Because that was what happened next.
After. Alex collapsed beside me, hand finding mine on the sheets. “That was…”
“Yeah.” I didn’t need him to finish.
He rolled onto his side. The look was soft. The look was the wrong look. “Can I stay? I’d like to wake up next to you.”
There it was.
“I’ve got a thing in the morning. Work.” I made my voice apologetic in a way I’d practiced. “Don’t want to wake you up.”
His face did the small fall I knew. “Oh. Okay. I could leave early with you?”
“Better if you don’t.” I was sitting up now, putting space in the room before I had to put it in my voice. “Tonight was great, though.”
He sat up, too, and his face worked through whether I was telling the truth or doing the thing. “Can I get your number? We could do this again.”
I gave him my number. I knew what I was going to do with the texts when they came; he didn’t.
He got dressed slowly. Slow enough that I knew he was hoping I’d change my mind. I didn’t. I stayed in bed with the sheet around my waist and tracked him buttoning his shirt with hands that had been all over me twenty minutes ago, which should’ve been weirder than it was. The trick was not to think about it that way.
At the door, he hesitated. “Thanks for tonight, Jett. You’re… really something.”
“You, too.” I meant it. Half-meant it. He was great. Just not mine.
The door clicked shut, and I was alone again.
I lay back against the pillows. The fairy lights threw slow shadows across the ceiling, the same shadows they’d thrown the night I moved in. Somewhere in the building, a pipe was groaning the way old buildings did when they remembered they were old. My body was loose and spent. The thing under my ribs again. The flutter. Restless. Directionless. The thing that wanted me to sit with it.
I didn’t sit with it.
I had a rule. Three seconds, then redirect, even inside my own head. I’d been running this protocol since approximately sophomore year, when I’d figured out it was the difference between functional and not. No complications. No expectations. Nobody to disappoint when I pulled away.
I got up, cracked the window, and drank a glass of water. Done.
Sunday brunch with The Inner Circle was sacred.
We rotated. Someone’s apartment, a café, or whatever one of us had stumbled across that week. Today it was a hole-in-the-wall diner in Clinton Hill. Best hangover food in Brooklyn, zero judgment for showing up half-drunk and wrecked.
I slid into the booth next to Raven, who was wearing sunglasses indoors and nursing a coffee like it was the only thing keeping her alive.
“Rough night?” I asked.
“You have no idea,” she muttered. “Never let me do shots again.”
Calliope blew in as if she hadn’t closed down Neon Pulse with the rest of us at 2 a.m. “Darlings! I have survived another week in this capitalist hellscape, and I demand waffles as tribute.”
Sierra was at the booth already, looking like the only one of us who’d slept. Camera on the table next to her water glass. She was probably half-plotting a shoot in her head, the way she did at Sunday brunch and on the subway and during her own cousin’s wedding the year before.
“You’re annoyingly chipper, babe. Stop.” I dropped my menu on the table.
“Some of us know how to pace ourselves. I had two drinks. I am a responsible adult now, apparently.”
“Boring,” Calliope rolled her eyes.
“What about you?” Sierra looked at me. “I saw you leave with that guy last night. Alex, right?”
“Alex,” I confirmed. “Adequate, darlings. Dictionary definition.”
