He cleared his throat, leaning into the doorway of the fitting room, and when she looked over her face lit up in a smile.

"Oh, that looks great."

"You think?"

"Why did you even come out here, you know it looks good," she teased, the cocky glint in his eye not getting past her. "Wrap it up and let's go."

He reappeared in a few minutes, interrupted a question about a bag she was looking at with no, he definitely did not have opinions about purses, and then reminded her she needed to pick up something for her manager's daughter because she'd actually been invited to the birthday party for some vague everyone-loves-Uhura reason, or so he summated.

"Lego set and you're done," he insisted.

"I don't think she's quite old enough for Legos, so..."

"Something she'll shove in her mouth then. Go on. I'll be in electronics."

She wandered into the toy aisle and considered one thing after another with lazy indecision. Her eyebrow had cocked at a decidedly creepy-looking stuffed animal when she heard a hissed curse pulled from a woman standing a few feet away.

Looking over, she saw a pretty blonde woman with a slightly chipmunk-cheeked grimace, who appeared to have just accidentally cracked the arm right off of a battery-operated robot. It went on creaking through the demo of flashing lights and chirping beeps, moving its one functional arm up and down, only adding to the comical effect of the sight of the woman obviously contemplating whether she was willing to march the broken merchandise up to the front or just leave it there in full sight of another customer. Nyota laughed as soon as the woman's eyes self-consciously flitted up to meet her, saying, "They don't make them like they used to, huh?"

The woman laughed back, then, and decided to ditch the toy.

Jim met Nyota up at the front, almost immediately saying, "That is the shadiest little bastard of a teddy bear I have ever seen."

She tossed it for him to catch and smirk at. He'd just bounced it back at her when he swiveled to lean into the sight of the magazine rack, and then his gaze locked on something and he tensed. She followed his eyes and was puzzled to see he was looking at the woman from the toy aisle.

"Shit," Jim said in an abrupt groan. "Uh, we're going. Now."

"What's wrong?"

But just then the woman noticed him. There was a barely perceptible thud of hesitation, and then she yelled, "Oh, hey, Jim!"

There was a dazed, confused way his eyes followed her approach. "Hey, Carol," he finally managed.

"It's good to see you," she said, stopping in front of him, also a bit flummoxed. "What are you doing these days?"

They caught up for a bit, saying nothing that revealed much of anything to Nyota, until Jim turned to her, giving her a gentle knock on the shoulder. "Sorry. This is Nyota, a good friend of mine."

"Hi. Carol Marcus," she said, laughing as she placed Nyota as soon as they shook hands.

"We were...kind of introduced by C3PO in aisle six," Nyota explained.

"Toys?" Jim said in a jeering way, the attempt at familiar teasing falling a little flat, though Carol had no trouble weeding out the implication.

"Not for kids of ours. None yet." Carol shook her head with a shrug. "I mean, you'd probably have heard if we did have..."

Jim responded to this so abruptly it was as if the tape skipped over an actual lull in the conversation. "Well, it was nice to run into you." And when he reached his hand out to her, Nyota realized she could have so easily mistook them for barely more than acquaintances, two old coworkers who chatted all the time but never outside of their professions; but there was a flinch of Carol's jaw tightening and something hard and daring in the motion of Jim reaching out to shake her hand, and it seemed obvious that that handshake was a deliberate insult, though to what exactly she had no idea.

As soon as they were well out of earshot outside the store, Nyota quietly asked, "Why were you like that? She seemed glad to see you."

Jim took a blunt hesitation before answering. "A couple of laughs in the baby aisle and you're ready to take sides?"

"Yes, obviously, since I'm asking you to explain it to me," she said shortly.

Looking at her straight-on and then back down, Jim opened his mouth but then second-guessed again and fell completely silent.

"...Jim," she tried again. "Are you okay?"

He softened up a little but it only seemed for her sake, nodding with a nervous smile and saying, "Yeah, I'm fine."

And he did seem fine, mostly, until she talked about going by the library like they'd planned and could tell he really just wanted to go home for a while and didn't hold him to it. He gave her a brief one-arm hug when they split up later.

::

She wasn't able to sleep. She made some tea and tucked herself into her window overlooking the old movie theatre across the street, with a book that eventually got propped on her chest as she stared thoughtfully out through the glass. A couple leaving a movie embraced and braided into one dark form down in the changing lights of the passing cars; somebody knocked into somebody just down outside her building and she could hear an annoyed string of cussing in response to that or something else.

She was lightly startled when her phone rang, and wasn't sure if she was surprised when she looked at the ID.

"Hey," she said, picking up.

There was a heavy uncertain breath on the other line, and she felt an instinctive little strike of concern.

"...Are you alright?"

"Fuck, she..." He swallowed, said with his drunk thick enunciations, "She came over for a while. Came over to talk to me, she said she needed to clear up some shit and..."

"Carol did?"

"I don't even know," he said like he hadn't heard her. "I don't know how I feel about it, it's like I'm so angry and I don't know why and I feel like—"

"Jim, I'm coming over. Is that okay?"

"You don't need—"

"I'll be over in half an hour."

His door was unlocked when she got there and she hesitantly let herself in, looked around and quickly spotted him sunk far back in his cheap lounge chair by the window.

