#honeybear

Your connection to Carmen Berzatto never had a clean beginning.

People liked beginnings: a date, a first conversation, a moment you could point to and say, there, that's where it happened. You never had one. It grew instead the way ivy grows: slow, sideways, patient, finding every crack in a foundation before anyone thought to check for damage.

Maybe it started with the moving truck that backed into the driveway next door when you were seven, its ramp cracking against the pavement loud enough to rattle your bedroom window. Or maybe it was the loose board in your father's fence, the one he kept meaning to fix until everyone quietly stopped expecting him to — until it stopped being broken and became a doorway instead. By the end of that first summer, children crossed through it often enough that neither family bothered asking whose yard they were standing in.

However it happened, one afternoon became another, and then another after that, until your life and the Berzattos' had grown around each other the way roots do underground; out of sight, impossible to separate without tearing something.

Your parents were careful people. Everything in your house had a place. Shoes came off at the door. Music stayed low. Arguments, on the rare occasion they happened, stayed private. Your mother folded fitted sheets so neatly they looked store-bought, and your father mowed the lawn every Saturday whether it needed it or not. Being one of the only Black families on a block that ran mostly white and close-knit bought your household a certain careful, watchful respect — the Berzattos, for their part, never learned how to do boundaries with anyone, careful or not.

Next door was another country entirely. The Berzatto house breathed with its mouth open. Doors slammed. Pans clanged. Donna laughed loud enough for three houses to hear before bursting into tears over something nobody else had noticed. Mikey shouted from room to room instead of walking the ten feet it would have taken. Richie seemed to materialize wherever someone was already yelling. Natalie spent half her childhood trying to keep plates from breaking and the other half pretending she wasn't.

And Carmen was quiet. Not shy, exactly,  he simply existed at a different volume than the rest of them. While Mikey was the sun everyone orbited, Carmy lingered at the edges of things, watching. You noticed him because he noticed things: the sparrow trapped in your mother's tomato netting before anyone else spotted it, the smell of your father's brisket smoking six hours before dinner, the exact moment you stopped pretending to read your book and started watching him practice kickflips in the driveway. He never waved. You never called out. Somehow that counted as conversation.

You were the sort of child who repaired things no one else thought worth saving. You kept a cigar box full of broken jewelry because the clasps still worked. Pressed maple leaves between encyclopedia pages until they dried flat enough to frame. Carefully glued porcelain figurines your grandmother swore were too chipped to bother with. When adults asked why, you never had an answer beyond I don't like throwing things away. Years later, someone would give that instinct a name;  conservation, archival repair, a graduate degree, white cotton gloves, humidity-controlled storage; but at seven it simply meant your bedroom was full of objects waiting for another chance. You suspected people deserved the same courtesy. Especially the strange, quiet boy next door.

The first thing Carmy ever gave you wasn't a toy. It was information. He knocked on your back door one August morning, hands shoved deep in the pockets of an oversized sweatshirt despite the heat, and when your mother answered, he stared determinedly at the welcome mat. "There's a cat," he said, and paused, like the sentence cost him something. "A three-legged one." Another pause. "Behind your garage." Then he walked away before she could ask a single follow-up question. You found the cat asleep beneath your father's workbench fifteen minutes later. Your parents took it to a veterinarian. It lived another nine years, and you never forgot who'd found him.

That became the shape of your friendship, plain sentences traded like currency. There are mushrooms growing behind the shed. You left your library book outside. Mikey’s making ribs. "Good. Can I come over?" you'd ask, and he'd just nod, and that was enough. You learned, early, that with Carm an invitation rarely needed more than a single word to carry it.

Mikey, for his part, decided almost immediately that you were his kid now.

He was old enough to hover somewhere between older brother and neighborhood menace, forever appearing exactly where he wasn't supposed to be. He taught you how to skip rocks badly, insisted every decent hot dog needed sport peppers whether you liked them or not, and once convinced both you and Carm that the abandoned lot three blocks over was haunted simply because he thought your horrified faces were funny.

One humid July evening he found you and Carm sitting on the flat stretch of the Berzattos' garage roof, splitting a paper bag of potato chips while watching fireflies drift over the alley.

"You two trying to give me a heart attack?" he called up.

Carm didn't even look over the edge. "No."

"Looks dangerous."

"It's not."

Mikey stood with his hands on his hips for a long moment, clearly unconvinced, before disappearing back into the house. He returned five minutes later carrying three bottles of root beer and ordering the two of you to scoot over, and the three of you watched the sun sink behind the garages without saying much of anything, until Donna leaned out the back door and shouted for all three of you with increasing volume, and Mikey sighed theatrically and climbed down first.

Years later, when people asked why you were always at the Berzatto house, nobody could quite remember a time when you hadn't been.

Years passed without either of you asking permission for any of it. You learned how Donna liked her coffee on the mornings she was able to drink it. You learned to braid Natalie's hair before school because she could never manage the back herself, your fingers working deftly through hair so different in texture from your own that it had taken you all of one summer to learn the trick of it. You learned to step over Richie when he'd fallen asleep on the living room carpet after one too many beers with Uncle Jimmy. Somewhere along the way, Donna started calling you one of hers. Your parents stopped correcting her.

It was Mikey who named you, though he would always insist the answer had been obvious. Your mother called “Honey” across the yard one afternoon while Mikey chased Carmy with a garden hose. Carmy had been Bear for years by then, the family nickname following him from room to room whether he answered to it or not. Mikey looked from you to him—Honey and Bear, together as usual—and laughed as though he had discovered something everyone else had missed.

“Honeybear.”

Carmy stopped running long enough to groan. You told Mikey you hated it. He used it again at dinner, then the next morning through the gap in the fence, and within a week everyone in the Berzatto house had adopted it. The name stuck because it had never described only you. It named the two of you as Mikey had always seen you: arriving together, leaving together, one rarely far behind the other.

Somewhere over the years, the rules everyone else seemed to carry around each other quietly dissolved between the two of you. You bumped shoulders to get his attention instead of saying his name. He caught your backpack before it slid off your shoulder, adjusted the hood of your coat when Chicago wind blew it crooked, or nudged your elbow away from a closing gate without interrupting whatever either of you had been talking about. If flour dust clung to his sleeves after a bakery shift, you'd brush it away absentmindedly while he kept explaining whatever recipe had gone wrong that day.

Neither of you thought much about it. Physical closeness had become another language you shared, no stranger than sitting in comfortable silence or passing books back and forth over the fence. It belonged to years rather than intention.

The next morning he appeared at your back door before breakfast holding the skateboard up like evidence. "I fixed it," he announced. Two ugly metal plates had been bolted across the crack. It looked terrible. It would never ride the same again. You grinned anyway. "It'll work," you told him, and he looked strangely pleased that you'd said that instead of anything about how it looked. Years later, standing over four-hundred-year-old manuscripts repaired with Japanese tissue so fine the seams disappeared under magnification, you'd remember that board and understand something you hadn't had words for yet: not every repair had to be invisible. Sometimes surviving was enough.

Long before he started buying you Christmas presents, Carm brought you things. Never with any ceremony. He'd appear beside you on the back steps, place something in your lap, then continue whatever conversation you'd already been having.

The first strawberry that ripened in Donna's garden. A smooth skipping stone shaped like Saturn. A newspaper clipping about an exhibit at the Art Institute. Burnt croissants from the bakery because he knew you'd eat the mistakes before anyone else could throw them away. Once, he handed you a bent teaspoon he'd rescued from work because the handle had been twisted into an elegant spiral by accident.

"Thought you'd like it," he said. You did.

It took years to understand those objects were their own kind of sentence. I saw this. It made me think of you.

By high school, people had started assuming the two of you were dating, mostly because neither of you ever seemed to be anywhere without the other. You studied in your backyard; he sketched. You read; sometimes neither of you spoke for an hour at a stretch, and your mother would slide the screen door open just long enough to ask if either of you wanted lemonade. You both always did.

Once, during sophomore year, a girl from your chemistry class leaned across her lab bench and asked, with the particular bluntness of a fifteen-year-old, whether the two of you were a thing. You followed her gaze across the cafeteria to where Carm sat at his usual table, laughing, or trying to, laughter always looked a little surprised on him. Like he hadn't planned for it.

