"Hey," I say. Soft.
He looks at me.
His face is doing several things at once. None of them are anger. None of them areno. What they are, mostly, isI don't have the room in me right now to put what you just gave me down anywhere safe.
I know that face.
I'm not going to keep him when he’s spiraling like this.
He crosses back to the couch in three quick steps, leans down, and kisses my mouth—soft, brief, receipt—and his hand cups the side of my jaw for one second before he's gone again.
"I'll—"
"Yeah, Maxie."
"—I'll see you tomorrow."
"Yeah."
He goes.
I hear his footsteps down the hall. The soft shut of his door. The quiet that comes after.
I sit on the couch for a while.
I don't pick the beer up. I do not pick the file up. I don't move at all, actually, for a few minutes. I just look at the fire and let the thing in my chest do what it's going to do, which is settle.
He kissed me before he left.
That's the thing I'm holding on to.
Even if he gave me nothing else to hold on to.
I've spent enough of my life reading rooms to know what that kiss meant.I heard you. I didn't run. I don't have the words to give it back yet. Give me time. Small, brief, deliberate. He took two steps out of his panic to put it on my mouth.
I file it.
I file it next to the concrete floor when I dressed him with the scrubs. I file it next to the morning after I knotted him in that cell and everything had changed between us. I file it next to the night at the beach house when he asked me for the bond on purpose and called me by my name and meant it.
It is the same shape.
It keeps being the same shape.
He loves me too.
He doesn't know that yet. He will. He's twenty years old and he's spent every year of those twenty being given love that was conditional on being smaller than he was, and this is going to take him a minute. I can feel that across the bond now, the bright bewildered bracing of him in his own room down the hall, and it doesn't worry me. Not even a little.
I pick up the beer. Drain the rest of it in one swallow. Lean back into the couch.
I have time.
I've got the rest of my life to make him understand exactly what I meant.
I close my eyes and let him work through whatever emotions are running through his head. Whatever doubt and fear he carries so deep I think I might never be able to wipe away.
The bond hums steady between us.
He'll come back.