Jim's apartment was not the studded ideal out of New York sitcoms but a proper example of postage-stamp-sized city realty, smaller than Nyota's cozy two-room. But it was something other than the size about it that struck her as more gloomy-looking than she'd ever noticed before. The light from his desk lamp shed a quality of neglected surfaces and the acoustics swallowed up every too-quiet movement so that the place felt strongly of a little too much winter. She crossed the room in a few paces and her first action was to pull the vodka bottle out of his hand. His grasp followed it, noncommittally, before sinking into his lap. She thought, briefly, that he might want a hug, before she felt some bend of reluctance that told her this was not the time and went to go tuck the bottle under his sink.

"How much did you drink?" she asked.

"I'm okay," he replied simply. He did actually sound more put-together than he had on the phone, if not by much.

"Come on, Jim," she said, finally taking a seat close by on the futon which, she remembered with another irritatingly vague pang of sadness, was also his bed. "Talk."

Jim had a hand rubbing at his chin for a few seconds, then dropped that arm down off of his chair sloppily. A long moment went by.

"You don't have to tell me, but I don't know what to tell you if you don't talk."

Jim's eyes were distantly glazed, wet-looking. Finally he scratchily spoke. "Carol and I used to date, okay...I even sort of considered her my girlfriend at some point. That kind of dating."

He came to a stop already, checking, it seemed, for some badly timed response of cheeky surprise over this. When she showed no sign of this, he went on.

"But it was a really vague thing, it was on and off, for a long time, it never quite worked out because it just wasn't right in a lotta ways, we didn't...we didn't want the same things. Eventually we called it off for good when we decided we would just be friends..."

He let out a long breath that didn't quite have the weight of a sigh. She only waited patiently for him to go on.

"And we were, pretty good friends, for a while. She even introduced me when she met this new guy she was falling for, and me and Owen got along fine, we probably could have all been good friends if things had gone differently. Sooner or later they wound up engaged, I got invited over to celebrate, and everything was just great. But then...maybe a couple months after the engagement, she stopped returning my messages, she stopped picking up on my calls. She'd always been a little hard to get a hold of, so I was slow to realize it but...after a time I couldn't deny she'd gone and cut me off. And I had absolutely no idea why, but I wasn't about to go over to her place or butt into her business begging for some explanation, so I just..." He shrugged bitterly. "And then today at the store she has the nerve to walk up to me and act like it's so good to see me, as if we haven't both been living in the same city all this time."

She had her chin rested forward on her knuckles, and finally sat back, prompting, "But she knew she needed to explain herself."

"Yeah, I..." He made a gesture towards the kitchen. "There was a message waiting for me when I got back, she was saying she was sorry, that she understood if I was unhappy with her, and she'd like to get together...So she came over and decided to finally tell me what the fuck happened."

After a stretch of hesitation went by without Jim continuing, Nyota said, frowning, "She still had feelings for you."

He made a low, sad scoffing noise. "You know what the worst part is? I don't think it occurred to her how much I would really miss her. Like if I'd asked, she probably couldn't have explained what it is about me that made her feel like that, and maybe that's why she didn't feel the need to explain...But yeah, I guess, I don't know, when you're getting married to somebody there are some questions that inevitably come up, and one of them was whether she was still carrying a bit of a flame for me...and I guess it was only when this guy she wanted to spend the rest of her life with asked her about it that she realized it was still a problem. Only I had no clue. Was I just supposed to know?"

She watched him agitatedly digging the heels of his hands into his eyes until he dropped them and said, "Shoot. Whatever you're thinking, just say something, please."

"You have every right to be angry that she didn't explain herself at the time," she said slowly, "but I do have to say I can maybe understand why she could have felt like an actual conversation about it would have been almost impossible to have with you."

He let out a bitter laugh, saying after a moment, "You think she would have gotten a big fight. Okay."

"And...you know, maybe the reason she talked to you is because she's figured everything out, because she has room to start over. She's still fully committed to this guy?"

"Right, it totally alleviates the whole thing that she wants to have me over for the Christmas dinner party once a year."

Nyota made a frustrated noise, and Jim's voice raised.

"I lost a friend and it's like I'm just supposed to accept that it's the natural thing, that that's growing up or whatever. I was honest with somebody I cared about and I lost her anyway and that just makes me so..." He was standing up and pacing hotly back into the kitchen. After a minute he got even more sour, saying, "So yeah, go ahead. Go ahead and ask."

She was getting up to follow him. "Ask what?"

"Or maybe you've already made up your mind about it."

"What?"

"If this is the reason I am the way I am. If this happened before or after we first met, and what that means. I mean, you've been wondering it, right? What's the cause and effect?"

"Jim, I don't think..." She crossed her arms. "I don't think there's some missing implement, I don't think there's something wrong with you that needs to be fixed, other than being a stubborn little bastard, so stop putting thoughts in my head. And don't you pick up that whisky, you'll already be suffering tomorrow morning."

"Fine. Why don't you tell me what you are thinking?"

