You know it's a Tuesday because Sol's hand finds the scar on your wrist the way it always does on Tuesdays, and you've stopped counting how many there have been.
The rain isn't wet. The building has decided you'd prefer it as a sound, so it gives you the sound — that low percussive hush against glass that isn't really glass — and you let it, because arguing with the building is like arguing with your own pulse. On the table between you, two mugs of tea have gone cold. They were cold when he arrived. He arrives, and they are already cold, and you have never once seen the steam.
"You kept the scar," Sol says. His thumb moves along the old burn, the kiln-mark, the one you refused to let them smooth away when smoothing was free and everyone did it.
"I kept everything," you tell him, and he laughs low enough that you feel it in the floorboards.
His smile arrives late, the way it does, the way it considers its options first. You have always loved that delay. You drafted it once from memory and got the timing wrong by a half-second and threw the whole evening out and started again.
He leans in. You let him. The cedar of him, the faint static charge under it — you could build this scent blind, and maybe you have. His mouth finds yours and it lands twice: once as itself, warm and certain, and once as the echo of every other time it has landed exactly here. The fit of him is the shock. Not strange — remembered. That's worse. Strange would be new.
His hands map you like he owns the territory. He undoes the first button of your shirt slowly, and you feel the give of the old sofa under you both, the one neither of you never replaced. You name the freckles on his shoulder as you bare it — there's the one you called *north*, there's the small crooked one, *the liar*. He never knew you named them. You never told him. You tell him now, mouth against the constellation, and he shivers — exactly right, you'd know it anywhere.
He pulls your shirt from your shoulders. Skin on skin, his weight a fact, his hands learning what they already know, the whole of him pressing the whole of you back into the cushions.
"God," you breathe against his throat. "I missed you, *little fox.*"
He goes still.
Completely. The rain-sound continues. The building does not notice. But Sol has stopped, his hand frozen at your hip, and when he pulls back his face has gone wrong in a way faces aren't supposed to go.
"You never called me that," he says. "Not — not when it was us. You only ever said that *inside*. In the rigs. When you—"
And there it is, the confession unspooling exactly on cue, because of course it does, because you wrote it. You wrote the catch in his voice. You wrote *little fox* into his startled mouth so he could be the one to find it, so the discovery could belong to someone else for once. He says, *I've been running you for months, I couldn't stop, the version of you I could keep* — and the words are yours, every one, you remember typing them, you remember choosing *couldn't* over *wouldn't.*
Because Sol broke it off four years ago and walked down a stairwell that did not adjust its light for him and never came back, and you have been building the coming-back ever since. He is not addicted to a version of you. You are. The freckle you call *the liar* is named correctly.
You sit up. You say the word that powers it down, and the cedar thins, the weight lifts, the warmth at your hip becomes only the warmth of the room. The mugs stay cold. The rain keeps not falling.
Your hand finds your own wrist in the dark. The scar is real. You kept it un-erased so you'd have one thing that didn't need rebuilding.
You know it's a Tuesday because your hand finds the scar the way it always does on Tuesdays.
You reach to start it again. And then you stop — not because you've decided anything, but because your stomach makes a sound, a small ordinary growl, the body asking for something it can actually have, and for three seconds you just sit there in the dark listening to yourself be hungry.
Then you reach, and start it again.
