Whispers of the Enchanted Heart

Seven Months

The walk home has always been the part of the day where my head finally catches up with the rest of me.

No one to perform for. No expressions to calibrate. Just the road and whatever I've been carrying around all day without looking at directly. Usually it's nothing worth examining. Today it had hazel eyes and an eyebrow lifted at a slight angle and a voice that didn't need to try.

Twice.

In one day, after seven months of nothing, she had looked in my direction twice. I turned that over as I walked, the way you turn something fragile, carefully, not sure yet if it means what you think it means or if you're just someone who has been waiting so long for a sign that you've started seeing them in things that aren't.

Seven months.

That's how long I'd been in this college. And in seven months, not once had we occupied the same moment. She was always looking somewhere I wasn't. And on the rare occasion she'd turn in my general direction, something in me would just shut, eyes down, look away, don't. Like a reflex. Like my body had made a decision my brain hadn't been consulted on.

I kicked a stone without thinking. It skipped twice against the pavement and disappeared somewhere ahead.

The honest thing, the thing I was only willing to admit to myself in the specific privacy of an empty road, was that I'd been the one keeping the distance. Not deliberately. Not with any real plan. Just instinct, the same way you slow down near something you know has the potential to change things, because some part of you understands that once you step forward, you can't step back.

She had handed me a water bottle today. That was the sum total of what had happened. And I was treating it like something that needed to be examined from multiple angles.

I needed to sleep.

The stone I'd kicked had apparently found a destination, because somewhere up ahead I heard it connect with something, followed immediately by a sound that was distinctly human.

"Hey—"

I looked up. A man, slightly older, the kind of face that still looked like it belonged in a lecture hall even if it had graduated out of one, was looking around for the source of the projectile with the mild irritation of someone whose afternoon had just been interrupted by physics.

"Sorry," I said, already turning in the other direction, not waiting to see his expression.

I really needed to sleep.

My phone buzzed before I'd reached the building.

Still not going to tell me?

Then, before I could even process that one:

You don't have anything else to do?

And then:

I just want to help my brother in a ditch

I stared at the screen for a moment. Then I put it face down in my pocket and kept walking.

The thing about Luca is that I trust him. Genuinely, completely, in the specific way you only trust someone you've been through a few boring and a few terrible things with. He's the only person in that entire building I'd actually call if something went wrong.

But there's another thing about Luca, and it's harder to explain without sounding like I'm being superstitious, which I'm not, I'm just observant. Whenever I tell him something I actually care about, something I'm hoping will go well, it doesn't. Not because of anything he does. He's not careless with things I tell him. It's just that the moment he knows, the thing I was quietly hoping for stops being quiet, and something about that kills it. Like turning the lights on in a room you'd been navigating comfortably in the dark.

I didn't want the lights on yet.

I archived the chat and told myself I'd explain later.

He would spam me regardless. That was simply the Luca tax.

The ceiling fan in my room made a sound it had been making for three years that I kept meaning to mention and kept forgetting. A slight tick on every second rotation. I lay there listening to it, not quite asleep, not quite awake, somewhere in that grey middle space where thoughts lose their edges and become something closer to feelings.

I was trying to understand it. The thing I felt when I saw her. I wanted to name it cleanly, file it somewhere with a proper label and stop carrying it around loose.

It wasn't a crush. That word was too light for whatever this was, too easily outgrown. It wasn't obsession either, not quite, obsession had a frantic quality to it and this was more like something slow, something that had settled into the background of my days so gradually I hadn't noticed its weight until I tried to put it down.

She wasn't my friend. She wasn't anything I had a word for.

She was just someone who had existed at the edge of my awareness for seven months, never close enough to be real, never far enough to be forgotten. And today, for reasons that had nothing to do with either of us, the distance had briefly collapsed.

That was all.

The fan ticked.

I fell asleep before I reached any conclusion, which was probably the most honest outcome available to me.

The yelling, I should clarify, has been the same volume for nineteen years.

It has never once failed to send my heart directly into my throat.

"Ren! You're going to be late!"

I was already half off the bed before I was fully conscious, operating on some deep animal instinct that had been conditioned since childhood to respond to that particular frequency with immediate physical movement.

Breakfast happened. Getting dressed happened. The usual negotiation between the version of me that wanted to be a functioning person and the version that wanted four more minutes.

"Bye!"

The bread was already in my mouth as I hit the door. I swallowed it with water on the stairs, which was not dignified but was efficient, and then I was outside, in the morning air, in the specific chaos of a day that hadn't decided what it was going to be yet.

I just want today to be nothing, I thought. I want to sit in the right seats, take the right notes, walk home without incident. I want seven months of comfortable invisibility back, the kind where nobody handed me anything and I didn't have to think about what it meant.

I want things to go back to normal.

The thought lasted approximately four minutes.

Then I turned the corner onto campus and walked directly into her.

Not metaphorically.

The coffee in her hand survived. Barely. She pulled it back just in time, and I managed to stop myself with one hand against the wall, close enough that I could see, with complete clarity, the exact expression of someone who has now encountered the same inconvenience three times in two days.

The eyebrow went up again.

"You," she said.

Not unkindly. Just. Accurately.

"I'm so sorry," I said.

She looked at me for a moment, then at her coffee, then back at me. Something moved across her face that I couldn't fully read, too quick, like a word you catch the shape of but not the meaning.

"You should watch where you're going," she said.

"I know. I really should."

A beat.

The corner of her mouth moved. Just slightly. Not quite a smile. Something smaller than that, and somehow worse, because smaller things are harder to dismiss.

She walked past me without another word.

I stood at the corner for a moment, hand still against the wall, the morning carrying on around me with complete indifference to what had just happened.

Normal, I thought.

I had wanted normal.