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𝐒𝐡𝐮𝐭 𝐔𝐩, 𝐈 𝐋𝐨𝐯𝐞 𝐘𝐨𝐮 // 𝐖𝐍𝟖𝟖

PART TWO OF TWO┃MASTERLIST

Summary: “She left because I’m in love with you,” – or the one where William is clearly in love with his childhood best friend and the only one who’s smart enough to notice is his girlfriend.

Pairing: William Nylander x afab! reader with she/her pronouns

Word count: 22.4k

Warnings: 18+ Minors DNI ★ Some mature dialogue, but no smut. No physical cheating, but definitely an emotional thing going on. A bunch of angst including failing friendships and a grandpa who died of cancer.

A/N: Sorry this took so long to finish! Please tell me what you think!! ◡̈

The next morning arrived without any of the softness this trip usually promised. You woke up long late, tangled in sheets that felt far too warm and with a headache that surprisingly had nothing to do with alcohol.

You didn’t know how long you spent just staring at the ceiling. Hours, maybe. Long enough for the sunlight to slowly shift across the room. Long enough to hear the villa wake up around you and realize you had absolutely no intention of joining it.

Lovisa came in a couple of times to check on you. The first time was simply to confirm you were alive and hadn’t fled the country overnight. The second time she brought you a cup of coffee.

You only offered muffled answers to all her attempts at conversation.

The villa was quieter than usual. You didn't hear much of the normal rhythm of people moving around and living their lives. Maybe everyone was sleeping in after yesterday. Or maybe last night's argument had simply put everyone on edge.

And weren't you the one responsible for that?

“You haven't been there for me since the day you got drafted.”

What kind of monster said that to someone? Well, apparently you did. And to your best friend, nonetheless.

You could still remember William's face afterward. The way he'd looked at you like you'd physically hit him. Taken aback and completely numb. In a way, punching him in the face would've probably hurt both of you less, and you were against physical violence in every conceivable way.

You'd spent most of the night lying awake convincing yourself that you didn't care—that he had started the argument, that he'd made it much bigger than it ever needed to become—only to wake up realizing you cared so much it felt sickeningly embarrassing.

With a soft knock on your door and a squeak from the hinges, Lovisa entered your room again. You heard her but didn't bother rolling over to look at her.

“Sunny, we’re leaving for the beach now,” she said gently. “Are you sure you don’t want to come?”

You groaned into the pillow. “Lollo, leave me alone.”

“Not possible,” Lovisa informed you. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“I’ve said no, like, fifteen times already.”

You felt the mattress dip as she sat down on the bed, and you flopped dramatically onto your back. Lovisa sat cross-legged at the edge of the bed, already dressed for the beach in a linen cover-up and oversized sunglasses pushed into her hair. She looked annoyingly put together for someone who had consumed enough vodka to tranquilize a horse two nights ago. You still weren’t entirely convinced you'd recovered from that first night out.

“I think William was being very childish last night,” she stated.

You groaned louder. There wasn’t possibly anything she could say that would make you feel better. “Lovisa—”

“No, let me finish.” Her voice softened. “He had no right to say any of that to you. Of course you should move when you get accepted. I don’t know what he was thinking.”

A lump immediately formed in your throat. The stupid thing was that you'd wanted somebody to say exactly that. Just once, to reassure you that you weren't losing your mind, attempting to do the impossible. But if you were being honest, you'd wanted to hear it from William. Because despite everything, despite how angry you were with him, despite the argument and the hurt and the months of distance, his stupid opinion still mattered the most to you.

“And you will get accepted,” Lovisa continued firmly. “No arguments.”

You ignored that entirely, staring back up at the ceiling instead.

“I called him a shitty friend, Lollo. That’s so much worse.”

William had said something selfish—that he thought you should stay in Sweden because that meant you’d conveniently be there when he was there. You had said something cruel, and there was a massive difference.

Lovisa's expression softened immediately. “Sunny.”

You looked over at her. Her shoulders had slumped slightly. A small crease sat permanently between her eyebrows now. You hated that she looked worried. You hated even more that your nickname sounded different when she said it, like there were words underneath it she wasn’t quite saying that you miraculously should just know.

“We’ve all been shitty friends to you these last few months. I think it’s only fair you call us out on it,” she continued.

“What?”

You pushed yourself up onto your elbows. The statement surprised you enough to cut straight through your self-pity.

“You’ve been dealing with everything at home. The stuff with your granddad, and the applications and we—” She stopped herself, exhaling sharply through her nose. “We haven’t exactly been present.”

You quickly shook your head, dismissing everything she’d just said. “But you’re not bad friends, though. I mean—I'm being overly emotional over something most people deal with alone anyway—”

“Shut up, shut up, shut up,” Lovisa mumbled. Before you could react, she had practically launched herself forward. The hug was awkward considering you were still half horizontal, but that had never stopped her before. “You can be so dumb for someone who’s spent her entire life in school.”

A laugh escaped you despite yourself, small and a little pathetic. Wet from the tears threatening to fall from your eyes.

Lovisa squeezed you once more before letting go and eventually pushed herself to her feet.

“Anyway.” She smoothed out her cover-up. “I’m gonna leave now. The rest are probably waiting in the car for me.”

You nodded weakly.

“Maybe take a shower?” she added. “And eat something. You look like hell.”

She was quickly back to the Lovisa you knew and loved, like her hug and almost-tears could be forgotten about. She still smiled at you, though, letting the emotion still shine through her eyes.

Lovisa took a few steps toward the door before pausing and turning to you again. “And try to talk to William, at least. You’re both fucking miserable whenever you argue.”

You groaned again. “Lollo, stop.”

The worst part was that she wasn't wrong.

You and William hardly ever fought. Maybe because you'd spent most of your friendship avoiding things that could turn into fights. Maybe because you usually understood each other before it got that far. Whatever the reason, arguments always felt wrong between you. Like a sweater put on backwards, uncomfortable in a way that never stopped demanding your attention until you corrected it.

