Page 140 of Wells

She presses her foot into her hand and tips forward. I keep my hand steady. I don't pull at her or try to adjust her. I don't make myself the reason she holds the pose.

She breathes in, lifts through her chest, and steadies.

“There,” I say quietly.

Her mouth curves with concentration. “That's the first time I've been able to get all of this in place and hold it.”

She's grinning, proud of herself. Her fingers tighten around mine. Not much. Enough.

“You’re steady,” she says.

I look at our hands. “I’m working on it.”

She holds the pose for another breath, then another. Her balance wavers, and every instinct in me rises at once, but I keep my feet planted and my hand exactly where she put it. She adjusts herself. She finds her own center again.

Then she releases her ankle and comes down laughing, breathless.

I let go when she does. She looks at my hand, then at me. Her eyes stay on mine, and the thing between us turns over, quiet, like a latch giving from the inside.

The garden has emptied around us. A few people talk near the path, but they are far enough away that their voices blur with the breeze moving through the trees. Cera rolls her mat with careful hands, and I do the same, though I could not say if mine ends up straight.

We start walking without discussing it.

The path curves through the sculptures, past wet leaves and bronze shapes catching the new sun. Cera walks beside me, her mat tucked under one arm, close enough that her shoulder almost brushes mine. The almost of it takes up more room inside me than contact ever used to.

I used to think wanting meant reaching.

I used to think love was the thing a man took when the door cracked open because he was terrified the door would close again.

Cera taught me what damage that kind of hunger can do. Or maybe I taught myself, and she paid for the lesson.

She stops beneath a live oak where the branches spread wide over the path. Sunlight breaks through in thin gold lines across her face. I stop with her and keep both hands on my mat because I am not taking anything she hasn't given.

“I meant what I said at coffee,” she says. “I’m not looking to fall into anything.”

“I know.”

“And I can’t do secrets dressed up as protection.”

“I know that, too.”

She turns toward me fully then. “I need the ground under me to be real, Wells.”

The words settle in my chest, and they're deserved.

“It is,” I say. “And when it isn’t, I’ll tell you before you step there.”

Her eyes search mine.

I let her. There's no mask to hold up anymore, no shadow to tuck myself into or a version of this where I win by hiding the ugly parts and hope she thanks me for the shape of the lie.

“I can't promise I’ll always know the right thing fast enough,” I say. “But I can promise I will not build another life on something I’m afraid to say out loud.”

Her breath moves through her slowly.

"So I'll start now," I say. "The morning you left my apartment and went dark, I traced your phone. I told myself it was because I was scared something had happened to you, and maybe it was. It was also the exact thing you'd never trust me to stop doing, and I did it anyway, and you never knew. I'm telling you because you should hear it from me instead of finding out later that I sat on one more thing."

She goes very still. I make myself hold her eyes and not look away from what I just handed her.