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The bus station in Fairview Fall is not really a bus station. It is a parking lot beside the post office with a painted sign on a wooden post that reads Fairview Fall — Pop. 2,847 and a single bench that has seen better decades. You step off the bus into heat so thick it feels like walking into something solid, and the first thing you think is that your mother would have had something to say about this. Something funny. She always had something funny. You are still working on finding it funny.

Your bag is on your shoulder and your mother’s cardigan is tied around your waist because you could not bring yourself to pack it and you could not wear it either, not in this heat, but you needed it close. The driver hands down your suitcase from the hold and then the box — your father’s records, wrapped in an old bedsheet and taped within an inch of their lives — and you take it with both hands like it is something that could break, because it is. “Y/N.” You turn around.

Birdie is standing at the edge of the parking lot in a yellow sundress with her dark hair pinned up and her hands clasped in front of her like she is trying to hold herself together by sheer force of will. She is younger than you keep expecting — younger than your mother was, softer somehow, with the same eyes. That is the thing you were not prepared for. The eyes. She opens her arms and you walk into them and she holds on tight and doesn’t say anything for a long moment and that is exactly right, that is the only right thing, and you press your face into her shoulder and breathe. “Okay,” she says finally, quietly, into your hair. “Okay. Let’s get you home.” She takes the suitcase without asking. You keep the records.

Her truck is an old Ford the colour of rust and good intentions. It smells like vanilla and, underneath that, the faint ghost of something that went wrong in a kitchen recently. Birdie swings out of the parking lot with the ease of someone who has been driving these roads for years and cracks both windows so the hot air moves, and for a minute neither of you says anything.

The town scrolls past — the diner, the hardware store, the church, a barbershop with a striped pole still spinning — and you watch it go by with your elbow on the window ledge and the sun on your arm. “It’s smaller than I thought,” you say. “It’s small,” Birdie agrees easily. “You get used to it. Then you start to like it. Then one day you realise you can’t imagine being anywhere else and that’s just that.” She glances over at you. “Happened to me and I came here for a man, which tells you something about how good the town is.” “What happened to the man?”

“He left.” She says it without any weight on it, like a fact about the weather. “Best thing he ever did for me, honestly. I got to keep the town.” You look back out the window. There is a bookshop on the corner of main street with a display in the window — paperbacks arranged around a small ceramic rooster — and a hand-painted sign above the door that reads Read a Cookie in cheerful red letters. “Is that—” “That’s mine,” Birdie says, and the pride in her voice is warm and uncomplicated. “Named it myself. People told me it didn’t make any sense. I told them that was the point.” Something loosens very slightly in your chest. “My mom would have loved that name.” Birdie’s hands shift on the steering wheel. “Yeah,” she says softly. “She would have.”

The town gives way to a residential street, quieter, lined with oak trees that are losing the fight against the August heat. Birdie pulls up outside a small white house with a porch and a hanging basket and a cat sitting in the front window staring out at the street with the energy of someone who has appointed himself neighbourhood watch. “That’s Gerald,” Birdie says. “He doesn’t warm up to people easily.” She pauses. “He’ll be on your lap by Thursday.”

The house is warm and slightly chaotic in the way that feels lived-in rather than messy — books on every surface, a quilt over the sofa, a kitchen that smells like sugar and ambition. Your room has a window overlooking the street and a quilt that matches the one downstairs and a small vase of wildflowers on the dresser that Birdie must have put there this morning, and you have to look at the ceiling for a moment before you can say anything. “It’s lovely,” you manage. “Thank you, Birdie.”

“Don’t,” she says simply. “You’re family. This is just where family goes.” She leaves you to settle in. You sit on the edge of the bed for a while before you do anything else. Then you open the box of records carefully, take each one out, and line them up against the wall until you can find something to put them on properly. You run your thumb along the spines of them — your father’s handwriting on some of the paper sleeves, little notes he’d written to himself, great for Sunday mornings and Y/N will like this one when she’s older — and you breathe through it, in and out, until you can. You take out the journal Birdie sent you in the weeks after. Brown leather, your name on the inside cover in her loopy handwriting. You open to the first page. We’re here, Dad, you write. It seems like a good place.

August bleeds away slowly, the way time does when you are somewhere new and the shape of your days has not yet formed. Birdie puts you to work in the bookshop most mornings — not because she needs the help, though she doesn’t turn it down, but because she is perceptive enough to know that you need somewhere to be. You shelve books and make change and learn the names of regulars who come in and stay too long, browsing without buying, talking to Birdie about their lives while she leans on the counter and listens like she has nowhere else to be.

They look at you with open curiosity every single one of them. Not unkind. Just unsubtle. “This your niece, Birdie?” “That’s her. In from New York.” “Well, welcome to Fairview Fall, honey. You settling in alright?” “Yes, thank you,” you say, every time, and mean it, and still go home some evenings feeling so full of warmth from strangers that you don’t know what to do with it. You write about it.

You write about your mother and how she would have made friends with every single one of them inside of five minutes, your mother who could talk to anyone, who remembered every name, who made a room feel like a party just by walking into it. You write about your father and the record shop you found on main street, the one he would have disappeared into on day one and emerged from an hour later sheepish and happy with something tucked under his arm. You write in present tense. It is the only way you know how to keep them with you.

The grief comes without warning and without schedule. A song on the radio in the bookshop one afternoon that your mother used to hum in the kitchen and you have to go into the back and sit down until it passes. A customer who wears the same cologne your father wore and you spend the rest of the morning slightly underwater. Birdie always knows. She brings you things — a cookie, a glass of water, a hand on your shoulder — and she does not ask you to explain and she does not try to fix it and that, more than anything, is why you are starting to love her. She is an awful cook. She is a spectacular baker. These are two entirely different skills that exist peacefully in the same person and Fairview Fall has long since made its peace with this fact. The dinners are ambitious and variable. The baked goods are extraordinary, and she knows it, and she is not modest about it.

September comes and brings with it the particular dread of a first day at a new school. The night before, you cannot sleep. You lie in the dark and listen to Fairview Fall settle into quiet around you and you think about your old school, your old locker, your old seat by the window in English class, your old life. You think about how none of it exists anymore in the same way. You think about walking into a building where everyone already knows everyone and you are the city girl, the new girl, the one staying with Miss Birdie, and how that will precede you through every door.

In the morning Birdie is up before you. You come downstairs in your mother’s cardigan and your jeans and your stomach in knots and she turns from the kitchen and says “sit down, baby” and puts a plate of blueberry muffins in front of you that are so good it is almost offensive. She sits across from you with her coffee and she talks — about the town, about the teachers, about nothing important — and she lets you eat and lets the morning be ordinary, and by the time you have to leave your stomach has unknotted itself by about half.

She drops you at the school gates in the truck and squeezes your hand before you get out. “You’re going to be just fine,” she says. “I know,” you say, which is not the same as believing it.

Fairview Fall High School is a low brick building with a football field that is clearly the town’s real pride and joy — the grass better maintained than anything else on the property, a hand-painted banner above the gymnasium doors reading GO HAWKS in red and gold so fresh it must be new this week. The gate is open and everyone is moving through it with the ease of people who have done this a hundred times, which they have. They know where they are going. They know who they are going with. They move in clusters that have been the same clusters since middle school and they talk and laugh and do not notice you standing just outside the gate with your bag on your shoulder and your mother’s cardigan tied around your waist trying to figure out if you could leave without anyone noticing.

You are still trying to figure it out when a car pulls up to the kerb beside you — a blue thing, old and a little battered but clearly loved, clearly tended to — and the door opens and someone gets out, and he is tall, dark-haired, broad across the shoulders in the way of someone who has been physical his whole life without thinking about it, wearing a Fairview Fall Hawks t-shirt with the sleeves cut and an easy, unhurried look on his face that you will come to understand is just him, that is just what he looks like, like the world is something he finds genuinely good.

He leans against the side of his car and looks at you. Not in a way that makes you feel looked at. Just in a way that sees you. “You look like you’re trying to figure out if you can leave without anyone noticing,” he says. “That obvious?” “Little bit.” The corner of his mouth lifts. “You’re staying with Miss Birdie, right?” Of course he knows. Of course. “That’s me.” He nods, easy, like this confirms something he already suspected, and then he just pushes off the car and extends his hand like it is the most natural thing in the world. “Lee Heeseung,” he says. “Come on, I’ll walk you in.” You look at his hand. You look at the gate. You look back at him. “Okay,” you say, and shake it.

He walks with the kind of ease that parts a crowd without trying. People call his name and he calls theirs back — first names, last names, nicknames, little details lobbed like catching up even though school has not started yet, how’s your daddy’s back, tell your sister congratulations on the baby — and he does it all without breaking stride, without making you feel like an afterthought beside him. He introduces you to people in the hallway with a hand half-raised in your direction, this is Y/N, she’s staying with Miss Birdie, and they say hi Y/N and welcome to Fairview Fall and love your cardigan and you say thank you, thank you, thank you. He takes you to the principal’s office himself. Sits in the chair beside you like he belongs there, which apparently he does because the secretary says “morning, Heeseung” without looking up, and the principal shakes his hand before he shakes yours. You come out with a timetable and a map of the building and Heeseung looks at both and says “okay, your first class is this way” and just starts walking.

At the door of your first class he leans in the doorframe — just leans there like he was born to lean, like all doorframes exist in anticipation of him — and looks at you with that easy grin. “I’ll find you before lunch,” he says. “You can sit with me and my friends.”

“You don’t have to do that,” you say. “I know I don’t.” He says it simply, without any performance behind it. “I’ll find you before lunch.” You look at him for a moment. “Okay.” “Okay.” He pushes off the doorframe. Starts to go. Then he glances back over his shoulder at you, grin already in place. “See you later, city girl.” The door closes behind him. You turn around and find a seat and spend the first ten minutes of class thinking about absolutely nothing related to the lesson.

He finds you before lunch. He materialises at your locker with the punctuality of someone who means what he says and says what he means, and he falls into step beside you down the hallway and pushes open the cafeteria door and steers you toward a corner table where two people are already sitting. The boy is leaning back in his chair with his arms folded and the look of someone who has a lot of feelings about Wednesdays and none of them are positive. He is handsome in a sharp, clean way, dark-haired, and he looks up at you and nods once like you have passed some preliminary inspection.

The girl beside him is already looking at you like she has made a decision. She is in a bright green dress with her hair down and she has the kind of face that is interesting before it is pretty, quick and watchful and warm all at once, and she says “oh good, another girl” before you have even sat down. “I have been the only one for six years and I want you to know it has been a lot.” “Hi,” you say. “Hi,” she says, and scoots over to make room. “I’m Immy. That’s Hoon, he’s not as unfriendly as he looks.” “I’m plenty friendly,” Sunghoon says, and steals something off her tray without looking at it. “Hoon.” Her voice goes flat. “Sweetheart.” His doesn’t change at all. “I told you not to call me that.” He looks at her then, and there is something in his face that is so straightforward and so completely unbothered that you almost laugh. “I know you did,” he says pleasantly. Immy stares at him. She is fighting a smile and losing. She turns back to you like none of that happened. “So. New York City.” She says it like she is tasting it. “What’s it like?”

“Loud,” you say. “A lot of people. Everything’s very fast.” “Do you miss it?” It is a direct question. You appreciate that she asks it like she actually wants to know rather than like she is being polite. You think about it honestly. “I miss the familiarity of it,” you say. “I miss knowing where I am.” Immy nods. “You’ll know where you are here pretty quick,” she says. “It’s not a big place to learn.” She slides a chocolate milkshake across the table to you. “You look like you need this.” You did not order it. You do not know when she did. “Thank you.” “Don’t mention it, honey.”

Across the table Heeseung is watching you with that quiet, attentive look he has — the one that notices things, that collects details and keeps them somewhere. He catches you looking and grins, easy, and goes back to his food. Sunghoon steals from Immy’s tray again. She elbows him without looking up from asking you about the bookshop. He absorbs the elbow with equanimity. He does not stop eating her fries. You think: Mom, you would love these people. Present tense. Always.

The school day ends and you come out through the front doors into the late afternoon gold of a September in Texas and you are thinking about the walk home — Birdie drew you a map this morning on a paper bag, fifteen minutes, turn left at the church — when a car horn sounds once, short and friendly, and you look over and there is the blue car at the kerb and Heeseung leaning out the window. “Get in,” he says. “I’ll give you a lift.” “I was going to walk.” “It’s a hundred degrees.” It is not quite a hundred degrees. It is close enough that you do not argue. You go around and get in the passenger side and the inside of the car smells like worn leather and something warm, like a radio that’s been on all day, and there is a small St. Christopher medal hanging from the mirror that swings when you close the door. He pulls out into the street unhurried, one hand on the wheel, and you tell him the address and he nods like he already knew. “How was the rest of it?” he asks. “Okay,” you say. “Miss Beaumont gave me a book.”

“She does that.” He says it warmly. “She gave me East of Eden sophomore year and told me to come back when I’d read it. I came back two weeks later and we talked about it for an hour after school. She’s good people.” You look at him sideways. He is watching the road. “You don’t seem like someone who stays after school to talk about books,” you say. He glances over, amused. “What do I seem like?” You think about the football banner. The teammates who called his name in the hallway. The easy authority of someone the whole building seems to orbit without him asking for it. “I don’t know yet,” you say honestly.

He nods like that is a fair answer. “Good,” he says. “Keep looking.” He pulls up outside Birdie’s house before you have figured out what to say to that. You are still working on it when the front door opens and Birdie comes out onto the porch, dish towel over her shoulder, and her face does something warm and immediate at the sight of the car. “Heeseung Lee,” she calls. He cuts the engine and gets out — of course he gets out, of course he does not just wave from the window — and he pulls himself up to his full height and says “afternoon, ma’am” with such genuine politeness that you watch it happen like it is something to study. Birdie gives him a look. “Ma’am,” she repeats. “Yes, ma’am.” “Heeseung.” She puts a hand on her hip. “I have known you since you were a tot. Small enough to fit in that window box.” She points at it. “Now you call me Birdie.”

He has the grace to look slightly abashed, which on him is mostly just the grin getting a little sheepish. “Yes, ma— yes. Sorry. Birdie.” “Better.” She looks between the two of you with an expression that is doing several things at once and landing primarily on satisfied. “You staying for supper?” “No thank you, I’ve got to get home. But I appreciate it.” “Another time then.” She says it like it is already decided. “You drive safe.” “Always do.” He looks at you. “See you tomorrow, city girl.” “See you tomorrow,” you say. He gets back in the car. You stand on the kerb and watch him pull away — the blue car disappearing around the corner at the end of the street, the St. Christopher swinging — and then Birdie is beside you with the dish towel still over her shoulder and a look on her face that is entirely too knowing for this time of day.

“Come inside,” she says. “I’ll put the kettle on.” You follow her up the porch steps. Gerald is in the window, watching. Inside the house it smells like vanilla and a baking experiment and something that might be dinner taking a turn for the ambitious, and Birdie fills the kettle and sets it on the stove and leans against the counter with her arms crossed and that look still on her face. “So,” she says. “You met Heeseung.” “He found me outside the gates,” you say, dropping your bag on a chair. “He showed me around.” “Mmhm.” She says it in a way that contains a lot. “He’s nice.” “He is.” She nods slowly. “He’s a good boy, Heeseung. His family have been here as long as mine have. His daddy taught him to fix that car himself, the blue one — he was about fourteen when they started on it, worked on it for two years. His mama makes the best peach preserves in the county and she will give you a jar if you so much as look at them.” She pauses. “He’s going to be offered a football scholarship.” You look up. “Yeah?” “Yeah. He doesn’t want it.” She says it simply, without editorialising, like it is just a thing she knows. “He wants to stay here and study music. Plays guitar, did he tell you that?” “No.”

“He wouldn’t, first day.” She unfolds herself from the counter as the kettle starts to murmur. “He doesn’t show that to many people.” She glances back at you with those familiar eyes, your mother’s eyes, and something in her expression is soft and deliberate. “You had a good day.”

It is not a question exactly. You think about Immy’s arm through yours in the hallway. You think about Sunghoon’s complete indifference to being elbowed and Immy’s losing battle with her own smile. You think about Heeseung in the doorframe, easy as breathing, see you later, city girl. “Yeah,” you say. “I think I did.” Birdie smiles and pours the tea and doesn’t say I told you so, which is generous of her, and the evening settles around you soft and warm and ordinary in a way that feels, for the first time, like something you might be able to live inside. Gerald comes down from his windowsill and sits on your feet. “Thursday,” Birdie says, without looking. “I told you.”

By the end of the first week you have learned the following things about Fairview Fall High School. The bathroom by the science block floods if someone flushes the third stall, which Immy told you on day one and which you have since witnessed firsthand. The cafeteria does a peach cobbler on Fridays that is apparently worth rearranging your entire lunch schedule around, according to Sunghoon, who said it with a sincerity usually reserved for serious matters. Miss Beaumont assigns reading like she is prescribing medicine — specific and deliberate and not up for debate. The football team practises every day after school on the good grass and half the school finds reasons to walk past the field while it’s happening, which everyone pretends is coincidental and nobody believes.

You have also learned that Heeseung is there every morning. Not waiting for you, exactly. He is never standing at the gate with any kind of obvious intention. He is just — there. Leaning against the blue car with one ankle crossed over the other and his face tipped up to whatever the morning is doing, talking to someone or not talking to anyone, and when you come through the gate he sees you the way he seems to see everything, which is immediately and without making a production of it, and he falls into step beside you like it is the most natural thing in the world, which by Friday it almost is.

“Morning, city girl.” “Morning.” “Sleep alright?” “Better than the night before.” “That’s something.” He holds the door. You go through. “Birdie feed you before you left?” “Lemon muffins today.” “Lord.” He says it with feeling. “Her lemon muffins are something else.” “You’ve had them?” “She used to bring them to my mama when I was small. I’d eat about four before anyone noticed.” He grins at the memory, easy and unguarded, and you look at him sideways and think about what Birdie said — he doesn’t show that to many people — and you file it away without knowing exactly why.

On Friday Immy decides, without consulting anyone, that you are all going to the diner after school. She announces this at lunch with the confidence of someone who has never once proposed something and been told no, which you are beginning to understand is simply accurate. Sunghoon says “I was going to go home” and Immy says “no you weren’t” and he considers this and says “you’re right, I wasn’t” and that is the entire negotiation. Heeseung looks at you across the table. “You in?” “I don’t have anywhere else to be,” you say. “That’s the spirit,” Immy says, pointing a fork at you approvingly.

The diner is called Mae’s, which is also the name of the woman behind the counter who is somewhere between sixty and ageless and who looks at you when you walk in and says “you must be Birdie’s girl” before you have opened your mouth. You say yes ma’am and she nods like you have passed something and brings over four menus that nobody looks at because apparently nobody here needs a menu. “Usual?” she says to Heeseung. “Yes ma’am.” “Immy, you want the grilled cheese or the club today?” “Grilled cheese, Mae, I’m not complicated.” “Hoon.” “Chocolate shake and whatever Immy doesn’t finish,” Sunghoon says. Mae looks at him over the top of her notepad with an expression that has lived in this diner for thirty years. “I’ll put in an order for you like a normal person.” “I appreciate that.” She turns to you last and there is something in her face that is not pity but is in the neighbourhood of kindness, the particular kindness of someone who has watched a lot of life come through a door and knows what it looks like when someone is still finding their feet. “What do you like, sweetheart?”

You look at the menu properly. Everything on it is the kind of food that takes its time — burgers and cobbler and sandwiches that come with a side of something and a pickle that nobody asked for and nobody minds. You order a club sandwich and a chocolate milkshake and Mae writes it down and goes, and you put the menu back behind the napkin holder and look around. The diner is warm and a little worn in the way of places that have been genuinely used — the vinyl on the booths cracked at the edges, the counter stools slightly uneven, the jukebox in the corner playing something slow and country that you do not recognise but that sounds like it belongs here.

There are photographs on the wall near the register, decades of them, Fairview Fall laid out in black and white and faded colour. Football teams and school groups and a ribbon cutting for something and a woman who might be a younger Mae standing in front of the counter with her arms crossed and a look on her face that has not changed. “She’s been here since before I was born,” Heeseung says, following your eye line. He is beside you in the booth, close enough that you are aware of it without it being a thing. “Her husband built the counter. She buried him about ten years ago and kept coming in every day.” “That’s sad,” you say. “She doesn’t seem to think so.” He tilts his head slightly, considering. “She says this place is where she’s most herself. That she can feel him in it.” He pauses. “I think that makes sense.”

You think about your father’s records lined up on the shelf in your room. The way you run your thumb along the spines of them sometimes before bed without taking any out. You think about how some things are sad and a comfort at exactly the same time and how nobody tells you that before you need to know it. “Yeah,” you say. “It does.” Across the table Immy is telling Sunghoon something with her hands, which is how she tells everything — full body, gestures large and certain — and Sunghoon is watching her with his chin in his hand and the expression he gets when he is listening to her properly, which is soft in a way he would probably deny. She is talking about something that happened in her chemistry class, a lab that went sideways, and she is making it very funny, and Sunghoon is not laughing but he is very close to it, the way he always is with her, like she is the only person who can find the seam of him. “How long have they been together?” you ask quietly. Heeseung glances over at them. “They’re not,” he says. You look at him. “Really.”

“Really.” He says it with the patience of someone who has had this conversation before. “They’re just — Immy and Sunghoon. They’ve been Immy and Sunghoon since we were thirteen.” “That sounds like together.” “Don’t tell Sunghoon that, he’ll short-circuit.” He picks up his water glass. “He knows what it is. He’s waiting for her to decide she knows too.” You look back at Sunghoon, who has apparently made a quiet comment because Immy has stopped mid-gesture to stare at him and then shove his shoulder and he has absorbed the shove with complete serenity, the ghost of something pleased at the corner of his mouth. “How long has he been waiting?” you ask. Heeseung thinks about it. “Thirteen,” he says. “So about four years.” You consider this. “That’s very patient.” “That’s Sunghoon.” He says it simply, like it is just a true thing about his friend, like patience is just the shape of him. “He’d wait forever if that’s what it took.”

The food arrives and the conversation opens up and you let yourself be carried by it — Immy asking you about New York with genuine curiosity and not the performative kind, what do people do there, what does it smell like, is it true the pizza is actually better. Sunghoon asks if you’ve ever been to a baseball game and when you say yes, a lot, his whole face does something interested. Heeseung mostly listens, eating his food — a burger, you note, always a burger — and occasionally adding something that reframes the conversation entirely without seeming to try.

You order the peach cobbler because Sunghoon tells you to and because by now you understand that Sunghoon’s food opinions are to be taken seriously. It arrives warm with a scoop of vanilla ice cream going slowly soft at the edges and the first bite is the kind of thing that makes you close your eyes for a second. “Told you,” Sunghoon says. “You did,” you admit. He nods once, satisfied. Steals a bite of Immy’s cobbler. She moves it closer to him without comment, which is so unconscious that you are not sure either of them notices they’ve done it. You notice.

Mae brings the check and Heeseung takes it before anyone else can reach it and there is a brief argument about this that he wins through the simple method of already having his wallet out, and you make a note to be faster next time.

Outside the diner the September evening is doing something beautiful — the sky going amber and deep at the edges, the heat off the day softened to something almost gentle, the main street quiet in the way it gets when school is out and supper is being thought about. Immy loops her arm through yours on the sidewalk. This is already just something she does. “Walk me home?” she says, and it is not really a question. “It’s on the way to Birdie’s.” It is not on the way to Birdie’s. You have seen Birdie’s map. You walk with her anyway. She talks the way she does everything — fully, with her whole self in it. She tells you about growing up in Fairview Fall, about the way the town feels small until you know where all the seams are and then it feels like it contains everything. She tells you about the lake, twenty minutes out, where everyone goes on Friday nights in summer. She tells you about the drive-in and how Heeseung once narrated an entire film in the wrong voices because the sound wasn’t working in his car and had half the lot in tears laughing. She tells you about the high roads above the town, the ones that wind up through the hills, and how on a clear night you can see the lights of Fairview Fall spread out below you and it looks like something impossible. “You’ll see it,” she says. “When the time’s right, you’ll see it.”

You walk through a neighbourhood that is going golden in the evening light, porch lights coming on, someone’s radio on somewhere, a dog barking once and stopping. It smells like cut grass and the beginning of autumn and something good cooking in someone’s house. “Can I ask you something?” Immy says. “Sure.” “How are you doing.” She says it without the question mark, which you understand means she wants a real answer and not the performed one. You think about it. The real answer, not the easy one. “Some days are okay,” you say. “Some days it hits me out of nowhere and I don’t know what to do with it. Today was okay.” You pause. “Today was actually good.” Immy nods, arm still in yours. “Good days are allowed,” she says. “You know that, right? You’re allowed to have them.” You do know that, in theory. You are still working on knowing it in practice. “My mom would be furious with me if I wasn’t living,” you say. “She was — she was very much a person who lived. Loudly and fully. She would hate for me to stop because of her.” “She sounds amazing.” “She was.” Present tense is the only way. “She is.”

Immy doesn’t correct you. She just squeezes your arm and keeps walking, and you are grateful for that in a way you couldn’t put into words if you tried.

Her house is a white clapboard on a corner lot with a porch swing and a magnolia tree in the front yard that has shed its flowers all over the path. You stop at the gate. “Same time Monday?” she says. “For what?” “For everything.” She waves a hand. “School. The diner, probably. Heeseung driving you home and pretending it’s just convenient.” She gives you a look that is very Immy, which is to say warm and blunt and absolutely certain of itself. “He drove you home the first day.” “He said it was a hundred degrees.” “It was seventy-eight.” She smiles. “See you Monday, honey.” She goes up the path through the fallen magnolia flowers and up the porch steps and the door opens before she reaches it — Sunghoon, who apparently walked her home by a different route and got here first — and she stops on the top step and looks at him and says “how did you—” and he says “I know a shortcut” and she shakes her head and goes inside and he follows her and the door closes.

You stand at the gate for a moment in the evening quiet. Then you walk home through the golden streets of Fairview Fall with your mother’s cardigan tied around your waist and your hands in your pockets and something in your chest that is not quite happiness but is something adjacent to it, something that has warmth in it, something that you think might be the beginning of okay. Birdie is on the porch when you get back, coffee in hand, Gerald at her feet. “Good?” she says. “Good,” you say. She smiles and opens the door and the house wraps around you, warm and vanilla-scented and familiar already in the way that good places get familiar, like your body knew before your mind caught up, and you go upstairs and take out the journal and sit on the bed and write.

Mom, you write. I think I’m making friends. Real ones. The kind you would approve of. Dad, there’s a record shop on main street. I keep meaning to go in. I think I’m working up to it. I wore your cardigan today. It still smells like you, a little. I’m glad.

Outside your window Fairview Fall is settling into night, the street going quiet, a dog somewhere and a radio somewhere and the distant sound of a screen door. Gerald jumps up onto the bed and turns three times and lies down against your leg with the certainty of an animal who has decided this is now his arrangement. You close the journal. You think about Immy saying good days are allowed, the matter-of-fact kindness of it, the way she said it like it was just true and not something that needed softening. You think about Heeseung in the diner, his voice low, she can feel him in it — I think that makes sense. You reach over and touch the edge of the nearest record sleeve. Your father’s handwriting. Y/N will like this one when she’s older. “I’m getting there, Dad,” you say quietly, to the room, to the record, to wherever he is. “I promise I’m getting there.”

—

Miss Beaumont teaches English the way some people play music — like she means every note of it, like she would be doing it even if nobody was listening. Her classroom is the kind of room that accumulates over years. There are books on every surface that was not strictly designed for books. There are quotes written on strips of paper pinned along the top of the blackboard, running the full length of the room, and on your first day you spent the better part of the lesson trying to read all of them instead of paying attention to what she was actually saying, which she noticed, and which she did not comment on, which told you something about her. There is a rug under her desk that does not match anything else in the room and a lamp in the corner that she switches on instead of the overhead light on grey days, which makes the whole room feel like somewhere you might voluntarily spend time. You like it in there. You did not expect to like anything about a new school this much this quickly and you are choosing not to examine it too closely.

The poem is Whitman. Song of Myself, the sixth section, the one about the grass. Miss Beaumont writes the last few lines on the board in her clean, deliberate hand and then sets down the chalk and turns around and looks at the class the way she always does, like she is genuinely curious what you are all going to do with it. “Well,” she says. “What is he saying?” The class does the thing that classes do, which is to say it does very little. Someone offers something careful and non-committal about nature. Someone else agrees with that person. Miss Beaumont listens with her arms folded and the expression of someone waiting for the room to warm up. Your hand goes up before you have fully decided to raise it. “Yes,” she says, and looks at you with something that sharpens slightly, like a lens adjusting.

“He’s not really talking about grass,” you say. “The child asks what grass is and he says he doesn’t know, but then he spends the whole section telling you exactly what it is. It’s the handkerchief of the Lord. It’s the hair of graves. It’s everyone who ever lived, compressed into something ordinary that we walk on without thinking.” You pause. “He’s saying that everything we’ve lost is still here. Just in a different form. And we keep stepping on it and not noticing.” The room is quiet for a moment. Miss Beaumont looks at you with an expression you cannot fully read. “And what do you make of that?” she says. “The idea that the lost are still here.” You think about your father’s records. Your mother’s cardigan. The way you write in present tense because past tense feels like a door closing. “I think it’s something people need to believe,” you say carefully. “Whether or not it’s true.” Miss Beaumont holds your gaze for a moment longer than feels strictly academic. Then she nods, once, and turns to the rest of the class, and the lesson moves on, and you look back down at the poem in your textbook and read the last line again. The smallest sprout shows there is really no death. You underline it. You are not sure if you believe it. You are not sure you need to.

She asks you to stay after. The class files out around you and you gather your things slowly and approach her desk where she is making notes in the margin of something, and she finishes her thought before she looks up, which you appreciate. Teachers who perform attentiveness by stopping what they’re doing the second you arrive have always made you vaguely suspicious. “Sit,” she says, nodding at the chair beside her desk. You sit. The lamp in the corner is on today.

Outside the window the school grounds are going quiet, the afternoon emptying out. “Where are you from originally?” she says, though you suspect she already knows. “New York.” “I thought so.” She sets down her pen. She has the kind of face that has always been interested in things, fine lines at the corners of her eyes from a lifetime of reading in insufficient light. “What did you read there?” “Everything I could find.” You think about your bedroom in the apartment, the shelves your father built along one whole wall, the library card that you used until it was soft at the edges. “My dad used to take me to the Strand on weekends. We’d spend hours.”

“Good man,” she says simply. She opens her desk drawer and takes out a book and sets it on the desk between you. Their Eyes Were Watching God. Zora Neale Hurston. The cover is worn in the way of a book that has been loved by more than one person. “Have you read it?” “No.” “Then read it.” She slides it across. “And come back to me with those wide opinions from the city.” She says it without any edge, but with something pointed in it, something that is less criticism than it is challenge. “You see things. That’s good. I want to know what you see when you’ve read something that will make you work for it.” You look at the book in your hands. “When do you need it back?” “I don’t,” she says. “It’s yours.” You look up. She is already picking up her pen again. “Thank you, Miss Beaumont.” “Come back when you’ve read it,” she says, by way of goodbye.

Heeseung is leaning against the blue car in the parking lot when you come out, turning his keys over in his hand, face tipped up to the sky in that way he has, like he is checking what the weather is planning. He looks over when he hears the door. “Beaumont keep you?” he says. “How did you know?” “She kept me twice in the first month of sophomore year.” He opens the passenger door. “What did she give you?” You hold up the Hurston. He looks at it and nods with the slow approval of someone who has been given books by this woman and understands the system. “Good one,” he says. You get in. He goes around and folds himself into the driver’s side and starts the engine and pulls out of the lot and the afternoon opens up around you — the sky wide and still going gold at the edges, the roads quiet, the radio low. He drives the way he does everything, unhurried, one hand on the wheel, the St. Christopher medal swinging gently. You are almost at Birdie’s when he takes a turn you don’t recognise. “This isn’t—” “I know.” He glances over. “I need to drop something at my daddy’s. Two minutes, I promise.”

He pulls up outside a house that is not unlike Birdie’s — white, porch, well-kept, a truck in the drive — and cuts the engine and reaches into the backseat for a brown paper bag that you didn’t notice before. “Come on,” he says, like it is obvious you would.

You get out. The front yard has a garden along one side of it that is clearly someone’s serious project — beds of herbs and late-summer tomatoes and something flowering that you don’t know the name of, staked and tended, the kind of garden that is visited every day. There is a woman kneeling at the far end of it with her sleeves rolled up and a wide-brimmed hat and garden gloves gone brown at the fingers, and she sits back on her heels when she hears the gate.

“There he is,” she says, and her face does the thing that mothers’ faces do, warm and immediate, like just the sight of him settles something. She pulls off a glove and pushes up the brim of her hat and looks at you with eyes that are Heeseung’s eyes, that same quality of attention, noticing and not making it a thing. “Mama, this is Y/N,” Heeseung says. “She’s staying with Miss Birdie.” “I know who she is.” His mother stands, brushing her knees off, and extends her unglov­ed hand to you with a smile that is the easiest thing you have ever encountered. “I’ve been meaning to get over to Birdie’s and introduce myself properly. I’m sorry it’s taken me this long.” “It’s lovely to meet you,” you say. “Likewise, sweetheart.” She looks at you for a moment with that honest, unhurried attention. “You settling in alright?” “Better every day,” you say, and mean it.

She nods like this is the right answer, then turns to Heeseung and takes the paper bag he’s holding out. “Your daddy’s in the back.” “I’ll just be a minute.” He goes around the side of the house and you are left in the garden with his mother, who does not seem to find this strange at all. She pulls her glove back on and crouches back down beside the tomatoes. “Do you garden?” she asks, conversationally. “No. We had a balcony in the apartment. My mom grew herbs in pots.” You look at the beds, the order of them, the care. “This is beautiful.”

“It keeps my hands busy and my head quiet.” She ties a stem to its stake with a small piece of twine, efficient and practiced. “There’s a lot to be said for things that do both at once.” She glances up at you. “Birdie tells me you’re working in the bookshop.” “Most days after school.” “Good.” She says it simply. “Good for you, and good for her. She’s been on her own in that shop a long time.” She pauses. “She loves having you there. She tells it differently but that’s what she means.” You look at the garden so she does not see what your face does with that. Heeseung comes back around the side of the house with his hands in his pockets, unhurried, and his mother stands up again. “Stay for supper,” she says to him. “I was going to take Y/N home.” “Take her home and come back.” He looks at you. You look at him. Something in his face is asking a question without exactly asking it.

“Actually,” you say, before you know you are going to say it. “Birdie would probably— I mean she always makes too much.” You pause. “You could stay. At ours. If you wanted.” He blinks. Just once, just briefly, like you have slightly surprised him, which is not something that seems to happen to him often. Then the grin settles back into place. “Yeah?” “She’ll be pleased,” you say. “She always asks.” His mother is looking between you with an expression she is not bothering to conceal, which is to say fond and unhurried and absolutely certain of something. “Go on then,” she says, and turns back to her garden.

Birdie opens the door before you have reached the porch steps. She looks at Heeseung and then at you and then back at Heeseung and the smile that crosses her face is the most unguarded thing, warm and quick and immediately suppressed into something more dignified. “Staying for supper?” she says. “Yes ma’am,” Heeseung says. She gives him the look. The I have known you since you were a tot look. “Birdie,” he says, correcting himself. “Better.” She steps back to let you both in. “I’m making pot roast. I want no opinions about it until it’s on the table.” “I don’t have opinions about pot roast,” Heeseung says, following her into the hallway. “You haven’t had mine yet.” She disappears into the kitchen. “Y/N, show him where everything is.” You look at Heeseung. He looks at the house around him with the comfortable ease of someone who is good at being in other people’s spaces — not intrusive, just present, taking it in without making it a thing. He looks at the books on every surface, the quilt on the sofa, Gerald on the windowsill who opens one eye and then closes it again. “Nice place,” he says quietly, and means it. “Come on,” you say. “She’ll want someone to set the table.”

You show him where the plates are and he takes them down without being asked twice, and he sets the table with the straightforward helpfulness of someone raised by people who taught him how to be in a house, and Birdie comes in and out of the kitchen with things and talks to him about his parents and about the football season and about a leaking gutter on the bookshop that apparently his daddy offered to look at three weeks ago and has she called him about it, and he says no ma’am — Birdie — and she says she will tomorrow, and it is the most ordinary thing, the three of you moving around each other in the small kitchen and the small dining room, and it does not feel strange. That is the thing you keep noticing about Heeseung. He does not make things feel strange. The pot roast arrives at the table and Birdie sits down and looks at it with the particular expression of someone who is unsure and hoping for the best, and Heeseung looks at it and says “that smells incredible, Birdie” and she looks at him and says “it could go either way” with such naked honesty that you both laugh. It goes fine, actually. More than fine.

You eat and the conversation wanders — Heeseung talking about the football season, the game next Friday, the way he says it with enthusiasm that is genuine without being the only thing about him, just a part of him, one part among many. He asks you about the Hurston and you tell him what Beaumont said, come back to me with those wide opinions from the city, and he laughs and says “she said something almost exactly like that to me once, I don’t remember what about” and Birdie says “she said it to everyone who’s worth saying it to, she said it to me years ago and I’ve never forgotten it either.” You look at Birdie. “You know Miss Beaumont?” “Before she was Miss Beaumont.” Birdie waves a hand. “She’s been here a long time. Came for reasons of her own and stayed.” She says it with a look that suggests the reasons are a whole other story and not for tonight.

The evening goes slow and easy, the way good evenings do. Gerald comes and sits under Heeseung’s chair, which Birdie points out has never happened with a dinner guest in living memory, and Heeseung looks down at him and says “hey there” very quietly and Gerald does not move, which is apparently a significant endorsement. You clear the plates and Birdie produces a peach cake from somewhere that is extraordinary and the three of you eat it at the table while the night comes in through the window screens, and Heeseung talks about music — carefully, like he is not quite used to doing it, like it is something he keeps in a different pocket — and Birdie asks questions that are good questions, not polite ones, and you watch him answer them and think about what his mother said in the garden.

It keeps my hands busy and my head quiet. You think Heeseung understands that too. You think music is that for him. You think the guitar is something he goes to the way you go to the journal, the way you go to the records — because some things need somewhere to go. He leaves at half past eight, because he has school in the morning and because he was raised right and he knows when an evening has found its natural end. He thanks Birdie for supper with a sincerity that is so complete it is almost formal, and she squeezes his arm and says come back anytime and means it, and he says good night to you at the door with that easy grin, the one that is just him, that is just what he looks like. “See you tomorrow, city girl.” “See you tomorrow.” The door closes. You stand in the hallway for a moment and listen to the blue car start up outside and pull away down the street.

Birdie appears from the kitchen with a dish towel. “Nice boy,” she says, in a tone that contains an entire conversation she has decided not to have yet. “He is,” you say simply. She nods and goes back to the kitchen and you go upstairs and sit on the bed and open the journal and look at the blank page for a while. You don’t write anything tonight. You just sit with the evening, the weight of it, the warmth of it. Gerald jumps up and settles against your leg. Some things don’t need words yet.

The record shop is called Spinning Wheel and it has been on the corner of main street since before Heeseung was born, which he tells you on the walk over on a Thursday afternoon in late September when the heat has finally started to relent into something that feels like the beginning of a season changing. You have walked past it every day since you arrived. You have looked at the window display — a handwritten chalkboard of new arrivals, a turntable set up so you can see it spinning from the street, a cardboard cut-out of Johnny Cash that has been there so long it has faded at the edges — and you have not gone in. You were not ready to go in. The record shop was your father’s thing, his particular joy, the errand that was never really an errand, and you needed to be ready. You did not tell Heeseung any of this. He asked on Wednesday if you had been in yet and you said no and he said “come on then” like it was the simplest thing in the world, which for him it probably was, and that was that.

The bell above the door sounds when you push it open. Inside it smells like dust and something warmer underneath it, like the particular smell of vinyl that you know from your father’s study, from Saturday mornings, from every good memory you have of being small and sitting on the floor beside the record player while he talked you through whatever he was playing. The walls are shelved floor to ceiling. There are crates on the floor sorted by genre in handwriting that has changed systems at least three times.

At the back counter an old man with reading glasses pushed to the end of his nose looks up when you come in and nods at Heeseung with the recognition of a regular. “Lee,” he says. “Mr. Cole,” Heeseung says back. “This is Y/N. She’s staying with Miss Birdie.” Mr. Cole looks at you over his glasses. “You browse,” he says, which you understand to mean take your time and don’t ask me where anything is because it’s organised in a way only I understand. “Yes sir,” you say. He goes back to whatever he is reading. Heeseung moves through the shop the way he moves through everything — easy, familiar, at home. He goes to a crate near the window and starts flicking through without any urgency, pulling things out to look at the sleeve and putting them back, occasionally holding something up in your direction with a questioning look. You move through the other side, slower, running your fingers along the tops of the sleeves.

It hits you about three minutes in. Not hard, not the kind of grief that knocks the wind out of you, but the quiet kind — the kind that just settles behind your sternum and sits there. Your father’s hands doing exactly this. Your father’s voice: you have to feel the edges, you can tell a lot about how it’s been kept. Your father’s face when he found something he had been looking for, the particular happiness of it. You stop at a sleeve and look at it for a moment without seeing it.

“Hey.” Heeseung is beside you, not quite touching. He has learned already, somehow, when to come closer. “You alright?” “Yeah.” You mean it, mostly. “It’s just — my dad loved record shops. This is the first one I’ve been in since.” You pause. “It’s fine. It’s a good thing. I just needed a second.” He nods. He does not say I’m sorry or we can go or any of the things that are well-meaning and wrong. He just waits, turning the record in his hands, giving you the second. Then he holds something out to you. “Look at this one,” he says. You take it. The sleeve is navy blue, simple, the title in clean white lettering. You look at it and something moves in your chest because you know this record. You know this record the way you know your own name — you know the A-side and the B-side and which track your father always skipped back to and the scratch at the beginning of the third song that he said was just part of it now, just part of how it sounded.

“This is—” Your voice does something you do not intend. You clear it. “My dad had this one.” Heeseung looks at the sleeve and then at you. He does not know what he has just handed you. He genuinely does not know, you can see that, he picked it up because he loves it and wanted to show you and that is all, and that somehow makes it more rather than less. “It’s one of my favourites,” he says, carefully, watching your face. “Mine too,” you say. “My dad’s too.” A beat of quiet. Mr. Cole turns a page at the back counter. “You should have it,” Heeseung says. “Heeseung—” “I’ve already got a copy.” He nods at the shelf like this is a minor logistical point and not a kindness. “Take it.”

You look at the sleeve in your hands. Your father’s copy is on the shelf in your room at Birdie’s. This one would be yours. Given to you by someone who loved it without knowing why you needed it. “Thank you,” you say, and your voice is steady, and you are grateful for that. He just nods and goes back to the crate and pulls out something else entirely and holds it up. “What about this one. Your dad ever play you this?” And just like that the shop becomes something you can be in. You spend an hour in there, moving through the crates, playing things on the turntable that Mr. Cole sets up for you without being asked — he is gruff and does not make conversation but he puts a record on when you hold one up with a question in your face and that is its own kind of welcome. Heeseung knows more than you expected and less than your father did and the combination of those two things makes the whole afternoon feel like something that was supposed to happen.

You leave with two records. The navy blue one and a second one Heeseung insisted on, something you had never heard of, trust me, city girl, just trust me. He drops you at Birdie’s in the early evening and cuts the engine but doesn’t get out this time, one arm resting on the wheel, easy.

“There’s a game Friday night,” he says. “Football?” “The very same.” He glances over at you. “You should come. Immy’ll be there — Sunghoon plays, so she’s always there. It’s a whole thing.” “A whole thing meaning what?” “Meaning the whole town comes out. Mae’s does a special. There’s a band that plays in the parking lot after, sometimes.” He says it without selling it too hard, just laying it out, taking or leaving. “It’s a good time.” You think about Friday nights in New York. The specific texture of them — the noise, the speed, the way the city never once lowered its voice. You think about a football field in Fairview Fall with the whole town in the stands and Immy beside you and the evening going cool. “Okay,” you say. He grins. “Okay.” He reaches over and opens your door from the inside, which is a thing the blue car requires because the handle sticks. “See you tomorrow, city girl.” “See you tomorrow.”

Upstairs your room is the particular gold of a late September evening, the light coming in low through the window and lying in strips across the floor. Gerald is on the bed, which is his default position. You drop your bag and sit beside him and look at the records on the shelf for a moment — your father’s, lined up the way he kept them, spines out, everything in its place. You take the navy blue one out of the paper bag and hold it.

Then you get up and go to the shelf and take out your father’s copy of the same record and sit on the floor with both of them in your lap and that is when it comes, the grief, the real kind, the kind that does not warn you. It comes up from somewhere low and you put your face in your hands and you cry in the way you mostly cry which is quietly and completely, not performing it for anyone, just letting it happen because there is nowhere else for it to go. Dad, you think, not in words exactly but in the way grief communicates which is more like weather than language. Dad, someone gave me your record. Someone who didn’t know it was your record. Someone who just loved it. I think you would like him. You sit on the floor until it passes. It always passes.

You wipe your face with the sleeve of your mother’s cardigan and sit there in the evening quiet with two copies of the same record in your lap and Gerald comes and presses his head against your knee, solemn and warm. “Thanks, Gerald,” you say. He purrs. You put your father’s copy back on the shelf in its place. You put Heeseung’s copy beside it. Then you take out the journal. Dad, you write. Someone gave me your record today. He didn’t know. He just handed it to me because he loved it and wanted to share it with me and I think that’s one of the most him things anyone has ever done without knowing they were doing it. I think you would have liked it here. I think I’m starting to.

Friday night arrives cool and clear, the sky over Fairview Fall the deep blue of early evening with the first stars coming through. Birdie sends you out in your jeans and your mother’s cardigan with a scarf she presses into your hands at the door because it gets cold by the second half, baby, take it. Immy is waiting at the gate to the football field in a red Fairview Fall Hawks scarf and an expression of someone who has been doing this for years and still finds it genuinely exciting, which you are starting to understand is just Immy. She finds things genuinely exciting. She is not performing enthusiasm, she simply has it, in abundance, about most things. “You came,” she says, like she is pleased but not surprised. “I said I would.” “I know.” She loops her arm through yours. “Come on, I’ve got us good seats. Middle of the stands, you can see everything.”

The field is lit up and the stands are already filling — families and couples and groups of kids and older men with their arms folded and the studied expressions of people who take high school football seriously, which in Fairview Fall is everyone. There is a smell of popcorn and cut grass and the first bite of real autumn air, and the band is warming up on the far side and someone is selling something from a cart by the gate and the whole thing has the particular energy of an event that a town has built its Fridays around for generations. You find your seats and the teams come out and the stands go up like a wave. You find Heeseung immediately. You are not looking for him specifically but you find him anyway — tall, easy even in the middle of forty people doing drills, moving with the same unhurried quality he has everywhere, like he has never once been in a hurry in his life. He is laughing at something

Sunghoon has said, head tipped back, and from this distance you can see the shape of him clearly — the way he takes up space without demanding it, the way people orient toward him. “There’s Hoon,” Immy says, pointing, then looks at you. “And there’s Heeseung.” She says it without inflection. “I see them,” you say, equally without inflection. She smiles at the field.

The game is not something you know well but Immy talks you through it in a low running commentary that is partly explanation and partly editorial — that was a bad call, that ref has always had it out for us, oh that’s good, that’s Heeseung, watch — and you watch. Heeseung plays the way he does everything, which is to say with a kind of complete and total presence that makes it look effortless even when it isn’t. He is fast and he thinks ahead and when he does something good the stands go up and you find yourself going up with them without quite deciding to. “You’re cheering,” Immy says, pleased. “I got caught up in it,” you say. “Everyone does.” She is already back to watching. “Hoon!” she shouts, when Sunghoon does something that earns it, and he does not look up at her because he is a professional, but something about the set of his shoulders changes. Fairview Fall wins by two touchdowns. The stands come down in a wave of noise and Immy grabs your arm and squeezes it and you are laughing and you are not entirely sure when you started.

The diner after is Mae’s again, every table full, the jukebox going, the particular noise of a town celebrating something. You are in the big corner booth — you and Immy and Sunghoon, still in his jersey, and Heeseung, hair damp from the locker room, the easy energy of someone who has just played well and knows it and is not making a thing of it. The booth is full and warm and loud and Mae brings milkshakes without being asked because she knows, she always knows, and Sunghoon and Immy are already in a detailed debrief of the game in which Immy is more knowledgeable than you would have expected and Sunghoon is listening to her notes with the expression of someone taking them seriously.

Heeseung nudges the milkshake toward you and you take it and then he takes it back and takes a pull through the straw and pushes it back and neither of you mentions that this has just happened, that you are sharing a milkshake, that this is apparently a thing you do now. “Good game,” you say. “Decent game.” He says it honestly, not falsely modest, not proud. “Second quarter was sloppy.” “Immy said the ref had it out for you.” “Immy says that every game.” He glances over at her, fond. “She’s usually right though.” The booth is loud and easy and you eat and talk and the evening stretches out comfortable around you and Mae brings cobbler that nobody ordered and everybody eats and Sunghoon says something very quiet to Immy and she goes pink in a way you have never seen on her before, pink and pleased, and she shoves him and he grins and steals her spoon. You are watching them when you become aware that Heeseung is watching you watch them. You look over. He does not look away. “What?” you say. “Nothing,” he says. He picks up the milkshake. “You just look like you’re somewhere good.”

You take a second with that. With the diner and the noise and Immy’s laugh and the cobbler and the autumn air coming in under the door. “I think I am,” you say. Outside the temperature has dropped the way Birdie promised it would and you cross your arms against it and Heeseung, without any preamble or ceremony, takes off his letterman jacket and holds it out to you. You look at it. “I’m fine.” “You’re cold.” “I’m from New York.” “New York is cold in winter,” he says patiently. “This is October in Texas. Completely different kind of cold.” He shakes the jacket slightly. “Take it.” You take it. It is warm from him and heavy across your shoulders and smells like the blue car — worn leather and something warm — and you put your arms through the sleeves and the cuffs come past your hands entirely and Immy, walking ahead of you with Sunghoon, looks back and says nothing, which is somehow louder than if she had said something.

Heeseung walks you home. Not formally, not announced, just — falls into step beside you through the streets of Fairview Fall while Immy and Sunghoon peel off at the corner with goodnights, and the town is quiet around you, lit up warm in the dark, and your breath shows faintly in the air. You talk about nothing in particular. The game. A song that was on the jukebox. Whether the peach cobbler is better at Mae’s or Birdie’s, which is a debate that has a clear answer and you both know it but you negotiate it anyway because it is the kind of conversation you have when you are not ready for the walk to be over. Birdie’s porch light is on. You stop at the bottom of the steps. “Thanks for coming tonight,” he says. He is standing close enough that you are aware of it, the way you are always aware of it lately, something you keep not naming. “Thanks for asking,” you say. “I didn’t know I’d like it that much.” “Football?” “Fairview Fall,” you say, and mean something slightly larger than that.

He looks at you for a moment with those attentive eyes, and then he leans in and presses his lips to your cheek, warm and brief, the most natural thing in the world. “Goodnight, darlin’,” he says, and takes a step back with that easy grin, hands in his pockets. “Goodnight,” you say. You watch him go back down the street toward where he parked the blue car, unhurried as always. You stand on the bottom porch step in his letterman jacket with the sleeves too long and your cheek warm and you think: that’s just what people do here. That’s a western thing. A friendly thing. That’s just Heeseung being Heeseung. You go inside. You hang his jacket on the hook by the door and go upstairs and sit on the bed and open the journal and look at the blank page for a long time. You write: I think people are just more affectionate here. Then you look at what you have written. Then you close the journal and lie back on the bed and look at the ceiling and listen to the quiet of Fairview Fall and your cheek is still warm and you think, carefully, about nothing at all.

October arrives and picks up speed. This is the thing about settling somewhere — it happens in the background, without announcement. You do not notice you are settling until you already have, until the shape of your days has formed without you consciously building it, and then one morning you wake up and know where everything is and it does not feel like someone else’s house anymore. Birdie bakes on Saturday mornings. This becomes a fact of your life the way the sun coming through the east window becomes a fact, the way Gerald on your feet becomes a fact — inevitable, warm, something you would notice immediately if it stopped. She does not ask you to help but she does not tell you not to, and somewhere in the second week of October you start appearing in the kitchen on Saturday mornings in your mother’s cardigan with your hair still unbrushed and she hands you something to do without comment and you do it, and that is that.

She is teaching you, without calling it teaching. How to fold butter into pastry. How to know by smell when something is ready. How to clean as you go because a clean kitchen is a kind kitchen, which is a thing her mother told her and which she says with the particular tone of someone passing something down. “My mom couldn’t bake,” you tell her one Saturday, your hands floury, watching her crimp the edge of something with a thumb that has done this a thousand times. “She could cook though. Really well. Everything from scratch.”

“Different skills,” Birdie says, without looking up. “I can’t cook to save my life and I’ve made peace with it.” She pauses. “What did she make? Your mom.” You think about it. The specific things, the ones that come with smell and light attached. “Sunday pasta,” you say. “Always from scratch, never from a box. She’d make it in the morning and leave it to dry on the rack and the whole apartment smelled like it all day.” You pause. “And her chicken soup. When I was sick. It was the kind of thing that actually made you feel better, not just warm.”

Birdie is quiet for a moment, working the pastry. “She learned from your grandmother,” she says eventually. “Their mama. She was an incredible cook.” She glances over at you. “Your mom used to write me letters about it when we were young. She’d describe meals she’d made like they were events.” This is new. You look at her. “You wrote letters?” “We weren’t close in the way that means seeing each other all the time,” Birdie says carefully. “But we were close in the way that means I knew her.” She smooths the pastry down. “She wrote beautifully. You get it from her.”

You look back down at what you are doing. Your hands in the flour. The kitchen warm around you. “I know,” you say quietly. “I get it from both of them actually. Dad too.” “I know you do,” Birdie says. “I’ve read your journal.” You look up sharply. She meets your eyes with an expression that is completely unrepentant. “It was open on the table,” she says. “I read one page. The one about the record shop.” She pauses. “I closed it immediately after. I’m not a monster.” You stare at her. “You write beautifully,” she says again, simply, and goes back to the pastry. You go back to the pastry too. There is nothing to say to that, or there is everything, and either way the kitchen is warm and smells like butter and Saturday morning and for a moment the grief sits quietly, like it is giving you the room.

Shopping with Immy is its own education. She moves through the two clothing shops on main street — there are only two, a fact that she acknowledges and has made her peace with — with the authority of someone who knows exactly what she is looking for and exactly where it is and has strong opinions about everyone else’s choices too. She holds things up to you without asking if you want her opinion and gives it anyway and you have learned that her opinion is usually right, which is annoying and convenient in equal measure. “This,” she says, holding up a blouse in a warm amber colour. “I don’t know.” “I do.” She puts it in your hands. “Your colouring. Trust me.” You try it on. She is right. You buy it without further discussion. In return you talk her out of something she has convinced herself she needs on the grounds that she doesn’t need it, she wants it, which is fine, but the cut is wrong and Immy is a woman who should only wear things that are right on her and she knows that, and she knows that you are right, and she puts it back with the reluctant dignity of someone conceding a fair point.

“How do you know about cuts?” she says, on the sidewalk after, linking her arm through yours. “My mom,” you say. “She was very particular about clothes. She said wearing something that doesn’t fit right is like telling a lie with your body.” Immy considers this with the seriousness it deserves. “I’m going to think about that for a long time,” she says. “She was good at saying things like that.” “She sounds incredible.” “She was.” Present tense is the only way. “She is.” Immy squeezes your arm and keeps walking and you walk with her through the golden October streets and the trees are starting to turn and Fairview Fall in autumn is something you were not prepared for, the particular beauty of it, the way the light goes amber and the air goes clean and everything smells like something ending and beginning at the same time.

Their Eyes Were Watching God takes you a few days, which is fast for a book that requires that much of you. You read it in the evenings after the bookshop and in the mornings before school and once for two hours on a Sunday afternoon while Birdie baked downstairs and Gerald slept on your legs and the wind moved in the oak tree outside your window. You go back to Miss Beaumont on a Tuesday after school with the book under your arm and she looks up from her desk and says “sit” before you have opened your mouth and you sit. The conversation lasts forty minutes. She asks you questions that are not really questions — what did you make of Janie’s horizon, what does the pear tree mean to her, where do you think she ends up when it’s all over — and you answer them and she listens and pushes back and you push back at her pushing back and at some point you realise you are arguing, genuinely arguing, about a novel, and it is the most alive you have felt in a classroom in longer than you want to think about.

When you finally stop she looks at you over the top of her glasses with an expression that takes you a moment to read. It is not quite pride — it is something more precise than that, something more like recognition, like she is seeing something she suspected and has now confirmed. “You argued three of those points better than my graduate students did,” she says. “And I was one of them.” “I disagreed with part of your reading,” you say. “About the ending.” “I know you did.” She takes the book back and holds it for a moment. “I think you’re right.” She says it plainly, without qualifying it, and then puts the book on the shelf behind her. “What do you want to do with this? With reading and writing and thinking. After school.”

You have not been asked this since before the crash. You have not asked it of yourself. “English literature,” you say, slowly, like you are finding it as you say it. “I want to study it properly. I want to learn how to talk about books the way you just did.” Miss Beaumont looks at you for a moment. “Good,” she says. “Don’t let anyone talk you out of it.” She opens her desk drawer. “Take this.” Another book. To the Lighthouse. Virginia Woolf. “Come back when you’ve read it,” she says. “Same deal.” You look at the book and then at her and you think about your father, who would have loved her, who would have argued with her for hours and walked out glowing. “Thank you, Miss Beaumont,” you say. “Go home,” she says. “It’s getting dark.”

The cardigan tears on a Wednesday. You catch it on the corner of a shelf in the bookshop — the left cuff, your mother’s favourite, the one she always pushed up to her elbow when she was doing something with her hands — and it snags and you hear it before you feel it, a small clean sound, and you look down and there is a pull in the wool, a run, and then a tear, and you stand very still in the aisle of the bookshop with your hand over it like you can hold it closed. Birdie finds you like that. She comes around the end of the shelf with a stack of returns and sees your face before she sees the cardigan and puts the books down. “Hey,” she says. “Hey, what happened?” You show her. You cannot speak around it, which is ridiculous because it is a cardigan, it is a thing, it is wool and buttons and it can be fixed, but it is also your mother’s and it smells like her and you have worn it every single day since the crash and you cannot speak around it. Birdie takes your hand away from the tear very gently and looks at it. Then she looks at you. “Come on,” she says. “We’re closing early.”

She sits you on the sofa and takes the cardigan and her sewing kit and she fixes it while you watch, her hands sure and small and practiced, and you do not cry while she is doing it because you are past the acute part by then, past the part that takes your breath, and you sit with Gerald in your lap and watch her work and the lamp is on and the house is warm and quiet. “She bought it in a shop on fifth avenue,” you say eventually. “I remember going with her. I was maybe nine. She tried on about six things and came back to this one and said this one is me and bought it.” You look at your hands. “She wore it all the time. It was her comfort thing.” “And now it’s yours,” Birdie says, without looking up from the needle. “And now it’s mine.” Birdie ties off the thread and smooths the cuff and holds the cardigan up to the light and inspects it and then holds it out to you. The repair is invisible. You cannot see where it tore. “Birdie,” you say. “Don’t,” she says, which is what she always says when you thank her, which is her way of saying of course, you don’t have to say it. You put the cardigan back on. She refolds her sewing kit. Outside the window Fairview Fall is going dark and gold and the first proper cold of October is in the air. “Mom loved you,” you tell Birdie. “She thought you were the funniest person..”

Birdie laughs, short and bright and a little wet at the edges. “She was funnier than me,” she says. “She always was.” She closes the sewing kit. “We should have been closer. I should have — I kept meaning to, and then there wasn’t — “ She stops. Clears her throat. “Anyway.” “I know,” you say. “I know you know.” She stands up and smooths her skirt. “I’m making pasta tonight. I’ve been practising.” She pauses. “It will not be as good as your mother’s.” “It won’t,” you agree. “But I’ll eat it.” She laughs again, more solidly this time, and goes to the kitchen, and you sit on the sofa with Gerald and your mended cardigan and the quiet of the house around you, and it is not fine, exactly, but it is something that can be lived in. In the morning you come downstairs and there is a note on the kitchen table. Birdie’s handwriting, on a piece of paper torn from the back of a receipt. For my girl — who is braver than she knows and more her mother’s daughter than she realises. Keep wearing it. She’d want you to. You fold it up and put it in the journal.

The Lees have you and Birdie over for dinner on a Friday in late October. Heeseung’s mother has made enough food for twice as many people, which Heeseung says is just how she cooks, she cannot make a small amount of anything, it is a documented fact. His daddy is a broad quiet man with Heeseung’s eyes and a handshake that is very firm and a way of listening that makes you feel like whatever you are saying is worth hearing. He asks about New York and you tell him and he asks follow-up questions and you tell him more and by the time you are at the table you have told him things about the city you have not thought about in months — the specific smell of the subway in summer, the way the light hits the buildings at six in the evening, the sound of it, the particular sound that is not one thing but all things at once. “You miss it,” he says. Not accusing. Just observing. “I miss parts of it,” you say. “It’s complicated.” He nods like he understands complicated. “Most real things are,” he says, and passes you the bread.

The dinner is loud and warm and good, Birdie and Heeseung’s mother finding each other across the table with the ease of two women who should have been friends years ago and are making up for lost time, and Heeseung’s daddy and Birdie talking about the bookshop gutter which he has apparently actually been meaning to fix, he is sorry about that, he’ll come by Tuesday. At some point the adults move to the sitting room with wine and you and Heeseung look at each other across the cleared table and he tilts his head toward the back door.

The garden is dark and cool, lit by the light from the kitchen window and a three-quarter moon that is doing a lot of heavy lifting. There is an oak tree at the back of the yard and from one of its lower branches hangs a wooden swing — old, clearly original to the house, the rope thick and worn. Heeseung sits on it and you sit beside him on the grass, your back against the trunk, and for a while neither of you says anything in particular. “Mocks next week,” you say eventually. “I know.” He pushes the swing back and forth with one foot. “You worried?” “A little.” You pull your knees up. “I didn’t miss much school after — after the crash. My teachers were good about it. But I still feel like I’m playing catch-up.” “In what?” “Everything except English.” “English you could teach,” he says, easily, matter-of-fact. “I’m not sure about that.” “I am.” He says it simply, like it is a thing he has assessed and concluded. “I’ve seen you in Beaumont’s class. You think differently to everyone else in there.” He pauses. “That’s not a criticism of everyone else. It’s just — you see the seams of things.” You look at the moon through the oak branches. “My dad used to say that,” you say. “He said I could find the argument in anything.” “Smart man.” “The smartest.” You pause. “He would have talked to your daddy for six hours straight tonight. They have the same way of listening.”

Heeseung is quiet for a moment. “I’ll take that,” he says. “That’s a real compliment.” You sit in the cool dark and talk about the mocks — his, yours, Immy’s periodic panic and Sunghoon’s inexplicable calm — and about what comes after, the haziest outline of it, what it might look like. Heeseung says community college like he always does, easy and certain, and you think about Miss Beaumont saying don’t let anyone talk you out of it and think that maybe you are starting to know what you want too, the shape of it at least, English literature and something that uses the part of your brain that found the argument in Whitman and the horizon in Hurston.

“You’ll pass everything,” Heeseung says, when you circle back to the mocks. “I know you will.” “You don’t know that.” “I know you,” he says. “Same thing.” You look at him on the swing in the dark. The kitchen light on one side of his face. The moon on the other. “Heeseung,” you say. “City girl,” he says back. You look away. “Goodnight.”

The mocks come and go in a blur of early mornings and index cards and Birdie’s good baking and Immy’s voice notes that are mostly panic and occasionally useful. You sit in the exam hall with your pen and your mother’s cardigan and you write and write and write, and when it is over you go to the bookshop and shelve things in alphabetical order because it is the most calming thing you know how to do.

The results come on a Thursday morning. You open the envelope at the kitchen table with Gerald watching from his windowsill and Birdie pretending not to hover by the kettle. You passed everything. English, highest mark in the year. Miss Beaumont’s handwriting in the margin of the practice essay: This is what I meant. Well done. You sit with it for a moment. Then you pick up the journal. Mom, you write. I passed. All of it. English highest in the year. I wish you could see it. I wish I could call you. I wish I could hear you say you knew I would. I know you knew I would. Dad, Miss Beaumont says I think differently. You always said that too. I’m starting to think it might actually be true. I’m going to study English literature. I think I’ve known for a while. I’m writing it down now so it’s real.

You close the journal. Birdie puts a cup of tea in front of you and squeezes your shoulder and doesn’t say anything and that is exactly right. You run into Heeseung outside the school gates at lunch, which is where he always is when the weather holds, leaning against the blue car with his face in the sun. He looks over when he hears the gate and reads your face before you have said a word.

“Well?” he says. “Passed everything,” you say. “English highest in the year.” What happens next is that he crosses the space between you in two steps and picks you up, both arms around you, lifting you clear off the ground and turning once, and you make a sound that is mostly surprise and partly laughter and you grab his shoulders and hold on, and he is warm and solid and he smells like the blue car, like worn leather and something warm, and he is laughing too, low and real, right beside your ear. He sets you down. His hands stay on your waist for a moment, just a moment, before they don’t. “Told you,” he says. His voice is the same. His face is the same. Everything is the same except that your heart is doing something you do not have a word for yet. “You told me,” you agree. He grins. “Highest in the year.” “Don’t make it a thing.” “City girl.” He steps back, easy, hands in his pockets. “It’s already a thing.”

That evening Sunghoon finds Heeseung in the parking lot after practice, when everyone else has gone, and leans against the blue car with his arms folded. Heeseung is loading his bag into the back. He glances over. “What.” Sunghoon does not say anything for a moment. He has the expression he gets when he has thought about something thoroughly and arrived at a conclusion and is choosing his moment. “You picked her up,” he says. Heeseung straightens. “I was happy for her.” “I know you were.” “She passed everything. Highest in English.” “I know.”

Sunghoon looks at him. “Heeseung.” “What.” “You know what.” Heeseung is quiet. He shuts the car door. He looks at the middle distance with the expression of someone who has been told a thing he already knew and was hoping not to have confirmed out loud yet. “It’s not—” he starts. “It is,” Sunghoon says. Not unkind. Just clear, the way Sunghoon is always clear, the way he cuts through the middle of things without making a mess of them. Heeseung puts his hands in his pockets. He looks at the school building, the last of the afternoon light on the brick. “She’s still finding her feet,” he says, finally. “I know,” Sunghoon says. “I don’t want to—” “I know.” He pushes off the car. “I’m not telling you to do anything.” He picks up his bag. “I’m just telling you what I see.” He pauses. “You’ve known since the gate on the first day. You should probably get used to the idea.” He walks off across the parking lot.

Heeseung watches him go. The school is empty and the afternoon is going gold and the blue car is warm from sitting in the sun all day, and Heeseung stands beside it for a long time after Sunghoon has gone, looking at nothing, thinking about a girl who talks about her parents in present tense and picks arguments with Whitman and holds his record like it is something precious without knowing why. He gets in the car. He sits for a moment with his hands on the wheel. “Yeah,” he says to no one. “Okay.” He starts the engine and pulls out of the lot and drives home through the golden streets of Fairview Fall with the radio low and the St. Christopher swinging and something settled in him now, something named, sitting quiet and certain in his chest like it has been there a long time. Because it has.

November comes in quietly, the way months do when you have finally stopped counting them. You notice it first in the light — the way it changes angle, goes thinner and more golden, lying longer across the floors in the mornings and disappearing earlier in the evenings until the town is dark by five and the porch lights are all on by the time you walk home from the bookshop. The oak trees on Birdie’s street have gone fully now, the last of them letting go, and the sidewalks are deep in leaves that nobody seems in any hurry to clear because they are beautiful and this is Fairview Fall and there is time.

You have been here four months. You know this the way you know the layout of Birdie’s kitchen, the way you know which stair creaks and which drawer sticks and the precise angle Gerald prefers to be scratched behind the ear. You know the regulars at the bookshop by name and by reading habit. You know Mae’s by booth and by order. You know the way Immy talks with her hands and the way Sunghoon goes quiet when he is actually paying the most attention and the way Heeseung’s voice drops slightly when he is saying something he means, which is most of the time, because Heeseung does not say things he doesn’t mean. Four months. You turn it over in your hands like a stone, testing its weight.

It is heavier than it sounds. It is lighter than you expected.

November does what November does, which is arrive and then be over before you have properly registered it. There are things inside it — Immy’s birthday, which is celebrated with the particular enthusiasm of someone who has been looking forward to it since October, a dinner at Mae’s that goes on until closing and ends with Sunghoon presenting her with a gift that makes her go very still and then throw her arms around his neck while he stands there absorbing it with his hands in his jacket pockets and a look on his face that is the most unguarded thing you have seen on him yet. You do not ask what the gift was. Some things are not yours to know.

There is a Sunday afternoon at the bookshop with Miss Beaumont, who comes in on her day off and spends an hour in the poetry section and buys three things and talks to you about To the Lighthouse across the counter in a conversation that keeps getting interrupted by customers and keeps resuming the moment they leave. She says before she goes, pulling on her coat, “you should think about what you want to write, not just what you want to read” and then she leaves before you can ask her what she means, which you are beginning to understand is her preferred method.

There is a Tuesday when the grief comes out of nowhere — a smell in the street, someone’s perfume, your mother’s perfume, and you are at the corner of main street and you have to stop walking and stand very still for a moment and breathe through it with your hand against the wall of the hardware store while the town moves around you. It passes. It always passes. You write about it that night — three pages, which is more than you usually write, and when you are done your hand aches and the feeling has somewhere to be that is not inside your chest.

There is a Thursday when Heeseung drives you out past the edge of town for no stated reason and parks on a rise where you can see for miles — the land going flat and wide in every direction, the sky enormous above it, the late November light turning everything amber and still. You sit on the hood of the blue car and don’t say very much and it is one of the better silences of your life, the kind that only happen with people you trust without having decided to. November passes. December arrives and brings with it cold that is serious now, cold that means something, and Birdie puts a second quilt on your bed and buys cinnamon for the baking and the town strings lights along main street that go on at dusk and make the whole place look like something you would make up if you were trying to imagine a Christmas.

The drive-in is showing Christmas movies on a Friday in mid-December. This is announced on a chalkboard outside as Holiday Double Feature and whoever writes the chalkboard has drawn a small lopsided Christmas tree beside it that has clearly been done with great affection and no particular artistic talent, and Immy calls it the most charming thing she has ever seen and takes everyone.

Sunghoon’s truck is better for this than the blue car, which Heeseung acknowledges without any defensiveness because the blue car is many things and a comfortable place to sit in the back of on a cold December night is not one of them. You all pile into the truck bed with blankets from Immy’s house — she brought four, which was the right number — and the speakers rigged up on the dash inside play the drive-in audio through the open rear window, tinny and warm. The first film starts. Something black and white, something with snow and a big house and people in good coats making complicated decisions about love. You are not entirely following it. You are warm enough, tucked under a blanket with your knees drawn up, and the cold air is sharp and clean on your face, and above the screen the actual sky is enormous and dark and full of stars in the way that a sky over a small town in December can be, which is a way that the sky over New York never was.

Immy is against Sunghoon’s side with his arm around her in the way that is just their arrangement now, comfortable as furniture. He says something low to her and she tips her head up to answer him and you look away because some things are private even in a truck bed.

“You cold?” Heeseung is beside you, close in the way the small space of the truck bed makes everyone close, close enough that you are aware of it as something other than proximity. “I’m fine,” you say, which is the answer you give. He looks at you sideways. “I’m a little cold,” you say. He lifts the blanket and pulls it more squarely over both of you and you shift slightly without meaning to so that you are closer, and he stays very still when you do, and then he is just — there, warm along your left side, solid and present, and you look at the screen and do not think about it because you have been not thinking about it for a while now and you are getting quite practiced. You are not getting that practiced.

Immy and Sunghoon disappear at some point in the middle of the first film — popcorn, Immy says, we need more popcorn, and they climb out of the truck with the blanket and do not come back for a while. The drive-in hums around you, other cars and trucks glowing softly in the dark, the screen washing blue and white light across everything. You are watching the film. You are also aware of his hand, which has found your knee through the blanket, just resting there, warm and heavy, the way his hand always rests on things — without urgency, without asking for more than it is. “Do you like it here?” he says.

You turn to look at him. He is already looking at you, and his face in the light from the screen is soft and serious and very close, and his eyes have that quality they always have, that quality of seeing you, and you look at him and something in your chest does something you are not ready to name but can no longer pretend is nothing. “Yeah,” you say. Your voice comes out quieter than you intended. “I really do.”

He looks at you for a moment longer. The film plays on. His thumb moves once against your knee through the blanket, a small thing, barely a thing at all. Then he leans in and presses his lips to your temple. Warm and still. Not the quick friendly press of before — this one stays, just a moment, and his nose is cold against your hair. “Good,” he says quietly, against your hair. You look at the screen. Your heart is doing something complicated. It’s not just friendliness, you think, clearly, for the first time, the thought arriving with the quiet certainty of something you have known for a while and have finally let yourself know. It is not just western friendliness and it is not just him being Heeseung and I have been so careful not to see it and I see it. You do not say this. You look at the screen. His hand stays on your knee. The film goes on.

Immy and Sunghoon come back with popcorn that is too buttery and a shared expression of people who went for popcorn and did something else as well and are not talking about it. Immy drops back into the truck bed and looks at you and then at Heeseung and then at you again and her face does the thing it does when she knows something, which is to do nothing, perfectly, too carefully. You take some popcorn. You watch the rest of the film. On the drive home Immy sits in the front with Sunghoon and you and Heeseung are in the back seat of the truck and his shoulder is against yours and neither of you moves away and the St. Christopher swings on the rear view mirror and the heater makes the windows fog at the edges and outside Fairview Fall goes past, lit up and cold and yours, more and more yours every day.

Christmas is the two of you. You and Birdie in the small warm house with Gerald and the tree she made you help her decorate on the first of December because she does not believe in waiting, and the smell of whatever she has attempted for Christmas dinner which is ambitious this year, genuinely ambitious, and the radio on the kitchen windowsill playing carols that neither of you knows all the words to and both of you sing anyway. It is a good day. It is also the hardest day. You knew it would be. You have been knowing it was coming the way you know weather is coming, something in the air before it arrives. Your parents were people who made Christmas — made it loudly and fully and with too much food and a specific record your father played on Christmas morning while your mother made coffee and you sat on the floor in your pyjamas and the apartment smelled like pine and something good. That record is on your shelf in your room. You did not take it out this morning because you were not ready and you knew you were not ready.

After dinner — which is better than it had any right to be, Birdie has been practising — you sit on the sofa with your tea and Gerald and the tree lights going soft in the corner and Birdie comes in from the kitchen and sits beside you and she has something in her hand.

“I’ve been thinking about when to give you this,” she says, “and I decided Christmas was right because your mother would have given it to you herself someday and I want to be the one to do it in her place.” She opens her hand. Your mother’s wedding ring. You know it immediately. The plain gold band, the small diamond, the slight asymmetry where she knocked it against something years ago and had it repaired and you could always see where if you looked. She wore it every day of her life. You have not seen it since the hospital. You cannot speak for a long moment.

“How—” you start. “It came to me with her things,” Birdie says quietly. “I’ve been keeping it safe.” She takes your hand and presses it into your palm and closes your fingers around it. “It’s yours. It always was going to be yours.” You look at your closed hand. “Birdie,” you say, and your voice does not work properly, and she opens her arms and you go into them the way you did in the bus station parking lot in August, and she holds on and you cry into her shoulder, properly, the way you mostly don’t let yourself in front of people, the way you usually save for your room alone.

You cry for your mother and your father and the Christmas morning with the record and the coffee and the apartment and the life that was yours before it wasn’t, and Birdie holds you through all of it and does not say hush or it’s alright because she is too wise to say either of those things and she just holds on. When you surface she is crying too, quietly, in the way she always cries which is privately even when she is in company. “Sorry,” you say. “Don’t,” she says. Which means of course not, never. You sit together on the sofa with the tree lights and Gerald and your mother’s ring in your hand and the radio still playing something gentle from the kitchen, and it is sad and it is also okay, both things fully true at the same time, and you are learning that this is how it is and how it will be — the grief and the warmth living in the same rooms, not cancelling each other out, just coexisting, because they have to. You put the ring on the chain you wear around your neck, the thin gold one your father gave you for your sixteenth birthday. It rests against your chest. It is warm from your hand. You write about it that night. Mom, you write. Birdie gave me your ring. I’m wearing it. I’ll wear it every day the way you did. I’m okay. I’m more than okay, most days. I miss you both so much it’s like weather — it changes, it comes and goes, and sometimes it’s very bad and sometimes it’s just there in the background, part of everything. I think I’m building something here. I think you’d both be glad. Merry Christmas.

January comes cold and clear and the town shakes itself out of the stillness of the holidays and picks back up, and with it comes the Winter Festival.

You have heard about this since October — Immy mentioned it in passing as something the whole town does, and Birdie mentioned it as something that has been happening since before she arrived, and Mae mentioned it as her second busiest weekend of the year and said it with the satisfaction of someone who likes being busy. It takes over the centre of town for a weekend — stalls and food and a brass band and lights strung between the buildings and a stretch of the main street cleared for dancing on the Saturday night, which is the real reason anyone comes, which nobody admits.

Heeseung picks you up in the blue car on Saturday evening. You are wearing the amber blouse Immy picked out for you in October under your coat, and your mother’s cardigan underneath, and the ring on its chain, and he looks at you when you come down the porch steps with the same expression he gets sometimes, the one that is only there for a second before the grin settles back into place, but you see it now, you have been seeing it, you are done pretending you don’t. “You look nice,” he says, easy. “Thank you,” you say, equally easy, and get in the car.

The festival is everything Immy promised and a few things she forgot to mention, including the fact that the brass band is genuinely excellent and the food stalls go on longer than the main street which means someone has taken over the hardware store car park and nobody seems to mind. You move through it in a loose group — you and Heeseung and Immy and Sunghoon, picking up other people from school and putting them down again, stopping at stalls and eating things that are too good and too hot and burn your fingers in the good way. Immy buys something fried and inexplicable and shares it with you and declares it the best thing she has ever eaten and Sunghoon takes one look at it and says “absolutely not” and eats it anyway when she holds it out to him, and you are laughing, you are genuinely laughing in the cold January air with the lights above you and the brass band somewhere close playing something that gets into your feet.

The dancing starts at eight. The main street clears itself in the way of places where this has happened for generations — people just know, they move back, they make space — and the band shifts into something slower and the first couples move into the middle and then more, and it is warm from all the bodies and lit gold from the strings of lights and it smells like winter and something sweet from the stalls. Heeseung holds out his hand to you. You take it. He dances the way he does everything, which is well and without making a production of it, and you know the steps well enough because Birdie taught you in the kitchen in November on a rainy evening when there was nothing else to do, this is just a two-step, baby, it’s not complicated, and it is not complicated, it is just his hand warm in yours and his other hand at your waist and the two of you moving through the same space in the same direction. You dance for a while.

Around you Immy and Sunghoon are dancing the way they exist, which is easily and entirely, and other couples are moving and the band is warm and the town is all around you, Fairview Fall in January, lit up and cold and full.

The song changes to something slower. Heeseung does not let go. You do not move away. The space between you closes in the natural way of a slower song and you are close enough now that you can feel the warmth coming off him and you look up at him and he is looking at you, and his face is doing the thing it has been doing for a while now, that serious and certain thing, and he opens his mouth. “I’ve been thinking,” he says. “Okay,” you say. “I’ve been thinking that—” He stops. Starts again. “The thing is, I—” He exhales. “You know when you know something and you keep not saying it because you don’t want to—” “Heeseung,” you say. “Yeah.” “Kiss me.” He blinks. Just once. And then something in his face settles, completely, like a thing that has been held at tension for a long time and has finally been allowed to let go, and he brings his hand up from your waist to your jaw, careful, and he kisses you.

It is soft and unhurried and entirely certain, the way he is — no performance, no question in it, just him, just this, just the two of you in the middle of the Winter Festival in the middle of Fairview Fall in January with the brass band playing and the lights overhead and the cold air around you and his hand warm on your jaw.

When he pulls back his eyes open slowly and he looks at you and neither of you says anything for a moment. “Hi,” he says finally. “Hi,” you say. He laughs, low and real, and you laugh too, and he presses his forehead to yours and you stand like that in the middle of the street while the town moves around you, and it is so far from where you started — the bus station, the parking lot, the small wooden sign that said Fairview Fall, Pop. 2,847 — and so completely, entirely right. His thumb traces your jaw once, gentle. “Darlin’,” he says softly. “I know,” you say. “I know.”

You walk home from the festival with his hand in yours. This is not discussed. It just happens — the crowd thinning around you, Immy and Sunghoon peeling off at their corner with goodnights that contain entire conversations neither of them says out loud, and then it is just you and Heeseung on the quiet streets of Fairview Fall in January, your breath showing in the cold air, the festival lights fading behind you, and at some point between the main street and Birdie’s road his hand finds yours and holds it and that is that. You walk without talking much. There is not much that needs saying yet. The kiss is still warm in you, sitting somewhere low and certain, and the town is quiet around you and the stars are out and his hand is warm and you think: this is what it feels like when something is right. You have not felt it before, not exactly like this, and you hold it carefully the way you hold things that are new and true and slightly frightening.

At Birdie’s porch he stops at the bottom step and you turn to face him and he is looking at you in the way he has been looking at you for a while now, except that now neither of you has to pretend it isn’t happening. “Goodnight, darlin’,” he says.“Goodnight, Heeseung.” He squeezes your hand once before he lets go. You watch him walk back down the street — unhurried, hands in his pockets, the blue car waiting at the kerb — and you stand on the bottom step until he is gone and then you go inside. The house is quiet. The tree lights are still on in the sitting room, Birdie having forgotten or having left them on deliberately, which is entirely possible. You hang up your coat and stand in the hallway for a moment, your hand still warm from his. Gerald appears from the sitting room, looks at you, and turns around and goes back. “I know,” you say, to no one. You go upstairs. You sit on the bed. You pick up the journal and hold it and then put it back down because some things need a night to settle before you put them into words. You lie back and look at the ceiling and you are smiling and you do not try to stop it.

Birdie knows in the morning. You do not tell her. You do not have to tell her. You come downstairs in your mother’s cardigan with the ring warm on its chain and she is at the kitchen table with her coffee and she looks at your face and her whole expression does something slow and warm and satisfied, like a woman who has been patient about something for a long time and has been proven right. “Morning,” you say. “Morning, baby,” she says. “How was the festival?” “Good,” you say. “Mm.” She wraps both hands around her mug. “Just good?” You get yourself a cup and sit down across from her and look at her and she looks back at you with those familiar eyes, your mother’s eyes, and she is fighting a smile with everything she has and losing.

“Birdie,” you say. “I’m not saying anything,” she says. “You’re saying everything.” “I’m drinking my coffee.” She takes a very deliberate sip. “I’m simply a woman drinking coffee who is extremely happy on a Sunday morning for no particular reason.” You look at her. She looks at you. The smile wins, on both sides. “He’s a good boy,” she says, finally, simply. “I know,” you say. “His mama will be insufferable about it.” She says this with the warmth of someone who likes his mama very much. “In the best possible way.” You wrap your hands around your cup and look out the kitchen window at the January garden, frost on the grass, the oak tree bare. Something has settled in you, something that was restless and is not restless anymore, and you sit with it in the warm kitchen while Birdie finishes her coffee and does not make a production of anything, because she never does, because she is exactly who she is. “Thank you,” you say, eventually, not about anything specific. She reaches across the table and puts her hand over yours for a moment. “Don’t,” she says. Which means of course. Always. You don’t have to say it.

