Chapter 22

You make it out of bed at half ten.

This feels like an achievement.

The apartment is warm and Saturday-quiet around you as you move through it together, unhurried, in that easy way of two people who have stopped performing for each other entirely. She borrows your bathroom and emerges looking somehow effortlessly herself despite everything, which you decide not to examine too closely because you are in a soft oversized sweater with your hair in a loose bun and the comparison is not doing you any favours and she is looking at you like it absolutely is.

“Coffee?” you ask.

“Please,” she says.

She sits at your kitchen table while you make it.

You’re aware of her the way you’re always aware of her — that particular quality of attention that has a direction — except now it’s different, now it lives in your kitchen on a Saturday morning with her chin in her hand and her striped hair loose and her silver ring on the table where she set it while she washed her hands and picked it back up and put it back on without thinking, and you watch all of this from the corner of your eye while you wait for the kettle and think —

I would like to do this every Saturday.

The thought arrives so quietly and so completely that you don’t question it.

You just put it somewhere safe and make the coffee.

You’re at the table — mugs between you, the morning going on outside the window, some weekend radio station playing low from your phone on the counter — when hers buzzes.

She glances at it.

Then she picks it up properly and looks at it and makes a sound that is half laugh half something exasperated and fond, and turns the screen toward you.

It’s a photo.

Massimo has sent it to a group chat at — you check the timestamp — seven forty three in the morning, which means he was awake at seven forty three in the morning specifically to do this — and the photo is of him and Phillip at what appears to be a kitchen table, both of them holding mugs, both of them with enormous matching smiles, and the caption reads:

good morning to our girl and her GIRLFRIEND 🥹🥹🥹 we are SO happy we are SO proud she finally did it phillip say something

Below it, from Phillip:

I said she would.

And then from Massimo:

you absolutely did not

And then from Phillip:

I implied it strongly

And then several more messages that are mostly Massimo using every available heart emoji in what appears to be a completely random order.

You stare at the screen.

“They knew before you asked me,” Alysa says, with the resignation of someone who has long since made peace with having no secrets from two people who love her too much to pretend otherwise.

“How—”

“Jade,” you both say at the same time.

You look at each other.

You both start laughing.

She types back into the group chat one handed, still laughing slightly, and turns the screen to show you before she sends it.

you’re both embarrassing. thank you. also massimo it’s 7am on a saturday

Massimo’s reply arrives in four seconds.

love doesn’t sleep [y/n] tell her

You take the phone gently and type:

he’s right

And then hand it back.

Alysa reads it and looks at you with an expression that does something very specific to the already compromised state of your chest and then she puts her phone face down on the table and picks up her mug and says nothing and says everything.

It’s her phone that ends it.

Not Massimo this time — a different notification, a reminder she’d set, and she looks at it and something shifts in her expression. Not unhappy. Just — the world arriving gently at the door, the way it eventually always does.

“I have to be somewhere at one,” she says.

You look at the clock on the microwave.

Twelve fourteen.

“Okay,” you say.

Neither of you moves immediately.

The radio plays something you don’t know. The mugs are long empty. Outside your window the Saturday has become fully itself — bright and cold and going on without you — and inside your kitchen it is still and warm and neither of you is in any particular hurry to close the distance between now and one o’clock.

“I could—” she starts.

“You should go,” you say, gently. “You’ll be late.”

She looks at you.

“I know,” she says.

She doesn’t move.

You look at her — at this girl in your kitchen on a Saturday morning, silver ring and striped hair and the soft version of herself that belongs to small hours and warm rooms and the spaces between things — and something in you is so full it doesn’t quite know where to put itself.

She stands slowly.

You stand with her.

She finds her jacket in the living room — draped over the sofa where it landed last night, the lamp finally off now, the morning coming in clean and clear through your windows. She puts it on and picks up her bag and turns to you and the goodbye is already happening in the way goodbyes do when neither person wants to be the one to start it.

You walk her to the door.

She stops in the doorway and turns back and looks at you for a moment in that particular way — the quiet, careful, I am looking at you on purpose way — and then she reaches out and adjusts the collar of your sweater.

Just that.

Just her hands at your collar, gentle and unhurried, smoothing something that doesn’t need smoothing, and it is such a small thing, such an entirely unnecessary thing, and it is one of the most tender things anyone has ever done in your general direction.

You look up at her.

She’s still looking at your collar. Focused on it like it matters. Like this small domestic gesture is the thing she needs to give you before she goes, like her hands needed one more moment of being near you before the day takes her.

“Alysa,” you say softly.

She looks up.

You kiss her.

She kisses you back immediately, warm and certain, her hand coming up to your face in that way she has, and for a moment the doorway holds you both and the Saturday waits and nothing requires anything of either of you.

When you pull back she stays close.

Forehead to yours.

Eyes closed.

Just breathing.

“Wednesday,” she says eventually. Quiet and certain.

“Wednesday,” you say.

She pulls back just enough to look at you properly. Something in her expression is new — softer than soft, something that is still finding its shape, something that belongs to the version of her that exists in your kitchen on Saturday mornings and your doorway in the afternoon light and the particular silence after a goodbye that doesn’t want to be one.

She tucks a strand of hair behind your ear.

Lingers.

Then she steps back and her hand drops and she is Alysa again — effortless and cool and entirely herself — except you know now what lives underneath it and you don’t think you’ll ever be able to unknow it and you don’t want to.

“Text me later,” she says.

“Obviously,” you say.

She smiles.

Turns.

Walks down the hall toward the stairs and you lean in your doorway and watch her go and she turns back once at the stairwell door — just once, just for a second — and grins at you, bright and real and completely hers.

The door closes.

From Alysa’s perspective — twelve thirty one.

The stairs. The entrance. The cold air of the street meeting her at the door like it’s been waiting.

She walks to her car with her hands in her jacket pockets and her breath visible in the cold and she is — something. She doesn’t have the exact word yet. Full, maybe. The way the rink feels after a perfect run-through, that particular completeness, except warmer. Considerably warmer.

She gets in the car.

Sits for a moment.

Takes her phone out and opens the group chat, past Massimo’s parade of hearts, and types:

phillip

Three dots. Immediately.

yes

She looks at the screen for a second.

I’ve never felt like this before

She sends it before she can reconsider it, which is probably for the best because she would have reconsidered it seventeen times.

The dots appear.

Disappear.

Appear again.

I know, Phillip says. We know. That’s why we’ve been watching you moon over her for two months.

And then, after a pause, in a tone she can hear even through a text message:

She’s good for you, Alysa.

She reads it twice.

Puts her phone away.

Starts the car.

And she drives away from your building smiling at the road ahead, and the city goes on around her in its ordinary Saturday way, and she thinks about a bench and a hey and a girl with pink laces and three pins on her bag and how the most important things sometimes announce themselves so quietly you almost miss them.

Almost.