Page 93 of Jax (The Kansas City Reapers #3)

He dried me slowly, reverently. Not just patting away water, but touching each place the rope had marked like it mattered. The cotton dragged softly over skin still warm from surrender. His silence was full of meaning—no praise, no commentary. Just the worship of what I’d survived. What I’d given.

He dressed me in himself—his worn black shirt, loose lounge pants that still carried his scent. Cedar. Salt. Smoke. He changed too, eyes never leaving mine, and when he offered his hand, I took it without hesitation.

The walk to the bedroom felt like a crossing. Not a beginning, but a shift. The air was different now. Cleared of everything we’d left behind in that room.

He climbed onto the bed first, cross-legged in the center, warm light painting his face in gold. I followed, mirroring his posture. Our knees brushed. Our hands found each other in the space between.

When he finally spoke, his voice was quiet and sure, full of the kind of truth that doesn’t need to be loud.

“I used to think rope was about control,” he said.

“That if I tied something tight enough, it couldn’t fall apart.

That if I mapped every knot, every breath, I could keep the world from slipping through my fingers.

And maybe, for a while, I needed it to be that. ”

He glanced down at our hands, then back at me.

“But it changed. It became something quieter. Something deeper. It taught me how to listen, how to see. It made me softer. And I thought maybe that was the gift. That rope turned me into a man who could stay.” His fingers brushed mine.

“But then you showed up,” he said. “And you didn’t just give me rope. You gave me yourself. You gave me your fight, your grief, your hunger. And with you, rope isn’t control. It’s devotion.”

The words hit low and hot and beautiful, like sunlight sliding down my spine.

My voice was a rasp when I finally found it. “You’ve seen all of me. Not just the parts I gave you. The parts I tried to hide. The ones I buried under strength and snark. You saw them. And you didn’t turn away.”

Emotion thickened in my throat. I blinked hard, but the tears came anyway.

“I don’t want a life without this. Without you. Without knowing exactly who I am when I’m on my knees in front of you—and knowing that it’s still me. That you don’t need me to be anyone else.”

He lifted my hands to his lips, kissing the knuckles one at a time. “Then don’t,” he said. “We’re here. You and me. No exit strategy. No maybe.”

My chest caved in a little at that. Not from fear. From relief. From knowing, finally, that I didn’t have to keep searching for the shape of safety. I had found it. In him.

“I want more,” I whispered. “More than what we have here. More than just when we’re in a scene. There is still a lot I have to learn about being in a dynamic, but I know I don’t want this to end when we stand up. I want it to be… us. Always. All the time. I want you.”

Jax didn’t answer right away. His gaze stayed steady, weighty, like he was cataloguing every word, every tremor in my voice. Then he nodded, slow and certain. “Then kneel,” he said. “And say it.”

I moved without pause, slipping from the bed with a grace that wasn’t performed, it was lived, bone-deep and certain.

Kneeling didn’t feel like submission. It felt like truth.

My spine stayed tall, hands resting on my thighs, chin lifted not in challenge but in calm surrender.

The tremor in my limbs didn’t embarrass me.

It felt sacred. A quiet signal of everything this moment carried—the weight, the rawness, the clarity of choosing something that had always waited behind the noise.

This wasn’t about needing to surrender. It was about knowing I didn’t have to, and choosing to anyway. The kneeling, the stillness, the offering of breath and presence… it was mine.

“I’m yours, Jax.” My voice shook, not from doubt, but from the gravity of finally saying what my body had known long before my mouth caught up.

The words burned on the way out—too big, too sharp, too dangerous to take back, but I didn’t want them back.

“I want you to have me. All of me. The scars. The chaos. The fire. I’m not just giving you fragments of myself.

I want you to have the whole wreckage, and I give you permission to put me back together again. ”

The silence afterward wasn’t empty. It cracked open, thick with something holy, like the air itself bent to carry what I’d just given him.

