Page 36 of What We Don't Say: Part Two

Calliope

Morning comes softly through the curtains, pale and cool, with birds moving somewhere in the oaks outside the window. I wake before my alarm and stay still, waiting for the panic to arrive in its usual shape. For a few seconds, my body reaches for old things. Sloane’s arm. Idris' quiet movement down the hall. Theo’s soft weight tucked into a nest that still smelled new. Then the room settles around me, small and unfamiliar, and I remember where I am before the grief can make the mistake crueler than it has to be.

The lockoff is quiet. My suitcase is still by the wall. My sweater is folded over the chair where I left it. The internal door is closed, and the little brass lock on my side is turned.

I get dressed slowly, choosing a soft green sweater and loose black pants, then stand in the kitchenette staring at the bread on the counter. Breakfast in this room would be safer. Coffee from the little machine would be safer. Staying behind my own locked door would be safest, if safety were only measured by distance.

But I can smell coffee through the internal door. I stand with my hand on the lock and let myself breathe before I can stop it. Dash is on the other side of the door, moving through his own kitchen, and the ordinary sounds of it reach me more gently than they should.

Comfort rises before shame can stop it. It feels too soon, even after six weeks of silence, and some loyal, ruined part of me still turns toward the house that rejected it.

My fingers turn the lock as the door opens into a short hall and then the kitchen. Dash is at the stove in a gray T-shirt and dark sweatpants, one hand around a coffee mug, his hair still damp from a shower. He turns when he hears me, and whatever he was about to say disappears from his face. He takes me in without making it feel like inspection: the sweater, the bare throat, the bite I haven't covered yet, the way one hand stays wrapped around the edge of the door frame.

“Morning,” he says, setting his mug down.

“Morning.” My voice sounds rough from sleep, and I hate that it makes the moment feel more intimate than I know how to handle. I reach for the scarf I don't have, fingers brushing bare skin instead. “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“You didn’t.” Dash stays by the stove, giving me the whole kitchen between us. “Coffee’s fresh. I was going to make eggs, but we don’t have to do breakfast here.”

The we slides through me with a strange little ache. I look at the kitchen table, the two mugs set out, the pan on the stove, the towel folded beside the sink. Domesticity sits everywhere in small ordinary pieces, and my body wants to move toward it with an instinct I no longer trust.

Dash watches me for another second, his expression changing with a softness that makes me want to hide and step closer at the same time. “Do you need a hug?”

The question is so simple that I can't answer it. My throat closes around every possible response. Need is too large a word for the way my body has been holding itself together with wire and habit. Want is worse. Want makes it mine.

Dash doesn't move. He only turns fully toward me and opens his arms a little, enough to show me the offer without making it a command. “You can say no.”

I manage to shake my head, but the motion doesn't mean no. He seems to understand that too, which is becoming its own kind of danger. His arms stay open. His feet stay planted. I have to cross the kitchen myself.

The first step feels humiliating. The second feels worse. By the third, my eyes are burning, and then I'm close enough that the warmth of him reaches me through the morning air. I stop just short of contact, and Dash waits until I lean the last inch into his chest.

His arms come around me carefully. One hand settles high between my shoulder blades, the other at my upper back, nowhere that asks anything from me. My cheek rests against his shirt, and his scent surrounds me, bergamot bright at the edge and sandalwood steady beneath it. I breathe in once, then again, and my body gives up a little of the fight it has been making against every room, every night, every unanswered name.

The sound I make is small and awful. Dash holds me through it without tightening his grip. That may be what breaks me morethan anything. He doesn't pull me closer to prove he can comfort me. He lets me decide how much of myself to put against him.

My hands find his waist. I don't mean for them to. They curl in the soft fabric at his sides, and for one breath, I let myself feel the solid shape of him under my fingers. He's warm. He's here. He isn't asking why I'm crying against him in his kitchen when I barely managed to make it through a doorway.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper into his shirt.

His breath shifts above me. “Calliope.”

“I know.” My fingers tighten, then force themselves to loosen. “I’m trying.”

“I know you are.” His hand moves once over my back, slow and careful. “You’re doing all right.”

I want to believe him so badly that I have to pull away. He lets me go the instant my weight changes, his hands falling back to his sides before I can feel trapped by the absence of them. My face is hot, and I wipe under my eyes with the heel of my hand, turning toward the counter as if the coffee maker requires my attention.

Dash looks at the pan on the stove, then turns off the burner. “There’s a diner outside campus with decent coffee and pancakes that don’t taste like they came from a box. We can go there instead.”

I glance back at him. The offer is so mercifully ordinary that I nearly miss how carefully he has made it. Breakfast here would sit too close to the hug. Too close to his kitchen, his morning, his shirt under my hands. A diner gives us tables, noise, a server, an exit.

“That sounds good,” I say, and my voice steadies around the last word.

Dash nods and reaches for his keys from the counter. “Take your time. I’ll wait by the front door.”

The diner is ten minutes from campus, tucked between a pharmacy and a laundromat with fogged windows and a parking lot full of cracked asphalt. It smells like coffee, butter, syrup, and hot griddle, and the noise hits me in layers as soon as we walk in. Silverware against plates. A child asking for more whipped cream. The low murmur of a morning news segment from a television over the counter. It should be too much after the quiet of Dash’s kitchen, but the ordinary bustle gives my nerves somewhere to scatter.

Dash steps slightly ahead to speak to the hostess, then pauses before choosing a direction. “Booth or table?”