#the margin notes

It starts the way most things start between people who love each other and are also, very much, human.

You'd had a day. Not a bad day, really—nothing catastrophic—just the kind of day that accumulates. Small frustrations stacking on top of each other like dishes nobody washed, until by evening the pile is just precarious and you are tired and you just need somewhere to put it down.

Joshua is the somewhere you always put things down. That's not a burden—you've never thought of it as a burden and you don't think he does either. It's just what you are to each other. The person the other one comes home to.

So you'd come home to him.

He's in the living room when you get in, laptop open, something playing low on the speaker in the kitchen. He looks up and smiles when you come through the door—that immediate smile, the one that means you're here—and you feel some of the day's ease.

"Hey," he says softly.

"Hey." You drop your bag. Sit on the arm of the couch for a moment, not quite settled. "Can I tell you something?"

"Of course." His eyes drift back to the screen.

You watch him for a moment. The half-presence of someone whose attention is divided and hasn't fully chosen yet. You know this look. You start anyway because you've been carrying it all day and the carrying has gotten heavy.

"So there was this thing at work—it's not a big deal but it kind of got to me more than I expected and I've been thinking about it and—"

"Mm," he says. "Yeah."

You stop.

He doesn't notice you've stopped.

You sit with that for a moment. The mm, yeah. It’s automatic, unprocessed, the verbal equivalent of a nod from someone looking the other direction. You know he didn't mean it. You know he's tired too. You know all the reasonable things that could be.

But it still lands the way it lands.

"Never mind," you say. Perfectly even.

He looks up then. "Sorry—what was that?"

"Nothing. It's fine." You start to stand. "We should start getting ready, we're going to be late."

Something moves across his face. He’s reading you the way he always reads you. "You sure?"

"Yeah," you say. Forced. "I'm sure."

You go to the bedroom to change.

He follows you a few minutes later. Joshua has never been able to leave things alone—it is one of the things you love about him and sometimes find exhausting, this inability to let an unresolved thing sit or go. Usually it works in your favor. Tonight you're not sure yet.

"Hey," he says from the doorway.

"Hey." You're at the wardrobe, suddenly thinking that deciding what to wear felt like a monumental task.

"You're not fine."

"I said I was fine, though."

"I know what you said." He comes in, sits on the edge of the bed. "What happened?"

You turn around. You look at him, and you try—genuinely try—to find the words for the thing that is small and also, inexplicably, not small.

"I was trying to tell you something," you say. "And you weren't listening."

He looks at you for a moment. And you see it—just barely, just at the edges—something tightening in his expression. Something pulling back, perhaps.

"I was in the middle of something," he says.

You blink.

"I know," you say carefully.

"I didn't even know you were going to—" He stops to run a hand through his hair. "You could've said you needed to talk. I would've put it down."

There it is. The slight shift in his voice—it’s not cruel, not even unkind, but tilted somehow, maybe angled away from accountability and toward explanation. Toward but.

"I did say I needed to talk," you say. "I said can I tell you something."

"I know, I just —" He exhales. "I had three things open and I was trying to finish before we had to leave. It wasn't intentional."

"I know it wasn't intentional, you say. But under your breath, “I know it wasn’t.”

"So then—" He gestures slightly. "I mean, I said sorry, I asked you to tell me again—"

"You said sorry, what," you say and your voice is still even, still measured, still so very fine. "That's not the same thing."

He looks at you. There is something in his face now that you recognize but rarely see directed at you—a kind of bracing, a slight squaring off like he is deciding how much ground to hold.

"I don't know what you want me to say," he says. "I was busy. I looked up. I asked you to continue. You said never mind."

"Because the moment had passed."

"I'm not a mind reader." It comes out more clipped than he means it to. You can tell, you can always tell with him, but it comes out nonetheless and it lands the way clipped things land. 

Sharp at the edges.

You look at him.

And something in you makes a quiet decision.

"You're right," you say. "Let's just get ready."

You turn back to the wardrobe.

Behind you, there’s silence.

"That's it?" he then says.

"That's it," you say pleasantly.

"You're just going to—"

"Joshua." You take out what you need, your voice perfectly warm, perfectly level, the careful neutral of someone who has folded something up and put it somewhere he cannot reach. "We're going to be late. It's fine. I'm fine. We don’t have to talk about it."

He opens his mouth.

He closes it.

He hears it then—not what you said but what you didn't say. The fine that isn't fine. The warmth that has no heat in it. The wall going up in real time. It’s polite and total and impenetrable and he is standing on the wrong side of it.

"I didn't mean—" he starts.

"I know," you cut in.

You go to the bathroom to finish getting ready and you close the door and the click of it is the quietest, most complete sound he has heard all evening.

He sits on the edge of the bed.

I'm not a mind reader.

The words come back to him the way words do when you've said something you can't take back. They arrive fully formed, exact, carrying their weight. He hadn't meant them the way they landed. He'd been tired and caught off guard and a little defensive and he'd said the thing that came out instead of the thing that was true and now you are on the other side of a closed door being perfectly fine with him and he has no one to blame for that except himself.

He puts his head in his hands briefly.

Then he gets up and goes to change.

The car ride is its own particular thing.

He tries to talk and you answer everything. Every question, every observation, every tentative reach with the warm attentive responses of someone who is absolutely present and absolutely unreachable at the same time. You ask about his day. You laugh at something on the radio. You are so entirely fine that it is like sitting next to a very convincing approximation of you and he would almost believe it except that he knows. He has always known exactly what your real fine looks like.

This isn't it.

He quietly reaches for your hand at a red light, palm up, the same way he always reaches. You let him take it. Your hand sits in his but it doesn't curl around his fingers, doesn't press back. It’s present. Polite. Gone.

He stares at the road.

I'm not a mind reader.

He thinks about the way your face had done nothing when he said it. Not flinched, not crumpled, just gone very still and very smooth, the expression of someone receiving a thing they'd half expected and are now quietly filing away somewhere he can't follow.

He thinks about what you'd said before that. The moment had passed. And before that: I was trying to tell you something and you weren't listening. And before that, standing in the living room, trying to start a sentence while he sat there with his laptop and his three open tabs and his mm, yeah.

He'd been defensive. He knew he was defensive. He'd felt himself doing it—the pulling back, the slight pivot toward justification. And he'd done it anyway because he was tired and felt caught out and something in him had gone but before the rest of him could stop it.

That's not an excuse. He knows that's not an excuse.

He just didn't realize the damage until he heard the bathroom door.

He glances at you. You're looking out the window, your eyes distant and shining, the city moving past in streaks of light, your expression composed and unreadable and somewhere very far from here.

He looks back at the road.

He drives with your hand still in his.

The restaurant is warm and full of people you both love and for a while that almost works.

Seungcheol pulls you into a hug the moment you walk in and says something that makes you laugh genuinely and properly. It’s a laugh that reaches your eyes and for just a moment Joshua watches the tightness in your face ease and something loosens in his own chest. Seokmin is already mid-story about something that makes no sense and you slide into the seat next to Minghao who gives you a kiss on the cheek. You let the noise of them wash over you.

Joshua takes the seat directly across from you. He always chooses it deliberately because it’s close enough to see your face, close enough for the small private language you speak without words. Normally you catch him choosing it and raise an eyebrow and he shrugs and looks away. Tonight you don't look at him when you sit down.

He unfolds his napkin.

The evening moves the way these evenings do—loud and overlapping, food arriving in waves, conversations splitting and merging. You are good at this. You like these people. You laugh at the right moments because the moments are truly funny and you contribute to the conversation because you have things to say and from the outside you are probably completely fine.

But then the food comes.

The main dishes arrive and Joshua reaches across the table toward your plate—automatic, the same thing he always does, the reaching without thinking because putting food on your plate is something his hands do before his brain has to decide—and you reach for the serving dish yourself, quietly, a half second before he gets there. You serve your own plate and set the spoon down and reach for the next dish.

It's nothing. Three seconds. Nobody would notice.

Jeonghan notices.

He doesn't say anything. He just reaches for his own bowl with the particular ease of someone who has just registered something and kept quiet for now.

Joshua withdraws his hand. He picks up his chopsticks. He doesn't look at you.

Across the table Seungkwan is telling a story that has taken several left turns and Minghao is laughing and you're watching them with your chin in your hand, warm and open and entirely somewhere Joshua can't reach. He watches you tilt your head at something Mingyu says. He watches you smile at Vernon’s punchline. He watches you be completely, convincingly present with everyone at this table except him.

He tries, a few minutes later, to catch your eye. Just that—just the small private reach across the table, the thing he does without thinking, the checking in that has become as natural as breathing. He looks at you at the moment you turn to say something to Minghao. He looks again when you're reaching for your drink. He looks when Seokmin says something that makes the whole table erupt, because he always, always looks for you first when something is funny—always wants to see your face in the moment of it, always finds you first in a room full of people.

Each time, you are looking somewhere else.

Not deliberately—or maybe deliberately, he can't tell anymore and the not being able to tell is its own particular ache. You're not punishing him. You would never. You're just…closed. Present in every way that involves the people around you but quietly, politely absent in the one way that involves him.

He passes the dish to his left when Wonwoo reaches for it. He laughs at Seokmin's next story. He answers a question Seungcheol asks about next month's schedule. He is, from the outside, probably completely fine.

Then you look at him.

It lasts maybe two seconds—your eyes finding him across the table, the first time all evening you've let them land there. And in those two seconds he sees it: underneath the polished composed surface of you tonight, the thing you have been carrying since the bathroom door clicked shut. Not anger. Something smaller and more tired than anger. A quiet hurt and behind it a kind of watching—patient, waiting—to see what he does with the space between you.

He holds your gaze.

You look away first. Back to Minghao, back to the warmth of the table, your expression rearranging itself seamlessly. The two seconds close like water over a stone.

He looks at his plate.

I'm not a mind reader.

He would give a great deal to take it all back.

Jeonghan materializes at Joshua’s side between courses the way Jeonghan does—sliding into a vacated seat with a glass in hand and the expression of someone who has been watching for a while and has reached some conclusions.

"So," Jeonghan says, not looking at him.

"So," Joshua says.

The corner of Jeonghan's mouth moves. He takes a slow sip. "She seems fine."

"She is fine."

"Mm." A pause weighted with everything he's decided not to say yet. "That's the problem, isn't it."

Joshua is quiet. Sometimes he hates how well his people are able to read the love of his life in all the ways he seems to lack.

"What happened?" Jeonghan asks and his voice has dropped the lightness, becoming the thing it becomes when he actually means something.

"I wasn't listening," Joshua says. Quiet. "She came home and she wanted to tell me something and I was on my laptop and I gave her a mm, yeah. And then when she told me what was wrong—" He exhales. "I got defensive real fast. I said I wasn't a mind reader."

Jeonghan is still for a moment.

"Yeah," he says. Just that.

"It came out wrong,” Joshua says.

"I imagine."

"I wasn't trying to be mean."

"I know you weren't." Jeonghan sets his glass down. "That's almost the harder part, isn't it? When you say the thing you didn't mean and you can see the exact moment it lands and there's nothing you can do about it."

Joshua looks at the table. "She closed the bathroom door."

"Mm."

"She never closes the bathroom door."

"No," Jeonghan agrees. "She doesn't." He's quiet for a moment, watching the table. Across it you're laughing at something Seokmin has said, your head tipping back, your whole face giving itself to it. Jeonghan watches it. "She's good at this," he says. "Being fine."

