"Then why are you on the floor?"
He glances up at me over his glasses. "I want to be near you lot."
He says it simply, like it's obvious, like the floor in front of the couch is an entirely reasonable place to be. Then he goes back to his book.
I look at Malcolm. He shrugs.
I glance at Rhys. He looks at Finn on the floor with an expression that might be fond, might be exasperated, might be both.
We watch something on the TV that nobody is particularly invested in. The conversation drifts in and out—Malcolm and Finn resuming some argument from earlier in the day about something neither of them will remember by tomorrow. Alex appears from the kitchen with sliced banana bread on a plate and sets it on the coffee table. Rhys eats three pieces with no comment and Finn reaches up from the floor to take two.
At some point I stop watching the television.
I stop thinking too.
Malcolm's purr moves through me. Rhys's warmth is solid against my other side. Finn's presence on the floor is a comfortable weight, his hair visible just below the edge of the cushion.
I close my eyes.
Just for a second.
***
I wake up slowly.
The room is dim. The light has shifted. It’s later afternoon now, edging toward evening. The television is still on, volume turned low. Malcolm and Rhys are both asleep, Malcolm's head tipped back, Rhys entirely still in how he sleeps, like he learned not to move in his sleep a long time ago and never unlearned it.
Finn is asleep on the floor, curled on his side with the blanket pulled up, book face-down beside him.
I sit there taking all of them in.
Then I slip out from under the blanket, moving slowly, stepping over Finn's legs, and go to find Alex.
He's on the porch in one of the wooden chairs, facing the woods, forearms resting on his knees. He’s not scanning the surroundings for danger for once. He’s just… present. Like he’s finally allowing himself to inhabit this moment fully.
I take the chair next to him.
The woods are the deep green-gold of late afternoon, light coming through the canopy in broken pieces, something moving in the underbrush far off. It smells like pine and damp earth and the last of the day.
"How are you feeling?" I ask.
He's quiet. Then: "Hopeful."
"Me too," I say.
We sit with that for a while.
"I've been thinking," Alex says eventually. He sounds even but careful underneath, the kind of careful that means he's been sitting with it for a while and is only now deciding to say it. "About how long we waited. How long we watched what was happening to you and didn't move faster."
I look at him.
"You got hurt," he says. "Badly. And I know the reasons we waited… but I'm still having a hard time living with it."
"Alex—"
"You were right there,” he says. "Fifty feet from our door. And we watched your scent suppress and you got quieter and we didn't—" He stops.
"You didn't have a lot of choices," I say.
