Chapter 18
Jace
She was asleep in my cabin and I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
Down the hall. In a room I’d never imagined anyone would use because the cabin existed for the opposite of company. It existed for silence and solitude and the controlled absence of other people.
And Anna Wilson was sleeping in it. In my robe. In my sheets.
I sat at the piano and played. The piece was my mother’s. Catherine’s favorite. She taught me when I was six, sitting beside me on the bench, guiding my small hands across the keys. It was one of the few memories from before the basement that wasn’t contaminated.
The feel of her fingers over mine. Her patience. The way she hummed along when I got the notes right and laughed when I got them wrong, and the laughter was the kind that made you want to get it wrong on purpose.
The melody filled the cabin. Slow, aching, and I thought about the woman down the hall and what it meant that she’d driven two hours in a rainstorm to find me.
I finished the piece. Sat in the silence. Then I went to the studio.
The portrait was waiting. Her face, half-finished.
I picked up the charcoal and worked. The thing that had eluded me for days came easily now because she was in the house and the memory wasn’t distant anymore.
It was warm and sleeping twenty-three steps away.
Her jaw. Her eyes. The expression from the elevator, the lips that whispered I’m here and meant it.
I drew until my fingers were black and the portrait was complete. I stepped back and she looked back at me from the paper with an expression that said everything I couldn’t say out loud.
I cleaned my hands. Twice. Went to bed, but didn’t sleep. Lay in the dark with the image of her burned into my eyelids and my body responding in ways I couldn’t override, and didn’t want to.
Morning came gray and wet. The rain had softened but not stopped. I made coffee and checked the road conditions on my phone.
Flooded. Mudslides overnight. The mountain route was closed. Advisory warning on the county website said no travel until further notice.
She couldn’t leave.
I stared at the screen and I didn’t know if what I felt was relief or terror. Both, probably. Both at the same time, which seemed to be the permanent state of every emotion I had concerning Anna Wilson.
She walked out of the guest room at half past eight.
My robe. She was wearing my robe. The white one, the one I kept for emergencies that had never been used, and it fell to her knees and the belt was tied at her waist. Her hair was loose around her shoulders in dark curls that were still messy from sleep and her feet were bare on my clean wood floor.
"Morning," she said. Her voice was raspy, rough from sleep. The sound of it went straight through me.
"Morning." I poured her coffee. Set the mug on the counter between us. Safe distance.
She picked up the mug and our fingers brushed on the ceramic. Brief. Incidental. My pulse responded anyway.
"The roads are flooded," I said stiffly. "Mudslides overnight. The mountain route is closed until further notice."
She took a sip. "So I’m stuck with you."
"It appears so."
"I guess there are worse prisons."
"This cabin costs more than most prisons."
"And the warden is better looking." She said it into her coffee, casual, like she hadn’t just made my ears burn. I turned back to the counter and started breakfast. She sat at the table in the robe that kept shifting and every time she moved, a different part of her was briefly visible.
The curve of her shoulder when she leaned forward. The inside of her knee when she crossed her legs. The shadow of her collarbone when she tilted her head to push her hair back. She was doing none of this on purpose but my brain was treating it like a full sensory assault.
We ate. We talked about the rain and a book she'd noticed on my shelf. The conversation came without effort, which never happened to me, and I kept forgetting to be careful because her laugh did something to the air in the room that made walls feel pointless.
The day unfolded. She read on the couch, legs tucked under her, one of my books in her lap.
I worked at my desk, the Ethereal Vanguard modifications I’d been neglecting, code reviews and narrative feedback that Miles had been forwarding for days.
We existed in the same space without needing to fill it with noise.
By afternoon the proximity had done its work.
She kept being close. Sitting beside me on the couch when every other seat was empty.
Standing next to me at the window when there were six in the cabin.
Reaching past me in the kitchen for a glass, her body angling toward mine, the robe brushing my arm, her breath warm on my neck for half a second before she pulled away.
I was going to break. I could feel the fracture spreading through the control I’d spent the entire day maintaining and the question wasn’t if but when.
