17. Stay
Chapter seventeen
Stay
Lila mentioned it casually, like it was nothing.
"Oh, someone was asking about you yesterday." She was sorting fabric swatches, not looking at me. "Tall guy. Handsome, kind of intense. Said he was a friend."
Everything in me went still.
My hands stopped moving. My breath stopped coming. For a moment, the world narrowed to a single point of icy terror.
"What did he want?"
"Just asked if I knew you. If you worked here." Lila looked up, finally noticing my expression. "Serena? What's wrong?"
"What did he look like exactly?"
"Dark hair. Nice suit. Really focused, you know? Like he was paying attention to everything." She frowned. "Is everything okay?"
"Did he leave a name?"
"No. I asked, but he said he'd find you himself." Her frown deepened. "Serena, you've gone white. What's going on?"
I made myself breathe. One, two, three. Pushed through the panic, found my voice.
"If he comes back," I said, and my voice was steadier than I felt, "don't tell him anything. Don't confirm that I work here. Don't—" I stopped. "Just don't talk to him."
"Who is he?"
"Someone I used to know. Someone I don't want to know anymore."
Understanding dawned in Lila's eyes, not the full picture, but enough. She reached out and squeezed my hand.
"Got it," she said simply. "He won't get anything from me."
I made it home on autopilot.
The familiar route, design studio to Main Street to the quiet residential roads to Thornwood Drive, passed in a blur. My body moved while my mind spiraled, caught in the grip of a fear I thought I'd left behind.
He's here. He's actually here.
All the blocked numbers. The new town. The anonymity. And he'd walked through it all like it was tissue paper.
Marcus had found me.
I kept walking. I counted my footsteps because it was something to count.
The magnolia trees along the road blurred in my peripheral vision; all that golden afternoon light that I'd been loving was doing nothing now but making everything feel too exposed, too visible.
I wanted walls. I wanted dark. I wanted to be something that didn't cast a shadow.
Old instinct. Three years old, at least.
I recognized it. That didn't make it easier to stop.
I was sitting on my porch, shaking, when Jasper found me.
He took one look at my face and sat down beside me, close enough that our shoulders touched but not so close that I felt trapped. He didn't say anything. Didn't ask questions. Just sat with me, steady and present, while I tried to remember how to be okay.
The sun was finishing its descent behind the treeline, pulling the gold out of the sky and leaving something cooler, blue-edged.
The preserve was going dark. Below, in the main house, someone was moving around in the kitchen, I could hear the low percussion of cabinet doors, the muffled sound of water running.
The normalcy of it helped, distantly, the way knowing a light is on in the next room helps when you're afraid of the dark.
"He's here," I said finally. My voice sounded strange, far away. "My ex. He came to the studio. He's looking for me."
Jasper didn't react. Didn't flinch, didn't exclaim, didn't do anything to add to the chaos in my head. He just nodded slowly, absorbing the information.
"Tell me about him," he said.
So I did.
Not everything; I couldn't bring myself to say everything, but enough.
The controlling behavior, the jealousy, the way he'd made my world smaller until I was living in a prison of his design.
The texts that never stopped, the blocked numbers that kept multiplying, the certainty that he was always watching, always waiting.
The rose on my pillow that had finally made me run… again.
Jasper listened without interrupting. When I finished, his face had gone hard, all the warmth stripped away.
"Okay," he said. His voice was calm, controlled, but I could hear something dangerous underneath. "Here's what we're going to do."
"We?"
"You're not alone in this. Not anymore." He met my eyes, and in his gaze was a fierce protectiveness that made my throat tight. "My brothers and I, we have resources. Connections. Ways of handling people who don't understand the word 'no.'
"I don't want you to—"
"I know you don't want to need help. I know you've been handling this alone for a long time. But you're not alone anymore, Serena." He reached out, took my hand. His fingers were warm around mine. "Let us help. Please."
I should have said no. Should have protected my independence, maintained my boundaries, continued fighting my battles alone.
Instead, I said: "Okay."
Jasper stayed until the light was gone. He didn't push.
Didn't make promises he couldn't keep or say things like he won't get near you in the hollow, blustery way some people had, as if certainty was protective in itself.
