Page 38 of Jax
I should have brushed past it, just a vague answer to a throwaway joke. But something in the curve of his voice stuck. No tease, no bravado. Just quiet honesty. And I wasn’t prepared for how it settled in my chest, how it made me notice his hands, the deliberate flex of his knuckles, the sure pull of the rope. It shouldn’t have drawn me in, but it did. He was practiced.Precise. Magnetic in his restraint. It reminded me of how I moved when I welded, when the world narrowed to flame and form, and nothing else existed but pressure and control.
I hated the comparison the second it landed. Watching him, how fully he owned every motion, twisted something low in my gut. Not heat. Not desire. Just awareness. Raw. Sharp. It wasn’t the rope. It was him. The unapologetic way he existed in his skin. No shrinking. No spectacle. Just presence. I hated how much I envied that.
I pulled my knees in tighter, pretending to focus on Bellamy stacking cards, but my gaze kept drifting, catching on the way the rope slid between his fingers, ordered and sure, like he’d done it a thousand times. Like he could do it again. To me.
I swallowed that thought like it burned.
This house was already messing with my sense of safety. I didn’t need it screwing with my self-control too. It was too easy to forget. To sink into the couch, drink from a mug I hadn’t poured, watch Bellamy press her toes into Carrick’s thigh like she owned the air between them, or listen to Deacon wrap the room in chords softer than he should’ve been capable of. Too easy to ignore that I was still a prisoner here, just one with throw blankets and a curated Spotify soundtrack.
So I did what I always did when things started to feel safe. I broke the silence.
“Seriously though…” I said, voice light enough to pass as idle curiosity, even as my fingers tightened around the mug. “Who the hell are you people?” It was a joke. Mostly. But one with teeth under the gloss. I wasn’t asking what they did for a living. I was asking what kind of men laughed this easily while carrying that much darkness behind their eyes.
Maddy stretched out on the couch across from me like a cat who’d just taken her first sip of whiskey. “Depends on the day,” she said with a grin. “Babysitters. Assassins. Furniture movers.”
Bellamy didn’t even lift her head. “Carrick once built an entire coffee bar because Niko blinked too loudly at a French press.”
Carrick scoffed. “It was a shit press.”
“And you’re so normal about it,” Bellamy replied, flipping another card onto the pile between them.
Sully strolled in from the kitchen holding a beer and a bowl of popcorn like the chaos suited him. “We’re former military. Some of us were in intelligence. Some combat. A couple of ghosts.”
The way he said it, casual, matter-of-fact, landed cleaner than it should have, like a blade slicing skin without the sting.
I blinked. “And you all just... retired here?”
The warmth didn’t leave the room, but it changed. Shifted.
Niko slid into the room behind Sully and sat, a wine glass dangling between two fingers like it weighed nothing. His voice dropped low, the kind of deep that made people listen before they understood why. “We built this place because we stopped believing the people in charge were helping anyone.”
He didn’t blink.
“So now we help the ones they forget,” Sully added, and just like that, the room exhaled differently. No jokes. No quips. Even Deacon’s guitar softened into something barely there, threading silence with sound just loud enough to hear. I let it sit in my chest for a breath before curling my hands around the mug, letting the heat ground me.
“That sounds like a recruitment speech,” I said eventually, dry enough to pass for teasing, even as something inside twisted at the truth of it.
Sully didn’t miss a beat, just tossed popcorn into the air and caught it on his tongue with ease. “We’re fresh out of pamphlets, but we throw a mean barbecue.”
The tension cracked. Laughter filled the room—warm, easy, and real. I smiled without trying to. But it wasn’t supposed to feel like this. They weren’t supposed to feel like awe.They weren’t supposed to be something I wanted.
And still, my gaze drifted.
Jax hadn’t said a word since he sat. The rope in his hands had transformed into a series of small, perfect knots, each one tied with quiet reverence, like someone stringing rosary beads. His sleeves were pushed up to the elbows. The ink on his forearm caught the lamplight, shimmering like secrets.
I watched him longer than I meant to. Then, I tilted my head. “And you?” I asked, light as sugar on the tongue. “What made you join the antihero clubhouse?”
Jax didn’t stop tying, but his hands paused, just for a breath. The kind of hesitation that would’ve slipped past anyone not watching him as closely as I had been all evening. Then the motion resumed, fluid again.
“I don’t sleep well when it’s quiet,” he said after a beat, voice low, even, more honest than I expected. “This house is noisy.”
He didn’t elaborate. Didn’t explain. Just finished a loop and pulled the knot tight with a clean, efficient tug.
“And rope.”
No one reacted. They didn’t need to. It was the kind of answer they’d all heard before, maybe not in words, but in the way his presence filled a room without demanding space.
I looked away first, because I felt it. That pull in my stomach, in the base of my spine. That slow, dangerous tug toward someone absolutely wrong in every way that mattered, who still somehow made the air feel safer just by being in it. I hated the way he answered me. Hated more that I wanted to ask what else made him feel like he belonged here. Worst of all, I wasn’t sure I’d survive it if he ever actually told me.
