The campus felt different that morning, as if the sun had to work harder to warm the stone steps and the students moving over them. Aira felt it too — not in the weather but in the way pressure seemed to hang in the air, a quiet gravity tugging at the edges of everything.
She kept her coat buttoned up to her throat as she walked, shoulders square, a silhouette cut from midnight. The routine steadied her: the measured tap of her boots on stone, the soft rustle of other students passing, the distant clatter of a bike chain being fixed. Rituals were small anchors now.
She entered the classroom with the same neutral composure she wore like armor. Conversations folded politely into silence and the teacher's voice attempted to pull the room into the day's lesson, but Aira's world narrowed to a single, impossible presence at the back of the room.
Liam stood there, half-hidden in a pool of light near the window, his shape familiar and painfully precise. Time did something odd — it slipped sideways; memory and present overlapped until the treehouse afternoons and scraped knees blurred with today.
He took a step as if to cross that impossible distance, as if reaching out could stitch things back to how they were. But before he could move an inch further, the air shifted again.
Kai, in full dramatic mode, swung into Liam's path without warning — a theatrical crash of limbs and grins. "Oops, my bad. Didn't see you there, bro," he said, wholly unserious, but the move was deliberate: three inches of physical obstruction for the past that hoped to walk across the floor.
Damian materialized at the same time, adjusting the cuff of his watch like a soldier taking position. He planted himself between Liam and Aira with a single deliberate stance, jaw set, a look that carried the uncomplicated message: not today. Unspoken muscles pulled tight. The rest of the group aligned instinctively, the way a unit compacts around a weak point to protect it.
Rei, lounging near the door, threw his voice like a pebble. "Man, weather forecast says it's freezing today," he drawled, a small joke that pressed like a thumb on the moment's edge and lightened the air just enough to keep it from fracturing.
Liam's fingers clenched at his sides. The motion was small, nearly private, but Aira — who didn't even glance in his direction — would have felt the weight of it if she allowed herself to notice.
She didn't; she kept moving, the set of her shoulders flat, the expression practiced and distant. She refused to look back. Not now. Not for anyone.
Later, the group convened in the long, sunlit library for their project — a patchwork of textbooks, highlighters, and the quiet hum of studious voices.
The room smelled of paper and cut lemons from someone's travel mug; dust motes turned lazily in the streams of light. Kai collapsed into a chair like a deflating balloon. "Why are group projects still a thing in 2025?" he groaned, flinging a pen with exaggerated despair.
Valentina laughed and whapped his shoulder with a spiral-bound notebook. "Shut up and work, you big baby." She glanced at Aira as she said it, warm curiosity threaded through her tone.
Bianca and Ivy traded amused, conspiratorial looks. Damian spread his textbook and scanned it with a patience that was almost religious. The room's rhythm was comfortable: an orchestra with each member filling a particular sound.
Aira approached the long table as if gliding, a black shape against the honeyed wood. Zane — who had been leaning against the pillar, hands deep in his coat pockets, watching the comings and goings — rose without fuss and slid the chair out for her. It was a small movement. Precise. Protective without ceremony.
"Sit here," he said in that quiet way of his, a small smirk tugging at one corner of his mouth. "Don't worry. I'll make sure no lost puppies follow you." There was humor there, but also a steady reassurance. No theatrics, no crowding — just his presence, placed exactly where she felt safest most days.
Aira blinked. The twinkle she had so rarely allowed herself — a near imperceptible relaxation of her face — softened the corner of her mouth for a fraction of a second.
Valentina, watching, leaned toward Ivy in a dramatized whisper, loud enough for the nearest pair to hear: "Oh my God… did you see that? The Ice Queen's heart just… beat." Laughter bubbled; Kai gasped in mock terror again. The sound wrapped around Aira like something novel and oddly benign.
For a moment it felt warm. Different. Like a small, fragile hearth was being tended by hands that didn't ask for payment.
She spun two pens in a slow, absent rhythm and flicked one to land between Valentina and Kai — a tiny, private gesture of participation. Kai snorted approval. "Cool," he said. Valentina, dramatic as ever, stood and bowed. "Sorry, Ice Queen, we couldn't tease you again," she said, and the table answered with a comfortable noise: laughter, the soft clatter of pages, the clinking of a spoon in a coffee mug.
But not everyone in the library smiled.
Hidden behind a tall shelf, in a darker hourglass of shade where the stacks met, Liam stood frozen. The sun carved half of his face and left the other in shadow. He watched Aira lean toward Zane, watched her laugh — a quiet, domestic sound that felt unbearable to him. He watched her weave herself into a new constellation of people who had become her orbit. A fist of cold tightened in his gut.
