There's nowhere to look except the ceiling or him.
I choose him.
Then he looks back at me.
Neither of us says a word.
And I feel it, the way you feel everything that doesn’t need words to be explained.
He reaches over slowly. His arm slides around my shoulders and pulls me in closer. My head finds his chest. His chin settles on top of my head. His hand comes to rest at my shoulder.
My whole body exhales. Like something has been wound tight for so long it forgot there was another way to exist.
His heartbeat is right there beneath my ear. A little faster than it should be for someone lying down doing nothing. Mine too.
"Okay?" he asks. The word vibrates through his chest and into me.
"Yeah," I say quietly. Quiet enough that it's just for this room. Just for us. "Yeah. I'm much better. Thank you."
His hand shifts once against my shoulder. Just settling. Just holding. Then it starts moving in slow, absent-minded circles.
And we lie there as the room gets fully dark. The sounds outside fade. The campus is quiet in the way it does when the daystarts winding down and people go inside and the world gets smaller. In here it's just the shadows surrounding us and his heartbeat and the weight of his arm and I keep waiting for the feeling to shift into something complicated — into the push and pull we're so good at, into the tension that's been living between us since September — and it doesn't.
It just stays like this.
He presses his lips to the top of my head. Soft. Barely there, but completely intentional in the way Jamie Nash is intentional about everything he actually means. Such a small act means so much coming from Jamie. I close my eyes and soak it in.
"Jamie," I say.
"Mhm."
"This is—" I stop. Start again. "You're being really—I just—" I stop again. “Want to say thank you.”
I don't have the words for what I'm trying to say.
What I'm trying to say is that nobody has done this for me in a very long time. Just held me. Without wanting anything back. Without it being a game or a transaction or something that comes with a price I find out about later. Just — held me like I was worth holding and stayed.
What I'm trying to say is that I came here this morning barely holding it together over a name on a schedule and I'm lying here now in the dark with his heartbeat under my ear and it's the safest I've felt since I was in a room with blue light everywhere where I stupidly believed every word someone said to me. Except this time I'm not scared of what comes next. That's terrifying in a different way.
What I'm trying to say is maybe the thing I've been running from and the thing I've been running toward have been the same thing all along.
Jamie.
"Nothing," I say instead. "Never mind."
Of course he doesn't push. His thumb moves once against my shoulder. Like he heard everything I didn't say anyway and is answering it in the only language he knows how to use.
"Can I stay?" I say into the dark. "If it's not too weird."
A pause. Long enough that my chest tightens.
Then his arm pulls me slightly closer.
"Whatever you need," he says. "It's fine. I want you to stay."
I let out a breath and close my eyes and inhale the smell of him everywhere.
I think about the blue room. The projector. The underwater light. Every word Marcus said that he meant completely and took back completely.