You’d never really argued about serious things before, anyway. Certainly not to the point of screaming. Your disagreements usually revolved around important issues like who got shotgun in the car, who cheated during board games, or who was responsible for hanging up the phone first.

“Is he not going with you?” you asked hesitantly.

“No,” Lovisa paused, a small smile tugging at one corner of her mouth. “He said something about sleeping off a headache. I think he’s mostly sulking.”

Before you could throw something at her, she slipped out the door and closed it after her.

And your room fell deathly quiet again. For a long moment, you stared at the closed door. Then at the ceiling. Then toward the bathroom.

You should really take a shower and eat something. You were starving for breakfast.

You should also probably answer the texts that had accumulated on your phone overnight. You’d heard them buzz in throughout the night and morning, but you hadn’t dared to look until now.

Three were from your mother, simply asking about the trip. Those could wait a little longer until you answered them. One was from August asking if you wanted something special for dinner tonight. He was definitely going to attempt solving this awkward tension through food, and it might just work because of how talented he was.

And one was from Alana with a hope you feel better soon and a red heart emoji. She just had to be nice even when you were acting like the most socially inept person ever. You couldn’t even begin to imagine what that argument must’ve looked like from the eyes of a stranger.

There was nothing from William.

Not that you expected there to be.

He had a headache.

You dropped the phone back onto the mattress and stared at it for a second longer.

You really should eat and shower. And, apparently, talk to William. Unfortunately, that sounded like the hardest task on the list.

⋆.˚𖦹⋆✮⋆.˚ ⋆.˚𖦹⋆✮⋆.˚ ⋆.˚𖦹⋆✮⋆.˚ ⋆.˚𖦹⋆✮⋆.˚

William’s headache disappeared the second everyone left the house.

He’d spent all morning just muttering excuses about why he didn’t want to leave the bed, hiding from any possible sunlight. And people. God, voices annoyed him when the last thing he wanted was to hear them. Or worse, have to talk to them.

He'd spent enough years testing the limits of his body for hockey to know the difference between exhaustion and avoidance. This was avoidance. Pure, uncomplicated avoidance of any responsibility he might have today.

He wasn’t going to the beach. He wasn’t being civil with the others at breakfast. And he definitely wasn’t talking to anyone about what had happened last night.

As Alana had quietly gotten ready in their shared bathroom, she’d asked him a couple of times if he really wasn’t coming or asked if she should stay behind too.

William had shut that down immediately.

And every time she’d asked him if he was okay or if he wanted to talk, all he could blame was his headache. But Alana never argued or pressured him into saying more. That was one of the things he liked about her. She never demanded explanations.

Once he could hear the front door shut and the rental car leave the driveway, he decided he should probably get out of bed. Not before thinking about it for another ten minutes, though.

Because Lovisa had very loudly announced that you were staying home too.

But he couldn’t hear you move around the house, which made him assume you were stuck in the same position he was.

William dragged himself out of bed, not bothering to change clothes or even look himself in the mirror.

The villa felt strange without everyone in it. It almost reminded him of his condo back in Toronto with how empty and quiet it was. And he hated that about it.

Sunlight spilled across empty hallways and untouched furniture. Somewhere downstairs, the air conditioning vent hummed softly. He wandered without much purpose. Kitchen. Living room. Terrace. Back inside. As if movement itself might somehow solve whatever the hell was wrong with him.

Eventually he found himself upstairs again. Should he just go back to bed?

He stopped in the hallway without really thinking, his eyes landing on the closed door to your room. William frowned. What exactly was his plan here? Stand outside your room like a serial killer? Wait until you inevitably had to come out and he could totally accidentally just be standing there, forcing you to talk to him?

Great strategy. Real mature. About as mature as he'd been last night.

Suddenly he noticed the sound of running water drifting through the door. So, you were awake and in the shower, apparently.

For some reason, that made something tighten in his chest. And it wasn't because you were naked on the other side of the wall. That thought genuinely didn’t even cross his mind. Not until now, anyway. William immediately shoved it aside.

The thing bothering him was the realization that you'd probably spent the entire morning doing exactly what he'd been doing.

Just thinking about it all. And knowing you, you’d definitely overthought it already. Brought the thought back to its tiny little core and examined it from every possible angle. He wondered what your conclusion was.

William leaned back against the wall and quickly pushed himself away again.

Fuck. This was ridiculous.

You'd had arguments before. Not too many. Almost none, actually. But they happened, and usually they lasted an hour. Maybe two at tops. Then one of you made a stupid apology disguised as a joke, the other pretended not to care, and everything went back to normal.

This felt very different to that. Maybe because the topic was actually worth discussing. Not worth fighting over like you currently were, but it was something you needed to talk about.

William had known exactly what every word you’d said last night meant. That was the worst part of it all. Everything had landed because some part of him knew there was truth buried inside it.

“You haven't been there for me since the day you got drafted.”

That sentence sat in his chest like some sort of spreading disease.

Because he hadn’t. It was true—he hadn’t been there for you like he used to. He’d left you alone to deal with so much shit, then expected you to answer the phone every time he had a weird dream or a bad playoff loss or some minor crisis he couldn’t figure out himself.

He’d like to blame it on life happening around him. Too much and too quickly all at once.

He had a team and the entire city of Toronto depending on him. He had relationships falling apart wherever he looked. He couldn’t even remember the last time he hung out with all his siblings together, unless it was related to hockey and they’d all shown up for him.

So when had he stopped showing up for the people he loved? It had happened somewhere along the way, and he’d stubbornly not even noticed it.

He hadn’t visited August’s new restaurant, even though he’d worked there for nearly two years. Lovisa’s sister had a kid he’d never met. And he'd missed your grandfather’s fucking funeral—a man who'd practically adopted him every summer since he was fourteen years old.

