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“I wish we were back in our little bed, don’t you, Caleb? The one on Dalton’s boat.”
I was surprised by the shift in topic, but when he continued a moment later, I knew what he was doing.
“The bed was small, but that’s not why you pressed up against me, was it, baby?”
I shook my head. I automatically thought of all the times Jace had held me, never once demanding anything from me. My body relaxed, allowing Jace to ease inside of me a bit more.
“That’s what I was thinking about during the wedding. The bed, the boat… it was our own little haven, wasn’t it?”
“It was perfect,” I said, right before I let out a harsh gasp as Jace sank deeper inside of me.
He punctuated his next words with a few kisses. “I want our first night together once we’re married to be on that boat.”
I closed my eyes at that and nodded. I knew he wasn’t proposing to me, because it was way too soon for that. But he was making me a promise that I could hang onto. I could add it to the mental list I kept in my head that I sought out whenever the doubts would threaten to creep in. Jace and Willa took up much of that list. Eli was there too.
“Do you want that, baby?”
“More than anything,” I admitted.
“Open your eyes, Caleb.”
I did as he asked. He pressed deeper inside of me, stretching me full as his balls bumped up against my ass.
It was done.
He was inside of me and I was still me. Jace was still Jace. And another piece slipped into place. One that started to finally show the hint of a picture in my mind’s eye.
A perfect picture that I couldn’t have dreamed up even if I’d tried.
“I love you, Jace,” I said.
“I love you, too, Caleb. More than you’ll ever know.”
I doubted that, because I couldn’t conceive that it could be any greater than how much I loved him.
Jace began to move and the need for words drifted away. He spoke with his body and I answered with mine. There was no frantic rush to the finish line as he moved in and out of me. I was so lost in all the sensations exploding through my body that he could have been fucking me for minutes or hours and I wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference. By the time the end was in sight, we were clinging to each other and Jace had started whispering in my ear.
That he loved me.
That he wasn’t leaving.
That he was going to marry me.
It went on and on like that and I swore it was his words that drove me higher and higher. When I was flung over the edge, he was right there with me, but there was no crashing down to earth. It was just him and me floating as his release burned my insides, proving that he was now a part of me forever.
My most important piece.
It hurt to watch Aleks suffering. Even though he’d been the one to ask me to go with him to the waterfront, I felt completely helpless as I watched my friend try to deal with his fear.
In the two weeks since the wedding, I’d gone to visit Aleks several times at the flower shop he worked at and a few times at Magnus and Dante’s house. While the young man did okay in scenarios where it was just me and him or his family members, he got tense whenever he had to deal with more than a stranger or two at a time. The flower shop was the one place where being around a few more people than he was used to wasn’t as hard for him, because he had a tendency to get lost in the flowers themselves. He’d even gotten comfortable enough in the past year that he’d started working there by himself.
It was striking how many things Aleks and I had in common. Like me, he’d had to get his GED, since he’d never had the opportunity to go to school. He’d only recently earned the equivalency degree, but wanted to someday go to college. He was still living with Magnus and Dante, but outings like the one we were currently on were meant to get him to a point where he could get his own place. And like me, he’d avoided therapy to deal with the trauma of his past. It was something I was trying to encourage him to reconsider, but I wasn’t going to push it, since I knew it was a decision he needed to make for himself. The few times I’d gone to therapy when I’d been seventeen, I hadn’t really wanted it and had done it only to please the people around me. I doubted I would have made anywhere near the progress I was making now.
