Archive of Our Own

even the best fall down sometimes
even the wrong words seem to rhyme
out of the doubt that fills your mind
you finally find
you and i
collide

“collide,” howie day

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In the Before— Amy didn’t know there was a Before.

For a place with such a brisk schedule of promotional cycles and a high rate of job turnover, Cloud Nine, and the way time moved within it, was akin to bayou swamp mud. Sticky, and stagnant. The store had a way of creeping up on people, rooting them in place by the ankles and swallowing them down an inch at a time before they could even notice. The only significant Before that Amy ever knew— Before Pregnancy, Before Emma, Before Motherhood-Come-Marriage— faded away so hazy and distant that she rarely had occasion to think about it anymore. Two and six and nine and thirteen years later, she was still there, her days piled up one after another, like identical pearls on a string, slapped with a Cloud Nine discount tag.

She was always tired, yes. And weary, and sleep-deprived, and put-upon. But she got on with things. A little plastic girltoy in a heavy blue polyester vest, spinning in a manufacturer-determined circle around the plastic confines of an unglamorous snowglobe in St. Louis, Missouri.

And then came the tornado. Shattering the glass of her insulated world in all of ten minutes, so many confusing shards of a life strewn amongst the debris. It wasn’t much, any of it— but it was hers, and in a moment, it suddenly was no more. Her skin felt tight and blue in the sharp, disorienting cold of this vast unknown.

Here, in the After, she was faced with a littering, a litany, of endings. The end of her relationship, when she realized that even seeing Adam alive and whole after a cataclysm inspired in her only a flat, lukewarm relief. The end of that version of herself, who had loved him, or at least tried to— the version of herself she’d known the best and the longest. And the end of her workplace as she knew it. Physically, but also existentially.

Because it was also the end of her easy, increasingly important working banter with Jonah.

They came outside together when it was over, awed by the wreckage— but she ran to Adam and Emma, and he wandered off with Garrett and Marcus, and they went their separate ways, and there just wasn’t any time. To thank him, for staying with her. To apologize, for her neediness and the shitty timing. To take a couple of deep breaths, and look at him, really look at him. Commit to memory every shade of hazel in his extraordinary eyes. Eyes that she had misjudged, in the Before; eyes that she trusted now.

It dawned on her later in the evening, over pizza and a movie with a still-shaken Emma, that she took his everyday presence for granted so much that she couldn’t even picture the exact shade of his eyes in his absence.

The thought made her sadder than it had any right to.

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She wanted to text him, so many times, in the surreal days and weeks on leave. She found work at another store about twenty minutes away to tide her over, and sometimes she hoped he would find his way there too, to her. But he didn’t. And she kept thinking idly of his contact picture on her phone— beaming in a particularly colorful and douchey fedora he’d tried on to make her laugh— but no matter how many messages she tried to draft in her head while folding clothes / stocking shelves / cleaning dressing rooms / sighing at the stale employee chatter, no words seemed impactful enough to bridge the growing canyon gap between them.

To be fair, Amy tried to console herself, he hadn’t texted her either. And phones worked both ways.

She was distracted, anyway. Adam sealed their mutual apathy towards each other a few days after the tornado, so cruelly cavalier she was almost breathless with it. They were trying to figure out how to cleave their shared life in two with minimal expense and bloodletting. He packed a small suitcase and moved out, though he kept coming back to pick up things he’d forgotten, or hadn’t thought to bring. His favorite coffee mugs, his high school diploma, his childhood collection of baseball cards. Sometimes he took practical things. A floor lamp, and the old space heater, and the designated spaghetti-making pot, because furnishing a whole new place was expensive. She tried not to begrudge him those little things, and let him take whatever he wanted.

For her own part, she re-evaluated the household budget, tried to trim it down to the barest essentials. Continuing with her college classes was completely out of the question, though that practicality remained a bitter pill to swallow. She took on a second job at Target in order to make the mortgage on her own. Moving out of this house would only be further expense and hassle, and Emma was distraught enough with all the change upending the ground she stood on. Keeping her home intact for her was one thing Amy was determined to do.

So she was busy, busier than ever. She had stacks of things to do in a day, and she possessed neither the time nor the emotional wherewithal to wade into the mess with Jonah and craft the perfect text. If he wanted to talk to her, he knew how to reach her. They would see each other at work soon enough anyway. Everything would work out fine.

She told herself this, and she almost believed it.

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Jonah didn’t wait for Amy, exactly. There wasn’t much time for the leisurely idle-handedness that “waiting” implied in the aftermath of the tornado, anyway. But as he slowly made his way through the rubble of his neighborhood and his life, he did find himself hoping. That tiny seedling of emotion, simultaneously innocent and reckless, curled up and rooted in a corner of his chest— despite all the stern, stiff-bristled brooms of reality with which he swatted at it.

He reminded himself: she was still married to someone else.

He reminded himself: she’d had her own life completely independent of his existence for decades now, he couldn’t be that special.

He reminded itself: everything was so complicated right now, and he knew that, and he wasn’t in any position to ask a single thing of her.

The sleeping seed of hope had existed inside of him long before the tornado, if he was honest with himself. It had been there much since the day he met her. But he’d always been strict with himself about expectations. Friendship was not a consolation prize, and a homewrecker was the very last thing he wanted to be. He could care about her, make her laugh, support her, wonder about her— but there were lines, deep red ones, and they were not his to cross. He made it his priority to respect them. He couldn’t rip the hope out of his chest, but he could certainly contain it, and never give it control over his hands or his heart.

So he didn’t. But he would be lying to himself if he didn’t admit he hoped on anyway.

He’d let himself get used to her. Depend on her. On all of them, really— the whole little world of their Cloud Nine store. He’d come to St. Louis on a whim, a sudden desperate itch to escape everything he’d ever known, with nothing but the modest savings he had separate from the family accounts he lost access to, and whatever random junk from his apartment he could fit into his father’s old Honda. And his job was nothing special, exactly— but he fit here, in a way he’d never fit anywhere else. Even when he was being gently (or not gently) roasted for his hipster tastes, it was with the knowledge that he was theirs, and he was a part of something, and despite the many less-than-savory aspects of this job, things were okay. Good, even.

But in ten minutes, it was gone. Everything. The store in ruins, the staff, his friends, all scattered. His apartment blown away. His relationship with Amy, once vibrant and essential, suddenly confusing and a little painful.

Even after dropping out of school, he had never felt so truly adrift, and alone in the world. His fragile sense of groundedness over the past year swept away by the wind with the rest of it.

He almost got into his car— which, by some miracle, survived— and drove away again.

It wouldn’t have been difficult. He had no roots anymore, no home and no job and no Amy, anymore, probably. He didn’t know when the store was supposed to reopen again, or if it would. FEMA had him in a disaster relief tent, and the temporariness, the wistful humbleness of it, made his skin crawl. He could leave, and no one would stop him, and it wouldn’t matter. He could go on and on until he hit west somewhere. Tulsa, or Austin, or Phoenix. He could go all the way to the ocean in California, if he wanted to. There were minimum-wage retail jobs anywhere and everywhere.

But there was that pesky hope of his. Utterly absurd, in the absence of any normalcy, but still there, tugging at him. Asking him to see this through, this time. Even if it was awkward and hard. Asking him to wait— or at least hang on. Until the store got rebuilt, until they got a chance to talk.

She was married, yes. She existed outside of him, and things were complicated, yes. But they were friends. They were. And despite everything— he felt bound to her. At least enough not to vanish without any closure.

That may have been who he was, Before. But he found himself hoping that maybe, here, he could be someone else. Someone…better.

And so he tried to teach himself how to stay. How to adjust to a life in limbo. How to shower and brush his teeth both hastily and creatively amidst his neighbors’ truly singular hygiene habits.

This, too, would surely pass.

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When Jonah heard the store would reopen, almost exactly six weeks after the tornado hit, he smiled his first real smile in what felt like years.

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When Amy heard the store was reopening, she couldn’t decide if she was relieved, or vaguely nauseous.

Nauseated , corrected the hateful fun-fact voice in her head that sounded too much like Jonah’s.

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The moment he saw her again, it was like all the layers of exhaustion and worry and questions and grime were all cut through to the bone, leaving him as raw and exposed as he was when she looked up at him after kissing him. When they stared at each other for three heartbeats, wildly overstimulated and in shock over all that had so recently transpired. The way they looked at each other now, the intervening time collapsed like an accordion, like she’d only kissed him a minute ago.

But then something shifted behind her face, and her eyes were like two doors firmly shut. She smiled with only her mouth, told him to restock a shelf, and disappeared.

It was like that all day. Even when he tried to break the ice, offer to talk about things, even when he broke a little and asked if they were still friends— her whole body told him no. She could barely look at him. She told him that she didn’t know how to be around him, and that she was getting a divorce. She was tight-lipped and harangued and the dark circles under her eyes were more pronounced than ever. She felt so faraway that he felt like she was still on leave, like he was still missing her and missing her while she stood right beside him.

