Chapter 19: Stay Because I Asked

Elis had finished checking her shoulder and was halfway to the door when Cerys realized she did not want another quiet room.

He had said nothing alarming. She was still healing. She was still supposed to rest. None of that had changed since yesterday, and none of it explained why the closing door suddenly felt like a threat.

“Elis.”

He stopped. Cerys almost asked him a question about her recovery. It would have been easy. There was always something she could ask about pain, sleep, walking, or when she might be allowed to do more.

She was tired of talking about her body as if it were the only thing happening to her.

“Do you have to go right now?”

His hand dropped from the door. “No.”

“Then stay for a little while.”

He looked at her, not moving yet. “Do you need something?”

“Yes.” She heard how serious that sounded and almost laughed. “A conversation that has nothing to do with whether I’m getting better.”

His mouth shifted. “That may be beyond my training.”

“Take the risk.”

Elis came back to the chair, but he did not pull it closer to the bed. Cerys noticed that too. She had spent the last several days noticing distances.

He sat. For a moment, neither of them said anything. Cerys had asked him to stay. Apparently that had not included a plan for what happened next.

Elis waited. She wished he would rescue her from the silence. She also knew, by now, that he probably would not.

“So,” she said, “tell me something that happened today that wasn’t about me.”

“That’s a dangerous request.”

“Why?”

“I’ve heard how you react when people make decisions without consulting you,” Elis said.

“That was work.”

“Yes.”

“You’re enjoying this,” Cerys said.

“A little.”

The answer came so easily that Cerys smiled before she meant to.

“Fine. Tell me about work.”

“Mine or yours?”

“Anyone’s. I don’t care,” Cerys said.

“That sounds unlike you.”

She picked up the folded hydroponics page beside her and threw it at him. It did not travel far. Elis caught it against his knee.

“That,” he said, “was an impressive display of strength.”

“Give it back.”

“You said we weren’t discussing your recovery.”

“We’re not,” Cerys said.

“Then I assume that was your full throwing capacity even before the injuries.”

Cerys held out her hand until he returned the page.

“That was cruel.”

“I thought we were taking risks.”

She laughed, then regretted it when her ribs protested. The pain was brief enough that she could wait it out without letting the conversation turn. Elis saw it. His expression changed, but he did not ask how much it hurt.

Cerys was grateful enough to keep talking before he could reconsider.

“My coworker finally admitted he made the right call while I was gone,” she said.

“I thought you admitted he made the right call.”

“That’s different.”

“Of course,” Elis said.

“He looked offended when I agreed with him.”

“Maybe he’d prepared an argument.”

“He probably had. We’re very considerate that way,” Cerys said.

Elis leaned back in the chair. “You plan your disagreements in advance?”

“Only the important ones.”

“Is that why you’ve been rehearsing arguments with me since you woke up?”

“I don’t rehearse,” Cerys said.

“You absolutely rehearse.”

He raised both hands. “Not medical.”

“That was dangerously close.”

“I’ll be more careful.”

The conversation drifted after that. She told him about the empty stretch in the growing room and how strange it had been to see work continuing around it. Not the details of what had failed or what should replace it. Just the fact that the place had moved without her and still felt like hers.

Elis told her about someone in the common room who had spent half a meal insisting a chair belonged at one table instead of another, as though the entire silo depended on its position.

“Who won?” Cerys asked.

“The chair.”

“That isn’t an answer.”

“It ended up against the wall where nobody wanted it,” someone said.

She pictured the argument continuing around an empty space and laughed again, more carefully this time.

“What else?”

“You really were lonely.”

The words were quiet. Cerys’s smile faded.

There it was: the thing she had been trying not to name. She could tell him that Rhys had visited. She could explain that she had chosen to send him away and then hated the room after he left. She could make this conversation about the breakup and ask Elis to help fill the space.

That was exactly what she did not want to do.

“I was,” she said. “That isn’t why I want you here.”

Elis’s gaze stayed on her face. Cerys forced herself not to soften the truth into something safer.

“I don’t want to use you because I miss him.”

“I know.”

“You can’t know that,” Elis said.

“No.” He paused. “But I know you stopped this conversation to tell me.”

She looked down at the page in her hands. That was not absolution. It was not permission to pretend Rhys did not matter. She still loved him. The ache of his absence had not disappeared because someone else could make her laugh.

But wanting company did not have to mean replacing one man with another. Cerys set the page aside.

“I asked you to stay because I like talking to you,” she said.

Elis was silent for just long enough to make her wish she could take the sentence back. Then he smiled.

“I like talking to you too.”

Something in her chest shifted, small and inconvenient.

She reached out without thinking and touched his forearm, just above his wrist. Not because she needed help standing. Not because he was checking an injury. The contact lasted only a moment, but she felt the difference immediately.

Elis did not close his hand over hers. Cerys withdrew when she wanted to. Neither of them commented on it.

“That was almost painfully normal,” she said.

“I can ruin it if you want.”

“No.”

“Good,” Elis said.

She settled back against the pillows. The room was still the same room. Rhys was still absent. Nothing had been repaired, replaced, or decided.

It was simply less empty. Elis stood when she began to tire. This time Cerys did not ask him to stay longer just because she could.

At the door, he glanced back.

“When you’re ready to be out for more than a walk to hydroponics,” he said, “we could talk somewhere that isn’t your room or my work.”

He added, “No check. No excuse.”

Her first instinct was to ask what he meant by it. Her second was to say yes too quickly, just to prove she could.

She did neither.

“Somewhere in the silo?” she asked.

“I wasn’t planning anything dramatic.”

“That doesn’t answer the question.”

“The common room. A meal. Ten minutes arguing about furniture if that’s all you can manage,” Rhys said.

Cerys pictured it: people around them, no bed, no medical reason for him to be there, no Rhys shaping the choice by his presence or absence.

It felt more dangerous than it should have. It also felt like something she wanted to consider.

“All right,” she said. “When I’m ready.”

Elis nodded once. “When you’re ready.”

He left before either of them could turn the agreement into something larger. Cerys listened to his footsteps fade.

This time, the room did not feel abandoned.