In The Light of Destiny

The Landing

The weekend arrived the way weekends always did in the dormitory, not with any particular fanfare, but with a subtle shift in the quality of the morning light and the absence of alarm clocks going off in sequence down the hall. Saturday had its own texture in a building full of women who spent their weekdays chasing appointments and auditions and callbacks that never came. It was the one day the city felt slightly less like an opponent and slightly more like a place you could exist in without bracing yourself.

Kira was in the kitchen when she heard Emma's bedroom door open. She had been cleaning not because the kitchen was particularly dirty, but because cleaning was the thing she did when her thoughts needed somewhere to go that wasn't inward. She had the radio on low, something instrumental and undemanding, and she was working her way along the counter with a cloth, her movements slow and methodical, the kind of task that kept the hands busy enough to give the mind a little peace.

Emma appeared in the kitchen doorway already dressed, which was unusual for a Saturday morning. She had her bag over her shoulder and her hair done, not elaborately, but with the intention of the way she looked when she was going somewhere that mattered.

She looked rested, which made sense. She had been asleep before nine o'clock, an event so rare in the history of their friendship that Kira had actually checked on her through the door just to make sure she was all right.

"I can't believe it's the weekend already," Emma said, leaning against the door-frame with a particular lightness in her posture that had been there since Thursday evening, since the phone call and the audition and Mr. Jonas and all the things that had rearranged the furniture of her life in a single afternoon. "I'm going out, Kira. I'll see you later."

"Okay," Kira called back, running the cloth along the edge of the sink. "See you later. Have fun."

She listened to Emma's footsteps move down the hallway toward the front door, then the familiar sound of it opening and the building taking her in the slight echo of the stairwell, the creak of the old wooden banister Emma always held onto on the way down.

Then, after a pause long enough to suggest something unexpected had happened, the footsteps stopped.

Emma had made it as far as the second-floor landing when she heard her name.

"Good afternoon, Emma."

She stopped on the stairs and looked down to see Mrs. Gavi standing at the bottom with one hand on the newel post, looking up at her with the particular expression she wore when she was about to deliver information she considered important. Mrs. Gavi was the building manager, a stout, sharp-eyed woman in her early sixties who wore house slippers at all hours and kept the dormitory running with the efficiency of someone who had long since stopped being surprised by anything young women in this city got up to. She had a fondness for the tenants she approved of and a brisk impatience with the ones she didn't, and she had, from very early on, decided that Emma was one of the ones worth approving of.

"Good afternoon, ma'am," Emma said, descending another step. "Is something wrong?"

"Nothing at all, dear." Mrs. Gavi's eyes were doing something that Emma, in the full year she had lived here, had never seen them do before: twinkling. It was brief and subtle, but it was there. "I was actually on my way up to get you. There is a gentleman downstairs asking for you."

Emma blinked. "A gentleman."

"Mm." Mrs. Gavi's expression remained composed, but she reached up and adjusted the collar of her cardigan in a way that suggested she was enjoying this considerably. "Waiting in the lobby. Very well-dressed." She paused. "Very." And then, because she was Mrs. Gavi and subtlety only went so far: she winked.

Emma's mouth curved upward despite herself. "Thank you, Mrs. Gavi."

She continued down the stairs at a measured pace, telling herself there was absolutely no reason to rush, that it was most likely someone from one of the agencies she had submitted to, or perhaps a delivery that required a signature, or any number of perfectly ordinary Saturday afternoon explanations for a gentleman waiting in the lobby of a girls' dormitory.

Then she rounded the landing, looked down through the banister railing to the lobby below, and her measured pace evaporated.

Kylen Roy was standing at the bottom of the stairs.

He was exactly as she had imagined him, and entirely nothing like she had imagined him, in the way that real people always are when you finally see them in three dimensions after constructing them from a voice. He was considerably taller than she had pictured, with an ease in the way he held himself that was not arrogance but something quieter and more settled than that. The kind of man who didn't need to fill a room because he simply occupied his portion of it completely. He was dressed with the casual precision of someone who understood clothing without being consumed by well-fitted dark trousers, a light shirt open at the collar, and he was looking up the staircase with an expression of patient, unhurried attention.

When he saw her, he smiled. It was a real smile, not the professional, managed expression of someone in his position performing charm, but something that arrived on his face the way sunlight arrives, without calculation.

Emma continued down the last flight of stairs at exactly the same pace she had been using. She was very proud of this.

"Hello, Kylen," she said when she reached the bottom, her voice composed and warm without giving away the fact that her heart had just made a very undignified decision about its own rhythm.

"Hello, Emma." He had forest-green eyes, she noticed. Dark and quiet, like looking into something deep. The kind of eyes that paid attention. He was watching her in a way that was neither invasive nor dismissive but simply present as though she was something worth looking at carefully.

"What are you doing here on a Saturday?" she asked, tilting her head slightly. One eyebrow lifted. She had always been better at delivering composure than she was at feeling it.

He held her gaze for a moment, and the smile deepened at one corner. "I'm here to ask you to lunch this afternoon." He paused. "If you don't already have plans."

Her heart did the same thing again. She absolutely refused to acknowledge it. "I was on my way to get lunch anyway," she said, which was true, or close enough to true to work. "So sure."

The smile became a smirk, not the unpleasant kind, but the kind that suggested he found her deeply entertaining in a way he wasn't going to apologize for. "Perfect," he said, and held the door open.