Page 34 of In Too Deep

Harrison held his gaze. “I came here because I wanted you.”

“Alright.” Jake leaned back enough to see his face. “So is it just because of him? Or is there summat else going on?”

Harrison frowned. “Is what because of him?”

“You wanting me, then pulling back. Letting me have one bit of you, then shutting the door on the rest.” He chewed on his lip. “Sometimes it feels like being with me makes you think you’re doing summat wrong.”

“It doesn’t.”

Jake searched his face. “Then I don’t get it. You say you want me but, then you don’t.”

Harrison held his gaze.

No. Of course he didn’t understand it. Because Harrison hadn’t given him anything to understand. So he needed to give him more than half truths.

“I haven’t been with anyone else since Chris.”

“I know that—”

“Or before him.”

Jake blinked. “Oh.”

“Yeah.” Harrison looked away.

“Right.”

“Hm.”

Silence dropped between them.

And there it was.

Jake shifting beside him. A hand going to his hair, pushing the curls back from his face. Just enough distance opening between them for Harrison to feel it.

He hated it.

This was exactly why he hadn’t told him.

Jake had been with plenty of men. Harrison knew that. Men he’d wanted, taken home, learned for a night and walked away from again. Whatever else Jake might be uncertain about between them, new wasn’t something that frightened him.

Harrison had no idea how to do new.

It wasn’t inexperience. Christ, twenty years with Chris had made sure of that. Harrison knew sex. Knew intimacy. Knew what it was to understand another man’s body so completely that words became almost unnecessary. He and Chris had learned each other young, discovering what they liked together until it had become instinctive. Chris had been Harrison’s first lover. His husband. The only man Harrison had ever learned that way.

And now there was Jake.

A different body. Different wants. Different ways of touching and being touched. Harrison had never had to work out how to begin again because he’d never imagined there would be an again.

“No one?” Jake asked eventually.

Harrison glanced back at him. “There were a few fairly disastrous attempts when I was a teenager, but nothing…” He rubbed a hand across his jaw. “Nothing I’d count. Then I met Chris when I was twenty-one.”

“And that were it?”

Harrison nodded. “That was it.”

Jake went quiet again, chewing lightly at the inside of his lip as though trying to make sense of it.