Muva Heaux

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

—

Now it’s after eleven, and the rain is coming sideways. The girls are down the hall in two separate rooms — Joe has the space, and you’d watched him show them which was which earlier with the careful seriousness of a man giving a tour. This one’s yours, Lo. This one’s Gem’s. He had each one set up: a nightlight shaped like a moon in Gemma’s, a small stack of picture books on Lola’s nightstand. Pajamas, folded on each dresser—sized right, washed soft. A weighted blanket lay at the end of Lola’s bed, the same kind she sleeps under at home. You don’t know how Joe knew that, and you didn’t ask.

You’d helped him brush their teeth with the toothbrushes he’d bought. Tucked Gemma in with her stuffed rabbit, which you’d remembered to bring at the last second. Read her one short book. Closed her door most of the way. Then crossed the hall to Lola’s room — she was already in bed, weighted blanket up to her chin, looking at the ceiling. You’d kissed her forehead. She’d said goodnight in that careful voice she uses when she doesn’t want to give anything away.

You’d left her door cracked, too. Closed Joe’s bedroom door behind you.

He’s already in bed when you come out of the bathroom. The lamp on his side is on. The lamp on yours is on. There’s a glass of water on the nightstand that wasn’t there before.

You get in. He pulls you against him without saying anything. The rain is loud on the windows, and the room is dark except for the lamps, and his arm is heavy across your waist, and you fall asleep faster than you have in months.

—

You don’t hear him get up.

You don’t hear anything.

—

Joe hears it first.

He’s been half-awake for a while — the storm woke him around one, and he’d been lying there listening to it, his hand at the small of your back, thinking about nothing in particular. The kind of thinking he does in the dark. He hears the thunder roll in long and low and then the smaller sound underneath it, the one that doesn’t belong to the storm.

Crying. Soft. Down the hall.

He goes still.

Listens.

It’s Lola. He knows it’s Lola because Gemma cries loudly — Gemma cries like she wants the building to know — and this is the other kind. Pressed into a pillow. Trying not to be heard.

He doesn’t wake you up.

He eases out from under your arm, slow, and you make a small sound and roll into the warm spot he leaves behind and don’t wake. He pulls the covers up over your shoulder. Stands for a second beside the bed, looking down at you, and then turns toward the door.

The hallway is dark. The nightlight in Gemma’s room is throwing a small wedge of moon-shaped light onto the carpet. He’s three steps in when he sees her.

Gemma. Standing in the hallway in her pajamas. A stuffed rabbit dangling from one hand by an ear. Her hair is sticking up on one side, and she’s barefoot, and she’s not crying, she’s just standing there in the dark, looking at Lola’s door.

She sees him. She doesn’t startle.

“Joe.”

“Hi, sweetheart.”

She points at Lola’s door.

“Lola.”

He listens for a second. Hears it under the rain. The small sound she heard, too.

“Yeah,” he says. “I hear her.”

Gemma lifts both arms. The universal three-year-old signal. He crouches and picks her up, and she puts her face against his neck, and the rabbit ends up squashed between them, and she doesn’t say anything else. She just holds on.

He nudges Lola’s door open with his foot.

—

Lola is curled on her side under the weighted blanket, facing the wall. The crying has gone quieter — she heard the door — but her shoulders are still moving, small and tight, and she doesn’t turn around.

Joe sets Gemma down on the edge of Lola’s bed.

Gemma climbs over the blanket on her hands and knees, drops her rabbit somewhere near Lola’s stomach, and lies down behind her sister with the kind of total commitment a three-year-old brings to a project. She wedges herself against Lola’s back. Puts her arm over Lola’s side. Says, very quietly, Lo.

Lola’s shoulders stop moving.

Joe stays where he is. Doesn’t sit on the bed. Doesn’t crouch down again. Just stands a few feet back in the dim, hands in his pockets, giving her the room.

“Hey, Lo,” he says.

She doesn’t answer. But she doesn’t tell him to leave either.

“You want me to go get your mom?”

A long pause.

