Chapter 11
Emilia
It takes Jake three minutes to untangle Poppy’s arm from his without waking her, ease her head off his lap, and get her up against his shoulder. She doesn’t stir once, sea turtle still locked in her fist.
I walk beside him through the maternity ward corridor and neither of us says anything as the fluorescent lights buzz. I am very aware of what happened on that bench twenty minutes ago.
The way he looked at me. Whatever he was thinking, he didn’t say it out loud.
The night air outside is warm and thick and smells like rain that hasn’t arrived yet. Jake gets Poppy buckled in with the focused precision of a man defusing a bomb. I stand beside the car and watch him without saying a word.
The drive takes twelve minutes. Poppy doesn’t stir once.
Jake reheats pasta while I run Poppy’s bath. She wakes up enough to insist on bubbles and lavender shampoo and putting the sea turtle on the edge of the tub where she can see it. At some point the sea turtle is going to get wet, but I’m solving problems one at a time tonight.
Jake’s voice carries from the kitchen, low, talking to himself as he moves things around. A drawer. The beep of the microwave. Then a pan on the burner because he changed his mind about the microwave.
“Daddy is very loud,” Poppy observes.
“He is.”
“He always does that in the kitchen. He talks to himself.” She sculpts a soap bubble mountain with great concentration. “He doesn’t know I can hear him.”
“Probably best we don’t tell him.”
She looks at me with the gravity of someone who’s decided we’re on the same team. “Okay. It can be our secret.”
I’m keeping a four-year-old’s secrets now.
Jake appears in the doorway with two glasses of cold juice and leans against the frame. He looks better than he did in the car. Having his hands busy must’ve helped.
“Pasta’s ready when she is,” he says.
He stays in the doorway while I help Poppy out of the tub.
He hands me things when I need them: the second towel, the lavender lotion she’s particular about, the comb she’ll allow me to use and won’t allow Jake to because, as she informed him last week with devastating frankness: you always miss the tangles, Daddy, because you are very bad at hair.
The word lands so naturally in her voice that it takes me a second to realize she isn’t calling him Jake anymore.
He watches us. I don’t look at him directly.
There’s something in the atmosphere of this bathroom that requires careful handling, and I’m handling it by focusing on the task and not thinking about what it means that this feels so damn easy.
The juice spills at bedtime.
Poppy is in her pajamas and settled against her pillows, juice box in hand as a precaution against the thirst that always materializes at lights-out. I have the storybook open. Jake is at the end of the bed, one hand resting on Poppy’s feet.
She reaches too far. The juice box tilts, and cold apple juice soaks the entire front of my shirt.
Poppy freezes. “Uh-oh.”
“Uh-oh,” I agree, holding the hem away from my skin.
Jake is already up. He disappears and comes back thirty seconds later with a T-shirt from his room: soft cotton, heathered gray, Hale Foundation Pacific Edge 5K in faded print across the chest. I take it because there’s no practical alternative.
“Bathroom’s yours,” he says.
The shirt is enormous on me. It falls to mid-thigh and the sleeves reach my elbows and it smells like him, clean cotton and cedar and salt, which is a problem. I come back into Poppy’s room and she looks at me with wide eyes.
“You look like Daddy now,” she says.
Jake coughs.
“I’m going to finish the story,” I say.
She wants two chapters, not one, and then the end of the second chapter again, and then she wants to know whether the bear in the story has a family.
“He has a whole forest full of friends,” I tell her.
“That’s not a family.”
“Some families are made of friends.”
She considers this, sea turtle tucked under one arm. “Is our family made of friends?”
I look up. Jake is in the doorway. He’s been there for the last chapter and a half. He’s not looking at me. He’s looking at his daughter, who asked that question the way she asks every question, straight out and no filter.
“I think some of the best ones are,” I say.
She settles against her pillow, satisfied. “Okay. One more page.”
One more page becomes one more chapter becomes the deep, heavy silence of a child finally asleep.
I don’t mean to stay. I just don’t leave. The room is dark and warm and Poppy’s breathing is slow and even and I close my eyes just for a moment.
I surface slowly.
The room is the same. Jake is in the doorway.
His face in the low light is doing something I don’t have a name for. It’s not an expression I’ve seen on him before.
Not lust. Not the easy charm he pulls out in public. Not even the unguarded quality that slips through when he’s exhausted.
He realizes I’m awake.
“Hey,” he says. Quiet.
“Hey,” I say back.
“What are you thinking?” he asks.
“That you’ve been standing there a while and you look uncertain.”