"Too good," Joshua mutters under his breath as he catches a droplet of condensation falling from his glass.

"That's not a criticism of her."

"I know it's not."

"It means," Jeonghan says carefully, "that when she shows you something is wrong, it costs her something to show it. And when you responded to that cost with a but—" He leaves it there.

Joshua closes his eyes briefly. Opens them. "I know."

"Do you?" Jeonghan asks. Not unkindly. "Or do you know it in your head but not yet in the place where you'll remember it next time?"

The question lands. Joshua doesn't answer it because there isn't a good answer, only an honest one, and the honest one is that he's still working on it.

Jeonghan seems to understand this. He picks up his glass again. "She'll let you back in," he says. "She always does. That's who she is." A glance sideways at Joshua. "Just make sure that when the door opens, you walk through it with the real thing. Not the version that starts with I was tired or I didn't mean it. The actual thing."

"Which is…" Joshua asks.

"That she came home and needed you and you made her feel like that was inconvenient." Jeonghan's voice is even. Within reason. Without cruelty. "That's the actual thing. Everything else is an explanation."

Joshua is quiet for a long moment.

Down the table you laugh at something again and he watches it the way he always watches you, the particular way you laugh when you mean it, the thing he has loved about you since long before he knew he loved you. He thinks about the living room and the mm yeah and everything he was one bad moment away from missing entirely.

"Yeah," he says. "Okay."

Jeonghan nods once. "Good. Now eat something. You've been moving your food around for ten minutes."

Seungcheol finds him by the coats at the end of the night as the evening breaks up and people gather their things.

He doesn't say anything at first. Just stands beside Joshua with the quiet solidity he has always carried, watching the room. Across it you're saying your goodbyes—hugging Mingyu who says something into your ear that makes you laugh, the real one, the full one. Joshua watches it happen and feels the familiar pull of it and the familiar distance of tonight sitting between that pull and him.

"She's not mad," Seungcheol says. It’s a statement, not a question.

"No," Joshua agrees.

"Worse."

"Yeah."

Seungcheol is quiet for a moment. "I tried to read the table all night. Couldn't figure out exactly what happened but I could see the shape of it." He glances at Joshua. "She passed the dishes herself every time."

"Yeah."

"Laughed at everything Seokmin and Mingyu said."

"I know."

"Didn't look at you for about forty minutes."

"I know." Joshua's voice is quiet. "And when she finally did—"

"I saw," Seungcheol says simply. "Two seconds." He folds his coat over his arm. "What did you say to her?"

"Wrong thing." Joshua looks at his own coat, not yet putting it on. "She came home wanting to talk and I wasn't paying attention and when she called me on it I went sideways. I said I wasn't a mind reader."

Seungcheol absorbs this. "And now she's—"

"Perfectly fine," Joshua says. "All evening."

"That's not nothing."

"No," Joshua agrees. "It's not."

Seungcheol is quiet for a moment, the particular stillness of someone choosing their words. Then: "You know what to do."

"I know what I should've done three hours ago."

"That's done. You've got now." He puts a hand on Joshua's shoulder, brief and solid. "Go home. Say the real thing, not the version of it that makes you look better. She'll know the difference."

"She always does."

"That's why you're with her." His hand drops. "Go."

Across the room you look up and your eyes find Joshua's. Just for a moment, held across the warm noise of the restaurant. Your expression is still composed, still carrying that particular waiting quality he has been sitting across from all evening. But in it, underneath it, the thing that has always been there: you, still here, still his, giving him the space to find his way back.

He holds your gaze.

The corner of your mouth moves and your eyes smile—barely, just barely—before you turn back to finish your goodbyes.

He puts on his coat.

The ride home is quiet in a different way than before.

The sharp edges have worn down. They’re not resolved. Not yet. But the warmth of the evening has softened the texture of the silence between you. You rest your chin on your palm as you look out the window. He drives. The city moves past in the way it moves past late at night, slower and more golden.

At a red light he reaches over without looking at you, palm up. The same reach as before.

You look at his hand.

You put yours in it.

And this time—slowly, after a moment—your fingers curl around his.

He doesn't say anything. Just holds on tighter, careful, like something he wants to keep.

The light changes. He drives you home.

Home.

Coats off. Shoes by the door.

You go to the kitchen. He follows because he cannot not follow, because the distance has been building all evening and he has been waiting for the door of the restaurant to close behind you and now it has.

You're at the counter, your back to him, hands around a glass of water.

He stops a few feet away. Not touching you. Not yet because he hasn't earned that yet.

"I've been trying to figure out what to say since the drive back home," he says. Low. Careful. "I keep starting and it keeps coming out as an explanation and I don't want to explain. I just want to say it."

You don't turn around. But your hands go still around the glass.

"You can say it," you say quietly.

A pause. The kind that means he's finding the real thing, not the comfortable version of it.

"I wasn't there," he says. "You came home and you needed me and I gave you a mm, yeah and that was already bad enough. And then when you told me… when you did exactly the right thing and told me… I made it about myself. I went straight to but instead of just—" He stops. 

"I said I wasn't a mind reader. And that was wrong and it wasn't true and I knew it the moment it came out and I let you walk away anyway."

You stare at the counter.

"Why?" you ask. Not accusatory. Genuinely asking, the way you always genuinely ask, even now.

"Because I felt caught," he says. "And when I feel caught I justify instead of listen. I've done it before in smaller ways and you've never called me on it and I think I got comfortable not being called on it. And tonight you called me on it and I didn't know how to just—receive that." A pause. "That's mine. Not yours."

Something loosens in your chest. That honesty. The specific difficult generous honesty of someone who has had an entire evening to sit with something and is now handing it over fully.

You turn around.

He looks tired. Not just from the evening but from the whole night of carrying it: the dinner and the distance and the careful ride home. There is something open and a little raw in his face, the look of a person who has been sitting with guilt and is only now setting it down.

"It's hard," you say. "When I say something hurts and the first thing I get back is but."

"I know." He doesn't look away. "You came home and you needed me to just be there. And I couldn't even manage that. And then when you told me I made you feel like it was your fault for telling me." His jaw tightens slightly. "I'm ashamed of that."

"I'm not trying to make you feel bad," you say.

"I know you're not. I'm not saying it for sympathy. I'm saying it because I want you to know I understand what I actually did. Not just the laptop. The but."

You look at him for a long moment.

"Can I tell you something?" you say.

"Always," he says. And the word comes out the way it always comes out: like a door swinging open.

"I don't think you don't care," you say. "I've never thought that. Not once." You find his eyes. "But sometimes when I try to say something and it goes nowhere I think… maybe it wasn't worth saying. Maybe the things I want to share are too small or too frequent or—" You stop, your eyes shining. "I know that's mine to work on. But tonight when you said what you said it felt like… like evidence. That maybe I'd been right to wonder."

The words land and you feel them land and you feel him feel them land and the silence afterward is very honest.

"You are not too much," he says. Quietly. Firmly. He takes a step forward. "There is no version of what you want to tell me that I don't want to hear. There is no small thing." 

Damn it all because he crosses the room then and stops in front of you and his hand comes up to your face—his thumb at your cheek, the gesture so familiar it lives somewhere permanent in your chest. "What I said was wrong and it wasn't true and those are not the same thing. My defensiveness and what I actually think of you. They have nothing to do with each other."

Your throat does something inconvenient.

"I hate that I can't just shake it off," you say.

"Don't." His voice is gentle but certain. "Don't make it smaller than it is because you think you should be able to handle it. You came home and tried to give me something and I dropped it. I should have tried to catch it."

You look at the space between you.

"Next time," you say quietly, "I won't say never mind."

"Next time," he says, "I'll put the laptop down before you have to ask." His thumb brushes across your cheek. "And if I'm tired and I miss it—you say Joshua, put it down. And I will. Every single time. Without the but."

You look up at him.

"Every time?" you say.

He leans closer. "Every time," he whispers against your lips.

Something in you that has been held carefully all evening finally, gently, sets itself down.

You lean your forehead against his. He exhales—long and slow, like something he has been holding since the bathroom door—and his arms come around you properly, solid and warm and certain.

"I'm sorry," he says into your hair. "For all of it. For carrying it through the whole dinner."

"I know," you say. "You were doing your best."

You stay like that for a while, the kitchen warm and still around you. Not everything has been said—there are probably more conversations inside this one, smaller rooms you'll find your way into eventually. But the main thing is here, in his arms, already softening into something that will become okay.

"What was it?" he says eventually, softer now.

You pull back enough to look at him. "What?"

"The thing," he says. "The small warm thing you were going to tell me."

You look at him for a moment.

"There were two things, actually," you say. "That's why it felt like a lot to carry."

He waits the way he waits: without filling the silence, just holding it open for you.

"The work thing first," you say. "There's someone on my team. You don't know her… and she's been struggling for weeks and she never says anything, she just gets quieter and I've been watching it and not knowing how to—anyway. Today she came and found me. She just showed up at my desk and said I don't know who else to tell this to and she sat down and talked for twenty minutes." You pause. "I didn't do anything. I just listened. And at the end she said thank you, I felt better and went back to her desk like it was nothing." You look at your hands. "And I just sat there thinking about how sometimes that's all it is. Just—someone showing up. Just being there."

He is very still.

"That's what you wanted to tell me," he says quietly.

"Yeah." You look up at him. "While it was still warm."

Neither of you says anything for a moment. The kitchen holds it.

"And the second thing?" he says.

Something in your face softens. "I found a bookshop," you say. "A new one near the office. I went in because I had twenty minutes and I found this whole shelf of poetry in the back and I—" You pause. "I thought about you. About Busan. About what you wrote in the margin. And I wanted to tell you that too, while it was still—"

"Warm," he says.

"Yeah." Your voice goes soft. "I had a whole day's worth of things and I just wanted to bring them home to you."

He holds your face in both hands. His eyes are soft and present and carrying something that looks a little like the specific weight of understanding; not just what he missed tonight but what it means that you wanted to share it, what it says about who you bring your days to and why.

"Tell me about her," he says. "Your colleague."

So you do. And then you tell him about the bookshop— the smell of it, the particular light, the poetry shelf and the specific feeling of standing there and thinking of him. He listens to every word of both. He asks one question and then another and the conversation opens the way it always does between you until the evening has lost all its sharp edges entirely.

He makes tea without being asked. He gets yours exactly right. You wrap both hands around it and look at him over the rim and think: there he is. Even after all of this, there he is.

A little while later, with your mugs empty, the quiet of the apartment settled around you, he reaches over and takes your face in his hands again—the same way he did before but slower now. More deliberate. He looks at you for a moment the way he looks at things he is glad to have and then he kisses you.

Not urgently. Not making up for anything or trying to. Just soft. His mouth on yours, his thumbs resting light at your cheeks. The kind of kiss that doesn't want anything except to say I'm here. I know. I'm sorry. I'm here.

You let him. You kiss him back the same way: slow and forgiving and certain, the way you are with each other when the hard part is over and what's left is just the two of you, still here, still choosing this.

He rests his forehead against yours when it ends.

"Come to bed," you say.

"Yeah," he says. "Okay."

Later, the lamp was still on. You are on your sides facing each other, the way you end up sometimes when the day has been too much to turn away from just yet. His hand finds your waist. Your eyes find him. The room is warm and small and entirely yours.

