Page 101 of Drawn By Dragonblood
“We can go home, right now.” I told him the same thing he’d offered me, even though my heart broke. “We can leave this all behind and start over.”
“No—”
“We can move to another city, Jon. Head south where it’s warmer like you’ve always wanted to do. I’ll?—”
“No, baby.” He pulled me tight against him, muffling my mouth against his neck. “This job—it’s too important. Think of everything we can gain from this. The experience, the contacts I’ll make. Hell.” He snorted a laugh that didn’t sound the least bit like happiness. “The fucking salary for gaming is ten times what I could find doing design work. We’re staying.”
I pulled back and peered into his troubled eyes, the vulnerability he shared with me squeezing my heart. “Don’t do this for me, Jon. Please. You heard what Elijah has said. We need to choose for ourselves what we want.”
His dimpled smile, however swoon-worthy, didn’t ease or melt me like it usually did. “I’m doing this for us.”
“I’d rather if you did it for you because it’s what you desire. I know you do. I can feel it as deeply as my own need.” Jon didn’t reply, and I rubbed my thumb along the patches of his scruffy jawline, choosing to let the matter lie quiet for now. “Did you speak with him this morning?”
“No.” His gaze flitted around the apartment. “Being the chickenshit I am, I pretended I was asleep until he left.”
“You’re not a chickenshit.” I hoped he read the truth of my thoughts in my eyes when he finally looked me full in the face. “You just need to figure out how you feel. What you want.”
“I want to submit so fucking bad,” he whispered and swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “To give him every goddamn inch of me, inside and out, and to lay my entire fucking life at his feet and tell him to do with me what he will.” A frown furrowed his brow as he peered down at me. “What kind of spineless man does that make me, Dakota?”
The words had come straight from that fuckface of a foster father who’d raised him.
I cupped Jon’s cheek in my hand as my eyesight grew hazy from the sudden tears clogging my throat. “It makes you a man who loves deeply. The kind every single person on this planet is searching to find. Faithful. Devoted and honest.”
His gaze lightened although he didn’t smile. “You just say that because you don’t know anything different than me.”
“I have no wish to either. You’re it for me, Jon. You have been since we were kids.”
Along with Elijah, both of us I felt sure wished to tack on.
Neither of us spoke the truth aloud though.
We stared at each other in silence for a few moments, and I needed to bury the hatchet once and for all.
“I’m sorry for hurting you all those years ago,” I whispered, my throat tightening.
He huffed a snort. “You’ve said it a million times already, baby, and I’ll tell you again—I forgave you the second you walked away because of how I reacted over that blond douche. There’s nothing you could do to change how I feel about you, Dakota Taylor Ebel, okay? I’ll be yours forever and always, no matter what.”
A half-sob, half-laugh escaped me, and he pressed his lips against mine, soothing the guilt I couldn’t rid myself of.
A heavy sigh shuddered his chest, and he tipped his head back against the couch, eyes closing as he pulled my head against his neck once more. “Love you, baby,” he murmured.
“Love you more,” I whispered, closing my own eyes and praying to whatever god existed above that Jon would find the strength to give in to what both he and Elijah longed for.
Because living without one or the other and hoping to find containment or happiness was no longer an option.
Chapter 36
Jonathan
Dakota always quieted my inner demons, but I held tight to the wall I’d built, the imaginary line I couldn’t cross even though my body begged me to do so.
More coffee, breakfast, shower together, and cuddling—without sex—on Elijah’s bed, surrounded by his scent would have been fucking heaven if it weren’t for the damn ache in my chest that no amount of rubbing or scratching eased.
I wondered over my well-founded fear and the sexual high Elijah had taken me on the night before. Considered the cum he’d filled me with and its ability to hit me like the sweetest drug and make me crave more as I’d done with Dakota from the first time we’d had sex. And watching my wife surrender herself to him without me involved in their coupling turned me the fuck on rather than pissed me of.
I hadn’t slept worth a shit the night before, and I finally drifted off in peace, Dakota wrapped around my body. When I woke, Elijah sat on the couch in his suit and tie, Dakota still naked—and straddling his thighs.
I should have seen red, my stomach souring, but found my cock swelling and my hand sliding down my stomach to wrap around it, same as the night before when Elijah had made love to my wife.
