As soon as Amy made the announcement, Jacob disintegrated. The shift was palpable. The tipping of a teetering glass on the edge of a table. Shattered.
His anxiety had been high all day. Probably because he knew he had this bachelor party and was already worn out from dinner with my family last night. He’d been sort of moody and detached from the minute he woke up. I’d been trying to give him space since he was people’d out, so I’d spent the day watching TikTok videos and texting Alexis so I stayed out of his hair. But now I wished I’d gotten him to stay home instead. He wasn’t in a good place to hear this news on his best day.
He used his escape phrase and practically ran to the steps leading to the basement. By the time I got down there, he was sitting on the little futon sofa in the room with the pool table, crying and breathing into his hands.
He was having a panic attack. Like, an actual panic attack. Because Amy was pregnant.
My heart broke.
I stood in front of him, watching him have a breakdown on this futon, and I couldn’t begin to describe the way it felt seeing him like this. Watching him live the moment he realized that it was really over because there was going to be a baby now and they might have figured it out before that, but now it was real.
She wasn’t leaving Jeremiah for him.
Amy and Jeremiah were going to be a family. It was over.
All his hopes were over. He was heartbroken, and so was I.
I was right here. I was right here and I was in love with him and he didn’t care because he couldn’t even see me past her. I had fallen completely and utterly in love with him and he had stayed completely and utterly in love with someone else.
I started to cry too.
I just stood there in front of him, my shoulders slumped, tears starting to roll down my face.
Lieutenant Dan was almost frantic, trying to crawl into the space between Jacob’s stomach and the hands he had cupped over his mouth. And I wanted to crawl into that space too.
Screw it. I did.
I moved the dog over and climbed into Jacob’s lap. I straddled him in my blue summer dress and wrapped my arms around his neck and put my lips to his ear and just kept whispering the same thing over and over and over again. “I love you. I love you. I love you.”
He responded immediately. Like I’d reached him in the fog and he was clinging to me before he lost me again. His arms wrapped around me and he buried his face in my hair and it felt like the magnets that had been flipped and turned and flipped and turned had finally snapped together and spun to a halt.
“I love you,” I whispered. “I love you so much.”
Even if you don’t love me back. Even if it never matters to you or means anything or goes anywhere. I love you.
His breathing was labored.
I put my hands on his wet cheeks and looked him in the eye and started reciting the grounding exercises I used for panicking patients in the ER.
“Look for five things you can see,” I whispered. “Four things you can touch. Three things you can hear. Two things you can smell. One thing you can taste.”
But he didn’t look for any of them. He just looked in my eyes. It must have worked, because after a few moments, I felt him calming down. His breathing steadied, his heart rate settled. When it was clear he was coming out of it, I put my forehead to his and closed my eyes.
Love me. Just love me instead. I’d take care of you. I’d protect you and shield you and be anything you needed. I’d be harmless to you…
He shook his head gently against mine like he could hear my thoughts. “I can’t fucking do this anymore…” he breathed.
Neither could I. But then I couldn’t even bring myself to get off his lap. The power this man had over me terrified me because there was so little I wouldn’t do. I was glad he never asked more of me after he asked me on that date, because I wasn’t capable of saying no to him. Even if it was against my own best interest. Especially if it was against my own best interest.
Why was I spending all my time pretending that I wasn’t in love with a man in love with someone else? Why was I doing this? Why was I torturing myself? Again.
It was so unfair.
I squeezed my eyes shut tighter, trying to hold it back, but a sob choked me. He pulled away to look at me, worried. I turned, but he tipped my chin back to him. “What’s wrong?”
I just shook my head. “Briana, look at me.”
I opened my eyes. His face was so close I could see the tears on his lashes, the red rims of his eyelids. We breathed into each other’s space and he stared back at me, one of his quiets, the one I couldn’t ever read.
He was so perfect.
His face was like art to me. The slope of his nose. The angle of his jaw. The black flecks in his eyes, the fullness of his bottom lip. I studied him unapologetically. Canvassed him up close with so much longing I felt like my heart would give out under the strain of loving him this much.
I was aware of everything. Every point of contact. My hands on his warm, firm shoulders. My dress hiked up, my bare thighs against his thighs. The tickle of his breath on my face, his belt buckle pressing low into my stomach.
He was looking at me too. His face looked tortured and pained, and I hated that she did this to him. That she could.
We just peered at each other. Me loving him, and him loving her. He raised a tentative hand and wiped a tear off my cheek. “Briana…” he whispered.
The sound of my name caressed my ears.
There was something so intimate hanging in the space between us. I was hypnotized by it. By the proximity to him and the hand on my skin and the way his sad eyes were roaming my face.
His gaze moved to my mouth.
He pressed a thumb to my bottom lip and pulled it down the slightest bit. And then he did the worst possible thing. The absolute worst thing he could ever do. He drew my face to his and kissed me.
Just a light brushing of his lips to mine. A little test. I failed. I kissed him back.
It all unraveled after that.
Any boundaries, any semblance of propriety or politeness that we’d maintained all these months, were instantly gone. Hands raked into my hair and I wrapped my arms around his neck and the kissing became a desperate, starving, frantic extension of everything we’d already been doing
—only there was nobody here to see and no reason for it other than I couldn’t deny him anything he wanted and both of us were out of our fucking minds.