"What was the good moment?" he asks. Soft and sleepy. "The one from this afternoon. Tell me again."

You smile into the pillow.

You tell him again.

He listens to every word.

"Next time," he says quietly, already half toward sleep, "don't say never mind."

"Next time," you say, "put the laptop down before I have to ask."

A pause.

"Deal," he says, the corners of his eyes smiling.

You close your eyes, a smile on your lips. Joshua quietly leans in to kiss them. 

Outside it is late and cold and the city goes on without you. In here, it is warm and resolved and whole, and tomorrow you will both be a little more careful, a little more honest, a little more practiced at finding each other when the distance creeps in.

That, you think, is what this is. Not the absence of distance. Just getting better at closing it.

His breathing slows. His arm stays where it is.

You wake up to the smell of butter.

Not in a dramatic way. Just your eyes opening, the ceiling of your bedroom coming into focus and underneath the general morning quiet the faint warm smell of something cooking.

You lie there for a moment, listening. You hear the soft knock of a pan. The low sound of him humming something you can't quite identify from here, unhurried, like he doesn't know he's doing it. The radiator is ticking. A car passes outside.

You look at your phone. 8:14am.

You consider going back to sleep purely out of principle because it's a Saturday and you have opinions about Saturdays but then the smell gets more persuasive and you give up. You find his sweater on the chair by the bed; the big grey one that technically belongs to neither of you anymore, that has simply become the sweater through a long process of borrowing and forgetting. You pull it on and go to find him.

Joshua is standing at the stove with his back to you, his hair still a little unsettled from sleep, wearing the apron you got him as a joke six months ago that he now wears completely unironically. He hasn't heard you come in. He's still humming, some song you almost recognize, while he shifts the pan with the easy confidence of someone who has done this particular thing many times.

You lean in the doorway for a moment and just watch him. The morning light comes in at a low angle across the kitchen. He is, objectively, a little ridiculous in that apron. He is also, objectively, the most comfortable person you know.

"You're staring," he says without turning around.

A smile creeps up on your lips. It’s still a mystery to you how he just knows. "I'm observing. There's actually a difference."

"Is there."

"One is scientific."

He turns then and his face does the thing it does when he first sees you in the morning. Something that isn't quite a smile—it’s softer than that… like you're a fact he's glad to be reminded of. "Good morning," he says.

"Morning." You cross to him, tuck yourself under his free arm the way you always do, and he adjusts without thinking: pan to his right hand, left arm coming around you, pressing a kiss to the top of your head. It smells like butter and something sweet and the particular warm smell of him that you have never been able to describe to anyone and have never tried.

"What are you making?" you ask.

"Crepes."

You pull back enough to look up at him. "You're making crepes."

"I'm making crepes."

"It's eight in the morning."

"That's when crepes happen." He says it with complete authority, with a soft smile on his face, like this is an established and well-documented fact. You laugh despite yourself and he looks quietly pleased about it. Joshua has that small private expression he gets when he makes you laugh—like he's won something he wasn't sure he was going to win.

"I didn't know you could make crepes."

"There are many things about me you don't know. Yet."

"Name one other thing."

He considers this with great seriousness. "I'm very good at crepes." He tilts the pan before looking at you. The batter moves in a perfect thin circle. "See."

You watch him work and think: at some point this morning, while you were still asleep, he decided to do this. He got up quietly—he always gets up quietly, the mattress barely moves, you used to wonder if he practiced—and he came in here, in your shared kitchen, and started making you crepes. 

Not because you asked. Not because the day demanded it. Just because it was morning and you were here and he wanted to.

"Joshua," you say.

"Mm."

"You know what day it is."

"Saturday."

"Joshua."

"February fourteenth." He slides the crepe onto a plate without looking at you, his tone perfectly even. "A Saturday. A good day for crepes."

"I thought we said we weren't doing anything."

"We're not doing anything. I'm making breakfast."

"This is something."

"Breakfast," he says with great patience, "is the most fundamental form of human nourishment. It is not something. It is the baseline." He glances down at you and there is something warm and dancing in his eyes that he doesn't bother to hide. "Do you want some fruit on your crepes, sweetheart?"

You stare at him. He waits, easy and unhurried.

"Yes," you say.

Like your responses are his greatest pleasure. "Okay then."

You hop up on the kitchen counter—which you are technically not supposed to sit on. It’s a house rule you have violated so consistently it has effectively been repealed. You watch him finish the crepes. He makes six, which is ambitious, and he layers them with something lemony and sweet and cuts strawberries with the focused attention he gives to small tasks, neat and deliberate, like it matters most to do it right.

"You're cutting them in hearts," you say.

He looks down at the cutting board. Back up at you. "They're just cut."

"Joshua. Those are hearts."

"Strawberries are naturally heart-shaped."

"They are not naturally—"

"It's a botanical fact."

"That is not a botanical fact."

He plates everything without further comment and carries it to the table and pulls out your chair, which he always does, which you still aren't entirely used to even after all this time. You sit. Joshua sits across from you. He folds his hands and looks at you expectantly, like a person who has done nothing unusual and is simply waiting to have breakfast with you.

You look down at the plate.

The strawberries are very definitely cut into hearts.

"Thank you," you say and keep your voice completely straight.

"You're welcome," he says, keeping his.

You eat. The crepes are extraordinary—thin and just sweet enough, the lemon cutting through the richness, the strawberries arranged with the care of someone who will insist until his last breath that he just cut them normally. You eat two and a half before you put your fork down and look at him.

"These are really good."

"I know,” he says with a smirk.

You throw your napkin at him. He catches it without looking up from his plate and sets it neatly beside your fork and you think there is something almost unbearably charming about that. About the fact that even catching a thrown napkin he is somehow courteous about it.

After breakfast he does the dishes.

You offer to help and he quietly points at the couch. Finger extended, his expression mild, the universal gesture to go sit down. You open your mouth and he raises his eyebrows and you go and sit on the couch because you know that look. That look has a whole argument already built into it that you will not win.

You sit with your warm tea and listen to him move around the kitchen, the water running, the small domestic sounds of him cleaning up after himself the way he always does. Outside the window the city is grey-bright the way February gets, that flat light that isn't quite winter and isn't quite anything else.

He comes in and sits beside you after he’s done cleaning. He’s close, the way he always sits — not draped over you, just near, just present, like proximity is its own language he speaks fluently. He reaches behind the couch cushion and produces something you didn't know was there.

He pulled out a book. It was small and slightly worn at the spine. A slip of paper tucked inside near the back. He sets it in your lap without a word.

You look at it. It's a poetry collection, clearly actually read. It’s not decorative, not recently purchased. The cover is soft at the corners in the way of something that has been carried around. You open to the marked page and find a poem. Halfway down in the margin, in Joshua's handwriting, was something very small and certain: this one. this is the one.

You read it.

You were across the room and laughing. Not at me, not for me, just laughing, the way water doesn't perform when it moves. I have spent a long time watching people hold joy at arm's length. Like they’re careful with it, like it’s something borrowed. You threw your head back. I thought: someone taught her that she's allowed to do that. I've been looking for that. I didn't have a name for it until I saw it and recognized it anyway. The way you recognize a place you've never been but always meant to go.

You read it again.

The room is very quiet. Joshua is still beside you but he wasn’t watching you. He was giving you the privacy of the moment. The way he always seems to know how to do.

"When did you find this?" you ask. Your voice comes out softer than you intend.

"A while back." He's looking at the coffee table in front of you, comfortable, one arm stretched along the back of the couch behind you. "At a bookstore near the venue in Busan. I was early so I walked around for a bit. I found this in a pile near the back and read the whole thing standing in the aisle." 

A brief pause. "I bought it because of that poem."

"You didn't tell me."

"I was saving it for you."

You look at him. He turns then, meets your eyes, and there is something open in his face—not performing anything, not building toward anything. It was just Joshua. Present. Honest.

"For today?" you ask simply.

The corner of his mouth moves. "For when it felt right."

You look back down at the page. This one. This is the one. You think about him standing in a bookstore in Busan, reading something in a dusty aisle and feeling it land in his chest. Picking up a pen, maybe borrowing it from the bookstore owner. Him writing four words. 

Carrying the book home along with his beating heart.

You don't say everything you're thinking. You don't have to. That's the thing about Joshua. You have never once had to explain yourself all the way to the end.

You lean into him. His arm comes down from the back of the couch to settle around you. Warm and sure.

"Happy Valentine's Day," you say quietly.

He presses a kiss to your temple. A kiss so slow and deliberate.

"Happy Valentine's Day, my love."

You don't have plans.

That was the agreement—no reservations, no itinerary, no performance of the day. It was just a Saturday. Just the two of you. And so the morning stretches out the way unhurried mornings do.

You read. He plays guitar for a while, sitting on the floor with his back against the couch near your feet—a chord progression, a melody he keeps circling back to, something you don't recognize that might not be a real song yet. You read three pages and then just listen instead while the book remains open in your lap, already forgotten.

"What is that?" you ask eventually.

He plays the progression again. "I don’t know yet."

"It sounds pretty."

He doesn't say anything but his shoulders do something small, like he was pleased.

Around noon he makes you both tea without asking— your order, exactly right, the way he has had memorized for longer than either of you has ever discussed—and you sit together at the kitchen table and do nothing in particular. You show him something on your phone that makes him laugh. A real laugh: the one that crinkles his eyes. You file that away the way you file all of them. He tells you something about a conversation he had with Jeonghan that you suspect is ninety percent embellished and you listen to the whole thing with complete attention and then say that is not what happened and he says more or less and you say more or less is doing a lot of work in that sentence and he smiles into his mug, takes a sip, his eyes never leaving yours.

It is, you think, a very good morning.

The drive is Joshua’s idea.

You're surprised by this only in the way you're always a little surprised when he leads. Not because you doubt him but because he tends to follow your lead so easily, so naturally, that you sometimes forget to ask what he wants. His answer is almost always some version of whatever you want and you love him for it and also sometimes have to remind yourself to push past it to find the actual him underneath.

So when he jingles his keys in the early afternoon and asks if you want to go for a drive, you look up from your book and say yes before you've even fully processed the question.

"Where?" you ask as you pull on your coat.

He holds the door for you. "Nowhere in particular."

That, it turns out, is exactly right.

He connects his phone to the speakers before you've even buckled your seatbelt and puts on something you half know: something with a guitar and a voice that suits the dim afternoon. He pulls out of the parking structure and turns in a direction that isn't toward anything specific and you watch the city shift around you and don't ask where you're going because you already know the answer.

"Can I put the seat back?" you ask.

"It's your seat, love."

"Technically, it's your car."

"Technically," he agrees, "but you've claimed it."

You smile as you put the seat back. He doesn't say anything about this, which means he finds it endearing, which you know because you know him, which you still haven't entirely gotten used to—the fact that you know him, down past the celebrity status, down past the careful considerate surface of him into the actual interior, down past the private opinions and the small vanities and the things that make him laugh at unexpected moments. You have been given access to all of it and you still sometimes turn it over in your hands like something you can't believe you get to hold.

You end up on a road that runs along the river. The water is silver and flat in the afternoon light, the bare trees lining the bank, a handful of other cars drifting past in both directions. He slows without being asked and settles into a pace that matches the music.

You watch the water.

"Can I ask you something?" you say.

"Always."

