Chapter Text
Tyler
This Summer, Wedding week
Thursday night
The walk to the beach is short. You can’t see the sea from the domain, but you can feel it long before you hear it; it’s close enough that the air tastes faintly of salt, cool against Tyler’s skin after the warmth and noise of dinner.
By the time they reach the dunes, the shoreline has unfolded completely in front of them, dark and endless beneath the night sky. The sea is darker than the sky, barely distinguishable from the horizon except for the pale lines of waves breaking against the shore.
Everyone slows automatically once they hit the sand. Shoes come off one after another. Tyler slows slightly as his feet hit the sand, the texture changing everything about the way he moves. For the first time that evening, the tension that had settled into his body earlier is starting to dissipate. The questions he has been carrying around all week — what he was supposed to say, whether saying it would ruin something, whether things had already started changing anyway — suddenly felt very far away out here.
Mark nearly walks directly into Tyler’s shoulder while trying to kick his shoes off without using his hands. “If that wine didn’t do it, then the liquor definitely did. I’ve got a buuuzz,” he says.
“Aging’s really not helping your alcohol tolerance,” Tyler says, catching him automatically by the elbow before he topples sideways.
Mark straightens with exaggerated dignity. “I can walk a straight line. Watch this," he announces, suddenly taking off to run toward the water at full speed.
Tyler stares after him. “What is he doing?”
Nora grins at him. “The right thing.” And she takes off after him, immediately screaming when the freezing water hits her legs.
Noah watches them for exactly two seconds before shaking his head. “Fuck it. She’s only getting married once.” And he runs after them too.
Nora, already waist-deep beside Mark now, turns back toward the beach with both arms raised. “C’MON GUYS!”
Josh turns to look at Tyler, amusement already written all over his face, already undoing his shirt buttons. “I’m not ruining this one,” he says.
Tyler watches him pull the shirt off and toss it onto the sand beside his shoes before running after them. He exhales, shaking his head, while farther behind them Iris lingers near the dunes, camera already lifted to her face. He walks toward the shoreline more carefully than the others, letting the water reach him in increments. When the first wave hits his feet, he recoils instantly. “Guys, it’s cold!”
“It’s all in the head!” Mark yells back.
He takes a few steps forward, still debating whether he actually wants to go farther in.
“And here,” Mark announces over the sound of the waves, “we observe the rare Midwestern emo in his natural habitat.”
Tyler groans instantly. “No.”
“Notice how he approaches the water with deep suspicion—”
“It’s freezing.”
“—a defensive instinct developed after years of emotional repression in the suburbs of Ohio.”
“I’m going to drown you.”
Tyler notices Josh turning around in the water. The smile on his face says he definitely has something up his sleeve. He takes a step back instinctively. “Don’t even think about it, Josh.”
Josh only grins wider before he starts running. Tyler barely has time to react before Josh reaches him, grabbing him around the waist and dragging him off balance.
“Hey—!” Tyler laughs despite himself, pushing uselessly at his shoulders. “You are not throwing me in the water—”
Josh commits anyway. The impact knocks the breath straight out of him. Freezing water crashes over his head and for a second all Tyler can hear is his own startled laughter breaking through the shock of it.
He surfaces coughing, pushing wet hair back out of his face. “Josh, serio—”
Where the hell is he?
Tyler blinks seawater out of his eyes, turning in confusion. “Where did you—”
That’s when he feels it again — a sudden tug at his legs, the ground vanishing. He yelps as he’s lifted clean out of the water, laughter breaking out of him, and a second later Josh bursts back up through the surface with him thrown over his shoulder. Water streams down both of them while Josh steadies himself against the tide.
Tyler grabs instinctively at the back of his neck. “Put me down!”
Josh laughs. “Whatever you want, Majesty.”
Josh drops him back into the water, but Tyler doesn’t pull away. His arms loop around Josh’s shoulders on instinct, catching him from behind, pulling himself in until there’s no space left between them except the shifting cold of the sea. Josh adjusts without comment, steadying them both, letting him stay. Now he can feel him properly — the heat of his body beneath the cold water, solid and real. His heart is beating so hard in his chest; he sinks into it, and briefly thinks he never wants to let go.
