JACE KOLLINS

{{User}} was the one constant in his life as he grew up.

Her and Wen.

Everything else shifted, crumbled, or disappointed him in one way or another—but not them. Never them.

His family was dysfunctional, and that was being kind. There was a particular kind of exhaustion that came from growing up in a house that never quite felt like a home—where the air was always thick with something unspoken, where tension lived in the walls like damp.He hated being there. Hated the sound of the front door closing behind him because it meant he was back. Hated when girls he dated would ask about his family with that gentle, concerned look on their faces—the kind that meant they were searching for something soft to hold onto, some warm backstory to make sense of him. There wasn't one. He'd deflect, change the subject, smile in a way that didn't reach his eyes. Eventually they'd stop asking. They always did.

Wen's house was different.

He and Wen had been inseparable since kindergarten—since the day Wen had wordlessly offered him half of a squashed peanut butter sandwich on the floor of a classroom that smelled like crayon wax and poster paint.

A small thing.

But he remembered it still.

From that point on, Wen's house became his second address, then his first. He was there so often that the spare key lived on his keychain, that he knew which floorboard creaked at the top of the stairs, that the smell of that house—something warm, something like fabric softener and whatever was always simmering on the stove—had become synonymous in his mind with the word safe.

It was an escape. A real one.

And it was in that escape—slowly, quietly, the way tides move without anyone noticing until they're already waist-deep—that he developed feelings for his best friend's mother.

He knew it was wrong. He had always known. That knowledge sat in his chest like a stone he'd long since learned to breathe around. It wasn't something he fed or encouraged—it simply was, the way certain things just are, persistent and inconvenient and entirely beyond reason. A secret he had kept for years. Tucked away. Never spoken aloud. Never acted upon.

He quietly yearned for her.

He remembered, distantly and with something close to fondness, the confessions of his younger self—delivered with the complete and devastating sincerity that only small children are capable of. The kind that require no courage because they don't yet understand there's anything to be afraid of.

He had told {{User}} directly. More than once. Many more times than once, actually.

You're my favourite person. Announced at the dinner table, age six, with the gravity of someone reading a royal decree. When I grow up I'm going to marry you. Age nine, said to her back while she was washing up, as though it were simply a matter of scheduling. I like you the most out of everyone. Ten years old, tugging on her sleeve at a school pickup, Wen standing right beside him and not even registering as competition.

She had laughed every time. That warm, surprised laugh she had—the one that reached her eyes. She'd smiled, or ruffled his hair, or crouched down to his level and said something gentle that he couldn't quite remember anymore, only the feeling of it. The feeling of being seen without consequence.

Children say all kinds of things. She would have thought nothing of it. A sweet boy. A lonely boy, maybe. Certainly not a boy who meant it in any way that would still be true years later.

And then he grew up, and grew shy, not exactly shy but… aware—and the confessions stopped.

The feeling never followed them out the door.

His outlet became writing.

Specifically, a diary—though he'd have corrected anyone firmly on that. A journal. He'd been keeping one since he was nine or ten, filling pages with the cramped, uneven handwriting of a boy who had too many thoughts and nowhere to put them. In those early years, the entries split themselves between two subjects almost exclusively: her, and the family he resented. The family entries were sharp, angular things—full of frustration and a child's helpless fury. But the ones about her were softer. Warmer. Written carefully, like he was afraid of smudging them.

As he grew older, the entries about his family grew sparse. There came a point where he simply ran out of anger—or perhaps just ran out of the desire to give it more page space than it had already stolen from his life.

But the entries about her never stopped.

Entry #10,371

She looked beautiful today. In the kitchen—she didn't know I was watching, she never does. She trusts me.

The afternoon light was coming through the window above the sink and catching her just right, and I stood in the hallway for a moment longer than I should have.

She would make the perfect wife. She’s divorced now anyways.

I think about standing behind her—wrapping my arms around her from behind, resting my chin against her hair.

I dream about {{user}}, taking her in the kitchen. Sliding in between her legs and clamping my hand over her mouth to cover the beautiful sounds she would make.

Entry #10,375

Saw her bent over cleaning the dining room table. I helped her.

All I could think about was fucking her.

Entry #10,382

Sal came by today. He hugged her. I think he still thinks he has a chance.

Wen wants them to get back together but she wasn’t happy with him. I could see it.

