Eli
His hand slides up beneath my shirt, palm warm against my bare side, and whatever respectable version of myself I was aiming for immediately dies. I make a sound into his mouth that’s more desperate than I mean it to be, and Julian’s fingers tense on my skin before he smooths them again.
That tiny restraint lights me up more than if he’d shoved me flat.
I pull back just enough to breathe against his mouth. “You’re doing that thing again.”
His eyes are dark and focused, but his lips twitch. “What thing?”
“Being all careful.” I hate how breathless I sound already, but apparently pride left the building when I told him I loved him while straddling his lap. “It’s hot, and I need you to stop making it hotter if you expect me to function.”
Julian stares at me for one second, then laughs quietly. “I’m sorry my effort not to traumatize you is inconveniently sexy.”
“See?” I mutter, kissing him again because his mouth is right there and I’m weak. “That. Fucking that.”
His hand spreads wider over my ribs, thumb dragging once across skin, and my whole body leans toward it.
I’ve been waiting years for that exact touch.
Maybe that’s the part I’m not ready to stare at directly tonight—the possibility that wanting Julian was never as new as I thought, only unnamed.
His other hand finds my jaw, tilting my face up, and when he kisses me deeper, I let myself sink into it instead of trying to manage every reaction.
My arms lift late and awkwardly when he pulls off my shirt, and Julian smiles against the corner of my mouth before tossing the shirt somewhere off the side of the bed. He doesn’t move away afterward; he just looks at me.
His gaze travels over my chest, my shoulders, the line of my stomach. I know he’s not judging or comparing me to anybody else, just absorbing me with open hunger and something so tender it makes my chest ache.
I’ve been shirtless in front of him a thousand times, so this shouldn’t feel different. Except it is different because this time, he’s allowed to look and I’m allowed to want him to.
My face heats anyway.
His hand settles over my sternum, right above the place my heart is trying to break through. “You’re blushing.”
“Thanks for the update.”
“It’s cute.”
“I’m naked from the waist up and emotionally compromised. Don’t call me cute.”
His smile turns slow, but his eyes stay warm. “You’re cute and hot. People can contain multitudes.”
“Fuck off,” I say, but I’m smiling when I say it, and when he leans in, I meet him halfway.
His shirt comes off next, and that should be illegal too, because I have seen Julian’s body before and it still somehow catches me unprepared when it’s presented to me like an answer.
Tattoos climb over muscle and golden skin, dark ink shifting with every breath, across his chest, over his shoulders, down his arms in patterns I used to notice and pretended I didn’t.
Up close, in his bed, with my hands allowed to go where my eyes have gone for years, he’s devastating.
Solid. Beautiful. Mine in a way I’m scared to say even in my head.
I touch him with both hands before I can talk myself out of it. His breath catches, and that one sound changes something in me.
My palms skim over the hard planes of his chest, over the warm rise and fall of his breathing, over ink I’ve seen a hundred times. They’re a map I thought I knew from memory, but up close they become unfamiliar.
Skulls, flames, a phoenix, quotes, ivy vines, thorns, and snakes. Pieces disappearing beneath the waistband of his sweats, others climbing toward his throat like they’ve been trying to reach his voice for years.
I trace one curling pattern over his ribs, then another along the edge of his sternum, and my hand stops.
There, partly tucked beneath the darker ink over the left side of his chest, close enough to his heart that I almost miss it, are two small shapes worked into the design.
A rugby ball cleanly shaded and angled slightly against a football with its familiar laces marked in tiny, careful detail. The two are crossed like symbols in a crest, hidden inside the larger sweep of ink of the skull and flames behind it.
I touch the tattoo with two fingers, and Julian goes very still under my hand.
I look up. “What’s this about?”
His face changes immediately, and God, he blushes. Julian West, tattooed, unfairly gorgeous, stupidly confident when he wants to be, actually blushes while lying half naked beneath me because I found two tiny sports balls over his heart.
He looks away, jaw working. “Nothing.”
“Bullshit,” I say softly. My fingers stay over the tattoo, feeling his heartbeat underneath. “Jules.”
His eyes flick back to mine, and the color in his cheeks deepens in a way that makes my chest ache. “It’s stupid.”
“It’s over your heart.”
“That doesn’t mean it’s not stupid.”
“Baby.”
