Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The bus caught ruts in the private road and shivered like it remembered every summer these tires had eaten. Nova leaned her temple to the glass and watched the treeline flicker: pine, birch, taller pine, sky punched full of afternoon light. She had forgotten the way the air here smelled—wet bark and sun-warmed sap and some mineral tang off the lake that didn’t exist anywhere else. On the seat beside her, her duffel slumped like a tired animal. Her phone lay faceup on top of it, black screen reflecting her mouth set in a composed line.

When the bus curved, a glint touched her wrist. Reflex made her thumb find the little clasp, the small circle of steel Eli had looped there in December, the night they’d stood under a too-bright mall skylight pretending carolers didn’t make them both laugh. The bracelet was simple: a thin band, a cool weight, a habit. She had told herself she’d take it off before she stepped onto camp soil, like some ritual cutting of ties—only her fingers had kept not doing it, as if the thing had grown roots beneath her skin.

She breathed, slow and shallow, and the breath snagged on a memory she had not invited: lanterns haloing the lake; Victor’s voice last summer—in that low easy way he had when he wasn’t performing for anyone—telling her he liked how the night looked on her. No kiss. No label. Just the sense of something with its hands braced against a door, deciding whether it would dare to open it.

Addison had texted an hour ago: see you soon!!! bring bug spray ❤️. Nova had answered with an emoji and a joke and absolutely no truth. Another thread sat higher in her messages: a phone number without a name, still there from the previous August. She never saved it because names made things real. The last thing on that thread was his: you up?—sent on a night the world had felt like it was rotating under her in perfect balance. She had typed an answer and not sent it, and then time drew the answer’s outline thinner until she couldn’t see it at all.

The bus climbed the last hill. A bright piece of water flashed through the trees ahead like a mirror catching sun and throwing it at her on purpose. People around her started standing, jittery with return. Somebody shouted that they could see the pier. The driver took the curve fast and the whole body of the bus leaned, a collective sway like a breath before a leap, and then Camp Rayburn arrived in a small, holy shock—wooden archway painted fresh, the big communal oak throwing its freckles of shade, the cabins lined like punctuation along the slope to the lake.

Nova’s heart did the worst thing—it recognized home before she decided she wanted it.

She waited out the first stampede, letting the aisle jam with elbows and duffels. When she stood, the bracelet hit light again. She cupped it with her palm and stepped down into the day.

Heat stood on the ground. Voices did that old familiar echo trick off the water. Somewhere, already, someone was playing guitar badly. She shouldered the duffel and followed a trickle of people toward the check-in tables, the white paper sign with her cabin name printed in block letters. The counselor stationed there—Rebecca, older now by one year but still with glitter on her cheeks—hugged her like a cousin you never see but never forget. “Look at you,” Rebecca said. “You cut your hair.”

Nova ran a hand over the ends. “I got brave with scissors in March.” A lie. She had sat in a salon chair and watched pieces drop and thought about cutting other things away and had not done it.

“Addison’s already in the cabin,” Rebecca said, making a small show of checking the list and then blowing her a kiss over the cardboard. “And the rumor mill says we’ve got alumni helpers this summer. You didn’t hear it from me.”

Nova lifted a shoulder. “I never hear anything from you. Your mouth is a vault.”

Rebecca laughed and let her go. The path to the cabins was muscle memory: up past the communal showers, right at the wild current bush, left where the ground dipped. The cabin door stuck halfway, same as last year; it always needed a shoulder and a curse. Nova gave it both, easy, and stepped into lemon cleaner and wooden heat.

Addison hit her at rib level, all arms and hair and breathless, “Finally,” and “I missed you,” and “Never leave me alone with Bree when she’s on an organizational tear,” all in one sentence. Bree, hands inside a plastic tub labeled BUG SPRAY in capital letters, glanced up without moving her hands and said, “You’re late. We were going to give your bed to a raccoon.”

“Let it have it.” Nova dropped the duffel onto the bottom bunk and pretended the weight that fell with it was only clothes. “Maybe the raccoon will write my letters for me.”

“Please,” Bree said. “A raccoon would have better penmanship.”

They were sunshine and noise and safety. They were also—Nova felt it as a pressure behind her sternum—people who had watched last summer happen and not happen. She put her back to them and unzipped the duffel and felt the bracelet catch a tooth of metal like it didn’t want her to unpack.

“Rumor has it,” Bree said to the bug spray, “that certain ghost stories are walking around on two legs tonight.”

Addison’s mouth did a slow grin. “Do you want to know? Or do you want to pretend he’s a myth and we dreamt him up?”

Nova didn’t turn. She folded a t-shirt she didn’t remember liking and set it on the bunk. “I want to know,” she said, because choosing ignorance was like turning her own face away in a mirror. “And if it turns out to be someone else, you can laugh at me for three days.”

“Victor,” Bree said, flat as facts. “Helping. I heard he’s in for the first session, maybe more. He’s on the roster for lake safety and the arts program. Which is either extremely responsible or a terrible idea given his habit of drawing people and making them look like saints.”

Addison threw a rolled sock at her. “You’re just mad he never made your eyebrows symmetrical.”

“Symmetry is a fascist lie,” Bree said, but she was smiling into the tub.

Nova folded another shirt that didn’t need folding. “It’s fine,” she said, and made her mouth shape the words clean. “It’s been a year. Nothing explodes after twelve months.”

“Naturally,” Addison said lightly. “That’s why volcanologists only study last week.”

Nova got the door stuck again on purpose and then unstuck it, and then she laughed, the sound coming in a relief-sigh like her rib cage had been cinched and some careful hand had let it go a notch. The cabin, the ritual of joking about nothing as a way to speak around something—that part she remembered how to do.

Dinner was a rumor speeding patient through everyone’s blood. The whole camp gathered itself along the walkways in strips of color and motion, the way a flock decides without deciding to turn. The dining hall looked exactly the same—long tables, the big windows cranked open to invite in other people’s laughter, the menu scrawled on a chalkboard as if chalk could keep rhythm. Nova carried her tray to the line and was halfway to deciding she felt normal when Addison’s elbow dug into her side.

“Don’t look,” Addison whispered, which of course meant look, “but Eli’s in the far corner.”

Nova did not have to look to know which corner. She looked anyway. It was impossible not to. He was handsome in that reassuring way that made adults at PTA meetings call you a “nice young man.” He had sat precisely where Victor used to sit, as if the camp blueprint had come stamped with a reserved sign under that bench. Lila was tucked under his arm with a familiarity that looked practiced. She taught the younger campers dance—Nova recognized her from last year’s closing-circle videos. At that table, someone tossed a marshmallow from a fork to someone else’s mouth and it landed, and the cheer that rose up felt like a paper cut. Not deadly. Real anyway.

“Smile,” Bree said quietly. “He thinks you can’t.”

Nova smiled. She smiled with the part of her face that had muscles built for smiling at extended family and store cashiers and people who told her she looked tired. She paid for a lemonade she didn’t want and walked past Eli’s table without stopping.

“Nova,” he said, standing because he was someone who did that. His expression had that careful kindness you offer to a person you once took care of and no longer do. “Hey.”

She stopped, because politeness and because she wasn’t made of ice. Lila’s eyes flicked over Nova’s face and then dropped to the bracelet like she knew what it was and why it mattered.

“Hi,” Nova said. She kept her voice level, made it the voice she used when she reminded small campers not to run on wet docks. “Back on staff?”

“For the first session,” he said. “Then maybe the reunion week. Depends on… you know. Logistics.” He laughed a little and looked at Lila like logistics meant her and also not her. “This is Lila. She’s—”

“I’ve seen you dance,” Nova said to Lila. “You’re good.”

“Thanks,” Lila said, not unkindly.

“We’re all good,” Eli said, because he underestimated how words sometimes sounded out loud. “I’m glad we can all be friends.”

Nova should have left it there, with the lemonade sweating in her hand and her smile doing its best impression of peace. But something old and unhealed spoke before her better judgment did. “We were never just friends,” she said, not louder than necessary, and then she gave them both a soft nod and kept walking until the far doors gave her the slope and the slice of shimmering water she needed like oxygen.

She didn’t realize she’d been holding her breath until the air made her lungs sting.

The first official fire of summer lit as the sun pulled its hand off the world. A counselor fed wood to the ring in a practiced, reverent way. People circled on benches and on ground and on each other’s shoes. Someone had a guitar; someone else had a drum. Above them the sky changed clothes in a slow dance—gold to amber to deepening blue—and the lanterns, because Rayburn was that kind of place, winked on one by one as if stars had ideas about proximity.

Nova took the end of a bench and let the heat bathe her shins. The flame turned everyone into a new version of themselves—edges softer, eyes brighter. She let the noise of the camp settle into her joints. And then a hush rolled across the circle, one of those human hushes where rumor and gravity agree to become fact for a heartbeat, and she did not look up yet because anticipation had its own flavor and she wanted to taste it.

“Welcome back, Rayburn,” Rebecca called, standing with her clipboard and her glitter. “We’ve got a stacked staff this summer, and—because we love community—we’ve also got a couple alumni back to help keep you from drowning or making friendship bracelets so tight you can’t feel your fingers.”

Laughter rose. Nova’s hands found each other under her knees.

“Please be kind,” Rebecca said, “and please don’t make me separate you like toddlers. You know who you are. Victor, if you want to stop hiding in the tree line and say hi like a normal person…”

He stepped out of shadow like he belonged to it. Lantern light climbed his body and sat on his hair and decided to stay. The silence broke itself on other people’s air: oh my god, and finally, and I told you so. Victor put his hand up in a hello that wasn’t a wave and wasn’t not a wave. He looked older the way a storm makes a tree look older—not changed in architecture, but in ring count. The angle of his mouth said he’d learned to be careful with what he offered to crowds. His eyes did not.

They found hers like they’d always known where to look.

The look was not dramatic—no jaw drop, no string section swelling in an invisible orchestra pit. It just connected and held, and the inside of her spine straightened because recognition does that to a body. He dipped his chin once. She made herself look back and not away, because leaving her own gaze felt like a betrayal of the person who had managed to survive a year. He stepped nearer to Rebecca, murmured something that made glitter flip in laughter, and took a place along the fire’s edge where anyone could look and say his name without meaning anything by it.

Nova watched the fire until colors melted into coal-orange. She could feel Addison vibrating beside her without touching her, an orbit you learn without trying. “Breathe,” Addison whispered. “Or I’m going to do it for you, and that will be weird for both of us.”

“I am,” Nova said, breathless.

“Technically,” Addison said.

After curfew, the camp peeled apart like a sticker: pieces taking away the shadow of a larger shape. Nova let herself be a last piece, the one you peel slow because the paper under it matters. The path toward the cabins hugged the lake, and the lake was a show-off, wearing sky and lanterns like jewelry. She walked with her hands in her pockets so she wouldn’t fuss with the bracelet. The night was warm enough to hold but not so warm it made you let go.

Footsteps took the path behind her, unhurried. She didn’t look—she didn’t have to.

“Thought you’d be halfway to the cabins by now,” he said, voice low enough that it didn’t have to fight the water to be heard.

“I was letting the crowd clear.” She kept her eyes on the ripples making coin shapes when they caught light. “Some of us don’t need to make an entrance.”

“Sure,” he said lightly. “You only do it by accident.”

She let herself smile at the water where he couldn’t see it. “Welcome back, counselor.”

“Terrifying title.” He walked in parallel, not close enough to touch, close enough that the backs of their hands knew about each other. “You cut your hair.”

“March,” she said. “Tired of brushing it.”

“Looks like you,” he said, and then, because he’d learned something too, he left it at that.

The night insects sang their old chorus. Somewhere behind them, someone tripped and denied it. The ground did its careful slope and the trees held up a piece of sky for them to pass under. Nova glanced at him and looked away quickly because looking felt like swallowing something hot.

“How was your year?” he asked, in a tone that suggested he knew the answer would be a landmine field and was willing to walk it anyway.

“Ordinary,” she said, and then, because he deserved something that wasn’t a lie, “Mostly. I tried to make it be.”

He hummed. “How’d that go.”

“I broke a mug in February because it wasn’t the right one,” she said, which was not the story but was the shape of it. “So. Work in progress.”

He nodded. There was no pity in it. “I drew a lot,” he said. “Most of it isn’t any good.”

“You never think it’s good,” she said, and the familiar bicker warmed some cold, tucked place as efficiently as the fire had warmed her legs. “You only think you almost caught something.”

“That’s the whole point,” he said, amused. “Catching it would ruin it.”

They reached the fork where the path split toward staff housing on the left and the summer cabins on the right. The lantern nearest the sign creaked on its hook. He saw it at the same time she did—his glance dipped to her wrist and then to her face, swift and bright.

“Still wearing his colors?” he said, not a challenge exactly. An inventory.

She lifted her chin a little. “Still drawing ghosts?”

His mouth did a thing she recognized and had missed, a sideways almost-smile like he’d been surprised by her and liked it. “Touché.”

For a second they stood in the piece of air where last summer had left them: his hand not touching her, hers not reaching. This, too, was a door. Every part of her that remembered the exact temperature of his skin said open, open, open, and all the parts that had learned how to last said careful.

“Night,” he said finally, softer, and turned left.

“Night,” she said to the sign after he was gone, and only then to the path.

Inside the cabin, the air had changed. It held shampoo steam and damp towels and the vanilla of somebody’s lotion. Addison lay on her stomach with her feet kicking, reading a text thread with a concentration that meant trouble. Bree had organized the bug spray into a pyramid that was not mathematically sound but was aesthetically ambitious.

“That looked painful,” Bree said without looking up.

“I didn’t cry,” Nova said.

“Growth,” Bree said.

Addison rolled over, hair a halo. “He looked at you like you were a song he remembered the words to.”

“Songs get stuck in your head,” Nova said, dropping onto her bunk, pressing her palms to the cool sheet like it was a grounding exercise. “They don’t mean anything.”

Addison’s gaze softened. “Sometimes they do.”

Nova let the conversation ghost out. She showered last, letting the water take camp dust out of her hair and the day’s last heat off her skin. When she came back, the cabin was night-soft. The window near the bunks was cracked, and rain had found the edge of the roof and started tapping it delicately like someone learning patience. Bree’s pyramid of bug spray glistened minutely in the dark like a monument to preparedness.

Nova sat on the edge of her bunk with her knees up and her hands around them. She turned her wrist over in the thin light and examined the bracelet as if it were a living thing and not a circle of metal and memory.

December’s mall. Eli’s hands, steady and sincere. Her own smile, the sturdy kind. He had been good in all the ways that made teachers write emails to your parents. He had also been a quiet room she kept walking into to avoid the one on fire.

She unclasped the bracelet. The small machine-click sounded too loud. The skin under it was pale where the sun hadn’t learned it. She laid the thing in her palm and felt how little it weighed, how much she had given it anyway. She closed her fingers and left them closed.

Outside, laughter rose and ebbed. Somewhere between the tap of rain and the hush of wind moving in the leaves, a guitar found three chords and tried to be a song. Nova stretched out on the bunk and watched her ceiling breathe as the lights from the path moved over it. She pressed the bracelet into the curve of her hand until the skin remembered it and then eased off, not ready to throw anything, not ready to wear it to bed.

Maybe she had come back to prove she was fine. Maybe she had come back because she wanted to find out what honesty would do to her if she let it.

She turned onto her side and let her eyes close around that thought, around the echo of Victor’s voice saying night like it knew more syllables than it allowed. The bunk’s wood sighed. The rain deepened to a steady pattern. The lake, even unseen, made its presence known in the little cooling draft that came through the window.

Nova slept with her hand curled around a small ring of metal and the lake in her lungs and the knowledge that the door she had backed away from last summer was still there, patient as a habit, waiting for a decision she hadn’t made yet.

In the morning there would be schedules and roll calls and whistles; there would be mosquitoes and jokes and the shock of cold water biting her ankles on the dock. There would be Eli saying something in that polite voice. There would be Addison’s relentless cheer and Bree’s weaponized sarcasm. And somewhere in the grid of all that, there would be a boy who walked out of shadow and into a room full of people and looked at her like he had remembered every line of her and was testing himself to see if he still knew them.

But morning hadn’t been invented yet. Night pressed a cool palm to her forehead and told her to wait. The bracelet loosened in her hand when sleep finally found her. On the table beside the bunk, someone had left a camp-issued lantern, turned down to its lowest glow. It made a small circle of light, quiet and sure, proof that more light could be made when more was needed.

Nova breathed, and for now, that was enough.

Chapter Text

Morning came loud and golden, the kind of light that barged through curtains and reminded everyone they were here to be alive on purpose. Nova woke to the door banging, to Bree cataloging the crimes of scrambled eggs, to Addison singing two wrong keys at once while hunting for a missing sock. The bracelet, small and unassuming, sat where she’d left it on the windowsill. She touched it—cool, harmless—and left it there like a truce.

Schedules multiplied. Someone from lake staff begged her to swap blocks because the canoe count had apparently been a rumor. Nova said yes. She said yes to sunscreen, to a safety talk, to a junior camper who asked if glitter counted as a life skill (it did, with caveats). By lunch, her skin hummed with sun and usefulness, and her head had discovered the pleasant emptiness that comes from having no room for the past.

It lasted until the dining hall.

Addison materialized at her elbow with the tray of a woman on a mission. “Report,” she said. “Does Session One show promise for romance, personal growth, or at least free cookies?”

“Vegetables,” Bree said behind her, as if that were a scandal. “They’ve put peppers in everything.”

“Tragic,” Nova said. She kept her attention on the chalkboard, as if choosing tacos or pasta were a moral question. At the edge of her vision, the corner table did the worst thing: it didn’t perform. Eli and Lila were being ordinary, which always hurt more because you couldn’t complain about it without sounding unwell.

Addison followed her gaze and then pretended she hadn’t. “We’re sitting by the windows,” she declared. “For the lake vibes.”

“Also to make sure you get vitamin D,” Bree said. “Your winter pallor could frighten the raccoons.”

Nova carried her tray like it was a shield. When they reached the table by the glass, she angled her chair so the lake filled her peripheral vision—silver and insistent, a good distraction. Addison launched into a story about a cabin harmony circle that had devolved into a debate about whether ghosts could swim. Bree built a tower of carrot sticks like a municipal error.

Nobody said Victor’s name, which meant everyone thought it, which meant Nova ate her salad like a person whose jaw had something to prove. She laughed in the right places. She did not look at the door. She failed not to hear the shift in the room when he came in: the easy ripple of attention that follows certain people like a wake.

He passed their table. He did not stop. He didn’t have to for her pulse to admit that it knew the shape of his stride.

“Lakeside after lunch?” Addison said, already halfway out of her seat. “We’re planning the coup for the canoe shortage.”

“Absolutely,” Bree said. “I have a manifesto.”

Nova nodded and stood with them—then paused, tray in hand. “I’ll meet you there,” she said, trying for casual. “I need to talk to Rebecca about the archery switch.”

“You hate archery,” Addison said, suspicious.

“I love competency,” Nova said. “Go.”

They went. She watched them thread into the crowd until they were swallowed by bodies and noise—her safe chorus. Then she set her tray on the return, stepped sideways into the flow of the room, and let the current carry her to the door as if she hadn’t planned every step.

Outside, the path bored a thin privacy between the dining hall and the lake. Wind moved the birches like murmurs. Nova took the slope down until the water pressed cool against the air in a way that made honesty harder to dodge. She didn’t have to wait long; his footsteps chose the gravel over the grass because he’d always liked the sound.

