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“I believe in you,” Steph is smiling, like she’s about to laugh. “Come on. It can’t be worse than Killer Croc.”
Tim eyes her doubtfully. Steph sighs.
“Okay,” she says, and pushes his hair back. Her fingertips are calloused. Tim pulls in a deep breath to keep himself steady. “It can’t be worse than the Riddler.”
“The Riddler’s riddles are solvable,” Tim counters. Steph’s hands trail down his neck and link at his nape. Their heights are finally starting to even out. It makes his stomach flutter. He’s pleased to think he might end up taller than her, but it’s strange, too, to think that he will never get to be shorter than her again. Time is passing and passes still and those days are done forever. Maybe his back will bend first, maybe he’ll be the first of them to lean on a cane. He’s probably done enough damage to his spine for a lifetime.
“You dork,” Steph grins, butting her knee against his. “It’s just teenage girls.”
Teenage girls are fine. Tim’s long grown used to Anita braiding his hair and Greta making him take magazine quizzes and Cassie asking for his opinion on her clothes and Cissie’s terrible cooking. “I’m more worried about them being your friends.”
Steph’s mouth drops open. “Hey!”
A knock at the door breaks in – because Crystal Brown allows Tim to be up in Steph’s room with the door closed, a fact which Tim’s father must never, ever find out unless Tim wants to be grounded until he’s thirty.
“Steph, honey,” Crystal says, opening the door very slowly. Steph turns her head, unconcerned that she and Tim are pressed up against each other with her fingers tickling his hair. “Your friends are starting to arrive.”
“We’ll be down in a sec, Mom,” Steph promises. Crystal nods and shuts the door. Tim opens his mouth, and Steph cuts him off with a kiss. A good one. Her lips are firm and insistent, her mouth soft and welcoming, and Tim’s hands find her waist and pull her closer. She runs her fingers through his hair and he melts with the gentleness of her touch. Steph is all fire and excitement and cherry perfume. Their bodies move together, and he wants her, and –
“I think I can hear Jessica,” Steph says, extricating herself. Tim blinks several times. Right. Jessica. Party. Got it. He shakes himself. It’s funny how easily the rest of the world can fall away when he’s up in Steph’s room. Steph takes him by the shoulders. Her curly blonde hair falls just past her clavicle, and her new earrings match the sparkle in her eyes. “You’re going to be fine.”
“I know.” Steph rolls her eyes and pulls him into the sight of her mirror. Here he is: his debut as Timothy Drake, civilian, boyfriend of also-civilian Stephanie Brown. Levi’s and a puka shell necklace that made him feel like a bit of an idiot when he first put it on, but Steph had exclaimed and kissed him in a way that made sure he wasn’t about to take it off. They’re wearing matching jeans. It’s the kind of thing he would’ve recoiled from about a year ago. Tonight he wraps his arms around Steph’s shoulders and squeezes her. He does eye the Superboy poster on the wall suspiciously, though. He’s pretty sure Kon’s not spying on him through a network of weaponized merchandise, but, hey. Weirder things have happened. Tim flashes him a rude gesture in case.
“Don’t be mean to Superboy,” Steph chides, catching him in the mirror.
“I can’t believe you still have a poster of him,” Tim retorts. “You’ve met him. I mean. You could have a Robin poster.” Annnnd he can’t believe he’s bringing it up. Kon better not be spying on him through the image of himself, because Tim would die of embarrassment on the spot.
“You don’t have licensed merchandise,” Steph says, bumping him on the nose. “I looked. Wonder Woman panties, Superboy panties… No Robin. The downside of being an urban legend, Boy Wonder.”
Batman would probably fire him if he found out Tim had flirted, even for a second, with the idea of becoming known to the public just so his girlfriend could have merchandise of him. Humiliating. “I don’t see Spoiler merchandise.”
Steph clicks her tongue. “That’s because Spoiler is totally punk rock. She doesn’t sell out.”
“And Robin’s not punk rock?”
“No way.” Steph twists to face him, smiling mischievously. “I’d totally wear his name on my crotch, though.”
Tim chokes. Steph pokes him in the ribs.
“Come on,” she says. “I gotta get the pizzas out of the oven.”
---
Friday nights usually mean some kind of party is happening, and for all Tim plays Warlocks and Warriors, he gets a lot of invitations. He hasn’t actually been to a party in a while, though. Well. Not in regular clothes, and not without beating someone up. The last party he went to was probably the Crocky-themed one for Ives’s little sister’s fourth birthday. It had featured Tim and Ives wearing sweaty, hired costumes of Crocky’s friends, Crockadilla and Crockette.
