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Three weeks ago, I'd mumbled a complaint into her chest at two in the morning, half-asleep and ruined in the best way, and I'd forgotten I'd even said it. She hadn't. She'd carried it around for three weeks, a sentence I'd barely finished, filed away with the hair tie and the coffee mug caption and every other piece of me she'd been collecting in the dark.

"It's on the arm of the couch," I said faintly.

She was gone before I finished the sentence. She came back holding the green satin with the little gold stars in both hands, carefully, like it was a live bird she'd been asked to carry across a room. She set it in my lap.

That was all. She didn't fuss. She didn't make a moment of it. She just brought it to me and stepped back, like it was the most obvious task in the world, and like it would be the most obvious task tomorrow night, and every night after that.

I looked down at it in my lap and started crying all over again.

"Harper." Panic flickered across her face. "Did I get the wrong—"

"No." I laughed through it, wiping my eyes with the heel of my hand. "No. You got it exactly right. You remembered."

"Of course I remembered," she said, and I could see that the alternative had never been possible. She would've never forgotten.

Nobody had ever remembered. Not Henry, in two years of sharing a bed. Not the women after him. I'd spent my whole adult life explaining myself to people, my hair and my body and my needs, and then explaining them again, and again, until I got tired and stopped asking for anything at all.

She'd heard it once, half-asleep, at two in the morning. And she'd kept it.

I sat up and gathered my curls up on top of my head, loose, the way I'd done a thousand nights alone. Cam sat on the edge of the bed and watched me do it with the same total focus she gave game film, like she was learning it.

Then she reached for her own wrist.

She slid the black hair tie off and held it out to me in her open palm.

"Here," she said quietly. "This is yours."

I looked at it. It was stretched out and a little frayed, and her pulse had beaten under it for three weeks.

I didn't take it.

I reached past it and took her hand instead, and I slid the hair tie back over her knuckles and settled it on her wrist, right on top of her tattoo, which I'd later find out were the coordinates to the house she grew up in. It made sense. That tattoo represented home, and home, I'd quickly learn, was wherever my heart went. And right now, my heart was sitting on the edge of my bed, amber eyes rimmed with red, her expression earnest and honest and so unbelievably vulnerable that I found myself giving her a watery smile.

"Keep it," I said. "You don't have to hide it anymore. You don't have to keep it because it's the only part of me you're allowed to have." My voice broke. "You're allowed to have all of it now. All of me."

She looked down at her wrist. Her throat moved.

Then she picked my satin scrunchie up off the nightstand, where it lived, where she must have seen it the second she walked in, and handed it to me without a word.

I twisted my curls up with it, tied on the bonnet, and tucked in the edges. The gold stars sat a little crooked. I didn't fix them.

"Okay?" she asked.

"Okay," I whispered.

She straightened. She started to turn toward the hallway.

I reached out and caught her wrist, hair tie and all.

"Stay," I said quietly, with no armor and no backup wit. Just the word and what it meant. "Please."

She looked down at my fingers wrapped around her wrist, around the hair tie I'd just given back to her. She looked at me.

"Okay," she said.

She toed off her shoes and came around to the other side of the bed and lay down beside me on top of the covers. She pulled me in, my back to her chest, her arm around my waist, and I felt the breath move through her whole body when we settled. It was long and slow. It sounded like she'd been holding a wire tight for a very long time and had finally let it go.

I was crying again. Quietly. These tears didn't have any drama left in them. I didn't try to stop them, and she didn't ask me to.