megan

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

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

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

“You’re so high.”

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

“For the glacier facts.”

“For the glacier facts.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Come here.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Whenever you’re ready,” he says.

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

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

His mouth drops open for you.

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

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

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

“Again,” he says.

The second one is messier.

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

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

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

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

“Finish it, then,” he says.

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

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

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

“Like what?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Joe—”

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

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

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

Neither of you moves for a while.

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

The ashtray sits there with the dead joint in it.

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

“Drink.”

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

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

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

“Improved it.”

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

“Yeah,” he says. “You did.”

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

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

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

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

“I ate before I came.”

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

He looks at you a second too long.

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

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

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

—

You go up to bed a little after eleven.

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

You lie there with your eyes open.

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

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

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

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

Except the list came down the stairs with you.

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

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

The stairs.

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

“Hey.” He stops at the bottom. “Hey—”

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

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

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

He doesn’t go back to bed.

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

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

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

It doesn’t come.

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

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

“You’re not.”

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

“Whenever you want it,” he says.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m sorry,” you say.

“For what.”

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

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

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

“The reading one,” he says. “Maddox.”

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

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

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

“How long have you been doing this alone?”

“Joe.”

“How long.”

“Since always. College. It’s easier.”

“Easier than what?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Joe—”

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

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

—

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

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

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

“You don’t have to—”

“I know.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Joe—”

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

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

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

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

You’re almost under when he says it.

“Hey.”

“Mm.”

“Next time, wake me up.”

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

He picks up on the second ring.

“Hey.”

“Hey.” Your voice comes out fine. You think it comes out fine. “How was practice?”

“Long.” There’s a rustle on his end, the sound of him moving through his kitchen. “Zac kept us late. How was your day?”

You take a sip of the wine. It’s too cold. You bought it three days ago and forgot to take it out of the fridge in time.

“Long,” you say back, and you try to make it sound like a joke, like you’re matching him. It doesn’t quite land. “Yeah, it was — yeah.”

There’s a pause on his end. Not long. Just a second where the rustling stops.

“Yeah?”

“Mhm.” You set the wine down on the coffee table because your hand isn’t doing what you want it to. “I think we’re going to have to take another look at the Breedlove stuff. They want a different direction.”

“After all that?”

“Mhm.”

“Babe.”

“It’s fine. It’s — it’ll be fine. I’ll figure out where to start tomorrow.”

He doesn’t say anything for a second.

“You eat?”

“I will.”

“Okay.”

You can hear him thinking. You change the subject before he can land on what he’s thinking about. You ask him what he wants for dinner this weekend. You ask him if Tee texted him back about Saturday. You keep your voice in the register it’s supposed to be in. You sound like yourself. You’re pretty sure you sound like yourself.

He answers your questions. He doesn’t ask you anything else about Breedlove.

When you finally say you’re going to take a shower and get to bed early, he says okay. He says he’s going to let you rest. He tells you he loves you and you tell him you love him back and you hang up and you sit on the couch in the dark and you finish the wine and you do not cry.

—

The knock comes forty minutes later.

You know before you open the door. You’ve known since you hung up. You walk to it slow anyway, because some part of you still wants to be the kind of person who can handle her own bad day.

He’s on the other side in a hoodie and gray sweats, duffel slung over his shoulder, hair still wet from the shower he took before he got in the car.

“Joe.”

“Hi.”

“You didn’t have to —”

“I know.”

He steps inside. Sets the duffel down by the door. Toes his shoes off the way he always does, lining them up against the wall without looking, because he’s been here enough now that his body knows where they go.

His eyes catch on the kitchen island — your laptop still open where you left it, the Breedlove binder closed but sitting on top of a stack of mood boards you’d printed out two weeks ago. He doesn’t say anything about it. Just clocks it.

“You eat?” he asks.

“I told you I would.”

He looks at you.

“I’ll figure something out.”

“Sit down.”

“Joe —”

“Sit down, baby.”

He says it the way he says everything that matters. Quiet. Not a request. He passes you on his way to the kitchen and his hand brushes your lower back as he goes, just for a second, and you sit down on the couch because your legs feel suddenly like they’ve been waiting for permission.

You hear him open the fridge. You hear him open it again. You hear him swear under his breath at whatever he finds.

“Babe.”

“Don’t start.”

“There’s a lemon. And ketchup.”

“I went to the store on Sunday.”

“It’s Thursday.”

