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A smile played at his lips. “You’ve seemed pretty chill while dating me,” he said, his voice getting a little flirty. “And just so you know, with you, my little, fleeting sexual fantasies about men haven’t been little or fleeting at all. I fucking crave you every two minutes, it feels like.”
Across the room, a shattering of glass rang out. A drunk guy in a suit had bumped into a caterer’s tray of empty glasses, sending them flying onto the floor.
All the better for the distraction, because Jax telling me that he craved me that much had gotten me hard as hell under my fancy slacks, and suddenly my outfit felt way too tight.
It just didn’t make any sense to me. For so long, the endless loop in my head had been confirmed, over and over again: no one ever really wants you, in the end. Being with you is too much. Loving you is too much.
Jax had never made me feel like that for one moment. But he also wasn’t really my boyfriend.
“Don’t you think we’ve been good together?” he asked me, his expression sweeter than ever, those big eyes looking at me like I was somehow someone that mattered.
I needed a goddamn hole to disappear into right about now otherwise I was liable to leap across the table and tear his clothes off in public. I felt crazed, like a caged lion who finally saw an open gate, but was too conditioned to captivity to bolt out into the world.
“We’ve had fun,” I said, my throat a little tight. I took a big swig of my apple cider.
Jax’s eyes weren’t helping my situation. He looked at me longingly, the soft green of his irises looking like jewels in the ambient light.
“And we could have so, so much more fun,” he told me.
My chest felt molten. I swallowed hard. I downed the rest of my cider, stepping back from the table. Fuck. What was wrong with me?
“I, uh, gotta grab something from my office,” I said, already bolting away from him before I’d finished my sentence.
I undid the top two buttons of my collared shirt as I strode through the sea of people. Cameras flashed as I walked through, and a couple of people made moves as if they wanted me to stop and chat, but I charged forward
I couldn’t stop.
I couldn’t do anything. If I had to stand there in front of Jax for another second I would have burst out crying or professed feelings to him that I definitely should not be professing. Feelings that I had no right to feel, at all.
I swung open the door to my office and immediately was confronted with him—more of him, everywhere, all over my space, even though he wasn’t here with me. His clothes, strewn over the chair and in a little tidy pile by his backpack on the ground. His textbooks on my desk. And a lingering remnant of his goddamn perfect smell, just here in the air, clean and fresh and smelling like home, to me. I
No, no, no, I told myself on a loop in my head, leaning my forehead against the wall, the cold plaster a momentary relief on my hot skin.
Danger. You are going to get yourself badly hurt, all over again, and you know it.
“Hey,” I heard Jax’s soft voice coming from the crack in the doorway, and my heart lurched up somewhere near my throat.
I was done for, when I heard that voice.
“Hi,” I managed to say, lifting my head off of the wall and trying to look like some semblance of a normal person.
Jax slipped inside the room, gently closing the door behind him. He leaned back on it, watching me, quiet for a moment before he spoke.
“You didn’t really need anything in here, did you?”
“No,” I said.
“You came in here because I was freaking you out, right?”
“Yes.” I didn’t have enough energy left inside me to tell him anything but the truth.
“I’m too much, aren’t I?” he asked me, and at once I saw a familiar flicker of doubt on his face—the kind of doubt I’d always had, about myself.
It made my heart feel like it was dropping in freefall, suddenly.
“You are nowhere close to ‘too much,’” I said, my voice coming out a little rough. “Not fucking possible, Jax.”
“Then let me tell you how I feel,” he said, stepping forward toward me in a confident stride. I’d been wrong earlier when I’d thought his eyes were like jewels—now, they were like pure, pale green fire. The most beautiful goddamn thing I’d ever seen.
My sternum ached as he closed the gap between us, but he didn’t touch me.
“You can tell me anything,” I said.
“Really? Anything?”
I sucked in a breath of air. “Yes, Jax,” I whispered.
It took him a moment to speak. “You’ve… you’ve been like a fucking earthquake in my life,” he finally said, his voice low with a slight waver.
