Slowly but Surely

He picks up his fork. He puts it down. He picks it up again.

There is pie on the table between you. He ordered it like a man being held at gunpoint and it has been sitting there for nine minutes untouched, which is fine, because you've both been doing other things with your mouths, conversationally speaking, and now neither of you is doing anything with your mouth at all.

"Okay," he says.

"Don't."

"I didn't say anything."

"You said okay."

"That's a sound. Okay is a sound. I'm allowed to make sounds."

"It's a sound you make right before you say a thing."

"Sometimes." He sets the fork down for what you decide will be the final time. "Not always."

"Name one time."

He thinks about this. He thinks about it for longer than the question deserves, which is sort of his whole deal, and you watch him work through what is presumably a mental list of every time he has ever said okay, ranked by how much it preceded a thing, and you can see the exact moment he abandons the search.

"Fine," he says. "I was about to say a thing."

"I know."

"You want me to not say the thing."

"Correct."

"Even though we've now established, scientifically, that I was going to."

"Especially then."

He nods, slowly, like a man being reasonable. He is not about to be reasonable. You have known him long enough to recognise the specific quality of his nodding, and this nod is the nod of a man buying himself approximately four more seconds of runway before takeoff.

"I'm going to say the thing."

"Ryland."

It comes out before you can route around it. His name, in your mouth, sober, at a diner, on a Tuesday. You feel it land. He feels it land. The waitress, two booths down, refilling somebody's decaf, almost certainly feels it land. The whole diner tilts about half a degree on its axis and then rights itself, and you are both still sitting there, and the pie is still uneaten, and he is looking at you the way he looked at you the time you told him your dad was sick, which is to say like he is recalculating the entire evening from scratch.

"Right," he says, quieter. "Okay."

You wait.

He doesn't walk it back.

You've watched him walk things back before. You've watched him walk things back from cliffs of his own engineering. You have, on multiple occasions, handed him the rope yourself, and he has taken the rope, and you have both pretended very hard that the cliff was never there. It is one of the things the two of you do. It is, you might even say, foundational.

He doesn't take the rope.

"I have a thought," he says. "About this. The thing. The thing you said. I have a thought about it and I want to tell you the thought, and I'm asking, as a, as a friend, as your friend, I'm asking you to let me get to the end of the thought before you say anything, because if you stop me in the middle I'm not going to make it back to the start, and then we're both just going to be sitting here, and the pie is going to congeal, and somebody's going to have to pay for it, and it'll probably be me, because you always do this thing where you pretend you're going to pay and then you go to the bathroom right when the check comes."

"That's not."

"It is. It's a pattern. I've logged it."

"You haven't logged it."

"Mentally. I've mentally logged it. There's a spreadsheet, in my head, and you're on it."

You almost laugh. He sees you almost laugh. Something in his shoulders comes down half an inch and you realise, with the kind of clarity that only arrives slightly too late, that he was scared.

He is still scared. He's just less scared than he was eight seconds ago, because you almost laughed, and almost-laughing is, in the long and unwritten constitution of your friendship, a kind of green light.

"Okay," you say. "Tell me the thought."

He picks up the fork. He gestures with it, briefly, in a way that is not about pie.

"Here's the thought."

"Okay."

"The thought is, and I want to be clear that I've, this isn't a, I'm not. Okay. The thought is that this is a solvable problem."

You look at him.

"Not a problem," he says, immediately. "Wrong word. Solvable's the wrong, no, solvable's right, problem's wrong. It's a, it's a thing. It's a thing that has a, there's an answer to it. There's a, somebody could, with the right. Okay. Start again."

"You're doing great."

"I'm doing terribly."

"You're doing the talking-yourself-out-of-the-thing thing. Just say the thing."

He sets the fork down. He folds his hands on the table in front of him like a man who has decided to commit to a posture, and the posture he has committed to is guy at a parent-teacher conference, which is so deeply on-brand for him that you have to look at the dessert menu again.

"I think I could help you," he says.

The dessert menu is suddenly extremely interesting.

"Not. Not like that. I mean. Not, like. With me. I don't mean. I'm not proposing that. I'm proposing the opposite of that."

"The opposite."

"The supervised opposite. The, the. Okay. You've never gotten there because you're in your head. Yes? Generally? When you've tried? Solo, I mean. When you've tried solo."

You consider lying. You consider getting up and walking into the parking lot and starting a new life under a different name. You consider, briefly, the pie.

"Yes," you say.

"Right. Okay. So the variable isn't the, the mechanics. The mechanics are fine. The mechanics, presumably, the mechanics work. The variable is the part where you're in your head."

"And it's. It's been a thing. With. Generally. With other."

"With other people. Yes. I'm aware of the. Yes."

"Right. Right, sorry, of course you're, I wasn't implying you'd. I just meant. It's the same thing, every time, basically? The in-your-head thing?"

"Basically."

"Okay. So it's not a, it's not a them problem, necessarily, it's a, it's a you-with-them problem. Which is. That's a different problem. That's a much more interesting problem."

"Glad you find it interesting."

"I find everything interesting, that's a separate issue."

He's gathering speed now, the way he does when he's stopped being scared of the sentence and started being interested in it. You can see the gear-change happen. It's the same gear-change you've watched him do at parties, in your kitchen, in the passenger seat of your car on long drives, every time something has caught the front of his brain and the rest of him has had to scramble to keep up.

"So the solution isn't a technique thing, it's an environment thing, which means somebody can help with that without, without being a, without it being a."

"Without it being a sex thing."

"Yes. Thank you. Without it being a sex thing." He exhales. "I could sit with you. Not sit with you. I could be in the. Adjacent. I could be adjacent. I could help with the part of it that's the, the relaxing part. The talking part. The, you're safe, you can stop thinking part. And you would do the, the. You. You would do the you part."

You stare at him.

"I'd be a spotter," he says.

"A spotter."

"Like at the gym."

"Like at the gym."

"Yes."

"You're proposing to spot me."

"I am proposing," he says, with the dignity of a man who has heard his own sentence and decided to stand behind it anyway, "to spot you."

There is a silence. It is not a short silence. In the silence, the waitress refills both your coffees without making eye contact with either of you, which suggests she has been refilling coffees in this diner for long enough to know when not to.

"As your friend," he adds.

"As my friend."

"Yeah."

"In a totally."

"Totally."

"Platonic."

"Platonic."

"Capacity."

"That's the, yes. That is the capacity. The platonic capacity. I would be in a platonic capacity. Capacitating, platonically."

"That's not a word."

"It is now. I've logged it."

You drink your coffee. It is no longer too hot, which means time has been passing, which means you have actually been sitting here, in this booth, having this conversation, with this man, who you have known for years, who has just offered, in apparent good faith, to platonically supervise you having an orgasm.

The thing you should say is no.

The thing you should say is Ryland, what the fuck.

The thing you should say is any of the seventeen things lining up in your throat, all of which are reasonable, several of which are funny, two of which would let you both walk away from this booth with the friendship intact and the pie still uneaten.

"Okay," you say.

He blinks.

"Okay?"

"Okay."

"Okay as in."

"Okay as in I'll think about it."

"Right. Right. Yeah. Of course. Yeah. Think about it. Take your. There's no, there's no timeline. There's no, I'm not. Take your time."

"Ryland."

"Yeah."

"Eat your pie."

He eats his pie.

It is Saturday. It is four in the afternoon. It is, by every reasonable metric, the least sexy time of day that has ever been invented, which is part of why you picked it.

You spent Wednesday thinking about it. You spent Thursday pretending you hadn't spent Wednesday thinking about it. On Friday morning you texted him saturday? and he texted back saturday eleven seconds later, which suggested he had been waiting, which you then had to spend Friday afternoon not thinking about either.

He is in your kitchen. He is in your kitchen because you let him in eight minutes ago and neither of you has yet been able to figure out how to leave the kitchen, which is the room in your apartment that has the most furniture between you and any other room, and therefore the safest.

"So," he says.

"So."

"This is your kitchen."

"It is."

"It's nice. I like the, the. There's a thing on the wall."

"It's a calendar."

"Right. Yeah. That tracks."

He has brought, for reasons he has not yet explained, a paper bag from the bodega on the corner. He sets it on the counter. He does not open it. The bag sits there, between you, doing the same job the pie did at the diner, which is being the thing both of you can look at instead of each other.

"What's in the bag," you say.

"Skittles."

You look at him.

"It's a bag of Skittles," he says.

"You brought me Skittles."

"I brought, yes, I brought Skittles. I went into the bodega and I, I needed to bring a thing, you bring a thing, when you go to a, when you go to a." He stops. "I don't know what the etiquette is. There isn't an etiquette. I made up an etiquette and the etiquette said bring a thing and I went in and I just."

"Skittles."

"Skittles." He reaches into the bag. He produces them. He looks at them like he's never seen them before, which is a face he makes a lot, around objects he himself has purchased. "For after. I think. I think they were for after."

"After-Skittles."

"Apparently."

You look at him.

"I'm aware," he says.

You take the Skittles. You put them on the counter. You leave them there because if you put them in a cupboard you have to walk past him to do it and walking past him is currently a thing that requires more planning than it should.

"Okay," he says.

You both stand in the kitchen.

"Okay," you say.