Then a small nod against the pillow. He can barely see it in the dark, but he sees it.

“Okay,” he says. “I’ll be right back.”

He doesn’t move yet. He looks at the two of them — Gemma already half-asleep again with her face mashed into the back of Lola’s pajama shirt, Lola still facing the wall — and then he says, just as quietly:

“You did the right thing, Gem.”

Gemma makes a small mmh sound that might be agreement or might be sleep.

He goes.

—

You wake up to a hand on your shoulder.

“Hey.”

Joe’s voice. Low. Close.

You blink. The room is dark. The rain is still going. His face is right there, and his hand is warm on your shoulder, and your first thought is something is wrong, your second thought is the girls, and you’re sitting up before he’s finished the sentence.

“Lola’s crying,” he says. “Gemma’s already in there with her. She wants you.”

You’re out of bed and moving before he’s done talking. Joe follows you down the hall, half a step behind, and when you push the door open Gemma is curled against Lola’s back exactly the way you used to find them in Lola’s bed at home when Gemma was still in a crib and would somehow escape it, and Lola is still facing the wall but she’s awake, and when she hears you come in her shoulders start moving again.

“Oh, baby.”

You cross the room. Sit on the edge of the bed. Put your hand on her back.

Lola turns into you so fast it almost knocks the air out of you, and then she’s crying for real, the kind of crying she only does when she’s been holding it in for hours, her face pressed into your stomach and one fist gripping the front of your shirt. Gemma, displaced, scoots up the bed and wedges herself against your hip without opening her eyes.

You stroke Lola’s hair. You don’t ask her what’s wrong. You know what’s wrong. The storm, the strange house, the strange bed, the long day of holding it together in a place that isn’t hers. All of it. Any of it. None of it specifically.

“It’s okay,” you say, into the top of her head. “It’s okay. I’ve got you.”

She cries until she’s tired. It doesn’t take long.

You look up.

Joe is in the doorway. Just inside it. Arms crossed loosely, shoulder against the frame. He’s watching you with the girls, and his face is doing something you can’t quite read in the dim.

You tilt your head toward the hallway. Bed?

He nods. Yeah.

You scoop Gemma up first — she’s tired and pliant, head dropping to your shoulder, one arm going around your neck — and Joe steps forward and lifts her off you without asking. She doesn’t fight it. He holds her against his chest with one hand at her back like he’s done it a thousand times, and he hasn’t, and you watch him do it for a second too long before you turn to Lola.

“Come on, Lo. Let’s go to bed.”

She doesn’t argue. She slides off the mattress and stands there in her bare feet and her tear-streaked face and looks at the floor.

You hold out your hand.

She takes it.

—

Joe’s bed is big enough for all of you, and that’s what ends up happening, mostly. He lays Gemma down in the middle, and she rolls into your side and tucks her rabbit under her chin. Lola climbs in on the other side of you and curls into your shoulder under the duvet. You’ve got one girl on each side, and the storm is still loud outside the window, and the lamps are still on low, and you look up.

Joe is standing at the foot of the bed.

You can see him deciding.

“Couch,” he says, finally. Quiet. Almost to himself.

“Joe —”

“I’m good.” He’s already reaching for the spare blanket folded over the chair in the corner. “Y’all need the space.”

You want to argue. You also know he’s right. Lola wouldn’t sleep with him in bed. Lola is barely going to sleep as it is, and the only reason her breathing is starting to slow is that she’s pressed against your side and there’s no one in this room she has to be a certain way around.

You watch him pull the blanket off the chair. He doesn’t make a thing of it. Doesn’t sigh, doesn’t perform the inconvenience, doesn’t ask for a thank-you. He just folds the blanket over his arm and crosses to the door.

He looks back once.

You meet his eyes over the top of Lola’s head. There’s a lot in the space between you. None of it gets said.

“Get some sleep,” he says.

“You too.”

He pulls the door most of the way shut behind him. Leaves it cracked, you notice. So they can find you if they need to.

—

You don’t sleep for a while.

