The sun hung like an afterthought that afternoon, soft and lazy across the university green, but inside Aira every motion felt frozen, as if the heat of the day couldn't reach what had been chilled into her bones.
She tightened the strap of her bag, the leather squeaking faintly, and moved through the corridor with the quiet precision of someone who'd learned how to make herself as small and sharp as necessary.
By the lockers, Liam leaned against cold metal, pretending to fumble with a stack of papers. It was a gesture meant to look casual; his hands betrayed him, trembling just enough that the papers fluttered like distressed birds.
When Aira's silhouette crossed the hall his face brightened and then contracted — a familiar ache surfacing in the sunlight.
She didn't slow. She didn't turn. She walked past as if the world held only the weight of the floor beneath her boots.
His voice was sudden and fractured: "Aira… wait."
The sound cut through the murmur of students like glass. For a fraction of a second everything tightened — a breath held in a lung.
Her spine stiffened. The practised calm on her face was a blade. Her reply was as cold and measured as she could make it: "I don't have anything to say to you."
She moved on before he could answer, leaving him standing in a small puddle of startled silence. The empty space where her arm had been seconds before felt suddenly enormous, like a wound left open.
Zane watched from the shadow of an archway. He did not move. He did not shout or glare. His black eyes narrowed, sharp as flint, recording every detail: the tilt of her jaw when she refused to look back, the way her fingers curled briefly as if to remind herself she was real. A green, corrosive spark crawled through him — jealousy, slow and fierce. He could feel it in his throat like smoke.
They'd planned a small outing that evening — a corner café off-campus, lanterns strung like constellations and small tables crowded with students and laptops.
The place smelled of roasted coffee and warm sugar; fairy lights blinked lazy in the window glass. It was the sort of space that invited confessions wrapped in steam. It was where they always landed when the campus felt too loud.
Kai arrived with theatrical flourish, Valentina in tow, the rest straggling in like mismatched beads threaded into something whole. They piled into a corner booth and took it as if staking a claim. Laughter folded over them like a blanket. Aira sat between Zane and Bianca, a small island of quiet in the tide.
Valentina teased, "Come on, Ice Queen — even royalty needs caffeine."Damian bowed with mock ceremony. "Your throne awaits, your majesty."
Aira let an almost-smile tug the corner of her mouth. Small things — a shared joke, a crooked pastry, someone sliding a napkin under her hand — made the hollow spaces inside her fern and bloom for the briefest moment.
She sipped her coffee and felt warmth climb her throat that had nothing to do with the drink.
Across the room, Liam watched them work their easy orbit. He saw Aira laugh at something Kai said — soft, private. He saw the way she leaned, barely, toward Zane when she reached for her cup.
He saw Zane's hand, casual and unforced, come to her lower back in a gesture so ordinary and protective that it punched the air out of him. The sight fractured something ancient in him; pride and regret combined into a raw ache he could not swallow.
Mrs. Harper sat by the window, deliberately innocuous in oversized sunglasses and a folded newspaper. Her eyes — the ones that played kindly and the ones that schemed — tracked the scene like a hawk circling a field. She had engineered things before. She had a slow, clinical joy at watching plans unfurl. Liam's obvious, unguarded pain was an instrument she intended to play.
Aira rose mid-conversation, needing air more than another sentence. The room tilted like a stage; she moved toward the bathroom as if moving through a dream.
A shadow fell in front of her.
Zane. Not aggressive, not rude — just there, like a wall you stumble into and, for a heartbeat, happen to lean on. He rested his forearms against the tiles on either side of the passage, caging her gently. His voice lowered and smoothed like velvet rubbed on steel. "If you keep looking over your shoulder, princess… you'll miss what's right in front of you."
The closeness stole her breath. Up close, he smelled like rain-soaked asphalt and something clean and dangerous — a scent that lodged in her memory with malicious ease.
The angle of his face, the light in his eyes, was not pitying. Not soft. It was carved with an admiration that made her both afraid and oddly feral.
She swallowed. Her pulse thudded too loud. The world reduced to the small space between his mouth and hers.
He brushed forward a fraction, a deliberate move that flinched the air. For an instant she thought: maybe. Maybe this will be the moment that rewrites the script. Maybe…
He didn't kiss her.
Instead he leaned back with the lazy smile of someone who had just flipped a switch and discovered it worked.
"I'm not him," he murmured, too close for strangers. "And I don't lose."
Words, but more than words — the promise wrapped in gravity. She felt steadier for the contact. He stepped aside, eyes trained without apology on the corridor where she had been walking. In them was a definite, possessive claim: she belonged somewhere he intended to hold.
Aira stood as if reconstituting herself, fingers worrying the rim of her cup, cheeks flushed with emotion she'd barely allowed. She adjusted her sleeve and forced air into her lungs until the tremor calmed.
Outside, under strands of warm bulbs, a cool night had rolled in. They filed out of the café — jokes and the easing of homework stress trailing behind like exhaust. Aira shivered in the wind. Without hesitation, Zane removed his jacket and draped it over her shoulders. The wool fell around her like a second skin. It was warm, heavy with his scent and something older, protective and unambiguous.
The effect was immediate and visible: Kai whistled like an idiot, Valentina winked, Bianca and Ivy exchanged a look that softened. The group tightened around the small act like an armor of subtler things; they had given a promise in practice, not rhetoric.
Across the street, in a pool of shadow and distance, Liam watched. The sight of the jacket resting on Aira's shoulders felt like a crucible poured through him. She did not take it off. She did not look his way. The image was a knife: intimate, intimate and not him.
Zane's eyes flicked toward Liam; the movement was a simple measuring, and his smirk rippled slow and dangerous as a tide. It carried no words but one clear message: Try and take her from me. I dare you.
Liam's fists clenched until his knuckles blanched white. Mrs. Harper's words — the ones designed to amplify doubt and jealousy — chimed again in the back of his skull like a chorus.
"You're going to lose her," the message had implied; she was a careful surgeon of rumor. "Unless you fight."
He had the clean, sharp taste of the unfairness in his mouth and the terrified knowledge that he had been slow before. He shouldered a sudden, stubborn resolve. If she had chosen a new orbit, he would find a new way to be necessary. If he had to tear down walls or build new ones around her, he would try. The thought was frantic and clumsy and wholly human.
That night Aira sat on the edge of her bed, the jacket folded on the chair like a small, warm island waiting for the sea. The café's fairy lights replayed behind her eyelids. Her hands were steady but not blind to what had passed between them: Zane's closeness, the weight of his jacket, the fact that she had not been alone. A small truth, fragile and glittering, whispered through her chest — that perhaps the world could hold someone who would not break her.
She slept poorly and when sleep came it carried with it the usual ghosts: hands that had hurt, voices that had blamed, a basement where light never reached. But threaded through the nightmare was a blurred warmth — an arm, a jacket, the shape of a man who refused to run.
In the shadowed quiet of the night, two men paced separate paths: one, furious and fumbling with remorse; the other, calm and assured, laying quiet plans like traps to keep what he wanted from drifting away.
And Mrs. Harper — twisting events like threads on her fingers — smiled to herself in the dark, already composing the next page of a story she was determined to finish.