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The party has that kind of noise.
A thick noise, slightly humid, made of overlapping laughter, glasses clinking, sentences interrupted by “wait wait” and “no, I swear,” music too low to be a real vibe but present enough to give the room a pulse. Red cups everywhere, perched on the corners of furniture that never asked for this responsibility. Robin’s plants have been nudged back a few centimeters, diplomatically, like someone negotiated a ceasefire with a jungle.
The cats move through it all like exasperated landlords.
The black cat has installed itself on the back of the couch, up high, the posture of a silent king. The other one, the dumber one, keeps doing laps between people’s legs, rubbing against jeans, meowing at every new voice as if it wants to join every conversation at once. Robin has already given it three nicknames in twenty minutes.
“Okay, that one is Mister President,” Robin announces, pointing at it, “because he judges everyone.”
The cat blinks slowly.
“And you,” she tells the other, “you’re DJ Chaos, because you do unpredictable transitions between rooms.”
Someone laughs. Someone says, “She’s incredible.” Robin answers, “I know,” with a smile that lands perfectly. She has that energy tonight: like a draft of air. She goes from the couch to the kitchen, from the kitchen to the balcony, from the balcony to the hallway, picking up a drink on the way, wiping up a tiny spill like it’s a bit, telling a story that’s too long and still managing to keep everyone hooked. She gestures wide, she mimes, she does voices. She’s alive.
And Nancy watches.
Nancy is near the table, a cup in her hand that she barely drinks from. She smiles, she responds, she’s polite, she nods at the right moments. She has the posture of someone who knows how to hold a group, how not to disappear without taking up all the space. But her gaze… her gaze never really stays on the person in front of her.
It follows Robin.
Like an invisible hand.
Robin slips behind someone, leans to grab chips, laughs too loud at a mediocre joke, taps a shoulder, pats an arm in friendly punctuation, apologizes when she bumps someone, comes back. She’s everywhere. And Nancy, even when she’s talking to someone, keeps Robin in the corner of her eye. Not because she’s afraid. Not because she’s monitoring. Because she’s obsessed. Because the way Robin exists in public, that blend of confidence and awkwardness, makes her dangerously… adorable. Desirable too. And Nancy hates that word in her head because it’s too blunt, too simple, too true.
At one point, Robin gets stuck in the kitchen, stuck in the Robin way: surrounded by people who want to listen to her. She’s telling a story about a radio set, a cable problem, a manager who’s too serious, and she ends up imitating the voice of some guy who told her “you’re really something,” with a ridiculous accent.
The laughter detonates.
Nancy, at the far end of the counter, arms crossed, looks at Robin like she wants to bite her collarbone.
Robin doesn’t see her. Or pretends not to see her. She shines, she plays, she floats.
Someone, a girl in an oversized shirt who’s had too much to drink, looks at Robin with that very simple, very direct expression of “wow.” She leans in and says something in Robin’s ear. Robin laughs, touches her arm, answers. Nothing serious. Nothing “cheating.” Just… life. Just the fact that Robin, in an apartment full of people, is still capable of becoming a center of gravity.
Nancy feels something tighten low in her belly, not explosive anger, more like a cold clamp. She inhales. She keeps her smile. She answers the person in front of her, but she isn’t really hearing them anymore. Her brain is already elsewhere, already in the kitchen, already on that hand that just touched Robin’s arm, already on Robin’s laugh that had a tiny softer note in it.
She thinks: they’re looking at her like she’s available.
And Nancy cannot tolerate that for long.
Robin comes back into the living room, slips out of the group, nearly hops over the dumb cat, apologizes, keeps moving. She stops near the offended plant, talks to it like an old enemy.
“I told you you can’t fall tonight,” Robin murmurs to the plant. “I’m performing.”
Nancy watches her do it, and it’s so Robin it almost makes her laugh, except the laugh stays stuck. Because she has that feeling of too much. A “I can’t take this” that isn’t fatigue, but desire with nowhere to go. Desire and attachment mixed together, that dangerous cocktail that makes you want to bite and protect at the same time.
