Chapter Fifteen #2
“Sorry,” he gasped. “Omega instincts. I didn’t mean to...”
“Don’t apologize.” I pressed my mouth to his collarbone. “Don’t ever apologize for wanting me.”
Something shifted in him. I felt it happen, the last of the nervousness dissolving into something braver and more present. His hands tightened on my hips. His body arched into mine. And the tentative, uncertain man disappeared into someone responsive and vocal and absolutely unafraid.
I took the lead. It felt natural, the way leading Jonah always felt natural, not because he was passive but because he was choosing to trust me, and the gift of that trust made me want to be worthy of it.
I undressed him slowly, and he let me, watching me with those wide green eyes, and every piece of clothing I removed earned a reaction.
A sharp inhale when I pulled his shirt over his head.
A shiver when my hands traced his ribs. A low, broken moan when I kissed the plane of his stomach that made me stop breathing for a full second.
He was beautiful. Not in the way Kieran was beautiful, which was all danger and dark edges and barely contained power. Jonah was beautiful the way a melody was beautiful. Fluid and warm and completely himself.
He undressed me in return, his hands curious and careful, and when he touched my bare skin for the first time, his expression crumbled into something so vulnerable and awed that my eyes stung.
“You’re so soft,” he whispered. “I didn’t know... you’re so soft.”
I kissed him because if I tried to speak, I was going to cry, and I didn’t want to cry right now. I wanted to be present. I wanted to feel everything.
I felt everything.
His body was different from Kieran’s in every way.
Where Kieran was hard planes and coiled strength, Jonah was lean and responsive and impossibly sensitive.
Every touch drew a sound out of him. Every new sensation made his eyes flutter shut and his lips part and his back arch.
His omega nature made him receptive in a way that surprised and moved me.
He wasn’t performing. He wasn’t trying to be anything.
He was just feeling, openly and without filter, and the purity of his response was the most intimate thing I’d ever experienced.
For him, everything was discovery. The way my body curved against his.
The way my hair fell over his shoulder. The way my mouth felt in places no woman’s mouth had been.
Each revelation drew a gasp or a moan or a breathless oh that I was collecting like precious things and storing in the center of my chest.
For me, it was the tenderness. Kieran burned.
Jonah melted. He melted into me, around me, against me, with a trust so complete it felt like falling into warm water.
There was no edge to him. No restraint. No fear of being too much, because Jonah had never been afraid of his own capacity for feeling.
He loved loudly and openly and without armor, and making love with him was like being given permission to stop protecting myself.
When I moved inside him, he made a sound that I will never forget. Not pain. Wonder. Pure, uncomplicated wonder, like he was discovering something about himself that he’d always known but never had the context to understand.
His hands found my face. He held me the way Kieran had held me, palms on my cheeks, except where Kieran’s grip was fierce and possessive, Jonah’s was open and anchoring.
He looked into my eyes and I looked into his and we moved together, slow and deep and achingly tender, and the world outside the couch and the blankets and the warm circle of his body ceased to exist.
He came apart quietly. A shudder and a gasp and my name, Nora, just my name, whispered like it was sacred. I followed a breath later, pressing my face into his neck, and for a long, suspended moment, we just held each other and breathed.
· · ·
We lay tangled together on the couch.
Jonah’s blankets were pulled over us, the soft ones on the bottom, the textured one on top, and his head was on my chest and his fingers were tracing slow patterns on my collarbone.
Circles and spirals and something that might have been a letter, repeated over and over.
The movie had long since ended. The menu screen glowed blue in the dark room.
I ran my fingers through his hair. It was softer than I’d expected, curling slightly at the ends, and the feeling of it between my fingers was hypnotic.
“Nora?”
“Hmm?”
“Is this what it’s supposed to feel like?” His voice was quiet. Wondering. The voice of someone standing inside a new room and looking around. “Because I don’t think I can go back.”
My hand stilled in his hair. I looked down at him. His green eyes were luminous in the blue light, open and serious and completely unguarded, and the weight of what he’d just said settled into me like a stone into still water.
I couldn’t go back either. I’d known it since the first lunch.
I’d known it since the elevator. I’d known it since the sidewalk kiss and the breathless oh and the sound of my name in his mouth.
But hearing him say it, hearing him name the thing that we had both felt but neither had spoken, made it real in a way that was terrifying and right and irrevocable.
I kissed his forehead. Pressed my lips to the warm skin and held them there, and he curled tighter against me, and something settled in both of us.
Not the hum. Something deeper. Something that felt like an anchor dropping, like a foundation being laid, like the first beam of a structure that might, if we were brave enough, hold the weight of a life.
“It’s supposed to feel exactly like this,” I said.
He smiled against my chest. I felt it, the curve of his mouth on my skin, and I held him and listened to his breathing slow and even and thought about the shared bedroom down the hall with its four pillows and its empty side and its photographs of men who loved each other, and I thought about a fifth pillow, and whether there was room.
· · ·
The front door opened at 10:47.
I heard the click of the lock and the quiet sound of footsteps and I tensed, instinctively, pulling the blanket higher over us.
We were clothed again, mostly. Jonah had found his shirt and I’d pulled mine back on, and we’d arranged ourselves into something that could have been innocent if you didn’t look too carefully at the flush on Jonah’s cheeks or the fact that my hair had given up all pretense of order.
Kieran came around the corner. He was still in his suit from the Mercer crisis, his tie loosened, his jaw tight with the residual tension of whatever he’d been handling for the last four hours. He looked tired and wound up and sharp.
He saw us on the couch. Jonah tucked against my side, my arm around him, both of us half-covered in blankets, the blue menu screen casting everything in soft light.
His face changed.
The tension drained. The jaw unclenched. The tiredness remained but it transformed from exhaustion into something softer, and the expression that replaced everything else was one I recognized from the hallway outside his office the night of the first kiss.
Joy.
Pure, unguarded, incandescent joy. His alpha’s eyes moving over his omega and his match, together, curled into each other on the couch in his home, and finding nothing but rightness.
“Hi,” Jonah said softly, lifting his head.
Kieran crossed the room. He crouched beside the couch, the way I’d learned he did when he wanted to be close without looming, and he looked at Jonah and then at me and his dark eyes were bright.
“Good night?” he asked. The same words Jonah had said to me in the hallway after the first kiss. A callback. An echo.
Jonah smiled. That incandescent grin. “The best.”
Kieran looked at me. I saw the question in his eyes, the one he would never ask because he would never presume. Are you okay? Was this right? Is this what you wanted?
“The best,” I confirmed.
Something crossed his face that was too big for the room.
He reached out and brushed a strand of hair from my forehead, his fingers gentle and warm, and then he leaned in and kissed Jonah, soft and deep, and I watched my alpha kiss my omega and felt no jealousy, no exclusion, no sting of being the outsider.
I felt held. I felt included. I felt like a piece that had found its place in a puzzle that had been waiting for it.
Kieran pulled back and looked at both of us and said, very quietly, “The pack is growing.”
Jonah reached for his hand. I reached for Jonah’s. A chain of three, linked on a couch in a penthouse that still had too many empty spaces but felt, tonight, like it was starting to fill.
We sat there for a long time. The menu screen glowed blue. The city hummed outside. And somewhere in the building, in a room I’d never seen, Rhys’s guitar started playing. A slow, aching melody that wound through the walls like smoke.
The pack was growing.
But it wasn’t whole yet.
And the ache of that, the exquisite, painful nearness of something almost complete, was the most beautiful and most terrible thing I’d ever felt.