Chapter 7
By midnight it was clear neither of them was going anywhere.
The temperature upstairs had dropped hard enough that Dani had gone up once, just to check, and come back down within two minutes reporting that her room felt like the inside of a refrigerator and she’d rather sleep sitting up in a chair than go back to it.
Alex hadn’t even bothered checking her own room.
The living room, with its steady fire and its nest of blankets and its four solid walls holding in whatever warmth the flames put out, was obviously the only sane option, and both of them knew it without having to say so out loud.
Which meant, eventually, unavoidably, they were going to have to figure out how to actually sleep in the same room.
“I can take the couch,” Alex offered, though her tone suggested she was hoping to be talked out of it. “You take the floor setup, it looks warmer anyway.”
“The floor setup is warmer because it’s closer to the fire.
You’d freeze on the couch by three a.m.” Dani was already rearranging cushions, dragging the loveseat cushions down to widen their little nest of blankets into something that could reasonably fit two people without either of them ending up in the actual fireplace.
“Come on. It’s not that deep. We’re adults.
We can share floor space without it being a whole thing. ”
“Everything’s been a whole thing since you showed up.”
“Technically, you showed up.” Dani patted the blankets beside her, an invitation and a challenge both. “I promise not to make it weird if you promise not to make it weird.”
Alex huffed something that wasn’t quite a laugh and lowered herself down anyway, because the alternative really was freezing on the couch, and because some smaller, more honest part of her had wanted an excuse to be exactly here since roughly four in the afternoon.
They settled in an approximation of distance that neither of them fully committed to, shoulders a careful few inches apart, blankets pulled up high, the fire throwing long, moving shadows across the ceiling.
For a while neither of them spoke. The wind kept up its low howl outside, and the fire popped and settled, and Alex found herself watching the play of orange light across Dani’s face instead of the flames themselves.
“Can I ask you something,” Dani said eventually, quiet, her eyes on the fire rather than on Alex, which made it easier, somehow, to keep talking. “About your wife.”
Alex tensed, just slightly, an old reflex she couldn’t quite unlearn. “Sure.”
“Do you still love her? Or is it more that you loved the life you thought you had?”
It wasn’t the question Alex expected, and maybe that was exactly why it landed the way it did, straight through whatever careful answer she’d been keeping ready for three years for anyone who asked something adjacent to this.
“The life,” she said slowly, working it out loud for what might have been the first time.
“I don’t think I’ve missed her, specifically, in a long time.
I think I’ve missed being someone who knew exactly what her next ten years looked like.
Being blindsided took that away more than it took her away, if that makes sense. ”
“It makes a lot of sense.” Dani shifted slightly, enough that her shoulder came to rest properly against Alex’s, no careful distance left between them at all now.
“I think that’s why I never let anything get far enough to blindside me.
If you never build the ten-year plan, nobody can rip it away from you. ”
“That sounds exhausting. Bracing for a hit that might never come.”
“It’s less exhausting than the hit.”
Alex turned her head, found Dani already watching her, firelight catching gold and amber in her eyes, none of the performance or the easy deflection from earlier in the day anywhere in sight now.
“Is that why you left the girlfriend? The apartment, all of it?”
“Partly.” Dani’s voice had gone very quiet, almost swallowed by the crackle of the fire.
“Mostly I think I was scared that if I let myself want it, actually want the whole permanent thing, and then lost it anyway, it would break something in me that wouldn’t fix itself.
Easier to leave first. Easier to be the one who chooses to go instead of the one standing in the kitchen finding out secondhand. ”
Something in Alex’s chest went tight and warm at once, recognition and ache tangled together. “For what it’s worth, I don’t think leaving first actually protects you from anything. I think it just guarantees the loss instead of risking it.”
“That’s a very consultant thing to say. Very rational.”
“I contain multitudes,” Alex said, echoing herself from the cellar days earlier, and Dani laughed, soft and real, some of the tension easing out of her shoulders.
They lay there for a long while after that, not quite touching beyond the point of contact at their shoulders, watching the fire burn lower, neither of them in any hurry to close the last small distance between them and neither of them retreating from it either.
It felt different from the couch, from the wine, from the frantic unplanned collision of the kiss.
This felt slower. Steadier. Like something being built instead of something happening to them.
“Alex.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m not saying this because of the fire, or because we’re stuck here, or any of it.” Dani turned her head, close enough now that Alex could feel her breath. “I just want that on the record. Whatever this is. It’s not just the storm talking.”
Alex’s heart was going too fast, the same lurch of feeling as the couch two nights before, but steadier this time, surer, no wine to blame and nothing to hide behind. “Noted.”
Neither of them moved to close the distance. Not yet. There was something almost sacred in the waiting, in letting the moment stretch out unhurried instead of rushing toward whatever came next, and Alex found she didn’t mind the ache of it at all.
“Get some sleep,” Dani said finally, voice rough and soft at once, settling back against the cushions but not pulling her shoulder away. “Long two weeks ahead of us. Might as well not spend all of it exhausted.”
“Might as well,” Alex agreed, and closed her eyes to the sound of the fire and the storm and Dani’s steady breathing beside her, and for the first time since she’d woken up to a stranger in the middle of this house, felt something in her chest settle instead of brace.