She clenched her jaw as he met her eyes straight-on, looked down. "I'm thinking that I don't know what you want me to say, or why you called me instead of Leonard, when he would have known you when you knew Carol because I think you're hurting too much for this not to have happened after we first met...And I'm thinking about how crappy it makes me feel that I don't know what I'm supposed to say."

He swerved a little to rest into the kitchen counter, then took a few steps after her when she went back into the main room, watched her lean over to wad up an empty potato chip bag and look around for the garbage can. "Look, I don't know...Maybe I just wanted you to tell me I'm wrong like you usually do because I always find that weirdly comforting."

"I don't always tell you you're wrong," she said in a sigh. "But this time you are...way off, pathetically off, just totally completely wrong."

"...About what?" Jim had stopped in totally perplexed shock to have this play slung back at him in a kind of threatening honesty. She looked back with an unapologetic look that said she was not going to simply ignore the subtext of this entire conversation, of the fact that she had been the one he called, the one he needed.

"About me," she answered simply.

"...Oh." He went past her and dropped himself down into the futon, and flatly replied, "That's sweet."

He might as well have shoved her into something sharp; she tightened all over, speechless with something that wasn't anger just yet.

He caught it in her expression and fell to contrite. "Shit."

"I'm going to get you a glass of water," she said evenly, "and then I think I better leave."

He swallowed heavily, blinking around him. There was a long moment before he just said in a kind of lowly boyish acceptance, "Okay."

At the fridge, she pinched the bridge of her nose, struggling against something until she managed to bluntly shake it off. She returned with the tallest glass she could find filled to the brim, saying, "Drink all of this. You'll be hungover either way, probably, but..."

She was setting it down on the stand next to the futon. Before she'd made it a step away, his arms were coming around to pull her in at the torso, burying his head against her, something deepening his breathing. "I'm sorry," he started muttering. "I'm sorry, okay, please don't leave right now..."

Her eyes were looming forward from this in some shocked plea for something from a horizon, and then her hands fell to his hair and his shoulders, hugging him to her. "Hey. It's okay..."

He was clamped tight around her waist, his hands squeezing at her clothes, while the room around them seemed to slowly steady itself. Finally he did pull himself back, looking embarrassed, and she asked where he'd have some sweats or something she could borrow. "Drink that," she insisted again as she disappeared around the corner into his closet.

Later they lay down facing each other on the wide futon, the silence coming in as softly as the darkness of the room after he'd turned off the lamp. Eventually his thoughts started to crackle less recklessly into speech.

"I was just thinking about how..." He rubbed a hand up over his pout for a second. "How I never had anybody to introduce to my mom. How she kept expecting it, but after a while she just stopped asking, like she understood. But I think she was worried. And of course I get it now, because...one day you're thinking to yourself that you still haven't replied to that Christmas card or given her a call in a while, and then a week after that she's dead, and you've run out of reasons to ever go back home again."

He was slowly speaking, more clearly now but with a tight crack of misery.

"And one day you realize your parents are gone, your family's just trickling farther and farther away, and you're supposed to just go out into the world and find new family, make new family..." He swallowed roughly. "And if you don't know how to do it or want it in the same way that other people want it, you're just kind of fucked. And it's this huge city, with so many goddamn people, and you can still be just kind of fucked, because..."

He rolled over onto his back a little, hesitating for so long that she had to quietly ask, "What?..."

"It sounds so overdramatic, so juvenile...It's like everything I say to you sounds so juvenile," he said, his voice casting a bitter blow over the air, "and usually I'm actually fine with this whole thing, but the fact is whether it's somebody I talk to for five minutes at a bar or some one-night stand or somebody I was really close to for five years, I think I'm always the one who cares just that little bit more. Every single time. And it's like there are these set avenues that tell you how you're supposed to declare it, and I don't know how to take them."

"Ah, sweetie." Nyota was rubbing at her eyes, her frustration with him softer than before. "You know Leonard isn't going anywhere. And neither am I."

"You say that now." He interrupted her protest with his voice twisted in soft regret, "You say that now, but you'll meet somebody. You will, and maybe he'll have a problem with me or maybe he won't, maybe we'll just grow apart, but it's what happens when people find somebody, and I'll be fine and I'll love you and we'll still talk, but..."

"That's such bullshit. What makes you think I'd just let you go?"

His face had propped out of some strip of light from the window and she could barely see him, only sense the defeated sigh away from some oldest question he'd never quite had an answer for. Suddenly tired, way too tired, she turned away from him, her back arching slightly into a fetal position as she bunched one of the pillows under her neck.

"Let's just talk in the morning," she muttered. "Turn the TV on if you want."

His breathing slowly became a lazily thoughtful brush of noise just behind her, their bodies only touching where the balls of her feet fell up under him a bit. After a few minutes she felt him moving to his side but still holding still, as if pensive. In another moment, his hand came over her shoulder and turned her just slightly into him.

In some instinctive movement, her face turned up when his came close for a gentle hesitation, and the kiss on her lips was as pure and firm as any other promise, brief and yet slow, loving in its careful caution. And then his mouth plucked away and lingered over her only barely, before he turned back into his side and she felt his back warm and solid against hers.

In another minute, she hazily thought, it will be as if that never happened.

They fell asleep together, too soon to confirm or deny it.

