gold code

As he walked away (she couldn't remember having to watch him do that before and hated it now), she buzzed in her skin – stuck firmly in place but itching to do something, anything. Take an umbrella, please, she thought, mind wandering to the closet where they were kept (behind the door he'd hit on his way back to the bedroom) while she kept her focus on a point between his shoulder blades. There's a jacket he (unambiguous, unnamed he) won't notice missing— but she wasn't sure that was true. She could always make a something up – clothing drive, didn't I tell you?; dry cleaning mishap, oh, I'm so sorry, sweetheart; lent it to Nate, I'll ask him about it next time I see him. It would just be one more tiny lie on top of everything else. Or, an even more asinine thought: ugh, you idiot, I'll go down with you. What more damage could ninety seconds in an elevator do? Sharp florescent light on wood paneling, twelve square feet with nowhere to go, the beady security camera in the corner? She wasn't sure she wanted to find out, but she was almost willing to try. Almost.

When he looked back, her last chance to do something or at least say something, she declined – the polite word for drowning, dismembering, destroying the rogue instincts that urged her to do otherwise. There was nothing to say, after all. She had to convince herself of that. Even if there was, there was no time, never any time. It was easy to attribute her near-desperation to that fact rather than the thought that she actually needed him. No. Absolutely not.

But now gone, she was reminded of a cliched train departure scene from the kinds of movies Blair loved: the last lingering stare through a dingy window, the distance that grew slowly and then became unconquerable, maybe a thoughtless, ridiculous chase, but always characterized by the unfinishable, unfathomable, yet unavoidable end. 

Except the doors closed and he was just gone, no opportunity for some agonized, unrequited glance, no running after him in any meaningful way. She could press her ear up against the cold sliding doors, listen for the faint, obscure metallic hum of his cab's descent, another ambient noise of the penthouse like the ice maker filling or the heating finally clicking off mid-April, but it wasn't the same.

Instead, after staring at the closed doors for far too long, she turned back to her bedroom for what felt like the one-hundredth time today. The back-and-forth motion between that room and this door had been entirely overworked this afternoon, but she could get the best view of the front door (and Jack's most likely exit) from the window across from her side of the bed. 

She retrieved her planner from where she'd discarded it on the bathroom counter and brought it to the window, flipping to Saturday, then Sunday. Flickering her attention from the street below to the calendar in her hand, back and forth and back again, she pressed a pen to the page to absently draw a thin, straight line through her Sunday appointments – and then she saw him. 

Her self-satisfied smile faltered at the choice of words. Uninvited. She would have preferred 'without warning,' even 'unannounced,' but he'd had plenty of time to choose his phrasing, even if he only gave last time half as much thought as she had. Uninvited. Unwelcome. Unwanted. In hindsight, Catherine had realized that coming over without invitation had not only been an error, but evidence of a severe lapse in judgment. Jack had made that abundantly clear by the time she left and, even though she'd asked, she hadn't needed to hear him put the sentiment into words, certainly not that one.

Jack's thumb at her lip was a reminder of just how she, they, had accomplished today. She hadn't applied her makeup, hadn't done her hair, hadn't put on shoes. They had covered as much ground as her apartment had allowed, but, really, had gotten absolutely nowhere. If anything, Catherine would say they had regressed, even if his conversation at the door had shown some initial promise. There wasn't enough time to do all, or any, of things she wanted, to distill the hurt out of her anger, to fix this like she naively hoped she might. This whole thing was a disaster: a mistake in the beginning and a fuck-up now. Maybe there never had been anything to salvage in the first place.

Catherine had meant it when she said it earlier. This wasn't fair. Jack wasn't fair. It wasn't fair to blame and punish her for last time, for caring about him and how he got his bruises. It wasn't fair that he had pulled back and away every time she had reached out to touch him, but he got to touch her now that he'd wasted all the time they had. Jack Bass didn't, couldn't 'like' her; he just liked the idea of having something he couldn't have. Everyone did. She knew that, or wanted to know that, or wanted it not to be true. 

