49. Jae #3
The words land in the dark between us with a weight that feels physical.
Her body goes rigid against mine—not the controlled rigidity of her professional composure, but something deeper, something that lives in the muscle and bone, the particular freeze of an animal that has just heard a sound it cannot process.
Then she moves.
She pushes herself upright, knees digging into the mattress on either side of my hips, and her hands find my face with a desperation I have never seen from her—never, not in the library, not in bed, not in any of the moments where I’ve watched her dismantle herself piece by piece and rebuild into something softer.
Her thumbs press into my cheekbones hard enough to hurt, and her eyes are wide and wild and utterly, catastrophically unguarded.
“No.” The word comes out sharp, fractured, nothing like the measured, melodic cadence she uses in lecture halls or the clipped precision of The Pink Precision.
This is raw. This is the woman underneath both of them, and she is terrified.
“No, Jae, we will find another way. I don’t care about the consequences.
I don’t care about the board or the replacement or any of it.
I will kill every single person who comes after us, I do not give a fuck anymore—”
“Jagiya.” I catch her wrists, not pulling them away, just holding. Steadying. “We’ve both done the math. You know there isn’t another way.”
“There is always another way.”
“Not this time.”
“I won’t do it.”
“You don’t have a choice.”
“I have always had a choice.” Her voice cracks on the last word, and something in my chest splinters with it. “I chose you. I chose you over the contract, over the money, over everything—”
“And I’m choosing you.” My hands slide from her wrists to her shoulders, then to her face, cupping her jaw the way I’ve cupped it a hundred times before, my thumbs brushing the wet tracks I didn’t notice forming on her cheeks until now. “That’s what this is. My choice. Not yours. Mine.”
She is shaking.
Full-body tremors that start at her shoulders and work their way down to her hands where they grip my forearms, her nails digging half-moons into my skin that I will find tomorrow and press my fingertips to and remember this moment by.
“I can’t,” she whispers. “Jae, I can’t—”
“You can.” I pull her to me. One arm around her waist, the other hand cradling the back of her head, fingers tangled in the damp roots of her hair.
She collapses against my chest like something whose architecture has given out, and the sob that tears out of her is the kind that comes from somewhere deeper than sound—a raw, broken thing that shakes through both of us and leaves the air thin in its wake.
I just hold her.
One hand strokes her hair, slow and steady, the rhythm I’ve been using since the first night she fell asleep in my bed and I lay awake staring at the ceiling wondering what the hell I was doing.
The other arm is tight around her waist, anchoring her to me while she comes apart in increments I can feel against my skin—each shudder, each hitch of breath, each fractured sound that she tries to swallow and fails.
“There’s nothing to apologize for,” I murmur against her hair. “You didn’t choose this any more than I did. The only thing I would change is the part where you had to carry it alone for so long.”
She fists her hands in my shirt. Her face is pressed into the hollow of my neck, her breath hot and damp against my collarbone, and I can feel the exact moment when the anger runs out and leaves only the grief—a quieter, deeper thing that has no shape and no sound and simply is, a weight settling into the space between her ribs that I can feel through the fabric of my t-shirt.
Eventually, she goes still against my chest. Not the rigid, calculated stillness of before.
Something smaller. Something broken open and reassembled into a shape I’ve never seen before—vulnerable in a way that has nothing to do with nakedness and everything to do with the particular, devastating courage it takes to let someone hold you while you fall apart.
I lie awake long after her breathing evens out.
Her weight against me is warm and solid and entirely, catastrophically real—the rise and fall of her ribs under my palm, the particular scent of her shampoo lingering in the sheets, the small, unconscious sound she makes in her sleep when she shifts against me.
The shape of my own ending is already forming in my head.
Not the details—those will come later, when we plan it properly, when the mechanics require the same meticulous attention that Amiyah brings to everything she does.
But the broader architecture of it. The choice.
The fact that for the first time in my life, I am not running from something. I am running toward it. Toward her.
She is worth every cent of it. The thought arrives not as a revelation but as a confirmation—something I’ve known since the night she tased me with a bedazzled compact and then looked at me with eyes that held nothing but calculation and want in equal measure, and I decided, against every rational instinct I possess, that I would rather be electrocuted by this woman than spared by anyone else.
She has always been worth it.