Page 26 of The Night Of
“What did you do to me?” Jonathan demanded. “Say it.”
I squeezed my eyes closed. The last, bitter remnants of my heart cracked and bled out inside my chest. I felt disgust coat the inside of my ribs, drown my lungs in the darkest self-hate.You are to blame for everything.
“I attacked you.” My voice was no louder than a breath. “Oh my fucking God, Jonathan, I attacked you. Fuck, I held you down—”
He was on me in a half second, grabbing me by the shoulders and shaking me. I went limp in his hold, letting him take his revenge, or whatever he wanted. Anything he wanted from me, he could have.
“Sean!” Jonathan hissed. “Sean, goddamn it, I begged you for that. I begged for it!”
Time froze. I stared at him, at his wrecked expression, the devastation in his gaze, the broken way he looked into my eyes.
“I thought that’s why you ran. I thought you were disgusted by me, by what I asked you to do.”
“Youaskedme…”
“Don’t you remember?” Hurt creased the edges of his eyes.
There had been a lot of Jack Daniel’s that night. I’d bought a bottle at the airport when we were in-processing in Japan, since I wasn’t on the prime detail when we’d landed at the G8 last year. I’d thought, hey, maybe I could come up with a reason for Jonathan and me to share a drink.
I hadn’t thought a drink would turn into the entire bottle.
We’d found our reason, slipping out of the hotel after midnight and onto the private beach near the resort where the G8 summit was being held. The beach was pristine, and miles and miles of emptiness lay in either direction. We’d walked for half an hour, side by side, rolling up our suit pants and our shirtsleeves and passing the bottle back and forth. My nerves got the best of me, and my sips of Jack got larger, more frequent.
We were laughing in the moonlight, beneath the stars of a different country, and it had seemed, for that night, that we had escaped the bonds of our positions and we weren’t the vice president and a Secret Service agent, we were Jonathan and Sean, and we were on the edge of everything. We were going over that edge together, finally, maybe.
I was so fucking terrified.
We found the cove almost a mile away from the resort. When we ducked inside, we were sheltered from view, out of sight of the resort. It was our own private world, just the sand and the stars and the two of us. And the fucking bottle of Jack.
Drinking turned into our first, hesitant kiss. The world was already fuzzy by the time Jonathan reached for my cheek and pulled me close. Brushed his lips against my own. I needed another shot after that.
I couldn’t remember much more of what we did, except for the images that haunted me, that chased me night and day and made me scream into my pillow or alone in my car, made me wash my hands until they bled, made me sit and sob in the shower. What the fuck had I done?
Pushing Jonathan down, pinning him to the sand. My knees on either side of his chest. One of my hands capturing his wrists, the other grabbing his hair, the silken strands sliding through my fingers. He’d gasped. Said my name, like a plea—
I’d shoved my cock in his mouth.
His eyes had burned up at me beneath the starlight as I thrust, and thrust, and thrust, and he gagged—
I was going to be sick. I tried to break free of Jonathan’s hold. He refused to let me go. “I told you,” he said. “I told you what I wanted.” He spoke through gritted teeth. “I told you what I’d never told anyone else, ever.”
I struggled again, finally twisting away and slumping against the Resolute desk.
When Jonathan spoke, he sounded defeated. Broken. “I’ve always had a weakness for strong men. Great men. Passionate, courageous men. That’s why I stayed with Steven for all these years. And that’s why I fell head over heels for you, Sean.” He laughed at himself, a hollow chuckle. “I fantasized about you every day. How you would have to save me, throw me down, put your whole body on top of mine. Or how you’d come in one night when I stayed late, and you’d cuff my hands behind my back and have your way with me. You’d lay me on my own desk, and I’d be completely at your mercy—”
I turned, not believing a single fucking word I was hearing.
“One day, when I was trying to sneak glances at you, I realized you were looking back at me.” Jonathan’s eyes flicked over everything in the Oval, everything except me. Gone was the colonel, the army officer, the tough-as-nails vice president—president. Gone was the veneer, the Jonathan Sharp he showed the world. Now he was the man I’d chiseled out of that shell, that I’d seen and known and been greedy for so much more of. This was the man I’d sat in the back of that limo with. This was the man I’d walked on the sand with. “I couldn’t believe it,” he continued. “I thought it was too good to be true. I thought you were being polite about my… interest in you. Being friendly. Doing your job.”
“I was breaking every rule in the book.”
“Felicity told me that. I said I didn’t want to jeopardize your position. She said that was up to you, deciding what you’d risk, but that you wouldn’t risk a damn thing if you didn’t know I was…”
“Was?”
“Crazy about you.” He closed his eyes. Tried to gather himself back together. “So goddamn crazy about you.”
I wasn’t going to fucking cry. I fucking wasn’t. I bullied the tears away, blinking and snarling and swallowing like a feral animal. I didn’t know what to feel, what to think. For three hundred and sixty-seven days, I’d thought I was a fucking rapist. I thought I’d attacked the man I loved. I thought I deserved to be in jail, and the only reason I wasn’t was because Jonathan wanted to preserve his privacy.
