24. Hannah
— ? —
Hannah
Three flights of stairs.
My feet are bare against the cold concrete and I don’t remember taking off my shoes. I must have kicked them off somewhere between the kitchen table and the front door, between my mother’s voice and the buzzer’s shrill announcement that everything I’ve been running from is standing on my doorstep.
My heart slams against my ribs with every step. The stairwell echoes with my breathing, too loud, too fast. I grip the railing to keep from falling because my legs aren’t working right, because my whole body has forgotten how to do anything except move toward him.
Second floor. First floor. The door to the lobby looms ahead of me, frosted glass separating the dry warmth of the building from whatever waits outside.
I stop with my hand on the push bar.
Through the glass, I can see him. Just a shape at first, blurred by rain and condensation, but I don’t need the details to know it’s him.
He’s not under the awning. He’s not trying to stay dry.
He’s just standing there in the downpour like he deserves it, like the weather is penance and he’s ready to pay.
His shoulders are hunched against the cold.
Water streams down his face, plasters his hair to his forehead, turns his white shirt transparent against his chest. He’s holding something in each hand, papers in one, a pen in the other, and he’s staring at the door like he can will it to open through sheer desperation.
He doesn’t see me yet.
I could stay here. Watch him through the glass until the cold drives him away or the hope bleeds out of him entirely. I could make him wait the way he made me wait through years of empty chairs and missed calls and promises that evaporated the moment his phone rang.
But I’ve never been good at cruelty. Even when he deserved it.
I push through the door.
He’s standing outside the street door. Soaked through. Shaking. The divorce papers crumpled in one fist, a pen clutched in the other like a lifeline. His hair is plastered to his forehead and his shirt is transparent with rain and he looks like absolute hell.
He’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
“Cameron-”
“I meant what I said.” His voice is hoarse, raw from the cold or from crying or from both. “If you want this over, I’ll sign right now. Walk away forever. You’ll never have to see me again.”
“Cam-”
“But if there’s any chance.” He steps forward, rain streaming down his face, and I can’t tell if the water on his cheeks is from the sky or from him.
“Any chance at all that you could give me one more try. I’m begging you, Hannah.
I’m not the man I was. Let me prove it. Every day for the rest of my life, let me prove it. ”
I look at the papers in his hand. My signature already there, dried for days now. Just waiting for his.
All the ways he’s failed me flood back without permission.
Dinners missed, not just once or twice but dozens of times, until I stopped setting a place for him entirely.
Calls that went to voicemail while I sat in restaurants alone, humiliated, making excuses to waiters who’d seen it all before.
The sound of Violet’s voice in his hotel room at seven in the morning.
His mother’s sneer across a hundred dinner tables and his silence beside it, hand squeezing mine under the tablecloth like that made up for never using his voice.
The interview. God, the fucking interview: my husband turning my diagnoses into entertainment for strangers, and the worst part wasn’t even the words.
It was his face while he said them. Relaxed.
Charming. Like he didn’t understand he was handing them a knife.
But the scales have another side, and I can’t pretend they don’t.
The office at two in the morning, his voice reading my own words back to me so my ears could catch what my eyes kept scrambling.
The patience in his hands as he organized my chaos into something I could navigate.
The way he stood between me and his mother in my own lobby, finally, finally, choosing me over blood, over legacy, over everything he’d been taught to worship.
His face on that broadcast, wrecked and raw, tearing himself apart for millions of strangers because he knew I was the only one really watching.
The fact that he walked away from an empire his family spent generations building because I told him he loved it more than me, and instead of resenting me, instead of throwing it back in my face, he just said okay.
Okay, then it goes. If that’s what it costs to keep you, it goes.
The scales tip.
“Give me the papers.”
His face crumples. He holds them out with a shaking hand.
I take them. They’re wet, soft with rain, my signature bleeding at the edges where the water has seeped through.
And I tear them in half.
The sound is louder than I expect. A wet rip that gets lost in the rain almost immediately.
The pieces sag in my hands, pulpy and ruined, and I let them fall.
They hit the sidewalk and the water carries them toward the gutter in sodden clumps: all those weeks of lawyers and paperwork and carefully worded clauses washing away like they never mattered.
Because they didn’t. They never did.
“Hannah-”
“You get ONE chance, Cameron Jasper.” I step toward him, into the rain, and it’s cold and I don’t care. “One. And it comes with terms.”
“Anything.” The word cracks in his throat. “Name them.”
“I come first. Not the legacy. Not whatever business you rebuild. Not your family’s opinions or the media’s opinions or anyone else’s. ME.”
“You come first.” He’s crying now, I can see it, tears mixing with the rain. “You come only.”
“And if you EVER make me feel like I don’t matter again-”
“I won’t. I swear to God, Hannah, I won’t.”
I hold out my left hand.
He stares at it. Then at me. Then at my hand again, like he can’t believe what he’s seeing.
His fingers go to his breast pocket. Come out with my ring, the diamond he picked himself, the one I left on a note in an empty kitchen a lifetime ago.
His hands shake so badly he almost drops it twice. But he slides it onto my finger, and it fits exactly the way it always has.
