Chapter 30

It happens gradually.

The way most things between you happen — without announcement, without a moment you could point to and say there, that’s where it changed. Just the slow, easy drift of two people who have stopped keeping any distance at all.

You’re on your third volume.

Or you were.

At some point the manga is still open in Alysa’s hands but neither of you is reading it anymore — you’re talking about something else entirely, something that led to something else, the way conversations do when you’re not watching them, and your legs have migrated without any real decision being made about it.

First your feet tucked beside you.

Then sideways, gradually, incrementally, the way tide comes in.

Until somehow — and you’re genuinely not sure of the exact moment — your legs are across her lap and she has one hand resting on your ankle and the manga has been set on the coffee table and you are practically in her lap and neither of you has said a word about it because it is simply where you ended up and where you ended up feels exactly right.

She’s talking.

You’re watching her talk.

Her hands move when she speaks — they always move, you love that about her, the way her whole body participates in whatever she’s saying — and the afternoon light through her windows has gone that particular gold of late afternoon, the kind that makes everything look like it’s been painted carefully, and it falls across her face and her hair and the silver of her piercing as she smiles and you think—

I love you.

You don’t say it again. You don’t need to. It said itself this morning and it will say itself many more times and right now it just lives quietly in your chest alongside everything else and that is enough.

More than enough.

She catches you looking.

Of course she does.

“Hi,” she says softly, mid-sentence, like the word just arrives when it finds you watching her.

“Hi,” you say.

She looks at you for a moment.

The afternoon looks at both of you.

And then she leans forward and you meet her halfway and it starts the way it always starts — soft and unhurried, her hand coming up to your face, the kiss that isn’t asking for anything except to say the things that don’t have words yet.

Except this time you don’t pull back.

And neither does she.

The afternoon is golden through the windows.

Your fingers in her hair. Her hands warm and certain and gentle, always gentle, the particular tenderness of someone who handles things they love carefully. The manga forgotten on the coffee table. The fairy lights still on even in the gold of the afternoon because neither of you thought to turn them off and neither of you wants to.

The kisses change.

Slowly. Gradually. The way all things between you change — without announcement, without a moment you could name. Just the soft sounds of your mouths and your breathing and the afternoon going on around you and then something shifting, deepening, the warmth of her becoming the warmth of everything—

The gold light fades.

The room goes softer, bluer, the particular colour of early evening arriving gently through the windows, and the fairy lights become the brightest thing in the room, and somewhere in the city outside a day is ending and inside this apartment that smells like her and is covered in her things and holds all her hidden depths—

The soft sounds of kisses become something else. Soft moans.

Something that belongs only to this room, this evening, this specific blue-gold hour between afternoon and night.

Her voice low and warm.

Yours softer than you knew it could be.

The fairy lights casting everything in something that feels like a dream you don’t want to wake from.

Later.

The sofa.

The city outside fully evening now, the windows dark and the fairy lights doing everything they need to do, and you are warm in a way that starts from the inside and works its way out, warm in the way of someone who has been held carefully by someone who loves them.

She drapes the blanket over you both.

Unhurried. Domestic. Like covering you up is just something she does now, like making sure you’re warm is simply part of how she moves through the world when you’re in it.

You pull it up to your chin.

She pulls it up to hers.

And you lie together in the quiet evening with the fairy lights on and the city going on outside and nothing required of either of you except this — just this, just being here, just the slow return of breath and warmth and the particular completeness of being somewhere that feels entirely right.

She presses her lips to your temple.

Stays there a moment.

“Hi,” she says, into your hair.

You smile.

“Hi,” you say.

She’s the one who moves first.

Not away — just shifting, carefully, making sure the blanket stays across you as she untangles herself gently from the warmth of it. You make a small sound of protest that you don’t entirely mean to make out loud and she pauses and looks at you with an expression that is so soft and so fond and so completely undone by you that you feel it like sunlight.

“Two minutes,” she says quietly.

“Mm,” you say, which is not agreement but is not disagreement either.

She disappears.

Down the short hallway. A door opening, the soft sound of her moving through her bedroom, the small sounds of someone who knows their own space in the dark.

You look at the fairy lights.

At the ceiling.

At the manga on the coffee table.

At the corkboard on the wall where a photograph of the two of you laughing lives, hung up before she knew how it would end, because she already knew how it would end.

You feel so full.

Not of anything you could name exactly. Just — full. Complete. The particular feeling of being in the right place at the right time with the right person, which is a feeling you didn’t know you’d been missing until you found it and now cannot imagine being without.

She comes back with something dark bundled in her arms.

A hoodie.

Oversized, black, slightly worn at the cuffs in the way of something loved for a long time — you can tell just from here that it’s thrifted, that it has a history, that it is one of her things in the specific way that her things are hers.

She holds it out.

You sit up and she helps you into it — sleeves too long, hem coming to mid-thigh, the fabric soft from a hundred washes and smelling like her in the particular way of clothing that has been worn close to someone’s skin — and you push the sleeves up slightly and look down at yourself and then up at her.

She is looking at you with an expression that does not have a name.

Or rather — it has a name, it just said itself this morning on a bench in a rink, and it is looking at you right now from her face in the light of her fairy lights in her flat and meaning itself completely.

“Hi,” you say.

She laughs — soft and low and so warm.

“Hi, baby,” she says.

She gets back under the blanket.

You go back to where you were — your head on her shoulder, her arm around you, the city outside and the fairy lights inside and the evening doing whatever evenings do when they’re not being paid attention to.

She picks the manga up from the coffee table.

Opens it to where you left off.

Holds it so you can both see.

And you stay like that — warm and blanketed and wearing her hoodie in her flat that smells like her and holds all her hidden depths — for a long time.

For a very long time.

For exactly as long as you want to.

Which is, it turns out, considerably longer than the evening.