Gemma’s breathing evens out first. Then Lola’s. The storm keeps going outside the window, but it’s quieter now, or you’re getting used to it, or your body has decided the threat is over. Your hand stays on Lola’s back the whole time. You can feel her heartbeat through her pajamas, slow and slow and slower.

At some point, you slip out from between them.

You move slowly. Gemma is finally out cold, hand still curled in your sleeve. Lola makes a small sound and rolls into the spot you leave behind and doesn’t wake. You pad to the door in your bare feet and stand at the top of the stairs.

The lamp in the living room is on low. You can just see him from here — the long shape of him on the couch, one arm thrown over his eyes, the blanket pulled up to his chest. He gave you his bed. He gave Lola the room she needed to fall apart. He carried Gemma down the hall and didn’t wake her up.

You watch him for a long time.

Then you go back to bed and let yourself fall asleep with both your girls warm against you, in his bed, in his house, and you don’t make it mean anything yet.

You’ll do that tomorrow.

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

He’s at the counter when you head upstairs. Phone in his hand, water glass beside it. Lola’s at the kitchen table with the galaxy project spread out in front of her — paper plate of paint, foam stars in a baggie, a paintbrush she’s been holding too tight all evening.

“I’m doing Gemma’s bath,” you say. “Lo, you got it from here?”

Lola doesn’t look up. “Yeah.”

You glance at Joe. He doesn’t say anything, but his eyes meet yours over the counter for a second. He’ll be there. You don’t need to ask.

You take Gemma upstairs.

—

The bath is a production, which is to say it’s normal. Gemma wants the unicorn cup and the dolphin cup. Gemma wants to wash Mommy’s hair, no, the dolphin’s hair, no, Mommy’s hair. Gemma stands up to announce something and you tell her to sit down. Gemma sits down so hard the water sloshes onto the bathmat. You laugh in spite of yourself, and she laughs because you laughed, and you reach for the shampoo and try to remember what you were doing.

Downstairs is quiet at first.

Then it isn’t quiet, exactly — it’s just the regular sounds of a house with another person in it. The fridge opening. A cabinet closing. Nothing alarming. You tip Gemma’s head back to rinse her hair and she squeezes her eyes shut and holds her nose dramatically even though you’re not anywhere near her face.

“Tight squeeze,” she says.

“Tight squeeze.”

You’re working conditioner through her hair when you hear it.

A noise from downstairs. Small. Sharp. A chair scraping back hard, and under it a sound you know even from a floor away, even through running water — a frustrated huff that’s halfway to a sob.

You go still. Your hands stop in Gemma’s hair.

It comes again. Quieter. Someone trying not to make a sound and not quite managing it.

You’re up before you decide to be — half-risen, one hand braced on the lip of the tub, the towel already in your other hand. And then you stop, because you can’t. Gemma is sitting in eight inches of water with conditioner in her hair and a cup in each fist, three years old, and you cannot leave her in it, and you cannot haul her out dripping and naked and carry her downstairs, and even if you could — especially if you could — arriving wet and frantic to rescue your eight-year-old in front of him is the one thing that would make it unbearable for her. Going down those stairs doesn’t help her. It only helps you.

You lower yourself back down onto the bathmat.

It is the worst feeling you know, this one. Hearing one of them and being held in place by the other. Your whole body is pointed at the staircase and you are kneeling on a wet bathmat with your hands in your younger daughter’s hair, and downstairs your older one is crying where you can’t reach her, with a man you’re still deciding about.

You make yourself keep moving. Rinse. Cup of water, tip her head back, rinse.

“Mommy, you’re squeezing too hard.”

“Sorry, baby.”

You loosen your grip. You didn’t know you were holding on. You listen.

Nothing for a long minute. Then footsteps. Not up the stairs — just to the bottom of them. He stops there.

“Hey — “ Joe’s voice, low. Pitched to carry through the bathroom door without raising. “Everything’s fine.”

You go still.

He led with everything’s fine which means everything is NOT fine.

“Yeah?”

