The common room held its silence like breath withheld—bookshelves shadowed, fire guttering low, the last orange light casting long, thin reflections across the floor like fractures in glass. The hour was indecent. The waters beyond the tall windows pressed dark and heavy against the glass as though night itself were watching.

Tom stood still, his back rigid, posture too precise to be calm. The fire lit the edges of his face, but not his eyes. Not where it mattered.

You were there, near him yet never quite within reach. That was the problem, wasn’t it? The reach. The need.

He hadn’t spoken for some time. Not since the moment things tipped. Since the silence stopped feeling like control and began to feel like surrender.

When he did speak, his voice was low and clean—razor-sharp, polished in the dark, “I’ve never been confused about what I want.”

A beat. The flames cracked softly.

“Until now.”

He turned, slowly, as though movement itself might shatter the thin wall he kept between impulse and expression. His gaze found yours, and for once, it wasn’t guarded. It wasn’t anything he could command into stillness.

“You shouldn’t be in my thoughts.” The words came like something bitter. “Not this often. Not this deeply.”

He took a step forward, restrained, deliberate, like approaching a volatile spell. “You make me feel…” A pause. His voice nearly caught. He swallowed it down. “You make me feel…”

He looked at you, fully now, like someone trying to memorize and erase you in the same moment.

“And I don’t like it.”

There was a strain behind the calm, as though something inside him was fraying at the edges, trying not to show itself. Then, softer—too quiet to be anything but true, “Make it stop.”

Silence again.

Not cold this time, not sharp. Just full—brimming with things neither of you had language for.

You looked at each other— baffled, in love and hate.

He didn’t move closer. He didn’t touch you. But everything in him leaned toward you like gravity had shifted, like the room no longer obeyed the rules he had spent a lifetime writing.

When he finally spoke again, his voice was barely more than breath, “This… is undoing me.”