Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Michaela appears in her doorway wearing a barely-concealed look of irritation.

“Hey,” she starts, although the sound of Christopher’s hysterical wailing does a decent job of drowning her out. She adjusts her volume accordingly, until she’s almost shouting and probably only upsetting him more. “I’m trying to be understanding of this whole baby roommate thing, and you know I admire single motherhood, but can you calm him down or something? I need to study-”

Laurel swears her eardrums burst half an hour ago, and now there’s only a tinny ringing sound reverberating around her skull in place of where her thoughts should be. She’s never seen Christopher like this, inconsolable and screaming his tiny lungs out and making her want to do the same; she’d expected an adjustment period – first night in a new place – but she hadn’t expected this: crying like the world is ending, hiccupping sobs and long, hoarse howls, so loud she’s surprised his vocal cords haven’t snapped.

Like something is missing. Like he’s missing someone.

She’s too drained to do anything other than stare at Michaela and sigh. “What do you think I’m trying to do here?”

Michaela steps inside and folds her arms, looking very much like she’s rethinking her current living situation. She peers down at Christopher like a small alien just beamed down from space, and Laurel wants to scoff; everyone without babies always fawns over babies right up until their screaming reaches DEFCON 1 and they hand them back like they’re suddenly stricken with the bubonic plague. Everything is all oooh’s and aww’s until the crying starts.

“What’s wrong with him? Does he… do this all the time? Oh, God, please tell me he doesn’t-”

“No,” Laurel grumbles, massaging her temples. “No, I – I have no idea what’s wrong. He doesn’t even want his stuffed giraffe, and that thing is, like, an elephant tranquilizer for him usually.”

“What’s different about tonight?” Michaela asks, and when she does, a look of understanding sweeps her features. “You think he misses…”

She doesn’t say his name. But she doesn’t have to.

Frank is as present in his absence as he’s ever been. Even more so, somehow.

The thought has been crossing her mind ever since he started up on this fit about an hour ago and refused to settle down. She hadn’t done anything different about his routine, even set up his nursery in the same general layout, fed him his favorite mushy pea puree and done everything right – and yet one thing is missing, one thing no amount of stuffed giraffes or pea puree can replace. He’d been around Frank near constantly for the first few months of his life; of course it would make sense he’d have some sort of separation anxiety, sense a change. He seems to miss him desperately, as if crying out over and over for him to come and getting only her sorry ass instead.

He’s already going to have trauma from a broken family before he’s even one-year-old. Clearly she’s doing a fantastic job as a mother so far.

“Yeah,” Laurel mutters, that familiar mix of guilt and confusion swirling in her chest, and that’s all she can bring herself to say.

She misses him, too, and she hates herself for it. She always realizes things too late, like a knee-jerk reflex triggering way after the hammer comes down, a clock eternally running an hour behind. She’s the walking, talking embodiment of don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone. She’s fucking stupid – but worse, she’s predictably fucking stupid.

“Can’t you call him?” Michaela presses. “Have him come over or something, work his baby magic?”

“I just took his heart and smashed it into a million pieces, Michaela, I cannot call him. Just – I don’t know, invest in earplugs. Take pleasure in the fact I’m probably going to fail all my classes so at least your ranking will go up.”

Michaela huffs but makes herself scarce, retreating back downstairs and leaving them alone once more with a surprisingly minimal amount of protest. It’s not like her, but Laurel doesn’t dwell on it long, instead turning back to Christopher and taking him into her arms, shushing him gently. That only seems to aggravate him more – the nonverbal, baby equivalent of Don’t tell me to calm down – but she persists, offering him his giraffe and his rattle and his blanket and damn near every item he owns and being rejected each time, only answered with more screams.

She’s at her wit’s end. Miles past her wit’s end, really, because she hadn’t realized just how hard subtracting Frank from this equation would be, and none of her new roommates have proven to be very adequate co-parents, not that she’d ever expected that of them. She’d been so sure she could do this alone, but her nerves are frayed, body strung out with exhaustion after only one day. Her head feels full of lead, heavy as hell.

And then, to top it all off, there’s another knock on her door.

Immediately, she snaps, storming over and yanking it open. “Michaela, it’s not gonna take much to make me murder someone right now, so you really do not-”

She goes still the instant the door swings open. Because it isn’t Michaela there on the other side, the intended recipient of her homicidal rage.

Instead Frank is staring back at her with raised eyebrows, caught off guard by the aggressive welcome, and she simultaneously slumps and tenses up, the wind rushing out of her like a sad, deflated, sleep-deprived balloon. Sort of similar to the way he’d looked down on one knee that night, holding out his ring and his heart for her and watching her refuse to take it. Watching her walk away. She’s been replaying the sequence in her head so many times that seeing him standing before her now feels almost surreal.

“What’re you-” Laurel swallows, her throat tightening. “What’re you doing here?”

“Michaela called me,” he tells her, glancing over at the distraught baby in her arms. “Said he’s hysterical, won’t calm down. Thinks maybe it’s ‘cause he’s missin’ me.”

“I-” She exhales sharply. “I can handle it, Frank, it’s fine-”

There’s something markedly different about the way he carries himself, she notices, something empty and hollow in his eyes. He didn’t greet her with a smile. He’s just looking at her, cold and indifferent, and she’d never realized how awful apathy could feel.

She’d never imagined that one day he could look at her and feel… nothing.

“She wouldn’t take no for an answer.” He shoves his hands into his pockets. “I’m here now. Might as well give it a shot.”

Laurel sighs, but steps aside anyway, letting him in and passing Christopher over to him, the transfer as effortless as anything; something they’d become so used to doing. Of course, miracle of miracles, the exact second Frank takes him into his arms and kisses his head and greets him with a soft, lilting Hey, little man, the baby goes completely silent.

“Oh my God,” she groans, grateful and endlessly frustrated all at once – but mostly grateful. She runs her hands over her face. “Unbelievable.”

“What’s the haps, buddy?” Frank asks, pulling back slightly to look him in the eyes. He shifts him up, bouncing him gently and smiling an easy smile as he sinks down into the rocking chair by the window. “C’mon, what’re you cryin’ for? You got one heck of a good life. All you gotta do is eat and sleep and let your ma love on ya. Don’t go cryin’ – that’s ideal.”

It’s uncanny, the way the baby lights up when he hears his voice. How happy he is to see him and how obviously he loves him. It makes her want to cry.

Like this wasn’t already hard enough. Of course he had to come fix everything and make it harder.

“He’s been crying for – God, I don’t even know.” Laurel finally plops down onto the bed, exhausted and trying to remember where she’d stashed her Advil, wondering if Connor has something stronger. “I lost track of time after hour one.”

Frank looks up at her only briefly, focusing most of his attention on Christopher and cooing to him, “What’s wrong, huh? You miss me? You got your ma right here, I’m not all that. But if you ever need me, you just gimme a call, okay? I’m never far away. I’m always with you.” He points to his chest, his heart, as if the baby can understand. “I’m always in here.”

Laurel melts a little at the sight of them together despite herself. “I’m chopped liver compared to you, I guess.”

Again, her words get only a cursory glance. She can’t say she blames him, but it stings in a way she hadn’t anticipated, like rubbing a scabbing wound until it’s broken open and bleeding once more, then pouring a shitton of salt directly into it. Again – probably similar to the way he’d felt that night. She’d broken him in the cruelest way possible.

She deserves this, she knows. But that doesn’t make the salt-pouring feel any less painful.

Frank doesn’t say a word to her as they sit there in silence. He barely even acknowledges her, only murmuring soft encouragements to Christopher, then humming him a song that sounds vaguely like ‘Hotline Bling’; one of his favorites, for some reason Laurel will never understand. He’d just started singing it to him out of the blue one day and the baby had latched onto the melody – and although singing Drake as a lullaby is far from conventional, Laurel can’t help but find it endearing.

He likes that: being sung to. And she can’t sing for shit. Really, it doesn’t seem like she can do anything right.

They sit in silence for a while, half an hour or so, and she’s never heard a sound as beautiful as that silence, even though her ears are ringing and she has a splitting headache even the four Advil she popped probably won’t cure. It’s been chaos these past few days with the move, and she feels like she’s doing little more than sleepwalking through her life. All day today she’s felt as if something was missing, like the pain of a phantom limb, and now Chris has reminded her what that something is – because with Frank here now, everything feels right again, whole. It’s all wrong without him. She’s all wrong without him, and as she watches him cradle her son, she knows, with all the swiftness and brutality of a sucker punch to the stomach, that she loves him.

She loves him. And she ruined him, like she ruins everyone, and drove him away in the hopes that maybe, somehow, she could keep from ruining him more. And then she ruined him even more in the process.

Frank gets to his feet right then, having finally calmed Christopher until his hiccups and snuffles have faded, and walks him over to his crib, lowering him softly into it like she’s watched him do a hundred times. The baby isn’t asleep but he’s close, little eyelids fluttered shut, all cried out and down for the count. When Frank ducks back into the bedroom, he clears his throat, and she’s expecting him to stay, try to talk to her, say something. He always does.

Instead, he just goes for the door.

“I think I got him down. Probably just an adjustment period,” he tells her, all business all at once. He looks, in a way, like he isn’t letting himself feel anything, detachment as a defense mechanism – or maybe it’s that he simply has nothing left to feel. “I should get goin’.”

“Oh,” is all she says. “Uh, okay.”

She feels panicked, all at once, to see him leaving without hardly even looking her way; none of those soft, furtive glances when he thinks she can’t see, no long last sentimental looks. He heads for the door without any of that, and before she can think better of it she’s getting to her feet, hurrying after him down the stairs.

“I-” she cuts herself off, not knowing what to say and knowing she desperately needs to say something, although maybe she’s already done enough damage and this is just another round of salt-pouring. “Thanks, for coming over. You didn’t have to.”

He comes to a stop at their front door and turns, only facing her halfway; not fully, not like he usually would. His guarded stance isn’t lost on her, nor is the look in his eyes, all that warmth and affection gone from him, beaten out. She knows full well it was her who did the beating.

“I did it for him,” he says, but she hears the words he doesn’t say, which are, I didn’t do it for you.

Laurel gulps. “Still. Thank you. You can… stay the night, if you want.” She shifts beneath his gaze awkwardly, feeling like an ant under a magnifying glass slowly being burnt alive. “It’s late.”

There’s a sort of twisted amusement in his eyes, at that. “You don’t gotta pretend you want me to do that, Laurel.”

“I-” she blinks, taken aback at the anger in his voice, the raw hurt. “I’m not, I just-”

“You can cut the bullshit, okay? Just be real with me. For once.”

He spits the words like venom, and all she can do is stare. He’s never been angry with her like this. He doesn’t get angry with her, no matter what she does, but when she left she broke him – broke him like a filament of a lightbulb, invisible and irreparable and terribly final – and it’s only then, standing there looking him in the eyes, that she realizes just how final a break that was.

“That wasn’t bullshit, I was just asking if you wanted to stay-”

“Look. I’m tired of this,” he tells her, and he sounds it; hell, he looks it. He looks exhausted, but there’s a sort of emotionlessness to it. Weariness, on a level deeper than physical. “I’m tired of gettin’ the runaround. You pullin’ me in and then pushin’ me away whenever you feel like it. It’s killin’ me.”

She goes on the defensive at once, jaw clenched. “What, are you mad because I wouldn’t marry you? You knew I wasn’t ready for that, you knew I couldn’t say yes-”

“Ain’t about that, Laurel, and you know it. I’ve been-” He exhales, frustrated. “I’ve been tryin’ so hard. For so damn long. All I’ve done is try, and we both know it's not workin'.” His lips curl up into a horrible smirk, and she doesn’t recognize him. She’s never seen him look like this. “Must be nice. To have someone who keeps crawlin’ back. Keeps lettin’ you use ‘em over and over, whenever you bat your eyes. That’s all I ever was for you.” His voice is low and mournful, suddenly, so awfully sad it eats her alive. “Some kinda toy. Trained lapdog. Fool me twice, right?”

He’s wrong. He’s so wrong. She wants to scream at him how wrong he is, but even if she did she doesn’t think he would believe her, and so she retreats into silence because it’s the only weapon she has left. There are only so many stones you can throw at a dog before you scare it off, blind loyalty be damned. Only so many pushes you can give before someone pushes back.

He’s pushing back, now. And after she’s silent for the longest minute in the world, he gives one last shove.

“I’m just… I’m done, Laurel,” he says, more defeated than angry now. He’s giving up, she realizes with panic hardening like ice in her stomach. Surrendering. “I’m done.”

Silent, again. Silent like the deathly silence after a bomb detonates, the last few shockwaves of the explosion ripping through the air until quiet settles over the scorched earth. Every time she left him he tried desperately to make her stay, gave her everything over and over and over again, and all she did was take – and she has no goddamn clue how to give anything back. And now, he has nothing left to give.

