I Want You Back (Want You #1)(101)
“I wondered. But is that really something I can ask? Because what if you didn’t know? What if you couldn’t remember how it was not to give in to that urge to drink until you felt better or felt nothing? You didn’t drink more than I did whenever we were together, but I wasn’t around you all the time. You hid it from your family, your teammates; it would’ve been easy to hide it from me.” But I didn’t give him the real reason I hadn’t asked: I was afraid he’d tell me it happened after he’d checked out of our relationship.
“That’s fair. The truth is a mix of those things. I needed booze to help me have fun. Then I needed it to help me sleep. Then I needed it for everything else. Alcohol started making my decisions. And I made some bad ones obviously.”
“Jax, just tell me.”
“Over the years the secrecy surrounding my drinking problem was eating away at me. The last year before I got help, I couldn’t even look at myself in the mirror because all I saw was a liar and a coward and a drunken loser. A lonely loser who used random sexual encounters to feel something for a few minutes other than despair. But the booze took that away from me too; I’d black out with no memory of where I was, how I’d gotten there or who I had been with.”
I don’t want to hear this. I don’t want to know this about you. I don’t know that I can handle it.
I gave that whiny, scared, judgmental voice a hard mental slap. If he’d found the guts to tell me this, I’d find the courage to listen.
“But the kicker? What finally sent me to rehab? I had some health issues and I found out . . .”
The paused killed me. Killed me.
“I’d contracted a sexually transmitted disease.”
Do not react. Not yet.
Jax jammed his hand through his hair. “I didn’t know when it’d happened or who passed it to me or if I’d unknowingly passed it to someone else. Random encounters also meant I had no way of finding out.” He closed his eyes. “I couldn’t help but think it’s what I deserved. I knew everyone in my life I’d ever hurt emotionally or pissed off would be fucking gleeful that I’d got my comeuppance. My stupidity and arrogance and self-involvement and entitlement had brought me to the lowest point in my life. I checked into rehab two days later.
“I dealt with the booze addiction and my new reality as being a lifelong carrier of an STD all at one time, because they were so wound up together I couldn’t separate the cause from the effect. It’s been a helluva lot easier telling people that I’m an alcoholic than I have HSV-2 and I’ll be on medication for the rest of my life.”
“Who knows?”
“That I have an incurable STD? My team doctor, my personal physician, my counselor.” Jax lifted his gaze to mine. “And now you.”
That shocked me.
“Mimi can’t get it from me. But you can. There’s the ugly truth. In fact, if we have sex, there’s an eight percent chance that you’ll be infected. Even if we use condoms. Even when I take Valtrex every day to control outbreaks. Even when I haven’t had any outbreak for eighteen months. Not one sexy thing about that, is there? When I first found out I had this, I felt lucky that I hadn’t ended up with HPV, Hep C, or syphilis. Then after doing research, I discovered that herpes two, like AIDS, can’t be cured. I just have to learn to live with it. And tell any potential partner that I have it, so knowing that, I decided I wouldn’t subject anyone to the slightest chance of exposure and chose abstinence.”
My thoughts spun so fast I couldn’t grasp a single one.
“I knew I wouldn’t get involved in another intimate relationship that was temporary.” Jax looked away, took a deep breath and returned his gaze to me. “I want you, Luce. I want you like fucking crazy. I love you. I want to spend my life with you and be the loyal, loving man you deserve. I’m not telling you this because I want you to throw caution to the wind and get naked with me right now. I’m telling you this because I want you to think about what it would mean for you, and for your health, if we become lovers. If you can’t get past it . . . I understand that too. Maybe too well.”
I frowned at him. “What’s that mean that you understand too well?”
“I’d hoped after I started getting my life back together if I made the changes I needed to become a mentally healthy man, that maybe there would be a chance for us to try again. We loved each other fiercely once. We were good together until I screwed it up. I wanted to fix it. But there is no fix for the physical risk you’d take every time we’d be intimate. That night when you gave me a massage? I panicked. I wanted your touch, craved your attention, so much that for the briefest moment I forgot I couldn’t just say yes and lose myself in that sexual relationship that was as natural as breathing to us. We had to talk about it first.”
“And the night you went down on me?”
“There’s no risk for you on the receiving end. That’s no excuse for not telling you. But it just seemed so right, and as always with us, it happened so goddamned fast.”
All of this was going fast. “So what now?”
“So now . . . you know.” He exhaled. “I love you, Lucy Q. I’ve always loved you. No matter the outcome of this between us, I’m here for Mimi for the long haul.”
“I don’t doubt that, Jax.” I paused and seized the chance to talk about something else. “What happened with her today?”