I startle and turn around to find Lewis at the bottom of the stairs, one hand wrapped around the banister, the other scratching the back of his neck. My heart squeezes at how rumpled he looks: hair sticking up, creases on his cheek, one eye half-closed against the glare of the light. This side of him, so sleepy and soft, is new to me.
How long has he been standing there?
“Is everything okay?” he asks gruffly and comes shufflinginto the kitchen. It doesn’t seem like he overheard my conversation with Karo.
I lower the phone against my collarbone. “Give me a sec.” After I promise Karo to call her in a few days, I hang up the call. “Did I wake you up? I’m sorry.”
He shakes his head as he touches the small of my back. “Are you okay, though?” His hand lingers there as he opens the fridge door. The stark light illuminates his profile.
I feel his closeness, his warmth, in every nerve of my body, like my cells are rejoicing at having him close again, but that’s the problem, isn’t it?
I clear my throat. “Yeah, all good.”
Lewis studies me for a moment, then puts his hand on my head, palm on my crown and fingers reaching to my temples. “What’s going on inside that brain of yours?”
“Hah,” I laugh out. “Asked every neuroscientist, ever.”
Lewis indulges me with a smile, but it passes quickly. After another long look, he turns to the fridge again, and I use the short break of contact to wander to the other side of the kitchen island and perch on one of the stools. As Lewis rummages in a cupboard overhead, the stash on the counter grows: oat milk, cocoa powder, marshmallows.
“Hot chocolate?” I ask.
Lewis pulls a small saucepan out of the drying rack. “Want one?”
I nod. “This is becoming a sad tradition.”
“Having something sweet in the middle of the night and talking to you?” Lewis shrugs. “I could get used to this.”
I melt a little inside, until sensible Frances catches up with what’s happening. “About that…” I trail off. I watch him as he moves through the kitchen, pours the oat milk into the saucepan, switches on the stove, and lines up two mugs on the counter.
“Something sweet? You?” I ask in surprise.
“You’re not the only one spiraling after last night,” Lewis replies.
“Oh?” Does he regret what happened between us? I pause, giving him the space to elaborate.
“It’s…” He rifles through the silverware drawer, then straightens with a spoon in hand and says, “It’s not…” He starts over, only to falter again. A sigh moves through his chest, his whole body. He looks so lost and it makes that tenderness swell up inside me again.
I look at my fingers on the kitchen counter. “But you’ve done this before. You’ve decompressed with colleagues, right?”
His brows drag down. “Right. But this feels different.” He looks up then, finds my eyes and touches my pinkie. “With you, it feels different.”
Heartbeat thundering in my ears, I’m suddenly unsure if him regretting last night was what I was afraid of, or if the truly scary part is how monumental it felt between us, like so much more than just a flicker of attraction.
I lift my pinkie and crook it around his. “Yeah,” is all I manage to say. It makes it a little easier, knowing that he’s not completely immune to freaking out.
Lewis pulls back with a small smile and measures out two spoons of cocoa powder. He repeats the motions for the second cup, squints at me, and then adds a third spoon.
“Do you want to talk about it?” I ask carefully. He’s the one who’s held my hand, listened, and told me to slow down, but seeing him this stuck in his head makes me forget about my worries. Instead of answering, he stares down into the cups with his brow all scrunched up, like the cocoa powder at the bottom holds all the solutions to his problems.
“I’m just…” He expels a hard breath as he returns the box to the cupboard, then continues, “I’m not sure how to go fromhere. Whatever this is with you, it feels big and I don’t know what to do with that.” He swallows, and when his eyes flit to mine, they’re glassy with anguish. “I just don’t know. I know about other things, like how to mess up. I’m actually really great at disappointing people,” he says on a laugh that sounds like it hurt his throat on the way out. “I’m great at doing the one thing that is so bad people end up leaving.”
It’s the first time I see Lewis at a loss like this. But before I can think of a way to give him comfort, he continues, “Do you want to know why I never emailed you to apologize? Because it wouldn’t have mattered.” He makes a movement as if to pull out his phone, then, seemingly remembering that he’s only wearing boxer briefs and a tee, looks around until he spots his phone on the dining room table. “None of these would’ve changed a damn thing.”
When he returns to my side, his screen is open on a series of drafted emails, and he scrolls and scrolls all the way from one dated a month ago to four years back. I catch subjects and first lines. “Dear Franziska,” one says. Another one starts with, “Dear Dr. Silberstein,” “I’m an idiot,” and “I’m sorry. How do I fix—” And “Tell me what to do.”
“None of these matter,” he insists with a raw voice. “They won’t change anything about the fact that I made a huge mistake when I should’ve given your career the boost it absolutely deserved.”
“Hey.” I take his phone out of his hands and push it aside, then shift on my stool to face him. His shoulders are tense when I hold on to them. It hurts to see how bad he still feels about this, when the last days made me see that the real him is so much more than the mistake he made four years ago. When everything he’s done since outweighs that one bad decision. When my resentment has evaporated and made space for curiosity and warmth.