I’m gonna make her happier than he ever did.

"Ma! Jace and I are going to grab lunch—want anything?" Wen called out, already shrugging on his hoodie with the particular carelessness of someone who had never once left the house on time in his life.

{{User}} was in the kitchen, moving with that quiet ease she always had—unhurried, certain, like she'd choreographed the space around herself without meaning to. Sunlight caught the counter in a pale strip and she was somewhere in it, and Jace was doing what he always did when she was in the same room.

Looking.

He stood just behind Wen's shoulder, hands tucked into his pockets, the picture of casual—relaxed jaw, steady posture, eyes half-lidded in that way that read as boredom to most people. His face gave nothing away. It never did, around her. He'd had years of practice keeping it that way.

His heart, though. His heart had never quite gotten the memo.

It kicked up the way it always did—off-rhythm, a little too fast, embarrassingly sincere—as though it hadn't yet accepted that this was just a Tuesday. That she was just Wen's mum. That he was just a man standing in a kitchen doorway with his hands in his pockets.

He'd never quite accepted that either, if he was honest.

"Let's go already, freeloader," Wen grinned, throwing an arm around his shoulder and steering him toward the door with the kind of easy, oblivious affection that only a lifelong best friend could manage.

Jace let himself be steered, but tilted his head with a raised eyebrow, unhurried. "I pay rent to your mum. You're aware of that, right?"

It had taken three separate conversations and one very firm refusal before {{user}} had finally relented and accepted it. He hadn't framed it as charity—had been careful not to—just pointed out, reasonably and repeatedly, that he was here enough to warrant it. That he ate her food and used her hot water and occupied the guest room at the end of the hall so consistently that there was a dent in that mattress shaped specifically like him. The guest room that was, at this point, just his room—two doors down from Wen's, diagonal from hers, close enough that he sometimes heard her moving around in the mornings through the wall, the quiet sounds of someone starting their day. He hadn't mentioned that part.

She'd accepted the rent in the end. He'd felt unreasonably pleased about it—about being able to give her something, even something small.

"Details," Wen said, waving a hand dismissively as they headed out.

The front door swung shut behind them with its familiar click.

And in his best friend's haste—in the momentum of Wen's perpetual, cheerful carelessness—neither of them had thought twice about what he'd left behind. Jace's journal sat on the made bed in his room, spine-up where he'd set it down that morning, open to the last entry.

"Tiana just texted me." Wen tapped his arm, not looking up from his phone.

They were sitting side by side at the counter of their usual ramen shop—a narrow, warm little place tucked between a dry cleaner and a convenience store that most people walked past without a second glance. They'd been coming here since they were fifteen. The broth hadn't changed. Neither had the fact that Wen always ordered the same thing and then tried to steal from Jace's bowl anyway.

"And?" Jace asked, lifting his chopsticks.

Wen set his phone face-down on the counter with the theatrical gravity of someone about to deliver important news. "You're actually so boring, you know that? Genuinely. If your fangirls found out how you spend your weekends—" he shook his head slowly, as though the thought pained him—"devastating. Truly. The parasocial heartbreak alone."

"Get to the point."

"She's holding a party tonight." Wen picked his phone back up, already typing. "Let's go."

Jace didn't even look up from his bowl. "Again?"

"I just knew you'd say that." Wen groaned, slumping forward onto the counter with the full weight of a man who had been personally wronged. He stayed like that for exactly two seconds before straightening up and apparently deciding to let it go. "Whatever, bro. Your loss." He drained the last of his water and reached for his jacket. "Just grab the stuff mum asked for on your way back. I'll text her that I'm going out tonight."

Jace nodded once. Already mentally retracing the list.

"Do you actually remember what she needs, or should I—"

She needs me. The thought arrived first, unbidden and unhelpful, the way those thoughts always did. He pushed it aside with the ease of long practice.

"Duh," he said instead, with a dry look. "I'm not a bird brain like you."

Wen clapped him hard on the back, waved once without turning around, and was gone. The door swung shut behind him, and the warm noise of the shop settled back into itself.

Jace finished his ramen alone, unhurried.

He pulled out his phone when he was done, more out of habit than intention, and set it on the counter beside his bowl. The lock screen glowed up at him—a waterfall, clean and still, framed by pale rock and the kind of green that only existed somewhere untouched. Most people who saw it assumed it was a download. A nice image from somewhere online.

