Chapter Three
The rain stopped sometime after Avery lost track of the hours.
He knew because the sound changed — the roar on the tin roof thinning into something patchier, then a drip off the eaves outside the window, then nothing but a stillness so complete it had its own pressure, pushing against his ears like altitude.
The heat hadn't broken with it. If anything the air had gotten thicker, wetter, the kind of humid that made the sheet under him stick to his shoulder blades every time he shifted.
He wasn't shifting much.
He'd worked out somewhere around the second hour that the mattress creaked if he moved his weight more than an inch at a time.
Old springs, worn down in the middle from years of one person sleeping dead center, and every time Avery so much as flexed his foot the frame gave a low groan that seemed impossibly loud in a room with no other noise to hide it in.
So he'd stopped moving. Lay flat on his back with his hands folded over his stomach like he was already being viewed at a wake, staring at a ceiling he still couldn't fully see, and did the math on how many hours were left before the sky would start doing something about the dark.
Four, maybe. Five.
His body ached from holding one position. His mind wouldn't slow down enough to let him forget that it did.
This was the part nobody understood about him, not really — not his mother, who thought his tension was a scheduling problem solvable with better planning, and not Marcus, who used to reach over in the middle of the night and physically pin Avery's knee still under his palm like that would fix it, like the problem was the leg and not the three hours of unspooling thought underneath it.
You're doing it again, Marcus would say, half asleep, more annoyed than concerned, and Avery would apologize and lie there just as awake, just quieter about it, holding his body as still as he was holding it now.
Marcus left two years into the engagement, not because of one specific fight but because of the accumulated weight of a hundred nights like that — Avery had understood that even before Marcus said it out loud, standing in their kitchen with his coat already on.
I can't keep reassuring you. I'm not your therapist. He hadn't been wrong.
That was the part that still sat wrong in Avery's chest at two in the morning sometimes, two years later. He hadn't been wrong.
The lake district didn't have city sounds to distract from any of it.
No traffic below the window, no neighbor's television through the wall, no sirens two streets over to remind him that other people's emergencies existed too.
Just the settling creak of an old building and, a few feet away, breathing.
Slow. Even. Certainly asleep, or close enough to it.
Avery lay there and let himself, for one indulgent second, actually listen to it — the rhythm of a body that didn't have anywhere else to be, that wasn't running a spreadsheet of consequences behind closed eyes — and something about the calm of it made his own chest go tight instead of loose, some perverse comparison forming that he didn't examine too closely.
He thought about his mother's kitchen. Right now, in some other version of tonight, he'd have been standing in it with a dish towel over his shoulder, refilling his aunt's wine before she noticed it was empty, listening to his father explain to a cousin's new boyfriend exactly what Avery did for the city and how demanding it was, how impressive, in the tone he used when he wanted credit for raising someone impressive.
Avery would have smiled through it. He always smiled through it.
It was easier than the alternative, which was watching his mother's face do the thing it did when he corrected anything she said about him in front of people.
He thought about the group chat that had probably been blowing up his phone for hours, sitting dead in his coat pocket downstairs.
The sigh came out before he'd decided to let it. Long, through his nose first and then his mouth, the kind of exhale that had weight to it, that pulled all the way up from somewhere under his sternum.
"You're not sleeping."
Avery's whole body went rigid. Hayes's voice in the dark was lower than it had been all evening — rougher at the edges, dragged half out of sleep, gravel over something quieter underneath.
"Sorry. Did I wake you?"
"Wasn't asleep."
"You sounded —"
"Wasn't asleep." A shift of weight on the other side of the mattress, not toward him, just a body resettling. "You've been holding still for two hours like the bed's wired to go off."
Heat crawled up the back of Avery's neck that had nothing to do with the room temperature. "I didn't want to wake you."
"Missed that."
"I'm aware."
A sound in the dark that might have been the start of a laugh, cut off before it became one. Silence again, but different now — occupied.
"You always do that," Hayes said. "Go quiet like you're waiting to get in trouble."
Avery stared at the ceiling. "I'm supposed to be at my parents' place right now.
There's a whole — there's a schedule. My mother makes a schedule every year, color-coded, and I'm the first slot, I'm supposed to be there before anyone else so I can help set up, and I am currently four hours late with a dead phone and a car that isn't going anywhere and no way to tell her any of it. "
"She'll figure it out."
