Jade
Imade dinner at seven. By eight-thirty the pasta was cold and I'd stopped pretending I was going to reheat it.
I poured a glass of wine instead and sat at the table and listened to the house settle around me and told myself it wasn't a big deal, which is something I've been telling myself a lot lately.
Phoenix comes in at nine-fifteen. I hear his bag hit the floor in the hall, his jacket over the chair, the specific sound of him checking his phone before he's even properly through the door.
When he comes into the kitchen and sees the table—the two plates, the candle I lit at seven and blew out at eight—something moves across his face that looks like genuine guilt.
"I'm sorry," he says. "The meeting ran long."
"They always do," I say, and I mean it to come out neutral and it doesn't quite.
He looks at me. He's tired. I can see it in the line of his shoulders, still half in whatever the meeting was about. He pulls out the chair across from me and sits down and looks at the cold pasta.
"I'll heat it up," he says.
"It's fine."
"Jade—"
"I said it's fine. Eat."
We eat. He heats the pasta and sets it in front of me like an apology and I accept it like one. The kitchen is quiet in the specific way it gets when two people are not saying something.
He checks his phone halfway through dinner, catches himself and sets it face-down on the table and doesn't pick it up again. I notice that I've stopped finding that gesture reassuring and started finding it exhausting.
He asks about my day. I tell him about the chapter I finally cracked, the scene that had been stuck for two weeks, and I watch him listen.
He's there—he's nodding, he's asking a follow-up question—but he's also somewhere else.
Crawford Group, Richard Hale, whatever the meeting was about tonight.
I can feel the split. It's been there for weeks, that half-attention, and I've been telling myself it's temporary and I'm running out of ways to believe that.
I stand and start clearing the plates. He gets up to help and I shake my head without thinking and then immediately wish I hadn't because now he's just standing there watching me at the sink and I can feel him trying to read what's wrong, and the fact that he has to figure it out, that it isn't obvious to him, is the whole answer right there.
"The files are on the table again," I say.
"I'll move them."
"You said that yesterday."
He pauses. "I know. I'll move them tonight."
"It's not about the files."
He looks at me steadily. "I know that too."
I put the last dish in the rack and dry my hands and turn around and lean against the counter and look at him across the kitchen. He's still in his work clothes, sleeves rolled up and he looks like a man bracing for something he knew was coming.
"You've been gone for weeks," I say. "Not physically. You're here. But you're not here."
"I'm handling a crisis."
"I know you are. I'm not asking you to stop." I keep my voice even. "I'm asking you to still be in the room when you're in the room."
He exhales. Runs a hand through his hair. "I'm doing the best I can, Jade. You know what's at stake right now. The assets, the regulatory inquiry, Richard—"
"I know what's at stake." I look at him. "What I'm talking about is something different. I'm watching you seal yourself up one layer at a time and I keep waiting for you to come back and you keep not coming back."
Something shifts in his face. Not anger—more like a man recognizing a fight he didn't want but can't avoid. "That's not fair."
"Which part?"
"You knew what my life looked like when you came into it."
There it is. I can hear that he doesn't mean it cruelly, that it's coming from somewhere tired and defensive and scared. But it still hurts.
"My mother said that," I say quietly. "About Nicholas. She said she knew what she was getting into."
The kitchen goes very still.
Phoenix looks at me and I look back and I watch something move through him.
"I'm not him." His voice is quiet and tight. "I've told you that."
"I know you're not."
"Do you?" The control slips slightly, just enough. "Because it feels like every time I make a hard call or go quiet under pressure you're measuring me against him. Like you're waiting for me to turn into someone you’ve already decided I'd be."
That hits somewhere true. "That's not what I'm doing."
"Isn't it?"
"No." I push off the counter. "What I'm doing is watching someone I love disappear behind a version of himself that doesn't need me and trying to figure out if that's permanent or temporary."
We're both breathing harder than the conversation warrants. The kitchen feels smaller than it is. He's looking at me with those dark eyes and his jaw is tight and I'm looking back and we're both somewhere past the words now, in the place underneath them where the real thing lives.
One of us moves first. I don't know which one.
What matters is that his hands find me and I don't step back and suddenly we're not fighting anymore, or we are but it's turned into something else, the argument burning down to whatever's underneath it.
