Chapter 12
JAXON
Jaxon was reading when the knock came. He'd been on the couch with Beau's head on his foot and a dog-eared copy of a novel balanced on his knee, a book he'd been working through slowly for the past two weeks because he liked the way the sentences moved, looping and doubling back on themselves, circling the same loss from different angles.
It reminded him of something, though he chose not to examine what.
The knock was too loud. That was the first thing he registered. He set the book down and Beau lifted his head, ears forward, tail still. Jaxon crossed the room and opened the door.
Adelaide stood on the step.
She looked like someone who had come through a wall rather than around it. Her hair was loose, her coat pulled on unevenly, one side of the collar folded under. Her breathing was unsteady in a way she was trying to control and failing.
"Addie." Her name came out more carefully than he'd intended. He heard the guard in his own voice and could not remove it.
She started to speak and stopped. Her mouth opened and closed and she shook her head, a small unsteady movement, and the gesture was so unlike the composed woman he'd had dinner with two nights ago that something in his chest tightened before he could prevent it.
"What happened?" he asked.
"I don't know how to explain it."
He studied her. The flush along her jaw. The way her hands were clenched at her sides, knuckles pale. He stepped back and opened the door wider.
"Come in."
She moved past him and stopped in the center of the room, taking it in with the scattered attention of someone whose thoughts were elsewhere.
Beau thumped his tail twice from his bed by the wood stove and settled again, as though he'd assessed the newcomer and decided she was welcome but not interesting enough to stand for.
The room was warm. The fire had been going for an hour.
The lamp beside the couch threw a circle of amber light across the floorboards and left the corners in shadow.
Adelaide stood in the middle of all of it, and Jaxon closed the door and leaned against it and waited.
He did not move closer. He had spent the better part of two days reminding himself that proximity to her was not something he could afford, and the reminder had been partially successful.
He had worked. He had eaten. He had walked Beau along the creek trail and thought about her only four or five times per hour, which was an improvement over the previous day.
Now she was standing in his living room and the improvement collapsed in under three seconds.
"What happened?" he asked again.
"He came back." She said it to the wall rather than to him. "We talked." She exhaled sharply, the sound catching in her throat. "I almost believed him."
Jaxon said nothing. He watched her and waited for the rest of it. He could feel it coming the way you felt weather change, a drop in pressure, something in the air altering before you could name it.
"I almost went back," she said.
The words landed in his chest like a hand laid flat. He held his expression steady, but he felt something shift behind it. A tightening. A door beginning to close. He had spent ten years learning how to close doors quietly, and the mechanism engaged now with the smooth efficiency of long practice.
She turned to face him when she said it, and he saw that she was watching for his reaction with an intensity that told him the next thing she said would depend on what she saw in his face.
He gave her nothing. He had learned, the hard way, that giving Adelaide his feelings before she'd finished sorting hers was how you ended up standing on a cracked sidewalk watching her drive away.
"Almost?” he said.
"It felt wrong. Feels wrong.”
The answer was immediate. No hedging. No qualification. And the relief that moved through him at hearing it was so sharp and so unwelcome that he tightened his jaw against it.
Relief was dangerous here. Relief meant he still had something at stake, and having something at stake with Adelaide Taylor had cost him three months of fourteen-hour days and a year of sleeping badly and years after that of dating women whose only flaw was that they were not her.
Silence filled the room. The fire popped once in the stove. Beau sighed and shifted on his bed.
Then Adelaide stepped closer. And he knew, before she reached him, what she was going to do.
Her hand found his shirt. Fingers curled into the fabric. She pulled herself toward him and kissed him.
This was unguarded. Everything she'd been holding since she arrived spilling forward through her mouth, her hands, and the press of her body against his.
She kissed him the way a person grabbed a railing when the ground shifted, and the problem was that he was the railing and he could feel her shaking.
For a second his body responded before his mind caught up.
His hands went to her waist. He pulled her closer.
The kiss deepened. It was uneven, raw and nothing like what he remembered from ten years ago because ten years ago they had been young enough to kiss without the accumulated debris of everything that had gone wrong between them, and now the debris was right there in the room with them, stacked in the corners, impossible to ignore even with her mouth against his.
Then his mind caught up.
She had almost gone back. And now she was here, kissing Jaxon with the desperate urgency of someone reaching for solid ground, and the solid ground she was reaching for was him, and the last time she'd reached for him she'd held on just long enough to decide she wanted something else.
He stopped.
He pulled back and dropped his hands and put a full step between them. The air where she'd been standing against him went cold immediately.