Mrs. Harper was close by, tucked further into the stacks like a spider in her web, watching Liam with a predatory satisfaction. When she sent that message — a small, precise injection of poison — the words were surgical.
Be careful. That guy — Zane — he's very close to Aira. She trusts him. Maybe… even loves him. Are you sure you're not already too late?
The phone buzzed at Liam's hip. He read it. The letters swam for a second, angling themselves into accusation. Are you too late? The concept sank like a nail into his chest. Zane. Loving her? The idea turned hot and metallic. He saw them together and didn't register the accuracy in the detail — he only registered the loss.
Without thinking beyond the thunder of his own heart, Liam shoved his way through the stacks and out into the corridor. He didn't plan. He moved. Grief, apology, guilt, a willful and wild need to reclaim what had been his — those feelings were a heat that made him reckless.
Back at the table, the group edged toward the end of their work when the moment Aira had been walking through happened: a sleeve snagged on a chair arm, the corner of a heavy textbook slipped. She faltered, the book tilting toward the floor.
Time compressed to the breath in her lungs. A half-second — the book's slow arc, the micro-wince across her face.
Zane's hands reacted before she registered danger. He wrapped one arm around her waist with an economy of movement that felt practiced and sure; the book was steadied, the stumble arrested. His fingers were firm at the small of her back, his palm flat and steady. For everyone watching, it was a moment of physical truth: she had nearly fallen, and he had been the one to catch her.
Silence folded like paper into the circle. The table's clatter slowed to a stopped heartbeat. The other seven watched the scene the way you watch the last act of a play: breathless and a little raw.
Zane's voice was a low, teasing murmur near her ear, audible only to those closest. "Careful, princess. Can't have you falling for anyone but me."
The words were light, but the undercurrent was heavy. The sound of his voice against her skin — warm, male, intimate — registered in Aira's veins like the first time the world had ever seemed to promise safety. She caught the breath at the back of her throat and dragged it back in. She didn't lean away, though she did pull the sleeve into place and force a smile that felt brittle under her fingers.
And then, almost casually, as if the movement cost him nothing, Zane draped his arm over the back of her chair and pulled her a fraction of an inch closer. It was subtle theater: a claiming gesture that read plainly to anyone paying attention.
Across the library entry, Liam stood, the posted message in his head a live wire. He had watched the small, intimate choreography and it cut him like a physical object. Their eyes met — briefly — and Zane's glance slipped over with a smirk that was small and extremely dangerous. It said, cleanly and without flourish: she isn't yours anymore.
Something cold and clenched answered in Liam's chest — not only jealousy, but the hollow realization of having been too late in the only way that matters: he had been too late to be the one who stayed.
Aira's face was a calm mask, but heat flushed the skin beneath. She kept her gaze down because pride was a stubborn thing and because, in the quietest places inside her, she was still learning what it meant to let someone meet her halfway. To let someone catch her. To let someone decide, without fanfare, that they would not allow her to fall unobserved.
She did not have the words then. She had a small, tremulous thought: maybe it was okay to trust, maybe it was not a crime to feel again. That thought frightened her and warmed her at the same time.
The group's laughter began to bubble up again — softer, more careful. The library returned to its rhythm: pages turned; a pen clicked; a laptop muttered to life.
Outside, Liam walked away under the cherry blossom tree where years of memory gathered like petals. He pressed the photograph to his face once, then slid it back into his pocket. Determination — clumsy, desperate — tightened his shoulders. He would not give up. He would find a way.
And in the hidden corners where teachers watched and smiles pretended to be benign, Mrs. Harper adjusted her expression. The chessboard had changed. She'd planted seeds and watched them sprout into inconvenient blossoms. She would replant, reweave, escalate if she had to. She enjoyed the puzzle of it. She thrived in the frayed edges of broken things.
But for the seven at the long table — and especially for Zane, whose stare lingered on Aira until she was a notch of dark against the sun — the day had rearranged itself.
Little proofs had formed: a pulled-out chair, catching a falling book, a light smirk that promised war with anyone who dared trespass. Those were small loyalties that stacked and grew into a kind of safety.
Aira sat with the book steady in front of her; Zane's palm was a steadying presence at her back. Around them, voices softened in the rhythm of shared work. The moment was small, ordinary, and fragile as glass. And under the surface of the ordinary, the slow work began: the fragile pieces of a life once shattered were being placed, gently, by hands that chose to stay.