Chapter Seven
Ending things with Maya took four minutes on the concrete steps outside her building.
She sat with her arms wrapped around her knees, her jacket collar pulled up against the sharp wind blowing off the campus quad. Lucas stood a step below her, his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his track pants.
"Is there someone else?" she asked.
The question hung between them, thin and pale in the cold air.
"No," Lucas said. It felt like the truest lie he’d ever told.
There wasn't another girlfriend. There was no clean, socially acceptable alternative waiting for him in a warm apartment.
There was only a dark hollow two miles into the timber and a pair of heavy, calloused hands that had ripped his entire world off its axis.
"I'm just not in this, Maya. You deserve someone who's actually here. "
She stared at the toe of her boot for a long time. Then she stood up, brushed a dry leaf from her jeans, and went inside without another word. The heavy glass door swung shut, the latch engaging with a dull, pneumatic hiss.
Lucas had stood there on the landing, waiting for the guilt to crush him. He’d expected the cold pit of regret that usually followed a bad decision.
Nothing came. Just a vast, terrifying quiet in his chest.
Over the following weeks, the hollow became a rhythm as regular as his Tuesday tempo intervals.
It was reckless. Lucas knew the risks down to the penny: if campus security spotted flashlight beams off the perimeter road, or if Coach Miller caught wind of late-night absences from Maple Hall, his roster spot was gone. His partial scholarship was gone.
None of it stopped him. Every few nights, once Kevin’s breathing smoothed out into heavy sleep, Lucas slipped past the taped latch of the stairwell exit and hit the dirt trail.
The woods had changed. The autumn frost had stripped the sweetgums and maples bare, leaving skeletal branches clawing against the gray night sky.
The only cover left was the dense, evergreen wall of the loblolly pines, their needle-strewn floor muffling his footsteps as he dropped down the unmarked cut into the gully.
Jax was always there first.
Tonight, the wind was quiet, locked down by an approaching freeze. A low fog pooled along the earthen banks of the hollow, swirling around the roots of the fallen white pine.
Jax sat on the trunk, wearing a faded gray thermal shirt under an unzipped work jacket, his heavy combat boots planted in the loam. Between his knees, he balanced a battered metal thermos.
He didn't look up when Lucas pushed through the dry briars. He just poured dark, steaming liquid into the plastic cup-cap and held it out.
Lucas took it. His fingers, numb from the two-mile jog through the freeze, curled around the warm plastic. The coffee was black, bitter, and tasted faintly of chicory.
"Your turnover was flat yesterday," Jax said.
Lucas took a sip, the heat scalding his tongue. "You were watching?"
"Saw your interval work from the backstretch. You're kicking out with your right heel on the final turn. Over striding." Jax picked up the thermos, screwing the stopper back in with a soft squeak of rubber. "You do that another month, you're gonna tear your plantar fascia."
Lucas leaned his hip against the rough bark of the log, cradling the cup. "I don't overstride."
"You do when you're tired." Jax stood up, his heavy frame shifting with an ease that always threw Lucas off. Sprinters weren't supposed to move quietly, but Jax had a smooth, deliberate economy to the way he carried his weight. "Sit."
"Jax, I don't need—"
"Sit down, Vance."
Lucas hesitated, then lowered himself onto the log, resting his elbows on his knees.
Jax didn't touch him roughly. He stepped behind Lucas, placed both heavy hands flat against Lucas’s shoulder blades, and pushed down until Lucas’s spine straightened.
Jax’s thumbs found the tight knots of muscle along the spine, pressing hard into the tissue between the shoulder blade and the rib cage.
Lucas hissed through his teeth, his head dropping forward. "Jesus."
"Told you." Jax worked the muscle with slow, grinding pressure, using the heel of his palm to work out the lactic buildup. "You carry all your tension in your upper back. Restricts your rib cage. You're losing five percent of your lung capacity before you even hit the two-mile mark."
The touch was purely clinical, informed by hours in the kinesiology lab and athletic training rooms. But as Jax’s thumbs slid down the corded lines of Lucas’s neck, the pressure shifted.
The movements slowed. Jax’s palms lingered against the heated skin at the base of Lucas’s skull, the calloused pads of his fingers tracing the curve of Lucas’s jaw.
The casual athletic banter evaporated completely, leaving only the sound of the thermos cooling on the frost-bitten dirt.
Lucas’s shoulders went rigid, his breath stuttering into sparse, shallow hitches. He didn't pull away. He couldn't.
Jax lowered his hands to Lucas’s shoulders, his thumbs hooking into the collar of Lucas’s windbreaker as he leaned down until his mouth was level with Lucas’s ear.
"You're not sleeping," Jax murmured.
"I sleep," Lucas whispered.
"Bullshit. Look at your eyes." Jax’s breath brushed against the damp hair at Lucas’s temple, hot and steady against the freeze. "You spend all day running from Miller, and then you spend all night running out here."
Jax moved around to the front of the log. He planted his heavy boots between Lucas’s parted knees, closing the space until the rough denim of his jeans brushed against the thin cotton of Lucas’s sweatpants.
The cold ambient air bit at the exposed skin of Lucas’s throat and wrists, but the heat rolling off Jax’s chest was thick and suffocating, smelling of cedar soap, bitter coffee, and hot muscle. Jax reached down, took the plastic cup from Lucas’s hands, and set it on the mossy log.