"Don't do this," he said. His voice was low, firm, and steadier than anything he felt.
Adelaide blinked. Her breath came unevenly. Her hand was still half-raised, fingers still curled around the shape his shirt had been in. "Don't do what?"
"Don't do this because you're breaking."
He watched the words hit her. Watched the urgency in her face collide with the meaning and stall there, caught between what she wanted and what he'd just said.
"That's not what this is," she said.
He shook his head. "You just told me you almost went back to him."
"I didn't."
"But you almost did."
She took a step forward. He held his ground, but he did not let the distance close.
His arms stayed at his sides. Everything in him wanted to reach for her, and he did not reach for her, because reaching for her right now would feel like catching someone who hadn't yet decided whether they were falling or jumping, and the difference mattered.
It mattered more than anything else in this room.
"You don't get to show up here like this," he said. His voice carried something sharper now, closer to frustration than he usually allowed. "Not when you're in the middle of figuring out whether you still want him."
"I'm not—"
"You are." He didn't raise his voice. "Maybe not consciously. Maybe not in a way you want to admit. But you don't come here like this, you don't do that"—he gestured between them—"if everything is already decided."
She went quiet. He could see her processing it, and the fact that she didn't immediately argue told him more than any argument would have. She was turning it over. Finding the parts that fit. That meant some of them did.
"I know what I felt," she said. Quieter now.
"So do I."
He heard the rawness in his own voice and didn't try to smooth it over.
Let her hear it. Let her understand that what had just happened between them was not a small thing to him, that his body's response to hers was not casual or habitual, that pulling away from her had cost him something real and that he had done it anyway because the alternative was worse.
The alternative was this. Again. The same pattern they'd lived through a decade ago, when she had loved him enough to stay for a while and not enough to stay for good, and he had stood on the sidewalk outside her mother's house and watched her choose someone else and spent the next year building a life around the hole she left.
"I'm not doing this again," he said.
"Doing what?"
"Being the one you come back to when everything else falls apart. Being the one you almost choose."
The words came out steadier than he expected.
He had not planned them. They had been in him for ten years, waiting for the conversation that would finally require them.
Now here it was, in his living room, with the fire going and the dog asleep, and the woman he had never fully gotten over standing feet away.
"That's not what you are," she said, and her voice cracked on the last word.
"It was last time."
He let the past land. Just the fact of it, offered the way he offered everything: plainly, and with the expectation that she would do with it what she chose.
"You already made your choice once," he said. "I'm not standing here waiting to see if you do it again."
Adelaide's face changed. He watched it happen, the composure she'd been holding cracking along a line he hadn't seen coming, and for a moment she looked exactly the way she had at twenty-three, standing on that sidewalk, holding her car keys, trying to convince both of them that leaving was the right thing.
She had been wrong then. She might be wrong now.
But the wrongness was hers to work through, and he could not do it for her.
He had tried that once, silently, by being steady and present and available, by being the man she could come back to when the city lost its shine, and it hadn't worked.
She had not come back. Not until something broke.
He would not be the backup plan. He would not be the safe harbor she reached for when the storm got bad enough.
If she chose him, it would need to be on a clear day, with no rain in the forecast, with her eyes open, her feet under her, and the full understanding of what she was walking toward rather than what she was running from.
"You need to figure this out," he said. "Without me in the middle of it."
He moved toward the door. His steps were steady. His hands were not, but she couldn't see that, and he curled them into fists at his sides and let the tension live there where it wouldn't show.
"Jaxon—"
He shook his head. "Not like this."
He opened the door. He stood to the side and waited; the waiting was the hardest thing he had done in a very long time because every instinct he possessed was telling him to close the door again, cross the room, take her face in his hands and tell her that she didn't need to figure anything out, that he was here, that he had always been here, that he would wait as long as she needed.
But he had waited before. And she had left.
Adelaide looked at him for a long moment. He held her gaze and let her see what was there. Tonight he was giving her the only thing that mattered more than his feelings: the space to find her own.
She walked through the door. Beau padded over from his bed and pressed his nose against Jaxon's hand. Jaxon stood in the open doorway with the dog leaning against his leg and watched Adelaide disappear into the dark at the end of the yard.
He closed the door.
He stood there with his hand flat against it, his forehead resting on the wood and breathed.
In and out. In and out. The fire ticked in the stove.
Beau whined once, low and uncertain, and then went back to his bed and curled into a ball and watched Jaxon with the steady, patient gaze of an animal that understood loss in the simple terms of presence and absence.
She was gone. Again. He'd survived it once. He could survive it again.
He just wasn't sure he wanted to.