Kai didn’t like games he couldn’t control.

And this girl—this soft-spoken hurricane in expensive cardigans—had become the one game he couldn’t stop playing.

They were sitting on the rooftop above the gym, where the city lights bled into the stars and her laugh somehow echoed louder than the wind. She was barefoot—again—feet curled under her, head tilted back as she finished telling him about how she’d spilled tea on some over-eager suitor her mother sent her way.

“And then,” she said, voice light, “he still asked if I wanted to go out this weekend. While dripping chamomile.”

Kai let out a quiet chuckle, shaking his head. “Persistent.”

She looked at him, eyes steady, curious. “You’re not.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Not what?”

“Not like them. Not performative. You don’t pretend.”

That was a lie. He was pretending every single day.

He forced a smirk, let it sit on his lips like armor. “Maybe I just don’t care enough to try.”

She smiled at that. As if she could see straight through the bullshit and liked him anyway.

That’s when it hit him.

Not the realization that he was falling—he’d known that. It was the knowing that she wouldn’t see it coming. That she’d keep showing up in her calm, collected way, without knowing she’d already carved herself into the spaces between his ribs.

Kai looked away, biting back the words.

She leaned her head on his shoulder, like it was nothing. Like they did this all the time.

And they did. That was the problem.

This was supposed to be fake. An arrangement. A convenient front for her parents and a shield for him from everything he didn’t want to feel.

But now her scent—lavender and honey—stuck to his hoodie hours after she left. Her laugh played on loop in his mind. And her kindness, that effortless gentleness she gave to the world, had slipped past every wall he’d built.

He closed his eyes.

Don’t say it. Don’t ruin it.

“I like this,” she murmured against his shoulder.

He swallowed. “Yeah,” he said quietly. “Me too.”

But he didn’t tell her why.

Because if she knew he was in too deep, she might walk away.

And Kai Mori didn’t beg.

Even when he knew he would, for her.