Rose
I wake up in Jackson's arms.
It takes me a few seconds to understand what I'm feeling.
His chest is pressed along my back, one heavy arm draped around my waist with his hand resting low on my stomach, and his face is buried somewhere in my hair.
He's warm. So fucking warm. Every slow breath he takes brushes against the back of my neck, and that's all my body needs to start its engines.
A low warmth unfurls in my stomach before I'm even fully awake, spreading lower as I become increasingly aware of just how much of him is pressed against how much of me.
I shift slightly, trying to discreetly move my ass away from the very hard and oh-so-fucking-thick situation happening behind me, and immediately regret the decision when his arm tightens in his sleep and pulls me closer with an unconscious slide of his hips into mine.
Well.
Good fucking morning to me.
I go perfectly still.
This is fine. Completely normal friend behavior. Plenty of married men spend the night mostly naked in bed wrapped around their female best friends like human weighted blankets. I'm sure there's data.
I very carefully lift the covers just enough to conduct an inventory. Jackson is wearing boxers. I am wearing pajamas I have absolutely no memory of putting on, which means he handled that too.
My eyes close again for half a second as another warm breath moves over my neck and his hand shifts against my stomach.
Nope.
We are not doing this.
I set to work forcing last night and the current unauthorized activity happening below my waist into the never happened box.
Truth be told, I'm embarrassed.
I pride myself on holding it together. At this point, it's practically the whole of my personality.
I am the woman people call when things go wrong, not the woman sobbing so hard in someone's office that she has to be carried home.
Even if I grant myself a little leeway where Jackson is concerned, even if he's the one person alive I've ever consistently allowed past that particular gate, I have never once let him see me like that.
Whatever that was.
I don't have a tidy word for it, and I'm a lawyer. I've got words for everything.
Seeing James up close hit me so fucking hard.
I have no right to expect anything from him, and I don't. It was just something about him standing there, talking to me like I was any other person in that restaurant.
I think some stupid part of me expected some cosmic-level recognition or something.
A pause. A feeling. Some biological little hey, I know you that makes absolutely no sense outside of movies and books written specifically to make women cry.
But I'm a stranger to him.
I chose that.
I walked away to give him a life, and he has one. A really good one. He's happy. I love that he's happy. Seeing that with my own eyes is the entire reason I've been putting myself through those dinners every six months for four years.
It just hit differently when he was standing right in front of me.
I suddenly felt so fucking alone. Insignificant. Useless in the whole life game. Michael doesn't need me to raise him anymore. James never needed me to raise him at all. My parents are gone. Jackson has a wife. Even David found somebody he'd rather bend over my brand-new sheets.
Add an entire bottle of Prosecco and three mini bottles of tequila that I chugged on the way back, and some pretty heavy fucking darkness took the wheel.
Not my finest hour.
What I do know, bone-deep and without needing any memory to prove it, is that I was safe with Jackson.
My body remembers that much.
I remember his office. Crying. Kissing him, which is getting filed under its own subsection of Things Rosalie Bennett Will Never Be Discussing Again. I remember the shower in pieces, mostly warmth and Jackson's hands in my hair, then his lips on my face and him telling me he loves me.
I've always loved you, Rosalie.
Fuck.
And what do I even do with that particular piece of information? What do I do with the fact that I was naked and wrapped up in his arms when he said it, while his wife was at home waiting for him?
Nothing.
That's what I do with it.
Which is exactly why I need to get out of his arms.
I tell myself this several times while doing absolutely nothing about it, my cheek tucked against his chest while I listen to the steady thrum of his heart beneath my ear. He's warm, annoyingly solid and built specifically to make poor decisions feel reasonable.
He's married.
There.
Useful fact.
I line it up in front of me like a barricade and keep repeating it because repetition is how cults and toddlers make things true.
He's married.
He belongs to someone whose name sits beside his on a legal document, and no amount of history between us changes that.
Not the hotel room. Not the rooftop pool.
Not even him telling me he loves me, no matter how many years I've spent wanting to hear those exact words from his mouth so badly that sometimes I physically ached with it.
