Fuck, why was that so good?

I can't get attached, but James makes everything so difficult.

The way his large, veined hands explore the curves of my body.

He knows exactly where my sensitive spots are and showers me with wet kisses while moaning softly against my skin.

Every passing second makes my panties more transparent and sticky.

That's so disgusting.

He always smiles when he realizes how wet I get for him, pathetic.

All I need is your cock deep inside me.

Our mess is so disgusting, wet, and noisy, damn it's so good.

My pussy is slowly going crazy.

Feeling your erection through your underwear pressing against my stomach is so relaxing.

His tip is already leaking, he's as needy as I am.

Her soft moans are the most addictive thing I've ever heard in my entire life.

I know I'm going to wake up with terrible pain and marks all over my body.

Waking up with your cum inside me is so comforting.

I love our nightly relationship.

There are small white flowers growing near the fence, low to the ground, in an uneven little cluster like they weren't planted so much as they simply decided to show up. James doesn't know their name. He's thought about looking it up more than once and never has, maybe because not knowing gives him something small to wonder about every time he comes here, and the wondering is easier than the alternative, which is having nothing left to learn about anything connected to you.

He comes on Sundays, mostly. Sometimes a weekday, if the week has been bad in a specific, quiet way that only this place seems to answer. Today it's a Sunday, overcast, the kind of gray that doesn't commit to rain, and he's wearing the jacket you used to steal off the back of his chair because you said his stuff smelled like actual laundry detergent and yours smelled like the inside of a gym bag no matter how many times you washed it.

He sits down the way he always does—knees bent, forearms resting on them, weight balanced easy on the balls of his feet, like even grief hasn't managed to touch his sense of balance. He sets a coffee cup down in the grass beside him. Oat milk, extra shot, the way you took it on the mornings you were pretending your stomach could handle caffeine. He knows you won't drink it. He brings it anyway. Some rituals don't need to make sense to be worth keeping.

In his jacket pocket is a notebook with a cracked spine, its pages gone soft and slightly curled from being opened too many times in too short a span. He didn't find it until three months after—buried in the drawer of your nightstand under a phone charger and a half-empty pack of gum, sitting there the whole time like it was waiting to be inconvenient, waiting for him to be ready, though he still isn't sure he ever fully was.

He doesn't open it right away today. He watches a bird land on the fence and immediately think better of it, watches the gray sky do nothing in particular. Somewhere behind him footsteps pass along a gravel path, slow and unhurried, and further off a car door shuts, and further off than that the ordinary sounds of a city keep happening the way they always do, indifferent to the fact that an entire year of your life sits folded up in the notebook in his pocket, waiting.

He'd tried, in the early weeks, to talk to you here the way people do in movies—full sentences, whole conversations, a kind of one-sided performance he didn't know how to sustain. It had felt false almost immediately, like doing an impression of grief instead of actually having it. What he does now is quieter. He reads. He lets the reading do the talking his own voice can't always manage.

Then, because the silence has done what it usually does—filled up until it needs something to interrupt it—he takes the notebook out and finds the last page, the one he's read so many times the ink has nearly worn a groove into his memory.

He starts, like he always does, at the end.

Small day today. Good small, not sad small. I sat on the balcony for almost an hour and just watched the street—the guy who walks his dog the exact same route every morning, the kid across the way practicing violin badly and without shame, which I respect more than I can say. James brought tea instead of asking if I wanted to talk. I think he's gotten good at reading which day it is before I even say anything.

I keep meaning to tell him something and keep losing the nerve. Not anything big. Just—a thank you that's too big to say casually and too small to make into an event. I'll find the right moment. There's still time to find the right moment.

The balcony faced east, which meant mornings arrived there first, pale and unhurried, sliding across the two mismatched chairs you'd bought secondhand and never gotten around to replacing. You liked it that way. James liked whatever you liked, which was a fact about him he'd never admit out loud but had stopped bothering to disguise.

He brought the tea without asking. Chamomile, too hot, the way you always let it sit until it was drinkable and never actually drank cold. He set it on the little table between the chairs and folded himself into the one beside you, long legs stretched out, ankles crossed, watching the street with the same patient attention you were giving it.

"That kid's going to be terrible at violin for a long time," he said, nodding toward the window across the courtyard, where the scratchy, tuneless scrape of a bow drifted out into the morning. "Impressive commitment to being bad at something in public, though. I respect it."

"You'd never do that. Be bad at something in public."

"Absolutely not. I suffer in private, like a normal, well-adjusted person."

You laughed—a real one, easy, the kind that didn't cost you anything, which was rare enough lately that you both noticed it and neither of you said so.

"I like this," you said, after a while, watching the dog-walker make his same loop for what had to be the hundredth morning you'd witnessed it. "Just—this. Nothing happening. I used to think I needed things to happen to feel like I was living. Now I think this is the whole point. I just didn't know it yet."

James turned his head to look at you instead of the street. He didn't say anything clever back. He just reached over and laced his fingers through yours on the armrest between the chairs, thumb moving slow over your knuckles, and let the quiet do the rest of the talking.

"Can I ask you something," you said, once the dog-walker had rounded the corner out of sight and the street had gone briefly, perfectly still.

"You can ask me anything. I reserve the right to answer with a bit though."

"If I ever stop being—" you paused, hunting for the word, "—present. Like if I get quiet, or far away, or start doing that thing where I disappear into my own head. Will you just sit with me anyway? Not try to pull me out of it?"

