Read Chapter 29: The Morning After

The code on the screen blurred into a smear of colour. Jazz blinked, trying to focus on the function she’d been debugging for the past hour, but her eyes refused to cooperate. The numbers swam and rearranged themselves into meaningless patterns. Somewhere beside her, Tom’s keyboard had gone silent.

She turned her head—slowly, because her neck had stiffened into a knot of tension—and found him slumped against the arm of the sofa, laptop balanced precariously on his chest, head lolled back against the cushion. His mouth was slightly open. He looked younger when he slept, the perpetual crease between his brows smoothed away.

Jazz watched him for a moment, something soft and inconvenient blooming in her chest, before she caught herself and looked away. She reached for her mug, found it empty, and put it back down with a clink that sounded louder than it should have in the quiet flat.

The clock on the wall read 4:47 AM.

They’d been at it for thirteen hours. Thirteen hours of integrating Maya’s voice-recognition engine with their prototype, stripping out the parts that clashed, welding the rest together into something that might—*might*—survive Daniel’s ownership claim. Her fingers ached. Her brain felt like it had been wrung out and hung up to dry.

One more test. She just needed to run one more test.

Jazz reached for her own laptop, but her hand missed the trackpad entirely and knocked the machine off its precarious balance on the armrest. She lunged to catch it, overcorrected, and felt herself tipping sideways.

Gravity took over.

She landed half on Tom’s chest, her elbow digging into his ribs, her face inches from his. Tom grunted, eyes flying open with the confused panic of someone yanked from deep sleep.

“What—what happened—are they—is it—?”

“Nothing. Everything’s fine. I just—” Jazz tried to push herself up, but her arm buckled, and she landed back against him, harder this time. “Sorry. Sorry. I’m just tired.”

Tom blinked down at her. The blur of sleep cleared from his eyes, replaced by something sharper, more aware. His hand came up, almost without conscious intent, and brushed a strand of hair from her face.

“You’re exhausted,” he said. His voice was rough from sleep, low. “When did you last eat?”

“You made me toast at, like, nine?”

“That was yesterday.”

“So? Time is a social construct.” Jazz tried for sarcasm, but it came out breathless. She was still lying across him. She should move. She should very definitely move.

She didn’t.

Tom’s hand lingered near her cheek. His thumb traced a slow arc across her cheekbone, and Jazz felt her entire body go very, very still.

They’d touched before, of course. Countless times. Passed each other in the kitchen, brushed shoulders in the cramped hallway outside the bathroom, bumped into each other during arguments that ended in shouted apologies and awkward silences. But this was different. This was deliberate. This was Tom looking at her like she was something other than a co-founder and a problem to be solved.

“Jazz,” he said.

“Tom.”

“We should probably—” he started.

“Talk about the integration protocol,” she finished lamely.

“I was going to say move.”

“Right. Move. That’s what I meant.” She didn’t move. He didn’t either.

The flat was silent. The hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen, the distant rumble of an early-morning lorry from the street below, the thud of her own heartbeat in her ears. And Tom’s breath, warm against her face, steady and slow.

“We can’t—” Jazz started.

“I know,” Tom said.

“The startup, the deadline, the claim, the story running at noon, we have maybe seven hours to figure out what we’re going to say to the lawyer, and if anyone finds out we’re sleeping together—not that we’re sleeping together, we’re not sleeping together, we just fell asleep together, which is different—but if anyone *thinks* we’re sleeping together, then Maya pulls the integration, Daniel uses it against us, Eleanor writes a different story about how we’re sleeping our way through this crisis, and I can’t—Tom, I can’t lose this. I can’t lose everything I’ve built. Not because I couldn’t keep my hands off my co-founder.”

Tom’s thumb stroked her cheek again, and Jazz felt the fight drain out of her.

“I know,” he said again. “I know all of that.”

“So why are you still looking at me like that?”

“Because you’ve got a red mark on your face from the sofa cushion, and you look like you haven’t slept properly in a month, and you’re still the most beautiful thing I’ve seen all week.”

Jazz opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.

“That’s—that’s not helpful.”

“No,” Tom agreed. “It’s probably not.”

And then he kissed her.

