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He waits.

“Are we exclusive?”

He blinks once.

Then he laughs.

Not a big laugh. A startled one.

Heat rushes straight into my face.

“Forget it,” I say quickly. “That was badly phrased.”

“Bea.”

“What?”

“Of course, we are.”

I stare at him.

“What did you think we were?”

“I don’t know.” I pull the sleeves of his hoodie over my hands. “We never actually said anything.”

“I thought it was pretty clear.”

“Well, it wasn’t clear to me. We didn’t… talk about it. We never used the word. And people—people assume different things now. I don’t—I wasn’t sure if you and I had the same—the same definition.”

He shuts the laptop. Puts it on the coffee table. Turns toward me on the couch so that his whole front is facing me, the body language he does when he is about to take something seriously.

“Doc.”

“Don’t Doc me about this.”

“Alright, Bea, darling, apple of my eye.” I shove him, and he grins. “I’m sorry I didn’t make it clearer. I have been so all for you, I just thought it was obvious.”

“Well, it wasn’t,” I mumble self-consciously.

“It is now,” he says. “For the avoidance of doubt and any future confusion, I have—since our first tutoring session—had eyes for exactly one person, and that person is you, and there is no scenario in which I am also looking elsewhere. There is no roster. There is no, Bea, look at me.”

I look at him.

“There’s you and nobody else,” he says. “I’m sorry I didn’t say it before.”

I am giddy.

“Okay,” I say.

“Okay.”

“That’s all I needed.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

“Because we can also have, like, an actual conversation about it. With words. About what we want it to look like.”