The cards go still in my hand.
"And he believes every step of it, because he made each one himself, and none of them looked like the end."
My voice doesn't do anything dramatic. That's what makes it true.
"I've stood in the room where it finishes," I say. "It's quiet. You go down the last stair on your own feet because that's the only way the thing at the bottom takes anyone, and nobody drags you, nobody has to, you just—agree. And we feel it happen from too far away to matter. Callum feels it worst. He spends what's left of his life understanding that he chose every step."
The room holds its breath. Old house, old stone, a hundred years of girls who went down stairs they agreed to. It listens to me say it.
"Felix." Her voice is even. "How many of the branches go that way?"
"Don't ask me that."
"How many?"
"Enough." The number sits behind my teeth and I don't give it to her, because numbers make it sound managed and there's nothing managed about it. "Enough that I don't sleep great. There. You got the charming version."
She uncurls. Crosses the cold floor in three steps, no hesitation, and takes the deck out of my hand, just lifts it out of my grip, sets it on the desk by the sad little bag of stale snickerdoodles she still hasn't thrown out, and the second it leaves my fingers something in my chest gets loud, the sudden loud of a room right after the radio dies.
"Stop looking at the worst one," she says.
"It's not a choice. They're all just—there." I spread my empty hand. "I look at all of them. Most of yours are bad. You want to know my one comfort? In the bad ones I'm usually already gone, so at least I don't have to watch."
I meant it light. It lands like a stone in a well, and we both hear it hit the water.
She doesn't flinch from it. That's the thing about her. Everyone else I've ever told the truth to has needed me to take it back. She just steps in between me and the deck, between me and the branches, and puts both her hands on my face like she's deciding to.
"Then look at this one," she says.
She kisses me before I can find a card to hide behind.
It's not careful. There's nothing careful left in either of us tonight. Her mouth opens under mine and the futures keep fanning out behind my eyes, same as they always do, and then she does the thing she's the only one who can do, which is be so completelyherethat for a second the field collapses to one branch, this one, her hands fisted in my shirt and her breath going ragged against my mouth, and the relief of it is so big it's almost grief.
"Don't go anywhere," she says against my lips.
"I'm right here."
"You're three branches deep. I can feel it."
She can't feel it, not the way Ren feels things, but she knows me. Ten weeks in a car taught her my tells; it taught me hers right back. She presses her thumb to the corner of my eye, the place the grin climbs to and stops.
"Right here," she says. "Your smile never makes it past right here. Not with anyone else. I've watched for it a whole year."
So I let the grin go. All the way. Two seconds after it should've moved on. That only happens with her.
She takes my hand—the marked one, the one with the burn glowing low across the back of it—and she lifts it to her mouth and sets her lips to my knuckles, one at a time, over the leash, over the place the school carved into me to keep me away from her, and I feel that everywhere. The sight goes quiet. Not gone. Quiet.
"There he is," she says.
I get a hand into her hair and kiss her properly then, and the want comes up out of me with no charm on it at all, just teeth and breath and the low filthy run of everything I don't say out loud—how I've wanted her under my hands since a parking lot in Kansas, how I've spent every session at that table three feet from her bending the odds so my face stays bored while I think about exactly this. My hand finds the hem of her shirt. Hers finds my belt.
"Tell me what you want," I say, because I want to hear her say it, and because she always does.
"You already know."
"I want it out loud."
"Your hand." Her voice doesn't waver. "And then I want you to stop running the odds and be here."