“You disappeared,” he said, not accusing.

“You passed my table,” she returned, not greeting.

He tipped his head, conceding both. Up close, the lanyard made him look like he belonged, which annoyed her more than it should. “How are your vegetables doing?”

“Thriving,” she said. “I’m proud of them.”

Silence wasn’t awkward with him; it had texture, like linen you’d worn soft. They listened to the lake throwing light at everything it touched. Somewhere, a whistle blew, petulant.

“I have an idea,” she said, before she chickened out. “It’s a bad one.”

“Excellent,” he said promptly. “Those are my favorite.”

She folded her arms because it was either that or reach for him. “Everyone’s already telling a story with me in it. If we don’t give them a different one, they’ll keep writing the old chapters. So—for a little while—we make a new chapter. Together.”

His expression didn’t change dramatically; something quieter happened, a focus, like someone turning down the music in his head to hear her better. “Define ‘together.’”

“Fake,” she said, and the word tasted stubborn. “We pretend we’re dating. Convincingly. We misdirect. People stop asking me if I’m okay. Eli stops looking at me like I’m a museum exhibit he used to dust. And then—end of session—we quietly let it fade and everyone moves on.”

“Just us,” he said, reading the part she didn’t want to say. “No one else knows.”

“No one,” she said. “Not Addison. Not Bree. Not your bat fan club.”

He huffed. “They’re just people who appreciate nocturnal mammals.”

She didn’t smile. He did, a little, because he couldn’t help it when she was being absurd on purpose. Then he sobered. “Terms.”

“Rules,” she corrected, and saw his eyes flash with memory—her notebook last summer, her lists a way of holding the world still. “One: no real kissing.”

“Stagecraft only,” he echoed.

“Two: no sleeping over.” She held up a finger when he opened his mouth. “Even during a storm. Even if I forget my raincoat. Even if you’re on fire.”

“I feel like the last one is an outlier,” he said, obediently closing his mouth. “But okay.”

“Three,” she went on, “no mixed signals. If something doesn’t work, we say so. We stop when either of us says stop. This is mine to control as much as yours.”

His face shifted again, something warm and careful sliding into place. “Yes,” he said. “Full sentence.”

“Four,” she said, and almost laughed at herself, “we do not actually fall for each other. We’ve both done enough falling.”

The corner of his mouth tilted. “We could walk carefully.”

“And five,” she said, “this ends when Session One ends. We don’t drip it into our lives. No ambiguous posts. No staged ‘amicable breakup’ statements. We let the rumor die of natural causes.”

He nodded, slow. “Clean exit,” he said. “No debris.”

“The cleaner the better,” she said, and hated that her body reacted to him like someone had lit a match anyway.

He took a breath she recognized—the kind that meant he was about to do something impulsive and dress it in reason. “One more rule?” he asked. “Just us. If we tell no one, we don’t have to manage other people’s performances. We improvise together.”

“That’s already a rule,” she said, even though she liked hearing him say it. “We don’t tell. We just do it.”

“Shake on it?” he said, wry. “Since we’re cosplaying diplomats.”

They shook. His hand wrapped hers and didn’t squeeze; it just fit—like last summer’s unanswered question had been waiting patiently for new wording. For a second his thumb found the ridge of bone along the back of her hand and learned it again. Heat zipped up her arm and had the courtesy to leave her face out of it.

“First scene?” he asked, letting her go.

“Campfire,” she said, before the part of her that wanted to say never could wake. “We sit together. We look like we do on purpose. We don’t overdo it. We let people do the math.”

“Understated,” he said. “Classy. The Chanel of schemes.”

“You’re unbearable,” she said, and then, because she needed to put air between them before she did something stupid in a picturesque location, “I have to meet Addison. If I don’t arrive with an opinion about canoe distribution, she’ll stage a coup without me.”

He stepped aside, a courtesy with weight. “See you tonight.”

“See me,” she said, and the words made something inside her stumble and then keep moving.

Addison and Bree were exactly where they’d promised: lakeside, plotting the great canoe redistribution with the fervor of people who loved to fix problems that didn’t strictly belong to them. Nova slid into the space they made for her and nodded at all the right places. She did not mention that a different, much more urgent redistribution—of narrative, of attention—had already begun.

“Excellent,” Bree said, satisfied, when they’d sketched out a plan that involved two sign-up sheets and one passive-aggressive poster. “Revolution achieved. Now we loaf.”

“Loafing scheduled for post-dinner,” Addison said. “Campfire. We require your presence, Nova. For moral support and to mock the ghost story.”

“I would never mock the raccoon,” Nova said.

“Liar,” Bree said fondly.

They didn’t notice her glance toward the path. They didn’t ask why her smile felt too sharp at the edges. They didn’t say Victor’s name. The secret sat between her ribs with its knees drawn up, patient and buzzing and real.

By dinner, the rumor mill had ground itself up like summer always did. Victor existed in enough space that nothing he did was neutral. When Nova spotted him across the room, he was carrying a stack of plates for a table of younger campers, letting them choose the top ones as if that mattered, which meant of course it did. He moved like he understood where he was needed and didn’t announce it.

“Look at you not looking at him,” Addison murmured, piling noodles like a sinner. “Such restraint.”

“I’m a monk,” Nova said.

“Always thought so,” Bree said, reaching over to add peppers to Nova’s plate in a betrayal so profound it counted as love.

They ate in their usual window seats, the lake putting on a show no one could match. Conversation scattered like marbles. People drifted by and dropped opinions as if they were pebbles skipped: “Did you hear?” and “He’s actually back?” and “Do you think they’ll—” All of it atmospheric. None of it addressed to her. That, at least, was a mercy.

When the fire started, the camp came like it always did: tidal, eager, uncoordinated. Nova let Addison and Bree pull her toward the benches, aiming for their usual spot. She didn’t let herself scan the circle. She didn’t let herself plan. She had already made the plan. All that was left was to carry it out and attempt not to drown in it.

Victor arrived late, because of course he did. He took the outer edge of the crowd, listening without performing, and then circled in. When he reached their bench, he did not ask. There was a sliver of space left beside Nova—an error of geometry created by people who didn’t know what they were leaving—and he took it like it had always been his. Addison blinked once, then twice, then turned her face toward the guitar to control it. Bree made one small sound that could have been a snort and could have been a sneeze.

“Hey,” he said to the bench at large, inclusive and friendly. “Room?”

“No,” Bree said flatly, making no move to stop him.

“Rude,” Addison whispered, kicking Bree’s ankle with sisterly tenderness.

Nova stared at the fire and tried to pretend her body hadn’t just recalibrated to the new proximity. He smelled like the clean shirt he’d put on and like sun. Heat lapped her shins. Lantern light touched his jaw and decided to stay.

They didn’t talk at first. They let the circle do its work. When the ghost story started—a classic about the Rayburn Raccoon stealing someone’s lunch and their boyfriend in the same night—Victor let his knee rest near hers, a precise distance that felt deliberate because it was. She didn’t move away. When laughter shook the benches and people pressed shoulders simply because bodies do that in crowds, Nova let herself lean—just enough that anyone watching would do the math they came for. His hand lay open on the bench between them like a question asked very politely.

It would have been easy to lace their fingers together, too much and too soon. She let her pinkie find his instead—barely there. He didn’t flinch. He didn’t close his hand around hers. He matched her pressure and stayed.

Across the circle, Eli turned his head. If there was a flicker in his expression, it had the decency to be small. Lila said something. He answered. The world kept turning.

Addison tilted. Bree raised an eyebrow. Neither said a word. Nova’s heart competed with the drum someone had brought and was failing, and it made her want to laugh because she was losing to rhythm on both fronts.

Announcements came, inevitable: counselor sign-ups, reminders about not running with marshmallow skewers like lances, a threat from Rebecca to make anyone caught texting during ghost stories lead the morning warm-up dance. The fire ate another log. The sky deepened into its best blue. Victor’s thumb brushed once along the edge of the bench as if testing the grain, as if he needed his hand to be doing an innocent thing.

When the circle broke, it did so in clumps. Nova stood with her friends, doing the shuffle of people who wanted to go and also didn’t. Victor was there, then not, then there again, keeping an orbit without bumping into the moons. Bree looked between Nova and the path to the cabins with the face of a person assembling data.

“Don’t get eaten by the raccoon,” Addison said, pulling Nova into a hug that looked casual and felt like an oath. “Text me if you do, so I can tell your story correctly.”

“Put me in the epilogue,” Nova said into her hair.

“Always,” Addison said, and peeled away, dragging Bree with her by the sleeve. They headed uphill, talking over each other, performing normal in the way you do when you suspect the air is about to change and you want to leave before it does.

Victor drifted to Nova’s side like water finds the shape it wants. “Walk?” he asked, and the word felt different because of the weight they’d hung on it.

They took the lakeside path without discussing it, because of course they did. Under the trees, the night made small sounds like a living thing sleeping. He didn’t reach for her. She didn’t reach for him. It was somehow more intimate that way.

“You were perfect,” he said finally, soft. “The pinkie thing. It was… exactly enough.”

“Understatement sells,” she said, finding breath where she hadn’t left any.

“And leaves room for sequels,” he said, then winced. “Bad joke.”

“Average,” she said, which was kinder than nice.

They reached the fork. The lantern by the sign creaked as if to remind them it was part of their story now. Victor stopped and looked at her—not at her mouth, not at her hands, at her in the way that always felt like being cataloged and chosen.

“We’re fooling them,” he said, as if testing the sentence for both meanings.

“We have to,” she said.

“Right,” he said. “Only us.”

“Only us,” she said, and felt the secret settle deeper, warm and dangerous.

“Good night,” he said, voice gone careful. “I won’t walk you all the way. Your rule.”

“Thank you,” she said, and meant it—because he could have argued, could have pushed, could have made her be the one to walk away. He stepped back instead. She turned first. Self-control was heavy; she was getting better at carrying it.

She didn’t look back. Neither did he.

The next morning, they rehearsed normal like professionals.

Nova arrived at the lakeside table seven minutes early and pretended she was just efficient. Victor arrived exactly on time with two coffees, handing her the larger without ceremony. They talked about whether raccoons unionized. They let other people notice without making noticing easy. When Addison swooped in to steal a bite of Nova’s bagel, she clocked the second coffee, raised her eyebrows, and said nothing—weaponizing restraint in a way that meant she was saving it for later.

By midmorning, the camp photographer ambushed them by the canoe racks. “Local color!” she sang, waving her camera. “Give me something people will put on their bulletin boards.”

“No kisses,” Nova said instantly.

“Rude,” the photographer said. “I’m not a villain. Hands. Laughter. The lake. Boom.”

Victor slid his fingers through Nova’s like he’d been given permission and took it with gratitude instead of greed. She looked at him because not looking would have looked false; he was already looking at her. The shutter clicked. Later, when the photo went up on the newsletter and then the feed with a caption so sugary it could have iced a cake, they’d both pretend they weren’t staring at their phones. For now, Nova felt the impossible thing—the tiny slackening in her chest when his hand settled around hers and didn’t try to make it a bigger event.

“Thank you,” the photographer said, satisfied. “Rayburn’s favorite couple. Finally.”

Addison found Nova ten minutes later by the arts cabin and came in hot. “Explain.”

“Glitter inventory?” Nova said, holding up a jar as evidence of innocence.

“Cute,” Addison said. “Also, I’m thrilled for you. And I will not make it a Thing unless you want me to make it a Thing. But if you hurt each other, I am going to enlist a raccoon to eat your shoelaces.”

Nova kept her face steady. The secret pressed its forehead to her sternum. “Duly noted.”

Addison’s eyes softened. “You look happy.”

“I’m—” Nova started, and stopped. Honesty wasn’t always about telling the whole truth. “I’m okay.”

“Good,” Addison said, squeezing her arm. “Also, I’m going to cry at your wedding.”

“Addison.”

“Kidding. Mostly.” She flounced away, humming, already composing a new harmony circle agenda.

It was almost a relief when Victor dragged her into the scavenger hunt. They didn’t need to win; they needed to be seen enjoying the possibility of it. He did the ridiculous clues with earnest attention, which made people like him more, which made it easier for Nova to laugh when he discovered a rubber duck in the bell rope and held it up like a relic. At the dock, when the final clue had everyone sprinting and panting and blaming the map, he turned and offered his hand like a lifeline. She took it because of the game. She took it because of everything else.

They lost to a pack of nine-year-olds—a moral victory for the universe. They did, however, get folded into a dozen casual sentences that all ended with “finally,” which was both exhausting and exactly the point.

After lunch, the pier offered shade and an excuse to sit with their feet over the water. Victor flicked pebbles; Nova watched the circles the drops made. “Say it,” he said eventually, half-laughing. “The thing you’re chewing on with your molars.”

She huffed. “Thank you.”

“For what?”

“For being good at this without being awful,” she said. “For not making me a performance.”

He was quiet long enough that she glanced over to make sure she hadn’t offended him. He was looking at her, that careful focus again. “It’s not a performance to me,” he said. Then he ruined it—mercifully—by nudging her ankle with his toes until the water kissed her skin and she yelped.

“Gremlin,” she said.

“Icon,” he returned.

“Stop,” she said, laughing, and he did, immediately, obedient to a rule she hadn’t written down.

By dinner, even Rebecca had joined the side chorus. “You two are adorable,” she stage-whispered when they passed, and then, more quietly to Nova, “You look like a person in her own story.” Nova didn’t trust herself to answer that, so she winked and kept walking.

Eli approached the salad bar when she did. They stood with tongs between them as if in a very low-stakes duel. He smiled, gentle. “You look well.”

“You too,” she said, and meant it.

“I hope this is…” He gestured, vaguely. “…good.”

“It is,” she said, and the breath that followed went all the way in.

That night, they didn’t escalate. They didn’t need to. They sat close enough at the fire that anyone who wanted to assign them to each other felt vindicated. He toasted her marshmallow exactly to her favorite degree of gold and didn’t smirk when she fed him the first bite as a joke; he let the stickiness catch at the corner of his mouth and then wiped it with his thumb in a way that probably looked like a romance montage if you stood far enough back.

On the walk to the fork, he slowed, same place, same lantern creak. Habit already. “We’re still good?” he asked quietly, which meant tell me if the secret feels too heavy.

“We’re good,” she said, which meant don’t put it down yet.

He nodded. “Dock duty, second block tomorrow,” he said, neutral. “If you want the scenic route for our propaganda.”

She should have said she was busy. “I’ll see,” she said, and hoped the yes was audible in the spaces around the words.

“Night, Nova,” he said.

“Night,” she said, and this time she didn’t look at the windowsill when she came in. The bracelet sat in its square of lantern light, harmless as a coin. She left it there. Sleep came like a tide after a windless day—slow at first, then total. When morning invented itself again, the camp newsletter had already posted the photo the photographer had taken: Nova laughing toward Victor; Victor not looking at the camera at all. The caption said first-day smiles: rayburn romance edition 💫 and the comments were exactly as ridiculous as advertised.

Addison wordlessly slid her phone across the table at breakfast, the picture bright. “I hate you,” she said, eyes wet in the happy way.

“Rude,” Nova said, smiling into her cup.

“Bring tissues to the canoe coup,” Bree said. “For Addison’s weeping and the pepper shortage.”

Nova tucked her phone face down and let the photo live behind it. The secret sat where it had sat all day, warm and complicated. Only two people carried it. It felt both impossible and like the only way this could have ever worked.

When she looked up, Victor was on the dock, lanyard bright, hands competent. He glanced over once, as if checking the weather. She lifted her chin an inch, a semaphore only he would read.

Copy that, his mouth shaped.

Only us, hers said back.

The lake threw light at everything, unbothered. The day lifted its sleeves. They went to meet it.

Chapter Text

The photo hit the newsletter before breakfast ended: Nova turned half toward Victor, laughing; Victor not looking at the camera at all, like the joke lived in the angle of her mouth. The caption did the rest—first-week smiles: rayburn romance edition 💫—and from there the camp did what camps do best: it made a story out of two people breathing near each other.

They learned how to ride it.

Day one of the montage: lakeside coffees, a bagel split unevenly because Victor always handed her the bigger piece without noticing. Addison clocked the second cup and tilted her head, measuring; Bree said nothing and invented a new topic with aggressive efficiency. On the dock, a pack of nine-year-olds demanded a dragon-vs-canoe drawing; Victor crouched on the planks, serious as a surgeon, while Nova steadied the paper against the wind and pretended that her lungs weren’t paying attention to the way he breathed when he concentrated.

He glanced up once, as if checking the weather; she lifted her chin a fraction, a semaphore that meant: copy. He returned to the dragon with a satisfied noise that made two campers declare him “the best adult,” which was a low bar and still true.

Day two: the arts cabin turned them into a game. “Couple charades,” someone shouted, and thirty teenagers invented scenarios so wildly inaccurate Nova had to bite her knuckle to keep from laughing: dramatic proposals, outrageous jealousy, the infamous “two people sharing a sweater,” which ended in a fall and a loud complaint about knitwear. When it was their turn, Victor looked at her with mock gravity and then mimed rowing while she pantomimed bailing water with a frantic precision that brought the house down. Later, while untangling string lights for that night’s lantern walk, Nova asked, “What was that supposed to be?” and he said, “Metaphor,” and almost didn’t smile.

Day three: camp rowing relays. They weren’t on the same team—she was drafted last-minute by a group of juniors who shouted her name like a chant—and that should have made it easier. It didn’t. Every time her boat scraped water into muscle and speed, Victor’s voice found her anyway out of the tangle of cheers: not louder, not obvious, just tuned to the exact frequency she could hear and no one else would notice. She pretended not to look for him on the dock because pretending was the job, but when they won their heat by a single blade-length, she did look, and he was already clapping with that unguarded delight that belonged to a person cheering for something that felt like his, too.

“Careful,” Addison said from behind her as Nova gulped air and lake light in equal measure.

“With what?” Nova asked, wiping water from her cheek.

“Looking like you mean it,” Addison said, affectionate and brutal. “Also, you were amazing. The way you terrified physics.”

Nova bumped her shoulder. “You’re ridiculous.”

“I contain multitudes,” Addison declared, and went to hyper-organize the medal ceremony despite there being no medals.

Day four: the camp gossip engine had moved past whispering to comfortable acceptance. A counselor walked by their lakeside table and said, “You two are disgustingly cute,” in a tone that meant everybody’s problems were simpler if this stayed true. Eli’s polite nods shortened into small, non-intrusive smiles. Lila, to her credit, complimented Nova’s braid with the sincere envy of a person who actually wanted to know how it was done. The air around the whole thing lost some of its static. That should have made Nova’s pulse settle. It didn’t. Peace was a complicated ask when you were holding a secret that hummed in time with your heartbeat.

Through it all, she and Victor learned the choreography of pretending so well it scared her.

They discovered a public distance that read as intimacy: the arm’s-length lean on the bench that let her shoulder brush his every few breaths; the way he angled his body when they stood in line so anyone watching would think he’d made a protective circle around her; the light touches that counted as punctuation and not grammar—his palm at her elbow when a pack of campers sprinted past; her hand finding the back of his hoodie when they navigated a crowd, as if they had been doing this for years.

Addison began collecting evidence like a biologist. “Exhibit A,” she whispered during a camp-wide stretch, “he knows your exact coffee order.” “Exhibit B,” at lunch, “you didn’t notice you gave him your last chip.” “Exhibit C,” simultaneously, “you hate sharing chips.” Nova responded with the advanced art of not flinching. Bree, suspicious by vocation, lobbed no questions, just dry commentary to keep the pressure gauge from spiking. “If you two get engaged,” she murmured over bug spray, “please register for things that cannot be weaponized.”