Someone settles onto the couch and says, cheerfully, looking at Robin and Nancy:
“You two are so cute. Like, best friends.”
The sentence lands like a foam brick. It should bounce. It should be funny. Robin immediately makes a comedic face, ready to answer with a joke about “best friends who share cats” or “best friends who fight over one shirt.”
She opens her mouth.
But Nancy moves.
Nancy passes behind Robin. No hesitation. No announcement. Like her body decided before her head did. She positions herself right behind her, very close, and her hands find Robin’s hips with a precision that has nothing innocent about it.
Robin freezes, a micro-flinch, breath cut off.
Nancy pulls her back against her for one second. Just one. Just long enough for everyone to see the gesture. Long enough for it to stop being a best-friend detail. Long enough for it to become… a fact.
And then Nancy kisses the back of Robin’s neck.
Unhurried. Calm. Not a performance, exactly. A kiss placed like an obvious truth. Like a signature on skin.
The room goes blank for half a second.
Even the music seems to hesitate.
Nancy lifts her head, looks at the group, cup still in her hand, voice perfectly steady, that journalist tone that states a truth without asking for approval.
“She’s not my best friend,” Nancy says, calmly. “She’s my little wife.”
Silence.
Then the explosion.
Laughter, “OH MY GOD,” “I knew it,” “obviously,” a “I KNEW IT” yelled from the kitchen. Someone applauds stupidly. Someone makes a siren noise. The cats remain unmoved, because cats are never surprised by love, only by the sound of a can being opened.
Robin turns red all the way to her roots. Red like someone just shoved a spotlight into her face. She spins around, eyes wide, mouth parted, caught between scandal and… total melt.
“You just said that in front of people,” Robin hisses, half outraged, half thrilled, her voice cracked by emotion and adrenaline.
Nancy lifts one shoulder, unbothered.
“Yes.”
Robin blinks, searches for an escape plan, finds none, because Nancy’s hands are still on her hips, and it’s the only thing her body can truly register right now.
“Why?” Robin asks, lower, like she’s afraid of the answer.
Nancy tightens her hold just a little. Her smile is small, almost secret, but it has a possessive edge that makes something inside Robin stumble.
“Because I wanted to.”
Robin closes her eyes for a second, like someone just handed her something enormous in public. Humiliated and happy. Like the whole room just looked at her and said “oh, so that’s what this is,” and Nancy, in the middle of it, said “yes.”
The girl in the oversized shirt, the one who’d been staring at Robin too long, lets out an amused “okay wow” and backs off with a grin, hands raised like: I respect it.
Robin, still burning red, murmurs, “You’re impossible.”
Nancy leans to her ear, still holding her hips, and her voice becomes a thread meant only for Robin.
“And you’re mine.”
A full-body shiver runs through Robin. Not a little cold shiver. A shiver of consented possession, of heat, of “my body understands before my brain does.” She swallows, tries to find her sarcasm again, but it slips out the back door.
“You’re doing this on purpose,” Robin breathes.
Nancy kisses her neck again. Slower. Firmer. Still not a show, but enough that Robin can feel Nancy marking, anchoring, telling the world: this is not a hypothesis.
“Yes,” Nancy murmurs.
Robin parts her lips, and her voice comes out weaker than she wants.
“I’m going to die.”
Nancy smiles against her skin. “Not tonight.”
Behind them, someone calls out, “Well then, Mrs. Wheeler, look at you claiming your territory!” and someone else answers, “She said little wife, I wrote it down.” The laughter starts up again, the atmosphere warms, conversations resume, and yet there’s a new center in the apartment.
Robin and Nancy.
Not “the two cute friends.”
The couple.
Robin finally pulls back a little, looks Nancy in the face. Her cheeks are still hot.
“You know I’m going to think about that for three weeks,” Robin says, breathy.
Nancy tilts her head, calm. “That’s the point.”
Robin opens her mouth, scandalized, then a nervous laugh breaks out of her, and that laugh turns into a sigh, and that sigh turns into a truth she can’t hide:
“I like it.”