He wasn’t going to push her, or hold her obvious anguish against her, but it was hard to avoid feeling disappointed nonetheless. After all the waiting and the missing and the aching— and yes, the hoping— it took him a minute to find his footing. Took him longer to find and grip tight his own door handles, and gently push them shut, too. Polite, friendly, but carefully at a distance when they used to collide as sweetly and as thoughtlessly as two blades of wild grass in the breeze.

And Amy sensed it in him. Felt him take her lead, albeit reluctantly. She knew it wasn’t his instinct, that he swallowed her off-color joke about having sex as a kindness, and she appreciated it more than she knew how to tell him. In her heart of hearts, she knew she was the one who owed him the first gesture. The first crack of vulnerability. An explanation, a confession. But she just wasn’t ready yet, and she didn’t know how to be. There was so much baggage that had nothing to do with him, and some that had too much to do with him. She needed time to sort through it all. She took a half-hearted look around the chaos of her battered heart, and she couldn’t find more to give him.

And so she sighed, and gave in. Let them blunder through the clunky aftermath blind, as she and her determined silence failed them both day after day after day.

She chose herself, and hoped he could, in time, forgive her her desperately needed selfishness at his expense.

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He was patient. And he was so very kind. But she couldn’t ask him to put his life on pause forever. They both knew this.

It was her fault, really, that Jonah began dating Kelly. Yet, in a weird way, Amy felt like she owed it to him, to give him a chance to be happy while she dealt with the ruins of her personal life. Her ex-husband with a thousand questions about legal documents and more stuff he wanted from the house. Her teenage daughter, mercurial and impossible, simultaneously infuriating and heartbreaking as she bounced from one parent to the other.

Divorce with a child was messy. She was, correspondingly, a mess. Kelly was simpler. Annoying, perhaps, by Amy’s standards, but easier. And easy was good. Easy was…easy.

She was determined to be gracious about this. So she resolved to leave them to it.

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But through the process of couple’s therapy and then divorce negotiations, Amy discovered that she was not a naturally gracious person. She was exacting, and detail-oriented, and she liked to micromanage. She was caring, but she often pushed too hard. She wanted things the way that she wanted them.

And as it turned out, she wanted to transfer Kelly to a store on the goddamn moon.

She was bubbly and inoffensive to the point of madness. The kind of person Amy would have probably pity-protected, in other circumstances, because she had this bland sort of haplessness to her that kicked up Amy’s Mom radar. She had such enviable hair— big and blonde and lusciously curly, the kind that involved patience and also sheer genetic fortune. And she often flipped it over her shoulder as she laughed and preened and flashed sunny smiles at even obnoxious customers. Amy was a veritable Grinch beside her, and this reality did absolutely nothing to rehabilitate her mood.

Neither did the reality of how effortlessly Jonah fell into the seemingly eternal wellspring of Kelly’s charm.

It was like he absorbed some of her sunlight, enjoying her lame jokes and naturally pairing off with her while out on the floor. He still paired off with Amy, too— almost as a force of habit— but then he inevitably wandered back to Kelly, and she said something irritatingly wholesome, and Amy saw them leave the store together more than once at the end of a shift, holding hands.

She had no reason to be upset, logically. This is what she had asked for, after all— some distance, some time. It wasn’t her business whom he dated. He wasn’t hers to keep, and she was far from ready to belong with anyone else. Kelly was nice, and Jonah was happy, and Amy was healing. Everyone, ostensibly, won.

She wanted to be happier for him. She did want to be gracious. But she hadn’t realized how much she had grown to count on his light touch, his easygoing steadiness, the unguarded way he smiled at her. She hadn’t realized how little she liked to compete for his time and attention. Mostly, in the Before, the Cloud Nine staff intuitively deferred to their closeness and left them to it; but Kelly, who knew nothing about any of that, kept waltzing in between them without realizing there was a them to get between. And he let her do it. It left Amy perpetually wrong-footed. Mulishly displeased. She missed him, even as he sat at the adjacent table in the break room— close enough to poke in the arm at a joke on her phone, but also further away than her than he had ever been.

Amy had believed, in the aftermath of the storm, that the tornado, and the kiss it had spawned, embodied the marker between Before and After. But in the days and weeks Jonah started teasing Kelly the way he used to tease Amy, she found that the Before and After in her life were marked by Jonah himself.

Before, supervising the barely-contained chaos of the store was her day job, a relatively arbitrary place she earned a living. Before, when the day was over, she went back home, back to her real life, the one in which she was Adam’s wife, and Emma’s mother, and a whole person of her own, presumably, with her own dreams and ambitions and existential worth.

But then came Jonah, like some kind of cosmic event that permanently shook the landscape. That somehow brought the phrase “moments of beauty” into her vernacular. And now looking back, she found that he was the beginning of so many defining Afters.

After the awkward, giddy first impressions. After the glowing green stars on the ceiling. After they organized a protest together. After he called her sexy. After he held her with their lives on the line, and After she discovered that his kiss was gentle, warm, and strongly scented with hair product that she actually didn’t hate. That just smelled heady, and spicy-sweet, and like him.

Nothing was as it had been, even before the tornado forced their hand. She hadn’t been the same since he first made it his mission to add a little glitter to her boring snow globe snowflakes. She depended too much on the casual depth of their friendship. And she wasn’t gracious enough to let it go when everything else she held steady and close had fallen through.

She wasn’t sure, anymore, who she was or what she needed. She didn’t know how to get her hands around what Jonah meant to her. But as the wistful autumn turned into a bitter winter, what she did know was that it couldn’t go on like this. That something had to give. Some one would have to give.

The only questions left were whom, and in which direction.

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She was so hungover on Boxing Day, after drinking herself stupid over Adam’s new girlfriend and the melancholy of her first divorced holiday, that she called him at six in the morning while sitting on the cold tile of her bathroom floor, head spinning despite resting on the comfortingly firm wall.

“Mmmf…hello?”

“I can’t take my shift today, can you cover for me,” she mumbled into the phone, no preamble.

She heard some noise in the background, the rustle of sheets— and a voice, soft and sleepy and female, asking who it was. Amy’s shriveled-up stomach dropped like a stone into her toes.

“Oh, I’m sorry. You’re with your girlfriend,” she said, too tired and cranky and nauseous (nauseated) to reign in her wild indignation. “I’ll call— I don’t know, someone—”

“Amy.”

He said her name so gently. Gravelly with sleep, punctuated with a yawn, but bracing. A door clicked shut behind the sound of his breathing.

“It’s okay, Amy, I’ll cover for you,” he told her. She could picture him in a rumpled T-shirt with equally rumpled hair, an imprint of the blanket in his pale cheek.

“You sure?” Somehow she had to check, had to know. “Your girlfriend won’t mind?”

Jonah’s voice tightened a little. “It’s fine. Really. You should spend the day with your daughter.”

“She’s not here,” Amy admitted. “She slept at her Dad’s because I was supposed to work today.”

“You’re alone.”

He didn’t mean to imbue this with particular meaning— it was an observation, a vague worry that no one would be around to hand her water and ibuprofen and make her soup while everything was closed— but it came out too quiet, too dramatic. She sighed heavily into the phone, banged her head irritably against the wall and winced when it lurched with pain.

“I’m fine. It’s fine. I can go to work. I’m sorry I called.”

“I didn’t— I’m sorry.” He wasn’t even sure what he was apologizing for, but he couldn’t let her hang up. “I’ll take your shift. Do you need me to bring you anything?”

“No. Thank you.” She yawned, and wrinkled her nose at the rancid sourness in the back of her mouth. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“See you…”

He expected her to hang up, honor the obvious end of this awkward, stilted conversation and let them move on with their lives. But she didn’t. Instead she stayed where she was, phone sticky and overheated to her ear, and let the silence stretch on and on, long seconds of quiet static as their witnesses.

She wondered if Kelly suspected them of something untoward, based on the way he clearly left her company to take her call. She wondered if there was anything left to say between them, much less anything that warranted such suspicion.

She wondered if he would hang up on her first, or take her lead and stay.

Listening to him breathe was strangely hypnotic. Comforting. She closed her eyes, and tried to steady her breaths to link up with his.

He stayed for another fifteen seconds, then hung up the phone.

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They were at a stubborn, delicate impasse. A fork in the road, in front of which they were idled through the holidays and into the new year. Spinning their wheels, and circling each other, the air fraught and nervous. The two of them stuck between yes and no, between stay and go. Between do you want me to wait and I’m not ready yet.

She was darkly inscrutable, sealing off her personal feelings and her personal life in some box none of them were allowed to touch. She acted normally, kept up her end of the day-to-day store chatter, but she just looked so tired all the time, doing the bare minimum that was expected of her and keeping her head down otherwise. She was the butt of Mateo and Dina and Cheyenne’s jokes, and she just let them have at her. Played along, and went home at the end of the day without lingering to talk. He saw more of her retreating back than he did her eyes anymore, and it cut him up inside to witness her struggling from afar.

He still took her lead, though, as in the fall. Kept a respectful distance. He didn't want to make her life any harder, or exert any pressure. And Kelly was great. She made Jonah genuinely happy. Went to drinks with him after work, brought him coffee the way he liked it before morning shifts, let him sleep on the couch when Garrett got sick of him and increasingly let him sleep in her bed. Things were good with her, and he let them continue to be good.

