by Cate Ashwood
“Done?”
“Yeah. Two full pizzas was probably overkill.”
“Leftovers for breakfast in the morning.” I grabbed both our plates and stood to carry them to the kitchen. “No eating past 10:00 a.m., though. There’s going to be enough food tomorrow night to feed a thousand people, and you’re going to want to go hungry.”
“Your friends good cooks?” Jackson walked into the kitchen behind me, sliding in close as I set the plates into the dishwasher.
“Gage and Holden, no. But Jane is, and she’s taking over the kitchen for the night.”
As I stood, Jackson’s arms slid around me, holding me to him, his mouth going to the side of my neck. I shivered at his touch, the way it felt to have his hands on me now familiar. But even with that familiarity, none of the excitement was lost. All it did was make me want it harder, knowing what was coming.
“We should go to bed.” Jackson breathed the words against my skin.
“Tired?”
“Nope.”
“Good.”
I turned in his arms and kissed him, the saltiness from the pizza still on his lips.
The lights were off, and the house was quiet. There was no one around for miles and miles but me and Jackson. We were totally alone out here, and when he kissed me, taking my clothes off piece by piece, gently lowering me onto the mattress and covering my body with his, it was easy to believe we were the only people in the entire world.
“All I thought about, all day, was putting my hands on you,” he murmured. “We were in the middle of that square, and there were people everywhere—your patients, your friends… that girl with the goddamn moose antlers on her head—and all I could think about was getting you somewhere I could touch you like this.”
I arched into him, his words turning me on as much as the physical sensations.
“Nothing feels as good as you.” He nuzzled against the curve of my neck, dragging his lips across my pulse point. I tilted my head to the side, giving him more space, shivering as his stubble scraped along my sensitive skin.
“Cold?” His voice rumbled through me, and I shook my head.
I was anything but cold. My blood was on fire, my heart fanning the flames as it pulsed. A bolt of heat blazed down my spine as he thrust against me, moisture gathering at the tip of my cock. It slicked my stomach, his cock sliding against mine as he thrust again, slow and languid.
We kissed for ages, letting the need build to a fevered peak. This was so different than the first time we’d been together. It wasn’t frantic and desperate, but God, the way he made me want him—it was hard to put words to it. I’d never experienced such an insatiable desire for someone before, and the way my body lit up when he touched me just got me more and more addicted to him.
I hooked my leg around his and pushed off, rolling him to his back and pinning him down. He grinned up at me with a smile that hit me right in the chest, and I felt something inside me shift so hard it took me a second to reorient myself.
Dipping my head forward, I kissed along his neck, his throat, down over his Adam’s apple and licked along his clavicle as his fingers traced over my back, the tips sliding along each bump of my spine as though he was memorizing me by touch.
I kissed down his body, brushing my lips gently over the slightly raised skin where the bullet had entered his shoulder. I hated that he’d been hurt, but I was so grateful that it had brought him into my life.
I kissed farther down, smiling against his skin as he moved against me, his hips lifting off the bed as he slid the ridge of his erection against my sternum. He was impatient, his muscles trembling as I slowed right down, drawing it out and making him wait for it. I knew how desperate he was, how much he wanted my mouth, but the longer I delayed it, the better it would feel.
I lingered near his hips, pressing gentle kisses there and running my tongue along the deep vee that cut all the way down.
“Logan…”
I sat up and looked at him. “Yes?”
“Jesus Christ,” he growled. “You’re killing me here.”
“Is there something you wanted?” I smirked.
“You know exactly what I want.”
I leaned forward, huffing a breath across his hypersensitive skin. “Say it.”
“Suck me.” The words came out as more of a growl, and I felt the punch of them go straight through me.
Without any more preamble, I gripped his cock by the base and took him into my mouth, sliding him all the way to the back of my throat.
“Fuck,” Jackson gasped, his hands flying to my head, holding me in place with the crown of his dick lodged down my throat. I relaxed, swallowing around him, and he tightened his fingers in my hair so hard I’d be feeling the sting for days.
My dick was impossibly hard, leaking precome against my leg as Jackson tugged, pulling my head back. His grip loosened for a minute, and I went to work, sucking and licking, pulling noises from him that I wore as a personal badge of honor.
I loved that I could make him feel so good, that the things I was doing to him were making him crazy with need and lust.
Reaching up, I covered his hand with mine, encouraging him to grip my hair again. It didn’t take much convincing, and a second later he was holding me in place as his hips lifted off the bed. He fucked into my mouth over and over until his thighs were quaking from the strain of holding back his orgasm.
I pulled off him, and he grabbed me, hoisting me up and crashing his mouth down on mine. He groaned, and I knew he could taste the salty tang of precome on my tongue as he maneuvered me to where he wanted me.
I was on all fours as he kissed down my spine, making me arch my back, the hot wash of his breath across my hole the only warning I got before it was replaced with his tongue.
When he did that, I couldn’t fucking keep my mouth shut. Every expletive I knew tumbled out of my mouth, the “oh, shit” and “fuck, yes” becoming nothing more than incoherent groaning as he worked me open with his fingers and tongue.
