Page 18 of Death is Familiar

Which caused me to do a bad thing.

I couldn’t restrain myself any longer. The tension was too much. I needed release. Now. And if he wasn’t going to⁠—

Somehow, my hand had slipped into his pants. And I was moving. A lot.

“Delilah.” Jack ripped his mouth from me, but it was too late. I wouldn’t, I couldn’t, be still any longer. “Delilah⁠—”

Jack clamped onto my shoulders and bowed his head, release shuddering through him. A tidal wave beneath his skin.

Even as I felt the rattle of satisfaction overwhelm him, I didn’t slow until Jack drew in a long trembling breath. Then another.

He looked at himself, what I’d made him do, then to me.

“You moved.”

5

Aside from a few bumps and hiccups in an attempt to even the score—and learning that Jack’s stamina in the bedroom was only when he was in control—the rest of the night was pleasant.

Jack’s dinner plans involved not only eating, but cooking the meal together. Where he quickly learned just how sorely my meal preparation skills were lacking. And that, if nothing else, I excelled at using a can opener.

Most of our evening was spent swapping stories, memories, the last good book we read. We made sure to keep the nature of our conversation light. Nothing too personal, too deep, or too charged, as if we both needed to distance ourselves from the darkness— the wrong—that permeated the other parts of our lives. Even though Jack’s art, and the insights I gleaned from what were effectively his memories, brought a number of questions to mind.

A series of his sketches were set in a hospital, the point of view set from the hospital bed, as though Jack was the patient. Todd had been in one of them. Seated by a window, next to the bed. His grumpy face, relaxed by sleep, resting against his fist.

But in keeping things light, I didn’t want to touch that with a ten-foot pole. It seemed bleak. And extremely personal. Which meant my best laid plans for the evening were left unfulfilled.

I wanted to get to the bottom of why Jack thought he couldn’t have children, though I suspected the hospital scenes, and his infertility, were connected.

I’d need to bring it up another time. Or…

I could broach the subject with someone else. Someone who had clearly been there. Dig into why Jack was in the hospital, which might give me enough information, if they were in fact connected.

So, I kept my questions to myself. For now.

Logic told me that knowing more would help me make an informed decision, or at the very least normalize the situation. With more information, I hoped I could explain a lot of things away.

But I carried with me a glimmer of ever-present unease that threatened to swallow me whole. The odds against this happening were far too great, and that didn’t even take into consideration the weight of the Seal’s intentions for me. I wasn’t a virgin, but I had been… If they somehow found out, would they consider the circumstances close enough to fulfill the ‘prophecy’?

Cold washed over me as the scales of decision started to tip more to one side than the other.

If there was so much wrong in the world, why would I want to force a life into it?

†

By the time I got home, I needed something mindless. Something distracting. Easy. Which is how Todd and I ended up watching an entire season of drunken fifty-somethings squabble over nothing until the sun came up. A last hoorah before our obligations to the FBI resumed in full force.

“You did something stupid today.” Todd raised his brow as he took the bowl of chips I offered. He would have known I was at Jack’s, but he wouldn’t have known what we were up to. “You’re moving strange. You’re trying to compensate for something.”

I huffed at him.

When Jack had tried to ‘even the score’ in his studio, he’d flipped me onto his couch. Onto my back, and my rib cage unceremoniously erupted in pain, and any thoughts of pleasure, or my release, were torn away. Jack had apologized profusely while I recovered my breath, though we both realized that further intimacy was not in the cards.

“You asking or telling?”

Todd put the bowl in his lap. I was still getting used to casual Todd. Grey sweatpants, t-shirt, his tattooed arms on display. “It’s a—” He did a motion I couldn’t quite place. He did it again when he noticed I wasn’t cluing in.

“Moving scooter?” And that was my best guess.