"We didn't want the same thing," she began, lifting her gaze from his hand, now at her chest, just inches from the zipper she'd made him do up, eyes back to him and his stupid smirk. "You wanted me to go." She dropped each word with too much weight as an attempt to keep her voice level. There was no way Catherine was going to let him forget that detail or, rather, her interpretation. As often as she reinforced the idea that Jack was an idiot, he wasn't stupid. Neither was she. "And, at your request, I did."

She had to get rid of him and not because she had finally realized what time it was. This was slipping out of her control, hurt feelings seeping in, clouding her judgment, threatening to manifest as something other than annoyance. A no-win situation, a reason for him to rescind this weekend’s invitation. The tightness in her chest just under his hand was evidence of just how far she'd let him in and how fragile she became now that she had. She didn't just care if he was bruised or safe, she cared about what he thought of her and how he felt about her and she had to get rid of him.

If his plan was really to push her away again, then she was going to have to push back and harder, shove him out the door, stuff him into an elevator, and reevaluate if going to see him this weekend was just as likely to end in disaster. He could refuse to let her touch him and she could refuse to kiss him. At least if they were irritated with each other, they didn't just stare longingly at each other waiting for the other to make the first move. That could work. They'd have to get back on track somehow.

But no. No, instead they were going to hold hands, as if going through some relationship checklist in all the wrong order where they'd started in each other's beds and ended on the doorstep hand in hand. Saying goodbye and, apparently, conducting an affair were now two things she knew they were not very good at. Repetition had done them no favors.

Catherine refused to believe she was the only one who saw the boundary they were pushing here. All their actions and reactions led somewhere, each word and look and touch like a carefully plotted point mapping their familiar trajectory to one bedroom or the other, or a bathroom, or a counter, or a wall. Though the setting changed, the exposition and climax and denouement all followed a fairly regular plot line. He was asking her to turn a plot device into a symbol, change the story. She kissed him to get him to stay, not on his way out the door as some soft parting gesture. Another reason to be frustrated.

She should have just kissed him and let him go. She shouldn't have derailed their trajectory when he said he missed her. She should have reluctantly agreed to meet him at his house this morning when he'd suggested it. The longer they stayed like this now, upright and not enough time to remedy that, the longer Jack talked and the more Catherine listened, overanalyzing and storing things away to add to the ever-growing list of reasons to be annoyed. At this rate, she'd never be able to send him away because she liked being mad at him. She liked fighting with him. She liked where it always led but they didn't have time. 

Now Jack was just adding fuel to the fire and Catherine was all too ready to react, impatiently holding her tongue. I'm sure I'll have something like what you wanted. She was starting to think Jack really had no idea what she wanted, though she knew something like it was not going to work for her. She knew exactly what she wanted and knew she didn't want to have to explain, in the interest of saving time, sure, but mostly out of reluctance to admitting how far off track this whole thing had gotten.

"No, no, please." Catherine tightened her grip at his hip, curled her fingers into his, leaned into him, any subtle thing she could think of to hold him in place in case withholding a kiss wasn't enough. With her attention focused on Jack and Jack alone, it was becoming too easy to ignore the clock ticking away in the living room, the digital display on the oven she never used, and the time displayed on her phone, wherever that was now. "Let's bring it back up. What exactly did I do that you're now so generously willing to let slide? I'd hate to do it again."

Still, she'd let it slide, like she usually did. Pressing for more seemed to backfire more often than not and he had let her get away with apologizing just moments before, or minutes, or years before. If he was serious, if she could trust him, if they "liked" each other, then this really had become something else entirely. It hadn't but it had, and this undefinable, strange gray area that they had stumbled into was unfamiliar and uncomfortable. She couldn't get him to leave or to touch her and he couldn't really be honest in the same way that she couldn't really believe him. Maybe that was for the best.

This weekend, not unlike others before it, she probably would ice him up. And he'd let her for whatever reason. And maybe that would be enough of a reminder as to who he was and she had to be and, really, what they were: a mess that got worse every time they tried to clean it up.

