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Chris lets herself into the dark, quiet house and moves to lock the door out of habit before remembering that she has Street’s key.
“Duke!” she calls out, but the dog is already lumbering in her direction from the hall where Luca and Street’s bedrooms are. Duke hesitates when he realizes that it’s not his normal human, and then lurches forward when he realizes it’s her. His tail wags fiercely, dragging his whole body along as he tucks his face between her thighs in greeting.
It feels good to be wanted so enthusiastically for once, even if it’s just by a dog.
“Come here, boy. Let’s go out and then I’ll feed you.”
In the yard, Duke is quick about his business and then he comes trotting back over to her, his nose cold against her palm. He presses his body against her leg as she leads the way back inside, like he can sense her need for physical comfort right now. In fact, she’s sure he can.
Chris scoops his food into his bowl with the measuring cup that sits at the top of the food bin, then gives him another quarter scoop for good measure — she knows Luca has been getting on Street about Duke’s weight, but she’s more of the fun aunt than the stand-in parent so she’s not above spoiling the dog a little. While he eats she finds her way to the couch, settles sideways against the arm with her knees to her chest and she pulls a blanket from the back of the couch over her legs. She turns the TV on for background noise and leaves it on whatever unfamiliar cooking show pops up. Soon Duke finishes his food and curls up on top of her feet, his head angled to rest on the edge of the couch by her hip. She lets a lazy hand scratch idle circles on the top of his head and tries to let the TV drown out her thoughts.
A thud and the jiggling of the doorknob draw her attention away, and then Street appears with hands full of a white takeout bag and two helmets. Chris realizes that he was fully prepared to drag her out of whatever state he found her in, literally if he had to, and a small warmth makes its home in her chest.
He kicks the door closed and scans the room, smiling when his eyes fall on Chris’s form folded up on his couch.
“Good, you made it,” he says, like he’s the one who’s been waiting for her. “Duke! Hey, buddy.”
Duke picks his head up, glances at Street, and nudges his nose back against Chris.
“Oh, so that’s how it is.” Street rolls his eyes but winks at Chris as he moves towards the kitchen. “Whatcha watching?”
“I don’t know, whatever was on,” Chris admits.
“Well—“ He starts unpacking the food onto the island, still talking as he turns to the fridge “—I’m glad you’re not attached to it because we’re going to eat and watch the greatest breakup movie of all time.”
“Oh, what’s that?”
“You’ll see.” Street flicks mischievous eyebrows at her across the room, exuding a relaxed demeanor even though he feels anything but. Seeing Chris hurt and vulnerable always him in a way he can’t deny, even though he thinks he hides it well enough. It’s all been grating at him since they parted ways at the beach—his heart broken on her behalf, his mind furious at the two people responsible.
Whenever she’s off balance, he finds his whole world tipping off its axis alongside. And he’s powerless to fix himself until Chris finds her own way back to right-side up.
He also knows it’s not just self-preservation driving his deep-seated need to help relieve the menace of tension and pain that simmer under her skin. But he can’t go there right now.
He debates water versus beers, wary of alcohol compounding the heartbreak that must already cloud Chris’s judgment, but he remembers that her entire life is packed up in her truck and realizes that she has no home to drive back to tonight. Deciding for himself that she’ll spend the night here, he grabs two beers from the fridge and sets them next to the food on the counter.
“I’m gonna change real quick. Do you want me to grab you anything from your truck?”
“Oh, I—no, it’s a mess in there.” But she takes his offer for the hint that it is and gently pushes Duke off her feet so she can go get her things herself.
Street pretends to be busy until she goes outside, and then he heads to his bedroom to change into a tank top and sweats. The bathroom door is shut when he comes back out and Chris emerges soon after, her jeans exchanged for soft purple shorts and a Def Leppard t-shirt almost long enough to cover them.
She looks around until she sees Street in the kitchen, where he gathers napkins and stalls so she has all the space she needs. He waits until she takes up her same spot on the couch before he grabs the food and the beers to join her.
“Hand me the remote?”
Chris complies. “What’s this great breakup movie?”
“I’ll tell you, if you promise not to make fun of me.”
“Oh, so I’m definitely going to make fun of you.”
“Okay—but you have to give it a chance, at least.”
Interest piqued, Chris watches the screen as Street navigates through subsequent menu screens until he finds what he’s looking for.
“You have got to be kidding.”
“What?” He quips innocently, smirking at the dismayed look on her face.
“Twilight? Are you serious?”
