Cleo heard him moving without fully waking. The couch shifted beneath her, the blanket loosened briefly at her back, and the warmth she had been resting against disappeared by slow degrees rather than all at once. Some drowsy part of her registered the loss and objected, but not enough to open her eyes. She only curled deeper into the place he had left behind, trusting the quiet sounds from the kitchen—the faint rinse of ceramic, ice dropping into glass, the low murmur of his voice carrying words she could not quite separate—to mean he was still near. Her body had spent so much of the morning braced for the next demand that surrendering now felt almost unfamiliar. Still, she let the weight in her limbs hold her down, let the blanket protect the warmth he had tucked around her, and allowed herself to remain exactly where she was without checking whether he needed anything from her in return.

When the cushion dipped again, relief moved through her before consciousness could name it. His arm returned around her, fitting into the same place as though the brief absence had only been practical, never emotional, and she shifted toward him on instinct until the line of her back settled against his chest. The clean chill from the fresh water reached her faintly from the coffee table, mixing with the soft cotton smell of the blanket and the familiar warmth of his skin. She heard enough of his whispered inventory to understand that everything had been put in order—the ice cream saved, the water waiting, the small government of their morning apparently still intact—and a sleepy smile touched her mouth against his shirt.

“Good,” she murmured, the word blurred by exhaustion and barely loud enough to escape the cocoon. Her hand found his where it rested over the blanket and folded loosely around it, not needing to guide him anywhere, only confirming that he had returned. “You’re very good at boring.”

The teasing held no energy beyond affection, and she made no attempt to preserve the smile after it faded. His body finally softened behind her in a way it had not allowed itself to do all morning, the careful vigilance in his muscles easing until he was no longer merely holding her but resting too. Cleo felt the change immediately. It mattered that he had stopped pretending exhaustion was irrelevant simply because hers had been louder. She wanted him beside her, not stationed around her like a guard who had forgotten he was also allowed to need sleep. The thought remained only half-formed before she drew his hand closer against her middle and tucked herself more securely beneath his chin, making the adjustment without words because there was nothing left to negotiate.

The apartment settled around them as the morning continued beyond the blanket. A pipe clicked somewhere inside the wall, tires passed below the open window, and the refrigerator resumed its patient hum after accepting the rescued vanilla back into its care. None of it asked them to participate. The canvases could wait. His guitar could remain untouched. Their phones could collect whatever obligations believed themselves urgent while the two of them slept through them. Even Sage seemed temporarily satisfied, her stomach quiet beneath their joined hands, the violent insistence of earlier reduced to a lingering soreness and the strange comfort of something cold finally staying where it belonged.

Cleo’s breathing lengthened until each inhale pressed her more deeply into him. The last clear thought she managed was that this was what she had meant when she said home. Not a place where nothing difficult happened, but a place where difficulty was allowed to end. A place where she could be sick, frightened, hungry, contradictory, and then simply tired, without anyone asking her to turn the morning into evidence of strength. Ben’s arm remained around her, the water waited close enough for later, and the unfinished life they had spent years trying not to want held them without requiring another promise.

She pressed one final, absent kiss against his chest, too sleepy to know whether he felt it, then let her hand go slack over his. “Love you,” she breathed, the words nearly swallowed by the fabric between them.

After that, she stopped trying to stay awake. The room softened, his heartbeat steadied beneath her cheek, and the profoundly boring day they had chosen finally began with both of them asleep on the couch.

Ben heard her.

Barely. The words arrived more as warmth than sound, breathed through cotton and exhaustion, nearly lost beneath the quiet machinery of the apartment. But he heard them, because some part of him had stayed awake for exactly that kind of small thing all morning. Not alert in the anxious, sharp-edged way he had been on the bathroom floor. Not braced for the next wave of nausea or the next sudden movement toward the hallway. This was different. Softer. The kind of awareness that remained after crisis had finally loosened its grip, when love stopped standing guard with both hands up and simply kept watch from inside the body. His eyes were already closed, but the words found him anyway, slipping beneath his ribs and settling there with everything else she had given him since sunrise.

His first instinct was to answer in a way that matched the size of what he felt.

That instinct, fortunately, was exhausted.

He didn’t have the strength for another enormous declaration. Not after the morning had taken them through sickness, tour grief, plain vanilla diplomacy, the architecture of trust, the shape of marriage, and the quiet holiness of ordinary days. Every large truth in him had already been turned over and offered until there was nothing left but the simplest one. So he lowered his mouth to the top of her hair, the movement so slight it barely shifted the blanket, and let his reply fall there, low and sleep-worn and entirely unadorned.

“Love you too.”

Even that felt like more than speech. It felt like returning something she had placed carefully in his hands. His arm stayed curved around her, heavier now than it had been all morning because his body was finally beginning to believe it was allowed to rest. The water waited on the coffee table. The bowl remained close enough. The world had been arranged, as much as he could arrange it, into a small, survivable circle around them. He had done what he could. Not everything. Not the future. Not the tour. Not pregnancy. Not all the miles and mornings still coming for them. But this much. This room. This blanket. This woman tucked against him without apology. Their child quiet beneath his hand for the moment. Enough.

The thought moved through him slowly, blurred at the edges by fatigue: this was what he wanted to learn how to do for the rest of his life. Not only the dramatic things, not only the songs or the flights home or the future question he kept carefully waiting in the private place where he stored things that mattered too much to rush. This too. The unremarkable maintenance of peace. Remembering water. Moving a mug. Letting silence be restful instead of unresolved. Holding his own worry still enough that it didn’t become another thing she had to carry. Being the kind of tired that stayed kind.

His face rested against her hair, and his breathing gradually began to lengthen with hers. The apartment continued in its quiet, ordinary way around them, indifferent and generous all at once. A low sound from the street rose and faded. The refrigerator hummed. The open window let the morning breathe through the room. Sunlight warmed the floor in slow increments, reaching toward the coffee table where the evidence of their small survival remained gathered: water, napkin, bowl, the abandoned traces of vanilla. None of it looked like a milestone. None of it would announce itself later as the day everything changed. But Ben knew better now than to trust spectacle with meaning. Sometimes the whole life was hidden inside a morning no one else would ever see.

He let himself sink another fraction into the couch.

There was still a stubborn part of him that wanted to stay half-awake forever, tracking every shift in her breathing, every possible sign that her stomach might change its mind again. It had been a long morning. His body had learned vigilance too quickly, and love had a terrible habit of confusing rest with negligence when the person beside him had been hurting. But Cleo had asked for boring. She had asked for rest. She had asked, in a dozen ways, for him to stop standing outside the moment like a guard and come back inside it with her.

So he did.

His hand loosened over hers without letting go. His shoulders eased. The ache behind his eyes deepened into something warm and pulling. For once, he didn’t chase another thought to its conclusion. He didn’t rehearse future logistics or silently revise the list of foods that might work later. He didn’t write a line in his head, though he knew the morning would come back to him eventually in music whether he invited it or not. He only held the shape of them in the quiet and let it be unfinished.

Right before sleep took him, Ben had one clear impression of the life around him: not perfect, not polished, not even easy in the way people usually meant easy. But theirs. Soft where it needed to be. Strong in places neither of them used to know how to build. A little absurd. Deeply ordinary. Already loved.

His thumb made one last slow pass over her hand.

Then he finally let his eyes stay closed.

Cleo had gotten good at filling the spaces Ben left behind. Not replacing him, because she had learned there was a difference, but refusing to let the month he had been gone become a stretch of time she merely endured until he came home. South America had taken him into the strange rhythm she was still learning how to exist alongside, different cities and hotels, performances and flights, calls squeezed into whatever overlapping hours they could find. Meanwhile, Cleo had kept living. She had painted more than she had in months, enough that the living room regularly looked more like an extension of her studio than somewhere anyone was supposed to sit. She had sold three pieces, including one she had nearly talked herself into keeping, and had felt the particular satisfaction of wrapping them, signing the backs, and sending something she had made out into the world. There had been doctor appointments and errands and ordinary responsibilities, and her sister had apparently made it a personal mission to ensure Cleo never had too many empty afternoons to herself. They had gone to lunch, wandered through shops neither of them needed anything from, eaten takeout on Cleo’s couch, and talked late enough into the evening that Cleo occasionally realized an entire day had passed without her organizing it around when Ben might call. She still missed him. Sometimes badly. But she was learning that missing him didn’t have to consume everything else.

That afternoon had belonged to painting. Cleo had been in the living room for hours, sitting near the canvas with one bare foot tucked beneath her, brushes and supplies scattered across the drop cloth around her. Her hair had been pulled up earlier and was gradually escaping around her face and neck, and there was paint along the side of one hand and another small streak across her cheek from touching her face without thinking. Music played quietly somewhere behind her, just loud enough to fill the apartment without interfering with the concentration that had narrowed her world to color, shape, and the section of canvas she had been trying to get right for the better part of twenty minutes.

The creak of the front door broke straight through it.

Cleo’s brush stopped. She remained completely still for a second, head turning toward the sound while her mind tried to place it. She wasn’t expecting anyone. Her sister hadn’t said she was coming over, and nobody else had any reason to be walking through her door. A flicker of unease had only just begun to move through her when the door opened farther and somebody stepped inside.

Ben.

For several seconds, Cleo simply stared at him.

He stood in the entryway with a duffel bag, looking so thoroughly wrecked by travel that under any other circumstances she probably would have laughed. His clothes were rumpled, his hair was an absolute disaster, and exhaustion sat plainly across his face. None of that registered properly at first. What registered was that he was there, standing inside her apartment when every piece of information Cleo possessed told her he was supposed to be thousands of miles away.

Her brush lowered slowly toward her lap. “Ben?”

His name came out almost cautiously, as though saying it too loudly might expose whatever trick her brain was playing on her. She blinked at him, looked at the duffel, then back at his face. “What are you doing here?”

She was already getting to her feet.

“No, seriously.” The brush slipped from her fingers onto the drop cloth, forgotten immediately. “What are you doing here?” Confusion and happiness collided so quickly that her face couldn’t seem to settle on either one. She took several steps toward him, staring as if proximity might provide an explanation. “You’re in South America. You’re supposed to be in South America.” A startled laugh escaped her as she reached him, her eyes moving over his face again. “Did something happen? Are you okay? Why are you here?”

She barely gave him enough space between the questions to answer any of them. Her attention caught on his face again, on the unmistakable reality of him standing directly in front of her instead of appearing inside the screen of her phone, and whatever part of Cleo had been attempting to understand the logistics simply gave up.

Her eyes filled.

“Oh my God.”

The first tear made her laugh in embarrassment, and then another followed it, and Cleo stopped pretending she had any control over the reaction. She closed the remaining distance between them at once, throwing both arms around his neck and pressing herself against him hard enough that the momentum carried straight through the embrace. Her face disappeared against the side of his neck, fingers curling into the back of his messy hair while she held him as though her body had spent the entire month waiting to do exactly this even while the rest of her had been getting perfectly good at functioning without him.

“I missed you.”

It came out muffled against his neck, much smaller than everything she had been feeling. Cleo tightened her arms around him, and a shaky laugh caught behind the next breath. “God, I missed you so much.”

The admission seemed to open something. She had been painting. She had sold work. She had gone to her appointments and spent time with her sister and kept the apartment running and made plans and filled her days with things that belonged entirely to her. She had proven to herself that Ben could leave and Cleo’s life wouldn’t simply stop until he returned. She was proud of that. None of it changed what happened inside her now that she could actually feel him beneath her hands again.

“I’ve been okay,” she murmured, drawing back just enough to look at him while keeping both arms around his neck. Tears had already made a mess of her face, but she couldn’t bring herself to care. “I’ve been really okay. I’ve been painting like crazy. I sold three pieces while you’ve been gone. I’ve been going to my appointments, and my sister has basically decided she’s responsible for keeping me occupied, so I’ve seen her constantly.” Her smile wobbled as her eyes searched his face. “I’ve been doing everything I’m supposed to do. I’ve been living my life. I haven’t been sitting here miserable waiting for you.”

Her hand slid from behind his neck to his cheek, thumb moving over his skin almost absently as she absorbed the difference between remembering his face and actually touching it. “But I still missed you every single day.” Her voice softened around the confession. “Both things can apparently be true, which feels unfair.”

Cleo laughed through the last of her tears and leaned her forehead against his, finally allowing herself to stop trying to make sense of why he was there long enough to simply enjoy that he was. She still didn’t know how he’d managed it. She didn’t know how long he had, what flight he’d taken, when he’d slept last, or what possessed him to cross continents and show up at her door without warning. Those questions could wait until she had finished convincing herself that he wasn’t about to disappear when she blinked.

For now, her fingers slipped back into his hair, keeping him close as she smiled through damp lashes. “I’m really happy you’re here.”

