gg

You stay anchored to her, fingers laced together, but it’s obvious how easily Alysa slips into this version of herself. Her posture loosens, her smile comes quicker, brighter, her voice shifting as she responds in Mandarin, fluid, effortless, like she doesn’t have to think about it at all. People greet her all at once, hands on her shoulders, her arms, her cheeks, voices layered over each other as if they’ve been waiting specifically for her to walk through that door. And because she won’t let go of you, you’re brought along too, passed from person to person in a way that’s not overwhelming exactly… just disorienting. Faces blur together, smiles kind, welcoming, but conversations slip past you like water. You nod when it feels right, laugh when others do, hoping it lines up.

At some point, Alysa gets pulled a step too far ahead of you—still holding your hand, but just enough distance that you’re left standing half a beat behind her conversation. You catch maybe one word in ten, watching the way her expression shifts as she talks, how animated she gets, how her family mirrors it.

You don’t feel unwelcome. If anything, it’s the opposite because there’s warmth in every glance sent your way but it’s also like standing just outside a glass wall. You’re included, but not quite inside.

Then there’s a gentle tug at your sleeve. You turn to find Alysa’s grandma is right there, her hand wrapped lightly around your arm. Her face is soft, smiling in that patient, knowing way that older women have, like she really likes you without needing to say it. You brighten instantly, shoulders straightening a little as you reach out, removing your hand from Alysa’s to shake her hand with both of yours like you’ve seen people do before.

“Hi—hi, it’s so good to see you,” you say, slower than usual, like that might somehow make it easier to understand. You gesture vaguely between the two of you, nodding, your smile widening. “You look… amazing. Really, you do.”

You add a little thumbs up at the end without thinking, and immediately feel a tiny flicker of embarrassment, but she just nods along, smiling just as brightly, murmuring something back in Mandarin. You have no idea what she said, but you nod anyway, like you understood every word.

For a second, you both just stand there, smiling at each other, this silent agreement settling in that this is enough. It’s a little awkward, a little funny, but not uncomfortable, just truly limited.

Alysa appears at your side again because she noticed immediately when your hand left hers, her hand sliding back around yours without making a show of it. She leans down to greet her grandma properly, her voice softening, respectful in a way you’ve only seen in moments like this. Then she glances at you, her thumb brushing over your knuckles.

“She’s asking how you’ve been,” Alysa says, easy, natural. “And she said you look very pretty today.”

You let out a quiet laugh, shoulders relaxing. “Tell her she looks even better.”

Alysa huffs softly through her nose, translating, and her grandma laughs this time, patting your arm like she approves. It’s small, but it helps. Alysa stays close, translating here and there, filling gaps without making it obvious she’s doing it. It’s subtle, the way she includes you—never making you feel like you’re slowing anything down, never making it a big deal.

Eventually, you drift toward a quieter corner where her siblings are gathered, the noise dipping just enough that you can breathe again. Justin leans back against the wall, half-smirking as he watches the room, Julia and Jaylinn mid-conversation, Selina scrolling through her phone before glancing up.

“You made it,” Justin says, nodding at you like you’ve passed some kind of test.

“Yeah, just about,” you mutter, but there’s a small smile tugging at your mouth.

Alysa doesn’t let go of your hand even here, her arm brushing against yours as she slots into the group. The conversation shifts easily into English, and you feel yourself settle more, finally able to follow without guessing.

“I heard Maya’s bringing her new boyfriend,” Julia says, lowering her voice just enough to make it feel like gossip.

You blink, trying to place the name, your brows pulling together for a second, and before you can even ask, Alysa tilts her head toward you slightly.

“She’s the short one with red hair,” she murmurs.

Recognition clicks immediately, your mouth forms the shape of an O and you nod, remembering her from the last party Alysa invited you to. Alysa just nods, like it was obvious she’d fill that gap for you, her thumb still tracing along your hand.

It’s easy here with her and her siblings that you almost forget that feeling of being an outsider from earlier—almost. Until the front door opens again.

There’s a subtle shift in attention as people glance over, Julia straightening a little. “That’s her.”

You follow their gaze, watching as Maya steps in, bright and confident, and beside her is her boyfriend. You feel that flicker of relief immediately, something in your chest loosening. Because he just looks normal. Like really normal. Just an average white guy, mid-twenties, clean-cut. There's nothing about him that screams prepared for this. No cultural cues, no hint that he belongs here more than you do.

Okay. Good. Not just you.

He looks like someone who's about to go through the exact same thing you just did. He'll probably walk in with the smiling and nodding and try to piece things together as he goes. You almost feel a little bad for him, already bracing yourself to watch him fumble through the respectful, slightly awkward interactions.

He reaches Alysa’s grandma. You expect the same polite smiles, maybe a few gestures. A shared understanding that neither of you fully understands the other but you'll meet somewhere in the middle anyway. But then, he bows his head slightly and starts speaking...

In Mandarin.

It's fluent and smooth. There’s no trace of hesitation, it flows out of him like it belongs there, like he's done this before, like he fits in a way you just assumed he wouldn't. Alysa's grandma lights up instantly, her face opening with genuine excitement, responding just as quickly and suddenly, they're having a full conversation.

The reaction is immediate. You see the way a couple of the aunts and uncles glance at each other, impressed, eyebrows lifting. Justin lets out a quiet, surprised laugh under his breath. Even Alysa’s posture shifts a little beside you, her attention sharpening.

And you just… sit there. Still smiling but something in your chest tightens in a way that’s harder to ignore this time, annoyed.

Of course he speaks Mandarin. Of course the new guy walks in and just fits.

You look down for a second, your fingers curling slightly in Alysa’s hand, suddenly hyper-aware of how little you understand, how much you’ve been relying on her to fill in every gap, every silence. It hadn’t felt like a problem before because Alysa and her family never made it seem like one. But now it’s loud in your head because it's not about being new anymore. It's about you not trying.

Who are you, really, if you can’t even meet her family halfway? Who are you if you haven’t taken the time to understand something that’s such a big part of her?

It's not like anyone's ever made you feel bad about it. But rather, they've all done the opposite. They're patient, kind in ways that never once made you feel like you didn't belong. So pressure isn't coming from them but rather from you. It creeps in as a feeling you can't shake. It's like you've somehow slipped into a place you didn't fully earn, like you've been getting by on Alysa's presence alone, letting her carry you through every interaction. It feels like this is something temporary. Like you're replaceable so there’s no point in trying to learn.

You don’t say anything and you don’t pull away. When someone looks your way, you’re still smiling, still present. But there’s this quiet shift under it all, something unsettled. Your grip on Alysa’s hand tightens just slightly, and this time she notices. She glances at you, briefly, her expression softening in that subtle way she gets when she’s reading you without asking. You shake your head a little before she can say anything, offering a small, easy smile like nothing’s wrong. But as your eyes flick back toward the room, toward the conversation you still can't understand, toward the ease you can't replicate, that feeling gets deeper and more certain.

You don't want to be the person who just stands there and smiles anymore. For the first time, it's not just a passing thought.

It's something you know you're going to act on.

-------

It doesn’t happen all at once. It starts quiet and a little stubborn.

That night sticks with you longer than you expect. It lingers in the background, replaying in pieces. The sound of Alysa’s voice slipping so easily into Mandarin. Her grandma’s smile. The way you stood there, smiling, present but not really part of it. And then that moment of watching someone else step into that space so effortlessly, like it wasn’t even something to think twice about.

You don’t feel angry. You don’t even feel embarrassed anymore. You just feel… aware. And that awareness settles into something steady, something that doesn’t fade after a day or two. It turns into a decision.

This isn’t about proving anything to anyone in that room. It’s about Alysa. It’s about the way she didn’t let go of your hand once that entire night. The way she translated without asking, without ever making you feel like you were behind. It’s about the way her world opened up around you. You realized how much of it you were only skimming the surface of.

If you’re going to be here, like really here, long-term, years from now, holidays and birthdays and quiet family dinners, you don’t want to just exist in the corner of it. You want to fully belong in it.

You start small at first, like a copy of Chinese for Dummies and Duolingo, and then you don’t.

The first Mandarin class feels humbling in a way you weren’t fully prepared for. It’s not an app you can casually scroll through in bed. It’s structured and intentional. You chose to go to an actual classroom, see a professor who expects participation, pronunciation that matters. You sit there the first day, notebook open, pen hovering, listening as sounds are broken down into tones that feel almost impossible to control.

You repeat them anyway and you mess up. A lot.

Your voice feels awkward in your own mouth, unfamiliar shapes forming with every word. But you don’t stop. You write everything down, your notes messy at first, then more organized as weeks pass. You practice in your car, under your breath, in front of the mirror sometimes, watching how your mouth moves, correcting yourself over and over until it starts to feel a little less foreign.

And then there’s everything else too. Your apartment slowly fills with books and not just textbooks, but novels, memoirs, essays. Stories written by Chinese authors, about Chinese families, traditions, relationships, identity. You sit curled up on the couch at night, highlighter in hand, pausing every few pages to look something up, to understand context you don’t want to skim over.

It’s not just about language. It’s about truly understanding why certain things matter, why certain traditions are done a certain way. The small details that no one explains out loud because they’re just known.

You want to know them too. You don't want to rely on Alysa for the smallest interactions forever. You want to meet her more than halfway.

This takes time. A lot of time you don’t always have. Time you start making.

At first, it’s easy to hide. Alysa’s away for competitions for a few months, traveling, training, her schedule packed in a way that gives you space to build your own routine without raising questions. You tell her you’re catching up on work, that you’ve been busy, and it’s not even a lie. You are busy, just not in the way she thinks.

Your days start revolving around it. Classes, studying, reading, repeating, learning. You fall into a rhythm, one that feels productive, purposeful. There’s something satisfying about it too, watching yourself improve, even in small ways.

But then she comes back and that’s when it gets hard. Now it’s not just about commitment—it’s about choosing.

You miss her in a way that feels physical sometimes, like it sits in your chest and doesn’t quite go away. You want to be with her, to fall back into your usual routine of late nights, lazy mornings, the easy way you exist together without effort.

But you can’t do both, so you start by making excuses. They're small at first. “I’ve got something I need to finish tonight.” “I can’t make it, I already promised someone I’d help them with something.” You reschedule plans, push things back, cut time shorter than you normally would. And every time, it feels wrong. She doesn’t get upset—Alysa’s easygoing in that way, understanding even when she doesn’t fully get it. She’ll just nod, shrug a little, kiss your temple like it’s nothing.

“Okay. Tomorrow then?” she says one night, standing in your doorway, already halfway out because you told her you had something to do.

