Chapter 6 #2
Jonah kept waiting for it to turn frantic, the way wanting something this long is supposed to turn frantic, and it didn't. Dom took his time like a man who'd learned the hard way that fast is how you miss things.
He stopped to learn the line of Jonah's jaw, the hinge of it, with his thumb.
He stopped to look — actually stopped, and held Jonah at arm's length under the one lamp and looked at him, unhurried, cataloguing, and Jonah had been looked at plenty in his life but never like this, never like the looking was the point and not the toll on the way to somewhere else.
It made him want to squirm out of his own skin. It made him want to never move again.
"You keep doing that," Jonah said, unsteady. "The looking thing. It's — I don't know what to do with it."
"Get used to it." Dom's voice had dropped to that register Jonah had never heard, low and stripped of every wall.
"I read scenes for a living. Turns out you're the only thing I've wanted to read in a year and a half.
" He pressed his mouth to the hinge of that jaw he'd been mapping. "You're shaking again."
"That's your fault. That's a you problem." Jonah's hands were fisted in Dom's shirt, the way they'd been in the bay, like the man might disappear if he let go. "Don't stop. If you stop and give me a speech about my career I'm going to lose my mind, I swear to God—"
"I'm not stopping." Dom got the shirt over Jonah's head, and then his own, and Jonah forgot how to make words for a second at the sight of him — the size and the weathered warmth of him, twenty years of the job written on his body, an old surgical scar, the burn on his forearm, a life you could read like a chart if you knew the language.
Jonah put his hand on the burn scar without thinking, and Dom went still, and Jonah understood he'd touched something and left his hand there anyway, gentle, and Dom let him.
"Look at you," Dom said, quiet, almost to himself, one steady-unsteady hand spread flat over Jonah's ribs like he was taking a pulse through the whole chest at once. "You've been running so hard for so long. Nobody catches you, do they. You catch everybody and nobody catches you."
And that — that undid Jonah more than any touch, because it was true, it was the truest thing anyone had said to him in years, and his eyes went hot and he ducked his head so Dom wouldn't see and Dom saw anyway, of course he saw, and didn't make it a thing, just tipped Jonah's chin back up and kissed the corner of his eye where the wet was, gentle, and said, "No.
Don't hide from me. Not tonight. Tonight you don't have to be anybody's wall. "
Jonah made a sound he'd be embarrassed about later and pulled Dom down onto the bed.
After that it stopped being anything either of them was performing.
Dom took him apart with a patience that bordered on cruel, those hands that never wasted a motion not wasting one now, learning him, reading him the way he read everything, finding the places that made Jonah's breath break and going back to them, unhurried, relentless, while Jonah came apart under him and tried to hold on and failed.
Because that was the thing — Jonah had spent his whole life being the one who was capable, the steady hands, the one who showed up, and Dom would not let him be capable.
Dom pinned his wrists gently to the mattress every time Jonah reached to reciprocate, to earn it, to make it a transaction he understood, and said "no, let me, just let me," until Jonah stopped trying to be useful and let himself be wanted, purely, for no reason, for nothing he'd done or could do — and it broke something open in his chest that he'd been holding shut since he was seventeen, since a bathroom, since the last time being enough hadn't been enough.
"I've got you," Dom said, low, into the skin of his throat, when Jonah was past words, past strategy, past everything but the pure overwhelming fact of being held. "I've got you. You don't have to do anything. I've got you."
It should have been embarrassing, how much Jonah needed to hear it.
How the words did more to him than the hands did.
Nobody said that to Jonah — Jonah was the one who said that, Jonah had built a whole self out of being the guy who said I've got you to strangers on the worst day of their lives, and he had genuinely not known, until this exact moment in a dark spare bedroom, that he'd been waiting the entire seven years for someone to say it back.
To him. Like he was worth catching. Like he was allowed to be the one who fell.
And Jonah, who had been the one holding on for seven years, who had made a religion out of being there in time, let go.
He let go completely, for the first time since he was a kid on a bathroom floor doing compressions off a video, and Dom caught him — caught all of it, the shaking and the wet eyes and the sounds and the sheer unbearable relief of being someone's rather than something's — and when Jonah finally came it was with Dom's name in his mouth and Dom's steady hands holding his and Dom watching his face like it was the only scene in the world worth reading.
And then, after, Dom followed him over with his forehead pressed to Jonah's shoulder and a broken sound of his own, a man who'd let himself feel something at last, and Jonah held him through it — got to be the wall for one second, got to give it back — and it wasn't a transaction after all, it was just two people trading the weight back and forth so neither of them had to hold all of it alone.
***
The aftermath was the part Jonah would keep.
Not the sex, though the sex had rearranged some furniture in his soul he'd thought was bolted down.
The after. Dom, in the dark of a bedroom as spare as the rest of the apartment, lying on his back with Jonah tucked into the side of him, one big hand moving slow up and down Jonah's spine like he couldn't quite believe he was allowed to touch it.
Neither of them talking, because the talking would bring the world back, and for a little while they held the world off by not saying its name.