Hi. I’m Allison. I’m 35. I just like Austin Butler and I needed a place to thirst about it. Sue me—I keep it very real around here.Im on Twitter as well-Butlerrizz :)
The shoes were so…small? Comparative to the bulk of the suit, he was wearing Tinkerbell’s shoes.
And the black jacket over his bare chest has been done before. Twice, tbh, and it’s been done better both times.
Why was he not dressed for the weather? Summer fashion show, nearly 100°, and dressed in a thick head to toe black oversized suit?
And I said it already but…his hair was sloppy. Too much product and somehow not enough product all at once.
I know likely he’s growing it out for MV filming, but surely there’s something else we can do for it in the meantime, other than dipped in glue and placed in a wind tunnel?
I know the man loves a black suit, but we can do better.
The thing about a terrible idea is that it doesn’t stop being terrible just because you want more of it. And I wanted more. More of him. More of whatever this was. More of the specific, targeted problem of Austin Butler’s mouth on my neck at two in the afternoon while I was supposed to be doing literally anything else with my life.
Four and a half weeks in and we’d developed something that wasn’t quite a routine but had a shape to it. His days were carved up by other people — the trainer, the agent, the meetings, the fittings, whatever machinery kept his life moving forward — and mine were wide open in a way that should have felt like freedom and mostly just felt like waiting. Not for him, exactly. Just in general. I didn’t have a job, a plan, or a reason to set an alarm, and Austin’s schedule had become the closest thing I had to a structure, which was either convenient or pathetic depending on when you asked me.
He’d call after something wrapped. Sometimes mid-morning, sometimes not until the afternoon, depending on what his day looked like. We’d talk for twenty minutes or an hour, and at some point one of us would say what we were both thinking.
“Come over.”
And that was the shape of it.
When I went to his place I’d borrow Eva’s car or get a cab, and he’d open the door looking like something I hadn’t ordered but was absolutely going to accept, and we’d end up in his kitchen or his bedroom or, once, memorably, against the hallway wall before we’d made it to either.
It was easy. That was the thing. Stupidly, dangerously easy. We didn’t talk about what it was. We didn’t negotiate boundaries or have the conversation. We just kept showing up.
The first time he came to Nate’s was a Sunday, late morning. Nate and Eva were out somewhere. I was in the kitchen making coffee when I heard a car in the driveway and looked out to see him getting out, sunglasses on, two takeout bags in hand.
I opened the door. “What are you doing here?”
“Feeding you.” He held up the bags. “There’s a place near mine that does these breakfast burritos that’ll change your life.”
“You drove across town to bring me a burrito?”
“Two burritos. I’m not a monster.”
I let him in. We ate at the kitchen counter, our knees touching, hot sauce on everything, and he told me about a film he’d watched the night before that he couldn’t stop thinking about and I told him about a guy I’d seen at the beach who’d been trying to teach his dog to surf with complete, unironic seriousness, and we went back and forth the way we always did — easy, overlapping, the kind of talking where you forget you’re not the only two people in the world.
The sex had changed. It had been good from the start and we both knew it — but something had shifted in the texture of it. The first time had been all urgency and discovery, both of us running on adrenaline and the particular madness of wanting someone you probably shouldn’t. Now there was a patience to it.
He’d learned me. That was the only way to put it. He knew what happened when he kissed the spot below my ear. He knew the sound I made when his fingers trailed up the inside of my thigh, and he knew what it meant when my breathing changed, and he used all of it with a calm, deliberate attention that made me want to scream.
It was a Wednesday afternoon. Something had been rescheduled and he’d shown up at the bottom of the stairs with two coffees and that look.
I knew the look by now. I was developing a Pavlovian response to the look.
We’d barely made it through the coffee.
He was behind me. My back against his chest, both of us on our sides on the bed, the sheets half off because neither of us had bothered. His arm was under my head, his other hand between my thighs, and he was taking his time with a patience that bordered on cruelty.
“Austin.” My voice came out thinner than I wanted. “Stop teasing.”
“I’m not teasing.” His mouth was against the back of my neck, his lips tracing the line of my shoulder. “I’m being thorough.”
“You’ve been thorough. You’ve been thorough for ten minutes. I’m going to lose my mind.”
“That’s kind of the point.”
His fingers moved in slow circles, barely enough pressure, keeping me right at the edge without letting me fall. Every time I shifted my hips to chase it he’d ease off, his breath warm against my ear, and the restraint of it — the fact that he was completely in control and clearly enjoying it — was making me insane in ways I couldn’t articulate because I’d forgotten most of the English language.
I reached back and grabbed his hip, pulling him closer, grinding back against him. He was hard against me and I heard his breath catch — just slightly, just enough to tell me the patience was costing him more than he was letting on.
“Please,” I breathed, and I never said please, and the fact that he’d gotten me there made me want to bite him.
He pushed into me slowly and my whole body answered — a full-length shudder, my hand gripping his forearm where it lay across me, my head tipping back against his shoulder. He stayed close, his mouth on my neck, one hand still between my legs, setting a rhythm that was devastatingly slow and deep and exactly calibrated to undo me.
The angle was everything. He was pressed flush against my back, close enough that I could feel his heartbeat, and every thrust hit a spot that sent sparks up my spine. His fingers matched the pace — slow, precise, relentless — and the combination of both was building something in me that felt massive, the kind of thing you can feel coming from a long way off and can’t do anything about.
I turned my head and found his mouth. The kiss was awkward from this angle — more breath than contact, messy, his lower lip between my teeth — but his hips stuttered when I bit down, his rhythm faltering for the first time, and the sound he made against my mouth — desperate, nothing like the composure he’d been holding — went through me like electricity.
He swore against my skin and his pace shifted — faster, harder, the patience finally cracking open — and I stopped thinking about anything except the way his body felt against mine, behind mine, the way his breathing had gone ragged and his fingers were still moving and everything was narrowing to a single bright point.
I came hard and loud and without a shred of dignity, his name falling out of me in a way that I’d be embarrassed about later but couldn’t care about now. He followed almost immediately, his arm tightening around me, his face pressed into my hair, his whole body shuddering against my back — a low sound against my collarbone that I’d started cataloguing somewhere in the back of my mind like a collection I wasn’t ready to admit I was keeping.
We lay there afterwards in a tangle of damp sheets and heavy breathing. His arm was still across me, his hand resting flat on my stomach, his thumb moving absently back and forth. I could feel his chest expanding against my back with each breath as it slowed.
“So,” I said eventually. “How was your morning?”
He laughed into my hair. I felt it more than I heard it — the vibration of it through his chest into my spine. “Better now.”
I turned over to face him. He watched me the way he always watched me — eyes open, steady, that unbroken attention that made the whole thing feel like being seen at a frequency most people couldn’t reach. He looked the way he always looked after — flushed, heavy-lidded, his hair destroyed, his mouth soft. I’d started to think of this version of him as the real one. Not the person on camera or at industry events, not even the person at Nate’s barbecue. This one. Undone and unselfconscious, lying in my ridiculously small bed in the loft above my brother’s garage.
“You have to go soon, don’t you,” I said.
“I have a thing tonight.”
“A thing.”
“Screening. Then dinner after. Industry stuff.”
“Sounds awful.”
“It will be.” He traced a line along my collarbone. “I’d rather stay here.”
“You’d rather stay in a converted garage above a Toyota Camry than go to a nice dinner?”
“I’d rather stay wherever you are than go to most places.”
I opened my mouth to make a joke — something sharp, something deflecting — and then didn’t. I just looked at him, and let it be what it was, and tucked it somewhere behind my ribs where I was keeping all the things he said that I didn’t know what to do with yet.
He left not long after. I listened to his car pull out of the driveway, then lay on the bed staring at the ceiling, still warm from where he’d been, still smelling like him, still feeling his hands on me like a physical memory.
The days I didn’t see him had their own rhythm, though it took me a while to notice it. That was the part I didn’t talk about. Not with Austin, not with Nate, not with anyone. The days between his phone calls stretched out long and featureless and I filled them the way I’d always filled empty time — moving.
I’d do my practice in the morning. Then later I’d walk or run — I’d started running again, something I hadn’t done since my early twenties, long loops through the neighbourhood that left me sweaty and empty-headed in the best way. I’d cook, usually something ambitious — working through a list of dishes I’d learned in different countries, testing them on Nate and Eva, who were either genuinely impressed or extremely polite about it.
Sometimes Eva and I would drive somewhere — a farmers’ market, a coffee place she liked in Glendale. She didn’t ask about Austin and I didn’t bring him up, and the restraint on both sides had its own kind of warmth to it. She’d become someone I liked being around without having to explain myself, which was rarer than it should have been.
And I’d look at things online. Not with any urgency — just browsing, the way you scroll through listings for apartments in cities you’re not moving to, or flights to places you’re not going. Resorts in Thailand, retreats in Bali, a new wellness centre in Byron Bay looking for someone to build out their yoga programme. Places I’d worked before, or places close enough to places I’d worked that I could picture myself there without effort. I could see exactly how it would go — the new place, the new classes, the fresh start that would feel like freedom for a year or two until it didn't. I'd done it enough times to know the shape of it by heart.
I didn't apply to any of them. Not because I was lazy or because I hadn't found the right one. Because I wasn't sure doing it again would change anything.
One day we drove up the coast. He picked me up mid-morning and we went north on PCH with no destination, just driving, the ocean on our left and the hills on our right and nothing on the calendar for either of us.
We stopped at a place he knew in Malibu — small, right on the water, the kind of restaurant that doesn’t need a sign because the people who go there already know where it is. We ate fish tacos and drank beer and he told me about his mom — losing her, how it almost made him stop acting. I told him about mine — how she’d never understood the way I lived, and how I’d stopped trying to explain it. For a while the conversation got quieter and more careful in the way it does when you’re giving someone something real.
On the drive back he reached across the centre console and took my hand. Just held it. Didn’t say anything. I looked down at his fingers laced through mine. We didn’t do this. This was not a hand-holding situation. But his hand was warm and the light was doing that early-evening thing where everything looked like it had been dipped in honey, and the restlessness wasn’t there. I just sat there, holding his hand, watching the coastline, letting it be good without needing it to be anything else.
When he dropped me home that evening I stood at the top of the loft stairs and watched his car disappear around the corner, and the thought that arrived wasn’t complicated.
I like this.
That was it. No qualification, no asterisk, no exit strategy drafted in the margins. Just: I like this. I like him. I like who I am when I’m with him.
It was the simplest thing I’d felt in a long time, and it scared the shit out of me.
⸻
I was in the car heading back from a meeting when I caught myself smiling at nothing.
It had been happening more and more. I’d be in the middle of something — a fitting, a phone call, a conversation with someone who needed my full attention — a thought would surface and the smile would arrive before I’d registered what had caused it. Usually it was something she’d said. A line, a face she’d pulled, the way she’d sat on my couch the other night and argued with me about a film for forty minutes like the outcome was the most important thing in the world.
A month ago I’d been someone who agreed to come to a friend’s barbecue and didn’t expect anything from it. Six weeks and change later I was someone who picked up the phone whenever her name lit up the screen and didn’t think twice about driving across town in the middle of the day to bring her a burrito.
The sex was a big part of it. I wasn’t going to pretend otherwise. It was incredible — the kind that rearranged your priorities and made you late for things you should not have been late for.
But it wasn’t just the sex. It was her in my kitchen, showing me how to cook something she’d learned from a woman in a hostel in Laos who didn’t speak any English. It was the way she told a story — starting in the middle, looping sideways, pulling in details that shouldn’t have been relevant but somehow were. It was the way she’d sit cross-legged on my bed eating takeout and say something so casually devastating that I’d still be thinking about it three days later.
She had this way of seeing the world at a slightly different angle to everyone else, and standing next to her — even just on the phone — made everything tilt in a way I’d started to crave.
I called her from the kitchen when I got home.
She picked up on the second ring. “Hey.”
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing. Eva’s making us watch a documentary about competitive dog grooming and I’ve never wanted to die more in my life.”
“Come over.”
She came over. We’d eaten — something she’d made, brought over in a container because she’d cooked too much at Nate’s and apparently I was the overflow solution. She was leaning against the kitchen island in one of my T-shirts and not much else, her hair piled up, a glass of wine in her hand, and she had the look on her face that meant she was about to say something I wasn’t ready for.
“So,” she said. “I’ve been watching your movies.”
Something shifted in my chest. She'd seen me on screen. The public version — the one on posters, the one people had opinions about — had entered the space between us, and I had no idea what to do with that.
I set my glass down. “Okay.”
“I have thoughts.”
“I’m sure you do.”
“Do you want to hear them?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“No.” She took a sip of wine. “I’m going in order of how confused they made me about myself as a person. Starting with Dune.”
“What about it?”
“I mean this with love, but I had absolutely no idea what was happening at any point in that movie.”
I let out a breath I didn't know I'd been holding and smiled. “Did you watch the first one?”
“No.”
“Liv.”
“And you were very bald.”
“I was.”
“And a complete psychopath.”
“That’s the character, yes.”
“Right. So can you explain to me why I found that incredibly attractive? Because I need answers.”
I stared at her. “You found Feyd attractive?”
“Aggressively attractive. It’s a problem. He’s murdering people and I’m sitting there thinking —” She stopped herself. “Actually, I’m not going to finish that sentence.”
I ran my tongue along the inside of my cheek. “No, please finish that sentence.”
“Have you seen your tongue in that movie? Because I have, and I’d like to formally volunteer as one of his darlings.” She tried to hold back a smile. “I already knew what you could do with it — but seeing it on screen just made me angry I wasn’t getting it right then.”
Of all the ways I'd imagined this conversation going, this was not one of them. I wasn’t complaining.
“That can be arranged.” I said, and my voice came out lower than I'd intended.
Something flickered in her expression. She caught it. Filed it away. “Don’t tempt me, I haven’t finished reviewing your work.”
"Uh-huh." I took a very long sip of wine.
She let the silence sit for a second, enjoying it, and then her expression shifted — still amused, but something else underneath. “The biker one though.”
“Yeah?”
“I loved that. Actually loved it.” She was quiet for a second, which was unusual for her. “In fact, I’m pretty sure I dated that guy.”
“What do you mean?”
“Senior year. Nate was at college. You were off doing whatever you were doing —”
“Acting.”
“Right. And I was dating this guy who had a bike and a leather jacket and absolutely nothing else going on. Emotionally unavailable. Selfish. Total prick. But he was hot, and cool, and he pissed my parents off, which at the time was basically all I needed.”
“Sounds like a great relationship.”
“It was terrible. I loved it.” She smiled — the real one, the one that made her whole face change — and I could picture it so clearly. Eighteen-year-old Liv on the back of some idiot's bike, her arms around his waist, grinning into the wind.
“The point is, you on a motorcycle is —” She paused, tilted her head, and made a face like she was searching for the right word. “Effective.”
“Effective.”
“Did they let you keep the jacket?” she asked.
“Yeah, actually.”
Her eyes widened. “Please tell me you have a bike too.”
“Jeff — the stunt coordinator on the film — he found one for me after we wrapped. It’s a sixties Harley.”
“Austin.” She looked at me like I’d been hiding a second personality. “You have a Harley.”
“I have a Harley.”
“And you’ve never mentioned this.”
“It hasn’t come up.”
“It’s coming up now. You have to take me on it.”
“Have you ever been on a Harley?”
“The guy in high school had a Honda. But the principle is the same.”
“The principle is absolutely not the same.”
“I’ll hold on tight. I’m very good at holding on tight.”
I looked at her and decided this was not the moment to explore that sentence further.
She must have seen something in my face because she grinned and moved on. “And then there’s Elvis.”
The grin faded into something quieter. She turned the glass slowly in her hands.
“That was —” She paused, and for a second the sharpness dropped and she just looked at me. “Austin, that was genuinely incredible. Like, I know I give you a hard time, but that was something else. I don’t know how you did that.”
I didn’t know what to do with my face. People told me things like this all the time — at events, in interviews, strangers who stopped me in the street. It always meant something. But it always came through a filter. This was Liv on a Friday night with no agenda, and she wasn't the kind of person who said things she didn't mean.
“Thank you,” I said. “That actually means a lot.”
She set her glass down and walked toward me. I was leaning against the opposite counter and she stopped right in front of me, close enough that I could smell the shampoo in her hair. She hooked a finger into the waistband of my pants and pulled me toward her.
“For the record,” she said, “you’re good. You’re really good. And I’m not just saying that because we’re sleeping together.”
“You’re a little bit saying that because we’re sleeping together.”
“Maybe five percent. The rest is genuine.”
“Good to know my craft is appreciated.”
She pulled me down the rest of the way and kissed me — slow, unhurried, her other hand coming up to the side of my neck. I could taste the wine and feel her smiling against my mouth and I thought: this. Just this. Whatever this is, I want to keep it.
The thought arrived and left without any weight to it. No urgency, no anxiety. Just a fact, sitting there in the quiet, the same way you’d notice the sun had moved across the room.
She left around midnight. She always left, or I drove her home, and we’d fallen into that pattern without discussing it the same way we’d fallen into everything else. She kissed me at the door — quick, a hand on my chest, already reaching for her bag — and I stood in the doorway and watched her get into the cab she’d called.
I closed the door and the house went quiet.
I liked my life before her. I wanted to be clear about that, even just to myself. I hadn’t been waiting for someone to come along and fix something. I’d taken the time and done the work of figuring out who I was on my own, and I’d been good at it.
But the house was quieter now when she wasn’t in it. Like someone had turned the volume down on a room I’d gotten used to hearing at full.
I cleaned up the kitchen, put the wine glasses in the sink, wiped down the counter. Went upstairs. The bed smelled like her — that particular mix of whatever product she used and something underneath that was just Liv, warm and clean and specific enough that I’d started noticing it on my pillows after she’d been here.
We hadn’t talked about what we were. We hadn’t needed to. The whole thing had unfolded with this easy, unspoken quality — like neither of us wanted to put a name on it because the second you did, you’d have to start managing it.
She didn’t have a plan. She’d told me that more than once, and I believed her, and I wasn’t going to be the person who tried to give her one. She was here because she hadn’t decided to be anywhere else yet, and I understood the difference. The best thing I could do was exactly what I was doing: show up, be here, let her figure it out at her own speed.
