Page 91 of Second Alarm

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"I know, Ty."

"I know you know. I'm — "

"I know what you're doing. Thank you."

"Okay."

"Don't say anything else reasonable."

"Okay."

I turn around. My face is a mess. The water is warm. His face is the face I've been looking at since forever — wet, hair stuck to his forehead, same eyes — and he isn't here with a plan. He's here because I asked him to be. He's here with his hand on me because I asked him to be. He isn't doing anything else.

"Touch me."

"Hanna — "

"Touch me, Ty."

"Are you — "

"I'm not okay. I'm not going to be okay. I don't want to talk about it. I want you to touch me. Not fix me. Touch me the way you touched me yesterday morning."

"Yesterday." He tips his head. "That was this morning, Hanna. Yesterday was the barbecue."

"Oh my god."

"Yeah."

"It was yesterday."

"It was yesterday."

"This has all — "

"Yeah."

"Touch me."

He does.

It isn't the bedroom. It's a shower with a plastic curtain and water starting to cool, and we're two people in a four-foot space with our hands on each other because the world nearly took the third leg of the tripod we've been balancing on for years. The tripod has wobbled. The only answer my body can generate to the wobble is to be held.

He holds me.

Specifically.

Attentively.

He knows what he's doing. He's known since he was twenty-three. He didn't lose the knowing in the ten years we didn't touch each other. If anything the knowing got worse for him, because Ty Brennan, left alone with a thing he cares about, pays attention to it harder the longer he's denied it — and the memory of me he carried through a decade of not touching me has been refined into something I'm having a very difficult time keeping my balance under.

"I almost lost him."

"I know." His hand moves at the small of my back.

"And if I — if I had — "

"You didn't."

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