Still Landing
35. The current runs differently than the script assumed it would.
Sunday morning. His flat.
She woke at six-forty-three to a thin line of pre-dawn grey across the ceiling — the blackout curtains not quite meeting at the centre. He was still asleep. The temperature he liked. A door somewhere. The distant sound of cars leaving the carpark.
She lay there.
She’d been thinking about Kaia since Tuesday. Not continuously, not on purpose. The way a line keeps returning: the feeling is in the restraint. The way Kaia had set her pages down without checking whether the room had followed.
She remembered the title Kaia had said. She reached for her phone.
She typed the title into chat, still horizontal in the dark. What is it actually about. The response came back: a guide to rethinking how we understand relationships, monogamy, sexuality, identity — through a queer lens. She read the summary. The language moved through territory she’d been skirting without a map: orientation, desire as more varied than the script allowed, attraction as something that could be structured differently and not be broken.
She went to find it on Kindle.
Opened Instagram first, by habit, while the book loaded.
Someone she followed had shared a post. A carousel. She almost kept going.
The first slide said: You are not broken. You are not cold. You might just be greysexual.
She stopped.
Read it.
The second slide: For greysexuals, attraction is not absent — it is rare. It does not run as a general current. You do not look at the world and feel it moving. Most people you meet, nothing happens. Occasionally — a particular person — and something arrives. When it does, it is real. It has always been real. You just couldn’t explain why it didn’t happen the way it was supposed to — with everyone, or most people, or with enough frequency to match the script. The current runs differently than the script assumed it would.
She read it again.
The third slide listed things that greysexual people commonly described. She read each one. Slowly. The way you read something when your chest has gone very still.
Sex feels fine. Sometimes good. But it’s rarely something you initiate or think about when you’re alone.
You’ve wondered if something is wrong with you. You’ve performed desire because the relationship needed it. It wasn’t dishonest. You just didn’t have language for why it cost something.
Emotional closeness matters deeply. Physical closeness — genuinely, separately wanted. Sexual attraction specifically is the thing that rarely arrives — and when it does, it arrives for a specific person, in a specific way. It is not a general signal. It is always particular.
She kept scrolling.
The next slide: Sometimes the signal is not in the body first. It is in what keeps returning. A quality of presence — the way someone holds a room, the frequency they run at. Not what they look like. Not what they do. Something underneath that — the thing you can’t name when someone asks why. You find yourself returning to it before you have a word for what you’re returning to. That is also the attraction.
She put the phone face down on the mattress.
Lay there.
The ceiling. The thin line of light. His breathing beside her.
The word sitting in her like a stone dropped into still water. Not painful. Not relieving. Just — landing. Still landing.
She thought about the things she’d told herself. Low drive. Tired. Stressed. Not in the mood. The accounting she’d been doing for years, adding it up to something that would make sense inside the script. She’d never arrived at a number that worked.
She thought about Kaia reading on Tuesday. The feeling is in the restraint.
She thought about her skin. The brightness in her eyes. Her lips.
She didn’t follow that thought.
She lay still. Breathed out slowly. Let the sounds of the estate come in — the lift, someone’s door, the lone sounds of a Sunday beginning.
Five minutes later he stirred. His hand found her waist, thumb moving in a slow circle.
She felt it. What he was reaching toward.
She didn’t move away. She moved in — but differently. Rolled toward him until her head was against his chest. Brought her hand to his.
He stilled.
“Hey,” he said. Low, still half asleep.
“Hey.”
His arm around her went still. A weight in his chest she could feel against her temple.
“Everything okay?”
“Yes,” she said. And then: “I just want to stay like this for a bit. Is that okay?”
He was quiet for a moment.
“Yeah,” he said. “Okay.”
He didn’t ask what she meant. She didn’t explain. She just lay there with his arm around her and the word still moving through her like something that could not be unread, settling into places she hadn’t known were waiting for it.
Outside the estate was doing its Sunday morning thing.
Inside the flat: the temperature he liked. The blackout curtains with their thin line of light. Two people in a bed they had arrived at from different directions.
She didn’t know yet what any of it meant.
She only knew the accounting didn’t work anymore. And that the number she’d been trying to reach had never been the right number.
She closed her eyes.
Stayed.