Chapter 29

The restaurant is small and slightly hidden.

The kind of place you’d walk past a hundred times without noticing the door, which is exactly the kind of place Alysa would find and love and make her own. A hand-painted sign. A menu that hasn’t changed in years because it doesn’t need to. The person at the counter knows her name and her order and has it started before she’s finished saying hello.

“She comes in a lot,” you say, watching this.

“Three times a week minimum,” the person confirms, with the fond exasperation of someone who has accepted this about a regular and moved on.

Alysa sits down across from you with great dignity. “The food is good.”

“It’s really good,” the person agrees.

“Thank you.”

“You’re here constantly though.”

“The food is very good,” Alysa says.

You eat slowly, the way you eat when there’s nowhere to be and everything to stay for.

The morning has settled into something lighter than it was — the heaviness that greeted you on the bench has lifted, not entirely, but enough, the way mornings sometimes do when they’re given the right things. Food and warmth and not being asked to be more than you are.

She’s more herself now.

Talking more, the natural rhythm of her returning, and at one point she’s mid-story about something Massimo did at practice last week and she does the voice and you laugh so hard you have to put your fork down and she watches you laugh with that look — the collecting look, the I’m keeping this look — and you think about the little digital camera in her jacket pocket and feel warm all the way through.

I love you, she said this morning.

I love you too, you said back.

It sits between you now like something that has always been there, like it was just waiting for the right bench and the right raccoon pin and the right ordinary extraordinary moment to finally say itself out loud.

“What are you thinking about?” she asks.

You look at her across the small table.

“This morning,” you say.

She holds your gaze.

“Yeah,” she says softly. “Me too.”

Her building is ten minutes from the restaurant.

You’ve driven past it before — she mentioned it once and you noted it without meaning to, the way you note all things about her — but you’ve never been inside, and the walk there has a particular quality of anticipation to it, the feeling of a door you’ve been curious about finally being opened.

She unlocks it and holds it for you and you step through into—

Her.

That’s the first thing you think. It is so entirely, completely her that for a moment you just stand in the entrance and take it in.

Not tidy, not messy — somewhere precisely between the two, the organised chaos of someone who knows exactly where everything is even when it looks like they might not. Layers of things everywhere — jackets on hooks, shoes with personality, a collection of tote bags hanging from a door handle that tells you everything about who she is. Fairy lights along the top of the bookshelf — you smile at those, think of Cora’s place, think of how she surrounds herself with warmth wherever she goes.

The walls have things on them. Prints and photographs and a small corkboard covered in tickets and receipts and notes and one photograph that you look at for a moment before you realise — it’s the two of you. Taken by someone else, at the party at Jade’s, before everything happened, and you’re both laughing at something and not looking at the camera and it is so unguarded and so real that you feel it in your chest.

She hung it up.

Before the kiss. Before girlfriend and I love you and everything after — she already hung it up.

You file that away in the place where you keep all the things she does without thinking that mean everything.

“Do you want tea?” she asks, from the kitchen.

“Please,” you say.

You drift.

The way you drift in bookshops — drawn by things, following your curiosity, letting the room tell you about the person who lives in it. A record player on a side table with a small stack of vinyl beside it, organised by colour in a way that makes no logical sense and makes complete sense. A plant on the windowsill that is thriving, which says something. A mug collection that has gotten slightly out of hand, which says something else.

And then —

The shelf.

You almost walk past it. It’s floor to ceiling, the whole wall beside the television, and your eyes move across it and then stop and go back—

Manga.

A lot of manga. Organised by series, spines aligned, clearly read and reread and loved, the kind of collection that has been built over years with real investment and real feeling. You recognise some titles, don’t recognise others, and you’re reading the spines slowly when you notice what’s beside them—

Kpop albums.

A row of them, neat and deliberate, photocards tucked into the cases, albums you recognise and some you don’t and all of them clearly cherished in the specific way of someone who cares about this deeply and quietly.

And below that—

Video games. Cases stacked and sorted, a console tucked underneath the television, controllers on the shelf with the particular placement of things that get used regularly.

You stand in front of the shelf and feel something bloom in your chest that is so warm and so fond and so completely delighted that you don’t know what to do with your face about it.

She comes back from the kitchen with two mugs and stops.

She sees you at the shelf.

And something happens to her expression that you have never seen before — a new one, a version of her you haven’t met yet. Something that is caught and slightly uncertain, a quality of shyness that sits so unexpectedly on someone who moves through the world with such effortless confidence that it takes your breath away a little.

She sets the mugs down on the coffee table.

“So,” she says carefully.

“So,” you say.

A pause.

“You found the shelf,” she says.

“I found the shelf,” you confirm.

She looks at it. Looks at you. Looks at the shelf again like she’s considering her options and finding them limited.

“I’m aware,” she says, with great dignity, “that it makes me look like a massive geek.”

“It makes you look like a massive geek,” you agree.

She points at you. “You’re supposed to say it doesn’t.”

“Does it bother you that it does?”

A pause.

“No,” she admits. Quietly. “Not really.”

You look back at the shelf. At the manga spines and the album cases and the video game controllers and all of it, all of this hidden depth that exists underneath the silver piercing and the thrifted outfits and the effortless cool, and you think about a rink and a bench and a girl you thought you knew and keep finding out you’ve only just begun to know.

“Which ones are your favourite?” you ask.

She blinks.

“The manga,” you clarify. “Which series. Tell me.”

Something shifts in her face. The shyness receding, replaced by something that is tentatively, carefully pleased — like she was bracing for something and got something else entirely.

“Sit down,” she says.

You sit on her sofa.

She sits beside you, close, and reaches for the shelf and pulls out the first volume of something and holds it in her hands with the particular reverence of someone showing you something they love, and she starts talking — really talking, with her hands and her face fully in it — and you pull your feet up underneath you and turn toward her and listen to every single word.

An hour later you know more about manga storylines than you did this morning and you are completely, embarrassingly invested in at least three of them and she is mid-explanation of a plot point with both hands gesturing when she catches your expression and stops.

“What?” she says.

“Nothing,” you say.

“You’re doing the thing.”

“What thing.”

“The looking at me thing.”

“I’m always looking at you,” you say simply.

She opens her mouth.

Closes it.

Looks at the manga in her hands.

“I have the next volume,” she says, after a moment, trying to recover. “If you want to borrow it.”

“I want to read it here,” you say. “With you.”

She looks at you.

You look back.

“Okay,” she says softly. “Yeah. Okay.”

She gets up and gets the next volume and comes back and sits back down and this time she sits close enough that your shoulders are pressed together and she opens the volume and holds it so you can both see and you lean into her and she leans back and the fairy lights are on even though it’s afternoon and the tea is warm and outside the window the city goes on quietly and inside this flat that is so completely her you are learning a new part of her language and finding it as beautiful as all the rest.