"The poem." You keep your eyes on the river. "When you wrote that in the margin. Was it—was that already about me? Or did you find the poem first and then think of me?"

He's quiet for a moment. The road curves gently and he follows it.

"I read it and I thought about it for the first time," he says. "The first time I knew. There was a party—I can't even remember whose, some industry thing. It was crowded and loud, you know those kinds. You were on the other side of the room talking to someone and you laughed at something they said." A pause. "I wasn't even close enough to hear what was funny. I couldn't hear anything over the noise. I just saw your face and I thought—" He stops. Starts again, now more carefully. "I thought, oh, there it is. And I didn't know what to do with it yet so I just... filed it away. And then I read that poem in Busan and it said the thing I'd never found words for. And I wrote this one in the margin because that was the only thing that felt right."

You are quiet for a long moment.

Outside a heron stands perfectly still at the edge of the water, grey and patient and then you've passed it.

"You never told me any of that," you say.

"I know."

"The party. The first time. I didn't know there was a first time like that for you."

"There's always a first time," he says simply. "I think people just don't always know how to say it out loud." His hands are easy on the wheel. "I'm better at writing things in margins, apparently."

You laugh softly at that. He glances over and the look on his face in that half-second is so unguarded, so openly fond, that you have to look back at the river before you do something embarrassing.

"I have one too," you say. "A first time."

"Yeah?"

"It was earlier than you might think."

He waits. Joshua is very good at waiting, at giving you space inside a silence without filling it with something.

"You brought me tea once," you say. "When I was sick… early on, before we were—before we were together. I'd mentioned being under the weather to the whole group, just in passing, and you showed up with tea and didn't make it a big thing. You just left it and said you were in the neighborhood." 

You pause. "You weren't in the neighborhood."

Joshua says nothing.

"I asked Hao about it. You were forty minutes away." You feel him still beside you. "And it was my specific kind. Not just any tea. You remembered something I said once, weeks before. And I remember sitting there with it getting warm in my hands and thinking—" You stop.

"Thinking what?" His voice is very quiet.

"Thinking that I was in a lot of trouble," you say, chuckling.

The car is quiet for a moment. Just the music and the river outside and the comfortable warmth of the car.

Then Joshua reaches over without looking away from the road and finds your hand where it rests on your knee. He doesn't make a thing of it. He just turns his palm up and you put your hand in his and he folds his fingers around yours; like a door closing on something that was always supposed to be shut.

You drive like that for another half hour. The city gives way at its edges to stretches of bare-branched trees and distant hills gone pale with the cold season. He stops at a small place near the waterfront for hot drinks. For a moment he leaves you in the warm car, comes back in five minutes with two cups, hands you yours before he even sits back down and you wrap both hands around it and watch him and think: I'm glad that falling feeling didn't stay unrequited. I'm glad it turned into this—into him, into us, into today.

"What are you thinking about?" he asks.

"Forty minutes," you say.

He shakes his head slowly but he's smiling into his cup. And that's answer enough.

Dinner is not a production.

That's what Joshua says when you offer to help, waving you gently off toward the counter where you can sit and watch: it's not a production. He has clearly thought about this, planned it without making it a thing, and he moves through the kitchen with the ease of someone who has been thoughtful in advance.

You sit on the counter and he navigates around you without complaint, sometimes handing you things to hold as if you are a very stationary assistant.

"You're using me as a shelf," you say plainly, but with a hint of humor in your tone.

"You're a very good shelf." He takes the olive oil back. "A very reliable one."

"I feel objectified."

"You feel useful." He looks up at you. "That’s an Important distinction."

"Is it?"

"Shelves are load-bearing." He says it with complete seriousness and you laugh and he makes that face and goes back to the stove.

He makes pasta—not crepes-level ambitious though. It’s the kind that smells like garlic and white wine and something herby you can't entirely identify. He tastes as he goes, adjusts things, tastes again. It’s how Joshua has always cooked—led by his feelings. He puts on music from the kitchen speaker, something older, something that fits the warm light and the smell of garlic and the soft feeling of the evening.

You watch him and think, not for the first time: I get to have this. The thought arrives naturally and without ceremony. You get to have him in your shared kitchen on a Saturday night, wearing the ridiculous apron, turning without being asked to hand you a piece of bread because he knows you taste things while you wait.

He plates everything with care. He sets the table properly, complete with cloth napkins, two small candles. Perfectly chosen for not being too much. He pulls out your chair.

"You always do that," you say as you sit.

"Do what."

"Pull out my chair."

He sits across from you and unfolds his napkin. "Is that all right?"

"It's very all right." You look at him. "I just notice it every time."

He meets your eyes and something warm and simple lives in his expression. "Good," he says, like that's the whole answer. 

Like the point was always for you to notice.

You eat slowly, the same way the whole day has moved — without urgency, without anywhere else to be. You talk about nothing important and everything comfortable: a book you've been meaning to read, something he wants to do when spring comes, a memory that surfaces without context and leads to another and another. He refills your glass without interrupting what he's saying. He passes you more bread before you think to reach for it.

You raise an eyebrow.

"You were going to," he says.

"I hadn't decided."

"You'd decided."

You take the bread. "Insufferable," you whisper jokingly.

"Mm," he says pleasantly and twirls his pasta.

Later, the dishes done, you move to the bedroom.

Not for any particular reason at first—just the natural drift of the evening, the lamp on the nightstand warmer than the living room light, the bed an obvious place to land at the end of a full day. You change into something comfortable. Joshua loses the apron (finally) and you mourn it silently and then don't.

He disappears briefly and comes back with a small plate. You look at it.

Chocolate-covered strawberries. Four of them, neat and glossy, arranged with the same quiet attention he gives to everything.

"Joshua," you start.

"They were left over," he says simply as he sets the plate on the bed between you and settles back against the headboard beside you. His shoulder finds yours. "From the groceries."

"You bought chocolate-covered strawberries in your groceries."

"I buy a variety of things."

You look at him with such quiet, maybe even devastating love. He looks at the plate with great innocence.

"Thank you," you say and pick one up.

You lean back against the headboard together, the lamp casting everything in gold, and you talk the way you talk when the day has run out of steam—now slower, softer, sentences with longer pauses between them. He asks about your week, something specific you'd mentioned in passing days ago that he apparently filed away in his mind and you tell him and he listens the way he listens: like you are the most interesting thing currently happening.

"What about you?" you ask. "Honestly. How was your week?"

He thinks about it, which you love—that he actually considers the question instead of defaulting to fine. "Long," he says after a beat. "But there were good parts." He glances at you before taking another bite. "Thursday was good."

"What happened Thursday?"

"You called me on your lunch break."

You stare at him. "That was a four minute call. I was asking if you'd seen my brown scarf."

"I know." Joshua says, completely unbothered. "It was the best day of my week."

You don't have a response to that. You pick up another strawberry to have something to do with your hands and take a bite and the chocolate cracks a little too sharply and a small smear catches at the corner of your lips.

"You've got—" he starts.

"I know, I know." You reach up.

"Here—" He's already reaching too and his thumb finds the corner of your mouth before you do, gently, wiping it away with the same care he brings to everything that has to do with you. He means it practically. You know he means it practically.

But his hand doesn't move away immediately.

His thumb stays at the corner of your mouth for a half second longer than it needs to and you look at him and he's already looking at you and there it is—that small and distinct shift, like a key turning in a lock.

"Hi," you say, very quietly.

"Hi," he says back.

You laugh first. You can't help it—the absurdity of the moment, the strawberry still in your hand, the thumb at the corner of your lips. He catches it, the laugh, and it undoes whatever the half-serious moment was building toward and suddenly you're both a little ridiculous again, but still warm and familiar.

"You have chocolate on your—" you start.

"I do not."

"On your— just here—" You reach up and touch the corner of his jaw and there is, in fact, no chocolate there, which you knew, but he doesn't know you knew, and his expression cycles through suspicious to betrayed to reluctantly amused.

"You made that up," he says.

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"You completely made that up."

"Chocolate is a slippery thing."

"There was no chocolate."

"I thought I saw—"

"You did not see—"

You are laughing again and he's trying to hold his baffled expression and failing, the corner of his mouth giving him away, and you can see the exact moment he decides to stop trying because his face just… opens, becomes the warm uncomplicated thing it is when he's happy, and he shakes his head slowly.

"Unbelievable," he whispers.

"You started it," you say. "With the thumb."

"That was practical."

"It was very—" you search for the word. "Attentive."

"I'm an attentive person."

"That you are," you agree and something in your voice shifts when you say it—drops a register, loses the teasing edge, becomes something more honest than the game you were playing. He hears it. He always hears it.

He looks at you.

You look back.

The plate is still between you on the bed, the lamp still warm, the apartment still quiet around you. Outside the city has gone soft with night. Something has shifted in the room.

Joshua reaches over and moves the plate to the nightstand and when he turns back he is closer than he was. His hand comes up slowly, giving you every moment to move, to say something, to redirect, maybe even deflect—and finds your jaw, the same thumb that wiped chocolate from the corner of your lips now resting at your cheek, tilting your face toward him with the particular gentleness he reserves for things he means.

"Okay?" he asks. Soft. Low.

"Okay," you say back.

He kisses you gently at first, the way he does most things: without rushing, without taking more than what's offered him. Just his mouth on yours, unhurried, his thumb tracing along your cheekbone like he has nowhere to be and nothing more pressing than this precise moment. You feel yourself settling into it, the warmth of his mouth, the steadiness of his hand, the particular feeling of being held in someone's full attention.

Then you kiss him back with intention and something shifts again.

It’s not urgency. It never becomes frantic. But it deepens. Your hand finds the front of his shirt and his hand moves from your jaw into your hair, fingers curling gently at the base of your neck and the kiss becomes slower and more deliberate and more honest than what it started as. He angles toward you and you feel the warmth of him, the solidness, and you wonder briefly how you ever thought you could be satisfied with just talking.

He pulls back just enough to look at you. His eyes are dark and very present and you just want to live in them at the same time.

"Hi," you say.

"Hi," he says and the smile that crosses his face is soft and private and entirely for you: a little undone at the edges in a way you don't often get to see in full light. You think you could spend a long time cataloguing all the versions of that smile. Then he's kissing you again and you stop thinking in lists.

Your kisses deepen gradually like a tide coming in.

Joshua’s hand moves from your hair to your waist and you shift closer without deciding to, drawn by some gravity that has existed between you since the beginning. He makes a small sound against your mouth when you press into him; low and barely there, the kind of sound he doesn't always mean to make and you feel it more than hear it. Something warm unfurls in your chest.

You pull back an inch. "Was that—"

"Don't," he says mildly.

"I didn't say anything."

"You were going to."

You were absolutely going to. You decide to let it go. You kiss him instead, slower this time, and feel the way his breath shifts, the slight tightening of his hand at your waist.

His other hand finds the hem of your shirt. He doesn't move it, just rests his fingers there at the edge, warm against the strip of skin above your waist, asking without asking. You shift toward him in answer. He takes his time anyway. His fingers tracing slowly along your side, learning the shape of you the way he seems to always be, like you're something he wants to know by heart and keeps finding new pages of.

You tip your head back when his mouth finds the curve of your neck, just below your jaw. He knows that spot, has known it for a while now, and uses it the way he uses most things he knows about you: carefully, with intention, like it matters to do it right.

"Joshua," you murmur.