James turned that over for a second, serious now, the joking put away somewhere for later use. "Yeah," he said. "I'm good at sitting with things. Better than I am at fixing them, probably, even if I hate admitting that."

"I know. That's why I asked you and not, like, the internet."

"Devastating review of the internet's bedside manner, but accurate." He squeezed your hand once, light. "I'm not going anywhere, Bird. Quiet or loud. Present or far away. You could go completely silent for a week and I'd just bring the tea and wait you out."

You almost told him then—the thing you kept meaning to say, the thank you too big for a Tuesday morning, the words already forming somewhere behind your teeth, warm and ready to be spoken. It sat right at the back of your throat. But the violin started up again, badly, gloriously off-key, and you both laughed instead, and the moment folded itself back up neat and small and waited for a better one to come along.

There would not turn out to be a better one. Neither of you knew that yet. The tea went cold in its cup, mostly untouched, and neither of you minded, because mornings like that one felt, at the time, like something you'd simply get more of—an easy, ordinary Tuesday, one of what you both assumed would be hundreds more just like it.

I told him today that I'm tired. Not tired like I need sleep. Tired like I've been carrying something up a hill for so long I forgot the hill has a top. He got that look—the one where his jaw does something before his mouth does. He didn't yell. James never yells. He just went quiet in that way that's louder than yelling, and I hated that I did that to him, and I hated more that some small, ugly part of me didn't care enough to take it back.

Is it really selfish of me for wanting to leave? Have you ever thought about how selfish it is for you for wanting me to stay?

I don't think he has an answer. I don't think I want one. I just wanted to say it out loud to someone besides this notebook.

You said it on a Tuesday, sitting on the bathroom floor because the tile was cold and cold was one of the only things that still felt like anything. The overhead light hummed faintly, the way it had for months and neither of you had ever gotten around to fixing. James was leaning in the doorway with his arms crossed, not because he was angry, but because it was the only way he'd found to keep his hands still.

"Say that again," he said. Not sharp. Just certain, the way he got when he wanted to make sure he'd heard something right before he let himself react to it.

"You heard me."

"I want you to say it again anyway."

You did. Word for word, like reading a line back to a director who'd missed it the first time. Is it really selfish of me for wanting to leave. Have you ever thought about how selfish it is for you, wanting me to stay.

He didn't flinch. That was the thing about him—he never gave you the satisfaction of watching something land. He crouched down instead, so he was at your height, elbows on his knees, and he looked at you for a long moment like he was doing math in his head, working something out that didn't have a clean answer no matter how many times he ran it.

"Yeah," he said finally. "I have."

You hadn't expected that. You'd expected an argument, a reason, some version of don't say that dressed up as encouragement. Instead he just sat with you on the cold floor and let the question breathe between you, unanswered, because some questions aren't rhetorical, and some questions don't have an answer that's fair to give at eleven at night, when your body has been fighting a war it's losing for a year and a half and his has been fighting right alongside it without ever getting to say so.

"I'm not going to tell you it's not selfish," he said eventually. "I don't actually think that's the point."

"Then what's the point."

"The point is I'm selfish too, and I'm not sorry about it. So I guess we're both just—selfish, together, in the same bathroom, on the same cold floor, at the same stupid hour."

You laughed, which surprised you both, a short, cracked thing that turned into something closer to crying halfway through. He didn't try to fix it. He just moved to sit next to you, shoulder to shoulder, spine against the cabinet, and let the tile be cold under both of you for a long while.

"Can I tell you something I've never said out loud," he said eventually, staring straight ahead at the opposite wall instead of at you, the way he sometimes did when a thing mattered too much to say while making eye contact.

"Always."

"Some nights I lie awake doing the math. Like—best case, worst case, all the cases in between. I know exactly how many good days a best case probably buys us. I run the numbers like it's a schedule I can actually control, like if I just plan hard enough I can negotiate with it." A dry, humorless laugh. "It's the stupidest thing I do. I know it doesn't work like that. I do it anyway. Every night."

"That sounds exhausting."

"It is. But it's also the only way I know how to love someone I can't fix. I turn it into a project. A stupid, doomed project, but at least it's something my brain can hold onto at three in the morning instead of just—the fear, raw, with nothing to organize it."

You reached over and laced your fingers through his on the cold tile. "You don't have to run the numbers for me. I'd rather have you here than have you doing math in the dark."

"I know. I'm working on it." He turned his head finally, met your eyes, something raw and unguarded in his face that he rarely let anyone see, not even you, not often. "For what it's worth—the selfish thing. If you ever do decide you're done fighting, I'm not going to make you carry my wanting-you-to-stay on top of everything else you're already carrying. I might feel it. I'm allowed to feel it. But I'm not going to make it your job to manage."

"That's the nicest terrible thing you've ever said to me."

"I have a whole collection. Ask me again sometime when it's not eleven at night on a bathroom floor."

You laughed again, softer this time, and let your head fall against his shoulder, and neither of you said anything else, because for once nothing else needed saying—just the cold tile, and his steady breathing, and the quiet, unfinished shape of a promise neither of you yet knew would never really get tested the way you both expected it to.

Talked James into taking me somewhere today. Nowhere special—just the coast, an hour's drive, the kind of trip I would've called "nothing" a year and a half ago and now feels like an entire event I'm still riding the high of. I felt guilty asking. Guilty for wanting something outside these four walls when wanting things outside these four walls costs energy I don't always have to spend. James didn't make me feel guilty for it. He just said "get your shoes" like it was the easiest yes in the world.

