Chapter Two
Rose
Even through the headache and the heartbreak, through the cotton-thick fog of however much wine that actually was, nothing can fuzz out the one fact my brain has helpfully preserved in crystal clarity.
I am the worst person to walk this earth.
Every time I close my eyes, I see that fucking condom landing on the table.
What do you say, Jackoftrades20?
Jesus Christ.
Replaying how I propositioned Jackson last night, and his entirely rightful rejection, has me wanting to sink straight through the bed frame, through the floor and into whichever apartment is beneath mine.
I'll introduce myself when I get there. Explain that I'm their upstairs neighbor and I've come to live with them now because I can never show my face in my own home again.
I roll over and bury my face in the pillow, which smells like him because he carried me against him to my bed last night, so that's not helping a single fucking thing. I let out a long, muffled, thoroughly frustrated scream into the down.
Because this is not me.
I don't fall apart. I'm the one who holds everyone else together while they do. Michael fucks up, I fix it. A deal starts bleeding, I stop it. Something hurts, I put it somewhere inconvenient and deal with it when I have time, which historically means never.
And yet here I am, face-down in bed at whatever ungodly hour, reeking of someone else's heartbreak and my own poor decisions, trying to reassemble what's left of my dignity from the wreckage before I've even located my pants.
“Take your aspirin. Drink the water. You've got a change of clothes in the bathroom.”
I slowly lift my face from the pillow.
Jackson is leaning against the doorway holding a cup of coffee, already dressed for the office like there’s nothing remotely remarkable about any of this.
Like I didn't throw a condom at him, sexually harass him with memories of our past, cry in his lap and then require transportation into my own bed.
“Why are you still here?”
“Good morning to you too.”
“I thought you left.”
He lifts the coffee slightly. "Nope," he says with a pop of the p.
“Why?”
“Because I knew you'd wake up like this.”
“Like what?”
His eyes move over me.
I narrow mine.
“Choose your next words very fucking carefully.”
His mouth twitches. “Thirsty.”
“Good answer.”
He walks into the room and sets the coffee beside the water and aspirin he must have arranged for me last night. The mattress dips when he sits on the edge, and then his hand is in my hair, ruffling the back of my head the way you'd settle a kid who's worked herself into a tantrum.
I hate how much I don't hate it.
“Don't overthink last night.”
Too late.
“Nothing happened,” he continues. “You're fine. You're safe. You've got to be at the office in an hour. Want me to wait around and you can ride down with me?”
Ugh. Fucking hell. This is the whole infuriating package of him.
The aspirin. The water. The coffee. Clothes already laid out in the bathroom. Nothing happened delivered before I can even start humiliating myself by apologizing for everything that almost did.
He knows me too fucking well.
Worse, he's done this before.
Two years ago, there was another drunken night.
Another line blurred that neither of us had any business getting near.
He never mentioned it afterward, and I've kept it buried in the section of my brain labeled never happened, where Jackson and I have accumulated an alarming amount of material over the years.
He made it impossible to be embarrassed then.
He's making it impossible now.
Somehow that makes me want to be both embarrassed and angry purely on principle.
I bury my face back into the pillow. “I hate you.”
“I know you do.” I can hear the smirk in his voice, the bastard, and his fingers move through my hair again. “Is that a yes?”
I turn my head enough to glare at him with one eye. “Do I have to speak in the elevator?”
“No.”
“Fine. Damn it,” I yell, kicking both legs against the mattress like a petulant child who has entirely run out of better options, which, to be fair, I have.
“Then get your ass in gear.” His weight lifts off the bed, and his hand gives my head one last ruffle on the way up. “Up you go.”
“Don't treat me like a child. I'm ten years older than you, Jackson.” I swat at his hand without any real conviction, mostly on principle because I'm hungover, heartbroken and wearing yesterday's underwear, so principle is about the only thing I have left.
“Yeah, but you're pocket-sized.” The smirk is all over his face now, fully unrepentant. “Age doesn't count when I can fit you in a carry-on.”
“I hope you choke on something.”
“That's not very nice.”
“Neither is calling a grown woman pocket-sized.”
“If the carry-on fits.”
I lift my middle finger, but before I can formulate something sufficiently hateful, he takes both my hands and pulls me off the mattress.
