gluing teacups back together

the answer...yes! no! maybe! i think you are definitely onto something here. i didn't end up going specifically into what losing her virginity looked like for scrambled!reader, because ultimately the greater damage was done over the course of her marriage. canonically, she had most of her firsts in that relationship. but i do headcanon that she probably at least made out with/had non-PIV hookups with a few other guys in her first year of college before she met her ex-husband.

here are some specific options i toyed around with but ultimately decided against including in the final draft:

her first time was with her ex-husband, and was super safe/sane/consensual/loving. lowkey this is my favorite option, because i think there is a particular kind of hurt and betrayal that can only be doled out by a person who was genuinely good to you once upon a time. what do you do when one bad memory ends up tainting all of the good ones?

her first time was with her ex-husband, and was consensual but maybe a little bit rougher, maybe she was drunk,, and she went along with it because sometimes when you're eighteen you're like. well. this person says they love me, so whatever they do to me is out of love (very Perks of Being A Wallflower "we accept the love we think we deserve").

her first time was with someone else (there was a version of this draft where she and her ex-husband had been on and off throughout college, and so in that version she maybe lost her v-card in a random drunken hookup while she and Tyler were off-again). this feels the least likely to me, just because i decided to specify that all of her firsts (except her first kiss) were with her ex. but hey, nothing's impossible! and in this case, probably the trauma would be more the fact of it being less sane/her maybe not being able to remember so much what happened.

It's the third Tuesday since you first fucked. Olesya teased you at brunch the morning after, and you waved her off with an eye roll and a lie about how you were going to think about donors some more. The week after she didn't bring it up at all, which you take as a decisive win. You don't need her knowing. You don't need anyone knowing, and you're sure Ryland doesn't, either. After all, you promised him nobody would ever find out. Signed on the dotted line about it.

So when he walked into the bar that first Saturday after, you pretended at first not to notice. And when he went in for a hug, you acted like you weren't suddenly very aware of every place his body was pressed to yours, and every place he had touched you the day before, even though for a moment you were convinced everyone else could, too, like he'd left some kind of thermal map in his wake. You spoke with him only in a group, and you waited to leave until five minutes after he did, and walked another ten minutes to meet up at a different bar before letting him fuck you in the bathroom, and when you got home and showered and went to sleep that night you congratulated yourself on being very discreet.

Tonight you are, perhaps, less discreet.

It's not trivia, but you are at a bar. You've allowed yourself two drinks—you didn't drive, and also you think complete teetotalism might make Olya suspicious of the claim that you've put your baby quest on pause—and the drinks are making you a bit reckless with your eyes.

The drinks are making you linger on his hands, as he toys with a straw; his tongue, as he licks his bottom lip; the movement of his Adam's apple when he swallows.

You know what those hands feel like on your neck. You know what that tongue feels like between your thighs, and you know what his throat feels like beneath your mouth, and you are still deliciously sore from yesterday, when he visited you at your office after hours and picked you up and set you on the desk and pressed into you with your heels still on, and you are increasingly struck by the realization that you will never again know what it's like to live in a world where Ryland Grace has not been inside you.

There's a thrill to this, the sneaking around. The longer you do it, the less careful you feel yourself getting. Like you're daring yourself to get caught. Tonight, he waited only a very cursory twenty seven minutes before wandering across the bar to you.

“Smoke break?” he asked, gesturing towards the door.

“I don’t smoke,” you said, already getting up from your seat.

“I know.”

“You don’t smoke.”

“I could start. You have no idea how many vapes I have to confiscate every week.”

“That is, hands down, the unsexiest thing you’ve ever said,” you said. “Also, I think they call them juuls now?”

And then you were out the door, and around the corner, and any pretense of making conversation fled to the wayside, and now here you are, and he is looking at you like it’s the whole reason he came tonight at all.

His glasses are halfway on. His eyes are unbearably soft. It's the kind of look that cuts you to the quick every time, even though it's more or less his default, so you tug him closer and focus on the desire that blooms up behind the softness. Desire is bearable, you've learned. You know what to do with desire. Even now, a few weeks in, you cannot help but be a little thrilled by the knowledge of this, his desire for you, the physical proof of it hard and urgent against your hip.

It's almost enough to outweigh the pit in your stomach. 

This is the point, you know, where you should kiss. Under any normal circumstances, this is where the kiss would go. You know what it would feel like. You can feel the phantom of it on your lips. 

You're pretty sure, based on the way his eyes slip down for a moment, that he can, too. 

These are not normal circumstances. The circumstances you have drummed up for yourself include, in no particular order:

1) Resigning yourself to a life of happy singledom, wherein you raise a child by yourself

2) Sneaking around with your oldest friend in order to acquire said child (and, apparently, a baffling number of orgasms along the way)

3) Forbidding yourself from falling in love with him

4) In the interest of #3, forbidding yourself from kissing him on the mouth

So you don't kiss him. Just like you didn't kiss him in the bar bathroom, or against the wall of the foyer of his house the following Tuesday, or in the back seat of your car, or, on one memorable occasion, the front seat of his car (probably the most action it's seen in months).

Instead, you let your hands trace across his chest to settle on his arms. You turn him around, so that your positions are reversed. You give him a little push, hear the quiet exhale that escapes him when his back hits the wall.

You get down on your knees.

He gets his hands in your hair almost immediately. Not pulling, or pushing, just gathering. He combs back through it, catching any stray strands, and holds it up in the back of your head like a makeshift bun, and even in this he is so gentle, thumbs brushing at your temples, that all at once you have to put effort into keeping your hands from trembling as you undo the front of his jeans. You mostly succeed. Any remaining failure you choose to blame on the alcohol.

His underwear is gray this time. The same branded waistband. You are reminded of a few weeks ago—not when you were looking at his underwear, or even in the same room as it, but after you went home, when you were trying and failing to sleep, and you went down a rabbit hole of trying to find actual underwear with Bunsen burners on the band. It didn't take long to find.

You almost sent them to him, and then you stopped yourself.

It should have been an inside joke. A friendly gesture. To him, it would have been a friendly gesture. To you, it would have been yet more mortifying proof of your fundamental flaw, which is that you fall into things too hard, too fast, and you always have, and this is the one thing that you absolutely, under no circumstances, can fall into.

You tell yourself this as though it will somehow reverse the fact that you are already halfway down the cliff. You fell off this particular cliff twenty two years ago.

He's already hard when you free him from his underwear, hard and flushed and leaking at the tip. You lick your palm, run it over the head, smile at the sound this results in. A long, slow stroke up and down, repeated, because you like the feel of him in your hand, and you like the way his breath hitches, and you like this, this one, tiny way in which you can have any measure of power over him.

You retrace the movements of your hand with your tongue—first licking just the head, then tracing up along the entire length of him from base to tip, and he moans, unrestrained.

There's no reservation in him when he gets you alone, because he cares less. Because the stakes are lower. Because he has nothing to lose. You don't kid yourself into thinking this is anything more to him than a rebound; an opportunity to have easy sex after a breakup and do an old friend a favor. Two for one.

Does that mean you don't think he cares at all? No. Of course not. Ryland has always cared about you, has always tried to take care of you, even when he's done a shit job of it, because at the end of the day you are his friend, you are the little sister of his best friend from elementary school, you are the daughter of his mother's best friend from elementary school, and you see all of this in his eyes, you feel the weight of it settle over you like molasses, every time he looks at you.

When you look up at him, his glasses are three-quarters off. His hair is the exact kind of mussed it was when two years ago when you both walked into the bar.

You open your mouth. You take him in.

-

Two years ago

The hair is the first thing you see. The back of his head. Glasses over the ears.

You tell yourself you're imagining things. You tell yourself there are plenty of blond men. This is a lie; you reframe it. There are plenty of men in San Francisco. Some percentage of them must use hair dye. Some percentage of that percentage could be at this bar, on this night, in your hometown, and then he turns around and sees you and you see his brain glitch in the exact same way as yours.

"Hi," you say.

"Hi." His voice is a little lower than it was the last time you saw him. Lower and softer, even pitched as it is to carry the few feet across the bar. Of course, he was much younger, and much angrier, when you saw him last. You both were.

"What are you doing here?" you ask, crossing to him. You rest a hand on a stool, but don't sit. Sitting feels presumptuous.

"I live here. As of a few days ago. I'm back in the old house." He gestures at you with his beer. "And you…"

"Live here," you repeat. "As of a few months ago. Further out of the neighborhood, but I come here every week. They do a trivia night."

"I heard. Saturdays at eight. That's why I'm here."

"Of course." You stare at him. You can't help it. What helps is the fact that he is staring back, with just as little compunction. "Wow."

"Wow."

"Wow."

"Wow." He nods at the stool. "Do you want to sit?"

"Yeah. Yeah! Why not." You hook your jacket under the bar. "Espresso martini, and one of whatever he's having," you tell the bartender, and then turn back to Ryland. "Consider it a housewarming gift."

"You sure your husband won't mind?"

In lieu of a verbal response, you hold up your bare left hand, wiggling five bare fingers and pretending the question doesn't make the blood congeal in your veins.

"Oh. Shoot," he says. "I'm, um. Sorry."

You squint at him.

"What?" he asks.

"Shoot?"

"Oh. Yeah. Yeah, uh, my first ever performance review, I was told I needed to watch my language around the thirteen-year-olds. Some parents complained. Several, apparently. Stellar reviews otherwise. So since then I've. Adjusted."

"Thirteen-year-olds."

"I'm starting at Grover Cleveland in a few weeks. Mr. Clivers, you remember him, he retired, so now it's me, if you can believe it. Room two twenty. Teaching. I'm teaching, if that wasn't clear." His eyes slide back to your left hand. "And you're…separated?"

"Divorced." You twist at your ring finger with your free hand. "A few years."

"If I'd known—"

"I kept it pretty quiet." You shrug. "It's embarrassing. Admitting you were on a leash."

He doesn't answer that. He doesn't need to. You see the memory play back in his eyes.

You give him a smile that's not really a smile, and then: "I'm so sorry about your mom."

"Oh. Yeah. Thanks."

"The funeral. I wanted to, but. Things with Tyler were."

"Yeah."

"I felt shitty just sending a text, and then I. He'd. I didn't have your number in my phone anymore, and—"

"It's okay," he says. Gently. Like he really means it.

You give him a look. "It's really not."

"You're here now. Apology accepted."

"Did you get body snatched, or something?" You clap a hand to your mouth, but it's too late. "Sorry," you say, absolutely the least sorry you've ever been in your life, because he's also chuckling. "Sorry! You're just so…different." Your eyes drift over him, and you hold a hand up, waving it in a vague circle. "The same, but different. Very, like, mellow."