Nancy doesn’t even blink. She answers, simple, almost gentle:
“I know.”
Robin searches for something to do with her hands. She grabs her cup, sets it on the table, picks it up again, sets it down again. The party keeps moving around them, but Robin feels like she’s inside a small tunnel where there’s only Nancy.
Nancy keeps her hands on Robin’s hips like it’s normal. Like it’s where they naturally belong. And Robin feels that hold like a sentence being repeated in her body.
Someone squeezes past behind them to grab a beer, apologizes, and Robin presses closer to Nancy by reflex, like Nancy is a soft wall.
Nancy murmurs, “You’re trembling.”
Robin lies immediately: “No.”
Nancy smiles. “Yes.”
Robin exhales, defeated: “Okay. Yes. But it’s… your fault.”
Nancy leans in, speaks without moving her lips, almost a secret.
“You had an audience. I wanted you to remember where you come home to.”
Robin closes her eyes, a little stunned. “Nancy…”
Nancy kisses the angle of Robin’s jaw, just under the ear, where Robin is always too sensitive, and Robin makes a tiny sound she tries to swallow.
That’s the tension.
No need for more. No need to go further. The tension lives in the fact that Nancy is calm. In the fact that she touches Robin like she has every right, and Robin grants her those rights without a fight. In the fact that Robin is taller, fifteen centimeters taller, and yet she still ends up… held. Put away. Placed back in her favorite spot.
Robin whispers, her voice breaking:
“What do you want me to do now? I can’t… be normal after that.”
Nancy looks at her, eyes dark and precise. Her smile is minimal.
“You can go be your star,” Nancy says. “Laugh. Talk. Be everywhere.”
Robin blinks. “And you?”
Nancy tightens her fingers on Robin’s hips, and the pressure says: and I keep you.
“Me,” Nancy says, “I’m going to watch you.”
Robin swallows. “That’s… illegal.”
Nancy lifts an eyebrow. “Under which law.”
Robin opens her mouth, incapable of answering.
Someone calls for Robin from the kitchen. “ROBIN! Come tell the story about the cat and the radio!”
Robin turns her head, hesitates, caught between the party and this moment.
Nancy murmurs, very low, just for her: “Go.”
Robin takes one step, then another. Nancy releases her waist at last, but the release feels like a reminder, not a loss.
Robin walks toward the kitchen, trying to recover her DJ posture, her clown posture, her social-comet role. She laughs, she cracks a joke, she slides back into character. But she still feels Nancy’s hands on her hips like a print.
And Nancy, in the living room, watches her.
Always.
Calm.
Possessive.
As if the party is just scenery around the only thing she truly cares about.
Robin tells her story, everybody laughs. Robin shines. Robin does her star thing. And every time she turns her head, she catches Nancy’s gaze, and that gaze puts her feet back on the ground, brings her back to home, brings her back to the sentence that changed the air in the room:
She’s my little wife.
Later, when the party thins out a bit, when people start clustering into smaller groups, Robin ends up by the sink, rinsing a glass because Robin is physically incapable of not “handling” something.
Nancy appears behind her.
Silent.
Her hands return to Robin’s hips like they never left.
Robin closes her eyes, exhales, defeated.
“You’re doing it again,” Robin murmurs.
Nancy kisses the back of her neck, slow, and answers:
“I’m not finished.”
Robin laughs, muffled, then she whispers, lower, trembling:
“I’m still warm.”
Nancy presses her cheek to Robin’s neck, and her voice turns almost soft:
“Good.”
Robin turns a little, looks at Nancy. Her sarcasm tries to come back, but it dissolves on contact.
“You’re going to kill me,” Robin murmurs.
Nancy smiles, small, possessive.
“No,” Nancy says. “I’m going to keep you.”
Robin closes her eyes. Humiliated and happy, again. Like it’s her favorite state.
And outside, the world can think whatever it wants. In this apartment, between the plants, the cats, the red cups, and the rain smearing the windows into blur, Nancy is done pretending.
So she marks.
Calmly.
And Robin lets her.