Jack gives me a light shove back, and I know it’s light because it still hurts, but I don’t actually go flying. “This is basic shit, Leo,” he says, clearly judging me and my dog-owning skills. “You can’t let him get away with bad behaviour. He’ll rule you.”
“Well, alright, how about from now on you take over disciplining our dog, and I’ll play good cop and dish out the treats?”
“He’s our dog now, is he?” Jack asks, raising a sceptical eyebrow. “I didn’t realise I’d signed adoption papers whilst looped out on drugs in medical.”
“That’s why they tell you to Say No to Drugs.” I tut at him. “Drugs are for mugs. Shoulda stayed in school, we had multiple super-fun and informative assemblies about it; then you wouldn’t have wound up coerced into dog parenthood.”
“I never went to school,” Jack reminds me offhandedly, then he seems rethink it and corrects himself. “The schools I went to for undercover missions never had drug talks. I did go to one where they had a sex talk, though. The teachers handed out condoms, and the kids blew them up into balloons.”
“Yeah.” I laugh. “Think I skipped that one.”
“Did you bunk off school a lot as a kid?” Jack asks, sounding more curious this time.
I shrug lightly. “Some. When I started going to state school. No one gave a shit as long as I did all my coursework.”
Jack makes a thoughtful humming noise. He doesn’t sound pleased by the idea for some reason. I can’t imagine it’s the skipping school he cares about, so it must be something else.
I take Jack’s hand at the top of the stairs and lead him to my room, pulling him inside and over to the bed. Jack lets me push him down to sit on the bed, and I climb onto his lap. I’m usually too tall to do this with people, but Jack is more than a match for me in terms of size as well as outdoing me in strength, able to take my weight easily.
Jack tilts his head back to meet my eyes and brings his hands up to press them into my back. I cup his face and bend down the last few inches to kiss him. Jack allows me to take control of the kiss for once. I push my tongue past the seam of his lips and do a thorough exploration of his mouth whilst Jack holds onto me in an unyielding grip.
A little while later, when I let both of us come up for some much-needed oxygen, Jack moves his hands to my arse and flips us over in one smooth motion and moves me up the bed, so I’m laid down in the middle of it with him on top of me.
Jack raises one hand to wrap around my throat. He presses down a little, just enough to make a point, the point being he has me right where he wants me, caught beneath him and unable to get away. I put up a token struggle to see what he does, and in response, Jack tighten his hand on my throat, pushing down a bit harder, almost but not quite cutting off my airway.
“Behave.” Jack growls at me, voice rough and soaked with that same dark lust I’ve heard from him before. I can feel the pulsing hot hardness of his cock digging into me like a pipe that has scalding water passing through it.
I stop pretending to fight him then and look up into his eyes. The startlingly serious expression on his face snags my attention, and I wait for him to say whatever it is he’s clearly working up to saying to me.
It takes quite a bit of Jack staring down at me like he’s trying to communicate via telepathy before he finds the right words and puts them in the correct order, then expels them in a frustrated rush. “People should care about you.”
I’m not sure what I was expecting, but it definitely wasn’t that. I almost make a joke, but the sincerity with which he spoke stops me from giving into my instinctual need to downplay emotionally solemn things.
“Do you care about me?” I ask, feeling vulnerable about the answer and low-key hating it. There’s a reason I usually make jokes and avoid these sorts of conversations with people. Because they make me feel like this. Jittery and weak. Scared of rejection and equally afraid of an acceptance I know can’t last.
It seems to take about three million years for Jack to respond, and when he finally does, it’s less of a relief than it is a firework going off inside my head. It triggers more potentially damaging emotions to flood in and lay waste to the doubts I’d been carefully cultivating as a defence against the sheer magnitude of what I’ve begun to feel for my partner.
“More than I know how to handle, Leo,” Jack admits like it’s a flaw, like he’s retroactively apologising for not knowing how to deal with how much he cares about me.
“For the record,” I tell him, trying to keep my voice level, “I care a whole fuckload about you too.”
Jack must not have expected my reciprocation, because his eyes widen like I’ve just handed him a surprise gift. Once he gets over the initial shock, his eyes change shape, narrowing slightly in apparent consternation.
“Don’t know if I like it,” he confesses brazenly. “This wholethingwe’ve got going on, turning all important to me and shit.”
I can’t stop the snort of laughter that comes out in response to the genuine dismay in Jack’s voice. I give his torso a consoling pat. “It’s been a real inconvenience to me too, to be honest, babe.”
That, for whatever reason, seems to ease Jack’s uncertainty about our feelings for each other rather than elevating it.
“So we’re still in agreement, then?” Jack asks. “This is a bad idea.”
I think back to the first time we had sex in this bed, well over a month ago. We both said it was a mistake. Our conversation about it was short but honest. I’m assuming that’s what Jack is alluding to.
Part of me, a big part, wants to play it off, make a joke likeMight be the worst one either of us has ever had, which is really saying something, then kiss Jack as if anything is settled and fall into the same patterns we’ve been relying on since the beginning of this whateveritis between us: acknowledgement of problem, make light of it, proceed to have sex without any real resolution.
But with mine and Rex's conversation still fresh in my mind, the idea of pushing away the seriousness of what we’ve begun to feel for each other seems like the cowardly move. There are a lot of things I can be accused of, but I hope that lacking grit isn’t one of them. I can’t bottle it now, after all the shit we’ve been through, after almost losing him only days ago. Jack deserves more than that, braver than that.
If I can’t tell him the truth, if we can’t have a frank conversation about it, then we also can’t keep on doing this. We’ll just wind up hurting each other, and fuck knows we’ve both had enough of that in our lives.