"So I've heard."

"What happened?"

He purses his lips. "Life," he says, bringing the bottle to his mouth.

"That's not an answer, that's a cliché."

"And if I ask what happened with the divorce?"

You raise your own drink in a toast, making a face meant to more or less convey touché, and take a long sip.

After a moment's silence, he says, "It was mostly the middle schoolers." You look at him blankly. "The middle schoolers happened. They are not nice."

"Is that so."

"Very creative with their insults."

"Taste of your own medicine, huh."

"I was never that brutal. Honestly, it's worse when they're not even trying. I mentioned NSYNC to a class last year, and they didn't know who that was, and then I said they were like One Direction, back in the day, and they also didn't really know who that was, and I said the band with that guy, the style guy, and they were all, like, he's in a band?"

"God, we're so old," you say, shaking your head. "Or you are, anyway."

He points the neck of his bottle at you. "Watch it."

"How long has that been a thing? The teaching?"

"This'll be my fourth year. I pissed off one too many people in the molecular biology academia pool. Guess you could say I splashed too close to the sun."

"Ah." You nod. "Life."

"Life," he agrees.

"Life." You stare. He stares back. "Sorry, I just. I'm still on the." The muscles in your cheeks are twitching. "Shoot is just. That's really good."

"I regularly and earnestly say fudge," he says, which breaks the seal. You giggle. You can't help it, and you don't want to help it, because he's giggling too, and the giggling turns to full hysterics, and possibly the people sitting at the bar around you think you're insane, and you don't care. You haven't seen Ryland Grace in nine years. You don't think you've laughed like this with him for fourteen.

"How regularly?" you barely get out. "How earnestly?"

"Way too much. To both." He claps. "You'll love this—I dropped a box on my toe the other day while moving, and I said, out loud, Christmas Eve."

"Christmas Eve!" Your mouth hurts from smiling so wide, and you press your hands to your cheeks. "Oh, that's gorgeous."

"I really meant it, too."

"You can't even take the Lord's name in vain? Since when is Grover Cleveland Catholic?"

"They're not. I'm just paranoid."

"No, of course, of course. You ever get a Jiminy Cricket in there?"

"I'll submit that one to the PTA for consideration." His eyes flicker back to your left hand again. Your fingers twitch as you fight the urge to cover it up. It's a hard habit to break. "It's really good to see you," he finally says.

"It's good to see you, too."

"I think the last time. I mean. I know the last time I saw you—"

"Wedding number five," you say grimly, holding up as many fingers.

"Right. I'm sorry. About everything I said. That time and—honestly, there's probably about twenty years' worth of stuff I could apologize for."

"It's okay."

"It's not. It's really, really not."

He's really, really right.

But also maybe not. If you'd been asked, nine years ago, if you could ever forgive Ryland Grace, you would have said no. Mostly because, at the time, he was seemingly incapable of apologizing for anything. Now, you can't help but look at him fondly. Time and memory are flattening the old wounds to scars, distant in the back of your mind, superseded by the fact of him sitting in front of you. Real. Breathing.

There are lines in his face that weren't there a decade ago. The last few bits of baby-faced softness are gone. His hair is longer than it used to be, and fluffy up top, like he recently ran his hand through it, and you want to run your hand through it. You tell yourself this is a normal product of being happy to see someone from your past. You almost buy it.

"Look," you say. "I moved back here because I needed a fresh start. The divorce had just gone through, and. I." Your fingers twitch. "The point is, all of that was a long time ago. Case in point: Greg, who I'm seeing now—in the flannel, over there—is very nice and very normal. And, get this, he actually likes when I have friends."

Something ticks behind his eyes. "Good. Good, that's. A real improvement."

"Yeah. So." You extend a hand. "Fresh start?"

He takes it. "Fresh start."

His hand is warm, and firm. You feel the callus from the way he holds a pencil. You feel the lines of his palm against yours. You feel things in your chest and your cheeks and the back of your neck that you should not be feeling during a handshake, and that you should definitely not be feeling three months into a relationship with a very nice and very normal guy.

"Or, you know, I'll do my best," he says. "Hard to forget the time you put Play-Doh in the microwa—

"Okay," you cut him off, freeing your hand to pick up your drink. Your fake indignance can't hide your real smile. "Maybe we go back to the part where you were trying to apologize."

-

Now

He tugs at your hair, and you moan around him. "Sorry," he says, immediately letting go. "Sorry."

You pull off, looking up at him briefly with his cock on your tongue, in a way that is, you have found over the years, very reliable in its ability to render a man speechless. 

"Do it again," you say, before swallowing him back down.

If he was going to say anything in response, it disappears into the groan he lets out, his head tipping back against the wall. To your delight, he does get his hands back into your hair. He pulls again, gentle. Hesitant.

There is no hesitance in your responding sound.

You can't take him all the way down right away. You don't even try; instead, you press the tip of him against the roof of your mouth, laving your tongue against the underside and letting your moans vibrate through him any time his fingers tighten in your hair. You are enjoying this far more than you had any expectations of. Maybe because it's him. Maybe because he has an objectively pretty dick, long and flushed and slightly curved at the end.

Or maybe it's just the sheer relief of finally, finally getting your mouth on him one way or another. You've resolved to never kiss him. You can at least have this.

You take him deeper slowly, in increments. You use your hand to cover the ground your mouth cannot, slick movements up and down the length of him, squeezing slightly every so often just to be a little mean. Just to get to hear what it sounds like, to hear how surprise briefly breaks his voice from groan to whimper, and to feel him try and fail to keep his hips from jerking into you.

By the time you get him deep enough that you don't need your hands anymore, he is so hard you wonder if it doesn't hurt, red and twitching, his pulse a real, tangible throb against your tongue. You have one hand on his hip, his ass, pressing through his jeans to urge him closer, and the other one tangled up in the hem of his shirt, pushing up to graze across his stomach, lean but soft, and you feel as the muscles beneath begin to tense.

"Okay. That's—ah—get up here."

You shake your head as much as you can with him in your mouth, which is not much, and pause only to say, "I'm busy."

"You—ah. Hang on, hang on."

He pulls you off of his cock with two hands fisted in your hair, and when you try to lean forward he holds you where you are. The tension of your hair wrapped around his fingers is delicious, hazy, and you feel the thrum of blood through your lips, your tongue, your throat. You look up at him, plaintive. "Is something wrong?"

"No, but I'm—I'm close. You should stand up."

"Why?" Your hands are still free, you remember. You bring one of them up. He groans, loosing one of his hands to catch yours before you can wrap it around him. It's not a foolproof plan; you have another hand, and you use it. You're gentle. Slow. Slow enough that he can think about it. A bead of precum rises at the tip, and you run your thumb over it. "You don't want to come in my mouth?"

"God," he breathes. "Yes, I want to, of course I want to, but that's not. I mean." Your tongue is lolling slightly out of your mouth, and you let your gaze flicker back and forth from his eyes to his cock, back and forth, back and forth, as you strain towards it. "The point. The whole point."

"Maybe we can make an exception," you say, then look up at him entirely. "It's going inside me either way, right?"

He lets out a low, shaky breath on a desperate vowel. "You can't say things like that."

"I don't have to say anything." You bring a hand to your mouth, and lick your palm, long and slow, savouring the taste of it, and then take two fingers into your mouth. "You're the one who keeps trying to make conversation." 

You bring your hand below your skirt. When you lean forward, this time, he doesn't pull you back.

Your fingers brush against your clit, over your underwear, as he reaches the back of your throat. It gives you something to focus on, something to distract from the overwhelm, as you breathe through your nose and relax your throat and press forward a little more, a little more. You're already wet, somehow. Very possibly you've been wet since before you got his pants open; from before he got you outside; from the moment you saw him in the bar and felt his hand pressed against the small of your back and imagined what that same hand would feel like, will feel like, later tonight when he presses into you.

You push your underwear to the side, slipping a finger in, then two, and match the rhythm and pace at which you are taking him with your mouth. It's simultaneously not enough—your fingers can't reach as far as his, can't curl at quite the same angles—and too much, too much stimuli, too many things competing for your attention as you let him fuck your mouth and pretend that's filling you where you need.

And the thing is—it's good. It's not enough, but it's good; you want more, but you're somehow satisfied, just like this, because you like to make him feel good, and because you trust that he will want to make you feel good, and the reciprocation may not be the whole point but it makes all the difference in the world.

The hand intertwined with yours tightens. He holds fast, gripping you as you grip at his waist, like that one point of contact is an anchor in the ocean. Like it's keeping him steady. Like you are keeping him steady, keeping him together, holding him the way he's always held you. The way he always manages to take you apart.

-

Eleven years ago

In your mom's defense, she really scaled down for her fifth wedding.

In lieu of a fancy venue, it's in the Grace's backyard, which is bigger than yours. Your mom is rewearing her first wedding dress, claiming that she'd been waiting for it come back in fashion. You're the maid of honor, having been passed the mantel by Mrs. Grace, who, thin and soft-spoken and freshly in remission after a grueling year of chemo, assured you that she was more than happy to take a backseat and let someone else plan the bridal shower for once.

You have put together and taken apart five separate plans for this wedding over the past six months. You are beyond relieved that things went off half as well as they did.

You were supposed to wear your last bridesmaid dress. Your last bridesmaid dress is several cup sizes old. So instead you went into the back of your childhood bedroom, and dug out something long and brown and satin, and steamed out five years' worth of wrinkles from where it had been living on the closet floor, and you wore it like it meant nothing to you at all.

Now you're wearing it sitting in a plastic lawn chair, swatting away mosquitos and watching the last few stragglers tear up the dance floor to Whitney Houston. Just like you watched them through "Sweet Caroline," and "September," and the Cupid Shuffle. Not that you mind sitting. It's good, for the maid of honor to oversee.

And, anyway, Tyler doesn't like dancing, and you feel bad leaving him at the table, even though he left for the bathroom and hasn't come back in three songs.

As always, your mom cried during the ceremony. As always, she claims its the final one. As always, you know she genuinely believes it. That's the thing about your mom: outside of her job, she isn't flighty, not really. She just loves hard. And you have an optimistic feeling, about Husband Number Five (he'll earn a name once they make it past the two year mark. You're optimistic, not stupid). With any luck, there'll only be two more weddings in your family's future: yours, and Josh's. Josh might never get married, which is fine, and you, much to your relief, are only going to have to date one person before you get married.

You're happy to be like your mother in every way but this. Her capacity for love is impressive, and exhausts you just to think about. You've only ever really had room in your heart for one person at a time.

Someone steps in front of you. "Hey."