I forgot, for almost two whole hours, that I was sick. I want to write that down before I forget I forgot.

"Get your shoes," James said, already grabbing his keys off the counter, like the request hadn't taken you three tries to actually say out loud.

"You don't have anything better to do?"

"I have several things better to do. I'm choosing this instead. Get your shoes before I change my mind and make you watch me alphabetize my sneaker collection instead, which, fair warning, is a genuinely riveting several hours."

The drive took just over an hour, most of it with the windows cracked and the radio doing whatever it wanted, James's hand resting easy on the gearshift, occasionally drumming some rhythm only he could hear. You watched the scenery shift from city to the flatter green stretch outside it to, finally, the first gray line of ocean on the horizon, and something in your chest loosened that you hadn't realized was clenched.

He parked facing the water and didn't get out right away, just sat there with you, engine ticking as it cooled, both of you looking at the same gray-blue stretch of nothing in particular.

"I used to come here as a kid," he said, unprompted, which was rare enough that you turned to look at him instead of the ocean. "Family trips. My dad would fall asleep in the car within twenty minutes every single time. Like clockwork. My mom used to time it."

"Did you ever wake him up?"

"Once. Regretted it immediately." A small, private smile. "He wasn't a morning person even in the middle of the afternoon."

You got out and walked down toward the water, slow, your pace and not his, and he matched it without comment, hands in his pockets, shoulder brushing yours every few steps like he was keeping tabs on you without needing to hold your hand to do it. The wind was sharp and cold and completely unbothered by either of you, and you tipped your face into it and breathed like you hadn't breathed in months.

Further down the beach a couple was trying, unsuccessfully, to fly a kite that kept nosediving into the sand, and James watched them for a while with the particular focus he gave any problem that wasn't his, arms crossed, head tilted.

"They're doing it wrong," he said finally.

"Are you going to go fix their kite."

"I am extremely tempted. It's a wind angle issue. Basic stuff." But he didn't move, just kept watching, something almost fond in it, and you realized he wasn't actually annoyed by their failure—he just liked knowing the answer to things, liked having a theory even about strangers and their kite.

"You'd have made a good coach for something," you said. "In another life."

"I coach the members constantly. Nobody asked me to. I do it anyway." He glanced sideways at you, something gentler creeping into his voice. "I'd coach you too, if there was anything to coach. There isn't. You're not doing anything wrong. I just wanted to say that, in case some part of you thinks you are."

You didn't have an answer for that, so you just leaned into his shoulder instead, and he let you, solid as ever, and the two of you stood there long enough to watch the kite finally catch the wind and lift, unsteady but airborne, the couple down the beach cheering like it was the greatest victory either of them had ever witnessed.

"I forgot," you said, mostly to the water, once the kite had steadied into a lazy arc above the waves. "For like two hours back there. I actually forgot I was sick. I didn't think that was still possible."

James didn't say anything grand back. He just bumped his shoulder against yours, gentle, and said, "Good. Let's go find something to eat that's terrible for both of us and ruin the health streak entirely. I saw a place near the parking lot that looked criminally unregulated."

"That's your review? Criminally unregulated?"

"Highest compliment I give a roadside restaurant."

You laughed into the wind, and for the length of that drive home, headlights cutting through early dark, radio low, his hand finding yours over the gearshift somewhere past the halfway mark, you let yourself believe there'd be a hundred more days exactly like it.

Today was a bad scan day. They used the word "progression," which is a soft word for a hard thing, like calling a car crash a "development." James drove me home and didn't put music on, which is how I know he already knew before the doctor said it out loud—he always reads the room before the room's finished talking.

He made dinner and burned the garlic and didn't say anything about it, just scraped it into the trash and started again, and I sat at the counter watching him do that, this small furious competence, like if he could just get the garlic right the rest of it might follow. I didn't tell him I noticed. Some things you let a person have.

Here's a thing about James that people who only know him from the group don't get to see: he cooks like he's arguing with the pan.

You watched him from the kitchen stool, knees pulled up, chin resting on them, while he stood at the stove scraping burnt garlic into the sink with more force than the task strictly required, the smell of it sharp and bitter in the small kitchen. He hadn't said a word since the car, and the silence had a texture to it now, thick enough you could almost lean on it.

"You can be mad about the appointment," you said finally. "You don't have to take it out on dinner."

"I'm not mad about the appointment."

"James."

He set the pan down harder than he meant to. Turned around. Looked at you for a second too long, the kind of look that in anyone else would've come with words, but with him just sat there, doing its work silently, his jaw working through something before his mouth caught up.

"I'm mad that there's nothing to actually do," he said finally, voice tighter than usual. "Give me a problem, I'll take it apart, I'll figure out the angle, I'll fix it. That's—that's the one thing I'm actually good at. This is the first thing in my life I can't out-think my way around. I hate it. I hate that I can't just find the smarter approach and solve it for you."

"Welcome to my whole year."

That got the corner of his mouth up, just barely, a flicker before it settled again. He came around the counter and stood in front of you, tipped your chin up with two fingers like he was checking a fact he already knew but needed to confirm anyway.

"I'm not going anywhere," he said. "For the record. In case the silence in the car made it seem like I was somewhere else. I was just thinking too loud to talk."

"I know."

"You don't have to pretend the scan was fine."

"I know that too."

He pressed his forehead to yours for a moment, breathing slow, deliberate, like he was resetting something in himself before he trusted his own voice again. He didn't ask you to talk about it more than that. That was the whole shape of him—he'd sit in a thing with you rather than talk you out of it, which you'd learned, slowly, over a year and a half, was its own kind of rare.