“Yeah,” you answer, forcing a small smile. “Tomorrow.”

But tomorrow turns into next week. Next week turns into “I’ll see you after this.” And it builds quietly, this distance that wasn’t there before.

You notice it in the little things. Like in the way she lingers a second longer when she hugs you goodbye. The way she looks at you sometimes, like she’s trying to figure something out but doesn’t ask. The way her texts come in a little more often—nothing overwhelming, just small check-ins.

u busy?

can I come over later?

miss you

And you sit there, phone in your hand, staring at the screen longer than you should before replying because you miss her too, so much. There are nights where you’re sitting at your desk, notes spread out in front of you, repeating phrases under your breath and all you can think about is how much easier it would be to just stop. To text her, tell her to come over, forget about all of this for a few hours.

But then you remember why you started. You remember that feeling of standing in that room, knowing you weren’t even halfway there. Knowing that if this is the person you’re choosing, if this is the life you’re stepping into, you don’t want to stay on the outside of it. This isn’t for a moment. It’s for everything that comes after, for years down the line, when it’s not just parties and introductions, but real relationships with the people that matter to her. You want to be someone her family doesn’t just welcome but someone they can know. And more than that you want to be someone Alysa doesn’t have to carry through those moments. So you keep going. Even when it’s hard and even when it means missing her.

You give yourself until Alysa's birthday which comes out to be ten months. Ten months of learning, of building something quietly that isn’t for show, isn’t for approval. Something that’s just yours and for her and for the life you’re trying to grow into with her.

And if it costs you a little distance now, you tell yourself it’ll be worth it later.

———

At first, Alysa doesn’t think anything of it.

That night at her mom’s birthday passes in her head the way most family parties do. She remembers keeping hold of your hand through most of it without really thinking about why, remembers translating here and there when she caught that look on your face—that polite little smile you got when you were trying hard to keep up even while clearly not understanding half of what was happening around you. But to Alysa, none of that reads as a problem. You looked okay. Maybe a little quieter, maybe a little clingier than usual, but still smiling, still laughing when it counted, still leaning into her side when you found those calmer moments with her siblings.

She doesn’t notice the small shift when Maya’s boyfriend starts speaking Mandarin. There was your hand tightening in hers but then you smiled when she checked your face, so there wasn't anything there that felt urgent enough to ask about. She lets it go. In her mind, the night lands where it always does—fine. Good, even. Another family thing you came to, another room you survived with that easy willingness of yours, another night where she got to bring you into her world and you handled it like you always did. She leaves thinking you did well.

Then competition season starts, and like always, life breaks into pieces.

Alysa leaves, and distance becomes normal in the way it has to when travel takes over everything. When she and you talk, she doesn’t overanalyze the fact that you seem a little split between her and something else. Your calls are still happening. Your texts are still sweet, still full of enough warmth that nothing feels off in any major way. You pick up when you can. You answer her messages. You tell her about your day, even if a little vaguely. Sometimes she hears papers shifting in the background or the click of your laptop keys while she’s talking, and maybe once or twice she jokes, “Are you even listening to me?” and you laugh and say, “I am, keep talking,” and she does. It’s not ideal, but it’s fine.

She tells herself that a hundred times because from far away, fine is easy to believe in. Especially when you still show up for the events you can like the domestic ones, the competitions close enough that your being there feels possible. She sees you in the crowd and the whole room settles. She gets that same stupid rush every time, that automatic softening in her chest just from spotting your face. So whatever slight distraction lives in your calls, whatever busyness fills your texts, she writes it off. You’re still there and that’s what matters.

It’s when she really comes home that it changes.

Not slowly, either. That’s the thing that gets under her skin the fastest. It feels immediate, like walking into a room expecting the furniture to be where it’s always been and realizing someone’s moved everything two inches to the left. Nothing is technically wrong, nothing is obviously broken, but the entire shape of things is off enough that she can’t stop noticing it. You’re suddenly hard to pin down in a way you’ve never been before. Plans become tentative, then flexible, then constantly changing.

You’re “so sorry” and “something came up” and “can we do later instead?” and at first she takes it the way she takes most things—with a shrug, with a quick yeah, okay, with the assumption that whatever’s going on has nothing to do with her. Because Alysa, by nature, is easy. She doesn’t like making things heavier than they need to be. She’s not someone who wants to trap you into explaining every schedule change or every canceled night.

The first month, she adjusts. That’s the word she’d use if anyone asked. If you can’t come over, fine, she’ll meet you somewhere. If you only have a few hours, fine, she’ll take the few hours. If the only way she gets time with you now is by waiting for you to fit her into your calendar, then she tells herself to stop being weird about it.

And when she does get you, it only confuses her more because nothing is wrong when you’re actually there. That’s what makes it hard for her to grab onto any one explanation. You still kiss her the same way when she opens the door. Still step into her space like you belong there. Still let your hand find the back of her neck when you’re talking, still laugh at the same things, still melt into the couch beside her like you always have. The conversations are normal. The touches are normal. She still gets that same warm, stupid, full-body ease whenever you show up, that same sense that everything in her settles the minute she has you in front of her again. It’s just that now those moments come with a clock attached.

There’s always somewhere else you have to be. Always a reason you can’t stay the night. Always a glance at the time eventually, followed by that apologetic look she’s starting to hate. And Alysa, who can usually let things roll right off her, starts feeling every goodbye harder than she should. You’ll be standing in her kitchen finishing a conversation like nothing’s wrong, and then suddenly you’re putting your shoes on and saying, “I have to go,” and she has to stand there pretending it doesn’t hit her in the chest every single time. She tells herself it’s temporary. She tells herself you mean it when you say you’re busy. She tells herself people go through phases.

By the start of the second month, all that understanding starts to wear thin around the edges because now she’s home. Fully home. Competition is over, her schedule is open, and all that time that used to have you in it is just empty.

She isn't good at stillness. During season, missing you has somewhere to go—it gets tucked into routines, into training and recovery and the constant forward motion of needing to be somewhere else. But home strips all that away. At home, missing you becomes so obvious.

She wakes up and there’s time. She gets through her day and there’s time. She’s in her apartment at six in the evening and there’s nothing pressing, nowhere urgent to be, and all of that space used to fill so naturally with you that she almost doesn’t know what to do with it now.

She finds herself reaching for her phone more. Opening your text thread just to stare at it. Thinking I should ask if she wants to come over, then stopping because she asked two days ago and you said you couldn’t. She misses the ordinary parts most like the way you used to just exist around her, not even doing anything special. It becomes this ache she can’t really name without sounding dramatic, so she doesn’t say it. But it’s there, constant, low and annoying at first, then sharper, more restless, until by the middle of the second month it starts putting her on edge.

And that’s when her mind turns on her. If Alysa can’t find a reason, she starts looking for one in herself.

At first it’s just little thoughts, passing ones she doesn’t fully believe.

Did I miss something? Did I say something weird? Was it that night with my family?

But then the thoughts start linking together, building structure, and once that happens they get harder to shake.

You’ve never been this unavailable before. Never this slippery or this consistently almost-there. What else is she supposed to think? She starts replaying conversations in her head after they happen, combing through them for tone, for hesitation, for anything she might’ve missed. She thinks about every time you looked distracted on the phone while she was away, and suddenly those moments don’t feel harmless anymore. She thinks about how easily you say sorry now, how practiced it sounds. She starts wondering if you’re pulling away on purpose and if there’s something she did that hurt you and you’re waiting for her to be smart enough to figure it out on her own. That thought gets its claws in her fast, because it would almost be easier if she had done something wrong. Then at least there’d be an explanation, at least she could fix it. But the harder she looks, the less she finds, and that uncertainty turns into frustration, then anxiety, then a kind of quiet panic she keeps mostly to herself because she doesn’t even know how to make it sound reasonable.

When she finally asks, it doesn’t happen in some huge blowout. It’s too late in the day for that, and Alysa’s too thrown off to come in angry right away.

It’s one of those shortened evenings again. You’re at her apartment because you’ve stopped inviting her over, sitting on the edge of her bed while she stands across from you, pretending to tidy up when really she’s just trying to work up the nerve to say something without sounding needy. You’d been normal all night—sweet, affectionate, tucked under her arm on the couch like nothing in the world had changed.

And then, like always, you checked the time. Started gathering your things. Started leaving. That’s what finally does it so Alysa says your name before she can overthink it, and there’s something in her voice that makes you pause immediately. She’s not looking at you at first, which is rare for her when something actually matters. Her hands are busy with nothing—picking up a hoodie, dropping it again, jaw tight in a way she doesn’t know how to hide.

“Did I do something?” she asks finally, and the question comes out flatter than she means it to, less emotional, more careful. “Because it kind of feels like I did.”

You stare at her for a second like you genuinely don’t understand what she means, and somehow that throws her off more than if you’d immediately gotten defensive. “What?”

Alysa lifts a shoulder, but it’s tense, not casual. “You’ve been… I don’t know. Busy, I guess. A lot. Since I got back.” She glances at you then, finally, and there’s enough rawness in her expression that she hates it instantly. “And I’m trying not to be weird about it, but it feels like you’re avoiding me.”

The incredulous look on your face comes fast. “Alysa, no.” You step toward her right away, your brows pulled together, like the idea itself bothers you. “You didn’t do anything wrong. I’m not mad at you, I promise.” And for a second, the tension in her eases just a little but then you keep going. “I’m just really busy right now. I’m sorry. I’ll make it up to you.” You say it sincerely, you sound honest. You sound apologetic, like someone who cares.

And still, nothing changes.

It starts souring something in Alysa by the end of the second month—not because she stops believing you care, but because your reassurance stops matching your actions.

She tries after that conversation to settle back down, to trust what you said, to stop making herself crazy over it. But the next week comes and goes and you’re still hard to reach. Still rescheduling and still finding time for her only in small, pre-measured pieces. “I’ll make it up to you” becomes one of those phrases that starts echoing in her head in a way she hates, because she keeps waiting for the making-up part and it never comes. And Alysa, who is usually the least dramatic person in the room, starts getting irritated in this quiet, simmering way that’s foreign to her. At some point “busy” stops feeling like an explanation and starts feeling like a wall.

She can’t tell if you’re hiding something, sparing her something, or just genuinely refusing to let her in but whatever it is, she can feel it now every time you leave too early, every time she checks her phone and sees another changed plan, every time she wants to ask what the hell is going on and stops herself because she already asked once and you gave her nothing she could actually hold onto.