He moved slowly, fingers threading into my hair with the kind of precision that felt like possession. His lips pressed to the crown of my head, reverent and unhurried, and when he spoke, it didn’t sound like comfort. It sounded like a vow.

“You don’t know what that does to me,” he said, low and ragged, then steadier, each word deliberate, like he was building the truth brick by brick so it couldn’t be torn down.

“I’m yours, Stella. Not sometimes. Not halfway.

Entirely. Every breath. Every calculation.

Every knot I tie, every ounce of discipline I thought made me untouchable.

It’s yours now. And I’ll spend the rest of my life proving you were right to claim it. ”

His words didn’t demand. They soaked into me slowly and deeply, like water over earth that had waited too long. His hand moved through my hair in an even rhythm, grounding me with each stroke as if time itself had paused to witness us.

When I moved, it was toward him. He opened his arms like a promise, and I climbed into them without hesitation, curling into his lap like I’d always belonged there.

His hold wrapped around me with the same care he’d shown all night, my head tucked under his jaw, his heartbeat steady against my cheek. Nothing in him asked. It only offered.

The room cooled, but he didn’t pull back.

His hand stroked my back, not to calm, but to affirm.

I was here. I was his. I was safe. When he shifted, it was only to grab the blanket beside us.

He wrapped it around my shoulders and pulled the edge beneath my chin with a tenderness that broke something open.

The weight of it hit me hard, not from temperature, but from the jolt of being tended to without condition.

His touch asked for nothing. It simply was. Steady. Devoted. The way he loved.

He lay back and took me with him. We stretched across the bed, bodies tucked in perfect symmetry. I didn’t resist. I melted into it. My legs tangled with his. My hand found his chest. His fingers moved through my hair again with the same quiet rhythm.

Silence spun through the room like silk—soft, strong, and real. Every breath between us wove something deeper, something lasting. It wasn’t the end. It was a breath held between moments. A hush before light returns. That sliver of time when everything is still and nothing needs fixing.

Neither of us spoke. The quiet was already saying everything: belonging, promise, peace. And when sleep finally came, it didn’t feel like letting go. It felt like falling into something warmer than rest. Not escape. Not retreat. Just surrender.

Still, before I drifted, I traced his chest with slow fingers, needing the tether. Needing him solid and there and mine.

I whispered his name like a truth I could sleep inside.

His hand paused in my hair.

“Yeah, wicked girl?”

I hesitated, not from doubt, but because some things, once spoken, are sacred. Binding. Permanent.

“Thank you,” I breathed. “For seeing me, and never looking away. For never making me feel like I had to hide.” He pressed a kiss to the top of my head, then another to the curve of my temple. His voice was quiet, raw. “Thank you for letting me. You gave me something I didn’t know I was missing.”

Tears pricked sharp and sudden, not because I was broken, but because for once I wasn’t invisible.

He saw all of me, and it was almost too much to hold.

I shifted to face him, our noses almost touching.

I ran my fingers along the line of his jaw, memorizing the texture of stubble, the heat of his skin, the certainty in his eyes.

“What do we do now?” I asked, the words barely louder than breath.

He smiled, not a grin, not smugness. Just soft. Just real.

“Now? We live. We love. We figure it out, one day at a time. No more masks. No more running.”

I nodded, pressing my forehead to his, letting our breaths merge.

“I want that. With you. Just like this.”

“Then sleep,” he murmured. “Because tomorrow, we build it. Whatever it is, we’ll build it together.”

So I let go, not just of grief, but of the lie I’d carried for too long.

That I had to hold everything by myself.

I exhaled armor I’d mistaken for skin, unclenched fists I didn’t know were clenched, and in that space between breaths, I gave him what I’d never given to anyone else—my stillness.

Not because I needed saving, but because I finally believed he wouldn’t look away from what he saw.

He didn’t hold me like I was fragile. He held me like I was sacred.

Not with control, not with caution, but with reverence, like my wreckage wasn’t something to fix, but something to memorize.

