Chapter Twenty-Six #2
“Don’t,” I said. Preemptively. Because I knew what he was going to say and I could not hear it.
He said nothing. He came in. He closed the door. And he lay down on the bed beside me, on his back, staring at the ceiling, his body close but not touching. Waiting.
Jonah’s patience was the most dangerous weapon in the pack’s arsenal. He could outwait anything. He could lie beside you in the dark for hours, silent and present, until the silence itself became a pressure that was harder to resist than any argument.
I lasted eleven minutes.
I turned to him. His face was there, inches from mine, green eyes steady in the dark. He didn’t smile. He didn’t reach for me. He just looked at me with the particular expression that meant I see you and I love you and I am not going anywhere.
I broke.
Not dramatically. Not the way Kieran broke, with fury and fire and the force of a man who felt everything at maximum volume.
I broke quietly. The way a river erodes a bank.
A slow giving-way, the last resistance dissolving into something softer, and then I was reaching for him and he was there and his arms were around me and his mouth found mine.
We kissed the way we always kissed. Slowly.
Carefully. As if we were both made of something that could fracture, and the care was the point.
Jonah was the only person I had ever kissed slowly.
With my first pack, with Marcus, with Lena, everything had been urgent and hungry and desperate.
With Jonah, it was the opposite. Every touch was chosen.
Every breath was deliberate. The slowness was not hesitation. It was devotion.
He undressed me without hurry. His hands moved over my chest, my ribs, the scar on my hip from the year everything fell apart, and he touched the scar the way he always touched it, with his fingertips and then his mouth, and the gentleness of it made something behind my eyes burn.
I undressed him in return. His skin was warm from the nest, still carrying traces of the heat even days later, and beneath my hands he was soft and real and alive.
He arched when I touched the places I knew, the places four years had taught me, and the sounds he made were quiet.
Almost whispers. The private sounds that belonged only to us.
We moved together slowly. No urgency. No performance.
Just two bodies finding each other in the dark with the practiced tenderness of people who had done this many times and had never let it become routine.
I was inside him and he was holding me, his hands on my back, his legs around my waist, and his eyes were open and on mine and the intimacy of being seen, really seen, by the one person I trusted enough to let this close, was almost more than I could bear.
He came apart quietly. A shudder and a breath and my name, just my name, whispered. I followed. And the silence after was the kind I lived for. The kind that was not empty but full. Full of his breathing and mine. Full of what we were to each other.
After, he traced patterns on my back. Slow. Lazy. The patterns he always traced, which I had never asked about and which I suspected were words, written in a language of skin and fingertips that only Jonah spoke.
I let him hold me. This was the most intimate thing I could give anyone. Not the sex. The surrender of being held. The act of letting another body support my weight, of going limp in someone’s arms and trusting that they would not let go.
Jonah never let go.
“She’s not going to leave, Rhys.”
His voice in the dark. Quiet. Sure. The voice he used when he was telling me something I needed to hear, not what I wanted to hear.
My jaw tightened. My body tensed in his arms.
“Everyone leaves.”
The words were stones. Heavy and smooth and worn down by years of carrying them, and I set them between us the way I always set them between us, as evidence, as proof, as the foundational truth that I had built my life around since I was twenty-one.
Jonah was quiet. His fingers kept tracing. The patterns didn’t falter.
“I didn’t,” he said. “Kieran didn’t. Dec didn’t.”
His hand moved from my back to my jaw. He tilted my face toward him. In the dark, his green eyes were luminous and serious and absolutely certain.
“And she won’t,” he said. “But you have to let her in first.”
I closed my eyes. His hand stayed on my jaw. His thumb traced my cheekbone. The thread in my chest, the one I had not consented to, the one that reached for a woman who smelled like nothing and meant everything, pulsed with a warmth I could not deny.
Let her in.
The simplest instruction in the world. Three words. A door and a choice and the entire terrifying possibility of a life that was bigger than the one I’d built from the wreckage of the first.
I didn’t answer. Jonah didn’t need me to.
He knew me well enough to know that the silence was not refusal.
It was the sound of a wall developing a crack.
The sound of a man who had sworn he would never be this vulnerable again, lying in the arms of the person who had proven him wrong once, and wondering if he had the courage to be proven wrong again.
Outside the window, the city hummed. Inside the room, Jonah held me and the silence held us both.
And the thread pulsed. Patient. Warm. Waiting.
Like her.