My legs haven't received notice that we're participating in the day yet, because I stumble straight into him, and his arm comes around my back before I can correct myself.
His chin settles naturally on top of my head.
Fucking pocket-sized.
The irritating part is how comfortable it is.
My face fits against his chest, his arm is warm around me, and the steady rise and fall of his breathing is doing more for my headache than the aspirin has managed so far.
I should move, if only to prove some kind of point, but I can't decide what the point would be and I'm too tired to invent one.
So I stay.
Just for a second.
Or several.
Who's counting?
Jackson doesn't say anything about it. He just rubs his hand slowly between my shoulder blades while I stand there letting him hold me, and that's all it takes for the thing I've been carrying since yesterday to crawl up my throat.
“I'm sorry I called you Marcus.”
His hand pauses for barely a second before continuing.
“Yesterday,” I add, because humiliation is a buffet and I've decided to go back for another plate. “And for the other thing. The condom. Propositioning you in a restaurant. Generally behaving like a drunken sex pest. Pick whichever offense you'd like. I was in a bad place.”
I feel his chest move beneath my cheek, and if the bastard is laughing at me, he's at least smart enough to keep it silent.
“Already forgotten.”
“Liar.”
“Completely.”
I pull back enough to look up at him. “You are absolutely going to remember that condom until one of us dies.”
“Probably.”
“Jackson.”
He laughs, tightening his arm around me before I can move away. “I'm never going to use it against you. Better?”
Unfortunately, yes.
“Marginally.”
“Good.”
I look down at his shirt because looking at him feels unnecessarily intimate after apologizing for drunkenly attempting to fuck him while he's married. “I really am sorry.”
“I know, Rose.”
No lecture, no demand that I explain myself, no awkward attempt to unpack why I thought throwing a condom onto a table was a reasonable response to heartbreak. He accepts the apology and lets it die, which is exactly what I need him to do and it just makes me want to hug him harder.
Absolutely not.
We have suffered enough indignities this morning.
Then his lips press lightly against the top of my head.
“Now hurry up. You're stinking up the place.”
I pull back and stare at him. “Excuse me?”
“You heard me.” He releases me, turns me by the shoulders and starts steering me toward the bathroom with both hands. “Who knew something so small could reek this bad?”
“Fuck off, you.” I try to elbow him, but he stays safely out of range while shoving me toward the bathroom.
“Use soap. A lot of it.”
I spin around. “I swear to God, Jackson—”
He closes the bathroom door in my face.
I stare at it for a second before the smile wins anyway.
“Asshole,” I mutter, and turn toward the shower.
***
The morning passes mostly in a blur of hangover, exhaustion and a low, humming sexual frustration I can't seem to file away with the rest of the morning's correspondence.
It's not even about David, not really. Watching a man I trusted rut into his pretend cousin on my own sheets stripped something from me that I've spent a long time learning to keep a grip on, and now my whole body wants it back.
Control.
The need for it has come roaring up out of wherever I keep it, and it doesn't care that I'm sitting at a conference table surrounded by a board trying to salvage their CEO's reputation, or that it's my brother's genitals currently trending, or that I have approximately nine fires to put out before noon.
I know the psychology behind it. I'd be insulting myself to pretend I don't.
I was sexually assaulted the same night my parents died.
The same night.
I'd been attacked only hours earlier and was still shaking, still crying and bleeding as I drove myself toward the nearest hospital when my phone rang. Somewhere along that road, the night went from unsurvivable to something I didn't have a word for yet.
Vanguard Airlines, flight VG 811, crashed shortly after takeoff heading from Houston to LAX.
No survivors.
Both of them gone, just like that, in the time it took to answer a phone call.
Michael was at a sleepover for the weekend with Samson and his family. Fourteen years old, asleep two doors down, blissfully unaware that the entire shape of his life had just changed while he slept.
So I never made it to the hospital.
I turned the car around somewhere in the middle of the worst night of my life, went home long enough to throw clothes into a bag with hands that wouldn't stop trembling, and headed for the airport instead.
Getting to my brother before the world told him about our parents first mattered more than anything that had happened to my body a few hours earlier.
By the time the wheels touched down in Houston, the assault had already quietly filed itself under never happened.
Never reported. Never spoken about. Never given enough room to become something I'd have to deal with, because there was suddenly something bigger waiting for me on the other side of that flight.
Michael.