“Fucking Christ,” I mutter. “Trixie and her big fucking mouth.”
“You forget, I’m the baby brother she never had,” he teases.
“Excuse you,” I scoff. “That title belongs to me.”
Jagger laughs. “Try again, brother.”
I huff and swirl my whiskey, watching the tears trickle down the glass.
“You know that he would never want that for you, right?” His voice is barely above a whisper as he speaks about the love that I’d tucked tightly away so many years ago. Jagger had drawn the story out of me one night during survival training when we were in basic. We’d laid out under the stars, our breaths making ghostly vapors in the winter air as we traded stories about growing up queer.
I crane my neck to look at him over my shoulder, but his head is tilted back over the low back of the chair, his own glass of whiskey dangling from the tips of his fingers.
“He knew what the deal was the first time you ever met, and he’s had years to come to grips with that.”
A hold wraps around my heart, one that I’m achingly familiar with but have grown so accustomed to that I rarely even notice it anymore. “It’s not him.” My friend doesn’t say anything. Maybe he doesn’t believe me. “It was a woman.” My voice is barely a whisper, as if speaking of it out loud will bring back all the hurt and joy and sorrow and love.
“A woman?” He says the word like it’s foreign to him.
I can only nod.
Jagger abruptly sits up in the chair, grabbing me by the shoulders and turning me around so I’m trapped inhis hazel gaze. “That’s good, then, right? There’s nothing to hold you back there.”
If only that were so.“She’s a commoner.”
“Christ on a cracker. Are you all still on that made-up shit of common versus noble? Man, fuck that!”
I shove out of his hold, pushing roughly to my feet. “It’s not my fucking choice, is it?” Dragging my free hand through my beard, I pace the room, my pulse kicking up like it always does when I start thinking of Aurelia again.
“Your father is the king of the whole goddamn country. He may not hold all the power, but he has a lot of pull in legislation.”
“Jagger, it’s not that simple?—”
“It is, though!” He snatches for my hand, pulling me back to him and onto my knees where he still sits. “Stones, if you love this woman, then you have to fight for her.”
I open my mouth to argue, but he silences me with a bruising kiss. His tongue does battle with mine, wrestling and fighting as if he can subdue me with his mouth.Fuck, and maybe he can. Because even as he pours all the passion and pent-up need that I know has been eating at him—because it should have been eating at me, too—I remember that while I love this man because of what we shared, I’m notinlove with him. I’ve only truly loved two people in my life, maybe three, and that kind of love is all-consuming. It’s the fire that keeps me alive and destroys me at the same time. That kind of love doesn’t develop over time; it doesn’t comewith years of marriage or learning to make it happen. The kind of love I feel for Aurelia is the kind that was tattooed on my soul the very moment I fell into those eyes like summer grass, the second I heard her sweet drawl while comforting little Darcy. The instant I felt her skin on mine, she became a part of me.
And I let that kind of love go once before. I will not do that again.
