"Clara—"
"Don't." She pulled back just enough to meet his eyes. "Don't say you're tired. Don't say you're fine. Just — be here. Right now. With me."
Something cracked behind his expression. Not broke — cracked. A fissure in the wall, letting through a sliver of the fear and grief and longing he'd been mortaring over since Josie called.
He didn't answer with words. He picked her up — hands under her thighs, lifting her onto the kitchen counter with the strength of a man who worked withhis body every day — and kissed her like he was running out of time.
Maybe he was.
They didn't make it to the bedroom.
Clara wrapped her legs around him, pulling him closer, her fingers in his hair, her back against the cabinet. Jack's mouth traveled down her neck, her collarbone, the hollow above her sternum, each kiss landing with an intensity that was almost desperate — not rushed, buturgent, like he was trying to memorize the geography of her before he forgot it.
"Hey," she breathed. "Slow down. I'm not going anywhere."
He stilled. Forehead against her shoulder. Breathing hard.
"I know," he said. But it sounded like he didn't.
They moved to the bedroom eventually — Clara pulling him by the hand, Jack following like someone being led toward something he wanted and was terrified of in equal measure. The room was dim, the last of the evening light slanting through the window, the sheets still rumpled from the morning.
Clara pulled her shirt over her head. Jack watched her with an expression she couldn't categorize — want and grief tangled together, the look ofsomeone staring at something beautiful and already mourning its loss.
"Stop looking at me like that," she said.
"Like what?"
"Like you're already remembering this."
The words hit something. She saw it land — the flinch he tried to hide, the way his hands stilled on his own shirt buttons for just a beat too long.
"Come here," she said. Softer now.
He came.
What followed was nothing like their other times. Not the tender, healing intensity of their first night, when Clara had cried and laughed and reclaimed her body from the ghost of Sam's indifference. Not the playful, sleepy warmth of the morning after. Not the giddy, laughing adventure on the boat, when the ridiculousness of the logistics had been half the fun.
This was sex with an undertow.
Clara felt it in the way Jack touched her — carefully, thoroughly, like he was cataloguing every detail. The curve of her hip under his palm. The sound she made when he kissed the inside of her wrist. The way her breath hitched when his hand traveled lower, finding her with a precision that came frompaying attention, from learning her, from the accumulated knowledge of a body he'd been studying for weeks.
She felt it in herself, too — a fierceness she hadn't expected. She pulled him closer than close. Wrapped herself around him when he entered her, arms and legs and every part of her that could hold on holding on, because some animal part of her brain had registered the duffel bag and the half-smiles and the too-early hammering and had decided that if he was leaving, she was going to burn this into both of them first.
"Clara." His voice was rough against her ear. Raw. The way he said her name — like it contained the entire argument he couldn't make, every reason to stay that he was too scared to articulate.
"I'm here," she said. Moved with him. Against him. "I'm right here."
He pressed his forehead to hers. Eyes open. Both of them looking at each other in the half-light, and for a moment the walls came down entirely — no half-smiles, no deflection, no carefully managed distance. Just two people in the terrifying clarity of wanting something too much to hold without shaking.
Jack's rhythm faltered. His breath caught. He buried his face in her neck and whispered something she almost didn't hear.
"I don't want to go."
Five words. Barely audible. Said into her skin like he was hiding them there, pressing them into a place where he could pretend he'd never said them at all.
Clara's throat closed. She held him tighter. Moved with him through the last desperate minutes, her body arching into his, his hands gripping the sheets beside her head, both of them chasing something that felt less like pleasure and more like proof — proof that this was real, that it mattered, that wanting to stay and actually staying were close enough to be the same thing.
They came within moments of each other. Clara first — a wave that started deep and radiated outward, pulling a sound from her that was half gasp, half something closer to grief. Jack followed, his whole body shuddering, her name on his lips again, and then he collapsed against her with the weight of a man who'd been holding himself up for too long.
