I still sleep in the bedroom. The sheets still smell like her, and I refuse to wash them. It's torture, breathing her in every night while she's three thousand miles away. But I'm a man who's always believed in earning what I want through pain. This is my penance. My punishment for letting her walk out that door.
For not locking it behind her.
I'm not a man who begs. I'm not a man who waits. I'm a man who takes what he wants and deals with the consequences later.
But she asked me to give her space.
And for reasons I don't fully understand, her asking means something. Her words have power over me that no one else's ever have. When she said she couldn't breathe, something cracked open inside me. Not guilt, exactly. Something deeper. The realization that I would rather let her go than watch her suffocate.
Even if letting her go might kill me.
I pick up my phone and stare at her name in my contacts. My thumb hovers over the call button, desperate to hear her voice.
I could call her. Wake her up. Remind her who she belongs to.
Because she does belong to me. That hasn't changed just because she ran. If anything, the distance has made it clearer.She's mine. She's been mine since the moment I first saw her, and she'll be mine until the day I die.
The question is whether she knows it yet.
I set the phone down and light another joint with steady hands.
I understand why she left. I was suffocating her, treating her like a possession to be guarded rather than a woman to be trusted. My father does the same thing to my mother, and I swore I'd never repeat his mistakes.
But here's the difference between my father and me: I'm aware of what I am. I know my instincts are fucked up, that my first response to loving someone is to lock them away where no one can touch them. Knowing doesn't make it easier to change. It just means I have to fight harder.
And I've never backed down from a fight.
Around four in the morning, I pull up flight options to Boston. I could be there by noon. I could walk into her mother's house, look that woman in the eye, and tell her exactly what I think of her.
Sydney Catalano thinks she can take Jade from me. She thinks a few days in Boston and some guilt trips about the past will undo everything we've built. She doesn't know who she's dealing with.
I'm not James, whatever pathetic excuse for a man he turned out to be. I don't cheat. I don't abandon. When I commit to something, I commit completely, and I committed to Jade the moment I sent that check.
My finger hovers over the purchase button for a first-class ticket.
Then I hear her voice in my head.
I need space. If you love me, you'll let me go.
I close the browser. Not because I'm accepting defeat. Because I'm playing a longer game.
Jade thinks she needs to choose between me and her mother. She thinks this is about two different versions of her life, two different futures. She's wrong. There is no future without me. She just hasn't accepted that yet.
Waiting isn't surrender. It's strategy. I'm giving her room to breathe, room to miss me, room to realize that whatever her mother says about the Crawfords, I'm not my father and she's not Olive.
When she comes back, and she will come back, she'll come because she chose me. Not because I dragged her home. Not because I gave her no other option. Because she looked at her life without me and decided it wasn't worth living.
That's what I want. Her complete, willing surrender.
The sun starts to rise around six, painting the sky in shades of pink and gold. I should shower and shave. Put on a suit and remind the world that Phoenix Crawford doesn't break.
I think about what my father said when he came to check on me. Crawfords don't fall apart. We don't let our emotions control us.
He's half right. I'm not falling apart. I'm being rebuilt. Every day without her strips away another layer of the man I thought I was, revealing something harder underneath. Something that knows exactly what it wants and has already proven there is no line it won't cross to have it.
My phone buzzes and I pick it up.
It's a text from Jade.
