Page 107 of Joker

He doesn’t hold on tighter. Doesn’t demand I stay where I am. Doesn’t make a joke or turn this into something easier to survive by pretending it’s not heavy. He just gives me room.

And that nearly undoes me more than anything else could have.

I push up onto one elbow and glance back at him.

He’s already awake, dark eyes on me, hair a little rough from sleep, one arm tucked under his head and the other now resting loose over the sheet where it had been around me a second ago. He looks like a man who slept just fine.

Which is deeply unfair, considering I’m one bad thought away from emotional collapse.

“You can breathe,” he says quietly.

I stare at him.

He lifts one brow. “You’re doing that thing again.”

“What thing?”

“Trying to think yourself into a corner.”

The fact that he can already read that in me should concern me more than it does.

“I’m not—”

“You are.” His voice stays low and even. No judgment. No impatience. Just certainty.

I look away because if I keep looking at him, I might say something embarrassing and irreversible before I’ve had caffeine. Or emotional armor. Or literally any amount of distance from last night.

I swing my legs over the edge of the bed and sit there for a second, gathering the sheet around myself even though modesty feels a little ridiculous after the things we did to each other in this room.

Still. It gives my hands something to do.

The room is quiet around us, sunlight just beginning to edge around the curtains. His room smells like him and sleep and warm skin and something unmistakably us now, and that alone is enough to make my face heat.

God. This is humiliating.

Not because of what happened.

Because I liked it. Because I liked all of it. Because I’m sitting here trying not to visibly unravel while he looks completely at ease in the aftermath.

Maybe he senses where my head is going, because when he speaks again, his voice is softer than I expect from him this early in the morning.

“Raven.”

I look back.

He doesn’t move toward me. Doesn’t close the space. He just holds my gaze from where he’s still half-sprawled in bed and says, “You regret it?”

The answer is immediate. “No.”

His expression doesn’t change much, but something in his shoulders loosens anyway. “Then stop acting like you need to apologize for it.”

That one gets me. Because I hadn’t realized until he said it that some part of me absolutely had been gearing up to do exactly that. Not because I owe him an apology. Because I’ve spent too long cleaning up emotional messes that weren’t mine to begin with.

Too long trying to get ahead of fallout before it hits. And here he is, seeing it in under ten minutes and cutting it off before I can even fully lean into it.

I swallow hard. “I just…” I look down at my hands. “I didn’t expect it to feel like that.”

He’s quiet for a second. Then, “Like what?”