He went back to the stove and started the garlic a third time, more careful this time, watching it the way he watched choreography drills, like the pan had something to teach him if he just paid close enough attention. You watched his shoulders slowly unknot as the smell turned from bitter to something closer to right.

"You know it's just garlic," you said eventually, gentle, more to break the quiet than because you needed to say it.

"It is never just garlic," he said, without turning around. "Garlic is a referendum on whether I can keep even one small thing under control tonight. Don't take this from me."

"Okay. Sorry. Please continue your referendum."

"Thank you. I appreciate the show of support." A beat. "For the record, I know I'm being insane about the garlic. I'm aware. I'm choosing to be insane about the garlic instead of insane about the actual thing, because the actual thing doesn't have a fix and this does."

"That's actually a really healthy coping mechanism, James."

"Don't tell my therapist that. She'll be so smug."

You laughed, small and tired, and it seemed to loosen something in the room that the silence in the car had left knotted up. He finished the garlic, right this time, and plated the rest of it without another word about the appointment, setting the plate in front of you like an offering, like something he'd fought for and won on your behalf, even if the only thing he'd actually beaten tonight was a clove of garlic. You ate it like it mattered more than food usually did, because tonight, it did.

The group came by today, all of them, loud and too big for the apartment in the best way. James was doing his thing—the goofing around, the impressions, making Martin nearly choke laughing at something so stupid I can't even remember what it was five minutes later. Watching him be that person for everyone else, and then watching the door close behind them and watching him fold that whole performance away in about four seconds flat, still gets me every time.

After they left he sat next to me and just said, "That was a lot, for you, wasn't it," not even a question really. I don't know how he always clocks it before I do.

The apartment had felt impossibly full for an hour—six of them crammed into a space built for two, someone's laughter always overlapping someone else's story, a card game that had devolved into an argument about rules nobody actually remembered correctly. James was at the center of most of it without seeming to try, tossing out some half-formed bit about Keonho’s cooking that spiraled into a full impression within thirty seconds, the whole room dissolving into noise around him.

You watched him do it from the couch, tucked into the corner with a blanket you didn't need but liked the weight of, and thought, not for the first time, that there were two versions of him—the one doing this, quick and bright and endlessly generative, riffing off whatever anyone said like it was raw material for the next joke, and the one who existed only in rooms with just you in them, quieter, steadier, weight settled low and calm like something that had already decided where it stood.

The door clicked shut behind the last of them a little after ten. The apartment went from too full to very empty in the space of a breath, and James's whole posture changed with it—shoulders dropping an inch, the bright quick energy folding itself away somewhere you'd never quite located, replaced by the version of him that sat down next to you without needing to pretend anything at all.

"That was a lot, for you, wasn't it," he said. Not really a question. He was already reaching for the blanket, tugging a corner of it over his own knees, settling in like he intended to stay exactly where he was for a while.

"I'm fine. I liked seeing them."

"I didn't ask if you liked it. I asked if it was a lot." He glanced at you sideways, patient, unbothered by your dodge, waiting it out the way he always did.

"...Yeah. It was a lot."

"Thought so. You get this thing around your eyes." He tapped lightly under his own, demonstrating. "Same thing you did after the fan meet last year. Give it ten minutes and you'll be fully asleep sitting up."

"How do you even do it," you asked, half into his shoulder already. "Go from—that, all of that, the noise and the bits and Martin nearly falling off the couch laughing—straight into this. Like flipping a switch."

He considered the question seriously, the way he considered most things you asked him when you actually meant them. "I don't think it's a switch," he said. "I think it's more like—that's a room I know how to fill. I'm good at filling rooms. It's easy, I kind of just got used to it, it's basically just talking fast and committing to the bit. This—" he gestured vaguely between the two of you, the quiet, the dim lamp, the blanket, "—this is different. This isn't some sort of pretending. I don't have to fill anything here. You already know all of me, so there's nothing left to perform."

"That's annoyingly poetic for someone who was doing a Martin impression forty minutes ago."

"I contain multitudes, I told you this already." But his hand had found yours under the blanket, thumb moving slow over your knuckles, and his voice when he spoke again had dropped back into that low, private register that only ever showed up once the door was shut and the noise had gone home. "Rest. I'll wake you before you fall face-first into the coffee table again."

"I hate that you catalog my tells like this."

"I have an excellent memory and nothing better to spend it on."

"That happened one time."

"It was a great time. I still think about it." But his voice had already gone soft, low, meant for exactly one person in the room, and you let your eyes close against the warm solid weight of his shoulder, the loud version of him folded neatly away, replaced by the only version that had ever mattered as much.

Had the fight today. An actual fight, not the small ones we do like warm-ups. He wants me to try the next round of treatment. I told him I'm so tired of my body being a battlefield that isn't even mine anymore, that every week is just deciding how much of myself I'm willing to trade for more weeks. He said "I'm not ready to lose you" like that settles it, like his readiness is the variable that matters here, and God, I understand it, I do, but I also wanted to scream that I don't know how to keep fighting a war just because someone loves me too much to let me stop.

We didn't finish the conversation. I don't think we know how to.

"You don't get to decide this is over," he said, and his voice had an edge in it you'd heard maybe twice in the entire time you'd known him—not cruelty, never cruelty, but the particular sharpness of someone who is scared and has decided to be angry about it instead, because anger is a shape he knows what to do with and fear isn't.

