𓈒𓏼 ᩧ　᥊ꪱ౿　⊹ ۫🪽

Your friend Gaming had been pacing for the better part of an hour before the match even started, bouncing on the balls of his feet while his teammates tried to warm up around him. He had been told at least three times to stop burning through his energy before the actual game, but every time somebody pointed it out, he only laughed and promised he was fine. You knew him well enough to recognize that particular kind of nervousness, though; the louder he became, the more jokes he made, and the more he bounced around the locker room, the more obvious it was that he was trying not to think about how much this match meant to him.

When you finally found him near the entrance to the court, he brightened immediately, and whatever nervousness had been hiding beneath his grin seemed to disappear the moment he spotted you. He jogged over with his jacket half-zipped and his hair still slightly damp from warming up, stopping in front of you with enough energy that he nearly collided with your shoulder. “You came!” he exclaimed, his face lighting up as he looked you over, and when you laughed and told him you had promised you would, he shook his head as though that wasn't the point at all. “No, I know you promised, but you actually came. That's different.”

You smiled as you reached up to fix the crooked collar of his jersey, and Gaming immediately went still beneath your hands, watching you with an expression that was far softer than the grin he'd been wearing a moment earlier. You told him that you wouldn't miss something this important, especially after listening to him talk about the match for the past month, and he laughed while rubbing the back of his neck, clearly embarrassed that you'd noticed how much he'd been talking about it. When you wished him good luck, he caught your wrist before you could pull your hand away and looked down at the little red bracelet around your wrist, the one he'd given you weeks ago after joking that it was his personal lucky charm.

“You're wearing it,” he said, his thumb brushing lightly over the bracelet as though he needed to make sure it was really there.

You glanced down at it and smiled. “You told me I had to.”

Gaming's grin returned immediately, bright and almost boyish as he released your wrist. “Then we're definitely winning today.”

You laughed at the confidence in his voice, but he only pointed toward you with an exaggeratedly serious expression before backing toward the court. “Don't take it off, okay? I'm counting on you.”

The match was brutal.

For most of the first half, Gaming looked like he was fighting the entire opposing team by himself, throwing himself into every play with the same reckless enthusiasm he brought to everything else. Every time he landed a difficult move, he looked toward the stands as though he needed to make sure you had seen it, and whenever your eyes met, his face would brighten before he turned back toward the game. You found yourself gripping the edge of your seat harder with every passing minute, especially when the score remained painfully close and the other team began pulling ahead.

By the final minutes, Gaming was exhausted.

His breathing had become heavier, his hair was sticking to his forehead, and there was a scrape along his cheek that you knew would probably become a much bigger story than it deserved once he had recovered enough to start exaggerating it. The score was tied, the crowd was deafening, and the entire court seemed to narrow down to the few seconds remaining on the clock.

Then Gaming saw you.

You had stood up without realizing it, both hands clasped tightly in front of you, the little red bracelet still visible around your wrist. When his eyes found yours, something in his expression changed. The exhaustion remained, but the uncertainty disappeared, replaced by the same determined grin he had worn before the match even started.

The final play happened so quickly that you barely understood what you were watching.

The final whistle blew—the crowd erupted.

And then... Gaming's team had won!?

He didn't wait for the rest of his teammates.

The moment the referee confirmed the final score, Gaming turned and ran.

He sprinted across the court with his jersey clinging to his back and his teammates shouting after him, but he ignored all of them, weaving past people until he reached the barrier separating the court from the stands. You barely had time to laugh before he reached up for you, his hands catching yours as he looked up with a grin so wide that you could see exactly how proud he was of himself.

“We won!” he shouted, breathless and laughing as though he had forgotten that thousands of people were watching. “I told you we'd win!”

You laughed with him, leaning over the barrier as you congratulated him, but Gaming was already looking at your wrist again. His fingers closed gently around your hand, his thumb brushing over the bracelet before he looked back up at you with an expression that suddenly seemed much more nervous than victorious.

“I think it really worked,” he said, laughing softly as he glanced toward the court and then back at you. “Or maybe it was just because you were here.”

Your smile faltered slightly.

Gaming seemed to realize what he'd said at the same time you did.

For once, he didn't immediately turn it into a joke.

Instead, he looked down at your intertwined hands, his ears turning noticeably pink as he rubbed his thumb over your knuckles. “I've been wanting to tell you something for a while,” he admitted, his voice quieter now that the initial excitement had begun to settle. “I kept thinking I'd do it after the match because I figured if I lost, I'd need time to recover from embarrassing myself twice.”