"If this is about Aunt Irma throwing up in the bathroom," you say, looking very pointedly at your nails and very pointedly not at him, "then yes, I know, and I put Kristy on it, and if it's about which of the bridesmaids is single, the answer is no. Actually the answer is two, but I'm pretty sure they've already been dibs'd on, which is gross and terrible, but that's how it was conveyed to me, and if you were hoping for a different answer then you should have asked me this three days ago." You look up. "But also the answer then would have been no. Unless you've got your eye on Aunt Irma. She could probably use the win."

"Uh, I choose E?" He fidgets with his glasses, giving you a very sheepish, very smug, very him smile. "None of the above?"

He looks good from this angle.

He looks good from every angle, of course, that's always been the problem—and, worse, you're pretty sure grad school has made him aware of it. He's wearing a suit similar to his prom one, but not exact. He's grown since then. Same height, more shoulders. His glasses are all wrong, because they always are, in some new and exciting way. He has facial hair, too, a light beard that you know is soft to the touch from when his jaw brushed your temple, from when you hugged him hello, before Tyler cleared his throat and gently tugged you back.

You feel normal about all of this. You've had a solid five-year streak of feeling and acting very, very normal about and around Ryland Grace.

You see him when he comes over to get high with your brother in the basement on school breaks. You saw him a lot in the hospital, when his mom was there and your mom would visit. You've seen him bike down your street almost every day for the past two weeks. You do pleasant smiles, and civil hugs, and I've only ever seen you as a friend banter, and you do them well because you do only see him as a friend, because you have a fiancé and he has a revolving door of short-term girlfriends and it's been half a decade since you allowed yourself to hope for anything different.

It's not like how it used to be. Not really. You'll never be that close again. But that's okay. People change, and time passes, and life moves on. You, at the very adult age of twenty-three, know and understand this in a way you didn't at eighteen.

"Then what?" you ask. "No Blue Moons left in the cooler? You guys were on alcohol duty, that's all you."

He shakes his head, then gestures at the dance floor. "For old times' sake?" When you don't immediately stand, he adds, "Technically I still owe you one. From prom."

"A night I desperately want to relive," you deadpan.

"You're the one who wore the dress."

You glance over your shoulder. "I should wait for Tyler."

"Yeah, uh, I think he and Josh went around the side of the house? For a smoke?"

You're simultaneously annoyed and pleasantly surprised. You can count on no hands the number of times your brother and fiancé have voluntarily hung out. Still, you hesitate.

"Music's ending soon, right? I think this is the last song. Technically the song before this was supposed to be the last, but I pulled some strings." He nods in the direction of the DJ booth. "You haven't danced all night."

You look at the booth, and Colt behind it. You look at Ryland's hand. You look off towards the side of the house. You look up.

You give him your hand, and let him gently tug you to standing.

"These shoes are new," you warn as the two of you cross to the makeshift dance floor. "And expensive. You step on them, you're buying me a new pair."

He chuckles. "Yeah, sure." He brings you around to face him. One hand slides around your waist, warm through the fabric of your dress, resting respectfully above the small of your back. He keeps his other hand in yours, and you bring up your free hand to rest on his shoulder. "I'll put that top of list if my funding comes through."

"How is all of that going?" you ask as you slowly step in time. "You've been making some splashes, lately. In the molecular bio academia pool."

"Kiddie pool, with how fucking shallow it is." He brings your hand up to meet the other around his neck, and places both of his hands on your waist. "You've read my papers?"

"I'm thinking of going into medmal, when I graduate, so. Seems relevant."

"Right. Yeah, it's, it's going fine. It's good. I just need my PI to grow some balls. I started working under him a few months ago, but he knew who I was when I applied, and it's still like pulling teeth getting him to approve anything original."

You reach up and fix his glasses. He scrunches his nose, immediately fucking them up again. "By original, you mean splashy?"

"Hey, science takes cash. Splashy is good for getting money thrown at you, if you're not afraid of pissing people off."

"That's never been your problem, huh?"

He shrugs. You feel the movement of each muscle in his shoulders, his neck, beneath your hands.

"Maybe it wouldn't hurt to try catching some flies with honey," you say. "Like, your PI. Go along with his ideas for a little bit to get him to trust you more, and then start doing what you actually want to do."

He chuckles.

Your brows furrow, even as you laugh with him. "What?"

"Yeah, uh. Much as I appreciate the words of wisdom, I'm not sure I really need advice from the child bride."

You blink. Your feet are still moving only of their own accord. You'd leave the floor, if you weren't so convinced that you must have heard him wrong. "Sorry?"

"You're twenty three. What are you getting engaged for?"

"You sound like my mom. Who, by the way, got married at nineteen."

"Yeah, and look how well that turned out."

"Okay. Cool it. My point is, twenty three isn't even. I mean, I'm an adult. That's a normal age to get married."

"If you live in Wisconsin, maybe."

You swallow, and then continue the monologue you've had to deliver to pretty much everyone you know in the two months since Tyler proposed. "We're not even getting married until I'm done with school. That's another few years, at least. This is just a promise. It's a commitment."

"It seems more like a leash," he says. "You're moving across the country for him, you turned down Stanford—"

"Yale isn't exactly a consolation prize."

"It's not what you wanted. Plus, he's an asshole."

You laugh, short and bitter. "Got any evidence to support that particular hypothesis? Other than it takes one to know one?"

"It's not just me. Everyone thinks so. Josh hates him."

"Okay," you say, stung. It isn't like you need your brother to be best friends with the love of your life, but that's worlds away from hates. "Well, if Josh feels that way, he can tell me himself."

His eyes trace across your face. "You're always looking around for him."

You stop yourself mid-looking-around, furious at having been caught doing something perfectly innocuous. "Because he's my fiancé."

"Because he's your fiancé, or because you're scared he might catch you dancing with someone else?"

It's his tone that really pisses you off. How gently he says it. The edge is still there, but beneath it is a softness that's reflected across his entire face, his brows, his eyes, and the back of your neck is hot, and your arms are still around his neck, and you are so, so sick of Ryland Grace acting like he knows what's best for you.

"Because that's what you do when you love someone, Ryland," you say. "You look for them. You'd know that if you'd ever dated someone for more than three months at a time."

That lands. You can tell by the slight drop of that infinitely smug mouth. He tries to bluster his way through it. "Just because I'm not throwing myself at every half-decent option who comes along—"

"Throwing myself?" You step away. He lets you. "Nice, really nice."

He follows you the few steps off the dance floor. "No, I just mean—I'm not going to stick around with the wrong person just for the sake of not being alone."

You turn on him. "I am perfectly capable of being alone. I just don't have to be, because I'm not going to spend my life running away because I'm scared of being with the right person—"

You hear your name, in your fiancé's voice, from the end of the backyard, and flinch so sharply it's impossible to pretend it was anything else.

You step back. Your face is burning. You don't look at Ryland. You are intensely aware of the fact that he is looking at you, which means you are intensely aware of the moment he stops. "Thanks for the dance," you say.

"Right," he says. Then, more quietly, when you don't move, "Well, you heard him. Better go fetch."

You slap him.

Not very hard, but the sound of it—only a few people are looking at you, so it can't have been that loud, but it rings in your ears and your chest and the throb of your pulse through your palm. His cheek is pink with it. His glasses are askew. He doesn't bother making eye contact with you.

"Fuck you." It feels toothless, but you can't think of anything that will make the situation better or worse, so you force yourself to settle for toothless as you walk away.

He doesn't reach for you. He doesn't try to follow. He doesn't even call your name.

-

Now

He finishes with one hand in your hair and your name in his mouth, and you keep him in yours through the whole thing.

His free hand clings to yours, tight. Desperate. Wanting. The hand on your head doesn't push so much as it cradles, following you as you take the initiative to press forward, swallowing him down as deeply as you can, hollowing your cheeks until you can tell, by the sounds he makes and the shaking in his hips and his hands on your head, that it's too much, and only then do you pull off, breathing heavily, to rest your forehead against his thigh. You pull your own hand out from between your legs. You didn't get off; you didn't have the bandwidth to focus on it, which means now you are just wet and worked up and wanting.

When you shift, pressing your thighs together in a hopeless attempt at nothing, he takes it as a signal to help you to standing, giving you a better vantage point from which to appraise your handiwork. His chest is still rising and falling at post-orgasmic speeds. His hair, despite nobody touching it, is a disaster. His glasses are establishing their own area code.

He cups your face in one hand, gentle, and looks at you, and traces his thumb along your lower lip.

"Your lipstick," he says, apologetic.

You lean forward to kiss his neck, half to hear the sound it draws out of him and half to escape his thumb, his gaze, the softness of it.

"It's okay," you say against his skin. "It was a good use of it."

His hand slides around to the back of your head, your neck; the other takes the measure of your body, the landscape of it, running down over your back and your hips to land between your legs. His breath catches when he feels how wet you are.

He turns the both of you around, returning your back to the wall. "Can I—"

You nod into his neck.

His fingers trace over your underwear, feeling where you've soaked through the fabric, and you are making soft noises into his neck and you can feel it, you feel the moment when he's about to push your underwear to the side and—

Thunder. Far away thunder, but thunder.

You pull away from each other—not fully. Just enough to make eye contact. It's the most bearable eye contact you've made all night.

"Uber?" you ask.

He nods, already reaching for his phone. "I'll call."

-

Fifteen years ago

"Hey. It's me. Don't hang up."

"Josh isn't back in town until next week, you'll have to call him at school."

"I know."

The silence stretches. You don't hang up, but you don't help him, either.

"So," he finally says. "Freshman year. That's big. How's, uh, how were midterms?"

"What do you want, Ryland?"

"Brr."

"What?"

"Frosty. Like, you're being cold, like—it was a joke."

"Funny."

"You can't seriously still be mad about last year. Look, it was my first time going through a breakup, and I was still really messed up about it, and then you were. You were just—there."

"Great apology. You practice that one?"

"I'm trying to—"

"Look." You sigh, and then plaster on a smile so broad you know he'll hear it through the phone. "Just forget it, okay? That was ages ago. I don't even think about it anymore."

A pause. "Great," he finally says. "Okay."

"I'll tell Josh you called."

"I—"

You hang up, and flop back on the bed, and stare at the ceiling for a long, long time.

There's no reason for you to be upset about this. Prom was forever ago, and you've seen Ryland in passing plenty of times since then, and you haven't been angry. You've just been—distant. That's normal. That's fine. And, anyway, you have a boyfriend. You've had a boyfriend for about three months, and you're pretty sure you've cracked the code to happy, healthy, mature relationships.

