Chapter 31

“Ramen or sushi?” she asks.

She’s already on her phone, already looking at the app, and you’re on the sofa with your feet tucked under you and her hoodie swamping you completely and the blanket still half across your lap because you haven’t fully let go of it yet.

“Both,” you say.

She looks up.

You look back.

“Both,” she agrees, like this was always the answer, like suggesting anything less would have been unreasonable.

The order is placed with the efficiency of someone who knows exactly what she wants — ramen, her usual, the specific one with the soft egg that she mentioned once in passing three weeks ago and you filed away without meaning to — and a sushi selection for you that she puts together from memory, from things you’ve mentioned, from the quiet accumulating knowledge of someone who has been paying attention.

She hands you a controller while they wait.

You look at it.

“Have you played before?” she asks.

“A little,” you say.

This is slightly modest.

Fortnite loads and she walks you through it with the patient thoroughness of someone who genuinely loves this and wants you to love it too, which is how she does everything — fully, without reservation, wanting you inside whatever she’s sharing with her.

You listen carefully.

You have always been a good listener.

The first game you survive longer than she does.

She stares at the screen.

“How,” she says.

“I told you I’d played a little.”

“That’s not a little.”

“Define little.”

She turns to look at you. You are very busy examining the controller. “How long have you actually been playing Fortnite?”

“A while,” you say.

“[y/n].”

“Some time,” you say.

“You hustled me,” she says, with great wonder. “My sweet pretty girl completely hustled me.”

My pretty girl.

New. Warm. Landing somewhere in your chest alongside baby and I love you and all the other things she says that you are quietly, helplessly collecting.

“I didn’t hustle you,” you say. “I said a little. A little is relative.”

“A little is not surviving longer than someone who plays three times a week—”

“Skill issue,” you say sweetly.

She stares at you.

And then she laughs — the real one, the whole one — and falls sideways against you on the sofa and you grab the controller to keep it out of the way and she stays there, laughing into your shoulder, and you sit very straight and very dignified and feel so completely, riotously happy about this moment that you don’t know where to put it all.

The food arrives.

You pause the game and she gets the door and comes back with containers and chopsticks and the specific reverence of someone who takes food seriously, and you clear the coffee table of manga and she sets everything out and you sit cross-legged facing each other with your respective containers and it is so domestic and so easy and so right that you have to look at your ramen for a moment just to have somewhere to look that isn’t her face.

Her ramen. Your sushi.

She ordered both without asking twice.

She remembered.

You eat and play and the evening does what evenings do — deepens, settles, the city outside going quieter by degrees while inside the flat it stays warm and lit and entirely its own world. She beats you in the second game. You beat her in the third. The fourth is unresolved because the food is finished and the controllers are down and you’re both just sitting, warm and full and close, the television gone to menu music.

“Stay,” she says.

Quietly. Simply.

Not a question exactly. More like a thing she’s been thinking and has decided to say.

You look at her.

“Okay,” you say.

Just that. Just — okay. Yes. Obviously. There is nowhere else.

Her bedroom is her.

Of course it is — you don’t know why you expected anything different, why you thought it might be neutral somehow, like bedrooms sometimes are. But it isn’t neutral, it is entirely and specifically her, from the string of photographs above the headboard to the small figures on the windowsill to the records stacked in the corner to the particular quality of the dark when she turns the main light off and just the small lamp on the nightstand stays on.

Warm. Low. The same kind of light as your apartment, and you think about the lamp you left on in your living room that first night and feel something in your chest that is so full it almost aches.

You’re wearing her hoodie.

No more than that.

She’s in a ‘Rad Dad’ t-shirt and shorts, her hair loose, the silver ring on the nightstand beside her phone, and she looks — undone in the best way. The version of her that belongs to small hours and quiet rooms. The version you have been let into, carefully and completely, and that you understand is not something she shows easily or often.

You get into her bed.

She gets in beside you.

The lamp stays on — of course it does, it always does, you are both apparently people who leave lamps on, which feels significant in a way you couldn’t explain and don’t need to.

She turns toward you.

You turn toward her.

The city is quiet outside.

The lamp throws warm light across everything.

And you look at her — at this girl in the soft dark of her own bedroom, close enough that you can see every detail of her face, the silver of her piercing, the stripes of her hair against the pillow — and something opens up in you that has been building for a long time, something warm and vast and completely certain, and before you can think too carefully about it—

You start talking.