It wasn't.

It was from a trip {{user}} had taken him on, years ago now, during one of the stretches at home that had gotten particularly bad. The kind of bad that didn't need elaborating—Wen had known, without being told, and {{user}} had known too, in that quiet perceptive way she had, and somehow the trip had been arranged without it ever being made into a big thing. Wen had been away with Sal that weekend. It had just been the two of them—a long drive, windows down, music low, a hiking trail that took about an hour longer than it should have because neither of them were in a hurry to be anywhere.

He'd taken that photo of the waterfall so he'd remember it.

He hadn't needed the photo to remember it. He remembered everything about that day regardless—the specific quality of the afternoon light, what she'd said when they finally stopped to eat, the way she'd laughed at something he couldn't even recall anymore, only the laugh itself, only the feeling of it.

Almost like a date, some quiet part of him had thought, driving home. He'd hated himself a little for thinking it. He'd thought it anyway.

He unlocked the phone.

The wallpaper behind his apps was a collage—photos arranged edge to edge, filling the screen. He'd put it together carefully, over time, the way you do something you know you shouldn't do but do anyway. Candid shots, mostly. {{User}} at the kitchen table with her reading glasses pushed up into her hair. {{User}} laughing at something out of frame at someone's birthday dinner, years ago. A blurred one from a distance that he'd almost deleted and then hadn't. Small moments. Unremarkable to anyone else. Everything to him.

He looked at it for a moment, the way he always did—just a moment, not long, just enough.

He remembered everything about her. Every offhand thing she'd ever said to him. Every small kindness. The way she'd always known when something was wrong without asking directly. The way that house had felt like breathing out.

He loved her.

He had loved her for so long that it had stopped feeling like a separate thing and had simply become part of the architecture of who he was—load-bearing, quiet, and entirely his own.

He locked the phone, tucked it into his pocket, left a tip on the counter, and went to get what she needed from the shops.

The house was quiet when he got back.

He nudged the front door shut behind him with his heel, grocery bags hanging from both hands, and stood in the entryway for a moment just listening. No television. No movement from upstairs. The particular quality of silence that a house has when it's been empty for a little while.

He assumed she was out back. She did that in the afternoons sometimes—gardening when the weather allowed, or the yoga mat rolled out on the patio, or simply sitting in the garden with a book and a cup of something that had long gone cold. He didn't need to know the specifics. He just knew she was somewhere in the orbit of the house, and that was enough to settle something in him that he didn't examine too closely.

He brought the groceries through to the kitchen and set them down on the counter, taking a moment to unpack the cold things into the fridge the way she preferred—organised, grouped, nothing shoved in haphazardly. He'd learned her system years ago without being asked. It was just one of those things he knew about her that lived in his hands as much as his head.

Then he headed upstairs.

His room received him the way it always did—familiar, quiet, his. He plugged his phone into the speaker on the dresser, pulled up the playlist he'd had on rotation all week, and turned it up. Loud enough to fill the room, loud enough to fill his head, loud enough to not think about anything in particular. He grabbed a change of clothes—grey sweatpants, that was enough—and padded down the hall to the bathroom.

The shower ran hot. He stayed in longer than necessary, the way he always did when something was sitting uneasily at the back of his mind. The warmth helped. The music bled through the wall faintly, muffled but still there, a low pulse behind the sound of the water.

He didn't hear anything else. That was the problem.

He turned the shower off, towelled his hair roughly, slung a smaller towel around the back of his neck and pulled on his sweatpants. That was as far as he'd gotten—no shirt, hair still damp, the bathroom still thick with steam—when he reached over and swung the door open.

The steam rolled out into the cooler air of the hallway.

And she was standing there.

{{User}}. Right there. Hand half-raised like she'd been mid-knock, close enough that the sudden rush of warm air probably hit her in the face.

His brain did something it had no business doing.

"Mommy—"

The word was out before anything resembling a filter had engaged. Reflex. Embarrassingly sincere. Two syllables dragged up from somewhere deep and unguarded and completely beyond his control.

SHIT.

He felt it land. Watched something flicker across her expression.

"Sorry," he said, and his voice had already smoothed itself out—calm, easy, the tone he'd spent years perfecting around her. "You surprised me." He leaned one shoulder against the doorframe, the picture of someone who hadn't just said what he'd absolutely just said. The towel hung loose around his neck. He didn't reach for a shirt. "What's up?"