You don’t answer. You hear him close the fridge. Hear him pick up his phone. Hear him order something — he knows the place, he knows your order, he doesn’t have to ask. He’s quiet and efficient about it the way he’s quiet and efficient about everything, and you sit on the couch listening to him do this for you and you press your fingers against your eyes until you see colors.

He comes back into the living room. Sits down next to you. Doesn’t pull you in yet. Just sits, close enough that his thigh is against yours, and rests his hand on your knee.

“Twenty minutes,” he says.

“Okay.”

“You wanna put something on?”

“Okay.”

He picks up the remote. Doesn’t ask what you want to watch. Puts on the cooking show you’ve fallen asleep to a hundred times. Volume low. He doesn’t look at you while he does it. He’s giving you the room to be in the same space as him without having to be looked at, and you don’t know how he knows to do that but he does.

—

The food comes. He pays the delivery guy at the door and brings it in and sets it on the coffee table because he knows you don’t want to sit at the kitchen island tonight. He opens the containers. Hands you yours. Sits back down.

You eat about half of it.

He doesn’t comment. Just finishes his and takes both containers to the kitchen and comes back with a glass of water that he sets in front of you without saying anything about the wine.

Then he sits down and opens his arm.

You go.

You go without thinking about it, without making it a thing, and his arm closes around you and pulls you in against his chest and his other hand comes up to the back of your head and you close your eyes.

He doesn’t say anything.

The cooking show is still on. Someone’s making a galette. The host is whispering for some reason. Joe’s chest moves slow under your cheek, and his thumb is on the back of your neck, not stroking, just there, and you can smell his soap and the faint trace of laundry detergent on his hoodie and you can feel his heartbeat through three layers of fabric.

“It was a good project,” you say.

You don’t know you’re going to say it until it’s out.

“I know it was.”

“I worked on it for —”

“I know.”

Your throat closes. You stop.

He doesn’t push. His hand stays on the back of your neck. He’s quiet for a second, and then —

“Tell me what they said.”

“Joe —”

“Not all of it. Just what they said.”

So you tell him. Not the whole meeting. Just the part where Daniel said the direction wasn’t landing the way they’d hoped, and the part where Megan wouldn’t look at you, and the part where you realized halfway through that the version you’d been building for four months was already dead in the room and nobody had told you yet.

You tell it flat. No editorializing. Just the facts.

He listens. His thumb moves once on the back of your neck.

“That’s bullshit.”

“Joe.”

“It is. They let you build the whole thing and then changed their mind. That’s bullshit.”

“It’s how it works sometimes.”

“Doesn’t mean it’s not bullshit.”

You almost laugh. It comes out more like a breath.

He shifts a little, gets his other arm around you too. Doesn’t say anything for a minute. The cooking show is still on. Someone’s whisking something. The host is whispering for some reason.

“You did good work on that project.”

“You didn’t see it.”

“I heard you talk about it for four months. I know what good work sounds like when you talk about it. You did good work.”

Your throat closes.

“I’m sorry, baby.”

That’s the thing that almost gets you. Not the validation. Not even the bullshit. Just I’m sorry — like he’s allowed to be sorry for you, like it’s not asking too much of him to feel it with you.

You press your forehead harder into his chest.

He tightens his arm.

—

His arm is tight around you. His hand is still on the back of your neck. You can feel his heartbeat through his hoodie and you can feel him breathing slow on purpose and you can feel the careful, contained way he’s holding you, like he knows you’re closer to the edge than you’ve said.

That’s what does it.

Not the meeting. Not the four months. Not even the wine.

The fact that he knows.

Your chest goes wrong before your brain catches up. One second you’re fine — wrung out, but fine — and the next second your lungs have forgotten what they’re supposed to do. The air’s there. You can feel it. It just isn’t going in right. It’s getting stuck somewhere in your throat and your shoulders are up by your ears and your hands have started shaking, the small useless kind of shake that you can’t make stop just by looking at it.

You try to sit up. You try to get off his chest because you don’t want him to see this, you don’t want him to see you like this, this isn’t —

“Hey. Hey, no. Come here.”

His arm tightens. Doesn’t let you pull back.

“Joe —”

“I got you.”

“I can’t — I’m sorry, I can’t —”

“You don’t have to do anything. Come here.”

