by Amy Lane
“You look thoughtful, Counselor,” Jackson said, draping himself over Ellery’s back and whispering in his ear.
“Lots of info to process,” Ellery mumbled. Jackson slid his hands up along his back and his ribs, pulling his polo over his head and peppering his back with kisses. “Should we move to the bed?”
“Nope.”
Ellery squirmed, feeling wanton and a little dirty. For the most part, they’d stuck to the bed in the past few months, because both of them had been healing and things got stiff—and not the good things either—when you had sex on the floor or the table.
But here, with his weight on his elbows, he was acutely aware that he was thrusting his ass out in what could be a blatant invitation.
He’d been so ready to have Jackson take him the night before.
Jackson didn’t let him down.
He kissed down Ellery’s naked spine again, then dipped his lips below the belt line, tugging at Ellery’s slacks. They didn’t yield, so his hands went to the belt holding them up, and Ellery whimpered with impatience. He wanted Jackson’s naked body against his.
The slacks fell to his feet, and Jackson shoved his boxers down, then, oh my God, squatted behind Ellery, his hot, callused palms parting Ellery’s cheeks.
“Really?” Ellery breathed. “We’re going right th—ere?”
Jackson didn’t just go there—Jackson went to town there—tongue extended, whisker stubble abrading the soft inside of Ellery’s cheeks. Ellery moaned, naked and spread out on the kitchen table, needing more, harder, needing penetration, fast and dirty and now. He reached behind him, trying to grab Jackson’s hair, but he ended up pushing on his head, demanding more.
And Jackson gave him more. He reached between Ellery’s legs and grabbed his balls—firm, but still gentle as he rolled them softly between his fingers. Ellery’s knees threatened to buckle, just that quickly.
“Lube?” he squeaked, needing it all right now!
Jackson pulled away, giving Ellery a quick bite on the soft part of his bottom, and his face was replaced by—oh thank God—his well-oiled cock.
Sometimes, stretching was a good thing, but right now, he welcomed the bite of pain that came with Jackson’s sudden intrusion. With a quick thrust, Ellery’s confusion, his vulnerability, was washed away, and he was filled with Jackson, filled with power. He felt desirable and hot and needed.
And Jackson was skillful—Ellery had never doubted it. With long, full, fast strokes, Jackson dominated him, hands on his waist, hips rocking. Ellery was incoherent, a sweaty mass of desire sticking to his kitchen table.
Jackson slowed down long enough to pull him upright, weight on his hands, so he could nibble on Ellery’s neck, his shoulders, trail gentle fingers down his flanks. His rhythm turned languorous, drugging, and Ellery dropped his hand to his cock shamelessly, needing more.
Jackson pulled it away and chuckled, right in his ear. “You’re that ready?”
“Zero to fifty, one good lick,” Ellery panted, and Jackson’s laugh rumbled through his stomach, to where their bodies were touching.
His next thrust was brutally hard, and then he stopped, leaving Ellery quivering, waiting for the next blow.
“Please,” Ellery begged. “Please, baby, finish me—ahh….”
This flurry of fucking was it. He could feel it, the violent tingle that started at his taint and rushed his thighs, his stomach, his balls. No touching necessary. Just Jackson’s furnace-like body throwing heat into Ellery’s ass.
Ellery cried out, collapsing on the table, pushing hard to keep from overbalancing, and Jackson let out a soft little moan of completion behind him. Jackson fell heavily over his back, as though he’d suddenly run out of strength, and Ellery felt the table rock.
“We’re gonna break it,” he mumbled, and Jackson chuckled and stood heavily upright, hefting Ellery up against his front and nuzzling his temple as though suddenly weary.
“Hey,” he whispered, “I love you.”
Ellery felt the first stirrings of suspicion. “I love you too,” he murmured, leaning into Jackson’s cheek. “What’s up?”
Jackson shook his head and bent over enough to capture Ellery’s lips briefly. “I’m gonna go shower,” he said. “I’ll be out in ten—we can go over stuff then.” He held Ellery tight again and slid out in a wash of come before pulling his underwear and scrubs up his thighs.