"So the. So I was thinking, on the way over, about the. About how to. Because there's a, I think there's a setup question, right, like, where do we, where does this. Where am I."

"Where are you."

"Spatially. Where am I, spatially. In the. During."

You hadn't, until this exact moment, thought about where he would be spatially. You had been thinking about it in the abstract, in the way you think about a thing by not thinking about it, and the abstract version had him as a sort of disembodied voice somewhere in the middle distance, not a six-foot man with a bag of Skittles currently standing four feet from you in your kitchen.

"Bedroom," you say. Because the bedroom is the room with the door and the door is the thing you are increasingly aware you are going to need.

"Bedroom. Right. Yeah. And then in the bedroom I'm."

"You're."

"On a chair? Is there a chair? I could be on a chair."

"There's a chair."

"Great. Chair. Chair is good. Chair is a, chair is a piece of furniture that says I am here in an observational capacity, which is, that's the. Yeah. Chair."

You lead him to the bedroom. You do not look at him while you do it. He follows you at a distance of approximately one and a half normal-person follow-distances, which is the distance a person follows you when they are trying very hard to seem like they are not following you.

The chair is the chair in the corner where you put clothes you have not yet decided whether to put away or wear again. You moved the clothes this morning. You moved them twice. The chair, freed of its clothes, looks naked in a way the chair has never looked before.

He sits on the chair. He sits on the chair like it is the witness stand. He folds his hands in his lap. He looks at you.

You look at him.

The bed is behind you. You are extremely aware of the bed being behind you. The bed is doing a thing where it is simultaneously much larger and much smaller than it has ever been. The duvet, which you washed yesterday, which is the same duvet you have had for four years, is suddenly the most aggressive piece of textile in the apartment.

"Do you want me to," he says.

"What."

"I don't know. I was going to finish the sentence."

"Finish it."

"I lost it. I had a sentence and I lost it. It was going to be helpful."

You almost laugh. You don't, because if you start laughing you are going to keep laughing, and if you keep laughing you are not going to do the thing you came here to do, except came here is wrong, this is your apartment, you live here, you have lived here for three years and now you cannot remember how any of the rooms work.

"Okay," you say. "I'm going to."

"Yeah."

"And you're going to."

"Sit. I'm going to sit. I'm sitting. I am, currently, sitting."

"Right."

You sit on the edge of the bed. The bed makes a noise it has never made before in its life. You look at the bed, betrayed. You look at him. He is looking very intently at a spot on the wall about three feet above your head, with the specific concentration of a man who has decided that this spot, of all the spots, is the safest spot.

"This isn't going to work," you say.

"No," he agrees, immediately. "No, it's not."

"I can't. I'm not even. I haven't done anything yet and I already can't."

"Yeah."

"You're on a chair."

"I'm on a chair."

"In my bedroom."

"In your bedroom."

"You brought Skittles."

"The Skittles, I will admit, in hindsight, the Skittles were."

"What were you thinking with the Skittles."

"I don't know. I don't know what I was thinking. I was thinking what does a person need, and I got as far as sugar and then I just sort of."

You start laughing. You can't help it. You laugh with your face in your hands, which is also not a thing you usually do, and you can hear him start to laugh too, and his laugh has always been one of your favourite of the things he does, and the bedroom, which forty seconds ago was the most charged room in the building, becomes, slowly, just a room again. Just a room with you in it and him in it and a bag of Skittles two rooms away on the kitchen counter.

He waits until you've stopped.

He waits a few seconds after that.

Then he says, quietly, in a voice you have not heard from him before, "Tell me what would actually help."

You stop laughing.

You look at him. He is still on the chair. His hands are still folded. His glasses are still askew. He is the same person he was four minutes ago in your kitchen and he is also, somehow, not, because the question he just asked is not a question a facilitator asks. A facilitator does not ask what would help. A facilitator already has the protocol.

He has put the protocol down.

He is asking you.

You sit with the question. You sit with it for longer than is probably comfortable for either of you, because the honest answer is I don't know and you have spent most of your adult life refusing to say I don't know out loud about this in particular.

He waits.

This, you realise, is the new thing. Not the chair. Not the bedroom. Not the bag of Skittles two rooms away. The new thing is that he is waiting. Ryland Grace, who fills silences for a living, who would rather narrate his own hands than let a quiet go unmolested, is sitting on a chair in your bedroom letting the silence sit.

"I don't know," you say.

"Okay."

"That's the. That's basically the whole problem. I don't know what would help because I don't, I haven't ever. I don't have a, a baseline. To work from."

"Right."

"So I don't know what to tell you. To do. Or not do. Because I don't know."

"Yeah."

"And that's the. That's why I said yes, at the diner, I think. Because you said environment and I thought, oh, maybe somebody else could figure out what the environment is, because I clearly can't."

You stop. You hear what you've said. You hear, specifically, the part where you outsourced the figuring-out of yourself to him, and you wait for the embarrassment to land.

It doesn't land. He's just looking at you.

"Okay," he says. Quiet. "Okay, that's. That's useful. That's really useful, actually."

"It is?"

"Yeah. Yeah, because I was about to ask you a whole list of things. I had a list. In my head. I was going to ask you the list. And the list was wrong, because the list assumed you had answers, and the answers are what you don't have. So."

"So?"

"So we don't do the list."

"What do we do."

He thinks about this. He thinks about it with his elbows on his knees and his hands loose between them, which is a thinking-posture you have seen him in a thousand times, in a thousand other rooms, about a thousand other problems. The familiarity of it does something to your chest you decide not to examine.

"I think," he says, slowly, "we just talk."

"Talk."

"Yeah."

"About."

"About anything. About nothing. About the. The thing you were going to do today before I showed up. About a movie. I don't know. I think the, the issue is that you're sitting there waiting for it to be a thing, and as long as it's a thing you're going to be in your head about it. So we make it not a thing. We just. We're just in a room. We've been in rooms before."

"Not like this."

"Not exactly like this."

"You're on a chair."

"I know I'm on a chair."

"You're on a chair for a reason."

"I am aware of the reason for the chair, yes."

"You can't just talk to me like the chair isn't a thing."

"Why not."

You open your mouth. You close it. Because you don't actually have a good answer to why not. The reason the chair is a thing is that you both agreed it was a thing. He's now proposing, with his elbows on his knees, that you both un-agree.

"Okay," you say.

"Yeah?"

"Talk to me, then."

He talks to you.

He talks to you about a documentary he watched last week about deep-sea anglerfish, and the absolutely unhinged reproductive arrangement they have, which involves the male biting the female and slowly fusing into her body over time until he is essentially a permanent attached sperm-producing organ, which Ryland thinks is wild, because, and this is his exact phrase, think about the first guy who tried that. He talks to you about how he keeps meaning to repot the plant on his kitchen windowsill and how the plant keeps almost dying and then rallying, which he has started to take personally, like the plant is doing it on purpose to make him feel bad. He talks to you about the undergrad his advisor has dumped on him for the semester, who has started labelling all of her sample tubes with the same brand of glitter pen in increasingly elaborate colour-coded schemes that nobody else in the lab can decode, and Ryland cannot decide whether to address it or just let it run its course and see what the system ends up being.

He talks to you the way he talks to you on long drives. He talks to you the way he talks to you in your kitchen when you're cooking and he's allegedly helping. He talks to you the way he has been talking to you for years, and you slowly become aware that you are, despite yourself, listening.

You are also, you realise, no longer sitting on the edge of the bed.

You don't remember the moment you moved. You are leaned back against the pillows now, knees up, one hand under your jaw. He is still in the chair. He has not moved. He has been very careful not to move. The not-moving is, you suspect, deliberate, but you can't tell whether he knows it's deliberate or whether he's doing it on instinct.

"And then," he is saying, "I realised the plant was on the side of the window that doesn't get morning sun, so I moved it about eighteen inches, and now the plant is, the plant is thriving, the plant is having the best week of its life, and I am taking this entirely too personally as a, as a sort of personal."

He stops.

He has noticed you're listening. He has noticed, specifically, the way you are listening. He looks at you for a second too long. He looks away.

"You should try it," he says.

You blink.

"What."

"Touching yourself."

You stare at him.

"Now," he says. "I mean now. Not. Not while I, I'll, the chair, I'll. I can. I'll be here, but I'll be. I'll talk. I'll keep talking. About the plant. I have more about the plant. I have a, a substantial amount of additional plant content. And you just. You do the thing. You don't think about me. You don't think about it. You think about, whatever, anglerfish. And I'll just be the." He gestures, vaguely, at himself. "The voice. In the room."

"The voice in the room."

"Yes."

"That's your pitch."

"That's the pitch. The revised pitch. The pitch is, I'm going to bore you into it."

Something in your chest loosens. You don't, this time, because the loosening would break the thing that has just happened in the room, which is that the temperature has come down about six degrees and your shoulders have come down with it and you are, against everything you would have predicted forty minutes ago, considering it.

"Okay," you say.

"Okay?"

"Okay."

You reach for the hem of your shirt.

He looks, very deliberately, at the spot on the wall three feet above your head.

He starts talking about the plant.

He talks about the plant.

