Page 81 of One Adult, Please

He's quiet. The tank hums. A shark passes overhead.

"You make the panic quiet," I say. The words come out wrong. They always come out wrong.

Joel's looking at me the way he looked at me last night, right before he kissed me. "What did you say?"

"I said..." I try to reconstruct. "I was trying to say that when I'm with you, the part of me that's waiting for the ground to reach up and grab me is quieter. You make the panic quiet."

He takes a step toward me. Then another. The distance between us halves. Halves again.

"I was trying to say you feel safe," I add, my words coming faster. "But that's not right either because nothing is safe. Nothing has been safe since the highway, but when I'm with you the unsafe feels survivable. And I know that's a lot to put on someone, I know I'm being too much again, I'm always too much or not enough and there's never a middle setting for me, but I just..."

His hands come up to my face. Both of them. Palms against my jaw, fingers in my hair, holding me.

I make a sound against his mouth. Something that would be mortifying if I had the capacity for mortification right now, which I don't, because Joel is kissing me in the fish tube.

"Joel," I say, pulling back just enough to breathe. "The perimeter."

"The perimeter is fine."

"You didn't check."

"I'm checking right now." His eyes move over my face. "Perimeter looks good."

"That's not what perimeter means."

"It's what it means right now."

His tongue traces my lower lip and I open for him and then we're really kissing.

I didn't notice us moving but we must have moved because I'm against the curved wall of the tunnel now, the tank pressing cool against my shoulder blades through my hoodie, and Joel is pressing warm against my front.

His thigh slots between mine. I gasp. He swallows the sound as I rock into him.

"I've been thinking about this," he says against my mouth. "Since the first night. You fell asleep on that bench with a rain poncho for a pillow and I watched you breathe for three hours."

He pulls back. The blue light turns his eyes into something oceanic, deep and dark and full of things I can't see from the surface.

"Joel."

"Is that a no?"

"It's a yes." My hands are on his chest, and his heart is pounding against my palm. "It's been a yes since the fish tube. The first fish tube time. When you gave me the terrible protein bar and I ate the whole thing even though it tasted like compressed disappointment."

"You ate it because you were hungry."

"I ate it because you gave it to me and you were worried and I wanted you to stop worrying." I pull him closer by his shirt. "I need you to stop talking about protein bars now."

"What should I talk about instead?"

"Nothing. Talking is over. We're doing other things now."

I kiss him. Joel makes a sound in his throat that I'm going to remember for the rest of my life.

His hands move. Down from my face, along my neck, over my shoulders. They pause at the hem of my hoodie and he pulls back just enough to look at me, a question in his eyes.

"Yes," I say, before he can ask.

"You don't know what I'm asking."