Rachel Ellis’s bedroom had that after-the-fact hush she was still learning to trust.

  The sheets held heat the way a good secret held weight: quietly, but with authority. Noah lay on his back, one arm flung above his head like he’d been defeated by comfort, the other curved around her with the lazy certainty of someone who’d stopped asking whether he was allowed to want.

  Rachel was tucked against his side, half draped across his ribs, her cheek on his shoulder. She could hear his heartbeat if she focused. She could also hear his breathing when she didn’t, which was unhelpfully grounding—steady, close, real.

  There had been a kind of dam-breaking to their intimacy before—that first week back after doing the responsible thing very badly. Two weeks apart after the discovery—teacher, student, ethics like a guillotine—followed by the messy, frantic release of finally letting themselves feel again. That had been catharsis in the obvious sense: relief, hunger, the delicious defiance of being unable to keep pretending they could live with the distance.

  This—tonight—had been catharsis of a different flavour.

  Still satisfying. Still wildly unfair and embarrassing at times. But the emotions dialed up had shifted. Less we’re together, oh god we're actually doing this, and more something tender slipping loose. Something she hadn’t realized could be held and not handled. Like she’d pressed into him and felt, beneath the heat, a place that was normally guarded—something he didn’t quite know what to do with once it was seen, and let her touch anyway.

  Rachel had once assumed physical intimacy would be simple. Heat, relief, maybe affection if you were lucky. The kind of uncomplicated thing people did and then went back to their lives.

  She’d recently learned better.

  Not because the motions of it were vastly different from her expectations—though in some good ways, they were—but because it kept carrying layers. It kept reaching places that had nothing to do with skin, and everything to do with safety.

  Her brain struggled to restart its usual logic now that the afterglow had stopped buzzing under her skin.

  It kept snagging on the same things.

  The way he’d looked at her face like it was a weather report he had to interpret correctly to keep everyone alive. The way he didn’t know how to be needed in a way that wasn’t material. The way he’d only truly softened when she’d pinned him down with her hands and her voice and made him stay in the room with her.

  Rachel traced an idle line along his forearm, pretending it was mindless. It wasn’t.

  Noah’s fingers flexed at her waist—a small squeeze, a quiet check-in that she was still there.

  “You’re thinking loudly,” he murmured, his eyes still closed. “It’s drowning out the radiator.” It was an observation delivered with sleepy amusement, like he’d accepted that she came with a background hum and he’d stopped trying to find the mute button.

  Rachel made a noncommittal noise into his shoulder.

  Noah’s thumb rubbed a slow circle against her hip. “Good things, I hope? Or are you grading what just happened?”

  “I haven’t decided on your final score yet,” Rachel murmured, trying to ignore the smile she heard in his tone. “I’m trying to figure out how to justify deducting points for making me lose my composure.”

  He made a satisfied sound—half-laugh, half-hum—and the vibration of it went straight through her chest. It was hard to think about bad things when he was like this. Heavy. Warm. Solid. Here.

  “Well,” he began, his voice dropping to that rough, lower register that did terrible things to her brain, “if the positive feedback I got in the moment meant anything, I’m not too worried about my GPA.”

  Rachel felt a flush heat the back of her neck. She refused to give him the satisfaction of seeing it, so she simply buried her face harder into the curve of his neck to hide the evidence.

  “I’m revoking your speaking privileges,” she muttered against his collarbone.

  “Understood,” he said, sounding entirely unbothered and entirely pleased with himself.

  He let the silence settle for a moment, just breathing, but still listening to the silence. “Okay,” Noah said after a beat, catching the shift in her energy even without seeing her face. “What’s the noise in your head?”

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  Rachel hesitated, and he felt it. She could tell he felt it because his whole body went that almost-imperceptible fraction more alert.

  Not tense. Just… available. He didn’t pull away; he just came online—quiet, ready. The transition from "sleepy" to "attentive and helpful and available" was so fast it made her chest ache. She exhaled through her nose, fighting a sudden wave of protectiveness—annoyed at where that reflex had come from.

  “I just remembered something,” she said carefully.

  Noah’s gaze flicked down to her. His expression stayed neutral, but his eyes sharpened a touch—the polite focus of someone waiting for an order.

  Rachel almost smacked him with a pillow. Affectionately.

  Instead, she shifted up on her elbow, making herself look casual. “Over the summer,” she said. “When we were talking about our experiences living alone.”

  Noah blinked once, slow. “Yeah.”

  “You said you’d been living on your own for ‘a couple years.’”

  Noah’s mouth twitched faintly, like he could hear his own past vagueness and found it mildly incriminating. “Did I?”

  “You did,” Rachel confirmed.

