jen

your thighs shook where they framed jim’s lap, his free hand braced on your hip while the other worked between your legs, fingers deep and slow and soaked.

you gasped, voice trembling as you moaned his name, breath hot against his neck. “jim- fuck- ”

his mouth twitched into a grin you couldn’t see, his fingers curling just right inside you, and he felt it - how wet you were, how the slick clung to his skin. creamy and warm, trailing down his knuckles and forearm in lazy, obscene drips.

“yeah?” he murmured, his voice low, smug, deliciously soft in your ear. “you like that, baby?”

you whimpered, hips rolling down onto his hand, your panties long pushed to the side, his old college t-shirt sticking to your back where you sweated through it. “mhm,” you managed, barely coherent. “so good- jim, i’m-”

he kissed the edge of your jaw, breath warm. “you’re fucking soaking me.”

you felt it, the mess you were making of him, dripping down his wrist, your body clenching greedily around his fingers with every slow thrust. and he didn’t stop. he kept watching your face, lips parted, flushed and glassy-eyed, like you were the only thing in the world worth staring at.

“just like that,” he whispered, fingers pressing deeper, “give it to me, sweetheart. let me feel you.”

your hand shot out blindly, catching the loosened knot of his tie and tugging - just enough to steady yourself, to pull him in closer, like your body was trying to anchor itself to him while his fingers wrecked you.

he was still in his work clothes, sleeves rolled up to his elbows, dress shirt slightly rumpled from hours at his desk - and now completely undone from watching you fall apart in his lap. his tie hung loosely around his neck, cool silk clenched tight in your fist as your hips jerked forward with another wave of slick heat.

jim’s leather watch gleamed under the soft bedroom light, but the shine was dulled now by the creamy slick that coated his wrist. it trailed down his forearm, catching in the notches of muscle, his knuckles drenched in your mess. he groaned when he looked down at it.

“look what you’re doing to me,” he muttered, almost dazed, like he couldn’t believe it. his fingers stayed buried inside you, slow and purposeful, dragging against that spot that had your back arching and your thighs trembling. “fucking dripping all over me, baby.”

you couldn’t speak - just nodded, clung tighter to his tie, chest heaving. every curl of his fingers made your eyes flutter, your jaw slack with quiet, ruined sounds.

he leaned in, mouth brushing yours but not quite kissing, his breath catching. “you always get this wet for me?”

you nodded again, helpless, desperate. “always. just you.”

that made something flicker in him - low and rough and needy. his hand flexed on your hip, his tie clutched tighter in your grip, the weight of him still fully clothed against your bare thighs, warm and solid. his fingers moved a little faster now, the wet sounds obscene between your thighs, your body grinding down to meet every thrust.

and he watched you - like you were the only thing in the world he wanted to see come undone.

“Yeah, I—sorry,” he says, bending himself at the waist too, draping his front over yours, his sweaty chest sticking to your back as he scatters kisses all over your shoulderblades. “You just—” he heaves a sigh, wrapping an arm around your waist to hug you like it’s an apology. “You get real tight when you touch yourself like that.”

You squirm a little underneath him, because you feel too wet and too sensitive and you still haven’t come. He pulls his hips back a little, and you feel his come start to dribble out of you and down onto your fingers, your palm.

“Well,” you say, turning a little to look back at him as he pushes himself off of you. “You know the rule.”

You watch as the smirk flits over his face, because he loves this as much as you do.

“Yes ma’am,” he says, straightening up, pulling out of you, tapping the head of his cock against your gaped slit a couple times, just for fun, watching you tighten up around nothing, more of his release oozing out of you as you do, and then he flops down onto the bed beside you, looking over at you with a grin on his face.

“If I didn’t know better, I’d say you did this on purpose.”

Steve lifts a hand, holds up three fingers, and shakes his head. “No ma’am, scouts honor.”

“Stop calling me ma’am, you weirdo,” you say, but there’s no malice in it. You push yourself up to your knees, move so you’re straddling his chest, and then without any further conversation or fanfare, lower your come-covered pussy to his mouth.

He wastes no time either, parting his lips against you and licking into your folds, tonguing your slit and moaning as he tastes himself on you, in you. His hands come up to grope at your ass, pulling you further onto him, holding you down, wanting his face buried in your pussy. Your grasp at the headboard, holding onto it for support as Steve laps noisily at you, his mouth sucking and slurping his own spend from inside of you, swallowing his release and your arousal both, eyes fluttering closed at the taste of you both combined.

“Steve,” you resume moaning his name, one hand slipping from the headboard as you press it to your clit again, rubbing at the sensitive bead as Steve eats your pussy with abandon, like there’s nothing else he’d rather be doing, ever. His tongue slides into you, your slit slippery with his come and your own fluids, and you shudder as you feel it drip out of you into his waiting mouth.

“Taste so—fucking good,” he manages to utter from between your pussy lips.

“I’m—close,” you tell him, and the wet sounds of his mouth on you resume, the feeling of his lips sucking at your folds, drawing them into his mouth, making you quiver on top of him. “Steve, babe, I’m—”

“Mhm,” he encourages you, tongue moving against you as he squeezes your ass, fingers pressing divots into you as he holds you down, and you grind your cunt down against him.

Your fingers slip over your clit at the perfect angle—finally, you found it again—and you keep doing it, pressing a little harder, moving them a little faster, and then, your body curls up on itself, your other hand leaving the headboard to curl into Steve’s mop of hair, holding tight to him as you tremble on top of him, your cunt squeezing down around nothing but his tongue, still inside of you, fucking into you as best he can while you’re so tight, and you tear your fingers away from your clit because suddenly, suddenly it’s all too much, it’s all way, way too much and you pull up and off of him, falling back and landing roughing on his chest, wetting his chest with your pussy, dripping come and saliva onto his front.

“Mm,” Steve says, and you glance up at him, still breathless. His lips are pursed, and he points at his mouth and then at yours. You slide yourself back, whimpering as his softening cock slicks through your folds, but you end straddling his thighs as he sits up. His hands land on your arms, pulling you close, and he takes your mouth in a searing kiss, lips pressing to yours. You part them, already suspecting what he’s angling for, and once you do, his part too, tongue slipping between your lips, pushing the mouthful of his come and yours into your mouth. You take it in, not pulling away, just kissing him back; you pass it back and forth, swapping spit and come until finally, you let it slide down your throat, the mouthful making you moan against Steve’s lips as the taste of both of you lingers on your tongue, the scent of sex still hanging in the air too.