Monday morning arrives and you walk through the school gate and Immy is there. She is leaning against the wall beside the gate with her arms folded and an expression that is doing extraordinary things — warm and knowing and delighted and restrained all at once, the expression of someone who has known something for a long time and has finally been vindicated. “Hi,” you say. “Hi honey,” she says. “Good weekend?” “Good weekend.” “Anything interesting happen?” “Immy.” “I’m just asking.”

She falls into step beside you. “I’m asking a perfectly normal question about your weekend. I happened to be at the Winter Festival. I happened to see certain things. I’m not saying anything about those things. I’m just asking about your weekend.” “Immy.” “Yes?” “He kissed me.” She stops walking. You keep walking. She catches up in three steps. “I know he kissed you,” she says, and her voice has gone high and bright around the edges in the way it does when she is genuinely delighted and cannot fully contain it.

“I saw him kiss you. Sunghoon saw him kiss you. Half of Fairview Fall probably saw him kiss you.” “That’s fine,” you say, because it is. She grabs your arm and stops you in the middle of the hallway and looks at your face with her hands on your shoulders and her eyes going soft. “Are you happy?” she says. Just like that, direct and real, the way Immy always asks the things that matter. You think about it. The honest answer, the real one. “Yeah,” you say. “I really am.” She makes a sound that is mostly just joy, pulls you into a hug that is brief and tight and completely certain, and then releases you and straightens and composes herself into someone who is simply walking to class. “Good,” she says briskly. “That’s all I wanted to know. Come on, we’ll be late.”

You walk to class. You are smiling. You cannot stop doing that today. Heeseung finds you before lunch. He always finds you before lunch. This is not new. What is new is that when he falls into step beside you in the hallway he takes your hand, easy as anything, like it is something you have always done, and you look down at your joined hands and then up at him and he looks back at you with that grin that has always been just him, that has always been the most natural thing in the world. “Hi,” he says. “Hi,” you say.

“Is this okay?” He means the hand. “Very okay,” you say. He nods once, satisfied, and walks with you down the hallway through the midday noise of Fairview Fall High School, and the school moves around you the way it always has, except that now you are holding his hand and the whole building seems to know it and most of it seems pleased.

It is in the corridor outside the science block that you see Cassie Howard. She’s been interested in Heesueng since October from what you’ve seen. Always loitering beside his locker and asking him to help her with reading for English. She’s a nice girl. But when these interactions happened you couldn’t help but feel jealous. She is with two girls from her class, laughing at something, her hair in a high ponytail, and she looks up when you pass and her eyes go to your joined hands and then to your face. Something moves through her expression — you see it, brief and honest, the particular look of someone who has let something go and is at peace with having let it go — and then she smiles at you. A real smile. Warm and direct. She lifts a hand. You lift yours back. She turns back to her friends and keeps talking and that is the whole of it, clean and simple and kind, and you look at it as you walk past and feel something in your chest that is gratitude, or respect, or both.

“What was that?” Heeseung asks. “Cassie Howard waved at me.” “Yeah,” he says, easy. “She would.” He glances over at you. “This town doesn’t really have time for conflict.” You look up at him — the grin, the certainty of him, the way he says it like it is just a true thing about the place he loves — and you smile, properly, all the way through it. “I like this town,” you say. “I know you do,” he says. “I’ve known for a while.”

The conversation about what you are happens that afternoon, in the blue car, parked outside Birdie’s with the engine running for the heat and the radio low. It is not a serious conversation. That is the thing you will remember about it — it is not fraught or uncertain or full of the nervous energy of something that could go wrong. It is just the two of you in the warm car in the cold January afternoon, talking about it the way you talk about most things, which is honestly and without making it harder than it is.

“So,” he says. “So,” you say. He looks at the steering wheel. Then at you. “I’d like it if you were mine,” he says, which is simple and direct and so entirely him that something in you softens completely. “If that’s something you want too.” “It’s something I want,” you say. He nods. The grin. “Okay.” “Okay,” you say. He reaches over and tucks a piece of hair behind your ear — careful, like he has been wanting to do it for a while and is allowing himself to now — and his fingers brush your jaw and rest there for a moment. “I’ve wanted to do that since October,” he says. “Which part?” “All of it.” He says it plainly. “The hair. The—” He pauses. “All of it.” You look at him in the afternoon light, this boy who found you outside a gate on the first day and showed you around a town that was not your town and drove you home and stayed for dinner and gave you a record he loved without knowing why you needed it, and you think: I was not supposed to stay. I was not supposed to build anything here. I was not supposed to end up in a blue car in January in Fairview Fall, Texas feeling like this. You think: I am so glad I did.

“Heeseung,” you say. “Yeah.” You lean across the console and kiss him, soft and certain, and his hand comes up to your jaw the way it did last night and he kisses you back the same way he does everything, which is completely and without any hurry, like he has all the time in the world and intends to use it, and you think that there is something very specific about being kissed by someone who actually means it, who is not performing it, who is just — there, entirely, in the moment with you. When you pull back he is smiling. Not the grin, not the easy public one — something smaller and more private, something that you think might be just yours. “Go inside,” he says. “It’s cold.” “It’s warm in the car.” “Go inside,” he says again, and the smile gets wider. “Birdie’ll be watching from the window.”

You look at the house. The curtain moves. “Oh my God,” you say. He laughs, fully, head tipping back, and you get out of the car before you start laughing too, and you take the porch steps two at a time and the front door opens before you reach it and Birdie is standing there with the most unconvincing innocent expression you have ever seen. “How was school?” she says. “Birdie.” “What? I’m asking about your day.” You push past her into the warm house and she closes the door behind you both and the sound of the blue car pulling away from the kerb is very clear in the quiet and Birdie hums something small and satisfied to herself in the hallway. “Not a word,” you say. “Not a single one,” she agrees, and goes to put the kettle on, and you lean against the wall and press your hand to your mouth and smile into your palm while Gerald winds around your ankles and the house wraps around you, warm and full, yours.

February in Fairview Fall is the quiet month. The festival is over and the holidays are long gone and the town settles into the particular stillness of a place waiting for spring, going about its business without any special occasion to dress itself up for. The cold is still real but it has lost the bite of January — it is a softer cold now, the kind you can walk in without bracing, and on the clearest days there is something in the light that is almost a promise, a brightness at the edges of the afternoon that was not there in December.

You and Heeseung find your rhythm the way rivers find their course — not by deciding, but by going the way that is natural, the way that offers the least resistance. He picks you up in the mornings. He walks you to class. He finds you before lunch without fail. He drives you home in the blue car with the radio low and his hand finding yours across the console somewhere between the school and Birdie’s road, easy and unhurried, like it is the most obvious thing in the world. It is the most obvious thing in the world. You are still slightly amazed that it gets to be. Birdie makes pointed remarks about how often there are two cups on the drying rack now instead of one, which she does with such elaborate innocence that it is impossible to be annoyed by it. His mother sends peach preserves home with him for you — a jar, then another jar, then a third with a small note attached in handwriting that is Heeseung’s handwriting in thirty years that simply says for Y/N, with love — and you put them in Birdie’s kitchen and they make everything taste like summer. Immy has taken to calling you both insufferable with enormous affection. Sunghoon has said nothing, which is the loudest thing Sunghoon can do.

He takes you to the high roads on a clear Saturday in late February when the sky is the particular shade of blue that only happens in winter, deep and cloudless, the kind of sky that goes on forever. You have seen the high roads from below — from the town, looking up, the winding line of them against the hillside — but you have not been up them yet, and when he turns off the main road and the blue car begins to climb you understand immediately why this is somewhere people go.

The town falls away below you slowly, revealing itself in pieces — the water tower, the church steeple, the football field, the grid of streets you know now, that you could walk from memory — and by the time he pulls off onto the flat ridge at the top and cuts the engine you can see all of Fairview Fall spread out beneath you like a map of a life. You get out of the car without speaking. You both do. The wind up here is different — wider, cleaner, coming from somewhere far away — and you stand at the edge of the ridge and look at the town below and the land beyond it going flat and enormous in every direction and the sky above it all doing what the sky does up here, which is everything. “My dad used to take me to the roof of our building in the city,” you say. You do not plan to say it. It comes out the way things come out when you are somewhere that opens you. “Not to see the city — we could see that from our windows. He took me up for the sky. He said the city was too bright to see it properly from the street but if you got high enough above the light you could still find them.” You pause. “The constellations. He knew all of them.”

Heeseung is beside you, not quite touching, listening the way he listens which is with his whole self, not waiting for you to finish so he can speak but actually receiving what you are saying. “He’d stand behind me and point over my shoulder,” you say. “And he’d say there, do you see it? and I’d say yes even when I couldn’t always see it because I loved the way he talked about them. Like they were old friends.” You look at the sky. The February afternoon is going and the first stars are beginning, faint at the edges of the blue. “He said every constellation has a story and every story is about the same things. Love and loss and people trying to find their way home.” The wind moves. “He sounds like someone worth knowing,” Heeseung says, quietly.

“He was the best person I’ve ever known,” you say. “Him and my mom both. They were—” You stop. The grief is here, the real kind, the kind that comes up from the ground. “They were just the best people. And I don’t know how to—” Your voice goes. “I don’t know how to stop feeling like I should call him every time I see something I want to tell him about.” Heeseung puts his arm around you. Not to stop the crying — you are crying now, quietly, the tears going cold on your face in the wind — but just to be there, to be solid, to be the thing you are not falling into even though you are falling. “You don’t have to stop,” he says. “You can want to call him every time.” “It doesn’t go away,” you say. “People say it gets easier but it doesn’t go away.” “No,” he says. “I don’t think it does.” He says it simply, without flinching from it, without trying to fix it into something more comfortable, and you love him for that in a way that you do not yet have a word for — the particular love of someone who tells you the true thing instead of the easy thing.

You cry for a while in the wind on the high roads above Fairview Fall with his arm around you and the town below and the stars coming through above, and he holds you and does not say it’s okay because he is too wise for that, and he does not say hush because that is not something he would ever say to you, and he does not let go.

When you surface he turns to you and lifts his hand and presses his thumb to your cheek, gentle, and catches a tear that has not finished yet, and then he leans in and kisses where it was, soft, his lips cold and warm at the same time, and then the other cheek, and your eyes close. “Hey,” he says softly, against your face. “Hey,” you say back. He pulls you in properly, both arms, and you press your face into his jacket and breathe and he rests his chin on top of your head and you stand like that on the ridge above the town until you are steady again, until the grief has done what it came to do and settled back into the place where it lives, and the stars are properly out now, a handful of them at least, and you pull back and look up.

“There,” you say. You find the one you know most certainly, the one your father always found first. “That one. Orion. My dad said find Orion first and everything else follows.” Heeseung looks where you are pointing. “I see him,” he says. “He’s always there,” you say. “My dad said that. He said some things are always there, you just have to know where to look.” Heeseung looks at the sky for a moment and then looks at you, and his face in the starlight is so careful and so certain and so entirely his. “Smart man,” he says. “The smartest,” you say. He takes your hand and you stand on the ridge and look at the stars until the cold drives you back into the car, and on the drive home the radio plays something soft and country and his hand is warm over yours on the console and Fairview Fall comes up to meet you, lit and small and entirely yours.

Spring arrives in March like it means it. Overnight, or what feels like overnight, the brown gives way to green and the air changes temperature and quality and the town opens up the way it does when winter is done — windows, doors, people on porches, Mae’s putting tables out on the sidewalk for the first time since October. The football field goes bright again. The oak trees on Birdie’s street bud out and within two weeks are full and green and moving in the warm breeze. Immy announces the lake on a Friday in late March the same way she announces everything, which is as a fact that has already been decided. “Saturday,” she says at lunch. “The lake. All four of us. It’s warm enough.” “It’s barely warm enough,” Sunghoon says. “It’s warm enough,” she says again, with finality. It is warm enough. Just. The lake in spring is the colour of something deep and clear and cold, ringed with trees that are only just coming into leaf, the banks soft with new grass. There are other people there — it is a public place, a Friday night place in summer, but on a Saturday morning in late March it is quiet enough that you have the good stretch of bank largely to yourselves.

Immy has brought a blanket and approximately half of her kitchen and she sets up on the bank with the efficiency of someone who has done this many times while Sunghoon wades in without ceremony and makes a sound that suggests Immy was generous in her assessment of the temperature. You are standing at the edge of the water in your swimsuit — the one Immy helped you pick out, the green one, the one she said was exactly right with your colouring — with your toes in the cold and the spring sun warm on your back, looking at the lake and deciding whether you are brave enough.

You become aware that Heeseung has stopped moving beside you. You look over. He is looking at you. Not in a way that is rude or obvious — in a way that is simply honest, a way he does not quite school fast enough, a way that you catch before it becomes the grin. “What?” you say. “Nothing,” he says. The grin arrives. “You just look—” He does not finish the sentence because Sunghoon, from the water, sends a splash that catches him full across the chest, and you take several steps back to avoid the second wave. “Eyes forward,” Sunghoon says, with absolute serenity. “I wasn’t—” Heeseung starts. “In,” Sunghoon says, and splashes him again. Heeseung goes in, retaliating immediately, and you stand on the bank and laugh at both of them until Immy materialises beside you and says “we should go in before they start trying to dunk each other” and takes your hand and you go in together, fast, because fast is the only way, and the cold hits you all at once and you gasp and then you are in it, properly in it, and after thirty seconds it is perfect, the kind of cold that makes you feel entirely alive.

You spend the morning in the water and on the bank and in the water again. Sunghoon and Heeseung have an argument about something that happened in a football game two years ago that neither of them can fully remember and that Immy referees with the authority of someone who was there and remembers everything. You and Immy lie on the blanket in the midday sun while the boys swim further out and she tells you about the summer she was twelve and she and Heeseung and Sunghoon built a raft in Heeseung’s backyard and carried it out here and it sank immediately and Sunghoon said he knew it would and he had told them so and Heeseung said he was the worst and Sunghoon said he knew that too.

“He was right though,” Immy says. “It was terrible construction.” “Did Heeseung admit that?” “Eventually.” She shades her eyes to look at the water. “He always admits it eventually. He just needs a minute.” She pauses. “That’s one of the things about him. He comes around. He always comes around.” You look at the water too, at Heeseung out in the middle of it, dark head, easy stroke. “I know,” you say. She smiles at the sky.

The afternoon goes golden and then the four of you build a fire on the bank in the early evening in the practiced way of people who have done this before — Sunghoon doing most of the actual work while Heeseung hands him things and makes suggestions that Sunghoon ignores — and you sit around it with blankets and the remains of what Immy brought and the lake going dark and still in front of you.

At some point Immy stands up and says she needs to be home for dinner and Sunghoon stands with her immediately, the way he always does, and there is a small exchange of goodnights and the sounds of them packing up, and then their voices going up the bank toward the road, and then quiet. Just you and Heeseung and the fire and the lake. He has been quiet the last hour in a way that is not unhappy, just interior, something running underneath. You sit with it because you know him well enough by now to know when to wait. Gerald is teaching you this too. Everyone in your life is teaching you to wait. He gets up and goes to the car and comes back with his guitar. You look at it. You have never seen him carry it out of the house before — you know it exists, Birdie told you, you have known it was coming in the way you know spring is coming, something in the air before it arrives.

He sits back down beside you and settles it in his lap and does not look at you. “You don’t have to listen,” he says. “I want to,” you say. He nods once. He adjusts the tuning quietly, the small careful sounds of it, and then his hands find the strings and he begins to play.

It is not a song you know. You do not think it is a song anyone knows — it has the quality of something made, something that grew rather than was written, the melody finding itself as it goes. It is quiet and unhurried and the notes go out over the water and the fire pops and the spring air holds it and you sit very still because you do not want to be the thing that breaks it.

He plays for a while. You look at the lake. You look at the fire. You look at him — his hands on the strings, the concentration on his face, the way he is entirely present in the music, the way everything else about him is here but this particular part of him goes somewhere else, somewhere interior, the same place the journal takes you. He lets the last chord go. The quiet comes back. “That was yours,” you say. Not a question. “Yeah.” He sets his hand flat against the strings to still them. “I’ve been working on it for a while.” “Does it have a name?” He looks at you sideways, and something in his expression is careful and open and slightly vulnerable in a way he rarely is in company. “Not yet,” he says. You look at the lake. “It should,” you say. “It’s too good not to have a name.”

He is quiet for a moment. Then he says, “I’ll figure it out,” and it sounds like he already has, and you do not push it, and the fire burns down and the stars come out and the two of you sit by the lake in the early spring dark and he plays a little more — things you half-know, things that are fully his — and it is one of the best evenings of your life, quiet and full, the kind you will come back to when you need to remember what good feels like.

March becomes April and the bookshop comes into its busiest season — spring cleaning, Birdie says, people remember books exist when the weather turns — and you are in after school most days, shelving and helping and making change and talking to the regulars who have become your regulars too, people who ask after you by name and bring you things from their gardens and tell you things about the town that Birdie has not told you yet.

You are on the ladder reaching for the top shelf on a Thursday afternoon, a stack of returns to be reshelved, when the bell above the door sounds and you do not look down because you are busy and Birdie is at the counter. “She’s in the back,” you hear Birdie say, and then, a beat later: “second aisle.” Footsteps on the wooden floor. You are still reaching for the shelf. “Need a hand?” Heeseung says, below you. “I’ve got it,” you say. You get it. You come down the ladder with the empty stack and he is there at the bottom of it, leaning against the shelves with his jacket on and his hair slightly messed from the wind outside, and he looks at you the way he looks at you now — that private, warm, certain look that is just yours, that you have stopped being surprised by and started simply receiving. “Hi,” he says. “Hi,” you say. “I’m working.” “I know.”

He pushes off the shelf and steps into the aisle and it is narrow enough that he is very close, and he takes the empty stack from your hands and sets it on the floor without breaking eye contact and you look up at him and the afternoon light from the window at the end of the aisle is warm and golden and his hands find your waist. “Heeseung,” you say, with a very specific kind of not-seriousness. “I’ll be quick,” he says, and he is grinning, and then he kisses you back against the shelves, his hands warm on your waist, and you put yours on his chest and the shelves press gently into your back and it is soft and thorough and entirely him and the bookshop smells like paper and vanilla and spring through the open window.

A sound from the direction of the counter. A very deliberate cough. You pull apart. Heeseung drops his forehead to yours and his shoulders shake once, silently. Another cough. Pointed. Patient. With the timing of a woman who has been a bookshop owner for years and has heard everything happen in her aisles and has Opinions. “We should—” you start. “Yeah,” he says. He steps back. He picks up the empty stack from the floor and holds it out to you with the expression of a man attempting innocence. “Reshelving.” “Reshelving,” you agree.

You go back to the front of the shop. Birdie is behind the counter with a customer, her back to you, discussing a book recommendation with complete concentration. She does not look at you. She also does not stop smiling. You catch Heeseung’s eye across the shop. He presses his lips together against the grin. You look at the ceiling. “Really?” Birdie says, to no one, to the air, conversationally, still not looking at you. “We’re working,” you say. “Mm,” she says. “I see that.” The customer looks between all three of you with polite confusion. Birdie recommends them something excellent and sends them on their way and then turns around and looks at you both with the expression of a woman who has said everything she intends to say on the subject without saying a word.

Heeseung clears his throat. “Afternoon, Birdie.” “Heeseung,” she says pleasantly. “You know my stockroom needs reorganising if you’ve got time on your hands.” He reorganises the stockroom. You shelve the returns. Birdie bakes something in the back that smells extraordinary and pretends this is all very normal and you work through the afternoon in the warm, paper-scented air of Read a Cookie while the spring goes on outside the window and Gerald sleeps on the counter and the town moves past the glass. Later, walking home, Heeseung says: “I like your aunt.” “She likes you too,” you say. “That’s what makes it worse.” He laughs, and takes your hand, and you walk home through the April streets of Fairview Fall with the trees fully green and the light going gold and warm and the ring on its chain warm at your chest, and everything is tender and good and slightly too full to hold, the way the best things are.

Birdie goes to visit a friend in Austin on a Friday in April — an old friend, someone from before Fairview Fall, someone she has been meaning to visit for two years and has finally committed to, leaving Thursday evening with a bag and a list of instructions about Gerald that is longer than it needs to be. “He eats at seven,” she says, at the door. “Not six-thirty. Seven. He knows the difference and he will make your life very difficult if you get it wrong.” “I know, Birdie. I live here.” “I’m just saying.” She picks up her bag. “There’s a cobbler in the fridge. Don’t let Heeseung eat all of it.” “I wasn’t planning on—” “I know you weren’t planning on it.” She gives you the look, the fond and entirely unsubtle one. “I’m just saying.” She kisses your cheek. “Be good.” “Always,” you say. She gives you a look that suggests she finds this moderately believable and goes.

The house is very quiet on Friday evening. You feed Gerald at seven — exactly seven, he does know the difference — and you sit on the sofa with your book and the lamp on and the spring evening going dark outside the window, and it is fine, it is completely fine, you have been alone before, and then the phone rings and it is Heeseung. “Hi,” you say. “Hi.” His voice is warm and easy. “How’s the house?” “Quiet.” “Birdie get off alright?” “With a list of Gerald’s dietary requirements and a pointed comment about cobbler.” He laughs. “She left cobbler?” “Don’t.” “I’m just asking.” “Heeseung.” A pause, warm at the edges. “My parents are at my uncle’s tonight,” he says. “I’m at the house alone.” Another pause. “You could come over. If you wanted.” You look at the quiet room. Gerald looks back at you from the armchair with the expression of an animal who has no opinions about your personal life. “Give me twenty minutes,” you say.

The Lee house is lit warm from the inside when you come up the front path, the porch light on, the garden going dark around it. He opens the door before you knock — he must have heard the gate — and he is in a soft shirt with the sleeves pushed up and his feet bare and he looks at you on the doorstep for a moment with that expression, the private one, the one that is just yours. “Hi,” he says. “Hi,” you say, and he steps back to let you in. The house has the particular quiet of a place that is usually full and is not full tonight, and it is warm from the day’s heat still in the walls, and it smells like his mother’s cooking and something underneath that is just the house, just the smell of a place that has been lived in well. He takes your jacket and you follow him to the kitchen where there are two glasses on the counter and something on the stove that he has apparently made, which surprises you. “You cook?” you say. “My mama taught me.” He lifts the lid and checks it. “I’m not as good as she is.” “Nobody is.”

He makes a sound of agreement and you sit at the kitchen counter and watch him finish it and it is domestic in a way that sits warmly in your chest, the ease of it, the two of you in a kitchen with the evening outside and nowhere else to be. He plates it up — something simple, something good — and you eat at the kitchen table and the conversation wanders the way it does when you are somewhere comfortable, from school to music to something Sunghoon said at practice that made the whole team laugh, to the book you are reading, to nothing in particular. “Miss Beaumont asked about you today,” you say. “Yeah?” “She said you were the best argument she ever lost.” He looks pleased. “What were we arguing about?” “She didn’t say. She said you were wrong but you made her think harder about why, and that’s rarer than being right.” He considers this with the seriousness it deserves. “I’ll take that,” he says. “That’s a real compliment.” “I told her that’s what you’d say.”

He smiles at his plate, private and warm, and you look at him across the kitchen table in the lamplight and think about what it is to know someone — to know the way they receive things, the way they hold compliments, the way they go quiet when something matters and loud when something is funny, the way they drive and the way they listen and the way their voice drops when they are saying something true. You have been building this knowledge for eight months without knowing you were building it and now it is just — there, solid, a thing you can lean on.

After dinner he washes up and you dry, the way you have fallen into doing it at Birdie’s, and it is the same quiet domestic ease, his hands in the water and yours with the cloth and the radio low on the windowsill, and at some point he says something that makes you laugh and you lean into his shoulder without thinking about it and he turns his head and presses his lips to your hair and stays there a moment, and then he takes the cloth from your hands and hangs it over the tap and turns to you. “Come on,” he says, quietly.

His room is at the back of the house, overlooking the garden, the oak tree visible through the window in the dark. It is a room that has been lived in for seventeen years — worn at the edges, comfortable, everything in its place but none of it arranged for display. There are records on the shelf, the good kind, stacked carefully. His guitar in the corner on its stand. A photograph on the desk of the three of them — him and Sunghoon and Immy, young, maybe thirteen, standing at what looks like the lake, all of them squinting into the sun and grinning. Books, more than you expected, stacked on the nightstand and on the floor beside the bed. You go to the records first, because you cannot help it, running your finger along the spines the way your father taught you. “You and my dad would have gotten along,” you say. It comes out soft and easy, not weighted, just true. “I know,” he says, from behind you. “You’ve told me enough about him that I feel like I know him a little.”

You turn around. He is close, in the way he is always close now, in the way you have stopped registering as proximity and started registering as just — him, just the space he takes up in your life. “I love you,” you say. You have not said it before. You have known it — you have known it for longer than you have allowed yourself to know it — but you have not said it, and it comes out now in this room with his records and his guitar and the photograph of him at thirteen with his whole life ahead of him, and it comes out the way true things come out when you stop holding them, which is simply and without apology. He looks at you for a moment. Something in his face does what it does when something matters, which is go very still and very certain. “I love you,” he says back. “I’ve loved you since the gate on the first day and I’m done not saying it.”

You look at him. He looks at you. “Since the gate,” you say. “Since the gate,” he confirms. You step into him and he meets you halfway and the kiss is different to the others — not urgency, not the sweet tentativeness of the first one, but something fuller and more certain, something that has all the months in it, all the mornings in the blue car and the evenings at the diner and the high roads and the fire by the lake and the bookshop and the kitchen and all of it, every bit of it, and his hands are in your hair and yours are on his chest and you are both entirely present in it, entirely there. He pulls back just enough to look at you, his forehead against yours, his hands framing your face. “You sure?” he says. Quiet and straight, the way he always is. “I’m sure,” you say. “Are you?” “Since the gate,” he says again, soft, and you laugh against his mouth and he smiles into the kiss. Your hands slide into his hair immediately, pulling him closer, and he exhales sharply, his hand moving from your face to the back of your neck, gripping a little tighter now, holding you in place as the kiss deepens. His mouth moves against yours with more intent, his tongue slower but heavier, like he’s tasting you properly now, like he’s not holding back the fact that he wants this. Wants you.

Your hands move down his back, pressing him closer, feeling the solid warmth of him, and he responds instantly, his body shifting into yours, his thigh pressing between yours without thinking. “Fuck—” he exhales quietly against your mouth. He pulls back just enough to breathe, but his lips don’t leave you — they trail along your jaw instead, down your neck, slower again but heavier, his mouth open against your skin. You feel it everywhere. “Heeseung—” you breathe. He hums softly against your throat, the sound low, vibrating through you, and then his teeth graze your skin — not enough to hurt, just enough to make your breath catch.

“Heeseung—” you breathe. He hums softly against your throat, the sound low, vibrating through you, and then his teeth graze your skin — not enough to hurt, just enough to make your breath catch. “Darlin’…” he says again, against your neck this time, his voice rougher. “You have no idea—” His hands move down from your face, your neck, over your shoulders, your arms, then back in — pulling your shirt up, slower than before but more intentional, like he’s aware of every inch of skin he’s uncovering. You lift your arms for him and he drags the fabric off you, his eyes dropping immediately to your chest.

He exhales. “Jesus—” His hands come up to your tits instantly, full, firm, like he’s been waiting to touch you like this. His thumbs drag over your nipples and you arch into him without thinking. “There,” he murmurs. “Yeah— you feel that?” “Yes—” He presses harder. Rolls your nipple between his fingers. You gasp. “Fuck—” he breathes, almost to himself. “You’re so—” He cuts himself off and leans down, his mouth replacing his hand, taking your nipple into his mouth, his tongue circling slowly before he sucks. Your fingers tighten in his hair. “Heeseung—” He groans softly against your skin, the sound unguarded, and it makes your stomach flip. “Yeah,” he murmurs, pulling back just enough to speak, his breath warm against your chest. “Say it again—” You say his name again, softer this time, and his hands tighten on you, his mouth returning, slower but deeper, like he’s losing track of how careful he was trying to be. His other hand stays on your other breast, squeezing, his thumb dragging over your nipple in time with his mouth, and the combination makes your hips shift under him. He notices immediately. Of course he does. “Sensitive,” he murmurs. “Fuck— I can feel it—”

Your hands move down his chest now, pushing his shirt up, needing to touch him too, needing something solid under your palms. He lets you, lifts his arms so you can pull it off, and the second your hands hit his skin, he exhales. “Yeah,” he says softly. “There—” You run your hands over him, his chest, his stomach, feeling the tension in him, the way his body reacts to your touch just as much as yours reacts to his. “You’re shaking,” he murmurs, kissing along your neck again. “So are you,” you whisper. He lets out a quiet, breathless laugh against your skin. “Yeah,” he admits. “I am.”

His hand slides down your stomach, slow, his fingers tracing the line of your waist, your hips, before settling on your thigh. He presses gently, encouraging you to open for him. You do. His breath catches slightly when he sees you open.. His fingers brush between your thighs, light at first, feeling the warmth, the slickness already there. “Fuck,” he exhales quietly. “You’re already—” He stops himself and looks back at your face. “You okay?” “Yes,” you say, breath uneven. “Yeah?” he asks softly. “Good girl,” he murmurs. His fingers move again. More deliberate now. He runs them through your folds, slow, spreading the wetness, learning you the same way he learned everything else — carefully, completely. When his thumb finds your clit, he presses lightly, testing. You react instantly, hips shifting. He notices. “Right there?” he asks. “Yes—”

He circles it slowly, steady, his other hand still resting on your thigh, holding you open. His touch isn’t rushed, but it’s precise, like he’s mapping exactly what you need. “You’re doing so well,” he murmurs. “So good for me.” His fingers slide down, then back up, then he presses one finger into you. Slow. You gasp. He stills. “Okay?” “Yes,” you breathe. “Don’t stop.” He nods slightly. “Alright. I’ve got you, darlin’.” He moves again, pushing deeper, then adding another finger, curling them slightly inside you, watching your face for every reaction. “That’s it,” he says softly. “Just relax— I’ve got you—” His thumb keeps working your clit, his fingers moving in a steady rhythm, and you feel it building, tightening low in your stomach. “Heeseung—”

“I know,” he murmurs. “I know—” He leans down and kisses you again, softer now, his movements syncing — his fingers, his mouth, everything aligned. When he finally moves over you properly, settling between your thighs, his body warm and solid against yours, the shift is immediate. Closer. Heavier. Real. He lines himself up slowly, his hand coming back to your face again, thumb brushing your cheek. “Look at me,” he says softly and then he pushes into you. You gasp, your body tightening around him instinctively. He stops immediately. Completely still.

“Okay?” he asks. “Yes,” you breathe. “Don’t stop.”He moves again, slower than he wants to, you can feel it — the control, the effort — but underneath it there’s something stronger now, something that wants more. His hips press into yours, deeper each time, his hand sliding to your hip, holding you, grounding you. “Fuck—” he exhales. “You feel—” You say his name and it breaks him. His rhythm deepens, still controlled but heavier now, more intent, his forehead pressing to yours again. “I’ve got you, darlin’,” he says. “You’re alright— I’ve got you—” Your hands move all over him — his back, his shoulders, pulling him closer, and he responds immediately, pressing deeper, his pace shifting just enough to make your breath catch.

“You feel incredible,” he murmurs. “So warm— so tight—” You gasp. Your body tightens. He feels it. “Yeah— I know—” he breathes. “I know—” His mouth finds your neck again, kissing, slower now but deeper, like he can’t stay away from it, like he needs to feel you there while he moves. “Stay with me,” he murmurs. “I am—” “Good girl,” he says softly. “That’s it—” It builds. Steady and inevitable.. Your body tightens, your hands gripping him, your breath breaking, and he stays right there with you, not rushing, not pulling away, just with you.

“Darlin’—” he breathes. “You’re doing so well—” You come.. His whole body reacts, his rhythm stuttering, then deepening as he follows, his voice breaking softly against your neck as he finishes, still pressed close, still holding you. He stays there. Inside you. Breathing hard. His hand comes back to your face again, thumb brushing your cheek, softer now. “You okay?” he murmurs. You nod, smiling faintly. “Yeah.” He exhales. Relieved. And kisses you again, slow and warm, like he’s not done touching you yet. “Stay with me,” he says softly.

Afterward you lie in the warm dark with his arm around you and your head on his chest and his heartbeat under your ear, and neither of you speaks for a long time because there is nothing that needs saying and it is enough to just be here, to just be this. “Hey,” he says eventually, into your hair. “Hey,” you say. He tightens his arm around you once, just once, and then loosens it, and you lie there in the quiet of his room in the house where he grew up and you think: I was not supposed to stay. I was not supposed to build anything here. You think: I am going to stay.

You fall asleep without meaning to and wake to the dark room and Heeseung warm beside you and the clock on his nightstand reading half past ten. You lie still for a moment, listening to the house, the spring night outside, a dog somewhere distant. Heeseung is awake. You can tell by his breathing. “You okay?” you say. “Yeah.” He says it easily, and he means it, but there is something underneath it, something that has been there since dinner, something you noticed and did not push. You wait. He exhales. “There’s something I should have told you,” he says. “I’ve been meaning to and I kept — I don’t know. I kept waiting for the right time and there wasn’t one so I just didn’t.” You lift your head to look at him. In the low light his face is serious. “The scholarship,” he says. You go still. “Coach put my name forward in January,” he says. “To three programmes. I found out in February that one of them wants me. Full ride. Music programme at a school in Nashville.” He pauses. “It’s a good programme. It’s a real one.” The room is quiet.

“You’ve known since February,” you say. “Yeah.” “It’s April, Heeseung.” “I know.” “That’s—” You sit up. The warmth of the last hour is still in you but something else is in you now too, something cold and specific. “That’s two months. You’ve known for two months and you didn’t—” You stop. “Why didn’t you tell me?” “Because I didn’t want it,” he says. He says it simply, like it is an explanation. “I still don’t want it. I want to stay here. I want community college and music and—”

“That’s not the point,” you say. “The point is you didn’t tell me.” You look at him in the dark. “I heard about it, Heeseung. Someone at school — I don’t even remember who — said something about Coach pushing you for a scholarship and I thought they meant the football one, I thought — I had no idea there was a music one, I had no idea it was real and current and something you were sitting on—” You hear yourself and stop. He is looking at you with an expression that is not defensive, which somehow makes it worse.

He looks like someone who knows he is wrong and is not going to pretend otherwise. “You heard about it at school,” he says. “Weeks ago,” you say. “I didn’t know what they meant. I didn’t know enough to ask.” You get up and find your clothes and he sits up and watches you and does not try to stop you because he understands that this is not something to stop, this is something to let happen. “I’m not angry about the scholarship,” you say, pulling on your cardigan. Your mother’s cardigan, warm and familiar. “I’m angry that you didn’t trust me with it. I’m angry that I heard it from someone else. I’m angry that you let me fall in love with you and didn’t tell me there was a version of the future where you might not be here.” Your voice does not break. You are grateful for that.

“That’s what I’m angry about.” “I know,” he says. “You’re right.” “I know I’m right.” You pick up your jacket. “I’m going to go home.” “Let me drive you.” “I’ll walk.” “It’s dark—” “Heeseung.” You look at him. He looks back, and his face is open and honest and not making excuses, and you love him, you still love him, that has not moved at all, which is its own kind of complicated. “I just need tonight. Okay? I just need tonight.” He nods. “Okay.” You go to the door. You stop. “I’m not going anywhere,” you say, and you mean Fairview Fall, you mean him, you mean all of it. “I just need tonight.” “I know,” he says. “I’ll be here.”

You go home through the spring dark, the streets of Fairview Fall quiet and lit around you, your mother’s cardigan warm on your shoulders and your heart doing several things at once. Gerald is in the window when you come up the path. You go inside and sit on the sofa in the lamplight and pick up the journal. You write for a long time. At the end of it you close the journal and sit in the quiet house and you are still angry and you are still in love and both of those things are fully true and you are learning, slowly, that love is not the absence of anger, it is just what is there when the anger passes. It will pass. He will be there. You know both of these things the way you know Orion — certainly, completely, because someone you loved taught you where to look.

The thing about being angry at someone you love is that it lives in your body. It is not a clean, distant thing. It sits in your chest and your throat and behind your eyes and it makes everything heavier — the morning, the walk to school, the seat at lunch, the backseat of Sunghoon’s truck where the space beside you is wrong now, off-balance, like a room where the furniture has been moved in the night.

You give yourself the weekend. You walk home Friday night and you cry into Gerald and you write in the journal and in the morning you get up and you make tea and you sit with the quiet and you let yourself feel it fully — the anger, and underneath the anger, the fear, and underneath the fear, everything else. You give yourself the weekend because you said you needed tonight and one night was not enough and you are learning to know what you need. Monday comes and you walk through the school gate and he is there, beside the blue car, and you look at him and look away and keep walking, and the air between you is something you have never felt between you before, which is distance.

You do not sit with him at lunch. You sit with Immy, who does not ask questions, who hands you half her sandwich and talks about her chemistry coursework with the focused energy of someone who understands that the best thing she can do right now is be normal, and you love her for it even as you are aware of Heeseung across the cafeteria not looking at you in a way that is very much looking at you. Sunghoon says nothing. He eats. He is a barometer of the situation and he knows it and he stays very still.

Wednesday he comes to the bookshop. You hear the bell above the door and look up from the returns you are sorting and he is there in his jacket with his hands in his pockets and he looks at you with an expression that is not an argument, that is just — him, open and present and a little wrecked around the edges in the way you have not seen him be before.

“Hey,” he says. You look back at the returns. “I’m working.” “I know.” He does not move from the door. “I’m not here to push. I just—” He stops. “I wanted to see you.” “I’m here,” you say, to the books. He stands there for a moment. Then he goes to the shelf nearest the door and starts looking at things, not browsing, just — being in the same room. Giving you something without asking for anything back.

Birdie comes out from the back and sees him and sees your face and does the thing she always does which is to read the room completely and not comment on a single thing she has read. She says “Heeseung, those top shelves need dusting if you’ve got a minute” and he says “yes, Birdie” and she hands him a cloth and he dusts the top shelves and you sort returns and nobody talks and the afternoon goes by and he leaves at closing without saying anything else and the door bell sounds and then the shop is quiet. Birdie puts the closed sign up. She comes to stand beside you at the counter. “You don’t have to tell me,” she says. “But I’m here if you want to.”

You look at the counter. The grain of the wood. The small chip at the corner that has been there since before Birdie bought the shop, that she has never repaired because she says it is part of the history of it. “He kept something from me,” you say. “Something important. For two months.” Birdie is quiet. “A scholarship,” you say. “A real one. Music, in Nashville. He knew in February and he didn’t tell me.” You pause. “I heard it from someone else. I didn’t even understand what I was hearing because I didn’t have enough information.”

“Ah,” Birdie says. “I’m not angry about the scholarship. I know he doesn’t want it. I believe him.” You press your palms flat to the counter. “I’m angry that he didn’t trust me with it. That I had to find out from someone else. That—” Your voice does something unexpected. “That there’s a version of this where he’s not here and he didn’t tell me.” The last part is the real part. You hear it when you say it. Birdie hears it too. She turns to face you fully. “That’s not really about the scholarship,” she says, gently. “No,” you say. “That’s about not knowing,” she says. “About not being told. About something changing without warning.”

The grief comes up then, the real kind, the deep kind, the kind that has been sitting underneath the anger all week waiting for you to stop being angry long enough to feel it. Your parents did not call to say they were leaving the work event. They did not say goodbye. One moment they were in the world and the next moment they were not and you had no warning, no preparation, no chance to hold the last conversation more carefully because you did not know it was the last one. You know this is not the same. You know Heeseung withholding a scholarship is not the same as a car crash on a highway. But fear does not do logic. Fear finds the shape of itself wherever it can. You put your face in your hands and you cry, properly, the ugly kind, the kind that has been building for days and longer than days. Birdie puts her arm around you and holds on and lets you. “I know,” she says, softly, into your hair. “I know, baby.”

“I’m so scared of losing someone else,” you say, into your hands. “I know that’s not fair to him. I know it’s not the same. But I’m so scared.” “That’s not unfair,” Birdie says. “That’s just true. You’re allowed to be scared.” “I love him,” you say. “I know you do.” “It makes it scarier.” “That’s how it works,” she says. “That’s just how it works. The loving and the scared are the same size.” She rubs your back. “That doesn’t mean you stop. You just carry both.” You cry until it’s done.

The shop is quiet and dark except for the lamp at the counter and outside the April evening is warm and the town is going about its business and Gerald has appeared from somewhere and is pressing himself against your leg. You wipe your face. You breathe. “I need to talk to him,” you say. “You do,” Birdie agrees. “When you’re ready.” “I’m almost ready,” you say. She squeezes your shoulder. “Almost is enough,” she says. “Come on. I’ll make tea and we can eat cobbler for dinner and not tell anyone.” “Birdie.” “I’m just saying what’s going to happen,” she says, and goes to put the kettle on, and you stand in the quiet bookshop and breathe and look at the chip in the counter and think about history and what you carry and what you build and the difference between the two.

Almost ready turns out to be another week. Finals are close now — three weeks out — and the school has that particular compressed energy of the end of a year approaching, everyone slightly too loud or slightly too quiet depending on their disposition. You study in the evenings at the bookshop after closing, your books spread across the counter, Birdie moving around you with tea and the occasional baked thing. You study well. Miss Beaumont has given you a reading list for the summer that is long enough to be a compliment, and you are working through it alongside the exam texts, because you cannot not. Heeseung studies too. You know this because Immy tells you, casually, the way she drops things casually that are not casual — Heeseung’s doing his English revision at the library after school, he asked me to recommend something Beaumont would like — and you do not comment and she does not push and the information sits with you.

He still drives you to school in the mornings. You did not ask him to keep doing it. He just keeps doing it. You get in the car and you say good morning and he says good morning and the radio is low and the drive is short and it is the saddest version of something that used to be the best part of your day. He offers his hand one afternoon in the backseat of Sunghoon’s truck, the four of you coming back from somewhere, and you look out the window instead, and you feel him pull his hand back, and the silence in the truck is enormous for about ten seconds until Immy says something completely unrelated in a bright voice and Sunghoon responds and the moment passes but it does not pass, not really, it just goes underneath.

Immy appears at your locker on a Tuesday morning two and a half weeks before finals with an expression that is equal parts loving and done. “Come with me,” she says. “I have class.” “You have ten minutes before class.” She closes your locker for you. “Come with me.” You go with her. This is the thing about Immy — you always go with her. She takes you to the science block. The old one, the one that floods, the one nobody uses anymore for anything except storage. She has a key, which you do not ask about. She opens a door at the end of the corridor and you follow her into a room full of old equipment and afternoon light through dusty windows and— Heeseung.

He is standing by the window with his hands in his pockets and when you come through the door he looks at you and then at Immy and she says “you’re welcome” and steps back into the hallway and pulls the door closed and you hear the key turn in the lock. You look at the door. You look at Heeseung. “She planned this,” you say. “Since last week,” he says. “Sunghoon drew a diagram.” “Of course he did.” A pause. The room is dusty and warm and smells like old chemicals and something that has been closed up for a long time. Light comes through the window in long stripes and dust moves in it.

Heeseung looks at you. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I need to say that first and I need to say it properly.” He takes his hands out of his pockets. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I’m sorry you heard it from someone else. I’m sorry I let two months go by and kept it from you.” He pauses. “I thought I was protecting you from something that wasn’t going to be a thing. I thought if I turned it down before you had to know about it then it would just — not exist. Not be something you had to think about.” He exhales. “That was wrong. I treated it like my decision when it was about both of us and I didn’t give you the chance to be part of it.”

You look at him in the dusty light. He looks back. “You scared me,” you say. “Not the scholarship. You. The not telling. It made me feel like—” You stop. Start again. “My parents didn’t tell me they were leaving that night. They didn’t call to say goodnight. It was an ordinary evening and then it wasn’t and I had no — there was no warning, there was no chance to—” Your voice is steady. You are proud of that. “I know it’s not the same. I know that. But fear doesn’t do logic and when I realised you’d been keeping something from me about your future it hit me in the same place.”

He crosses the room. He does not reach for you — he stops just short, close enough, and he looks at your face with that quality he has always had, that complete attention. “I’m not going anywhere,” he says. “I know.” “The scholarship—” “Tell me,” you say. “Tell me properly. What do you want to do.” He is quiet for a moment. “I want to turn it down,” he says. “I’ve known since February that I want to turn it down. Nashville is — it’s far. It’s not here. It’s not—” He pauses. “Music is mine. It’s the thing that’s actually mine, more than football, more than any of it. And I want to study it the way it deserves. But I want to do it here. Community college. Close to my family. Close to Birdie.” He looks at you. “Close to you.” He says it plainly, without making it a plea, just a fact. “This is my life. You’re in it. That’s not something I’m willing to set aside for a programme in a city that isn’t mine.” You look at him. “It has to be your choice,” you say. “Completely yours. Not because of me.”

“It is completely mine,” he says. “You’re part of my life. Choosing my life isn’t choosing because of you. It’s choosing because this is where I belong.” He pauses. “But I should have told you. I should have trusted you with it. That part I got wrong and I know I got it wrong.” The room is quiet. Dust moves in the light. “I was so angry at you,” you say. “I know.” “I’m still a little angry.” “That’s fair.” “I cried to Birdie about it.” Something moves through his face. “I’m sorry,” he says again, and means it.

You look at him for a long moment. The boy who found you outside a gate. Who drove you home and stayed for dinner and gave you a record and took you to the high roads and held you while you cried and played guitar by the lake and kissed you at the Winter Festival and said since the gate and meant it completely.

You close the space between you and put your arms around him and he wraps his around you immediately, both arms, tight, and you press your face into his shoulder and breathe and he presses his lips to the top of your head and holds on. “I’m not going anywhere either,” you say, into his jacket. His arms tighten once. “I know,” he says. “I love you,” you say. “Even when I’m angry at you.” “I love you,” he says, into your hair. “I’m sorry it took me so long to be honest.”

You stand like that in the dusty science lab in the old building that floods, held together by a plan that Immy drew up and Sunghoon diagrammed, and it is not romantic exactly and it is also completely romantic, because this is Fairview Fall and this is them, and you would not have it any other way. From the other side of the door, very faintly, you hear Immy say something to Sunghoon. You hear Sunghoon’s low response. You hear Immy make a sound of satisfaction. Heeseung laughs against your hair. You laugh into his shoulder. He pulls back enough to look at your face and he wipes your cheek with his thumb — you did not know you were crying until he does it — and he kisses you, soft and certain, and you kiss him back the same way. “Are we okay?” he says, against your mouth. “We’re okay,” you say. “Go tell your coach.” “Tomorrow,” he says. “Today,” you say. He looks at you. He nods. “Today,” he says. You step back.

He goes to the door and tries it and it is still locked and he knocks twice and from the other side Immy says “are you done?” and he says “yes” and the key turns and the door opens and Immy is there with Sunghoon behind her, both of them wearing expressions that are so carefully neutral they are the least neutral things you have ever seen. “Good talk?” Immy says. “Good talk,” you say. She looks at your face and his face and her carefully neutral expression gives way completely to something warm and bright and entirely herself. She puts her arm around your shoulders. “Come on,” she says. “We’re going to be late.” You walk to class through the old science corridor — you and Immy ahead, Heeseung and Sunghoon behind — and from behind you you hear Sunghoon say, very quietly, something you cannot make out, and Heeseung says something back, and then there is a sound that is Sunghoon being shoved and not minding. Immy squeezes your shoulders. “Okay?” she says. “Okay,” you say. And mean it, fully, all the way through.

Finals arrive the way the end of things always does — faster than you were ready for and slower than you could stand. The last three weeks of the school year compress into a particular kind of time, dense and pressurised, the days full of index cards and highlighters and the specific exhaustion of a brain that has been asked to hold too much at once. You study at the bookshop counter after closing and at the kitchen table with Birdie’s tea going cold beside you and in the blue car in the school parking lot during free periods, your textbook open on your knees and Heeseung beside you doing the same, the two of you in companionable silence broken occasionally by one of you reading something out loud that the other has to hear.

This is its own kind of intimacy. You did not know that before. You know it now — the particular closeness of working in the same direction, of being tired together, of someone handing you a biscuit at ten o’clock at night because Birdie left a tin and they know you forget to eat when you are deep in something. Immy studies in bursts — intense, focused, slightly panicked, then suddenly fine.

Sunghoon studies the way he does everything, steadily and without visible stress, which Immy finds both reassuring and personally offensive. “How are you not worried?” she says at the diner one evening, revision notes spread across the booth. “I’m worried,” Sunghoon says. “You don’t look worried.” “I know.” He takes a fry from her plate. “It’s a gift.” She stares at him. She steals his milkshake. He lets her. You watch them across the booth and Heeseung’s knee presses against yours under the table and you look over at him and he is already looking at you and the grin is there, warm and private, and you think: I am going to be okay. I have been okay. I am building something here that is mine.

The exams themselves are five days of early mornings and the exam hall and the scratch of pens and the particular silence of a room full of people thinking as hard as they can. You sit in your assigned seat with your mother’s cardigan over your shoulders and the ring warm on its chain and you write. English is last. Three hours in the same hall, the same seat, and Miss Beaumont is one of the invigilators and she does not look at you differently to anyone else in the room — she is professional and precise and entirely fair — but when you hand in your paper at the end and walk past her desk she looks up briefly and gives you one small nod, and that is everything.

You walk out of the exam hall into the May sunshine and Heeseung is there — leaning against the blue car in the car park, face tipped up to the sky, and when he hears the doors he looks over and reads your face before you have reached him. “Well?” he says. “Good,” you say. “Really good.” He opens his arms and you walk into them and he holds you in the school car park in the May afternoon sun and you press your face into his jacket and think: Mom. Dad. I did it. I really did it. “Proudest person in Fairview Fall,” he says, into your hair. “Birdie might have something to say about that.” “Tied,” he says. “Birdie and I are tied.”

The weeks between exams and graduation are the loosest, most golden weeks of the year. There is nothing left to do but wait for results and show up and let the school year finish itself, and so you do — you and Heeseung and Immy and Sunghoon filling the days with the things that have become your things, the diner and the lake and the high roads and the bookshop and long evenings on Birdie’s porch and longer evenings in the blue car parked somewhere with the radio on. The results come on a Thursday morning and they are good — better than good, all of you, and Miss Beaumont leaves a note in your locker that is two lines long and says more than two lines usually can: You were the best argument I ever lost. Go do something with it. You keep it. You put it in the journal.

Heeseung turns down the scholarship the week before graduation. He calls Coach into his office himself — does not wait to be summoned, does not ask anyone to do it for him — and he tells him clearly and without apology that he is grateful and he is declining. He tells you after, in the blue car, with the same simple directness he brings to everything that matters. “How did he take it?” you ask. “He was disappointed,” Heeseung says. “He’ll get over it.” He pauses. “He said I was making a mistake.” “What did you say?” “I said I disagreed.” He looks over at you. “Respectfully.” “Of course.” “I’m always respectful.” “Always,” you agree. He takes your hand across the console.

“Community college music programme starts in September,” he says. “I already registered.” “I registered for English literature last week,” you say. He squeezes your hand. You look out the window at Fairview Fall going past — the main street, the bookshop, the diner, the church, the barbershop, all of it so known to you now, so entirely yours — and you think about September and what it will look like, this town in autumn again, the light going amber, the oak trees turning. You think about being here for it. You think about the shape of a future that is not the one you were supposed to have and is better than you could have built on purpose. “Birdie’s going to cry at graduation,” you say. “My mama’s going to cry at graduation,” he says. “My daddy’s going to pretend he’s not crying and fail.” You are both smiling and the blue car takes you home through the early summer streets of Fairview Fall and the St. Christopher swings and the radio plays and everything is very good.

Graduation is on a Saturday in early June. The ceremony is held on the football field — of course it is, this is Fairview Fall, everything important happens on the football field — with white chairs set out in rows and a small stage at one end with a podium and the faculty in a line behind it and the bleachers full of families who have been looking forward to this for eighteen years. Birdie is in the front row of the family section in a yellow dress — her good one, the one she saves — with her hair pinned up and Gerald’s absence conspicuous because you would not let her bring him, which she argued about and lost.

She is already crying when you find her before the ceremony and she says “I’m not crying” and you say “Birdie” and she says “I’m just very warm, it’s June” and you hug her and she holds on tight. Heeseung’s mother is two seats down with a camera that is serious enough to suggest she means business. His daddy is beside her in a good shirt with the look of a man who has decided to hold it together and is not certain he will manage it. They both pull you into a hug before you go to find your place in the graduating line and his mother holds your face in her hands for a moment and says “we’re so proud of you” and means the we completely. You find your place in the line. Immy is two ahead of you in her gown with her cap at an angle that is very her, and she turns and finds you and grabs your hand and squeezes it hard. “We did it, honey,” she says. “We did it,” you say. Sunghoon is behind Heeseung somewhere in the line and you cannot see him from here but you know he is doing the thing he always does which is standing very still and holding everything together quietly, and Immy knows it too and the knowing is in her face.

Heeseung is ahead of you by several places. He turns before the line starts moving and finds you over the heads of the people between you and he grins — that grin, the one that has always been the most natural thing in the world — and you grin back and then the music starts and the line begins to move.

The ceremony is long in the way that ceremonies are long, which is to say that individual moments of it are everything and the rest of it is just time passing. Names are called and people walk across the stage and the bleachers erupt for each one the way small towns erupt, which is completely and without irony, and Mae is in the stands hollering for every single graduate regardless of whether she knows them, because this is Mae and this is what she does.

When your name is called you walk across the stage and shake the principal’s hand and the bleachers go up and you hear Birdie clearly above everything else, Birdie who is not crying, who is simply very warm, and you think: Mom. Dad. Look. And then the speeches.

The principal speaks first, the usual things, and then she says: “This year’s student address will be given by someone who needs very little introduction in Fairview Fall. Lee Heeseung.” The bleachers respond the way the bleachers always respond to Heeseung, which is warmly and immediately.

He walks to the podium with his hands in his pockets and his cap slightly crooked and he looks out at the crowd with that easy, unhurried quality he has, like he has all the time in the world and intends to use it well. He speaks about Fairview Fall the way someone speaks about a place they love without sentimentality — honestly, specifically, with the detail of someone who has paid attention. He talks about what it means to grow up somewhere that knows your name, about the particular gift of a community that shows up, about Mae’s cobbler and the football field grass and the record shop on main street. He makes people laugh twice and mean it both times. And then he pauses.

“This year we welcomed someone new to Fairview Fall,” he says. “Someone who came here when she didn’t choose to, who stood outside these gates on the first day of school not knowing a single person inside them.” He looks out at the crowd and his eyes find you in the graduating class with the ease of someone who always knows where you are.

“She taught this town a few things this year without meaning to. She taught me what it looks like to carry grief and keep living inside it. She taught me that some things are always there if you know where to look.” He pauses. “She came here for someone else’s reasons and she stayed for her own. And I think—” He stops. The grin, private and certain, just for you. “I think that’s the best thing a place can do for a person. Give them reasons that are theirs.”

The bleachers are quiet in the way of people who are feeling something. Then they are not quiet at all. You look at him at the podium and your vision goes slightly and you blink and the ring on its chain is warm against your chest and you think: Mom. Dad. Do you see? You know they see. The caps go up. This is the moment — the principal says I hereby declare you graduates of Fairview Fall High School and the field erupts and every cap in the graduating class goes up into the June sky at once, a cloud of them, black against the blue, and you throw yours and you are laughing and Immy beside you is laughing and Sunghoon beside her is smiling the widest smile you have ever seen on him and the bleachers are a wall of noise.

Heeseung finds you in about four seconds. He crosses the field with purpose and when he reaches you he takes your face in his hands and he kisses you, right there, in the middle of the graduating class of Fairview Fall High School with the caps still coming down around you and the bleachers still going and Birdie in the front row making a sound that is probably not crying because she is simply very warm. He pulls back and looks at you and his eyes are bright. “Hi,” he says. “Hi,” you say. You are still laughing. “That speech.” “Too much?” “Perfect,” you say. “It was perfect.” He keeps his hands on your face for a moment. Around you the field is full — families flooding in from the bleachers, people finding each other, photographs being taken, the particular happy chaos of an ending that is also a beginning.

“Fairview Fall, Texas,” you say. “Population now includes you,” he says. “Permanently.” “Permanently,” you agree. He kisses you again, softer, and then his forehead is against yours and the June sun is warm on both of you and the town is all around you and somewhere behind you Birdie is making her way across the field in her yellow dress with her camera and his mother is right beside her with hers and the two of them are going to take approximately forty photographs of this moment and you are going to let them. “What comes next?” he says, against your forehead.

You think about September and community college and English literature and his music programme and the bookshop and the blue car and the high roads and the record on its shelf and the ring on its chain and Birdie’s baking and Immy’s late night phone calls and Sunghoon’s quiet certainty and Mae’s cobbler on Fridays and the lake in the summer and Fairview Fall in every season, yours in every season, for keeps. “Everything,” you say. He smiles. “Yeah,” he says. “Everything.” The caps come down around you like the beginning of something. You catch yours. You stay.

The party is Mina’s idea. It always is. You’ve stopped pretending otherwise — stopped doing the thing where you spend twenty minutes debating whether you’re really feeling it before Mina gives you the look and you both know you’re going regardless.

It’s a Friday in late September, the air outside finally tipping from warm to something with a bite in it, and you’ve been in your dorm room since two in the afternoon staring at the same paragraph of Middlemarch without absorbing a single word.

“You need to get out of this room,” Mina says from your bed, where she’s been watching you not read for the past hour. She’s already dressed — black top, dark jeans, the gold hoops she only wears when she’s decided the night is going to be worth the effort. She decided before she came over. The last hour has been a courtesy. “You’ve been staring at that book like it cheated on you.”

The word lands between you, briefly. Mina’s face doesn’t change “George Eliot is a menace,” you say.

“You love George Eliot.”

“I love George Eliot when I’m not trying to produce fifteen hundred words on her narrative voice by Monday morning.” You close the book. It’s not like you’re reading it anyway.

The thing about Delta Kappa parties is that they are, by any objective measure, too much. Too loud, too hot, the bass sitting somewhere in your sternum, red cups and bodies everywhere you look. Mina thrives. You tolerate it with the specific resignation of someone who knows they’re going to have a good time despite themselves and finds this faintly irritating.

You’re on your second drink when you see Sunghoon. He’s across the room near the kitchen doorway, mid-conversation with someone you don’t recognise, laughing at something. Head tipped back the way he always did — that particular way, unhurried and a little private, like whatever amused him was his alone. You used to love that about him. You watch it for maybe three seconds before you look away, which feels like a victory of some kind.

Four months. Four months since you’d found out, since you’d sat on your dorm room floor and read a conversation thread you were never supposed to see, since everything you thought you’d built with him had turned out to be built on something rotten underneath.

Two years of your life. Your first real relationship. You’d thought it would last.

You look away. You drain the rest of your cup.

“He’s here,” Mina says, appearing at your elbow with the precision of someone who has been watching.

“I know.”

“Do you want to leave?”

“No.” You mean it. “I’m not leaving a party because of Sunghoon Park.”

She studies you for a moment with that particular look — the one that measures the difference between actually fine and performing fine with uncomfortable accuracy. Whatever she finds seems to satisfy her, because she clinks her cup against yours and says, “Then let’s get another drink.”

You’re at the makeshift bar — someone’s kitchen counter pressed into service — when you become aware of someone standing beside you. Not waiting for the bottle. Something else. A specific quality of attention that you register before you’ve consciously clocked it. You look up. Jake Sim looks back.

You know who he is the way you know most things about the people who exist in Caldwell’s uppermost stratum — passively, through cultural osmosis, without ever having chosen to learn. Captain of the Wolves. Dean’s son. The name that comes up in a specific tone of voice, like a warning dressed as gossip.

Up close he is, unfortunately, exactly as good-looking as that reputation implies. Tall, built through the shoulders and chest in the way that years of hockey builds — not showy, just solid, like his body was designed to take up space and does so without apology. Dark eyes. A jaw that should probably be illegal. A mouth curved at the corner like he’s already three steps ahead of the conversation and finds this mildly entertaining.

“You’re doing maths,” he says.

You blink. “What?”

“Your face.” He nods at you, vaguely. “Very intense for someone just standing at a bar.”

“I’m making a drink.”

“You’ve been staring at that vodka for forty-five seconds.”

“I didn’t realise I was being timed.”

“You weren’t.” He reaches past you for the bottle — close enough that you catch something clean and faintly expensive — pours his own cup, sets it back.

“I’m Jake.”

“I know who you are.” Something moves through his expression. Amusement, maybe, or the specific satisfaction of a fact confirmed.

“Most people do,” he says, and there’s no arrogance in it, just a statement of observable reality, which is somehow worse. “And you’re—”

“Also a person,” you say.

That gets a real smile. Brief, but actual. “Fair enough.”

You should find Mina. You’re aware of this the way you’re aware of the coursework due Monday and the fact that it’s past midnight — true, noted, irrelevant. Instead you stay where you are and let the conversation go where it goes, and it goes somewhere you didn’t expect.

He’s good at this. That’s the thing you clock first and keep clocking — the way he makes conversation feel like it has momentum, like you’re building toward something together, the timing of his humour landing slightly off-beat in a way that catches you. He asks questions and actually listens to the answers. You know it’s a formula. You know it has worked on an uncountable number of girls at an uncountable number of parties exactly like this one, and knowing that should make you immune to it, and it doesn’t.

Mina finds you at some point, clocks the situation in under a second, raises her eyebrows precisely two millimetres — a full paragraph in two millimetres — and disappears back into the crowd.

At some point his hand finds the small of your back. Light. Questioning. You don’t move away from it. At some point, close enough that you feel the words more than hear them, he says: “We could get out of here.”

You think about Middlemarch, which you’re not going to read tonight regardless. You think about the two years you spent being someone’s person and the four months since that have felt like learning to walk in a body that’s been subtly rearranged. You think about Sunghoon somewhere in this house with his head tipped back, laughing.

“Okay,” you say.

His room is in the east block upperclassmen housing — a single, because of course, because Jake Sim has probably never had to negotiate space with anyone in his life. It’s tidier than you’d have guessed. You file this away without meaning to, the way you’re still filing things even now, even when you’ve told yourself you’re not doing that anymore.

He closes the door and you’re already turning toward him and then his mouth is on yours and it’s nothing like how he acted downstairs — no charm, no ease, just heat and intent, his hands gripping your face and kissing you like he’s already decided exactly how this goes.

You grab his shirt and walk him backwards and he turns you instead, smooth and immediate, your back hitting the wall beside the door hard enough to knock the breath out of you and you don’t care, you’re already pulling at his shirt and he’s already got your top halfway up your body.

He strips it off you and his mouth drops straight to your throat, open and hot, and then your bra is unclasped and gone before you’ve fully registered his hands at the back of it.

Then his mouth is on your tits and he makes a sound low in his chest like the sight of them was specifically designed to ruin him. His hands cup them, squeezing, thumbs dragging slow over your nipples and watching your face while he does it. You feel your cheeks go hot because his expression is entirely too focused, too attentive, like he’s cataloguing your reactions and filing it away for later use.

He bends his head and takes one nipple into his mouth, tongue working in slow wet circles. Your head drops back against the wall on a moan you didn’t mean to let out that loud.

“Yeah,” he says against your skin, rough and pleased, “get loud,” and bites down lightly you gasp and your nails find his shoulders through his shirt.

He marks you up like he has all the time in the world — mouth dragging from your tits to your throat to your collarbone and back again, teeth and tongue, leaving his work on your skin with a thoroughness that should feel like too much and instead just makes you want more.

His hips grind into yours against the wall, the hard line of his cock pressed against your core through clothing, slow and deliberate, the friction makes you roll up into it and he does it again to which you make a sound that’s honestly embarrassing.

“Bed,” you manage, and he pulls back just enough to look at you — mouth-bitten, dark-eyed, satisfied with himself in a way you don’t have the capacity to be annoyed about right now — and walks you to it.

You land on the mattress and he’s over you immediately, his mouth back on your tits before you’ve stopped bouncing on the mattress, you’re pulling at his shirt until he lets you get it off him and then his jeans are gone and yours are gone and he’s settled between your thighs in just his boxers and the weight of him is — a lot, in the best way, solid and warm and pressing you into the mattress, his hips grind down slow as his cock drags against your pussy through the thin fabric of your panties, you grab his shoulders to hold onto something.

He does it again. Slower.

His mouth is still at your nipple, tongue working it stiff while his hips keep that maddening rhythm, grinding into you with enough friction to make your thighs clench around him but not enough to give you anything real, you can hear how wet you are, can feel it and judging by the way his jaw tightens he can too.

“Jake,” you say, and it comes out more desperate than you intend.

“I know,” he says, like that’s an answer, and then he’s moving down your body.

He hooks your underwear off, throws it somewhere and finally puts his mouth on your pussy. Your back comes off the mattress.

He licks into your folds slowly, taking his time, his tongue dragging from your entrance up to your clit in one long stroke and then doing it again, his hands are spread flat on your inner thighs holding you open and still and there is nothing to do but take it.

He’s good — infuriatingly good — like he’s genuinely interested in making you cum, like this is something he wants to do rather than something he’s doing to get to the next thing. You’ve got one fist in the sheets and one pressed to your own mouth to which he pulls your hand away from your face without looking up. “Don’t,” he says against your cunt, and goes back to work.

His tongue finds your clit and stays there, tight focused circles, two fingers then press at your entrance and push in slow, curling immediately, finding the spot that makes your hips jolt and working it with patience that feels almost cruel.

The sounds coming out of you are loud and continuous and undignified and he hums against you like he approves, the vibration travelling straight up your spine, and you can feel yourself getting close embarrassingly fast, your walls clenching tight around his fingers, your whole body chasing it.

“Don’t stop,” you manage, “don’t — please —“ and he doesn’t, his tongue relentless on your clit and his fingers curling deep, and you cum on his mouth with your thighs shaking, his name coming out broken and too loud for the room.

He works you through every second of it, tongue gentling, fingers slowing until you’re twitching and oversensitive and pulling at his hair to get him off you, he comes back up your body looking composed in a way that feels like a personal attack. There’s something dark and satisfied in his expression as he looks down at you and kisses you before you can say anything, slow, and you taste yourself on his tongue.

His cock is hard against your hip, straining against his boxers, you reach between you and wrap your hand around him and feel him shudder. He’s thick and heavy in your palm, already slick at the tip and when you stroke him his composure cracks — hips pushing into your grip, jaw tightening and a low rough sound forming against your mouth.

You work him slow and watch his face and feel something warm and powerful settle in your chest. “Condom,” you say.

“Yeah,” he says and reaches for the nightstand.

He pushes in slow and you feel every single inch. The stretch of him opening you up, thick and relentless, your walls giving way around his cock, you dig your nails into his back and breathe through it until he’s fully seated. You’re so full it sits somewhere between pleasure and pain and then he rolls his hips and it tips firmly into the first one.

He starts slow — deep, grinding strokes, his cock dragging against every nerve of you, the weight of his hips pinning yours into the mattress and his mouth finds your tits again immediately, like he can’t help it, tongue working your nipple while his hips keep their deep rhythm and you stop being capable of thoughts that go anywhere.

“You’re so fucking tight,” he says against your breast, low and rough, and bites down on the swell of it and soothes it with his tongue and does it again somewhere else.

“Jake—”

“I know,” he says, his thumb finds your clit. The added pressure makes you gasp and your hips jolt up to meet his and he makes a sound that isn’t quite a groan and picks up the pace.

The slow grind gives way to something sharper. His hips snap against yours and the headboard knocks the wall and the wet sounds of it fill the room. You have completely stopped caring about anything except the way his cock fills you on every stroke, deep and thick, the drag of him pulling back and driving in again setting off a chain reaction of sensation that climbs fast.

He shifts your leg up higher over his hip and the angle changes, deeper, and the sound you make at that is genuinely obscene. “Yeah?” he says, doing it again, deliberate. “There?”

“Yes,” you manage, “there, don’t stop, please—”

“Dirty when you want something,” he says, low and pleased, and fucks you harder.

His thumb circles your clit without stopping, his cock drives into your cunt again and again and his mouth marks your throat. The build crests too fast to catch — you cum for the second time harder, walls clenching rhythmically around him, his name coming out wrecked and he follows you over with his hips buried deep and his face pressed to your throat, low broken sounds against your skin as he cums.

The room goes quiet. You stare at the ceiling. Your body has been taken apart and put back together slightly differently and everything feels warm and loose and heavy.

That, you think distantly, was either the best or worst decision you’ve made in months.

Possibly both.

Jake disposes of the condom, comes back, drops onto the bed beside you. The quiet settles. It’s almost comfortable — the dark, the warmth, both of you just breathing. And then…

“You can go whenever,” he says. Flat. Casual. Already looking at the ceiling like you’re no longer the most interesting thing in the room. Like you’ve been downgraded, in the last thirty seconds, from a person to an inconvenience that’s resolved itself.

You blink. You can go whenever. Not you don’t have to rush, not do you want some water, not even basic human decency. Just — you can go. Door’s there. Thanks for coming.

Something cold moves cleanly through the warmth in your chest and extinguishes it. You sit up. “Right,” you say. Your voice comes out level. You’re proud of that.

He says nothing. He is staring at the ceiling with his arms folded behind his head like a man with absolutely no awareness that he’s just been profoundly rude, or perhaps perfect awareness and total indifference, which is worse.

You find your clothes in the dark with quiet methodical efficiency — jeans, top, shoes, bra shoved into your bag because life is short. You do not look at him while you dress and he does not look at you. At the door you pause, and you genuinely don’t know why, some reflex kicking in from a life spent being polite to people who haven’t earned it.

“Bye, then,” you say.

“Mm,” says Jake Sim, at the ceiling not even at you. You want to scoff in his stupidly hot face.

You close the door behind you.

The walk back across campus takes twelve minutes and you spend all twelve of them with the cold night air doing its best against the heat in your face. Not embarrassment — or not only that. Something sharper. The specific anger of someone who knew exactly what they were walking into and walked into it anyway and is now annoyed at themselves for being annoyed.

I knew, you think, with each step. I knew what he was. Everyone knows what he is. I just—

You’d let the hour at the bar do its work. You’d let the conversation and the hand at the small of your back and the dark eyes and the unfair jaw do their work, and you’d told yourself it was fine because you were going in clear-eyed, and the sex had been — god, the sex had been amazing — but then he’d opened his mouth and reminded you exactly who he was and now here you are, at one forty in the morning, crossing the quad with your bra in your bag.

You text Mina. still up?

The reply is immediate. obviously. how was it?

You stare at your phone for a moment. come to mine, you type back.

Mina is sitting up in your bed when you get back, laptop open, a bowl of cereal balanced on her knee that she definitely made while waiting. She takes one look at your face as you come through the door and sets it on the nightstand. “Tell me.”

You drop your bag, toe off your shoes, and sit on the end of the bed. You press your fingers to your eyes for a moment. “The sex,” you say carefully, “was genuinely incredible. Like — top three of my life, Mina. Easily. Potentially top two.”

“Okay—”

“And then, the moment it was over, he looked at the ceiling and told me I could go whenever.” You drop your hands. “In the tone of someone dismissing a tradesman. Like I’d come to fix his boiler.”

Mina’s expression moves through several stages. “He did not.”

“He absolutely did.”

“What did you say?”

“I said bye then and closed the door.”

“Bye then?”

“I panicked and defaulted to manners.” You flop backwards onto the duvet. “I knew. That’s the thing. I knew exactly what he was before I ever spoke to him and I did it anyway because—” You gesture at the ceiling. “I don’t know. Because I’m tired of being careful. Because Sunghoon was across the room being beautiful and I wanted to feel something that wasn’t about him.”

Mina is quiet for a moment. Then: “Was it, at least something that wasn’t about Sunghoon.”

You consider this with the ceiling. “Yes,” you admit. “Annoyingly, yes. Right up until he opened his mouth.”

“He really is the worst,” Mina says, with the conviction of someone delivering a verdict.

“He really, genuinely is.” You stare upward. “He’s got such a good cock though, Mina. Like. I’m annoyed about it. I’m actively annoyed.”

Mina puts her face in her hands. You watch her shoulders shake. “It’s not funny,” you tell her, and then you’re laughing too, and the tight mean thing in your chest loosens by a fraction, and outside the window Caldwell goes on being loud and indifferent and fully lit up, and you are fine.

You’re fine. You’re completely fine.

The week after the party you are, by any reasonable measure, completely fine.

You turn in the Middlemarch essay on Monday morning — fifteen hundred words on narrative voice, mostly written Sunday afternoon in a single focused stretch that you attribute to having gotten something out of your system.

You go to your Tuesday seminar and your Wednesday lecture and you have coffee with Mina on Thursday at the place near the English building where they do the good almond croissants, and you do not think about Jake Sim.

Or you think about him the normal amount. The amount that is appropriate for a person you slept with once at a party and will probably never speak to again, which is to say occasionally and without weight, the way you might think about a film you watched on a plane — enjoyable in the moment, not something you’d seek out again, largely irrelevant to your actual life.

This is what you tell yourself. Mina does not challenge it, which means she’s either convinced or she’s decided to let you have it, and knowing Mina it’s the second one.

Sunghoon texts you on Wednesday. Just — hey, saw you at Delta Kappa Friday. you looked good. You stare at it for a long time. You don’t reply.

You see Jake on Monday. You’re crossing the main quad, coffee in hand, bag over one shoulder, running approximately four minutes late for your seminar, and he’s coming the other direction with Jay Park and someone you don’t recognise, all three of them in Wolves gear, clearly post-practice.

He’s laughing at something Jay said, head tilted back, and he looks — easy, and loose, and completely unbothered by anything in the known universe, which you knew, which is exactly what you expected, and yet something about seeing it in person at ten forty-three on a Monday morning makes your jaw tighten anyway.

He doesn’t see you. Or he does and gives no indication of it, which amounts to the same thing. You look straight ahead and keep walking and do not think about it for the rest of the morning.

You think about it a little bit in the afternoon. By evening you’ve filed it away under irrelevant and moved on, which is the correct and mature response and you’re proud of yourself.

The sickness starts on Wednesday morning. You wake up with your stomach doing something wrong — not dramatic, not the sharp unmistakable rebellion of food poisoning, just a low persistent nausea that sits behind your sternum like it’s made itself at home. You lie still for a moment, waiting for it to pass.

It doesn’t.

You get up, make it to the bathroom, sit on the edge of the tub for ten minutes breathing carefully, and then it eases enough that you can brush your teeth and get dressed and tell yourself you’re fine.

You’re not fine by Thursday morning.

The nausea is worse — still not acute, still this low insidious wrongness, but it’s there when you wake up and it doesn’t fully lift, and your coffee tastes like something burnt and metallic and you push it away after two sips which Mina clocks immediately from across the table at the place near the English building.

“You’re not drinking your coffee.”

“I’m not feeling it today.”

Mina looks at the cup. Looks at you. “You have never in three years of knowing you not felt like coffee.”

“There’s a first time for everything.” She watches you for a moment with that look. You look back at your laptop and don’t say anything else.

By Saturday you feel actively, genuinely terrible.

Not sick-sick — no fever, no aches, nothing you can point to as a specific illness — just this relentless creeping nausea that is worst in the morning and fades by afternoon and makes the idea of eating before eleven o’clock an abstract and unpleasant concept.

You cancel your Saturday morning coffee with Mina, which you have never done, and she’s at your door by noon with a container of crackers and a forensic expression. “Talk,” she says.

“I think I’m coming down with something.”

“What kind of something.”

“I don’t know, Mina, a virus. A bug. Something that’s going around.”

She sits down on your bed and opens the crackers and holds them out to you and you take one because the sight of them is, somehow, the most appealing thing you’ve encountered all week. You eat it slowly. Your stomach does not immediately rebel. You take another one. “How long?” Mina asks.

“Since Wednesday morning.”

“And it’s worst in the morning.”

“Yes.”

“And you can’t drink coffee.”

“It tastes wrong.” Mina is quiet for a moment. You eat another cracker and look at the wall. “I’m sure it’s just a bug,” you say.

“Yeah,” Mina says, in a tone that means something else entirely. “Probably.”

The conspiracy theories start that evening, though. It’s the two of you on your bed with Mina’s laptop open and a bag of pretzels between you, and it begins reasonably enough — you googling nausea worse in morning possible causes and working through the list with the detached efficiency of someone who is definitely not spiralling. Stress. Acid reflux. Inner ear issues. Viral gastroenteritis. Dietary changes.

“Have you eaten anything different lately?” Mina asks.

“No.”

“Stressed about something?”

“When am I not stressed about something.”

“Fair.” She scrolls. “It says here inner ear problems can cause—”

“I don’t have inner ear problems, Mina.”

Mina scrolls further. You eat a pretzel and watch her face and wait for it. You know it’s coming. You’ve known since Saturday morning, if you’re being honest, since she’d sat on your bed with that specific expression and said probably in that specific tone, and you’ve been not-thinking about it with considerable effort for the past several hours.

“Okay,” Mina says, carefully, still looking at the screen. “What if.”

“No.”

“I haven’t said anything yet.”

“You don’t have to.” You pull the laptop toward you and close the tab. “It’s been less than two weeks. It’s too early for that. It’s a bug.”

“You used a condom?”

“Obviously.”

“They’re not a hundred percent.”

“It’s a bug,” you say. “It’s a completely normal bug that normal people get and it has nothing to do with — it’s a bug.”

Mina looks at you with the expression of someone who has several more things to say and has made a strategic decision to not say them yet. “Okay,” she says. “Bug.”

By Sunday you can’t keep breakfast down. You sit on your bathroom floor at eight in the morning with your back against the tub and your forehead against your knees and you think about the party, and Jake’s room, and the nightstand, and the condom, and you think no very firmly and repeatedly and it doesn’t help at all.

You text Mina. can you come over

She’s there in seven minutes. She doesn’t say anything when you open the door, just looks at your face, and you nod back at her.

The Caldwell campus drugstore is a five minute walk from your building and has, blessedly, a single-occupancy bathroom at the back that Mina sweet-talks the Saturday cashier into letting you use on the grounds that you’re not feeling well, which is at least entirely true. It’s a very small bathroom.

The two of you fill it completely — you on the closed toilet lid, Mina with her back against the sink, the test sitting on the edge of it between you with three minutes on Mina’s phone timer counting down. Nobody says anything.

The tile is white. There’s a motivational poster on the back of the door — you’ve got this! in yellow letters — that you stare at with a feeling you can’t fully name.

Two minutes.

“It’s probably negative,” you say.

“Probably,” Mina says.

“The condom—”

“Yeah.” “And it’s been less than two weeks. Like. The timing—”

“The timing is actually about right,” Mina says, gently, “for symptoms to—”

“Stop,” you say.

One minute.

You watch the timer. The timer watches back. Your hands are completely still in your lap which surprises you — you’d have expected them to shake, but instead you feel very calm in the specific way that you get sometimes when something is about to happen and your body has decided that panic is a resource to be conserved.

The timer goes off.

Neither of you moves for a second. Then Mina picks up the test and looks at it. Her face does something — a flicker, fast and controlled, there and gone — and she hands it to you without speaking.

Two lines.

You look at it for a long time.

“Okay,” you say, finally.

“Yeah,” Mina says.

The motivational poster on the wall says you’ve got this! in yellow letters and you stare at it and think about Jake Sim telling the ceiling you can go whenever and feel something move through you that is too big and too complicated to have a name yet.

“Okay,” you say again. Like if you keep saying it, it’ll start meaning something useful.

—

You don’t go to him straight away. That feels important somehow — that you don’t just spiral out of that drugstore bathroom and make a beeline for the Hargrove Center in a panic, that you go back to your dorm first and sit with it for a while like a person with some degree of self-possession.

You and Mina order food you mostly don’t eat and sit on your bed with the test face-down on the nightstand like if you can’t see it it’s less real, and you talk around it for a while before you talk about it directly, which is its own kind of processing.

“You don’t have to decide anything today,” Mina says.

“I know.”

“You don’t have to tell him today either.”

“I know.” You pull your sleeves over your hands. “But I feel like — I don’t know. He should know. Like in or not he’s — it’s his. He should know.”

Mina is quiet for a moment. “Okay,” she says. “But eat something first.”

You eat half a portion of noodles. It’s the most you’ve managed in days and your stomach accepts it cautiously, like it’s making no promises. Then you change your top, put your shoes on, and look at Mina.

“Don’t come with me,” you say.

“I wasn’t going to.”

“You were absolutely going to.”

She opens her mouth. Closes it. “Text me the second you’re out.”

The Hargrove Center is a twenty minute walk across campus and you use all twenty minutes to rehearse what you’re going to say, which turns out to be a complete waste of time because the moment you push through the side door and the cold air of the rink hits you — that particular sharp smell of ice and equipment — your prepared sentences evaporate entirely.

Practice is just wrapping up. You can see them from the entrance, the Wolves coming off the ice in clusters, helmets off, sticks in hand. Jay Park says something that makes Riki Nishimura laugh. Jungwon Yang is already halfway to the boards.

And Jake is — there, centre ice, still, talking to one of the assistant coaches with his helmet under his arm and his hair pushed back from his face, and even from here he looks like someone who has never had an uncontrollable variable in his life.

You wait.

You’re good at waiting. You’ve spent the last two weeks being good at things you didn’t choose to be good at.

He sees you when he comes off the ice — clocks you in the way that people clock something unexpected in a familiar space, a brief recalibration. Something moves across his face, too fast to read. Then it’s gone and he’s walking toward you with the easy unhurried stride of someone who has decided to be unbothered and you stand your ground and wait for him to reach you.

“Hey,” he says. Like you’re an acquaintance. Like he’s mildly surprised to see you and finds it mildly unremarkable.

“I need to talk to you,” you say. Something shifts.

The easy expression doesn’t disappear exactly but it adjusts, becomes more guarded. He glances around — Jay is watching from the boards with open curiosity, Riki less subtly — and then jerks his head toward the corridor off the main rink.

You follow him into it. It’s quieter here, the noise of the rink muffled, the overhead lights slightly too bright. He turns and faces you with his arms crossed and his weight back, and waits. You had sentences. You had very good sentences, all the way across campus.

“I’m pregnant,” you say.

The corridor goes very quiet. Jake looks at you. His expression does several things in quick succession that he doesn’t quite manage to keep off his face — shock, and something that might be fear, and then a shuttering, a closing, something careful dropping down over all of it.

“Okay,” he says.

“Okay,” you repeat.

“That’s — okay. How far—”

“I just found out today. So.” You fold your arms across your chest. “Not far.”

He nods slowly. His jaw is working. He looks at the floor for a moment and then back at you and the careful expression is fully in place now, composed and unreadable, and you don’t know whether to be relieved or furious about it.

“Are you sure it’s mine,” he says.

The corridor goes even quieter somehow.

You look at him. “What did you just say.”

“I’m just—” He shifts his weight. “We don’t know each other. I don’t know who else you’ve been—”

“Are you calling me a slut.” It comes out flat. Not a question.

“I’m not calling you anything, I’m just saying I don’t know—”

“You’re the only person I’ve slept with in four months.” Your voice is very level. “I was in a relationship. It ended. I haven’t — there’s been no one else. There’s only been you.” You look at him. “And I can’t believe I’m standing here explaining that to you.”

“I’m not trying to—”

“You literally just implied I could have slept with someone else.” The level voice is beginning to fray at the edges. “You literally said that. To my face.”

