"I know." Her fingers are working at the buttons of my shirt now, getting the first one open, then the second. "But I'm tired of being the person who always does what she should. Fiveyears of that with Gabriel. Five years of calculating every move to keep myself safe." She gets the third button open, her palm flat against my chest where my heart is doing something arrhythmic. "I want to do something because I want it, not because it's strategic."
The logic is flawed—wanting something doesn't make it right, doesn't erase power imbalances or trauma responses or the very real possibility that we're both making decisions we'll regret when the adrenaline wears off. But her hands are on my skin now, tracing the muscles of my chest and stomach with a kind of focused attention that makes rational thought increasingly difficult.
I should be the responsible one. Should maintain the boundaries we set two days ago. But Ezra's threat is gone. The legal pressure has evaporated. The excuse we used to justify waiting no longer applies, and now we're left with just the raw reality of attraction without the scaffolding of external necessity.
My hands move higher under her sweater, finding the band of her bra, the curve of her ribs, the place where her breathing shifts from controlled to something more desperate. She makes that sound again—small, involuntary, the kind of noise you can't fake. I catalog it the way I catalog everything about her, storing it in whatever part of my brain has been systematically compromised since the night I first saw her on my screen.
"We agreed to wait," I tell her, even as my mouth moves to her neck, finding the pulse point that's beating too fast. "Until we could think clearly."
"When will that be?" Her head falls back against the refrigerator, giving me better access. "A week from now? A month? When will the timing ever be right?"
She's got a point. There's always going to be some external factor—Ezra's investigators still operating, the foundation's expansion requiring her attention, my work at The Dominion pulling me into situations that make clear thinking impossible. We could wait forever for the perfect moment and never find it.
But this isn't about perfect moments. This is about whether we're choosing each other for genuine reasons or whether we're just two damaged people reaching for the nearest source of comfort.
Her hands are at my belt now, not removing it but resting there, a question without words. I pull back enough to see her face—flushed, eyes dark, expression somewhere between determined and terrified. This is a woman who knows exactly what she's doing, who's making a conscious choice even if the choice might be catastrophic.
"Tell me this is real," I say. "Tell me you're not just responding to relief about Ezra, or fear about what comes next, or any of the thousand other things that could be driving this."
"I can't tell you that." Her honesty is brutal and uncompromising. "Because I don't know. I've spent five months in therapy trying to untangle what's real from what's trauma response, and I still can't always tell the difference." Her hands move from my belt to my face, framing it the way I framed hers earlier. "But I know that when you touch me, I feel something I haven't felt in more than five years. I feel chosen. Not controlled, not monitored. Just... seen."
The word hits with more weight than it should. Seen. The thing I do through cameras, through surveillance, through the careful documentation of patterns and behaviors. But she means something different—not the mechanical observation of securitywork but the human act of witnessing another person without trying to shape them into something else.
I kiss her again, and this time there's no pretense of stopping. My hands find the hem of her sweater, pull it up and over her head. She's wearing a black bra that matches the one I saw two days ago through the living room camera feed when she changed after work, but seeing it directly is different—the way it frames her skin, the way she reaches back to unhook it without any performance of modesty or shame.
This is happening. We're crossing the line we set, dismantling the boundaries we established for very good reasons. Part of me is documenting all the ways this could destroy what we've been carefully building—the trust, the transparency, the attempt to do surveillance differently than Gabriel did. But most of me is focused on the sensation of her skin under my hands, the way she's pulling at my shirt, getting it untucked and pushed off my shoulders.
We're moving out of the kitchen now, stumbling toward the couch in her living room. I'm hyperaware of the camera mounted near her bookshelf—the one that's recording this, that will document our first real moment of physical intimacy for later analysis if either of us wants to review it. The thought should be horrifying, should make me pause and reconsider whether surveillance and intimacy can coexist in any healthy way.
Instead it's oddly grounding. A reminder that this is being witnessed, documented, made real by the same technology I've been using to keep her safe. That if this goes wrong, there will be evidence. If it goes right, there will be proof.
Lana pulls me down onto the couch, and suddenly we're horizontal, her legs tangled with mine, hands everywhere, mouths finding new territory. I'm kissing her neck, hercollarbone, the hollow of her throat where her pulse is racing. She's making sounds I’ve never heard her make before—private sounds, the kind you only make when you've forgotten you're being observed.
"Jax, wait—" She's pushing at my chest, not hard but firm enough to create space between us.
I pull back immediately, hands coming off her body, putting six inches of distance on the couch. "Too much?"
"No. Yes. I don't know." She sits up, arms crossing over her chest in a gesture that's pure self-protection. "I want this. I want you. But I'm also terrified that if we do this now, tonight, it'll be because of the legal victory and the adrenaline and everything except the actual choice to be together."
The assessment is correct, which makes it worse. We're both running on victory endorphins and days of pent-up attraction and the relief of external threats diminishing. Not the best foundation for making decisions about physical intimacy.
I sit up too, reach for my shirt that's ended up on the floor beside the couch. "You're right. This is exactly what we said we wouldn't do—let circumstances push us into choices instead of making them deliberately."
"But I also think we could wait forever and never find the 'right' moment." She's looking at me with an expression I can't quite decode—want and fear and something that might be frustration. "There's always going to be some complication. Some external pressure. Some reason to justify waiting."
"So what do we do?"
She takes a breath, reaches for her sweater, pulls it back on. The gesture feels like decision-making in real time. "We stop. Right now. Before we cross the line completely. And tomorrow, when we're both thinking clearly, we talk about whether this issomething we actually want to pursue or if we're just responding to proximity and danger."
The logic is sound, which doesn't make it any less frustrating. My body is still running on want and touch and the sensation of her skin under my hands. But she's right—making this decision at one in the morning after a legal victory and two days of trying not to think about each other is exactly how boundaries get violated and regrets get made.
"Tomorrow," I agree, buttoning my shirt with hands that aren't quite steady. "We'll figure this out. With clear heads and better timing."
She walks me to the door, and the distance between us now feels charged with everything we're not doing. At the threshold, she touches my arm, just briefly. "Thank you for stopping. For respecting the boundary even though neither of us wanted to."
"That's the point of boundaries," I tell her. "They only matter when they're inconvenient."
After I leave, I sit in my car in the parking lot for ten minutes, trying to get my breathing back to normal, trying to convince myself that stopping was the right call. My phone vibrates. Text from Lana:I'm going to have a very frustrating night of not sleeping.