But.

But in the Before— before St. Louis and Cloud Nine— he was the kind of person who was never in one place for very long. His family moved around during his childhood based on the demands of his father’s various jobs, and his parents divorced when he was twelve, which left him splitting his holidays between them. In college, he delighted in studying abroad as long as he could; after graduating and before business school, he hopped around the country doing internships and service trips, spent some time in Europe working and backpacking through big capitals and small towns. He was good at self-sufficiency, and had a lively and curious enough spirit that constant change was stimulating more than it was alienating. He’d lasted through about half of his MBA requirements, before the restlessness morphed into a gambling addiction and he spiraled out of control, and had to run away and try something new.

Being here for over almost two years now, patiently working the same job and staying away from poker and resisting the urge to tour the Amazon the moment he could buy a ticket— it was the exception to his life, not the rule.

Whomever he was with, however much he liked them— he knew why he was still enduring St. Louis’s petulant slushy winter, and not driving out to some obscure town in California where he could smell the salt of the ocean.

He’d finally found a reason to stay still.

There was a moment, just after New Year’s, when he and Kelly were rearranging the paperback novels on the shelves, making faces at the silliest covers. Amy was on the phone, expression strained— likely arguing with Emma. She was pacing the aisle, her voice loud and alive with mingled English and Spanish, but then she caught sight of Kelly cackling at a particularly horrible Harlequinn couple, and her eyes flickered to the way her body leaned all over Jonah’s shoulder with breathless laughter, and Jonah looked up at Amy, and Amy just froze.

Time shuddered for a beat. Her eyes widened, and met his for what felt like the first time in months. She recovered enough to keep speaking on the phone, but she kept looking at him like she was searching his face for something too dangerous to articulate.

He could have flinched. Blanched. Blinked, and screwed it up. Before, he would have.

But here, in the After, despite everything— he looked that extraordinary woman in the eye, and held her gaze. Met her where she was. Didn’t make any sudden moves, but dug his heels in. Refused to back down, or give in.

Kelly, noticing nothing, returned to the books she was shelving. Jonah let his mouth relax into a small smile in Amy’s direction.

Amy, seeming to lose the thread of what she was saying, was the one to blink, and turn away to finish her call.

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He was surprised when she announced the Globes party was still on, barbecue and all. But she was so insistent on it, nearly to the point of mania, that he hoped for the best anyway. Trusted her, even as Mateo predicted it would be disastrous and he’d have to scroll through the highlights on Buzzfeed the next morning like a peasant.

Jonah offered, quite casually, to come by early and help her with the party prep, if she wanted.

She, most determinedly, said no, because she could handle this. She did most of the hostess work every year anyway.

Indeed, that was true. But she had never been the one to do the cooking part, or the technical set-up part— and by the time Jonah and Kelly, and the rest of the guests arrive, it became abundantly clear that she could not, in fact, handle it. Any of it. Despite her stubborn bravado, Amy failed to cook the chicken and failed to force the TV to do her bidding. Her microwave, and her fragile confidence, were in ruins. She looked miserable as Dina crowned the festivities with a spectacular digestive breakdown in the bathroom, Mateo got to be right about everything after all, and Garrett cast her a baleful look before leading the group outside and suggesting a bar at which to finish the show.

Kelly, despite being petite and lovely, had never felt heavier at Jonah’s side.

He didn’t get much of a chance to talk to Amy all night, between trying to convince Mateo to stay, and smoothing over Kelly’s social difficulties with the group, and generally feeling torn about how much space to give Amy. And he hated it, because if things were the way they were supposed to be— he would’ve been there for her. He would’ve come early, and showed her how to use the grill, and run out for propane while she set the table. He would’ve figured out her TV, and tasted the sauce before she served the food, and he would’ve sat next to her on the couch, thighs pressing and elbows colliding as they competed to guess each category’s winners, celebrating loudly when they won.

But instead, he lingered awkwardly in her doorway, Kelly shivering in her ridiculous dress and clinging to him for warmth, as he asked feebly if she needed any help with cleanup.

“I’m fine,” Amy said, smile plastered to her face like an obnoxious billboard ad. “Have a good night. Jonah. Kelly.”

“Thanks for having us!” Kelly chirped, though her expression was almost as pained as Amy’s, albeit for different reasons. “Let’s get in the car, I’m freezing!”

Walking away in that moment— with Amy standing on the front step in her party dress, such a familiar silhouette backlit against the bright lights of the house, her goldenish curls blowing in the wind— was viscerally painful. Like he was breaking something irrevocable inside himself by leaving, the rupture raw and elemental and bubbling up in his throat as he fumbled for his keys to let Kelly into the car.

She was saying something to him through her chattering teeth— something about wanting a drink, a real dinner, a night in. But as he turned on the car, the realization came to him, slowly and then all at once— that it just couldn’t go on like this. It couldn’t. It couldn’t. He couldn’t go on like this.

He drove away, and felt the yawning mouth of the wound on his heart widen and widen with every mile, like it was going to grow big enough to swallow him whole before he even got home.

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Amy should have known better. Should have known that it was too soon, that splitting a life in two meant there were certain roles and expertise Adam took with him that she didn’t yet possess on her own. He would be useless with cleaning the bathroom, or balancing the budget, or picking up the right groceries, but he would know how to use the grill. Fix the TV and the WiFi. He also knew how to rub her shoulders just right after an exceptionally tiring day, and that was another thing she missed right now, collapsing on her couch beside Dina, who still weakly eyed the designated vomit bowl perched on her lap.

“So that was a disaster,” Amy said. Better to get that hard truth out into the open, for herself more than anyone else. “You can sleep upstairs, if you want. Emma didn’t bother to return my calls, but she texted saying she’s staying with a friend, so you can crash in her room.”

“Will do.” Dina carefully extricated herself from the couch and blankets, still holding the vomit bowl. “You gonna be okay with all this?”

Amy sighed. “Yeah.”

“Cool. Well, I’ll holler if I need anything.”

She clapped Amy on the shoulder and promptly slouched upstairs. But Amy stayed where she was, wishing she could sink through the cushions into the center of the earth— wondering how it had come to this point, how she could let herself feel so foolish. She didn’t know what she was doing, but her husband was dating and her daughter had her own life, and Jonah was dating Kelly, and suddenly Amy was alone in the world. Despite Dina retching loudly upstairs, it felt like she was adrift somewhere on the peripheries of everything, while life went on in the center, just beyond her reach.

She couldn’t throw a barbecue. She couldn’t keep it together for one evening in front of her coworkers. She didn’t even know how to date. She’d never had to try, had never even had sex with anyone but Adam since she was in high school too many years ago. She was out of practice. Sometimes she couldn’t remember how to be a functioning human being anymore.

From there she dozed off, briefly. A reprieve for both mind and body. She woke with a jolt, realized she’d been out for almost two hours, and the kitchen still needed clearing. Dina, mercifully, appeared to have fallen into a deep enough sleep that the house was silent.

It was such a waste, having to throw away so much meat. Amy surveyed it sadly, hoping the chicken soul up in heaven could forgive her for her incompetence. She was trying to figure out if there was any way at all to salvage it when she heard several frantic knocks at the door.

Her first instinct was Emma— some urgent thing she’d forgotten for her sleepover. She rushed to open the door, motherly concerns about toiletries and phone chargers already poised on her lips when—

“Jonah?”

He looked a little bedraggled, his eyes wide and wild, and his usually sleek hair mussed, his breathing sharp, like he’d just run a great distance. Something caught in the pit of her heart at the sight of him; her shoulders curled inward, and she found herself clinging to the doorframe.

“Jonah, what is this?” she asked, somehow already afraid of his answer.

“Listen— you know what— I’m just gonna say it, okay?” The words came out in a hurricane rush; she gripped the doorframe more tightly. “Do you remember, when we came back to work in August, and we were in the warehouse, and you asked me if I wanted to have that conversation with you, the one where everything was awkward and weird and you didn’t know how to be around me? And I didn’t say anything, and you walked away? Well. My answer is yes. Yes, I want to have that conversation with you, even if it kills us, because tonight at the bar, Mateo slipped in a beer puddle, and somehow landed face first in someone’s nachos, and it was probably the funniest thing I’ve ever witnessed in real life— and I turned around to share the joke with you, but you weren’t there. Because you were here, cleaning up after a party during which you were so obviously hurting, but I couldn’t do anything, or help you, because I still don’t know the rules after that tornado— and the only person I wanted to talk it all out with was my best friend, and I couldn’t do that either.” Something caught in the pit of his heart, too. Tremulous, and sad, and a little desperate. “You were the one who kissed me, Amy. And it meant something to me. So, yeah. I do want to talk about it.”

She didn’t know if he was brave, or completely stupid, dumping all of that in her face, likely quaking with the midnight cold. She bit down on her lip, unable to tear herself away from how he was looking at her. Reckless, and all-consuming, but also poignant and soft.

She glanced behind and around him, half-expecting Kelly to come erupting out of the bushes to see this. But there was no one. She had been alone, and now they were alone together. He’d parked his car on the street, leaving the span of her driveway like a respectful distance between them. It was somehow a touching thing. But it also reminded her of all the things that lurked in any distance between them.