Tyler brings food to class when you forget, and insists you sleep over so that you don't have to walk alone across campus in the dark. He kisses you in the middle of the quad, in front of everyone. When you walk into a party together, he keeps one protective arm slung over your neck, and when you go back to the dark of his attic dorm and twin XL bed you never have to worry that he's going to recoil from your touch. He's tall enough that you can wear heels, and smart enough to hold his own against you in an argument, and he makes you feel wanted.

He makes you feel wanted.

When you compare what you'd offered to Ryland—sneaking around behind everyone's backs for a few months—to this? You could laugh, really. So there's no reason why a twenty second phone call should leave you with tears pricking at the corners of your eyes. It doesn't make sense.

Then again, nothing you've ever felt about Ryland has really ever made sense.

So you cry anyway. You give yourself five minutes on a timer, and then you wipe your tears and dig out the informational pamphlets you received in the mail from various NorCal law programs, atop a backlog of Cosmopolitans (your mom leaves you her subscription when she's gone), and you flip through them all until your head is full of meal plans and finanical aid brackets and day-to-night looks, and nothing and nobody else.

-

Now

You love your shoe collection. In particular, you love the shoes you've chosen to wear tonight: a very sensible heel, perfect for the office and for a night out. They are strappy, but not too high. They are suede.

They are also, incidentally, terrible in anything but perfect weather.

You can walk fine in them—you're not eighteen anymore—and the storm still hasn't arrived quite to where you are, but it's muggy and grey and they're suede, for fuck's sake. You frown down at them as you stand on Ryland's front porch, waiting for him to find his keys.

"Shoot," he says, patting his pants agressively for the third consecutive time. You fight for your life not to tease him mercilessly about shoot. You've done it often enough in the past two years to straddle the line between inside joke and gauche. You settle for saving it to deploy at a later date. "I think—maybe they fell out in the car. Or else I left them at the bar?"

"Hopefully not behind the bar."

He groans, but he's smiling through it. "I think we've got to go through the back," he says, and so now you're following him up down the porch, up past the driveway, and the concrete is turning to mud and these are your favorite shoes.

He finds the spare key in short order, unlocks the door, notices you aren't right next to him anymore, and turns around. "What are you—oh, my god."

"They're suede," you say, fumbling with the buckle. It is, it turns out, much harder to unbuckle them when the humidity has rendered both your fingers and the fabric a little damp. "And the mud—I don't want to ruin them—"

You're in the air before you finish your sentence.

"You are just," he says, looking at you, then shakes his head, laughing, and you can't help but join him, laughing with your face pressed into his shoulder (he was much less muscular, the last time he carried you like this) at the absurdity of the situation as he carries you across his back lawn to the back door, and over the threshold.

"I can walk, you know," you say, as he kicks off his shoes without putting you down.

"Can is irrelevant," he says. "Like you said, they're suede."

"We're not in the mud anymore. This is hardwood."

"Hardwood could be terrible for suede."

"I think hardwood is pretty neutral, as far as suede is concerned."

"That's hardwood's PR answer," he says, and the bed is here, you've reached the bedroom, and he puts you down on the bed, and you sit, still a little giggly with your two drinks, and try again to unbuckle your shoes.

His hands settle over yours.

"Here," he says from his current position, which is apparently on his knees, on the ground, in front of you. "I can—" His fingers brush against your ankle as he undoes a buckle, pulls the strap back, eases the shoe off your foot, places it to the side.

As he tends to the other side, he presses his mouth to the inside of your knee, open, and as soon as the buckle is undone he lifts up his head and looks at you while he runs a free hand up your calf, up your thigh, under your skirt.

When he reaches your underwear, you let out a sound somewhere between a sigh and a whimper.

You are still wet from before, wet through the fabric, and his fingers press against the fabric and against the wet and against you and he is still looking at you. He looks at you as his thumb finds your clit, applying an amount of pressure that could charitably be called teasing. He looks at you as he pulls your underwear to the side and touches you directly, dragging a finger across your entrance but not pressing any further. He looks at you between kisses pressed in an upward trajectory along your thigh.

You aren't looking away. You don't know why you're not looking away, because the looking is unbearable. You just know that not looking is impossible.

He breaks eye contact to reach for your underwear. You lift your hips to allow him to pull it down, just until it's dangling from one ankle. He gets his hands more firmly around your hips at the same time he leans forward to get his mouth on you, he tugs you to the edge of the bed and you are flat on your back with your legs over his shoulders.

He tastes you like he is hungry for it.

Not that he ever lacked enthusiasm. Or technique, for that matter. A few weeks ago, he was good, genuinely good, at reading your reactions in the moment. Now he has done the reading. Now he shows you how terrifyingly quickly he has learned what you like, and occasionally that he has new ideas of things that you might like, and do like, and it doesn't take very much time before you are close. You were already close, on your knees outside, with him in your mouth, and your own fingers trembling and inadequate inside you. Now, he drags his own fingers along that same path, but it's more—more inside you, more intense for the fact that you have no way of knowing what he's going to do before he does it.

The orgasm shudders through you, gentle and languid, and you know he feels it because he keeps doing exactly what he's doing, not changing the rhythm, until you've crested the wave and you're coming down and he eases up to avoid overstimulating you.

He eases up. He does not stop.

"Hey," you say, reaching down to tug at his hair. This is maybe a mistake, because now the roles are reversed, and tugging his hair makes him moan into you. "I—oh."

He pulls off. His mouth only; his fingers are still inside you, slow. "I'm not done," he says, into the crease where hip meets thigh, and then, into your mons: "You never let me take my time with you."

"You take plenty of time with me," you say. The fact that you are producing coherent language at this point is a miracle worthy of canonization, because he is back on your clit, first with his tongue and then with his whole mouth, lips and tongue together, like he's kissing you.

"You never let me take as much time as I want." He curls his fingers a bit more, moving his hand with your hips as they lift off the bed a little. "You know, the contractions of the vaginal walls during orgasm help to draw sperm up deeper inside. Towards the uterus. Scientifically, this is useful to the cause. You can't argue with science."

"That doesn't make sense. That only works if there's sperm to. To. To draw up."

"I'm priming the engine," he says. "Putting one in the bank for later."

"That's not—that makes even less sense. That's, like, two half metaphors sandwiched into a quarter. Quarter metaphor," you say, and then you stop saying anything at all because he has his mouth back around your clit and he is sucking, and there are three fingers pushing into you instead of two.

Your muscles have all sorts of opinions on what the appropriate reaction to this situation is. The muscles south of your waist, especially—not just where he's currently the most focused on, but your legs (twitching), your toes (curling), your thighs pressing around his head with absolutely no input from your brain. He seemingly figured out how to circumvent your overstimulation fuse—while still riding the aftershocks of your first orgasm into the before-shocks of what appears to be a rapidly-approaching second—but you are sensitive. Shaky. The sounds you make are rapidly decreasing in dignity.

You press a hand to your mouth—half to stifle your own moans, half to give your mouth something to do—and you feel him shake his head, "mm-mm" muffled against you. One hand leaves your hip to reach up, feeling, grasping for yours. You give him your hand, slightly baffled.

He pulls back just enough to say, practically into you, "Don't." He squeezes your hand. "Let me hear you. I want to hear you. Please."

He gets his mouth back on you, and your head tips sideways. You can make out your reflection, just barely, in a sliver of window. He curls his fingers, and it pulls a moan out of you from somewhere deep in your chest, and you do not try to hold it back.

-

Sixteen years ago

Your mother is out of town, and so is your brother, so Mrs. Grace invites you over to get ready.

She lets you rifle through a box of old lipsticks, and laughs when you make a face at the more egreiously frost-forward options. Sun through the bathroom window. Donna Summer crooning in the background. Hair in a curling iron; AquaNet, acrid in your nose, a fine mist that hangs in the air for a moment before settling in a thin film on the bathroom sink and the bobby pins scattered across it. Mrs. Grace is full-cheeked and smiling, her long blonde hair tied back in a ponytail, her fingers under your chin, delicate, as she brushes on a layer of eyeshadow. Whenever you think about her, years down the line, it will be like this.

"There." She pats your knee. "All done."

When you look at yourself in the mirror, you don't look that much different. You found your dress on consignment: bronze satin that gathers at the waist and falls like water to your ankles, which you have yet to twist in the shoes you borrowed from your mother's closet. The heels are three inches high. You have been practicing walking around the house in them all week, with mixed results. Mrs. Grace kept your makeup simple. You look a little more shimmery than usual, maybe, but—yourself.

When you come out to the living room, and see Ryland, his reaction (or lack thereof) confirms it. "You look nice," he says, and nothing more.

He looks nice. It's not that you've never seen him in a suit before, but you've never seen him in a suit for you. He didn't go to his own prom, you remember. Too busy. And the last time your mom got married was when you were sixteen. So it's been a few years. The suit is dark, and the tie is white, matching the boutonniere pinned to his lapel, and the corsage he pulls out of a box on the living room table.

"You never told me what color," he says. He reaches forward for your hand, and your heart freezes. "So I figured white was safe."

"Right." You let him slide the corsage on. Roses. "No, yeah, this is. This is great. Thanks."

"The car's ready out front, so—"

There's a flash from your left. Mrs. Grace, with the kind of disposable camera that she's still loyal to, despite the boys gifting her a digital camera for the holidays. "Not so fast."

Ryland groans, rolling his eyes. "Mom."

"Oh, shush. I didn't even get to do this with you last year."

"You got to with Colt. Same difference."

"Step in like that, perfect."

He stands just behind you, his hands resting gingerly on either side of your waist for a moment, before reaching further to take either one of your hands in his. You've taken dozens of photos with Ryland. You've hugged him dozens more times. There's no reason why this version of that same touch should be any different. Your pulse argues otherwise.

"No faces, Ry, you know I'll keep you here forever if you don't—"

"Mom."

"Smile!" The camera flashes. "One more!"

You feel his head turn, and you turn to look up at him. "Sorry," he mouths.

You're still smiling a little. "It's okay." You look forward just in time for another flash.

"Mom, we're going to be late."

"Alright, alright." She fidgets with the camera. "I won't be able to get them developed until next week, but—"

"I'm sure they're great, Carol." You run up to her—or wobble up to her—and give her a hug, and a kiss on the cheek. "Thank you. For all of this."

"Oh, it's nothing." She pinches your cheek. "You two stay out of trouble, all right? I'll be home all night if you need to call, but I DVR'd the Days finale, so don't. Spare key's in the back, usual spot, and I already made up the bed in the spare room for you."

"Thank you," you say again—and then follow Ryland, who's already out on the porch. With a not-insignificant amount of effort, you manage to walk down the stairs and get into the car, and you wave goodbye as he pulls back out of the driveway and down the street.

"Thanks for doing this," you say, after about thirty seconds of silence. "Even if it's just because your mom made you, or whatever."