So she ends up in this awful in-between state of feeling restless, on edge, trying not to push too hard while feeling more and more certain that if she doesn’t push, nothing will change. If you were angry, she could deal with that. If you were upset, if you needed space, if there was an actual reason—something clear, something solid—Alysa could work with it. She could apologize. She could adjust and try but you won’t tell her anything.

And she doesn’t know how to start a conversation with someone who keeps insisting everything is fine while slowly disappearing from the life you used to share so easily.

———

Alysa doesn’t go to her friends looking for answers. At least, that’s not how she frames it to herself.

She tells herself she just needs to get out of the apartment, just needs noise, something to fill the empty space that’s been sitting too loudly around her lately. So she meets them for something casual. They’re sitting across from her, half-eaten plates in front of them, drinks sweating against the table, and Alysa’s leaning back in her chair trying to act like everything’s normal. She listens to them talk for a while but she’s not really paying attention. She’s nodding at the right times, chiming in just enough to not seem completely checked out.

Eventually, one of them notices. “You’re quiet,” she says, narrowing her eyes slightly, not accusatory.

Alysa shrugs, reaching for her drink. “I’m fine.” She says it too quickly which they both catch immediately.

“What’s going on?” the other one asks, leaning forward a little now, elbows on the table. “Is everything good with you and—” she gestures vaguely, like she doesn’t even need to say your name.

Alysa hesitates.

That’s all it takes because once she pauses, even for a second, they know there’s something there.

“It’s nothing,” she says, but softer this time, less convincing even to her own ears. She exhales, running a hand through her hair, gaze dropping to the table. “She’s just… busy. Like really busy. Since I got back.”

“Busy how?” one of them presses.

Alysa shakes her head, trying to downplay it. “I don’t know, just… stuff. Work or whatever. She keeps having to reschedule, or she can only hang out for like a few hours and then she leaves.” She shrugs again, like it’s no big deal, like she hasn’t been thinking about it constantly. “It’s just different. She doesn’t even invite me over to her place and if we’re not in my apartment I’m having to go meet her somewhere instead of just driving together. She’s kinda always on her phone too when we are together.” There’s a pause. A look passes between them. It’s quick, subtle, but Alysa sees it and something in her stomach drops before either of them even says anything. “What?” she asks immediately, her voice sharper than she means it to be. “Why are you guys looking at each other like that?”

One of them hesitates, like she’s trying to decide how to say it without making it worse.

“Alysa…” she starts slowly, carefully, her tone shifting into something more cautious. “You don’t think…?”

Alysa frowns, confusion pulling at her expression. “What?”

But there’s something else under it too. Something tighter.

The other friend doesn’t hesitate. “It sounds like she’s cheating on you.”

It hits her like a drop, like that sudden, weightless feeling in her stomach, like everything just fell out from under her for a second. Alysa actually has to inhale sharply, like she forgot how to breathe for a second there, her hand tightening around her glass without her realizing it. She shakes her head immediately, too fast, like if she does it quick enough the idea won’t stick.

“No,” she says, almost instinctively. “No, that’s not—what are you talking about?” Her voice sounds off to her own ears. She doesn’t sound fully convinced even to herself but it’s also not fully dismissive either. “We’re fine when we’re together,” she adds quickly, like that proves something. “Like nothing’s different. She’s not weird, she’s not distant when she’s there. Wouldn’t—wouldn’t someone cheating be… different?” She frowns, trying to make it make sense. “Like tired? Or distracted or something?”

One of them tilts her head slightly. “Alysa, she is distracted. You literally just said she’s always doing something else when you guys talk.”

“That’s not the same thing,” Alysa pushes back, but it comes out weaker than she wants it to.

The other friend leans in a little more, her tone gentler but firmer. “You just said this is out of character for her. She’s never been this hard to get ahold of, right? She’s not letting you come over anymore. She’s always going to your apartment or you’re meeting her somewhere. That’s weird.”

Alysa opens her mouth to respond, but nothing comes out. When it’s said like that, when it’s laid out in a straight line like this, it does sound weird.

“She could be living a whole separate life right now and you wouldn’t even know,” her friend adds, not harshly, just matter-of-fact.

“And people don’t always act different when you’re with them,” the other one chimes in, a little more blunt. “They pick up right where they left off like nothing happened. It’s like—psychotic behavior, honestly.”

Alysa lets out a short, hollow laugh at that, but it doesn’t reach anywhere real. Their voices are still there, still talking, but they feel further away now to Alysa, like someone turned the volume down just enough that she has to strain to catch the words. Her focus drops to the table again, her fingers pressing into the condensation on her glass, dragging through it without thinking.

Cheating.

The word sits wrong in her head. She tries to push it away instantly but it doesn’t go because now it’s attached itself to everything. Every rescheduled plan and every “I’m sorry, I’m busy.” Every time you left early with every distracted call. Every moment she brushed off because she trusted you.

Her chest tightens. Actually tightens—like something is physically pressing down on it, making it harder to take a full breath. She swallows, her throat suddenly dry, her eyes stinging in a way that catches her off guard. She blinks hard, once, twice, trying to clear it, but it doesn’t help at all because her brain won’t stop.

What if that’s why?

What if that’s what all of this is?

The thought makes her feel sick, not metaphorically but actually sick. Like her stomach flips, a wave of nausea rolling through her so suddenly she has to lean back in her chair just to steady herself. Her grip tightens again, knuckles going pale around the glass.

The idea of you—of you doing that, of you choosing someone else while still standing in her apartment, still kissing her like nothing changed—

It hurts. It hurts in a way that’s immediate and overwhelming, like it bypasses everything logical and goes straight to something painful. Her chest aches, sharp and deep, and she doesn’t even realize her vision’s blurring until she has to blink again and a tear actually slips free.

“Hey,” one of her friends says immediately, her tone softening as she reaches across the table. “Hey, don’t cry. It’s okay.”

Alysa inhales shakily, shaking her head like she can physically push the feeling away. “I’m not—” she starts, but her voice cracks halfway through and she has to stop.

The other friend leans back a little, her expression shifting—less certain now, more careful. “We don’t know that she is,” she says quickly, softer than before. “Okay? We’re just—guessing. It could be something else.”

Alysa doesn’t respond right away because now that the idea’s in her head, it’s not just a guess anymore.

It’s a possibility, which, in circumstances where you don’t have much to go off of, is enough to wreck something in you.

“Then what am I supposed to do?” she asks finally, her voice quieter now, rougher. She wipes at her face quickly, like she’s annoyed with herself for reacting this way. “I already asked her. She said nothing’s wrong.”

“Check her phone.”

Alysa looks up immediately, frowning. “What? No.”

“That’s the easiest way to know,” her friend says, like it’s obvious.

“That’s—” Alysa shakes her head again, more firmly this time. “That’s an invasion of privacy.”

One of them gives her a look. seriously?

“Alysa.”

She exhales, frustrated now, running a hand over her face. “I’m not doing that.”

But the idea’s already there. What if that’s the only way she finds out? What if she’s just… sitting here, being stupid, trusting something that’s already broken?

Her jaw tightens. She looks down at the table again, blinking hard once more before finally nodding—small, reluctant. “…Fine,” she mutters. “I’ll… think about it.”

They don’t push her further after that. The conversation shifts, softens, but Alysa doesn’t really come back into it. She stays quiet for the rest of the night, answering when she has to, but mostly just sitting there, the weight of that one idea pressing heavier with every passing minute.

By the time she gets home, it’s changed shape. The sadness is still there—but it’s not the only thing anymore. It twists and sharpens until it turns into something hotter. The more she thinks about it, the more it starts to make sense in a way she hates.

That’s why you’re busy.

That’s why you won’t let me come over.

That’s why you leave early.

Her chest tightens again, but this time there’s something under it—anger, low and simmering, building with every new thought that slots into place.

“How could she do that?” she mutters out loud to no one, pacing her apartment now, hands dragging through her hair. “How could she actually do that?” Her voice breaks at the end, but she pushes through it, because now her brain is moving too fast to stop.

After everything?

After bringing you into her family, into her life, letting everything blend together so easily—it feels like a betrayal just thinking about it. Like something sacred got handled carelessly. Like she opened something up for you and you decided it wasn’t enough.

if this is what you’re doing then she wants to know. She just can’t sit here wondering or dragging it out. She wants proof. Something real she can hold onto so she can stop guessing, stop spiraling, stop feeling like she’s losing her mind trying to piece this together.

Because if you’re going to break her, she’d rather you just do it all at once.

———

Alysa is already wound too tight by the time you come over. It’s not obvious at first but it’s there in the way she keeps glancing at you when she thinks you won’t notice, in the way her shoulders never fully relax even after you’ve settled onto her couch, even after your shoes are off and your body has leaned into the familiar shape of her apartment like you’ve done a hundred times before.

The room itself is normal, almost painfully so. The lamp in the corner casts that same warm low light over everything, there’s some half-finished show playing that neither of you is really paying attention to. And that normalcy is almost offensive to her now, because it makes her feel crazy. It makes her feel like the only one carrying this terrible, shifting thing inside her chest while you sit there beside her looking so entirely like yourself. You answer when she talks. You smile in the right places. You let your knee knock against hers. But every few minutes your attention slips back to your phone, your thumb moving over the screen, your expression going distant in that tiny way she’s learned to dread.

Normally Alysa would say something easy about it, steal the phone from your hands, throw herself across your lap until you laughed and paid attention to her instead. But she can’t do that now, because now every small distraction feels loaded. Now every glance at your screen feels like proof of something she hasn’t been able to catch up to.

She shifts closer once, trying to make it look natural, trying to see what has your attention without directly asking. But all she catches is a darkened blur. The privacy screen turns your phone into a flat black wall the second it isn’t being looked at head-on, and the sight of it sends this immediate, irrational heat through her. Not because the screen itself means anything. People get privacy protectors all the time and you’ve had this one on for a year now so It shouldn’t matter.

But her mind is no longer in a place where it accepts neutral explanations. It’s been too many weeks of canceled plans, too many cut-short evenings, too many distracted calls, too many apologies that never amount to anything changing. So instead of seeing an accessory, she sees concealment. Instead of brushing it off, she sits there feeling her stomach turn over again, feeling that awful quiet certainty pressing harder at the inside of her ribs.

You don’t notice her looking. Or maybe you do and you say nothing. Either way, you stay where you are for another few minutes before standing up and saying you’re going to use the bathroom. You leave your phone behind on the couch, plugged in and charging, like it’s nothing. Like there’s nothing in it to hide. And that almost makes it worse.

The second you disappear down the hall, the apartment changes. It’s still quiet, but it’s a different kind now—too clear, too open, the kind of silence that makes every thought sound louder.

