Lovely

The rules are his. Phone face down on the coffee table — he set yours there himself when you sat down, screen to the wood, like a man confiscating something. You watch the whole thing. No scrolling. No, I’m listening while you answer a text. He doesn’t say all that out loud anymore. He just held out his palm when the title card came up, and you handed over the phone.

So now your feet are in his lap, and a narrator is talking about a part of the ocean where the light doesn’t reach, and Joe’s thumb is moving slow over your ankle bone, back and forth, like he doesn’t know he’s doing it.

He probably doesn’t.

On screen, something with teeth drifts up out of the black, a little light hanging off a stalk above its head. The narrator says its name.

“That’s the female,” Joe says.

You don’t ask. You know better. It doesn’t matter.

“The male’s like a tenth the size. He finds one, bites onto her, and then he just—” he folds his fingers in, slow. “Fuses. Her skin grows over him. He’s part of her body at that point. Just there to—”

“Please don’t finish that.”

“—reproduce. He loses his eyes. His organs. Everything but the part she needs.”

“Joe.”

“What.”

“You’re doing the thing.”

He looks over at you like he doesn’t know what thing. He genuinely doesn’t.

On the screen, the little light moves through the dark. You watch it longer than you mean to.

“Wait. So she just carries him around.”

“Rest of her life.”

“That’s the most depressing thing I’ve ever heard.”

“It’s efficient.” He presses his tongue to the inside of his cheek and looks back at the TV like he’s won something.

You hate that you want to know what’s further down. You ask anyway.

“So what’s deeper than this?”

He slides down the couch and takes you with him, gets comfortable, like it’s going to take a while.

“You’re gonna love this,” he says.

———

The ritual sticks. It turns into a thing you have — Sunday nights, mostly, a Tuesday if his week’s open, his place and yours trading off, a running fight about subtitles that neither of you ever wins.

Your weeks, you make him watch the movies that raised you. You put on How to Train Your Dragon, the one you’ve seen so many times you mouth the words, and you wait for him to make fun of you. He doesn’t. He goes quiet in the good way, and twenty minutes in he says “the dad’s wrong about him,” flat, like it’s bothering him, and you have to look at the floor so you don’t grin and ruin it.

His weeks are whatever he’s deep in that month — space, the bottom of the ocean, how mountains move — plus Heat and one cult thing after another, each one “important,” each one earning him a pillow to the face.

Then it’s a Sunday, and he puts on The Dark Knight, and you can tell it’s not like the others before it even starts — he sits up, phone all the way across the room, like the movie deserves his hands free.

“I watched this probably a hundred times the year I got my license,” he says.

You’ve seen it too. Your brother had it on in the basement so many weekends that it became the background noise of being a kid. Without thinking about it, you do the math. “God, so I was like nine.”

His thumb stops on your ankle.

He doesn’t say anything. He’s looking at the screen, the city, the title coming up over it. You watch the side of his face for a second, then let it go.

“The Joker scared the hell out of me,” you say. “I used to leave the room.”

“You can leave the room.”

“Shut up. Start it.”

His thumb starts moving again.

———

A few weeks in, you push your luck. It’s your night. You put on a show.

“This isn’t a movie.”

“The deal was favorites.”

“The deal was movies.”

“The deal was never movies. You just kept picking movies.”

He opens his mouth. Closes it. You can see him deciding whether this is worth dying over, and you watch him decide it isn’t.

“Fine.” He gets his phone. “I’m not watching it, though. Background noise.”

You start it from the beginning.

That first night he’s on his phone the whole time, thumb going, and at the end he says it was fine, he guesses, and you let him have that. The next week the phone goes down somewhere in the back half. The week after that, it doesn’t come out at all.

He keeps saying background noise. He says it while he’s leaning forward. He says it the week he asks, too casual, whether the dark-haired brother is coming back — and when you tell him the guy’s name is Conrad, he says he didn’t ask for a name; he asked if he’s coming back. He says it the week he calls the blond one “that kid” in a tone that has opinions. He doesn’t know the names. He refuses to know the names. He knows exactly who everyone is.

By the time you get him to the third season, you’ve stopped pretending it’s background noise.

He hasn’t.

———

Season three, you don’t even have to fight him for it. You put it on, and he’s already settled, arm out for you, eyes on the screen before the recap’s done, like he’s been waiting for this all week.

“Background noise,” he says, to nobody.

“Sure.”

The premiere doesn’t waste time. There’s a party. A girl you don’t recognize yet is talking to her friends, loud and careless, and across the room Belly goes still.

Joe sits forward.

“He did it,” he says.

“What?”

“The blond one.” He doesn’t look away from the screen. “Whatever she just heard — he did it.”

“You don’t know that yet.”

“He’s gonna say ’I can explain.’ Watch. Guilty people explain. Innocent people just say no.”

Belly crosses the room and asks him straight out. The first thing out of his mouth is that he can explain.

Joe breathes out through his nose, slow, like he just watched a ref blow a call, and now he’s personally offended.

“Cabo,” he says, when it comes out where it happened. “He did it in Cabo and sat on it. Look at his face — he’s not sorry he did it. He’s sorry she found out.”

You’re not watching the show anymore. You’re watching him.

When Jeremiah gets to the part about how they were technically on a break, Joe’s jaw sets.

“That’s not an explanation,” he says. “That’s a loophole.”

On screen, Belly’s coming apart, and Joe watches her like he’d fix it if he could reach.

“She’s gonna take him back,” he says, low. “Don’t. Belly. Come on.”

You look at him.

“You know her name.”

He doesn’t answer. His eyes stay on the screen. Then he catches it — what he said, the way he said it — and his jaw works, and he keeps very busy not looking at you.

“…How many of these even are there?”

“Three seasons. We’re in the last one.”

“How many episodes left?”

“Like ten.”

He pulls you into his side, chin landing on the top of your head.

“Don’t watch them without me.”