Your cactus - they don’t come in litters by the way, they’re not puppies. A cluster, maybe? Either way I like that it leans. Gives it character. Who needs a fully upright functional cactus when the leaning one still flowers?

One more thing. You don’t need to apologise for the emails. Maybe I shouldn’t have listened to all of them. I’m glad I did though. It was good hearing from you, even when you weren’t really writing to me.

Take care. Gator.

Re: (no subject)

From: [email protected] 

To: [email protected] 

Date: 24 Oct 2025

Hi Gator,

House of Pain, huh? I’ve had “Jump Around” stuck in my head for five days. I’m blaming you for that. Coincidentally, it is my go-to song choice at karaoke. I know all the words.

If you can find a good audio-described copy of 2001 - A Space Odyssey, you should watch it. Your roommate is right, it is a good movie.  I took my dog for a walk earlier, before it got dark, and there’s a huge tree trunk that washed up years ago that sort of looms on the shore like the obelisk in the movie.  I thought about it, then I thought of HAL, then I thought of your software. Was it hard to learn how to use it?  Does your accent give it any trouble? Mine does sometimes when I use voice commands in the car, I’ll be trying to get it to call someone and it decides I’ve asked it to find directions to somewhere random instead. That’s annoying.

So you live with two other guys, and you have a support worker. What’s that like? How do you spend your days? One thing I remember is that boredom doesn’t suit you - I hope Britt has a lot of patience if she has to deal with a bored Gator Tillman. God help the girl.

Re: (no subject)

From: [email protected] 

To: [email protected] 

Date: 26 Oct 2025

Karaoke. I didn’t have you down for karaoke. I’m going to need to know more about this at some point.

The obelisk thing - okay, that’s a good comparison. I’m adding 2001 to the list. Britt has a whole system for finding audio described stuff, she set it up on my laptop, so that’s not the problem it used to be. The accent thing - yes, constantly. The software and I have an ongoing disagreement about certain words. It keeps hearing “marsh” when I say “wash”, which makes no damn sense. Mikey thinks it’s the funniest thing that’s ever happened to anyone. He’s an ass.

What’s it like living here? It’s okay. It’s a lot, sometimes, living with other people, but it’s easier than the last time I did it. Britt is good at her job and doesn’t take any of our stuff personally, which you have to respect. Dom is anti-social, Mikey talks too much in the evenings, and Greg - one of the overnight support workers - once talked me through a whole situation at two in the morning and then made me go to the ER anyway, which I needed but was being stubborn about. The routine helps. I’ve got things I do during the week that I didn’t used to have, a group I go to, a kitchen session where I’m learning to cook properly, Joshua twice a week, and I meet Dot most weeks too. The routine fills the days. Some days that’s enough and some days it’s not, but most days lately it’s been enough.

Boredom isn’t really the problem. Turns out there’s a lot to keep you busy when you’re learning to do everything differently.

What’s your dog’s name?

Take care. Gator.

****************

He books the longer session himself, which he knows Joshua notes without commenting on out loud. Two hours instead of one, starting at two in the afternoon, which means he should be inside and occupied at home through the worst of the early evening when the streets start filling up.

Joshua had been expecting it. Gator could tell from the way he’d sounded on the phone - not surprised by it, just ready, the way of someone who has already cleared the time in their head before being officially asked.

They don’t talk about Halloween directly. That’s not how it works, not with Joshua, not with this particular thing. They talk around the edges of it - about control, about the difference between responsibility and punishment, about the work of learning to carry something without being flattened by it. Joshua asks questions that don’t announce themselves as questions. Gator answers them as honestly as he can, which is more honestly than he could have managed a few months ago, which he thinks feels like something.

At some point, maybe an hour in, Joshua says, you know she doesn’t blame you for it. Not anymore.

I know, Gator says.

Do you believe it?

He holds onto that for a little while. Noise from the street outside carries through the office window - a child’s voice, high and excited, followed by the shriek of someone who has been successfully scared.

I’m working on it, he says.

That’s enough, Joshua says. That’s exactly enough for today.

The session runs the full two hours. By the time he’s out on the street it’s past four and he can feel somehow that the light has gone and Stillwater has committed fully to Halloween - he hears passers-by talking about the carved pumpkins on porches, and the strings of orange lights in windows. A group of small children cross the road ahead of him with an adult he can hear but not see, the adult saying wait for me, wait for me in the tone of someone who has been saying that all afternoon.

He finds the bus stop. He waits.

On the bus he takes out his phone and puts an earbud - just one - in. He navigates to the email - her reply to his question, received two days ago and not yet answered because he’s been thinking about what to say, which is new, the thinking before the saying, something Joshua would comment on if he ever mentioned it.

HAL reads it back to him in its flat generic accent.

Flynn.

Just the one word. Her dog’s name, given to him freely, like it’s the most ordinary thing in the world to give someone like him something he asked for.

He thinks about it for the rest of the journey. The bus moves through Stillwater’s Halloween streets, the sounds of it coming through the windows - laughter and doors and the occasional distant firework - and he sits in the middle of it with his phone in his hand and her dog’s name in his head and something happening in his chest that isn’t anything to do with the heaviness of the date, that is in fact the opposite of it.

He’s still sitting with it when the woman across the aisle pats his shoulder and says, have a good Halloween, honey, and he realises his face has done that thing it does without his permission.

Thanks, he says. You too.

He gets off at his stop. He walks the half block to the house, his cane finding the familiar path, the smell of woodsmoke and something sweet from a neighbour’s porch, and he goes inside and upstairs and sits at his desk and pulls up the email app and starts talking.

“Hey. Flynn’s a good name. Tell me about him.”

****************

Re: (no subject)

From: [email protected] 

To: [email protected] 

Date: 06 Nov 2025

Flynn sounds like exactly the right kind of stubborn. Mikey has opinions about the name - he says it’s a good name for a dog who knows he’s good looking, which I think is a compliment to Flynn and an insult to everyone else simultaneously. That sort of talk is pretty typical for Mikey. What sort of dog is he? Is he a mutt, or a breed?

