Chapter 3
Dear Nazareth,
I couldn't sleep last night.
Lay there listening to Paris being Paris—someone's music, a fight two streets over, a siren that showed up and left before I could decide if it mattered—and I just.
Thought about you. Not even coherently. Just you, the way you think about something that's become part of the wallpaper of your brain, always there in the background, humming.
I thought about your hands. The way you watched me. The specific feeling of being seen by someone who had memorized me before I knew he existed, and how I should probably still be disturbed by that and instead it's the thing I miss most.
I wonder if you allow yourself to think about me. I wonder if you lock it down the way you lock everything else. I hope you don’t. I hope I'm the thing that gets through, regardless. I hope I'm inconvenient for you.
Is that terrible? That's terrible.
Thank God for Ian. Genuinely. The man is a menace, but he keeps me from disappearing into my own head entirely, and I don't think he even knows he's doing it. He just…does it. Every day. And somehow that's enough to keep my pieces roughly in the same place.
That reminds me, we need more cheese.