“Look, I just—”

You slap him.

You don’t plan it. Your hand moves before the decision has fully formed, the sharp crack of it landing across his cheek, and then there’s a ringing silence and your palm is stinging and Jake’s head has turned with the force of it and he’s looking at you now with an expression you haven’t seen on him before. Not angry. Something more complicated than angry.

“Don’t ever,” you say, quietly, “imply something like that to me again.”

He says nothing. His hand has come up to his cheek, not pressing, just — there. His jaw is tight.

“I thought you should know,” you say. “That’s all. I thought you deserved to know because it’s yours and you deserved to know. I haven’t decided anything yet and I’m not asking you for anything.” You pull your bag higher on your shoulder. “Okay?”

“Okay,” he says. Low. You walk back out into the cold. You text Mina out and she sends back seventeen question marks which is fair.

You tell her you’ll explain when you get back and spend the walk home feeling the particular hollow exhaustion of someone who has done the thing they needed to do and now has no idea what comes next.

You’re back in your building, one flight up, when you hear him behind you. “Hey—”

You turn. Jake is in the stairwell, still in his practice gear, slightly out of breath like he walked fast to get here, and you have absolutely no idea how he found out which dorm you’re in and you’re going to have questions about that later.

“How did you—“

“Jay knew,” he says, which explains nothing and everything.

He comes up the last few steps and stops on your landing and runs a hand through his hair and looks like someone who has been having a very difficult internal conversation at speed. “Can I—”

“No,” you say.

“Two minutes.” You look at him. He looks back. The mark from your hand has faded from his cheek but his expression is still doing that thing — complicated, unreadable, something working behind it.

“Two minutes,” you say, and unlock your door. Your room is small and suddenly smaller with him in it. He stands just inside the door like he’s not sure he’s allowed further in, which is the most uncertain you’ve seen him, and you sit on the end of your bed and look at him and wait.

He reaches into his jacket. He puts a stack of bills on your desk. You look at the money. You look at him. “Jake.”

“It’s enough to cover — whatever you decide.” He’s not quite meeting your eyes. “I’m not — look. I don’t want a kid. I’m not in a place for that. We don’t know each other. But I’m not going to just—” He stops. Starts again. “Take it. Whatever you need it for.”

You stare at the money for a long moment. “Are you going to want to be involved,” you ask. “If I decide to keep it.”

Something crosses his face. “I don’t — I haven’t—” He exhales. “I don’t know.”

“Okay,” you say. “That’s honest at least.”

“Are you going to keep it,” he asks. Quietly. Like he’s not sure he has the right to ask.

You look at the money on your desk. You look at him — standing in your doorway in his practice gear, jaw tight, trying very hard to look like someone who has this handled and not quite managing it — and you think that this is the first time he’s looked like a person to you. Not the reputation, not the corridor composure, not the ceiling of his bedroom. Just a person who is as blindsided as you are and coping with it badly.

“I don’t know yet,” you say. “I’ll let you know when I do.”

He nods. He looks at you for a moment longer than necessary. Then he picks up the money from your desk and puts it on your nightstand instead, like the desk was somehow wrong, like the four feet of distance makes a difference, and you don’t say anything about it.

“I’m sorry,” he says, at the door. “For what I said. At the rink.”

You look at him. “Which part.”

“All of it.”

He closes the door behind him and you sit on your bed in the quiet of your room for a long time, the money on your nightstand and the weight of everything pressing down, and then you pick up your phone and call your sister.

She picks up on the third ring. “Hey, you.” Hannah’s voice is warm and slightly distracted in the way it always is — you can hear one of the kids in the background, the particular high-pitched negotiation of a five year old who wants something and has decided now is the time. “Give me two seconds.”

Then, away from the phone: “Lily, baby, I said after dinner. After. Yes. Because I said so, that’s why.” A door closing.

Then: “Okay. Hi. Sorry. What’s up?”

You open your mouth. You’ve been sitting on your bed for forty minutes since Jake left, the money on your nightstand and your phone in your hand, and you’ve composed this conversation approximately thirty times in your head and all thirty versions started more coherently than what actually comes out, which is: “I did something kind of stupid.”

“How stupid.”

“Significantly.”

A beat. Hannah has always been good at letting silence do its work, at not rushing in to fill it with the wrong thing. It’s one of the things you’ve always loved about her. “Okay,” she says. “Tell me.”

So you tell her. All of it — the party and Jake and the test and the corridor and the slap and him in your room with the money — and Hannah listens through all of it without interrupting, which is its own kind of gift, and when you’re done there’s a moment of quiet that feels like her sorting through it.

“Okay,” she says again. “First question. Are you physically okay?”

“Yes.”

“Second question. Do you have someone with you?”

“Mina’s coming over in an hour.”

“Good.” You can hear her moving around, the soft sounds of her kitchen. “Third question, and I want you to actually think about it before you answer — not what you think you should say, not what’s practical, not what he wants or what anyone else wants. Just you.”

She pauses. “Do you want to keep it?”

You look at the money on your nightstand.

You think about the question the way she asked it — stripped of everything else, just you, just the truth of it underneath all the noise.

The thing is, you already know. You’ve known since the bathroom floor this morning, since you sat with your back against the tub and your forehead on your knees. It’s why the knowing has been so terrifying — not because you’re uncertain but because you’re not, and being not uncertain makes it real in a way that uncertainty would have postponed.

“Yeah,” you say. Quietly. “I do. I just — I don’t want it to be his. I don’t want to be tied to someone who—” You stop. “I don’t want the situation. I just want—”

“The baby,” Hannah says. “Yeah.” She’s quiet for a moment. “Those are two separate things,” she says. “The situation and the baby. They feel like the same thing right now but they’re not.”

You hear her sit down somewhere. “Marcus and I — when I had Lily, things with us were not good. You remember. We were not in a good place. And I thought about it the same way — I want her, I just don’t want this. And it was hard. It was genuinely really hard. But she’s five now and she’s the most annoying, amazing person I’ve ever met and I can’t — I can’t imagine.”

You press the back of your hand to your mouth.

“I’m not telling you what to do,” Hannah says quickly. “I promise I’m not. Whatever you decide I’m with you. I just — you asked.”

“I know,” you manage. “I know you’re not.”

“Is he terrible?” she asks. “This Jake person.”

You think about the corridor. The money. I’m sorry. For what I said. All of it. “I don’t know yet,” you say. “He’s — I don’t know what he is.”

“Okay.” Hannah’s voice is careful and warm. “You don’t have to know yet. You don’t have to know anything yet except what you want. Everything else gets figured out.”

You sit with that for a moment. “I’m keeping it,” you say. Out loud, to another person, for the first time. It lands differently than it did in your head — more solid, more real, like something that has been decided rather than something being considered.

“Okay,” Hannah says, and she says it the way Mina says it — not okay as in fine but okay as in I’ve got you. “Then we figure out the rest.”

You tell Mina when she comes over and she holds your hand and doesn’t say anything for a long moment and then says “okay, what do we need to do” in the tone of someone rolling up their sleeves, which is exactly right, which is why she’s your person.

You tell Jake two days later.

You find him after morning practice on a Wednesday, same side entrance to the Hargrove Center, and this time he sees you coming and something in his posture adjusts — not quite bracing, just becoming more careful, more deliberate, the way he gets when he’s paying attention. “Hey,” he says.

“I’m keeping it,” you say.

He goes very still. You watch him process it — the stillness and then the almost imperceptible movement of his jaw, the way his eyes go somewhere internal for a second before coming back to you. He looks like someone doing rapid and complicated mathematics. “Okay,” he says finally.

“You don’t have to be involved. I meant that when I said it. I’m not — I’m not asking you for anything except to know. You deserved to know and now you know and whatever you decide to do with that is up to you.”

“I said I’d provide,” he says. “I meant that.”

“Money isn’t the same as involved.”

“I know.” He shifts his weight. His hands are in his pockets and he’s looking at you with that careful expression, the one you can’t fully read. “I don’t — I’m not going to be the guy who just throws money at it and disappears. That’s not—” He stops. “I don’t know what I am yet. But I’m not that.”

You look at him for a long moment. There is, underneath the practice gear and the careful composure and the history of the last two weeks, something that might be decency in there. It’s buried. It’s inconsistent. You’ve seen it appear and disappear enough times already to know better than to trust it yet. But it’s there. “Okay,” you say. “Then figure out what you are and let me know.”

You turn to go. “Can I—” He stops. You look back. “Can I have your number,” he says. “Properly. So we can — so it’s easier to—”

“To what.”

He looks, briefly, like someone who hasn’t thought this far ahead. “Talk,” he says. “If we need to.”

You look at him for a moment. Then you take out your phone and hold it out. He puts his number in and hands it back and you save it under Jake Sim (do not text unless necessary) which you do not show him. “I’ll be in touch,” you say.

Jake doesn’t mean to tell his friend— or he does, but not like this, not in the locker room with his gear half off and Riki eating a protein bar on the bench across from him and Jay taping his wrist in the corner and Jungwon doing something on his phone. It comes out the way things come out when you’ve been holding them too long and the effort of holding them finally exceeds the effort of saying them.

“I got someone pregnant,” he says.

The locker room goes quiet. Riki stops chewing. Jay puts down the tape. Jungwon looks up from his phone. “I’m sorry,” Jay says, with the careful enunciation of someone who wants to make sure they’ve heard correctly. “You what?”

“You heard me.”

“I heard you, I just want to make sure I—” Jay sets down the tape fully and turns to face him. “Who.”

“Girl from Delta Kappa. Three weeks ago.” Another silence. Jay is looking at him with an expression that Jake doesn’t particularly enjoy — something between concern and the specific look of someone doing the maths on how this could have happened and arriving at several uncomfortable conclusions about Jake’s general life choices.

“Are you—” Jungwon starts.

“I’m fine.”

“That’s not what I was going to ask.”

“Then what.”

Jungwon looks at him steadily. “Is she okay.”

Jake opens his mouth. Closes it. Thinks about you in the corridor at the rink and your voice going flat and your hand cracking across his face, and then you in your dorm room — calm and certain and telling him you weren’t asking him for anything, which was somehow the part that landed hardest. “I think so,” he says. “She’s — yeah.”

“Do you like her?” Riki asks, with the bluntness of someone who has not yet learned that some questions require more runway.

“I don’t know her,” Jake says.

“That’s not what I asked.” Jay shoots Riki a look. Riki shrugs and takes another bite of his protein bar.

“What are you going to do?” Jay asks, turning back to Jake.

Jake leans his elbows on his knees and looks at the floor. The locker room smells like it always does — ice and rubber and effort — and it’s familiar in a way that is almost destabilising right now, how normal everything around him is when nothing feels particularly normal. “I don’t know yet,” he says. “Be there, I think. As much as she’ll let me.”

“As much as she’ll let you,” Jay repeats. Something in his tone.

“She’s not — she’s not soft.” Jake looks up. “She’s not going to make it easy.”

“Should she?”

Jake looks at him. Jay looks back, steady and unhurried. “No,” Jake says, after a moment. “Probably not.”

Jay nods once. Picks the tape back up. “Then figure it out,” he says, like it’s simple, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world, and Jake sits with that in the familiar smell of the locker room and thinks that he probably needs to.

—

The truce, when it forms, is not announced. It happens gradually over the following week — a text from him checking if you need anything, which you respond to with I’m fine thanks and nothing else. A text from you three days later telling him your first appointment is booked for the following week, which he responds to with do you want me there and you respond with not yet and he responds with okay and that’s it, that’s the whole exchange, and somehow it’s the most civil conversation you’ve had.

He doesn’t push. You note this without letting it mean too much. You’re not friends. You’re not anything with a name. You’re two people who made a mistake that turned into something neither of you planned for, and you’re figuring out how to exist in the same orbit without either of you combusting, and most days it feels manageable and some days it feels impossible and on the days it feels impossible you call Hannah, who answers on the third ring and lets the silence do its work.

It’s something, you think. It’s not much but it’s something. For now, that has to be enough.

The thing about Caldwell though, is that it’s a big campus until it isn’t.

Thirty thousand students, four faculties, two libraries, a quad the size of a small park — and yet somehow the people you most want to avoid have an unerring instinct for occupying the same coffee shop, the same corridor, the same stretch of pavement at the same time.

You’ve been navigating this for four months with Sunghoon and you’ve gotten good at it. You know his schedule well enough to avoid it without meaning to, the way you learn the shape of someone after two years and can’t quite unlearn it.

Which is why it catches you off guard when he’s just — there. The library café, a Tuesday afternoon, three weeks after the test. You’re at a corner table with your laptop and a cup of tea you’ve been nursing for an hour because coffee is still wrong and probably will be for the foreseeable future, and you’re halfway through a close reading of Middlemarch chapter forty-two when someone pulls out the chair across from you and sits down and you look up and it’s Sunghoon.

He looks, as he always looks, like something assembled with unreasonable care. Dark hair, clean jawline, the particular quality of stillness he has that used to make you feel calm and now just makes you feel tired.

“Hey,” he says.

You look at him. Then at the chair he’s sitting in. Then back at him. “I didn’t say you could sit.”

“I know.” He doesn’t move. “I just wanted to talk.”

“Sunghoon.”

“Five minutes.”

You close your laptop. Not because you’re agreeing, but because whatever he’s about to say you want to be looking at him when he says it. “Five minutes,” you say. “And then you’re going to go away.”

Something moves through his expression — not quite hurt, but adjacent. He folds his hands on the table. He has nice hands. You spent two years noticing his hands. “I saw you at Delta Kappa,” he says.

“I know. You texted me.”

“You didn’t reply.” He looks at you steadily. “You were talking to Jake Sim.”

There it is.

You keep your face very neutral. “I was at a party. I talked to a lot of people.”

“Jake Sim isn’t a lot of people.” Something in his voice shifts — not quite possessive, not quite jealous, threading that needle with the precision of someone who knows he doesn’t have the right to either and is trying to disguise it as concern. “He’s not a good person to get involved with.”

“Thank you for that,” you say. “I’ll bear it in mind.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I.” You look at him. “Sunghoon. You don’t get to come sit at my table and tell me who I should and shouldn’t talk to. You gave that up.”

His jaw tightens. “I know I did.”

“Then why are you here?”

He’s quiet for a moment. Outside the café windows the quad is grey and overcast, students moving across it with their heads down against the wind, and Sunghoon is looking at you with an expression you know — you’ve catalogued it, the way you’ve catalogued everything about him, two years of accumulated knowledge you can’t seem to put down. It’s the expression he gets when he wants to say something and is choosing his words with care.

“I miss you,” he says.

You look at him for a long time. The honest answer is that you miss him too — or you miss the version of things you thought you had, which isn’t exactly the same as missing him but lives close enough to it that the distinction is hard to maintain on a grey Tuesday afternoon with him sitting across from you looking like that.

You miss having a person. You miss the shape of your life before it got complicated in every possible direction.

But you also know what he did.

You know it with the specific clarity of something you’ve gone over enough times that it’s stopped being sharp and started being just — true. A fact about him. A fact about what he chose. “I know,” you say. Carefully. “But that’s not my problem to fix.”

He nods. Slow. Like he expected it and it still costs him something. He stands up, pushes the chair back in, and then pauses with his hands on the back of it. “Are you okay?” he asks. “Actually? You look—” He stops.

“I look what.”

“Tired,” he says. “You look tired.”

“I’m fine,” you say.

He looks at you for a moment longer. Then he goes, and you open your laptop, and you stare at Middlemarch chapter forty-two for a while without reading any of it.

You don’t tell Jake about Sunghoon.

There’s no reason to.

You and Jake are not — whatever you are, it doesn’t include telling each other things. It includes occasional texts, one appointment you went to alone where a doctor confirmed what you already knew and gave you a due date that made it real in a new and specific way, and a strange careful politeness that exists between you like a temporary structure neither of you fully trusts.

He texts you on a Friday evening. how are you feeling

You look at it for a while. Fine. Less sick this week.

that’s good

A pause. Then: do you need anything?

You think about your sister’s voice. You don’t have to know anything yet except what you want. You think about Jake in your dorm room, the money on your nightstand, I’m not going to be the guy who just throws money at it. You think about how many times in the past three weeks he’s almost been decent and then done something to complicate it.

I’m okay, you send back. Thanks.

He sends a thumbs up and you put your phone face down and tell yourself this is fine, this arrangement is fine, and mostly you believe it.

You find out about the girl on a Saturday night.

You’re not looking for it — you’re not the kind of person who goes searching for things they don’t want to find, you learned that lesson with Sunghoon — but Caldwell is a big campus until it isn’t, and Mina’s friend group overlaps with the hockey crowd in the specific way that happens at schools where athletes are their own ecosystem but not a fully separate one.

It’s Mina who tells you, with the careful expression of someone who has been sitting on information and decided you’d rather hear it from her. “I heard Jake hooked up with someone last weekend,” she says. Not leading with it, not burying it either. Just: here is a thing that is true.

You look at your coffee. You’ve graduated back to coffee this week, weak and milky, which feels like a victory. “Okay,” you say.

“You’re allowed to have feelings about that.”

“We’re not together, Mina.”

“I know.”

“He can do whatever he wants. We’re not — there’s nothing between us. We’re just—” You move your hand in a vague gesture that encompasses the entire situation. “This.”

“I know,” Mina says again, in the tone that means she has more to say and is choosing not to. You continue to drink your coffee.

The thing is — and this is the part you don’t say out loud, the part you turn over privately in the quiet of your own head — the thing is that you know she’s right.

You are allowed to have feelings about it.

You do have feelings about it, somewhere underneath the very reasonable and correct observation that Jake Sim owes you nothing beyond basic decency and whatever co-parenting arrangement you eventually figure out.

You have feelings about it the way you have feelings about a lot of things lately — in the muffled, at-a-distance way, like they’re happening to someone slightly removed from you and you’re watching through glass.

You’re pregnant with his baby and he’s sleeping with someone else and you’re not together and you have no claim on him and all of that is true simultaneously and you’re not sure what to do with the fact that it still sits in your chest like something uncomfortable.

“I don’t care,” you tell Mina. She looks at you with the expression that means I know you and I know that’s not entirely true but I love you so I’ll let you have it.

“Okay,” she says.

—

Jake texts you on Sunday.

heard you’ve been doing better. that’s good

You stare at the message for a long time. Yeah, you type back. Thanks.

A pause. Then: can I take you to your next appointment?

You put the phone down. Pick it up. Put it down again.

The question sits there, simple and direct, and the thing about it is that it isn’t nothing. It’s not the gesture of someone who is just throwing money at a situation. It’s — something. Small and tentative and probably not enough and something nonetheless.

It’s in two weeks, you send back. I’ll let you know.

okay, he says. no pressure.

You put the phone down and look at the ceiling and think about a girl you don’t know and a Saturday night you weren’t part of and the specific stupidity of having feelings about either, and then you think about your next appointment and the due date the doctor gave you and the small impossible reality of all of it, and you decide that you are going to take a nap and deal with every single one of these things later.

Later, you think. All of it later.

He comes to the appointment, in the end you let him. You texted him the details the night before — time, building, room number — and he’s there when you arrive, standing outside the health centre with his hands in his jacket pockets and his breath fogging in the cold, and he looks up when he sees you coming and something in his expression does that thing, that complicated unreadable thing, and he falls into step beside you without saying anything.

Inside, in the waiting room, you sit next to each other in plastic chairs with a magazine between you that neither of you reads. A couple across the room are holding hands. You and Jake sit with six inches of space between you like a demilitarised zone.

“You okay?” he asks, quietly.

“Fine,” you say. “You?”

“Fine,” he says.

The nurse calls your name and you both stand up and Jake follows you in and stands slightly to the side while the doctor talks and asks questions and pulls up the scan on the screen, and you look at it — the small impossible blur of it, the heartbeat a flickering certainty on the monitor — and you feel the thing in your chest that you’ve been keeping at distance move closer without permission.

Beside you Jake goes very still.

You don’t look at him. You look at the screen.

“Everything looks perfect,” the doctor says.

You nod. You don’t trust your voice.

In the corridor after, walking back out into the cold, Jake is quiet for a long time. Longer than usual even for him.

You’re almost at the path that splits — his way, your way — when he says, without looking at you: “That was—”

“Yeah,” you say.

He nods. Puts his hands back in his pockets. “I’ll walk you back,” he says.

You think about the girl he slept with. You think about Sunghoon in the library café. You think about the scan on the monitor and the heartbeat that is real and certain and not theoretical anymore.

“Okay,” you say.

He walks you back. You don’t talk much. It’s not uncomfortable exactly — it’s something more complicated than that, something neither of you has a name for yet, and when you reach your building he stops at the bottom of the steps and looks at you and opens his mouth and then closes it again.

“What,” you say.

“Nothing,” he says. “Just — take care of yourself.” You look at him for a moment.

“You too,” you say, and go inside.

—

Sunghoon doesn’t give up. You’d half expected him to — one conversation in the library café, you’d said your piece, he’d said his, and you’d thought that would be the end of it. Sunghoon has always been precise about things, economical, not the type to repeat himself unnecessarily. You’d thought he’d take the answer and file it and move on.

Instead he texts you on a Wednesday. Just — how are you doing. No punctuation, which for Sunghoon is practically shouting.

You don’t reply.

He texts again on Friday. can we get coffee sometime? just to talk?

You stare at it for a long time.

You show it to Mina, who makes a face. “Don’t,” she says.

“I’m not going to,” you say.

He finds you on campus on Monday — the English building, your own territory, which feels deliberate. He’s waiting near the entrance when you come out of your seminar and you see him before he sees you and for one uncharitable second you think about turning around and going back inside.

You don’t. You keep walking. “Hey,” he says, falling into step beside you.

“Sunghoon.”

“I just want to walk with you.”

“I didn’t say you could.”

“I know.” He walks with you anyway, hands in his coat pockets, quiet for a moment in the way that used to feel comfortable and now just feels like pressure. “How are you feeling?”

You glance at him. “Fine.”

“You look better than last time I saw you. Less tired.”

“Thanks,” you say, flatly.

He’s quiet again. The path curves toward the quad and you keep walking and he keeps pace and you’re aware — acutely, uncomfortably aware — that you’re starting to show. Not dramatically, not in a way that’s obvious under your coat, but enough that you know. Enough that it’s a matter of time.

“I meant what I said,” Sunghoon says. “In the library.”

“I know you did.”

“I’m not trying to pressure you.”

“You’re walking next to me uninvited,” you say. “What would you call that?”

He stops. You stop too, half a beat later, and turn to look at him. He’s standing in the middle of the path with that precise, careful expression and something underneath it that isn’t quite what he’s performing, and you know him well enough to know the difference and wish you didn’t.

“I made a mistake,” he says. “I know I did. I know what I did and I know it was—” He stops. Starts again. “I just want a chance to—”

“Sunghoon.” You keep your voice even. “I can’t do this right now. I genuinely cannot — there is too much happening in my life right now for me to also be doing this. Okay? Please.”

He looks at you. Something in his expression shifts — a question forming, something he’s noticed that he can’t quite place. “What’s happening?” he asks. Carefully.

“Nothing that’s your business,” you say. “Please just — let me go.”

And he lets you go.

But the problem is that Caldwell is a big campus until it isn’t.

The problem is that two weeks later you’re at a party you didn’t particularly want to attend — a smaller thing, a friend of Mina’s, an apartment off campus — and both of them are there. Jake and Sunghoon.

You don’t notice Jake first. You notice Sunghoon, across the room with his circle, and you note it and move on, you’re good at that now. You get a drink — water, the specific reality of being the only sober person at a party hitting — and find Mina and settle into the corner and decide you’ll stay an hour and then leave.

You notice Jake about twenty minutes in.

He’s near the kitchen with Jay, and there’s a girl — tall, dark-haired, laughing at something he’s said with her hand on his arm and her body angled toward him in the specific way that means something. You see him lean in to say something close to her ear. You see her laugh again. You look away.

You look back to Mina, who is mid-conversation with someone and hasn’t clocked it, and you drink your water and you are fine, you are completely fine, this is exactly what you knew was happening and seeing it in person doesn’t change anything and you are fine.

You last another twenty minutes before you decide you’re going to get some air.

The problem is that getting air requires passing the kitchen. Jake sees you at the same moment you see him and something in his expression shifts — that recalibration, that adjustment — and the girl’s hand is still on his arm and you keep walking, eyes forward, almost past— “Hey.”

His voice.

You stop. You turn. He’s stepped slightly away from the girl, who is watching with a politely curious expression. “Hey,” you say.

“You’re here,” he says, which is not his most articulate moment.

“Briefly,” you say. “Don’t mind me.” Something moves across his face.

“You okay?”

“Fine.” You smile at him — pleasant, neutral, the smile of someone who is absolutely fine. “Enjoy your night.” You keep walking.

The air outside is cold and you stand on the small concrete step outside the apartment and breathe it and tell yourself the tightness in your chest is just the stuffiness of the party and not anything else.

You hear the door behind you. “Hey—”

You turn, expecting Jake, and it’s Sunghoon. Of course it’s Sunghoon.

He’s in his coat, hands in his pockets, and he looks at you with that careful expression and says “I saw you come out” like that explains what he’s doing here, which it does, which doesn’t make it better.

“I needed air,” you say.

“I know.” He comes to stand beside you. Close, but not touching. “You looked upset.”

“I’m not upset.”

“You have a face,” he says, gently, and you hate that he’s right, hate that after four months and everything that happened he can still read you like that. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing.”

“Is it Sim?” Something in his voice changes — not quite hard, not quite angry, threading the needle. “Are you involved with him?”

“That’s not your business.”

“I’m asking because I’m worried about you, not because—”

“Sunghoon.” You turn to face him. “Please stop. Please just—”

The door opens behind you. Jake comes out. He takes in the scene — you and Sunghoon, close, Sunghoon’s expression, yours — in about half a second and his jaw tightens in a way you’ve learned to read as something being suppressed.

“Everything okay?” he asks. Looking at you, not at Sunghoon.

“Fine,” you say, for what feels like the hundredth time tonight.

“She said she’s fine,” Sunghoon says. His voice is even. “So you can go back inside.” Jake looks at him. Something passes between them that has nothing to do with you — some older, unnamed thing.

“I wasn’t talking to you,” Jake says.

“Then walk away.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“Jake.” Your voice is sharper than you intend. “It’s fine. Go inside.”

He doesn’t go inside.

He stays where he is with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on Sunghoon, and Sunghoon stays where he is with that precise stillness, and the cold air between all three of you is doing a lot of work.

“You’re the one she’s been seeing,” Sunghoon says, to Jake. Not a question.

“That’s not your business,” Jake says.

“It is when you’re—” Sunghoon stops. Something has crossed his face — he’s looking at you, at your coat, and the realisation moves through his expression slowly and then all at once.

His eyes find yours. “Are you—”

“Don’t,” you say.

“Are you pregnant?”

The step goes very quiet.

Jake goes very still.

You look at Sunghoon and there is a specific kind of exhaustion that moves through you — the exhaustion of someone who has been managing too many things for too long and has just watched one of them slip out of their hands.

“That,” you say, carefully, “is none of your business.”

“It’s his, isn’t it.” Not looking at Jake. Looking at you. Something in his voice that you don’t have a name for — not anger, not hurt, something more complicated and less clean than either. “You hooked up with Jake Sim at a party and now you’re—”

“Sunghoon—”

“What were you thinking?” And there it is — the composure cracking, the precision slipping, something rawer underneath. “What were you actually — with him, of all people—”

“Hey.” Jake’s voice is hard. “Watch yourself.”

“You stay out of it—”

“She told you it’s none of your business—”

“I’m talking to her—”

“Then talk to her with some respect—”

“Oh that’s rich, coming from you.” Sunghoon turns to Jake fully now and the precise stillness has sharpened into something else. “Everyone knows what you are. Everyone knows how you treat—”

“And everyone knows what you did,” Jake says, low and flat. “So don’t stand here and act like you’ve got the moral—”

“Stop.” Your voice cuts through both of them. They both look at you. “Both of you. Stop.”

A beat. “I’m going home,” you say. “This is—” You gesture at the three of you, at the step, at all of it. “I’m not doing this.”

“I’ll walk you—” Both of them, simultaneously.

“Neither of you will walk me anywhere.” You pull your coat around you. “I want to go by myself and I want both of you to leave me alone tonight. Okay?”

Sunghoon opens his mouth.

And then — later, when you try to reconstruct the exact sequence, it’s hard to isolate the moment it tips — he reaches for your arm, a gesture, just trying to stop you leaving, and Jake moves at the same time, stepping forward, his hand coming out to push Sunghoon back, and Sunghoon turns, and the angles are all wrong, and Jake’s elbow catches you across the side of your face.

It’s not hard. It’s not a real blow — it’s the edge of the motion, glancing, the kind of thing that in any other circumstance would be an accidental knock in a crowded corridor that you’d shake off and keep walking.

But you make a sound and stumble back.

Jake turns and sees your face and goes completely white. “Fuck—” He reaches for you.

“Don’t touch me.”

Your hand comes up. Your voice has gone very quiet. The side of your face is throbbing, low and dull, and underneath it everything else — the tiredness, the party, Sunghoon’s face when he realised, the girl’s hand on Jake’s arm — all of it presses in at once and you are so, so tired.

“I didn’t — it was an accident, I didn’t mean to—”

“I know it was an accident,” you say. Still quiet. Still very controlled. “I know that.”

“Are you okay? The baby—”

“I’m fine. It was my face, not—” You stop. Press your fingers briefly to your temple. “I’m fine.”

Jake is looking at you with an expression you haven’t seen on him before — something undone about it, all the composure gone, something almost desperate. “Let me take you home—”

“No.”

You look at him. Then at Sunghoon, who has gone very still and very pale. “I’m going to get Mina. I’m going to go home. And I don’t want either of you to contact me tonight.”

You take out your phone. You text Mina. You wait on the step with your back to both of them until she comes out, takes one look at your face, takes your arm, and walks you away without saying a word.

Behind you, you don’t look back.

Jake texts at midnight. I’m so sorry. please tell me you’re okay

You look at it for a long time. I’m fine, you send back. Goodnight Jake.

He sends: I’m sorry again

Those two words, and you put your phone face down and stare at the ceiling of your dorm room and Mina is asleep in your desk chair with a blanket over her because she refused to go home and you love her for it, and the small dull ache in your temple has faded to almost nothing, and the baby is fine, you’re fine, everything is fine.

You don’t text him back.

He tries on Sunday.

A text at nine in the morning — can we talk please? — that you look at and put face down without replying.

Then at eleven: I know you’re angry. you have every right to be. I just want to talk.

Then at two in the afternoon, which shows either impressive persistence or a complete inability to read a room: I’m going to keep texting until you tell me to stop.

You text back: stop.

He texts back: okay. I’m sorry.

You put the phone in your drawer.

He doesn’t stop.

Well, he stops texting — he respects that, or he tries to, mostly — but he finds other ways. There’s a bag outside your dorm room door on Monday morning: crackers, the specific brand you’d been eating in the early weeks, ginger tea, a punnet of the green grapes that you’d mentioned once in passing to him that you’d been craving. No note. Just the bag.

You stand in your doorway looking at it for a long time.

You bring it inside. You eat the grapes. You do not text him to say thank you and you do not text him to say stop and the not-texting feels like its own kind of answer that you’re not ready to examine yet.

On Tuesday he’s outside your building.

Not lurking — he’s sitting on the low wall by the entrance with his hands between his knees and his jacket on against the cold, and he stands up when he sees you come out and he doesn’t move toward you, just — stands there, and waits, and lets you decide.

You stop on the steps. “Jake.”

“Five minutes,” he says. “I know I don’t deserve them. Five minutes and then I’ll go and I won’t — I’ll leave you alone if that’s what you want.”

You look at him. He looks back. He has, you note, the specific appearance of someone who hasn’t been sleeping well — not dramatic, just a tightness around his eyes, a quality of having been somewhere difficult in his own head for the past two days.

Good, says a part of you.

The other part steps down off the steps and stands in front of him and crosses her arms and says: “Five minutes.”

He exhales. “I’m sorry,” he says. “For Friday night. For — all of it, the whole night, but specifically for—” He stops. His jaw works. “I should never have let it get to that point. I should have walked away from him the second it started and I didn’t and you got hurt and you’re — the baby could have—” He stops again. Something in his face that isn’t composure. “I will never forgive myself for that. I need you to know that. It keeps me up.”

You look at him. “It was an accident.”

“It was an accident that happened because I couldn’t keep my head.” His voice is flat with self-assessment. “Same difference.”

“It’s not the same difference.”

“It’s close enough.” He looks at you steadily. “I’m also sorry for the girl at the party. I know you saw. I know we’re not — I know you don’t have any claim on me and I don’t have any claim on you and technically I didn’t do anything wrong but I’m still sorry because I saw your face and I knew and I did it anyway and that’s—” He stops. “That’s not who I want to be. With this. With you.”

The wall by the entrance is cold and grey and a girl from your floor passes you both with her earphones in and doesn’t look up and the world keeps moving indifferently around this conversation.

“You hurt me,” you say. Not the elbow. The other thing. The girl at the party and the ceiling of his bedroom and the weeks of almost-decency that kept getting complicated. “Not — not physically. You just keep—” You stop. “Every time I think maybe you’re a person you do something that reminds me why I shouldn’t think that.”

He takes that. Doesn’t deflect, doesn’t explain, just takes it. “I know,” he says.

“I need you to be consistent,” you say. “I can’t — I’m going to have your baby, Jake. We’re going to be in each other’s lives for a very long time. I need you to be someone I can rely on or I need you to be completely absent because the in-between is—” Your voice doesn’t shake. You’re proud of that. “It’s too hard. I can’t do the in-between.”

He’s quiet for a moment. The wind moves across the quad and he looks at you with that expression — the undone one, the one without composure — and says: “I don’t want to be absent.”

“Then be consistent.”

“Okay.”

“That’s it? Okay?”

“What else do you want me to say?” He’s not defensive — it’s a real question, earnest in a way that sits oddly on him, like a piece of vocabulary he hasn’t used much. “Tell me what you need and I’ll do it. Specifically. I’m not good at—” He moves his hand. “Guessing. Feelings. Whatever this is. But if you tell me what it looks like I’ll do it.”

You look at him for a long moment.

“No more girls,” you say. “Not while we’re — not while this is what it is. I know I have no right to ask that but I’m asking.”

Something shifts in his expression. “Done,” he says. No hesitation.

“And show up. When you say you’re going to show up, show up.”

“Done.”

“And don’t fight people on my behalf. I can handle my own situations.”

His jaw tightens slightly. “That one’s harder.”

“Jake.”

“Done,” he says. “Okay. Done.”

You look at him. He looks back. The five minutes has long since passed and neither of you has moved and the cold is starting to get into your fingers.

“The grapes were good,” you say finally.

Something in his expression — brief, warm, gone almost immediately. “I’ll get more,” he says.

“You don’t have to—”

“I want to.” He says it simply. No performance in it.

You nod. You pull your coat tighter. “I have a seminar,” you say.

“I know. Go.” He steps back, hands in his pockets. “Thank you. For the five minutes.”

You go.

He tells his father that evening.

He doesn’t plan to. He goes to his dad’s office on the east side of the admin building for what is ostensibly a standing weekly dinner that they do on Tuesday evenings — a thing they’ve done since Jake’s freshman year, his dad’s attempt at maintaining something normal in the specific abnormality of being the dean’s son at your own father’s university. They go to the Italian place two blocks off campus. They talk about the team, the season, coursework, the usual rotation.

Except tonight Jake sits down across from his father and picks up the menu and puts it down again and his dad looks at him over his own menu with the steady, unhurried attention that has always been the most disarming thing about him — the way he looks at you like he has all the time in the world and means it — and says:

“What’s going on.” Not a question. His dad has never really needed to make them questions.

Jake puts his menu down. He looks at the table. He thinks about you on the steps this morning saying every time I think maybe you’re a person and the specific accuracy of it, the way it had landed not like an attack but like a diagnosis.

“I got someone pregnant,” he says.

The restaurant is quiet around them — mid-evening, not full yet, the soft noise of other people’s conversations providing cover. His dad sets his menu down with the deliberate care of someone who is choosing his response carefully.

“How far along,” he says.

“About eight weeks.”

His dad nods slowly. He’s a big man — Jake has his build, the same broad shoulders, though his dad carries more grey now at his temples and something steadier in his face, something earned. He looks at Jake with the expression that Jake has never been able to fully decode — not anger, not disappointment exactly, something more complicated and more patient than either.

“Tell me about her,” he says.

Jake blinks. Of all the things he’d expected — “What?”

“The woman. Tell me about her.”

Jake opens his mouth. Closes it. He thinks about you — the flat voice in the corridor at the rink, your hand cracking across his face, I can’t do the in-between. The grapes. The way you’d said the grapes were good like it cost you something to admit it.

“She’s—” He stops. Tries again. “She’s a third year. English lit. She’s sharp. Like — she doesn’t let me get away with anything, she just looks at me and calls it and moves on. She’s not—” He shifts. “She didn’t want this to be mine. She told me that. She wants the baby, she just didn’t want it to be complicated, and I’ve made it complicated.”

“How.”

Jake looks at the table. Lists it. The slap he deserved, the money that was clumsy, the girl at the party, Friday night and the elbow and her face and the specific look she’d had, controlled and exhausted and done.

His dad listens to all of it without interrupting. When Jake finishes there’s a pause — his dad picks up his water glass, drinks, sets it back down.

“Do you like her?” he asks.

Jake looks up.

“It’s a simple question,” his dad says.

“We don’t — I don’t know her. Not really.”

“That’s not what I asked, son.”

Jake is quiet for a moment. He thinks about you outside your building this morning, arms crossed, giving him five minutes you didn’t have to give. The way you’d said I need you to be someone I can rely on like it was the most reasonable thing in the world, like you weren’t asking for anything extraordinary, just — consistency. Basic human consistency. The thing he has never had to be for anyone.

“Yeah,” he says. Quiet. “I think so.”

His dad nods. Like that’s the piece he needed. Like everything else was context and that was the information.

“Then be someone worth liking,” he says. Simply. Like it’s obvious. Like it’s the only thing that matters and everything else is just logistics.

Jake looks at him.

“You’ve never had to work for anything,” his dad says, and it’s not unkind — it’s just true, delivered with the directness of someone who has been watching this coming for a long time. “Not really. Not the things that count. You’re talented and you’re smart and things have always — moved for you. And that’s partly my fault.” He meets Jake’s eyes. “But she’s right. You can’t be the in-between. You’re going to be someone’s father. That’s not a thing you can be inconsistent about.”

Jake absorbs this.

“I know,” he says.

“Do you?”

“I’m trying to.”

His dad looks at him for a long moment. Then he picks his menu back up. “Good,” he says. “That’s the right answer.” He glances over the top of it. “Order something. You look like you haven’t eaten good in a while.”

Jake looks at the menu.

“Dad,” he says.

“Mm.”

“I really—” He stops. “I’ve really made a mess of this.”

His dad lowers the menu slightly. Looks at him with that steady, unhurried attention. “Yes,” he says. “But messes can be cleaned up.” He raises the menu again. “The carbonara is good tonight.”

Jake picks up his menu.

He end up ordering the carbonara.

—

The thing about consistency is that it’s quiet.

It doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t arrive with a gesture or a speech or a moment you can point to and say — there, that’s when things changed. It just accumulates, slowly, in the background of your ordinary life, until one day you look up and realise the weight you’ve been carrying has shifted without you noticing.

Jake shows up.

That’s the only way to describe it. He shows up in the small ways, the unglamorous ways, the ways that don’t make for a good story but add up to something anyway. He texts when he says he will. He’s outside your building on Wednesday mornings because you have a seminar and the walk takes you past the science quad where the wind is brutal and he started walking with you three weeks ago without asking and has not stopped. He brings food — not always the crackers and ginger tea, sometimes just the grapes, sometimes something from the good Thai place near the rink that you’d mentioned once you were craving and didn’t expect him to remember.

He remembers things.

This is, you find, the most disarming thing about him. More than the jaw and the shoulders and the specific quality of his attention when he’s fully in a conversation.

He remembers that you take your tea with one sugar and that you’re writing your dissertation on George Eliot and that your sister’s youngest is called Lily and that you cannot watch medical dramas right now because they make you anxious in a way you can’t fully explain. He files things away and uses them with a quietness that suggests he’s not doing it to impress you — he’s just paying attention.

And god, it’s harder to be angry at someone who pays attention. You’re still trying.

Your bump begins appearing at eleven weeks.

Not dramatically — not one morning you wake up transformed, just a gradual undeniable softening of the line of your stomach that means your jeans sit differently and your favourite hoodie, the oversized one you’ve worn for three years, suddenly doesn’t hang quite right. You stand in front of your mirror on a Thursday morning and put your hand flat against it and stay there for a moment with the strange doubled feeling that has been following you for weeks now — the unreality of it and the complete reality of it, existing simultaneously, refusing to resolve.

Mina notices before you say anything. She’s been noticing for two weeks, you suspect, and has been waiting for you to bring it up, which is one of the reasons she’s your person.

“You’re showing,” she says, on Friday afternoon, without preamble.

“A little,” you say.

“How do you feel about that?”

You think about it genuinely. “Weird,” you say. “Good weird. Mostly good weird.”

Mina nods. “Have you told Jake?”

“He’ll notice,” you say. “We’re — we’ve been spending time together. He’ll see.”

Mina looks at you with the expression that means she has registered the significance of we’ve been spending time together and is choosing, for now, not to make anything of it. “Okay,” she says.

“Don’t,” you say.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You were going to.”

“I really wasn’t,” she says, in the tone that means she absolutely was.

He notices on Saturday.

You’re at this Thai place — his suggestion, your agreement, the two of you in a corner booth with menus neither of you needs because you’ve been here enough times now that you already know — and you’ve taken your coat off because the restaurant is warm and you’re wearing a fitted top and when you reach across the table for the soy sauce you catch him looking.

Not rudely. Not in a way that makes you want to cover yourself. Just — looking, with that attentive expression, taking in information.

“Don’t,” you say.

“I’m not doing anything.”

“You have a face.”

“I have a face,” he says, which is almost a smile. “You’re showing.”

“I know.”

“You look—” He stops. Considers his word choice with unusual care. “Good,” he says finally. “You look good.”

You look at him across the table. “That was very diplomatic.”

“I meant it.”

“Jake.”

“I genuinely meant it.” He meets your eyes. “You look good. You’ve looked good for a while. I just—” He stops again. “Didn’t say it. You looks beautiful actually.”

The restaurant is warm and smells like lemongrass and the couple at the next table are arguing quietly about something and the ordinary world is going on all around you and Jake Sim is sitting across from you saying you look good with an expression that has nothing performative in it, no angle, no formula.

You pick up your menu that you don’t need and look at it. “Thank you,” you say, at the laminated page.

He goes back to his menu too. Neither of you says anything else about it. But the air between you has shifted by some small degree and you both know it and neither of you is ready to name it yet and that, you think, is okay.

For now that’s okay.

The not-naming becomes its own kind of language eventually.

He walks you to your seminar on Wednesday and waits fifteen minutes in the wrong direction from the rink to do it, which you know because you’ve looked at the campus map, which you will not be telling him. You bring him coffee one morning — just once, without explanation, the specific order you’ve heard him give three times now — and he takes it without making anything of it which is exactly right. You text him a photo of a onesie Mina finds online that says future hockey player as a joke and he sends back a voice note that is mostly him laughing, genuine and unguarded, and you listen to it twice.

You do not examine why you listen to it twice.

Sunghoon texts once more — I hope you’re okay. I mean that.

You look at it for a long time. You think about the library café and the step outside the party and the way his face had looked when he realised. You think about two years and what they were and what they turned out to be underneath.

I’m okay, you send back. Take care of yourself.

He sends a single: you too.

And that, you think, is the end of that chapter. It doesn’t feel like closure exactly — closure implies a clean line, and there is no clean line, just a gradual and mutual putting down of something that had gotten too heavy to carry. But it feels like something finished. Something that needed to be done.

You feel lighter, after.

Jake finds out about the dissertation.

Not in a dramatic way — you’re in the library one afternoon, the two of you at adjacent tables because you’d both ended up there independently and moving would have been more pointed than staying, and he leans over at some point and looks at your screen and reads two sentences and says: “You write like this normally?”

“Like what.”

“Like—” He gestures at the screen. “Like that. Like it means something.”

You look at him. “It’s an academic paper.”

“I know what it is.” He looks faintly annoyed, the way he gets when he’s trying to say something and the words aren’t cooperating. “I’m saying it’s good. It sounds like you.”

You turn back to your screen. You are not going to make anything of this. You are a reasonable and self-possessed adult and you are not going to sit in the library and catch feelings because Jake Sim said your writing sounds like you.

“Thanks,” you say, at your laptop.

“I’m serious. It’s—” He picks up his pen. “Good.”

“You said that.”

“Because I mean it.”

You look at him. He looks back, pen between his fingers, entirely unaware that he’s just done something dangerous, and you look back at your dissertation and breathe carefully and remind yourself of all the reasons this is complicated.

There are many reasons. They are good reasons. You know them all.

The night it almost becomes something, it’s late November and it’s cold enough that your breath fogs and Jake has walked you back from the library and you’re standing at the bottom of your building’s steps in the dark and neither of you is moving.

“I should go in,” you say.

“Yeah,” he says.

Neither of you moves.

You’ve been doing this — the standing, the not-moving, the conversations that go slightly longer than they need to — for three weeks now. It has a shape, this thing between you, even if it doesn’t have a name. It has weight. You’re both aware of it and both moving around it with the particular carefulness of people who have been burned recently and are not in a hurry to be burned again.

“Jake,” you say.

“I know,” he says. Like he already knows what you’re going to say. Like he’s been having the same conversation in his own head.

“I just need it to stay—” You gesture between you. “Like this. For now. Okay? I need it to stay manageable.”

He looks at you. “Is it not?”

You look back. “Less and less,” you admit.

Something moves through his expression. Warm and complicated and controlled. “Okay,” he says. “We’ll keep it manageable.”

“Okay.”

“I just need you to know—” He stops. Starts again. “I’m not going anywhere. Whatever this is, whatever speed it goes. I’m not going anywhere.”

The cold is sharp and the steps are lit by the yellow glow of the entrance light and you are eleven weeks pregnant and standing in the dark with the father of your baby who is looking at you like you’re something worth staying for, and you think about all the reasons this is complicated and you think about your sister’s voice — those are two separate things — and you think that maybe, maybe, the situation and the feeling don’t have to be the same thing.

“Goodnight, Jake,” you say.

“Goodnight,” he says. You go inside.

At the top of the first flight of stairs you take out your phone.

You open his name — Jake Sim (do not text unless necessary) — and you look at it for a long moment.

You change it to Jake.

Just Jake. Nothing else.

You put your phone in your pocket and go to bed.

—

He asks you out on a Tuesday.

Not dramatically — not with any of the ceremony you might have expected from someone who has spent the better part of four months being alternately infuriating and disarming. He just falls into step beside you on the Wednesday morning walk to your seminar and says, with his hands in his pockets and his eyes forward: “Let me take you to dinner. A real one. Not Thai because we’ve done that.”

You look at him. “Are you asking me on a date?”

“Yes.”

“Just like that.”

“Did you want me to make it complicated?”

You look back at the path ahead. The quad is grey and cold and a girl on a bike nearly takes out a first year near the fountain and life goes on all around you, indifferent and ordinary. “No,” you say. “I didn’t want it complicated.”

“Friday,” he says. “Seven. I’ll pick you up.”

“I know where the restaurants are, Jake. I go here too.”

“I know you do.” He glances at you sideways. “Let me pick you up though.”

You look at him. That expression — patient, certain, not performing anything. Just asking.

“Friday,” you say. “Seven.”

He nods. Looks back at the path. The corner of his mouth does something that isn’t quite a smile and is better than one.

The restaurant he takes you to is small and Italian and not the kind of place you’d have expected from him, which you’re finding is a theme — Jake Sim consistently failing to be what you expect in the specific ways that make him hardest to keep at distance. It’s candlelit without being try-hard about it, the kind of place where the pasta is made that morning and the wine list is handwritten and the tables are close enough that you’re aware of his knee near yours under the table for the entirety of dinner.

You talk. That’s the thing — you just talk, the way you have been talking for weeks now on walks and in the library and over Thai food, except tonight there’s no pretence of it being anything other than what it is. He asks about your dissertation and actually listens to the answer. You ask about the season and he tells you about the conference standings with genuine animation, hands moving, and you watch him and think about the ceiling of his bedroom in September and the corridor at the rink and the bag outside your dorm door and all the distance between those things.

“What,” he says, catching you looking.

“Nothing,” you say. “You’re different.”

“From what?” He laughs.

“From who you were in September.”

He’s quiet for a moment. He turns his wine glass slowly on the table. “Yeah,” he says. “I think I am.”

“Is that — do you mind that? Being different?”

He looks at you. “No,” he says. Simply. “I don’t mind it at all.”

You look back at your pasta.

Under the table his knee settles against yours and stays there and you don’t move away from it and neither does he and you eat your dinner in the warm candlelit ordinary of it and let yourself be there, fully, without managing it from a distance.

Outside afterward the cold hits and you’re pulling your coat around you when his hand finds yours. Not reaching, not making a thing of it — just his hand finding yours in the dark like it already knows the way, fingers threading through, warm and certain.

You let him.

You walk back across campus like that, not talking much, and when you reach your building you stop at the bottom of the steps and he turns to face you and you look at him in the yellow entrance light and you think about goodnight, about all the goodnights, about the careful distance you’ve been keeping.

“Come up,” you say.

His expression does that thing — complicated and warm and something that isn’t quite controlled anymore. “You sure?”

“I just asked, didn’t I?”

He follows you up.

Your room is warm and small and familiar and he’s been in it before but not like this — not with the door closed and the lights low and both of you knowing exactly what this is. He stands just inside the door and looks at you and you cross the room and kiss him.

It’s different from September.

September was heat and momentum and two people who didn’t know each other doing something that felt like a decision.

This is — slower. His hands come up to your face the way they did at the party but gentler, more deliberate, like he’s paying attention to something he nearly missed before. He kisses you like he has something to say and this is the only language that fits, and you feel it move through you differently than anything has moved through you in a long time.

“Hey,” he says, against your mouth.

“Hi,” you say back.

He pulls back just enough to look at you — really look, the way he does now, the full attentive weight of it — and his thumb traces your cheekbone and he says, quietly: “You’re so beautiful. Do you know that?”

“Jake—”

“I mean it.” You can tell he means it. It’s in his face, unguarded and certain. “I’ve been — I should have said it a long time ago.”

You look at him for a moment. Then you pull him back down.

He undresses you slowly, which is new — September was efficient, purposeful, barely stopping. Now he takes his time like he’s making up for it, his mouth following the line of your throat, your collarbone, his hands sliding your top off with a care that makes your breath catch. When he gets to the soft curve of your stomach he stops.

He goes to his knees.

You look down at him, breath held, and he puts both hands flat and warm against your bump and just — holds them there. His forehead drops forward to rest against you. The room is quiet. You put your hand in his hair without thinking about it.

“Hey,” he says softly. Not to you.

Your throat tightens.

He turns his head and presses his lips to the curve of your stomach, gentle, then again, then moves his hands slowly like he’s learning the shape of it, and you feel something in your chest come undone quietly and without ceremony.

“Jake,” you say, and your voice is not entirely steady.

He looks up at you. His eyes are dark and very serious. “Okay?” he asks.

“More than okay,” you manage.

He stands back up and kisses you again and walks you back to the bed.

He lays you down and settles over you and his mouth goes back to your tits immediately — you’d forgotten, or you’d tried to forget, the specific focused obsession of it — his hands cupping them, heavier now, thumbs dragging slow over your nipples until you’re arching up into his mouth.

“Perfect,” he murmurs against your skin, “you’re so perfect,” and the praise lands warm and low in your stomach and you pull at his shirt until he lets you get it off.

He’s as good-looking as you remembered, which is annoying.

His mouth works down your body and his hands slide your underwear off and then he looks up at you from between your thighs with an expression that makes your brain go briefly offline. “Okay?” he says again.

“If you don’t—” you start.

He puts his mouth on your pussy and the rest of that sentence evaporates.

He goes slower than September. That’s the difference — the same precision, the same devastating accuracy with his tongue on your clit and his fingers curling deep into your walls, but slower, like he wants to take you apart carefully this time, like he’s paying attention to every sound you make and adjusting accordingly.

Your hands find his hair. Your hips roll up. He holds them down with one forearm across your hips and doesn’t stop, doesn’t change pace, just keeps that steady merciless rhythm until you’re shaking and pleading and your walls are clenching around his fingers and you cum on his tongue with his name coming out wrecked and too loud for the room.

He comes back up your body looking — different than September. Still composed, still that infuriating ease, but underneath it something open. Something that wasn’t there before.

He reaches for his jacket on the floor. Finds his wallet to grab a condom.

You start laughing.

He looks at you confused. “What.”

“Jake.” You press your lips together. “We don’t — I’m already pregnant.

He looks at the condom in his hand. Looks at you. Something crosses his face and then he laughs too — real and unguarded, the laugh from the voice note, the one you listened to twice — drops it back on the floor and comes back to you.

“Fair point,” he says, against your mouth.

“Incredible,” you tell him. “You’re incredible.”

“Shut up,” he says, warmly, and kisses you.

He flips you over.

Not roughly — carefully, one hand at your hip and one at your shoulder, mindful, and you end up straddling him and looking down at him and his hands settle on your hips and he looks up at you like you’re the best thing he’s seen.

“You good?” he asks.

“Very,” you say, and sink down onto him.

The sound he makes is low and immediate and deeply satisfying. You feel every inch of him filling you, your walls stretching around his cock, and you go slow — partly because of the bump, partly because you want to, partly because watching his face as you take him is something you want to draw out. His jaw is tight. His hands on your hips are firm but not directing, just — there, holding on.

“Fuck,” he breathes. “You feel—”

“I know,” you say, and roll your hips.

His head drops back.

You find your rhythm — slow, deep, the grind of your hips meeting his, and his hands tighten and his hips push up to meet you and his mouth falls open and he is, you think, the best-looking thing you’ve ever seen like this, undone and flushed and completely present, all the composure stripped away.

“Perfect,” he says, rough and low, watching you move. “You’re so perfect, look at you—”

The praise moves through you like heat and you move faster, his thumb finds your clit and you gasp and his other hand spreads warm and careful over your bump and the gesture — the gentleness of it, the instinct of it — tips something over in your chest that you’re not going to examine right now because you’re busy, but you feel it, you feel it clearly.

You cum the second time with his cock buried inside you and his thumb on your clit, his hand on your stomach and his eyes on your face. He follows you not long after with his hips driving up and your name in his mouth, said like it means something, said like he’s been saving it.

Afterward you lie tangled together in your narrow dorm bed, which is not really built for two people but is managing. His hand is resting on your stomach with a naturalness that would have been impossible three months ago and you’re staring at the ceiling and feeling the particular peace of someone who has been braced for a long time and has just, finally, put it down.

“Come to my game next week,” he says.

You turn your head to look at him. “What?”

“Home game. Friday.” He’s looking at the ceiling too. Casual. Except you know him well enough now to know when the casual is covering something. “Come watch.”

You look back at the ceiling. “Okay,” you say.

He turns his head. “Actually?”

“Don’t make it weird,” you say. “Yes. I’ll come to your game.”

The corner of his mouth. That almost-smile that’s better than a real one. “Okay,” he says, and looks back at the ceiling, and his hand stays where it is, warm and certain.

—

The following week is small moments.

Tuesday he brings you the grapes and stays to help you outline your next dissertation chapter, sitting on your floor with his back against your bed and your notes spread between you, and he asks better questions than you expect and you don’t tell him that.

Wednesday the walk to your seminar, his shoulder bumping yours, the coffee he brings without asking — your order, exact, without you saying anything.

Thursday a voice note at eleven at night: just wanted to check you were okay. don’t reply if you’re asleep.

You reply and end up talking for forty minutes.

Friday morning he’s at your door.

In one hand, coffee. In the other, folded fabric — dark blue, the Caldwell Wolves crest on the chest, white lettering across the back. SIM. 9.

He holds it out. “You don’t have to,” he says, before you can say anything. “It’s not — I’m not trying to make it a thing. I just thought—”

You take it from him.

You pull it over your head immediately. It’s enormous on you — falls to mid-thigh, swamps your shoulders, the fabric soft from washing. You look down at it and then up at him. His expression is something you don’t have a word for.

You reach up and pull him down by his jacket lapel and kiss him, there in your doorway, in the yellow morning light, slow and certain.

When you pull back he looks — stunned, almost. Like he didn’t expect it even after everything.

“What was that for,” he says with a big grin.

“The jersey,” you say. “Come on. We’ll be late.”

The Hargrove Center is loud in a way that is different when you’re in the stands rather than the corridor — a living, moving noise, four thousand people and the echo of the ice and the announcer’s voice bouncing off the rafters. Mina is beside you, which you’d insisted on, and she’s wearing a Wolves scarf she definitely did not own before today and is eating a pretzel with the focus of someone who has decided to enjoy this.

Someone sits down on your other side.

You look over. He’s older — Jake’s build, the same broad shoulders, grey at his temples, a Wolves cap and a measured, unhurried expression.

“You must be—” he starts while smiling at you with the same grin Jake gave you not long ago.

“Dean Sim,” you say. “Hi.”

He looks at you for a moment with that steady attention that is so recognisably Jake’s that it almost makes you laugh. He’s smileing — warm, real. “He talks about you,” he says. “Quite a lot.”

“Good things, I hope.”

“Mostly.” He settles back in his seat. “He told me about the grapes.”

You look at him. He looks back with an expression of someone who finds this mildly amusing and is being polite about it.

“He remembered I was craving them,” you say.

“I know,” Dean Sim says. “That’s why he told me.” He looks out at the ice where the Wolves are warming up, Jake moving with that particular ease that is the same on ice as off it, unhurried and certain.

“He’s better than he knows how to show yet,” his dad says, quietly. Not performing it. Just — true. “But he’s getting there.”

You watch Jake on the ice.

“Yeah,” you say. “I know.”

The Wolves win.

Not narrowly — convincingly, the way they do when Jake is in the kind of form he’s been in lately, sharp and present, the kind of player who makes everyone around him better just by being fully there. You find yourself on your feet twice without meaning to be and Mina is absolutely losing her mind beside you in a way that suggests she has been quietly wanting to attend a hockey game for some time and has simply been waiting for the invitation.

After the final buzzer the arena stays loud, the celebration on the ice spilling into the stands, and Dean Sim shakes your hand and says it was lovely to meet you with a warmth that is entirely genuine, and you watch him go and think that Jake got the best of him, underneath everything.

And then the jumbo screen above the ice lights up.

You see it before you process it — your name, in big white letters, and then: JAKE SIM WANTS TO KNOW — WILL YOU BE HIS GIRLFRIEND?

The arena does not go quiet because four thousand people do not go quiet, but there is a definite shift — a ripple, a collective awareness, people turning and pointing and the noise changing character. Mina grabs your arm. You stare at the screen.

“Oh my god,” Mina says.

“Oh my god,” you say.

“Are you — are you going to—”

And then he’s there.

Full hockey gear, skates and all, somehow having gotten from the ice to the stands in the time it took you to register what the screen said, and he’s standing at the end of your row with his helmet under his arm and his hair damp and his face doing that thing — the unguarded thing, the thing without composure — and four thousand people are watching and Mina has both hands over her mouth.

“Well?” he says. Over the noise. Just to you.

You look at him. You look at the screen. You look back at him.

“You’re insane,” you say.

“Yeah,” he agrees. “Is that a yes?”

You laugh — real and helpless, the kind that comes from somewhere you haven’t accessed in a while — and you step over Mina’s knees and go to him and he meets you halfway and you kiss him in the Hargrove Center in front of four thousand people and full hockey gear and the crowd does what crowds do when they witness something and the noise is enormous but you don’t hear any of it.

When you pull back his forehead drops to yours.

“Yes,” you tell him. “Obviously yes.”

He exhales — slow, like something released. His hand comes up to your face. His thumb at your cheekbone, the way it always is. “Good,” he says.

“Good,” you say back.

Behind you Mina is making a noise that suggests she is going to be telling this story for the rest of her natural life.

—

Three weeks later you are officially four months pregnant and the bump is undeniable now, round and real, and you’re sitting on Jake’s bed in his room — tidier than September, same room, different everything — with your legs across his lap while he reads something for class and his hand rests on your stomach with the absent certainty of someone who has stopped thinking about it and started just doing it.

The Wolves won again last night. His jersey, what you wore last night and have been to every game, is on the back of his chair.

Outside the window Caldwell goes on being large and indifferent and fully lit up, and in here it is warm and quiet and ordinary in a way that is — everything, actually. The whole thing. The specific ordinary of someone else’s presence that you’ve been missing without knowing how to name it.

“Hey,” Jake says, without looking up from his page.

“Hey,” you say.

“You good?”

You look at him — at the line of his jaw and the hand on your stomach and the room that used to be just a room and is now something else, something yours — and you think about September, about the corridor and the money and the slap you don’t regret. You think about Mina in the drugstore bathroom and Hannah on the third ring and the heartbeat on the monitor that made everything real.

You think about how none of this was the plan and how a plan was never the point.

“Yeah,” you say. “I’m good.”

He turns a page. His hand stays where it is. Outside, Caldwell. Inside, this.

Good, you think. I’m more than good.

The culprit, rather unbothered by it, sits perched on top of his cat tree, licking himself clean with loud, wet sounds. Gus stares down at you from his throne above mortals, green eyes unblinking as he focuses on the vet file in your hands.

Then with the subtlety of a child with a hand bell, he hisses at it. Not at you―no, Gus was too much of a sap and lover boy with you to do that―but rather at the file stamped with the vet hospital's logo.

You snap the file shut, huffing at the fluffy orange and white menace. Gus immediately softens again as the logo disappears, meowing softly at you.

“Honestly, Gus,” you sigh, pinching the bridge of your nose. “That's the tenth vet we've changed, and you've been alive for a grand total of five years. Why do you like to live life like you've got eight more lives left? Is this your first one or something?”

Gus only gives you a purr in response, as if ignoring everything you just said.

You sigh again. Tucking the file away under your arm, you begin to walk away from him. Gus jumps down from the top, leaping over the different branches of the cat tree, before finally landing on the floor with a soft jingle of the bell on his collar.

He follows behind you like a little orange shadow, right at your footsteps. “Hey, I don't really wanna be talking to you right now,” you glare at him, walking faster.

Gus, of course, promptly ignores that, and follows you anyways.

Letting out a soft “meow” that sounds half-pitiful, and half-like he's plotting your downfall, he immediately trots faster after you, tail stuck up straight.

When you come to a stop next to your bedroom door, Gus stands on his hind legs, and pulls the door open. You stare at him in disbelief, because you definitely don't remember teaching your cat to be able to open doors.

“You don't even have opposable thumbs,” you crouch to look at him closer. “How on earth did you do that, you little fish breath menace?”

Gus licks his mouth, before rubbing against your legs. He spins in a circle, before sitting down all eleven point nine pounds of him on the floor in front of you.

You meet his expectant gaze with a squint of your eyes. “You're not getting a treat for that.”

Gus meows once more, wide, pitiful boba-like eyes staring back at you.

You stare back, raising an eyebrow at him.

He increases the intensity of his expression, adding in a tilt of his head.

You hold his gaze, unblinking.

Gus decides it's time to up his game. He lets out a little “mrrp” and rolls to the floor, exposing his fluffy white belly.

You throw the towel and cave in.

Rubbing his belly, you grumble under your breath. “How am I supposed to stay mad at you if you're going to lure me in with that belly, hm? You know I can't resist it ― ow!”

Gus licks your hand to soothe over the nip he gave you, but the way his ears twitch twice tells you that he's rather content with the reaction he's pulled out of you. Adorable little piece of shit.

He twists his body, holding onto your wrist as he begins to groom your hand, and you wrinkle your nose at the smell of a cat's characteristic tuna breath. “Gus, I brush your teeth every third day, yet you still have that stinky tuna breath. I love you, Gus Gus, I really do, but I really don't want to be smelling like tuna.”

Despite all that, you don't pull your hand away from him, and Gus, content with where he is, continues to groom and lick your arm, even throwing a minor bite here and there for a “thorough” cleaning.

Then with a final hiss at the file on the table, he rolls away with a soft 'thump!' against the floor, his tail flicking in mild annoyance at something you're yet to figure out.

Sighing at him, you give him another scratch under the chin (which the furry bastard takes with great pleasure, purring loud enough for you to feel it in your bones), before heading off to shower, closing the bathroom door shut behind you.

Which happened to apparently (actually, definitely) be a crime worthy of death.

The moment you step into the shower, a pained yowl sounds behind the door, before being followed by frantic scratching and clawing at the wood.

Then a paw sneaks under the gap between the door and the floor, pink toe beans appearing and disappearing as he flexes his paw, before a second one joins in and begins to shred the door from the inside.

“... Really? Really?” you sigh in exasperation, hair still half-wet from the water, before swinging the door open. “Are you a velcro baby,” you mutter in amused exhaustion, “or are you just an opportunistic voyeur?”

Gus meows innocently at you, as if he wasn't the one screaming his lungs out like he was going to die if he was separated from you for a moment longer.

Then he brushes past you and into the bathroom, before jumping onto the counter, and resting next to the sink. When you raise an eyebrow at him, he gives you a slow blink, before returning his gaze towards the shower.

Sighing, you roll your shoulders, before stepping back into the shower, making sure to let the door stay open a little so that the little menace can “supervise” you in the water.

Midway through your shower, Gus willingly walks into the shower... just to stick his tongue out to drink some water. Very conveniently ignoring the existence of the three water fountains in various places around your apartment.

“I use mineral water for you, and you prefer to drink shower water? What is wrong with you?” you stare down at him, watching the way his tongue sticks out to catch the falling water.

He blinks, his head wet in the middle between his ears, from where the water falls on it, and makes no move to cease his “drinking” attempts.

“Oh? Is it your turn with the communal orange braincell today?” you sigh at him with fond exasperation.

The wide eyes, pointed ears, and straight tail tell you enough.

Then as if he remembers that he actually has a good water fountain, Gus jerks back like the water is scalding poison, and then hops out of the shower to go back to his original position on the bathroom counter.

After circling his spot twice, he sits down with a flop, and begins to lick away at the wet parts of his fur. With the orange demon out of the way, you're free to finish your shower.

When you step out of the shower, he's still sat in the bathroom, but has now climbed on top of the shelf, watching over you like a gargoyle on a cathedral's spire.

“How did you even climb up there ― you know what, nevermind. I don't want to know.” You groan, grabbing your towel and drying yourself off.

Gus watches you go through your routine, giving you slow blinks every time you make eye contact with him, green eyes disappearing for a bit, before reappearing.

When you pull out your hairbrush from the drawer, he jumps down to the counter, and comes to sit next to you for his part of your routine. When you brush through your hair once, he ducks his head so that you can “brush” him with the back of your hairbrush.

The entire back and forth continues till your hair no longer has any knots in it, while Gus's purring has reached the maximum possible decibel level for him.

When you do your makeup, you make sure to use the other brush to “blush” his cheeks, before doing your own. When you finish with your routine, Gus flops onto your makeup products, rolling twice as he asks for pets.

You obey His Clementine Majesty's demand with no question of refusal.

He tilts his head back for more chin scritches, almost knocking down your bottle of lotion into the trash can with how much he stretches.

He follows you out of the bathroom and into the bedroom, climbing onto the bed. He stays curled in your duvet, and patiently waits for you to lay out your three outfit options for the day.

When you give him the go ahead, he makes a big stretch, yawning for a moment, before he trots over to inspect the choices before him. Sniffing and testing them for durability with his claws, he finally picks a navy blue turtleneck and khaki slacks for your outfit of the day, nudging two rings out of your jewelry holder.

“For an animal that's supposed to have the IQ of a two year old toddler, you've got a rather refined sense of style,” you mutter, putting on the necklace that he gives a headbutt to.

Gus looks very proud of his choices for your OOTD as you put them on, and flops onto your bed again, demanding pets as payment for his very distinguished services. When he's satisfied with the praise and pets he receives for his payment, he jumps off of your bed, and heads towards the door.

He sits outside your bedroom, looking back at you, as if expecting you to follow him. You laugh at the sight, grabbing your backpack as you trail behind him, while he leads the way to your kitchen.

Breakfast is a quiet affair, with you eating your human only food (Gus did try to steal some of your eggs while you were cooking them, and almost did succeed in his endeavour.

Keyword being almost, because then he got smacked with the back end of the spatula, and then gave you betrayed looks the entire time), while Gus crunches on his cat food on the other end of the table, having insisted on joining you at the table with a loud, stretched out meow that demanded nothing but complete compliance from you.

Grabbing your university ID, you let the turquoise lanyard hang around your neck—the lanyard colour for the marine biology department had been unanimously chosen by the teachers and students alike—the fabric cool to the touch as it rests against your skin.

Slinging your backpack over your shoulder, you find Gus back up in his cat tree, in his little bed where he spends his mornings after you leave the apartment. Giving him one final pet, and kissing the top of his head (to which he gives you another round of purrs), you grab your car's keys, and head down into the parking lot.

Sophia, your best friend, texts you updates as you ride the elevator downstairs. The two of you had sat down together in one of the introductory classes to your major, and ever since then, you'd been absolutely inseparable. It

[Sophia the First]: Where are youuuuu?

[Sophia the First]: It's been ages since I saw you omg

You chuckle at her response, fingers swiping across the screen as you reply to her.

[You]: Oh my god. We just saw each other yesterday, Soph 🤭

[You]: And I'm on the way, cutie

[You]: I'll be over at the conservatory soon!

Her reply comes back almost instantaneously.

[Sophia the First]: Hurry up then, lady!

[Sophia the First]: I want to see your cute face again 😛

[Sophia the First]: It's a sea of olive green lanyards in here

[Sophia the First]: Vet med's taking over the conservatory

[Sophia the First]: Which is why we need our star student

[Sophia the First]: Aka YOU missy

[Sophia the First]: To fight back and win

[Sophia the First]: Everyone in favour of otter toe beans say aye

You chuckle at her messages, sending her a final text, before getting into your car.

[You]: Aye!

The drive to the Saltwater Conservatory from your apartment takes about half an hour, but the beachside road that leads to the conservatory makes up for the time it takes to get there.

The salty sea breeze blows through your hair, and the morning sun glints against the water in fractured ribbons of light. A lighthearted pop song plays from the console, the sound of seagulls squawking and the waves rolling onto the shore accompanying it as a background score. It's usually a peaceful, scenic drive.

Until it becomes no longer peaceful or scenic today, that is.

It all happens within a matter of seconds—one moment, you're driving happily along the road, humming along to the song playing, and the next moment, your windshield is ninety percent bird.

An albatross (which shouldn't even be in this urban area) is lying on your windshield. On a good day, you would've taken the time to admire the bird when you could catch a glimpse of it this close, but right now, the marine bird's massive wingspan stretches across the glass and virtually blocks all vision for you.

You hit the brakes immediately, pulling over, and leap out of your seat to go check up on it. Crouching low, so as to not startle it, you move just a bit closer to inspect the albatross as safely as you can for both you and the bird.

The animal, even as it lays across your car's hood now, is a majestic sight to behold. The long flight feathers shine against the sun, and the softer downy feathers puff out a little, as a breeze blows past. The beak is sharp and pointed—perfect for hunting prey from the waters. The sound of the bird crowing snaps you out of your daze.

Right. Not the time to be admiring it right now.

Shaking your head to get rid of the thoughts occupying your mind, you move to focus on the bird's possible injuries. From an immediate glance, you can tell that it has a broken wing—the angle at which the wing is bent is odd—but the wing seems to have been broken much before the bird had landed on your car. When the bird lets out another pained squawk, you immediately step back, not wanting to aggravate it.

Defensive animals rarely believed in peaceful conflict resolution.

The time you had spent at the conservatory had taught you enough about that.

Stepping back to put some more distance between you and the bird, you pull out your phone to call wildlife services, watching the bird keenly while the phone rings. After informing the rescue about the incident, you take a picture of the tracker attached to the bird's foot and forward it to them.

Then you move to sit down on the pavement by the road a little distance away from your car—but not too far that you couldn't observe the bird as was requested of you by the vet team at the rescue—you patiently wait for the rescue team's arrival.

The bird still lays on your car, probably exhausted, and you make no further move to approach it. The sound of the rolling waves, the seagulls, and the calls the albatross lets out from time to time remain the only sounds around you, carried away by the salty sea breeze with the scent of seaweed and wet sand. As you continue to wait for help to arrive, one thought lingers in your mind, as the initial panic and awe had begun to slowly ebb away with the tide.

There was no way that Sophia would believe the morning you've just had.

Sophia, it turns out, had been blatantly lying to you about the Great Veterinary Medicine Takeover of the Saltwater Conservatory.

When you'd finally arrived at the conservatory after sending the albatross off with the professionals that would give it the help it needed (they'd assured you of updates, and thankfully, your car had escaped the situation unscathed too), you were expecting to find yourself in a sea of olive green lanyards moving around the building.

But what you found instead were olive green lanyards moving around the building, yes, but there were only six of them.

Six.

Sure, for someone who's class strength was limited to twenty students a year it may have seemed more, but could a “takeover” occur with only six students? You didn't think so.

You find Sophia waiting for you by the otter enclosure's entrance, already dressed in her PPE and ready to go. She lights up when she spots you, and still not having worn her gloves yet, smacks you on the arm.

The sound echoes in the hallway, drawing a few curious chitters from the critters inside. “What on earth took you so long?! You told me you'd left your apartment over an hour ago!”

“You're not gonna believe me,” you say, walking into the locker room to grab your PPE kit, “but an albatross crash landed on my car's windshield on the drive over here.” She gapes at you, her eyes blown wide in sheer disbelief. “Of course I don't believe you! An albatross, in these parts?”

You slip on the coat, buttoning it up. “Right? That's what I thought too. I almost crashed because its wings were wide enough to cover my windshield.” Upon hearing that, Sophia's expression morphs into one of concern, and she reaches out to rub your arm. “Hey, that must've been terrifying—both for you and the bird.”

You give her a fond look, and wrap your arm around her in a side hug. “Soph, I'm fine. I pulled over immediately.” She huffs a sigh of relief, squeezing you in return. “Good. I would've been very sad otherwise.”

You smile at her. “I know, Soph, I know.” Sophia gives you another hug—a proper one this time—before letting go of you. “So, what happened next?”

You slip your gloves on as you continue telling her the story. “Then I stepped out, and inspected it. Found a broken wing and it was tagged, so I called wildlife protection services. They came pretty early to the scene, but took around forty-five minutes to decide what was the best way to transport it safely. They did assure me of updates on its progress, so I'm not too worried about it.”

Sophia hums at that, nodding seriously. “That's good, then. I'm glad nobody was hurt,” she pauses for a bit, before turning back to you. “You done?”

Checking yourself over in the full length mirror to catch any unbuttoned areas in your coat, you nod at her. “Yeah, I'm done. Let's go.” Her excitement returns again, as she claps her hands and leads you over to the door.

“I still can't believe we get to observe THE sea cats in person!” She squeals, before immediately quietening when the two of you are close enough to hear the noises and chirps of the animals inside. The door, now with a sign that reads 'Lontra felina (Marine otter/Sea cat)' in big, bold letters, is the only thing between the two of you and your current subject of study.

You share one final look of excitement with Sophia, before she pushes the door open extremely slowly. The two of you peek your heads around the metal, and there they are—two marine otters, members of the Lontra felina species, splashing around in the water right before your eyes.

They chirp and trill at each other, and it takes all you have to not squeal out loud, but you manage to pace yourself for the sake of the animals. No loud noises, you remind yourself. We're just here to observe their behaviours today. No contact.

Sophia does a little happy dance at the sight of them, but manages to do it while completely silent. Her shoulders shake with the brunt of her excitement, and you have to suppress a chuckle at the sight.

The sight of the usually composed Sophia vibrating with childish glee is not something you'd see on the regular, but with the context of the marine otters, it makes a lot of sense.

You think that her reaction to them was actually a more subdued one, considering that you'd screamed loud enough to scare Gus off of your desk when the email about your participation in the enclosure study from your professor had arrived.

Marine otters in the wild were an elusive, largely solitary species—seldom forming groups more than two or three individuals if they did—who often avoided contact with humans.

While historical records did show that they could be domesticated to live in freshwater pools, and were even used by fishermen to fish for them at some point of time, the practice had been discouraged due to the risk of illegal poaching and declining wild populations.

Currently an endangered species, to be able to get your hands on not one, but TWO individuals was like winning a lottery for someone like you, who was studying marine mammals.

You and Sophia tip toe your way around the enclosure, finding a space by the rocky outcroppings meant to mimic the tide pools in their natural habitats.

You pull out your notebook, having opted for a pen that uses a twist mechanism to open instead of the traditional cap or click mechanisms—completely preventing any possible source of noise. The smell of ink isn't strong, but with its high quality, it easily glides across the paper in vivid strokes, as you sketch and take notes of the otters' behaviours.

They use tools from their environment to crack open some of the shells “hidden” in the rocks for their enrichment, and even play with a large inflatable ball. The pair had been moved from the wildlife rescue to the conservatory after they had grown dependent on their human caretakers.

Since the rescue wouldn't have enough space to house them in a manner that would enrich them properly, the university had taken them in, having converted an empty enclosure into one that mimicked their natural habitats.

Their behaviour with their caretakers (they had arrived to start the otters on a three-month transitionary period) is similar to that of captive sea otters, and you and Sophia spend a good chunk of the next two hours documenting all their behaviours, individual personalities, social interactions, down to the smallest of quirks.

The male, Leonard, is more curious compared to the female, Yun, who while extroverted, tends to explore her surroundings slowly, one thing at a time.

By the time you finish up for the day, your fingers ache with the pain from long writing periods, but the sketches and data encapsulated in your notebook make up for it. While reading about the species in a textbook was one thing, seeing them with your own eyes had been a whole different thing.

Both you and Sophia are silent as you take off your PPE and place it in the designated laundry spot, still decompressing from the hours spent in the enclosure. When the two of you walk outside into the late afternoon sun, you're the one who breaks the silence first. “So.... That just happened.”

“Yeah,” she breathes, still in awe of the animals. “That just happened, and I still can't believe that it actually did.” Another beat of silence passes as you stand side by side, before the two of you turn to face each other, and let out loud squeals, finally being allowed to express your excitement. “Oh! Oh! Oh! We just saw sea cats! We just saw actual sea cats! Oh my gosh, we saw THE sea cats!”

The other people passing by the two of you give slightly odd looks, but neither you nor Sophia care about them, too busy jumping up and down. “Oh my gosh, oh my gosh, I need to mark today's date in my calendar. Like, I still can't believe that this is all real.”

You agree with her, but the ache in your fingers and wrist tells you that it was, in fact, very real. The two of you exchange your notes and observations for a bit longer, before finally parting ways.

“I'll see you on Thursday, then?” she tilts her head at you, a smile on her face. “We can head over, right after class.” You nod, reaching in for a hug. She obliges, squeezing you harder, before finally letting go, and walking over to her own car. You wave her goodbye, watching her drive away.

When you turn around to head to your own car, you bump into someone—the impact abrupt and solid—and the world tilts on its axis as you fall to the pavement behind you, hands flying to your nose. The sound of clattering pens and rustling papers follows right after, as warm hands—much larger than your own—wrap around your wrists, trying to move them away to inspect the damage.

“Oh shit—I am so, so sorry. Are you hurt? Is your nose bleeding?” A soft voice calls out, thick with concern and guilt. “I really didn't mean to bump into you, I can promise you that. I was just distracted by the thought of the porpoises I had been observing earlier—why am I even telling you all of this? Uh, are you really okay?”

An olive green lanyard comes into your view first, before its owner appears in your line of vision—with a pair of soft brown eyes, messy black hair, and a rounded pair of black spectacles that sit on his nose—he makes a rather handsome figure, something that you can recognise even through the pain.

The glare of the sun softening into a halo behind his head does not help in your perception of him, and as someone conditioned to make unhinged comments thanks to your proximity to animals (and a certain psych major named Lara), you end up blurting out the first thought that comes to your mind.

“Are you an actual angel, or am I just hallucinating your entire existence?”

The words leave your mouth before your dignity can give them the go ahead. He blinks at that, before letting out what seems to be a flattered chuckle. “Uh, sorry to break your heart, but I'm still unfortunately as human as you are. And no, you're not hallucinating... Or maybe you might be. Wait, how many fingers am I holding up?”

You mutter to yourself under your breath, but to him, it sounds like you're speaking gibberish, and his expression tightens, as if he's panicking internally.

“I swear she only hit her nose, but her speech seems to be impaired... Should I call Jungwon and ask him for help? I don't want to be medically irresponsible,” he muses to himself, glancing between you and his phone, unsure of what to do.

“Two, two,” you finally speak up, coughing into your fist as the pain finally begins to subside. “You are—uh, you were holding up two fingers.” He lets out an audible sigh of relief, setting his phone down.

“Thank goodness. I thought I was going to have to drive a half-conscious woman to the medbay, while trying to figure out a way to not get arrested.”

He gathers your fallen things before he gets his, arranging them neatly before he places them in one arm, and extends the other to you to help you up. When you place your hand in his, he pulls you up with almost little to no effort, and the force of the action nearly sends you tumbling into his chest again.

“Easy,” he says, steadying you. “I got you.” He lets go of you only when he's sure that you won't tip over again, watching you stand on your own feet.

Then he hands you your collected items and backpack, questioning you quietly now that he's calmer. “No dizziness or anything of the sort? You're not seeing doubles or triples?”

You shake your head—regretting the action for a moment as the slightest hint of vertigo creeps in—before standing normally again when the sensation fades away. “No multiples,” you answer, slinging your bag over your shoulder.

He notices your fallen notebook a bit further away from his feet, having missed it while he was gathering the rest of your stuff, and crouches down to pick it up.

He brushes the dust off of the cover, beginning to hand it back to you, when his eyes land on your sketches of the otters. His entire face lights up, and he turns to you excitedly. “Are these the sketches of the new arrivals at the conservatory?”

You blink for a moment, caught off guard, but a chance to gush about the little critters wasn't one you were about to miss. “Yeah! My friend and I were assigned to be their student caretakers! Today was our first session, so we just spent the four hours observing them.”

“Lucky girls, you two,” he whistles, eyes glancing between the book and you. “Mind if I just glance through this real quick?” You shake your head at him, happy to share your data with him. “Not at all. Go ahead!”

He reads through your notes, flipping through the pages with great care. He tries to suppress his little chuckles in the places where you've added your own funny little comments about the otters.

He pauses when he gets to a particular line about their feline resemblance. “.... similar to my 'land cat'? You have a cat?” He glances up at you, adjusting his glasses, as his eyes shine expectantly at you.

You, of course oblige his request, and pull up the entire folder in your camera roll dedicated to Gus. “Meet my little orange tyrant. Certified lover boy.”

He coos at the pictures, scrolling through them after he gets your permission. “Oh, he's adorable. Quite sassy at times, too. Seems like he's quite aware of who's in charge of who.”

You beam at him with the pride of a proud pet parent at his praises of your four legged child, when you notice the little keychain hanging from his scrub pants. “Is that your dog's picture?” you bend down to observe the ornament hanging at his waist more closely. He blinks, before a fond expression crosses his face. “Yeah. This is my baby, Layla.”

“Aw, she's adorable! What a cutie. The sunglasses are so cute on her!” He preens at the praise, immediately taking it off for you to inspect closely and praise his doggy daughter some more. “I know, right?! She's just so cute in everything she does. I seriously can't get enough of her.”

