C

It had been another bitingly cold October day in your small Midwest town, not much else to do besides camp out in front of the small fireplace. Lars was happily reading a book, fingers tracing soothing circles over your calves as they draped across his lap, when a sharp gasp tore him from the story he was entranced by. He looked up with wide eyes, only to be met with your broad grin peeking out from behind the phone screen pointed in his direction. He squinted at the video playing before him, it seemed to be a quick montage of a couple matching beads to one another’s eye color and making bracelets with them.

“Lars, please can we do this? Look how cute it is! We can match.”

Your shiny, pleading eyes are not lost on Lars as the corners of his mouth tug into a smile.

“The craft store doesn’t close for another hour! That’s plenty of time!” You say as you rocket off the sofa and start pulling your boots on.

You’re practically vibrating with excitement as Lars follows suit and pulls on his coat, passing a scarf to you before wrapping his own around his neck. You lean forward and press a warm kiss to his cheek as you pass through the door, all but skipping to the car as Lars locks up and follows behind.

The drive was quick, Lars listening intently as you babble over the hum of the radio about what you had learned from reading the comments under the bracelet video. Inside, a soft laugh is pulled from Lars’s lips as your hand closes around his wrist, leading him wildly up and down the aisles of the craft store as you search for the needed materials.

You finally stumble upon the rows of colored beads with a squeal of delight, loosening your hold on Lars to reach out and brush your fingers along the varying textures in front of you. After pulling a few options from the display, you hold up each string to compare the shade to the beautiful eyes looking back down at you. Lars beams, a warm blush beginning to crawl up his neck as you examine each set of beads thoroughly.

“Mm, there we go.” You nod, holding up the winning selection as if it were a fish you just caught. “Aren’t they pretty?”

The beads were a vibrant grey-blue with small specks of a green shade scattered throughout. They were round, almost like a string of pearls hanging down from your fingers. The blush from before has now fully engulfed Lars’s cheeks, skin burning as he nodded back at you with a wide smile.

“My turn.” He says quietly, pressing a chaste kiss to the tip of your nose, his wide smile stretching into a grin before placing another kiss to your lips.

His brow furrows slightly as his fingers trace over each row of beads, eyes flicking between you and the wall. He pulls a few strings from the wall, holding them up to your face just as you had done moments before. His eyes twinkle as he compares each color to your loving gaze. You think your heart might leap right out of your chest at the way Lars looks back at you, so full of love and devotion. Lars smiles sweetly as he holds up his final decision to you, a beautiful string of earthy hues glinting in the fluorescent lights of the department store.

“They’re beautiful.” You murmur, taking the beads from his hands and adding them along with your selection.

“Hm, not as beautiful as you.” Lars says, wrapping one arm around you and pulling your hand to his lips to press a warm kiss against your knuckles.

Now it’s your turn to blush as you melt into his touch, staying there for a moment, as if you were the only two people in the world.

“Okay, we just need to get some neutral beads and elastic thread and I think we should be set.” You grab a set of small gold filler beads and spin around to the other side of the aisle to grab the first spool of clear cord your eyes land on.

The cashier rings up your items and you two are on your way, Lars slipping his hand into yours as you step out into the brisk winter air. The drive back to the house is uneventful, you are just happy to be in Lars’s presence with his warm hand enveloping yours as they rest in your lap. He peers over at you every once in a while, his usual shy smile creeping up each time under the warm flashes of the streetlights.

Once you return home, you both settle on the floor in front of the fireplace, a blanket spread out beneath you and the beads organized on a spare plate. Lars hums softly to the music playing through the living room as you both string colorful beads onto the elastic cord. You finish your bracelet first, holding it up in the flickering light of the fireplace, marveling at the pattern of blue and earth toned beads separated by small gold spheres. It’s beautiful. The two colors of your eyes joined together in harmony.

You turn to Lars, who is already gazing at you with a fire of his own burning behind his eyes. Barely containing your grin, you crawl over to where Lars is seated on the plush blanket and reach for his hand to slip the bracelet over his wrist. He stares at the new jewelry adorning his wrist where your hand still rests against his skin, mesmerized by you and your touch.

“I love it, sweetheart. Now I get to have a piece of you wherever I go.” He whispers, giving you the brightest smile he could muster. “I’m never going to take it off.”

Lars leans closer to you, long fingers brushing against yours as he slips his creation along your soft skin. The pattern differs slightly from your own, making it one of a kind. He raises both your hands up and peppers feather-soft kisses to your pulse point where it’s hammering against your skin. You’re certain he can feel it.

“I love it, Lars. I love you.”

“I love you too, my angel.” Tears glisten in Lars’s eyes as he looks between your clasped hands, clad in the matching bracelets, and your face.

