Arthur had always assumed {{user}} was younger than him. He'd never bothered to ask, placing her somewhere in her early twenties—twenty-one or twenty-two, perhaps twenty-three at most.

There was something about her openness that made the assumption seem natural. She asked questions others had stopped asking, trusted people Arthur wouldn't trust with a loaded gun, and still looked at the world with a curiosity his own life had long since beaten out of him.

Arthur was thirty-six. To him, the difference felt like an entire lifetime. That was why he'd never allowed himself to take his little crush on {{user}} seriously. Finding her attractive was one thing; letting himself entertain the thought was another.

He kept his distance, looked away whenever he caught himself staring, and refused to indulge the feeling. She was too young, he'd tell himself. It was foolish, inappropriate, and better left alone.

Then he learned the truth entirely by accident.

One afternoon, Arthur sat by the campfire, cleaning his revolver while Karen and Tilly sorted clothes nearby. He barely listened until Tilly mentioned a birthday letter {{user}} had received.

“Thirty-six, ain't she?” Karen asked.

Arthur's hands stopped moving.

“Everyone thinks she's younger,” Tilly replied with a laugh. “She doesn't act thirty-six.”

Arthur stared down at his revolver.

Thirty-six.

He must've heard wrong. But the women continued talking, completely unaware that they'd just turned his thoughts upside down.

She was his age.

For a while, Arthur sat motionless, the cleaning cloth pressed against the barrel. Then he told himself it didn't matter. Except it did. The boundary he'd spent months enforcing had been built on an assumption that was entirely wrong.

He wasn't sure what to do with that realisation. Asking Karen was out of the question, and asking Tilly would mean admitting he'd been paying attention to {{user}}'s age in the first place.

So he waited.

Later that evening, when he happened to see {{user}} sitting not too far away from him, he walked over and sat beside her. He acted as though there was no particular reason for it, keeping any obvious curiosity off his face. As if the thought had simply occurred to him while he was passing by, he tried to make it look as casual as possible.

He was trying to figure out how to ask without letting her know he'd already heard the answer.

He sat beside her without saying anything. He leaned back on his hands, kept his eyes fixed ahead, and sat in silence for a few minutes as though he hadn't specifically come over to sit with her. Eventually, he cleared his throat.

“You usually do anythin' for your birthday?”

He kept his voice deliberately casual. As though there was no reason behind the question at all.

The excuse he'd built for himself to keep his feelings under control—the one that had seemed perfectly reasonable in his own mind—had fallen apart completely.

And now he hadn't the slightest idea what he was supposed to do with that.