This man was hurting. He was looking for some kind of distraction or escape from what he was feeling and I knew this.
I devoured him anyway. And he matched my energy a thousand percent.
His tongue plunged against mine, he nipped at my bottom lip, parted for me and started again. Opened and tasted, pulled back and nibbled, and kissing him was everything I’d imagined it would be and more. We already knew how to do this. We already had a rhythm, like we’d already kissed a thousand different ways over a hundred different lifetimes. I knew his mouth. I knew his whole body. I knew all of him with my eyes closed after months of watching and wanting, and he knew me too. I could feel it in every touch.
I drew in closer and his hands started to wander. He ran a palm up my calf, under my thigh, and pulled me into his growing erection with a grip on my ass. I lifted his shirt and pressed my fingers along his bare chest, rocking against the hard edge in his lap. When he slid fingers into my underwear and circled, kissing roughly down my neck, I knew without a shadow of a doubt that I was about to fuck him on this futon. I had zero control over any of it and I didn’t even care. I literally couldn’t stop.
I didn’t even want to.
I tugged at his belt until he took over and unzipped himself. He raised his hips to get his pants far enough off for me to pull him out.
And then he was in my hand. And he was so hard.
This was for me.
Maybe nothing else he felt was mine, but this was. It turned me on to think I could turn him on. That if nothing else, at least I could do this to his body. I slid my hand up and down, stroking him between us. He put his hand firmly over mine and made me go faster.
I was coming undone. It was all too much and not enough.
I wanted to get on my knees and put my mouth on it and taste him, but when I started to climb off, he grabbed my hips and pulled me back. He crushed his mouth to mine, yanked my underwear sideways, and eased me down on top of him. The noise he made in the back of his throat as he slid inside me almost finished me right there.
It was fireworks. Explosions. Nothing else existed outside of this moment.
My brain was screaming yes. Yes to everything.
YESSSSS.
All of our clothes were on. I didn’t care.
The door was probably unlocked. I didn’t care.
Everyone upstairs was going to take one look at my wrinkled dress and kiss-bruised mouth and know what we did down here—I didn’t care.
I didn’t care.
I’d fantasized about this moment so many times. Jacob had made me orgasm a hundred ways in the last few months, only he’d never actually been there for it. And I must have said this out loud in my delirium because he breathed, “Me too” into my ear. And then in a gravelly voice, “You in the red dress at the luau. You in my shirt. You in your scrubs. Always you…”
Our breath was shallow. My hair fell around him like a curtain, and his hands lifted my bare thighs and guided me up and down. The momentum built in my core and it was so good I was going to scream his name if I didn’t bite my lips closed when it happened and then he was groaning and I was gasping, and I felt him tensing and pulsing into me and I had an orgasm that made me forget my own fucking name.
I loved him so much.
I wanted to die, I loved him so much. I wanted to crawl inside of him and live there. I wanted to spend the rest of my life just being with him. Adoring him. Protecting him. Living in all his quiets. Letting him touch me any way he wanted to, as often as he wanted to.
A head on his shoulder in a movie theater. A kiss before bed. A cuddle in the dark. Growing old and holding his hand.
Anything he wanted. Anything he needed. I wanted to be his anything. But I wasn’t.
The reality came down slow and then all at once. The heated moment passed, and my head started to clear and I realized what I’d just done.
This man was in love with someone else.
I’d promised myself that I would never let a man love me with only half of himself ever again. I wasn’t even sure I’d just gotten half of Jacob. I wasn’t sure I’d gotten any of him at all.
I don’t even think Jacob was there.
“Oh my God, you guys are always making out.” We turned to Jewel standing in the doorway.
“He’s in the basement!” she called over her shoulder. “He’s just sucking face with Briana. As usual.” She looked back at us. “The limo’s here.”
She rolled her eyes, turned, and left.
We looked back at each other, out of breath. My dress was covering his lap, but he was still inside me. My face stung from the shadow of his beard, my hair was tangled and sticking to my wet cheeks.
His eyes dropped to my mouth and he slid a hand into the back of my hair, but before he leaned in to kiss me again, I scrambled off him. “No,” I said, tugging my dress down.
I was so disgusted with what I’d done I couldn’t even look him in the eye. I’d just had sex with him, he was dripping into my underwear, and suddenly watching him do his belt buckle felt too personal.
I started to shake. I couldn’t tell if it was from the orgasm or the adrenaline or the soul-crushing disappointment in myself.
“We can never do that again,” I said, finally mustering the courage to look at him.
He blinked at me, rumpled from the sofa. “What?”
“I should have never done this…” I breathed. “It was a mistake. I’m sorry.”
The silence between us was like a vacuum. It wasn’t the cessation of sound, it was a world where sound didn’t exist. I couldn’t stand the way he was looking at me.
I was trying so hard not to cry. I didn’t want him to have to deal with Amy and my feelings too.
“You’re going to miss the limo,” I said, my voice cracking.
He shook his head at me. “I don’t care about the limo.” He started to get up. “Briana—”
I backed up. “No! Don’t touch me.”
It was amazing how clear his eyes looked now as he stared at me. Sharp and focused. Like a storm had passed and the sun was out and he was seeing every single flaw on my face. Every flaw in my personality.
Maybe he was finally seeing the thing that made Nick want someone else.
I couldn’t stand the scrutiny. I couldn’t stand the reality. I ran to the bathroom and locked the door.