“I, um. I don’t want to do this to Kelly,” she said, voice shaky. “It wouldn’t be fair.”

“You’re right. And that’s why I broke up with her tonight. After drinks.” A note of apologetic triumph breaks through his careful tone.

God forgive her, but she grinned at that. Surprised, impressed; wry with guilty pleasure. Amy still didn’t like Kelly much, but she was certainly more attractive now that she was single. “Really? Did she cry? Sorry.”

But Jonah just looked sheepish. “As a matter of fact, she did. I’m a monster.”

Amy sighed, rested her cheek against the cold wooden frame. “Well, I’m a monster too.” A beat. “After the tornado, Adam and I knew that even though we were glad the other was alive, we should still just. End it. You know? And I knew that, intellectually— but then Emma came home upset and confused a few days later, because she said she’d seen her dad kissing some other woman in the parking lot at school, and she thought he was having an affair.”

Jonah winced. “That’s rough.”

“Well, I was pretty furious, and I confronted him about it that night— asked him how long that had been going on, or if he was really that quick on the rebound. And— and he looked at me so hurt and indignant that it was like I’d hit him. And he told me that it was only fair he get to be with other people when I had clearly been cheating on him with you, since at least Cheyenne’s wedding.”

Jonah inhaled sharply; nearly choked on the night air. “Shit. But, but we weren’t— fuck, Amy, I’m so sorry—”

But she only chuckled, bloodless and matter-of-fact. “Don’t be. It was my fault, not yours. I paid too much attention to my work husband, and not enough to my real one. And technically, by kissing you, I had cheated on him. So.”

“Why did you?” The words were loaded, live and dangerous, but he had to ask them, oh so carefully. “Why did you kiss me, that day?”

Amy considered. The wind blew at her bare legs, and both of their exposed faces, and yet neither of them moved.

“I’ve gone over and over it in my head,” she admitted. “Especially after that fun conversation with Adam about the precise nature of infidelity. But, um. I don’t really have a good answer. The world was going crazy, and I really thought I was going to die, and you just— you grabbed me, to hide us under the counter, and all these shelves were falling around us, but. You made me feel safe. And I guess I got…carried away.”

She was absently shredding her nail polish, to occupy her restless hands. She seemed somewhat embarrassed to say these things out loud to him, but something warm and sweet swelled up in his chest. At the way they could both breathe a little easier now, with this open between them. At everything about her.

“It was a good kiss,” he opined, soft and wistful.

She smiled, just as soft. “Yeah. It was.”

“You don’t regret it, do you?” His heart clenched at the thought.

Mercifully, she shook her head. “No. But…the divorce is still pretty fresh. And it was a lot. So I’m not really in a position to promise you anything. You know?”

“I do,” he said immediately. “Of course. You, and Emma— you both come first. Always.”

“Thank you.”

They were still standing in her doorway, poised on a precipice. Her arms were crossed against the cold, and his limbs with giddy with it, with everything. They could both breathe easier, but there was still a guardedness he could feel in her that had evaporated from him a long time ago. She let the conversation sit for a long moment, eye contact never wavering. Like she was searching him for something, but couldn’t decide what exactly it was.

Finally, she said, “Do you want to come in?”

“I actually— on my way here, I bought propane,” he told her. “It’s in my car. I know it’s late, but I thought we could fire up your grill and cook some of that meat instead of throwing it out. Or, if you want to sleep— I mean, I know my way around a grill, used to do it all the time that year I was in a frat, I can just do it for you, you’ll have lunch the rest of the week—”

“Okay, okay,” she cut him off with a laugh. She was smiling his favorite smile, the big wide one with all her teeth that lit up her face, always sent a little thrill down his spine. Like he’d earned her genuine happiness. “I’m not tired, I can help. Go get the propane and meet me in the backyard.”

When he heard the door click shut, he practically skipped back to his car.

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.

.

Dina was still asleep upstairs, so they stayed mostly in the backyard with the grill, bundled up in their coats. Amy set out beer and plates and silverware on her rickety table, and pulled up a lawn chair while Jonah got the meat going for real this time. He looked endearingly silly in her old “kiss the cook” apron, lurid blue and red and white over his winter jacket. She dimly registered that it should be awkward, him wearing an old gift from Adam in better times, with that particular sentiment, given their history— but it was too good, having him back. Catching up properly, this time, about the summer and the awful FEMA tents, the documentaries he’d watched and the podcasts he’d listened to. There had been many, evidently. They’d kept him company through the worst of the summer, kept him connected to the world and to himself. He wore it all lightly, though, and accepted her rant on the importance of escapism.

Those were the easier things, the usual things. Teasing each other, because he strive for a degree of erudition in his entertainment, while Amy had developed an unfortunate habit of binge-watching America’s Next Top Model. He had her in stitches while they scarfed down some of the barbecue, which had actually turned out quite decent, especially considering how hungry she was.

But then they also started talking about the hard things, too. Explaining the ground rules of divorce to Emma while she either sat stony-faced, or cried. Telling both of their parents that they were done, and for Amy, enduring her mom’s smothering concerns and invasive questions. Having to accept some money from her family while she worked flat out to keep the mortgage afloat. How weird it felt, changing her signature to her maiden name. How exhausting it all was.

“It’s like I’ve done the whole life cycle with my foot on the accelerator,” she told him. “I was married with a baby by the time I was nineteen, and I’ve been working ever since, and now my kid is nearly off to college and I’m divorced. And I’m only thirty-one. I’m still young, but like, I’ve already done all this old person shit. So what do I even do now?”

He was a good listener. Let her dictate the pace and the mood of the conversation, but knew when to throw in a joke to ease the heaviness. They were outside until three in the morning, side by side in her crappy lawn chairs, picking at the meat and looking up at the stars. The nights got cold out here, but somehow neither of them really wanted to go inside, breaking the spell and risking Dina overhearing them. And anyway, when the sunrise came, it was a magnificent thing to witness outside, dawn blooming slowly from the horizon line.

She looked so lovely in that pink light, nose rosy with exposure.

It was a little painful to have to leave. To not let this night go on and on. They threw the empty bottles in recycling, quietly packed up the meat in the kitchen— indeed, enough, even after their all-night feast, that Emma and Amy both would have meals for at least a week. Amy offered to let Jonah take some home for himself, and Garrett maybe— he was the one who cooked after all— but he shook his head. Grinned, and said she deserved a break from meal prep. To hide her blush, she retorted that Emma would likely want to go to McDonald’s every night anyway. Teenagers.

She walked him to the door, and they were back where they started— her against the frame, him standing on the step. But everything was different now. Another After, both familiar and new. She thought she’d known him, Before, but he kept surprising her. She’d seen him smile a million times at the store, and yet, the way he smiled at her now was a different creature entirely. Warm and guileless, and achingly tender. No one had ever looked at her like that, and it was almost too much. Almost radioactive in its power, its potential. He’d taken such a risk, arriving at her door with the big romantic gesture and letting her see this in him. Trusting her with it.

Something had had to give between them— and so he did. He gave. For her.

It was an unrivaled moment of beauty.

And now it was her turn.

She took a step across the threshold, joining him in front of her door. Anchored her hand to his face, and guided him down to kiss her. No tornado this time, no dramatic whirlwind impulses. Just a kiss, in the sober light of day. He tasted a little like their barbecue, but mostly he tasted like himself— a taste she was already coming to know. His hand found her waist, the small of her back, and pulled her closer into him. She fit just right in his arms.

Neither of them wanted to be the one to let go. His only consolation in doing so was that this was only the beginning. They had time, so much time stretching out in front of them, to figure out how to touch, how to do more than kiss. He let himself sigh, exhale the cold and the pleasure as he rested his forehead against hers, let their noses brush. She planted a small kiss to the corner of his mouth, and then backed away, her smile complicated but unmistakably glad. He tucked a stray blonde strand behind her ear, and resisted the urge to kiss her again.

“I’ll see you later,” he said.

She retreated back into the house, watching him walk to his car with her arms crossed protectively in front of her chest.

“Bye,” she called out.

But it wasn’t a real goodbye. It was just, yeah. Yeah, I’ll see you later.

.

.

.

Cheyenne and Mateo, displaying a prescience bordering on psychic, started giving Amy a hard time about “getting back out there” the very next day. Mateo reminded her she wasn’t getting any younger, and started shooting off texts to all his available cousins right in front of her, while Cheyenne cycled aloud through all of Bo’s friends, in case Amy wanted “a younger man.” Amy rolled her eyes, and told them to mind their own business, which of course they didn’t do.

Over lunch, they got the rest of the store involved, trying to set Amy up on a blind date. When she chanced a look at Jonah, he was just laughing at her, and she glared murder at him until he hastily rearranged his face into a more apologetic expression. It was even worse when she took her sandwich out of her Tupperware, and she was forced to endure all the chatter at her expense while eating the barbecue Jonah had grilled. By the way he surreptitiously grinned at her— sitting beside her at the breakroom table while Kelly notably sat at the opposite end of the room— the irony was not lost on him either.