You observe it closely, handling it with careful fingers, before handing it back to him. “Oh, I need to make one with Gus's face too. This is so cute.” He tilts his head at that, an excited smile on his face. “I can give you the website I used to make this if you want.”

“Oh, please, please do. I could never have enough Gus Gus merch.” He chuckles at your enthusiasm, and holds his phone out to you. “Give me your number, and I'll send the details to you.” You restrain yourself from outright snatching his phone, and punch in your digits, before handing it back to him.

As he moves to save you contact, he pauses for a moment, before giving you a sheepish smile. “Sorry, I uh... Didn't ask for your name. Can't call you 'Otter Girl' in my head the entire time.”

You laugh at that, and give him your name, holding your hand out. He grabs a hold of it, and gives you a firm handshake as he grins. “I'm Jake. Nice to meet you. I'll require daily updates about Gus now that we're friends.”

“I'll oblige only if I get daily Layla updates too,” you tease, and he nods his head sagely. “Of course, of course. An equivalent exchange is a must.”

The two of you simply stare at each other for a few seconds, before bursting out into loud laughter. “What was that?” Jake mutters, wiping a tear from the corner of his eye. “Why did I sound like a mob boss making deals for pet pictures?”

“You wouldn't last a day as a mob boss,” you quip, and he gives you a look of faux offense, before laughing himself. “You're right. I actually wouldn't. That's not my cup of tea—it's more Gus's cup of tea, I'd assume?”

“A hundred points right there,” you smile, and he cheers. You laugh at him again, and he gives you an easy grin. “Well, if you don't mind excusing me, I have a daughter to pick up from my friends, or she'll sulk for the rest of the evening.”

You move out of the way, being slightly dramatic about it. “Why of course, make haste! Princess Layla must not be kept waiting!” He gives you a bow, before jogging off towards his car. As he runs, he calls out over his shoulder one last time: “Give my salutations to the tangerine terror!”

You laugh harder at that, watching him get into his car. He waves at you again, before actually driving away. You watch him go, his car slowly growing smaller as he crosses the distance. Shaking your head with a grin that hasn't left your face, you finally head back to your car.

Seems like the upcoming days at the conservatory would have a new friend joining you and Sophia. You did need a vet to join your study, anyways.

⚚ ACT TWO: EIGHT LIVES TOO MANY

Jake lights up like a child on Christmas morning when you bring up the question to him on Thursday morning.

“Of course I'd love to join the otter study!” he says, holding your hands tightly. “I've been dying to get a look at them ever since they arrived at the conservatory—I can't thank you enough for offering me a chance despite having met me only once before!”

You chuckle warmly at his enthusiasm, giving him a smile. “That single meeting was enough to tell me what kind of a person you are around animals—no, actually, the Layla keychain was the one that told me enough.”

“What can I say?” He gives you a bashful grin, glasses sitting a little crooked on his nose, and still holding onto your hands, his grip warm and comforting. “I just love my daughter.” You shake your head, giggling softly. “I could tell—anyone in vet med who was that obsessed with their fur baby would definitely be good with other animals.”

He gives you another shy smile, but the satisfied gleam in his eyes says enough about the subtle pride he takes in his ability to care for animals. “Of course, that's a given. Layla was the reason I picked vet med as a major.” His smile curls into something fonder at the thought of Layla.

You smile at the sight, before letting go of one of his hands to reach for your phone as it lights up in your jean's pocket. He looks curiously at you, but waits for you to tell him what's going on. “Oh, it's just Sophia,” you say, pocketing your phone again. “She's asking if you'd like to come with us to the docks. We're going to go observe some migrating whales.”

His eyes widen so much you think that they'll pop out of his head. “Like, actual, real whales? Some of the biggest mammals on earth kinda whales?” You nod at him, biting down on your lip to suppress the chuckle threatening to slip out of you. He stares at you for a beat longer, eyes still blown wide.

Then he pulls you into a big bear hug, wrapping his arms around your shoulders. “Oh, I'd love to join! Thank you for inviting me, really!” His mop of messy hair brushes against your cheek as he squeezes you gently, and he's giggling in excitement as he pulls away. “I've been interested in whale migration patterns since a visit to the aquarium a few years ago, so an opportunity to observe them in their natural habitat isn't one that I'll turn down.”

You laugh, patting his shoulder as you gesture at him to follow you. “C'mon. Soph's already at the docks, prepping the gear. The bus will be leaving soon—we've to hurry if we want seats for the half an hour drive there.”

Jake doesn't need a second reminder, and he quickly follows after you, long limbs catching up to you with ease. Then he slows his pace down to match yours, his stride in step with yours. He's clutching onto the strap of his bag like it's a lifeline, and he clumsily adjusts his glasses as the bus comes into view. “Okay,” he breathes, patting his face. “This is happening. I'm going to go whale watching.”

You give him an amused grin, climbing inside. “Yeah, Sim Jake's going whale watching. Layla won't get jealous, right?” That comment seems to ease his nerves, and he gives you a look of faux annoyance, settling down next to you comfortably. “Hush. This stays between us, you hear? My daughter does not need to know about the existence of other animals in my periphery.”

The bus ride over is mildly bumpy, due to the recent stormy weather. During a particularly harsh bump, Jake nearly bumps into the seat in front of him, and he rubs his nose in mild annoyance. “Does the driver have an agenda against people in majors other than marine bio?”

“One of the vet med majors insulted his driving once. Yeah, he does have an agenda against olive green lanyards.” You whisper to him, and he gives you an unimpressed look. “And you couldn't tell me this earlier?”

You give him an innocent look, already standing up in your seat as the bus comes to a stop a little distance away from the piers. “You'd have run away if I had told you. Can't have my vet running away from me without permission.” He scoffs at that, but the grin tugging at his lips gives him away. “I wasn't aware that I was already a possessive object.”

“Well, you are now—woah!” you yelp, being tugged backwards as you move to get past him, and land on his lap. “Hey, easy,” he murmurs, hands reaching out to steady your shoulders. “What happened? Did you trip?”

You shake your head, still confused. “No, I didn't. I got tugged backwards, actually.” He blinks at that, and then he lets out a soft chuckle. “I think I know why you nearly fell.”

That earns him a confused look from you, and he looks at something between the two of you. You follow his gaze, only to find your lanyard tangled with his, turquoise bending and twisting around olive green.

“Oh,” you say, blinking at the sight. “The bumps must've tangled them together.” He hums at that, an amused gleam replacing the concerned one in his eyes. “... Maybe it did. Or maybe this was your way of making sure that I don't run away from you.”

“I would never resort to such underhanded tactics, thank you,” you huff, and he gives you a mildly dubious look at that. He watches as your fingers reach out to untangle the fabric.

“Why is this so tight? Even a sailor's knot would be easier to deal with than this.” He laughs at your complaint, and reaches out to help you, nimble fingers quickly helping you untangle the knot. You stare at him in mild awe, stepping down from your seats. “Now how did you do that?”

His hand rests on your back as he follows you through the alley, and his other one instinctively reaches out to block the sun from your view as the two of you step out of the vehicle. “Oh, it was nothing much. Hours of suturing practice does that to you.”

“Is that a flex, or was that merely an observation?” you tease, hopping down the steps. He chuckles, following after you, the dried twigs on the pier crunching under his shoes. “Why couldn't it be both? I did put in a lot of effort to make my skills as perfect as possible.”

“Touché,” you hum, and Sophia's loud yell draws your attention from him to her. “OI! HURRY UP PEOPLE! THE WHALES ARE GOING TO FLIPPER AWAY IF YOU DON'T!”

Jake blinks at her energy, before cupping his mouth and yelling back. “TELL THEM TO WAIT A LITTLE! EVOLUTION FROM WATER TO LAND NEEDS TO HAPPEN OVER A LONG TIME, NOT IN A SPAN OF HOURS!”

Sophia cackles at his response, immediately reaching out to wrap an arm around his shoulders. “Welcome to the crew! You've passed the first test!” Jake rolls his eyes at that. “There's more? Please, have mercy. I just gave like three exams two days ago.”

Sophia huffs, and hands him a safety vest, goggles and a helmet as a just in case. “The second and true test is going to be the seas, goldie. If you can stomach choppy waves, then you can stomach anything.” He takes them—and to his credit, as a first timer, puts them on okay—but the gear isn't secured properly.

So you wordlessly reach out, fingers brushing the fabric, and tighten the straps of his safety vest. He gives you a grateful glance as he puts the goggles on, shaking his head to push his hair out of his eyes. Sophia directs him to sit down in a safer corner of the boat, and he obeys quickly, sitting down with his arms braced on either side and clutching onto the railing.

You and Sophia mill about the vessel, tightening up any loose equipment and securing the rails, with Jake observing both of you and asking questions occasionally. About ten minutes later, Professor Han and Professor Neumann step on board, their faces mildly flushed from the winds beginning to blow.

Professor Neumann notices Jake first, and extends her hand out for a handshake. “Ah, you must be the vet med candidate that this one here,” she gestures to you, “recommended for the marine otter study. I've seen some of your work and I must say, you'd be a good addition to the team. I just hope you don't get too seasick.”

Jake gives her a bashful smile, rubbing the back of his neck. “Ah, thank you. I've read some of your work, too—your research into pilot whale pod hierarchies and the social complexities within them was an interesting read.” Professor Neumann raises an eyebrow at that, surprise colouring her features. “You've read that? Most people know me for my work on sea turtles and orcas.”

Jake chuckles warmly at that, shaking his head. “It was a chance discovery, actually. I was looking up some information on some elective classes I wanted to take, when I found your paper. I found the topic rather interesting, since it contrasts with the examples of traditional social behaviours we have, like in wolf packs.”

Professor Han comes to stand between you and Sophia, her arms crossed over her chest. She gives you an amused look, nodding her head towards where Jake and Professor Neumann are engaged in a discussion about “non-linear hierarchies in mammals” and “how human sociology and stereotypes influence non-primate research.”

Sophia stifles a chuckle at the sight, and Professor Han herself lets out an amused, long suffering sigh. “I hope you don't have any other vet med candidates in mind,” she says, her eyes still fixed on the pair, “because Hilda will not approve anyone else after this.”

“Don't worry, Prof. We're not going to have any issues.” You chuckle at that, hands resting in your pockets. “No other candidates to be vetted for now.” Professor Han gives a satisfied nod at that, patting you and Sophia on a shoulder each. “Good job, then. You picked well, girls. The study should progress smoothly with him around.”

You watch as Professor Han joins in on their discussion, interjecting with a point that Sophia backs her up with, using a cited source. The boat rocks slowly with the movement of the shallow waves of the low tide, as birds circle the sky overhead.

The sun has softened to a gentle warmth, and the wind brushes your hair as you lean against the railing. The four of them discuss their points animatedly, each one bouncing off of the points of another.

Professor Han said that you'd chosen well by recommending Jake for the study. A smile tugs on your lips as you decide to keep the truth to yourself instead.

There had been no “other” candidates. Jake had been your first and last choice since the afternoon when you first bumped into him.

You hear the call of the whales before you catch sight of them.

It's a low, resonant sound—a series of chirps and clicks—that seem to vibrate in your body, down to every last cell in your bones. The wind whips through your hair, harsher this far out into the sea, but that doesn't stop you from running to the deck to see the massive animals glide alongside your boat.

The waves are stronger in these parts, further stirred by the powerful sweeps of the whales' tails, but Professor Han steers through them with ease, guided by her years of experience.

A shaky breath next to you draws your attention away from the animals for a second. Jake—now having abandoned his safe corner—stands next to you, his eyes locked on the pod as they swim through the water.

“They're... They're beautiful, really,” he murmurs softly, eyes beginning to glisten with unshed tears. “God. I've never felt this small, and I've stood next to a fully grown male African elephant before.” You smile at that, and keep the silence in between the two of you. The first sighting of the whales was something intimate and personal, after all.

“Beauties, aren't they?” Professor Neumann comes to stand on Jake's other side, an awed smile on her face. “No matter how many times I see them, it's like seeing them for the first time all over again. It never gets old.”

He glances at her, before returning his gaze to the animals, watching the young ones twirl and spin next to their much, much larger mothers. “No,” he breathes, still star-struck. “I doubt it could ever get old.”

Sophia brings up the instruments you need to collect data, and you help her and the two older women set them up. You notice that Jake lingers a little too close to the railing for your liking, and you call out to him, yelling to make yourself heard over the sounds of the winds, water, and whales.

“Jake! Step back a little! I'm not sure we have insurance for “death by whale tails” on our list of possible claims!” He blinks at that, and immediately shuffles himself backwards as a sheepish smile makes itself home on his face. “... Sorry. I didn't realise how close I'd gotten to the railing.”

Professor Han chuckles and hands him a pair of binoculars, as Professor Neumann reminds all of you to pull up the hoods on your raincoats.

“That's a rookie mistake, it's fine. The first sighting is always the most impactful one. Here, use these.” He gingerly takes them from her, and holds them up to his eyes to observe the animals.

A particularly hard swing of one of the whales' tails sends water splashing over the deck, seafoam spraying along with it, as everyone is drenched. The raincoat you're wearing does help a little, but some strands of hair still stick stubbornly to your face now that they're wet.

A hand reaches out to brush them away for you, since your own two are occupied with the equipment, and Jake's face—scrunched in careful concentration—appears in your line of sight. “Hold on for a sec. I'll get that for you.” He carefully tucks them away, the warmth of his hands a contrast to the cold from the sea spray.

“There. Potential professional hazard taken care of,” he says, a satisfied grin on his face. Then he reaches out to help steady the sensor you were holding up, his hands curling above yours, letting tops of your fingers brush against the undersides of his.

He stands steady by your side for the entire time you record the data, broad shoulders brushing against yours. The rocking of the boat sends him bumping at you a few times, and he apologises each time with a little sheepish smile and a raise of his eyebrow.

With him keeping the instrument steady, it becomes easier for you to adjust the settings, and you capture the readings without any hitch. Professor Han gives the two of you an approving nod, as she heads to help Sophia.

It's late afternoon when the entire field study is completed, and almost early evening by the time the boat reaches the piers again. Both your professors are extremely satisfied with the data you've collected, and invite Jake to all upcoming field studies in exchange for his help with gathering intel (Professor Neumann even mentions making a special access pass for him!).

Sophia parts ways with you early since she had to go pick up Lara from her university block, leaving you alone with Jake (something you didn't mind). He's brushing his hair to smooth it down, but the windswept strands refuse to cooperate.

In the end, he deems it a fight that he had no chance of winning, and gives up with a huff. “It's like my hair has a mind of its own,” he sighs, shaking his head as one last effort, but it ends up worsening things instead. He lets out a frustrated groan, and you laugh at him.

“Duck your head a little,” you say, and he gives you a confused glance, but complies nonetheless, lowering his head a bit. You run your hands through his hair, untangling the knots carefully, before smoothing it down. As you do, you notice how soft and shiny the locks are between your fingers, and you can't help the tease that slips out. “You sure you're using Layla's pet shampoo for her only? Your hair has a suspiciously glossy softness to it.”

He makes an offended noise at that, head snapping up almost immediately. “I do not! My parents just gave me good genes when it came to hair, thank you very much! And I take good care of my health, which is why my hair is healthy too!”

You laugh at that, hands leaving his hair to pinch his cheek. “Hmm, no. I don't believe you. Sounds like propaganda to me.” He sputters at that, half-annoyed, half-amused. “Propaganda for what, woman?! Haircare?!” You hum at his answer, and reach out to pinch his other cheek too. “It sounds like propaganda to conceal illegal shampoo usage to me.”

He reaches out to pinch both of your cheeks in retaliation, shaking your head from side to side. “You take that back right now, or I'll do much more than just pinch your cheeks.” He seems entirely serious about his threat.

So of course you decide to continue teasing him, and stick your tongue out at him. “No.” He blinks, not expecting your response, before finally letting go of you, and straightening to his full height. He adjusts his watch and ring with a near blank expression, save for a raise of his brow. “No? You're sure about that?”

You bite your lip to keep your grin down, and nod your head with mock seriousness. “I'm sure. It's a no.” He hums for a bit. “I can let you still think about it.” You pretend to give it a thought, before turning to him. “Hm, still a no.” He nods at your answer, sliding his watch back some more. “Okay. You asked for it, then.”

You don't get to question what you asked for, before Jake is grabbing you with an arm wrapped around your middle, and lifting you up into his arms, as he begins to run towards the beach.

You shriek at the sight of the water getting closer, and the bastard has the audacity to laugh at that. “Not so tough now, are we?! I gave you choices. Remember that when you go down!” You scream about your clothes getting wet. He just laughs harder.

When you reach the edge of the water, he pretends to drop you in, and you cling to him like a koala to a branch. He laughs at the sight of you clinging to him, and adjusts his glasses with one hand, while the other still holds you near the water.

“Take it back, and I'll let you go.” You shake your head, pride not allowing you to. “No way! I said what I said!” He raises a brow again, and drops you a little more closer to the water, the ends of your hair now wet from the proximity. “And if I drop you into the water, I did what I did.”

“Okay, okay, I take it back! I take it back!” you yell, and he pulls you to your feet, his arm still wrapped around your middle. “See?” he teases, giving you a lopsided grin, “that wasn't so hard, was it?” You grumble at that, batting at his shoulder like an annoyed cat.

He laughs and takes your hits without complaint, before reaching out to fix your hair again. “Well, are we done with business here, or do you still want to go for a spontaneous dip into the ocean?”

“Of course not,” you grumble, and his arm moves up to wrap around your shoulders instead, as the two of you walk back towards the bus. He huffs out a chuckle, and bends down to pick up your bag that he'd pulled off earlier, and slings it over his shoulder along with his own.

You blink at the sight, and reach for it. “Hey, I can carry it—” He cuts you off with a little 'tch,' holding your bag further away from you. “I know you can. I'm carrying it because I want to.”

“... Seriously?” you deadpan, and he simply flashes a megawatt smile at you. “We've reached the bus. Go on, board it. Ladies first,” he lets go of you and steps aside, gesturing to the open door with one of his hands.

You give him another exasperated look, but quickly climb in to prevent him from seeing the grin on your face. He follows right after, a warm shadow behind you.

Naturally, he takes the seat next to you again, and you raise an eyebrow at him. “The others haven't arrived yet—the entire bus is completely empty save for the two of us, and you still made the choice to sit next to me?”

He stretches languidly in his seat, but still remembers to remain mindful of your space. He answers you with a tilt of his head, like his answer was obvious. “Why wouldn't I sit next to you? I don't know anyone else here. However, I do know you.”

“You've known me for a grand total of two days,” you point out. He shrugs, unbothered. “And? You liked Layla as soon as you saw her picture. I trust anybody who likes my daughter at first glance.” You can't help but laugh at the absurdity of his logic.

“I could like Layla and still be a bad person.” He reaches out to flick your forehead for that, kissing his teeth. “My daughter attracts good vibes and good people only. Do not doubt the power of Sim Layla's cuteness.”

You roll your eyes at that, quietening down as others begin to climb aboard. Jake pulls out a video one of his friends had taken of Layla, and it has you blinking in surprise. “Why on earth is your dog using an Annabelle-lookalike as a chew toy?”

He snorts at your response, shaking his head. “I know, right? I almost had a heart attack when I saw it. But uh, one of my younger friends bought a doll off of the internet, and hung it up in another friend's apartment as a joke because he's absolutely terrified of ghosts.”

“What?” you laugh incredulously at that. “That's so mean!” He agrees with you. “It was! And he had Layla with him because he and another mutual take care of her on Wednesdays for my internship, so he gave it to her, and she turned it into a chew toy. I didn't mean to, but I ended up lecturing him for an hour and a half about letting my baby near suspicious looking things. Who knows what kind of diseases she could've contracted from using that thing as a toy?”

You blink at that. “I wouldn't let Gus near a doll like that because I wouldn't want a demon from hell possessing my sweet boy. I didn't even think about the potential of diseases.” He laughs so hard, he nearly falls off of his seat.

“Oh my god,” he breathes, wiping a tear from the corner of his eye. “You're going to love my friends then. They've got the exact same thought process that you do.” You roll your eyes at him, muttering under your breath. “He's friends with me for two days, and now he wants me to be friends with his other friends. Tell me you're a dog owner without telling me you're a dog owner.”

He grins at you, having heard what you were muttering. “Hey, anybody who likes Layla gets fast tracked into our friend group. She's our people filter.” You roll your eyes again, and he chuckles, wrapping an arm around your shoulders again. “Hey, don't knock it till you've seen my baby in action. You'll be amazed at what she can do.”

The rest of the bus ride—all the way back to the conservatory—turns into a debate over whether mackerels or sardines are a better source of nutrients for obligate carnivores such as cats, which then turns into you discussing the best method to preserve the nutrients in vegetables for facultative carnivores such as dogs.

The bus driver practically has to yell at the two of you to get down (which you do, with sheepish smiles), before coming to a halt next to your car. Jake finally returns your bag, placing it into the passenger seat, and pulling the seat belt over it so that it wouldn't fall.

“Well, you should get going then,” he finally says, watching as the evening slowly begins to ink the sky a deep shade of blue. “It's pretty late, and I doubt Gus will like it if you come home after your curfew.” You nod, chuckling at him.

“Mhm. I'll see you next week, then?” He gives you a soft smile, watching you get into the driver's seat. “Of course. Just text me what I need to prepare for, and I'll meet you by the otter enclosure.” He watches you pull out of the parking lot, waving you off as you begin to move past him.

The last thing you hear as you drive out of the conservatory is his smug, satisfied yell. “Oh, and I wasn't going to drop you in the water anyways! You gave up all on your own!”

An incredulous chuckle slips out of you before you can control it, but it's too late to turn around, so you just shake your head and drive away.

The audacity of this man, really. Maybe you should let Gus have a little go at him. Perhaps your vet-hating cat could humble him a little.

Gus, it turns out, does absolutely everything else at the veterinary hospital but despise Jake.

His latest vaccine appointment had landed at eleven on a Wednesday, coincidentally landing on one of your days off. Getting him into the carrier hadn't been much of a struggle, since he willingly went in—Lara had however still shown up for minor help and major moral support.

She'd stared blankly at the sight of Gus going into the carrier on his own, before shaking her head. “I wish my cats were this cooperative when it came to carriers.”

You sigh, patting her shoulder. “That's only for now. The Gus you see now, and the Gus at the vet are two different cats.” She snorts at the thought. “Oh, trust me, I know. Sophia's still traumatised from the last time she accompanied you and Gus. “It's like he wasn't Gus back then,” she said, word for word. “It was like a demon had temporarily possessed him.” She hadn't believed me when I told her that was a cat's normal response to a vet.”

You laugh at her words, shaking your head. When you place a blanket over Gus's carrier, he meows once before finally settling down, his purr reverberating in the enclosed space. Making sure to muffle the sound of the vet file, you place it into your bag, along with some treats and one of his favourite toys ― a little stuffed mouse with a feather tail.

Lara takes the bag and locks up behind you, as you take the carrier. The elevator ride is anything but silent, as Lara brings up one of her cats' escapade episodes at the vet. “I swear, she's going to get a spice warning like Gus in all caps in her patient file one of these days,” she sighs, staring at the carrier in your hand. “Why does he hate vets so much, anyways?”

“I'm not sure, but I think he just doesn't like the scent of other animals on them. Or maybe he had a stressful experience at the vet before I got him from the shelter, so there could also be that.”

Lara nods at that, intrigued. “Animal psychologists are so incredible for that,” she hums, “It's hard for us human ones with even talking clients sometimes, but they have to deal with ones that talk, but only in chirps, meows, squeaks or barks.”

“Why are you reflecting on your major all of a sudden?” you give her an incredulous look, as you walk to your car together. “Who are you and what have you done to one of my best friends?”

Lara waits until you safely buckle Gus's carrier into the backseat, before smacking your shoulder. “Can't a girl reminisce a little without being suspected of being three raccoons in a trench coat?”

“So at one point you were three raccoons in a trench coat,” you tease, ducking your head to dodge another whack from her swinging hands. “What? You were so specific, I had to be sure I was still talking to a human and not three raccoons in a trench coat!”

“Ugh. This is why I hate you,” she mutters under her breath. “I say anything ONCE, and you, Manon, and Sophia run with it for this lifetime and the next.” You roll your eyes at her, starting the car. “Yet you're the one who's always dragging us out for girl dates. For someone who “hates” us, you sure do love having us around.”

“Some things are not meant to be spoken out loud! I would've hit you if not for the fact that you're driving and my nephew is in the backseat,” Lara huffs, already pulling up her playlist for the drive. “Count yourself lucky.”

“Oh, fortune must be smiling upon me for sparing me from Lara's wrath,” you snark, turning right at the intersection near the vet hospital. “How blessed I am, truly.”

Lara snorts at that, but quietens down as you pull into the veterinary hospital's parking lot. She reaches out to place a hand on your shoulder, drawing your attention to her as she switches into serious psych major mode. “Okay,” she says, looking into your eyes. “You can do this. We can do this. We can and we will get Gus in and out of there without stressing him out.”

You nod at her with the seriousness of a mortal about to face divine (feline?) judgement, before getting out of the car and rounding to the back to grab the carrier. Gus, having sensed the shift in the air, lets out a low growl.

“Gus Gus, it's just one little injection... Please don't bite the vet,” you grunt, adjusting your grip, “... again.” He shifts in his carrier, spinning hard enough that you can feel it jerk. Lara rushes you across the compound, having already filled out the paperwork in the time while you were trying to calm Gus down.

The staff, used to Gus's volatility, immediately fast track you into the examination room so that Gus isn't more stressed out by the scents of other animals in the building.

The vet nurse, someone who's dealt with Gus since you got him as a little kitten, nods at you as she leaves the room after setting everything up. “We'll have a different vet for Gus today—he's still a student, but I promise you that he's quite competent at what he does. I think he'll do well with Gus.”

You open your mouth, about to request a different vet, but Lara shakes her head. “Hey, sometimes a person doesn't have to be a full-fledged professional to be good at their job. Maybe let's give this person a try? She's known Gus since he was a kitten, after all. I'd trust her judgement, but you're the owner, so it's your call.”

Sighing, you weigh your options. On one hand, a new vet—a student at that—could potentially stress him out more. But on the other hand, Nurse Kim had seen Gus go through vets like they were cardboard against his claws. So for her to personally recommend someone meant that they were good good at their job.

“Okay... Okay,” you nod at Lara, before turning to Gus, letting him sniff your finger through the carrier. “Let's see how this one goes. Who knows? Maybe you'll like coming to the vet after this, Gus Gus.”

Lara gives you a proud smile, before patting your back. “Yeah, there's no harm in giving it a shot. I'll be right here if things go south, okay? We'll call out the big guns if he commits vet-specific violence,” she glances at your bag, where the gabapentin is.

You snort at that, giving Gus a pet through the little window at the back of his carrier. “Just keep an eye out for escape attempts, yeah?” Lara nods at you, moving to sit on one of the chairs, nose wrinkling at the strong smell of disinfectant clinging to it. “... Did this thing just get sanitised? This smells suspiciously clean.”

You're about to reply to Lara when the door swings open gently, and your attention snaps to the doorway. You recognise him by his crocs before you see his face, and you blink at the sight of him. “Jake?”

He gives you a small smile as he adjusts his glasses, hair still just as messy, before walking in with Gus's patient file under his arm. Lara glances at you, then at Jake, then back to you again, before she claps her hands in realisation.

“You're that Jake? Whale evolution guy?” Jake blinks at the way she's referring to him, before laughing at the nickname. “In the flesh,” he gives her a soft grin, holding her hand out for a handshake, which she obliges. “You must be Lara, right? Sophia mentioned you a lot during the whale watch.”

“Oh my god. I made a joke about whale sharks once, and she's still quoting it to new people?” Lara groans, running a hand through her hair.

Jake simply laughs as he rounds the examination table to come stand next to you, his fingers brushing against yours as he sets Gus's file down. “If it helps, I thought it was a clever joke.” She gives him a look of faux offense, but the grin she has gives her away. “I know it's a good joke, but I just wish she'd stop quoting it everywhere.”

“That's just wishful thinking, unfortunately. They never stop once they start,” he says, reading through the file as Lara agrees with a chuckle of her own. “Spice level's ghost pepper, huh?” He continues to scan through the papers, before pausing at a detail in the papers.

His brows furrow just the slightest, and he turns to you, mildly offended. “You didn't tell me that I was dealing with a noble. I would've prepared a more grand welcome, y'know? Pulled out the Fancy Feast and everything.” You blink, flabbergasted for a second. “What?”

He holds up the file to let you see Gus's full legal name written in Lara's handwriting. “Sir Asparagus Meownnaise the Second of the Artichoke-Broccoli Isles. He deserves a welcome worthy of his title, doesn't he?” He shakes his head, as if very disappointed in you, before leaning down to talk to Gus through the carrier's gate.

“Hello, Sir Gus. My apologies for the substandard welcome you're receiving right now. I bet your mom didn't tell the other vets that you were a noble of great station too, right?” Gus meows at him—eyes still blown wide and ears pinned to his head—but already seems much more receptive to Jake.

Jake nods his head at Gus, a serious expression on his face. “A travesty, I know,” he gives you another look of disappointment, though his eyes twinkle with amusement.

“But it's okay. I can fix that.” He slowly pulls away the carrier's gate, and Lara steps up to take it from him. Grabbing a treat from the drawer, he places some onto the floor of Gus's carrier. “Fancy Feast. A cuisine as dignified as you are.”

Gus, never one to refuse food, sniffs hesitantly at the treat. With a little encouragement from you and Lara with a bit of praise, he finally eats some. Jake lets him finish one treat in the carriage, before drawing him out of it with another.

Gus finishes half of the second treat at a safe distance, before abandoning all hesitancy and grabbing Jake's arm with his paws to eat straight from his hands. “There we go. Good boy,” Jake praises him, petting his spine with smooth, long strokes, while you and Lara stare at Gus, gobsmacked.

For a second, you're not sure if it's even your cat that you're seeing right now.

“Did he just...” you whisper in disbelief, as Lara finishes your thought for you, “... tame the demon velociraptor Ragus?” Jake looks up to give both of you a confused look at the new name. “... Ragus?”

You share a look with Lara, and she explains it to him. “... That's what we call Gus's alter ego at the vet. The one that you... uh, seemingly tamed.” Jake blinks, before letting out a breezy laugh as he realises the name's origin. “Ah, “Ragus” from the last five letters of Asparagus. Surprisingly fitting to describe a demon.”

Gus, now having eaten his second treat, pulls away to lick at his mouth. Jake still remains crouched low, holding out a finger for him to sniff. The feline leans forward, sniffing thoroughly at his finger, before he meows softly. Jake pauses for a second, before reaching out with the same finger to scratch between Gus's ears.

Gus lets him do that, and much to your growing disbelief, even begins to purr. “Mhm, there we go. You're okay with this, cutie?” Jake murmurs, moving his hand to give your cat some chin scratches. You think you couldn't be even more surprised, but then Gus proves you wrong.

Catastrophically wrong. Lara lets out a loud gasp, her hands flying to her mouth as Gus pulls out the ultimate trust move: he flops down onto his side, demanding belly rubs from Jake with a long, stretched out meow.

“He isn't even getting nipped!” Lara whisper-yells to you, still mindful of her volume despite her utter disbelief as Jake gives Gus all the belly rubs he wants. “You're the person Gus loves the most in the whole wide world, but even you aren't spared from the bites! You're sure this guy isn't just three fairies in a trench coat or something?”

You snort at her, giving her an incredulous look. “What is it with you, the number three, and that trench coat?”

Lara flashes you a grin. “My signature catchphrase, of course. Manon says I need to have it patented at this point.” You roll your eyes at the mention of Lara's roommate, shaking your head.

“Of course the law major says that to you.” She shrugs, watching as Jake places a stethoscope on Gus, his expression turning to one of mild confusion. “.... Okay,” he finally says, pulling off the instrument, “... we have a little problem on our hands.”

You sit up straighter, concern flickering across your face, as Lara mirrors your expression. “What's wrong? Is he sick?” Jake shakes his head, rubbing his nape.

“No... It's just that he's purring too loud. I can't exactly hear his heartbeat through the steth.” You blink in disbelief, before standing up to grab the stuffed mouse from your bag.

“God. God, you cannot imagine how much I've yearned to have this problem on my hands.” Jake laughs at that, watching as Gus follows the movement of the toy in your hand. He immediately takes the opportunity to check and note the cat's pulse while Gus is still distracted. “Okay, he's good. Consistent rhythm and sound. Now for teeth...”

“Teeth are in good condition... How often do you brush them?” Gus lets Jake poke and prod at his teeth with his gloved finger, and he notes down his readings. “Once every three days, since I don't want to irritate him. I do give him dental treats, though.”

Jake nods at that, and moves to check other parameters like weight and general responsiveness. “Okay. He's doing well overall—you're doing a good job taking care of him. I don't feel any lumps or suspicious masses either, so he's clear in that department too. Today's visit is for a routine vaccination, yes?”

You nod, and he gestures for you to play with Gus. “He's just gone through an examination, so he won't like it if we poke him with a needle right away. The main goal right now is to desensitise whatever hard feelings he has against the vet's office for long term benefit, so let's give him a minute.”

He leans back against the counter, letting Gus run around the exam room as he chases the laser pointer that Lara had brought along. When he's deemed it okay, he crouches to gently stop Gus in his tracks, before picking him up. “Okay, buddy. You can have a conversation with your mom while we get your shots done.”

Gus makes a little “Mrrp!” at you, tucking his legs under him as he sits on the table. Lara taps her fingers against the edge of the metal, keeping Gus engaged, while Jake loads the syringes with practiced efficiency.

He glances at Lara once, before turning back to his work. “Give him a break in between. He might get too excited and pounce when I give him his vaccines.”

Lara nods, and slows the speed of her taps. You talk to Gus about watching Tom and Jerry after getting back home, while Jake discreetly uses an alcohol wipe on his hind leg under the guise of petting. When you get a slow blink from your cat, he quickly gives him the first vaccine before waiting to see his reaction.

When Gus doesn't become aggressive (and judging by the way he's rubbing against Lara's hands), you figure that he didn't realise that he got a shot. Jake gives him the second one on the other side, before finally patting Gus's head. “There we go. You're all done. Good boy, Gus Gus. Well done.”

Your shoulders sag with relief, and Nurse Kim peeks her head in when Jake rings the buzzer, a satisfied yet awed smile on her face. “So this is lover boy Gus? Oh, he's so sweet.” She steps in, reaching out for a pet.

Gus lets her, and also takes the little pocket treat she offers him, crunching away. She pats Jake on the back, a smile on her face. “Well, Doctor Sim, if you could be friends with one of our most notorious patients, I'm sure your internship will be smooth sailing from here onwards.”

Jake shakes his head with a bashful smile. “Gus should be credited for his cooperation, too. Seems he just wanted his aristocratic status to be acknowledged, is all.”

Nurse Kim laughs, giving him another pat on the back, before collecting the used instruments. “We don't have any other patients, so why don't you see Gus off? I'm sure he'd appreciate the send off.”

Jake nods, letting his coat rest on his arm, as he follows you and Lara out of the exam room. Gus sits contently in his carrier, a sight that still feels unreal to you—Lara notices, and takes the carrier from you.

“I'm going to go ahead and get his file updated, okay? See you at the receptionist's desk.” Before you can say anything, she's already off, rounding the corner with quick steps, leaving you alone with Jake in the hallway.

Jake laughs, walking in stride with you. “She's energetic,” he says, referring to Lara. “But she's a great aunt to Gus, I can tell.” You chuckle at that, shaking your head.

“She is, yeah. She, Sophia, and Manon—our other friend—spoil him rotten.” You glance at his waist, where there's no Layla keychain looped into his pant's belt loops. “No Layla accompanying you on duty today?”

He looks down, before laughing. “Unfortunately, no acrylic Layla joining me right now. I took a shower before Gus's appointment and got into fresh scrubs to remove any lingering scents, so I didn't clip it back.”

You hum, nodding at his answer. “But seriously, I can't thank you enough. That's the first time I've seen Gus and not Ragus at an appointment—now I'm even more sure that Leonard and Yun will love you. The otters have a soft spot for gentle people.”

He shakes his head, holding the door open for you. “Oh, please. I did what I had to do. A good rapport with my patients is important if I want to give them the best care possible. Gus is no exception to that, even if he was a little feral.”

“I'll see you tomorrow at the conservatory, then?” He follows after you, watching you sign the papers required to finish the appointment. You nod, giving him a smile, watching as he kisses Gus's head between the ears when he peeks out of his carrier. Lara tucks Gus back in, before heading off to the car. “Of course. Same time, same place. Give me a call if you get lost.”

Jake laughs, wrapping an arm around your shoulders in a side hug, as he pats your back. “Sure, sure. Just don't get too mad if I blow up your phone with calls.” You squeeze him gently, before pulling away. “I doubt I could be mad at you ever again. You're in my list of permanent people now.”

He raises a brow at that, a teasing smile on his face. “So I was in the temporary section the entire time? Good thing I'm friends with Gus now, so you can't demote me ever again.” You shake your head, and he gives your hand one final squeeze before heading off. “See you, then. Give me an update on Gus when you reach home, okay?”

When you get back to the car, Lara is adjusting her hair using the car's mirror, but her manner is far too nonchalant for her to be casual.

“So.... Jake, huh?” You give her a smile, as you buckle in your seatbelt. “Yeah, Jake.” She hums, leaning back into her seat. “He reminds me of a golden retriever. Cute, but also smart.”

Shaking your head, you start the car, pulling out of the parking lot. “You're willingly giving a man a compliment?” Lara rolls her eyes, her fingers tapping away at her phone's screen, possibly texting Sophia and Manon to catch them upto speed. “I give out compliments where they're desrved, alright? And he absolutely deserved one. He sent Ragus on vacation—that alone deserves two compliments.”

The music from Lara's playlist fills the car, as you drive back to your apartment. Lara is asleep in the passenger seat, knocked out from the day. The roads are covered in beams of oranges, reds and pinks from the setting sun, bathing everything in a warmth that feels familiar.

As you glance back at a sleeping Gus in the backseat, a small smile rests on your face, chest warm and full from something other than the mellow orange sunrays.

Good thing Lara convinced you to give Nurse Kim's suggestion a chance—Jake truly did deserve any and all compliments you could give him. Guess vet visits won't be such a battle against feline alter egos from now on, huh?

⚚ ACT THREE: EIGHT LIVES MEET ONE LIFE TO THE MAX

The first time you meet Jake outside of the conservatory corridors and vet visits, it's on a walk with Gus, while Layla accompanies him, tail wagging at speeds you've never seen on a dog before.

Gus, much like a canine, enjoyed his excursions out in the parks, though he did spend a lot more time basking in the sun than doing any actual walking. Armed with a bright, neon pink harness and matching leash—he'd picked it out himself at the pet store—he was constantly drawing attention simply because he was a cat who liked to behave more like a dog.

Yet, he enjoyed the attention thoroughly, purring and rolling over for strangers who wanted to pet him. He soaked up all the praise and coos of “Oh, my god, he's so friendly!” he got like a sponge to water, leaving you to wonder how a cat who loved people so much would turn into a literal nightmare at the vet's.

Until Jake showed up, that is.

Now all of Gus's vet appointments are scheduled for eleven on Wednesdays, the same day Jake drops by for his internship. Gus still purrs as loud as a motorbike, and Jake still pulls out the Fancy Feast treats for him, sometimes even throwing in a can of Royal Canin as a reward for good behaviour. Oh, and of course, no vet visit ended without a kiss to Gus's head from Jake, which was something the feline was shamelessly fond of.

You're leaning against an old oak tree, watching Gus sniff at a clover on the ground with the precision of a forensic investigator, when a familiar voice rings out. “Layla, baby, some of us still run on two legs only! Slow down a little!”

Gus perks up at the sound of his other favourite human's voice, ears swiveling in all directions as he tries to pinpoint Jake's location. A few rustling bushes nearby have you step away from the tree, and then out pops from the leaves a head of white fur you've seen in pictures so many times now.

Layla pants in what you assume to be excitement, before she jumps out of the shrubbery. Jake follows behind her, a few leaves stuck in his messy mop of hair, his glasses slightly askew.

Gus meows loudly at the sight of Jake, who immediately recognises him—and in turn, you—with a loud gasp. “Gus Gus! Are you out for a walk with mom today?”

Gus makes another loud, stretched out meow, his tail standing pin straight. Jake's still struggling with Layla's sudden burst of energy, but with a soft command of “Layla, be good,” he gets her to calm down just enough that the two of them can approach you.

He still makes sure to maintain an appropriate amount of distance between her and Gus, keeping a firm hold on her collar as he crouches down to let Gus sniff at his finger first.

Gus sniffs his finger for a mere fraction of a second, before he's already bumping his head against Jake's hand and flopping onto his side to ask for pets. Jake happily obliges him, even giving him some chin scratches without being prompted to, which makes the feline purr even louder in satisfaction.

In the meantime, Layla—despite the grip Jake has on her collar—steps closer to sniff at your shoes, before letting out a mellowed, curious bark. Her tail wags softly, brushing against your pants.

“Hi, Layla,” you coo, crouching down to give her head pats. She happily accepts them, and Jake, with a glance towards you and Layla, lets go of her collar, trusting her to behave.

Layla sits down in front of you, wet nose bumping into your hands as she takes all the pets she can get from you. “You're such a pretty girl. Did dad bring you out for a walk, sweetheart?”

She barks twice at that, tail wagging in excitement, before spinning in a little circle. “She insisted on deviating from our usual routine,” Jake explains, cradling Gus like a baby. “And somehow she led me to the two of you.”

You snort at the sight of your cat being carried around like a furry tangerine toddler, though Gus himself seems to have no qualms about the attention he's receiving.

“Are you sure it was Layla and not you who wanted to see me and Gus?” you tease, and Jake flushes slightly, a gentle red tint colouring his ears. “It wasn't me, it really was Layla—not that I don't want to see you two!”

You laugh, before yelping as Layla places her paws onto your legs so that she can give you doggy kisses. “Oh, Layla! That surprised me!” Jake laughs at the sight of it, giving you a smug smirk. “Told you, my daughter is an excellent people filter.” Gus looks down at you and Layla from his arms, letting out a little “Mrrp!” in curiosity.

Layla, once she's satisfied with the amount of kisses she's given you, steps back to sit next to Jake, just as Gus jumps down from his arms to brush against your legs.

He gives you a gentle headbutt, before turning to face Layla, who crouches down to sniff at him curiously. Perhaps finding Jake's scent all over him helps, because then she crouches low to the ground, tail still wagging, as she asks Gus to play with her.

Gus sniffs her cautiously, and Layla remembers to stay low so as to not startle him. He takes his sweet time, even placing one paw on hers to sniff at her fur better. When he's sure of what—or rather, who—he's smelling, he rolls over to lay in between her paws, resting his head against her.

Jake raises a brow at the two animals, before chuckling softly. “Of course they'd be friends,” he says, an amused yet affectionate gleam in his eyes. “Both of them like pink accessories. Look, they're even matching.” He points out the pink harnesses and leashes that both Gus and Layla are sporting. “Similar shades, too.”

You shake your head, pulling your phone out to snap a picture. “Guess we were meant to meet today, after all. Gosh, how cute. Layla, Gus! Look here!” Both the animals tilt their heads at the camera, and you quickly snap a picture.

Jake leans over your shoulder to see it better, and coos at the picture. “Oh, they're so cute. They even do the little head tilts like each other! Do you mind sending me that picture?”

“Of course not,” you reply, already pulling up his contact to forward the image to him. His phone lights up, and he immediately moves to set the picture as his profile.

“That looks good. Two of my favourite animals in the same photo is all that I needed.” When he looks back to see you, he blinks in confusion, tilting his head like Gus and Layla had done a moment ago. “... What are you laughing for?”

Biting down on your lip to suppress the grin on your face, you reach up to brush the leaves out of his hair. “You've got a little something in your hair. Trying to cosplay a tanuki, are we?” Jake blinks, before laughing as he bends down a little to let you get the rest of the leaves out of his hair.

“Ah, Layla, why did you have to run through the bushes like that? Now Dad has all sorts of leaves and twigs in his hair.” Layla barks at the sound of her name, before going back to playing with Gus, who's content to bat a paw at Layla to play. You laugh at the way Layla doesn't care about having her face squished, content to let your little orange boy play hide and seek with her fur.

“Am I going to find orange fur on my clothes now, like white wasn't enough already?” Jake sighs in fond annoyance, shaking his head at the thought of more visible fur showing up on his clothes.

Both Layla and Gus make little noises at him, before going back to rolling in the grass. “Gus, you're gonna get dust all over you!” you exclaim, watching in affectionate exasperation as your cat ignores your protests in favour of Layla.

Jake snorts quietly, before wordlessly handing you a wet wipe from the little backpack slung on his shoulder. He crouches down to wipe Layla's paws, before slipping on some dog booties onto her feet.

“This is why I always come prepared. There's no telling when Layla ropes in another pet into doing something she wants to,” he says, reaching out to adjust Gus's harness after you finish wiping his paws as well. “I think I still have a pair of Layla's booties from when she was smaller in the car—they should be able to fit Gus.”

“Gus doesn't really wear stuff like boots, unfortunately,” you sigh, and Jake gives you a quizzical look at that. “Really?” You nod, picking up Gus. “Really. Trust me, I've tried. He doesn't want to cooperate—he doesn't let me fasten the straps at all.” Jake hums, observing Gus for a moment, before standing up and brushing the dust off of his knees.

“Let me try once, then. No harm in giving it a try, right?” He flashes you a bright grin, before turning to Layla, tapping his thigh once. “Stay here for a second, okay? I'll be back.” Layla yips twice, before settling back down again—but this time she opts to sit closer to you. Jake returns a little while later, two tiny dog booties clutched in his hand.

He crouches back down, sitting in front of you, before reaching out to pet Gus. “Hey, Gus Gus. We're just gonna try something out, okay?” Gus licks his mouth, and watches Jake closely. It's kinda insulting at this point, really, how much your cat seems to adore Jake.

“Angle him downwards a little,” he says, and you follow, adjusting your grip on Gus. When you notice the type of boots he's holding, a little noise of acknowledgement escapes you.

“Are those the lacing kind?” Jake nods, quickly fastening the boots around Gus's feet. “Mhm. Layla doesn't like the velcro ones either. I assume she finds them very restrictive, so I think that's the problem for Gus as well.”

Gus meows once, flexing his feet in the boots. You let him down gently, and he makes two stomps, as if trying to get used to the foreign feeling of leather on his feet. Jake whistles softly, patting his thigh to draw Gus's attention towards him.

But before Gus can take another step towards him, Layla's already at Jake's side, licking his face and sending his glasses more off course. “Layla, baby, that wasn't a call for you,” he gasps, mid-laugh. Layla, however, couldn't care less, and continues her wet nosed assault of doggy kisses.

He finally manages to get her to sit next to him, and this time, he uses a different whistle to call for Gus's attention. “Come here, Gus Gus.” The feline takes a hesitant step, but when you praise him, he takes another step forward.

Slowly, he walks ahead, gaining more confidence with every word of encouragement he receives, before eventually reaching Jake.

He stands on two feet, rubbing against Jake's chin. “Good boy,” Jake smoothes a hand over Gus's spine, and the sound of purring echoes again. “You did very well, sweetie. Do you want a treat?” Gus meows at the word 'treat,' and runs back to you when he hears you pull out the treats from your bag.

You give him two of the pocket treats, and he crunches them up, licking your hand to get any last crumbs before sitting back on his haunches, rather content with himself.

Jake offers you a hand to help you—and just like the day at the beach—you end up stumbling into him due to the force he uses to pull you up. His arm comes to wrap around your middle, and he lets out a breathy laugh. “Easy there,” he holds you close, his grip firm to prevent any accidents. “Wouldn't want you eating grass like a herbivore, would we now?”

You open your mouth to retort, but those eyes of his, filled with just so much warmth, end up freezing you in place. You're close enough that you can smell the faint scent of his cologne—a light, airy fragrance, like coconut and cinnamon—and Jake's grip on you subtly tightens, fingers flexing just a little more to hold you closer. “What,” he teases, snickering softly, “did a little Gus get your tongue?”

Something in you decides that he needs to shut up. So you make him.

Reaching up to adjust his glasses, you feel the way his breathing gets heavier as your fingers brush against his skin. “Not really,” you hum, voice casual as you brush away some of his hair from his face, “just trying not to laugh at how stupid you can look with your glasses all messed up like that.”

He scoffs, a little smirk tugging at his mouth—one that he tries to tamp down by biting his lip—before turning to you again. “I look stupid, huh? Are you sure about that?”

Stupidly cute. Stupidly handsome. Yet the words don't leave your mouth—instead you flick his forehead, and he lets go of you with a yelp, hands reaching up to rub it. “Meanie,” he pouts, and you resist the urge to coo at him. “Gus, are you seeing this? Your mother's so mean to me.”

Layla barks once, before coming to sit next to you, as if taking your side. Jake stares in mild offense at her, his eye twitching just the slightest, and you have to try your hardest not to burst out laughing.

“Layla,” he whispers, “you've only known her for an hour. You're still gonna take her side over mine?” She only yips at him, before the border collie's nudging your hand for pets again. You laugh this time, as Jake stares at her in betrayal.

“Guess she likes me more,” you tease, and he shakes his head, pretending to be annoyed, but his grin gives him away. “Fine, fine. I suppose I can... concede first place in Layla's heart to you.” Then, as if to add salt to his metaphorical wounds, Gus also trots over to you, purring as he sits by your feet.

“Really?” Jake huffs, crossing his arms over his chest. “You're gonna hog both of them?” You shrug, teasing him. “What can I say? Animals just love me.” He rolls his eyes at that, narrowing them dramatically at you. “Oh, do they? Let's see how much they love you...” he steps forward, a smirk on his face, “.... when I do this!”

Jake moves to grab you, but misses when you move to the side. He takes the momentary setback to his advantage instead, chasing you around the park.

“C'mere! I'm not letting you off today!” he hollers, pretending to swipe at you, while you shriek in laughter at him. Layla runs in circles around the two of you, tongue out and tail wagging at record speeds in her excitement, while Gus weaves in and out between your feet.

“Woah, watch out for Gus!” you yell, screaming again as you barely manage to get away, Jake's fingers brushing against your arm. He makes a quick glance at his feet, noting Gus's presence, before lunging at you again. “Nice try! You're not getting away this time!”

Layla seems to be on her dad's side this time, because before you notice it, she's already herded you back to Jake. “Gotcha,” he whispers, wrapping both arms around you from the back, as he lifts you up. “I always knew my daughter was gonna be on my side. Now what do we do with you, hm?”

You yell and kick your feet in the air, but he simply tightens his grip on you, heading away from the grass to the pathway. There, he sets you down on the concrete, but doesn't let go of you just yet.

“Oh, I know what we can do with you.” He grins, handing Gus's leash to you, fixing your tousled hair for you. “You and Gus are going to accompany Layla and I to the café down the second street. They make really good petcups.”

“Do I even get a choice?” you question, Gus on your left, already beginning to walk besides him. He flashes you a saccharine smile, as Layla takes the space to his right.

“No.” You roll your eyes, scoffing at him. “I figured.” He pokes your temple, then wraps his arm around your shoulders. “Smart girl. Now onwards! Their blueberry croissants sell out real fast, so chop chop!”

Layla and Gus walk a beat faster than the two of you, the two of them in step with each other, side by side in matching booties and harnesses. The late afternoon mellows the sunlight to something more pleasant, and the trees cast shadows with their leaves, leaving little pockets of light on the concrete that become a game for the two pets.

Jake draws you closer to him when someone passes the four of you, unapologetic about having you stay near him. He just gives you another innocent grin, leaving you shaking your head at him. His warmth curls around you in a comfortable way.

As you watch Gus and Layla chase the little patches of light, while Jake yells at them to be careful, a familiar feeling makes itself home, the same way it has been doing for the past few days—warm and fuzzy like cottony rabbits, gently resting in the hollow of your chest, right next to your fluttering heart.

Would this be a date? You're not sure. But it never hurt a girl to daydream, did it? Maybe this can remain between the two of you for a little while longer.

With a silent glance at each other, both Sunghoon and Jay decide that Jake's chipper-than-usual mood these past few days has been rather suspicious.

They stare at him, watching as he hums to himself while making popcorn for boys' night at Sunghoon's apartment. The others had been busy, swamped with assignments and deadlines, so it was just the three of them for tonight.

“He's been grinning like an idiot for twenty minutes more than he usually does,” Sunghoon whispers to Jay, giving Jake a side eye. “Also, he's being rather liberal with the salt on the popcorn... Wouldn't he have stopped adding it by now?”

Jay, still keeping the smile on his face so that Jake wouldn't be suspicious, whispers back. “Are you trying to figure out what's got him so happy, or are you trying to criticise his sodium intake?”

“Can't I do both?” Sunghoon shoots back, leaning against the counter casually as Jake passes by him. “I'm even more suspicious now because he hasn't asked to see Zootopia at all till now. He usually asks at least once every movie night, if Jungwon doesn't do it before him.”

Jay, unable to deny the truth in his words, simply sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose. “So what do you want to do? Corner him? Go through his phone? Threaten to withhold any further screenings of Zootopia and Zootopia 2 till he cracks and confesses?”

“Exactly,” Sunghoon snaps his fingers at Jay, “banning screenings of Zootopia and Zootopia 2 will get him. And if it doesn't, Jungwon will get him before we do.” Jay facepalms, muttering an “I'm surrounded by idiots,” under his breath as he moves to grab the drinks.

Sunghoon, now sure that he must execute his plan, grabs the TV remote before anybody else does. He flops onto the couch, hoarding an entire blanket for himself, as he waits for Jay and Jake, who appear soon after, drinks and popcorn in hand.

Jake sets the bowl onto the table, sitting down in the middle, while Jay takes his other side, handing him and Sunghoon a cup of lemon soda each.

“What are we going to watch?” Jay questions, leaning back into his seat. Sunghoon catches his eye over Jake's head, gesturing to the remote in his hand.

Jay sighs, before finally speaking up, trying to be as casual as possible. “... So, Jake. That's... a cute new profile picture you have now.” Sunghoon cringes at his attempt at an interrogation, but Jake answers him anyways.

“Oh, that's Gus! He's one of my patients at the hospital, but his mom is a friend of mine. She took the picture, actually. We met by coincidence at the park, and Layla was smitten with him. She's good at photography, right? They're so cute, I had to immediately make it my profile.”

Sunghoon, having found his prey, sinks his fangs in. “She? Sim, you didn't tell me you had a girl friend.” Jake blinks at him, confused. “Hoon, she's... she's not my girlfriend.”

Jay coughs into his hand to stifle his laughter, while Sunghoon continues, a grin on his face. “I never said she was your girlfriend. I said she was your girl friend—a girl who's your friend. No one mentioned romance around here, so why are you bringing it up, hm?”

Jake chokes on his drink, coughing as Jay rubs his back. “I—I wasn't thinking about that,” he breathes out, wiping his mouth with a tissue. “No one said anything about dating.”

Jay takes the lead this time, sipping leisurely on his glass of soda. “Yeah, genius. We didn't say anything about dating. You're the only one bringing it up. You wanna share something with the class?”

Jake—to his credit—tries to deflect the topic, bringing up the fact they haven't picked a title to watch yet. “Yeah. What I wanna share is that we haven't picked anything to watch yet. If you two don't have any ideas, I nominate Zootopia 2.”

Sunghoon's grin widens, and he brandishes the remote like a trophy. “Confess, or we ban the Zootopia series till you do. Do you really want to fight an annoyed Jungwon, Jakey?”

Jake stares at him for a second, before groaning and holding his head in his hands. “Seriously, ah! I can't believe you'd hold Nick Wilde hostage of all things!” He squirms in his seat, sitting back up with a huff, blowing his bangs out of his face. “I hate you two.” Jay laughs, pinching his cheek. “So cute. We love you too, even if you behave like a sulking puppy at times.”

Sunghoon crowds into his space from the other side, wiggling his fingers in a pathetic attempt to “hypnotise” Jake. “Come on, come on. Spill it out. Spare no details.” Jake slaps his hands away, holding up a pillow like it's a shield.

“Get away, you nosy asses! Even Layla doesn't stick her nose into my stuff this much!” Jay snorts at that, giving Jake's cup a refill. “Layla sticks her nose into your things literally. We do it metaphorically. Now talk, Sim. Don't you want to see Mr Big and his skunk fur rug again?”

Jake groans, punching the pillow in his lap, before sitting up with a huff. “Fine. Fine, I'll talk!” Sunghoon and Jay cheer at that, giving each other a high five.

“So...” Sunghoon drawls, a teasing smirk on his face. “... You like her?” Jake flushes at the question, and Jay cackles loudly, clutching his stomach. “Oh my god! You must really like her to have your body answer before you do!”

“Hey, hey. Stop distracting him,” Sunghoon nudges Jay with his foot, before turning back to Jake. “Yeah, buddy. I'm gonna need more details than that. Where did you meet her? How long have you known her? Does she like Layla? Are you mentally ready to co-parent an orange cat?”

Jake blinks at the rapid influx of questions, but tries his best to answer them. “I met her at the conservatory, I've known her a few months now, she liked Layla without actually meeting her and... I'm already Gus's chosen vet.”

Both Sunghoon and Jay share a look of realisation at that. “Wait... She's the one who took you whale watching and recommended you for the otter study?” Jake nods, a bashful smile on his face. Jay slaps his shoulder, before pulling him into a side hug. “Ay, look at that grin he has! You're done for, dude. You're so done for.”

Sunghoon snaps his fingers, a teasing lilt to his voice. “So when do we get to meet future Mrs Sim? Do I have to plan a wedding already?” Jake groans at that, but the grin on his face tells another story. “Oh, shush. I don't even know if she likes me back!”

Jay rolls his eyes, but offers a comforting squeeze to Jake's shoulders. “Jake, I love you, I really do, but I can't sit here and watch you fumble this. She literally took you whale watching. That's got to be like... the most romantic thing in you guys' language. And you said she trusts you with her fur baby? You honestly can't be that blind.”

“Maybe we need to get him an extra pair of glasses,” Sunghoon grins, “preferably a rose tinted pair. Let him see the love in the air a little.” Jake sighs, but gives them another fond grin. “I really hate you guys.”

“We love you too, Jakey,” the two of them wink at him, already pulling up Zootopia 2 to watch. Sunghoon, now satisfied with the level of information he has, slings an arm over the back of the couch. “Now who's ready to see a bunny and a fox be the cutest pair of cops? Maybe they'll give you a little confession inspiration.”

He dodges the pillow thrown at his head, joining Jay who's already laughing. Jake huffs and shakes his head, biting down on his lip to hide his little smile as he settles down to finally watch the animated feature, Nick Wilde now no longer held hostage.

What a nosy, nosy pair of friends he had. Perhaps he could take their advice and take you out on a date—the new cat café downtown did have pretty good reviews, after all.

⚚ ACT FOUR: EIGHT LIVES VS ONE DOG WHO LOVES THEM ALL

When Jake joked about wanting to see Gus get jealous, he hadn't expected the universe to take that as a personal challenge.

It happened so fast, he didn't even have time to process what was going on. One moment he was speaking with you while you made tea in your kitchen (he'd brought Layla over to yours for a playdate with Gus), the next moment Gus was leaping onto the counter, a tuft of suspiciously Layla-like fur in his mouth.

He'd stared at the cat for a moment, turned to stare at you, before looking back at Gus again, taking in the sight of him holding up the fur like a little trophy. Then, he'd scrambled off of his seat, nearly dropping his tea mug in his haste to get to Layla.

“Layla! Layla!” he calls out, with you following right behind. The clicking of dog paws against floors rings out first, before Layla shows up looking... perfectly normal? His face furrows in confusion, but he kneels down to check up on her anyway.

“Oh my god, I'm so sorry! I didn't realise Gus would swipe at her since they were getting along so well! He usually does get along well with dogs... I don't know why he's doing this now,” you breathe out next to him, and the look of pure concern on your face for his four legged daughter has his heart doing somersaults at a perfectly inappropriate time.

“It's okay,” he says, running his hands over Layla—partly to check up on her, partly to avoid eye contact with you—and sighs in relief when he finds no blood or injuries. “I think they were just play fighting.”

As he runs his fingers through her fur, more tufts come free with each stroke, and he sighs at that. “She's... shedding. Gus pulled off a loose tuft—he didn't rip anything out. She's not hurt.” He hears you take an audible sigh of relief, holding a hand to your chest.

“Oh thank goodness. I thought he'd really hurt her.” He shakes his head, laughing softly as he cups Layla's little face in his hands. “Were you playing with Gus Gus, Layla?”

She yips at that, tail wagging faster at the mention of Gus's name. The cat himself comes to sit next to your leg, licking his mouth as he watches Jake and Layla with an intensity that's borderline obsessive.

“Woah, Gus. Why're you staring at him like that?” You blink at him, and Gus turns to give you a sweet slow blink, before returning his attention to Layla and Jake.

Layla's standing on her haunches now, front legs resting on his shoulders as she covers his face in doggy kisses, sending his glasses off-center with the loving force behind them.

“Layla, Layla,” Jake chuckles, being forced to sit down, as Layla uses the opportunity to plant more licks and kisses. “Easy, girl. Easy. Dad's okay. I was just worried about you.”

He scratches the fur under her baby pink collar, and her tail begins to nearly sweep your floor with how fast she's wagging it. You pet Gus, and he purrs, brushing his head against your knees, his tail standing pin straight.

Then, just as everything seems to have gone back to normal... it happens.

As soon as Jake cups Layla's face and plants a kiss between her ears, Gus—who'd been happily purring away by your feet—lets out a little hiss, his tail now swishing slowly in mild annoyance. Jake blinks in surprise at that, still holding Layla. “Is he... Is he hissing at me?” You glance at Jake, then at Gus, before looking back at Jake.

“... Pet Layla, would you?” Jake does as you say, smoothing his hands over the border collie's fur. Gus goes back to being calm, purring again. You watch him closely, before nodding at Jake again. “Now kiss her head like you did earlier.” Jake, although very much confused, kisses the top of Layla's head again.

The moment his lips touch the space between her ears, Gus bristles and lets out another hiss. Jake's brow furrows, and he kisses Layla's cheek. Gus is calm again, purring once more. Jake stares at him, and while maintaining eye contact with the feline, leans down to kiss her head again.

Gus reacts immediately, hissing again, his tail swishing rather wildly now. You reach out to pet and kiss Layla, but it doesn't elicit the same kind of reaction from the cat. Jake repeats the action of kissing Layla's head a few more times, and Gus hisses every single time. Finally, Jake pulls away, pushing his glasses back into place, reaches out to pick Gus up.

There's an amused lilt to his voice, as he coos at Gus, having figured out what's going on. “Aw, Gus Gus, are you jealous? You don't like it when I kiss Layla's head?” Gus immediately meows, paws reaching up to rest on Jake's face. He laughs, moving to cradle the cat.

You stare down at the feline, watching him in fond exasperation as he begins to purr louder, shamelessly getting his fill of kisses from Jake. “... Seriously? You're not mad that he's kissing Layla, but you're mad because he's kissing her head? Gus, you're so weird at times.”

Layla barks, crouching low, resting her head against Jake's thigh. Gus lets out a little “Mrow,” slumping over Jake's hands like liquid, before immediately beginning to groom Layla. He's annoyingly thorough with it too, placing a paw on her collar to keep her in place, as he leaves Jake's grip to have better posture.

“See? All good.” Jake gives you a lopsided grin—letting go of Gus, who curls into Layla's side—and scoots back to sit next to you, his back to the couch. His arm brushes against yours as he moves to sit comfortably, before resting his head against your shoulder.

He huffs out a chuckle at the sight of your pets playing together again—Layla nudges her favourite squeaky ball towards Gus, who flicks it for her to fetch—the sound warm, and rumbling through his chest.

He pulls out his phone to record a video of them, snorting under his breath when they do something particularly stupid. “Look at them,” he says, holding the device to show you the footage, “they're so cute. I'm so glad they get along so well.”

He clutches his chest dramatically when they curl up together in the dog bed you'd bought for Layla, his breath warm against your skin as he whispers to you, trying not to disturb the animals. “Oh my god. I'm going to die of cuteness... Ah, I just wanna squish them.”

You snort at that, pinching his cheek, whispering just as quietly. “Rein in that cuteness aggression, please. They'll never cuddle together again if you wake them up now.” He rolls his eyes, hand reaching out to play with your fingers, before he playfully pretends to nip at them.

“Oi! What's that for?” you huff, nudging his leg with yours. Jake lifts his head from your shoulder, teasing grin on his face. “Hey, I have to get this cuteness aggression out somehow. You're the perfect alternative outlet.”

You scoff, flicking his forehead again. “Idiot. You're lucky I find you endearing.” He raises a brow at that, sitting up straighter. “... That's interesting.”

You freeze for a moment at his tone, before turning your head to glare at him. “Jake.” He laughs at the threat in your voice, raising his hands in surrender. “Okay, okay. I'm sorry,” he chuckles, reaching out to wrap his arm around your shoulders and pulls you to his side. “I won't do it again.”

You roll your eyes again, resting your head on his chest, feeling the soft thumping of his heart against your ear. “... You're really an idiot.” He hums, carding his fingers through your hair, as he rests his head against the cushions.

“Yeah, I suppose I am an idiot.” The way he says it feels like there's more to the words, but when you finally lift your head to look up at him, he's already closed his eyes, breathing softly as he sleeps.

You sweep your gaze around your apartment, watching the way the late afternoon lights it up in hues of mellow white gold. Gus and Layla are cuddled together, exhausted from all the running and playing.

Jake slumbers at your side, his head now resting on top of yours, fingers wrapped around your arm. Huffing out a soft chuckle, you curl into his side again, and let the steady drumming of his heart lull you to sleep with the rest of them.

You'll have to apologise to Manon later, perhaps with a treat at the café. Lazy afternoons are indeed much more enjoyable, especially with the right people around.

⚚ EPILOGUE: NINE LIVES ONCE MORE

For a second, Jake wonders if his glasses have failed him. But when he takes them off, and still sees that man standing next to you like he belonged there—which he didn't, of course—he feels an ugly, heavy weight curl itself into the hollow of his chest.

He gives a half-hearted response to the classmate showing him a field report on her file, his gaze still locked on you from across the entrance hall of the marine biology building. He bristles when the man leans over your shoulder to take a better look at the papers in your hands, his arm coming around you to hold them up better.

Manon stands on your other side, dressed in a crisp suit, just having returned from a mock court. Her easygoing demeanour with the man tells him that you're familiar with him to some capacity as well, and the thought of it has his ears turning red in annoyance.

This wasn't how it was supposed to go.

The elective class he'd signed up for—Marine Mammalogy, Intermediate Level—was supposed to be one he shared with you. In fact, he should be sitting next to you right now, exchanging notes for the class.

Instead, he's stuck with the rest of his classmates (no offense to them, but they're kind of the last people he wants to see at the moment), just because Professor Choi decided that it would be a good idea to split the class based on their majors, since the methodology of teaching would be different depending on it. Curse interdisciplinary dynamics. They could burn in a pit for all he cared.

But even if Jake didn't care much about said methodologies, Sim Jaeyun did. So he rips his gaze away from you, turns back to his classmate, and tries to pretend that he can still hear her over the sound of his own heartbeat rushing in his ears.

“Yeah,” he smiles, all teeth and no warmth, gulping down the fury bubbling in his throat. “That's an interesting case. Fur seals do have an intricate foraging cycle. How'd you get your data?”

The girl preens at his praise, tucking her hair behind her ear as she begins to ramble about how hard it was to secure an opportunity to study the seals during an exchange programme.

Jake usually would've felt bad about not giving her his full attention—especially since he could see that she's clearly passionate about the topic—but at the moment he couldn't care any less, social courtesies be damned, because he can still see that man speaking to you from his peripheral vision.

Oh. Oh. He's making you laugh now.

“Hey,” he interrupts his peer, flashing her an apologetic smile and hopes that it would be convincing enough. “That's a great deal of care you've poured into your research—admirable, really—but I'm kinda busy at the moment. How about we catch up on it sometime later? I've still got my own studies to do on the marine otters.”

The girl blinks, before nodding at him, although very visibly disappointed. She wishes him luck for his own studies, and goes off to socialise with her friends with a “See you later, Jake!” that has him biting his cheek in irritation he doesn't quite understand.

He takes a deep breath, and rolls his shoulders in an attempt to calm down. It almost works, and he feels his elevated pulse slowly begin to descend—until his ears pick up on the sound of your loud laughter. Then his heart rate shoots back up, spiking into a crescendo of annoyance and fury.

He can hear Manon laugh with you, but it's the way you laugh that stands out to him. Loud, free, and most importantly, happy. He knows that laugh. It's the type of laughter that spills out of you when you're talking about Gus. It's the same laughter he's heard when you talk about Sophia, Lara and Manon. He's memorised it to be the sound of laughter that bubbles out when it comes to the people you love.

So why is this no-name bastard earning the privilege of being able to hear you laugh like that?

Against his will, he turns to look back at you. But instead of finding your eyes, it's Manon's that he finds. She raises an inquisitive brow at him, before she looks back at you, where you're still talking to that man.

Her gaze returns to Jake again, and he doesn't know what kind of expression he's making, but what he does know is that it's the reason why that stupid, smug smirk slowly curls onto her face. Then, to his confusion, she pretends that the entire interaction didn't occur, and turns to talk to you again.

The angle she's standing at blocks his view of you and the stranger, and he absolutely hates that he can't see your expressions any longer. He can't see those eyes that say more than what your mouth does. He can't see if you're grinning at him, or if you're giving him one of those teasing smirks he's come to be so fond of.

All he sees is the back of Manon's head, all he hears is the combined sound of another round of laughter, and it all drives him fucking crazy.

His head feels like it's being dunked underwater. He hates it. He wants to go to you, see what's actually going on. He wants to see those pretty eyes that shine with so much love and care for beings that don't speak the same language you do, yet you understand them all the same.

He wants to see you smile at him, tease him with that airy little lilt in your voice. He wants to listen to you talk for hours about Gus, and he wants to hold your hand through it all. Yet his feet feel heavy, like lead and metal have replaced bone and sinew, and he stays rooted to his spot.

He snaps out of his daze when Professor Choi calls for him, and with a final glance at you, the stranger, and Manon still engaged in conversation, he forces his feet to walk away, no matter how much he wants to stay. He greets the older man with a polite smile, and offers to carry the books he's carrying.

Professor Choi laughs and brushes him off with a clap on his shoulder, as he pulls Jake along with him to study sea lion skeletons. The sound of your laughter is one he can still hear, but the further he walks away, the more it fades away. And for some reason unbeknownst to him, for a moment, it really does feel like you're actually slipping through his fingers.

He shakes his head, giving the excuse of adjusting his vision to the low blue lights when the professor sends him a concerned glance. He holds the strap of his bag tighter, following him through the hallways, and into the specimen room.

Slipping the bag off and placing it onto a chair, he methodically washes his hands, before snapping on a pair of gloves. As Professor Choi takes the lead of the class, he lets his gaze wander over the various skeletons and preserved specimens in the jars on the shelves.

Hopefully the smell of formaldehyde would numb the ache in his chest better than the paltry reassurances he can offer himself ever could.

Manon's smug smirk is the first thing you see after sending off Nicholas.

“... What?” you ask warily, because the only time Manon ever wears that expression is when she's ready to cause trouble. “Oh, it's nothing,” she says, voice a little too airy to be casual. “Just came to the realisation that you have the spatial awareness of a three year old.”

“... What?” you echo, an incredulous look on your face. “Manon, I'm not sure I understand what you're talking about.” Manon clicks her teeth, before looping her arm through yours, and drags you to the café on the campus, her heels clicking against the floors with a sharp sound.

“I figured,” she says, steering you through the crowd of students, “and that's why I'm here—to stage an intervention, before you fumble this spectacularly. I thought Sophia and Lara were joking when they said it, but really, you're more deserving of the title of “Scaredy Cat” than Gus—the actual cat—ever will be.”

She pulls you inside the building, flashing the barista a charming smile, before she drags you over to the booths at the back and forces you to sit down. “Sit,” she practically forces you into the seat, before taking the one across from you. “What do you want to drink?”

The sudden change in her demeanour leaves you flabbergasted, but you tell her what you want anyways. She gives the waitress a smile as she tells her your orders. “An iced americano, and a mint lemonade, please.” The waitress notes them down, before leaving with the menu.

Manon turns back to you, and crosses her arms over her chest. Suddenly, you feel like you're on the witness stand, about to be cross-examined. Her expression is rather serious, and she crosses her ankles, leaning back into the seat.

“I'm going to ask you some questions,” she drawls, “and you're going to answer all of them. Honestly. Alright?” You nod nervously, pinned underneath her expectant stare.

“First question,” she lays her eyes on you, her expression completely blank. “Do you like him?”

You sputter at that, choking on your glass of water. “What the hell, Manon?!” She remains unaffected, and merely hands you a napkin before continuing her questioning.

“Answer the question. Do you, or do you not like Sim Jaeyun?” You stare at her, eye twitching in mild irritation. But you answer her anyways, clearing your throat rather obnoxiously. “... I do.”

Manon nods, tapping her fingers against her arm. “Second question. Why haven't you confessed to him yet?” Your eye twitches harder at that question. Manon raises an eyebrow at the way your grip tightens on the glass in your hand, but says nothing about it. “I'm not a hundred percent sure if he likes me back. I don't want to ruin what we have.”

“Liar,” Manon quips, a smile beginning to tug at her mouth, satisfied that you're right where she wants you to be. “I'll give you another chance. Answer honestly.” You sigh, shaking your head as you realise that there's no place you can hide in, without Manon digging away at your composure.

So you decide to be honest instead.

“I'm... scared,” you pause, watching your friend's expression closely, “of how much I like him. He's always there, like a lingering presence... And, and Gus loves him so much. I don't want him to lose that bond just because I read too much and too wrong into things.”

Manon's expression softens, and she reaches out to hold your hands in hers. “Hey, look at me.” She waits till you make proper eye contact with her, rubbing soothing circles into your palms. “You've always trusted your gut before, and it's helped you out so much. Why not trust in what you feel now as well?”

You let out a shaky breath, and Manon squeezes your fingers just a bit tighter. “.... What if I'm wrong?”

“What if you're right?” she doesn't hesitate, raising an eyebrow at you. “What if you're right, and you lose what you could have just because you're too into your head?” Your breath hitches, and you stare at her. The noise of the café begins to fade away into background noise, the firm grip Manon has on your fingers being the only thing keeping you from spiralling.

What if you were right? What if all the signs were right there, and you were just ignoring them on purpose?

“... Where is he?” you all but demand, and Manon lets go of you, a proud smile on her face. “Specimen room, I believe. The vet meds have their class with Professor Choi there.”

You down your lemonade in one go, the sourness of the drink washing away the last vestiges of your hesitation. “I'll take Sophia and Lara out instead,” Manon smiles, sipping on her iced americano. “I'm sure I can keep them occupied for one evening.”

“Thanks, Manon,” you breathe out, pulling her into a hug that she reciprocates with equal warmth. She pats your back once, and then you're off, shoes skidding against the pavement in search of a familiar mop of messy hair that belonged to a certain vet student.

The sunlight filtering through the leaves along the path creates little pockets of light, dazzling iridescence when your bracelet catches the light. The wind whips through your hair as you run, people moving to make way for you as they see your urgency.

You called him an idiot, but turns out you were one too. You just hope he's there when you reach that place.

Jake's standing by the docks, a can of lemon soda in hand, when you finally get there.

His head snaps up when he hears the screeching of your soles against the polish of the wood, surprise colouring his face. “Hey,” he says, reaching out to steady you as you skid to a stop a few inches before him. “Is something wrong? Did you run all the way here?”

You hunch over, hands on your knees, as you try to catch your breath. You hear the soft clink of metal as he sets the can aside, before his face, furrowed in concern, comes into view, as he crouches down to see you better.

“I...” you heave, holding up a hand, “I need to tell you something.” Jake nods, voice soft as he answers. “Okay. Tell me.” His hand rubs soft circles into the crook of your elbow, grounding you in his warmth. “... I'm listening.”

“I... I know Gus likes you a lot.” He raises an eyebrow at that, an amused yet incredulous laugh slipping out of him. “You ran all the way here, just to tell me that Gus likes me a lot?”

“Yeah,” you breathe, wiping the sweat at your jaw, “and I like you too.”

Jake freezes at that, going stiff as a board. He opens his mouth to speak, then shuts up right after—he does it a few times, trying to find the words to say what he wants to, but lets out a frustrated breath when he realises that it's a futile attempt, and more importantly, a complete waste of time.

So he does what he does best—with the grip he has on your elbow, he tugs you downwards, sending you stumbling into him. “Woah—hey!”

“Don't “Hey” me,” he finally says, face hidden in the crook of your neck, as one arm wraps around your waist, while the other buries itself into your hair as he holds you close in a mess of tangled limbs. “You can't just drop something so important on me like it's just another Wednesday and expect me to be normal about it.”

“Then don't,” you tighten your grip on his shoulders, “don't be normal about it. I'll still like you the same.” He laughs at that, the warm, breathy sound sending a pleasant shiver down your spine. “... That's a dangerous thought to entertain. I barely held myself back from pulling you away from that bastard you kept laughing with earlier.”

You blink at the admission, before bursting into a peal of laughter. Jake pulls away at that, confused at your reaction, as his hand drops down from your hair to rest at your waist. He tilts his head, but there's already a smile on his face just from seeing you laugh.

“... What's so funny, huh? Care to share, or do I have to find out myself?” You shake your head, wiping the tears at the corners of your eyes. “Oh, baby. You don't have to be jealous. Nicholas doesn't stand a chance against you.”

He gives you another raised eyebrow, but the pleased purr in his voice at your answer is unmistakable. “... Really? And why's that, hm?” You cup his face, placing your forehead against his. “Because,” you chuckle, placing a kiss to his forehead, “Nicholas is my cousin. He's family, Jake.”

He sighs at that, head dropping to rest against your clavicles. His ears burn a soft flush from his embarrassment, but the smile on his face is hard to hide against your skin. “... Oh. He's family,” he whispers, and you place another kiss to the top of his head. “No wonder you were laughing like that.”

“Laughing like what?” you question. He looks up again, and you feel your heart nearly stutter to a stop when you see the sheer adoration in his eyes. “You were laughing the way you do when you talk about Gus. When you tell me about Sophia, Lara, and Manon. You were laughing with him like he was one of the people you love—which makes sense, because now I know that he's your family.”

A watery chuckle slips out before you can tamp it down, and you fling yourself at him—he catches you, but the momentum sends him off-balance, and he ends up lying on the wood underneath you, his fluffy hair sticking out in all directions.

“You, sir,” you grin at him, letting your nose brush against his, “are going to be stuck with me for life just 'cause of that. There's no way I can let go of somebody who can differentiate between my laughter. You're a liability, but you're my liability now.”

“Gladly,” he hums, reaching up to tuck some of your hair behind your ear. “That's the only kind of liability I ever want to be.” He cups your face, thumb rubbing against your jaw in a comforting, steady brhythm. “... Can I kiss you?”

You feel your grin grow wider. “... Thought you'd never ask.” He laughs at that, glasses still askew, before he's leaning up to kiss you. It's sweet, soft and everything just as normal as it can be—because it's Jake who's kissing you.

It's the same boy who's carved himself a space in your life, the same person who earned Gus's trust over and over again, and it's the same Jake who found himself in your list of permanent people the day you met him. It's as familiar as it can get.

When you pull away, he lets you take a breath, before tugging you back in and kissing you again. He moves to pepper kisses along the side of your face, before finally, finally ending with a kiss on the top of your head. “... I like you so, so much. I'm glad I bumped into you at the conservatory that day.” You snicker, holding up your ID. “The tangled lanyards should've been the first sign.”

He reaches out to hold your hand, fingers sliding against yours before he holds them in place with a firm grip. He lifts your twined hands to place a kiss on your knuckles, grinning wildly. “Guess I need to start referring to myself as Layla and Gus's dad now.” You roll your eyes at that, scoffing playfully. “Does that make me Layla's mom now?”

“Yeah,” he breathes, pressing another kiss to your knuckles, “and then, I'll make you Mrs Sim in the future, because there's no way I can let go of you now.” That earns him a playful shove, and he laughs loudly.

“Already planning for the wedding, are we?” Jake shakes his head, pulling you up to stand with him. “Nah, Sunghoon's already got that covered for me. All we have to do is just show up at the wedding.”

“Now,” he snickers, as he sweeps you into his arms again while you shriek at him. “I believe we can squeeze in a date at the cat café downtown if we hurry.” He doesn't wait for your answer, already beginning to walk away, leaving you with no option but to take the opportunity to observe him.

His hair is messed up, there's a wide grin on his face and a pep in his step, his glasses still sit slightly askew—but most importantly, he looks like he's yours.

You curl into him, and he holds you tighter to his chest, letting the thrum of his heartbeat against your ear lull you to a familiar rhythm, as Jake begins to ramble to you about all the different cats at the café.

The scent of sea salt mingles with the breeze, as you close your eyes, letting his voice be the anchor that sinks in the realisation of everything that's been building for the past few months.

Yeah, dealing with a vet can be hard at times. Especially if you've got a pet who absolutely despises them. However, even then, there will always be a person who holds the greatest of passions, and a saintly amount of patience to earn said pet's trust.

There's a lot of stuff that goes on with a vet―exams, tests, diagnostics, and medications―some with even side effects.

But turns out, some of those side effects do include love—and of course, you wouldn't have it any other way.

taglist: @sparkcling @supahintohoon @tinyteezer @goosemantheweeb @simpikeu @kristynaaah

Prince Jake awoke on the morning before his twenty-first birthday. The heavy, dark brown velvet curtains surrounding his massive four-poster bed were drawn tight, sealing in a heat so oppressive it would have made a commoner faint. The hearth across his expansive bedchamber roared, feeding on precious, dry logs while the outer wards of the city below slowly starved and froze in the grip of a generational winter.

Jake pushed the heavy, black bear-fur blankets down to his waist and sat up, running a perfectly manicured hand through his hair. In a royal court filled with men and women who mirrored the dark, brooding architecture of their kingdom, Jake had been born with hair the color of spun gold. It fell in soft, feathered waves around a face carved with impossible, angelic precision. His eyes were a clear, luminous amber, framed by thick lashes. By all natural metrics, he possessed a sweet, puppy-like beauty that made people instinctively want to trust him, to protect him, and to worship him.

He swung his legs over the edge of the mattress, his bare feet touching the heated, dark mahogany floorboards.

"Enter," he called out. His voice was naturally warm, a soft, melodic baritone that sounded like a gentle invitation rather than a royal command.

The heavy oak door creaked open, and a procession of valets shuffled into the room. They wore the liveries of the castle staff: coarse brown wool tunics trimmed with black thread. The winter outside was a nightmare, and the chill clung to their clothes, warring with the furnace-like heat of Jake’s room.

"Good morning, my Prince," the head valet, a trembling young man named Elian, whispered. He carried a silver basin of steaming, rose-scented water. His knuckles were white from the cold of the servant's corridors.

"Good morning, Elian," Jake murmured, offering a soft, breathtaking smile that crinkled the corners of his amber eyes. He looked like the very picture of innocence, a benevolent son of the gods waking to greet the day.

He allowed the servants to strip him of his nightclothes and bathe his skin. As they worked, Jake observed them in the towering, silver-backed mirror. He watched the way they handled him with terrifying reverence. He knew exactly what they saw: a sweet, gentle boy burdened by the harshness of his father’s kingdom.

Jake weaponized that perception flawlessly, but beneath the golden surface, he felt nothing but a crawling, profound disgust. He hated the weakness of the peasantry. He hated the dirt under their fingernails, the pathetic desperation in their voices, and the way they tracked the scent of poverty into his immaculate sanctuary. They were nothing but raw materials to him, fuel to keep the citadel burning.