It snowed on Saturday. First proper snow of the year - I knew it was coming, the air had been doing something different for a few days, that kind of cold that means business. But I still wasn’t ready for it. I was on the bus when it started and I could hear it before I understood what I was hearing - the sound the wheels make on the road changes, the whole of the outside changes, and then someone near the front said “oh, it’s snowing”, and I just sat there and listened to it come down. I don’t know what I expected. I’ve been in snow before, obviously. But this was different somehow. Quieter than I expected. It settled.

Group on Tuesday was good. Leticia was late - her car wouldn’t start in the cold - so we just sat there for a while, the five of us, waiting. Marie said, “well, I’ll tell you what I heard on the way here”. And she did. She talked for about ten minutes - the sounds of her street in the morning, what the coffee place on the corner smelled like, the noise of the bus she takes. Nothing about what she might have seen though. I don’t know if she knows she does that. I didn’t say anything.

Michael in the cooking workshop has started teaching me to bake. Cookies, this week. The first batch went about as well as you’d imagine - Michael was very nice about it, which tells you everything. The second attempt was a little less burnt. I’m going in on Tuesday with the goal of producing something actually edible. I’ll report back.

Take care. Gator.

****************

The storms haven’t arrived yet. They’re coming - you can feel it in the air, the sort of heaviness that settles over the coast before the weather turns - but on this mid-November morning it’s still walkable, the beach is still accessible, the sea is doing something dramatic but not dangerous in the grey light.

Flynn runs ahead. You walk. The usual arrangement.

You’ve been thinking about what to write back to Gator’s last email. Not anxiously - that’s new, the not-anxious quality of it, the way the back-and-forth has settled into something that feels more like conversation than negotiation. You’d told him about Flynn’s name origin, and he’d come back with a whole thing involving his roommate Mikey and a movie marathon and a very strong opinion about naming conventions for animals that you’d found genuinely funny. You’d written back the same night and told him about the Therapet training process, how Flynn had come to you as a failed police dog, already partly trained, already himself, just needing the right context to be useful in.

He’d said, “that sounds like most people actually.”

You’d thought about that for two days.

Flynn doubles back, checks on you, accelerates away again toward the northern rocks. You watch him go and take your phone out of your jacket pocket and think about writing something, here, now. You look out at the ocean, the vast grey ahead, knowing that somewhere out there the winter storms are building up.

You put the phone away.

You think, “I’ll tell him about the storms when they come.”

You walk.

****************

Re: (no subject)

From: [email protected] 

To: [email protected] 

Date: 24 Nov 2025

Hi Gator,

Flynn says thank you for asking, the groomer was great. He’s doing well. He had a very important Sunday last week - we went on a Therapet visit to a care home along the coast, his regular placement. He has a favourite resident there - had, I should say. She died in September. Her name was Mrs Okafor and she was eighty-four and she used to call him Ọba mi, which is Yoruba for something like “my king” - it’s lucky he doesn’t speak Yoruba because that would have gone straight to his head. Her daughter told me at the funeral that she talked about Flynn every week, and that she’d thought he was something her mother had dreamed up. She’d been living with dementia, so sometimes the things she’d talk about had happened forty years ago, if they’d happened at all. But he’s very real and he’s asleep at my feet right now, dreaming about something, his legs going nuts. Whatever it is, it looks like hard work.

We spent most of the afternoon there. There’s a man who’s been living there since 2018, Walter. His son and grandkids moved to Arizona for work last year and the nurses in the care home said they could see him fading every day, like he’d given up. No one else comes to visit him - except for Flynn. Walter tosses a ball every so often for him, which Flynn brings back each time, and they sit together and Walter tells him stories. Sometimes I stay to listen, but I always feel a little like a spare part - the residents don’t really need me, it’s Flynn they look forward to seeing. He’s very good at his job. The nurses say Walter’s doing better now. I hope that continues. I’m going to bring him some magazines next week - he loved going fishing with his son, so I’ll try to find some angling magazines or something like that.

Thanksgiving this week. I’m spending it with my friends Esha and Kim - they’re a couple, they live about ten minutes from me, they’ve been here longer than I have and they’re the closest thing I have to family out here. We used to host a big dinner for everyone in the community who didn’t have anywhere to go, which was a lot of people when I first arrived. Three years on, most of those people have coupled up or moved away or found their people, so now it’s just the three of us with too much food and a very competitive game of Scrabble that Esha always wins. I don’t mind. It’s warm and it’s ours and that’s enough.

What are your plans?

Re: (no subject)

From: [email protected] 

To: [email protected] 

Date: 01 Dec 2025

Sorry for the slow reply.

I spent Thanksgiving with Dot and her family. Dot is - she’s complicated to explain. She was my stepmom for a little while, before Karen, but when I think about it, she didn’t ever really feel like a stepmom. She’s only a couple of years older than me so that might be part of it. The truth of it all is pretty bleak. Anyway.

She’s been - she's important. That’s the clearest way I can put it. She got me out, which is a long story, and now we have coffee most weeks and she picks me up from Joshua sometimes and on Thursday she made me sit at her table with her family and pass the cranberry sauce and pretend I knew what I was doing, which I didn’t, but I figured it out. We never really did Thanksgiving properly, in Lehigh.

Her husband Wayne cooked. He has opinions about stuffing. Strong ones. I’m not going to weigh in on the stuffing debate because I’ve only been out of jail since May and I don’t have enough data yet, but I’ll say this - it was good. Dot’s daughter Scotty was there too. She’s sixteen and she doesn’t miss much. She’s a good kid. It was - it was okay. More than okay, some of it. I didn’t know what to do with most of it, if I’m honest. It’s been a long time since I was at something like that.

Your Mrs Okafor - I’m sorry. She sounds like she was something. Sounds like she had good taste in dogs, and people. Walter likes fishing? He’ll like the magazines. That’s a nice thing you’re doing for him. I don’t think you’re as peripheral to Flynn’s job as you think you are.

Esha and Kim sound good. I’m glad you have them.

Happy late Thanksgiving. 

Gator.

****************

The smell of it hits him at the door.

He’s been to Dot’s enough times now that the house has its own geography in his head - the three porch steps, the door that sticks slightly in its frame, the right turn into the living room, the left into the kitchen where the island is, where he knows to put his cane. He knows the distance from the front door to the couch. He knows which floorboard creaks in the hallway and has learned to step over it out of habit, though he’s not sure why, nobody minds.

But he doesn’t know this smell. This is new.