Cleo stayed wrapped around him for another few seconds, unwilling to surrender the simple fact that she could. Her hand remained in his hair while the other rested at the back of his neck, and she let herself breathe him in until the first shock of finding him in her doorway began settling into something she could actually process. He was here. Not on her phone with hotel lighting behind him, not sending her a picture from an airport she had never been to, not reduced to a voice she had to carry around after the call ended. Here. Solid beneath her hands, exhausted and rumpled and so familiar that her chest still ached every time she looked at him.

She finally eased back enough to see his face properly, though she didn’t let go. Her arms loosened around his neck instead, one hand sliding down to his shoulder while the other stayed against his cheek. Cleo’s eyes moved over him again with the same disbelieving little smile she’d been unable to shake since he walked through the door, and her thumb brushed beneath one of his eyes as she took in just how tired he looked. “You really flew all the way back here,” she murmured, almost to herself. The reality of that was beginning to sink in now. Somewhere in the middle of a tour on another continent, Ben had gotten on a plane and crossed thousands of miles instead of spending whatever break he’d been given sleeping in a hotel room. He had come home. He had come to her.

The thought warmed her for approximately three seconds before another one followed directly behind it, and Cleo’s expression shifted. Her gaze dropped briefly toward the duffel bag before returning to him. She knew better than to interpret a bag as evidence of anything. Ben practically lived out of one when he was working. It could mean a night. It could mean several. She had no idea, and suddenly the answer mattered enough that she almost didn’t want to ask.

“Okay,” she said softly, drawing in a breath as her fingers moved absently along the edge of his collar. “I have one question, and I don’t know if I actually want the answer yet.” Her mouth curved faintly, but the emotion underneath it was impossible to hide. She had spent a month learning how to miss him without counting down every day until he returned, and now that he was unexpectedly standing in front of her, some greedy little part of her immediately wanted to know exactly how much of him she had been given.

Cleo looked up at him, her hand settling against the side of his neck. “How long do I get you home for?”

The word home slipped out naturally enough that she only noticed it after she’d said it. She didn’t correct herself. This was home, at least in the way that mattered to her right now, and Ben had come back to it. Her thumb moved once against his skin as her smile softened. “Because I need to know whether I’m allowed to get excited or whether you’re about to tell me you have a flight again in six hours and make me hate airports even more than I already do.”

She was teasing, but only barely. Cleo’s eyes stayed on his, searching his face while her fingers curled loosely behind his neck again. “A day?” she asked. “Two?” Then she stopped herself before she could keep guessing, shaking her head with another quiet laugh. “No. Just tell me. How long are you mine before I have to give you back?”

Ben had imagined this part during an unreasonable percentage of the trip home. Somewhere over one ocean or another, folded badly into an airplane seat with his hood pulled up and his neck at an angle he was going to regret tomorrow, he had pictured opening the apartment door and seeing Cleo. His imagination had supplied surprise, obviously, and probably some accusation about being an asshole for not warning her before crossing half the planet. He had imagined getting his arms around her. What he had not accounted for was the few seconds in which she simply stared at him, or how hearing his name in her voice—not through earbuds, not distorted slightly by hotel Wi-Fi, but from across their actual apartment—would make every mile he had traveled suddenly feel worth it.

The questions started before his exhausted brain had properly caught up with the first one. Ben's mouth twitched despite himself, amusement getting tangled with the immediate realization that he had scared her before he had managed to surprise her, and he shook his head quickly when concern entered her face. “Nothing happened. I’m okay, I swear.” He barely got that much out before she was closer, and whatever explanation he might have assembled disappeared completely. His duffel slipped from his shoulder and landed beside the entryway with the careless familiarity of a bag being dropped exactly where he had dropped it a hundred times before, among the ordinary evidence that he lived here too when the tour wasn't stealing him somewhere else.

Then he had her in his arms, and Ben stopped caring about everything except the fact that she was real.

His arm closed around her waist while the other swept securely across her back, catching her easily and pulling her closer when momentum brought her into him. There was a split second, barely conscious, when his hold adjusted—not tentative enough to ruin the embrace, just some newly embedded instinct reminding him that there were two people he loved contained in the body pressed against his. A breath left him somewhere between a laugh and something embarrassingly less controlled, and he buried his face against her hair before she could get a particularly good look at him. “Hey,” he breathed, because apparently he had flown thousands of miles and spent an entire month missing this woman only to arrive equipped with a vocabulary of approximately one syllable. His mouth pressed against her temple, then disappeared into her hair again as his eyes closed. “Hi.”

The tears he felt against his neck dismantled what remained of him. His palm spread over the middle of her back, fingers flexing against her shirt as his hold tightened almost involuntarily, and for several seconds Ben couldn't make himself loosen it. He had underestimated how much he had missed the physical reality of her. Calls had kept them connected, pictures had filled in pieces, and there had been nights when he'd fallen asleep with his phone still beside his face after talking to her, but none of it had given him this—the precise weight of her against him, her fingers in his hair, the familiar pressure of her body fitting into the space his had apparently been keeping empty for her. “I know,” he murmured when her confession reached him, his voice roughened by too many hours awake and something considerably more dangerous than exhaustion. He swallowed before adding, “Me too, Cleo. Every fucking day.”

He let himself stay there while she began telling him about the month he had missed, listening with his cheek against her hair and a tired smile gradually forming. The paintings caught his attention immediately, but three sales made him pull back enough to see her properly, eyebrows lifting as if she had buried a fairly significant piece of information halfway through a routine status report. “Hold on. Three?” Pride cut cleanly through the jet lag, bright and immediate. “You sold three paintings and you're just casually slipping that in between everything else?” His thumb moved along her back as he looked at her, the smile widening despite how thoroughly wrecked the rest of him looked. “That's fucking amazing.”

The rest mattered just as much, though differently. He listened to the appointments, her sister, the days she'd filled without arranging every hour around whatever continent he happened to be standing on, and relief moved through him alongside the pride. The mention of the appointments snagged a little more firmly than the others, because no matter how many updates she had given him afterward, there was still a particular guilt attached to knowing some of them had happened while he was thousands of miles away. He knew she could handle them without him; she had never needed him hovering over every part of the pregnancy to prove he cared. That did not stop him from wanting to be there, though, or from privately resenting every tour date that made him experience pieces of this through phone calls and pictures instead of beside her.

Ben had worried about her while he was gone, sometimes reasonably and sometimes because distance gave the imagination too much room to work. He had worried when nausea had hit at inconvenient hours, when food suddenly became unacceptable after being perfectly fine the day before, when exhaustion had flattened her harder than she wanted to admit. Mostly, he had worried because there was no useful way to reach through a phone and take any of it off her shoulders. Seeing her now with paint on her hand and cheek, surrounded by the evidence of a full afternoon she had built for herself, loosened something that had been sitting tight in his chest for weeks. She had missed him, but she hadn't disappeared into missing him.

“Good,” he said, and there was enough weight behind the word that it lost any possibility of sounding dismissive. His gaze stayed on hers while his hand settled comfortably at the small of her back. “I'm glad you've been good. Really.” His eyes moved over her face for another second before the concern he had been holding at bay inevitably won a little territory. “And you've actually been feeling okay? Not your version of okay where you conveniently leave out that you almost threw up because somebody opened a yogurt three rooms away?” A beat passed before the corner of his mouth lifted, taking some of the scrutiny out of it. “Because I've had a month to learn your reporting methods, and they're suspicious.”

Her hand against his face quieted him again. Ben leaned into the touch without thinking, eyelids lowering for half a second as her thumb moved over skin made dry by airplane cabins and neglect. He became vaguely aware of the state of himself through her scrutiny: rumpled clothes, dark hair that had lost an argument with several headrests, stubble he had stopped caring about somewhere around the first connection, exhaustion carved deeply enough beneath his eyes that no amount of pretending was going to disguise it. He should probably have wanted a shower before she touched him this much. Instead he turned his face slightly into her palm, because after a month without it, vanity ranked somewhere below international baggage regulations on his current list of concerns.

It was the word home that got him.

Ben didn't react quickly enough to hide it, though he doubted she was looking for a reaction in the first place. Something softened in his face before he could stop it, and for a moment his eyes simply moved over hers while the word settled into him. He had been living here with her between tour legs long enough that his things had migrated into drawers and cabinets, his shoes appeared beside hers, his charger had developed a permanent residence, and there were pieces of his life scattered through rooms that had once belonged entirely to Cleo. He no longer arrived with the careful temporaryness of somebody visiting. He came back, dumped his bag near the door, knew what was in the refrigerator, slept on his side of the bed, and inevitably left something stupid somewhere she would find it after he flew out again. Somewhere along the way, without either of them needing to formally declare it, her apartment had become the place his mind pictured when somebody told him he was finally going home.

And now there was another layer to it that still occasionally hit him sideways. Their baby existed here too, impossibly small and already capable of reorganizing entire sections of their lives. There were appointments on the calendar because of them, foods in the kitchen selected according to whatever Cleo could tolerate that particular week, conversations that began with practical things and somehow ended with the two of them lying awake discussing January. Ben had spent years thinking of home as somewhere he returned to. Lately, for the first time, it had begun to feel like something being built around him.

That was probably why he noticed the exact moment her happiness acquired an edge.

Her attention went toward the duffel, and Ben understood immediately. The bag itself told her nothing; she had watched him live out of one too many times for that. A month apart had taught both of them not to assume that an arrival meant permanence, and the machinery of touring had a particularly cruel way of putting an expiration date on reunions before they had properly begun. Ben's thumb traced once along her side while he watched the question gather behind her expression. He could have answered before she asked. He didn't, partly because he wanted to let her arrive at it herself and partly because the sleepy, selfish part of him wanted another few seconds before putting a number on something that felt infinitely better without one.

The airport threat made his mouth curve. Six hours was insulting after what he had just put his spine through, and his eyebrows lifted with tired disbelief as though she had personally questioned his intelligence. “Six hours?” he echoed. “Baby, if I did all that for six hours, don't even let me unpack. Take me directly to a neurologist.” His hand slid a little higher along her back, keeping her close while the guesses continued, and he felt his expression soften as quickly as the joke had come. She was trying to prepare herself for the answer. That realization took most of the fun out of making her wait.

Still, the particular way she finally asked nearly did him in.

Ben breathed out a quiet laugh, but it wasn't really because anything was funny. His eyes dropped briefly, and he rubbed his thumb once against her back while those words found somewhere inconveniently tender to lodge. Mine. Give you back. Tour had reduced so much of their relationship lately to borrowed stretches of time that he understood exactly what she meant. He had spent a month belonging to schedules, venues, flights, interviews, rehearsals, crowds, and everybody who needed something from him; the prospect of belonging only here for a little while sounded almost obscenely good.

“Seventy-two hours.”

He watched her face as he said it, not wanting to miss the reaction. Three days sounded both enormous and painfully small after a month, which was probably why he preferred hours. Seventy-two had weight to it. It contained three nights in their bed, three mornings that didn't begin with checking which city he had woken up in, and enough ordinary time between arrival and departure that they didn't have to immediately turn every second into something meaningful. More privately, it meant three days of being physically present for all the small things pregnancy had forced him to hear about secondhand lately. If she felt sick, he could get her something. If she fell asleep halfway through the afternoon, he could put a blanket over her instead of finding out afterward. If some inexplicable craving appeared at ten at night, he could be the idiot going out to find it.

“I leave again in three days,” he clarified, quieter now. “East Coast run.”

There it was: the unavoidable edge. Ben felt it himself the moment the next departure became something spoken aloud rather than an itinerary buried in his phone, but he refused to let it eat the arrival. He had spent too much time getting here for that. His hand moved slowly up her back until his palm rested between her shoulder blades, and he pulled her that fraction closer again, gaze steady on hers. “But not tonight. Not tomorrow. Not the day after that until somebody physically makes me go to the airport.” His smile returned, worn-out and crooked. “So you're allowed to get excited. Moderately. Don't embarrass yourself.”

The teasing bought him approximately two seconds before his attention caught on the streak of paint across her cheek. Ben's eyes narrowed slightly as he focused on it, and his thumb came up to investigate, brushing carefully over the mark only to smear it farther rather than remove it. He stared at his thumb, then back at her face, caught in the act of making the problem objectively worse. “Fixed it,” he decided, with the confidence of a man who clearly had not. Only then did he finally look past her toward the living room, taking in the easel near the windows, the drop cloth, the scattered brushes and supplies, and the unmistakable evidence that he had interrupted her halfway through working.

Something about it made him smile differently. This was the life that had continued while he was gone, and there was an intimacy in walking back into it mid-afternoon instead of receiving the edited version over a call later. “I wanna see everything,” he said, his attention returning to her. “What you were working on, what you finished, the three you sold. I want pictures if they're already gone.” He gave her a pointed look, fatigue doing absolutely nothing to lessen the sincerity beneath it. “And I'm gonna be annoying about the sales, just so we're clear. You've had a month without me here to brag about you in person. There's a backlog.”

