⁰⁴

the insult passes through him without so much as a flinch. he’d been called worse by men who later found themselves six feet beneath the nevada desert. but look me in the eye — that one lingers. his gaze lifts at last, finding hers with an almost reluctant precision and for the briefest of moments the fatigue etched into him eclipses the man who’d spent years cultivating the illusion that very little could reach him. he notices the way her arms have folded into themselves and it unsettles him far more than anger ever could. a slow breath leaves his nose as he closes the distance by a single step. not intimate, just enough that he no longer has to raise his voice. “ no. ” the word is quiet, but unwavering. “ you’re wrong. ” she’d mistaken distance for indifference, which he couldn’t fault her for after all those years of meticulous performance and inclination to decorum. it was easier to shoulder her resentment than risk placing her between the obligations she’d inherited and the feelings neither of them had ever been foolish enough to dignify with a name. some lines, once crossed, consumed more than the people standing on either side of them. his jaw tightens once, “ not because of you. ” he had never been afraid of facing her, only of what facing him would demand from her.

her jaw works once, a muscle feathering beneath skin gone pale with restraint. the silence between them is taut enough to splinter. when she finally opens her mouth, the words come sharpened against her teeth. “ you don’t get to decide that. ” it's a hiss more than a sentence. her arms fold tighter across her chest until her knuckles ache beneath the sleeves of her jacket. she's trying to keep her hands occupied. trying to keep them from reaching for him, or shoving him away. she isn't sure which impulse would win. “ if that’s really what you told yourself, fine, lucky. ” a breath releases. “ but you made that choice without me. ” the admission hangs between them. “ you say it wasn’t because of me. ” she swallows. “ it doesn’t matter. ” she hears it herself and despises it immediately. anger would have been easier. “ you still stopped coming to me. ” her eyes never leave his now. “ you still went around me. every time. ” each sentence hauled upward through layers of sediment she'd packed over them year after year. they scrape on the way out. “ so i filled in the blanks. ” what else had there been to do ? there had only ever been silence. stories. she had lived inside every one of them. she'd turned over old conversations, replayed arguments so many times they no longer sounded real, searched his expressions for meanings that dissolved the instant she thought she'd caught them. every glance that lingered. every one that didn't. she dissected them with almost religious devotion, convinced there had been a single careless moment where she'd become too much, too difficult, too impossible to keep. eventually she'd stopped looking for the exact wound. it was easier to believe she'd simply always been the knife. “ i figured if you wanted to talk to me, you would've. ” only then does she look away. her throat tightens around a swallow that feels impossible. for a moment she stares somewhere over his shoulder, gathering whatever pieces of herself remain dispersed across the floor between them. there is hurt there now, older than either of them wants to acknowledge. “ you don’t get to stand here now and tell me i fucking misunderstood. ”

the accusation peels back years of deliberate distance. every contract routed through her husband, every negotiation addressed to his office, every opportunity to seek her quietly surrendered to protocol instead. his expression scarcely changes, only a faint flex of his jaw as his gaze drifts past her shoulder, toward nowhere in particular. it had always been easier this way. cleaner. safer. “ i did, ” his voice doesn’t waver. no apology. no justification. “ it was the proper way. ”

the word hollowed around inside her head. it’s fucking amazing how one word can erase years. reduce to etiquette. reduce to bullshit. how pathetic it all really was. so she swallows, her arms folding across her chest on instinct — less a challenge than a way to stop herself from coming apart where he can see it. she’d spent too many years being too much. too angry, too reckless, too emotional. the family whispered about her, but she decided she’d rather be difficult than invisible. “ you didn’t go to my husband because it was proper. ” her voice wavers despite it all. “ you went to him because it meant you didn’t have to deal with me. ” her eyes stay on him anyway, searching for the smallest splinter, something that says this costs him too. anything. instead she gets the same glazed over silence he’s always worn, and she realizes she’s the only one bleeding. a shaky breath escapes through her nose. “ so don’t hide behind ‘ proper. ’ ” her jaw clenches hard enough to ache. “ just tell me the truth, lucky. ” a dismantling of her own making. “ was it really business or was it just easier to be a fucking pussy than look me in the eye ? ”