She loves him. She doesn’t know how to tell him. She never has; even now, even when it counts.

Even now, when it’s her last chance.

“You said I never asked for anything in return. That I shoulda. But I didn’t need to,” he says, stopping at the door and giving her one last look, one last distant smile. He looks at her like she’s a memory already. “The only thing I wanted was you.”

The door closes behind him. And he feels, for the first time, well and truly gone.

Chapter Text

“There’s no moping in study group, Castillo.”

Laurel glances up from her notes as Connor sinks down on the couch next to her, propping his feet up on the coffee table. “I’m not moping.”

“Please,” Michaela jeers across from her, flipping through a textbook. They’re all gathered in the living room, sprawled out on the corner sectional in varying states of preparedness with their readings for class, and her voice breaks Laurel’s concentration, although she wasn’t concentrating very well to begin with. “It’s Mopetown, USA over here. And it better not be over what I think it is.”

Fine. She’ll admit it. She’s moping, and she doesn’t mope. Moping is not a thing she does, ever, because she’s learned not to dwell on things. Life is short. She’s nearly died two times in the last year. She doesn’t waste time moping.

But he’d said he was done, and there was a finality to it that she knows means it wasn’t a bluff. Done. Done with her. She’d never envisioned a future for herself in which Frank didn’t exist by default, in some capacity. In which he wasn’t at least waiting in the wings. She supposes she was stupid to think she could keep him there forever, expect him not to grow tired of it. Really, she’s surprised it took this long.

He said he would wait, and he meant that too, she knows. But he wasn’t going to wait forever.

“No,” she mutters, unconvincingly.

“Really?” Michaela deadpans, eyebrows raised into perfectly-plucked arcs. “So it’s not about Frank saying he was done with you last night?”

Connor’s ears perk up at that, and Oliver steps over to the couch just in time with a pot of coffee, eyes all alight at the potential for spilt tea.

“Frank said that?” Connor scoffs, and Laurel shoots a death-glare Michaela’s way.

“Michaela!”

“I wasn’t eavesdropping,” she says with a shrug as Oliver pours her a cup. “Voices carry, and my bedroom is on the first floor. Besides, we’re roommates now and communally raising a baby; we no longer have secrets.”

“Good on him for finally rediscovering his balls,” Connor snarks. “That dude was so whipped even I felt bad.”

Laurel closes her eyes and leans her head back, grimacing. “Can we please not talk about this?”

“Wait, why are you moping over Frank?” Oliver asks, confused. “Didn’t you say you didn’t love him and were just using him for… sex and mannying?”

She wilts at the barrage of questions. “I – yes, I said that, but I didn’t… mean it. Or, I don’t know.” Laurel sighs and lets him pour her a cup, drinking deeply and enjoying the pleasant scald. “I didn’t… realize it, until he wasn’t here anymore.”

Michaela looks amused. “Is this the whole I-didn’t-know-I-loved-him-until-it-was-too-late routine again? I mean, are you kidding?”

“Seriously,” Connor chimes in. “Let’s recap, shall we? This guy waits for you while you pop out another dude’s kid, stays with you in the hospital after, lives with you for months dicking you down on the regular and basically playing daddy – again, just so we’re clear, to another dude’s kid – asks you to marry him, and you just don’t realize you love him until he finally gets fed up and bails?”

“That’s-” Laurel exhales, frustrated and scrambling for some kind of higher ground here. “That is an oversimplification, okay-”

“Not gonna lie, I get why he’s frustrated,” Michaela huffs. “I mean, God, I’m frustrated.”

“Are you done roasting me now?” she sighs. “I would like to get back to studying, please.”

“Well, you’re not studying,” Connor retorts. “You’re moping. I guess I don’t blame you; he’s a prime piece of ass. Honestly, I’m proud of him for finally having some self-respect. The doormat schtick was getting a little sad.”

She can’t argue with them. Connor and Michaela have such a relentless way of hurling jabs in tandem that all she can do is sit there and take it, never having enough time to recover between blows. They haven’t said a single thing that’s wrong – that’s the worst part – and it only makes her feel shittier. She feels like the shittiest person in the entire world right then, and it’s only after Oliver takes a seat next to Michaela and gives her a sympathetic look that she feels talked to instead of talked at.

“If you really do love him,” Oliver says softly, a welcome reprieve from the others, “you need to tell him.”

“Even if I did, he wouldn’t believe me now. He’s never… looked at me like that, before.”

She can still see his face so clearly, betrayal and anger in the crease of his brow, this hollow void in his eyes where tenderness had always been before. It’d been sharper, his face, the way he spoke, everything about him, like weathered rock cut down by the elements, by trying over and over and receiving only the dysfunctional half-love she seems to be capable of in return, no give and all take. She loves like a hit-and-run, always fleeing the second something inevitably goes south – although this time, she thinks, he’s done both the hitting and the running.

She probably deserves it. And her own medicine tastes like shit, for the record.

“Besides,” she continues, “I can’t be what he needs, anyway. I need to focus on Christopher, I need to… do what’s best for-”

“Oh, please,” Michaela cuts her off. “If you really wanted to do what’s best for Christopher, get Frank’s ass over here and put a ring on it. The kid loves him. Plus, my GPA and I cannot take these nightly tantrums anymore.”

“Neither can Ollie and mine’s sex life,” Connor adds, and Oliver nods in agreement.

“I do not need advice on my love life from you guys,” Laurel shoots back, “thank you very much.”

Connor shrugs. “Maybe not from Miss Infidelity over here, but I’m getting married and have somehow managed to have arguably the least dysfunctional relationship out of all of us. I’m pretty much an expert on these things.”

Her patience wearing thin, Laurel finally gets to her feet, collects her textbooks with one dramatic sweep of her arms, and grinds her teeth.

“I’m gonna go study upstairs. And my Ethical Issues in Criminal Practice outlines are coming with me!”

Michaela throws up her hands in protest as she grabs the notebook she’d been perusing right out from under her. “What – hey, I need that-”

“It’s not our fault you’re emotionally-constipated to the max. If you can’t handle the truth,” Connor calls after her, “you picked the wrong roommates.”

Laurel groans and stomps up the stairs. She’s certainly starting to think so.

~

The week passes.

It’s like a slap, Frank deciding to be done with her, and it’s only after the initial sting wears off that the real hurting begins. She makes it to Friday miraculously enough, but most days she feels like she’s barely keeping her head above water, her sanity about as sturdy as a half-dissembled Jenga tower one piece away from collapsing in on itself. Christopher cries at least twice as much as he used to and doesn’t seem to like Connor, Michaela, or Oliver very much at all. Honestly, he doesn’t seem to like her much either anymore, as if somehow he knows with his telepathic baby insight that she’s responsible for Frank’s absence.

It’s almost incredible how her life goes from mostly alright to complete shit with the removal of one single factor. She’d underestimated how integral Frank was to her life, to Christopher’s. She sure as hell underestimated how much she would miss him, rolling over in the middle of the night expecting to find a body next to her but finding only cold sheets. He used to make her breakfast in bed on Saturday mornings, cooking her eggs just how she liked them and always burning her bacon just black enough, teasing her for liking it that way – but Saturday comes, and it’s only cold sheets there to greet her in the morning once more.

In an effort to prove to herself she can be self-sufficient, she tries cooking her own breakfast, and of course she burns the scrambled eggs because she’s shit at cooking and turns the burner on too high, filling the entire kitchen with the scent of charred butter and smoke. Her eyes well up with tears before she can help it, and Michaela walks up behind her, frowning.

“What’s that smell?”

She wipes at her eyes, sniffing, feeling like an idiot. Crying over burnt eggs. Crying over what the burnt eggs represent. “I burned my eggs.”

Michaela looks at her like she’s crazy. “And you’re crying about that… why?”

“I’m not crying,” she chokes out, taking the frying pan off the stove and dumping it into the trash with an unnecessary amount of aggression. “I just – got smoke in my eyes.”

Michaela gives her a skeptical sidelong look. But for once, she doesn’t push it.

Annalise takes Christopher for the day to give her a much-needed break, and she spends it studying and sidling around the house like a ghost, all out of sorts and listless. She considers texting Frank, but her pride gets the better of her, and what would she say, anyway? ‘Sorry I refused your marriage proposal, I changed my mind, please come back?’ It’s not like it was all her fault, anyway; he put her on the spot and she bolted like she always does. Like he should’ve known she would.

But he was trying. He’s always been trying, and maybe it’s her suspicious nature or her skittish heart or something deeper and fucked up and broken inside her, but she could never reciprocate. Not like he needed, not like he deserved. He always loved her too much for his own good anyway. He’s probably better off without her, but she knows now that she isn’t better off without him, selfish as that may be. She checks her phone almost obsessively as the afternoon passes, waiting for a text she knows will never come, but she can’t help the flicker of hope in her chest every time the screen lights up regardless.

She’s sitting on the sofa trying to focus on writing a case brief when movement outside the front window catches her eye, and Laurel frowns as she watches a car pull into the driveway; a familiar one, old and rusted-out.

His car.

She hears the car door slam, and she’s expecting a ring on the doorbell to follow, but it doesn’t. She doesn’t hear much of anything at all, and so she gets to her feet and pads over to the front door, pulling it open just in time to see Frank setting down a cardboard box on the porch and turning to go. Immediately, she realizes, with a sinking feeling, what he was doing: leaving it there for her to find later, after he was already gone. So he wouldn’t have to see her. The realization hurts like hell, almost as much as the look in his eyes when she comes into view, same as it’d been that night.

Not hatred. Not anger. Not even sadness. Just nothing.

“Hey,” she breathes, jittery and nervous. She smiles, small but genuine, and he doesn’t return it. For a second, she’s scared he isn’t going to say anything at all, just turn and leave like he was planning to do.

“Hey,” he answers, finally, tucking his hands into the pockets of his jeans, looking impatient, as if he’s waiting to see if she’s finished speaking with him, ready to dismiss him; all cool and distant formality. Like a servant.

There aren’t more than a few feet between them, and yet it might as well be a gully the size of the Pacific. There’s an undercurrent of anger in the way he carries himself, cut through with this indifference she suspects is more façade than anything – or she hopes, at least. All she can do is hope.

Now, all she can do is try.

“What’s, uh, what’s this?” she asks, looking down at the box, which he picks up and holds out to her.

“Found some stuff of yours lyin’ around. Few of Christopher’s toys. Couple got jammed between the couch cushions.” He makes sure she has a good grip on it and lets go once he does, backing off. “Figured you’d want ‘em back.”

It feels symbolic, in a way, like washing his hands of her. Spring cleaning. Getting rid of any reminders of her, of them, if there ever was a them. He doesn’t seem to give these items any sentimental value; if anything, he seems just to want them out of his sight, and Laurel shrinks back somewhat.

“Yeah,” is all she can muster, lamely. Her heart is pounding, so fast she wonders how he can’t hear. “Um, thanks.”

She glances down into the box, finding a familiar red flannel resting on top; one of his, which she’d used to sleep in often, wear around the house on lazy Sundays. Christopher had liked it too, drawn to the color. Once, they’d put it on him just to see how ridiculous it would look, and it’d ended up being more baby-cape than shirt, but he’d found it hilarious and so had they. It’s still her phone background, a picture of Chris draped in the oversized shirt, huge empty sleeves dangling at his sides.

She nods down at it. “The flannel’s yours.”

“I know he likes it,” Frank replies with a shrug. “It’s already hard for him, all this change. Wanted to give him a piece of home.”

Home. This house doesn’t feel like home. Laurel isn’t sure it ever will, and the word sends a pang through her which settles heavy between her ribcage. She thinks she could stand to learn something from Christopher, how blatantly he makes his wishes known; how he shows Frank he loves him without even having to say a word – when she has a million words at her disposal and can’t figure out what to do with a single goddamn one of them.

“Thanks,” she says, gulping. “You can come in, if you want. He’s with Annalise today, but you could…”

She drifts off, not knowing what the hell she really has to offer without Christopher here, and she can feel a wall slam down between them immediately, feel him shut down at the suggestion.

“Some other time,” he demurs, all boilerplate, perfunctory politeness.

It’s more effective than anything she ever used to push him away, that’s for damn sure; somehow, it feels worse even than anger. He could yell and scream and calling her a heartless fucking bitch to her face, and it wouldn’t feel near as awful as this, as him talking to her like she’s a stranger. Part of her wants him to. If he yelled, at least it would mean he cared. At least it would mean he still felt something toward her.

Apparently finished here, Frank turns to go – and for once, she doesn’t let him.

“Can we-” She sighs, and thank God he stops in his tracks, glancing back at her. At least she can still get him to stop. “Can we talk?”

He lets out a breath, exasperated. “I don’t really have anythin’ to say.”

I do. She licks her lips, fidgeting nervously, feeling like a 1L in front of Annalise once again being torn to shreds. No, she doesn’t think he has anything left to say; he said everything he needed to that night, and now it’s her turn.

