Page 82 of Jax
She didn’t speak, but her body shifted. Her fingers loosened. Her posture eased, a slight change in how she carried herself. Subtle. But I saw it.
I didn’t offer an apology. Not because I wasn’t sorry, but because apologies center the wrong person. I’d learned that lesson early. Guilt was only useful when it built somethingbetter. She didn’t need regret. She needed recalibration. A different process. A better response, built from better data.
I’d rebuild every system I had if it meant she could feel safe inside her own skin.
Because I saw her. Every piece. And I stayed.
When she opened her mouth, I caught the flicker in her jaw just before the words could surface. The reflex to soften the moment, to take the weight off me, to insist it wasn’t my fault. But that wasn’t true. And it wouldn’t help her. So I stepped in. Not to steer the moment. Just to keep her from carrying what wasn’t hers.
“I don’t want you to comfort me,” I said, low and steady. “I want to understand you.”
That stopped her. Froze her, like I’d flipped a switch. Most people want comfort. They want to hear it wasn’t their fault. They want closure dressed up as mutual apologies, passed back and forth like peace offerings to avoid the wreckage underneath. But not me. I didn’t want absolution. I wanted comprehension. I wanted to know the cause, the sequence, the shape of what went wrong. Because when I understood the full framework, I could rewrite the outcome. She wasn’t just another system to study. She was the one I refused to misread twice.
“That night didn’t fail because of what happened,” I said, voice low and deliberate. “It failed because I didn’t have enough data.” I let the words sit in the space between us, stripped of drama, and I watched the way they landed. Her brow eased, her weight tilted forward just slightly, like her listening had shifted into something deeper.
“Consent isn’t a fixed point,” I said. “It changes. With nervous system state, with memory, with capacity. That night I tracked your external cues. But I missed your internal override.” I wasn’t apologizing. I was diagnosing. “I missed the breath pattern shift. I missed the delay between touch and response.I misread your stillness as surrender, when it was static. That wasn’t your failure to signal. That was my failure to read you with the right system.”
Her gaze held steady, unmoving. I couldn’t tell if anyone had ever spoken to her this way before; not emotionally, but clinically. Not as someone fragile, but as someone worth getting exactly right. I wasn’t here to romanticize her pain or minimize it. I was here to name it. To study it. To meet it with precision.
“I don’t want to fix you,” I said. “I want to fix what I’m building with you.” She didn’t respond. Her throat shifted like she was holding something in, but her stillness wasn’t resistance; it was weight. Thought. It was the gravity of being seen clearly, and not having to brace for distortion.
“I want to rebuild everything,” I said. “Strip it down to the bones. Reassemble it in a way that reflects your truth. Not just what you say, but how you breathe, how your body speaks when your voice goes quiet. No assumptions. We track. We adapt. We build it solid.” I paused, then added more quietly, “I want it to be safe enough that you might want it again.”
That was what I had to offer. Not comfort. Not an apology. Not a grand declaration. For me, love was methodical. It was measured. It was the willingness to tear apart everything I thought I knew and reconstruct something better. Not easier. Better. Something worthy of her.
Was that what this was? Was I falling in love with this woman I’d only known for a matter of weeks?
She didn’t need to be pulled into my arms. She needed steadiness. She needed to know I saw what others ignored. That I could read the language of her body when she had no words left. She needed the line held. So, I did what I always do when something breaks. I didn’t discard it. I traced the failure back to its origin, documented the pattern, and started again, not toerase what went wrong, but to build something that wouldn’t collapse under stress.
She didn’t move at first. Just sat with everything I’d given her like she was testing the structure for fault lines, looking for the place it might snap. She didn’t trust easily. Her trust had been broken too precisely for that. And she wasn’t about to hand me another piece of herself just because I knew how to sound steady.
But then she shifted. A quiet lean toward the chair opposite mine, the smallest realignment of weight, like a decision had settled behind her ribs. She didn’t collapse onto the seat. Didn’t sink. She perched on the edge with hands braced against her knees, spine rigid, breath too deliberate. It was the posture of someone ready to bolt. But choosing to stay.
“I don’t know what I need,” she said at last. Her voice was thin, not with weakness, but wear. “I want to want it again. I really do. But I don’t trust myself to know when it’s too much.”
The way she said it was clinical. Like a report, not a confession. A fact she’d been carrying around like shrapnel she couldn’t remove.
And God, that admission was its own kind of bravery. Not knowing is terrifying. Especially for someone who had been through what Stella had in the last few weeks. For a survivor of that kind of trauma, uncertainty wasn’t just uncomfortable. It was dangerous.
So I didn’t offer her comfort.
I offered her structure.
“Then we stop chasing the right answers,” I said. “We start with what’s off the table. What didn’t feel safe. What we can eliminate from the equation.”
She didn’t speak, but she didn’t pull away either. So I kept going, soft and methodical. Not guiding her—building with her.
“No full-body bondage.”
She gave a small nod, her eyes fixed on her lap.
“No being turned away from me. No scenes that involve your back to me for now…face-down, face-away, anything that removes your access to me visually.”
Another nod, tighter. But I saw the way her shoulders eased a few percentage points.
“No blindfolds. Not until you ask for them.”
That one made her inhale, just a little deeper.