Then all at once, he was gone, and I whimpered, falling forward onto the bed, my face pressed into the mattress. I felt Jackson smoothing his hand along my back, heard the crinkle of the condom wrapper, and a second later, he spun me around, pulling me into his lap, his cock pressing inside as I lowered myself down.
I wrapped my arms around his neck and began to move, rocking my hips as I rode him. In this position, I couldn’t get the same leverage I would have had if Jackson had been fucking me from behind, but we were wrapped up in each other, his arms around my back, my legs around his waist. I could see every emotion as it passed over his face, my heart drugged with bliss that I was making him feel so good.
There was this perfect push and pull we achieved, sweat-slicked skin and not a hair’s width of space between us. He kissed me, his one hand tangling in my hair as we rode toward completion.
It was over all too soon—three strokes of my hand over my cock and I was painting us both with come. Jackson was right behind me, holding me tight enough to bruise as he pulsed inside. He kissed me slowly, bringing us both down from the high of our orgasms. We stayed like that for a long time, just holding each other in the dark.
Jackson
“I gotta say, I would choose this right here over pretty much anything.” I slipped my fingertips across Logan’s smooth skin, tracing abstract shapes along the ridges of his abdomen. “And having to choose between this and working my ass off overnight in the freezing cold, this beats that by a thousand miles.”
“Even with overtime pay?” he teased with a half smile.
“They could pay me quadruple time and it still wouldn’t be worth giving this up for.” I let my eyes fall closed, feeling drained and sated. “In fact, I should be paying you—that thing you do, the thing with your tongue—just take my bank card. It’s all yours.” I continued to stroke along Logan’s belly, my fingertips tracing the spot where smooth skin became furred. Bishop Ridge Ranch was quickly becoming my favorite spot in general, an
d the place where his vee angled below his waistband was by far my favorite spot in particular.
“That’s what you’d be doing if you were home? Working overtime, right?” His words came out slower than usual, as though I’d fucked any urgency right out of him. Everything was lazy and languid, and I would have been happy to stay like this forever. Sex with Logan was so fucking simple, and it made ignoring the rest of the noise in my life so much easier.
“Probably. Unless there’s something else going on, a trip to Juneau or down here, I’m usually on-site. Not a lot else to do around Belcourt.”
“Is that what most guys do, work extra shifts?”
I shook my head. “Most guys fuck off outta there on days off. They can’t wait to get away from site for a few days. It fucks with your mind, being in that place for too long.”
“But you don’t leave?”
“I got nowhere else to go, really. I suppose I could travel, but I’ll be heading somewhere new soon enough, so I figured, for now, stay put, save up as much as I can and give myself a buffer before I move on.”
“Right. Santa Fe.”
His voice was quieter than it’d been a minute ago. I was starting to feel the pull of sleep too. It had been an eventful few days, and I felt the energy sapped from my body.
“Yeah.”
“There a reason you chose New Mexico?”
I tilted my head, letting it roll against the plush pillows that were so much nicer than my four-for-ten pack from Walmart. “Good a place as any, I guess. Never been there, but I heard it’s nice, and it’d be nice not to freeze my balls off all winter for a change, plus there was a job opening at the concrete place.”
“You don’t know anyone there?”
“Not a soul.” I paused to think. “Well, maybe one or two of the guys who’ve come through the site over the years, but no one I’m gonna pick up the phone and call when I ride into town.”
“You don’t want to go back to where you grew up? Be close to family?”
“I don’t have a family.”
Normally, this was where the interrogation started with most people. They heard I was an orphan and they wanted to know all the fucked-up, tragic details. Because of that, most of the time I avoided talking about my past at all. It never did any good—it sure as shit didn’t do me any. Bringing up memories of my shit childhood wasn’t my idea of a good time.
But Logan just hummed, his hand giving mine a gentle squeeze, letting me know he’d heard me. He didn’t ask a single prying question, and maybe that was the reason, or maybe for no reason at all, I just kept talking. I couldn’t make myself shut the hell up, and he was lying there, looking at me with such nonjudgmental understanding that I just couldn’t stop.
“I used to have a family once upon a time. Sort of. We never had the typical parents-and-kids dynamic other people’s families did. Even when I was really little, I knew there was something off about our family, but it wasn’t until I was older that I figured out that it was because my parents were dirtbags. If there were two people on the planet who should not have had kids, it was Clay and Vicky Daley.”
“That bad?”
“I know you’ve seen enough shit to know how bad it can get. It was worse than that.”
“Drugs? Alcohol? Abuse?” he asked, his voice sounding smaller than I’d ever heard it, and I knew he was imagining the horror show that had been my childhood.
“Yes.” I sighed. “My dad overdosed when I was twelve. My mom followed behind three years later. My brother was barely a week past his eighteenth birthday and was left to raise a pissed-off teenager.” I swallowed hard, remembering the conversation we’d had the night social services had gotten involved. “He swore no one else could do as good a job raising me—so I stuck with him. Blood’s thicker than water, right? He was never going to make it to college, so he started working for a hardware store that was nothing more than a flimsy front to cover up a pretty serious drug operation.”
