Of course she’s in there. The one place I told her not to go. My room—like the rest of this house—has boundaries. Ones she either doesn’t hear or just cheerfully bulldozes past.
I push the door open without warning. She’s on her knees, half under my bed, arm outstretched toward the ginger menace crouched in the shadows. Boomerang meets my eyes with the smug satisfaction of a feline who knows he’s just thrown gasoline on an already simmering fire.
“Did I not say my room is off limits?”
My voice is calm, but she startles anyway—jerking up so fast she cracks her head on the edge of the bedside table with a sharp thud that even makes me wince.
“Shit,” she hisses, pressing a hand to her temple. “I was just trying to get Boomerang.”
Her face scrunches as she rubs the growing welt, glaring at me like this is somehowmyfault.
Honestly? I’m more impressed than annoyed. It takes a special kind of determination to trespass, headbutt furniture, and still sound self-righteous in the aftermath.
Nell mutters something unintelligible as she tries to stand, still clutching her head. There’s a faint red mark blooming near her temple, and she glares at me like I’m the one who built the bedside table just to sabotage her.
“He just ran in here,” she grumbles. “I didn’t exactly have time to send a formal request.”
I huff a quiet laugh. “And clearly no time to develop spatial awareness.”
She groans. “Seriously?”
I gestures at the spot she hit. “That’s going to swell, you know. I should probably get you a helmet if you’re going to keep charging through my house like a one-woman demolition team.”
She shoots me a look, half-defiant, half-exasperated. “Are you always this charming, or is it just with me?”
I shrug. “Just with you. Everyone else knows how doors work.”
Boomerang meows lazily from beneath the bed, clearly unbothered, as if he planned this chaos.
“Ha. You’re funny.”
She’s being sarcastic—obviously. But the curve of her mouth doesn’t quite match the tone, and it lingers longer than necessary.
There hasn’t been a woman in this room since Kyla. The air still feels like hers sometimes, like memory soaked into the walls.
Now we’re just standing here, suspended in a silence too tight to breathe in. Neither of us speaks. Neither of us moves. But something crackles at the edges.
Then, mercifully—or not—Boomerang bolts from beneath the bed like an orange blur of chaos, tail high, eyes wild, dashing for the door.
Cupid in fur.
She goes to follow. Or tries to. But my arm moves before I think—blocks her path, firm and unyielding across the frame.
And suddenly she’s close.
Too close.
She smells like something sweet and sharp, like citrus spiked with something softer—danger wrapped in sugar. And I hate how familiar it feels. How natural. Howwrong.
She doesn’t flinch, and doesn’t try to push past. Just… waits, so still and expectant.
Is it fear holding her here? Or something else neither of us is ready to name?
Either way, I’m the one who should move.
But I don’t.
She turns to leave—shoulder brushing past mine, soft and determined, like she doesn’t feel this boulder of tension betweenus. Like the scent of her hasn’t threaded itself through the walls of this house.
