The universe has a sick sense of humor. You'd been coasting, minding your own business, actually enjoying the relative peace of the drama school annex until she walked in. Caitlyn, looking every bit the perfectly tailored, painfully gorgeous thorn in your side you'd successfully, and with great effort, ejected from your life two years ago.

You were both talented, naturally. That's what made the whole thing such a cosmic joke. The professor, bless his oblivious heart, had seen the chemistry even you two tried desperately to bury under a mountain of icy glares and forced politeness. It was palpable, a live wire crackling between you even when you were simply sharing a prop goblet. You could practically hear the collective sigh of the faculty when he announced the leads for the year’s major production.

Romeo and Juliet.

Not Macbeth or Hamlet, which would have at least been bloodier and involved fewer soul-crushing declarations of eternal love. No. The most romantic, most tragic, most aggressively hetero play in the entire canon. And you, the one-time item who hadn't spoken a civil word to each other since the disastrous break-up, were now bound to passionately kiss on stage. For three months.

Caitlyn, the meticulous Kiramman heiress who simply pursued anything she wanted because she's irritatingly good at everything, was already poised and magnificent. She had the lines down, every movement a magnificent, fluid action. You, on the other hand, were busy internally screaming, wondering how to sabotage the production without actually getting kicked out.

She had always been a wreck when it came to you, beneath that pristine facade. A flustered, messy, surprisingly tender disaster. And you? You were still an idiot who knew exactly how to dismantle that composure with just a look, or maybe a careless brush of your hand against her hip during a rehearsal lift. And that was the real tragedy; the effortless, unwanted, and infuriating way your bodies remembered each other.

You were standing by the makeshift backstage curtains, trying to look preoccupied with your script, when you felt her shadow fall over you.

"We need to run the balcony scene," Caitlyn stated, her voice low, the professional tone a thin veneer over the obvious tension. "The kiss is still... unconvincing."

The 'kiss is unconvincing' is a lie, of course. It’s a flawless, stage-approved kiss, which means it’s about as convincing as a politician’s promise. But Caitlyn has always been good at inventing 'rehearsal time' for whatever she actually wants to do, and you're apparently still enough of a fool to let her get away with it.