The scare hits. She yelps and flinches so hard her knee jerks sideways and grazes my thigh. The contact lasts less than asecond but I feel it everywhere, a jolt of warmth that registers in my pulse before my brain can file it under “accidental.”
“You knew that was coming? You could have warned me,” she mutters, pulling her knee back.
I chuckle. “Where’s the fun in that?”
She side-eyes me, and there it is. Just a flash. The real Ella, behind the wall I put there, fighting not to engage. “You have a weird definition of fun.”
“So I’ve been told.”
The quiet that follows is different from the ones we’ve been trading for the past couple of days. Less hollow. More like the silence between two people settling into a comfortable familiarity, even if neither of them has decided to call it that.
She gestures at the flotilla of food. “Eat some if you want. I ordered enough to survive the apocalypse, apparently.”
The offer is off-hand, not warm. But it’s the first crack in the frost, and I take it. With my attention rooted on the screen, I reach for a few fries. Then half of the untouched burger, which is still warm and obscenely good. Then more fries. Then a shrimp. I haven’t eaten like this since before Dr. Vaughn’s ultimatum. The salt and grease hit my system like a jailbreak, and something about being near Ella, about the easy proximity of her bare legs and the low hum of the movie and the smell of her sun-warmed skin mixing with the food, makes me forget to be careful.
On screen, the survivors have made it to a second farmhouse and are arguing about whether to trust the stranger they found in the basement. Ella mutters about the blonde character being obviously untrustworthy and I tell her she’s wrong, which she is. She tells me the brunette is going to die next, and she’s right, and the look she gives me when it happens contains the first real spark of satisfaction I’ve seen from her all day.
We’re forty minutes into the movie when my back finally stages its full revolt. The knot that’s been building between myshoulder blades after nights on a couch designed for decorative purposes tightens into a fist. I shift. I adjust. I try to find an angle that doesn’t feel like my spine is being squeezed in a vise. Nothing works. I press my hand into the muscle, trying to reach the spot, and fail because human arms weren’t designed to solve problems in the middle of your own back.
“Stop squirming.” Ella’s watching me with narrowed eyes.
“I’m not squirming. I’m adjusting.”
“You’ve been adjusting for ten minutes. It’s distracting.” She pauses the movie and turns to face me fully, and her expression has shifted from neutral to mild exasperation. “Is it your back?”
“It’s fine.”
“It’s the couch.” Not a question. She says it the way she’d say the sky is blue or my dietary restrictions are tragic. Fact, delivered without sympathy. “You’ve been sleeping on this thing for two nights and it’s destroying you. Turn around.”
“What? Why?”
“Turn around and give me your back. Or take your shirt off and turn around. One or the other, but stop fidgeting.”
The words “take your shirt off” coming out of Ella’s mouth in that no-nonsense tone impact my nervous system in a way that has nothing to do with therapeutic massage. I pull the shirt over my head because the alternative is arguing, and arguing with Ella when she’s decided something is like negotiating with gravity.
Then her hands are on me.
Her thumbs find the knot between my shoulder blades with the accuracy of someone who knows exactly what a seized muscle feels like. She digs in, firm and sure, and the pressure is so precisely targeted that a groan escapes me before I can stop it. Her palms spread warm across my bare skin. Her fingers work up toward my neck, finding a second knot I didn’t know I had,and the pain blooms bright before her pressure dissolves it into relief so sudden my head drops forward.
“You’re an idiot,” she says, her voice close behind me. “We’re both adults. We both paid for this suite. You don’t have to wreck your spine to prove a point.” Her thumbs drag down along the channel of muscle beside my vertebrae and I stop breathing for a full beat. “Just sleep in the bed, Alec. It’s a king. There’s room.”
She’s right. I know she’s right. The couch is too short, my back is wrecked, and the noble sacrifice of sleeping six feet from her bedroom door has done nothing except leave me sore, sleepless, and replaying the sound she made when I kissed her every night until my self-control is a thin, fraying thing.
“Fine,” I manage. My voice comes out rougher than I intend because her hands are moving across my shoulders now, palms flat and warm, and every point of contact is sending low currents through my skin that have nothing to do with knots being worked out and everything to do with the fact that this is Ella touching me.
Ella’s fingers on my bare back. Ella’s breath warm between my shoulder blades. I can feel the heat of her knees where they’re pressed against my lower back, and the thought that she’s this close, this deliberate, this focused on my body while wearing nothing under that T-shirt, is testing the roommates agreement in ways that would void the contract entirely if I let it.
I don’t let it. She finishes with a final press of her palms against the muscle she loosened, and the absence of her hands when she pulls away registers as a drop in temperature I feel across my entire back.
“Better?” she asks.
“Yeah.” I clear my throat. “Thanks.”
She unpauses the movie. I put my shirt back on because leaving it off feels like tempting the sort of fate I can’t afford to test. We finish the movie, and we don’t talk about the massage,and we don’t talk about the bed, and the distance between us on the couch has somehow closed by a full cushion without either of us acknowledging it.
The transition to bed is brief and logistically awkward the way all shared-space negotiations are between people pretending not to notice each other. We clear the room service tray. She takes the bathroom first. I hear the faucet, the hum of her brushing her teeth, the soft sounds of a routine I’ve memorized against my will. When she comes out, I go in. Our toothbrushes are still side by side in the cup on the counter. I don’t let myself look at them.
The lights go off. I’m on the right side because the left has been hers since a nightmare about a monster when she was seven, and that’s a territorial claim I stopped contesting a long time ago.
