mel

You were pretty sure your brain stopped working over an hour ago and your body was running on pure fucking adrenaline and the need to see your boyfriend. 

The nurse was still talking to you as she pushed the door open, the regular beeping of the heart monitor echoing through the room as the sight of your boyfriend sprawled on the hospital bed came to view. There were a few other people in the room—some of them you vaguely recognised from hanging around the Rock—but your focus was completely on Nico. 

“Schatz! You made it!” 

Nico held his hand out to you—the sight of an IV tube tangled around his arm making your stomach twist in discomfort—and you quickly crossed the room to stand by his side, to take his hand in yours and intertwine your fingers with a quick squeeze.

“Hey, baby, how you feeling?” You murmured, your voice soft and your free (but shaking) hand moving to lightly push strands of hair away from his face. 

Nico’s smile turned dopey. “Soooo good.”

Someone in the room snorted in response. 

You tried to smile, though you doubted it was anything more than a grimace. “That’s good. You gave everyone quite the scare.” 

“Whoops,” Nico murmured, his brows furrowed together like he was trying to remember the incident. “I should say sorry.”

You shook your head. “You don’t need to do that—” 

“And get everyone cheese baskets. Swiss cheese.” 

The words were spoken so seriously that you couldn’t help but snort. “Okay, baby, whatever you want.” 

Nico’s head whipped around, his eyes widening slightly as he squeezed your hand tighter. “Schatz—”

Your heart skipped a beat. “What? What is it? Are you in pain? Should we get the doctors or—”

“I have something very serious to tell you,” Nico interrupted, the dopey smile replaced with a determined look. One that you were more used to seeing on the ice or on the bench. 

“Yeah, of course, anything,” you assured him, squeezing his hand tighter.

“I love you.” 

You blinked. And then again. And then you smiled softly, even if your heart was still beating in your chest like it was trying to rip through your ribs. “I love you too, Nico.” 

“No like,” Nico shook his head. “I am serious. I love you so much.” 

You could have sworn the nurse was giggling by the door. 

“Nico—”

“Not to be drastic, but I would jump off a cliff for you,” Nico continued, completely sincere and serious as he spoke, even with the slightly glazed look in his eyes. 

“I would rather you didn’t,” you retorted, pressing your lips together to hold back your grin.

Nico nodded. “I can do that too. But the option is there.”

“I appreciate it,” you murmured, finally allowing yourself to smile as you leaned down to press a chaste kiss to his forehead.

you’ve been thinking about the wall at the end of the hall for weeks. the one where the light pools in the afternoon and there’s nothing there to catch it.

the painting’s in your tote, still wrapped in the brown paper the woman at the flea market folded around it. an abstract in a chipped gold frame — big careless slabs of red and rust and hot pink shoved up against each other, not trying to be anything in particular. eleven dollars. you’d stood in front of the booth for a full minute before you understood why you couldn’t put it back down. it was warm. in a house full of right angles and the color of wet concrete, it was just — warm.

you measure with your eye, then with the level on your phone, then with your eye again. tap the nail in. it goes cleaner than you expect, and when you hang the frame it sits a little crooked, so you nudge the bottom corner with one finger until it doesn’t.

then you back up to the other end of the hall to look.

it’s loud. that’s the whole thing about it. against all that gray it’s almost rude — all that red practically buzzing, the gold of the frame catching the window light — and you stand there in the middle of his hallway with your arms crossed, grinning at it like you got away with something.

you take a picture. thumb hovering over his name. but you don’t send it.

you want to see his face.

———

he’s home a little after six, gym bag over one shoulder. you’re up off the couch before the door’s all the way shut.

“don’t take your shoes off yet. i got you a surprise.”

“yeah?” he gets one shoe half off, then leaves it. “what’d you do.” but he lets you take his hand, lets you walk him backward down the hall toward it.

he sees it.

you’re watching his face, because that’s the part you’ve waited for all afternoon — and it does open, it does, just not the way you’d been picturing. he laughs. surprised, easy, the sound he only makes when his guard’s all the way down and something’s caught him sideways.

“baby.” he’s grinning at it. “that’s the ugliest thing i’ve ever seen.”

he’s still in it, delighted — “where’d you even find that?” — looking from the painting to you and waiting for you to be in on it with him.

“flea market, over on vine.” you say it too fast. “eleven bucks.”

and the afternoon just goes out of you. quiet. all at once. you feel the grin you walked in with come off your face before you can keep it there.

he catches it. half a second late, but he catches it — he watches everything — and the laugh settles.

“it’s just not my thing,” he says. gentler now, looking at you instead of the wall. trying to walk it back to somewhere okay. “good find, though. eleven bucks, you can’t lose.”

“right?” you hear yourself say it. “it’s hideous.”

you reach up and straighten the corner that doesn’t need straightening, and you let him think you’re both laughing at it. it’s the easiest thing in the room to do. he rolls the shoulder the bag strap sat on and tips his head toward the kitchen, says something about what you’re doing for dinner, and goes.

behind him all that red goes on buzzing against all that gray.

———

you leave it up three more days. he doesn’t bring it up again — but then, to him there’s nothing to bring up. it was a bit. he walks past it on the way to bed, on the way to the kitchen, the way you walk past a thermostat.

so you take it down.

it’s a tuesday, he’s at the facility, and it comes off the wall easier than it went up. you wrap it back in the brown paper. the nail you leave — pulling it would mean spackle, and there’s no point making a project of it. just the bare nail at the end of his hall, where the light still pools and there’s nothing now to catch it.

it rides in your passenger seat to your place.

your hallway’s narrow and already crowded — photos, a mirror you painted, a row of cheap postcards. you find a spot between the window and the closet and tap the nail in yourself, and it goes up against your wall like it was cut for it. here it doesn’t fight anything. it just looks like the rest of you.

you step back and look at it a while.

it’s a good little painting.

———

you’re back at his place that weekend like nothing happened, because nothing did, technically. you made dinner. he did the dishes, sleeves shoved up, while you sat on the counter and told him about your week.

it’s later, when he’s coming back from the bedroom pulling a clean shirt on, that you catch him stop.

just for a second. at the end of the hall.

he’s looking at the bare stretch of it — the nail still in the wall with nothing on it. you watch it not quite land; he figured the ugly thing had run its course, and a nail with nothing on it doesn’t say anything to him yet. he tugs the shirt down and keeps walking.

you figure that’s the end of it.

it isn’t. he’s easy through the rest of the night, loose, but when you’re loading up your bag by the door he leans on the edge of the hall and tips his head back toward it.

