Chapter 10

You weren’t nervous about coming.

That’s what you told yourself on the way over — bag on your shoulder, Alysa’s address in your phone, the evening air cool against your face. You’re not nervous. You’ve spent time with her before. This is fine. You are fine.

You were nervous about coming.

The house belongs to a friend of Alysa’s named Cora — small and warm and decorated in the way of someone who collects things they love without worrying too much about whether they match. Plants on every surface. Fairy lights along the top of the bookshelf. A cork board in the hallway covered in photos and ticket stubs and little notes in different handwriting.

There are maybe ten people here, scattered across the living room and the kitchen, the kind of gathering that has no real agenda beyond being together, and the whole place has that easy comfortable energy that means everyone here knows each other well and likes what they know.

Alysa meets you at the door.

She’s in something dark and layered, a little silver ring on her finger you haven’t seen before, her hair half up in a way that looks effortless and probably isn’t, and she looks so at home here, so completely herself, that for a moment you just stand in the doorway and take that in.

“You came,” she says, and she sounds genuinely pleased about it, like she wasn’t entirely sure you would and is glad to be wrong.

“I said I would,” you say.

“I know.” She smiles. “Come in.”

She introduces you to people with the easy warmth of someone who wants you to feel included from the first moment — Cora, who has paint on her wrist and immediately offers you something to drink and means it; a girl called Wren with close cropped hair and kind eyes who talks to you about skating for ten minutes with genuine curiosity; two boys on the sofa who are clearly together in the way of people who have been together long enough to finish each other’s sentences without noticing.

Nobody makes anything of anything. Nobody has to. The room just is what it is, warm and easy and full of people being entirely themselves, and you feel it settle around you like something you didn’t know you were looking for.

At one point Cora leans over to refill your drink and glances at your bag where it’s sitting on the side table, the two pins catching the fairy light glow, and she says “oh cute pins” with a small smile that is warm and knowing and doesn’t require anything from you, and you smile back and say thank you and that’s all it is.

Across the room Alysa is talking to Wren but her eyes find yours for just a second, checking in, and something in her expression is soft and careful and hopeful in a way that makes your chest ache quietly.

She’s not saying anything.

She’s just letting you be here.

You love her for it so suddenly and so completely that you have to look away.

Someone puts a film on around nine.

The gathering folds itself inward — people finding seats, the overhead light going off, just the warm glow of the television and the fairy lights on the bookshelf. Cora takes the armchair. Wren and her friend settle on the floor with a blanket. The couple on the sofa rearrange themselves into their default configuration of one leaning against the other like they’re furniture that comes as a set.

You end up on the smaller sofa.

Alysa ends up beside you.

Not in a way that was discussed. Not in a way that anyone arranged. Just in the way that things between you keep happening — like gravity, like the most natural conclusion to any sequence of events that contains the two of you.

The film starts. Something warm and a little funny, the kind of thing that asks nothing of you. Around you the room settles into that comfortable collective quiet of people watching something together, and beside you Alysa tucks her feet up underneath her and pulls a throw blanket across her lap and the edge of it falls over your knee too and neither of you moves it.

You watch the film.

Your hand is resting on the sofa cushion between you.

It happens twenty minutes in.

You feel it before you process it — the lightest thing, barely anything, the back of Alysa’s fingers brushing against the back of your hand.

Accidental, maybe. The sofa is small. People shift.

You don’t move.

Neither does she.

A breath passes. Two. The film keeps going, someone on screen saying something that makes Cora laugh softly from the armchair, and the fairy lights glow warm on the bookshelf and the world keeps turning at its normal pace and underneath the blanket—

Her fingers move again. Slower this time. Deliberate this time. Tracing the edge of your hand so lightly you could almost convince yourself you’re imagining it except you’re not, you know you’re not, every nerve ending you possess has relocated to that single point of contact.

She pauses.

Waiting.

Checking.

You turn your hand over.

It’s the smallest movement. Barely a thing. Just your hand, open now, and the quiet offer of it.

And Alysa slots her fingers through yours.

Slowly. Carefully. Like something she’s been thinking about for longer than tonight. Her thumb settles against the side of your hand and stays there, and her fingers are warm — rink-warm, the deep warmth of someone who has spent their life in the cold and carries heat in spite of it — and her hand in yours feels so specific, so exactly right, that your eyes stay on the screen because if you look at her right now you will not be responsible for what your face does.

This is her hand.

Her hand is in your hand.

She brushed your hand first and waited and you turned yours over and now—

Earlier — twenty minutes in.

The film is fine. Alysa is not watching the film.

She’s watching it technically. Her eyes are on the screen. But her attention — her full, entire, helpless attention — is on the three inches of sofa cushion between her hand and yours, and the way your hand is just there, and the fact that she has been thinking about this, about the specific question of your hand, since somewhere around the combination spin three weeks ago and she can’t keep not doing anything about it.

She’s not going to say anything. She knows that. This isn’t the moment for words — words would make it too big, too fast, and you are soft and careful and she doesn’t want to push a door open, she wants to find out if it’s already unlocked.

So she just—

Brushes her fingers against yours.

And then she waits.

The film keeps going. Cora laughs at something. The fairy lights do what they do.

And then you turn your hand over.

Something happens in Alysa’s chest that she doesn’t have a name for and doesn’t need one.

She links her fingers through yours slowly, making sure, giving you every chance to change your mind, and your hand closes around hers warm and certain and she exhales very quietly through her nose and fixes her eyes back on the screen and does not smile.

She smiles.

She can’t help it, she smiles, and she turns it toward the television before anyone can see it, before you can see it, and she sits in the warm dark with your hand in hers and the film plays and she thinks—

There you are.

There you finally are.

Neither of you mentions it.

Not when the film ends and the lights come back up softly and you both slip your hands apart in the natural movement of people readjusting. Not when you say your goodbyes and Alysa walks you to the door and you stand on Cora’s front step in the night air and say I had a really nice time and she says me too and you smile at each other in the dark.

Not when you walk to your car and she stands in the doorway watching until you reach it, and you turn back once, and she raises her hand, and you raise yours.

Not yet.

But the word yet is doing a lot of work now.

And you both know it.