Page 42 of Jax (The Kansas City Reapers #3)

That was what I had to offer. Not comfort. Not an apology. Not a grand declaration. For me, love was methodical. It was measured. It was the willingness to tear apart everything I thought I knew and reconstruct something better. Not easier. Better. Something worthy of her.

Was that what this was? Was I falling in love with this woman I’d only known for a matter of weeks?

She didn’t need to be pulled into my arms. She needed steadiness.

She needed to know I saw what others ignored.

That I could read the language of her body when she had no words left.

She needed the line held. So, I did what I always do when something breaks.

I didn’t discard it. I traced the failure back to its origin, documented the pattern, and started again, not to erase what went wrong, but to build something that wouldn’t collapse under stress.

She didn’t move at first. Just sat with everything I’d given her like she was testing the structure for fault lines, looking for the place it might snap.

She didn’t trust easily. Her trust had been broken too precisely for that.

And she wasn’t about to hand me another piece of herself just because I knew how to sound steady.

But then she shifted. A quiet lean toward the chair opposite mine, the smallest realignment of weight, like a decision had settled behind her ribs.

She didn’t collapse onto the seat. Didn’t sink.

She perched on the edge with hands braced against her knees, spine rigid, breath too deliberate.

It was the posture of someone ready to bolt. But choosing to stay.

“I don’t know what I need,” she said at last. Her voice was thin, not with weakness, but wear. “I want to want it again. I really do. But I don’t trust myself to know when it’s too much.”

The way she said it was clinical. Like a report, not a confession. A fact she’d been carrying around like shrapnel she couldn’t remove.

And God, that admission was its own kind of bravery. Not knowing is terrifying. Especially for someone who had been through what Stella had in the last few weeks. For a survivor of that kind of trauma, uncertainty wasn’t just uncomfortable. It was dangerous.

So I didn’t offer her comfort.

I offered her structure.

“Then we stop chasing the right answers,” I said. “We start with what’s off the table. What didn’t feel safe. What we can eliminate from the equation.”

She didn’t speak, but she didn’t pull away either. So I kept going, soft and methodical. Not guiding her—building with her.

“No full-body bondage.”

She gave a small nod, her eyes fixed on her lap.

“No being turned away from me. No scenes that involve your back to me for now…face-down, face-away, anything that removes your access to me visually.”

Another nod, tighter. But I saw the way her shoulders eased a few percentage points.

“No blindfolds. Not until you ask for them.”

That one made her inhale, just a little deeper.

“We also add a visual safeword,” I continued. “Two fingers raised. You don’t have to speak if you don’t want to. We make silence an option, not a trap.”

She looked at me then, sharp and searching. “And if I do speak?”

I nodded. “Even better. We make room for active voice. If you feel something rising—not panic, but pressure, discomfort, even pleasure that feels close to the line—you tell me. That’s not weakness. That’s intel. It’s real-time adjustment data.”

Her mouth quirked, just barely. “You really have built a spreadsheet in your head for this, haven’t you?”

I didn’t blink. “No,” I said. “I built three.”

That pulled a soft, stunned laugh from her, a real one. The sound cracked through the air between us like a warm front rolling in after a storm. Not because it erased the tension, but because it rewired it. Shifted the energy from defensive to collaborative.

“I swear to God,” she muttered, smiling under her breath. “You’re like a kinky NASA engineer.”

“Only with better safeword protocols,” I said dryly. “And slightly more nudity.”

She rolled her eyes, but her hands unclenched in her lap. Her breath came easier. Her mouth was still curved when she looked down.

And in that pause, in that exhale, I offered one more piece—not a rule, not a note, not a protocol. Just the truth.

“You’re worth the processing power, Stella.”

She stilled, and I read it as more than a pause. Not uncertainty. More like the way a body braces when it decides something. Her fingers twined. Her eyes stayed down.

“What if I say yes,” she whispered, “and halfway through I realize I can’t keep going? And I don’t know how to explain it.”

I didn’t hesitate. “Then you safeword again, and we stop.”

She blinked.