“You said you’re done with me. That mean you’re done with Christopher too?”

“’Course not. I’m still his god dad.” There’s a flicker in his eyes, a muted spark of humor. “I’d be crap at showin’ him the way of the Lord or whatever, but I can still babysit.”

She chances a smile. “He misses you.”

I miss you.

Jesus. She’s got to stop using her son as a proxy for her own feelings; it’s pathetic. Maybe Connor wasn’t wrong when she said she was emotionally-constipated.

“Yeah,” he murmurs, and she swears there’s a ghost of his own smile on his lips, wistful and sad but there, even if not for her. Although she can’t help but wonder, for a second, if he isn’t really talking about Chris here, either. “I miss him too.”

They stand there for a while without a word, even though her mind is rushing a mile a minute behind her eyes, trying to come up with something; formulate an apology, an I love you, something, anything to make him stay. She can talk her way out of any situation in the courtroom, but here somehow she has nothing to say, stripped of her charade and laid vulnerable before him.

“I don’t…” She swallows, grateful for the box between them; a shield, something to hide behind. “I don’t want us to be done.”

He doesn’t budge. He’s as unmovable as a glacier and twice as cold, and he doesn’t so much as blink. “I don’t – I don’t know what you want me to say here, Laurel. You want me to tell you you’re gonna have to get over it? That what you wanna hear?”

“What if I don’t want to get over it?”

She said those words once before, or a slightly different iteration of them. She wishes they could go back to that porch. She wishes they could start over right here, have a second chance – but he gave her second and third and fourth and fifth chances, and she fucked them all up one right after another. At least he could rely on her for that.

He kissed her after she said those words, once; he kissed her and pushed up her skirt and fucked her right there, fucked every piece of himself into her. They began with fire and fury and brimstone and there was none of that in the way they ended, and there’s sure as hell none of that now; no blaze of glory, no going down in flames, no screaming match or vicious name-calling.

They didn’t burn out. They just faded away.

“Then that’s your problem, I guess,” he tells her, turning and stepping off the porch.

~

Staring at her phone in the darkness later that night, she taps his name.

She has a bad habit of lying in bed scrolling aimlessly through the thing at night, the blinding LED no doubt fucking up her circadian rhythms or something – not that Christopher doesn’t do that enough already. It’s a bad habit, but it’s probably the least bad of all her bad habits, and before she can think better of it, she brings up her messages and scrolls through their old conversations, just as a fun little self-torture session.

Mostly routine, boring things. Can you pick up wipes at the store? and Have you seen the damn giraffe? I lost it again and Frank did you sneak him a lollipop? I can’t get him down. You’re going to make him an addict like you. Her irritated questions and his ever-patient answers. Links to mom blogs he’d used to read back when they were both absolutely clueless how to raise a child. Up further – videos and pictures he’d sent her in the early days, whenever she was in class or at work and Christopher did anything other than lie there like a sack of lumpy potatoes.

He was a fixture in her messages. There was always something, a reliable blue dot next to his name, and now there’s nothing, and her phone is silent. She didn’t think she would miss that.

She misses a lot of things she’d never thought she would miss.

She starts to type a message, her own masochistic stupidity and boneheaded determination taking over. An ill-advised series of taps which spell out I love you when she’s finished, words she’s far too chickenshit to say in person and which fall flat over text. Laurel frowns and hits backspace, erasing that and substituting I miss you, before deciding that sounds all wrong and deleting that, too.

Jesus, she can’t even text him these things. How is she ever supposed to say them?

Finally: Hi

Insufficient. It feels like a cop-out. It doesn’t elicit a response – not that she’s going to get one anyway.

A second later: You up?

This feels stupid, juvenile, like teenage pining, staying up late on the phone under the covers. Trying to text him things she can’t manage to say otherwise. It feels like pounding her fists against a brick wall, screaming in a soundproof box. It’s stupid, but her heart jumps when the familiar read receipt pops up below her message not more than a few seconds later.

Read: 12:52 AM.

He’s up, as much a night owl as ever, just like she’d expected he would be. She holds her breath, but a minute passes, then two, then three, and still no answer, no dots to indicate typing; just radio silence. After ten, she finally sighs, switching her phone off and slamming it down on the nightstand next to her so hard it nearly goes sliding off.

He’s up. But like he told her, he has nothing to say.

Chapter Text

The moment she tells the others about Frank and his new bedroom companion over breakfast, they burst out laughing. Asher snorts milk from his cereal up his nose and Connor nearly does the same with his coffee, and immediately, Laurel’s mood sours.

“It’s not funny!” she hisses, indignant, glancing around the table for sympathy and finding none. “It was irresponsible-”

Michaela doesn’t bother humoring her. “No, it’s pretty funny.”

“He invited a stranger over while he was watching my son!” she insists in between bites of pancake. “And just put him in another room while he was-” She realizes quickly she has to either censor herself or cover Christopher’s ears, and so she reaches sideways to do the latter, lowering her voice. “While he was fucking some… some-”

“Uh, I’m gonna stop you right there before you slut-shame,” Asher chimes in. “Not cool.”

Laurel fixes him with a withering glare and releases Christopher’s ears. “A little sympathy would be nice, you know.”

“As someone who has also had my heart shattered into a zillion pieces by a cruel mistress,” Asher says, staring straight at Michaela, who rolls her eyes, “I can relate. I mean, you don’t get to be mad at the dude for moving on after you broke his heart.”

“Oh she’s not mad,” Connor declares, setting down his coffee mug with a decisive clunk and a knowing smirk. “She’s just jealous.”

She admitted she was moping. She admitted she wanted him back. But this – this she is not going to admit, because if she has to endure the Roast of Laurel Castillo every time she gives an update on Frank like some sort of long-running household gag, her sleep-deprived ass is going to lose it. She’s already losing it, really. She can’t stop picturing it: Frank in bed with that girl. Their bed. That girl fawning over her baby with Frank by her side, usurping her place. Younger and perkier and a whole lot peppier. She’s driving herself crazy over it, and she can pretend all she wants she’s pissed at him for being irresponsible when the real root of the issue is apparently blatantly obvious to everyone already.

Still. She will literally have to die or endure Chinese water torture or something before she admits it.

Laurel buries her face into her coffee cup grumpily. “I am not jealous.”

“You said you didn’t realize you loved him until he was gone,” Connor retorts, not having any of it. “And now he’s moved on to greener pastures and wetter pussy, and you’re jealous.”

Her jaw drops, and she turns to Christopher, who is sitting in his highchair, soaking in everything with wide eyes and very open ears. “Do not use that word around him-”

“He’s already gonna be scarred for life living with us,” Michaela remarks, rising to her feet and clearing her dishes. “Might as well start him young.”

“Hey, bud,” Oliver says, in a frantic attempt to undo whatever damage has been done to his impressionable mind. “Pussy is just another name for cat, okay? Kitty? Meow? A pussycat. Like that song. ‘What’s new pussycat, whoa, whoa-’”

Laurel has to remind herself to take a deep breath to keep from screaming. “Oh my God, you are not making it any better.”

“I’m rooting for Frank, in a weird way,” Michaela comments over her shoulder. “Karma’s a bi-” Laurel silences her with a glower, and she corrects herself. “I mean – a… female dog.”

Asher scoffs. “Yeah, well, I hope you get cheated on someday so you know exactly how true that statement is!”

“I must say,” Connor snorts and hands his plate to Michaela, “now that my relationship is largely drama-free, I’m enjoying living vicariously through yours.”

He clears her plate for her with a flourish, and Laurel just stares. “I appreciate the support.”

“At least you’ve got reliable daycare now, right?” Oliver tries to cheer her up. “So you won’t be dumping Christopher off with him all the time. Or with me.”

She scoffs and stands, crossing the room to find her purse. “Even if I asked, he wouldn’t answer me anyway.”

Michaela cocks a brow. “He’s ignoring you?”

“Oh no, he has read receipts on. He’s been reading all my messages. Just not replying,” she answers, and Connor barks a laugh.

“He’s leaving you on read? That is a whole new level of petty.”

“I’m pretty sure he likes Christopher better than he likes me at the moment,” she tells them, sighing – and that’s when it hits her.

She doesn’t have a way to get him to put an end to this silent treatment. Or maybe… maybe she does.

She pulls out her phone with sudden determination, and Michaela must notice the lightbulb over her head because she frowns. “What’re you doing?”

“I,” she begins, chin raised, “am gonna get him to talk to me. Can you guys let me have the house tonight, for a couple hours?”

Oliver gives her a wary look. “… Why do you need the entire house?”

“Yeah,” Connor breaks in. “You gonna bang him on every available surface or something?”

“I’m gonna invite him over to watch Christopher while I’m at study group. Say it’s an emergency.”

Michaela scowls. “What other study group are you in? You better not be study-group cheating on – oh.”

A beat. The realization seems to sweep around the room from person to person through osmosis, and when it finally lands on Connor, he just chuckles and shakes his head at her, dumbfounded.

“You’re going to lure him over here to talk using your child as bait? Like a kid to a candy van?”

“Isn’t that a little…” Asher drifts off, and Michaela finishes for him, “Twisted and manipulative and awful?”

“The end justifies the means!” she hisses, then loses a bit of her confidence and deflates. “Right?”

“Whatever you say. And yes, you can have the house. Ollie and I have a wedding cake tasting. Michaela can come too,” Connor announces, glancing over at Oliver. “I never thought I would have such a disgustingly cliché hetero wedding experience, but here we are. And, by the way, if you two do end up boning on the counter, just be a pal and Lysol it afterward, deal?”

“That will not be happening,” she retorts, but reconsiders, never able to place anything entirely outside the realm of possibility when it comes to Frank and her, the human equivalents of fire and gasoline. “But… on the outside chance it does, fine.”

She texts him as she steps out the door, simple and innocuous and seemingly well-intentioned. Can you watch Christopher tonight? Oliver has a cake tasting and my study group got rescheduled. The best lies are short and sweet, not too much elaboration or detail, and as she hits send, Connor comes up behind her, still shaking his head with an aggravating mixture of pity and disbelief on his face.

“Operation Baby Bait is a go, I see,” he quips. “You’re really something else.”

“I’m gonna take that as a compliment,” she shoots back and follows him to the car. “Even if it wasn’t meant to be one.”

~

He says yes, of course. And at seven PM sharp, Operation Baby Bait commences.

She can’t let herself think too much about the moral implications of all this, because if she did she’d probably realize she’s becoming scarily like her mother, possibly worse, and that’s a realization she doesn’t have the mental energy to process at the moment. She’s going to hell anyway, signed, sealed, delivered, and if Frank is through with her for good, if he really means everything he’s said, then she isn’t going to just let him slip away without fighting, even if it’s a losing fight. Even if she’s too late.

This is a Hail Mary. It’ll either succeed perfectly or fail spectacularly, but it’s her last shot.

She smiles when she opens the front door, eagerly but not overly so, and predictably enough she doesn’t get one back from him, but she keeps her head held high, watching as Frank makes his way over to Christopher’s designated play area, with his little play mat and mountain of toys by the couch.

“He ate dinner already, so he shouldn’t get hungry,” she informs him, sinking down beside where Christopher sits while Frank takes a seat across from her. It seems intentional, using the little safari-themed activity gym as a barrier between them. “I’ve started putting him down around eight, recently.”

Frank keeps his eyes locked on Christopher, giving him the smile he denied her. “You’re gettin’ big, huh? Big boy bedtimes now.”

They’re silent for a moment, both awkwardly trying to focus on Christopher between them without acknowledging the other’s presence beyond what is absolutely necessary, and finally Frank seems to grow impatient because he glances up at her, eyebrows raised.

“I can take it from here,” he tells her, not harshly, but the implication is obvious. He wants her gone.

She tries not to let that burn, and shrugs. “I still have a few minutes before I have to go.”

They watch Christopher bat around a stuffed lion head hanging from one of the bars, before he refocuses his attention on a cartoonish blue giraffe instead. Laurel nudges it with one hand to send it swinging back and forth, and the baby swats at it like a cat trying to catch a string dangling in front of it, but never quite managing to.

That gets another smile out of Frank, and even though it’s not for her, it eases the tension in the air somewhat. “What is it with you and giraffes, huh?”

“The inner machinations of his mind are an enigma,” Laurel muses.

When she does, Frank looks her way for the first time with a little light in his eyes, that knowing glint of comradery that had always reminded her they were a team, that he was on her side. He’s happier than he ever is with the baby, and the same goes for Christopher, and it’s so startingly easy to lose herself in this little moment, forget what she really asked him here for tonight. She’s missed this, all three of them together. It was always so easy. It always felt right.

They were a family, and Laurel has no damn idea what they are now.

“Who was that girl?” she asks abruptly, no longer able to bite the words back. They burst forth and ruin the moment like they have a mind entirely their own, like a razor-edged flywheel hurtling out of control. “The other night?”

