Married By Mistake

Chapter Twenty: The Email

Jax's POV

I almost didn't go.

Stood in my own doorway for a full minute with my keys in my hand, running through every reason it was a bad idea. Her fiancé. My brother's warning. The email still sitting unanswered in my inbox like something radioactive.

I went anyway.

Elena opened the door before I'd finished knocking, like she'd been standing close to it, waiting.

"Hey," she said.

"Hey."

Her apartment looked exactly like I'd have guessed it would. Clean lines, nothing out of place, a bookshelf organized by color that probably also happened to be alphabetical. It suited her in a way that made me feel like an intruder just by standing in it.

"You want coffee? Wine? I don't actually know what people bring each other in this situation."

"Neither do I. We're kind of making up the rules as we go."

That got the ghost of a smile out of her. She poured two glasses of wine anyway, handed me one, and we ended up on her couch with a careful few inches of space between us. The same distance from the park bench. I noticed we kept doing that. Choosing the distance on purpose.

"So," she said. "The email."

I pulled it up on my phone and handed it to her rather than read it out loud. Easier that way.

She read it twice, I could tell by how long her eyes stayed on the screen.

"Who is he," she asked. "The panel judge."

"Guy named Aldous Reyes. He was one of five judges that night in Vienna. I haven't thought about his name in years, and now here it is in my inbox like no time passed at all."

"What do you think he wants to tell you?"

"I have no idea. Six years of nobody from that world reaching out, and now this, the same week a photo of us ends up online." I turned the wine glass in my hands, not drinking it. "Feels like too much coincidence."

"Are you going to write back?"

"I don't know yet." I looked at her, really looked, in a way I'd been careful not to do too often. "I keep thinking if I open that door even a crack, everything I built the last six years just falls in behind it."

"Maybe it doesn't fall in. Maybe it just changes shape."

"That's very optimistic for someone who color-codes her bookshelf."

"I contain multitudes." She said it dry, but something in her voice had gone softer than the joke deserved.

We sat there a while, the wine mostly untouched, the quiet between us doing more work than either of us was saying out loud. I found myself watching the way she held her glass, the small, precise movements of someone who'd spent a lifetime being careful, and thought about how much I wanted to see what she looked like when she wasn't.

"Can I ask you something," I said.

"Depends what it is."

"Why didn't you just let me disappear that first morning? You could've handled the annulment on your own, kept your distance, made this whole thing as small as possible. Instead you kept calling me. Kept showing up."

Elena was quiet for a moment, turning the question over the way she turns over contracts, looking for the part that mattered.

"I don't fully know," she said finally. "Except that every time I was around you, I stopped performing for a minute. I didn't realize how much I'd been performing until I met someone I didn't have to."

The words landed somewhere in my chest I wasn't prepared for.

"I feel the same thing," I said. "Around you. Like I don't have to be funny to survive the conversation."

"You're still pretty funny."

"I said I don't have to be. Not that I stopped."

She laughed, quiet and real, and somewhere in the space of that laugh the careful few inches between us had closed without either of us deciding to close it. I could see the exact moment she noticed too, the way her breath caught slightly, her eyes dropping to my mouth and back up again like she was asking herself a question she didn't have an answer for yet.

"Jax—"

"Yeah."

Neither of us moved for a second. Then both of us moved at once, slow, careful, like we were each waiting for the other to stop it before it started.

Her phone rang, loud and sudden on the coffee table between us, both our names lighting up nowhere on the screen. Just one word.

REGINA.

We froze, inches apart, and Elena let out a breath that sounded like it hurt.

"I have to take this," she said, not moving.

"Yeah."

Neither of us moved for another second longer than we should have.