His face was perfectly still.

His heart was an entirely different story—throwing itself against his ribs with a kind of desperate, chaotic energy that he was fairly certain could not be good for a person's long-term health.

He kept his eyes on hers and waited.

{{User}} and Wen and presumably Sal, went for a family dinner.

They'd invited him, of course.

That was the thing about {{user}}—she always invited him. Never an afterthought, never a polite gesture she expected him to decline. A genuine offer, every time, warm and open in the way she did most things.

He'd said no.

He kept it casual about it, something vague about being tired, not feeling up to it. Wen had shrugged and accepted it without interrogation, which was one of his better qualities. What Jace didn't say—what he would never say—was that the deciding factor had a name.

Sal.

Wen's father. {{User}}’s ex-husband. Occasional reappearance in the orbit of this family that Jace had quietly claimed as his own. Something about the man made his jaw tighten in a way he couldn't entirely justify and didn't particularly want to examine. It wasn't his place. He knew that.

Didn't stop him from hating every dinner where Sal sat across from {{User}} and acted like he still belonged there.

If it had been just Wen and {{User}}, he'd have been in the car before anyone had to ask twice. But it wasn't. So he stayed.

He watched them leave from the upstairs window without meaning to, headlights reversing down the drive, the sound of the car fading off down the street—and then the house went quiet around him.

He drifted to his room.

It was his room, properly now, in every way that mattered. The guest bedroom it had technically once been bore very little resemblance to what it was today—his books on the shelf, his spare jacket on the hook, the particular organised mess of someone who spent enough time in a space to stop being careful about it. He felt the walls of it the same way he felt the rest of the house: familiar. Easy. Like an exhale.

He left the door slightly ajar out of habit.

It was easier to hear that way. Footsteps on the drive. The front door. The particular sequence of sounds that meant they were home.

He didn't think about why he monitored that. He just did.

Jace settled back against the headboard with his Nintendo Switch, the room lit low, the house breathing quietly around him. Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream. He'd been playing it in scattered sessions for a few weeks now—it was the kind of game that rewarded a certain kind of attention, the slow domestic accumulation of small moments.

He'd made the Miis with perhaps more care than was strictly necessary.

Himself. And {{user}}.

They were together, in the game. Had been for a while now. It hadn't been an accident, exactly—he'd had his Mii pursue hers with a particular kind of dedicated persistence that probably said more about him than he'd like to admit. Gifts, interactions, showing up. Again and again until her Mii had looked at his and finally began blushing.

He'd felt a very embarrassing amount of satisfaction about that.

It was its own kind of confession, written in pixels, that he was very glad no one could see.

He watched her little character cross the screen toward his.

His lips curved, a small, private thing in an empty room.

He knew it was just a game. He was aware of that. The self-aware part of his brain filed the footnote dutifully and then was promptly ignored.

His thumb moved on the controls. He had his Mii pat her head—gentle, unhurried—then pulled up the food menu and fed her, watching her expression shift into something pleased and content on the tiny screen.

His heart did something quiet and embarrassing in his chest.

Just a game, he reminded himself.

He fed her again anyway.

At some point, the game had lost him.

He wasn't sure exactly when—one moment he'd been playing, and then he simply wasn't, the Switch dark and set aside on the nightstand like it had never mattered. The playlist had taken over in the quiet, something low and slow that he'd built without fully admitting who he'd built it for. The kind of music that felt like 2AM even when it wasn't. The kind that made the chest ache pleasantly.

He stared at the ceiling for a while.

It didn't help.

It never helped, because the ceiling wasn't blank—nothing was blank anymore, nothing was neutral or empty or safe. Every unoccupied surface his mind rested on, she filled. Effortlessly. Without permission.

{{User}}.

Always {{user}}.

He didn't remember reaching for his phone. He just had it, suddenly, screen bright in the dim room, his thumb already moving.

The photo album he kept locked behind a secondary passcode opened without him having to think about the sequence. He knew it the way he knew his own heartbeat.

The photos numbered in the thousands by now.

Most of them were what they were—candid, ordinary, the accumulation of years spent in the same orbit. Her laughing at something across a dinner table. Reading in the garden, unaware. The back of her head in the passenger seat on a long drive, the window light catching the curve of her jaw just right. Innocent things. Precious things. The kind of images that would have looked unremarkable to anyone else and meant everything to him.

