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ONE
He’s just a guy at the bar.
She’s bored and stressed and she has 1500 words left to write, but she’s here. It’s dingy, her boots sticking to the floor with every step, but the liquor is cheap and it’s only four blocks from her apartment. The bartender puts two shots of vodka in front of her as requested. They burn her throat and she almost gags, so she orders a lemonade.
He’s three stools away, a full beer glass bubbling next to the newspaper in front of him.
No one reads a physical newspaper these days.
“You know the foam is predominantly created by a protein in the barley called Lipid Transfer Protein 1, because it uses the carbon dioxide brewed into the beer to escape the water.”
He glances up at her and turns his whole body, letting her talk about hydrophobicity for eight minutes before he tells her about its role in nature. Before she knows it, they’ve talked about lack of attraction for half an hour and she realises that’s not at all the case here.
(His curls are cute and she’s always had a soft spot for smart guys with puppy dog eyes.
His curls are even cuter between her thighs, and his tongue isn’t just good with a snarky remark.)
When he leaves, he has this goofy grin like her handjob had bought about world peace, and he kisses her cheek.
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Six weeks pass before she spots him again.
Different bar, different city.
He’s chatting to a group of friends and she’s halfway into schooling the guy trying to pour tequila down her throat about how his personal take on modern feminism is horrifically wrong.
If he spots her, she doesn’t care.
She makes out with a blonde in the back corner because she can, then heads back to her dad's place to pick at leftovers and take advantage of the cable.
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As a rule, she doesn’t sleep with anyone more than once.
It’s less messy and she’s only interested in the endorphin rush, has no need for anyone lingering around.
But the pickings are slim and he walks in a half-hour before closing, just as she’s contemplating spending her evening with her vibrator. There’s a paper under his arm, a burgundy shirt accentuating the colour of his eyes.
He remembers her, exchanges for too many pleasantries for her current level of patience.
He takes her to his place when she asks and lets her ride him until she’s orgasmed three times and his chest is flushed a pretty shade of pink with the effort to control himself.
She comes back from the bathroom dressed and ready to go. He tells her to stay, if she wants to.
She laughs twice and lets the door slam behind her.
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She surfaces from finals week with so much tension in her shoulders that she’s probably developing a hunchback. Plus she’s exhausted and definitely deserves a decent slice of pizza, so she hops on the subway and heads to her favourite joint.
While she’s waiting to pay she sees windswept curls poking out of a dark red hoodie, and she raps her knuckles on the glass until he glances up, a friendly smile stretching across his face. There’s no expectation in the short, easy conversation they share as she eats her food, and when he mentions finishing finals the day before, the invitation to celebrate together slips out before the idea can even be considered.
His place is closer, and he fucks her once in the kitchen and twice into his mattress, until she’s so relaxed that when he asks her to stay she’s already half asleep.
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It’s the first time she’s slept over after a hookup, and when she wakes up to the warm weight of his arm across the small of her back, she panics.
He stirs before she can formulate a plan on how to escape, but his coffee is decent and he makes an even better grilled cheese.
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They swap numbers, and three days later he’s pushing into her against her bedroom wall. It’s the first time he moans her name, and she sucks hard at his throat in retaliation.
“You’re just so… so pretty.”
(She's never liked the word 'pretty', doesn't believe in society's need to label women based purely on their appearance, but he says it in this way like he means more than what he's said, like he truly believes it, and suddenly the word doesn't seem quite so ugly.)
She pushes aside the worry of if he’s getting too close and focuses on the way his tongue laves over her breast.
A week later he’s admiring her bookshelves as she licks down his chest, and says, “So, you’re really fucking smart.”
She removes herself from his abs and snaps, “You're not here to make comments, you’re here because fucking myself isn’t enough fun.”
She dry humps him like a hormonal teenage boy to punish him, doesn’t even let his fingers get past her waist, but it just makes his eyes darken hungrily when she instructs him to sit on his hands to avoid temptation.
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It's an arrangement of mutually assured satisfaction.
She doesn't have to waste precious studying time at bars, and he gets to live the dream of sex without commitment, or whatever his reason is for letting her fuck him whenever she fancies it.
She doesn't ask because she doesn't care.
(He always smells like he's showered just for her, and he learns pretty quickly what she likes and what makes her tick. He knows by the way she greets him whether she wants to chat first, and she notices he buys her favourite tea after she lets him sleep over for the first time.
It should probably be setting off some alarm bells, but he's an engineering major who's fantastic with his hands so she ignores it.)