His gaze dipped briefly, and this time it caught on something that had changed. The fitted tank she wore made the difference easier to see than it might otherwise have been, a small curve at her stomach that was still subtle enough that a stranger might not have thought twice about it. Ben wasn't a stranger. He knew the shape of her body too intimately for a month of gradual change to disappear into familiarity, and seeing four months of their baby in person after weeks of photographs and video calls landed differently than he had expected. For a second he simply looked, exhaustion and amusement falling away from his expression as the reality of what he'd missed became unexpectedly tangible.

His hand left her back and settled gently over the beginning of that curve, palm warm through the thin fabric of her tank. There was nothing tentative in the gesture, but there was wonder in it, quiet enough that Ben probably would have denied the word if anybody accused him of it aloud. His thumb moved once, tracing a small arc without any expectation that he would feel something in return, and his eyes lifted to hers before dropping again. “Okay,” he murmured, a faint, almost disbelieving smile appearing. “You definitely did that while I was gone.”

The month had not felt short while he was living it. Standing here, it suddenly seemed enormous. Cleo had looked like Cleo every time he'd seen her on a screen, and logically Ben had known her body was changing even while he wasn't there to witness each incremental difference, but seeing the evidence beneath his own hand made him acutely aware that the pregnancy had kept moving forward without waiting for his tour schedule to accommodate it. The feeling wasn't quite sadness and wasn't guilt either. It was something more complicated: amazement tangled with the sharp little ache of having missed the gradual becoming of something he could now see all at once.

His mouth curved again before the emotion could get too comfortable. “And hi to you too,” he murmured toward the small curve beneath his palm, affection pulling crookedly at his expression. “Sorry your dad's first move after crossing a continent was apparently ignoring you for ten minutes.” The absurdity of apologizing to someone who hadn't been born yet amused him enough that a tired laugh escaped, but his hand stayed where it was. He rubbed his thumb once more over Cleo's tank and looked back at her. “I've missed both of you,” he admitted, softer than the joke that had preceded it, and before the sentiment could sit exposed for too long, he added, “Although one of you has been significantly better about answering my calls.”

His body chose that moment to remind him that enthusiasm was not a substitute for sleep. The adrenaline that had carried him through customs, baggage claim, the ride home, and finally through their front door was draining fast, leaving his shoulders heavy and his eyes burning. Ben exhaled and leaned his forehead against hers, letting his eyes close as soon as they touched. He could smell paint faintly from her skin, something familiar from the apartment underneath it, and the combination was so aggressively domestic after weeks of hotels that his entire nervous system seemed to sag toward it. “I do need you to know,” he murmured, “that I am currently held together by caffeine, spite, and the knowledge that you were at the end of the flight.”

For several seconds he didn't move. There was no reason to. The music was still playing softly somewhere behind them, his bag could remain abandoned by the door, and whatever clothes were inside it had already survived this many airports without his supervision. Ben let himself stand there with her, breathing slowly while the last month finally began losing its grip on his body. Three days wasn't enough, but standing here thinking about the fourth would be an exceptionally stupid way to spend the first.

His eyes opened again, and this time the look he gave her held more mischief than emotion, as if he'd caught himself drifting dangerously close to sentimentality and needed to correct course. “Here's what I'm thinking,” he said, his hand returning to her waist. “I shower before you decide you've made a terrible mistake letting a man who smells like international air travel live here. Then food—whatever currently passes the pregnancy smell test. Then you show me the paintings and accept praise with dignity for once.” His thumb slipped beneath the hem at her side just enough to find warm skin, familiar and absent-minded rather than demanding anything from her. “After that, I intend to contribute absolutely nothing useful to society for the remainder of the evening.”

The plan sounded better with every word. No surprise dinner, no attempt to manufacture some grand reunion worthy of the distance he had traveled, no obligation to turn seventy-two hours into a highlight reel because the clock was already running. Ben wanted their couch. He wanted his toothbrush where he had left it and the stupid argument over what to watch and whatever food could be obtained without either of them dressing properly. He wanted to see which foods had appeared in the kitchen since he'd left and hear Cleo explain why something she'd loved two weeks ago was now apparently disgusting. He wanted to wake sometime tomorrow without an alarm and spend several confused seconds figuring out where he was before realizing Cleo was beside him. After a month of movement, the ordinary had become the luxury.

He tipped his head enough to press a slow kiss against her forehead, lingering there before easing back only far enough to see her again. Exhaustion had stripped away most of his ability to disguise what he felt, leaving affection plainly visible in the softened line of his mouth and the way he kept finding excuses not to take his hands off her. “Seventy-two hours,” he repeated, giving the number one last consideration before his expression shifted into mock seriousness. “Which means I have officially moved from long-distance boyfriend back to household nuisance.” His fingers tightened gently at her waist, and his eyes dipped once toward the subtle curve he'd only just gotten to meet in person before returning to hers. The smile that followed was small, exhausted, and unmistakably content. “I'm home.”

Cleo’s smile changed the second he said it. Seventy-two hours. Three days. Three nights. Long enough that she didn’t have to immediately start grieving the goodbye while he was still standing in front of her. Long enough for his shoes to end up wherever she would inevitably trip over them, for his charger to migrate back beside the bed, for him to leave a glass somewhere inexplicable and swear he was coming back for it. Long enough to wake beside him more than once. Her eyes closed for half a second as relief moved through her, and when they opened again, she was smiling so broadly she couldn’t have hidden it if she tried. “Seventy-two hours,” she repeated, almost testing the number for herself. “Okay. I can work with seventy-two hours.” The East Coast run could wait. She heard it, understood exactly what it meant, and deliberately refused to follow the thought any farther than that. Three days from now, she could hate the airport. Right now Ben was standing in their apartment looking like he had personally fought commercial aviation and narrowly survived, and she wasn’t wasting the first ten minutes of having him home preparing herself to lose him again. She slipped her arms around his neck and kissed his cheek. “And for the record, I’m going to get extremely excited. Possibly embarrassingly excited. You flew home from South America. You forfeited your right to pretend you’re too cool for my reaction.”

His attempt to wipe the paint from her cheek made her laugh, and she caught his wrist before he could smear it any farther. “Oh, good. Thank you. Very helpful. A month away and somehow you’ve gotten worse at this.” She glanced at the paint decorating his thumb and shook her head before threading her fingers through his. Hearing that he wanted to see everything she had been working on sent another little rush of pride through her, one she didn’t bother trying to hide. “You can. I took pictures of the sold ones before they went out because I knew you’d want to see them, and yes, you can be annoying about it. Within reason.” Her nose wrinkled as she looked at him. “I reserve the right to revoke bragging privileges if you become unbearable.” It was almost dizzying how quickly ordinary conversation returned between them. There was no screen, no slight delay before his laugh reached her, no awareness that either of them needed to check a clock because one was about to go onstage or the other needed to sleep. She could touch him while she talked. She could watch his attention wander around the apartment and know he was actually seeing the things she had been describing for the last month.

Then his gaze lowered, and Cleo knew exactly what had caught his attention before his hand ever settled against her stomach. Her own eyes followed his, and something softer replaced the teasing. She had watched the change happen incrementally, little enough from one morning to the next that she sometimes still forgot about it until a pair of jeans fit differently or she caught herself sideways in the mirror. Ben hadn’t gotten that gradual introduction. He had left one version of her and come home to another, and seeing the realization move across his face made the difference suddenly feel more significant to her too. Cleo laid her hand over his, fingers slipping naturally between his as she looked down at them together. “I know,” she murmured, smiling. “It’s weird, isn’t it? I keep looking at myself from the side like I’m checking whether it’s still there.” Her thumb moved slowly over the back of his hand before she looked up again. “Everything’s been good. Really good. The appointments have been boring, which apparently is exactly what you want pregnancy appointments to be. And before you interrogate me, yes, I’ve been eating, yes, I’m taking everything I’m supposed to take, and yes, I still occasionally want to throw up because food has committed the crime of having a smell. But your yogurt example was unnecessarily specific and defamatory.”

His little greeting toward the baby made her laugh, but the admission underneath it landed somewhere much deeper. Cleo kept her hand over his and let him have the moment without rushing him through it. She had been able to touch the small change whenever she wanted, had watched it emerge slowly enough to become part of her reflection before she quite realized it was happening, while he had been limited to photographs and video calls that could never really translate it. “We missed you too,” she said softly, then glanced down at herself as though reconsidering her authority to make that statement. “Well, I missed you. This one currently has no concept of international touring or fathers, so I’m taking some creative liberties.” Her gaze returned to his, affection warming her expression. “But I’m pretty sure you’ll be forgiven for the ten-minute delay.” She squeezed his hand beneath hers, letting the quiet linger for a moment because there was something almost surreal about standing in the middle of their apartment with Ben’s palm over the beginning of their baby after spending a month experiencing the pregnancy without his physical presence beside her.

The exhaustion became impossible to ignore once his forehead settled against hers. Cleo’s hands moved up over his shoulders, rubbing them slowly as she listened to his assessment of the caffeine, spite, and sheer determination apparently responsible for delivering him across continents. “That’s an incredibly reassuring list of vital nutrients. I’m especially glad spite made the trip.” She pressed a brief kiss to his mouth, soft enough that it asked nothing from him, and studied his face when she pulled back. “You look exhausted, baby.” She didn’t say it critically. If anything, seeing the evidence of the journey on him made the surprise feel even more enormous. He could have spent this break sleeping. He could have found a hotel and shut the curtains and disappeared for three days before the next run began. Instead, he had folded himself into airplane seats and crossed half the world to come back here, and Cleo wasn’t sure she could think about that for too long without crying again.

His proposed schedule earned her immediate approval right up until he reached the part about accepting praise with dignity. “You had me at shower and food, and then you got ambitious.” She let her hands travel down his arms until she could catch both of his. “But yes. Shower. Absolutely shower. I love you very much, and I am thrilled you’re home, but there are limits to what love can overcome, and apparently international air travel is one of them.” Her smile took any sting out of the words as she squeezed his hands. “I’ll figure out food while you’re in there. Something safe enough that neither your stomach nor mine stages a revolt, and then you can inspect the paintings and tell me I’m brilliant until I become uncomfortable.” She meant it, too. She didn’t want a reservation somewhere or some elaborate plan designed to justify the miles he had traveled. She wanted him clean and fed and barefoot in their living room. She wanted his head in her lap while she told him everything that had happened since he left and eventually wanted the weight of him on his side of their bed.

She still didn’t let him go immediately. The ordinary shape of what he was offering struck her harder than any grand reunion could have. A shower. Food. Paintings. Their couch. Their bed. Three mornings. She had once been so frightened that Ben’s life would never leave enough room for anything quiet that she had nearly convinced herself loving him from a distance was safer than trying to build something real beside him. Yet here he was, exhausted from the very life that had frightened her, wanting nothing more glamorous from the next seventy-two hours than to exist inside hers. When he pressed the kiss to her forehead and finally said, I’m home, Cleo felt her expression soften completely. “I know,” she whispered, bringing both hands back to his face. She leaned up and kissed him slowly, without the frantic relief of their first embrace because now she knew she had time. When she pulled away, she stayed close, thumbs resting against the scruff along his cheeks. “That’s my favorite part. Not the seventy-two hours. Not even the fact that you apparently lost your mind and crossed half the planet instead of sleeping like a normal person.” Her smile turned smaller, warmer. “It’s that you came home.”

Cleo kissed the corner of his mouth once more before finally stepping back, though she kept one hand wrapped around his because apparently total separation was still asking too much of her. Her gaze traveled over his destroyed hair, rumpled clothes, and exhausted face, and she gave his hand a gentle tug farther into the apartment. “Now go shower before I decide missing you has compromised my sense of smell. I’ll make us something to eat, and then you’re getting on that couch with me and doing absolutely nothing.” She managed two steps before glancing back at him, the thought of his caffeine-and-spite survival strategy making her reconsider the rest of her plan. “Actually, forget everything after the couch. You’re definitely going to fall asleep.” Her smile widened as she tugged him forward again, surrounded by the apartment she had kept living in while he was gone and suddenly absurdly happy to have him occupying it again. “But you’re doing it here, so I don’t care.”

Cleo kept hold of his hand until the distance between the kitchen and the hallway made it impossible without physically following him to the shower, and even then she let their fingers drag apart reluctantly. “Go,” she told him, pointing toward the bedroom with the authority of someone who had already decided she was in charge of the next hour. “Hot water. Clean clothes. I’m feeding you when you come back, and if you fall asleep standing up in there after flying all the way home to surprise me, I’m going to be incredibly annoyed.” She watched him go for another second longer than necessary, still wearing the stupidly happy smile that had apparently become permanent, and only when he disappeared from view did she turn toward the kitchen. The apartment felt different already. His duffel was still abandoned by the door, his shoes would undoubtedly become her problem within the hour, and somewhere down the hall she could hear the familiar sounds of him moving through a home he no longer needed directions around. Cleo stood there listening for a moment, letting the reality settle again before she shook herself out of it and went to find them something to eat.