"Mm." His mouth moves further along your collarbone.

You gather yourself enough to reach for him: your hands finding the fabric of his shirt, pulling it up slowly, and he sits back to let you take it over his head. You take a moment just to look at him in the warm lamp light, the way you always do when you get this version of him, unguarded, and you watch something quiet and wanting move through his expression when your hand presses flat against his chest.

His turn.

His hands find the hem of your shirt, patient, and you lift your arms and then you are simply looking at each other in the low gold light of your bedroom, both a little undone and neither embarrassed about it.

"You're so—" he starts, then stops.

"What?"

He shakes his head slightly. Not unwilling to say it—just, you think, working out how. He reaches out and brushes your hair back from your face with both hands. It’s a gesture so gentle it makes your chest ache. He holds your face for a moment the way he holds things he is glad to have.

"Mine," he says quietly. Just that.

You lean up and kiss him because that's the only answer that feels enough.

He takes his time with you the way he takes his time with everything.

His hands move over you slowly, attentive, warm through the thin fabric still between you. He finds the curve of you, the warmth of you, gentle in a way that makes you feel like the only thing in the room worth attending to. When he finally draws you closer his hands are reverent, hands trying to learn what he already knows and finding it remarkable anyway.

His mouth finds your collarbone again, your shoulder, the place he knows below your ear. You exhale something that isn't quite a sound.

"Still with me?" he murmurs against your skin.

"Very much with you," you manage.

He hums, satisfied, and keeps going—his mouth drifting lower, his hands mapping you with the focused quiet of someone who finds this worthy of his full attention. He moves slowly, intentionally, pausing when you make a sound he likes, returning to it. You are aware of his warmth everywhere, the graze of his lips, the careful pressure of his hands, and it is simultaneously too much and not enough.

His hands trace over your chest, learning and re-learning the shape of you with a gentleness that almost undoes you entirely. He presses his mouth there and you close your eyes. His palms move down your sides, your waist, lower still—unhurried, asking with his hands before anything else, always giving you time, always checking without words that you are here, with him, wanting this as much as he does.

You do. And you are so entirely here.

When he moves lower still, you thread your fingers into his hair. He settles against you like he has all the time in the world and the only thing he wants to do with it is this. He whispers something against you—you're so beautiful—and the warmth of his voice is almost as much as the warmth of his touch and his tongue.

He takes you apart gradually, like someone who has learned that the best things don't require force. He reads every sound you make, every shift of your body, and responds to all of it. You say his name once, softly, and he hums like you've said something he's glad to hear.

The room is warm and still. The lamp makes everything amber. Outside the city goes about its late February business, indifferent and very much far away.

Later, you reach for him.

He lifts his head and finds your eyes in the low light, reading you the way he always reads you.

"Hey," you say.

"Hey," he says, and moves back up to you and you turn toward him so you are face to face, close, his hand resting warm on your hip.

"My turn," you say.

You push gently at his shoulder and he goes willingly, settling back, and you take your time the way he takes his time. Your hands move slowly, your mouth finding the line of his jaw, the curve of his shoulder, the center of his chest where you can feel his heartbeat quicken beneath your lips.

He exhales slowly, like he's working to stay controlled. His hand finds your hair, not directing, just resting there.

"You're very…" he starts.

"What?" you ask against his skin.

"Distracting," he says and it comes out lower than he means it to and you smile against him.

Your hands move further and you hear the quiet sound he makes—restrained, barely there— and you pause just for a moment to look up at him.

"Okay?" you ask, echoing him from earlier.

"That's not fair," he says.

"Just checking," you say innocently and his hand tightens gently in your hair.

You take your time because you want to, because you want to give him what he gives you; that feeling of being someone's entire focus, of being attended to without rush. You whisper against his skin: you're the only one. Just that. And his breath catches. His chest rises and falls a little faster and you feel the way his hand trembles against your hair.

I only want you, you say softly, your lips at the line of his hip. Just you. For as long as you’ll love me.

He makes a sound low in his throat and you feel it in your own chest.

"Come here," he says after a while. His voice is rougher than usual, so warm and low. "Please."

You move back up to him and he holds your face in both hands the way he did before and kisses you deeply, thoroughly, like something he has been wanting to do for the last several minutes and has been very patient about. His thumbs slowly trace your cheeks. You can feel how much he means it.

"You," he says against your mouth. "Are incredible."

"I know," you tease.

"I’m glad you know," he says and kisses you again.

The lamp stays on.

He seems to want to see you and you are glad because you want to see him too. The unfiltered version of him, the open one, the one that exists only in rooms like this, at hours like this, with you. He is careful with you in the way he is careful with everything he values, his hands moving with intention, learning you and returning to what he knows.

He guides you both forward with the same quiet confidence he brings to the rest of his life. His hands are warm on you, reverent, moving over you slowly before drawing you close. He touches you like something he is grateful for, like something he does not take for granted and you feel that in his hands, in the particular way he has of making you feel entirely seen.

You're so beautiful, he says quietly, his mouth at your temple. Like this. Always like this.

The space between you closes and then there is no space and the feeling is one you have no adequate language for. 

The feeling of being entirely met, of having no distance left between you.

His forehead finds yours. He goes still for a moment, just breathing, just here.

"Okay?" he murmurs, for the third time tonight and you love him so much for this—for asking, for checking, for the fact that he will always stop everything to make sure.

"Yes," you say, almost breathless. "Yes, Joshua."

He exhales against your temple, something relieved and warm in it, and his hand finds yours against the sheet and laces your fingers together.

You move together slowly the same way the whole day has moved: without anything more important than this. He whispers against your skin: you're everything, low and without fanfare. You press closer. He makes a quiet sound that belongs only to this room, to you.

Mine, he murmurs, lips at your jaw. My girl.

"I've got you," he murmurs at some point. "I've got you."

You believe him. You have always believed him.

His free hand moves over you and you sigh his name into his shoulder and he responds to it the way he responds to everything you give him: fully, without holding back. He whispers praises against your skin—that's it, you're perfect— quiet and warm, just true things said out loud because he means them.

You lose track of time. You lose track of everything except the warmth of him and the low amber light and the sound of his breath and the overwhelming feeling of being completely loved.

At some point you feel the tiredness come. He notices before you say anything. 

He always notices.

His hand moves to your face, brushing your hair back, and he presses a slow kiss to your temple.

"I have you," he says, softer now. "Let me."

And he takes over, gentle and steady. His focus entirely on you, on the two of you, on bringing you together to the place you are moving toward. You hold onto him. His hand stays laced with yours. He says your name once. You with me? he murmurs and you say yes, always, and he exhales like that is everything he needed to hear.

The warmth builds and crests and you breathe through it and he is there for all of it. Steady, his in every way, and when you surface you are warm all the way through and he is right there, his forehead against your cheek, his breath slowing, his hand still holding yours.

"Hey," he says, soft, after a while.

"Hey," you say.

You stay folded together in the warm light for a long time afterward, neither of you moving, neither of you speaking. His thumb draws slow absent circles against your hand. You can feel his heartbeat easing back to its resting pace.

A long quiet settles. His breathing has almost evened out.

"You never expect anything," he murmurs softly like the thought has been sitting with him all day and only now found its way out. "That's why."

You don't ask why. You already know.

You press a little closer. His arm tightens around you.

"Joshua," you say eventually.

"Mm."

"I love you."

He turns his head and presses his lips to your temple. His lips stay there for a while.

"I love you," he says back. "So much."

You close your eyes. Stay exactly where you are.

And the night settles around you both, soft and complete, like a door gently closing on the whole long beautiful day.

Much later.

The lamp is still on, turned down low. You are on your side, his arm a warm weight across your waist, his breath slow and even against the back of your neck. The room is quiet and dark at the edges and you should be asleep.

But you're not quite there yet.

"Shua," you say, soft and still, maybe a little unsure.

A sound against your shoulder. Not quite awake, not quite not.

"The poem," you start. "What you wrote in the margin."

A pause. He is listening even half-asleep, you know this, he has always been like this—available for you in whatever state he's in.

"What about it, my love," he murmurs.

"I think about it the same way," you say. "The party. I couldn't hear what you were saying but you were listening to someone and you looked so present." You pause. "Like you actually cared what they were saying. And I thought, there it is. There he is."

His arm tightens around you. A full stop.

"I didn't know that," he says.

"We have a lot of those," you say. "Things we didn't know about each other."

"Mm." You can hear the smile in it even when you're mostly asleep. "We should probably keep telling them to each other."

"We should," you agree.

Outside a night bird calls once and doesn't repeat. The lamp makes a small warm circle on the ceiling.

"What else?" he says. Nearly asleep now.

"What else what?"

"Things I didn't know."

You think about it. About the forty minutes and the party and four words written in a bookstore margin and a day that had nowhere to be and went everywhere worth going anyway.

"Lots," you say. "We have time."

"We have a lot of time," he echoes.

His breathing slows again. You feel the exact moment he goes under. The slight release of his weight, the shift in his breath. His arm stays where it is.

You look at the low lamp. The ceiling. The shape of the bedroom you share with Joshua in the familiar dark.

There it is, you think. There he is.

You close your eyes.

Outside, the city holds its cold and keeps its February. It doesn't know what happened here tonight. It doesn't need to.

The lamp is low. Joshua’s arm is warm across you. The day was long and full and given entirely and now it is folding itself gently closed.

Tomorrow will come small and ordinary, the way most things do. You have learned to be glad for that. You are glad for that.

It starts on a Tuesday.

You mention it the way you mention most things—in passing while you're doing something else, like it's a footnote to the actual conversation. You're putting groceries away and he's at the counter and you say, almost absently, "Oh, a weird thing happened yesterday on the way home."

He looks up.

"Some guy followed me for like three blocks," you stretched on tiptoe trying to reach for the top shelf but the distance remained just out of grasp. Sensing your struggle, he stepped in quietly. As he slid the item into place, his other hand settled against the small of your back—a gesture so steady and instinctive it felt as natural as breathing. 

You thank him before continuing, "The guy kept saying things, asking where I was going. Wanted to know if I knew you." You pause, setting a can down. "I ducked into that convenience store on the corner and waited until he left."

Joshua goes completely still.

The air changes in the kitchen. You don't notice at first—you're still unpacking, still moving—but he feels it, the way the temperature drops when something lands wrong.

"What?" he says quietly.

"It's fine," you say as you turn to grab the next bag. "He didn't follow me in or anything. I just waited like ten minutes and then went home a different way." You glance at him. "I'm fine. It was just weird."

"He asked if you knew me," Joshua says.

"Yeah." You shrug, the small casual shrug of someone who has already processed this. "I said no and kept walking but he kept following so I just handled it. It's fine."

That word again. Fine.

"Did you—" He stops. His hands have gone very still on the counter. "Did you call someone? Did you—"

"Shua." You look at him with the particular patience of someone who has already processed a thing and is now being asked to re-process it. "I'm okay. I handled it. It's over."

But there's something else in your face. Something careful—you've clocked his reaction, the way he's gone quiet and still, and he can see you doing the thing you do, the small recalibration where you decide how much of this to let him carry.

"It wasn't—" you start. "He wasn't aggressive or anything. Just persistent. I'm fine."

You say it again. The second fine in as many minutes and Joshua knows what that means—you're saying it for him, not for you. You're trying to make it smaller so he doesn't have to hold the weight of it.