They didn’t talk explicitly about it, but they agreed not to let on to anyone what had transpired that night on her front step. Kelly was still bruised and baleful after the breakup— a phenomenon Dina pounced on when she caught Kelly crying in the bathroom during a non-scheduled break— and it wasn’t anyone’s business, anyway. It was still fresh, still uncertain and ill-defined with them, and they needed the time and space to figure out what it meant that she had a daughter, an ex-husband, and he loved her. Loved her, in the privacy of his mind— a soft spot he’d nursed for so long that he no longer knew what it felt like to walk around this place without it.

It would scare her, if she knew. It scared him enough as it was. But he knew himself, he knew what to label the undeniable feeling, and he just kept it quiet. Savored the return of their sweet, mischievous camaraderie. The kind that animated their days, made them both lighter and kinder.

If anyone noticed the way they became inseparable again at work, no one mentioned it. The employees of Cloud Nine merely adapted, as they did with everything, deferring once more to AmyandJonah and their shenanigans. Mateo and Cheyenne retired their project of setting Amy up, and Amy dyed her hair back to its natural dark brown— like a signal back to normalcy, to a version of herself that was different than before but still steady and familiar.

Over dinner in the Cloud Nine parking lot, sitting in the open trunk of her car, he confessed that while she looked good with blonde too, he preferred her hair this way, long and dark and curly. She said she was thinking of cutting it short again, though. She’d liked the way the bob had made her feel free. Maybe she’d do highlights again, too, but not so stark this time. Perhaps in a soft caramel.

He told her, “You’re beautiful, you know.” Glanced around to ensure no witnesses, and kissed her cheek. She was blushing, and he could see it, even in the dark. She hooked her foot around his ankle, and he shifted sideways so that their thighs pressed together. She told him, “You’re really ugly, though,” and promptly ruined his carefully gelled hair. She only stopped cackling when he set his food aside and kissed her into acquiescence.

It was like their banter before, fast and thrilling and giving off sparks, but now the heat was more purposeful, more focused. They were almost always touching, some part of them overlapping whenever possible. His hand on her elbow when he helped her shelve items. Her shoulder nudging his when she walked by in the aisle. Dumb footsie games and held hands under the breakroom tables like they were fifteen years old flirting in class, and occasionally, her cheek resting on his shoulder when she was exceptionally tired or bored, her yawns fanning across his chest.

It was more than he had ever let himself hope for. More than he thought he could want. They hadn’t had sex yet, but he still felt like he knew her body, how it moved and breathed and slotted in beside him all the time. He was content just like this, with whatever she was willing to give him.

It was still the honeymoon period. They were taking it slow, and it was good.

For now.

Even in his giddy joy, he sensed there would be storm clouds ahead, serious ones. Emma, in particular, was a sore subject. At work, Amy was in business mode, and they had a good— nonsexual— time, as they always had. She was sometimes game to have a car picnic, or eat dinner at Cloud Nine’s cafe, while off the clock, but she didn’t like to go out to dinner or drinks, and she didn’t like to invite him over, either. She said it was because she didn’t want Emma to know they were seeing each other; Adam had been in and out of a couple of relationships already, and it was hard on Emma to watch him dating around, not knowing who would be sticking around for how long. Her voice got tight with suppressed anger the one time they talked about it explicitly; she was fiercely protective of her daughter in a mama bear kind of way that underlaid everything she did. Even Jonah was someone she had to protect her baby from.

And Jonah understood this. Agreed it was best to keep their relationship from Emma for the moment. But he knew from her offhand comments while scheduling shifts that Emma split her time pretty evenly between Adam and Amy— so she wasn’t home all the time. And yet, after that night in the backyard, her house had somehow been deemed off-limits, and they couldn’t go to his place with Garrett there. So they spent their time together almost exclusively at Cloud Nine, while wearing their obnoxious blue vests and chasing items and customers around the store, and that was the way it had to be.

She was keeping him at a certain distance, he knew. And while he was willing to take her lead, he knew they’d have to talk about it eventually. He wasn’t planning on going anywhere, and that meant, sooner or later, some tricky conversations with Amy about fully letting him into her life. She would have to really trust him, and he would have to prove himself worthy of such an investment.

He was already gone for her. This, he was sure of. He was going to stay, and build his roots here, with her.

But— logistics mattered.

Her world was complicated in a way his hadn’t been. While he’d loved and lost before, she was the center of a family, one that had fractured and still somehow had to stay together.

He wasn’t afraid of that, of her other life before him, but he did have to tread carefully. There were unexplored, unexploded mines afoot.

.

.

.

Two months of relative peace later, however, Garrett forced their hand. After Jonah had ruined his loud Valentine’s Day sex plans by existing in the apartment (because Amy was hosting a Galentine’s Day dinner for Emma and her friends); and after Jonah had further ruined his St. Patrick Day plans by accidentally eating all of the weed brownies his friends were going to use to augment their binge-drinking (because he saw brownies and they’d actually smelled amazing and he couldn’t stop after only one), Garrett put his foot down. Metaphorically, of course. Jonah had to move out by the first of April, or he’d be the fool Garrett made miserable everyday until he left.

“Despite my better instincts, I actually do like you, Jonah,” he said, upon giving his pronouncement. “But I will definitely start hating you if you live in my apartment for another month.”

He had to find a new place to live, quickly, or he would be imminently homeless again.

He brought up the subject with no particular intent while giving Amy a foot massage in the breakroom. Amy had had a rough time of it in the winter, working two jobs, always on the edge of exhaustion. She’d bought new work shoes last week, but had yet to totally break them in, and she looked so miserable wincing between steps that Jonah impulsively offered to rub her feet for her during their break. It was a mark of how awful she really felt that she gratefully said yes.

Her feet were tiny but mighty, digging into Jonah’s thighs as she got comfortable in her chair. She groaned with pleasure as he got to work on some of the tightness around her toes— a sound sexual enough that Cheyenne and Mateo chortled from the next table over.

“God, Jonah, you have magic hands,” she said, closing her eyes as he kept working.

“There are some noises I’ve never wanted to hear Amy make, and that is definitely one of them,” Mateo sniffed.

Amy pointedly moaned louder, expression more than halfway to pornographic, until Cheyenne and Mateo cleared out of the breakroom, leaving Amy and Jonah there alone. He waited until they were gone to let his head fall back laughing, and Amy cackled until she was snorting.

“I’m actually kind of disappointed that they’re too young to make a good When Harry Met Sally reference,” she remarked. “I’ll have what she’s having? And here it’s your foot rub? Get it?”

“Yes, but I don’t think I’ve actually watched that whole movie before,” said Jonah.

“Okay, well, we will definitely have to fix that,” she said. “You’re such a damn hipster, you watch all this shit on your Netflix queue that only three other people in the world care about, but you haven’t seen this absolute classic. It’s sad. I’m sad for you.”

“You know why you should be sad for me— I’m about to be evicted by Garrett and I’ll have to live out of my car until I find a decent place,” he told her, resuming his massage of her foot.

“Really?” Amy frowned.

“I hate apartment hunting,” he said. “I got lucky with the one I found when I got here. Although, not that lucky, since the tornado destroyed it.”

“Mmm.” But Amy was still frowning. “Do you really think you’re not going to find anything in time and have to live in your car?”

“My credit isn’t great,” he admitted. “The whole gambling and dropping out of school and getting cut off thing. I’m still working on it.”

“I mean…I do have a den,” she said slowly. Reluctantly. “It was full of Adam’s stuff, so it’s empty now, and it’s not much, but it has a door and everything.”

Jonah knew better than to look eager, though an odd kind of anticipation churned in his belly at the thought of living with her. “I don’t want to put any pressure on you. I know we’re not exactly— you know. It would be a lot to ask of you.”

“It’s not ideal,” she agreed, frown deepening. “I mean— it’s only been a few months— and Emma—”

“We wouldn’t have to tell her anything.”

“She’s fifteen, she’s not stupid,” Amy said with a grimace.

“I really don’t want to put any pressure on you.”

“Well, I would feel terrible letting you live out of your car when I have a perfectly good room open,” she retorted. Almost scolding him for testing her morality like this. “And, I mean. It would really help with the house payments. I can even quit that second job once I have a bit more saved.”

He could pinpoint the moment she relented, financial sense winning out over her many objections. She was so tired; he could feel it in her feet. She could use a break. And he just happened to be in a position to cut her one.

“You have to behave when Emma’s home,” she told him sternly, digging her heel into his hip for emphasis. “She can’t know we’ve been…hanging out. You are not going to discipline her, or go around my back with her. You have to keep your hands to yourself in front of her. And obviously no one can breathe a word of this to Adam. Or anyone we know.”

“I can do all that,” he said quickly. Amy’s eyes glinted with not a small amount of danger in them.

“It’s too soon to be doing this,” she said firmly. “And if you find another place, take it. But if you can keep it a secret, and you leave Emma out of this…you can move into the den.”

He schooled his expression into careful neutrality, absently rubbing his thumb against her ankle bone. “You’ve got a deal.”

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.

.