"It's not over, James, I'm talking about one more round —"

"You said you're tired of fighting. That's not the same sentence as 'let's talk about round six,' that's a different sentence entirely and you know it."

You did know it. That was the worst part.

"I'm allowed to be tired."

"You're allowed to be tired. You're not allowed to stop telling me the truth about what tired means." He was pacing now, short, restless lines across the living room, hands moving like he was trying to physically shape an argument out of the air. "I need you to be honest with me. Not brave. Not—managing me. Just honest."

"I am being honest. This is what honest looks like. I don't know how to keep doing this."

The apartment went very quiet. Somewhere outside a car alarm was going off, one of those long, useless ones nobody comes to turn off, and you both just let it fill the space where neither of you had the next sentence. James stopped pacing near the window, back to you, shoulders rigid, and when he spoke again his voice had dropped, all the sharp edges sanded off it, leaving something raw underneath.

"I'm not ready to lose you," he said finally, quiet now, almost a whisper. "That's not—I know that's not fair. I know wanting you to stay isn't the same as it being right for you to stay. I'm not stupid. I just don't have a version of this where I get to be reasonable about it."

"Can I say something and have you not use it as ammunition later," you said, quiet, to his back.

"Depends what it is."

"I'm scared too. Of the treatment. Of what it does to me every time. That's part of why I don't want round six. It's not just that I'm tired. It's that I'm scared of what tired does to a person, if you let it go on long enough."

He turned around at that, finally, and something in his face had shifted—the anger burned down to something closer to grief, closer to the thing underneath it he'd been trying not to show you.

"I didn't know that," he said. "I thought it was just exhaustion. I didn't realize there was fear under it too."

"There's always fear under it. I'm just better at hiding that part than the tired part."

"You don't have to hide either one from me."

"I know. I'm working on it."

You crossed the room and reached for his hand because you didn't have the rest of the sentence either. He took it like it was the only solid thing in a room that had stopped making sense, pulling you in until your forehead rested against his collarbone, his other hand coming up to rest at the back of your neck, steady, grounding.

"I don't want another fight like this," he murmured into your hair. "I want to actually hear you. Not just brace for what you're going to say and get it wrong."

"I don't want another one either."

Neither of you said much else that night. You'd revisit it—you always did, that was how the two of you worked, circling a hard thing until it wore down enough to hold—but that particular conversation never did get finished. There was always going to be a version of you both that thought there'd be time to finish it later.

I stopped telling people how I actually feel today. Not James—I could never actually stop telling James, he reads it off me anyway, he says I telegraph everything even when I think I'm being subtle, which apparently I am not. But everyone else, the group, the messages asking "how are you feeling," I've started answering "hanging in there" like it's a real answer and not a wall with a nice paint job.

James caught me doing it in front of him once, this fake brightness, and after they left he just looked at me and said, "You don't have to perform for me. I already know what round we're in." I don't know why that undid me more than any kindness has this whole year.

You'd gotten good at it—the bright voice, the "I'm okay, really," the smile you could put on like a coat and take off the second the door clicked shut. You did it for the members when they visited, because they needed you to be okay more than you needed to actually be okay, and it felt, in some strange way, like a gift you could still afford to give people even when you had so little else left to give.

James caught the tail end of it once, the door barely shut behind the last person to leave, your face already sliding back into its real shape like a mask coming off in slow motion.

"You don't have to pretend for my sake," he said, from the doorway, arms crossed, watching you with that unreadable calm he wore like armor. "I already know what round we're in."

"I wasn't pretending mr. know it all."

"You were doing the voice. The bright I’m okay voice. You do it for them and I get it, I do—it's kind, honestly, it's more patience than I'd have—but you don't have to do it in this apartment. This apartment doesn't need you to be okay."

You sat down on the couch harder than you meant to, and something in your chest just—gave, the way overworked things eventually give.

"I'm so tired of being brave," you said. "I don't even know if I'm being brave. I think I'm just being quiet about being scared, and everyone's calling that brave because it's easier to watch than the alternative."

He crossed the room and sat next to you, not saying anything for a moment, just letting his shoulder press into yours, solid and unmoving, warm through the thin fabric of his shirt.

"You don't have to be brave with me," he said finally. "I'd rather have the scared version. I like her better anyway. She's more honest. And she doesn't make me pretend I believe the bright voice, which, for the record, I never once believed."

"Not even a little?"

"Not even a little. You've got a great poker face for everyone else. It's never worked on me." He said it without smugness, just fact, the same way he'd tell you the sky was gray.

"Why do you think that is? Why does it work on everyone else and not you?"

He thought about it for a moment, genuinely, the way he thought about most things you asked him seriously.

"Because I know the difference between you being okay and you wanting to be okay. Everyone else only gets the second one, because you're kind to them and you don't want to make your illness someone else's Tuesday. I get the first one, because I'm the person you don't have to do that with. That's not a compliment to me, by the way—it's just the arrangement. I signed up to be the person who gets the real version."

"When did you sign up for that, exactly?"

"Somewhere around the third week I knew you, probably. Didn't get a contract. Would've read the fine print if I had."

"You'd have unionized."

"Absolutely. Demanded better hours, at minimum." A small, real smile. "But I wouldn't have quit. For the record. In case that wasn't obvious by now."

You laughed—a wet, unsteady thing—and put your head on his shoulder, and for a while, that was enough. Neither of you said anything else. He just stayed, solid and quiet, exactly the way he always did when the loud version of the world had finally gone home, one hand resting warm against your back, patient as ever, in no hurry to be anywhere else.