“Do you have a small fan anywhere?”

You blink. You’d expected — you didn’t know what you’d expected. Not a fan question.

“Hall closet,” you say. “Bottom shelf, behind the vacuum. It’s white.”

“Got it.”

You hear him move. The closet door opening, a soft scrape of something being shifted, the door closing. Footsteps going back to the kitchen.

He didn’t ask what you’d want him to do. He didn’t explain. He just asked about the fan.

Gemma is humming to herself in the bath. The dolphin cup is on its side, floating. You’re sitting with your hand still in the water, conditioner running down your wrist, and the only thing you can think about is everything’s fine and what that means and what it covers.

“Mommy.”

“Hi, baby.”

“You’re not washing me.”

“I know. I’m coming back.”

You finish her hair. You let her play with the cups for the three minutes it takes to convince her that getting out is a good idea. You wrap her in the hooded towel with the elephant ears and carry her to her room and put her in her pajamas and read her one book about a pigeon driving a bus, and Gemma is asleep before you finish the page where the pigeon gets mad. You close the book and sit on the edge of her bed for a second longer than you need to.

You listen.

The kitchen is quiet. But it’s a different quiet now. There’s a low voice — Joe’s voice — saying something you can’t make out. The hum of the fan underneath it. And then, after a long pause, Lola’s voice. You can’t hear the words. You can hear that she’s talking.

You go downstairs.

—

You stop at the bottom of the stairs because you don’t want to interrupt whatever this is.

The galaxy is on the kitchen table. From the doorway you can see it from the side — purple and blue and black swirled across the paper, glitter catching the overhead light. The foam stars are in a small pile next to a different bottle of glue than the one Lola started with. A small black-handled box fan is sitting on a chair at the end of the table, angled at the paper, humming. The painting is dry now, or close to it. You can see that from across the room.

Joe is sitting in the chair next to Lola’s. His elbows are on the table. He’s holding the bottle of glue and showing her how to put a dot of it on the back of a star.

“You don’t want a lot,” he’s saying. “Just enough. If you put too much it’ll squish out the sides when you press.”

“Like how much.”

“About like that.” He squeezes a tiny dot onto the back of the star. “See? Smaller than a pea. Smaller than that, even.”

Lola takes the bottle from him. She’s frowning the way she frowns when she’s concentrating, the way she frowned at three years old trying to put her shoes on the right feet. She squeezes a dot onto the back of a star. Looks at it. Looks at Joe.

“That’s it,” he says. “Now press it where you want it.”

She presses it. It sticks. She lifts her finger and the star stays.

Her shoulders go down a quarter of an inch.

She doesn’t see you yet. Joe doesn’t either, or maybe he does and is choosing not to.

“How many you got left?” he asks.

“Seven.”

“Okay. You wanna keep going?”

“Yeah.”

She does another one. He sits back a little, lets her work. He doesn’t reach for the star she places slightly crooked. He doesn’t reach for anything. He just sits there with one hand around the back of her chair, not touching her, just there.

You can see her face from where you’re standing. You can see that she’s been crying. Her cheeks have that flush they get, the one that takes a while to fade. Her eyes are a little puffy. She hasn’t wiped her face all the way; there’s still a streak under one eye where she dragged her hand and missed.

She places another star. This one’s straighter.

“That one’s better,” she says.

“Yeah.”

“The first one’s crooked.”

“You want to fix it?”

“It’s stuck.”

“Yeah, it’s stuck. We can leave it.”

She looks at him sideways. Considers this. “Okay.”

You step into the kitchen.

Lola looks up. For half a second her face does something — embarrassed, maybe, or guarded — and then she settles. She doesn’t perform anything for you. She just goes back to the star she’s holding.

“Look, mom,” she says. “Joe got the fan.”

“I see that.”

“The paint wasn’t dry. That’s why the stars wouldn’t stick.”

“I see.”

Joe looks at you finally. His face does its Joe thing — gives you almost nothing if you don’t know him. You know him. There’s a small thing happening at the edge of his mouth that means he’s relieved you came down when you did and not five minutes earlier. There’s a small thing happening in his eyes that means don’t.

