The Last Tram Before Midnight

Melbourne was all inky streets and amber light when I finally gave in and ordered the second espresso.

The barista in the little Fitzroy café — the one that never closes, held together with fairy lights and good intentions — had started to look at me with something between concern and impatience. I'd been there three hours, hunched over a notebook I hadn't touched, watching the rain turn Lygon Street into a smear of neon and reflection. My flight was in nine hours. New York loomed ahead of me like a wall I wasn't sure I wanted to climb.

I should have been anywhere else. I should have been home, packing, pretending I was ready to leave.

Instead I was here, in the warm belly of a city I'd told myself I was done with, doing the one thing I'd forbidden myself to do all winter: I was waiting for him.

I didn't know that's what I was doing until the door chimed and the whole room seemed to hold its breath. And there he was, shaking rain from a black coat, hair curling dark against his temples, scanning the room with that unhurried certainty of a man who has never once doubted his welcome anywhere.

His eyes found mine like they'd been looking for me too.

Elias.

I hadn't told him I was leaving. I hadn't told him I was still here be. That had been the whole problem, hadn't it? I'd spent two years building careful walls between us, and now I was going to leave the whole city behind without ever once knocking on his. Except I had. I'd messaged him three hours ago, one thoughtless line — you still know where to find me?

And here he was. Finding me.

He crossed the room without hurry, weaving between tables, and I watched him come the way you watch a wave decide whether it's going to break. He pulled out the chair across from mine and sat, close enough that I could smell the cold rain and the clean cedar of his collar, and he looked at me for a long moment before he said anything at all.

"You're leaving," he said. Not a question.

"How did you—"

"You only drink one espresso, Ruby. You drink one when you're thinking, and you drink two when you're saying goodbye to something."

My breath caught. Two years, and he'd catalogued me that closely without my ever noticing the weight of it. Two years of arguments and almosts, of hands that lingered a heartbeat too long, of nights I'd lain awake replaying the way he'd look at me across crowded rooms like I was the only source of light in them.

"And here I thought I was being mysterious," I managed.

"You're never mysterious to me." His voice dropped, intimate as a secret. "You're the most transparent woman I've ever met. You just spend all your energy pretending otherwise."

The espresso machine hissed. Somewhere behind us a couple laughed. And I sat across from the man I'd spent two years convincing myself I could live without, and I felt every one of those careful walls begin to tremble.

"I was going to go without saying goodbye," I admitted. The words came out soft, ashamed. "I thought it would be cleaner. Easier."

"Was it?"

"No." I pushed my cup away. "I've been sitting here for three hours trying to figure out why I couldn't leave, and I think I finally understand. It's not the city I can't say goodbye to, Elias. It's —"

I couldn't finish. He reached across the table and took my hand, and the touch was so gentle, so deliberate, that it undid me completely. His thumb traced a slow circle over my knuckles, and I felt the heat of it travel all the way up my arm, into my chest, low into the hollow of my stomach.

"Come with me," he said.

"Where?"

"Anywhere but here. This café has seen enough of us deciding. Let's go somewhere we aren't deciding." His eyes were dark, serious, lit from within. "Let's go be certain, for once."

The rain had not let up when we walked out, and he held his coat over both our heads as we ran for his car, laughing like teenagers, my notebook forgotten on the table, New York forgotten, everything forgotten except the press of his body against mine and the ridiculous, buoyant certainty that this was the rightest thing I'd done in years.

His apartment was on the tenth floor, all glass and shadow looking out over the sleeping city, the rain streaking the windows until Melbourne dissolved into constellations of blurred gold. He didn't turn on a light. He just stood in the dark with me, his hands at my waist, his forehead resting against mine, and in the silence I heard his heartbeat, fast and loud, telling me what his careful tongue would not.

"I've waited so long to have you like this," he said, and the raw honesty in his voice cracked something open inside me. "I've imagined it a thousand ways, and I never let myself believe you'd ever really be here."

"I'm here." My hands came up to cup his face, thumbs tracing the sharp line of his jaw. Rain was still in his hair, in his lashes. "I'm here, Elias."

