Chapter 6
A brEATH OF FRESH AIR
“Wait, wait, wait—go back to the part where security walked him out.”
“Liv, I’ve told you three times.”
“And I need a fourth.” She jabs a chopstick at me across the kitchen table, a piece of orange chicken dangling from the end. “Because it keeps getting better. His face, Mara. Describe his face again.”
I laugh—a real one, loose and ridiculous, starting somewhere deep in my belly and spilling out before I can catch it. Liv grins and bites the chicken off her chopstick and points the bare end at me like a conductor’s baton.
“He buttoned his jacket,” I say. “On the way out. Like—automatically. His hands just did it while the rest of him was falling apart.”
“Stop.” Liv slaps the table. The wine glasses jump. “That is the most pathetic, beautiful detail I have ever heard and I need it tattooed on my body.”
“You’re a terrible person.”
“I’m your terrible person. There’s a difference.
” She pours more wine into my glass—Barefoot Chardonnay, the official vintage of our two-woman crime spree—and the sound of it glugging out of the bottle is the most normal, beautiful thing in the world.
“I still can’t believe you sat in that chair and didn’t say a single word. ”
“I didn’t need to.”
“No, you didn’t. You just sat there looking like a goddamn weapon while his managing partner ended his career.” She lifts her glass. “To you. To this kitchen table. To the worst bottle of wine ever made.”
I clink my glass against hers and drink, and the wine is terrible and warm and exactly right.
Tabitha is at my mother’s for the night.
The takeout containers are scattered across the table like debris from a celebration nobody planned.
And the knot that’s lived between my shoulder blades since the night Liv turned her phone screen toward me on this couch—the one that tightened every time Jermaine walked through the door, every time I performed normal across the dinner table, every time I lay in the dark on my side of the California king and stared at the ceiling—that knot is loosening.
Not gone. But looser. Like a fist slowly opening.
“Can I say something?” Liv sets down her glass. Her face shifts—still warm, but focused. Liv with a point.
“You’re going to whether I say yes or not.”
“The dress.”
I look down. Wine red. Fitted through the waist. A soft jersey knit I pulled off a rack at Target three days ago while picking up Tabitha’s prescription—not planned, not calculated, not the armor I’ve been wearing for weeks.
I stopped because the color caught me. Because I reached for it without thinking and held it against my body in the fluorescent light of the women’s section and thought yes. This.
Not black. The first thing I’ve bought in five years that isn’t black.
“It was twenty-eight dollars,” I say.
“I don’t care if it was free.” Liv leans forward, elbows on the table. “You bought a dress that has color, Mara. You put it on to eat orange chicken with me on a Tuesday night. You look different.”
My throat tightens. Not the painful kind—the kind that happens when someone sees the thing you’ve been quietly becoming before you’ve finished becoming it.
“I feel different,” I say.
Liv holds my gaze. Something moves across her face—not the wicked grin, not the gentle one. Something older. Something that makes my eyes sting.
Her phone buzzes on the table. She glances at it, groans. “My sister. The bathroom tile. I told her I’d help tonight because apparently I have no boundaries.”
“Go.”
“I’m going.” She stands, stretches, grabs her bag. Rounds the table and wraps her arms around me—tight, fierce, her chin on my shoulder, jasmine perfume and cheap wine and the faint grease of Chinese takeout.
“I’m proud of you,” she says. Low. Just for me.
“Stop it. I’ll cry.”
“Cry if you want. I’ll just be late for grout.” She pulls back, slings her bag over her shoulder, heads for the front door. One hand on the frame. Then she stops. Turns.
“You know Jasper’s been texting me, right?”
My stomach drops. “What?”
“Oh, don’t give me that face.” She’s grinning—the wicked one, the one with teeth. “He’s been checking in. Asking if you’re okay. He DM’d me on Instagram last week asking what kind of flowers you like. I told him peonies.”
“Liv—“
“That man is not subtle, Mara. And honestly? He’s not trying to be.” She adjusts the bag on her shoulder and watches me, her eyes bright and sharp and knowing. “So. Has he asked?”
The kitchen hums around us. The fridge cycles on. A car passes outside, headlights sweeping across the window. My pulse is doing something fast and unfamiliar in my throat, and the word is already in my mouth—round, warm, terrifying.
“He asked me to dinner,” I say.
Liv’s face breaks open. Not a grin—a bloom, starting in her eyes and flooding everything, and she looks like the woman who showed up at my door with gas-station wine and a laptop, the woman who held my phone out of reach while I shook on the couch, the woman who sat across this table and helped me take apart a man’s career between bites of leftover pasta.