“Comfy back there?” Josh asks.
"Very much so," Tyler replies, tightening his grip, as if that’s clearer than words.
Noah calls from the shore, “C’mon, Iris! Join us!”
Tyler turns his head just enough to see Iris with her camera. She’s not even looking through it anymore, just watching him and Josh, finger still resting on the shutter.
There’s a small pause where she doesn’t move. Then she lowers the camera, revealing the huge smile spread across her face. “I’m working.”
Josh, still holding Tyler’s weight on his back, calls out, “That’s just an excuse!”
“You’ll thank me in a few years,” she says, “when you have all these memories because of me.”
The Third Year Apart, nine years ago
October
By the time the show lets out, the floor of Newport feels like it has absorbed several hundred people’s worth of heat and noise into its walls, the old building holding onto the echo of the concert even after the lights have come up and the crowd has started pouring toward the exit. Tyler is standing near the side doors with a flashlight hanging loosely from his wrist and a radio clipped at his hip that has not stopped crackling for the better part of four hours, his black staff shirt sticking slightly between his shoulder blades from the warmth of the room and the constant movement of the shift. Newport never really settles into one atmosphere for long; every night bends differently depending on the artist, the crowd, how drunk people decide to get before they even arrive, whether the audience wants to mosh, cry or stand perfectly still with their hands wrapped around plastic cups.
Tonight’s crowd had been mostly harmless, which by Newport standards already qualifies as a good shift. One guy had nearly passed out halfway through the opener and needed to be guided toward the lobby before he actually hit the floor, and later Tyler had spent a solid ten minutes trying to de-escalate two girls arguing over a jacket neither of them actually owned, but compared to the time someone threw up directly onto the stairs during a sold-out punk show last month, it barely registers as eventful.
Around him, the rest of the staff moves through the familiar choreography of closing, checking for phones, jackets and abandoned drinks, stacking stools near the bar, shouting over the music still humming faintly through the speakers while roadies begin tearing equipment apart near the stage.
Tyler bends briefly to pick up a crumpled flyer near the front before making his way back toward the lobby, where the cold from outside slips in every time the doors open. A couple people linger near the merch table, reluctant to fully let the night end, while others stand around under the marquee lighting waiting for rides with flushed cheeks.
“Tyler?”
He looks up to see someone from campus heading toward him through the thinning crowd, a guy from one of his classes whose name takes him a second to remember.
“Eric, right?”
The guy grins immediately, clearly pleased he got it right.
“Yeah. Didn’t know you worked here, man.”
Tyler shrugs lightly. “Yeah, two years and still counting.”
They talk for another minute or two, mostly about the show, about midterms, about how everybody already looks exhausted and it’s only October, and then Eric mentions a party happening Friday night somewhere off-campus near Indianola, apparently hosted by people Tyler vaguely recognizes but has never actually spoken to.
“You should come,” Eric says.
Tyler smiles. “Can I bring people?”
“Yeah, obviously.”
By the time Tyler finally clocks out nearly half an hour later and steps properly into the cold night air outside Newport, Columbus feels damp with early autumn. As he walks toward the bus stop, he pulls out his phone and opens the group chat he shares with Mark and Iris.
Tyler: got invited to a party friday if either of u want to come
Mark answers first, unsurprisingly.
Mark: Depends, is there free alcohol?
Tyler: probably
Mark: I’m in
Tyler smiles to himself before another notification appears.
Iris: Can’t :( Hanging out with Aaron that night
Tyler: ohhh mysterious man returns
Iris: Shut up
Iris: But come by the darkroom this week if you can
Iris: I need to show you something
Tyler: sure, when?
Iris: Thursday night?
The bus pulls up before he can answer immediately, brakes hissing against the curb as Tyler steps aboard with one last glance at the screen still glowing faintly in his hand.
Outside, the marquee lights of Newport remain bright against the dark street behind him, the venue already swallowing the last remains of the night whole again.
