She finishes her coffee. Washes both cups—standing at the sink, her back to me, the sweater slipping further off her shoulder, the line of her neck exposed. I watch the muscle in her forearm work as she scrubs, the efficient movements of hands that know their way around physical tasks. She dries them on the towel. Turns around.
"I should probably go," she says. But the way she says it—leaning against the counter, one bare shoulder catching the light, her weight settled, her body making no motion toward the door—the words and the body are telling two different stories.
"Stay," I say. The same word from Saturday night. It keeps finding its way out of me when she's near—the one request I can't dress up in strategy or disguise as something else. Stay. The most honest word I have.
She looks at me. The kitchen is quiet except for the hum of the refrigerator and the distant city noise from the windows. Her eyes are dark and serious and there's a fight happening behind them—the push and pull I've come to recognize as the fundamental conflict of Jess Rowe. The woman who protects herself warring with the woman who wants to be known.
"I didn't bring anything," she says. "No toothbrush. No change of clothes."
"I have a toothbrush. And you can wear my shirt again."
"I can't keep wearing your clothes."
"Why not?"
She doesn't have an answer for that. Or the answer she has is the wrong one—because wearing your clothes means I'm becoming part of your life and that terrifies me—and she can't say it out loud because saying it would make it true.
She stays.
Not because I convinced her. Because the pull is stronger than the resistance, and we both know it, and pretending otherwise has become a performance that neither of us can sustain.
We end up on the couch—not the bedroom, not yet. She tucks herself against my side with her legs curled under her and her head on my shoulder, and I put my arm around her and feel the weight of her against me and the warmth of her body through the sweater. We don't talk. The city hums outside the windows. The apartment, which has been silent and empty for months, is full.
She falls asleep against my shoulder at ten. I feel the moment it happens—the softening of her body, the weight shifting, her breathing deepening into the slow rhythm of someone who feels safe enough to let go.
She feels safe. In my apartment, against my body, she feels safe enough to fall asleep.
The thought is a blade and a balm simultaneously. She's safe here. I would burn this city to the ground before I let anything touch her. But the thing she should be afraid of isn't out there in the city. It's here, in this apartment, holding her while she sleeps. It's the man whose arm is around her, whose cameras are mounted across the street from her studio, whose lies are the foundation she's building her trust on.
I don't move. I hold her and I listen to her breathe and I watch the lights of Manhattan through the window and I let the guilt do what it does, which is settle into my chest like sediment, layer upon layer, building toward a weight that will eventually become structural.
Wednesday she texts me:Working late. Cargo door will be open.
An invitation. The first she's offered—not a response to my summons, not a reaction to my presence. A door held open.
I go to the studio at ten. She's welding. I sit on the crate in the corner and watch her work, and the camera feed I've been watching for weeks is nothing compared to this—the heat, the sound, the smell of ozone, the way the torch light plays across her face when she lifts the mask.
She doesn't talk while she works. I don't expect her to. I sit in her space and she works and the silence is the same silence from the kitchen—two people sharing air.
At midnight, she kills the torch. Pulls off her gloves. Looks at me across the studio with sweat on her forehead and a fresh burn on her wrist.
"You're good at being quiet," she says.
"Practice."
"Most people can't just sit. They fidget. They fill the space."
"I don't need to fill the space. Not with you."
She looks at me for a long time. Then she crosses the studio and stands in front of me and puts her hands on my shoulders and leans down and kisses me. Slow. Deliberate. Her mouth tastes like water and the particular sweetness that is just her.
When she pulls back, her eyes are serious.
"I don't know what this is yet," she says. "I don't know who you are, not really. But I know what I feel when I'm with you, and I know what I feel when I'm not, and the difference is big enough that I'm willing to wait for the rest."
The window. She's offering me a window—a period of grace in which feelings outweigh facts and the gap in her knowledge of me is tolerable.
The window won't stay open forever. She's too smart, too observant, too fundamentally committed to truth. Eventually the questions will sharpen and the answers will need to be real and the surface I'm maintaining will reach its limit.
