Virgin Dot Com Novel

[Jasmine's POV] My mother's hands shook as she slid medical documents across the café table, and I watched those trembling fingers like they belonged to a stranger. Because they did. This woman had stopped being my mother fifteen years ago. The papers were real. Hospital letterhead, doctor signatures, medical terminology I didn't understand but recognized as serious. Stage 4 lung cancer. Terminal. Inoperable. The doctors gave her six months, maybe less. Proof that she was telling the truth for once in her miserable fucking life.

"Your father died two years ago," she said, voice barely above a whisper. "Overdose. Motel room outside Atlantic City. They found him three days later." The information landed somewhere in my chest but didn't detonate. I felt nothing. Or everything. I couldn't tell which, couldn't separate the numbness from the overwhelming surge of emotions I'd spent years learning to suppress. "I tried to get clean after that," she continued, staring at her tea like it held answers. "Managed all that time. Then..." She gestured vaguely at the medical documents.

"Then came the diagnosis." I should have felt something. Grief for the father I barely remembered, the man who'd walked out when I was eleven and never looked back. Sympathy for the woman sitting across from me, dying slowly and painfully. Something human and appropriate. Instead, I felt the phantom burn of Jackson's hand on my ass. Heard his voice calling me a good girl like I was a dog who'd learned to sit on command. Tasted bile and exhaustion and the particular flavor of despair that came from realizing you'd volunteered for your own destruction.

"I've been sober for two years," my mother said. "Attending meetings. Trying to make amends before..." She didn't finish the sentence. Didn't need to. Before she died. Before the cancer finished what the drugs had started decades ago. "I want to see Leo," she whispered. "I want to apologize to both of you. Properly. While I still can." The audacity of it made me want to laugh. Or scream. This woman had destroyed our childhood, chosen drugs over feeding her children, let CPS take us without fighting. And now she wanted forgiveness because she was dying?

Like terminal illness absolved you of abandonment, like impending death erased years of neglect? "I need to think about it," I heard myself say, voice hollow and distant like it was coming from underwater. She nodded, understanding she didn't deserve more. Didn't deserve anything, really, but she'd come anyway. Had the courage to ask for what she knew she hadn't earned. I left the café feeling like I was moving through molasses, every step requiring conscious effort. Got in my car and sat there for ten minutes before I remembered how to turn the key.

Pulled out my phone and texted Leo: Mom showed up. She's dying. Cancer. We need to talk. Hours passed. No response. I texted again: Leo, please. I need to know you're okay. Nothing. The silence felt deliberate. Pointed. Like he was punishing me for something I couldn't name, or maybe he was just drowning in his own shit and couldn't reach the surface long enough to respond. I needed someone. Needed another human being to help me hold the pieces together before I shattered completely.

Liam would try to fix it, would immediately start calculating solutions and strategies when all I needed was to exist in the wreckage for a minute. Finn would make jokes, would try to lighten the darkness when what I needed was someone who could sit in it with me without flinching. I drove to Asher's penthouse on autopilot, my body making decisions my brain was too fractured to process. He answered the door in sweatpants and a t-shirt, clearly not expecting company, and his expression shifted the moment he saw my face.

"Jasmine-" I walked past him into the apartment and everything I'd been holding together for the past twelve hours disintegrated. Just fucking collapsed. The sobs came from somewhere deep and primal, tearing through my chest with physical force. My knees gave out and I was on his floor, curled around myself like I could protect against the pain radiating through every nerve ending. Asher was there immediately, arms around me, pulling me against his chest. He didn't ask questions. Didn't try to fix it or minimize it or tell me it would be okay.

He just held me while I broke apart, his hands steady on my back, his heartbeat solid beneath my ear. "Jackson," I gasped between sobs. "He-today he-" "I know," Asher said quietly, and there was something dangerous in his voice. "I saw." "My mother showed up. She's dying. Cancer. She wants forgiveness and Leo won't respond and I don't know if he's okay or if he's-" The words tangled in my throat, choking me. "I can't do this anymore. I can't fix everyone. I can't hold everything together when I'm falling apart." "You don't have to," he murmured against my hair. "You're allowed to fall apart.

I've got you." I cried until there was nothing left, until my body was empty of everything except exhaustion and the dull throb of accumulated trauma. Asher held me through all of it, his presence the only thing keeping me tethered to reality. When the sobs finally subsided, I became aware of other things. The warmth of his body against mine. The way his hand moved in slow circles on my back. How his breath stirred my hair. The solid strength of him, steady when everything else was chaos. I pulled back enough to look at him, and something shifted in the space between us.

His eyes were dark, intense, searching my face with an attention that made my breath catch. "I need to feel something else," I whispered. "I need to feel anything other than this." His jaw tightened. "Jasmine-" "Please." My hand found his chest, feeling his heartbeat accelerate beneath my palm. "I just need-I need to not think for a while. To be somewhere other than inside my own head." I watched the internal war play across his features. The careful control he maintained warring with something rawer, more primal.

The knowledge that I was asking him to give me escape through oblivion, that this was probably a terrible idea born of desperation and grief. But I also saw the moment he decided. The instant his control fractured and he made the choice to give me whatever I needed to survive this. His hand came up to cup my face, thumb brushing away tears. "Tell me to stop and I'll stop. Any time. You understand?" I nodded, and then his mouth was on mine-not gentle, not careful, but consuming. Desperate. Like he could kiss away the pain if he just tried hard enough.

And for the first time all day, I felt something other than anguish. Felt desire rising to meet desperation, need replacing despair. Felt alive instead of drowning. His hands moved to my waist, pulling me closer, and I went willingly into the escape he offered. Into the temporary oblivion of being wanted, needed, chosen. Into forgetting, even if just for a few hours, that everything else was falling apart. Virgin Dot Com