You bring your free hand up to his face to brush away the tear threatening to fall, resting your palm against his cheek. Lars leans into your touch as you carefully swing a leg over his, slotting yourself into his lap. Your hands settle in his hair, fingers raking softly through the locks as Lars wraps himself around you, palms flush against the small of your back.

A content sigh leaves your lips as Lars tightens his hold on you, catching your lips in a tender but searing kiss. It’s this moment, here with you on the floor of his apartment, that Lars realizes there’s no one else he’d rather spend the rest of his life with. The glint in your eyes as you pull him into another dizzying kiss, tells him that you feel the exact same.

He only had preconceived notions, that after teaching long enough, he knew new hires usually arrived with the same expression on their faces. The same wide eyes, the feeling of open opportunities, and the desperate need to prove they belonged.

You fit perfectly, fitting right into the puzzle.

You were young and nervous, but eager to prove yourself. You were the type of person who reminded him, and many others, why he loves teaching—that vigor and passion is irreplaceable when you first start out.

He’d been just like you.

Always staying late, and always apologizing for things you didn’t need to apologize for, but felt that you needed to.

You’d settle eventually. As everyone else did.

Of course, there was no way to know when, and to Ryland, it certainly wasn’t now, as you glared at the printer with a certain disdain swimming in your eyes and a press of defeat on your lips.

“The printer hates me.” You sigh, hands on your hips as you stare at the current cause of your misfortune, refusing to print your lesson plans despite the ticking time of your deadline.

Your tone remains polite, but Ryland can tell you were starting to get upset by the way your tongue darted over your lips, and the way your fingers drummed on the table where the printer was sitting.

A laugh sounds from a table nearby, his.

“Don’t worry too much about it. The printer hates everyone.” Ryland says without even looking up from the stack of papers in his hands.

By the nonchalance he’s going for, it seems a common occurrence.

“That’s a little comforting.”

You continue to study it, like it’d suddenly work if you’d just direct enough intensity towards it. Maybe it’d cower in fear, maybe it’d listen to you and start printing because you had a deadline, and God forbid you made it in time.

You’re so intent on staring at it that you don’t realize the looming presence behind you.

You smell him before you fully process he’s there—the scent of coffee, dry erase markers, and a musky perfume you can’t name.

The way his scent completely engulfs you makes your heart beat irregularly, cardiac arrhythmia-esque. His towering height doesn’t help either, makes you stand a little too stiffly when you catch sight of him through your peripheral vision.

Ryland, on the other hand, is completely normal about everything.

He’s reaching around you, pressing another button on the printer with the mastery of a man who has been teaching for years, and apparently navigating this very stubborn printer.

He’s hard at work, focused on pulling the stubborn sheet of paper you had fed it earlier when you made the mistake of assuming its cooperation, but all you can think about is how big and tall he is compared to you.

What he always this tall? Or were you always this short?

There is a certain way his biceps flex when his arm is outstretched like this, and when he’s using a bit of strength to grasp at the stubborn paper that had been caught in the teeth of the printer. It’s tight against the button down shirt he’s wearing that it almost makes your breath hitch.

Like God left a traitorous kiss on his cheek by casting him here, straight off his good-boy-who-doesn’t-know-he’s-hot trope.

You’re only pulled out of your thoughts when the printer starts to hum in the obedience you’d asked from it earlier.

The papers you’d been meaning to print follow.

"There." He smiles down at you, glasses hanging stubbornly by his chin.

It’s always anywhere on his face but properly horizontal on the bridge of his nose. It somehow makes him more painfully dashing, yet so painfully out of your league.

He waits a second more, checking the piece of paper that slips out to make sure it doesn’t print in botched ink like it does sometimes. And when a few more pass in perfect ink, he’s already back to where he was seated with his stacks of paper.

You blink at the fast pace of events, at the rasp of his voice, at how proportionate he looks with his business casual.

It’s basic human decency, helping you with the printer. He just happened to look unfairly attractive while doing it, and effortless, too.

The printer seems to be able to differentiate between years of experience.

“I’d been fighting with the printer for fifteen minutes, and you fixed it in like two.” Your voice is amused, riddled with disbelief.

The science teacher simply chuckles, still unmoving from his grading of papers.

“It just takes a bit of experience. All the equipment in this school knows when you’re new. Give it a month. It'll stop picking on you.”

“Guess I have a few more weeks of getting picked on then.”

You shake your head, a small laugh leaving your lips. And the sound echoes for a while in the empty faculty room before you excuse yourself to submit the papers you’d just printed.

Against his better judgement, and unknowing at the time, Ryland finds himself smiling.

After that day, he finds himself helping you more often than he’d liked to admit.

Ryland reasons it’s because you were still finding balance, still standing on unsteady feet from a life entirely different from university. He figured he could offer a little help once in a while, pass on the times when he’d been the one who needed help earlier in his career.