I lay in the dark and thought about the meeting with James earlier in the week. The travel coming up soon. The summer shooting schedule, the fall press run, the months that would take me somewhere else. And how my first thought — before anything practical — had been: she might not be here when I get back.
I turned over. Pressed my face into the pillow that smelled like her.
That one I didn’t sit with for long.
But it kept coming back.
⸻
The car ride home was thirty minutes of Eva trying to carry a conversation that nobody else was participating in.
“The chicken was actually really good tonight,” she said from the front seat. “Your mom’s doing something different with the marinade.”
Nothing from me. Nothing from Nate.
“And the garden looks amazing. Did your dad do that himself or did they get someone in?”
Nate made a sound that could have been agreement or indigestion. I stared out the window at the streetlights sliding past and let the evening replay itself behind my eyes.
It had started fine. It always started fine. My mom was good at fine — the table set properly, the food ready on time, the first half hour of catching up and how’s work Nate and Eva you look wonderful. She saved the real stuff for later, once the wine was open and everyone was comfortable, like she needed the room to be warm before she could start taking pieces out of you. She built toward it sideways, in layers, the first of which was Megan Langley.
Did I know that Megan had gotten her physical therapy license? Had her own practice now, right here in LA. She was doing so well. Really thriving.
She’d smiled at me when she said thriving. That particular smile.
“That’s great,” I’d said. “Good for her.”
“It is great. It’s so nice when people find their thing.”
Find their thing. Like I’d spent over a decade looking for my keys.
Then came Amy Whitfield. Had I heard? She’d gotten married. Beautiful wedding last October. And she was already pregnant, actually, just a few months, but she was glowing. Everyone was so happy for her.
A pause. The briefest glance in my direction.
“It’s such a shame about you and Thomas,” she’d said. Not to me, exactly — to the table, to the air, to the idea of it. “Five years. That’s a long time. And he was so lovely.”
Was. Like it was a eulogy.
“It didn’t work out, Mom.”
“I know, I know. I’m not saying — I just think it’s a shame, that’s all. You seemed so happy there.”
There. Not with him — there. As in: you had a life that looked like a life and now you don’t.
Then she’d turned to Eva. How was work? Was she still enjoying the firm? And my mom had listened with this focused, bright-eyed attention, leaning forward, asking follow-up questions, laughing in the right places, the full warmth of a woman talking to someone whose choices she understood.
“You’re so driven, Eva. I always say that. You remind me of myself at your age.”
Eva had smiled politely. Nate had looked at his plate. My dad had cleared his throat and asked if anyone wanted more wine.
And then my mom’s eyes had found me again, and the warmth didn’t leave exactly — it rearranged itself into something softer. Careful. The voice she used when she was about to say something she thought was kind.
“And what about you, sweetheart? Have you thought about what’s next?” She’d reached across and touched my hand. “You know your father and I are so happy to have you home. And if you ever did want to think about something more permanent — teaching locally, or your own studio — Eva, didn’t you say there was a space in Silver Lake?”
Eva had opened her mouth, caught my expression, and closed it again.
“I’m just saying, you’re so talented, Livvy, you could do anything you wanted,” my mom had continued, waving a hand like the whole thing was nothing, like she hadn’t just mapped out a life for me between the main course and dessert. “No pressure. But it would be so nice to have you settled. Actually put down some roots. You know your father and I would help.”
Settled. That word. She used it every time, like it was the answer to a question I’d never asked. And every other time I’d come home I’d had a response ready — the next job, the next place, the next plan that made her uncomfortable but at least proved I wasn’t drifting. I’d always had somewhere to point to and say: there. That’s where I’m going. That’s what I’m doing. You don’t have to understand it but it’s happening.
This time I had nothing. That was the part that made my chest tight. She’d looked at me across the dinner table and seen the gap where the answer should have been, and instead of backing off she’d leaned in — a studio in Silver Lake, a life she could understand, a daughter who finally made sense.
I’d looked at Nate. He’d been watching the exchange with that particular expression he got when he wanted to step in but knew it wouldn’t help. He’d given me a look — barely perceptible, just a shift in his eyes — that said: I know. I’m sorry. Let it go.
So I had. I’d smiled. Said I’d think about it. Helped clear the plates. And somewhere between the kitchen and the dining room I’d felt something shut inside me — not anger, exactly, but the flat, heavy recognition that I would never be enough for my mother while my life looked like this. That the version of me she was waiting for was someone I didn’t know how to be and might not want to be, and that the distance between those two things was never going to close.
The streetlights kept sliding past and Eva tried once more. “Do you guys want to put something on? Music, podcast, anything?”
“I’m good,” I said.
The rest of the drive was quiet.
We pulled into the driveway and got out without saying much. Inside, the house was still and cool. I grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge and Nate threw his keys in the bowl on the counter. Eva looked between us — that quick, careful glance of someone who’d been part of the family long enough to know when to step in and when to leave it alone. She chose correctly.
“I’m going up,” she said. She squeezed my arm on the way past — light, brief, her fingers pressing just enough to say I know, I’m sorry, I’m here — and disappeared upstairs.
I headed for the back door.
“Liv.”
I stopped with my hand on the handle.
“Hang on a second,” Nate said behind me.
I turned around. He was leaning against the counter, arms crossed. He looked tired. Not the normal end-of-day tired — something else. Something that had been sitting on him all evening, maybe longer.
“I’m fine, Nate.”
“I didn’t ask if you were fine.”
“You were about to.”
“I was going to say don’t let Mom get to you. She doesn’t know how to talk to you about this stuff. She never has.”
“I know. It’s fine.”
“It’s not fine. You’ve barely spoken since dinner.”
“I’m just tired.”
He looked at me the way he used to look at me when we were kids and I’d come home with a scraped knee and told him it didn’t hurt. Like he could see straight through the performance to the thing underneath.
“You want a drink?” he said.
I almost said no. I should have said no — should have gone to the loft, closed the door, put my headphones on and let the evening burn itself out. But something in his voice made me stop. The gentleness of it. The fact that he wasn’t pushing, just offering.
“Sure,” I said.
He poured two glasses of wine and handed me one. We stood on opposite sides of the kitchen island, the way we’d stood a hundred times growing up — different kitchen, same positions, same dynamic of Nate being steady and me being whatever I was.
“She means well,” he said. “You know that.”
“I know she means well. That’s what makes it worse. She can’t just say she’s disappointed. She has to do the whole — Megan Langley’s thriving, Amy Whitfield’s married, it’s such a shame about Thomas. She looks at you and Eva and lights up, and then she looks at me and does this — soft thing. Like I’m someone she’s trying really hard not to worry about.”
Nate was quiet for a second. He swirled the wine in his glass without drinking it.
“Can I say something?” he said. “And can you hear it as me, not as a version of Mom?”
Something tightened in my stomach. “Go ahead.”
“I worry too, Liv.”
I looked at him. I hadn't expected that. He said it quietly. Like he'd been carrying it for a while and had been waiting for a moment to set it down.
“You’re not yourself,” he said. “And I don’t mean tonight — I mean in general. Since you’ve been back.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’re quiet. You’re — around. You’re in the loft, or you’re running, or you’re cooking something, and it’s all fine, it’s all normal stuff, but it’s not you.” He paused. “You’ve always been the person who’s doing something. Even when you didn’t know what the something was, you were moving. You were annoying. You had energy coming off you that made the rest of us tired just being in the room.”
“Thanks.”
“You know what I mean. And now you’re just — here. Going through the motions. It's been two months and I can’t tell if you’re okay or if you’re just pretending to be okay, and it’s freaking me out a little.”
I didn’t say anything. Because the honest answer was that I couldn’t tell either.
“And you’re at Austin’s a lot,” he said.
“Nate —”
“I’m not asking. Whatever it is, it’s your business. But you light up when you’re going over there, and then you come back and you’re just — flat again. And that’s the part that worries me. That the only time you seem like yourself is when you’re with him.”
I felt something tighten behind my ribs. “Is that such a bad thing?”
He took a sip of wine. "No it's not. But you know what his life's like. He's gone for months at a time, the whole world's watching — and right now you don't know where yours is going."
"So."
"So what happens next?"
"I don't know. It's casual, Nate."
He looked at me. Not like he didn't believe me — more like he was trying to figure out if I believed myself. "Okay. Maybe it is. But I know you, and I've known him a long time. I know what he's like when something matters to him. He goes all in. And from where I'm standing — and I might be wrong — it doesn't look like something that's going to be easy to walk away from. For either of you."
"So what are you saying? I should stop seeing him?"
"I'm saying I don't want either of you to get hurt. That's all." He took another drink of wine. "And maybe — and I know you don't want to hear this — maybe it's easier to not think about the stuff that's actually hard when you've got something good filling up the days. And I don't know if you'd be looking at that if I didn't say it."
That one landed. Not like a blow — like a hand on a bruise you didn’t know you had.
The quiet suggestion that the reason I hadn't figured anything out wasn't because I was taking my time. It was because I didn't have to. Because I had somewhere to go and someone to see and a reason to not sit alone in the loft with my laptop and the listings and the questions I couldn't answer.
I felt my jaw tighten. "That's not what this is."
"Okay," he said. "I might be completely off base. I just don’t want you disappearing into something because the rest of it feels too hard to look at.”
And I heard him. Somewhere underneath the defensive roar already building in my chest, I heard what he was actually saying — that he loved me and he was worried. But that's not what I let land. What I let land was the accumulation of it. The whole evening — my mom's bullshit comparisons and digs, and now Nate standing in his kitchen telling me I was stuck and hiding from it. That I was using Austin to avoid dealing with myself. That I was filling the gap instead of facing it, and sooner or later someone was going to pay for that.
"So that's what you think," I said. My voice had changed. I could hear it — harder, flatter, the version of me that came out when I felt cornered. "Liv's back, she's got nothing going on, she's fucking someone whose life actually works, and sooner or later she's going to blow it up because that's what she does."
"That's not what I said. I just want —"
I put my glass down harder than I meant to. “You know what, Nate? You don’t get to stand there with your whole life sorted and tell me that mine’s a problem. You’ve had it figured out since you were twenty-two. You’ve never once had to —”
“That’s not fair.”
“None of this is fair." I could feel the heat in my face, my voice climbing. "I come home and Mom wants me settled and married and pregnant, and now you’re telling me I’m not myself — like you’d know. Like any of you would know. I’ve been gone for fourteen years. How would you even know what myself looks like?”
That one hurt him. I saw it land — the slight flinch, the way his jaw tightened. Because it wasn’t true. He did know. He’d always known, better than anyone, and throwing that in his face was the cruelest thing I could have done and I’d done it anyway.
The silence stretched between us. Somewhere upstairs a floorboard creaked.
I should have apologised. I knew it even as I stood there. Every word I'd said was a grenade thrown at the one person who'd never given me a reason to throw one, and I could see the damage all over his face. But my throat had closed and my eyes were burning and if I opened my mouth again I was going to cry, and I was not going to cry.
“I need some air,” I said.
“Liv —”
“I just need to walk.”
I left through the back door and stood in the driveway for a second, just breathing. The loft was right there, above the garage, twenty steps up the outside staircase. But I couldn't go up there. I couldn't sit in that small room with his words bouncing off the walls and the resort listings still open on my laptop and the evidence of everything he'd just said arranged neatly around me like an exhibit.
So I walked. Down the driveway, onto the sidewalk, into the dark. No direction. No plan.
Sounds about right.
⸻
I said goodbye on the sidewalk outside the restaurant. We’d been in there close to three hours, which was longer than I’d planned but that was how it went with this group — the producing stuff took forty minutes and the rest was just talking, because I’d known these people for years and the evening had been the kind of easy that only happened when you could skip the performance.
I pulled my jacket on and walked to the car. Started the engine, sat for a second, then pulled out my phone.
The voice note from Liv was still sitting there. I'd seen it when I'd stepped away from the table halfway through dinner — just the notification, her name, the play button. I hadn't thought much of it. She was at her parents' tonight for dinner, so I wasn't expecting to hear from her. I'd figured I'd listen on the way home.
I pulled out onto the street and hit play.
Her voice filled the car.
"Hey. It's me. I just — I don't even know why I'm sending this. Don't worry about it. I'll call you tomorrow."
That was it. Eight seconds. I glanced at the screen to make sure it hadn't cut off. It hadn't.
I knew Liv's voice notes. They were long, winding, full of tangents she'd circle back to three sentences later. She'd start a story, abandon it, pick up a different one, argue with herself mid-thought, and sign off with something that made me laugh out loud in whatever room I was in. I could always hear whether she was walking or lying on her bed in the loft, whether she was amused or annoyed or half-asleep.
This was none of those things. This was short and flat and careful. She sounded like she was trying to get through it before her voice gave her away.
I played it again.
Don't worry about it.
I called her.
She picked up on the fourth ring. In the background I could hear traffic, the distant sound of a street, her footsteps on concrete.
"Hey," she said.
"Hey. I just got your message."
"Yeah. It's nothing. I'm fine."
She wasn't fine. Her voice was too even, too controlled — Liv was never even or controlled. There was a gap between each sentence like she was deciding what to say next instead of just saying it.
"What happened?"
"Nothing. Just — family stuff. It's okay."
"Where are you?"
"I'm just walking."
"Walking where?"
A pause. I heard a car pass close to her.
"Liv. Where are you?"
"I don't know. Somewhere near — I don't know. I left Nate's and I just started walking." Another pause, longer this time. "I'm on Magnolia, I think. Near the bridge."
"Okay. Stay there. I'm coming."
"Austin, you don't have to —"
"I know. Stay there."
She didn't argue. That was the part that got me. Liv argued about everything. If she'd been okay she'd have told me I was being ridiculous and hung up. She didn't.
I turned the car around.
I found her on a bench at a bus stop on Magnolia, under one of those flat white lights that drain the colour out of everything. She was sitting with her knees pulled up and her phone in her hand, and when my car pulled up she looked at me through the windshield and didn't smile.
I got out. Walked around to her side. She stood up before I reached her, like she didn't want me to see her sitting still.
"You didn't have to come," she said.
"I know."
Her eyes were red but dry. She'd been crying at some point but she wasn't now, and I could tell from the set of her jaw that she had no intention of starting again. She had her arms crossed, her phone gripped in one hand.
I didn't touch her. Didn't hug her or ask what happened or do any of the things that would have made her shut down completely. I just opened the passenger door.
"Come on," I said.
She got in.
I didn't ask where she wanted to go. I just drove toward Los Feliz and she didn't say anything, which was answer enough.
The car was quiet. Not the kind of quiet that needed fixing — just the absence of talking, her head turned toward the window, the streetlights sliding over her face in slow intervals. I kept my eyes on the road and let her have it. Whatever had happened tonight, she'd tell me when she was ready or she wouldn't, and either way the thing she needed right now wasn't questions.
She reached forward at one point and turned the heat up. That was it. The only thing she did for the entire drive.
I pulled into the driveway and cut the engine. The road noise fell away and the car settled into stillness — just the tick of the engine cooling and the faint rustle of something in the trees.
She looked at the house, then at me. "Sorry," she said. "For dragging you out."
"You didn't drag me anywhere."
"You were at dinner."
"It was over."
She almost smiled. Not quite, but the corner of her mouth moved and I took it.
We went inside. She kicked her shoes off by the door the way she always did — that part was automatic, muscle memory from all the other times she'd walked into this house. But everything else was different. Usually she'd go straight to the kitchen, open the fridge, start talking. Tonight she just stood in the hallway, arms still crossed, like she wasn't sure she was allowed to be here even though she'd been here a dozen times.
"Sit down," I said. "I'll get you something."
She went to the couch. I filled a glass of water, then stood in the kitchen for a second, thinking. I ran hot water through the coffee machine and found the box of herbal tea that had been in the cupboard since I couldn't remember when — something with chamomile on the label. It was late, and she looked cold even though it wasn't cold, and making her a drink was the only useful thing I could think of to do.
When I came back she was sitting with her legs tucked under her, a cushion pulled into her lap, staring at nothing. I set the mug on the table in front of her and sat beside her — close, but not touching. Giving her the space to close the gap if she wanted to.
She picked up the mug. Held it without drinking.
"I had a fight with Nate," she said.
I waited.
"It was bad."
"What kind of bad?"
"The kind where I said things I didn't mean and he stood there and took it." She looked down at the mug. "My mom was doing her thing at dinner. The comparisons, the when are you going to settle down routine. And I held it together, I smiled, I did the whole thing. And then we got home and Nate tried to talk to me about it and I just —" She stopped. Swallowed. "I took everything I was feeling about her and threw it at him instead. He was trying to help. And I went for him."
She took a sip of tea. Her hands were steady but her voice wasn't — not shaking, just thinner than usual, like there was less of it.
"He said some stuff that was probably right. And I said some stuff that definitely wasn't." She was quiet for a second. "I don't want to get into it tonight."
I reached over and took the mug out of her hands. Set it on the table. Then I took her hand — just held it, my fingers lacing through hers the way they had on the drive back from Malibu. She looked down at our hands and didn't pull away.
"You and Nate will be fine," I said. "You'll sort it out."
She nodded. Didn't say anything. After a minute she leaned sideways until her head was resting against my shoulder. I put my arm around her and she shifted closer, curling into the space against my side, and I felt the tension leave her in stages — not all at once, but gradually, like something slowly being released.
We stayed like that for a while. The house was quiet around us. At some point I became aware that neither of us had mentioned her leaving. No cab, no "I should go," no reaching for her phone. Every other time — every single time since this started — one of us had made the move. She'd call a car, or I'd drive her home, or she'd get up and find her shoes and kiss me at the door. There was always a departure. It was part of the shape of us, how we kept this easy, kept it something we didn't have to think too hard about.
Not tonight.
I don't know which of us moved first. At some point we were on the couch and then at some point we weren't — we were in the hallway, then the bedroom, not urgently, not heading toward anything except the fact that it was late and she was tired and neither of us wanted to be anywhere else.
She borrowed a T-shirt. Went to the bathroom, came back. I was already in bed, the covers pulled back on her side — a side that hadn't existed until right now but somehow already had a place.
She got in. Pulled the covers up. Lay on her side facing me.
"Thank you for coming to get me," she said softly.
"You don't have to thank me for that."
"I know. But thank you."