“Completely!” He loses control over the grin that insists on breaking across his face, pleased to get the exact reaction he expected from her. “It’s so bad, it’s good. And nothing can make you feel better about your love life than watching a depressed teenager fall in love with a hundred-year-old humanoid monster. Plus—the special effects are awful. What? Don’t tell me you’ve never seen it.”
“Never. And I don’t understand why you have.”
“Because! I told you. It’s the ultimate breakup comfort movie and I’ve been around that block a few times.” He pushes one of the takeout boxes towards her. “Here, eat. Relax. It’s okay.”
Chris presses her lips together to suppress a small smile, avoiding the urge to look over at him as she reaches for her food.
“Oh, here, this is yours.” Street hands her a lidded cup of dipping sauce that was tucked in with his fries.
“Didn’t even forget the extra ranch,” she says, hoping as soon as she speaks that her voice doesn’t betray the overwhelming sense of being cared for that she’s missed this past year.
She spent a year ignoring it, but now a series of specific memories flood back—the way Ty and Kira moved seamlessly around each other, all the times they got one another’s favorite takeout orders exactly right, while she got used to overlooked details in their gestures toward her. Whenever it happened, she brushed it off and blamed the newness of the relationship, tried to appreciate kind intentions even if the results were never perfect. But she hasn’t realized until now how much it bothered her that their intimate knowledge of each other never fully extended to her. And it shouldn’t take a year to learn that she prefers ranch over ketchup for her fucking fries.
“You ready for this?” Street asks, bringing her back to his living room.
She squirms when she realizes he’s been watching her, and swallows the swell of emotions in her throat before it can overflow. “Ready as I’ll ever be, I guess.”
“Good. Rules of Twilight, all comments are welcome so don’t hold back.”
“Am I going to have lots of comments?”
“Oh, absolutely. You won’t get through the opening—well, you’ll see.”
“Noted.”
He starts the movie, and Chris pushes Duke’s head off her lap so she can dig into her burger without his interference.
“Why are these woods so blue?”
Street laughs at her question, covering his full mouth with the back of his hand. “Not everywhere can be sunny Los Angeles, okay?” He says once he swallows. “They’re in the rainiest town in the continental US.”
Amused, Chris exhales sharply through her nose and makes a face at him. “Since when is rain literally blue?”
“Shh, watch, this is important or you’ll miss the whole premise.”
“All comments are welcome, sure,” Chris mutters to herself, smiling into a sip of beer.
“They are! But you still have to watch.”
“Wait, is that a desert? The desert should definitely not be blue.”
She sees Street shake his head with an exaggerated eye roll in her direction.
“Did she literally just hold a little potted cactus in her lap for her whole flight?”
“It’s her little piece of home! Why are you looking at me like that?”
“This is—just a side of you that I never knew existed,” Chris says.
“Just roll with it—I won’t tell if you won’t. Stays between us.”
Chris recognizes that he means more than just his strange devotion to the movie; he’s not going to go spreading her business around the team, and she nods in appreciation for it.
Several scenes pass without comment from Chris, and Street keeps a peripheral eye on her as she eats and watches. He’s relieved to see her shoulders no longer hunched up to her earlobes, some of the tension of the day melting away, at least for now. He can only imagine the turmoil that awaits her as she processes her breakup in the next days and weeks, but at least tonight she’s allowing him to distract her and he lets that ease the achy discomfort that started spreading in his gut the moment Ty first called him.
“Here they are, they’re the vampires,” Street tells her, pointing at the TV with one of his last French fries as a high school cafeteria pans across the screen.
“Hang on, hang on. What the fuck is going on? They’re all siblings? And they’re dating each other? And they’re getting to school in the middle of lunch period? And we’re just going to act like all of this is fine?”
“Yes, that’s exactly what we’re doing. They’re not siblings, though, not really.”
“You ever date your own foster sister when you were a kid?” Chris asks pointedly.
“No, but I’m not a vampire. They’re not really in foster care.”
“Okay, obviously. It’s still batshit crazy.”
Street shrugs and lets Chris complain about the actors’ unchanging facial expressions, the way every boy in the school fawns over Bella Swan, and the strange way Edward Cullen cranes his neck towards Bella when he talks to her.
Their empty food containers forgotten on the coffee table, Chris rests back against the couch cushions with her legs criss-crossed under the blanket. Duke plops his head into her lap at his first opportunity, and soon enough his paws and then the upper half of his body follow. Chris’s outraged commentary and Street’s laughs, at her more than at the TV, punctuate the dramatic scenes that play out in front of them.