“I might as well shower with you,” Ellery said, crouching to get his pants up from around his ankles so he could walk into the bathroom.
Then he saw it. Jackson had turned around as he’d reached the door to the hallway and their bedroom, and the patch of blood seeping through Jackson’s white scrubs stood out like a red flag to a bull.
“Jackson, what happened to your back?”
Jackson didn’t even bother to look at him. “Doesn’t matter—I’m fine, right? We had sex, it’s all good, I’m fine.”
Fine?
Ellery had never lost his temper like this in his life.
He’d heard of people seeing red—had defended clients who had looked at him helplessly and said, “I don’t know what happened then. I just… snapped.”
But until the glass paperweight his mother had bought them went sailing past Jackson’s head to thunk and shatter on the wall, he had never thought it would happen to him.
Jackson went very still.
“Ell….” His voice wobbled. “Ellery?”
“Tell me,” Ellery said, his own voice shaking. “Tell me we didn’t just have sex on the kitchen table so you could hide whatever the hell happened to your back!”
Jackson’s shoulders rolled forward, stretching the scrubs tight enough that Ellery could see the outline of the bandage. “We had sex because you were hot,” he said, sounding lost.
“Jackson, look at me.”
Jackson crouched instead, picking up glass shards with fingers that shook. “I really liked this.”
“I did too.” Ellery’s eyes were hot, and he couldn’t seem to find his center. “I liked the sex. But… but did you really just come home and seduce me so I wouldn’t see you’d been hurt?”
“I just wanted you not to worry,” Jackson said, looking at him for the first time. His green eyes were wide and shiny and scared, and Ellery’s chest went cold. In their entire relationship, Jackson had never looked at him with the eyes of the victim he must have been as a child.
Until now.
“I’m sorry,” Ellery told him thickly. “I shouldn’t have lost my temper like that. My emotions were… were just too close to the surface. Man, I’ve been worried about you since that phone call.” He walked toward where Jackson crouched, but Jackson held out his hand, so he stopped.
“You’re barefoot,” he said, because Ellery had kicked off his loafers by the rack in the kitchen.
“I don’t care!” Oh God. Ellery had done this. That haunted look on his lover’s face—Ellery had done it.
“I do,” Jackson rasped, collecting the shards in his hand. “This was really pretty—”
“And I broke it because I’m worried about you!”
Jackson recoiled from Ellery’s raised voice in a way he never had before, and Ellery felt the helplessness of knowing he’d violated Jackson’s safety when he’d been the only security Jackson had ever known.
“I… I gotta shower,” Jackson mumbled, gathering the pieces together in the front of his scrubs. “Just let me shower.” He disappeared down the hallway, and Ellery heard the tinkle of glass from the guest bathroom a moment later, while he stood, pants clutched around his waist, still in a state of shock.
The guest bathroom.
Oh God.
Jackson was bathing in the guest bathroom.
Like he didn’t belong in the house.
Like they hadn’t lived together, slept together, showered together since September when he’d gotten home from the hospital.
Ten months—ten months they’d been in each other’s back pockets, and Jackson was putti
ng distance between them again.
Ellery looked at the hand that he’d used to dash their future against the wall and fought the temptation to cry.
TWO HOURS later, he stopped fighting.
Jackson had showered and done a load of laundry, then sat in the guest bedroom and worked on his laptop.
He’d closed the door, but Ellery had peeked in to ask him if he wanted some dinner.
Ellery had gotten a shake of Jackson’s head and eyes that skated away from an actual meeting. That’s when he’d gone to their bedroom to cry.
What had he done?
He didn’t even realize he was texting his mother until he pressed Send.
Mom, I did something awful.
His phone buzzed. “Do I need to hire you a lawyer or buy you tickets to a nonextradition country?”
She was completely serious.