🌊 ✈️ 🌊 ✈️ 🌊
It’s Thursday night. After spending a few hours working on an assignment at the library, Tyler makes his way to meet Iris at the lab.
On the walk over, he tries calling her to know if she is already there, but it barely rings before dropping straight to voicemail, which tells him what he needs to know. There is no signal once you go far enough down into the art building, and especially not in the basement labs, where the walls are too thick and the network simply doesn’t reach.
Once he get to the building, he passes through the upper corridors first, quieter now at night, a dance studio still running behind glass on one side of the hall where bodies move in repetition under muted music. Further down, someone is playing piano in a practice room. By the time he reaches the stairs leading down, the sound of everything above him starts to thin out, replaced by the hum of fluorescent lights and the cooler, denser air of the lower level.
The lab is not one room but several connected spaces, and he enters through the first one. Shelves line the walls with equipment, paper and chemicals, labelled and slightly worn from use, and in the corner a cupboard stands half-open, filled with large bottles of developing solution and fixer that carry a faint sharp smell even from across the room. There are still a few students scattered around at this hour, familiar faces he recognizes from the other evenings he has spent here waiting for Iris or watching her work, all of them absorbed in their own quiet routines. Nobody speaks much. Most are focused on negatives held against glowing light panels or prints spread carefully across tables under soft lamps, leaning in with the kind of concentration that makes the whole room feel slower. He has always liked that about this place: the absence of unnecessary noise. After long days filled with people, classes, movement and constant sound, the silence here never feels empty, only calm.
He doesn’t see Iris in here, which means she is already inside the darkroom.
Before entering he taps lightly on the first door of the small intermediary space, listening for any sound that would indicate that the second door is open or that someone is still moving through it, because even a brief flash of light at the wrong moment can ruin someone’s work. There is a rhythm to the darkroom that everyone respects. He doesn’t hear anything back, so he pushes through and closes the door behind him, finding himself in pitch dark in the in-between space. Then, he taps the second door to make sure no one’s behind it, and opens it when he doesn’t hear anything back either.
The change is immediate. The world narrows into red light and shadow, everything outside disappearing as soon as the door closes behind him, and the air inside is warmer, heavier, carrying the chemical scent of film development and damp paper, mixed with the quiet, steady sound of water running somewhere in the back where prints are being rinsed.
There is a large central bench with shallow trays arranged in a line, each filled with different chemical solutions where the prints are developed step by step, and around the edges of the room are smaller workstations fitted with enlargers and scanners, where people work in concentrated silence, adjusting focus, sliding photo paper carefully into place, studying negatives through small viewing scopes before exposing the image they want to print. Most of the movement happens quietly and precisely, interrupted only by the soft rustle of paper, the low hum of the machines, or the occasional instruction murmured under someone’s breath.
It feels almost like stepping into a different kind of time. Slower, contained, controlled. And in the middle of it, Iris is there.
She is standing at one of the enlargers near the wall, her attention fixed on the glowing surface in front of her, the machine projecting a soft rectangular light across the table while she leans in slightly, looking through the small viewing scope she uses to examine grain and focus, her hand adjusting something with slow precision before she pauses, checks, adjusts again, entirely absorbed in the process in a way that makes her feel both distant and completely herself at the same time. He doesn’t interrupt her straight away. He just watches her for a moment, quietly settled into her element like she belongs to this room as much as the red light does.
“Hey,” Tyler whispers after a moment.
She glances up immediately, not startled, just aware, like she had already half-registered him being there.
“Hey,” she says, already turning back to her work, “wait a sec, I want to show you something.”
And then she is gone again into the process, switching off the main light of her enlarger, sliding a filter into place, taking a sheet of paper from a stack beside her, her movements precise in a way that makes it clear she has done this a hundred times, before she presses a button and the light flickers briefly back on like a controlled breath of brightness in the middle of the dark room.
“Come here,” she says as she approaches the central bench.
He steps closer. She lowers the paper carefully into the first tray, and for a while nothing seems to happen, just liquid and waiting, but slowly, gradually, an image begins to surface. At first it is nothing more than shapes. Then contrast. Then light pulling definition out of the blankness. And as it appears fully, Tyler feels a warmth spread through his chest and up his neck, sudden enough that he becomes aware of his own breathing changing.