He just sat with me until I stopped shaking, and then he made me a cup of tea I didn't ask for, and set it on the rail beside me without comment.
Eventually, he said he'd be downstairs if I needed anything.
He touched my hair, briefly, before he left. Not romantic, exactly. More like someone checking to confirm I was still real.
"Lock your door," he said.
"Yeah, okay" I said even as I hated the feeling of moving backwards, of losing my newfound freedom and strength.
He turned to go, and I watched him move toward the stairs. I watched the way he held himself, all that warmth held tight, the careful restraint of a man who'd just listened to something terrible and swallowed his rage to give me what I needed instead.
And something broke loose in me. Not the fear, that was still there, a cold wire through my chest. But something alongside it. Something that recognized what Jasper had just done, the particular courage of sitting still, swallowing his rage, when everything in him wanted to fight, and wanted…
I wanted.
It was that simple, and that complicated.
"Jasper."
He stopped at the top of the stairs. Turned back. The porch light caught the line of his jaw, the question in his eyes.
"Stay," I said.
Not a question. Not a request. Something rawer than both.
He didn't move for a beat. Two. I watched him wrestle with something, with the same carefulness he'd shown all evening, the determination not to take advantage of a bad day.
"Serena," his voice was rough. "I… You—"
"I know." I stood up. The tea was going cold on the railing, and I didn't care.
"I know the difference between wanting something and needing something, and I know you know it too.
" I stepped toward him. "This isn't about Marcus.
This isn't about being afraid, although I admit I don’t want to be alone.
" Another step. Close enough now to see the way his breathing had changed.
"But this is about the fact that I've wanted to touch you for weeks, and I'm tired of pretending that's not true. "
His eyes went dark. Not dangerous, not the way Marcus's eyes had gone dark, calculating and possessive. This was different. This was heat, hunger, and the careful, almost painful restraint of a man waiting for permission he'd already been given.
"Say it again," he said.
"Stay… please."
He closed the distance between us.
His hands found my waist first, tentative, reading me, giving me every chance to change my mind. When I didn't, when I pressed closer instead, something shifted in him. Permission registered. His grip tightened, pulling me flush against his body, and the sound I made was not something I'd planned.
He was warm. That was the first thing, impossibly, almost feverishly warm, heat radiating through his shirt and into my palms where I'd pressed them flat against his chest. I could feel his heart under my right hand, hammering, and the knowledge that he was this undone from standing close to me was its own kind of power.
I had been a good hot minute since I'd wanted someone's hands on me. It had been at least a couple years since touch meant anything other than threat.
Jasper's hands meant something else entirely.
He kissed me on the stairs. Or I kissed him, the distinction blurred because we were both moving, both reaching, and when our mouths met, it was not gentle.
There was nothing polite about it. I tasted tea…
and want… and something darker, something that had been building through all those careful conversations and manufactured excuses to be near me.
I opened my mouth, let him in and felt the groan that moved through his chest like a physical thing, resonant, real.
He pressed me back against the railing, and I went willingly. His thigh slid between mine, pressure and heat in exactly the right place, and my hips rolled against him before my brain caught up. His hands moved up my sides, thumbs tracing the curve beneath my breasts, asking a question.
"Yes," I said against his mouth. "God, yes."
He made a sound, low, strained, almost wounded, and his hands closed over my breasts through the thin cotton of my shirt, and I arched into the pressure of it, into the way his palms fit against me like he'd been thinking about this, mapping it out, imagining exactly how it would feel.
The stairs were narrow. Ridiculous place for this. I didn't care.
"Inside," Jasper said, and his voice had dropped into a register I'd never heard from him, stripped of charm, stripped of ease, down to something fundamental. "Serena. Let me take you inside."
I pulled him through my door by the front of his shirt.
We didn't make it far. The hallway, just a few steps past the threshold, was as far as we got before his hands were under my shirt and lifting, and I raised my arms and let the flimsy material flutter to the floor.
I felt the cool air and then his mouth, hot and open, moving down my throat to my collarbone to the swell of my breast above my bra.
His teeth grazed me there, light, questioning, and I fisted my hands in his hair and held him against me.
"More," I said. "Don't be careful."