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Three months into their unofficial arrangement, they’re bickering over what to watch with the Thai food she’d bought over. He spills his beer in the height of his passionate plea for a romcom and without pausing for breath, she grabs a clean dishcloth from the kitchen so he can clear up the puddle.
Now who’s getting too familiar.
She makes her excuses and leaves before he can do any of the ten filthy things he’d promised over text that morning.
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(When he texts her a cheesy animal meme later on, she realises she's smiling not because it's funny, but because of the person who sent it.)
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There’s a packet of her favourite gummy worms on her welcome mat when she gets back from class the next day. She sends him a message to tell him she’s out of town for two weeks, heads out to the bar where they’d met and goes home with the bartender who sometimes gives her free drinks.
He’s sloppy and can’t figure out the right angle to make her knees give out, and she doesn’t believe in faking it so cuts him off and holes up in her apartment alone for the rest of the weekend.
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He doesn’t text her after the two weeks is up, and she goes back to how life was before she met him.
It feels a little bit different, a little bit off, and she distracts herself with studying so she can’t analyse the particulars.
TWO
Christmas beckons her home, where she strings lights and tinsel with her Dad, meets the one high school friend she’s hung on to for coffee. She volunteers at the soup kitchen, reads three books, cooks a better turkey than last year, and falls asleep during the first viewing of The Muppet’s Christmas Carol, so has to watch it again.
Her friend invites her to a rooftop party for New Year's Eve. Dressed in her tightest jeans, she meets her friend at the subway and gets ditched within moments of entering the building. She busies herself with finding enough alcohol for a pleasant buzz and raiding the kitchen cupboards for snacks.
“Second door to your left, behind the fryer.”
Those puppy dog eyes crinkle with an easy smile when she turns to the intrusion. It’s been months, so long that she’d forgotten all about the brief moment she’d seen him in the city, and his sudden presence catches her off guard. He nods toward the aforementioned cupboard and she busies herself with reaching into the back, arm fully extended.
When she pulls it back she’s delighted to discover a bag of pretzels. “I’m not sharing,” she tells him as she rips open the packet.
“I don’t need a burglary wrap on my record.”
“I will rat you out as an accessory to this crime.”
He bites his lip and it makes her stomach do a weird swooping thing. “Can I really be an accessory when this is my party?”
She reluctantly shares her prize, gets drunk on cheap liquor, and kisses him softly at midnight.
”If that’s any indication of the year to come, then it’s gonna be the best year of all time.”
She quirks an eyebrow.
”Even better than the year I got my braces off, and that was a great year.” He leans in close. “My aunt won $100 on a scratch card.”
He doesn't leave her side all night, and she wonders if he's missed her too. When she gets home at 6 am she has a blossoming headache and a fully formed smile.
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She texts him when classes begin again, and he drops by her apartment that afternoon to stream movies and eat their body weight in spring rolls.
There's a tingling in her cheek from where he kisses her goodnight, and she thinks she wouldn't mind having someone lingering around if it was the boy with the puppy dog eyes.
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The date is a happy accident.
He spots her after class and offers to walk her home, but she’s hungry so they find a little diner that serves waffles all day. He puts whipped cream on her nose and laughs when she can’t lick it off. He tells her about growing up with his aunt and uncle and she tells him about her dad and the sister on the other side of the world.
When they arrive at her door he stutters a goodbye and she tugs at his belt until he stumbles inside and she kisses him, over and over, his content little sighs like a beautiful symphony to her ears.
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They go on three more dates, and at the end of the third, he buys her ice cream and asks in the softest voice imaginable if she'll be his girlfriend.
(She can't stop smiling and it hurts her cheeks but she doesn't care, because he kisses her like it's his favourite thing to do in the world, like she's the most valuable thing he's ever held.
She never wants to let go, thinks she might adore him too fiercely for words.)
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If she wasn’t so busy with college, she insists, she would have worked it out much quicker.
He looks after her when she gets the flu without a care.
He keeps weird hours, slipping out when he thinks she’s asleep or turning up at 3am, breathless and with treats from the bakery she loves four stops in the wrong direction of his apartment.
Sometimes he flinches when her greedy hands explore his body, and she feels little cuts, already half healed, and he’d engage his alarmingly effective distraction technique of licking between her thighs until she’s a quivering mess. After, she’d find ways of caressing the spot, all signs of distress gone.
He doesn’t hide the nightmares well, and he mutters impossible words in his sleep as he clings to her, things about aliens and magic and I don’t want to go.
She’s about 67% sure she’s got it sussed when she raids his closet one day for the sapphire toned shirt that makes his eyes sparkle and something red and blue and unmistakable pokes haphazardly out of a false floorboard.