I reached over and pushed her hair back from her face. She closed her eyes at the contact, and something in her expression loosened — the last held thing, the last piece of whatever she'd been carrying all night, letting go. She moved toward me and I pulled her in, her back against my chest, my arm around her waist. She laced her fingers through mine and held on.
She was asleep within minutes. I could tell from the change in her breathing — the way it deepened and slowed — and the way her grip on my hand loosened as her body gave in to it. She was warm against me, her hair against my jaw, and I could feel each breath she took, steady and even.
I lay there in the dark and listened to her breathe.
I'd shared a bed with her plenty of times — but always in the middle of something or right after, when staying was a continuation of what we'd been doing and leaving was just the next step. This was different. This was just sleeping. Just being next to someone in the dark with nothing between you and nothing to perform. And it was so much more intimate than anything we'd done in this bed.
I pressed my mouth against her hair and closed my eyes.
The house settled around us. She was here. She was staying. I held on to her and let myself stay too.
I woke up before her.
That almost never happened. I was a deep sleeper — always had been, the kind who needed three alarms before my brain accepted that consciousness was required. But this morning my eyes opened on their own, and the room was dark and quiet and she was right there.
She was on her stomach, one arm folded under the pillow, her face turned toward me. The T-shirt she'd borrowed was bunched up on the sheet beside her — she must have pulled it off in the night — her bare back rose and fell with each breath, the sheet pooled low across her hips. Her hair was everywhere. Her mouth was slightly open. She was breathing the way people breathe when they're so far under that nothing in the world could reach them.
I didn't move. I didn't want to wake her — she looked like she was finally getting the kind of sleep she actually needed, and I wasn't going to be the reason it ended. So I just lay there, watching her. And I was aware of the change, of how right it felt having her here. How easy. Like something that should have been complicated but wasn't.
She stirred after a while. A small sound, her face pressing further into the pillow. Then her eyes opened — slowly, unfocused — and found me.
"Hi," she said. Her voice was rough with sleep.
"Hi."
She blinked a few times, adjusting, then seemed to register the darkness. She looked toward the windows — completely black, not a sliver of light.
"What time is it?"
"I don't know. Early, I think."
"Why is it so dark?"
"Blackout blinds." I reached for the remote on the bedside table and pressed the button. The blinds began to rise slowly, letting the morning in by degrees.
She watched them go up with an expression of growing recognition. "Are those... motorised?"
"Yeah."
"Like in The Holiday?"
"I'm not going to answer that."
"It is. It's exactly like The Holiday. Cameron Diaz's house had those exact blinds." She looked back at me. "Is that why you got them?"
I said nothing, which was its own answer.
"Oh my god." She was smiling now — the first real one since last night, still half-buried in the pillow but unmistakable. "Austin Butler has The Holiday blinds. This is the best thing I've ever learned about you."
"I got them because I needed to sleep between night shoots. The fact that they happen to be the same as —"
"You saw a romantic comedy and went shopping."
"I saw a romantic comedy and went shopping."
She laughed — small, muffled by the pillow, but it was a laugh. Something loosened in my chest that I hadn't realised was tight. She was still Liv. Whatever had happened last night hadn't taken that away.
The laughter faded but the warmth stayed. She rolled onto her side, facing me properly, her head on the pillow, and for a while we just lay there looking at each other. The light was coming in now — slow and grey, early morning, the room taking shape around us. Her face was open and unguarded in a way I'd never seen from her. I could have stayed like that for hours.
"Thank you for last night," she said. "For coming to get me."
"You already thanked me."
"I'm thanking you again." She paused. "I'm also thanking you for not asking me a hundred questions in the car."
"You didn't need questions."
"No. I didn't." She looked at me, and something in her expression shifted — the softness making room for something more complicated underneath. "I need to call Nate," she said.
"Yeah."
"I don't know what to say."
"You'll figure it out."
A beat of silence. Then: "Last night I didn't tell you what I actually said to him."
"You don't have to."
"I know. But I want to." She took a breath. “All he said was that he was worried about me and I told him he doesn’t get to stand there with his whole life sorted and tell me mine’s a problem. Which is — I mean. He opened his house to me. He’s never once made me feel like I’m in the way. But the worst thing — the thing that actually hurt him — I told him he doesn't know me. That I've been gone for fourteen years so how would he even know."
She said it flatly. I could hear the shame in it, the weight of knowing you'd hurt someone who didn't deserve it.
"Because he does know you," I said.
"Better than anyone. He always has. And I said the one thing guaranteed to hurt him, because I knew it would work. Because I was angry and I wanted someone else to feel as bad as I did."
I reached over and took her hand. She let me. "He'll know you didn't mean it."
"That doesn't make it okay."
"No. But you'll fix it. I know both of you. He's probably up right now wishing he'd handled it differently too."
She turned my hand over and traced a line across my palm, not looking at me. "The thing is, he wasn't even wrong," she said. "About me not being myself. About any of it."
I waited. I could feel something opening up now, something she'd been carrying around much longer than the fight with Nate.
"The stuff with my mom — normally that bounces off. Because I know who I am and I know what I'm doing and she just doesn't get it." She paused. "But this time it landed. Because this time I'm thinking all the same things she's thinking. I just don't want to hear them coming out of her mouth."
"What things?"
"That I don't have a plan. That I'm thirty-two and living above my brother's garage. That I had something with Thomas and I let it go." She was quiet for a second. "And then Nate — Nate wasn't even saying those things. He was saying something different, something harder. He was saying I'm stuck. That I'm not acting like the person he knows. And he's right. I'm not."
She let go of my hand and lay on her back, looking at the ceiling. I stayed where I was, close, watching her work through it.
"I didn't come home because I was between jobs," she said. "I mean, I am. But that's not why I'm here."
This was new. She'd never talked about why she came back — not really. She'd said the thing about not having a plan, not having a next place, and I'd accepted it the same way everyone else had. "Why are you here?"
"Because I keep doing the same thing and I wanted to understand why." She said it carefully, like she'd been rehearsing it in her head for weeks but had never said it out loud. "I go somewhere. I love it. I build my classes, I make friends, I have a life. And it's good — really good, for a while. And then this feeling starts. Slowly. The things I loved start getting under my skin. I get restless, I lose motivation, I get irritable, I start picking at everything. And then I leave."
"And start again somewhere new."
"And start again somewhere new. And the new place works. For a few years. And then it happens again." She turned her head toward me. "With Thomas — my ex — we met at one resort and then moved to another one after about a year, stayed. It was the longest I'd ever been anywhere, the closest I'd come to something that actually looked like a life. And then he started talking about the future. Getting married, kids, the whole thing."
"And you didn't want that."
"I didn't know if I didn't want it or if I just didn't want it with him or if I was just — scared. Of what it would mean. Of being that locked in. So I didn't say anything, and he could tell, and eventually he left."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be. He was right to go. He wanted things I couldn't give him." She swallowed. "I stayed for another year after he left. But the feeling was already there. Had been for a while, probably, before he even brought it up. And that's when I realised. It wasn't Thomas. It wasn't the place. It was me. Something in me that won't let things just be good."
My chest ached. Not pity — something closer to recognition. The version of this I understood from the inside, even if mine looked different. The way a career could become a place to hide. The way you could keep moving forward and call it ambition when really it was just a way of not standing still long enough to feel what was underneath.
"So I came home," she said. "Not to find the next job or the next country. To figure out whether I'm just — wired this way. Whether every good thing I have is always going to have an expiration date that only I can feel."
No jokes, no armour, no angle. Just Liv, lying in my bed, telling me the thing she was most afraid of.
"And then I got here," she said, "and I didn't figure out anything. I just stopped. And it felt good at first. No classes, no schedule — nothing." She almost smiled. "Which is its own problem, because I'm not a nothing person. And now it's past being a vacation and I'm starting to lose my mind a little, if I'm honest. I've got all this energy and nowhere to put it except —"
She didn't finish the sentence. She didn't need to.
"Except me," I said.
"That's what Nate was getting at. And he's not wrong. You're the only thing I've got going on right now. And I don't know if that's because I want it to be or because the alternative is sitting alone with questions I can't answer."
"Which do you think it is?"
"I think it's both. And I think Nate could see that, and I punished him for it."
The honesty of it sat between us. From anyone else it might have stung — the idea that you might be someone's way of not dealing with their life. But from Liv, who armoured everything in humour and had just lain here and told me the truest thing she'd ever said, it didn't feel like a dismissal. It felt like the opposite. She was telling me I mattered enough that she needed to be honest about it.
I moved closer to her. Brought her hand up and kissed the back of it — not a gesture, just the thing my body wanted to do. She watched me do it with an expression I couldn't quite read.
"You're not broken, Liv," I said. "You know that, right?"
"Do I?"
"The fact that you came home to ask the question instead of just running again — that's not someone who's broken. That's someone who's trying to figure it out."
"I haven't figured out anything."
"Maybe that takes longer than two months."
She was quiet for a while. I could feel her thinking — not the frantic kind, more like something slowly settling, finding a place to rest.
"Nate said something else," she said. "He said this doesn't look casual. You and me."
The words sat between us. "What do you think?"
She looked at me for a long time. Her thumb moved slowly across my knuckles. "I think it stopped being casual somewhere around the time you drove across the city at eleven o'clock at night because I sounded wrong on a voice note."
Something shifted in my chest, like a lock turning. "It was before that," I said.
"Yeah." She almost smiled. "It was before that."
We lay there. Neither of us moved to fill the silence, and it didn't need filling. The light had come up fully now, warm and clean through the windows, and we were close enough that I could feel her breath on my face, and the thing we'd been circling for weeks was just sitting there between us. Not solved, not wrapped up. Just said.
"Well," she said. "Shit."
I laughed. She laughed — quiet, reluctant, the sound of someone surprised to find herself laughing after everything she'd just said. I pulled her toward me and she came, pressing her forehead against my chest, and I felt her exhale — long, slow, the kind that carries something out with it. I ran my hand across her back, tracing the line of her spine the way I'd wanted to when she was sleeping. She made a small sound — not quite a hum, just an acknowledgment — and I felt her body settle against mine.
"I'm going to need coffee before I call Nate," she said, muffled against me.
"I'll make it."
"The good kind."
"There's only the good kind."
"That's why I like you."
I kept my hand on her back, slow and steady, and she stayed where she was — warm against me, breathing, not going anywhere. I thought about what she'd said, about every good thing having an expiration date, and I wanted to tell her that this one didn't. That I was here and whatever came next, she wouldn't have to figure it out alone.
But I didn't say it. Because she didn't need another person telling her what to do or how to feel or what the answer was. She needed someone to just be there. So I lay in the quiet with her head on my chest and my hand on her back, in no hurry to get up, in no hurry to be anywhere at all.
My alarm went off at six and for once I didn’t hate it.
That should’ve been the first sign. I was not a morning person. I had never been a morning person. But today I was awake before the alarm finished its first cycle, lying in the half-dark with the ceiling taking shape above me, and the first thing in my head wasn’t the fitting I had at ten or the meeting with my agent I’d already rescheduled twice.
It was her mouth.
The way she’d tasted. The way she’d closed the distance herself — no hesitation, no second-guessing, just a decision made and acted on in the same breath. The way she’d pulled back afterwards and looked at me like she was daring me to regret it.
I didn’t regret it.
I got up, made coffee, drank it standing at the counter while the morning light crept across the kitchen. I checked my phone out of habit — emails, a couple of texts from yesterday I still hadn’t answered, the usual background noise. Nothing from Liv, but I hadn’t expected anything. It was barely past six and she didn’t strike me as someone who set alarms unless a flight was involved.
I drove over to Roy’s studio on Sunset and sat in the car for a second, finishing the last of my coffee, the windows down, the air already thick enough to feel like a promise. He was already warming up when I walked in. He had that energy he always had — locked in, focused, the kind of quiet intensity that made you feel like everything was going to hurt but in a way you’d eventually be grateful for.
“You look more awake than usual,” he said, which coming from Roy at seven in the morning was practically a compliment.
“Don’t get used to it.”
He grinned. We’d been working together long enough that the warmup conversation had its own rhythm — easy, familiar, the kind of shorthand you develop with someone who’s seen you at your worst and your most exhausted and kept showing up anyway. Roy knew more about my body than I did, knew when to push and when to back off, and had the rare ability to tell me I was doing something wrong without making me feel like an idiot about it.
We got to work. He’d programmed a full session — compound movements, mobility, the kind of technical training that didn’t leave room for anything else. I liked that. The focus of it, the way the world narrowed down to the weight and the movement and Roy’s voice cutting through when something needed adjusting.
“You’re distracted today,” he said, halfway through a set of Bulgarian split squats that were making my left quad feel like it was staging a revolt.
“I’m not distracted.”
“You’ve been smiling for twenty minutes.”
“I’m enjoying the workout.”
He looked at me. “Nobody enjoys Bulgarian split squats.”
I laughed and got back to work.
After the session I showered at the gym, grabbed my bag, and sat in the car for a minute, checking my phone before pulling out. A text from Liv, sent a little while ago.
So. On a scale of 1 to “I’ve made a huge mistake,” how are we feeling this morning?
I sat there with the phone in my hand and grinned like an idiot. She hadn’t waited, hadn’t played it cool or pretended last night was nothing. She’d just gone straight at it, the same way she went at everything.
I almost replied right there in the parking lot, but I was already running late for the fitting and I knew that whatever I sent back deserved more than something tapped out in a rush. I put the phone down and drove.
The fitting took forever — three suits and a conversation about fabric that I actually cared about more than most people expected me to, which meant I had opinions that slowed things down. After that I drove across town for the meeting with James, which ran past an hour the way it always did, because somewhere between the scheduling and the project updates the conversation always drifted into real life — how things were going, what I actually wanted the next year to look like, the kind of stuff that had nothing to do with contracts and everything to do with the fact that he genuinely gave a damn.
Somewhere around the forty-minute mark, I thought about how long Liv’s message had been sitting unanswered. Not anxiously — just the quiet awareness that she’d put herself out there this morning and I’d left her hanging all day.
It was late afternoon by the time I got home. I dropped my bag by the door, kicked off my shoes, and sank into the couch, the day’s obligations finally behind me. I picked up my phone, and opened Liv’s message again.
I hit the voice button.
“Hey, Liv. Sorry it’s taken me all day — it’s been nonstop since six and I’m just getting home. Also, full disclosure, I’m terrible at replying. But I’m working on it.” I paused. Took a breath. “To answer your question — definitely not a huge mistake. Not even on the scale.” I could hear the smile in my own voice and didn’t try to hide it. “I’ve been thinking about it all day. I’d really like to see you again — just us, no barbecue, no audience. Whenever works for you. I’m around.”
I sent it without listening back.
Then I got up to make coffee, because sitting still felt suddenly impossible, and I wasn’t ready to think too hard about why.
⸻
It was late afternoon when my phone buzzed.
I was at the kitchen counter, halfway through a Thai curry that was probably too ambitious for Nate’s kitchen but I’d committed now — lemongrass bruised, coconut milk open, paste made from scratch because I’d learned how from a woman in Chiang Mai and couldn’t bring myself to use a jar. I’d sent Austin a message that morning and heard nothing back, which I’d chosen to file under he’s busy rather than kissing his friend’s little sister probably looked a lot less like a good idea in the sober light of a Friday morning.
He was definitely busy — he was the kind of person whose schedule was managed by other people. He was probably in a meeting, or on a call, or being driven somewhere in a car with tinted windows while someone talked at him about contracts.
I wiped my hands and reached for the phone.
A voice note. From Austin.
Instead of typing a reply like a normal person he’d sent me his voice, and I already knew that pressing play was going to be a problem.
I pressed play anyway.
His voice filled the kitchen — and the thing that hit me wasn’t what he said, although what he said was good. It was the fact that I was standing in my brother’s house in the middle of a mundane Friday afternoon and suddenly Austin was right there, in my ears, sounding like the end of a long day and the beginning of something I hadn’t planned for.
I leaned against the counter and considered my options. I could text back something witty. I could play it cool, wait an hour, match his energy. I could be sensible about this.
I hit record.
“Well. First of all — voice notes. That’s a move, and I need you to know I’m onto you.” I was already smiling. “Second — you’ve been thinking about it all day? Very flattering. I’ve thought about it maybe twice. Three times, tops. And third — nonstop since six? What does nonstop since six even look like for you? Actually, I want the full breakdown. Every boring detail.” I let a beat pass. “Unless you’re too tired. In which case, I completely understand. Not everyone can keep up.”
Sent it.
I set the phone down and went back to the curry, feeling quietly pleased with myself. The voice note was good — funny, light, just enough to keep the thread going without giving too much away. He’d probably reply in an hour. Maybe two, given his track record. I’d hear back eventually and —
My phone vibrated again, but this time it didn’t stop.
I stared at it. His name on the screen. Not a voice note. Not a text. An actual phone call, happening right now, less than a minute after I’d sent that.
“Shit,” I said to the empty kitchen.
I picked up on the second ring, because picking up on the first would’ve been embarrassing and I had some standards left.
“That was fast,” I said, aiming for casual and mostly getting there.
“You said not everyone can keep up. I took that personally.”
“Good. I need to hear about this day that kept you so busy you couldn’t reply to a simple text for” — I checked the time — “eight hours.”
“It wasn’t eight hours.”
“It was absolutely eight hours. I sent that message before nine.”
He let out a breath that was half laugh, half concession. “Alright,” he said. “You want the full rundown?”
“Every tedious detail.”
I could hear him settling in — the shift of weight, the creak of a couch. “Up at six. Workout with my trainer at seven —”
“At seven in the morning?”
“Roy doesn’t believe in late starts.”
“Roy sounds like a psychopath. I like him already.”
He laughed. “He’d like you too, actually. You’ve got the same energy.”
“Terrifying and right about everything?”
“Something like that.” I could hear the smile. “So — gym, then I had a fitting. Three suits. Took forever because I made the mistake of having opinions about fabric.”
“You have opinions about fabric?”
“Strong ones.”
“That’s unexpectedly attractive. Continue.”
“Then a meeting with my agent and those always run long because we end up actually talking instead of just going through the schedule. And then home. That’s it.”
“So basically you’ve been playing dress up and talking about yourself all day.”
“When you put it like that —”
“No, I respect it. Very demanding.” I pulled myself up onto the counter, feet dangling, the curry completely forgotten. “So what’s Roy got you doing at seven in the morning? Just weights, or is he more creative than that?”
