I let it go. Not because I believe it. Because he came here with groceries on a Tuesday and burned sauce badly and moved out of my way without being asked, and I want this to be what it looks like for twenty more minutes.
I choose the night.
After dinner we end up on the couch with the game muted on television, his arm along the back of the cushion not quite touching my head. I am pretending to read a transcript. His hand eventually settles in my hair.
I read the same paragraph four times.
“My turn,” I say.
“I thought we already played.”
“Second period.”
He looks at the television. “That is not how periods work.”
“It is in my apartment.”
His hand moves slowly through my hair. “Ask.”
“What happens inside the room when someone is hurt and nobody wants to say it?”
His fingers still.
For a second, I regret the question.
Then I do not.
Ryan looks at the muted game. The blue flicker of it moves over his face.
“The room gets closed in playoffs,” he says. “Not because we do not trust people outside it. Because everything inside it becomes a story outside it, and stories change things before the guys inside are ready.”
“That sounds reasonable,” I say.
“It is reasonable.”
“And when the thing inside the room is something that should be seen?”
He meets my eyes. “That is what makes it complicated.”
I want to press. I want to stop holding the story that could hurt both of us.
I choose the couch.
He kisses me later, in the kitchen while I am washing the one pan, and I turn in his arms and knock the basil off the counter. It hits the floor. Neither of us picks it up for a while.
The pan keeps running under the water behind me.
The basil lies beside Ryan’s shoe like a tiny green casualty. I don’t care about either.
I care about his hands.
One at the back of my neck. One low on my waist, fingers spread wide over the sweater I planned to throw away three times and never did. He kisses me like the night has been building under the ordinary things. Burned sauce. Bad cheese. The question I did not press.
I turn off the faucet without looking.
“Good call,” he says against my mouth.
“I am a safety professional.”