"She didn't make me. I promised." He glances at you, then back to the road. He clears his throat. "It's cool if you don't remember. You were, like, ten."

"I was twelve. My mom's wedding. Second to last. I remember." You look at him. He doesn't look back. "It's, um, it's nice of your girlfriend. To be okay with it." You fidget with the volume on the radio. "She sounds great."

"Yeah. She isn't really my girlfriend right now. We're on a break. I mean. We were on a break. We're broken up now, or whatever. So it's not like she really has a right to care."

"Oh." You leave the radio dial alone, and fold your hands back in your lap. "I'm sorry."

“It’s fine. It's not a big deal. Happens all the time. You'll see, when you get to college."

You turn to face the window, so that you can roll your eyes without him seeing. "Sure."

It is very Ryland, to think he's figured out the way the entire world works in a nine-month span. You don't look forward to the person he'll be once he makes it through all of undergrad and starts grad school.

To his credit, though, he keeps any insufferability to a minimum the rest of the night.

He doesn't comment on the food (which is, objectively, terrible). He's sociable and pleasant to your friends, making jokes and asking about their graduation plans with a distinct (and, you suspect, effortful) lack of condescension. He dances with you without complaint, and rescues you from losing your balance on more than one occasion.

The only moment he objects to anything, really, is when one of your classmates tries to pass you a flask.

"No," he says, taking it from you and passing it to the couple next to you.

"What? Why?"

"I'm not drinking because I'm driving, and you're not drinking because you are eighteen."

"You're nineteen."

"And driving," he says.

When he briefly leaves to go to the bathroom, your friend Kristy passes you a cup full of punch. You take a sip. It's bad. You gulp down another six sips before he comes back from the bathroom, and you smile up at him perfectly innocently, and he gives you a look like he knows exactly what just happened.

"What did you do," he says.

"Nothing."

He picks up the cup, which is mostly empty, and takes a small sip. He makes a small face. Then he puts it back down, and sighs, and reaches a hand down.

"What?" you ask.

"We're going to get you some water, and then dance off whatever you just drank."

"I barely had any. And it was more fruit juice than tequila, anyway."

"Vodka," he corrects you. You roll your eyes, but you drink the water he gives you, and you stumble over to the dance floor, hand in hand, and all you can think is that this is a night you're going to want to remember forever.

Most of the music has been upbeat. You figure the chaperones don't want to have to worry about getting a floorful of hormonal teenagers to leave room for Jesus. But you can't help but look at Ryland, all elbows and knees, eyes squeezed shut as he moves so gracelessly it's a wonder his hair is still on his head, let alone his glasses—and you think about his hand in yours pulling you to the dance floor. You think about his arm around your waist when you were taking photos at his house, and the way it makes you feel to have his eyes on you, even just sideways for a second in the car, and you can't help but wonder what it would feel like to have all of that for a whole song. Unrushed.

The song ends. The lights dim. The music slows. He slows.

He looks at you.

The heavens open.

If by "the heavens," you mean "the ceiling of the high school gym." And if by "opens" you mean opens. The fire sprinklers are going off. Your hair is wet and your dress is wet and the floor is wet, and the water sends mascara stinging into your eyes, so now all you can hear is everyone screaming and all you can see is nothing.

A hand finds yours. You squeeze. He squeezes back.

"Come on," he says, just audible above the chaos, and you nearly slip and twist an ankle no fewer than three times as you wind your way through the crowd, out a side door, and into the relative calm (most people must have rushed for the main doors) of outside, the night air cool on your newly damp skin. Once you're outside, he lets go of your hand.

You rub at both of your eyes. "Oh, my God."

"Are you okay?" He sounds breathless, and there's genuine concern there, sure—but also a smile.

"Yes, I'm—God." You stop, laughing. "Shit." You rub until the stinging abates enough that you're able to open your eyes, just a little, your entire face a squint, and he looks over at you and starts laughing twice as hard. "Shut up."

"You look like a raccoon!"

"Yeah, and you look like a drowned rat," you say, which is sort of true in that his hair plastered to his head and his glasses are beaded with water and sitting at a full diagonal, and not at all true in that he is smiling and he is smiling at you and you don't think he's ever looked more beautiful.

He reapproaches you, fidgeting with his suit pocket. "Wait." He reaches, then hesitates, then commits to putting a hand on your face, your cheek.

There is a brief, gorgeous, terrifying moment of stillness.

Then he uses the handkerchief in his other hand to start swiping at your eyes.

He does it with all of the gentleness of a teenage boy who has never had to take off makeup in his life—which is to say he is slow, and he is careful, and he is using way too much pressure.

"Hey," you say, catching the handkerchief hand in yours. "Okay. Thank you, but—just let me—" He relinquishes it to you, the hand on your jaw lingering for one half-second longer before he steps back. "I can't believe you have a pocket square."

"Fuck off," he says, his voice fond and exasperated. "Car's over this way."

You follow him a few steps, still dabbing at your eyes. After a particularly treacherous step, you stop, and bend down, doing your damnedest to stay balanced on one foot as you tug at the straps of the other. "One sec."

He turns back. "What are you doing?"

"These aren't—the ground is too soft," you explain. "My heels. I'm taking them off."

"You can't just. Okay." Before you know it, he's back by your side, and there's an arm behind your back, and an arm beneath your knees, and your heels are not on your feet but also your feet are not on the ground.

"What are you—"

"You can barely walk in those things. I don't know why you even wore them."

"It's a—" You hiccup. "It's a rite of passage. My mom picked them out. Said they went with my dress."

It was the only thing she had time to help pick out. She cares a lot, your mom, she really does; that's why she's out of town all the time, picking up extra flights so that you and Josh don't have to worry quite so much about college. You know this. Still, in some of your more self-pitying moments, you can't help but wish she had the kind of job that kept her a little bit more in one place.

So yeah, you wore the shoes. And yeah, you can't walk in them, but that's seeming less and less like a bug and more like a feature if it's the thing that landed you here: cradled against his chest, one arm slung around his neck, your impossible shoes dangling from your other hand.

His face is closer to yours than it has been all night, so you see him visibly soften a bit. "They do go with your dress," he says. "They're pretty. I just don't want you to sprain something. Or step on a nail. Tetanus feels like bad prom date protocol."

"It's very chivalrous of you," you say. "That and the handkerchief."

"Shut up."

Bold with six and a half sips of punch, you press your lips quick to his cheek. Then you let your head flop back. "Put me down. I want to run."

"No running."

"Why not?"

"Because that would also be bad prom date protocol. And we're at the car already."

Three minutes later, when you are both in the car and wrapped in old camping blankets pulled from the trunk, he says, "We didn't dance."

"The blisters on my feet say otherwise."

"I mean a dance dance. A slow dance."

"Mm. Maybe there'll be dancing at the afterparty."

"Right. Where's that?" You give him the address. He pauses. "That's a hotel."

"Yeah. A bunch of people pooled together and got a suite, I guess."

"There's no way your mom is cool with that."

"She is somewhere over Nevada right now, so she doesn't really get to be un-cool with it. Plus, she heard you were coming and basically gave carte blanche to do whatever. But, um, you don't have to come, if you don't want. You can just drop me off. I think you've solidly fulfilled your prom date duties at this point."

"No. We're not going there. Unless you really want to, I guess?"

"No." It's the truth. You don't really have a desire to go to a hotel with a bunch of other eighteen-year-olds drinking and hooking up. You had thought that might be the kind of thing Ryland would want to do. "No, not really."

"Great." He puts the car into reverse. "I have an idea."

-

The beach is almost empty when you get there.

Far down, so far you can barely see them, is a group of kids having a bonfire. You leave your shoes in the car, and run down the sand until it shifts from powdery to packed, and you lay down in your dress and your wet hair and let the tide lap at your feet.

Out of the corner of your eye, you see him walk up to you. He sits. He lays down.

Above you, the sky is so dark it almost circles back around to lightness, a heavy purple-grey that you make an active effort to commit to memory.

"This is perfect," you say, after a while. "Thank you. For keeping your promise, even if your mom didn't make you. You didn't have to do that. I could have gone with someone else."

"I'm glad you didn't. It was good to have a weekend home. School is good, but. I missed this." He waves a hand up, at the sky. You understand what he means. "All of this. So, you know. Thanks for letting me crash your prom."

You hum. "It wasn't really crashing. We agreed, just. A long time ago." You look at him. He looks at you. You both smile, and then look back up at the purple sky.

His hand is an inch away from yours. You are so aware of it, embarassingly aware, as if there is some kind of electrical current that's pulsing from him, through the sea-damp earth, into you.

"And." You stop yourself. You start again, "If this was going to be my first d—I mean, my first time going to a dance, or whatever. I'm glad it was with you. I mean. You’re the first person I ever really liked."

He doesn't say anything.

"Back when we were kids," you rush to add. "Obviously. Sorry." You laugh. "I—that's embarrassing, or whatever, but I couldn’t say it before, and I know I probably shouldn’t have said anything because I don’t want things to be weird, I just—” 

You turn to look at him a second time, midsentence. This is the bravest thing you’ve ever done, and maybe the bravest thing you ever will do.

The best case scenario is something you don’t even let yourself dream about. The worst case scenario is that he looks at you with disgust, and you really don’t want to see him looking at you with disgust, but you have to know something about what he’s thinking, and so you turn your head and you don’t even get a chance to really even look at his expression before he kisses you.

He kisses you.

You’ve never kissed anyone before. You don’t know if you’re any good; you don’t know how to be any good. You just know his mouth is warm and soft against yours. Gentle. You think he might be wearing chapstick. You have no idea what to do with your hands.

His hands are more decisive, coming up to cup your face. This gives you something of a blueprint; you let your hands lift to his chest, then to mirror his, tentatively brushing against his neck, his jaw.

He pulls back—not far away enough to really look at you. Just enough to mark the end of that kiss, and separate the beginning of the next one, which is deeper and fiercer and has one of your arms winding back around his neck.

He uses one hand to pull you closer, the other still at your cheek. Your clothes still aren't dry from the fire sprinklers, and for a moment you could almost believe you are flush against him, nothing in between. You still aren't really sure what you're doing, but you understand, by some instinct built up by years of sneaking your mom's magazines and Harlequin books, that this is maybe where you're supposed to open your mouth.

So you do. Just slightly.

There is a distinct shift from warm to hot as he mirrors the movement. The hand on your cheek slides back around to the back of your head, the back of your neck, and the hand on the small of your back urges your body against his, and you make a sound, a small one, a soft one—

He stops.

You spend a second like that—still, clinging to each other. Panting slightly. Your heart is a hummingbird in your chest.

