Jessie Walker

They say everything happens for a reason. That you’re never given more than you can handle. To trust the process. Well, I don’t know who ‘they’ are, but disrespectfully, they can go fuck themselves.
Without lube.

“I could never sit for one tattoo, let alone do all this,” I said, running my hands over his wet skin. “You know I get queasy at the sight of blood.”
“Like the time I fell off my skateboard and cut my leg open?” He grinned darkly.
I groaned. “Why did you have to bring that up?”
“Because I was the one bleeding all over the driveway and yet you were the one who got to ride in the ambulance!”

“What happened to taking things one day at a time?”
“Fuck it.”
“Fuck it?”
“Fuck it,” he repeated with a smile.
“I like it,” I grinned, kissing him softly. “But, next year—” The scowl on his face stopped me in my tracks.
“If you ask me to be your fucking Valentine, I’m going to punch you in the face.”

When I cost us a victory, I got the brunt of the backlash. When I won us a match, I got a slight nod as though Beckett approved of me doing precisely what I was supposed to do. As if I’d done the minimum and won.

He didn’t say I was his only. He said I was his favorite.

A loneliness in him that resonates with the loneliness in me.

I don’t want to die. Not now. Not yet, not yet…
I haven’t even gotten a chance to live.
It’s ironic, considering how I got in this mess in the first place.
But that was before…

Stars dance across my vision, and I think of the tattoo on Nolan’s shoulder.
The night sky.
If there’s a heaven, I hope that’s where it is.
Embedded in his skin.

It’s something I didn’t even know I craved, not until this very moment.
To be owned, wholly and completely. To be devoured, so consumed by another person that no fiber of my being is left untouched by this man.

You’ve flipped my entire world upside down.” He says it like it’s a marvel, not a curse, and my smile widens.