Unforced

Unforced

POV: Bash

"You've been staring at that silverware like it's about to move."

Julian didn't say it like a challenge. He was just leaning back against the diner booth, half-smiling, holding a sandwich in one hand like the world wasn't a tightrope we were all trying not to fall off of.

"Sorry," I said, setting the fork down like it had personally offended me. "Long morning."

"You said that yesterday too."

"Long week, then."

He laughed, easy, and didn't push. I waited for the follow-up question, the one that always came next in every conversation I'd had for the past two years — long how, tired why, what happened, who upset you — some version of concern that always somehow circled back to whether I'd been careful enough with myself. It didn't come. He just took another bite of his sandwich and asked if I'd tried the soup, because apparently the soup here was worth writing home about.

My shoulders were still locked somewhere up near my ears. I could feel it, the tension sitting there like a held note that never resolved, my thumb tracing slow circles around the rim of my glass because my hands needed something to do or they'd start doing something else — tapping, drumming, counting things I didn't want to count in front of him.

"I messed up an order earlier," I said, before he could ask, because it felt safer to confess it first than to wait and get caught. "Gave the wrong table the wrong ticket. Priya had to fix it."

"Happens." He shrugged, already reaching for his fries. "Priya messed up three orders my first week. You should've seen her face."

That was it. No lecture on attention, no gentle suggestion that maybe I should slow down and think before I acted, no quiet reminder disguised as concern. Just — happens. I sat there for a second waiting for the second half of the sentence, the part where he'd tell me what it meant about me, and it never arrived. It was disorienting in a way I didn't have a word for yet, like walking into a room I'd braced myself to be hit in and finding out there was nothing there at all.

"You're doing the thing again," Julian said.

"What thing?"

"That thing where you look like you're waiting for someone to grade you." He wasn't unkind about it. He said it the way you'd point out someone had spinach in their teeth — casual, no weight behind it. "Relax. It's lunch."

I laughed, and it came out a little strangled, a little too relieved, because relax, it's just coffee was a sentence I'd heard that same morning and it had meant something completely different when Rhys said it. Here it just meant relax. It was lunch. Nothing underneath it, no second meaning waiting to surface later.

I hated how much that unsettled me. I hated that I'd gotten so used to conversations having a floor that could give out beneath me that a normal one felt like standing on air.

"You do this thing with your hands," Julian said, nodding at my fingers, which had drifted to the edge of the table and were tapping out some silent rhythm against the laminate without my permission. "Counting something?"

My whole body went cold for a second, the old reflex kicking in — deny it, explain it away, make it small enough that it couldn't be used against me later. I opened my mouth to say it was nothing.

"My cousin used to do that," he said, before I could get the lie out. "Count ceiling tiles during finals. Drove his roommate insane, but it worked for him, so." He shrugged again, unbothered, like it was just a fact about a person, the same way you'd mention someone was left-handed. "He asked me why I count the tiles in my kitchen once. Not accusing. Just asking. Like it was a normal thing to notice about a person."

Something in my chest loosened that I hadn't realized was clenched.

Nobody had ever said it back to me like that. Not once. Rhys watched me do it and filed it away like evidence, Marion pretended not to see it at all, and here was Julian just handing the observation over like a small gift, no strings, no correction attached. My fingers stopped moving on their own. I hadn't told them to. They just did.

"It's stupid," I said anyway, because old habits don't die just because someone's kind to you once.

"It's not stupid. It's just a thing you do." He said it so plainly it almost hurt, the way relief sometimes hurts before it settles into something you can hold onto. "Everybody's got something."

I looked at him properly then — really looked, the way I hadn't let myself all lunch because looking too long at things that felt good had never gone well for me. He had steady hands wrapped loosely around his glass, no tension in them at all, like his whole body had never learned to brace for impact. There was something almost unbearable about how uncomplicated he was. How much space he took up without ever once making the air feel smaller for it.

"I should head back," I said finally, because the alternative was sitting there feeling all of that a second longer than I could stand.

"Yeah, in a minute." He wiped his hands on a napkin, and something in his posture shifted, a little more deliberate now, a little more like he'd been building up to this the whole meal. "Can I ask you something first?"

"Sure."

"This — " he gestured between us, unhurried, "isn't really about lunch, is it. Not for me, anyway."

My pulse picked up. I didn't answer right away, and he didn't fill the silence for me, just let it sit there, patient, unbothered by my hesitation the way he seemed unbothered by everything.

"I'm not asking you to get lunch between shifts, Bash. I'm asking if I can take you out on Friday. Just us. No work talk."

My chest hitched, my brain instantly jumping to Rhys sitting in the dark living room, counting the minutes until my shift ended. I should have made an excuse. I should have swallowed the word before it cleared my teeth.

"Yeah," I blurted, my hands gripping the edge of the table. "Yeah, I'd like that."