He pulls away. Far enough to look at you. The hand on your neck is back to your jaw, and the hand from your waist comes up to touch your cheek, tracing down to your mouth, thumb dragging across your lower lip.

"Your lipstick," he says. "Sorry."

"It's okay." It's barely a whisper.

"We should. Um." He swallows. His eyes don't meet yours. "Come on."

 He gets up. The night air hits, with a sudden chill, everywhere he was just pressed against you. He holds out a hand without looking at you, and helps you to standing, and starts back up over the little dunes.

You don't speak as you walk to the car.

You don't speak as you get in.

It isn't until several endlessly long minutes driving that you ask, "Where are we going?"

"Your house. I'm taking you home."

You pause. It takes you several skipped heartbeats to be able to formulate some kind of response. "My mom is out of town," you settle on, slowly. Cautiously.

"I know."

"Right." Your heart is in your stomach, and your stomach seems currently to be making a play for your throat. "I, um. You should know, I haven't. I mean, we can. We can do whatever you want. I want to. But I haven't, I mean, I haven't even kissed anyone before, so it might not—I'm probably not going to be as good as your ex—"

"What."

You look at him. He keeps his eyes firmly on the road. "What?"

"What are you talking about?"

"You're driving to my house."

"Yeah. I'm dropping you off."

You blink. "Nobody else is home."

"You're a big girl, you can handle a night alone." There's a layer of sarcasm that wasn't there before—and it's not that you haven't heard Ryland be sarcastic, and it's not even that you haven't heard him be condescending. But there's an edge to it, a hardness, that is new.

"That's not. I just thought—"

"I'm not hooking up with you."

"Okay." You nod. You don't know what the hell you're nodding at; mostly because you need to do something that isn't sitting still and listening to your entire nervous system explode. "Why not?"

"For starters, your brother will kill me."

"He doesn't have to know," you say, and you know that you should have more self respect than to say that, and you hate that you don't care. "I don't have to tell anyone, we can just. Until you go back to school, or just tonight, whatever you want."

"I'm not doing that," he says sharply.

There are several stoplight's worth of silence.

You hate how small your voice is when you ask, "Did I do something wrong?"

He sighs. It's the worst sound you've ever heard. "Everything you said before was really sweet. You've always been sweet." On his tongue, its impossible to hear it as anything but naive. "But you should be more careful, in college. There are a lot of guys who would take advantage of that."

"How is it taking advantage of me if I'm asking for it?" He doesn't answer. "Ryland, you don't really think you took—"

"No," he says sharply. "You're right. I didn't. And I'm not going to. So stop asking."

"Okay. I'm just a little confused. Why would you—"

He hits the breaks, harder than he has all night, and the car lurches to a stop. "God, I was just trying to be nice." The silence that follows is heavy. There's no air in your lungs. Very possibly there is no air in the car, or in San Francisco, or in the entire state of California. "Don't overthink it. I was doing you a favor."

You realize, dimly, that you're in front of your house, where he has driven so that you can get out of the car and take off your wet dress and climb into bed and spend the night alone in an empty house with the past thirty minutes on replay behind your eyes. You should unbuckle your seatbelt. You make no move to unbuckle your seatbelt.

"A favor," you say.

"Yeah," he says. He pauses. Then he clears his throat, and says, more confidently, "Yeah. Otherwise your first kiss would probably have been, like, with some random guy in a frat basement somewhere, you know? You deserve better than that."

"Right." You unbuckle your seatbelt, and open the door. "Right. Thanks a lot, Ryland, this was so much better than that."

You slam the car door shut behind you, muffling whatever it is he says next.

The sidewalk is wet beneath your bare feet. You drop your shoes in the foyer, and watch the shadows move on the wall as he pulls away and down the street.

You peel off your dress. You don't bother to shower. You just tug on an old shirt, and climb into bed, and press the side of your face into the pillow, and wait for it to be morning.

-

Now

You fight the urge to quiet your moans with the pillow, because he asked you to let him hear you, and you want him to hear you, and there isn't much to quiet, anyways. You are making sounds, but they are soft. Hitched breaths. Little rhythmic whines, in time with the pulls of his mouth on your clit. Something close to a please, when you feel the pleasure beginning to crest, and you clutch at his hand and at his hair as he finally, finally gets what he's been begging for, and the moan he lets out against you rolls through you like far-off thunder.

Now, after two, your body twitches away from him. Too much pleasure. Too much everything.

He leans back before you can push his head off. You are hazier than ever—eyelids low, mouth a little slack. He looks up at you, and you expect to see smugness on his face, and maybe there's a note of it but primarily he just looks—pleased. You'd almost say relieved, if that didn't feel like an odd adjective for the moment.

His mouth is still wet with you. His hand is still in yours, thumb tracing patterns across your fingertips. His other hand lies flat on your abdomen, slow, slow, slow strokes up and down as he rests his head on your thigh and looks up at you.

"Good?" he asks.

The answer is yes. You do not have any words left with which to answer him. Instead you grab at him with both hands, pulling him up, undoing his pants and his shirt with shaky fingers.

He's tugging at your shirt, too. You are a mess of hands, the two of you, a mess of hands and of lips—yours on his neck, his on your forehead—and you both get about half undressed from the waist up before you feel the full weight of him settle between your hips.

You haven't actually slept with him in a bed before, you realize.

You haven't slept with him in a bed, and you haven't slept with him fully naked, and, while you've certainly fucked face-to-face, you've never actually slept with him in missionary. The old-fashioned way. You know, traditional.

Without really thinking, you push at him. He pulls away immediately. "What? Are you okay?"

"Yes—just— " You manuever him, and he lets you, until he is flat on his back, and you are above him, knees to either side. If he has any problems with the sudden coup, you'd never know it from the unabashed delight on his face. And this is good. The delight is good, obviously, and so is everything else. You can see his face from here, but there's distance. Further-than-kissing-distance.

It's stupid. The whole rule is stupid, but it's a rule you've engineered, and so now this a necessary precaution. It's already been agony not kissing him tonight, and you know better than to think it'll be any easier once he's inside you.

You start with a slow grind. It's slick, almost frictionless with how wet you are, which is wet enough that he almost slides in every time the head passes over your entrance. You don't last long before reaching down and lining him up, and taking him in, in one long, not-quite-patient motion.

"Okay?" he asks, like always.

"Yeah." You are jelly-limbed on top of him, so relaxed from two orgasms that you don't particularly have it in you to do anything but take him all the way to the base. "It's good. I'm good." He twitches inside you, and you take a deep, shuddery breath. "It's a lot," you admit. "It never stops being a lot. You'd think I'd be used to it by now."

"Yeah. I know," he says. Some distant part of your brain wants to point out the ridiculousness of that claim. "But you can take it."

His hand settles lower on your waist, your hips, until his thumb can reach your clit. At the touch, you let out a slow, shuddery breath, and lower yourself forward, pressing your torso flush to his. His other arm winds around your waist, hand resting on your back.

His hands on your hips follow you—not urging in any particular direction, just holding, keeping his thumb on your clit as you start to move against him.

You start slow. You cannot stay slow for long. Not after an entire evening of wanting and waiting and close but not quite. You are relieved and you are desperate, and as you properly pick up the pace he begins to meet each movement of your hips with an upstroke of his own.

You shouldn't be able to come again so soon. You shouldn't even be able to get close.

But the angle. And the length of him. The weight. The sounds he's making against the side of your head, into your hair, and the steady circles he's rubbing into your clit; and his other hand on the small of your back, where it had rested when he hugged you tonight.

"You can take it," he repeats, more quietly now that his mouth is at a level with your ear, and the softness in his voice is indirect opposition to the way he is now fucking up into you from below. "I know you can. You always take it so well for me." You make a noise into his neck—asking, pleading—and you feel him nod. "You do, you do, you know you do, you always—you feel so good."

You're close. You're close, but not tipping over, because it is too soon for that, after all. But you are on the edge, you're riding the edge for longer than you thought possible, you just can't reach it.

"Can you," you say. It's muffled into his neck; you turn your head, slightly. "I need—fuck. I need."

The hand on your back slides up to your neck, holding. Grasping. The lightest pressure. "Here?"

"Yes. Yes, but." You grab at his other arm, pulling, so that your clit is pressed against his pelvis rather than his hand, and you guide that hand to your hip, your thigh.

He grabs, letting you feel where each finger indents the softest part of your ass. "Like this?"

"Yeah. Yes. And can you." You cling to him tighter. "Can you—hit."

He hesitates only briefly. The first smack is tentative. Light. Barely enough to make a sound.

"Harder." He tries again, and you hear the snap of it, in between the slap of his hips against yours. "Harder, please, please."

The third time is a proper slap, loud. It stings just right, just enough, an anchor amidst the overwhelming pleasure, and you nod into his shoulder with a little cry, again, again, and he hears you and he does it again and you come, hard.

When you start coming down from the high, he's still driving into you. The hand on your ass is rubbing, soothing, gentle back and forth.

"Thank you," you mumble, the words half-slurred against him. "Thank you, thank you, thank you."

He's getting close too, you think. His moans are getting louder, his thrusts less controlled. You get your hands on his chest and press up to sitting, looking down at him.

His face is flushed. Rosy. Glasses fogged. His lips are parted, and he isn't bothering to censor any of the sounds coming from it, and you want so badly to lean down and swallow those sounds, and that is the one thing you cannot do, and you think you might lose your mind a little.

With what little wherewithal you have left, you reach down, covering his mouth with your hand. It doesn't actually do much to muffle him. You really don't mind. He's still looking at you. His eyes are fixed on yours, above your hand, his brows drawn. You feel something enormous in your chest. It beats at your ribs from the inside. It's too much. It's too much. You can't take him looking at you like that.

You lean down, and you press your lips against the back of your own hand. 

His hips stutter. He moans, low and louder than ever, so much so that you feel it in your chest and your hips and your palm through to your lips, and he comes into you hard and long with your hand against his mouth.

-

Sixteen years ago

Anyone who ever said senior year of high school is for coasting was lying. You've never had more work in your life. It's like your teachers are assigning you more in order to ward off senioritis. Like it even matters. Except it does matter, of course, because you need to keep your grades up in order to not lose your scholarship to Berkley, which is why you are now essentially flat on your stomach, cheek to carpet, hand smushed against your mouth, trying to dig out an essay from months and months ago that your AP Lit teacher for some reason wants you to rewrite.

"Aha!" You emerge with a bulging blue D-ring binder, triumphant. You wrinkle your nose at the dust bunnies clinging to your hand. Whatever. You found what you needed to find. You drop the binder on the floor, shake off your hand, and flop back on the bed.

The phone rings. You grab it without looking. "You've reached—"

"It's me."

"Colt! It's been too long."