The refrigerator presented the usual pregnancy-era negotiation between what technically constituted food and what Cleo’s stomach had arbitrarily decided was offensive this week. She opened it and stared inside, one hand settling unconsciously against the small curve of her stomach while she considered the possibilities. Anything heavily seasoned was immediately eliminated. The leftover takeout her sister had insisted she keep was questionable even before Cleo remembered how aggressively the garlic had announced itself when she’d opened the container yesterday. Eggs had been enemies for almost two weeks now, and she wasn’t prepared to test whether the ceasefire had begun. What remained was simple enough: chicken she’d cooked the day before, bread, cheese, some fruit, and the increasingly ridiculous collection of crackers and bland snacks that had taken over an entire shelf since pregnancy had apparently transformed her kitchen into the waiting room of a pediatrician’s office.

“Okay,” she murmured to herself as she started pulling things out. “We’re doing boring.”

Boring sounded perfect. Cleo set a skillet on the stove and built two grilled sandwiches, adding chicken to Ben’s and keeping hers simpler because she trusted melted cheese considerably more than she trusted her own digestive system. She sliced an apple and strawberries for the side, then added a handful of crackers to her plate after briefly considering whether that made the meal look depressing and deciding she no longer cared. Ben had eaten enough meals in airports and hotel rooms over the last month that warm bread and actual fruit probably qualified as luxury. She worked slowly, listening to the shower running down the hall while butter began to hiss quietly against the pan. Every so often her attention drifted toward the hallway for no reason beyond the strange comfort of knowing exactly what the sound meant. He was here. His shampoo would be wet in their shower again. He would leave a towel somewhere irritating. In a few minutes he would come back into the kitchen wearing something soft and clean, probably looking only marginally more awake, and none of it required a phone call or a time-zone calculation.

She flipped the sandwiches and leaned her hip against the counter while they browned, her eyes wandering toward the living room. Her abandoned brush was still lying on the drop cloth where she’d dropped it when she saw him. The canvas would need attention before the paint dried completely, but for once Cleo couldn’t make herself care about interrupting the work. She had spent the last month protecting that part of herself, refusing to make Ben’s absence the organizing principle of her life, and she was proud of what she’d accomplished because of it. Three paintings had sold. Another was taking shape ten feet away. She had kept appointments and spent time with her sister and discovered that she could love somebody whose career regularly carried him away without becoming a woman who merely waited for him to return. But independence, she was realizing, didn’t require pretending his presence wasn’t better. She could be perfectly capable of feeding herself, entertaining herself, building a career and filling her own days, and still feel absurdly happy because his duffel was on her floor again.

Cleo pulled the sandwiches from the pan before sentimentality could make her burn them, cut Ben’s diagonally and then paused over her own before cutting it the same way. “Fancy,” she muttered, amused with herself. She carried the plates to the small table, went back for water, and then reconsidered Ben’s caffeine intake and filled an extra glass for him before placing it beside his plate. Her own water came with the prenatal vitamin she’d forgotten to take earlier, which she swallowed immediately rather than risk Ben noticing and using it as evidence in his ongoing prosecution of her allegedly unreliable reporting methods. By the time she finished cleaning the skillet and wiping the counter, the shower had stopped, and anticipation fluttered embarrassingly through her stomach all over again.

She turned toward the hallway at the first sound of movement, leaning back against the counter with her arms loosely folded. She knew how ridiculous it was. He had been gone for perhaps fifteen minutes. She had survived an entire month without seeing him in person, and somehow the duration of one shower had been enough to make her wait for him to reappear. Cleo rolled her eyes at herself and reached for one of the strawberries from her plate, taking a bite as she called toward the hallway, “I made grilled cheese and chicken, which isn’t remotely impressive, but you look like you’ve eaten seventeen consecutive airport meals, so I’m assuming your standards are currently underground.”

Her smile returned before she even finished speaking. She glanced at the plates and then toward the hallway again, unable to resist adding, “Also, I cut them diagonally, so technically this is fine dining.” Cleo picked up the plates instead of waiting at the table and carried them toward the living room, setting them on the coffee table in front of the couch because she had already decided neither of them needed the formality of sitting upright for dinner. She gathered the scattered cushions into something comfortable, pulled the throw blanket down from the back of the couch, and tucked her legs beneath herself as she settled into the corner. The unfinished painting remained visible across the room, the evidence of her afternoon exactly where she’d left it, while Ben’s bag remained by the front door and the quiet sounds of him moving through the apartment filled the spaces between.

For the first time in a month, Cleo wasn’t wondering when his name would appear on her phone. She wasn’t wondering whether he was asleep, performing, boarding a flight, or waking somewhere she had to look up on a map. He was twenty feet away. He was going to eat the sandwich she’d just made, probably insist on seeing every painting before exhaustion won, and eventually fall asleep somewhere close enough for her to touch him. Seventy-two hours would begin shrinking whether she watched the clock or not, so Cleo decided she wasn’t going to. She reached for another strawberry and smiled toward the hallway when she heard him coming closer. “Come eat, baby,” she called, settling deeper into the couch. “You crossed a continent. I think you’ve earned grilled cheese.”

Yes—I see what you mean. The previous version keeps visibly servicing the instructions: he won't sleep, he won't move, he only has seventy-two hours, he wants every minute, and after a while those points start sounding like themes Ben is consciously narrating instead of circumstances naturally shaping his behavior.

I'd make those things much quieter. He can simply be awake after the shower without repeatedly explaining why, stay beside her because that's naturally where he wants to be, and let the limited time surface once or twice rather than constantly measuring it. I'd also give the scene more room for Ben himself: curiosity about her month, playful commentary, his reaction to the food, the pregnancy, her paintings, little tour stories, physical affection that changes rather than defaulting repeatedly to his hand on her stomach. That should make the scene feel lived rather than instructed.

Here’s a more varied version:

The shower stripped away most of what the trip had left on him. By the time Ben came back down the hallway in a black T-shirt and gray sweats, his hair was damp and pushed loosely away from his face, his skin still carrying warmth from the water, and the particular misery of several airports had been reduced to a heaviness behind his eyes. He felt human again, or close enough to qualify. More importantly, the apartment smelled like toasted bread and butter, and after a month of catering trays, hotel breakfasts, backstage snacks, and meals selected according to whichever airport terminal he happened to be trapped in, it nearly stopped him in the doorway.

Her commentary from the other room pulled a laugh out of him before he even reached her. “My standards aren't underground,” he called back, voice clearer now that he'd showered. “They've become adaptable. That's different.” The distinction lasted until he saw the plates waiting on the coffee table and immediately abandoned any pretense of sophistication. He dropped into the open space beside her, looked down at the sandwich, fruit, and crackers with genuine appreciation, then added, “Although I did eat something twelve hours ago that had the structural integrity of a kitchen sponge, so maybe don't use me as your Michelin inspector tonight.”

The couch felt exactly as good as he'd been imagining it would. Ben settled back against the cushions and stretched one leg out, shoulder brushing hers before he deliberately crowded closer rather than correcting the overlap. He had spent a month surrounded by people and still somehow starved for uncomplicated contact; backstage hugs, handshakes, shoulders knocking together in vans, all the casual physicality of touring had done nothing to replace this. His knee rested against hers while he picked up his plate, and the first bite made his eyes close briefly for reasons that had very little to do with culinary complexity. “Fuck,” he said after swallowing, staring down at it. “Okay. You win. Diagonal grilled cheese is fine dining.”

He ate another bite almost immediately, considerably more interested in the food than dignity, and reached for a strawberry between bites. It was only after the first edge of hunger disappeared that he noticed the extra glass of water waiting for him. His eyes moved from it to Cleo, and a small smile tugged at his mouth before he picked it up. Of course she had noticed the caffeine situation and quietly countered it without turning hydration into a conversation. “Look at you,” he murmured, taking a long drink. “Keeping international recording artists alive. Very glamorous work.”

The apartment looked different from this angle after a month away. Not actually changed in any dramatic sense, but inhabited in ways video calls had never quite captured: a few things shifted on the shelves, art supplies claiming territory around the easel, the abandoned brush still lying where her afternoon had been interrupted. His gaze landed on the canvas and stayed there while he chewed. Even unfinished, it looked nothing like the flattened glimpses he'd caught through his phone, and Ben leaned slightly forward as if the extra foot of distance were responsible for everything he'd been missing. “Okay, that's annoying,” he said, nodding toward it. “It looks way better in person. Your camera has been committing crimes against you.”

There were questions he wanted to ask immediately, but he resisted turning her first meal with him home into an interrogation about technique. Instead, Ben reached for another strawberry and stole a cracker from her plate with the shameless confidence of somebody who technically lived here. “You said you photographed the three that sold, right?” His attention remained on the painting for another moment before returning to her. “I want those later. And I want to know which one you almost kept, because that part interests me more than whatever tasteful explanation you gave the buyer.” He took the cracker before permission could become relevant and added, “Also, your threat to revoke bragging privileges has been reviewed and rejected.”

He was halfway through the sandwich when his attention drifted downward again. It happened differently now than it had in the entryway, without that first startled realization; his eyes simply caught the small change in her silhouette where she sat beside him, and his expression softened before he could interfere with it. Four months had been information while he was away. Weeks on a calendar, appointment updates, pictures, questions asked over the phone from rooms thousands of miles from this one. Here, it was Cleo beside him on their couch, her body subtly different from the one he'd kissed goodbye a month earlier.

Ben set his plate down and rested his forearm along the back of the couch behind her instead of immediately reaching for her stomach again. His fingers found one of the loose strands of hair near her shoulder and absently caught it between them, his gaze still tracing the changes he was learning in person. “It's not weird,” he said eventually, returning to something she'd told him earlier. “I mean, it is. But not bad weird.” His mouth tilted as he searched for a description that didn't sound ridiculous. “It's more like I missed a few episodes and everybody else knows what happened.”

That was closer. He had known every important thing, but knowing wasn't the same as witnessing the incremental details. Ben had been told when the nausea eased and when it returned, had heard about appointments and symptoms and the increasingly bizarre politics governing acceptable smells, but he hadn't been there for the mornings when a waistband suddenly fit differently or the first time Cleo noticed a change in the mirror. He wasn't jealous of the time exactly. He just felt its absence more clearly now that he could see what it had done.

His fingers slipped from her hair to the back of her neck, thumb brushing once beneath it. “Boring appointments are my favorite kind,” he said, and there was no joke in that part. “You can give me four more months of doctors saying, ‘Yep, everything's normal,’ and I'll be thrilled every single time.” Then his expression shifted as the earlier accusation against him resurfaced in his mind. “And I stand by the yogurt example. Maybe not factually, but spiritually. You know what you've done.”

Ben's sandwich disappeared faster than he intended. He stared at the empty half of his plate with faint disappointment before finishing the fruit, then set everything on the coffee table and settled back without making any immediate effort to clear it. There would be dishes later. Right now, Cleo was warm against his side, the apartment was quiet, and his phone was blessedly absent enough that he couldn't even remember whether he'd left it in the bedroom or buried it in the clothes he'd changed out of. For somebody whose previous month had been dictated down to call times and departure minutes, not knowing where his phone was felt almost decadent.

He shifted until his arm could settle comfortably behind her shoulders, fingers resting loosely against her upper arm. The position brought her closer without arranging her anywhere, and Ben tipped his head against the couch as he looked across the room. “You know what I missed that nobody tells you you're gonna miss?” he asked. “Being bored with you.” A laugh slipped into his voice because it sounded terrible when phrased that way. “Not by you. Important distinction. I mean this. Sitting here with nowhere we're supposed to be.”

Tour was full of experiences worth remembering. There were nights he'd walked offstage vibrating with enough adrenaline that sleep seemed impossible, cities he'd barely had time to understand before leaving them, crowds whose noise seemed to stay inside his body hours afterward. He loved it. That was precisely why the contrast surprised him sometimes; loving that life had never prevented him from craving one that operated at a completely different volume. He could want thousands of people singing back at him one night and still spend the next week fantasizing about Cleo stealing half a blanket on this couch.

“I have stories, by the way,” he said, turning toward her with sudden purpose. “Nothing important enough that I was gonna waste our calls telling you, but now you're trapped.” The grin that followed was unmistakably pleased with this arrangement. “There was a hotel shower in Buenos Aires that only had two settings: glacier and lawsuit. I need you to understand that I spent twenty minutes trying to find a temperature between them and eventually accepted that the hotel wanted me dead.”

