Chapter Twenty-Three
They were in Jack's apartment the next evening when Harold got off work at the station, sitting on the floor because Jack only had two stools and the floor was more comfortable for eating takeout containers of pad thai.
Harold had his back against the bed frame and Jack was cross-legged across from him and the remains of dinner were spread between them on the carpet like a picnic.
"You move differently now," Harold said.
He'd been watching Jack all week. The way he held himself had changed since the shiver house.
His shoulders were lower. His stride was longer.
He still had the watchfulness, the constant awareness of everyone in a room, but the coiled tension underneath it had loosened.
He moved like someone who wasn't waiting to be hit.
Jack just blinked at him. "Is this you hitting on me? You don't have to try so hard. You know I want you."
Harold snorted. "That's not what I mean, though I appreciate the compliment. Your body is different. You walk differently. You stand differently. You used to carry yourself like you were trying to take up as little space as possible. Now you take up space."
Jack set his chopsticks down and cocked his head to the side. "Is this going somewhere?"
"I want to try something." Harold pushed the takeout containers aside. "Physical. Not sex. Not a scene. Wrestling."
Jack's face went still. Not blank, not the shutdown, but careful. The face of someone evaluating a situation for danger. "Why?"
"Because the last time you and I were physical without sex involved, I pinned you and you went limp. You've been carrying that experience around for weeks. I want to give you a different one."
Jack pursed his lips. "You want to fight me."
"I want to wrestle you. No stakes. No debt. Just two people on a floor finding out what happens when contact doesn't have to end in someone losing. It'll be fun."
Jack looked at the carpet between them. Harold could see him thinking, the shark's gray eyes moving through the options, weighing the risk against the possibility that he might be right. The floor of the apartment was clean. The door was locked.
"Okay," Jack said. "But if I pin you, nothing happens. And if you pin me, nothing happens."
"That's the whole point. Though, if you want to kiss me, I'm not going to say no."
Jack rolled his eyes, but he was smiling.
They cleared the floor. Harold pushed the bed against the wall to make room. Jack stood on one side and Harold stood on the other and the space between them was ten feet of beige carpet.
Harold moved first. He came in low, the way he'd been taught during police training, and Jack sidestepped him with the fluid speed of someone who'd been fighting his whole life.
Harold caught nothing but air. He turned and Jack was already behind him, one hand on his shoulder, the other on his hip, leverage, balance, and the muscle memory of a thousand shiver challenges directing his body without conscious thought.
Jack took Harold down. Fast, clean, controlled. Harold hit the carpet on his back with Jack's weight on his chest and Jack's hands pinning his shoulders and Jack's face six inches above his own.
Jack froze.
Harold could see it happen. Not the shutdown, not the blankness.
The opposite. Jack was too present. He was on top of Harold, he'd won, and every piece of conditioning in his body was telling him what came next.
The winner takes. That was the rule. The architecture of the shiver, the foundation everything was built on, and Jack was lying on top of the person he'd pinned and his body knew what was supposed to happen and the knowing had locked him in place.
"I can't," Jack’s voice was tight. His arms were rigid, holding himself above Harold, and Harold could see the war in his face. The conditioning pulling him toward something and the new understanding pushing him away from it. "I can't do this. If I take this position I have to."
Harold shook his head. "You don't have to do anything."
"You don't understand. My body is telling me." Jack squeezed his eyes shut. "I won. I have you pinned. My body is telling me to take what I won. That's the reflex. That's what the shiver put in me and it's still there even though the shiver is gone."
Harold lay still beneath him. He kept his hands open, palms up, not resisting. "What do you want to do?"
Jack opened his eyes. "Let you up."
"Then let me up."
Jack rolled off him. He sat on the carpet with his back against the wall and pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. Harold sat up and gave him space. Twenty seconds. Thirty. Jack's breathing slowed.
"Again," Jack said.
"You sure?"
"Again."
This time Harold didn't go easy. He came in harder, faster, and Jack met him in the middle and they grappled standing, arms locked, feet shifting on the carpet.
Jack was strong but Harold was heavier and Harold knew leverage from years of taking down suspects who didn't want to go down easy.
He got his arm around Jack's waist, swept his legs, and put him on the floor face-up with Harold's weight across his chest.
Jack's body tensed. Harold felt it, the familiar beginning of the shutdown, the muscles starting to go slack. He held perfectly still and watched Jack's face and waited.
The shutdown didn't come.
Jack's jaw clenched. His hands came up and gripped Harold's shoulders and pushed.
Not to escape. To resist. To test the weight on top of him, to feel it, to push against it and discover that pushing back was an option.
Harold pushed down. Jack pushed up. The resistance built between them, muscle against muscle, and Jack's face wasn't blank. It was fierce.
Jack bucked his hips and Harold's balance shifted. They rolled, tangling. Jack ended up on his side with Harold's arm across his chest and Harold's leg hooked over his thigh and their faces inches apart. Both of them breathing hard. Both of them grinning.
Jack laughed. The real laugh, the one Harold had heard at the pool, rough and surprised and alive.
He shoved Harold's shoulder. Harold shoved back.
They rolled again. It was a mess, no technique, no training, just two bodies on a carpet pushing, pulling, and testing each other.
Jack got Harold's arm behind his back. Harold squirmed free.
Harold got Jack in a headlock. Jack bit his forearm, not hard, just enough to startle him into letting go.
"You bit me," Harold said.
Jack shrugged. The smirk stayed on his face. "I'm a shark."
"Fair point."