At night, the lantern walk stitched the camp to itself in a glowing necklace. Nova and Victor fell into step without needing to agree on a pace. The path did its familiar descent and the lake wore the sky like it always had. He didn’t take her hand; she didn’t take his. Campers darted past in streaks of laughter. A counselor told a ghost story so committed to its bit it almost became a myth they’d inherit. When the group bottlenecked at the narrow bend, Victor’s palm slid, easy and thoughtless, to the small of her back to steady her. It lasted the length of a blink. It burned the rest of the way back.

“Understated,” he said later, under his breath, in victory or apology she wasn’t sure.

“You’re insufferable,” she said, and the words came out too soft to be bite. He heard the softness and looked away first.

Camp did not schedule an almost-kiss, but it tried.

The highlight came at week’s end: a counselor-cooked idea for “Unity Night,” an all-camp event that was half showcase, half game show, with the kind of challenges designed to make people look adorable or foolish and, ideally, both. Teams were pairs, and sign-ups happened so fast Nova didn’t have time to decline. Victor found her name on the chalkboard, found his under it—someone had made sure—and raised a brow that asked: ready?

“You talked to Rebecca,” she accused, quiet enough to get away with it.

“I’d never influence the democratic process,” he murmured, all innocence, then crooked a grin that confessed anyway.

The evening began with low-stakes chaos: a relay where one person wore an oversized life jacket while the other tried to fasten buckles blindfolded (Nova’s hands were unfairly good at knowing where things went; Victor declared it rigged). A “how well do you know your partner” trivia round where Nova guessed, correctly, that Victor’s least favorite camp chore was scraping burnt marshmallow off sticks (“tacky,” he shuddered, delighted to be dramatic). A talent swap in which Victor played a hesitant four chords on the guitar and Nova attempted—and failed, giggling—to spin a pencil over her knuckles the way he did when he thought.

Then came the trust course.

It was simple on paper: a series of small obstacles set up along the far field, lamps marking the path, the lake breeze cooling the open grass. One partner blindfolded, the other giving verbal directions. No touching, the counselor said. Use your words. It was a metaphor so big it might as well have been wearing a shirt with metaphor printed across the chest.

“Your call,” Victor said, the blindfold dangling from his finger. “Lead or follow.”

“Follow,” Nova said, before she thought about why. “You talk a lot.”

“Infrequently and with gravitas,” he said, but he tied the blindfold at her nape with careful fingers. The fabric slid over her eyes, cool, final. He checked it the way he checked knots at the dock—firm, not tight. The world condensed into sound and temperature: the small hiss of grass in a breeze; the distant clatter of someone knocking a cone; his breath, close enough to count, and then a step away as he took his position at her right shoulder.

“Okay,” he said, voice pitched for her alone. “Square your feet. Good. Three steps forward. Small ones. There’s a marker at your toes.”

She went, trusting his count. The blindfold made her head do strange math: her body wanted to move in short, cautious increments; his voice made her bolder. He narrated the ground like it was a friend they were meeting together. “There’s a ridge; lift your right foot higher. Beautiful. Pause. Now left, left, left—mm, that was my fault; two inches back. There you go.”

“Don’t apologize,” she said, and almost laughed at the uselessness of the command.

“Right,” he said, a little hoarse. “Okay. Turn, a quarter step. There’s a rope ahead at shin height. Think ballerina. Perfect. Nova, you’re ridiculously good at this.”

She wanted to say it was because he was good at this—at seeing what she couldn’t and making it feel like empowerment rather than control. She wanted to say a thousand things, terrible and true. She stepped over the rope: an exhale of relief from somewhere nearby; the course invited applause because that’s what summer nights do.

“Last stretch,” he said, steady. “It’s a zigzag. We’ll go slow. I’ll be right here.”

“I know,” she said, and the words slipped out raw enough that he breathed in, quick.

They made the turns—the kind of shallow angles that turn ankles if you overthink them—and then the field opened; she could feel it in the temperature, the way air moves different over empty. He let his voice drop on purpose, like a hand held out without touch. “This last one is a low beam. It wobbles. Put your right foot on it… good. Left foot to meet it. I’m—here. Yep. Little steps. You’ve got it.”

The wobble found her knee and tried to write her a letter. She felt her center tip and flung out a hand reflex, forgetting the rule. His palm found hers immediately, warm, certain, and the game’s no touching dissolved around them like paper in rain. She steadied. For one wild, selfish second she leaned into the contact, blindfold and all, and let the rest of the world be an audience they didn’t owe the truth.

“Nova,” he said, soft warning or prayer; she couldn’t tell.

“I’ve got it,” she whispered, meaning the beam, meaning her body, meaning something bigger and wildly irresponsible. She made the last three steps a performance of control and slid off onto grass. The applause belonged to everyone and to no one.

He untied the blindfold with careful fingers, lifting it so the world returned in increments: the shape of his face too close, the lamps smearing light on the field, a few friends whooping like goons. She blinked, eyes adjusting. He was looking at her with the kind of focus that made time misbehave.

“You’re up,” she said, to break the spell. “Don’t embarrass us.”

“Impossible,” he said, grinning like oxygen had come back.

His run was—of course—ridiculous, because Victor did not know how to half-commit. She guided him the way he’d guided her, crisp and clean, loving the way his shoulders relaxed when he trusted what she told him to do. At the rope she said, “Ballerina,” and he snorted midair and nearly fell. At the beam, he wobbled in exaggerated fashion until she said, “Show-off,” and he steadied to spite her.

They finished with the bell—a silly, tinny ring that sent laughter through the line—and slapped palms like kids who’d gotten away with something. Addison and Bree were at the edge of the crowd, clapping, wearing matching looks of you two are terrible and we love you for it. Eli’s smile, when she caught it, was small and genuine. Lila whooped and gave Nova a thumbs-up so sincere it undid something tight.

“Picture!” Rebecca yelled, because of course. Couples, teams, pairs, pick your person—someone had a Polaroid and the kind of enthusiasm that turns strangers into family for three seconds. Victor’s arm came around Nova’s shoulders like a form fitted with practice. It was warm. It was too much. She leaned into it anyway because that was the job and maybe something else, and the camera burned the moment to paper while she was still deciding which it was.

They didn’t kiss. It would have been easy—the sort of easy that ruins you. They didn’t need to. The air around them had been kissed already: by laughter, by applause, by the permission of night to believe in good stories. They stood with their shoulders pressed, smiling like it was a choice and not a reflex, and kept their first real kiss in a pocket they pretended not to know they had.

Later, when the field had emptied and the Polaroids were waved dry, Nova found their photo clipped to a string by the arts cabin, fluttering with others in the lake breeze. In it, she was mid-laugh and he was mid-look, and together they looked like exactly what everyone wanted them to be: easy, bright, inevitable.

“Understated,” he said behind her, because he couldn’t help narrating.

“Don’t start,” she said, not turning.

He stepped up beside her, not touching. “We were good,” he admitted, quieter. “Maybe too good.”

“Don’t get cocky,” she said. “We have at least three more days of pretending we enjoy each other.”

“At least,” he echoed, an echo that felt like a dare.

They walked the path back with the crowd, bodies in motion around them, the lanterns doing their small saint work of making darkness sweet. At the fork he slowed as always. The lantern creaked like it had been written into their script. He didn’t reach for her. She didn’t reach for him. That was the new intimacy—the one that said I could and I won’t because we agreed not to and because wanting isn’t permission. His mouth tipped as if he’d nearly said something reckless and had caught it by the tail.

“Night, Nova,” he said, careful.

“Night,” she said, and meant: not yet.

In the cabin, Addison was already horizontal, texting furiously; Bree was sorting Polaroids with the disdain of a curator who resented loving art. “This one,” Bree said, flicking a photo at Nova’s bunk. “You look almost human.”

Nova caught it. In this one, she and Victor were slightly out of focus, motion blurring into softness. The world behind them was all lamps and mouths open in laughter. It looked like joy trying to outrun the shutter.

Addison peeked over her phone with a grin that was mostly dimples. “I’m happy for you,” she said, plain. “I know I’m not supposed to say it because it will make you feral, but I am. And if you both hurt each other, I will stage an intervention with raccoons.”

“Very on brand,” Nova said, setting the photo on her shelf. The bracelet on the windowsill lay quiet, a coin the night didn’t spend. She did not pick it up.

When lights went out, the secret lay down in her chest and stretched like a cat. Nova stared at the shadowy ceiling and listened to wind moving in the leaves, to the far-off clatter of someone cleaning up the field, to the echo of his voice saying square your feet as if it were advice for the heart and not the body. She told herself the day had been a performance that had gone well. She told herself the power in it belonged to her because she had made the rules and was keeping them.

She did not say out loud the thing that kept skimming the surface of her thoughts like a clever fish: this feels exactly like the truth would feel if I let it.

She slept anyway, eventually. She had to. In the morning there would be whistles and coffee and unglamorous chores and a newsletter half the camp would read aloud. In the corner of that morning, there would also be the two of them, still the only ones who knew the game wasn’t real and already a little unsure that it wasn’t.

Chapter Text

The morning felt like a room she could arrange. Nova woke to breezes nosing the cracked window and the quiet industry of a camp not yet fully awake: someone rolling a cart, a distant shower turning on, a zipper arguing with itself. The Polaroid from Unity Night lay on her shelf, mid-laugh, mid-look, a captured accident. The bracelet on the sill did its coin impression, innocent until light hit it.

She dressed without thinking, which was getting dangerous—her hands knew where the softest t-shirt was, where sunscreen lived. She braided her hair with muscle memory and then, because control was a ritual, unbraided and redid it tighter. When she found her notebook at the bottom of her duffel, she slid it free and held it like a relic. The cover was scuffed where last summer’s weather had rubbed against it; the corners still knew how to find her palms.

Addison mumbled something into her pillow about empires and socks. Bree, already awake and pretending she wasn’t, clinked bug spray on the dresser like a bartender. Nova eased the notebook open on her bunk, wrote the date in the corner as if that made the page behave, and titled the blank with a neat, ruthless hand:

Terms & Conditions.

Ink felt heavier than it should.

She stared at the first line long enough to hear her own pulse in her ears, and then, because hesitation only let the world edit without you, she started.

1. No real kissing.
   
   
2. No sleeping over.
   
   
3. No touching unless necessary to sell it (define “necessary” later).
   
   
4. No… she paused, swallowed …falling.
   
   
5. End of Session One: sunset clause. No post-camp bleed.
   
   

She sat back. It looked like a spell that would hold the shape of her life if she repeated it daily. She could almost believe in it: if she could keep rules, she could keep her center. A laugh outside, bright and careless, made the ink feel theatrical.

“Breakfast?” Bree asked, hovering by the door, pretending disinterest in a way that meant she’d counted down.

“Go ahead,” Nova said. “I’ll meet you. I have to—” She tapped the notebook. “—make a list.”

“Of course you do,” Bree said, not unkind, and left with a soft thunk of the door.

Nova looked at her own handwriting until the letters steadied. Then she shut the notebook and slid it into her backpack. There: a small wall raised. Not fortification, not yet. But something to lean on when the ground sloped.

The lake was glassy at eight; dew pearl-beaded the dock ropes. Victor was easy to find if you didn’t look directly at him—the way some stars are. He was at the far end of the dock with a coil of rope over his shoulder and a junior camper lecturing him about knots. He listened like it was a TED Talk. When he saw her, he lifted the coil by reflex and made an apologetic face to the kid, who forgave him because adults who apologized were exotic.

“Morning,” he said when she reached him, quiet in the way the lake was.

“Morning,” she returned, letting the word balance on her tongue. She could do this. She had written rules. That meant the weather in her chest was about to improve.

He nodded toward the bag slung across her body. “That the infamous notebook?”

She exhaled through a smile. “You say that like I’m an urban legend.”

“You are,” he said, as if that were a compliment. “What’s today’s spell?”

She tapped the cover. “A treaty.”

“Between who?”

“Me,” she said, “and me.”

He considered that and set the coil down. His mouth did the tilt that meant he was playing it light on purpose. “Do I get a copy?”

“You get a summary,” she said, because reading the actual words out loud would make them breakable. “We already agreed on most of it. I wrote it down so my hands remember.”

He held up both palms as if in surrender. “I’m an excellent respecter of treaties.”

“Good,” she said, and tried not to catalog how his shoulders looked under the thin cotton of his shirt. “Because today is going to test every one of them.”

He glanced at the clipboard tucked under the life ring. “Because of the camp-wide photo scavenger hunt? Or because of the fact that Rebecca told me, point-blank, that she plans to ‘get her shot’ of ‘summer’s favorite narrative’ before lunch?”

“Both,” Nova said, and then, because pretending you’re not bracing does not make you less likely to fall, “mostly the second.”

He winced like a performer scheduled to be on stage while allergic to fog machines. “We can vanish.”

“We can look like we enjoy vanishing together,” she corrected. “That’s what we’re selling, right? Ease.”

His mouth softened. “We don’t have to sell anything that hurts.”

“I know,” she said. She did, theoretically. The knowledge felt like a flashlight at the edge of a forest—technical and insufficient.

The first test arrived in a ponytail with a camera. “You two,” the camp photographer sang from the shore, pushing her sunglasses up. “Do you love me?”

“Dangerous question,” Victor said.

“Answer is yes,” Nova said. “What do you need?”

“Ten minutes,” the photographer said. “Up by the arts cabin. Natural light. ‘Candid’ couple shots. Laugh at nothing. Resist the urge to pose like prom.”

“Prom,” Victor murmured. “A cursed word.”

Nova’s hand tightened on her bag strap. He saw it. “We’ll control it,” he added, quieter, for her and not the camera. “Our terms.”

The path up to the arts cabin had baked into the earth every summer since the first one. The cabin itself was a cheerful mess of drying paint cups, string tangles, and paper sculptures that looked like earnest aliens. The photographer pointed them at the patch of shade under the eaves and started adjusting settings, the camera clicking like a clock.

“Okay,” she said. “Give me… something that looks like a secret.”

Nova’s spine stiffened. Victor’s hand hovered near her elbow and didn’t land. She found a compromise: she tilted her shoulder to his and leaned in the distance of a breath, not a decision. He angled toward her like he’d been built to fit the slope she made.

“Laugh,” the photographer ordered, delighted tyrant. “Make it real.”

“This is extortion,” Nova said.

“Correct,” the photographer said. “One, two—”

Victor whispered without moving his mouth, “Your fly is down.”

She snorted at sheer audacity—looked down by reflex—saw everything in order—looked up to glare—and laughing had happened to her face without permission.

Click.

“Beautiful,” the photographer crowed. “Again.”

He didn’t push. He didn’t whisper anything else. He just stood close enough that their bodies told the same weather story. Nova let her mouth soften on purpose, then straightened and stepped back half an inch to reclaim the distance.

“Perfect, perfect,” the photographer sang, and then, apparently satisfied with her harvest, waved them away with a benevolent flick. “Don’t do anything interesting until I find you again.”

“Impossible,” Victor said lightly, but when they reached the stairs he didn’t follow the crowd downhill. He went sideways, along the art room windows, where shelves lined the wall with the charming menace of precarious things.

Inside, half-finished projects waited for their owners: bead trays, papier-mâché beasts, sketches pinned with the kind of magnets that never obey. At the far table by the window, a stack of drawing pads slumped like exhausted birds. Nova almost kept walking. Curiosity, rude and old, made her glance.

The top pad had his name on the cardboard backing, written in the tidy print he pretended not to have. A graphite smudge smudged the edge where a hand had rested too long. The elastic band across it had been looped twice; an invitation no one had made. She shouldn’t have. She counted three slow breaths to convince herself of that moral fact.

He was already beside her, as if the room had tilted him that way. He watched her not reach.

“May I?” she asked, voice even.

He hesitated just enough for honesty and then nodded. “Some of it’s… rough.”

She slipped the elastic, lifted the cover.

The first pages were warmups: lines learning how to be outlines; small studies of hands, of rope, of a lantern hook. The next were camp scenes captured at a distance—a jumble of kids with their tongues out in concentration; a counselor holding a trumpet like a third arm; the lake in five quick strokes that still managed to be the lake. She turned another page and felt something unclench in her sternum and then tense tighter.

Her. Not grand. Not posed. Not flattered. Her head tipped, jaw softening in a way she recognized when she forgot to arrange it. Her braid over one shoulder. The small, familiar repentant tuck of her bottom lip between her teeth when she was thinking. Laughter not performative so much as private—like someone had told a joke that lived under the skin. The sketch was from last summer. She knew because she was wearing the bracelet; the telltale shine was caught in graphite like a trapped light.

She had accidentally braced her fingers on the page. She lifted them as if the paper might bruise. “You drew this last year,” she said, unnecessarily.

He didn’t pretend otherwise. “Yes.”

“In the moment?” The idea felt too intimate: him watching her and turning her into marks as it happened.

“Later,” he said. “From memory.”

Memory. The word turned different textures in her mouth. “You could have told me you kept drawing me after—”

He winced. “I… didn’t know if it would make it worse.”

She looked at the bracelet on paper and remembered the winter version, cool metal, polite boy. She looked at the line of her mouth and remembered the way it hurt not to put a name to what last summer had been. She kept her face still. “Did it?”

“Sometimes,” he admitted. “Sometimes it made it not-worse.”

She turned one more page. A newer sketch. Her again, different. From this week—the tilt of her head toward him in the newsletter photo, caught from the side so you could see she was looking at him, not the camera. The bracelet absent, a pale mark left where it would have been if she still wore it. The caption at the bottom in tiny print, like he’d tried to hide it from himself: Understated. She felt pried open in a way that wasn’t violation—like a window someone had forgotten they’d left cracked.

“Victor,” she said carefully. The urge to lash out at the tenderness—that old reflex—prickled along her skin. “This… crosses some kind of line.”

“I know,” he said, and the admission landed clean. “I almost didn’t bring it back this year.”

“Why did you?”

He exhaled. “Because the only way I know how to not put pressure on a thing is to paint around it until it tells me where it is.”

She set the pad down as if it could shatter. The room felt too bright. “You don’t get to keep me like this,” she said, and even as she said it she knew she was punishing him for doing the one honest thing he had left. “Not without asking.”

He flinched and then stood up straight inside his own guilt. “You’re right,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

The apology knocked air out of her for reasons that had nothing to do with the drawing. She’d braced for a defense, a joke, a dodge. He’d offered none. Guilt, properly handled, made a gentler space. The part of her that made rules recognized that.

“I don’t hate it,” she said, softer than she meant.

His mouth did the small, disbelieving line it did when he wanted to be happy and didn’t trust the room. “That’s worse,” he said. “In some ways.”

She closed the pad and looped the elastic again with the kind of care you use for bandages. The moment had weight. She didn’t know where to put it yet.

They didn’t talk much on the walk back. The day had warmed; the lake pulled sunlight onto its surface like a blanket. A dragonfly dragged its ridiculous body past and, in the way of such creatures, chose Victor’s shoulder for a rest. He didn’t shake it off. He tilted his head to admire it and then smiled crookedly when it flew.

“Lunch,” he said later, near the dining hall doors, as if the word were neutral. “We can avoid the windows if you want.”

“Windows line is shorter,” she said, defaulting to logistics because the alternative was thinking about graphite and the caption he’d written when he thought no one would see.

