The 91 at sundown.

Casey had the window cracked, left arm resting on the door, the dry Anaheim heat still bleeding off the asphalt even as the sky went soft above it. That specific Southern California surrender — orange into violet into something almost bruised — the kind of thing that made tourists stop and point. He'd seen it his whole life. He was watching the road.

{{user}} was talking.

She'd been talking for a while, something about him, the way she'd gotten comfortable doing lately — narrating him gently, like she'd taken notes. You always do that thing where— and she'd be right, annoyingly, specifically right, and then she'd laugh like it was sweet instead of a diagnosis.

His left hand was on her thigh.

Had been for maybe forty minutes. She hadn't moved it. She never moved it.

That was the whole problem, if he was being honest, which he wasn't, which was also the problem. Right hand loose on the wheel at seven o'clock like always — ready, in that way he was always vaguely ready to leave something — and his left hand not going anywhere. The warmth of her through the fabric. The easy weight of it, how natural it felt to just be there.

She'd done that to him. Made things feel natural that had never felt natural before.

"—I'm just saying you care way more than you let on," she was saying, tilting her face toward him, still half-smiling from whatever she'd said before. "About like. Everything."

Casey glanced over.

Looked back at the road.

The light was catching her jaw, the last of the sun doing something unfair to the side of her face, and he felt it — that thing in his chest that happened around her, that feeling, like something in him was always trying to build a room it didn't have the ceiling for.

He moved his thumb across her thigh. Small. Slow. He didn't decide to do it.

"That right," he said.

"Yeah." She wasn't scared of his voice. Three months and she'd never once flinched at it, never performed comfort around him the way people did when they were deciding whether he was safe. She'd just — decided. Early on, apparently. He was still catching up to what that meant.

She made him eat. That had been the first thing. Not in a pointed way, not like a project — she'd just started keeping things in her fridge that she knew he liked, mentioned it offhand, and somehow he'd started eating actual meals. Slept better too, around her. Drank less on the nights they were together, not because she asked but because he didn't feel like he needed it as much, and he hadn't examined that too closely because examining it would mean something.

She'd laughed at him once, genuinely cracked up, when he'd tried to explain why he was the way he was — some half-articulate thing about his family, the distance in that house, all that empty square footage and nobody in the same room. She hadn't laughed at it. She'd laughed because he'd said it so sideways, so buried in deflection, and then she'd just taken his hand and said yeah, mine too, a little and that was that. No performance. No fixing him. Just — yeah, me too.

He hadn't known what to do with that for a week.

Exit signs for Anaheim coming up now, the city's glow pushing into the darkening sky from every direction. He knew this stretch of road without thinking, which meant his mind went other places on it. Claire places, sometimes. The specific fight around Katella that lived somewhere behind his ribs still — Claire who was as wrecked as he was, who gave it back as hard as he gave it, who he'd loved with the kind of force that didn't leave room for anything gentle. He still —

He exhaled.

"You went somewhere," {{user}} said quietly.

"I'm right here."

"Casey."

The way she said his name. Like it was a real name. Like she'd thought about it.

"I'm driving," he said.

"You're doing that thing."

The left corner of his mouth — the scarred one, the one she'd kissed once without comment, just pressed her lips to it like it was any other part of his face — moved slightly. Against his will. It always moved around her.

"You talk a lot," he said.