Turkey and something sweet - sweet potato maybe, or the cranberry sauce Wayne has been making since seven this morning according to Dot, who had called at eight to tell him this in the tone of someone filing a report. Underneath that, there’s sage, butter, cinnamon, and the dry heat of an oven that’s been on since early morning. It’s a lot. It fills the house. He stands in the doorway for a moment longer than necessary, just holding it.

“You okay?” Dot, from the kitchen.

“Yeah,” he says. “Just - it smells good.”

He can hear her deciding not to say something, which is its own kind of saying it.

“Come on in,” she tells him. “Wayne needs someone to tell him the stuffing is fine.”

“Is it fine?” 

“Oh yeah, it’s incredible,” she smiles. “But he needs to hear it from someone other than me and Scotty.”

He hears Wayne working at the stove with the concentrated energy of a man who takes his cooking seriously and knows it. Gator can hear him moving - the rhythm of someone who knows their own kitchen completely, who has been cooking in this space for years and doesn’t need to think about where anything is. He finds that comforting in a way he doesn’t examine.

“Gator,” Wayne says, without turning around. “Glad you’re here. What do you know about stuffing?”

“Nothing,” he says, as a cold Coke bottle is pressed into his hand. “Not a damn thing.”

“Perfect,” Wayne says. “Unbiased opinion. Try this.”

Something is put in front of him - a spoon, he thinks, and then the smell of it, sage and butter and something else, something that’s been cooking long enough to become its own thing. He tries it.

“It’s good,” he says.

“Of course it’s good,” Wayne almost laughs, satisfied. “Dot thinks I put too much rosemary in.”

“Hey, I didn’t say too much,” Dot cuts in, from somewhere behind him. “I said a lot.”

“Those are the same thing, Dottie.”

“They’re not.”

He stands in their kitchen listening to them argue about herbs with the ease of people who have been arguing about the same things for years and enjoy it, and something in his gut does something he doesn’t have a word for. Not envy. Not quite. Something adjacent to it, and also something else entirely.

Scotty arrives from upstairs at some point - he hears her on the stairs, the footsteps of a teenager descending without urgency - and she says hey, Gator, in his direction, which is a little warmer than the first dinner, and then she immediately starts an argument with Wayne about the music he’s got playing, which Wayne loses, and then the kitchen fills with something loud and vaguely familiar that Scotty informs him is essential Thanksgiving listening, which he has doubts about but doesn’t say a word.

He finds a place at the kitchen island and stays there. Not in the way, not quite participating, just being present. Learning the choreography of it. Dot passes him things without being asked - a dish to hold, something to mash, small tasks that fold him into the preparation without asking him to know what he’s doing. He notices she’s doing it. He doesn’t say anything.

At the table Wayne says grace, which Gator hadn’t expected - a short, plain thing, nothing elaborate, nothing like his father’s self-indulgent speeches - just gratitude for the food and the people around the table and the year that’s been. He sits with his hands in his lap while Wayne talks and thinks about the years before, the Thanksgivings in Lehigh that weren’t really Thanksgivings, that were just days when Roy was present and required things of people and called it a celebration.

This is different. This is the thing itself, he thinks. Whatever this is supposed to be - this is it.

“Could you pass the cranberry sauce?” Dot asks, to him specifically.

He finds it. He passes it. He gets it right.

“Thank you, hon,” she says, exactly as she would to Wayne or Scotty, exactly as though he’s always been here, exactly as though this is ordinary.

He decides to let it be ordinary.

Later, when Scotty has disappeared back upstairs and Wayne is doing something in the kitchen that involves a lot of clattering, Dot sits beside him on the couch.

“You doing okay?” she asks. Second time today.

“Yeah,” he says. “I think so.”

“Good,” she says, her hand on his arm. And then, after a moment, she leans in beside him, conspiratorially, lowering her voice to a whisper. “Save me from more playlist fights at Christmas?”

He thinks about it. About the smell at the door, and Wayne’s stuffing, and the cranberry sauce passed correctly, and Scotty’s playlist, and grace said plainly over a table that had room for him at it.

“Okay,” he says. “I’d like that.”

****************

Re: (no subject)

From: [email protected] 

To: [email protected] 

Date: 03 Dec 2025

Hi Gator,

December on the coast is a whole different thing from the rest of the year. The sea has been genuinely angry this week - two days of storms that kept us off the beach entirely, which Flynn took as a personal affront. He’s been pacing the cabin and whining at the door, stopping sometimes to look at me as if I’m responsible for the weather, which I’m not, for the record. We did get out yesterday when it eased off, but we stayed well back from the waterline - the waves have been coming up high and fast and neither of us felt like finding out what that felt like up close. The big logs on the shore have been rearranged by the storms, some of them shifted twenty feet from where they usually sit. Flynn assessed the situation and decided his usual log was unacceptable in its new position and staged a small protest. I let him have it. It’s been a hard week for the dog.

Work is steady. We’re in the quieter stretch before the end of year reporting period, which means I can breathe for a few weeks before everything gets busy again in January. I’ve been using the time to get ahead on some things, which is either virtuous or compulsive depending on how you look at it. Probably both.

I’ve been watching the weather reports for the midwest this week - I do that sometimes, check the forecasts for North Dakota out of habit. I’ve started checking Minnesota too, lately. How’s the snow in Stillwater? I keep seeing warnings for the region. I imagine the bus route gets interesting in winter.

I hope you’re keeping warm.

Re: (no subject)

From: [email protected] 

To: [email protected] 

Date: 07 Dec 2025

Flynn staging a protest is the funniest thing I’ve heard all week. 

Yes, the snow is definitely here now. It’s been snowing since the end of November, on and off. The bus route is fine - the drivers know what they’re doing and the city keeps the main roads clear. The halfway mark is different in the snow, the sound is different, the way the wheels sound on the road, the way the air feels when the doors open at each stop. Everything is quieter. I didn’t expect that, how quiet it gets. In Lehigh the snow was loud somehow, or maybe just everything around it was loud and the snow didn’t change that. Here it just settles. The whole city settles under it and gets quiet and I find that I don’t mind it at all.

I don’t know what the weather is like where you are now - I don’t know what it’s like on the coast in winter. But I remember what snow looked like in North Dakota. The plains especially. Nothing stops it out there, it just goes, as far as you can see in every direction and then further. I remember thinking it looked like the end of the world and also like the beginning of it somehow. I don’t know if that makes sense. Did it feel like that for you?