"Ha, ha," Ryland says dryly. "You know that joke is even funnier the hundred and fifth time."

"Don't be pissy," you say. "What's up? I can grab Josh's dorm number from the kitchen, hang on, but you seriously have to write it down this time—"

"I'm calling for you. What color is your dress?"

"What?"

"Your prom dress. What color is it."

"Uh. I don't have one yet. Why?"

"So I can make sure my tie matches. I know that's a big deal, or whatever."

"…I wasn't aware that you were coming to prom. To my prom."

"Are you going with someone else?"

You've been asked, a few times. You haven't given any of your would-be dates an answer. "No."

"Cool, so just let me know when you pick a dress. I think I need to order the corsage or whatever ahead of time."

"You're coming to prom—"

"I'm taking you, yeah. Catch up."

"Will your girlfriend mind?"

He pauses. "Why would she mind? She knows we've been friends forever."

"Right. Is school….I mean, like, how are things? Otherwise?"

Someone shouts at him from off the phone. "Fuck off," he says to them, his voice muffled—and then he's back, close in your ear. "Look, I've got to go. Just tell my mom when you find a dress."

"I will. Bye, Ryland."

You hold the phone to your ear for a few seconds after he hangs up. Then you press it to your chest. You look at yourself in the mirror, tilting your head as though the version of you on the other side will have some kind of answers to the questions you are too afraid to even ask.

"It's not a big deal," you tell yourself, out loud, as you put the phone back in its cradle.

It isn't a big deal. He has a girlfriend. It wouldn't be a big deal even if he didn't have a girlfriend, because it's just Ryland. Ryland, calling to hold up his end of a pinky promise he made you six years ago.

You flop back on the bed, reaching up to try and touch your toes as your brain continues its crusade. It's just you. It's just Ryland. It's just prom. You've been friends since before you even knew what prom or a date even were. Nothing that could happen over the course of a single night could ever change that.

-

Now

You are once again on your back, a pillow under your hips and a blanket over you. During some of your less-horizontal hookups (see: bar bathroom, office desk, car), you've been giving yourself over to gravity's whims without worrying about it too much. Since you have access to an actual bed this time, though, you feel as though you might as well at least try following r/TryingForABaby's advice.

As though reading your mind, he says, "I can't believe it took us this long to reach an actual bed."

"Hm." You look around the master bedroom, as much as you can look around. The only light is from the moon and the streetlamps outside, filtered through the curtains into a gauzy silver glow. "You know what I can't believe? I think this is the only room in your house I'd never been in before."

"Yeah?" You hear his head shift on the pillow. "Yeah. I guess you're right. It's weird, right? The master bedroom. It took me a full year or something to move all of my stuff in."

"You spent a year in the bunk beds?"

"It was nice," he says defensively. "I'd never had the top bunk before. Colt always called dibs." He pauses. "And then I rolled off my first night, and I never used it again."

"Ouch."

"Took my tailbone two weeks to recover." He nudges your hip with his hand. It's almost funny, how tentative he becomes in the immediate aftermath. He'll touch you, sure. He'll squeeze your hand, and stroke your hair; but the two of you don't really cuddle. You take it as another sign that you are on the same page about what this all is. Casual. Or, if not casual, then purposeful. Strictly business, as he'd joked the first time. "Speaking of, are your knees okay?"

"What, from being on top? I'm not actually that old, you know. You may be ancient, but some of us are still a young and sprightly thirty-four."

"No, I mean. Back at the bar." His hand twitches, down, like he's going to touch your knee and then thinks better of it. "I shouldn't have let you do that."

"Let me?"

"At least if we were here, you could have had a pillow, something—"

You wave a hand. "I've been on my knees in worse places. Don't worry about it."

"Where could possibly be worse than concrete?"

"A frat basement, for starters."

It comes out harsher than you mean. Not in tone. It's the nakedness of the words, dropped into the silence like a stone into a pond. The room swallows them whole.

I didn't mean that, you want to say—but, of course, you did. That's the problem. You meant it. You meant it a lot, and you meant a lot by it. It's accusation and absolution, all in one. It's permission. It means look at what you did to me (that's not fair, you know, because what did he do, really, except kiss you one time and then decide he didn't want to anymore?). It means you could do anything to me, anything you want, and I would still let you after all this time. 

"That sounds uncomfortable," he says.

So he doesn't remember, then.

That shouldn't be disappointing. It shouldn't be. It's the kind of thing that should fade after a few years, let alone sixteen; the kind of thing you are embarrassed for still remembering after so long. And, anyway, you don't actually want to fight.

Still, it feels like swallowing something when you speak again. "I didn't mind. That's my point. Did you like it?"

"Obviously."

"Great. So did I. So it's all good." This time, you nudge his hip. "I'm pretty tough, you know. I won't break, if you're a little rough with me."

"Okay," he says. "Well, that's not the bar."

"Yeah, I know. I took the bar ages ago. Passed it my first try."

"You—" The joke makes him laugh, once, curtly, dragging a hand down over his face. Unfortunately, it doesn't derail his train of thought. "I mean, the bar for this," he says, gesturing between the two of you, "isn't I don't mind, or I won't break. That's not good enough. I can't do this if you're not getting anything out of it."

You push your lower lip into a moue. "I feel like it's pretty clear what I'm getting out of it."

"You know what I mean. If you're not going to enjoy it, then I can go out to the grocery store and pick up a turkey baster right now. That's part of the point, to me. "

"I am. Enjoying it. That's why I asked for it, all of it. And I thought you had a very strict BYOB policy."

"If you want a turkey baster, I will make sure you get a turkey baster."

"You've always tried to give me exactly what I wanted, huh?"

"Yeah, well. There were times when I could have done a better job."

“You." You roll over onto your side to look at him. "You do realize you're currently giving me a baby? A whole baby. That’s—I mean, it’s crazy I asked. It’s crazy you said yes.”

“It’s not that crazy.”

You flop back onto the mattress. You stare at the ceiling. “It’s pretty crazy."

"Maybe. But I don't mind." He goes quiet, in the way that you know means he's thinking about something. "I don't mind. Was that the bar with. Your ex. The big one. Did he—"

"Ryland."

"Yes?"

"We just."

"I know."

"Do you really want me to go into the details of my sex life with my ex-husband."

"On a personal level? No. But for research purposes of what does and doesn't work for you—"

"Okay, so Reddit doesn't count as research, but me telling you my memory verbally, off the cuff, does?" You keep your tone light. You are passing the light tone test with flying colors. "Eyewitness testimony is famously untrustworthy, you know. And, um. I don't really remember much of it, anyway."

"That sounds like a cop out."

"It's not," you say, and your tone is still light but with an undercurrent you can't control, and you know he hears it because he stops saying anything at all. "Um. I remember some things, but for the most part its fuzzy. I think I blocked a lot of it out." You laugh, quiet. Bitter. "I do remember that he wanted kids."

"That…makes sense. Seems like the kind of thing you should agree on, to get married."

"We didn't, though. Agree." The ceiling fan spins lazily overhead. "You asked me, ages ago, what caused the divorce. That's what it was."

Not the other stuff, you don't say, because you know you don't have to say it for him to hear it.

"We'd talked about it back when we were dating," you say instead. "We'd decided that we didn't want them. And then our last year together, I guess he changed his mind. Which, you know, he was allowed to do, what do you know when you're twenty, but he didn't. He didn't really tell me? It was just."

You have to think about what you say next. It's not the first time you've used the words, but it's the first time in a while, and the first time here, in the dark, with a body that was just inside you and is now an inch and a half away. You can hear him breathing. It's quiet, but you can hear it, and it's occasionally sending you back to a different bed, next to a different body, with a ring still on your finger, and it's making you lose the thread of the story.

You dig a nail into your palm. You coax yourself back.

You are here, in this room, next to the person you are next to. You find the thread of the story. You pull at it until the words unravel in the order you'd decided on several years ago, when you needed to explain this to your brother and your therapist and your journal in a way that would not make you cry.

"My birth control kept on not being where I'd left it, which I thought was just. You know. Me. Being forgetful." This was a place for people to laugh, you'd decided, when you'd practiced the telling of it. He doesn't laugh. No one ever does. "And then we had a scare, so finally I just decided to get my tubes tied, and he wouldn't sign off on it. Husbands still have to, apparently, did you know that? Like we were in the fifteen hundreds."

You sort of laugh. He doesn't.

"Anyway, he wouldn't give his permission, or whatever, and we fought about it, and I remember the next day—I mean, I'd barely slept, we were arguing all night—and I was just too exhausted to really feel angry anymore, and instead I just had this weird mixture of dread and relief, and I wasn't sure what the relief part was, until the next day I was taking the subway home and I saw this baby. A cute one. Like, Gerber baby cute. And I thought oh, maybe I do want kids one day, but not with Tyler."

The room is silent.

"Just. That easy. Just sitting on the 6 like, Astor Place is next, and also I don't want to have a baby with my husband. It was the most honest thought I'd had in years. And I knew if I went home, I wouldn't have that kind of clarity again, and my birth control would keep going missing, and the next scare wouldn't just be a scare, and I'd have to stop working, and—I don't know."

You press the heels of your hands to your eyes.

"Maybe I was being dramatic. But I got off the train at Grand Central, and instead my normal transfer I caught the Metro-North—God, I didn't even buy a ticket, just got on the train. It was so stupid, I almost cried when the conductor came up, because I didn't have enough cash on me and I didn't. I didn't want it to show up on the credit card. In case. But yeah, I showed up at Josh's door at, like, one in the morning, and. Everything after was a mess, obviously."

Your hands are still against your face. You don't say anything for what is less than two seconds, but feels like much longer, because you don't trust your voice to be steady.

Sorry," you say. Your voice isn't quite where you want it, but if you don't talk then he is going to talk, and you're not sure you're ready to hear what he may or may not say. "Sorry, none of that is what you asked, like, at all, I really just don't remember a lot of the other stuff, sex, and what I liked, or if I really like—I mean, we met when I was eighteen. All of my."

You pause. It is a short pause. It does not feel short. The room is silent. The room is roaring with the fan and the blood in your ears and the sound of him listening.

"Most of my firsts happened in that relationship," you say, carefully. "So. I don't know that I'll ever be able to parse out exactly what I would have liked, on my own, if I hadn't met him. But, um. When I started dating again, after the divorce, a while after, sometimes I would just. Go somewhere else. In the middle of it. And turns out a little bit of pain is really good for, like, reminding yourself that you have a body. It makes it easier to stay in the moment. And I do think it feels good, genuinely, but it's a little bit of a chicken-or-egg situation as to how much I just like it organically, and how much it's a matter of function, because now it's both."

He doesn't say anything.

