In the comfortable silence, I focused on the music in the background and the feeling of her fingertips. A few weeks ago, I hadn’t been able to imagine being this close to her, much less feeling this relaxed in her presence. I also hadn’t imagined her voice to be as soft as it was when she told me to hold still or her touch to be this careful, fingertips so light against my skin it almost seemed like she was afraid I would splinter beneath them.

I knew that, a few weeks ago, I would have felt terribly uncomfortable doing this. I would have overanalyzed every twitch of my face, every flutter of my heartbeat, every tiny change in atmosphere. I would have been rigid, fingers clutched tightly in my lap for fear of accidentally reaching out, of doing anything that could give myself away.

Now, with Noelle, after everything we had talked about in the gym that night, I easily let myself sink into the comfortable silence, and while my heart was racing, it wasn’t out of fear.

I blinked my eyes open only when her hands left my face and picked up an eyeshadow palette instead. “What color?”

I thought for a moment before I pointed at a shade of peach.

Noelle gave no indication of whether or not she liked my choice, but picked up a smaller eyeshadow brush.

I closed my eyes again without having to be told, waiting for the contact of the brush, but it didn’t come.

Instead, Noelle suddenly said, “I’m sorry.”

“What for?” I asked, opening my eyes again.

“For the way I treated you when you first came here. I didn’t even know you, but I was acting like an asshole.”

“Oh,” I murmured. “That’s okay. You weren’t that bad.”

“Yeah, I was. You seemed like you were genuinely scared of me.”

She wasn’t wrong. But looking at her now, with the creases of her pillow still indented in her cheek and the glow of a dozen fairy lights in her eyes, I didn’t feel a trace of anxiety.

Instead, something about her face made my chest ache. “I’m not anymore.”

Noelle’s lips—God, I had to stop staring at them—curved into a smile at that. She picked up the brush again and I closed my eyes, glad about the excuse to break eye contact. My skin felt warm everywhere she touched me, tingling where her fingertips rested against my jaw as naturally as if they had always belonged there.

“Hey, Noelle?” I asked when the silence dragged on.

“M-hm.”

“When you put up the fairy lights you said you also used to have really bad nightmares. What were they about?”

Just for a split second, Noelle’s hand stilled. “That was a while ago. It doesn’t matter now.”

No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t think of anything that could make her feel this shaky and afraid, to feel the need to leave on a night-light for when she startled awake. Still, I thought it best not to press on.