46. Dominic #2
“The speech. Same thing. You stood up in front of two hundred people and told our story without ever asking me if I wanted it told. It was full of love and it flayed me alive, and you didn’t know it would, because you decided what I needed instead of asking.
That’s the pattern. That’s the whole pattern—the gala, my mother, the merger.
You keep trying to hand me finished products, Dominic.
Paid in full, fixed in the dark, ribbon on top.
” She steps closer. The shop light catches her face, and her eyes are wet and absolutely unwavering.
“And I don’t want finished products. I want the man.
I want to be in the room where things get decided about my own life.
I want the drafts, the bad math, the blueprints—I want you to reach for the wrench and then hand it to me so we fix the thing together. That’s the marriage I’ll stay for.”
The silence stretches between us, heavy and absolute, save for the faint hum of the fluorescent lights overhead. I stare at her, my lungs locked, feeling the sheer, terrifying weight of everything she just said settle into the concrete floor.
She’s right. God, she’s completely right.
I’ve spent my entire life being the architect.
The guy with the answers, the guy who buys the building, structures the deal, and hands over the keys so no one ever has to see him sweat.
I thought that was my value. I thought that was the only way I was worth keeping around.
But she doesn’t want the building. She wants the dirt.
I look down at my hands. They’re coated in black grease and engine oil, shaking slightly from adrenaline and exhaustion. I drop the shop rag onto the workbench. I don’t try to wipe them clean again. For the first time in my life, I don’t try to manage the optics.
“I’m sorry,” I say, the words scraping out of my throat, completely stripped of their usual polish.
“I thought loving you meant bringing you the answer. I didn’t understand that keeping you out of the work meant keeping you out of the marriage too.
” My throat tightens. “I just . . . I don’t have a blueprint for doing it differently.
If I’m not solving the problem, I don’t know what my role in the room is. ”
She closes the last foot of distance between us. She doesn’t flinch at the grime on my skin or the chaos of the workshop. She stops so close I can feel the heat radiating from her beneath the fleece.
“Your role is to be my husband,” she says softly, her eyes locking onto mine with an intensity that steals the remaining oxygen from my lungs. “Just Dominic. Not the savior. Not the strategist. Just the man who stands next to me while we figure it out together.”
My chest heaves. A dangerous, stinging pressure builds behind my eyes. I want to touch her so badly it feels like a physical injury. But I ball my hands at my sides.
“I love you, Dominic,” she whispers, and it hits so hard the backs of my eyes sting and I have to look away.
She doesn’t let me. She places her hand on the side of my face and forces me to look her in the eye.
“I’ve loved you since before Tokyo, if I’m being honest with myself.
And I should have believed you sooner—I spent our whole marriage waiting for the punchline, and you spent it proving there wasn’t one, and I convicted you anyway on one bad night because being wrong about you was safer than being right.
That’s mine. I own it.” Her nails scrape through my overgrown scruff.
“But for this to work—for me to stay—you have to treat me like a partner. Not a prize, not a project, not a rescue. A partner. It’s when we’re best, Dominic—every good thing we’ve ever done, we did side by side.
So that’s the term sheet. One clause. Partners. ”
I lean into her palm. The contrast of her clean, soft skin against my rough, grease-stained jaw is a physical shock. My eyes flutter shut for a fraction of a second, just long enough to memorize the exact pressure of her fingers.
“Partners,” I repeat, the word tasting like oxygen after nearly two weeks underwater. “I don’t know how to do it perfectly, Jenna. I’m gonna fuck it up. I’m going to see a problem and my first instinct will always be to throw myself in front of it before it reaches you.”
“I know,” she says, her thumb stroking my cheekbone. “And my first instinct will be to build a spreadsheet proving why you shouldn’t. We’ll fight about it.”
“We’ll fight about it,” I agree, the corners of my mouth finally twitching upward.
“And you’ll learn to stop and ask before acting.”
A tear streaks from my eye. “I will.”
“And I’ll learn to speak up instead of shutting down.”
“OK.” The engine inside my chest turns over, roaring back to life. I can’t take it anymore. I need to hold my wife.
I wrap my hands around her waist, pulling her flush against me. She goes up on her tiptoes, her arms sliding around my neck, and the moment our lips meet, the entire garage spins out of focus.
It’s not a gentle kiss. It’s a collision.
It’s ten days of starvation, of agonizing regret and meticulous, self-inflicted ruin, completely obliterated by the taste of her.
She opens her mouth for me, demanding and desperate, her fingers threading into my hair.
I groan, walking her backward until her spine hits the edge of the rolling tool chest.
I break the kiss only when my lungs absolutely demand it, resting my forehead against hers. We’re both panting, breathing each other’s air in the dim light of the garage.
“Fuck, I missed you, Jen.” My hands are still gripping her waist, smudging engine grease over the gray fleece, but she doesn’t care.
“I missed you too.” She reaches blindly behind her, her fingers grazing the edge of the manila folder she tossed on the tool chest.
She pulls the paperwork from inside it, and with a swift, decisive motion, she rips the annulment papers cleanly in half. Then she stacks the halves and tears them again, tossing the shredded legal ruin of our worst days onto the concrete floor.
My chest expands, the last knot of tension unspooling from my spine.
Before I can say a word, Jenna reaches over to her right hand. She slides the two heavy metal bands—the simple gold one from Tokyo and the custom ring I sent to Queens—off her middle finger. She holds them out to me, the gold catching the harsh fluorescent shop light.
“Since we’re staying married,” she says, a soft smile breaking through her exhausted features, “you’ll be needing these—Mr. Pemberton-Cruz.”
A grin splits my face, wide and filled with relief. I look from the rings in her palm up to her eyes, my heart hammering a wild, disbelieving rhythm. “You decided on a name?”
“Yes,” she says, her gaze fiercely locked on mine. “It’s the only logical structure.”
“Pemberton-Cruz it is,” I say.
I hold out my hand and she slides the rings back onto my left ring finger where they belong. The warm metal settles against my skin. Home.
“I love you, Jenna.”
“I love you too, Dominic.”
I crush my mouth to hers again. The kiss is deeper this time, a promise and a homecoming all at once. I slide my arms under her thighs and hoist her up, carrying her toward the stairs.