As Elian stepped forward to help Jake into his undershirt, the boy’s freezing, calloused fingers accidentally brushed against the warm skin of Jake’s collarbone. The boy gasped, dropping the linen shirt in pure terror. He fell to his knees instantly, pressing his forehead against the mahogany floor.

"Forgive me, sire!" the boy practically sobbed, his voice cracking. "I am clumsy. The cold in the servant's quarters... my hands are stiff. I beg your mercy."

Jake looked down at the trembling heap of brown wool. Internally, his stomach turned with revulsion at the boy's sniveling weakness. But his father, King Aldric, had taught him the mechanics of power long ago. Fear keeps a blade at a man’s throat, but love makes a man hand you the blade and bare his own neck. Let them see the shepherd.

Jake’s expression shifted instantly. The cold calculation vanished, replaced by an expression of profound, aching empathy. He knelt on the floor, ignoring the way the hard wood pressed into his knees, and placed a warm, gentle hand on the boy’s shaking shoulder.

"Hey," Jake said softly, his voice thick with tender concern. "Look at me."

Elian slowly raised his head, tears tracking through the soot on his cheeks. Jake offered him a smile so sweet, so full of radiant forgiveness, that it seemed to illuminate the dark room.

"You have nothing to fear from me," Jake whispered, his amber eyes wide and puppy-like. "The winter is cruel to us all. Stand up. It was only a touch, my friend. You are forgiven."

The boy wept openly, overwhelmed by the Prince’s angelic mercy, kissing the back of Jake's hand before scrambling to his feet. "You are too good for this world, my Prince. The gods bless you."

Jake stood, his gentle smile never wavering as they finished dressing him in his morning sparring leathers—a fitted, dark brown gambeson laced with black cord, paired with a heavy crimson cloak draped over one shoulder.

"You may go," Jake said softly, dismissing them with a warm nod.

The moment the heavy ironwood door clicked shut behind them, Jake’s smile evaporated. The warmth vanished from his eyes, leaving behind a blank, terrifying void. He walked over to his washbasin, picked up a bar of lye soap, and began to violently scrub the hand the servant boy had kissed. He scrubbed until the skin was raw and pink, washing away the invisible stain of the lower class.

"Kael," Jake said, his voice flat and devoid of any emotion, not bothering to turn around as his armored lieutenant stepped out from the shadows of the antechamber.

"Yes, sire?" the guard asked, standing at attention in his blackened steel plate.

"The valet. Elian," Jake ordered, drying his hands on a silk towel, his golden hair catching the light of the fire. "Have him reassigned to the northern gate watch by midday. Strip him of his citadel cloaks. He complained of the cold in the castle. Let him experience the true winter."

The northern gate was a death sentence. It was fully exposed to the blizzards, and guards posted there rarely survived the week without losing digits to frostbite, if they survived at all.

"At once, my Prince," Kael said, bowing his head, fully accustomed to the whiplash of the Prince's dual nature.

Jake adjusted the collar of his gambeson in the mirror. He looked beautiful. He looked innocent. He looked perfectly ready for the day.

The training yard of Aethelgard was located in the lower bailey, enclosed by towering walls of black stone that effectively trapped the bitter cold. The ground was hard-packed earth, frozen solid and dusted with a thin layer of crystalline snow.

When Jake descended the steps, the yard fell instantly silent. A dozen knights, clad in heavy brown leather and crimson tabards, ceased their sparring and bowed deeply. Jake ignored them, walking with a light, graceful step that stood in stark contrast to the heavy, brutalist aesthetic of the military men.

He approached the weapon rack, selecting a heavy, unsharpened broadsword of dark iron. He rolled his shoulders, feeling the satisfying pull of the dense muscle beneath his leathers.

"Gareth," Jake called out, his voice cutting clearly through the freezing air, dropping the sweet, melodic tone he used for the court.

Sir Gareth, the Captain of the Guard, stepped out from the armory overhang. He was a massive, grizzled veteran, his face a map of pale scars, his dark hair greying at the temples. Gareth was one of the few living souls in Aethelgard who had known Jake since he was a child, and the only man Jake held any genuine respect for. Gareth had not coddled him; Gareth had taught him how to break a man's knee, how to slice an artery, and how to survive the lethal politics of his father's court.

"Late this morning, cub," Gareth grunted, pulling his own iron broadsword from the rack. "The heat of your chambers making you soft?"

"Just conserving my energy to put you in the dirt, Captain," Jake shot back, a genuine, dark smirk touching his lips. With Gareth, the angelic facade was entirely absent. There was no need for the shepherd’s mask here.

They took their stances in the center of the yard. The moment the bout began, the air rang with the brutal, concussive crack of iron meeting iron.

Jake fought the way he ruled his inner circle: flawlessly, aggressively, and with calculated cruelty. He lunged, his golden hair whipping around his face as he drove Gareth backward. The older knight parried a heavy downward strike, stepping inside Jake's guard and driving an armored shoulder directly into the Prince’s chest.

Jake stumbled back, his boots skidding on the frost. He didn't hesitate. He used the momentum to spin, bringing the pommel of his sword crashing down on Gareth’s armored wrist. The knight grunted in pain, his grip faltering. Before Gareth could recover, Jake swept his leg, hooking the older man’s ankle and sending him crashing into the frozen dirt with a heavy thud.

The tip of Jake’s iron sword hovered an inch from Gareth’s throat. Jake’s breathing was perfectly even, his amber eyes cold and sharp as a hawk's.

Gareth looked up at the tip of the blade, then up at the Prince's impassive face. The old knight let out a barking laugh, his breath pluming in the icy air. "Flawless footwork. But you fight with a bitter head today, Jake. You're tense."

Jake lowered the sword, offering a hand to pull the massive knight to his feet. It was a gesture of respect, not mercy. "My father's banquet is tonight. I have to sit at the high table and play the sweet, blushing virgin for the Valorian princess while listening to merchants whine about the cold."

"And that bothers you?" Gareth asked, dusting the snow from his brown leathers, a knowing glint in his eye.

"It bothers me that I have to waste my evening pretending to care about her father's trade routes," Jake muttered, tossing his practice sword back onto the rack. "I should just take the eastern rivers by force and be done with it. The political theater is exhausting."

Gareth leaned against the weapon rack, looking at the young prince. Gareth knew the truth of what lived beneath the golden hair and the angelic face. He knew Jake was a monster, cold and entirely detached from human suffering, but he was Aethelgard's monster.

"You've survived twenty-one years of playing your father's game, lad," Gareth said, his voice dropping to a low, gruff rumble. "You can survive one more banquet. Just remember to keep your teeth hidden until the trap snaps shut."

Jake looked out over the frozen yard, a cruel, satisfied smile curving his lips. "They never see the teeth, Gareth. Not until it's much too late."

The Great Hall of Aethelgard was a cavernous expanse of obsidian pillars and dark wood. Huge banners of crimson silk hung from the rafters, absorbing the light of the roaring hearths.

Jake slipped into the hall quietly, taking his place on a carved ironwood chair situated to the right of the massive iron throne. He crossed his legs, resting his chin on his hand, seamlessly sliding back into the picture of a dutiful, attentive, and gentle son.

King Aldric sat on the throne, a terrifying monolith draped in the heavy brown furs of a dire bear, a crown of jagged black iron resting on his brow. The King was currently listening to a delegation of merchants from the lower wards. The men were shivering violently, their clothes threadbare, their lips tinged with blue.

"Your Grace," the lead merchant pleaded, his voice echoing off the dark stones, raw with desperation. "We ask only for a temporary lifting of the grain tax. The outer wards have exhausted their winter stores. People are eating shoe leather to survive. The children are dying in the snow."

Jake watched his father closely. He saw the microscopic tightening of Aldric's jaw—the utter, sociopathic disdain for the weakness standing before him. But Aldric was a master of the game.

The King stood up, his heavy furs dragging across the floor. He stepped down from the dais and approached the merchants. He reached out, taking the shivering man’s filthy hands in his own bare, ringed hands.

"My brother," the King said, his voice thick with a profound, theatrical grief that sounded horrifyingly real. "The Crown bleeds when Aethelgard bleeds. Do you think I sleep warmly knowing my people suffer?"

The merchant looked up, tears springing to his eyes, hope blossoming like a fragile flower in the dead of winter. "Then... you will lift the tax, Your Grace?"

"I will do better," the King decreed, his voice booming with magnanimous warmth. "I shall open the lower granaries. A ration of flour for every family in the outer wards, in honor of my son’s coming-of-age tomorrow."

The merchants wept. They fell to their knees on the hard obsidian floor, kissing the King’s boots, praising his mercy. They left the hall with tears of joy freezing on their cheeks, entirely devoted to their savior.

When the heavy oak doors closed, sealing the hall in silence, the King’s posture shifted. The benevolent father of the realm vanished in an instant. Aldric turned back to his advisors, his face hardening into a scowl of pure, reptilian contempt. "Take the flour from the reserves we confiscated from the northern traitors," Aldric ordered the Master of Coin, his voice cold and flat. "Mix it with sawdust to stretch the yield. And double the tax on firewood. If they have free bread, they can afford to pay for the heat to bake it." Jake sat motionless, watching the exchange. He felt a surge of dark admiration. This was the architecture of Aethelgard. This was the legacy he was set to inherit. Total control, wrapped in the illusion of grace.

Aldric turned his dark, calculating eyes to Jake. "You observe quietly today, my son."

"I am taking notes, Father," Jake replied, his voice soft, offering his dad a sweet, respectful smile that mirrored the King's own deception.

The King walked up the steps, standing over Jake. He reached out, his calloused thumb brushing against Jake’s golden hair, a gesture that was meant to be affectionate but felt entirely possessive. "Tomorrow is your twenty-first birthday. The Royal Hunt. You will ride into the deep woods alone, and you will bring back a kill. You will prove to this realm that you are not just a pretty face, but an apex predator."

"I will not fail," Jake said earnestly, meeting his father's gaze without blinking."I know you won't," Aldric said, his voice dropping to a low rumble. "You have the face of an angel, Jake. It is a weapon sharper than iron. They look at you and they see a sweet, golden boy who will save them from my cruelty. Let them believe it. Smile at them. Play the gentle puppy. And then, when their bellies are full of sawdust and they are thanking you for it, you bleed them dry." Jake’s amber eyes gleamed with cold understanding. "Yes, Father."

"Tonight is your banquet. Princess Elara of Valoria will be seated beside you. Her father controls the eastern rivers. I want you to secure her affections by the time the dessert is served. Am I understood?"

Jake tilted his head, letting his golden hair fall perfectly across his forehead. He deployed the sweet, innocent, devastating smile his father demanded. "Of course. She will hand us the rivers gladly, and thank me for taking them." The sun set early, plunging the kingdom into a freezing, starless night. But inside the Great Hall, it was a suffocating summer.

The eve of the Prince’s birthday was a staggering spectacle of hoarding. Thousands of beeswax candles burned in massive black iron chandeliers, casting a warm, honeyed glow over the dark wood and crimson banners. The tables groaned beneath the weight of excess: entire roasted boars glazed in dark honey, towering pies filled with pigeon and imported spices, swans decorated in their own feathers, and rivers of deep red wine that stained the lips of the nobility. Jake sat at the high table, dressed in a sharply tailored doublet of oxblood velvet, intricately embroidered with black thread. He was the focal point of the room. Every lord, lady, and servant could not tear their eyes away from the golden prince who sat amongst the dark, brooding lords of Aethelgard like a captured, celestial star.

He played his part to perfection.He laughed softly at the jokes of the drunken lords. He offered sweet, shy smiles to the ladies who curtsied before him. But internally, the noise was grating on his nerves. The smell of roasting meat, unwashed bodies, and heavy perfumes made him want to drive his dagger into the mahogany table. He despised them all.

To his right sat Princess Elara. She was wrapped in dark red silk, her soft skin standing out in the dim lighting.

"You barely touch your wine, Prince Jake," Elara noted softly, leaning closer. The scent of her expensive jasmine perfume wafted over him, cloying and desperate.Jake turned to her. He let his shoulders slump just a fraction, a micro-expression of exhaustion that he knew her romantic, foolish heart would latch onto. He looked down at his silver goblet, letting out a soft, beautiful sigh."Forgive me, Princess," Jake murmured, his voice dropping to a low, intimate timber meant only for her ears. "The wine is excellent. But my mind is... heavy tonight."

Elara’s eyes widened, her maternal instincts immediately hooked by his vulnerability. "Is something wrong? On the eve of your manhood?"

Jake looked up at her through his thick lashes, his amber eyes pooling with a fabricated, tragic sadness that veiled his true, bitter boredom. He reached out, his long fingers gently resting near hers on the table.

"Tomorrow, I ride into the deep woods for the Rite of the Hunt," Jake said, his voice a soft, melodic whisper. "I must go alone, without guards, into the frozen wilds. Everyone in this room expects a conquering hero. They see a prince." He looked away, staring into the roaring hearth as if burdened by the sheer weight of his existence. "But sometimes, Elara... I wish I were just a man. Free from the bloodshed. Free from the expectations of the crown."

It was a brilliant, manipulative lie, weaponizing her own naive fantasies against her.

Elara melted completely. She reached out, placing her soft, warm hand over his. "You have such a gentle soul, Jake. The realm is blessed to have a prince with such a tender heart. You will be a wonderful, merciful king."

Jake turned his hand over, intertwining his fingers with hers. He offered her a breathtaking, warm smile, mentally securing the eastern trade routes and feeling absolutely nothing but cold victory. "Your words give me strength, Princess."

As the banquet raged on, the music growing louder and the lords growing drunker, Jake politely excused himself. He played the part of the nervous boy preparing for a great trial, bowing gracefully and leaving the hall amidst a chorus of adoring cheers.

But the moment he stepped out of the Great Hall and the heavy ironwood doors sealed the noise behind him, the sweet smile fell from his face like dead weight. His amber eyes went flat and predatory.

He walked through the silent, torch-lit corridors of the citadel, climbing the winding stairs of the highest tower to his private balcony.

He pushed open the glass doors and stepped out into the biting, sub-zero wind. The cold hit him like a physical blow, tearing at his golden hair and his oxblood velvet doublet. It was freezing, but for the first time all day, Jake could actually breathe.

He stood at the edge of the stone balustrade, resting his hands on the frozen black iron railing. Below him, the outer wards of Aethelgard were a sea of absolute, crushing darkness. There were no fires burning in the hovels. The people were eating sawdust, just as his father commanded.

He lifted his gaze, looking past the city, out toward the jagged, terrifying expanse of the deep woods. The ancient forest was a mass of black and brown, swallowed by the night, utterly indifferent to the politics of kings and princes.

Tomorrow, he would ride into those woods alone. He would slaughter a beast, bathe his hands in its blood, and return to claim his throne.

Jake leaned against the railing, his jaw clenching as a slow, arrogant smirk spread across his angelic face. He did not know that the woods were waiting for him. And he did not know that by this time tomorrow night, the gilded cage he ruled would be shattered, and the true monster within him would finally be forced into the light.

The dawn of Prince Jake’s twenty-first year did not arrive with the celebrated warmth of a summer festival; it bled into the horizon like a fresh, dark bruise. The sky above the obsidian towers of Aethelgard was a suffocating expanse of iron-grey, heavy with the promise of a blizzard that would undoubtedly claim another hundred lives in the outer wards before nightfall. But inside the citadel’s highest tier, the morning was marked only by the quiet, meticulous preparation for the Rite of the Hunt.

Jake stood in the center of the armory, his arms outstretched as his squires strapped him into his hunting leathers. There would be no velvet today, no silks or delicate silver embroidery. The Rite demanded utility, though even Aethelgard’s utility was a display of dominant wealth. He wore a heavy gambeson of dark brown, boiled leather, reinforced with blackened steel rivets at the joints. A thick, crimson wool cloak was fastened to his broad shoulders with a heavy iron clasp forged in the shape of a wolf’s head. He was twenty-one today. He was a man by the laws of the realm, the undisputed heir to the iron throne, and a god to the starving masses trembling below his balcony.

He looked at his reflection in the polished surface of a broadshield resting against the stone wall. His golden hair, usually styled in soft, feathered waves to project his angelic innocence, was tied back severely with a leather cord at the nape of his neck. Without the soft framing of his hair, the sharp, aristocratic cruelty of his jawline and the predatory stillness in his amber eyes were suddenly, terrifyingly pronounced.

"Your bow, my Prince," a squire murmured, his head bowed low as he presented a weapon carved from a single piece of ancient, petrified yew.

Jake took it, his gloved hand wrapping around the grip. The wood was cold and heavy, a lethal extension of his own will. He slung the quiver of black-fletched, iron-tipped arrows over his shoulder and strapped a long, serrated hunting dagger to his thigh.He walked out into the biting cold of the upper courtyard. The wind immediately tore at his crimson cloak, howling around the black stone turrets, but Jake did not shiver. A prince of Aethelgard did not surrender to the elements; he conquered them.

Waiting for him on the frost-covered cobblestones was Ruin. The destrier was a monster of a horse, bred from northern war-stock, its coat as black as pitch and its eyes rolling with aggressive, pent-up energy. The beast stamped a massive, iron-shod hoof, blowing thick plumes of white vapor from its flared nostrils. It took two armored stable hands pulling desperately on the iron bit to keep the animal still.King Aldric stood on the raised dais overlooking the yard, wrapped in the heavy brown furs of a dire bear. The King’s dark eyes locked onto his son. There were no warm birthday greetings, no paternal embraces. There was only the cold, unyielding expectation of the Crown.

"You ride alone," the King’s voice boomed, echoing off the obsidian walls. "You take no guards. You take no hounds. You enter the deep woods, and you bring back the blood of the wild. Show them that the heir of Aethelgard needs no army to bring this world to its knees."

"I will bring you a carcass, Father," Jake replied, his voice calm, carrying effortlessly over the wind.

Jake stepped up to the massive destrier, grabbing the pommel and swinging himself into the saddle with a singular, fluid motion. Ruin instantly reared back, fighting the sudden weight, but Jake savagely hauled on the reins, driving his knees into the horse’s flanks until the beast submitted with a sharp, angry whinny. "Open the gates!" the Captain of the Guard bellowed. The heavy ironwood portcullis groaned, the massive chains shrieking in protest as they hauled the spiked iron upward. Beyond the gate lay the bridge over the frozen moat, and beyond that, the sprawling, dead expanse of the deep woods.

Jake spurred Ruin forward. The heavy clack-clack-clack of the destrier’s hooves on the frozen stone bridge sounded like the beating of a slow, iron heart.

As he crossed the threshold of the citadel, leaving the protection of the black walls behind, the true hostility of the generational winter hit him. The temperature plummeted. The wind shrieked across the open plains, driving microscopic shards of ice against his exposed cheeks. Yet, as he rode past the outer wards, past the dilapidated, soot-stained hovels of the peasantry, Jake felt nothing but a cold, simmering superiority.

The commoners had gathered at the edges of the frozen mud road to watch him pass. They were hollow-eyed, their lips tinged blue, wrapped in filthy rags. As his massive black horse thundered past, they fell to their knees in the snow, pressing their foreheads to the dirt in a wave of desperate reverence. They thought he was their golden shepherd, riding out to secure the favor of the gods for their dying crops.

Jake didn't even look down at them. He kept his amber eyes fixed on the treeline ahead. The deep woods of Aethelgard were not a forest; they were a fortress of ancient, untamed hostility. As Jake guided Ruin beneath the canopy of towering, skeletal pines, the shrieking wind of the plains was instantly choked off, replaced by a silence so absolute and heavy it felt like a physical weight pressing against his eardrums.

The trees grew unnaturally close together, their twisted, dark brown branches interlocking overhead to block out the bruised grey sky. The snow here was pristine, undisturbed, and terrifyingly deep. There were no tracks. There was no birdsong. The air smelled of sharp pine resin, ancient frost, and a deep, unsettling decay.He rode for hours, plunging deeper into the uncharted territories where even his father’s vanguard refused to patrol. The cold seeped through the thick leather of his gambeson, gnawing at his joints, but Jake welcomed the discomfort. It sharpened his focus. It reminded him that he was alive, and that he was entirely untouchable.But as the hours dragged on, a quiet, irritated boredom began to replace his predatory focus.The woods were dead. The winter had driven the stags south and frozen the boars in their dens. He had ridden for half the day and hadn't seen so much as a snow hare. The Rite of the Hunt demanded blood, and nature was boldly refusing to provide it.

Suddenly, Ruin stopped dead.The massive destrier planted its front hooves deep in the snow, its head jerking upward. The horse let out a high-pitched, panicked snort, its ears pinning flat against its skull. The muscles in the beast’s thick neck trembled violently beneath Jake’s leather-gloved hands.

"Steady," Jake commanded, his voice a low, harsh rasp in the suffocating silence. He tightened his grip on the reins, his eyes scanning the dense thicket of frosted brambles ahead.

Ruin took a frantic, shuddering step backward, tossing his head and fighting the iron bit.Jake drew his yew bow from his shoulder in one smooth motion, notching a black-fletched arrow to the string. If it was a dire bear, he would put a shaft of iron through its eye and be back at the citadel in time for his banquet.He drove his spurs sharply into Ruin’s flanks, forcing the terrified horse through the thicket and into a wide, snow-drowned clearing.Jake pulled the bowstring taut, the leather groaning, his amber eyes narrowed and searching for the massive, hulking shape of a predator.But there was no bear. There was no stag.

Standing in the absolute dead center of the frozen clearing, blocking the only traversable path forward, was a woman.Jake slowly lowered his bow, the tension in his shoulders converting instantly from adrenaline to profound, disgusted annoyance.

She was an affront to the pristine, deadly isolation of his hunt. She was ancient, her spine bent and twisted at an agonizing angle, forcing her to lean her entire, frail weight onto a gnarled, blackened staff of rotting wood. She wore a chaotic assembly of filthy, threadbare rags that offered absolutely no insulation against the deadly cold. Her skin was a ghastly, translucent grey, pulled tight over her skeletal face, and as she lifted her chin toward him, Jake saw that her eyes were completely clouded over with milky, thick cataracts.She was blind. She was freezing. And she was standing in the path of the Crown Prince.Jake rested the bow across the pommel of his saddle, looking down at the pathetic creature from his elevated perch. He did not feel an ounce of the shepherd’s fabricated pity. There was no audience here. There were no lords to impress with his benevolence. Here, in the absolute isolation of the deep woods, he could finally be exactly what he was."You have wandered far from the dying wards, old mother," Jake called out. His voice was smooth, melodic, and laced with an icy, lethal condescension. "This forest belongs to the King. The path is closed today."

The old woman did not flinch at the sound of the destrier’s snorting, nor did she bow. She slowly turned her head, her milky, blind eyes tracking the sound of his voice with unnatural precision. She seemed to look right through the dark leather and the golden hair, staring directly into the hollow, pitch-black center of his chest."My Prince," she croaked. Her voice was the sound of a rusted blade scraping against a tombstone—dry, ancient, and grating. "Have mercy on a dying soul. The earth is hard as iron, and the wheat refuses to grow. The rivers are choked with ice. I have not eaten in seven days."She raised a trembling, skeletal hand, reaching out toward the massive black horse. "Please... a crust of bread. A scrap of dried meat from your saddlebags. The cold is eating the marrow from my bones."Jake stared at the outstretched hand. The sheer, staggering audacity of the request made a cold, cruel smirk touch the corners of his lips. She wasn't begging like a peasant should. She was demanding resources from him as if her suffering somehow entitled her to his wealth.

He leaned forward over the saddle, the crimson wool of his cloak pooling around him."Bread?" Jake murmured, his voice sweet, soft, and entirely poisonous. "You drag your filth into my woods, interrupt the sacred Rite of my bloodline, and demand the food from my stores?"

"The kingdom flourishes in the warmth of your citadel, while the roots of the earth rot in the cold," the old woman rasped, her knuckles turning white as she gripped her wooden staff. "You are to be King. It is your duty to provide for the soil that birthed you."

Jake let out a soft, beautiful laugh. It was a terrifying sound, utterly devoid of humanity, echoing off the frozen pines."You misunderstand the natural order of the world, hag," Jake sneered, his amber eyes going completely dead. "My duty is to the strong. The Crown does not bleed for parasites that suck at the edges of our walls. If the cold is killing you, then the gods have deemed you useless. I suggest you lie down in the snow and die quietly. You are making an unsightly mess of my hunting grounds."

The old woman did not lower her hand. The violent shivering in her frail body suddenly ceased entirely."You look upon starvation and feel nothing but pride," she whispered, her voice losing its rasp, deepening into a strange, multi-layered resonance."I look upon a pest," Jake corrected sharply. His patience was gone. He raised his yew bow, pulling the thick string back with a smooth, practiced exertion of muscle until the fletching of the arrow brushed his cheek. He aimed the heavy, iron broadhead directly at the center of her sunken chest. "I came to these woods to kill a beast, but pest control will have to suffice. May the dirt find you more useful than my kingdom did."

He released the string.

The thwack of the bowstring echoed like a gunshot. The arrow whispered through the freezing air, driven with enough lethal force to punch straight through a boar’s skull.

It never found its mark. A mere foot away from the old woman’s chest, the arrow struck an invisible, solid wall of air. It stopped dead in its flight, suspended in the space between them, vibrating violently.

Jake froze. The arrogant smirk vanished from his face, replaced by a sudden, electric spike of genuine terror. Before his eyes, the iron-tipped arrow began to glow with a sickly, violet light. In an instant, the wood and iron combusted, turning into a shower of brilliant, purple ash that drifted harmlessly into the snow. Ruin shrieked. The massive destrier reared up on its hind legs, kicking violently at the air, driven mad by a sudden, unseen pressure in the clearing. Jake savagely hauled on the reins, fighting with all his immense strength to keep the horse from bolting, his heart hammering against his ribs in a frantic, panicked rhythm.

"The weak do not demand from the strong," the old woman repeated.

But it was no longer the voice of a dying hag. It was a booming, percussive echo that vibrated in Jake’s molars, shook the heavy snow from the surrounding pine branches, and made the ground beneath the horse's hooves tremble.

She slammed the base of her wooden staff into the frozen earth.

The air in the clearing violently, sickeningly shifted. The crisp, oppressive scent of pine and snow was instantly eradicated, swallowed whole by the sharp, metallic tang of ozone and the heavy, suffocating stench of an open, rotting grave.The old woman’s hunched spine snapped straight with a series of loud, percussive cracks that sounded like breaking timber. The rotting, threadbare rags clinging to her frame began to melt and writhe, transforming into a living, shifting cloak of midnight-black feathers. Her skeletal face smoothed out, becoming an ageless mask of terrible, ancient authority.And her eyes—the milky, blind cataracts burned away in a flash of violet fire, revealing pools of liquid, glowing silver that locked onto Jake with the weight of a collapsing star. "You are a boy forged in deceit, wrapping your rot in silk," the Witch declared, her voice echoing from the ancient trees themselves, coming from everywhere and nowhere all at once. She glided across the snow, her bare feet not leaving a single indentation in the powder, stopping directly beside the panicked, foaming destrier. Jake dropped his bow. He reached down for the serrated hunting dagger strapped to his thigh, his mind screaming at him to fight, to kill the threat. But his hand never reached the hilt.

A heavy, paralyzing weight slammed down on him from above. It felt as though the atmospheric pressure in the clearing had increased a hundredfold. His muscles locked instantly in place. He was trapped, frozen in the saddle, entirely helpless for the first time in his sheltered, gilded life.

"You hold yourself above humanity because of your golden face," the Witch hissed, looking up at him. The silver light from her eyes illuminated the terror finally breaking through his arrogant mask. "You weaponize your beauty. You look upon starvation and offer a gentle smile while you press an iron boot to their necks. You play the shepherd, Prince Jake, but you harbor the heart of a ravenous, unfeeling beast."

"W-wait," Jake choked out, the word tearing past his paralyzed vocal cords, sounding small and pathetic."Let us see how long your arrogance survives when your outside matches the monstrosity on your inside," the Witch decreed, raising her hand.She extended a single, elongated finger, the nail sharp and blackened. She reached up and tapped the dark leather of his gambeson, directly over his wildly beating heart.

The agony was instantaneous, absolute, and beyond the realm of human comprehension.It did not feel like a spell. It felt like a biological violation. It felt as though she had reached a hand straight through his ribcage, seized his beating heart in an iron grip, and poured boiling, liquid acid directly into his ventricles.

Jake’s magical paralysis broke in a violent snap. He threw his head back, his golden hair whipping through the air, and tore his own throat open with a blood-curdling, agonizing scream that echoed for miles across the dead canopy."On the night of the blood moon, the beast you harbor within shall fully consume the prince!" she chanted, stepping back as the violet magic flared, wrapping around Jake’s thrashing body. "Your golden hair, your angelic face, your divine right—all of it shall be stripped away. You shall become the monster your kingdom fears. A Lycan. An outcast. Hunted, reviled, and despised."

"Stop!" Jake gasped, choking on his own saliva as a mouthful of hot, metallic blood bubbled over his lips.

A horrific, tearing sensation erupted in his shoulders and along his spine. His bones felt as though they were melting, softening, lengthening, breaking, and reforming in a torturous, rapid evolution. His skin felt like it was on fire, a literal furnace igniting in his core, burning so hot that the snow falling around him instantly hissed into steam before it could touch his leathers."There is only one salvation for a heart of ice," the Witch said, her physical form beginning to dissolve into a violent, swirling vortex of violet ash and black feathers that caught the winter wind. "You must find one who can look upon the monster, and love the man beneath it without condition. But the curse is a jealous architect, golden prince. To find your cure is to seal your doom. Happy hunting."

The magic released its hold on the clearing in a concussive, deafening shockwave that flattened the surrounding snowdrifts.

Ruin shrieked in pure, primal terror. The unmistakable, overpowering scent of an apex predator had suddenly erupted from the rider on his back. The massive black horse went completely feral, bucking violently, kicking its heavy hind legs high into the freezing air in a desperate bid to dislodge the monster it was carrying.

Jake, blinded by the red haze of pain, his nervous system completely overwhelmed by the horrific shifting of his own skeleton, couldn't hold onto the reins. His grip failed. He was launched violently from the saddle.

He tumbled through the freezing air, the crimson wool of his cloak snapping around him, before crashing heavily into a brutal drift of snow and jagged ice at the base of a massive, hollowed-out oak tree.

The impact knocked the breath from his lungs in a sharp gasp. He lay there, his vision swimming with dark, encroaching shadows and flashes of violet light. Above the ringing in his ears, he heard the frantic, galloping hooves of his horse fleeing back toward the plains, taking with it his only lifeline to the citadel.The heat radiating from his core was catastrophic. The freezing snow beneath him began to instantly melt, turning into slush and mud, hissing violently against his dark leather gambeson.

He couldn't breathe. Every inhale was a jagged, rattling pull of air that sounded too deep, too guttural to be human.

Jake dragged his heavy, trembling hand out of the snow, driven by the desperate instinct to push himself up, to demand his guards, to demand his father. He looked down at his hand. The heavy, reinforced riding leather of his glove was tearing at the seams, the thick thread snapping as the hand inside rapidly stretched and widened. Beneath the ruined fabric, his skin was flushed a deep, feverish red. And as he watched in paralyzed, helpless horror, his manicured fingernails darkened. They thickened, lengthening and curving into jagged, vicious, bone-white claws.

A raw, animalistic sob tore from his chest, mutating halfway up his throat into a terrifying, deep-chested snarl.The pain reached a critical threshold, a blinding white crescendo that shattered his consciousness. His golden eyes rolled back in his head. The frozen canopy above him spun violently, fading into a suffocating, absolute darkness.

The golden prince of Aethelgard collapsed into the melting snow, completely unconscious, as the beast beneath his skin finally began to breathe.

The cold did not merely exist in the outer woods; it was a living, ravenous entity that inhabited your cottage alongside you. It slipped through the microscopic, frozen cracks in the wattle and daub, curled around the heavy, petrified ironwood beams of the low ceiling, and settled deep into the marrow of your bones before your eyes even fluttered open.You woke to the suffocating, heavy silence of the deep woods. For a long, agonizing moment, you simply lay beneath the crushing weight of your patchwork rabbit furs, watching your breath materialize into thick, white plumes in the freezing air of the cabin. The only warmth in the entire room came from the small, vibrant orange tabby cat curled tightly against your ribs. The cat was a vibrating furnace of soft fur and low, rhythmic purrs, a tiny anchor of life in a room that felt dangerously close to a tomb.

You gently shifted your weight, mindful of the cat, and looked across the small, single-room sanctuary. The hearth had burned down to a pile of fragile, skeletal grey ash. Only a single, stubborn ember glowed weakly in its center, fighting a losing battle against the encroaching frost that was already beginning to lace the inside of your single glass windowpane.If you did not feed the fire, it would die. And if the fire died, you and your cat would follow shortly after.You threw the heavy furs back. The sudden, violent loss of trapped body heat made your jaw lock and your teeth click together instantly. You swung your legs over the edge of the narrow, rough-hewn wooden cot, bracing yourself. The moment your bare left foot brushed the freezing floorboards, a sickening, sharp spike of pain shot straight up your calf, settling deep and hot in your knee joint.You bit the inside of your cheek until the sharp, metallic tang of copper flooded your mouth, swallowing the groan that tried to claw its way up your throat. Three days ago, while digging through the frozen underbrush near the eastern ravine for the dormant, blood-red roots of the nettle plant, a patch of black ice hidden beneath the powder had sent you tumbling down the rocky embankment. The jagged gash along your ankle had been deep enough to scrape the white of the bone, but the severe, agonizing sprain that accompanied the tear was the true nightmare.

You had dragged yourself back to the cottage on your hands and knees, stitched the torn flesh yourself using boiled silk thread and a curved bone needle, and packed the angry wound with a fiery, stinging poultice of crushed yarrow and dried comfrey. But the winter offered no grace period for healing. The natural order of the deep woods was uncompromising: adapt, move, or become carrion for the scavengers.

You reached down, your fingers stiff and clumsy from the chill, and wrapped a thick strip of boiled wool tightly around the swollen, discolored joint, pulling it violently taut to restrict the inflammation. The fabric was rough, smelling faintly of old woodsmoke and crushed pine needles. Survival in the shadow of Aethelgard was never a graceful endeavor. It was a brutal, daily exercise in pure, unadulterated spite.

You were twenty-three years old. By the meticulously recorded tax laws and census rolls of King Aldric’s golden citadel, you were supposed to be a memory. A casualty of the margins.You pulled a heavy, coarse woolen tunic over your head, shivering as the freezing fabric settled against your bare skin. You limped heavily toward the scarred wooden table in the center of the room, pulling a heavy stone mortar and pestle toward you.The air in the cottage was permanently thick with the heavy, earthy, medicinal spice of drying herbs. Bundles of deadly nightshade, wolfsbane, foxglove, and sweet-briar hung upside down from the low rafters like strange, withered bats. The wooden shelves lining the walls were cluttered with glass vials, ceramic pots of rendering animal fats, and tightly corked tinctures of ghost-mushroom.

You were a healer. Under the laws of the Crown, it was a treasonous offense punishable by the gallows.

The King required all apothecaries to be licensed, heavily taxed, and confined within the towering obsidian walls of the citadel, ensuring that only the wealthy could afford the luxury of surviving a winter fever. But out here, in the freezing shadows of the kingdom's periphery, the abandoned peasantry did not care about the King’s wax seals or his mandates. Just two nights ago, a desperate, severely frostbitten tenant farmer had knocked frantically on your hidden door. He had traded half a sack of unbleached flour—likely stolen from his own lord's granary at the risk of losing his hands—for a single jar of your ghost-mushroom salve to save his youngest daughter's blackened, dying fingers.You were the ghost of the woods. You kept the forgotten people alive when the golden throne left them to rot.You poured a handful of dried willow bark into the stone mortar, the rhythmic crk-crk-crk of the heavy pestle grounding you in the present. You needed to prepare a fever-reducing tincture. The current cold snap would inevitably bring lung-rot to the lower wards soon, and the desperate would come knocking in the dead of night.But as you ground the rough bark into a fine, pale dust, the ghosts of Aethelgard crept into the corners of your vision. They always did when the cold was at its absolute worst, when the silence of the woods left too much room for memory.

You remembered the smell of the rich, dark soil on your father’s calloused hands. He had been a man who belonged entirely to the earth, a gentle farmer who knew the rhythm of the seasons better than he knew the King’s brutal laws. He had taught you how to read the moss on the trees, how to coax life from stubborn, rocky dirt. But King Aldric’s endless, ravenous territorial wars on the northern borders required endless meat for the grinder. The Crown did not care for farmers. It only cared for expansion.

When you were just a kid, they had come. Armored men with iron pikes, riding heavy destriers, bearing sealed parchment. They tore him from the wheat fields while your mother screamed from the porch. He was handed a rusted, heavy pike and marched into the slaughterhouse of the vanguard. He had died in a nameless, frozen trench, his blood turning to ice in the mud, all so the King could draw a new, arbitrary line on a map and claim a barren hill.But the Crown’s cruelty was comprehensive; it was a vast, systemic architecture designed to break the very foundation of a family. It did not stop at the taking of blood.You stopped grinding the willow bark, your knuckles turning white as you gripped the heavy stone pestle.The King's magistrates had arrived at your family's grieving farm a mere month after the death notice. You remembered them vividly. They were wrapped in heavy, oxblood velvet cloaks, smelling of expensive jasmine oils and bureaucratic sympathy. They spoke in winding, labyrinthine circles of “widow’s tithes,” “war-time debt,” and “estate restructuring.” Your mother, hollowed out by grief and unable to read the sprawling, arrogant calligraphy of the nobility, had trusted the King’s men. They had offered her a gentle, sorrowful smile, placed a feather quill in her trembling hand, and promised that the Crown would always look after its war widows.

With a single stroke of ink, she had unwittingly signed away the farm, the livestock, and the very roof over your heads to pay the fabricated back-taxes for the war that had just slaughtered her husband.

The realization of the deception had not broken her slowly; it had shattered her all at once. The Crown had taken her love, and then it had taken her sanctuary.

You were fifteen years old when you walked into the drafty, empty barn, your hands numb from the morning frost, to find her swaying gently from the heavy oak rafters. Her neck was broken, her eyes staring blankly at the dirt floor she no longer owned.

She had left you with nothing but the coarse clothes on your back, an orphaned title, and a crushing, suffocating hatred for the golden citadel that gleamed mockingly on the horizon.So, you had fled. You ran past the outer boundaries, plunging deep into the untamed, ancient woods where the King’s pampered guards were too superstitious and cowardly to patrol. You taught yourself the language of the forest. You learned that boiling willow bark stripped a fever, that foxglove could steady a failing heart, and that crushed ghost-mushroom could numb the horrific pain of a back-alley amputation. You forged yourself into a weapon of survival.You blinked away the dark memory, your jaw clenching so hard your teeth ached. You looked toward the corner of the room.The woodpile was terrifyingly low. There were perhaps three small, dry logs left. Enough for the afternoon, but nowhere near enough to survive the night.The mathematics of winter were entirely uncompromising. If you stayed inside to protect your torn ankle, the fire would die by dusk. Without the fire to ward off the sub-zero temperatures, the frost would creep into the cabin, freeze the water in your ceramic jugs, stop your heart, and you would simply never wake up.

You looked down at your foot, the thick woolen bandages already stained a faint, rusty brown from the exertion of merely standing at the table. You let out a slow, ragged exhale, your breath pluming in the freezing cabin. The orange tabby cat let out a soft meow, rubbing its warm head against your uninjured ankle.

"I know," you whispered to the cat, your voice hoarse from disuse. "Spite. It's all we have." You pushed yourself away from the table. You pulled on a second pair of thick woolen socks, gritting your teeth against the sickening throb in your joint. You strapped your heavy, fur-lined leather boots over your calves, lacing them brutally tight to act as a crude splint. You threw a heavy, boiled-wool cloak over your shoulders, the dark fabric sweeping the floorboards, and strapped your iron skinning knife to your thigh. It was a heavy, utilitarian blade, designed for dressing game, but it had tasted the blood of desperate poachers more than once.You grabbed your woven gathering basket, slinging the leather strap diagonally over your chest, and picked up a walking stick carved from a sturdy hickory branch.Stepping up to the heavy oak door, you unlatched the iron bolt. The moment you pulled it open, the winter screamed into the cabin.The wind was a physical, violent blow, tearing at your cowl and throwing a handful of icy powder across your floorboards. You pulled the thick wool up to obscure your face, leaned heavily on your walking stick, and stepped out into the blinding white maelstrom.The forest was a cathedral of ice.

The ancient, towering pines groaned under the immense weight of the snow, their dark branches interlocked like skeletal fingers blocking out the weak, iron-grey sky. Every step you took was an ordeal. The snow was knee-deep, acting as a freezing, heavy resistance against your shins. You could not walk normally; you had to drag your injured leg forward, carving a slow, painful trench through the powder.

The pain in your ankle was immediate and blinding. It radiated up your calf, settling deep in your hip like a hot iron spike. But you forced your mind to disconnect from the physical vessel. You locked your jaw, focusing your narrowed eyes on the frozen underbrush. You scanned the blinding landscape for fallen, dead branches that weren't completely saturated with moisture.You limped deeper into the uncharted territory, moving further from the safety of your camouflaged door than you usually dared during a storm. The wind howled through the hollowed trunks, a haunting, high-pitched shriek that sounded exactly like the wailing of the King’s forgotten victims.You gripped the leather strap of your basket, your knuckles white inside your thick mittens, driven purely by the sheer, unyielding refusal to let Aethelgard outlive you. You were out to gather wood. You were out to survive just one more day in defiance of a world that demanded your death.An hour passed. The basket on your back grew marginally heavier with damp, frozen kindling, but it wasn't enough to sustain a blaze through the night.You paused near a dense thicket of frosted brambles, leaning heavily against the rough bark of a frozen elm to catch your breath. Your lungs burned, the icy air scraping against your throat like crushed glass. You closed your eyes for a brief second, allowing yourself to feel the absolute, crushing exhaustion.

Crack.

The sound was sharp, incredibly heavy, and entirely unnatural. It wasn't the agonizing groan of a frozen tree branch succumbing to the weight of the snow. It sounded like something massive had just violently shifted in the brush.

Your eyes snapped open. You froze, your breathing halting instantly. In the deep woods, sound was currency, and you had just been alerted to a presence.

Your right hand instinctively dropped to your thigh. The thick, damp leather of your mitten wrapped around the familiar, comforting grip of your iron skinning knife. You drew it silently. The woods around you were deadly quiet, the falling snow absorbing all ambient noise, making the sudden silence feel heavy and suffocating.

You scanned the blinding white landscape, your eyes narrowing against the harsh glare of the frost. About fifty yards off the faint, winding deer trail you had been following, at the base of a massive, hollowed-out oak tree, there was a glaring anomaly in the snow. It was a crater.It looked as though something incredibly heavy had been dropped from a great height, violently displacing the powder. But what made your breath catch in your throat was the texture of the snow around it. It wasn't pristine, fluffy powder. It was melted. The edges of the crater were a glassy, icy slush, as though a sudden, explosive burst of immense, localized heat had scorched the earth before the winter air had rapidly frozen it again. The faint, sharp scent of ozone and burnt pine needles hung strangely in the freezing air.You tightened your grip on the hickory walking stick. Every survival instinct you possessed screamed at you to turn around. A violent displacement of snow in the deep woods usually meant a predator’s den, or worse, a territorial dispute between things that viewed humans as easy prey.But curiosity, paired with the desperate need to know if the perimeter of your gathering territory had been breached, urged you forward.

Ignoring the screaming protest of your injured foot, you crept forward, your boots crunching softly in the icy crust. You kept low, using the frozen, dark trunks of the pines for cover.As you crested the lip of the snowdrift and looked down into the melted crater, your heart slammed against your ribs so hard it ached.

It was a man.

He was curled onto his side, his knees drawn slightly toward his chest in a fetal position. But the most jarring, immediate realization that sent a spike of absolute bewilderment through your mind was his state of dress.

He was completely, utterly naked.There was no shredded clothing scattered in the snow. There was no discarded armor, no boots, no torn cloaks. It was as if his garments had been vaporized off his body by whatever catastrophic force had created the melted crater around him.

He’s dead, you thought instantly, a cold knot forming in your stomach. It was a simple, undeniable fact of the woods. No human being could survive in this sub-zero temperature without heavy furs for more than twenty minutes, let alone stripped bare against the frozen earth.You cautiously slid down the bank of the snowdrift, your iron knife still drawn and held at the ready, the blade gleaming a dull, lethal grey against the white landscape.As you drew closer, the details of him began to resolve, and they fiercely defied all logic. He was not an emaciated, starving peasant who had wandered into the woods in a fit of madness. He was muscled, his physique dense, broad, and powerful. He bore the kind of lethal, sculpted definition that came from a lifetime of combat and endless rations of meat, not the slow starvation of the lower wards.His hair was a shock of dark, matted gold, a color so rare and brilliant it contrasted violently with the pale, dirty snow beneath him. It fell over his face, obscuring his features. You didn't recognize him. You had lived in exile since you were fifteen; the faces of the high lords and the royal court were nothing but abstract concepts to you. To your eyes, he was simply a stranger—perhaps a wealthy knight or a northern mercenary who had crossed the wrong witch or fallen victim to a bandit trap.

But it was his skin that made you stop dead in your tracks.

It wasn't the mottled, translucent blue of a frozen corpse. It wasn't the waxy, pale white of death. His skin was flushed. It was a deep, vibrant pink, seemingly completely unaffected by the freezing air whipping around him.

You knelt beside him in the slush, the cold biting into your knees through your woolen skirts. You reached out with your left hand, peeling off your heavy leather mitten with your teeth and spitting it into the snow. Hesitantly, your hand trembling slightly, you reached out to press your bare fingertips against the side of his neck, searching for the faint, thready pulse of a dying man.You gasped, violently jerking your hand back.

He was burning.It wasn't just the warmth of a living body fighting off hypothermia; he was radiating heat like a stoked iron forge. The snow directly beneath his broad shoulders was actively melting, turning into a puddle of icy mud that steamed faintly in the winter air. His skin was fever-hot, almost painfully scorching to the touch.

As you stared at him, utterly bewildered, you noticed the movement. His chest rose. It was a deep, steady, and incredibly heavy breath. He wasn't just alive; he was breathing with the rhythmic, powerful, unbothered cadence of a sleeping animal.

You leaned in closer, the healer’s analytical instinct overriding your profound confusion and mounting fear.There were marks on him. Faint, jagged, pink lines crisscrossed his broad chest and the dense muscle of his forearms. They looked like massive lacerations, the kind of lethal, tearing wounds inflicted by the claws of a dire bear.

But they were... moving.

You stopped breathing entirely. The skin was actively knitting together right before your eyes. You watched, mesmerized and horrified, as a deep gouge near his collarbone literally sealed itself shut, the raw tissue weaving together like microscopic threads, leaving behind only a thin, shiny silver scar that immediately began to fade into his flushed skin.A chill that had absolutely nothing to do with the winter air walked slowly up your spine.What in the names of the old gods was this? It wasn't human. No man healed like that. No man generated enough body heat to melt a snowbank in the dead of a generational winter. Was he a demon? A creature of blood magic summoned from the rot of the deep woods? A cursed thing cast out by the citadel? You slowly stood up, backing away, your boots slipping in the slush. You should drive your heavy iron knife directly into his throat right now. Whatever he was, he was an anomaly, and anomalies in the deep woods were universally lethal. When he woke up, his first instinct might be to kill you. The smartest, safest thing to do was to turn around, walk back to your cottage, bar the door, and let the winter try to finish whatever catastrophic magic had left him in this state.You looked down at your woven gathering basket. If you didn't gather wood, your hearth would die. Your poultices would freeze. The tabby cat waiting for you by the ashes would freeze. You had your own survival to worry about.

You looked back down at the man. The wind shifted his golden hair, revealing his face.

Despite the dirt, the faint scars, and the feral, terrifying nature of his condition, he was breathtakingly handsome. He had a sharp, aristocratic jawline, high cheekbones, and full lips slightly parted as he breathed out a thick cloud of steam. He looked like an arrogant, beautiful fallen star that had crashed violently into the mud.

Let him die, the cynical, hardened survivor inside you whispered. He is a monster. He is not your burden.

But then, he shifted in his sleep. A soft, agonizing groan slipped past his chapped lips. It was a sound of such profound, vulnerable suffering that it cut straight through the icy, bitter armor you had spent years building around your heart. He sounded entirely broken. He didn't sound like a demon or a supernatural threat. He sounded exactly like the desperate, dying peasants you patched up in the dark.He sounded tragically human.You stared at him for a long, quiet moment, the wind howling around the crater, whipping your dark cloak around your ankles."Damn it all," you cursed aloud, your breath pluming in the freezing air.You jammed your iron hunting knife back into its leather sheath with a frustrated, definitive shing. You grabbed your woven gathering basket, full of the few precious, dry logs you had managed to find over the last hour, and unceremoniously dumped them out. The wood scattered, burying itself uselessly in the deep snowdrifts."You had better be worth the frostbite, golden boy," you grumbled through chattering teeth, stepping down into the melted crater.You grabbed his thick arms. His skin was searingly hot against the cold leather of your remaining glove. He was impossibly heavy—his muscles felt as dense as lead—but as you hauled him upward, hoisting his upper body against your chest, the supernatural heat radiating from him seeped through your heavy woolen tunic. It was a terrifying, comforting warmth that immediately stopped your shivering.You gritted your teeth, bracing your injured ankle against the snow, and began the agonizing, impossible task of dragging the burning stranger home.

The journey back to your cottage was not a rescue; it was a descent into a specific, agonizing hell.

The distance between the hollowed-out oak tree and your camouflaged door was perhaps less than a mile, but the deep woods warped time and space. The snow, heavy and wet, acted like freezing quicksand, violently resisting every inch of progress. You had your arms wrapped under his arms, locking your hands over his broad chest. You dragged him backward, step by excruciating step, your boots carving a deep, ugly trench through the pristine powder.

He was impossibly heavy. It felt as though you were trying to drag a statue cast from solid lead rather than a man of flesh and blood. Every time you shifted your weight, the torn ligaments in your left ankle screamed in protest, sending blinding, white-hot flares of pain shooting straight up into your hip.

"Keep moving," you rasped to yourself, the words tearing out of your throat in a cloud of white vapor. "Don't stop. Don't let them win."

The only thing keeping you from succumbing to the lethal drop in temperature was the stranger himself. The unnatural, furnace-like heat radiating from his bare skin bled right through your heavy woolen tunic. It was a terrifying, suffocating warmth, smelling faintly of ozone, sweat, and the sharp scent of pine needles. He was a living hearth fire in the dead of the frost, and you clung to him with the desperate pragmatism of a survivor. Your vision began to swim with black spots. The skeletal branches of the pines overhead spun lazily in your periphery. You tripped over a hidden, snow-drowned root, collapsing backward into a drift. The stranger’s massive, dead weight slumped over your legs, pinning you to the freezing earth.

You lay there for a long, quiet moment, staring up at the bruising, iron-grey sky. The exhaustion was absolute. It seeped into your marrow, whispering seductive promises of peace. If you simply closed your eyes, the pain in your ankle would stop. The bitter, endless struggle against the King's winter would finally be over.

But then, the stranger shifted against your legs. A deep, guttural sound rumbled in his chest—a vibration that felt less like a human groan and more like the low, warning growl of a territorial predator. The sheer alienness of the sound snapped you violently back to reality. The instinct to survive, forged in the ashes of your mother's suicide and the cruelty of the citadel, flared to life. Spite.

With a feral, ragged shout, you shoved his heavy torso off your legs. You scrambled to your knees, ignoring the sickening pop in your ankle, and grabbed him beneath the arms once more. You hauled him the rest of the way on nothing but pure, adrenaline-fueled stubbornness.

By the time the thatched, snow-covered roof of your cottage came into view, your lungs felt as though they were filled with crushed glass. You dragged him up the small incline, kicked the heavy oak door open with your good foot, and hauled him over the threshold. You pulled him onto the rough-hewn floorboards and immediately dropped his arms. You collapsed beside him, your back hitting the floor, your chest heaving violently as you gasped for the stagnant, freezing air of the cabin. For several minutes, the only sound in the room was the ragged, desperate rasp of your breathing, contrasting sharply with the slow, impossibly deep, rhythmic breaths of the naked stranger.

"Meow." You turned your head lazily against the floorboards. Your orange tabby cat was standing on the edge of the scarred wooden table. But the cat was not acting normally. Its back was arched into a rigid crescent, its fur standing perfectly on end, making it look twice its size. Its ears were pinned flat against its skull, and it was staring down at the unconscious man with wide, dilated eyes, emitting a low, continuous hiss. Animals in the deep woods possessed a sixth sense for danger that humans had long ago bred out of themselves. The cat did not see a vulnerable, naked man bleeding on the floor. The cat saw an apex predator. "It's alright, Barnaby," you wheezed, forcing yourself to sit up. "He's just... a very heavy idiot who forgot his coat." The cat did not break its stare, slowly backing away until it practically melted into the shadows of the highest shelf.

The biting cold of the room forced you to move. If you didn't stoke the fire immediately, your herculean effort would have been for nothing. You dragged yourself across the floorboards, your hands shaking violently from muscle fatigue as you grabbed your flint and steel. You struck the metal against the stone over and over, your movements clumsy, until a brilliant spark finally caught the dry moss in the center of the ash. You blew on it gently, coaxing the tiny, fragile orange glow until it greedily caught the splinters of kindling, illuminating the small room in dancing, warm light. You fed it the last three precious logs you possessed, watching the flames roar to life.

Only then did you turn your attention back to the anomaly lying on your floor.

In the warm light of the hearth, the sheer, imposing scale of him was even more apparent. He took up a massive amount of space in your small sanctuary. You crawled over to him, your injured leg dragging uselessly behind you. You grabbed the thick, patchwork quilt of rabbit furs from your cot and threw it over his lower half, offering him a scrap of dignity you doubted he deserved, while also shielding yourself from the glaring reality of his nakedness. Now that you were no longer fighting for your life in a blizzard, you could properly examine him. You knelt beside his shoulders. His golden hair was damp with melted snow and sweat, clinging to his forehead. His jaw was locked tight, the muscles jumping beneath his flushed skin.

You reached out, hovering your hand an inch above his chest. The heat radiating off him was staggering. It wasn't the clammy, shivering heat of a winter fever; it was a dry, baking intensity. You looked closer at the faint, silver lines crisscrossing his collarbone and ribs. They were entirely healed. Whatever had torn his flesh open out in the woods had been repaired by his own impossible biology in a matter of minutes.

You dipped a clean linen cloth into a ceramic bowl of water, wringing it out. Cautiously, you pressed the damp cloth against his forehead to wipe away the dirt and grime. The moment the cold water touched his burning skin, the stranger’s body violently reacted. His eyes did not flutter open; they snapped open, wide and alert, completely devoid of the usual groggy disorientation of a waking man.

You froze, the damp cloth suspended in your hand.

His eyes were a clear, luminous amber. But in the flickering light of the hearth, the pupils were blown wide, and for a terrifying, microscopic fraction of a second, you could have sworn they flashed with a brilliant, inhuman gold.

He didn't speak. He moved with a sudden, terrifying blur of speed that your human eyes could barely track. One second he was lying flat on his back; the next, his hand shot out, wrapping around your wrist with a grip like a vise of solid iron. He violently twisted your arm, using your own momentum to flip your positions.

You hit the floorboards hard on your back, the breath knocked completely out of your lungs. Before you could even process the impact, he was looming over you, straddling your hips, his heavy, burning weight pinning you to the floor. His free hand shot to your throat, his long, aristocratic fingers pressing firmly against your windpipe.

"Where am I?" he demanded. His voice was a low, melodic baritone, but it was laced with a chilling, absolute authority. It was not the voice of a panicked victim. It was the voice of a man who was entirely accustomed to holding the power of life and death in his hands. You stared up at him, your heart hammering a frantic rhythm against your ribs. His amber eyes were scanning your face, searching for recognition, searching for a threat. His chest heaved above yours, radiating that suffocating, furnace-like heat.

He is a lord, you realized instantly. The arrogant tilt of his chin, the flawless perfection of his features, the immediate assumption of violence to secure dominance—he reeked of the citadel. You had dragged a piece of the rot into your home. But you were not a trembling servant of Aethelgard. You were a survivor of the deep woods. And you were profoundly, aggressively out of patience.

You didn't thrash. You didn't claw at the hand on your throat. Instead, you let your expression go completely, terrifyingly blank. You met his intense, predatory stare with a look of absolute, icy spite. "You are currently bleeding your impossible body heat all over my clean floorboards," you rasped, your voice steady despite the pressure on your windpipe. "And if you don't take your hand off my throat in the next three seconds, I am going to take the skinning knife strapped to my thigh and bury it directly into your femoral artery. You might heal fast, golden boy, but you will still bleed out before you reach the door."

Jake froze.

The absolute lack of fear in your eyes threw him. In his twenty-one years of existence, no one—not the nobility, not the servants, not even the battle-hardened knights of his father's vanguard—had ever spoken to him with such utter, unimpressed contempt. He was the Crown Prince of Aethelgard. He was a god.

But as his amber eyes darted around the room, taking in the drying herbs, the rough-hewn walls, and the complete lack of royal insignias, the horrific reality of his situation crashed down upon him. He remembered the Witch. He remembered the blinding, agonizing pain in his chest. He remembered the feeling of his bones stretching, his fingernails elongating into claws. He looked down at the hand wrapped around your throat. He expected to see a monster's appendage. Instead, he saw his own hand—human, flawless, albeit dirt-stained. The curse had not made the transformation permanent; it was tied to the blood moon. He was still human. For now.But he was completely naked, miles from the safety of his citadel, trapped in a peasant's hovel, and entirely stripped of his royal authority. If he told this wild, angry girl that he was Prince Jake, she would likely slit his throat while he slept and sell his golden hair to a merchant for a year's supply of flour. He was the son of the King who had starved the outer wards. He was enemy number one.

He had to play the game. He had to be the shepherd. Jake immediately released your throat. He rolled off you, pulling the patchwork rabbit furs tightly around his waist to preserve his modesty, and scrambled backward until his spine hit the wooden leg of the table.He let out a ragged, perfectly crafted gasp of manufactured panic, bringing a trembling hand to his forehead. He allowed his broad shoulders to slump, transforming his posture from that of a lethal predator to a confused, deeply traumatized victim."I... I apologize," Jake stammered, his voice softening, taking on that sweet, puppy-like vulnerability he used to manipulate the court ladies. He looked at you through his thick lashes, his amber eyes pooling with feigned terror. "I don't... I don't know what came over me. The last thing I remember... there were wolves. A pack of them. They attacked my horse. I thought you were one of them." You sat up slowly, rubbing the faint red marks on your throat. You didn't buy a single word of his performance.You had lived with desperate people for years. You knew what true panic looked like. True panic was messy. True panic didn't execute a flawless, trained martial arts takedown in the blink of an eye.

"Wolves," you repeated flatly, your voice dripping with cynical disbelief.

"Yes," Jake nodded earnestly, pulling the furs tighter around himself, shivering slightly—a brilliant piece of acting considering his body temperature was easily a hundred and four degrees. "They tore me from the saddle. I ran, but they caught me. They tore my clothes... they..." He looked down at his bare, unblemished chest, feigning confusion. "I was bleeding. I swear I was bleeding."

"You were," you said coldly, pushing yourself up until you were leaning against the edge of your cot. You crossed your arms over your chest. "I saw the lacerations. I also saw them stitch themselves back together like magic. Normal men don't heal like that. Normal men don't melt snowbanks with their bare skin. So, let's drop the theatrical act. What are you? A blood-mage? A demon summoned by some idiot cult in the lower wards?" Jake’s heart hammered against his ribs. She was sharp. Much sharper than the dim-witted nobility he was used to lying to. She had seen him healing. If she connected the rapid regeneration to the folklore of the deep woods, she would realize he was cursed."I am neither," Jake said, his voice careful and slow, like a man picking his way across thin ice. He leaned his head back against the table leg, closing his eyes as if fighting off a wave of dizziness. "My name is Jake. I was riding north when the storm hit. My horse threw me. I hit the ground hard and I don't remember much after that." It was a thin lie. Barely a scaffold. He knew it the moment it left his mouth. "You hit the ground," you repeated. "Yes."

"And the heat?" A pause. "I run hot. It's a condition. Northern bloodlines sometimes—"

"And the healing?" His jaw tightened fractionally. "I don't know what you think you saw."

"I know exactly what I saw," you said, your voice quiet and entirely without drama. "I watched a wound seal itself shut in under a minute. I have been a healer for eight years. I know what a healing wound looks like, and I know what that was not." You held his gaze steadily. "I'm not asking you to explain it right now. I'm telling you that I am not going to pretend I didn't see it, and I would strongly recommend that you stop treating me like I'm stupid." The silence that followed was long and weighted. Jake looked at you. The performance flickered behind his amber eyes — he was calculating, measuring, deciding how much truth was safe to spend. "I won't lie to you again," he said finally. It cost him something to say it. You could see that clearly. "Good," you replied. You pushed yourself up from the floor, grabbed the heavy wooden chest at the foot of the bed, and pulled out the dead farmer's clothes. You tossed them at his face. "Put those on. And don't lie to me again.” Jake caught them effortlessly, his reflexes impossibly fast, though he quickly masked it by fumbling with the fabric.

You turned your back to him to afford him a shred of privacy, limping back toward the hearth to check a pot of melting snow. "They belonged to a man who was actually worth the air he breathed, so try not to ruin them. And if you try to jump me again while my back is turned, I will throw my boiling tea directly into your face. Understood?" Behind you, Jake stared at your back. His jaw clenched tight, a flash of genuine, arrogant fury burning in his amber eyes. How dare she speak to the future King of Aethelgard like this? He wanted to step forward, wrap his hand around her throat again, and remind her of her place in the dirt.

But he took a slow, deep breath, forcing the beast down. He was a master of the game. He would play the role of the humble, grateful mercenary until he found a way to break the Witch's curse. And to do that, he needed shelter. He needed this bitter, sharp-tongued healer.

"I understand," Jake said softly, his voice returning to that sweet, melodic timbre. He stood up, his massive, sculpted frame making the small cabin feel claustrophobic, and pulled the coarse woolen trousers on. They were tight across his thick thighs, and the linen shirt strained tightly against his broad shoulders, but they offered a layer of normalcy.He walked slowly toward the fire, stopping a respectful distance away from you."Thank you," Jake murmured, looking down at his bare feet, the picture of humbled grace. "For saving me. I know I am an uninvited burden. May I ask the name of my savior?"You turned around, a ceramic mug of hot willow-bark tea in your hands. You looked him up and down. Even dressed in the scratchy, oversized clothes of a dead farmer, he looked entirely out of place. He possessed a terrifying, magnetic beauty that made the very air around him feel charged.

"You can call me your only chance of surviving the week," you said flatly, taking a slow sip of the bitter tea. "And you are a burden. You're going to chop my firewood to pay off your debt, mercenary. Assuming your delicate hands can handle an axe."

Jake offered a soft, self-deprecating smile, though internally, the golden prince was seething at the prospect of manual labor. "I am stronger than I look. I will earn my keep."He looked toward the small window, where the bruised grey sky was rapidly darkening into a pitch-black, starless night. The curse was dormant, for now. The moon tonight was only a sliver. But as he stood in the warmth of the outcast's sanctuary, smelling the drying herbs and the faint, coppery scent of the blood on her bandages, the beast beneath his skin shifted.

It was awake. It was watching her. And it was waiting for the moon to grow.

The dead man’s clothes were an agonizing, tactile nightmare. Prince Jake of Aethelgard sat on the rough, splintering floorboards near the hearth, his long legs drawn up defensively, the patchwork rabbit furs pooled around his waist. The coarse, unbleached wool of the borrowed trousers scratched relentlessly against his hyper-sensitized skin, and the oversized linen shirt smelled faintly of stale sweat, damp earth, and the undeniable rot of poverty. It was the scent of the lower wards. It was the scent of the people he had spent his entire life stepping over.

Every instinct bred into him screamed to tear the filthy garments off, to demand his silks, to summon his guards and have this miserable, insolent girl whipped for daring to speak to him as an equal. But he was a prisoner of geography and circumstance.

Jake watched you through the veil of his golden bangs. You were seated on the edge of the narrow cot across the small cabin, your face pale and tight with exhaustion, unlacing your heavy leather boots to inspect your injured ankle. The room was claustrophobic, heavy with the suffocating, medicinal stench of drying wolfsbane and crushed willow. In the shadows above, that wretched orange feline watched him with wide, unblinking, predatory eyes. He needed to plot his extraction. To do that, he needed data.

Where exactly am I? Jake thought, his jaw clenching as a fresh wave of unnatural, searing heat radiated from his core. The Witch’s curse was a humming, vibrant current beneath his skin, keeping his body temperature at a terrifying, feverish high. I rode north-west from the citadel for 2 hours. If Ruin fled straight back along the trail, the vanguard will track his hoofprints to the clearing. But the snow is heavy. The tracks will fill by dawn. He needed a map. He needed to know the nearest landmark, the nearest outpost. Once he had his bearings, he could wait for this peasant girl to sleep, steal whatever meager rations she had hoarded, take her heavy winter cloak, and leave her to freeze while he made his way back to the iron gates of Aethelgard.

"You're staring, mercenary," you rasped, not looking up from your ankle. The boiled wool bandages were stained a fresh, dark crimson. Jake’s amber eyes snapped into focus. The arrogant prince flared to the surface, completely unbidden. He let out a soft, derisive scoff. "I was merely marveling at the squalor," Jake said, the venom dripping from his melodic voice before he could stop it. "Do you intentionally cultivate this level of filth, or is it simply a natural byproduct of living like a feral animal in the dirt?" You stopped unlacing your boot. The silence in the cabin stretched, heavy and dangerous, broken only by the crackle of the hearth fire. You slowly lifted your head. Your eyes were dark, flat, and entirely devoid of intimidation.

"The squalor," you repeated, your voice a dangerous, quiet whisper. "Right."

You pushed yourself up from the cot, entirely ignoring the agonizing pop of your swollen joint. You reached the scarred wooden table in two limping strides, grabbed a heavy, wooden bucket filled with melting snow, and turned back toward him.

"Catch," you deadpanned.

You didn't toss it. You hurled the bucket directly at his chest.

Jake’s newly enhanced reflexes flared. He caught the heavy wooden bucket effortlessly mid-air before it could shatter against his ribs, but the momentum sloshed a gallon of freezing, half-melted snow and icy water directly over his head and down the front of his borrowed shirt. The shock of the freezing water hitting his scorching skin produced an audible hiss of steam.Jake gasped, his golden hair plastered to his forehead, icy water dripping from his nose and chin. The sheer audacity of the act left him temporarily speechless. His amber eyes wide, he stared at you as the beast beneath his skin roared, demanding violence. His elongated canines ground together behind his closed lips. "You insolent little—" Jake began, his voice dropping into a guttural, terrifying register, his hands gripping the edges of the wooden bucket hard enough to make the wood splinter and crack under his thumbs. "Finish that sentence," you interrupted, pulling the heavy iron skinning knife from the sheath at your thigh and slamming the point of the blade directly into the wooden table. It embedded with a solid thwack, vibrating in the wood. "Go on. Finish it. And then I will drag you back out into the blizzard by your golden hair and let the wolves finish what they started."

Jake stared at the quivering iron blade. He looked at your face. There was no hesitation in your posture. You were a creature forged by the harshness of the outer woods; you had nothing left to lose, which made you incredibly dangerous.

The Prince's internal calculus shifted rapidly.She has the shelter. She has the food. She knows the woods.

If he killed her now, he would have no guide. If he killed her, he would be alone in a cursed forest with a monster waking up in his blood. His father’s lessons echoed in his mind, clear and sharp as ringing steel: Never let them see the wolf. Play the shepherd until the trap snaps shut. Jake closed his eyes. He forced his breathing to slow, burying the arrogant, furious royal deep beneath the surface. He felt the tension drain from his shoulders, a deliberate, masterful physical manipulation. When he opened his eyes again, the cold, predatory gleam was gone. Instead, they pooled with a soft, manufactured shame. He lowered his head, letting his wet, golden hair fall across his face in a picture of utter vulnerability. He let out a long, shaky exhale, the sound of a man completely broken by his circumstances.

"You are right," Jake whispered, his voice cracking perfectly on the last syllable.

You narrowed your eyes, your hand still resting near the hilt of the embedded knife. "Excuse me?" Jake slowly set the cracked wooden bucket on the floorboards. He looked up at you through his wet lashes, his amber eyes wide and painfully sincere. The transition was so flawless, so terrifyingly abrupt, that it gave you mental whiplash. "I am... I am so sorry," Jake murmured, bringing a trembling hand to his forehead, leaning his weight back against the wall as if he could barely hold himself up. "That was inexcusable. My pride is bruised, my body feels as though it is burning from the inside out, and I am terrified." He paused, letting a strategic, self-deprecating smile touch his lips. "I am a soldier used to being strong. Now, I am sitting in a puddle of water, wearing a dead man's clothes, entirely reliant on the mercy of a stranger. I lashed out. I took my fear out on the only person who showed me kindness. Please... forgive me." You stared at him, analyzing the subtle shift in his posture, the soft curve of his brow, the absolute sincerity radiating from his melodic voice. It was a flawless performance. It was the exact performance that had secured trade routes and unquestioning loyalty back in the citadel.

But you had survived this long because you trusted actions, not apologies.

"Save the pretty speeches, mercenary," you said, though the aggressive edge had noticeably dulled from your voice. You pulled the knife from the table and slid it back into its sheath. "Fear doesn't give you the right to be a tyrant in my house. My roof, my rules."

"Your rules," Jake agreed softly, nodding his head in subservience, while internally, he promised himself he would burn this wretched cabin to the ground the moment he no longer needed it. "What would you have me do?"

"You're going to dry off," you commanded, limping back to your cot and sitting heavily. "And then, since you clearly have enough energy to complain about my housekeeping, you are going to chop the rest of the wood in the corner so we don't freeze to death by midnight. Can your noble, northern hands handle an axe?"

"I will manage," Jake said smoothly, offering a weak, grateful smile. "Thank you. Truly."

The tension in the cabin shifted from overtly hostile to a quiet, thick wariness.

While you tended to your ankle, spreading a fresh layer of the stinging comfrey poultice over the torn flesh, Jake stripped off the wet linen shirt. He did it slowly, acutely aware of your eyes darting toward him.

As he knelt by the hearth to dry the fabric, he felt the first true, terrifying tremor of the Witch’s magic. It started as a dull ache at the base of his spine, a deep, heavy pressure in the marrow of his bones. He squeezed his eyes shut, his jaw locking tight to silence the groan in his throat. His senses, already heightened from his elite military training, began to unnaturally expand.With his eyes closed, the small cabin suddenly exploded into a cacophony of overwhelming sensory input. He could hear the wind outside, not just as a howling mass, but breaking down into individual currents rushing through the pine needles. He could hear the faint, rapid thump-thump-thump of the cat's heartbeat in the rafters. And worse, he could hear your heartbeat across the room—a steady, rhythmic drum that pushed rich, hot blood through your veins.

The scent of the room changed. The overwhelming smell of the medicinal herbs faded into the background, replaced by a hyper-specific, terrifyingly detailed olfactory map. He could smell the sharp, metallic tang of the fresh blood on your ankle. He could smell the salt of your sweat. He could smell the faint, bitter adrenaline pumping through your system. It smelled... appetizing.

Jake’s eyes snapped open in absolute horror. His stomach cramped, a violent, ravenous hunger clawing at his insides. It wasn't the hunger for roasted boar or spiced pigeon from his father's banquets. It was a raw, primal demand for fresh, tearing meat.

No, he panicked internally, his fingers digging into his own kneecaps. I am Prince Jake of Aethelgard. I am a man. I am a soon to be King.

He forced the rising beast down, locking it in the darkest, deepest cage of his mind. He shoved the horrific hunger aside, wrapping himself in the iron-clad discipline that Gareth had beaten into him in the training yards. He would not lose his mind. He would not become a monster in front of a peasant. He draped the wet linen shirt over a chair near the fire and stood up, his bare chest gleaming in the hearth light. He spotted the small iron hand-axe resting near the meager pile of unchopped wood.

"Allow me to earn my keep," Jake said softly, keeping his voice perfectly even, betraying none of the internal psychological warfare tearing his mind apart.

He picked up the axe. To his dense, newly strengthened Lycan muscles, the iron tool felt as light as a feather. He set a log on the chopping block and brought the axe down.

Crack.

The wood split perfectly in two with a sound like a gunshot. He moved with a terrifying, fluid efficiency, fueled by the desperate need to channel the beast's energy into something mundane. The repetitive motion grounded him. Strike. Split. Stack. Strike. Split. Stack.

From the cot, you watched him work.You had expected the golden boy to struggle, to complain about blisters or the heavy iron. Instead, he moved with the lethal, mechanical precision of an executioner. The muscles in his broad back flexed and shifted beneath his flushed skin, the faint, silver scars rippling with every swing. He chopped a week's worth of kindling in less than ten minutes, barely breaking a sweat, his breathing entirely untaxed. He is dangerous, you thought, pulling the heavy rabbit furs up to your chin. He is a liar, he is arrogant, and he is infinitely more powerful than he is letting on.But as you watched the flames of the hearth leap higher, feeding on the wood he had just split, the freezing chill finally retreated from the edges of the room. The cabin grew warm. Safe.Jake set the axe down, wiping a stray lock of golden hair from his forehead. He looked over at you, his amber eyes soft, playing the role of the diligent, grateful survivor to perfection.

"Is this sufficient?" he asked softly, gesturing to the neatly stacked pile of wood.

"It will do," you murmured, your eyelids growing heavy with exhaustion. The adrenaline of the rescue was finally crashing, leaving behind a profound, bone-deep weariness. "You can sleep by the hearth. It’s the warmest spot in the room."

"Thank you," Jake replied, lowering himself gracefully onto the floorboards, pulling the heavy woolen cloak around his shoulders.

He watched you settle into the cot, your breathing eventually slowing as exhaustion pulled you under. The moment you were asleep, the sweet, puppy-dog mask vanished entirely. Jake’s features hardened into a mask of cold, predatory calculation. He stared at the flames, feeling the unnatural heat of his own blood, listening to the steady, rhythmic heartbeat of the human across the room.

He was trapped in the periphery. He was cursed by a Witch, housing a monster beneath his skin. But he was still the Prince of Aethelgard. He would play the sweet, grateful shepherd for as long as it took to extract the geographical information he needed.And then, he would leave her to the wolves.

The passage of time in the deep woods was not measured by the tolling of the citadel’s silver bells, but by the agonizing, repetitive rhythm of survival.

For three days, Prince Jake of Aethelgard lived a life of absolute, degrading squalor.

The mornings began in the freezing darkness, long before the anemic winter sun breached the canopy. Jake would wake on the hard, rough-hewn floorboards, his body tangled in the heavy woolen cloak, his spine aching from the lack of a feather mattress. The indignity of it burned like acid in his throat. He was a god among men, destined to wear a crown of black iron, and yet here he was, sleeping like a feral dog at the foot of a peasant’s cot.

Every time you spoke to him, it took a monumental, agonizing exertion of willpower for Jake not to cross the room and snap your neck.

"The fire is dying, mercenary," you would rasp, your voice thick with sleep and the bitter exhaustion of your healing injuries. "Fetch more wood. And check the snares on the eastern ridge while you're out there. If you want to eat, you work."

He would lower his head, letting his golden hair shield the lethal, predatory fury in his amber eyes. "Of course," he would murmur, his voice a perfect, melodic simulation of humble gratitude. "Right away."

But the moment he stepped out of the heavy oak door and the biting winter wind hit his face, the shepherd’s mask dissolved.

Jake stood in the snow behind the cottage, the iron hand-axe gripped in his hand. He placed a thick, frozen log of pine onto the chopping block. He didn't just swing the axe; he brought it down with the full, devastating force of his unnatural, shifting biology.

Crack.

The wood practically exploded, splitting into uneven shards that flew into the snowbanks. Jake breathed heavily, his chest heaving beneath the oversized linen shirt. He imagined the log was his father's throne. He imagined it was the Witch's skull.

Most often, he imagined it was you.

He despised you with a cold, pristine clarity. He hated your sharp, unimpressed tone. He hated the way you looked at him without an ounce of reverence or fear. You treated him like a stray cur you had reluctantly brought in from the storm, ordering him to haul buckets of melting snow, to mend the leaking thatch of the roof, and to scrub the blood-stained floorboards after you changed your bandages.

I will burn this wretched hovel to the ashes, Jake thought, bringing the axe down again, cleaving another log in two. When the vanguard finds me, I will have the guards drag her by her hair to the citadel. I will let her freeze in the black cells, and I will personally watch the life leave those defiant eyes.

The fantasy of your execution was the only thing keeping his temper in check.

But as he swung the axe, the horrifying reality of the Witch’s curse made itself known. The physical exertion should have left him panting, his muscles burning with lactic acid, the skin of his palms blistering from the rough wooden handle of the axe. But Jake felt nothing but an endless, terrifying well of explosive energy.

He looked down at his hands. The callouses he was beginning to form were already shedding, the skin regenerating rapidly to remain smooth and flawless. But worse, as his anger spiked, he watched in paralyzed horror as the tips of his fingers began to darken. His fingernails were thickening, growing rigid and pointed, shifting into jagged, bone-white claws.

A low, guttural snarl vibrated in his chest—a sound he couldn't stop.

Panic seized him. He dropped the axe into the snow and buried his hands in his armpits, squeezing his fists tightly until the dark magic receded and the claws painfully retracted back into his nail beds. His gums throbbed with a dull, persistent ache, his canines feeling suddenly too sharp, too long for his mouth.

The beast was not dormant. It was awake, pacing just beneath the surface of his skin, feeding on his fury.

He had to control it. He had to play the docile mercenary. If you saw his eyes flash gold, or caught sight of his claws, you would know exactly what he was. You would slip foxglove into his stew or drive that iron skinning knife through his heart while he slept.

Jake took a slow, jagged breath, composing his features back into the sweet, vulnerable boy. He gathered the chopped wood into his arms, carrying an impossible load that would have broken a normal man's back, and carried it inside.

If the days were an exercise in suffocating humility, the nights were a psychological warzone.

It was midnight. The cabin was sealed tight against a raging blizzard, the wind howling a mournful dirge outside the thick walls. You were asleep on the narrow cot, your breathing slow and even, completely oblivious to the apex predator lying just ten feet away.

Jake lay on his side near the roaring hearth, completely still. He couldn't sleep. The curse kept his blood running at a feverish, blistering temperature, and his newly heightened senses made the small cabin feel like an echo chamber. He could hear the blood rushing through your veins. He could smell the clean, sharp scent of your skin beneath the medicinal herbs.

"Meow."

Jake’s amber eyes slid open, glowing faintly in the firelight.

Across the room, perched high on the back of a heavy wooden chair, was the orange tabby cat. The beast—Barnaby, you had called him—was resting on the furniture in a domestic posture, but his eyes were wide, unblinking, and locked directly onto Jake.

The cat knew. It had known since the moment Jake was dragged across the threshold.

Jake slowly sat up, resting his forearms on his knees. He stared at the tabby. The silence stretched between them, heavy and hostile.

For a moment, Jake let the iron grip on his control slip. He allowed the Lycan to rise to the surface. His amber eyes flared a brilliant, luminescent gold in the shadows. He bared his teeth, revealing canines that had elongated slightly, and let out a sound so low it was entirely sub-audible—a frequency of pure, territorial dominance that vibrated through the floorboards.

The orange tabby cat did not run. It did not hiss. Instead, Barnaby simply opened his mouth, yawning widely, showing his own tiny, needle-like teeth, before resting his chin back on his paws, entirely unbothered but eternally vigilant.

Jake’s jaw clenched. Even the vermin in this house mock me.

He turned his gaze away from the cat and looked at you. The heavy furs had slipped down to your waist, revealing the thick woolen bandages wrapped securely around your left ankle.

Jake tilted his head, listening to your heartbeat. It would be so incredibly easy. He could cross the room before you even drew a breath. He could silence your sharp tongue forever. His fingers twitched, the phantom sensation of claws pressing against his skin.

No,he ordered himself, forcing the golden light to fade from his eyes. She is the map. She is the survival tool. Use the tool, then discard it.

The true revelation came on the fourth evening.

The blizzard had finally broken, leaving the deep woods suffocating under three feet of fresh, undisturbed powder. Jake was sitting at the scarred wooden table, meticulously sharpening your iron skinning knife with a whetstone. It was a chore you had assigned him, and he performed it with deadly, mechanical precision, the rhythmic shhhh-clack of the metal soothing his frayed nerves.

You were standing by the hearth, a heavy iron pot suspended over the flames. You were preparing a meager stew from the supplies you had managed to scrounge from the root cellar.

It was day eleven when Jake made you laugh for the first time. It was entirely accidental, which was probably why it worked. You had sent him to check the root cellar inventory while you changed your ankle dressing, a task you had assigned him primarily to have him on the other side of the room while you dealt with the worst of the pain without an audience. You heard him moving around below the hatch, the scrape of ceramic crocks being shifted and examined. "There are seven turnips," Jake called up, his voice carrying the particular tone of a man trying very hard to sound neutral about something that was bothering him considerably. "I know," you called back, pressing the yarrow poultice against the raw skin and locking your jaw against the sting. "And a quantity of dried fish that I would describe as—" a pause — "aggressively optimistic."

"Also aware." Another pause. "There are no onions."

"Correct."

"You threw the last of them in the fire four days ago."

"I did."

"We are facing genuine caloric scarcity," Jake said, his voice taking on the measured gravity of a man who had spent his life in war councils, "and your primary nutritional strategy has been to eliminate entire food groups based on personal preference." You finished tying off the bandage. You sat back, pressing your lips together. "The onions were making the broth bitter," you said. "The onions were making the broth food," Jake replied, emerging from the root cellar hatch with an expression of such profound, aristocratic bewilderment that it sat entirely wrong on his face — a face built for cold authority and devastating beauty, now arranged in the genuine, helpless confusion of a man confronting a turnip shortage caused entirely by his host's culinary opinions. The laugh came out of you before you could stop it. It wasn't a polite sound. It was a short, sharp, completely undignified burst of genuine amusement that surprised you both equally. Jake stared at you. You pressed the back of your hand against your mouth, composing yourself rapidly. "We'll manage," you said, your voice still slightly unsteady. He continued staring for a moment longer, something shifting behind his amber eyes — a brief, unguarded softness that he tucked away almost immediately. "I will find onions," Jake announced, with the grave, solemn conviction of a man declaring war. "You absolutely will not," you told him.

"I saw wild onion grass on the eastern slope last week. Frozen, but viable if—"

"You are not trekking a mile through knee-deep powder to dig up frozen onion grass."

"You threw away our last food source because you found it aesthetically disagreeable," Jake said, with immense dignity. "I feel that the onion grass expedition is the least I can do."

"Sit down," you said. But you were still almost smiling, and he could see it, and the insufferable almost-smile on his own face told you that he could. He sat down. The warmth of it — small, accidental, entirely unplanned — settled in the cabin like a third presence. Neither of you named it. Neither of you looked directly at it. But it was there, quiet and unhurried and considerably more dangerous than either of you had the vocabulary to address. Outside, the moon was growing. "You're cutting the vegetables terribly small," Jake noted softly, maintaining his sweet, conversational tone. "Are we rationing?"

"I am picking out the wild red onions," you replied flatly, using a wooden spoon to fish out several dark, crescent-shaped slices of the root from the boiling broth, flicking them unceremoniously into the fire where they hissed and popped.