“I can explain,” he stammers when she asks him which shade of blue he prefers.
“At least now I know who you’ve been cheating with.”
She smiles when he flails and swears, I was going to tell you, kisses away every apology he tries to lay at her feet, because a lot of the world doesn’t make sense but her boyfriend being a crime-fighting acrobat in an expensive onesie is not one of those things.
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He meets her dad over Spring break and peppers his speech with fancy words she’s taught him like vermillion and absquatulate and omphalos, because the quickest way to this English professor’s heart is a varied vocabulary.
(When he leaves, her dad ruffles her hair like he did when she was a kid, and says, “If he’s willing to try that hard, he must be a keeper.”)
She meets his Aunt and his best friend the next day, and they're so kind and wonderful and sweet that when they retire to his room she can’t even bring herself to defile his childhood bed in fear of disrespecting the house rules.
(When his aunt hugs her goodbye, she whispers, “Thank you for making him smile.”
Her heart grows three sizes and she wonders if this it what every poet has spent millennia trying to put into words.)
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She has a drawer at his place because she always forgets to pack a bag, and he has space in her closet because she like wearing his things when he isn't around.
He helps her with grad school applications and she teaches him how to cook meals that contain vegetables.
He tells her about every animal he sees on patrol until the adrenaline's gone and he can sleep, his head on her chest because he likes to hear her heart beat.
Being with him is effortless. He makes her heart happy.
The way he makes her feel is like watching a snow storm in front of the fireplace with a blanket and a hot chocolate. All the chaos that comes with a double major, the stress and panic over grad school, he soothes with just his presence, grounding her when she feels like she might get swept away with it all.
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They graduate.
She's not done with school yet, and he has a job lined up with his old mentor's company, and they’re gonna be four hours away from each other but he tells her in no uncertain terms that, “I’m not letting you go. We’ll make it work.”
They fly out to see her sister’s family for a week and then he’s working and she’s packing and time moves too fast, her moving day upon them in a rush of emotions that claw at her chest when she says goodbye.
After her dad finishes settling her in to her new home, she curls around the pillow that smells like his shampoo and refuses to cry.
(She loves him.)
(She hasn’t told him.)
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“We’ll make it work,” he’d promised.
And they do, for a while.
She doesn’t have a lot of spare time around the demands of law school and her job at the coffee shop, and he’s working so hard to prove that he has what it takes, as well as manage his side hustle of fighting bad guys and helping kids cross the street.
He spends three weekends in her bed, worshipping her over and over. Every time he thrusts into her she focuses on cataloguing exactly how it feels, how the rough skin of his hands electrify her skin, how it tastes when he pants her name into her mouth.
(She rolls her hips over him for the last time before Christmas break and wonders when she’ll find the courage to tell him how she feels.)
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They kiss as one year ticks into the next, surrounded by everyone he knows and a bunch of people he doesn’t.
A year ago, it had been the start of something.
It tastes a little different now.
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She cancels first.
He bails next.
They fight and scream and they tell each other after that it’s okay, they’re okay.
He goes away for a mission without telling her and she watches it unfold on the news until she throws up her breakfast and phones his aunt so they aren’t alone.
“I’m okay,” he tells her when he calls, his tone suggesting otherwise.
(She doesn’t know when they’d started using that word as a way to lie to each other.)
He crawls through her window hours later, smelling of sweat and smoke and remorse. She washes the ash from his hair, runs her hands over the mottling of bruising along his left side, re-bandages the hole in his shoulder.
It’s the first time in three months that he falls asleep in her arms, and even though his wounds have mostly healed by the morning, she feels something that’s still broken between them, something no confession to his resting heart will fix.
He goes home the next day, a sadness in his eyes that mirrors her own.
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The way she misses him is visceral, and some days it's worse than others.
She misses their strolls through the park, the way he poked his tongue out when he was puzzling over something particularly difficult. She misses the way he hums when he cooks and how he can never seem to figure out how to make her tea just right. She misses his hands and his soft hair and how he calls her 'babe' in public because he knows it annoys her.
She misses when it was simple, when being with him was as easy as breathing.
Now there's a distance between them no matter how close he is.
She doesn't want to lose him, but maybe she already has.
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“Do you want to be with him?” her sister asks through the screen as she cradles her daughter to her chest.
“Of course I do.”
“Then make it work.”
She sighs. “I don’t think it’s that easy.”
“But you love him.”
“I do.”
“So what’s the problem?”
(She watches her younger sister, now three years older than her, who is settled into a life with her high school sweetheart that she’d followed to the other side of the world. She doesn’t understand the need for things outside of love. She doesn’t get why you wouldn’t throw yourself head first into something that makes you happy.)