::

In the morning he was lying almost flat on his stomach and crammed far into the corner of the futon, and her arm was slung over his back, her face falling in next to his arm. She blinked her head up, yawned, and gave his shoulder blades some absent pats as she sat up to rub at her eyes.

She took a shower and put her clothes back on, borrowing some of his deodorant with a mental note to make fun of him later for his choice of testosterone-charged commercial brand, but then doing a double take at the scent of it. He was still hard asleep when she came back out. She refilled his water glass and set it down next to the Advil she found in his medicine cabinet. Crouching down next to the futon, she blew a narrow gust of air on his bangs. A twitch of eyelashes but no real sign of life.

Sitting back then, she crossed her arms and just looked at him a moment, as if a close enough inspection would tell her whether she should stay or go. The simple silence of the room and the sight of him sleeping in front of her swelled up to an odd pain in her chest. She sighed, stood up, and left him a note with the white lie that Christine needed a favor and urging him to call her later if he wanted to.

::

Without really thinking about what she was doing, she picked up a few bagels, checked the time, and then took a cab over to Leonard's place. A woman walking a greyhound let her in at the main door.

She hoped it wouldn't bother him that she was showing up without any warning. When she stopped in front of his door she hesitated for a short moment, let out a gust of air and then knocked lightly.

A woman's voice, vague and then crisply familiar, was heard through the wood as she was laughing a bark of a remark at something, and then the door was opened a small gap. She was about to stick her head out when Nyota said, "Chris?"

The two looked at each other through the crack, flushing and wide-eyed, and momentarily Nyota forgot all about the mood of this morning or last night in the rush of giddy shock as she realized Christine was only dressed in a bathrobe.

Her mouth dropped open. "Oh my god, you are in so much trouble."

Christine opened the door a little wider, her eyes wandering up in defeated amazement. "Ah, good lord, this is such a cliché."

"You are in so much trouble," Nyota repeated, hushed and emphatic as she pushed through the door and grabbed at Christine's shoulders.

At a quick secretive mutter, she said, "Look, I was going to tell you, but this is only the second time and I just didn't want to mess things up by making too big a something out of it..."

"Who is it?" Leonard had appeared at the end of the long hallway, his hair a little mussed and his flannel pants and t-shirt well-ruffled, and he stopped in surprise. "You called Nyota?"

"No, she's...here on her own," Christine stammered, still recovering from her embarrassment. Nyota passed by lightly punching her in the arm, and Christine grabbed the bag. "Any poppy seed in here?"

Leonard was looking at Nyota, a soberness in him now. "Are you here to tell me what's wrong with Jim? We were supposed to go to a movie last night and he never picked up."

Nyota hesitated for a short beat. "I guess that's part of it."

"Is everything okay?" Christine asked. When she got a complicated sort of shrugging and nodding for that, Leonard looked relieved that it wasn't something emphatically awful that had gone down.

"Yesterday he ran into this...this woman he knew, I don't know how much I should say."

"I was about to take off, actually." After giving herself that cue to go change, Christine returned after Leonard had put on some coffee, fastening a belt over her sweater dress and asking if he remembered where she'd left her boots. She gave Nyota a warm little hug and then lingered for a second, looking at Leonard. "See you soon?"

"Would you get over here?" he said, all warm gruffness when she'd looked like she was about to start straight for the door.

As she smiled and came closer to him, Nyota rolled her glance up to the ceiling for a few seconds, managing to look down and catch Christine's eyes at the end of the relatively innocent but thorough goodbye kissing to dramatically mouth, "So much trouble." Christine chuckled at her as she pulled back, and as soon as she was out the door Leonard looked immediately sheepish, making some placating gesture and stammering quickly.

"Look, I know I'm not the best candidate for anybody, especially not right now, but I really really like Christine..."

Nyota shook this off. "I think it's great, Leonard. Really. Jim and I have kinda been expecting it for months now."

This surprised him more than she would have anticipated; maybe Jim was better at keeping his mouth shut than she gave him credit for. "Really?"

"Really."

After a moment he sighed, looking very relieved, but not entirely relaxed. "So it was Carol?"

Nyota nodded.

Her brief explanation hummed by into smaller talk they made as they poured their coffee and zipped up their jackets to bring it all out onto the balcony. Jim had made a lot of disclaimers about Leonard's temperament before introducing the two of them, but the guy's company could be a lot more calming than one might initially imagine. If he couldn't afford this type of apartment she really didn't know how a man like him would survive living in New York, but the cluttered ebbing of the city waking up far below them had an altered sort of attitude next to the antique feel of his residence.

She propped one leg up to place the mug on her knee. A silence had wandered into the conversation, and Leonard finally broke it.

"You didn't sleep with him, did you?"

She'd been staring vaguely at a blue curtain moving in the window of an adjacent apartment far across the street. It seemed like the question should have knocked at her hard, but the surprise landed, present but lazy, in her prompt movement of looking at him. "No."

He looked down into his mug and took a drink, waited.

She decided to dive in. "...Have you been expecting that to happen some day, with him and me?"