“Way more creative. The whole thing’s very holistic — mobility, breathwork, functional movement. He builds the training around how the body actually works rather than just loading it up.”
“Smart. So he’s not in the crush-your-body-and-eat-chicken school of thought?”
“Definitely not. He’d probably fight someone who said that.”
“I like him more and more.” I shifted the phone to my other ear. “So what does someone with a trainer like that actually need a yoga teacher for?”
“I didn’t say I needed a yoga teacher.”
“You were about to.”
He laughed again. “Are you technically even a yoga instructor though? You said last night you’d developed your own style. What does that mean?”
“It means I got bored of the way everyone else was doing it and made up my own thing.”
“Care to elaborate?”
I leaned back against the cabinets, warming to a subject I could talk about for hours if someone let me. “Okay. So when people hear yoga they picture a quiet room, soft music, everyone in matching outfits doing sun salutations. My style is nothing like that. My classes are based on vibes.”
“Vibes?”
“Like — I’ve got one that’s basically pre-gaming. Friday night energy. It’s all about waking the body up, getting you buzzing, so you walk out of the studio feeling like you could take on the whole city.”
“That sounds like the opposite of yoga.”
“That’s why people love it. Then there’s the hangover flow — slow, restorative, basically resurrection through breathwork. People crawl in looking like death and leave functioning again.”
“I could’ve used that a few times.”
“Everyone could.”
“Don’t forget your sex class.”
I smiled. “I prefer intimacy, if you must know.”
“Noted. Intimacy. Not just sex.”
I’d meant the class. He’d made it sound like something else entirely — like I’d just told him how I liked to be touched. The kitchen felt about ten degrees hotter than it had a minute ago. I looked down at my feet and took a second before I trusted my voice again.
“It makes a great first date, actually.” I swung my feet idly against the cabinets, aware that I was enjoying this far too much. “Pretty sure I’m responsible for starting some very meaningful relationships.”
There was a beat of silence. When he spoke again his voice had dropped — just enough that I noticed. “Is that right.”
It wasn’t a question. It was the kind of thing someone says when they’re thinking about something very specific and deciding how much to show. My pulse picked up and I pressed my free hand flat against the counter like that would help.
“Are you free Sunday?” he said.
“That depends entirely on what you’re suggesting.”
“Well, you did say it makes a great first date.” A pause. “I’d like to see what you do, Liv. The real thing.”
“That’s not really how I work. I do groups, not one-on-one.”
“Make an exception.”
Something about the way he said it — direct, no games, that quiet confidence that had been undoing me since the kitchen island — cut right through the banter and landed somewhere I wasn’t ready for.
“Fine,” I said. “But I’m warning you now — I’m not going to go easy on you just because you’re pretty.”
“I’d be offended if you did.”
“Good. What time works for you?”
“I’ll pick you up around ten, if that’s not too early?”
“Ten’s perfect.”
“And after — let me cook for you.”
“You cook?”
“I try.”
I bit my lip against a grin he couldn’t see. The image of Austin in a kitchen, cooking for me after I’d just put him through one of my sessions, was not something I needed in my head right now but it was there and it wasn’t leaving.
“Alright,” I said. “Sunday. You pick me up, I ruin you, and then you feed me. This is either going to be the best day of your week or the worst.”
“I’ll take those odds.”
We talked for a while longer — lighter stuff, the easy back-and-forth that happened when neither person was ready to hang up but both of them knew they should. The conversation had a loose, comfortable feel to it — the kind where you could hear someone smiling even when they weren’t saying anything, and the silences felt as good as the talking.
Eventually I heard Nate’s car crunch onto the driveway and remembered where I was — sitting on his kitchen counter with an abandoned curry on the stove, talking to his friend, grinning like an idiot.
“I should go,” I said. “Nate’s home and I’ve destroyed his kitchen.”
“Destroyed it how?”
“I started prepping dinner and then someone called me and I got distracted.”
“Sounds irresponsible.”
“Extremely.”
A pause. Full. The kind that didn’t need filling.
“See you Sunday,” he said.
“Sunday.”
I hung up, slid off the counter, and started chopping vegetables at speed, like I’d been at it the whole time. The front door opened and I heard Nate drop his bag, Eva’s voice somewhere behind him.
Nate appeared in the kitchen doorway a minute later, loosening his collar. He looked around. “Something smells good.”
“Thai curry. Need to earn my keep somehow.”
“I knew I kept you around for a reason.”
“And here I thought it was my sparkling personality.”
He snorted and headed upstairs to change, then paused at the bottom of the stairs and looked back at me. “You look suspiciously happy.”
“I’m always happy.”
“You’re really not,” he called over his shoulder.
I went back to the chopping with the knife in one hand and Sunday sitting in my chest like a held breath.
Sunday morning I changed my outfit three times.
Which was ridiculous. I was a yoga instructor and the dress code was essentially: things you can move in. There were no wrong answers. And yet I’d somehow cycled through a sports bra and leggings (too try-hard), a loose tank and shorts (too casual), and back to the sports bra and leggings (fine, it was the right call, stop overthinking it) in the space of twenty minutes.
I tied my hair up, checked the mirror, pulled it back down, and then put it up again because I was losing my mind and the man would be here in ten minutes.
I heard footsteps on the stairs and then a knock as Eva appeared at the top. She leaned against the doorframe with her coffee, watching me retie my hair for the third time with an expression of carefully managed amusement.
“Don’t,” I said.
“I didn’t say a word.”
“You’re thinking very loudly.”
She smiled into her mug. “You look great.”
“I look like I’m going to a gym.”
“You look like you’re going to a gym and you want someone to notice.” She took a sip. “That’s not the same thing.”
I opened my mouth to argue and realised I had absolutely no defence. “I’m not dignifying that with a response.”
She pushed off the doorframe, still grinning. “Have fun. Be safe. Tell me everything.”
“There won’t be anything to tell.”
She gave me a look that said she didn’t believe that for a second and headed back down the stairs toward the house.
I checked my phone. 9:56. He’d said ten. I grabbed my bag — water bottle, towel, phone, a small speaker I always brought to sessions — and headed downstairs.
The driveway was warm already, the mid-morning sun throwing long shadows across the concrete. I sat on the bottom step of the loft stairs and waited, bag at my feet, one knee bouncing.
I heard the car before I saw it. A low, smooth sound rounding the corner — nothing flashy, but unmistakably expensive in the way that quiet things often are. It pulled into the driveway and stopped, and for a second the sun caught the windshield and I couldn’t see inside.
Then the door opened.
And Austin got out.
I want to say I was prepared. I want to say I’d braced myself, that I’d had two full days to get my expectations in order and had arrived at a place of calm, centred readiness.
I was not prepared.
He was wearing a sleeveless tee — black, soft, cut off at the shoulders in a way that looked like he’d done it himself or like someone very expensive had done it to look like he’d done it himself. It hung loose through the body but the arms were just — there. All of them. The full situation. Shoulders, biceps, the cords of his forearms, a vein running down his left arm that I was going to need a moment to process. He had on dark track pants with white stripes down the sides, sitting low on his hips, black sneakers, and a thin silver chain at his throat that caught the light when he moved. His hair was messy — not styled, just genuinely imperfect, a little wild from the drive, lighter at the ends where the sun had been at it. Sunglasses perched on his nose.
I didn’t move. I’m not sure I was breathing.
There should be a word for what was happening — for the specific, targeted devastation of a man in an objectively unremarkable outfit looking like he’d walked out of a slow-motion sequence in a movie no one had given you permission to watch. On anyone else — literally anyone — this would have just been a guy in activewear. That’s all it was. A sleeveless shirt and some track pants.
But on him, in the morning light, walking up the driveway with that unhurried swagger and the chain glinting at his throat and his arms doing things to that shirt that should have required some kind of written warning — it was an event. A full-body, nervous-system-overriding, category-five event.
He stopped a few feet away and lowered his sunglasses just enough to look at me over the top of them. “Morning.”
His voice. That voice. Low and warm and slightly rough, like the morning hadn’t fully worn off it yet.
“Hi,” I said.
One syllable. One. That was all I could manage, because my brain had evacuated and left my body to fend for itself, and my body was not handling the situation with any kind of dignity.
The corner of his mouth lifted. That same slow, crooked thing from the other night, the one that suggested he knew exactly what he was doing and was choosing to be gracious about it.
“You ready?”
“Yep,” I said, standing up and grabbing my bag with more force than was necessary. “Let’s go.”
I walked toward the car without looking back at him because I was absolutely certain that if I looked at his arms one more time I was going to say something I could never take back.
He fell into step beside me — close enough that I could smell him. Something clean, not cologne exactly, just him and soap and the faint trace of coffee. He opened the passenger door and leaned across to move the grocery bags from the front seat to the back. His shirt shifted and I caught a flash of his stomach — tanned, taut, that line of muscle disappearing below his waistband — I slid into the seat, stared straight ahead, and thought about taxes.
Taxes. Interest rates. Municipal planning regulations. Anything.
He got in the driver’s side and pulled out of the driveway. I focused on breathing.
“You okay?” he said, glancing over.
“Perfect. Great. Totally fine.”
He smiled like he didn’t believe a word of it and drove.
His house was exactly the kind of place I should have expected and somehow wasn’t ready for.
It wasn’t showy — that was the thing. No gates, no ridiculous driveway, no statement architecture screaming look how much money I have. It was tucked away on a quiet street in Los Feliz, behind mature trees and a low wall, and when he pulled in and parked it could have been any house in any nice neighbourhood if you didn’t look too closely. But you could feel the quality of it — the proportions, the light, the way the garden had been designed to feel effortless when it was obviously anything but.
He led me inside, grocery bags in hand, and I followed him through a hallway that opened into a kitchen that made me want to cry. Huge windows, a stone island that could seat six, appliances that looked like they’d been chosen by someone who actually cooked or at least wanted to. He set the bags on the counter and started unpacking — easy, unhurried, like having someone in his space was the most natural thing in the world.
“Make yourself at home,” he said, pulling out vegetables, a paper-wrapped piece of fish, lemons. “There’s water in the fridge. Coffee if you want it.”
I looked around. The house had that particular quality of being lived in but not cluttered — books on a shelf, a guitar leaning against a wall in the next room, a pair of running shoes by the back door. It felt like him. Quiet, considered, warm without trying.
“Where’s the gym?” I asked, because if I stood here watching him for much longer I was going to need medical attention.
He nodded toward the back of the house. “Through there. Out past the yard.”
I followed the direction through a set of glass doors and across a patio into what turned out to be a converted pool house — or maybe it had always been this, a bright, open space with wood floors, full-length mirrors along one wall, natural light pouring through skylights. There was equipment along one side — dumbbells, a cable machine, a bench, a rack of kettlebells — but the rest of the floor was clear. Open. Perfect.
“This works,” I said, mostly to myself.
Austin appeared behind me in the doorway, water bottle in hand. He’d taken off his sunglasses and his shoes, and in bare feet with that shirt and those track pants he looked — unfairly, impossibly — even better. More relaxed. More real. The chain sat against his collarbone and I tracked it with my eyes before catching myself.
“So,” he said, leaning against the doorframe the way he’d leaned against the kitchen island at the barbecue — that same easy posture, one ankle crossed over the other, like he had nowhere else to be. “What happens now?”
I slipped my shoes off, set my bag down, pulled out the speaker, and connected my phone. Then I turned to face him. “Now,” I said, “you do what I tell you.”
Something flickered in his expression. Interest. Amusement. Something else underneath both of those that he didn’t try to hide. “Yes ma’am,” he said.
“Don’t call me ma’am. It makes me feel old.”
“What should I call you?”
“Liv is fine. Or ‘the person who’s about to make you regret every stretch you’ve ever skipped.’”
He laughed and pushed off the doorframe, walking to the centre of the floor. “Alright. I’m all yours.”
I’m all yours. He’d said it casually — throwaway, easy. But the words landed somewhere in my chest and stayed there, quiet and inconvenient, while I pulled up the playlist. That was always where it began — the right music changed everything. I’d spent all of yesterday testing tracks in the loft with my headphones on until the energy moved the way I wanted it to.
The opening song was low and rhythmic, a slow-building beat with just enough pulse to start waking the body up. I pressed play and the room filled with sound.
Austin glanced at the speaker, then back at me. “That’s not what I expected.”
“What did you expect?”
“I don’t know. Pan flutes? Whale sounds?”
“If you ever hear whale sounds in one of my sessions, you should be extremely concerned about my wellbeing.” I walked toward him. “First things first,” I said. “Forget everything you think you know about yoga. This isn’t about finding your centre or holding poses or looking pretty. My classes are about energy. About waking your body up and actually feeling alive in it.”
I stopped in front of him. Close. Close enough that I could see the slight unevenness of his breathing, the way his gaze dropped to my mouth for a half-second before he caught himself.
“Close your eyes,” I said.
He closed them. And stood there, trusting me completely, without a single joke or deflection. His face in stillness was almost worse than his face in motion. The stubble along his jaw, the sweep of his lashes against his cheeks — he looked like something out of a Renaissance painting that someone had dressed in Adidas. I wanted to touch his mouth.
Jesus, Liv. Focus.
I circled him slowly, keeping my voice steady. “Breathe in. Deep. Then out — slow. Let the exhale make a sound.”
He breathed out and produced something so polite I nearly lost it. “You’re an actor. That’s the best sound you can make?”
One eye opened. “I make very specific sounds. On cue.”
“I bet you do.”
The words came out before I could stop them. His eye closed again but the corner of his mouth curved, and I turned away and busied myself with the speaker volume before either of us had to acknowledge what I’d just said.
The next exhale was better — looser, less controlled. By the third round his whole posture had changed, the stiffness leaving him in stages.
“Good. Open your eyes.”
His eyes found mine and held. There was a beat where neither of us said anything and the music pulsed between us. “We’re going to start moving.” I said. “I’ll lead, you follow. Don’t think about getting it right. Just stay with me.”
I led him through the opening flow from my energising class — big movements, dynamic stretches, things that got the heart rate up and the blood moving. Reaching, folding, lunging, twisting — one thing flowing into the next, synced to the music.
And god, watching him move was something I was not prepared for. Once he stopped trying to be precise and started actually feeling the rhythm, his whole body changed. He moved without excess — everything connected, fluid, his body finding the music before his brain caught up. And the fact that he had no idea how he looked right now — flushed, breathing hard, fully committed — somehow made it worse. Better. Worse. I didn’t know anymore.
"How's that feel?" I asked.
"Fine."
"Just fine?"
"Easy."
I smiled. "Let's fix that."
I pushed the pace. The sequences got longer, the transitions faster, the movements bigger — twists that used momentum, reaches that opened into backbends, combinations that built in speed until the body stopped thinking and just responded. He kept up. Messy in places, but committed, and when he fumbled a transition and recovered without stopping I felt a flash of genuine respect alongside the other, less professional things I was feeling.
He grabbed his water bottle during a break between sequences, tipping his head back to drink, and I watched the line of his throat move as he swallowed. His fingers were long, wrapped loosely around the bottle, and the ring on his left hand caught the light. I looked at those hands and the thought arrived before I could stop it — those fingers in my hair, gripping my hip, sliding between my thighs. My skin prickled. My mouth went dry.
Get a fucking grip, Liv. Seriously.
He lowered the bottle and caught me looking. I didn’t look away fast enough.
“See something interesting?” he said.
“You’ve got water on your chin.”
He didn’t. He wiped it anyway, smiling.
I moved us back into a flow.
“Deeper in the lunge. Commit.”
“I am committing.”
“You’re negotiating. Your hips are still two inches higher than they should be.”
He sank lower and his face changed — the stretch catching him, his lips parting on an exhale that sounded nothing like the polite little sound from the start of the session.
“There it is,” I said. “That’s what an honest exhale sounds like.”
He looked at me from the lunge, slightly breathless. “Are you always this bossy?”
“Always.”
“Noted.” Something passed across his face — amusement layered over something less casual. “I don’t hate it.”
I turned away before he could see what that did to me. “Up. Next sequence.”
I demonstrated the rotation — a twist that started in the hips and rolled through the torso, arms loose, the kind of movement that was more feel than form. I knew how it looked when I did it. I’d been doing it for years and I knew exactly what it showed.
I caught him in the mirror. He wasn’t watching my form — he was watching me. His eyes tracing the movement from my hips upward, slow enough that I felt it like a touch even through the reflection. When I turned back to face him his expression was carefully neutral but his ears were flushed, which I filed away as extremely useful information.
“Like that,” I said. “Your turn.”
He tried. Got the direction right but led with his shoulders.
“It starts in the hips,” I said. “Not the top. Can I?”
“Yeah.”
I put my hand on his hip. My other hand on his ribcage. And I felt his stomach tighten under my fingers — not a flinch, just the involuntary response of someone being touched by the person they’d been checking out thirty seconds ago.
“From here,” I said. My thumb was on the ridge of his hip bone. My voice sounded almost normal. “Let the top half follow.”
He rotated. Slowly, under my hands. I felt the moment it clicked — the movement finding the right path through his body — and I also felt his heartbeat under my palm, contradicting every ounce of composure on his face.
“Better,” I said, and didn’t move my hands.
He looked down at me. There was a pause that lasted a beat too long, the air between us taut with something neither of us was naming. His eyes dropped to my mouth and came back up.
“Show me again?” he said quietly.
He didn’t need me to show him again. We both knew that.
I took my hands off him. “Again. On your own.”
He ran the sequence and nailed it, and the look on his face — that unguarded, genuine satisfaction — hit me somewhere behind my ribs. I wanted to kiss him. I wanted to grab the front of that stupid shirt and pull him down to me and I wanted it so badly I could feel it in my hands.
I didn’t. I put him through a balance series instead, which felt like a reasonable alternative to losing my mind.
He was solid on his left, a little shaky on his right. During the half-moon his standing leg started trembling.
“You can come out of it,” I said.
“Not a chance.”
“Your leg’s shaking.”
“It’s vibrating. With enthusiasm.”
I snorted — a real, ugly snort that I hadn’t made in front of another person in years. His focus shattered and he stumbled out of the pose, catching himself, and we both cracked up. Full, stupid laughter that bounced off the mirrors and filled the room, and for a second we were just two people laughing together and not thinking about anything else.