Immediately, there’s a shift in the air. The illusion shatters, and he glances up at her with a look of irritation as if to say Really? We’re doing this in front of him?

“Don’t see how that’s any of your business.”

“I just figured we could… be adults about this,” she lies, falling back on the old moral-high-ground angle. “If we’re still gonna be seeing each other because of him.”

“It’s not like we got divorced. I don’t have visitation rights. You don’t have to see me if you don’t wanna,” he reminds her, and she sighs.

“You’re important to him,” she says, softly and more vulnerable than she generally allows herself to be – even if vulnerability is really only the tool she’s using to pry this answer out of him. “I want you to be in his life.” In mine.

Finally – a crack in his composure, something she can worm her way into. He lets out a breath. “Her name’s Liz.”

“Oh. Okay,” she mumbles, trying and utterly failing to play it off nonchalantly. “Liz.”

He sighs, like a man sensing a fight approaching, stepping into a war zone. “Why’re you sayin’ her name like that?”

“I’m not saying her name like anything,” she dismisses again, with a toss of her hair and a shrug of her shoulders. “So what? You dating her now?”

“Maybe,” he concedes, cocking his head to one side and looking at her too closely for comfort. She has the distinct feeling she’s being read, that he isn’t buying any of this, though she isn’t sure what she expected. “There a reason you care so much?”

Again, that affected nonchalance; flimsy and even more see-through this time. “I don’t. It’d just be nice to know if you’re… planning on having her over here while I’m gone and screwing her instead of watching him, that’s all.”

It’s below the belt and completely uncalled for. She’s expecting a comeback, some surge of anger, but she gets only measured, infuriating silence from Frank, before he pulls out his phone to check the time and looks her way once more.

“Don’t you got a study group to be goin’ to?” he asks, this time with markedly less patience than he had before, and when Laurel doesn’t answer, just flounders for some semi-convincing lie, he narrows his eyes. “Do you even have a study group tonight?”

“It-” she cuts herself off, exhaling a breath to buy herself a few seconds. She’s never been a bad liar, has always been able to do it poker-faced and with remarkably few tells, but for some reason tonight she can’t seem to lie to him, like that old familiar reflex inside her is broken. “It… got cancelled right before you got here, I knew you were already on your wa-”

It takes him all of 0.5 seconds to see through that lie too, and he stands abruptly, disgust on his face. “Jesus, Laurel, you never had a study group to begin with, did you?”

He goes for the door, but she’d planned for this contingency and she follows, refusing to leave well enough alone. She isn’t familiar with this, with having to be the one doing the following and doing the groveling, the fighting; she isn’t sure she really knows how. But she has to do something, even if she feels like she may only be making things worse and worse every time.

“What was I supposed to do?” she shoots back when he comes to a stop, rounding on her. “You wouldn’t answer my texts, you-”

He’s angry; she can tell in the set of his jaw, the way he holds his shoulders. Angry in a way he doesn’t often allow himself to be, and especially not with her. “I don’t know how many times we need to keep havin’ this conversation, Laurel. I told you I didn’t have anythin’ to say, and you said you needed to focus on him, so why the hell are you still spendin’ so much time worrying about me? Usin’ him to lure me over here? Who the hell does that kinda thing-”

“What I’m worried about is you bringing strangers around my son-”

He chuckles at that, actually laughs at her, and she stands there seething, anger and want and longing coiled tight in her chest, tongue all tied up like a Gordian knot, useless. She wants to slap him. She wants to kiss him so goddamn hard he’ll feel like he’s been slapped. She wants him to smile, look at her with that old softness in his eyes that’d always been there before, but it’s gone and she doesn’t know if it’s ever coming back.

“You can quit it with this fake moral outrage, okay? You don’t get to be jealous. You’re the one who left me, in case you forgot.”

He’s raising his voice. He doesn’t do that with her, either; he always fights in low, measured tones, growls and hisses but never shouts. He’s never once yelled at her no matter how furious he was, and she can’t help but flinch, instinctively resorting to denial even if it runs counter to everything she came here to accomplish.

She lies through her teeth, “I am not jealous.”

“You just can’t stand it, can you?” he demands, inching closer so that he looms over her. There’s moonlight in his eyes, and they turn that normally warm blue to ice, cutting and frigid and merciless. “That I’m not just waitin’ around until whenever you decide you want me again. That you’re not gettin’ your way for once. That maybe I found someone I can be happy with.”

“What?” She clenches her jaw, raising her chin to meet his eyes. “You weren’t happy with me, with him? That what you’re saying?”

“You know I was. Christ, you know how much I loved you – and him, I love the hell outta him. But you didn’t want me, and I couldn’t change that.” He backs off, shaking his head. “If you didn’t love me, Laurel, then why the hell do you keep tryin’ to reel me back in, huh?”

You know how much I loved you. The past tense isn’t lost on her. He could only keep throwing his heart at a brick wall and getting nothing back for so long before it finally gave out and stopped working, started resenting. She’s heard that trite old maxim – if you love someone, let them go – and he’s trying to let her go now, but she just keeps holding on. She knows she’s sure as hell not selfless enough to let him go.

Even if he would be happier – and he would be, there’s no doubt about that. All she’s ever done is make him miserable, break his heart and bolt whenever he got close because she doesn’t know how to be with him, and if he has a chance with someone else, someone that’s not her, a chance for something real – God, if she were a better woman, she would tell him to take it. But she isn’t.

She’s a cheater. A slut. A bad person. And she wants him; hopelessly, selfishly. She wants him and she has nothing to offer.

Nothing except this.

She moves as if she’s in a dream, charging toward Frank and pulling him close and laying her lips on his, kissing him greedily and parting his lips with her tongue, not waiting for permission first. She doesn’t allow herself to be desperate, often, but her desperation seeps into the kiss too before she can help it, and she kisses him as hard as she can muster, kisses him like she’s trying to draw something out of him, search for something inside him; the remnants of whatever he felt for her, once. She knows they must be in there somewhere.

He can’t not love her anymore. He has to.

He kisses back initially, maybe more out of reflex than anything, but after a while his lips go unresponsive beneath hers, cold as a corpse. He stiffens, and she pulls away, coming up for air without having found whatever it was she was looking for, empty-handed and panting. She can’t read the look on his face, the way his eyes flicker from emotion to emotion until they finally settle on blankness, and she searches them instead for a sign – and again, she finds nothing. Maybe there’s nothing to be found, now.

“I did love you,” she breathes, feeling small and stupid and inadequate, and too late. She always is. “I… I do, I-”

Of all things, Frank grins, wry and crooked, like he’s laughing at a bad joke. No warmth in it at all. No warmth in him at all.

“You’re good, I’ll give you that,” he murmurs, and his voice rings hollow. He may as well have spit in her face. “For a second there I almost believed you.”

She knows how he feels right then, watching him walk away after she gave him everything she had to give. She did it to him – not once but twice, and it’s the worst feeling. The most helpless feeling.

She knows how he feels, and she’s certain now that she deserves it.

~

Connor, Oliver, and Michaela stumble through the door a few hours later, all varying degrees of intoxicated with Oliver probably the soberest of the bunch. Clearly they’d abandoned their cake tasting in favor of a liquor tasting, but the moment they notice her sitting alone on the couch, staring down into a cup of tea morosely, their laughter dies down.

“Operation Baby Bait didn’t go well, I take it?” Connor asks, plopping down next to her while Michaela does the same at her other side, pulling her into a clumsy side hug.

She feels numb, speechless; like the shock of losing a limb, watching blood pour from a gaping wound without clotting. She doesn’t know what to do with herself, but she knows that there’s no coming back from that; if anything in the world would have swayed Frank, it would have been that, those three little words she’d withheld until they’d soured and turned into weapons. Maybe that’s what it’d felt like for him: just another tool in her arsenal. Just another weapon to get what she wanted out of him. Maybe it’s second-nature for her by now to manipulate. Maybe it’s the only way she knows how to be.

The first time he told her he loved her, she said she didn’t believe him either. They can never seem to get it right, feel the same way at the same time, like bumper cars eternally pushing the other away. Maybe that’s their fate.

She sighs and hangs her head. “To say the least. I definitely didn’t have to Lysol the counter.”

“I’m sorry,” Michaela slurs and tightens her arms around her. “We love you.”

“It’s over,” she admits, speaking the words out loud and allowing them to be real. If she can start processing them now, the sooner the pain will fade and the scar tissue will form, and she wants the hurting to be over, God, she wants it to be over so badly – even if part of her knows it never will. “He’s done. And the worst part is… I don’t blame him. I’m too late.” She lowers her eyes, throat tightening. “I’m always too late.”

“You still have us, at least,” Connor reminds her, not mocking her misery for once. “One big, unhappy, murderous family.”

She lets herself be pulled into an awkward, drunken group hug, which is really more of a dogpile than anything – but it gets a smile out of her, however brief. For a moment, she’s almost happy.

Only almost. But it’s better than nothing.

Chapter Text

For a while, she gives up.

She gives up expecting that he’ll text, call, come around to see her for any reason other than to visit Christopher, and she stops fooling herself into believing he secretly visits to see her, too. She gives up hoping he’ll change his mind just because she changed hers; it was selfish, selfish to expect him to wait forever, wait as she broke his heart over and over and somehow expected it to keep beating. She tries to give up thinking about him, but she can never quite manage it completely. He slips into her thoughts unbidden, lingering in the fringes of her subconscious like a shadow in her periphery that vanishes when she turns her head. He’s always existed in some capacity in her life. She’d never dreamed there could be a day when he was simply… gone.

She’d never thought when she finally told him she loved him he would walk away.

She hadn’t really believed it until then – that’s the honest truth. Part of her had wondered deep down if it was all a ruse, some twisted charade, playing hard to get in an attempt to win her back, but she’d seen in his eyes when he’d said that he didn’t believe her that it was never a ruse at all. He didn’t believe her. He was tired of her. Done with her. Really he should have been done with her a long time ago, but he’d held on, stayed aboard a sinking ship patching up leaks until finally the waters had drowned him. And she picked up after him and fought, fought a losing battle only after it was too late and put the final nail in the coffin, the last pailful of water over his head.

The difference now is that she knows this is a losing battle. A lost battle.

So she gives up. She moves on – or convinces herself she has, at least, because she’s always thrived in self-delusion. She goes to work and class and comes home to Christopher and tries to pretend she doesn’t feel the hollow void inside her, the distinct sense of something missing. She gets used to sleeping alone again. She sets herself on autopilot and goes through her life competently enough, and that works well for a few weeks. She’s survived worse than heartbreak. She can survive this, too.

She’ll survive. Even if she feels half-alive at best, guilty and broken and incapable of feeling the way normal people do, eternally playing catch-up, always watching the last train speed out of the station without her. She’ll survive, even if what she’s doing now doesn’t feel like much like surviving at all; some distant, detached form of existing, present in the world but not truly in it, like a player in a scene someone else wrote for her.

Annalise takes Christopher most Saturdays, and it’s one Saturday evening after dropping the baby off that the woman pauses in their living room, looking her over all at once in the middle of their small talk with that skeptical, narrow-eyed gaze of hers, the way she looks when smelling a lie.

“What’s wrong?” she asks, and there’s a surprising lack of an edge in her tone.

Laurel blinks, confused. “What? Nothing.”

“You’re not a good liar,” the woman tells her, folding her arms. “Not like you usually are.”

She sinks down onto the couch with a sigh. “I – it’s nothing. You’re my boss, you wouldn’t wanna hear it.”

“I’m not here as your boss,” Annalise reminds her, taking a seat by her side. “Never thought I’d say this to any of you, but I’m here as your friend. You haven’t been yourself for weeks, Laurel.”

God. Of all the people she ever thought she would be talking relationship drama with, she did not think it would be Annalise Keating, the woman who eviscerated her on her first day of law school ages ago. But the others have started to treat it like a recurring joke on a soap opera, finding humor in her misery, and it’s nice to be looked at with genuine sympathy for once, though she doesn’t deserve it.

“It’s just – a Frank thing.” She sighs, shaking her head at the ridiculousness of this. “You really do not want to hear this, trust me.”

“I’m listening, aren’t I?”

Finally, she takes a deep breath and begins. “It’s… well – the abbreviated version? We’re done. He asked me to marry him, and I said no, and I moved out, and then when he was gone… I realized I loved him. And I told him. And he still…” She lowers her eyes, picking at a loose thread on her sweater. “He still doesn’t want anything to do with me. And the worst part is I don’t blame him. I’m a shitty person.” She laughs, a dark, rueful sound, like her entire life is an inside joke she’s on the outs of. “I never realize until it’s too late. This time it’s really too late.”

“Frank said he was done with you?” Annalise echoes, incredulous, and Laurel can’t help but huff a laugh.

“Why does everyone say that like it’s so surprising?”