You don’t.

“It looks beautiful, Lo.”

“It’s not done.”

“It looks beautiful so far.”

She presses another star down. “Joe’s helping me.”

“I can tell.”

You walk past them to the sink. You don’t sit down at the table. You don’t pull up a chair and join. You rinse out the paintbrush she abandoned next to the paper plate of paint, because the paint will be impossible to get out tomorrow if it dries. You wipe the counter. You move slowly enough that you can keep listening without watching.

Lola places another star. Reaches for a new one and knocks the baggie. Three stars skitter across the table and one lands in the small mound of glitter she spilled earlier.

“Oh my god,” she says, scrambling for them.

“Casualties,” Joe says, picking the glittery one out of the pile by its edge.

“It has glitter on it now.”

“It does.” He turns it in his fingers. “Looks more like a star, actually.”

Lola makes a small huff. Looks at him. Looks at the star.

She laughs.

It’s not a big laugh. It’s a quick one — almost a snort, the kind that gets out before you can stop it. Her hand goes up to her face like she’s surprised by the sound. She presses her mouth flat. Looks back down at the table.

But it happened. And from the sink you can see Joe not looking at her. He’s looking at the galaxy. He doesn’t acknowledge the laugh, doesn’t smile at it, doesn’t do anything that would make her aware she did something. He just hands her the glittery star like he was always going to.

“Where do you want this one.”

She takes it. “I don’t know.”

She picks a spot. Glues it down. Sits there for a second with her hand still on it.

“Mr. Joe.”

“Yeah.”

“The crooked one.” She doesn’t point at it. They both know which one. “Can you get it off?”

“I can try.”

He leans over. Works a fingernail under the edge of the foam. Peels it up slow, careful not to tear the paper or take any paint with it. Holds it up. “Okay.”

“It’s still good?”

“It’s still good. Here.” He hands her the bottle of glue. “Try again.”

She does. Smaller dot this time, like he showed her. Presses it down where she wanted it the first time. Holds her finger there longer than she needs to. Lifts it.

Straight.

“There you go,” he says.

She looks at it.

“Where do you want the last one,” she’s asking him.

“Where do you want it?”

“I don’t know. There’s no more room.”

“There’s room there.”

“That’s empty.”

“That’s where the empty parts of space are, though. It’s not all stars.”

“Oh.”

A pause. “Did you know there are parts of space that don’t have anything?”

“Yeah. They’re called voids.”

“What.”

“Voids. They’re huge empty parts of space with nothing in them. Like the Boötes void. It’s like — hundreds of millions of light-years across and basically empty.”

“That’s a lot.”

“It is a lot.”

“How do you know that.”

“I don’t know. I read it somewhere.”

“Is it really empty? Like nothing?”

“Almost. There’s a few galaxies way out in it. Not many — like sixty, maybe, in a space that could fit millions. So far apart you’d never get from one to the next.”

“Sixty.”

You’re standing at the sink with your back to them. Your hand is on the faucet. You’re not moving.

“Mr. Joe.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m putting the last one in the void. It can be one of the sixty.”

“Good call.”

You hear her press it down. You hear the small huh sound she makes when something works.

You turn around.

“All done?”

“All done.”

She slides off her chair and stands back to look at it from a little farther away. Joe stays seated. The fan keeps humming. The galaxy is — actually, it’s good. It’s an eight-year-old’s galaxy, swirly and a little messy, glitter clumped in the corners where she got excited with the brush, foam stars at slightly off angles. The last one is alone in a dark patch near the bottom corner.

“Everybody else is doing the solar system,” she says.

“Yeah?”

“Mrs. Patterson said we could do either. I picked galaxy.”

“How come?”

She thinks about it. “I didn’t want to do the same as everybody.”

Joe looks at it for a second. “Yeah,” he says. “I get that.”

“I love it, baby.”

“It’s for science.”

“I know. It’s beautiful.”