Then it passed, and he was looking at me through the aftermath of the laugh — breathing hard, eyes bright, his whole face open. His hair had darkened with sweat, curling at his temples and behind his ears, nothing like the artful mess it had been in the driveway. There was a drop of sweat tracking down the side of his neck and I watched it disappear beneath the chain at his collarbone. I thought about what that chain would feel like dragging across my skin if he was on top of me, and then I thought: Jesus Christ, Liv, you are at work.
Except I wasn’t at work. I was in his gym. In his house. And he was standing there looking at me like that, damp and undone and grinning, and every responsible instinct I had was losing to the part of my brain that just wanted to climb him.
“Okay, let’s move to some floor work,” I said. “Lie back.”
“Yes, sensei.”
“Don’t call me sensei.”
“You don’t like ma’am, you don’t like sensei — I’m running out of options here.”
“You’ve always had the option of just doing what I say without commentary.”
“Where’s the fun in that?”
“The fun is that I don’t make the stretches worse.”
“You can do that?”
“I can do a lot of things.”
Something shifted in his expression. “I believe you.”
He lay down. And the thing I hadn’t been ready for was how long he was — stretched out on the floor, all limbs and lean muscle, his hands resting palm-up at his sides. His shirt had ridden up on one side and I could see the cut of his hip and the line of muscle disappearing into his waistband.
I knelt beside him and started the slower stretches — hip openers, twists, the kind that needed breath and patience. The dynamic was different when someone was lying down. More vulnerable. More intimate. The jokes thinned out and the silences thickened and every time I placed my hand on him — his knee, his hip, the inside of his thigh — I could feel him responding underneath the stillness. A held breath. A slight tension. The careful, deliberate act of not reacting.
I leaned over him to adjust the twist and his eyes opened and moved up my body — my hips, my stomach, my chest, my face — slowly, deliberately, without pretending he hadn’t.
I guided his knee toward the floor. My hand was on his thigh, my thumb resting against the inner seam of his track pants, and I watched his jaw clench and release.
“Breathe,” I said.
“Trying.”
“You’ve stopped again.”
“You’ve got your hand on my thigh, Liv.”
The way he said my name. Low, slightly strained, with an honesty that cut through every layer of pretence between us.
“I’m adjusting your position,” I said.
“Is that what this is?”
“That’s what this is.”
A pause. Then, quietly: “Okay.”
I moved him into pigeon pose. He swore into the floor.
“Breathe through it,” I said.
“I am breathing.”
“You’re holding. I can see it in your jaw.”
He exhaled. The stretch deepened. “This is cruel.”
“This is necessary. Twenty more seconds.”
“That’s a lifetime.”
“Nineteen.”
“You’re enjoying this.”
“Immensely.”
Normal. Fine. Professional. Except that my hand was on his lower back and I could feel every breath he took and I wasn’t thinking about his hip flexors at all.
I brought him up and into a seated forward fold. “This last part’s a little different,” I said. “It’s from my couples class — the intimacy work. I need to be close for it.”
He glanced back at me. “How close?”
Instead of answering, I sat behind him — my legs either side of his hips, my palms flat on his back. I felt him go still. Not tense — still. The kind of stillness that comes from paying very careful attention.
“Fold forward,” I said, close to his ear. “Slowly. I’ve got you.”
He folded. My hands moved down his back, guiding the stretch, and the sound he made — quiet, involuntary, not a stretch sound, something else entirely — went through me like a current. It made the hair on my arms stand up and my breath catch and every professional boundary I’d been clinging to feel tissue-thin.
I held the position. Breathed. Counted to ten.
“Good,” I managed. “Now come back up.”
He sat up slowly. My legs were still either side of him, my hands still on his back. He turned his head slightly — just enough that I could see his profile, the line of his jaw, the corner of his mouth.
“Now what?” he said. His voice had gone low and rough.
“Turn around. Face me. Cross your legs.”
He shifted until he was facing me. I mirrored him — cross-legged, our knees almost touching. The distance between us was maybe a foot. Close enough that the air between us felt occupied.
“This part is about presence,” I said, and my voice was barely holding. “Aligning with someone. Breathing together. Eye contact.”
“Eye contact,” he repeated.
“Don’t look away.”
“I wasn’t planning on it.”
“Hands on your knees. Relax your shoulders.” I waited until he’d settled. “Now breathe with me. Match my pace.”
We breathed. In together, hold, out together. The music had dropped to something barely there — just bass and breath, just enough to fill the edges of the silence. His eyes stayed on mine and mine stayed on his, and the closeness of it, the sustained, unbroken attention, was somehow the most intense thing we’d done all morning.
Because there was nowhere to go. No movement to focus on, no instruction to follow. Just him, looking at me from a foot away with everything he was feeling right there on his face, unperformed and unhidden. And me, looking back, with the growing and deeply inconvenient realisation that I couldn’t hide behind the teaching anymore.
This was the thing I told couples would crack them open, and I’d been right every time. I’d just never understood it as well as I did right now — sitting on the floor of his gym with his breath matching mine and his eyes on me like the rest of the world had been gently, permanently switched off.
Three breaths. Four. Five.
“So,” he said. His voice barely above a whisper. “Is this still part of the class? Because if I’m being honest, the line between yoga and something else got pretty blurry about ten minutes ago.”
My heart was doing something chaotic and unhelpful.
“That’s kind of the point,” I said. “The intimacy work — it’s supposed to blur that line. It’s about being close to someone and staying present in it instead of deflecting.”
“And the fact that I can barely breathe right now?”
“Also part of it.”
“Uh huh.” His eyes moved across my face.
A beat of silence. Then he said, quieter: “Is there more? Or is this as far as it goes?”
I looked at him. He wasn’t teasing. He was asking — genuinely, carefully — whether I was going to take him further. Whether I trusted him with the rest of it. Whether he’d earned it.
“There’s more,” I said. “But it’s —” I paused. “It’s a lot.”
“I can handle a lot.”
I wasn’t sure if I could. Not with him.
He held my gaze. Steady. Open. “Show me.”
“Okay.” My voice had gone quiet.
“This is called yab yum,” I said. “It’s a partner position. One person sits, the other sits facing them. In their lap. It’s used for connection — shared breath, shared energy, closeness.”
“In my lap?”
“We don’t have to do it.”
“No, it’s okay.”
I moved forward. Lowered myself into his lap.
His hands came up instinctively — hovering, not quite touching, waiting for permission. I took his wrists and placed his palms flat on my lower back, then I rested mine lightly on his shoulders.
The contact was immediate and everywhere. His thighs underneath me. My chest close to his. His hands on my back, fingers spread, barely pressing. I could feel his heartbeat — or maybe that was mine. Impossible to tell anymore.
“Breathe,” I said. More to myself than to him.
He breathed in. I breathed with him. Out together. In together. Our chests rising and falling in the same rhythm, close enough that I could feel his breath on my face. I could see every shade of colour in his eyes, the slight dilation of his pupils, the way his breathing had changed.
His hands pressed slightly firmer against my back.
Fuck.
“In the class,” I said, barely above a whisper, “this is when I’d tell you to focus on the breath. On the connection. Nothing else.”
“And when’s the part where I stop pretending I’m not thinking about kissing you? Is that in the syllabus?”
My stomach dropped about six floors.
“That’s extra credit,” I said.
The corner of his mouth lifted. “I’ve always been an overachiever.”
“I’ve noticed.”
A beat of silence. I just looked at him, and let him see exactly what I was thinking, and watched the moment he saw it.
⸻
She let me see it.
That was what tipped it — not the closeness, not the breathing, not the fact that her thighs were warm against mine and her hands were on my shoulders and I could count the freckles on her nose from here. It was the moment she stopped teaching and just looked at me, and let her face say exactly what it was saying without reaching for a joke or a deflection or anything to soften it.
I kissed her.
No preamble, no asking, no careful lead-in. I leaned forward and put my mouth on hers and she met me — her hands in my hair, her mouth opening under mine. She kissed like she moved, like she lived — with a kind of fierce, joyful intent, like she’d decided what she wanted and saw no reason to be tentative about it.
It was nothing like the other night. That had been careful, first-time tentative, both of us testing a line before crossing it. This was the line already gone — her mouth hungry, tongue finding mine, whatever distance we’d been maintaining all morning collapsing in on itself.
She broke the kiss, breathing hard. “That took you long enough.”
“You had your hands on me for an hour. I was being respectful.”
“Respectful.” She smiled, her thumb tracing the hinge of my jaw. “Is that what that was?”
“Would you have preferred I grabbed you during pigeon pose?”
“I would’ve preferred it during the warm-up, but I appreciate the restraint.”
I laughed and she kissed me again — harder this time, her teeth catching my lower lip — and whatever we’d been building toward all morning collapsed into something simple and urgent. Her thighs tightened around my hips, her chest flush against mine, and I could feel every line of her body through the thin layers still between us.
Her hips shifted in my lap and my hands slid over the curve of her hips, fingers curving around the shape of her. She hummed against my mouth, a low sound of approval that I felt in my chest, and did it again. Slower, a deliberate roll. The friction through the fabric was enough to make my grip tighten, pulling her down against me, and she responded by grinding harder, her breath catching between kisses.
I slid my hands lower — over her ass — and pulled her into me as she rolled forward and the pressure drew a groan out of me that I couldn’t have held back if I’d tried. She smiled into the kiss. I felt the shape of it against my lips, and it made me want to take her apart piece by piece just to see what other expressions I could put on her face.
“This is —” she started.
“Escalating?”
“Rapidly.” She pulled back just enough to look at me, her eyes darker than they’d been ten minutes ago. “Do you want to stop?”
“God, no.” I said it before she’d finished the question. “Do you?”
She answered by kissing me again — slower this time, deeper — and her hips kept moving in that maddening rhythm, grinding against me. I was getting hard. There was no hiding it — not with her pressed against me like that, not in thin track pants — and she knew. The way she shifted her weight told me she knew, and the way she pressed down told me she didn’t mind.
She pulled back and reached for the hem of my shirt, dragging it up. I helped her get it over my head and she dropped it behind her. Her eyes moved down my chest, slow and appreciative and completely unembarrassed.
“What?” I said.
“Nothing.” Her fingers traced the chain at my collarbone, following it across my skin. “Just adjusting my expectations.”
“Up or down?”
“Don’t fish.” She leaned in and pressed her mouth to my shoulder, and the soft scrape of her teeth sent a current down my spine that settled at the base of it.
“Words of affirmation,” I said. “That’s all I’m asking for.”
She pulled back and looked at me, one eyebrow raised. “Your love language is compliments?”
“My love language is you telling me I look good with my shirt off.”
“I’m not telling you that.”
“You’re thinking it.”
“I’m thinking a lot of things.” Her eyes dropped to my chest and back up. “None of which I’m sharing with you right now.”
I hooked my fingers under the strap of her sports bra. She raised her arms and I peeled it off slowly, watching her face the whole time. When it was gone she didn’t cover herself or look away — she just sat there, bare from the waist up in the late morning light pouring through the skylights.
I cupped her breast, my thumb brushing across her nipple, and watched her eyes flutter shut. The sound she made — quiet, catching in her throat — reached into my chest and grabbed hold of something vital.
I lowered my mouth to her neck. Her collarbone. Lower, tasting the salt on her skin. She arched into me, her fingers threading through my hair, pulling just enough to send a bolt of heat down my spine. My lips closed around her nipple, tongue circling slowly, and her grip in my hair tightened, her hips grinding down against me hard enough that my thoughts whited out for a second.
“Austin —”
Her skin was warm and impossibly smooth beneath my palms and I couldn’t stop touching her — her waist, her ribs, the dip at the small of her back. My hands kept finding new places and every one of them made her respond differently, a shifting catalogue of breath and sound and movement that I wanted to spend a long time learning.
“Not in here,” she said.
I looked at her. Her lips were swollen, her hair starting to come loose from where she’d tied it, strands falling around her face. She looked like she’d already been thoroughly kissed and we hadn’t even started.
I stood — lifting her with me, her legs wrapping around my waist instinctively — and she made a noise of surprise that dissolved into a laugh against my neck.
“Show-off,” she murmured.
Her arms tightened around my shoulders, her mouth finding the spot just below my ear, and whatever reply I’d been forming dissolved before it reached my tongue.
I carried her out, across the patio, into the house. She kissed my neck the entire way — lazy, unhurried, open-mouthed kisses that made navigating the hallway significantly harder than it should have been. I shouldered through my bedroom door and she lifted her head long enough to glance around.
“Nice room.”
“Thanks.”
She laughed against my neck and I set her down so she was standing in front of me. For a second we just looked at each other — the brief pause between us charged, like a held breath before a dive.
⸻
I reached for his waistband. He reached for mine.
There was a brief, graceless negotiation — my leggings catching at my ankle, both of us laughing by the time we kicked them free. But the laughter faded when I straightened up and looked at him.
He was standing in front of me in black briefs and nothing else, the chain catching the light streaming in from the open windows, and he was hard — visibly, unmistakably hard — the outline of him straining against the fabric in a way that made my mouth go dry.
He raised an eyebrow. “You’re staring.”
“Shut up. I’m having a moment.”
He smiled — a little smug, like he could see exactly what was happening to me but was giving me the space to have it. He stepped closer.
He leaned down and kissed me. One hand on my hip, the other sliding up my ribs, his thumb brushing the underside of my breast. Light. Deliberate. Taking his time like he had nowhere else to be, and the patience of it was quietly destroying me because I was not a patient person and he seemed to know that.
I backed up until my legs hit the edge of the bed, then lay back and pulled him with me. His weight settled over me — careful at first, then heavier when I wrapped a leg around his hip and drew him in. His mouth moved down my neck, along my collarbone, and I felt the hard length of him pressed against my thigh through thin fabric and my stomach dipped.
His hand trailed down my stomach, fingers drawing a slow line across the waistband of my underwear. My breath caught before he’d even gone further — anticipation doing half the work for him, my hips lifting fractionally without my permission.
He touched me through the fabric first. A light, testing pressure, his fingers finding the shape of me through thin cotton. I was already so keyed up from the last hour that even that was almost too much — my hips lifted and I felt his breath catch against my neck.
Then his fingers slipped beneath the waistband. His hand stilled for a fraction of a second when he felt how wet I was — and the sound he made, a low, punched-out exhale against my throat, like feeling how much I wanted him had knocked something loose in him too — made my stomach clench.
He pulled my underwear down and off. Then his hand was back — fingers sliding between my folds, circling my clit with a slow, deliberate pressure before he pushed inside me. He knew what he was doing. That was immediately clear. His fingers moved with the same attentiveness he’d brought to every correction I’d given him today — responsive, paying close attention to what worked, adjusting when something worked better. Except now what he was reading wasn’t his own body but mine, and he was reading it with a fluency that was taking me apart slowly and thoroughly. He used the heel of his hand to grind against my clit, maintaining that pressure while his fingers curled. My whole body responded — back arching, my hips rolling against his hand, chasing it, my fingers digging into his shoulders.
“There?” he murmured against my throat.
I couldn’t speak. I nodded.
He didn’t change a thing. His fingers kept their rhythm, and I could hear his breathing — rough and strained and barely controlled, and knowing that touching me was doing that to him pushed me higher. His mouth was on my neck, his free hand in my hair, and the pleasure was building in long, rolling waves that radiated outward from his hand, tightening everything — my thighs, my stomach, the sounds climbing in my throat that I’d stopped trying to contain.
It hit me like a slow collapse — not sharp or sudden, but deep and full and consuming, spreading from his hand through my centre and outward until my back arched and my breath locked and I came apart beneath him with my face pressed into his shoulder and my hands gripping his arms. He kept his hand moving, lighter now, easing me through it, until my grip loosened and my breathing came back in ragged, shattered pulls.
I opened my eyes. He was watching me — intent, undone, like watching me had cost him something too.
I reached between us and wrapped my hand around him through the fabric. His whole body jerked — eyes closing, breath leaving him in a rush. He was thick and hard, straining against the cotton, and when I stroked him slowly through the briefs — feeling the full shape of him, the heat of him through the thin layer — a sound tore out of him, guttural and honest, and my body responded to it like a reflex, a fresh pulse of want low in my stomach.
I pushed at the waistband of his briefs. He lifted his hips and I pulled them off and let myself look. All of him — the lean muscle, the narrow hips, his cock hard against his stomach — and even here he was unfairly, almost absurdly beautiful. I wrapped my hand around him again, bare skin this time, and stroked once, slowly, my thumb dragging over the head, and his jaw clenched so hard I could see the muscle jump.
“Condom,” I said.
He reached for the bedside table — pulled open a drawer, found one. I took it from him and rolled it on, and the way his stomach tensed under my fingers while I did it was its own kind of power.
Then I pushed him back, climbed over him, and sank down.
⸻
She pushed me back and climbed over me — her hair fully loose now, falling around her face, nothing like the neat tie she’d arrived in — and I let her, because watching Liv take what she wanted was something I could build a religion around.
She guided me into her and sank down slowly. Her lips parted. Her eyes closed and then opened, finding mine, and for a few seconds neither of us moved. Just breathed. She was tight and warm around me, and the sensation narrowed the world to the place where our bodies met.
I ran my hands up her thighs, over her hips, up the sides of her ribs. She watched my hands move with a kind of focused attention, like she was cataloguing each point of contact.
She shifted her hips — a slow, experimental roll — and I exhaled hard through my teeth. “If you do that again I’m going to last about thirty seconds.”
She laughed — breathless, delighted — and did it again, the movement slow and deliberate. I gripped her hips and swore under my breath.
“Thirty seconds might be generous,” she said.
She started to move properly. Slow at first, finding the angle, until she settled into her own rhythm — the same instinctive musicality she’d brought to every sequence today. Watching her above me was extraordinary. This was Liv without a single barrier left, moving the way her body wanted to move, her head tipped back, her hands on my chest, completely in control.
It felt so good my eyes closed without permission.
“Don’t close your eyes,” she said.
I opened them. She was looking down at me with an expression that was half want and half challenge, her hair falling around her face, her body rolling with that same fluid control I’d watched all morning — only now it was pulling me apart from the inside.