“Because it is. The man’s gone through hell and back for you. He’s on my nerves half the time, but even I can see it. Hell, a blind man could see it.”

“Yeah, well,” she scoffs. “Apparently I couldn’t.”

Stupid. She’s an idiot, unable to see what was right in front of her, what everyone else on earth seems to have seen clear as day. Annalise lets silence settle over them for a moment, contemplative and heavy, before she looks over at her and meets her eyes.

“He applied to Middleton, you know,” she tells her, and Laurel can’t breathe, suddenly. “He got waitlisted, but even that is a feat in itself. He did it for you, he told me. For Christopher. Said he wanted to be a better man for both of you. A man he could look up to one day.”

“He never…” she drifts off, shaking her head. “He never told me that.”

“He told me not to tell you when he didn’t get it,” Annalise confesses. “I don’t know why. Maybe because he thought it’d disappoint you. He worked hard, even if he fell short.” She pauses, solemn. “I admire him for it.”

He did it for her. All for her. The knowledge sets her head spinning as much as it makes guilt roil like nausea in her gut, because she knows she didn’t deserve that: him taking the LSAT, applying to Middleton, trying to become someone better for her and her son, like he was certain he wasn’t good enough already. Like he had to prove himself to her. He spent ages trying to do that, proving himself over and over and showing he cared in every way he knew how, coming up empty every time until finally he hid it from her, not wanting her to know that he’d failed. It makes her feel like crying.

He was always good enough. It was her that wasn’t.

“I…” she croaks. “I had no idea.”

“Look,” Annalise tells her, firm all at once. “I’m not here to tell you what to do. But I know he loves you, as much as I’ve ever seen anyone love anybody. He says he’s done with you? He’s lying. You two will never be done with each other.” Annalise glances down at Christopher, who seems to be listening, soaking it all in. “He wanted to become a better man for your son. For you. That?” Annalise smirks. “God knows I’m the last person on earth who should be giving relationship advice, but that’s worth fighting for.”

“I tried,” Laurel murmurs. “He’s… he’s done. I fucked up.” She swallows. “It’s over, this time. For good.”

“You know you don’t really believe that,” is all the woman says, as she stands and turns to go. “And deep down, you know neither does he.”

~

Their paths cross again a few days later. Because they always do, one way or another.

They’re like two heavenly bodies locked in each other’s gravity, planets endlessly circling one another whether they like it or not. There’s no defying gravity much like there’s no defying fate, and when Annalise keeps them all working late into the night on an important case – even Oliver – and the daycare closes at five as usual, he’s the first call she makes. It’s out of habit as much as it is out of practicality; it’s always felt impossibly natural, calling him when Christopher needed something. When she needed something. He was always her first choice, her speed dial, and he seems hesitant initially, but agrees and picks him up at five, bringing him back to the house while she finishes up with the others.

By the time she steps through the door, it’s close to midnight and she feels like an asshole for keeping him so late – not that she doesn’t feel like an asshole already for about a thousand other reasons. She’s the last one in behind Connor, Michaela, and Oliver, and the moment she notices the three of them standing there staring at something on the couch, she stops in her tracks.

It’s him. But he’s not there alone.

Frank is lying there, sound asleep with the baby curled up on his chest. Christopher is down for the count too, and for a moment she just stares, feeling a pang shoot through her chest at the peaceful silhouette they make together. She half-wants to take a photo, but then decides it would tarnish the sanctity of this moment. It could never capture what it feels like to stand here, anyway. What it feels like to see this.

Because for a few brief seconds, everything feels right again, when it’s felt all wrong for weeks. Everything feels right – and she knows right then, as sure as she’s breathing, as sure as the sky is blue and the world is round, that this is the way things should be. Frank’s breathing is slow and even with the distinctive rattle of sleep in it, one of his hands resting on Christopher’s back to support him instinctively, like he knows even in the throes of slumber to hold onto him, keep him safe.

“Looks like substitute baby daddy’s on duty,” Connor has the good sense to whisper, nodding at Oliver and Michaela to follow him as he steps away.

They make themselves scarce in a timely fashion for once, leaving Laurel alone with Frank and Christopher and the darkness. There’s nothing but faint moonlight illuminating the living room, streaming in through the semi-closed blinds over the two of them. Frank looks younger in the grey-blue light. At peace. Happy, in a way. She knows she’s sure as shit done nothing to contribute to that at all. Probably he’s happier now, happier without her.

But he’s with her. Holding her, if only by proxy. He never feels closer to her than when he holds her son, his heart beating next to Christopher’s and next to hers. He loves him, and he’d never held back, never hesitated in knowing that; he loved the way he always does, giving his full heart and surrendering himself to it. The way he’d loved her too.

The way she’d never been able to love him.

She tiptoes over to the two of them as quietly as she can manage, taking a seat on the couch but leaving enough distance so as to not disturb them. She would sooner die than ruin this moment, like something that would come out of a postcard, too picturesque and idyllic to belong in her reality. More than she deserves – but he’s exactly what Christopher deserves, a good man and a good father, and she wants that for him, as much as she selfishly wants it for herself.

She ruined things the night she left and there’s no going back now; she’s not the idealist she once was, and she’s sure as hell no optimist either. She knows there are no happy endings, and certainly none for people like her, but for one second she can pretend they’ve gone back to how things were, that they’re here together in this house instead of miles apart, that after this they’ll put the baby down and make their way upstairs, lie down together and make love. That was always all too idyllic to be real, too. She knew it had an expiration date simply because it felt too good to be true, and so she took it upon herself to ruin it on her own terms before anything else could do it for her.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers, the words barely louder than a breeze. As if somehow he can hear, wherever his mind is wandering in slumber.

Sorry for everything. Sorry for being broken, for only ever being able to give him half of herself when he needed and deserved so much more. Sorry for having walls made of goddamn industrial grade steel that nothing could break through. Sorry for not being able to say she loved him when she should have. Sorry she’s too chickenshit to say this to his face now.

It feels so selfish to fight, to want him still. It feels both masochistic and sadistic, but she can’t help it, no matter how hard she tries.

“I love you,” she says, testing the words on her tongue, turning them over and seeing how they feel, and she says it to both of them, but she’s looking only at Frank. They’re meant for him. He hopes, somehow, illogically, that he can hear them too.

She knows that she should probably wake him, take over and let him go home, but something stops her. This moment doesn’t feel quite like it belongs to her, like she’s a ghost watching over the land of the living. Frank has always had a bond with Christopher that ran deeper than she could ever understand, and she’s seen how much the baby adores him. She’s learning from that, from the both of them, even if she’s a slow learner.

With a sigh, she stands and leaves them there together.

Chapter Text

“Why do you smell like you just stumbled out of a frat party?”

Connor fires the question at Asher over breakfast as the other man makes his way to the fridge, rummaging through it whilst reeking of booze. After taking inventory of the contents, Laurel watches him close the door and groan, squinting at the sunlight streaming in through the window.

“Yeah, and why are you always here?” Michaela demands in between spoonfuls of cereal. “Last I checked, you don’t pay rent.”

“One: Frankie D and I went a little hard last night picking up some fiiine chickadees. Two: do you guys have any Pedialyte? ‘Cause your boy’s in desperate need of electrolytes over here.”

Laurel perks up at the mention of Frank’s name, but bites her tongue at the last second, and Michaela scoffs before she has a chance to say anything anyway. “No. Because unlike you, we don’t still drink like undergrads.”

“You went out with Frank?”

She doesn’t even mean to ask the question. Really. It just erupts out of her subconscious with a sort of volcanic force, her id taking over like one of those mind-control parasites that zombify ants and subject them to their whims. She hates herself the moment she opens her mouth, probably more than Frank or the rest of them could ever hate her, but she can’t help it.

She’s a glutton for punishment, apparently.

Michaela just rolls her eyes and looks back down at her food. “Here we go.”

“Yeah, I did,” Asher announces proudly, squaring his shoulders. “He went home with a foxy brunette little number. Big naturals. Defo a dime. I decided to play wingman. Help a heartbroken brotha out, if you know when I’m sayin’.”

Connor chortles. “Just admit you couldn’t get a girl to go home with you. We won’t judge.”

They descend into a familiar squabble, which Laurel promptly tunes out, shoveling the last few bites of cereal into her mouth robotically but not really tasting them. They taste like ashes, cold, unpleasant gruel, and she swallows and brings her bowl to the sink with a frown, a storm of jealousy churning in her stomach. She knows doesn’t get to do that: be jealous. Keep tabs on him. Ask after him. She left him, as Frank hadn’t hesitated to remind her, but the idea of him living his life and going on without her feels-

Awful. Like shit. It feels like shit to imagine him moving on, and she feels like worse shit for being this selfish, because she cut him loose and now keeps trying to rope him back, like a horrible compulsion, tearing off a scab over and over so it never has time to heal. If she knew what was best for her, she would stop.

But she doesn’t. And that’s why she catches Asher after the others have cleared out of the kitchen, cornering him by the sink.

“Hey,” she blurts out, and he turns to look at her, apparently confused as to why she’s acknowledging his presence. “Are you, uh, going out with Frank again anytime soon?”

Asher narrows his eyes. “… Maybe. Why?”

“Text me the time and place,” is all she says, trying to appear as nonchalant as possible and failing miserably. “I’ll… tag along.”

Something clicks behind Asher’s eyes, right then. “No, no, no, no. No can do. I am not enabling this whole jealous stalker ex thing, okay? That’s against the bro code.”

To be fair, she expected this reaction. This reaction is probably justified, all things considered, but she stands her ground regardless.

“Not even if I give you my Admin Law outlines?” Laurel can see him start to waver at that, like a dieter offered a dessert cart, and so she soldiers on, sweetening the deal. “They’re highlighted, tabbed by section…”

“Fine,” he snaps, holding up a finger. “On one condition.”

“Name it.”

“You have access to the poopy diaper arsenal,” Asher bargains, and she blinks. “I want one under Pratt’s pillow the next time she brings a guy home. Revenge by any other name wouldn’t smell so sweet.”

That’s not a quote, not even close, but Laurel doesn’t bother to correct him. “You play dirty. Literally.” A pause. She folds her arms. “Fine. Deal.”

She doesn’t feel quite like she’s made a deal with the devil as she watches him walk away, all puffed up and proud of himself. If anything, she’s just made a deal with the devil’s much stupider frat boy-esque cousin.

But the end justifies the means. Though she’s starting to realize there may be no end in sight.

~

The intel comes late Friday afternoon via text as she’s finishing up at the office.

-The Parlour at 10

A few seconds later, a follow up:

-Can you not go all drunk jealous weepy ex tho? Frankie D finally thinks I’m cool

Laurel just chuckles under her breath and taps out a response.

-I promise he doesn’t think you’re cool. And will do

She’s not entirely sure why she’s doing this, Laurel realizes on the commute home. For some twisted sort of closure, maybe. If she can just see him – see him out living his life, being happy without her, happier than he could ever be with her – she thinks it might trigger something inside her; the realization that she needs to let go, maybe. She needs to see it, live, in screaming color. See him.

Then she’ll let go. Only she’s very much aware she keeps moving the goalposts back further and further for just what will allow her to let go.

She doesn’t have to strongarm Connor and Oliver into babysitting Christopher. Turns out they’re in the middle of a convenient disagreement over having kids anyway and want a trial run, and although Connor seems less than thrilled about spending a Friday night in with a baby, Oliver does the coercing for her. She doesn’t dress to the nines; she dresses to about a solid five, forgoing the LBD and opting for jeans and heeled ankle boots and a brown moto jacket instead. She tries to slip out the door before anyone can catch her, but of course Michaela does just that, emerging from the kitchen with narrowed eyes and a pint of ice cream, ever the inconvenient psychic.

“Where are you going?” she asks like she already knows the answer, and Laurel grimaces, caught red-handed like a cat burglar trying to abscond into the night.

Dammit. “Nowhere.”

“If you’re going to stalk Frank, Laurel, I swear-”

She rolls her eyes and turns. “Stalking is a very extreme way to put it-”

“Don’t Bill Clinton me with words. You’re stalking him. And trying to cockblock him. If I’m being honest,” she lowers her voice to a faux-whisper which really isn’t very quiet at all, “it’s a little sad.”

“You’re home on a Friday eating ice cream in your pajamas at nine o’clock. Is that also not a little sad?”

Michaela considers that, before giving a soft humph and sticking the spoon in her mouth. “Touché. Maybe we both deserve this.”

“You’re always free to join,” she jokes. “You cockblock Asher, I cockblock Frank.”

“Mmm,” Michaela hums, popping another spoonful into her mouth and turning to go. “Hard pass. Have a good stalk, though.”

~

Two hours and three vodka Sprites later, and she’s acutely aware that she’s not getting closure. She’s just getting drunk and progressively more miserable.