Ellery smiled in spite of the ache in his chest. “Not quite that awful,” he said, sighing and wishing for Billy Bob. The cat had ended up in the guest bedroom with Jackson. Of course he had.
“What’s wrong, honey?”
Oh, he must sound worse than he thought. Honey. His mother never used endearments, but her voice had dropped softly, and he realized that the last time he’d cried had been when Jackson’s heart had stopped.
“I… I got mad enough to throw something,” he said. “And I did. And I broke the thing, and I might have broken us, and I don’t know how to make it right.”
“If you didn’t like the paperweight, Ellery, all you had to do was say so.”
“I didn’t,” Ellery told her. “But Jackson loved it. And I broke it when I missed his head.”
“On purpose?” Like this meant something.
Ellery thought about it. “Yeah. I was really just trying to get his attention.”
“About what?” she asked, delicate and direct at the same time, because that was Taylor Cramer.
“He… he came home with a big… wound on his back, and he didn’t tell me. And he evaded me. And he….” Oh God. This was his mother!
“Used sex to distract you?”
“How did you know that?” If his mother had bugged his house, he’d jump off a cliff.
“It wasn’t hard to figure out. It’s worked so well with all of his past lovers, I don’t see why he’d quit now, do you?”
“But I’m different!” he argued, affronted.
“Of course you are! You’re the only real relationship he’s ever had. And he was trying to keep you from worrying about him. Why would you be doing that, by the way? I thought things were going well between you?”
“These last couple weeks he’s been… been slipping. He stopped talking to Rabbi Watson, stopped eating, stopped sleeping. He skipped his cardiologist appointment—” He took a deep breath because he didn’t like to think about Jackson doing all that running around with a chronic condition, so he mostly just didn’t. But he’d been the one to make the monthly appointment, so he’d gotten the call that it had slipped Jackson’s mind. That’s when he’d seen it—how much Jackson wasn’t taking care of himself. “And this case we’re working on—”
“You have a case?”
Ellery had discussed his cases with his mother since law school, and he wasn’t going to stop now. He came to a close and heard her fascinated hum.
“Give him some space tonight,” she said after a moment. “Maybe let him talk to his new partner—”
“Henry? Henry’s a client.”
“Sure he is. But give him some space. Talk to him tomorrow. Don’t give up on him, son. He’s hurt, but so are you. He loves you very much. He’ll see that.”
“I just took away the only security he’s ever had.”
“Because he was slipping away from you. Maybe he’s never had a lover who cared enough about him to break a hand-blown glass paperweight.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, feeling like crap.
“No worries. I found another one on Etsy from that same vendor—different colors, but still, it will do nicely. But this one’s Jackson’s. He gets to open it, and you get to not touch it. Ever again.”
Ellery dropped his chin to his chest and rubbed the back of his neck. “Sorry, Mother.”
She let out a sigh. “You’re a good man, Ellery. And like I said, he loves you. He loves you so much that maybe your worry is the problem.”
“I can’t stop worrying!”
“And you shouldn’t. But maybe… maybe take the weight of it from his shoulders a little. He’s not broken to vex you, you know.”
“Sometimes I’m not so sure about that,” Ellery said darkly.
“Ellery….”
Sigh. “Yeah. No, you’re right, Mother. You are. I just… sex should be off-limits,” he said, not caring suddenly that she was the one he was confiding in.
“It should be.” She was agreeing with him? He looked outside the window quickly to see if the sky had turned to blood. No, the sun hadn’t even set, because it was damned close to summer solstice.
“But so should breaking things,” Ellery said with a sigh. He slid down his bed, hating himself all over again.
“You’ll figure it out, son,” she told him softly. “You said he hasn’t been sleeping well?”
“Yeah.”
“So tonight?”
Whether Jackson wanted him to be or not, Ellery wasn’t going to leave him alone to his demons.
“I’ll be exactly where he needs me,” Ellery said, his voice steely with resolve.
“Good boy.”