Alysa stares at your phone where it rests against the cushion, its charging cable stretched toward the wall, and she doesn’t move at first. Her heart is already beating too fast in this ugly, physical way that makes her feel vaguely sick, like adrenaline without somewhere to go.

She knows this is wrong. She knows it before she even reaches for it. This is not who she is, not how the two of you have ever worked. Trust has never been something she had to force with you; it was always just there, easy and unspoken, something solid under everything else. But that trust has been getting scraped thinner for months now because you keep handing her pieces that don’t fit.

She tells herself she just needs to know. That’s the justification she reaches for as her hand finally closes around the phone. She just needs to know whether she’s losing her mind or whether her body’s been trying to tell her the truth before her brain caught up.

Her fingers are clumsy with nerves when she unlocks it, but the passcode still works immediately. And then your wallpaper lights up, and it’s a photo of her you took, she’s not even posed, she’s mid-laugh, head turned slightly away from the camera, the kind of picture that only exists because you were looking at her with affection and reached instinctively for your phone.

That detail hits so hard it almost stops her. Her chest tightens with this sudden painful sadness, because if you were really building something behind her back, why would your phone still open to her face?

But the question doesn’t save anything. It just makes the next part hurt more.

She starts with Instagram because it feels like the easiest place to confirm it, and for a few brief, miserable seconds she actually hopes it’ll be obvious. Some hidden account, some flirty thread, some stranger’s name appearing too often. Something clean and straightforward. But there’s nothing. You only have your normal account, the one she’s seen a million times with no secret profiles logged in. There aren’t any suspicious message requests with no weird conversations.

She moves faster after that, more tense instead of relieved, checking the places her friends had thrown out as possibilities.

Twitter is the same. Your regular account with retweets from Alysa fan pages, clips of her programs and your defensive replies under mean tweets from people who don’t know what they’re talking about, and likes about movies you’re excited about.

It’s so completely, embarrassingly loyal that it makes her stomach twist. It should reassure her. Instead it makes her feel worse, because now the phone feels split in two—one half still so clearly built around her, the other half maybe hiding something she hasn’t found yet.

The photos app is no better in giving her tangible proof. You have a bunch of work screenshots, notes. There’s random saved images and pictures of your fish she’s already seen because you always send them to her. Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

And at this point the pounding in her chest has become something almost unbearable, because if she’s wrong, then what is all this distance? What is all this pain she’s been carrying around? What is she supposed to do with the last two months if the answer isn’t sitting plainly in front of her?

That’s why she leaves iMessages for last. Not because it makes the most sense, but because some part of her is stalling. Some small, desperate part wants to hear the bathroom door open before she has to press it, wants to be interrupted, caught, forced to stop before she sees something that can’t be unseen.

She sits there with her thumb hovering for a beat too long, breathing shallowly, every muscle in her body tight. Then she taps it anyway. The text message list opens. Her own contact is pinned right at the top, and that almost makes her laugh from how cruel it feels. Of course she is after all this, after everything unraveling under her hands, your phone still arranges itself like she’s the center of your life. Beneath it are the names she expects—friends, family, spam, appointment reminders. Again, so normal that for one suspended second she thinks maybe this whole thing is about to collapse in on itself, maybe she really is just a paranoid mess who let two friends and too much silence rot her brain.

And then she sees it.

A contact she doesn’t know. Not a family member, not one of your usual friends, not anyone Alysa’s ever heard you mention.

P. Lucas.

Her entire body reacts before she has a thought coherent enough to name what she’s feeling. Her stomach drops so hard it’s almost disorienting, like she missed a stair that wasn’t there. Her mouth floods with that awful metallic saliva that comes right before throwing up. She opens the thread.

The messages are not dramatic. If anything, they’re worse for how ordinary they look.

Voice memos stacked one after another. A few short texts.

Can I call you? I’ll see you tomorrow. Great session today.

The words rearrange themselves instantly into the shape her fear has been waiting for. Her mind doesn’t pause to consider alternatives because she already built the framework weeks ago. It’s all been leading here.

Now there’s a name attached to it, and suddenly every piece slots in so neatly it makes her feel sick. Actually, physically sick. Her stomach turns so violently she thinks for a second she might genuinely throw up onto the floor. Her vision goes strange around the edges. Her chest feels like something inside it is caving in under pressure with this real, ugly pain that makes it hard to get a full breath.

And through all of it, one thought keeps battering into her from every angle: you lied to me. Not just once, not just tonight, but for weeks. You stood in her kitchen, sat on her couch, kissed her goodbye with this hidden thing tucked somewhere, and she had still been trying to understand you gently.

Then your voice breaks across the room and the whole moment jerks violently back into motion.

You’re standing there just inside the living room now, fresh from the bathroom, your expression changing the second you register what she’s holding.

“What’s going on?” you ask, and your voice is not defensive yet, it’s just earnestly confused, thrown off, cautious.

Alysa can’t look at you. That’s the first thing she realizes. She physically cannot make herself turn her head. She keeps staring at the thread like if she looks away, she’ll lose her nerve and let you explain it into something survivable.

You cross the room quickly, and she feels rather than sees you take the phone from her hands. There’s no fight in it, no scrambling. You just take it, look at the screen, and sigh.

That sigh destroys whatever was left of her ability to doubt herself. Because to Alysa, already deep inside this hurt, that isn’t the sound of someone confused by a misunderstanding. It’s the sound of someone caught.

You slide the phone into your pocket, shoulders dropping in this tired, defeated way, and say, “Alysa, can we talk?”

That’s the last click in the lock. If it were innocent, you’d say the innocent thing immediately. If there were nothing to hide, you’d laugh in disbelief, correct her, show her, explain it in one breath. But instead you sound guilty. You sound resigned and you sound like someone trying to manage fallout.

So when she tells you to get out, she's not bluffing. It isn’t an opening for you to convince her. It comes out of her with the force of two months of confusion finally finding a target.

“Get out.” The words sound sharper than anything she’s ever said to you, and even she feels the violence of them as they leave her mouth.

You blink at her, stunned. “What?” You look genuinely lost, and under any other circumstances that expression would undo her instantly.

But her mind is made up now. It has been making itself up for weeks, collecting evidence, bracing for impact, preparing her body for this exact kind of break.

“Get out,” she says again, louder, each word trembling with the effort it takes not to collapse. “Now. I don’t want you here.”

You take a step toward her, and she can hear the panic entering your voice now, hear the urgency in the way you say her name, in the way you ask what she’s talking about.

Right now, to her, even your confusion folds into the story she’s already accepted. You’re denying it, it’s expected and you’re trying to slow this down. So she throws Lucas at you like a weapon because she needs you to know she saw it, needs you to understand that whatever lie you had prepared no longer has room to work.

“Go have another session with Lucas or whatever that means.” Saying it makes her mouth water again with nausea. The words taste toxic but she gets them out anyway.

You’re staring at her now with this open, horrified look, and you say no immediately, too quickly, hands lifting slightly like you can still stop this.

“Alysa, what? No. This isn’t what you think it is. I promise. Please. I can explain.” But explain to her now sounds like stall. Explain sounds like twist it, soften it, make her doubt what she saw long enough for you to leave with your dignity intact. Alysa has nothing left for that since the hurt is too huge, too physical, too all-consuming. It feels lodged beneath her sternum like shattered glass.

“No,” she says, and her voice breaks with the force of it. “Get out. Now.”

When she moves, it’s to get away from you before the crying starts. Before her body betrays how destroyed she really is. But you reach for her wrist on instinct, maybe to stop her, maybe just to make her stay long enough to listen—and she jerks away so violently it shocks you both. The motion is harsh, almost wild, born from pure reflex and raw panic, and for a second the entire room freezes around it. Alysa turns back toward you with a look you’ve never seen directed at you before, her face drawn tight with fury and heartbreak so tangled together they’re almost indistinguishable. Her eyes are wet now, shining, furious, wounded. Her breathing is uneven. Every inch of her looks like she’s holding herself together by force alone.

“Don’t touch me,” she says, and it comes out low and shaking and deadly serious.

You physically shrink, enough that Alysa notices, enough that something inside her almost buckles. Your shoulders draw in, your face changes. The fight in you goes quiet. You grab your jacket without another argument, and she hates that too—hates that you’re leaving, hates that you’re listening, hates that some terrible traitorous part of her still wants to stop you even now. But she doesn’t. She just stands there rigid and trembling while you walk out of the apartment you’ve moved through so easily for so long, and the second the door closes behind you, all that anger burns off and leaves only the wreckage underneath

She breaks immediately. One second she’s standing there, jaw locked, chest heaving, and the next her body just gives up the performance entirely. A sound tears out of her—small at first, then broken open—and she folds in on herself like she’s been hit somewhere vital. Her hand flies to her mouth as if she can physically hold the grief in, but it’s useless. Tears spill fast enough to blur everything. Her knees weaken and she stumbles backward until the couch catches her, and then she’s sinking onto it, curling over herself, one hand gripping her shirt right over her chest like maybe pressure there will dull the pain. It doesn’t, nothing does. Her heart hurts in this brutal, humiliatingly real way, like an injury instead of an emotion. Her stomach is still turning and her throat burns. Breathing feels uneven and wrong. Under all of it is this enormous, unbearable grief because you are not some casual person she can hate cleanly.

You are built into her life, into her routines, her body memory, her sense of comfort. You’re in her apartment and in her phone and in the way she reaches automatically for someone at the end of the day. You matter in all the soft places. So the idea that you would do this—that you could look her in the eye for weeks while belonging partly somewhere else—doesn’t just upset her. It makes the whole world feel rearranged into something colder and uglier than it was an hour ago.

———

The door closing behind you doesn’t feel real at first. It’s just a sound—sharp, final—but your body doesn’t catch up to it right away. You stand there in the hallway for a second longer than you should, your hand still loosely wrapped around your jacket like you forgot what you were doing mid-motion. The quiet outside her apartment feels wrong, like you stepped into a different version of the world where everything is slightly off.

Just minutes ago, you were inside. Sitting next to her, leaning into her, existing in that same space that’s always felt like yours too.

And now you’re not allowed there.

The shift is so abrupt it leaves you disoriented. You walk out of the building on autopilot, barely registering the cold air when it hits your face, barely noticing the way your steps feel uneven beneath you. Your mind is stuck on a loop, replaying the last few minutes over and over again, but it keeps getting stuck on one thing…

That look on her face.

You’ve never seen Alysa look at you like that before. Not once. You’ve seen her annoyed, playful, even frustrated—but never that. Never something so sharp, so full of anger that it almost didn’t look like her. It wasn’t just anger either. There was hurt under it. Deep, unmistakable hurt. The kind that doesn’t come from a small misunderstanding. The kind that comes from feeling betrayed.