You laughed softly, and he smiled at the sound before taking a breath.

“But I don't really want to wait anymore.” His eyes lifted to yours, and despite the noise surrounding you, his attention seemed completely fixed on you. “You're not actually my lucky charm because of the bracelet. You're my lucky charm because whenever you're around, I feel like I can do anything. I play better, I stop worrying so much, and I keep looking for you whenever things get difficult because somehow just seeing you makes everything feel easier.”

Your heart began beating faster as you listened, and Gaming's nervous smile returned when he realized he had your full attention. He squeezed your hand gently before continuing, his voice becoming softer as he finally said the thing he'd apparently been trying to build enough courage to confess for weeks.

“I like you,” he admitted, the words leaving him with a small, almost embarrassed laugh. “Like, really like you. And I know this is probably the worst possible place to confess because there are a million people around us and I'm sweaty and I probably smell terrible right now, but I just won the biggest match I've ever played, and the first person I wanted to see was you.”

You stared at him for a moment, trying to process the fact that the boy who had just played one of the most important games of his life had apparently spent the entire time thinking about you.

Then you smiled, reaching down to cup his cheek despite the sweat and the scrape and the ridiculous grin he was trying to hide. “You really are an idiot, Gaming.”

His eyebrows lifted in surprise, and his smile became almost shy as he leaned instinctively into your hand. “Is that a yes?”

You laughed as you nodded, brushing your thumb gently over his cheek. “That's a yes.”

The grin that broke across his face was somehow even brighter than the one he'd worn when the final whistle blew. He caught your hand and pressed a quick kiss against your knuckles before laughing under his breath, his entire face flushed with happiness as his teammates finally started yelling at him from across the court.

Gaming glanced over his shoulder, then looked back at you with the same mischievous expression you'd seen a hundred times before.

“I'll come back,” he promised, reluctantly letting go of your hand as he started backing toward his teammates. “Don't go anywhere.”

You smiled and touched the red bracelet around your wrist, watching him run back toward the court with a ridiculous amount of energy for someone who had just played an entire match.

Maybe the bracelet had never been lucky—maybe the real lucky charm had always been the person waiting for him at the finish line.

Lohen had never understood why people treated commitment as though it were supposed to be frightening, because fear had never been particularly useful to him in the first place. He had always been the kind of person who moved toward the things everyone else warned him about, whether that meant taking a dangerous shortcut simply because it was faster, provoking somebody stronger than him because he wanted to see what would happen, or making an irreversible decision before anyone else had finished explaining why it was a bad idea. You had learned to recognize the look in his eyes whenever he was about to do something reckless, the faint spark of amusement that appeared whenever common sense told him to stop, and you had learned that the most effective way to survive loving someone like Lohen was not necessarily to prevent him from doing stupid things but to make sure you were close enough to drag him home afterward.

That was why you should have known better when he looked across the street at the courthouse that night.

You had been sitting on the hood of his car while he leaned against the driver's side door, both of you exhausted from wandering around the city with nowhere particular to go. The courthouse had been almost completely dark, with only a handful of windows still illuminated against the midnight sky, and you had been making fun of Lohen for getting lost despite insisting for the last twenty minutes that he knew exactly where he was going. He had taken the teasing remarkably well, which should have warned you that something else had already caught his attention. When he finally pushed himself away from the car and looked across the street with that familiar, dangerous curiosity in his eyes, you immediately followed his gaze and realized exactly what he was thinking.

“You're not seriously considering that,” you said, laughing under your breath as you watched him study the courthouse entrance with an expression that was far too thoughtful for your comfort.

Lohen glanced back at you with a crooked smile and slipped both hands into the pockets of his jacket, looking completely at ease despite the fact that he was clearly contemplating something absurd. “Why would I joke about something that would make you this nervous?”

Your smile disappeared as you stared at him, trying to determine whether he was actually serious. “Because you're Lohen, and half the things you say are either jokes or threats.”

He laughed quietly at that and stepped closer until he was standing between you and the car, his attention shifting from the courthouse to your face. There was still amusement in his expression, but something underneath it had become more sincere, and that sincerity made your stomach twist more than the joke ever could have. “What if I told you I was serious this time?”

You looked toward the courthouse again, then back at him, and suddenly every practical objection you could think of seemed to arrive at once. You were young, neither of you had enough money, your apartment was barely large enough for two people, and you still had arguments about groceries that somehow lasted longer than the actual grocery shopping. Lohen had no concept of saving money when something caught his attention, while you had spent years convincing yourself that major life decisions were supposed to be carefully planned and discussed until there was no uncertainty left. Marriage belonged somewhere in the distant future, after you had both established yourselves and figured out who you were supposed to become, so the idea of doing it now felt almost ridiculous.