That led naturally into another memory, and Ben found himself laughing before he finished explaining it: a backstage translation mishap, a missing shoe that had somehow ended up in somebody else's equipment case, an argument over snacks that had become disproportionately serious at two in the morning. They were stupid stories, exactly the kind distance edited out because phone calls had always felt too precious to spend on nothing. Telling them now felt strangely intimate. He could stop halfway through one to steal another cracker, lose his train of thought because something on the television caught his peripheral vision, circle back three minutes later, and none of it had to fit inside the remaining battery percentage or a schedule.

Somewhere in the middle of it, his hand ended up loosely linked with hers between them. Ben didn't remember reaching for it. He only noticed when his thumb moved across her knuckles and found the faint trace of paint still clinging near one finger. He turned her hand over with quiet curiosity, examining the stubborn mark before looking toward the streak he'd made worse on her cheek earlier. “I did improve that, by the way,” he said. “Artistically. You were working with one paint smear, which was predictable. I introduced movement.”

The defense was indefensible and he knew it. His grin gave him away before he had finished speaking, and Ben lifted their joined hands to press an absent kiss against her knuckles. The gesture lingered for only a second before he lowered them again, affection moving easily rather than gathering into another grand declaration. That was what he had missed most, he thought—not necessarily kissing her or holding her, although God knew he'd missed those too, but the ability to touch her without the moment needing to mean anything because she was simply there.

His gaze eventually wandered back toward her middle, and this time Ben smiled to himself before reaching over. His palm rested lightly against the small curve for a few seconds, familiarizing himself with it rather than marveling at it. “I'm gonna have to update my mental picture,” he murmured. “I've apparently been walking around South America imagining an outdated Cleo.” He glanced up, amusement brightening his expression. “Very embarrassing for me. Bad boyfriend behavior.”

He left his hand there only briefly before letting it travel back to her side. There would be plenty of opportunities over the next few days to indulge the fascination without treating her stomach like a newly discovered landmark. Cleo was still Cleo, after all, and Ben had missed all of her—the sarcasm, the paintings, the way she could dismantle one of his arguments with a look before bothering to use words. Pregnancy had added something enormous to their lives without erasing the relationship that had existed first, and he didn't want his excitement about the baby to accidentally make her feel as though every interaction now had to orbit it.

“Also,” he said, remembering another matter requiring immediate investigation, “I want your month.” His fingers traced idly along her arm. “Not the stuff I already know. I know about appointments. I know about the paintings. I know your sister has apparently appointed herself Secretary of Keeping Cleo Busy.” His smile widened. “Give me the useless stuff. What did I miss that wasn't worth texting?”

That was the information distance never preserved. The weird person in line at the grocery store. Something her sister had said over lunch. A show Cleo had started and decided she hated. Whatever tiny domestic disaster had occurred and been fixed before Ben even knew about it. Those were the pieces of sharing a home that disappeared first when somebody left, and Ben found he wanted them with almost embarrassing intensity.

He tucked one foot beneath the opposite leg and turned a little more toward her, settling in rather than sprawling dramatically across the cushions. The travel fatigue had become background noise now—present in the heaviness of his limbs, but no longer important enough to command his attention. His mind felt awake, sharpened by food and the shower and the pleasure of finally being somewhere he wanted to remain. Sleep belonged to later, when it meant climbing into their bed together rather than surrendering part of an afternoon he'd only just gotten back.

A quiet beat passed while his eyes moved over her face. Ben had spent so much of the flight picturing the reunion that he'd never thought much beyond it; in his head, getting through the door had been the finish line. He hadn't imagined grilled cheese or damp hair or the unfinished painting across the room. He hadn't pictured Cleo four months pregnant beside him while he complained about hotel plumbing. Somehow those smaller things were better than anything he'd invented at thirty thousand feet.

“I'm glad you didn't stop,” he said eventually, gaze flicking toward the easel before returning to her. The thought had been sitting with him since she'd told him how full her month had been. “Painting, seeing your sister, doing your stuff. All of it.” His fingers tightened gently around hers. “I don't want you waiting around for me to show back up before your life starts again.”

The words weren't solemn, but he meant them. There was relief in knowing that while he'd been performing and traveling, Cleo had been making things, selling them, seeing people she loved, growing their baby, inhabiting days that were valuable even without him inside them. Ben wanted to be missed; he wasn't evolved enough to pretend otherwise. But he wanted to return to a woman with stories to tell him far more than he wanted proof that she'd spent a month counting down.

His mouth curved as another thought followed. “Although I do reserve the right to be extremely pleased that you're happy I'm back.” He leaned over and kissed her temple, then remained close enough that his cheek brushed her hair when he settled again. “Healthy independence is beautiful. So is being adored. I'm trying to support both.”

The afternoon light had shifted while they talked, warming the room differently than when he'd first walked in. Ben noticed it mostly because it caught the edge of the unfinished canvas, revealing texture he hadn't seen before, and he nodded toward it again. “Tell me about that,” he said. “Start wherever you want. I wanna know what I'm looking at before you show me the finished ones.” His attention returned to Cleo rather than the painting itself, because watching her explain something she cared about had always interested him almost as much as the thing.

He settled farther into the couch as he waited, shoulder comfortably against hers, their hands still loosely connected. There was food left on the table, dishes they would eventually deal with, a duffel still sitting somewhere near the front door and three days worth of clothes waiting to migrate into the apartment. None of it required attention yet. For now, Ben was clean, fed, home, and close enough to Cleo that he could feel the warmth of her beside him while she talked, which seemed like more than enough occupation for one evening.

Cleo followed his glance toward the easel, and for a second she considered actually answering the question he had asked. She could have told him about the piece, about the afternoon she’d started it and the idea that had changed halfway through, about the section near the bottom she’d painted over three separate times because nothing had looked right. Instead, she found herself watching Ben settle farther into the couch with his damp hair and clean clothes, listening to him ask for all the pieces of her month he’d missed as though there were nothing in the world he’d rather hear. The painting suddenly seemed capable of waiting another five minutes. She shifted closer until her thigh rested fully against his and brought their joined hands into her lap. “You know what’s funny? I thought I was going to have so much to tell you when you came home. I’ve been mentally collecting things for a month, and now you’re actually sitting here and apparently my brain has decided none of them exist.”

She smiled and looked down at their hands, rubbing her thumb slowly over his before the memories began finding their way back in without being summoned. There had been plenty of useless things. Her sister had come over one afternoon with groceries and somehow stayed until nearly midnight because they’d started watching a terrible reality show neither of them liked enough to justify six consecutive episodes. Cleo had bought a plant for the kitchen windowsill and spent two weeks convinced she was killing it before discovering she’d simply been watering it too much. One morning she’d cried because the coffee shop had stopped carrying the pastry she’d wanted, which she still maintained had been a perfectly rational response under the circumstances. “Oh, and I reorganized the bathroom cabinet at two in the morning last week,” she remembered, turning toward him with complete seriousness. “I couldn’t sleep, and suddenly the fact that cold medicine was sharing a shelf with skincare became completely unacceptable. So if you can’t find anything anymore, that’s why. Everything has a system now. I don’t know what the system is, but there is one.”

Her smile widened as she watched him, enjoying the luxury of telling him something that absolutely did not matter. Those were exactly the stories their calls had lost. Whenever Ben had found an hour between soundcheck and a show or she’d caught him before bed, there had always been something more important to fit into it. How she felt. How the appointment went. How his show had gone. Whether he’d eaten. Whether she was sleeping. The little things had seemed too insignificant for limited time, and Cleo hadn’t realized how much she’d missed saying them until now. “I also started that crime show you told me I’d like. You were wrong. I made it through two episodes, hated everybody, and quit.” She nudged his leg with hers before he could defend himself. “And before you say I didn’t give it enough time, two hours is an enormous investment in people I actively wanted arrested by the end of episode one.”

The month had contained quieter things too, days when she had deliberately made herself leave the apartment even when staying home would have been easier. She had gone to lunch with her sister, wandered through galleries without any particular purpose, spent too much money in an art-supply store because she’d convinced herself three slightly different shades were essential, and taken herself to breakfast after one of her appointments rather than coming straight home to an empty apartment. None of it had been extraordinary, but that had been the point. She had wanted to prove to herself that missing Ben did not require suspending her own life until his returned to intersect with it. “I’ve actually gotten pretty good at being alone again,” she admitted, turning their hands over so his rested inside hers. “Not lonely. That’s different. I missed you constantly, but I stopped treating missing you like something I needed to fix every minute. Sometimes I just missed you and went grocery shopping anyway.” Her expression softened as she looked at him. “Which doesn’t sound impressive until you know how spectacularly bad I used to be at letting those two things exist at the same time.”

She knew he understood what she meant without requiring the history to be unpacked again. There had been a version of Cleo who experienced Ben leaving as something closer to abandonment even when she rationally knew it wasn’t. Distance had made everything louder then. Every missed call became evidence, every changed plan felt personal, and every reunion came with an expiration date she could already see stamped across it. This time had been different. Not painless, certainly, and there had been nights she’d wanted him badly enough that sleeping alone had made her angry at the entire concept of touring, but she hadn’t spent the month waiting for their relationship to become unstable simply because he was somewhere else. “I think this is the first time you’ve been gone this long where I didn’t spend part of it waiting for something between us to go wrong,” she said after a moment. “I missed you. I worried about you. I had days when I wanted to call and tell you to get on a plane immediately because I was tired and hormonal and irrationally offended that you weren’t here. But I never wondered whether we were okay.”

The distinction mattered enough that Cleo went quiet for a few seconds after saying it. Six months ago, she wasn’t sure she could have imagined that kind of security existing between them. Now it had become quiet enough that she sometimes forgot how hard they’d fought to reach it. She leaned her head against his shoulder and looked toward the unfinished canvas. “So yes, I kept painting. Partly because I love it, and partly because if I’d spent a month staring at your tour schedule, you would’ve come home to someone absolutely unbearable.” Her fingers tightened gently around his. “And I like having things to tell you. I like that you can go away and live this huge, ridiculous life and come back, and I’ve lived mine too. Then we sit here and trade them.”

Her attention finally returned to the canvas when he asked about it again. From the couch, Cleo could see all the places where the piece remained unresolved, but she could also see enough of what it was becoming that the instinct to criticize it had begun loosening. “That one started because I couldn’t sleep after you left,” she explained, nodding toward it. “Not the first night. Maybe four or five days later. I kept thinking about airports, which is extremely on brand for us and also deeply annoying, so I refused to paint an airport.” Her mouth curved as she shifted against him. “It’s supposed to be about the feeling right after somebody leaves. Not the dramatic part. Not crying at the gate or watching the plane take off. The weird quiet afterward, when you come home and everything looks exactly the same, but one person isn’t in it.”

She lifted her free hand toward the canvas, indicating the broad unfinished section without getting up. “That’s why that side is emptier. I kept trying to fill it, and every time I did, it stopped feeling right. Then I realized the empty space was basically the entire point.” Cleo glanced at him, almost sheepish now that she was explaining something she’d made directly from missing him. “Which is embarrassingly sentimental, so you’re forbidden from becoming smug about inspiring art while abroad. I have a reputation.”

Her gaze moved back to the painting, and she rested more fully against him. She had spent enough hours with the canvas that she knew every layer beneath the visible one, every color she’d changed, every mark she’d scraped away and rebuilt. The fact that somebody else might eventually buy it still felt strange. Selling the other three had been exhilarating, but each departure had carried a tiny grief she hadn’t anticipated, especially with the one she’d nearly kept. “The one I almost didn’t sell wasn’t this one,” she added, remembering his earlier question. “I’ll show you the picture. It was the smaller blue one I was working on when we talked that night you were in Santiago. I never showed you because I hated it then.” She gave him a look before he could comment. “And then I fixed it, so don’t start. Apparently somebody else liked it enough to pay actual money for it, which remains suspicious.”

She reached for her water and took a drink before settling back against him, her hand finding his again almost automatically. Ben had asked for the useless pieces of the month, but sitting beside him now made her realize none of them felt useless anymore. They were simply the parts of her life he hadn’t been standing beside her to witness, and telling him about them closed some tiny distance the flight itself hadn’t. “There were hard days too,” she admitted, quieter now. “Nothing scary. Just pregnancy days. Tired days. A couple mornings where I wanted you here so badly that I got mad at you for having a job you’ve had since before we got back together, which was very mature of me.” Her mouth twitched. “I didn’t call and pick a fight, though. Personal growth.”