Your chest tightens at the memory of it, your stomach twisting uncomfortably as you unlock your car and slide into the driver’s seat. You don’t start it right away, sitting there with your hands resting on the wheel, staring straight ahead at nothing.

You know what she thinks but you didn’t fix it.

You had the chance to fix it. When she told you to leave, when she looked at you like you’d broken something that couldn’t be put back together—you could’ve just told her. You could’ve explained everything right then. You could’ve told her it’s all for you.

But you didn’t because in that moment, it didn’t feel like it would land the way it was supposed to. She was too upset, too far gone in whatever she was feeling. You saw it in her face, in the way her voice was shaking, in the way she couldn’t even look at you for more than a second at a time. If you had tried to explain it then, it would’ve sounded ridiculous. Like an excuse or like something you made up on the spot to cover whatever she thought she found. You couldn’t risk that, not after everything you’ve been doing. So you let her believe it for now.

The thought makes your chest ache in a completely different way, something heavier, quieter, harder to sit with. You know how much that hurt her. You saw it and you felt it in the way she pulled away from you, in the way she told you not to touch her like your hands suddenly meant something else.

And you still walked out.

You exhale slowly, finally starting the car, the engine breaking the silence just enough to pull you back into the present. The drive home is a blur. Your mind just keeps drifting back, filling in all the moments you should’ve said something and didn’t. By the time you make it to your apartment, the weight of it has settled deeper.

You drop your keys on the counter, shrug off your jacket, and for a second you just stand there in the middle of the room like you don’t know what to do with yourself. You were supposed to be somewhere else tonight. You were supposed to be at her place, spend the night and then wake up and give her birthday kisses. You’re supposed to go to her dad’s house together tomorrow for her birthday party and finally show off what you’ve been working on for months. The entire night and day after had already been planned in your head without you even realizing it.

And now, none of that is happening.

You swallow, your throat tight as you move toward your bedroom, your body feeling heavier with each step. When you sit down on the edge of your bed, the emptiness hits harder. It’s not just that you’re alone—you’ve been alone plenty of nights over the past few months. It’s that you shouldn’t be.

You lean back slowly, staring up at the ceiling, your phone resting on your chest as if you’re waiting for it to light up but it doesn’t. You don’t text her either because you don’t even know what you’d say that wouldn’t make things worse right now.

You close your eyes as your mind drifts to the image of her face, clearer now in the dark. The glare she gave you which wasn’t just anger but it was also something that looked like it hurt her to even look at you. You shift slightly, trying to get comfortable, but there’s nowhere for that feeling to go.

These past few months have been hard in a way you didn’t fully let yourself acknowledge. You filled every gap with purpose—classes, studying, reading, pushing yourself through something that felt worth it because it had her at the end of it. Every late night, every canceled plan, every moment you chose this over being with her, you told yourself it was temporary. That it would mean something when it was done. That it would bring you closer, not push you apart.

And now, you’re lying here, alone, and she thinks you betrayed her.

Your chest aches at the thought, your hand unconsciously curling slightly against your shirt as if you can hold that feeling in place. You miss her. Not in some passing way, but in this constant, physical sense of something missing where it’s supposed to be. You miss her voice, her presence, the way she fills a room without trying. You miss how easy it used to feel to just be with her. And tonight, more than anything, you miss what this night was supposed to be. You let out a slow breath, your eyes opening again as you stare at the ceiling, unmoving.

Tomorrow.

That’s all you have to hold onto now.

Tomorrow was supposed to be the moment everything paid off anyway. It was going to be the reveal and proof that all of this time, all of this distance, had a reason. That you weren’t just drifting away, you were building something.

You just have to make it there, just have to get through tonight.

But the night doesn’t move. It stretches and every time you close your eyes, that look comes back. Every time you start to drift, your mind snaps back awake, like it won’t let you rest while things are unresolved. So you stare into the dark, holding onto tomorrow like it’s the only thing keeping everything from falling apart.

———

Alysa wakes up slowly at first, still half inside sleep, her body reaching for something before her mind has caught up enough to know what it’s doing. One arm slides across the sheets beside her, searching for warmth on instinct, for the shape of you curled somewhere in the bed the way you were supposed to be, the way you said you would be. For one soft, stupid second there’s even disappointment before there’s pain—just that dull little feeling of where is she—and then everything from last night comes crashing back all at once, hard enough that it almost feels physical.

Alysa opens her eyes fully to an empty room that suddenly feels too bright, too still, too honest. The bed is only half slept in. The other pillow is untouched except for where it had been fluffed for you before everything went wrong. She stares at it for a long moment, throat tightening so fast it burns.

There’s no anger in that first minute but grief. Heavy, immediate grief, the kind that makes her feel like she’s mourning something that was still alive yesterday. Because in her head, that’s what this is now. It’s over. The best thing that’s happened to her in years—easily, undeniably—has been taken out from under her, and worse, it’s been taken out from under her by you. Her face twists before she can stop it, and tears come hot and fast, slipping sideways into the pillow while she lies there staring at the spot where you should have been.

Normally she’d be irritated with herself by now, annoyed at crying first thing in the morning, annoyed at how dramatic it feels, how weak. But today she just lets it happen. It’s her birthday after all. She doesn’t have the energy to police her own grief. So she presses her face harder into the pillow and cries quietly into the emptiness you left behind, her chest aching with every shaky breath, every thought returning to the same impossible point—that you were meant to wake up beside her today, and instead she’s alone in a bed that still looks like it was expecting you.

The whole day moves like that after. Each hour seeming longer than it should be, as if time itself has become aware that it no longer has anything good to deliver her. She gets up because staying in bed would only make it worse, but getting up doesn’t make anything feel better either.

The apartment is too quiet. Even the ordinary things feel hostile in some small way. The hoodie of yours still looped over the back of a chair, the half-finished conversation sitting dead in her texts like something abandoned mid-sentence.

This was supposed to be a day already shaped out in her mind before it arrived. You were supposed to be here. You were supposed to tease her awake, steal the first birthday kiss, make some comment about how you technically deserved credit for getting her into another year of life. You were supposed to get ready together, crowding each other in the bathroom while one of you complained about the lighting and the other pretended not to care. It was supposed to be easy and familiar.

Instead everything has this stripped-down, wrong feeling to it. At some point she calls her dad to cancel the party because the thought of smiling through it, of standing in a room full of people while this sits like a fresh wound under her ribs, feels impossible. But her dad, in that steady way he has, gently refuses to let her hide. He reminds her how much family is coming, how rarely everyone’s all in one place, how people are excited to see her. He tells her she doesn’t have to stay all night, just come by, make an appearance, let herself be loved a little. Alysa nearly says no again, but there’s something tired in her by then, something too worn down to keep fighting every small thing. So she agrees, though she doesn’t want to. She gets dressed without much care, pulling things on more than choosing them, and stares at herself in the mirror long enough to know she looks off like someone turned the brightness down on her from the inside.

She arrives alone, and that in itself says too much immediately. The house is already alive with voices and movement, the front rooms warm with the smell of food and that particular hum family gatherings always have when people are circulating and reconnecting at once. Under other circumstances, Alysa would have loved it. Today it feels like walking into a stage play she forgot she was cast in.

Her siblings realize the situation before she even makes it through the first round of greetings. Justin notices first because he’s Justin and because he’s already looking for you the second he sees Alysa by herself. Julia and Jaylinn catch it half a beat later, Selina’s expression changes more subtly but just as quickly. None of them say anything in front of everyone else. They just guide her with those quiet sibling instincts that don’t need much explaining, until they’ve tucked her into a back room away from the noise.

The second the door shuts, Justin asks where you are, and Alysa, already raw, already tired, has to say it out loud. Not every detail at first, just enough for the room to go still. Enough for all four of them to understand this is not some late arrival, not some scheduling issue. Her voice stays remarkably steady while she explains what she saw, what happened, how you left. Her sisters look devastated for her in a way that almost makes it harder. Justin looks immediately furious, jaw set, arms crossed so tightly it’s obvious he’s already decided what he thinks of you. Alysa tells them not to tell anyone else, not because she wants to protect you but because she cannot handle the room turning toward her in collective sympathy. She doesn’t want whispers or pity. So they promise or close enough to one. The mood that settles over the room is quiet and ugly, all of them feeling the same thing in different directions. They only know the story from Alysa’s side, and from that angle there’s not much room left for nuance. By the time they leave that room, it’s more or less understood between the siblings that they hate you now too.

She moves through the party on muscle memory, smiling where she has to, hugging the relatives she doesn’t see often enough, thanking people for gifts, for coming. It is astonishing how well the body can imitate normalcy when the mind is somewhere else entirely. People talk to her and she answers. People laugh and sometimes she even manages a version of it back. But under it all she feels hollowed out, like every interaction is happening one room away from where she actually is.

It gets worse every time someone casually asks where you are. There's the assumption that of course you’d be here and since you're not, everyone is now curious but each question lands like a bruise.

“Where’s your girl?” one aunt asks with a smile.

“Is she coming later?” another cousin says.

An older family friend looks around and says, “I thought she’d be glued to your side today.”

Alysa keeps deflecting without technically lying. “She couldn’t make it on time.” “She’s busy.” “Not here yet.”

The words feel brittle in her mouth. She can’t bring herself to say more, but she also can’t stomach inventing some clean excuse. So she lets the questions slide off as best she can and eventually retreats to sit near her sisters, letting them buffer her from the room a little. They do it naturally.

As she sits there, half removed from the center of her own birthday, Alysa can’t stop thinking the worst part isn’t even the anger. The anger is real, yes, hot and humiliating and still ready to rise any time she thinks too directly about last night. But underneath it is longing so deep it makes her feel weak. She misses you. God, she misses you. She misses you even while believing you hurt her. She misses the version of today that should have existed. She misses the idea of getting one more uncomplicated day before all of this, one more day to be with you before her brain attached betrayal to your face. She wants to hate you cleanly, but she can’t. What she really wants, in the most useless and painful way possible, is for it all to go back to before the suspicion, before the phone, before the look on your face and the one she threw back. Her sisters can tell. They can tell that this isn’t just anger, not just wounded pride, but something much softer and more devastating. They look at her with that protective sadness younger siblings get when the older one they rely on suddenly seems breakable.

———-

Outside, the air is cooler than it should be for a summer evening. The house glows from within, light spilling through windows, silhouettes moving back and forth behind glass, laughter occasionally escaping whenever the front door opens and closes. You stand at the edge of the driveway for a moment before walking up it, your body tighter with nerves the closer you get, your hands colder than they should be.