Then he caught Lucas’s face in his hands.
His palms were rough, marked by the knurling of heavy Olympic barbells, but they cupped Lucas’s chilled cheeks with absolute, immovable weight. The heat soaked straight into Lucas’s cheekbones. Jax tilted Lucas’s head back, forcing his gaze up into the moonlight.
Lucas looked into the steady amber eyes staring down at him.
Every defense he’d carried—the obsessive split times, the panic about Coach Miller’s clipboard, the lingering confusion about what this made him—went completely quiet.
For years, his brain had run on constant, exhausting static: calculating pace per mile, calories per plate, hours of sleep per night.
Under Jax’s hands, the noise shut off. There were no metrics to hit out here.
No expectations. There was only the solid weight of a man who saw right through every wall Lucas had ever built.
Jax didn't demand anything right away. He lowered his forehead against Lucas’s, letting their breath tangle together in a single, shared cloud of white vapor.
They stayed like that for several long, silent beats.
Lucas closed his eyes, his hands coming up to grip the heavy canvas of Jax’s jacket, holding on not to shove him away, but to anchor himself to the solid frame of the other man.
Jax’s thumbs stroked the line of Lucas’s cheekbones, slow and deliberate, resting in the stillness.
"You're done running for tonight," Jax whispered against his lips.
Lucas opened his eyes, his voice catching in his throat. "Jax..."
"I've got you," Jax said, his voice dropping into that heavy, possessive register that set Lucas's blood on fire. "Right here."
Jax didn't give him time to overthink.
He caught Lucas by the waist and hauled him upright off the log, spinning him until Lucas’s back hit the flat, broad timber of the fallen white pine. He wedged his knee between Lucas’s thighs, forcing them apart, pressing his entire weight forward until Lucas was locked tight against the wood.
Jax’s mouth came down on his.
It wasn't tentative. It was a deep, open-mouthed claiming that drove the air straight from Lucas’s chest. Jax’s tongue pushed past his lips, tasting of bitter chicory and heat, his hand sliding under the hem of Lucas’s windbreaker to drag up the bare skin of his ribs.
Lucas groaned into Jax’s mouth, his hands locking onto the back of Jax’s neck, pulling him closer.
Jax broke the kiss with a wet drag of his lips, dropping down to Lucas’s waist. He tore the drawstring loose, shoving Lucas’s sweatpants and briefs down to his knees in one rough motion.
The freezing night air hit Lucas’s bare cock, already fully hard, flushed dark, and weeping against his lower stomach.
Jax’s bare hand closed around both their cocks at once, binding their lengths together.
He had unzipped his own pants just enough to free his shaft—massive, searing, and leaking slick pre-come. The slide of their wet shafts rubbing together in Jax’s tight fist drew a choked cry from Lucas’s throat.
"Look at me," Jax growled against his jaw, his hips beginning to drive forward in a brutal, metronomic cadence.
Jax ground their cocks together, using the friction of their bodies and the tight grip of his calloused hand to pump them both.
Every thrust of Jax’s pelvis pinned Lucas harder against the timber, the heavy head of Jax’s cock catching against Lucas’s in slick, rhythmic strokes that sent white-hot sparks tearing through Lucas’s core.
Lucas couldn't hold his weight. His head thrown back against the bark, his heels digging uselessly into the dirt as Jax used him, dictated the tempo, and drove them both toward the edge with relentless, explosive power.
Jax’s thumb dragged hard over both weeping heads, smearing the fluid between them, his breathing turning into a ragged, guttural roar as he hammered his hips forward.
Lucas shattered first, his back arching violently as thick, heavy ropes of come pulsed across Jax’s knuckles and splattered high onto Jax’s chest. A beat later, Jax drove his hips forward one final, punishing time, his own release flooding over Lucas’s stomach in searing, shuddering waves.
The aftermath lingered in the hollow, thick and quiet.
Jax didn't step back. He kept his forehead pressed against Lucas’s shoulder, his chest heaving against Lucas’s ribs, his hand resting heavy and warm on the curve of Lucas’s hip.
Lucas’s fingers remained tangled in the dark hair at the back of Jax’s neck, his pulse slowing gradually to match the heavy thrum of Jax’s heart.
The wind rustled the pine canopy above them, showering a few dry needles down onto their clothes.
Slowly, Jax shifted, resting his weight back on his heels. He zipped his pants, then reached down and pulled Lucas’s sweatpants back up over his chilled legs, his knuckles brushing Lucas’s skin with deliberate care.
"I took the regional internship," Jax said quietly.
Lucas blinked, the cold air rushing back into his senses. He leaned back against the fallen pine, adjusting his waistband. "What?"
"The biomechanics fellowship at the sports institute downtown," Jax said, picking up the thermos from the log. He capped it, the metal clinking in the dark. "Starts after graduation in the spring. I signed the paperwork yesterday."
Lucas looked at him. Metro State was thirty miles west, but the regional sports institute was barely ten minutes from Lucas’s campus.
"You're staying," Lucas said.
Jax looked at him through the gloom, the faint scar over his eyebrow catching the pale light. He reached out, his thumb dragging across Lucas’s lower lip, wiping away the faint shine of their kiss.
"Told you, Vance," Jax said, his voice low and steady. "You're mine out here. I'm not going anywhere."