Page 15 of A Man To Remember
I hold my breath.
"I know," he says.
And then, he doesn't.
We stay frozen like that. My confession hangs in the air between us, unanswered but not rejected.
Just suspended. Like us.
CHAPTER 9
AUSTIN
THERE'S AN OCEAN in these eyes and I'm drowning.
Jesse's words hang between us like smoke, curling around my ribs and settling in my lungs until breathing becomes this conscious effort I have to think about.
You could kiss me now.
Five words. Five simple words that detonate in my chest like grenades, sending shrapnel through every carefully constructed wall I've built around the part of me that still bleeds his name.
I know I could kiss him. Christ, I've known it for the past hour. Known it in the way his pupils dilate when I step into his orbit, swallowing green until there's nothing left but darkness. Known it in the way his chest rises and falls like he's been running wind sprints instead of standing perfectly still in a room that suddenly feels smaller than a coffin. Known it in the tremor that runs through his body every time my hands find his skin, like electricity jumping between live wires.
But knowing and doing are two different beasts, and right now they're locked in mortal combat somewhere behind my sternum.
My teenage self is screaming in the back of my skull, a desperate howl offinally, finally, finallythat makes my hands shake where they hang at my sides like useless appendages. This is everything that pathetic kid used to dream about in the suffocating dark of his bedroom, stroking himself raw to fantasies of Jesse looking at him exactly like this. With want carved into every line of his face. With need bleeding from his pores. With those fucking ocean eyes gone dark and hungry like he might actually devour me whole if I let him.
And fuck, do I want to let him.
The adult in me, the one who spent years learning how to breathe underwater, how to exist in the crushing depths Jesse left me in, whispers warnings like liturgy.
He destroyed you once.
Scattered your pieces to the wind and didn't look back to see where they landed.
Why hand him the ammunition to finish the job?
But my body has already staged a coup. My brain is no longer in charge of this operation. I'm leaning forward before conscious thought catches up, drawn by gravity I've been fighting since the moment I saw him behind that bar, all golden hair and easy smiles like he hadn't ripped my world apart and left me to die in the wreckage.
Jesse is both the tide that will drag me under and the shore I've been swimming toward for a decade, and I'm so fucking tired of treading water. So tired of keeping my head above the surface when all I want to do is sink.
The first brush of our lips is electric shock therapy. Lightning that starts at my mouth and shoots straight to my cock, making me gasp against his lips like I've forgotten how oxygen works. Jesse's response is immediate, eager in a way that stops my heart and restarts it with a completely different rhythm. His lips part under mine like they were designed for this moment, welcoming me home to a place I was never supposed to belong.
This isn't how I expected him to kiss. Not hesitant or experimental or apologetic the way straight guys kiss when they're curious about crossing lines. Jesse kisses like he's been starving for it, like he's been thinking about this as much as I have, lying awake at night wondering what my mouth would taste like, what sounds I'd make if he did that thing with his tongue.
His hands find my back, fingers digging into my shirt, pulling me closer until there's no space left between us. Not even room for air. I can feel the heat of his nearly naked body through my clothes, can feel his heart hammering against my chest like it's trying to break free from his ribcage and merge with mine in some twisted anatomical miracle.
And that's when the anger hits like a sledgehammer to the solar plexus.
Where the fuck was this ten years ago? Where was this desperate clinging, this eager surrender, when I needed it most? When I was eighteen and broken and convinced I'd never be worth wanting by anyone, let alone him? When I spent months walking through school hallways like a ghost, watching him laugh with his friends, watching him date girls who looked nothing like me, watching him pretend I didn't exist while I bled out in plain sight?
The rage tastes like copper on my tongue, mixing with the sweetness of his mouth until I can't tell where one ends and the other begins. I kiss him harder, meaner, pouring ten years of resentment into the slide of tongue against tongue. My hands find his waist, fingers digging into bare skin, leaving my signature written in fingerprint bruises, and Jesse just moans like I've given him the greatest gift imaginable and presses closer.
Do you know what you did to me?I want to ask between kisses, want to bite the words into his throat until they scar over and he carries them forever.
Do you have any fucking idea how many nights I spent wanting this and hating myself for it?
How many mornings I woke up hard and aching with your name on my lips like a prayer to a god who never answered?
