Tempting /A Jordan Knight fanfic ✔️

38

Chapter 38: If Only

There was nothing easy or simple about the way Jordan was staring at me as I stood on the other side of the bedroom.

He looked at me with the face of a young man but eyes of a man who'd lived many sad lives. The brown of his eyes seemed darker—faded even—like a light had died out inside of them.

What waited for me on his side of the room was darkness, regret, and a similarly bleeding heart. I could feel his pain reaching out to me, banging on the caved in walls of my heart and begging for relief.

We could give that to each other—relief. But it wouldn't last.

Still, I let the hand of pain drag me along the floor to him like I had no choice. Truthfully, I'd lost control of all choices when Jordan's lips first touched mine all those weeks ago, and I'd yet to regain it back. There were moments where I came close and times where I thought I found my way back on track.

But every time Jordan looked at me, my compass spun, and I lost my way all over again.

"I assume Mel told you?"

I nodded.

He breathed out a long sigh, polluting the air with more melancholy. There was so much hurt and remorse clouding the space between us that I could hardly see through it all down to him. The vision of Jordan was fading away right before me.

Everything around us was growing dark and bleak.

"Are you okay?" I asked.

Jordan shut his eyes, the skin next to them pinching together, drawing in stress between each line. My mind drifting back to the locked door, I lifted my hand to his face. I wanted the lines gone. I hated the reminder of what they represented.

A shudder vibrated beneath my touch as I laid my fingers across his cheek, smoothing out the stress tonight had put there. Jordan let go of another breath as I caressed my hand across his rigid jawline and up through his soft as silk hair. He sunk further and further into me, the weight of his head resting against my stomach.

There, he shook his head to say 'no'.

My eyes pressed shut, and even though I knew that would be his answer, I still felt so sad. My sadness was a dagger dipped in poison. Each stab to my chest seared with the pain of its intrusion, but what came after the pain was a sickness—debilitating and nauseating—that crept through my heart, my blood, my bones, sealing in the feeling for good.

This poison infused my system with an indefinite and inescapable sadness that felt worse than death itself, I imagined.

"Is there anything I can do?"

Jordan's hands found the dips of my waist, holding me against him.

"Turn back time." He paused between his next words. In that beat, his hands around my waist tightened. "Make it so I met you first."

It hurt to think about how much easier things would be had Jordan met me before he met Mel. We'd be in love and freely so. This Thanksgiving trip would have been about introducing the man of my dreams to my parents and showing off how happy and in love I was with this perfect man. We wouldn't be sad or hiding away in my bedroom, whispering so that no one heard us.

I'd sell my soul to the devil to go back in time and do it all over again.

"Anything else?" I spoke softly, playing my fingertips around the hairs curling at the nape of his neck.

Jordan lifted his head and buckled my weak heart with the need in his eyes.

"Let me hold you."

I was nodding sooner than my mind could catch up, sliding down onto Jordan with my legs on either side of him, straddling his lap.