"You're still here," I murmur against her skin. "You're home. You're mine."
She makes a sound that isn't quite an answer but means yes anyway.
I press my lips to her collarbone, her shoulder, the soft skin below her ear. She smells like the bath salts and underneath that something warmer, something that is purely her, and I take my time because she needs time. Tonight is about giving her body back to her, reminding her that it belongs to something other than fear.
My mouth moves lower. She draws in a breath when I find the curve of her breast, her fingers threading into my hair, not directing, just holding on. I circle slowly, dragging out every sensation, and feel her hips shift beneath me, her body waking up despite everything, responding the way it always respondsto me, and something in my chest tightens with a feeling that is bigger than want.
"Phoenix." My name in her mouth, quiet and unsteady.
"I've got you," I tell her. "I'm right here."
Her hands tighten in my hair.
I work my way down her body with patience, my lips against her ribs, careful over the bruising, soft where she's been hurt. She makes a small sound when I press a kiss to the worst of it, and I linger there for a moment.
When I finally give her what she's been arching toward she comes undone quietly, her thighs trembling against my shoulders, one hand pressed over her own mouth like she's trying to hold something in. I don't let her hold it in. I keep going until she stops trying, until the sound escapes her and her whole body goes taut and then loose.
I settle over her and she wraps around me and when I finally push inside her we both go still for a moment, adjusting to the feeling of it. Her eyes are open and on mine in the dark and I hold her gaze and move slowly.
"You're strong," I tell her. "You're brave." I kiss her cheek, her temple. "You're everything."
She turns her face into my neck and I feel the wetness of tears against my skin. But her hips are moving with mine and her arms are tight around my back. This is both things at once, grief and want, and I hold her through all of it.
I slide one hand between us and feel her gasp against my throat, her whole body tightening, and I keep the pressure steady and the rhythm slow and whisper against her hair that she's mine, that she's safe, that I have her, that I'm never letting go.
When she breaks this time it's completely. Her fingers dig into my back hard enough to leave marks. She shakes againstme and says my name over and over. I follow her over the edge with my face buried in her hair.
Afterward she lies against my chest and doesn't speak. Her breathing slows. Her hand rests flat over my heart, and I cover it with mine, and I feel the exact moment she crosses from wakefulness into sleep, the small surrender of it, her body going completely heavy and soft against me.
I kiss the top of her head and close my eyes, and let the future wait until morning.
CHAPTER 34- JADE
The dust settles the way Phoenix's father promised it would.
Nicholas calls one afternoon while I'm on the back deck watching the ocean, his voice carrying the same measured certainty he uses for everything, like outcomes are simply a matter of proper management. The case is stalled. No body, no evidence, no witnesses. The detectives have moved on.
It's over.
I stand on the deck for a long time after the call ends, phone in my hand, the Pacific doing what it always does, moving and moving without caring about any of it. I wait to feel something definitive. Relief, maybe, or the lightness of a weight finally lifted.
What I feel instead is quiet. A deep bone-level quiet that I'm starting to understand is what the other side of everything looks like.
I go inside and find Phoenix at his desk. He looks up when I appear in the doorway. Something in my face makes him close his laptop without a word and open his arms, and I cross the room and fold myself into him, my face against his neck. We stay like that for a long time. The ocean moves outside the window. The afternoon light shifts slowly across the floor.
"It's done," I say finally.
"It's done," he confirms.
We stay like that for a while longer. His hand moves slowly up and down my back.
Suddenly, I get the urge to pick up the phone and call my mom. I want to tell her that I’m okay and that we made it through. But I leave the phone where it is.
She made her position clear. Some doors, once closed, stay that way.
The Crawfordsclose ranks in the weeks that follow, so gradually and completely that I barely notice it happening until it already has. Nicholas stops looking at me like a variable he hasn't yet solved. There's a dinner where he asks about my manuscript with what appears to be genuine interest. Olive starts texting me book recommendations, and she turns out to have impeccable taste, and then we're exchanging titles back and forth the way people do when they've decided they actually like each other. Small things accumulate, an extra key pressed into my hand one evening after dinner without ceremony, Olive saying keep it like it was the most natural thing in the world.
I am slowly one of them.
