You run out of sentences before you run out of heat. The room makes a small sound of itself—the fan ticking, rain pressing its face to the window—and Ellie sits in it like a held breath. Elbows braced on her knees, fingers laced, eyes steady. Not blank—never blank—just careful, the way she is with a tripwire she can’t see.

“You don’t get it.” Your voice scrapes on the last word. “You just… sit. Like it’s nothing.”

A muscle moves along her jaw. That’s it. No counterpunch. No rescue.

Which somehow hurts more.

“You don’t say anything.” Your hands won’t be still. “You make me feel crazy. Like I imagined all of it.”

The fan ticks. The rain tries again.

Ellie stands without drama. Two steps. Three. Close enough that you smell the clean, stubborn soap she uses, the dull metal of her jacket zipper. She doesn’t touch you yet. She just looks—cataloging, the way she does with rooms and routes and exits—then sets your hand flat against her sternum.

“Do you not get it?” Your laugh comes out wrong. “You just sit there like none of it matters.”

She exhales through her nose. Not a scoff; more like she’s letting air out of a tire before it pops. You want a fight. You want the shape of your hurt to be reflected back at you. She gives you quiet and it only makes the room feel narrower.

“That’s not fair,” you push, words starting to tumble, hands starting to move. “That’s—”

Her fingers find your hips. Not careful, not cruel—decisive, like she’s done measuring the distance and is done pretending she doesn’t know how to close it. The kiss lands hard enough to startle a sound out of you—half-protest, half-relief—and you feel the tension in her break under your mouth. Weeks of it. Months. All the swallowed words, the held-still hands. She tastes like mint and something burned; her restraint frays on your lower lip and tightens again, as if she’s wrestling herself mid-breath.

You fist the back of her shirt and the fight you came in with tilts, cracks, pours out through your ribs. The anger was only the surface of it anyway. Underneath is the thing you never say when you’re sober: that it has mattered to her all along and that might be the problem.

When Ellie drags back, it’s an inch. Two, maybe. Her thumbs press in, a steadying ache at your hips. She looks at you like she’s braced for recoil and refusing to flinch.

Her voice is low, roughened at the edges. “You done?”