I’ve been thinking about Christmas. Dot’s already sent me approximately nine hundred messages about the playlist argument situation, which I’m staying out of. I told her she’s on her own with that one. Scotty and Wayne have these running battles about music - there’s nothing angry in it, but they argue and fight about bands and songs and playlists and. I’ve never seen that before. They fight like they’re having fun about it. I think they are. They always laugh, at the end.

This is going to sound strange. I was thinking about the office - the one in Dickinson, the main building. And I remembered you always had a little Christmas tree. In the corner of your office, or near your desk, I can’t remember exactly where. Little green thing, covered in glitter. Do you still have it?

Give Flynn a scratch from me.

Stay warm. Gator.

Re: (no subject)

From: [email protected] 

To: [email protected] 

Date: 10 Dec 2025

Hey,

I can’t believe you remember that tree. I bought it in K Mart in a rush one morning on the way to work, on a whim. I saw it at the counter and just grabbed it, and then once it was on my desk it looked so pathetic being the only Christmas thing in there, so I went back after my shift and bought the lights and glitter and paper chains and ornaments. I managed to fit everything in a box the next January and I stored it in the basement, beside the uniform supply room. The box is probably still down there. Maybe someone found it, and it’s being used again?

The coast is usually mild but stormy. It doesn’t get so cold where I am, but further inland or on higher ground it can get colder and there’s usually snow at some point. I mean, I say mild, it’s somewhere around forty-five degrees which is still pretty damn cold but not cold enough for ice or snow.  The rain, though. Some days the rain feels endless. It seeps in everywhere, into your bones even. It comes down hard and fast, then eases just a little before the wind brings in more heavy rain. It’s thick and relentless, every day. Weirdly, I like it. I like the dramatic weather. It feels like the whole coast is getting clean.

I remember the snow, and yeah, it felt like the end and the beginning all at once for me too. I remember how quiet the plains got, even with the wind. It was like a thick blanket had been laid out over everything. It was beautiful.  I miss it, sometimes. I miss parts of it.

How are you feeling about Christmas and New Years? Any plans? You and the guys in the home going out on the town?

Flynn appreciated the scratch.  I appreciated the email.

Talk to you later.

Re: (no subject)

From: [email protected] 

To: [email protected] 

Date: 16 Dec 2025

The coast getting clean - I like that. It sounds like exactly the right way to think about it.

I hope someone found the box in the basement. Things should get to keep being useful.

Christmas. I’m going to Dot’s - that was settled at Thanksgiving, her idea, I said yes before I’d finished thinking about it which seems to be a pattern when I’m with her. Wayne is already in some kind of pre-Christmas cooking preparation phase that Dot says is both impressive and exhausting. The playlist situation has escalated. I’ve been asked to weigh in and I’ve declined. I’m staying out of it. This is not my battle.

Mikey is going back to his family in Duluth for the week. Dom is moving out soon. Britt is taking some time off. The house will be quiet for a few days between Christmas and New Year, just me and the overnight staff. I don’t mind quiet. I’ve gotten used to quiet.

It’s been a while since I’ve done Christmas properly. A long while. I don’t really know what to expect from it, if I’m honest. Dot will make it okay. She’s good at that, making things okay without making a thing of making them okay. I’m grateful for that, even if I don’t always tell her.

Legally I am not permitted to go out on the town in any capacity. Strict ten pm curfew and regular drug and alcohol testing. I’ve dealt with it fine since May. 

What about you? Esha and Kim again?

Stay dry. Gator.

Re: (no subject)

From: [email protected] 

To: [email protected] 

Date: 21 Dec 2025

Hi Gator,

May is a long time to have dealt with it all fine. I’m proud that you’ve done that.

Esha and Kim are hosting Christmas Eve this year - their place is bigger than mine and Kim cooks so much you’d think twenty people were invited. She fills the whole kitchen with food, and we basically graze on it all night even after the elaborate meal she cooks to go with the snacks. There’s a loose group of friends they always invite for these things, some of them I haven’t seen for months. It’ll be good. It always is.

After that I’ll be on my own, which is exactly how I like it. I don’t fly home for Christmas - my mother is in Ohio now and going back invites questions I don’t have good answers for, and I’d rather not spend the holiday explaining myself or the last few years to people who knew me before. Flynn and I will stay here. I’ve taken some PTO over the holidays, and I’m looking forward to the time off. I’ll cook something good, drink something good, walk the beach on Christmas morning if the weather holds. 

There’s a real nice quality to the coast at Christmas when there’s no-one around - the sea doesn’t know it’s a holiday, the logs on the shore don’t know, Flynn doesn’t know or doesn’t care. Everything just continues. I find that comforting rather than lonely, which I know sounds strange but I think you might understand it.

New Year’s Eve I’ll pop into Tom and June Henderson’s place for an hour - they live nearby and always have people over, it’s warm and easy and I don’t have to stay long. New Year’s Day Kim drags us all out for a walk in the woods, which is non-negotiable and actually very good once you’re out there.

I’m glad Dot will make your holiday okay. She sounds like someone special.

Happy Christmas, Gator. I hope it’s a good one.

****************

You wake at nine, which is late for you, Flynn already at the bedroom door with the mournful whine of a dog who has decided that nine o’clock is a frankly unreasonable hour and he’s bored of waiting for you.

Your head is making its feelings known. Not badly - you’d had the sense to drink water before bed, which was the right call - but enough that the light through the curtains is doing something unhelpful and you lie still for a moment, taking stock.

Merry Christmas to you.

Kim and Esha’s last night had been exactly what it was supposed to be - too much food and too much wine and the bright warmth of a room full of people who’ve chosen each other, the fire going, someone’s mixtape doing its best work. Gabriel had been there, back from Stockholm for the holidays, easy and warm and exactly as he’d always been. You’d hugged him hello and talked for a while and somewhere in the middle of it you’d noticed - registered, filed, made note of - that there was nothing there. Not absence exactly, just… nothing new. He felt like someone you’d known a long time, comfortably, without a hint of a spark left between you. He felt like a friend and nothing more. You’d noticed that and moved on and had another glass of wine and danced badly in Kim’s kitchen at midnight, which was the right thing to do.

You noticed it again, briefly, walking home.

You’re noticing it now, and then you’re not, because Flynn is making a sound that means the situation has become urgent.

Alright, you tell him. Alright.

**

The beach is wild.

