All Chapters of The Way He Looked at Me: Chapter 201 - Chapter 209

209 Chapters

201

Jace pushed back from the counter, came around, and stood close. "I'm sorry you lost her.""Me too." I leaned into him. "I almost didn't make it myself, before I got clean. Overdosed. And lately the only thing I think about when I remember that is if it had worked, I wouldn't be here. I wouldn't have found you." I looked up at him. "Some days that's the only reason I'm glad I survived."He tilted my chin up. Kissed me soft and slow, his mouth gentle, his hands steadier than anything I had ever held onto.When my stomach made a noise that ruined the moment, he laughed real and short and quiet and pulled back. "Eat.""Make your plate too. Then I wanted to work on the truck, and then I grinned at him. "Stalk Tim. Round two."Something moved across his face. Not quite a smile. "One day, little lamb."I always knew what that meant. One day I'll give you more of this too.Jace POV She was asking if I wanted to walk with her.She always asked like it was a question, even though we both k

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He turned his face away. The pain in his eyes was physical. I felt it press into my own chest as though it were mine."You don't have to," I said. "Not tonight. Not until you're ready."I started to slide down his body, wanting to give him something wordless, something that said you are safe and I am here without requiring anything from him in return. But his hands came up and framed my face before I could get far, and he brought my mouth to his.We kissed slowly. Unhurried and deep, like we were both trying to say something the other needed to hear. His kiss had a language by now I'd been learning it for months. In it I heard: I'm sorry. I want to give you more. I don't know how yet. I answered back: You don't owe me anything. What you already give me is more than enough.When it ended, I worked my way down, settled close, and let my warmth be the thing that held him.His breathing deepened after a while. Then deeper still.He slept. I stayed.I was awake first, which almost never h

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Jace POV"Jace." His voice reached me first. Soft and worn thin around the edges. "I need you to take this for me."Something pressed against my lips. I turned my head."Please." Just that one word, barely held together. "For me."I opened my eyes.Tim's face was pale and creased, his hair matted, dark circles carved under his eyes like he hadn't slept in days. He looked wrong. He looked like someone who had been through something.What happened? What happened to you?I realized I hadn't said it. My mouth hadn't moved."Don't leave me." His voice was barely above a breath. "I can't go through losing som

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Spoon by spoon, quietly, without making it into anything bigger than it was, he fed me. And when the bowl was empty, I took the medication from his palm and the cup he held out, and I swallowed them both.He curled into my side. I held him with the arm that still had some strength in it."In foster care," I started slowly, "they put things in my food. The boys."Tim's face went soft and sad. "Jace""I know you wouldn't." I cut him off before he could say it, because I needed him to know I already knew. "Dave did it too, sometimes. Sedated us. Made us sick when it served him." I paused. "When he wanted me to be with Hillary when I couldn't he gave me something to make my body cooperate."The quiet that followed was

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Jace POVI wanted him in front of me. Not from memory. From life.Painting Tim from memory had become as natural to me as breathing, but there was something entirely different about having him there real and warm and present, lying still for me because he chose to.We carried the supplies inside, shed the winter layers, and made our way to the bedroom.Sharing my art room with him had cost me something. Not in a bad way. In the way that all real things cost , giving someone a piece of yourself you've kept hidden for years pulls at something internal on the way out. But Tim was mine, and I wanted him to have all of me. Every part I had spent years protecting from the outside world."Take your clothes off," I told him. "Let me see what's

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Jace POV"Mine."One word from his lips. My word, the one I had claimed so many times and now he was giving it back to me, and the weight of it was different coming from him. Heavier. Truer.He understood what was happening. Not just the physical act of being above me, but what it cost me to allow it. What I was laying down without saying a word.Everything. Willingly. For him.His gaze never left my face. Not once. And I kept mine on his, which was new to this steady, open looking, neither of us blinking away.I pressed my thumb into the bruise at his throat, the one my mouth had made, and he shuddered hard and bore down against me, and the sound that tore out of me had nothing civilized in it.His body was heat and pressure and everything I had ever wanted to lose inside. He moved, and I moved with him, and at some point the line between giving and taking dissolved entirely, became something else, became just us."Everything," he breathed. "Give it all to me."I dragged him down t

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The more the years passed, the deeper his hold on you became. Children are fragile that way their minds open, their trust given freely. I was terrified that pulling you away from him would only make you despise me. But somewhere along the way, the truth became impossible to ignore: getting you out was the only thing that truly mattered.You were worth so much more than the life we were living.That realization was what pushed me to start planning our escape. Deep down, though, I think I already knew it was too late to save myself. But not you, Jace. Please hear me when I say this: it is never too late for you.I found an attorney willing to help me find a way out. Over the years, Dave had quietly built up a fortune, money poured into his hands by people desperate to be called Enlightened. We had to vanish completely. If we didn't, he would never stop hunting us.All I have ever wanted is a better life for you. I want you to see the world beyond these walls, to feel things that are r

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"I failed her. I never gave her the love she was owed. "Stop." I kept my voice level. "You were a child. None of that weight belongs to you. She knew she was loved, and none of what happened was your fault."I said it twice, because once was not going to be enough.Then I climbed into his lap.His entire body let go.His arms closed around me with the grip of someone who had decided, very firmly, that letting go was not something he was willing to practice.People used to make fun of me for crying easily. Boys at school had a whole vocabulary for it. Somewhere along the way, the world had decided that a man with visible feelings was a man with a crack in him.I had always believed the opposite. I thought it took more to feel openly than to hold everything behind your teeth and pretend. And when my tears finally came, Jace came undone right alongside me grieving the boy he'd once been, mourning what had been taken before he even knew its name. But beneath all of it, pressed quietly be

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The money wasn't the point. I wasn't getting rich behind this counter. But I needed to earn something of my own not because Jace asked me to, not because he kept track, but because it mattered to me that I brought something to what we had. That I wasn't only receiving.And there was something else this place gave me that the mountain for all the peace it held simply couldn't: the world, in small, manageable pieces. Other voices. Other rhythms. My therapist said it was healthy. I was beginning to think she might be right.We'd both started therapy. Virtual sessions, which made it possible. For me, it wasn't unfamiliar. I'd been in and out of it before. For Jace, it was entirely new ground, and he moved across it the way he moved across anything unknown: slowly, watching for the wrong step. He didn't fully trust his therapist yet. Probably the most honest evidence of that was the session where she had carefully suggested that our need for each other, while real and deep, shouldn't be

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