Page 169 of Jax
My lips hovered near his throat. My breath snagged on the edge of something long buried. When the words came, they came quietly.
“You’re not just the only one I trust with my body,” I whispered. “You’re the only one I trust with my truth.”
He didn’t answer right away. The way his arms tightened around me said enough. His hand moved to rest over my heart,and his mouth pressed to my temple like a vow. It wasn’t a possessive hold. It wasn’t protection. It was witness. The vow of a man who had seen every aching, raw piece of me—and stayed. And in that bath, wrapped in his arms with the rope now just a memory, I finally understood. Surrender wasn’t a loss. It was letting someone love you exactly as you are.
The lavender air clung to my skin, but I felt only him—his arms at my waist, his chest rising steady behind me. I rested my head on his shoulder and let my eyes fall shut, to stay inside this stillness. The world beyond the water didn’t exist. Only his breath and mine. Only this.
Eventually, he shifted behind me, not urgent, just intentional. His hands flexed gently, anchoring before releasing, and when he stood, he brought me with him. The water spilled from our bodies as we stepped onto the tile, steam curling at our feet. I didn’t shiver. His presence was still wrapped around me.
He dried me slowly, reverently. Not just patting away water, but touching each place the rope had marked like it mattered. The cotton dragged softly over skin still warm from surrender. His silence was full of meaning—no praise, no commentary. Just the worship of what I’d survived. What I’d given.
He dressed me in himself—his worn black shirt, loose lounge pants that still carried his scent. Cedar. Salt. Smoke. He changed too, eyes never leaving mine, and when he offered his hand, I took it without hesitation.
The walk to the bedroom felt like a crossing. Not a beginning, but a shift. The air was different now. Cleared of everything we’d left behind in that room.
He climbed onto the bed first, cross-legged in the center, warm light painting his face in gold. I followed, mirroring his posture. Our knees brushed. Our hands found each other in the space between.
When he finally spoke, his voice was quiet and sure, full of the kind of truth that doesn’t need to be loud. “I used to think rope was about control,” he said. “That if I tied something tight enough, it couldn’t fall apart. That if I mapped every knot, every breath, I could keep the world from slipping through my fingers. And maybe, for a while, I needed it to be that.”
He glanced down at our hands, then back at me.
“But it changed. It became something quieter. Something deeper. It taught me how to listen, how to see. It made me softer. And I thought maybe that was the gift. That rope turned me into a man who could stay.” His fingers brushed mine.
“But then you showed up,” he said. “And you didn’t just give me rope. You gave me yourself. You gave me your fight, your grief, your hunger. And with you, rope isn’t control. It’s devotion.”
The words hit low and hot and beautiful, like sunlight sliding down my spine.
My voice was a rasp when I finally found it. “You’ve seen all of me. Not just the parts I gave you. The parts I tried to hide. The ones I buried under strength and snark. You saw them. And you didn’t turn away.”
Emotion thickened in my throat. I blinked hard, but the tears came anyway.
“I don’t want a life without this. Without you. Without knowing exactly who I am when I’m on my knees in front of you—and knowing that it’s still me. That you don’t need me to be anyone else.”
He lifted my hands to his lips, kissing the knuckles one at a time. “Then don’t,” he said. “We’re here. You and me. No exit strategy. No maybe.”
My chest caved in a little at that. Not from fear. From relief. From knowing, finally, that I didn’t have to keep searching for the shape of safety. I had found it. In him.
“I want more,” I whispered. “More than what we have here. More than just when we’re in a scene. There is still a lot I have to learn about being in a dynamic, but I know I don’t want this to end when we stand up. I want it to be… us. Always. All the time. I want you.”
Jax didn’t answer right away. His gaze stayed steady, weighty, like he was cataloguing every word, every tremor in my voice. Then he nodded, slow and certain. “Then kneel,” he said. “And say it.”
I moved without pause, slipping from the bed with a grace that wasn’t performed, it was lived, bone-deep and certain. Kneeling didn’t feel like submission. It felt like truth. My spine stayed tall, hands resting on my thighs, chin lifted not in challenge but in calm surrender. The tremor in my limbs didn’t embarrass me. It felt sacred. A quiet signal of everything this moment carried—the weight, the rawness, the clarity of choosing something that had always waited behind the noise.
This wasn’t about needing to surrender. It was about knowing I didn’t have to, and choosing to anyway. The kneeling, the stillness, the offering of breath and presence… it was mine.
“I’m yours, Jax.” My voice shook, not from doubt, but from the gravity of finally saying what my body had known long before my mouth caught up. The words burned on the way out—too big, too sharp, too dangerous to take back, but I didn’t want them back. “I want you to have me. All of me. The scars. The chaos. The fire. I’m not just giving you fragments of myself. I want you to have the whole wreckage, and I give you permission to put me back together again.”
The silence afterward wasn’t empty. It cracked open, thick with something holy, like the air itself bent to carry what I’d just given him.
He moved slowly, fingers threading into my hair with the kind of precision that felt like possession. His lips pressed to thecrown of my head, reverent and unhurried, and when he spoke, it didn’t sound like comfort. It sounded like a vow.
“You don’t know what that does to me,” he said, low and ragged, then steadier, each word deliberate, like he was building the truth brick by brick so it couldn’t be torn down. “I’m yours, Stella. Not sometimes. Not halfway. Entirely. Every breath. Every calculation. Every knot I tie, every ounce of discipline I thought made me untouchable. It’s yours now. And I’ll spend the rest of my life proving you were right to claim it.”
His words didn’t demand. They soaked into me slowly and deeply, like water over earth that had waited too long. His hand moved through my hair in an even rhythm, grounding me with each stroke as if time itself had paused to witness us.
When I moved, it was toward him. He opened his arms like a promise, and I climbed into them without hesitation, curling into his lap like I’d always belonged there. His hold wrapped around me with the same care he’d shown all night, my head tucked under his jaw, his heartbeat steady against my cheek. Nothing in him asked. It only offered.
The room cooled, but he didn’t pull back. His hand stroked my back, not to calm, but to affirm. I was here. I was his. I was safe. When he shifted, it was only to grab the blanket beside us. He wrapped it around my shoulders and pulled the edge beneath my chin with a tenderness that broke something open. The weight of it hit me hard, not from temperature, but from the jolt of being tended to without condition. His touch asked for nothing. It simply was. Steady. Devoted. The way he loved.