"What do you want, Anna?"
I asked it at the kitchen counter. Late afternoon. The under-cabinet lights were on and she was leaning against the counter with a glass of wine, her hair pulled up, the back of her neck exposed.
She looked at me and set the wine down. Her eyes searched my face. "I want to learn all of you, Jace. Please stop pushing me away."
My throat closed, and it had nothing to do with allergies. Dr. Adler had a name for this, my body's way of processing feelings too large for language. She was standing in my kitchen, in my robe, asking me to let her in, and the request was so simple and so terrifying that I couldn't speak.
"I didn’t come here out of sympathy," she said, taking a step toward me. "I didn’t come because I felt sorry for you or because Miles asked me to check on you or because it’s my job."
Another step. Closer.
"I came here for you, Jace. Because I miss you. Because that office is wrong without you in it and my week was wrong without you in it and I drove here because being far from you felt worse than anything I was afraid of."
She was right in front of me. "I want you. All of you. The man who plays piano at midnight and draws my face from memory and can’t touch a doorknob without gloves. I want that man. All of him."
I swallowed. My hands were shaking. My pulse was so loud in my ears that I could barely hear the rain.
I was afraid to hope because hope was the most dangerous thing in the world for a man like me.
Worse than the basement. Worse than the panic attacks.
Because hope meant believing this could last, and I had never survived the moment when something I believed in was taken away.
But she was standing in my kitchen, her voice steady as her eyes.
She wanted me. All of me.
The space between us closed.
I kissed her.
Her lips were soft, warm, and everything else fell away.
Her mouth opened under mine and I tasted the wine on her tongue, the sweetness underneath, and my brain went silent.
The compulsions, the counting, the constant low-frequency static of anxiety that I’d lived with, all of it stopped.
Like someone had found the switch, flipped it, and the only thing left was her.
I kissed her deeper and she pulled me closer, her hands fisting in my shirt, and I backed her against the counter.
My hands went from her face into her hair and the curls were silk between my fingers.
I pulled gently, and her head tipped back, and the sound she made was small, involuntary, and it detonated something in my chest that I didn’t know existed.
I kissed her neck. Open-mouthed and hungry. I wanted to consume her. I wanted to put my mouth on every inch of her and learn the geography of her body the way I learned code and music and everything else I cared about enough to master.
She gasped when my teeth grazed her throat.
The gasp went straight through me and I was hard, so achingly hard I could feel myself straining against my pants and I didn’t try to hide it or shift away.
I pressed against her and let her feel it, and her breath hitched, her hips rocking forward into mine.
I lifted her onto the counter. She wrapped her legs around my waist and pulled me between her thighs.
The robe fell open to her hips. I could feel the bare skin of her inner thighs around my waist, the warmth of her pressed into me through the denim.
My hands gripped her hips. Held her there.
The sound I made was raw, guttural, completely beyond my control.
I pressed my forehead against hers. Both of us were breathing hard. Her legs locked around me, her fingers in my hair, her body warm and open. The heat of her against the front of my jeans was making coherent thought impossible.
"Are you sure?" I needed to hear it. Because consent wasn’t a formality, it was a foundation, and I didn’t build anything without one.
"I have been sure since the fitting room." She kissed the corner of my mouth. "Take me to bed, Jace."
I picked her up off the counter. She stayed wrapped around me, her face buried in my neck, her breath warm against my throat. I carried her down the hallway past the piano room, the paintings, the studio where her portrait watched us pass, into my bedroom.
I laid her on the bed and stood over her. She was lying in my sheets, her hair spread across my pillow, her chest rising and falling, her lips swollen from my mouth.
I reached for the robe. Pulled the belt loose. The fabric fell open and I let it, let the white cotton part across her body, and the sight of her underneath it, all warm skin and curves, made my mouth go dry.
She was beautiful. I’d known that since the market. But knowing it clothed and knowing it bare were different categories of knowledge entirely. She was soft where I was hard and warm where the cabin was cold.