I couldn’t seem to shut up. It was like after years of keeping all this stuff hidden away, buried down deep, the stopper had been pulled and bullshit was draining out in a torrential stream. I ran my mouth, divulging all the things I’d never told anyone.
And now Logan knew. He’d heard all the messed-up details. I searched his face, sure I would find traces of pity or even disgust, but all I saw was empathy, and it made my throat clench until once more it became difficult to breathe.
I didn’t do this. This was not me. Emotional outbursts and unloading my carts and carts of baggage onto a guy whose come I was still wearing wasn’t my thing. And yet, I couldn’t seem to stop.
“Jesus.”
I shrugged, feeling stripped raw and now wanting nothing more than to pretend I’d never said anything. “Coulda been worse, I guess.”
“God.” He pulled me to him, hugging me tight enough that for a few seconds I couldn’t breathe. “But you got out.”
“Yeah. Even when I was little, before I understood why all our spoons were always black, I knew I didn’t want to be like them. And once I did know, I was sure I didn’t want to follow in that wreckage, and then my brother… So as soon as I could, I got out.”
“And you chose Alaska?”
“Well, not right away. Traveled around some, ended up here.”
“What happened to your brother?”
“Westville Correctional. At least until the end of next month. That was the call I got when we were in the coffee place. He’s getting out.”
“How long has he been there?”
“Almost a decade. I haven’t seen him in that long.”
“Are you going to see him now?”
I shook my head. “I have no idea. I still haven’t totally processed the fact that he’s not going to be in prison. I mean, who knows. He could end up right back there five minutes after he’s out. I’m sure the conditions of his parole are going to be pretty heavy.”
“Do you think he will?”
“Dunno. I don’t know him anymore. Just saying that my brother never had a chance from the very beginning. I shouldn’t have either. I dunno why I made it outta that life and he didn’t.”
When Logan spoke, his voice was gentle. “You’re not responsible for other people’s successes and failures.”
“I know.”
“Good. But sometimes it’s good to hear it again, just as a reminder.”
I nodded but didn’t say anything. I hadn’t gotten emotional about this shit in years. Hell, when I heard my brother was in prison, I didn’t shed a tear. I’d always known he’d end up there one day, either there or dead, and locked up was preferable to dead.
Logan
I wasn’t sure when this casual hookup thing had turned into… whatever this was, but somewhere between the orgasms and the post-sex haze of hormones, we’d slipped into this weird place where Jackson was confiding in me about the horrifying parts of his life.
I got the feeling it wasn’t a regular occurrence for him, and I had no idea what to do with that.
There was a knot in the pit of my stomach as I considered the twelve-year-old boy who was left to deal with the fallout of his father’s death. I’d seen what addiction could do to people, how quickly it could tear through a family and leave nothing but a path of devastation in its wake. No child should be made to suffer through something like that. My heart was breaking for him.
But at the same time, I was proud of him too. The entire world had been stacked against him. Nothing had ever come easy to him—the pathway to success had been blocked by so many obstacles and shit turns, it was a wonder he hadn’t followed in his brother’s footsteps at the very least.
But he hadn’t. He’d come out the other side a caring, compassionate human who was maybe a little bit scarred from the things he’d lived through, but it only made him more amazing, not less.
There was a third emotion swirling around in my head, shrouded by all the others, and it was one that I was more hesitant to put a name to. I felt guilty for a
cknowledging it at all because that feeling was happiness.
I wasn’t happy that Jackson had suffered through so much. I hated that he hadn’t had an easy childhood. But there was a very small part of me—an entirely selfish part—that felt gratified by the fact that he’d chosen to tell me those things. I loved that he trusted me enough to confide in me about his parents’ deaths and his brother’s incarceration—about all the things he’d experienced, really, because that information was really fucking personal.
Jackson rolled, propping himself up onto his elbow, his head in his hand. The atmosphere in the room had suddenly shifted, and I knew he’d shut the door on the tragic past.
“So, now that I’ve unloaded all my personal shit on you,” he said, “you get to tell me something really fucking embarrassing about you so I’m not the only one baring my soul here.”
I could tell he was trying to lighten the mood, and I was more than happy to indulge him. I paused, considering the options—there were more than one—but in the end, decided to go with the one thing I’d never told anyone. It wasn’t dark or tragic like his secrets had been, but this was the first time I’d ever said it out loud.
“I was in love with my best friend for years and never told him.”
“That’s it?” He scoffed. “That’s all you got?”
“He was also my roommate?”
“Better, but still not humiliating enough.”
“We hooked up once and he has no idea?”
“Bingo. Tell me more.”
“We were in college together, and it didn’t take long for me to realize I was in love with him. We were neighbors, but he spent all his time in my room because his roommate was insane.”
“Okay, so then what?”
“So I spent the next few years pining after him, like a lovesick kid.”
“But you hooked up.”
“Yeah, and he has no clue. Not even now.”
“Yeah, explain that to me?”
“One night after a particularly large-scale consumption of alcohol, he crawled into bed with me. We both got off—”