She’s nestled into the corner of the bar nursing her fourth glumly and staring at Frank across the way when Asher comes up behind her, having temporarily abandoned his table with Frank and their two female companions; both bottle blondes, gorgeous and bubbly and laughing too loud, leaning in too close. She doesn’t think Frank has seen her yet, or if he has he’s just gone back to ignoring her, but either way, nothing about tonight is making her feel even marginally better. He’s happy, smiling and carousing and throwing back drinks. Happier than she’s seen him in a while. Happier than he was with her toward the end, that’s for damn sure.

She doesn’t know why she came, what she’s doing here still. Michaela was right: this is a little sad, and more than a little. Throwing a pity party and drinking alone at a shitty stinking dive bar that is nowhere near her scene, isolated in a room full of people and lost in a misery of her own making. Having ditched her kid to chase her ex-boyfriend around town. She’s as bad as her mother – possibly worse – and when Asher sidles on into the empty stool beside her, he only reinforces that notion.

“Hate to be the one to say it,” he tells her, shockingly sober for as long as he’s been here. “But this is kiiiiinda pathetic.”

She takes a deep swig of her drink and scowls. God. Having Asher tell her that must definitively mean she’s hit rock bottom. “I’m aware of that.”

“Dude’s finally moving on after being hung up on you since, like, the beginning of time,” Asher says, his own Michaela-induced frustration seeping into his tone. “It’s sorta cruel that you don’t wanna let him.”

Cruel. Yeah, that’s a good word for it. She feels like a parody of herself, coming here tonight to – what? She didn’t come to get closure. She didn’t come to cockblock him or try to win him back either. She came here just to hurt herself, apparently, like some act of self-flagellation. Hurting herself because she knows she deserves it, like staring at a solar eclipse just because she knows she should look away and frying her corneas.

“Are you doing this because you actually love him? Or just because you don’t want him to be happy with anyone else? That’s what you do if you really love someone, yo.” Asher sips his own drink, surprisingly insightful for once, as Frank and the table burst out into laughter and they both find their eyes drawn there. “You want them to be happy even if you’re not the one making them happy.”

Laurel blinks. “That’s… when did you-”

“Just dropping wisdom bombs left and right like we in Hiroshima, son!” Asher declares, immediately ruining it. “Look, Frankie Dizzle and I are boys now, so this is a cockblock-free zone, capiche? Don’t mess this up for me. Seriously.”

Well. That lasted long.

“Got it,” she grumbles into her drink and watches as he stands, weaving his way through the crowd and making his way back over to the table.

These are words she never thought she would say, ever in her life, but maybe Asher is right. Maybe she doesn’t really love him. Because she isn’t selfless enough to let him go and she’s never going to be; she was kidding herself to think coming here tonight would snap that last thread binding them together, suddenly make her able to set him free. With a sigh, she downs the rest of her drink and rises to stand too, heading in the direction of the bathroom to escape the thud of the bass and drone of chatter all around her. It’s all too much, suddenly, overloading her circuitry, and she comes to a stop at the end of the line for the bathroom, massaging her temples, wishing desperately she could fade into the wallpaper.

She is not going to drunk-cry in public. She would literally rather die.

“What’re you doin’ here, Laurel?”

Oh, God. Now she definitely is.

She’s too drunk to notice him come up behind her and stop, and when she turns, she finds Frank staring at her with raised eyebrows, leather jacket-clad, hair slicked back like he’d always used to wear it, and it looks good, God it looks so good. She has a fair bit of trouble focusing her eyes, but when she finally does, Laurel notices that he doesn’t seem angry to see her, not even really annoyed. There’s no bite to the words. He sounds – horrifyingly enough – like he almost feels bad for her, the way he’d pity a stray cat who keeps sniffing around his door and just won’t go away.

“I don’t know,” she slurs, gritting out a laugh and throwing up her hands. “I don’t… Yeah, I don’t know.”

He furrows his brow, looking almost amused. “You had Doucheface tell you where I’d be?”

“I have stooped oh so low,” Laurel quips, then tilts her head to one side with a sigh. “Don’t be mad at him. He’s very excited you finally think he’s cool.”

Frank chuckles. “I don’t think he’s cool.”

“I tried to tell him that.”

They laugh together this time, and she’s drunk enough to almost be able to fool herself into believing, for a second, that they’re here as friends. That they can be friends, at least, if never anything more. Drunkenness and delusion go hand in hand, and she’s so steeped in both for a moment that she almost, almost believes that.

“What’re you doin’ here?” he asks again, more serious this time, and the laughter on her tongue evaporates.

“I wanted to see you. Or just… I don’t know. See you out. Being normal. Being… happy.” She leans against the wall, feeling woozy and unsteady and pitiful all at once. “I thought it would make me feel better, or something. So I’d know I didn’t completely fuck you up, I guess. It was… it was stupid.” He opens his mouth to say something, but she keeps going, well aware she’s drunkenly rambling and too far gone to care; she might as well own how pathetic she is. “It’s like you said once. This isn’t high school. If you don’t like me… then I don’t like you. That’s the way it should be, right?”

Jesus, she can only imagine how she looks: teary-eyed and wobbling in her heels with mascara smudged beneath her eyes, all the poise of a drunk college freshman. She should be above this, but losing him has made her feel like she isn’t above much of anything, no moral high ground to stand on, no high horse to saddle. She fucked up the best thing in her life beyond repair and maybe this is what she deserves, being brought this low. As low as she brought him.

None of what she’d said makes much of any sense, and Frank just sighs, nodding toward the back exit. “You’re drunk. I’ll get you a cab.”

“Annalise told me,” she slurs and stops him in his tracks. “About Middleton. How you applied, got waitlisted.” Laurel straightens her back and walks over to him, coming to a stop in the middle of the hallway. They’re both bathed in deep red neon lighting, red as blood, and Frank raises his eyebrows, pausing long enough to hear her out. “You didn’t tell me.”

He lets out a breath, stuffing his hands in the pockets of his jeans. “Didn’t think it mattered.”

“Why would it not matter? Even getting waitlisted, that’s-”

“I wasn’t good enough,” is his simple answer. “If nothin’ was gonna come of it…” He lowers his eyes, something like shame settling over him; a familiar sort of hurt, like an old friend he recognizes, a shadow. “Just figured it didn’t matter.”

“You did it for me,” she murmurs, and she wants to reach out, slap him, beat her hands against his chest until he can see how much that matters. She wants to go back in time and do the same thing to herself until past-Laurel sees that, too. “How could you… how could you think it wouldn’t matter?”

A beat. There’s something behind his eyes, something he wants to say, and she has a million words bottled up inside her too, so many words that’ll never do any good. She thinks she could talk for hours and it would still never be enough to fix this; she gave him the most important ones – I love you – and they didn’t do shit. If anything, all her words have ever done is make things worse.

Finally, he just settles on sighing again. “C’mon. I’ll call you a cab.”

The back exit leads out into an alleyway, and he accompanies her down it and out to the curb, keeping an eye on her to make sure she stays upright. She manages surprisingly well, the December air shocking her system and jolting her awake, and she hugs herself, shivering as Frank flags down a cab. The entire world has that blue winter hue to it, a few wayward snowflakes fluttering down and landing on them both. Laurel watches his breath fog in the frigid air, and she thinks about getting closer for some stupid reason – under the guise of seeking body heat, God, anything – but she doesn’t know how. He would push her away anyway, humoring her with all that condescending amusement people always give to the extremely intoxicated.

It isn’t long before a cab spots them and pulls over to the curb. He opens the door for her and gives the drive her address, and she somehow manages to clamber into the backseat without falling on her ass – but before Frank can shut the door, send her off and wash his hands of her, she catches it.

“You’re happy, right?” she blurts out, Asher’s words of all people’s buzzing around the inside of her skull. She blinks, eyelids heavy and tongue clumsy like swollen cotton, but she persists, raising her voice when he hesitates. “Without me, I mean.” Still, nothing but hesitation, and she scoots closer to the door, closer to him. “You can tell me, if you are. So I can… so I can stop.”

Stop. Stop doing this. Stop hurting herself and running in circles. She wants to the answer to be yes for his sake so badly she can’t breathe and yet, at the same time, nothing terrifies her more. For all intents and purposes, he seemed happy tonight, and if he can just tell her now, tell her to her face and put an end to this for her-

Instead, all he tells her is: “G’night, Laurel.”

When she looks back, he’s still standing there by the curb, a lonely silhouette under the streetlights. She catches his eye, and she knows his answer.

Chapter Text

Even after that night, he’s still her first call. Her speed dial.

He shouldn’t be. Trust her, she knows this. She really does, as much as she knows that she’s the worst. But Annalise keeps them late after business hours on another vitally important case and she can’t find an opening to bail, and calling him to pick up Christopher is as selfish as it is automatic – but she finds herself doing it anyway. She can mask it as pragmatism all she wants, tell herself that he’s available anyway and wouldn’t mind, but when it comes down to it, the thought of coming home to Frank outweighs any scrap of practicality left in her. It feels kinda pathetic – as Asher would put it – clinging to the last few scraps of something long dead, but she saw the look in his eyes that night as he sent her off in the taxi, watched her until she was out of view.

Maybe it’s not something so dead after all.

She’s exhausted by the time they get back to the house; the kind of exhaustion that’s bone-deep, filling her limbs with lead, until all she’s really capable of doing is dragging herself up the stairs and into her bedroom like a bag of bricks on autopilot. For a moment she almost forgets Frank is going to be there, but remembers the moment she sees the light on in her bedroom, warm and welcoming instead of darkness. He’s leaning over Christopher’s crib when she steps inside, watching him doze with a look of fondness in his eyes, and at first he doesn’t even seem to notice her, though for a moment she wonders if maybe he’s purposely ignoring her. It wouldn’t be the first time.

But then he looks up at her, and of all things, he smiles.

“Hey,” he greets, and she’s so taken aback all she can do is stare for a moment, wondering if she’s dreaming or if he’s drunk, before she finally realizes neither of them are either one of those things. She’s gotten so used to a frigid reception from Frank that getting this instead is like a shock to her system, like the thawing heat of a fire after being out in the freezing cold for hours.

“Hi,” she says, voice higher and more breathless than she’d like. She sets her purse down on the bed and peels off her coat, slowly making her way to the crib. “Thanks. For getting him on such short notice. I’m sorry this keeps happening, I just-”

He shrugs it off, but places a finger to his lips to get her to quiet down. “Little guy’s sleepin’. He was in a mood earlier, finally got him down.”

It feels as natural as anything to come to stand by his side, and she does it almost without thinking, drawn to him and her son, the perfect picture they make and her need to be in it with them. She’s too sober this time to delude herself into believing this is anything more than what it is: a kind gesture on his part, for his godson – not for her. No use pretending now. But Frank is looking at her in a way he hasn’t in what feels like ages, with that old affection and not that ice-cold apathy; not shutting off the moment he sees her, but opening up. It feels like something so easy to slip back into, acting on muscle memory and instinct alone. Being with him always was the easiest thing.

She rests a hand on the side of the crib. “Sorry he was giving you a hard time.”

“Must get it from you,” he jokes, and she can’t help but chuckle as she looks down at the baby, slumbering as deeply and as peacefully as she’s ever seen.

“You’re a-” she cuts herself off just in time to remember to censor her vocabulary. “A jerk.”

“Am I?” He raises his eyebrows. “Don’t have to censor yourself while he’s passed out, y’know.”

“Old habits, I guess.” She leans over, resting her elbows on the crib and peering down at Christopher with a sigh. “Thank you, though. I don’t know what I would’ve done without you.”

The words could be a brittle formality, but she means them. She doesn’t know what she would do without Frank at all, because she can call herself a single mother all she wants but the truth is she’s never had to do any of this alone because of him. He’s always been there, just a call or text away – even after they were over, even after he didn’t have any reason to stick around anymore. There’s a look in his eyes now that makes her wonder if he always had one anyway.

If he still does.

They’re quiet, for a while, and Frank doesn’t reply at first. The only sound to be heard is the winter wind outside beating at the siding and the faint creaking of the old house as it settles, before finally he looks away from Christopher and up at her.

“I don’t mind. He’s one hell of a cute kid.” He pauses, and when he speaks again his voice is lower, raspy with hidden meaning beneath his words. “Got your genes. ‘Course he’s cute.”

It’s almost – God, she doesn’t want to say it or even think it, get her hopes up, but it almost feels like flirting, like falling back into their familiar witty repartee. Like she never broke his heart. Like she never left at all. She flushes from head to toe, half because of the old overzealous heater and half from the warmth of his gaze; she hadn’t realized how bad she missed that, those little looks and remarks that mean nothing and yet everything.

“I’m sorry,” she murmurs, wilting somewhat. “About the other night. I shouldn’t have-”

“Don’t be,” he interrupts. “We all do stupid stuff when we’re wasted.”

“Still. I ruined your night.”

“Nah,” he demurs with a wink. “Just made it a little more interestin’.”

