3. Jade
JADE
The house goes quiet around eleven.
I hear Killian's door close first—not slammed, just shut with that deliberate weight—and then after a long pause, Cormac's door further down the hall. Lower in the frame, more final. The sound a door makes when the person behind it is completely done with the evening.
I lie in the dark and look at the ceiling.
The guest room feels smaller than I remember, or maybe I just feel bigger in it—too much wine, too much dinner, too much of this house sitting somewhere in my chest and not moving.
There's a water stain near the window I never noticed before, shaped like Florida.
I've been staring at it for going on forty minutes, which tells you everything you need to know about how my plan to be back on the highway by eight is going.
My boxes are still in the corner, both of them sealed, labeled in my handwriting.
Jade—kitchen. Jade—books. I wrote neatly because I was crying when I packed them, and crying makes me very precise about stupid things.
I sealed them on a Sunday in March and told myself it was just packing.
I kept telling myself that until the tape was smooth and the boxes were stacked.
Then I walked out of the apartment I used to share with Ryan without looking back.
I came here for twenty minutes tonight. I have one change of clothes in a bag in my car for the drive home.
I cannot sleep.
Around midnight I hear movement downstairs.
It's Ryan—I can tell by how careful he's being, which is to say very careful, which is to say extremely loud.
There is nothing louder than a grown man trying not to make noise in a house he knows by heart.
I lie there for a minute listening to it and then I get up, because I'm not sleeping and there's no version of tonight where I pretend his being down there isn't my problem too.
The kitchen light is on low. Ryan's at the counter with his back to me, both hands around a mug that definitely isn't hot anymore, just standing there. He hears me on the stairs and his shoulders shift, but he doesn't turn around right away.
There's something almost funny about it. He's been coming into this kitchen his whole life and here he is at midnight doing a very committed impression of someone who just happened to want tea.
"Hey," I say.
"Hey." He turns. He looks tired—not because of the hour, but in the way he's been looking tired since February, that eight-month-running tired that lives behind his eyes now.
He puts the mug down, crosses his arms, leans against the counter.
He looks at me the way he used to look at me in the beginning, before everything between us went quiet.
Like I'm something he's trying to figure out how to hold without breaking.
I know that look. I fell for it the first time.
"Couldn't sleep?" he says.
"You?"
He glances at the mug. "Made some tea."
It's chamomile. The man hates chamomile—I know because we once had an entire argument about it in a grocery store.
He was genuinely offended by chamomile on principle, convinced it tasted like someone had given up on the concept of flavor and decided to sell the giving-up.
I laughed at him for three full minutes. He did not think it was funny.
I don't say anything about the chamomile.
He's got something he wants to tell me—it's right there in how carefully he's avoiding my eyes, the set of his jaw like he's bracing something. He looks at the floor. Then at my face. His mouth opens.
"Jade—"
"Ryan." I keep my voice quiet, so it's clear I'm not angry about it. "I know. You don't have to."
He understands what that means. The thing that happened in February is in this kitchen whether we name it or not, and there's no version of a midnight conversation that changes what tonight is.
He picks up the chamomile tea and tips it carefully down the sink. Rinses the mug. Sets it in the drying rack with a small deliberate click. Then he turns and gives me one more look—the same look, one last attempt—like something I could say might still give him somewhere to put what he's carrying.
I don't have anything to give him.
"Go to bed," I say.
"Yeah." He breathes out. "Okay."
He passes me on his way to the hall. I get a brief hit of him—soap, something woodsy, the Ryan smell I spent two years falling asleep next to. The body that gave him two years remembers it. I am angry that it does. He keeps walking.
I hear him on the stairs. His weight on each step, and then a pause at the creaky board before he steps over it.
He remembered.
I stand in the empty kitchen for a while.
The counters are clean, the wine glasses washed and in the rack, and I didn't see Cormac do it but I know it was him—the way everything in this kitchen gets handled, without announcement and without drama.
Done and put away. I can still smell the braise from earlier, something deep and wine-dark sitting low in the air.