Cleo lifted her head from his shoulder then, studying him with an expression that softened as soon as she caught the exhaustion still lingering around his eyes. She brought their joined hands up and kissed his knuckles, mirroring the absent affection he’d given her earlier. “But I did miss being bored with you,” she admitted. “I missed telling you things that don’t deserve a phone call. I missed sitting beside you without knowing somebody was going to knock on your hotel door in ten minutes because you had somewhere else to be. I missed touching you while I’m talking instead of looking at your face on a screen.” She lowered their hands but didn’t release him, leaning back into his side as naturally as if the month between them had collapsed into nothing. “And I really, really missed stealing food off your plate, which is unfortunate because you already inhaled everything.”

Her eyes dropped pointedly toward his empty plate before she reached across and stole the last strawberry from her own instead, biting into it with a little smile. “So that’s my month. I painted. I sold things. I spent an unreasonable amount of time with my sister. I reorganized cabinets nobody asked me to reorganize. I grew your baby a little more.” Her hand drifted briefly over the small curve of her stomach before returning to his. “And I missed you without falling apart about missing you. Which might actually be the thing I’m proudest of.”

She let that truth settle without turning it into anything heavier. The month had not proved she needed him less. If anything, seeing him here had made the depth of her attachment painfully obvious. It had simply proved that loving Ben no longer required Cleo to live frightened of the parts of his life she couldn’t control. He could leave. She could miss him. Her own days could continue. And eventually, whether after a month or seventy-two hours or some future stretch neither of them had encountered yet, he could open the door and come home.

Cleo looked at him for another moment before her expression brightened again. “Now you have two choices,” she said, settling her feet beneath the blanket and drawing it farther across both of them. “I can get my phone and show you the three paintings you missed, or you can put your head in my lap and pretend you’re not approximately seven minutes from passing out.” She brushed her fingers through the damp hair near his temple, already fairly certain which option his body was going to choose regardless of his opinion. “And before you get stubborn, the paintings will still exist when you wake up. You, on the other hand, currently look like you’re about to start hallucinating another airport.”

Ben listened without interrupting, which became progressively harder once the bathroom cabinet entered the story. He could picture it too easily: Cleo awake at an hour when no reasonable person should be reorganizing anything, suddenly developing strong opinions about the moral incompatibility of cold medicine and skincare. His mouth pulled sideways as he looked toward the hallway, mentally reviewing the cabinet he'd used twenty minutes earlier without noticing anything except the location of his toothbrush. “That explains why I opened it and thought I'd suffered some kind of memory loss,” he said. “I found my stuff, so I decided not to investigate. Apparently that was the correct survival instinct.” The plant interested him almost as much, though, and his gaze shifted toward the kitchen as if he might somehow spot the victim from here. “And you didn't kill the plant. That's big. I leave for one month and everybody's thriving.”

The coffee-shop incident got him differently. Ben tried—genuinely tried—to maintain a sympathetic expression, but amusement gathered around his eyes until the effort became pointless. He knew better than to dismiss pregnancy crying after enough phone calls had taught him that Cleo herself could be simultaneously devastated by something and completely aware that the scale of the devastation made no sense. “I'm on your side,” he assured her, already sounding guilty of the opposite. “Discontinuing a pastry without consulting you first was reckless corporate behavior. Frankly, I'm surprised you didn't pursue damages.” His thumb swept slowly over the back of her hand while his grin escaped completely. “Tell me which one. If they have it somewhere else, I'll find it before I leave. I'm not saying I can solve everything, but baked goods are within my jurisdiction.”

The crime show, however, was an attack on his judgment, and Ben's eyebrows rose before she'd even finished condemning it. He opened his mouth, received the preemptive rejection of the defense he had been about to make, and closed it again with an offended little nod. “Wow. Okay.” He shifted enough to face her more directly, their legs still pressed together beneath the blanket. “First of all, they're supposed to be terrible. That's part of the experience. You're watching deeply dysfunctional people make increasingly bad decisions and then judging them from the safety of your couch.” He paused, considered his own argument, and conceded, “Actually, no, two episodes is probably enough. Episode three would've made you hate me personally for recommending it.”

He liked this more than he'd expected to. Not the stories themselves, exactly, although he wanted every one of them; it was the looseness with which they arrived. Nothing had to justify taking up airtime. He could hear about a plant, a pastry, a reorganized cabinet, and a television show she'd abandoned without either of them unconsciously calculating whether there was something more important they ought to discuss first. For a month, their conversations had been intimate but compressed, life distilled into whatever deserved reporting across several thousand miles. Sitting beside her reminded him how much of knowing someone lived below that threshold of importance.

His amusement quieted when the shape of the month changed beneath her words. Ben's thumb stopped moving for a moment against her hand, not because anything she'd said frightened him, but because he understood the significance of it well enough not to smother it beneath reassurance. There had been a time when distance seemed to activate every old fear between them. He remembered conversations where a delayed call carried weight wildly disproportionate to the actual delay, departures that began hurting before he'd packed, both of them trying to distinguish what was happening from what they were afraid might happen. He had learned to be careful around those fractures without treating Cleo as fragile, and she had learned things he knew he couldn't have learned on her behalf.

What she described now felt different in a way Ben could almost physically sense. Not indifference, not some cleaner version of love in which neither of them needed the other very much, but trust sturdy enough to tolerate absence without translating it into danger. She had been alone and hadn't mistaken that for being left. The distinction hit him harder than he expected, and his gaze dropped briefly to their hands before returning to her face. “That's... really fucking good, Cleo,” he said, the roughness in his voice making the simple words carry more than he intended. “Not that you got good at being without me. I'm not endorsing that part too enthusiastically.” A faint smile appeared, but it didn't erase the seriousness underneath. “That you knew we were okay even when it sucked. I knew we were too.”

He hadn't spent the month wondering whether they would survive it either. He had missed her badly, occasionally at ridiculous moments: turning toward an empty side of a hotel bed, seeing something in a shop window she would've liked, finishing a show and wanting her face among the first ones he saw afterward. But missing her had felt like evidence of attachment rather than evidence of instability. There had been no constant need to check the foundation underneath them. Ben hadn't recognized how profound that change was until Cleo gave it language.

Her pride in it made him squeeze her hand once. “You should be proud of that,” he said, and this time he resisted the instinct to joke immediately afterward. He knew the accomplishment wasn't that she'd managed grocery shopping while missing her boyfriend; stripped of history, that sounded almost comically ordinary. The accomplishment was everything she'd had to unlearn before an ordinary thing could remain ordinary. Ben understood enough of the road behind them to know the difference.

When she leaned into him, he shifted instinctively to accommodate her weight, his arm settling more comfortably around her. The idea of them leaving, living separately for a while, then returning with whole lives to exchange had something almost old-fashioned about it that pleased him. “I like that too,” he murmured. “I don't want to come back and find out your only news is that you watched my location move around on a map for four weeks. That would be deeply unsettling.” His mouth brushed lightly against the top of her head before he added, “I like getting to miss things. Not while I'm missing them, obviously. But this part. Finding out what you did when I wasn't here.”

The explanation of the painting pulled his attention fully across the room. Ben went quiet as he studied it again, now seeing intention where he'd previously only seen composition. The emptier side changed once she gave him the idea behind it. He could understand the impulse to keep filling space simply because emptiness looked unfinished, and the realization that removing something could communicate more than adding it struck him as annoyingly clever in precisely the way that made him proud of her.

Then he realized what the painting was actually about.

Ben slowly turned his head toward her. The expression he wore was insufferable for perhaps half a second before he visibly tried to suppress it, pressing his lips together as though physically containing the response might satisfy the prohibition. “I'm not smug,” he said, which would have been considerably more convincing without the smile threatening his mouth. “I'm being extremely normal about the fact that I apparently have a Blue Period now.” He looked back toward the canvas, nodded thoughtfully, and added, “International Muse Era. Very difficult burden, but I'll carry it privately.”

He lasted another second before laughing under his breath. The teasing didn't diminish what the piece did to him, though. If anything, it gave him somewhere to put the feeling. He had spent plenty of nights missing her from the other side of that departure, leaving a city with the knowledge that Cleo was returning to an apartment still containing his things but not him. Seeing that absence translated into something she could work on, fight with, repaint and eventually understand made him want to look at the canvas differently. “I really like it,” he said after the joke had settled. “And I don't mean because it's secretly about me. Although obviously that's helping enormously.”

His interest sharpened when she mentioned Santiago. Ben remembered the call, though not the painting; he could picture the hotel room more easily than he wanted to, the curtains he'd never figured out how to close completely and the light from a building across the street bleeding through them. “The blue one,” he repeated, searching backward through memory for anything she might have accidentally shown him. Nothing came. “You hid an entire painting from me because you hated it?” His brows rose with theatrical betrayal. “This is exactly the kind of information I'm talking about. I've been operating under incomplete intelligence.”

The warning stopped his next comment before it arrived. Ben lifted both hands slightly in surrender, though one remained linked with hers. “I didn't say anything.” His face said several things anyway. “I'm just interested in this mysterious person who paid actual money for something you had apparently sentenced to death. Sounds like excellent judgment on their part.” He settled back again, already impatient to see the photograph but content to let the conversation reach it in its own time.

The harder days brought a different stillness over him. Ben didn't tense or rush to apologize for having been gone; that would have turned her honesty into something she had to manage for him. He listened instead, fingertips moving slowly over her knuckles while she described the exhaustion and the irrational anger that had never become an argument. There was something almost endearing about knowing she'd occasionally resented him in absentia for continuing to possess the career he'd had all along. Not because he wanted her miserable, but because pregnancy had apparently found new and inventive ways to make both of them unreasonable.

“Thank you for not calling me solely to yell at me for employment,” he said solemnly. “I would've taken it, but I appreciate the restraint.” His expression softened before he continued. “You can be mad at me sometimes, though. Even when it's irrational. You don't have to become the world's most emotionally balanced pregnant woman because I'm on tour.” Ben knew there was a line between giving her room for difficult feelings and making himself the designated target for them, but that wasn't what he meant. He simply didn't want growth to become another standard she could fail by having a bad morning.

The kiss against his knuckles quieted whatever else he'd been preparing to say. His fingers curled instinctively around hers afterward, and Ben looked at her with an expression that had lost most of its teasing. Hearing her describe missing touch struck somewhere painfully familiar. He had spent a month wanting exactly this kind of contact—not necessarily anything dramatic, just her thigh against his, fingers intertwined, the ability to turn his head and find her within inches rather than pixels.

Her accusation about his empty plate restored his grin. Ben glanced toward it and then back at her with absolutely no remorse. “You had ample opportunity,” he said. “You knew who I was when you made the sandwich.” He watched the last strawberry disappear with narrowed eyes and added, “And now you're eating the evidence, so I don't think this case is going anywhere.”

But the list she gave him afterward settled differently. Painting. Her sister. Cabinets. Their baby. Missing him without coming undone. Ben listened until the last part, and something warm tightened beneath his ribs. There was no part of him that heard her increased security as decreased love. If anything, the fact that she could stand securely in her own life and still choose to make room for his felt more intimate than dependence ever could.

His gaze dropped briefly when her hand passed over the curve of her stomach. Four months still startled him when he let himself think about it too directly. The baby had grown while Cleo had been learning all these other things about herself, while he had been waking in hotels and going onstage and collecting ridiculous stories to bring home. Their lives hadn't paused for one another, and somehow they were still moving in the same direction.

“Yeah,” he said quietly, looking back at her. “I think you should be proudest of that too.” His thumb brushed once along her hand. “And selfishly, I like this version better. Not the version where you don't miss me. That sounds terrible and I reject it completely.” The familiar crookedness returned to his smile. “The version where I can leave and neither of us has to spend the whole time proving we're still here.”

The blanket shifting over his legs made the couch warmer, and Ben automatically adjusted it near his knee. He saw the choice she was building toward before she finished presenting it, and his expression changed almost immediately at the second option. Not because her lap sounded remotely unpleasant. It sounded dangerously good, actually. But the prediction attached to it earned a skeptical look from a man who had been accused of impending unconsciousness several times since arriving home and had yet to cooperate.

“Absolutely not,” he said, amusement roughening his voice. He turned farther toward her and propped one elbow against the back cushion, alert enough that the case against him was considerably weaker than she seemed to believe. “You keep trying to put me to sleep. It's getting suspicious.” His eyes narrowed playfully. “Did you invite someone over? Is there another boyfriend coming at eight? You need me unconscious before he gets here?”

Ben had slept on the flight. Not well enough to qualify as restorative by any sane standard, but enough that the shower and food had left him comfortable rather than drowsy. There was fatigue in his body, certainly; he could feel it in the pleasant heaviness of his shoulders and the way the couch seemed particularly persuasive beneath him. But his mind was clear, and the last thing he wanted was to close his eyes and skip over an evening he'd spent most of a month wanting.

He reached up and caught the hand near his hair before it could retreat, turning his head to press a kiss into the center of her palm. “I'm not going anywhere,” he murmured, and then seemed to hear the accidental weight of the sentence himself. His mouth tilted before it could become too solemn. “Including unconscious. At least not yet.” He lowered her hand but kept it captured loosely in his, rubbing his thumb over her wrist.

