Page 60 of You, Only You

"It makes perfect sense," I said. "It's stupid, but it makes sense. People do stupid things that make sense all the time. My father embezzled twelve million dollars because he was afraid of being ordinary. That's profoundly stupid and it makes complete sense."

He stared at me. "Did you just compare my emotional avoidance to your father's federal crime?"

"I compared the psychological architecture. The acts are not equivalent. Obviously."

"Obviously." He was almost smiling. "I feel very reassured."

"You should. I've contextualized your dysfunction within a framework. That's basically therapy."

"That's basically terrifying."

"Same thing."

We sat in the kitchen and didn't touch and didn't need to, because something had shifted and the not-touching was different now. Not the careful avoidance of before. More like two people who knew they could touch and were choosing to sit in the knowing for a while. Letting it be enough.

My phone buzzed around one in the morning. A text from an unknown number that turned out to be Bates using a new secure line:

File received. Strong work. Grand jury timeline accelerating. Will brief you both tomorrow.

I showed Will. He nodded. We cleaned up the kitchen in companionable silence, moving around each other with the easy awareness that had been there since the storage unit, the unconscious choreography that had somehow survived four days of deliberate distance.

At my bedroom door, I stopped. He was a few feet down the hallway, heading to his own room, and he stopped too.

"Goodnight, Will."

"Goodnight."

Neither of us moved. The hallway light hummed. This was the same geography as four nights ago, two doors, a stretch of carpet, the architecture of separation. But it felt completely different. Not because anything had been resolved. Because we'd agreed that unresolved was a place we could stand in together instead of hiding from separately.

"For the record," I said. "The kiss. The one in the hallway."

He went very still.

"It was..." I searched for the right word. My whole vocabulary was available to me, thousands of words, precisely organized,and the one I needed wasn't in any of them. "It was the first time in a long time that I forgot to be careful. And I don't... I'm not someone who forgets to be careful. Ever. About anything." I looked at the carpet because looking at him was too much. "I just wanted you to know that it mattered. In case you were doing that thing where you convince yourself it didn't."

"I was doing exactly that thing."

"I know. You're very predictable for someone who thinks he's mysterious."

"Goodnight, Lindsey."

"Goodnight, Will."

I went into my room. Closed the door. Leaned against it and pressed my hand against my chest where my heart was doing its arrhythmic thing again.

Nothing was fixed. The trial was coming. Reeves was still out there. The professional complications hadn't vanished because we'd held each other on a balcony and eaten scrambled eggs at midnight. Tomorrow I'd probably catch him making contingency plans and he'd probably catch me running background checks on my own emotional state, and we'd have to navigate all of it, the trust and the fear and the control and the letting go, one day at a time.

But I could sleep tonight. For the first time in four days, I could feel the exhaustion settling into my bones like something that would actually lead to unconsciousness rather than just lying in the dark cataloguing the exact pitch of Will Steele's voice when he said my name.

I got into bed. Pulled the covers up. Stared at the ceiling, which was still white and featureless and offering nothing.

My phone buzzed. A text from Will:

For the record. It mattered. More than I know how to say, which is apparently a recurring problem.

I stared at the message. Then typed back:

Maybe we just need a bigger vocabulary.