19. Jenna
Jenna
“Jenna,” Dominic warns, and holy hell, that voice of his goes right through me. Even when I’m frustrated with him.
“No.” I sit up straighter. “Do not say my name like that. Like the answer is simple because you don’t like it.”
“The answer isn’t simple. The claim is.”
I look toward the window.
Dark glass. My reflection. His face behind mine.
“You were sober,” he says. “We both were.”
“I know.”
“We planned the whole thing together.”
“I know.”
“You said yes. While sober.”
“I know.”
His jaw flexes.
Good. Let him be frustrated. I’m frustrated too. With him. With me. With Tokyo. With the version of myself that stood under soft lights in a city where nobody knew my mother or Teddy Pemberton or the girl outside prom and thought yes was a survivable word.
“Sober isn’t the same as sane,” I say.
Dominic goes still.
“I was drunk on Tokyo.” My voice sounds steadier than I feel.
“On you. On not being the person who knew better. No one was watching. No one knew us. There was a hotel suite and neon and sex good enough to damage brain function, and then there was a night where the whole world felt like it had been built for bad decisions that could somehow turn beautiful if we wanted them hard enough.”
His eyes stay on me, but he doesn’t interrupt.
“I was drunk on the fairy tale,” I say. “Not legally, maybe. But emotionally? Completely.”
He inhales slowly.
“And then I woke up.”
“In my arms.”
“Yes.”
“Wearing my ring.”
My throat closes around the word.
“Yes.”
“And?”
“And reality got in.”
His mouth tightens. “Reality.”
“Your family loves like breathing. Mine loves like a bill that always comes due. You grew up with noise that meant dinner. I grew up with noise that meant someone was about to throw something or leave or apologize badly enough that I had to forgive them before they fell apart.”
“Jen—”
“This weekend made it worse.”
His brow pulls together. “How?”
“Your house swallowed me whole and somehow I liked it. Your father kissed my face. Your mother held me tight. Dustin pranked me like I was—” I shake my head. “You all belong to each other like it’s easy.”
“It isn’t always easy.”
“But it survives.” My voice drops. “That’s the difference. You believe love survives. I believe it takes hostages.”
His face changes.
“We are compatible,” I say, because this is the part I need him to understand. “Ridiculously. Professionally, sexually, conversationally. You make me laugh when I don’t want to. You make me feel things I have spent my whole life avoiding. But compatibility is not the same as sustainability.”
“That sounds like something you’d say in a meeting to avoid admitting the product works.”
I grip the sleeves of his jacket. “We’re too different.”
“No.”
“Dominic.”
“No.” He sits back, but his voice stays calm. “Different is exactly why we work, Jen.”
I laugh once. No humor. “That is a very billionaire answer.”
“It is a very husband answer.”
The word hits the cabin floor between us.
Husband.
Neither of us moves.
“You are a brilliant negotiator, Jenna. So let’s negotiate.”
“Negotiate what?” I say. “Whether Tokyo counts? Whether this weekend magically erased all that’s fundamentally wrong with us?”
“I want sixty days.”
“What?”
“We have eighty days before the annulment window closes,” he says. “Give me sixty of them.”
My pulse kicks.
“Sixty days for what?”
“Real life.”
I stare at him.
“Not Tokyo,” he says. “Not a hotel suite. Not sex and rules and nobody knows. Real life. Chicago. Work. Friends. Movie nights. Bad coffee. My family. Your family, if you want. Dinner when we’re tired.
Mornings when we have somewhere to be. You seeing me when I’m in a shitty mood and not working a room.
Me seeing you when you’re not hiding behind all those rules you’ve built up in your head. ”
“That sounds awful. I like rules.”
“I know you do, sweetheart.”
He leans forward again, and the whole cabin seems to shrink around us.
“Give us sixty days. If day sixty comes and you still want out, I’ll give you out.”
My chest hurts.
“What does that mean?”
“No fight. No punishment. No making you prove you’re scared enough to leave me. I’ll sign whatever ends the marriage without asking me to lie.”
“A divorce?”
His jaw tightens. But he nods.
“Not an annulment?”
“I won’t erase us, Jenna. But I will let you go.”
I’m standing on the edge of something enormous, and Dominic Cruz is offering me sixty days to decide whether to step back or jump.
“What if I say no?”
“Then I still won’t sign the annulment, and you’ll need to fight me in court over it.”
“Dominic.”
“But I’ll still give you a divorce if that’s what you want.”
“You’re very calm for a man trying to negotiate his own marriage.”