"No," you told her.

"You sure?"

"Pretty sure."

She just shrugged. "He looks at you." "Everybody looks at everybody," you said. "Not like that," she said, and smiled like she knew something you didn't. You spent the rest of the afternoon trying very hard not to notice. You failed.

The almosts started around seventeen, so small you could have mistaken any one of them for an accident; his knee pressing against yours beneath the bleachers during a rainstorm, his fingers lingering half a second too long when he handed you a coffee, the two of you standing closer than you needed to while looking at Christmas lights because the sidewalk was crowded and neither of you moved to fix it.

There was a rooftop graduation party where everyone else eventually drifted downstairs for more drinks, leaving the two of you alone under a sky the color of old denim.

"You ever think about leaving?" he asked.

"Sometimes."

"Where would you go?"

"London. The British Museum." You bumped his shoulder with yours. "What about you?"

He looked out over the neighborhood — the roofs, the streetlights, the fence between your houses that hadn't mattered in years — and said, so quietly you almost missed it, "Anywhere."

He turned toward you. You turned toward him. There was wine on his breath and the city humming somewhere below, and his eyes dropped to your mouth in a way that made your heartbeat stumble over itself.

"Honey—" he started.

"Carmy!" Mikey's voice came exploding up the fire escape before he could finish. "You seen Richie's dumb ass?"

Carm shut his mouth, jaw working for a second before he managed, "No."

"Well if you do, tell him he's an asshole!"

"Will do."

The rooftop door slammed shut again. Neither of you moved for a long moment. Then you smiled. "So." "So." "You were saying?" He rubbed the back of his neck. "...Forgot." 

He hadn't. Neither had you.

By the time you were twenty, nobody knocked anymore. Your father replaced the loose fence board twice; twice, somebody took it back out. The second time, he stood at the kitchen window looking through the neat gap between the yards and sighed, "I'm outnumbered."

Your mother didn't even glance up from her crossword. "You have been for years." The fence stayed exactly as it was after that.

You earned your degree one careful requirement at a time — paper chemistry, bookbinding, pigments, humidity, insects, the strange comfort of bending for hours over something centuries old, repairing damage one fiber at a time. Whenever anyone asked what conservation actually meant, you learned to smile through the same three corrections: no, you didn't write the books; no, you didn't appraise them; no, you couldn't tell them if their grandmother's Bible was worth anything. People usually looked disappointed. Carm never did. He wanted to know everything.

By then, your life had begun to extend beyond the two neighboring houses. You moved into an apartment with bad water pressure and good afternoon light, filled it with books, half-finished repair projects and furniture your parents politely called eclectic. You had colleagues who knew you as the woman who could spend six hours matching a missing line of gilding and still remember everyone’s coffee order, friends Carmy had met only in passing, invitations and deadlines and ordinary adult habits that did not include him at the center. None of it loosened the old bond. It only meant that when you crossed back through the gap in the fence, you were returning by choice rather than because you had nowhere else to go.

You were sitting on the hood of his car outside a twenty-four-hour diner once a few beers deep, sharing a basket of fries because neither of you had much money that month, when he finally asked.

"So. Wait." He turned the thought over like he wasn't sure it was worth saying out loud. "You repair paper."

"Among other things."

"But how?"

You stole one of his fries instead of answering right away. "Very carefully."

"No, seriously."

"I am serious."

He leaned back against the windshield, genuinely stuck. "I don't get it."

"No kidding," you laughed.

He pointed at the crumpled receipt sitting between you on the hood. "Show me."

You picked it up, held it toward the streetlight. "It's wood pulp. The fibers are damaged, here — see?" and tore the receipt clean in half.

"What the hell?"

"Trust me."

From your bag you pulled a tiny envelope of Japanese tissue, a small brush, a little jar of wheat starch paste. He watched, arms crossed, deeply skeptical, as you worked in the orange wash of the streetlight. Patient, unhurried, the way you did everything that mattered. Five minutes later you handed the receipt back. He turned it over. Held it up to the light. Ran his thumb across the seam.

"...Shit."

"Mm."

"It doesn't even—" He looked again, closer. "How?"

"Practice," you said, and shrugged like it was nothing, though it had taken you two years of graduate coursework to make it look that easy.

He stared at the repair another full minute before folding the receipt with almost ridiculous care and tucking it into his wallet.

"You keeping that?" you asked.

"You fixed it."

"So?"

"So."

His gifts changed by then. The burnt croissants became proper ones once he started working real shifts at the bakery. He stopped bringing you flowers entirely after discovering pollen made you sneeze, and gave you a fountain pen instead, then a pair of cotton handling gloves when yours wore through at the fingertips, then a first-edition restoration manual he'd found in a used bookstore because you'd mentioned wanting it exactly once, months earlier. You never asked how much any of it cost him. He never asked why you sometimes looked like you might cry over a fountain pen.

Kitchens swallowed him whole in ways few other people understood. Sometimes he disappeared for three or four days at a time once bakery work became serious. You learned not to chase after him. The first few times you'd knocked on his door, Donna had simply shrugged and said he was sleeping before another shift. After that, you convinced yourself he wanted to be left alone whenever life became too much. You respected the silence because you thought it was kindness. Years later, Carm would admit those had usually been the weeks he'd wanted to see you most. He simply couldn't make himself knock on your door first.

People assumed the two of you would eventually figure it out. Richie certainly did. He caught you eating a sandwich behind The Beef on your lunch break one afternoon and lit a cigarette before he'd even finished sitting down. "You know what's hilarious?" he asked, already grinning like he knew you weren't going to like the answer.

"No."

"You two."

"We're not doing this."

"I didn't even say anything."

"You were about to."

"I was," he admitted, unbothered. "You've been in love with each other since you were barely potty trained."

"We're friends."

"Yeah, and I'm the Queen of England."

You pointed your sandwich at him. "I mean it."

"So do I." He took a long drag, considering you the way he considered everything, like it was a 

bet he'd already won. "You know what's gonna happen? You two're gonna spend another ten years making eyes at each other."

"We don't make eyes."

"You absolutely make eyes."

"We don't."

"You wanna know how I know?"

"Not particularly."

"'Cause nobody else looks at Carm like he's—" he searched for it, found it, savored it — "worth waiting for."

That shut you up. Richie noticed. He always noticed. He flicked his ash into an empty coffee cup and let the silence sit there, satisfied, until you finally walked away without arguing the point any further.

Looking back, it was almost impossible to point to the exact moment friendship stopped being enough. There was no single glance that changed everything, only years of accumulated almosts and the growing awareness that both of you were choosing not to name them.

The first time Carmy kissed you happened three weeks before Christmas in the stairwell of an apartment belonging to someone neither of you knew particularly well.

You had gone because a colleague from the museum was leaving for a fellowship and had threatened to make your final weeks together unbearable if you skipped her party. Carmy had gone because you asked, though he spent the drive insisting he would stay for one drink and leave before the apartment became crowded. By the time you arrived, people were already sitting on the floor, coats buried the bed in the spare room, and someone had put on music loud enough that conversation required leaning close.

Carmy lasted forty minutes.

You saw the moment the room became too much. His answers shortened. His shoulders rose. He moved nearer the wall without appearing to move at all, nursing the same beer while watching the traffic between the kitchen and living room. You would have gone to him if Adrian had not touched your elbow at exactly the wrong time.

Adrian worked in exhibition design and had been asking you to dinner for nearly a month. He was attractive in a straightforward way, easy with people and uncomplicated about wanting things. When he leaned close to ask whether you wanted air, you knew Carmy was watching before you looked.

That knowledge should have embarrassed you.

Instead, you let Adrian’s hand settle at your waist.

Carmy looked away so sharply that the movement felt like an answer.

You followed Adrian onto the fire escape, listened to him tell a story you barely heard and laughed in the correct places while resentment gathered beneath your ribs. For years Carmy had been allowed to watch, to remember, to bring you gifts and stand too close and become silent whenever another man showed interest. Everyone treated his jealousy like evidence of a love too delicate to confront. Meanwhile, you were expected to interpret restraint as devotion and wait for him to decide whether you were worth risking the friendship.