My cracks weren’t flaws. They were constellations.

Not a problem to solve, but a story worth reading again.

He didn’t ask for compliance. He asked for nothing.

He just stayed, his presence permission enough.

And in the hush of that moment, something opened.

Not the kind of peace that waits for healing, but the kind that comes when someone sees your ruin and still reaches for your hand.

The storm passed without thunder. The ache in my chest eased, the static in my head softened, and though the weight of memory lingered, it no longer threatened to split me. He didn’t speak or shift. He just stayed. Steady. Present.

Sleep didn’t descend all at once. It crept in slowly, wrapping around me like a returning tide. And somewhere in the quiet between one breath and the next, a truth settled low in my chest. Not soft. Not whispered. Certain.

He didn’t save me.

He honored me.

He stood inside the wreckage, not with answers or plans, but with the structure to help me rebuild.

He didn’t sweep the damage away, or reshape me into something easier to hold.

He stood firm as the scaffolding I’d built to survive fell piece by piece.

He didn’t catch me to stop the fall; he stayed so I wouldn’t have to land alone.

And there, in that stillness, I understood a kind of love no one ever taught me to expect.

The kind that doesn’t arrive in triumph, but kneels beside your ruin with dirt under its nails and says, I’ll wait here.

And when you rise, it will be in the image you choose, not the one the world demanded you become.

Held in the certainty of him, with his breath warm against my back, his hands curved gently around me, I realized I wasn’t broken or in need of saving.

I was simply seen. Not edited, not managed, not diminished into something easier to hold.

Just known. And in that quiet truth, I understood that it was enough.

I had never needed a hero, only someone willing to stay long enough to witness all of me without turning away.

I had that now. Not as a shield or a solution, but as a mirror—clear and steady—reflecting the woman I had fought to become.

He didn’t carry my grief, but he held the space where I could lay it down.

He didn’t fill my silence, but waited quietly within it.

He didn’t drag me from the fire. He stood beside me while I walked through the heat on my terms. When I came out on the other side, he was there.

Not because he led me. Because he believed I would make it.

This wasn’t a love I minimized, softened, or rewrote to fit someone else’s comfort.

It was the kind I lived, with breath and body and bare, burning truth.

With him. For me.

It was messy. God, it was going to be messy.

There would be sharp words and jagged edges, nights when panic scraped me raw, mornings when he’d drown himself in equations to make sense of the chaos I carried.

But he wouldn’t leave. And I wouldn’t run.

Where my fire met his steel, something new had been forged—stronger, stranger, and infinitely more ours.

I thought love would feel like rescue.

Instead, it felt like recognition.

Like walking into a room I’d been locked out of my entire life, and finding him already waiting in the quiet, a chair pulled up, rope coiled at his side, patient enough to teach me a new language when words weren’t enough.

That was the truth of us; chaos braided into calculation, his stillness teaching my storms to rest, my recklessness teaching his rules to bend. Not perfection. Not peace. A rhythm we could build our lives around. A pulse that said, stay .

My fingers curled into the fabric of his shirt, clutching him closer, and for the first time in years, the ache in my chest didn’t feel like loss. It felt like a possibility.

Tomorrow, the world would press its teeth into us again. There would be danger, memories, choices neither of us could predict. Tomorrow might even bring battles for Violet, ones I still wasn’t sure we’d win. But tonight—this breath, this bed, this man—was mine.

In the dark, tangled in him, I finally understood what it meant to stop surviving, and start living.

I once believed my story would end with Violet, either clawing her free, or going down beside her. Survival had never been the point; saving her had been. But here, in the quiet weight of Jax’s arms, I realized I’d been wrong.

My story hadn’t ended in sacrifice.

It had unfolded into something fiercer: life after fire, and a love I hadn’t thought I’d ever claim. He saw every fracture, every scar, every wildfire part of me, and chose not to tame it.

He chose to love it.

He chose to love me .