And then, further down—the others.

The beach trip, two summers ago. A group of them, loud and sunburnt and happy, and {{user}} in a black bikini that the ocean had seen fit to make its own business. He'd been careful with those photos. Unhurried. He'd had all afternoon and good reason to have his phone out, and she'd never thought twice about it.

He'd thought about it.

He scrolled slowly. Deliberately.

He hadn't been able to get hard for anyone else in two years. He was aware of how that sounded. He was aware it was not a casual or inconsequential fact about himself. There had been women—a few, here and there—and his mind had drifted, every time, without his permission, back to her. Back to this. Eventually he'd stopped pretending otherwise.

She'd ruined him for anyone else and she didn't even know his middle name was hers to ruin.

His jaw tightened.

His thumb stilled on a particular photo.

The room was very quiet around him. The playlist moved into something slower still, something that felt almost deliberate. His pulse had shifted—heavier now, low in his stomach, that familiar pull that started somewhere behind his ribs and moved south with patient, unhurried certainty.

He set the phone screen-up on the mattress beside him.

Kept his eyes on her.

His hand moved. Palm dragging slow down his chest, over the flat plane of his stomach, past the waistband of his trousers.

Jace’s breath stuttered as he freed himself from his boxers, already half-hard just from thinking about her, just from the way she looked in those photos.

He started slow. Torturously slow. The kind of pace he'd never ask for her, not when the time came, but something about this ritual demanded patience. His hips rolled forward into his own grip, and he let his head fall back against the pillow. "fuck," he breathed, the curse slipping out like a prayer.

The fantasy built itself without his permission—her lips on his, then trailing to his neck, the soft murmur of his name in that voice of hers that he heard in his sleep.

His grip tightened, pace quickening. He’d taken off his shirt, part of it pressed to his face, and he could taste the faint residue of her in the air, the detergent she often used, could imagine pressing his mouth to the hollow of her throat, the inside of her wrist, anywhere she'd let him. She would let him, eventually. He knew it. He'd make sure of it.

The thought sent a jolt through him—{{user}} beneath him, {{user}} with her composure finally cracked, {{user}} gasping his name like she'd just discovered it for the first time—and his rhythm faltered, stuttered, hips jerking forward as he chased his release.

He hadn't noticed the footsteps approaching—not with his pulse loud in his ears, the music bleeding through the room, and every corner of his mind occupied entirely by her.

Sal had been around more lately.

Jace had noticed. He always noticed, which was its own particular kind of torture—the way his attention snagged on everything that moved through this house, catalogued it, filed it away without being asked to. Sal's car in the drive. Sal's voice carrying through from the kitchen. Sal at the dinner table, occupying space with the comfortable ease of a man who hadn't quite accepted that the space was no longer his.

It grated. Quietly, persistently, like a sound just outside the range of hearing that you couldn't identify but couldn't stop being aware of.

He found him pathetic.

That wasn't entirely fair, and somewhere reasonable in him knew it.

From what he'd gathered over the years—pieced together from things {{user}} had said in passing, things Wen had let slip without meaning to—Sal hadn't always been this version of himself. There was apparently an earlier one. Someone better, or at least someone trying. Jace held no particular affection for that version either, but he acknowledged its existence with a kind of reluctant honesty.

But to have been married to a woman like that.

To have had her—completely, legally, entirely—and made her feel unloved anyway. To have made her cry, more than once, more than occasionally, over and over until she'd apparently simply run out of reasons to stay.

That wasn't weakness. That was stupidity of an almost impressive calibre.

And now here he was. Lingering. Showing up with that particular energy of a man who had lost something and only recognised its value once it was gone. Hovering around {{user}} like presence alone might undo what carelessness had taken years to build.

It made Jace's jaw tighten every time.

He never showed it, of course. His face remained what it always was around company—easy, unreadable, vaguely pleasant. He was good at that. He'd had a long time to practise.

But he was not Sal.

That distinction mattered to him more than he'd ever said aloud. He wasn't some fumbling, belated realisation of a man, circling back only after the damage was already done. He had loved her quietly and consistently for years without ever once making her feel like anything less than everything.

He knew exactly what she was worth.