“You know we're not ready for that,” you said eventually, your voice quieter as you looked at him again. “We don't even know what we're doing with our lives yet.”

Lohen's expression softened, although the confidence in his eyes never disappeared. He reached for your hand and loosely threaded his fingers through yours, giving you a small squeeze as he considered your words. “Nobody knows what they're doing with their lives,” he replied, his thumb brushing across your knuckles as though he were trying to reassure you without making a big deal out of it. “The difference is that most people pretend they do before they make the decision.”

You let out a breath that sounded suspiciously like a laugh, even though your chest had begun to ache. “That's not a very convincing argument.”

“It doesn't have to be convincing.” His smile became gentler as he looked at you, and for once there was no trace of mockery in his expression. “You love me, I love you, and we've already built a life together. If everything else is going to be figured out eventually, why can't this be figured out too?”

You knew he was being reckless.

You knew you should have told him no.

You also knew that when Lohen looked at you like that, with all of his usual arrogance stripped down into something almost painfully sincere, you had always been terrible at remembering how to protect yourself from him.

Three hours later, you were standing in a courthouse wearing the same clothes you'd gone out in that evening, while Lohen stood beside you in a suit he had bought from a department store that had been open late enough to accommodate the worst decision either of you had ever made. There had been no flowers, no carefully planned ceremony, and no family waiting outside with cameras because neither of you had even had time to tell anyone what you were doing. The rings had been cheap enough that you could both afford them without checking your bank accounts afterward, and yours was slightly too large for your finger while Lohen's already had a tiny scratch across the band because he had somehow managed to drop it on the pavement before you'd even left the store. When you teased him about it, he had merely slipped the ring onto his finger and claimed that the imperfection made it more valuable because nobody else could ever mistake it for theirs.

The clerk had looked exhausted throughout the entire process, but she remained professional while you both signed your names and answered the necessary questions. Lohen made a mistake on one of the forms and laughed when he had to start again, while you covered your mouth to keep yourself from laughing along with him. When you finally finished signing everything, he leaned closer to inspect your name before looking at you with an expression of almost childlike satisfaction.

“You're really my wife now,” he murmured, his voice carrying a strange mixture of disbelief and delight as his fingers closed gently around yours.

You smiled despite yourself and glanced down at the ring before looking back at him. “And you're really my husband, which is probably the most concerning part of this entire situation.”

His laugh echoed quietly through the nearly empty room as he leaned closer, his forehead brushing against yours while his fingers squeezed yours. “You married me anyway.”

“I know,” you whispered, and the warmth that spread through your chest made you wonder whether perhaps this really could be enough.

When the two of you finally left the courthouse, Lohen kept your hand in his all the way to the car. He looked down at the ring every few minutes as though he still couldn't believe it was there, and whenever you caught him doing it, he would pretend that he had simply been checking whether it was still attached. You eventually accused him of being sentimental, which he denied with such exaggerated offense that you laughed until your stomach hurt. He called you dramatic, you called him an idiot, and somewhere between the two insults he leaned across the center console and kissed your knuckles as though the entire night had been nothing more than an elaborate joke that had somehow become the most serious thing either of you had ever done.

For the first few years, you almost believed that you had been right to trust him.

Marriage did not initially feel different because you had already been sharing an apartment, already waking up beside each other, and already making decisions together about groceries, rent, weekend plans, and whose responsibility it was to deal with the increasingly mysterious stain on the living-room carpet. Lohen still stole food from your plate even after ordering the exact same thing, still found ways to turn ordinary errands into unnecessary adventures, and still came home with strange objects because he had seen them somewhere and decided they would make your apartment “more interesting.” He loved introducing you as his wife, sometimes with such obvious satisfaction that you would tease him afterward for sounding like a child showing off a new toy, but he always responded by reminding you that you were the one who had agreed to marry him in the first place.

There were nights when the two of you stayed awake until sunrise talking about everything and nothing, and there were mornings when Lohen would drag himself out of bed with his hair a complete mess while complaining that you had somehow stolen all the blankets again. You built routines without realizing they were becoming routines, and eventually the apartment became filled with small pieces of both of you. Your books occupied half the shelves, his things occupied the other half, and the kitchen slowly accumulated the mismatched mugs, plates, utensils, and appliances that neither of you remembered buying. The life you built together was imperfect and occasionally ridiculous, but it was yours, and for a while that seemed like the only thing that mattered.

