Page 10

The door wasn’t fully closed, it never is. I need the gap, I need to be able to hear and Toren is the lightest sleeper I have ever encountered. She has been awake and standing in this hallway and has heard everything.

Every word.

The beach. The warehouse. The coward speech. The love speech. The part about the wardrobe drawer.

I look at her.

She looks at me over the tops of her hands. Her eyes are wet, catching the low light from the end of the hallway and she’s not making a sound. She’s looking at me with the expression she has that I have never found a name for, the one that is not pity and not softness exactly. Not love exactly, but something that contains all three of those things and is also something beyond them.

She is the most devastating thing I have ever seen.

I cross over to her.

I take her face in my hands, the way I have done a hundred times, this specific face that I have held in anger and strategy and something I was not yet willing to name and that I am now willing to name plainly. I tilt it up toward mine and I look at her.

I look at all of it. The exhaustion she is carrying. The joy. The grief for the version of herself she had to lose before she could find this one. The love she has never once tried to hide from me, which has always been the thing that broke me open most cleanly, that she just loved me and didn’t make a performance of it and kept doing it regardless of what I gave her back.

I think about all the times I held this face and chose the wrong thing.

Not tonight.

“I love you,” I say.

Her breath breaks behind her hands.

“I have loved you for longer than I was capable of admitting,” I say. “I’ve been a pussy about saying it to your face and I am done being a fucking pussy about it. I’m saying it now. Out loud. Here.” I hold her gaze and I don’t look away. “I love you, Tink.”

She makes another sound from behind her hands that is grief and laughter in the same breath, the specific sound that only she makes, the one I would recognize in any room in any country and which does something to the inside of my chest every single time without exception.

“You told Em first,” she manages.

“I was building up to it.”

“You were building up to it⁠—”

“I needed a practice run.”

“A practice run⁠—”

“Fuck, she’s two months old, Tink. She can’t tell anyone.”

“She is nine weeks old and⁠—”

“She was the practice run,” I say. “You are the real thing. That's the difference.”

She stops.

Looks at me.

Her hands have come down from her mouth and she’s just looking at me now, no performance in it, nothing she is managing or presenting, just my Tink, the real one. The one who stood in front of me in a warehouse with a scalpel at her throat and said I love you like a fact she was reporting and who has been waiting, with considerably more patience than I deserved, for me to catch up.

“The real thing,” she says.

“The real thing,” I confirm.

Her face does something complicated and then settles. The way it does when she has landed on something true and is deciding to keep it.

I pull her forward and press my forehead to hers and I breathe.