Chapter Three
Jackson
I'm not proud of this. I want that on the record before I say the rest of it, for whatever my pride's still worth at this point.
The whole idea of Stacy exists because she scratches my Rose itch.
That's the ugly engine under the hood of the thing I keep calling convenience to my own face.
I found her on Tinder about a year ago, right after the closest call I've ever survived with Rose.
Close enough that walking away from it, I understood with total clarity that I needed something built between me and her before the next time, because there wasn't going to be a next time so much as a point I couldn't come back from.
We'd both been drinking heavily, one of those corporate days that earns a bottle at the end of it.
Bennet had bailed on the two of us at the bar, the way he does, and left us to our own devices, which should've been fine.
Rose and I had been alone together thousands of times by then.
We'd survived hotel rooms on business trips, late nights at the office, dinners, beaches, celebrations, arguments, all of it without doing anything we couldn't take back.
But there's always been a current in the air between Rose and me, a live wire we've spent a long time stepping carefully around.
Most of the time we don't even have to think about it anymore.
It's just there, buried underneath the friendship, and we've both gotten good enough at pretending not to feel it that sometimes I can almost convince myself it's gone.
That night it wasn't gone.
Whether it was the alcohol, the length of the day or just the accumulated weight of not touching her, neither of us stepped around it.
We decided to go swimming at the rooftop pool in our building, closed to everyone except the handful of people who own the place, which at that hour meant empty and ours.
We laughed at everything and nothing the whole way up, bumping into the walls and each other, useless and happy.
Rose kept trying to walk backward while talking to me and nearly ate shit twice, then accused me of sabotaging her when I caught her the second time.
By the time we pushed through the doors onto the roof, she had one heel in her hand and the other still on her foot, and I was laughing hard enough that my stomach hurt.
"Let's see the goods, Jackie boy. Get those pants off and that ass in the pool."
She started stripping before I could answer.
The problem was that I'd just watched her peel down to a black lace bra and a scrap of a thong before she hit the water, and there are limits to how evolved a man can reasonably be expected to become, because every good intention I'd ever had went straight south to my dick with zero regard for my dignity.
I did my level best to be a gentleman about it.
I stripped down to my briefs, got into the water and tried to keep enough distance between us that neither of us had to acknowledge what was happening.
The cold water helped for a minute, right up until Rose surfaced, pushed her wet hair away from her face and looked at me.
And Rose being Rose, she clocked the erection almost immediately.
Her eyes dropped below the water, and when they came back to mine, I felt the change between us so fast it almost sobered me up. Her breathing got heavier, her lips parted, and those piercing gray eyes went dark in a way I hadn't seen directed at me in years.
Rose was turned on.
And once I knew that, keeping my distance became a much harder fucking argument to make.
I stepped toward her and watched her eyes move over me, across my chest and stomach before dropping again to the bulge straining against my briefs.
She wasn't even pretending not to look. Her gaze stayed there long enough to send every bit of blood I had left directly to the problem, then slowly climbed back up until it landed on my mouth.
I took another step.
She still didn't move.
By the time I reached her, we were close enough that I could feel the heat of her body despite the water between us. Every inch of me was vibrating with the need to touch her, taste her, kiss her, and the only thing keeping my hands at my sides was knowing exactly how badly this could go.
"Maybe this was a bad idea," she breathed.
"Why is that?"
I closed the last of the distance anyway, because asking the question while doing the exact thing that made it irrelevant was where my decision-making skills had landed for the evening.
We were hip to hip now, her body nearly against mine, and I watched her gaze drop to my mouth before she forced it back to my eyes.
"Because we're drunk."
"We've been drunk together before."
"I guess that's true." She swallowed, and for a second I thought she might finally step away. "We're friends."
The word sat between us doing absolutely nothing useful.
"Yeah," I said. "We are."
