Home didn't fix anything.

  That wasn't what he expected going in. Three weeks, his own bed, his mom's cooking, no deadlines — he thought he'd come back feeling reset. Instead he spent most of it sitting in rooms, present enough to answer when people talked to him, gone enough that his mom started giving him that look. The one she'd been giving him his whole life when she knew something was wrong and was deciding whether to push.

  She didn't push. She just kept cooking and checking the locks and that was its own kind of comfort, honestly. The routine of it. The fact that some things just stayed the same no matter what.

  Henry was around most of the break. He and Ye Feng's mom had been together four years now and Ye Feng had spent a long time being weird about it before he finally just — stopped. Henry was quiet in a way that used to read as cold and now just read as Henry. He didn't perform. Didn't try too hard. He showed up and did things without making a production of it, and at some point that consistency had just worn Ye Feng down into actually trusting him.

  The morning Ye Feng left, Henry put one of his bags in the car without being asked. Stood by the trunk.

  "Pay attention this semester," he said. "Not just to your grades."

  Ye Feng said he would.

  Henry went back inside.

  That was it. And somehow that twelve second conversation was the thing Ye Feng kept coming back to the entire drive.

  JoJo was already in the room when he got there. Shoes off, show paused the second Ye Feng pushed the door open.

  "You look rough," JoJo said.

  "Thanks, JoJo."

  "Not trying to be mean. You just look like the break didn't really work."

  Ye Feng dropped his bag. "It worked a little."

  JoJo looked at him one more second, then turned his show back on.

  That was why they worked as roommates. JoJo said the thing once and then it was done. No circling back, no checking in every hour, no making you feel observed. They'd been like that since eleventh grade when they got thrown together on a history project and spent a whole weekend on it and came out the other side actually knowing each other. JoJo was from Atlanta, studied international relations, physically incapable of waking up before nine but somehow never late to anything, and made instant noodles at midnight with a level of commitment that Ye Feng found genuinely admirable.

  He sat on his bed and checked his phone. His brother Wei had texted that morning — the new contract came through, Kai had closed it, Wei said something about how he'd underestimated Kai's ability to read a room and was rethinking that now. Good news. Normal news. The kind that reminded him the world kept moving.

  He texted back a thumbs up. Wei replied with a thumbs up. That was their whole relationship basically, two thumbs up and the occasional phone call. It worked.

  Raina was already back on campus. He found out because she sent him a photo of her dorm window, the quad below it, trees bare, caption just: beat you.

  He laughed. Like actually laughed, the first time in three weeks it felt like the real version of laughing and not just the sound of it.

  JoJo glanced over. Didn't say anything. Ye Feng appreciated that more than he could explain.

  They met at the café that night. The one off the east quad with the bad overhead lighting and the tea that was actually good and the permanent low hum of the refrigerator that should have been annoying but had become part of the atmosphere at this point. Their place. Not officially. Just — where they always ended up.

  She had both drinks when he got there.

  "You look tired," she said.

  "You look like a person who slept."

  "I slept the entire break. It was genuinely one of the best decisions I've ever made."

  "How do you turn your brain off."

  She looked at him over her mug. "Practice."

  They stayed two hours. Talked about the new semester, the professor everyone feared, the strange hollow feeling of campus at the start of term before the noise came back. She talked about her break carefully the way she always did — he'd noticed that before, the careful way, just never sat with it long enough to think about what it meant. He talked about his, left out the parts that were heavy.

  Walking back it was cold and quiet and he made the decision somewhere between the café and the main path.

  Three months of this. The texting, the tea, her showing up on his hard days without him asking, him staying at her study sessions past when he had any reason to be there. He knew what it was. He'd known for a while. He'd just been doing the thing he always did with anything that felt risky, which was to keep moving and not look directly at it.

  He was going to look at it.

  Wednesday. He picked Wednesday on purpose because nothing is built into Wednesday, no pressure in it, and he'd watched enough people crater their own moments by making them too big.

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  They were walking to the library and she was mid-sentence about her history lecture and he just stopped.

  She stopped too. Looked at him. That expression she had — half amused, half actually paying attention.

  "You have a look on your face," she said.

  "I want to ask you something."

  "Okay."

  "I'm just going to say it because if I don't say it now I'll wait another month."

  "Okay, Feng."

  "Do you want to actually go out with me. Not — whatever this is. Like actually."

  She looked at him.

  He had no idea what her face was doing. He could usually read her. Right now, nothing.

  Then: "I wondered when you were going to ask."

  "Is that a yes."

  "That's a yes."

  He breathed. She started walking again. He stood there one more second and then caught up and they went to the library and returned her books and it was completely ordinary except that something had shifted and he felt it the entire time.

  JoJo looked up when Ye Feng got back. Said "finally." Looked back down.

  "How did you know."

  "Feng. Everybody knew. Even the guy at the café knew probably."

  "Did she know."

  "Everybody knew."

  Ye Feng sat at his desk and stared at his reading and didn't read any of it. JoJo put music on at a reasonable volume and left him alone and that was the right call.

  Two weeks in. Thursday. Cold and sunny, the sharp kind of winter sun that makes shadows very defined and everything feel slightly more real than usual.

  Courtyard. Raina reading, him working on a policy paper that was already two days late. Normal. Fine.

