Page 20 of Uncharted

“’Cause it’s funny to tease ya, should’ve seen the look on your face.”

“Jerk,” I muttered, feeling my face warm. “Did that actually happen? Both times? Or is this you fucking with me?”

“Nah, he definitely tried. I woke up and told him that no way was I interested in that sorta thing outta him, and he said something about bein’ sorry, he was havin’ a good dream,” Jake said with a snort. “I didn’t believe ’em, but I pretended like I did so he wouldn’t act all weird with me after that.”

I frowned. “Is that why you didn’t say anything before about me doing it?”

“You were asleep, and it’s not like ya tried to give me a handsy,” he chuckled. “Ya just kinda…grabbed on. Not really a big deal.”

“And you pushed my hand off and acted like nothing happened?” I wondered with a shake of my head. It was exactly what Jake would do. And his reason for not telling me was probably the same motivation; he just didn’t want to embarrass me. The only reason he’d probably told me in the first place was because he was several drinks in and his lips were a lot looser than they would have been normally.

Jake’s expression was sheepish. “I, uh…kinda just went back to sleep.”

That startled me even more, and I stared at him, dropping my voice. “You…didn’t⁠—”

He held his shoulders up before dropping them. “I dunno, I woke up to you doin’ it, kinda laughed and just…fell asleep.”

It’s not like it was the first time Jake had done something confusing, though in most cases I wasn’t all that surprised. He was the most laid-back person I’d ever known, so it was rarely surprising when he let stuff roll off his back. That was who Jake was, and honestly, I loved that about him. It helped me to feel calmer and more in control, knowing I had someone like him watching my back.

That, however, was something else entirely, and I didn’t know how to process it. I mean, people did all sorts of things they wouldn’t normally do while asleep. So I could wrap my head around the idea that my hands might have wandered and taken hold of his dick without me knowing. Still weird that I was groping him, but hell, I’d been asleep.

But for Jake to just…laugh and fall asleep without removing my hand? That was a level of Jake that I didn’t even know he could reach, and I didn’t know how to wrap my head around that.

Which, of course, was the point where my mind decided it was going to summon up the image of the two of us in bed, curled against each other, my hand sliding down to wrap around his dick through his sleep pants. The guys liked to complain that he seemed to buy the smallest shorts and pants imaginable, but that was because…well, Jake was a big guy in every sense of the word. If he wasn’t wearing jeans, then he was making a display of himself, but that didn’t bother him.

What could have possessed me to reach down and take hold of him like that? I’d never touched another guy’s dick before; the idea had never held any appeal whatsoever, so I didn’t know what my sleeping self was thinking, if anything at all. Had he been hard, semi, or just soft? I’d never seen it hard before; soft I’d seen plenty of times in the shower or when he was changing without regard for who might be around, but never hard.

I wondered what it would look like, what it must have felt like for both him and my sleeping self, to just wrap my hands around and⁠—

“You know, I think it might be time for you boys to find somewhere else to be,” an unfamiliar voice piped up, and I stared up into a strange face hardened into an ugly frown.

“What?” I asked. “Why?”

“We don’t need that sort of thing around here, is all,” he said with what I was sure was supposed to be a smile, but it made me think of apes showing their teeth as a warning.

“What sort of thing?” Colin asked, and while he asked calmly, there was something in his voice that made the fuzziness in my brain fade, and I felt Jake tense, as though he’d heard some sort of warning.

“Them,” the man said, pointing at Jake and me.

“What about us?” Jake asked, but I wasn’t fooled for a moment. My brain was all over the place.

“Look, you two wanna do your thing, that’s your business,” the man said, scowling. “But we don’t deal with no faggot shit around here and⁠—”

Jake was up from his chair and sent the table flying with a heavy crash as he launched himself at the man. One of his friends leaped toward Jake, and I was there in an instant, running on pure, drunken adrenaline as I slammed into him, driving him back into a wooden pillar and knocking the wind from his lungs. I drove my fist into his gut but forgot about the rest of them; my reminder coming in the form of a fist that slammed into the side of my head, narrowly missing my jaw, which I was sure was the intended target.

I could only stare in surprise as Colin took hold of the man’s fist and twisted it behind his back, driving his foot into his knee, making him cry out. I had my own knitting to sort out because the guy I was supposed to be fighting had recovered from being winded and was lashing out at me furiously.

I was driven back and flinched when one of the chairs broke as one man in the group fell on it, with Carter quickly following him. Jake was duking it out with two of them, and I wasn’t surprised to see him holding his own. A little more surprising was that Colin was doing just as well, if not better than Jake, with the two guys he was dealing with.

I wasn’t exactly built for fighting, so I ended up stumbling down the small set of stairs and falling to the ground. I was surprised to see my brother’s face as he interrupted the fight, and the entire thing was breaking down into complete chaos. I didn’t know if it was the same guy I’d been fighting with who descended on me, but it didn’t matter; his blows made the room spin, but I was lashing out as the sounds of fighting surrounded me.

And then the room echoed with the sound of a massive gunshot, and everyone froze. The man above me, with his arm cocked, clearly prepared to strike me in the face again. The source of the interruption was the woman behind the bar, holding a shotgun pointed toward the ceiling, which had a fresh hole in it, littering her and the surrounding ground with drywall and wood chunks.

“Good, I got your attention,” she said, eyes shifting rapidly between all of us. “Now, Jackson⁠—”

“What?” Jake shouted at the same time as the guy who had approached us and started the whole thing. There was a bruise forming on the side of his face, and his expression was one of rage, though whether it was because of the fight or because he’d been interrupted, I didn’t know.

“The one on the ground,” the bartender said, gesturing to the beaten man. “I told you more than once that if you keep starting shit in here, you’re not coming back. So now you’re not coming back. Get your friends and get the fuck out before you find out what birdshot in your ass feels like while you spend the night in jail.”