  Noah hummed. “That sounds like me.”

  She tried to keep her tone light. “It didn’t register at the time. Because I thought you were older.”

  Noah’s eyes flickered—an apology starting to rise. Rachel put her hand on his chest. Gentle pressure. Don’t.

  He didn’t apologize. He just watched her.

  Rachel stared at his collarbone instead of his face, because she suddenly felt ridiculous for asking this now, in bed, when his skin still smelled like her.

  “When, specifically?” she asked, as casually as she could manage. “How long has it actually been?”

  Noah’s fingers stilled on her hip. Not a full freeze. Not dramatic. Just a pause. Like he’d reached a page he wasn’t sure he wanted to hand her.

  Noah exhaled. “Three years,” he eventually said.

  Rachel’s brain did the math before she could stop it. Three years. He hadn’t even turned nineteen yet.

  Which meant—“Fifteen,” she said, barely audible. Noah didn’t correct her. He didn’t have to. His silence was confirmation enough.

  Rachel felt something cold lace through her, cutting cleanly through the warmth of the sheets and the soft haze of the evening. Her hand tightened on his chest without meaning to.

  Noah’s gaze stayed on her face—careful, attentive, ready to respond to whatever expression she gave him.

  There it was. That tiny, instinctive scan, as if her reaction was the weather and he needed to predict the storm before it hit. Rachel’s anger didn’t go toward him. It never went toward him. It went toward the fact that his body felt the need to do that.

  She lifted her face and kissed him—soft, quick, certain. Not a distraction. A message. I’m here. I’m okay. Don’t shrink.

  When she pulled back, his eyes had gone slightly wide, like the kiss had interrupted a reflex he hadn’t realized he was doing. He swallowed. His hand tightened at her waist.

  Rachel forced her voice steady. “Why?”

  Noah’s eyes shifted away, just briefly, to the corner of the room. Like the answer was written on the wall and he could read it without looking at her.

  He shrugged—a small, contained movement.

  “It was… easier,” he said. “For everyone.”

  Rachel hated that sentence on sight. It sounded like something an adult said to make a terrible outcome feel inevitable.

  He added, because he couldn’t leave the silence empty, “My mom remarried. She wanted a fresh start. A clean slate.” He said it with a faint, dry tone of his lips—the kind that suggested he knew how brutal the logic was but respected the efficiency of it anyway.

  “Hard to really start over when the past is still sitting at your table asking what’s for dinner.”

  Rachel didn’t laugh, but she didn’t cry, either. She just looked at him.

  When the past is still sitting at your table. That was the version he could say in one breath. It was honest—brutally so—but it was also sanitized. It framed his departure as a favor he did for her. She wanted to be happy; I got out of the way.

  She wanted to push. She wanted to dig her fingers into the gaps in the story and ask how a mother could ever look at him and see the past instead of her son. But she also knew, with sharp clarity, that if she pushed too hard right now, he would do what he always did: he would make her comfortable. He would minimize it until she stopped looking worried.

  Rachel didn’t want a minimized answer. She wanted him.

  So she swallowed the questions that were too sharp for this moment and said, quietly, “Okay.”

  The word came out as permission and patience all at once.

  Noah’s jaw flexed. His gaze came back to her. He watched her for a beat—checking to see if “Okay” was a trap—and Rachel kissed him again, because that was the policy, and she never got tired of kissing him, so it was effective in more ways than one.

  He exhaled against her mouth like the contact had knocked something loose.

  “There’s… probably more,” he murmured when she drew back. Noah’s voice stayed careful, but something in it had shifted—less rehearsed. “No, there is more. I know that answer isn’t the whole thing. I’m not trying to lie. I just—”

  He paused, searching for the logic.

  “I don’t really know where the start of it is anymore.”

  “Then we’ll wait until you find it,” Rachel said simply. “The deadline is indefinite.”

  Noah made a small sound—agreement, maybe relief—and the tension finally began to bleed out of his shoulders.

  Rachel settled back into him properly, half draped across his chest again like she belonged there, a leg swung over his simply because it could be.

  “Sleep,” she commanded softly. “I’ll stop thinking so loud.”

  “Yes, Miss Ellis,” Noah whispered, earning a well-deserved pinch to his side.

  He chuckled—a low, sleepy vibration against her ribs—and pulled the duvet up over her shoulder, tucking her in with a muscle memory that had only taken a few weeks to develop.

  The adrenaline of the hour finally faded, leaving only the heavy, warm pull of the room.

  Noah made a vague, contented sound—half-sigh, half-hum—and tightened his arm around her ribs.

  Rachel closed her eyes. The answers could wait. They weren’t going anywhere.

  And, more importantly, neither was he.