They took the windows. Addison was in full host mode, introducing a table of new campers to the concept of “structured chaos.” Bree waved a fork without moving her expression. “Menu: peppers and lies,” she said. “We’re out of both.”

“Blessings,” Nova replied, grateful for the distraction and the small domesticity of friends who didn’t know they were being fooled. Victor took a seat, casual, like a person who belonged. He asked one of the juniors about their cabin skit and listened to the entire, convoluted pitch with the gravity of a committee.

It should have made everything easier, as if ease could be imported. Instead Nova felt the rules she’d written that morning lift, hover, consider.

Midway through lunch, Eli drifted toward the buffet. They arrived at the tongs at the same time again, as if fate was uncreative. He looked up and gave her that small, nonintrusive smile that had stopped being a knife.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” she returned.

He gestured vaguely with a pepper strip. “You look—”

“Don’t say ‘happy,’” she said, a reflex that made them both laugh.

“I was going to say ‘good,’” he said. “But I’ll take your edit.”

She stared at the red wedge on his plate. “You were always kind,” she said, and it was both acknowledgment and absolution. “Even when it made me want to throw something.”

He huffed. “I appreciate this opportunity to apologize for being nice.” He glanced at the windows, where Victor was making two eight-year-olds shriek with a magic trick involving a quarter and his sleeve. “I hope it’s… what you want.”

“I don’t know what I want,” she said, and the honesty came out untidier than she’d planned. “But I know this feels like… breathing.”

“That’s something,” he said, and for the second time in two days she had the peculiar pleasure of meaning something to him without owing him anything.

Afternoon activity was the photo scavenger hunt, which meant the camp turned into a swarm of buzzing pairs hunting for items like “a pinecone shaped like a heart” and “a counselor pretending to be a statue.” Victor refused to be a statue—“I can’t hold still that long without attracting raccoons”—so Nova found a pinecone and held it out to his ear like a telephone while he pretended to receive a business call. Someone’s phone captured it. Somewhere else, the narrative pelted forward.

They made a circuit of the campus, alert to cameras, alert to themselves. In the canoe shed, where the light went green through weathered slats, he adjusted the strap of her bag because it had twisted and looked at his own hand like it had moved without permission. She stepped back and said “thanks” too brightly. Rules. She had rules. The trouble with lines is that bodies love to find them.

By late afternoon the day had burned off its extra energy. The lake blew a small wind over the dock; the whistle declared the last block over with a sound like resignation. Nova followed Victor to the equipment shed under the half-excuse of needing to return a life vest and the full excuse of wanting the strange gentleness of a room where things smelled like damp rope and wood and a very specific kind of order.

It was cooler in there. Dust floated like patient snow. Victor set the vest on a hook and then stayed standing, like a thought put on pause. He looked at her and then at the rafter and then at her again, like honesty kept showing him a door and he was deciding whether to put his hand on it.

“You were right,” he said finally. The words had the feel of something carried a while. “About the sketch. About asking.”

Her chest was still too tight. “But?”

“No ‘but,’” he said with a small, nervous laugh. “Just ‘and.’ And I… I wanted to make you visible to myself again. The version of you that wasn’t… last winter. The one who laughs without checking who’s listening. The one who—” He stopped, embarrassed by the intensity of his own sentence. “I’m not entitled to you. The drawings were me trying to be less of a coward about that.”

Nova swallowed. The room felt like it had been cut from noise. He had a way of saying something raw and then leaving it on the table for her to accept or refuse without flinching. It made her want to be careful. It made her want to throw her rules into the lake and dive after them.

“I don’t hate it,” she said again, and this time she knew it was the worst possible answer, because it added permission to apology and the combination was combustible. “I hate that I don’t hate it.”

He breathed like he’d been underwater. “I can live with that.”

“We said no mixed signals,” she reminded both of them, hoarse.

“I know,” he said. “So: signal. I care about you. It’s not part of the act. I will keep all your rules to the letter.”

The sentence landed with the force of a confession and the restraint of a bow. Something in her lit and tried to run; she put a hand out to keep it from bolting and found, unhelpfully, his shoulder. Warmth came through cotton like information. She pulled back as if she’d touched a hot pan.

“Careful,” he said softly. He didn’t step into her. He didn’t make it worse. “We don’t owe this to anyone. Not the camp. Not the lake. Not whatever last summer thinks it is.”

“What if I owe it to myself,” she said. She hadn’t meant to say that out loud. “To not be stupid.”

He smiled without joy. “Then we keep the treaty.”

He took a half-step back, as if giving the room its shape again. He reached for the light cord and didn’t pull it. “Tonight,” he said, voice steady by choice, “the photographer’s posting the gallery.”

“I know,” she said.

“They’ll say things,” he added, half-amused and half-braced. “People always do when they think they know what they’re looking at.”

“They don’t,” she said, and couldn’t keep the edge out of it. “That’s the point.”

He tucked his hands into his pockets like a person who had to keep them somewhere safe. “Can I—” He stopped, chose again. “Do you want me to walk you to the fork?”

She wanted him to do a hundred other things. She nodded. “Yes.”

They weren’t good at silence on that path; they were excellent at it. The lake threw silver at their feet. The lantern above the sign was not yet on, but it might as well have been. Halfway there, she felt the resistance of the morning’s list soften in her bag like paper finding humidity.

At the fork he stopped where he always did. They stood in a geometry their bodies had learned too quickly: not touching, not running away. He looked at her with an apology he had already said and a promise he hadn’t dared to, and she felt, with simple clarity, the exact place the treaty ended and the unspeakable began.

“I found the page,” she said, before she could learn to be cowardly. “The one from last year. With the bracelet.”

He didn’t fake surprise. “I know.”

“I think I wore that thing because it was easy,” she admitted. “Because it looked like something you could point to and say ‘this.’”

“And us?”

She swallowed. She had spent all day writing rules to keep from saying the simplest truth. “You’re not easy.”

He laughed, quiet and wrecked. “No.”

“The page from this week,” she said. “You wrote ‘Understated.’”

He flushed like he’d forgotten the caption existed and was ashamed to remember. “I—yeah. It’s dumb. I write stupid notes to myself so I don’t overwork the lines.”

“It’s not dumb,” she said. “It’s insulting, but not dumb.”

“What would you have called it?” he asked, very gently.

She looked at him long enough to learn the shape of her answer. “Obvious.”

The word made him close his eyes for a beat and open them again. The breath he let out found her skin like warm air finds a window. “Nova,” he said, and she heard her name like a horizon—far and near at once.

“Don’t,” she said, shaking her head, because the part of her that wanted to be brave had not yet written its own contracts. “Not yet.”

He nodded, obedient to rules she hadn’t dared write. “Okay.”

They stood without moving until the lantern ticked on above them and made a small halo on the dirt that felt like an altar. The treaty sat between them, stubborn and holy.

“Good night,” he said first.

“Good night,” she said, and turned toward her slope of cabins before the word could melt into anything truer.

Inside, Addison and Bree were mid-argument about whether the newsletter’s new font counted as a cry for help. Nova brushed by them with a smile that passed every test. She put her notebook on the shelf and opened it to the page she’d written that morning. The ink had dried. The letters hadn’t changed. She added a sixth line without letting herself think about it.

6. When the performance hurts more than the truth would, stop performing.
   
   

She capped the pen. The Polaroid above the notebook fluttered in the warm breeze as if laughing again. On the sill, the bracelet didn’t look like anything. She turned off the lamp and let the dark hold her like a teacher who expected her to show her work.

On her phone, face down on the bunk, a notification vibrated once, then again. The gallery had gone up. The camp would be reading the story, writing endings in the comments, guessing what had never been theirs to guess. Nova didn’t flip it over. Instead she lay on her back and rehearsed the new line until it settled into her mouth like a promise: When the performance hurts more than the truth would, stop performing.

Somewhere, in the shed that smelled like rope and apology, graphite waited under an elastic band. Somewhere, at the lake’s lip, a lantern remembered how to come on when asked. Somewhere, in the space just ahead of her, a door kept its patient hand on the latch.

She slept like a person who had made a rule she might actually keep.

Chapter Text

By morning the gallery had colonized every phone in camp. Screens flashed with their faces like migratory birds: Nova mid-laugh; Victor already looking at her; the Unity Night Polaroid scanned and posted, its blur upgraded into myth. The caption game escalated. People wrote essays in the comments as if this were a seminar on Love: Field Applications.

Nova skimmed three and put her phone face-down like it was a hot pan. Rule Six sat in her notebook, drying into something that looked like a vow: When the performance hurts more than the truth would, stop performing.

She meant it. Mostly.

The day started easy on purpose. Lakeside coffee; Victor handing her the bigger half of the bagel without thinking; sun burnishing the dock planks until they smelled like warm rope and cleaner. Camp had that post-gallery glow—everyone was kinder, as if proximity to a story made them careful with one another.

“Big day for raccoon PR,” Victor said, nodding at a hand-lettered sign: UNION MEETING (BRING LIP BALM). Bree’s work.

Nova laughed despite herself. Ease. She could do ease. “You’re on dock?” she asked.

“Until lunch,” he said. “Then arts—to avoid further exploitation by the paparazzi.”

“Brave,” she said.

He tipped a salute with his lanyard and went to wrangle life vests with the focus of a saint. She watched his hands work the buckles, efficient and sure. It was an unremarkable thing to admire. She told herself that and didn’t believe it.

The first stumble arrived disguised as a compliment. During canoe lessons, a counselor named Maya—new this summer, sharp and easy—sidled up to Nova with a grin like a slant of sun. “I love your photos,” she said. “You two look… real. In the good way.”

“Thanks,” Nova said, polite. She adjusted a junior’s grip on a paddle, demonstrated the angle like it was an equation.

Maya pushed her sunglasses up. “Off-hours, you should come by the staff fire pit,” she added. “We do bad karaoke and worse s’mores. Bring Victor.”

There was nothing loaded in it. Still, Nova’s body reacted like she’d been dared. “Maybe,” she said. “If we survive water safety.”

Maya’s gaze flicked toward the dock. “He’s sweet with the little ones,” she said, admiration benign and sincere. “The calm kind. Rare.”

“Yes,” Nova said, a little too fast. “He is.”

Maya’s smile tipped toward mischief. “Forgive me for saying, but… you’re lucky.”

Lucky. It should have slid off. Instead it landed and stayed. When Maya headed for the kayaks, Nova found herself staring at the lake as if it could answer something she wasn’t ready to ask. Lucky. Because she had Victor? Because he had her? Because the whole camp had gotten what they wanted, a story behaving as designed? The word lodged like a seed in a tooth.

They met at lunch by the windows without arranging it—habit taking their feet there before intention did. Addison launched a tirade about someone clandestinely swapping the good pens for cursed ones. Bree handed out carrots like citations.

“Fame looks good on you,” Addison said to Nova, then narrowed her eyes. “What’s wrong with your face.”

“Nothing,” Nova said, too evenly.

“Your face is doing that thing,” Bree added. “Like you’re reading a sorrowful poem only you can see.”

“Eat,” Nova told them, and ate, and couldn’t taste anything for exactly eleven bites.

Across the room, Maya bumped Victor’s shoulder with the easy touch of a colleague. He laughed—no harm in it; it didn’t sound like last summer. He said something; Maya threw her head back. A weird, narrow heat flicked along Nova’s ribs, part shock, part recognition: jealousy was an ungenerous emotion and also a fast one. It ran ahead of dignity and planted a flag.

Victor looked over then, as if his attention had a homing device. He read her too quickly. The corners of his mouth softened, apology before guilt. He excused himself from Maya with a polite nod and crossed toward the windows.

“Don’t sprint,” Bree muttered, eyes on her tray.

He didn’t. He just arrived and let his hand rest on the back of Nova’s chair, casual geometry. “We’re out of decent forks,” he said to no one, which somehow meant I saw you.

“Tragedy,” Nova said, and the deadpan came out sharper than she meant. Because she was angry? At whom? At herself, for letting a stranger’s touch make all her rules rattle.

Addison’s gaze ping-ponged. “Am I supposed to be narrating this for the blind?” she whispered to Bree. “Because it’s spicy.”

“Shh,” Bree said, unshushed. “We’re studying anthropology.”

“Of two idiots,” Addison said.

Nova stared at her lemonade like it was an oracle. Jealousy wasn’t an argument she could defend. It also wasn’t a lie. The steady ground of their act had gotten an angle, and she didn’t like heights.

“Arts block,” Victor said, to her shoulder blade. “Want to… swing by?”

“Schedule,” she said. “I’m on archery.”

“Right,” he said. He squeezed the chair once, a pressure so faint it might have been invented, and left. He was good at leaving at the exact moment that preserved dignity. It made her want to call him back and accuse him of something she couldn’t name.

Archery punished distraction. Nova appreciated that. She lined teenagers behind a chalk line and talked breath and anchors and letting the bow do the work. Wind shuffled the trees. The targets did their nonplussed stares. When one arrow skittered off the hay bale and into the grass like a fleeing thought, Nova jogged to retrieve it and forced herself not to glance toward the arts cabin.

Later she did glance. She always would have. Through the open door, she saw children bent over paper like monks; shelves of disaster and triumph sharing space; Victor at the back table, adjusting an easel for a camper whose canvas kept tilting. He had rolled his sleeves, and the tendons at his wrist moved when he tightened the knob. Maya walked by, tapping his shoulder to get his attention and flashing him a smile before pointing at a catastrophic paint spill. He went. Of course he did.

A younger version of Nova would’ve found a way to be superior about it. The present version admitted, silently, that she wanted something uncomplicated and therefore impossible. Not just the act. Not just its power. The stupid, ordinary fact of someone choosing her not because the room had already decided she was half of a picture they liked, but because their body took its next step and found her there again and again and again.

She closed the archery shed carefully, like it contained a sleeping dog.

By the time afternoon scrolled into evening, the rumor engine had upgraded into a full carnival ride. Someone had made a meme of their Polaroid with a caption that said understated in bold italics and then added LOL below it, which would have been funny if she hadn’t seen that word on the bottom of his sketch. Her world kept colliding with their world, and the overlap made her skin buzz.

Unity Night had been play. Tonight was Campfire Games: fewer metaphors, more chaos. The “Couples’ Lightning Round” arrived dressed as a joke: ten pairs pulled from the crowd—Nova and Victor included by default; the host’s pleasure too obvious—given speed tasks under the kind of lights that made everyone look impossibly young.

“Task one,” Rebecca intoned into a megaphone she did not need, “recreate your first handshake. Improvised, of course. Three… two…”

“You can opt out,” Victor murmured.

Nova stuck her hand out. “Diplomacy,” she said.

He took it. His thumb found her knuckle in the same thoughtless line as the first day by the birches. “Compromise,” he returned.

It worked; the crowd hooted like seals. Nova released him the instant after appropriate and kept her face identical to the one she had in the gallery shots: unbothered, amused.

“Task two,” Rebecca boomed, “finish each other’s sentence! Prompt: ‘I knew it was real when…’ Three, two—”

Nova’s mouth got there before her caution did. “—he handed me the bigger half of the bagel without noticing.”

“—she laughed at a joke that wasn’t a joke,” Victor said at the same time, and the way they overlapped made something collective in the circle ohhh like a wave. He looked at her, startled at his own mouth.

Nova’s chest did a devastating, stupid thing—opened. She closed it again like a fist.

“Task three,” someone yelled from the peanut gallery, ignoring the host entirely, “kiss!”

The crowd, being a crowd, took the invitation and made a chant out of it. Nova felt heat climb the back of her neck, not flirtatious—cornered. The good mood flipped like a coin. And there it was: the line where their act ended and the hunger of a room began.

Victor’s posture changed half a degree. Not defensive—protective. He lifted his palms toward the circle and made his face charming enough to sell a small rebellion. “Guys,” he said, easy, “save a little for the finale.”

Laughter, light. The chant thinned.

He turned to Nova, lower, for her alone. “We don’t have to—”

“Of course we don’t,” she said, with a smile that read as playful and hid the flare of gratitude under it. No mixed signals, she thought. No kissing. The treaty had scaffolding for this exact moment. She could climb down.

“Task three,” Rebecca rescued, bless her glitter, “three-legged race to the pine. No kissing required. If you trip, you have to recite a compliment about your partner before you can stand.”

“Cruel,” Victor said, already crouching for the band.

Nova knelt. His hand brushed her calf as they fastened themselves together; heat arrowed up her leg like a spark running a wire. She stood too fast. He steadied her with a palm at her hip and removed it instantly. The crowd didn’t see; the crowd never sees the piece that matters. The race started. They ran. They didn’t trip.

At the pine, breathless and tangled, they laughed into each other’s shoulders because their lungs insisted on borrowing space. It read perfectly. It was also the first moment all day that didn’t feel like pretending. That terrified her.

Back at the benches, Addison had gone shiny-eyed in a way that suggested Future Scrapbook. Bree handed Nova a water with exaggerated boredom. “Hydrate,” she said. “Your performance art is making me thirsty.”

“It’s not—” Nova began, and then shut her mouth because arguing would make her a liar twice.

The fire slid toward its last logs. People drifted to the lake, the path, the shadows. The chant did not return. Relief did, and under it something more complex, a braid of longing and warning. Victor kept a gentle orbit, letting the crowd cut him off and then rethreading the circle, always coming back without announcing that he was. When the moment came to stand and go, their bodies knew it, the way people who have danced find the same beat.

They took the lakeside path without asking. The night had cooled enough to make the skin along her neck aware of itself. Crickets performed their supervise-your-heartbeat set. The lantern at the fork had not come on yet; they stood in the blue-before-glow that felt like holding breath.

She had planned to say something. Not everything—just a piece. I don’t like crowds owning us. Or: It felt like a line, the kiss thing. Or, the dangerous, honest: I was jealous and it made me feel ridiculous and real and I’m mad at both those things. Any of those would have qualified as not performing.

He looked at her with that gentleness he used when he knew he might be the reason she couldn’t breathe right. “You okay?” he asked, as if the entire day lived inside the question and would accept whatever answer she handed it.

The word rose to her mouth and broke apart. Yes. No. I don’t know. She found instead the miserable compromise, the one that touches truth and then backs off. “Long day.”

“Yeah,” he said. He gave her half a second to redirect. When she didn’t, he offered the easy out. “We were funny, though.”

“We were… something,” she said, aiming for wry and landing on tired.

His jaw shifted. He tilted his head like he could see behind her words if he angled correctly. “If we need to cut back, we cut back. Photos. The games. Whatever turns you into a headline instead of a person.”

She thought of Rule Six like a lever. The hard part wasn’t pulling it; it was admitting her fingers were already wrapped around it. She could name the hurt—jealousy, public want, the way other people’s joy at their story made her feel used even as it warmed her. She could stop the act and deal with the truth searing everything it touched. She could.

“Not tonight,” she said. It came out almost kind. “I don’t have the… language yet.”

He nodded. He didn’t push the door she’d hesitated in. “Okay,” he said. “Then I’ll walk you—”

“No,” she said, then softened it. “I mean… I know the way.”

A beat. The old almost-smile, except it wasn’t ironic tonight; it was careful. “Right.”

He put his hands in his pockets because he needed to do something with them. She tucked hers into the kangaroo pouch of her sweatshirt and felt the drag of the notebook against her ribs, heavy and patient.

“Good night,” she said, already stepping back, because if she stayed one second longer she would do something irrevocable—say the jealous thing; say the obvious thing; break her own rule in the middle of a path that felt holy.