But he was still here and she had almost forgotten she'd asked him to go. All the dialogue while she stood in the doorway just waiting for Jack to meet her there, this was starting to look more like the beginning of their interactions than the end. Her departures were fairly rushed, usually silent, and never ended in a kiss after she'd gotten dressed. That would be some sort of definitive action, an obvious punctuation mark to end the encounter and cause for the next time they met to be a beginning rather than a continuation. It had always been easier to think of this whole thing as a long, winding run-on sentence that neither of them knew how to end, a mistake she kept making because she hadn't really thought it through and, therefore, couldn't really be held accountable. 

Seal the deal, just for you, civilized people, beg you... There were a lot of things wrong with what he'd said but goodbye kiss was the worst of all. And he'd said it twice. She could kiss him, she couldn't deny that she wanted to, but wasn't so sure she wanted to think about what it meant. Could she send both Julian and Jack out her front door to work, into the world, wherever they went, with a kiss? That seemed like a new line, one of the final few Catherine hadn't managed to cross and she was caught on the threshold and any movement forward or backwards would be all the more obvious because of it and he had begged her to be the one to make this worse when he hadn't even been able to touch her earlier back when she had been the one begging and she had to stop thinking about it. She didn’t need to kiss him. It was just a kiss for fuck’s sake and she was twenty-four, not fourteen, and she could live without it. She could. 

It took her too long to process, too long to formulate a response, too long to prepare a somewhat mocking delivery. "That's not fair," she began, attempting a smirk of her own and finally breaking out of the door frame to close the distance between them, their ridiculous height disparity more obvious with each step closer. "It was my birthday and you wouldn't do anything that I asked for, begged for." Mostly true, as far as she was concerned. 

Catherine had never been particularly bothered by obvious displays of emotion, from others or, more often, herself. It had always been easier to follow her gut instinct than any premeditated logic, made more sense to communicate with feeling than formula. Even when she hadn't really known what she wanted, she knew what made her happy or not and acted accordingly. If there was one visible reaction she had been embarrassed by, it was how easily pink bloomed in her cheeks, always giving her away. That, or the way every sentiment was showcased for everyone to see. So much time and even more effort had gone into her slowly becoming a passable liar. Over the years she may have gotten a bit better at concealing the messier parts, but, even still and for the most part, Catherine had accepted the fact that she was, at her core, an emotional person. 

It was way too late to say that feelings didn't play a role in the way she interacted with Jack, but that display felt like too much. Even for her. Especially for her. Pairing that with her suggestion for him to go, she didn't know what else she could do to get him to leave even if she could dedicate herself fully to the idea. Just to prove her wrong once more, he was here. To continue to fight her requests, he stayed. And Jack smiled. And she wanted to believe him. And even more, she wanted him to take just a few more steps forward.

She finally stopped the anxious mortar-and-pestle motion of her hands, paused the two knuckles grinding in her palm, before dropping both hands to smooth over the front of her thighs, now covered by a dress that seemed like a good idea a few minutes ago. It had been a dumb choice for a variety of reasons. Ridiculous to get dressed when maybe there was still a chance they hadn't totally fucked up today too, not an intricate enough zipper or hook to require him to touch her for even a few seconds longer... though the most frustrating thing now was the lack of pockets. She didn't have the luxury of tucking her hands away, her thoughts away, her every emotion that flickered across her face in moments of weakness far, far away. Not now and not with Jack.

"So," she echoed back, lifting her eyebrows. "Make her ice you up, then." 

Far from her best attempt at banter, but she was finally able to manage a smile. Tease him, kind of, and almost totally obscure the hint of jealousy with sarcasm. Jack was at perfect liberty to do whatever he wanted with whomever he wanted. This wasn't new information or anything she hadn't been fully aware of for the last several months. She wasn't his... well, anything. They weren't anything. She even had a boyfriend with whom she lived right in this house. Just this morning, she'd had a conversation with him while he was standing just inches from where Jack was now. Still, Catherine had always preferred to avoid thinking about where exactly she fell in his rotation of other girls and other boy's girlfriends. She wasn't so naive as if to think that hadn't played a role in his initial or continued interest. Maybe that's just what Jack did and that was fine (she had repeated as much to herself enough times), just so long as she didn't have to know about it.

