19. Declan #2
He shoots me a look, but there’s no bite in it. He walks down the short hallway, and I hear the small click of the toothbrush cup on the counter. Then he comes back for a charger. A shirt. His skin-care stuff, which he arranges with the focused intensity of a man setting up a military operation.
I lean against the kitchen counter and watch him put pieces of himself back into the apartment.
Not because I need to see proof he’s staying.
Because I want to remember this.
The exact way he folds his black T-shirt and puts it in the second drawer in my bedroom. The way he sets his phone charger on my nightstand, then pauses and corrects himself.
“Our nightstand,” he mutters.
I don’t breathe for a second.
Shay looks up. “Don’t make that face.”
“What face?”
“The one where you look like you’re about to cry over furniture.”
“I’m not.”
“You are. You’re furniture crying.”
“That’s not a thing.”
“It is now.”
I push off the counter and cross the room. He’s standing at the foot of the bed, arms folded, pretending he doesn’t look a little wrecked by the pile of blankets and shirts waiting there.
The nest.
His nest.
Our nest.
My green bar towel is still right in the middle, faded and soft from too many years over my shoulder. Shay picks it up, rubs the fabric between his fingers.
“I took this because it smelled like you,” he says.
“I know.”
“I know you know. I’m saying it anyway.”
“Okay.”
His eyes meet mine. “I didn’t want to need it that much.”
I move closer, but not close enough to touch him yet. “I didn’t want to need anything that wasn’t this place.”
His mouth tightens.
“The first bar went under and I thought it was because I’d wanted too much,” I say. “I wanted it to work. I wanted people to like it. I wanted a life that looked bigger than what I could afford. Then I lost it, and I got scared that wanting things was how I ruined them.”
“Declan.”
“So I made Byrne’s smaller.” I glance around the apartment. “I kept it manageable. Kept myself manageable. Work, home, work again. No room for anybody to leave. No room for me to screw it up.”
Shay’s fingers curl around the towel.
“You didn’t screw it up,” he says.
“I almost did with you.”
“You did,” he says quietly.
I nod. “Yeah. I did.”
He doesn’t flinch from the truth. Neither do I.
Then he sets the towel down and comes closer until the space between us is barely there.
“My mom used to get quiet when one of them started pulling away,” he says.
His voice has gone flat around the edges, like he’s holding something fragile with both hands.
“That was always worse than when they yelled. She’d start checking her phone.
She’d buy stuff she couldn’t afford, cook their favorite food, act like if she could just be useful enough, pretty enough, easy enough, they’d stay. ”
My jaw locks.
Shay looks down at the blankets. “I watched her disappear into them. Every time.”
“You’re not her.”
“I know that now.” He lets out a shaky little laugh. “Or I’m trying to. I have a degree. A job. A horrifying amount of spreadsheets. I can leave when I want.”
“You can.”
“But I don’t want leaving to be the only thing I’m good at.”
Fuck.
I cup his face before I can stop myself, then wait. My hands are big against his jaw, my thumbs near the soft line of his beard-shadowed cheeks. Shay leans into the touch.
Chooses it.
“You’ll never have to earn a place with me,” I tell him. “Not with work. Not with sex. Not by being easy, or useful, or anything else. You’re here because I love you. You’re my partner because you’re damn good at this and because I want you beside me. Those are both true.”
His eyes shine.
“And if you need space,” I add, “you take it. If you want to stay at the apartment with the guys sometimes, you stay. If you want your own account, your own room, your own anything, we talk about it. I don’t get to decide your life for you.”
Shay’s throat moves.
“You really mean that.”
“I do.”
He presses his forehead to mine. “I don’t want my own room.”
“No?”
“No.” His breath warms my mouth. “I want this one.”
My alpha goes so still inside me it’s almost reverent.
Shay kisses me.
Once. Soft.
Then he catches my hand and leads me backward until my knees hit the edge of the bed.
“Sit,” he says.
I raise an eyebrow. “That an order?”
“Obviously.”
I sit.
The nest gives under my weight, blankets and shirts and the old towel carrying both our scents.
Shay stands between my knees, looking down at me.
His curls are messy from his friends grabbing at him.
The scar through his eyebrow pulls when he frowns, and I know that frown by now.
It means he’s nervous. It means he’s about to say something that costs him.
“I want you,” he says.