No prizes for guessing who had been stuck doing falsetto. Thanks for getting the flu, Callie.
Crystal kisses Steph on the temple and trudges out to work the night shift, leaving the party to really get started. Tim is on kitchen detail, tasked with making a cheese platter. Tim has a command of Cantonese and Russian, can hack the Department of Justice, and is able to take down a man twice his body weight in ten seconds flat. Tim has never made a cheese platter.
MTV blasts Justin Timberlake as a crowd begins to congregate in the Browns’ cramped living room, eating slices of pizza and chattering away. A piece of pepperoni slides off and splatters against the ragged green couch. Steph is on the other side of the sink, muscly arms working as she stirs the punch.
“Somebody’s going to spike it anyway,” she says, curls frizzing. Tim helped set up a couple of pedestal fans around the house, but there’s no relief in the narrow galley kitchen.
“I’ll guard it,” he suggests, tearing open a sleeve of saltines. He pours them onto the battered platter – a wedding present for the Browns, permanently stained with something olive green and congealed. Is he meant to present them? Tim pushes them into a kind of semi-circle shape.
“That’s not very –” Steph glances at the archway that leads to the living room, and lowers her voice, “civvy.”
Tim spins to the fridge and pulls it open, knocking askew the faded Atlantic City magnet holding up an electricity bill. He’s a bit… nonplussed. The bottom section of the fridge is stacked with microwavable meals and cans of beer. Creeping upwards come a variety of jars of things he can’t name (but could probably guess on taste, given the rigorous drills Batman has put him through), old fruit, and a few lumps in clingwrap. Cheese? He picks a lump up, hesitates, and sniffs it. Some kind of cheese. Okay. He shuts the fridge and returns to his sad little platter.
“It’s risky,” Tim says, returning to the topic of conversation as he peels away the clear wrap. “I mean – even ignoring any actual harm, if someone’s parents found out…”
Steph shrugs. “Everyone here drinks. Except you.”
Tim grimaces at the blob of cheese. Maybe he should slice it? “Yeah,” he says. “But.” But what? He pulls open a drawer at random and finds an eclectic hodgepodge of novelty dish towels squished around a cookie tin. Nothing useful. He shuts it. Something even poppier comes on the tv, and there’s a rush of excited noises.
“I don’t –” Steph takes a step back from the punchbowl and leans against the stove opposite. She hums. Tim glances over his shoulder. “I don’t want you to be uncomfortable,” she says earnestly, brushing her curls out of her eyes. Her blue shirt rides up a little, exposing the stretch of her navel and the faintest white lines on her stomach. Tim, if he wants to make Good Choices, absolutely cannot think about her stomach or the waistband of her jeans or how she leans back and her muscles flex and if they hadn’t been dancing around it for months, if he wasn’t terrified of hurting her or sending her back into the same place she’d been last year, he would abandon all thoughts of punch and cheese platters and cross the kitchen and lift her up onto the counter and bury his head into her neck and –
“I’m not uncomfortable,” Tim says, remembering that he’s supposed to answer. Steph raises an eyebrow.
“You can talk to me,” she says. “I invited you because I –” she swallows whatever that word is and presses on, “—and I thought now we both know… you know. But I know you don’t… and if…”
“It’s okay,” Tim says, rolling his shoulders back. And he is. It’s not – discomfort, exactly. It just feels like he’s stumbled into a new country and a new set of laws without anyone checking his passport or lending him a Lonely Planet. At fourteen, it was easy: Just Say No To Drugs! Abstinence is the only form of birth control with 100% accuracy. Batman is good, and Batman is brave, and Batman protects the innocent and punishes the wrongdoers. Alcohol causes a spike in cases of domestic violence, and underage drinking is irrefutably linked with brain damage and fatal car accidents. You, too, could be like Scott from Little Rock, a star football player who tried a sip of beer at his best friend’s birthday party while the rest of the team cheered him on, and who ended up with AIDS and addicted to heroin before killing himself in a motorcycle crash aged seventeen, shortly after losing his full-ride scholarship. Tim knew those rules and knew them well. He was a Good Kid, and then he was a Good Kid except when he had to lie to his father (for the good of Gotham, of course).
