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"Yeah." She pulled me into her side, her arm around me. I'd been memorizing the weight of that arm since the first time she put it around me, and I still wasn't used to it. I still felt it like a new sentence every single time. "But not right now."

"Not right now," I agreed.

My phone buzzed on the kitchen counter. Then buzzed again. Then didn't stop.

Cam glanced toward it. "That's your post."

"That's my post."

"Have you looked?"

"No." I leaned my head on her shoulder. "Have you?"

"No." There was a slow, heavy pause. "But I want to."

I looked up at her.

"I want to read every single comment on that post you wrote about me," she said. "I want to read them all, and I want to screenshot the good ones, and I want to put whatever photo you posted on my lock screen." The tips of her ears went red. "Is that too much?"

"Cam," I said, and my voice cracked in a very undignified way. "That's exactly enough."

The coffee was cold. I was going to make more. But not yet.

I was tired in the best possible way, and she was here, and the morning was arriving, and none of it was going anywhere. I thought about everything waiting for us. The comments and the captions and the long process of learning how to be this in daylight. The conversations we still needed to have, and the ones we'd already had, and the ones neither of us had words for yet. A Finals game on Monday. Sunday dinner in Providence someday soon. Tuesdays. Endless ordinary Tuesdays.

There was time.

For the first time in a long time, maybe for the first time ever, if I was being honest—and I was always being honest now, it was a whole new personality trait—I wasn't bracing for what came next. I wasn't calculating the cost or managing the outcome or performing a version of myself that could survive being rejected, being thrown away.

Because I was just here.

Cam was here, and she chose me.

The morning was warm, and the coffee was cold, and the pigeon had apparently resolved its grievances and moved on, and I was happy in a completely unperformed, unfiltered, uncaptioned way I hadn't believed was available to me until right now.

It was available to me.

It had been available all along.

I just had to stop being afraid of it.

And I wouldn't change a single moment. Not even the parts that hurt.

Especially not those.

24

Gamebreaker

Cam

I woke up at 5:30 like I always did.

Same time, same darkness, same ceiling. Same long body in the same king-size bed in the same big house in the hills I'd bought eight years ago to prove to myself I'd made it somewhere worth feeling good about.

Except none of it was the same at all.

Because Harper was asleep beside me.