Jake raised a golden eyebrow, genuinely bewildered. "You are starving in the deep woods, and you are discarding perfectly good food?"

"I despise red onions," you said, your tone brokering absolutely no argument, stirring the pot with a stubborn finality. "They ruin the broth. If we are going to freeze to death by the end of the week, I refuse to do it with the taste of sulfur in my mouth. You will eat what I serve, mercenary, or you can go hunt a rabbit in the snow yourself." Jake swallowed the venomous retort that immediately sprang to his tongue. He offered a soft, amused smile. "Your hospitality is unmatched. I eagerly await the onion-less stew." Before you could respond, three sharp, frantic knocks echoed against the heavy oak door. The domestic tension shattered instantly. You dropped the wooden spoon, your hand flying to the dagger you kept at your hip. Jake’s muscles locked, the whetstone stopping mid-scrape. In the deep woods, a knock after nightfall was rarely a friendly neighbor. It was usually the King’s vanguard, or bandits. You gestured for Jake to stay silent, pressing a finger to your lips. You limped toward the door, peering through a small, carved knot in the heavy wood. The tension left your shoulders. You unlatched the heavy iron bolt and pulled the door open, letting a rush of freezing air into the cabin. Standing on the threshold was a young woman, shivering violently beneath a threadbare shawl. Her lips were tinged blue, and her eyes were wide with terror. "Y/N," the woman gasped, her voice trembling. "Please. The fever... it’s taken my husband’s lungs. He’s coughing blood. The citadel apothecaries turned us away because we couldn't pay the silver tax."

Jake sat perfectly still at the table, his amber eyes tracking the interaction. He pulled the hood of his cloak up slightly, obscuring his golden hair in the shadows.

"Come inside, quickly," you said, pulling the woman out of the wind and shutting the door. You didn't waste time with pleasantries. You limped directly to the wooden shelves lining the far wall, your hands moving with practiced efficiency. You grabbed a dark glass vial sealed with wax and a bundle of dried, grey leaves.

"Boil the sweet-briar leaves in water and make him inhale the steam," you instructed, your voice low and urgent, devoid of the bitter sarcasm you reserved for Jake. "When his chest loosens, give him three drops of this tincture under his tongue. No more than three, or it will stop his heart. Do you understand?"

"Yes," the woman sobbed, clutching the medicine to her chest like a holy relic. She reached into her pocket with trembling fingers and pulled out a small, tarnished copper coin and a handful of dried barley. "It’s... it’s all we have. I’m sorry."

You looked at the pathetic payment. You pushed her hand back gently. "Keep the barley for the broth. Give me the copper. Now go, before the snow covers your tracks."

The woman kissed your hand—a gesture of profound reverence that made Jake’s stomach twist—and slipped back out into the freezing night. You bolted the door behind her, leaning your forehead against the wood for a tired moment before limping back to the cooking pot.

Jake watched you in the dim light of the fire.

The pieces clicked together in his brilliant, calculating mind. The glass vials. The drying herbs. The midnight transactions.

You weren't just a bitter outcast surviving in the woods. You were an unlicensed apothecary.

According to the High Decrees of King Aldric—laws that Jake had memorized and enforced—the distribution of unregulated medicine was considered theft from the Crown's royal apothecaries. It was a high crime. It was treason. The penalty was death by hanging in the lower bailey.

A slow, chilling smile spread across Jake’s face in the shadows.

He didn't just have a reason to hate you anymore. He had a legal mandate to destroy you. You were a criminal, harboring the King's stolen resources, operating a treasonous enterprise right under his nose. The moment he returned to Aethelgard, he wouldn't even have to invent a charge to have you executed. He could simply send the vanguard to arrest you for treason. He could watch you hang from his private balcony and know that justice had been served.

Suddenly, the humiliation of chopping wood and scrubbing floors didn't sting quite as much. It was merely the price of gathering intelligence.

"You play a dangerous game, healer," Jake noted softly, his voice cutting through the silence of the cabin.

You stiffened, turning around to face him. "If you breathe a word of what you just saw to the King's guards, I will gut you before they can draw their swords."

"My lips are sealed," Jake promised, holding his hands up in a gesture of surrender. He offered you his sweetest, most angelic smile. "I am merely a mercenary. The laws of Aethelgard mean nothing to me. But you have a kind heart, risking your life for the peasantry. It is... admirable."

He delivered the lie with such flawless, breathtaking sincerity that it almost sounded like a prayer.

"They have nothing," you said bitterly, turning back to the fire. "The Crown bleeds them dry and leaves them to rot in the winter. Someone has to keep them breathing."

Not for long, Jake thought, his amber eyes dropping to the freshly sharpened iron blade on the table. Not for long.

The forced domesticity ground on, wearing Jake's control dangerously thin.

By the 14th day, the unnatural heat radiating from his core had escalated from a constant fever to a searing inferno. He felt as though his veins were filled with liquid fire. He began sleeping on the floorboards as far away from the hearth as possible, kicking off the rabbit furs and lying in the freezing drafts near the door, desperately trying to cool the Lycan blood boiling beneath his skin.

His senses were completely out of control.

When you accidentally nicked your finger with the paring knife while peeling a shriveled tuber, the scent of the single drop of blood hit Jake like a physical blow.

He was standing across the room, patching a hole in the wattle wall. The moment the copper scent breached the air, his vision swam with red. His muscles locked. A terrifying, overwhelming surge of predatory hunger slammed into his chest, so violent that he staggered forward, his hand bracing against the wooden beam to keep from falling.

Prey, the beast whispered in his mind. Fresh, prey.

"Damn it," you hissed softly, putting your bleeding finger in your mouth to staunch the flow.

Jake turned his head toward you. He couldn't help it. His amber eyes had completely vanished, replaced entirely by glowing, luminous gold. His jaw slacked, a low, wet growl vibrating deep in his throat. He took a single, heavy step toward you, his fingernails lengthening instantly, tearing right through the sleeves of the borrowed linen shirt as he reached out.

He wanted to taste it. He needed to taste it.

You turned around, reaching for a clean rag. Your eyes met his across the dim room.

You froze.

You saw the golden light in his eyes. You saw the terrifying, inhuman posture—shoulders hunched, muscles coiled like a tightly wound spring, radiating absolute violence. You saw the dark claws emerging from his fingertips. "Jake?" you breathed, the rag slipping from your fingers. The sound of his name, spoken in your raspy, human voice, acted like a bucket of freezing water over his head. Jake gasped, violently wrenching control back from the monster. He slammed his eyes shut, turning his face to the wall. He drove his rapidly shifting hands deep into his armpits, digging his claws into his own ribs to hide them, fighting down the horrific transformation with everything he had. "I'm fine," Jake choked out. His voice was a mangled, terrifying rasp. He cleared his throat violently, forcing the melodic baritone back into place. "I just... I stood up too fast." When he opened his eyes and turned back around, the golden light was gone. His eyes were amber, wide, and appropriately apologetic. He kept his hands hidden beneath his arms. You stared at him for a long moment. Your heart was hammering against your ribs. Your instincts were screaming at you — a primal alarm bell ringing somewhere deep and animal. Something is wrong with him. Something is deeply, fundamentally wrong with him. But he was hunched over, sweating, wearing a dead man's oversized shirt. He looked wrecked. He looked human. You let out a slow breath. Your hand dropped away from your dagger. "Sit down," you said quietly. Not an order this time. Something closer to a concession. "Before you fall down."

"Yes," Jake whispered, sinking back to the floorboards. He rested his head against the wall, his chest heaving. His hands, hidden in his armpits, were still trembling. That was too close. Far too close. He looked over at you, watching you stir the pot over the fire. You hadn't named what you had seen. You hadn't reached for the knife. But you weren't fooled either — he could see it in the careful, measured way you were now moving around the cabin. You were filing it away. You were watching him differently.That was its own kind of danger. He pressed his jaw shut and stared at the floorboards. The moon was waxing. He could feel it in his blood like a tide turning, slow and inevitable and entirely indifferent to his plans.

Sixteen days in the deep woods did not merely pass; they ground down the soul like a heavy millstone crushing dried wheat.

For Prince Jake of Aethelgard, the passage of two weeks and some was a systematic, agonizing dismantling of his reality. The citadel, with its roaring obsidian hearths, silk sheets, and groveling courtiers, began to feel like a fever dream. The only truth left in his world was the suffocating, herbal stench of your cabin, the relentless, shrieking howl of the winter winds, and the terrifying, violent thrum of the curse multiplying in his bloodstream.

He stood outside in the knee-deep powder, a heavy iron wood-splitting maul resting against his shoulder. He wore the dead farmer’s coarse woolen trousers and the oversized linen shirt, the sleeves rolled up past his elbows despite the sub-zero temperature. His golden hair, once washed daily in rosewater and brushed to a soft, angelic shine, was now a tangled, dark-blonde mane tied brutally back at the nape of his neck with a strip of cured leather.

He brought the heavy iron maul down on a thick stump of petrified oak.

CRACK.

The oak exploded. It didn’t just split; it splintered violently, raining shards of frozen wood across the snowdrifts.

Jake stood over the ruined block, his chest heaving, his breath pluming in thick, heavy clouds. He looked down at his hands. The thick, hickory handle of the maul was groaning under his grip. His knuckles were white, the veins in his forearms bulging against the linen sleeves.

The physical symptoms of the Witch’s curse were no longer a subtle, creeping dread. They were an occupying force.

His core temperature had risen to a sustained, terrifying inferno. He had not shivered once in fourteen days. The snow beneath his boots actively melted into a slushy puddle wherever he stood for too long. His hearing had sharpened to a sickening degree; he could hear the distinct, agonizing scrape of the ice crystals forming on the thatched roof above, and worse, he could hear the exact, rhythmic thump-thump of your heartbeat moving around inside the cabin.

But the most dangerous symptom was the hunger.

It was a hollow, scraping void in his stomach that the meager bowls of root stew and dried barley simply could not fill. His Lycan biology was demanding immense, staggering amounts of calories to fuel its rapid cellular regeneration and unnatural heat. He was starving, and the beast beneath his skin was growing restless, pacing against the cage of his ribs, demanding fresh, hot meat.

Jake closed his eyes, his jaw locking so hard his teeth audibly ground together. He forced his breathing to slow, burying the predatory urge beneath years of absolute, princely discipline.

He gathered the split wood, stacking an impossible, back-breaking load into his arms, and turned toward the cabin.

Inside, you were seated at the scarred wooden table, meticulously grinding dried foxglove leaves into a fine powder.

Your ankle was healing—the swelling had finally subsided to a dull, manageable ache—but the forced proximity with the golden stranger was testing the absolute limits of your sanity.

The door pushed open, letting in a swirl of violently cold air, followed by Jake. He ducked his head to clear the low ironwood frame, turning sideways to maneuver his broad shoulders and the massive load of firewood through the entrance. He dropped the wood into the stone bin beside the hearth with a heavy, reverberating crash.

You watched him from the corner of your eye, the pestle continuing its rhythmic grinding.

He was a terrible, beautiful liar.

For two weeks, he had played the role of the humble, grateful northern mercenary flawlessly. He spoke to you with a soft, melodic deference. He never complained about the squalor, the cold, or the tasteless rations. He anticipated your needs, fetching water before you asked, reinforcing the drafty windows with packed mud, and executing every chore with a quiet, lethal efficiency.

It was entirely unnatural.

Men who looked like him—men with high-born jawlines, skin that healed like magic, and the inherent, arrogant grace of a predator—did not submit so easily. You knew he was calculating his every move. You saw the microscopic tightening of his jaw when you ordered him to scrub the floors. You noticed the way his amber eyes occasionally went flat and dead, staring into the fire as if he were plotting the collapse of an empire.

But you didn't press him. You didn't care about his secrets. In the brutal mathematics of the winter, he was a massive asset. He was an engine of survival, generating heat and performing the heavy labor your injured body could not.

"The wind is picking up again," Jake murmured, dusting the snow from his sleeves. His voice was that familiar, sweet baritone. "The western ridge looks completely whited out."

"Then we stay inside," you replied without looking up. "I checked the snares this morning before you woke. We have a hare."

Jake’s posture shifted instantly. He turned toward the table, his amber eyes locking onto the small, frozen carcass of a winter hare resting on a piece of oiled parchment near your mortar.

The moment his eyes registered the meat, you saw the micro-expression. It was a flash of pure, unadulterated famine. His pupils dilated violently, swallowing the amber irises until his eyes were almost entirely pitch black. His nostrils flared, pulling in the scent of the frozen blood.

"I can... I can dress it," Jake offered. His voice was slightly hoarse, tight with a sudden, barely concealed desperation. "Your hands are covered in foxglove. It's toxic if it gets into the meat."

You stopped grinding. You looked at your dust-coated fingers, then up at him. You knew how to clean your hands, but the raw, strange intensity in his gaze made you pause.

"Fine," you said, gesturing to the hare and the small, razor-sharp paring knife resting beside it. "Don't puncture the gallbladder. It ruins the meat."

Jake stepped up to the table. He didn't walk; he practically glided, his eyes entirely fixated on the carcass.

He picked up the small knife. His hands, usually so steady and precise, were trembling faintly. He made the first incision, dragging the blade down the belly of the hare to part the frozen fur.

As the skin parted and the dark, red muscle and frozen blood were exposed to the air, the scent hit him.

To you, it smelled like raw, metallic game. To the Lycan rapidly consuming Jake’s humanity, it smelled like absolute salvation.

Jake let out a sharp, ragged gasp. The knife slipped from his fingers, clattering loudly onto the wooden floorboards. He didn't reach down to retrieve it. Instead, his large hands clamped directly onto the carcass.

You watched, frozen in your seat, as the facade of the golden prince finally, catastrophically shattered.

Jake’s breathing mutated into a horrific, deep-chested rasp. His hands gripped the hare, and as he began to physically tear the skin away from the muscle, his fingernails darkened. You saw it happen in real-time. The human nails thickened, lengthening and curving into jagged, bone-white claws that effortlessly sliced through the frozen sinew and bone.

"Jake," you said sharply, the alarm finally breaching your voice.

He didn't hear you. He was gone.

He brought the raw, bloody carcass up toward his face, his jaw unhinging slightly. His golden hair fell forward, but you could see his eyes. They were no longer amber. They were a brilliant, terrifying, luminescent gold, glowing in the dim light of the cabin with an ancient, predatory fire. He let out a low, wet snarl that vibrated the ceramic bowls on your shelves.

He was going to eat it raw. He was going to tear into the frozen meat like a feral beast.

Fear—cold, primal, and absolute—spiked in your chest. The anomaly you had dragged from the snow was finally showing its teeth, and the sheer, physical reality of the monster standing in your kitchen was paralyzing.

But the fear was immediately chased by a surge of pure, territorial spite. This was your sanctuary. That was your food. And you refused to let a cursed stray ruin your only protein for the week.

You didn't reach for your dagger. Drawing a weapon on an apex predator was an invitation for a slaughter.

Instead, you stood up. You closed the distance between you, entirely ignoring the screaming survival instincts begging you to run.

You reached out, your bare hands slamming down over his massive, clawed hands, physically arresting his movement just inches before his elongated canines could sink into the raw meat.

"Stop," you commanded.

Your voice wasn't a scream. It wasn't a plea. It was a cold, flat, absolute decree. It was the voice of a healer who had ordered desperate, violent men to hold still while she sawed through their infected limbs.

The heat radiating off his skin was agonizing. It felt like grabbing a hot iron stove. But you didn't flinch. You dug your fingers into the dense, burning muscle of his wrists, locking your grip.

Jake froze.

The beast inside him raged, a chaotic storm of hunger and violence, roaring at the sheer audacity of the fragile human prey touching him, challenging him. His head snapped toward you. His glowing, golden eyes locked onto yours. The intelligence in them was completely eclipsed by a feral, hungry void. He bared his teeth, leaning down, his face inches from yours. He could snap your neck with a twitch of his wrist.

"Look at me," you ordered, your dark eyes boring directly into his glowing golden ones. You didn't blink. You didn't cower. "You are not an animal. You are in my house. And if you ruin this meat by tearing it apart like a rabid dog, we both starve. Drop it."

The standoff was terrifying. The silence in the cabin was so heavy it felt like water filling your lungs. You could feel the violent trembling in his arms, the sheer, muscular force of the Lycan warring against your pathetic human grip.

But as he stared into your eyes, searching for the scent of terror, he found nothing. He found only an icy, immovable wall of resilience.

He had expected you to scream. He had expected you to run, triggering his predator drive to hunt and kill. But your absolute, clinical lack of fear short-circuited the beast's logic. You weren't acting like prey. You were acting like the master of the territory.

Slowly, agonizingly, the golden fire in his eyes began to flicker.

The Prince trapped inside the monster seized the momentary confusion. Jake fought his way back to the surface, clawing his way through the red haze of the curse, using your steady, fearless voice as a tether to his humanity.

He squeezed his eyes shut. A choked, agonizing sob tore from his throat.

When he opened his eyes again, the gold was gone. The soft, terrified amber had returned. He looked down at his hands, his chest heaving. The claws were retracting, shrinking painfully back into his nail beds, leaving his human fingers stained with the hare's blood.

He dropped the carcass back onto the parchment as if it burned him.

Jake stumbled backward, tearing himself out of your grip. He hit the opposite wall of the cabin, his back sliding down the rough timber until he hit the floorboards. He pulled his knees to his chest, burying his blood-stained hands in his golden hair, shaking violently. "I'm sorry," Jake gasped, the facade of the composed mercenary completely annihilated. His voice was broken, raw with genuine, unadulterated horror. "I didn't... I didn't mean to. The smell... I couldn't stop it."

He waited for the screaming. He waited for you to grab the iron skinning knife and demand he leave. He was a monster. He had just shown you exactly what he was.

But the screaming never came. You stood by the table, looking at the bloody hare, and then looking at the massive, terrifying man curled into a ball on your floor. Your hands were trembling slightly from the adrenaline drop, but you forced them steady.

You walked over to the wooden bucket, dipped a clean linen rag into the water, and limped across the room. You stopped in front of him. You didn't kneel. You tossed the damp rag, letting it land squarely on his knee. 

"Clean your hands," you said. Your voice came out steadier than you felt. "And then wash the blood off the floorboards. I'll finish the hare." Jake stared at your back for a long moment. He waited for the accusation. For the knife. For you to name what you had just seen. You said nothing. You simply began making clean, precise cuts to the hare's hide. He picked up the rag. He scrubbed the blood from his fingers in silence. That night, after the stew was eaten and the fire had settled low, you lay awake in the dark long after his breathing had slowed. You stared at the ceiling, turning over everything you had observed since the moment you dragged him from the snow. The heat. The healing. The eyes. You had a word for it forming in the back of your mind, pressing against your teeth. You didn't say it out loud. But you kept the knife under your pillow. And you watched him more carefully after that. That night, the dynamic in the small cabin irrevocably shifted. The hostility and the thick, paranoid wariness that had defined the first two weeks dissolved into a quiet, heavily guarded truce. They were no longer a reluctant host and an unwanted burden; they were two outcasts sharing a fragile sanctuary against a hostile world. After dinner, the cabin grew quiet. The wind had died down, leaving a profound, eerie silence outside. You were sitting on the edge of your cot, using a bone needle and thick thread to mend a tear in your heavy woolen cloak. Jake was sitting on the floor near the hearth, using his hunting dagger to whittle a piece of pine into a new handle for the damaged wood-splitting maul.

The orange tabby cat, Barnaby, hopped down from the high shelf. He padded silently across the floorboards, completely ignoring you, and approached Jake.

Jake froze, his knife pausing mid-scrape.

The cat sat down three feet away from the Lycan, wrapped its tail around its paws, and stared at him with wide, unblinking eyes.

Jake stared back. He didn't bare his teeth. He didn't let the golden light flash in his eyes. He simply watched the small, orange creature, entirely unsure of what to do.

"He likes the heat," you said quietly, not looking up from your mending. "He usually sleeps as close to the fire as he can get without singeing his whiskers. But since you got here, you're the warmest thing in the room."

Jake looked down at his own body, acutely aware of the unnatural furnace burning in his chest. "I suppose I am."

Slowly, carefully, Jake extended a single, calloused hand toward the cat. He kept his fingers relaxed, keeping his claws locked firmly beneath the skin.

Barnaby sniffed the air, leaning forward slightly. The cat took a deliberate step forward, then another, until it was close enough to press its small, cold wet nose against Jake’s knuckles.

Jake held his breath.

The cat let out a soft, vibrating purr, turning its head to aggressively rub its cheek against Jake’s hand, demanding attention.

A sudden, unfamiliar tightness gripped Jake’s chest. It wasn't the panic of the curse, or the rage of the Prince. It was a strange, delicate pang of emotion. He turned his hand over, gently scratching the cat behind the ears. Barnaby immediately collapsed onto his side, leaning his entire weight against Jake’s thigh, purring like a small engine.

Jake looked across the room at you. You were still focused on your sewing, the firelight casting long shadows against the walls.

"Thank you," Jake said softly into the quiet room.

You paused, your needle suspended in the fabric. "For what?"

"For not throwing me out into the snow," Jake replied, his amber eyes locked onto your face. "For looking at me and not seeing a monster."

You tied off the thread, biting the excess string with your teeth, and set the cloak aside. You looked at him. The golden boy, the terrifying predator, sitting on your floor petting a stray cat.

"I see the monster, Jake," you said, your voice gentle but brutally honest. "I just chose to see the man holding the leash, too. Don't make me regret it."

Jake swallowed hard, the weight of your words settling deep into his bones. "I won't."

He looked away, staring into the flickering flames of the hearth. For the first time since the Witch had shattered his life, Prince Jake of Aethelgard did not long for the obsidian walls of his citadel. He did not think about the throne, or his cruel father, or the velvet cloaks he had lost.

He listened to the crackle of the fire, the purring of the cat, and the steady, grounding rhythm of your heartbeat across the room.

But outside, high above the frozen, skeletal canopy of the deep woods, the clouds briefly parted. The silver light of a waxing moon, just days away from being full, poured through the frost-covered windowpane, casting a pale, cold beam across the floorboards.

Jake felt the deep, agonizing ache in his marrow flare to life, a stark, terrifying 

reminder that his peace was temporary. The beast was contained for tonight, tethered by a fragile, newly formed trust. But the moon was growing, the curse was absolute, and the true test of his humanity was rapidly, inevitably approaching.

The full moon rose on the twenty-first night.

Jake felt it before he saw it.

He had been awake since the second hour past midnight, lying on the floorboards with his spine rigid and his jaw locked, and at first he had told himself it was the hunger again — the hollow, scraping Lycan hunger that the meager cabin rations could never fully address. But this was different from the hunger. This was directional. This was a pull, like a fishhook set somewhere beneath his sternum, tugging with slow, increasing insistence toward something outside the cabin walls.

He lay still and tried to identify it. He had become, over three weeks of forced cohabitation with the curse, something of an expert in cataloguing his own symptoms. The heat that never left his core. The hearing that had sharpened past usefulness into something closer to torment. The way his eyes caught the firelight differently now, throwing it back in a way that sometimes made you go very still when you thought he wasn't looking.

But this was none of those things. This was new.

This was the moon.

He felt the exact moment it crested the treeline. He couldn't have explained how he knew — he was inside, behind three feet of wattle and daub and heavy thatch — but the knowledge arrived with the physical certainty of a blade finding a gap in armor. Something in his blood simply recognized it. Rose toward it, the way a drowning man's hands rise toward the surface without conscious instruction.

And with that recognition came the fear.

He had been unconscious for the first transformation. He remembered the Witch's clearing, the violet fire, the agonizing sensation of his own skeleton betraying him — and then nothing. He had woken up naked in the snow with no memory of the hours between. He didn't know what he had done. He didn't know what he was capable of. He didn't know if there would be anything left of him on the other side of whatever the full moon was about to demand.

He only knew that you were asleep ten feet away.

And that was enough to get him off the floor.

He moved with exquisite, terrified care. Every instinct in his Lycan blood was screaming at him to move fast, to run, to answer the pull before it answered itself — but he forced himself to go slowly, to lift the iron bolt on the door with both hands to muffle the scrape of metal, to ease it open one inch at a time. Your breathing didn't change. Barnaby didn't stir.

He stepped outside and pulled the door shut behind him.

The winter hit him with scent rather than cold — he hadn't felt the cold in weeks. Pine resin and frost and frozen earth and the distant musky trail of a stag on the eastern ridge. The sharp clean ozone of ice forming on the river. And behind him, threading through the gap in the door before it clicked shut, the specific warm human scent of you that his Lycan senses had catalogued so thoroughly over three weeks that he could have identified it in a blizzard at a hundred yards.

He turned away from it. He walked into the trees.

He didn't know how far he walked. Distance felt different at night, in the full weight of whatever was building in his blood. The moon above the canopy was enormous — he could feel it even through the interlocking branches, a pressure against the top of his skull, a gravitational insistence that had nothing to do with physics and everything to do with the Witch's architecture sitting in the marrow of his bones.He found a clearing by accident, stumbling through a ring of silver birches into a wide, open hollow where the snow lay undisturbed and the moon poured down without obstruction. He stopped in the center of it and looked up.The light hit his eyes.Something in his chest lurched so violently he staggered.He caught himself. He planted his feet in the snow and breathed — slow, deliberate, from the belly, the way Gareth had drilled into him a thousand times in the training yard. He focused on the specific cold of the air against his face, the texture of the snow compressing under his boots, anything physical and present and human.He didn't know what was coming. That was the worst of it. The not knowing. He had faced war councils and assassination attempts and the lethal social architecture of his father's court, and he had always walked into those rooms knowing the terrain. Knowing the exits. Knowing exactly what weapon he was carrying and precisely when to use it.He had nothing here. No map, no strategy, no precedent. Just the moon and the pull and the terrifying sense that whatever had taken him the first time — whatever had stripped him of his clothes and his consciousness and deposited him in a melted crater in the snow — was about to take him again.He squeezed his eyes shut.

If I hurt her, he thought, with a cold, flat clarity that surprised him with its honesty. If I come back from this and I have hurt her—

He didn't finish the thought. He didn't need to.The first tremor hit him without warning.It wasn't like the partial shifts — the claws, the eyes, the hunger spikes. Those had been manageable. Painful and humiliating, but manageable. This was categorically different. This was total. It started in his spine and it didn't stop, rolling upward through every vertebra in a grinding seismic wave that blew out his vision in a flash of white and drove him to his knees in the snow. He tried to hold on. He gripped the Gareth-breathing, he gripped the texture of the snow beneath his palms, he gripped his own name in the dark behind his eyes like a handhold on a cliff face.

Jake. I am Jake. I am the Prince of Aethelgard. I am—

The second tremor hit and took the sentence away entirely.

You woke to Barnaby's voice. Not his usual soft domestic meow. This was different — high and urgent and stripped of all his habitual feline composure, the specific sound he reserved for genuine alarm. You were upright before your eyes were fully open, the iron skinning knife in your hand from muscle memory alone.The floorboards near the hearth were empty. Jake's woolen cloak was gone.You were at the door in four steps.Outside, the full moon had turned the world into something alien and silver. The snow was so bright it was almost painful. The trees stood in their dark rows, perfectly still, and Jake's bootprints led north-northwest into the trees with the long, slightly uneven stride of someone moving fast and not entirely steadily.You stood on the threshold for three seconds.You had known, in the abstract, that the full moon would come. You had known it the way you knew most things — from the old books, the ones the citadel's clergy called superstition and burned when they could find them, that you had traded three jars of ghost-mushroom salve for from a half-mad hedge scholar in the outer wards seven years ago. You had read them by firelight in the early years of your exile, learning the language of the deep woods the only way available to you — obsessively, desperately, turning every page as though your life depended on it. Which, as it turned out, it had.The books had chapters on Lycans. On the full moon that transformed them but left the man intact enough to hold the beast at bay. 

You had read those chapters with the detached academic interest of someone who did not expect to ever need them practically.You pulled your cloak off the hook. You followed his tracks.The birch ring was perhaps a quarter mile from the cabin. You heard the clearing before you reached it — a sound that stopped you dead at the treeline with your hand on your knife and every hair on the back of your neck standing at full attention.It was a sound the deep woods did not make. Low and resonant and enormous, vibrating at a frequency that didn't so much enter through your ears as settle into your bones and make the marrow of them hum in response. Old. Territorial. Entirely, categorically wrong in the way that only things from the very oldest stories managed to be wrong.You stepped through the birches.The thing in the center of the clearing was not Jake. Or rather — it was Jake, in the same way that a city in ruins is still the city. Something of the original architecture remained, visible in the specific angle of the restructured jaw, the golden hair wild around a face that had been pushed forward and thickened into something predatory. He stood on two legs, which somehow made it worse than four would have. He was vast. The transformation had amplified the already considerable mass of him into something that belonged in the burned chapters of the books the citadel's clergy kept locked away, in the stories that the outer ward mothers told their children to make them stay inside after dark.

His eyes were entirely gold. Not the brief terrifying flash of it you had seen twice before — continuous, deep, luminescent, catching the moonlight and returning it like signal fires.He had his back to you.He was very still. And he was breathing — slowly, laboriously, with the concentrated effort of someone performing an extremely difficult physical task that happened to look, from the outside, like simply standing in a field of snow.He knew you were there. You understood this immediately and without question. Whatever those senses of his had become over three weeks of the curse's escalation, they had catalogued you with a thoroughness that left no room for doubt.He hadn't turned around.You understood that too, after a moment. He was choosing not to turn around. There was a difference between an apex predator that didn't know you were behind it and an apex predator that knew and was choosing, with tremendous effort, to keep its back to you anyway.Your hand dropped away from the knife.You had spent eight years learning to read the woods. You knew what a predator looked like when it was hunting. You knew the specific coiled, forward-weighted stillness of an animal preparing to charge. You knew what fear smelled like in an animal, and what aggression smelled like, and the crucial, life-preserving difference between them.What you were looking at was neither.

What you were looking at was a creature in tremendous pain trying very hard not to do something it was afraid of doing. You recognized that from your work. You had seen it in men with infected limbs who gripped the table and stared at the ceiling and breathed through their teeth. You had seen it in fever patients who fought the delirium with everything they had because they were terrified of what they might say or do if they let go.You had never seen it in something this large. The scale of it was new.You took one step forward, angled slightly left. Non-threatening. The way you moved around anything with enough pain in it to be unpredictable."Jake," you said.Your voice came out steady. You were mildly surprised by this. The enormous gold-lit frame shuddered. Not with aggression — with the specific tremor of someone who has been holding on alone for a very long time and has just heard another person's voice in the dark. "I'm not going to run," you told him. "So you can stop holding your breath." Silence. The moonlight moved across the snow. Then, with a slowness that conveyed tremendous deliberateness — the slowness of something acutely conscious of its own mass and what that mass was capable of — the thing in the clearing turned around. The gold eyes found you. Not searching. Finding, instantly and completely, with the absolute precision of something that had known exactly where you were since the moment you stepped through the birch ring. You looked back at him.

Up close the gold of his eyes was extraordinary — not the flat reflective gold of an animal's nightshine, but something deeper and stranger, lit from within, carrying in its depths the dim and desperate flicker of the man you had spent three weeks arguing with over onions and firewood and the correct temperature for rendering ghost-mushroom. He was in there. Buried under layers of biology and moonlight and the Witch's architectural cruelty, but present. Holding on by whatever the Lycan equivalent of fingernails was. You took two more steps. Twelve feet between you now. Close enough to see that he was shaking. Not with aggression. With effort. The sheer, exhausting, monumental effort of maintaining the thread of himself against the weight of the full moon bearing down on his blood. Something in your chest did a thing you chose not to examine closely. "How long?" you asked. The gold eyes moved over your face. "How long has it been happening?" A long pause. The effort of forming speech through a jaw that had been restructured for entirely different purposes was visible — a grinding, laborious process that looked painful in its own right. "Don't — know," he managed. Two words, barely. The voice was almost unrecognizable, scraped down to something guttural and resonant. But it was his voice. Underneath the damage, it was unmistakably his. You nodded. You looked at him with the flat clinical attention of a healer assessing an unknown presentation for the first time. You noted the shaking. You noted the specific quality of his stillness — not calm, but the opposite of calm held under enormous pressure. You noted the way the gold in his eyes fluctuated, dimming and brightening in a rhythm that corresponded to the rhythm of his controlled breathing.

He was fighting it. Whatever the full moon demanded of him, he was fighting it with everything he had, and the fight was costing him enormously.You sat down in the snow. It was a practical decision. You were going to be here for a while, and standing was harder on your ankle than sitting. You lowered yourself into the powder, folded your legs beneath you, pulled your cloak tight, and looked up at him from the ground with the same expression you brought to everything — level, unimpressed, and entirely present. "Then I'll wait," you said. The fluctuating gold of his eyes went very still. He stared at you for a long time. Long enough for a cloud to cross the moon and return it. Long enough for the distant frozen river to groan once in the dark. He stared at you with an expression that the restructured landscape of his face was not currently equipped to convey but managed anyway — something stripped entirely raw, something that had never had occasion to exist in the court of Aethelgard because the court of Aethelgard had never once offered it the conditions under which it could exist. Then, with the slow and painstaking care of something acutely aware of the damage it was capable of, Jake lowered himself to the ground at the far treeline. He put his back against the silver birches. He set his clawed hands loose on his knees. He kept his eyes on you. You kept your eyes on him.

Neither of you spoke. The deep woods had their own language for this — for two creatures sharing a space in the dark without agenda, simply present to each other across the cold — and neither of you needed to translate it. The moon moved. The light shifted across the clearing floor in its slow, indifferent arc. And then, so gradually you almost missed it beginning — the transformation started to reverse. You watched it the way you watched everything medical and strange and outside the boundaries of your existing knowledge — with total, quiet attention, committing every detail to the healer's catalogue in the back of your mind. The frame contracting. The jaw slowly restructuring. The gold fading from his eyes by degrees, amber bleeding back in the way colour returns to something healing — slowly, from the edges inward, until the last of the gold dimmed and went out like an ember and what was left was just the familiar amber, exhausted and dark-circled and entirely human. He was breathing hard. His golden hair was plastered to his face with sweat. His hands — human hands again, bare and pale in the fading moonlight — were pressed flat against the snow on either side of him as if he needed the physical anchor of the ground to confirm he was still in it. He looked at you. You looked at him. For a long moment neither of you spoke. The birch ring held its silver silence around you. "You came after me," he said finally. His voice was wrecked — scraped down to something barely above a whisper, raw at every edge. "You were alone," you said. Simple. Sufficient. "You didn't know what you'd find."

"No," you agreed. "But I had an idea." His eyes moved over your face. "How?" You were quiet for a moment. "I read a great deal," you said, deliberately, watching his expression shift as he recognized his own deflection turned back on him. "Old books. The kind the citadel burns." You paused. "I knew what you were before the hare incident. I knew what the full moon meant. I knew what to expect, roughly." The silence that followed was a different kind than the ones before it. "And you stayed," Jake said. Not quite a question. "You were useful," you said, which was true but was no longer the whole truth and both of you understood that perfectly well. "And you fixed my roof." Something crossed his face that wasn't quite a smile but was closer to one than anything manufactured. Raw and small and entirely without performance. "I didn't know," he said quietly. "What I'd find on the other side. Whether there would be anything left of me. The first time I transformed I lost consciousness completely — I woke in the snow with no memory of the hours between." His jaw tightened. "I didn't know if I would hurt you."

"That's why you left without waking me," you said.

"Yes." You looked at him steadily. "Next time, wake me."

"You just watched me become—"

"I know what I watched," you said. "Wake me next time." He stared at you for a long moment, the amber eyes moving over your face with that expression you still didn't quite have a name for — the one that lived in the territory between bewilderment and something that looked, uncomfortably, like a wound slowly recognizing that it might be able to close. You pushed yourself up from the snow. "Come inside." He looked up at you. "You'll freeze," you said, which was not entirely true and both of you knew it. "And I'm not carrying you again." He got to his feet. You walked back through the birch ring together, following your footprints through the silver-dark forest toward the faint amber glow of the cabin window. You didn't speak. The silence between you had shed the last of its armor and what remained in its place was something quiet and unguarded and considerably more frightening than either of you was prepared to acknowledge yet. Inside, you stoked the fire back to life. Jake settled onto the floorboards. Barnaby descended from the high shelf with the dignified air of a cat who had absolutely not been worried and planted himself against Jake's side. Jake's hand settled on the cat's back with the gentleness that still caught you off guard sometimes, because it didn't match anything else about him. You climbed into your cot. The fire rebuilt itself from the coals, orange and steady. "I would have told you," Jake said, from the floor. Quiet. "Eventually. About the full moon. About all of it."

You stared at the ceiling. "I know," you said. A pause. "How much do you know?" he asked carefully.  You were quiet for a moment, deciding how much of your hand to show. You thought about the chapters on blood moons. About the specific, architectural cruelty of a curse that made its cure and its catastrophe the same event. About the things you had been turning over quietly in the back of your mind since the night you had first pressed your fingers to his burning neck in the snow and felt the impossible heat of him and known, on some level, that you were picking up something you would not be able to put back down. "Enough," you said finally. "I know enough." Jake was silent for a long time. The fire crackled. Barnaby purred. Outside, the last of the moonlight faded from the windowpane, replaced by the blue-grey suggestion of an approaching dawn. "Then you know it gets worse," he said quietly. "I know it can," you said, which was not the same thing, and which you meant as a deliberate distinction. He heard it that way. You could tell by the quality of the silence that followed. "Go to sleep, Jake," you said. He did. And in the thin cold light of the winter dawn, with the deep woods holding their breath around the small warm cabin, neither of you spoke about blood moons or Witches or the specific cruel mathematics of a curse designed to make salvation and destruction the same event. Neither of you named the thing that had been quietly taking root between the floorboards and the cot for three weeks, growing without permission in the warmth of shared survival and onion-free stew and a cat who had decided, with the absolute authority of his kind, that the golden stranger was acceptable. You simply slept. Outside, the blood moon was still distant. But it was coming, the way all inevitable things came — patient and absolute and entirely indifferent to the fragile, warming thing it had been specifically designed to destroy.

It made no sound at all.

The days after the full moon were quieter than Jake expected. He had anticipated — something. A shift in the dynamic, perhaps. A new wariness in the way you moved around the cabin, an extra inch of distance maintained, the knife closer to hand. He had shown you the monster completely and without the buffer of gradual revelation, and he had expected that sight to change the specific texture of your regard for him in some fundamental, irreversible way. It didn't. You woke the morning after and made the barley broth and told him the eastern snares needed checking and that the thatch above the window was leaking again and did he think he could manage the repair before the next snowfall or was that beyond the capabilities of his reportedly useful northern hands. You said all of this without looking up from the mortar and pestle, in the same flat, unhurried tone you used for everything, as though the previous night had been simply another item catalogued and filed and integrated into your existing understanding of the situation. Jake stood in the doorway watching you work for a moment longer than was strictly necessary. Then he checked the snares. Then he fixed the thatch. Then he came inside and ate his broth and said nothing, and neither did you, and the cabin settled back into its familiar rhythm as though the silver birch clearing had never happened at all. Except that it had. And they both knew it had. And the knowing sat between them like a third presence in the room — not uncomfortable exactly, but impossible to ignore, the way a fire is impossible to ignore even when you are deliberately looking at something else.

Three weeks passed. Then four. The deep woods moved through the back half of winter with a grinding, reluctant slowness, the cold refusing to release its grip on the canopy even as the daylight hours stretched incrementally longer. The change was barely perceptible — a fraction more light on the eastern windowpane in the mornings, a marginally less hostile quality to the wind — but you noticed it with the attentiveness of someone whose survival had depended for eight years on reading exactly these kinds of marginal shifts.Jake noticed it too, though he said nothing. He had become, over the weeks since the full moon, acutely alert to the passage of time in a way that sat in his chest like a low, persistent ache. Every additional hour of daylight was a marker. Every week that passed was the blood moon drawing incrementally closer, and beneath that — beneath the specific dread of what the blood moon meant for the curse — was the other calculation. The one he performed in the quiet of the early mornings when you were still asleep and the fire was low and there was nothing to do but think. When the blood moon passed, he could return to Aethelgard. He had known his route for weeks. He had extracted the information he needed from casual conversation and careful observation — the name of the ravine, the direction of the frozen river, the specific landmarks that placed the cabin approximately six miles northwest of the nearest vanguard outpost. Six miles in winter was not nothing, but for a man with Lycan biology heating his blood and a military career's worth of wilderness survival training, it was manageable. He would go back. He would return to the citadel, to his father's court, to the iron throne waiting for him at the end of the long dark corridor of his inheritance. He would bring the Crown's resources to bear on breaking whatever remnant of the curse survived the blood moon. He would be the Prince of Aethelgard again, with all that entailed.

He did not tell you any of this. He told himself it was practical. There was no point creating tension in the cabin over a plan that was weeks away from execution. You were useful to him — your knowledge of the woods, your medicines, the warmth of the cabin — and a hostile dynamic would compromise that utility. The shepherd's logic. Keep the peace until the trap snaps shut. But in the cold, honest hours of the early morning, with your heartbeat a steady rhythm across the room and Barnaby purring against his ribs, Jake found the shepherd's logic increasingly difficult to sustain as his primary explanation. He fixed the thatch instead. He checked the snares. He chopped the wood and hauled the water and rendered the ghost-mushroom with careful, methodical hands, and he did not examine too closely the fact that he had been doing these things for weeks past the point where they served any strategic purpose.

The changes in his Lycan biology announced themselves gradually, then all at once. The hunger was the first and most immediate. In the weeks following the full moon it escalated from the persistent, manageable void he had learned to live with into something considerably more demanding. The root stews and dried barley that had sustained him through the first weeks were suddenly, emphatically insufficient. His body was burning through calories at a rate that the cabin's meager stores simply could not meet, the Lycan metabolism accelerating in the wake of the first full transformation as though the moon had kicked something into a higher gear. He started hunting. Not with the cabin's small iron snares — those produced snow hares occasionally, which helped, but not enough. He went out in the pre-dawn dark, when you were still asleep, and he ran the deep woods with his Lycan senses fully extended and came back with things that would have been entirely impossible for a normal man to catch in the deep winter. A young stag from the eastern ridge. A pair of fat wood grouse from the frozen creek bed three miles north. Once, memorably, a boar — small and lean from the winter, but a boar nonetheless, which had required a level of physical engagement that left Jake with torn borrowed trousers and a satisfaction so visceral and uncomplicated it briefly alarmed him. He dressed the kills cleanly before bringing them back, leaving the evidence of how exactly they had been obtained out in the snow for the scavengers. You accepted the sudden improvement in the cabin's protein supply with the pragmatic gratitude of someone who was not going to ask questions that might produce answers requiring difficult decisions. The first morning he came back with the stag, you had looked at him for a long moment — at his wild hair and the flush of exertion across his face and the very specific light in his amber eyes that accompanied successful hunting — and then looked at the dressed carcass he'd set on the preparation block outside, and then back at him.

"Snares," you said. "Snares," he agreed. You had gone back inside to start the fire. The meat helped. It didn't solve the problem entirely — the Lycan hunger had a quality to it that went beyond simple caloric need, a craving for the specific warmth and vitality of fresh-killed game that dried fish and barley simply could not approximate — but it brought the worst of it down to a manageable level. Enough that he could sit across the cabin from you without the persistent, uncomfortable awareness of the blood moving through your veins overwhelming every other sensory input. That awareness — the second change — was considerably more difficult to manage than the hunger. His senses had always been heightened since the curse. But the full moon had amplified them past the threshold of useful into something that occasionally bordered on unbearable. He could hear the specific sound of ice crystals forming on the window glass. He could smell the exact stage of healing of your ankle from across the room without looking at the bandages. He could identify, by the quality of your footsteps on the floorboards, whether you had slept well or badly and whether your ankle was causing you more or less pain than the previous day. And your scent. Your scent was the worst. Had always been present in his awareness — a specific, layered signature of woodsmoke and medicinal herbs and clean skin and the faint metallic edge of the bloodwork that was simply a constant of your profession — but since the full moon it had acquired a quality he struggled to categorize. It wasn't the predatory appetence of the early days, the blood-hunger that had driven him toward you over a nicked finger. It was something different and more complicated and considerably harder to dismiss. It was distracting in a way that had nothing to do with threat assessment.

He managed it. He went outside more often than strictly necessary. He took the long route to the snares. He sat at the far end of the cabin when the space permitted and positioned himself upwind when it didn't, and he got very good at the specific discipline of keeping his expression entirely neutral while his enhanced senses were delivering an overwhelming amount of information about the person sitting twelve feet away from him grinding herbs. You noticed, of course. You noticed everything. But you didn't press him, which he was beginning to understand was one of your most consistent and disarming characteristics. You simply adjusted — left the window cracked more often than the temperature warranted, took Barnaby's preferred route around the table when passing him, maintained the particular quality of deliberate unawareness that people develop when they are choosing to give someone space without making an announcement of the choice.It was, he thought, in the quiet dark of one early morning, an extraordinarily considerate thing to do for a man you had every rational reason to be frightened of. The thought sat with him for the rest of the day.

It was a Wednesday — you kept a rough tally on the cabin wall, notches in the wood beside the door — when the first genuinely unguarded thing happened between them. You had been attempting, for the better part of the morning, to reach a bundle of dried nightshade hanging from the highest rafter hook. Your ankle had healed to the point of functional but not to the point of reliable, and the step-stool you used for high-shelf work had lost a leg to dry rot sometime in the previous month, leaving you with the options of climbing the rough-hewn shelving — inadvisable on a healing joint — or waiting for a moment of charity from the golden giant currently occupying your floor space. You had been waiting for approximately forty minutes, on principle, before the principle became less important than the nightshade. "Jake," you said, in the tone of someone making a significant concession. He looked up from the new snare trap he was constructing, his large hands working the wire with a deft precision that still occasionally surprised you. You pointed at the nightshade bundle without elaboration. He set down the wire. He crossed the cabin in four steps, which was two fewer than it took you, and reached the bundle without even fully extending his arm. He unhooked it and held it out to you. You took it. "Thank you."

"You waited forty minutes," Jake said. You looked up at him. "I don't know what you mean."

"I heard you trying to reach it," he said, and something in the amber eyes was doing the thing you had catalogued over the past weeks — the thing where amusement tried to exist in a face that had been trained from birth to weaponize every expression and was only now, haltingly and imperfectly, learning what it felt like to have one that wasn't deployed for strategic effect. "Your hearing is unsettling," you told him. "Frequently," he agreed. You turned back to the worktable. You heard him settle back onto the floor behind you, heard the resumed, precise work of his hands on the snare wire. "Jake," you said, not turning around. "Yes."

"You don't have to wait to be asked." You paused. "For things like that. You can just — help." A beat of silence. "I wasn't sure it would be welcome." You considered this. It was, you thought, the most honest thing he had said to you in weeks that wasn't extracted from him by circumstance. He had been calibrating constantly — reading the room, adjusting his behavior, trying to determine what was permitted and what was too much. It was a habit so deeply ingrained he probably wasn't fully aware he was doing it. "It's welcome," you said simply. The wire work resumed. The fire crackled. Outside, the wind moved through the pines in its familiar, cold conversation with itself. After a moment, Jake said — very quietly, as though testing the weight of something before committing to it — "You're nearly out of yarrow." You were. You had been aware of it for two days and had been trying to determine how far into the eastern ravine you would need to go to find dormant root stock. "I know."

"I can find it. I know what it looks like from the ghost-mushroom harvests." You turned around. He was looking at you with an expression that was not the sweet, puppy-dog performance and not the cold predatory blankness — it was something in between, something still learning its own shape. Tentative in a way that sat entirely wrong on his face and was, paradoxically, more convincing than anything deliberate he had ever produced. "The eastern ravine has an ice shelf on the north lip," you said. "I remember," he said. "Don't step on it. Forty-foot drop."

"Don't puncture the root casing when you dig," you said. "The active compound is in the outer layer."

"I'll be careful." You looked at him for a moment longer. Then you turned back to the nightshade. "There's a woven bag on the second shelf. Take it." He took it. He went. He came back two hours later with enough yarrow root to last the month, the woven bag full, the root casings entirely intact. He set it on the table beside you and went back to the snare wire without comment. You looked at the yarrow. You looked at his bent golden head. You looked back at the yarrow. "Thank you," you said. "You're welcome," he said, and this time it sounded, for the first time, like something he actually meant.

The budding of it was not dramatic. That was the thing about it that Jake found most disorienting — he had expected, if this kind of thing happened to him at all, that it would happen with the same architectural grandeur as everything else in his life. A declaration. A moment. Something that could be identified and catalogued and responded to with a defined strategic position. Instead it happened in the accumulation of small things, each individually insignificant, collectively devastating. It happened in the mornings, when he had taken to stoking the fire before you woke — not because you had asked him to, not because it served any tactical purpose, but because he had noticed that the first thing you did upon waking was shiver, and the shivering troubled him in a way he couldn't fully articulate, and it was a simple thing to prevent. It happened in the evenings, when the cabin was quiet and the fire was low and you read from the battered, herb-stained journal you kept of your medicinal notes, muttering occasionally to yourself when something didn't resolve the way you wanted it to. He had learned not to offer suggestions during these mutterings — you were not asking for input, you were thinking out loud — but he had also learned that if he waited long enough, sometimes you would look up and say, with a studied casualness that didn't fool him for a second, "hypothetically, if someone were attempting to stabilize a foxglove extraction at low temperature, what would you—" and then stop yourself, because you had remembered you were asking a mercenary from the northern territories for pharmacological advice, and the logical flaw in that was becoming increasingly apparent. The first time it happened he had answered carefully, from the abstract, claiming the knowledge as tavern-rumor and hedge-scholar gossip. The second time, he had answered slightly more specifically. By the fourth time, you had simply stopped pretending to be surprised by how much he knew, and he had stopped pretending to know it accidentally, and neither of you addressed this new tacit understanding because addressing it would have required addressing the larger question of who exactly he was, and that question still had too many jagged edges for either of you to approach directly.

It happened in the specific way Barnaby had taken to dividing his sleeping time equally between you — half the night pressed against your feet, half the night pressed against Jake's side — as though the cat had made a territorial assessment and determined that both humans now fell within the boundaries of his domain. It happened on the afternoon that you caught a fever. It was not, by your standards, a serious fever — a three-day thing, the kind of low-grade misery that your body occasionally produced in response to the accumulated stress of a hard winter and a healing injury and insufficient sleep. You treated it with your own willow bark tincture, declared it manageable, and continued working at the table with the specific bloody-minded stubbornness that Jake had come to think of as your defining characteristic. He watched you do this for approximately four hours before he crossed the room, took the mortar and pestle out of your hands with a gentleness that brooked absolutely no argument, set them on the shelf, and steered you toward the cot with one careful hand between your shoulder blades. You were too tired to fight him properly. "The rendering—"

"Will keep," he said.

"The snares need—"

"I'll check them."

"Barnaby hasn't been—"

"Fed," Jake finished. "I know. I'll feed him. Lie down." You lay down. You pulled the rabbit furs up. You looked at him standing over you with his arms crossed and his golden hair tied back and an expression of such complete, unperformative authority that it briefly reminded you — for the first time in weeks, and with a disorienting lurch — that he was not, in fact, a northern mercenary. You filed this away. You were too feverish to deal with it. "You don't have to—" you started. "I know," he said. "Sleep." You slept. He checked the snares. He fed Barnaby. He rendered the ghost-mushroom you had left half-finished on the hearth with careful, precise attention to the temperature, the way you had taught him. He refreshed your willow bark tincture at the correct intervals, timing it by the tally marks on the wall, and left it within reach of the cot without waking you. He sat on the floorboards beside the cot — not across the room, not at the far wall, but beside it — and he listened to your breathing even out into the slow, steady rhythm of real sleep, and he felt the Lycan senses tracking you with an attention that had nothing predatory in it anymore and everything watchful, and he thought about Aethelgard. He thought about the iron throne and the obsidian walls and the banners of dried-blood crimson snapping in the winter wind. He thought about his father's hand on his golden hair, possessive and cold. He thought about Gareth in the training yard and the specific, honest brutality of their sparring that was the closest thing to genuine affection the citadel had ever offered him. He thought about what it would mean to go back.

He would go back. He had always been going back. The plan had not changed — the blood moon, the passage of the curse's final stage, and then the six-mile walk to the vanguard outpost with whatever was left of him after the night was over. It was a good plan. It was the only plan that made sense. He looked at you sleeping in the firelight, your face finally relaxed out of its habitual watchful tension, Barnaby a warm orange weight against your feet. He looked away. He looked at the fire. Outside, the deep woods settled into their night silence, and the stars above the canopy were very bright and very cold, and somewhere above the horizon the blood moon was gathering itself with the patient, absolute indifference of something that had been coming long before Jake had ridden into the woods on his birthday and longer still before you had dragged him out of a melted snowbank on a broken ankle.It was coming. He knew it in his blood the way he knew the full moon — not yet, not close, but oriented toward him with the specific gravity of an inevitable thing. He had time. Weeks, maybe more. He told himself this was the only reason he was still here. He fed the fire. He listened to you breathe. Barnaby relocated from your feet to Jake's knee sometime after midnight, and Jake's hand settled on the cat's back without his conscious instruction, the way it always did now. The cabin was warm. Outside, the winter was beginning its long, grudging retreat. PJake sat in the firelight and did not think about leaving. He was very good at not thinking about things. It was one of the few skills his father's court had given him that he had found genuinely, unexpectedly useful in the deep woods. He simply sat. He simply stayed.And the blood moon drew closer, one quiet evening at a time, indifferent to the warmth it had been specifically designed to extinguish.

It started, as most irreversible things do, without announcement. Jake had been keeping a private inventory of the reasons he did not have feelings for you. It was a practical exercise — the kind of clear-eyed self-assessment his father had drilled into him since childhood, the discipline of knowing exactly what you wanted and what you didn't and never allowing the two to become confused. The inventory was extensive and logical and had been working perfectly well until approximately the third week of the fifth month, when you had done something so unremarkable that the inventory had simply — stopped. What you had done was this: you had come in from checking the snares in a blizzard, your cloak so saturated with snow it had gone stiff at the edges, your face raw and red from the wind, your ankle clearly hurting more than you were acknowledging — and instead of sitting down, instead of seeing to yourself first, you had gone directly to the shelf and measured out a careful dose of fever tincture into a ceramic cup and left it by the door of old Maren's cottage on your way back. Maren was seventy and arthritic and could not get to you in weather like this. You had gone to her. You had not mentioned it. You came in, hung your frozen cloak, and started the fire as though it were simply the next item on the day's list. Jake only knew because his Lycan hearing had tracked your footsteps taking the longer route home through the outer edge of the ward. He had watched you crouch by the hearth, coaxing the kindling to life with chapped, freezing hands, and something in the inventory had quietly put down its quill and declined to continue.He hadn't said anything. He had gotten up and taken over the fire-starting without comment, and you had sat back on your heels and let him without the usual negotiation of independence, and that had been that. But the inventory never quite recovered.

The understanding arrived in pieces, the way the thaw arrived  not all at once, but in the incremental surrender of small frozen things.He understood it first as simple observation. He had always been good at observation; it was the foundation of every manipulation he had ever executed, the careful reading of a person's specific architecture before deciding precisely where to apply pressure. He had turned that same instrument on you because he couldn't turn it off, because eight years in the woods had made you extraordinarily difficult to read and difficult things were the only things that had ever held his attention for longer than five minutes. What he observed, over the long weeks of the deep winter's retreat, was this: You were nothing like anyone he had ever known. This seemed, stated plainly, like an obvious observation. You were a peasant healer living in illegal exile in the deep woods — of course you were nothing like the lords and ladies and carefully manufactured political assets he had spent his life navigating. The gap in circumstance was self-evident. But it wasn't the circumstance he meant. The people of his father's court operated on a principle Jake had always understood and respected, because it was the same principle he operated on — everything was currency. Kindness was currency. Loyalty was currency. Love was the most expensive and therefore most carefully spent currency of all. Nothing was given without calculation of return. Nothing was offered without a silent invoice attached.

You operated on no such principle. This was what kept confounding his attempts to read you. When Maren's granddaughter came to the door at midnight with a child burning with fever, you gave your last jar of the best salve and took a handful of dried beans in return that both of you knew were worth a fraction of what you'd given. When the tenant farmer came with his frostbitten hands, you spent three hours on the treatment when thirty minutes would have been sufficient by any clinical standard, because he was frightened and the fear was making the pain worse and you were constitutionally incapable of leaving a frightened person in unnecessary pain. When Jake himself had stumbled into your territory — naked and cursed and radiating enough heat to melt snowbanks — you had dumped out your entire firewood supply to drag him home on a broken ankle. None of it was strategic. None of it was currency. It was simply — given. Freely, practically, without ledger. He had spent twenty-one years in a world where love was a weapon and warmth was a performance and the shepherd's smile was the most powerful tool in any ambitious person's arsenal. He had been so immersed in that world that he had genuinely believed it was the only world. That the warmth the peasants showed his father's deceitful generosity was the same manufactured warmth his father deployed to extract it — just less sophisticated. Just sheep responding to the shepherd's call. He understood now, with the particular quality of understanding that comes from being made to live inside a thing rather than observe it from above, that he had been entirely, catastrophically wrong.

The warmth was real. That was what he hadn't been able to account for. The woman who had saved his life, who healed the sick for dried beans and kept the dying alive out of sheer bloody-minded refusal to let the King's cruelty have the final word — she was warm in a way that had nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with the simple, radical fact that she had chosen, against all reasonable incentive, to remain a person who gave a damn. His father had never been warm. Jake had never been warm. The citadel was not warm. It was beautiful and powerful and suffocating and it produced people who were brilliant at performing warmth while feeling nothing of it. He thought about Elian, the valet boy he had sent to the northern gate for the crime of having cold hands. He thought about the merchants weeping over sawdust flour. He thought about the Princess Elara and her genuine, earnest tenderness that he had catalogued and weaponized and discarded in the same evening without a second thought. He thought about you in the silver birch clearing, sitting down in the snow at midnight across from the monster with the same matter-of-fact steadiness you brought to everything, and saying then I'll wait as though it were simply the obvious thing. He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes and breathed.

The Lycan senses were not helping. They had been escalating steadily since the full moon  sharper, more insistent, more difficult to compartmentalize and the particular problem they presented in the context of his increasingly complicated feelings about you was this: they were incapable of lying. His mind could construct narratives. His mind was extraordinarily good at constructing narratives — it had been doing so since early childhood, papering over the cold rot of the citadel with whatever story served the moment best. His mind could tell him that his presence in the cabin was purely strategic, that the woodchopping and the snare-checking and the pre-dawn fire-stoking were all rational extensions of a practical arrangement. His senses could not be told anything. They simply reported. And what they reported, with the implacable accuracy of instruments that had no interest in his emotional comfort, was a level of attunement to your specific presence that went so far beyond threat assessment it had become almost laughable. He knew the exact rhythm of your breathing in every stage of sleep. He knew the difference between the footstep pattern of a morning when your ankle was manageable and a morning when it was bad, and on the bad mornings he found reasons to be inside and near the heavy bucket so you wouldn't have to carry it. He knew that you made a specific small sound — barely audible, a soft exhale through the nose — when something you were reading resolved in a way that satisfied you, and he had started timing his own tasks to be completed quietly so as not to interrupt the conditions that produced it. Your scent had become so familiar it had ceased to be overwhelming and become instead something closer to necessary — a constant in the background of his sensory world that he had stopped noticing the way you stop noticing a sound that has always been there and only register it in its absence. The one morning you had gone to the outer ward before he woke and he had come downstairs to a cabin that smelled only of woodsmoke and herbs and not of you, the specific wrongness of it had been visceral enough to stop him in the doorway for a full ten seconds before he identified what was missing.He did not share this information with anyone, including himself, for approximately two weeks.

The evening it became undeniable was unremarkable in every external detail. It was late. The fire had settled to a low, steady burn. You were at the table, not working for once but simply sitting, your hands wrapped around a ceramic mug of willow bark tea that had gone cold, staring at the middle distance with an expression he had learned to recognize as the particular exhaustion that came not from physical labor but from the weight of memory. He had seen it on the bad nights, when the deep cold brought the ghosts back — the father pulled from the wheat fields, the mother in the barn. You never spoke of it directly. You simply went somewhere else for a while and came back. Jake was on the floor near the hearth, nominally sharpening the axe blade but in practice watching you with the helpless attention he had entirely given up trying to discipline. Barnaby was on the table beside your mug, pressing his orange head rhythmically against your forearm in the cat's ancient, simple vocabulary of comfort. You looked down at Barnaby. Something in your face softened — not the careful softening of someone performing warmth, but the involuntary, unguarded relaxation of a person receiving something they needed without having asked for it. You set the cold mug down. You scratched behind Barnaby's ears. The cat's purr filled the small cabin like a second fire. "He does that when I'm thinking about them," you said, without looking up. You didn't specify who. You didn't need to. "He always knows."

Jake set the whetstone down. He was quiet for a moment, turning over several possible responses and discarding each of them. The shepherd's toolkit offered plenty — manufactured empathy, strategic vulnerability, the careful question designed to open a wound just enough to create dependency. He had used every one of them at some point in his life, and they rose to his tongue now with the automatic ease of long practice. He let them go. "How old were you?" he asked. Just that. No performance attached. You looked up. You read his face the way you read everything — carefully, looking for the angle. You didn't find one, which he could tell by the slight shift in your expression. "Young," you said. He nodded. He didn't say anything else. He didn't offer the fabricated grief or the theatrical compassion. He simply acknowledged it — the weight of it, the specific, unhealing quality of a loss that had been delivered not by fate but by the deliberate machinery of a system designed to take everything from people who had nothing to begin with. You looked at him for a moment. Then you looked back at Barnaby. "He was a good man," you said. "My father. He knew the names of every plant on the farm. He could tell what the weather would do three days out just from the way the moss grew on the north fence." A pause. "He didn't want to go. They didn't ask." Jake thought about the war reports he had read at the high table. The casualty columns in his father's military dispatches — numbers, not names. Meat for the grinder. The precise, bloodless language of a system that had never once considered the moss on the north fence or the daughter watching from the doorway. Something moved in his chest that was not comfortable and not small.

"I'm sorry," he said. You looked at him again. This time the reading was longer. "You mean that," you said, with the mild surprise of someone encountering an unexpected species. "Yes," he said. You were quiet for a moment. Then you picked up your cold tea, made a face at the temperature, and pushed yourself up to reheat it. On your way past him you paused, and you did something you had never done before — you set your hand briefly on his shoulder. One touch, no more than three seconds, warm and entirely without agenda. Then you moved to the hearth. Jake did not move for a long moment. He looked at the middle distance where you had been sitting. He felt the specific warmth of where your hand had rested on his shoulder with the Lycan sensitivity that registered everything, and he thought about the inventory he had stopped keeping, and he thought about all the ways he had been wrong about the world, and he thought about the blood moon that was coming and the six-mile walk to the vanguard outpost and the iron throne at the end of the long dark corridor. He set all of that aside. He picked up the whetstone. He resumed the slow, rhythmic work of the blade. But something had settled in him — quietly, without drama, without the fanfare of declaration or the strategic calculation of deployment. Something that had been in the process of becoming for weeks had simply, finally, finished becoming. He loved you. He turned the knowledge over carefully, the way he turned a new weapon in his hands — assessing the weight and the balance and the specific implications of the thing. He had expected it to feel like weakness. His father had always framed love as weakness — the shepherd's tool, the leash by which the foolish were led. He had spent twenty-one years armored against it with the specific, comprehensive armor of a person who has been taught from birth that feeling anything is the first step toward being controlled by it.

It didn't feel like weakness. It felt like — he searched for the word with the frustration of a man trying to describe a color he has no name for — it felt like the specific, clarifying quality of the deep woods at dawn. Not comfortable exactly. Too large for comfortable. Too honest. But clarifying the way the pre-dawn dark clarified everything it touched, stripping away the citadel's elaborate architecture of performance and politics and leaving only what was actually there. What was actually there was this: a woman who had dragged a monster out of the snow on a broken ankle. Who sat in a silver birch clearing at midnight and said then I'll wait without drama or agenda. Who gave her last jar of salve to an old woman she'd never met and came home and started the fire. Who looked at the thing he became under the full moon and handed him a damp rag and told him to clean up his mess. Who had just touched his shoulder for three seconds and walked away and not looked back, because she wasn't doing it for any return. She was just — there. Warm and present and entirely, devastatingly real. He had never known anyone real before. He understood this now with a completeness that was its own quiet devastation. He let himself feel it. He sat with it in the firelight, this strange new territory — alien and enormous and nothing like the cold, calculated architecture of the world he had grown up in, but warm. Genuinely, unreservedly warm, in the way that only things without an agenda can be warm.

He didn't try to file it. He didn't try to manage it or deploy it or protect himself from it. He simply let it exist, sitting there in his chest beside the Lycan heat and the cursor's ache, entirely ungoverned and entirely his. Outside, the deep woods were quiet. The winter was retreating by degrees. The days were growing longer. Somewhere above the horizon, unhurried and absolute, the blood moon was approaching. Jake did not think about this. For the first time in months, the careful, ever-running calculation at the back of his mind — the exit route, the vanguard outpost, the iron throne, the plan — had gone quiet. Replaced by the sound of you moving around the cabin behind him, the soft domestic sounds of the fire and the ceramic mug and Barnaby's purring, the specific, grounding rhythm of your heartbeat that his Lycan senses had long since memorized. He thought about none of the things he should have been thinking about. He thought about the moss on the north fence that told the weather three days out. He thought about what it might be like to know a thing like that. To belong so completely to a piece of earth that you learned its specific language. To have that belonging taken from you by a column of numbers in a war dispatch. He thought about the merchant weeping over sawdust flour and believing in it, the genuine tears on a cheek above a blue-tinged lip, a man who had so little left that a handful of flour could produce that quality of hope. He thought about you, fifteen years old, walking into the barn on a frost-bitten morning.

He thought about everything he had been too elevated to see, for twenty-one years, from the high table. The fire popped. Barnaby relocated from the table to Jake's knee with the casual authority of a creature entirely at home in its domain. "The yarrow is almost out again," you said, from behind him. Practical. Conversational. Entirely ordinary. "I'll go tomorrow," Jake said. And he meant it as more than an errand. He meant it as the specific, quiet declaration of a man who has decided, without ceremony, to stay present in a life that has turned out to contain something worth being present for. You made a soft sound of acknowledgment. The fire burned. The cat purred. The blood moon climbed toward its apex above the frozen canopy, patient and inevitable and entirely forgotten by the man sitting on the floor of a healer's cabin in the deep woods, learning, for the first time in his life, what it felt like to be simply, unreservedly somewhere. It made no sound at all.

The thaw announced itself not with warmth but with sound. It began as a subtle shift in the language of the deep woods — the specific, groaning vocabulary of ice under stress, the percussion of meltwater finding new paths beneath the snow's crust, the occasional sharp crack of a branch releasing its winter burden with a sound like a distant gunshot. You had lived through enough thaws to read them the way you read everything else — methodically, cataloguing each signal, adjusting your movements through the woods accordingly. The ravine, you knew, would be the first place to become genuinely dangerous. The ice shelf on the north lip was a seasonal hazard — solid through the hard freeze, treacherous in the transition. You had been monitoring it since the temperature first began its marginal upward creep, checking the root growth below the overhang where the yarrow and the nettle came back earliest, timing your harvests to the narrow window between frozen-solid and actively-collapsing. You had been making this calculation alone for eight years. You were good at it. You told yourself this on the morning you pulled on your boots and reached for your walking stick and deliberately did not mention where you were going. Jake was outside splitting wood — she could hear the rhythmic crack of the maul from the chopping block behind the cabin, could feel the specific vibration of it through the floorboards the way she felt everything he did now, with a heightened awareness she had given up pretending was purely practical. He would be occupied for at least an hour. The ravine was a quarter mile. She would be back before he finished. She left a note on the table. Checking the ravine. Back by midday. Practical. Informative. Not a request for permission. You picked up the woven gathering basket and went.

The woods were different in the thaw. Not warmer — not yet, the air still had a blade to it, the snow still knee-deep in the hollows — but lighter somehow. The quality of the light through the canopy had shifted from the flat, iron-grey compression of deep winter to something marginally more tentative, as though the sun were testing its authority after months of abdication. The trees dripped at the tips of their branches. The snow had a different texture underfoot — not the clean, powdery compression of the hard freeze but something denser, wetter, with an icy crust that held your weight for two steps before surrendering. You moved carefully, your walking stick taking the primary weight off your left ankle, your eyes reading the ground ahead with the attention of someone who has learned the specific cost of reading it wrong. The ravine came into view through the pines — the dark, dramatic gash in the earth that had been part of your gathering territory for seven years, its walls slick with black ice, the bottom still invisible in shadow. The yarrow root system you had been monitoring was visible on the south wall, the dormant casing just beginning to show the faint blush of red that indicated the compounds were active again. Another week and they would be at peak potency. You moved along the southern edge, keeping well back from the lip, your stick probing the snow ahead of each step. The ground was solid. The shelf was on the north side — you were nowhere near it. You crouched at the edge to examine the root system more closely, calculating the harvest. The casing was intact, the soil around the base beginning to soften at the very top — not ready yet, but close. Three days, maybe four. You straightened. You took one step back. The ground gave way.

Not catastrophically — not the full shelf collapse you had always feared, not the forty-foot plunge onto frozen rock. A partial give, a two-foot subsidence of the snow and soil at the very edge of the south lip where the meltwater had been working at the ground beneath for days without visible surface evidence. Your left foot dropped through into empty air. Your right foot held, your walking stick drove deep into the solid ground to your right, and you wrenched yourself sideways and back with everything you had. You landed hard on your side in the snow, three feet from the edge, your left ankle bent at the specific angle that sent a white-hot bolt of agony straight up your leg and punched the breath out of your lungs in a sharp, involuntary gasp. You lay there for a moment, flat on your back, staring up at the winter sky through the pine canopy. "Right," you said, to no one. You assessed. The ankle — the same ankle, of course it was the same ankle — was screaming with a persistence that suggested the scar tissue from the original injury had taken the brunt of the wrench. Not broken. You were almost certain it wasn't broken. Badly sprained, possibly a partial re-tear of the ligament that had never quite finished healing. You would know more when the shock wore off and you could do a proper examination.Getting home was the immediate problem. You rolled onto your side and pushed yourself up with your arms, keeping your left foot lifted. You retrieved your walking stick from where it had embedded in the snow. You tested your weight carefully — enough to hobble, not enough to walk normally. You had just gotten yourself upright when you heard it.

Not footsteps — the snow was too deep for footsteps to carry — but the specific displacement of the air that accompanied something moving very fast through the trees toward you. You turned. Jake came through the pine break at a speed that was not human. His golden hair was loose around his face, the leather cord lost somewhere between the chopping block and here, and his expression was the most unguarded you had ever seen it — stripped entirely of every layer of performance and calculation, down to something raw and immediate that you recognized as fear before you could name anything else about it. He stopped when he saw you upright. The relief that crossed his face was physical — a visible release of tension through his entire frame, from his jaw to his shoulders to the hands that had been, you noticed, slightly clawed at the fingertips and were now retracting. He had run a quarter mile through knee-deep snow in under two minutes. "I'm fine," you said, preemptively. He crossed the remaining distance between you and crouched in the snow in front of you without speaking, his eyes going immediately to your left ankle with the specific focus of someone who had spent months watching you favor it. "It's the same ankle," you said. "I'm aware. It's a sprain, possibly a re-tear of the—"

"Be quiet," he said. Not unkindly. Quietly. He set his hands around the ankle with a gentleness so careful it was almost absurd given the size of them — large and warm and entirely steady, the heat of his Lycan blood bleeding through the leather of your boot. He pressed with his thumbs along the specific lines of the injury with a precision that went well beyond what a northern mercenary should have possessed, and you watched his face while he did it. His jaw was set. His amber eyes were focused and unreadable in the way they got when he was feeling something he hadn't decided what to do with yet. The fear was gone — replaced by the controlled, careful attention he brought to things that mattered to him, the same attention he brought to ghost-mushroom harvests and snare construction and the pre-dawn fire he thought you didn't know he stoked before you woke. "Not broken," he said. "I know," you said. "I told you." He looked up at you. The amber eyes were very close and very direct. "You left a note," he said. "I left a note," you confirmed. "The note said you were checking the ravine."

"The note was accurate."

"The note," Jake said, with a quiet precision that was somehow more alarming than raised volume, "did not mention that the south lip was unstable."

"I didn't know the south lip was unstable."

"No," he agreed. His hands were still around your ankle, warm and unmoving. "That's the problem." You looked at him for a moment. He looked at you. The ravine breathed its cold, damp breath behind you and the pines stood in their indifferent rows and the winter light fell across the specific angles of his face and you thought about eight years of doing this alone — every ravine, every ice shelf, every three-in-the-morning knock on the door, every moment of every day without anyone who would run a quarter mile at inhuman speed because they heard the ice give way. You didn't say any of this. Instead you said, "Are you going to help me up or are you going to crouch in the snow indefinitely." Something shifted in his face. "I'm going to carry you home," he said. "You are not—"

"You re-tore the ligament," he said, simply and without drama. "If you walk on it now you'll be off it for two weeks instead of four days. So I'm going to carry you home." You opened your mouth. You closed it again. He looked at you with the specific patience of someone who has learned the rhythm of your stubbornness and knows exactly how long it takes to complete its arc. "Fine," you said. He picked you up as though you weighed nothing — which, relative to his Lycan strength, you essentially didn't. One arm under your knees, one arm around your back, your gathering basket hooked over his shoulder with a practicality that shouldn't have been as disarming as it was. He straightened without effort and turned toward home. You did not argue. That was the tell, if either of you had been paying attention to it. In all the weeks of the cabin and the woodchopping and the onion standoffs and the snare wire, you had never once let him do something for you without at least a token negotiation of independence. You were quiet all the way home, your cheek resting against the warmth of his shoulder, the deep woods moving past you in their silver and shadow.

He set you on the cot with the same careful gentleness he had used in the ravine, crouching in front of you to remove your boot with both hands, his touch so precise and so warm that the pain of the movement was almost secondary to the specific, overwhelming domesticity of the moment — this man, this impossible golden-haired prince-shaped anomaly, kneeling on the rough floorboards of your exile cottage with your foot in his hands as though it were the most natural position he had ever occupied. The cabin was very quiet. The fire had burned low in your absence and was just beginning to rebuild itself from the coals, casting the room in amber and deep shadow. Barnaby was on the high shelf, watching with the wide, unblinking attention he reserved for significant events. Jake examined the ankle with the same careful precision as before, his thumbs tracing the swollen lines of the injury with a focus so complete it felt like something else. You watched his bent golden head, the loose hair falling forward around his face, the specific quality of his concentration. "It needs the comfrey poultice," you said. "Second shelf, the brown ceramic pot." He retrieved it without standing — simply reached, his Lycan range of motion making the distance trivial — and opened it, and the sharp medicinal smell of the comfrey filled the small cabin. He applied it with the same hands that had carried you through the snow, with the same gentleness, with the same complete, quiet attention. You watched his face. He looked up and caught you watching. The cabin was very warm now. The fire had found its rhythm. Outside, the deep woods were utterly still in the way they got in the late afternoon, between the morning's wind and the evening's.

Neither of you moved. He was still crouched in front of you, your ankle resting in his hands, the poultice applied, no practical reason left for either his position or the specific quality of stillness that had settled over the room. His amber eyes were on yours. The calculation that usually lived in them — the constant, subtle assessment, the measurement of angles and exits and optimal responses — was absent. What was there instead was something that had no strategy in it and no performance and no agenda. Just him. Looking at you. Just you. Looking back. Everything that had accumulated since the silver birch clearing was in the room with you. Every pre-dawn fire and yarrow harvest and cold-tea-reheated-without-being-asked. Every almost-smile over onion grass and every three seconds of a hand on a shoulder. Every night he had stayed when he could have left and every morning he had been there when you woke. "Jake," you said. Very quietly. "Yes," he said. The same way — very quietly. As though speaking at normal volume might disturb something that was in the process of becoming. You reached out. You set your hand against his jaw — the sharp, aristocratic angle of it, the familiar lines of a face you had been learning for months whether you had intended to or not. He went very still beneath your touch, the way he went still when something mattered enough to require every available resource of his attention. His eyes closed for a moment. When they opened again the amber was very dark and very warm and entirely, devastatingly unguarded. He reached up. He set his hand over yours where it rested against his face, covering it completely — his hand so much larger that your fingers disappeared beneath his — and held it there. Neither of you spoke. The fire crackled. Barnaby made a soft, decisive sound from the high shelf, as though confirming something he had known for quite some time. Jake turned his face slightly, just enough to press his lips against your palm — not a performance, not a strategy, not the calculated tenderness of the shepherd's mask. Something entirely different. Something offered with the specific, terrifying simplicity of a man who has nothing left to hide behind and has decided, finally, to stop trying.

The fire crackled low, casting flickering amber across the rough cabin walls as Jake rose from his crouch. His amber eyes held yours with an intensity that pinned you more effectively than any physical restraint. The air between you thickened, charged with months of unspoken hunger finally breaking free. He leaned in slowly, deliberately, giving you time to feel the full weight of what was coming. His large hand cupped your jaw, thumb stroking your lower lip before he claimed your mouth. The kiss started deep and searching—his tongue licking into you with possessive strokes, tasting, exploring, demanding you open wider for him. You moaned softly into it, and he swallowed the sound, licking deeper, hotter, as if he could devour every quiet year of solitude you’d carried. When he pulled back, both of you were breathing harder. “I’ve waited long enough,” he growled, voice rough with Lycan gravel. “You’re going to feel every second of it.” He stripped you with unhurried command, peeling away each layer of clothing until you lay completely bare on the cot. His gaze dragged over your body like a physical touch—slow, heated, appreciative. He shed his own clothes next, revealing the powerful, sculpted lines of his Lycan form: broad shoulders, corded muscle, and the thick, heavy cock already flushed and leaking at the tip. He was magnificent, intimidating, and utterly focused on you. Jake settled between your spread thighs, but he didn’t enter you. Not yet. Instead, he dragged it out, building the tension until it felt like you might snap.

His mouth found your throat first, sucking and biting marks into your skin while one hand palmed your breast, rolling the nipple between his fingers until it ached. He licked a hot trail down to your other breast, sucking the peak into his mouth with long, pulling draws that had your back arching off the furs. Two thick fingers slid between your legs, stroking through your slick folds with devastating patience—circling your clit, teasing your entrance, never giving you enough. “Jake…” you whimpered, hips rolling desperately. “Not yet,” he murmured against your skin, licking into your mouth again in a filthy, open-mouthed kiss as he pushed one finger inside you, then two. He curled them perfectly, stroking that sensitive spot while his thumb worked your clit in tight circles. Every time your breathing hitched and your walls started to flutter, he slowed or pulled back, edging you cruelly. “Please,” you gasped against his lips. He licked deeper into your mouth in answer, tongue fucking against yours in rhythm with his fingers. “You’ll come when I decide. I want you dripping for me.” By the time he finally withdrew his fingers, you were trembling, slick coating your thighs. Jake gripped your hips and flipped you onto your stomach with effortless strength, pulling your ass up so you were on your knees, chest pressed to the furs. He knelt behind you, rubbing the thick head of his cock through your soaked folds, teasing your entrance. “You’re mine,” he said, voice low and dark. One hand fisted in your hair, pulling your head back just enough to arch your spine as he finally pushed inside. The stretch was intense—his girth splitting you open inch by thick inch. He went slow at first, letting you feel every ridge and vein as he filled you completely, bottoming out with a deep groan. Then the leash on his control snapped.

He fucked you hard. His hips snapped forward with powerful, punishing thrusts that drove the breath from your lungs. The sound of skin slapping skin filled the cabin, wet and obscene. Each stroke dragged against that perfect spot inside you, his heavy balls slapping against your clit. He kept one hand tangled in your hair and the other gripping your hip hard enough to bruise, holding you exactly where he wanted as he railed you. He pulled you up onto your knees, back flush against his chest, and turned your head to lick into your mouth again—deep, messy kisses while he continued fucking you with brutal intensity. His tongue stroked yours in time with his cock, swallowing every moan and cry as he drove into you harder, faster. “Fuck, you feel perfect,” he growled against your lips, licking deeper, claiming every gasp. “Taking me so well. My love. My mate.” The tension coiled tighter in your belly, every hard thrust pushing you closer to the edge. He felt it—the way you clenched around him—and snarled, pounding into you even harder, the cot creaking dangerously beneath you. When your orgasm finally crashed over you, it was devastating. You cried out into his mouth as your walls spasmed around his cock, milking him. Jake roared, burying himself to the hilt. At the peak of his release, his fangs sank into the junction of your neck and shoulder—the marking instinctive, irreversible. White-hot pleasure-pain exploded through you, triggering another shattering climax as his essence bonded you to him forever. He licked the mark closed with slow, reverent strokes of his tongue, still buried deep inside you, arms wrapped possessively around your body as you both trembled through the aftershocks.There was no strategy left in his amber eyes when he finally turned you to face him—only raw, unguarded truth. The Lycan prince had claimed his equal completely, and in doing so, had given himself over in return.

Jake woke before you did. This was not unusual — the Lycan biology kept him at a perpetual low simmer of alertness, the senses running their quiet inventory of the environment even in sleep. But the specific quality of waking was different this morning. Instead of the usual snapping-to of tactical awareness, the immediate catalogue of threats and exits and variables, there was only — this. The fire burned low. The early morning light was a pale, tentative grey through the frosted window. Barnaby was a warm weight somewhere near the foot of the cot, his purring a constant, uninterrupted thread in the cabin's silence. And you were asleep against his chest, your breathing slow and even and entirely unguarded in the specific way that sleep strips everything back to its essential self. Jake lay still. He was aware of the mark at your neck with a clarity that went beyond the physical — a deep, settled recognition in the Lycan part of him that was not triumphant or possessive in the way he might once have expected, but simply certain. The way the deep woods were certain of their own geography. Immovable. Factual. Irrevocable. He had not planned it. That was the thing he kept returning to — he, who had planned everything, every gesture and every word and every calculated deployment of warmth, had done the most permanent and unstrategic thing of his life entirely without planning. The Lycan had simply — known. And for once, the Prince had not argued. He looked at the ceiling. The rough-hewn beams with their bundles of drying herbs, the familiar herbal weight of the air, the specific amber light of the fire catching the glass vials on the shelves. This was the cabin he had arrived in as a monster and had intended to leave as soon as it was tactically viable. He thought about the six-mile walk to the vanguard outpost. He thought about it with the same flat, examining attention he had brought to it for months, turning it over to assess its weight.

It was lighter than he expected. That surprised him. Not because he no longer intended to return — Aethelgard was still there, the throne was still there, the question of the curse's final stage was still unanswered. He was still a prince and the kingdom was still waiting and none of those facts had changed overnight. But the specific urgency of escape that had driven the calculation for the first months — the desperate need to return to the citadel, to restore the walls and the silk and the authority — that had quieted. Replaced by something he was only beginning to have language for. He wanted to go back changed. Not the same man who had ridden into the deep woods on his birthday with an arrow nocked and a century's worth of inherited contempt in his chest. Something else. Something that had stood in a silver birch clearing and been held together by a voice in the dark, and had sat on the floor of a cottage learning to render ghost-mushroom and check snares and stoke fires for someone who had never once asked to be taken care of and had never once stopped taking care. He did not know yet what that man would do with a kingdom. That was a problem for a later hour. You stirred against him. A soft exhale, the small adjustment of someone surfacing slowly from sleep, and then stillness again — not back under, but not quite present either, suspended in the particular warmth of the space between. He felt you become aware of him. The slight tension of consciousness returning, the brief moment of orientation — where am I, what is this, why is it warm — and then the release of it, the body deciding it knew the answer and that the answer was acceptable, settling back into the warmth.