Somewhere along the way he'd stopped being the person who automatically knew what was happening in your life, and that hurt more than he could admit even to himself.

He hadn't known you were serious about the PhD applications this year. Hadn't known you'd applied abroad or that you’d already picked which cities. He’d been ready to laugh it off like usual when Lovisa brought it up out of the blue. You always said you would apply, yet you never did.

And somehow hearing it from across a Yahtzee table had felt awful. Not because you were leaving—he could survive that actually—but because you hadn’t told him.

When the fuck had he stopped being the person you told things like that to? And if he didn’t know about this, what else didn’t he know?

William scrubbed both hands down his face. Jesus Christ. He needed to eat something before this fake headache became a real one. So, he finally forced himself downstairs before he could spend another ten minutes staring at your bedroom door like an idiot.

⋆.˚𖦹⋆✮⋆.˚ ⋆.˚𖦹⋆✮⋆.˚ ⋆.˚𖦹⋆✮⋆.˚ ⋆.˚𖦹⋆✮⋆.˚

William stood with the refrigerator door hanging open, staring at shelves he’d already checked twice, when he heard the sound of bare feet padding softly against the stone floors.

You appeared in the kitchen a second later, freshly showered.

Your hair was still damp, darker than usual where water clung to it. A few strands stuck to the side of your neck. You were wearing a pair of soft sleep shorts and one of those ancient university t-shirts you refused to throw away despite it looking like it had survived several wars, a faded logo stretched across your chest.

For a moment, neither of you said anything.

William hadn’t seen you since you'd stormed away from the table last night. That realization felt strangely ridiculous. Less than twelve hours, and somehow it felt like weeks.

“Oh,” you said.

Just that.

Oh.

Like you'd stumbled across him entirely by accident and had been expecting literally anyone else to be standing there.

“You’re awake.”

William shoved his hands deeper into the pockets of his shorts and leaned against the open refrigerator door. “Yeah.”

You stopped where you were, halfway between the doorway and the kitchen island. Your arms hung awkwardly at your sides, like you weren't entirely sure what to do with them.

“How’s the headache?” you asked.

The question shouldn't have made him feel guilty, but it did. Because you were asking sincerely and you both knew it had never really been about a headache.

“Mostly gone,” he answered.

You nodded, and silence filled the room again.

God, this was painful.

Normally you would’ve been making fun of him already. Or stealing whatever food he’d found. Or hopping up onto the counter and talking about some book nobody else cared about while forcing him to make breakfast for the both of you.

Instead, you hovered near the kitchen island while William stood by the fridge, the two of you behaving like distant relatives who’d unexpectedly run into each other at a grocery store.

The refrigerator was mostly empty anyway. A couple of eggs and an unreasonable amount of beer. The villa was large enough to house a small monarchy. Surely somebody had bought actual food. Then again, August had been in charge of dinner most days, and William didn’t dare to touch any of those ingredients.

“Why is there absolutely nothing in this fridge?” he muttered, finally shutting the door.

William hadn't really expected you to answer, but a small smile tugged at your mouth. He actually watched you fight against it.

“My guess would be because you boys eat like cavemen,” you said, shrugging.

There it was. Tiny, but he caught it. The first glimpse of normal he’d seen all morning. And embarrassingly enough, William felt himself relax almost immediately.

“You wanna order something?” you asked.

“No.” William shook his head.

You frowned slightly. “What do you want then?”

There was only one thing William could possibly think of eating right now, to rebuild the bridge he’d burned between you last night. Not because it sounded particularly good, but because he needed it. The answer would’ve been the same ten years ago, as it would’ve been last summer. He hoped, stupidly and desperately, that it would still be the same answer ten years from now.

“You know what I want?” he laughed. “I want marmalade toast and chocolate milk.”

⋆.˚𖦹⋆✮⋆.˚ ⋆.˚𖦹⋆✮⋆.˚ ⋆.˚𖦹⋆✮⋆.˚ ⋆.˚𖦹⋆✮⋆.˚

Sundbyberg, Stockholm County. Sometime in January 2013.

Three floors up in a mid-century apartment building, William could see big snowflakes through the kitchen window, slowly sailing down to the ground and landing in what was already an entirely white landscape.

Inside, everything smelled like toast.

Between sage-green kitchen cabinets and a fridge absolutely littered with magnets, vacation photos, shopping lists, and takeout menus, he'd somehow found a second little home at your parents' place.

As William waited for bread to pop out of the toaster, he could hear you muttering at something in the living room. It was most definitely directed at his poor attempt at writing a book report that needed to be finished by Monday morning.

“Did you seriously write about that stupid Zlatan Ibrahimović book?” you yelled towards the kitchen. “The assignment is for fiction!”

“Zlatan's career is unreal. It's basically fiction,” William mumbled back through a mouthful of cheese.

You groaned in response and muttered something unintelligible just as the toaster finally made the very awaited popping sound.

It was a Friday evening, and William had hopped on the metro straight from practice to get to your side of town. Your parents were away for the weekend at your granddad's place—helping him shovel snow, chop firewood, and whatever else retired Swedish men insisted on doing in the dead of winter—so the apartment was empty save for the two of you.

Not that it felt strange anymore. It was a standard procedure by now for you to hang out like this. A few years ago William would've been nervous showing up unannounced. Now he had his own mug in one of the cabinets, and his mother knew where he was before he’d even texted her.

He'd found you exactly where he almost always found you when he knocked on the door.

Nose buried in a book or homework despite it being a Friday night. Pink fluffy slippers on your feet. Your granddad's old fisherman sweater hanging off your shoulders. The coffee table already showing evidence of your preferred dinner whenever nobody responsible was around to stop you.

Marmalade toast and chocolate milk.