New treatment started this week. They said the word "aggressive" so many times it stopped sounding like a warning and started sounding like a compliment, which is a strange thing your brain does when it's trying to survive being scared. I threw up twice and slept twelve hours and woke up not sure what day it was, and James was there both times, sitting in the chair by the bed with his laptop, not working, just there, like a guard who forgot he was allowed to leave the post.

I asked him why he doesn't go home and sleep in his own bed. He said, "This is my post now," like it was a joke, except neither of us laughed.

"You should go home," you mumbled, half-asleep, the room still spinning faintly from whatever had been dripped into your arm that afternoon, the IV line taped awkwardly to the back of your hand. "You have rehearsal tomorrow."

"I'll survive on four hours. I've survived on less for dumber reasons."

"James."

"This is my post now," he said, not looking up from the laptop he wasn't actually using, the screen dim, mostly just something for his hands to rest near while the rest of him stayed alert to every small sound you made. "Someone's gotta guard it. Standards would slip otherwise. Next thing you know someone lets the vending machine guy in here unsupervised."

You groaned a laugh into the pillow, and he finally looked over, something in his face softening the way it only did when he thought you weren't paying close enough attention to catch it.

"You're throwing up heroically, by the way," he added, deadpan. "Very high production value. I give it a nine."

"You're ridiculous."

"I contain multitudes. Go to sleep."

"There's nothing to guard. I'm just throwing up."

"That's exactly the kind of thing an unguarded post would say." He set the laptop aside entirely now, angled his chair closer, close enough to reach over and brush the hair back from your damp forehead, an easy, practiced motion, like he'd done it a hundred times, because he had.

"Don't you have a life outside this room," you mumbled, eyes barely open.

"I have a life. This is currently what it looks like. Try the pudding cup, by the way, I stole it from the nurses' station and I feel genuinely proud of the crime."

"You didn't steal it, they gave it to you."

"The details are unimportant. What's important is the crime narrative I've built in my head, and I'd like you to respect it."

You managed a weak laugh that turned into a cough, and he was up out of the chair in an instant, hand steady at your back, waiting it out without hovering, without making it bigger than it needed to be—just present, exactly present, the way he always managed to be without ever seeming to try.

"I'm not going anywhere," he said again, once you'd settled back against the pillow, his voice lower now, meant only for the two of you and the humming fluorescent light overhead.

"You never do."

"No," he agreed, quiet, like it wasn't really a joke anymore. "I don't."

You didn't remember falling asleep. You only remembered, vaguely, waking sometime near dawn to find him still in the chair, laptop closed now, head tipped back at an angle that was going to wreck his neck for a week, asleep upright, having kept his post exactly as promised, right down to the last hour of it.

A nurse came in not long after to check your vitals, quiet and efficient, and paused at the sight of him—mouth slightly open, one arm still curled protectively toward the edge of the bed even in sleep, like some part of him refused to fully power down.

"He's been here the whole time?" she asked, soft, careful not to wake him.

"He does that," you whispered back, and something about saying it out loud, to a stranger, in the gray light of early morning, made it feel more real than it had felt in the middle of the night—the fact of him, staying, over and over, without once being asked twice.

She smiled, wrote something on her clipboard, and left as quietly as she'd come. You watched him sleep a while longer, the rise and fall of his chest, the small furrow between his brows that never quite disappeared even when he was unconscious, like he was standing guard even in his dreams, and you thought, not for the first time, that whatever else this year had taken from you, it hadn't taken this—him, choosing this, again and again, without ever once making you feel like a burden for needing it.

I got angry today. Actually angry, not the sad kind that looks like anger from the outside. I threw a mug—didn't hit anyone, didn't even hit anything important, just the wall, and it broke in that satisfying, useless way things break when you need them to. James didn't flinch. He just watched me do it, waited until I was done, and said, "Okay. What do you need." Not "calm down." Not "it's going to be fine." Just—what do you need, like my anger was a language he was fluent in and didn't need translated.

I told him I needed to be furious for five more minutes and then I'd be fine. He set a timer on his phone. Actually set a timer. I don't know why that's the thing that made me cry, out of everything.

The mug hit the wall with a crack that felt, for one clean second, like relief, ceramic shards scattering across the floor in a pattern neither of you would clean up for another hour.

James didn't move from where he was leaning against the counter. Didn't reach for you, didn't tell you to breathe, didn't do any of the soft things people do when they're more scared of your anger than they are willing to sit inside it with you. He just watched, steady, arms loosely crossed, waiting you out with the patience of someone who had never once needed you to be smaller than you actually felt.

"Okay," he said, when the silence after the crash had stretched long enough to feel like its own kind of sound. "What do you need."

"I need—" Your voice cracked on it. "I need to be furious for like five more minutes and then I promise I'll be normal again."

He pulled out his phone without a word and tapped the screen. "Five minutes. Go."

"What?"

"You've got the floor. Rage away. I'll keep time." He held the phone up, screen facing you, the countdown already ticking downward. "Four fifty-one. Better hurry, you're wasting your rage window."

Something broke open in you that had nothing to do with the mug. You cried instead of raging, which he let happen too, timer still running silently in his hand, standing there the entire five minutes without once trying to shrink the moment down into something easier to hold, without once flinching at the shards still scattered across the kitchen floor between you.