The wind is coming off the water hard and fast, the kind that gets inside your coat regardless of how well you’ve zipped and fastened it, and the waves are enormous - not dangerous, not today, but impressive, the kind of waves that make you feel appropriately small. The logs on the shore are half-buried in sand and stones from the recent storms. Flynn’s usual log is barely visible.

Today, Flynn doesn’t care. There are no canine protests today. Flynn is magnificent in this weather, bounding along the waterline with the loose joyful energy of a dog who has decided that wind is just more air and more air is always good. You watch him and feel, despite your sore head and the cold and the spray coming off the waves, something uncomplicated and good.

Happy.

The beach is completely empty. Just you and Flynn and the old logs and the sea, all of you exactly where you should be.

You walk further than usual. The cold is helping, the salt air cleansing, the cobwebs clearing with each gust. By the time you turn back you’re properly awake and your sore head has receded to a distant suggestion and Flynn is running circles around you with the enthusiasm of a dog who has thoroughly enjoyed himself and wants you to know it. He barks like he’s telling you all about it.

Good boy, you tell him. Good Christmas.

**

The shower is long and hot. You stand under it until the bathroom is entirely steam and then you stay a little longer. Then you put on the clothes you’d laid out the night before - the big soft jumper, the oldest pair of sweatpants, the thick socks - and you pad downstairs and feed Flynn and put the kettle on and survey the contents of the fridge.

Pastries. The canapés you’d made yesterday and wrapped in foil. The good cheese, saved for today. The bottle of something fizzy that’s been in the fridge since Tuesday.

You put the pastries and canapés in the oven. You make coffee. You find the tv remote.

This is your Christmas. You built it over three years, incrementally, one decision at a time - the walk, the shower, the movies, the food, the simple pleasure of a whole day with nowhere to be and no-one to perform okayness for. You love it. You love every quiet hour of it.

Flynn settles comfortably on the couch beside you, which he’s still not supposed to do, and you don’t say anything about it.

**

By lunchtime you’re two movies in and the pastries are gone and Flynn is asleep with his head on your thigh and outside the wind has picked up fiercely, the trees visible through the kitchen window moving in long slow sweeps.

The movie catches your attention again, and you laugh out loud, loud enough that Flynn lifts his head, half awake, before flopping back down to your thigh, and you reach for your phone before you’ve consciously decided to.

You stop, and put your phone back down.

You look at the television, where the scene is still playing, and you think to yourself, he’d find that funny. Not a general he. A specific one. You’d wanted to send him a message, a quick one, the kind you’d send to Kim or Esha without thinking - do you remember this, this bit, listen to this - and the impulse had arrived so naturally that you’d already had the phone in your hand before you’d caught it.

That’s not what he is to you, is he?

Flynn shifts in his sleep, his legs twitching, chasing something. You put your hand on him and feel the warmth of his chest rising and falling.

Outside the wind gusts through the trees and the coast roars somewhere below the cliffs and the movie continues, the scene already past, and you think, I could just email him. Not a text - you don’t have his number, he doesn’t have yours, that’s not what this is (is it?). But you could email him. Later, perhaps, when you’ve thought about what to say. Or you could not - you could just watch the movie, and tell him about it next time you write anyway.

You watch the movie.

You’re smiling, a little. You notice that too.

****************

New Year’s Eve he spends alone, which is what he wanted.

Mikey is in Duluth. Dom’s somewhere else. Britt is on vacation. The overnight worker - a newer guy named Pete who he’s met twice and likes - does his checks and leaves him to it. The house is the quietest it’s been since May, just the sounds of the street outside, cars and distant music and at some point the sound of people who have decided New Years Eve fireworks are worth standing outside for.

He’s in bed by ten.

He lies in the dark and listens to the house settle and thinks about nothing in particular, which he’s gotten better at. The year ending. The year that contained May, and the bus route, and the halfway mark, and Joshua, and Dot, and the group, and Marie’s yellow door, and the omelettes, and the emails. All of it fitting into the last seven months of one year, which seems impossible and is nonetheless true.

He doesn’t remember much about last New Year, and what he does remember he’d rather not. He knows where he was - Larson Unit, North Dakota, his second facility, the one that had decided early on that Roy Tillman’s blind son was worth making an example of. He knows what he’d taken to get him through the night, something that cost him more commissary credits than he had and had left him somewhere between sleep and not, and he knows what came after - the door, the hands, the fierceness of the things done to him by men who knew they wouldn’t be stopped, and others who let it happen. He’s learned, with Joshua’s help, not to follow that particular thread any further than he has to. He takes a long breath, counts to twenty, and comes back to tonight. The quiet house. Pete doing his rounds downstairs. Tomorrow, and Dot picking him up at two. It’s the end of a very long year.

He doesn’t need to see it through to midnight. He’s asleep before it arrives.

**

Dot picks him up at two pm the next day, which she’d arranged the week before, the way she does when she’s decided on something and he doesn’t really have a say in the matter. The curfew exemption had required phone calls and paperwork that she hadn’t mentioned to him until it was done, which is exactly how Dot operates. 

You didn’t have to do all that, he’d said, when she told him.

I know, she’d replied with a chuckle. Pack a bag, I’m bustin’ you out for the night.

The drive to Scandia takes the usual thirty minutes, no detours or diversions today. Dot has something on the radio - not the humming this time, just listening, comfortable in the car with someone else and not needing to fill it. He sits in the passenger seat with his bag at his feet and feels the new year begin through the window he can’t see out of, which is a thought he has and then lets go of, the way Joshua has taught him to let go of things that aren’t useful.

How was last night? Dot asks him, somewhere on the highway.

Quiet, he says. Good quiet.

That’s nice, hon, she says, with a gentle pat on his leg.

That’s the end of it.

**

The house smells different in January - woodsmoke and something baked, the dusty heat of the central heating doing battle against the cold coming in from outside. Wayne meets them at the door as usual, with the easy welcome of a man who is genuinely glad to see him arrive, which is one of the things he’s come to understand about Wayne - that the welcome is always real, never faked for his or Dot’s benefit.

Scotty is on the couch with her phone - he hears Dot chastising her for it as he’s hanging up his coat - and the huff of annoyance when Dot takes the phone from her hand and puts it on the table with a thud is as familiar as it is amusing. She reminds him of himself.

Hey Gator, she says.

Hey, Scotty.