“No explanation required. Full stop, full care. No pressure to justify it, no disappointment from me. You don’t need a post-mortem in the moment. You need safety. Analysis comes after, only if you want it.”

She blinked again. Slower this time. Letting the words sink.

“And if that keeps happening?” she asked. “If I keep freezing or doubting or….”

“Then I stay,” I said. “And I adjust. And we try again. Or we don’t. On your timeline, not mine.”

She swallowed, then looked up. “You won’t be mad?”

“Mad?” I said. “Stella, I’ll be grateful . Because it means you trusted me enough to choose yourself in the middle of something vulnerable. It means you believed me when I said this only works if you feel in control.”

She didn’t answer. Just breathed. Slower now. Deeper. And for the first time all night, her spine eased against the back of the chair, not fully, but enough to make my chest loosen. She didn’t realize it yet, but that was progress. A quiet yes, in the language we were still learning.

She stayed quiet, gaze lowered, fingers tracing idle lines into the cushion, not fidgeting, but thinking.

Her body wasn’t wound tight the way it had been in those first days after her arrival, though it hadn’t settled fully into rest either.

What she carried now wasn’t fear; it was nerves, the kind that come before a choice.

The silence between us wasn’t empty. It gathered in layers, thick with thought, her focus aligning behind her ribs like she was building toward words she hadn’t released yet.

And then she spoke.

“What if I do like it again?”

The words were soft; not whispered, but cautious, like she hadn’t decided if they were safe. Her eyes stayed on her hands, and the shape of her voice carried the weight of shame, like she was afraid wanting this was betrayal.

“What if it feels good, and I let myself have that for a second... and then I remember I’m not supposed to?” She exhaled through her nose, tight and sharp. “That I shouldn’t feel good. Not when it’s still in me. Not when I haven’t earned it. Not when I don’t know if it’ll ever be gone.”

I didn’t need to ask what she meant. Her trauma wasn’t a mystery.

I’d been tracking it from the beginning.

The word “still” said enough. Still in her.

Still shaping how she responded, how she breathed, how she carried herself in every room.

Still rising in her chest when joy surfaced too fast. Still pulling her under when softness got too close.

What she was asking—what she hadn’t quite said—was whether healing might betray the version of herself who had survived without it. Whether pleasure could erase pain. Whether reaching for more would mean what happened before no longer counted.

She didn’t say it. But I heard all of it.

And I didn’t reach for her. Didn’t fall back on touch or false comfort.

That kind of response so often serves the giver more than the one grieving.

I didn’t want to soothe her into silence.

I wanted to speak to her mind, to the structure of it.

To the part of her that needed facts as much as safety.

So I leaned forward, just enough to meet the moment without crowding it.

“My job,” I said, “isn’t to make you forget where you’ve been. It’s to help you build around it. So memory doesn’t own your body anymore. So that when it feels good, it doesn’t turn on you. So you don’t have to flinch every time joy shows up and knocks.”

Her gaze lifted then, just barely, and I held it. Not intensely, but with precision. With care. Enough that she knew I was still there. Still tracking.

“If it comes up again,” I said, “if that guilt crawls in the moment you start to feel something real, I won’t judge it.

I won’t try to override it. But I’ll help you build the space around it so it doesn’t drown the whole scene.

We can stop. Breathe. Name it, or ignore it.

That’s not a failure. That’s the process. ”

Her arms wrapped around her knees again, but it wasn’t to hide. It was comfort, containment. She folded in, not to disappear, but to protect the spark she hadn’t let herself name until now.

“I just... I don’t want to hate myself for it,” she said, voice still timid. “I don’t want to feel good and then be ashamed. I already feel broken half the time. I don’t want to break more, because something good happened and I let it.”

I nodded, slow and steady. “Your pleasure doesn’t erase your pain. It doesn’t undo what you survived, or rewrite your grief. It adds. That’s all. It builds something beside the pain, not over it.”

Tears hovered, unshed but bright at the corners of her eyes, held back by sheer will. She trembled in the smallest, most devastating ways—fingers flexing, breath catching, jaw twitching as she tried not to clench.

