Chapter 41 #3
And we're close in the way we've been all day—everything touching—except now it's about to be night and neither of us is pretending we have anywhere else to go.
There's nowhere to look except the ceiling or him.
I choose him.
Then he looks back at me.
Neither of us says a word.
And I feel it, the way you feel everything that doesn’t need words to be explained.
He reaches over slowly. His arm slides around my shoulders and pulls me in closer. My head finds his chest. His chin settles on top of my head. His hand comes to rest at my shoulder.
My whole body exhales. Like something has been wound tight for so long it forgot there was another way to exist.
His heartbeat is right there beneath my ear. A little faster than it should be for someone lying down doing nothing. Mine too.
"Okay?" he asks. The word vibrates through his chest and into me.
"Yeah," I say quietly. Quiet enough that it's just for this room. Just for us. "Yeah. I'm much better. Thank you."
His hand shifts once against my shoulder. Just settling. Just holding. Then it starts moving in slow, absent-minded circles.
And we lie there as the room gets fully dark.
The sounds outside fade. The campus is quiet in the way it does when the day starts winding down and people go inside and the world gets smaller.
In here it's just the shadows surrounding us and his heartbeat and the weight of his arm and I keep waiting for the feeling to shift into something complicated — into the push and pull we're so good at, into the tension that's been living between us since September — and it doesn't.
It just stays like this.
He presses his lips to the top of my head. Soft. Barely there, but completely intentional in the way Jamie Nash is intentional about everything he actually means. Such a small act means so much coming from Jamie. I close my eyes and soak it in.
"Jamie," I say.
"Mhm."
"This is—" I stop. Start again. "You're being really—I just—" I stop again. “Want to say thank you.”
I don't have the words for what I'm trying to say.
What I'm trying to say is that nobody has done this for me in a very long time. Just held me. Without wanting anything back. Without it being a game or a transaction or something that comes with a price I find out about later. Just — held me like I was worth holding and stayed.
What I'm trying to say is that I came here this morning barely holding it together over a name on a schedule and I'm lying here now in the dark with his heartbeat under my ear and it's the safest I've felt since I was in a room with blue light everywhere where I stupidly believed every word someone said to me.
Except this time I'm not scared of what comes next. That's terrifying in a different way.
What I'm trying to say is maybe the thing I've been running from and the thing I've been running toward have been the same thing all along.
Jamie.
"Nothing," I say instead. "Never mind."
Of course he doesn't push. His thumb moves once against my shoulder. Like he heard everything I didn't say anyway and is answering it in the only language he knows how to use.
"Can I stay?" I say into the dark. "If it's not too weird."
A pause. Long enough that my chest tightens.
Then his arm pulls me slightly closer.
"Whatever you need," he says. "It's fine. I want you to stay."
I let out a breath and close my eyes and inhale the smell of him everywhere.
I think about the blue room. The projector. The underwater light. Every word Marcus said that he meant completely and took back completely.
The way I held onto all of it and dissected it, like if I just understood it well enough it would stop hurting.
It never stopped hurting.
I was the guy everyone could tell was drowning but no one wanted to risk getting wet for.
And then I think about this room.
About a single bed and a broken protein bar and delivery food and a man who doesn't say much ever pressing his lips to the top of my head in the dark because I needed someone to and he decided that was going to be him. About how different those two things feel in my chest.
About how one of them broke me for years and this one just — doesn't.
This one feels like being alive.
I fall asleep thinking about that.
About Jamie Nash, of all people.
About a kid somewhere who grew up being told he was wrong for everything he was.
Who taught himself to need nothing and want nothing and feel nothing because feeling things got you hurt.
Thinking about how that kid became this man.
This man who doesn't know how to say anything soft.
Who presses his lips to your hair in the dark when he thinks you're almost asleep.
Who held on when every version of himself was screaming to run.
About how I came to Harlow with nothing left. Walls up. Rules in place. Never again. Never that close to anyone ever again. About how completely, catastrophically, entirely I have dismantled every single one of those rules.
About how I would do it all again.
Every bad decision. Every moment of it.
If it meant ending up here.
In this small bed.
With him.
I think I would have liked him back then too.