I sat up. Her legs locked around my waist, her arms around my neck — face to face, breath to breath, nothing between us, the echo of the position she’d put us in earlier so obvious neither of us needed to say it. The angle changed and she inhaled sharply, her forehead dropping to my shoulder.
“Yeah?” I said against her ear.
“Yeah. Like that.”
We moved together. Close, tangled, figuring it out in real time. I could feel everything — the sweat on her skin, the clench of her thighs, the catch in her breathing every time she sank down. Her fingers dug into my shoulders and her rhythm lost its steadiness, tipping into something more urgent.
I slid my hand between us and touched her and she swore — a single, emphatic syllable against my neck that vibrated through my skin.
I kept my hand where it was, matching the pace she was setting. I could feel her getting close — the tension building in her thighs, her body tightening around me, the small, desperate sounds climbing in her throat.
She came quietly. A long, shuddering exhale, her whole body pulling taut and then releasing, her mouth pressed against mine — not quite a kiss, just contact, her breath spilling into me in uneven bursts while her body clenched and softened in waves. I held still. Let it run through her. Watched her come back in stages — her grip loosening on my shoulders, her breathing slowly evening out, her eyes finding mine, dazed and wide.
She kissed me. Lazy. Thorough. The kind of kiss someone gives when they’ve stopped keeping score.
⸻
He rolled us over — one arm under my back, the other braced beside my head — and settled above me. The weight of him was exactly what I needed. Grounding. Real. His chain hung between us, brushing my collarbone, and I thought about how I’d imagined this exact thing during the session — the feel of it dragging across my skin — and how the reality was so much more than the thought had been.
He started to move. No careful build-up — he knew what I could take and he gave it to me. I met his rhythm, my hips rising to meet each thrust, my body answering his. The pace built because it needed to, not because either of us was forcing it.
I ran my fingers along his jaw and he turned his head and kissed my palm and I made a sound — quiet, almost surprised — that came from somewhere deep in my chest.
His breathing changed. Rougher, less even. I could feel the tension building in his arms, in the muscles of his back under my hands. I pulled him closer — one hand in his hair, the other sliding down to his ass, pulling him deeper into me — and I felt the moment he let go. His body locking, every muscle drawing tight, the release moving through him in waves. His face was buried in my neck and my name came out of him broken and raw and the sound of it spread through me like heat.
I held on through it. My mouth against his temple, my hand on his back, feeling every pulse and tremor until the tension drained out of him and he was just — there. Heavy and still and breathing against my skin.
For a while neither of us moved.
His breathing slowed against my neck. I could feel his heartbeat, still fast but gradually settling, his chest expanding against mine in a rhythm that was starting to match my own. My fingers traced idle lines up and down his spine and he made a small, contented sound — barely more than a hum — that I felt more than heard.
He lifted his head eventually. Looked at me.
His face — good god. His hair was a disaster, his lips were swollen, and he had a dazed expression that made him look about ten years younger and approximately seven thousand times more attractive, which should not have been possible but apparently was.
He pushed my hair back from my face and just looked at me, and I let him, because for once I didn’t feel the need to fill the silence with something clever.
He kissed the corner of my mouth. Slow. Then my cheekbone. Then the bridge of my nose, which made me scrunch my face, which made him smile.
“What?” I said.
“Nothing.” He settled back down, his head on the pillow beside mine, close enough that our noses were almost touching. “Just — you.”
I wanted to make a joke. Deflect, say something sharp, reestablish the dynamic. But I didn’t. I just looked at him, and he looked at me, and the quiet between us wasn’t empty — it was full in a way that made my chest ache, very slightly, in a way I chose not to examine.
He pulled me against him and we lay like that for a while — facing each other, his hand resting on my hip, my fingers tracing the line of his collarbone. Neither of us talking. Neither of us reaching for a phone or pulling away.
His thumb traced a slow, absent pattern on my skin.
“So,” I said eventually. My voice sounded like I’d been dragged behind a car. “That’s the advanced class.”
He pressed his mouth to my shoulder and I felt the shape of his grin against my skin. “Do I get a grade?”
“You get the satisfaction of knowing you have adequate hip mobility.”
“Adequate.”
“I don’t grade on a curve.”
He laughed again. His arm tightened around me, pulling me a little closer — not urgently, just the reflex of someone who wasn’t ready to let go yet.
I could have stayed. The bed was comfy, the light was warm, and the feeling of his skin against mine was the kind of thing that made staying very easy and leaving very hard. But we were both sticky with sweat and I was becoming increasingly aware that I smelled like someone who’d done hot yoga followed by enthusiastic cardio of a different kind, which was not how I wanted to spend the rest of the afternoon.
“I need a shower,” I said.
“Through there.” He nodded toward the en suite. “I wasn’t going to say anything, but…”
“Finish that sentence and I will end you.“
“You smell incredible. Like a field of wildflowers on a spring morning,” he said, without a trace of irony. “Like a fresh ocean breeze. Like —”
I hit him with the pillow. He laughed — real, full, the kind that creased his whole face — and caught my wrist before I could do it again. He was still laughing when he let go, and the sound of it — open, unguarded — made me want to spend an unreasonable amount of time figuring out how to make it happen again.
I kissed his shoulder once instead, then rolled off the bed. I felt his eyes on me as I crossed the room. I didn’t turn around, but I let my hips do whatever they wanted, which was petty and deliberate and exactly the kind of thing I would do.
His shower was predictably excellent — big enough for two, although I filed that away for another time, with good water pressure and a shelf full of products that told me more about his grooming routine than he’d probably want me to know. I stood under the hot water and let it run over me and tried not to think too hard about what had just happened, because thinking about it meant examining it, and examining it meant acknowledging that it had felt like more than just good sex, and I was not ready for that conversation. Not with him. Not with myself.
When I came out, towel around me, the bedroom was empty. The sheets were rumpled, the pillow still dented where his head had been. I dried off, pulled my leggings back on, and stole a T-shirt from his closet — a soft grey thing, worn thin, miles too big. It hung off one shoulder and smelled like laundry detergent and faintly like him and I decided I was keeping it.
I followed the sound of a drawer opening to the kitchen. He was already there — track pants on, nothing else, barefoot on the tile, pulling things out of the fridge with the easy, unhurried confidence of someone moving through their own space. His hair was still a disaster. He looked up when he heard me and his expression shifted — something warm, almost fond — like the sight of me in his kitchen in his shirt was a thing he wanted to get used to.
“Feel better?” he said.
“Much.” I leaned against the island. “Nice shower, by the way. Very generous square footage.”
“I’ll pass that along to the architect.”
“You do that.” I watched him set a lemon on the cutting board. “So. What are you making me?”
“Cedar plank salmon,” he said. There was a plank of wood in a bowl of water on the counter that had clearly been soaking since before he’d picked me up. He lifted it out, patted it dry, and laid a side of salmon skin-down on top.
“I had it at this place in Laurel Canyon called Pace,” he said, reaching for the olive oil. “I loved the smell of the wood and the smokiness in the fish. So I got cedar planks, started soaking them, and tried to figure it out myself.” He seasoned it — olive oil, salt, lemon zest, fresh herbs torn by hand — with a level of concentration that I was beginning to understand was just how he operated. Whether it was a workout or a conversation or a piece of fish, Austin gave it everything. It was deeply annoying and extremely attractive in equal measure.
“The trick is the wood fire.” He picked up the plank and nodded toward the back doors. “Come on.”
I followed him across the patio to the far corner of the yard, where a wood-fired oven sat built into a low stone wall, half-hidden by climbing jasmine. Old brick, darkened from years of use, the kind of thing that looked like it had always been part of the garden.
“You have a pizza oven.”
“I have a pizza oven.”
“Of course you do.”
“The previous owner built it. I walked in, saw this, and that was it. Decision made.” He slid the plank inside with a long wooden peel, adjusting its position, his face lit by the glow. “I started with pizza — obsessed over it for months. The dough, the sauce, the exact type of wood. Got a laser thermometer so I could get it to a thousand degrees. Then once I had the fire figured out I started thinking about what else I could do with it.” He straightened up.
I leaned against the stone and watched him — barefoot, no shirt, tending a fire he’d built to cook me lunch — and thought: I am in serious, serious trouble.
“How long?” I asked.
“Twenty minutes, give or take.”
We went back inside. He pulled a mandoline from a drawer and started shaving fennel paper-thin, then tossed it with arugula, radish, lemon juice, and olive oil.
“What’s this?” I asked, watching him work.
“Just a fennel salad,” he said, without looking up.
“You say that like it’s nothing, but the fact that you own a mandoline and know what to do with it puts you in the top one percent of men I’ve ever met.”
He smiled without looking up. “Low bar?”
“You have no idea.”
He wiped his hands on a dish cloth and glanced toward the oven outside, then down at himself. “Give me ten minutes to shower. Keep an eye on the oven?”
“What do I do if something catches fire?”
“It won’t.”
“But if it does?”
“Don’t let it.”
“Incredibly helpful. Thank you.”
He grinned and disappeared toward the bedroom.
I stood in his kitchen for a second, listening to the shower start, and then did what I always do when I need to not think about a naked man fifteen feet away — I made myself useful.
I found plates in the cabinet above the stove, carried them outside with the salad and cutlery, and set the patio table. Then I spotted a glass pitcher on the counter, filled it with water, and raided his fruit bowl — sliced a lemon and an orange, dropped them in with a handful of mint I pulled from a pot by the back door. I set it on the table with two glasses and stood back. It looked like something from one of those lifestyle magazines Eva was always leaving around the house, which was either impressive or embarrassing and I chose not to decide.
He came back out in grey sweatpants and a fresh white T-shirt, hair damp and pushed back from his face. He looked clean and relaxed and unfairly good in a way that should not have been possible in sweatpants, and when he saw the table — plates, salad, the pitcher of fruit water — he stopped.
“You set the table.”
“I made water.”
“You made water.”
“Infused water. With citrus and mint. From your garden.”
He looked at me with an expression I couldn’t quite read — somewhere between amused and something softer. “You raided my herb garden.”
“You left me unsupervised. That’s on you.”
He laughed and went to check the oven. When the salmon was done he brought it out on the plank — the fish barely pink in the centre, the cedar charred and smoking underneath — and set it on the table between us.
“This looks incredible,” I said, and meant it.
“Wait until you taste it.”
I took a bite. Then another. Then I set my fork down and looked at him.
“Okay,” I said. “That’s the best thing I’ve eaten since the Thai curry I made the other night.”
He paused mid-bite. “Did you just compliment my cooking by saying it’s almost as good as yours?”
“I said what I said.”
“That is the most backhanded compliment I’ve ever received.”
“You’re welcome.”
He shook his head, laughing, and went back to his plate.
We ate in the late afternoon sun with the smell of the cooling oven drifting across the yard. The conversation moved the way it had all day — easy, unforced, one thing leading to another. Places we’d been. Food we’d eaten in other countries. The woman I’d learned to cook from in Chiang Mai, a Sunday dinner tradition he’d had with a small group of friends in London when he’d been filming there. The way those details kept overlapping — not the same places, but the same impulse, two people who’d been circling the world looking for something that felt real.
But it was the talking itself that surprised me. Not the flirting — that had been easy since the kitchen island at Nate’s. The rest of it. The stuff underneath. He asked questions that weren’t small talk and actually listened to the answers, and when I said things I hadn’t planned to say he didn’t flinch or try to spin them into something more comfortable. He just sat with it. And I found myself doing the same — listening without planning my next line, letting the conversation go where it wanted instead of steering it somewhere safe. He was getting me to talk about things I hadn’t talked about with anyone since I’d been back. Not even Nate — and Nate knew me better than anyone.
I stretched my legs out under the table and my foot found his ankle. He didn’t move away. After a second his foot settled over mine, lightly, like it was the most natural thing in the world, and I felt that small contact more than I had any right to.
He set his fork down. “This has been a really good day, Liv.”
I looked at him sideways. “Is that your professional assessment?”
“I’m serious.” He said it simply, without weight. “I don’t get a lot of days like this. Where everything just feels easy. Normal. Not a performance.”
I turned the word over. Normal. From someone whose life was the opposite of that in almost every measurable way. He wasn’t making a grand statement. He was just telling me what the day had been. And the fact that it was rare enough to be worth naming told me more about his life than any of the work stories had.
“Well,” I said. “If it helps, I had a pretty good time too.”
“Pretty good.”
“Don’t push it.”
He smiled. The real one — the one that crinkled his eyes and made him look younger and made me want to say something I’d regret.
“I’d like to see you again,” he said. Just that. No caveat, no speech. Like it was the simplest thing in the world, which maybe it was.
“I’d like that too,” I said.
And then, because I could feel the moment tipping toward something more serious than either of us was ready for, I reached across and stole a piece of salmon off his plate.
“Hey —”
“Tax,” I said, already eating it. “For the yoga.”
“That’s not how this works.”
“It is now.”
⸻
I drove her home in the late afternoon. The windows were down, the air thick with that particular LA gold that makes everything look like a memory even while it’s happening. She’d connected her phone to the stereo without asking — something I didn’t recognise but immediately liked, which seemed to be a pattern with things she introduced me to.
She had her bare feet on my dashboard and her head tilted back against the headrest, watching the streets roll past. Every now and then she’d point at something and I’d glance over and catch her face lit up with the pleasure of someone relearning a place she used to know by heart.
She was funny. I’d known that from the barbecue — the sharpness, the timing, the way she could take any moment and tilt it until it caught the light differently. But this was a different kind of funny. Relaxed. Unguarded. The version of Liv that happened when she wasn’t performing for a room, when it was just one person and she didn’t have to be on. She made me laugh harder than I had in months, and she did it without trying, which was the part that got me.
I pulled into Nate’s driveway. She turned the music down and the evening settled around us — just the engine idling and the late-day hum of the neighbourhood.
She turned to me. “Thanks for today. The salmon alone was worth the trip.”
“Just the salmon?”
She held my gaze for a second. Then: “No. Not just the salmon.”
She said it quietly, without her usual deflection, and I felt it land in my chest the way simple things do when someone means them.
She leaned across the centre console and kissed me — slow, soft, her hand resting on my jaw. She held it for a few seconds longer than she needed to, then pulled back, catching her lower lip between her teeth, a smile already forming. She looked at me like she was deciding something. Then she leaned in again — just a quick press of her lips against mine, lighter this time, almost playful — and sat back. Not a goodbye kiss. More like a bookmark.
Then she grabbed her bag, opened the door, and looked back. “Hey, Austin?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m glad we’re both figuring our shit out at the same time.”
I looked at her — this woman who’d spent a decade moving through the world on her own terms and had somehow landed back here, in the same city, at the same moment I was trying to remember how to be a person outside of work. The timing of it. The stupid, improbable luck of it. “Yeah,” I said. “Me too.”
She smiled — not the sharp one, not the one she used on a room. Just Liv. Then she climbed out, slung her bag over her shoulder, and crossed the driveway toward the stairs. She took them two at a time and didn’t look back, which was such a Liv thing to do that I laughed quietly to myself. The loft door opened and closed.
I sat there for a second. The light was going amber through the windshield. The air coming through the open windows smelled like jasmine and cooling asphalt.
My phone buzzed.
A voice note. From Liv.
I pressed play.
“So. I’ve decided I’m keeping this shirt. Non-negotiable. I’m also keeping the fennel salad recipe, which I plan to pass off as my own at every opportunity. And I want you to know that I’m currently lying on my bed staring at the ceiling like a teenager, which is not a thing I do, and I’m blaming you entirely.” A beat. “Anyway. Today was —” A pause. The kind where you can hear someone smiling. “Yeah. Today was something.”
I sat in the car, grinning at my phone, and hit record. “The shirt’s yours. Looks better on you anyway. The salad recipe you can have — I’ll deny we ever met if you need a cover story.” A pause. “And Liv? Today was something for me too.”
I sent it, put the car in reverse, and pulled out onto the street. The evening stretched ahead — open, unhurried, warm in a way that had nothing to do with the weather.
Liv’s back in LA after years away, crashing at her brother’s with no clear next step. Spotting a familiar face at his barbecue stops her in her tracks. Austin Butler — the shy boy she used to know — is all grown up, and the night suddenly feels a lot more interesting.
Word Count: 7k
Masterlist
I hadn’t been back in LA for more than a quick visit in years, but tonight the warm California air felt like slipping into an old favourite coat as I stood at the window of Nate’s converted loft. The space was actually pretty great — bed, couch, small bathroom, and huge windows pouring in that golden light I’d almost forgotten how much I loved.
Nate had meant it as a short-term guest spot. A few days, maybe a week or two. Not… whatever this had become while I figured out what came next.
Down by the house, voices drifted across the driveway, followed by a burst of laughter. The back doors stood wide open, carrying the low hum of conversation straight into the loft.
Right. Tonight.
Nate had mentioned it casually over tacos a few nights ago. Just a few people. Old friends. Nothing big.
“You should come in for a bit,” he’d said.
I’d pulled a face. “I don’t really feel like small talk with strangers.”
“They’re not strangers, Liv. You grew up with half of them.”
“Exactly,” I said, already smiling a little despite myself. “They know too much.”
He’d given me that older brother look — the one that said he knew something was up, even if I hadn’t said it yet.
“I’ll come say hi,” I’d laughed. “For a little while.”
Now, standing by the door of the loft with the noise of conversation floating over, I was half regretting the promise and half curious what it would feel like after so long away.
I checked my reflection in the small mirror by the door, dragged a hand through my hair, and shoved my phone into my pocket. A couple of beers and a few familiar faces. I could handle that.
The walk across the driveway took maybe fifteen seconds. Just enough time for one steadying breath.
The kitchen lights spilled out through the back doors when I reached the house. Inside it was exactly what Nate had promised — relaxed, low-key, a handful of people spread through the kitchen and living room. I recognised a couple of Nate’s old friends immediately. A few others I didn’t, but the whole place had that easy, familiar buzz of people who’d known each other forever.
I slipped in, accepted a couple of quick hugs and “Liv! You’re back!” exclamations with genuine smiles. “Just visiting for a bit,” I said, the half-truth slipping out easily, and aimed straight for the fridge like it was my only mission.
Beer first. Socialising second.
I had the cold bottle in my hand when I noticed him.
He was leaning forward on the kitchen island, elbows on the granite, talking to Nate. White T-shirt, faded jeans. The shirt had ridden up just enough at the back to show a narrow strip of tanned skin above his waistband, and — damn.
