The truth is, I don’t think he has. I think I’m the only coward here.
We hit the bench overlooking the pier. It’s our bench now, even though we’ve never claimed it, never needed to. It’s the only place in the city that feels like a pause, a safe zone, a place where nothing has to be decided.
I sit first. He sits next to me, not touching, but close. The book is still in his hand, and he opens it, flips to a random page, pretends to read.
We watch the water. We don’t talk.
His knee bounces, a tiny earthquake. My hands drum the railing, quiet, nervous.
The city noise ramps up behind us, but here, it’s just the sound of the tide sucking at the rocks and the occasional warble of a ferry horn.
After a minute, he says, “I’m terrified, Ash.”
I want to say, “Me too.” But I don’t. Instead, I say, “You were always the brave one.”
He turns to look at me, really look, and I see it, the mix of fear and hope and raw animal hunger that’s been hiding under the surface since we met.
“Not about this,” he says. “Never about this.”
We sit with that for a long time.
I don’t know how to be here. I don’t know how to hold this moment without breaking it.
So I do the only thing I can think of. I reach out, slow, careful, and cover his hand with mine. Just for a second.
Just long enough to say, “I’m here. I want this. I don’t know how to do it, but I want it anyway.”
He closes the book.
He doesn’t let go.
The city keeps waking up. The world keeps spinning.
We sit like that, two idiots with nothing to offer each other but the thing we were both most afraid of.
For a minute, it’s enough.
———
We stay like that for a long time, or what feels like a long time, our hands together on the bench, not really holding but not letting go either.
The skin-on-skin contact is barely there, but it might as well be a live wire running through the cement.
Darius stares at the horizon, his thumb twitching in micro-motions against my knuckles, the way you’d test a surface to see if it burns.
I’m hyper-aware of my own pulse, my shitty breathing, the fact that at any second someone from the team could walk by and see us, and that every part of me wants to keep holding on anyway.
The sun’s higher now, the fog burned off, and a gang of gulls have decided the air above our heads is their personal stadium.
The city across the water is waking up, delivery trucks whining, a crew of guys in orange vests setting up traffic cones, a jogger with a dog that looks like it’s made entirely of PTSD.
For a while, the world outside is loud enough to keep us from having to talk. We just sit, and breathe, and don’t say anything, and that silence is its own kind of relief.
Eventually, though, Darius breaks it.
“I’ve never done this before,” he says, so quiet I almost don’t catch it.
“Yeah,” I say, “me neither,” and the words feel wrong the second they’re out, so I add, “Not like this. Not with someone who matters.”