“hey — what happened to your painting?”

“oh —” you zip the bag and pull the strap up onto your shoulder. “took it home. it wasn’t really a this-house kind of thing.”

you say it light. like it’s nothing, because you’ve decided it’s nothing.

he doesn’t answer right away.

you look up and he’s standing there with one hand on the edge of the wall, and you watch him run it back. all of it. the way he laughed. ugliest thing i’ve ever seen. the eleven bucks out of you too fast, your face going before you could stop it, the hideous, right? — the out you handed him so he’d take it. three days of walking past it like a thermostat. the bare nail. the painting forty minutes across town in a hallway he’s never seen, where you’d decided it should live instead.

he gets to the end. you can tell the second he does.

“…oh,” he says.

his hand comes off the wall. he looks at the empty stretch of it like it’s saying something to him it wasn’t an hour ago.

he doesn’t say anything else. he’s looking at you the way he watches film of a game that’s already over — like he can see the whole thing unfolding and there’s no reaching in to change the play.

———

he shows up thursday. no text, just the knock, and when you open the door he’s already got the look — the one he gets when he’s decided something on the drive over and is bracing to go through with it.

he doesn’t say hi. he comes in, walks down your narrow hall like he’s been here a hundred times, and stops in front of it, between the window and the closet.

then he lifts it off the nail.

“hey —” you’re behind him. “what are you doing?”

“taking it.” it’s already under his arm, no paper, just the bare frame against his side. “it’s mine.”

“you didn’t even like it.”

he turns around. whatever he usually does in a corner — the joke, the warm pivot, the easy version of the sentence — he’s not reaching for it.

“you put something of yours on my wall,” he says, “and i laughed at it.”

his jaw works. he looks at the painting instead of you.

“i gave you my opinion on it. like you’d brought it over for a grade.” he stops. “you let me think it was a joke because that was easier than telling me it landed wrong. you handed me the out, and i took it.”

he drags a hand back through his hair. the frame stays tucked against him the whole time, like setting it down isn’t on the table.

“you’ve been in it the whole time,” he says. quieter. “you’re the only thing in that house i’d notice if it was gone.”

a breath.

“so it’s going back up. tonight.”

———

you follow him back across town. he doesn’t put the painting in the trunk — sets it in the back seat, upright, like it’s a person.

at the house he goes straight to the end of the hall. the nail’s still there, right where you left it, nothing hanging off it. he hangs it back up without measuring, without the level on his phone, and of course it sits crooked.

he steps back. looks at it.

reaches out and nudges the bottom corner with one finger until it isn’t.

the same fix you made the first time. he doesn’t know he’s making it.

“better,” he says.

you stand at the far end of the hall, where you stood that first afternoon — except now he’s next to you, shoulder against yours, the two of you looking at eleven dollars of red and rust and hot pink glowing against all that gray. it still doesn’t match a single thing in the house.

he doesn’t tell you it’ll grow on him. he looks at the other walls instead — the empty ones — and you can feel him seeing them for the first time.

“bring the rest of your stuff next time,” he says.

like it’s nothing.

“i’m not moving in with you.” you say it from where you’re leaning, shoulder still against his. “it’s been five months.”

“five good months.”

“joe.”

“you’re here four nights a week. your shampoo’s in my shower, there’s a drawer.” he counts it off easy, like he’s had the argument loaded for a while. “you did one wall better than the decorator i paid for the whole house. that’s a tryout. you passed.”

“that’s a sample size of one wall.”

“so move in and do the rest of them.”

you laugh. “we’ve known each other five months. people don’t —”

“people do it in less.”

“people who aren't the only one giving something up do it in less.”

he doesn’t have a fast one for that. tips his head — fine, that one’s real, and he’s not going to be the guy who throws money at it to make it not real. but he’s still got the look, the one that decided something on the drive over and hasn’t undecided.

“the sentiment, i love,” you say, gentler. “you want me here. you want the house to have me in it — i got that the second you hung the ugly thing back up crooked. the u-haul, give me a year.”

“we’ll see.” he’s not agreeing to the year. there’s the grin now — the one you walked in with all those days ago, except it’s his, and aimed at you instead of the wall. “i think i can wear you down before then.”

———

he's the one looking at you now, not the painting.

you don't decide to do it so much as stop deciding not to — you turn into him, hand flat on his chest, and he goes still under it. not guarding himself. holding his breath, like moving wrong might end it.

"hey," you say.

he lets the breath go.

you kiss him. and there's none of the ease he does everything else with — he kisses you back a half-step behind, the smoothness that runs every room he walks into no good to him here — in his own hallway, the painting glowing red beside you, the one thing in the house with anything to say. just a guy with his hands coming up to your face, catching up.

you kiss him until he stops being behind it. you feel the moment he quits keeping up and lets you have the pace — his hands going slack on your jaw, then sliding back into your hair to hold on instead of steer.

"come here," you say against his mouth, even though he's already there.

you walk him backward down the hall. the same way you walked him to the painting that first night, except he goes easy now, no surprise to brace for, letting you steer him by the front of his shirt past the bare walls he's going to let you fill. the bedroom's dark. you leave it that way.

you take his shirt off first. he lifts his arms, ducks his head, and then he's just standing there letting you look at him — and you watch the joke arrive. the easy line, the thing he'd hand anyone else to take the edge off being looked at this long.

he doesn't say it.

"stay here," you tell him.

"i'm here." he means it the way he meant the hard sentence in your hallway. present. no exit cued.

you get the rest of it off between you. you take your time — no show in it, but no hurry either, because you want to watch what waiting does to him. and something it does. the guy who walked in cocky thirty seconds ago, who said i can wear you down, is gone. his hands come up like they want to help and then don't know where they're allowed, and he lets them drop, and he just lets you.

you put a hand flat on his chest and walk him back until his knees hit the bed. he sits. you climb into his lap, and he makes a sound low in his throat when you settle against him, both hands finding your hips like it's the only place they're sure of.

you kiss him slow, and you can feel how hard he's holding still underneath you — like if he moves he'll stop being able to let you run this. so you run it. you take one of his hands off your hip and put it where you want it, and his breath stutters against your mouth, and he follows you there. he's good with his hands the way he's good at everything — except there's no plan in it now, just him learning you in real time, reading you off every sound you make.