And now he’s sixteen and he just. The rug of good and bad has been pulled out from under him. He loves Steph, and she is one of the best people he knows, and she got pregnant at fifteen and she drinks and she smokes and she wanted to kill her father. How does he fit that in his head? How does he categorize that, or turn it into a set of rules by which to live? Tim pulls open another drawer, and faces down a grease-caked spatula.
“It’s okay if it’s not,” Steph says.
“It’s okay. I can’t dictate what your friends do.”
Steph shifts to the side and opens the drawer behind her. She fishes out a little knife and hands it to him handle-first. He takes it and returns to the cheese. Here goes nothing. How small is he slicing it? How much cheese do these people want?
“We can just wait for someone to spike it,” Steph says. “Or maybe they won’t.” She gives the punch one more stir and frowns at it. Maybe they won’t, but she doesn’t sound convinced. He cuts the cheese roughly, fanning out a range of slices for the enjoyment of the partygoers. It still looks a bit empty. What else is there? Fruit? Steph reaches under the sink and retrieves a cache of patterned napkins that go with the holographic paper plates and cups she bought at the mall. Half a packet of balloons remain tucked next to the paper towel. Tim chews his bottom lip, casting his eyes over the kitchen. He spots a jar of nuts, but has no way of knowing if anyone’s allergic. He’s practiced administering an EpiPen, of course, but tonight he’s meant to be Civilian Tim Drake. Do regular sixteen-year-olds know how to give someone else an EpiPen? He has a vague inkling that Ives might have been trained to do it at his last job. But maybe not.
Music thumps, and another hum of noise and excited clamor suggests the arrival of a few more people. Steph invited twenty, and told them to bring friends. Tim can only hope to mitigate the level of out-of-control – enough to make Steph happy, but not enough for any drama. Is that just another way of grappling for control, though? Would a regular boyfriend start and finish at Steph’s happiness? Won’t Steph be happier if he makes sure things go to plan? He’s spent half his life thinking, what would Batman do, but he knows. Tim knows what Batman would do.
Tim doesn’t want to be Batman.
“If you tell them there’s stuff in it, maybe they’ll hold off,” he says casually, opening the fridge again. He reads the labels. Olives should work. He unscrews the jar and gets to work as Steph laughs.
“I think they’ll be able to taste the difference.”
Tim shrugs. “Put stuff in it, then.”
The ladle clatters against the rim of the bowl. Steph curses. “Tim.”
“Steph,” he says, assessing his spread of olives. It’s not ideal, but it’s something. There’s a missing component. Meat? He thinks so. Had he known he’d be tasked with platter-making, he would’ve bothered to ask Alfred about it.
“Tim.” It’s quiet, for a second. He looks over. She’s tugging at her hair, sparkly nail polish chipped. “Are you for real?”
He could give her a hundred reasons. It’s a calculated risk; they’re both capable of handling anyone who gets unruly; he’s sixteen, and he’s never done anything like this before, and there is some traitorous part of him intoxicated by the normality of it all. It doesn’t feel evil. It’s not the path of righteousness or good or anything, don’t get him wrong, and he’s not, you know, about to throw ragers every weekend and storm the capitol demanding for the drinking age to be lowered. He’s not going to do something as stupid as tell his dad, or Bruce, or whoever (he has some wild thought that Bruce will smell it on him days later, even though Tim has no intention of partaking – just existing in the vicinity is rebellion enough).
“For shizzle,” he tells her instead, copying the words off tv. Steph guffaws and throws a napkin at him.
“For shizzle,” she repeats, shaking her head. “No take-backsies.”
“None.”
Steph stands on tiptoe and reaches for the liquor cabinet.
---
Tim’s curfew is midnight, and his father has promised that it will be enforced. With prejudice.
Tim’s house is twenty-one minutes from Steph’s in the Redbird.
It’s eleven-fifty-three p.m., and he is sitting on the tiles of the Browns’ one and only bathroom, holding back the twisted auburn hair of a girl he met seventeen minutes ago while Steph gags into the sink.
“I’m sorry,” Lizzie (?) moans, on her knees over the bowl of the toilet. The yellow lights hum, the fan whirring. “I didn’t know. I didn’t know.”
“You’re going to be okay,” Tim promises, digging his fingers into his palm to stop his head from chanting rohypnol alcohol poisoning olive allergy –
Steph steps back from the sink, pinching her nose, and takes a deep breath. “Weed before beer, you’re in the clear,” she chants, a phrase which Tim has never in his life heard before tonight. “Beer before weed, you’re fucked.”