Adrian bent toward you.

You turned your face before he could kiss you.

“I— Sorry,” you said.

He stepped back at once. “Carmy?”

The bluntness startled a laugh out of you.

“Is it that obvious?”

“To everyone except him, apparently.”

You should have defended Carmy. Habit nearly made you. Instead, you looked through the window and found him standing exactly where you had left him, staring at the bottle in his hand.

“I need to go talk to him.”

Adrian nodded. “You probably do.”

Carmy was no longer in the living room when you returned. His coat remained beneath the others, so you checked the kitchen, the bathroom line and finally the building’s narrow front stairwell. He stood one landing below the apartment, both hands braced against the railing, looking down through the center of the stairs as though calculating the distance to the lobby.

“You leaving?”

He glanced up. “No.”

“Your coat’s upstairs.”

“Was getting air.”

“There’s a fire escape.”

His mouth tightened. “Looked occupied.”

You descended until you stood on the same landing. The music came through the apartment door as a distant pulse, softened by plaster and two flights of stairs. Carmy would not look directly at you.

“Adrian went home.”

“Okay.”

“He asked me to dinner.”

Carmy’s jaw moved. “You going?”

“I haven’t decided.”

“He seems like an asshole.”

“You barely talked to him.”

“Enough.”

“He was polite to you.”

“Doesn’t mean anything.”

“Neither does watching someone all night, apparently.”

That brought his eyes to yours.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means you’ve been staring at him since he walked in.”

“I haven’t.”

“You nearly snapped the neck off your beer when he touched me.”

Carmy looked down at the bottle still clenched in one hand. His grip loosened.

“He was all over you.”

“He put one hand on my waist.”

“Yeah.”

“You touch me all the time.”

“That’s different.”

“Why?”

He had no answer that did not require admitting the thing both of you had spent years stepping around. His gaze dropped toward the floor, and something in you finally exhausted itself.

“You're not allowed to be jealous of a life you refuse to participate in.”

Carmy’s head lifted. “I participate.”

“No. You hover. You remember every detail and hate every man I date and then disappear into work before I can ask what any of it means.”

“I don’t hate everybody.”

“You hated Daniel.”

“He was a wall street douche!”

“He worked at a credit union.”

“Same vibe.”

Despite yourself, you nearly smiled. The feeling passed.

“I let Adrian touch me because I knew you would watch,” you said.

Carmy went still.

The confession was not flattering. It made you feel younger than you were, petty and tired and far too aware of the power his attention still held over you. You kept going anyway.

“I wanted you to hate it. I wanted you to do something besides stand in a corner looking miserable and make me feel like shit for noticing.”

His breathing had changed.

“You could’ve told me,” he said.

“I am telling you.”

“No, before.”

“I have been telling you for years. I sit beside you when there are six empty chairs. I call you first. I find you every time you leave a room. I keep making space, and you keep acting like taking it would be some kind of theft.”

“Honey—”

“I’m not stupid, Carmen.”

“I didn’t say you were.”

“Then don’t make me say it for you.”

The stairwell fell quiet except for the building’s old radiator knocking behind the wall.

Carmy looked frightened. Not of you, exactly. Of the fact that the distance between wanting and being known had finally collapsed.

“I don’t know how,” he said.

The answer was barely audible.

You believed him. That did not make it enough.

“It is not enough to hate everyone else,” you said. “You have to want me out loud.”

His face tightened as though the sentence hurt.

“I do.”

Your breath caught.

Carmy looked toward the apartment door, then down the stairwell, every escape registering before he forced his attention back to you.

“I want you,” he said, rougher now. “I think about you all the fucking time. When I’m working. When I can’t sleep. When somebody says something and I know what you’d say back before they finish.” His hand dragged once over his mouth. “I don’t know what happens if I do something about it.”

“Neither do I.”

“What if it ruins—”

“You are already ruining things.”

The words landed without cruelty because both of you were too tired for performance.

Carmy stared at you for a long second.

Then he crossed the small distance and kissed you.

There was nothing tentative about the first impact. His free hand caught your jaw, the beer bottle knocking softly against the railing as he pulled you toward him. Surprise held you still for half a breath before your fingers closed in the front of his shirt and you kissed him back with every year of waiting sharpened into anger.

Carmy made a broken sound against your mouth.

The kiss turned clumsy almost immediately. His shoulder struck the wall. Your teeth caught his lower lip. One of you laughed, though the sound disappeared when he kissed you again, slower this time, learning what the first rush had not allowed. His thumb moved beneath your ear. Your hands slid around his waist, finding the familiar body beneath unfamiliar intent.

When his mouth left yours, it traveled to your jaw and stopped there. Carmy stood with his forehead against your temple, breathing hard.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Did I—”

“Stop.”

He lifted his head.

“Do not start apologizing because I kissed you back.”

His ears had gone red. “Wasn’t.”

“You were.”

“Maybe.”

You kissed him again before he could retreat.

This time his hands settled at your waist, then moved with more confidence when you pressed closer. The stairwell was cold. Music thudded through the door above you. Somewhere on the ground floor, the outside door opened and voices entered the lobby.

Carmy pulled away first.

You felt the withdrawal before you understood it and tightened your hands in his shirt.

“What?”

“We’re drunk.”

“I had two glasses of wine.”

“I had more.”

“You are not drunk.”

“Close enough.”

The answer frustrated you because it was responsible and because you wanted him too badly to appreciate responsibility.

Carmy looked at the stairwell around you. “And this is fucked.”

“The hallway?”

“We’re in public.”

“We are in an empty stairwell.”

“Somebody’s coming up.”

Footsteps sounded below, proving him right.

You released his shirt reluctantly. Carmy moved aside, putting a careful foot of space between you just before a couple rounded the landing. They passed with quick, knowing smiles and disappeared into the apartment.

Neither of you spoke until the door closed behind them.

Carmy looked at you. “I don’t want the first time to be because I got pissed at some guy and followed you into a stairwell.”

“I followed you.”

“Oh. Right.”

“Try to contain your delight.”

His mouth shifted.

You touched the damp corner of his lower lip where your teeth had caught it. “There will be a next time.”

It was not a question.

Carmy’s eyes darkened.

“Yeah?”

“Yes.” You let your thumb rest against his mouth. “And next time, don’t stop.”

For the next three weeks, neither of you knew how to behave.

Carmy kissed you once behind The Beef after a late shift, quick and hungry, then spent the following day acting as though speaking too loudly might cause the world to notice. You sat too close in your parents’ kitchen. His hand found your lower back in crowded rooms and remained there longer than necessary. Every goodbye took several minutes because neither of you seemed able to decide whether another kiss would make things easier or impossible.

No one announced what had changed. Mikey watched the two of you with open satisfaction. Sugar became unusually interested in leaving rooms. Richie took one look at Carmy’s split lip the morning after the party and laughed until Tina threatened him with a knife.

The uncertainty did not diminish the wanting. It concentrated it.

Then Christmas arrived.

The Berzatto house had reached that particular stage of Christmas where every horizontal surface had something balancing precariously on it. A half-frosted tray of cookies sat on top of the microwave because someone had run out of counter space. Coats overflowed the hooks by the front door, sleeves trailing onto the hardwood. Somewhere in the living room an uncle was shouting over a football game no one was actually watching, while Donna yelled back from the kitchen about a pot nobody else had noticed boiling over.

You stepped around three open gift bags and nearly tripped over Pete, who was crouched beside the tree trying to reattach a loose string of lights.

"Sorry," he laughed, scooting out of your way.

"You've said that six times tonight."

"I’ve lost count."

"You don't have to apologize every time I walk past you."

"I probably will anyway," he said, so cheerfully that you gave up on the point and left him to his battle with the lights.

Natalie was halfway through wrapping a box that had somehow become more tape than paper when you wandered into the dining room.

"Need a hand?"

"Not unless you've got a miracle in your pocket," she said, not looking up.

You picked up the roll of tape. "Who's this one for?"

"No idea anymore." She pinched the bridge of her nose. "Richie mixed the tags up."

You laughed. "Of course he did."

"He’s the absolute worst."

