The late afternoon light had shifted while they lay there, the sun dropping low enough to throw long amber rectangles across the rumpled sheets. Ivy felt the change before she opened her eyes — the quality of the warmth on her shoulder had thinned, the air cooling just enough to raise the fine hairs on her arm.
Hazel stirred against her, a small sound escaping her throat. Not quite a word. Her fingers, which had been resting slack on Ivy's hip, twitched and then stilled again.
The creak came from somewhere in the hallway — a long, low complaint of old floorboards settling under the weight of the building's bones. Ivy heard it without alarm, her body still too heavy with the aftermath to tense. The sound stretched, then faded into the ambient hum of late afternoon: the distant drip of the bathroom faucet, the soft rattle of wind against the window glass.
Hazel's eyes opened.
She didn't move at first. Her gaze tracked across the ceiling, following the hairline crack that ran from the light fixture to the corner where the wall met the closet door. Ivy watched her watch it — the slow, deliberate focus of someone re-entering their own body after being somewhere else entirely.
"It was just the building," Ivy said, her voice barely above a murmur. "No one's coming."
Hazel nodded, but the tension in her shoulders didn't release. She shifted, her leg sliding against Ivy's, and her hand drifted downward. Her fingertips found the floor beside the bed — the place where the bubblegum-pink balloon had been, where Emilia had clutched it against her chest before it burst.
Her fingers brushed the shredded latex. She picked up one of the larger strips, a ragged crescent of pink that still held a faint curve in its resting shape, as if remembering the fullness it had once contained. Hazel rubbed it between her thumb and forefinger, the motion slow and absent, almost ritualistic. The latex was soft and slightly tacky from the heat of the room.
"She called Sofía's name," Hazel said.
Her voice was low, the words dropping into the quiet like stones into still water. Ivy turned her head on the pillow to look at her. Hazel's profile was caught in the amber light — the curve of her cheek, the slight downturn of her mouth, the way her eyes stayed fixed on the scrap of pink in her fingers.
"When she came," Hazel said. "She said Sofía's name. Not ours. Not anyone else's. Just hers."
Ivy let the silence hold for a moment. She was still learning the shape of this — the aftermath of being watched, the particular vulnerability of having shared something that intimate with an audience of one small girl who was also Hazel's sister. The air in the room felt different now, charged with something that wasn't arousal anymore but wasn't quite regret either. Something in between, waiting to be named.
"You heard it too," Hazel said. It wasn't a question.
"I heard it."
Hazel let the latex strip fall. It drifted to the floor, landing soundlessly among the others. She turned onto her side, facing Ivy now, and her expression was unreadable — not guarded, exactly, but held in a kind of suspension. Her hazel-green eyes searched Ivy's face, looking for something she couldn't name.
"She's eight," Hazel said. "And she just watched us — watched her sister — and when she came, she called another eight-year-old's name. What does that mean, Ivy?"
Ivy reached across the space between them and laid her palm flat against Hazel's chest, just below the collarbone. The skin was still warm, still carrying the flush of what they'd done. She felt Hazel's heartbeat under her hand — steady now, but deep, as if it was working harder than it showed.
"I don't know," Ivy said. "But whatever it means, we're going to figure it out together. We're not going to make her feel wrong for it."
From the hallway, the bedroom door clicked shut. Soft, but deliberate — the sound of a latch finding its home, of someone who had been listening and had now decided to stop. Emilia, closing herself in with Sofía. Closing them out.
Hazel's breath caught. Not a sob — something smaller, something caught between relief and a new kind of fear. She covered Ivy's hand with her own, pressing it harder against her chest, as if Ivy's touch could anchor her to the bed when everything else felt unmoored.
"She's probably embarrassed," Ivy said. "She made a deal to watch us, got what she wanted, and now she's realizing what it actually means to want something like that. She's eight. Everything is enormous when you're eight."
"I was nine," Hazel whispered. "The first time I knew. About the balloons."
Ivy went very still. Hazel had told her pieces — the shame, the ex who laughed, the years of hiding — but she'd never named the exact age. Never drawn a line that direct between herself and the two little girls in the next room.
"I was nine and I didn't understand it," Hazel continued, her voice dropping even lower, as if the words themselves were fragile. "I just knew that when I held one, when I felt it against me, my whole body would go quiet. The noise in my head would stop. And I thought — I honestly thought there was something wrong with me. That I was broken."
"Hazel."
"No, let me finish." Hazel's grip on Ivy's hand tightened. "The point isn't that I was broken. The point is that nobody told me I wasn't. Nobody said, 'Hey, that's weird, but it's okay to be weird.' Instead I got laughed at, and I learned to hide, and now there's an eight-year-old in there who just came whispering my sister's name and she probably feels the exact same way I did."
Ivy shifted closer, their bodies aligning along the length of the mattress. The sheet had slipped down to their waists, and the air on her bare shoulders was cool enough to raise goosebumps, but she didn't reach for the blanket. This moment needed to be skin to skin.
"What do you want to do?" Ivy asked.
Hazel blinked. A tear that had been gathering in the corner of her eye finally spilled, tracking down the bridge of her nose and disappearing into the pillow. "I want to talk to her. Not now — she's probably not ready. But soon. I want to tell her that I understand. That I'm not going to laugh at her, or tell our moms, or make her feel like a freak."
"Then we will," Ivy said. "When she's ready."
"We," Hazel repeated. The word came out differently than it had an hour ago in the hallway, when she'd said "Rules first. Then us." Now it was smaller, more wondering — as if she was testing the shape of it in her mouth and finding it unfamiliar but good.
"We," Ivy confirmed. She moved her hand from Hazel's chest to her cheek, cupping the warmth there, her thumb brushing away the damp trail the tear had left. "I'm not going anywhere, Hazel. Whatever this family looks like now — the four of us, plus a duck — I'm in it. I've been in it for two years. I just didn't know how to say it."