Page 39 of When the Sun Rises
“Great.” I nodded. “I assume you’ve got a condom?”
Jackson blinked at me and opened his mouth, but I cut him off.
“It’s fine if you don’t. In fact, let’s just skip it.” The words tumbled from me in a rush. My heart slammed against my chest, a cold chill coming over me. I quickly flipped around, not trusting I could maintain my poker face, and undid my pants. Shimming them down under my ass, I planted my hands on the wall and bent forward slightly.
Long, agonizing seconds passed as I tried to regulate my breathing while waiting for Jackson. Blood roared in my ears and bile rose high in my throat. But then I felt him there, calloused hands scraping around the tender skin of my exposed hips. He draped his body overtop of me, the extra weight comforting and jarring all at the same time. I squeezed my eyes shut, my breath stuttering in my lungs. Something inside me was rebelling, screaming and crying for me to stop before things got too far, but the ugly, sinister pieces deep down were running this show.
His warm breath fanned against the back of my neck, and before I could even react, one of his hands moved from my hip, and?—
“You’re not even hard.” He sounded hoarse, almost as broken as me.
I swallowed back the sour taste in my mouth, forcing the words out as steady as I could manage. “It’s fine. I’ll get there. Keep going.”
“I—”
“Just fuck me, Jackson,” I practically barked.
Touch me. You aren’t him; you’ll never be him.Fill me up and make me forget.I’ll never be able to forget.
I spread my legs a little wider, trying to press back against him, but in an instant, the weight over my back was gone, and he was tugging my pants up.
My eyes flew open, whipping my head around to look at him. “What? You don’t want it now?”
Jackson’s face was passive, but I couldn’t miss the near pained expression in those green-brown eyes as he stared back at me. “Notlike this.” He shook his head, tucking himself away, a distinct lack of a bulge in his pants when he was done. “Not like this,” he repeated a little more firmly.
“What the fuck? All that talk about wanting me however you could get me was just that, huh? Just talk?”
A muscle in that pristine jaw ticked, and he lifted his head a little higher. “I’m not going to force myself onto someone who obviously isn’t ready.”
Anger and shame roiled inside me, mixing and curdling, venom spitting from my lips as I whirled around fully. “Does it really fucking matter? Who the fuck are you to decide if I’m ready or not, anyway? If I say I’m ready, then I am.”
He shook his head. “This feels… different. I don’t know what it is, but…” Jackson ran a hand into his hair, sucking in a breath. “I want you, Tucker. I want you so bad I don’t know how to contain it sometimes. But I also care for you, and I care too much to do whatever the fuck this is.”
Something behind my ribs felt like it was tearing apart, and I had the crazy thought that maybe this was finally the moment my heart ripped itself out. When Jackson looked back up at me, I must have been making a face, because his fell, and he reached out toward me. Instinctually, I pressed myself back against the wall. I couldn’t let him touch me when I was this broken, this sharp, this close to shattering to dust.
“Shit. Fuck. I’m sorry.” He pulled his hand away immediately, shoving it back into his hair and gripping the strands so tight I knew it had to hurt. “I really don’t want to hurt you.”
After a few more seconds, he swallowed hard, and his voice was so small when he said, “I should go.”
I watched his back as he walked from the stall, and when he didn’t look back at me before completely leaving my sight, I thought this might be where it finally ended for me. My eyes burned, anger and tension and so much more I couldn’t even begin to understandwelling inside me. The wood of the wall dug into my back as I slid down it, the rough burn hardly registering through everything else I was feeling till I hit the ground unceremoniously. Hot tears started to slide down my cheeks, and I buried my face into my hands.
I didn’t deserve Jackson Arness. He could do so much better than me. Maybe I’d finally proven that to him tonight.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
JACKSON
My eyes burned as I stared at the ceiling, each blink feeling like sandpaper over a sunburn, and listened to Weston’s snores rattle the window panes with each exhale. Or at least they sounded like they should’ve been able to do that. But that wasn’t what was keeping me awake.
I couldn’t close my eyes without seeing the look on Tucker’s face three nights ago. He’d looked devastated. Gutted and frail. Like I’d just permanently broken him. And I hated that. Tucker was the strongest man I knew, and the idea I’d done something to put that look on his face was eating away at me. Even if I knew it was the right move.
Something had started to nag at me in the back of my mind when he’d tried to drop to his knees right there in the barn walkway. I was all for a little risky play, but that was beyond risky. It was reckless, and maybe it could’ve been written off as being caught up in the moment, but that wasn’t it either.
I may not have been with Tucker more than the one time, but it had been seared into my memories. With as often as I replayed it in my head, I could have recreated the whole thing from start to finish right down to thetiming of every little sound and trickle of sweat that rolled off our bodies. This had been different. Tucker had been up in his head, far away from where we were, but by the time I thought to pause and ask if he was okay, he was asking me to fuck him, and I could feel it. Iknewsomething was off.
Not that I didn’t think a man like Tucker couldn’t like to be fucked, or need that sort of release, but… I couldn’t explain it then, but I knew it was all wrong. It was in the tension of his shoulders as he’d demanded it, in the shaky rambling as he told me to skip a condom, and in the way he flipped around and refused to look at me when we’d never taken our eyes off each other the last time.
So I tried to reassure myself with his body, find proof that even if this felt different, he was still in it with me. The fucked-up thing was I knew before I’d ever wrapped a hand around his cock that he hadn’t been hard. I’d racked my brain over the last few days, trying to remember if there’d even been a hint of an erection before that point, and I thought maybe in the beginning he did. But I still wasn’t sure. What I was sure of was that Tucker hadn’t struggled with getting or maintaining an erection that time in my room. It was just more proof something more had been going on in his head.
