40 | Lost Time
TESSA
Treehouse.
One word. No punctuation. Sent before I could second-guess it.
I stared at my phone for exactly three seconds.
Then I grabbed the hoodie off the chair, didn’t bother with shoes that needed lacing, and went downstairs without turning on any lights.
The night air hit me the moment I stepped outside—cool, sharp, the kind that made everything feel more urgent than it probably was. I walked fast at first, hands in the front pocket of the hoodie, head down, thinking about what I was going to say when I got there.
Then I stopped thinking and started running.
Not sprinting—just that specific half-run of someone who has somewhere to be and can’t justify walking anymore. Past the hedge. Past the gap in the fence I’d known since I was eight.
His backyard was dark and quiet.
The treehouse sat at the far end, half-hidden by the oak that had grown around it over the years, the rope ladder hanging where it always had. I grabbed it without hesitating and climbed.
The hatch creaked when I pushed it open.
Inside was smaller than I remembered.
I sat down cross-legged in the middle, knees almost touching the opposite wall, and waited.
----
He came three minutes later.
The familiar creak of the third rung. The hatch. Then his head, then the rest of him, folding himself into the space with considerably more difficulty than he’d had at twelve.
He stopped when he saw me.
Then he sat down.
The space was ridiculous. Our knees nearly touched. The ceiling was too low. The whole thing smelled like old wood and something faintly sweet, like the ghost of whatever candy we’d hidden up here twenty years ago.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi.”
His jaw was tight. His hands rested loosely on his knees—too loose, stillness that cost something.
He exhaled slowly.
“I shouldn’t have said what I said tonight,” he started.
“The way I spoke to you—that wasn’t okay. And Melissa and I kissed, once, before homecoming, and it meant nothing. I didn't think it would be important, but I should have told you, I should have—” He shook his head, the words coming faster now.
“There’s no version of this where I get to say it didn’t matter and also not tell you, and tonight I turned it around on you instead of just being honest and I—”
“Theo.”
He kept going.
“—I was scared, I’m still scared, I know how easy it is to lose you and I don’t want—”
“Theo.”
“—I love you,” he said. “I love you and I don’t want—”
I kissed him.
Both hands on his jaw, leaning across the impossible small space between us. Soft.
He stopped talking.
When I pulled back he was watching me with an expression I couldn’t quite name.
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” I said quietly. “If you thought I didn’t want to go with you—you didn’t betray me. You didn’t owe me anything.”
He opened his mouth.
“Melissa lied to you,” I said. “I talked to my mom tonight. She told me you came over. That you thought I’d changed my mind.” I held his gaze. “I wouldn’t have done that to you. She lied, Theo.”
He stared at me.
“I waited,” I said.
“You—”
“I waited.” My voice was steady. “I got ready. I sat by the window.” A beat. “I waited twelve years.”
Something broke open in his expression.
He exhaled—long, slow, like something had finally been put down.
“She kept coming over,” he said quietly. “After. She kept telling me you didn’t want me to reach out. That I’d make it worse.” He shook his head. “And your mum—I thought—”
“I know what you thought.”
Silence.
Not heavy. Just real.
Twelve years of it, straightening out all at once.
“I joined the lacrosse team,” he said after a moment, “because that’s where the guys were that you said yes to.”
Something cracked open in my chest.
“Theo—”
“I thought if I just stayed close enough—” He stopped.
“You are the guy I say yes to Theo.”
He looked at me for a long moment.
"Always was."
Then he reached out and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear.
“We lost a lot of time,” he said quietly.
“I know.”
I kissed him again—slower, both of us leaning into it, his hand cupping my face. When I pulled back I rested my forehead against his.
“I love you,” I said.
His breath caught.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
He pulled me in, arms coming around me, and I felt him exhale against my hair like he’d been holding it for years not an hour.
We stayed like that for a while.
Then he said, against my hair: “We have a lot to make up for.”
“We do.”
His mouth curved against my temple.
I pulled back just enough to look at him.
“You remember,” I said, “what I told you about my first time? The one I’d imagined?”
He went still.
Something shifted in his eyes—slow recognition, then something warmer, darker.
“Tessa.”
“We’re already here,” I said simply.
His gaze moved around the space—the low ceiling, the walls barely wide enough for two adults, the floor that had been questionable even when we were children—and then came back to me.
“The floor hasn’t improved since 1998,” he said.
“I know.”
“There’s a nail—”
“I know about the nail.”
A beat.
His mouth curved.
“You’ve thought about this,” he said.
“Since I was sixteen,” I said.
His expression shifted—the amusement giving way to something steadier, warmer.
“Come here,” he murmured.
“I’m already here.”
“Closer.”
