Page 72 of Jax
Her voice stayed even, and her eyes didn’t waver. She wasn’t placating me. She wasn’t trying to offer comfort. She was offeringtruth,the kind that didn’t come with a Band-Aid, or a silver lining.
“I thought…” I exhaled, rolling the mug between my hands. “I thought I could keep my distance. Be smart about it. That I could handle what happened without expecting anything. Without wanting more.”
Maddy just waited.
“I observed what it did to you, you know?” I added, glancing at her. “To Niko. To Carrick. I thought I’d be the one who didn’t get tangled. The one who stayed objective. Detached.” I huffed out a laugh with no humor. “Guess not.”
“No offense taken,” she said dryly, picking up her spoon again. “Though I will point out that when Niko and I crashed, we did it in slow motion. You two went from zero to intimate in what…less than a week?”
I raised an eyebrow. “You think that’s what’s throwing her?”
“I think you didn’t give her time to build walls,” Maddy said. “She never got to pace herself. You made her feel safe, and she wasn’t ready for what that would unlock.”
I thought about that. About the sound she made when she fell apart in my arms. About the way she looked at me afterward, like I’d seen something she wasn’t sure she wanted found.
“I didn’t want to be her fantasy,” I said. “I wanted it to mean something.”
Maddy tilted her head, cereal forgotten. “And it did mean something.”
“Not enough.”
“Jax,” Maddy said gently, “youwere enough. That’s the problem. You gave her something real. And now she has to decide if she can survive without it.”
I stared down at my mug, thumb circling the rim like I could wear it smooth. “She’s already decided.”
“No,” Maddy said. “She’s coping. That’s different.”
We let the silence hang, unsettled, not comforting. Then she slid off the counter and stepped closer. No speech. No hug. Just her hand on my shoulder—warm and steady—and somehow that made it worse. Because I realized this kind of anchoring stillness was what Stella couldn’t hold. Couldn’t trust. And I wasn’t angry with her for that. I just didn’t know how to stop wanting her in spite of it all.
I hadn’t meant to stop in front of her door again. I thought I’d head to bed, file the evening away in that mental folder marked ‘emotional anomalies’, and focus on the case. Her safety. Anything but the pressure lodged in my chest. But my feet carried me down the hall anyway, like the silence around her room had its own gravity.
The light outside her door was off. Small detail. But it made the hallway feel thinner, like this part of the house had detached from the rest of us. Her door was closed, of course. Probably not locked, but shut with intent. Not to punish. Just to draw a line.
I stood there, listening. I didn’t expect her to speak. Didn’t need movement to know she was awake. I just listened. And somehow, that mattered.
I didn’t knock. Didn’t try the knob. I just leaned forward, letting my forehead rest against the door—light, steady, eyes closed—and let myself be there. Not analyzing or calculating.Just there. With her on the other side, and everything between us suspended in the ache of what we were.
I thought of her breath on my neck. Her voice in my ear. The panic in her eyes after, like she’d given too much and didn’t know how to take it back. And maybe she hadn’t. Maybe the moment had just swallowed her. The way it swallowed me.
I didn’t speak right away. The words came in pieces. I had to sort through them carefully, the way I handled intel, slow and deliberate, filtering for what was true, what was safe, and what would only make things worse.
When I finally spoke, my voice was low. Not a whisper. Just the same calm I used in confessionals and interrogations. Measured. Honest.
“You don’t have to come out. I’m not expecting that.” I exhaled through my nose. Pulse steady. Contained. “I’m not here to change your mind. I just…” I paused, hand flexing at my side. “I needed to stop pretending this doesn’t hurt.”
The silence didn’t shift. But I hadn’t come for answers. I just needed to say it somewhere that still felt like her. “You don’t owe me anything. Not an explanation. Not closure. I know you didn’t promise more. And I didn’t ask.”
I stared at the wood grain. “But Ihopedfor more. And that hope… it wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t delusion, or a misread signal. It was real. It was mine.”
My fingers brushed the doorframe, just to feel something solid.
“I know you’re scared. I know connection feels like exposure. I get that more than I ever wanted to admit. But what happened between us, you didn’t imagine it.”
I stepped back slightly, giving the words space to carry. “I felt it too. Every second. Every inhale. Every look. Every shiver when I touched you. And the part that hurts, the part I can’texplain neatly and file away, is that you let me hold all of it… then shut the door like none of it mattered.”
I ran a hand down my jaw, swallowing the pressure that built behind my throat. The lump didn’t rise fully. I was trained better than that. But it lived there, all the same.
“I keep running these calculations,” I said, quieter now. “Trying to isolate the variable that broke the equation. But there’s no clean answer. No single data point I can erase. You didn’t collapse. You didn’t malfunction. You left, quietly, deliberately, and I was never built to navigate absence that doesn’t announce itself. I can track a moving target. I can analyze risk, solve for the unknown. But I can’t model the kind of silence that chooses itself.”
