“Oh, I definitely get one.” I lean forward. “You don’t disappear on me. The in-your-own-head kind. If shit gets too loud, you tell me, and I get you out. You don’t grin and bear it alone to keep me from finding out you’re a person. Three days of disappearing to the west stairs is the kind of thing I’m talking about. You don’t get to do that.”
She stares at me. For a second, I worry I’ve blown it.
“That’s not really a rule,” she says, thick. “That’s just asking me to let you in.”
“Yeah, it is.”
“Fuck buddies don’t typically need to be let in.”
“Oh, are you an expert on fuck buddies?” My shoulders stiffen imagining her under anyone else but me.
“...Fine.” She swallows. “But add rule four. You stop bringing me sugar packets where people can see. It’s conspicuous.”
“Then what can I do?” I ask, slightly annoyed after hearing all of the things we “can’t” do.
Then she does a thing I don’t see coming, and I see most things coming. She tears the sandwich in half and holds the bigger piece down two steps to me.
“You didn’t eat,” she says. “You get a tone when you don’t eat.”
“I don’t have a tone.”
“You sure as hell do. Take the sandwich.”
I take the sandwich. We eat in the quiet for a minute.
“This is going to end badly,” she says. Not dramatic. Just stating it, like a forecast.
“Maybe.”
“You’re supposed to argue with me.”
“Can’t. It’s a rule, remember? I don’t lie to you.” I take a bite. “That one’s mine and yours both, turns out.”
She almost laughs. Almost. I’m counting it anyway.
I sit on a concrete step under a light she hates, eating half a tuna sandwich with the crusts cut off, next to a girl who just agreed to risk the only family she has on me.
The rules created as guardrails for this relationship should feel like a leash. Every set of conditions anybody’s ever read me has felt exactly like one.
But this is the first set I want to keep.
We’ve got rules now. A whole careful little setup to keep one beautiful, terrified, brilliant woman safe from her own father and from me.
It’ll hold everything together until it doesn’t.
I already know which one of us is gonna be the reason.
Jasmine
I drive past his building four times before I park.
I’m telling myself it’s recon.
But it’s not recon. It’s a woman trying to talk herself out of the first reckless thing she’s ever done on purpose, and losing.
His truck’s in the lot. The light’s on. The only variable left in the whole equation is me, and I’m the one I trust the least.
He opens the door before I knock. Of course he does.