Weeks pass, and they drift in this state of denial like ignoring the problem will somehow fix it, but it’s festering, poisoning them from the inside.
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She wakes up alone.
He’s staring into his cup of coffee when she finds him in the kitchen, white knuckles wrapped around the ceramic.
The tea he’s brewed for her is now lukewarm.
The sheets had been cold.
She links their fingers and when he finally looks at her, his eyes are red and wet.
“I know,” she whispers.
“I don’t know why,” he cries. When she doesn’t say anything, just strokes her thumb over the pulse in his wrist, he asks, “What do we do?”
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They agree to a breather.
There’s only two months until the summer, she assures him, and then she’ll be back in the city for her clerkship. The time will fly by, and they can reassess with a new sense of clarity.
She tries to be positive, even though he's always been the optimist in their relationship. Those puppy dog eyes were never supposed to be filled with the quiet acceptance of their end.
She wants to tell him that she loves him, but instead she holds him and says, "We can make it work.”
Her heart still breaks. She cries into the pillow that smells like his shampoo.
THREE
She heads back to the city with a determination in her step that would make the fiercest politician tremble in fear. She has a suitcase and a notebook full of answers, and she heads straight to his accommodations at the facility, hair clinging to her damp forehead in the heavy summer heat.
(She gets it now. Has spent time studying the relationships around her, the great love stories that exist in the pages of her books, listening to every gentle strum of the guitar as musicians old and new lament over lost loves. She can fix them; she can heal them.
They'd been young and dumb and in love, thought they were above such trivial matters of time and space, but they have the summer to be together and to work on being young and a little bit wiser.
And she misses him.
Fuck, she misses him.)
His aunt lets her in, her smile tight, and she watches him sleep from the door. He looks so peaceful, his curls a little too long around his ears, the shirt she got him for his birthday stretching across his chest.
She chews on her thumbnail until she taste blood. “How long?”
“3 days.”
The ventilator hisses as it forces oxygen into his lungs. There’s a halo of tubes and wires surrounding his face, trailing along the floor of the medical bay. White bandages wrap around his head, his arms, his ribs. The steady beat of his heart on the monitor is the only comfort.
“When will he—“
“They don’t know.” His aunt clears her throat, her voice watery. “There’s a chance that he won’t… They don’t know.”
She sits down next to his best friend and lets him cry into her shoulder, lets his grief smother her own until she's numb.
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His aunt has fallen into the habit of talking to him whenever she can manage to be within six feet of his bed, rambling on and on about nothing at all.
His best friend just stares at him, like if he looks away for even a moment he’ll disappear.
And she... She throws herself into work.
(He wouldn't want her to give up the clerkship, she knows that, and he's in the capable hands of the very best doctors in the world who know how to work with his enhancements. The city doesn't know their defender has been put into a coma to save him; doesn't know that in all the battles he's fought, it was a simple accident that nearly killed him; doesn't know that when her boss commends her work ethic a little piece of her crumbles.)
She takes to creeping in after midnight, when a large green man who once saved half the universe has carried the pair keeping vigil at his side to beds in the next room. She sits at his feet and reads aloud, the whir of machinery like a metronome, usually from the case files she’s sorting through, the odd joke about his participation in their arrest.
It’s been a week, and everyone keeps saying no change is good. His physical wounds have been gone for days, and the green man assures her that it’s all up to his brain now.
On day 8, she rolls her eyes and says, “If you didn’t want to talk, you could have just sent a pigeon or something.”
On day 11, she scrubs at her eyes until the tears retreat and snaps about him being an idiot for running directly into an explosion, just for some little girl’s lost doll.
On day 19, she pinches his arm and tells him he doesn’t get to die. She’s not finished with him yet.
On day 23, the doctors tell them his brain function is improving.
"Keep talking to him, he seems to be responding," the doctor says, and his aunt nudges her like she knows all about her late night trips, how she's spent hours talking to him in the hope that he'll reply. She nudges her back for spying, then they hold each other and cry for the boy they love.
On day 32, she tells him that she wants to talk to him forever, if he’ll have her.
His answering smile takes her breath away.
(It's not quite 'I love you,' but somehow it means so much more.)
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At the end of the summer, he drives her to the airport.
They’ve talked at length about them, where they stand, and how they need to learn to grow together instead of trying to stay the same. They want to try again, want to prove distance doesn’t have to change how much they love each other. He's holding her notebook on 'how to be in love and succeed' and it feels like that kiss on New Years; the start of something good.
"I love you," he says.
"I love you, too," she says.
