17: Feelings

**JAPHETH POV**

I woke up before her, the way I usually did now, and spent longer than I'd ever admit just watching her sleep  hair a mess across the pillow, one arm flung over her head, completely unguarded in a way she rarely let herself be awake.

Four years ago I would've called this pathetic. Now I just called it lucky.

I got up carefully, careful not to wake her, and went for a run through the hotel gym before the city was fully awake, trying to burn off some of the restless energy that had been building in me since Alex dropped her off the night before. Not jealousy this time  something closer to gratitude, and underneath it, nerves about a conversation I knew we needed to have and had been avoiding since the market, since the porch, since every quiet moment that had almost turned into something more and then didn't.

She was awake when I got back, sitting cross-legged on the low couch in a soft sweater, hair still messy, scrolling through something on her phone with a small furrow between her brows.

"Morning," I said, toweling off my neck.

"Morning." She looked up, and something in her expression made me pause.

"Everything okay?"

"Yeah. Just  thinking." She set the phone down, screen dark, and patted the cushion beside her. "Can we talk?"

I sat, my stomach doing the complicated thing it always did before a conversation I couldn't predict the outcome of.

"I've been turning something over," she said, "since last night, actually. Watching you let me go out with Alex without making it a whole thing. It was  really nice, honestly. But it also made me realize how much I still don't know what this actually is. Between us."

"What do you want it to be?" I asked, because it felt more honest to ask than to guess.

"I don't know yet. That's the problem." She pulled her knees up, wrapping her arms around them, a posture I recognized from when we were kids, the one she used whenever she was working up to something hard. "I like you, Japheth. A lot. I think I've liked you my whole life, if I'm being completely honest, in ways I didn't always let myself admit even to myself."

"I feel the same," I said. "I have for longer than I probably deserve to say out loud, given how badly I handled it the first time around."

"That's part of what scares me." She met my eyes directly. "Not that you'll hurt me the same way again. I don't actually think you would. But I've spent my whole life being valued for what I could give people  my time, my usefulness, my compliance. I don't know how to tell the difference anymore between someone wanting me and someone needing something from me."

I sat with that for a long moment, because it deserved more than a quick reassurance.

"I don't need anything from you, Jasmine," I said, using her actual name on purpose, the way I had in the break room. "I want things with you. That's different. I want to know what you think about things. I want to hear about your day even when it's boring. I want to watch you get excited about kimchi at eleven at night in a country neither of us grew up in. None of that requires anything from you except you actually being here, being yourself."

Her eyes were bright, and she blinked hard, looking away for a second before looking back.

"I want to believe that."

"Then let me prove it. Slowly. However long it takes." I reached over, not pulling her toward me, just offering my hand, palm up, on the cushion between us. "No pressure. No timeline. If all we ever are is exactly this  good conversation and terrible spicy food  I'll take it, gladly, over losing you again."

She looked at my hand for a long moment before she took it, lacing her fingers through mine slowly.

"I don't want to keep this a secret," she said. "Whatever this is. I don't want to hide it from Kate, or your parents, or anyone. I spent enough of my life hiding how I felt about you. I'm tired of it."

"Then we don't hide it." I squeezed her hand. "Whatever pace you want. Whatever you're comfortable telling people, and when."

"What about work? Voss?"

"Voss is going to find something to complain about regardless of what we do. I'd rather deal with his complaints as an honest man than as one hiding something." I paused, considering. "Though I'd rather we figure out what we actually are before we hand him a headline to run with."

She laughed, a little watery, wiping at her eyes with her free hand. "Fair."

"Can I ask you something?" I said. "Something that's been sitting with me since last night."

"Go ahead."

"Your dad. The texts. Kate mentioned some of it, and I noticed you tense up whenever your phone buzzes a certain way." I chose my words carefully, not wanting to push somewhere she wasn't ready to go. "You don't have to tell me anything you're not ready to share. But I want you to know I'm not going anywhere if you do."

Her whole body went still, and for a moment I thought I'd overstepped.

"He's not a bad man," she said finally, quiet. "He just  he's spent my whole life reminding me what your family did for mine. The scholarship. My mom's insurance. The house. He calls it gratitude. It mostly just feels like a debt I can never actually pay down, no matter how hard I work."

"That's not gratitude," I said carefully. "That's control dressed up as gratitude."

"I know that. Logically." She echoed the same phrase she'd used with me before, the one I was starting to recognize as her particular tell  the gap between what she understood and what she still felt. "It doesn't stop it from working on me every single time."

"I'm sorry," I said, and meant it fully. "I didn't know it was that specific. That direct."

"It's not something I talk about much." She looked down at our joined hands. "I don't want you to feel like you have to fix it. I just wanted you to know, since you asked."

"I'm not going to try to fix your father, Jasmine. That's not my place, and honestly, I don't think it's fixable by anyone but him." I brought her hand up, pressing a light kiss to her knuckles, careful, unhurried. "But I want you to know that nothing you do  not this promotion, not this trip, not this, whatever we're calling this  owes anything to my family. You don't have to solidify a position. You don't have to be indispensable. You just have to be you. That's always been enough for me."

She was crying properly now, quiet tears she didn't bother hiding, and I didn't reach to wipe them away, just stayed still, present, letting her have the moment without trying to manage it into something smaller and easier.

"Nobody's ever said that to me before," she said eventually. "Not like that."

"Then I'll keep saying it until it actually sinks in."

We sat like that for a long while, hands joined, the city waking up slowly outside the windows, and when she finally leaned her head against my shoulder, it felt like something settling into place that had been unsettled for four long years.

"For the record," she said, after a while, her voice steadier now, "I do want this. Whatever we end up calling it. I'm choosing it. Not because I'm scared of being alone, or because it's easier than saying no. Because I actually want you."

"For the record," I said, "so do I. All of you. Not the useful parts. All of it."

She tilted her head up, and this time when we kissed, there was no rush to it, no urgency born out of anything but two people who'd finally said the true things out loud and found, on the other side of it, that neither one had run.