Something in his chest turned over quietly. You tilted your head. You looked at the mark at your neck with your fingertips, very gently, the way you touched everything you were assessing — methodical, precise, cataloguing. "You marked me," you said. Not accusatory. Not alarmed. Simply noting. "Yes," he said.

A pause. "Lycan marking," you said. "The books described it."

"Yes." You were quiet for a moment, your fingers still resting at your neck. The fire popped. Outside, the early morning birds had begun their tentative thaw-season experiments with sound — the first in weeks. "Is it permanent?" you asked. "Yes," he said. And then, because the inventory was gone and the performance was gone and there was nothing left to hide behind: "I'm sorry if you didn't—"

"I didn't say that," you said quietly. He stopped. You turned your head and looked at him. The morning light was unkind in the way that only early light is unkind — showing everything exactly as it was, without the softening of the fire or the forgiving amber of the evening. You looked at him in the grey, honest light and he looked at you, and neither of you looked away. "I know what a Lycan marking means," you said. "I read the books. All of them." He held your gaze. "Then you know it isn't something I could have done without—"

"I know," you said. Simply. Completely.The silence that followed was the quietest the cabin had ever been.He looked at you in the grey morning light, your hand in his, your eyes steady and dark and entirely without fear, the mark at your neck that was the most honest thing he had ever done. He thought about what knowing would do to this morning. To the specific, fragile quality of the peace that had settled in the cabin overnight. We have now, you had said. He closed his mouth. He turned his hand over beneath yours and held it properly, his fingers warm against your knuckles. "Yes," he said softly. "We have now." Outside, the deep woods were waking into their tentative thaw-season morning, the birds finding their voices, the snow beginning its slow surrender to the inevitable. The blood moon climbed its patient arc above the canopy, drawing closer by the hour. And in the small warm cabin in the deep woods, two people lay in the grey morning light and held onto the present with both hands, the way people hold onto things they know are temporary but love too much to release before they have to.

The days that followed the marking were the best of Jake's life. He would not have said this out loud. He would not have known how to say it — the vocabulary of uncomplicated happiness was not one he had ever been given occasion to develop, and its absence left him reaching for words that kept arriving wrong. Too small. Too insufficient for the specific quality of what the days had become.So he didn't say it. He simply lived inside it, with the careful, wondering attention of a man handling something he doesn't fully trust not to break.The thaw was accelerating. The snow in the clearing outside the cabin had retreated to the shadowed hollows beneath the pines, and the ground that had been iron-hard for months was beginning its slow, muddy resurrection. The river to the north had broken up, and on clear mornings you could hear it moving again — a sound Jake had not heard since his arrival, and which struck him now with a quality of significance he couldn't entirely account for. Water moving. Things unfrozen. The world reconsidering its position. You had started leaving the window cracked in the mornings, and the air that came in was different — still cold, but carrying underneath the cold the faint green suggestion of something returning.Jake noticed these things in the way he noticed everything now — fully, without the filter of calculation. The thaw had done something to him that he suspected had less to do with the season and more to do with the marking, with the specific biological reality of a Lycan bond settling into his system like a second heartbeat. He was more attuned to the world than he had ever been and less defended against it, and this combination produced in him a state he had no prior experience with and was learning, incrementally, to inhabit without panic. The word for it, he thought, was present. He was simply — present. For the first time in twenty-one years. 

The funny moments came first, which surprised him. He had expected tenderness. He had expected the quiet, careful warmth of two people learning a new proximity, the specific soft-footed adjustment of sharing space in a new way. He had not expected to find himself laughing. It happened on the fourth morning after the marking, when you had sent him to the root cellar to retrieve the last of the dried barley and he had come back up through the hatch with an expression of profound existential distress. "There are onions," he said. You looked up from the worktable. "There are onions," you confirmed. "Wild spring onions," he said. "An entire bundle. On the bottom shelf. Which means they have been there for—"

"Several weeks," you said, perfectly pleasantly. "I found them in the outer ward trade."The silence stretched. "You threw away the red onions," Jake said slowly, "while possessing, in your root cellar, a secret supply of spring onions."

"The red onions were inferior," you said. "You argued with me for an entire afternoon about caloric scarcity—"

"The spring onions are much milder," you said. "They don't ruin the broth." Jake looked at you for a very long moment, his expression cycling through several distinct phases. Then he set the barley on the table, sat down on the floor, and laughed — a real laugh, unmanufactured and entirely undignified, the kind of laugh that had never once been permitted in the court of Aethelgard because laughter was a vulnerability and vulnerability was a weapon handed freely to your enemies. It felt extraordinary. It felt like putting down something very heavy that he hadn't known he was carrying. You watched him with the small, pleased expression you deployed when something had gone exactly as you intended, which it clearly had. "You did that on purpose," he said, when he could speak again. "The broth tonight will be excellent," you said. It was.

The tenderness came in the nights. It arrived not as a grand gesture but as the slow accumulation of small ones — the specific way he had started sleeping with his arm around you, not possessively but as though checking, in sleep, that you were still there. The mornings when he woke first and lay quietly cataloguing the specific weight and warmth of you against his side, turning it over with the careful attention he had once reserved for military strategy, finding in it something that required no strategy at all. He had started touching you in the idle, unconsidered way of someone who has forgotten to monitor the habit. A hand at the small of your back when he moved past you in the small cabin. His fingers finding yours when you passed him tools at the worktable. The specific domestic intimacy of sitting beside you in the evenings with his shoulder against yours, reading the medicinal journal over your arm while you made your notes, asking occasional questions that revealed more about his actual education than the northern mercenary story had ever been intended to permit.You had stopped pretending to be surprised by how much he knew. He had stopped pretending not to know it. This unspoken renegotiation had opened up a quality of conversation that neither of you had permitted before — real conversation, the kind that had opinions in it and genuine disagreement and the specific pleasure of a mind meeting another mind at approximately its own level. He told you about military cartography — abstractly, framed as things he had read. You told him about the medicinal properties of plants the citadel's licensed apothecaries had never bothered to study because they grew only in the margins, in the places the Crown's maps didn't bother to detail. "They don't know about the ghost-mushroom applications," you said one evening, with a flat wonder that was really a kind of fury. "Eight years I've been using it for pain management and the citadel apothecaries are still prescribing imported poppy at twenty times the cost to people who can't afford to eat."

Jake was quiet for a moment. He was thinking about the Master of Coin. About the specific, deliberate architecture of a system that kept its people sick enough to need help and poor enough to be grateful for whatever help they were permitted to afford. "It's intentional," he said, without the careful framing he would have used a month ago. "The ignorance isn't accidental." You looked at him. "The licensed apothecaries pay significant tithes to maintain their monopoly," he said. "The Crown benefits from the arrangement. Cheaper alternatives in the outer wards would reduce dependency on citadel services." He paused. "It's a supply chain, not a healthcare system." The silence that followed was a different kind than the comfortable ones. You were reading his face with the full, flat attention you brought to things that didn't add up. "How do you know that?" you said quietly. He met your eyes. The conversation sat at the edge of something — a line he had been approaching incrementally for weeks, the question of who he actually was pressing against the inside of the fiction with increasing insistence. "I read a great deal," he said, for the last time, and they both knew it was the last time, and neither of them pushed further tonight, because tonight was warm and the broth had spring onions in it and there would be time. There would be time.

There wasn't.

The blood moon gave no warning. That was the thing Jake would return to, afterward, in the long frozen hours of afterward — the complete, devastating absence of warning. He had felt the full moon building for days before it arrived, had felt it in his blood like a tide turning. He had assumed, without examining the assumption, that the blood moon would announce itself the same way. That he would have time to prepare. To tell you. To give you the chance to run or to stay or to choose with full knowledge of what you were choosing. He had been wrong. He woke on an ordinary morning in the ordinary way — your warmth against his side, Barnaby's purring at his feet, the early light pale and tentative through the frosted window. He stoked the fire. He checked the snares. He came back to the cabin and set a brace of wood grouse on the preparation block and knocked the snow off his boots at the door and stepped inside to find you at the worktable with the spring onion broth already started, the medicinal journal open beside the pot, Barnaby winding imperiously around your ankles. It was, in every particular, a normal morning. The blood moon rose that night.He felt it differently from the full moon — not the gravitational pull, not the tide-turning build, but something sudden and total, like a door slamming open in the dark. One moment he was sitting beside you on the cot, your head against his shoulder, the fire low and the cabin warm and the evening so ordinary it was almost laughable in retrospect — and then the door opened, and everything that was Jake stepped back, and everything that was the beast stepped forward. He had no time to speak. No time to warn you, to push you away, to do any of the things he had intended to do when the blood moon came — the conversation he had been deferring, the truth he had been meaning to tell you, the choice he had been meaning to give you. The Witch had been very specific. There is no control. There is no — there is nothing left of me. He had believed her. He simply hadn't believed it would be this fast.

The beast that emerged on the blood moon was not the creature from the silver birch clearing.That creature had retained enough of Jake to hold on, to turn its back, to hold itself at the far treeline with its clawed hands loose on its knees and breathe through it. That creature had been a man in tremendous difficulty. This was something else entirely. The bond recognized you. That was the cruelest part — the Lycan marking that had been the most honest thing Jake had ever done now worked against you in the most devastating way possible, because the beast that wore Jake's body on the blood moon was not bound by Jake's choices. It was bound by the Witch's architecture, which was older and more absolute than any marking, and the Witch's architecture said: find the one who loves you. Find the source of the cure. And fulfill the curse's final terms. The beast loved you. That was not in question. The bond made that impossible to doubt. But the beast's love and Jake's love were different things — one governed by the man's slowly acquired humanity, the other by the raw, primal mechanics of a curse designed by an ancient and furious power to exact a specific and irrevocable cost. You didn't run. This was the thing that broke him, after — the thing that sat in his chest in the long frozen hours of afterward like a shard of iron that could not be removed. You had read the books. You had known what the blood moon meant. You had lived in the deep woods for eight years and you had learned to run from every apex predator, every territorial dispute, every thing that went wrong in the dark — and you had survived by running. You didn't run from him. You stood in the cabin and you looked at what was coming and you did not run, because you had sat in a silver birch clearing at midnight and decided, and your decisions were not reversible things.The snow outside was very white afterward. That was what he remembered most, in the immediate and terrible afterward — the specific, brutal whiteness of it, and the red, and the silence.

He came back to himself the way he had after the first transformation — consciousness returning in pieces, the cold against his skin, the specific weight and texture of the ground beneath him. But this time there was no melted crater. This time there was no anonymous snowbank and an empty clearing and the distant, galloping hooves of a frightened horse.This time, he was on his knees in the snow outside the cabin, and you were in his arms. The cold arrived first — not in his body, which was still running its Lycan furnace, but in his hands, where the warmth that should have been there wasn't. He looked down and the world stopped. He didn't scream. He had expected to scream — had some distant, instinctive sense that this was a moment that should produce screaming. But what came out of him instead was something much quieter and much worse. A sound he didn't recognize from himself, low and broken and entirely without the architecture of language, the sound of something that had no performance left and no strategy and no shepherd's mask, stripped down to the thing underneath all of it that had never been permitted to exist until the deep woods had slowly, patiently excavated it. He held you. He held you the way he had carried you back from the ravine — both arms, your weight against his chest — but the carrying was over now and they both knew it and the knowledge was a physical thing, a crushing weight that had nothing to do with the Lycan biology and everything to do with the heart that had been so carefully, so improbably, softened. The snow around his knees was red.

He looked at your face. The expression on it was not what he had expected — not fear, not betrayal, not the specific devastating accusation his imagination had constructed in every version of this moment he had allowed himself to consider. You looked, in the last of the winter moonlight, like someone who had made their choice and was not sorry for it. He pressed his forehead against yours. His hands were shaking — the Lycan steadiness that had never failed him in a training yard or a war council entirely absent, because this was not a thing that steadiness was equipped for. "I was going to tell you," he said. His voice came out wrecked, barely recognizable. "I kept meaning to tell you. I kept — there was always another morning. Another evening. I thought there was—" The words stopped. They were insufficient. They had always been insufficient — he had always known, in the coldest and most honest part of himself, that there was no version of the telling that fixed the fundamental problem, which was not the withholding of information but the nature of the curse itself. It had been designed this way. It had always been designed to end this way. To find your cure is to seal your doom. The Witch's words arrived now with the specific, devastating clarity of things understood too late. He turned them over in his mind with the same careful attention he had brought to military dispatches and resource assessments, applying the full weight of his analytical intelligence to a problem that had already resolved itself in the worst possible way. The curse was broken. He felt it — felt the absence of it with the same sudden, total quality as its arrival on the day of his twenty-first birthday. The Lycan heat was still present, the senses still heightened, the biology irreversibly altered. But the compulsion was gone. The Witch's architecture had collapsed. The blood moon had done what it was designed to do and had taken its payment and the debt was settled and the curse was finished.

He was free. The word arrived in his mind with an irony so complete and so crushing it was almost architectural in its perfection. Free. He looked down at you in the red snow. He thought about the man who had ridden into these woods on his birthday — arrogant and cold and entirely, comprehensively wrong about the nature of the world. The man who had catalogued the weak as fuel, who had sent a boy to the northern gate for having cold hands, who had looked at the starving outer wards from his private balcony with nothing in his chest but a cold, simmering superiority. He thought about the man who had ended up on the floor of a healer's cottage in a dead farmer's clothes, being ordered to chop wood and clean floorboards, being told that his roof-fixing and his apologizing were evidence of something worth keeping. He thought about the ghost-mushroom rendered at the correct temperature. The yarrow harvested in the dark. The spring onions kept secret for weeks. The hand on his shoulder for three seconds. The silver birch clearing. Then I'll wait. The gods of Aethelgard had given him a golden face and a kingdom and a throne and a father who had taught him that love was the oldest weapon. He had believed, for twenty-one years, that this was a blessing — that he had been born into the top of the natural order and that the cold clarity of his position was a kind of grace.He understood now, kneeling in the red snow with the broken curse settling into silence in his blood, that it had been the curse all along. Not the Witch's magic. That had come later, had been a response to something that already existed. The real curse was the twenty-one years before the woods — the architecture of contempt and performance and cold calculation that had made him, by the time the Witch found him in the clearing, exactly the kind of monster who would aim an arrow at a starving woman and call it pest control.

The Witch had not cursed him. She had shown him. And the woods had done the rest — had dismantled him, slowly and without ceremony, with root stew and snare wire and the specific, radical equality of being treated like a man who needed to earn his keep. He had been given the rarest thing in the world. A second nature. A real one, built from scratch in the shadow of the citadel he had spent his life embodying, in the company of the person least likely to offer it and most qualified to know whether it was genuine. And the Witch had built the ending into the beginning, had known from the first violet spark in the clearing that the cure and the cost were the same event, had looked at the cold arrogant prince on his hunting horse and designed a punishment elegant in its precision: You will find warmth. You will become capable of it. And then you will understand, in the most complete and irreversible way possible, exactly what you spent twenty-one years treating as fuel. Barnaby appeared in the cabin doorway. The orange cat sat on the threshold, and he did not hiss, and he did not run, and he looked at Jake in the snow with his wide, unblinking eyes — the same eyes that had watched from the high shelf on the very first night, the eyes that had known before anyone else what was living under the golden hair and the amber eyes. The cat made a sound. Soft, small, entirely unlike his usual authority. Jake held you tighter. The tears arrived without warning — not the performed grief of the court, not the strategic vulnerability of the shepherd's mask, but the real thing, which he had not produced since early childhood and which felt now like something breaking open that had been sealed too long. They fell into your hair and they were entirely without dignity and entirely without calculation and they were the most honest thing he had ever produced with his face.

The winter was almost over. The snow was retreating from the clearing, day by day. The river was moving again. The birches at the tree line were beginning their slow, insistent resurrection, the first green suggestions of leaves pressing against the grey bark. The world was warming. Jake sat in the snow and held what the warming had cost him and wept without stopping, the tears of a man who had learned too late and too completely that the thing his father had always called weakness was in fact the only thing that had ever been real. The blood moon set. The dawn came in grey and tentative and entirely indifferent, the way dawns always came — without regard for what the night had taken, without ceremony, simply the next thing after the last thing. Jake was still there when the light found him. Still in the snow. Still holding on. The curse was broken. He was free. He had never been less free in his life. And somewhere in the back of his mind, behind the grief and the silence and the red snow, a single thought formed with the cold, precise clarity of a man who had been trained from birth to assess a situation and identify what came next — He was the Crown Prince of Aethelgard. He had the full resources of a kingdom. He had a court mage and a Master of Coin and a Captain of the Guard who had taught him how to break a man's knee and how to survive the lethal politics of an iron court. And he had, in his blood, the permanent, irreversible mark of a Lycan bond that the Witch herself had said was the architecture of true love. The curse had a paradox at its heart. It had always had a paradox at its heart. To find your cure is to seal your doom. But what if doom was not the end of the story? What if doom was simply the cost of entry?

He looked at your face in the dawn light. The winter light. The light of a world that was, against all reasonable expectation, continuing. We have now, you had said.His jaw set. His amber eyes cleared, slowly, from grief to something older and colder and more purposeful — the Prince of Aethelgard reassembling himself from the pieces the curse had scattered, but reassembling differently now. Built around a different center. Oriented toward a different throne. He gathered you closer against his chest. He pressed his lips to your hair. He stayed in the snow until the dawn had fully arrived and the red had been absorbed into the white and the winter birds had found their voices in the thawing canopy. Then he stood. He carried you inside. He set you on the cot with the same careful gentleness that had always been disproportionate for a man his size, the same hands that had learned ghost-mushroom and snare wire and pre-dawn fires and the specific temperature of a rendering pot. He looked at the shelves. The glass vials, the ceramic pots, the tightly corked tinctures, the bundles of herbs that had kept the forgotten people of the outer wards breathing through the hardest winter in a generation. He knew every one of them. He had learned them all, in this room, from you. He began to work. He worked with the total, focused attention of a man who has identified the only thing that matters and has eliminated everything else from his field of consideration — the Lycan senses extended to their full capacity, the military precision turned entirely inward, every piece of knowledge accumulated over months of ghost-mushroom and yarrow and foxglove and the correct temperature of a rendering pot deployed with the single-minded ferocity of a prince who had been trained from birth to want things and get them. Outside, the last of the blood moon faded from the sky. The dawn light strengthened. The river ran. The birches pressed their green suggestions against the grey bark.

Barnaby jumped onto the cot. He pressed his orange head against your arm, the ancient, simple vocabulary of a creature that had known from the beginning what the golden stranger in the cabin was worth. Jake worked. The curse was broken. He was the Crown Prince of Aethelgard, with a kingdom's resources and a Lycan's senses and months of the most rigorous education in the real world he had ever received. And the Witch, for all her ancient fury and her elegant architecture of punishment, had made one miscalculation. She had taught him to love.She had not considered what a man like Jake did with things he loved.He fought for them.The curse had been his punishment, and the woods had been his classroom, and you had been, without ever intending it, the first true thing he had ever been given — and he had held it the way all men hold the things they receive too late, which is to say, with the full and devastating understanding of its worth only in the moment of its leaving. The Witch had wanted him to feel what the starving felt, what the widows felt, what the boys sent to the northern gate felt — that specific, particular cold of a world that takes without asking and owes you nothing in return. He understood it now. He understood it completely, kneeling in the red snow in the grey dawn with a softened heart and clean hands, which was the only ending available to a man who had spent twenty-one years learning the wrong lessons and one winter, too late, learning the right ones.

 The kingdom was still there, and the throne was still there, and the iron crown was still waiting — but the man who would wear it now had been forged in a mud-and-stick cabin by a woman who had never asked to save anyone and had never once been able to stop.

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THE SEONGHYEON JAEGA ━━━━━ MASTERLIST

PROLOGUE ONE ━━━━━ pink tiles

꒰ 5.8k ꒱you didn’t expect the winter garden, or the hydrangeas blooming out of season. and you definitely didn’t expect sunghoon — quiet, unreadable, and watching you like he already knew how this would end.

PROLOGUE TWO ━━━━━ the seonghyeon jaega

꒰ 10.9k ꒱between printer boys, rooftop gardens, and the neighbor who looks at you like he’s trying not to set the world on fire, this is what happens when loneliness meets curiosity and accidentally kicks off something bigger than you’re ready for.

CHAPTER ONE ━━━━━ hydrangeas & homicide

꒰ 11.2k ꒱ park sunghoon has survived centuries by staying detached — until a new neighbor moves in and quietly unravels everything. caught between instinct and control, he senses a bond he thought was myth, as something human begins to feel dangerously inevitable.

CHAPTER TWO ━━━━━ six-hundred-and-thirty-three

꒰ 16k ꒱ your body thrums with a strange, residual ache — not pain, but presence. like something has settled beneath your skin, quiet and irreversible. you don't have the words for it yet, but whatever passed between you and sunghoon in that moment wasn’t just physical. it’s something older, deeper, and it’s already taken root.

CHAPTER THREE ━━━━━ eletromagnetic emo ghost

꒰ 21.6k ꒱ all day, he feels you — in the air, under his skin, in every pulse that isn't his own. he watches you stumble through the day, dazed and aching, and hates that he caused it. but more than that, he hates how badly he wants more.

CHAPTER FOUR ━━━━━ resist the urge to bite (or kiss)

꒰ 35.2k ꒱ you want answers, but you also don’t want to ask. when you finally see him again, your body reacts before your mind can. and when he speaks — low, careful, restrained — it only confirms what you’ve been afraid to admit.

CHAPTER FIVE ━━━━━ hanil women university

꒰ 18.2k ꒱ the tension between you builds — sharp, close, and unbearably restrained. and when you finally ask if he regrets it, sunghoon doesn’t answer with words. he just looks at you — and it’s enough to know the truth.

CHAPTER SIX ━━━━━ necklines & near-death experiences

꒰ 24.3k ꒱sunghoon is shaken. and now that the bond is forming between you two, it’s not just instinct — it’s blood memory. he’s caught in something ancient and irreversible. and for the first time, you’re not the one in danger — he is.

CHAPTER SEVEN ━━━━━ orange blood

you never knew. and now everything — your instincts, your reactions, the way your body answers sunghoon before you can think — starts to make sense. it’s not legacy. it’s inheritance by accident. buried. hidden. and now, waking up.

EPILOGUE ━━━━━ bad desire (unleash)

it’s not soft. it’s inevitable. after nights of denial and tension so thick it ached, this moment snaps like a pulled thread. it’s teeth, breath, hands, and truth.

TSJ TAGLIST ━━━━━ CLOSED

TAGS: @ikeugirly @vixialuvs @hoonprksung @kyunlov @verialuv @sagegreenhairclip @gal821 @hoonstrology @httpenhoon @questionsdearreader @mynameis-rosie1 @staygenesblog @stercul1a @nshmrarki @imeowni @harusoraa @niki788 @sosaphiee @seokjinthescientist @gloomyasphodel @ferjinyoungiee @temuao @p1ecetinyzen @theothernads @jellymiki @yepins @rift-in-worlds

Teaser

The Arrangement

Cold Palace Walls

Cracks in the Ice

Rumors & Jealousy

The Argument

Almost

Betrayal

The Distance Between Them

Confessions

The Crown & The Choice

You step down onto the road and the heat hits you like a physical thing.

Chicago in September is crisp. Leaves turning, wind off the lake, the smell of the city sharpening into something almost bearable. You have lived your whole life in that particular kind of autumn and you are standing here now in what should by all rights be the tail end of summer and the ground is baking. The sky is enormous. There are no buildings tall enough to interrupt it, nothing to cut the blue into manageable pieces, and for a moment you just stand there with your suitcase at your feet and your hat in your hand and feel very, very small.

“You the new schoolteacher?” You turn. A young man — can’t be more than nineteen — is leaning against the side of the bus stop with his arms crossed and his dark hair falling into his eyes. He’s got a look on his face that isn’t quite a smile but is clearly thinking about becoming one.

“That obvious?” you say.

“You’ve got a suitcase and a look on your face like you’re trying to figure out if you made a terrible mistake.” He pushes off the wall and picks up your larger bag before you can protest. “Riki. I work out at Sunrise Ranch but I’m in town most days. Mr. Lee sent me to check if you’d arrived.”

You blink. “Someone was expecting me?”

“Mrs. Calloway at the boarding house would’ve had your room ready since Tuesday,” he says, already walking. “Small town. News travels.”

You pick up your smaller case and follow him. Mrs. Calloway. The name lands somewhere behind your sternum and sits there, inert. Just a name. A common enough name. You are done flinching at common names. “I’m Y/N,” you say.

“I know,” Riki says, not unkindly. “Everyone does.”

—

Main Street — the only street, really, though two dirt roads branch off it like afterthoughts — is quiet in the way that feels inhabited rather than empty. A woman sweeps her front step and nods at you. Two men outside the hardware store pause their conversation to watch you pass with open, unapologetic curiosity. A little girl with two braids chases a dog around the side of the church and neither of them pays you any attention at all, which you find oddly comforting.

The diner is called Park’s and it has a specials board in the window that reads Tuesday: Peach Pie in chalk letters, and through the glass you can see red vinyl booths and a long counter with spinning stools and a man behind it who catches your eye through the window and raises a coffee pot in greeting like he’s been expecting you too. “That’s Jay,” Riki says, following your gaze. “He’ll want to talk your ear off. I’d give yourself a day before you go in or you’ll never get unpacked.”

“Is everyone here this—” you search for the word.

“Friendly?” Riki offers.

“I was going to say informed.”

He considers this. “Yeah,” he says. “Both.”

The boarding house sits at the end of the main street where the road widens slightly, a two-storey white clapboard building with a porch and a wind chime and flower boxes in the windows. It is, you think, the most aggressively quaint thing you have ever seen in your life. You grew up in an apartment on the fourth floor of a building that smelled like other people’s cooking and city rain and you are trying very hard not to let your face say anything impolite about wind chimes.

Mrs. Della, the landlady — not a Calloway, you exhale quietly — is a broad warm woman in her sixties with silver hair and flour on her apron who opens the door before you knock and says “There she is” like you’re something she ordered and is pleased to find arrived undamaged. “Come in, come in, you must be half dead from that bus.” She takes your smaller case clean out of your hand. “Riki, you staying for supper?”

“Can’t,” he says, setting your larger bag inside the door. He looks at you briefly, something almost like reassurance in it. “You’ll be alright here,” he says, which is a strange thing to say and which you believe immediately, and then he’s back down the porch steps and heading up the road with his hands in his pockets.

“Good boy,” Mrs. Della says, watching him go. “Lee Heeseung took him in two years back, gives him work and a roof. That man would give you the shirt off his back.” She says it the way people say things that are simply true, established fact, no elaboration required, and ushers you inside before you can ask who Lee Heeseung is.

Your room is small and clean and has a window that looks out over the back garden and a field beyond it and then nothing but flat land and sky all the way to the horizon. The bed has a quilt on it in yellow and white. There is a writing desk and a lamp and a hook on the back of the door.

You sit on the edge of the bed and let the quiet settle around you. In Chicago there is always noise — traffic and neighbours and the radiator banging in winter and the el train every twelve minutes rattling the windows. You have slept to that noise your whole life. This quiet is a different texture entirely. Crickets, somewhere. Wind moving through something dry. The distant low sound of what might be cattle.

You think about the apartment you gave up. The life you gave up — or that was given up on — and the way the story circulated, the whispers at the school where you’d taught for three years, the way your mother had said maybe if you’d been less difficult, Y/N, as though your own broken engagement was a character flaw you’d displayed in public. You’d applied for twenty-seven jobs in towns you’d never heard of. Castillo Creek, Texas was the one that wrote back.

You lie back on the yellow quilt and look at the ceiling and think: New soil. See what grows.

In the morning Mrs. Della makes you eggs and biscuits and coffee so strong it makes your eyes water and tells you that the schoolhouse is two blocks north, that school starts Monday which gives you four days to settle, that the previous teacher Miss Hargrove retired to be closer to her sister in San Antonio and left her lesson plans in the desk drawer, and that if you need anything at all you are to ask and not to be proud about it. “We don’t stand on ceremony here,” she says, refilling your cup. “You’ll find people are plain. They say what they mean.”

“That’s refreshing,” you say, and mean it more than she knows.

“You’ll fit in fine,” she says, in the same tone Riki used last night, that same easy certainty, and you don’t know yet whether Castillo Creek is simply a town full of optimists or whether they can see something in you that you can’t currently see in yourself.

After breakfast you walk the street. Slowly, no destination, just learning the shape of the place. The hardware store is run by a man named Gus who shakes your hand and calls you ma’am and means it respectfully. The general store has everything from canned peaches to horse liniment arranged with cheerful illogic on its shelves. The church noticeboard has a harvest dance announced for the first week of October, hand-lettered on card. A tabby cat sleeps on the post office step and does not move when you step over it.

You end up at Park’s because you are not made of stone and the peach pie in the window has been watching you since yesterday. The bell above the door chimes when you push it open. The diner smells like coffee and something frying and woodsmoke and the particular warm smell of a place that has been feeding people for a long time. Three of the booths are occupied — two older men playing cards over the remains of breakfast, a young woman nursing a baby and reading a magazine, a teenager staring out the window like he’s being paid for it.

The man behind the counter looks up and grins like you’ve just won something. “There she is,” he says, which is apparently how everyone in this town greets you. He’s handsome in an easy, untroubled way — dark eyes, an apron over his shirt, the kind of smile that has probably never caused him a day’s trouble because it is entirely, disarmingly genuine. “Jay Park. Welcome to Castillo Creek, and more importantly, welcome to my diner. Sit anywhere. Coffee?”

“Please,” you say, sliding onto a counter stool. “Y/N.”

“I know.” He’s already pouring. “The whole town knows. Don’t let that spook you — it’s not menacing, we’re just starved for news.” He sets the cup in front of you. “You surviving Mrs. Della’s biscuits?”

“They’re extraordinary.”

“Don’t tell her I said this but mine are better.” He leans on the counter. “How are you finding it so far?”

“I’ve been here less than twenty-four hours.”

“First impressions.”

You wrap your hands around the coffee cup. Outside the window the main street sits quiet in the morning sun, dust turning gold where the light hits it, a man on horseback moving slow at the far end of the road, hat low against the glare. “It’s very quiet,” you say.

“City girl.”

“Is it that obvious?”

“The accent gives you away a little,” he says, not unkindly. “Chicago?”

“Born and raised.”

He nods like this explains something. “You’ll either love it here or you’ll be back on the bus in a month. There’s not usually an in-between.” He tilts his head, studying you with the frank, comfortable curiosity of a man who talks to everyone and has learned to read them quickly. “My money’s on love it.”

“Why?”

“You ordered coffee before you ordered pie,” he says. “Practical. And you’re still here instead of back at the boarding house wondering what you’ve done. Means you’re the kind of person who walks toward things.”

You look at him for a moment. “You do this with everyone?”

“Do what?”

“Make them feel like you’ve known them for years.”

Jay grins, unabashed. “Only the interesting ones.” He reaches under the counter and produces a plate with a slice of peach pie on it, sets it in front of you without asking. “On the house. Welcome to town.”

You eat the pie. It is, genuinely, one of the best things you’ve ever tasted, which you tell him, and he looks so pleased about it that you find yourself smiling for what feels like the first time in a long time — the real kind, not the composed kind you’ve been wearing since spring.

You are still there an hour later when the bell above the door chimes and a man walks in. You notice the hat first. Worn tan leather, shaped by years and weather, pushed back just enough to see his face.

Then the face — and it is, unfairly, a lot of face: dark eyes, jaw that belongs in a painting, and a smile that appears when he spots Jay like the sun deciding to come out from behind something. He is tall and lean in the way of men who work with their bodies, wearing a shirt with the sleeves rolled and boots with actual dust on them, and he moves through the diner like a man who is completely comfortable taking up space, not arrogantly, just — naturally. Like the room fits him.

Half the diner looks up when he walks in. You notice this and then notice that he doesn’t seem to notice it. “Heeseung,” Jay says. “You’re late.”

“Riki let one of the mares out this morning,” the man says, dropping onto the stool two down from you. “Had to get her back in before she ate the garden.” His voice has the particular warm drawl of a man who has lived in Texas his whole life, the vowels long and unhurried. He glances over — and for just a moment, before the smile arrives, you see him register you. A quick, frank, unguarded look. Then the smile.

It is, you think distantly, a remarkably good smile. “You must be the new schoolteacher,” he says.

“So I’ve been told,” you say.

He huffs a quiet laugh and extends a hand across the empty stool between you. “Lee Heeseung. I run Sunrise Ranch, out east of town.” A pause, then, easy as breathing: “Welcome to Castillo Creek, darlin’.”

The darlin’ lands warmly, casually, the way he probably says it to everyone. You shake his hand. His grip is firm and his palm is calloused and he lets go at exactly the right moment. “Y/N,” you say.

“Pretty name,” he says, and turns back to Jay to ask about the lunch special, and that is that.

You finish your pie. You say goodbye to Jay, who tells you to come back tomorrow, and nod to Heeseung, who tips his hat slightly without looking up from his coffee, and you push out into the dry Texas morning with the bell chiming behind you and the sky enormous overhead. You think: new soil.

You walk back toward the boarding house and do not think about the smile. (You try.)

—

The schoolhouse is a single rectangular building painted white, sitting back from the road behind a low wooden fence with a gate that sticks. There is a bell above the door on a rope, a covered porch with two steps, and six windows along each side that let in long rectangles of morning light. Inside: four rows of desks, a blackboard, a bookshelf with a sadly depleted top shelf, a globe with a crack running through the Pacific, a teacher’s desk at the front with a chair that wobbles on its left leg, and the lesson plans Miss Hargrove left in the drawer, written in such small precise handwriting that you have to hold them close to the lamp to read them.

You spend the weekend getting acquainted with it. You rearrange the desks slightly — four rows feels regimented for fourteen children ranging from five to eleven — into a looser configuration that won’t make the little ones feel like they’re waiting to be sentenced. You find chalk in the wrong drawer and a box of coloured pencils in the right one. You fix the gate with a piece of wire you find coiled on the porch. You read Miss Hargrove’s lesson plans and her notes on each child, written in the margins in that same small hand: Clara D. — very bright, reads above her level. Tommy H. — struggles with numbers but never says so. Eli L. — clever, restless, tests limits. Handle firmly but don’t let him know you’re doing it.

You read that last one twice. Eli L.

You’d heard the name once already, briefly, the way you hear a lot of names in a town like this — someone mentioning someone else in passing, the social web of a small place where everyone is connected to everyone by approximately two degrees. Riki worked at Sunrise Ranch. Sunrise Ranch belonged to Lee Heeseung. Lee Heeseung had a son. Clever, restless, tests limits.

You put the lesson plans back in the drawer, look at the rearranged desks.

Monday morning arrives with the particular clarity of a sky that has not clouded in weeks. You are at the schoolhouse by seven-thirty. You write your name on the board — Miss Y/N — and you stand at the front and look at the empty desks and do something you haven’t let yourself do since you stepped off that bus: you feel, briefly and privately, afraid. Not of the children, not of the job — you have been a teacher for three years and you are good at it, this you know — but of the starting over. Of the standing in a room and introducing yourself to people who don’t know you yet and hoping that this time, in this place, what they learn about you is something you’ve chosen.

You take a breath. You put your composed face on. You go stand on the porch to watch them arrive.

They come in ones and twos, mostly walked by mothers who linger at the gate with polite curiosity to get a look at you, a few by fathers, one or two on their own who are clearly old enough to have decided they don’t need walking. The little ones are solemn and wide-eyed. The older ones are watchful. They file onto the porch and past you with varying degrees of shyness, and you smile at each of them and say good morning, and most of them say it back.

The boy who doesn’t say it back arrives at eight on the dot, alone. He is small for seven — wiry and dark-haired with his father’s eyes and a gap where one of his front teeth used to be — and he walks through the gate with his lunch pail swinging and his chin up with the specific energy of a child who has decided in advance that he is not going to be impressed. He stops at the foot of the porch steps and looks up at you.

You look down at him. “Good morning,” you say.

He considers you. His gaze is frank and assessing in a way that reminds you immediately, disconcertingly, of his father. “You talk funny,” he says.

Behind him, two of the other children go very still in that particular way children do when someone has said the thing everyone was thinking. “I do,” you agree pleasantly. “Good morning.”

He blinks — he was expecting something else, you can tell — and then, almost against his will: “Morning.” He goes inside. You allow yourself precisely one second of satisfaction and then follow him in.

Their names, as you learn them through the morning: Clara, Tommy, Ruth, Beau, Ida, Jesse, Mae, Henry, Grace, Daniel, Lottie, Patrick, Susie, and Eli. Fourteen children, five to eleven, in one room with one teacher, which is simply the way of it in a town this size and which you knew going in and which presents itself as exactly the specific beautiful chaos you anticipated.

The little ones need different work from the older ones, the older ones need to be trusted enough not to resent the time you spend with the younger, and the whole arrangement requires a kind of orchestrated independence that takes most new teachers a month to establish.

You have it running by lunch. This is not arrogance. It is three years of practice and the lesson plans of Miss Hargrove, who clearly knew what she was doing, and the children themselves, who are — beneath the shyness and the staring — genuinely good. Clara reads to the two youngest while you work arithmetic with the middle group. Tommy, who struggles with numbers and has clearly been told by someone who loves him to hide it, relaxes visibly when you kneel beside his desk and show him the same problem three different ways without making it a thing. Grace, who is eleven and takes her seniority seriously, helps you hand out the coloured pencils for the afternoon drawing exercise with the gravity of someone performing a civic duty.

Eli sits in the second row and does exactly enough work to be technically compliant and spends the rest of the time studying you like you’re a puzzle he’s deciding whether to bother solving. He is not disruptive. He does not cause trouble, exactly. He just — watches. And occasionally says something, not quite under his breath, that makes the children near him stifle laughter, and when you look at him he is already looking at the ceiling or his pencil or the middle distance, expression perfectly innocent.

At half past two he raises his hand for the first time. You are, cautiously, relieved. “Yes, Eli?”

“How come you don’t say cahn’t like us?” he says. “You say can’t like it’s short.” The room goes quiet with interest.

“Because I grew up in Chicago,” you say. “People talk differently there.”

“Why?”

“That’s a good question. Different places develop different ways of speaking over time depending on who settled there and where they came from originally. It’s called a dialect.”

He turns this over. “So you’re not talking wrong, you’re just talking different.”

“That’s exactly right.”

He seems to file this away somewhere. He looks at his desk, then back up at you. “My dad says Chicago’s real big.”

“It is.”

“Did you like it?”

There is nothing loaded in the question — he is seven, he is simply curious — but the room is listening and you have a composed face for exactly this and you use it. “I did,” you say. “But I like it here too. Different things to like.” You hold his gaze for just a moment. “Good question, Eli.” He ducks his head in a way that might, if you’re reading it right, be pleased.

You let them out at three o’clock. They pour off the porch like water and scatter in every direction — some toward the main street, some down the side road, a few collected by waiting parents at the gate. You stand on the porch and watch them go with the pleasant exhausted satisfaction of a good first day, the kind where you know the shape of things now even if the details are still forming.

The last child through the gate is Eli, lunch pail swinging again, cap pushed back on his head. He pauses at the gate and turns back. “Miss?” he calls.

“Yes?”

He looks at you for a moment, that assessing look. Then: “You fixed the gate.”

“It was sticking,” you say. He nods, apparently satisfied with this. And then he’s gone, off down the road at a trot, and you lean against the porch post and look at the empty yard and the long afternoon light making everything gold and think that clever, restless, tests limits is right but that the note should have also said watching everything, deciding what to do with it.

Jay brings you pie. Not in the diner — he appears at the boarding house at half past five with a covered plate and the energy of a man who has been wanting to ask you about your day since approximately eight that morning. Mrs. Della lets him in with the equanimity of someone accustomed to Jay Park appearing with baked goods and sets an extra cup on the table. “Well?” he says, sitting down across from you with the plate between you, which you note he has not uncovered, clearly operating on the pie as leverage.

“Well,” you say.

“First day.” He tilts his head. “Good? Bad? You still here, which is promising.”

“Good,” you say honestly. “They’re good kids.”

“They are.” He uncovers the plate — cherry, this time. “Any trouble?”

You think of dark eyes and a gap-toothed grin and you talk funny. “Nothing I couldn’t handle.”

Jay smiles, something knowing in it. “Eli Lee give you a hard time?”

“He was perfectly behaved.”

“That’s almost worse, honestly.” He leans back in his chair. “He’s a good kid. He just — tests people. Wants to know if you’re going to stay.” He says it lightly but you hear something underneath it, something careful. “His last teacher, Miss Hargrove, he adored her by the end. Took him a month.”

“I’ve got time,” you say.

Jay looks at you the way he did that first morning at the counter, that frank easy assessment. “You know Heeseung came into the diner after you left Friday,” he says, with the absolute casualness of a man deploying information he has been sitting on for days.

You cut into the pie. “Did he.”

“Asked how you seemed. Whether you looked settled.” Jay’s expression is the picture of innocence. “Just being neighbourly.”

“That’s nice of him.”

“Mm.” Jay drinks his coffee. “He doesn’t usually ask.”

You eat your cherry pie and look at Jay Park over your fork and decide that you like him enormously and that he is also going to be an absolute menace and that these two things are entirely compatible. “Thank you for the pie,” you say.

Jay grins. “Anytime, darlin’.”

The word lands differently in his mouth — friendly, careless, the way you’d expect. The way it probably sounds from everyone. You eat your pie and don’t think about the way it sounded Friday morning on a counter stool two seats down from you, unhurried and warm, like the man saying it had all the time in the world.

Wednesday afternoon you are erasing the board after the children have gone when you hear the gate. You turn, chalk dust on your hands, and Heeseung Lee is coming through it.

He has his hat in his hand this time — held at his side, the gesture you will come to learn is his version of courtesy, the small deliberate thing he does when he’s on someone else’s ground. He is in his work clothes, boots dusty, shirt with the sleeves rolled like the first time you saw him, and he is looking at the schoolhouse with a particular quiet expression that you can’t read yet. “Mr. Lee,” you say from the porch.

He looks up. “Miss Y/N.” The smile comes easy and unhurried, the same one from the diner, and you are annoyed to find that it works just as well the second time. “Hope I’m not disturbing.”

“Not at all.” You dust the chalk from your hands on your apron. “Is something wrong?”

“No, ma’am.” He reaches the foot of the steps and stops there, which you note — he doesn’t come up onto the porch uninvited, just stands at the bottom with his hat in his hand. “Eli mentioned you fixed the gate.”

You blink. “It was sticking.”

“I know. I kept meaning to get to it.” He looks at the gate briefly and back at you. “Just wanted to thank you. And to say — he told me about the dialect conversation.”

“Oh?”

“He came home and used the word dialect four times at supper.” Something warm moves through his expression. “He hasn’t stopped asking questions about Chicago.”

You lean against the porch post. “He’s very bright.”

“I know,” Heeseung says, quietly, the way parents say things about their children when they’re proud and trying not to make a production of it. “He can be a handful.”

“He’s been fine,” you say, and mean it. “He’s testing me. I don’t mind being tested.”

Heeseung looks at you for a moment — that same brief, unguarded register you caught in the diner, there and then gone. “Miss Hargrove said the same thing about him.” A pause. “She was right, and so are you.” He puts his hat back on, settling it with the ease of long habit. “I won’t keep you. Just — thank you. For the gate and for the patience.”

“It’s my job,” you say.

“The gate wasn’t,” he says simply, and tips his hat, and walks back through it — and you notice, as he goes, that he lifts the handle the right way so it doesn’t stick on him. He knew how it worked. He just hadn’t gotten to it.

You stand on the porch for a moment after he’s gone, chalk dust still on your apron, the afternoon light going gold and long across the schoolyard. Alright, you think. But it’s a different alright than the one on the bus.

—

You learn the rhythms of Castillo Creek the way you learn anything new — by paying attention. Monday through Friday the main street wakes slowly, the diner first, Jay’s lights on before six and the smell of coffee reaching the boarding house if the wind is right. The general store opens at seven, the hardware store at eight. The church bell rings at nine for no reason anyone can explain except that it always has.

Afternoons are quiet in the way that heat makes things quiet, everyone retreating into shade, and then around four the street comes back to life — horses at the post, trucks pulling in, the sound of voices carrying in the dry air. Evenings on the boarding house porch: crickets, the occasional distant sound of music from the diner where Jay sometimes puts a record on after hours, the sky going colours you don’t have names for yet.

Weekends the ranch hands come into town. This is when you first understand that Sunrise Ranch is not a small operation. Saturday morning and there are three trucks parked outside the general store and Jay’s counter is full and the voices are different — louder, easier, the particular looseness of men at the end of a working week. You are becoming a recognisable figure on the main street now, two weeks in, and people nod or wave or say morning, Miss Y/N with the comfortable familiarity of a town that has decided you belong, or is at least willing to extend the provisional assumption.

Riki finds you at the general store on the second Saturday, reaching for a tin on a high shelf. “Here,” he says, getting it down for you without ceremony.

“Thank you.” You put it in your basket. “How’s the mare?”

He blinks, then remembers. “Back in her paddock. She does it once a month like clockwork.” He falls into step beside you toward the counter, hands in his pockets. “How’s Eli?”

“Getting there,” you say.

Riki’s mouth twitches. “He told me you knew what a dialect was.”

“He told his father the same thing four times at supper, apparently.”

“Five times,” Riki says. “I was there. Mr. Lee made him use it in a sentence correctly before he could have dessert.” Something soft moves through his expression — fond and private, the look of someone describing a home. “He does that. Makes it a game so Eli doesn’t know he’s being taught.”

You look at him. “You live at the ranch?”

“Have done for two years.” He picks up a paper bag of something from the counter and adds it to your basket without asking, then pays for it along with his own things before you can protest. “Mr. Lee offered me the room off the stable when I first got here. Said I could work it off.” A pause. “I haven’t worked it off yet. I don’t think he’s keeping count.”

You think of the gate. Of a man standing at the foot of porch steps with his hat in his hand, not coming up unless invited. “He seems like a good man,” you say, carefully.

Riki looks at you with the frank, uncomplicated assessment of a nineteen-year-old who has not yet learned to be oblique. “He’s the best man I know,” he says simply. And then the door opens and two of the other ranch hands come in and Riki’s face shifts back into something easier and the conversation moves on, but you carry that best man I know out of the store with you and into the bright Saturday morning and find that you believe it without quite knowing why.

The invitation comes through Eli. It is a Thursday, three weeks into term, and Eli has — incrementally, perceptibly, in the way of a child who makes decisions slowly and then commits to them entirely — decided that you are acceptable. This has manifested in: asking you approximately forty questions about Chicago over the course of various lunchtimes, showing you a drawing he did of his horse with the air of someone bestowing an honour, correcting Tommy’s arithmetic before you can get there and then looking at you to see if you’ll mind, and most recently appointing himself the unofficial distributor of coloured pencils, a role Grace has had to be diplomatically persuaded to share.

On Thursday he stays behind after the others have gone.

You are at your desk reviewing the week’s work when you become aware that he is still in his seat, lunch pail on the desk in front of him, regarding you with his father’s eyes and an expression of elaborate casualness. “Yes, Eli?” you say, without looking up.

A pause. “My dad says you should come see the ranch.”

You look up. He is studying his lunch pail. “He said if you wanted. He said don’t make it a thing.” He glances up at you briefly. “I’m supposed to say it like it’s my idea.”

You press your lips together very firmly. “Whose idea was it?”

Eli considers the ethics of this for a moment. “Both,” he decides. “I said you’d like the horses and he said he’d been meaning to ask.” He picks up his lunch pail. “Saturday morning. Riki said he’d make sure the good horses are out.”

You look at this seven-year-old boy with his gap-toothed earnestness and his father’s dark eyes and the absolute transparency of a child who is not yet old enough to be a convincing liar and feel something in your chest do something inconvenient. “Saturday morning,” you say.

Eli nods, satisfied, and slides off his chair. At the door he pauses. “Miss?”

“Yes?”

“Dad said wear boots if you have them.” A beat. “Do you have boots?”

“I’ll manage,” you say. He looks doubtful but lets it go.

You do not have boots.

Mrs. Della solves this problem on Friday evening by producing a pair from somewhere in the back of a wardrobe that fit you well enough and have clearly belonged to several people before you, worn in and comfortable in the way of things that have been used properly. She does not make a fuss about it. She sets them by your door and says “for your visit to the ranch” with the serenity of a woman who knew this was coming before you did, which you are beginning to understand is simply Mrs. Della’s relationship with information.

Saturday morning is cooler than usual, a thin cloud cover cutting the worst of the heat, and you walk the road east of town with Mrs. Della’s boots on your feet and the particular feeling of a person going somewhere they haven’t decided how to feel about yet.

Sunrise Ranch announces itself before you reach it. The land opens up, the scrub giving way to fenced pasture, horses moving slow in the morning light — four, five, you count seven in the near paddock — and then the gate with Sunrise in iron letters across the top, and beyond it a long low ranch house in weathered timber, a stable block, a water tower, a barn with its doors open, and the general cheerful disorder of a working property.

Eli appears from nowhere, running. “You came,” he says, like this was uncertain, and then immediately: “You have boots.” He looks at them. “They’re okay.”

“Thank you,” you say gravely.

“Come see Maple.” He is already walking, assuming you’ll follow, which you do. “Maple’s mine. Dad got her for me last year. She’s brown.” He says this last detail with enormous authority, as though colour is the primary criterion for horse quality.

“Is she,” you say.

“She’s the best one.” He pushes open the stable door. “Don’t tell Riki’s horse.”

The stable smells of hay and horses and something warm and animal that is not unpleasant, and the light comes through the high windows in long dusty bars, and Maple is indeed brown and does indeed regard you with the large patient eyes of a creature who has learned that humans are mostly harmless if you wait them out. Eli shows her off with the proprietorial pride of a small boy who has been trusted with something real, and you let him lead you through every detail — her feeding schedule, her preferred brushing side, the way she does something with her ears when she’s happy — and listen properly, because he is telling you something important about himself by telling you about the horse. “She’s beautiful,” you say, and mean it.

Eli glows. “Yeah,” he agrees. He strokes her nose. “Dad taught me to ride on her. Well — on her and Scout. Scout’s too big for me yet but I can get on him if someone helps.”

“Who’s Scout?”

“Mine,” says a voice behind you. You turn. Heeseung is in the stable doorway, hat on, a coffee cup in one hand, backlit by the morning in a way that is doing no one any favours. He looks at you with that easy unhurried expression and then at Eli. “You showing her around properly?”

“I was getting to the rest,” Eli says, with dignity.

“Sure you were.” Heeseung’s gaze moves back to you. “Morning. Glad you came.” He says it simply, no particular weight on it, and holds out the second coffee cup that you hadn’t noticed he was holding. “Mrs. Della said you take it black.”

You take the cup. “She told you that?”

“Jay told me. Mrs. Della told Jay.” He lifts a shoulder. “Small town.”

You drink the coffee. It is good — strong and dark and made by someone who takes it seriously. “Thank you.”

“Thank Eli,” he says. “It was mostly his idea.”

“He told me,” you say.

Heeseung looks at his son with an expression of fond resignation. “Did he.” Eli, sensing this conversation is edging toward accountability, has become very interested in Maple’s left ear.

He shows you the ranch himself, Eli orbiting ahead and behind like a satellite, Riki appearing occasionally from whatever task he’s been given and nodding at you with the quiet approval of someone whose opinion you hadn’t realised you were seeking.

Heeseung walks beside you with his coffee and talks about the land with the ease of a man who has known it his whole life — the pasture his father planted, the fence line he extended six years ago, the water table, the horses by name and temperament, the rhythm of the seasons out here where seasons are more about rain than temperature. He is not performing. That is the thing you notice, watching him from the corner of your eye as he points out the far ridge where the light hits different at sunset. He is simply telling you, the way people talk about things they love when they’re comfortable enough to let it show. “How long has your family been here?” you ask.

“Three generations,” he says. “My grandfather broke the land. My father ran it until—” a brief pause, easy enough that you’d miss it if you weren’t paying attention “—until I was ready to.” He looks out at the pasture. “I can’t imagine being anywhere else.”

“I used to think that about Chicago,” you say, before you mean to.

He glances at you. “What changed?”

The morning light is warm on the fence rail where you’ve stopped. The horses move slow in the paddock. Eli is attempting to convince Riki to let him ride something he’s probably not supposed to, and Riki is maintaining a very patient no. “Things do,” you say. “Change.”

It is not an answer and you both know it. But Heeseung doesn’t push — just nods once, slow, and looks back out at the pasture, and the silence that follows is the comfortable kind. The kind you don’t feel obligated to fill.

“Scout,” he says, after a moment. You follow his gaze. A large grey horse has appeared at the paddock fence — appeared is the right word, horses move quietly for their size, you’re learning — and is regarding you with the same patient assessment as Maple, though with more authority behind it.

“He’s enormous,” you say.

“He’s a gentleman,” Heeseung says. “Come here.” You follow him to the fence. Scout watches you approach with ears forward. Heeseung holds out his hand and the horse drops his nose into it with the ease of long familiarity, a small exhale of breath like a greeting. “Give him your hand,” Heeseung says. “Palm up.”

You do. Scout sniffs your palm, his breath warm and grass-scented, and then shifts his nose slightly to nudge at your wrist, which makes you laugh — actually laugh, surprised out of it, the unguarded kind. Heeseung is watching you when you look up. He looks away just a moment too late, back to Scout, and settles his hand on the horse’s neck. “He likes you,” he says.

“Or he wants something.”

“Same thing, with horses.” The corner of his mouth lifts. He rubs Scout’s neck once and steps back from the fence. “You ride?”

“No.”

“You want to?”

You look at Scout. Scout looks at you. He is very large and very calm and the morning is soft and there is coffee going warm in your hand and no one in this field knows anything about you except that you fixed a gate and knew the word dialect and took your coffee black. “Yes,” you say.

He doesn’t put you on Scout — that comes later, he says, and something in the later is easy and assuming in a way that you notice and don’t examine — but on a smaller bay mare named Honey who is, in Eli’s expert opinion, basically a chair, she’s so calm, which Heeseung overrules diplomatically.

He helps you up with one hand steadying the stirrup and one hand briefly at your waist — functional, impersonal, the practiced efficiency of someone who has helped people onto horses many times — and then steps back and talks you through it. Heels down. Hands soft. Don’t grip with your knees. Breathe.

You walk Honey around the paddock twice with Heeseung at her head and Eli on the fence calling encouragement that is mostly suggestions about how you’re holding the reins wrong. By the third pass Heeseung drops back and lets you go alone, and there is a specific feeling in that — in him deciding you’re ready, stepping back, watching from the fence with his arms resting on the top rail and his hat low — that you don’t have a name for but that sits somewhere behind your sternum and stays there. “You’re a natural,” he calls.

“She’s a chair,” you call back, and hear him laugh from across the paddock, a real one, the kind that alters the whole shape of his face.

Eli says “I said that” with great indignation.

You stay until noon. It isn’t planned. It is the accumulation of small things: Eli deciding you needed to see the barn cat’s new kittens, the kittens being an objectively compelling argument for staying, Riki appearing with a plate of something Mrs. Lee — Heeseung’s housekeeper, an iron-haired woman named Bea who has been with the ranch for twenty years — had left covered on the kitchen table. You all eat on the porch in the late morning sun, Eli wedged between you and Heeseung with a kitten in his lap that he has named Chicago with the satisfied look of someone cementing an inside joke.

It is — easy. Unreasonably easy for a woman who has spent two months being careful about everything.

Heeseung sits with his ankle crossed over his knee and doesn’t push any conversations and doesn’t fill silences that don’t need filling and listens when you talk in the particular way that makes you feel actually heard rather than waited out. Once, when Eli says something that makes you laugh, he catches it — the laugh — in that peripheral way, not staring, just noticing, and then looks deliberately at something else. You notice him noticing. You look at something else too.

He walks you back to the gate at noon. Eli has been redirected to afternoon chores with the selective enthusiasm of a child who has negotiated the terms. Riki raises a hand from the stable door. The horses stand easy in the afternoon quiet.

At the gate Heeseung stops and holds it open — it swings cleanly, well-oiled, this one — and tips his hat. “Thank you for coming,” he says. “Eli’s been talking about this since Thursday.”

“Only since Thursday?” you say.

He smiles. God, that smile. “Since Tuesday,” he admits. “I told him to wait.”

You step through the gate and turn. He’s on the other side of it, hat tipped forward, the morning light going warm gold over the ranch behind him. Scout visible in the paddock beyond, Maple beside him. “Thank you for the coffee,” you say. “And the riding lesson.”

“Anytime,” he says. And then, easy as breathing, the way he always does it, like it costs him nothing: “You’re welcome here, darlin’. Any time you want.”

You walk the road back to town with the borrowed boots and the feeling of a morning that opened up something you hadn’t known was closed. Behind you the gate swings shut, clean on its hinge. New soil, you think. See what grows.

—

October arrives like an exhale. The heat doesn’t break exactly — you’re learning it doesn’t really break here, not the way it does in Chicago where summer ends with a week of storms and then suddenly you need a coat — but it softens. The mornings are cooler now, the light coming in at a different angle, and the scrub on the edge of town goes colours you weren’t expecting: amber and rust and a dry pale gold that isn’t quite like anything you’ve seen before. Mrs. Della puts a second quilt on your bed. The church noticeboard updates the harvest dance announcement with a date: Saturday, October 12th. All welcome. Bring a dish.

You have been in Castillo Creek six weeks. You know, now, which floorboard in the schoolhouse creaks and how to avoid it during silent reading so you don’t startle the little ones. You know that Tommy is left-handed and was made to switch and that this is why his numbers come out backwards sometimes, and you have quietly, without making it a thing, begun letting him work with his left hand and watching his shoulders drop two inches with relief. You know that Clara will read anything you put in front of her and that the shelf of books in the schoolhouse is genuinely inadequate and that you have written to the county school board about this and received in response a letter of such elaborate non-commitment that you have started a separate fund from your own salary, small but growing. You know that Eli Lee will behave perfectly for four days and then on the fifth do something just left of the line — not malicious, never malicious, just testing — and that the correct response is to look at him steadily and say his name once, and he will subside, and on day six he will be angelic in a way that is clearly an apology.

You know that Jay’s cherry pie is better than his peach, that Riki takes his coffee with enough sugar to make your teeth hurt, that Bea at the ranch makes the best biscuits in Texas and would probably agree with you about this if you said so, that the tabby cat on the post office step is named Gerald and will accept exactly one ear scratch before moving to bite you. You know that Heeseung Lee tips his hat to every woman on the main street and that it means something different when he does it to you, and you have not examined this too closely because you are being careful and new soil takes time and you are not here to start anything. You are just noticing. That’s all.

Eli asks you about your family on a Tuesday. It is lunchtime, the other children spread across the yard in the October sun, and Eli has taken to eating his lunch on the porch steps near where you stand with your coffee. This started without announcement — one day he was in the yard, the next he was on the steps — and you have not remarked on it because remarking on it would make him self-conscious about having done something soft. “Do you miss Chicago?” he asks, through a mouthful of whatever Bea has packed him.

“Sometimes,” you say. It’s true. You miss the lake. The particular smell of the city in November. The diner near your old apartment that made pierogi on Thursdays.

“What do you miss?”

“The lake,” you say. “Lake Michigan. It’s enormous — like an inland sea. You can stand at the edge and not see the other side.”

Eli processes this. “We have the creek,” he offers.

“I know. I like the creek.”

He nods, satisfied that the comparison comes out even. Then: “Do you have family there?”

“My parents,” you say. “A brother.”

“Do they visit?”

You think of your mother’s voice on the telephone — the one call you’ve made since arriving, standing in the general store with the receiver pressed to your ear, your mother saying when are you coming home in the tone that meant you’ve made your point now. “Not yet,” you say.

Eli swings his feet against the step. “My grandma visits sometimes. Dad’s mom. She lives in Austin.” He picks at his lunch. “I don’t have a mom,” he says, with the casual directness of a child who has been saying this long enough that it no longer feels like a wound, just a fact. “She went away.”

Your chest does something careful and quiet. “I know,” you say, gently. “I’m sorry.”

“Dad says she got sick,” Eli says. “But I think—” he stops. Looks at the yard. Starts again: “I think that’s not the whole story. But he doesn’t want me to be sad so he says it that way.” He looks up at you with those dark perceptive eyes. “Do you think that’s bad? To say a not-whole story?”

You look at this seven-year-old boy who is so much older than seven in the specific ways that loss makes children old, and you think about not-whole stories and composed faces and she wanted a simpler life and how many versions of the truth are actually just the parts you can bear to carry in public.

“I think,” you say carefully, “that sometimes people tell not-whole stories because they’re trying to protect someone they love. And I think when you’re older you’ll understand the rest, and your dad will tell it to you when you’re ready.” You meet his eyes. “Does that make sense?”

Eli thinks about it seriously, which is the only way he thinks about things. “Yeah,” he says. Then: “You’re smart.”

“Thank you.”

“Dad thinks so too.” He says it with absolute offhand innocence and takes a large bite of his sandwich and looks at the yard, and you look at the middle distance and drink your coffee and say nothing at all.

The thing about a small town is that the architecture of people’s lives is visible in a way it never is in a city. In Chicago you could live next door to someone for three years and know nothing about them. Here the walls are thin by design — not maliciously, just the natural result of everyone’s business being conducted in the same four blocks, the same diner, the same church on Sundays, the same post office queue. You learn things about people without trying. You learn them through Jay, who is a font of town history delivered in the register of casual conversation, and through Mrs. Della, whose knowledge of Castillo Creek extends back forty years and who shares it in the same tone she uses to describe the weather — matter of fact, no particular drama.

This is how you learn that Heeseung Lee has been running the ranch alone since he was twenty-six. That his father died the year before Eli was born, and his mother moved to Austin to be near her sister, and Heeseung stayed because someone had to and because the land was in him the way some things get into people.

That Clara — his wife, Eli’s mother — left when Eli was two. Jay tells you this on a Wednesday evening when you’ve stayed past closing, helping him wipe down the counter because you were in the middle of a conversation and neither of you wanted to stop it, and he says it quietly, without the gossipy relish he sometimes deploys for lesser information. He says it like he’s trusting you with something.

“She wasn’t unhappy,” Jay says, wiping the same spot twice. “Or — she was, but not because of him. She was a person who needed more than this place could give her and she stayed too long trying to want what she had and then she left.” He sets down the cloth. “Eli was two. Heeseung — he didn’t fall apart. That’s the thing about him. He just. Kept going.” He looks at the counter. “He hasn’t let anyone close since. Not like that.”

You are quiet for a moment. “Why are you telling me this?”

Jay looks at you with his frank dark eyes and the expression of a man who has thought carefully about what he’s going to say. “Because you’re going to be around for a while,” he says. “And I think you should know who he is. The real shape of him.” A pause. “And because he asked about you again today.”

“Jay—”

“He asked if you seemed settled,” Jay says. “Same question as before. He asks it like it’s nothing.” He picks the cloth back up. “Heeseung doesn’t ask about people, is the thing. He notices them. He listens. But he doesn’t ask.” He looks at you. “He’s asking about you.”

You go home to the boarding house and sit at your writing desk for a long time without writing anything.

—

The week before the harvest dance, Eli presents you with a drawing.

This is not unprecedented — he has given you two previous drawings, one of Maple and one of what you eventually identified as the schoolhouse, rendered in the bold confident lines of a child who draws from feeling rather than observation. This one he places on your desk at the end of Friday with the elaborate casualness he deploys for things that matter to him.

You wait until the room is empty before you look at it. It is two figures. One small, one tall. The small one has a gap in its teeth rendered in careful pencil. The tall one has long hair and is wearing — you look closer — a dress with a collar, which is clearly you. They are standing in front of something you take a moment to identify as the paddock fence, and between them, taking up most of the page, is a horse. Brown. Maple, you think, though the horse has been given an expression of benevolent authority that transcends species.

At the bottom, in the large uneven letters of a child still mastering the relationship between thought and handwriting: MISS YN AND ELI. FRIENDS.

You sit with that for a long moment. Then you take a piece of tape and put it on the wall beside the blackboard, where you can see it from your desk, and you go home for the weekend with something warm sitting in your chest that you don’t try to name.

Saturday, the day before the harvest dance, you are in Jay’s diner mid-morning when Heeseung comes in. This is not unusual. He comes in most Saturday mornings, sometimes with Riki, sometimes alone, and you have in six weeks arrived at a kind of comfortable parallel presence with him — you are often there, he is often there, you talk easily when you talk and don’t force it when you don’t, and Jay watches the whole thing with the serene satisfaction of a man who has predicted an outcome and is waiting for everyone else to catch up.

Today he comes in alone and sits at the counter and orders coffee and then turns to you with his hat on the stool beside him and says: “You going to the dance tomorrow?”

“Mrs. Della seems to think I’m obligated,” you say.

The corner of his mouth. “She’s not wrong. First harvest dance as a Castillo Creek resident is non-negotiable.” He turns his coffee cup in his hands. “It’s good. They do it right.”

“Do you go every year?”

“Every year.” He pauses. “I usually take Eli for the first part. He passes out around nine and I bring him home and come back.”

“Who looks after him?”

“Bea stays late.” He glances at you sidelong. “She has opinions about the dance. Mostly that someone should be dancing and it might as well be me.”

You smile. “Sound advice.”

“Mm.” He is quiet for a moment in the comfortable way he does quiet. Then: “Would you want to — go over together? You and me and Eli. He’d like that.”

The way he says it: simple, direct, no particular performance of casualness but no weight on it either. Just an offer, made plainly. You look at him. He is looking at his coffee cup with the expression of a man who has said the thing and is now waiting without making it a big deal either way. “Yes,” you say. “I’d like that.”

He nods, once, and drinks his coffee, and Jay behind the counter turns to do something at the back shelf that absolutely does not require his attention, and the diner is warm and smells of coffee and something frying and outside the Texas October is going gold in the morning light.

That afternoon you go back to the boarding house and sit on the edge of the bed and look at the window.

Outside: the field, the flat land, the sky. You think about Richard. You do this less than you used to — the thinking about Richard — which is itself a kind of measurement of how much has shifted in six weeks. He is still there, the way a bruise is there: faded but present when you press on it, the particular combination of shame and anger that comes from having your own story told about you rather than by you. The thing he did was not dramatic. That is almost the worst of it. He simply — ended the engagement, and then explained it in a way that made people look at you, and you could not stay in a city where everyone was deciding what version of you to believe.

You think about what Jay said: He asks about you. You think about Eli’s drawing on the wall beside the blackboard. You think about a gate that swings clean on its hinge, and a man who knew how it worked all along.

You are being careful. You are allowed to be careful. A woman who has had her story taken from her is allowed to be careful about who she gives it back to. But you are also — and this is newer, tentative, growing in the way things grow in new soil when they finally get enough light — you are also here. Present, in this room, in this town, in this life that is beginning to feel less like a retreat and more like an arrival.

You look at the field and the sky until the light goes gold and then rose and then the soft dark blue of a Texas evening. Tomorrow there is a dance. Heeseung Lee is going to take you and his son and bring you home after, and this is a simple thing, a neighbourly thing, a Castillo Creek thing where everything means less than it would mean somewhere else.

Or it means exactly as much as it means, and you’re just going to have to find out.

Eli arrives at the boarding house at six o’clock exactly.

You hear him before you see him — the gate, then footsteps on the porch, then a knock that has clearly been practiced for being the right amount of grown-up. You come downstairs to find Mrs. Della already at the door with the expression of a woman who has been waiting for this moment since approximately Tuesday.

Eli is in a white shirt with the collar buttoned and his hair combed flat in a way that will not survive the evening. He is holding his hat in both hands the way his father holds his, you notice — at his side, turned slightly. He looks up at you and his face does something he can’t quite control, a brightness that he immediately tamps down into dignity. “Dad’s outside,” he says.

“You look very smart,” you tell him.

He stands slightly taller. “Bea made me tuck in,” he says, in the tone of a man who has suffered and endured. Behind you Mrs. Della makes a sound that is definitely not a laugh.

You have worn the blue dress. You own three dresses suitable for an evening out and the blue one has a collar and buttons down the front and a skirt that moves when you walk and it is the one that makes you feel most like yourself, which is the only criterion that matters tonight. You have your hair down, which you don’t do at school, and Mrs. Della’s good earrings which she pressed on you with the firmness of a woman who will not be argued with about earrings.

You step out onto the porch. Heeseung is at the foot of the steps. He is in a dark shirt, clean boots, his hat. He looks up when you come out and there is a moment — brief, unguarded — where his expression does something he doesn’t quite catch before the easy steadiness comes back. His eyes move over you once, quickly, and then he looks at Eli.

“Hat,” he says. Eli puts his hat on. “Good.” Heeseung looks back at you, and the corner of his mouth lifts. “Miss Y/N,” he says. “You look real nice.”

“Thank you,” you say. “So do you.”

He makes a small sound, not quite dismissive, like a man who doesn’t know what to do with a compliment offered plainly and has decided not to examine it. He offers his arm — an old-fashioned gesture, natural on him — and you take it, and Eli immediately takes your other hand with the confidence of someone who has decided this is simply how the arrangement works, and the three of you walk down the road toward the lights and the music already drifting from the community hall at the end of the street.

The harvest dance is, as advertised, done right. The community hall is a low timber building you’ve walked past without knowing what it was, and tonight it is strung with lanterns and smells of sawdust and food and the particular excitement of a town that doesn’t get many occasions. Tables along the walls hold enough food to feed Castillo Creek twice over — Mrs. Della has contributed a peach cobbler, which you carried over earlier, and it is already half gone. A four-piece band is set up at the far end: fiddle, guitar, upright bass, a woman on piano who plays with her whole body. The dancing has already started, couples moving on the cleared floor, children weaving between adult legs at the edges.

The town turns to look when you walk in. Not unpleasantly — it is the small-town version of a head-turn, curious and warm, the collective noting of Heeseung Lee with the new schoolteacher that you can feel passing through the room like a current. Several women note it with expressions ranging from warmly approving to something more carefully neutral, which tells you what Jay has already told you about the general feeling toward the man beside you.

Heeseung appears to notice none of it. He steers you toward Jay, who is leaning against the far wall with a plate of food and the expression of a man who has been looking forward to tonight for reasons that are entirely about watching other people. “Well,” Jay says, looking between you with magnificent restraint, “don’t you both clean up nice.”

“Food’s good,” Heeseung says, ignoring this.

“I made the cornbread.”

“I know. I already had some.” He looks at Eli, who has been scanning the room with the efficient tactical assessment of a child locating friends. “Stay where I can see you.”

Eli is already gone. Heeseung watches him go with the particular expression of a parent who knows better than to fight it and has positioned himself where he can see the whole room.

The evening unfolds the way good evenings do: without agenda, in the accumulation of small moments. You eat. Jay introduces you to people you haven’t met, which turns out to be fewer than you expected — you know more of Castillo Creek than you realised, the six weeks of main street mornings and school gate conversations having done their quiet work. Mr. and Mrs. Holt from the farm to the north, who have a daughter in your class — Ruth, the one who does everything left-handed and ambidextrously, a fact you have been admiring for weeks. Old Pete from the hardware store, who shakes your hand and says “you fixed the school gate” with the respect of a man who rates practical competence above most other virtues. The minister’s wife, who is warm and enormous and has clearly decided you are good people and broadcasts this to the room through sheer force of conviction.

Heeseung stays near you without being beside you constantly — he moves through the room the way you’ve noticed he does, at ease everywhere, known to everyone, the smile given genuinely and the name remembered for everyone he talks to. Women approach him with the practised ease of long familiarity and he is warm and kind to all of them and doesn’t linger with any of them and drifts back in your direction after each one with the reliability of water finding level. Jay watches this and eats his cornbread and says nothing, which from Jay is extremely loud.

Eli reappears at intervals to report on things of importance: that Tommy has had four pieces of pie, that someone’s dog has got in and is under the far table, that the fiddle player has a hole in his boot which Eli finds compelling for reasons he can’t fully articulate. Each time he appears he is slightly more dishevelled — the collar loosened by degree, the hair no longer remotely flat, a smear of something on his cuff that you choose not to investigate.

The ninth time he appears he is pulling someone by the hand. “Miss Y/N,” he says, with great ceremony, “this is my friend Cody. Cody, this is my teacher. She’s from Chicago and she knows what a dialect is.”

Cody, who is approximately Eli’s age and has the look of a child who has eaten too much pie, nods with solemnity. “What’s a dialect?” he asks you. You explain it, briefly, and both boys listen with their heads slightly tilted, and Heeseung beside you makes a sound very low in his chest that is a laugh he has decided not to have.

The boys disappear again. You look up at Heeseung. He is already looking somewhere else, but his mouth is still doing the almost-laugh. “He’s been telling people that for weeks,” he says. “The dialect thing.”

“I know,” you say. “Grace told me he explained it to the minister’s wife.” The laugh escapes this time, quiet and genuine, and the shape it makes of his face is something you file away without meaning to.

The band shifts tempo around eight. The faster songs have been running for most of the evening — the kind of music that makes your feet move without asking — and now the fiddle drops into something slower, longer, the bass underneath it steady and low. Couples move differently on the floor. The children at the edges drift toward the food tables.

You are by the lantern at the far wall when Heeseung appears beside you. “Dance with me,” he says.

Not would you like to or may I have this — just dance with me, quiet and direct, the way he says most things, like an offer that trusts you to say no if you want to. You look at him. The lantern light is warm on his face, the hat casting a slight shadow, and he is watching you with the patient steadiness that is simply how he is — unhurried, undemanding, there. “Alright,” you say.

He takes your hand and leads you to the floor and puts his other hand at your waist, and you are aware of the warm weight of it through the blue dress, and you put your hand on his shoulder and you dance.

He is good at it. Not showy — he doesn’t have the look of a man who thinks about whether he’s good at things — but easy and sure, the same way he moves through everything. He leads without being heavy about it, and after the first few measures you stop thinking and just follow, and the music goes slow and the lanterns are warm and the whole room is soft at the edges. “You’re surprised I can dance,” he says.

“A little,” you admit.

“My mother’s doing.” Something fond in it. “She said a man who can’t dance is a man who doesn’t know how to listen.” He tilts his head slightly. “She’s right about most things.”

“She sounds formidable.”

“She’d like you.” He says it simply, without apparent awareness of what it implies, and you think: he means it exactly as plainly as he said it, which is somehow more significant than if he’d been trying.

You dance without talking for a while. The fiddle goes somewhere low and sweet. Around you other couples turn slowly, and across the room you can see Jay watching with the expression of a man witnessing the inevitable and finding it satisfying. “Can I ask you something?” Heeseung says.

“Yes.”

“Why Castillo Creek?” He looks at you — not the look he uses on everyone, the warm social look, but something quieter and more direct, the look you’ve caught a few times when he doesn’t know you’re watching. “Of all the places.”

“It was the furthest,” you say. You’ve given this answer before, half-answer that it is, and you feel him register the incompleteness of it.

He doesn’t push. He nods once, slow. “Were you running from something?” he asks. Gently. No judgment in it, just the question, open-handed.

The music turns. You consider him — the steadiness of him, the patience, the careful way he holds you on the dance floor like something he doesn’t want to break but also doesn’t want to handle too gingerly. “Yes,” you say. First time you’ve said it plainly.

He absorbs this. “You don’t have to tell me what,” he says.

“I know.”

“But if you ever want to—” he stops. Starts again. “I’m not going anywhere.”

I’m not going anywhere. Said so simply, with no particular weight on it, just a fact, and yet it lands in you somewhere deep and quiet and stays there like something settling.

“Thank you,” you say. He nods. You dance.

Eli falls asleep in a chair at half past eight. Not gracefully — he is mid-sentence, apparently, Cody reports, about something to do with the dog, and then he simply isn’t anymore. He is curled in the chair with his hat over his face in a pose of complete unconscious dignity, and Heeseung looks at him for a moment with an expression that is purely and simply love, uncomplicated by anything else. “I’ll take him home,” he says.

“Of course.” You help him get the boy upright — Eli stirs briefly, says something about the dog, and goes back under — and Heeseung lifts him with the ease of long practice, the boy’s head dropping onto his shoulder.

“Come back,” Jay says, appearing from nowhere.

“Give me twenty minutes,” Heeseung says. He looks at you over Eli’s sleeping head. “Will you—” a pause, something careful in it. “Will you still be here?”

“Yes,” you say. He holds your gaze for a moment. Then he nods, and carries his son home through the warm October night, and you go back to Jay and the music and the lanterns and the feeling of a hand at your waist that you can still feel even though it’s gone.

“Well,” says Jay.

“Don’t,” you say. He puts his hands up, peaceable, and hands you a glass of lemonade. But he is smiling.

Heeseung is back in eighteen minutes. You are talking to Mrs. Holt when you see him come through the door, hat resettled, and he finds you in the room immediately — doesn’t scan for you, just finds you, the way you find a light when you walk into a dark room. He comes over and Mrs. Holt makes a gracious excuse and leaves, and he stands beside you and accepts the glass of lemonade you’ve been holding for him without either of you remarking on why you knew to have it.

The band starts something slow again. Heeseung looks at you. You look at him. “Again?” he says.

“Again,” you say.

This time when he puts his hand at your waist you don’t catalogue it, don’t file it, don’t hold it at a careful distance to examine later. You just — let it be what it is, warm and steady and real, his hand and your shoulder and the fiddle going slow and the lanterns burning low, and if the space between you is slightly less than it was the first time then neither of you mentions it.

You dance until the band stops for a break and then you get food and eat it on the hall steps in the cool October night and talk — easily, unhurriedly — about nothing much and everything, the ranch and the classroom and things you’ve read and things you’ve seen, the way a conversation goes when two people discover they have more to say to each other than they anticipated.

At some point you become aware that the music has started again inside and neither of you has moved to go back in. At some point after that you become aware that your shoulders are nearly touching on the step and neither of you has moved apart.

The night is clear, stars enormous in that Texas sky that has too much room in it, the music muffled through the wall, and Heeseung is talking about the ranch in winter and you are listening and also listening to the warm unhurried sound of his voice and the night is soft and something is very quietly happening, the way things happen in new soil: without announcement, without drama, just the steady irresistible work of growing.

He walks you home at eleven. The street is quiet, the dance still going distantly, the air cool and smelling of dust and something dry and sweet. He walks beside you with his hands in his pockets and you walk with your arms crossed against the chill and at the boarding house gate you stop. He is looking at you.

The porch light is on — Mrs. Della — and in it his face is all warm shadow and that particular steadiness, and you are aware that this is a moment, the kind that has a before and after, and that you are both standing in it. “I had a good night,” you say.

“Me too,” he says. Quiet. Sincere. A pause. The street is empty. The stars are doing what they do.

He reaches out — slowly, deliberately, giving you every opportunity — and tucks a strand of hair back from your face, his fingers barely grazing your cheek, and it is such a small thing, so careful, and it takes your breath in a way that no grand gesture ever has. He drops his hand. “Goodnight, darlin’,” he says. Soft. Just yours.

“Goodnight,” you say. He tips his hat and walks back down the street and you watch him go and then you go inside and you sit on the edge of your bed in the dark and you press your fingers to your cheek where his hand was.

Outside the stars are enormous. New soil, you think. Something’s growing.

—

Nothing is said. This is the thing about Heeseung Lee — he does not press. He does not arrive at the schoolhouse the next morning with declarations or at Jay’s diner with meaningful looks or at the boarding house gate with anything that requires you to respond to it formally. He simply — continues. Being present in the way he is always present, warm and steady and unhurried, and the only difference after the harvest dance is a slight calibration in the frequency with which he finds reasons to be near you, and the way the darlin’ sounds when it’s only the two of you, lower and more deliberate, like a word that has been renegotiated.

You continue also. Teaching, reading, eating Jay’s pie, watching the season turn. But you are aware of him now in a way that has moved past noticing into something more like — waiting. Not anxiously. Just the particular heightened attention of a person who has begun to understand that something is being built, slowly, with care, and who has decided to trust the pace of it.

Eli notices. Of course Eli notices. He is seven and perceptive and he has his father’s eyes. He doesn’t say anything directly — he is too clever for direct — but the quality of his watching changes. He begins positioning himself as a reason for the two of you to be in the same place. Dad, can Miss Y/N come see the new foal. Miss, Dad says you should have Bea’s recipe for the cornbread. The transparent architecture of a child conducting an operation he believes to be covert, and which you and Heeseung have both silently agreed to treat as such because he is seven and it is working and no one is going to be the one to make him stop.

The new foal is three weeks old when Eli invites you to see it, and it has not yet decided what its legs are for. Eli brings you to the ranch on the second Saturday of October — I asked Dad and he said yes and also that it was fine if you were busy but you’re not busy, right? — and the foal is in the small paddock nearest the stable, bewilderingly long-limbed, a dark bay that will probably lighten as she grows. She looks at you when you approach the fence with the expression of a creature that has been in the world twenty-one days and has not yet accumulated the patience to find humans interesting. “She doesn’t have a name yet,” Eli says. “Dad said I could name her.”

“What are you thinking?”

He has clearly been thinking about it for days and has not decided, which is unusual for him — he is not generally a boy who holds back opinions. He leans on the fence rail and watches the foal with unusual gravity. “It has to be right,” he says.

“It does,” you agree. Heeseung is on the other side of Eli, his arms resting on the fence, watching the foal with the particular quiet warmth he reserves for the ranch and for his son. He glances over Eli’s head at you and something passes between you — amusement, tenderness, the shared appreciation of a child being serious about something — and it is so easy, so natural, that for a moment you don’t know what to do with how easy it is.

“What about Chicago?” Eli says. Casually. You look at him. He is studying the foal. “The horse you name,” Heeseung adds. “The barn cat?”

“The barn cat’s name is Chicago,” you tell Heeseung.

“I know,” he says. He is looking at the foal. His mouth is doing the thing. “He named it the day you came to the ranch.”

Eli has achieved maximum innocence, his face a study in disinterest.

“I think Chicago is a good name,” you say. The foal, as if in response, takes three uncertain steps and sits down abruptly.

Eli looks at his father. His father looks at you. You look at the foal, sitting in the dirt with its legs at improbable angles and its ears pricked forward as if this was entirely the plan. You all three start laughing at the same moment.

Riki makes coffee. This has become a thing — the coffee on the porch, the late morning sun, the ranch quiet around you. You have been to Sunrise Ranch four times now and each time it has arranged itself into the same comfortable shape: Eli showing you something, Heeseung nearby, Riki appearing and disappearing like a benevolent ghost, Bea’s food involved at some point, the afternoon light eventually demanding that you walk back to town.

Today Riki sits on the porch steps with his cup and looks out at the paddock where Chicago the foal is attempting, again, to organise her legs. “She’s going to be good,” he says, about the foal. “Look at the shoulder on her.”

“You know horses?” you ask.

“Mr. Lee taught me.” He says it simply, the way he says most things about Heeseung, with that uncomplicated weight of someone describing a fact that is also a debt he’s decided he’s glad to owe. “When I first came here I didn’t know anything about any of this. I just needed work.” He drinks his coffee. “He didn’t ask a lot of questions. He said: here’s the work, here’s the room, the rest we’ll figure out. And then he just — showed me things. Every day. How to work the land, how to read a horse, how to fix what breaks.” A pause. “He does that. Shows rather than tells.”

You think of the riding lesson. Heels down. Hands soft. Don’t grip. Breathe. And then stepping back and watching from the fence to see what you’d do on your own. “Yes,” you say. “He does.”

Riki glances at you with his dark eyes and the particular directness of someone who is not quite nineteen yet and hasn’t learned to be oblique about what he observes. “He’s happy,” he says. “More than usual. I thought you should know.”

You look at your coffee cup. The morning is warm and still.

