Abi In Wonderland

Some Rain

The study smelled like leather and old paper, the kind of room that made people lower their voices without being told to. Rain had started somewhere beyond the tall windows, a soft, steady patter against the glass, and the lamp on Zev's desk threw everything into amber and shadow. He sat with his sleeves rolled to the elbow, a glass of something untouched beside a stack of documents he'd stopped reading ten minutes ago, his mind clearly somewhere upstairs instead of on the page.

Havier let himself in without knocking, the way he always did, the door swinging just wide enough to let the hallway's cooler air slip into the room before it clicked shut again.

"You could try the door like a normal person," Zev said, not looking up.

"You could try locking it, then." Havier dropped into the chair across from him, slouching low, one ankle crossed over his knee, entirely too comfortable for a room that made everyone else sit up straighter. "Oh wait. You're too busy locking up other things."

Zev's pen stilled mid-word. The rain filled the pause.

"Careful," he said, low.

"I'm just saying." Havier grinned, unbothered, the kind of grin that only worked on someone who'd never really learned to be afraid of the man across from him. "Word's getting around, hyung. Pretty girl, big house, hasn't left in—what is it now, two years?"

"She leaves. The garden. The balcony." Zev finally looked up, and the lamplight caught the sharp line of his jaw, the flatness in his eyes that made most people stop talking. "She has everything she needs."

"That's not what I asked."

"You didn't ask anything. You're fishing." Zev set the pen down and leaned back, the chair creaking faintly under him. "What do you actually want, Havier?"

"Nothing." Havier held up both hands, grin still in place, though something more curious flickered underneath it now. "Just think it's funny. You, of all people, playing house. Didn't peg you as the type."

"You don't know what type I am."

"I know you don't explain yourself to anyone. Not even when you probably should." The grin faded, just slightly. "Doesn't that get exhausting? Everyone just… guessing?"

Zev studied him for a long moment, the kind of look that made most people fill silence out of nerves. Havier didn't. He never did, and that was probably the only reason Zev tolerated him at all.

"Their guessing isn't my problem," Zev said finally, voice quiet, final. "It never has been."

"Cold."

"Accurate." He picked the pen back up, already done, the conversation closed the way a door closes. "Don't you have somewhere to be?"

"Charming as always." Havier stood, stretching, unbothered by the dismissal. At the door, he paused, one hand on the frame. "For what it's worth—she seems fine. Whatever you're doing. Doesn't look miserable."

Zev didn't answer. But something in his jaw eased, just barely, the rain still ticking against the glass, before the door clicked shut behind his cousin and left him alone with it again.

---

The car ride home was quiet, headlights cutting through the rain, and by the time Zev stepped through the front door the house had already gone still for the night. He climbed the stairs slowly, jacket still damp at the shoulders, his mind clearly somewhere he hadn't left yet.

The rain sounded different up here—closer, heavier against the bedroom window, the kind of sound that usually made Abi feel safe, cocooned. Tonight it just made the room feel smaller.

She heard his footsteps before she saw him, that particular weight and rhythm she'd memorized without meaning to over two years, and her pulse picked up before she'd even decided to say anything. By the time the door opened, she was already sitting up, cross-legged at the edge of the bed, arms folded in a way that meant she'd been rehearsing.

"I want to go outside," she said, before he'd even fully stepped into the room.

Zev exhaled, already tired in a way that had nothing to do with the hour, and closed the door behind him with a soft, final click. "Abi."

"Not forever. Just—out. A market, a street, anything." Her voice climbed, steadier now that she'd started, her heart thudding hard enough that she could feel it in her throat. "I had the girls here for one afternoon and it was the best day I've had in two years, Zev. Doesn't that tell you something?"

"It tells me you're lonely. I already knew that."

"Then let me not be."

"It's not that simple."

"Why not?" She stood now, closing the distance between them, close enough to see the tightness around his eyes, the muscle working faintly in his jaw. "You keep saying that like it explains anything. It's not that simple—what does that even mean?"

His expression shuttered, the ease from downstairs gone completely, replaced by something colder, more distant. "It means there are things about my life you don't need to carry. That's protection, not punishment."

"It doesn't feel like protection." Her eyes traced his face, searching for something—a c***k, a flicker, anything that would explain him. "It feels like a cage with better lighting."

The words landed harder than she meant them to. She saw it happen—the flicker across his face, quick and gone, like a light behind a curtain. For a second neither of them said anything, and the rain filled the silence between them, loud now, insistent.

"I'm not doing this tonight," Zev said finally, quieter, turning toward the door.

"Of course you're not." Abi's voice cracked, frustration and hurt tangled together in her throat. "You never do this. You just leave."

He didn't leave, not right away. He stood there, hand on the doorframe, back to her, shoulders held in a way that looked almost like restraint. The room had gone cold somehow, colder than the weather outside could explain, the space between them stretched thin and taut.

