Page 136 of Lethal in Pink

“There is always another way.”

“Not this time.”

“I won’t do it.”

“You don’t have a choice.”

“I have always had a choice.” Her voice cracks on the last word, and something in my chest splinters with it. “I chose you. I chose you over the contract, over the money, over everything—”

“And I’m choosing you.” My hands slide from her wrists to her shoulders, then to her face, cupping her jaw the way I’ve cupped it a hundred times before, my thumbs brushing the wet tracks I didn’t notice forming on her cheeks until now. “That’s what this is. My choice. Not yours. Mine.”

She is shaking.

Full-body tremors that start at her shoulders and work their way down to her hands where they grip my forearms, her nails digging half-moons into my skin that I will find tomorrow and press my fingertips to and remember this moment by.

“I can’t,” she whispers. “Jae, I can’t—”

“You can.” I pull her to me. One arm around her waist, the other hand cradling the back of her head, fingers tangled in the damp roots of her hair.

She collapses against my chest like something whose architecture has given out, and the sob that tears out of her is the kind that comes from somewhere deeper than sound—a raw, broken thing that shakes through both of us and leaves the air thin in its wake.

I just hold her.

One hand strokes her hair, slow and steady, the rhythm I’ve been using since the first night she fell asleep in my bed and I lay awake staring at the ceiling wondering what the hell I was doing. The other arm is tight around her waist, anchoring her to me while she comes apart in increments I can feel against my skin—each shudder, each hitch of breath, each fractured sound that she tries to swallow and fails.

“There’s nothing to apologize for,” I murmur against her hair. “You didn’t choose this any more than I did. The only thing I would change is the part where you had to carry it alone for so long.”

She fists her hands in my shirt. Her face is pressed into the hollow of my neck, her breath hot and damp against my collarbone, and I can feel the exact moment when the anger runs out and leaves only the grief—a quieter, deeper thing that has no shape and no sound and simply is, a weight settling into the space between her ribs that I can feel through the fabric of my t-shirt.

Eventually, she goes still against my chest. Not the rigid, calculated stillness of before. Something smaller. Something broken open and reassembled into a shape I’ve never seen before—vulnerable in a way that has nothing to do with nakedness and everything to do with the particular, devastating courage it takes to let someone hold you while you fall apart.

I lie awake long after her breathing evens out. Her weight against me is warm and solid and entirely, catastrophically real—the rise and fall of her ribs under my palm, the particular scent of her shampoo lingering in the sheets, the small, unconscious sound she makes in her sleep when she shifts against me.

The shape of my own ending is already forming in my head. Not the details—those will come later, when we plan it properly, when the mechanics require the same meticulous attention that Amiyah brings to everything she does. But the broader architecture of it. The choice. The fact that for the first time in my life, I am not running from something. I am running toward it. Toward her.

She is worth every cent of it. The thought arrives not as a revelation but as a confirmation—something I’ve known since the night she tased me with a bedazzled compact and then looked at me with eyes that held nothing but calculation and want in equal measure, and I decided, against every rational instinct I possess, that I would rather be electrocuted by this woman than spared by anyone else.

She has always been worth it.

Chapter fifty

Jae

Something in the quality of the dark changes before I’m fully awake. The ceiling above the bed holds a shade of gray that means dawn is coming, and not the kind that ambushes you—the slow, deliberate kind that gives you time to remember who and where you are. I turn my head a fraction, and the movement is answered by Amiyah’s weight across my chest, her hair spread in dark waves against my shoulder, her mouth slightly open against my skin, and—this is the part that would make her murder me if she were awake to notice—a thin trail of drool pooled in the hollow of my collarbone.

I don’t wipe it away.

My hand rests at the small of her back, fingers splayed against the warm skin where her sleep shirt has ridden up. The sheets are a tangled mess around our legs, my hipbone pressed against the cool outer edge of the mattress, her knee tucked between mine with the particular insistence of someone who colonizes space even in sleep. I am, for once, completely still. Not the practiced stillness I use in lecture halls or the deliberate stillness I retreat into when my father is speaking. The real kind. The kind where your body has nothing to prove because it has everything it wants right here, and proving things would require moving, and moving is not currently on the agenda.

My eyes catalog every detail with the focused attention of someone burning a photograph into memory. The flutter of her lashes against her cheek. The way one strand of dark hair catches at the corner of her mouth with each exhale. The exact rhythm of her breathing—four counts in, six counts out, the pattern of someone who has trained her lungs the way other people train their legs. The temperature of her skin where it presses against mine, warmer than the air, holding the particular heat that bodies generate when they’ve been pressed together for hours. The small scar on her left shoulder, pale against her skin, which she told me once was from a childhood fall and which I know, now, is from something else entirely.

I memorize it all. The drool. The hair. The scar. The way her pinky finger curls against my ribs like it’s anchoring itself. Two days from now I will walk across a stage in a cap and gown I paid too much for, and everything after that is an equation I have already solved, and the solution lives in a drawer in my father’s office in Seoul, written in ink that does not erase. But this—this warm weight, this quiet room, this woman drooling on my collarbone with the absolute trust of someone who has never once been caught—this is what I am keeping. This is the photograph.

The apartment holds its pre-dawn hush. The HVAC clicks off, leaving the room in a silence that feels deliberate, like the building itself is giving us this moment. Outside, the city hums at its lowest setting—the particular white noise of Los Angeles between four and five, when the traffic is still mostly parked and the delivery trucks haven’t started their routes and the only people awake are the ones who have to be. The sound filters through the half-drawn blinds in a flat, distant murmur, the kind of noise that makes a room feel smaller rather than larger.

Graduation day looms in two days. The phrase lands in my head with the weight of something that has been sitting there for weeks, waiting its turn. Two days. Forty-eight hours. One thousand, one hundred and fifty-two minutes, if I’m being precise, and I am always being precise, it’s one of the few things my father and I have in common.

Amiyah stirs.