I stand there for longer than I need to before I turn off the light and go back up.
Killian is in the hall.
He's coming out of the bathroom, fresh from the shower, hair damp, the white shirt he's pulled on clinging to his shoulders and chest where the water from his hair has soaked through.
The shirt is loose at the bottom. His boxers are slung low on his hips.
He is barefoot on the runner. He smells like soap and warm skin, clean and direct.
No cologne. No aftershave. Nothing between me and his skin.
He sees me at the top of the stairs.
I see him.
Neither of us moves for a second too long. The damp hair, the cling of the shirt over his chest, the line of him from his throat to the waistband of his boxers—I look at all of it before I can stop. He sees me looking. His mouth does something small at one corner. He doesn't say it.
My mouth goes dry.
"Killian," I say, very quietly.
"Jade."
He doesn't step aside. I have to angle past him in the hall. My arm brushes the damp cotton of his shirt as I go, and I get a fuller hit of him—soap, skin, the heat of him just out of the shower. He stays exactly where he is.
I make it to my door. I do not look back.
I hear his bathroom light click off behind me. Then his door, down the hall.
I still can't sleep.
The guest room is dark except for the edge of moonlight through the curtains, and I'm lying on my back with my hands folded on my stomach like a corpse laid out for a viewing.
Except a corpse would not have a pulse this loud.
A corpse would not have its thighs pressed together.
A corpse would not still be wet from a finger brush at a kitchen sink.
A corpse would not still be feeling Killian's knuckles on the back of her hand from when he held out the bread.
There are three men in this house, all somewhere just down the hall, and the quiet feels expectant in a way empty quiet never does—like something is being held.
Like everyone in this house is waiting for something to happen.
Or maybe that's just me and my very real, very embarrassing situation projecting itself onto architecture.
I close my eyes, and my brain takes me somewhere else.
It takes me to Cara's kitchen table, sometime in June.
Sophie's birthday had started as an actual party and turned into the four of us sitting around drinking wine, which is everyone's preference anyway—me, Cara, Leigh, Sophie.
Cara had her feet up on the chair across from her and Leigh kept refilling everyone's glasses without asking, and the whole mood had gone warm and easy and a little confessional, the way it gets when you have nowhere else to be and no one you'd rather be with.
We were two bottles in, maybe starting a third, when everyone started talking about their boyfriends. The sex they were having.
Cara had been seeing the new one for two months at that point—the one she'd later move in with, though we didn't know that yet.
She said it with the honesty of someone slightly too drunk and tired of performing: "The first time he finished inside me I genuinely didn't know what to do with myself. " She laughed and covered her face.
"Oh god," Leigh said immediately. "Same."
"Why does it feel like that?" Sophie said.
And then they were all talking at once—the trust of it, the vulnerability of it, the way it felt different from all the times men had carefully, considerately, pointedly not.
Cara said she'd actually cried afterward and didn't know why, except that she'd been with men for years who felt like they had one foot out the door even when they were inside her, and then this one just stayed.
He communicated the whole time—he made noise, he talked, he told her what was happening and what he wanted.
And then he gave it to her and he stayed.
I laughed in all the right places. I said God and I know and exactly.
I held my wine glass in both hands and I didn't say: Ryan wears a condom every single time.
Two years, every time. With the condom I genuinely couldn't feel when he finished—I'd have to catch it from his breathing, from some shift in his body, some tell.
Sometimes I caught it. Sometimes I'd lie there in the aftermath trying to reconstruct the last sixty seconds like a detective, completely unsure whether it was over.
Sometimes he'd pull out and take the condom off and that was how I'd know. Him tying it off, rolling away.
And sometimes I had to ask.
"Did you?—?"
"Yeah." Already reaching for his phone.
He was so quiet. That was the other thing, the thing underneath the thing.
No dirty talk, barely a sound, almost no words during.
I used to think I was doing something wrong—being too much, being too loud.
I stopped thinking that eventually. I started listening.
Lying in the dark trying to figure out from a half-stifled exhale whether we were done.