“Go,” she says. “Wear the dress.”
Jasper shows up at my door in a navy sweater and dark jeans, holding a bottle of Barolo, and the first thing that hits me is that he’s not wearing a suit.
The second thing is the way his eyes drop to the red dress and stay there. Not fast—not the inventory Jermaine used to do, the quick up-down scan that always made me feel like a document he was skimming. Slow. Deliberate. Like he’s reading something he doesn’t want to rush.
“Hi,” I say. My voice sounds steadier than I feel.
“Hi.” His mouth curves. He lifts the bottle. “I brought something that goes with everything.”
“Good. Because the Bolognese has been on the stove for four hours and if it’s bad I’m going to need the alcohol as a distraction.”
“Four hours?” He steps inside and the hallway gets smaller. “That’s a commitment.”
We eat at my kitchen table. Not the dining room—my kitchen, Tabitha’s homework stacked in the corner, the purple mermaid taped to the cabinet. He takes a bite and sets his fork down and looks at me.
“This sauce. What did you put in this?”
“Patience. And half a bottle of wine I was too proud to drink.”
“It’s incredible.” He means it. I can hear it—the lack of performance in his voice, the simple fact of a man tasting something good and saying so. Jermaine used to eat my cooking the way he read contracts—efficiently, without comment, already thinking about the next thing.
Jasper tells me about the time he showed up to a client meeting in Pacific Heights with his shirt on inside out. An hour and forty-five minutes of discussing portfolio allocation with his seams showing.
“The client’s assistant left a note on my windshield,” he says. “Just two words: inside out. No signature.”
The laugh comes out of me fast and surprised, tipping my head back, and when I look at him again his eyes are on me with that expression—the one that is not subtle and is not trying to be.
We clear the table. He rolls his sleeves and runs the water and we stand side by side at the sink, and every time he reaches for the towel his arm presses warm against mine and I feel it all the way down my spine.
He hands me the last plate. Our fingers meet on the wet ceramic. Stay.
“Mara.” My whole name. Every syllable. Not Mar, not shortened, not trimmed down to fit someone else’s convenience.
He takes the plate from my hand and sets it on the counter. His palm slides along my jaw, tilting my face up, and he kisses me in my kitchen.
The same kind of room where Jermaine told me to make a little effort.
Jasper kisses like the effort was never the problem.
His mouth is warm and unhurried and his hand moves from my jaw to the back of my neck, fingers threading into my hair, and the sound I make against his lips is something I didn’t plan—low, raw, dragged out of a place I’ve kept locked for longer than I want to count.
His other hand finds my waist and pulls me flush against him and I feel him—all of him, the heat and the solidity and the hard length of him pressing against my hip—and a bolt of want shoots through me so sharp my knees almost buckle.
“Tell me to stop,” he says against my mouth. His breathing has changed. “If you want me to stop.”
“I don’t want you to stop.” My fist closes in the front of his sweater. “Come with me.”
He follows me down the hall. My pulse is hammering—wrists, throat, the hollow behind my ears—and the bedroom is dark, just the hallway light cutting a warm stripe across the bed.
I reach for the bedside lamp and then stop, my hand hovering over the switch.
Because the lamp means light, and light means he’ll see me—all of me, the body I’ve buried under black fabric for five years, the stomach and the thighs and every soft, heavy curve I’ve trained myself to hide.
“Can we leave the light off?” My voice comes out smaller than I want it to.
Jasper is behind me. Close enough that I feel his breath on my neck, his hand still warm on my hip. He reaches past me and turns the lamp on.
Warm light fills the room. My room. My bed. My white sheets.
“Why would I do that?” His voice is low, steady, certain. He turns me to face him. His eyes don’t leave mine. “Your body is perfect, and I want to see all of it.”
My throat closes. Not from grief—from the blunt, devastating force of being looked at by a man who means what he’s saying. No half-smile. No carefully worded non-compliment. Just his eyes, dark and direct, and the absolute absence of hesitation.
I reach for the hem of the dress—the red one, the twenty-eight-dollar Target dress, the first thing I’ve owned in five years that wasn’t camouflage—and pull it over my head.
I’m standing in my bra and underwear in the lamplight. Every part of me visible. The soft stomach. The heavy breasts. The thighs that press together. The stretch marks on my hips that I trace with my fingertips in the shower like a map of everything I’ve tried to erase.
Jasper’s gaze drops. Travels.