"there," you tell him, when he gets it right.

"yeah?" low, rough. he does it again, watching your face like the answer lives there.

you don't make him wait long. you lift up, reach between you, take him in your hand — and he goes still all over, jaw tight, bracing. then you sink down onto him slow, and the sound that comes out of him is nothing like the man who's smooth in every room he walks into. his forehead drops to your shoulder. his hands clamp down and stay.

"god," he breathes into your skin. "okay. okay."

you set the pace. slow at first, rolling down against him, and he lets you have every bit of it — whatever instinct a man built like him has to take it back, to flip you, to run it, he doesn't use it. he just holds on and feels it and says your name when you grind down, says it again, like it's the only word he trusts himself with.

then you slow. almost to nothing. he makes a sound, hips lifting to chase you, and you put a hand flat on his chest and hold him down.

"say you're sorry."

his eyes come open. "— what?"

"for my painting." you roll down once, slow, and feel his whole body try to follow it. "you laughed at my painting."

"i'm sorry —" it comes out fast, on a breath, like he'll say anything to get you moving again.

"mm. too easy." you go still. "sorry for what."

"for laughing."

"at."

his jaw works. you can see him clock that you're going to make him say all of it. "at your painting."

"and?"

"and —" his hands flex on your hips, and whatever's left of the smooth guy is gone, and he says the real one. "it was the best thing in that house. and i laughed at it."

"better." you give him an inch back — a slow grind, just enough to pull a groan out of him — then take it away again.

"now tell me how bad you want me to move in."

"you're killing me."

"how bad." you don't move.

"bad." it breaks out of him. "i want you in it. i want to come home and have it not be empty. move in."

"mmm." you tilt your head like you're thinking it over, rolling down slow while you do, and you watch him try to hold the thought and lose it. "i'll think about it."

"you said — god — you said a year."

"i said i'd think about it." you lean down, mouth at his ear. "you wanted to wear me down. so wear me down."

"baby —" it slips out of him. the same word he laughed the painting off with. nothing easy in it now.

you tip his face up. make him look at you — and that's his line, the one he'd run a whole room with, except you're saying it and he's the one who does it, eyes coming up to yours, glassy and open and not hiding a thing. he doesn't reach for the joke that would put the wall back between you. there's no wall left to reach for.

"i've got you," you tell him. you, to him. the line he'd usually be the one saying.

something goes out of him at that — the last of the holding-on. his hands start to shake where they grip you, his breath goes ragged, and you can feel him fighting it, the instinct to hold the line even here, even now.

"let go."

and he does. he comes with your name in his mouth and his face pressed to your throat and both arms locking around you like he's the one who needs holding through it. you don't stop. you take him all the way to the end of it, slow, until he's shaking and spent and still won't let go.

you follow him a breath later — his hand finding its way between you, clumsy and sure at once, working you until you come apart with your forehead dropped against his.

after, he doesn't let go. keeps you in his lap, both arms around you, his face in your neck, his heart going under your palm.

"a year, huh," he says into your skin. low. half gone.

"a year."

"...we'll see." no argument left in it. his arms don't loosen — he holds onto you the way he wouldn't put the frame down, like setting you anywhere else isn't on the table — and you stay where you are, in his lap, in his house, and let him.

He was aware of how funny that was. He’d been the most recognizable man in every room he walked into since he was twenty-two, and no suit, however well it fit, was going to make him disappear into a hotel ballroom in downtown Cincinnati. But there was a version close enough. He could be quiet. He could shake the hands that wanted shaking, hold still for the photos nobody asked permission to take, and otherwise stand at the edge of the night and let it belong to her.

Which was the entire point of being here.

She’d told the firm three weeks ago. Walked into her manager’s office and said it out loud — that she was seeing a client, that it was serious, that she wasn’t going to keep pretending — and then went back to her desk and waited to find out what it cost. Joe knew what that had taken, because he’d watched her decide to do it over the better part of a month, watched her run the math on every way it could go sideways. She’d spent two years in that office building something out of nothing but being good at the job. And she’d put all of it on the table to stop hiding him.

So no. He was not going to be the story tonight. Not the famous boyfriend who put a hand somewhere it didn’t belong, or said something a little too sharp to a colleague, or did one single thing that let anyone in this room decide she’d gotten careless. He’d be the most boring man at the gala if it killed him. He’d promised himself that in the car.

She was across the room, and he let himself look.

This was a version of her he didn’t get much — not the one who fell asleep on his couch at nine, but the work one, faster, lit from somewhere. She had a glass of wine she wasn’t drinking and a way of leaning in when someone spoke that made them the only person at the party. He watched her do it to a senior partner twice her age, watched the man laugh at whatever she’d said and his wife laugh right after. She remembered names. She remembered the names of people’s kids. She’d told him once, half-asleep, that most of her job was just making people feel okay, and he’d thought she was being modest. She wasn’t. It was a skill, and she was the best in the room at it.

It was a strange place to feel proud, a party where he knew almost no one. But that was the word for it. He stood in his very boring corner and felt it.

———

Then a guy walked up to her, and Joe’s attention snapped to him and stayed there.

Around her age. That was the first thing. Early twenties, good suit, not trying too hard, the easy posture of someone who’d never once wondered whether he belonged in a room. He leaned in to say something meant just for her, and her whole face changed — not the work warmth she’d been handing out all night, but something quicker, a laugh that got out of her before she’d cleared it for takeoff.

Whatever he said next, Joe didn’t catch. But he caught her hand landing on the guy’s arm, caught her firing something back that dropped the guy’s head into a laugh, the two of them folding toward each other the way people do when the joke is old and shared and doesn’t need a setup. A bartender drifted past. The guy lifted two fingers without looking, said a word, and a minute later the bartender slid a drink down to her — not the wine she’d been nursing all night. Something she actually wanted. He hadn’t had to ask.

Joe watched her take a sip of it.

It was a few minutes before the guy noticed him. When he did, his face opened all the way up, and he crossed the floor with his hand already out.

“Mr. Burrow. Drew.” A grin. “I work with Y/N — Sissy. Everybody calls her Sissy, but you’d know that better than me.” The handshake was good. Warm, a little reverent. “Listen, the back half of last season — I was losing my mind every Sunday. My roommate thought something was wrong with me.”

“Appreciate it,” Joe said, and meant the reflex half of it.