He pulls you back down against him. Doesn’t ask what’s happening. Doesn’t tell you to breathe. Doesn’t tell you it’s okay. Just gets you against his chest and gets his arm around you and puts his other hand flat between your shoulder blades and holds on.

Your hands are shaking against his ribs. You can hear yourself, the wrong-sounding pull of your own breath, and the sound of it makes it worse, makes your chest go tighter, and you think I’m going to throw up and then you think I’m going to embarrass myself and then you think I’m going to scare him and that one is the worst one, that one makes it so much worse —

“Baby.”

His voice is right next to your ear. Low. Not soft like he’s trying to be soft. Just there.

“Feel me breathing.”

You try.

“That’s it. Just feel it.”

His chest moves under your cheek. In. Out. Slower than yours. Much slower. He doesn’t tell you to match it. Doesn’t count. Doesn’t do any of the things people sometimes try to do that make it worse. He just breathes slow against you and keeps his hand spread wide on your back and lets you find it on your own.

You don’t, at first.

You can’t.

Your body is doing its thing and your body doesn’t care that he’s here. Your body is going to do this whether you want it to or not, and some part of you that’s still online enough to be embarrassed is screaming at the rest of you to get it together, to stop, to not do this in front of him — and that part is making the other part worse, and the loop is tightening, and your hands won’t stop —

“Hey.”

His hand moves. Comes up to the back of your head. Holds it.

“I’m not going anywhere.”

You make a sound. You don’t mean to.

“I know,” he says. Quiet. “I know, baby. I got you.”

He doesn’t move otherwise. Doesn’t shift, doesn’t reach for his phone, doesn’t try to do anything other than be the thing you’re pressed against. His chest keeps going slow. In. Out. The hand on the back of your head is heavy, anchoring, and somewhere in the part of your brain that’s still working you register that he’s done this before. That he knows not to talk too much. That he knows not to make it bigger than it is. That he’s not scared.

That’s what finally cracks it.

Not the breathing. Not the hand. The fact that he’s not scared.

The first real breath comes ragged. The second one comes a little better. The third one breaks, and that’s when you start crying — not the controlled kind, not the dignified kind, the kind you’ve been refusing since two o’clock this afternoon. Wet and ugly and shaking and into his hoodie.

He doesn’t say anything.

Just keeps his hand on the back of your head and lets you.

—

You cry for a long time.

Not the whole time at the same volume. It comes in waves — hard, then quieter, then hard again when you think about something specific (Daniel’s face, the look Megan gave the floor, four months, four months) and then quieter again. He doesn’t rush any of it. His hand stays on the back of your head through the loud parts. Moves to your back during the quiet ones. His hoodie is wet under your cheek and he doesn’t seem to care.

Eventually you stop.

Not because you’re done. Because you’re empty.

You stay there with your face against his chest, breathing in the damp spot you made, and you don’t move because moving means he might see your face and you don’t want anyone to see your face right now, not even him.

He seems to know that too.

He doesn’t try to tilt your chin up. Doesn’t ask if you’re okay. Just keeps his hand moving slow on your back and lets you stay hidden against him for as long as you need to.

“I’m sorry,” you say, eventually. Your voice is shot.

“For what.”

“That.”

“Baby.”

“I didn’t want you to see that.”

“I know you didn’t.”

He’s quiet for a second.

“I’m glad I did.”

You make a sound that isn’t quite a laugh.

“Don’t.”

“I am.”

His hand keeps moving on your back.

“I didn’t ask you to come.”

“I know.”

“How’d you know.”

“I just did.”

“Joe.”

“Baby. You called me to tell me about your day. You didn’t tell me about your day. I’m not gonna sit at home when you sound like that.”

“I sounded fine.”

“You sounded like you were trying to sound fine.”

You don’t have anything to say to that.

He turns a little, gets his hand under your jaw — careful, slow, giving you time to stop him if you want to — and tilts your face up the rest of the way. You let him. Your eyes are swollen and your nose is running and you look like exactly what you are, which is a thirty-five-year-old woman who just had a panic attack on her couch, and he looks at you like none of that registers as anything other than you.

“You’re not gonna ask. I know you’re not gonna ask. That’s okay. I’m not waiting for you to ask.”

“Joe.”

“I meant it. Whatever this looks like. I’m here for it.”

You close your eyes.

He pulls you back down to him, slow, his hand at the back of your neck guiding you until your cheek is against his chest again. His thumb starts moving on your back.

“Go to sleep, baby.”

You do.

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