"Okay," he says, because what else can he say? "Okay."

And that's it. That's the whole conversation. You go back to the groceries and the evening moves on and by the time you're both sitting down to eat you're talking about something completely different and the moment has passed.

Except it hasn't passed for him.

It sits in his chest while you eat. It sits there while you watch something later, your head on his shoulder, completely at ease. It's still there when you fall asleep that night and he lies awake in the dark thinking about three blocks and some guy asking if you knew him and the convenience store on the corner that he has never been so grateful existed.

This is the thing he can't protect you from.

That's what sits in his chest and heavier than the rest of it. He can walk you home when he's there. He can pick you up from places. He can do a hundred small things to make you safer. But he can't make you not-his-girlfriend. He can't make you anonymous. He can't undo the fact that being with him means sometimes people know who you are, or know who you might be, and sometimes those people follow you for three blocks asking questions.

You've told him a hundred times that you knew what you were signing up for. That you chose this. That it's worth it. And he believes you—he has to believe you because the alternative is unbearable. But that doesn't stop the guilt from sitting in his chest every time something like this happens.

Because it does happen. It’s not often, but enough. 

Enough that you've gotten good at handling it. Enough that you can duck into a convenience store and wait it out and come home and tell him about it like it's nothing…like it's just part of the landscape of your life now.

He wasn't there.

That's the other part that keeps circling back. You were three blocks from home and someone followed you and said things and asked things and Joshua was at the studio with Seungcheol going over something that felt important at the time but now feels like nothing. You were alone and he was elsewhere and the fact that this is unavoidable doesn't make it any easier to sit with.

He can't stop thinking about the ten minutes in the convenience store. What you did while you waited. If you were scared. If you texted someone. If you thought about calling him and decided not to because you didn't want to worry him, because you've learned that telling him these things means carrying his guilt on top of your own fear.

You're fine. You said you're fine. You are, arguably, fine.

But he can't stop thinking about the fact that it's over for you and it has not even started being over for him.

Wednesday you have a thing at work that doesn't go the way you wanted.

He only knows about it because he asks. You wouldn't have brought it up otherwise—he's learned this about you. The way you sort things into categories of worth mentioning and not worth mentioning and how most things end up in the latter unless you're directly asked.

So he asks. "How was the meeting?"

You pause just for a second in that way that means you're deciding how to answer. "It didn't happen," you say. "The client pulled out at the last minute. The whole project's on hold."

"That sucks," he says because it does. He knows you've been working on this for weeks.

"It's fine," you say, trying to move past it. "These things happen. We'll pivot. It's not a big deal."

But your voice does this thing—stays light, stays even, but there's something underneath it that he recognizes. The small disappointment you're not letting yourself dwell on. The professional frustration that's real but that you've decided doesn't warrant space.

"You put a lot of work into that," he says carefully.

"I know." You shrug. "But that's how it goes sometimes. I'll be fine."

There it is again. Fine.

Joshua wants to push. He wants to ask if you're actually fine or if you're just deciding to be fine, if you're allowed to be frustrated for more than thirty seconds before you try to forget about it. But he also knows you—knows that pushing too hard too fast makes you pull back further and makes the wall go up instead of down.

So he just says, "I'm sorry. That really does suck."

"Thanks," you say and you mean it. He can tell. You give him a small, real smile, "It is what it is."

And that's it. The conversation ends. You move on to something else and the disappointment gets filed wherever you file these things. Somewhere he can't quite see but can feel the shape of.

On Thursday, your phone screen cracks.

You're pulling it out of your pocket and it slips, just for a second, and hits the corner of the counter on the way down. When you pick it up there's a spiderweb crack across the bottom corner, thin lines spreading like roots.

He watches your face. There's a flash of something—frustration, maybe or just tiredness—and then it smooths out.

"Damn," you say mildly.

"Are you okay?" he asks. You nod. “Is it bad?”

"It's just the corner." You turn the phone over in your hands. "It'll be fine once I can get it fixed."

"Didn't you just pay it off?"

"Last month." You say it lightly but he can hear the edge underneath it. The bad timing. The small stupid unfairness of it. "It's fine. It's just a screen."

You set it down and go back to what you were doing and he watches the small thing get absorbed into the pile of other small things. None of them big enough to acknowledge individually but all of them sitting on you anyway.

On Friday you're tired.

He can see it when you come home—not falling-asleep tired, just the kind that lives in your shoulders and the way you move through the apartment. Like you're pushing through water.

"Long day?" he asks.

"Just a long week," you say as you set your bag down with the particular care of someone who is very close to just dropping everything. "I'm fine. Just need to sit for a minute."

You sit. He watches you from the kitchen, the way you close your eyes and let your head fall back against the couch, the way your hands are very still in your lap like you're afraid if you move you'll have to keep moving.

He makes you tea without asking. He brings it over and sets it on the table beside you and sits down next to you without saying anything.

You open your eyes and look at the tea and then at him and something in your face softens.

"Thank you," you say.

"Anytime, love."

You pick up the mug and hold it but don't drink, just letting the warmth of it sit in your hands. He wants to ask what happened. What made the day long, what made the week long, if it's just accumulation or if there's something specific. But he also knows that if you wanted to tell him you would and pushing when you're this tired will only make you perform with energy you don't have.

So he just sits with you while you hold your tea and look at nothing in particular and he tries not to think about Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday and the way these things keep stacking.

Saturday morning your friend cancels.

The text comes while you're having coffee and he sees your face change when you read it—just slightly, just a small dimming, like a light going down a single notch.

"Everything okay?" he asks as he comes through the door. He just came home from a schedule.

"Yeah." You set the phone down. "Mia can't do lunch. Something came up."

Mia. The friend you've been trying to see for almost a month. The one you'd actually been looking forward to, who you'd mentioned twice this week in passing. He'd heard the small brightness in your voice when you talked about it, the thing you'd been holding onto as a good thing in a week of not-good things.

"That sucks," he says.

"It's fine. She's busy." You pick up your coffee. "We'll reschedule."

But he can see it—the disappointment you're not letting yourself feel, the small thing you were looking forward to that's now just another thing that didn't happen. You're already smoothing it over, already making it fine, already deciding it's not worth being sad about.

"You were really looking forward to seeing her," he says.

You pause. Look at him. There's something in your eyes that he recognizes—the small acknowledgement that yes, he's right, yes it does hurt a little, and also the decision to not go there, to not make it a thing.

"I'll see her soon," you say.

And that's it. The moment passes. You drink your coffee and the disappointment joins everything else in the place where you keep things you've decided not to feel.

He watches it happen and feels it happen and doesn't know what to do with the fact that he's carrying all the things you're not letting yourself carry.

Saturday afternoon he can't sit still.

You're on the couch reading and he's technically doing the same but he's been on the same page for fifteen minutes. He keeps looking at you over the top of his book. You're fine. You're completely fine. You're comfortable and relaxed and reading and occasionally making a small sound at something in it and you are the picture of someone having a perfectly ordinary Saturday.

He can feel it anyway.

That's the thing he's never quite known how to explain to you—he can feel it even when you're not showing it. The weight you're carrying that you've decided isn't heavy. The disappointments you've filed away as not worth space. All the small hurts of the week that you've absorbed individually and decided to be fine about collectively.

He knows why you do it. He's known you long enough to understand it, even if you've never said it directly. You grew up learning that your feelings were manageable if you managed them quietly. You also learned that being low-maintenance was a virtue; that handling things on your own was a form of strength and asking for help was something you did only when you'd exhausted every other option.

You're not doing it to him. That's what he has to keep reminding himself of. You're not shutting him out or keeping things from him out of lack of trust. You're just doing what you've always done: sorting things into categories of big enough to mention and not big enough to mention and your threshold for "big enough" is so high that by the time something crosses it you're already half-buried under everything that didn't.

He understands it. He even loves parts of it: your competence, your steadiness, the way you can handle difficult things with grace. But he also sees what it costs you.

And this week… this week he's been watching it pile up and feeling it pile up and not knowing how to say I know you can handle it but you don't have to handle it alone without making you feel like you're doing something wrong by being the person you are.

You look up and catch him staring.

"What?" you say.

"Nothing," he says.

You look at him for a moment longer—he can see you doing it, the quick assessment of whether something's wrong, whether he needs something, whether you should be worried. Always looking outward, always checking on others before checking on yourself.

"Are you sure?" you ask.

"Yeah," he says. "Just thinking."

"About what?"

He almost says it then. Almost says about you, about Tuesday, about the fact that you're carrying too much and pretending you're not. But you're looking at him with those eyes that are trying to read him and he knows if he starts this conversation now you'll shift into taking-care-of-him mode and he'll lose the thread of what he actually needs to say.

"It’s nothing important," he says. "Go back to your book."

You look at him for one more second, unconvinced, but then you do. You go back to reading and he goes back to pretending to read and the moment passes without being resolved.

An hour later he tries.

"Hey," he says.

"Mm?" You don't look up.

"Do you want to talk about it?"

Now you look up. "About what?"

"The week." He closes his book. "Your friend. Work. Tuesday. Just… the week."

Something crosses your face. "There's nothing to talk about," you say. It’s not defensive—just factual. "It was just a week. Things happened. I'm fine."

"You keep saying that," he says gently.

"Because I am," you say. You're still holding your book but you've stopped reading, your finger marking the place. "Babe, I promise. I'm okay. It was just some annoying stuff. That's all."

He looks at you and you look back and he can see you believe it. That's the thing—you're not lying. You genuinely think you're fine because you've decided to be fine and your ability to make that decision and commit to it is so practiced that you can't always tell the difference between being fine and performing fine.

"Okay," he says because pushing harder right now will only make you pull further in. He knows this about you too; that you have to arrive at feelings on your own timeline, that pushing before you're ready just makes you defensive.

"Okay," you echo and you give him a small, reassuring smile and go back to your book.

He doesn't push. He goes back to his book. But he feels it sitting between you—all the things you're not saying. All the weight you're not acknowledging. All the ways you've learned to be strong by being small.

He loves you. He loves all of you, including this part. Including the part that handles things alone, including the part that says fine when fine is doing so much work. But he also needs you to know that you don't have to do it alone just because you can.

He just has to figure out how to say that in a way you can hear.

Evening comes.

You make dinner together the way you always do. You move around each other in the easy choreography of people who have done this a hundred times. You talk about small things. You laugh at something dumb he says. You are light and present and fine.

And then you reach for something on the top shelf—the same shelf you reached for on Tuesday, the same movement  and your hand shakes.

Just slightly. Just for a second. So brief he almost misses it.

But he doesn't miss it.

Your hand shakes and you pull the dish down and set it on the counter and keep moving like nothing happened but he saw it. He saw the small tremble and the breath you took after and the way you didn't acknowledge it either.

And something in him just…stops.

"Hey," he says.

"Mm?" You're focused on what you're doing, not looking at him.

"Can you look at me for a second, sweetheart?"

You look up.

Nothing is wrong with your face. That's the thing. You look fine. Completely fine. But he's looking at you and he can see it now, the thing he's been feeling all week: the tiredness behind the fine, the weight underneath the capable, the small cracks in the thing you're holding together.

"You're not okay," he says.

You blink. "I'm fine."

"Please don't say that again," he says. Quiet. Not angry. Just…asking.

You look at him for a moment. "Shua—"

"Your hand was shaking," he says.

"I'm just tired."

