Work Text:
Laurie moves forward without questioning anything.
The path exists because they are walking it together. He needs no proof beyond the sound of their steps, the occasional brush of arms, their breathing falling into the same rhythm. Everything else—names, houses, promises—slips behind them with an unsettling ease. It does not vanish; it simply loses urgency. It stops demanding. What matters is here: the way Jo takes his hand without looking, the way she adjusts her pace so as not to leave him behind, with the precision of someone who knows his rhythm by heart.
He feels he could follow her like this to the end of the world; the thought has belonged to him for a long time, and he would never grow tired of it.
A sentence crosses his mind and settles without a sound: this is what it feels like when nothing weighs on you.
They are running away.
The word is light, clear, necessary. The gesture is simple: an old decision, long postponed. Jo does not look back. Neither does he. The past stays where it belongs: behind. What is freed moves forward with them.
Jo walks ahead, resolute, beautiful in a brutally alive way, and he cannot stop looking at her.
There is a different light in her—she shines with the intensity of someone who no longer restrains herself. Every movement is firm, chosen. She does not look like someone abandoning a life, but like someone who has stopped postponing herself. Seeing her like this—loving her like this—sets his chest in order. The body recognizes the motion, without friction, without the habit of correcting itself at every step. Just a straight line that, for the first time, does not hurt to follow.
His mind does not split. This—he thinks—is the happiness I wanted. Not the one they explained to me. The one that feels like this: direct, reckless, inevitable. The future feels unnecessary when the present is enough, and Jo remains.
They speak little. Just enough. Where to stop. How much light is left. The practical world reduced to essentials. Jo points out a narrower path; he follows without asking. When she turns to check that he is there, her eyes are clear, free of calculation. And in that look he recognizes something that had always been absent in waking life: an answer. He receives it with the naturalness of someone who has waited a long time, rehearsed by his body for years.
For the first time, he is not running ahead of anyone; only Jo’s love exists, returning.
That is what holds him. And it is enough.
They stop when they can no longer pretend they are not seeking each other. The room has nothing extraordinary about it. Precisely for that reason it becomes important. It is real. Worn walls. A narrow bed. A door that closes and does not accuse. Silence falls softly, and there stops being an outside. The certainty reaches him that he could live here, that he could reduce his world to this size without resentment.
Jo turns toward him unhurried.
They kiss with the urgency of those who know there is no going back. They touch each other against time, now a tangible enemy. It is not tenderness: it is recognition. Jo pushes him back onto the bed. He laughs, low, disbelieving, because even now—especially now—he feels that brutal clarity: this is being alive.
“I love you,” Jo says.
The words fall into place with an unrepeatable naturalness. She says it with the certainty of the indisputable, something that was always there and can finally be spoken aloud. No emphasis, no ceremony. He understands that this simplicity is the true miracle.
Laurie feels the world arrange itself around those words. Everything fits. Everything forgives. Love—that which never ceased—falls over him with a devastating softness. He thinks, without fear, that he could die in this instant and nothing would be missing, as long as Jo looks at him like that.
He kisses her with an almost grateful devotion. The world narrows to skin, breath, shared weight. They are going to seal the bargain between the sheets. Not as a mistake, not as a slip: as the inevitable consequence of having chosen. He thinks, with almost cruel lucidity, that he has never wanted anything so cleanly.
At last, the world cooperates.
The bed is not a destination, but a continuation. The closeness is certainty. The truth arranges itself clearly: there is nothing more beautiful than this—to see how Jo returns his love in her eyes, to feel that he is taking nothing that has not been offered, to know that desire breaks nothing because everything has already been chosen. Time grows docile. The body learns a new stillness.
The day falls away. The road falls away. What remains is allowed to drop.
They stay together, breathing the same air, without words. He rests his forehead against hers, convinced that nothing can fracture now. Fulfillment presents itself whole.
He wakes.
The change is immediate.
The body is heavy. The air is still. The room is familiar, proper, inexorably real. Objects keep their place with a discipline that feels almost offensive. The words I love you linger a moment longer, too clear to survive waking.
He turns his head.
Amy sleeps beside him. Her breathing insists, steady, marking a world Laurie cannot manage to fit himself into.
He does not move.
He understands, with devastating clarity, that escape was always available.
It was not desire, nor even happiness, that betrayed the dream.
It was reciprocated love.
Because only in his dreams does Jo love him like that.
And only for that reason did it feel so perfectly true.