Chapter 19 #2
I played. He sat beside me and watched. The game was beautiful, immersive, the kind of world you could lose hours in.
I moved through the story, made dialogue choices, watched the romance develop between the two leads.
A warrior and a healer. Two people circling each other, fighting the attraction, letting it build.
"It’s good," I said. "The banter is smart. The pacing is solid."
"But?"
I played for another few minutes. Reached a scene where the healer opens up about her past. It was well written. Touching. Emotional.
"She tells him everything in one scene," I said.
"All of it. Her whole history, laid out perfectly, like she rehearsed it.
" I set the controller down. "That’s not how people share trauma.
Nobody hands you the whole story at once.
They give you a piece. See if you run. If you stay, they give you another piece.
And sometimes they take pieces back because they gave too much too fast and they got scared. "
He went quiet, then looked at me.
"Vulnerability isn’t linear," I said. "It’s messy. Two steps forward, one step back. And the most powerful moment in a love story isn’t when someone finally opens up.
It’s when someone starts to open up and then stops because they’re terrified, and the other person stays anyway. Without pushing or demanding the rest."
"That’s it," he whispered, his gaze intent on me. "That’s what’s missing."
"What?"
"The regression. The taking it back. The fear of being known." He stood so fast the couch shifted and pulled me up with him. His arms wrapped around me and his mouth pressed against the top of my head.
The hug was tight and sudden, so unlike the controlled, measured Jace I knew that I froze for a second before melting into it.
"You’re perfect," he said into my hair. Then he pulled back and kissed my nose.
"That is going to fix the entire arc. I’ve had three narrative designers working on this for months and you solved it in ten minutes while sitting on my couch eating crackers."
"I wasn’t eating crackers."
"You were eating crackers."
I looked down. There were cracker crumbs on my shirt. "Okay, I was eating crackers."
He grinned and kissed me again on my mouth, deep and warm and tasting like the coffee we'd been sharing all morning, and I kissed him back with cracker crumbs still on my shirt and no intention of stopping.
His phone rang.
He ignored it. The phone rang again. He pulled back with an expression that suggested the phone had personally wronged him and his entire bloodline.
"If that’s Miles, I swear to…"
He looked at the screen. It was Miles.
"What."
I couldn’t hear Miles’s side but the tone was unmistakable. Upbeat. Casual. Miles’s default setting.
"No," Jace said. "She’s fine and her battery is dead. She’s here. Why are you calling her personal phone anyway?"
I raised my eyebrows. Jace’s eyes were on me but his expression was aimed at the phone. Jealousy. I’d seen glimpses of it before, at the gala with Christopher Vale, in the office when Miles leaned on my desk. But this was different.
"If you need to reach my assistant," Jace said, his voice clipped, "you have to wait until she’s back to work, and even then it’s not given."
Miles said something. Whatever it was, it made Jace’s eye twitch.
"Fuck off," he said, and hung up.
I laughed. I couldn’t help it. "Did you just hang up on your brother because he called me?"
"I established communication protocols."
"Communication protocols. Sounds like someone is jealous."
He pulled me close. The "protocol" conversation dissolved into his mouth on my neck and his hands under my shirt, and I stopped laughing and started making sounds that had nothing to do with humor.
I don't know how we got from the couch to the bedroom.
The afternoon light had turned everything gold by the time we stilled, tangled in sheets, legs intertwined.
His touch was different now than the first time.
More confident. Less careful. He'd learned the language of my body and was getting fluent.
"Anna." His voice held a bit of hesitation. "I would like, if you’re amenable, for us to be…" He stared at me, "I would like to formally, or informally, however you prefer the structure, for us to…"
I propped myself up on my elbow and watched him struggle. His ears were turning pink. His accent was getting thicker with every failed attempt.
"Are you asking me to be your girlfriend?"
"That’s an oversimplification of what I’m proposing but yes. Essentially. If the term is acceptable."
"The term is acceptable."
"Then yes?"
"Yes, Jace. Yes."
He kissed me. The kiss tasted like coffee and relief. He pulled back and looked at me with an expression so openly happy, so completely without walls, that it almost hurt to look at. This man. This impossible, complicated, glove-wearing, cube-solving, barefoot-in-the-mountains man. Mine.
I was in over my head and I didn’t want to come up for air.
We weren’t moving in together. We weren’t there yet.
The storm cleared the next morning.
I woke to blue sky through the bedroom window, sharp and clean, the mountains washed bright by days of rain. The air smelled like wet pine and cold earth and the beginning of something new.
The roads were passable. Reality was waiting. The office, the city, the world where we were boss and assistant and the tabloid photos were barely buried.
Jace was already dressed. Standing at the window, coffee in hand, his eyes on the road that wound down through the valley toward everything we'd left behind. I came up behind him and rested my chin on his shoulder the way he did to me, and he reached back and found my hip and held me there.
"Ready?" I asked.
He didn’t answer right away. He was staring at the mountains and the sky and the road that would take us back to everything we’d left behind.
"No," he said. "But that hasn’t stopped me before."