The paintings were tempting, but getting the phone would require movement from at least one of them, and Ben wasn't convinced the evidence needed immediate review. He glanced toward the unfinished canvas again, then toward Cleo, considering his options with exaggerated seriousness. “I choose secret option three.” He shifted until he could slide lower against the cushions, not into her lap but sideways enough that his shoulder tucked more comfortably against her and his head rested against the back of the couch near hers. “Nobody moves. You tell me more things.”

There was an entire month still between the broad strokes she'd already given him. Ben wanted the parts that would only emerge because one story reminded her of another, the things she had forgotten she meant to tell him until some random association dragged them forward. He wanted to hear about the galleries, what she'd bought at the art store, whether her sister had developed any new opinions about him while he'd been safely outside the country. The paintings could come when somebody eventually needed to stand up for another reason.

“And I want details about the two-in-the-morning cabinet incident,” he added. “Specifically what happened immediately before you decided pharmaceutical segregation was the emergency of the hour.” His grin widened as he settled his arm around her again. “Because nobody wakes up and just becomes passionate about shelf zoning. There's a story there.”

Ben tipped his head toward her, close enough now that he could see the tiny remnants of paint he'd failed to remove earlier. He resisted the urge to attempt another cleaning operation. The mark suited the afternoon too well, and there was something he liked about having arrived while she was in the middle of making something rather than after she'd cleaned herself and the room into a version prepared for his return.

His fingers idly traced the outside of her arm as he waited for whatever she would tell him next. No urgency accompanied the silence. He wasn't mentally calculating how much of the evening remained, wasn't thinking about the East Coast, and wasn't trying to cram a month of separation into a single conversation before exhaustion could interfere. Cleo was beside him, the painting waited across the room, and the last traces of daylight still warmed the apartment.

A smile appeared when he remembered one final item requiring correction. “Also, for the record, I do not look seven minutes from hallucinating an airport.” He paused and glanced toward the middle distance with exaggerated concern, as though checking the living room for imaginary departure boards. “Nine, minimum.” His eyes returned to hers, amusement settling comfortably into his expression as he squeezed her hand. “Plenty of time.”

Cleo stared at him for a second after the nine-minute correction, her expression caught somewhere between affection and the very specific irritation reserved for a man who had crossed continents, admitted he was exhausted, and was now attempting to litigate exactly how exhausted he was. The problem was that he did look better than when he’d first walked through the door. The shower had put some color back into his face, food had sharpened his eyes, and the longer he sat beside her, the more he seemed to settle into himself instead of looking like somebody whose body had arrived several hours ahead of his brain. She could still see the travel on him, though. She knew him too well not to. It lived in the faint heaviness around his eyes and the way his shoulders sank deeper into the couch whenever he stopped actively remembering to hold himself upright.

“Nine,” she repeated, accepting the amendment with a solemn little nod. “That’s reassuring. I was worried we were running out of time.” Her eyes followed his exaggerated inspection of the living room before she glanced toward the windows as though checking for herself. “No gates. No boarding groups. Nobody demanding your passport. I think we’re safe.” She squeezed his hand and settled more comfortably against him, letting her head find his shoulder again. “And there is no other boyfriend coming at eight. He comes at nine-thirty, so you’ve got loads of time.”

The joke lasted approximately as long as it took her to feel his fingers tighten around hers. Cleo smiled against his shoulder, entirely too pleased with herself, then turned her face enough to press a quick kiss through the cotton of his shirt before relaxing again. She liked him like this. Not exhausted, exactly—she could have done without the airports carved into his face—but loose. Showered and fed and beginning to understand that nobody was going to knock on the door with a schedule. There had been a time when Ben returning from somewhere carried so much emotional pressure that she could barely enjoy the arrival before anticipating the departure. Now his duffel was still abandoned by the door, he had seventy-two hours, and she could waste ten of those minutes making jokes about imaginary boyfriends without feeling as though she’d squandered something precious.

“Fine. Secret option three,” she conceded. “But when you fall asleep halfway through one of my stories, I reserve the right to take a picture and use it against you forever.” She tucked the blanket more securely across their legs, then considered his demand for the circumstances surrounding the cabinet incident. “And you’re going to be disappointed. There was no dramatic inciting event. I woke up because I had to pee, which happens approximately nine thousand times a night now, and then I couldn’t fall asleep again. I went into the bathroom for moisturizer, opened the cabinet, and saw your cold medicine sitting beside my vitamin C serum.”

Even now, remembering it produced a faint wrinkle between her brows. Cleo lifted her head enough to look at him with complete sincerity. “And suddenly it was disgusting to me. Not the medicine itself. The placement. It felt wrong.” She knew how absurd it sounded, which only made her more committed to explaining it properly. “Then I noticed the Band-Aids were mixed in with things that weren’t first aid, and once I’d seen that, obviously I couldn’t unknow it. So I took everything out.” Her mouth twitched. “All of it. At two-fifteen in the morning. I sat on the bathroom floor surrounded by everything we own and created categories.”

She could still picture herself there in pajamas with half the cabinet spread across the tile, becoming increasingly convinced that this was not merely reasonable but necessary. By three, she’d had labeled sections without labels, because actual labels would apparently have been crossing some invisible line into madness she believed she had not already crossed. “Medicine is together. First aid is together. Skincare has its own section. Your stuff is mostly where it was because I knew you’d come home eventually and accuse me of stealing things if you couldn’t find them.” Her voice softened almost imperceptibly around come home eventually, the phrase slipping out without thought because that was exactly how she’d approached the cabinet. His things hadn’t been clutter left behind by somebody absent. They had been things belonging to somebody who was coming back.

Cleo noticed it only after she’d said it, and her eyes moved toward his face for half a second before she smiled. “So technically, I reorganized around you. You’re welcome.” She settled her head back against him and let her fingers play idly with his where they rested between them. “The truly concerning part is that I felt incredible afterward. I got back into bed at three-thirty feeling like I’d accomplished something enormous. I was lying there thinking, yes, this is it. This is adulthood. Everything has a zone.”

Her sister had found considerably less dignity in the story when Cleo told her about it the next day. That memory brought another laugh from her. “My sister came over the next afternoon, opened the cabinet because she wanted ibuprofen, and asked whether I’d joined the military. Then she spent twenty minutes deliberately putting things in the wrong sections because apparently tormenting a pregnant woman is her love language.” Cleo’s eyes narrowed at the remembered offense. “She put toothpaste with first aid. On purpose. I watched her do it.”

That opened the door to everything else Ben had asked for, and once Cleo started, the stories arrived more easily. She told him about the art-supply trip she’d intended to keep under fifty dollars and absolutely had not. She had gone in for replacement brushes and come out with brushes, canvases, two sketchbooks, charcoal she did not need, and three tubes of blue that she insisted were completely different despite her sister holding them beside one another and declaring them identical. “They are different,” Cleo said firmly, already anticipating Ben siding with the prosecution. “One is colder. One has more gray in it. One is deeper. Do not look at me like that. You own guitars that sound identical to every normal person on Earth, so I suggest you choose your next words carefully.”

She told him about breakfast after the doctor’s appointment too, because somehow that had stayed with her more vividly than the appointment itself. She’d gone alone to a little place she’d passed dozens of times and never entered, ordered pancakes because for once her stomach had agreed pancakes were not an act of aggression, and sat by the window for almost an hour. Nobody had needed anything from her. She hadn’t called anyone to fill the silence. She’d sent Ben a picture afterward, but what she hadn’t told him was how strangely proud she’d felt sitting there by herself, one hand occasionally drifting to the barely emerging curve beneath her sweater while she watched people walk past outside.

“That was one of the days I really missed you,” she admitted. “Because the appointment had been good, and normally I would’ve wanted you there afterward so we could talk about everything fifteen times even though the doctor had basically said, ‘Everything looks great, see you next time.’” Her thumb moved slowly across his knuckles. “But I didn’t feel sad sitting there alone. I just kept thinking you’d have liked the pancakes.” A smile touched her mouth. “Which was deeply romantic of me.”

She didn’t tell him every story. There would be tomorrow for that, and the next day, and little pockets of conversation that would open without warning while one of them brushed their teeth or stood in the kitchen. For once, Cleo didn’t feel compelled to empty the entire month onto the couch simply because Ben was available to receive it. That realization itself felt like another quiet measure of how different they had become. She trusted there would be time—not infinite time, not even uninterrupted time, but enough. Enough for forgotten stories to survive until later.

Her gaze wandered toward him while he listened, and she caught the heaviness creeping back into his expression despite all his protests. Cleo didn’t point it out. Winning the argument would only make him fight sleep out of principle, and she had no interest in spending one of their three evenings debating the biological necessity of unconsciousness with somebody who had already crossed several time zones. Instead, she shifted carefully and tucked herself closer beneath his arm, making the couch increasingly comfortable without acknowledging that she was doing it.

“You know,” she said after a moment, “I thought this was going to feel stranger.”

Her voice had changed, not heavier exactly, but quieter. She kept her eyes on their joined hands rather than turning the thought into something that required his full attention. “You coming back after a month. I thought there’d be this adjustment period where we’d have to remember how to share space again.” She rubbed her thumb along the side of his finger. “Like maybe I’d gotten too used to sleeping diagonally or you’d come home and suddenly all my weird little routines would annoy you.”

She smiled faintly. “Instead you walked through the door, dropped your bag in exactly the place I would’ve yelled at you for dropping it a month ago, and within an hour you’re stealing my crackers and criticizing my television decisions.” Cleo tipped her head back enough to look at him, warmth settling openly into her expression. “It doesn’t feel like you’re visiting. That’s what I mean. It feels like you were gone and now you’re home.”

The words were simpler than everything they had once required from one another. Maybe that was why Cleo liked them so much. She didn’t need to explain what home meant anymore or qualify it with the knowledge that another flight waited three days away. Ben could be home while he was here and still leave again. Those truths no longer canceled each other out.

Her eyes dropped briefly toward the subtle curve beneath the blanket, and she smiled when another thought occurred to her. “Although I should warn you, your side of the bed has been partially colonized.” She looked back at him. “There’s a pregnancy pillow involved now. It’s enormous and obnoxious, and I’m emotionally attached to it, so you’re going to have to negotiate your territory directly with the pillow.”

Cleo’s expression grew more serious as though the situation required diplomatic preparation. “I don’t know how much influence you have after a month away. It’s been very supportive during your absence.” Her mouth betrayed her before she could maintain the performance, a smile spreading as she squeezed his hand. “Honestly, it may be the other boyfriend. That would explain everything.”

She laughed softly and rested against him again, content to let the joke dissolve into quiet. The apartment had begun taking on the muted warmth of evening, the unfinished canvas darker now without direct sunlight catching its texture. Dinner plates remained on the coffee table because neither of them had cared enough to move them yet. Ben’s duffel was still by the door. Her brushes were still where she’d abandoned them when she’d heard that first impossible creak and turned around to find him standing there.

A few hours ago, none of this had been part of her day.

Now his hand was wrapped around hers beneath the blanket.

Cleo brought their joined hands closer and rested them against the small curve of her stomach, not ceremoniously, not asking him to marvel at it again. She simply wanted his hand there while they sat together. At four months, she had become increasingly aware of the quiet physical fact of the baby throughout her day, and there was something satisfying about folding Ben back into that awareness now that he was physically here.

“You missed some things,” she murmured, her cheek settling against his shoulder. “And you’re going to miss some more things when you leave again. I think that’s probably just going to be part of this for us sometimes.” There was no accusation in it. A month earlier, perhaps she would have struggled to say it without one. Now her fingers merely threaded more securely through his. “But I don’t think I’m scared of that the way I was.”

She let herself breathe there for a moment, feeling the warmth of him beside her and the familiar rise and fall beneath her cheek. “Because you still know where home is.”

Cleo didn’t wait for him to answer. She pressed another small kiss against his shoulder, then settled back into the position she’d been slowly engineering for the past several minutes, warm beneath the blanket with his arm around her and his hand resting with hers over the beginning of their baby.

“And now,” she murmured, closing her eyes despite being perfectly awake, “tell me another stupid tour story. Nothing profound. I specifically want something useless.”

Ben's expression shifted at the nine-thirty correction with such immediate offense that there was no possibility of pretending the joke had slipped past him. His fingers tightened around hers on instinct, and he turned his head slowly enough to give her the full weight of a look that would have been considerably more threatening if he weren't barefoot, wrapped in a throw blanket, and still faintly pink from the shower. “Nine-thirty,” he repeated. “Good. Great. That's actually perfect.” He nodded toward the front door with grave consideration. “I'll be here. He and I can talk about his scheduling choices.” The performance lasted until he felt the kiss through his shirt, at which point his mouth betrayed him, curling at one corner as he drew her a fraction closer beneath his arm. “Very disrespectful to make the international boyfriend and the local boyfriend overlap, though. Poor management.”

