Jade
Phoenix comes home at noon. I hear his car in the drive and then the front door and then his footsteps down the hall, and I know before he appears in the kitchen doorway that something is different.
He's still in his jacket but he's loosened his tie and his jaw is set differently, the tension sitting lower, closer to his throat than his temples.
He looks like a man who sat in a driveway for fifteen minutes and came home still holding on to something.
He looks at me. At the laptop open on the table in front of me, the blank document I've been staring at for two hours. He crosses the kitchen, closes the laptop with one hand, and holds out the other.
I take it.
He leads me down the hall to the bathroom without saying anything. I don't ask. The tile is cold under my feet and the room smells like his soap from this morning and he reaches into the shower and turns it on and then turns to me and his hands find the hem of my shirt.
We undress each other without any words, just hands and the rustle of fabric and the quiet of a room filling with steam. He's watching me as he does it, not managing the pace. Just watching me like a man who needs to hold onto something.
The water is too hot, but neither of us adjusts it.
He pulls me under and I feel it across my shoulders and down my back, that sharp edge between heat and pain, and his hands are already in my hair and his mouth is on my throat and I press my palms flat against his chest and feel his heart going fast under my fingers.
His hands move without their usual precision.
He's not building toward anything, not reading my responses to adjust his.
He's just here, urgent without a plan, wanting without managing it, and I feel the difference in every place he touches me.
Whatever his father said in that study is still in him and he hasn't decided what to do with it yet and so, instead, he's here, his forehead against my collarbone, breathing me in like I'm the thing keeping him tethered.
I tilt his face up to mine and kiss him and he makes a sound low in his chest.
His hands slide down my back and grip my hips and the hot water runs down both of us and I stop thinking about what happened in the study or what happens next or any of the things I've been holding onto since the BBQ.
There is just the heat of him and the tile under my feet and his mouth finding mine again, urgent.
He presses me back against the wall. The tile is startling against my shoulders, cold against the heat of everything else, and I gasp and his hands are already everywhere, learning me again like something he was afraid he might lose.
I pull at his shoulders, his hair, trying to get closer, and he obliges, closing every last inch of distance until there's nothing between us but the water and the steam and the sound of his breathing.
I wrap my leg around him and he understands immediately, lifting me, and I feel the full weight of him solid against me before he slides home and we both go still for a moment.
His forehead drops to mine. My fingers curl into his shoulders hard enough to leave marks.
Then he starts to move.
Not slow, not the version of him that builds things in stages.
This is urgent and honest. I give him everything he asks for and take everything back.
The hot water runs down our faces and I taste salt and steam on his lips when I kiss him and he says my name once, quiet, like a thing he needed to say out loud.
The orgasm hits me hard and fast and I hear myself make a sound I couldn't suppress if I tried, my whole body going tight around him, and he follows thirty seconds later with his face buried in my neck and his hands gripping me hard.
We stay there for a long time.
The water starts to cool. Neither of us moves. His arms are still around me, his forehead against mine now, both of us just breathing. The bathroom has gone fully steamed, the mirror invisible, the air thick and warm and close.
"Your father knew about James," I say. "Before you brought me home."
It’s not a question.
He pulls back to look at me. His eyes are very dark in the steam, his hair wet against his forehead. "He told you?”
“Olive did."
He looks at me for a long moment. The water is definitely cooler now, sliding down our shoulders with less heat behind it. "What else did Olive tell you?”
"Everything she knew." I hold his gaze. "Hawaii. My mom. The hospital. What James didn't do." A pause. "She told me Nicholas knew about the pregnancy. That he knew my mom raised me alone and James never knew I existed."
Phoenix is quiet. His hands are still on my waist, thumbs against my hip bones, grip loose now but not gone.
"When did she tell you this."
"The kitchen lunch. Five days ago."
"Before you told me."
"Yes." I don't apologize for it. He understands. He went to his father before he told me things too — it's how we're the same, needing to understand something before we hand it over. "I needed to know what I was holding first."
He nods, once. His eyes go to the middle distance for half a second.
"What did he say," I ask. "Your father. This morning."
He looks at the wall past my shoulder. The water is cold now, genuinely cold, raising goosebumps on my arms, and still neither of us moves to turn it off. "He confirmed it. He looks into everyone. He found out who you were before I brought you home."
I put my hand against his face. His cheek is warm despite the cold water, and he turns into my palm fractionally, a small involuntary movement, before he catches it.
"Do you believe him?” I ask. "About the BBQ. That it was accidental?”
He thinks about this, the real version. "Yes," he says finally. "He doesn't gamble on variables he can't control. If he'd planned it, he'd have made sure you were there from the start.”
I lower my hand from his face. "I've been thinking about something since the BBQ. Whether I walked into this life or was walked into it." I pause. "I keep landing on the same thing."
“What?"
"I stayed. Whatever brought me here, I stayed because I wanted to."
He looks at me for a long moment. The shower is fully cold now, water running down our backs in thin streams, and I'm shivering and he has to be too but he doesn't move.
Then he reaches past me and turns it off.
The silence that follows is different from the silence before. Just two people standing in a cold shower with the steam slowly clearing and the mirror starting to show itself again at the edges.
He steps out and pulls a towel from the rack and wraps it around me. I watch him do it. He smooths the towel across my shoulders before he reaches for his own. His hands are steady.
"I need to talk to James," he says.
"I know."
"Not yet." He looks up. "But eventually."
"Okay."
He crosses to me and hooks two fingers under my chin and tips my face up and looks at me with those dark eyes that I have spent months learning to read.
"The rest I leave to you," he says quietly. His father's words, but different in his mouth. Not a deflection.
I cover his hand with mine.
The mirror is almost clear now, our reflections assembling themselves out of the steam, two people standing close in a bright cold bathroom with their hair wet and everything they've been holding onto for the past week still present.