SpoilerThere are incest elements in this chapter. If you are not comfortable with this, avoid it.

  [colpse]"I love you. Please marry me."

  "I can't. I love someone else."

  I was already sitting forward.

  "Why does the hero always reject the heroine." The words came out before I'd decided to say them. "Every single time."

  Nobody responded. My mother was somewhere in the dark beside me, quiet in the way she got when she was tired but didn't want to admit it. Sia was on the other side of her, legs folded under her, eyes on the screen.

  The room was dark except for the television. Its light moved across the walls in shifting blues and grays, painting everything in colors that didn't belong to daylight, that only existed in this specific hour before sleep when the world had narrowed down to one room and one screen and the particur cold that comes when seasons can't decide what they want to be yet.

  I stood up.

  "I'm going to bed."

  "At least finish it." Mom's voice, soft. "It's almost over."

  "I really can't."

  I pushed the door open and left before anyone could say anything else.

  The hallway was dark. The stairs were darker. I climbed them without turning the light on, one hand trailing the wall, my mind already somewhere other than the movie.

  I need to talk to them about Mia's house.

  The thought had been sitting in me since the rooftop. Since the lunch, the exchanged numbers, the way she had looked at me when she said she'd protect me — like she had already decided it and was simply informing me of the fact.

  I pushed open my bedroom door.

  Closed it behind me.

  Stood in the dark for a moment and let the room settle.

  It was colder in here than it should have been. The kind of cold that feels like it has been present for a while, quietly accumuting in the corners while you were somewhere else. I didn't turn the light on. I just stood there, feeling it, letting my eyes adjust to something they couldn't quite adjust to.

  I y down without changing.

  The ceiling was up there somewhere, further away than usual. It did that sometimes at night — gave the impression of receding, of the room expanding slowly outward in all directions while I stayed fixed in the middle of it.

  I stared at it and thought about strategy.

  Mom first. Then Sia separately. Different approaches for different conversations. It was manageable if I was careful about the order and the words and the timing.

  It had to be manageable.

  Creak.

  I turned my head.

  A line of light along the floor. Thin. Precise. The door open just enough to let it through, no more.

  I knew who it was before I saw anything.

  "Did you want something, Sia?"

  Her head appeared in the gap — just her face, the rest of her still in the hallway, caught between the light behind her and the dark of my room. The expression on her face was difficult to read at this angle, half-shadowed, half-lit.

  "Hey...." Her voice came out carefully. "um...You left early. I thought.. maybe something was wrong."

  "I'm fine. Just tired."

  I kept it even. Clear. The specific tone that was meant to communicate that the conversation was short and sleep was close and no further visiting was required.

  But she opened the door fully and walked in.

  The door clicked shut behind her.

  The room went dark again. Completely, immediately dark — the line of light gone, the ceiling gone, everything gone except the sound of her breathing and the cold and the knowledge that she was somewhere between me and the only way out.

  Something moved in my chest.

  Not fear exactly. Something that lived in the neighborhood of it.

  "Sia." I kept my voice even. "Can you turn the light on? I can't see."

  Silence.

  "Sia."

  Nothing.

  The silence had a weight to it. The kind that isn't empty — the kind that is full of something that has been building for a long time and has run out of pces to go.

  I opened my mouth to speak again.

  And then I felt it.

  Fingers.

  Against my cheek. Light and slow, moving across my skin with a deliberateness that didn't belong to any version of this moment that I could make sense of. Not the quick, careless touch of someone finding their way in the dark. Something intentional. Something that knew exactly where it was going.

  I went still.

  "Why did you go to the rooftop today?"

  Her voice arrived quietly. Too quietly. The kind of quiet that isn't calm but is the thing that sits on top of calm — the surface of something much deeper pressing up against the underside of each word, held back by an effort I could hear straining at the edges.

  Not just anger.

  Something that had been sitting in her all day. Through the corridor. Through the rest of school. Through dinner and the movie and the dark hallway and the careful walk to my door. Waiting for a room dark enough to say it in.

  I felt my throat tighten.

  "We were just eating lunch," I said. Carefully. "Nothing else. I'm sorry I didn't tell you first."

  "You shouldn't go anywhere without telling me."

  It wasn't quite a request. Wasn't quite a command. It lived in the space between them — the voice of someone stating something they believe with a completeness that makes disagreement feel like a misunderstanding rather than a different opinion.

  "I think I can handle lunch on a rooftop," I said. Gently. "I know you worry. But I'm not—"

  Her hand moved.