“Good night,” he said, a little rough, and stayed where he was.

Nova turned and went up the slope alone. The camp had gone to murmurs; the cabins wore their tired light. In the window of hers, the small lantern they kept on the shelf threw a circle on the sill where the bracelet rested. It looked like a coin going warm in a palm. She wanted to throw it into the lake and watch the ripple eat the moon.

Inside, Addison looked up, read her face like a tutor who knew when not to assign homework, and went back to her phone. Bree handed Nova a folded t-shirt for no reason except that a handoff sometimes helps. They said nothing useful, which was the most useful thing.

Nova sat on her bunk, pulled the notebook into her lap, and traced the sixth line with her finger as if she could learn its shape by touch. When the performance hurts more than the truth would, stop performing. The words did not rearrange themselves into courage.

Outside, footsteps paused at the bottom of the cabin steps and didn’t climb. Victor’s shape stayed on the path long enough for her to feel it and then thinned into ordinary night. He had not called up to her. He had not made her choose twice.

She flipped to a fresh page, wrote nothing, and let the blank insist on being honest for her.

Down by the fork, the lantern flicked on late, like a thought that arrives right after you’ve left the room.

Chapter Text

Storms in this part of the world didn’t start; they gathered. All morning the lake acted like it knew something—surface tight as a drum, wind moving in test pulses, the sky practicing darker shades in the corners like a child trying on a parent’s coat. Camp pretended along for a while, business-as-usual with a barometer headache: schedules shuffled, counselors trading blocks like playing cards, Rebecca making optimistic statements about “a sprinkle, at most.”

By second block, thunder rolled a lazy warning from somewhere far enough to dismiss. By third, the warning had teeth.

Nova had lake duty, which meant tying and retieing life vests, repeating no-running in a register that tried to be friendly and failed, and watching the way the wind penciled lines across the water. Victor was at her periphery the way he often was—counting paddles with a competence that made a small domestic ache in her ribs, teasing a sullen thirteen-year-old into admitting he didn’t hate kayaks, checking knots without making anyone feel checked. They hadn’t said much since last night’s almost-conversation at the fork. They were good at silence today—good and bad. Every sentence seemed expensive.

When the first fat drops dimpled the lake and the wind turned its head to speak, Rebecca blew the emergency whistle twice and the whole shoreline flinched.

“All right, my beloved damp gremlins,” she called through the megaphone. “Water’s closed. Back to cabins—briskly, calmly, joyfully. We are not auditioning for a disaster movie.”

A cheer went up because anything could be a party if you declared it. Camp scattered inland in panicked lines that wanted to be neat and couldn’t manage. Nova and Victor fell into the work of making sure nobody left a shoe or a smaller human behind. By the time the last paddle was returned, thunder had moved closer with the purposeful gait of a dog who had found your picnic.

“Go,” Victor said over the wind, flicking water off his sleeves. “I’ll grab the last vests.”

“We leave together,” Nova said, too fast, as if the storm were old enough to be offended by separation. He nodded, no argument, and they jogged up the slope with the dock creaking behind them like a ship annoyed to be on a lake.

Midway to the cabins, the sky emptied a bucket. Rain went from rehearsal to all-in, instant-soak. People shrieked in the joyous horror of it; counselors redirected with the frantic grace of cats. Nova’s braid became a rope; her shirt pasted itself to her spine.

“Shortcut,” Victor shouted, catching her elbow and gesturing toward the staff path—a narrower run that cut behind the arts cabin and ducked under a stand of pines thick enough to be a roof for exactly three minutes. They took it, feet skidding on wet roots, breath ragged in the warm storm air. The pines broke the downpour into a billion needle-fine threads that still found skin and made it sing.

“Power will go,” Victor said conversationally as they ran. “It always does when Rebecca dares the gods.”

“Blame her glitter,” Nova panted. “It’s conductive.”

They burst out from under the trees into heavier weather and crossed the gap toward staff housing—the square of newer cabins tucked behind a fence more symbolic than functional. A bolt cracked open a seam in the sky so bright it made Nova’s teeth ache. Thunder arrived on its heels, close enough to punch the air out of your lungs.

“Oh,” she said, not because she was surprised, but because her body wanted the sound.

“Here,” Victor said, already angling them toward the nearest door—his—because the slope toward the camper cabins was now a small river and staff had been told to shelter in place when the sky got serious. He fumbled a key—of course there was a key now; of course he had grown into someone who carried one—and shouldered the door when the swollen wood resisted. The storm shoved them in behind him like an usher.

Inside smelled like cedar and soap. The light did its brave flicker and then gave up, leaving the cabin in storm noon: dim and blue. Rain hit the roof with an insistence that made conversation feel elsewhere. Nova stood just inside, dripping into the entry mat, and cataloged the instant intimacy of small spaces: one bed with a plain quilt, one dresser with three drawers partially open, one desk with a sketch pad and a mug holding pencils, one hook from which a hoodie hung like a person. It was normal, and seeing where another human slept never was.

Victor locked the door against wind and turned to her with a breath that looked like regret and relief. Water beaded on his lashes, clung to the curve of his mouth. His shirt had turned the simple geometry of his shoulders into an x-ray. He raked a hand back through his hair and looked at her like he always did in storms—eyes clear, mouth careful.

“You okay?” he asked, the question both too big and exactly right.

“My bones are wet,” she said, because levity was easier to carry. The air in here had that post-storm electricity even before the storm was over, like a low hum. “Your treaty doesn’t cover weather.”

He laughed once, softly, and did something ordinary: he took the hoodie off the hook and held it out. It was navy and soft and looked like warmth. She didn’t take it.

“I’ll drip on it,” she said.

“It likes that,” he said, deadpan. “It’s an amphibious garment.”

She hesitated precisely one heartbeat longer than necessary and then gave in to the kind of practical intimacy she could still claim was logistics. She shoved damp arms into the sleeves and said, “You’re tall,” because the hem hit mid-thigh.

“You’re small,” he returned.

The cabin thundered with rain. On the desk, a candle waited—a camp-issued emergency pillar in unromantic white. Victor thumbed a match and then remembered there was no good place to set flame near paper. He moved the sketch pad without thinking and Nova saw the gouge of graphite in one corner where someone had started a line and not finished it. She pretended she didn’t. He lit the candle. The room accepted the warm flicker like a second heart.

“You can sit,” he said, nodding toward the bed, the only real option unless they wanted to pretend to be chairs.

“I’m extremely dry,” she said, standing on the mat like a supplicant.

He raised his hands. “We can stand like flamingos for an hour. It’ll be great for our calves.”

“The treaty says no sleeping over,” she said, because naming it could keep doors closed. “It says nothing about… sitting during a storm.”

“We’ll add a clause,” he said. “Natural disasters do not count as romance.”

She snorted and surrendered to common sense. The quilt was clean and rough under her palms. The hoodie already held a heat that wasn’t hers; she chose to believe it belonged to the candle.

Victor didn’t sit beside her. He gave the room the dignity of distance and claimed a spot at the desk instead, half-turned, as if he were a saint on an old triptych with his body arranged toward a central mystery. It should have made the air looser. It didn’t. The distance turned into a string pulled taut between them. Outside, thunder rolled across the roof like furniture being moved in the next apartment over.

“Addison will think I was kidnapped by raccoons,” Nova said, to say anything.

“Bree will write a ransom note,” Victor said. “And a manifesto.”

“Rebecca will assign me to storm clean-up as penance.”

“Deserved,” he said gravely.

Silence folded over them in a way that did not feel empty. The storm did its continuous work. The candle learned the shape of the air, leaned, straightened, leaned. Somewhere very high up, something boomed so close to thunder it might have been part of it and not a separate event. Nova realized her teeth were set and unclenched them.

“About last night,” she said, because the room had become a place you say things. “The kiss—” she stopped, embarrassed at naming the chant, at letting the world inside their small strategy, “—the crowd.”

“I know,” he said, tone immediately serious. “It was bad. They wanted to own us for a minute.”

“They do that because we let them,” she said. Rule Six scratched inside her notebook like an animal wanting out.

“Yes,” he said. Then, after a beat, “And because they like us. Which shouldn’t make it worse but sometimes does.”

She stared at the candle until her eyes watered and the flame haloed. “I was… jealous,” she said, as if speaking it would reduce it to a manageable noun. “At lunch. Maya. It doesn’t matter—”

“It matters,” he said gently, interrupting the lie. “Not because there was anything there. There wasn’t. But because it hurt you.”

“I’m not supposed to admit that,” she said, an old rule speaking through her mouth. “It makes me—”

“Human?” he offered. He tilted his head, a fraction. “Hypothetically, if I told you I left early because I saw your face and it made me want to cross a room without making a scene, would that also be inadmissible?”

She looked up too fast and met his gaze dead-on. He didn’t look away. He didn’t push the moment to do work for him. He just let the sentence sit there, exactly the size it was.

“I wrote Rule Six,” she said, because if she started by the door she might get to the center. “Last night. If the act hurts more than the truth would, we stop.”

He breathed out, an oh that wasn’t surprise so much as relief that she was naming the thing he’d been afraid to. “That’s a mean rule,” he said, approval in it.

“It is,” she agreed. “I might hate it.”

“We can hate it and keep it,” he said. “A lot of the best ones work like that.”

Another roll of thunder, this one almost playful. Rain had shifted registers, less ferocious and more insistent, like a drummer learning a new time signature. Nova set her hands on the quilt and flattened her palms. “I don’t want to be a performance that doesn’t end,” she said. “I don’t want to be a photo with a caption. I don’t want to be brave for an audience. I think—” She swallowed. “I think I want to be brave for me.”

He didn’t move, and somehow that was the movement that mattered. “Okay,” he said. “Then we can stop the parts that aren’t for you.”

She laughed once; it sounded like a hiccup. “That’s all the parts.”

“Not all,” he said, and the steadiness in his voice made the room feel warmer. “Not the part where you like coffee too hot because it feels like a decision. Not the part where you count paddles and still ask the nine-year-old to help because you remember being nine and wanting to be useful. Not the part where you look at the lake like it’s telling the truth and you’ll punish it if it lies.”

“Victor,” she said, a warning or a gratitude; she didn’t know.

He held up a hand, surrender to her rule even as he spoke against his own caution. “Let me give you the version that isn’t for them. And if it hurts, we stop.”

She nodded, eyes burning without tears. The candle breath, the rain, the way his voice had shifted to the tone he used when he talked to her at midnight by a dying fire—the combination tugged something open she’d held closed with habits and jokes.

“I care about you,” he said simply. “That’s the boring word. The better one is that I want to be careful with you. I don’t always know how. Last summer I thought careful meant not crossing the line. This year I keep thinking careful might mean telling you I’m on the other side of it.”

Her pulse reacted like a startled animal. “We can’t—” she began, uselessly.

“We won’t,” he said immediately, point-blank. “Not because I don’t want to. Because your rule is right, and because I promised. But pretending not to want to is starting to be its own kind of lie.”

She exhaled like something had been pulled out of her chest without anesthetic. Outside, the storm thudded in agreement; electricity popped in the outlet by the desk and went quiet.

“Come here,” she said, and he startled, subtle, the way a person does when the dangerous thing arrives with a soft voice. “Not to break anything. Just—” She gestured at the tiny world. “Stop sitting over there like I’m something you have to study.”

He stood without theatrics and crossed the too-small distance. The bed was narrow; when he sat, the quilt gave and their knees bumped, a plain contact that sent heat camera-flashing through her. He was wet and warm and close enough that she could catalog him in non-heroic pieces: the angle of his left eyebrow, the small scar near his jaw she didn’t remember noticing, the way the candle made his eyes hold more light than seemed possible.

“If we were in a different story,” she said, because humor was a safety line, “we’d kiss in a storm and the audience would clap.”

He smiled—pain and joy, both. “If we were in a different story, there wouldn’t be an audience.”

“True,” she said. The hoodie’s cuffs had swallowed her hands; she withdrew them and set her fingers on the quilt between them like a person approaching an altar. “I didn’t take the bracelet off because of you.”

“I know,” he said, and made not-knowing clear in his face anyway.

“I took it off because it made a decision for me,” she said. “Wearing it said something I thought I wanted to say. Not wearing it says less. Saying nothing felt safer. But it also made me feel like no one could hear me.”

“I can,” he said, quiet.

“Then hear this,” she said, and finally, finally stopped being funny. “I want you. I don’t know what that wants to look like yet. I don’t know if I can navigate it without hurting us. But I’m tired of acting like wanting is a moral failure.”

Something powerful and small moved through his expression—care first, then hunger, then an action plan putting both in order. He didn’t reach for her mouth. He reached for her hand, slow enough to be stopped, and set his palm over hers where they met the quilt. Heat completed a circuit. He kept his grip loose, a touch you can leave without having to pretend you didn’t like it.

“Thank you,” he said, and somehow made gratitude not about debt at all. “We can keep the treaty and still say true things.”

The storm quieted as if it had leaned toward the door to eavesdrop and decided to go bother the next town. Rain softened to a hiss. The candle guttered, then steadied—the wick learning something about the room.

He looked at her mouth then—unavoidable, honest—and she felt it, a physical tug like a string tied to her bottom lip. He caught himself, visible in the tiny flare of his nostrils, and laughed under his breath for the sheer effort it took. “We are extremely stupid,” he said warmly.

“I know,” she said, delighted, wrecked. “We could—” She swallowed. “—we could try something small.”

“Define small,” he said, amused and doomed.

“This,” she said, and turned her hand under his so their palms met and then slid their fingers together, slow, like a fuse seated into a circuit. Every nerve up her arm sang. He inhaled. The room changed temperature. The storm had left the building; the building had its own weather now.

“Understated,” he said helplessly, and then rolled his eyes at himself. “I hate me.”

“Don’t,” she said. Her thumb found the ridge of his knuckle—old territory, new map. She could feel his pulse there, a small, reliable animal. She pressed and watched the life in him answer the pressure.

“We should talk about rules while our brains still work,” he said, valiant, ridiculous.

“Okay,” she said, dutiful. “No kissing. Still.”

“Still,” he echoed. “We can adjust… proximity.”

She choked on a laugh. “Scientist.”

“Engineer,” he corrected solemnly. “We find tolerances. We don’t overload circuits. We back off at the first smell of smoke.”

She nodded, stronger than laughter now. “No… public escalations. We stop the… couples’ games. We decline photos.”

“Or we supply them on our terms,” he said, because he couldn’t help looking for angles that gave her control. “Neutral shots. No captions. Or maybe we answer with something so boring it’s not worth sharing.”

“Like a picture of a rock,” she said.

“Exactly,” he said, and grinned, and the look on his face—pride at a stupid plan; joy at sharing it with her; restraint sitting benevolently on both—hit her like a second weather front.

“Victor,” she said.

“I know,” he answered, already, because it was the kind of name that meant stop me / don’t you dare.

They sat like that with their fingers laced, the candle doing the small holy work of light, rain smoothing into background, thunder sulking on a far hill. Every time the urge to move closer flexed, they looked at it together and let it pass, sharing the ridiculous ache of victory. At some point his shoulder touched hers—barely—and stayed there with the humility of a bird choosing a branch. At some other point she leaned into the contact without calculation because her body knew the difference between acting a lean and using one.

“Tell me what happened last winter,” he said finally, voice the kind you use when the room is warm enough for old weather. “If you want.”

She did and didn’t. She took a breath that scraped, then let it out. “We dated like people in a brochure,” she said. “We went to quiet places. We said the correct things. I kept feeling like I was doing an impression of a person who had made simpler choices. Eli is—” She paused, then allowed truth its due. “—good. It wasn’t his fault. He made me feel… safe from my own life.”

“And you don’t want to be safe from it,” he said, not asking.

“No,” she admitted. “I want to be safe in it.”

He pressed their joined hands gently. “We can try that.”

“And you?” she asked, because the conversation shouldn’t only be hers. “Where did you go when you went away from me?”

He huffed a laugh that lived mostly in his chest. “Into drawings,” he said. “Into very boring evenings. Into a version of myself who thought being noble meant being absent. It turns out that version is bad at parties, and also at sleeping.”

“Same,” she said.

They traded small truths like stones found at the waterline: flat, pocketable, comforting by mere presence. He told her about the morning a sketch finally looked like a lake instead of a wet rectangle. She told him about the mug in February that wasn’t the right one and how she apologized to it out loud when it broke because everything had become a proxy for braver conversations. He told her how the first week back at camp he woke up before the bell to check the lake twice because something in him needed to know the water was still there. She told him she’d worn the bracelet to bed and woken up disappointed that it had not declared anything she couldn’t.

Eventually, fatigue threaded itself through the heat and quieted things. The storm, having given up on drama, settled into rain the way a person settles into an old couch. The candle had canoed down its own wax; he pinched it out, and the cabin became blue again, then darker, then nighttime at noon.

“Lay back,” he said softly. “You’re swaying.”

“I’m not,” she lied, and did anyway. The pillow smelled like laundry and some lemon-clean thing and under both, him. He didn’t lie beside her. He lay on top of the quilt, a fraction of a body’s width away, the kind of close that is less about distance than agreement. Their hands stayed laced. She let the weight of his palm tell her a small truth: you are here; I am here; this is not a story we owe anyone else.

“You can sleep,” he added, as if permission were needed.

“Bossy,” she murmured, and closed her eyes.

Time did its funny storm loop where minutes changed speed when you weren’t watching. The roof kept the rain out with an efficiency she was suddenly grateful for. Her breath synced with his because it wanted to. Every so often he’d squeeze her fingers in a quiet check-in—there?—and she’d squeeze back—here—without opening her eyes.

She didn’t mean to drift. She did anyway. When she woke, the room had shifted into a late-day shadow that felt like the end of a movie you weren’t ready to be done with. The rain had become a fine mist arguing with the screens. The power had returned without ceremony; the lamp by the bed tried on a low, apologetic glow.

She was still on her side, his hand still inside hers like a promise nobody else had signed. He was watching her the way you watch water deciding whether to boil—patient, fond, concerned about timing. She blinked at him in the tiny, private absurdity of waking up in someone else’s afternoon and smiled before she could edit it.

“Hey,” he said, that same careful tone that had become its own intimacy. “We didn’t break anything.”

“Speak for yourself,” she whispered, humor for bravery’s sake. “My heart is a little feral.”

“We can teach it tricks,” he said. “Sit. Stay. Don’t eat the couch.”

“Cruel to deny it the couch,” she said, and made herself move. Untangling fingers felt like peeling tape from skin. The absence where his palm had been cooled fast.

They sat up. The hoodie had warmed to her. The clock on his desk blinked 12:00 at them the way clocks do after they’ve lost track of themselves. Outside, the storm’s exit line was written on the lake in long pale smears.

He stood first, not to end anything but to reset the room to less dangerous geometry. He offered his hand automatically to help her off the bed and then laughed at himself when he realized how that read. She took it anyway, because now that they’d survived the worst ache of restraint, small kindnesses felt like dessert.

“Your hair,” he said, with something like awe. She reached up and found it a riot—storm-tossed, the braid long ago losing the war. She grimaced. He grinned. “It’s very… mythic.”

“Say Medusa and die,” she warned.

“I was going to say siren,” he said, too quick to be anything but true.

She went hot and chose to pretend she hadn’t. He turned to the desk, suddenly practical. “I’ll write Rebecca we’re safe. She’ll be doing roll call. Addison will file a missing persons report in rhymed couplets.”