“I finally took the time to develop the films I took this summer,” Iris says quietly, watching the tray with the same careful attention she gives everything.
“It’s so beautiful, Iris,” he says, eyes still on the picture.
She smiles faintly, still focused on the print. “Well, you guys are beautiful.”
He looks at her properly then, but she is already moving the photograph forward with a pair of tongs into the next tray, her attention half on the print, half on the clock on the wall, tracking time the way she has learned to, because here everything is measured in seconds.
The black and white image itself is already clear now, sitting fully formed in the tray, stable under the red light. Him and Josh. They are close in it, in the way they often are, but it feels different seen like this, outside of his own perspective. There is no awareness of being watched in it, no adjustment, no second thought. It’s just the way they exist.
Josh is not looking at the camera. He is turned slightly away, caught in something happening just out of frame, and Tyler is looking at him instead of anything else, completely, as if nothing else around has successfully asked for his attention. There is movement around them in the photo—blurred figures, half-finished gestures, the suggestion of noise and activity just beyond what the frame has decided to keep, but none of it seems to register for him. It is all happening at the edges, irrelevant.
Iris watches him for a second, then glances back down at the tray as she moves the print forward again. “I wanted to ask you,” she says casually, “if i could submit it for the exhibition in a couple of months.”
He blinks slightly, pulled out of it. “Exhibition?”
She nods. “There’s a multidisciplinary exhibition I’m gonna take part in. They ask all the different art departments, everyone picks one piece that fits the theme.”
He looks back at the photo again. “What’s the theme?”
Iris doesn’t answer immediately, because she is watching the print move into its final stage, the image now fully formed, stable, real. Then she says, simply, “Home.”
He looks up at her, but she is still focused on the tray, like she already knows what she has said and does not need to witness his reaction.
Then she adds, “I don’t know. You just look like you belong there, you know. It’s not about a place, but people. I wasn’t even thinking about the exhibition when I was looking through my film, but when I saw this one, it just hit me.”
Iris has a sense of understanding of him that always catches him off guard. She’s right. Home hasn’t been something he has been able to draw a clean line around for a long time.
It used to be his family home, with his parents and his siblings, until it stopped feeling like somewhere he could stay without thinking about what he was supposed to hold inside it. After his mother died, the house changed in ways that were never spoken about properly, and he became the one who stayed steady when his father couldn’t, too young to understand where his own feelings were supposed to go in all of that. And when he tried to turn to church for something familiar, something he had always been taught would hold him, it had already started to slip away from him too, prayers met with silence that slowly turned comfort into distance, until even that stopped feeling like somewhere he belonged.
Iris was there through all of it, as a witness to the way his idea of home slowly collapsed.
He realises he is seen in a way he has always craved. And it should feel like relief, but instead it settles somewhere uneasy under his ribs, because being understood so clearly leaves no place to hide. Still, he doesn’t step away from it, because there are people who don’t ask him to shrink himself to fit beside them. What he feels here, in the darkroom with Iris, and what he sees in the image with Josh, and what he knows is waiting just outside the frame with all of them, is the same thing in different forms: the possibility of not having to become someone else in order to belong.
🌊 ✈️ 🌊 ✈️ 🌊
When they leave the lab later, the air outside feels almost overwhelming at first. It’s colder, louder, too full after the sealed hush of the darkroom; campus feels brighter by comparison. They linger outside for a moment just to adjust.
Eventually, they drift toward a food truck near the edge of campus, more out of habit than hunger, Iris insisting they split something. They end up with a pizza between them, folded slices wrapped in paper, eating as they walk slowly through campus paths that are still busy with late-night groups and scattered conversations that blur together in the background. They talk between bites.
“When’s the last time you visited your dad? Or even called him?” she asks.
Tyler shoots her a look over the edge of his slice, chewing first before answering. “I don’t want to call him just so he can spend the whole time reminding me I never call. It’s kind of a perfect system, really. The less I call, the more he complains, and the more he complains, the less I want to call. What’s the reasoning there?”
