Chapter 228- Was I too Fast
The picture assembled itself slowly in Jenny’s mind. She turned it. She examined it from multiple angles.
’Until I decide otherwise.’
’It keeps her occupied.’
She exhaled through her nose.
Somewhere in the lower regions of the anger she had been carrying for a month — the anger at Jake, at circumstance, at the sequence of events that had landed Thalia in a position Jenny had privately imagined for herself — something shifted. Rearranged. Reformed itself into something slightly more bearable.
He was managing her. Thalia. Keeping her busy and titled and positioned while he—
’While he called Jenny.’
"Oh," Jenny said. And then, because the word felt too small to carry what it was supposed to carry, she said it again, differently. "Oh. I see."
’"Is there something wrong with that?"’
"No." She smoothed a hand over her hair, a reflex. "No, I just — why did you call?"
’"I thought,"’ Cruxius said, with the ease of a man who had thought of nothing of the sort and had arrived at his decisions through an entirely different process, ’"that I should check in on Thalia’s family. Common courtesy. How are you?"’
The question was so simple. So plainly, infuriatingly simple. And yet the way it arrived — low, direct, with the faint warmth of genuine attention — made Jenny’s grip on the phone tighten incrementally.
"I’m fine," she said. "Better now, actually. I’ve been—" She paused, choosing. "I’ve been staying in, mostly. It’s been a quiet month."
’"Quiet suits you?"’
"Not especially." She leaned her head back against the headboard. "I was thinking about getting out soon. Seeing people. Meeting someone—" She let the sentence trail with deliberate vagueness.
’"Mm."’
A beat of silence.
’"I could come to you,"’ he said. ’"Now, if you’d like."’
Jenny’s mouth opened.
Her brain went briefly, completely offline.
"What?" The word escaped before she could shape it into anything more sophisticated. "Now? You—" She looked around the room with the rapid, panicked inventory of someone taking stock of a disaster zone. The pyjamas. The unmade bed. The glass of water she hadn’t touched since this morning. The general state of a woman who had emphatically not been expecting company. "Now isn’t—I’m not — I mean, I’d have to—"
Her reflection stared back at her from the mirror.
’If he says he’ll come later, he might not come at all.’
The thought arrived cleanly and she recognized its truth immediately.
"Yes," she said.
The word came out before the thought had fully finished.
"Yes," she said again, more firmly. "Come now."
’"Good."’
One word. Said with the complete, uncomplicated certainty of a man who had already known what her answer would be.
And then the call ended.
Jenny held the phone at her ear for two additional seconds before the silence registered and she lowered it. She sat for a moment with the blank, slightly suspended expression of someone whose brain was still catching up to the decisions their mouth had made.
She should change. She should change her clothes, fix her hair, do ’something’ — she grabbed the hem of her pyjama top and then stopped, because how long did she have? Where was he coming from? How does a person get from wherever he was to—
Light.
Not lamp light. Not the warm amber of her bedside table or the flat overhead white she usually kept off in the evenings.
This was something else entirely. A seam of it. Like a split opening in the fabric of the room itself, beginning as a thin vertical line in the empty air beside her wardrobe and widening — blooming outward — with a soft, low pulse of luminescence that had no clear source and no clear explanation.
Jenny stopped breathing.
The light expanded. Edges shimmered, the air around the opening distorting the way heat distorts the space above summer asphalt. And through it — stepping through it with the particular unhurried ease of a man stepping through a perfectly ordinary door — came Cruxius.
He crossed the threshold of whatever that light was and it sealed behind him with a final, quiet shimmer, and then he was simply ’there’, standing in the middle of her bedroom beside her wardrobe, in the dim yellow glow of her bedside lamp.
Jenny’s brain processed several things in rapid, stuttering sequence.
The first was his face. She had remembered it correctly — the clean, sharp architecture of it, the jaw, the particular quality of his eyes that managed to be both attentive and deeply, infuriatingly amused. The smirk that sat at the corner of his mouth like it had a permanent lease.
The second was that he was — she blinked — he was—
He lifted one hand in a small, casual wave.
"You look quite hot," he said, his gaze traveling over her once with the complete, unhurried confidence of a man who considered observation a perfectly reasonable greeting.
Jenny’s eyes traveled downward of their own accord, the way eyes do when presented with something that bypasses conscious decision-making entirely. The definition of his chest and stomach in the lamplight. The carved line of his abs. The thick, heavy—
’Oh.’
The room tipped sideways.
Not literally. But the combination of things — the shock of the portal, the shock of him being ’here’, in her bedroom, the shock of ’that’, the month of imagining and the week of Jake on the grass and the pyjamas she was still wearing, the absolute totality of being caught off guard by the single most overwhelming person she had ever encountered — arrived all at once, simultaneously, a wave that hit every circuit in her nervous system at exactly the same instant.
Her hand went slack around the phone. It dropped to the mattress.
Her eyes rolled back.
She felt herself falling backward — the mattress catching her, her arms landing loose at her sides, her hair spreading across the pillow, her legs settling in an entirely undignified arrangement — and then she felt nothing at all, because Jenny had simply, completely, left the building.
’He is here,’ was her last coherent thought. The kind of thought that arrives in dreams about people you’ve thought about too much. ’He is actually here. In my room. That’s him. That’s actually—’
Silence.
Cruxius stood very still for a moment.
He looked at her. At the loose yellow pyjamas. At the way she had distributed herself across the mattress with the complete vulnerability of someone who had not planned this outcome. At the soft rise and fall of her chest that confirmed she was merely unconscious and not anything more serious.
His mouth twitched.
"...Was I too fast?" he said, to the room, to no one in particular.
He turned his head slightly, taking in the full picture.
The lamplight caught the pale cotton of her pyjamas. Her hair was loose and messy across the pillow. Her lips were parted.
One arm had landed at her side, the other resting across her stomach, fingers loosely curled.
Her legs were — he cleared his throat with the particular sound of a man reassessing several things simultaneously.
Below the waistband of his attention, something responded to the visual in a direction that was entirely involuntary and entirely inconvenient.
He looked away.
He looked back.
He pressed his knuckle against his mouth.