Her answer was fast and quiet. “No.”
It punched through me, clean and brutal. I don’t know what I did to deserve the truth, but I wasn’t going to let her regret it.
“Okay,” I said, exhaling. “Okay.”
She watched me, wary and hopeful in the same breath. “What do we do with that?”
I smiled softly, feeling helpless. “I think we be stupid for once.”
She laughed, and the sound wobbled. “That’s your plan?”
“It’s what I’ve got.”
Her eyes searched mine. I let her. I wanted her to find all of it there—the need, sure, but also the steadiness. The part of me that could be more than a good time and a bad idea. The man who’d shovel a driveway at five in the morning and learn how to make pancakes shaped like hearts because it made her laugh.
But then she looked away, and I saw it land again: the life waiting back in Seattle like an alarm clock.
“Drew,” she said, the apology already threaded into my name.
“Yeah,” I said, and somehow I was already standing. Not to make a point. To make it easier on both of us. “Thanks for the meal, Melanie.”
Her head snapped up. “What?”
“Dinner was great.”
“Don’t do that,” she said, voice too calm to be anything but panic-adjacent. “Don’t just…leave.”
I reached for my jacket off the back of the chair, slid an arm in, then the other. My hands were steady. My heart was not. “I’mnot punishing you. I’m… respecting the map you keep pointing at.”
“That’s not what I want,” she said, but a beat later in a smaller voice, “I don’t know what I want.”
I nodded. “That’s okay.”
“It doesn’t feel okay.”
“I know.”
She stood too then, as if height could close the distance words had opened. The room smelled like cooling garlic, wine, and candle wax, like something finished and something waiting. She took a step toward me, stopped, chewed her lower lip—the one that had been on mine an hour ago.
“Drew,” she said again.
“Mel,” I answered. I tucked a stray bit of hair behind her ear because I didn’t trust myself not to. “You don’t have to decide tonight. Really. You don’t.”
“That sounds reasonable,” she said, a little bitter. “I hate reasonable.”
“Me too,” I said, and meant it.
We stood there on the seam between two worlds, theirs and ours, ours and hers, and I knew if I stayed, I’d kiss her again, and the decision would get buried under heat and hunger and the way she said my name when she forgot to be careful.
We’d wind up in bed together because that was what we did. We didn’t plan. We didn’t discuss the future.
So I picked up my keys. The little jingle sounded like finality.
“Text me when the storm calms,” I said. “I’ll make sure you’ve got a ride if you need one.”
She swallowed. “Okay.”
I reached the door and looked back, letting myself have it—one last picture. Her in those ridiculous Santa pajamas, the twinkle lights making constellations in her hair, the half-empty wineglasses and a bowl of spaghetti gone lukewarm, the future crowding the room like a guest we hadn’t invited.
