The Weight of Unsent Letters

Chapter Four — Training

The first week of training was miserable, and Mila privately suspected that was mostly the point.Six a.m., freezing woods, a boy who complained about the cold with the specific theatrical suffering of someone who had never once in his life had to get up early for anything that mattered.

"You're doing it wrong," she told him, for the fourth time, watching him fumble the breathing exercise meant to help him find the seam between human and wolf. "You're forcing it. It's not a rep count, it's not something you power through."

"Everything I do, apparently, is wrong, according to you."

"Not everything." She said it before she could stop herself, and then immediately regretted how much softer it came out than she meant it to. She covered it by stepping in and adjusting his stance, hands brief and clinical on his shoulders, purely instructional. "Your form's fine. It's your head that's the problem. You're trying to win this like it's a game with a scoreboard."

"Isn't it?"

"No. It's more like — " She searched for it, surprised to find she cared about getting the metaphor right for him specifically. "It's like listening for something quiet in a loud room. You can't force quiet. You just have to stop being the loud thing for a second."

He actually stopped and looked at her at that, something unguarded flickering across his face before the usual performance slid back into place. "That was almost poetic. Careful, or I'll think you like me."

"Don't flatter yourself."

But she found, walking home that morning, that she was turning the exchange over in her head longer than the exchange deserved.

It went like that for two weeks — sharp edges wearing down so slowly neither of them tracked it happening. She stopped correcting his sarcasm as often. He stopped performing quite so hard for an audience of exactly one person who clearly wasn't impressed by it. There were mornings she caught herself laughing before she managed to stop it, and mornings he did the actual work without being told twice, like proving something to her had quietly become more important to him than the version of himself he performed at school.

Neither of them named it. Naming it felt like admitting something neither of them had agreed to admit.

"You're better today," she told him, the third week in, after he held a shift threshold for nearly a full minute without breaking it, longest he'd managed yet.

"I have a good teacher." He said it lightly, but there was something underneath it, something that had softened out of the sharp performance of their first week into an actual, unguarded gratitude he didn't seem to know what to do with. "For someone who apparently can't stand me."

"I never said I couldn't stand you." The admission surprised her as much as it seemed to surprise him. "I said you were exhausting. There's a difference."

"Is there?"

"There must be," she said, "because I keep showing up."

It wasn't a confession. It wasn't even close to one but both of them still carefully avoided anything that looked like the word like, let alone anything bigger than that. But something passed between them in the cold morning air that hadn't been there in Week One, something neither of them examined too closely for fear of what they'd find if they did, and they finished the rest of the session in a silence that was, for the first time, almost comfortable.

They looked at each other warmly in a way they've never done before. "Stop that" Mila said looking away but Cole didn't stop he stared at her in a way that made her heart race."Scared you might fall for me" Cole said winking at her."No way I was just" she paused, "I think we should go home" Mila said trying to avoid eye contact with Cole.

Mila told herself, walking home, that it meant nothing. She was aware, even as she thought it, that she didn't entirely believe herself anymore.