does it matter ? the question settles deep beneath his ribs and he doesn’t answer immediately. for a fleeting, disorienting moment, he’s seventeen again, standing on the banks of hollow creek while people asked questions he could never answer. his life has become an accumulation of those moments, forever convinced that if he’d noticed something sooner, asked one more question, lingered a little longer, someone might still be alive. parker is the only person who has managed to fracture that belief. she keeps proving that vigilance alone can’t save someone determined to outrun themselves. instead, he moves to stand beside her, shoulder nearly brushing hers, his gaze settling on the black water stretching endlessly. he doesn’t ask what she took. the professional version of him would — he’d gather facts, build timelines, search for cause. but she stopped being a case file a long time ago. “ i’m not asking what happened, ” he shakes his head, his voice absent of accusation. he looks at her, “ i’m asking if you’re alright. ”

the question catches her off guard. he's asking about her. she stares out at the water for a while, jaw twitching once. she bends down, picks up a shell, turns it over between her fingers without really looking at it. " i don't know. " a swallow. " i don't really think about it, jude. " she drops the shell back into the sand. " you don't have to do this. " a quiet, pathetic mumble. another half - hearted swallow. when she finally glances over, her face is unreadable. even she knows how vacant that answer is. she looks back at the waves, digging the toe of her shoe into the wet sand. " don't really know what you want me to say. "

the party sprawls across the hawthorne shoreline in a haze of firelight and nostalgia while he stands apart from most of it, as he always does. years ago, he was returned a young man more comfortable cataloging ghosts than joining the living. yet his attention keeps finding her. and he notices it the way he notices everything that matters too late. the way her pupils look when she turns toward a string light, how she disappears for twenty minutes and comes back just slightly different, familiar signs. dread settles heavily beneath his ribs as he follows her down the darker stretch of beach. “ you using again ? ”

she doesn't lie well around him. that's the fucked part. every relapse has always looked the same from the inside. she always tells herself it'll quiet everything for an hour. that this time she'll stop before anyone notices. that she still has enough control left. then he notices. a sick part of her wants to tell him she's clean just to watch relief dismantle his features, even if it only lasts five minutes. another part wants to laugh because they've done this enough times that they both know the script by heart. he asks. she lies. he doesn't believe her. she disappears anyway. like he's watching someone drown who keeps batting away the hand trying to pull her out. she hates that look more than withdrawal. she stares out at the black water instead of him, digging the toe of her shoe into damp sand until it caves beneath the pressure. for a second she almost says no automatically. the syllable is already sitting behind her teeth. " does it matter ? " her eyes slip away before he can answer.

‘  i’m  not  bullshitting  you,  dean.  ’  she  looks  at  him  evenly  —  all  this  time,  and  that  face  had  barely  changed.  ‘  i  loved  you.  i  did.  but  you  are  suffocating.  ’  her  voice  is  thin,  chest  tight  as  if  her  lungs  were  still  searching  for  purchase.  ‘  so  i  left.  ’

years of interrogation rooms taught him that the truth usually arrived in disguises. the badge was gone, but the habit never left. he studied her the way he used to study suspects. patiently, waiting for the part that didn’t add up. “ okay. ” a scrutinizing glance in her direction. “ you left. ” a pause. “ ‘you were suffocating’ sounds a whole lot of a hell better than whatever the real reason was. ” his hands remained in his pockets, posture loose, almost bored. “ if you wanted out, you wanted out. that’s all it had to be. ” he shrugged. “ but somehow you’re still here explaining yourself. ” the lilt of his head. “ doesn’t track, yasmine. ”

“ i was hoping you wouldn’t show up. ”

can’t even blame her for it. if she’d been on the other side of the door, she’d have prayed for the same thing. she’d spent months teaching everyone who cared about her that she’d eventually disappear, lie, relapse, choose the next deal over the next promise. showing up now, gaunt, exhausted, felt less like returning and more like proving every fear she’d left behind. her eyes float past her shoulder into the apartment that used to feel familiar, swallowing around the knot in her throat. “ yeah, ” she mutters under her breath. “ was hoping i wouldn’t have to either. ” nothing mattered. “ i just need my shit, lola. ” her fingers tighten around the strap of her bag, the only possession she hasn’t managed to lose.

