27. Jessica
Jessica
I woke up at three in the morning and couldn't remember where I was.
Hunter's apartment. His ceiling. His arm around my waist. His breathing was slow and warm against the back of my neck.
I knew this. My brain knew this. But my body was rigid — my shoulders locked, my jaw clenched, my hands fisted in the sheet.
My heart was slamming against my ribs, and the dark was pressing in.
For three full seconds I didn't know if the arm around my waist was safe.
Three seconds. That's all it took.
I slid out of bed. His arm tightened — a reflex, his sleeping body reaching for the warmth — and my skin crawled. I eased his hand off my hip. Stood in the dark. My feet on the cold floor. My chest heaved. My hands shook.
I went to the bathroom. Closed the door. Sat on the edge of the tub and pressed my palms into my eyes until the colors came and my breathing slowed.
This was the fourth night in a row.
The first week after the alley, I was angry.
The anger was clean and sharp, and it held me upright.
I gave my statement with steady hands and a steady voice.
I sat across from Liam and answered every question.
I watched Penny Calloway resign on the six o'clock news with my jaw set and spine straight.
The anger was a wall between me and everything underneath it.
The second week, the wall came down.
I was brushing my teeth on a Tuesday morning, and my hand stopped.
Mid-stroke. The toothbrush frozen in my mouth.
My eyes in the mirror, but I didn't recognize them.
The woman looking back at me had dark circles and a jaw that was still faintly yellow from the bruising, and a mouth that had been kissed against her will by a man who called her a whore.
I stared at her. She stared at me. My hand started shaking, and the toothbrush rattled against my teeth.
I spat. Rinsed. Gripped the edges of the sink.
The mirror again. My face. My cheek — healed now, the handprint gone, but I could still feel it. The weight of his palm. The crack of the slap. The way my head had snapped sideways. I touched my cheekbone. The skin was smooth. Normal. The feeling underneath wasn't.
I started flinching.
Hunter's hand would land on my hip in the dark, and my body would jerk sideways to get away.
My breath caught, and my muscles locked before my brain could say safe, this is safe.
Or his fingers brushing my arm at the kitchen counter.
My shoulder would pull away, a reflex so fast I couldn't catch it.
Or his palm on my lower back at Sunday dinner.
My spine stiffened, my fork paused in the air, the food in my mouth turned to paper.
He noticed. He always noticed.
The first time, he pulled back immediately. The space between us widened to six inches. He didn't fill it. He just lay there in the dark, and his breathing was careful and controlled. The six inches of mattress between us was louder than anything either of us had ever said.
"Sorry," I whispered. "I'm sorry. I don't —"
“Don’t be sorry. Come here when you're ready."
I pressed my back against his chest twenty minutes later. His arm settled around me — loose, careful, the hold of a man who was measuring his grip. I lay there with his heartbeat against my spine and my skin humming with the wrong current and my eyes open in the dark.
The third time I flinched, he stopped reaching for me.
He didn't announce it. He didn't pull away. He just stopped initiating. He gave me the space my body was demanding, and I let him do it. It was a knife in my chest watching his hands hang at his sides when they were meant to be on my skin, but I had put them there.
I sat on the far end of the couch. He sat on his end. Two feet between us. The Australia book was on the coffee table. Neither of us picked it up.
He'd ask me how my day was. I'd tell him.
Fine. Good. Busy. The words came out flat.
His eyes were on my face — reading me, tracking the distance, and I could see him choosing not to close it.
His jaw would tighten. His thumb would press into his thigh.
He'd nod. He'd look away. And the space would hold.
One night, he was in the kitchen making dinner. I was at the counter with my laptop, and he moved behind me to reach the cutting board, and his chest brushed my shoulder — barely, a graze, cotton on cotton — and I pulled away so fast the stool scraped the floor.
He stopped. The knife in his hand. His eyes stayed on the cutting board.
"Jess." His voice quiet. Careful. "Do you want me to —"
"I'm fine,” I rushed out.
“You are absolutely not fine."
I swallowed down the knot in my throat. ”I said I'm fine, Hunter."