Something shifts in his face. “Yeah,” he says. “I am.”
“Of what?”
He looks at Poppy. Then back at me. “Losing this.”
He doesn’t explain what this is. He doesn’t have to.
He tips his head toward the hallway. I ease out of Poppy’s bed one slow inch at a time. She doesn’t stir. Jake steps back and we stand in the hallway.
“Balcony?” he says.
Honolulu from this height at 3:00 a.m. is something different.
The lights spread below like a second sky.
The ocean begins where they end, dark and enormous.
Jake leans against the railing on both forearms, looking out.
I stand beside him, close enough that our arms nearly touch, and pull the long T-shirt sleeves over my hands because there’s an edge to the air at this hour.
“You should sleep,” I say.
“Yeah.” He doesn’t move. “I will.”
I wait.
“He looked at her like she was the whole answer,” he says. “Noah. Like he suddenly understood every question he’d ever had.”
“He’s wanted that for a long time.”
“I know.” He’s quiet a moment. “I spent years being the guy who didn’t want what he has.
I had a whole system. Reasons. Logic. It made sense.
” He turns his head slightly without quite looking at me.
“And then Poppy happened and the whole system just…” He stops.
“It doesn’t hold up anymore. Now I keep waiting to screw this up.
Poppy. All of it. I keep waiting for the moment I get it wrong and can’t fix it. ”
He’s not looking at the ocean anymore. He’s looking at me, and his jaw is loose and his eyes are tired and honest and there’s no trace of the easy confidence he walks around with every other hour of the day.
“I know,” I say.
He looks at me.
“You haven’t screwed it up once,” I say. “Not with her. Not with the foundation. Not with any of it.”
Something shifts in his expression. “That’s also new.”
“Don’t.”
“I wasn’t—”
“You were about to make a joke.”
“Maybe.”
“Jake.”
“Emilia.”
I hold his gaze. He holds it back.
“You’re not going to break her,” I say. “You got a hand you didn’t expect and you’re playing it better than I’ve seen anyone play anything.”
Something moves across his face.
He’s close suddenly. I don’t know when that happened. He looks tired and relieved and like a man who’s run out of reasons to stay away from me.
“Emilia,” he says.
I should say something cautious. Something that holds the architecture we built. Sixty days. Four rules.
I don’t say any of that.
He moves first. I meet him.
This isn’t like the night in the kitchen at Diamond Head.
That was combustion: years of careful distance, clipped professional emails, boardroom standoffs, and looking anywhere but at his mouth, all detonating at once.
The salt-heavy air on the balcony. The roar of blood in my ears louder than the waves crashing below.
His hands come to my jaw first, tilting my face up. They’re careful. That’s the thing I can’t stop noticing, the deliberate restraint in his touch. His thumbs trace my cheekbones slowly, like he’s memorizing me.
My breath stutters.
His mouth finds mine, warm and slow, and the kiss deepens. His tongue slides against mine once before he pulls back just enough to look at me again.
That look is honestly more dangerous than anything else he could do.
“You’re doing that on purpose,” I say.
“Which part.” Not a question.
“All of it.”
“Yeah.” Not an apology.
His mouth moves to my throat, hot and open, and he finds the spot below my ear that makes my breath catch.
He stays there, sucking a bruise into my skin, his teeth grazing my flesh.
A low, rough sound vibrates from his throat against my neck and goes straight down my spine, pooling hot between my thighs. My hands find his shirt and pull.
“Jake.”
“Still here,” he says against my skin.
“Shirt. Off.”
He pulls back just enough to look at me with that expression again, open, a little undone, like I’ve given him something he wasn’t sure he’d get. His hands find the hem of my T-shirt and pause, his fingers brushing the bare skin of my waist.
I shiver.
“Yes,” I say, before he can ask.
He pulls it over my head and tosses it aside. His eyes move over me slowly, my throat, my breasts spilling over the lace of my bra, my waist without apology, and I feel it like a hand stroking down my body.
“Fuck,” he says, low and rough.
I reach for him, yank his shirt off, and drag my palms over his chest, the hard flat muscle, the light dusting of hair, the taut line of his stomach. He exhales through his nose in the controlled way of someone working very hard to keep himself in check.
“You don’t have to do that,” I say.
“Do what?”
“Hold back.”
He looks at me for a long moment. “I’m not holding back.” He steps closer, hands gripping my waist, and I feel the railing solid at my back, the metal cool against my spine. “I’m paying attention. There’s a difference.”
I feel that sentence from my throat to my stomach.
He drops to his knees in front of me.