His mother rang off soon after that, and Ellery went out to the kitchen table—freshly cleaned—to run Sampson’s financials, and Carver’s as well. When he was done with that, he went over the bills and the specs for the office, because it was coming together nicely. By the end of the week, they could welcome a new client in there with the same amount of grace his old firm had provided, without quite the same strong smell of paint the place had sported this past week.
He paused for a moment, yawning and stretching and wondering if he should just go to sleep, when Jackson’s scream ripped the house—and his heart—wide open.
“Ellery!”
Ellery was through the door to the guest room before the last syllable died.
Jackson was thrashing on top of the covers, wearing a pair of sleep shorts and nothing else, and the lamp was still on next to the bed. Billy Bob leaped down and ran toward the open door as Ellery rushed to the bedside, and Ellery let him.
He’d chosen this job—Billy Bob got nights off.
“Baby, I’m here!”
“Ellery, don’t go,” Jackson whimpered.
Oh, baby. “I’m right here.”
“Don’t go. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Don’t go.”
Ellery slid next to him and wrapped his arms and legs around Jackson’s shoulders and hips, binding him as tightly as possible. “I’ve got you.”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I don’t know what I did—I’m sorry—”
Ellery’s eyes, hot and swollen from his little pity party before he talked to his mom, began to sting. “I’m sorry too,” he whispered, holding Jackson as tight as possible and still not keeping him from shaking. “I’m so sorry. I won’t go. I’m sorry. Don’t leave me. Come back. Wherever you went, come back. I’ll stay if you will. God, baby, you’re shaking so hard.”
“I lost you.”
“No, no, baby. Never.”
“I don’t even know what I did….”
Ellery let out a broken laugh. “We’ll have a talk about that in the morning,” he murmured. “Come on. Get up.” He shoved gently at Jackson’s hips until he rolled out of bed and stood.
“Where we going?” His eyes were at half-mast, and Ellery realized that no matter what his day had been like, Jackson was exhausted.
“To our bed, Jackson. You’re not sleeping in the guest bed ever again.”
His lips parted and wobbled, and he palmed his eyes. Ellery nudged him gently until they were out of the guest bedroom and b
ack in their own. He turned off the lights on the way, glad he’d locked everything down before he’d sat down to work. When they got to the bed, he paused and took off his pajama bottoms and T-shirt, then helped Jackson out of his sleep shorts.
Skin to skin. He needed as much of Jackson’s skin touching his as possible tonight, no matter how hot it was outside.
He turned off the light and crawled into bed, pulling Jackson so tightly against him that for a moment, Jackson struggled.
“Not letting you go,” Ellery murmured.
“Okay.” Jackson went still in his arms, which was almost as bad.
“I loved the sex,” Ellery said. The sandwich method, right? The good, the bad, the good? Well, the sex had been great. “I always like sex with you.”
Jackson melted a little—active acceptance instead of passive, at least Ellery hoped so.
“But… but you weren’t honest with me. You didn’t tell me you were hurt. It felt… manipulative. You wanted me to leave you alone about something you didn’t want to talk about, so you had sex with me.” Ellery grunted. “It’s not flattering to think that’s the only reason you want me, Jackson.”
“I want you all the time,” Jackson rumbled, and Ellery smiled a little. He meant it. Ellery had never fooled himself that he was in the same sexual league with Jackson Rivers, but Jackson had never seemed to think otherwise.
“That’s good. Because I want you, and that makes me an easy mark.”
“I don’t… I get banged up,” Jackson muttered, sounding irritated. That was a good sign too. “You freak out over every damned bruise!”
“Because I don’t want you hurt at all!” Ellery snapped, and then he took a deep breath. “But… but let’s do a rewind. Let’s go back to that phone conversation—you remember that?”
“Hunh.”
Never Ellery’s favorite word. “What?”
“You’re hella fucking smart, do you know that, Counselor?”
Ellery grunted, remembering the way that paperweight shattered. “No. Not tonight I’m not. Let’s try that convo again. ‘Jackson, you sound out of breath? What happened?’”