Part of me didn't want to find out. I didn't have the stomach to walk away from her again.
I followed the sounds of the low thuds until I found myself in the doorway to her little bedroom. It was such a sliver of a space, though I couldn't focus on that, not when Jasper was busy throwing shoes into an open-top box with bananas printed on the sides. At first glance, it seemed like she was packing, but this wasn't packing. It was demolition.
"Hey. The door was open," I said.
She turned, two different shoes in each hand. "I don't want these anymore," she said, her dark eyes brimming with as much determination as I'd ever seen them.
I shoved my hands in my pockets. It was all I could do to keep myself from reaching for her. "Okay."
She chucked the shoes into the box. "I don't want any of them. I don't want to need high heels to feel powerful."
"Fuck the shoes. You're already powerful."
"I don't want to do this anymore." She stared at the box of shoes and the clothes she'd piled on the bed. "I don't want to be a nightmare. I don't want to be known for that." She blinked up at me, her eyes shiny with unshed tears. I fisted my hands in my pockets. "I don't want to go to California. I don't want the job. I don't want any job like that one. I don't want to win at any cost and I don't want to sell my dirty tricks. I don't know when I stopped being that person but I don't want to go back."
"You don't have to." I had a million questions but there was only one I really needed her to answer right now. "What do you want?"
Jasper thumbed away her tears and turned toward the bed where she rifled through the clothes heaped there. From somewhere near the bottom, she produced a notebook. If I knew anything about Jasper, I knew that book was full of lists.
She flipped through the pages, saying, "I spent all night on that."
"Is that how long the front door has been open?"
She shook her head. "I landed in Boston at six this morning." She stopped at the right page and glimpsed at me before reading, "I want to have friends who are unrelated to my job. I want to surround myself with people who care about me and don't measure my value by the access or information I can grant them. I want a job that means something to me but not one that means everything. I want to wear clothes I find comfortable, not those that function as armor or intimidation. I want to get some hobbies and I don't care if I'm very bad at them." She glanced up from the book. "While I am very bad at baking and home renovation, I don't think either of them qualify as hobbies I want to continue."
"That's understandable." I bobbed my head as a smile pulled up one corner of my mouth. "Anything else?"
She nodded, saying, "I want a community of my own, a place that's mine because I choose it, not because I'm stuck with it. I want to let myself rely on people, even when that's scary. I want a home that people want to visit because it's so happy and welcoming. I want to belong somewhere and to someone. I want to start a family and have a baby or two, and I don't want to wait until everything is perfectly right to do it. I've waited so long and I don't think I can wait anymore. Actually, no. I can't wait. I know that."
I stepped into the room, edged the banana box of shoes aside as I went. "You're not going to California."
She gave a slow shake of her head. "Another day, I'll explain all the ways in which you were right about the job and how wrong it was for me."
"If we're tabling that discussion for another day, does that mean you're staying here? That you're choosing this place?"
Jasper studied her notebook for a moment, her fingers drumming against the back cover. "You didn't ask me to stay, Linden."
"Because I couldn't ask you to do that for me. If you didn't go out there and see about that job for yourself, you would've regretted it. You would've wondered whether it was what you need and—fuck, Jas, I had to do it. I had to let you go, even if it killed me."
She tossed the notebook to the bed. "You can't make those decisions for me. You can't decide you're going to withhold information from me and hope for the best. It's not fair to anyone. And what if I went out there and decided to take the job, even if I hated it? What would happen then, Lin? What would you do?"
"I'd live with it."
"And that way we'd both get to be miserable? Just because you didn't want to say the wrong thing to me? Is that really the solution you went with?"
I folded my arms over my chest. "I didn't say it was a good solution, just that it was better than trapping you here."
"It wouldn't be a trap if you were up-front with me. Do you have any clue how much I needed to hear you ask me to stay?"
"Obviously not. Okay? I didn't know. I thought I was protecting you."
She blew out a breath, rolled her eyes to the ceiling. "If you stopped acting like you have to protect everyone from the things you want, you could be honest instead."
"You want honest?" I took another step toward her. Any closer and we'd be right up on each other. "Okay, babe. I'll give you honest. I am in love with you. All right? I fucking love you and it physically hurt when you left and I really hope—"
She reached out, twisted her hands in my shirt, and yanked me to her chest, sealing her lips over mine before I could get another word in. It took a stunned second for me to process this before I could react, before I could respond.
"Jasper," I whispered against her lips.