“I’ll stop. Stop bothering you about… us. I know it’s over.” God, the words tear at her throat like blades. They’re agony, and they’re true, and yet that stubborn, nagging voice inside her keeps tugging at her pant lag, trying to convince her that maybe, just maybe, there’s still a chance they aren’t. “I’ll get over it.”

I think about you all the time. It’s freakin’ annoying. But I’ll get over it.

If her heart weren’t pounding like it was trying to mount an escape from her chest, she might almost find this role reversal comical – but before she knows it, she’s moving closer, close enough to feel the heat of his body, and neither of them are laughing.

“Unless… you don’t want me to,” she breathes, pleading silently with him, searching for something in his expression; a crack she can burrow into, something that looks liable to give way. Something has to give.

There’s a hint of a frown on his face – but he isn’t moving away, not like he had before, and there are no walls between them, no hardness in his jaw or anger in his eyes. He has a look on his face almost like he’s silently begging her not to do this, get too close and tempt him and start this again because he knows he won’t have the willpower to hold back. Like he knows, every day, with every time he’s told her no, he’s merely been delaying the inevitable.

His voice is thick when he says her name. “Laurel…”

“Tell me you don’t want me to,” she says. Begs. The words are laced with desperation, with need, with sadness and love and frustration and a storm of pent-up feelings that she can’t contain inside herself any longer. She wants to say so many things yet those are the only words she can seem to find, and she’s sure he’s going to pull away because there’s no reason this will end any differently than all the other times she’d tried, but she can’t stop. She can’t stop trying, even if it’s killing both of them. “Frank…”

He doesn’t answer. He just kisses her.

It’s slow at first; more tentative a kiss than they usually share and far more tentative than their first, shared in the midst of a firestorm of raging emotions and equally raging attraction. It’s almost like he’s testing the waters, and she can feel his restraint, the last few tense muscles in his body that haven’t quite decided this is the right course of action, before finally something inside him snaps and he gives himself over to it fully, deepening the kiss and bringing a hand up to her cheek to anchor her against him. She kisses like a drowning woman getting her first breath of oxygen, breathing him into her lungs as greedily as she dares. Kisses him harder than she thinks she ever has. She’s missed him so badly.

She needs him so much.

It’s a familiar dance they do as they make their way over to her bed, a careful tango of disrobing and touching as Frank walks her backwards, hardly ever breaking their kiss in the process. They’re both touch-starved, hungry for each other and loathe to part for even the briefest second. They were always like fire and gasoline combined, but there’s a sort of desperation now, too, a franticness in every touch they steal, like they’re both equally terrified of losing each other again. Laurel knows she is, at least.

She never fought for him, before. She let him do the fighting until he finally couldn’t fight anymore and laid down his weapons and marched home, and now all she wants to do is fight, kiss him harder and pull him closer and hold on tighter until he knows. Until somehow, she can show him that she’s fighting. She wants to do more than tell him she loves him; he deserves more. He deserves better than her and her dysfunctional, cautious heart, but she’s learning. She’s learned so much already, and he’s taught her so much too, though she doesn’t think she’ll ever be able to tell him.

He tugs off her blouse and she unbuttons his shirt, and they fall into bed together in a state of laughing disarray. There’s a profound satisfaction in kissing him, finding life in something she thought was dead forever, but she should have known better to think they could ever go on without each other. They’re bound together by something irrevocable, the child they share not by blood but by choice, and it could have pushed them apart – hell, a thousand things could have pushed them apart – but instead it brought them closer. The concept of family was always foreign to Laurel, something others experienced but something that never belonged to her, and now she knows he must be hers. What she was waiting for.

He tugs her onto his lap once they’re both nude, pressing their bodies together and going still for a moment. He looks almost childlike, marveling up at her, before he dives down to lay a trail of kisses across her collarbone, then slowly tips her backwards, parting her legs and beginning his journey down between them.

“I don’t,” he rasps against her thigh once he reaches the end of the bed, and her brain is too foggy to understand what he means at first.

All she can do is pant. “What?”

“I don’t want you to get over it,” Frank says, and the world catches fire when he opens his mouth to taste her.

~

The sunlight is what wakes her in the morning, filtering in through the blinds and drowning the bedroom in gold. Laurel winces when she tries to move, body wrung-out and sore, but it’s a pleasant kind of soreness, and before long the memories come flooding back, equally as pleasant. She rolls over with a yawn, instinctively reaching across the space next to her, where Frank rests.

Her eyes fly open when her hand drops onto rumpled sheets.

He isn’t there. The sheets still have the lingering traces of his warmth on them and the imprint of his body; he must have left recently, rose without waking her. She doesn’t panic at first, because he’s done this before, disappeared into the morning to hunt down bagels or some sort of breakfast – or maybe he’s even downstairs, cooking it for her there. It’s a catalog of plausible scenarios, all better than the worst-case one.

She’s rubbing the sleep out of her eyes when she spots the note on the nightstand.

It’s written on one of her neon yellow post-it’s he must have taken from her desk, scrawled in pencil. It’s obvious he’d been in a hurry when writing it. Eager to leave, maybe. It’s barely even two sentences, but that’s all it needs to be to convey his message, short and anything but sweet.

This was a mistake. I’m sorry.

Chapter Text

“Whaddup my party peooooople! We gettin’ litty titty toni-hiight.”

Asher’s announcement makes Laurel perk up out of her funk, as does the sudden appearance of a dozen tequila shots at their table. She had to be dragged to whatever this is – the less tame, more gay sequel to Coliver’s bachelor party held in some gay bar with flashing lights that already feel liable to give her a migraine – and she accepted mostly because of the allure of free drinks. She downs one immediately without waiting for a toast, the burn of the liquor soothing the burn of rejection, and the others make a collective sound of protest.

“Uh, rude. You not even gonna wait to toast to mine and Ollie’s everlasting love?” Connor scoffs, and she just glares at him, then knocks back another out of spite.

“Love isn’t real,” she mumbles against the rim of the shot glass, forgoing a chaser and allowing the sting of the tequila to linger. “It always ends, sooner or later.”

Oliver blinks. “That’s… great for a soon-to-be married couple to hear.”

“Ignore her,” Michaela tells them. “She’s still salty Frank boned her and then bounced.”

“A toast,” Connor proposes, undaunted, holding his shot glass out as the others do the same. “To our everlasting very gay love. And to Laurel, that her misery may one day find company.”

They clink glasses and knock them back in unison while Laurel just sits there, resting her head on her hand. Once they settle back into their seats, Asher leans her way, wriggling his eyebrows.

“So Frankie D really did the toot it and boot it, huh? My man,” he says and pounds his chest in something of a Tarzan-esque, macho show of solidarity. “How’s your own medicine taste, El Castillo?”

Laurel grabs another shot and downs it while glaring at him. “Thank you for rubbing it in.”

Oliver gathers up the remaining shots and slides them out of her reach. “Okay, yep, we’re cutting you off.”

She remains unfazed and swings her legs out, hopping off her barstool. “My credit card says otherwise. I’ll catch up with you guys in a bit.”

Michaela scoffs. “Come on, can you at least pretend that you-”

She’s gone before the other woman can finish her sentence, assimilating into the crowd of sweaty, grinding, scantily-clad bodies and navigating in the direction of the bar like a tequila-seeking missile. Normally she’d be a better sport about this and play along for Connor and Oliver’s sake, but she can’t find the will to fake it – not now anyway, when the burn of Frank leaving is still raw as hell. She thinks this is probably how he felt the night he proposed and she walked out, stupid and small and worthless – only somehow she imagines this might feel worse, having the rug ripped out from underneath her just when she’d started to believe things would be okay.

Nobody could fake the way he’d looked at her. And still in the morning he was gone, and all those loving looks and tender touches and sweet nothings were worth just that in the end: nothing.

Oliver is the one who finds her at the bar one open tab and three drinks later, too morose to even bother pouring out her sorrows to the leather-clad bartender wearing a sailor’s cap like something reminiscent of the Village People. Her vision has begun to go foggy and sideways, the bass of the music a distant thud she can only feel through the floor, and if she didn’t think she was becoming her mother before – well, this is pretty stark fucking evidence to the contrary, drinking to escape the misery of her existence. Add that to her ever-growing list of fuck-up’s. Shitty mom. Shitty girlfriend. Shitty person in general.

But of all the people to find her, she’s glad it’s Oliver, who seems far too sober for a man at his own bachelor party and more concerned about her than she deserves. He slides onto the barstool beside her with a sympathetic look, nudging her elbow gently with his own to alert her of his presence.

“Hey. You okay?”

“Never better,” is all she mumbles into her drink, then sighs, releasing all the air in her lungs and focusing her eyes on him as steadily as she can manage in her present state. “Sorry I ditched you guys. Really I did you a favor, though.” Something of a twisted, horrible grin worms its way onto her face. “I was totally killing the vibe back there.”

“Yeah,” Oliver concedes sheepishly. “Kind of.”

“I’m sorry. Really,” she slurs, polishing off the rest of her drink and slamming in down onto the bar, but not motioning for another one; she can already feel herself toeing the line between pleasantly hammered and what could quickly become a violent, vomiting nightmare later on. “I’m a terrible person and no one wants to be around me and I don’t…” She laughs, at herself and at this pile of shit predicament she’s gotten herself into, and at her own naiveté that night, thinking Frank had really wanted her again, that everything could be fixed so easily. “I don’t even blame them anymore. I’m like a black hole sucking all the fucking light out of the universe.”

“Sorry about Frank,” he tells her, and he sounds it. He flattens his lips into a grim line. “That was a dick move.”

“Believe me,” she scoffs. “I have made a lot more dick moves. Had to cash in on that bad karma at some point.” She perks up suddenly, shrugging off that line of questioning. “You should go back with the others. This only needs to be a pity party of one, trust me.”

Oliver shrugs. “Asher’s doing body shots off one of the male dancers. I left before they got started. There’re some things in life you can never un-see.”

Laurel cringes, but smirks. “That kill the mood even more than I did?”

“Oh, absolutely.”

Oliver orders himself a drink and her a water, and they sit side by side in silence for a while, shoulder to shoulder with a certain miserable camaraderie that only two people having a less-than-ideal night can have.

Finally, he looks over at her, broaching the subject hesitantly. “Look, I know this isn’t what you wanna hear, like, at all, but… Maybe you should consider moving on.”

She just stares at him. “Can’t believe I hadn’t thought of that already.”

“I just mean-” He exhales sharply, shrugging his shoulders. “I don’t know. It doesn’t seem like it’s working. And yeah, it sucks to get dumped by somebody you really love but… maybe you two are just better apart. Some people bring out the worst in each other.”

Bring out the worst in each other. That couldn’t be further from the truth, because Frank makes her laugh in a way no one else can, relaxes her and sets her at ease and allows her to breathe, and he looks at her in a way she’s never seen him look at anyone else, and that isn’t the worst of themselves. It can’t be. They were only ever the best versions of themselves when they were together; she just hadn’t realized it then, until she’d been confronted with the sorry-ass version of herself in the aftermath. They’d been over a dozen times before that, on and off and on and off, but none of those times had ever felt even remotely like this. He’d never truly felt gone, even after he skipped town. Even after he was.

He does, now. He’s across the city and he might as well be in another galaxy. He fucked her up as bad as she fucked him up, and maybe Oliver is right. Maybe they do bring out the worst in each other. They know how to hurt each other in the cruelest ways possible, all the exact pressure points and sore spots to strike. They’re pretty goddamn good at that, as good as they were at loving each other. Maybe it’s all they know how to do, anymore.

And fuck him, really, she thinks. Fuck him for doing this, for loving her so much the only option she had was to bolt, loving her so much it terrified her. He should’ve known better, and now she’s the asshole, and it’s all her fault. Fuck him. Fuck him.

She stands suddenly, with furious purpose, and Oliver blinks. “Uh, what’re you doing?”

“I’m gonna go find Frank,” she manages to bite out semi-coherently, shrugging on her coat. “And I’m gonna tell him he can go fuck himself.”

“That’s, uh – I mean, that’s… not a great tactic if you wanna – hey, wait, you didn’t close out your ta-”

Laurel doesn’t turn, just saunters out the front door and calls an Uber. She rides in silence, oddly centered and clear-headed for how drunk she is, because she knows what she has to do tonight, and when the driver pulls over in front of Bonnie’s house, she marches to the front door, flushed and indignant and shivering in the cold. She’s ready to unleash the moment the door opens, but when Bonnie appears on the other side instead of the intended recipient of her fury, she finds herself momentarily defused.

She must look like as much as of a mess as she feels, because the other woman furrows her brow as soon as she comes into view. “Laurel?”

“Hey,” she greets, teeth chattering. She folds her arms, releasing a foggy breath and glancing past her. “Is Frank here?”

“Uh, yeah, he’s-”

A voice behind her, suddenly. A familiar one. His.

“Laurel?”