(The words come easily to her now, whispered over and over as he recovered, under the covers with flashlights and gummy worms, on his favourite rooftop that overlooks the park, the city lights twinkling prettily. When she tells him so, he just stares at her and agrees in that way where he's not really talking about the lights, and she kisses him all over his face and then refuses to hold his hand because of his horrific levels of corny. On the way home he mouths at her neck until she's breathless and his hand is in hers again, but she forgives him because she loves him.)
He kisses her until she forgets her gate.
He kisses her with the quiet confidence that they’re going to make it.
He kisses her and he tastes like home.
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"Don't text and swing," she tells him for the 600th time since that clip of him crashing into the side of a bus went viral.
"Just wanted to say goodnight." She can hear the distant thwip of his webs. "And I haven't heard your voice today."
Part of the ‘how to’ guide states they should talk on the phone once a day. They've gotten better at making time for each other, be it three hours while they watch shitty tv or two minutes to say good morning and have a nice day. Before, she had thought carving time into her schedule was necessary, but now they fit each other into the moments in between, and the ache in her chest eases a little when she sees a text or his call, knowing he's always thinking of her too.
"This caseload is kicking my ass," she grumbles, and he insists on hearing all about it until an actual person tries to kick his ass and he has to hang up.
He calls her back when she's tucked into bed in his shirt and tells her about his grant application until she drifts off to sleep.
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She doesn't have time to come home for Thanksgiving, so the weekend before he surprises her with pizza and homemade brownies.
They don't make it to the bedroom - she fucks him right in the entryway and they eat cold pizza leaning against the wall, naked and momentarily satisfied. When they've had their fill, he throws her over his shoulder and he spends half an hour reacquainting himself with her clit, fingers buried deep inside of her.
She gets chocolate stains on her sheets and she's not even a little bit mad.
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"The lights just aren't that pretty without you," he sighs through the phone against her ear.
The holidays have settled over the campus, and she's got a flight booked in the morning because she's impatient and he's promised to meet her at Arrivals. There's an anticipation thrumming through her not just for his touch, finally, but because when she runs into his arms it's gonna feel even better than taking your bra off after a long day. It's only been a few weeks—they’ve gone so much longer—but somehow the certainty of being back with him so quickly has made the ache a little harder to manage.
She loves law school, she loves the city and the people and the hard work, but she loves him more.
"I'll be the judge of that tomorrow," she tells him, and she can hear the smile in his voice when he repeats, "Tomorrow."
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He's sat between her legs as she reads against their favourite tree, running her hands through his hair as he names the shapes he can see in the clouds.
It's been a year since his accident and the reminder of almost losing him has made her clingy. They have plans with his family that evening and she enjoys spending time with them, bonds forged in turmoil and solidified by their love of the boy running his blunt nails over the ticklish spot behind her knees.
She traces over the spot his skull had cracked and thinks about how he's willing to die for this city, but that he'd lived for them.
She kisses him because she can and traces the smile on his face until he snaps his teeth at her finger and tosses her book to the side so he can kiss her properly.
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He undoes her bra while her hands are desperately trying to pull him free from his boxers, and he laughs.
"What?" she snaps when he can't hold it in. She's had a particularly stressful week and they'd agreed to meet at a little motel half way between. The closer she gets to the end of her second year, the more insistent she has been on these little trips, feeling strung out and like she's drowning in all of the work.
He kisses her nose and busies himself unbuttoning her jeans—he has to be back in the city for something super-related—but then he laughs again and she shoves him so she can straddle his hips and get a proper answer.
"I was thinking about the night we met," he explains, "and the first thing you said was about beer foam."
It's the first time she tells him about that newspaper and how it changed her life forever, and they laugh until she presses him inside of her and they get lost in the feeling of being joined.
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(When she starts her last year, he gets a framed copy of the newspaper he'd been reading that night shipped to her, and she laughs at the front page headline about a boy dressed in red and blue, and then she cries because she knows deep in her soul that she's going to be with this man for the rest of her life.)
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She graduates top of her class with a bunch of job offers around the country.
Her family, old and new, crowd into the bar around the corner and she gets covered in champagne and confetti.
In a few days, she’s moving back to the city, the little house they’d scrimped and saved for already full of their belongings. There’s a little velvet box tucked away in his sock drawer, like he’s able to keep anything from her, like she wouldn’t have gone looking for a pair of his socks when he announced he was champion of sliding across the floor that was theirs because he was obviously wrong.
She looks up from feeling the kick of her growing baby nephew to see him already watching her, three seats away as he talks to her dad.
She smiles.
He’s just a guy at the bar.
But he’s everything to her.