“She’s the best one we’ve got, for the record.” Drew said it easy, like he was allowed to. “Don’t tell the partners I admitted the analysts run the place.” He laughed. Joe laughed too. On time. The right amount.

That was the problem. He was a good guy. There was nothing to hold onto. He was funny and warm and clearly thought the world of her, had just shaken Joe’s hand like it had made his whole year, and Joe stood there doing the right thing with his face and could not find one single thing wrong with him.

———

It was nothing. He told himself that.

And it was nothing — he knew it was. He’d watched her be exactly like this for the last hour with every person who came within range. The senior partner. The partner’s wife. The bartender. The kid working coat check. Him. This was just her. She’d flirt with a fence post. It was the first thing he’d loved about her, that warmth that didn’t check credentials first, the way she could make a whole room feel like it was on her side. He’d fallen for it standing in a hallway outside a conference room, watching her hand a man an out he hadn’t earned. He didn’t get to resent it now because it was pointed somewhere else for ten minutes.

So he told himself it was nothing. And then he kept count anyway. The hand on the arm. The drink the guy knew to order. The shorthand. The laugh that came early. He logged each one the way he logged a defense on film — filing it, building something he didn’t want to be building — and the harder he tried to stop, the cleaner the record got.

The worst part wasn’t the warmth. He could live with warmth. The worst part was that the guy spoke her language. When she told Joe about her work she translated it, flattened it into something he could follow from outside the fence. With Drew she didn’t translate. She used the shorthand and the acronyms and the names of people Joe had never met, and Drew kept up, fired it back, and the two of them stood there fluent in a thing Joe would always need subtitles for.

He took a drink he didn’t want. Pressed his tongue to the inside of his cheek and stood very still.

———

The woman who cornered him by the bar was named Diane, and she had two glasses of wine in her and forty years of opinions about everyone in the room.

She loved her, and didn’t waste time getting to it — she talked about her the way you talk about someone you’ve decided to look out for, told Joe unprompted that the girl outworked everyone on that floor and got half the credit for it, and Joe said he knew, because he did.

“She came up with Drew, you know.” Diane nodded across the room to where the two of them were still talking. “Same analyst class. Started the same week. Those two have been attached at the hip for —” she tried to count it on her fingers, lost it, gave up. “Years. There was a stretch where half of us figured they’d end up —”

She caught herself there. Looked at Joe. Laughed and waved a hand like she was clearing smoke.

“Well. You know how an office talks.” She patted his arm. “Anyway. She did a lot better.”

She meant it kindly. Joe could hear that she meant it kindly. He gave her the smile that meant thank you and let her start a story about last year’s Christmas party that he didn’t hear a word of.

Across the room, Drew laughed at something with his whole body.

So it wasn’t in his head. That was almost a relief, the way finding the thing on the MRI is a relief — at least now it’s real and not something you invented to torture yourself with. Half the office had figured it. There’d been a version of her life sitting right there the entire time, the frictionless one, where she ended up with the guy from her own class who spoke her language and was her age and would never once have made her walk into a manager’s office and gamble two years of work on whether he was worth it.

That was the door nobody at this party would have blinked at. And she’d walked past it.

He should have felt good about that. Some nights he did. Tonight he stood at the bar with a drink he wasn’t drinking and felt more like a man who’d talked somebody into a worse deal.

And he couldn’t do a single thing with any of it. That was the part that kept circling back. If he let it show — if his face did the wrong thing, if he crossed the room and put a hand on her in the way that said mine to a room full of the people she had to sit across from on Monday — he’d hand every one of them the exact story she’d spent three weeks bracing for. See. She’s not serious. She just landed the client. The only way to protect what she’d risked was to stand here and feel it and let none of it reach his face.

So he did. He’d done harder things on television.

———

He didn’t see her cross the room. He felt the air move and then she was beside him, close, her shoulder against his arm, and her hand found his without any production about it — out in the open, in front of all of them, like it was the most ordinary thing in the world.

It wasn’t. It was the first time she’d done it in this building, in front of these people, and he knew exactly what it was. She was telling the room. She’d decided to.

“You’ve gone quiet on me,” she said. Light. To anyone watching it was nothing, a girl checking on her date. But she was looking at the side of his face the way she looked at a number that didn’t add up.

“I’m good.”

She didn’t believe him. He watched her not believe him. She held his hand a second past what the sentence needed, reading whatever was on his face, and he gave her as little of it as he could, because the alternative was telling the truth in the middle of her own party.

Whatever she found, she put it away. She didn’t push. That was the thing about her in a room — she always knew when the room wasn’t the place.

“I’ve said hi to everyone who matters.” Still light. Still for the audience. Her thumb moved once across his knuckles. “We can go whenever you want.”

He knew what that cost her. She’d been lit up all night, in the one room where she got to be the center of her own world instead of a guest in his, and she was offering to cut it short because she’d looked at his face for four seconds and done the math.

“You don’t have to leave.”

“I know.” She was already reaching for her clutch on the bar. “Let’s go say goodbye to Diane. She’ll be hurt if we don’t.”

———

The valet brought the car around. He got her door, then his own, pulled out into the Cincinnati night, and for the first few blocks she was still up there with the party — loose, pleased with herself, recapping.

“Okay, Diane is obsessed with you now. That’s permanent, by the way. You’ve got her for life.” She had her shoes off already, one foot tucked under her, twisted in the seat to face him. “She told me you’d be too handsome to be nice, and then you went and ruined it by being nice, and now she doesn’t know what to do with herself. She started planning the wedding. My wedding. Our —” she laughed. “You know what I mean.”

“Mm,” Joe said.

She kept going a minute longer, because that was her, because she could carry a conversation across a desert if she had to. Who’d asked about him. Who’d been too nervous to. What one of the partners had said about the Alo deal. He answered where he had to. Eyes on the road. Both hands on the wheel.

It took her about a mile to feel it. He caught it out of the side of his eye — the recap winding down, the smile going thoughtful, her head tipping the way it did when a number stopped adding up.

“Hey.” Softer. “Where’d you go?”

“I’m here.”

“You’re not, though.” She put her hand on his leg, just above the knee, light. “You’ve been somewhere else since the bar.”

The light ahead went yellow. He could have made it. He stopped instead, because stopping gave his hands something to do.

“It’s been a long night,” he said.

It wasn’t a lie, exactly. It was just nowhere near the truth, and they both knew it, and the worst part of being with someone who paid attention the way he did was that she’d learned how to do it right back.

