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“I’m watching it more than you are.”

“I’m watching you,” I say, because it’s true and because I like the way it makes her cheeks go pink even now, five months in, even in the dark.

“That’s a line.”

“It’s not a line if it’s just what’s happening.”

She holds my eyes a second, and there’s a pull in it, the specific gravity that’s been between us since a coffee shop in October, and for a moment the room goes very warm and very still and I think about how easy it would be to close the last few inches.

I don’t. We don’t. Not with Bo fading into sleep on the floor below us.

It’s not a thing I have to white-knuckle anymore, honestly. Somewhere in the last few months keeping that line stopped feeling like restraint and started feeling like respect, like one more way of telling her I’m playing the long game, that I’m not after a night, I’m after all of them. So I kiss the top of her head instead, and she huffs a laugh and calls me a gentleman like it’s an insult, and settles back against my chest.

She makes it about forty minutes into the talking animals before I feel it happen.

Her head’s been on my shoulder, and somewhere around the part where the fox learns a lesson, the weight of her changes, and her breathing drops into the slow rhythm of a person who is fully, finally out. She’s had a long week, and it’s only Wednesday. The woman carries other people’s grief for a living and then comes here and carries my kid’s homework and my grandmother’s recipes and me, and somewhere in a dark living room with a cartoon fox she just ran out of road.

I could wake her. She’d probably want me to. She’s got a routine, a bedtime, a whole apartment across town set up exactly the way she likes it.

I don’t wake her.

I turn the volume down instead, and shift an inch to get my arm around her better, and she makes a small sound and burrows in, one hand fisting in the front of my shirt the way she does even asleep, and I go completely still so as not to lose it.

And I sit there in the blue light of a movie neither of us is watching anymore, with Bo asleep and the woman I love asleep against my chest, and I think about the fact that I spent ten years believing this exact thing was not for me. Not the romance. The ordinary part. A person who falls asleep on you because she trusts you enough to stop holding herself up. I built a whole life convinced I’d used up my allotment of people, that the safe move was to want less and keep the door shut and the list short. And here’s this woman breathing slow against my heart, drooling a little on a shirt I’d never wash again if I had my way, and I have never wanted anything the way I want every unremarkable night to look exactly like this one for the rest of my life.

I don’t move for the whole movie. My arm goes to sleep. I let it.

The front door opens a little after eleven. Dottie comes in on a wave of cool air and floral perfume, keys jingling, mid-sentence with herself the way she gets after a night out, and then she sees us on the couch and stops.

She takes it in. Olivia dead asleep against me, my arm pinned and useless, the movie long over, me looking up at her over the top of a blonde head with an expression I’m sure gives away everything.

Dottie’s face goes soft. She sets her keys down softly, which for Dottie is a small miracle, and comes over and looks down at the two of us with her hand pressed to her chest.

“Well,” she whispers. “Isn’t that a picture.”

“I’ll wake her,” I whisper back.

“She can’t drive home like this. It’s near midnight and she’s dead on her feet.”

“I know.”

“She’ll stay.”

“I know.”

So Olivia stays. It isn’t really a question, and we both know why.

This is a Christian house, with a grandmother in it and a ten-year-old asleep down the hall. There are lines we keep, Olivia and me, and we’ve never once had to say them out loud. One of them is simple: we don’t stay the night with each other.

But tonight is a unique circumstance and Dottie’s here, so Olivia can stay.

I wake her the gentle way, a hand on her back, my mouth near her ear. “Hey, Liv. You fell asleep.”

She surfaces slow, confused, beautiful, mascara smudged, and looks around like she’s not sure how she got to midnight. “Oh no. What time is it? I have to drive home.”

“You’re not driving home,” Dottie says from the kitchen, in the voice that ends discussions. “It’s the middle of the night and you’re exhausted and I won’t have it. You’ll take Luke’s room, he’ll take that couch he’s too tall for, and I’ll be right down the hall making sure everybody behaves.” She says the last part with a look that’s only about ten percent joke, and Olivia goes pink, and I find the ceiling very interesting.

So that’s how it goes.