"Apparently that's normal," you say. Reassuring him, maybe. Reassuring yourself. "Josh made me see this therapist, the year after. I was staying with him for a while, and—anyway. She said that's normal. That, and the memory gaps, too, after. Um. All of that."

There's a long, long silence.

Then he says, pleasantly, "I could kill him."

"Ryland."

"I'm not angry. I'm just stating it as fact. I really could kill him."

"Ryland."

"You wouldn't believe the stuff I have to MacGyver for labs, half the time I'm worried I'm going to accidentally make chlorine gas and poison the whole science wing. Or decapitate myself with a Rube Goldberg. Or something." You don't say anything. "Josh would help. Colt, too. I'm sure he'd have some great ideas. It's basically his job to get set on fire."

"Yeah."

"I probably shouldn't be telling you this. You should have plausible deniability, in case we need a lawyer."

"Josh is already a lawyer."

"Yeah, but he shouldn't defend himself. Not for such a grisly crime."

You crack a smile, finally. A tiny one. It feels a bit like tasting clear air after months of breathing nothing but ash. "I don't practice criminal law. You know that, right? It's important to me that you know that."

"You're smart. You'd pick it up."

"Pass." You twist your head in the direction of the wall clock. You can't make it out in the dark, but you still say, "It's late. I should get going soon."

"You know you can stay over, right?"

"Fine. But I call dibs on the top bunk," you say. You hear him chuckle. The sound, more than the joke, makes you smile. "No, look, I know you have an early start."

"Tomorrow? It's a bank holiday."

"Oh. Right. Well, I probably have to. I mean, there's always stuff in the office to." You shake your head. "Just give me ten more minutes of pillow time, and I'll be out of your hair."

Two seconds. Three. "Okay."

You chew on the inside of your cheek. "And I'm sorry for—" You press your hands back against your eyes, and are relieved to find them only a little wet. "All of that. Um. I don't know what—"

"Hey. Hey." His hand, touching the back of your wrist. Gently. Tentatively. You let him pull your hand away from your face. "It's okay. I mean, it's not okay that any of that—but you—you being here is okay. Whatever you want to talk about is okay."

Your hand curls back, out of his. Away from him. "I don't really want to talk about it anymore."

"That's okay too."

"Thanks," you say softly. It's all you can manage.

You sit in deafening silence for about a minute, and then: "If you don't want to talk, I actually." He claps—quiet—then gets up. "This is perfect."

He's only half-lit by the moon through the curtains as he hops around, trying to tug on a pair of pajama pants while he talks, and only half-succeeding at either. It shouldn't be charming. You are, regrettably, charmed.

"I found, while I was unpacking more boxes—attic boxes, not moving—the point is." He points at you. "Don't go anywhere."

"Wasn't planning on it." Even as you say it, you mentally track your shoes, on the floor; and your underwear, next to them; and your purse, abandoned on the couch on your way to the bedroom. You had your fair share of one-night stands, following the divorce, in between all the bad first dates and dead-end short-term relationships. You know how to make an exit.

He comes back holding a box before you can make an exit, and with his elbow manages to flip on the nightstand lamp. You both wince and blink furiously. When your eyes have more or less adjusted to the light, he is sitting very carefully on the edge of the bed.

"What's this?" you ask.

"Just some light reading." He takes something black and rectangular out of the box, and passes it to you. "Mom was religious about this stuff. Even when she was in the hospital, she'd have us bring these huge sterilite boxes of all of her craft stuff, and she would just go to town."

You open the scrapbook.

It starts off with baby pictures, of course. Too young for even you to tell the twins apart. Pictures of them with their mother. Not as you last saw her, but as you remember her. Pictures of them with their dad, who you never met.

Ryland—adult Ryland, real Ryland, the Ryland in the room with you—is still sitting on the edge of the bed, not touching you. You have spent most of the evening, you realize, with his hand on your waist or your wrist or your hair. The absence is strange. You gnaw on the inside of your cheek. "You look like you're about to fall off the bed," you say.

He hesitates. "You seemed like you might want some space."

You nod him over with a roll of your eyes. "Get over here."

He gets over there, sitting close enough next to you to look over your shoulder, while still leaving an inch or two of space.

"You can skip ahead," he says, reaching over. In leaning in, his other arm goes back behind you, resting across the headboard. He doesn't touch you. He also doesn't pull away when you lean against him. It isn't much a conscious decision as an inevitable one. You are tired, and he is warm and solid behind you, and you are still stubbornly clinging onto the belief that you can accept casual intimacy from him without drowning in want.

Pages flip. Photos of you. You, Ryland, Colt, Josh. Just the boys. Just you and the twins. Every possible configuration thereof. Running through sprinklers, and singing in school concerts, and holding up trick-or-treat hauls with gap-toothed triumph. Riding bikes. Falling off bikes. Graduations—yours, in addition to theirs. Elementary to middle school. Middle to high school. Wedding photos throughout—the boys in suits, you in a flower girl dress. The boys in suits, you in a puffy teal junior bridesmaid dress. The boys in suits, you in floor-length bronze satin.

Before high school graduation, there's a few of just you and Ryland. Bronze satin, again, but you're visibly younger, the both of you baby-faced in a way that, by your twenties, had already begun to fade. The living room as background. The window. The coffee table. The couch you straddled him on two and a half weeks ago.

Ryland, slipping white roses onto your wrist.

Ryland, standing behind you with hands, his and yours, clasped around your waist.

Ryland, seconds later, smiling down at you while you look into the camera.

"It makes you think," he says. "Thirty plus years. The photos make the memories more tactile, but they're just fragments. Moments of moments. There's so much stuff that happens in between that we just…forget."

"Yeah." You try to flip back to safe territory—bikes, suits, teal dress—and realize that such a thing doesn't exist. There is no safe territory. There is no part of your life, really, that he hasn't been present for, and vice versa, except for a decade in the middle that you can barely remember and would, most of the time, rather forget.

You close the book. You close your eyes.

You'll leave soon, you tell yourself. You'll go home. Sleep in your own bed. It's just that his chest is warm beneath your cheek, and his heart is steady beneath your ear, and you are so, so tired of pretending you want anything different.

"Yeah," you say. "Who even remembers that far back, anyway."

-

Twenty two years ago 

Your cheek is on his chest. His arms are around your waist. He is treating the dance like it might get him seasick. It has been the most awkward minute and forty five seconds of your life.

You have never been happier.

Every other step, his chin grazes the top of your head. It's a thrill every time. Ryland hit his growth spurt late—they both did, both twins—and you're still not quite accustomed to the height difference. You're pretty sure he isn't, either. Not the way Colt is.

But then, Colt has never been anything but perfectly at home in his own body. Colt is athletic, graceful, controlled. Ryland is, physically, none of these things. Ryland's posture is so bad that even his smile is crooked. Ryland trips over his own feet about as often as Colt trips over words while reading. It's like whoever split them up in utero did it intentionally off-kilter. Yin and yang. Unbalanced-ly balanced. 

All this to say: Colt was a great dance partner. Ryland has spent the past minute and forty-five seconds swaying side to side so stiffly its like he's barely moving at all, like he's being controlled by someone who has just been gifted a marionette and is trying very hard not to tangle the strings. He has also managed to step on your shiny patent leather shoes no fewer than seven times. It is not a very long song to begin with. He has been dancing with you for half of it.

You are relieved for your shoes, and otherwise disappointed, when the slow number is replaced by something upbeat. The adults around you seem excited enough. Your mother breaks out of the very long, very involved kiss she had been planting on her new husband to punch her hands up in the air and cheer, and allow the bridesmaids (Colt and Ryland's mother among them) to drag her to the center of the floor.

You and Ryland are in a corner of the dance floor, and for a few seconds he just stands there, so you also just stand there. You have spent what feels like a lifetime trying to copy Ryland Grace. What's a few more seconds?

"That wasn't even a whole song," he finally says. 

You look at him. He looks and sounds neutral—bored, in that way he began affecting pretty much as soon as he turned thirteen—so it's difficult to know if he means the remark as a complaint or a statement or what. 

"Maybe," you begin carefully, "we can do this again the next time my mom gets married."

"Okay," he agrees. His voice is still irritatingly level. There's a brief pause, and then, faster: "That might never happen, though. I overheard her telling my mom that this was the last time." 

You'll believe that when you see it. Your mother is beautiful, and gregarious, and loving, and works as a flight attendant. She has no shortage of men interested in her, and no shortage of interest in men. But it feels disloyal to say that (even to Ryland, who has seen all of this firsthand and thus knows it to be true), so you settle for a noncommittal shrug. 

"We'll dance at prom," he says. 

You look up at him. He's looking very determinedly at something on his shirt sleeve. His glasses are sliding down his nose. Those are new, too; he's still figuring out how to wear them. "Prom?"

"When we're in high school."

"Yeah, but my prom or your prom? We're in different grades, genius."

"Either. Both."

"What if you have a girlfriend? She'll want you to take her to prom."

"Ew." He scrunches up his nose. His glasses take this as an opportunity to go skydiving. By some miracle (the miracle being the strap his mom makes him attach to the arms of them, ever since that time he broke two pairs in as many days), they stay more or less on-slash-around his head. "I'm never getting a girlfriend."

Your heart sinks. "Okay." You chew your bottom lip, savoring the taste of the bubble-gum lipgloss your mom let the makeup artist use on you. That's one nice thing about your mom's weddings, is getting to feel pretty for a day. You can't wait to grow up and wear lipstick. "Well, I might have a boyfriend."

"Ugh. Fine. If you don't have a boyfriend, then I’ll take you to prom.”

"Promise?" You stick out your pinky finger. It's the kind of thing that, at twelve, you're sort of too old for, and that Ryland, at thirteen, is definitely too old for. He indulges you anyway. He always indulges you. Ryland's never done anything but give you exactly what you wanted.

"Promise," he says—then immediately lets go of your hand, like the indignity of doing a pinky promise as a teenager is causing him physical pain. You half expect him to wipe it off on the leg of his dress pants. He doesn't. He still doesn't look at you, either. "I can't believe I'm coming in second place to some guy you don't even know yet."

"Third place," you say. Finally, he looks at you. It's like a family-sized pack of glitter bursts in your chest. You try to keep any of it from showing in your eyes. Instead, you tilt your head, hoping your smile reads as mischievous rather than smitten. "Colt was born first.'

And then you run. You take off running past the dance floor; past the round tables with the lavender centerpieces you picked out; past sitting adults, whose reprimands Doppler away from you at lightspeed. You know he's following close behind. You know that when he catches you (he can, if he doesn't trip first), he'll grab your hand, and the thought of it makes you so giddy that you're tempted to let a hand trail behind.

No need. He reaches you.