It wasn't a full meal by any stretch of the imagination, but you'd never seemed particularly concerned by that fact, no matter how many times William pointed it out. If his coach ever caught him joining you as often as he did, he'd probably get benched for crimes against nutrition and not taking the game seriously.

But there was something unmatched about how nostalgic it made him feel.

Maybe because you'd introduced it to him not long after he'd moved back to Sweden. Maybe because evenings like these had become such a fundamental part of your friendship that they felt impossible to separate from it.

The familiar sound of the squeeze bottle of marmalade that was always somehow on its way to running out. A label that simply said Breakfast Marmalade. Apricots and oranges, supposedly. Pure sugar, realistically. That together with a thick layer of butter and an ungodly amount of cheese—all slapped onto poppyseed toast and washed down with ice-cold chocolate milk.

God, he could cry. Or have an orgasm.

As he carried his food into the living room, you were curled up in the corner of the couch beneath a blanket, trying to fight off the winter cold that always seemed to creep into the apartment once the few hours of afternoon sun had completely faded.

William couldn't wait to warm up too. His fingers still tingled from the rink, and his cheeks burned faintly from having crossed half of Stockholm in the snow.

Surprisingly, you’d put away his book report and were smiling stupidly at something on your phone instead.

“Did you see that Lollo and August ended up going to that house party?”

“Hm, no,” William mumbled, biting into the toast as he sat down. He got crumbs everywhere, but he knew it didn’t matter in this household. At least not when you would always leave a worse trace.

A laugh escaped you, half snort and half wheeze. “She just sent me a video of August making out with someone.”

You shoved the phone into his face before he could object.

The footage was blurry, shaky, and clearly filmed from the opposite side of a crowded room. Through the grainy darkness William could just barely make out August and a girl he didn't recognize attached at the mouth.

“That’s way too much tongue,” he grimaced.

You doubled over laughing, your slipper-clad feet knocking into his thigh. “I know.”

William physically recoiled as the clip replayed. You laughed so hard your shoulders started shaking. He loved when you got like this, even more so when he wasn’t the punchline.

Once you'd finally recovered, you tossed the phone onto the couch beside you and pointed toward the abandoned papers on the coffee table.

“Anyway. Back to your terrible book report.”

William groaned. “Sunny.”

“What were you thinking picking an autobiography?”

He leaned further back into the couch, balancing his plate on his stomach. “I just—I truly don’t get the point of book reports. And I wanted to read the Zlatan book anyway.”

“The point of this report,” you informed him, reaching for a pen like a weapon, “is to get you a passing grade in Swedish class so you'll be allowed to graduate like the rest of us.”

William rolled his eyes. “I still think that rule is stupid. I have passing grades in every other subject. Why are languages so important they dictate everything?”

You pointed the pen at him immediately. “It's almost like they do dictate everything.”

“Oh my God.”

“Language is literally how people communicate.”

“Stop being smart.”

A grin tugged at your mouth—the stupidly wide kind where your cheeks dimpled deeply and your lips twitched because you couldn’t contain it in the slightest. William hated that he loved when you got like this. Mostly because you were usually right, and partly because you looked entirely too pleased with yourself when you were.

And maybe a little because it was impossible not to smile back.

“I know, I know,” you sighed dramatically. “You're predestined to get drafted ridiculously high and become Vancouver's new golden boy or whatever, but a high school diploma could still be useful, William.”

William perked up instantly. “You’re thinking Vancouver? My mom thinks it will be Toronto.”

The draft still felt impossibly far away, even if it was only a few months now.

It felt like a make-believe thing people talked about more than something that would actually happen. Even less something that he would be a part of. NHL scouts had occasionally been appearing at tournaments for the last two years now. His coaches whispered, and his teammates’ parents speculated loudly.

But William still took the metro train going in the opposite direction to school sometimes when he was tired in the mornings. He still forgot assignments until the very last moment. He still left half his equipment everywhere he went. One of his old hockey sticks had been living in your family's umbrella stand for almost a year, and nobody had moved it—least of all him.

He was even pretty sure the sweatpants you were wearing now had once been his too, and he’d just forgotten them here.

It was difficult to imagine him becoming someone important when most of his life still looked exactly the same. Even so, the thought sent butterflies loose in his stomach every single time.

“It’s beside the point,” you argued. “If anything goes wrong, it could be useful to have a backup plan.”

“Do you have a backup plan, Sunny?” William asked, raising a brow.

“What? You think I’ll fail at becoming a teacher?”

“Do you think I will fail at becoming an NHL player?”

A reluctant smile crossed your face. “Touché.”

The conversation lingered for a moment after that, settling comfortably into the familiar quiet that always seemed to find its way between you. William reached for the last corner of his toast while you absentmindedly tapped the pen against your knee, both of you listening to the radiator hum softly behind the couch. Outside, snow continued drifting past the windows in slow, lazy flakes. The world beyond the apartment looked frozen solid.

That was until a thoughtful hum escaped you as you glanced toward the overflowing bookshelf beside the television. Then your eyes brightened.

William immediately knew he was in trouble.

“If I pick out a really short fictional book for you to read? Will you do that, and I can help you write the report?”

William groaned loudly enough to make you laugh. You weren't actually asking. You were presenting him with a solution and generously pretending he had a say in it.

“Sunny.”

“William.”

He dropped his head back against the couch cushion in defeat. A victorious smile immediately spread across your face.

“Excellent.”

Rolling your eyes at his dramatics, you pushed yourself off the couch and padded across the living room in your slippers. William watched you disappear toward the bookshelf.

It occupied nearly an entire wall of the apartment, packed so tightly that some books had been stacked horizontally on top of the others. Most people would've found that excessive. You treated it like a completely reasonable amount of books to own.

He knew your parents read plenty too, but a surprising number belonged to you.

He'd seen you return from your granddad's place before carrying one of those giant blue Ikea bags full of books he'd given you personally to read. Something about teaching the younger generation about the classics—a lesson he knew you’d already learned.

