Page 117 of Deacon

He let that settle before asking, “That workin’?”

“No.” The answer came too quickly, and his mouth knew it.

Jackson stood and came into the kitchen without hurry. The apartment suddenly felt smaller, his nearness familiar enough to be dangerous. “Lila.”

My name in his voice was always worse than Princess. It belonged to the version of us that had existed before everything broke, and some part of me still answered to it.

“This is about Jade,” I said before he could say whatever he intended. “It has to be.”

He stopped a foot away, close enough for me to see the darker ring around his irises and the tiny scar near his jaw I had kissed when we were young enough to believe love could outrun everything. “It is about Jade,” he said. “Don’t mean it’s only about Jade.”

I shook my head. “That’s exactly the kind of thing I mean. You can’t do that. You can’t just walk in here and decide we’re going to... what? Pick up some impossible thing that got broken almost seventeen years ago?”

His gaze stayed on mine. “I didn’t say easy.”

“No, you just keep acting like persistence is somehow the same as repair.” The words landed harder than the argument before them.

His jaw flexed, but his voice remained low. “I know I can’t fix all of it.”

“Do you?” I hated how much I needed the answer to be yes.

“Yeah.” He didn’t decorate it or defend himself, which somehow made it harder to dismiss.

A humorless laugh escaped me. “Because from where I’m standing, Jackson, you still don’t get the worst part.”

His brow lowered, and I knew he was bracing. The old anger had cooled over the years without ever dulling. “You didn’t just leave,” I said. “You made my choices for me. You decided what I could handle, what I deserved to know, what I deserved a say in. And even now, after all of this, I can still feel it. There are things you’re not telling me. Things you still think you have the right to keep from me.”

He went still. I had hit the exact place he guarded, and the certainty of that hurt almost as much as the secret itself.

He took the accusation without retreating. “I’m not tryin’ to take anything from you now,” he said.

“No,” I said quietly. “Now you’re trying to get in anyway.” That was exactly what scared me.

Pain crossed his face before he buried it, and part of me hated being the reason. “I’m trying.”

“I know.” That was the worst part. I knew he was trying with Jade. I knew he loved her already with a fierceness that frightened me in its immediacy. And some part of him had probably never stopped loving me either.

None of it erased what waited outside this apartment. Dad was still angry. Matty’s texts had gone stiff and wounded. Jade wanted all of us to fit together badly enough to hide it, while I stood in the middle afraid one wrong move would pull something apart.

“I don’t know how to do this,” I admitted, hating how small the confession sounded after all my certainty.

Jackson’s expression softened. “You don’t gotta know all at once.”

I looked away. “That sounds very convenient for you.”

A quiet huff of laughter left him. “You always did know how to cut me up nice.”

“That wasn’t nice.” If anything, it had been the gentlest version of what lived inside me.

“No,” he said, easing a little closer without touching me. “But it was honest.”

I should have moved. I didn’t. Down the hall, Jade moved around her room with music playing low. Those ordinary teenage sounds held the moment in place, reminding me what stood to gain or lose depending on what Jackson and I did next.

He reached past me for the mug I had abandoned on the counter and rinsed it at the sink like he had any business doing dishes in my kitchen.

I stared at him, almost offended by the domesticity of it. “Are you doing dishes to avoid being kicked out?”

He set the mug in the drainer with far too much satisfaction. “Maybe.”