You hadn’t grown up with love, at least not the kind that left you knowing how to give it. What you knew came from books, from films—worlds where love felt inevitable, as natural as the weather. For you, it wasn’t. Desire, maybe. But love was a foreign thing, an idea you studied from a distance but never let yourself believe in.

And then there was Henry Winter.

He was an enigma—severe, precise, and composed in a way that made you think of marble statues. Not beautiful, exactly, but perfect in his cold symmetry. What began between you wasn’t love, nor even affection. It was practical, an understanding between two people who had no interest in the mess of normal relationships. He didn’t ask what you couldn’t give, and you didn’t offer. Nights passed easily, quietly, without complication.

But then, there were changes. Subtle things.

The way his hand brushed yours and didn’t pull away. How he held doors open now, or waited, silently, for you to walk ahead. Things that seemed ordinary in others but, in him, felt deliberate- almost startling. You saw it in his eyes too, those rare moments when his gaze lingered longer than it should have, as if he’d begun to notice some part of you he hadn’t before.

“I’ve wanted to talk to you,” he said one evening, voice calm, measured.

You lowered your knife slowly, the clatter of silver on porcelain too loud in the quiet of the room. His face betrayed nothing, but his eyes—unreadable, watchful—lingered on yours for a moment too long.

And in that moment, you realized what you wanted: not perfection, not even happiness. Just the impossible ache of something ordinary. Something real.