Like we're not standing in his cabin after he was half-naked ten minutes ago.
"You don't have to?—"
"Well it's either that or," he cuts me off gently, "you keep coming over here in the middle of the night to use mine. Which is also fine too, by the way."
I nod, taking a sip of water just to have something to do with my hands.
"How was your day today?" he asks.
"Good. Mia's excited.” I'm babbling again. "Marcus flew in yesterday—he's bringing his new boyfriend Alex to the shower. Apparently he's a lawyer, which is not the kind of guy I thought Marcus would end up with, but hey, when you know you know.”
He smiles—really smiles—and it transforms his face.
"Marcus with a lawyer. Never would've guessed."
"Right? But apparently it works."
We fall into silence, and it's not uncomfortable exactly, but it's heavy.
Weighted with everything we're not saying.
With the fact that I'm standing in his cabin in my pajamas with wet hair smelling like his soap. With the fact that he saw me looking at him like I wanted to devour him. With the fact that neither of us is acknowledging any of it.
"I should go," I say finally, setting down the glass. "Let you get back to... whatever you were doing."
"Reading," he says. "Very exciting evening."
"What are you reading?"
He gestures to the coffee table where a worn paperback sits face-down, holding his place.
I move closer to see the cover.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
Of course.
Of course he's reading Kundera.
Of course it's a book about impossible choices and the weight of love and whether anything we do matters when we can only live our lives once, in one direction, with no way to know if we chose right.
Of course.
"Heavy reading," I manage, trying to keep my voice light even though my chest feels tight.
"Seemed fitting." He picks it up, runs his thumb over the cracked spine. "I read it years ago. Thought it might land differently now."
"Does it?"
He meets my eyes, and there's something raw in his expression.
"Yeah. Turns out living through something changes how you read about it."
"We can never know what to want, because, living only onelife, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come."
"You've read it?"
I read it the summer after Málaga, trying to understand how we'd gotten everything so wrong when it felt so right.