She nods, satisfied. Then she yawns so big her whole face scrunches up, and you remember what time it is.

“Bed, Lo.”

“I have to put it somewhere safe.”

“On the counter. Where the fan can keep going on it.”

She moves it carefully. Both hands. Joe gets up and moves the fan with her, holding the cord up so it doesn’t catch on the chair. They set it down on the counter together and Lola steps back and looks at it one more time.

“Okay.”

“Teeth,” you say.

“Okay.”

She goes. She doesn’t say goodnight to Joe. She doesn’t say thank you either. She just goes — bare feet on the hardwood, a small noise in her throat that means she’s tired, the bathroom door closing down the hall.

You stand there.

Joe is leaning against the counter now. He’s not looking at you. He’s looking at the galaxy.

You walk over. Stand next to him. Look at the galaxy with him. The foam stars are slightly raised against the paper. The void in the corner is a small dark room with one star in it.

“She was upset,” you say. Not a question.

“Yeah.”

“How upset.”

He’s quiet for a second. “She didn’t want me to know.”

You nod. You don’t push. You can feel him deciding what to give you.

“I just told her the paint was too wet,” he says. “That it wasn’t her fault. Got the fan out of the closet, set it up. Told her we’d let it dry and try again.”

“Okay.”

“She didn’t talk much while it dried. Just watched me move things around.” He pauses. “Then she asked if I was gonna tell you she cried.”

You close your eyes.

“What did you tell her.”

“I told her no.”

You open your eyes. He’s looking at you now.

“It wasn’t a lie,” he says. “I’m not telling you she cried. I’m telling you she was upset.” He glances at the galaxy, then back at you, and for the first time all night he doesn’t look sure of anything. “I didn’t know if that was my call. Keeping something from you. About her.”

“Joe.”

“I made it anyway.” Not defending it. Just telling you. “I don’t really know how this part goes.”

“That’s — “ You stop. You don’t know what you were going to say. You shake your head, and what comes out is quieter than you mean it to be. “It was yours to make. Okay? It was.”

He nods once. Looks back at the galaxy. The fan hums. You can hear Lola in the bathroom, the water running, the soft thump of her toothbrush on the cup when she’s done.

You lean against the counter, your shoulder against his. He doesn’t move. He just stays there with you, looking at your daughter’s project on the counter, and you don’t say anything else because there’s nothing to say that wouldn’t make it bigger than it should be.

You tuck Lola in. She’s almost asleep before you finish pulling the blanket up.

“Mom.”

“Yeah, baby.”

“Don’t forget the fan in the morning.”

“I won’t.”

She turns over. Pulls her stuffed dog under her chin. You smooth her hair back from her forehead and she lets you. You stand there for a second longer than you need to.

“Mom.”

“Yeah.”

“Joe’s coming back tomorrow?”

You stop. You hadn’t said anything about tomorrow. He doesn’t have plans here tomorrow that you’ve discussed. But she’s asking like he might be. Like it’s a thing she’s tracking.

“I don’t know, baby. Probably not tomorrow.”

“Okay.”

She closes her eyes.

You stand there in the dark for another minute, your hand still on her hair, and then you turn out the lamp and go back downstairs.

Joe is still in the kitchen. He’s washed the paintbrush. The paint plate is in the trash. The fan is humming at the galaxy on the counter.

He looks up when you come in.

You walk over to him and put your face against his shoulder and don’t say anything, and his hand comes up to the back of your head, and you stand there in the kitchen with the fan humming and your daughter’s galaxy drying on the counter, and you let him hold you up.

After a minute you pull back. Look at him.

“Don’t make me cry, Joe.”

“I’m not doing anything.”

“You’re doing something.”

“I’m standing here.”

“Yeah.”

He’s looking at you. You’re looking at him. The fan hums. The galaxy dries.

“She’s been asking about you more,” you say.

He closes his eyes for a second. Opens them.

“Good.”

You nod. He nods. Neither of you says anything else.

You turn the kitchen light off on your way out.

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