She steps inside without waiting to be let in, clenching her jaw and finding Frank standing a few yards away, over by the sofa. And she came here to yell, to scream at him, to tell him she’s done and doesn’t need him and never wants to see him again, but the moment their eyes meet, all the anger floods out of her and instead she’s just horribly, horribly sad.

Because she loves him. She’s never been surer of it, as sure as she’s breathing, just standing there looking at him with only feet between them that might as well be an entire ocean. She loves him, and that isn’t enough anymore. She’s too late. Missed the damn boat, like she always does. Some things can’t be fixed. This, she knows, is one of them, and they can’t keep dancing in circles around each other. One of them has to kill this for good, put them out of their mutual misery, and it might as well be her since that seems to be her specialty. What’s one last time. One merciful, killing blow.

“So, we’re even?” she asks, point-blank, and he blinks.

Bonnie takes this as her cue to flee to avoid being caught in the crossfire, retreating into the kitchen, and they both watch her go, until finally Frank looks back at her and sighs, folding his arms.

“What’re you talkin’ about?”

“You did that on purpose, right? Fucked me and left?” she sniffs, not nearly as angry as she wants to be. She’s just so damn sad, more than anything. “You do that just to show me how it feels?”

He seems genuinely hurt by that. “’Course not-”

“I deserved it,” she laughs, sounding slightly deranged, feeling slightly deranged. “I ruined us, and then… and then I realized how I really felt, and I was too late. So, we’re even. I get how it feels, if that was what you wanted.” She swallows, throat tight, eyes watering, and if she thought being drunk would make this easier, numb the burn, she was dead wrong. “Feels pretty fucking shitty.”

There’s a change in his demeanor; a softening. He’s always hated seeing her cry more than anything else, and it makes all the air go out of him, until he looks almost smaller before her. She can tell he wants to reach out, touch her, comfort her, do something; she can feel his restraint and how much it kills him not to, but she thinks it might kill them both more if he did, if he reignited this thing only to have to stamp it out once again. It’s better this way, a clean break at a safe distance, though this break has been bloody and brutal and slow, anything but clean. It could never be, after everything they were.

“That wasn’t…” he drifts off, shaking his head. “I didn’t do that to hurt you.”

“Not like I didn’t deserve it. Right? If we’re even-” she approaches him, raising her chin, arms folded against her chest and stance guarded. Bracing herself. “Then we can stop doing this. Stop… going in circles, over and over. Let’s just even the score. I’ve been awful to you. Be awful to me.” Another laugh, this one tearful and acidic. “Tell me you hate me. I know… I know you do. You have to, by now, after-”

“I don’t,” he tells her, softly emphatic, and he moves forward, forgetting to hold back for a moment and reaching out to her. “Laurel-”

“You shouldn’t have asked me to marry you,” she hisses, anger swelling inside her chest all at once. She recoils away before he can touch her. “You knew I couldn’t. You knew I would leave – and then I’m the heartless bitch who turns you down. Then it’s all on me.” She knows how she sounds, how she must look, drunk and blubbering, but the truth is she’s never going to be able to say these things sober. She needs to say them now. “I kept thinking you would leave. Before Chris. After he came and you… found out he wasn’t yours. All summer. I was so sure you were gonna leave at some point. And you didn’t. I didn’t get it.” She pauses, meets his eyes, and shakes her head. “I still don’t.”

He seems bewildered by that, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. Like it should be equally as obvious to her. “’Cause I loved you.”

Now she’s the bewildered one. “Why?”

“’Cause I loved you. I loved you more than anythin’. I never needed you to be a certain way, Laurel, all I wanted to do was love you,” he repeats, and she knows at once there’s no other reason. He has no rationale for it. “I – why the hell does that scare you so much?”

“Because.” A beat. She cracks a cheerless little smile. “Nobody’s ever done that.”

The words echo in the silence that follows. It’s the truth, and he knows it as well as she does. No one has ever loved her that way: unconditionally, absolutely and completely and without expectations, without judgement. Her father left her for dead and her mother was too trapped in her own mind to love her or anyone like that, and there were others, other men, Wes and a dozen more before, but none of them ever had that sort of love for her either. It was all conditional, contingent on something. It all came with a clause in the fine print and an expiration date stamped on the tin.

It freaked her the fuck out to be loved so much, loved just because. It still does. He loved her too much.

Too much for his own good. And for hers.

“We have to stop doing this,” she murmurs, finally, feeling a wave of wooziness but fighting it off. “One of us has to just… end this. We’re just making each other miserable. So, I’ll do it.” She wilts, folding her arms. “I should-” Laurel looks back at the door and takes an unsteady step toward it, grabbing her purse. “I should go, I shouldn’t have come here, I-”

She goes for the door, but the touch of a hand on her arm stops her, jolting her like an electric shock. She turns to find Frank there behind her, and if she just ended this, whatever this is, then that touch breathes life right back into it again, brings on that familiar clench in her chest and the warmth that spreads beneath his fingertips where his skin meets hers.

“You’re drunk. And upset. Just-” he sighs, seemingly as unsure how to handle this situation as she is. “Take the bed upstairs, okay? Get some sleep. I’d feel better knowin’ you’re somewhere safe for the night.”

Laurel considers protesting, but all at once she’s very aware she’s had more than her fair share of fighting tonight and has none left in her. It must be late – one or two in the morning at the earliest – and so she just nods without a word, taking a step toward the stairs and shaking him off when he tries to steady her. She ends up tripping over her own feet halfway up anyway, and he catches her just in time, leading her into his bedroom and kneeling to remove her boots when she sinks down onto the bed, too incapacitated to manage it herself. If she were less inebriated, she might insist on doing it herself, but all she can manage to do is sigh and glance down at Frank where he kneels, unlacing her boots, silent and devoted, and so good. So good it kills her.

“I love you,” she mutters like one last, miserable dirge for the dead. “And I’m too late. I only… figure out I love people after they’re dead. Or gone. Or after I made them hate me.” She can feel a lump in her throat, wedged there jagged and aching like a stone. “I’m always too late.”

Frank doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t so much as look up at her, until finally he’s undone both shoes and tossed them to the side. She lowers her head down onto the pillow once he has, watching through bleary eyes as he rises to stand and goes for the door – until suddenly Frank stops, lingering there in the doorway. He opens his mouth, but after a moment lets whatever words he was going to say die on his tongue, abruptly losing his confidence. She’s sure that’s all he’s going to leave her with, the ghost of the words he couldn’t say, until-

“You’re not too late,” he says, soft as a whisper, and turns off the light.

~

She comes to in the morning with a splitting headache that’s becoming an all-too-frequent occupant of the space behind her eyes and a familiar smell in her nostrils. Food. Something cooking. She rolls over, squinting in the blinding sunlight and shielding her eyes as she sits up to track the source of the scent. Food.

Breakfast.

If she didn’t know better, Laurel thinks, she could almost let herself live in this delusion for a little while longer: waking up in Frank’s bed all sun-drenched and sleepy to the smell of him downstairs cooking her breakfast. The room is gold, the sheets white enough to glow, idyllic as a late morning dream. If she didn’t know better, she could swear they’ve gone back in time.

But she does. And so Laurel climbs to her feet, steels herself for a swift gut-punch of reality, and creeps down the stairs.

She finds him at the stove like she’d expected, facing away from her and flipping an egg in a cast-iron skillet as it sizzles away next to a few slices of bacon. It crosses her mind, again – the temptation of waiting to make her presence known, just allowing herself to watch and lose herself in the perfection of this moment – but by now she can recognize her unhealthy, masochistic tendencies for what they are. So she makes herself clear her throat as she slips into one of the barstools at the kitchen island, and when she does Frank turns. It may be a trick of the light or the sun in her eyes, or both, but she swears she can see the flicker of a grin on his lips when he does.

He turns back to the food before she can confirm one way or another. “Mornin’.”

“Good morning,” she says back, somewhat tentatively, and narrows her eyes. “Is that for me?”

That does earn her a grin. He glances over his shoulder, incredulous. “Really think I’m gonna cook it in front of you and not give you any?”

“That would be pretty cruel revenge.”

“Oh, I forgot.” He turns suddenly, opening the fridge and retrieving a bottle of blue Gatorade. “Ran out and got you this. I knew you were gonna be nursin’ one hell of a hangover. Electrolytes.”

He slides it her way across the counter and she takes it with a grateful nod, unscrewing the cap and taking a sip. It’s her favorite flavor, which somehow he’d remembered, and the casual thoughtfulness only serves to make her feel worse. “I’m a terrible example to my kid. Going on a bender like a college freshman.”

“Least he don’t know the difference yet, right? You got time to get back on the straight and narrow,” Frank jokes. “Where’s little man anyway?”

“Annalise had him overnight.” She pauses, letting the tide of silence wash over them and pull them out into it, before finally Laurel sighs. “And about… last night. I-” She stops talking, frustrated with her inability to articulate herself when it matters. “I shouldn’t have come here. I was trying to end it. And I think…”

Again, she drifts off. He furrows his brow across the counter, where he stands opposite her. “Think what?”

“We should,” she says, low and mournful, and hell, even she knows it’s obvious she doesn’t want to. “End it.”

She pauses to wet her lips. Her throat feels dry, tongue like sandpaper, and there’s hurt plain as day on his face, but he masks it well enough in his voice. “That what you really want?”

She considers lying. She really does. It would be the best thing for both of them, if she could simply allow them to stop torturing themselves. But it’s torture and God, it’s the most wonderful feeling, the best in her life, being with him. She locks onto his gaze, and she must not be hiding the lie in her eyes very well because she can see it in his that he doesn’t believe her, not for a single second. She can hear the hitch in his breath too, remembers the way it had done that same thing that night on the porch when she’d told him she didn’t want him to get over it. A hitch of hope, like he’s holding it. Waiting for her answer.

“No,” she murmurs, finally, because there’s no other answer. There’ll never be any other answer. They both know that.

Blink, and somehow, she ends up on her feet with him standing close to her, so close she has to tilt her head upward ever so slightly to look him in the eyes. His gaze drops down to her lips, for a second, but he makes himself look away; it isn’t time for that, fire and fury and fucking out their feelings. They’ve had time enough for that already, and now they’re here to talk, even if she can’t quite focus on much of anything other than how badly she wants him to press his body against hers.

“I wanna be with you,” he confesses, voice deep enough to make her shudder. “I only… I only ever wanted to be with you.”

“Frank-” she breathes, but he continues, unflinching yet still somehow impossibly tender.

“But I can’t just have part of you, again. I can’t do that. That’s-” He shakes his head. “That’s torture, Laurel, that’s worse than havin’ none of you.”

“Guess I got used to that being all anyone wanted from me,” she admits. “Just part of me.”

The idea seems to cause him pain. He lets out a breath. “Laurel…”

Silence. Then, of all things, she laughs softly. “You scare the hell out of me, you know that?”

“So?” he quips smoothly. “You scare the hell outta me too. But you don’t see me runnin’.”

She should move away. But she swears she’s cemented in place, locked in his gravity like a satellite, and she couldn’t move away even if she wanted to – which she doesn’t. She’s unfamiliar with the concept of needing people, and when she was a child she taught herself not to, but she has the deeply disturbing yet almost euphoric sense that she does need him.

“Look,” he begins, somber and serious. “I wanna do this. But it can’t be the way it was. And I’m not sayin’ I’m gonna propose tomorrow. I’m not sayin’ we gotta move fast. We can go as slow as you want, but-” He swallows. “We can’t be not movin’ at all.”

“I, um…” Again, another breath of a laugh. “I don’t think I know how to do this.”

He winks. “That makes two of us.”

“No, you always have,” she scoffs, then grows solemn, searching his eyes. They’re so blue they cut right through her. They see everything, even if she tries to hide, and she realizes there was never any point in trying to hide from him in the first place. “Somehow. You always did.”

“’Cause this don’t have to be hard,” he undertones, shaking his head. “This could be so damn easy. If you let it.” He moves in closer. “Just let it be easy.”

At first she thinks he’s going to kiss her, but Laurel finds herself taken aback when he wraps his arms around her instead, folding her body into him. It feels more gratifying than a kiss, or any number of kisses they’ve shared in the past, because it’s all they need: her in his arms and him in hers. Simple. Easy. She can feel herself almost trembling against him, like someone living in the midst of a dream, and she bunches the fabric of his shirt into her fists as her way of pinching herself, as if to test if this is real.

“Okay.” Okay. I love you. Okay.

She’s not going to be good at this; that much is a foregone conclusion. And she knows they’re probably not finished breaking each other’s hearts just yet, but she doesn’t care. None of that matters. There’s no world that exists in which the two of them can ever be separate for long; they’ll always be together in some form or other, and they’re together now. They can be together, now. She knows she can learn how.

Easier said than done, she thinks, but it occurs to Laurel that this can be easy, if she’ll let it. When he presses a kiss to her forehead, she knows.

She’s not too late. Not this time.

END