The universe was just waiting until he was legally unavailable and I was having a mental fucking breakdown to really nail the timing.
Still, underneath every rational argument, the same treacherous question keeps surfacing.
Why does he feel like mine?
I close my eyes.
Absolutely not.
That question is getting boxed too.
I need to move before this turns into one of those mornings where I lie here pretending friendship explains why I'm wrapped around another woman's husband like a koala with attachment issues.
It gets harder every time we fall into each other like this to climb back out again, and the guilt afterward always lands in the same place.
I feel like the other woman.
I hate that feeling almost as much as I hate myself for repeatedly volunteering for it.
Carefully, I slip out from beneath his arm without waking him, dress in the quiet and head to the kitchen to start coffee.
I'm numb now, which is merciful.
I've successfully packed the rest of last night away too.
James's face. Those gray eyes that look too much like mine.
The streak in his hair. The sound of his voice, deepening now but still carrying the slightest hitch of the little boy he was not long ago.
The way his palm met mine in that stupid high five and how something so small somehow managed to tear open fourteen years of work.
The subsequent mental fucking breakdown and whatever other dignity-related offenses I committed before Jackson got me into bed.
All of it goes into the box.
Lid on. Move on.
Yep.
That's pretty much my motto.
Possibly my family crest.
The coffee starts dripping, and I lean against the counter waiting for enough caffeine to make pretending normal slightly less ambitious.
“Good morning.”
I take a breath before turning around.
Jackson is standing in the kitchen in his boxers, hair flattened on one side and absolutely no respect for the cardiovascular health of women closing in on their forties.
“Good morning.” I lift my cup toward him. “Coffee?”
Eyes above the neck, Rosalie. Eyes above the goddamn neck.
“How are you feeling?” He crosses the kitchen toward me with that easy, barefoot confidence men should not be allowed to possess before nine in the morning.
“Better. Thank you.”
I turn toward the coffee pot and reach for another mug, mostly because my hands need employment. “And I'm sorry about last night.”
“Rose.”
I close my eyes briefly.
Here we go.
“I'm fine, Jackson. Honest. I'd had a lot to drink, and...”
I have a son I love from afar, and it is slowly killing me.
The sentence makes it as far as my throat before I kill it.
“...I'm sorry for putting you in that position.”
He doesn't answer immediately. Instead, he takes both coffee cups from my hands, sets them on the counter and pulls me into his arms.
“What happened last night?” he asks quietly. “Talk to me.”
His chest is warm against my cheek, and normally I would melt straight into him without thinking. That's the problem. Jackson has spent so many years being the place I soften that my body starts doing it automatically now, long before my brain can remind it that we're supposed to have boundaries.
Boundaries with armed gates and snipers, preferably. Maybe a moat. I'm not ruling anything out.
So I don't let myself.
I put my hands against his chest, fuck, he has a nice chest, and ease backward. “It's late, Jackson. We need to get downstairs.”
His arms loosen, but the look he gives me doesn't. He knows exactly what I'm doing, and I know he knows, which is one of the more irritating features of a long-term friendship with someone who's made a hobby out of learning all your escape routes.
I pick up his coffee and hand it back to him like this is a perfectly normal Wednesday morning and not an exit strategy so transparent I'm surprised it doesn't come with emergency lighting.
“Here.”
He takes the cup but doesn't drink from it. “Rosalie.”
Fucking first name. We're escalating.
I can't even look him in the eyes, so I let mine wander down instead.
Well, don't look there either!
Jesus Christ.
I turn quickly and grab my bag before my eyeballs create an entirely new category of problems for me.
“Lock the door on your way down. I'll see you at the office.”
And without another word, without looking at his concerned face or that ridiculous, incredible body or any of the things that might keep me here if I gave them half a chance, I walk out.
The door clicks shut behind me.
My phone buzzes in my pocket almost immediately, and I've never been so grateful for an interruption in my life. A small mercy arriving in the shape of somebody else's problem, hauling me clean out of my own spiraling head.
Jade.