“I’m screaming internally.”
I squeeze my hands together in my lap. “So sixty days,” I say.
“Sixty.”
“And if I want out?”
“You get out.”
“And if I don’t?”
Dominic pulls out his wallet and opens it. “Then you stay married to me,” he says, setting two gold bands on the table between us.
My breath catches. “You want us to wear those?”
He picks his up and slides it onto his left ring finger. “Abso-fucking-lutely, I do.”
I’m so stunned I forget to breathe for a second.
He’s not joking. Gone is the smirk, the practiced debater. He’s looking at me like a man who means the next sixty years, not sixty days.
I stare at my ring, gold and shining.
“You understand that if I wear this, everyone will know?”
“Yes.”
“So public disclosure is part of your proposal.”
“Being honest is part of it.” He holds my gaze. “But I’m asking, Jen. The choice is yours.”
I press my lips together. The cocktail of panic and longing that’s been fermenting in my chest for the last forty-eight hours begins to spiral so fast I nearly laugh. “You’re not worried about what people will say?”
“Not even a little. Are you?”
“Yes,” I say honestly, because lying is for people who don’t already have lawyers involved.
He smiles, and it warms the space. “Would it help if I told you the only opinions that matter here are ours?”
“No.”
“So you admit you’re afraid of everyone knowing you married me,” he says, devil-smooth.
“That’s not what I said.”
“It’s what I heard, Pemberton.”
“Your hearing is conveniently selective.”
“I’m only selectively hearing the truth. Which is that you give a shit.”
“Of course I give a shit,” I hiss, too sharp, and now I’ve played myself because the admission slides its way into the air between us, unfixable.
“I care what people think, I always have. Why do you think I wear suits and control the narrative and never let anyone see me less than three percent away from perfect? Life is a game, Dominic. If you lose track of appearances, you just lose.”
He doesn’t say anything for a minute. The drone of the jet fills up the whole world, relentless.
I pick at the inside of his jacket sleeve, forcing the words back in, but he keeps looking at me, willing me toward something bigger and scarier than a gold ring or a new name or even sixty days of his undivided wanting.
It takes two tries to find my voice, and when I do, it’s soft and battery-acid true.
“For three years, you’ve had this—” I flick a hand between us, the ring, the air, my whole chest—“you’ve had this thing for me and you made it into a running joke.
Except the joke is that it was never one.
Everyone thought it was harmless, you chasing the one woman in the building who can walk away from your charm with her dignity and paperwork intact.
And for three years I built myself a fortress out of my indifference.
Because if people saw how much I wanted, how easily I could be ruined—” my voice breaks a little, but I push through—“they’d never let me up from under it. ”
He stands. Walks the two steps to where I’m sitting and kneels down in front of me, so we’re eye-level, and gently peels my hands apart until I have to look at him.
Goddamn this man for always knowing how to get around my defenses.
“Nobody is ruining you, Jenna,” he says quietly. “Least of all me. But I am going to spend every one of those sixty days proving that the rest of your life would be better with me in it.”
I blink fast, try to laugh it off, but my breath stutters instead. He traces one thumb along the inside of my wrist, gentle and almost absent, like he needs to memorize the vein pattern before he can say what comes next.
“You said you care what people think. So think about this: what if the people who matter see you choosing what you want, and all it does is make you more impossible to fuck with? What if the world doesn’t fall down, and you get to be happy and still leave them terrified?”
I want to tell him that isn’t how it works. Wanting people makes you vulnerable. Letting everyone see it gives them something to laugh about when it ends.
But what if it doesn’t make me ridiculous? What if it only ends the running joke?
“You’re really asking me to do this,” I whisper. Wear the ring. Walk into Mercer. Let our friends see exactly how badly I want the man they watched me turn down for three years.
Dominic’s face softens. “I’m asking you to choose what you want where people can see it.” His hand stays warm around my wrist. “But I’m not going to make you.”
The ring is bright on the table, simple and deliberate, and I realize my thumb is already tracing the circle of it like I can’t help myself.
Want is terrifying. Want is everything they tell you to never admit, not if you don’t want it used against you.
But look at me now. Want all over my face, my nerves stripped bare.
I take a deep breath and slip it on. It’s heavier than I remember, and the fit is still perfect. He watches me do it, and when the gold closes around my finger, his whole body unclenches with a satisfaction that I feel in my own bones.
“There,” I tell him, voice barely steady but still mine. “You win.”
His eyes flash. “No, Pemberton. We win.”
I reach out and touch the side of his face.
Then he’s kissing me.