She finally looked up at you then, taking in the untouched parcel tucked beneath your arm, and her expression shifted into something more pointed. "You still haven't found him."

"Found who?"

"Honey."

“Who says I’m looking for someone?”

"Mm." She smoothed one last piece of tape across the wrapping paper without further comment. 

"He's upstairs," she said eventually, with a shrug that wasn't really a shrug.

You reached for the tape dispenser beside her, turning it over in your hands. "You okay?"

"Yes."

"You've been wrapping presents for like forty minutes."

"It feels longer."

"You've wrapped the same one twice."

"That explains the tape." Natalie finally stopped moving, only for a second, long enough for you to notice, before she smoothed the paper flat again. "It's Christmas," she said, like that answered everything, and you nodded once, because it did.

The staircase creaked beneath your weight in the familiar way it always had, the old wood protesting every careful step. The noise of the party softened the higher you climbed—laughter, clattering pans, Donna’s unmistakable voice rising and falling like a tide—until the second floor swallowed you whole. Up here, the world narrowed to the hush of winter light spilling through the narrow window at the end of the hall, the kind of quiet that made your pulse feel loud in your own ears.

Carmen’s door was pulled almost closed. You knocked once with the back of your knuckles. No answer. After a moment, you nudged it open just enough to slip inside.

He stood at the window, both hands shoved deep into the pockets of his fleece, his shoulders drawn tight beneath the fabric. The glass had fogged where his breath met the cold pane, obscuring the view of the backyard—and the fence that had divided your lives for as long as either of you could remember. Snow had started again, drifting lazily, as if the world outside had paused just for you.

"You know," you said quietly, "most people hide in rooms with better heating."

He glanced over his shoulder. The tension in his face eased almost immediately, like a held breath finally released. "Hey." The single word carried more relief than greeting, as if he’d been waiting for the sound of your voice to settle something inside him.

You shut the door behind you, muffling the party until it was little more than a vibration beneath the floorboards. The room was exactly as you remembered: unmade bed, cookbooks stacked precariously on the desk, sketchbooks piled beneath the radiator, jackets draped over chairs instead of hung. A younger you would’ve started tidying without thinking. But tonight, you only crossed the room and leaned against the edge of his desk.

"They’re looking for you."

"I figured."

"Mikey’s buying you about ten more minutes."

A corner of his mouth twitched. "I owe him."

"You owe him a lot of things."

"Yeah."

Silence settled between you, no longer innocent enough to call comfortable. Since the party, every quiet moment had carried the memory of his mouth and the unfinished promise you had left between you. Neither of you had mentioned it directly. Neither of you had managed to forget.

Outside, the snow caught the orange glow of the streetlamps, each flake drifting so slowly it seemed suspended in time. You followed his gaze for a moment before looking back at him. 

"You alright?"

He took longer than usual to answer. "Just loud."

"Makes sense." You’d found him in this room a hundred times before—on birthdays, Thanksgivings, the Fourth of July—any gathering that swelled beyond what he could bear. No one chased him anymore. No one except you.

Without thinking, you reached into the pocket of your cardigan and pulled out the small parcel you’d carried all evening. "Don’t get excited. It’s just the usual."

His eyes flicked to the paper, then back to your face, as if he’d forgotten, for a second, that this was tradition. His thumbs worked at the linen tape too carefully, the kind of careful that was really just stalling. When he finally peeled it back, his breath caught.

Inside lay the professional drawing kit—the charcoal stumps, the blending tools, the heavy, high-tooth paper that could take the weight of his hand without tearing. His index finger traced the black buckram spine of the pad, and for a moment, he didn’t speak at all.

"The art store," he said, voice rough. "On Clark." He cleared his throat. "You said the heavy stock was a waste of money."

"You said that," you corrected softly. "I told you to buy it."

"Yeah." A short, sharp breath through his nose. He set the kit down like it might shatter. "Yeah, you did."

He reached into his fleece pocket and pressed a small, weighty box into your hands without quite looking at you. The wrapping was textured black paper, tied with a silk ribbon from the jeweler downtown. Your fingers trembled as you undid the knot.

Inside, on a bed of black velvet, was a silver chain holding a single freshwater pearl; irregular, lopsided, the grain of its shell still visible.

"How did you—" You stopped, looking up. "That was October."

He shrugged, too fast, his eyes flicking to the corner of the room. "You looked at it. For a long time." A beat. His jaw worked once before he forced out the rest. "Said it was gaudy. You do that. When you want something. Talk yourself out of it."

A dry, choked laugh escaped you. "Jesus, Carmy."

"Can I?" He nodded at your neck, his hands already half-raised, as if he’d asked too late to be asking now.

You nodded, lifted your hair. His fingers were freezing against the nape of your neck, his knuckles scraping your skin twice before he managed the clasp. A small, frustrated breath escaped him on the second try.

"Smooth," you murmured, biting back a smile.

"Shut up." No heat in it. His ears had gone red.

The pearl settled into the hollow between your collarbones, a cold point against your skin. When you turned back, he hadn’t retreated. His hand stayed by your throat, his index finger hovering just above the chain, as if he wasn’t sure it was still allowed to be there.

The silence stretched, suddenly thick and difficult to breathe through. You had spent most of your lives guarding the margins. One kiss in a stairwell had already ruined the old geometry; now every inch between you felt chosen.

Neither of you moved. The radiator ticked. Somewhere below, a door slammed and someone laughed too loudly, but the sounds reached you only as a muffled vibration through the floor. His thumb traced once along your jaw, then again, slower. Your pulse hammered beneath his hand.

“You’ve been avoiding me,” you said.

Carmy’s gaze stayed on your mouth. “I’m standing right here.”

“You know what I mean.”

His jaw worked. “Every time I’m near you, I think about the stairwell.”

“That was the idea.”

A breath left him that might have been a laugh. His finger moved from your jaw to the pearl resting at your throat.

“I keep thinking about what you said.”

“Which part?”

His eyes lifted to yours. “Next time.”

The words sent heat through you so quickly that your grip tightened in the front of his fleece.

“You stopped last time for good reasons,” you said.

“Doesn’t feel like it now.”

“What does it feel like?”

“Like I’ve been waiting three weeks to get you alone.”

You pulled him the final half inch closer. “You have me alone.”

Carmy became very still. “Honey.”

There was fear in the way he said it, but not uncertainty about wanting you. That had already been settled between you.

“If you need me to say it again, I will,” you told him. “I want you. I’m not confused. I’m not going to wake up tomorrow and pretend this was a mistake.”

His face changed at the word tomorrow, something closing too quickly for you to catch.

“What?” you asked.

“Nothing.”

Before you could press, his forehead dropped against yours. His breath was unsteady.

“I don’t know how to do this right,” he said.

“Then stop trying to make it perfect.”

His hand slid into your hair.

When he kissed you again, there was no testing left in it. The first contact was slow only because he was trying to hold himself back; then your mouth opened beneath his and something in him gave. His other arm hauled you flush against him, and a low groan worked loose from his chest when you kissed him with the same certainty you had carried since the stairwell.

His hands didn’t stay still after that. They moved with a kind of desperate, searching purpose—fisting in the back of your sweater, dragging up the curve of your spine like he couldn’t decide where to put them first. He walked you backward until your legs hit the edge of the mattress, and even then, he didn’t stop kissing you—jaw, throat, the soft skin just beneath your ear—his breath ragged, as if he’d used up every word he could manage and there was nothing left but this.

You sank onto the mattress slowly, in stages—his weight coming down over you by inches, like he was still checking, still leaving room for you to change your mind. The room had gone fully dark except for the blue wash of snowlight through the window, indifferent to the way your heart was trying to climb out of your throat.

The cold press of the pearl against your collarbone was a small, insistent reminder of everything that had led to this moment. His hands fumbled with the button of your jeans, more nerves than skill, and you laughed—startled, breathless.

"This is so stupid," you said. "You’ve seen me in a swimsuit since I was six."

"Yeah, well." His ears went red again, visible even in the dark. "Never seen you not in one."

That got a real laugh out of both of you—the kind that cracked something loose in the room, familiar and easy because you had spent most of your lives knowing each other before wanting became this impossible to ignore. But the laughter faded almost as fast as it came, replaced by the careful, unhurried way his hand finally found the bare skin of your waist for the first time.

