He was quiet for a moment. She hated when he went quiet. It always meant what came next would be true and she'd have nothing to fight it with. "I've thought about it," he said finally. "All of it. Every piece of it. And I know what it looks like and I know what people would say. But I made my choice, Jade. A long time ago." His arm was still around her waist, not tight, just present. "You're my choice. I'm not walking back from that because it's complicated."
She didn't have an answer. She never had an answer for that, and hating herself for not having one was its own separate thing she carried around.
He sat up behind her. She felt him looking at her - the tightness across her shoulders, the way she was holding herself like she was waiting for impact - and without any announcement he bent and slid one arm under her knees and the other around her back and stood.
"Blake-"
"Bathroom," he said. He was already walking. "You've been tense for the last two hours and your back is going to ache tomorrow if we don't do something about it now."
She didn't argue. She was too tired to argue, and also, if she was honest, she didn't want to.
He got the shower running while she sat on the edge of the tub and tried to pull herself together.
Steam rose off the tile. He tested the water temperature with the inside of his wrist - once, then a small adjustment, then again - the way he always did, methodical about it in a way that had once surprised her and didn't anymore. He would not hand her something that wasn't right. He never had.
He crouched in front of her when the temperature was where he wanted it.
"What else?" he said.
"Nothing else."
"You've got the look."
"I don't have a look, Blake."
He looked at her steadily. She did have a look. They both knew she had a look.
She let out a slow breath. "I just think about it. About if they find out. About what it would-" She stopped, started again. "Your mom calls me sweetheart. She's called me that since the second week I was here. She didn't have to do that. She didn't have to do any of it, and she did, and now I'm-" She pressed her mouth shut.
"You're what."
She shook her head.
He didn't push it. He stood up, moved around behind her, and put both thumbs at the base of her neck. She felt him find the knot of tension there - it was always in the same place, had been for years - and start to work it out in slow, careful circles.
She held herself rigid on principle.
She lasted roughly forty seconds.
Her shoulders dropped. Her chin dropped. She closed her eyes and let out a breath that had been sitting in her chest since the voicemail, and hated him a little for how easily he could do that - just find the exact place and press and wait, and she would undo herself entirely.
"You always do this," he said, quiet above her.
"Do what."
"Wind yourself all the way up and then I do this and you stop."
"It's manipulation," she said, without any real conviction.
His thumbs pressed in and she involuntarily went soft. "Sure," he said.
She sat with her eyes closed and let him work and tried not to think about anything. The steam from the shower was warm on her face. His hands were warm now too - not cold anymore from the storm, just warm and careful and specifically attentive to the places that hurt.
This is also the problem, she thought. This is exactly, specifically, also the problem. He knows where it hurts. He's always known where it hurts. And I can't- I never can-
She lifted her hand. She wasn't sure she'd decided to do it. His fingers were curved around the back of her neck and she turned her head slightly and she touched her tongue to the tip of his index finger.
Just barely. Just a brush.
Blake went completely still.
She looked up at him.
He looked back down at her. Something had changed in his face - the careful patience gone, replaced by something that was not patience at all.
"Jade," he said. Very low.
"I didn't mean-"
He straightened up in one movement, and her back hit the cold tile of the shower wall, and the water ran warm around their feet, and she stopped explaining herself entirely.
The clock on her nightstand read 10:14 when Jade opened her eyes.
She was alone in the bed.
The cold rush of panic hit before she was fully awake - that specific, irrational dread she'd never quite managed to reason herself out of - and then she heard Blake moving downstairs and her heart settled back into its normal rhythm.
She lay still and listened.
Drawers opening and closing. Something being moved across the hardwood floor. His footsteps, unhurried, crossing the kitchen. A sound she couldn't quite identify from this distance - something being picked up, returned to where it belonged. Then quiet.
She understood, after a moment, what he was doing.
She lay there with the knowledge of it and looked at the ceiling.
Blake worked with the focused efficiency that had made him the best floor general in the conference for four straight seasons. He started with the clothes - his sweater from the second-to-top stair landing where it had landed at some point last night, her cardigan from the couch cushions, the scarf she'd abandoned near the front door. He shook them out, folded what needed folding, hung what needed hanging. The throw pillow from the wrong end of the sofa. Her book, spine-up on the rug, pages bent. He smoothed the pages carefully before he set it back on the coffee table.