I burst into laughter. I couldn’t help myself. “Nothing. Trust me.”
He knelt in front of me and gently elbowed my thighs apart so he could fit better between them. I had no idea why he was getting so close, but I didn’t want to fight him. The heat off his body felt so good.
“I’m very good at helping people, you know,” he murmured.
I let out a high, tight laugh. “Yeah. I know. But this isn’t a problem you can solve.”
“Your legs? Your arms?”
I let out a puff of air. My head felt a little foggy, and god, it was like all my social filters had abandoned me because I said, “My dick.”
He sucked in a breath, then let it out slowly. “Oh.”
“I…I can’t…” I growled and shook my head, trying to make a fist, but all I could manage was to close my fingers in toward my palm. “I haven’t been able to, you know, since this started getting worse.” I lifted a floppy hand into the air, then let it drop. “Even when I’m feeling fine, every time I try, my arms just stop working.”
His eyes went soft. Sad. A little pity, but mostly sympathy. His hands touched my shoulders, then dragged down to my wrists, steady like a ballast. “Forest,” he muttered softly.
Something warm bloomed in my stomach—the erection that should have been flagging by now harder than ever. I swallowed thickly and couldn’t meet his eyes.
“Let me help.”
“You— You can’t help me with this.”
He laughed softly, releasing one wrist to tip my chin up. Our eyes met, and I could see something in his gaze—something heavy and hot and needy. Or maybe I was just imagining things. Then he leaned in close. “I know what I’m doing. Trust me.”
A small laugh burst out of my chest. “I’m sure you do, but…you can’t.”
“Why not?”
“I— It’s…” Too much? Too intimate? Crossing lines we can never walk back?
He squeezed my wrist again. “If I asked you to marry me, you have to believe I’m more than willing to touch your cock.”
God, the way he said that. I’d been out of the closet for so long, but growing up in a small town in the middle of nowhere made it hard to ever voice those things aloud. Finding the one other queer kid in school was easy. Finding the courage to do anything besides eye-fuck and trade silent hand jobs in the locker room was harder.
How was Nash so…so open? So at ease?
There was truth to his words, and my throat burned with the need to moan his name. I finally met his gaze again, something in me snapping. He was right—if I was willing to marry him, I had to be willing to get closer to him. And a lack of desire wasn’t the problem.
It was the potential for regret.
What if he realized what a mess I was and wished he could take it back? But that wasn’t like him, and I knew that.
I took a deep breath, then nodded.
His hand moved to my jaw, thumb coasting over my stubble with a quiet rasping sound. “I need you to say it, Forest. I need you to tell me what you want.”
Squeezing my eyes shut, I bowed my head and searched for the courage that seemed to come to these men in spades, and to me like the barest trickle of water in a drought. “I…need help. I want you to touch me.”
“Here?” Nash asked, his hand moving down my chest.
“Lower.”
Nash’s swallow clicked in the back of his throat so loud I could hear it. He moved to the waistband of my sweats. “Here?”
“Lower.”
He cupped me, rubbing the length of my erection with the heel of his hand, and my knees almost gave out on me. No, wait. I was sitting. It was the world that felt like it was tipping upside down. “Like this?”