Every version of today that ran through your head last night ended with you finally getting to explain everything, finally watching that awful misunderstanding collapse under the weight of the truth. That hope is the only thing that got you through the night before, the only thing that kept you from showing up at her door again at some unreasonable hour and begging her to listen. Instead, you came here, to the party where this was always meant to end anyway—not with heartbreak, but with the reveal, with your months of effort landing exactly where they were meant to.

You’re so close to the porch when Justin spots you. He had been out there with one of Alysa’s cousins, talking quietly, both of them half-turned toward the driveway, taking a break from the noise inside. The second he registers it’s you, his whole body changes. He straightens immediately, all ease leaving him at once, and folds his arms across his chest with a look so openly hostile that you almost stop walking. His cousin glances between the two of you and wisely says nothing. You don’t have the energy for subtlety, not today.

“Justin,” you say, the plea already in your voice before you can flatten it out. “Please. Let me go in. I need to talk to Alysa.”

He lets out a humorless sound and shakes his head once, slow, incredulous. “Jesus. You can’t even let her enjoy her birthday?” The accusation lands hard because part of you understands exactly how this looks.

“I’m not here to ruin anything,” you say quickly, stepping closer despite the tension rolling off him. “I just need to explain this. It’s one big misunderstanding and I need her to hear me.”

But Justin has already made up his mind from the version of the story he got, and in that version you don’t get the benefit of the doubt.

He scoffs, looks you up and down like he can’t believe you had the nerve to show up, and tells you to get lost. Tells you, flatly, that he’s not letting you in to make her birthday worse than it already is. For one dangerous second your frustration spikes high enough that you have to physically swallow it back down. You want to argue so terribly bad, but because he’s her brother, because he loves her, because from where he’s standing this reaction makes sense, you don't. You just take a long breath through your nose and force yourself still.

“I’m not leaving,” you say at last, quieter now but no less firm. “I’ll wait out here for her.”

Justin looks at you like you’re being dramatic, like there’s no way you actually mean it. He probably assumes you’ll get tired, embarrassed, cold. That eventually you’ll give up and go home and save him the trouble of throwing you off the property himself. So he just shrugs in that dismissive, irritated way and turns back toward the house, the cousin trailing in after him. The door shuts and you are left outside with the sound of the party muted behind it, the warm light unreachable now except through windows.

You walk slowly back down toward the curb and sit on it beside Alysa’s car, close enough that the metal of it catches the house lights in dull reflections. The curb is colder than you expected. You draw your knees up and rest your chin against them, staring at the cobblestone stretch of driveway in front of you like answers might rise from it if you look long enough.

You go over it all again in your head because you need to say it right. You need the explanation to be clear enough that nothing about it feels flimsy or opportunistic. You’ll tell her you started because you wanted more than a surface relationship with a big part of who she is. You’ll tell her about the classes, the professor, the notebooks full of tones and grammar and phrases you kept practicing even when your brain felt wrung out. You’ll tell her about the books too, the fiction and memoirs and essays, all the ways you’ve been trying to understand more than just vocabulary. You’ll tell her you kept it secret because you didn’t want it to feel performative. You wanted this to be real. You wanted to surprise her by showing her that you meant it—that you were in this for the long run, for years from now, for family gatherings where you could finally hold your own without her translating every second of it.

After a while the words stop sounding abstract in your head and start needing somewhere to go, so you whisper them instead. At first it’s just little fragments under your breath, your voice almost swallowed by the night. Then it becomes practice. Mandarin phrases repeated softly again and again, careful with pronunciation even through the ache sitting in your throat. You correct yourself, repeat, try again. Some of it is practical—greetings, short explanations, respectful phrases you know you’ll need if she lets you get inside. But the one you come back to most is simpler. Smaller.

The one thing you can’t stop wanting to say directly to her even now.

I love you.

You keep repeating it, low and quiet, trying to get the tones right despite how unsteady you feel. There’s something devastating about sitting outside her family home on her birthday while she thinks the worst of you, practicing how to tell her you love her in a language you learned for her in the first place.

You are so sad you almost feel numb around the edges of it. But under it there’s still certainty. Not blind optimism, not some easy confidence that this will magically be fine, but a hard little core of belief that this work did not happen for nothing. That eventually Alysa will hear you. That eventually this awful, ruined night and this miserable morning will make sense to her. You just need time to catch up to you. And you can’t wait anymore.

So you stay on the curb beside her car, chin on your knees, whispering I love you into the dark like a promise, like practice, like the only thing holding you together until she finally comes out.

———

By the third hour of being there, Alysa feels like she’s been holding herself upright by sheer politeness alone.

The party has only grown louder around her as the evening’s gone on. Under any other circumstance, Alysa would be fine here. She’d be drifting between rooms, getting pulled into conversations, stealing bites from plates she wasn’t supposed to touch yet, circling back to you every few minutes just because it would feel automatic to do that. But today the house feels like a place she’s performing inside of, and the performance is wearing her down.

Her face hurts from smiling on cue. Her body feels too hot, too tired, too aware of itself. Her sisters have been hovering in that quiet, protective way and she loves them for it, but even that has started to make her feel trapped.

If she tells her dad she wants to leave, she already knows what he’ll say—stay for the cake, at least, stay for another hour, people came all this way. And maybe on any other day she would. But tonight every minute feels like five, and the thought of staying until cake, of standing there while people sing at her when her insides still feel torn open from last night, makes something in her want to bolt.

So she waits for the right opening, slips away from her sisters when they’re distracted by an aunt who wants photos, avoids the hallway Justin just disappeared down, and finally makes it outside with the guilty, relieved feeling of someone sneaking out of their own life.

The driveway stretches long and dim in front of the house, the cobblestones washed in low porch light and the softer spill from inside the windows. Her car is parked all the way at the end just how she wanted it—unblocked, easy to get to, already angled like escape was something she’d subconsciously planned for hours ago.

She starts toward it with her head down, one hand already reaching into her pocket for her keys, her mind half on the relief of finally being alone and half on the shame of leaving her own birthday party early like she can’t even handle one bad day properly. Then something catches her attention. It’s soft enough at first that she almost mistakes it for the wind moving through leaves or voices carrying from farther down the street. But when she stops and listens, she realizes it’s neither. It’s murmuring, whispering, almost. The sound is coming from somewhere beside her car, low and steady, so quiet it keeps getting lost in the distance between them. Alysa stills completely.

There’s something strange about the sound—not just that someone is out here, but the shape of the words themselves. At first she can only make out fragments. A phrase in Mandarin, then another, spoken in an accent that is very obviously not native and yet somehow careful enough that she understands it almost immediately. The pronunciation isn’t perfect in that seamless way family speech is perfect, but it’s good. Shockingly good.

She hears words like sorry. Hears miss you. Hears love. Her brows pull together before she can stop them, and now curiosity outweighs the tiredness enough that she starts walking again, slower this time, cautious without really knowing why. As she rounds the front of her car, the source of the voice comes into view all at once.

It’s you.

You’re sitting on the curb with your knees drawn up, your body folded in around itself like you’ve been there long enough to settle into the discomfort of it. One hand is rolling a pebble back and forth between your fingers with absent concentration, your head tipped away as you mumble to yourself, too deep in it to notice her right away.

Up close, Alysa can hear you more clearly, and the clarity only makes the scene stranger. You’re not just repeating isolated phrases. You’re speaking in sequence, practicing like someone working through a lesson. Telling the time. Mentioning when you woke up. Saying what you ate. Stumbling once, correcting yourself softly, then continuing. It is not random or like you googled translations. It sounds lived in, the kind of speech that only comes from repetition and effort and time.

And for one suspended second Alysa doesn’t know what to do with what she’s seeing. Her chest tightens, but not in the clean, familiar way it has all day. This is different—sharper, more disorienting, almost like her body has recognized something before her mind can place it.

She clears her throat, mostly because she has to break the moment somehow, and your head snaps up so fast it’s almost violent. Your eyes find hers instantly. Then you’re scrambling to your feet, stumbling a little as circulation fights its way back into your legs, one hand flying out to catch your balance on the side of her car.

For a second neither of you says anything. You just look at each other under the weak wash of driveway light, and Alysa is struck by how terrible you look. Okay maybe not terrible, maybe she still hates you, but you look tired. Eyes blown wide with nerves and hope and fear all crowding into one expression, your face drawn with too little sleep, your whole body leaning toward her like it’s been waiting hours for this exact second.

“What are you doing here?” Alysa asks, and her voice comes out flatter than she means it to, worn thin by the day and by everything that’s happened since last night.

“I need to talk to you,” you say immediately. There’s no hesitation in it, it’s just pure urgency.

Alysa exhales through her nose, the sound edged with exhaustion more than anger, though the anger is still there. It resurfaces the second she remembers why she’s out here alone in the first place, why she woke up to an empty bed, why her whole birthday has felt empty. Her hand tightens around her keys and she starts to move past you toward the driver’s side door, because leaving would be easier, safer. But you step in front of it before she can reach it. And because you’re this close now, because she hasn’t really looked at you since last night, she does it now. Your eyes are huge, glassy in the low light, your expression open in a way that makes it impossible to mistake what’s there. You look pleading, scared. Hopeful in a way that almost hurts to witness. There’s no slickness to you, no confidence, no practiced excuse waiting smugly behind your teeth. You just look terribly earnest. Alysa should still say no. She knows she should. Every instinct built from the last twenty-four hours tells her to protect herself, to get in the car, to leave before you can talk your way back into all the places she just barely managed to start sealing off. But she has never, not once, been good at denying you when you ask softly enough. And when you add a quiet, strained “please,” it lands exactly where it always does. She closes her eyes for half a beat, then opens them again and says nothing, but doesn’t move. For you, that’s enough.

You start talking too fast at first, the words crowding each other like you’ve been holding them in so long they don’t know how to come out carefully anymore. “I’m sorry,” you say immediately, and then again, stronger this time, like the first one didn’t cover enough. “I’m so sorry, Alysa. This got so big and messy for no reason, and I should’ve told you everything last night. I should’ve explained the second I realized what you thought you saw.” You stop just long enough to drag in a breath, your eyes searching her face like you’re trying to figure out if she’s still listening, if she’s already shutting down again. “I just— I froze. You were so upset, and I’ve never… I’ve never had you look at me like that before. I was scared,” you admit, your voice dropping a little. “And I didn’t know how to explain any of it without making you more upset, and then you wanted me gone and I just…” You shake your head, frustrated with yourself, jaw tight. “I handled it wrong. I know I did.”