"I know you're tired." He puts down what he's holding and comes around the counter to stand in front of you. "I know you're tired and I know the week was long and I know you're handling it and I know you're fine." He pauses. "I just need you to know that I'm not."

You don’t move.

"What?" you say.

He looks at you and tries to find the words for the thing that has been building in him since Tuesday. The thing he doesn't entirely understand himself. The particular feeling of watching someone you love carry something heavy and pretend it's light.

"I feel it," he says finally. "When you're…when something's wrong. I don't know how to explain it. You don't even have to say anything and I just—I feel it." He stops. Then tries again. "And this week I've been feeling it and you keep saying you're fine and I know you believe that but I can't—I can't make myself believe it because I feel it."

You're looking at him with something he can't read.

"Joshua, I'm okay," you say softly.

"I know you are," he says. "I know you're okay. You're always okay. You're so good at being okay." His hand comes up to your face, his thumb at your cheek. "But that guy on Tuesday—"

"Joshua —"

"I wasn't there," he says and his voice cracks just slightly on it. Just enough that you hear it. "You were three blocks from home and someone followed you and I wasn't there and you handled it because you always handle things but I—" He stops. "I keep thinking about those ten minutes. In the store. I keep thinking about you waiting and I wasn't there."

"You couldn't have been there," you say. "You didn't know."

"I know I couldn't have been there. That's what's—" He exhales. "That's what I can't sit with. That something happened and you were scared—"

"I wasn't scared," you say.

"You were," he says gently. "Maybe just for a minute. Maybe just while you were deciding what to do. But you were and I wasn't there and now you've moved past it and I'm still—" He gestures vaguely. "I'm still in it. I'm still in those ten minutes. And I don't know what to do with that because there's nothing to do. It's over and you're fine but I can't stop feeling like I need to—"

He stops. You wait.

"—like I need to protect you," he says quietly. "From anything. From everything. From the guy last Tuesday and from your friend canceling and from work being frustrating and from your phone breaking and from being tired." 

He shakes his head slightly. 

"I know that's not…I know you don't need protecting. But I look at you and that's what I feel anyway and I don't—" He stops again. 

"I've never felt someone else's feelings like this before… like they're mine. It’s like when you're carrying something I'm carrying it too even when you don't ask me to."

You go very quiet.

"And this week," he says, "you've been carrying things and saying you're fine and I've been watching it pile up and I just—" He looks at you, his eyes soft and a little helpless. "I need you to know that I see it. Even when you don't say it. I feel it, babe. And I can't fix most of it and I hate that but I need you to know that I'm here and I care about your peace of mind or your happiness or just…” He makes a small frustrated sound. "I'm not saying this right."

"You're saying it fine," you say with a small smile. Your voice has gone very soft.

"I just need you to know you're important to me," he says. "More than I know how to say. And when you're not okay I'm not okay even when you're pretending you are. I know that's maybe not fair to put on you but I don't know how to not feel it."

The kitchen is very quiet.

You look at him for a long moment and something in your face shifts—it’s not a cracking, not breaking, just…softening. 

"I didn't know you were carrying it too," you say.

"I know you didn't." His thumb traces slow along your cheek. "That's not your fault. You're not supposed to worry about me worrying about you. I just—" He pauses. "I just wanted you to know that you don't have to handle everything alone. That I want to help even when there's nothing to help with. 

I want you to know that when you say you're fine I believe you and I’m also allowed to still feel like something's wrong."

You close your eyes briefly. When you open them they're bright.

"It was a long week," you say. Quiet. An admission.

"I know."

"And Tuesday—" You stop. Your voice goes smaller. "I was scared while I was trying to figure out what to do. And I hated that I was scared because it's not your fault. None of this is your fault. I chose this."

"I know you chose this," he says gently. "That doesn't mean I don't get to feel terrible when something happens because of it."

"But I don't want you to feel terrible," you say. "That's why I didn't—I wasn't trying to hide it from you. I just didn't want you to carry it when it was already over."

"But I carry it anyway," he says. "That's what I'm trying to tell you. When you don't tell me, I carry it and I carry the not knowing. At least if you tell me we can carry it together."

"I didn't think about it like that," you say.

"I know." His thumb brushes your cheek. "You're always trying to make things easier for everyone else, even when it makes things harder for you."

"I don't know how to not do that," you whisper.

"I know that too." He says it without judgment. "I'm not asking you to change. I'm just asking you to let me in even when it's already over."

You look at him for a long moment and something in your chest that's been held tight all week finally, gently, comes undone.

"I didn't want to make it a big thing," you say.

"It was already a big thing." His voice is soft. "You being scared for even a minute is a big thing to me. Your project falling through is a big thing. Your friend canceling when you were looking forward to it is a big thing." He pauses. "You don't get to decide for me what's big enough to care about."

Your eyes get bright again.

"I'm really tired, Shua," you say.

"I know you are."

"And my friend canceling did hurt more than I said."

"I know."

"And I still think about Tuesday. At weird times. It catches me off guard."

"I know, darling," he says. "I think about it all the time. I think about you standing in that convenience store and me not being there and it makes me—" He stops and takes a breath. "It makes me want to quit everything and just follow you around to make sure nothing bad ever happens to you again."

You give a small wet laugh. "That's not practical and you know it."

"I know it's not. That's why I don't do it. But it doesn't mean I don’t still feel it." He looks at you steadily. "And I need you to know that when something happens to you it happens to me too, in a different way, but it still happens. We can have different timelines for being okay about things. You can be fine and I can still be working on being fine and both of those can be true."

"Okay," you say softly.

"Okay," he says.

He pulls you into him then—his arms coming around you solid and warm and certain—and you let yourself gently collapse into it. You press your face into his shoulder and he feels the long exhale of you.

"I'm sorry I wasn't there," he says into your hair.

"You couldn't have been," you say into his shoulder.

"I know. I'm still sorry."

"I'm sorry I made you worry after."

"Don't be sorry for that," he says firmly. "Be sorry for pretending you were fine when you weren't. That's the only thing you need to be sorry for."

You make a small sound against him that might be a laugh.

"I'll work on it," you say.

"That's all I'm asking."

You stay like that for a while. Just breathing. Just being held and holding back. The kitchen is warm and the dinner can wait and everything else can wait and for right now this is the only thing.

When you finally pull back your eyes are red-rimmed but clear. His hands come up to frame your face, thumbs gentle at your cheeks.

"I'm always going to feel it," he says. "Even when you don't tell me. Especially when you don't tell me. That's just how I love you."

Your breath catches.

"And I need you to let me love you that way." he says. "I need you to tell me when things happen even when they're over, even when you think you've handled it. I need to be able to not be fine about things for a while even when you already are. Can you let me do that?"

"Yeah," you say. "I can try."

"That's all I need." He leans forward and rests his forehead against yours. "We're a team. That means I carry things too even when you don't ask me to."

"Okay," you whisper.

"Okay," he whispers back.

He kisses you then. Soft and slow and full of everything he's been trying to say all week. Relief and tenderness and the specific ache of loving someone who doesn't always know how to be loved. You kiss him back the same way and he feels the shift in it; the wall coming down, the letting in, the small surrender of not being fine alone.

When you pull back you're almost smiling.

"I've got you," he says. "You know that, right? Whatever you're carrying. I've got you."

"I know," you say.

"You should." He pulls you back into his arms and you fall easily. "Next time something happens, you tell me. So I can stop imagining it being worse than it was."

"Okay," you say into his chest.

"Promise me, my love."

"I promise."

"Good," he says again. He kisses the top of your head. "Now come on. Let's make dinner. And you can tell me about that co-worker of yours that broke the office printer."

You pull back to look at him. "But that happened days ago."

"You were going to tell me that but I wasn't listening again and then everything else happened. So tell me now. I'm listening."

Something soft crosses your face.

"It was just a small thing," you say.

"I want to hear about the small things," he says. "All of them. That's the whole point."

So you tell him. Standing in the kitchen with his arms around you, you tell him about the co-worker who broke the office printer. And he listens to every word, laughs at all the right parts, and he asks questions, and when you laugh at something he can feel it against his chest and he thinks: this. This is what I needed. Not to fix it but to be here for it.

Later, after the tea has been drunk and the conversation has settled into comfortable quiet, you both retreat to the bedroom.

Joshua showers after you. You hear the water running while you change into sleep clothes, the familiar domestic rhythm of an evening winding down. When he comes out, hair damp and wearing soft sweatpants and a t-shirt, you're sitting at the vanity brushing your hair.

He watches you for a moment from the doorway. The lamp is on low and it catches in your hair as you pull the brush through it.

"Hi," he says.

You meet his eyes in the mirror. "Hi."

He crosses the room and stands behind you, his hands resting lightly on your shoulders. You can see both of you in the mirror: him standing, you sitting, the warm light making everything soft at the edges.

"Can I?" he asks, gesturing to the brush.

You hand it to him without a word.

He's careful with it, gentle, starting at the ends and working his way up the way you've taught him. You watch him in the mirror and look at the concentrated expression he gets when he's doing something with that particular tenderness he brings to small tasks.

"You're good at this," you say.

"I've had practice," he says. "You have a lot of hair."

You smile. "Is that a complaint?"

"No," he says immediately. "I like your hair."

"You like brushing my hair?"

"I like doing things for you," he says simply.

You're quiet for a moment, just watching him work. His hands are steady and patient and there's something deeply peaceful about this: the quiet intimacy of letting someone take care of you in small ways.

"Thank you," you say softly. "For today. For listening. For not letting me get away with fine."

"That’s how I love you," he says.

He sets the brush down and his hands come to rest on your shoulders again. You look at each other in the mirror for a long moment—just being seen. There's something in his eyes that's warm and soft and entirely yours and you feel it settle in your chest like coming home.

"I love you," you say.

"I love you too," he says and leans down to press a kiss to your cheek. But he doesn't pull away. Instead, he stays there, close, and you can feel him smiling against your skin. "Even when you're stubborn."

"I'm not stubborn," you say.

"You're very stubborn," he says as he kisses your cheek again. "Especially about being fine."

You turn in the chair to face him properly and he doesn't pull away, which means you're suddenly very close—close enough to see the way his eyes crinkle at the corners when he smiles, close enough to count his eyelashes if you wanted to.

"Hi," you say again.

"Hi," he says and kisses you. Just a peck, quick and sweet, and when he pulls back he's grinning.

You pull him back to you. This kiss is slower, more intentional, and you feel him smile into it before kissing you properly. His hands come up to frame your face and you tilt your head and kiss him back and it's so easy, so natural, to just keep kissing him.

He makes a small sound—pleased and warm—and you smile against his mouth and then you're both laughing a little, soft breathy laughs that don't quite break the kiss, just make it better somehow.

"Come here," you murmur, and pull him to you again and this time the kiss deepens. His thumb traces along your jaw and you part your lips and feel the shift in it: from playful to something warmer.

When you finally break apart you're both a little breathless.

"Bed?" he asks, his voice slightly rougher than usual.

"Bed," you agree.

You end up tangled together almost immediately, the way you always do when you have time and privacy and nowhere else to be. Joshua kisses you slowly and thoroughly, takes his time until one hand starts sliding up your side under your shirt and his palm feels warm against your ribs.

"Can I?" he asks, his fingers at the hem and you nod and lift your arms and he pulls it over your head and tosses it somewhere neither of you cares about.