his expression barely changes but an old instinct tightens inside him. still loves her in the way men like him never learn to unlearn. like a system error in a body built for speed, where her absence never truly translated into detachment, only into a quieter, more disciplined kind of ruin he learned to live inside. “ you say that like i was supposed to become someone else. ” this was always the trajectory set in stone for him, etched into him long before love ever had a chance to become a competing force. even when it meant losing her, he never pretended it could be otherwise. “ that was never the deal. ”

for a long time, she’d mistaken his consistency for integrity. thought there was something noble about a man who never bent. it takes distance to realize stone doesn’t stay standing because it’s strong. it stays standing because it refuses to move. she wonders if he hears himself. that was never the deal. no. it wasn’t. she studies him the way she’d study a familiar combination at the barre, every line exactly where she remembers it. nothing out of place. nothing learned. “ that’s the difference between us. ” something akin to bile in the back of her throat. “ i stopped believing that who you were and who you chose to be were the same thing. ” she looks away. “ i don’t think you ever did. ”

her expression hardens the moment his attention stops circling the problem she wants him to see and lands, unflinching, on the one she cannot. not the man at the bar, not the drink, not the performance. her. she meets it the only way she knows how, by dismantling the shape of him. because it is easier to survive him as an employee than as something she might actually lose. a slow, brittle laugh slips out though it dies too quickly to be convincing. “ then do your job, ” her gaze flicks over him as she steps in, “ keep me alive. that’s what i’m paying you for, right ? ” a hand lifts to his shoulder — light contact, almost dismissive — the kind of touch that pretends it means nothing while insisting on everything.

his eyes dropped to her hand. that was always the problem. not the drinking. not the drugs. not the men she collected for an evening and forgot by morning. her. the fact that she could make everything sound like a joke right up until it wasn’t. he closed his hand around her wrist and lowered it from his shoulder. “ you’re paying me because somebody has to be here. ” a gruff statement, his grip loosening almost immediately. “ that’s it. ” he watched her for a moment then. the dilated pupils. the fidgety energy. the half - lidded look she got when the night was about to take a shitty turn. years ago he would’ve arrested people like her — and for fucking less. now he escorted them to parties and made sure they got home breathing. real funny how shit turned out. “ you want me to tell you you’re fine ? ” he muttered. “ no goddamn problem, amelia. ” his jaw relaxed, a look of indifference smeared across his features. “ but it’s your life. ”

“ out of control ? ” the accusation earns a laugh from her, head tipping back. “ that’s a little dramatic. ” the remnants of the party still cling to her — champagne on her tongue, adrenaline in her bloodstream, cocaine turning everything bright and reckless and invincible. she can feel her own pulse beneath her skin, humming with restless energy. she takes a step closer, “ i wasn’t aware i needed your permission to flirt. ” a smile curves across her mouth, all provocation and beautiful self-destruction. “ that guy bought me a drink. big deal. ”

his eyes trace her for a second before parting elsewhere. “ didn’t say you needed permission. ” the response leaves his mouth — cold. blasé. “ you can do whatever you want. ” he’s staring at the bar, toward the crowd, anywhere but her. “ but let’s not act like some random fuck buying you a drink is where this starts and ends. ” a blink. the subtle flex of his hand. “ you get bored. you push. you see what happens. ” his gaze returns to her, jaw slacked. “ and eventually something fuckin’ does. ”

his gaze drifts past her shoulder toward the dance floor, following the slow orbit of couples beneath the chandeliers. anywhere but her because looking at alondra now would require acknowledging that she has identified the pattern. worse, that she has named it. “ i wasn’t aware we were having an argument. ” except they were, just not the kind that announces itself through raised voices or spectacle. theirs rarely do, instead arriving disguised as observations, leaving casualties long after the conversation has ended. “ if your relationship can be dismantled by observations, ” he says, lifting his glass, “ that seems less like my interference and more like a structural deficiency. ”

doesn’t immediately answer. she sets her glass down on a passing tray, eyes following the movement for a moment before returning to him. “ that’s convenient. ” a factual statement. “ if every consequence is actually someone else’s weakness, you never have to consider your own involvement. ” attention drifts briefly toward the dance floor. “ whether the structure was sound isn’t really the point. ” she looks back at him. the silence that follows is brief. “ but by all means. continue pretending you’re an innocent bystander. ”