Chapter 28 #2
He moves to straighten the dish towels on the oven handle. Adjusts a canister on the counter by two inches, apparently dissatisfied with its previous position. Opens the refrigerator, checks something, closes it again.
“Bash,” I say.
He looks up.
“Do you ever just sit down?”
He pauses with his hand still on the refrigerator handle. Something flickers across his face before he can hide it. Like I've just pointed out a habit he didn't realize anyone was paying attention to.
“I’m not doing anything,” he says.
“You’ve been in motion since I came downstairs.”
He looks at the counter. Then at me. Then he sets down the cloth he's been holding. He comes around the island and sits on the stool with a huff, like he’s proving a point. “Happy?”
“You look like you’re going to start cleaning the stool you’re sitting on.” I tease.
The corner of his mouth twitches. He doesn’t deny it.
I come and sit beside him, pulling my feet up onto the rungs. Outside a bird starts chirping somewhere in the garden.
“People are usually surprised,” he says, after a while. He says it to the counter, not quite to me. “When they actually get to know me.”
I wait.
“They expect something different.” He rolls one shoulder, loose. “A Loud alpha that needs everything handled for him and takes up all the space. That’s what they expect.” He glances at me sideways. “That’s not me.”
“I know,” I say.
“You didn’t when we started.” He’s not challenging it, just stating it accurately. “You kept waiting for me to become a problem.”
I can’t argue that.
“Growing up,” he says, then pauses, choosing his words with more care than he usually does.
“If I was useful, people wanted me around. If I noticed things before anyone asked, if I kept things running, if I stayed ahead of what people needed.” He looks down at his hands.
“It became instinct. It’s just how I am now. ”
His words resonate with me in a place where I keep the parts of myself I haven’t shown anyone.
Because I know that calculation. I’ve been running it my entire career. Stay useful, stay efficient, anticipate every need before it’s spoken, make yourself indispensable. Earn the space you take up by making sure it’s always worth something to someone else.
I’ve been doing it since my first production job at twenty-two, when I figured out that the betas who made no demands and solved every problem were the ones who got called back. I built an entire professional identity around it without ever examining whether I’d had a choice.
“I do it too,” I say.
He’s quiet for a moment. Then: “Yeah. I know.”
We sit in silence for a moment.
Eventually, Bash gets to his feet and holds out a hand.
I eye it suspiciously.
“Trust me,” he says.
“That has never once reassured anyone,” I inform him.
His grin widens, and I take his hand anyway.
He leads me into the living room, and the moment we reach the couch he grabs the remote.
“We’re watching something,” he says. “Non-negotiable.”
“What are we watching?” I ask, already fighting a smile.
He pulls up a streaming menu and navigates with purpose. I catch the title a second before it loads and I turn to look at him.
“You’re not serious,” I say.
He looks at me with complete seriousness. “It’s a cultural artifact.”
“It is a terrible reality competition show from fifteen years ago where people try to survive on a fake deserted island and it’s very obvious nothing about the island is actually deserted.”
“The production design is interesting.”
“Bash.”
“The interpersonal dynamics are,” he pauses, “complex.”
He presses play.
I can’t explain what happens over the next two hours.
Bash pulls a blanket from a basket near the couch and settles it over both our laps.
I tuck my feet under myself and stop protesting by the time the first episode is seven minutes in.
He knows every episode. I realize this when he murmurs a line of dialogue two seconds before the contestant on screen says it.
I look over at him and find the expression of someone who has just been caught doing something mildly embarrassing and has absolutely no intention of apologizing for it.
“How many times have you watched this?” I ask.
“That’s not relevant to your viewing experience.” He responds glibly.
I steal a handful of chips from the bowl between us.
He doesn't comment on it. He just nudges the bowl closer, making it easier for me to reach.
On screen, two contestants are arguing about fish.
Bash murmurs a prediction under his breath, and the argument promptly escalates exactly the way he said it would.
I laugh, the sound coming easier than it has in days.
Bash goes still for half a second. Then something in him loosens. His shoulders drop slightly, and the tension that has been lingering around his jaw eases.