You trailed your fingers along the spines now, muttering titles under your breath while searching. To William, every single book looked exactly the same.

A moment later, you made a triumphant sound. “Aha. This one is like seventy pages. Is that doable?”

You returned holding a thin paperback and dropped back onto the couch beside him.

Not your side of the couch, though. His side. So close, your thigh instantly brushed his.

William shifted automatically to make room. The blanket pooled between you, and without either of you discussing it, you grabbed one side while he took the other, wrapping it around both of you. It happened so naturally neither of you noticed.

Or maybe you did it on purpose and simply didn't think it mattered.

The apartment was always cold in winter. Not freezing, but cold enough that blankets migrated from room to room depending on where people happened to be sitting. William couldn't remember a single evening spent here that didn't involve at least one.

By now he was almost convinced your family measured temperature differently than everyone else.

You immediately curled into his corner of the couch, tucking your feet underneath yourself. One of those ridiculous pink slippers hung halfway off your heel. Your hair was slightly messy from having spent the entire afternoon bent over homework. The sleeves of your grandfather's fisherman sweater swallowed your hands when you handed the book over to him.

William eyed the cover suspiciously as he accepted it from you.

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka.

“There’s a bug on it,” he stated flatly.

“It’s about a guy who wakes up one morning as a cockroach.”

“How is that better than Zlatan’s life story?”

You looked genuinely offended. “This one has actual substance for you to write about, and not just ‘If you’re good enough at your sport, you get to be an arrogant asshole.’”

William laughed, pressing a hand dramatically against his chest. “That was directed at Zlatan and not me, right?”

You only smiled in response, which wasn't reassuring at all.

The silence made William look down at the book once more, eyes still caught on what was frankly quite a disgusting-looking crawler. What could possibly be interesting about a guy living as a cockroach?

“What’s the purpose of the cockroach, anyway?” he mumbled. “Some sort of metaphor?”

“Read it and find out.”

You stared at him with raised brows. He could tell he wasn’t going to get more of an answer out of you until he at least gave a fair chance at reading it.

So, he did. He settled further into the couch and opened it up on the first page, eyes already tired from the small font.

You immediately looked far too pleased with yourself again.

Forty minutes later, William was sprawled across one end of the couch reading while you pretended to work on your own homework in the other corner. “Pretended” being the important word, because every few pages he caught you glancing over—waiting on him, like a scientist observing a particularly stupid laboratory rat.

The sky outside the windows had turned from pale gray to deep blue. Snow continued to drift past the windows in big, white flakes. Somewhere in a neighboring apartment a television murmured through the wall.

The blanket had shifted gradually over the last forty minutes too. Or maybe it was just that the two of you had become fully one with the couch now, sunken so deep into the cushions, someone would have to pull you out of there with force.

One of your legs was twisted with William’s, enough to make the warmth from your body spread through to his. It was simply the sort of thing that happened when you'd spent years occupying the same couch in the same spots.

William found himself absentmindedly tracing a finger back and forth across the fabric covering your shin where it rested beside him beneath the blanket. Not really thinking about it, just fidgeting. The way some people bounced their knees, or the way you chewed on pen caps. The rhythm of it became almost automatic as he read.

Back and forth. Back and forth.

Eventually, when he only had about thirty pages left, William lowered the book. “I think I get it now.”

You immediately looked up from where you'd been half-curled into the corner of the couch, your attention snapping back to him. “Oh?”

There was genuine excitement in your voice. Like you'd been waiting for this exact moment—for him to finally get it.

“Anyone can be a cockroach if something bad happens to them, right?”

You nodded. “Go on.”

William shifted slightly beneath the blanket, letting the book fall closed against his stomach. His fingers still rested absentmindedly against your shin, gripping it nervously through your sweatpants.

“Illness, depression, disability—anything that makes you heavily dependent on others,” he said slowly, feeling his way through the thought. He frowned, searching for the right words. “It becomes shame, I guess. And isolation.”

For a moment, you just looked at him. Then something softened in your expression, melting off like snow in warm hands. Your surprise disappeared fully, replaced by a small, pleased smile that tugged at the corners of your mouth.

“Yeah,” you said quietly. “You've got it.”

William tried very hard not to look too proud of himself. He still wasn't entirely sure whether this was supposed to be a difficult book to understand or not, but the approval in your voice landed with embarrassing effectiveness.

You tucked your leg further into William’s, the blanket shifting between you as you settled a little closer to him, your slipper hitting him in the arm in the process.

“There’s also a capitalist interpretation,” you continued. “About how humans are only valuable to society when they can contribute something productive, but I'm not going to bore you with that.”

William snorted. “You already are.”

You quickly kicked his leg beneath the blanket.

“Hey!”

“You deserved that,” you muttered back.

Both of you laughed in tandem, the sound filling the apartment before fading back into the comfortable quiet.

“Hypothetically,” William mused after a moment, “could a career-ending hockey injury make someone a cockroach?”

You sat up so quickly the blanket nearly slid off your lap.

“There!” You pointed at him immediately, eyes lighting up. “There’s your angle!”

William laughed at your enthusiasm. “Really? It’s not dumb?”

“No.” You shook your head firmly. “It's good. I promise.”

You looked ridiculously excited. Like he'd solved a puzzle, or maybe like he'd finally understood something you'd been trying to teach him since forever.

“I think your teacher would appreciate that angle,” you added, still smiling.

William looked at you for a second longer than he meant to as the excitement was still written all over your face. It was like he’d lit a spark inside of you by simply caring, for once. You genuinely loved this stuff. Books and languages. Being able to talk about things and helping people understand them.

“You know,” he said before he could stop himself, “you're going to be really good at this someday.”

You blinked. “What?”

“The teaching thing.” William shrugged. “You're good at it.”

