Sable | POV
People always got love wrong.
They thought it was soft. Warm blankets and shared playlists and the good kind of crying at the end of movies. They thought it was easy — something that just happened to you, like weather.
They were wrong.
Love was work. Love was maintenance. Like tending a garden — you pulled weeds before they choked the roots. You didn't apologize for that. You didn't explain it. You just kept your hands in the dirt and your face calm and you smiled when people looked at you, because if they saw the dirt under your nails they would misunderstand everything.
Eli never had to know how much work it took.
That was the point.
The girl had been easy.
Jade. Standing by the snack table with that open, curious face she wore like it was armor. Like being honest made her brave. Sable had crossed to her during the second movie — slipped out of the armchair while the credits of the first rolled and the boys were laughing — and smiled the way she'd practiced since she was twelve. Wide enough to be warm. Steady enough to be real.
"I'm so glad Eli has someone who makes him smile," Sable had said.
Jade looked at her. Not suspicious. Not yet. "He's easy to make smile."
"He is," Sable agreed. "He's also easy to hurt." She let that sit for one breath. Two. "He's been through a lot of things I don't talk about because they're his to tell. But the people who've come into his life not knowing that — they've done damage they didn't mean to." She tilted her head. "I'm not saying that's you. I'm saying I've watched it happen four times. And I'm very protective of him."
Jade's expression had shifted — not much, just a millimeter, the way a room shifts when a window opens somewhere.
"What kind of damage?" Jade asked.
Sable smiled. "The kind that takes years to undo." She touched Jade's wrist once, light as a feather. "Just go slow. That's all I'm asking. He gets attached fast and he doesn't always show it and when it ends it — it really takes something from him. So." She held her eyes. "Just be sure."
She walked away before Jade could answer.
That was the trick. You never stayed long enough for them to push back. You planted the seed and you walked away and you let their own doubt do the watering.
By the time Jade reached for her phone to text Eli about it — Sable had seen her start — she would have already begun to wonder if she was the problem. If she was moving too fast. If Eli was more fragile than she knew. If she was doing damage without meaning to.
That was all it took. One small, smiling sentence.
Just be sure.
Reeve was harder.
He'd always been harder.
In the kitchen doorway, when she'd heard the low edge in his voice — I have a list — she hadn't panicked. Panic was for people who hadn't thought ahead. She had simply picked up her mug and walked in and looked at him the way you looked at something you'd already decided.
She didn't speak to him with words. She never had to.
She just looked at him and let him see that she'd heard everything and that she wasn't afraid and that whatever he had written down on whatever piece of paper or phone note or napkin he'd been building over weeks — it didn't matter. Because Eli would choose her. He always chose her.
Reeve's mouth had closed like a door.
Good.
She wasn't cruel. She needed him to understand that. She didn't want bad things for Reeve. She just wanted him away from Eli's ear, and there were many ways to accomplish that without anyone getting hurt. He was dramatic and loud and Eli trusted him in the easy, uncomplicated way boys trusted each other — shared history, inside jokes, the shorthand of years.
She could work with that. She'd worked with less.
She had said as much to Eli on the walk home. Gently. Planting the idea the way she always did — not as accusation, as concern. Some people can't stand seeing you happy. He manufactures reasons for you to be unsettled.
She had watched Eli absorb it. Had felt him turning it over.
He would remember it later, when Reeve brought the list. He would already have a frame for it. A reason to doubt.
That was love. Thinking seven steps ahead. Removing obstacles before they became walls.
His window was dark by midnight.
She stood in the gap between the hedges at the far edge of his backyard — the one that smelled like cedar, the one she'd known since they were nine years old — and looked up at his room.
She came here sometimes. Not to do anything. Just to be near.
People wouldn't understand that. She knew that. But they didn't understand a lot of things. They would call it obsession. They would make it ugly and clinical and wrong. They didn't know what it meant to have one person in the world who was entirely yours — not in the possessive way people meant when they said it badly, but in the real way. The true way. The way that meant his safety was your first thought every morning and your last thought every night and every decision in between pointed back to him like a compass.
That wasn't obsession.
That was devotion.
Sable crossed the yard quietly and pressed one hand flat against his window glass. Cold against her palm.
Inside, Eli was a shape in the dark. Breathing. Safe.
"I'm right here," she said. Barely a sound. "I'm always right here."
She meant it the way she meant everything.
Completely.
Then his phone lit up on the nightstand.
She saw the name before the screen dimmed again.
Jade.
The cold from the glass moved up through her fingers, her wrist, the inside of her arm.
Sable's hand curled slowly against the pane. Her nail caught the edge of the seal.
She had been patient for nine years.
She looked at Eli's sleeping face.
She looked at the dark screen.
She had been so patient.
Her hand pressed harder — just slightly, just a degree — against the glass.
That patience, she decided, had an end.