He talks about the plant with a level of commitment that makes you understand, in a way you have not previously understood, that he has been thinking about this plant a lot. He has theories about the plant. He has theories about the theories about the plant. He is, you realise, talking about the plant the way a man talks when he is deliberately not talking about something else, and the something else is you, sitting on your bed with your hand under your t-shirt, and he is doing this for you, and the doing-this-for-you is the part you are not supposed to be noticing, because the whole point is that you are supposed to be thinking about anglerfish.

You are not thinking about anglerfish.

You are thinking about the specific care of him not looking. You are thinking about the way his voice has gone slightly quieter, which is not a voice he uses on purpose, it's a voice that happens to him when he's concentrating on a thing he doesn't want to break. You are thinking about how, in the entire time you have known him, you have never once heard him talk this long about a houseplant without circling back to a joke, and the absence of the joke is the most attentive thing he has ever done.

Your hand has stopped moving.

He notices. He doesn't look at you, but he notices. The plant content stutters, briefly, and then resumes at a slightly different angle, lower-pressure, easier, like he's giving you a wider lane.

"You okay?" he says, into the plant story. Doesn't break the flow. Just slips it in.

"Yeah."

"You sure."

"I'm. I'm in my head."

"Okay."

"It's not. It's not the room. The room is fine. The room is. The room is fine."

"Okay."

"It's me. I'm the problem."

"You're not the problem."

"I am, though."

"You're not. You're not a problem. You're a, you're a person trying a thing. That's not a problem. That's just a person trying a thing."

You close your eyes.

You close your eyes because if you keep looking at him on that chair with his glasses askew and his hands loose between his knees, speaking very quietly about how you are a person trying a thing, you are going to start crying, and crying is not what you came here to do, and crying would be, by any reasonable measure, worse than the original problem.

"Tell me something else," you say.

"About the plant?"

"No. Not the plant. Anything that isn't the plant."

He thinks for a second.

"Okay," he says. "Okay. There's this. There's a thing I've been thinking about. About, about how your body knows things before you do. Like, physiologically. There's a, there's a fraction of a second, before you consciously feel something, where your body has already, it's already done the thing. Your heart rate's up. Your pupils are dilating. You're already responding. The conscious feeling comes second. It's catching up. It's, like, narration. The body's already in the scene and the narrator's running to keep up."

You keep your eyes closed.

"And I think about that a lot," he says, "because it means the part of you that's, the part that's thinking, the part that's worrying, that's the slow part. That's the part that arrives late. The faster part already knows what it wants. It just doesn't have words for it. So sometimes, I think, the trick is to just. Let the body have a head start. Let it. Let it get ahead of the narrator."

His voice is the quietest it has been all afternoon.

"You don't have to think about it," he says. "Your body already knows. You're just. You're letting it run."

Your hand moves.

You don't decide to move your hand. Your hand decides. Your hand has, you realise with the part of you that is still narrating, been given permission, and your hand has taken the permission. It slides down past the waistband of your jeans, which you did not unbutton, which it turns out you do not need to unbutton, and the part of you that has spent your entire adult life trying to figure out what your body wants is, for the first time, briefly, quiet.

Your fingers find the place they always find. The pressure they always find. The small careful circle they have made a thousand times alone in this bed, in this room, against this ceiling, and never once with another person in the apartment, let alone in the chair.

He keeps talking.

You don't track what he's saying. You track the cadence of it. The shape. The fact of him still being there, still in the chair, still not looking, still giving you the room. He talks about something. He talks about something else. The words slide off you and what's left is the voice, low and steady, a thing in the room with you, and you let yourself listen to it the way you let yourself listen to rain.

You are getting wet.

You notice it the way you notice everything tonight, which is late. Your fingers have been making the same slow circle and somewhere in the last few minutes the friction changed. The drag of your fingertips softened. Your body has been listening to his voice in a way your brain was not keeping track of, and your body has responded, and the response is not ambiguous. The circle gets easier. Slicker. You press slightly harder to compensate and the pressure sends something up through you that you were not expecting, a small bright flare behind your navel, and your breath catches, and you hear him pause for a fraction of a second before continuing, and you understand that he heard it too.

Something is happening.

Something is happening that has not happened before, or has not happened in this shape before, or has happened in this shape before only in fragments you couldn't trust. Your body is moving toward a thing. The thing has an edge to it. You can feel the edge. You have never felt the edge from this side, or this close, or with this much awareness that the edge is what it is, and the closer you get the more you understand that the closeness is its own problem, because the moment you notice you are close, the noticing becomes a thing you are doing, and the thing you are doing is no longer the thing your body was doing, and the narrator is in the room again.

You try to push past it. You try to do what he said. You try to let the body run.

The body slows.

You can feel it happen. You can feel the precise moment your fingers become fingers that are trying. The circle gets slightly faster, slightly harder, the way it does when you are alone and impatient with yourself, except now the impatience has nothing to do with being alone. You can feel the precise moment your breath becomes a breath you are controlling. You can feel the thing you were moving toward stay exactly where it is, neither closer nor farther, and you are no longer moving toward it, you are negotiating with it, and the negotiation is the thing you have been doing your entire adult life, and you have never won the negotiation.

You stop.

Your hand stops. You leave it where it is for a second, pressed flat, willing the feeling back, and it does not come back. Your eyes are still closed. Your jaw, you discover, is clenched, which is the opposite of what was supposed to happen.

He notices the shift in your breathing. He stops talking.

The room is very quiet.

"It's gone," you say.

"Okay."

"It was. I was. I was almost. I think I was almost."

"Yeah."

"And then I noticed I was almost and it. It left."

"Yeah."

You open your eyes. You don't look at him. You look at the ceiling. The ceiling has a small crack in it shaped like the state of Florida. You have looked at this crack while trying to fall asleep more times than you can count and you have never once successfully fallen asleep faster for having noticed it.

"That's not. That wasn't nothing," you say. "I was close. I've never been that close."

"Yeah?"

"I think so. I don't. I don't have a baseline. But I think so."

"Okay."

"It's just." You stop. You try to find the word for the feeling, which is not just frustration, although it is also frustration. It is the feeling of having stood at the edge of something and watched yourself flinch back from it, and knowing the flinch was the part you have always done, and being briefly furious at the part of yourself that flinches. "It's just frustrating."

"I know."

"You don't, actually."

He huffs out a small laugh. Not at you. With you, or at himself, or at the situation.

"Fair," he says.

You slide your hand out of your jeans. You let your arm fall to the side. You stare at the Florida crack. You are aware, distantly, that you are not crying, which is a small victory, because for a second there it could have gone either way.

"Tell me what you noticed," he says. Quiet. "About what worked. Before it didn't."

You think about it.

You think about it for longer than the question deserves, because the answer is sitting right there, and you have not yet decided whether you are going to give it to him.

The answer is your voice.

The answer is that you were here.

The answer is that the thing that worked, that got you closer than you have ever been, was the specific fact of him being in the room with you, and the specific fact of him not looking, and the specific fact that he was talking, and the way the talking made you feel like you were being held without being touched. The answer is that the variable he controlled for was himself, and the variable he controlled for is the variable that worked, and you can feel, with the part of you that has been pretending very hard for years now, that telling him this would be telling him a different thing entirely.

"I don't know," you say.

He waits.

"I don't know," you say again, and you mean it slightly differently the second time, and you are fairly sure he hears the difference.

"Okay," he says.

He doesn't push.

He sits in the chair and he waits, with his hands loose between his knees again, and you stare at the Florida crack, and the room is full of a thing neither of you is saying.

You eat the Skittles.

This is not what you expected to be doing. You expected to be doing one of several things, most of which involved more clothing being removed and fewer sweets being consumed, but here you are, sitting cross-legged on your own bed with your jeans still buttoned, splitting a bag of Skittles with a man in a chair, and neither of you is talking about the thing that just happened.

He is sorting them by colour. He is doing this automatically, the way he does everything, which is without noticing he's doing it. He has a small pile of reds, a small pile of oranges, a slightly larger pile of yellows, and he is eating the greens first because, he told you once, two years ago, on a drive back from somewhere you can't remember, the greens are the worst and he likes to get them out of the way.

You remember this. You remember this the way you remember everything about him, which is involuntarily and in too much detail.

"You're staring at me," he says.

"I'm not."

"You are. You're staring at me and I'm trying to eat the greens."

"I'm looking in your direction. There's a difference."

"There isn't."

He eats a green. He eats it with an air of finality, like a man who has completed a task.

"So," he says.

"So."

"That was."

"Yeah."

"You were close, though."

"I was close."

"That's. That's something. That's data."

"It's data."

"We could. I mean, if you wanted. We could try again. Another time. Adjust the, the variables. I think the chair was maybe too far away. Not that I, I'm not suggesting I should be closer, I'm just. Spatially. The geometry of the room might have been."

"Hey."

"Yeah."

"It's okay."

He looks at you. He looks at you the way he's been looking at you all afternoon, which is carefully, but the carefulness now has something else in it, something tired, and you recognise it because you are tired in exactly the same way.

"Yeah," he says. "Okay."

He stays for another twenty minutes. He stays because leaving immediately would make it a thing, and if there is one skill the two of you have refined over the years it is the skill of making sure things are not things. You talk about a podcast he's been telling you to listen to. You talk about whether the diner has ever actually changed its menu or if the laminated dessert card is a permanent installation. He does a bit about the pie, about how the pie has been on that menu since before either of you were born and will outlive you both, and you laugh, and the laughing is real, and underneath the laughing is the thing neither of you is saying, and underneath the thing is the afternoon, and underneath the afternoon is everything else.