“I’m literally against the wall—”
Something creaked.
Loudly.
We both froze.
A beat of silence.
Then we both started laughing at the same time—muffled, helpless, the kind that came from relief as much as anything else. His forehead dropped to my shoulder. My face pressed into his neck.
“That was the wall,” he said.
“The wall is fine,” I argued.
“The wall is absolutely not fine.”
He pulled back just enough to look at me, still smiling, and his expression shifted, the laughter giving way to something steadier.
His hands found the hem of my hoodie.
I lifted my arms and let him pull it over my head.
The air was cool for exactly a second before his hands were back—moving over my shoulders, my sides, his thumbs tracing slow lines along my ribs. His mouth found my throat. My collarbone. The curve of my shoulder. Unhurried, like we had all night and he intended to use it.
I worked at the buttons of his shirt with fingers that weren’t entirely steady. He let me. Didn’t rush me. Just kept his mouth moving along my skin, my nipple, my neck while I worked, and by the time I got to the last button I’d mostly forgotten what I was doing.
He shrugged the shirt off.
I ran my hands over his chest, his shoulders, the warmth of him in the cool night air, and he watched me do it with an expression that made my breath unsteady.
His hands slid to the waistband of my panties.
I lifted slightly and he drew them down and off, and then he just looked at me—sitting across from him in the dark, knees almost touching his, the old wood beneath us, the stars above.
“Hi,” he said quietly.
“Hi,” I said.
His hands moved to his waistband. A moment, then it was done.
He reached for me then—hands on my hips, drawing me forward until I was in his lap, my knees on either side of him, the space so small there was nowhere else to be but close.
His hands moved over me slowly. My back. My waist. Lower. His mouth found mine and he kissed me again while his fingers traced unhurried patterns against my skin until I was breathing unevenly and pressing closer and not interested in patience anymore.
“Theo—I need you inside.”
He shifted slightly, one hand steadying my hip, and I felt him—warm, certain—and sank down slowly.
The sound that escaped me was quiet. He caught it with his mouth.
We stayed like that for a moment.
Just breathing.
His forehead pressed to mine, his hands holding me steady, both of us adjusting to the particular smallness of the space and the particular enormity of everything else.
Then I moved.
Slow at first—finding the rhythm in the cramped space, his hands guiding without directing, his mouth at my temple, my jaw, the side of my neck. Something creaked beneath us and neither of us cared.
His hands tightened on my hips.
“You always feel so good,” he whispered.
The rhythm built—quiet, unhurried, the two of us moving together in the dark with twelve years of distance finally dissolving between us. His breath grew uneven against my neck. My fingers curled into his shoulders. The treehouse held.
When I finally came apart it was with my face pressed into his neck and his name on my lips, and he followed a moment later—his arms pulling me close, his whole body stilling, my name low and certain against my hair.
Afterward we stayed sitting, leaning against the wall, my head on his shoulder.
For about thirty seconds.
Then I shifted, trying to find a position that didn’t involve a plank digging into my spine, and he moved at the same time, and we both ended up halfway horizontal before it became immediately clear that the floor was exactly as bad as advertised and neither of us were twelve anymore.
“Okay,” he said, from somewhere near my elbow. “No.”
“Agreed.”
We sat back up.
I looked at him. He looked at me.
“My room?” I said.
He laughed—surprised, real. “Your parents are home.”
“They’re asleep.”
“Tessa—”
“I’ll hide you under the bed if someone comes in.”
He stared at me. “I’m thirty years old.”
“The offer stands.”
A beat. His mouth curved slowly.
He looked at the sky for a second, like he was weighing his options, and then he stood and offered me his hand.
“Lead the way,” he said.
I took it.
We climbed down the ladder—him first, then me—and crossed the backyard in the dark, through the gap in the fence, up the path to my parents’ house. The porch light was off now. The street was quiet.
At the door I looked at him over my shoulder.
He raised an eyebrow.
I turned the handle as slowly as it would go.
We slipped inside.
The stairs took thirty seconds and approximately one held breath each. My childhood bedroom door opened without a sound—I’d learned that trick at fourteen and apparently never forgot it.
I closed it behind us.
We stood there in the dark, and then we both exhaled at exactly the same moment, and started laughing—quiet, helpless, faces pressed into hands to muffle it.
“We’re children,” he whispered.
“We really are,” I whispered back.
His hand found mine in the dark.
And we stopped laughing, and the room went quiet, and outside the stars did what they always did—patient, indifferent, completely unbothered by the two people below who had taken twelve years to get here.
“Hey,” I said softly.
“Mm.”
“We’re going to be okay.”
His fingers tightened around mine.
“Yeah,” he said. “We are.”