She didn’t push. That surprised him, even now. She took her hand back, folded it in her lap, looked out the windshield, and let the quiet get big.

He’d have preferred it if she pushed. When she pushed, he had something to push against. This — her just sitting there knowing, waiting him out, not making him say it and not pretending she couldn’t see it — this was worse. He could feel her running the whole night backward, laying it down next to the way he’d gone quiet, watching the answer come up.

The light turned green.

“It’s nothing,” he said. Too even. "Just didn't love watching that."

She turned in her seat to look at him. “Didn’t love watching what?”

He didn’t answer. Her building came up on the right and he was grateful for it — somewhere to put his hands, his eyes. He pulled to the curb, put it in park.

She was still watching him.

“You and Drew.” He kept his eyes forward. “Diane told me the whole office had the two of you ending up together. For years, apparently. Would’ve been nice if somebody mentioned that before tonight.”

———

She didn’t argue with it. She got out of the car.

For a second he thought she was leaving the whole thing on the curb — him, the conversation, all of it — but she leaned down and looked at him through the open door instead.

“You coming up? Or are you gonna sit out here and be jealous all night?”

She’d said it. The word he hadn’t. Light, like it was almost funny, because to her it almost was — she’d had the whole thing solved since the bar and was just waiting for him to catch up.

He came up.

The elevator was quiet. The hallway was quiet. She unlocked her door, dropped her clutch and her heels inside it the way she always did, and turned around like she had something else to say —

and he kissed her before she could say it.

One hand at her jaw, the other at her waist, and he walked her back into the wall beside the door hard enough to take the air out of her. His hands weren’t doing the careful thing they did. He’d spent four hours keeping every part of himself still, and now none of him was.

She made a sound against his mouth, and then her hands were in his hair, pulling, and she kissed him back like she’d been waiting all night for him to quit being so good.

He pulled back just enough to get a breath. Kept his forehead against hers.

“I had to stand there,” he said. Low, rough. “All night. Watching him make you laugh. Knowing every person in that room figured he was the one who should’ve been taking you home.”

“Joe—”

“He knew your drink.” Quieter. Worse. “He knew your drink and I didn’t.”

She took his face in both hands and made him look at her.

“You know how I take my coffee. You know I can’t fall asleep with cold feet. You know I cry at the dog commercials and you have never once given me grief for it.” Her thumbs moved over his cheekbones. “He knows what I order at a bar. That’s not the same thing. It’s not even close.”

He kissed her again, and whatever she’d just done to him, it didn’t come out gentle. His hands dropped to the backs of her thighs and lifted, and she wrapped around him like she’d done it a hundred times, and he carried her toward the bedroom — his hands deciding something his mouth still couldn’t.

———

He set her down at the edge of the bed and she had his tie loose before her feet hit the floor. He let her have it — the tie, the jacket she shoved off his shoulders, the buttons she was too impatient for. His own hands went to the zip down the back of her dress, and he didn’t bother being neat about it.

When the dress was gone he stopped for a second to look at her, and then he didn’t want to look, he wanted his hands on her and his mouth on her all at once, like touching enough of her fast enough might fix what the night had done to him.

He got a hand between her legs. She was already wet, already pushing up into his palm, and the sound she made went straight through him.

“He gets to make you laugh.” His mouth was at her throat, his fingers moving, her back coming up off the bed. “Fine. He can have that.” Lower. “He doesn’t get this.”

“Joe—”

“This part’s mine.”

“It’s yours.” She got a fist in his hair and dragged his mouth back to hers. “It was yours at the bar. It was yours all night. You absolute idiot.”

The rest of his clothes came off, and hers, and when he pushed into her, they both went still — her nails in his back, his face down at her shoulder. Then he moved, hard, and she took all of it and pulled him deeper with her heels.

It should have been enough. Her under him, around him, saying his name. It wasn’t. What the night had put in him wasn’t something he could work out of his system that way, and somewhere in the middle of it the claiming gave out and the thing underneath came up in its place. His rhythm broke. He put his face in her neck, where he didn’t have to watch her hear it.

“You could’ve had—” He stopped. Started over. “Everybody in that room, they all just—it would’ve been easy. With him. Same world, same age, nobody would’ve blinked. And you—”

He couldn’t finish it. He had the rest of it somewhere and it was too big to get through his teeth, and he made a frustrated sound against her skin and quit trying.

She went still under him. One hand came into his hair, the other flat between his shoulder blades, and she held him there a second, let him stay hidden, before she pushed him up far enough to make him look at her.

“Hey. Look at me.” She waited until he did. “Easy was never the thing I wanted. If I wanted easy I’d have taken it years ago — it was right there.” Her hand found his jaw. “I knew exactly what you’d cost me. I walked into that office and told them anyway. That wasn’t an accident, and you weren’t what was left when I ran out of options.” Her thumb moved over his cheek. “There was nothing better than you.”

Something in him gave way.

He kissed her, slower now, the urgency gone down into something deeper, and when he started to move again it was for a different reason — just to be as close to her as a person could get to another person. It built slow and then not slow at all, and when it took her he felt the whole of it, her mouth at his ear, his name going out of her like it was the last word she had. He went over with his face in her hair and her name coming out of him — the real one, the one only he got to use, the one she’d given him on purpose.

For a while neither of them moved. His weight on her, her hand still in his hair, the city going by the window the way it always did.

———

Eventually he rolled them, got his weight off her, and she ended up on his chest — the slow of his heart coming down under her ear, her fingers drawing something idle over his sternum, the streetlight coming through the curtain she never closed all the way.

“What was it, anyway,” he said.

“Hm?”

“The drink. The one he got you.”

She lifted her head to look at him, a smile already starting. “You are not going to let that go.”

“No.”

“It’s a French 75. Gin, champagne, lemon. I order it everywhere.” She propped her chin on her hands. “It’s on every cocktail menu in America, Joe. It’s not a secret handshake. Drew’s known me since my first week at that firm, and that is the single deepest thing he’s got on me.”

“French 75,” he repeated, like he was setting it down somewhere he wouldn’t lose it.

“You don’t have to—”

“I know.” He pulled her back down against him. “Gonna know it anyway.”