He kissed me then, and it was nothing like the careful, borrowed kisses we'd stolen before. There was no restraint left in it. His mouth claimed mine with a hunger that had been banked for two years, and I opened to it like a door swinging wide, like I'd been holding my breath my whole life just for this. His hands slid into my hair, tilting my head back, and I sank into him, into the heat of his body through damp clothes, into the taste of him — coffee and rain and something that was only ever him.

We moved through the dark without maps. His bedroom was a spill of moonlight and cold sheets, and he laid me back on them with a reverence that made my eyes sting, looking down at me as though I were something he'd crossed an ocean to find.

"You're trembling," he murmured.

"I know." I laughed, unsteady. "I don't think I've ever wanted anything the way I want —" My voice broke.

"Tell me," he said, lowering himself over me, one hand braced beside my head, the other trailing down the line of my throat, over the beating pulse at its base. "Tell me what you want."

"You. All of you. Every version of you you've been keeping from me." I caught his wrist, brought his hand to my lips, kissed the inside of it. "I want to stop pretending I don't."

Something shifted in his face — that careful composure finally cracking, finally letting me see the depth of feeling beneath it. "You have me, Ruby. You've had me since the night I met you, whether you knew it or not."

What happened after that was a slow, deliberate unmaking. He undressed me piece by piece, and every inch of skin he bared he touched, kissed, worshipped, until I was arching beneath him, breathless, my hands fisted in the sheets, the cold night air and the heat of his mouth chasing goosebumps across my skin. He was unhurried, methodical, a man savoring something he'd waited years for, and every moment of his patience drove me a little wilder.

I felt his breath on my stomach, his lips trailing lower, and I buried my hands in his hair, back bowing as the pleasure crested and broke, again and again, while the city rained gold outside the window and he learned every place I surrendered with his name on my lips.

And when finally he came back up to me, when I felt the weight of him settle between my thighs and the heat of his skin against every part of mine, when he looked into my eyes and asked — silently, with nothing but the question in his gaze — whether I was sure, I pulled him down to me and showed him I was.

He entered me slowly, so slowly it was almost unbearable, and I gasped, clutching at his shoulders, at the place where his neck met his back, as he filled me inch by aching inch. The world narrowed to him — the drag of his body inside mine, the shuddering breath against my ear, the low sound he made that was almost a sob, almost a prayer.

"God, Ruby," he breathed, forehead pressed to mine. "I should have done this a long time ago."

I couldn't answer. I could only cling to him as he began to move, and the motion was everything I'd been afraid to want — deep and sure and achingly intimate, each thrust a truth I'd been running from. His rhythm built slowly, matching the need coiling tighter and tighter in my belly, until I was whispering his name against his mouth and he was driving into me with a desperate, beautiful abandon, both of us past the point of guarding anything.

When I came it was a release of every wall I'd ever built, a flooding, shuddering relief that pulled him over the edge with me, his whole body tensing and breaking against mine, his face buried in my neck, his voice rough as he said my name like it was the only word he knew.

We lay tangled afterward, breathless and half-laughing, my heart still hammering against his, the rain gone soft against the glass. His hand traced idle patterns on my bare hip, and I felt light — weighted and light all at once, the way you feel when you finally set down something you didn't know you'd been carrying.

"You know what this means," I murmured, turning my face into the warmth of his chest.

"That you're going to miss your flight?"

I laughed, startled, and he laughed with me, the sound rumbling through his ribs into mine. "I'm serious, Elias. I have a life in New York. I have —"

"You have me," he said simply. "And I have you. Everything else, we figure out. We've spent two years not figuring things out, and look where it got us — you running from a city you couldn't leave, me chasing you into cafés in the rain." He tilted my chin up, kissed me soft. "I'm done not having you, Ruby. The rest is just logistics."

Outside, the first tram of some impossible hour rattled past below, lights streaming over wet asphalt. And I lay in the arms of the man I'd spent two years convincing myself I could live without, and I thought: no. I was never going to be able to live without him.

Melbourne had kept me. Not the city — it had always been him. It had always, always been him.