He leaves at six. He puts his shoes on in your hallway and he says "see you" and you say "see you" and he does the thing he always does, which is pat the doorframe on the way out, twice, like the doorframe is something he needs to acknowledge on his way through it. You have never asked him about the doorframe thing. You have noticed it every single time.

You close the door.

You stand in your hallway for a minute.

You go back to the bedroom. The chair is still in the corner, angled slightly toward the bed. The Skittles bag is empty on the duvet. You pick it up. You throw it away. You put the clothes back on the chair and the chair becomes, once again, just a chair.

You sit on the bed.

You sit on the bed and you think about the sound his voice made when it went quiet.

Three weeks go by.

Three weeks go by and nothing changes except that everything changes. You see him. You see him the way you always see him, at the places you always see him, doing the things you always do. He texts you about the plant. He sends you a link to an article about anglerfish mating habits with no caption, which is the kind of thing he has always done, and which you have always read as friendship, and which you now read as something you cannot stop reading as something.

You do not talk about the Saturday.

He does not bring it up. You do not bring it up. It sits between you like the broken spring in the diner booth, a thing you both know is there and have agreed, silently, to navigate around. Except the broken spring was always just a spring, and this is not just a spring.

You try, alone, one night. You try the circle. You try the pressure. You try closing your eyes and letting the body run and the narrator catch up. You try everything he said. You try the breathing. You try not thinking.

It is different now.

It is different because the silence in your apartment is the wrong silence. The silence in your apartment has a shape, and the shape is the absence of his voice, and you cannot not-notice the absence. You got closer with him in the room than you have ever gotten alone, and the reason was not the technique and the reason was not the breathing and the reason was not the letting-go. The reason was the specific fact of him, in the chair, not looking, talking about a plant, and his voice going quiet without him noticing it had gone quiet, and the way that quietness felt like a hand on the back of your neck that wasn't there.

You stop trying.

You lie in the dark and you stare at the Florida crack and you think about the fact that your body has apparently decided, without consulting you, that the thing it needs in order to let go is a specific man on a specific chair saying specific things in a specific voice, and your body has furthermore decided this without any regard for the fact that this man is your best friend, and that telling him this would be telling him something else entirely, and that the something else is a door you are not sure either of you can walk back through.

A few days later he calls you because he locked himself out of his apartment and needs to kill an hour while the super finds the spare key, and you sit with him on the steps outside his building sharing a bag of chips, and he is telling you about a simulation that keeps crashing and the very specific way it crashes, which involves a number going to infinity in a way that should not be possible, and you are not listening, because his knee is touching your knee, and the place where his knee is touching your knee is the loudest thing in the city.

He doesn't notice. Or he does notice and he is doing the thing you both do, which is not noticing.

The following week you go to a bar with a group. He is there. He is always there. He is across the table talking to someone else and you watch his hands and you watch his mouth and you watch the way he pushes his glasses up with his ring finger, specifically the ring finger, which is a detail you have been carrying for longer than you are willing to calculate, and a girl next to you says something and you say "sorry, what?" and she says it again and you hear it the second time but you do not remember it afterward because his laugh has just cut across the table and landed in your chest like a thing with weight.

You go home alone. You lie in your bed. You do not try. You do not try because trying means thinking about why it doesn't work and thinking about why it doesn't work means thinking about him and thinking about him means thinking about the Saturday and thinking about the Saturday means thinking about the sound his voice made when it dropped, when it went from the voice he uses to fill a room to the voice he used to fill just the space between the chair and the bed, and that voice is now a thing that lives in your body, and your body does not care that it is inconvenient.

Another week. He sits next to you at the diner. The same booth. The same broken spring. He has pie again. He eats it this time, which feels like a statement, although you could not tell you what the statement is. You watch him eat the pie and you think about the way he said you'd know weeks ago, sitting in this exact booth, with this exact fork, and how he was right, you would know, you do know, you know everything now except the one thing, and the one thing is what his hands feel like.

You are becoming an expert in the specific weight of him. The weight of his arm when it brushes yours reaching for the check. The weight of his laugh landing on you from across a room. The weight of the silence when he looks at you one beat too long and then looks away, and the looking-away is the thing, the looking-away is the tell, because he does it the same way every time, a small sharp cut of the eyes to the left, and you have been cataloguing this cut for weeks now and you know what it means. It means he was looking at you the way you look at him and he caught himself and he stopped.

You want to tell him to stop stopping.

You don't.

You go home. You lie in the dark. You don't try. You think about the voice. You think about the voice and the chair and the quiet and the way the room felt when he was in it, and the word that keeps arriving, the word you keep circling, is safe.

You felt safe.

You have had sex with people. You have been naked with people. You have been touched and held and pressed against and none of it, not once, made you feel the thing you felt sitting fully clothed on your own bed with your best friend in a chair talking about a houseplant. You felt safe. Not safe as in nothing bad will happen. Safe as in you can stop performing. Safe as in nobody in this room needs you to be anything. Safe as in his voice was a room inside the room and the room inside the room had no expectations and your body, for the first time, did not have to negotiate its way past the fact of being watched.

He wasn't watching. That was the thing. He was there and he wasn't watching and the combination of those two facts, present and not-looking, was the thing your body had apparently been waiting for your entire adult life, and your body had not thought to mention this to you until a man on a chair started talking about a plant.

You think about the fact that permission is the word. That the thing you cannot give yourself is permission. That he gave it to you without knowing he was giving it, because the permission was not a technique, it was not a word, it was the specific fact of being safe with him, fully, in a room, with nowhere to hide, and being safe was the thing that let your body stop negotiating.

You think about this for days.

And then he is in your kitchen. Because he is often in your kitchen, because your kitchen is one of the places he exists. He is eating crackers out of a box he found in your cupboard. He is telling you about a paper his advisor rejected and the specific, surgical way the rejection was phrased, and he is doing a dramatic reading of the margin notes, and he is funny, he is so funny, and you are laughing, and your body is doing the thing where it catalogues him without your permission.

His voice.

The way he leans against your counter. The way he uses his hands when he talks. The way his whole body is oriented toward you, slightly, like a compass needle that has found its direction and does not know it has found it.

You have been looking at this for years.

"You okay?" he says.

"Yeah. Fine."

"You're doing the thing."

"What thing."

"The thing where you go somewhere and don't tell me where."

You look at him. He is leaning against your counter, in your kitchen, with cracker crumbs on his t-shirt, and his glasses are slightly askew, and he is looking at you with the same expression he wore in the chair, which is the expression of a man who is paying attention to you with a kind of focus that has nothing recreational about it.

"I tried again," you say. "Alone. After the Saturday."

The crackers stop.

"Okay," he says.

"It didn't work."

"Okay."

He says it the way he said it at the diner. The way he said it on the Saturday. The way he always says it, which is like a man setting a plate down gently so it doesn't break.

You should stop here. You have given him the update. The experiment failed to replicate. That is a clean, scientific sentence and you could leave it there and he would let you leave it there and you would both go back to the thing you do, which is not saying the thing.

You are so tired of not saying the thing.

"On the Saturday I was close," you say. "I was closer than I've ever been. And then alone, after, I couldn't even. I couldn't get anywhere near it."

"Okay."

"And I've been thinking about why. About what was different."

He waits.

You look at him. He is leaning against the counter with cracker crumbs on his shirt and he is waiting for you to finish the sentence and you can see, in the very specific way he is not moving, that he already knows what you're going to say. He knows the way he knew at the diner. He has run the numbers and the numbers have told him something and he is standing very still because the numbers are telling him a thing he does not trust himself to hear without standing very still.

"It didn't work because you weren't there."

The kitchen is very quiet. The kitchen has never been this quiet. The kitchen is the room in your apartment that has always been the safest and it is no longer safe.

He puts the box of crackers down. He puts them down carefully, the way he put the Skittles down, the way he put the fork down at the diner, the way he puts things down when his hands need to be empty for what's coming next.

"Say that again," he says.

"You heard me."

"I did. I want to hear it again."

"It didn't work because you weren't there. Your voice. It was your voice the whole time. You asked me what worked and I said I didn't know and I was lying. I knew. I knew it was you."

He is very still. He is the stillest you have ever seen him, which is not a thing you thought Ryland Grace was capable of, because he is a man who moves, who fidgets, who narrates, who fills, and right now he is doing none of those things. He is just standing in your kitchen looking at you like the whole room has rearranged itself and he hasn't caught up yet.

"I need to tell you something," he says.

"Okay."

"I need to tell you something and I'm going to be bad at it."

"Okay."

"I am in love with you." He says it to the cracker box. He says it the way he said "solvable problem" at the diner, like a man who has arrived at a conclusion and is slightly surprised by it even though the data has been pointing there for years. "I have been. For a while. I don't. I don't know when it started. I think it might have always been. I think the diner might have been the first time I let myself. And then the Saturday. The Saturday was."

"The Saturday was what."

"The Saturday was the worst idea I've ever had. And I've had a lot of bad ideas. I've had, I've had professionally bad ideas. I once almost set a lab on fire because I wanted to see what happened. And the Saturday was worse than that, because I sat in your chair and I pretended I was there for, for science, for the experiment, for the variables, and I was there because I wanted to be in the room with you. That's it. That's the whole. That's what it was."

