He went still.
Not asleep — I knew what that looked like. Something else. Aware, suddenly, of the exact same thing I was aware of.
We looked at each other.
I didn’t move.
He didn’t move.
Neither of us even breathed.
And then he laughed at something on screen that wasn’t funny and reached over and shoved my shoulder and the moment dissolved like it was never there.
I let it.
We were good at that.
• • •
Then in November he mentioned a girl.
Someone from school. I don’t even remember her name now — she was gone by spring, barely a footnote. But the way he said it was different from how he’d talked about girls before. Less abstract.
More real.
I nodded along the way I always did.
Said the right things.
And somewhere in the middle of it something clicked into place in my chest. Quiet and final, like a key turning in a lock.
That’s what that is.
That’s what I am.
I didn’t say it out loud.
I wasn’t ready for it to be real yet.
But I knew.
And knowing, it turned out, was its own kind of loneliness.
• • •
His dad was worse this year.
I didn’t know the details. Cassian wouldn’t give them and I wouldn’t ask. But I could measure it in other ways — some nights he’d just lie there staring at the ceiling for an hour before he finally exhaled.
I’d pretend to be asleep.
Give him the privacy of thinking no one was watching him come back to himself.
It felt like the least I could do.
• • •
That was the year I started understanding something about the way I loved him.