"But I can probably help you with that." She'd said it more to distract herself than anything, maybe to continue to prolong his necessary departure, she wasn't entirely sure anymore. She just knew he was finally smiling and had gone from 'I might be available' to 'you'll see me this weekend' and he was definitively one step closer. "Even though I'd rather that not be necessary." Shit. That had come out wrong. Jack can do whatever he wants, it's fine! What had happened to that? 

Jack had barely touched her. If she had anticipated that, she might not have asked and delayed his departure. Usually when he was involved, she enabled her stubborn, combative streak and, even still, a part of her was tempted to do so now: to turn around and point and yell this is why you can't stay, this is the problem. The distance was only part of the issue, but the only fraction she was really willing to process at the moment. She did turn, though, watching him maneuver through her house before absent-mindedly following at a safe distance to keep him in sight.

Catherine hadn't even considered her own schedule, hadn't even thought the request through when she'd issued it, and wasn't really surprised he had other plans. Considering the logistics allowed for a momentary distraction and she wondered if they'd ever met up back to back before. Maybe. She had never had to think about it before, just called when she wanted, whenever. This whole thing had all been very casual and impersonal once. When had that changed? When had she started planning ahead and thinking ahead and suggesting they met up every day? But he was working tomorrow, whatever that meant. She could only guess, not that she wanted to.

"The weekend's fine." She nodded, framed in the doorway as if somehow trapped there. "Yeah, sure. Okay." It was something her dad had done, her grandpa had done before him, something Catherine had apparently picked up and was doing now. When there was nothing left to say, they'd start a string of meaningless synonyms to signal that even if the conversation was over, it wasn't over. It had never been enough to just continue talking, though, and Catherine didn't have the presence or authority or whatever it took to keep everyone in the room. She'd asked him to leave and, for whatever reason, that had been the request Jack had finally decided to follow.

That was smart, though. She had to keep reminding herself. This was a hard reset, a quick ripping-off-the-bandage reminder, a clumsy sort of redirect. They'd overcome these aberrations and everything would go back to just the way it was, like disruptive ripples fading back in the pond. He was turning to leave and they knew they’d fucked up and they’d do better next time. Probably.

But... that's what she had hoped would happen this time and it hadn't. What if they'd never go back to the way they were before? What if they couldn't?

"Wait."

She hadn't meant to say it. She hadn't wanted to, not over the phone what felt like hours and hours ago, not now with him closer to an exit than to her, but if she didn't say it here, she never would. Today was already ruined, anyway. If it was too late to take it back, maybe it would be quick and painless and another thing they could both forget by next time, next weekend, whenever.

"Jack, I’m sorry." For a lot of things lately and too many in relation to him. "About last time, and what I said, and I know I shouldn't have, and it's just, after what you said, I just... I panicked." She suddenly felt very small. The tightness in her throat that often accompanied heavy, hesitant honesty forced a shift from rushed rambling to something more stunted, slow, deliberate. There was still one thing she hadn't done in front of Jack and she was desperate to keep it that way, desperate to finish this asinine aside before she did something even more idiotic, desperate for him to understand, just desperate.

They’d done absolutely everything in the wrong order. Piecing it all together now had only made everything confusing and made it all hurt. Catherine wanted to point that out, as if she had some shred of evidence that could convince him that this wasn’t really what they wanted and this definitely wasn’t really the way they felt. They didn’t like each other, just fucking each other. And kissing and touching and fighting and staring and sneaking around and talking and just being around each other. That’s all.

It was easier to just watch him, though, rotating back on her side to keep him in view. She realized she wasn’t often on the other side of this, the one watching him get up and get ready to go. Under different circumstances, she might have been able to enjoy it. Instead, she couldn’t help but feel like this would be the last time, certainly the last time she’d ever invite him here if nothing else.