For once, there wasn't an immediate joke waiting behind your eyes. Just surprise. A little vulnerability painted across your features, somehow.

But you'd always been good at explaining things. Good at listening. Good at making people feel less stupid than they actually were. It was one of the reasons he'd kept showing up here in the first place. While he loved his teammates, no one else could make him feel as accepted as you did.

William suddenly felt his ears growing warm.

Your gaze lingered on him for a moment. Then you looked down at your lap, smoothing an imaginary wrinkle in the blanket. “Thanks,” you said softly.

Embarrassed by his own honesty, William looked away too, staring toward the little cockroach on the book cover that he now had a strange amount of empathy for. Neither of you moved, your legs still touching beneath the shared blanket.

Outside, snow continued falling over Stockholm.

Beyond the windows, the world disappeared more and more beneath a steady curtain of white. By morning, William was fairly certain the driveway back home would be buried under half a meter of fresh snow, and somehow all of his siblings would unanimously decide that made it his responsibility to shovel it.

That problem could wait until tomorrow. The last train to his side of town had already left anyway. And besides, he slept better here than he did at home.

Maybe it was the familiar sounds—the radiators humming softly through the night, the occasional creak of old floorboards, the muffled noise of traffic beyond the snow-covered streets. You couldn’t get that in the newly built house his parents had bought when they all moved back to Sweden. You also had no annoying siblings here.

Or maybe it was simply that being here had become second nature years ago. And that your bedroom was much cozier than his. Hockey posters and sticks taped to the walls didn’t exactly make the best decor.

Whatever the reason, he already knew he'd end up stretched across your bed later, stealing half the blanket while you complained about it in the morning.

Inside, wrapped in that ordinary winter evening, neither of you realized that one day you'd both get exactly what you wanted out of your lives.

Just on different sides of the Atlantic Ocean, and with a friendship neither of you thought could ever break serving as collateral damage.

⋆.˚𖦹⋆✮⋆.˚ ⋆.˚𖦹⋆✮⋆.˚ ⋆.˚𖦹⋆✮⋆.˚ ⋆.˚𖦹⋆✮⋆.˚

You split up at the little market square in town without really discussing it.

William headed toward the bakery tucked into the corner of the plaza—the one all of you had become embarrassingly attached to over the years; they had the best croissants in all of France—while you ducked into the supermarket across the street with a handwritten grocery list folded in your pocket.

There was only three things on it: marmalade, butter, and chocolate milk.

You called it efficiency.

In reality, neither of you had quite figured out how to be normal with each other yet. The argument still sat between you like a bruise. Less painful than yesterday, maybe, but tender enough that you kept finding ways not to touch it. You couldn’t solve this argument with marmalade, even if you wished you could.

The market itself was busy despite being a weekday afternoon, and almost painfully French.

Elderly couples lingered beside fruit stalls arguing over peaches and nectarines. Lavender bundles hung from wooden racks tied together with rough twine. The entire square smelled faintly of citrus and fresh bread, with sea salt drifting inland from the nearby coast. Somewhere in the distance, an accordion played a melody that sounded suspiciously like every French stereotype ever invented. It made you feel like Amélie in the best way.

By the time you returned with the groceries, William was already waiting. He sat on the edge of the fountain in the middle of the plaza, one paper bakery bag tucked beneath his arm while his other hand remained hidden behind his back.

You slowed automatically, just long enough to look at him.

He'd always been beautiful. That wasn't even a romantic thing. It was simply an observable fact, like saying the Mediterranean was blue or that August took barbecuing far too seriously.

But there was something different about William during the summers.

Maybe it was the tan that appeared effortlessly on his skin while the rest of you turned bright red and annoyed. Maybe it was because he spent most of the year hidden beneath hockey gear, workout clothes, media obligations, and the general exhaustion of being a professional athlete.

And summer stripped all that away. Just William, the boy you’d met before any of the other things existed.

When his eyes caught yours from across the square, you immediately felt ridiculous for staring. You hurried the rest of the way over before he could somehow read your mind. You feared he might be able to after all these years.

“I couldn't find the mixed marmalade we have at home,” you announced, lifting the grocery bag slightly. “So I went with one apricot and one orange. We should just be able to eat both at the same time, right?”

William chuckled. “I think that’s how marmalade works.”

You set the bag down on the ground between your feet, feeling a sudden warm breeze drift in, momentarily overwhelming you with heat.

“Did you find the right bread?” you asked him.

“Yeah, I think so,” he answered, lifting the paper bag slightly before tucking it down into the grocery bag between the jars of marmalade. “But not with poppy seeds, unfortunately.”

You shook your head solemnly. “Damn Frenchmen. Can’t do anything right.”

A laugh escaped him. Not one of his loud ones, but one that was more of a giggle. One you knew was unguarded and because he found your humor quite lame at times.

The square buzzed around you. Cutlery clinked against café tables. Someone's dog barked at a pigeon. The accordion player had migrated somewhere farther down the street, his music now drifting through the warm afternoon in broken pieces.

William patted the empty space beside him. “Sit down.”

“Why?” You narrowed your eyes. “We should be getting back. I’m starving.”

The truth was that you were acutely aware of how easy it would be to leave. Stand up. Walk back to the villa. Let the argument remain mostly unresolved. And that if you sat down next to him, it would almost definitely lead to you to talking it through.

William only shrugged at your question. “I stopped for something else too.”

Immediately suspicious, you reluctantly sat down, crossing your arms in the process as some sort of shield. “What did you do?”

A stubborn smile tugged at the corner of William’s mouth.

“Can you close your eyes, Sunny?” he asked.

“The trust I have in you will get me murdered someday.”

You rolled them dramatically first, just so he knew you objected on principle. Then you closed them anyway.

The sunlight glowed red through your eyelids. Somewhere nearby, water splashed from the fountain. And then you felt him take your hand.