"She'll assume the worst. That's what she does.
She'll assume I got in an accident, or that I did this on purpose because I don't want to be there, and either way by the time I actually show up tomorrow she's going to have spent a whole day being right about something, and I'm going to spend the next four days hearing about it. "
"Sounds exhausting."
"It is." He hadn't meant to say it that plainly. It sat in the dark between them, more honest than he'd intended.
Another pause. The mattress shifted again — Hayes turning onto his back, maybe, judging by the change in his voice, aimed more at the ceiling now than across the bed. "You call her every time she wants something?"
"Not — every time. But if I don't, it gets worse. It's easier to just answer."
"That's not easier. That's just quieter." A beat. "I stopped picking up for people who only call when they need something. Cuts the noise down a lot."
"That's not — it's not that simple with family."
"Didn't say it was simple." His voice didn't soften around it, didn't try to make it sound gentler than it was. "Said it works. You don't owe somebody an explanation every time you don't answer on their schedule."
Avery turned that over for longer than the sentence probably deserved.
It wasn't comfort, not the kind he was used to — nobody in his life talked to him like his anxiety was a policy decision he'd made and could unmake, calmly, like flipping a switch.
It should have annoyed him. It didn't, entirely.
Somewhere under the annoyance was something that felt almost like relief, hearing someone say it like it was actually possible.
"I don't think I know how to do that," he admitted, to the dark, because it was easier to say it to the dark than it would have been to Hayes's face.
"Didn't figure." No judgment in it. Just fact, same as everything else Hayes had said since the gravel lot. "Go to sleep. Won't fix itself tonight either way."
Avery didn't answer. After a while he heard Hayes's breathing lengthen out again, slow and even, genuinely under this time, and Avery lay there a while longer listening to it before his own eyes finally started to lose their fight with the dark.
He didn't remember deciding to close them. He remembered the ceiling turning from black to a deep, bruised gray, faint enough that he thought he was imagining it, and then he wasn't awake to argue with it anymore.
***
When he woke, the room had shape again.
Gray morning light through the one window, thin and flat, the kind that came before the sun actually cleared the ridge.
He could see the kitchenette now, the dresser, the shape of the door to the bathroom.
His body felt thick with the kind of sleep that hadn't lasted long enough, limbs heavy, and it took him a full few seconds of blinking at the ceiling to understand why the air felt different against his skin.
Warmer. Closer.
He turned his head.
He'd crossed it. Sometime in the night, without any memory of doing it, he'd drifted from his rigid strip at the edge of the mattress to the center — past the center — until there was no space left between him and the other side of the bed at all.
Hayes was inches away. Close enough that Avery could feel the heat coming off him like a low fire, could see, in the gray light, the rise and fall of his chest under a plain undershirt, slow and even.
Asleep, he looked different. The line of his jaw, sharp and set all day yesterday, had gone loose, unguarded in a way Avery suspected he never let it go while awake.
One arm was folded under the pillow. The other lay between them on top of the quilt, forearm marked with old grease that hadn't come out in whatever shower he'd taken, a thin white scar crossing two knuckles.
Up close, in the stillness, Avery could take in the sheer scale of him without the distraction of movement — the breadth through the shoulders, the size of a hand that could probably span Avery's whole ribcage — and something low in Avery's stomach pulled tight and stayed there, entirely separate from panic.
He should move back. He knew he should move back.
He didn't move at all.
Hayes's eyes opened.
No transition into it — asleep, then not, dark eyes finding Avery's from a few inches away with no confusion in them at all, like some part of him had known exactly where Avery was before he'd even checked.
Neither of them spoke. The gray light sat on both of them, on the small space of mattress between their chests, and Avery was aware of his own pulse in a way he hadn't been aware of anything in longer than he could remember — the humid morning air between them, the specific warmth radiating off a body that hadn't moved back either, the fact that neither of them had said a word in what felt like a very long five seconds.
Hayes cleared his throat.
The sound broke it instantly. He was up a second later, quilt shifting, mattress rising back to its normal angle as his weight left it, already crossing to the window without looking back, already saying something about coffee and checking the generator, brisk and flat and entirely unbothered.
The space where he'd been went cold fast. Avery lay there in the gray light, alone in the middle of a bed that felt too big now, and stared at the ceiling with his heart still going too hard for a morning that hadn't asked anything of him at all.