“Yeah, I think so.”
Jax unlocks his door and steps into his building, holding the door open for me to follow. Inside his apartment, he finally turns and kicks the door shut.
His kiss shocks me, like always. No dude before him ever kissed me like he does. As if we’re two people at the end of the world and kissing me is all he has left.
Even the softest touch of his lips is like that. Blinding. Consuming.
Dizzying.
When he pulls away, though, my selfish question still hangs between us.
“I’m gonna answer you,” he says. “Because I want to, and because I hope you’ll talk to me one day, and everything I know about you won’t be secondhand.”
“You know plenty about me.”
“Like what?”
I watch him ditch his coat and shoes on the floor next to a guitar I haven’t seen before, then I grab his shirt and pull him close again. “You know what makes me laugh. That I shout at myself in my sleep and worry about things that aren’t real.”
“Aren’t real? What happened that night that wasn’t real?”
“What I see in my sleep isn’t always what happened.”
“It doesn’t have to be.”
“No?”
“Reliving trauma isn’t like that. It’s not tangible, it’s just a wicked piece of shit that steals your happiness until you think you don’t deserve it anymore.”
“You sound like a coarser version of the therapist I can’t afford.”
Jax cracks a wan smile. “Why do you think that is?”
“Because you think the shark was trying to save you.”
“As fucked up as that sounds, you might be right.” Jax tugs me to the couch. We sit facing each other. “But no one held me prisoner, so you need to get that image out of your head right now.”
“Give me a new one.”
He finds a thread in my shirt and pulls at it. “They took all my money and convinced me I didn’t deserve it while I wasn’t working to earn more. We moved to a house I didn’t own, and I didn’t have a car. Everything I thought I wanted disappeared. I wanted to die for the longest time, and I thought the shark attack was a sign from Mother Nature that I was meant to.”
“What changed?”
“I remembered the cameras I kept at a lockup they didn’t know about. I’d sold most of my good stuff after the accident, but I still had enough to get me moving. Then I realized it wasn’t anyone else holding me hostage, it was me, and I left the next day.”
There’s more to the story than a suicidal epiphany, I can tell, but somehow it’s enough. Jax possesses a quiet determination I’ve never seen in anyone else. I don’t need a rundown of every second that made him that way. “I’m sorry I made you talk about it. I know it’s not fair.”
Jax’s eyes have hazed over as he’s talked. They sharpen now, but not with anger. “It’s not fair…toyou, not me. I don’t need your life story to want you, Tanner. But this wall of fucking silence isn’t sustainable. You know that, right? You know it’s gonna fall when you least expect it, and that shit hurts if you don’t have a safe place to land.”
I can no longer tell if he’s talking about me or himself. And we’ve run out of time. I need to get to the bar, and, actually, so does he. But neither of us make any move to leave.
Jax twines his fingers with mine, and I sit back on his couch, pulling him on top of me. He’s wearing worn jeans and a Wildfoot T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up over his leanly cut biceps. I’m still wearing my coat. Jax unzips it and pushes it off my shoulders. I shrug out of it and kiss him, pressing up against him, reveling in the friction between us. I’m so fucking hot for him. My brain empties of all responsibility. I shove my tongue in his mouth and my hands into his silky hair. I want him naked, but this is enough.
Everything about him will always be enough.
I grip his shirt at the hem and inch it up his torso, my fingers gliding over his skin. He shivers and bites my bottom lip. A growl builds in my chest. I reach for his fly and—
My phone rings. “Motherfucker.”
