Revenge plot part 5

Morning light found us still tangled in the wreckage we had made.

I woke up first. The sheets were damp in places, and sticky in others. My wrists carried faint red marks from whatever he had used to bind them. Between my legs I felt the deep, pleasant ache of having been used thoroughly and without gentleness. The taste of whiskey and him still lingered at the back of my tongue.

Jude slept on his stomach, one arm flung across my waist as if even unconscious he refused to let the distance return. In sleep the hard lines of his face softened. He looked closer to the boy I used to torment than the man who had fucked the apology out of me the night before.

I watched him breathe and felt the complicated weight of what we had done settle over me like another blanket.

When he woke, he didn’t startle. His eyes opened and found mine immediately.

“Regretting it?” he asked, voice rough with sleep.

“No, You?”

He shook his head. “No.”

We stayed like that for a while, not touching beyond the arm still across me, letting the ordinary morning light make the previous night feel both more and less real. Eventually he sat up, ran a hand through his hair, and looked at the clock.

“The meeting is at two,” he said. “Private conference room at the old warehouse offices on Pier 19. Tessa will be there with the two partners who pulled your contracts. She’s selling them a narrative: that you’re unstable, that associating with you is a liability, and that my space is somehow contaminated by proximity to you. She wants both of us isolated.”

“How did you know?”

“I have my sources”

I pushed myself upright, sheet clutched to my chest. “And we just walk in?”

“We walk in with proof.” He reached for his phone on the nightstand. “I’ve been collecting it since the photo went live. Messages between Tessa and one of the partners. Screenshots of her coordinating the cancellations. A recording from a mutual contact who got nervous and decided to cover himself. It’s not enough for a lawsuit, but it’s enough to make them reconsider who the real liability is.”

I stared at him. “You’ve been building a case while I was busy destroying myself in a bar.”

“I started the night you threw the tea,” he said simply. “I just didn’t know yet that I’d need an ally to finish it.”

The word ally hung between us, inadequate and necessary at the same time.

We showered separately. The domesticity of it felt almost more intimate than the sex had been. When I came out he had coffee waiting and a clean shirt of his folded on the bed for me. It smelled like him.

By the time we left the apartment the tentative truce of the morning had hardened into something purposeful. We barely spoke in the car. The city moved past the windows in ordinary daylight, unaware that two people who had spent years as each other’s private damage were about to step into the same fight on the same side.

At a red light Jude’s hand rested on the gearshift. After a moment I covered it with mine. He didn’t look at me, but his fingers turned and laced through my own.

Neither of us let go until we had to.