"Is that what I am? A boyfriend?"
The word sounded small in his mouth. Insufficient. Like trying to describe the river by calling it water.
"I don't know," I said. "I've never?—"
The words stopped. The fireflies pulsed, and his face was lit in gold and shadow, and I was about to say something I’d never said to anyone.
"I've never been with anyone," I said.
He didn't flinch. His expression didn't rearrange into surprise or the careful performance of tenderness that I'd imagined from a hundred hypothetical men who'd hear that and decide it meant something about me I didn't want it to mean.
He just looked at me. The same way he'd looked at me at the counter. At the diner. On the water. Like I was the fixed point and everything else was peripheral.
"Okay," he said.
Not a question. Not a reassurance. Just the acknowledgment of a fact that didn't change anything he already knew.
The branch held. The raft held. The shallows held us in the still water at the edge of Hadley Bend, and the fireflies keptrising. I sat three feet from a man who’d heard everything I was afraid to say and hadn't looked away.
Nobody had evernotlooked away.
"Bishop."
"Yeah."
"I don't want to go back to the dock."
His hand released the branch—not to let us drift, but to reach across the raft and take mine. His fingers closed around my clasped hands, warm and steady, and he didn't pull. He just held on.
"Then we stay," he said.
