he didn’t know he had inside him. But Matt was confessing something big here, wasn’t he?
Matt looked down. “I’ve known since my first moon shift after meeting you, though I had my suspicions from the second I smelt you. But I wasn’t sure how you would go for that. Not so much me telling you I’m a werewolf. That’s just stupid in all rights, but just me loving you, I wasn’t sure if you were gay or not. Even when I knew you found me attractive, I still wasn’t sure how you were handling it, if it was new to you or if you were freaking while unable to stop seeing me. So, I waited. I was happy to wait. Just getting to know you soothed me enough that I could understand what was happening around me while in wolf form.”
“So, you’ve loved me since we first meet?”
Matt laughed a little. “No. I wanted you. God I wanted you badly, but it wasn’t until we spent time together and I realised what kind of man you were. I learnt your history, or what you would tell me, and saw more. That you weren’t a pissed off prick because of the shit you’ve lived through. That’s when I started to fall for you. When I realised you wanted to know me just as much as I wanted to know you.”
“Why didn’t you say something, hint that you liked me that way?” Jex couldn’t keep the hurt feeling out of his voice.
“What if you couldn’t deal with just me liking you? A dude wanting to fuck you? I couldn’t lose you. Honestly, Jex, I would have stayed in your life as just a friend, forever, if that’s all I could get from you. I would have been happy just to know you, to be your friend.”
Jex swallowed hard. That was a sacrifice, wasn’t it? A fucking big one. One that got his heart twisting inside his chest.
“But...” Jex couldn’t think around the emotions that filled him from that. Couldn’t think of something to say that would assure Matt that he would never even ask him to be less than everything to him.
“It’s okay, Jex,” Matt mumbled, a sad smile pulled at the side of his mouth, “I’m happy with what we had.”
“But...” God why was talking so difficult? Because your fuckarse father got you paranoid to be who and what you truly are. It was true, and as they lay there in the silence of a confession and as close to love as Jex would ever expect to hear, he couldn’t seem to open his mouth and turn this into something that he had wanted from the moment that he met Matt.
But wasn’t that the werewolf side? Wasn’t that something from Matt that made Jex want him so bad?
Jex didn’t like that thought. Still, even as it dwindled in his mind, he knew it wasn’t really true. Was it? Yeah, as a werewolf, Matt believed in mates, which was really just the soul mate rule, wasn’t it? They just had a better way of identifying that said soul mate, so that once they came across them, they wouldn’t give them up. It was a part of their making, but at the end of the day, wasn’t that what it was for humans and human soul mates—just that they only had to just trust? They had to let everything happen and hope they were right, and that this was the place they were meant to be.
So wasn’t it better that Matt was a werewolf, who knew for a fact, one that ran deep inside his body, that Jex was his? Didn’t that mean that the emotions Jex was feeling inside him, the ones that he’d felt from the beginning, the ones that were all about rock hard cock that turned into a friendship Jex didn’t want to lose—wasn’t that soul mates? Wasn’t that what love was about—the lust that was there because the love was? Wasn’t that what people looked for their whole lives?
And if that was true, and if that was something Jex wanted, why shouldn’t he go for it? What was there to lose, really? Matt was his, that was what he said when he wanted to be with him, even if it meant nothing more than a friend, right?
Chapter Eight
“Jex?” Matt’s voice was so soft and tender Jex felt a burning