Jonah moved in a week later, on a cloudy Friday afternoon. Packed up his shockingly few belongings into a couple of boxes, and drove to Amy’s, where she’d unearthed the twin bed frame from Emma’s old bed. He’d bought a cheap IKEA mattress for Garrett’s room, and together the frame and mattress just barely fit inside the den. But Amy had cleared a closet for him, and it only took him about an hour to set up the room. Amy watched from the door, wrinkling her nose in disbelief.

“You have, like, nothing,” she said bluntly. “How do you live like that?”

“I’ve moved around a lot. It helps not to have to move too much. And I have some stuff at my parents’ house, if they haven’t thrown it out.”

The casual way he said it made her inexplicably sad.

“It really isn’t a huge deal,” he assured her, seeming to correctly interpret her expression. “I have what I need.”

“Emma baked you some welcome cookies last night,” was all she said, turning around and retreating to the kitchen.

It was incredibly strange, leaning against the counter with a mug of tea and seeing Jonah emerge from the den in jeans and a green t-shirt, making himself at home with the plates and silverware. He seemed an alien being disturbing the unspoken peace in her house, moving noisily from room to room, filling the place with his voice and his smell and his relentlessly cheerful energy. She didn’t know what to do with him when they weren’t at Cloud Nine with a set agenda for the day. She didn’t know how to be at home around him, without an expectation of some performance. He went to the living room, and she awkwardly followed him there, sitting with her back unnaturally straight on the loveseat while he spread out on the main sofa.

“Emma usually gets back from school at 3,” she told him. “She’s got band practice tonight, so she’ll be here by 6:30.”

“She makes amazing cookies,” Jonah remarked through a mouthful of one.

Amy’s smile was tight.

“I told her that you are strictly a tenant helping us out while you find a place of your own,” she said.

“We both work all the time,” Jonah pointed out. “I’m probably not going to see much of her anyway. Don’t worry, okay? I appreciate you letting me be here, and I promise I won’t screw up your kid.”

He opened his arm to her, gesturing for her to join him. She couldn’t exactly articulate what gave her pause in doing so. Maybe because it still wrong-footed her to see him so casually in her space, which she’d mostly sealed off from her professional life. Maybe it was because she didn’t realize how weighty and serious it would actually feel, bringing a man who wasn’t Adam into her home. Or maybe it was just because she was a more closed-off person than even she realized, unable to dissolve her boundaries even for someone she was, yes, seeing exclusively for months. She kept Jonah so compartmentalized emotionally and physically, especially during the tumult of her divorce, which was already like a cleaver to her heart, that she struggled to conceptualize him as a whole. As just a guy on her couch who liked her, and wanted to be around her.

She snuggled up to his side— the first time she’d ever really done so, because this would never fly at work. He felt different like this, his arm around her shoulders and her head on his chest, feeling each breath he breathed. She was tense, initially. But he found the remote, and turned on the TV, and started babbling about this mini-series he’d started last week— and she felt herself begin to relax into him.

It was that same, safe feeling she’d had when she kissed him in the tornado. He was thin and wiry, but he had a strength and a steadiness to him that she had grown to trust.

So she let him hold her. Snatched the remote back from him mid-babble, and put on Friends.

He laughed, and stroked her hair so gently as they watched that she was asleep by the second episode.

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.

.

Nobody was more surprised than Amy, but Emma and Jonah took to each other like a house on fire.

He was good with her. Awkward, and a bit socially clumsy at first, but good-natured and sincere. He asked her what she was studying in school, and puzzled over a biology project with her all evening while Amy worked a closing shift. They baked many more cookies, and chatted nonstop over breakfast before Emma went to school and Amy and Jonah went to work. He made her coffee along with Amy’s, and nodded along in perfect seriousness while Emma described in Tolkien-esque detail every facet of her high school friend group drama.

Within two weeks of Jonah living in the den, he and Emma were watching Empire together— without Amy— and she had him trained to drive her to school on his way to work so she could avoid the bus.

Amy didn’t know where to start with them.

It had perhaps been a fanciful daydream to imagine that someone living in her home would not, to some degree, socialize in a friendly manner with the other occupant of the house. But Emma loved Jonah. And Jonah, God help him, loved Emma. They discussed books all the time, or read quietly on opposite ends of the couch together. Amy was sure that they talked when she and Jonah worked different shifts. Sometimes it was like she was the one living in the den while the two of them had a grand old time. On Jonah’s third weekend in the house, Emma postponed going to her father’s The next weekend specifically because she and Jonah were going to go to Color Me Mine.

It was a good thing, on its face. Far from being alienated by a stranger living in her house, Emma enjoyed having Jonah around. The money really did help; Amy quit her second job and it was an incredible relief. And it wasn’t like she didn’t benefit from more time with Jonah too. She let him come to her room to snuggle up with some TV when Emma was asleep or out of the house. She got used to his presence at the dining table, in the kitchen, hanging out in the living room. They did work a lot, but their overlapping time at home was comfortable, and Amy didn’t worry about leaving Emma alone when Jonah was around.

They weren’t without their day-to-day annoyances. The things that were quirky and charming at work— Jonah’s idiosyncratic methods of communication, Amy’s compulsive need to keep order— were less so in a domestic setting. Jonah was messy, and talked too much, and Amy micromanaged him more than either of them liked.

But, for the most part, it was working. Working well, even.

It was almost too good to be true.

Which was why, in truth, Amy was slow to trust this. It couldn’t possibly be this easy, Jonah living here and bonding with her daughter and wandering around in pajamas on Saturday mornings. There had to be a catch somewhere. Something to pay, for all the free happiness they’d been indulging in.

It was just too good. He was too good.

One Wednesday, after watching the late-night comedy shows together in bed, they fell asleep before she could kick him out to the den, and somehow in the night, he had curled up spooning her back, his face in her hair, and she woke up to his arm draped over her waist like it belonged there. Like every part of them fit perfectly like two quotation marks in the center of the bed— and never, not once in all thirteen years of her marriage, had she ever woken up with Adam like this.

It was dizzying. Her easy joy was tinged with pulsing, genuine anxiety.

Something would have to give. To break.

This time, she was sure it was going to be her.

.

.

.

They somehow, miraculously, keep their living arrangement a secret for two blissful months. Then Cheyenne started pestering Jonah about doing a housewarming party, and the trouble began.

“It would be so fun!” she insisted. “I wanna see your new place!”

“Hope it’s tornado-proof,” Mateo noted.

“We could make it an early summer solstice party,” Cheyenne pressed.

“When is the summer solstice?” Kelly wondered. “It’s in June, right?”

“Yeah, late June,” Garrett laughed.

“I’m a terrible cook,” Jonah said. “And the place is kinda small.”

“We could do a potluck!” said Cheyenne.

“Where is it?” Dina demanded. She was heavily pregnant now, belly swollen and obvious, but the baby inside her did nothing to soften her hawk-eyed stares, which still filled Jonah with a certain fear. “Where do you live?”

“Yeah, where’d you end up, bro?” Marcus wanted to know.

“Just, a place,” Jonah said hastily. “I’m not doing a housewarming party, guys. Sorry.”

“I would need your address anyway though, to update your employee file,” Dina pointed out. “So where do you live?”

Jonah’s eyes widened. Amy, who until this point had been snickering and painting her nails on the breakroom couch, suddenly went still. She caught his eye, and her face contained nothing but fear.

“I, uh—” Jonah had always been a poor liar, and he was even poorer under pressure. “I don’t— I don’t know…yeah, I don’t know my address.”

“You don’t know your address.” Dina was supremely unimpressed. “Come on, Jonah. That’s pathetic.”

“Why won’t you tell us where you live?” Mateo pounced, smelling scandal. “Where could you be that’s that embarrassing?”

“Do you live in a trailer park?” asked Marcus, eyes wide.

“Do you live in your car?!” Cheyenne looked horrified.

“Jonah, you should’ve talked to us if things were that bad!” Kelly said, distressed.

“No! No, I don’t live in my car!”

“So where?” Dina asked.

“It’s like, I didn’t care, until you started being weird about it, and now I care deeply,” said Garrett.

Jonah cast Amy a helpless look. She closed her eyes in resignation, knowing that the jig was up. She heard him say, “Fine! I live with Amy.”

The resulting silence was so full and long and all-consuming that Amy actually opened her eyes to make sure everyone was still breathing.

In Kelly and Mateo’s cases, it was a close call.

"You live…with Amy?” Garrett’s expression was complicated. “That Amy?”

Amy smiled weakly, pushing her nail polish bottle aside despite her nails only being half done. “It’s not what you think. He lives in my den because he’s got the credit score of a homeless ghost.”

Marcus’s eyes were round as coins. “But like…you live with Amy. And her daughter.”

“Does Adam know?” asked Dina.

“I don’t think so,” Amy said, eyes averted. “Really, though, it’s not—”

“I knew this would happen,” Mateo said triumphantly. “How long has it been?”

“He moved out of my place at the end of March,” said Garrett.

“That’s— two months, which makes it just shy of nine months since her divorce, which means I win the pool!” Mateo shrieked. “Y’all better cough up, I told you Amy would take her time!”

