[BL] I Didn't Sign Up For This-Chapter 78: In Which We’re Shown What We Could Have Been

The merged light swallowed us whole.

When it faded, I wasn’t standing anywhere.

I was living somewhere.

***

Thursday.

I knew it was Thursday because Jamie had texted at six asking if I wanted to grab drinks at the place on fifth, and I always said yes on Thursdays because Thursdays were my off days and were bad for no particular reason and the place on fifth had good lighting and cheap beer and Jamie never asked too many questions.

I said yes.

Got changed, fed the plant on the windowsill, locked the door behind me.

The plant was a pothos, nearly eight months old now, which was longer than I’d ever kept anything alive that wasn’t me. Jamie had given it to me last winter after the promotion with a card that said *you keep showing up, maybe something else can too* and I’d rolled my eyes and put it on the windowsill and watered it every Sunday without thinking about it until watering it became the thing I did on Sundays.

I took the subway.

Read three stops of a novel I’d been working through for a month, the kind of book that didn’t demand anything from you, just quietly delivered story in manageable doses.

Got off at my stop, walked four blocks, pushed open the door of the place on fifth.

Jamie was already there, two drinks on the table, waving me over with the enthusiasm of someone who’d been waiting exactly four minutes and had opinions about it.

"You’re late."

"I’m on time."

"You’re Riven-on-time, which is regular-person-late."

I sat down, took the drink, drank half of it in one go because it’s Thursday, and Jamie launched into a story about something that had happened at work involving a printer and an existential crisis that was genuinely funny, and I laughed, actually laughed, the kind that comes from the chest instead of the throat.

The bar was warm and familiar.

My phone buzzed: a work email I ignored, a meme from a group chat I hadn’t had six months ago, a reminder about a dentist appointment next Tuesday.

Regular life.

Ordinary and warm and entirely mine.

We stayed for two drinks, then walked to a noodle place three blocks over because Jamie was hungry and I was always hungry after cheap beer, and the noodle place was loud and cramped and the soup came in bowls that were too big and burned your tongue if you weren’t careful.

I burned my tongue.

"Every time," Jamie said.

"Yeah," I agreed.

We talked about things that mattered in the way things matter when your life is small and safe and yours: Jamie’s sister’s wedding drama, my promotion and the colleague who hadn’t spoken to me since, whether the pothos counted as a pet for the purposes of breaking my no-living-things streak.

"It’s a plant," Jamie said.

"But it’s alive."

"So is bread mold."

"Bread mold doesn’t need me."

Jamie looked at me over the soup bowl. "The plant needs you?"

"It needs someone," I said. "And I’m the someone available."

Jamie smiled at that, something soft and knowing that I’d learned to accept instead of deflect.

We split the bill.

Walked to the subway together, parted ways at the turnstile with the easy comfort of people who knew each other’s rhythms, and I took the train home with my hands in my pockets and the particular quiet satisfaction of a Thursday that had gone right.

My apartment was exactly as I’d left it.

Microwave dinner, since the noodles hadn’t actually been enough and they never were. Some show that asked nothing of me, the pothos on the windowsill catching the last of the evening light.

I washed my face, changed into sleep clothes, and lay down.

The apartment settled around me, familiar creaks and the ambient sound of Mrs. Chen’s K-drama bleeding through the ceiling, a couple arguing in passionate Korean about something that was probably love.

I closed my eyes.

Reached, automatically, for the warm weight that usually....

Nothing.

I opened my eyes.

Stared at the ceiling.

The reaching had been so instinctive I’d barely noticed it, the way you reach for your phone and it’s not in your pocket and for one disorienting second the absence is larger than it should be.

I reached again, deliberately this time, for something I couldn’t name, something that wasn’t in the apartment, wasn’t in the city, wasn’t anywhere I could get to by taking a train or walking four blocks.

Nothing.

I lay there breathing.

The K-drama upstairs reached a crescendo, passionate and muffled, and I thought about the woman on screen probably falling in love with her enemy, about choices that didn’t make sense from the outside and were the only thing that made sense from the inside.

I thought about how the reaching had felt automatic.

How my body had known to reach before my mind had caught up.

How the absence felt exactly the same shape as something I couldn’t remember losing.

I thought about a thumb brushing my cheekbone in the dark.

I thought about a voice saying my name like recognition after a long disorientation.

I thought about hands learning to hold carefully after learning to hold too hard.

I didn’t know where the images came from, they arrived fully formed and certain, attached to a warmth that had no source in this apartment, in this life, in anything I could point to. 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝕨𝕖𝗯𝚗𝚘𝕧𝕖𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝕞

But they were mine.

More mine than the pothos, more mine than Jamie’s easy friendship, more mine than anything in this good quiet life that I had built and that had been built for me and that was enough and had always been enough except that something in my chest had been reaching for five minutes now and wasn’t going to stop.

I sat up.

Looked at my wrist.

Clean.

No mark, no seal, no sign of anything.

But the reaching didn’t care about that.

"No," I said quietly, to the apartment, to the good life arranged around me, to the ease of it, the safety of it, the genuine realness of it. "This is good, I know it’s good." A breath. "But I know what I’m reaching for. And it’s not here."

I stood up.

The pothos caught the light on the windowsill.

I was sorry to leave it.

I chose to leave it anyway.