"The thing is, I never really thought too much about that at all. The first time I met you and saw the way it was between you two, I just kind of accepted that it would be whatever Jim said it would be, and..." He sat up, crossing a leg as a thoughtful gust of air went out of him. He thought carefully. "But if I'm totally honest, I think at the back of my head, I always sort of thought you kids might end up like one of those couples that stay friends for a long time, for years and years, until one day they get it together and it's almost the afterthought, you know? I knew two people like that, growing up. Will-and-Susan, Susan-and-Will, it always rolled off the tongue like they were brother and sister or a married couple, but you ask anyone and no, they're just good friends. She was widowed when they met, and later on he got married but it didn't work out...And finally when they were in their late thirties or early forties people finally saw them around town holding hands. And then only a couple weeks after that, they were engaged. And I guess it made sense because...they knew each other so well, there was so little else they needed to figure out."

She cozied her hands tighter around the heat of the coffee cup, biting her lip and having nowhere to begin.

"I feel like I'm stepping on the wrong crack here, like it's bad luck to even ask, and you can tell me to mind my own beeswax if you want," Leonard said. "But did you ever think about it?"

There was a heaviness in both their eyes as they met, the understanding that for some reason this had to be approached with absolute care, as if they should barely even speak about it at all.

"I mean..." He shrugged. "This could all be very cut and dry if you're just not into Jim, for all I know."

After a moment, she sat up a little but looked down as she said, "Well, I know that as friends we make each other very happy."

He gave a rueful look. "You know that's not much of an answer."

"I know. But maybe it's the only one I have, for now."

After a second Leonard accepted that with a slight nod. She thought of what she needed to say.

"It almost feels different now," she said slowly, "because before I was so sure he was right, when he said he was perfectly happy the way he's been living. Or at least I knew to mind my own business; you know how he gets. And still, I think he can be just fine on his own and some of the stuff he said was mostly the booze talking, but I don't think it all was. And I don't know anymore if he avoids the whole business because he truly doesn't want it or if he just doesn't think he would ever be enough for anybody...It feels like a huge thing to realize."

Leonard's eyes had the sharp clarity of the unsettled, of someone whose hunch has been confirmed in the undesirable direction. He rested his mouth into his hand, thinking.

Abruptly she continued in a rise of agitation, "And the worst of it is that I think both things could be true, or that one idea has just cleft so thoroughly onto the other it's impossible to say which came first, and how am I supposed to talk to him directly about that? Everything is a damn debate with him. You know what he'd be saying if he were here standing in that corner? It would be like, how predictable of me to get into thinking about this when I'm not even completely sure one way or the other. He'd be saying that the only reason you and I are talking about the possibility is because we're conditioned to think of it because I'm a straight woman and he's—"

Leonard had put out his hand to interrupt her, a level expression on his face. "But you know, right, that all of that acrobatic intellectual pissing around is just a bunch of hot air?"

"...God, you really know how to mix a few metaphors, Leonard," she said in a sigh, leaning back in her chair as if suddenly very tired. "What are you trying to tell me here?"

"I'm saying..." He stammered off, grunting at his own hesitance. "Look, you gotta know that there's a place in his head where he knows full well that if he could ever take the leap, it would be for somebody like you. And it wouldn't be so much like Will and Susan either. You are not the type of woman that a man just settles with because 'it's about time,' and he's gotta know that there are always going to be other guys, but God's wild horses could not drag it out of him if he actually wanted to be with you because as far as he knows you probably don't need any of that and the last thing he'd want is some kind of pity from you. That is, the only way he'd ever admit it is if you brought it to him. And even then..."

"Look..." She shook her head as if trying to dispel even her own thoughts on the matter. "You are shading this like it's on me to change his mind, or 'open him up' or—"

"Well. In a way—"

"It's on him, Leonard." She let that sit in some invisible thud, and went on with solid conviction. "What I came here to tell you is that he might be a little confused and that he's in some kind of complicated pain right now and I'm hurting too because it hurt me to see it. Now, you may be right that he's capable of feeling the things he claims he doesn't or won't feel for people, but whether he's always been built that way or chooses to act like he is, I'm not going to try to tell him how to live his life. This isn't going to turn into some chick lit story where we're going to twist it like choosing to fall in love with somebody is somehow more or less virtuous than everything else he is; it's not. I judged him hard the first day we met and I wasn't ready to understand it then, but I would never insult him now by claiming he is not committed to me in whatever way is important to him."

Leonard had begun to look thoughtfully out at the city, as he reluctantly nodded his understanding. "Clear this up for me. He's been this way since he met you? Since before Carol?"

"...Yeah, I guess you would have assumed that. No, it's not because of Carol. I don't think it's because of any one person, it just isn't that simple."

"But then how did he end up getting a little serious with her in the first place?"

"He's not so systematic as you might imagine." She shrugged, not having really needed to dwell on that factor. "He could have just slipped up. People break their own rules, especially if they can be broken gradually...Look, I understand that you just want him to be as happy as he can possibly be, but this is only a phase for him if he decides that it is."

"...Then why," he asked slowly, carefully, "are you so worried?"

Slightly taken aback by this, she looked out over the planes of roofing and sky, recalling with sudden vividness Jim's staggering vulnerability the night before, her mind working in a wobbly flicker from the moment she'd arrived to see his wounded eyes and all the way to his arm at her shoulder and that goodnight kiss she would not tell Leonard about. The moment of consideration lasted longer than intended, but she found she couldn't look back ahead; when she turned it was to put her face in her hand.