When he pulled your sweater over your head, he didn’t rush for the clasp of your bra. He sat back on his heels for a second, breathing hard, his ink-stained hands resting flat against your ribs, as if he needed a moment to catch up with what was actually happening. His eyes moved over you slowly, deliberately, in the low light—not performing, just looking, the same unhurried attention he gave a dish before he decided it was right.

Your fingers found the raised line of the scar along his ribs before you meant to go looking for it—the fence, age eleven, the summer you’d held your cardigan against the cut the whole ride to the ER while Donna ran two red lights.

"I remember this," you murmured.

"You should." A ghost of a smile. "You gave me this."

"That was the fence."

"You dared me."

"You didn’t have to listen."

"Yeah, I did." His voice had gone quieter, more honest than the joke required. "Always have."

He didn’t answer with words this time. His hands hooked into the waistband of your jeans, dragging them down slow, his eyes following the movement like he needed to watch it happen to believe it was real. When his mouth found the inside of your thigh—open-mouthed, unhurried—you felt more than heard the low sound he made against your skin, something reverent, almost helpless.

"Carmy—"

"Lemme." Barely audible. His hands spread your thighs wider, and when his mouth finally found you, direct and unhurried, the sound that tore out of you had nothing careful left in it. He worked slow at first—testing, deliberate—before the rhythm found something surer, his tongue circling and pressing in a way that had your hips rocking up to meet him before you could stop them. His hands gripped your thighs to hold you open, and every time you tried to close around him, he just held you wider, relentless and unhurried, until the pressure building low in your stomach turned sharp and insistent.

"Carm, I’m—"

"Yeah." His voice vibrated against you, wrecked and low. "I got you. Let go."

He didn’t let up until you came apart against his mouth, back arching off the mattress, both hands fisted hard in his hair. He worked you through it, slow and deliberate, until the aftershocks left you boneless, and only then did he lift his head, mouth wet, eyes dark, dragging himself back up your body to kiss you deep, letting you taste yourself on his tongue.

The clumsiness didn’t leave the room, but it turned into something deliberate. His hands braced against the mattress on either side of your head, his knuckles white. He dug a condom from his wallet, his teeth tearing the wrapper with a sharp crinkle that sounded obscenely loud in the small room. You took it from his shaking fingers and rolled it down slow over the full, heavy length of him, your eyes fixed on his jaw as it went rigid under your palm.

"You’re staring," he muttered, voice strained.

"I’m allowed." Your thumb traced the vein along his length. "I’m making up for lost time."

That did something to his face—not quite a smile, something rawer than that—right before he notched himself against your entrance and pressed in, slow, immense, the air catching hard in the back of your throat. He filled you by degrees, each inch drawing a broken sound out of both of you, until he was seated fully inside you, thick and deep. For a moment, neither of you moved at all, just breathing through the impossible fullness of it, his forehead dropping to your shoulder.

"Fuck—honey." Just that. Like it was all he had room for.

He held there, hips flush against yours, and you could feel the slow throb of his pulse everywhere your bodies joined. When he finally started to move, it wasn’t the careful testing rhythm from before. He drew almost all the way out, slow enough that you felt every inch of the slide, before sinking back into you to the hilt, again and again, each thrust pulling a fresh, wrecked sound from his throat. His hands gripped your thighs, angling your hips to pull you into every movement, like he was trying to imprint the shape of you into his memory.

"You feel—" He cut himself off, jaw working, and tried again, quieter, rougher. "So—Christ, honey. Been thinkin’ about this." A broken laugh, more air than sound. "Longer than I should say."

"Yeah?" Your nails dragged down his back. "How long."

"Don’t." He groaned, his hips stuttering. "Don’t make me do math right now."

You arched up to meet him, your own voice fraying at the edges, unguarded in a way you rarely let yourself be. "Carmy…"

"I got you." His hand slid beneath you, angling your hips higher, and the new angle punched a sound out of you that you didn’t try to hide. "Right there? Yeah—fuck, Honey, right there."

The pace built past careful into something more urgent, the old bed frame knocking softly against the wall, your legs locking around him, his name breaking apart in your mouth every time he drove deep. He shifted his weight, one hand sliding between your bodies to find where you were still sensitive from before, his thumb working in slow circles that matched the drag of his hips. The pressure that had barely settled after the first time began building again, sharper now, doubled. You felt the pace stutter in him, the low sounds against your throat turning ragged and uneven, both of you chasing the same edge now instead of one waiting on the other.

"Together," he managed, barely words at all. "C’mon, honey, I got you—together—"

The pressure crested low and tight, and when it finally broke over you, he followed almost immediately after, a rough groan tearing out of him into your hair, his whole body going rigid before he collapsed his weight into you. Both of you breathed like you’d run a marathon, like the air itself was too thick to pull into your lungs.

Afterward, he didn’t roll away. He stayed heavy on top of you, his face buried in your hair, both of you sweating despite the draft coming off the window. The smell of him filled your nose—not just the cologne, but the permanent undercurrent of the bakery that lived in his skin: yeast, flour, old vanilla, things that never fully washed out.

"Hey," you muttered, shifting your hips beneath him. "Dead weight, Carmy."

He let out a weak huff, but instead of rolling away, he only shifted his weight to the side, his arm sliding beneath you to pull you flush against him. His other hand found your waist, his thumb tracing slow, lazy circles against your skin, like he was memorizing the shape of you all over again. You could feel his heartbeat against your ribs, steady but still a little wild, as if it hadn’t quite caught up to the fact that this was real.

You turned your head to press a kiss to his shoulder, tasting salt and the faintest hint of sugar on his skin. His breath hitched, and his fingers tightened against your hip, as if he were afraid you might disappear if he didn’t hold on.

"Stay," he murmured against your temple, his voice rough. Not a request. A plea.

You didn’t answer with words. Instead, you tangled your legs with his, your toes brushing against his calf, and let your fingers trace the line of his collarbone, the dip of his throat, the scar along his ribs. Every touch felt like a confession, a promise. His skin was warm beneath your fingertips, and you could feel the way his muscles tensed and relaxed beneath your exploration, like he was trying to commit the sensation to memory.

He pressed his lips to the top of your head, then lower, to your temple, your cheek, the corner of your mouth—small, lingering kisses that felt more intimate than everything that had come before. His hand slid up to cradle the back of your neck, his thumb brushing against the pearl he’d given you, as if to remind himself that it was real, that this was real.

He pulled you even closer, if that were possible, his chin resting on the crown of your head. For a long moment, neither of you spoke. There was no need. The quiet between you wasn’t empty—it was full of everything you’d never said, every glance you’d averted, every touch you’d denied yourselves. Now, it was all here, wrapped up in the way his fingers traced the curve of your spine, in the way your breath synchronized with his.

Eventually, his hand found yours, lacing your fingers together and pressing your palm flat against his chest, right over his heart. You could feel the steady thump-thump-thump beneath your skin, as if it were trying to beat in time with your own.

"Most of our lives," he said quietly, his voice thick. He gestured vaguely between you, as if the space itself could explain what he meant. "All this time, and I still don’t know how to do this right."

You tilted your head up to look at him, your lips brushing his jaw. "You’re doing fine."

He let out a shaky breath, his eyes searching yours in the dim light. There was something raw in his gaze, something that made your chest ache. "I’ve dreamed about this," he admitted, his voice barely above a whisper. "A thousand times. But none of them…" He swallowed. "None of them felt like this."

You didn’t let him finish. Instead, you pulled his face down to yours and kissed him, slow and deep, your free hand sliding into his hair to hold him there. When you finally pulled back, your forehead rested against his, your breaths mingling.

"Better?" you asked, your voice soft.

His answer was a kiss to the tip of your nose, then your lips again, lingering this time, like he was savoring the taste of you. "Yeah," he murmured against your mouth. "Better."

The room was quiet except for the sound of your shared breathing and the distant hum of the party downstairs, a world away. His fingers returned to tracing patterns on your skin—your shoulder, your collarbone, the sensitive spot behind your ear—and you let your eyes drift shut, letting the warmth of him, the rightness of him, wash over you.