“I’m just saying, Ty,” Iris replies, unbothered, “the longer you leave it, the worse it gets. What are you actually avoiding?”
“What are you, my shrink?” he mutters, but there’s no real bite to it.
She huffs a small laugh, then glances at him more seriously for a second. “No. But you know you should probably do something about that.”
Yes, he knows.
“You’ve been carrying all of that by yourself long enough,” she adds.
“I know,” he says after a beat. “It’s just been a lot with school and work.”
Iris nods, but doesn’t look convinced. “Promise me you’ll take care of it.”
He exhales through his nose. “Yes. I promise.”
By the time they part ways, he is walking alone with the last piece of pizza in his hand. He still has a bit of walking distance to his dorm, and it is only then, in the quiet that settles back in around him, that something from the evening follows him. After tonight with Iris, after everything that was said, he feels like calling him.
So he takes out his phone and scrolls to the contact without really thinking about it. It barely has time to ring before it is picked up.
“Hey there,” Josh says.
November
Thanksgiving at his father’s house is already in motion when he gets there. His youngest brother nearly crashes into him in the hallway before noticing who it is.
“Tyler!”
“Hey, Jay.”
The kid grins before disappearing again, socks sliding across hardwood floors toward the living room where football is already on. The whole house smells like food and cinnamon. His father appears a few seconds later from the dining room carrying a stack of plates.
“There he is,” he says, and there is something genuine in it that makes Tyler feel, immediately, how long it has been since he was last here.
“Hey, Dad.”
His father sets the plates down to pull him briefly into a hug. “Glad you made it.”
And for a moment, Tyler is glad too.
Lunch drifts into the afternoon the way holiday meals do, time loosening and expanding as people move between rooms with drinks in hand, children weaving between furniture. Around the table, conversations orbit familiar topics with almost ritual precision: jobs, church attendance, rising grocery prices, engagements, somebody’s cousin trying to buy a house too young, somebody else trying to have a baby too late.
One of his uncles looks at him across the table. “Senior year now, right?”
“Yeah,” Tyler says.
“That’s good,” his uncle nods. “Got a girl waiting for you after graduation yet?”
Tyler smiles into his glass before setting it down. “No. Not currently.”
“Well,” one aunt says, reaching for the rolls, “you better figure it out before all the good ones are gone.”
A polite laugh moves around the table.
Tyler laughs too because that is what everybody else is doing. “Working on it,” he says.
He tries to picture it sometimes: a wife, kids, a house that feel stable in the way his stopped feeling after his mother died. It sounds right.
“We haven’t seen you at church in a while,” his father says eventually. Tyler knew this was coming. “Have you been going near campus?”
“Some,” Tyler answers, which is not entirely true. “I’ve been meaning to go more.”
His father nods slowly, satisfied enough with the answer not to press.
“Good,” he says quietly. “I think it helps to stay connected.”
Tyler nods back before looking down at his plate again. Connected. Right. He hasn’t felt connected for a while; he doesn’t even know why he keeps trying so hard. Maybe because it’s something so familiar, something that used to hold him. His fingers brush the fabric of his shirt where the cross sits against his chest. An attempt at reconnection, maybe. A reminder of his questions, more likely.
It’s only when someone farther down the table asks what he did last summer that his enthusiasm surfaces. He starts telling them about the six pack getting together for two weeks at Mark’s parents house and what they got up to.
“Nora and Josh got stuck in the room for hours and—”
“Oooh Nora, is there something going on there?” one of his aunts interrupts, smiling over the rim of her wine glass.
Tyler smiles because there is nothing else to do. “Uh no, no,” he says. “One of my best friends, that’s all.”
And before the conversation can recover, she asks his younger brother about the girl he brought to dinner last month, attention shifting away from him, as if his story has reached its natural end. He leans back slightly in his chair after that, quieter again, listening to everyone talk over each other while the noise of the room swells around him.
February
The party is already overflowing by the time Tyler and Mark get there, music loud enough to make the front steps vibrate faintly beneath their shoes while people crowd shoulder to shoulder in the doorway trying to get inside without spilling drinks on each other.