When he realized she was crying his chair moved in, his hand going to her arm, urging her out of it and murmuring, "Come on, it's alright."

She spoke with quick feeling now. "I don't know why I'm so freaked out. It's just that if he ever changed his mind, if he ever realized or decided that he wanted it, he could make somebody so happy. But nobody's ever shown him that, and if nobody ever does..."

"Let me tell you something." Leonard shook her a little bit so that she looked up at him. "I know a few things about that kid, and I can tell you...if there is anybody he has ever met who could show him that, just by being around, just by caring about him, it sure as hell has got to be you. You don't have any idea how much it knocks him off his feet that you are his in any way, that he actually gets to call you a friend. You understand?"

Beginning to feel more steadied for the first time that morning in a way she hadn't realized she needed, Nyota finally nodded.

"For now all you have to do and all you can do is what you were gonna do anyway," Leonard added, "which is be there for him. For a long time. For as often as he needs it. I'm sure it's too fatalistic for either of your tastes to say what's meant to happen will happen, but if you don't want to over-think it, just make each other happy, and let it be. Okay?"

She was beginning to feel ridiculous—for crying, for the way she'd been unable to cast off some deep melancholy the night before had scraped up out of her—but also touched by the easy comfort she'd found in this purely linear wisdom. She nodded. "Okay."

"You want to freshen up that coffee there?" He opened the door to invite her back inside, and she got up to follow.

"Sure," she said with a sniff. "Listen, Leonard...could you not tell Jim I came over here?"

His eyes were light and warm on hers for a brief moment. "You didn't really need to ask. Now, while we're being sorely predictable, why don't you give me a juicy story or two about Christine?"

::

Late winter was shrugging one of its last snowfalls as Jim walked off his grogginess around the Linden Terrace at a slow aimless pull. He'd woken feeling better but with that crowding sense of hungover humility; the scent left lingering next to him made him remember how he'd very briefly woken at the tap of Nyota shutting the door behind her when she quietly took off.

He hadn't been so drunk that he couldn't remember most everything she'd said or done for him, but it came to him when it was ready to come, and the vague embarrassment he felt actually wasn't so strong as the tide of comfortable gratitude.

Staring off into the icy expanse over the water, his gaze strayed in a light flinch to the two women sitting on a nearby park bench at the sound of one of their cell phones blaring a Star Wars ringtone, the other reaching over to squeeze a knee in some kind of anticipation as she answered. He reflexively picked up a slightly faster pace as he passed them up.

He thought about Carol, wondering if that hurt now as much as it had the night before. When his heart gave no simple hint of how to measure this, he wondered if the whole quake had really been about her at its core. She had done a good dent on him and he did miss her, but in truth he'd stopped thinking about her more than occasionally until he was smacked with the sight of her at the shop the day before. If it had all caught up to him at a different time, he may have just accepted her friendliness with more confusion than anything else.

Carol had always been great company, and maybe for a brief time he'd contemplated that he may have been falling in love with her, shortly before they both at least claimed to have burned that bridge; but even when they'd been very good friends you wouldn't have thought either of them were the sharing type. Her presence hadn't had such a versatility with his own that made the lack of it felt in the most mundane pockets of his life. She'd secured a big part of herself so independently, almost secretively, in a way that made her eventually apparent inability to repress her feelings so shocking that Jim had almost felt the emotions themselves were some heavy betrayal; he'd understood after all that that was probably the reason she'd felt she needed to cut him off, even if it had taken until much later for him to get the explanation.

Nyota was a bit like her, actually. She had a beautiful impermeability to her, but at the same time a total sincerity which, once earned, had a way of being warmly shaped by the same forwardness that could be sharp and cold in other instances. Only she was invaluable. The idea of losing her—not just by a half to that seemingly inevitable distance of e-mails and the occasional Christmas party in late adulthood—but altogether, was so unthinkable it hadn't even reddened his mind in any vivid way when he'd been blasted on the vodka, until she'd voiced the fear for him and his cold mockery had alerted both of them to the fact that he did actually believe it could happen.

There was a tittering of a distant voice and he spared a look back at the two young women, one of them now out of the bench with excitement, snickering in a high response. He looked back ahead, blinking, somehow not having expected that laughter.

The truth was that Jim used to carry a cell phone, not even that long ago. The news that his mother was dead had reached all the way from a sparse Iowa country road to some curbside where he'd just shrugged a goodbye to Bones, and maybe it had been some unconscious weakness planted in him by that occurrence that made him want to get rid of it, the fact that if he hadn't had a mobile he could have gone some few more hours of his life with that type of ground still solid underneath him.

He had always thought, assumed somewhere far in the back of his mind where it felt morbid to even expect one way or the other, that his would be a nice sophisticated kind of grief, that he would just manage to be a strong and silent little cowboy about this eventual part of life. And maybe if he had been responsible for the peace of mind of anyone other than himself he could have managed to put up his backbone, but it was only him. Only him getting clapped right into when he stopped short in the thick of the sidewalk as if he couldn't see anything.

