I picked up my phone. Three months post-finale, and #Rhysloane was still trending biweekly — sometimes because BookTok had posted another POV: you fell for the one who refused to kneel edit set to a slowed-down Taylor Swift audio, sometimes because the show’s official account had dropped behind-the-scenes footage fans dissected frame by frame like the Zapruder film of romance television. My mentions were a scroll of people asking if Rhys was real, if the show was scripted, andwhether I could clone him. (Answers: yes, no, and I was looking into it.)
I typed a tweet. The one I’d been drafting in my head for days, because even spontaneity deserved a good edit.
Update: Found one who listens. Took five seasons and more candidates than I’m willing to count, but we got there.
Sent. Another sip. I counted. Twelve seconds. My phone buzzed.
@RhysCallahan: You’re welcome.
His laugh carried from the kitchen — low, unhurried, still rare enough that every occurrence felt like finding a twenty-dollar bill in a coat pocket. Then he appeared in the doorway, leaning against the frame in grey sweatpants and nothing else, because the universe had zero interest in fairness, and I thought about a conversation I’d had with Tessa last week where she’d asked, clinically, whether I ever got used to looking at him. I’d said yes. I’d been lying.
“You’re awake,” he said, watching me over the rim of his mug.
“You’re trending,” I told him, and his mouth twitched — the micro-expression version of a grin, which from Rhys was the equivalent of someone else throwing confetti.
“I’m always trending. It’s my cross to bear.” He took a sip, and his eyes did the thing they did — the slow, unhurried travel from my face to my shoulders to the bare legs tangled in sheets — with an unapologetic directness that three months ago would have been camouflaged and was now completely, carefully obvious. A lifetime of hiding every reaction, and he’d decided, on this side of the show, to stop. The reversal still stole breath from my lungs on a Sunday morning while I was wearing his old Henley and yesterday’s mascara.
“Come here,” I said.
“I’m drinking coffee.”
“Bring the coffee.”
He set the mug on the dresser with decisive efficiency — clear on which offer outranked caffeine — and then he was crossing the room, and then his knee was on the edge of the bed, and then his hands were in my hair and his mouth was on my neck and the ordered scaffolding of his morning dissolved.
RHYS
There were things about Sloane I’d filed away over ten weeks of televised proximity and three months of shared life, and the inventory had grown long enough that I’d stopped pretending it was anything other than what it was. A permanent archive, organized by sensory category, of every detail that made this woman the most disruptive variable in what had previously been a very well-structured existence.
I knew the sounds she made, the hierarchy of them: the laugh she used for television — bright, measured, professional — versus the real one, the loud one, the one her mother had spent a lifetime trying to edit down. The sigh when I found the exact spot beneath her ear. The sharp intake when my teeth followed my lips. My name when she wanted a truth sounded entirely different from my name when she already had it, which was different again from my name right now — half-gasp, half-command — as I pulled the Henley over her head and added it to the growing evidence that efficiency was its own form of foreplay.
“You,” she breathed, her fingers tracing down my chest with the deliberate focus of someone memorizing topography, “are the most annoyingly attractive person I’ve ever been woken up by, and I’ve been woken up by you for three months, and it’sgetting worse, which I think violates some kind of habituation principle.”
“Hedonic adaptation.” I kissed her collarbone. “The theory says pleasure from repeated stimuli should decrease over time.”
She arched an eyebrow. “So what’s your excuse?”
“You’re an outlier. I’m treating you as statistically significant.” I pulled back far enough to look at her — the sleep-rumpled hair, the bare shoulders, her eyes shifting from sharp to liquid. And felt, as I did every morning with an intensity that had stopped alarming me and started functioning as essential infrastructure, that the decades I’d spent building emotional fortifications had been spectacularly wasted.
She reached for me, her hands steady against my jaw, pulling me down, and the kiss started slow — Sunday-morning slow, the pace of two people who knew they had time and intended to spend every second of it. The cameras were gone. The ticking clock. The hallway where Derek Hoffman had tried to detonate our world. All gone, all burned away, and what remained was better: her body against mine in a bed that was ours, in an apartment that smelled like jasmine and coffee, in a life I was still learning to believe I deserved.
I kissed her deeper and she arched into me, legs wrapping around my waist, and the contact was so immediate — skin against skin, her heat against mine, every barrier gone — that a sound escaped my throat, low and stripped bare. Three months ago it would have alarmed me. Now it just made her smile.
“Tell me,” she whispered, her fingers sliding down my stomach, her nails catching lightly enough to make every nerve ending in my body vote unanimously to abandon rationality.
“Tell me what.” My voice was rough. She was destroying me slowly and she knew it and the knowing was part of what destroyed me.
Her lips brushed my ear. “Tell me what you want.”
There was a version of me — the one who’d walked into a reality show mansion eight months ago with his hands in his pockets and his mouth set and his flat, certain I don’t kneel — who would have deflected, would have kissed her harder to avoid answering. That version had been slowly, methodically taken apart by a woman on a throne who’d asked me to be honest and then waited, without judgment, until I’d learned how.
“I want you.” Simpler than a blueprint. Truer than anything I’d ever drafted. “I want all of you. Every morning. Exactly like this.”
She kissed me — hard, open, a kiss with a destination — and reached between us, her hand closing around me with confident certainty, having mapped my responses as thoroughly as I’d mapped hers. And I dropped my forehead against her shoulder and let the sensation rip through me because Sloane had taught me that surrender was a choice, and I chose it, every time, with increasing ease and diminishing fear.
“Look at me.” I looked at her. I would always look at her. She could have asked me to stare at the sun and I’d have weighed the risk and decided she was worth it.
She held my gaze as I reached for the nightstand — muscle memory, the condom found and opened with practiced ease — responsible adults planning to do this every Sunday morning kept supplies within arm’s reach. And then settled between her thighs and pushed inside her, slow, deliberate, wanting to feel every fraction of what it meant to be this close to another person and stay. Her eyes went wide. Her lips parted. Her fingers dug into my shoulders and she made the sound — the one I kept in the same category as cathedral acoustics and the resonance of a bridge span at its harmonic frequency — and I moved, and shemoved with me, and the rhythm was ours, the pace was ours, everything was ours.