His assistance consisted of unwilling projectors, spare markers, locked supply closets, things that were menial. And he never stayed longer than necessary. Never lingered.

Ryland, to him, was nothing but professional.

(If you called “noticing” professional.)

From weeks of being your right hand man, he’d made a few observations.

Of course he did, he was a scientist, it’s only inherent in him to do so. The list is long—the way you curl your lips when you concentrate enough, how you call staff by their first names but older colleagues always properly addressed with their last names, and that you stay long after most teachers have gone home.

Sometimes he’d pass by your classroom on his way out and notice the lights still on.

You’d be standing in front of a bulletin board, pre-cut tape hanging from your arm. Sometimes you’d be sitting cross-legged on the floor surrounded by paper.

But the one thing that never falters is that you were always doing something.

Always working hard to prove something.

It reminds him of his first year teaching, reminiscent in the way you mirror the same passion, the same determination in his eyes then that all first-year teachers always had.

Now, Ryland was a little more aged. He’d been teaching for more than 10 years now, ever since he’d quit the research field. But he’d like to think he still had remainders of that passion.

Though, sometimes passion can go a little overboard.

It’s been almost two months since you’d started teaching, and you were still staying later than most.

Ryland usually wouldn’t mind, usually wouldn’t have made a comment had it been anyone else but for some reason, he’s grown to have a little concern reserved for you.

“Hey, you’re still here?”

The sudden voice surprises you. You’d always been alone in the late hours of Grover Cleveland. So, it’s reasonable that the presence of another person startles you.

“Yeah.” You laugh, looking up from the heaps of paperwork on your desk. “Will that get me in trouble?”

Ryland lingers by your door, staring at the clock in the middle of your classroom. It’s been 3 hours since the bell rang for dismissal.

“No, no. I just, I didn’t realize anyone else was still here. You’re making us veteran teachers look bad.” He decides to joke, small smile on his lips.

You’re shaking your head as he speaks, sending him a tired smile as you stretch your arms over your head from being hunched over and grading papers for three hours.

“I just lost track of time.”

Ryland nods once, mind racing with how to tell you to not work too hard lest you want to exhaust yourself beyond recognition.

He’s done it before. Multiple times, even. He knows more than anyone how much exhaustion can beat you down until you can no longer stand on your feet.

“Don’t.”

You tilt your head, eyebrows furrowed in confusion. “Don’t what?”

“Lose track of time.” He’s looking at you a certain way, like you’re supposed to know what he means. “You’ll burn yourself out.”

Your face breaks into a soft smile, at the masked care dripping from his tone. “You sound experienced.”

“I am.”

You snort, and he exhales a laugh through his nose in response. When you don’t seem to move, he adds, “I’m gonna get going now. You should go home too, kid.”

“Sounds like a command.”

“Professional recommendation. From…you know. Someone who’s already made that mistake. And from all those teaching years under my belt.”

You laugh. “I will! Thanks Mr. Grace.”

He nods, heart swelling in an unidentifiable feeling at the thrill of your eager wholesomeness, before he closes the door behind him.

A week after he’d “reprimanded” you, heavy rain falls upon the school just as almost everyone in the school has left. It comes without warning.

The weather here is always unpredictable.

Ryland sees it through the window of his classroom, sees the tilt of the rain and how it makes the parking lot barely visible from where he’s looking.

It’s just hazes of gray outside with a certain blurriness heightened by his poor eyesight.

He sighs, rubbing his eyes in exhaustion as he remembers he’d forgotten to bring his raincoat today. Poor timing.

He rummages through his drawers, pulling out an old black umbrella he’d been keeping in his classroom for a few years in case of emergencies like today. And after packing up the remnants of things he needed to bring home, he heads out.

The hallways are quiet, and his eyes unintentionally spares a glance at your classroom, like it always did on nights like these.

Ryland sighs in relief when he sees it dark, unoccupied.

Good, you’d gotten home before the rain had hit, he thinks.

He doesn’t think about the connotations of his thoughts, and why he’d been thinking of your safety. He doesn’t want to think about it. Instead, he directs his attention to his old umbrella, clicking it open with a familiar resistance from not having been used for almost a year.

Then, he steps outside.

He counts down a few seconds to gather up the courage to walk to his bike, doesn’t know why he does, and when he’s just gotten to one and about to brave through the rain when he notices someone standing beneath the covered entrance of the school.

Well, not just anyone.

You’re standing just by the awning, arms folded, and simply watching the rain.

Ryland stops in his tracks, feet moving to where you are, instead.

“Are you planning on waiting until next week for it to stop?"

You turn your head at the voice. At this point, his intonations and the rumble of his voice has grown familiar to your ears (much to your delight). So, you’re not as surprised as you normally would be.

