Getting Closer

Chapter 4:

By the end of the first month, they weren't just sleeping together anymore, if they ever really had been just that to begin with. They were the first call when something good happened and the first text when something bad did. Jake showed up at Mia's office unannounced with soup and crackers when she came down with the flu, sitting on the floor of her tiny apartment for three hours just so she wouldn't be alone, even though she insisted repeatedly that he was going to catch it too. Mia, in turn, sat through three long hours of Jake's cousin's engagement party because he'd asked her to be his plus-one, "as a friend, obviously," even though the way he'd asked, nervous and a little too hopeful, hadn't felt like a friend asking a friend a favor at all.

"You didn't have to dance with me," Mia said, laughing, as they left the party well after midnight, her heels dangling from one hand.

"I wanted an excuse to touch you in public," Jake admitted, bumping her shoulder with his as they walked toward his car under the streetlights.

"That's not something friends say."

"Since when do we do things by the book, Mia? We broke rule one before we even wrote it down properly."

She swatted his arm, but she was smiling, and the warmth of his hand finding hers on the walk to the car felt like something she never wanted to question too closely, for fear of what she might find if she looked directly at it.

There had been a girl at the party — pretty, friendly, clearly interested in Jake from the moment he'd walked in wearing that navy blazer that made his shoulders look impossibly broad. Mia had watched her laugh a little too long at his jokes throughout the night, touch his arm a little too often, lean in a little too close when she whispered something in his ear. Mia had felt something twist hard and unwelcome in her chest, something ugly and possessive that she had absolutely no right to feel, not under the careful terms of their arrangement.

"You looked like you wanted to throw your drink at Carly," Jake said later, once they were back at his apartment, shoes kicked off, the party dress still zipped halfway down her back.

"I did not."

"Mia. I watched you. You had murder in your eyes."

"Okay, maybe a little," she admitted, flopping down onto his couch with a groan. "She kept touching your arm. It was annoying."

Jake stepped closer, kneeling down in front of her, tilting her chin up with one gentle finger so she had to look at him. "Are you jealous?"

"No," Mia said, far too fast, her cheeks already warming.

"Because I didn't love it either. Watching that guy at the bar buy you a drink and stand a little too close while you laughed at whatever he was saying."

"That was just a drink. He seemed nice."

"Yeah," Jake said softly, his thumb brushing along her jaw. "That's what I told myself too, the whole time I was watching. Just being friendly, just being nice. Didn't stop the feeling in my chest, though."

They didn't say the word that was hovering there, unspoken, between them. Neither of them was ready, not yet, not with everything still so fragile and new and unnamed. But something had shifted that night, quiet and undeniable, like the moment the tide pulls all the way out before a much bigger wave comes crashing in.

They spent the rest of that night simply talking, still in their party clothes, sprawled across his couch with a bottle of wine between them, trading stories they'd both already heard a dozen times before but somehow wanted to hear again — the disastrous camping trip junior year, the time Jake broke his arm trying to impress a girl at a skate park, the first apartment Mia had lived in that flooded during her very first week there. It was the kind of night that didn't need anything physical to feel intimate, and that, more than anything else, was the moment Mia knew, somewhere deep and quiet inside her chest, that this had stopped being simple a long time ago.

"Hey," Jake said, much later, when the wine bottle was empty and Mia's eyes were growing heavy against his shoulder. "I'm really glad it's you. Whatever this is. I'm glad it's you and not someone else."

"Me too," Mia murmured, already half asleep, and if either of them heard the weight in those words, neither one mentioned it.