14. Jade
JADE
The pill pack is in the medicine cabinet where it's been for two years.
I take it every night between eight and nine. I've taken it so consistently that missing one sets off a small alarm in my chest—the signal of a thing I keep in order, that I don't have to think about. I open the cabinet and take the pack out and stand at the bathroom mirror with it in my hand.
The foil has this month's days pressed in it. Little blisters. The one for today is still intact.
I look at my face in the mirror.
Then I put the pack back.
I close the door. Brush my teeth. Turn off the light.
Killian's room is at the far end of the hall. His door is closed. The line of light under it is on.
I knock twice.
A pause. Then: "Yeah."
I open it.
He's at the window with one shoulder against the frame, looking out at the dark.
Still in the work jeans and the gray shirt from this morning.
He turns when I come in. His eyes find my face and he takes me in—all the way, nothing skipped—and pushes off the window and crosses the room.
His hands come to my waist. Warm through the fabric of my sleep shirt. He pulls me in until we're close.
Not kissing yet. Just his hands on my waist and the warmth of him and the smell of him—wood and turned earth and something clean underneath that I've been catching across dinner tables and in doorways for two years and not letting myself name.
"Tell me," he says.
"I feel insane," I say.
"Tell me."
"Your dad." I look at his jaw—the bruise Ryan put there, gone to yellow-purple now. "The kitchen. Breakfast. And now I'm in your room because I want to be in your room and I'm trying to figure out if that makes me insane or?—"
He kisses me.
His hand cups my jaw and tips me up and he kisses me slow and certain, no hesitation anywhere, and I stop trying to finish the sentence. I get my hands in his shirt and hold on.
When he pulls back I'm still holding on.
"His father," he says. "Not mine. Different things."
"Your brother's ex," I say.
"My brother's ex," he says—and it's not something he's just thought of, it comes out like something he's been carrying for a long time and is finally setting down—"is the woman I've wanted since the first Sunday dinner she came to.
What Ryan did is on Ryan. I've been at every dinner.
I've been sitting across that table for two years. "
He tips my face up and kisses me again before I can answer. Slower this time. His thumb moves along my jaw and his hands tighten on my waist and my whole body makes a decision my head was already halfway to.
When I pull back: "I skipped my pill tonight."
He stills.
"I was on it last night. So that won't come to anything—almost certainly. But tonight I didn't take it." I hold his gaze. "I'm telling you that."
The muscle in his jaw. His hands tighten.
"There's a chance," he says.
"Very small. But yes."
He looks at me for a long moment. "I'll tell you what I told myself on the winery step.
" A breath. "Half of you is better than none.
I've been sharing you for two years without getting anything out of it.
Just watching. Eight months of Ryan wasting every day he had with you, then four months of him not being here, and I held a line that wasn't holding anything I was going to get.
" His eyes don't move from mine. "If this is how it is, I'm in it. At least now I'm in the room."
"That pained you to say."
"Yeah." The corner of his mouth. "It did."
"Come on," I say.
He walks me to the bed and sits me on the edge and steps back.
His shirt comes off first.
I look at him. I've been not letting myself look at him for two years.
His chest is broad, the muscle of his shoulders catching the low lamplight.
Dark hair across his sternum that narrows toward the waist of his jeans.
He works this land. His arms and his stomach show it.
He isn't still the way Cormac is still—he's urgency under the surface, always has been, and right now with nothing between him and what he wants, it's in every part of him.
His jaw. His breathing. The way his hands are at his sides instead of on me, because he's holding himself back by about a thread.
He reaches for my sleep shirt. His palms come up under the hem, warm against my sides. I lift my arms. He pulls it over my head and drops it.
He stands there and his chest rises and falls and his jaw is working.
"Christ," he says. Low. Just that.
I unhook my bra and drop it. His eyes go to my breasts and stay there.
He reaches for me—both hands, cupping my breasts, his thumbs dragging slow across my nipples—and I whimper.
The sound is immediate and embarrassing and I don't try to stop it.
His mouth opens slightly, watching me respond. His thumbs keep moving.