She didn’t say anything to that. Just worked her cold feet in between his calves the way she always did, and let him have the last word for once.

taglist: @honeydippedfiction, @harryweeniee, @mruizsworld, @cixrosie, @babygirlburrow, @coasttocold, @jbnine99, @willowpains, @melanie-15, @renegadebirch, @yourfavmahomie, @neyessibff, @hallecarey1, @nngkay, @itsleilabxtch, @cozygirljay, @nycgblogs05, @wickedfun9, @marvelislove10, @megsinnerthoughts, @vroomvroommbtch, @britt217, @thatgirltries, @edtomh, @nanouslibrary, @crazygirlinthisworld, @slutfordpr

You don’t remember how he got here. Something about the documentary neither of you is watching anymore, and now he’s three minutes deep into how the Ohio River used to be somewhere else entirely — an old riverbed, a wall of ice two miles thick pushing everything south — and his thumb hasn’t stopped moving against your ankle the whole time. Slow passes over the bone. He doesn’t seem to know he’s doing it.

You’re stretched across the couch with your legs in his lap. He’s got his back in the corner of the cushions, sweatpants, that worn OSU shirt that only comes out in the offseason, eyes a little pink and heavy in a way nobody outside this room ever gets to see.

“Two miles,” he says again, like the number still gets him. “Of ice. Over where we’re sitting.”

“You’re so high.”

“I’m being educational.” He takes the joint from your fingers without looking, pulls from it, lets the smoke go toward the ceiling. The lamp in the corner is the only light on, and it catches the side of his face, his jaw, the lazy line of his throat when he tips his head back. “You’re welcome, by the way.”

“For the glacier facts.”

“For the glacier facts.”

He passes it back. His hand finds your calf after, palm flat, fingers wrapped around the muscle like that’s just where it goes now. Outside it’s dark and there’s nothing on the calendar tomorrow, nothing in the kitchen, nothing in the whole house but the low hum of the TV menu screen neither of you has touched in twenty minutes.

You take your hit and watch him watch you do it.

“What,” you say, smoke still in your chest.

“Nothing.” His eyes stay on your mouth. “Hit it again.”

You do. The cherry flares orange in the low light, and this time when he reaches for the joint, you hold it out of range.

“Come here.”

Joe looks at you. One second, two — and then it clicks, because he taught you this. He’s the one who leaned over you on this same couch back in April with smoke in his lungs and a hand on your jaw and changed what sharing meant.

“Yeah?” His voice has dropped somewhere lower than the glacier talk.

“Mhm.” You sit up, knees folding under you, and his hand slides from your calf to your thigh to make room without ever leaving you. “Your turn.”

Something about that makes him exhale through his nose, almost a laugh, except he’s already moving — shoulders coming off the cushions, weight rolling forward, putting himself in your space the way you asked. He stops close. Closer than he needs to. Forearm on his knee, face turned up to you, and there’s a softness around his eyes that has nothing to do with the weed.

He could take it from you. You both know he could turn this around in half a second, get a hand in your hair, run it his way. He doesn’t. He just waits, lips parted, looking at you like he’s never been less interested in being in charge of anything.

“Whenever you’re ready,” he says.

You bring the joint to your lips and pull slow, deeper than you need to, holding his eyes the whole time. The smoke sits hot in your chest.

Your free hand comes up to his face. Fingers along his jaw, thumb just under his bottom lip, tilting him where you want him — and he lets you. That’s the part that gets you high all on its own, more than anything in your lungs. Joe Burrow, moved by two fingers.

His mouth drops open for you.

You lean in until there’s nothing between you but the shape of the air, lips almost touching, and exhale.

He inhales like he’s been waiting all night for it. Slow, smooth, pulling the smoke out of your mouth in one long draw, and his eyes never close. Not once. They stay on yours through all of it — through the last of the smoke, through the second after, when neither of you moves and the only thing left between your mouths is heat.

He holds it. Lets it out slow through his nose, smoke curling up between your faces, and his hand comes around the back of your knee.

“Again,” he says.

The second one is messier.

You barely get the exhale started before he closes the distance, smoke and all, and it stops being a shotgun and starts being a kiss somewhere in the middle. Slow. Deep. The kind you can taste. He kisses you like the weed has stripped every clock out of his body, like there’s nowhere to be ever again, his hand sliding up the back of your thigh.

You break away just long enough to lean over and press the joint out in the ashtray. His mouth finds your neck while you’re still reaching.

“Hey.” You laugh, but it comes out thinner than you meant.

“You started this,” he murmurs into your skin. He’s pulling you in by the hips, guiding you over him, and you go — knees sinking into the cushions on either side of him, coming down into his lap. His head drops back against the cushions to look up at you and there it is. That face. Heavy-lidded, mouth swollen, hair a mess from your hands, and underneath all of it something open that he never wears standing up.

“Finish it, then,” he says.

So you do. You take his face in both hands and kiss him the way you want to, slow as the smoke, rolling your hips down just to feel him exhale hard through his nose. His hands slide under your shirt and spread across your back — big, warm, pulling you closer with a patience that almost hurts. Everything is half-speed. Everything is twice as loud. His thumb dragging along your spine is the only thing happening in the world.

The shirt goes. His goes after, and you flatten your palms against his chest and feel his heart going quicker than the rest of him admits.

“Look at you,” he says, quiet. His hands move over you like he’s got all night and intends to use it — your waist, your ribs, the underside of your jaw. “Could watch you do anything like this.”

“Like what?”

“High. On top of me.” His eyes drag up to yours. “Bossing me around.”

You’re both down to nothing in increments, lazy and uncoordinated, laughing once when his sweatpants fight him at the ankle. And then you’re back over him, bare, and the laughing stops. He doesn’t grab. He doesn’t flip you. His hands rest at your hips with the lightest pressure, asking instead of taking, and you sink down onto him slow enough that you feel everything and so does he.

The sound he makes is low and unguarded, half a groan and half your name.

You set the pace and he lets you keep it. Rolling, easy, no rush in it anywhere — the haze stretching every second out long. His hands learn you all over again like the high has reset them. And he talks. That’s the thing about him like this: the filter’s gone soft, and the words come out against your throat between breaths, quiet, like he’s not entirely choosing them.

“Think about this,” he says. “When you’re not here. The house is too quiet.”

“Joe—”

He doesn’t let you finish. His forehead tips against yours. His hips press up to meet you, finally, just once, enough to make you gasp. “Keep going.”