“Bree will draw a political cartoon,” Nova said, stealing a corner of his towel to press water out of her ends. He didn’t snatch it back. She felt stupidly tender toward the fibers.

They lasted five more minutes in the soft retcon of reality. Then the world knocked—a literal knock, tentative against the storm-soft door.

“Victor?” Addison’s voice, high with concern and only pretending to be casual. “Are you alive? Is she with you?”

He looked at Nova; she looked back. The lie clocked them both with its arrival; the truth stared over its shoulder with arms crossed. Nova’s new rule rose like a good angel. She found breath.

“Yes,” Victor called, stepping to the door but not opening it yet, checking with his face before his hand. Nova nodded.

He cracked the door. Addison stood blinking, rain-freckled, hair static frizzy from humidity and worry. Bree was behind her, expression set to I have so many theories I could start a small newspaper.

“Hi,” Victor said.

“You’re here,” Addison said, sightline volleying Victor-Nova-Victor like a tennis match where love was somehow a number.

“We sheltered,” Nova said, not apologizing.

“Appropriate,” Bree said, voice dry enough to season salt. “Your cabin is the closest safe structure to the lake. It would be absurd to run uphill.”

Addison’s eyes softened into relief so pure Nova had to steady herself. “Okay,” she said. “Okay. Good. We thought—” She flapped a hand, abandoning the sentence for being useless. “Rebecca’s doing a headcount. Come to the dining hall when you can. They’re making emergency cocoa. It’s terrible.”

“We’ll be there,” Victor promised.

Addison looked between them one more time, part satisfied, part alarmed, like a scientist who had just confirmed a hypothesis she wished weren’t true. “Okay,” she repeated, then added, as if she couldn’t help it, “You’re both… you look different.”

“We got rained on,” Nova said. “It’s revolutionary.”

They left, Bree saying something under her breath that sounded suspiciously like, “I’m not saying I told you so; I’m just taping the words to the wall.”

The cabin went quiet again. The air had gone less blue, more ordinary. Nova turned back to him, something of the storm’s permission still in her body. “We didn’t break anything,” she repeated, as if daring the day to argue.

“No,” he said. “We didn’t.”

She reached for the hoodie zipper and paused halfway. “We’re going to cocoa,” she said practically. “We have to be boring.”

“We can be extremely boring,” he agreed, hearing the subtext: no hand-holding, no orbit performed, no show. “We can sit on opposite ends of a bench and pretend to hate marshmallows.”

“Impossible,” she said. “I love those little liars.”

He smiled like a person watching the sun find a new place to stand. “We’ll hate them ironically.”

She peeled the hoodie off and hesitated with it in her hands. He held his palms out; she tossed, he caught. The small domestic handoff struck her like an arrow in a target and she recognized the particular satisfaction in its landing: this was what she wanted—the stupid, ordinary part where two people moved through a room passing each other objects and information and truths.

At the door, she stopped him with his name. He stopped at once, backlit by the weak, forgiving light that made the air outside look rinsed.

“Thank you,” she said. Not for shelter; anyone would have. For making the storm into a room where the truth could walk barefoot.

“You’re welcome,” he said, and didn’t make it a quip. “We can do this. Slow. Honest. On purpose.”

“And when it hurts—” she began.

“We stop,” he finished. “I’ll help.”

They stepped into air that smelled like coins and cut grass. The lake lay on its side and breathed. Somewhere, a raccoon union meeting adjourned early on account of weather. From the dining hall came the din of too many people grateful to be indoors at once.

Addison saw them enter and scooted to make space that wasn’t next to each other; Bree nudged a mug toward Nova like a scepter. Camp swelled around them, louder for having been quiet. Nova sat across from Victor, because restraint newly decided is easiest to keep in the first hour. He grinned at his cocoa like it owed him money. She grinned at hers like it had loaned her something.

If anyone asked where they’d been, they told the truth: stormed in the nearest safe place. If anyone asked how they were, they told the right truth: fine. For now. Honest as they could afford.

Under the table, Rule Six lay down and stopped scratching, patient for once. In her chest, the part of her that had been acting everything to death decided to rest and see what the world would do when she didn’t force it.

And up on the hill, in a small blue room that still smelled like rain and candle smoke, a bed held the shape of two people who had learned how not to run and a notebook waited on a shelf for new terms that sounded less like laws and more like promises.

Chapter Text

Storms in Rayburn left everything rinsed and new, like the world had been wrung out and rehung. By morning the sky was a polite blue with nothing to prove. The grass wore sequins. The dock smelled like wood that had learned its lesson.

Nova woke to the soft insistence of camp reassembling itself—footsteps in gravel, a whistle in the distance just to make sure the day remembered who was in charge, Addison yawning like a bear and then apologizing to the air for being alive too loudly. The hoodie she’d borrowed yesterday was folded at the end of her bunk, neat as a thank-you. She touched the cuff with two fingers, then slid out of bed and into a morning that felt like holding a delicate cup with both hands: possible, but only with care.

“Report,” Bree murmured from her pillow, eyes closed, a smirk already primed. “Did the raccoons sign a peace accord, or are we at war with nature?”

“Cocoa was terrible,” Nova said, and it was somehow the truest thing.

Addison rolled over, hair a myth. “You look… rested,” she said, the word careful around the edges.

“Storm noise is a lullaby,” Nova answered, tying her hair back. She heard herself—steady, not glib. A new muscle.

Outside, camp did what it always does the morning after weather: it normalized. Schedules got uncrumpled. Life vests steamed on the line. Rebecca, fresh glitter applied like a defiant flag, held court with a clipboard and a megaphone she did not need. People were kinder, as they always were when reminded by thunder that they were small.

Breakfast by the windows tasted like something earned. Victor arrived with a second coffee for her, handed over without spectacle—just a habit learning to be honest. Addison clocked the handoff and said nothing; Bree raised her brows and spread cream cheese on a bagel like she was icing a cake with malice.

“Staff meeting said: no lake for two hours,” Victor told the table, voice easy and neutral. “Then reassess. Arts cabin is open if anyone needs to glue sequins onto trauma.”

“Sequins fix structural problems,” Bree said. “Prove me wrong.”

Nova watched the way he rested his forearms on the table, wrists crossed, the long line of his fingers relaxed. Yesterday, she would have filled the silence with jokes to manage her heart rate. Today, she let the quiet do the work. His knee wasn’t touching hers under the table. It didn’t need to. The space between them felt occupied anyway—by the storm, by the candlelight, by a promise they hadn’t named and didn’t need to for it to hold.

Maya breezed past with a tray and a grin, pausing to tap the table with two fingers. “You two survive?” she asked, bright and real.

“Barely,” Nova said, deadpan.

“We hid under a desk,” Victor added.

“Heroism,” Maya declared solemnly, then to Nova, low and sincere: “Come by the staff fire tonight if you feel like it. I promise no karaoke.”

“Tempting,” Nova said, and meant it more than she would have two days ago. The invitation didn’t scrape. It just landed and waited its turn.

They didn’t make a show of leaving breakfast together; they just did, because their blocks overlapped and their feet knew the path. On the walk they planned their quiet rebellion. “Photos,” Victor said. “We say no unless the terms are neutral.”

“Neutral,” Nova echoed. “We’re a rock.”

“Two rocks,” he corrected. “A tasteful cairn.”

She glanced up at him and almost laughed—his face was too solemn for the joke. It was ridiculous and so exactly what let her lungs feel loose. “A cairn,” she agreed. “Fine.”

Lake staff, when it reopened, came with fresh caution and extra whistles. The surface was sugar glass under a breeze; every now and then the sunlight broke and scattered into small, eager coins. Nova checked knots and fitted vests; Victor reset the rope line, hands competent, voice steady. When a cluster of junior campers gathered to watch him retie, Nova heard one whisper, He’s like a boat dad, in reverent tones, and had to cover her mouth with her wrist to hide the smile.

Between blocks, the camp photographer approached with her camera tucked against her ribs like a child who had been scolded. “Truce,” she said, apologetic. “Yesterday got… frothy.”

Nova let herself grin at that. “Understatement.”

“Can we do… hands without faces?” the photographer tried. “The newsletter folks are begging. ‘Recovery after the storm.’ Think: ropes, vests, useful hands. No captions about your future children.”

Victor looked at Nova, the way he always did—checking weather. She lifted a shoulder. “Useful hands,” she said. “No faces.”

They stood shoulder to shoulder and let the camera take exactly what they were willing to give: his hands knotting a line while hers held the end taut; her fingers flipping a life vest latch while his thumb steadied the clasp; two pairs of palms passing a coil of rope like a small, ordinary ceremony. The photographer’s smile stayed small and grateful. “Thank you,” she said, meaning thanks for trusting me with a boundary.

“Thank you,” Nova returned, meaning thanks for learning it.

By lunch, the lake had forgiven them for surviving. The dining hall hummed. Gossip had lost its edge, turned soft and useless; people still said “cute” like it was punctuation, but fewer of them meant “perform.” Eli gave Nova a nod from the salad tongs that carried no knives; Lila, sweating glitter from arts block, asked Nova if she knew a quick braid that didn’t resent humidity. Nova braided Lila’s hair against a window while Addison narrated like she was doing color commentary. It was all so normal she could taste the salt of it on her tongue.

“Will there be a demonstration at the fire,” Bree asked without looking up from her tray, “or are we allowing them to be boring?”

“Boring is a radical act,” Nova said. “I’m staging a sit-in.”

“Proud of you,” Bree replied, and stole a carrot stick with surgical precision.

After lunch, with the lake open and the day fully upright, Nova walked the long way past the arts cabin. She didn’t need to; her block started fifteen minutes later. She did anyway. Through the open door she saw markers uncapped, faces shadowed by focus, a sculpture made of bottle caps that had no right to be beautiful and was. Victor was at the back table with a kid who had no interest in perspective and a lot of interest in drawing the same perfect circle over and over. He didn’t correct; he admired. “That’s a very stubborn planet,” he said, and the boy beamed like an eclipse.

Nova leaned on the doorframe, watching. He noticed her without jolting; his shoulders did a small shift, like the body’s way of waving. She didn’t step inside. She didn’t run. She just let it be: this is a thing I like about you; I can say it with my eyes from here and it will still be true.

He mouthed, later? and she nodded. Not a date. Not a performance. Just a comma.

The day coasted. The storm smell burned off, leaving grass and sunblock and wood and something like lemon. Nova returned a lost water bottle to a kid who hugged her waist with reckless gratitude; she let herself take the hug, a small piece of being part of a place. On the dock, Victor failed spectacularly at a magic trick for two eight-year-olds and turned the failure into a better laugh. When their eyes caught in the dip between blocks, they didn’t rush or invent an errand to make proximity happen. They held the look, then looked away. It felt… adult. It felt like breathing.

By dinner, she could feel the shape of the new normal. Addison and Bree tested it with science and sarcasm in equal parts. “So,” Addison started, picking at a muffin top as if it had wronged her. “Hypothetically, if two people were, say, committed to a shared narrative, and then, say, decided to be private citizens, would the people who love them be allowed to say ‘we support you’ without anyone combusting?”

Nova took a long drink of water. “Hypothetically, yes. Combustion would be extra.”

Bree, kinder than she pretended, nudged a napkin toward Nova’s elbow—the kind of gesture you miss if you aren’t watching for care around the edges. “We can also say nothing,” Bree said. “We’re fluent.”

“Say that to Addison’s group chat,” Nova said.

“Don’t attack my religion,” Addison whispered, hand to heart.

They all laughed, and it felt like a trampoline the world had set up beneath her ribs.

The campfire that night was soft and low—a debrief fire, a thanks-for-not-becoming-kite-lightning-rod fire. Nobody tried to make them kiss. Nobody chanted. The guitar found the chords it liked best. The lake kept the moon still. When someone requested ghost stories, Rebecca refused on principle and told the saga of the time a raccoon stole the entire s’more kit and set up a black-market dessert ring behind the cabins. Nova ended up wedged between Addison and Bree on one bench while Victor sat behind them on the grass, close enough that she could feel the gravity without having to pretend to ignore it.

When the marshmallows came around, he didn’t toast hers. He passed the bag down the line and, when her hand reached for it, touched the back of her knuckles with his fingers, a one-second life raft. She didn’t look back; she didn’t need to.

People peeled away in gentle clumps. No couples’ games. No cameras in anyone’s face. The camp had learned, maybe, or maybe the storm had washed the headlines off the chalkboard and there wasn’t the energy to rewrite them yet.

Nova didn’t stand when Addison did. “I’m going to help Rebecca put the guitars in their cases before she tries to teach them to swim,” Addison declared, and Bree, muttering something about tuning being fascist, followed. Victor remained at her back like a a steady oar, and when she finally turned, he stood too, not too fast.

“Walk?” he asked.

“Please,” she said, and the honesty felt clean.

The path they took was familiar enough to be theatre, but it didn’t feel like any show she’d been in. The lake murmured like an old friend. Crickets and cicadas traded the mic with bored professionalism. The lanterns lit early, a necklace of small, obedient stars.

“I told the photographer we’re on strike,” Victor said, hands in his pockets in a way that only looked careless. “No captions. We send a photo of a rock if she pushes.”

“Solidarity,” Nova said, solemn, and he snorted quietly.

Her shoulder bumped his once where the path narrowed. He didn’t think his body into making room; he simply took the touch—registered, welcomed—and together they let the path widen again. It was nothing and everything at once. Yesterday that bump would have lit a fuse. Tonight, it warmed and then dimmed to an ember she could keep.

“I keep thinking about the candle,” she said, not to be poetic; to be precise.

He didn’t pretend not to know which one. “Me too.”

“How it leaned and learned,” she said.

“How it didn’t make the room behave,” he said, “but it made the room visible.”

They reached the dock because they always would in this story when they needed to tell the truth. The boards were dry now, the air still tart with yesterday. Far out, a fish disturbed the surface like punctuation. Nova sat with her feet over the water and he did the same, a shoulder’s width between them because restraint was still new and they were proud of it.

“I’m not performing,” she said into the lake so she wouldn’t have to keep proving it. “I’m still nervous.”

“Me too,” he said. “Good sign.”

She let that sit, and the night held it without comment.

“I don’t know yet what we call this,” she added, forcing herself not to bargain with air. “I don’t need a word for it tonight.”

“An agreement without a name,” he said. “Our specialty.”

Wind tugged her braid; she tucked it around her shoulder. His hand came up as if to help without thinking and then stopped at half-mast. She reached up and tucked the tail herself and then, because courage sometimes looks exactly like nothing to anyone else, she turned her hand and let it fall onto the boards between them, palm up.

He saw, of course. He set his palm into hers slowly, as if testing the weight before trusting the bridge. Their fingers didn’t tangle. It was simpler than that: he aligned his hand to hers until the heat found a match and stayed. They looked outward together and not at one another, and it made the contact feel less like a performance and more like a private treaty signed under moonlight.

“I promised slow,” he said after a long minute, as if reminding himself as much as her. “I like slow.”

“I like honest,” she said. “I think I like us when no one’s watching.”

“Me too,” he said, and the words didn’t try to be prettier than they were.

They sat until the gnats got bold and the night got bored of being excellent. On the walk back, they loosened their grip and then let it go without theatrics, like people ending a handshake they intended to repeat. At the fork, the lantern did its small creak as if it wanted a line. He looked at her the way he had in the storm—care, hunger, plan. She looked back and did not make it easier or harder; she just didn’t pretend anymore.

“Good night,” he said, and the word wasn’t a placeholder. It was a promise to do this again.

“Good night,” she said, and meant: yes.

Inside the cabin, Bree was already horizontal, a book over her face like a shield; Addison sat cross-legged on her bed, braid now a campaign against entropy. They both glanced up with synchronized curiosity and then, in a show of saintly restraint, said nothing.

Nova washed her face, teeth, day, and then sat on her bunk with her notebook in her lap. Rule Six watched her from the page like a friendly guard dog. She flipped to a clean line.

7. Be boring on purpose.
   
   

She wrote it and laughed, quietly, because she’d become a person who thought boring was the bravest thing she could try. She reached for the Polaroid that lived above the notebook and slid it back a little, making room as if the page had needed more air.

On the sill, the bracelet reflected a courtesy light from the path. It didn’t mean what it had meant. It didn’t have to be thrown into the lake for her to be honest. She left it there, irrelevant and still a part of the room.

When the cabin snapped to dark and the night yawned itself open, Nova let the day play back in sensible pieces: coffee; hands; a rock of a photo; a braid in a window; the small ordinary fact of choosing a path and walking it without checking to see if anyone was taking a picture. She breathed like she’d been taught at the archery line—deep in, long out—and right before sleep she found a sentence she could keep without writing it down: we could make this real because we already are.

Chapter Text

The day drifted like a boat when the paddles were up—self-propelled enough to count, unrushed enough to let you forget the shore. By dinner, the lake had flattened into a sheet of brushed steel. The air held that late-summer softness that makes people forgive each other without saying it out loud. Rayburn ran on after-storm grace; everyone said please more than usual. Even the raccoons seemed to be on their best behavior, which Bree insisted was a trap.

There was a big bonfire on the schedule—closing week was close enough to touch, and people wanted spectacle—but the storm had rearranged mood and timetables. The larger gathering wound down early, the guitarists running out of songs and glitter, campers yawning themselves toward curfew. Rebecca called it at a merciful hour, promised the “real” closing fire would be tomorrow, and sent everyone to bed with a threat about quiet hours that contained very little actual menace.

Which is how the smaller fire started, almost by accident.

After the big circle broke, a few older campers drifted back with mugs and blankets, bringing their soft conversations and their desire to sit near a thing that glowed. A couple of counselors—Maya among them—stayed to coil cords and stack benches and then, without quite planning to, sat too. Someone relit the ring with the reverence of a person adding one more log “just to be sure.” The flames obliged by finding themselves again and telling the ground to be warm.

Nova finished carrying a crate of unremarkable things—clean skewers, a bag of marshmallows everyone swore they hated and ate anyway—and set it near the storage shed. When she turned back, the fire was smaller, but it was still itself. The dark around it had thickened into privacy. She found Addison at the edge of the light, conspiratorial already.

“Afterparty,” Addison announced in a whisper that didn’t really qualify. “There’s an unofficial policy about this: if you stay, you have to talk about something true or make fun of someone who isn’t present.”

“Tradition is sacred,” Nova said, dry. “Which is it tonight?”

Addison tipped her head toward the benches, eyes flicking in the direction of the flames and then past them. “Truth feels cheaper by the second.”

“Go to bed,” Nova said, affectionate command.

“Soon.” Addison squeezed her arm with that light, sure pressure that had become an I love you in a language they didn’t need to translate. “You okay?”

Nova breathed in smoke and lake in equal measure. “I’m… here.”

“Good answer,” Addison said, and left it at that.

Victor was near the ring, turning the half-charred log with a stick like a person who had appointed himself fire steward. The hoodie he’d loaned her yesterday had miraculously returned to his shoulders. It looked like something the storm had kept alive and handed back. He glanced up as if he’d felt her arrive, eyes clear in the small light.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” she answered, the word wearing last night’s softness without apology.

People settled in loose constellations—two to a bench, three to the ground, one sprawled on their back with a sweatshirt over their face, listening without needing to see. For a while there were only small things: a memory from two summers ago about a canoe rescue that involved more dramatic shouting than was strictly necessary; a complaint about glitter that somehow turned into a compliment about it; Maya’s confession that she’d once accidentally led a choreography class facing away from her students for ten minutes. Laughter looped around the ring and came back changed. The dark outside the halo thickened into the kind of night that asks you to use your inside voice.

