Page 84 of Jax
And I didn’t reach for her. Didn’t fall back on touch or false comfort. That kind of response so often serves the giver more than the one grieving. I didn’t want to soothe her into silence. I wanted to speak to her mind, to the structure of it. To the part of her that needed facts as much as safety.
So I leaned forward, just enough to meet the moment without crowding it.
“My job,” I said, “isn’t to make you forget where you’ve been. It’s to help you build around it. So memory doesn’t own your body anymore. So that when it feels good, it doesn’t turn on you. So you don’t have to flinch every time joy shows up and knocks.”
Her gaze lifted then, just barely, and I held it. Not intensely, but with precision. With care. Enough that she knew I was still there. Still tracking.
“If it comes up again,” I said, “if that guilt crawls in the moment you start to feel something real, I won’t judge it. I won’t try to override it. But I’ll help you build the space around it so it doesn’t drown the whole scene. We can stop. Breathe. Name it, or ignore it. That’s not a failure. That’s the process.”
Her arms wrapped around her knees again, but it wasn’t to hide. It was comfort, containment. She folded in, not to disappear, but to protect the spark she hadn’t let herself name until now.
“I just... I don’t want to hate myself for it,” she said, voice still timid. “I don’t want to feel good and then be ashamed. I already feel broken half the time. I don’t want to break more, because something good happened and I let it.”
I nodded, slow and steady. “Your pleasure doesn’t erase your pain. It doesn’t undo what you survived, or rewrite your grief. It adds. That’s all. It builds somethingbesidethe pain, not over it.”
Tears hovered, unshed but bright at the corners of her eyes, held back by sheer will. She trembled in the smallest, most devastating ways—fingers flexing, breath catching, jaw twitching as she tried not to clench.
“You don’t have to earn it,” I said. “You don’t have to wait until you’re done hurting. You’re allowed to feel good while you’re still healing. That doesn’t make you selfish. That makes you alive.”
Her head lowered, eyes closing like she was letting those words in piece by piece. I gave her the quiet to hold it. She didn’t need noise. She needed somewhere to set the truth down.
“I don’t know how to believe that,” she whispered.
“You don’t have to,” I said. “Not yet.”
When her eyes opened, they met mine. Unsteady. Raw. Open.
“I’ll believe it for you,” I said. “Until you feel it in your skin.”
And I meant it, not as sentiment, but as structure. A framework I was ready to build with every ounce of care I’d ever given anything that mattered. She didn’t need to trust it now. She didn’t need to trust me. She only had to keep breathing, and I’d be there, reading every shift, holding steady through the silence between her words.
Because she didn’t need a savior. She needed something she could live inside without bracing for collapse. And I would give her that—not just once, but again and again—until safety stopped feeling like performance, and started feeling like home.
She exhaled, like the words still felt strange. “Not tonight.” It wasn’t avoidance. It wasn’t a retreat. It was a decision.
And I smiled—small, careful, real. “I didn’t bring rope.”
That earned me a look. One brow lifted. “You’re such an arrogant bastard.”
“Only on Tuesdays,” I said smoothly, leaning back in my chair. “And every other Thursday.”
She laughed, full-bodied and unguarded, the kind that seemed to catch her by surprise. It knocked something loose between us. For the first time all night, she didn’t reach for control; she reached for contact. Her hand brushed along mine as she stood, not a grab or a test, just a quiet check to see if the world tilted when she touched something by choice. It didn’t. And she didn’t pull away.
“I want to try,” she said, her eyes meeting mine. “Just... slowly. With guardrails.”
That was the beginning. Not a yes to rope, not a yes to scenes, just a yes to re-entry. A yes to letting me build something steady, and allowing herself to step into it on her own time, one breath at a time. I nodded once, without fanfare.
“Then I’ll build you a runway,” I said, my voice low. “And I’ll wait as long as it takes for you to fly again.”
She didn’t speak, but she held my gaze a beat longer, her mouth tilting into something almost amused, almost incredulous. Maybe, for the first time, she believed I meant it. And maybe, for the first time, she wanted to believe it for herself. She moved like the tide retreating, slow and certain, drawn by something deeper than fear. No apology in her motion, no need to check how I read it. Just a quiet reclaiming of her body, inch by inch, like she was walking out of a war she hadn’t realized she was still fighting.
I stayed seated. Not because she needed the space, but because she deserved the throne, and the choice to rise from it. She crossed the room in silence that didn’t feel empty; it felt deliberate. Her hand brushed the doorframe as she passed it, and for a second, I thought that would be it, that she’d leave it hanging in the air.
But Stella had never been predictable. She was the outlier, the unsolvable variable in every equation I thought I understood. She paused with her hand still on the frame, her back to me. And then, like she was naming a fact rather than offering a compliment, she said, “I meant it, you know. That first night? You were good.”
I could’ve let that be the end of it. But I’m not built for enough; I’m built for precision.
“Next time,” I said, voice even, “I won’t settle for good.”
