“He smiles plenty.”
Carl would’ve asked Jonah how he knew, and seen straight through whatever bullshit answer Jonah’s tired but wired brain spat out. But Winona didn’t ask. She put her head on Jonah’s shoulder and stared into space until Sacha returned with pizza slices and cans of lemonade.
The carbs and sugar sobered Jonah to the point he could hardly recall the four drinks he’d sunk before Sacha had joined him. The jolt in his belly when Sacha had walked into the pub felt like it had happened to someone else.
Winona stopped shaking too. She came back to herself and walked to the car that rolled up sometime later with steady legs.
They took her home.
Jonah escorted her into her building while Sacha waited in the car. Winona lived with her brother. Jonah explained the turn the evening had taken, then escaped the fraternal rage-storm brewing and jogged down the stairs. At the bottom, his hand shook on the door handle. He took a breath and retracted it, shoving it into his pocket as he backed up to the bottom step.
He sank down. Nausea bloomed in the pit of his stomach, and darkness threatened his vision. He leaned forwards, hunching over his knees, only half aware of the door opening and light from the street brightening the dim hallway.
“Jonah.” Sacha dropped down beside him and pressed a warm hand between Jonah’s shoulder blades. He didn’t say anything else, just rubbed soothing circles into Jonah’s back as they sat in the unfamiliar hallway, cloaked in a silence Jonah hadn’t known he needed until it was there.
“I’m sorry,” he said after a while. “Clearly I can’t handle my booze.”
Sacha snorted softly. “I have seen you drink more and be fine. Perhaps it is seeing your friends attacked that has rattled you.”
“I’m not rattled.”
“Then you are a liar.”
Sacha spoke without malice, but his hand on Jonah’s back stilled, as if the tiny fib had offended him too much to keep moving.
Jonah missed his warm touch and sighed. “Yeah. Okay. I’m rattled. Not about the boys, Carl and Nico can handle themselves. It’s what happened to Winona that bothers me. Why do people think it’s okay to violate women like that?”
“I cannot explain why the world works the way it does,” Sacha said. “It is not okay, though. It will never be okay.”
“Thank you for being nice to her.”
“It was not hard. She is nice girl.”
“I know, I just—”
“What?”
Jonah wished there was a wall behind him he could bang his head against. “I couldn’t look at her.”
“I know.”
“You do?”
“Yes, Jonah. I do.”
How could he? He’d asked Jonah about the “man with the unspeakable hair”, but Jonah had never answered him. How was it possible that Sacha had watched events unfold tonight and seen them mirrored in an insignificant, years’ old incident Jonah had spent most of his adult life trying to forget?
Itwasn’tpossible. And to think anything else was ridiculous.Jonahwas ridiculous, shivering against a man he barely—
“Jonah.”
“What?”
Sacha grasped Jonah’s chin with insistent fingers, forcing Jonah to look at him with the lightest touch. His gaze seem to have darkened as they’d huddled on the stairs, and the gold in his eyes shimmered with the gaudy Christmas lights someone had wrapped around the worst Christmas tree in the world. Warmth and conflict battled for dominance, and it was an even fight. No winners. No losers. Just Sacha leaning ever closer as Jonah’s pulse hammered his eardrums.
He’s going to kiss me.
Sacha’s lips on his surprised him all the same. A staggering shock that lit a new fire in the inferno of desire Jonah already carried for this man. Sacha’s lips were soft and smooth, contrasting with the scruff on his unshaven jaw, and his kiss was dizzying. Even sitting down, Jonah swayed with the gentle impact, blood rushing, veins hot with pleasure. Behind the scenes, his brain still ran a thousand miles an hour, but the noise was quieted, snuffed out by Sacha’s lips.