“Thank you, Riki,” you say. He nods and goes back to watching the foal, and the matter is settled, and you sit on the porch of Sunrise Ranch in the October sun and feel the particular quiet terror of something you want very much beginning to feel possible.

—

The almost-kiss happens on a Wednesday. It is not planned. It is not even exactly an almost-kiss, which is perhaps the most honest thing about it — it is more a moment in which a kiss becomes a possibility that both of you become aware of simultaneously, and the awareness itself is so charged that it amounts to nearly the same thing.

You have stayed late at the schoolhouse marking reading assessments, the kind of work that requires the particular quiet of an empty room, and you are still there at five when you hear the gate and look up to see Heeseung coming through it with something in his hand. He stops at the foot of the steps. “Bea sent this.” He holds up a cloth-wrapped parcel. “She made too much.”

Bea, you have come to understand, always makes too much. This is not accidental. “Tell her thank you,” you say.

“You tell her. She likes you more than she likes me.” He comes up the steps — this is newer, the coming up the steps, the crossing of the porch — and you open the door and he follows you inside because the light is going and neither of you suggests he leave.

He sets the parcel on your desk and looks at the wall beside the blackboard. Eli’s drawing. He looks at it for a long moment without saying anything. “He gave it to me on a Friday,” you say. “I put it up that evening.”

Heeseung is quiet. In the low afternoon light his profile is — you don’t look directly. You tidy the papers on your desk. But you are aware of him in the specific physical way you have been aware of him since the harvest dance, a warmth that doesn’t require proximity to function, that exists simply because he is in the room. “He doesn’t give drawings to people,” Heeseung says, finally.

“I know.”

“He gave one to Jay once.” A pause. “Jay cried.”

“Did he?” You let out an amused breath.

“He’ll tell you he didn’t.” He turns from the wall and the small distance of the schoolroom is between you, both of you standing in the last of the afternoon light through the windows, the assessment papers on the desk and Bea’s parcel beside them and the drawing on the wall. “You’ve been good for him,” he says. “For Eli.”

“He’s been good for me,” you say. Heeseung looks at you. The directness of it, steady and warm and something beneath it that is no longer entirely hidden from you — something careful and wanting and very, very controlled.

He takes a step. Just one. The room is small and one step is a significant renegotiation of the space between you, and you are aware of your own stillness, the way you are not moving away, the way you are — you realise — leaning, fractionally, toward him.

His hand comes up. The same gesture as the gate night — slow, deliberate, no ambiguity about the intention — and his fingers brush your jaw, not your cheek this time but your jaw, tilting your face up very slightly. He looks at you. You look at him. The moment is right there, the exact shape of it, and you can feel his breath and the warmth of his hand and the whole quiet room holding itself still— the gate.

You both hear it. A second later: footsteps on the porch, and Eli’s voice, Dad? Riki said you came here, and the door opens.

Heeseung’s hand drops. He steps back — not hastily, not guilty, just back — and turns toward the door as Eli comes through it with his schoolbag still on his shoulder from wherever he’s been, looking between the two of you with eyes that miss nothing.

“Bea sent food,” Heeseung says.

Eli looks at the parcel. Looks at you. Looks at his father. He is seven years old and he has the perceptive assessment of someone three times that age and you watch him put something together behind his eyes and decide, with great and deliberate charity, not to say it. “Okay,” he says. He drops his bag. “Can I have some?”

—

November comes in quietly. The cold arrives properly now, the mornings sharp, the light later. You have a proper coat from the general store — Castillo Creek wool, practically indestructible, Mrs. Della’s recommendation — and your own boots now, bought from the hardware store with the heel worn to fit your foot. You are, you realise one morning walking to the schoolhouse in the frost, no longer performing belonging. You just — belong. In the small ordinary way of someone who knows which floorboards creak and which gate sticks and which order to say good morning to the main street in. This is a thing you didn’t know you needed until you had it.

The children change too — they are yours now, fully, in the way a class becomes yours when they’ve stopped watching you to see if you’ll stay and started simply assuming you will. Tommy does his arithmetic left-handed and his numbers come out clean. Clara has read everything on the bookshelf and you’ve started lending her your own. The new books arrived last week from the county — three boxes, more than you expected, apparently the board received two letters — and the morning you unpacked them Eli said did you write two letters? and you said the second one was more strongly worded and he looked at you with pure satisfaction and said good.

Grace organises the shelf. Eli helps whether or not he’s asked. The little ones treat the new books with the reverence of sacred objects, which is the correct response.

The second time it almost happens is on your porch. Heeseung walks you home from the diner on a Friday — you’ve fallen into this, the Friday evenings at Jay’s that end with him walking you the two blocks home — and at the gate he stops, as he always does, and you turn, as you always do.

But tonight is different. Maybe it’s the cold, the way it makes the air sharp and close. Maybe it’s the week that’s been — Eli had a difficult day on Tuesday, something about a boy from another farm saying something about his mother, and he’d been quiet for three days until this evening when he’d appeared at Jay’s with Heeseung and been loud enough to make up for it, and you’d watched Heeseung watch his son come back to himself and felt something in your chest pull tight with feeling.

Maybe it’s just that you’re tired of the careful distance and your body is making decisions your head hasn’t approved.

You are at the gate and he is looking at you and the cold is making your breath visible between you and you say, before you’ve decided to: “You could come in.” He goes still. “For coffee,” you say. “Mrs. Della makes it before bed. She won’t mind.”

He looks at you for a long moment. The street is empty and dark and cold and the porch light is on and he is — you watch him weigh something, watch the careful consideration of a man who has learned the cost of moving without thinking, and you wait, and you don’t take it back.

“Not tonight,” he says. Quietly. Not as a rejection — the quality of it is entirely different from rejection, warm and regretful and something else, something that sounds almost like not yet. His eyes hold yours. “But—” he stops.

“But?” you say.

His hand finds yours, briefly, in the cold — not holding, just his fingers over yours for a moment, warm against the chill, a contact so small it might be nothing and is absolutely not nothing. “Soon,” he says.

You look at your hands. His fingers over yours. “Okay,” you say.

He squeezes once and lets go and steps back. Tips his hat. “Goodnight, darlin’.”

“Goodnight.” You go inside. You stand in the hallway for a moment with your hand held against your chest. Soon, you think.

Outside, his footsteps on the road, going home.

Tuesday in the third week of November, after school, after everyone has gone, the room is empty and the light low and you are at your desk and Heeseung has come — ostensibly to fix the wobbling chair leg, he appeared with a tool and a particular determined expression — and has fixed it and straightened up and you are still at the desk and the room is quiet and the space between you is approximately nothing.

He looks at you. You look at him. You say: “Heeseung.” Just his name. No question in it, no instruction, just the sound of it in the empty room, and something in him — the careful controlled something — gives way.

He crosses the room and his hands find your face and he kisses you.

Gently. Almost unbearably gently for a man who has been waiting this long — his mouth soft on yours, one hand curved around your jaw and one in your hair, the kiss slow and thorough and so tender that you feel it behind your eyes. He kisses you like he has all the time in the world and intends to use it, like he’s been thinking about exactly this and is in no hurry now that he’s here.

You make a sound, quiet and involuntary, and his hands tighten slightly in your hair — controlled, so controlled — and then he pulls back just enough to look at you, your face between his hands, his forehead almost touching yours. “Been wanting to do that,” he says, low, “since the diner.”

“The first morning?” you say. Your voice is not entirely steady.

“The first morning,” he confirms.

You pull him back down. This kiss is different — less tender, more certain, the both of you having established the territory now and moving through it with more confidence. His hands stay in your hair and at your jaw and you have one hand in his shirt and one on his arm and the chair leg is fixed and the school room is empty and the afternoon is going dark outside the windows.

Eventually — reluctantly — you separate. He rests his forehead against yours. His breathing is not entirely steady either, which you find deeply satisfying. His thumb moves along your jaw, once. “Eli’s at the ranch,” he says.

“I know.”

“Riki’s with him.”

“I know.” He pulls back enough to look at you properly. The expression on his face is something you haven’t seen before — open, unguarded, the steadiness still there but with something warmer beneath it, something that has stopped being controlled.

You look at him. This man who fixes things slowly and holds gates open and walks beside you without filling every silence and has been waiting, you realise, as carefully as you have — the both of you circling something real at a respectful distance because you both know the cost of getting it wrong. “Not here,” you say. “Not yet.”

He nods immediately, no argument, no pressure. “No.” He straightens. His hand drops from your jaw to your shoulder, rests there for a moment. “Soon.”

“Soon,” you agree.

He kisses you once more — brief, deliberate, a punctuation — and steps back and picks up his tool from the floor. At the door he pauses with his hand on the frame. “Fixed the chair,” he says.

“Thank you,” you say.

The corner of his mouth. He puts his hat on. He goes. You sit in the fixed chair in the empty schoolroom with your fingers at your lips and the particular feeling of someone standing at the very edge of something they’ve been walking toward for a long time.

Outside: Castillo Creek, going dark, going cold, going quiet. Inside: something beginning.

—

You don’t see him come in — you’re at the schoolhouse, mid-morning, working fractions with the older children while the little ones do their letters — but the town sees him, which amounts to the same thing. A black car, which is the first thing, because nobody in Castillo Creek drives a black car, everyone drives trucks with dust on them, and a black car with city plates sitting outside the boarding house is the kind of thing that travels the length of the main street in approximately four minutes.

Jay tells you at lunch. He appears at the schoolhouse gate during the midday break with his hands in his apron pockets and the expression of a man who has information he doesn’t want to deliver but will, because not delivering it would be worse. “Someone checked into Mrs. Della’s this morning,” he says.

You are eating a sandwich on the porch steps. “Who?”

“Man from Chicago.” He watches your face. “Name of Calloway.”

The sandwich stops being something you’re interested in. Jay sees it — the thing that happens to your face, the quick controlled shutting-down of it, the composed face coming up like a shutter. He sees it and his expression does something careful and angry on your behalf. “Richard,” you say. Not a question.

“Mrs. Della said he asked for you by name.” Jay’s voice is even, but only just. “Said he was an old friend.”

You set the sandwich down on the step beside you. In the yard the children are playing — Eli is attempting to teach Cody something that involves a great deal of running, unclear objective, self-invented rules — and the sound of them is bright and ordinary and very far away from the thing that is happening in your chest. “How long is he staying?” you say.

“Didn’t say.” Jay pauses. “You don’t have to see him. I mean it. You don’t have to do a single thing.”

“I know, Jay.” You look at the yard. Eli has apparently won whatever the game was and is explaining this to Cody with both hands. “Thank you for telling me.”

Jay looks at you for a long moment with the expression of a man who wants to say more and knows you well enough to know not to. “I’ll be at the diner,” he says. “All night if you need.” He goes. You sit on the steps and watch the children play and breathe.

You see Richard in town at four o’clock. You don’t plan it — or rather you plan to not plan it, to go home the back way and avoid the main street, but you have never been a person who runs from things indefinitely, which is different from a person who retreats to regroup, which is what Castillo Creek was supposed to be, and the distinction matters to you.

So you walk the main street at four. He is outside the general store. Six months since you’ve seen him and he looks exactly the same, which is the particular cruelty of certain kinds of men — Richard Calloway at thirty has the same easy handsomeness he had at twenty-five, the good jaw and the good clothes and the way of standing that broadcasts money without appearing to try. He is talking to Mr. Gus from the hardware store with the particular charm he deploys on strangers, warm and attentive, and Mr. Gus, who is a perfectly reasonable man, appears to be finding him perfectly reasonable.

Richard sees you at the same moment you see him. “Y/N,” he says. He says it the way he’s always said your name — with a kind of ownership, like the name is his to use, like he coined it. Six months ago that sound did something to you. Now it does something different: a cold clarity, like being fully awake.

“Richard,” you say. Mr. Gus, sensing something, makes a gracious excuse and goes inside.

Richard crosses the distance between you with that easy unhurried gait. He is looking at you the way he always looked at you — the assessing look, cataloguing, deciding what he’s working with. He looks at your coat, your boots, the dust on them. “You look well,” he says.

“What are you doing here?”

No preamble. His expression flickers — he expected something else, you can tell, some version of the composed uncertainty he knew how to work with — and then recalibrates. “I wanted to see you.” He tilts his head. “I’ve been worried. Your mother has been worried.”

“My mother knows where I am.”

“She knows where you are.” He glances around — the main street, the hardware store, the distant sound of the diner — with an expression that is almost too carefully neutral. “She’s less certain about why.”

“I am,” you say. “Certain about why.”

Something moves through his expression. Not hurt — Richard doesn’t do hurt, exactly, he does the performance of it — but something more like recalculation. He has come here with a script and you are not following it and he is deciding which page to go to next. “Can we talk?” he says. “Properly. Not — here.”

“Not today,” you say.

“Y/N—”

“I need to get home,” you say. “I have work to do.” You walk past him. You feel his gaze on your back the whole length of the street and you keep your spine straight and your pace even and you do not look back, and you turn the corner to the boarding house and you stand in the hallway for thirty seconds with your hand flat against the wall.

Then you go upstairs and sit at your desk and write lesson plans for the following week with the particular furious focus of a woman who knows exactly what she’s doing and exactly why.

He stays.

This is what you didn’t account for — or what you knew, somewhere, and didn’t want to know: that Richard Calloway does not come somewhere and leave without getting what he came for, because Richard Calloway has not, in thirty years of life, not gotten a thing he came for. He is patient in the manner of a man who has never had to be truly patient, which is a different thing from Heeseung’s patience — Heeseung’s patience is the patience of someone who understands that good things take the time they take. Richard’s patience is the patience of someone who is simply waiting for the situation to arrange itself correctly.

He is in the diner on Friday morning when you come in. He has clearly been there a while — Jay’s expression when you walk in tells you everything, the tight professional smile of a man maintaining composure in his own establishment — and Richard stands when he sees you with the automatic courtesy of old money and gestures at the booth across from him like you’ve just arrived somewhere he owns.

You sit at the counter instead. Jay puts coffee in front of you without being asked and goes to the back. Richard slides onto the stool beside you. “Your friend doesn’t like me,” he says pleasantly.

“Jay doesn’t know you,” you say. “He’s good at people.”

A flicker. “I see you haven’t lost your—” he pauses, finds the word “—sharpness.”

“I’ve been busy,” you say. “Teaching.”

“Yes.” He turns his cup in his hands. This is a gesture you know — he does it when he’s choosing his approach, the hand movement while he thinks. “You’re a good teacher, Y/N. You were always good at it. You could be doing it in Chicago. Somewhere with—” he doesn’t finish it but you hear it: resources, standing, people like us.

“I like it here,” you say.

“You’ve been here two months.”

“Ten weeks.”

“Ten weeks,” he says. “In a town with four hundred people.” He looks at you sidelong. “Is this really what you want? Or is it just — the furthest you could get?”

The question lands because he knows you well enough to know it might. You drink your coffee.

“Both,” you say. “And then it became what I wanted.”

He is quiet for a moment. Then, lower, the charm dialed back, something more direct underneath: “I made a mistake.” You look at him. “The way I handled things,” he says. “The way I — let people talk.” He meets your eyes. “I should have been clearer. About what happened.”

“What did happen, Richard?” you say. “Tell me your version.”

Something careful moves through his face. “We weren’t right for each other. I should have said that, instead of—”

“Instead of implying that I was unstable,” you say pleasantly. “Instead of telling your mother that I had become erratic, which she told her friends, which—” you stop. The composed face. “You know what was said. You know what it cost me.”

“That’s why I’m here,” he says. “I want to make it right.”

“By coming here,” you say. “To this town with four hundred people where I have managed, without your help, to make a life.”

He looks at you. His jaw is set slightly. “Come home,” he says. “That’s all I’m asking. Come home and we can—”

“No,” you say. Quietly. No drama. Just no, the way you should have been saying it for the two years you spent trying to become something that would satisfy him.

You finish your coffee. You put the money on the counter. You stand. “I hope you enjoy the rest of your visit,” you say. “The peach pie is very good.” You walk out. Behind you the bell chimes.

You don’t tell Heeseung. This is the thing you’ll come back to later — not telling him. It’s not deception, exactly, or you tell yourself it isn’t. It is the particular guarded instinct of a woman who has had her story taken from her once and is not ready yet to hand it to someone else to hold, even someone she trusts, even someone whose hands are the careful kind.

But Castillo Creek is four hundred people and a black city car parked on the main street and Richard Calloway has his father’s charm and the town is talking.

Jay doesn’t tell him either — you don’t have to ask, Jay simply knows — but Jay also cannot control what a town talks about, and towns talk.

You are outside the schoolhouse at half past four, gate latched behind you, walking toward the main street, and Richard is there.

He has been doing this — appearing at the edges of your day, not enough to be a confrontation, enough to be a reminder. Outside the general store, at the end of the street when you’re walking from the diner, once at the boarding house gate, though he didn’t approach that time, just stood at the end of the road as you went in.

Today he is at the corner near the schoolhouse and when you come through the gate he falls into step beside you. “I need you to stop,” you say.

“I just want to talk.”

“We’ve talked.”

“Y/N.” He takes your arm. Not hard — he’s never hard, that’s not how he operates, Richard operates through persistence and charm and the slow rewriting of reality until you can’t find the original — his hand on your arm, a familiar gesture from a thousand ordinary moments, the gesture of someone who knows where your arm is.

“Let go,” you say.

He does. Immediately, palms up, the gesture of a reasonable man. “I’m sorry. I just—”

“Richard.” Quietly. Firmly. “Go home.”

You step around him and walk. You don’t see Heeseung at the end of the street. But he sees you.

He doesn’t come to the diner on Friday. This is the first Friday in all the weeks you’ve been here that he doesn’t come. Jay notices — of course Jay notices, Jay notices everything — and he watches the door and watches you and keeps your cup full and doesn’t say anything, which from Jay means he is thinking very carefully about what not to say. You notice the absence like a change in weather. A front coming in.

He doesn’t come on Saturday either. Eli is in town — you see him outside the general store with Riki, who gives you a look you can’t fully interpret, something complicated — and Eli waves but doesn’t run over, which is so unlike him that something cold and certain settles in your stomach. You go to Jay. “What does he think he saw?” you say.

Jay is wiping the counter. He wipes it for a while. “Man from the city with his hand on your arm,” he says finally. “Outside the schoolhouse.”

“Richard grabbed my arm. I told him to let go. He did.”

“I know that.”

“Heeseung doesn’t.”

Jay sets down the cloth. He looks at you with the expression of a man who cares about two people who are being stupid at each other and has to navigate this carefully. “He didn’t ask me,” he says. “Which tells you something. If he thought it was nothing he would’ve asked.” You look at the counter. “He’s not angry,” Jay says. “He’s just — he’s gone back inside himself. The way he does.” He pauses. “You know about Clara.”

“I know she left.”

“He watched her talk to someone for a week before she told him she was going. He came home one day and she was packed.” Jay says it plainly, not for drama, just because you need to know the shape of what’s happening. “He doesn’t — he doesn’t do this consciously. It’s just where he goes. When it looks like someone’s about to leave.”

“I’m not leaving,” you say.

“I know.”

“He doesn’t know why Richard is here.”

“No.”

You are quiet for a moment. The diner is warm around you, the smell of coffee and the distant sound of the radio, and outside the window the main street is grey and cold under the November sky. “I should have told him,” you say.

“Yes,” Jay says, not unkindly. “You should have.”

—

Riki appears at the boarding house in the early morning of Sunday with his hands in his pockets and the look of someone who has decided to do something and is committed to seeing it through. You sit on the porch together in the cold and he looks at the street. “He’s not eating properly,” Riki says.

“Riki—”

“I’m not saying it to make you feel bad. I’m saying it because you should know what’s happening over there.” He looks at his hands. “He got up at four this morning and went out to the fence line and I don’t know when he came back.” He pauses. “Eli asked him why you hadn’t visited and he said you were probably busy. Eli didn’t believe him. He’s seven and he didn’t believe him.” You close your eyes briefly. “The man from the city,” Riki says. “Who is he?”

“My ex-fiancé,” you say. “He came here to bring me back. I told him no. What Heeseung saw—” you stop. “It wasn’t what it looked like.”

Riki is quiet for a moment. “He won’t ask,” he says. “He’ll just—” he does a gesture, a closing-in, both hands coming together. “He’ll just decide it’s already over and start making peace with it. He does it fast. He had a lot of practice.”

The cold is sharp on the porch and the street is empty and you think about a man up at four in the morning walking a fence line alone. “I’m going to the ranch,” you say.

Riki stands. “Good,” he says. Simply. And goes back down the porch steps and up the road, and you watch him go and then you go inside and put your coat on.

The ranch is quiet in the Sunday morning. Heeseung is at the paddock fence when you come through the gate — you know his shape at this distance now, the particular way he stands, the hat — and he turns when he hears you and goes very still. You walk toward him. The cold air is clean and the horses move slow in the paddock and the sky is white and enormous.

You stop at the fence beside him. He looks at you — that careful, closed look, the inside-self look that Jay described, and underneath it something that is trying very hard to be nothing and isn’t.

“His name is Richard Calloway,” you say. “He was my fiancé. He ended our engagement and made sure the story that circulated made me look like the problem. I came here because I needed to be somewhere no one knew that story.” You look at the paddock. “He came here to bring me back. I told him no. What you saw — he took my arm. I told him to let go. He did. And then I walked away.” Heeseung is very quiet beside you.

“I should have told you he was here,” you say. “I know that. I was—” you stop. Find the honest word. “I was holding it. My own story. I’ve had it taken from me before and I wasn’t ready to hand it to someone else yet, even someone I—” you stop again.

The paddock. The white sky. Chicago the foal, visible at the far end, picking her way through the grass. “Even someone I trust,” you finish.

A long silence. “He’s gone?” Heeseung says. His voice is careful. Controlled.

“He left yesterday morning,” you say. “Mrs. Della told me.”

Another silence. You can hear him breathing beside you, and the sound of it — the slight unevenness of it — tells you more than anything he’s said. “I thought—” he starts. Stops. Jaw tight. Starts again: “When I saw him with his hand on your arm I thought—”

“I know what you thought,” you say, gently. “I know why you thought it.”

He looks at you then. The inside face, still there, but cracking slightly at the edges. “I don’t do this well,” he says. “The—” he stops. “I’m not good at trusting that people—” another stop. He takes his hat off and turns it in his hands, looking at the brim. “I had six years of practice at being fine on my own and I got good at it.”

“I know,” you say.

“And then you came here,” he says. Quietly. “And Eli drew you on his wall.” Your chest does the thing it does. “And I started—” he stops again. The hat in his hands. “Getting bad at being fine on my own.”

You reach out and put your hand over his on the fence rail. Just your hand over his, the way he did at the boarding house gate in the cold, that same small warm contact. He looks at your hand. “I’m not going anywhere,” you say. “I fixed the gate. I’m staying.”

Something in him — the closed, careful, six-years-practiced something — gives. Not all at once, not dramatically. Just a breath, long and slow, and his hand turning under yours so his fingers can close around it. “Okay,” he says.

You stand at the fence in the cold white morning with his hand around yours and the horses moving slow in the paddock and the whole quiet ranch around you.

“I have to tell you something else,” you say.

“Alright.”

“I’ve been in love with you since approximately the harvest dance,” you say. “Possibly since the coffee in the stable. I’m not sure of the exact date.”

Heeseung is quiet for one moment. Then he makes a sound — low and startled and something that becomes a laugh, helpless, the kind that alters his whole face — and he pulls you toward him, one hand at the back of your head, and presses his mouth to your hair, your temple, and holds you there against the paddock fence in the November cold. “The coffee in the stable,” he says, into your hair.

“You’d already made two cups,” you say. “You knew I was coming.”

He laughs again, quieter. His arm is around you and his chin is on your head and across the paddock Chicago the foal is watching you both with enormous disinterested eyes. “Since the diner,” he says. “The first morning.”

“I know,” you say.

“You know?”

“You looked at me before you smiled,” you say. “Just for a second. Before the smile came. That’s when I knew.”

He pulls back enough to look at you. His expression — open, unguarded, the steadiness still there but warm all the way through now, nothing held back. “Lord,” he says softly. “You see everything.”

“I’m a teacher,” you say. “It’s the job.”

He kisses you. Right there at the paddock fence in the cold, his hand in your hair and yours in his coat, and it is nothing like the gentle kiss in the schoolroom — it is certain and warm and long and he kisses you like a man who has been holding something carefully for a very long time and has finally been told he can put it down.

When you separate, eventually, you are both slightly breathless. “Darlin’,” he says, low, the word doing what it does when it’s just yours.

“Yes?” you say.

“Come inside,” he says. “Bea made enough breakfast for six people and Eli is going to absolutely lose his mind when he sees you.”

You laugh. You take his hand. You go inside and Eli does, in fact, lose his mind. Not loudly — he is not a loud child, not in the way of tantrums or theatrics — but in the specific Eli way, which is a brightness that takes over his whole face before he can manage it, and then the immediate, instinctive suppression of it into dignity, and then the dignity failing completely because he is seven and some things are too good to be dignified about.

He is at the kitchen table with Bea when you come through the door behind Heeseung, still holding his hand, which Eli clocks immediately with the particular alertness of a child who has been waiting for exactly this data point. His eyes go to your joined hands. Then to your face. Then to his father’s face. Then back to your hands.

Bea, who misses nothing and reacts to nothing, sets a plate on the table. “Sit down,” she says. “Food’s hot.” Eli sits down. He is vibrating slightly.

You sit across from him. Heeseung sits beside you, easy, his knee against yours under the table. Bea puts coffee in front of you without being asked and goes back to the stove. Eli looks at you. “Hi,” you say.

“Hi,” he says. Carefully. Then, unable to help it: “Are you staying for breakfast?”

“If that’s alright.”

“It’s alright,” he says, very quickly. He picks up his fork. He puts it down. He looks at his father with the expression of a child requiring confirmation of something he doesn’t want to ask directly. Heeseung looks at him steadily. “Yes,” he says.

Eli picks up his fork again. He eats a bite of egg with enormous composure. Then: “I told Cody you’d probably end up friends.”

“Did you,” Heeseung says.

“I said probably.” He cuts a piece of biscuit with careful precision. “Cody said maybe.” He looks at you. “I was right.”

“You usually are,” you say.

This pleases him so deeply that he has to look at his plate to manage it. Bea, at the stove, makes a sound that is not quite a laugh but contains one.

Breakfast at Sunrise Ranch on a Sunday morning. This is what it is: the kitchen warm from the stove, the windows fogged slightly at the corners, Bea moving with the unhurried authority of someone who has run this kitchen for twenty years and will run it twenty more. Eli eating and talking and eating and talking, a stream of school information directed primarily at you — Tommy can do multiplication now and Clara finished the new books already, both of them and Grace thinks she should be in charge of the globe but the globe has a crack in it so it seems unfair — and Heeseung beside you, knee against yours, drinking his coffee and listening to his son with that expression, the open unguarded one, the love-without-complication one.

Once, while Eli is telling you about the globe, Heeseung’s hand finds yours under the table. He doesn’t look at you when he does it. He is looking at Eli. His thumb moves once across your knuckles and stays. You look at Eli and listen about the globe.

After breakfast Eli disappears outside — Riki materialises to take him to the stable, the easy choreography of a household that has its rhythms — and Bea goes to do something elsewhere in the house with pointed discretion, and you are alone in the kitchen with Heeseung and the remains of breakfast and the Sunday morning quiet.

He refills your coffee. He sits back down, closer this time, turned toward you slightly, his arm along the back of your chair. “Tell me about him,” he says. “If you want. Richard.”

You look at your cup. “I don’t want to spend the morning on Richard.”

“No,” he agrees. “But I want to understand what he did. What you were carrying when you came here.” His voice is even. “Not for any reason except I want to know what it cost you. Because I think it cost you a lot and I don’t think many people asked.”

You look at him. The steadiness of him, and underneath it now, openly, the warmth. You tell him. Not everything — there is no everything yet, some things need more time and more trust before they become speakable — but the shape of it: the engagement, the ending of it, the way the story moved through their social world with Richard’s fingerprints invisible on it, the school where you’d taught finding reasons to see you differently, your mother’s voice on the phone saying maybe if you’d been less. The twenty-seven job applications. Castillo Creek writing back.

Heeseung listens the way he always listens — completely, without filling the pauses, without deciding what your story means before you’ve finished telling it.

When you’re done he is quiet for a moment. “He came here thinking you’d go back,” he says.

“Yes.”

“And you—”

“I was never going back.” You look at him. “I think I knew that before he arrived. I think Castillo Creek stopped being a retreat and started being — this — weeks ago. I just hadn’t said it out loud yet.”

Heeseung nods, slow. He reaches out and tucks a strand of hair behind your ear with the same careful deliberateness he always uses — the gesture that gives you time to move away, that assumes nothing — and leaves his hand curved at your jaw. “He doesn’t get to have this,” he says. Quietly. “What happened to you back there. He doesn’t get to have the last word on it.”

“He doesn’t,” you agree.

“You fixed a gate,” Heeseung says. “You wrote two letters to the school board. You put a drawing on your wall.” His thumb at your jaw, the lightest movement. “You’re not someone who needed rescuing.”

“No,” you say. “I’m not.”

“Good,” he says. And kisses you, soft and brief, like a conclusion.

—

The weeks that follow are the best of your life.

You will think this later and it will surprise you — not the fact of it but the simplicity of it, that best can be made of such ordinary material. Morning coffee. The schoolhouse. Eli’s questions at lunch. Jay’s diner on Friday evenings. The ranch on Saturdays, your boots by the stable door, your coffee cup with the small chip in the handle that has become yours without anyone saying so.

Heeseung walks you home from the diner on Fridays and comes in now — Mrs. Della receives him with the satisfaction of someone whose predictions are being validated in real time — and they drink coffee at the kitchen table, all three of them, and talk until late, and then he walks back to the ranch and you watch him from the porch.

He kisses you in ordinary places: at the boarding house gate, in Jay’s diner when Jay has turned to the back shelf, at the paddock fence with one arm over the rail and one around you. He kisses you like someone who is very aware of what he has and intends to be careful with it. Tender, deliberate, thorough. You are, you think, going to have to do something about the thorough.

It happens on a Saturday in early December. Eli is in town with Riki — a deliberate arrangement, you’ll think later, with the particular transparency of a child who is also operating a long game — and Bea has gone to her sister’s for the weekend, and the ranch is quiet and cold and yours.

You come over in the morning with the box of marking you’d told yourself you’d do at the kitchen table, which is true, and which you do, for approximately forty minutes while Heeseung works at the desk in the adjoining room doing ranch accounts. The domestic ordinariness of it — the scratch of his pen, the occasional sound of a horse outside, the winter light — is the kind of thing you want to press into memory and keep.

Then the pen stops. You hear his chair. His footsteps. He appears in the kitchen doorway and leans against the frame and looks at you. “You’re not working,” you say, without looking up.

“I finished,” he says.

“I haven’t.”

“How much is left?”

You look at the stack. “Some.”

“Y/N.” You look up. He is in the doorway with his arms crossed and that expression — the warm one, the open one, the one that has nothing controlled about it — and the morning light behind him and the whole quiet ranch around you.

“Come here,” he says. You put your pen down. You go.

He kisses you in the hallway, backed against the wall with one hand braced beside your head and one at your waist, and it is immediately different from all the careful public kisses — there is nothing held back in it, nothing managing itself, just his mouth on yours and the warmth of him and the knowledge that there is no gate, no Eli, no diner bell, nowhere either of you needs to be.

You pull him closer by the front of his shirt. He makes a sound low in his chest — something between a groan and an exhale, the sound of a man whose patience has run its full course — and his hand moves from your waist to your hip and presses there, firm and deliberate. “Heeseung,” you say, against his mouth.

“Yeah,” he says. Like he knows.

“Bedroom,” you say. He pulls back enough to look at you — checking, the way he always checks, that you mean what you say — and you look back at him clearly, no ambiguity, and he makes that sound again and takes your hand and takes you there.

His bedroom is the ranch made interior: worn timber, a quilt in faded colours, the window looking out over the paddock. Clean and spare and entirely his. It smells like him — something warm and outdoor and specific, the smell you’ve catalogued without meaning to over months of being near him.

You sit on the edge of the bed and he stands in front of you and you reach up and take his hat off and set it on the nightstand. He looks down at you with that open expression, the warmth all the way through. “You’ve wanted to do that for a while,” he says.

“Since the diner,” you say. “The first morning.”

He laughs, surprised out of it, and cups your face in both hands and tilts it up and kisses you — but then he slows, and the kiss goes gentle again, the unbearable gentleness, and you feel it in your throat. “I want to take my time,” he says, against your mouth. Low. Deliberate. “That alright?”

You think about six months of composure and careful distances and soon and not yet. “Yes,” you say. “But you should know I’m not going to be patient about it.”

The corner of his mouth, close to yours. “That a fact.”

“Fair warning.” He kisses the corner of your mouth, your jaw, the soft place below your ear, taking his time as advertised and apparently fully at peace with the consequences of this, and you grip his shirt and close your eyes and let him.

He undresses you slowly.Each button on the front of your dress — his fingers finding each one, unhurried, like he has nowhere to be in the world except here — and watching his face while he does it: the focus, the deliberateness, the slight tension in his jaw that tells you the patience is real but not effortless. “You’re staring,” you say.

“Yes,” he agrees, without apology. When the dress is off he looks at you in the winter light from the window and the expression on his face — unhidden, unmanaged — does something to you more immediately than any touch. “Lord,” he says, soft. Same word as the paddock. Different weight.

“Your turn,” you say, and reach for his shirt buttons. He lets you. He watches you work through them with the stillness of a man exercising enormous self-control, and when you push the shirt off his shoulders you let your hands sit on his chest for a moment — warm skin, the steady beat of his heart beneath your palms — and look up at him.

“Hi,” you say. Something breaks open in his face. He pulls you up and against him and holds you there, skin to skin, his arms around you and his face in your hair, and you feel him breathe.

“Hi,” he says. Into your hair. Low and wrecked and yours.

He keeps his word about taking his time. He lays you back and moves over you and learns you slowly — his mouth at your throat, your collarbone, lower, taking inventory with the thoroughness of a man who intends to know exactly what he’s doing and is not embarrassed about the methodology. He finds the places that make you make sounds and stays there, patient, deliberate, until you are gripping the quilt. “Heeseung—”

“Mm,” he says. Not a response. A sound of someone occupied.

“I said I wouldn’t be patient—”

“I heard you.” He looks up at you from where he is, and the look on his face — dark-eyed, certain, that half-smile with intent behind it — dismantles you completely. “I’m getting there, darlin’.”

The darlin’. In that voice, in this room, low and deliberate. Just yours. “You are going to be the death of me,” you say.

“Not the plan,” he says, and goes back to what he was doing.

When his fingers find you you are already slick and wanting, six months of tension and patience and soon and careful distances arriving at this, and the sound you make is entirely involuntary. He stills. “Okay?” he says.

“Yes,” you say. “Please.”

He watches your face while he works — that focused look, reading you the way he reads everything, paying attention — and his fingers are skilled and patient and exactly right, and you are aware of him watching you come apart under his hands and aware that you don’t mind, that the composed face is nowhere and you don’t miss it. “That’s it,” he says, low, when your hips lift toward him. “There you go.” The voice. The drawl. The absolute certainty of him.

You come with his name in your mouth and his hand at your hip steadying you and his eyes on your face the whole time, and he works you through it with the same thoroughness he brought to everything else, and when you’re done he presses his mouth to your temple and stays there. “Good?” he says.

“Don’t be smug,” you say.

He laughs. “Not smug.”

“You’re a little smug.”

“Maybe a little.” He pulls back to look at you, and the smugness is there, yes, but underneath it something so warm and open that it cancels the smugness out entirely. “You’re beautiful,” he says. Simply. The way he says things that are just true. You reach up and pull him down. You have him on his back.

This is where you reclaim the pace — you swing your leg over and sit up and look down at him and watch his face do something entirely new, an expression you haven’t seen before: surprise, quickly followed by want, and underneath both of them something that is trying to be collected and isn’t. “Hi,” you say.

“Hi,” he says. His hands find your hips. He is, you note with satisfaction, not as composed as he was.

You move — slowly, deliberately — and watch his jaw set and his hands tighten on your hips and his head press back into the pillow. There is a specific pleasure in this that has nothing to do with the physical, or not only — the pleasure of watching Lee Heeseung, who is patient and steady and controlled, lose every one of those things because of you. “Lord,” he says, choked.

“Mm,” you say. His own syllable, returned.

“Y/N—”

“I heard you,” you say. “I’m getting there.”

He makes a sound that is half a groan and half a laugh and his grip on your hips tightens and his hips roll up to meet you and the laugh is gone, replaced by something lower and more urgent. “You’re—” he starts.

“I know,” you say.

“No, I mean you’re—” he stops again, jaw tight, eyes dark, looking up at you with the expression of a man whose vocabulary has been significantly reduced. “God, darlin’—”

His hand leaves your hip and finds your hair and pulls you down and kisses you deep and then his arms wrap around you and he rolls you over and you go, laughing, and then the laughing stops because he is looking at you with that expression still, wrecked and warm, and moves and you stop thinking about anything at all.

Afterward the ranch is quiet around you. You are in the faded quilt and his arm is around you and your head is on his chest and you can hear his heartbeat, slower now, and outside the paddock the horses move in the winter afternoon. His hand is in your hair, a slow absent movement. “That wasn’t what I expected,” he says.

“What did you expect?”

A pause. “Not that,” he says, and you can hear the smile in it.

You prop yourself up to look at him. He is looking at the ceiling with an expression of serene disbelief. “You look like a man who’s had a revelation,” you say.

“Something like that.” He looks at you, and the expression shifts into the warm open one, the real one. “You’re something else,” he says.

“Is that a complaint?”

“No,” he says. Definitively. “Not even close.”

You lie back down. His arm comes back around you. “Eli’s back at four,” you say.

“I know.”

“I should probably be at the kitchen table with my marking.”

“Probably,” he agrees, and makes no move to change the current arrangement. You lie in the quiet ranch afternoon and listen to his heartbeat and the horses and the winter silence and feel — you take inventory carefully, the way you do when something feels too good to trust yet — feel, genuinely and completely, right. In this room, in this town, in this life that was built from the furthest-job-offer and a broken gate and a man who made two cups of coffee because he knew you were coming.

“Heeseung,” you say. “I’m staying,” you say. “I know I said it at the fence. I’m saying it again.”

His arm tightens. Just once. “I know,” he says.

“I want you to know it,” you say. “Really know it. Not — hope it. Know it.”

A silence. His heartbeat steady under your ear. “I know it,” he says. Quietly. And then: “I’m not going anywhere either.”

I’m not going anywhere. First time he said it, at the harvest dance, it was an offer. Now it is something else — an answer, a matching of weight, the both of you putting the same thing down on the same table and deciding to trust it.

Outside: the paddock, the winter sky, Chicago the foal grown enough now to move with some authority, her dark coat catching the low December light.

Inside: the quilt, the heartbeat, the quiet. New soil, you think, for the last time that way. Because it isn’t new anymore. It’s just — yours. The roots are in. The thing has grown.

You stay exactly where you are until three forty-five, and then you get up and go back to your marking, and when Eli comes home at four and finds you at the kitchen table with your papers and his father making coffee at the stove he looks between you both with the assessment of a child who has gotten what he wanted and finds the result satisfactory.

He sits down across from you and opens his schoolbag. “I have reading,” he announces.

“Do it, then,” his father says.

Eli opens his book. You mark your papers. Heeseung brings coffee and goes back to the stove. The kitchen is warm and smells like dinner starting and outside the winter light is going gold over Sunrise Ranch. Eli reads three pages and then looks up. “Miss?” he says.

“Mm?”

“Are you staying for dinner?”

You look at Heeseung. He is at the stove and not looking at you but the back of his neck says everything. “If that’s alright,” you say.

Eli looks back at his book with an expression of profound satisfaction. “It’s alright,” he says.

—

December in Castillo Creek is cold and clear and strung with the particular quiet of a place that doesn’t make much noise about the holidays but means them deeply. The church puts candles in its windows. The general store gets a pine wreath on the door. Jay hangs lights along the diner’s front awning — coloured glass, old, the kind that have been on the same string for fifteen years and still work because Jay is meticulous about the things that matter to him. Mrs. Della bakes for a week straight and distributes the results to the whole street, appearing at doors with tins and brooking no argument.

The schoolhouse gets a paper chain. This is Eli’s doing — he arrives one Monday in the first week of December with a paper bag of coloured strips and announces to the class that they are making a paper chain, his tone suggesting this is non-negotiable, which it is. Grace organises the distribution of strips by colour. Tommy figures out the interlinking system and explains it to the little ones with unexpected patience. Eli and Clara argue about whether it should go across the windows or along the beams and settle on both, and by Friday afternoon the schoolhouse has been transformed by fourteen pairs of hands into something festive and faintly chaotic and entirely theirs.

You stand at the back of the room on Friday and look at it. Two months, you think. Ten weeks. The number Eli’s father said and you corrected, that first confrontation with Richard outside the general store that feels like it happened to someone in a different chapter of a different book.

You have been here three months now. You look at the paper chain and the drawings on the wall — Eli’s has been joined by two others, unsolicited offerings left on your desk on separate Mondays, one from Lottie of what appears to be you and a horse, one from Tommy of the schoolhouse with everyone standing outside it, their names printed carefully above their heads — and something in your chest is so full it has nowhere to go. You put your coat on and lock up and walk home in the cold.

Heeseung takes you riding properly for the first time on a Saturday in the second week of December. Scout this time — not Honey, not the chair — and you get on him in the yard with Heeseung holding the bridle and talking you through it, that same teaching voice, patient and specific and trusting you to get there. Scout is large and entirely calm and turns out to have a gait so smooth it borders on considerate.

“Told you he was a gentleman,” Heeseung says, walking beside you for the first few minutes.

“You can let go,” you say.

“I know.” He does. Steps back. Watches. You ride Scout to the end of the paddock and back, and then around the perimeter, and somewhere in the second circuit you stop thinking about what your hands are doing and just ride, and the feeling of it — the size of the animal beneath you, the cold air, the ranch open around you in the winter morning — is the kind of feeling you didn’t know you were missing until it arrived.

Heeseung is at the fence when you come back, arms resting on the rail, watching you with that expression he gets when he’s pleased about something and not performing it. “Well?” he says.

“He’s better than Honey,” you say.

“Don’t let Honey hear that.”

You dismount — not elegantly, but functionally, which is an improvement — and Scout drops his nose to Heeseung’s shoulder in greeting and Heeseung rubs his neck without looking away from you. “There’s a place I want to show you,” he says. “If you’re up for a longer ride.”

“How long?”

“Hour out. Hour back.” He tilts his head. “Worth it.”

You look at Scout. Scout looks at you with patient equine agreement. “Alright,” you say.

He takes you east, past the fence line, up into the low hills where the land changes from flat scrub to something rougher and more interesting, the winter grass pale gold, the sky enormous and white-edged. They ride side by side where the terrain allows and single file where it doesn’t, Heeseung ahead on the narrow parts, and he doesn’t talk much on the way, just rides, and you learn something about him in the riding — the ease of it, how completely at home he is moving through this land, how he and Scout communicate in small adjustments with no visible negotiation.

The place he wants to show you is at the top of the second hill. It is, simply, a view: the whole of the valley below, Castillo Creek visible as a cluster of shapes in the distance, the ranch a paler geometry of buildings and fence lines to the west, and beyond everything the flat enormous Texas horizon going all the way to where the sky meets the earth. You sit on Scout at the top of the hill and look at it. “Oh,” you say.

“Yeah,” he says.

The winter light is doing something particular to the valley — low and golden and very clear, the kind of light that makes everything look more itself than usual. You can see the creek, barely, a dark thread through the scrub. You can see, or imagine you can see, the white corner of the schoolhouse.

“My father used to bring me here,” Heeseung says. Beside you now, Scout and his horse standing easy. “When I was Eli’s age. Said if you ever got confused about what mattered you could come up here and look at it.”

“Does it work?”

“Every time.” He looks at the valley. “I came here a lot after Clara left. Trying to—” a pause “—get the proportion of things right.”

You look at him. He is looking at the valley with that quiet expression, the one that belongs to this land and this ranch and the private life he’s lived in them. “Did it help?” you say.

“Eventually.” He glances at you. “Took a while.”

You look back at the valley. Castillo Creek in the winter light. The white edge of the sky. “I want to bring Eli here,” you say. “When he’s old enough to—” you stop, aware suddenly of what you’ve just said — the assumption in it, the future in it, the easy taking-for-granted of a thing that is still, technically, new.

But Heeseung isn’t looking at the valley anymore. He is looking at you. “He’d like that,” he says. Simply. No performance of casualness, no careful management. Just the statement, meaning everything it means.

You look at him. He looks at you. The horses stand easy in the winter wind. “I love you,” you say. First time, on a hilltop in December with the whole valley below you, because it is true and it has been true for long enough that not saying it has become its own kind of dishonesty.

Heeseung is quiet for a moment. Then he reaches across the space between the horses and finds your hand and holds it, his thumb moving across your knuckles in the way it does. “I love you,” he says. “Been a while since I said that to anyone.” He looks at your joined hands. “Feels different this time.”

“Different how?”

He considers this with the seriousness he brings to things that matter. “Steadier,” he says. “Like saying something I already knew instead of something I was hoping would be true.”

You look at the valley and his hand around yours and the winter sky and the whole quiet particular life you have landed in, with its paper chains and borrowed boots and gap-toothed boy and a man who makes two cups of coffee because he knows you’re coming. “Steadier,” you agree.

Christmas at the ranch. This is not planned either — or it is planned by everyone except you, you discover, Mrs. Della and Bea and Jay all operating in quiet coordination, the whole thing arriving complete and inevitable on Christmas morning when Heeseung appears at the boarding house at ten with Eli and Riki and the truck and says “come to the ranch” in the same simple offering voice he uses for everything. Mrs. Della has already sent the cobbler ahead.

The day is the kitchen and the table extended to fit everyone — Jay materialises at noon with cornbread and the particular satisfaction of a man in his preferred social configuration — and Eli opening things with the focused efficiency of a child who has been patient about this for weeks, and Riki eating more than anyone else and not being asked about it, and Bea’s food, and the fire in the front room where you end up in the afternoon, the cold coming down outside and the ranch warm and close around you all.

Eli falls asleep in the armchair at four, his new book open on his chest. Jay catches your eye across the room and very deliberately does not look at Heeseung beside you on the sofa, which is Jay at his most ostentatious.

Riki carries Eli to bed with the long-practiced ease of someone who has done it before. Bea goes home to her sister. Jay stays for dinner and then takes himself off with the timing of a man who knows exactly when he’s no longer needed, and then it is just you and Heeseung in the front room with the fire going low.

He has his arm around you. Your feet are tucked up on the sofa. Outside the ranch is quiet and cold and dark. “Good day,” he says.

“Very good day,” you say.

He presses his mouth to your hair. “Stay,” he says. “Tonight. Eli’s asleep. You can take the—”

“Yes,” you say.

A pause. “I was going to say the spare—”

“I know what you were going to say,” you say. “Yes.” His arm tightens. He laughs, low and warm, into your hair. You don’t take the spare room.

—

January comes cold and clear. The new year settles over Castillo Creek with the quiet confidence of a place that has seen many of them and expects to see many more. The schoolhouse reopens the second week of January and the children arrive back with the particular energy of people who have been inside for two weeks and have run out of patience with it. Eli is approximately three inches taller, which you mention, and he tells you seriously that Bea measured him on the door frame and he grew one inch and you are not to exaggerate.

Tommy’s numbers are clean and confident now, left-handed from the start, and you watch him work through a column of addition with the ease of someone who has finally been given the right tool for the job, and feel the specific satisfaction of a teacher who has solved the right problem.

Clara has started writing stories. She brings you the first one on a Thursday in a folded piece of paper, her best handwriting, three pages, a story about a girl who goes on a journey and comes back changed. She stands by your desk while you read it and doesn’t pretend not to care about your response, which you respect enormously. It is good — genuinely good, the instinct for story already there, the voice already hers. “This is wonderful,” you tell her.

“Really?” she says, in the voice of a child who already knows but needs to hear it.

“Really.” You set it on the desk. “Have you shown your parents?”

“Not yet.” She folds the paper back up carefully. “I wanted to know if it was good first.”

“It’s good,” you say. “Show them. And write me another one.” Clara goes back to her seat with her story in her hand and the particular glow of a person who has been given something real to carry.

On the last Friday in January, Jay closes the diner early. He does this without explanation, just turns the sign and pours three glasses of something that is not coffee and sets them on the counter, and looks at you and Heeseung on opposite stools and says: “I want to make a toast.”

“Jay,” Heeseung says.

“I’m serious. I’ve been waiting for the right moment and I’ve decided this is it.” He picks up his glass. “To the new schoolteacher. Who fixed the gate,” Jay says, overriding you. “And stayed when she didn’t have to. And who—” he stops, and something moves through his expression that is not the easy social warmth but something deeper and more real “—who is good for this town. And for the specific people in it who needed good things to happen to them.”

He looks at Heeseung when he says the last part. Heeseung is looking at the counter. The back of his neck does the thing. “To Castillo Creek,” Jay says. “And to people who stay.”

You pick up your glass. Heeseung picks up his. “To Castillo Creek,” you say.

Jay grins. You all three drink. “Right,” Jay says, setting his glass down with a decisive click. “Now. Heeseung. Are you going to ask her or are you going to make me wait another six months.”

The diner goes very quiet. Heeseung looks at Jay with the expression of a man who is going to have a word with his best friend at a later date. Jay looks back with the expression of a man who has no regrets. “Ask me what?” you say.

Heeseung turns to you. He is — you watch the careful management dissolve, replaced by something undefended, the real face he’s been showing you more and more since December, since the hilltop, since steadier. He looks at you for a moment and then he does something you haven’t seen him do: he reaches into his shirt pocket. “I was going to do this differently,” he says.

“Jay ruined it?”

“Jay ruined it,” he agrees, without looking at Jay, who has the good grace to say nothing.

What’s in his pocket is not a ring box — not the velvet-and-presentation kind. It is a ring wrapped in a piece of cloth, unwrapped in his palm: gold, simple, a small band with a detail you can’t quite see yet. His mother’s, you’ll learn later. The one his grandmother brought from her own mother and passed down and which his mother pressed into his hand the Christmas before last and said when it’s right, you’ll know. He holds it in his palm and looks at you. “I know this is fast,” he says.

“It’s not,” you say. “It’s been since the diner.”

The corner of his mouth. “Since the diner,” he says. “I’ve been—” he stops. Tries again. “I don’t have a speech. I thought I’d have one by now but I don’t.” He looks at the ring in his hand. “I know what kind of person you are. I’ve watched you for four months and I know.” He looks up at you. “You fixed things that weren’t yours to fix. You stayed when it would have been easier to go. You put a drawing on your wall.” He closes his hand briefly around the ring, then opens it again. “My son thinks the sun rises and sets with you, which is—” his voice does something “—which is not a small thing. Coming from him.”

You are doing everything in your power to hold your face together and succeeding imperfectly. “I love you,” he says. “And I would very much like you to stay. Not just in the town. Here. At the ranch.” He holds the ring out toward you, steadily, his hand not moving. “With us.”

The diner. The coloured lights along the awning. Jay, very carefully, looking at the ceiling. You look at Heeseung Lee with his mother’s ring in his palm and his whole face open and waiting and none of the patience effortless anymore, all of it visible, the hope and the care and the barely-controlled terror of a man asking for the thing he wants most. “Yes,” you say.

Jay makes a sound. Heeseung lets out a breath that has been held since approximately November.

He puts the ring on your finger — it fits, which is either luck or fate or Bea, who you will later determine took one of your gloves to a jeweller in the next town, bless her — and then he holds your hand and looks at it and then at you, and the expression on his face is something you will carry for the rest of your life: unguarded and certain and entirely, quietly, happy. “Finally,” says Jay, with enormous feeling.

“I’m going to fire you,” Heeseung says.

“You don’t employ me.”

“I’m going to stop eating here.”

“You were here yesterday and you’re here now.” You are laughing, you realise. Both of you are laughing, your hand in both of his, and Jay is pouring more of the not-coffee and the diner lights are warm and outside Castillo Creek is cold and dark and going about its business.

Eli knows before you tell him. You don’t know how — this is simply a thing about Eli, that he knows things — but when you and Heeseung sit down with him on Saturday morning at the kitchen table with the specific parental gravity of people who have something to say, he looks at you both and then at your hand and then back at you and says: “Are you going to live here now?”

“If you’re alright with it,” you say.

He looks at his cereal. He stirs it. He does this for long enough that something uncertain stirs in you, the awareness that this is a seven-year-old boy whose mother left and whose life is about to change and who is allowed to have feelings about that. “Eli,” Heeseung says, gently. “You can say whatever you’re thinking.”

Eli looks up. His face is doing several things. “I just,” he starts. Stops. “I named the foal Chicago,” he says. “Before. I named it before because—” he stops again. Stirs his cereal. “I wanted you to stay from the beginning,” he says, quickly, like getting a thing out before he can change his mind. “I knew you were good before Dad did. I told Riki.”

“What did Riki say?” you ask.

“He said he knew too.” Eli looks at you. “Are you going to be my—” he stops at the word, turns it over, decides something. “Are you going to be my mom?”

The kitchen is very quiet. You look at this boy — gap-toothed, dark-eyed, too perceptive for his own good, who named a foal after a city to make you feel at home, who put FRIENDS at the bottom of a drawing in careful uneven letters — and your composed face is absolutely nowhere to be found. “I would very much like to,” you say. “If you want that.”

Eli looks at his cereal for a moment. Then he gets down from his chair and comes around the table and climbs into your lap, which he has never done before, and sits there with the specific decision of a child who has made up his mind. “Okay,” he says. You put your arms around him.

Across the table Heeseung has his hand over his mouth and is looking at the ceiling, which is the composed face losing, and you have never loved him more than right now. Eli, from your lap: “Can I still call you Miss at school?”

“You have to call me Miss at school,” you say.

“Good,” he says. “’Cause Cody would be weird about it.”

Riki takes the news with characteristic economy. He looks at your hand. He looks at Heeseung. He looks at you. He nods once, slowly, like a man confirming a long-held suspicion. “I told Eli in October,” he says. “That you were going to stay.”

“You told me in October,” you say. “That he was happy. More than usual.”

Riki looks between you both. “Yeah,” he says. He picks up his coffee and goes back toward the stable. Then, over his shoulder, not quite casually enough: “About time.”

February. The foal is four months old and has decided what her legs are for and uses them constantly, her dark coat catching the winter light where it falls across the paddock. Eli visits her every day before and after school and maintains a detailed running report on her progress that he delivers at the dinner table with the authority of someone who considers herself the foremost expert on Chicago specifically.

Your things have migrated slowly from the boarding house to the ranch over the course of January, the natural movement of a life toward where it belongs — books first, then the rest, Mrs. Della receiving each removal with the particular warm satisfaction of a woman who considers herself personally responsible for the outcome and is not incorrect.

Your coat is on the hook by the ranch door. Your coffee cup — chipped handle, yours — is in the cupboard. Your books are on the shelf in the front room, mixed in with Heeseung’s without ceremony, which is the most domestically intimate thing you’ve ever done and which undoes you slightly every time you look at it.

The drawing is still on the schoolhouse wall. It will stay there. You’ve decided this. Miss Y/N and Eli. Friends. Let every child who comes through that room see it — the evidence that teachers are people who belong somewhere, that belonging is a thing that can be built, that a drawing on a wall can be the most important document in a room full of books.

The last Friday in February, you and Heeseung are at Jay’s after closing. This is the usual arrangement — Jay with his counter, you on the stools, the diner warm and the street dark outside. But tonight Jay has put a record on, something slow, and the coloured lights along the awning are on outside, and it is, you think, the same scene as nearly five months ago except that nothing is the same at all. “Dance with me,” Heeseung says. The same words as the harvest dance. The same quiet directness. You get off the stool.

He takes your hand and you dance in Jay’s empty diner to the slow record, your hand on his shoulder and his at your waist and the ring on your finger catching the light when you turn. Jay watches from behind the counter with the expression of a man who has everything he wanted from this situation and finds it entirely satisfactory. “First dance,” you say. “You said your mother taught you.”

“She did.”

“I want to meet her.”

His hand at your waist, warm and firm. “She’s coming in March,” he says. “She’s been asking since October.”

“October,” you say.

“Eli told her about the dialect conversation.” His mouth at your temple. “She said anyone who could get Eli to use the word dialect correctly in a sentence was worth meeting.”

“High bar,” you say.

“For her, yes.” He pulls back slightly to look at you. The expression — open, warm, steady all the way down. “She’s going to love you.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do,” he says. Simply. “She knows people. Runs in the family.”

You think of a seven-year-old boy naming a foal Chicago in October. Knowing before anyone else. “Apparently it does,” you say. He smiles — the real one, the full one, the one that you catalogued on a diner stool on your first morning in Castillo Creek and have been cataloguing ever since, the one that is different when it’s just yours — and turns you slowly on the diner floor.

Outside: Castillo Creek, cold and clear, the stars doing their enormous Texas thing. The main street quiet, the church dark, the boarding house where you no longer live, the schoolhouse with its paper chain long since taken down and its drawing still on the wall. Inside: the music, the lights, the man, the ring, the dancing. New soil, you think, for the very last time and immediately think: no. Not new anymore. Just home.

—

Spring comes to Castillo Creek the way it comes to places that have earned it. Not dramatically — no single morning where you wake and everything is different — but incrementally, the way the best things happen: a degree warmer each week, the scrub going from pale gold to something greener at the edges, the creek running higher with the snowmelt from somewhere distant and northern. The horses grow restless in the way of animals that can smell a season changing. Chicago the foal gallops the length of the paddock every morning for no reason except that the air tastes different and her legs are finally, fully hers.

The schoolhouse gets its windows opened for the first time since October. This is a significant event. The children treat it as such, orienting their desks subtly toward the new rectangles of warm air, their attention drifting pleasurably to the sounds coming in — birdsong, wind, the distant sound of someone on the main street calling to someone else. You allow this. Spring arriving through classroom windows is an education of its own kind.

Eli sits at his desk on the first warm Friday and tilts his face toward the window with his eyes closed and the expression of a person receiving something they’ve been waiting for. “Eli,” you say.

“I’m thinking,” he says, without opening his eyes. You carry on.

Margaret Lee arrives on a Tuesday in the second week of March. She is not what you expected, which means you had built an expectation without realising it — some composite of your own mother and the idea of a woman who raised Heeseung, formidable and warm. Margaret Lee is both of these things and also neither of them, which is the way of people who exceed the categories you’ve prepared.

She is small. This is the first surprise — Heeseung is tall and she is small, barely to his shoulder, which he accommodates with the automatic ease of someone who has been bending toward her his whole life. She has grey-streaked hair and her son’s dark eyes and the particular posture of a woman who has decided exactly who she is and arranged herself accordingly. She steps down from the bus and looks at the main street of Castillo Creek and then at you, standing beside her son at the bus stop, and her face does something quick and assessing and then opens entirely. “There she is,” she says.

Heeseung looks at you. You look at Heeseung. “I feel like people keep saying that to me,” you say.

Margaret Lee laughs — genuine and sudden, the same quality of laugh as her son’s, the kind that alters the whole face — and takes both your hands in hers. “Lee Heeseung has been talking about you since October,” she says, without preamble. “He didn’t know he was doing it. He thought he was just giving me news from the town.” She pats your hands and releases them and looks at her son. “He mentioned you in every single letter.”

“Mama,” Heeseung says.

“The schoolteacher fixed the gate,” she says, in a perfect impression of neutrality. “‘The schoolteacher came to see the ranch. The schoolteacher can ride.’” She picks up her bag. “Every letter, Lee. Every one.”

“I’m aware,” he says.

“He thought I didn’t notice,” she tells you.

“I’m standing right here,” he says.

“I know, baby.” She pats his arm and walks toward the truck. You fall into step beside her and catch, from the corner of your eye, Heeseung’s expression — the exasperated tender helpless expression of a man who loves his mother and is entirely at her mercy and has made his peace with both of these facts. You like her immediately and completely.

She stays two weeks and in those two weeks she does the following: reorganises the kitchen at the ranch in a way that Bea approves of and Heeseung adapts to without complaint, teaches Eli three card games of increasing moral dubiousness, tells you four stories about Heeseung’s childhood that he would prefer you not to have, sits with you on the porch every morning with coffee and talks to you the way women talk when they’ve decided to trust each other — plainly, without ornament.

On the fourth morning she says: “Tell me about before.” You look at the paddock. Chicago the foal. The pale spring sky. “Before Castillo Creek,” she says. “If you want. You don’t have to.”

You think about before. The specific weight of it, which has changed — not lighter exactly, but different, the weight distributed differently now, held up by more points of contact so no single place takes all of it. You tell her.

She listens the way her son listens — completely, without deciding what it means before you’re done. When you finish she is quiet for a moment. “My husband left me once,” she says. “Heeseung’s father. We were young, we had a fight about something I can’t even remember now, and he left and I thought — that was that.” She looks at the paddock. “He came back in three days. But those three days I understood something I didn’t know before. That some people leave to see if you’ll chase them. And some people leave because they’re gone.” She looks at you. “The man you described sounds like the second kind.”

“He is,” you say.

“Good,” she says. “Those ones you let go.” She drinks her coffee. “My son is the staying kind. In case you didn’t know.”

“I know,” you say.

She looks at your ring. “My mother wore that for fifty-three years,” she says. “She said the secret was that you had to choose each other every day. Not just at the beginning.” She looks up at you. “Can you do that?”

“Yes,” you say. Without hesitation.

She nods. She looks at the paddock. “Good,” she says again. And that is that, and you drink your coffee together in the spring morning, and when Heeseung appears in the doorway looking for his mother she looks at him with the expression of a woman who has conducted her own assessment and is satisfied with the results, and he looks between you both with the wariness of a man who knows he has been discussed and decides not to ask.

The last week of March brings something you didn’t anticipate: a letter from the county school board. You open it at your desk on a Thursday afternoon while the children are doing their reading, and it takes you two passes through it to understand what it says, and then you put it down flat on the desk and look at the middle distance.

“Miss?” Eli, from the second row. The class has the particular sharpening of attention that occurs when a teacher does something unexpected.

“Keep reading,” you say. You pick up the letter and read it a third time.

A school is being built. A larger one, two rooms, in the next town along — not Castillo Creek, but a town of similar size twenty miles east. The county board is expanding provision across the region. They need a head teacher for the new school. They have, they write, been impressed by the correspondence and the results from Castillo Creek. They are writing to offer the position to you. You fold the letter.

You teach the afternoon out. You fix a disagreement between Patrick and Beau about a coloured pencil. You listen to the little ones read and hear in Grace’s oral assessment that her comprehension has jumped significantly since January and make a note to tell her parents. You let them out at three and stand on the porch and watch them go.

Then you go home to the ranch. Heeseung is at the paddock fence when you arrive. He turns when he hears the gate and reads something in your face immediately — not worry, just attention, the way he attends to you when something is different. “What happened?”

You hand him the letter. He reads it. His face is careful while he reads, the deliberate neutrality of a man withholding response until he understands what he’s responding to. He folds it when he’s done and holds it and looks at the paddock. “Twenty miles,” he says.

“Yes.”

“Head teacher.”

“Yes.”

He turns the folded letter in his hands. He looks at the horizon, the flat Texas line, and then at you. “What do you want to do?”

“I don’t know yet,” you say honestly. “I only just read it.”

He nods. He unfolds the letter and folds it again the other way, a thinking gesture. “It’s a good offer,” he says.

“I know.”

“The children here—” he starts.

“Would have a new teacher,” you say. “Someone good. Someone who needs a start.”

Like you needed a start. Neither of you says it but it’s there. “Twenty miles is a commute,” he says. “Not impossible.”

“No.”

He looks at you steadily. “Whatever you want to do,” he says. “I mean that.”

“I know you do.” You take the letter back, fold it into your pocket. “I need to think.”

He nods. He turns back to the paddock and after a moment his arm comes around you, easy and present, and you stand at the fence together while Chicago runs the length of the paddock for the joy of running and the spring evening comes down gold over Sunrise Ranch.

You think for three days. You think about the schoolhouse and the paper chain and Tommy’s clean left-handed numbers and Clara’s stories and Eli’s drawing on the wall. You think about fourteen children who have become yours in the particular way children become yours when you’ve solved them, when you know which problems are the real ones underneath the presenting ones, when you know who reads above their level and who is covering for a difficulty and who is going to do something surprising one day.

You think about what it would mean to build something from the beginning. Two rooms. New intake. The particular freedom and weight of being the person who sets the tone before there is a tone. You think about twenty miles and a commute and a husband with a ranch and a son who is eight in May. You think about what you came here to do and whether you’ve done it and what comes next.

On the third evening you tell Heeseung. “I’m going to turn it down,” you say.

He is at the kitchen table. He looks up. “Because of us?” he says, carefully.

“No,” you say. “Because of me.” You sit down across from him. “I came here to start over. And I have. And this—” you gesture, vaguely, at the kitchen, the ranch, the everything “—this is what I was starting over toward, even when I didn’t know it. I’m not done here. Castillo Creek isn’t done.” You look at him. “Clara is going to be a writer. I’m not done with Clara.”

Heeseung looks at you for a long moment. “You’re sure?” he says.

“I’m sure.”

He nods. Something in him settles — not the relief of a man who was afraid you’d go, because he’s past that, but the quieter thing, the satisfaction of a man watching someone he loves make a choice that is fully hers. “Write them a good letter,” he says.

“I will,” you say. “Strongly worded.” The corner of his mouth.

You write the letter on Saturday morning at the kitchen table, Eli doing his homework across from you with the focused efficiency of a child who has been told that homework-before-fun is a rule and has decided to take it seriously, Heeseung somewhere on the ranch, the spring morning coming through the window.

You thank them. You decline clearly. You recommend, in the final paragraph, that they consider expanding the library provision at existing schools before building new ones, and include three specific data points about reading outcomes, because some habits are simply who you are now. You seal the envelope. Eli looks up. “Done?”

“Done,” you say.

“What was it?”

“A job offer,” you say. “A bigger school.”

He looks at you. “Are you going?”

“No.”

He looks back at his homework. He does another line of arithmetic. Then, without looking up: “Good,” he says, in the tone of a person confirming the correct outcome. You put the letter in your pocket and drink your coffee and watch the spring morning come through the window, and outside Chicago the foal runs the paddock in the new warm air, her legs entirely hers, her name written on the sky.

May brings Eli’s birthday. He is eight. This is a serious number, he has informed you, because eight is when you can help with the real work on the ranch, not just the small stuff, and Heeseung has responded to this with the expression of a man who knows his son and has been quietly preparing for this specific negotiation for some time.

Riki gets up at dawn to decorate the stable on the day — this is Riki’s doing entirely, streamers in the ranch colours, a sign that says 8 in letters that are clearly Riki’s work and not a calligrapher’s but are heartfelt — and Eli discovers it at six-thirty when he goes to check on Chicago and comes back into the kitchen with the expression of a person who has been given something real.

Jay brings cake. Margaret, who has come back for the occasion — this is not a small thing, the coming back, and you watch Heeseung receive his mother at the bus stop with the quiet particular gratitude of an adult child who is still his mother’s, will always be — Margaret brings a present wrapped in brown paper and a ribbon, which Eli opens with the concentrated focus of someone who intends to remember the opening.

Inside: a pocket watch, old and gold, with an inscription on the back. Eli reads it. His lips move. He looks at his grandmother. “What does it say?” you ask him, gently.

He holds it out to you. You take it and read the back: Go steady. Go kind. Go far.

“It was your grandfather’s,” Margaret says. “And his father’s before that.”

Eli takes it back. He holds it in both palms and looks at it for a long moment with that Eli expression, the one where he is processing something bigger than seven-going-on-eight years of life have quite prepared him for. Then he closes his hands around it and looks at his grandmother and says: “Thank you.” No gap-toothed performance. No dignity management. Just the real thing, plain and clear.

Margaret cups his face in one hand. “You’re welcome, baby,” she says. Heeseung, beside you, takes your hand.

After the cake and the streamers and the stable and Riki being beaten at three card games by an eight-year-old, after Margaret and Jay have gone and Riki has taken himself off to give the evening its shape, you are at the paddock fence with Heeseung in the last of the May light.

Eli is with Chicago. He has had his horse for a year now and the relationship has settled into its permanent form: mutual trust, complete understanding, the particular bond between a child and an animal that is its own language. He is telling her something, pressed to her neck, and she is standing completely still with her ears forward in the way that means she is listening. “He’s going to be extraordinary,” you say.

Heeseung looks at his son. “He already is,” he says. He says it simply, no performance of it, just the fact. You lean into him. His arm comes around you.

The May evening is warm and going golden, the long Texas light doing what it does to the land, making everything more itself, more vivid, more worth looking at. The ranch in the evening — the fence lines, the water tower, the barn with its doors open, the horses in the paddock, Chicago standing still for an eight-year-old boy who is telling her his secrets. “Thank you,” you say.

“For what?”

“For the coffee,” you say. “That first morning. For making two cups.”

He looks at you. The smile — the full one, the real one, the one that is different when it’s just yours, that has been yours since a diner stool in September. “You noticed that,” he says.

“First morning,” you say. “I noticed everything first morning.”

He shakes his head slightly, the almost-laugh. His arm tightens around you. “Jay cried when I told him,” he says. “About the coffee.”

“Jay cried about Eli’s drawing.”

“Jay cries about a lot of things,” Heeseung says, affectionately.

“He does,” you agree. “It’s one of his best qualities.”

Eli has turned from Chicago now and is watching you both from across the paddock with the expression of a child conducting a quiet and ongoing assessment of the results of his work. He catches you looking and raises one hand in a small wave. You raise your hand back. He turns back to Chicago. Heeseung presses his mouth to your temple. Stays there. “Darlin’,” he says.

“Mm.”

“Come inside,” he says. “Bea left dinner.” You stay exactly one more minute — the warm arm around you, the evening light, the boy and the horse, the whole quiet extraordinary ordinary life of it — and then you go inside together, through the gate that swings clean on its hinge, into the ranch that smells like dinner and woodsmoke and home.

Behind you the sun goes down over Castillo Creek in all the colours you don’t have names for yet.

You’re staying. You’ll learn them.

This is home.

It’s finally Valentine’s Day. The long anticipated day circled on your calendar, the pinnacle of your plan, the expedited fall of your fake relationship. You can’t wait. You spend all day running around your house, double checking details and making sure everything goes according to plan. Your mom assumes your frenetic state is just regular date nerves, and she’s not wrong. She’s not entirely right, either. Even though you know it’s not a real date, that you really have nothing to be nervous about, you can’t help the jitters running through you. 

You think about what Jake said last night before leaving his thought unfinished. That was irrational, right? There wouldn’t be anything to miss, you and Jake are the same as you’ve always been. Aren’t you? Sure, maybe you hug more than you used to and talk on the phone longer than ever before, but that doesn’t mean anything. Does it? The more you think, the more confused and muddy everything becomes. You decide to distract yourself by getting ready for dinner, getting a head start so you don’t run out of time. 

After you finish your hair and makeup, you change into your dress. It’s beautiful. When you bought it months before, you didn’t have a specific occasion in mind to wear it. There were no fancy Valentine’s dates on your calendar then, but you just couldn’t resist it. It’s a maroon mini dress with a cinched waist, tulle bodice, and sheer sleeves that hug your arms perfectly. Perfect for the dinner occasion and location. You pair it with a pair of black heels that raise your height by an inch or two, guaranteeing Jake will still have a considerable amount of inches on you. 

Jake and his mom arrive early, because of course they do. You hear his car door shut outside and muffled greetings from downstairs, signaling that the last stage of the plan is finally being initiated. 

The fourth and final phase: falling apart. 

You take one last look in the mirror on your vanity, inhaling deeply. This is it. The whole point of this little scheme, the intended end goal. It all happens tonight. Just get through this dinner, make sure it goes wrong, and you’re free from a lifetime of romantic pronouncements about you and your best friend.  

You make your way downstairs to find Jake standing with the moms in your living room, his back to you. He’s holding yet another bouquet of roses, unsurprisingly. 

“Oh, Y/N!” his mom exclaims when she sees you. Her hands come up to cover her gasp. “Bug, you look beautiful.”  

Jake turns around, his eyes meeting yours. His lips part and you can hear him catch his breath. “Wow,” he breathes out. “You look…” He looks you up and down then flushes slightly. “Wow.” 

You feel your own face heat up, your flushed tone matching his. “Thank you,” you smile. “You look wow, too.” And you mean it. 

Jake looks good all the time, but gosh, you just love how he looks in red. He’s wearing a dark red sweater, the shade close in color to your dress, with a button up white collar peaking through the neckline. His hair is styled out of his face, a diverge from his usual messy look. He looks older. Sophisticated. Grown. It hits you unexpectedly, the realization that this boy is the same boy who used to camp with you in the backyard, the same boy who chased you with worms and wrestled you to the ground in the dirt. Somewhere between then and now, that boy grew into the sweet, respectful, hilarious, understanding, handsome young man standing before you now. His rough edges, though not completely rounded, softened through maturity and growth and countless lectures from both his mother and you alike. You got to see him through every stage of life, just like he saw you. And in that moment, you’ve never been more grateful that Jake Sim was your best friend.   

“Thanks,” he says back, stepping toward you and not taking his eyes off of yours for a second. He seems to remember he’s holding a bouquet in his hands and gives it to you. “Here,” he offers with an easy laugh. “Last one, I promise. For this week, at least.” 

You take the roses from his graciously, giving them a good, long sniff. “They’re lovely, Jake.” You reach up and loop an arm around his neck, giving him a quick hug. “Thank you.” 

He grins down at you. “Only the best for my girl,” he says with a wink only you can see, facing away from your moms. 

Your stomach does an Olympic level gymnastics routine hearing him call you that. It sounds so sincere, so natural from his lips that you almost forget that it’s not true. Still, you smile wide, holding the flowers blithely in your arms and looking at both of your moms. 

“Are we ready to head out?” you ask. “Our table should be ready at 6:30. I don’t wanna be late for the reservation.”

“Let’s get going then,” your mom agrees, grabbing her purse off the side table by the door. “Who’s driving?”

“Actually, do you mind if we drive separately?” Jake broaches. “If that’s okay with you guys.” 

“Of course,” his mom smiles. “We’re already crashing your dinner, we’ll give you lovebirds at least some alone time.” She wags a finger between the two of you. “Even though you’re alone, though-” 

“Mom!” Jake cries out, making a whiny noise. “Yes, there’s nothing to worry about.” 

His mom and yours cackle amongst themselves, snatching a pair of keys off the hook and heading out the door. You follow the pair as Jake fishes his own keys from his pocket, holding them up in front of you. 

“One last ride as my wonderful girlfriend?” he asks, opening the passenger side door for you.

“One last time.” You nod, taking a seat with the bouquet in your lap. You watch as he carefully shuts the door and goes around the car to the driver’s side. 

He plops down behind the wheel, turning the car on and reversing out of your driveway as your journey to The Claw begins. As always, you hold the responsibility of music for the car ride. You go ahead and play your ultimate playlist of love songs. It’s Valentine’s Day, after all, what else were you to do? 

The sound of I Was Made for Loving You by Tori Kelly and Ed Sheeran fills the space of Jake’s car. You put the phone down and get lost to the song, gazing out the window at the trees and buildings flying by. 

‘I’ll take this chance, so call me blind

I’ve been waiting all my life,’ plays, the lyrics echoing in your mind.

You look at Jake, just admiring the view of him driving, something so simple yet so comforting. His eyes are on the road, focused on the lanes, but you just watch him. His effortlessly perfect side profile, the way one of his hands rests lightly on the wheel, the other raking through his hair. The setting sun provides a luminous glow, the golden light half shining on his face through the windshield. He squints a little to shield his eyes from the glare before flipping down the sun visor. He then suddenly turns to you, catching you off guard. You jump back a little, feeling like the kid who got caught with her hand in the cookie jar. 

“You good?” Jake asks at your reaction, a slight smirk on his face. He immediately knows you were looking at him probably longer than you should’ve been. 

“Couldn’t be better,” you reply with fake nonchalance, averting his gaze. A couple more songs play before you feel like the moment has faded enough to speak. “Hey,” you shift in your seat so that you’re facing him. “Don’t miss the turn, it’s right up here.” 

“I knew that,” Jake says with fake snark. “I’m an excellent navigator.”

“Right,” you say flatly, dragging out the vowel. “The journey to Riki’s house shall remain unmentioned.” 

He scoffs loudly. “Whoa, first of all,” he clicks his blinker on to signal the upcoming turn, “it’s not my fault he lives in the middle of freaking nowhere.” Defending his point further, “And the pin he dropped me was inaccurate by two miles. Two miles!” He sighs. “I just wish I could apologize to that family of squirrels.” 

“Well,” you say reassuringly, “I’m sure they’ll never forget a car pummeling into their home. You gave them a core memory, if you think about it.” 

Jake laughs, “Way to look on the bright side of things.” He then frowns, looking over the parking lot. “Looks pretty packed.” 

Sure enough, there isn’t a single open space despite the vast square footage of the lot. You knew The Claw was a popular destination for Valentine’s dates, but you severely underestimated how many of those dates would be driving their own cars. Geez. Did nobody carpool anymore? 

“I blame this on lack of chivalry,” you state upon seeing the parking situation. “If more guys picked up the girls for their dates, half this lot would be empty.” You click your tongue. “Romance is truly dead.” 

“Talk about love in the air,” Jake murmurs. “Should I get a valet?” 

An idea comes to you. “No. Let’s park across the street.” You point to a clearing perfect for parallel parking. There’s much more space, a couple cars already setting the outline for your car to follow. “I’ll parallel.” 

He looks at you like you just announced plans to board NASA’s next rocket. “Seriously? You hate parallel parking.” His expression worsens. “Like genuinely, would-rather-die than parallel park.” 

You grin. “Exactly. How rude of my boyfriend, who knows how much I hate it, to make me parallel park the car for our date.”

Jake’s eyes light up and he chuckles lowly, “How horribly inconsiderate of me.” He turns the car around and drives over to the spot, lining the car up to park. “I’m still doing the actual parking,” he asserts. “I’m not actually gonna make you do that.” He checks over his shoulder before reversing into the spot and straightening out. 

“Aww,” you say, touched by the gesture. “Because you know how much I hate it?”

“Well, that,” he admits, putting the car in park and turning his head to you, “and that I don’t trust you with my car.”

Your shoulders sag. “I’m offended by that.”

He laughs at how quickly you deflated. “It’s just a safety precaution.” He turns off the car and looks past you out the window. “There they are.” He points out the window.

The moms have just arrived in your mom’s car. They luckily found an empty space in the main lot, quickly getting out and heading inside the restaurant. 

“I’ll go in first. You should walk a bit behind me. Act all overstimulated and I’ll tell them it’s cause you were parallel parking.” He winces. “They’ll want to bite my head off immediately.” 

You honestly feel yourself get emotional at how easily he formulates the plan on the spot. What a perfect co-conspirator. Jake exits the car and walks around the front to your side again to open your door, grabbing your hand to help you out of the car.

“You ready?” he breathes out, voice riddled with anticipation and just a hint of nerves. 

You give his hand a reassuring squeeze. “Ready. Let’s ruin this relationship.”

He breaks into a full faced grin, playfully yanking you up so you’re standing level with him. The cool night air is blowing around you, the breeze stronger than it’s been lately. It’s blowing your hair around, some stray pieces falling into your face and threatening to cling to your lip gloss. Jake reaches up and fixes the out of place strands, gently pushing them out of the way with the tips of his fingers. He’s so focused, genuine concentration showing on his face. It’s so endearing you want to smack him upside the head (lovingly, of course). When he’s pleased with the end result, he sighs contentedly, his eyes tracing over your face before meeting your gaze. 

“Wait,” he announces, “can I see your phone?” 

You hand it to him without question, trusting him fully. “For what?” 

“Your dress matches the rose bushes,” he points out, signaling to the greenery behind you. Sure enough, the dark red flowers perfectly complement your dress. 

“Let’s take a picture.” He opens your front camera and holds the phone up to take a selfie of the two of you. 

You oblige easily, smiling at the camera. Jake follows, grinning wide. After snapping a couple more shots than necessary, he hands the phone back to you. 

“That should do.” He maintains his smile, only now looking at you instead of a camera. 

Right as you feel your pulse be at risk of picking up, you clear your throat. “They’re probably waiting for us inside.” 

“Right,” Jake agrees, taking a step back from you. He turns to go, but stops and turns back around. He holds his hand out to you in a silent question. You answer, taking his hand in yours. “This feels right,” he says as you walk down the sidewalk hand in hand. “For the date, I mean.” 

“No, yeah, totally,” you concur, “it’s a nice touch. For the date.” 

It’s all just for the date. Obviously. 

As you reach the fancy doors of the restaurant, you and Jake exchange a look that confirms that it’s go time. From this moment on until the end of the night, you were the most incompatible couple on the planet. Both of your moms are waiting outside the entrance, smiling as you approach them. 

“Sorry to keep you guys waiting,” Jake apologizes. “This one was taking forever to park.” He gestures to you with his thumb. 

You exhale shakily, looking stressed. “You know I hate parallel parking, Jake.”

He shrugs dismissively. “Exposure therapy. Learn to do hard things, Y/N. Life is all about doing things you hate.”

Your moms side eye each other, confusion and slight panic in their eyes. Perfection.

You do nothing but close your eyes, taking a deep breath to compose yourself and letting it out slowly. “Whatever. Let’s go inside.”

Jake goes and opens the door for your moms, politely letting them walk through in front of him. After them, however, he walks in himself, letting the door shut behind him. You fight the urge to smile. Here it comes, the anti-boyfriend. You open the door for yourself, shuffling to catch up with the rest of them. 

“Jake,” his mom says, “how come you didn’t get the door for Y/N?” Her brows are furrowed, genuine bewilderment on her face. 

“Forgot,” is all he replies. Without another word, he walks up to the hostess at the counter. “Table for four under Sim, please.” You made the reservation under his last name, just for an added touch.

“Yes, right this way.” She smiles politely as she leads your party to a nicely dressed table near the center of the room. 

You can see why the restaurant is such a popular date spot for couples. The whole floor is dimly lit, warm ambience lighting bathing the walls. In the back of the room is an actual life cellist playing classical renditions of the most popular love songs of the last century; right now, he’s performing a beautiful string version of Islands in the Stream. The chatter is minimized, mostly quiet conversation accompanied by loving glances. If there was one word to sum it up, it would be romantic. 

Your moms take a seat… and Jake does, too. You pull out your own chair and sit down as well. The hostess hands you each a menu and announces she’ll be back soon with glasses of water for the table before walking away, but your mom and Jake’s seem to be too mentally preoccupied to peruse the appetizers. They’re both flitting their eyes back and forth between the two of you, then looking sideways at each other, communicating through looks alone. Even at casual dinners between your families, Jake always pulls your seat out for you. He has since he was thirteen. To not do it now, on Valentine’s, at The Claw? Not a good look. 

“What are you thinking of getting?” you ask in general to everyone sitting at the table.

Jake pretends not to notice the suspicious looks of the mothers, opening his menu with an air of obliviousness. “I heard the salmon here is really good,” he comments thoughtfully.

“Ah, that’s my favorite,” your mom says, feigning normalcy. “The sauce it comes with is so delicious.”

“I love it,” Jake’s mom agrees, “but I’m feeling more like a steak tonight. It’s been a long week.” She lets out an exhausted laugh. 

“Oh, tell me about it,” he commiserates. “This relationship stuff is not for the weak. Nobody told me that the week leading up to Valentine’s Day was going to feel like preparing a bomb for war.”