Not in a dramatic, cinematic way. In the real way—the way people look when their body has been at war with them and they’ve stopped fighting back. Her hair is in something that might have been a bun twelve hours ago but has since surrendered to gravity. She’s wearing a sweatshirt that swallows her whole—mine, I realize, the gray one I thought I’d lost. Her swollen eyes tell me today has involved crying. The kind that isn’t about one thing but about everything; the cumulative weight of a body and brain that won’t give you a break.
She stares at me. Not with surprise, exactly. More like she’s trying to determine whether I’m real.
“You’re early,” she says, and her voice is raw.
“I’m early.”
She doesn’t do the thing. The mask, the deflection, the easy joke that reroutes the conversation away from whatever she’s feeling. She doesn’t do any of it. She stands in her doorway in my stolen sweatshirt, with swollen eyes and unwashed hair, and she lets me see her.
All of her.
The version her father thinks is a failure. The version her mother has chosen not to see. The version her exes couldn’t handle. The version she’s spent her whole life editing down, smoothing over, packaging into something palatable so the world doesn’t choke on the fullness of who she is.
She lets me see it. And I understand what that costs her, and it cracks something open in my chest I don’t think will ever close.
“Bad day?” I ask because I don’t know what else to say, and because I know she doesn’t need me to say the perfect thing. She needs me to just be here.
Her face does something complicated. Her chin trembles—once, barely—and she presses her lips together hard, like she’s physically holding herself in. And then she exhales shakily and says, “Bad few days. Then I got my period.” She shrugs, but it’s weak.
I drop my bag on her porch and step forward. At the same time, she steps into me like she’s been holding herself upright by sheer force of will and has decided to stop.
“Is it okay that I’m here?” She nods, arms still at her sides. “I’m sorry I haven’t made the effort to come to your house sooner. I should have.”
“I like your place. And I’m always on the move, anyway.” Her arms go around my waist, and her face presses into my chest, but she doesn’t cry. She just breathes. Deep, deliberate breaths I feel against my sternum. I wrap my arms around her and hold on, thinking,This is it.This is everything. I will burn that offerletter and never go back to Toronto if it means I get to be the person she leans into when the lights go out.
“I’m wearing your sweatshirt,” she mumbles.
“I noticed.”
“I’m not giving it back.”
“I wasn’t going to ask.”
She’s quiet for a moment, and her arms tighten around me. And then, so softly I almost miss it: “You came back early.”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
Because my apartment ceiling didn’t have any answers. Because Martin’s offer felt like a sentence, not a reward. Because I called you every night and heard the space between your words and couldn’t stand being on the wrong side of it for one more day.
“Because I wanted to be here,” I say, and it’s the truest and simplest thing I’ve ever said.
She pulls back enough to look at me. Her eyes are glassy and tired, and so disarmingly open I have to remind myself to breathe. This is Beth without the armor. Without the jokes and the deflection and theI’m fineshe layers over everything like plaster over a crack. This is the woman underneath it all. She’s letting me see her, and I am absolutely, irreversibly, catastrophically in love with her.
“I look terrible,” she says.
“You look like you.”
“That’s either the sweetest or most offensive thing anyone’s ever said to me.”
“It’s the sweet one.”
She almost smiles. It doesn’t quite make it to her mouth, but it reaches her eyes, and that’s enough. That’s more than enough.
“Come inside.” She steps back, pulling me with her by the front of my shirt. “I haven’t eaten since this morning, and there’s nothing in my fridge except hot sauce and regret. Maybe eggs.”
“I’ll make you something.”