“You don’t have to earn it,” I said. “You don’t have to wait until you’re done hurting. You’re allowed to feel good while you’re still healing. That doesn’t make you selfish. That makes you alive.”

Her head lowered, eyes closing like she was letting those words in piece by piece. I gave her the quiet to hold it. She didn’t need noise. She needed somewhere to set the truth down.

“I don’t know how to believe that,” she whispered.

“You don’t have to,” I said. “Not yet.”

When her eyes opened, they met mine. Unsteady. Raw. Open.

“I’ll believe it for you,” I said. “Until you feel it in your skin.”

And I meant it, not as sentiment, but as structure.

A framework I was ready to build with every ounce of care I’d ever given anything that mattered.

She didn’t need to trust it now. She didn’t need to trust me.

She only had to keep breathing, and I’d be there, reading every shift, holding steady through the silence between her words.

Because she didn’t need a savior. She needed something she could live inside without bracing for collapse. And I would give her that—not just once, but again and again—until safety stopped feeling like performance, and started feeling like home.

She exhaled, like the words still felt strange. “Not tonight.” It wasn’t avoidance. It wasn’t a retreat. It was a decision.

And I smiled—small, careful, real. “I didn’t bring rope.”

That earned me a look. One brow lifted. “You’re such an arrogant bastard.”

“Only on Tuesdays,” I said smoothly, leaning back in my chair. “And every other Thursday.”

She laughed, full-bodied and unguarded, the kind that seemed to catch her by surprise.

It knocked something loose between us. For the first time all night, she didn’t reach for control; she reached for contact.

Her hand brushed along mine as she stood, not a grab or a test, just a quiet check to see if the world tilted when she touched something by choice. It didn’t. And she didn’t pull away.

“I want to try,” she said, her eyes meeting mine. “Just... slowly. With guardrails.”

That was the beginning. Not a yes to rope, not a yes to scenes, just a yes to re-entry. A yes to letting me build something steady, and allowing herself to step into it on her own time, one breath at a time. I nodded once, without fanfare.

“Then I’ll build you a runway,” I said, my voice low. “And I’ll wait as long as it takes for you to fly again.”

She didn’t speak, but she held my gaze a beat longer, her mouth tilting into something almost amused, almost incredulous.

Maybe, for the first time, she believed I meant it.

And maybe, for the first time, she wanted to believe it for herself.

She moved like the tide retreating, slow and certain, drawn by something deeper than fear.

No apology in her motion, no need to check how I read it.

Just a quiet reclaiming of her body, inch by inch, like she was walking out of a war she hadn’t realized she was still fighting.

I stayed seated. Not because she needed the space, but because she deserved the throne, and the choice to rise from it.

She crossed the room in silence that didn’t feel empty; it felt deliberate.

Her hand brushed the doorframe as she passed it, and for a second, I thought that would be it, that she’d leave it hanging in the air.

But Stella had never been predictable. She was the outlier, the unsolvable variable in every equation I thought I understood.

She paused with her hand still on the frame, her back to me.

And then, like she was naming a fact rather than offering a compliment, she said, “I meant it, you know. That first night? You were good.”

I could’ve let that be the end of it. But I’m not built for enough; I’m built for precision.

“Next time,” I said, voice even, “I won’t settle for good.”

She half-turned, just enough for me to see the glint in her eyes. Wariness still lived there, but it wasn’t alone anymore. It had company now. Something like heat. Maybe even hope.

“Don’t get cocky.”

I let a smile curl, not too wide, just enough to feel like a secret passed between us.

“Too late.”

She left on her own breath. The door didn’t close like goodbye.

It closed like a bookmark—intentional, unfinished, waiting.

When the quiet settled, I didn’t move. I let the tension hum in my ribs, let it ache the way truth sometimes does.

Then I exhaled, long and low, into the space she left behind.

Because what she gave me tonight wasn’t forgiveness. It wasn’t trust. It was the blueprint of a woman rebuilding herself from memory and fire.

And when she came back—not if, but when—I wouldn’t meet her where she’d been. I’d meet her where she was going.

And I’d be the one holding the fucking map.