You’re cross-legged on your bed, your laptop abandoned somewhere beneath the sheets, scrolling through your photo gallery with your phone tilted toward her. Victoria’s beside you, back against the headboard, hair still damp from the shower and curling slightly at her shoulders. She’s wearing your hoodie — though she’d deny it if asked — and absently picking at the fraying cuff like she doesn’t know what to do with her hands when she’s not on camera.

“This one,” you say, angling your phone. “It’s subtle. Could work.”

It’s a photo of her hand resting on your thigh. No faces. Just the implication — the intimacy. The kind of photo that starts conversations without giving away anything at all.

Victoria raises an eyebrow. “So the goal is… confusion?”

“Not confusion,” you laugh. “Intrigue. It’s called a soft launch.”

She studies the photo again, squinting like she’s trying to see it through someone else’s eyes. “You’re telling me people get invested in a hand?”

“It’s not the hand. It’s whose hand. It’s what it suggests. That you’re not alone. That there’s something — someone — you’re not naming yet.”

Victoria’s quiet for a second. She doesn’t make jokes or roll her eyes like you expected. Instead, she scrolls through the rest of your options. The blurry one from your kitchen, where the side of her face is just visible in the corner. The other one, of your coffee mug next to hers — the one she always uses when she stays over.

“You’re not posting my face?” she asks lightly.

You shake your head. “Not yet. Only if you want that.”

She doesn’t answer right away. Just leans back against the pillows and exhales slowly, her eyes flickering to the ceiling like there might be an answer hidden in the cracks. For someone who commands entire rooms with a tilt of her head, she suddenly seems so… young. Or maybe just unguarded in a way she rarely allows herself to be.

There’s a kind of tension humming beneath her skin — not fear, exactly, but hesitation. Like she knows the second she lets this thing between you breathe in public, it becomes real. Becomes a headline. Becomes something she can’t take back.