When the timer finally buzzed, he crossed the room, careful of the broken ceramic, and pulled you into him without a word, chin resting on the top of your head, letting you shake there for as long as you needed, five minutes turning quietly into fifteen, the timer long forgotten on the counter.

"I'm going to clean that up in a second," you mumbled eventually, voice muffled against his shirt, gesturing vaguely at the wreckage of the mug still scattered across the floor.

"I'll clean it up. You've done enough today." He pulled back just far enough to look at you, thumbs swiping gently under your eyes, businesslike about it in a way that somehow made it more tender, not less. "For what it's worth, that was a really impressive throw. Good follow-through. If we ever need someone to throw a first pitch at something, I'm nominating you."

"I hate you."

"You don't. You're just embarrassed you cried in front of me over a timer, which, again, deeply understandable, timers are very moving." He kissed the top of your head, brief, easy.

"You're allowed to be furious, Bird. You're allowed to break a mug about it. I'd rather you throw something at a wall than swallow it and let it eat you from the inside instead. I've watched you do both. I like this one better."

"That's a strange thing to say you like."

"I contain multitudes," he said again, the line worn soft and familiar between you by now, and you laughed despite everything, despite the mess on the floor and the ache still sitting behind your ribs, because somehow, with him, even the worst nights had room enough in them for that.

Diagnosis day. I keep wanting to write something profound here and instead all I have is: the fluorescent lights in that office were too bright, and James held my hand so tight I had a mark on my fingers after, and neither of us cried until we got to the parking garage, and then we both did, leaning against his car like it was the only thing holding either of us up, which it might have been.

He said, "We're going to figure this out," and I believed him, because he's the kind of person who makes you believe things by sheer force of how certain he sounds. I didn't know yet how much of that certainty was going to have to be relearned, over and over, every time the ground moved again. I just knew, in that parking garage, that I wasn't alone in it. I still don't think I was ever alone in it. I want that written down somewhere, in case I forget, or in case I don't get the chance to say it out loud enough times before—

The garage was cold and smelled like exhaust, fluorescent lights buzzing overhead in a way that felt almost cruel in its ordinariness, like the world hadn't gotten the memo that something in it had just changed forever. Neither of you had said a single word since walking out of that office, down the hallway, into the elevator, out the sliding doors, like speaking might make it more true than the diagnosis already had.

James's hand found yours somewhere around the elevator and didn't let go, grip tightening with every floor the numbers ticked down, like he could hold the news at bay through sheer physical pressure. By the time you reached his car, you were both leaning against the passenger door, and something in his face—the calm, the steadiness, the thing that made him feel like solid ground even when the ground was actively disappearing beneath both of you—cracked, just once, just for a second, and you watched him cry for the first time since you'd known him, silent, furious tears that he didn't try to hide or explain away.

"I'm sorry," you said, absurdly, apologizing for the diagnosis like it was something you'd done to him.

"Don't," he said, voice rough, thick. "Don't you dare apologize for this. Not ever. Not once."

"I don't know what to say."

"Then don't say anything. Just—" He pulled you in, tight, his chin on the top of your head, his heartbeat too fast under your ear, both of you standing there in the exhaust-smelling cold like the parking garage was the only place left in the world. "We're going to figure this out."

"You don't know that."

"No," he admitted, and you felt him breathe out, shaky, against your hair. "I don't. But I'm going to act like I do, because one of us has to, and you look like you're about to fall over, so it's not going to be you today. You get tomorrow off from being strong. I've got today covered."

You laughed, wet and small, into his chest, and he held on tighter, like he could physically keep the two of you upright by force of will alone.

Eventually he pulled back just enough to look at you, hands framing your face, thumbs brushing at the tears that hadn't stopped yet either of yours.

"I need you to hear this, okay?" he said, voice low, steady in a way that felt earned rather than easy. "Whatever this turns out to be—however long, however hard—I'm not going to treat you like you're already gone. I'm not going to start being careful with you, or soft in that way that makes a person feel like a patient instead of a person. You're still you. I'm still going to argue with you about the dumbest things. I'm still going to make fun of your taste in movies. That doesn't stop just because the doctor used a scary word today."

"You promise?"

"I don't make promises I can't keep. I'm making this one anyway, because I've decided I'm keeping it no matter what it costs me." He pressed his forehead to yours again, breath shaking but voice steady. "You're not a diagnosis to me. You're just you, having a very bad day, and I happen to love you, and none of that changed in that office. Not one bit of it."

It was, you'd think later, the truest thing he ever said to you, and the one he worked hardest to keep—through the fights, through the good days, through all the ordinary Tuesdays that made up the year that followed, a year neither of you had any way of measuring yet, standing there in that parking garage with the diagnosis still fresh enough to feel unreal.

"We're going to figure this out," he said again, quieter this time, like he needed to hear himself say it twice to fully believe it. "I don't know how yet. But we will."

You believed him. You knew that you didn't need any proof that was right—you didn't, not that night, not for a long time after—to you, it was easier to stand upright in a cold parking garage believing someone than it was to stand there alone with the fear by itself. So you let yourself believe it, and he let himself believe it too, and for a while, believing it was enough to get you both back in the car, and home, and into the year ahead of you neither of you could see yet. Yet it was something you both expected it to be, but hoped otherwise.

The flowers are still there when he closes the notebook. He doesn't cry anymore, not the way he did in a parking garage a year and three months ago—grief doesn't stay in one shape forever, it just changes what it looks like on a person, and on James it had settled into something quiet, something that lived mostly behind his eyes and came out only here, only like this, only where no one was around to catch it and worry.