It was not a careful kiss. It was not a tentative kiss, or a testing-the-waters kiss, or any of the measured, deliberate things Tom did in every other area of his life. It was a kiss born of exhaustion and proximity and thirteen hours of working shoulder-to-shoulder on a problem that might destroy them both, and it landed somewhere between desperate and hungry.

Jazz made a sound she was embarrassed about later. Her hands found his shoulders, then his neck, then fisted in the collar of his shirt. Tom’s arm curved around her waist, pulling her tighter, and she let herself sink into it, into him, into the stupid, reckless, catastrophic warmth of it.

And then she pulled back.

“Shit,” she said.

Tom blinked. “That’s—not the response I was hoping for.”

“Shit,” she said again, sliding off him and landing on the floor with a thump. She scrambled to her feet, putting the sofa between them. “That was—we can’t—that was a mistake.”

Tom sat up slowly, running a hand through his hair. He looked rumpled and disoriented and entirely too appealing. “Jazz.”

“No. I mean it. The integration with Maya rests on us being a stable, professional unit. The hearing is in—what, thirty hours? Thirty-one? Eleanor’s story runs at noon. Miles is still out there somewhere, waiting for the whole thing to collapse. If we do this—if we *are* this—it changes everything. And I don’t—” Her voice cracked. “I don’t know if we survive that. The company. Us. Any of it.”

Tom was quiet for a long moment. Then he stood, crossed to her side of the sofa, and took her hand. He didn’t kiss her again. He just held it, fingers laced through hers.

“Okay,” he said. “It was a mistake. It didn’t happen.”

“It did happen.”

“It happened, and it was a mistake, and nothing like it will happen again until the hearing is over and the story is handled and we’ve got at least one lawyer confirming we still own our own company.” He squeezed her fingers. “We keep it a secret. For the startup. Right?”

Jazz nodded, even as her heart gave a traitorous little lurch. “Right. Secret. For the startup.”

“Good.” Tom let go of her hand, and the absence of his warmth felt like a door closing. “Now. It’s five in the morning. Eleanor’s deadline is in seven hours. Let’s make a plan.”

Jazz opened her laptop, her fingers still tingling. But before she could pull up the email thread with their lawyer, her phone buzzed on the coffee table.

She picked it up. The caller ID made her stomach drop.

*Priya.*

Jazz stared at the screen as it buzzed again. At three in the morning, she’d called Priya and gotten no answer, only voicemail. But now, at dawn on the morning of Eleanor’s deadline, her former friend and current enigma was calling back.

“Who is it?” Tom asked.

Jazz didn’t answer. She just hit accept and raised the phone to her ear.

"You called," Priya's voice came through, clipped and wary. There was a background noise—distant café chatter, the clink of cups. "Did you mean it? About wanting real answers?"

"Yes." Jazz's voice was steadier than she felt. "I meant it."

A long pause. Then Priya spoke, lower now, almost inaudible beneath the café sounds. "They're not questions you want the answer to. Some doors, once opened..."

"Open it."

Another pause. When Priya next spoke, her tone shifted—harder, more deliberate. "Fine. But not over the phone. Meet me tomorrow. The Old Bell café in Farringdon. Ten AM."

"Tomorrow's too late. I need answers today. The hearing—"

"This isn't about the hearing." Priya cut her off. "This is about who you can trust. And Jazz?" A bitter edge crept into her voice. "What I have to tell you? It's going to make your 48-hour crisis look like a picnic."

The line went dead.

Jazz lowered the phone slowly. Outside, dawn was breaking over London, painting the sky in shades of pale gold and grey. Seven hours until Eleanor's story ran. Thirty hours until the ownership hearing. And somewhere out there, Priya was holding the key to something that could make both irrelevant.

Tom was watching her. "What did she say?"

Jazz looked at him—at the sleep-creased lines on his face, at the ghost of the kiss still lingering between them. She thought about the secret they'd just agreed to keep, and the other secrets multiplying around them like a virus.

"She said nothing useful," Jazz said. "She said everything."

She set the phone down and turned to her laptop. Outside, the city began to stir, unaware that the morning had just pulled the ground out from under them.