“Fucked?” Lizzie yelps, and her back muscles spasm. Tim turns his head just as the splash echoes through the toilet. Steph turns green. She throws her head back, eyes watering, and presses a fist to her mouth. Her stomach contracts, but she holds it down. Just. Leaving Tim to the emotional support.
A hero skill he can, fortunately, utilize as a civilian.
“Not fucked,” Tim assures her, rubbing her back. His ass is getting numb on the tiles. He stares at the shell pattern on the tiles above the bathtub and tries not to think about the sounds coming from Lizzie’s mouth. “You’re going to pull through.”
Tim does not think about that chunky splash. He’s on a beach somewhere. Strong stomach. He’s seen and heard worse than this on the streets. But Lizzie, in her embarrassment, has insisted on having the door shut. The bathroom doesn’t have fantastic ventilation. It’s an ongoing issue in Gotham Heights builds. Steph presses her hands against the edge of the counter and doubles over.
“Is this your first time using marijuana, Lizzie?”
“Huh?”
“Um.” His brain ticks. “Weed. Pot. Dope. Grass. Reefer.”
“Reefer?” Steph echoes. “Reefer?”
“I don’t know!” Tim yelps.
“Reefer? Are you sixty?”
“I thought you were about to throw up!” Tim shoots back, because Steph is still bent over. “Don’t you volunteer at the hospital?” He doesn’t say, weren’t you pregnant, but he thinks it.
“Don’t you like being beaten with a stick? It’s in your job description,” Steph scowls.
“Huh?” Lizzie repeats, and vomits again.
“Do you smoke?” Steph asks, and immediately gags. Smoke what? It’s infuriatingly unspecific.
“Uh,” Lizzie rasps. “Not much.”
Steph turns a palm upwards in a there you go gesture. What does not much mean?
No. Nope. Tim is not Batman-ing. He will make do with not much.
“Okay,” he says, in his best approximation of a soothing voice. Lizzie props herself up, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. Tim winces. Steph tears off a wad of toilet paper, scrunches it, and passes it over. Tim hands it to Lizzie, who begins to clean herself up. He gets into an awkward squat so he can reach the buttons and flushes it all away. “You’re going to be okay. This is, uh, a common reaction. You’re going to be perfectly safe.”
“I feel shitty,” Lizzie groans, struggling to roll herself over. Tim helps, moving her so her back is against the toilet. He lets go of her hair and she immediately throws her head back. Strands of hair brush the toilet seat and… he’s not thinking about that either. God, he’s always known it’s difficult to try to think of every possible outcome all the time, but he never realized how much harder it is to not think about it.
Tim lets her be and goes over to Steph, slipping his arms around her waist and helping her up. She leans against him.
“One sick,” he says, pressing his mouth against her ear. “Not bad.”
Steph blows air through her lips. “D’you think people are having fun?”
Fun? Beyond the bathroom door, some kind of hip-hop bounces through the house. Tim has been doing his best not to test the punch every fifteen minutes, but as far as he can tell, nobody but Steph has spiked it. People are dancing and drinking and stumbling through a card game Steph procured. Steph has hauled just one unruly couple out of her mom’s bedroom, and Tim busted the pot-smokers standing in a scrappy patch of yard, kicking up dirt and laughing. His response landed somewhere between complete calm acceptance and beating the crap out of them, so he’s going to take that as a victory for Civilian Tim Drake. Though Civilian Tim Drake implies the existence of a non-civilian Tim Drake, who is neither civilian nor Robin, and Tim doesn’t know who he might be.
“Yeah,” he says, and plants a kiss on her temple.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Lizzie interrupts this by groaning. Steph flops forward. Tim squints one eye.
“Should we take her home?” Again, this seems like an appropriate response, somewhere between leaving her here and calling an ambulance. Steph has never stopped laughing at him for the whole Norris thing. In Tim’s defence, Norris could have been having a schizoid breakdown, and Norris had just been ill. And Tim has been trained in dealing with heroin overdoses and serotonin syndrome and all the rest, but Batman has never bothered to instruct him in the art of helping someone who is – ah – greening out.
“Oh, no fucking way,” Steph says, fixing her hair in the mirror. “Lucy’s mom is crazy.”
Lucy. Right. God.
“So…”
Steph bites her thumbnail and shrugs. “We donate my bed.”
“We?” Tim says. Steph shoots him a wicked grin that curls his toes.