He exhales, then laughs once under his breath, rough and embarrassed and so unlike the version of him everyone else thinks they know. His hand comes up and covers mine where it rests on his chest, but he doesn’t move me away. He holds me there.
“That’s how I met the love of my life,” he says quietly.
The room seems to pull back around us—the dim light, the messy sheets, the heat between our bodies—all of it narrowing to his hand over mine and the tattoo beneath my fingertips.
“You…” My voice catches, so I start again, softer. “You got a tattoo for that?”
Julian’s mouth curves, but he still looks shy, which is devastating in a way I do not have the emotional equipment to survive. “You walked up to me in kindergarten, pointed at my rugby ball, and told me it was a funny-looking football.”
A laugh escapes me at the memory. “It was a funny-looking football.”
“It was a rugby ball,” he says, offended even now, which almost makes me kiss him and also maybe bite him.
I shrug. “I only knew football.”
The humor in his face softens into a look that makes my chest feel too small. “Yeah,” he says. “And I knew you.”
My fingers press more firmly over the tattoo, right above his heartbeat. “How long have you had it?”
Julian swallows. “Since freshman year.”
My stomach drops in the softest, worst way. “College freshman?”
He shakes his head.
“Jules,” I whisper. I already knew he’s loved me for a long time, but this… just hurts knowing how oblivious I was.
“It wasn’t supposed to be obvious.” His thumb moves over the back of my hand, and his gaze drops there instead of staying on my face.
“I told myself it was about home. About where I came from and where I ended up. Rugby and football. South Africa and here. All that symbolic bullshit tattoo artists love.” He huffs a quiet laugh, but it doesn’t hide the tremor underneath.
“But it was you. It was always you. I think I just needed to put it somewhere I could keep it when I didn’t think I’d ever get to say it. ”
The ache in my throat becomes painful.
I stare down at the tattoo. Years. He’s had me over his heart for years. While I dated Celeste and pushed him away. While he warned me and I wouldn’t listen. While he disappeared into his own hell with Blakely because some part of him believed the thing he actually wanted was already gone.
I bend before I know I’m going to.
Julian’s breath catches when my mouth touches the tattoo.
I kiss the rugby ball first, then the football, then the warm skin over his heart, and the hand he has over mine tightens.
I don’t make it quick. I press my lips there again, slower, letting the kiss say all the things I can’t get out without my voice failing.
I’m sorry. I see it now. I see you. I see us. I’m here.
When I lift my head, Julian’s eyes are bright. “Don’t look at me like you’re about to apologize for not knowing.”
I hate that he knows me that well. I hate it and love it and want to crawl inside the safety of it. “I should’ve noticed.”
“You weren’t supposed to.”
“It was on your chest.”
“It was hidden in a mess of other tattoos.”
“Over your heart,” I say again, because that detail will not leave me alone.
His expression turns painfully tender. “Where else was I supposed to put you, Liefling?”
I move up his body and kiss him hard. Julian answers immediately, his hands coming to my waist, careful even now, even when his own breathing turns rough, and his mouth opens under mine.
I kiss him like I’m trying to reach every version of us at once—the five-year-olds arguing over a ball, the teenagers holding each other through grief and rejection, the idiots who wasted years saying almost everything except the one thing that mattered, the men we are now, tangled in his bed with my hand still pressed over the proof that he loved me long before I deserved to know.
I break off the kiss and lean back again, dragging my palms over his chest, learning the give and tension of him under my hands. His nipples tighten when my thumbs pass over them, and his jaw ticks. I catch that. I definitely catch that.
I lean down and run my tongue over it, listening to him gasp as my cock twitches. “You like that?”
His mouth opens, then closes, and then, because apparently trauma gave me no filter and lust removed the rest, I lower my voice and add, “I want to know what else causes you to make that face.”
He lets out a rough sound that might be considered a laugh if it wasn’t so close to a groan. “Where the fuck did that mouth come from?”
“I don’t know,” I admit, my cheeks blazing. “Apparently you unlocked it.”
“Lucky me.”
“Very lucky you,” I mutter, and then immediately want to throw myself out the window.
I slide closer until my knees bracket one of his thighs, and when I kiss him again, I do it with my hand still spread over his chest, thumb brushing deliberately over his nipples. He makes another low sound, this one caught against my mouth, and I swear I feel it everywhere.