By the middle of the second episode, I start noticing a pattern.
Every time I laugh, some part of him settles.
Like my comfort is a variable he's been tracking all morning, and each laugh is confirmation that the numbers are moving in the right direction.
He fixes the blanket when it slips from my shoulder without taking his eyes off the screen.
He refills my water before I realize it's empty.
When I reach for the chips and find only crumbs, he disappears into the kitchen and returns with another bowl, setting it down before dropping back onto the couch beside me in one fluid motion, his knee coming to rest against mine.
I don’t shift away.
By the third episode, I’m curled on my side against the couch cushions.
Somewhere along the way, Bash’s arm ended up draped across the back of the couch behind me.
Somewhere after that, I leaned into it. Now his arm is around my shoulders, and neither of us has seen any reason to comment on the progression.
The television plays softly in the background.
The afternoon light filtering through the windows has shifted from warm gold to a cooler gray as clouds move overhead.
I’m thinking about the production again. Not painfully, just the way you circle a thing when you’re still trying to make sense of it.
I think about the prop issue I solved before eight in the morning. The scheduling overlap. All the work still running somewhere in that building because I put it in place.
It will keep running without me now, and the thought is both satisfying and awful at the same time.
“Hey,” Bash says.
I look up at him.
He’s watching the side of my face. “You went somewhere.”
“Just thinking about set.” I reply.
He nods once. “You’ll go back,” he says. “ It’ll be a Different production with different people who deserve to have you running their floor.” He pauses. “And when you do, you won’t be doing it because you’re trying to earn the right to exist. You’ll know the difference by then.”
I hold his gaze and don’t say anything for a moment because I don’t have a clean response to that.
“Okay,” I say finally in response.
He holds my gaze a moment longer, then nods and looks back at the screen. On it someone falls into a very shallow body of water in a way that’s clearly the production team’s fault and Bash huffs a laugh and I find myself laughing too.
He settles further into the couch cushions.
By the fourth episode, I’m mostly horizontal, my head near Bash’s shoulder and his arm still settled behind me. The warmth of him reaches me through the blanket, his hand resting loosely near my shoulder. The television murmurs on, neither of us paying much attention anymore.
I’m not asleep, but I’m close. My thoughts have gone slow and unstructured, drifting between the television’s ambient noise and the particular quality of Bash’s stillness.
He hasn’t moved much in a long time.
At some point during the second episode, he settled beside me and simply stayed there. No restless fidgeting. No getting up to straighten something that doesn't need straightening. No searching for a task to occupy his hands.
Watching him now, I realize this is what Bash looks like when he's actually resting. When nothing needs his attention, and no one is asking anything of him.
When he finally lets himself be still.
He’s still watching the screen. But I can feel his attention split, the way it always is, one part on whatever’s in front of him and one part on me. The way you’re aware of things you’ve decided matter.
I think about this morning. Elias’s breathing in the early dawn. Adrian’s hands folded on the counter before he asked me a question that could have cost him everything. Bash finding an activity that takes my mind off of everything.
I think about a room that was decorated before I ever decided to sleep in it. About snacks waiting in the pantry, blackout curtains already hanging, and someone researching blanket weights while I was still blocks away arguing with myself about whether I needed any of this.
I think about all of it, and a truth I've been circling for days finally settles into place.
It's not the heat.
That pull is there too, impossible to ignore, but this is something else entirely.
What I feel right now, warm and half-asleep against Bash's shoulder while he watches terrible television and pretends not to be monitoring whether I'm comfortable, has nothing to do with biology.
I genuinely like him.
And not because my instincts tell me to or because my body is changing.
Just because he's Bash.
On screen, someone dramatically accuses someone else of stealing their bag of trail mix.
“This is the best episode.” Bash murmurs
“They’re all your best episodes,” I say, my voice gone soft with almost-sleep.
I feel him smile more than I see it, a small shift in his posture as his hand adjusts slightly near my shoulder.
The television plays on. The house is warm.
And I let myself have this.