“I really thought you two were going to get together right after you got the divorce, Amy,” Cheyenne said sorrowfully, pulling out her wallet.

“You had a pool on this?” Kelly sounded horrified.

“Sorry, honey. Didn’t want to mess with the timing, with you dating Jonah and all. It would've been prejudicial,” said Mateo, collecting Cheyenne’s money and moving on to Marcus.

“I bet it would never happen,” sighed Marcus. “I was holding out for ya, Amy. But you chose Jonah. Typical.”

“Why is that typical?” Cheyenne asked. “Because they’ve been flirting their faces off since Jonah started here?”

“Guys.” Amy’s voice sounded feeble to her own ears, despite her genuine outrage. “You’ve all got the wrong idea. It’s really, really not what you think.”

“So…you and Jonah aren’t dating?” Justine chimed in. “I could swear you guys were dating. And like, you’re cohabiting.”

“It’s none of your business!” Amy insisted, cheeks red. “Now can we please drop this?”

She left her nail polish on the table and stormed out of the room, bumping into Glenn on her way out. He looked perplexed as he surveyed the manic energy of the breakroom, and Jonah’s abashed expression.

“What’s going on in here?” he asked. “Is Amy okay?”

“Amy and Jonah have been living together for two months,” Sandra reported quietly.

“Really?! Huh.” Glenn digested this thoughtfully. “Well, it’s about time, wouldn’t you say? Congrats, Jonah!”

Jonah just buried his face in his hands.

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Amy steadfastly avoided Jonah the rest of the day— which he expected. She ignored everyone, and refused to say a word to anyone who wasn’t a customer. She ducked out a full hour before the end of her shift, likely to beat Jonah home for some alone time, and he didn’t try to stop her. The staff wisely chose not to push him on the day’s revelation, and he waited out his shift mostly in silence.

About twenty minutes before he could reasonably pack up to go, though, Garrett pulled him aside in the men’s dressing room.

“You know it’s my policy never to get involved with shit like this,” he said. “But— seriously, dude? You’re living with Amy?”

“I swear, Garrett, it’s not—”

“Can it.” Jonah had never seen Garrett look this serious before. By this point, he didn’t think he had the facial muscles for it. “I can’t let this go without saying one thing to you.”

Jonah’s heart clenched in trepidation. “Okay.”

“I’ve known Amy a long time. Way longer than you have. You were still, like, thinking about applying to business school with your stupid haircut when Amy and I were slogging it out here together. So, I don’t know what exactly you two are doing right now— dating, or playing house with her kid—”

“I’m not playing house!” he interjected, stung. “That’s so unfair—”

“Well, whatever you’re doing living in her house and hanging out with her kid and giving her your weird goo-goo eyes everywhere— you’ve gotta be careful,” Garrett said. “Amy’s one of the good ones. And after how long she was married to Adam— you have to want this. You’ve got to be serious. Or it’s going to end badly, and I’ll just tell you straight up, we are all going to take her side, no matter why it blew up. Because at the end of the day you were the idiot schmuck who one-hundred percent knew she was in a weird place, and still made your move on her anyway.”

For a moment, Jonah was very much speechless. Garrett watched him closely, unrelenting, as he regained his composure.

“I am serious about her,” Jonah said at last. “I do have shitty credit, and she did need help paying for the house, and we are…seeing each other, in a circular kind of way. But I’m serious about her. And I’m not playing house.”

“You do you, man. This is all I’m gonna say about it,” said Garrett. “Just remember, whatever we may say to her face, every single one of us at this godforsaken chain store is rooting for Amy. We like you alright, but. Don’t fuck it up.”

He wheeled away then, leaving Jonah to see himself out of the dressing room.

After a conversation like that— it took a while.

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He wasn’t sure what he was going to find when he got home— home, Amy’s house was home to him now — but whatever he half-expected, it wasn’t Amy sitting at the kitchen table with her feet up on the adjacent chair, drinking her second bottle of beer.

She looked up when she heard him enter the room, but her expression was odd. Akin to a bubbling pot on a light flame, building slowly, slowly, to some unpredictable conclusion.

“Amy.”

“Sit.” She kicked out the chair she’d been resting on, so that it clattered half-turned towards him.

“Amy, are you—”

“We need to talk,” she said, point blank. “Upright and honest, like adults. Sit.”

He sat. She surveyed him over the lip of her bottle, like she was trying to decide where to start.

She settled for, “Do you want one?”

Jonah made a beeline for the fridge.

Once he had gulped down his first bottle, and went to get another one, she set hers down and crossed her arms.

“I know this isn’t, like, the friendliest body language,” she said. “But I’m feeling vulnerable, so doing this makes me feel better. The couples counselor kept saying body language was important for communication, so. Full disclosure.”

“Yeah. Yeah, makes sense. Thanks for telling me.” Jonah considered crossing his arms too, but it didn’t feel right to, somehow. He didn’t want to protect his heart. He leaned forward, chest wide open, elbows loosely touching the table. “Let’s talk. Do you— do you want to go first?”

A flicker of irritation flashed across her features. “I mean. Yes. I was  the one to ask for it— so. Yes. I’ll go first.” She took a deep breath. “Today really sucked.”

“I know.”

“It just— it reminded me that what we’re doing here, it has consequences. Like. This is serious, you living here with me and Emma.”

Jonah took a deep breath of his own. “Yeah. I know.”

"Do you? Because sometimes I really can’t tell.” The heat in Amy’s voice intensified, her eyes blazing. “Like, right now, you’re my awkward roommate, but we’re also together-ish— so do you ever move out, or do you just keep living in my den? Do you move up to my room? Is that something you want?”

His eyes widened. “Amy—”

“No, seriously! Do you understand what it would mean to be more than my friend and roommate? What it would mean to be my daughter’s father— one of my daughter’s father’s, specifically her stepfather, because she’s already got a father, and he thinks you broke up his marriage and his family! Have you thought about that?”

She was building up steam now; the warning smoke was beginning to come out of her ears. But Jonah balked— interrupted, “Wait, do you— do you think we’re just friends and roommates right now?”

“I don’t know!” She brandished her arm so emphatically that she knocked over one of the beer bottles, sending it to the floor with a clatter that made them both jump. “What are we doing here? Are we just— are we just having fun? Am I your girlfriend?”

Her words landed like iron-fisted blows. “Yeah! I haven’t been seeing other people. I haven't been kissing other people. I know you haven’t either. So we’re dating! Was there some confusion about that?”

“There is!” She crossed her arms tighter. “Because I’m not a casual date or a casual girlfriend, okay? And Emma isn’t your casual friend either. She’s my daughter. She’s a child. And if you want to date me— I’m a package deal. You break it, or even break it in, and you buy it. You have to want to stay here in St. Louis with us, not go gallivanting off to business school or whatever else on a moment’s notice. You only came here on a whim, Jonah, you were someone else before and you can be that person again after this if you want, anywhere you want— but I’m here. My life is here. And you have to be down with that, if you want anything to do with me outside that Cloud Nine we both work at. And I can’t imagine that’s somewhere you want to be forever.”

“I— I don’t even—” He was spluttering, overflowing with information. “I’m gonna need a second with all of that.”

“Okay.”

The tips of her ears were glowing with embarrassment. She returned to the fridge and brought two more beers. But he didn’t drink his yet.

“I get that you’re scared,” he said. “I’m not a complete moron, Amy, give me some credit here— all of those things have crossed my mind, more than once. That night of the Globes party, I told you. You and Emma come first. I know it’s serious.”

She didn’t relax, exactly, but she wasn’t smoking at the ears anymore, either. She was listening. He took another deep breath.

“I thought about leaving. After the tornado. I could have, I still had my car. For a minute, I didn’t think I had anything tying me down here. But— you kissed me in that storm, Amy. And it was like…I couldn’t be the person I was before anymore. Even if I wanted to be. Which, I didn’t. Because after the tornado, I wanted to be the person who stayed— even if you were with someone else, even if all we ever were was colleagues. I don’t think I’m going to work at Cloud Nine forever, but I don’t think you are either, if you don’t want to. And wherever else we end up living or working— I want us to make those decisions together. You, and me, and Emma too.”

“I can’t deal with another work-in-progress, Jonah,” Amy said. “After Adam, I just— I can’t be with someone who still has to ‘find himself.’ I need a sure thing. And if you can’t be that…we both need to know.”

He looked her in the eye. Held her gaze until he could feel her softening. He touched her wrist so that her arms unfolded, and he took her hand in his, let their interlocked fingers rest on the table in the space between them.

“I’m a sure thing,” he told her. “Promise. I’ll even buy you a ring to prove it. When we’re ready.”

She pursed her lips, eyes suddenly a little shiny. She wiped them with her free hand, but she squeezed the hand holding his tight.

“I don’t know if I’m ever going to be able to get married again,” she said in a raw whisper.

“We don’t have to worry about it now, okay?” He clasped her hand between both of his. “Just don’t worry right now. I’m here. I’m here to stay.”

He rose to his feet, and she followed suit. She felt even smaller in his arms as he gathered her up against his chest. Not fragile, exactly— but breakable. She sniffled into his shirt, and he kissed the top of her head.

