Page 167 of Jax
“You don’t have to be strong tomorrow,” he said, voice rough with exhaustion and softened by steam. “Not if it hurts. Not if it’s heavy. Let me carry some of it.”
His words settled like rope—familiar, steady, already wrapped around my ribs before I had the presence to resist. I didn’t answer with words of my own. They would’ve only dulled what already existed between us, humming beneath skin and breath. Instead, I lifted my hands to his face, slow and sure, fingertips brushing the damp line of his jaw as if reacquaintingmyself with something vital. I leaned in until our foreheads touched, skin to skin, his stubble grazing my cheek as the bathwater lapped gently against our bodies.
His breath slowed the second I touched him, like he’d been waiting for that exact signal. My thumbs traced quiet circles along his cheekbones. I stayed there, not because I was breaking, but because I was beginning to recognize the shape of something steadier. He didn’t speak. He didn’t pull away. He let the silence expand, filled it with something truer than words. I didn’t know how to give it all to him yet, but I wasn’t pretending I didn’t want to try.
The weight hadn’t vanished. It still lived in the hollow places, tucked behind my sternum, coiled in the tender dark. But it didn’t feel buried anymore. It felt shared.
His hands adjusted at my hips, sliding up my sides beneath the water with the kind of reverence that made my breath catch. It wasn’t sexual, not exactly, but it wasn’t neutral either, especially with him still inside me. It was pure intimacy, unguarded and slow, his palms dragging across skin that was marked and tender and wholly his.
My mouth opened to speak, to name what passed between us, but the only thing that came was his name—soft, fragile, a breath full of meaning. He exhaled, nose brushing mine, and kissed just below my eye where a tear had once fallen. The kiss didn’t ask. It offered. Quietly. Entirely. Without condition.
The moment didn’t end. It widened. It made room for something that hadn’t been there before. Not a finish, not even a pause, just an opening to what might come next. He held me with the same desperation that anchored me to him, the heat between us softening into something deeper, folding into a quiet connection that promised to endure. The water cooled, but still we didn’t move. My limbs ached with the weight of what I had finally set down, and that ache felt earned. Cleansing. Likea wound washed clean, no longer hidden under grit and old bandages too dirty to allow for healing.
Jax held me like I was both truth and treasure, something he hadn’t stumbled into, but chosen. Again and again, long before this moment came. My head rested against his shoulder, where I could feel the solid rhythm of his breath beneath my cheek, and the slow thump of his heart, like a steady drumbeat meant only for me. Each inhale came easier than the one before, as if my body had forgotten how to take in that much safety and was just now remembering how.
His hand moved along my spine, slow and wide, fingers splayed as though he believed he could keep me intact just by staying close enough. “I’ve never let anyone see this part of me,” I murmured, eyes closed, the words rising from somewhere deep and ancient. “I’ve never let anyone close enough to find it.”
His voice was quiet and steady. “I’ve seen it. Before you were even ready to show it to me. I didn’t need you to hand it over. I just waited. That kind of vulnerability takes time, and I was never here to break in. I was here tobe let in.”
A breath shuddered out of me that tasted like surrender and salt and something older than pain. “I thought if I kept it buried, it wouldn’t ruin anything. I thought being strong meant locking the door and turning off the light and pretending none of it was there.”
“And you’ve survived because of that,” he said. “But surviving and healing aren’t the same thing. One is holding your breath. The other is finally letting it go.”
He didn’t ask me to respond. He didn’t press. He just kept moving his hand over my back, his breath steady, his presence unshakable, and somehow that was what broke me open again—not the heat, not the sex, not the feelings that were obviously growing between us—but the stillness. Thestaying. The kind oflove that doesn’t fill silence with noise, but holds it gently until it becomes safe again.
“I think I’m tired of surviving,” I said, voice low and threadbare. “I think I want something else now.”
He kissed my temple, not with passion or hunger, but with a reverence so quiet it trembled through me. “Then let’s build it. Something that holds you without asking you to be anything but exactly what you are.”
I didn’t speak. I couldn’t. My throat had gone too tight again, and this time it wasn’t grief. It wasn’t fear. It wasrelief. That rare, dangerous relief that comes only when you realize the war might actually be over, and you’re still standing. Still wanted. Still whole enough to be held.
His hand lifted to my cheek, thumb brushing away a tear I didn’t remember shedding. He looked at me, not with pity, not with pride, but with something deeper, an unflinching, devastating kind of devotion.
“I love you,” he said again, quieter this time. “Not just because of what we survived. Not because you’re strong. I love you because when you finally let yourself be soft, you are the mostbrutallybeautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
I couldn’t hold it anymore. Not the weight. Not the words.
“I’m afraid I’ll lose this,” I said, my voice catching like it had to claw its way out. “That I’ll loseyou. That I’ll wake up tomorrow and find out this was all too much.”
It felt selfish. Childish. Weak. But I said it anyway. I was terrified that this—the softness, the safety, thehim—was something borrowed. Something I hadn’t earned.
He shook his head, kissed the tip of my nose, then my lips, then my forehead again. “You’re not too much. You never were. You arejustenough. Fierce enough to survive it. Brave enough to let me see the parts that don’t roar. And soft enough to still feel it all.”
His arms slid beneath my thighs, lifting me from the water with the same slow strength he always used, the kind that said he’d carry me as far as I needed to go. My arms looped around his neck as my legs wrapped loosely around his waist, and for a moment I just stayed there pressed against his chest, the thud of his heartbeat pounding into mine like a second rhythm, as if he was offering me something steadier to sync to.
He stepped from the bath with me held close, his movements unhurried, every gesture deliberate, patient, and grounding. The cool air met my damp skin, but I didn’t flinch. I didn’t curl away. His warmth held me through it. He finally pulled out of me, then knelt and wrapped a thick towel around me, then another, then held me to his chest, drying me with the kind of care that left no part untouched. Not because he needed to wipe the water away. Because he needed me to feel cared for in ways that had nothing to do with utility, and everything to do with intimacy.
He didn’t speak as he carried me up the stairs from the basement, just held me tighter, his mouth brushing the crown of my head as if every inch of me deserved reverence. I clung to him without shame, burying my face in the crook of his neck, letting myself be small, be heavy, be held.
And for the first time in my life, I didn’t brace for the drop.
Because I knew, trulyknew,he wasn’t letting go.
39
Stella
The days blurredafter that night. They folded over each other until I couldn’t always tell where one ended and the next began. Relief had a way of softening time, and Violet’s presence in the house made everything sharper and stranger all at once.
