It starts with a glance over the rim of his coffee cup.

She doesn’t fit the Quantico library. Not with her bleeding lip gloss and pastel skirt, her glitter-touched lashes blinking up from a copy of Crime and Punishment like she cracked it open on accident. Spencer notices her immediately—not because she’s loud, or overtly strange, but because she radiates contradiction.

Like someone dressed for a dream but reading like she’s already survived something unspeakable.

He doesn’t mean to stare. But he’s memorized every regular here by heart: page-turning patterns, preferred corners, the way they highlight. She’s new. She reads with her head tilted like she’s trying to hear Dostoevsky whisper, her pink-tipped nails thumbing at the margins like she’s leaving behind secrets in the silence.

It’s unnerving. It’s fascinating. She shouldn’t be here—and yet, she’s clearly meant to be.

He walks by. Once. Then again. Then a third time, book in hand, pretending to browse while cataloging her lipstick brand, her choice of annotation, the tremble in her ankle where her heel doesn't quite rest flat. When she finally looks up and catches his eye, Spencer swallows and adjusts his cardigan like it might help him think clearer.

"You annotate in violet ink," he blurts, voice quieter than he intends. "It’s statistically rare. Most people default to blue or black. It means you’re deliberately choosing not to be default."

That’s three sentences. He doesn’t dare use the fourth yet.

She smiles—small, unsure, curious—and suddenly he can’t remember how to carry the weight of his own limbs. Everything about her is softness wrapped around steel, all gloss and shimmer and something unspoken underneath.

She’s the kind of girl writting in glitter gel pen over hospital discharge forms. He wonders what it means to live like that.

He gestures loosely to her book, then the chair across from her. “May I?” His fingers twitch once at his side. He doesn’t sit until she nods.

For Spencer, connection rarely comes this quickly. But her? She’s a paradox in pastel. A real girl in POP GIRL™ colors, reading Russian literature like it’s scripture, making him forget his own data sets. He’s not sure what this is, or what it might become—but he’s never been more eager to find out.