his collarbones to his stomach and narrowing into a trail that disappeared below his waistband.
Scars mapped his torso—a puckered line along his left ribs, a cluster of small, round marks on his right shoulder that I recognized with a doctor’s eye as shrapnel wounds, a long, faded slash across his abdomen.
He stood there and let me look the same way I’d let him take me in, except this was harder for Mac.
I could see it, the effort of being seen, of standing in the light with his damage on display.
His jaw was set and his hands hung at his sides, and he didn’t cover himself or deflect—he just stood there in his kitchen and gave me the truth of his body the way he’d given me every other truth. Without flinching.
I stepped forward and put both hands on him.
His shoulders first—broad, hard, warm under my palms. Then down, over his chest, my fingers moving through the coarse hair, feeling the terrain of him.
The scar on his ribs. The shrapnel marks.
His stomach, the muscles taut and jumping slightly under my touch.
Mac’s breathing changed. Shorter, faster, his chest rising and falling under my hands.
His eyes were closed, his head tilted back slightly, his lips parted.
The expression on his face was one I’d never seen on him: open, surrendered.
A man letting himself be touched by someone he trusted and feeling it in places that had been numb for years.
I leaned in and pressed my mouth to the scar on his ribs. His hand came to the back of my head, fingers threading through my hair, and the sound he made—quiet, broken, scraped from somewhere deep—resonated through his chest and into my lips. “Arek.”
“Yeah.”
“I need…” His hand tightened in my hair. “I need you.”
This man. This amazing, wounded, hurting man. This man, who’d moved to a mountain to need nothing and no one, now standing in his kitchen with his shirt off and his scars showing, saying “I need you,” like it was being dragged out of him by a force he couldn’t resist.
Love filled me.
I took his hand, laced my fingers through his, and I led him down the hall toward the bedroom, toward the bed that had held only one person for eighteen months. At the doorway, I stopped and turned to face him.
Mac’s eyes were on me, scared and brave and wanting, the way he’d looked before the first kiss, but more. Deeper, like a man standing at the threshold of something he’d never done and choosing to walk through it.
“You sure?” I asked. Not because I doubted him, but because he deserved to be asked.
Mac looked at me, every wall he’d ever built lying in rubble at his feet. “More sure than I’ve ever been of anything.”