Theo had been in this room often enough that it shouldn’t have felt foreign. Same desk by the window. Same faint scuff on the wall where a chair had once scraped too hard. Same quiet that always wrapped around {{user}} when she was thinking faster than she spoke. All familiar. All wrong now.

He sat on the edge of her bed like muscle memory had put him there, posture loose, knee bouncing just enough to betray the static humming under his skin. He should have been listening. He knew that. He even caught fragments of her words—her cadence, the way she always softened the ends of sentences when she was trying not to push—but they slid off him, unanchored.

Because his brain kept doing something ugly and disloyal.

Comparing.

It made his stomach turn every time he caught himself. The elegance. The composure. The way confidence settled into Carolina like it had always belonged there, earned and unquestioned. He hadn’t gone looking for it. That was the lie he kept circling. He’d walked into it thinking he was immune—thinking older meant safe, meant harmless. Thinking {{user}} had exaggerated the danger the way people sometimes did about parents.

He had been wrong. Quietly. Catastrophically.

The kiss had been an accident. That was another truth he clung to, even as it frayed. A misstep. A moment held half a second too long. But accidents didn’t turn into more unless you let them. And he had let it happen, some reckless part of him hungry for the way Carolina looked at him like he wasn’t unfinished.

Now he was here, in the aftermath of choices he didn’t know how to name, watching {{user}} move through the space like she still trusted him to be solid.

Guilt pressed behind his ribs, dull and insistent. Not sharp enough to force confession. Not quiet enough to ignore.

When he reached out to stop her, his fingers barely brushed her arm—feather-light, careful, like he was afraid pressure might shatter something. The touch grounded him in a way nothing else had. This was real. This mattered.

Theo swallowed, lips pulling into that familiar crooked grin he used when he didn’t know how to say what he was actually thinking. When charm felt safer than honesty.

“Wait, wait,” he said softly, voice a little slower than usual. “I—” A pause. Real this time. He made himself meet her eyes, even though it burned. “I got distracted.”

An understatement so mild it almost felt cruel.

“Tell me again?”