"Two years," he says. Quiet. His thumbs. "You've been in this house for two years."
"I know."
He gets his jeans off.
I look at him. I'm not pretending not to.
He's thick and hard and flushed at the tip, and he's so hard it looks like it aches—like two years of watching and Sunday dinners and lying awake on the other side of my wall has been living in his body this whole time, building and building, with nowhere to go.
He wraps a hand around himself once. Just once.
A flex of his grip, not slow about it, the move of a man barely managing himself. My breath goes.
"You've been walking around like that," I say.
"Most Sunday dinners." His voice has dropped. "Yeah."
He comes to me and lays me back and gets his mouth on my breasts—really gets there, his tongue on one nipple and then the other, his teeth grazing, and I'm arching into him before I mean to.
I feel it all the way down to my stomach, the pull of his mouth, the wet heat.
He works one side and then the other and his palm drags down my ribs to my waist to my hip.
When his fingers find the waistband of my underwear I lift my hips without being asked and he slides them off.
He looks at me. Then he goes down.
His mouth finds my pussy and I make a sound—sharp, immediate, my hands going straight to his hair.
He doesn't ask. He doesn't warm up. He just—gets to work.
Like he has thought about this and has a plan and there's no reason to stall.
The flat of his tongue, long and slow, and I feel it from my spine outward. My hips lift. I let them.
He groans against me.
I feel the vibration of it everywhere. The warmth of it, the pressure. He's genuinely pleased with what he's found and the sound he makes tells me so. My fingers tighten in his hair.
"Killian—"
He hums. Keeps going.
He finds the spot that makes my breath change and he stays there.
His tongue and the suction of his mouth and then two fingers pressing into me—and the stretch of them makes me gasp, the curl of them finding a place that makes my thighs want to close.
I force them open. He groans again when I do, like that's exactly what he wanted.
I'm making sounds I can't manage. Little broken whimpers with every exhale. My hips are rolling up toward his mouth and I can't stop them.
"Please," I say.
His head lifts just enough: "Not yet." He goes back down.
"Killian—god—please?—"
"I've got you." His voice against me. His fingers don't stop. "Let me."
He takes his time. He takes exactly as long as he wants, and it is a long time.
I'm shaking. My thighs are shaking around his head and I'm pulling at his hair and saying his name in pieces.
The pressure builds until I don't have a language for it anymore—just his name and please and god—and when he finally gives me what I've been begging for, his tongue and his fingers working together, I come so hard my back lifts off the bed.
It goes through me in long waves. He works me through every one. He doesn't stop until I'm twitching and oversensitive and pulling at his hair to get him up.
He comes up.
His mouth is wet and his eyes are dark and he's breathing hard and he looks at me like I've given him something. His cock is hard against my inner thigh when he moves over me and I reach for him before I've decided to.
"Now," I say.
"Yeah," he says. "Now."
He lines himself up and pushes in.
Slow—one long stroke—and the sound of it is wet and loud in the quiet room and my face goes hot even as my body stretches open.
I'm that wet. He's that thick. The stretch of him pulls a long moan out of me and he keeps going, all the way in, until his hips are flush against mine and there's nowhere left.
He holds still.
I feel him everywhere. The fullness. The depth. The warmth of him and the pulse of him deep inside me.
I look down between us.
His cock buried in me, my body stretched tight around him. The visual of it hits somewhere I wasn't ready for. I clench around him—can't not—and he makes a sound. Low. A grunt he didn't plan.
"Fuck," he breathes. "You feel?—"
He pulls back and drives forward and I cry out.
Killian finds his rhythm and it isn't gentle.
Every stroke drives the breath out of me.
The headboard finds the wall on every thrust—hard, loud, the whole bed shaking with it.
I'm gripping his shoulders, his back, anywhere I can reach.
He's making sounds—low grunts, a curse when I clench, the broken cadence of his breathing—and they go through me like something physical.
Ryan was quiet. So quiet. Muffled. Sunday nights with my face in the pillow, trying not to be heard through the wall. Two years of holding myself back, keeping it contained.