My hands settle on his hips. “You’ve got me.”
“I know.” He takes a breath. “I want this. Not because I’m scared you’ll leave. Not because I need to prove I’m staying. I just…”
He looks at the nest around us.
“I want to be here with you.”
Every part of me softens.
“Tell me what you want,” I say.
His gaze drops to my mouth, lingers on the bow of my lower lip like he’s memorizing how it curves when I say his name.
The pulse in my throat jumps under his attention and I feel the exact three inches of air between that mouth and his.
Close enough that his next exhale ghosts warm across my skin.
My hands stay locked on his hips, fingers spread wide so the heat of him bleeds straight into my palms. I don’t close the gap.
I let the almost-touch sit there, humming between us until my cock throbs in time with my heartbeat.
“I want to ride you.”
The words land low in my gut. I watch the way his tongue touches his upper lip when he says it, the tiny wet flash that makes my mouth go dry.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” A tiny, wicked smile appears. “And I want you to stop looking so smug about it.”
“I’m not smug.”
“You’re smug in your bones.”
“That’s not how bones work.”
“Then you need less bones.”
I laugh, and Shay climbs into my lap.
There it is.
The choice.
His knees sink into the mattress on either side of my hips. He cups my face, kisses me again, slower this time, and I can taste the nerves in it. His scent sweetens, sandalwood dark and rich, chocolate melting warm under it.
I slide my hands under his shirt and up his back, tracing the line of his spine with my thumbs.
The involuntary shiver that rolls through him when I brush the small dip just above his waist makes my own breath hitch.
Three inches. Still three inches between our mouths even while we’re breathing the same air.
I could close it. I don’t. I let the charge build until my forearms tremble with the effort of holding still.
“Still want this?” I ask against his lips, voice gone gravel-rough.
He pulls back enough to look me in the eye. The scar in his eyebrow catches the low lamplight. “Yes.”
“Say it again.”
“Yes, Declan.”
That’s all I need.
I pull his shirt over his head, take my time with him.
Kiss his shoulder. His chest. The mark at his neck, my teeth’s permanent answer to a question neither of us knew how to ask right.
I let my mouth hover over the raised scar, close enough that my beard scrapes lightly against it, and feel the way his whole body reacts—hips twitching, breath catching—while I refuse to give him the pressure he wants yet.
The cost of that restraint sits heavy behind my ribs, a low throb that matches the ache in my cock.
Shay’s fingers find my hair, tugging lightly. “You’re taking forever.”
“Thought you wanted to savor it.”
“I can savor it faster.”
“Brat.”
“Your brat.”
The words hit low and hard.
I kiss him until he makes that soft sound into my mouth, then work his jeans open. He helps, impatient but smiling, lifting his hips as I pull them down with his underwear. Slick already glistens between his thighs, scenting the whole nest with him, thick and sweet and unmistakably mine.
“Jesus,” I mutter, eyes fixed on the way a single slow bead of it traces down the inside of his thigh.
My hands flex on his bare hips; the skin there is fever-hot under my palms. I track the exact distance between my thumbs and the crease where thigh meets groin—close enough that if I shifted half an inch I’d smear that slick everywhere. I don’t. I let the almost-touch burn.
“I know. It’s deeply inconvenient to be this into you.”
“It’s a burden we’ll bear.”
“Shut up.”
I lay him back for a minute, just long enough to get my mouth on him, to feel him twitch against my tongue and hear his breath go ragged. He comes apart so pretty when he stops trying to control every second of it. Not helpless. Never that.
Trusting.
I slide one finger inside him, slick and tight. Then a second, working him open with patience until he shudders. Shay’s hand catches mine.
“More,” he says.
“You sure?”
He gives me a look. “Declan.”
I add a third finger, my thumb rubbing over the place that makes his thighs shake. He curses into the blanket. Tells me I’m annoyingly good at that. I tell him he’s taking me so well, and his whole body goes loose for a second.
Good boy.
The old words mean something different now. They don’t pull him under.
They give him somewhere to rest.
When he’s ready, I shift back against the headboard.
My cock is hard and aching between us, already slick with my own precum.
Shay reaches down, wraps his hand around me, and his eyes go wide for half a second at the sheer girth filling his grip.
The way his fingers can’t quite meet around me sends a fresh pulse of want through my veins.