“God.” She whispered my name — a question she already knew the answer to. I kissed her neck, her jaw, the spot beneath her ear where her pulse hammered. “I’m here.”
“I know.” Her voice cracked, and she wrapped her arms tighter, pulling me closer, deeper, as if closer had no ceiling and she intended to test the hypothesis personally. “I know you’re here. I still can’t believe you’re here.”
“Believe it.” The sincerity in my own voice would have horrified the person I used to be, and I did not care. “I’m not going anywhere. I can’t go anywhere. You’ve ruined going anywhere.”
She laughed — the real one, breathless and loud — and the sound vibrated through me where we were connected, and I groaned against her skin because the combination of her body and her joy was categorically unfair.
She tilted my face up. Held me still. Her eyes were bright with the thing I’d spent decades running from and three months building my life around, and when she spoke, her voice was low and certain, the frequency she saved exclusively for this:
“Good boy.”
Every circuit shorted. Every wall, every blueprint, every distance I’d maintained — gone, rewired, rebuilt around two words that should have been simple and instead contained the entire history of two people learning to want and be wanted, and I moved harder, faster, less controlled, and she matched me, and when she said it again — good boy, you’re so good, you’re mine — I felt the climax building with an inevitability that had everything to do with being fully known by another person and fully chosen.
She came first — shaking, arching, my name caught between a laugh and a sob. And I followed seconds later, my face buried in her neck, her hands in my hair, the aftershocks rolling through us both in waves that left me wrung out and remade and more certain than I’d been of anything in my professional career that this woman was the one design I’d spend the rest of my life protecting.
Afterward, we lay tangled in sheets that needed washing and silence that needed nothing. Her head on my chest. My hand in her hair. The jasmine candle burned down to a stub, the mug on the nightstand gone cold, Gerald the succulent thriving in a patch of sunlight. And I thought: This. This is what my father was afraid of. This is what he spent my entire childhood teaching me was weakness, and it is the strongest thing I have ever felt.
“We should probably eat actual food at some point,” Sloane murmured into my chest.
“Mason’s coming for dinner.” She lifted her head.
“Did you just schedule a social engagement?” she asked, with the delighted horror of someone witnessing a feral cat voluntarily approach a human.
“He texted. I responded with a time and an address. Apparently that constitutes planning.”
“Oh my God, you’re becoming a person.” She dropped a kiss to my sternum. “I’m so proud of you.”
“Don’t push it.”
SLOANE
Mason brought wine, a story about a woman at his gym who’d struck up a conversation with him on the bench press and then asked for his training partner’s number (“She touched my arm and everything. Full contact. I thought, this is it, themain character moment. And then she goes, ‘So is your friend single?’”), and the particular energy of someone trying very hard to be happy and almost pulling it off.
He folded himself onto our couch with the familiarity of every Sunday since week one of our real-world relationship, kicked off his sneakers, and immediately began critiquing Rhys’s playlist. (“Bro, you cannot play Radiohead during dinner. This isn’t a French film about existential dread. This is pasta night. Put on some Lizzo.”) Rhys changed it to Billie Eilish out of spite, Mason deemed this an acceptable compromise, and I poured wine and watched them argue about music with helpless tenderness, understanding what this found-family thing meant to both of them, even if neither would ever use those words out loud.
Dinner was the risotto I’d learned from a YouTube video Tessa had sent me with the message learn to cook one impressive thing so he doesn’t figure out the rest of your diet is takeout and audacity. And Mason ate three servings and declared it the best meal he’d had in months, which was either a genuine compliment or a damning commentary on his own cooking.
“Applications for next season opened last week.” Mason’s tone was casual in the practiced way people are casual about the things that terrify them, and he was twisting his wine glass by the stem, spinning it slowly, watching the light catch the red. “Tessa called. Apparently she’s been pitching the network on a new format — same name, same concept, but instead of a Queen choosing men, it’s a Bachelor on the throne. Still the Good Boy Games, except this time the question is whether a man can stay a good boy when he’s the one with all the power.” He grinned. “Very Tessa. Very ‘I’ll reinvent the wheel and make it look easy.’”
I studied him — the bright grin doing its job, the eyes falling half a beat behind it. Mason Rivera could light up a room the way other people lit candles: effortlessly, instinctively, with no awareness of how much he was holding at bay. “And?”
“And she asked if I wanted to be involved.” He shrugged — the effortless Mason shrug I’d spent months learning to read beneath. “Consultant, maybe. Help design the new challenges, coach the candidates, whatever.” He stopped. Set the glass down. The Ted Lasso t-shirt from the finale had been replaced by a vintage Schitt’s Creek tee, because Mason’s wardrobe was an entire personality quiz in cotton. “And then she asked if I’d want to sit on the throne.”
Rhys went still beside me — his attention sharpened, a focused certainty I felt more than saw, reserved for the things that mattered.
“Mase.” I leaned forward.
“It’s stupid.” The brightness was back, deflective and blinding. “I mean, the world doesn’t need another season of my face. I’m already on enough screen grabs. Every fan account on TikTok has me filed under ‘best friend who deserves the world’ with a crying emoji, and honestly? That’s fine. That’s the brand.” He picked the glass back up. Drained it. “I’m great at being the best friend.”
“You’d be incredible,” I said. “You deserve someone who sees past the—” I gestured at his general radiant, teddy-bear persona. “Past the mascot energy. And honestly? You on that throne?” I pictured it — Mason Rivera, the man who apologized to furniture when he bumped into it, sitting where I’d sat for five seasons, wearing the crown. “They won’t know what hit them.”
“The mascot energy,” he repeated, and the laugh was genuine but the edges were serrated. “Yeah. Maybe.” He poured himself more wine steadily. He’d learned young that if you keptsmiling, people stopped looking closely enough to see what was underneath. “Maybe I should stop being the sidekick in everyone else’s love story and figure out what happens when I’m the one on the throne.”
The silence after that was brief and enormous. Rhys reached across the table and squeezed Mason’s shoulder without comment — the same wordless care he’d shown eight months ago when he’d fixed Mason’s door with no audience — and Mason caught it, as he always did, and his eyes went bright for half a second before he blinked it away.
“You’ll find her.” Rhys’s voice was low, deliberate — the tone he used for blueprints, for load calculations, for things he needed to be careful about. “Or him. Or whoever. You’ll find your person.” It was the most words he’d directed at anyone besides me in a single social interaction, and I could see it cost him the calculated amount of emotional energy he’d have previously allocated to an entire quarter’s worth of human connection. Progress.
Mason looked at him. Then at me. Then back at his wine. “Yeah.” The smile was smaller now but steadier, and I filed the moment away in the place where I kept the things that mattered, next to the coffee ritual and the real smile and the list he’d written at five AM on the floor of his room. “Maybe I will.”