There was no way to know the exact time, though she knew it was far too late in the day to be getting dressed for the first time. All the same, she sat up, stood up, and made her way into her closet. Home alone or with her boyfriend, her instinct had always been to close and lock the door behind her, but she broke habit this time, glancing through the doorway at Jack between adjusting straps and clasps. As she tugged the dress up and slipped the straps over her shoulders, she recognized she could have easily done this herself and avoided dragging this out.

Stepping into the door frame, another idiotic parallel to their last encounter, she felt somehow more exposed standing in front of him now, almost fully and totally decent, than she ever had otherwise but, after all, that was the point. She knew that even if he liked her, he couldn’t really want to do this domestic, boring, normal stuff. Maybe, hopefully, this would be all it took to remind him, her, them, what they were good at, what they were supposed to be. Then next time would be different. It would have to be. It would be.

She traced two fingers over her collar bone before an ill-defined gesture over her shoulder. “Can you…?”

Finishing the request seemed just as pointless as sending him away, but she had to accomplish at least one of those things. Catherine ran her tongue between her lips before stepping back into the room, then three steps closer, and finally an awkward half-rotation to put her back and the zipper of the dress toward him.

That was all that was left, really. He’d zip her up and leave; she would follow him out, positioning their departures on opposite ends of a safe, calculated distance. An easy estimation, good practice for trying to determine when she ‘wanted to come over.’ Too long a gap, she ran the risk of having another ‘I missed you’ discussion; too short, this fuck-up would be far too present in their minds and they’d never get past it. How many days was that? Was it weeks? Could she wait that long, even if she ‘wanted’ to?

It would have been easy for Catherine to put herself in Jack's place, to imagine how she would feel if he had been the one to ask her to leave. After all, the memory had been very fresh in her mind — until right now. Suddenly, she had completely forgotten and couldn't fathom why he couldn't just comply to one simple, reasonable, quite rational request, why he just had to deny her by coming closer. When the tables had been turned, she'd given in and gone home, albeit rather reluctantly. Though, as a result, they had avoided each other for weeks, creating enough of an absence to warrant missing each other, setting this whole catastrophe in motion. Every option seemed to have disastrous results. Finally, it seemed Catherine Archibald could not win.

This thing she had with Jack had always been delicate in one way or another. In the beginning, something like a landmine that threatened complete and utter destruction if one of them might misstep; now, something she could find in her mother's china cabinet that was sure to shatter whether she held too tightly or dared to loosen her grip. The first option had always been sort of dangerously exciting. This, on the other hand, was not.

Their back and forth had been utterly crippled by these pauses, devolved into single-word sentences and unfinished thoughts. She wouldn't have minded if she had been the one to definitively cause that sort of stunted speech. If things had gone to plan, she could have been: her hands pinning his above his head, her fingers in his hair, her body on his instead of inches, miles, galaxies away. 

Catherine held onto her immediate reaction: That's the point! We'll never have time for this conversation! She couldn't help but wonder that if let that sentiment slip, then she could start some sort of fight and make him want to leave. A terrible option given the situation, she realized, but no less terrible than actually making time for a conversation that, by her estimation, could only end in the realization that this was actually nothing, was never going to be anything, and was definitively over. 

"I know. I'm sorry." She really was, and in so many ways. Sorry this happened, sorry this keeps happening, sorry that I changed my mind, that we'll never figure anything out, that things can't go back to the way they were before, and on and on and on.

Retracing her steps in her mind from this morning, she remembered she'd left her planner open to today's date on her bathroom counter. If she flipped through the week, the month, the rest of the year, Catherine would find an intricately orchestrated road map for the foreseeable future. With the help of her mother, her friends, her network of charitable contacts across the island, she'd packed every page. She knew exactly where she was supposed to be, what she was supposed to be doing, who she was supposed to be meeting, and when. 