When the talk thinned, the guitar returned—softer now, a suggestion rather than a show. Maya knew exactly three melancholy chords and used all of them. Someone hummed something that might have been a lullaby or might have been a tune remembered by muscle. No one sang words; they didn’t need to.

Nova let the sound wash her bones. She could feel Victor’s attention like a warm wind at her side. They weren’t touching. They didn’t need to. Heat from the fire did the unromantic, sacred task of taking the edge off the air.

“Story?” Maya said eventually, half to the group, half to the night. “The quiet kind. No ghosts unless they’re friendly.”

“A raccoon once stole a counselor’s shoe,” Bree offered from behind Nova, voice mild as a watermark. “It used it as a boat.”

“That’s friendly,” Maya decided. “The raccoon had hobbies.”

Victor angled the stick, careful, and the log obligingly rolled, sending a brief lick of flame sideways, painting everyone’s faces warmer for a blink. “I want a shoe-boat,” he said. “It sounds like the right level of ambition.”

“You have a canoe,” Nova said.

“I have a canoe-shaped problem,” he corrected.

She smiled at the fire—small, involuntary. “Tell a story,” she challenged, because that was safer than addressing the look he’d already given her.

He thought, which on his face looked like the world pausing and then restarting two degrees kinder. “Okay,” he said. “Once upon a time there was a boy who kept drawing a lake and it only ever looked like a wet rectangle. So he kept drawing it, because stubbornness is cheaper than talent.”

“Relatable,” Maya murmured.

“One day,” Victor went on, more to the flames than to anyone else, “someone told him to stop trying to make the water behave and start drawing what it did to the shore.” He shrugged. “And then it started looking like itself. Not because he got better, but because he stopped lying.”

It wasn’t a performance. He’d told the truth sideways in a room that could hold it. Nova could feel the group listening in that respectful way people do when they recognize something useful and don’t want to scare it away.

“Once upon a time,” Nova said when silence settled again, “there was a girl who bought a bracelet because it looked like a decision she didn’t have to make.”

Across the fire, Bree shifted like she’d been waiting to hear Nova tell that version to someone other than herself.

“The bracelet was small and shiny,” Nova continued with a wicked little smile for the reading comprehension lesson she was inflicting. “Lots of people told her it looked nice. It did. It also felt like wearing a caption.”

Maya’s mouth quirked. “And then?”

“And then she took it off,” Nova said, voice a little lower than it had started. “Not because she had the right words. Just because she didn’t want to read that one anymore.”

The group, bless them, let that land without trying to build a gazebo around it. Someone threw a stick into the ring and missed. Someone else confiscated the stick with dignity. The guitar found a different key like it had discovered a door.

Time did its campfire loop—stretching and snapping, turning minutes into something braided with childhood. People peeled away by twos and threes with the lazy guilt of office workers leaving a party they liked too much to be at for long. Eventually there were six of them. Then four. Then three: Maya, who had couch-cushion energy and seemed capable of sleeping in any location; Victor, still doing his quiet fire duty; and Nova, who had decided to stay until the last ember went responsible.

Maya yawned, caught in the act. “My bed is calling me in a voice I cannot refuse,” she announced, untangling herself from a blanket with a grace that suggested choreography. She wiggled her fingers in a small salute. “Don’t steal any shoe-boats without me.”

“Promise nothing,” Victor said, deadpan.

“Liar,” she yawned, and padded off into the dark with a wave.

Which left them. The ring and its steady, smaller warmth. The lake doing its mirror trick without any audience to impress. The night pressing its cool palm lightly against their cheeks in a way that felt like permission rather than warning.

“Rehearsal ended,” Nova said softly, because the truth had become a thing she wanted to say even when it made the air harder to breathe. “Are we still here on purpose?”

“Yes,” he said simply.

They didn’t move closer. Not exactly. The space between them took a breath and let a few inches evaporate. The fire’s low roar became part of their pulse. In the halo, he looked older in a way she liked—less of a boy a story was being told about, more of a person who had decided which parts of himself to keep and would argue politely with anyone who tried to change his mind.

“Last night,” she said, because the candle had given her a language and she was trying to keep speaking it, “I thought—if I tell you what I want, I’ll set everything on fire.”

He huffed, hoarse. “And?”

“I was wrong,” she said. “We didn’t burn.”

“Not the bad kind,” he said, a smile he didn’t mean to let her see.

“Tonight,” she continued, eyes on the logs because looking at his mouth felt like a dare she wasn’t ready to accept, “I keep thinking about all the ways I made myself smaller so no one could accuse me of being dramatic.”

“Nova,” he said, a name like a palm on a forearm.

“I don’t want to be smaller anymore.”

He sat with that. He always did. “Then don’t be,” he said.

“How,” she said, not rhetorical, not whining—hungry.

He looked into the fire like it might loan him a metaphor. It did. “Start with one inch,” he said. “Take it and keep it. Then take another. If anyone complains, you can tell them the storm changed the shoreline.”

She made a low, involuntary sound that in another context would have been a laugh and now was something like gratitude aching at the root. “You and your shoreline,” she managed.

“Me and your shoreline,” he corrected gently.

Silence, warm. The fire ticked as sap remembered it used to be a tree.

“Ask me something real,” she said suddenly, a challenge to herself more than to him. “One question. No performance.”

He turned the stick in his hand as if the motion set the wheels in his head. When he looked at her, he did it like he’d decided courage was better than wit. “When did you first know you wanted me?”

Heat rose under her skin, a blush that felt somehow honest rather than ornamental. She could have dodged. She could have pretended there wasn’t a first time. Rule Six stretched on her lap like a cat and showed its throat—stop performing. She let the blush exist. She didn’t look away.

“Last summer,” she said. “It wasn’t a moment when you were being impressive. I think you were untangling two friendship bracelets for a kid who’d tied them into something so complicated it might have qualified as art.”

He smiled helplessly. “Sounds right.”

“You were making jokes to keep him from crying,” she said. “Not big ones. Little ones. It was… beautiful. Not because you were heroic. Because you were careful.”

He closed his eyes briefly, like the words had landed in a place he both feared and needed. “Ask me,” he said, voice lower.

She didn’t ask because she was terrified to hear it. She asked because the candle last night and the fire tonight had conspired to make her braver than she was used to being. “When did you know you wanted me?”

He looked at her without hedging. “At the lake,” he said. “When I told you not to run on the dock and you laughed at me and did it anyway. It was like the air changed temperature and decided to be yours.”

It was ridiculous that such a sentence didn’t kill her. It only rearranged something crucial and put it back better.

The question came without warning; that was the worst and best thing about it. It rose from her body like steam—knew itself before she did. “If we weren’t here,” she heard herself say, throat new and raw, “if there wasn’t a camp and a story and an audience—what would you do to me right now?”

The fire made a sharp sound then, a piece of sap giving up one last bright pop, and the timing was so absurd she almost laughed, except laughter would have been a dodge and she had asked for the opposite.

Victor’s mouth parted like he’d taken the question into his lungs. For a second he looked wrecked by the luxury of being allowed to answer. Then he steadied, as he always did, on a kind of reverence. His voice, when he used it, wore carefulness like a bow.

“I’d put my hands on your face,” he said. “Not to hold you—just to make sure you were real. I’d ask you twice. Then I’d kiss you like we had time.”

The honesty, simple and unornamented, rearranged the air. The fire, the lake, the late hour—they all folded back, making space for a thing that could not exist with spectators. Nova felt her pulse at her wrist, insistent as a knock.

“I asked for one question,” she said, a whisper with a smile inside it. “That was… two answers.”

“It was one truth,” he said, apology lodged under it like a stone.

“Say it again,” she asked, and realized with a small shock that she had made a request with no joke attached, no softening. “The hands part.”

“I’d put my hands on your face,” he repeated, a little unsteady now, because repetition had started to make it real.

She turned toward him—slow because slow was a chosen thing, not a lack of options. The fire threw a brighter breath and then settled, as if lighting them on purpose for a second so they’d have to own what their bodies did in shadow. She didn’t close the distance. She didn’t offer her mouth. She did something that felt both smaller and larger: she lifted her chin, exposed the line of her throat to the air between them, and waited.

His hands didn’t move. His breathing did. He made a sound like self-control recommitting. “Nova,” he said, her name a warning and a promise.

“Rule,” she whispered. “We keep it.”

“We keep it,” he agreed, and she felt the decision move through him like weather.

They sat in the breathless pocket after asking a question and choosing not to answer it. The world, to its credit, didn’t punish them. It rewarded them, perversely, by turning everything up: the drum-low surf of the fire, the minute scrape of his palm against the wood when he flexed his fingers, the distant slap of water against the dock.

She found his hand on the bench and turned hers until their fingertips touched. No lace. No lock. Just a line. It was absurd that it could feel like a mouth.

“No more questions tonight,” she said finally, when she trusted her voice again. “I want to keep this alive and not interrogate it to death.”

“My favorite kind of science,” he said, hoarse. “Observation.”

They sat until the small fire became a red core that only needed a gentle nudge to sleep. He gave it that nudge. The night accepted the end of the story and offered them a quiet. When they stood, they did it together, bodies synchronized by something past choreography.

On the walk, the ground remembered the storm and made small, soft sounds under their shoes. The lanterns were mostly out—early bedtime for objects too—but the path knew itself enough to guide them. At the fork, the familiar creak was replaced by the hush of a light that had already gone dark. The air there felt like an echo of all the nights they’d chosen to stop.

He looked at her mouth and then shut his eyes like he was turning around in a small room and wanted to see it from every angle first. When he opened them, it felt like a decision had been made and she’d been included in it.

“Good night,” he said. The words weren’t the end of anything. They were a place to put it until morning.

“Good night,” she said back, as if she were returning a borrowed thing.

They didn’t touch. For once, that felt like extravagance rather than denial. She turned toward the slope, toward the rectangle of lamplight that meant her cabin was still a place where sleep could happen. He took the other path, not looking back. Restraint was a muscle; they were getting strong.

Inside, Addison had already half-sunk into her mattress, eyes gummy with sleep but curiosity still awake. Bree’s book had fallen open on her chest like a shield abandoned mid-battle. Nova brushed her teeth to the rhythm of her own heart and didn’t spill.

On her bunk, she opened the notebook. Rule Six blinked up at her like a friend with good boundaries. She turned a page and wrote nothing. The blank felt exactly right.

On the sill, the bracelet lay where it had begun to mean more by meaning less. The small camp lantern’s courtesy glow reached it and made one slice of it bright, then moved on.

Nova lay down and let the night replay in precise parts—firelight, a story about a lake that was tired of being a rectangle, a shoe-boat raccoon that probably did exist, a question asked in a voice she recognized as her own. She imagined his hands on her face without trying to skip to the end of the scene the way her brain used to. She let herself want it and did not punish herself for wanting.

If the truth was a candle, she thought drowsily, then tonight they hadn’t blown it out. They’d cupped their palms around it and taught it how to live in the wind.

Chapter Text

Closing week moved like a tide you didn’t want to admit you could see coming: a little farther up the sand each day, then suddenly at your ankles, then tugging.

Rayburn wore its ending openly. Lost-and-found exploded across a table like a small thrift store. Lanyards dangled from hooks like retired snakes. The arts cabin turned into a triage center where sentimental objects went to be glued into a single piece for one more hour. Someone taped a list on the dining hall door titled THINGS YOU WILL MISS (YES, EVEN THIS), and campers added: mosquitoes, bad cocoa, the way the dock creaks like it has opinions.

Nova woke to the last-Thursday light and the sound of a zipper losing an argument. Addison’s suitcase had eaten three shirts and half of her will to live. Bree was pretending to fold by stacking things into a precise monument to passive-aggression.

“You’re both doing great,” Nova said, tying her hair back. On the windowsill, the bracelet lay in its usual square of courtesy light, unimportant and still present. She’d started to like it that way—staying without insisting.

“Today’s schedule is emotional violence,” Addison announced, triumphant as the suitcase surrendered one of the shirts. “Farewell notes, found items, porch crying. Then tonight, the Not-Actually-Closing fire where everyone speaks from the heart and pretends they invented it.”

“Cute,” Bree said. “I’m scheduled to heckle softly.”

Nova’s notebook—open to Rule Seven—waited on her shelf. Be boring on purpose. It had turned out to be less about dullness than about honesty that didn’t need fireworks. She slid the notebook into her bag and let the page face outward like a quiet spine.

They met Victor at breakfast by accident and also on purpose. He had a stack of printed certificates—Most Improved Paddler, Fearless Canoe-Exit, Master of Knot That Looks Like a Sandwich—and ink smudged on his thumb. He slid a coffee across to Nova without looking at his hand, and she took it without making a show. They had gotten good at that: keeping the tenderness while refusing the theater.

“Last lake block,” he said, like the weather.

“Make the water behave,” she replied, and he grinned because she was quoting him back to himself.

The day’s edges softened everything. Campers with glitter in their eyelashes hugged him around the waist and told Nova they would visit next year even if their parents didn’t allow it. Eli helped Rebecca carry a box without glancing in Nova’s direction; Lila winked at Nova and said, “We’re doing a goodbye braid circle after lunch if you want to supervise the chaos.” Nova said yes before considering whether she should. She liked the way yes felt coming out of her mouth when no one was watching for it.

Between blocks, she and Victor moved like people who had practiced not carving grooves in the ground anymore. They stood side by side for a while making paper name flags for the last canoe run. He drew bats in the margins because he couldn’t help himself. She pretended not to be charmed and failed.

“Tonight,” he said low, keeping his eyes on the pen because it made honesty easier, “we’re boring, right?”

“We’re rocks,” she said. “A cairn.”

“We don’t sit together,” he added, testing it like a rule on his tongue, even though it wasn’t. “Or we do?”

She thought about the way a crowd can make a story their own. She thought about the way the smaller fire had felt like permission rather than a dare. She thought about slow and honest, about the future that was exactly one day long if you only counted the days you could see.

“We let the room tell its story without us,” she said. “We don’t clarify. We also don’t perform. Radical neutrality.”

“Rocks,” he agreed again, but his mouth softened around it.

He had arts last block. She had the lake. They took the long way by the birches all the same, just to take one more lap of the path that had taught them the shape of themselves. He touched the lantern hook out of superstition when they passed it. She did, too, for once.

At the docks, the junior campers arrived with a noise like festival. Nova did what she did best: count, fit, steady, laugh enough to keep the line from tightening into something brittle. On the last run, a little boy with freckles and a gap-toothed sincerity looked up at her and said, “Will you be here next year?” with the kind of hope that assumes yes. Nova’s heart went soft in the middle.

“I want to be,” she said, and then, because honesty had to live in the small places too, “I can’t promise yet. But I want to.”

He accepted it like a weather report and ran toward a puddle as if it were his destiny.

When the final whistle blew and the lake closed like a hand making a fist around a secret, Nova walked the length of the dock alone. The boards creaked under her feet in all their familiar places. She stood at the end, let the wind lift hair from her neck, and practiced saying goodbye to something without making it a performance. It was harder than any game they’d played.

She detoured to the arts cabin before dinner, as if her feet had been voted on and overruled her head. The room was a museum of temporary things: a paper city gently collapsing in the corner; a mobile of bottle caps turning on an invented breeze; three Polaroids clipped to a string where someone had written GOODBYE, YOU MENACES in glitter glue. On the back table, Victor’s sketchbook sat under a ceramic bat a camper had pressed into being and painted purple. The bat stared at the ceiling with the weary dignity of an object that would be loved until it chipped.

Nova set her bag down, took a breath that itched, and pulled out a piece of paper folded in thirds. It had taken her an hour between lake and lunch to write it in the graveyard peace of her cabin while Addison and Bree argued about whether packing rolled or folded made you a better person. The letter wasn’t long; neither was it a spare part she could have tucked into another sentence and called it a day. It was exactly as long as it needed to be to say everything she was brave enough to say right now.

Victor,

I liked being boring next to you more than I have liked most exciting things in my life.

I know we said slow. I like slow. I like that it makes me listen.

I can’t promise what I’ll be in September, but I can promise that what was true this summer stays true outside of a fire ring. I want the version where I don’t make myself smaller. I want the version where you’re careful with me because you like me, not because you think I’m breakable.

If this is an act we’ve ended, good. We did the right thing. If it isn’t an act anymore, come find me in the quiet ways. I’ll be listening.

— N.

P.S. Send me one drawing when you’re ready. Not the lake. The shore you keep talking about.

She slid the letter under the elastic band on the back cover, tucked in enough that it wouldn’t fly out, not so deep it would be impossible to find. Her hand hovered over the cardboard a second longer, a ridiculous human habit of blessing an object and pretending it would help. Then she stepped back, touched the ceramic bat’s wing for luck (or to apologize), and left before she could change her mind.

The evening stretched itself toward ceremony. Dinner sounded like every table trying to tell every other table a story before the lights went out for the year. Rebecca, glitter dialed down to elegiac, stood on a chair and delivered a speech about safety and love that somehow involved a graph. Eli raised his cup for a toast that was humble and kind. Lila pressed a braid charm into Nova’s hand—tiny, silver, weightless. “For weather,” Lila said. “Yours has been good this week.”

“It has,” Nova agreed, and meant something else, and Lila smiled like she’d heard the second meaning anyway.

The fire ring for Not-Actually-Closing filled without hysteria. Parents hadn’t arrived yet; tomorrow would be chaos. Tonight was the camp’s to keep. People laid blankets. The guitarists tuned in mercy. Someone started a song that everyone knew and the words fell into place because they lived there permanently.

Victor sat two benches away with a cluster of lake staff and arts kids, a cairn built by accidental closeness. He didn’t look for her; he didn’t avoid looking for her; he did what they’d promised: let the room tell its story without stepping into frame. Nova kept to Addison and Bree, their warmth and commentary exactly enough. Every so often the circle shifted, and through three people and a lantern’s worth of shadow she caught him half-smiling at something Rebecca said about raccoon governance. The distance was measured, chosen, kind.

When it came time for “speaks”—the wide-open moment when anyone could stand and say a thing—people were clumsy and perfect. A small camper thanked the lake for not eating her sandal. A counselor confessed he’d learned more about apology from a nine-year-old than four years of student government. Addison stood and said a paragraph that included the word incandescent and the phrase we are not our headlines, and if her eyes were damp, no one mentioned it.

Bree stood and said, “This place taught me the correct order in which to put sunscreen and bug spray. Also that love is just attention with good boundaries. That’s all. I have a reputation to maintain.”

When the circle stilled, Victor got pulled to his feet by three different hands. He shrugged theatrically like a man about to tell a joke and then didn’t. “I came back because I wanted to make sure the water had stayed,” he said simply. “It had. Thank you for letting me become less of a rectangle.” He sat. The laughter he got was warm and baffled and exactly right.

Nova let herself not stand. What she had needed to say was pressed under a band in a sketchbook. The fire didn’t require her voice to believe her.

The last log found its glow. Campers leaned on each other in the artery of the night leading to bed. People who wanted the moment to last began doing that thing where they pretended to look for trash to pick up, just to stay near the light five minutes longer. Nova waited until the ring thinned, then waited one more song’s length. When she finally stood, Victor was already up, carefully letting his orbit intersect Addison and Bree first, as if taking their measure and asking permission to borrow Nova for a moment neither of them would ever say yes or no to out loud.