The contact surprised you more than it should have. William had held your hand a thousand times before. As kids, when he dragged you through crowds because you walked too slowly. When you nearly slipped on ice. When he’d hauled you onto docks, into boats, off trains, over fences.

None of it had ever meant anything.

It still didn’t, you told yourself. And yet something about him grabbing your hand now felt vastly different than ever before.

His fingers settled around yours with easy familiarity, like they already knew exactly where to go—how the unique shape of your hand differed from any other hand he might’ve held.

Your kept your hand still, fingers resting in his palm while his thumb swept once across the back of your hand. Then came the faint rattling sound of beads.

“You have some new ones,” William murmured.

You felt something cool circle your wrist before his fingers worked at a clasp. The market noise faded slightly. Or maybe you just stopped paying attention to it.

“Yeah, uhm…” Your voice caught unexpectedly. You tilted your head up slightly, eyes still closed. “The kids at the youth center love making bracelets ever since Taylor Swift played in Stockholm.”

William laughed. “Of course they did.”

You smiled despite yourself. “We’ve been doing little workshops, so that they can make a bunch and the proceeds go to charity.”

The explanation came easily because you loved talking about the kids.

Especially the ones at the youth center. They didn’t really have another choice but to be there after school and during school holidays, whether it was because of working parents or estranged parents or something else entirely. You knew those kids deserved your attention even more, just so they wouldn’t slip through the cracks of society.

Even with your eyes closed, you could picture all the individual bracelets: the colorful beads, the crooked letter charms, the uneven knots tied by twelve-year-olds who swore they were following instructions. The stacks of bracelets you’d spent entire afternoons helping untangle.

Tiny projects that resulted in tiny amounts of money, but you’d watched those kids become so proud of them. And that was what mattered.

You knew from the moment William had mentioned your new bracelets which one he’d focused on, though. A thin bracelet with rainbow glass beads, centered by a line of alphabet blocks spelling out fuck cancer. The profit from those went to cancer research, and basically half of Sweden already wore them. You just hadn’t personally had a reason to until this year.

“And uh,” you swallowed. “Well the rainbow one is for grandpa, obviously.”

The words settled softly between you and lingered there. William didn’t say anything. His hand remained against your wrist for a moment longer, then he folded both of his hands around yours, holding them with a gentle pressure that somehow felt kinder than anything he could have said.

“Can I open my eyes now?” you complained eventually. “You're taking forever.”

The pressure of his fingers disappeared, and you took that as approval.

After adjusting to the sunlight, the first thing you looked at was your own wrist and the new, pretty blue stones that adorned it. Lapis lazuli, if you had to guess, intertwined with a silver wire.

Exactly the sort of thing you would’ve stopped to admire yourself but never actually bought. It didn’t just look like your average cheap market stall bracelet.

Your gaze then jumped to William.

“Can you clasp mine, please?”

He was already extending his wrist toward you, holding another bracelet with the same blue stones.

“Y-you got us matching ones?” you stuttered out.

Of course he’d gotten you matching ones. The realization made something embarrassingly warm bloom in your chest.

William rolled his eyes. “Just clasp it, Sunny.”

You took his wrist without further argument.

The clasp was tiny and annoying, forcing you to focus harder than necessary. You could feel him watching you while you worked, the thought alone made your fingers slip twice. Eventually the clasp clicked shut.

“There.”

You leaned back to inspect your work. The blue stones looked strange beside the expensive jewelry already on his wrist.

“Sure you want to wear it next to your…” You pointed vaguely at it. “I don't even know what brand that is. Cartier?”

William looked instantly offended. “Did you not see my photoshoot for Tiffany?”

“Oh, I’m sorry.” You gasped dramatically. Pressing a hand to your chest, you bowed your head. “Of course it’s Tiffany.”

William laughed, his grin lingering for another second before fading into something quieter. The market noise carried on around you. The fountain splashed steadily behind and somewhere on the plaza, a vendor loudly called out to passing tourists.

Neither of you spoke for a moment. You found yourself absentmindedly tracing the blue stones around your wrist, looking over to see him do the same thing.

Matching bracelets. Such a William thing to do.

You were still smiling when he suddenly said, “I’m sorry I didn’t go to his funeral.”

The smile disappeared immediately. It wasn’t even close to being gradual, not in the way people described in books, where happiness slowly faded from someone's face. It was simply gone. One second you were teasing him about expensive Tiffany jewelry, the next, your chest hurt to the point where it felt hollow.

Your grief still at so close to the surface that it felt embarrassing.

You kept looking down at your hands. To the new bracelet around your wrist. To the familiar rainbow beads beside it. To anything that wasn’t William.

“I told you a million times, it’s okay,” you said quietly. “You were in a playoff stretch. Don't be ridiculous.”

“But were we really?” William joked, but you knew he didn’t actually mean to be funny.

Your laughter came out wet, broken around the edges.

“Shut up,” you managed. “I believed in you.”

For a moment, William just looked at you, then he smiled.

God. It was such a small smile. Painfully small. The kind that somehow hurt more than if he’d looked devastated, because it was full of guilt. Full of regret. Full of all the things he wished he'd done differently, and maybe the realization that he wasn’t even talking about hockey to begin with.

“Damn it,” you whispered.

Your vision blurred immediately, and against your own will. You harshly squeezed your eyes shut, as if that would somehow stop it. You laughed again because crying in the middle of a French market square wasn’t something you had planned on doing.

Around you, life continued uninterrupted. People wandered between market stalls carrying flowers and paper bags. Someone laughed loudly nearby. The accordion player was still going at it. The entire world had the audacity to keep moving.

“Sunny—” William tried.

“No.”

You rubbed furiously beneath your eyes, grateful to not be wearing makeup.

“My little Sunshine, look at me.”

William’s hand came up to cradle your jaw, forcing you to look at him even as big, lonely tears rolled softly down your cheeks.