You do. The build is slow as everything else tonight, climbing in degrees, his breath going ragged under you, your fingers laced through his against the back of the couch. When you tighten around him his whole body answers, and the word he says into your shoulder is too quiet to catch and too honest to ask about.

It rolls through you like smoke — heavy, spreading, taking its time. He follows you down with his arms locked around your back, holding on like the couch might tip.

Neither of you moves for a while.

You’re draped over him, cheek on his shoulder, his heartbeat slowing under your ear. One of his hands is in your hair. The other is making long, slow passes up and down your back, the same absent rhythm as the thumb on your ankle an hour ago, like touching you is just what his hands do when he’s not using them for anything else.

The ashtray sits there with the dead joint in it.

He reaches over you without dislodging you — long arm, fingertips, the water bottle off the side table — and presses it into your hand before you’ve said a word.

“Drink.”

You lift your head enough to manage it. He watches you do that too, eyes half shut, looking thoroughly pleased with himself for a man who just spent twenty minutes doing whatever he was told.

You hand the bottle back. He finishes it. Drops it somewhere soft.

“So,” he says, sinking deeper into the couch, arms coming back around you. “You’re just gonna steal my move.”

“Improved it.”

He huffs, and you feel it more than hear it. His lips land somewhere near your temple and stay there.

“Yeah,” he says. “You did.”

taglist: @honeydippedfiction, @harryweeniee, @mruizsworld, @cixrosie, @babygirlburrow, @coasttocold, @jbnine99, @willowpains, @melanie-15, @renegadebirch, @yourfavmahomie, @neyessibff, @hallecarey1, @nngkay, @itsleilabxtch, @cozygirljay, @nycgblogs05, @wickedfun9, @marvelislove10, @megsinnerthoughts, @vroomvroommbtch, @britt217, @thatgirltries, @edtomh, @nanouslibrary, @crazygirlinthisworld, @slutfordpr

It’s Sunday night and you’re on his couch with your laptop hot against your thighs, and the lit review is due Wednesday, and there’s a parent email sitting in your drafts that you’ve rewritten twice already — the one recommending reading intervention for a kid whose parents already decided at conferences that you’re the problem, the one that has to be worded so carefully it might as well be a hostage negotiation. Under that, in your texts, the estimate from the mechanic. Eight hundred and forty dollars. You did that math at a red light on the way over here. You did it again in his driveway with the engine off.

Joe’s at the other end of the couch with golf on, volume low, your feet in his lap. Every few minutes his hand wraps around your ankle and stays there a while, then goes back to his phone. He’s not watching the golf. You’re not reading the paragraph.

You highlight a sentence. Unhighlight it. Your thumbnail’s gone ragged on one side and you keep finding it with your finger anyway.

“Chef left the chicken thing,” he says. “Want me to heat it up?”

“I ate before I came.”

You didn’t. You had coffee at four and your stomach has been a closed fist since Friday, but eating means stopping, and stopping means the list catches up, and the list is fine. It’s a normal amount of things. Everyone has a normal amount of things.

He looks at you a second too long.

“You’ve been on that page a while,” he says.

“It’s dense.” You scroll down so the screen changes. “Education theory. Riveting stuff.”

He doesn’t push. His hand comes back to your ankle, thumb moving over the bone, and he goes back to the golf he isn’t watching.

—

You go up to bed a little after eleven.

You do the whole routine like your body isn’t humming — wash your face next to him at the double sink, take your side, let him pull you back against his chest the way he does. His breathing goes long and slow within minutes. He sleeps like a man with a clear conscience and a personal chef.

You lie there with your eyes open.

The email. The lit review. Eight hundred and forty dollars. The email again — the parents’ faces at conferences, the dad with his arms crossed saying she read fine last year, like you’d broken something in their kid by noticing it. You write the email in your head and hit the words wrong and start over. Then again. Your heart picks up somewhere in the fourth draft and doesn’t come back down.

The clock says 12:53 when you slide out from under his arm. You do it slow, one limb at a time, and he shifts and doesn’t wake. You take your phone off the nightstand and you don’t take the laptop, because the laptop isn’t the plan anymore. The plan is downstairs.

You put on Golden Girls with the volume at almost nothing. You don’t even have to scroll for it — it’s in his continue watching now, which is its own small thing you’re not going to look at directly. You pick an episode you’ve seen thirty times. Sophia’s already mid-story when it loads. Picture it: Sicily, 1922.

This is the show that works. It worked on your mom’s couch when you were eight and home sick, it worked through undergrad finals, it worked the whole week after your first parent conference went sideways. It’s not one of yours and his. It’s from before him. That’s the point. Nothing in it can touch the list.

Except the list came down the stairs with you.

Your breath stops going all the way down somewhere in the second act. You sit forward, elbows on your knees, and try the counting thing — four in, hold, seven out — and lose it at three because your heart is going too fast to count over. Your hands are doing the pins-and-needles thing. The room is too warm and then it isn’t. Blanche says something and the laugh track hisses about it at its almost-nothing volume and you slide off the couch onto the carpet because the couch suddenly feels like standing on something high.

You’re not — this is stupid. You’re sitting on the floor of your boyfriend’s basement at one in the morning trying to talk your own lungs into doing the one thing they’re for. He’s asleep. He’s two floors up. You just need to be quiet and ride it down and be back in bed before he ever—

The stairs.

You hear him on the stairs and you can’t fix your face in time, can’t get up off the floor, can’t do anything but sit there with your hands shaking in your lap while the show rolls on at a whisper.

“Hey.” He stops at the bottom. “Hey—”

You get a hand up before he’s even off the last step. “I’m fine.”

He stops where he is. You watch him take it in — you on the carpet with your knees pulled up, the shake in your hands, the show going at a whisper, one in the morning. You watch him do it and you wait for it. The look. You know the look. You’ve gotten it before, from people who were supposed to be safe — the one that lands somewhere between seriously? and what do you want me to do about this, the one that files you under too much.

“Go back to bed,” you say. It comes out in pieces. “I couldn’t sleep. I’m fine, I just need a minute.”

He doesn’t go back to bed.

He doesn’t crouch in front of you and grab your shoulders and tell you to breathe, either. He crosses the room and lowers himself onto the floor next to you, back against the couch, legs out, like this is a place he sits. An arm’s length away. He doesn’t touch you.

“You don’t have to talk,” he says. Low, under the laugh track. “I’m just gonna sit here.”

You keep waiting for the rest of it. The questions. The fixing.

