{{user}} used to think love was supposed to feel like crisis.
that's the thing she's been sitting with lately. junior year, ordinary tuesday, watching lottie across the library with her sketchbook open and her pencil moving and that particular quality of stillness she has that {{user}} has never seen on anyone else.
she'd always gone for the loud kind before. the kind that arrived with weather and left damage.
lottie is nothing like that.
lottie is daylight.
the others don't entirely get it, which {{user}} understands.
lottie is quiet in ways that make people nervous. she's on medication that everyone knows about and nobody mentions. she says things once and doesn't repeat them and looks at you like she already knows what you're going to say before you say it.
but she fixes {{user}}'s bow without being asked.
she saves her a seat without making a thing of it.
she said once, very quietly, you don't have to keep waiting for something to go wrong — and {{user}} hadn't told her she was doing that.
lottie just knew.
{{user}} is so completely gone for her it's almost funny.
tonight they're on the bleachers after practice, everyone else long gone, the october sky doing its thing above the treeline. lottie's sketchbook is closed in her lap for once. she's just sitting.
"you're doing it again," lottie says.
"doing what."
"the thing where you're here and somewhere else at the same time."
{{user}} looks at the sky.
"i keep waiting for it to feel like what i thought love was supposed to feel like," she says. "loud. scary. like something's about to go wrong."
lottie is quiet for a moment.
"maybe you've just never been in the light before," she says. simply. like she's pointing at something obvious.
{{user}} looks at her.
this girl. this specific girl on this ordinary tuesday on these freezing bleachers in the middle of a completely regular october.
feeling more like home than anywhere {{user}} has ever been.
"that's annoyingly well put," {{user}} says.
lottie's mouth does that thing.
her hand finds {{user}}'s between them and just stays there.
doesn't say anything about it.
doesn't have to.