Downstairs, the front door finally slammed, the loud, lingering farewells of your parents and the rest of the uncles echoing up the floorboards. They’d assume you’d walked home early or crashed on Sugar’s floor—a lie you’d used since high school. But for the first time, the deception didn’t feel like a burden. It felt like a secret, something precious and just yours.

You let your fingers drift down to the small of his back, pulling him even closer, if that were possible. His skin was warm, his breath steady against your neck. You could have stayed like that forever—entwined, unhurried, finally his in a way you’d both pretended not to want for too long.

And when sleep finally pulled at the edges of your consciousness, it wasn’t to the sound of graphite on paper, but to the quiet, rhythmic rise and fall of his chest beneath your palm, and a quiet “Honey” pressed against your hair with the weight of a vow.

The old wool quilt had slipped almost entirely from the bed during the night. What remained lay twisted around your calves, its rough edge scratching bare skin whenever you moved. Beyond it, the room had gone gray with morning. Frost clouded the window above Carmy’s desk, thinning near the corners where weak winter light pressed through, and the radiator beneath it had stopped making noise sometime before dawn.

Cold reached you gradually. First along your shoulder, then down your back where the air touched skin that had stayed warm beneath Carmy only hours earlier. You drew the quilt higher and rolled toward the heat beside you.

Carmy was already awake.

He lay flat on his back in the black hoodie he had pulled on sometime during the night, one arm bent beneath his head and his eyes fixed on the old water stain spreading across the ceiling. Nothing about him looked rested. His jaw remained too tight, and the hand resting over his stomach had curled into the fabric as though waking beside you had given him something else to survive.

The mattress groaned when you shifted closer.

His eyes moved immediately toward you.

“Morning,” he said.

Sleep had worn his voice down to something rough and intimate. You smiled before you could stop yourself and pulled the quilt over your shoulder.

“Your bed still sounds terrible.”

“It’s old.”

“You fell out of it in fourth grade.”

Carmy’s mouth moved at one corner. “I remember.”

“You cried so hard Mikey thought you broke your arm.”

“My wrist was fucked.”

“You were nine, Bear.”

The name softened something in his face. “You were bossy.”

“You liked being taken care of.”

His gaze dropped to the space between you. “Still do.”

The admission came quietly enough that you might have missed it if you had not spent most of your life listening for the things he could barely make himself say.

You reached beneath the edge of his sleeve. His skin was cold.

“You’ve been awake long?”

“A while.”

“How long?”

“Since it got light.”

“You could’ve woken me.”

“You were sleeping.”

“That is usually what people do over night Carmen.”

His fingers caught yours beneath the quilt but did not hold them. “Thought you might leave before I woke up.”

The humor left the room.

Carmy gave the confession to the ceiling rather than to you. He looked braced for the answer, as though your presence beside him might still be an accident the morning could correct.

You pushed yourself onto one elbow. His curls were flattened on one side, still disordered from your fingers the night before. In this room he looked close enough to the boy you had known that tenderness rose through you before anger had any chance to follow.

“I wasn’t going to leave.”

“You could’ve.”

“I could have. I didn’t want to.”

His jaw worked.

“I didn’t know what this would feel like after,” he said.

“Neither did I.”

“Thought maybe you’d wake up and decide it was a bad idea.”

You touched his face. Carmy leaned into your palm before he could seem to reconsider the movement.

“Last night was not something I did because you were upset,” you said. “It was not me taking care of you.”

His eyes returned to yours.

“I wanted you. I wanted that before the party, after the stairwell and every day you spent pretending the kiss had not changed anything.”

Carmy covered your hand where it rested against his cheek. “I wanted you to stay.”

“You could have asked.”

“I did.”

“You told me to stay while you were still inside me. I am not sure that counts.”

Color moved across his face.

You slid closer and drew one of his hands beneath the quilt, placing his palm against the warm skin of your stomach. His fingers spread slowly.

“You are allowed to want me here,” you told him. “You are allowed to say it before you get desperate.”

Carmy’s thumb moved beneath your ribs. “Stay.”

You studied his face.

“Today,” he added, as though the smaller unit of time made the request survivable. “Stay today.”

“I was already planning to.”

His shoulders lowered by a fraction.

You kissed him then, gently at first. Carmy’s mouth was warm and soft with sleep, his hesitation lasting only until your thigh moved over his. His hand slid from your stomach to your waist, drawing you across him. The hardness beneath his sweatpants pressed against the inside of your leg.

He froze.

“Sorry.”

You drew back. “For having a body?”

His ears reddened.

“Carmen.”

“I don’t want you thinking I expect—”

“You have spent the last five minutes deciding what I think again.”

His mouth closed.

You touched the line of his jaw. “Ask.”

Carmy looked at you with an expression that was equal parts desire and alarm.

“Do you want to?” he asked.

“Yes.”

He kissed you again before the word had fully left your mouth.

The second time was slower, not because either of you wanted less but because morning had removed the desperate sense that the chance might disappear if you paused. Carmy pulled the hoodie over his head while you pushed his sweatpants down his hips. The mattress complained beneath every shift of your bodies, making you laugh against his neck.

“It held last night,” you said.

“Barely.”

“It held you when you were nine.”

Carmy laughed, warm and startled, before catching your mouth again.

His hands moved over you with the confidence of recent memory, tracing the path they had learned only hours before. He checked the tenderness between your thighs with careful fingers, watching your face until you drew him closer and told him you wanted more than caution. When he reached toward the floor for his pants, you caught his wrist.

“What?”

“Wallet,” he said, still breathing hard. “Condom.”

The word grounded the moment. You released him and watched him retrieve it, grateful that desire had not made either of you careless or left the choice unspoken. Carmy tore the wrapper open, then stopped with the condom pinched between his fingers.

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

“You’re sore.”

“A little. Go slowly.”

He nodded.

You rolled the condom over him yourself, enjoying the way his jaw tightened beneath your hand. Carmy settled between your thighs and entered you by degrees, pausing whenever your breath changed until the ache softened into pleasure. There was no need to relearn everything from the night before. You guided his hips, told him when the angle was right and pulled him down when he tried to hold too much of his weight away from you.

“Closer,” you murmured.

“Don’t wanna crush you.”

“You are not that heavy.”

His expression suggested offense, but he obeyed.

The rhythm remained unhurried. You kissed the scar along his ribs when he shifted above you, then his throat, his jaw, every piece of him you had known in one form and were learning in another. Carmy buried his face near your neck when pleasure made language difficult. The sounds he allowed you to hear were rough and unguarded, far more intimate than any polished praise could have been.

When your body began tightening around him, his hand slipped between you.

“Here?” he asked.

You guided his thumb. “A little slower.”

He listened.

The orgasm came gradually, drawn out by the careful roll of his hips and the steady movement of his hand. You held his face close as it moved through you, your breath breaking against his mouth. Carmy followed soon after, shuddering above you with 'Honey' caught low in his throat.

The room remained cold beyond the quilt, but his body covered yours, warm and damp and real. 

You ran your fingers through the curls at the back of his head until his breathing settled.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Very.”

“Sore?”

“Manageable.”

Concern gathered anyway.

You caught his chin. “Do not turn good sex into a medical emergency.”

His mouth twitched. “It was good?”

“You’re fishing.”

“I’m asking.”

“It was good.”

“Better than last night?”

You stared at him.

Carmy looked immediately embarrassed by his own question. “Never mind.”

“You competitive about sex now?”

“No.”

“You want a scorecard?”

“Shut up.”

You laughed as he hid his face against your shoulder.

After he withdrew, he tied the condom and wrapped it in tissue before placing it in the wastebasket with such deliberation that you nearly teased him again. Instead, you let him clean you gently and pull the quilt back over both of you. When he settled beside you, you fitted yourself against his chest and draped one leg across his.

His arm closed around you without hesitation.

For several minutes, you listened to the house waking beneath the floorboards. A cabinet opened. Water ran through the pipes. Donna called for a pan she had almost certainly misplaced herself. Someone—Mikey, judging by the heavy tread—crossed the hallway and stopped near the bottom of the stairs.

Carmy’s body tightened.

“He is going to know,” you said.

“He doesn’t know anything.”