What do we do now? Had she stuck to her own schedule, right now she was supposed to be far away from here and farther away from Jack. Instead, even the few inches that separated them seemed like too wide a gap. 

Catherine knew immediately what she wanted to do now, none of it written into her planner or featured in the overarching five-year plan she knew she was expected to follow and had almost convinced herself she could maybe even enjoy one day. She wanted to close the space between them, curl into Jack's side, trace over his tattoo while he told her what it meant, wanted him to zip her up in the dress she'd been eyeing earlier, slip into a cab behind her, and run away upstate, across the country, across the globe, leaving the planner and the plan behind until they could piece together a new one. 

She knew exactly how she wanted to respond. If you missed me, show me. If you like me, prove it. Touch me. Kiss me. Tell me we're going to figure it out. Stay, stay, stay.

"You should probably go."

The words had come out wrong, in a voice barely above a whisper as she glanced around the room. Even if she knew what she wanted, she realized too, more importantly, what she couldn't have. Feelings were, and had always been, too flimsy for a foundation, a weak motivator she wouldn't, couldn't risk relying on again. 

She truly didn’t want him to go but couldn’t deny the nagging thought in the back of her mind that told her if he stayed and they tried to decide, the whole thing would fall apart. She had no realistic big-picture response to his question, yet dodging it with a short-term nonsolution seemed like the wrong move too. This was just delaying the inevitable, the conversation that maybe she could just keep postponing until they both forgot and quietly and wordlessly resumed the affair. 

Catherine would have loved if she could have isolated this moment, dissected this fraction of time from their day and categorized it independently, but she couldn’t. This wasn’t a standalone act of comfort or intimacy, some quiet celebration of finally reciprocated feelings; it was a reminder of how this sort of closeness was completely foreign and how, even if they did feel the same, neither of them had any idea of what that meant or what they were going to do about it.

Jack missed her. And liked her. And couldn't leave her. He was hugging her and she could lift her head from his chest and kiss him and they could figure it out. But that would involve more boundaries and rules and definitions and and decisions and bullshit that the two of them had never bothered with, not really, before.

Catherine knew better. Liking each other was never enough. She had convinced herself that, in a real relationship and a grander scheme, that wasn't even very important amidst other criteria. That conviction was why she and Julian worked out so well, or at least why they had worked out for so long. 

Historically, it had been quite easy to annex the rest of the world when she was with Jack. There had never been a shortage of sounds or sights or sensations that could drown out everything else, guilt included. She wasn't just betraying Julian now, a name that loomed in the back of her mind, knotted in her stomach, and was painfully absent from this conversation, but from now on she was going to be disappointing Jack too. Not so long ago she'd had everything she wanted. For the first time, it finally seemed like she'd have to make a choice.

She couldn’t even fully enjoy his stammered, confused commentary, couldn't indulge in her favorite phrases new or old, couldn’t relish in the depressing fact that she had been right: feelings and words and emotion were going to be her downfall. She’d known that for months. The momentarily and unsullied high was just that: a moment, and one that had passed. Even though she hadn't been able to say it out loud, she felt it all the same. This was going to be the end. They weren't going to be able to recover from this. Things could never go back to the way they were before.

When he finally broke away, she took the opportunity to rotate onto her stomach and look down at him while propped up on her elbows. He didn't look like he knew it was over. She could almost, almost believe that. Focusing on his smile, his laugh, him still being here despite everything that had gone horribly wrong, she allowed herself the betrayal of half a smile. Catherine had no idea how this had happened but she thought she really might rather scream than issue the phrase I don't know again.

It wasn’t just Jack she couldn’t control anymore and she knew it. She had no control what this had become, what had happened last time, was happening now. Maybe they were fated to keep repeating failed attempts at honesty over and over and over again, naked in bed while struggling to hold a conversation that would never end with any sense of closure. Maybe it was going to get harder and hurt more every time. That almost sounded worse than him leaving and her never seeing him again, which was no longer just the worst case scenario but steadily becoming the most realistic possibility. That wasn’t what she wanted. 