“I had plans for it,” she says, and doesn’t elaborate. Tim takes a deep breath, tries to reason that the universe is simply protecting his chastity, and nods.
“Okay.”
Steph grabs a hairband from under the sink and ties Lucy’s hair back, and then the two of them help Lucy to her feet. She’s fine, really – conscious and everything – just rather clammy and nauseous.
“C’mon, Luce,” Steph says cheerfully. “You know I have this Superboy poster in my bedroom?”
Tim flashes her a look. Steph smiles angelically and gestures to the door. Tim opens it for them.
“I love Superboy,” Lucy murmurs. “His jacket…” If Tim and Steph get married, remind him not to let Kon anywhere near Steph’s friends. Jesus. It’d be worse than the time Cassie mentioned, off-handedly, that she thought tactile telekinesis was cool. Tim cuts a path through the crowd, parting the sea of chatty high schoolers. Steph coaxes Lucy along, an arm around her waist. Tim waits at the bottom of the stairs and only then takes Lucy’s other side, helping her navigate the steep carpeted flight.
The Brown household isn’t big on pictures, but the path up to Steph’s bedroom – and the attic – indulge more than anywhere else. First-grader Steph beams out of a photo frame, all bunched curly pigtails and missing front teeth. Steph groans and throws a hand over it as they pass.
“You were cute,” Tim informs her, with a little dangerous flutter in his stomach that wonders at the kind of stuff that is far too old and far too sensitive for them – will her baby grow up to look like her; if we ever have kids…
“I feel like I’m gonna die,” Lucy moans, shaking her head as Steph tries to drag her up the next step. “I’m never doing this again. God, never. I promise. I’ll be good, I’ll be so good. Make it stop.”
“You’re not gonna die,” Steph promises.
“You hate me.”
“Never,” Steph says. “You know what? We’re gonna go up to bed and pig out and watch movies. You know what I just got on video?” Tim hooks his arm around Lucy’s shoulders, and together they get her up to the second floor. “I Know What You Did Last Summer!” Steph sing-songs. Tim stares at her as she switches on the light.
“Steph,” he says seriously. “You can’t show her that.”
“It’s a good movie!” Steph protests. “Okay, my room’s just down here. Uh-huh. One foot in front of the other.”
“It’s –” Tim just doesn’t think horror movies are right for someone intoxicated, “—gory.”
“It’s fine,” Steph says. “Ryan Phillippe.”
“What if it freaks her out?”
“Ryan Phillippe.”
“Ha ha,” Tim deadpans. “This isn’t your History midterm.”
Steph flips him off. “Low blow, Drake. And that was Kurt.”
“As long as their names aren’t on your crotch,” he says, shifting Lucy’s weight so he can open Steph’s door. It swings back, revealing the mess of clothes from her outfit deliberations. Tim smiles. Is it totally lame if this is one of his favorite places in the world?
“Wanna check?” Steph offers. Before Tim can answer, she’s got Lucy through the door and heading towards her bed. The moment it’s in sight, Lucy launches face-first into the covers. And groans.
“Oh my god, Steph,” she moans. “This is ’mazing.”
Steph sits on the bed, making it squeak. “You know it,” she chirps, tossing Lucy a pillow. Lucy hugs the pillow. Steph reaches under the bed and pulls out a bag of chocolate chip cookies. Tim asked her about them one of the first times he properly came over. For emergencies. She looks around and grabs a half-empty glass off her nightstand. “You thirsty?”
“No,” Lucy mumbles into the pillow.
“Well, either you drink it or I’m pouring it on you,” Steph tells her. Lucy grunts and rolls onto her side. Steph raises her eyebrows at Tim and gets to work.
Tim, for his part, goes over to the battered old tv that sits atop Steph’s drawers and turns it on. He plugs in the VHS player and recoils at the sharp beep, horizontal bars flickering across the screen. Tim heaves a long-suffering sigh.
“I fell asleep!” Steph protests. Water runs down Lucy’s chin. Tim shakes his head and holds his finger against the rewind button. His finger is cramped by the end of the backwards, sped-up rendition of Buffy, and finally he ejects the tape. Steph’s collection is stacked haphazardly between pots of creams he can’t name and a single rubber glove. It’s slim compared to the library Tim’s accrued, so it’s a hard pick. He shoves in the next video and heads back to Steph, wading through the clothes.
“Should I get more water?” he asks. Steph considers the glass in her hand, swirling it.
“She’ll be okay,” she decides. “How are the cookies, Luce?”
