I don't move away. I don't move at all, frozen in that specific paralysis of someone who hasn't decided yet, whois waiting to find out what they want from the thing happening right in front of them.
He stops. A breath away. Close enough that I can feel the warmth radiating off him, close enough that the distance between almost and happening is nothing, is barely air, is one small decision either of us could make.
A beat.
Another.
And my eyes close as he leans in, half-dreading, half-anticipating, when he inches to the left and his lips brush my ear instead.
"Goodnight, Crazy."
He pulls back. Stands. Takes the sake bottle with him, and the air thins.
The door opens and closes, and he's gone, and I'm sitting on the step alone in the warm dark with Gerald between my feet and my heart doing something loud and complicated and the night continuing around me as if nothing just happened.
As if everything just happened.
I sit there for a long moment. The cicadas go. The tap drips. I don't know what to call what just happened or what it means or what I would have done if he hadn't pulled back.
I'm not sure I want to know.
There’s a storm in my chest as I go to my room, close the door. I try to locate the exact point where tonight crossed from one thing into another but can't find it. There was no clear line. Just the sake and the festival and laughter and then his leg against my knee and the air changing and me not moving away.
I turn Gerald over in my hands as I try to dissect it. I loveReth. With all my heart. He consumes me with a kind of ferocity that isn’t negotiable, and I miss him so viscerally it hurts in a way I can’t put into words.
But Ian…Ian isnotnothing.
If I’m absolutely honest with myself, he has never been nothing. There has always been something between us that lives in a different register than friendship, something light and easy and warm, the kind of connection that doesn't demand anything from you, that just exists quietly alongside everything else without needing to be named or managed or survived.
What I have with Reth is none of those things.
What I have with Reth is heavy and real and terrifying, a gravitational force I walked into without understanding what it would cost me. A love that has asked me to be braver and more frightened than I knew I was capable of being simultaneously.
But it has cost me more lonely nights than I can count. More mornings waking up reaching across a cold and empty bed. More hours sitting with my phone in my hand, wanting to call someone who doesn't have a number I can dial. More days wondering where he is, wishing he was with me. Days of being completely and utterly alone.
And Ian? He’s in the next room. Right here…with me.
I love him. I do. Not the way I love Reth.Nothingis the way I love Reth. That's a category of its own, a thing that lives in my bones—but I love Ian in the way you love someone who shows up in the dark and stays until the nightmare loosens its grip.
And tonight, on that step he almost?—
And I almost?—
Shit.
I set Gerald on the nightstand.
Through the wall, I can hear nothing, no movement, just the quiet of a house where someone is very deliberately being still.
A tear slips free, and I press my hand flat against my mouth. Everything’s a mess. It’s like I’ve been caught in this web of madness, and the more I try to survive, the more entangled I get.
“I need you,” I whisper against my palm, closing my eyes as this profound sadness falls over me. “I need you so much.”
Sobs erupt as I imagine his face, those winter-blue eyes and a scar I know by touch and the specific way he said my name when it was just the two of us. Like the word meant something, like he was glad it existed. The way he held me like I was both precious and inevitable. Like loving me was the one thing in his life he hadn't been forced into.
If he were here, there would be noalmost. There would be no step in the dark with someone else, no complicated warmth, no question I don't want to answer. He would be here and the missing would be over and everything would collapse back into the shape it's supposed to be.
But he's not here.