Where surprise would’ve been, you laugh.

“I was hoping the rain would get tired eventually.”

“You’re very optimistic.”

“Well, I guess that’s one of the perks of being new here.” You look up at him, spare him a second, before it fixates on the rain again. “I haven't learned exactly how the weather works yet."

“Did you study somewhere else?” He asks curiously, umbrella staying idle in his hands.

“Yeah. I studied in New York.”

“Woah, that’s… that’s a long way from home.”

You nod your head. “It is. But I needed the change in environment.”

Ryland doesn’t prod further, sensing that you didn’t really want to talk about it. There is a certain tone in your voice that doesn’t want further questioning, like you’ve been avoiding it.

Maybe he’d find out eventually. For now, he’ll look towards the parking lot.

It’s a lot more visible when you’re standing outside, and he can almost make the model of a few cars sitting a distance away from where you’re standing. It’s not too far, but it’s far enough that if you attempted to run for it, your shoes would get soaked.

And you might get sick. He doesn’t think that’s worth the risk.

He looks back at the umbrella in his hand, and then at you, still staring at the rain, still crossing your arms over your chest. Still patient.

Ryland hesitates for a moment, but surely walking you to your car is normal. It’s human decency. It’s just sharing an umbrella. It’s just walking you and making sure you don’t get sick.

Nevermind the proximity that would entail.

(Very mind, he will come to learn.)

“Come on.”

You blink at the older man and at his vagueness. “Huh?”

"Which one's yours?"

You’re still staring at him, eyes wide until they travel towards where he’s now holding his umbrella. His hand is outstretched just a little that it now covers the both of you partially.

Partially. He’s asking for your permission, if this was okay.

You couldn’t say no, not with his loose tie, and the starting buttons of his top unbuttoned, and the shy, polite way he’s looking at you over his glasses. It’s almost impossible to refuse.

There is no better offer, anyway.

“Oh.” A smile falls on your lips, shuffling a little closer to the man so you’re both now beneath the umbrella. “Thank you. It’s uh, it’s just over there.”

It’s small, barely enough to really protect the both of you from the rain. So, when you walk, your shoulders are brushing against each other.

Again and again and again. By accident.

And both of you are hunched over on instinct, by feeble attempt at keeping yourselves dry, and you’re impossibly close to him as you’re both struggling to walk through the rain.

It’s a little awkward, and you can’t help the occasional laughter that escapes your lips when you try to step over a puddle at the same time. There’s a persistent smile on his face.

Despite the struggle and his distaste of getting wet, Ryland shifts the umbrella further towards you without really thinking about it. Droplets fall on half his sleeve and it wets the blazer he’s wearing.

You notice immediately.

"Mr. Grace." You’re trying to yell over the loudness of the rain, but it’s so loud. "You've got the umbrella entirely over me."

He glances once. He looks like he didn’t hear you, despite hearing loud and clear.

"You're getting wet!” You reattempt, deciding on shorter sentences.

Ryland only shakes his head, his grin growing. “It’s only cause I’m taller.”

Your footsteps continue to match despite the rushed pace, and the tapping of the rain on the umbrella and on the ground is loud, and it’s so cold but there is warmth where your shoulders are meeting.

Your car came too soon.

When you unlock it, Ryland reaches for the handle at the exact time that you do, and your hands almost touch. It feels unbearably hot.

“Sorry.” He mumbles. It sounds more for himself. And then, he opens it for you.

“Thank you, Mr. Grace.” You’re smiling at him sheepishly, and Ryland suddenly couldn’t care less that he’s getting wetter and wetter from the rain as time passes.

(He quickly reasons that it’d be stupid if you got sick after all this trouble.)

“Drive carefully.”

“You too. Thanks for rescuing me from the rain.”

You don’t know he’ll have to walk home with his bike.

“No problem, kid.”

The term of endearment bothers you because it reminds you there is a reason it is being used. He is, really, painfully out of your league.

‘Kid’ is a line, a sword, a boundary, a shield. You could search up so many more adjectives, and it will all mean the same thing. It is something that stands in between the two of you.

On the other hand, the last thing Ryland hears is your laugh before the door is closed, and he stays behind as your headlights disappear through the curtain of the rain. And he only realizes he’s still standing there when the rain starts to slow a little.

The umbrella starts feeling heavy still on his hand.

On the entire walk home, through the struggle of pushing his bike with him, he realizes he still has the umbrella tilted slightly to his right. As if you were still walking beside him. And he catches himself replaying the sound of your laugh. Once. And then again.

This Lars piece has been sitting in my wip folder for a while now but thanks to @pixiebuggz absolutely adorable Lars fic I was inspired to finish it 🫶🏽

LOVE YA VI!!! 💖