[Looking at him is really hard. His face is still the face she knows so well. He looks sad and happy - he looks torn - the way she (remembers) usually pictures him. He's so much like how she usually pictures him, so deceptively familiar and perfect and strange that it skips past comforting and goes right back to distressing. It's a projection of who he was over the person he's become, this new Bruce. And he's crying. Bruce never cries (she doesn't know that/that isn't true), and it's wrong, it's probably her fault, and it makes looking at him even harder.

Nothing could stop her looking, even if it is through a blur of leftover tears that missed the memo about how she's cried herself out already and they should stop at any time. Her face is blotchy and red where he touches it, and she scrubs at it more roughly than him, blows snot into the sleeve of her bathrobe. Her voice jerks when she speaks, interrupted by sniffs and soggy hiccups.]

Stay for the night. The weekend. The week. Just stay. [Get it together, Ross. Oh, god, he's in her house.] Don't leave again. Promise me. I know you can't promise me that, but promise me anyway. That you're staying. I can't- I can't- [Shuddering breath.]

I won't.

[She could and she would, and by now they both know it, but she's a little more solid for having said it. Not solid enough give him an additional inch of personal space, but solid enough to believe that she could. If he needed her to.]