For a moment he just looks at you and there's something in his gaze that makes you feel seen in the best way.

"Hi," he says.

"You keep saying that," you say.

"I keep meaning it," he says and kisses you deeper this time. His tongue traces your bottom lip and you open for him and feel the shift—from sweet to something heavier.

His mouth moves from your lips to your jaw, kissing a slow path down to your neck. When he finds the spot just below your ear that he knows about, you inhale sharply and he smiles against your skin.

"There it is," he murmurs and does it again—a kiss, then the barest scrape of teeth—and you feel your fingers tighten in his hair.

"Joshua," you breathe.

"Mm." His hands are moving now, one sliding up to cup you through the thin fabric of your bra while his mouth works its way down your collarbone. When his thumb brushes over you deliberately you arch into the touch and make a sound you didn't mean to make.

"There you are," he says, pleased. "I like that sound."

"Then keep doing what you're doing," you manage.

"Oh, I will," he says and there's a promise in his voice that makes your stomach flip. 

"But not too fast."

His fingers find the clasp at your back and he undoes it slowly then slides the straps down your arms one at a time. He takes his time doing it, him trying to draw it out as much as possible. When he finally tosses it aside and his hands return to bare skin you let your head fall back.

"God, you're beautiful," he says and his voice goes rough. His hands are warm, his palms skate over your sides, his thumbs brushing over sensitive skin until you're breathing harder. But every time you arch toward him seeking more pressure he pulls back slightly, keeping you on edge.

"Baby," you say and it comes out more pleading than you meant.

"I'm right here," he says innocently. "Just taking my time."

His mouth follows where his hands have been. He kisses down your collarbone and when he reaches your chest he pauses, his breath warm against sensitive skin, making you wait. When he finally takes you into his mouth you gasp and your hips lift and he hums in satisfaction.

He alternates between gentle and firm, never quite giving you enough of either, and when you try to direct him with the hand in his hair he catches your wrist and pins it gently to the bed.

"I need you to be patient," he murmurs against your skin.

"You're being mean," you breathe.

"Am I?" He sounds entirely too pleased with himself. "I'm just making sure you feel everything."

And he does make you feel everything. He builds the sensation slowly until you're squirming beneath him, until every touch feels like too much and not enough at the same time.

His hand slides lower, his fingers hooking into the waistband of your sleep shorts. "These?"

"Yes," you manage. "Please."

He slides them down so slowly you might die. 

"You're so perfect," he whispers and then he's kissing his way down again, hands spreading your thighs, and when his breath ghosts over where you want him most you make a sound that's almost desperate.

"I love the sounds you make," he says, and then finally, finally his mouth is on you.

But he's still taking his time. Slow deliberate strokes of his tongue that make your breath stutter but never quite build into anything. Every time you start to climb toward something he changes the pressure or the rhythm, keeping you suspended right on the edge.

"Shua," you gasp. "Please."

"Please what?" he asks and you can hear the smile in his voice.

"More," you manage. "I need—"

"I know what you need," he says and goes back to the slow teasing pace that's making you crazy.

He builds you up gradually, so gradually, alternating between almost-enough and not-quite-there until you're making sounds you've never made before and your hand is tight in his hair and you're not sure if you want to pull him closer or push him away because it's so much and still not enough.

"That's it," he murmurs between kisses. "I want to feel you fall apart because of me."

When he finally, finally gives you what you need—the right pressure, the right rhythm, consistent and perfect—you're already so close that it doesn't take long. The pleasure builds fast and sharp and when one of his hands finds yours and laces your fingers together that's what tips you over.

You come with his name on your lips, your back arching, and he works you through all of it, gentler now, until you're tugging at his hair and making soft overwhelmed sounds.

He presses one last kiss before moving back up to you and when he kisses you properly you can taste yourself on his tongue and feel how pleased he is with himself.

"You," you say when you can speak again but are still panting, "are terrible."

"You didn't seem to mind," he says, grinning, then kisses you deep and slow.

"I'm getting you back for that," you say as you pull away from him.

His grin widens. Against your lips, he whispers, "I'm counting on it."

When you've caught your breath, you push at his shoulder until he rolls onto his back. "You're going to lie there and take it."

Something flashes in his eyes at that. "Yes ma'am."

You take your time with his shirt, kissing newly exposed skin as you push it up, and when it's finally off you spend a while just exploring—learning the places that make him sigh, the spots that make his breath catch. When you scrape your teeth lightly over his collarbone he makes a low sound and his hips shift.

"Sensitive there?" you ask innocently.

"You know I am," he whispers.

You do it again, harder this time, and his hand comes up to your hair. "You're playing dirty."

"You started it," you remind him as you kiss your way down his chest. You take your time and make him wait the way he made you wait.

When you reach the waistband of his sweatpants, you can see how hard he already is, and when you trace one finger along the shape of him through the fabric he makes a broken sound.

"Can I?" you ask, your fingers at the waistband, echoing him from earlier.

"Please," he says immediately.

You take your time sliding them down and when he's finally bare to you, he's flushed and wanting and so hard it must almost hurt.

"Look at you," you say softly and wrap your hand around him. He's warm and heavy in your palm and when you give him one slow stroke from base to tip he makes a sound that goes straight through you.

"This is how I make you feel?" you ask.

"Yes," he gasps. "God, yes. Sometimes, I feel so much more for you, you don’t even realize—” Another slow stroke of your hand made him gasp. “God, please don't stop."

But you do stop just to watch his reaction and his hips shift seeking friction and his hand tightens in your hair.

"Don't tease," he says, voice strained.

"Why not?" you ask. "You teased me."

"That was different," he tries to argue.

"How?"

"Because—" He loses the thread when you stroke him again, slow and light. "Because I'm asking nicely."

"Are you?" You kiss his hip bone, deliberately not where he wants you. "Because it sounds like you're making demands."

"I'm begging," he corrects himself. "Is that better?"

"That’s more like it," you say and finally take him into your mouth.

The sound he makes is almost wounded and his hand in your hair tightens immediately. You start slow, just taking the tip of him, using your tongue in light teasing strokes that make him squirm.

"More," he breathes. "Please, sweetheart, I need more."

But you don't give him more. Not yet. You keep the touches light and teasing, alternating between your mouth and your hand, never quite giving him enough pressure or depth to build toward anything real.

"Fuck baby, you're killing me," he gasps.

"Well I hope not. I want to live a long life with you," you murmur and take him a little deeper for just a moment before pulling back.

Joshua’s whole body goes still for a second and when he speaks his voice has gone thick with emotion. "Baby." Just that: almost choked. "You can't—you can't just say things like that when I'm—" He makes a sound that's half laugh, half something more tender. "I'm trying so hard not to come and you just—" His voice cracks. "I want that too. I want every day with you. I want to wake up next to you when we're old and still—" He gasps when you do something particularly good. "God, I love you. I love you so much and you're so good to me and I can't think when you do that, please, sweetheart, I need—"

His hips shift involuntarily then and he makes a frustrated sound. "Please. I'm sorry I teased you, baby. I'm very sorry. Please."

The desperation in his voice makes you relent slightly, “Please what?”

"Please make me yours," he breathes, voice gone soft and wrecked. "I'm already yours but I need—I need to feel it.”

Joshua pushes himself upright as much as he can until his face is only inches from yours. His gaze drops to your lips, his breath uneven, and captures your lips briefly before speaking again.

“I need you to make me fall apart the way I make you fall apart on this bed. I want you to be the one who does it." His hand finds your face and holds you with utmost love, "Please, sweetheart, I need you so much it hurts."

How do you say no to that confession?

You take him deeper, establish a rhythm that's actually building toward something and he makes a broken grateful sound.

"Thank you," he gasps. "God, that's so good. You're so good."

You work him like that for a while, building him up slowly, and every time he starts to get close you can feel it: the way his breathing changes, the way his hand tightens in your hair—and you slow down or change the angle, keeping him right on the edge.

"Please," he pleads again and his voice has gone rough and desperate, his heels digging and slipping across the sheets. "Please, I need— I'm so close baby, please let me come, I—"

You pull off entirely and he makes a sound that's almost anguished.

"Look at me," you say so gently and when his eyes find yours, they're dark and a little wild. "You're going to come when I say you can. Can you do that for me, love?"

He nods frantically. "Okay. Yes, baby. Anything. Just please—"

You take him back in your mouth and this time you don't tease. You give him everything—depth and pressure and rhythm—and his whole body goes taut.

"Oh god," he gasps. "Oh god, I'm—can I? Please can I?"

"Not yet," you say, pulling off just enough to speak, and go back to teasing.

He makes a sound that might be your name or might just be incoherent and when you look up at him there are actual tears of frustration at the corners of his eyes.

"Please," he begs. "Please, sweetheart, I can't— I need—"

You take pity on him. You take him deep and set the rhythm you know will finish him and his hand tightens almost painfully in your hair.

"Yes," he gasps. "Yes, just like that, don't stop, please don't stop—"

You don't stop. You work him steadily and when you feel him getting close again you look up and catch his eyes.

"Come for me," you say. "I want you to."

And he immediately does. “Thank you, thank you, fuck baby—” His whole body tenses and he says your name like a prayer— "I love you, I love you, oh god I love you"—and then he's coming with a broken moan, his hips shifting. You stay with him through all of it, swallowing, gentle now as he comes down.

When you finally release him and move back up his whole body is trembling, chest heaving, and there are actual tears tracking down from the corners of his eyes. You kiss them away gently before finding his lips and when you do, Joshua kisses you back like you've undone him completely, like you've taken him apart and he's grateful for it.

His hands come up to frame your face and they’re shaking slightly and he just looks at you for a long moment with something so tender and raw in his eyes that it makes your chest ache.

"You," he says, voice wrecked and wandering, "are going to be the death of me."

"Was it too much?" you ask softly as you brush damp hair back from his forehead.

"No." He pulls you down into another kiss, this one slower, deeper, full of things he doesn't have words for. When he breaks away his eyes are still bright. "It was perfect. You're perfect. I don't— I don't even have words for what you just—" His voice catches and he just pulls you closer instead, burying his face in your neck. "I love you. I love you so much."

"I love you too," you murmur against his hair.

He holds you impossibly tight for a moment, one hand in your hair and the other wrapped around your back, his heart still racing against your chest. When he finally loosens his grip enough to look at you again, his eyes are soft and completely unguarded.

"Long life," he whispers. "I want that. For as long as you’ll have me."

"Me too," you say and kiss him again.

He sighs into it, content and overwhelmed and entirely yours, and pulls you down to rest fully against him. His hands trace slow patterns on your back like he's still processing what just happened between you.

"Thank you," he whispers eventually. "For the incredibly mind-blowing blow job of my life.” You laugh into his shoulder and he smiles lazily. “For all of it. For wanting a long life with me."

"There's no one else I'd want it with."

His arms tighten around you and you feel him press a kiss to the top of your head, then another, like he can't help himself.

"I love you," he says again. "So much. Did I say that already?"

"A few times," you say, smiling against his chest.

"Good," he says. "Don’t forget it."

"I won’t," you say. "I love you too."

You stay like that for a long time: just breathing together, warm and content and entirely whole. 

Outside, the city continues to buzz. Inside, it's just this: two people who have learned to carry each other's worries, to feel each other's feelings, to love each other through the hard parts and the soft parts and everything in between.

You sleep eventually.

Both of you.