“I love you,” he whispers. “So much it’s made me crazy. So much I stopped showing it. But I remember now. I’ll never forget again.”
“Prove it.”
He kisses me.
His mouth is cold from the rain and desperate and I kiss him back like I’ve been starving for exactly this. My hands fist in his soaked shirt and his arms wrap around me so tight I can barely breathe and I don’t want to breathe, I just want this, him, us.
“Inside,” I gasp against his mouth. “Now.”
He doesn’t need to be told twice.
We stumble through the lobby door together, dripping everywhere, leaving a trail of water across the tile.
The elevator takes too long so we take the stairs, his hand in mine, both of us running, laughing like idiots, like teenagers, like people who haven’t spent the last year breaking each other’s hearts.
My legs burn but I don’t care. His hand squeezes mine tighter.
By the time we hit the third floor I’m laughing so hard I can barely breathe.
My apartment door. My keys somewhere, God knows where, but he presses me against the frame and kisses me again and I forget to care about keys. My fingers fumble in my pocket, find metal, somehow get the door open without separating my mouth from his.
We spill inside. His hands are everywhere, my hair, my waist, the hem of my shirt, and I’m pulling at his buttons, shoving the ruined fabric off his shoulders, pressing my palms flat against his chest just to feel his heartbeat slamming against my hands.
“Hannah.” My name sounds like a prayer in his mouth. “Tell me this is real. Tell me I’m not dreaming.”
“Does this feel like a dream?”
I push him back toward my bedroom. He goes willingly, stumbling, unable to stop touching me long enough to watch where he’s walking.
We hit the edge of the bed in a tangle of wet clothes and desperate hands.
I don’t even get his pants all the way off.
I shove them down just far enough, push my own jeans and panties to my knees, and he spins me, bending me over the mattress.
He pushes inside me from behind in one hard thrust, still half-dressed, rain dripping from his hair onto my back.
I cry out, laughing and gasping at the same time.
“Fuck, yes,” I moan, pushing back against him.
He fucks me fast and frantic, hips snapping, the wet fabric of our clothes rubbing between us.
His hand grips my hip, the other reaches around to rub my clit in quick circles.
I come quick and hard, body shaking, the orgasm ripped out of me in seconds.
He follows almost immediately, groaning as he spills inside me, still thrusting through it.
We barely catch our breath before he’s pulling out and turning me around. He kisses me hard, laughing against my mouth, both of us still mostly clothed.
“I wasted so much time,” he says roughly. “Not touching you like this. Not looking at you like this. Not making you feel like the most important thing in my universe.”
“Then stop talking and start making up for lost time.”
He laughs, a real laugh, surprised out of him, and then his mouth is on my throat and his hands are working at my jeans again. This time we strip properly, kicking the wet clothes to the floor. He lays me back on the bed, slower now.
“Patience,” he murmurs against my stomach.
“I’ve been patient long enough.”
“Then let me make it worth the wait.”
His mouth moves lower. His hands push my thighs apart and he licks me open, slow and thorough this time.
I moan, already sensitive from the first round.
He takes his time, tongue circling my clit, two fingers sliding inside me and pumping gently.
I arch up, hands in his hair, but he holds me down with one broad palm spread across my hip.
When he finally slides inside me again, I’m shaking. He moves slow, deep, every thrust deliberate. His forehead presses against mine and his eyes stay open, locked on me, watching every flicker of sensation cross my face.
“I love you,” he says with every thrust. “I love you. I’m sorry. I love you.”
I come apart with his name on my lips and his body cradling mine and tears streaming down my temples into my hair. He follows seconds later, burying his face in my neck, trembling with the force of it.
After, he holds me like I might vanish if he loosens his grip. I let him. My fingertips drift back and forth across his chest while our breathing slows and the rain keeps hammering against the windows.
The apartment is dark except for the streetlight filtering through the blinds. It catches my ring when I shift my hand against his chest: a flash of diamond, a reminder that I’m wearing his promise again. That I chose to.
On the kitchen table, I can just make out a piece of paper in my mother’s handwriting. She must have taken that ancient elevator down while we were racing up the stairs. I’ll read it later. Right now, the only thing that exists is this room. This bed. Him.
“I meant every word,” he says quietly. “On that broadcast. In the rain. All of it.”
“I know.”
“I’ll spend the rest of my life earning this.”
“I know that too.”
He props himself up on one elbow, looking down at me with an expression that makes my chest ache. Soft. Open. More vulnerable than I’ve ever seen him.
“Marry me again, Hannah.” His voice is rough. “Properly this time. Just us. No society spectacle, no cathedral full of strangers, no input from anyone but you. Let me give you the wedding we should’ve had.”
I touch his face. Trace the stubble on his jaw, the new lines around his eyes that weren’t there when we first met.
“Ask me again when you’ve earned it.”
He grins, all teeth and trouble and that devastating confidence that first made me fall for him.
“Challenge accepted.”
I fall asleep to the sound of his heartbeat, his arms wrapped around me like I’m something precious.
And even half-dreaming, I can practically hear him planning.