They’ve gotten better at this, the two of them. The subtle calibration of how much space to take up around each other, how much to say and when to say nothing. She’s still cautious, still watching, still filing things away with the determined attention of someone who takes people seriously. But the caution has a different aspect now than it did at the first dinner. It’s not wariness. It’s just attention.

Wayne has made a casserole, which has been going since morning apparently, the smell of it meeting them at the door alongside the woodsmoke. Dot had told him this in the car with the satisfied tone of someone who knows Wayne’s beef casserole is worth driving thirty minutes for, which it turns out it is.

They eat at the table, the four of them, the new year settling around them. The conversation is easy - Wayne’s fishing plans for spring, Scotty’s band resuming practice next week, the incompetence of their bassist which Scotty describes with the exasperation of a girl who is fully baffled by the situation. Dot tells them about a book she’s been reading, the latest from the local book group she joined in the summer. He listens and contributes when he has something to contribute, which is more often than it used to be.

They’re talking about pets - Scotty wants to get a cat, which Wayne is open to but Dot is more cautious about, something about shedding and litter boxes giving her the dry heaves.

At some point, semi-related, he says, “…my friend has a dog. A German Shepherd. The dog does therapy work - visits care homes, that kind of thing.”

He’s smiling before he’s finished the sentence. He can feel it arriving on his face without his permission, the gentle joy of it, and he lets it stay because by the time he’s noticed it it’s already there and there’s not much to be done.

He hears Dot make a sound - not quite a gasp, something in the region of one - and then the small deliberate click of her teeth hitting her glass as she drinks.

Wayne says nothing. He chews on his casserole, deliberately, and Gator’s sure he hears Dot kick out at his leg under the table.

“Wait, hold on -” Scotty, out of the blue, her fork tapping the edge of her plate idly.

He turns his head towards her voice, hoping for the best.

“- you have a friend?”

She sounds even more bemused than when she was talking about her wayward bassist.

”Yeah,” he tells her, with more nonchalance than he thought he was capable of. He feels a younger version of himself smirk, somewhere deep inside.

“Like an actual friend? That you talk to regularly?”

“Every week or so, yeah.”

He can almost hear the cogs in her mind turning.

“What kind of friend?” she asks him, eventually. “Like - is this a blind friend or a crime friend?”

Dot makes another sound, less ambiguous than the first. “Scotty Lyon, that’s - that is enough -”

”What? It’s a reasonable question. It’s not like Gator’s got that many options -”

He hears both Dot and Wayne erupt, in their own quiet way, trying to shut down any more insensitive remarks and that’s quite enough Scotty and you can’t just ask someone if their friend is blind or a criminal - that’s not how things work!

He sits with it for a moment, then bursts out laughing, loud and loose with it. The table around him falls suddenly quiet, their familial bickering forgotten. He can feel all three of them - Dot with her wine glass, Wayne with whatever expression Wayne is wearing, and Scotty, indignant and prepared to wait for his answer - turning to look at him.

“Neither,” he says once the laughter has settled. “She’s just a friend.”

“She.” Of course Scotty picked up on that.

“Yeah. She.”

”Your friend with a dog. What’s the dog’s name?”

Someone’s fork scrapes on a plate.

“Flynn. He’s a German Shepherd.”

He hears her repeat the name under her breath, trying it out. “That’s a good name.”

He smiles again, deliberately this time.  “Yeah, that’s what I said too.”

He hears her go back to her food. He hears Dot set her wine glass down with great care. Wayne says something about the casserole that nobody quite responds to, which Wayne accepts with his usual equanimity.

The dinner continues, and New Year’s Day continues with it. And he sits at the table in the warm house in Scandia and thinks about a German Shepherd on a Pacific Northwest beach and a woman who told him the coast gets clean in the rain, and he lets himself smile about it because Scotty has already seen it and there’s no point pretending otherwise.

**

Dot shows him to the guest room later, long after dinner.

The room has been prepared - he can tell from the freshness of the air, the slight lavender hint to it, the way the space is clear around the bed, the nightstand accessible, his phone charger already in place within easy reach. Dot would have thought about all of this. Dot would have moved the furniture slightly, checked the route from door to bed to bathroom, done it quietly without making it a big deal. That’s who she is.

He doesn’t say anything about it. Saying anything would make it a thing, but he squeezes her hand once, then twice, and she says his name, just his name, before she goes.

She leaves him to get comfortable, and he finds the edge of the bed. The sheets are crisp and slightly cool the way guest room sheets always are, and the house settles around him - Wayne’s television playing low somewhere downstairs, Scotty’s music through the wall, the January snow coming down hard against the windows.

He gets changed, slips into bed, pulls the thick quilt up to his ears and thinks, this is a good place to be.

He sleeps.

****************

Re: (no subject)

From: [email protected] 

To: [email protected] 

Date: 06 Jan 2026

Hi Gator,

Happy New Year. I hope the house was okay on New Year’s Eve - I thought about you, when the fireworks started going off along the coast. Flynn was unimpressed by the noise and spent the evening sitting on my feet, which I appreciated. How was dinner with Dot and her family? Any more music fights or has that all calmed down? The more you talk about Scotty, the more I like her. I think teenage me would have wanted to be friends with her.

I went for my usual long walk with the group on Saturday morning. The forest was quiet - it usually is in January, most of the day-trippers are gone and it’s just the regulars, moving through the trees in the cold and the wet. It was good. It’s always good. I looked like someone had turned a hose against me when I got back to the car, and Flynn didn’t look much better, but the wet was worth it.

I was talking to someone, on the walk. She said something that’s been sitting with me since - the details aren’t important, it’d take too much typing to explain and it’s too cold to type that much today. But I’d been talking about our emails, about who you are now and a little about what happened, and she asked me something I couldn’t answer.

So I’ll ask you instead, since you were there too.

Was any of it real? The outpost. Your apartment. That winter. Was any of it real, or was it just… circumstance? Two people stuck somewhere, in a shitty situation, making the best of it.

I’ve been wondering about that for a long time. I think I need to know.

Re: (no subject)

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected] 

Date: 09 Jan 2026

Yes. It was real. Most of it anyway.

The part where I. The diner. What happened there. That wasn’t real in the same way. It was a thing I had to do to get you out of something that would have been bad. Worse. And I know it was bad enough already. I know that, I do. I told you I was sorry for it and I meant it. But it was real, the outpost. The walk. And my place and everything before that. All of it.