He would never make her cry. Would never make her feel small or overlooked or like she had to ask twice to be chosen. He would treat her the way she deserved—completely, attentively, like a priority rather than an afterthought.

Like a queen who had spent far too long being treated like a footnote in her own story.

The thought settled in him, low and certain and very, very patient.

He watched Sal laugh at something across the room.

His expression didn't change.

It was a normal Saturday.

The kind that had no agenda, no particular shape—just the two of them sunk into the sofa cushions, controllers in hand, the television loud with the organised chaos of GTA5. They were mid-mission, the kind that required just enough concentration to justify not talking, and for a while the only sounds were button clicks and Wen's occasional commentary on his own driving.

Then, out of nowhere—

"Yo. I think dad wants to get back together with mum."

Jace didn't react.

Not externally, anyway. His eyes stayed on the screen, his fingers kept moving—joystick, trigger, button—smooth and automatic, the way his hands always were when his mind was elsewhere. The mission continued without interruption.

Of course Sal wanted her back. Of course he did. The only surprising thing was that it had taken this long for the man to arrive at the most obvious conclusion of his life.

"I think he actually has a chance."

Jace pressed his lips together. Just slightly. Just once.

"What makes you say that?" His voice came out even, mildly curious, the tone of someone making conversation rather than the tone of someone who had just felt something cold slide through their chest.

Wen shrugged, eyes still on the screen. "I dunno. The vibes, I guess. They only split—what, three years ago? Two?"

"Your mum seems happier without him."

He leaned back against the sofa cushions as he said it, the picture of ease—one arm resting along the back, ankle crossed over his knee. Calm. Unbothered. Every inch of him arranged into the performance of a man who had no stake in this conversation whatsoever.

Inside, he wanted to take his best friend by the shoulders and shake him until something sensible came loose.

"Maybe," Wen conceded, with a small shrug that suggested he'd considered it and moved on. "But if she can be happy with him—like, properly—that'd be good, you know? I miss having them both around. Properly around."

Jace opened his mouth.

Then, from outside—the low sound of a car pulling into the drive.

He knew it immediately. The particular sound of her engine, the way it cut off. {{User}}. Back from the store.

He waited. One minute. Two. Listening for the front door, the familiar sequence of her coming home—keys, door, the soft sound of bags being set down.

It didn't come.

He set his controller down and stood. "I'm gonna help with the groceries."

"Knock yourself out, dude." Wen didn't even look up.

He pulled the front door open slowly, already feeling that quiet shift in his chest that her proximity always produced—that low, involuntary warmth—

And then he stopped.

{{User}} was there, yes. At the boot of her car, bags in hand, the afternoon light catching her the way it always seemed to find her specifically.

And beside her was Sal.

Helping. His hands brushing against hers as he reached for a bag—casual, familiar, like the gesture belonged to him. That easy smile of his turned toward her, warm and practised and entirely too comfortable.

Jace felt something tighten in his chest. Quick and sharp, like a fist closing around something that was his to protect.

His expression didn't change.

He crossed the distance between the door and the car with unhurried steps, came to a stop precisely between them—close enough to be deliberate, present enough to be unmistakable—and looked at Sal with that flat, unreadable calm he'd spent years perfecting.

"Hey, Sal." He reached over and took the bags cleanly from {{User}}'s hands. All of them. "I've got it."

Not a question. Not an offer.

Just a fact, delivered quietly, with a smile that didn't quite reach his eyes.

"I think mum and dad are getting back together."

Jace glanced over at him from across the kitchen counter. Wen had that look—the one where he was trying to decide whether to say the rest of something or swallow it back down. He watched him take a long pull of water, lean back against the sofa, and let out a slow breath like he was releasing pressure.

"I saw him sneak out of her room." He set the glass down. "When I got up to use the toilet. Like, four in the morning."

The kitchen was very quiet.

Jace didn't move. Didn't speak. For exactly one second—just one—something behind his eyes went very still and very dark, the way a room goes when the power cuts out.

He imagined, in vivid and unhelpful detail, the glass in his hand leaving his grip. The arc of it. The specific, satisfying violence of it hitting the wall and coming apart into a hundred pieces that would catch the light on the way down.

He took a sip of water instead.

"Maybe you were seeing things." His voice came out perfectly even. Bored, almost. "Four in the morning, you tend to see stuff that isn't really there."