"I think I knew," you say. "I think I've been trying not to know."

He looks at you.

"For how long," he says.

"A while. A long while. I just didn't want to be right, because being right meant the chair wasn't a chair and the experiment wasn't an experiment and we weren't."

"We weren't what."

"We weren't just friends. And I wanted us to be just friends. I wanted that so badly, Ryland. Because the version of you that shows up in my kitchen with crackers and talks to me about his plant and pats my doorframe on the way out. I didn't want to lose that. I would rather have that version and not have this than not have you."

"You would rather not have this."

"I didn't say that."

"You said."

"I said I didn't want to lose you. That's different."

He looks at you. He looks at you for a long time.

"I'm scared too," he says. "I've been scared for, for a while. I've been scared since the diner. I've been scared since before the diner, probably, I've just been, I've been filing it wrong. I filed it as, as friendship. As, that's just how this is. That's just how you feel about your best friend. You show up in their kitchen and you eat their crackers and you send them articles about anglerfish at two in the morning and you pat their doorframe on the way out, and that's. That's friendship. That's."

"That's not friendship."

"No," he says. "It isn't."

The kitchen is still very quiet.

You should be happy. You are, you think, happy. He is standing in your kitchen and he has said the thing and you have said the thing and the things are the same thing and this is, by any reasonable definition, the moment. This is the part where the door opens.

But there is something behind the door, and it has been there the whole time, and you have been trying very hard not to look at it, and now the door is open and you cannot not-look anymore.

"I need to tell you something," you say, and your voice comes out wrong. It comes out small and tight and nothing like the voice you have been using for the rest of this conversation, and you can see him hear the change, and you can see the half-second where he braces.

"Okay."

You look at the floor. You look at the floor because looking at him while you say this is not something you are able to do.

"I'm scared that if we do this. If this becomes a, a thing." You stop. You start again. "Every person I've ever been with has eventually. There's a moment where they realise I can't. Where it stops being a thing we're working on and starts being a thing that's wrong with me. And they don't always say it. But I can feel it. I can feel the moment they start thinking about it differently. And I don't want. I can't."

Your throat closes.

"I can't watch you think about me like that," you say. "I would rather not have this than watch you get tired of me not being able to get there."

He looks at you.

"Hey," he says. Quiet. "Listen to me."

"I'm listening."

"If you never get there. If this is the thing that doesn't happen. If we spend the rest of, if we're together and it never. That's okay."

"It's not."

"It is. It is okay. It is genuinely, completely okay. I didn't fall in love with you because I thought you'd, because of what you can or can't. I fell in love with you because you let me sit in a chair in your bedroom and talk about a plant. Because you remember which Skittles I eat first. Because you go somewhere in your head sometimes and I can see you go and I just want to be there when you come back. That's it. That's the whole thing. The other part is. The other part would be nice. But it's not the thing."

"Ryland."

"It's not the thing."

You are standing in your kitchen, three feet apart, and he has cracker crumbs on his shirt, and his glasses are askew, and he has just told you that he is in love with you and that whether or not you ever have an orgasm is not the point, and you believe him, because he is the worst liar you have ever met, and because his hands are shaking.

"Come here," you say.

He comes.

He comes the way he does everything, which is slightly too fast and with not quite enough plan for what happens when he gets there. He crosses the three feet of kitchen and he is in front of you and his hands are at his sides and he is looking at you and neither of you has thought past this part.

"Hi," he says.

You almost laugh.

"Hi."

"I don't. I don't know what to do with my hands."

"You could put them on me."

"Right. Right, yeah. That's. Yeah."

He puts his hands on you. He puts them on your waist, carefully, like he is handling something he is not sure he is allowed to handle, and his hands are still shaking, and the shaking is the most honest thing in the room.

You kiss him.

You kiss him because if you wait for him to do it you will both be standing in this kitchen until the heat death of the universe. You kiss him and his mouth is warm and he tastes, faintly, of crackers, and there is a moment, a very small moment, where you can feel him not know what to do with the kiss, where his mouth is just receiving yours without participating, and then the moment ends and he is kissing you back and his hands are no longer shaking because his hands have found something to do, which is pull you closer, which they do with a certainty that the rest of him has not caught up to yet.

You pull back.

"Bedroom," you say.

"Bedroom. Yeah. Okay."

You take his hand. You lead him down the hallway the same way you led him down the hallway on the Saturday, except on the Saturday you did not look at him and he followed you at one and a half normal-person follow-distances, and tonight you are looking at him and he is right behind you and his hand is in your hand and neither of you is pretending about anything.

The chair is in the corner. The clothes are on the chair. He looks at the chair.

"I'm not sitting in the chair," he says.

"You're not sitting in the chair."

"Good. I just wanted to. Officially. For the record."

You sit on the edge of the bed. The bed makes the same noise it made last time. You do not look at the bed, betrayed, this time, because this time you are looking at him, standing in the doorway of your bedroom, backlit by the hallway light, with cracker crumbs still on his shirt and his glasses slightly askew, and you think, very clearly, I am going to remember exactly what he looks like right now for the rest of my life.

"Come here," you say, again.

He comes. He sits on the bed next to you. The bed makes another noise. He looks at the bed.

"Your bed is very opinionated," he says.

"It has thoughts."

"It has thoughts. Okay."

He is next to you. He is next to you on a bed he was not on the last time he was in this room, and you can feel the difference the way you can feel a room where someone has moved the furniture. Everything is almost the same and nothing is the same.

He kisses you. He kisses you this time, and it is different from the kitchen, because in the kitchen he was catching up and now he is here, and his hands are on your face, and his thumbs are on your jaw, and he is kissing you the way he talks about things he loves, which is thoroughly and with his whole attention and with small, unnecessary detours that somehow end up being the point.

His shirt comes off first because it has cracker crumbs on it and you both agree, in a wordless negotiation that takes about four seconds, that the cracker crumbs have to go. Your shirt comes off second and he looks at you and you watch him look at you and the looking is nothing like the not-looking from the Saturday. The not-looking was protection. The looking is something else.

"You're staring," you say.

"I'm looking in your direction. There's a difference."

"You said there wasn't."

"I've revised my position."

You pull him down. He goes. He is, it turns out, slightly worse at navigating the geometry of a bed than you would have expected from a man who thinks in spatial variables, and there is a brief, deeply human negotiation of elbows and knees and where things go, and you are laughing, and he is laughing, and the laughing is not the kind of laughing that deflects. It is the kind of laughing that says we are here and we are both bad at this and that is fine.

His mouth is on your neck. His mouth is on your collarbone. His mouth is on the place between your ribs where your breathing lives, and you can feel him paying attention, the same way he was paying attention from the chair, except now the attention has hands and the hands are on your skin and the difference is so large that your brain briefly whites out trying to calculate it.

"Tell me," he says, against your stomach. "Tell me what you want."

"You."

"More specific."

"Your hands. I want your hands."

He gives you his hands.

He gives you his hands and they are not shaking anymore.

He puts them on your stomach first. Just that. Just his palms flat on your stomach, warm, still, like he is introducing himself to your skin. He stays there long enough that you feel your breathing change under his hands, and you know he feels it too, because his thumbs move, just slightly, tracing the lowest edge of your ribs, and the trace is so slow and so deliberate that you understand he is paying attention to your body the way he pays attention to everything, which is completely.

His hands move down. Over your hips. Along the waistband of your jeans, his fingers tracing the edge where fabric meets skin, and the edge is the point, the boundary is the point, because he is touching everything he is allowed to touch and not one inch past it, and the restraint is doing something to you that the touching alone would not do.

"You're thinking," you say.

"I'm always thinking."

"You're thinking like you're taking notes."

"I am taking notes. Mentally. There's a spreadsheet."

"You're bringing the spreadsheet to bed."

"The spreadsheet goes everywhere. The spreadsheet is non-negotiable."

You laugh. You laugh and his hands are on your hips and the laughing does something to the muscles in your stomach that makes his hands shift, and the shift sends something through you, a small involuntary pull, and you feel his breath catch against your neck. He felt it. He felt your body respond to a thing neither of you planned, and the feeling of him feeling it is its own thing, a feedback loop you did not anticipate, his attention on your body and your body responding to the attention and his attention sharpening in response.

Your jeans come off. You don't remember which of you undoes the button. It might be both of you, simultaneously, which would be on-brand for the evening.

His hands move lower. Slowly. Giving you time to say stop. You do not say stop.

His fingers find you. He touches you the way you touch yourself, two fingers flat against your clit, the same slow circle, except his circle is slightly different from yours, slightly slower, slightly more deliberate, and the difference is everything. When you do this yourself your hand knows where it's going. His hand doesn't. His hand is learning you in real time, adjusting pressure by the half-second, reading your breathing like a dial, and the not-knowing is the thing, because when your own hand touches you the touch is predictable and your body discounts it, and when his hand touches you there is nowhere for your body to hide.

He slides his fingers lower. Through the wet. You hear him inhale, sharp, quiet, when he feels how wet you are, and the sound of him discovering that does something to you that his hands alone could not have done. He brings the slickness back up, spreads it under his fingertips, and the circle gets easier, slicker, and you feel your hips tilt toward his hand without deciding to, your body asking for something your mouth has not said yet.

