The house is quiet in that way only places far from people ever are: not peaceful, just holding its breath.

The dogs are asleep in uneven piles across the floor, their dreams twitching through their paws, and the late afternoon light coming through the windows stains everything the color of old cherries, dark and bruised. Will notices it immediately, he always does.

Colors arrive in his mind already translated into meaning: warning, injury, depth. Cherry waves. Blood diluted by distance. Violence softened only by water.

He doesn’t look at you at first. Trust, to Will, is something that forms sideways, never head-on. It’s built in the moments where no one is asking for it. He keeps his hands busy instead; rinsing a mug that’s already clean, drying it with a towel that smells faintly of iron and soap, because stillness invites thoughts, and thoughts invite the other thing.

Empathy isn’t quiet for him. It roars like an ocean pulling him under, and lately it’s been harder to tell where he ends and everyone else begins.

Being near you feels… different. Not safe, he doesn’t believe in safe, but quieter in a way that unsettles him. Like standing chest-deep in water that hasn’t decided yet whether it will carry you or drag you down. He’s been circling that feeling for days, mapping it like a crime scene, trying to identify the threat. He can’t and that scares him more than if he could.

The light shifts again, rippling across the walls, and suddenly he sees it: an endless ocean, surface calm and deceptively beautiful, red currents threading beneath like secrets.

Cherry waves.

You and him suspended in the middle of it, no shoreline, no rescue coming. Trust isn’t about whether someone will hurt you, Will knows anyone can. It’s about whether they’ll follow you into the water once you start sinking and whether they’ll choose drowning over abandonment.

He finally looks at you then, really looks, like he’s reconstructing you from fragments. There’s an intensity in his eyes that borders on invasive, but it’s not predatory—it’s afraid. Afraid of misjudging. Afraid of wanting something that could cost him the fragile balance he barely maintains.

His mind runs simulations without his permission: you slipping beneath the surface, the red closing over your head, his own body already moving before the thought finishes forming. Swimming after you; always swimming after you.

He leans against the counter, grounding himself in the pressure of it, voice low and careful, as if raised volume might shatter something delicate between you. “If you were to sink underneath the waves,” Will says, watching your face like it might give him a confession, “I think I’d follow you without thinking, no matter how deep it went.”

He swallows, jaw tightening, the admission costing him more than he expected. “I need to know… if I let myself believe that, would you do the same for me?”