Page 198 of Iced Up Love: Part Two
Nothing about this helps.
She hasn’t looked up.
Not once.
She’s still sitting exactly where I left her on the couch, the laptop balanced carefully on her legs, her fingers moving across the keys in a steady rhythm that hasn’t faltered since she started.There’s a kind of quiet focus in her that pulls at something in my chest every time I let myself look for too long, something soft and familiar and achingly out of reach all at once.
Focused.
Lost in it.
Alive in a way she hasn’t been since we brought her home. And I can’t stop watching her.
It’s not deliberate anymore. It doesn’t feel like a choice. My attention just keeps dragging back, over and over again, like something in me is anchored to her whether I want it to be or not.
It should settle something.
Seeing that spark.
Seeing her come back to herself, even in something as simple as this, something as small as sitting there and writing like she used to, like nothing has been taken from her, like she hasn’t been broken open and stitched back together in ways that will never fully disappear.
It should ease something. It should give me something to hold onto. But it doesn’t. If anything, it makes everything worse. Because now I can see it clearly.
The difference. The gap. What she needs. And what I’m not giving her.
My hand flexes slightly at my side before I force it still, the movement small but deliberate as I shift my weight and lean back against the wall instead of pacing again. It takes more effort than it should to stay there, to keep myself in one place when everything in me is still wired to move, to check, to watch, to stay ahead of something I can’t see but know is still out there.
My phone is still in my hand.
It hasn’t left it for more than a few seconds at a time since we got her home.
Security feeds.
Messages.
Updates.
Anything that lets me feel like I’m not standing still while something else moves.
But even with all of that, even with everything in place, my focus keeps dragging back to her.
The way her brows pull together slightly when she’s concentrating. The way her lips part just a fraction without her noticing. The way her body has softened into the couch, no longer held tight with that constant, underlying tension she carried when we first brought her back.
She looks like herself. And the realization hits harder than anything else has today.
Because I haven’t been treating her like herself.
I’ve been treating her like something that survived. Like something fragile. Like something I have to handle carefully or risk losing all over again.
And I know why. I know exactly why. I saw what he did to her. I saw her on that floor. I felt her stop breathing in my arms. I felt what it was like to lose her.
So now, everything in me is wired to make sure that never happens again.
But watching her like this, seeing that spark come back, I can see the cost of that. I can see the distance it’s creating. I can see it in the way she asked me to sit with her. In the way she had to ask me to hold her. In the hesitation before she touched me. In the way she leaned into me like she’d been missing something. And I fucking hate that I’m the one who put that there.
My jaw tightens as I drag my gaze away from her for a second, letting it land on the television instead, where the post-game interviews have already started to roll.
Jackson is on the screen.
