They're not pretty and I've given up on them.
"The collectors will come in the morning," I say. "Not the calls—the actual people. When I don't pay by the third notice they send someone. I know this because I got the third notice two weeks ago and I've been calculating how much time I had. The answer was not much. And my car is on a road fifteen minutes from here. And this apartment—" I gesture at the ceiling holes, at the wet floor, at the books, at all of it. "—isn't a place I can sleep tonight. And I have no savings because my savingsgo directly toward the interest so the principal doesn't keep growing, and that's the best I can do, every week, and some weeks I can't even do that."
I grip the book.
The pages are wet in my hands, the paper gone soft and yielding in the way of things that have lost their structural integrity from the inside.
"I went along with everything," I say, and this is the core of it, the one beneath all the others, the thing I've been circling for fourteen months and am now finally just saying. "I accommodated. I made myself useful and flexible and present and I said yes when I meant no and I managed situations that weren't mine to manage and I made myself into the person the pack needed me to be rather than the person I actually was, and what it bought me was this. A ruined apartment and a ruined car and a debt with my name on it and the knowledge that they traded me for a better situation the moment a better situation presented itself, and I wasn't even surprised enough to be properly devastated. I was—" I stop. "I was mostly just tired."
The sob that gets out is the real one.
Not the controlled, managed kind I've been producing since I opened the door. The actual thing—deep and involuntary, the kind that comes from the part of you that existed before you learned to manage the presenting of distress to other people. It doesn't last long. Long enough to be real.
"I just—" My voice is smaller than I intend. "I work hard. I don't sleep and I can't afford to eat properly and I haven't stopped trying for a single day since I got here. And I don't understand why the trying isn't enough. I don't understand what the correct move is from this position. The collectors are coming and my car is gone and my apartment is—" Another breath. "—and I don't know what I'm supposed to do now. I genuinely don'tknow. And I hate not knowing because I always have a next step and right now I don't have one."
I close my eyes.
I wish, briefly and completely, that I could simply not be here. Not in a way that means anything permanent—I'm too tired for permanent—but in the specific way of wanting to not occupy this moment while it's this hard. To be somewhere else while the situation resolves. To skip forward past the part where I'm crying on a wet floor over a soaked book while a stranger witnesses the full inventory of my circumstances.
Hands.
They find my face before I register the movement—warm, large, settling against my wet cheeks with a steadiness that has nothing demanding in it and everything grounding. The contact is?—
I open my eyes.
Rowan is crouched in front of me.
He came across the wet floor of my ruined apartment in his formal wear at four in the morning and he is crouched in front of me with both hands against my face, his dark eyes level with mine at this angle, close enough that the scent of him arrives in full—the black pepper immediate and warm, the ink underneath it, and the dark chocolate base note that doesn't sweeten and doesn't need to. It's just present. Grounding in the specific way of certain scents that don't ask anything but make the room feel more bearable by existing in it.
His thumbs move—one slow pass across each cheekbone, the specific gesture of someone clearing the evidence not because it should be hidden but because it's in your eyes and that's inconvenient when you're trying to see clearly.
He doesn't say:it's going to be fine.
He doesn't say:don't cry.
He doesn't offer the inventory of things that people offer when they don't know what else to do—the reflexive reassurances that are meant to make the person saying them feel less helpless, and mostly don't make the person receiving them feel anything at all.
"Breathe," he says.
Low. The same unhurried register from the car, from the road, from every moment of this interaction, where I've expected a different kind of person and found this one.
"You're not unlucky."
A beat.
"We'll figure this out."
I look at him.
We.
We.
A man I met thirty minutes ago on a rain-dark road in a Cadillac, who got out in a storm to hold an umbrella so I wouldn't get wet, who arranged a tow without being asked and sent a text so I'd have his number, who followed me to a ransacked apartment because he hadn't left yet?—
We.
I don't know what to do with it.
