Page 109 of Returned Mail

He takes the smaller bedroom without question. I offer him mine, well, his, but he refuses. “I’m not kicking you out of your room,” he says. “I may be wounded, but I’m not a monster.”

“At least let me get you a better mattress,” I argue.

He shakes his head. “I’ve slept on worse.”

“I know,” I say. “That’s part of the problem.”

Every time the floor creaks at night, my heart jumps. I want to go there, to lie on his bed, or for him to come to mine, but I don’t know how to make that approach. I don’t even know if I should at all.

Whatever we had going on has vanished. The banter, the teasing, everything has disappeared, and I don’t blame him. We’ve been preoccupied with his recovery, and I don’t regret a single thing.

But somewhere deep inside my mind, I can’t help but wonder…has it really vanished? Or is it simply hiding behind all of this?

We have fallen into a rhythm.

We go to his follow-up appointments together. We laugh at stupid TV shows because neither of us has the emotional capacity for anything heavy. We cook side by side, shoulders brushing, heat humming under my skin with every accidental touch. He moves around the space like he’s relearning it.

Sometimes, I catch him watching me more than the room. I let him.

I start to learn his damage. The way his hand trembles when he grips the mug too tightly. The way his shoulder stiffens when he reaches too high. The way his breath catches when he laughs too hard, and his ribs protest.

I also learned his tenderness. The way he takes the knife out of my hand when I’m chopping vegetables too fast. The way he covers me with a blanket when I fall asleep on the couch. The way he always, always makes sure I’m on the inside of the sidewalk when we walk anywhere.

I’m becoming his person, and he’s becoming mine.

We don’t say it. We haven’t kissed, and we don’t touch more than we have to. But the wanting is everywhere. It’s in the way his eyes linger on my mouth when I talk. In the way my fingers itch to push his hair back from his face. In the way our laughter stretches longer than the joke calls for.

Slow burn used to be something I liked in books. Living inside one is something else entirely.

Even as I tell myself to be careful, to breathe, to take it one day at a time, a single truth keeps beating under everything. We are one small, reckless moment away from crossing a line we won’t come back from. And I don’t know if I’m more afraid of that…or of never crossing it at all.

Chapter Thirty-Five

George

I don’t realize I’m in real trouble until she falls asleep on me.

Literally, on me.

We’re on the couch, some movie playing I’m not even pretending to follow. She insisted on a “low-impact night,” which, in Mia’s terms, means snacks, a blanket, and picking apart plots like we’re on a panel. I last maybe twenty minutes before my focus abandons any attempt to follow the story and settles on her instead.

She’s in my t-shirt and a pair of shorts, legs curled under the blanket, hair scraped up into some messy knot that keeps leaking strands down her neck. Every time she laughs, she tips forward, touching my arm, like her body doesn’t know how not to reach for me.

I don’t know when that started.

I only know I never want it to stop.

She shifts, yawns, then leans sideways and just… drops her head in my lap. Like it’s the most natural thing in the world. Like we do this all the time. And my body immediately goes rigid.

“Sorry,” she mumbles, already half gone. “You’re just… comfortable.” Comfortable. My pulse is trying to punch its way out of my neck, and she calls me comfortable. I swallow hard and force my hand to stay exactly where it is, resting on the back of the couch, not sliding into her hair, not skimming her shoulder, not doing any of the things I’ve imagined doing a thousand times in the dark.

Her breath evens out.

Her lashes flutter once, twice, and then she’s asleep. On me. Her cheek is warm against my thigh. One of her hands is curled, palm open over my knee like she meant to grab on and missed. She smells like my soap, her shampoo, and something sweet from the snacks we demolished earlier.

I stare at the TV and see absolutely nothing. I should move her. I should wake her up, send her to her own bed, put some distance between us before I do something I can’t take back. I don’t move.

Not an inch.