He put the knife down, and looked at me. His eyes were steady and patient, but underneath the patience was something I'd never seen on his face before — hurt. Not anger. Not frustration. Hurt. Raw and deep and sitting right behind his eyes where he couldn't hide it.
I'd hurt him.
The flinching. The pulling away. The putting two feet of couch between us. I was hurting him every day, and I couldn't stop because my body had rewritten its rules and the new rules said any hand could be Garrett's hand, and the only way to be safe was to not be touched.
"I just need some space." My voice small. My eyes on my laptop. "Just — for a bit."
He nodded. Picked up the knife, and went back to the cutting board. His shoulders were tight. His jaw was working. He didn't look at me again for the rest of the evening.
I lay in bed that night — his bed, which I was still sleeping in because leaving would be an admission, and I wasn't ready for admissions — and I stared at the ceiling. My chest ached, my skin felt wrong, and that’s when I realized: this is what breaking looks like.
I stood in front of the bathroom mirror at six in the morning.
My face. My hair. My body in his t-shirt.
I looked at myself, and I searched for the woman who had straddled Hunter on a couch and taken his shirt off and told him to keep his hands to himself.
The woman who had planned a fundraiser and a record breaking county fair.
The woman who had moved to New York at eighteen with two suitcases and a fury that could power a city block and had built a career that nobody gave her and nobody could take away.
She was in there somewhere. Behind the dark circles and the flinching and the two feet of couch.
I gripped the sink. My knuckles white. My jaw tight.
Ten years. Ten years in New York. The career.
The network. The reputation. The apartment with the view and the client list and the name on the door.
I had walked away from all of it for a twelve-month contract in a town I'd sworn I'd never come back to.
And then I'd fallen in love with a man who fixed trucks and built fences and had travel books on a shelf he'd never opened, and I'd started planning a trip to Italy and talking about next year like next year was a guarantee.
What was I doing?
What was I giving up? For what? For a man.
Albeit a man I loved — God, the way I loved him.
The word was in my chest every second of every day.
But love didn't pay rent in Manhattan. Love didn't build a career.
Love didn't stop a woman's body from flinching when the wrong memory hit at the wrong time.
I'd spent ten years building something that was mine, and I'd been ready to throw it away for a man and a ranch and a family that wasn't mine and a town that had gotten me assaulted in an alley behind a bar.
The thought was ugly. The thought was unfair. The thought was exactly what I needed to make the next part easier.
My phone buzzed on the counter. New York number. My firm.
I picked it up.
The Whitfield Gala. The biggest event on the New York calendar. The one I'd been chasing for three years. The director's voice was warm and direct, and the words were: It's yours if you come back now.
I stood in the bathroom with my phone pressed to my ear and Hunter's toothbrush beside mine.
The director was talking about timelines and budgets and the scale of the production.
The words were landing in the part of my brain that had been starving for months — the professional part, the ambitious part, the part that knew how to win in rooms where the stakes were real and the competition was brutal, and the reward was your name on a list that mattered.
"I need to think about it," I said.
"Of course. But Jessica — we need you. Nobody else can do what you do."
I hung up. My hand was steady. My breathing was even. My reflection in the mirror looked different than it had five minutes ago. The dark circles were still there. The flinch was still in my muscles. But something behind my eyes had shifted — a door opening. A way out.
I knew what I was going to do before I admitted it to myself. My body knew. My body had been packing for days.
I called the firm at eight the next morning, and accepted. The words came out clean. Decisive. Professional. The words of a woman who was making a career move, not running from a man she loved.
I drove to the ranch.
The morning was sharp and clear. My hands on the steering wheel. My stomach tight. My jaw clenched. I'd rehearsed what I was going to say. Every word measured. Every reason sound.
Hunter’s truck was at the workshop. The doors open. The wrench on metal.
I stood in the doorway. The light behind me. Him at the bench. His back to me. His shoulders moving.
"Hunt."
He turned. The wrench in his hand. His eyes found mine. His face softened — the ease, the pull at the corner of his mouth. The way he always looked at me when I appeared in his doorway, like I was the best part of whatever he was building.
Then he read me. His face changed. The wrench lowered. "What's wrong?"