At some point Street quietly gets up to clean up their trash and bring back two more beers and two glasses of water. Chris adjusts to stretch out across the sofa while he’s gone, irritating Duke until he climbs on top of her and settles his entire weight over her torso.
Street’s first choice would be to lift her feet out of the way and sit at the end of the couch, but there are a million reasons not to and his only goal tonight is to remind Chris how to be comfortable in her own skin, the way she seems to have forgotten with Ty and Kira. So he sets her drinks down on the coffee table and chooses the armchair instead, bothered as he is that he can’t see her face with the way she lays facing the opposite wall.
With Duke on top of her, her animated physical reactions are limited to waving her arms at the television as Bella figures out that Edward is a vampire—“What, like two weeks after meeting this guy when all these other people have known him for years and never figured it out?”—and as they watch the special effects of super speed and sparkling skin.
“This is seriously what all the hype was about? God, when I was in high school half the girls were obsessed with this shit. And he’s up here watching her sleep? And they think that’s romantic?”
“Oh, just wait until he tells her that she’s his life now. When they’ve known each other for like two months.”
“No way, I can’t handle it. Turn it off, we’re done.”
“No! Come on, it’s just getting good.”
“We have very different definitions of good.”
“But you can’t say this isn’t fun.”
She shakes her head at the ceiling, hair swishing against the pillow that sits against the arm of the couch. Street can tell that she’s smiling in spite of herself.
Chris feels lighter than she has in weeks, the pressure of her and Kira’s unknown future now lifted even if this isn’t the way she hoped things would turn out. The anxiety of the situation had been eating away at her and there’s an undeniable relief in finding its end, however strange and unknown the future looks for her now. She’s not an idiot, and she knows that soon enough the reality of things will set in—but right this second, good food and this stupid movie and the warmth of a home more comfortable than the one she just left have her convinced that she can wait just a little longer before the fallout really falls.
She kind of hates that Street was right about the movie, though. She’d make a note to tell him later, when the admission won’t feel so big, but she’s pretty sure he already knows.
She mocks the way the villains of the movie aren’t introduced until the end, and the played-up intensity of the climactic fight scene, all while scoffing at the shallowness of Edward and Bella’s relationship development and Bella’s prom attire of Chuck Taylors and leggings. But it’s not until the two main characters are dancing in a quiet gazebo that she pushes up on one arm, even with Duke’s weight on her, so she can turn her head to look at Street.
“Do not tell me we did all this just for this bitch turn into a vampire at the end of the movie. No! I do not accept this.”
“Just watch,” he says, nodding at the TV.
“They’ve known each other for what, a couple of months at the most? And she’s ready to throw away her whole life for him? Goddamn, this does make me feel like my judgment isn’t all that bad.”
“See? Best breakup movie ever. Wait! You gotta watch this, it sets up the next movie.”
“Next movie?” Chris yelps. “Is that the evil vampire? She’s still alive?”
“She’s still alive,” Street confirms as the credits begin to roll.
“How many of these are there?”
“Five, and they’re all the exact same quality.” He mutes the TV. “We can start the next one, if you want. Or I can set up the couch and you can get some sleep. Up to you.”
She considers for a moment, one hand absently stroking down Duke’s back. “ I mean, I feel like I’m invested now—“
“See? I told you. It’s like driving past a car wreck, you can’t look away. The second movie is something else. Love triangles, werewolves…”
“But rain check on the next movie, maybe. I’m kind of wiped.”
He nods, stands and goes to move the coffee table as he calls Duke to get down.
“No, he’s fine, I’m fine. You don’t need to do all that.”
“It’s not a big deal, really.”
“I’m not moving,” she says, and the finality in her tone has Street sighing in acceptance.
He gives her a small, tight-lipped smile and swings his arms back and forth a couple times before he crosses the living room to the hall closet. He comes back with an extra blanket and a real pillow to replace the worn-out decorative throw behind her head.
“You can kick him off whenever you want, he usually sleeps in Luca’s room.”
“Well, I’m his favorite person. Right, Duke?”
The dog sighs in his sleep and Chris smiles.
Street grabs the remote from his chair and sets it next to Chris’s water glass on the coffee table. Chris’s eyes are already drifting closed and he sets a hand on top of her head, his thumb brushing across her hairline.
“You sure you’re good?”
“I’m good.”
Better than I thought I’d be, she thinks, but that’s not for him to know.