Then you started changing.

Neither of you noticed it at first because change rarely announces itself when it begins. It arrived through smaller things, through conversations that became shorter and evenings that became quieter, through the gradual realization that you had started making plans without automatically assuming the other person would be included. Lohen began coming home later, and you began staying out longer because the apartment felt strangely uncomfortable whenever he was there but neither of you knew what to say. The two of you still loved each other, which made everything worse because there was no obvious reason for the distance. You could not point to betrayal or cruelty or some unforgivable mistake and say that it had destroyed the marriage. You could only look at each other and recognize that the people who had promised forever were no longer exactly the people who had made that promise.

Lohen noticed before you admitted it to yourself.

He always did.

One evening, he came home after midnight and found you sitting at the kitchen table with your laptop open in front of you, although the screen had gone dark several minutes earlier because you had stopped reading. He set his keys on the counter and began removing his jacket, but the moment he noticed your expression, his movements slowed. He had spent years learning the difference between your anger, your exhaustion, and your sadness, and whatever he saw on your face made the usual teasing remark die before it reached his mouth.

“Where were you?” you asked, closing the laptop as you tried to make your voice sound casual.

Lohen leaned against the counter and watched you carefully, his eyebrows drawing together as he recognized the question underneath the question. “You already know I was out.”

“With who?”

He exhaled slowly and pulled out the chair across from you, sitting down while keeping his eyes on your face. “You're not actually asking whether I was with somebody else.”

The fact that he could still read you so easily made your chest ache. You looked down at your hands and rubbed your thumb over the faint indentation left by your wedding ring even though you weren't wearing it. “Then what am I asking?”

Lohen's expression tightened as he leaned forward, resting his forearms against the table. “You're asking whether I'm still happy.”

You didn't answer.

He watched the silence stretch between you, and when you finally lifted your eyes, the confidence he usually wore so effortlessly had disappeared. “Are you?” you asked, and the quietness of your voice seemed to affect him more than any accusation could have.

He looked away for a moment, his jaw tightening as though he were searching for an answer he could actually live with. “I love you.”

Your eyes burned almost immediately because he had understood the question and still refused to answer it. “That's not what I asked.”

“I know.”

The admission sat between you, heavy enough that neither of you tried to move past it.

You stared at the person across from you and realized that you had spent months trying to convince yourself that love was supposed to fix everything. You had believed that if two people cared enough, they would eventually find their way back to each other, but sitting there with Lohen, you were beginning to understand how cruel that belief could become. Sometimes love made you stay long after you had stopped being happy because leaving felt like admitting that all those promises had meant nothing.

You did not want your marriage to become something you resented simply because neither of you had been brave enough to end it.

The conversation that finally ended everything happened three weeks later, on a rainy evening when the apartment felt colder than it should have. You had spent most of the night sitting across from each other without speaking, both of you waiting for the other person to say what you already knew was coming. Eventually, you took off your wedding ring and placed it carefully on the table between you, and the small metallic sound it made against the wood seemed impossibly loud in the silence.

Lohen stared at it for several seconds before looking at you. His face had become unreadable in the way it always did when he was trying to keep himself from reacting too quickly, but you could see the tension in his hands as his fingers curled against his knees. “You're really doing this.”

Your throat tightened as you nodded, your eyes fixed on the ring because looking directly at him felt unbearable. “I think we should annul the marriage before we start hating each other.”

His laugh was quiet and humorless as he leaned back in his chair, running one hand through his hair. “You think that's what we're doing?”

“I think we're already hurting each other.”

“You're hurting me right now.”

The words came out sharper than he probably intended, and you flinched before you could stop yourself. Lohen immediately noticed, his expression changing as regret crossed his face, but he didn't take the words back because both of you knew they were true. He had always been good at recognizing lies, and there was no point lying now.

“I don't want to keep doing this,” you whispered, wiping at the tears beginning to gather in your eyes. “I don't want to wake up beside you and feel lonely, and I don't want you to come home and feel like you're walking into a place you don't belong anymore.”

Lohen stared at you with an expression that looked almost angry until you realized the anger was the only thing keeping his face from collapsing. He had never been good at helplessness. He could handle pain when there was something he could do about it, but there was no action he could take that would make you want to stay. He could not argue you into loving him differently, could not threaten the problem into disappearing, and could not outsmart the fact that the two of you had become people who wanted different lives.

“I thought you were going to stay,” he said, his voice so quiet that you almost couldn't hear him.

