“Nico.” His voice scrapes against his throat.
“Right here, baby. Right here.”
He grabs the front of my shirt with both fists, pressing his face further into my chest, breathing ragged against the fabric. The trembling starts in his hands, moving through his arms and shoulders, until his whole frame is vibrating against mine.
“Can you—” His voice catches in his throat and then he swallows before trying again. “Can you lay on me? Your full weight. Just block everything out.”
I shift over him carefully, settling my body on top of his, distributing my weight across his chest, hips, and thighs. I brace my forearms on either side of his head, and his hands find my elbows, pushing them flat.
“All of it.” His voice is muffled against my collarbone. “I need all of it.”
I flatten my arms, pressing my full weight into Wilson and pinning him to the mattress. His hands slip free of my shirt and curl around my back, fingers digging into the muscles along my spine to hold me there. I feel his breathing slow, each exhale pushing tension from his body, his muscles relaxing beneath me.
His grip loosens, one finger at a time, until his hands are simply resting on my back. He buries his face into my collarbone, his nose pressed into the hollow of my throat. Minutes pass. His trembling stops. His breaths come steady against my neck. His body softens again but I keep my weight where it is. All I hear is his breathing and the distant hum of the building settling around us.
When he finally speaks, his voice is soft, murmured against my throat like a thought surfacing from the dark place his dream dragged him through. “Your jokes were so bad.” I rest my chin on the top of his head and let the words settle between our breaths.
“What?”
“At the barbecue. That first one about the penguin and the bartender.” His mouth moves against my collarbone with every word, each a warm press of air. “I wanted to leave. I was sitting on my cooler, wishing I was anywhere else, then you sat down with that stupid grin and those massive glasses and told the worst joke I’ve ever heard.”
I have no idea why Wilson is bringing this up but if it helps him calm to walk down memory lane, I will do it in a heartbeat. “It was pretty bad,” I admit.
“It was criminal. You should have been arrested.” He traces a slow, absent line along the muscle between my shoulder blades. “I couldn’t figure out why you kept talking to me. Everyone else at that party was smiling and laughing and being normal, and there I was with my arms crossed looking like I wanted to set the backyard on fire.”
“You did look like that.”
“So why me?” His question is so quiet I feel it more than hear it. “There were so many people there who weren’t—” His hand stills on my back and the sentence dissolves.
“You told me the truth.” I turn my head so my mouth hovers near his ear. “Everyone else laughed at the penguin joke because that’s what you do at a party when someone tells a joke. You looked me in the face and said, ‘That’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard,’ then you took my beer out of my hand and drank half of it.”
“You offered it,” he says softly.
“After you stole it.”
His chest hitches against mine. “You could’ve been talking to anyone.”
“I did talk to other people for about ten minutes. Then you sat on the cooler next to mine, crossed your arms, and glared at the grill like it had personally wronged you, and I thought—” My thumb finds his ear, tracing its curve. “I thought if I could make you laugh,reallylaugh, that sound would be worth more than anything else that happened to me that year.”
He tilts his chin up, his eyes rimmed red in the dim light, his face carrying the raw openness that only surfaces when sleep and fear and the weight of another person have stripped him bare.
“You choked on your beer,” I remind him. “You snorted half of it through your nose. Your eyes watered. It was the best sound I’d ever heard.”
“I didn’t snort.”
“You absolutely snorted.”
“That was just the carbonation.”
A soft laugh meets my bare skin as Wilson tugs me closer. God, I would give anything to this man. “Will, I was there. You snorted. Beer came out of your nose. You wiped it on your sleeve and then stole the rest of my drink and told me to try again with a better joke. So I did. And the next one was worse. And you laughed harder.”
He lifts his hands from my back to cup my face, my fingers mirroring that same path along his jaw. His thumb brushes across my lower lip, the heat between us tightening.
“I sat down on that cooler because you were wearing glasses that were three sizes too big,” He murmurs. “You looked ridiculous. And you were smiling at everyone like you actually meant it. I’d never met anyone who smiled at strangers like they mattered.”
I tilt my head up. “I got better glasses.”
Wilson shakes his head, stifling a smile as best he can and failing. “The new ones are worse.”
