Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
Reese
Dinner is loud and chaotic in the best way. Bo made his grandmother’s jambalaya, the kind that makes your eyes water and your soul sit up, and all nine of us are crammed around a dining table built for six, passing bread and talking over each other.
“Three oh four,” Zane says for the third time, shaking his head. “That’s insane. That’s Olympic trials insane.”
“It’s one practice.” Gray can’t quite keep the satisfaction out of his voice. “We need to be consistent.”
“We will be.” Tyler already has training schedules open on his phone.
“Tyler, put the phone down and eat,” Bo calls from the kitchen. “Food’s getting cold.”
“I’m eating.”
“You’re holding a fork. Different activity.”
Zane reaches over and takes Tyler’s phone out of his hand. Tyler looks offended enough that Beckett starts laughing before he even says anything.
“He’s right, though,” Eli says. “Today felt different. Like we finally stopped fighting it.”
Nobody asks what it means. Everybody at this table knows, and nobody says it out loud.
Gray sets down his fork. “Speaking of things we’re not saying out loud, we need to talk about the filing.”
The table gets quieter without actually going quiet. Zane is still chewing. Bo comes in from the kitchen with the rest of the bread and drops it in the middle of the table.
“Tyler has the paperwork ready,” Gray continues. “If we’re filing for pack recognition before nationals, we need to move this week.”
“What’s the rush?” Beckett asks, in the tone of a man who already knows.
“The scouts today. The reporter.” Gray’s jaw tightens. “People are paying attention.”
“You mean before somebody outs Reese,” Jackson says.
I flinch at how flat he says it, but he isn’t wrong. Kowalski’s questions were too well aimed to be accidental.
Tyler reaches across Zane for his phone. “The problem is timing. If we file after somebody makes this public, it looks reactive.”
“Because it is reactive,” Beckett says.
“Legally, that doesn’t matter. Optically, it does.”
“Can we stop saying optically while I’m eating?” Zane asks.
“No.” Tyler takes his phone back.
Gray looks at me. “Which means we need to decide what we’re doing before somebody else decides what this looks like for us.”
I know what doing means. Pack recognition means documented bonds, and right now only Jackson and Beckett have claimed me. Six names at this table still come with six sets of teeth, six marks that don’t come off, six decisions that can’t be made because a reporter showed up on our dock.
“So we’re doing this,” Zane says, quieter now. “For real. All of us.”
“I want this.” It comes out steadier than I feel. “I want all of you. I just don’t know where to put it all yet.”
“Overwhelmed,” Bo offers.
“A little.”
Gray’s attention stays on me. “This has to be your choice. All of it. If there’s another way, we find it.”
“We don’t have to solve it tonight,” Cameron says.
It’s the most he’s said all evening, and every head turns toward him. Beckett lifts his eyebrows. “Profound. Did you get that off a fortune cookie?”
Cameron flips him off without moving anything else in his face, and the table breaks. Zane snorts, then Eli, and within seconds the whole heavy conversation has dissolved into eight men insulting each other over jambalaya.
This is the part I’d lose. Not only the men, but the noise, the bread going around, somebody’s elbow in my ribs.
I push back from the table. “I’m going to shower. Save me some bread?”
“No promises,” Zane calls after me.
The bathroom is at the end of the hall, big enough for the industrial shower that nine athletes in one house require. I peel off practice clothes still damp with sweat and lake water and step under the spray.
The hot water is bliss on tired muscles. I tip my head back and let it pound my shoulders while I try to quiet everything down. Pack bonds, legal filings, six more sets of teeth. The reporter and the scouts. Quinton’s text. Gray keeping a room’s width between us for four days running.
The door opens, and I turn my head as Jackson comes in already pulling his shirt over his head. He’s all lean muscle and hard angles, a body built by eight years of pulling on an oar.
“Room for one more?”
“Depends. Are you going to use all the hot water?”
He doesn’t smile, but his eyes lose an edge. He strips off the rest and steps in behind me, close enough that I can feel the heat coming off him through the steam.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“What I’ve been trying not to do since practice.”
His hands find my hips and pull me back against him. He’s already hard against my lower back, so whatever he’s been trying hasn’t gone especially well.
“That doesn’t look like trying.”
“I stopped.”
I laugh, and his mouth touches the side of my neck.
Since the claiming there’s been a pull between us, a low constant hum that gets louder when we’re apart. I can feel it now in the way something in me settles as soon as his body meets mine.