"Talk to me," you say.

"About what."

"I don't care. The plant. Anglerfish. Anything."

He laughs, softly, against your hip.

"Okay," he says. "Okay. There's this thing. About, about the way nerve endings work. The ones in your skin. They fire faster when the stimulus is unfamiliar. Your own touch, your body knows what's coming, it can predict, it sort of. It discounts. But someone else's touch, it can't predict, it doesn't know the pattern yet, so everything is. Everything is louder."

His fingers adjust. You inhale. He hears the inhale.

"That's why this is different," he says, quieter now. "That's why. Your body can't get ahead of my hands the way it gets ahead of yours. So it has to just. It has to just be in it."

You are in it.

You are in it in a way you were not in it on the Saturday, because on the Saturday you were trying to let go and tonight you are not trying anything. You are lying in your bed with his hand between your legs and his voice in your ear and you are not thinking about whether this is going to work because you are not thinking. The narrator is gone. The narrator left somewhere between his mouth on your ribs and his fingers finding the place, and what is left is the body, and the body is not negotiating.

His voice drops lower. He is not talking about nerve endings anymore. He is talking to you the way he talked to you from the chair, low and steady and close, except he is not in the chair, he is pressed against your side with his mouth near your ear and the words are less important than the sound and the sound is less important than the fact that it is him and the fact that it is him is the whole thing. The whole thing. The only variable that ever mattered.

You feel safe.

You feel safe the way you felt safe on the Saturday, except more, except closer, except his skin is against your skin and his hand is between your legs and you are not performing. You are not performing for him. You are not narrating for yourself. You are not watching yourself from the outside trying to figure out if this is working. You are just here, in your body, in your bed, with a man who has seen you fail at this and did not flinch, and the not-flinching is the safety, and the safety is the permission, and the permission is the thing your body has been waiting for.

Something builds.

Something builds and it is not like the Saturday. On the Saturday the building had an edge and you moved toward the edge and the edge stayed where it was. Tonight the edge is moving toward you. You are not chasing it. It is arriving.

Your breath catches. Your breath catches and then, without deciding to, you hold it. You hold your breath and your whole body tenses, every muscle pulling tight at once, your hand gripping his arm, your thighs closing around his wrist, and it is the opposite of everything he told you. It is the opposite of letting go. It is the opposite of letting the body run. It is holding on, holding still, holding your breath and clenching every part of yourself around the feeling so it cannot leave, and it does not leave.

It does not leave.

It breaks over you like something with weight, like something that has been waiting, like something your body knew how to do the whole time and simply needed you to stop asking it to explain itself. You make a sound. You make the sound with no air in your lungs because you are still holding your breath and the sound is small and tight and broken-open and nothing like what you imagined, nothing like what you thought it would be, and his hand does not stop. His hand keeps moving, slower now, gentler, working you through it, and his forehead is pressed against your temple and he is breathing and you are not breathing and the room is the smallest it has ever been.

And then his fingers move over you again and your whole body jerks.

You have never felt this. You have never felt what comes after because you have never had an after. Everything is oversensitive, swollen, raw, his fingertips on your clit almost too much but not quite too much, and each pass sends a smaller wave through you, an aftershock, a bright sharp thing that pulls a sound out of you that is half gasp and half something else, and the something else is surprise, because you did not know there was more, you did not know it kept going, and it keeps going. He reads the aftershocks the way he has been reading everything tonight, adjusting lighter, slower, barely touching, his fingers moving through the wet of you with so little pressure it is almost nothing, and the almost-nothing is still sending you somewhere, still pulling small involuntary shivers out of your thighs, out of your stomach, out of parts of your body you did not know were connected to this.

You breathe.

You breathe and his hand goes still. Not because he decided to stop. Because he felt you come back. He felt the exact moment your body stopped shaking and your lungs opened and the air came in, and he stilled his hand at the same moment, like the two things were the same thing, like your breathing and his hands were part of the same system.

"You'd know," he says, very quietly.

You start crying.

You don't mean to. You don't expect to. It arrives the way the other thing arrived, without permission, without negotiation, your body simply doing the thing it has decided to do, and you are crying and laughing at the same time, which is a combination you did not know you were capable of, and he pulls you into him, both arms, your face in his neck, and he holds you the way he held the fork at the diner, which is like he is never going to put you down.

"Hey," he says. "Hey. You're okay."

"I know."

"You're okay."

"I know. I know I'm okay. I'm. Ryland."

"Yeah."

"That."

"Yeah."

"That was."

"Yeah." His voice is thick. His arms are tight around you. He presses his mouth to the top of your head. "Yeah. It was."

You lie there. You lie there in your bed with your face in his neck and his arms around you and neither of you says anything for a while, because there is nothing to say that the room does not already know.

After a while, you become aware of his heartbeat. It is fast. It is faster than it should be for a man who is lying still, and you realise, with the part of you that has started paying attention again, that his body has been doing its own thing this entire time, and its thing has been waiting.

You move your hand down his chest. Down his stomach. He breathes in.

"You don't have to," he says.

"I know I don't have to."

"I just mean. Tonight was. You don't have to make it about."

"Ryland."

"Yeah."

"Shut up."

He shuts up.

He is hard. He has been hard, you suspect, for a while, possibly since the kitchen, possibly since the aftershocks, possibly since a Saturday afternoon three weeks ago when he sat in a chair and listened to you breathe. You touch him through his jeans and his hips push up into your hand once, involuntarily, and the involuntary push is the most honest thing you have learned about him tonight, and you have learned a lot of honest things about him tonight.

His jeans come off. His boxers come off. You look at him the way he looked at you and you watch him let you look, and the letting is hard for him, you can tell, the same way the letting was hard for you. He is a man who fills silences and narrates his own hands and makes jokes at the exact moment a normal person would make a different face, and right now he is doing none of that. He is lying in your bed with his clothes off and his glasses off and he is just a person, quiet, watching you look at him.

"Hi," you say.

"You keep saying that."

"I keep meaning it."

He pulls you down. He pulls you into him and kisses you and the kissing has changed again, it is different from the kitchen and different from the first time on the bed, it is slower and more certain and his hands are on your back and your skin is against his skin and the amount of skin is new, the full length of him against the full length of you is a thing neither of you has had before and you both feel it arrive, the contact, the warmth, the simple animal fact of another body.

His hand finds you again. Not the same way as before. Slower. Exploring. His fingers slide through the wet of you and you are still sensitive from before, still swollen, and the touch sends a shiver through you that he feels against his chest. He keeps his hand there, not circling, not pressing, just feeling you, learning the shape of you with his fingers like he is reading something in a language he is teaching himself.

"You feel," he starts, and doesn't finish.

"What."

"You feel incredible. I just want. I want you to know that."

You kiss him because if you try to respond to that with words you are going to cry again and you have already cried once tonight and you are trying to maintain at least the appearance of a person who has it together.

His fingers move inside you. One first, then two, and the stretch is slow and careful and his thumb is still on your clit, barely touching, and the combination makes your back arch slightly, and he watches it arch, and you feel his cock twitch against your thigh.

"I want you," you say. "I want. All of you. I want."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah."

He reaches for his jeans on the floor. He finds his wallet. He finds a condom. He tears the wrapper with his teeth because his hands are shaking again and you take it from him and roll it on yourself because his hands are shaking and your hands are steady for the first time all evening, and the reversal of that, the steadiness of your hands on him, makes him close his eyes and breathe out through his nose like a man counting to ten.

You guide him. He presses into you slowly, slowly, and you feel yourself open around him, and he makes a sound when he is all the way inside you, low and involuntary and slightly startled, like he is surprised by something he knew was coming, and you make a sound too, and the sounds are not performative, they are just the sounds two bodies make when they stop being separate.

He moves slowly. He moves slowly and carefully in a way that is not about being gentle, it is about paying attention, the same attention he has been paying all evening, except now the attention is inside you and the inside is a different kind of close. You can feel him adjusting. You can feel him reading you the way he read you with his hands, by breath, by sound, by the way your body tightens or opens, and the reading is the thing, the reading has always been the thing.

"Okay?" he says.

"Yeah."

"Still okay?"

"Ryland. I will tell you if I'm not okay."

"Right. Right. Sorry. I just."

"I know."

He moves. You move with him. There is a moment, early, where the geometry doesn't quite work, and there is a brief, honest negotiation of angles, and he laughs, quietly, against your neck, and you laugh, and the laughing is the permission it has always been. The laughing is what lets the bodies figure it out without the brains getting in the way.

He finds a rhythm. You find it with him. His forehead is against yours and his breath is on your mouth and his hands are in your hair and you are looking at each other, which is a thing you did not expect, because you have spent your entire life closing your eyes during sex, and tonight your eyes are open, and his eyes are open, and the openness is its own kind of naked.

He says your name.

He says it once, quietly, against your mouth, not as a question, not as a request, just as a fact, just as confirmation that you are here and he is here and neither of you is pretending, and the sound of your name in his voice in this room in this bed is a thing you are going to carry for a very long time.

