Page 121 of Jax
Her exhale landed like something ancient, surrendering its echo. She leaned back into me with an intent that cracked something beneath my ribs. Her fingers traced the lines I’d tied, seeking not restraint, but identity. She was no longer dissolving. She was forming.
“You know,” I said, voice low near her temple, “people with your trauma pattern often start to compartmentalize affection. You box vulnerability, what’s safe, what’s strategic, what’s allowed. But just now, you stepped outside all that. No script. No defense.”
She laughed, quiet and startled. “You always talk like that?”
“Only when I’m describing something impossible,” I murmured, words brushing her skin. “Like watching someone conquer their fear, and choose to be heard.”
It wasn’t flattery. I was reading the pattern. I knew how to track the data. Her breath had shifted. Her posture was no longer braced. The rope didn’t bind her; it clarified her. A visible translation of identity. This is who I am. This is what I need. This is what I’m ready to carry.
Her body curled slightly toward mine, not for shelter, not for show, but because something in her needed rest. Not escape. Just rest.
Her voice came a moment later, thin and threadbare but steady. “I’m tired.”
Not the kind of tired sleep could solve. Not a dramatic unraveling. Just truth, stripped to its bones.
“I know how that feels,” I murmured, tracing the edge of her shirt where skin met cotton, where pulse met quiet. “It’s the kind of tiredness that rewrites you. The kind born from toomany days spent in survival mode. From carrying secrets that should never have been yours to bear.”
She didn’t respond. But she didn’t pull away. And in that stillness, something shifted. A tremor too small for sound, too sacred for words. A recalibration. Her breath slowed. Her weight adjusted. Her spine eased, like maybe, for the first time, the fight wasn’t in charge.
“You’re not lost,” I said softly, mouth near her hairline, the words no longer an offering, but a fact. “You’re just remembering how to read your own compass. And it’s still here. Still pointing true. You’ve just been spinning too fast to hear it.”
And then she moved, not dramatically, not like surrender, but with slow deliberateness, turning just enough to rest against me. Her cheek settled in the hollow of my throat, a place I hadn’t realized I’d been saving for her. I didn’t tighten my arms, or shift to hold her closer. I just stayed still and let her arrive on her own terms. She wasn’t collapsing. She wasn’t conceding. She was aligning, her body finally registering that safety wasn’t something she had to earn. It was already here.
Her exhale, when it came, was long and full and unapologetic. And I counted it, not as an ending, but as proof of life. A sacred variable returned to baseline. She didn’t say thank you. Didn’t say anything at all. But she didn’t need to.
Because clarity doesn’t always speak in declarations. Sometimes it’s the quiet at the end of panic. Sometimes it’s the shift in breath that doesn’t beg to be heard. And sometimes it’s this: just two people holding still. One choosing stillness for the first time. The other holding the signal steady long enough for her to hear her own return.
28
Stella
The weld hissed,popped, and flared to life, white-hot and watching, like it knew I was holding my breath again. I didn’t let it go. Not until the seam took shape beneath my electrode, each molten inch pulled tight with precision. I maintained a steady pace, wrists aching, shoulders burning, sweat slipping down my spine and catching under the band of my bra. Only when the glow dimmed from white to amber, when the metal stilled beneath my hands, did I exhale.
I flipped my mask up and stepped back, dragging my arm across my forehead as I stared down the thing I’d made, or the thing that was becoming something beneath my hands. It had started as a rose. Curved steel, delicately bent. Meant to catch light. Meant to be pretty. But the metal hadn’t wanted pretty. It wanted to fight. It hunched into itself with jagged weight and sharpened edges, every seam radiating tension like it resented every compromise I’d forced on it. This wasn’t a flower anymore. It was a warning. And I couldn’t stop looking at it.
My body still buzzed with the wrong kind of energy. I hadn’t come out here to make anything. I came to burn through the pressure clawing just beneath my skin, the helplessness, thewaiting, the slow grind of Quinn and the others retreating into strategy, stacking files and theories while time kept slipping by with no word.
I didn’t wait well. So I welded. And when the metal resisted, it felt honest.
I reached for the wire brush and froze. The air behind me shifted. That prickle at the base of my neck was instinct, not imagination. I didn’t turn. Didn’t need to.
“You gonna say something?” I asked, grabbing the brush, “Or just stand there staring at my ass while I sweat?”
There was a long enough pause to make me smile before he even spoke.
“Can’t I do both?” Jax’s voice dropped behind me, smooth, low, dry enough to make my knees ache.
I kept brushing the weld line, but my smirk deepened. “That line’s only gonna work once.”
“Then it was well spent.”
He stepped closer. I felt the heat of him before I saw him, that quiet, steady gravity he carried, like nothing around him moved without permission. I finally turned, tossing the brush onto the worktable. Sweat slicked the base of my throat, soot streaked my arm, and my tank top clung in all the wrong places. I probably looked like hell.
Jax looked like stillness made flesh. Shirt sleeves rolled, eyes on everything.
“I figured you’d be with the others,” I said, nodding toward the house. “Or buried in data. Doing something useful.”
He looked at the sculpture. “I was. Then I realized something.” His gaze met mine. “Tension doesn’t build in silence. It needs friction. Pressure. Contact.”