“Let me take care of you,” he murmured into her hair.

She nodded, and he led her upstairs to her room.

Her cheeks were wet when he kissed them; her lips tasted like salt. But she had never been lovelier to him than she was right then, snot and tears and swollen eyes. There had always been layers between them— work vests and silly jokes and hedged bets. But when she let him pull her shirt over her head, they were distilled down to two souls draped in flimsy garments that soon fell away too, leaving them utterly bare.

They had spent many afternoons and evenings curled up with each other, even making out on her couch sometimes, but some invisible barrier inside her had always stopped her from letting him go any further. Now, she let him unhook her bra without complaint, her hands running up and down his stomach, the expanse of his back. He kissed down the line of her jaw, and he could feel her smiling with it, arching her back so that she pressed in closer on his chest. He let her fall back on the bed, and bracketed her hips between his legs as he leaned down to kiss her soundly.

Everything about her was so soft— her breasts, her thighs, her hips and her tummy with their faint stretch marks from her long-ago pregnancy. She seemed a little self-conscious when he kissed each lightning stripe, but he felt like he could bury himself in her softness and make his home there forever. He got down on his knees to eat her out, and from the sound she made upon contact, he could tell it had been a long time since anyone had done this for her. Which, frankly, was a goddamn tragedy.

But he was determined to do right by her this time.

He made her come twice, and after the second time she was crying in earnest. They were complicated tears, but mostly they were tears of overwhelming pleasure. She brought him to rest on top of her, her legs straddling his narrow waist, and they were content just to kiss for a while, tongues sliding past one another in a rhythmic, companionable give-and-take. It was such a novelty just to touch freely— rolling around in the sheets to try different angles, learning how their bodies moved together, the weight and the heat and the give of each other. He learned that she was ticklish, if he stayed too long in her neck or behind her ear; she kicked when she laughed, high and breathy and sweet, and it made him laugh too, falling onto his back and pulling her back on top of him. Her eyes were still shiny, as he held her face in his hands. They were both breathing hard, but then she smiled that megawatt smile again, and the air caught in his throat like cotton on a branch. To see her so radiant, and glowing, and alive— to know he was the reason she looked like that— was almost more satisfying than the sex.

Almost.

She shifted their position so that she was on top of him, hips grinding down against his and relishing in his breathlessness, the obviousness of his erection. She put her lips to his ear, her hair in his eyes, and asked, "Do you have a condom, by any chance?"

He pressed a reverent kiss just under her throat. "Actually..."

He leaned over her body to snatch for his jeans, forgotten in a heap on the floor. And indeed, there it was, discreetly tucked inside his wallet. Amy chuckled— a wry, quivering little sound— and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.

"How long have you had that on you, Jonah?"

"Awhile," he confessed. His tone was a little shy, but he was beaming anyway, eyes bright and giddy. "You know...just in case."

She shook her head in delight, amusement; he unwrapped the condom in record time, slipping it on and tossing the wrapper off the bed. He eased a pillow under her head, and he kissed her, long and deep and confident, still marveling that after all the wanting and waiting and hoping, he was here, getting to do this with her. She was worth it, was the thing. Her moans went straight to his cock as he found the right position, started pushing into her. He took it slow, at first, until she dug her heels into the small of his back to speed him up. It felt like an eternity compressed into a minute, when he came too fast and she cried out to the ceiling, and the whole sweaty, sticky, glorious intimacy of it broke over them like a wave of warm bathwater. He nuzzled his face into her neck, and they drifted off to sleep panting hard, limbs tangled up in each other, his breath hot on her sternum.

It was the best either of them had slept in years.

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She woke up with a jolt around dawn, though, suddenly afraid Emma would walk in on them like this. But Emma was with her dad for the next couple of days, and the house was silent, save for the distant chirping birds beyond the window.

Jonah was still sound asleep, legs intertwined with hers and drooling into her shoulder. He didn't snore, interestingly enough. She’d pegged him as a snorer, but he slept peacefully in her arms. His hair, as yet undisturbed by combs and gels, had a nice natural wave to it, messy curls she twisted idly around her fingers until he stirred.

“Hi,” he mumbled sleepily, kissing the wetness he’d created on her skin.

“Hi.”

“What are you thinking about?”

“I’m still wondering where the catch is,” Amy said.

“The catch— with me?”

“Mmm.”

He mulled this one over. “Does there have to be a catch?”

“Always.”

“You wanna know what I think?”

“What?”

He leaned down, caught her nipple between his teeth, and nipped playfully at it until she squealed and swatted his face away.

“I think you think too much,” he laughed. “Now come on. We’ve still got time before work. Come back.”

And he burrowed back into the soft fragrant part of her neck, and stroked her arm until they were both nodding off again.

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That day at work, the mood in the breakroom was one of lively anticipation, wondering what drama had come about after the revelation of their living arrangement. Normally, to minimize attention to themselves, Amy and Jonah staggered their arrivals to work by twenty minutes, as though they hadn’t ridden in together and hadn’t flipped a coin for who would sit in the car playing with their phone until they could come inside.

This time, though, they walked into the breakroom holding hands. Openly, matter-of-factly. Nervously.

Proudly.

Cheyenne beamed and offered them a thumbs-up. Glenn grinned his dopey grin and mirrored Cheyenne’s thumbs-up. Mateo glanced up from his phone, then returned his attention to it. Marcus and Sandra and Justine looked merely awed; Kelly, uncomfortable; Dina, amused.

Jonah walked right up to Dina and asked, “Which form do I fill out for the change of address?”

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Two nights later, while Jonah worked a late shift, Amy switched hers so she could come home to Emma, who was back from Adam’s. Amy put out bowls of their mutual favorite ice cream, rocky road, with extra whipped cream.

She said, “Em, I wanted to talk to you, because Jonah and I…we’re seeing each other, and it’s getting kind of serious.”

Emma snorted into her whipped cream. “Duh, Mom.”

“What, did he tell you?”

“No, I just have eyes.” She took a bite of her ice cream. Considered. “I asked him once, if you were dating.”

“You did?”

Amy really shouldn’t have been shocked, but she let herself forget, sometimes. That this person in front of her was no longer a baby, but a young woman in her own right, with her own opinions and feelings and inner universe, which operated outside of her mother’s purview.

Emma nodded, loading more whipped cream onto her spoon. “This was, like, last week. He wouldn’t give me a straight answer. He said it was complicated. But I said it didn’t seem that complicated to me. You loved him, and he loved you.”

Amy’s heart sank, somehow. “I didn’t want to tell you until I felt sure. I didn’t want either of us to get hurt in all this.”

“I get it. Dad really hates Jonah. You should be careful how you explain to him that Jonah lives here.”

“You like Jonah, right?” She had to check. Had to confirm it, just once, out loud.

Emma snorted again. “Yeah, of course.”

“And I’m not, like, screwing you up by having him here?”

Emma licked her spoon clean with some care. “I don’t think so. You guys seem really happy, which is a good thing. I do actually want that for you, Mom, even if it’s not with Dad.”

Amy bit her lip, eyes a little shiny. “I love you most, you know. More than anyone.”

Emma smiled. “I know. Hey, do we have any of that Magic Shell stuff to go on top of this?”

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It took a long time for her to fully let him in— to stop testing him, second-guessing him, waiting for the other shoe to drop. She finally let him move out of the den six months after they first had sex, and it took awhile for her to get used to him sleeping beside her every night. But he was patient, and he was kind. He earned her trust by meeting her hopes and turning them into reliable expectations. He made her feel understood, and adored.

Still, it took even longer for her to agree to marry him officially. She had finished her bachelor’s degree in business management through an online program, and Emma was already in college herself, by the time they exchanged rings. Amy would’ve been happy just signing papers at the courthouse in a summer dress, both sets of parents and Emma as their witnesses— but this was Jonah’s first marriage, and she wanted him to have the wedding experience. She had to reign in his most contrarian, hipster-esque impulses, but he wore a gray and navy blue suit, and she wore a white dress with gold accents, and flats instead of awful pinching heels, and he picked a barn to fill with fairy lights and weird fancy horderves in mason jars for their confused guests. The entire Cloud Nine crew attended, and Dina insisted on giving a speech about how Amy and Jonah were the last people on earth she ever thought would get married, but c’est la vie, right? They kissed, and posed for pictures, and flew to Greece for their honeymoon the next morning.

Sometimes she felt a little guilty, taking so long before taking any leaps. He was always sure of himself, and of her, in a way she could never quite master. But he always silenced that guilt with a grin and a kiss.

“It’s okay,” he liked to tell her. “We’re a sure thing. We’ve got the time.”

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She felt the tiny little life start to stir inside of her two months after the honeymoon. It was pure terror, at first— and then, a kind of quiet awe, unfolding in her like cool clean linen.

She was older now, and this was a pregnancy she was ready for. She told Emma first, called her in the middle of a lecture; Emma had to excuse herself in order to shriek as loudly and fully as the situation deserved.

When Amy told Jonah that night, he couldn’t stop tearing up, and he couldn’t stop smiling.

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When she came in the spring— a healthy baby girl, right on time— they named her Hannah Sosa Simms.

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