15
Lila
I whispered his name as Jackson’s hands slid up my arms, his fingers pressing just enough to make me gasp.
My heart raced as I looked up at him, lips parting before he kissed me hard, his tongue sweeping into my mouth with the faint taste of ketchup and beer still lingering from the party.
I melted against him, my hands exploring the firm ridges of his stomach while my nails scraped lightly over his skin, and he guided me toward a soft patch of grass beside the water.
Jackson lowered me gently, moonlight reflecting in his eyes as he looked down at me with an intensity that made everything inside me tremble. “I've waited so long for you,” he said, his voice thick with emotion.
I nodded, breathless, and pulled my sundress over my head with shaking fingers.
I had worn nothing beneath it except simple white panties, and the night air raised goose bumps across my bare skin while his gaze warmed every inch it touched.
Jackson’s breath caught before he kicked off his shoes, opened his belt, and pushed his jeans and boxers down.
I couldn’t help staring.
“Jackson... I've never...” My voice faded, but he understood.
This moment, my first time, belonged to him.
Somewhere inside me, it always had. Jackson knelt between my legs and slid my panties down with hands that were gentle despite the strength in them, leaving me exposed in a way that should have frightened me more than it did.
The way he looked at me, as though I were something precious rather than merely something he wanted, made my heart ache.
“You're perfect,” he murmured before kissing my inner thigh.
His stubble rasped over sensitive skin, sending a shiver through me as my legs opened without being told. His mouth traveled higher, and when his tongue finally touched me, slow and deliberate, my back lifted from the grass.
“Oh God.” My fingers clenched around cool blades while my hips moved instinctively toward him, every sensation unfamiliar and overwhelming.
Jackson took his time until I was trembling beneath him, my breathing ragged and my thighs unsteady. Only then did he move over me, the heat of him pressing against my entrance as he held my gaze.
“Tell me if it hurts,” he said, restraint roughening his voice.
I bit my lip and nodded. “I want this. I want you.”
I had wanted him for so long, the boy from the wrong side of town, my brother’s best friend, the one person who had eventually learned to see something beyond Matty’s little sister.
Jackson pushed into me slowly, stretching me around him until the first sharp sting stole my breath.
He stopped immediately and kissed me, one hand slipping between us to replace pain with something warmer.
“Breathe, baby,” he whispered.
I did, slowly relaxing beneath him until my body began accepting what my heart had already chosen.
Moonlight washed over us while water lapped softly against the shore, and I knew I would remember this night for the rest of my life.
My first time with Jackson Hayes. The boy I had loved for what felt like forever, who had finally admitted he loved me too even though we both knew loving me could cost him everything.
Every detail returned with painful clarity. Cool grass against my skin. The weight of his gaze. The vulnerability of giving myself to him and trusting him to hold what I offered.
That one perfect night had lived inside me so long it still knew how to find me in my sleep.
I woke up gasping in the dark, sheets tangled around my legs and my heart pounding hard enough to make the bedroom feel smaller.
Frustration followed almost immediately because that was the cruel part.
However beautiful the night had been, Jackson still drove me home afterward, kissed me goodbye, and vanished from my life without a word.
Seventeen years.
I sat up and dragged both hands through my hair, furious that my own mind could still pull me backward into the arms of the boy who broke me open and disappeared before I understood what he had left behind.
Jackson never knew I was pregnant. He never knew that night gave me Jade or that I built an entire life around the absence he carved through the middle of mine.
Now fate had thrown me straight back into his orbit with all the subtlety of a truck through a wall.
Except he wasn’t only Jackson anymore.
He was Deacon, vice president of a motorcycle club, rolled bloody and barely alive into my ER after an ambush.
For days, I had lived with the fear that I might watch him die before either of us had a chance to speak about the past. Now he was alive, awake, and back in Wicker Falls, dangerously close to the daughter he had no idea existed.
Gray morning pressed against the edges of my curtains while I paced barefoot across my bedroom with my arms folded over my middle.
I had spent almost two decades protecting the life I built and the girl at the center of it, while protecting the version of myself that learned to survive without answers.
Now every question I had buried was waiting for me inside a hospital room behind dark eyes that still knew exactly where to find every weak spot.
Did I tell him about Jade? Could I trust the man who broke my heart and vanished without explanation? Had he really loved me, and if he had, what could have made him leave anyway?
My shift started in a few hours. Soon I would have to face Jackson again, no longer a ghost or an unconscious body caught somewhere between life and death, but a man capable of looking back at me.
That was the dangerous part.
Because whenever Jackson Hayes looked at me, some piece of my heart still remembered exactly what it felt like to be eighteen and foolish enough to give him everything beneath the moonlight.
Somewhere between home and the hospital, I convinced myself the visit was practical.
A quick check before my shift. Nothing more. I had arrived early enough that Jackson might still be asleep and hopefully before one of his brothers appeared, sparing me the added pleasure of pretending I wasn’t already raw enough without an audience.
The plan fell apart the second I stepped onto the floor.
His door stood cracked open. No voices came from inside, so I let myself breathe once before pushing it wider and walking in with coffee in one hand and my composure hanging by a thread.
Jackson was awake.
Of course he was.
His bed had been raised farther than yesterday, one arm resting across the blanket while his eyes stayed fixed on the door as though he had been waiting to see who came through it.