The threat of photographic evidence earned considerably less concern. Ben had been photographed in enough unflattering circumstances over the years that Cleo possessing a picture of him asleep on their couch barely registered as leverage, especially when he had no intention of providing the opportunity yet. “Go ahead,” he said, settling his head more comfortably against the cushion in a way that probably weakened his case. “I'll look peaceful and mysterious. You'll look cruel for exploiting a vulnerable traveler.” He wasn't particularly sleepy, despite the heaviness that came and went behind his eyes whenever he stopped moving; the shower and food had done their jobs, leaving him in that pleasant post-travel state where his muscles were tired but his mind had finally stopped feeling several seconds behind everything around him.

The cabinet story immediately justified his earlier suspicion that there had been more to it. He listened with growing amusement as moisturizer somehow became a full-scale reorganization project, his gaze periodically drifting toward the hallway as though he could see the scene reconstructed on the bathroom floor. By the time Band-Aids entered the crisis, Ben had pressed his lips together to keep from interrupting. It wasn't that the logic made sense. It was that Cleo was explaining it with enough conviction that he could almost understand how two-fifteen in the morning had transformed shelf placement into an emergency requiring immediate intervention.

“Okay, no, I take it back. There absolutely was an inciting event,” he said once there was finally room for him. “The inciting event was you opening a cabinet while pregnant at two in the morning. That's basically the beginning of a psychological thriller.” His thumb moved slowly across hers while he considered the rest. “But I'm impressed you spared my section. I would've come home, opened that thing, and spent twenty minutes accusing myself of putting deodorant somewhere stupid before it occurred to me that another human being lives here.”

Then she mentioned having organized around his eventual return, and the joke waiting behind Ben's teeth quietly disappeared. It was such an ordinary detail that she might as well have told him she'd left his toothbrush where it belonged, but that was exactly why it got him. While he'd been living out of suitcases and moving between rooms that ceased belonging to him the moment he checked out, Cleo had been rearranging their bathroom at an ungodly hour and making decisions that included the assumption of him coming back. His things had a future tense here even when he didn't.

Ben didn't point that out. The impulse to dissect every tender thing between them had faded considerably over time, and this one felt better left intact. He only lifted their joined hands and pressed his mouth briefly against the back of hers before lowering them again. “Thank you for respecting my deodorant's established habitat,” he murmured. “It means a lot to me.”

Her sister's sabotage nearly ruined the tenderness immediately. Ben laughed, head tipping back against the couch as he pictured the deliberate relocation of toothpaste. “No, that's funny. I'm sorry, but that's excellent.” He glanced down at Cleo's narrowed eyes and visibly reconsidered his allegiance. “Terrible. Cruel. Unforgivable.” Another beat passed. “Putting it with first aid was inspired, though.”

The art-store confession put him directly into another trap. Three shades of blue sounded like precisely the kind of thing he could have teased her about for ten minutes if she hadn't produced the guitar comparison before he had the opportunity. Ben froze with his mouth already beginning to form an argument. Slowly, he closed it. His eyes narrowed, first at Cleo and then vaguely toward the room as though searching for legal representation that was not forthcoming.

“That was cheap,” he decided. “Accurate, but cheap.” He shifted his leg beneath the blanket and regarded her with wounded dignity. “Also, guitars don't sound identical. They feel different, they respond differently, the pickups—” He stopped himself, recognizing the hole getting deeper in real time. “I'm hearing it. Never mind.” His fingers squeezed hers once in reluctant concession. “Your blues are different. I support all three blues. I'm sorry I ever doubted them.”

The breakfast story stripped the amusement from his expression much more gradually. Ben remembered the photograph. He remembered where he'd been when it arrived too, although the specifics were fuzzy now—somewhere backstage, his attention split between people moving equipment around him and Cleo's message on his phone. He'd seen pancakes and sunlight and had been glad she was eating after the appointment. He hadn't known about the hour beside the window, or the quiet pride contained inside it, or the fact that she'd been missing him without needing that absence filled immediately.

His thumb slowed against her hand. “I would've liked the pancakes,” he said, because anything more sentimental at first would have risked crowding the memory she was giving him. A faint smile appeared. “Probably would've complained that yours looked better after ordering something completely different, then eaten some of yours anyway.” He pictured her sitting there after receiving good news about their baby, alone without being lonely, and felt something warmer than pride settle through him. “I'm glad you went.”

There was a distinction there he understood more clearly after everything she'd already told him. He wasn't glad because she had demonstrated some ability to survive breakfast without him. He was glad because the day hadn't become lesser simply because he couldn't be part of it. There would be more of those days. His work virtually guaranteed it, and parenthood was not going to politely schedule every meaningful moment around tour dates. He could hate missing pieces without needing Cleo to hate living them.

Her observation about his return drew Ben's attention back from the memory. He looked around the apartment almost involuntarily when she described the adjustment period she'd expected, as though there might be evidence of one hiding somewhere. His duffel was still exactly where he'd dropped it. He had already used the shower without thinking about where anything was, pulled clothes from his drawer, eaten her crackers, and settled into his preferred part of the couch with the entitlement of someone who had been gone for an afternoon rather than a month.

“I'm sure I'll find a routine to ruin,” he said, but his voice had softened. “Give me until tomorrow. I'll put something in the wrong section of the military cabinet and destroy the peace.” His gaze returned to her, lingering when she gave language to the thing he'd felt since walking through the door. Visiting implied carefulness. It implied a bag that stayed packed and toiletries that remained inside it, asking where the glasses were kept, occupying somebody else's space without leaving much evidence behind. Nothing about being here felt temporary in that particular way, even with another flight sitting several days ahead.

Ben leaned his head lightly against hers. “Yeah,” he said after a moment. “That's what it feels like to me too.” There wasn't much else he wanted to add. The simplicity was the point.

Then came the pregnancy pillow.

Ben's head lifted. He stared at her as though she had just disclosed a major betrayal deliberately withheld during all previous conversations. “I'm sorry, my side of the bed has what?” His eyebrows climbed higher as the rival acquired increasingly damning qualities: enormous, supportive, emotionally significant. By the time Cleo suggested the pillow might be the mysterious second boyfriend, Ben looked genuinely affronted. “Oh, so he's already sleeping in my bed. That's much worse than nine-thirty.”

He considered this new domestic adversary with the seriousness it deserved. “I'm not negotiating with a pillow,” he informed her. “I live here. I have rights.” A pause followed while practical reality apparently presented itself. His eyes narrowed. “How enormous are we talking? Because if this thing is one of those full-body horseshoe situations, I may need to review the floor plan before making promises.”

The smile broke through before he finished, and Ben shook his head at the absurdity of being jealous of an object designed to make his pregnant girlfriend comfortable. “Fine. It can stay.” He gave the concession grudgingly, then added, “But I'm not thanking it for its service. It knew what it was doing.”

Even while he joked, the existence of the pillow supplied another small piece of the month he'd missed. Cleo's sleep had changed enough to require something new. Her body had made demands and she'd adapted to them while he was elsewhere, just as she had with food and clothes and all the little practical realities that photographs didn't show. Ben didn't feel excluded by it exactly. He simply kept discovering that pregnancy had an everyday texture no appointment update could communicate.

The room grew quieter around them. Evening had begun replacing afternoon at the windows, softening the apartment into warmer shadows, and Ben became aware of how thoroughly he'd settled into the couch only when Cleo moved their hands. He followed without resistance until his palm rested over the small curve beneath the blanket, hers layered with it. This time there was no startled fascination, no need to examine the difference he'd first noticed by the door. His hand simply belonged there for the moment.

Her next words found the part of him that had been deliberately refusing to think too far ahead.

Ben looked down at their hands while she acknowledged what both of them already knew. He was going to miss things. Maybe small things, maybe something one of them wished desperately he'd been present for. There was no honest promise he could make that touring would never cost them moments, and he respected her too much to offer one merely because it would sound reassuring. The reality of his career had existed before the pregnancy; now the stakes attached to absence were simply changing.

His fingers spread slightly beneath hers. He thought of being in some dressing room when Cleo called because something had happened for the first time. He thought about appointments he would make and ones circumstances might force him to miss, about eventually leaving a child at home along with her and discovering an entirely new version of the ache he'd already learned. None of those thoughts made him want his work less. They made him want to become better at the transitions between the two lives until they stopped feeling like separate lives at all.

“I hate that part,” he admitted quietly. “Not you saying it. The fact that it's true.” His thumb moved once over the fabric beneath his palm. “I'm gonna miss stuff. You're gonna have things happen when I'm somewhere stupid with a guitar, and I'm probably going to take it personally even though time itself is not conspiring against me.”

A tired little smile touched his mouth, but he didn't use it to escape the thought. “I don't want to start making promises I can't control just because they sound good. I can't promise I'll catch every single thing.” His eyes lifted from their hands to Cleo. “But you won't have to wonder whether I'm coming back from wherever I am.”

That was something he could give her without pretending their life would become easier than it was. There would be airports and hotel rooms and schedules. There would also be this apartment, his drawer, the absurdly regimented bathroom cabinet, a pregnancy pillow currently occupying disputed territory, and eventually a baby whose existence would make leaving significantly harder than any tour departure had been before. Home didn't erase the movement. It gave the movement somewhere to return from.

The kiss against his shoulder loosened something in his chest. Ben let his cheek settle lightly against the top of her head, breathing out through his nose while her request steered them away from anything profound before either of them could drown in it. “Something useless,” he repeated, considering the category. “Okay. I have an excellent one.”

His hand remained beneath hers over her stomach, but the rest of him shifted slightly as he prepared to tell it. “So, Brazil. Hotel. Maybe two in the morning.” He glanced down at her. “And before you ask why every bad decision apparently happens at two in the morning, I don't have an answer. It's an industry-wide problem.”

The memory already had him smiling. “I get back after the show, and I'm trying to be quiet because the whole floor is basically asleep. I get to my room, put the key card against the door, red light. Try it again. Red light.” Ben lifted his free hand, counting off the escalating indignities with his fingers. “I flip the card over even though I know that's not how technology works. Red light. I wipe it on my shirt like it's an old Nintendo cartridge. Red light.”

He had been tired enough by then that the door's refusal had begun feeling personal. Instead of admitting defeat and going downstairs, Ben had stood in the hallway repeatedly presenting the same key to the same lock as though persistence might eventually shame the electronics into cooperation. “Then I hear somebody moving around inside,” he continued, eyebrows lifting. “And now I'm pissed, because my brain goes straight to, somebody's in my room. Not maybe I have the wrong room. No. Clearly I've uncovered a hotel-based conspiracy at two in the morning.”

Ben's smile widened as the stupidity of what came next returned to him. “So I knock. Very authoritative. Like I'm about to reclaim property.” He demonstrated two firm knocks against the couch cushion with his knuckles. “Nothing happens for a second, and then this guy opens the door wearing pajama pants, one sock, and the most terrified expression I've ever seen on another human being.”

There had been a beat in which Ben stared at the stranger and the stranger stared back. Behind him was a room that looked almost exactly like Ben's because hotels were designed specifically to make this kind of humiliation possible. Ben had even looked past the man at the bed, convinced for one catastrophic second that he was somehow still correct. “And I go, ‘I think you're in my room.’” He closed his eyes briefly now, visibly pained by his past self. “Cleo, I said it with confidence. That's the worst part. Full confidence.”

The stranger had blinked at him, looked down the hallway, then very cautiously pointed at the number beside the door. Ben's room was one floor above.

“I wasn't even on the right floor,” he admitted, laughing now. “Not the wrong room. Wrong floor. I'd gotten off the elevator, walked the exact route I always walked, and apparently my brain just decided geography was optional.” He shook his head. “And this poor guy doesn't get angry. That would've been easier. He just looks at me and goes, ‘Long night?’”

Ben had been forced to stand there and accept the kindness of a stranger whose hotel room he'd nearly attempted to repossess. “So I apologize about six times, tell him I'm an idiot, and start walking away.” His shoulders moved with another quiet laugh. “Then I get back in the elevator and stare at the floor for the entire ride up like the security cameras can feel disappointment.”

The story was precisely as useless as requested. No revelation about tour, no emotional significance, nothing Cleo needed to know about the month they'd spent apart. It was simply something ridiculous that had happened to him in a hotel hallway thousands of miles away, saved accidentally until he could tell her from their couch.

Ben turned his face enough to press a kiss into her hair. “There,” he murmured, satisfaction warm in his voice. “No meaning whatsoever.” His fingers shifted beneath hers over the small curve of her stomach, comfortable and unhurried. “I've got at least thirty more.”