It is not, you understand, going to happen again tonight. Your body is done with that particular miracle for now. But it does not matter. It does not matter because the sex is not about the orgasm, the sex was never about the orgasm, the sex is about the thing he said in the kitchen, which is that the orgasm is not the thing. The thing is this. His forehead on yours. His weight. His breathing getting faster. His hands gripping the sheets next to your head because he is close, he is close and you can feel it in him, and you wrap your legs around him and pull him deeper and say, very quietly, "it's okay, you can let go."

He lets go.

He lets go the way you let go, which is all at once, his whole body tensing, a sound pressed into your neck that he did not plan to make, and you hold him through it the way he held you through yours, your arms around his back, your mouth on his temple, and you feel him shake, and the shaking is the mirror of your shaking, and the room is very quiet, and the room is very full.

After a while he pulls out, carefully, and deals with the condom, and comes back. He comes back immediately, like the three seconds of not touching you were three seconds he did not care for, and he lies on his back and pulls you into his side and you go, your head on his chest, your leg over his, your hand flat on his sternum where you can feel his heart still going too fast. He presses his mouth to the top of your head and leaves it there.

After a while, you say, "The plant metaphor was a stretch."

He laughs. He laughs with his whole chest, the laugh you have been cataloguing for years, the one that cuts across rooms, except now it is in your bed, against your hair, vibrating through his ribs into yours, and it is yours. It is yours.

"The plant metaphor was science," he says.

"The plant metaphor was you buying time."

"The plant metaphor was me buying time, yes."

You lift your head. You look at him. His face, without the glasses, is a face you have technically seen before but have never seen like this, this close, with this specific expression on it, which is the expression of a man who is looking at you like you are the coolest thing he has ever seen, and he has seen anglerfish.

"Hi," you say.

"Hi."

"I think the experiment worked."

"I think," he says, "the experiment had a significant confounding variable."

"What variable."

"Me. Being in love with you. That's, that's a confound. You can't. You can't control for that."

"No," you say. "You can't."

"Might need a bigger sample size, though."

"Might."

"For rigour."

"For rigour."

He is smiling. You can feel him smiling against the top of your head. It is the smile of a man who has found a problem he would like to spend a very long time not solving.

You think about what it would be like. To get there with him inside you. To feel that edge and not flinch and hold your breath and let it break while he is as close as another person can be. You think about it not as a fear, which is new. You think about it as a thing that might happen. On a Tuesday. On a Saturday. On some unremarkable afternoon when neither of you is trying.

You kiss him. You kiss him slowly, with no urgency, with the specific calm of a person who knows she has time, and he kisses you back, and his hands are in your hair, and the chair is in the corner with the clothes on it, and the kitchen has cracker crumbs on the counter, and somewhere in this apartment there is a bag that once held Skittles, and the room is full of everything you have both been carrying, and it is light. For the first time in a very long time, it is light.

She sighed dramatically. “The school’s doing a Mother’s Day event the day after tomorrow. Everyone’s bringing their mom or aunt or somebody from their family and I was kinda wondering…” She looked up at him with those big hopeful eyes. “Do you think I could invite her?”

“Oh.”

That caught him off guard a little. But in a good way.

Holland had known for a long time that you had slipped into their little family with alarming ease. Your clothes had somehow claimed permanent space in his closet, one of your hair clips lived beside the kitchen sink, and Holly’s half-finished school project still sat under the living room window where the two of you had abandoned it the night before.

Leaning back against the counter, he studied his daughter carefully. “You want her there?” he asked softly.

Holly shrugged, pretending to play it cool. “I mean, it’s not a big deal. Just some school thing. But…it’d be nice.”

“Mhmm.” Holland nodded slowly.

He knew his daughter too well. Whenever Holly said it wasn’t a big deal, it usually meant it mattered a lot.

“I think,” he said, “you should ask her yourself. During dinner. Use the food as bribery.”

Holly perked up immediately. “You think bribery’ll work?”

“It always works on me.”

“That explains a lot.”

A moment later your footsteps echoed down the hallway and you appeared in the kitchen wearing one of Holland’s oversized t-shirts,  something he pretended not to notice while secretly loving the sight of far too much.

“Something smells good,” you said, peeking over Holly’s shoulder.

“As the only man in this household,” Holland announced proudly, “I have returned with food for my girls. Sit down before I pass out.”

You settled beside Holly, already reaching for your fork when you noticed how stiffly she was sitting. Your eyes flicked toward Holland suspiciously, but he only smiled innocently.

“Were you two talking about something while I was gone?” you asked.

Holly glanced at her father, then back at you. “There’s a thing,” she began.

And then the words came tumbling out in one long nervous rush -  that it really wasn’t a huge deal, and you absolutely didn’t have to go if you didn’t want to, but there’d be games and activities and food and everybody else would be there and you had that really pretty dress you could wear and…

Eventually she stopped, lips pressed together tightly as though she were waiting for a verdict. Across the takeout boxes, you exchanged a glance with Holland.

“Well, Holly,” you said gently, “I think that sounds wonderful, and I’d love to go with you. If you really want me there. And you’re right, that dress does sound perfect for the occasion.”

Holly’s head snapped up so fast it nearly gave Holland whiplash. “Really?”

“Of course. It sounds really good.”

Holland nodded solemnly. “The dress is gonna be a real crowd-pleaser.”

“It definitely will!” Holly nearly clapped. “Mr. Phillips is gonna lose his mind when he sees her in it.”

“Mr…” Holland blinked.

“Mr. Phillips. The gym teacher, Dad.” Holly rolled her eyes dramatically, though you were almost certain she’d brought him up specifically to irritate her father. “He flirts with all the pretty moms.”

You laughed softly. Holland’s blue eyes immediately shifted toward you as he pointed his fork in your direction.

“Remember,” he warned, “you already have a charming single father at home.”

“I think I can handle one PE teacher,” you teased.

“Oh yeah? That’s how every tragic love story starts. One PTA event later and suddenly I’m alone, drinking whiskey in a motel…”

“Dad, you’re being dramatic!”

“I’m being emotionally attacked at my own dinner table. I didn’t realize a school event could destroy my relationship.”

And for the next fifteen minutes Holland continued spiraling theatrically while Holly took immense joy in making it worse.

The event’s day, when you and Holly were getting ready to leave, Holland had to be talked into staying home.

The dress was “too pretty,” you were “too attractive,” and the gym teacher, whom he had never seen in his life, was apparently “a criminal who specializes in ruining healthy relationships.”

Only after you promised that you would, in fact, come back home afterward, and not run away to Las Vegas to marry an athletic PE teacher, did he finally allow you to leave.

When you returned, the afternoon sun filled the house with a warm, golden glow. Holly was the first into the living room and immediately spotted her father sprawled on the couch. His sleeves were rolled up, several buttons on his shirt were undone, and his tie had long since been abandoned.

“Look what we got!” Holly announced proudly, holding up the two gold medals hanging around her neck. “She was incredible! Three-legged race and archery. Seriously. Wow.”

“Oh, stop,” you groaned, unable to hide your smile as you stepped inside behind her and shut the door. “The competition wasn’t exactly fierce.”

“Jessica’s mom turned bright red,” Holly whispered conspiratorially. “I don’t even like her. She deserved it.”

“Holly!”

You kicked off your heels and collapsed beside Holland on the couch. He looked at you with open fondness and something softer underneath it.

“You volunteered for the competitions?” he asked. Without thinking, his large hands reached for your legs, lifting them effortlessly into his lap. His thumbs immediately began rubbing slow circles against your calves.

“You didn’t see Jessica’s mom,” you said, struggling not to laugh. “She was so competitive. She wanted every medal.”

“I’m proud of you,” Holland said. “Both of you.”

Holly wandered into the kitchen and opened the fridge in search of snacks. “Mr. Phillips thought she was amazing too,” she tossed over her shoulder casually.

You felt Holland freeze. His eyes widened slightly, fingers tightening just a little around your calf.

“Oh really?” he asked suspiciously calmly.

“Mhm.” Holly pulled out leftover pasta. “He was very impressed by her athletic ability.”

“Oh.”

You bit your lip hard to stop yourself from laughing. Holland’s eyes never left you.

“And he offered to help her stretch afterward,” Holly continued sweetly. “You know. Since she looked so good in that dress.”

“Holly?” Holland smiled and pointed down the hall. “Could you check if you’re in your room now?”

“Dad!”

“Now. Please.”

The moment Holly’s bedroom door shut, Holland let out a long suffering sigh. You had absolutely no chance of escaping while he still had your legs trapped across his lap.

“So,” he drawled, “how’s Mr. Phillips doing these days? You must’ve made quite the impression on him, sweetheart.”

You swallowed carefully. “He was very nice,” you admitted.

“Nice.”

“And athletic. I mean, he teaches PE. He also coaches basketball.”

“Athletic.”

Holland’s jaw tightened slightly.

“And…” You tried very hard to stay serious. “He has a really cute bald spot.”

Holland stared at you. “He’s bald?”

You nodded.

“Thank God.”

You burst out laughing as his head dropped dramatically against the couch cushion, relief washing across his face.

“I was so close to going over there and burying him under the football field,” he muttered. “But if he’s bald…”

“So now you’re not threatened anymore?”

“I’m still threatened! My self-esteem is fragile and nobody in this house is helping.”

You tried to slide your legs away, but Holland only held on tighter.