“The bed has been filing reports all night.”

Carmy covered his eyes with one hand. “Fuck.”

You laughed against his chest.

A knock landed against the bedroom door.

“Breakfast,” Mikey called. There was a pause long enough to become deliberate. “Whenever everybody’s decent.”

Carmy groaned.

Mikey’s footsteps moved away.

You lifted your head. “He was restrained.”

“He’s saving it.”

“Probably.”

Carmy looked toward the door, then back at you. The earlier warmth in his face faded beneath something more serious.

“There’s something I need to tell you.”

Your hand stilled against his chest.

“What?”

His mouth opened.

From downstairs, Donna shouted his name with enough force to rattle the vent.

Carmy flinched.

You watched his attention fracture between the room and the house below. “Is it bad?”

“No. I mean—no, it’s not bad.”

“Then tell me after coffee.”

The relief that crossed his face was too quick, and you mistook it for gratitude that you had not made him talk while half dressed in a freezing room.

“After coffee,” he repeated.

You kissed him once, then climbed out of bed in search of your clothes.

Carmy watched you move around the room with an expression you would not understand until much later.

You went downstairs first.

Arriving separately was meant to preserve some small illusion that nothing unusual had happened. It was not a convincing plan. Carmy needed another minute to find his shirt, and you needed one alone in the bathroom to make your curls look less like someone had spent half the night pulling them through his fingers.

The kitchen was already warm. Butter hissed in a pan, the windows had fogged above the sink and Sugar stood at the stove in yesterday’s clothes, moving scrambled eggs slowly through the heat. Mikey leaned against the counter near the coffee machine with both hands around a mug.

His eyes lifted when you entered.

Recognition arrived almost immediately.

To his credit, he kept it to himself.

Sugar looked over too. Her gaze moved across yesterday’s sweater, your face and the pearl resting at your throat before returning to the eggs.

“Morning.”

“Morning.”

“Sleep okay?”

“Eventually.”

The corner of her mouth curved.

You crossed to the cabinet and took down two mugs.

“One for Carm?” Sugar asked.

“He’ll want one.”

Mikey raised his eyebrows over the rim of his coffee.

You pointed at him. “Behave.”

“I am behaving.”

“That is not your usual face.”

“This is my Christmas face.”

“It looks smug.”

“Christmas brings me joy.”

Footsteps creaked along the stairs before you could answer. Carmy entered wearing his black hoodie again, his curls damp where he had tried to flatten them with water. The effort had made the rest stand up more noticeably.

His gaze found you first.

Something quiet passed between you, warm enough that Sugar looked down at the pan and Mikey’s smile spread slowly across his face.

“Don’t,” Carmy said.

Mikey held up one hand. “Didn’t say anything.”

“You were going to.”

“I was gonna say Merry Christmas.”

“You already said it yesterday.”

“Holiday lasts all day.”

Carmy ignored him and came to stand beside you. His hand settled briefly at the small of your back as he reached for the coffee you had prepared. The touch lasted less than a second. It was enough.

Sugar slid a plate onto the counter. “Sit. Both of you.”

Carmy looked toward you. “You eating?”

“Yes.”

He took the seat beside yours.

Mikey watched the two of you for another moment, humor giving way to something gentler.

“You okay, Honey?” he asked.

The question was for you alone. Not a joke about thin walls or years of waiting. He wanted to know whether his brother had been careful with something Mikey understood mattered.

“I’m good.”

Mikey studied your face, then nodded.

“Good.”

That was all.

Carmy’s knee pressed against yours beneath the counter and remained there. He ate with one hand resting beside your thigh, close enough that your fingers could brush his when you reached for the salt. Sugar talked about a serving tray Donna had misplaced. Mikey claimed Richie had moved it. Richie shouted from the next room that he had never touched the thing in his life.

For a few minutes, the kitchen returned to its ordinary shape.

Then Carmy leaned close enough for only you to hear.

“Can we talk after this?”

You glanced at him. The anxiety from upstairs had returned, visible in the tightness around his mouth.

“Of course.”

Donna entered before he could say more, carrying a bundle of dish towels and demanding to know why everyone was sitting while there was still food to finish. The room expanded around her immediately. Sugar rose. Mikey took the towels. Carmy stood too, caught between you and the work being handed to him.

You touched his wrist.

“Later,” you said.

He nodded.

The answer did not settle him.

It should have warned you.

Instead, you let the morning carry you forward. You helped Sugar. Carmy moved through the kitchen beside you, occasionally touching your back as he passed, each small contact feeling like confirmation. Mikey teased him only once, asking whether he planned to stare at you all day or eventually chop the onions in front of him.

Carmy picked up the knife.

“I can do both.”

Mikey’s face opened in delighted disbelief.

You threw a dish towel at him before he could turn the sentence into family history.

The day carried on the way Christmas always did in the Berzatto house—too loud, too warm and crowded with more food than the number of people present could reasonably finish. Someone was always opening the oven. Someone else shouted from another room about a serving spoon no one could find. Uncles argued over the Bears with the gravity of men negotiating a ceasefire. Donna cried once at the sink and again when Sugar found a photograph from 1997 beneath a stack of takeout menus.

Carmy tried to get you alone twice.

The first time, Donna intercepted him with a roasting pan before he crossed the kitchen. The second, Richie opened the back door just as Carmy tried to catch your attention and demanded help carrying beer from the trunk. Each interruption left him more tightly wound. He tore a paper napkin into thin strips during lunch and forgot the coffee cooling beside his hand.

You assumed the conversation waiting between you concerned the two of you. Perhaps he wanted to decide what to tell everyone, or whether last night made you a couple after years of refusing the word. The possibilities made you nervous, but not frightened. Carmy had kissed you in front of the Christmas tree when no one was looking. He had brushed his thumb across the pearl each time he passed you. Once, while Donna argued with Cicero near the stove, he caught your hand behind his back and held it there until the shouting moved elsewhere.

By midafternoon, even those small touches had stopped.

You found him in the dining room carrying a bowl he had already delivered once. He set it near the wrong plates and stared at the serving spoon as though he had forgotten its purpose.

When you touched his arm, he startled.

“You’re making me nervous,” you said.

His eyes moved toward the clock. “Can we go outside?”

The words came with such visible effort that you put down the stack of napkins in your hand.

“All right.”

Carmy retrieved your coat before his own. He held it while you pushed your arms through the sleeves, fingers catching once in your hair before he freed it from the collar. The gesture was gentle enough to make the dread in his face feel worse.

Outside, the cold had sharpened toward evening. Snow traced the edges of the steps and lay thin across the crooked fence between the yards. Your parents’ porch light had already come on next door. You had planned to sleep in your childhood room rather than drive back to your apartment after wine and Christmas noise; from the Berzatto steps, the quiet house looked close enough to reach in a few seconds.

Carmy sat beside you with his elbows on his knees.

For a moment, he said nothing.

You waited until the cold began entering through your coat.

“Whatever it is, say it.”

His hands clasped more tightly.

“I got the callback from New York.”

The first feeling that moved through you was pride. It arrived instinctively, before fear had time to follow. You knew what the restaurant meant and how hard he had worked to be considered there at all.

“They offered you the position?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s incredible.”

Carmy looked at his hands.

The absence of happiness in him changed the shape of the news.

“When do they want you?”

His throat moved.

“Next week.”

The pride inside you dropped so quickly it felt physical.

“Next week?”

“Seven days.”

You looked across the yard toward your parents’ kitchen. The curtains stood open over an empty, warmly lit room.

“When did you find out?”

Carmy did not answer.

You turned toward him. “When?”

“Yesterday morning.”

The cold seemed to enter you all at once.

He had known before the gifts. Before the pearl. Before you followed him upstairs and reminded him of the promise made in the stairwell. He had known while you undressed him and while he asked you to stay.

“You knew before last night.”

His eyes closed briefly. “Yeah.”

“Before we slept together.”

“Honey—”

“You had this in your pocket the whole time.”

“I was going to tell you.”

“You nearly did this morning.”

“I tried.”

“After.”

The single word stopped him.

Your voice remained quiet because anything louder would have broken.