"You asked me something," he says, to the flowers, to the version of you that only exists in a notebook and in his own memory now. "In the bathroom. On the floor. You asked if it was selfish of you to want to leave, and whether I'd ever thought about how selfish it was of me to want you to stay."

He runs his thumb along the edge of the notebook's cover, the motion worn smooth from repetition.

"I told you I didn't have an answer. That was true then." He looks up at the gray line of clouds doing nothing in particular. "I think I have one now. Wanting you to stay wasn't selfish. It was just love that hadn't figured out yet how to let go. And you weren't selfish either—you just got so tired of surviving that you started imagining what it might feel like to finally rest. I don't think either of those things needed forgiving. I think they just needed to be said, out loud, to each other."

The wind moves through the little white flowers, bending them all one direction and then letting them spring back.

"I found the notebook," he says.

"Took me three months. I've read it so many times the spine's basically gone. I read it backward, the first time—by accident, started from the last page, worked my way to the first—and I think, honestly, I'm glad I did it in that order. I got to watch you get braver instead of more tired. I got to end on the day I still had all the time in the world with you, instead of the day I didn't."

He stops there, jaw working through something, the way it always used to before his mouth caught up to it.

This was something he had, ultimately, decided not to say out loud, because he's said it out loud before. More than once, to grief counselors and to his own reflection and to a version of you that only exists now in his own memory, and saying it again doesn't make it easier, only more worn.

It was that the last entry in the notebook was written one week before you died, and that the two of you never got to finish that conversation on the bathroom floor, and that there was no slow fading, no final goodbye, no hand held at the end.

Just an ordinary Tuesday that turned, without warning, into an infection that moved faster than anyone had time to be afraid of, a phone call that pulled him out of rehearsal, a hospital hallway too bright the same way the diagnosis office had been too bright a year before, and then, impossibly fast, nothing left to hold onto but a notebook he wouldn't find for another three months.

He could still vividly remember what happened that day. While he was rehearsing for an upcoming comeback with the boys, he suddenly received a phone call.

"James, god, James." It was your mother, panicking. He could hear her try to make out the words while sobbing.

He responded, starting to get worried. "Eomeoni? What is it?"

He knew damn well what it could possible mean, and he ran. He ran and ran to the point that he almost forgot that taking a cab was an option to go to the hospital where you were admitted. He was telling the driver it was an emergency at this point, hoping that they would arrive before it's too late.

The moment he entered the hospital, he frantically looked around and rushed to the elevator. Fortunately, the elevator was on his floor; and he immediately went inside. He pressed the 7th floor multiple times, as if it was going to help him arrive to that floor faster.

James exited the elevator as fast as he could, and he ran, again. He ran through the countless people walking around the bright white hallways. If there was one thing that he knew, it was to get to you as fast as he could. If here was one thing he had hoped for, it was that what his intuition is telling him is wrong. That you're okay.

He didn't get to answer your question. Not really. Not out loud, not to you, not in time.

He's been trying to answer it ever since—here, at the low gray stone with your name cut into it, where the flowers keep coming back every year without anyone asking them to, where he sets down coffee you'll never drink and talks to you like the ground between you is nothing more than distance, because some days that's the only way he can stand to sit here at all.

"For what it's worth," he says, quieter now, almost a whisper, one hand resting flat against the top of the headstone the way you used to press your palm to his chest, just to check he was still there.

"You weren't a burden. You were never that. You were just a person, in a body that was fighting something bigger than both of us, and I got to love you the whole way through it—the angry days, the scared days, the good ones on the balcony, all of it. I'd call that the opposite of selfish. I'd call that the only thing that ever made sense to me, out of anything."

A jogger passes on the gravel path behind him, footsteps soft, and somewhere further off a dog barks twice and goes quiet. James doesn't turn to look. He's learned, over the past year, that the world keeps doing this—keeps insisting on its own small, ongoing noise, joggers and dogs and gardeners and violin students getting slowly, stubbornly better—completely unbothered by the fact that his has, in the most important ways, gone still.

He thinks sometimes about the version of this story where the notebook stays lost, tucked forever under a phone charger, unread. He's grateful, in a complicated way, that it didn't stay that way. It would have been easier, maybe, to grieve a version of you frozen at the diagnosis, brave and unknowable.

It's harder, and better, to grieve the whole of you instead—the furious version, the exhausted version, the one who threw mugs and asked hard questions and sat on cold bathroom floors and still, somehow, on a Tuesday morning a week before the end, watched a badly-played violin and laughed like there was all the time left in the world.

"I think that's something I end up coming back to," he says, mostly to himself now, notebook closed and resting against his knee.

"You thought there was more time. I thought there was more time. We were both wrong, and neither of us could've known it, and I've spent a year trying to decide if that makes it better or worse, and I don't think I've landed anywhere yet. Maybe there isn't a place to land. Maybe you just carry it."

He stays a while longer, watching the light shift slowly through the gray. Then he picks up the coffee cup, untouched, cold now, and stands, knees cracking a little the way they hadn't a year ago, another small proof that time keeps moving whether or not you're ready for it to.

"Same time next week, Bird," he says, the old nickname slipping out soft and easy, the way it always had—for the way you used to talk with your hands like you were about to take off, for the way you were always looking for an open window, even on the days you never meant to actually fly through one.

He doesn't look back until he reaches the car. He never does. But he always looks back once, right before he gets in, just to make sure the flowers, and the small gray stone beneath them, are still standing.

They always are.

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