Alysa says nothing. She just stands there, shoulders tense, keys pressing into her palm, and lets you keep going because now that the dam is broken you clearly can’t stop if you wanted to. Then you say the name. P. Lucas. And the second you do, Alysa’s stomach tightens again, but now with anticipation instead of sickness. “It’s not some guy,” you say quickly, seeing the shift in her face. “It means Professor Lucas. He’s my Mandarin teacher.” There’s a flicker of confusion in Alysa then—small, enough that it passes visibly across her features before she can smooth it out. You see it and keep going, more steady now that you’ve begun telling the actual truth. “I’ve been taking lessons for like… ten-ish months,” you say. “Not even Duolingo, I mean yeah I started there but I realized it wasn't working so then it turned into like actual lessons, in person, with a professor, every day for an hour and a half whenever I could make it work.” You swallow, glance down for half a second, then force yourself to meet her eyes again. “And I’ve been reading too. Books, essays, memoirs, fiction, history—anything I could find that would help me understand more. I’ve been watching movies and interviews and lectures and taking notes like a psycho.” There’s a small, humorless exhale at that, not quite a laugh, gone as quickly as it appeared.

And as you talk, Alysa feels that unbearable tightness in her chest building again, but now it’s changing shape faster than she can keep up with. You take a breath, slower this time, and when you speak again your voice changes. It gets quieter and less frantic. Like you’ve reached the part that matters most and now you need her to hear every word exactly as you mean it. “It wasn’t just because of that party,” you say. “Or—okay, no, that’s not true. That party stayed with me, and Maya’s boyfriend showing up and just… fitting like that. Watching him talk to your family so easily. Sure, it bothered me.” Your eyes flick away for a second, toward the lit windows of the house behind her, then back to her face. “But it wasn’t just me feeling embarrassed or left out. It was more than that. I realized I didn’t want to keep standing on the outside of your world.”

But that wasn’t the whole thing. The whole thing, you say, was, “If I’m really in this, if I’m really in your life, then I don’t want to only exist in translation when it comes to the people and the culture that matter this much to you. I don’t want to just smile and nod and follow you around and depend on you to bridge every gap forever. I want to hold my own years from now without needing you to translate every second of it for me.”

Your voice gets quieter; the words matter more than how fast they come. “I kept it secret because I didn’t want it to feel fake,” you say. “I didn’t want you thinking I was doing it for praise, or because I wanted everyone to think I was this amazing girlfriend who cares so much.” You wince faintly at yourself, then keep going. “I wanted it to be real. I wanted to surprise you with something that actually meant something. I wanted to show you that I meant it—that I’m in this for real, for the long run.” Your face softens then, sadness pulling at it openly now. “I was literally imagining today as the payoff. Showing up here with you and understanding what people were saying. Trying to answer back but probably messing it up and making you laugh and then getting it right eventually.” The smallest, saddest smile tugs at your mouth and disappears again. “I thought if I could just get to your birthday, if I could just finish it the way I imagined, it would all be worth it.”

Alysa’s chest hurts.

There’s no better way to describe it. It just hurts. Tight and full and raw all at once, because she can hear the shape of your intentions now, can see how long you’ve been carrying this, how badly you wanted this reveal to go right. And at the same time, she can’t unknow the way the last two months felt. The loneliness of it. The confusion. The nights she missed you so much it made her restless in her own apartment. The resentment that started taking root when “busy” stopped feeling temporary and started feeling personal.

Maybe you see some of that flicker across her face, because your own expression crumples a little with guilt. “I know I pushed you away,” you say, voice rough now. “I know I did, and I’m sorry. I was wrong.” There is something almost unbearable in your sincerity, in the way every word seems dragged out of a place that has nothing to do with self-protection and everything to do with wanting her back. Wanting this back. Still, there’s something pressing behind it all.

“But why did you push me away so much?” she says, and the words come out smaller than she intended, not accusing now so much as wounded. “I feel like I haven’t seen you in so long. Haven’t been with you in so long.”

You look stricken at that, like this is the part you knew was coming and dreaded anyway. You let out a breath, glance down at the driveway for a second, then back at her. You admit it—you were excessive. More than excessive. A little obsessive, probably. You got fixated on making it all happen before her birthday, on making the surprise complete, on reaching some invisible finish line you set for yourself without realizing you were sacrificing the very thing you were supposed to be protecting. “I got too wrapped up in it.” Your eyes shine a little now, not fully crying but close enough that Alysa notices. “I shouldn’t have done that. I shouldn’t have prioritized some future moment over actually being there with you in the present. I know that now. I know I hurt you, and I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”. Your voice is quieter by the end, stripped down, almost fragile with honesty. “I want to make it up to you now. Like actually this time.”

By the time you switch into Mandarin, Alysa is barely holding herself in the same emotional shape she started in. The words are deliberate, each one placed with concentration and respect, and the accent is still yours—still undeniably you—but now she can hear how much time sits underneath it. How many repetitions. How many corrections. How many nights and mornings and stolen hours. You look a little embarrassed speaking it in front of her, a little exposed, but you do it anyway.

You say you’re sorry. You say you’ve missed her. You say you love her.

Hearing it in that language, in her family language—spoken by you, for her, with months of private effort sitting underneath each syllable—does something to Alysa so abruptly she almost has to brace herself against the car.

That tightness in her chest finally resolves into something she can name, and the name is not one emotion but too many at once. Hurt, still, because the last twenty-four hours happened and she cannot unfeel them just because there’s an explanation now. Relief, immense and dizzying, because the explanation exists at all and it is not cheating, not betrayal, not the ugly end she had been forcing herself to mourn all day. Love, most of all, rising through everything else so strongly that it almost feels like grief in reverse.

Because of course it comes back to love.

The anger came from love. The aching all day, the empty bed, the way she could barely make it through her own birthday party—all of it was love twisted into pain by what she thought she’d lost. And now this too is love. Love is ten months of Mandarin lessons. Love is notebooks and books and films and voice memos and time carved violently out of your own life just to learn how to stand a little closer to hers. Love is you sitting on the curb outside her family home whispering apologies and practice phrases into the dark because you couldn’t bear not fixing this tonight. The feeling that climbs into Alysa’s throat is so overwhelming it almost scares her. She could actually cry.

Alysa stands there breathing through the last of the adrenaline, the last of the fear, and logic finally starts returning in pieces. This is not an easy thing to fake. Not this level of detail, not the Mandarin, not the way your face has gone soft with genuine regret instead of defensiveness. Later, she knows, she can look through the messages with Professor Lucas, can listen to the voice memos and hear that they’re about pronunciation and phrasing, can come to your apartment and see the mountains of books and the notes and all the evidence of this life you built in secret. Though, she already believes you before any of that. But only because this explanation fits in a way the other one only forced itself to fit through pain. And the second she lets herself accept that, truly accept it, something in her gives way completely. She doesn’t say yes in words. She doesn’t make some neat declaration about forgiveness. She just steps forward with a breath that sounds almost like a break and collapses into you.

You catch her immediately, like you were ready for exactly that, like some part of you has been holding your whole body in place waiting for permission to do this. Her face buries itself in the side of your neck, and the second she’s there, the whole last day finally starts draining out of her. Your hand comes up to cradle the back of her head, fingers sliding gently into her hair, while your other hand settles firm and warm against the middle of her back. Alysa’s arms wrap tight around your waist, tighter than she means them to, but you don’t react except to hold her closer. She can feel how real you are then—your breathing, the weight of your body, the warmth of your skin under the collar of your shirt—and the relief of it is so intense it almost hurts as much as the grief did.

Being held by you after spending all day believing she’d lost you feels like stepping out of freezing water. Neither of you moves for a while. The driveway is quiet except for distant party noise spilling faintly from the house, some car passing far away at the street. But here, tucked against each other in the half-dark, everything has narrowed down to breathing and contact and the stunned, exhausted knowledge that this is over now. That the worst of it has finally loosened its hands from both your throats. When you speak, it’s into her hair, your voice low and a little wrecked still.

You murmur happy birthday, my sweet in Mandarin, careful with each word even now, and Alysa lets out a breath against your neck that might be the beginning of a laugh, might be a sob, might be both. Her grip tightens once more before easing, and she stays there a little longer, because after all that distance, after all that hurt, she is not ready to let go of you yet.

———

For a little while after Alysa folds into you, neither of you seems capable of doing. The misunderstanding has burned itself out and left only the two of you standing in the driveway breathing against each other like you’ve both just survived something uglier than either of you expected. Alysa’s face stays buried against your neck long enough that your shirt grows warm from her breath, and your hand never leaves the back of her head, fingers spread there carefully, like you’re afraid she’ll slip away if you loosen your grip too soon. Her arms are still locked around your waist with that same desperate tightness, and you let her hold on as hard as she needs to because you get it. You feel the ache of the last few months, the shock of last night, the loneliness of not being able to fix it fast enough—it’s all still in both of you, but now it’s softened by relief, by the steady realization that you’re here and she’s here and neither of you lost the other after all.

When Alysa finally lifts her head, it happens slowly, almost reluctantly, like she has to physically force herself to leave the shelter of your neck. Her cheeks are a little flushed, her eyes still glossy from everything she’s been carrying around all day, and for a second she just looks at you from too close, taking you in with the kind of focus that makes it obvious she’s still grounding herself in the sight of you.

Then she kisses you.

It isn’t hesitant. It's not even particularly gentle at first. It’s the kind of kiss that happens when both people have been starved of each other long enough that the second permission exists, restraint goes with it. Alysa’s hand comes up to the side of your face as she leans in, and you kiss her back instantly. The relief of it is almost physical. It really does feel like coming up for air after being underwater too long—like the first full breath after a long panic, like your ribs finally unlocking.

The kiss deepens quickly because too much has built up. Too many nights cut short, too many missed mornings, too many almosts and not-enoughs. Alysa lets out the faintest sound against your mouth when your hands settle at her waist and pull her in harder, and for a few seconds neither of you is thinking about the house ten yards away. There’s only the fact that she’s kissing you again, that you get to kiss her back, that all day she thought this was gone and now it isn’t.

When you finally break apart, it’s only by inches, lips still brushing, both of you breathing a little too fast. Alysa’s forehead nearly knocks into yours when she chases one more kiss, shorter this time, softer, and then she mumbles, still so close that the words warm your mouth as they leave her. “I missed you so much.” It comes out half-breathed, almost embarrassed by how honest it is. You answer before there’s even room for thought.

“I missed you too. So much.” And then you’re kissing again, not because either of you planned to but because apparently this is what missing each other for months does once it finally has somewhere to go.