  Not sharply. That would have been easier to process. Slowly — finding my shoulder, pressing in, the weight of her grip building in the way that pressure builds when it isn't trying to hurt but has stopped trying not to.

  The room felt smaller.

  "You shouldn't talk to other girls."

  Her voice was still quiet. Still controlled. Two separate things happening in her at once — one choosing words carefully, one done choosing.

  "They show you what they want you to see." Her grip tightened fractionally. "They come close because of what you are. Not because of who you are. They circle you and you just—" A pause. Something swallowed. "You just let them."

  "Sia—"

  "Mia."

  The name nded differently. Harder. Like it had been waiting specifically.

  "She follows you everywhere. Lunch. The corridor. The rooftop. And you go." Her voice dropped lower. "You just go with her."

  "She is my friend." I kept it steady. "She has been nothing but—"

  "She took you to the rooftop today." Each word pced separately, deliberately. "Tomorrow it's somewhere else. Then her house. Then—"

  "Sia." Everything I had went into keeping my voice level. "You're hurting me."

  A pause.

  Her grip loosened. Just slightly. Just enough.

  I pulled in a breath and let my lungs remember what they were for.

  "Say you won't see her anymore."

  She was above me now.

  I hadn't registered the movement — only the result of it. The ceiling was gone and she was where it had been, her weight settling against me with a completeness that made the distance between us feel like something that had already closed. Her breathing had changed. Uneven now. Her hands moving in ways I hadn't given permission for, finding edges and surfaces I wasn't ready for.

  "Say it." Something in her voice had shifted — still hers, but a version I had never heard before. Something stripped of the parts she usually kept managed. "Say you won't go near her."

  "She is my friend, Sia."

  Something cracked.

  I felt it before I understood it. A shift in the air. In her. In the space between us that had been narrowing since she walked through the door and had now run out of room entirely.

  Her lips found mine.

  I went numb.

  Not the peaceful kind. The kind that arrives when the mind encounters something it cannot immediately process and quietly removes itself, leaving the body to manage alone. I was there and not there simultaneously — present in every physical sense and somewhere else entirely in every other.

  I pushed.

  With everything I had, I pushed — hands against her shoulders, every part of me saying the same thing as clearly and as urgently as it could.

  She didn't move.

  Or rather — she moved, but not away.

  Her teeth found my lower lip and pressed until something warm and metallic bloomed on my tongue. Her hands traced downward — my throat, my shoulders, the line of my colrbone — methodical and desperate at the same time, like someone who is both lost and completely certain of where they are going.

  No.

  The word formed clearly and completely and went nowhere.

  My body, betrayed by its own mechanics, responded to things my soul was screaming against. I hated the distance between what I felt and what was happening to me. Between who I had been an hour ago, lying here thinking about strategy and ceilings and manageable conversations, and whoever was lying here now, unable to move, unable to make the sounds coming out of him into words.

  Time did something.

  Not passed — something else. Folded. Stretched. Became a texture rather than a sequence.

  There was only the dark and the cold and her and the ceiling somewhere above all of it that I couldn't see anymore.

  And then it stopped.

  She pulled back.

  Slowly. Like something surfacing.

  Her breathing came in waves — uneven, deep, the breathing of someone who has been somewhere consuming and has only just returned. Her body stayed against mine, heavy and warm, her heartbeat rge and rapid against my chest.

  She stayed there.

  Just breathing.

  Just above me in the dark.

  The room was completely silent except for the two of us and I y very still and did not speak and did not move and waited for whatever came next.

  Then she spoke.

  Quietly. Calmly. In a voice that had come back to itself in a way that was somehow worse than everything that had preceded it.

  "You are mine"

  A pause.

  "You have always been mine"

  Another.

  "Don't talk to that bitch again."

  She got up.

  Found the door in the dark without hesitation, as if she had always known exactly where it was.

  Opened it.

  Closed it behind her with the same quiet click as before — unhurried, precise, the sound of someone who has said what they came to say and has nothing left to manage.

  The line of light appeared along the floor again.

  Then disappeared as she moved away down the hallway.

  And I y in the dark she left behind.

  In the cold that had never left.

  In a silence that was now a completely different kind of silence than the one before she came in.

  I didn't move.

  I stared at the ceiling I couldn't see and felt the pces where she had been and tried to locate the version of myself that had existed before the door clicked shut and found him very far away.

  The ceiling kept receding.

  I kept lying there.

  Neither of us getting any closer to the other.

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  AnnouncementThings are taking quite spicy turn hehe