If Bones hadn't happened somehow to look back and see this just before he took off into the walkway, Jim may have ambulated right into traffic for all he could know. When the careful but firm hands took him by the arms, all he could say was, "Oh God. Oh God. She isn't even sixty," until Bones dragged him carefully into the hotel a few doors up and managed such an effortlessly authoritative urgency when he asked if they had somewhere a guy could catch his breath for a couple hours that the guy at the front desk handed them a free room key with no questions asked. And then in the suite Jim dropped into an easy chair and Bones sat down across from him and simply asked, "Your mother?" and it took Jim a deluge of very slow minutes to get past the shocked onset of tears in order to be able to say anything at all.

Leonard and Jim had barely been more than acquaintances then. They'd run into each other at the same bar enough times for Jim to have been able to guess about the impending demise of his marriage, and only twice they'd idled out of the pub to go get to know each other over a bite to eat. The lightning strike of Jim's grief had made them settle permanently into a solid friendship, and though Jim hadn't spent any conscious time second-guessing the man's love for him, he supposed there was always a place in the back of his mind that thought it had been awfully inconvenient for Bones that he hadn't had anyone else he could lean on during those first weeks. He'd assumed reflexively that the tighter camaraderie that followed had been more of a series of follow-up appointments connected to that one essential favor Bones had just been too good to deny, rather than some real desire to be all of that for Jim.

And then Nyota came along. He remembered her standing on the street with a hardened desperation in her eyes that was not so raw but instantly recognizable to the still-recovering, and his reason for being that to someone else had been so natural as to seem fateful. The simple currency of her trust in him had applied infinitely to other layers of his life; the affection around him suddenly seemed so simple and so earned but also more rare in all the best ways. He still dwelled painfully on his regrets that he couldn't have just gotten with the picture and talked a little more plainly to his mom now and then, that he'd taken for granted she was still far from death, but it wasn't the kind of regret wielded as self-harm. He hurt for Nyota on top of it, when she admitted to the day she stayed in bed for hours listening to her dad's favorite record or to the way she would clean out and purge random belongings from her closet in an attempt to feel more put-together. In the evenings they went out and laughed and late at night they calmed to endless circuits of conversation while sprawled on her couch or in the quieter bars, and there would just sometimes be a warmly teasing look between them that seemed to thoughtfully say, We almost didn't do any of this. Can you believe that?

Even more meaningful was the revelation that when they'd talked tirelessly about their differences from the start, it turned out that some part of her had actually listened. Because after he'd attempted to explain that he was no coward but simply had a different definition for what was the most absolute state of what it was to love someone, she had shown up in his life in another handful of years, cracking slightly open as she stood dripping and crying before him, and asked him to be her friend. And hadn't that been bravery?—The kind usually reserved for knock-kneed declarations of passion or stealing a first kiss at the airport, but all the same in its importance. It all looked, suspiciously, prettily, like a love story.

He shoved his hands into his pockets, and thought to himself that maybe it was. Why the hell not? His head was laughing, sharing some joke with the sprawling uncertainty of his own fate as it looked back at him with the cards still face-down, not caring for its confirmation or denial. Maybe it was.

::

She'd just flicked the burner on to make some tea, and turned the knob back off when her phone rang.

"Hello?"

"Hey, guess what?" Jim's voice, and then a series of knocks she heard simultaneously at her door and in duller beats through the call.

She went to the door and opened it with a slow smile, revealing Jim with a smartphone held to his head. "Well, Jim, it's about damn time. Welcome to society."

He hung up, grinning, slipping the phone into a back pocket as he went past her into the apartment. "Are you ready to go?"

"Ready to go where?"

"I thought Christine would have told you. They want us to come to this party; it sounds like some kind of surgeon shindig but you never know what the conversation's gonna be with that crowd. Also his place is on Park Avenue so it'll probably be nice and swanky."

"Oh, lord, am I even in the mood for swanky?" She started to boil her water again, making a thoughtful restless motion with one foot bouncing up over the other.

"Whatever. You could show up in your pajamas and you'd still have more class than half of the interns, from what I've heard." She gave him a smile for that, which he returned with a gentle kick at her slipper. "Come on."

"I've got work to catch up on, but..." Her eyes followed him while he peeked into her fridge, her hesitation already breaking. "What the hell."

She wore the green dress and they both drank about half a bucket of chardonnay, all the while using this outing to camouflage recent events. She found herself uncertain about whether there was any need for that, whether there was anything either of them needed to say. But she did want to know if he was doing okay, and she felt the need to keep some kind of close eye on him. He seemed to notice this; well, of course he did.

Christine made the mistake of mentioning what day it was that Nyota had shown up and discovered her with Leonard, her immediate balking look giving away the reason she'd probably been there more than anything else. Nyota just shifted on her heels and went off to find somewhere to get rid of her empty glass.

Later she and Christine went up together to the rooftop. Christine, always surprisingly cavalier about heights, bowed a bit farther over the edge than Nyota was willing to do with wine in her system, looking to report on Leonard's entertaining expressions as he mingled with some cardiologist on the balcony just below. After she sat down with a contentedly tired motion next to Nyota, neither of them worrying too much about dirtying their dresses on cigarette stubs, there was a fall of silence.