You looked at him through your tears and felt your heart break because you had once believed the same thing. “I thought you were too.”

His gaze dropped toward the ring again, and after several seconds he reached across the table and picked it up. He rolled the band slowly between his fingers, his thumb tracing the tiny scratch that had been there since the night you bought it. You watched him remember the same night you were remembering, and for a moment the years between then and now disappeared.

“You remember how you laughed when I dropped this?” he asked, his mouth pulling into a faint smile that vanished almost immediately.

You laughed weakly through your tears as you wiped your cheek. “You blamed the pavement.”

“It was uneven.”

“You dropped a wedding ring on the pavement.”

“And you still married me.”

Your smile broke as another tear slipped down your face. “I loved you.”

Lohen's eyes returned to yours, and the grief in them made it difficult to breathe. “You still do.”

You couldn't bring yourself to deny it.

He set the ring down and reached across the table until his fingers covered yours. His touch was familiar enough to hurt, and you hated how naturally your hand turned beneath his so that your fingers could intertwine. For all the ways your relationship had changed, your body still remembered him. It remembered the shape of his hand, the warmth of his palm, and the unconscious way he always rubbed his thumb over your knuckles when he wanted to calm you down.

“I still love you too,” he admitted, his voice breaking slightly despite his attempt to keep it steady. “That's why this feels so fucking wrong.”

You leaned forward and pressed your forehead against his, crying quietly as his hand moved to your cheek. “Maybe that's why it has to end.”

Lohen closed his eyes, breathing slowly as he tried to accept the sentence. When he finally kissed you, there was none of the reckless confidence that had defined your wedding night. His hand trembled against your face, and yours curled into the fabric of his shirt as though some instinct inside you still believed that holding him tightly enough could stop time. The kiss was slow and painfully gentle, the kind of goodbye neither of you had ever wanted to learn how to give.

When you finally pulled away, Lohen kept his forehead against yours and whispered that he wished loving you had been enough. You told him that you wished it had been too, and neither of you tried to pretend that there was some hidden solution waiting to be discovered. You had spent too long searching for one already.

The annulment was finalized months later.

By then, you had moved out, the apartment had been emptied, and the photographs from the courthouse had been placed inside a box that neither of you had opened since the day you packed it. The legal document that had once made you feel invincible had become nothing more than a piece of paper in a file, and the rings that had represented forever had become objects neither of you knew what to do with.

Lohen kept his.

He stopped wearing it eventually, but he could never bring himself to throw it away. Sometimes he would find it buried beneath old receipts or tucked into a drawer, and every time he touched the scratched metal, he remembered the night you had stood beside him beneath fluorescent courthouse lights and laughed because neither of you could believe what you had done. He remembered the department-store suit that didn't fit properly, the cheap ring that had been slightly damaged before you even reached the courthouse, and the way you had looked at him when the clerk finally pronounced you married.

Most painfully, he remembered believing that the feeling in his chest was certainty.

Years later, he understood that it had not been certainty at all.

It had been hope.

The distinction mattered now.

Lohen had spent most of his life believing that anything could be survived if he was stubborn enough, clever enough, or reckless enough to keep moving forward. He had never been particularly afraid of consequences because consequences were simply problems that appeared after decisions, and problems could usually be solved. What he had never learned was how to accept something that could not be solved, and losing you had forced him to learn it slowly, painfully, and without the satisfaction of being able to blame anyone.

You had not betrayed him, he had not betrayed you. Neither of you had stopped caring.

You had simply become two people who could no longer make the same life work.

That truth haunted him more than any uglier explanation could have, because if you had hurt him, he could have hated you—if he had hurt you badly enough, you could have hated him and if either of you had done something unforgivable, the ending would have had a shape, a reason, and somewhere to place the blame.

Instead, there was only love.

There was the love that had existed before the courthouse, the love that had survived the marriage, and the love that remained even after the marriage had ended.

Lohen eventually stopped wondering whether he should have refused that night.

He stopped wondering whether the marriage had been a mistake.

He stopped trying to convince himself that you had been wrong for him from the beginning because that would have made the years together easier to dismiss, and he had no desire to make them smaller simply because they had ended.

You had loved him and he had loved you—for a while, you had been happy, you had believed forever belonged to you.

That had been real, even if forever had not been—and perhaps that was the cruelest thing about growing up: eventually learning that some promises were never meant to predict the future. Sometimes they only described what two people believed with their entire hearts at the exact moment they made them.

Lohen had meant every word—and so had you.

The fact that neither of you could keep the promise did not make the love that created it any less true.