The second he realized it was me, something changed in his face, subtle enough that I might have missed it on anyone else and strong enough that I felt it from across the room.
“Well,” he said, his voice still rough from sleep and healing, “if it isn’t my favorite nurse.”
I stopped inside the doorway and gave him a flat look. “You’ve been awake for what, ten minutes, and you’re already obnoxious?”
The corner of his mouth pulled. “Missed you too, princess.”
There it was.
That old name slid beneath my ribs with surgical precision.
I set my coffee on the counter harder than necessary and turned toward the monitor so I had something to look at besides him. “You know we’re going to need to talk about it at some point, Jacks.”
The playfulness eased from his expression, set aside rather than gone, and I felt his attention settle fully on me while I pretended to study numbers I already knew were fine.
“You owe me an explanation,” I continued.
“Why you left without a word. Where you’ve been.
Not just me, either. Matty was just as crushed as I was when you were gone. ”
The silence changed between us, growing thicker and more honest than anything we had shared since he woke.
“I know,” he said finally. “I...”
His gaze shifted away, and whatever came next seemed unwilling to leave him while he was still weak and trapped in a hospital bed. Before he could force it, I spared both of us.
“Matty doesn’t know you’re back yet.”
Jackson’s head turned toward me. “You didn’t tell him?”
I folded my arms and released a breath through my nose. “Wasn’t my place. And besides, the way you returned wasn’t exactly the best way to tell my cop brother you were back, you know?”
A small smirk appeared, familiar enough to warm something it had no business touching. “So he became a cop after all,” he said. “Huh. Always knew he would.”
His gaze lingered on mine before he asked, almost casually, “How are your mom and dad?”
The room tilted.
The change inside me was probably invisible to anyone who hadn’t once known me well, but Jackson had. The smirk disappeared before I even found the words.
“Dad’s retired,” I said. “Been retired about ten years now.” My throat tightened anyway. “Mom...”
I looked away, but the word still cracked when I tried to force it out. “Mom passed a few years after you left.”
Jackson went completely still. Then he pushed himself higher despite the pain written across his face. “Shit, princess.” Shock and grief changed him so quickly that for a moment guilt seemed tangled through both. “Damn, I’m so sorry. What... what happened?”
My arms wrapped around myself as I turned away. The room felt too bright now, exposing too much, and when I finally looked at him again, his eyes had never left me.
“Cancer,” I said. “Ovarian cancer. She was sick for a while.” I swallowed and forced myself through the rest because stopping halfway would only make it worse.
“Dad took it hard. Real hard. Put her in every trial and treatment he could find. Even when she didn’t want to do it anymore, she kept going for him. Because he couldn’t let her go.”
My mouth trembled once, and I hated that Jackson saw it. “Her death crushed him. Crushed all of us. It was hard on us.”
One tear escaped before I could catch it.
Jackson sucked in a breath that sounded painful for reasons having little to do with his injuries. “When did she get sick?”
“Matty and I found out a few months after you were gone.” I wiped impatiently at my cheek. “I don’t know how long she’d been sick before that. They tried hiding it from us. She may have been sick before you left.”
Something folded inward behind his eyes. For one raw moment, he looked less like Deacon, vice president of the Saints of Retribution, hardened by war and whatever else the last seventeen years had done to him, and more like the boy who had once belonged at our dinner table.
“I’m so damn sorry, princess,” he said quietly. “I wish I’d been here for you. I know how much Rose was the heart of your family. I know how much your momma meant to you.”
He struck the mattress once with the sides of his fists, frustration hardening his face. “God, I feel like an even bigger ass for not being here. You know I cared about her too.”
The words should have softened me.
Maybe they did.
Maybe that was why I lashed back.
“Yeah, well,” I said, sharper than I intended and still nowhere near as sharp as I felt, “not much you can do about it now, is there?”
I turned toward the door because staying meant risking tears or forgiveness for something I still didn’t understand. Neither was happening today.
“Lila.”
His voice stopped me.
I stood with one hand curled at my side and breathed through the ache in my throat before he continued.
“Listen,” he said, and something in his voice sounded dangerously close to what I had waited seventeen years to hear.
“Let me just get out of this hospital. Let me wrap my head around some things, and then we can sit down. I’ll do what I can to tell you what I can about what happened and why I left. ”
Slowly, I turned toward him.
Jackson watched me with an intensity that would have been unbearable even if I hadn’t spent years carrying pieces of him I never asked to keep.
“But, princess,” he said, his voice lowering, rougher and fiercer now, “what I can tell you right now, right this minute?” He held my gaze. “It had nothing to do with my love for you. Everything that happened that night was real. Everything I said, I meant.”
The room went still around us.
“Still do.”
My breath caught.
For one terrible second, I was eighteen again, barefoot beside the lake and young enough to believe love became permanent if somebody said it with enough conviction.
Then I remembered everything that followed. Silence. Years. A life built with Jackson’s absence running straight through its center.
“Words are hard to believe,” I said quietly, “when the man who says them ghosted you for seventeen years, Jacks.”
His face tightened, but he didn’t argue.
I was grateful for that. If he had pushed, something inside me might have broken open right there beside his hospital bed before my shift even began.
Instead, I picked up my coffee and walked out before Jackson could say anything else that might follow me for the rest of the day.