“Walk?” he asked, in the same tone he’d used the first night they agreed to pretend, softened now by the week they had stopped.

“Yes,” Nova said, and to Addison and Bree: “Save me from any raccoon coups.”

“As if we wouldn’t lead them,” Bree said. “Go.”

They didn’t take the lakeside path. They took the camp’s spine up toward the arts cabin, past the dining hall where chairs were already stacked like a modern art installation about impermanence. Crickets did their bored applause. The sky learned to be full of stars again after a few days of forgetting.

“I put something in your sketchbook,” Nova said before the nerves could reassert their right to the room.

He looked at her, startled, then softened into a kind of gratitude she was beginning to recognize as his truest expression. “Okay.”

They reached the cabin. It still smelled like glue and story. He crossed to the back table, removed the purple bat with reverence, and lifted the sketchbook as if it would bruise. He saw the corner of the letter and touched it like it might be hot.

“Now?” he asked, one eyebrow as polite as his hand.

“Later,” she said. “When you’ve forgotten to expect it.”

He closed the cover like a promise not to cheat. “All right.”

Outside again, the air went cooler, as if to underline the part where the day was ending. They drifted to the short stretch of railing along the cabin’s porch, leaning their elbows side by side, looking out at nothing specific. The lantern at the fork threw their two shadows long without oversight. It felt less like an ending than a pause they could keep living inside if they were gentle.

“Tomorrow is…” Victor started, then let the ellipsis do work.

“Buses,” Nova said. “Chaos. Parents pretending to remember counselor names and saying them slightly wrong, which is a Rayburn tradition.”

“I’ll be at the lake early,” he said, like a weather report. “I’ve got to check lines. Do the thing where the dock learns it has to be brave without us for a while.”

“I have to help Rebecca with sign-outs and glitter management,” she said. “Which are functionally the same job.”

They let the logistics stand for affection for a second. Then he turned his head toward her, not enough to make it a dare, just enough to make it a choice.

“We don’t need to write it for other people,” he said. “What we are. We can let it be… us, and then tell whoever needs telling later.”

She nodded. She’d thought the same line in different clothes all day. “We can be boring and real at the same time,” she said. “We can also be—” she searched for a word that didn’t make her skin crawl—“private.”

He smiled, small and a little wrecked. “I like private with you.”

“Me too.”

They didn’t kiss. The part of her that would always be nineteen in certain places stamped its foot about that. The part of her that had sat in a storm and learned how to breathe a different way knew better. He lifted his hand slowly, and because she’d asked for it last night and not gotten it, and because she could ask again and survive it, she said, “The hands thing. The face.”

He made a sound—relief, gratitude, hunger—short and decent. He set his palms against her jaw like he had practiced it in mercy and now had been given permission to remember. He didn’t tilt or pull. He didn’t move at all, really. He just held her face as if it were a piece of the shoreline he had kept trying to draw and had only now realized he could touch. The heat in his hands was enough to make her eyes want to close; she let them. Everything in her body quieted like a dog being told to wait and deciding to be good because it wanted to be asked again.

“Okay,” she whispered after a few breaths, because boundaries also required language. He let go immediately, the absence like cold water and also like oxygen.

“We’re very stupid,” he said softly, delighted and devastated.

“We’re very good,” she corrected.

He nodded. “Tomorrow I’ll… I’ll not chase you. I’ll do my job. You’ll do yours. We’ll be boring.”

“And then we won’t,” she said, hearing herself be brave. “Later. Not here.”

“Not here,” he agreed.

They walked to the fork and stopped in the ordinary spot where dozens of small decisions had been made. The lantern creaked like a joke it refused to retire. They looked at each other full-on, eyes open to what they were not yet taking.

“Good night,” he said, not hiding in it.

“Good night,” she said back, and added, because the letter’s P.S. had taught her she wanted to ask for things: “Find me. After.”

“I will,” he said, and made it sound like a plan rather than faith.

She turned uphill and didn’t look back, because the only thing worse than an ache is making it theatrical. The cabin welcomed her with the mess of leaving, the smell of slept-in sheets, the two girls who had become sisters by proximity and relentless affection. Addison sat with a Sharpie and a stack of Polaroids like an archivist who believed in glitter. Bree had converted a shoe box into a vault for things that needed saving.

“You’re glowing,” Addison observed, casual as weather.

“It’s the fire,” Nova said. She set her bag down and took out the braid charm Lila had pressed into her palm and put it on the windowsill beside the helpless bracelet, letting old and new sit together without fighting.

Sleep came because she’d earned it. When the morning came, it was trumpets and buses and last-minute hugs and a postal service of letters folded into triangles and passed like contraband. Nova stood behind the sign-out table with Rebecca and hugged campers and parents in equal measure and said she would miss them in ways that sounded identical and meant different things and both were true.

Across the yard, Victor became logistics and calm. He lifted a canoe to help a parent see that yes, their child’s water bottle had been under it all along, imagine that. He took a stack of envelopes from a kid who said please deliver these to the lake, which made no sense and also did.

They didn’t find each other in the chaos. That felt like discipline and mercy. At the very end, when the last bus pulled out and left behind a flat quiet that made even the dock nervous, Nova walked up to the arts cabin one more time, just to put her hand on the doorframe. On the back table, the sketchbook wasn’t there. Good. It was where it needed to be: with him.

Back in the cabin, she did the last job: checking the corners for small lives left behind. She found a sock that had lost its twin and a note that said THANK YOU FOR SAVING MY BRACELET WHEN IT FELL IN THE TOILET, which she carefully did not keep. She made her bunk into a flat plane that told no stories. She closed the windows against a future storm because the present one had already finished.

When she walked out, bag over her shoulder, Addison and Bree flanked her like bookends.

“Home?” Addison asked, voice both eager and reluctant.

“For now,” Nova said.

Bree linked their elbows. “For now is our specialty.”

They reached the hilltop where the gate framed the lake like a postcard someone had creased and smoothed so many times the paper had learned to forgive it. Nova stopped and let her throat tighten without shame. The dock looked smaller without people on it; the water looked larger the way it always did when it didn’t have to hold anyone up.

Behind her, footsteps paused. She didn’t turn. She didn’t need to know whether it was him. The letter under the sketchbook band already knew it would be read. The version of her that had sat in candlelight and asked for what she wanted already knew she’d done the bravest part.

“Ready?” Addison asked, gentle.

“Yeah,” Nova said, and meant: I’ll be back.

They walked through the arch and into the kind of day that pretends not to be an ending. The lake held its light like a secret. Somewhere, in a bag that was not hers, a letter waited to be unfolded.

Chapter Text

The week after camp moved like a tide turned sideways. Time didn’t pass; it nodded at her from doorways. Nova slept like a person who’d been running at a polite speed for a month and finally got to sit. She went back to the job that paid for groceries and the kind of coffee Victor always made too hot. She did the good, boring things: answered emails, watered a plant that forgave her immediately, put the bracelet in a dish on her dresser and let it be nothing more than a circle of metal and a story with an ending.

On Wednesday a padded envelope arrived, his name in small, careful print in the corner. No return address—of course. She took it to the kitchen, ignored it while she wiped a nonexistent crumb from the counter, then gave up the illusion and slit it open.

A single sheet. Thick paper, the kind that smells faintly like money and art. Graphite in strokes she knew now, lines that didn’t force a scene to behave but coaxed it into telling the truth. Not the lake.

The shore.

Not dramatic. A strip of land and the way water eats at it and is made for it. Grass bent by wind enough to talk about it. The little stutter where waves meet sand. A rock, set back just enough to count as a decision. The whole drawing held a small, steady hum, like a candle learning the room.

At the bottom he’d written, in tiny letters like a secret that wasn’t trying to hide: For weather.

Nova stood very still and let the picture tell her what she already knew. She took a photo and did not post it anywhere and sent it to him anyway with two words: It’s us.

The three bubbles appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again. Yeah, he wrote. Then: Friday?

He sent an address. Not a cafe. Not a halfway corner. B—Victor’s place.

She said yes before the part of her that still liked refusing could make a joke.

Friday arrived in the way Fridays do, wearing ordinary clothes and carrying small mercy. Nova took the later train because that made the day feel like a decision instead of a rush. She looked out at the small theater of other people’s lives sliding by and didn’t rehearse the reunion into a monologue. The station near his place was two stops past a park she’d been to as a kid, which felt like a practical omen. She walked the last six blocks because she had room for air.

His building was the kind you only notice once you need it: three stories, sensible brick, small front stoop blushing with late summer geraniums. The intercom was a metal rectangle with ambitions. His name wasn’t on it; his apartment number was. She pressed the button and heard the little static of being expected.

“Hey,” his voice said, and a grain of static turned it into something private. “Come on up.” The lock sang. The door gave.

The stairwell smelled like old paint and a neighbor’s curry. His door was at the end of the second landing, white the way ceilings are white, a small brass 3C that had been polished by accident more than intention. Before she could lift her hand to knock, it swung open.

He looked the same and not. Summer had moved out of his cheeks and into his eyes. He was barefoot; the floor under his feet looked like wood that remembered other tenants and forgave them all. For a second they did the polite thing, because this wasn’t the dock and there were corners where neighbors could appear and make this into a hallway scene. They smiled like people who had found each other on purpose. The space between them didn’t know whether to be a distance or a welcome.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi,” he said back, and when he stepped aside to make room for her to pass, his hand didn’t touch her back; it hovered because rules are a way of loving a person the way they asked.

His place was exactly his. Not the curated version people invent when they’re staging a life for strangers, but the comfortable mess of someone who uses his things. A small couch with an old blanket thrown over one arm. A low shelf with plants doing their best. A desk by the window with a sketchbook open to a clean page and a ceramic purple bat keeping it from wandering. A mug with graphite prints where fingers had insisted on holding it wrong. On the wall, four frames: not his drawings. Old concert posters. A postcard with the lake just visible in the corner like a shy friend.

He watched her look and didn’t narrate it. “Water?” he offered, the exact domestic gambit she’d missed without knowing.

“Yes, please,” she said, because small choices were a way of practicing bigger ones.

In the kitchen—more of an alcove that had decided to host appliances—they passed each other in that choreography people learn when they’ve cooked together once and then never forget. He opened a cabinet; she reached for a glass; he let her take the one that wasn’t the chipped one because she had already learned he kept his own small disasters on purpose. He poured. The sound of it filled the room with a mercy that had nothing to do with thirst.

“We don’t have to talk about camp like it’s the only language we share,” he said, setting the glass in her hand and letting go at exactly the moment that made it feel intentional instead of performed.

“We can anyway,” she replied, because honesty didn’t require novelty. “Your drawing—” She nodded toward the rolled paper sticking up from her tote. “I wanted to frame it. Then I got nervous about who I’d be if I started curating a wall around one truth.”

“You can be the kind of person who puts one thing up and waits,” he said, and she saw New Rule Eight writing itself inside her chest: Wait when it matters.

They moved to the couch. He chose the opposite corner first, as if giving her the room to change her mind. She didn’t. She left the space between them like an empty plate at dinner: planned for. The window looked out onto a sycamore that had maybe owned the block in a previous life. A breeze came through the screen and touched the sweaty back of her neck with friend hands.

“What did your week do?” he asked.

“Pretended it wasn’t about you,” she said lightly, and then—because light shouldn’t be a way to hide—“I missed you without narrating it. It felt like a muscle I was stretching for the first time.”

His mouth did the small tilt that meant joy had arrived without making a scene. “Same.”

They told each other small news. Bree had secured a job writing copy for a nonprofit and had started describing everything as “impactful” while practicing her disdain face in the mirror. Addison had cried at a cardigan in a store because it was “camp-colored” and then bought it and called it her winter therapy. Lila had texted Nova a photo of a braid she’d done herself with the caption: nailed it (don’t tell gravity), and Nova had sent back ten exclamation points and the humble-brag of a tutorial video.

He told her about his neighbor, an elderly man who practiced clarinet every evening at seven and sounded like a train deciding whether to stop. He told her about coffee at the corner that claimed to be single-origin and tasted like hot optimism. He told her he’d gone to the art store and stood in front of the good paper for twelve minutes like he was staring at a precipice, and then bought one pad and went home and didn’t draw for an hour, and then did.

They didn’t rush the part where the room had to remember their bodies were in it. When it arrived it didn’t announce itself; it slid in like the breeze. He angled his knees toward her. She tucked her foot under her thigh and let her shin rest against the cushion just close enough to register heat. He looked at her hands the way he had on the dock—to know where they were, not to take anything. She breathed in time with the sycamore’s shadow moving against the wall and thought: We could spend an entire afternoon doing exactly this and call it huge.

“Read it?” she asked, before fear could edit the question. “The letter.”

He nodded once, solemn, like she’d asked him to confirm he still believed in gravity. “In the kitchen,” he said. “Standing up, because I didn’t trust a chair.”

“And?” she asked, even though she’d asked everything she needed to say inside that folded paper.

“And I stood there for ten minutes after,” he said, “staring at my sink, which did not object at all, and I felt the exact size of my chest for the first time in a long time. And then I said ‘okay’ out loud like a person agreeing with themselves, and then I went to the art store and bought paper.”

She laughed because her body needed the relief of it. He laughed too, because laughter had always been a hand they could hold without anyone getting hurt.

“Can I see your sink?” she said, and they both cracked up, and the room learned them a little better.

They didn’t kiss, not yet, because they were good at making their bodies wait for a thing so that when they did it, it would be a decision and not a reaction. They sat until shadows sketched across the living room like graphite confused about perspective. He got up once to close the window when the breeze decided to bring the neighbor’s clarinet. He came back and didn’t sit yet; he stood at the end of the couch and looked at her like he could see the version of her that had done hard things on purpose and was proud.

“Can I—” he started, then caught himself and restarted with the whole sentence. “I’d like to take you to dinner. Not as a performance. Not as a joke. Just… food, public, my face across from yours while neither of us pretends we’re doing a bit.”

She looked at him, the directness landing in her like warm rain. “Yes,” she said. “Right now?”

“Later,” he said immediately, and the way he said it was a promise to every one of her nerves. “Tonight I want to… be here with you and not give it away to a waiter and a room and a bill.”

“That was almost poetic,” she teased.

“I’m very literary when I’m overwhelmed,” he admitted.

“Then be overwhelmed over here,” she said, shifting a little toward the center cushion—not an invitation to cross the distance; an invitation to be close to the fact that there was distance and they were choosing it until they didn’t.

He sat again, close enough that if she moved her hand it would find his knee. She didn’t. She let the near-ness do the work. They watched the sycamore move and didn’t talk for a full minute, because silence between two people who like each other is an expensive thing and they were rich tonight.

“Ask me the firelight question,” he said quietly, surprising them both. “If you still want to.”

The world fell away a little, in the safe way. The neighbor’s clarinet started sawing its way through a scale downstairs and somehow made it better. The question lived in her mouth like a coin she’d been keeping for weeks: If we weren’t here… what would you do to me right now? But they were here. The exciting part was that here meant his couch, her yes, their rules.

“We’re here,” she said instead. “What do you want to do to me right now?”

He let the truth collect itself. He didn’t hurry. When he looked at her, his eyes were exactly the color they always were; they just seemed closer, because she’d let them be. “I want to put my hands on your face,” he said, like an oath he’d learned by heart. “Ask you twice. And then kiss you like we have time.”

She didn’t need to ask him to repeat it. She didn’t need to test whether her body would panic or make a joke. She had brought herself into this room knowing what she wanted and that wanting it wasn’t a moral failure. She nodded once, slow, permission landed and made warm.

“Ask,” she said.

He did. “Can I?”

“Yes,” she said.

He didn’t move. He breathed. “Are you sure?”

“Yes,” she said, and the second yes was easier—the thing that happens when you keep a promise to yourself out loud.

He lifted his hands and set them on her face, exactly as lightly as he had on the porch under the camp’s small star system, exactly as deliberately. The weight of them was a word she didn’t know how to spell: here. He didn’t tilt her. He didn’t pull. He waited for her to move into the space between them so he wouldn’t mistake momentum for consent.

She did. A fraction, a breath, a learned trust turned into action. The first press of his mouth was not a performance or a triumph. It was a recognition: I know you. Warmth traveled along her jaw like a memory finally allowed to wear skin. He tasted like mint and something summer had left behind. He was careful the way he’d promised, which didn’t mean timid; it meant he paid attention, which had always been the thing that made her feel most like a person.

They didn’t rush to be cinematic. The kiss stayed close and sure, a sentence spoken in present tense. When they parted, it was by mutual decision, not because the moment had run out. He rested his forehead against hers and laughed once, that small, wrecked relief laugh that had become her favorite sound.

“Understatement,” he murmured, then groaned at himself. “I’m banned from that word.”

She smiled against his breath. “It’s obvious,” she corrected, and he made a small sound that was almost a thank-you and almost a prayer.

They sat back just enough to see each other, faces close enough for honesty to be the only sensible language. His thumb, treacherous and reverent, drew one absent line along her cheekbone like he was checking a sketch against the original. She let him, then turned her head and put her mouth to the base of his thumb in a kiss so small it might have been invented just for them.

“Are we…” he began, and trailed off, because labels had always been the least interesting part to both of them and the most dangerous when applied too soon.

“We’re us,” she said. “And we can tell people later.”

He nodded, like it was the best name he’d ever heard. “I’ll… take you to dinner tomorrow,” he said, bright with the mundane joy of plans. “We’ll be boring in public.”

“And then not boring in private,” she said, straight-faced, and he made a face like she’d pushed him down a small hill and he liked it.

The neighbor’s clarinet found a tune that could almost pass for something on purpose. The sycamore went on with its personal drama. The evening settled around them like a quilt someone’s grandmother had stitched with precise hands. They talked about nothing for a while because that’s how you test whether the kiss broke anything crucial. It hadn’t. It had, if anything, repaired a piece she hadn’t realized was cracked.

When she stood at last to leave, the sky out his window had gone the color of last pages. He walked her to the door, because chivalry is just logistics with nicer manners. She put her shoes on and he did not help; she didn’t need help. On the threshold, they looked at each other like teenagers pretending not to be, and then like adults who had decided to keep the parts of teenage that didn’t hurt.

“Find me,” she said, out of habit, and laughed, because he had.

“I will,” he said, like always, and then: “And you—find me back.”

“Deal,” she said.

He kissed her once more—quick, sure, a punctuation mark that refused to be a period. She went down the stairs with her hand on the rail, light and deliberate, and out into a street that smelled like hot pavement giving up the day. The sky had a few brave stars finding their places early. On the train she took the drawing out and looked at it again, the shore he’d promised her—complicated, faithful, a line you couldn’t draw without deciding where to stand.

At home she leaned the paper against a plant and looked at her blank wall and didn’t hurry. She put the bracelet back in its dish without ceremony. She opened her notebook and turned to the page after Rule Seven. She waited. Then she let her pen write one clear line without joking at all:

8. Make it real in the quiet ways.
   
   

She set the pen down, turned off the lamp, and lay in the kind of dark that doesn’t ask for a performance. The room felt like a shore. Somewhere, her phone buzzed. One text.

Tomorrow at six. There’s a place with terrible napkins and perfect soup. I’ll hold the boring and you hold the honest. We’ll switch if we need to.

She smiled into the pillow like a person who had decided what to do with the next inch of her life. Copy that, she wrote back. Bring a rock.

The lake would always be there, drawn right for once. The shoreline would change like honest things do. The door she’d spent all summer standing beside was open and did not require an audience to walk through. She did.