“It's absolutely packed,” Mark mutters beside him.
Inside, the house feels overheated almost immediately, every room occupied by some slightly different version of the same scene: people shouting conversations over music, bodies leaning close together on couches, somebody drunk enough that they’ve become too honest and are trying to be their friend’s therapist.
Some Drake song is playing from blown-out speakers in the living room. Tyler grimaces instinctively.
He quickly falls into the familiar rhythm of college parties he has spent the last three years learning how to navigate: drifting between groups, accepting drinks he probably does not need, getting pulled into conversations halfway through and slipping out before they properly finish. He plays beer pong in the dining room with a group of people from one of Mark’s film history classes and wins mostly because the other team is too drunk to aim properly.
At some point he ends up in the kitchen talking music with a guy wearing a Radiohead hoodie who seems personally offended Tyler has never listened properly to one specific live album. The conversation breaks apart when someone squeezes between them looking for vodka, and by then Mark has already disappeared upstairs with a girl.
Tyler checks his phone once while leaning against the counter. He opens his conversation with Iris and stares at the unread text.
Tyler: Are you coming?
She told him she’d try, but there’s still no reply. She’s probably with Aaron.
“Hey, Tyler, you in?” someone calls.
He looks up to see Eric holding a blunt between his fingers.
“Oh, perfect,” Tyler says, locking his phone.
He follows the group outside, grateful for the cold air after hours inside the packed house. The first time Tyler smoked had been with Noah during one of their summer trips, all six of them passing a badly rolled joint around while sitting on the dock behind Iris’s aunt’s house, laughing at absolutely nothing until Tyler’s stomach hurt from it. Back then, he'd expected to hate it.
They pass the blunt around in rotation for a while, sitting directly in the grass despite the cold, somewhere isolated far enough from the house to not get too much intention. He is having a better time than he was inside, shoulders relaxed beneath his jacket, the constant static in his head softening. Eventually, though, people start drifting back inside one by one, drawn back toward the warmth and noise and music, until the backyard grows quieter.
That is how he ends up staying out there with Kate.
He knows her from around campus and other parties, enough that they always say hi when they cross paths, enough mutual friends that familiarity settled in naturally a long time ago. He has always thought she was cute. More importantly, she is funny. They talk just the two of them for a bit the conversation slipping sideways into increasingly strange territory in the way conversations do when you’re high. And she has the kind of laugh that makes him want to keep finding reasons to hear it again.
At some point her fingers brush absentmindedly against the skin just above his wrist while she talks, and something inside him responds immediately to the contact, a sudden sharp awareness of how long it has actually been since someone touched him like that.
Yes, much to his own surprise, he is touch-starved.
He has never been naturally touchy in the way other people seem to be, never the kind of person constantly draped over friends or reaching instinctively for physical affection, but college has slowly taught him that there is a difference between not seeking touch and quietly missing it anyway. Lately, he has started understanding how deeply comforting simple affection can feel once he actually allows himself access to it.
But he has always felt a gap. Growing up, when guys at school started obsessing over girls and hookups and sex like it had suddenly become the central operating system of their personalities overnight, Tyler mostly remembered feeling confused by the sheer intensity of it all. He liked his friends. He liked closeness. That had always felt more immediate to him somehow. And it made him feel odd more than once. Especially because eventually even the church boys caught up to everybody else, meanwhile Tyler kept waiting for himself to feel whatever everyone else seemed so naturally certain they were feeling.
Kate kisses him eventually, slow enough that he has room to pull away if he wants to, but he doesn’t. He kisses her back immediately, one hand settling instinctively at her waist while the damp cold of the grass presses through his jeans beneath him. And for a while, it works. He likes this part. The weed helps too, quieting the endless motion of his thoughts enough that he can stay inside the feeling instead of immediately stepping outside of it to analyze himself.
But eventually the line always arrives. That moment, the one where things begin to move toward something more expected. That’s usually when self-consciousness crashes back into him, and he feels himself pulling away. At that point, his thoughts surge all at once, too fast to even separate properly from each other, every sensation suddenly becoming something he is observing instead of experiencing.