They were both hard. Harold noticed it the way he noticed everything about Jack's body, automatically, through contact and scent and the shift in breathing.
Jack's cock was pressing against Harold's hip through his jeans and Harold's was straining against his own, and the wrestling had turned from exercise to foreplay without either of them deciding it.
Jack noticed too. He stopped pushing and looked down at where their bodies met. "This feels different."
"Good different?"
"Real different." He looked up at Harold. His eyes were bright and his face was flushed and his hair was in his face and Harold wanted to wreck him. "I'm hard because I want you. Not because someone won."
"I noticed."
"I want to." Jack's hand found Harold's belt.
"I want to this time. Not as payment. Not as service.
" His fingers worked the buckle with a steadiness that was nothing like the efficient precision of the truck.
This was deliberate. Chosen. Jack's hands doing what Jack wanted them to do.
"I want you because you wrestled me on a carpet and let me pin you and didn't take anything. "
Harold's belt opened. Jack's hand was inside his jeans and Harold's breath left him in a rush and his hips pushed into the touch and the control he'd been maintaining, the patience, the stop-when-it-shifts vigilance, cracked.
Jack's hand was on his cock and the grip was firm and sure and the intent behind it was want, pure want, and Harold was done being patient.
He rolled Jack onto his back and kissed him hard. Jack kissed him back harder. Their hands were on each other, pulling clothes off, jeans and shirts and boxers thrown toward the wall. Naked on the carpet, skin against skin, and neither of them was careful.
Harold pulled back. "Wait. I want to try something." He got up, crossed to his bag, and came back with something in his hand. A black fabric blindfold.
"No," Jack said. Then: "Wait."
Harold held it loosely, not offering, not pushing.
Just showing. "You couldn't touch this in the private room.
You couldn't imagine trusting someone enough to wear it.
That was months ago." He turned the fabric over in his hands.
"You just wrestled me on a carpet and pinned me and let me pin you and didn't shut down once. I'm asking if you trust me enough now."
Jack looked at the blindfold. The fabric was soft. The straps were adjustable. It was a piece of cloth, not a weapon, not a restraint, not the darkness of the shiver house floor. It was a choice.
"If I say Lioness?" Jack said.
"It comes off and everything stops."
Jack took the blindfold from Harold's hand and put it on himself. He pulled it over his eyes and tied the strap at the back of his head and the world went dark.
His body didn't shut down.
His hands shook. His breathing was fast. But his mind stayed in the room.
He could feel the carpet under his bare skin.
He could hear Harold's breathing, close, and smell the earth-and-rain scent that meant Harold was right there.
He couldn't see who was in the room with him, but his body knew it was Harold.
That it was safe. That the darkness was a choice he'd made and could unmake with a single word.
"I'm here," Harold said. His voice was rough and close and his hand found Jack's jaw, the familiar touch, thumb on cheekbone. "I'm right here."
"I know." Jack's voice cracked. "I can feel you."
Harold kissed him. Blind, the kiss was different.
Sharper. Every sensation magnified without sight to dilute it.
Harold's mouth was warm and his stubble scraped Jack's chin and the hand on his jaw was steady and Jack could feel the other hand trailing down his chest, fingertips light, and every nerve in his body was firing because he couldn't predict where the touch would land next and the not-knowing was terrifying and electric and nothing like the shiver.
Harold's hand found his cock and Jack gasped and his hips came off the carpet and the blindfold stayed on. He was present. Trembling and blind and completely present.
Harold stroked him slowly, once, twice, and then stopped. "Okay. That's enough for tonight." He reached behind Jack's head and untied the blindfold and the light came back and Harold's face was right there, brown eyes bright, looking at Jack like he'd just watched him walk through a wall.
"You stayed," Harold said.
"Yeah. I did."
Harold kissed him again, harder, and the tenderness burned off into heat.
They were still on the carpet and Harold grabbed Jack's hip and flipped him facedown and Jack went willingly, pressing his face into the carpet, arching his back.
Harold fumbled for the bottle in his jeans pocket, slicked his fingers, worked Jack open with less patience than the pool and more urgency than either of them could contain.
Jack's hands clawed in the carpet and his moans were loud, unfiltered, the noises of a person who'd discovered that his body could demand and receive and enjoy.
Harold pushed into him and they both groaned.
The sound of it filled the small apartment.
Faster than the pool. Rougher. Jack's hips shoving back to meet every thrust, his body not just accepting but participating, actively, aggressively, the shark in him responding to the physicality of it.
Harold's hands gripped his hips hard enough to bruise.
Jack said, “More.”
Harold gave him more without a second thought.
They came fast. Jack first, with Harold's hand around his cock and Harold's teeth in his shoulder and a shout that echoed around them. Harold followed, his vision whiting out, his body slamming forward one last time and holding there while the orgasm tore through him.
Harold collapsed beside Jack and they lay on the floor side by side, panting, sweat and cum cooling on their bodies.
Jack turned his head. He looked at Harold with the gray eyes that had been flat and dead and terrified and blank in all the weeks Harold had known him, and at that moment, they were none of those things.
They were warm. Tired, warm, and looking at Harold like he was the best thing Jack had ever seen.
"Nobody has ever just wrestled me before," Jack said. "Without it meaning something else."
Harold reached over and pushed the hair off Jack's forehead. "It meant something. Just not what you're used to."
Jack closed his eyes and smiled. A real smile, small, tired, unguarded, and Harold lay on the floor of Jack's apartment, watched it happen, and felt his heart do something that was either breaking or expanding and didn't much care which.