He pulls me in hard and I go. The counter catches me in the lower back and his mouth is at my throat and I grab his collar and drag him closer and he makes a sound low in his chest that I feel more than hear.
We've been so careful with each other. Weeks of careful. This is nothing like that.
His hands push my shirt up and I pull at his.
The dishes are right there and neither of us cares.
He gets his hands under my thighs and lifts me onto the counter and I wrap my legs around him and the fight is still in the room.
The frustration and the wanting and the weeks of distance all collapsed into the same thing.
I pull his face up to mine and kiss him and he kisses back just as hard. I taste all of it. Phoenix’s hands move like he's been waiting for this. Like he's been holding back and now he's done. I pull him closer and he obliges and I stop thinking about anything else.
He says my name once. Quietly. Like it's the only word he has left.
We end up on the kitchen floor, the two of us on the cold tile because we couldn't be bothered to move anywhere else.
The floor is hard, but it doesn’t matter. The cold is seeping through my shirt, the cabinet handle digging into the back of my calf, the faint hum of the refrigerator three feet away. None of it matters because his mouth is on my throat and his hands are pulling me closer.
He moves down my neck to my collarbone and I tip my head back against the tile and stare at the kitchen ceiling, the shadows up there, the edge of the light above the stove.
His hands find the hem of my shirt and slide underneath and his palms are warm against my ribs and I arch up into him and he responds immediately, shifting his weight.
This is the version of him I've been missing for weeks.
Not calibrated. Just here, with his hands on my skin and his mouth finding every place that makes me press harder against him.
I drag his shirt over his head and run my palms flat across his chest and feel his heart going fast under my fingers and that undoes something in me.
His hand slides down my stomach and I stop thinking entirely.
There is just this—the tile cold at my shoulders and warm at my lower back from his weight, his breath against my skin, his mouth moving down my body.
He says my name again. Lower this time.
I pull him back up to me and kiss him and wrap my leg around his hip and he shifts and then he's where I want him.
When I come it hits me like a wave breaking—my whole body pulling tight around him, a sound tearing out of me that bounces off the kitchen walls and I don't care, I don't care about anything except the sharp bright peak of it and his hands gripping my hips hard enough to leave marks.
I ride it out with my fingers locked in his hair and my face pressed to his shoulder and my whole body shaking.
Phoenix doesn't stop. He works me through it, every stroke deliberate now, watching my face in the low light above the stove with that dark focused look he gets when he's completely present. It’s just this, just the two of us on a kitchen floor at ten o'clock on a Tuesday like the rest of the world doesn't exist.
When he follows it's hard and urgent, his hips driving into mine one last time as he buries himself deep and goes still.
Both hands grip me like I'm the only solid thing in the room.
His face drops to my neck and he says my name against my skin, broken at the edges, and I feel the shudder move through him and hold him through it with my arms wrapped around his shoulders and my cheek pressed to his hair.
The clock in the hallway ticks. The refrigerator hums. Somewhere outside a car passes.
"I don't think you're your father," I say into his shoulder.
He's quiet. I can feel him thinking.
"But?" he says finally.
"But I need you to stay with me."
Another silence. His hand moves slowly through my hair, the same way he does when I can't sleep—automatic and present.
"I'm trying," he says.
"I know." I turn my face up toward him. "I see you trying. That's why I'm still here."
He looks at me. The lamp above the stove is the only light on and it's casting everything warm and slightly gold and his face in that light is open in a way it hasn't been for weeks. Nothing is fixed, the crisis is still happening, but he’s here now.
He reaches over and tucks a piece of hair behind my ear.
"I don't want to be him," he says. He’s not defensive this time. Just true.
"I know you don't."
"I'm not— " He stops. Starts again. "When it gets bad, I go somewhere. I've always done it. It's the only way I know how to hold things together."
"I know that too."
"I'll work on it."
"I'm not asking you to be different," I say. "I'm asking you to let me in when you go there. That's all."
He's quiet for a moment. The clock in the hallway marks the hour.
"Okay," he says.
It’s not a promise exactly. But he’s trying.
I put my head back on his shoulder.
Tomorrow the phone will go off before seven and we'll be two people moving carefully through the same space again.
But tonight, he's here. All the way here.
For now, that's enough.