Sarah stood on the sidewalk for exactly as long as it took her brain to catch up with what her body already knew had happened.
He hugged me
Not I like him. Not anything bigger than that. Just the fact of it, sitting there, too large to fit anywhere useful.
Her hand drifted halfway to her chest before she caught it and yanked it back down, glancing left, then right, like the street might have witnesses lined up specifically to catch her having a moment. Nobody. Just a guy walking a dog half a block down, blissfully uninterested in her emotional collapse.
Okay, inside. Go inside
She let herself in, dropped her keys in the little bowl by the door with more force than the bowl deserved, and toed off her shoes without bothering to undo the laces first, a habit her mother had spent years failing to correct.
She was halfway through changing into something that wasn’t jeans when the memory arrived again, uninvited, the way memories did when you were mid-motion and defenseless.
His hands on my shoulders
She paused with the shirt half over her head.
He doesn’t just do that. Does he?
Maybe he does that with everyone, maybe it’s a whole personality thing she just hasn’t seen before.
No, it wasn’t.
She’d known him well for one full day and a handful of morning greetings before that, and in all of it, Jason had said maybe four sentences about how he actually felt about anything.
So the fact that he’d looked at her and said I’d like to have more days like this out loud, on purpose, without her dragging it out of him with a crowbar
She got the shirt the rest of the way on and stood there a second too long, staring at nothing in particular.
That’s the part that got you. Not the hug. The sentence before it.
She wandered into the kitchen, mostly on autopilot, and opened the fridge without any real plan for what she wanted from it. Cold air hit her face.
She stood there, door open, thinking about the café and how quiet he’d been at first, how she’d carried half the conversation solo and started quietly wondering if she was doing too much, talking too fast, being too something.
And then he’d laughed.
A real one. Not the polite exhale he usually gave her jokes.
She smiled at the open fridge like an idiot and finally grabbed the water bottle she’d been ignoring for a full minute.
I wasn’t trying to get him to laugh because I needed it she told herself, twisting the cap off.
I just wanted to know if he was actually having fun
Which was true. Mostly true. Maybe sixty percent true, and she wasn’t going to interrogate the other forty percent tonight.
And then the confession
I confessed to someone today
The flat, deadpan delivery of
...you’re looking at how it went
which had made her laugh before she’d even fully processed that he was talking about real, actual heartbreak. And then the part that stuck harder than the joke had
...it sucked. Really sucked. But I don’t want to spend the next month pretending it didn’t happen
She took a sip of water and forgot to swallow it for a second, just standing there holding it in her mouth like her body had also paused to think about that sentence.
He hadn’t pretended it didn’t hurt. He’d just refused to let it run the rest of his week.
Huh
She closed the fridge, wandered back toward her room, and picked up a plate from her desk that had been sitting there since lunch, fully intending to take it to the sink.
She got as far as the doorway and stopped, plate in hand, because she’d just remembered the drink.
He remembered the drink
She’d mentioned it once, in passing, hours before any of this happened.
Some offhand comment about the café’s iced thing being basically illegal and he’d gone and gotten it without her asking, and then acted completely unbothered when she made a big deal out of it.
It’s a drink, Sarah
Like it hadn’t meant anything. Which was, obviously, exactly why it had.
"...Shut up," she muttered to the plate, for no one, about nothing in particular, because apparently she’d reached the point in the evening where she was narrating her own feelings out loud to kitchenware.
She finally got the plate to the sink and sat down on the edge of her bed a few minutes later, phone in hand, thumb hovering without direction.
Yesterday, had just been the guy from her apartment building who bought too much instant noodles and occasionally made a joke funny enough to catch her off guard.
Today she knew he didn’t talk just to fill silence. That he wasn’t comfortable saying how he felt, which made it matter more on the rare occasions he did. That he was funny in a way he clearly hadn’t noticed about himself. That he’d had a genuinely bad day and had still shown up, still teased her about pineapple pizza, still remembered a drink she’d mentioned once.
He doesn’t have it figured out
She turned the phone over in her hand
He’s just trying
She almost finished the thought, almost let herself land on the word that was hovering right there, obvious, waiting and then swerved off it entirely, because that felt like too much to hand herself tonight after one hug and a burger.
I just like being around him
Fine. That was allowed. That was a normal, containable sentence.
She got up, went through the motions of getting ready for bed, pulling her hair back, brushing her teeth, the whole mechanical routine and somewhere in the middle of it the hug came back one more time, sharper than before. How frozen she’d gone. How it had taken her a full three seconds to remember that "goodnight" was a word she knew how to say.
She laughed quietly at herself in the mirror, toothbrush still in hand.
It was just a hug Sarah
Pause.
A normal hug
Except he’d been the one to start it. He’d crossed the distance, put his hands on her shoulders, said the thing out loud and Sarah, who had spent the better part of an hour internally rehearsing how to sound normal today, hadn’t managed to say a single coherent word back.
She climbed into bed, phone in hand, thumb already moving toward her messages before she’d fully decided what she wanted to do with it. Something small. Something normal.
Made it home safe
Or
thanks for the drink
...or literally anything that would give her an excuse to have this day not quite be over yet.
She opened her contacts.
Searched his name.
Nothing came up.
She stared at the empty results for a second, genuinely confused, like the app had made an error somewhere. Then it landed, slow and a little ridiculous.
I don’t have his number
She actually sat up a little. They’d spent an entire afternoon together. The walk, the shop, Max’s terrible jokes, the café, the pineapple argument, the hug that was apparently still living rent-free in her chest and at no point had either of them thought to do the single most basic thing two people who enjoyed each other were supposed to do.
How does that even happen
She flopped back against her pillow, phone held up over her face, and let out a short sigh at the ceiling.
All that, the outfit crisis, the fifty plus minutes of not deciding anything, the window, the walk, the hug and she’d walked away from the entire day with absolutely no way to reach him except showing up at his apartment or waiting for him to wander into the store again like nothing had happened.
Ridiculous. This is actually ridiculous
She set the phone face-down on the nightstand, more amused than annoyed, already rehearsing how she’d bring it up casually, obviously, not like she’d spent even one second thinking about it the next time she saw him.
Then she reached over and nudged her alarm twenty minutes earlier than she normally set it, for reasons she didn’t examine too closely, and turned off the lamp.
She lay there a while, unreasonably aware that tomorrow was, for some reason, taking its time getting here and that when it did arrive, she was absolutely going to make sure it ended with his number actually saved in her phone.
[THE BOOK HAS BEEN SUCCESSFULLY CONTRACTED]