"I'll think about it," he said eventually, and then he was gone, the door closing softer than she expected, which somehow made it worse than if he'd slammed it.

Abi sat back down on the bed, staring at the space where he'd been standing, her heart still thudding from the fight, the fight draining out of her and leaving something heavier behind. Outside, the rain kept falling, steady and indifferent, like it hadn't just watched something break a little.

Sleep didn't come easily.

She lay there long after the house had gone silent, staring at the ceiling, replaying the shape of his face when she'd said *cage*—the way something in him had flinched before he'd shut it back down. Somewhere down the hall, in a room she rarely thought about because he was never in it, Zev would be lying in a bed that wasn't theirs, alone, the house cold around him the way it only got when the heating hadn't caught up with the rain. She wondered if he was staring at his own ceiling too. She wondered if he regretted the door closing as softly as it had, or if regret was even something he let himself feel all the way through.

*This is your fault,* she thought, and didn't fully believe it, and believed it anyway.

Her mind wandered, uninvited, to the idea of leaving. Not the girls-and-a-market kind of outside she'd been asking for—further than that. Gone. She let herself sit with it for a moment, the fantasy of a door she opened herself, a street she chose the direction of, a life with no locks in it at all.

Then, just as quickly, the guilt arrived, sharp and immediate.

*Selfish,* she thought. *After everything.*

Because what would she even be running to? She thought of her parents—the particular blankness in her mother's eyes whenever Abi walked into a room, the way her father's attention had always seemed to be somewhere else, some other version of a daughter he'd have preferred. She thought of school, of the three friends who'd stopped texting back within a month of her disappearing from their lives, of how easily she'd been forgotten, like a chair pulled out from a table nobody noticed was missing a seat.

There was no one out there waiting for her. There never had been.

Zev had been the one constant—difficult, controlling, maddening in ways she didn't have words for, but constant. He remembered how she liked her eggs. He'd learned the sound of her nightmares well enough to know when to knock and when to leave her be. Whatever this was, it wasn't nothing, and some nights, lying exactly like this, she genuinely didn't know if she was grateful or if she'd simply stopped being able to tell the difference between gratitude and habit.

*I should be thankful,* she told herself, and the thought sat strangely in her chest, too big and too small at the same time.

But underneath the gratitude, something else had been growing quietly for a while now—something she didn't have a clean name for yet. A restlessness. A rot, almost, soft and slow, spreading somewhere she couldn't point to. She was becoming someone who flinched at doors, who measured happiness in single afternoons, who cried more easily than she used to and laughed a little too hard when given the chance. She didn't feel like herself anymore. She wasn't sure, some nights, if she remembered what herself had even felt like.

*I'm getting sick,* she thought, not of body, but of something quieter, something that didn't show up on any test. *And I don't know how to say that out loud without it sounding like I'm asking to leave him. I don't even know if I am.*

Eventually, somewhere past midnight, exhaustion won out over the noise in her head, and she drifted into a thin, restless sleep, the rain still tapping softly against the glass like it was keeping watch for her.

---

The rain had cleared by the following afternoon, the sky washed pale and thin, and only two girls came through the gate.

Melba and Matilda arrived a little past noon, arms full of snacks and a portable speaker that immediately started playing something loud and upbeat, filling the room the way it had the day before—almost the same, but not quite. Abi noticed the gap before either of them said a word, felt it the way you feel a missing tooth with your tongue.

"Where's Pyonghwa?" she asked, trying to keep her voice light.

"Busy," Melba said simply, already digging through the snack bag. "Karen too. They've got stuff going on."

"Stuff?"

"Mm-hm." Matilda flopped onto the bed, already scrolling through her phone. "Boring stuff. Family things, I think. They said sorry, though."

Nobody offered anything more than that, and Abi didn't push—she'd learned already that pushing rarely got her anywhere in this house. She swallowed the disappointment quietly, tucking it somewhere behind her ribs, and let Melba pull her into whatever video was making her laugh.

It was still a good afternoon. Melba braided her hair again, Matilda made her try three different lip glosses that all tasted like artificial fruit, and there was a solid twenty minutes dedicated entirely to arguing about which one of them would survive longest in a horror movie. Abi laughed more than she expected to, given the fight still sitting unresolved somewhere downstairs in Zev's silence, given the empty space where two familiar faces should have been.

But underneath the laughter, quiet and persistent, was the small ache of missing someone she'd only properly known for a single day. She was fond of Pyonghwa in a way she couldn't quite explain yet—something steady in the way she spoke, the way she always seemed to notice things a half-second before anyone else did.

*She'll be back,* Abi told herself, watching Matilda attempt and fail at a dance trend for the fourth time. *This is still good. This still counts.*

And it did. Just not quite as much as the day before.