It doesn’t come.

Your lungs are still doing the thing where the top third works and nothing else does. The counting keeps falling apart. Some part of you is narrating the whole time — he’s seeing this, he’s seeing all of this, this is the version of you he has now — and that part won’t shut up, and your eyes are burning, and Dorothy says something to Rose that you know by heart and it goes past you like traffic.

“This is so stupid,” you get out. “I’m—”

“You’re not.”

He puts his hand on the carpet between you. Palm up. He doesn’t look at it.

“Whenever you want it,” he says.

You stare at it through two more breaths that don’t land.

Then you take it, and you grip it way too hard, nails and everything, and he doesn’t flinch.

“Squeeze,” he says. “You’re not gonna hurt me.”

His fingers close around yours and his thumb moves slow across your knuckles, the same lap of it, over and over, something to count that isn’t counting. When the wave picks back up and your grip goes tight again, he says it again — “Still here” — same two words, same volume, every time it comes back.

Four in. You lose it. Four in. Hold. Seven out.

It takes what it takes. The episode ends and autoplays into the next one. Sophia’s back in Sicily at a whisper. Your grip eases off his hand by degrees and he doesn’t take it back, and neither do you, and he stays on the floor.

At some point he gets up, and your stomach drops — there it is — and then he’s back before the thought can finish, a water bottle from the mini fridge behind the bar, cap already cracked. He puts it in your hands without saying anything. You drink because it’s something to do with your mouth that isn’t apologizing. Your whole body feels like a wrung-out towel, and the embarrassment is arriving now the way it always does, filling in behind the fear as soon as the fear clears out room.

“I’m sorry,” you say.

“For what.”

“You weren’t supposed to — ” You gesture with the bottle. The floor. The show. You. “See this.”

He doesn’t answer that. He’s still next to you, shoulder against the couch, watching the side of your face now instead of the TV. “What set it off?”

You laugh, one syllable, nothing in it. “An email. I’m sitting on your floor at one a.m. because of an email.”

“The reading one,” he says. “Maddox.”

You turn and look at him. You told him about Maddox once — weeks ago, in the car, the kid who holds the book three inches from his face and guesses at the long words. You hadn’t even said you were worried. You’d just talked too long about it, probably.

“His parents,” Joe says. “You said the dad’s a lot.”

“Yeah.” The label on the water bottle is coming apart under your thumbnail. “Yeah, it’s — I have to send it tomorrow. Today. And it’s not even the email, it’s the email and the lit review and my car and — it stacks. It’s a few times a year. It stacks and then my body just.” You don’t finish. There isn’t a verb.

“How long have you been doing this alone?”

“Joe.”

“How long.”

“Since always. College. It’s easier.”

“Easier than what?”

“Than someone watching me like I’m a flat tire.” It comes out before you can sand it down. “I dated a guy who used to sigh, Joe. Audibly. My roommate used to say just breathe like I hadn’t thought of it. People get one of these and then they get a tone with you. Like you’re doing it at them.“

He doesn’t say anything. You’re not done and he knows it. The show murmurs along.

“And you’re twenty-nine,” you say, to the water bottle. “You’ve got a chef and a stylist and a whole life that runs on time. I’m already the youngest thing in it. I wasn’t going to hand you this too. Cry on your floor about an email like a — ” You don’t say the word. It’s been in the room for months anyway. “I didn’t want to give you more math.”

He’s quiet long enough that you almost look at him.

“There are guys on my team who throw up before kickoff,” he says. “Every game. Grown men with mortgages. One of them breathes into a paper bag in the tunnel and then goes out and hits people for three hours.” His thumb finds your knuckles again. “Your body doing this isn’t an age thing.”

“Joe—”

“And the math is mine. I told you that.” His voice stays low. “You don’t get to start carrying it for me.”

He stands and takes the empty bottle with him, and his other hand comes down for you. You let him pull you up. Your legs have the after-shake in them. He picks up the remote and the screen goes dark mid-Sicily.

—

The clock on his nightstand says 2:05 when you get back in bed.

You take your side the way you took it at eleven — careful, an inch of space, hands to yourself. You’ve used up enough tonight. The floor. The hand. The forty-five minutes of him sitting on carpet in his own basement at one in the morning. There’s a version of this where you ask him to hold you too, and somewhere in your chest a meter is running on how much a person gets to need in one night.

He erases the inch before you finish the thought. Arm under you, pulls you across the mattress and into him, your cheek landing on his chest like that was always where it was going.

“You don’t have to—”

“I know.”

You lie there a second. His heart under your ear. His hand starts moving on your back, slow, the full length of it.

“I’m trying not to be clingy,” you say into his collarbone, and it comes out smaller than you wanted it to.

“You snuck out of bed to fall apart alone in my basement,” he says. “Clingy is not the thing you need to work on.”

You don’t have anything for that. His hand keeps moving.

“I knew something was up,” he says, after a while. “Since Friday. You were here all weekend and somewhere else the whole time. I was waiting for you to bring it to me.”

You lift your head an inch. “Why didn’t you ask?”

“Because you’d have said you were fine.” His hand doesn’t stop. “You said it down there. Hands shaking, couldn’t breathe, still telling me you’re fine.”

“Joe—”

“You kept looking at me like you were waiting for something.” He says it slow, like he’s still working it out. “Down there. Like any second I was gonna — I don’t know. Get up and leave you down there.”

You don’t answer. That’s its own answer.

“I’m not him,” he says. “Whoever taught you to do this in a basement with the volume off — I’m not him. You don’t have to be fine in this house, baby.”

The email is still in your drafts. The lit review is still due Wednesday. The car is still eight hundred and forty dollars. None of it has moved, and your body is going heavy anyway, the weight of him under you doing the thing the counting couldn’t.

You’re almost under when he says it.

“Hey.”

“Mm.”

“Next time, wake me up.”

taglist: @honeydippedfiction, @harryweeniee, @mruizsworld, @cixrosie, @babygirlburrow, @coasttocold, @jbnine99, @willowpains, @melanie-15, @renegadebirch, @yourfavmahomie, @neyessibff, @hallecarey1, @nngkay, @itsleilabxtch, @cozygirljay, @nycgblogs05, @wickedfun9, @marvelislove10, @megsinnerthoughts, @vroomvroommbtch, @britt217, @thatgirltries, @edtomh, @nanouslibrary, @crazygirlinthisworld, @slutfordpr