“Bash.”
“The interpersonal dynamics are,” he pauses, “complex.”
He presses play.
I can’t explain what happens over the next two hours. Bash pulls a blanket from a basket near the couch and settles it over both our laps. I tuck my feet under myself and stop protesting by the time the first episode is seven minutes in. He knows every episode. I realize this when he murmurs a line of dialoguetwo seconds before the contestant on screen says it. I look over at him and find the expression of someone who has just been caught doing something mildly embarrassing and has absolutely no intention of apologizing for it.
“How many times have you watched this?” I ask.
“That’s not relevant to your viewing experience.” He responds glibly.
I steal a handful of chips from the bowl between us. He doesn't comment on it. He just nudges the bowl closer, making it easier for me to reach. On screen, two contestants are arguing about fish. Bash murmurs a prediction under his breath, and the argument promptly escalates exactly the way he said it would. I laugh, the sound coming easier than it has in days.
Bash goes still for half a second. Then something in him loosens. His shoulders drop slightly, and the tension that has been lingering around his jaw eases.
By the middle of the second episode, I start noticing a pattern.
Every time I laugh, some part of him settles.
Like my comfort is a variable he's been tracking all morning, and each laugh is confirmation that the numbers are moving in the right direction.
He fixes the blanket when it slips from my shoulder without taking his eyes off the screen. He refills my water before I realize it's empty. When I reach for the chips and find only crumbs, he disappears into the kitchen and returns with another bowl, setting it down before dropping back onto the couch beside me in one fluid motion, his knee coming to rest against mine.
I don’t shift away.
By the third episode, I’m curled on my side against the couch cushions. Somewhere along the way, Bash’s arm ended up draped across the back of the couch behind me. Somewhere after that, I leaned into it. Now his arm is around my shoulders, and neither of us has seen any reason to comment on the progression. The television plays softly in the background. The afternoon light filtering through the windows has shifted from warm gold to a cooler gray as clouds move overhead.
I’m thinking about the production again. Not painfully, just the way you circle a thing when you’re still trying to make sense of it.
I think about the prop issue I solved before eight in the morning. The scheduling overlap. All the work still running somewhere in that building because I put it in place.
It will keep running without me now, and the thought is both satisfying and awful at the same time.
“Hey,” Bash says.
I look up at him.
He’s watching the side of my face. “You went somewhere.”
“Just thinking about set.” I reply.
He nods once. “You’ll go back,” he says. “ It’ll be a Different production with different people who deserve to have you running their floor.” He pauses. “And when you do, you won’t be doing it because you’re trying to earn the right to exist. You’ll know the difference by then.”
I hold his gaze and don’t say anything for a moment because I don’t have a clean response to that.
“Okay,” I say finally in response.
He holds my gaze a moment longer, then nods and looks back at the screen. On it someone falls into a very shallow body of water in a way that’s clearly the production team’s fault and Bash huffs a laugh and I find myself laughing too.
He settles further into the couch cushions.
By the fourth episode, I’m mostly horizontal, my head near Bash’s shoulder and his arm still settled behind me. The warmth of him reaches me through the blanket, his hand resting loosely near my shoulder. The television murmurs on, neither of us paying much attention anymore.
I’m not asleep, but I’m close. My thoughts have gone slow and unstructured, drifting between the television’s ambient noise and the particular quality of Bash’s stillness.
He hasn’t moved much in a long time.
At some point during the second episode, he settled beside me and simply stayed there. No restless fidgeting. No getting up to straighten something that doesn't need straightening. No searching for a task to occupy his hands.