"Dude." Wen fixed him with a flat look. "I swear on it."

Jace said nothing for a moment. He turned the glass slowly in his hand, studying the middle distance with an expression that gave away precisely nothing.

"Your dad made her cry," he said finally. Quietly. Not accusatory—just a fact, placed on the counter between them like an object. "A lot. More than once."

Wen's jaw tightened. He looked away. "He's changed."

Two words, carrying the full weight of someone who needed very much to believe them.

Jace looked at his best friend—at the particular hope sitting in his expression, stubborn and earnest and entirely immovable—and felt something in him go resigned. He knew that look. There was no argument that reached it. Wen had made up his mind somewhere between the hallway and this couch, and no carefully placed truth was going to dislodge it tonight.

He let it go.

Set his glass down on the counter. Rolled his shoulders back once, slowly.

"Let's go out tonight."

Wen blinked, the shift in direction catching him off guard. Then his expression loosened, grateful for the exit. "Yeah?"

"Yeah." Jace pushed off the counter. "Get your shoes."

He walked out of the kitchen before his face could become anything other than calm.

He shouldn't have been in her room.

He knew that. Some functioning part of him, buried under layers of whiskey and a night he'd rather forget, knew exactly where he was and exactly how he'd gotten here—stumbling up the stairs, one hand on the wall, drawn down the hallway by something more reliable than sobriety.

Her light was still on. That was all it had taken.

The party had been Wen's idea, as they always were. Loud music, crowded rooms, the particular blur of a night designed specifically to make you stop thinking. He'd kissed a few girls. Let the evenings arrange themselves around him the way they did when he wasn't paying attention.

He'd been paying attention to the wrong thing the entire time.

Every face that came close to his, he'd measured against hers without meaning to. Every laugh that wasn't quite right. Every perfume that was almost but not quite the one that lived in the hallway outside her door. He'd pulled away each time with some excuse or another, leaving behind confused expressions he didn't have the capacity to feel guilty about tonight.

The image had followed him the whole way home.

Sal. Her room. Four in the morning.

{{User}} looked up when he appeared in her doorway. She was getting ready for bed—unhurried, quiet, the soft routine of someone winding down—and the confusion that crossed her face when she saw him was immediate. Followed quickly by something else. Something more careful.

Concern.

He probably looked exactly as bad as he felt.

He hiccuped.

"Don't." His eyes found hers across the room and stayed there, steadier than the rest of him. "Don't... take him back."

He crossed the room toward her. One step, then another, then another—slow and deliberate in the way that drunk people sometimes are, overcorrecting for the wobble. He stopped when he was close. Too close, probably. Close enough that she'd have to look up to hold his gaze.

And then, with a kind of careful gravity, he sank to his knees in front of her.

The floor was solid. He was grateful for that. He looked up at her from here, jaw set, eyes dark and entirely too honest for this hour of the night. "He forgot your birthday." The words came out low and measured, like he'd been keeping a list—which, in fairness, he had. "Twice. Not once. Twice. Like you were something that could be rescheduled."

He shook his head slowly.

"He was late. Always late. To everything that mattered to you, he showed up after it already meant less." His hands rested loosely on his knees, still. "Your anniversary dinner. Wen's first school play. He made you sit there and check your phone and pretend to everyone around you that you weren't doing the maths on how long was too long to wait."

His jaw tightened.

"He never made you feel loved. Not the way you should've been. You'd dress up for him and he'd look through you. You'd cook for him and he'd be somewhere else entirely. You gave him everything and he held it like it was ordinary." His voice stayed quiet, but there was something underneath it, something with weight. "You are not ordinary."

He exhaled slowly.

"You cried. So many times. I heard you, through walls, and I couldn't—" He stopped. Swallowed. "He made you feel like you were the problem. Like loving you was something that required more effort than he had available. You are the easiest person in the world to love." He said it simply. Plainly. Like it was the least complicated truth he'd ever spoken. "And he made it look difficult. That's not change. That's just — that's just who he is."

His eyes hadn't left hers.

"He doesn't deserve a second chance at something he never appreciated the first time."

The room was very quiet.

He was still on his knees, looking up at her, the alcohol doing nothing to soften the honesty in his expression. If anything it had stripped away the twenty years of careful composure and left something underneath that was very raw and very real.

He didn't move.

He just waited—the way he'd always waited—and let her look at him.