It. 

It was the realest thing I’d ever had and it fucking terrified me.

I was in no position to be starting anything with anyone. You know some of what my life was then, maybe not all of it, but you probably know enough or can guess. And I knew that. I knew what it would mean for you to be anywhere near me or any of it and I let it happen anyway because I wanted it. Wanted you. That’s on me. I was selfish and I let it happen and then I had to end it the way I did because it was the only way I knew how to get you clear of what was coming.

I know that’s not an excuse. I’m not offering it as one. You asked me a question and I’m answering it.

It was real. 

And I’m glad you asked.

Gator.

****************

The email alert pings on his phone the next morning, when he’s sitting at the table with Mikey and Britt, listening to them bicker about the way she makes the coffee.

He holds the phone to his ear, and listens as the software reads it out to him.

That’s all I needed to hear.

And then - a string of digits.

I’ve made you use that speech to text software for too long. You can call, or send a voicenote, or text, or whatever.

He pushes his chair back from the table, ignoring Britt’s complaints when it scrapes harshly against the tiled floor. He finds the wall, then the open arch that leads to the hallway, then the bannister, then the stairs. Then his room. He listens to the email again, and again, making absolutely sure she’s given him what he thinks she has.

Her phone number.

He tells the phone to save it as a new contact.

**

He saves her contact as apt3b, not quite trusting himself to add her full name to it yet.

He doesn’t tell anyone.

Not Mikey, who is now echoing Britt’s complaints about the chair scrape when he comes back downstairs, and who doesn’t notice anything different in him because there isn’t anything different to notice, not on the outside. Not Britt, who makes a fresh pot of coffee with great pointed emphasis and slides a mug in his direction, almost goading him into complaining about it.

He doesn’t. Not today. (He finds Britt’s coffee to be better than Greg’s, but that’s no big compliment). 

He doesn’t tell Dot, who calls on Sunday evening to ask how he’s doing and gets the same answer she usually gets - fine, good, yeah I’m eating properly - and who he can hear deciding not to push for anything more, which is the thing about Dot, she always knows when not to push, and he’s grateful for it in a way he couldn’t have articulated six months ago.

He holds her number - the olive branch of it - like he’s shielding a spark from the wind.

That’s the only way he can describe it, even to himself. Something small and certain, cupped in his hands, kept out of the weather. Not fragile exactly - he doesn’t think it’s fragile - but it is private. His. The decision already made, sitting quietly in him, waiting for the right moment the way he’s learned to wait for things since May. Not anxiously. Just knowing it’s coming, and being okay with that, and letting the days be what the days are in the meantime.

Monday is quiet, and Tuesday is a full day.

The bus, the halfway mark arriving in the January dark because the days are still short, the icy cold of a Minnesota Tuesday in the second week of January. The group - Marie describing what she heard that morning, the sound of her street, the rhythm of it, less and less of what she might have seen - and him sitting with that the way he always sits with it, present and careful and not naming what he notices. Another kitchen session with Michael, something with fish this time, the smell of it not pleasant but he keeps it to himself. Joshua at four, the session running its usual course, him answering everything honestly except the one thing sitting quietly in his chest, which Joshua probably notices and doesn’t push on, because Joshua also knows when not to push.

He gets home at six. Mikey is watching something loud in the common room, the smell of whatever he and Britt made for dinner is lingering in the kitchen. He makes a plate of the leftovers and eats it at the table and washes up after, the ordinary end of an ordinary Tuesday, and then he goes upstairs.

Greg comes on duty later and sticks his head around the door at eight, the way he always does at the start of his shift. “Doin’ alright Gator?”

“Uh huh,” he says, fingers paused over the Braille book he’s been chipping away at for weeks. “Good day.”

“Nice,” Greg says, with a rap of his knuckles on the doorframe. “I’ll leave you to it.”

The door closes. The house settles. Downstairs the common room television is a low murmur through the floor, and outside the street is quieter, and his room is his room, the desk and the chair and the laptop and the phone on the nightstand where he left it when he picked up the book.

He sits on the edge of the bed.

He picks up the phone.

He tells the phone to open her details - apt3b, sitting there, the number underneath it - and he holds the phone for a moment, just feeling the weight of it, and the Tuesday evening quiet of the house around him.

Before he can think better of it, he tells the phone to make the call.

It rings once. He sits very still on the edge of the bed, both feet flat on the floor, his free hand pressed against his thigh. It rings again. He becomes aware that he’s holding his breath and makes himself stop doing that. It rings a third time and he thinks, she’s not going to -

Hello?

The word lands in the quiet room like something physical. Her voice, real and present and coming through the phone in his hand. He knows this voice. He’s been carrying this voice for six years without knowing that’s what he was doing.

“Hi, uh. Hey. It’s me. Gator.”

He hears her take a breath, sharp and involuntary. Then she swallows.

Gator. It’s really you. God…

Something happens in his chest. Not the breakdown of Dot’s kitchen, not the shaking - something quieter than that, something that arrives without drama and sits down and stays. He presses his free hand harder against his thigh, his fingers digging into the denim of his jeans.

There’s a long moment of quiet, where he just listens to her breathe down the line and knows that she’s doing the same. The house is settled around him - the television a murmur through the floor, cars moving along the January street outside - and none of it matters, none of it is the point, the point is her breathing in his ear and him breathing in hers and the six years between this call and the last time they were in the same space together folding into something smaller than he expected.

I wasn’t sure you’d call, she says. I thought maybe calling would be… I don’t know. I guess I just wasn’t sure you’d use my number. I was going to email you tonight actually, but… She trails off. He hears her swallow again. I’m rambling. Sorry.

“Jesus,” he says, and his voice comes out rougher than he intended, rougher than he was prepared for. “You sound just like I remembered.”

The silence that follows has a different colour to the one before. Warmer, somehow. Fuller.

She smiles. He can hear it in the way her breath changes, the slight shift in the silence on her end, Flynn moving somewhere in the background of wherever she is.

Yeah, she says. So do you.

He stays on the edge of the bed for a long time after the call ends, both feet still flat on the floor, the phone warm in his hand.

He asks HAL for the call duration. Twenty-three minutes and forty-two seconds. If anyone asked him what they’d talked about on the call, he’s not sure he could give a clear answer, but he knows it felt like they spoke for less time and somehow also much more time than twenty-three minutes and forty-two seconds.

He thinks, okay.