I reached up and brushed the wet hair away from her neck. Goosebumps scattered across her skin beneath my fingers, and her breath caught softly enough that I might've missed it if I hadn't been paying attention to every fucking thing she did.
"We're really good friends," she added, as if perhaps the first attempt hadn't been legally binding enough.
I smiled. "The best."
That finally pulled a small laugh out of her, but she didn't move away. Instead, she reached up and wrapped her arms around my neck, slowly enough that either one of us could've stopped what was happening and neither of us did.
There are moments when you can still pretend you don't know where something is going.
That wasn't one of them.
I grabbed the backs of her thighs and lifted her, her legs wrapping around my waist.
My hands gripped her hips, fingers spread wide across her ass, and for a long second neither of us said anything. We just stared at each other like one of us was eventually going to remember this was a terrible fucking idea and put a stop to it.
Neither of us did.
Rose tightened her thighs around me and lifted herself slightly before settling back against me, slow enough that I felt every inch of the movement, and I knew she had to feel every fucking inch of me.
Her mouth opened on a soft moan and my grip on her tightened instinctively, jaw clenched hard enough to ache while whatever remained of my good judgment quietly packed its shit and left.
I knew what this made me. The married man. The cheat. The dog. I knew every name waiting for me on the other side of this and exactly what I'd think of a man doing what I was doing if I were standing anywhere except inside my own skin.
None of it stopped me.
Worse, I didn't want it to.
I widened my stance and pulled her tighter against me, finally giving up on the pathetic attempt to hide how badly I wanted her. Her fingers plunged into my hair as my hips moved with hers, and the friction between us built until both of our breathing had gone rough and uneven.
Still, we didn't say a word to each other.
That's the part that has stayed with me more than anything.
All that time of wanting each other, and when it finally broke loose, neither of us trusted a single fucking word to it. Our mouths were inches apart, open, sharing breath, but neither of us said the thing that would've made any of it real.
Because real would've required tomorrow.
Real would've required explanations.
Real would've meant admitting this wasn't some drunken mistake that could be shoved into the same locked drawer as the hotel room and never mentioned again.
So we stayed silent and let everything else speak for us.
I backed her against the wall of the pool as our rhythm picked up, water sloshing over the edge while whatever control I'd been hanging onto finally gave out.
One arm stayed wrapped around her waist, the other hand curved around the back of her neck as I pulled her tighter against me and moved with her, harder now, past the point of pretending either of us was going to stop.
Her arms locked around my neck, and I reached past her to grip the edge of the pool on either side of her.
The leverage only made things worse. Or better.
Fuck if I knew anymore. I just knew I couldn't get enough of the way she moved against me, the way her breathing kept breaking apart until every breath turned into a moan against my skin and her fingernails dug into the back of my neck.
Her back arched, dragging her chest against mine, and I felt the exact moment everything changed. Her whole body went taut in my arms before she wrapped herself tighter around me and buried her face against my neck, muffling her screams into my skin while I held on.
That small, trembling, fierce body coming apart against mine was all it took, and I went right over the edge behind her with absolutely no say in it.
Afterward, neither of us moved.
All I could hear was the quiver in our breathing and the water slowly settling around us. I kept both arms around her because I wasn't ready to find out what happened when I let go, and Rose didn't seem in any hurry to move either.
Minutes might've passed. I honestly don't know.
Eventually, I lowered her until her feet found the bottom of the pool, but she stayed close for another second, her hands still resting against me.
Her cheeks were flushed crimson, wet hair plastered to her neck and shoulders, and when she looked up at me, I could see something sitting right there behind her eyes.
She wanted to say something.
Hell, so did I.
But what the fuck were we supposed to say?
I've wanted you for so long?
Sorry about the wife?
Want to completely destroy every boundary we've spent nearly a decade building and see how that works out for us?
Nothing felt big enough. Or safe enough.
Her lips parted like maybe she'd found something anyway, and I would've given just about anything to hear it.
Instead, she looked away.