Whoever he was, he had an excellent ass.
I was still staring when Nate’s voice cut across the room.
“Liv!”
Busted.
My brother was already grinning at me from across the island. “Come here.”
Well. So much for quietly grabbing a drink. I took a sip before walking over.
Nate clapped a hand on my shoulder briefly as he nodded toward the guy leaning across the counter. “You remember Austin.”
I turned to look at him.
And my brain short-circuited.
The shy, lanky boy who used to hang around with Nate had turned into… this. Same eyes, but everything else had sharpened and filled out in ways that felt borderline unfair. His hair was a few shades darker than I remembered, somewhere between sandy blond and light brown in the warm kitchen light. He was broader through the shoulders now, the sleeves of his T-shirt strained slightly against biceps that definitely hadn’t been there when we were teenagers. His forearms, resting on the counter, were tanned and corded with quiet strength.
Austin Butler — whose face was now on billboards and movie posters everywhere. The fact that he was still showing up at my brother’s house like any other old friend somehow made the transformation even more surreal.
Recognition lit his face the second our eyes met. “Hey, Liv.”
His voice had settled into something deeper over the years, a little rough at the edges.
I realised, mortifyingly, that my mouth had fallen open a fraction.
I snapped it shut.
“Hi,” I managed.
Smooth, Olivia. Real smooth.
Nate was saying something else, but I barely heard it. Because Austin was still looking at me, and for the briefest second his expression mirrored exactly what I was feeling: a startled, almost disbelieving spark of oh.
Then the corner of his mouth lifted — that slow, crooked smile I suddenly remembered from years ago, only now it carried a quiet confidence that made my stomach do an unwelcome flip.
“Been a minute,” he said, voice low enough that it felt meant just for me even with the noise around us. He straightened up from the counter, and damn if the extra height didn’t make the whole effect even more unfair.
“Yeah,” I said.
Brilliant contribution, Liv.
Nate glanced between us and snorted. “Wow. Okay. This is weird.”
I blinked. “What?”
“You. Speechless. I think this is the first time in my life I’ve seen you without a quick comeback lined up.”
“Shut up,” I said automatically, elbowing him lightly.
He grinned like he was enjoying this far too much. “I’m just saying. Liv without words? Mark the calendar.”
I rolled my eyes. Nate had always known how to poke at me without crossing the line, and right now, it was a welcome distraction from the way Austin’s steady gaze kept pulling me back. There was something in it — not just surprise, but a kind of quiet relief, like he’d been hoping for a familiar face tonight too. Or maybe like he was trying to match the person in front of him with whatever memory he had stored away from years ago.
He watched the exchange between me and Nate with that same quiet amusement, his eyes flicking between us without interrupting. He didn’t push or fill the silence; he just… let it be. It was oddly comforting, that steadiness, like he was content to take the measure of the moment rather than force it.
Nate rubbed his hands together, still smirking. “Alright, well, before this turns into a full sibling roast… I’m gonna go check on the grill before my wife accuses me of neglecting my host duties.” He added, nodding at us both, “You two should catch up.”
And just like that, he wandered off toward the backyard, leaving the two of us standing at the island with the low hum of conversation and music drifting through the house.
I took a sip of beer, leaning my hip against the counter to mirror Austin’s relaxed posture. No big deal, I told myself. Just two old acquaintances at a backyard gathering. Except the way his eyes stayed on mine, steady and unblinking, made it feel like more than that. I lifted my bottle a fraction in a small, silent toast.
⸻
I watched her lift the bottle, the gesture pulling at memories I hadn’t touched in years. The way she met my gaze without flinching sent a small jolt through me. The years away had only sharpened what I’d always noticed about her — that restless energy, the way she seemed lit from inside.
I took a sip of my own drink, buying myself a second. “So,” I said, tilting the bottle lightly, “what’ve you been up to all these years?”
She laughed softly. “That’s a dangerously big question.”
“I’ve got nowhere else to be.”
She rolled the bottle between her palms, watching the condensation gather along the glass as if deciding where to start. “Well… right after high school my parents were very confident I’d be going to UCLA.”
I smiled. I could picture the conversation. “And?”
“And I told them I wanted to take a year first,” she said. “Travel a little, see some places, then come back and do the sensible thing.”
“The sensible thing being…”
“College, job, mortgage, slow descent into suburbia.” Her eyes sparkled with that familiar mischief. “So... I left. Did the whole backpacker cliché for a while — hostels, night buses, meeting someone who’d just come from somewhere cool and deciding that was where I was going next.”
I smiled. That sounded exactly like Liv — the girl who used to blow through Nate’s house with music blasting from her phone, dragging half the room into whatever she’d just discovered and insisting we all listen to it. “Where’d you start?” I asked.
“Australia. It seemed like the obvious place. I spent a few months there, moved around a bit, then started heading through Southeast Asia.”
When she mentioned Australia, I raised my eyebrows. “I know the Gold Coast pretty well.”
Her eyes lit with real surprise. “You do?”
“I spent just over a year there,” I said. “Filming.”
She walked around the island and leaned back against the counter beside me. The kitchen suddenly felt smaller, the easy distance we’d had a minute ago gone. I became very aware of how close she was. “Where abouts?”
“Mostly around Burleigh.”
She let out a small laugh. “Of course it was Burleigh.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“That’s where everyone ends up sooner or later.”
I smiled. “Did you go to Rick Shores?”
Her eyes widened. “The bug rolls?”
“Yeah.”
“God, those things were ridiculous,” she said. “Pretty sure I spent half my savings there.”
“Worth it though.”
“Absolutely.”
It was strange to think we’d sat in the same place years apart, looking out over the same stretch of water without knowing the other had been there. We traded a couple more details — the stretch of beach, the coffee place with the Harleys — the little overlaps building easy bridges across the years we’d missed.
I leaned a little more comfortably against the counter, turning fully toward her. Up close I could see the faint freckles across her nose I must have missed when we were kids. “So... after the gap year?”
“The year ended,” she said, “and I realised I didn’t really want to come back yet. I kept telling myself I would eventually. Just… not yet.”
I laughed under my breath. “Then what?”
“At first I just kept going,” she said. “One place to the next, whatever sounded good at the time.” She glanced down at her bottle, then back up at me. “Then eventually I’d end up somewhere and think… alright. I could stay here for a bit.”
I nodded. “What’d you do for money?”
She shifted again, angling toward me, close enough that the conversation had its own small orbit inside the noise of the party. “Sex work, mostly.”
I choked on my beer — actually choked — turning as I coughed into my fist.
Her laugh burst out bright and uncontained. “Oh my god, you’re still so easy.”
I dragged a hand over my mouth, half coughing, half laughing with her. “Jesus, Liv.” Heat crawled up my neck; I could feel it.
“You’re blushing.”
“I’m not.”
“You are.” She grinned, clearly delighted.
I glanced away for half a second, then back at her. She looked so pleased with herself I couldn’t even pretend to be annoyed. “Good to know you haven’t changed too much,” I said quietly, meeting her eyes.
I realised I was still smiling — not just at the joke, but at her. At how easily she could still disarm me after all this time.
"What?” she asked, head tilted.
“It just makes sense.”
Her eyebrows lifted, then a smile crept across her face. “That I'd prostitute myself around the world?”
I laughed again. “No. You always seemed like someone who’d get bored if you stayed in one place too long.”
Liv watched me carefully for a moment. “Is that a compliment?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I think so.” I took another sip of my beer, watching her over the rim of the bottle.
“You know what’s funny?” she said.
“What?”
“I think you might actually be partly responsible.”
“For what?”
“This whole thing.” She gestured vaguely, meaning the travelling, the decade away, the version of her standing here now.
I frowned slightly. “How?”
“When you went to New Zealand.”
I stared at her. “That was when I was fifteen.”
“I know.”
“You remember that?”
She gave me a look like the answer should have been obvious. “You vanished to the other side of the world for months,” she said. “Of course I remember.”
I felt a strange mix of surprise and something warmer settle in my chest. I hadn’t realised anyone, especially not Nate’s little sister, had been paying that kind of attention back then.
Her gaze lingered on me a second longer before she added quietly, “You were different when you came back.”
I felt my eyebrow lift. “Different how?”
She considered that for a second, studying me like she was comparing two versions of the same person. “Like you’d seen something bigger than this place.”
I let out a quiet laugh. “I mostly remember being jet-lagged.”
“Maybe,” she said, smiling. “But it stuck with me.” She lifted the bottle again, eyes flicking up to mine. “I remember thinking… I want that. To see the world like that. Really see it. Not just the version where you do what everyone expects.”
I held her gaze. Something about the way she said it — calm, certain, completely unapologetic — made it clear she wasn’t trying to justify the choice. It was simply the life she’d decided to live.
“Yeah,” I said after a moment. “That sounds exactly like you.” I wasn’t even sure how I knew that — only that it felt obvious, standing here with her now.
I realised I’d been watching the way she talked — the quick spark in her eyes when something amused her, the way her hands moved when she was explaining something. She’d always done that.
For the first time since we’d started talking, something in her expression softened — not surprised, exactly, but pleased. Like I’d understood a piece of her most people missed.
⸻
For a second I just looked at him, my stomach doing a slow, treacherous roll. I hadn’t expected him to understand that so easily.
Most people either laughed or tried to turn it into some neat life lesson. Austin had just… listened. And he was still looking at me. Not the polite, drifting kind of eye contact. His gaze stayed steady, like he was actually paying attention to what I said instead of waiting for his turn to talk.
It made me suddenly, stupidly aware of how close we were standing at the counter — close enough that I could see the tiny scar above his eyebrow and the way his T-shirt stretched across his shoulders when he breathed.
I took another sip of beer mostly so my hands had something to do. “Well,” I said, aiming for light but missing by a mile, “this is wildly unfair.”
His eyebrows lifted, that slow, crooked smile tugging at the corner of his mouth again. God, he was pretty.
“What is?”
“You’ve just got my entire messy life story in one go, and I know exactly nothing about what you’ve been up to besides the occasional bug roll in Burleigh.”
“That wasn’t your entire life story.”
“Close enough.”
He huffed a quiet laugh and looked down at his bottle for half a second, turning it slowly against the granite. When he glanced back up, the smile was still there but softer. “Maybe I’m just interested in what you’ve done.”
The way he said it made it annoyingly difficult to keep my expression neutral. That was not the response I’d been expecting. I tilted my head, studying him with exaggerated suspicion. “That’s suspiciously charming, Butler. Careful, or I’ll start thinking the shy kid who used to hide in Nate’s room has been replaced by some smooth Hollywood type.”
He shifted his weight, one hand briefly pushing the sleeve of his T-shirt higher on his arm before dropping back to the bottle. Right. Because the situation definitely needed more biceps.
“Still the same kid underneath,” he said. “Just slightly better at stringing sentences together.”
I gave him a look. The kind that said I wasn’t letting him off that easy.
His smile widened slightly. “Alright,” he said. “What do you wanna know?”
I laughed despite myself. The house hummed on around us — music drifting low from the living room, bursts of laughter, the faint clatter of Nate at the grill outside through the open doors — but it felt strangely easy to forget anyone else was in the room.
“Where’ve you been hiding all this time? Besides the Gold Coast.”
He thought about it for a second, a small, self-deprecating smile playing on his lips. “Working, mostly. It’s been a lot of bouncing around — Australia, London, Hungary… a bunch of places around the States.”
I let that sink in.
“I actually went back to New Zealand for a show for a while too. And I’ve spent a lot of time in New York,” he added, like the thought had just occurred to him. “Did some theatre there — somehow ended up sharing a stage with Denzel Washington, which still feels like a fever dream.”
My eyebrows lifted and I let out a small laugh. “Wow. You’ve been busy.”
“I got stupidly lucky and ended up working with some really amazing directors along the way.”
I tilted my head. “Lucky? Come on. Everyone could see you worked hard and took it seriously even back then. I’m pretty sure it’s not just luck.”
Austin looked at me for a second like he wasn’t quite sure what to do with that. Then he let out a quiet laugh, rubbing the back of his neck. “You’re giving teenage me a lot of credit.”
“I’m really not,” I said. “You were the only one of Nate’s friends who ever actually did what they said they were gonna do.”
“That’s not true.”
“Please,” I said. “Half of them were convinced they were starting bands.”
A grin tugged at his mouth.
“Hard not to notice the one person in the room who wasn’t screwing around. You earned every bit of it.”
The look he gave me then made me immediately wonder if I’d said too much. That probably hadn’t come out the way I meant it to.
“Well,” he said after a moment, “I’m glad someone thought I knew what I was doing.”
“Did you?”
“Not even slightly.”
I laughed. “Good,” I said. “That’s reassuring.”
For a second we just stood there again, the easy quiet settling back in between us. Nate’s voice drifted in from the backyard.
“Coming back here after all that must feel a bit strange sometimes, though.”
“Yeah,” he said. “A little.”
The silence stretched just long enough that I became aware of the warmth of him beside me, my pulse jumping a little in response. I finished the last sip of my beer, then stepped over to the fridge and pulled it open, grabbing two fresh ones.
“You want one?” I asked over my shoulder.
“Sure,” Austin said behind me.
As I turned back with the bottles in my hands, Nate stepped in from the backyard.
“Perfect timing,” he said, already heading for the fridge. “Pass me one of those.”
His eyes flicked between me and Austin, and the corner of his mouth curved in a way that instantly made me suspicious. “Food’s almost ready if you two want to come outside,” he said, grabbing the bottle I handed him. He disappeared again before either of us could answer.
I looked back at Austin and handed him one of the beers. Our fingers brushed briefly as he took it. “Well,” I said, “I guess that’s our cue.”
He nodded. “After you.”
“…I’m telling you, that’s not what happened,” someone was saying as we stepped outside.
“That’s exactly what happened,” another voice shot back.
Nate didn’t even look up from the grill. “You’re both remembering it wrong.” A second later he glanced over his shoulder, spotted me, and lifted the tongs in my direction. “Perfect timing. Here comes the defendant.”
I stopped a few steps into the patio. “That sounds ominous.”
A couple of Nate’s friends turned, grinning.
“Liv,” Greg called. “We were just talking about the night you ruined Rob’s chances with Kelly Ramirez.”
“That’s absolute slander,” I laughed, dropping onto the end of the couch.
“You gave him the tequila,” Micah said.
“I gave him one tequila.“
Austin slid in beside me a moment later. The cushion dipped under his weight and his shoulder brushed mine as he settled back. I shifted slightly to make room but somehow ended up even closer.
“Yeah…” Greg added, “but he was already six beers in.”
“How is that my fault?”
“You told him tequila would ‘cancel out the beer,’” Micah said, barely holding back a laugh.
Nate snorted. “That’s not what did it.”
I pointed at him gratefully. “Thank you.”
“He smoked a joint right after that,” Nate said, leaning forward with a grin. “Took one drag, tried to play it cool—”
“—and then,” he finished, turning back to the grill, “puked all over Kelly.”
The whole patio erupted.
“Oh my god,” someone groaned.
“He’d been trying to talk to her all night,” Greg added through the laughter. “That was the end of that.”
Austin bumped his shoulder lightly against mine. “Pretty sure that was Liv’s joint too.”
I turned to him, mouth falling open in exaggerated outrage. Of course he’d remember that.
He was already watching me, the corner of his mouth lifting into something more than a smile — amused, a little wicked, like he was enjoying this far too much.
“Of course it was,” Nate said, sliding the food onto a tray.
“He asked if he could have a drag!” I protested.
Greg shook his head. “You’re unbelievable.”
“I was being supportive.”
Micah laughed. “Of what? His collapse?”
Through the noise, Eva’s voice rose, bright with disbelief. “Remind me again why you were taking your little sister to parties like that?”
Nate glanced over. “Babe, have you met your sister-in-law? You think I had a choice?“
Eva shook her head, half laughing. “I’m amazed any of you survived high school.”
Nate winked at her. “You’re just jealous you missed it.” He passed her the tray.
I nudged Austin’s knee lightly with mine and murmured under my breath, “Traitor.”
He glanced down at me, still smiling. “Just keeping the story straight.”
For a second we just looked at each other. Then someone shouted something about plates from the other side of the patio and the moment dissolved back into the easy chaos of the backyard.
Food started circulating, someone passed me a napkin, and conversation shifted. I tried to settle back into it, but mostly I was aware of two things.
Austin’s knee still resting against mine.
And the fact that every time I glanced over, he was already looking at me.
⸻
I let the conversation roll on around me. Laughter moved around the patio in loose bursts. Nate had finally abandoned the grill and was sitting beside Eva, his arm stretched comfortably along the back of her chair. Everyone was talking over each other about a new Cuban place in Silver Lake — whether it was actually any good or just another attempt at authentic that missed the mark.
Liv was leaning back into the corner of the couch now, one leg pulled up under her, beer balanced loosely on her knee. I was half-listening to the debate and half watching the way her fingers traced the condensation on the bottle, the subtle shift of her leg against mine when she adjusted her weight. It wasn’t deliberate on her part. But I noticed it every time.
Every now and then she glanced over. The first time it happened I wasn’t ready for it. Our eyes met and she looked away straight after, like nothing had happened, but the corner of her mouth twitched like she knew exactly what she’d caught me doing.
I looked down at my drink.
The conversation drifted from the restaurant to vacations, people swapping stories about where they’d actually found decent food abroad. Someone raved about Havana, another about a hidden spot in Barbados. When it circled around to the Caribbean, I mentioned a trip to Puerto Rico a couple of months back — the food, the beaches, how the whole island had a rhythm to it that was hard to leave behind.
A couple of heads turned. The woman across from me — Amy, I think — smiled, a little apologetic. “Yeah, I think I saw something about that on Fallon. Looked like quite the trip.”
There it was. That small tilt in the air, the slight change in how people looked at me — like they were suddenly remembering I wasn't just Nate's old friend anymore. I felt Nate glance at me before I even looked up. He gave the smallest wince, like he’d been hoping we might get through the night without veering into work territory.
I gave the easy answer. “It was great — beautiful place. Got lucky with that one.”
Greg leaned in. “Was that for the new movie? I saw it — it’s awesome man.”
“Thanks.”
“What’s Aronofsky like?”
