For a second or two, everything else fell away.
He looked…stunned. Not displeased, though. Caught, focused,intent. As if he—Jesus. As if he felt it, too. As if maybe I wasn’t alone in this.
“Come on,” the guy next to me wheedled, voice raised over the music. It barely registered. “Someone like you should come with a crowd and paparazzi. Or a dance partner, at least.”
I angled my head just slightly, enough to show that I’d heard him. Polite habit. Truth was, the words barely touched down. Because Jesse was still looking right at me, steady and unsmiling.
What are the odds?
I drew a shaky breath and dipped my chin, looked back up at him through my lashes. Heat thrummed in my bones, thicker and slower than the throbbing bass, and I let one side of my mouth curl up.
Your move, Jesse. Because I’m not running.
The guy touched my shoulder. Jesse put down his glass.
“I’ll be your best bad decision tonight,” the guy beside me promised, and yeah, yes. Not him, though. Not him because Jesse was moving, drink abandoned as the room narrowed to a single focal point—Jesse, drawing closer.
Seconds fractured like glass. I felt the wall solid against my back and shifted to shrug off the guy who’d been hitting on me just as Jesse stepped up, eyes dark. God. There wasn’t enoughairin the room.
“Hey, man.” The other guy drew himself up to be taller. “You’re kind of cutting in.”
Jesse spared him half a glance. “Yeah,” he said—not rude or regretful, really just stating a fact, indisputable like gravity. “I am.”
I inhaled and smiled.
The stranger might have caught it—I didn’t care enough to check. But he made some kind of dismissive noise before he melted away, swallowed by the crowd. Gone. Just Jesse.
“Finn.” It was the shape of my name rather than anything that translated over the music. I felt it, though—heat that shivered up my spine and settled at the base of my skull. The way he watched me held the weight of a thousand suns.
I let my smile unfurl further. “Hi.”
People pressed in around us, damp skin and swaying bodies, but the space between him and me seemed personal and private, something that existed outside of the surging music. I reached for him—slowly, hooking both thumbs into the belt loops of his jeans. A question? A dare? My heart was beating high in my throat.
His gaze flared. He stepped in,chest stomach thighs, all up against me, no air between us. I tilted my head like it was an answer.
He kissed me.
Hot and hard, no apologies. The smoky taste of bourbon fogged up my mind, like the aftershock of adrenaline still pounding in my bloodstream. The world swung out of orbit. I opened for him with a groan that he swallowed, one of his hands framing my jaw, thumb digging into my cheek. The other gripped my hip and pulled me closer,closer. I tightened my hold on him, knuckles pressing into his stomach, until there was nothing but shadows and heat and yes.
Someone bumped into Jesse’s side. He stumbled, caught his breath against my mouth, and pressed even tighter into me. The music blurred into thunder in my ears, strobe lights like glitter in my mind. Every slick drag of his mouth over mine felt like an epiphany. A recalibration, as if my body had tuned into a new frequency.
When he broke away, it was by a fraction, breaths tangling. Pupils wide, the green of his eyes turned into a swirl of shadows as if the blackout still lingered in the corners of his mind. In mine, too.
“Please,” I said—wasn’t sure if he even heard me, what he made of it. His chest rose against mine, breath a whisper.
“I don’t live far.”
Oh. Fuck, yes. A strange, distorted reflection of that first time when I’d led him to an empty hotel room in a city that I barely knew.His place.It felt like a promise, doubt burned away somewhere between the frantic beep of a failing ventilator and this moment, his hands on me, strobe lights catching in his dark hair, colors smeared across the edges of my vision.
I nodded, swallowed hard. “Lead the way.”
Night air hit like a bucket of water, like jumping into a spring-cool lake in the early days of summer. Car horns and distant music sliced through the haze in my mind and threw into sharp relief the reality of what we were about to do.
Maybe Jesse felt it, too. He stopped walking, two minutes after we’d left the bar, time that had passed in stolen glances and charged silence. “You sure about this?” he asked, hushed.
I turned to face him. Neon shop signs cast him in multicolored hues, something about him still off-kilter, a far cry from the clear, decisive surgeon who’d held his nerve while the monitors screamed and the power failed. That Jesse had been steady, in control. This one was something else entirely—gaze flicking over my face like he needed me to be sure.
Just a man. And fuck, I only wanted him more for it.