“You’ve been wound tight since dinner,” he says.
I turn in his arms with water running down between us. “You can feel that?”
“I can feel everything lately.”
“That’s terrifying.”
“I’m aware.”
His thumbs move once over my hips. For all the heat in his eyes, he waits, and I realize that’s what he’s doing. Waiting for me.
I close the space between us.
“I feel it too,” I tell him. “When we’re apart, it’s like something keeps pulling tighter.”
“And now?”
I take a second to notice. “Quiet.”
He lets out a breath, forehead coming down against mine. “Yeah.”
We stand there for a moment with the water falling around us, and then his mouth finds mine and the gentleness goes out of it.
Jackson kisses the way he rows, relentless and total. His hands move over wet skin and pull me closer until there’s nothing left between us, and I hold his shoulders for balance as he walks me backward into the cool tile.
His mouth moves down my throat, teeth grazing the skin below my ear. “Been thinking about this since practice.”
“Apparently.”
One hand closes around my breast, his thumb moving over my nipple until I arch into him. The bond hums between us, carrying his want into mine until I can’t tell whether the sharp pulse low in my stomach started with him or me.
“Jackson.”
He lifts his head.
“Stop thinking about it and do something.”
His mouth twitches. “Bossy.”
“I’m literally your coxswain.”
That almost gets a smile out of him. Instead he drops to his knees.
He looks up at me with water running down his face, and this is a man who does not bow to anybody, who guards himself like a locked room. Seeing him there for me hits somewhere deeper than it should.
He lifts one of my legs over his shoulder and opens me to him. “Hold still.”
Then he buries his face between my thighs.
I cry out and grab for the wall, but there’s nothing to hold on to, so my hand ends up in his wet hair.
There’s nothing tentative in the way he uses his mouth on me.
His fingers dig into my thigh while his tongue works over my clit, steady and deliberate, until my hips start moving against him despite the order to hold still.
His hand tightens.
“Oh, fuck.” My head goes back against the tile. “Jackson.”
He doesn’t stop. Two fingers push inside me and curl, and my whole body jerks.
“Please.”
He pulls back just far enough to look up at me. “What do you need?”
“You.”
His eyes go dark. “You’ve got me.”
His mouth closes over me again, fingers moving inside me in the same rhythm, and whatever smart answer I might have had disappears.
The pressure builds too fast, sharp enough that I try to pull away from it and can’t.
Jackson follows every movement, holding me exactly where he wants me while my fingers knot in his hair.
I come with his name echoing off the tile, clenching around his fingers while he keeps his mouth on me and works me through it. By the time he finally eases off, my leg is shaking over his shoulder.
He presses a kiss to the inside of my thigh before he stands.
“You’re smug,” I tell him.
“No.”
“You are.”
He catches me around the waist when my knees threaten to prove his point. “Can you stand?”
“Fuck you.”
“That’s a no.”
He lifts me before I can argue, and my legs go around his waist. I feel him hard against my entrance and the humor leaves both of us.
“I need you,” he says into my throat.
“Then stop talking.”
He doesn’t need it said twice.
The first thrust punches the air out of my lungs. He fills me completely, stretching me right to the edge of too much, and my back arches away from the tile as he seats himself.
“Fuck.” The word comes out of him wrecked. “Reese.”
He holds still with his forehead against mine while we both breathe. I can feel him everywhere, and not only where he’s inside me. The bond runs his pleasure into mine until the edges blur, his relief hitting me at the same time mine hits him.
When he moves, he starts slow and deep. Every stroke drags against something that sends heat up my spine, and I put my nails into his shoulders because I need somewhere for it to go.
“Eyes on me.”
I open them and find his.
What’s in his face makes my throat close. There’s lust in it, plenty, but Jackson is terrible at hiding anger and almost impossibly good at hiding everything else. Right now he isn’t hiding anything.
I pull him down and kiss him.
His rhythm breaks for half a second before he comes back harder. The kiss turns messy, all teeth and tongue and shared breath, and his hips drive mine against the tile hard enough that I’ll probably feel it tomorrow.
“More,” I get out against his mouth. “I can take it.”
Jackson groans and gives me what I asked for.
The sound of us echoes off the tile. Water runs lukewarm over my shoulders while he fucks me harder, one hand braced under my ass and the other spread across my back.
Every thrust drives him deep, and the bond turns the pleasure into something circular, his feeding mine and mine coming back through him.
I feel his knot start to swell.
“Jackson.”
“I know.”