"I think I might love him," Christine finally said with a dazed, surprised weight.

Nyota began to giggle lazily, and she got a light kick to her ankle for that.

"What's so funny?"

"No, it's not funny. It's great." She lightly patted Christine on the knee. "I'm just happy. I bet he loves you too."

"Oh, he better," Christine cooed, and they both fell into companionable laughter for another moment. When this finally abated, she got a little serious, looking into Nyota's eyes for a second. "You're doing okay, right?...I haven't seen you with anyone for a while."

"I'm fine. I don't know why that's been," she said, considering. "I just feel like trying to care about someone that way isn't something I can do halfway, and it's not the best time to try."

There was a slip of silence, Christine thinking. "Because you're so busy, or because of your dad?"

"Busy" never seemed to get in the way of her routine escapes on Jim's time, but neither of them mentioned this of course; it was as if it didn't occur to her because his presence had fallen into her habits so naturally that it was barely up for questioning. Whatever it was that had grown between her and him wasn't something she could ever forget to keep watering. She said, "I guess it's both, really."

Jim appeared after a minute, his voice surprising them a little out of the dimness when he asked, "What are you two doing on the floor? I think Bones needs you, Christine."

"Is he running out of stories he can use to scare the interns?" she asked, accepting a hand from him as she stood up.

Nyota moved to get up too, but Jim gave a motion to wait and then took the place where Christine had been sitting.

After a steady moment of listening to the music that was thrumming up from the balcony, she asked, "Am I in trouble?"

"What, for going to Bones about me?" Jim asked in a chuckle with a sidelong look, but he seemed somehow comforted about something by her forwardness.

"...I just want to know if you need anything." Her hands were wringing together a little where they hung off the bump of her knees. "And that you're not going to bite my head off for worrying about you from time to time."

"You've got your own problems. Don't worry about my little relapse."

"Don't tell me what to do, you little bastard," she said cleanly, looking ahead while he scoffed. "We'll get out of the woods together. How's that?"

Jim's eyes on her seemed careful, hesitant. After a short moment he seemed to kick himself into asking, "And then what?"

"I'll still be around, if you want me for more than the support group."

"I do," he said, the admittance quick.

"Okay," she said, not surprised, but still feeling relief settle somewhere inside of her.

They were silent. Then Jim said in a quick kind of caution, "I thought about what you said, about why Carol probably didn't feel like she could talk to me, back then. And you're right. But I want you to know, just in general...it would never be like that with you. I would never fight you on anything you needed, anything you felt. I don't know if it's because I've grown the hell up or if it's just different with you, but..."

She watched him carefully as his hand scrubbed briefly at the back of his neck, then dropped back down bluntly.

"Christ, Nyota, the truth is there isn't much of anything I wouldn't do for you. And that includes letting you walk, I guess. Ain't life grand." His tone was a strange contradiction, like wonder masked partly by sarcasm. She looped her arm snugly through his.

"You won't have to," she said. "And anyway, you'll find other people too. No, you will. Maybe you'll have less time for me sooner or later. Maybe that uptight supervisor you've been putting up with will be your new best friend some day."

Jim laughed.

"...We're both a little difficult, aren't we?"

"Challenging," he playfully corrected. "We're challenging pains in the ass."

"But that's why we both know to hold onto what we've earned. Right?"

His eyes met hers before gliding back ahead. He seemed deep in some thought that he grappled his way out of in abrupt chagrin. "I shouldn't have kissed you," he quietly said. "I'm sorry."

She considered this only briefly. "I'm not."

His mouth moved to an uncomfortable half-cringe, but when he looked up and into her eyes he seemed to understand what her forwardness meant: that she would do just about anything for him except lie to him, that she had no intention of spending some handful of eternity at his side with the two of them bending over backwards to pretend that that kiss or some momentum that was behind it never crossed either of their minds. He saw that for now it was nothing but honesty. He reached down and squeezed her hand for a moment.

"Hey," he said a moment later in some abruptly high mood, standing and already moving to pull her up with him. The song choices had melted into jazz melodies, slowing the thin air around them. "You like this song?"

"Do you even know how to slow-dance?" she teased. "Or do you get dizzy staying vertical with somebody for that long?"

"Oh, that's cute," he said with a soft roll of his eyes, pulling in the small of her back in a sneer of a gesture that positioned them both fluidly into the swaying. Smiling lightly, she pressed her forearm farther across the slope of his shoulders and leaned in, pressing her other hand into a lazy hold with his below his collarbone.

Their movements emerged from the dusty dark of the rooftop like some ribbon blowing in the wind: an intimacy to be caught sight of in the corner of an eye, but never looked at straight-on. She rested her temple at his cheek and after a while began to hum vaguely along, feeling the curl of a smile on his face. And she thought to herself how it had just been a joke but surely there had to be some upright way to press that promise between two people, a lullaby for those who stood up as surely as the towers scraping the sky around them.

He cradled her a little closer, their feet not quite touching. She closed her eyes, and she didn't think of what it had been like to fall asleep with him as much as she thought of these past months, the better part of a year that she'd spent with him, falling slowly awake.