“He’s great. Very direct. Knows exactly what he wants.” I answered on autopilot — clean, practised. The version of the story that fit a dinner table.
But part of me had already checked out.
It wasn't that I minded talking about work. I was proud of what I'd done. But there was always this moment when the air shifted and I stopped being just Austin and became something else. Something to be curious about. Something separate.
“And the cat,” Amy said, laughing. “Please tell me the cat was as good in real life.”
I smiled. “Better. Hit every mark, never complained. Put the rest of us to shame.”
That got a laugh.
Then Micah leaned forward, grinning. “Didn’t you take an edible before some concert out there? I saw a video of you dancing onstage — that was everywhere.”
I dragged a hand over my mouth. “Yeah. That story’s been doing the rounds. I thought we were gonna be off to the side. Turned out we weren’t.”
“That’s wild,” Amy said.
“It was… a lot,” I said. “Didn’t really know what to do with myself.”
The attention held there a second too long. I could feel where it was heading — the next question already forming, the slight lean-in that meant someone was about to ask something I’d have to navigate more carefully.
Before it got there, I felt Liv shift beside me, her knee settling more firmly against mine.
Then she cut in. “Please, like you all haven’t done worse shit than that. I’ve got stories that would make that look responsible.”
Laughter rippled through the group, and just like that, the spotlight slid off me and back into the group, dissolving into noise again.
I glanced over at her and leaned a little closer, my fingers brushing her forearm. She turned her head just enough to look at me properly. “Thanks,” I murmured.
“For what?”
“Changing the subject.”
Her eyes flicked toward the group and then back. “That obvious?”
“Only to me.”
She gave a small, satisfied shrug and took another sip of her beer. Something loosened in my chest.
Across the patio, Greg was still laughing. “Speaking of… how long are you actually back for this time Liv?”
The question landed lightly, but I saw the shift before she answered. Just the smallest pause, her fingers tightening briefly around the neck of the bottle.
“Long enough to annoy my brother,” she said, nodding vaguely toward Nate, “short enough that he doesn’t start charging me rent. You know me — I don’t do plans.”
Greg accepted the answer without pushing.
Nate let out a quiet laugh. “Yeah, we know.”
The conversation moved on, and the evening settled into that easy, stretched-out phase where the food was mostly gone and nobody was in a hurry to be anywhere.
⸻
Austin’s arm had found its way along the back of the couch at some point — casually, like it had just landed there — his fingers resting somewhere behind my shoulder. I was choosing not to acknowledge it. Acknowledging it would mean thinking about it, and thinking about it would mean admitting that the proximity of his hand to the bare skin of my neck was doing things to my nervous system that had no business happening at my brother’s barbecue.
So. Not thinking about it.
Except then he’d laugh at something and I’d feel it rumble through the cushion. Or my attention caught on the way he turned his beer bottle slowly on his knee while he listened to someone talk — his long fingers loose around the glass, his thighs spread wide enough in those faded jeans that I had to actively redirect my eyes more than once.
Conversations split and merged. Eva and Amy were grilling Greg about his new girlfriend, who he’d apparently been hiding from everyone. Micah and Nate were deep in their own thread. It left us in a pocket of quiet that felt almost deliberate, even though it wasn’t.
Austin turned toward me, shifting his weight so his body was angled in my direction, his arm still resting along the couch behind me. “You never actually told me what you do.”
I glanced at him. “I believe I told you I was a sex worker.”
“You did. And then you let me choke on my beer and changed the subject.”
“That’s not how I remember it.”
“That’s exactly how it happened.”
I smiled into my bottle. “Fine. I teach yoga.”
He looked at me — properly, like he was rearranging something in his head. “Really?”
“Don’t sound so surprised.”
“I’m not surprised. I’m just —” He paused. “Actually, yeah. I’m a little surprised.”
“Because I don’t seem like the calm and centred type?”
“Exactly.”
I tilted my head, watching him. “You don’t think I’m capable of inner peace?”
“Oh, I think you’re capable of it,” he said. “I’m just guessing the class might get interesting.”
I laughed. “Fair. I guess you could say I’ve developed my own style. I’m kinda known for it actually. And the sex work thing wasn’t entirely a joke.”
He raised an eyebrow.
“One of my classes is for couples,” I said. “Flexibility, breathwork, connection. People’s sex lives improve. Dramatically, from what I’ve been told.” I took a sip. “So technically — sex work.”
He was quiet for a second. Then: “That’s a stretch.”
“That’s literally what yoga is.”
He closed his eyes briefly, the kind of pained expression people make when they’ve walked into something and there’s no way out. “I’m going to pretend that didn’t happen.”
“Too late. It happened. I saw you almost smile.”
“I didn’t almost smile.”
“You absolutely almost smiled.”
He looked at me, and this time he did — his teeth catching his lower lip like he was physically trying to hold it back before giving up. The smile broke through, reluctant and warm, and my gaze stuck on his mouth a beat longer than it should have. Those lips had no business being that full.
Something warm spread through my chest and settled there.
“So how’d you get into it?” he asked.
“Accidentally, like most things. I’d been travelling for a while, ended up doing a class somewhere, and something just clicked. I started training properly, got into it more seriously, and eventually a friend asked me to fill in for her at a resort she was working at.” I shrugged. “I thought it’d be a few weeks. I stayed almost three years.”
“Three years?” He looked at me like he was recalibrating again. “That’s not what I expected from the girl who never stays anywhere.”
“I know. Surprised me too. But the place was amazing, I built up my own classes, people kept coming back. It was the first time I’d been somewhere and thought — okay, maybe this is actually what I’m supposed to be doing.”
“So what happened?”
“I got restless.” I said it like it was simple, because it was. “Lined up another place, moved on. Came home for a bit in between, then did it again. That’s been the cycle for the last few years — find a resort, build something, stay for a while, then start over somewhere new.”
“And this time?”
I looked down at my beer. “This time there’s no next place. No job lined up, no plan. I’m just… here.” I let out a short breath. “I keep telling myself I’m taking time to figure things out. Like, am I doing this forever? Is this actually what I want? Am I ever going to be a real adult?” I smiled. “I’m thirty-two and I’m living above my brother’s garage.”
“I’m thirty-four and I just spent ten minutes talking about working with a cat,” he said. “I don’t think either of us gets to claim real adulthood.”
I laughed. Something loosened in my chest — the relief of saying it out loud to someone who didn’t immediately try to fix it or turn it into advice.
“For what it’s worth,” he said, “I think the not-knowing is okay. You built something real. More than once. That’s not nothing.”
I looked at him. He wasn’t being glib. He meant it.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m starting to think that too.”
The evening wound down around us in slow stages. The gaps between conversations grew wider, the patio gradually losing people the way parties do once the food’s gone and the drinks run low. Amy left first with a round of hugs. Greg and Micah followed not long after, already arguing about something as they walked to their cars. A couple of others I hadn’t spoken to much drifted out without ceremony.
Eva yawned and stood. “I’m done,” she announced. “Nate?”
Nate was already collecting bottles. “Coming.” He paused by the couch and looked at me, then at Austin, then back at me. “Don’t stay up too late,” he said.
“We’re not twelve, Nate.”
“And yet.” He ruffled my hair as he passed, which he knew I hated, and disappeared inside with Eva.
Then it was just us.
The patio felt bigger without anyone else on it. Quieter. The kind of quiet where you can hear someone breathing if you’re sitting close enough.
I was sitting close enough.
Austin leaned forward to set his empty bottle on the table, then sat back and stretched — lifting his arms above his head, rolling his shoulders out with a low groan that I felt somewhere I probably shouldn’t have. His T-shirt rode up and exposed a strip of tanned stomach, the faint line of hair trailing down from his navel and disappearing below his waistband.
I stared.
I absolutely, unequivocally stared.
My brain abandoned every higher function it had ever learned and went somewhere deeply, spectacularly unhelpful.
He caught me with my eyes exactly where they should not have been before settling back, one ankle coming to rest on the opposite knee, his body angled toward me. Something shifted in his expression. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to.
I cleared my throat and changed the subject. “Can I ask you something?”
“Depends on whether it’s going to make me choke again.”
“No promises.” I pulled one leg up under me. “Everyone was talking earlier about how busy you’ve been — all the travel, the press, the projects. But you’re here. At my brother’s barbecue on a random weeknight. How come?”
He didn’t answer straight away. His thumb ran along the seam of his jeans — not stalling, just choosing his words.
“I got tired of not showing up,” he said. “For people, I mean. For the stuff that matters.” He glanced at me. “I spent the last few years saying yes to everything work-related and not much else. And it was great — I’m not complaining. But at some point you realise you’ve got all these people you care about and you haven’t actually been around for any of them.”
He said it simply. No performance, no rehearsed version. Just something he’d figured out and decided to act on.
“Nate was the easy one,” he added. “Show up, eat food, be normal for a night.”
“And instead you got cornered by his sister.”
“I didn’t get cornered.” He looked at me. “This is the best part of my night.”
I held his gaze. My chest did something tight and stupid and I didn’t bother pretending it wasn’t happening.
“Yeah,” I said. “Mine too.”
⸻
She said it like it cost her something. Not a lot — just enough that I could hear the difference between the version of Liv that performed for a room and the one sitting next to me right now.
The patio was empty. The lights were still on but the house behind us had gone dark. It felt like we were the only two people still awake, even though I could hear the faint sounds of Nate running water inside.
She was watching me with that expression I’d been catching all night — the one she thought she was hiding. Every time I’d seen it she’d looked away or deflected or said something funny. But right now she wasn’t doing any of those things.
She was just looking at me.
“Liv,” I said. I’m not sure why. Her name just came out, low and certain, like I was anchoring myself to the moment before I did something about it.
“Yeah?”
I didn’t answer. I reached over and touched her jaw — lightly, just my fingertips against the side of her face — and tilted her chin up toward me. She went still. Not pulling away. Not moving closer. Just waiting, her eyes wide and very clear in the low light.
I could feel her pulse under my fingers. Fast. Faster than her expression let on.
“Tell me if this is a bad idea,” I said quietly.
She let out a breath that was almost a laugh. “It’s a terrible idea.”
“Yeah?”
“The worst.”
She closed the distance herself.
⸻
His mouth was warm. That was my first clear thought — everything before it was just static and heat and the sharp, sudden reality of Austin’s hand sliding from my jaw into my hair.
The kiss started slow. Careful, almost — like we were both checking this was actually happening. His lips were soft and he tasted like beer and something warm underneath, and when I leaned into him his other hand found my waist, fingers pressing lightly against the thin fabric of my shirt.
Then I made a sound — small, involuntary, mortifying — and whatever restraint he’d been holding onto dissolved. He deepened the kiss, his tongue brushing mine, and I stopped thinking entirely. My fingers slid into his hair, pulling him closer. His thumb traced a slow line across my hip bone and my brain short-circuited for the second time that night.
When we broke apart we were both breathing harder than the situation strictly warranted.
His forehead rested against mine. His hand was still in my hair.
“Terrible idea,” I murmured.
“The worst,” he agreed.
I could feel him smiling.
I pulled back just enough to see his face. He looked — god. He looked undone. In the best possible way — like someone who’d just had the ground shift under him and was still deciding whether to be alarmed or delighted about it.
“We should probably call it a night,” I said. “Before Nate looks out a window and has a stroke.”
He laughed quietly, his hand sliding from my hair to the back of my neck, lingering for just a second before he let go. “Fair point.”
We stood and walked across the driveway side by side, close enough that our hands brushed with every step. Neither of us moved away. Neither of us reached for the other. The tension of that tiny gap was almost worse than the kiss.
We stopped at the bottom of the stairs to the loft. The light above the door cast a warm yellow circle around us. Austin turned to face me, hands in his pockets.
“Can I see you again?” he said.
I almost laughed. It was such a normal question — the kind of thing you’d ask anyone after a normal night. Except nothing about this night had been normal, and the way he was looking at me suggested he knew that too.
“I’m not going anywhere,” I said. “I already told you — no plan, no next flight. You know where to find me.”
He smiled. “Above the garage.”
“Living the dream.”
He looked at me for a long moment. Then he stepped closer and I thought he was going to kiss me again — wanted him to, if I was being honest — but instead he leaned in and pressed his lips to my cheek, soft and deliberate, right at the corner of my mouth. Close enough to be a promise.
“Goodnight, Liv.”
“Goodnight, Austin.” I pulled my phone out of my pocket and held it toward him. “Give me your number. So I can ignore your texts.”
He laughed as he took the phone, typed his number in, then tapped the screen once more. His phone buzzed in his pocket.
“Now I have yours too,” he said.
“Smooth.”
“I try.”
His fingers brushed mine as I took the phone back, and neither of us pretended not to notice.
Then he stepped back and walked toward his car. I watched him go because apparently I was that person now.
I made it through the door, up the stairs, and into the loft before I let the grin break across my face. I pressed my hands over my eyes and laughed into the empty room.
My phone buzzed.
A text from the number he’d just saved.
For the record — best terrible idea I’ve ever had
I stared at the screen. Then I dropped onto the bed and typed back:
Technically it was my idea. I closed the distance
Three dots appeared. Then:
I’ll let you have that one
I smiled at the ceiling, grinning like an idiot in the dark.
summary (unreciprocated love series): Austin falls in love with a girl who can't love him back
His blue eyes followed your every move. From the way your eyes lit up and to the way your lips slowly morphed into a smile. Your soft hair fell off your shoulders as you threw your head back and laughed with your entire heart. The scattered fairy lights mirrored an ethereal glow on you, and even in a room full of people, you were the one that stood out.
Austin was toast, and he knew it.
You placed a hand on Callum's arm, emphasizing one of your points, and Austin couldn't help but notice everyone's eyes on you, keen and patient for the next words coming out of your mouth. He felt his heartbeat speed up at the simplicity of you. You weren't overly extroverted, not at all, but when it came to one of your topics, something switched. Your hands would move and your eyes would spark at something that excited you, something that genuinely made you happy.
He wondered if that would ever be him.
"Hey honey," you tenderly kissed someone else's lips. The man in question leaning forward to capture something Austin dreamed about day and night. He shifted uncomfortably in his seat. "You guys have all met Oliver, I hope," you laughed, quickly scanning the group with your eyes. But Austin's gaze darted away.
Boyfriend's hand curled on your thigh, so comfortably like it had always belonged there. He squeezed your flesh, giving you a grin that made your insides melt. Austin couldn't bear it anymore.
"I'm going out for some fresh air," he muttered to Callum and lowered his gaze, pushing the chair away. His steps were quick and calculated as he desperately tried to shake off the image of the two of you together. Austin's back met the harsh surface of the cold wall, the breeze made him shiver for a short moment.
What did you see in him? Was he more outgoing than he was? Was he funnier? Was he better? Was he enough for you?
The thoughts were loud and clear, sending a direct message to his heart. He lost. That guy, Oliver, was the winner. And the winner takes it all. He was the loser standing small.
"Hey man," Callum pushed the door open, a cigarette in his hold as he cupped his hands together, a flicker of orange flames appearing. "Been gone for a while. Don't want ya to catch a cold," he said teasingly.
Austin chuckled lightly. "Yeah. It was getting too warm in there."
Callum hummed. "I know it's hard, man. You gotta push through." He was the only one aware of Austin's crush on you, and he held no judgement, no. He felt compassion for his friend's unreciprocated feelings, for if there was anyone deserving of good love, it was Austin.
"Yeah," Austin's tone was flat, like of someone who had already given up. Callum leaned on the wall beside him, his hand slapping Austin's torso.
"I want more enthusiasm. No yeah," he mocked his tone, but Austin could only sigh, shaking his head.
"I don't know what to tell you, Cal," Austin looked over at his friend. "She's brought her boyfriend to meet the whole group. It's over."
Callum's brows scrunched. "No, no, no. It's over when we give up. And we don't give up."
"Oh yeah, I've given up, it's over," Austin let out a breathless laugh, his gaze lowering. "It's over."
"That's bad attitude," Callum brought his cigarette to his lips. "You have to fight. You remember when we played those two pilots, right? Just like that."
Austin knew that his friend only meant well, but his words brought him even lower. "It's easy for you to say. You have a fiancé," he didn't mean to snap, but his lips were quicker than his brain.
Callum nodded slowly, puffing out the smoke. "Yeah, I do. And I wouldn't have one if I didn't show up every single day as the best version of myself. She was in love with someone else. You remember that, don't you?"
Austin hummed, nodding.
"I knew my chances were slim, but I had nothing to lose. Nothing," he continued. "What do you have to lose, Austin?"
"Her friendship."
Silence followed, thick and lingering.
"You get one life, man," Callum discarded his cigarette. "You gotta make the most of it."
And he walked back inside, leaving Austin alone with his tormenting thoughts.
A/N: thank you so much for reading! might do a part two, let me know what you think 💋
It’s not that I don’t want Timmy to win an Oscar. I do think he deserves one—but I don’t want him to be a little fuck about it. You’re not guaranteed an Oscar because you did A Good Job, if that were the case then they’d be passing out participation awards. He IS a great actor, I will be happy to see him win one day, but I am genuinely so glad this wasn’t the moment lol
Sorry you didn't like janitorai. I find Ch.ai and C.ai to be harder because they have less in chat memory. Janitor tended to remember what I added to the in chat memories well. Also I could never get more than a paragraph in response on C.ai or ch.ai, in janitor I would get four or five paragraphs replies which built a story better.
It’s okay bestie 😊
I totally get that! There’s definitely pros and cons to all of them. I just find that C.AI holds true to the characters personality sooo well, even if some things do get forgotten, which I think is probably the most important feature for me lol. Maybe one day they’ll morph into one super app 😂
have you ever tried Janitorai? I found when I used it that you can get much longer messages from the bot. And they allow open sourcing you can write some great stories. There are a few Feyd ones I loved and a couple good Benny ones too.
I’ve not heard of this one! I used CHAI for a bit, but I found the conversations were severely lacking, and C.AI is much better there. Maybe I’ll give it a shot, thanks 🥰
have you ever tried Janitorai? I found when I used it that you can get much longer messages from the bot. And they allow open sourcing you can write some great stories. There are a few Feyd ones I loved and a couple good Benny ones too.
I’ve not heard of this one! I used CHAI for a bit, but I found the conversations were severely lacking, and C.AI is much better there. Maybe I’ll give it a shot, thanks 🥰