“You waited until after you had given me the necklace, after we had sex, after I woke up believing we had finally begun something. You knew every one of those moments had a deadline I could not see.”

“I didn’t want it to be a goodbye.”

“There was a goodbye inside it whether you wanted one or not.”

Carmy looked at you.

“You knew that,” you said. “You decided I didn’t need to.”

“I wanted one night that was only ours.”

“Last night was mine too.”

His face went pale.

“You did not get to choose what information I was allowed to have before I gave that to you.”

“I wasn’t trying to take anything.”

“But you took the choice out of it.” Your eyes had begun to burn. “Maybe I still would have gone upstairs. Maybe I would have needed time. Maybe I would have told you to go to hell. That answer belonged to me.”

Carmy dragged both hands over his face. “You’re right.”

The concession did not make the hurt smaller.

“I was scared you’d leave before we ever—” He stopped. “I wanted you.”

“You have wanted me for years. You still found a way to make wanting me something you managed alone.”

He flinched.

You stood because remaining beside him had become unbearable. The air rushed into the narrow space your bodies had shared.

“So what happens?” you asked. “You leave in a week, and we call last night enough?”

“No.” Carmy rose too quickly, his shoe slipping once against the frosted step. “I want you to come with me.”

You stared at him.

The sentence should have sounded like hope.

Instead, something in the speed of it made dread move down your spine.

“What?”

“There’s a place two blocks from the restaurant. Two bedrooms. It’s not great, but the rent’s not—”

“You found an apartment.”

“I looked at one.”

“For both of us.”

“I didn’t sign anything.”

The distinction made heat rise into your throat.

“And there are museums,” he continued. “Archives. Universities. I asked the chef, and he knows somebody whose wife works at—”

“You asked strangers about my career.”

Carmy stopped.

The yard became terribly quiet. Through the wall behind you, the heating system turned on with a low mechanical hum.

“I was trying to make sure you had something there,” he said.

“You were making sure your plan worked.”

“No. I wanted to know it could be real.”

“You still haven’t asked.”

The realization crossed his face slowly.

“You told me about a two-bedroom. You researched places I could work. You decided there was room for me and arrived at the part where I agree.”

“You have a choice.”

“After you built everything around the answer you wanted.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“You thought if you removed enough obstacles, I would have no reason to refuse.”

“I thought you might want it too.”

“I might have.”

Carmy went still.

The tears finally slipped hot over your cold cheeks.

“If you had come to me yesterday and said you had an offer and wanted to talk about what it meant for us, maybe I would have gone. Maybe I would have asked for a month. Maybe I would have said no.” You wiped your face with the heel of your hand. “We will never know, because you did not let me be part of the decision.”

“I trust you.”

“You trust me to follow you.”

His face folded.

You did not want to hurt him. Some old instinct still wanted to take his hand, explain his own fear back to him and soften the consequences until he could bear them.

You kept your arms at your sides.

“You remember everything about me,” you said. “What I eat. What books I want. Which necklace I looked at in October. But remembering my preferences is not the same as respecting my future.”

“I wanted a future with you.”

“Then you should have spoken to me before you furnished it.”

Carmy looked as though the words had struck him.

“I’m trying now.”

“You’re telling me after the job, the apartment and last night.” Your voice lowered, exhausted by the anger carrying it. “You keep giving me decisions after you’ve made them.”

For several seconds, he could not speak.

Then he said, “I love you.”

Plainly. No stairwell noise, no mouth against your hair, no unfinished sentence you had to translate for him.

You had imagined those words from Carmy for most of your life. You had never imagined they would make you feel this lonely.

“I love you too,” you whispered. 

Carmy stepped toward you.

You moved back.

The small retreat stopped him more completely than shouting could have.

“Please don’t touch me.”

His hands fell to his sides.

“I have to go.”

“Wait.”

You turned toward the yard.

“I can fix this,” he said behind you.

You stopped with one hand against the fence opening and looked back at him. He stood beneath the weak porch light, hood fallen away from his head, looking frightened and young and exactly like the boy you had spent half your life trying to understand.

“You can’t  fix a decision by making another one for me.”

Carmy’s mouth opened.

You crossed through the gap before he found an answer.

The back door of your parents’ house waited only a few yards away, but the thought of stepping into that quiet kitchen while everyone was still next door felt impossible. Your overnight bag sat in your childhood room. Your car was parked out front. You could have gone inside, locked the door and let the house hide you until morning.

Instead, you passed the steps, went through the side gate and onto the sidewalk.

You made it half a block before Mikey called after you.

“Honeybear—hey.”

You closed your eyes.

His footsteps approached at a jog. He had thrown a jacket over a thin T-shirt, and neither shoe was tied properly. Cold had already reddened his face.

“Jesus. You trying to outrun the whole neighborhood?”

You looked away.

Mikey took in your wet cheeks, the tension in your shoulders and the way you held your coat closed with both fists. The humor left his face.

“What happened?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Okay.”

He moved beside you rather than blocking your path and matched his pace to yours. For several seconds, the only sound was your boots against the frozen sidewalk.

Then he asked, “Was it Carm?”

You did not answer.

Mikey looked back toward the house. “He told you about New York.”

You stopped.

“You knew?”

“Not that he got it.” The answer came quickly. “I knew he was waiting to hear. That’s it.”

You studied him, trying to decide whether another piece of your life had been sitting in someone else’s hands.

Mikey saw the fear in your face.

“I swear, Honeybear. I didn’t know.”

Your shoulders lowered by a fraction.

“He wants me to go with him.”

For one second, Mikey looked relieved. Then he understood that the sentence was not good news.

“How’d he ask?”

A broken sound escaped you, almost a laugh.

“He didn’t. He found an apartment. He asked people about jobs for me.” You wiped angrily at your face. “He knew before last night. He knew he was leaving, and he didn’t tell me until after.”

Your voice failed.

Mikey’s face went still.

“Jesus Christ, Carm.”

“I feel so stupid.”

“No.” The word came sharply enough to stop you. “Don’t do that.”

You looked at him.

“You trusted him,” Mikey said. “That is not stupidity.”

The gentleness in his voice loosened what little control you had left.

“He could have told me,” you said. “I would have listened. I might have gone.”

Mikey nodded once. “He should’ve asked.”

Your breath hitched.

He opened his arms.

“C’mere.”

You went to him.

Mikey wrapped his jacket around both of you as much as he could and held you against his chest. The embrace carried the same uncomplicated safety it had when you were children, when a bicycle chain snapped or pavement opened your knee and he appeared before either set of parents had time to notice.

He did not soften Carmy for you.

He only held you.

When the shaking slowed, Mikey drew back enough to see your face.

“He’s a fucking idiot,” he said.

You gave a weak nod.

“And he loves you.” Mikey’s jaw tightened before he added, “That doesn’t make him right.”

You looked down at the pavement.

“I don’t know what happens now.”

“You don’t need an answer tonight.”

He slipped one arm around your shoulders and walked you back toward the neighboring houses. He did not steer you toward the Berzatto porch. He took you to your parents’ house, where the light over the front steps cast its familiar yellow circle across the snow.

“You want me to come in?”

You shook your head. “My parents are still next door. I was supposed to sleep here tonight.”

“Okay.”

“I need to be alone.”

Mikey remained at the bottom of the steps while you climbed.

“Honeybear.”

You looked back.

“You don’t owe him New York,” he said. “And you don’t have to forgive him on his schedule.”

The words settled more slowly than comfort.

“I’m trying to believe that.”

“That’s enough for tonight.”

From the porch, you could see Carmy’s upstairs window across the narrow strip of darkness between the houses. The curtain remained open. His old bed sat unmade beneath the frost-clouded glass.

That morning, you had believed waking there meant the two of you had finally stopped leaving each other behind.

Now you understood that Carmy had already been preparing to go.

Mikey waited until you unlocked the door.

You entered without turning on the lights. Your overnight bag sat at the foot of the stairs, exactly where you had left it before crossing next door that afternoon. The house received you in silence, familiar rooms holding their shapes in the dark.

Behind you, Mikey remained on the porch until the lock clicked.

Through the front window, you watched him cross the lawn and disappear into the Berzatto house.

Carmy never came out.

For once, you were grateful he had let you go.