The tone between you has shifted now, lighter in some ways but no less intense. The panic is gone and what’s left is all that pent-up affection and need rushing to fill the cleared space. Your hands start roaming without much thought, the way they used to when privacy wasn’t an issue and time wasn’t always running out. One slides from Alysa’s waist to the small of her back, then upward, fingertips slipping under the hem of her shirt to find warm skin. Alysa shivers at the contact, just enough that you feel it under your palms, and her mouth parts against yours in a way that immediately goes to your head. You are very clearly in the mode of wanting to make up for everything at once. For the distance, for the confusion, for the fact that she woke up without you this morning, for every time she looked at the clock and you were already leaving. So when your hand moves higher under her shirt you don’t even think about where you are. You only think about how badly you’ve missed touching her like this, how familiar and unbearable it feels all at once to have her body fitting against yours again.

Alysa, for her part, is hardly less affected. Her hands are on your neck, then sliding down your shoulders, then back up again like she can’t settle on one place because she wants all of it at once. But unlike you, she does remember where you are, and eventually some sliver of situational awareness cuts through the haze enough for her to pull back with a breathless little laugh that sounds half dazed, half disbelieving.

“Okay,” she murmurs, catching your wrist lightly before your hand can get too far. “Okay—wait.” You blink at her, clearly prepared to pretend not to understand the problem. Alysa has to bite back a smile because even now, even like this, you look so earnest in your desperation it’s hard to take seriously. “You should come inside,” she says, still close enough that your mouths brush when she talks. “Everyone’s been asking about you.”

You look at her for a second, trying to gather yourself enough to process the sentence, then your brows pull together. “I thought you were leaving.”

Alysa lets out a soft exhale through her nose, one shoulder lifting as her hand smooths once over your side, grounding both of you. “I was,” she admits. “It was unbearable without you. But I can go back if you go with me.”

You stop trying to pull her closer for a second and just hold her instead, your arms winding fully around her as if the answer is already yes and your body has moved on before your mouth does.

“Yeah,” you say quietly. “Okay. I’ll go with you.” The decision settles between you with surprising ease after everything.

You both take a second to straighten up after that, partly because you need to and partly because if you don’t, you’re probably going to end up right back against her car doing something neither of you can defend to the rest of her family. Alysa smooths a hand over the front of her shirt, glances at you, then laughs under her breath at the state of your face—tired eyes, hair a little wind-shifted from sitting on the curb and being immediately kissed senseless the second she forgave you. But you’re dressed fine. Better than fine, actually. You had come expecting to walk into a birthday party, not a breakup aftermath, so your clothes fit the room you’re about to enter even if your expression gives away the long night that came before it. Alysa reaches for your hand without hesitation, threading your fingers together with a possessiveness that feels earned now, and the two of you start back toward the house side by side.

Walking in hand in hand changes the room almost instantly. The second the front door opens and you step inside with Alysa beside you, the energy nearest the entrance shifts first in surprise, then in visible relief from the people who had spent the last few hours asking where you were. Her family brightens almost immediately, several of them greeting you before you’ve even made it two steps in. And this time you’re not shrinking from it. You’re still a little flustered, still carrying the emotional wreckage of the last twenty-four hours in your eyes, but you’re eager now, too eager in a way that seems to override your nerves.

You squeeze Alysa’s hand once and follow her further in, and she, suddenly back in her element now that the central wrongness of the night has been corrected, gets a little cute about the whole thing. She’s introducing you again to people who already know you, except now her voice has that barely contained edge to it that says she’s sitting on a piece of information she enjoys very much.

“She’s been taking Mandarin lessons,” Alysa says to one of her aunts, unable to stop the pride that sneaks into her tone.

The aunt blinks, looks from Alysa to you, and then, naturally, tests it. She says something in Mandarin and Alysa watches the split second where you process it, your lips parting just slightly while you sort through the words. Then you answer. It isn't perfect like family who grew up inside the language, but clear enough, correct enough, warm enough that the aunt’s face lights up in delight.

The response from the room is instant. People gush; someone laughs in surprise. Another aunt calls somebody else over to hear you say something again. You smile, visibly embarrassed by the sudden attention but also happy in a way that makes the embarrassment worth it. There’s color rising in your cheeks, and your eyes flick toward Alysa once like help me, but there’s affection under it rather than panic. And Alysa, watching you stand there in the middle of her family trying so sincerely, feels that ache in her chest return in its way better form—the one made of pride and relief and love rather than fear.

The further into the party you go, the closer you get to the real test of whether the night has truly turned. Her siblings are gathered near the living room, exactly where Alysa left them, and they notice the two of you immediately. Julia and Jaylinn both make near-identical faces the second they register your joined hands. Selina’s brows go up but Justin reacts the fastest.

He’s halfway to standing before Alysa and you have fully reached them, his expression somewhere between disbelief and protective outrage. “Alysa,” he starts, already exasperated, “what are you doing?”

Alysa doesn’t even let him build momentum. She squeezes your hand, steps slightly forward, and says, with a patience she probably would not have had an hour ago, “Please, guys. I appreciate everything you did for me. I really do. But it’s okay now.”

Justin looks deeply unconvinced. “Okay now?” he repeats flatly. “That’s what we’re calling this?”

You stand there taking it because, honestly, you’ve earned a little bit of hostility from them even if it came from the wrong story. There’s something sheepish about the way you say hello to her siblings from behind Alysa—small, careful, not trying to force ease where there clearly isn’t any. It is painfully awkward. Alysa can feel you trying not to make it worse just by existing there.

So she turns more fully to her siblings and lowers her voice enough that the conversation becomes a contained bubble rather than a scene. “It’s not what I told you,” she says. “I was wrong.”

That gets their attention if only because they know how difficult that sentence can be for anybody in the immediate aftermath of heartbreak. Then Alysa explains in a hurried, quiet version—the Mandarin lessons, Professor Lucas, the entire surprise gone horribly sideways.

Her sisters’ expressions change first, skepticism warring with reluctant intrigue. Justin remains harder to win over, arms folded, mouth set, until Jaylinn—because she wants proof and because she’s enjoying your discomfort just a little—tilts her head and says, “Okay then. Say something.”

You look briefly horrified by being put on the spot, which only encourages them.

“Anything,” Julia adds, crossing her arms but smiling now despite herself. “Go on.”

You glance at Alysa and she only raises her brows, amused now too. You clear your throat and, after one second of visible mental scrambling, start talking in Mandarin about your fish. It’s oddly specific how you say you have alarms set to wake you up in order to feed your fish. That she likes one food but not the other one you bought. The siblings listen, and though none of them understand enough Mandarin to assess the grammar properly, the evidence is embarrassingly clear in your pronunciation, in the fact that you didn’t freeze and fake it, in the confidence that arrived sentence by sentence once you got going.

They glance at each other in that murmured, grudging way of people being forced to revise an opinion they had already committed to. Jaylinn mutters something about you being a nerd. Julia snorts. Justin’s expression loosens last and least.

He looks at you for a long second, then away, then finally says, with all the magnanimity of someone pretending he was never worried at all, “You should’ve just said that outside.”

You have the grace not to point out that he wouldn’t have let you. Gradually, the tension begins to diminish. The siblings drift back into you in pieces, the way people do when love is still the underlying structure even after irritation. Jaylinn and Julia eventually pull you into some gossip you missed, talking over each other while you try to catch up. Selina asks a quieter question about your lessons and actually seems impressed when you answer. Justin, after an appropriate period of continued younger-brother glare, eventually mutters something about whether you’re still free for the hangout the two of you had planned before all this mess, and that’s basically his way of saying fine, you’re not dead to him.

From there the night begins to feel like it belongs to both of you again. The lost months don’t disappear, but now every touch has permission behind it again, and both of you are embarrassingly unwilling to waste that.

You and Alysa stay hand in hand for most of the rest of the party. Alysa’s hand brushes your arm when she passes behind you. Your palm settles low on her back as you guide her around clusters of relatives. More than once one of you leans in for what should clearly be a simple peck and it almost derails into something more—the kiss deepening too fast, one of you smiling into it because seriously? here? before forcing the other to pull back. There is a clinginess to both of you that nobody who knows the context would dare make fun of. Too much had been held back. Too much had almost been lost. So now the smallest contact feels necessary.

When you come across Alysa’s grandma again, the moment matters more than either of you expected it to. The older woman brightens the second she sees you, reaching for your hand the way she did the first time, and this time when she speaks to you in Mandarin you actually understand enough to answer. You do have to pause and search for a word here and there, but you get it now. Enough that her face changes with real pleasure, she laughs softly and squeezes your hand and responds again with the kind of warm patience that makes trying easier rather than harder. Alysa still has to step in every so often to supply a word you’re missing, and each time you glance at her with that quick, grateful look before continuing, but it doesn’t feel like being rescued now. It feels like being a part of something, like finally stepping into the world you had spent months trying to reach. And for Alysa, standing there watching you with her grandmother, the rightness of it is almost overwhelming.

Eventually it’s cake time, and the house shifts accordingly, people being called in from the kitchen and the porch and wherever else they’ve wandered. The lights in the living room are dimmed one by one until the room goes soft and warm around the edges, and voices start corralling into one place.

You disappear briefly into the kitchen and reemerge carrying the cake with the candles already lit, their glow catching along your tired face and turning it softer. The room starts singing almost immediately—family loud and off-key and affectionate in exactly the way birthday songs always are—but for Alysa the room narrows the second she sees you walking toward her through the dim light holding that cake.

She is vaguely aware of everyone else, but none of it lands the way you do. You look at her over the candles with so much open love on your face that it steadies something deep in her.

And she knows, right then, that this is the moment that you were working so hard for. It’s not perfect, the day didn’t go anything like planned, but it went wrong in the worst possible way and still ended here. With the two of you looking at each other across candlelight and noise and family and all the complications that come with loving someone fully. The misunderstanding, the distance, the hurt, the relief—it all points to the same thing. Your relationship has weight to it. It held through months of miscommunication and a day that should have wrecked it. It held because underneath everything else there is love, real and persistent enough to survive both your mistakes.

Alysa feels it when the song finishes and everyone starts cheering, feels it when you set the cake down and immediately reach for her hand again, feels it in the way both of you break into the same private smile at the exact same time. This is not some fragile thing that only works when everything is easy. This is something sturdier. Something that will keep asking things of both of you and keep being worth it anyway.

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first post back???? i wouldve split this up into two parts but i wanted to use those three pics LOL like theyre perfect for this story. Also... anyone at all get the very small wicked reference,,,,, hold out my....

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tag list :P

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