He looked like he was testing the structure to see if it held.
It did.
“Okay,” he said.
The same word.
Not the same weight.
This was not theokayfrom the couch with the water stain, the one with no bottom that had sounded like surrender. Not the flatokayin my apartment, when he’d decided to accept a number he didn’t like because he thought I was giving him nothing else.
This one landed somewhere solid.
I felt it.
“Okay?” I said.
I needed to hear it again, from him, with the new weight.
He huffed out something that was almost a laugh, almost a sob, neither of those things exactly.
“Yeah,” he said. “Okay.”
He sat down on the couch.
It was such an ordinary motion that, for a second, my brain stuttered. I had just said the most destabilizing sentence of my adult life and he was sitting on his couch like we were about to watch film.
He looked up at me.
“You can sit down,” he said. “You look like you’re about to run drills.”
I sat.
On my usual forty percent of his couch.
For once, the fraction didn’t feel like distance. It felt like habit , something we could change later, or not, because the important part wasn’t where we were sitting, it was what had just been said in this room.
We were quiet for a moment.
My heart was still going too fast. I suspected it would be for a while.
“So,” Shay said eventually. “What did the GM say?”
I blinked.
“I just told you I love you,” I said.
“I know,” he said. “We’re circling back to it. I just need to know if I should be packing boxes while we have this conversation.”
I made a sound that might have been a laugh, which was absurd under the circumstances and apparently unavoidable around him.
“The case is strong,” I said. “He’s taking it to ownership. He used the wordlikelyless than he did the first time.” I hesitated. “I can’t promise they won’t consider it. But I made sure they understood what they’d be losing.”
Shay nodded slowly.
“Thank you,” he said.
He meant it. Not just for the numbers.