“No. Stay. This is nice.”

You tucked a pillow beneath your head and stretched out more comfortably against the couch. The long emotional day was finally catching up with you. All you wanted now was a hot shower and comfortable clothes.

“Holly really enjoyed it today,” Holland said quietly after a moment. His voice softened completely. “You made her really happy.”

You smiled. “I’m glad I could do that for her. And honestly… I had fun too.”

A lazy grin spread across his face. “Another March hopelessly in love with you. Must be difficult.”

“I can handle it.”

He leaned down and pressed a kiss just above your knee. Your fingers slid into his soft hair where it had fallen over his forehead. Evening sunlight spilled through the room in warm red-gold waves. You were about to say something when Holland suddenly lifted his head, mischief sparkling in his eyes.

“You know,” he mused, “I’m not surprised Mr. Phillips was impressed by your athletic ability.”

You narrowed your eyes immediately.

“With all the cardio training we do together…”

“Holland!” You shot a glance toward Holly’s closed bedroom door.

“What?” he said innocently. “I care about your fitness.” He shrugged, though the grin tugging at his mouth gave him away completely. “Maybe we should do a little training tonight too.” He winked. “Think my performance would improve if I stretched first?”

You buried your face in your hands, trying desperately not to laugh. Holland’s hand slid higher beneath your dress, squeezing your thigh gently while his lips brushed your skin again.

“I’m really glad you didn’t leave me for some athletic coach.”

“How could I?” you murmured. “Emotionally unstable detectives are much more my type.”

“My lucky day.”

Jacob has a huge shower. Massive. It takes up half the room. It has a huge rainfall shower head and some kind of water jets built into the wall that you’re a little bit scared of, and it doesn’t even have a door. He has all of the fancy, high-end products that he has to have bought from that luxury hair salon he goes to and he clearly doesn’t even think about it when he puts twice as much of each liquid into his hands while he washes your hair. He knows how to emulsify, he’s working the shampoo into your scalp with firm, practiced hands, and he’s massaging both your head and the back of your neck in a way that makes you let out an unintentional, soft moan. You asked once about why it feels like he’s done this a thousand times before, and he tells you that his mother used to put him to work in her salon when he was home from college — which is not at all what you expected him to say but is a warmly unanticipated answer. You love sharing post-shower ritual time with Jacob because he has a routine too, and there’s plenty of room for the both of you at the sink while you do your own skincare routines on each side, smiling at and making eye contact with each other through the (huge) mirror until one of you demands a kiss from the other. 

It takes a while to work up to showering with Lars. For the first few months you just take turns in the small bathroom of his garage-flat while the other warms a fluffy towel next to the fire to be exchanged when each of you get out of the shower. You’re incredibly conscious of how cramped the shower is and with his touch aversion (that has been getting a lot better with you, but you do not want to push it), you’re not confident in it really ever being a possibility, so you never ask. He’s the one who floats it as a surprisingly pointed suggestion one day — you’re both cold and wet from the rain outside and he thinks it would be safer for you to both just get in together and you don’t really have an argument for that because you don’t want either of you to get sick either. So he quickly finds some kind of rack to put both towels on near the fire and then he gingerly peels you out of your wet clothes (the second surprise of the evening) and sends you into the shower while he strips down too, throwing both of your clothes directly into the washing machine before stepping in with you. You press as far into the corner as you can to give the man more room (and are now barely under the warm stream of water from the shower head), and Lars is blinking hard like he does when he’s at the edge of being overwhelmed, but then he reaches out for your hand (like he often does now, which makes your heart soar) and gives you a soft pull closer so that you can (awkwardly) share the hot water. 

In your first apartment with Sebastian, the shower is on the smaller side and you’re both too conscious of the water bill to spend much time in there together even when you’re both home at the same time. After you both ‘make it’ in your respective fields, things are a lot easier to shoulder. When Seb’s is doing really well and you’re moving up, you move into a much nicer apartment that neither of you really know what to do with for a while — especially when it comes to the shower with the square rainfall head that is twice as big as the previous one (on both counts). It does get utilised though, and then you’re regularly having sing-offs and doing karaoke in there (even though neither of you are vocalists) or listening to a jazz record off the bluetooth speaker that Sebastian insisted on buying just for the room and generally taking twice as long as you need to under the water. He’s tapping his fingers in time with the keyboard or piano notes in the music against any of your skin that he can reach when he isn’t taking the tension out of your shoulders with his long, elegant fingers that are almost as good at massaging as they are at playing his instrument. He’s bending forward for you to wash his hair for him while his hands settle softly on your hips, still tapping away, then he blinks down at you with an adoring gaze that he reserves only for you when he tips his head back to wash the product out. Sebastian has never been so thankful for someone having faith in him, and he intends to make you as happy and comfortable as possible. 

The shower in Luke’s trailer is very small and neither of you like to waste time in there, so it’s a toss-up of whether you’ll shower together or not every time (usually you do, both of you love being close to the other anyway and are rarely far apart). You both wash quickly and in motions reminiscent of vertical Twister when you do, and his hands only start to wander when you’re both clean — the proximity causes more things than just the water vapours to be steamy, and you’ve been pressing soft kisses to each other’s skin at every opportunity. He’s wrapping you up in a towel when you get out (whether you showered together or not) and you’re drying his hair with a hand towel until the bleach-blond tresses fall handsomely over his forehead as he leans down to kiss you. Do you even get dressed after the shower? Probably not, because Luke loves skin-to-skin contact and prefers to cuddle to sleep without boundaries. 

If Colt comes home injured, you’re both getting in the shower pretty much immediately. He got any scratches or cuts patched up and medically cleared on set but you both know that your hands are a kind of magic that can’t be found in a medical trailer. You’re helping him strip off before shedding your own clothes, and then washing away the dirt and grime that still coats his skin with a soft washcloth under the stream of water as hot as the two of you can stand to try and loosen up his tight muscles. Your hands knead into his back with practiced ease (avoiding the visible bruises and abrasions and the still-tender area around his spinal injury) until he sighs heavily and melts into your touch, forehead pressed against the tiles as he tells you about what he was working on that day and you press kisses into his warm flesh. 

When Colt isn’t injured, you’re washing each other while you quiz each other on movie quotes. He can’t reach most of his back so you have to wash it anyway (literally too jacked to reach between his own shoulder blades and it makes you giggle every time he tries). He is super supportive of your ‘everything showers’ and begs to be included, touching you softly as if he’s going to hurt you if he scrubs you with the loofah too hard. He takes all of your directions about what products to use and in what order, and he even wants to do skincare with you after! Matching face masks, moisturising, fluffy robes — you even bought him one of those novelty headbands to keep his hair out of his face. And you best bet that Colt's taking a silly selfie with you and then sending it to the stunt team group chat for whatever movie he’s working on with a corny message that makes you roll your eyes, something like ‘resting and rejuvenating 🙏’.

Holland is only allowed to shower with you sometimes. 

When Holland does shower with you, he can’t keep his hands to himself. He loves to touch you, any way that you let him, and that usually means that the shower ends up being longer than an hour because you basically have to take a second shower in the same shower because of it. He’s praising you the whole time as he gropes at your chest and practically humps your thigh or against your ass because he thinks you’re just too divine to keep his hands (or his dick) away. Will ask you to wash his hair and then drop to his knees with that smirk you can’t help but blush at and then you’re up against the tiles while he uses his mouth on you. 

When you don’t let Holland shower with you, he’s absolutely sitting on the lid of the toilet in his underwear, still intermittently praising you and telling you how good you look through the shower screen while he rambles to you about whatever case he’s working on. He’ll wrap you up in a towel when you’re done and you’ll probably stay in the bathroom while it’s his turn too so you can hear the rest of the story about the case because the second the two of you get into bed, it’ll go one of two ways — Holland will start groping you and you won’t stop him (you might even actively encourage it with the wandering of your own hands), or his head is hitting that pillow and he’s snoring within seconds. 

When you shower with Ryland in the morning, you’re talking about what you each have going on for the day — what experiments is he running with his classes? What are they learning about? Who is he expecting to act up? Who has he been keeping an eye on because they always seem just a little bit too tired in class? He’s drawing stick figures and love hearts in the shower steam on the glass and saying “that’s us, we’re in love!” or some other adorably dorky thing that makes you smile wide and kiss him. 

When you shower with Ryland at night, you’re debriefing — who did he snap and give detention to? Who had a really good question that reminded him of something he studied once? What gossip did he overhear in the teacher’s lounge? What published research paper did he read at lunch and why was the researcher right/wrong? You love it when he rambles, and it’s incredibly soothing when he talks to you in that soft voice he seems to only use with you (even when he’s calling some other scientist an idiot in creative ways for ten solid minutes) while you take turns washing each other. He’s putting his glasses on the second his face is dry so that he can look at you, even though they steam up pretty much immediately and his hair drips onto the lenses so he has to wipe them on his towel anyway, which gives you the opportunity to dry his hair until it’s only damp before he puts the glasses back on, pulls you close, and kisses you deeply with mutterings of how you always take care of him, how much he loves you, and how considerate you are. He pulls one of his clean t-shirts gently over your head for you to sleep in and holds your underwear out for you to step into before pulling on his own pajama pants (no shirt, because Ryland knows how much you love his chest and arms).