His question struck her as the wrong takeaway from everything she’d said and she turned to look back at him. Would admitting that she had thought about it and did want it make it real or reciprocal? Did what she want really matter? Could it change things?

Catherine knew this was going to have to end one day. Eventually, she’d have to make a choice and, from the beginning, she knew what choice she was going to make. Whether she’d drop some trite variation of the ‘it’s over’ speech in his mailbox or announce the news as she she zipped herself up and slipped out of his house and life or simply stopped calling him or answering his calls, every realistic scenario concluded with her ending up with Julian and Jack going on his way, whatever that meant. In no imaginary scenario, realistic or not, was the eventual decision a difficult one. She’d end it. Jack wouldn’t care. This would be over. Everything, and everyone, would be fine. Problem solved.

She could do it right now. If they really were doomed to keep doing this, putting an end to it right now would be a favor, a gift she could give herself and him, all but an act of mercy. It would only be fair to ignore his request like he’d ignored hers. She wouldn’t even have to write her own script, just borrow his words from last time and take back her earlier request: I think maybe it’s time for you to go. Leave no room for misinterpretation. Now. Forever. Save them both. You’re welcome.

She could end this, them, everything, like she should have months ago, with one sentence, right now. Step one: she turned back towards him, on her side again, narrowing the distance she’d put there. Two: continuing to honor his request for a few seconds more, she slid her hands to his bicep, holding his arm, and pressed her forehead to his shoulder. Finally, step three, the last. End it. Say it. Do it.

“I can’t.” Catherine exhaled against his skin, shifting to peer up at him, shifting closer still.

They were too close, too exposed. The ambient light in the room, struggling to shine through clouds and curtains, was still somehow too bright. She should have gone through her to-do list, waited until tonight to call Jack back. She should have cut ties after he reached out and touched her at that party. She shouldn't have even been at that bar where they met, or remet, or started this, or ruined everything.

I like you. That was a string of words she hadn't heard since what felt like high school, fumbling through her first ill-fated relationship, accompanied by a sensation that belonged there too, one she had tried to both replicate and ignore. The goddamn fluttering. Again. She felt that it first night, someone like him acknowledging someone like her. The way he looked at her. When he went out of his way not to. The stupid smirk. How he touched her. How he said her name and his nicknames for her. Catherine sought out that feeling, but it had been personal, private, secret then. A physical response to physical stimuli. Unreciprocated. Irrelevant. Embarrassing, weak, naive, but ultimately unimportant.

This was different, though. Despite her very best efforts, this was no longer physical. Movements replaced by words, moans replaced by quiet breathing, the pink she felt creep into her cheeks completely unwelcome. I like you so fucking much.

Her heartbeat in her stomach was going to make her sick. She wasn't supposed to feel like this again, especially not for Jack, especially not over such a silly word. It never ended well. She knew that. She fucking knew that. It wasn't safe. The last two years had been all about crafting a safe existence. All that work, all the restructuring and settling and self-convincing, everything, crumbled under three words, one childish sentiment, eight letters which, in that order, couldn't even be true.

"You don't," she echoed, redirecting his words despite the uncertainty and reluctance in her voice. With more effort than it should have required, she shook her head. "You don't. You like this," she insisted, lifting the hand at his neck in a weak, ambiguous gesture before dropping it to his rib cage. "Or you used to. You like being the bad guy and having someone on call. You're never going to tell me what you're really up to and I'm never going to believe you and we're not going to go upstate or hold hands through the park or, or..."

Breaking contact for the first time since he'd walked in the door, she hid her face behind one hand and rotated her head away first, then her body, pressing her shoulders back into the mattress. Shit. Both unwelcome, unwanted, and humiliating, the tightness at the back of her throat and the stinging in her eyes had come too late. She'd barely had time to catch herself before she broke the only rule she hadn't yet broken. After her best attempt at a stabilizing exhale, she moved her hand from over her eyes to her forehead then back through her hair, almost dry now, before looking back to him.