“You wanna go back to mine?” Kate asks softly against his mouth.
Tyler hesitates just long enough to feel embarrassed by it. He tries to shift naturally toward the things he knows he’s good with, and good at.
“I kinda wanna stay here,” he whispers, fingers trailing carefully along the fabric at her waist before slipping higher beneath her dress. “Or… I don’t know. We can keep doing this.”
“Okay,” she says, before kissing him again.
She doesn’t seem disappointed by the direction they’re going, fingers still tangled loosely in the fabric of his shirt while he kisses his way slowly back down her neck, and for a little while he manages to stay inside the moment without overthinking it. He’s good at this part: giving pleasure, learning reactions, rhythms, details. There is something grounding in focusing entirely on another person’s body instead of being trapped inside his own head. And she meets him there; her hands moving over his skin and getting bolder.
But even then, another thought keeps surfacing stubbornly through the haze.
Mark hooking up with a girl right this second;
Iris cancelling plans because she is with Aaron;
Nora mentioning a trip with Ellie’s family over the phone weeks ago;
Josh laughing while recounting some ridiculous hookup story that Tyler had smiled through despite the strange twist of discomfort it left behind afterward.
People moving forward toward relationships, intimacy, lives that seem to fit them naturally, while he keeps feeling like he missed some invisible lesson everybody else understood years ago.
April
The call comes a little after two in the morning. Tyler answers before he’s fully awake, because Josh’s name lighting up his screen at this hour without warning has rarely meant anything good these days.
“Hey,” he says, already reaching blindly for the lamp beside his bed before Josh even speaks, warm yellow light flooding slowly across the room as he pushes himself upright against the headboard.
For a second there’s only breathing on the other end, uneven enough that Tyler is fully awake before anything is said.
“Josh?”
“Sorry,” Josh says eventually, and Tyler doesn’t like how wrong his voice sounds. “I know it’s late.”
“It’s fine,” Tyler answers immediately, already more alert now, pressing the phone more firmly against his ear. “What’s going on?”
There’s a break in Josh’s breathing then. When he finally speaks again it’s already cracked. “She—” he starts, then stops, like the rest of it is stuck somewhere behind his teeth. “She said I left them, Ty. She said I just left them there.” And that’s when he fully breaks.
“Hey,” Tyler murmurs, “I’m here.”
What comes out of Josh next is fractured, not fully linear, the kind of explanation that is really just repetition of the same thought from different angles: a fight with his sister, words said too quickly to be taken back, accusations about their parents’ divorce, about how fast Josh left home, how easy it must have been for him to walk away and not look back, about the younger ones still in that house, still in the middle of it.
“I keep thinking maybe she’s right,” he says eventually. “Maybe I just—left too fast, like I didn’t care enough to stay, like I didn’t think they’d need me and I should’ve known, I should’ve—”
“Josh,” Tyler cuts in firmly enough to interrupt the loop in his head, “stop. Just—stay with me, yeah?”
Josh goes quiet immediately, the silence settling in its place, not empty but attentive, like he’s finally listening instead of running ahead of himself.
Tyler exhales, choosing his words carefully. “You’re not responsible for holding everything together,” he says, voice softer but steady. “People say things in the heat of it. It doesn’t mean there isn’t truth in what she feels, but it also doesn’t mean you’re automatically in the wrong for leaving, or that staying would’ve fixed everything either.”
“Yeah,” Josh says, but it doesn’t sound like agreement so much as exhaustion.
Tyler lets a pause sit between them before continuing. “And hey, she’ll come down. You guys can still talk. Figure it out properly when it’s not all still hot. She knows you care, Josh. She’s just feeling a lot. You all are.”
“Yeah,” Josh repeats, more assured.
“Did you talk to Noah or Nora?” Tyler asks quickly so Josh doesn’t tip back into spiral.
“Yeah, I went to Noah’s after it happened. I couldn’t be alone. But then I came home and I went to bed and I couldn’t sleep and I just kept thinking about it and—” he stops again, breath catching, “I don’t know, I just called you.”