  Two guys in suits came across from the north end of the quad. That specific walk — purposeful, not looking around, people who know exactly where they are — he clocked it automatically. They stopped near the far bench and just stood there. Waiting.

  Then a woman came out of the building across the way.

  Moving fast, phone out, head slightly down. Two more people with her, positioned close without making it obvious. She stopped near the two men, said something to them, and then looked up — quick scan, automatic — and her eyes found Raina.

  Stopped there for maybe three seconds.

  Then she looked away and kept talking.

  Raina hadn't moved. Still reading.

  Ye Feng looked at the woman. Looked at Raina. Looked back.

  The jaw. The angle of the head when she was listening — tilted just slightly, exactly like — the way the eyes sat, not identical but the same family of features, the same underlying structure —

  He knew that face. Not personally. From screens. From the kind of coverage that ended up on front pages.

  His brain did something like:

  no

  wait

  that's not possible she would have —

  I'm making this up

  I'm exhausted and I'm making this up

  "You stopped typing," Raina said.

  "Sorry." He looked at his screen. "Lost my train of thought."

  The woman left. East gate, same people around her, gone in under a minute. The courtyard went back to being a courtyard.

  He read the same sentence six times.

  It was nothing. A resemblance. Two people who happened to share some features, that happened, it wasn't rare, he was tired and had been in his head for weeks and he was pattern-matching things that weren't patterns. Raina was just Raina. She bought her own things, complained about the library hours, texted him at random hours, knew when he was having a bad day before he did — she was just a person, a normal person, there was nothing —

  Her hand touched his arm. Light.

  "Hey. You good?"

  He looked at her.

  "Yeah," he said. "Just zoned out."

  She looked at him one second longer than necessary. He smiled and she went back to her book and neither of them said anything else.

  He didn't say anything.

  What was he going to say.

  Max went for the Wen placement without telling him.

  Ye Feng found out from a classmate who mentioned it assuming he already knew. Just — casually. Oh did you see Max put in for the Wen group. The senior research placement. The one with the direct line to the regional governance board. The one Ye Feng had been slowly, carefully working toward since September.

  He sat on it for a day. Kept looking for the version of it that was okay. Where Max had just forgotten to mention it, or figured Ye Feng had heard, or —

  There wasn't a version.

  He went to Max's building the next night. Max was in the common room, laptop open, completely at ease. Real or performed, Ye Feng couldn't tell anymore and that was its own thing to sit with.

  "Wen group," Ye Feng said.

  "Yeah," Max said.

  "You didn't say anything."

  "Didn't occur to me that I needed to."

  "We literally talked about that placement. Both of us, together, we talked about wanting it."

  "Right." Max leaned back. "And there's one spot. That's how it works." He wasn't being mean about it. That almost made it worse — how calm he was. "I'm not going to not go for something because it makes things uncomfortable. You wouldn't either, honestly, if you think about it."

  Ye Feng didn't say anything.

  "You're not actually angry," Max said. Head tilted a little, like he was reading something. "You're just disappointed. Because you still think of this as — us working together. You've got to let that go, Feng. It's going to keep costing you."

  Nine years. That was the number that kept occurring to Ye Feng, standing there. Nine years of this person. Who was at his grandmother's funeral. Who knew about the dream before anyone else did. Who had raised his hand for him at Future Leaders Day so he had to stand up and say it out loud.

  "Is that what you actually want," Ye Feng said. "To not be — to just not be that anymore."

  Max looked at his laptop. "I want to win. That's what I want." Pause. "You want the same thing. You just haven't accepted what it costs yet."

  He started typing.

  Ye Feng left. Didn't say anything else. Walked back across campus and tried to figure out at what exact point Max had become someone he didn't fully recognize and couldn't land on an answer.

  The car was there again.

  He almost missed it — brain still full of Max, full of the courtyard, full of everything — but something caught his eye on the walk back from the library. Same make. Dark. Parked right at the edge of where the nearest light reached. Different plates again.

  He stopped.

  Looked at it.

  It didn't do anything.

  He took the long way back. The lit route, the busy route, the one that went past the 24-hour study hall and the main offices. Something his mom had drilled into him growing up — vary your routes, stay in lit areas, don't make patterns. He'd thought that was old caution. Leftover from before.

  Now he thought: maybe not.

  Room was dark when he got in. JoJo asleep, arm over his face, desk lamp still on. Ye Feng turned it off and sat on the edge of his bed and just — listed things.

  Max. Real. Concrete. Something to actually deal with.

  The car. Unknown. Maybe nothing, maybe something.

  The courtyard. The woman. The resemblance that was probably just a resemblance except —

  He stopped listing.

  Phone buzzed.

  you've gone quiet. you okay?

  Raina.

  He stared at her name for a second.

  yeah. rough day. talk tomorrow?

  Thumbs up. Then, after a few seconds — a small sun.

  He put the phone down.

  Lay back.

  Stared at the dark ceiling and thought about her sitting in the courtyard not looking up from her book and the woman's eyes finding her across twenty feet of open space and stopping there and what that meant or didn't mean or —

  He didn't know.

  That was the thing. He just didn't know.

  The room was quiet. JoJo breathed across from him, steady and even.

  Ye Feng closed his eyes.

  Took a long time.

  But eventually, sleep.