“Good,” Lucy chimes in, rolling onto her back as she bites into another. Tim doesn’t think that’s best practice for digestion. He’ll keep an eye on things. Steph pats the space on the bed beside her and Tim sits. Steph stretches out, legs over his lap. His thumb traces circles on the denim over her calves. The movie rolls into the slew of previews. Lucy crunches loudly. He thinks that like… bread, or something, could be easier on her stomach than cookies. But she seems happy enough.
“So,” Tim says. “How long have you guys known each other?”
Steph snorts. “About an hour. She’s the one who found the remote control.”
Oh. And yet Steph has given her bed over and is letting this girl eat her emergency stash. He squeezes her through her jeans and she smiles faintly, cheeks a bit pink.
“Fast friends.”
“You betcha.”
“So…” Tim pushes his nail, lightly, into the threads of denim. “Are we on babysitting detail? Do you want to go back down?” He cocks his head towards the door. “It’s your party.”
Steph purses her lips, considering.
“We can stay up here til it’s time for you to go,” she decides, settling back against the headboard on her purple pillows. “Maybe Lucy will be a bit brighter by then. I dunno who she’s meant to go home with.”
Tim glances at the nightstand, and its jumble of jewelry and cans and sticky notes. The alarm clock is barely visible underneath it, though he glimpses a 12. He can race home now and face down his dad and grovel and hope for some kind of mitigation, leaving Steph to all of this.
He can stay. He can have his ears split with his father’s shouts in the morning, and he can spend the next month sneaking out his window to get to the Batcave and spending the rest of the time shut up doing his homework. He can get in trouble, for once, for exactly what his father thinks he’s been up to. For staying out all night with his girlfriend, not getting beaten or kidnapped or half-killed, not absconding to locked-down cities and foreign countries. Tim can go home and tell his dad he stayed at Steph’s; yeah, people were drinking; yes, he’ll learn his lesson, he knows. It’s such an ordinary, everyday prospect and yet adrenalin curls in his veins. Tim has done a lot of things, but never this.
“I thought I’d see the movie through,” he says casually, as if it doesn’t matter at all. Lucy nods. Steph steals a cookie out of the bag. Her legs wriggle against him.
“Your dad –”
“—is pretty used to me breaking curfew,” he concludes. Steph’s eyes crinkle in her smile. “Besides,” Tim adds, “this is the first party I’ve been to in ages that hasn’t put me through the ordeal of S Club 7.”
Steph laughs out loud at that – that big, barking laugh that’s all teeth that makes him want to scoop her up and kiss her. Lucy smacks her lips together.
“I like S Club 7,” she murmurs. Steph pats her cheek.
“That’s because you’re stoned, sweetie.”
Tim can’t see how intoxication of any kind would make the music more bearable, but he doesn’t question Steph, not as she’s grinning as she bites into the cookie. Tim reaches over and brushes the crumbs from her lower lip. Steph bites. Gently, but she captures his thumbnail between her front teeth, crooked and chipped. Then she laughs again, and she’s the most beautiful person Tim’s ever seen.
“You’re sure?” she says. “You’re not going to lose it in the morning? ‘Ah, the guilt, the humanity, how could I ever break a rule --’”
Is that what she thinks of him? “Steph.”
“Timbo.”
Tim pushes her legs out off his thighs and crawls up the bed, holding himself over the top of her. His necklace hangs down between them. Tim bridges the gap, kissing her, and he feels Steph smile as she kisses him back, hands tangling over his shoulders. The bed protests under the movement and something crunches under Tim’s knee. He rolls off Steph, scrambling to land as he flies off the bed. A shattered cookie lays in the wake of their embrace. Lucy sits up and props herself against the collage of posters on Steph’s wall, perpendicular to Steph.
“Hey,” Lucy frowns. “You killed it.” She picks up the remnants of the pulverized cookie. Tim locks eyes with Steph. Behind him, the strains of the film’s first song start up. He can taste Steph’s lip-gloss.
“I forgive him,” Steph says, and shuffles over, so they can all squeeze into the twin bed. Her eyes sparkle in the dim light. “Come on. You’re not scared of teenage girls, are you?”
Tim rolls his eyes and climbs in next to her, ass half-hanging off the bed. Steph leans her head against his shoulder, hair tickling his neck. Tim slides an arm around her. In a little while, they’ll have to go downstairs and check the house isn’t being demolished. For now, they watch the sun rise over an African savannah.