Quietly. Into the space between you. Not planned, not rehearsed, just — true, the way things that have been true for a long time eventually insist on being said.

“I want you to know something,” you say.

She looks at you. Listening. Completely present.

“I have never—” you stop. Start again. “Before you, I didn’t know it could feel like this. Any of it.” You look at her hand between you on the pillow, the space between your fingers. “I didn’t know someone could just — see me. The way you see me. From the beginning. Like you were just — quietly paying attention and I didn’t even know.”

She is very still.

“The pins,” you say softly. “The book. The bench. The way you remembered everything I said like it mattered. Like I mattered.” You pause. “I’ve never felt that before. Not like that. Not from anyone.”

The lamp. The quiet. Her eyes in the warm dark.

“And the way you touch me,” you say, and your voice goes softer, more careful, entering somewhere more intimate. “Earlier. On the sofa.” You feel warmth move through you at the memory — her hands and the afternoon light and the sounds of both of you in the quiet of her apartment. “I’ve never felt anything like that. It’s like—” you search for it. “Electric. Like something live, like something that starts where you touch me and goes everywhere. Like my whole body knows it’s you and responds before I’ve even thought about it.”

She makes a very small sound.

You keep going.

Because you’ve started and it’s all true and she should know all of it.

“I don’t want to be apart from you,” you say. “I know that’s — I know we’re still new and everything is still finding its shape but I just — when I’m not with you I’m thinking about when I will be. When I wake up you’re the first thing. When something happens you’re who I want to tell.” You pause. “You’re just — everywhere. You’re just completely everywhere in my life now and I don’t know when that happened exactly but I know I don’t want it to stop.”

Your eyes are warm.

Not quite spilling. Just — full.

“I love you,” you say. “I love you so much it doesn’t fit inside an ordinary day. It just keeps being more than I have room for and I don’t know what to do with that except tell you.”

She doesn’t say anything for a moment.

You watch her face in the warm lamplight and what you see there makes your breath catch — her eyes are bright, unmistakably bright, the particular brightness of someone who is holding something in with great effort and not entirely managing.

Her jaw moves slightly. Setting. Steadying.

And then one tear, just one, slips quietly from the corner of her eye and she lets it go without trying to stop it and doesn’t look away from you.

You reach up and brush it away with your thumb.

The same way she does for you.

She turns her face into your palm and closes her eyes and stays there, and you feel her breathe — once, slow, the breath of someone letting something move through them rather than holding it off — and then she opens her eyes and looks at you and what’s in them is so open and so luminous and so completely, entirely for you that you feel it like the ice on a perfect day, like a spin that finds its centre and just stays.

“You,” she says softly.

Just that word. Worn like everything.

She takes your hand from her face and holds it.

Brings it to her chest.

Just over her heart.

You feel it — the steady certain beat of it, warm through the fabric of her t-shirt — and she keeps your hand there and looks at you and says, quiet and complete:

“It’s always been you. From the spin. From before the spin maybe.” She shakes her head slightly, still looking at you. “I kept looking across the rink and thinking — her. Just — her. And I didn’t have a word for it yet but it was already this, it was already everything, it was already you.”

You are crying now.

Softly. Warmly. The kind of tears that aren’t sad, that are just too full to stay in.

She pulls you in.

Your head against her chest, her arms around you, her chin on top of your head, and you can hear her heartbeat properly now — steady and sure and slightly faster than resting, which makes you feel everything — and you close your eyes and breathe and feel the warmth of her all around you.

“I love you,” she says, into your hair. “My pretty girl. I love you so much.”

My pretty girl.

You close your eyes tighter.

Hold her tighter.

“I love you,” you say back, into her chest. “I love you I love you I love you.”

Three times.

Because once didn’t feel like enough.

She presses her lips to the top of your head and stays there.

The lamp stays on.

The city is quiet.

Her heart beats steadily under your ear and her arms are warm and certain around you and her hoodie smells like her and the bed is soft and the room is hers and you are so completely, irreversibly home that the word doesn’t feel big enough for it.

You fall asleep there.

Just like that.

Mid-held.

Mid-loved.

Her heartbeat the last thing you hear.