“Hey, you don’t have to justify calling me.”
“I’m calling so late,” Josh says, deflated. “I just— I tried really hard not to call.”
“Why?”
“I don’t want to be a burden.”
“You can never be a burden to me,” Tyler says, without hesitation. “You know you can always call me.”
Josh hums quietly, and his next words are barely a whisper. “I just wish you were here.”
Tyler closes his eyes tightly, because there is something about that sentence that makes the distance between them feel more physical than ever. His chest aches with it suddenly, sharp enough that he has to press his free hand briefly against his ribs. He glances up at the framed photograph on the wall across from his bed. The picture of him and Josh that Iris had taken is looking back at him. She'd kept it after her exhibition before kindly gifting him for his birthday.
“Yeah,” he says, “me too.”
After a moment, Tyler tries to come up with other subjects of conversation to keep Josh out of his own head, which seems to work.
“How is Iris?” Josh asks. “I couldn’t help noticing she hasn’t been as active in the groupchat.”
“Honestly? I don’t know. I barely see her lately. She spends a lot of time with her boyfriend.”
“That bothering you?”
Tyler lets out a small breath and shrugs, then realizes too late that Josh can’t see it. “I mean,” he says, “I know she’s allowed to have a life.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
A faint, tired laugh escapes him despite himself. “I just didn’t think I’d care this much, I guess,” he admits. “I know it’s selfish.”
“No,” Josh says immediately.
“No?”
“You’re allowed to miss your friend.”
The conversation moves on, peppered with comfortable silences. Josh yawns at some point, and Tyler hears it like a signal.
“You still there?”
“Yeah,” Josh murmurs.
Tyler shifts lower under the blankets, phone still pressed to his ear, the room dim except for the lamp he never turned off. “You wanna stay on the phone?”
Josh lets out a tired breath that almost sounds relieved. “Yeah.”
Neither of them says much after that. Tyler sinks further into the blankets and lets the weight of the night pull him under while Josh’s breathing evens out softly through the speaker beside him. And somewhere between one sentence and the next, they both fall asleep, still connected.
This Summer, Wedding week
Thursday night
By the time they finally drag themselves out of the water, everyone is shivering.
Mark is still pretending he’s fine despite the fact that his teeth are visibly chattering, Nora wrapped around Noah’s side while loudly complaining about hypothermia, and Josh is running both hands through his soaked hair as he walks back up the beach.
Somewhere during the chaos, Iris had apparently called Ellie and Lindsay to bring towels down from the hotel. Mark immediately throws half his towel over Tyler’s head.
Tyler shoves the wet fabric away from his face. “You’re unbearable.”
“You love me.”
“Love is a strong word.”
Josh laughs quietly beside them while rubbing water from his arms. He reaches over and tugs briefly at the soaked sleeve sticking uncomfortably to Tyler’s arm. “You’re gonna freeze in that.”
Tyler looks down at himself. “I’m aware. You’re the one who threw me in the water fully clothed, may I remind you.”
“C’mere,” Josh says.
He catches Tyler by the wrist and pulls him closer without waiting for an answer, wrapping part of the towel around both of them instead and tugging him against the warmth of his chest. The heat hits almost immediately after the freezing water.
Tyler lets out a quiet laugh through his nose, instinctively sliding his arms around Josh’s waist beneath the towel. “That’s nice.”
“Yeah, no shit,” Josh mutters. He keeps the towel held around both of them while the wind moves harder across the beach now, all cold salt air and damp fabric and lingering adrenaline.
And suddenly Tyler is aware again of everything he had managed to stop thinking about for the past hour.
The conversation waiting for him.
The possibility of ruining this.
The terrifying, impossible hope that maybe he wouldn’t.
And still, despite all of it, he melts further into Josh’s warmth without thinking twice.
The easy way he always reaches for him.
How right this feels.
The shutter clicks. Tyler turns his head just in time to see Iris lowering her camera with a look on her face that feels dangerously fond.
“Still using us to climb the art industry ladder?” he asks.
She grins immediately. “You’ve always been my best muses.”