Ethan takes a step forward. Just one — toward the car, toward the open door, his body angling toward it the way a body does when it's been trained to move toward situations. Less because he thinks she needs help than because car on slope is a physical equation and his muscles solve it before his brain consults.
I catch his arm.
"Don't." Squeeze. "You." Tighter. "Dare."
He stops. Sophie looks at us. A look passes across her face — fast, warm, complicated — and then she laughs. We all laugh. But the laughing has something underneath it, the laughter of three people who were all at the same place when a bad thing happened and are now at the same place and the bad thing is over but their bodies still remember.
"I'm going to start parking at the top," Sophie says. Matter-of-fact. Like a schedule adjustment. "Better for my calves."
She says it light. She means it heavy.
"Yeah?" Ethan says.
"Yeah. I mean, not because of anything. Just — calves." She pulls her collar up. "Also I'm focusing on myself right now, so. No distractions. Including parallel parking on slopes."
One sentence. No detail.
I link my arm through hers. She links back.
"Brunch?" she says. "I found a place that does smoked meat eggs Benedict and the menu has the worst typo I've ever seen."
We walk up the slope. Three of us. Sophie finds every puddle and steps in it — not by accident, by conviction. Ethan keeps up at his pace, the catch in his hip barely visible unless you're watching for it. The slope gets smaller behind us with every step.
Above it, in the apartment I still haven't fully emptied, the bookshelf is finally fixed. The brackets he brought that night are holding up the bottom shelf now, quiet and useful and exactly as stubborn as promised.
At the top, I look back. Just once.
It's a hill. Just a hill.
II.
Brunch was loud. Sophie found the typo and made the waiter acknowledge it and Ethan ate proteins he called "excessive" and I sat between them listening to them argue about whether a smoked meat eggs Benedict constitutes a crime against cholesterol, and Sophie laughed so hard at something Ethan said that coffee came out of her nose, and I held a napkin out without looking, how you hold things for people you've known long enough that the gesture is automatic.
The hallway is narrow.
This is a fact I've known for weeks — I've navigated it carrying laundry, carrying soup, carrying the careful distance of a woman who understood that four feet of corridor was notenough space for two people and an unspoken thing. Four feet. I mapped it the way I map everything — measured the clearance, calculated the angles, determined that if I flattened against the wall when he passed on crutches, we could avoid the kind of contact that would undo me.
The crutches are gone now. The cane is by the door, for outside. The clearance is the same. The calculation is irrelevant.
He comes out of the bedroom — T-shirt, sweats, hair still damp from the shower. I'm coming from the kitchen with water. We meet in the middle of four feet of corridor and neither of us flattens against the wall.
"Hi," he says. His eyes go from my face to my collarbone and back up, and the return trip takes longer than it should, and he knows I noticed, and he doesn't pretend he didn't.
"Hi."
"I was going to get—"
"Get it later."
I don't know who moves first. It doesn't matter. What matters is that his hand is on my waist and my hand is on his jaw and the corridor feels both very small and exactly the right size, and he leans down and kisses me with the slow, deliberate care of a man learning his body's new terms.
This is different from the kitchen floor. The kitchen floor was collision — nose-bump, wrong angles, crying and laughing. This is — intention. His mouth on mine with purpose. His hand sliding from my waist to the small of my back. The warmth of his palm through my shirt, and underneath, the awareness of proximity, and his fingers tighten slightly as if registering the same thing.
"We could—" he says against my mouth.
"Yes."
His bedroom.The door open, as it's been since that first night. The bed unmade — neither of us makes it anymore, which feels like a revolution and also like laziness and I've stopped determining which.
