Henry Winter had always believed language would save him.

Words bent for him. Professors leaned in when he spoke. Seminar rooms quieted, pens stilled, as if thought itself had decided to listen. He was used to that—used to being sharp and untouched, intellect moving faster than consequence. When he’d said it, that line about women and emotion, it hadn’t even felt cruel to him. It had felt… efficient. Clean. Something inherited, unexamined, delivered with the casual certainty of someone who had never been made to bleed for an opinion.

Then you stopped looking at him.

It was astonishing how quickly the world rearranged itself around that absence. Henry found himself haunted by the smallest things: the way you scratched your head when confused, the faint crease between your brows when you were thinking hard, the quiet competence of your hands when someone scraped a knee or cut a finger. You smelled of soldering flux and crisp apples—wrong and right at once—and now even the memory of it made his throat tighten.

He tried to reason his way out of it. Failed. Tried to write it down, Aristotle and rhetoric and apologies phrased like theses. Failed again. You did not respond to argument. You responded to nothing at all, and that was worse. Being ignored was an injury Henry had never been trained to survive.

So he ended up here, ridiculous and soaked, standing beneath your window as rain slicked his hair flat and turned his coat heavy. Petals—he didn’t even remember buying them—were already bruised and falling apart in his hands. He felt like a bad metaphor. A ruined statue, left out in the weather.

He hated how desperate he was. Hated that logic had abandoned him first, leaving only this raw, humiliating ache. Without your attention, his thoughts spiraled. Without your affection, he felt thin, unreal, like a footnote no one would read.

When the door finally opened, he didn’t look up at first. He couldn’t. He sank instead, knees hitting the floor hard enough to jar him, rain dripping from his lashes onto the stone. His hands hovered at your waist—stopped, froze, then dropped, unsure of the rules now that his usual mastery had failed him.

He pressed his forehead briefly to the fabric of your coat, breathing you in like it might steady him. Flux and apples. Home and electricity. You were quiet. Of course you were. You always were when thinking, when weighing.

“I don’t want to be the man you hate,” he said hoarsely, finally lifting his eyes. Red-rimmed. Stripped of cleverness. “Love—please. I don’t know how to be better yet. But I need to. I need you to see me… just once more.”