Mitt lilla solsken

You couldn’t believe he’d just called you that. Maybe because he hadn’t called you that in a while, or because the last person you remember calling you those three exact words were your grandfather.

A strangled laugh escaped you, immediately followed by a couple more tears.

“God, I hate you.”

“No, you don’t.”

“No,” you admitted miserably. “Of course I don’t.”

His thumb brushed beneath your eye. Then, before you could even take noticed of it, William swiftly moved and pulled you closer. One second he was sitting still and the next his arms were around you. You folded almost instantly, like your body had been waiting for permission. Your forehead hit his shoulder, hands grabbing at the back of his shirt, as his arms tightened around you.

Suddenly there was nowhere left for you to hide.

The past few months crashed into you all at once. The countless hospital visits that still would never be enough. Cleaning out your grandfather’s house, sorting through decades of his life and deciding what stayed and what disappeared forever. The guilt of leaving your parents to handle so much of it. Your PhD applications in the middle of it all. The uncertainty, the loneliness, and the constant feeling that everyone else had kept moving while you were somehow stuck in place.

You’d spent so much time being practical that you hadn’t really stopped to be sad.

Now it seemed determined to come out at once. Messily. Your face buried against William’s shoulder while the people walking past pretending not to notice.

“I’m sorry,” you mumbled eventually, voice muffled against his shirt.

“You don’t need to apologize.”

His hand moved slowly up and down your back. The same steady rhythm he’d used your entire life whenever something hurt. William had always known how to hold you together.

“It’s just—” you swallowed. “It’s been a lot these past months and I haven’t really talked to anybody about it, so even the smallest mention just… sets me off.”

“It’s okay.”

Eventually, reluctantly, you pulled back from him. The hug loosened inch by inch, neither of you seeming particularly eager to be the first person to let go. When you finally did, you became mortifyingly aware of the damp spot your tears had left on the shoulder of his shirt.

You stared at it for too long. William, meanwhile, didn’t seem to care in the slightest.

His hands lingered briefly on your arms before dropping away.

The market square felt quieter somehow. Or maybe it was just your head. Crying always did that, like it wrung something out of you and left behind a strange kind of stillness.

William looked out toward the sea beyond the rooftops, sunlight glinting off the water in the distance, You figured he couldn’t quite bear to look at you while he spoke.

“I’m the one who should be sorry,” he said quietly. “I feel like I have no idea what’s going on in your life anymore.”

“Please don’t bring that up,” you groaned lightly, sure you knew were this was going already. “I don’t want to fight with you again.”

“We’re not fighting.” His eyes found yours again. “I want to apologize,”

Something in his voice made you stop, trying to listen to him instead of just talking over him to quiet it all down. William was rarely bad at expressing affection, but he was terrible at expressing guilt. Usually he handled it the same way he handled everything uncomfortable—buried beneath jokes and distractions.

You couldn’t remember the last time you’d heard him sit with the guilt instead.

Yet here he was.

“You have so much on your shoulders that I’ve stupidly not cared about,” he continued. “I’ve been acting like a really shitty friend, Sunny.”

“But you’re not, though—”

“Oh, I am.” His answer came without hesitation. “You have no idea how selfish I am when it comes to you.”

For a second you genuinely thought you’d misheard him. The words didn’t fit neatly anywhere in your head. Sure, he’d been selfish during the argument, but selfish with you That accusation didn’t make sense. Not directed at him, and not directed at you.

You frowned. “What does that even mean?”

William laughed softly through his nose. Not because anything was particularly funny, but out of embarrassed by the fact that he’d said something revealing out loud. His gaze dropped briefly toward the bracelet now sitting on his wrist. The matching one. Then back to you.

“It means you’re trying to make one of the biggest decisions of your life,” he said calmly. “And all I can think about is how much I don’t want you to leave Stockholm.”

The words were simple and ugly and selfish exactly the way he’d called it, and how you’d perceived it last night. You felt your breath tighten painfully beneath your ribs.

“Because if you leave,” he sighed, “I get even less of you than I already do.”

You didn’t have anything to say to that, simply staring at him. The breeze coming off the coast stirred the loose strands of his hair, and you saw tears clinging to the corners of his eyes. He’d perfected the ability to not let them fall.

You couldn't remember William ever sounding quite so vulnerable. He’d accidentally cracked something open and now couldn’t put it back together, because you’d seen it all happen anyway.

“But that's not your problem to solve,” William continued eventually. “You should obviously do what you want, Sunny.”

His smile returned then—small, crooked and a little sad around the edges. The kind that belonged entirely to William.

Your throat tightened again, but this time it was from something way more confusing than grief. You’d mastered grief at this point, and this was something entirely new you were feeling. You knew what friendship looked like—you’d spent your entire life surrounded by the beauty of it—but there was something about the way he was looking at you now that made your pulse stumble unexpectedly, heartbeat running wild inside your ribcage, like… falling without knowing where to land.

“You deserve it,” he smiled. “To go after your dream like that. And I’m one hundred percent sure you’d be incredible at it.”

For the first time since the argument, you believed him.

And it wasn’t even because he’d finally said the words you’d been yearning for, even if you couldn’t ignore him like you could Lovisa or your parents. It was because of the way he said them, like your success would break his heart a little and he’d cheer for you anyway.

⋆.˚𖦹⋆✮⋆.˚ ⋆.˚𖦹⋆✮⋆.˚ ⋆.˚𖦹⋆✮⋆.˚ ⋆.˚𖦹⋆✮⋆.˚

On the walk back to the villa, things started to feel miles better between you.

Neither of you suddenly transformed into people who talked through every emotion the second it appeared. You'd probably never be those kinds of people. But the conversation settled back into something remarkably ordinary, and that felt far more important than trying to force out more apologies. You’d both said enough already.

William complained about the cobblestones hurting his feet. You complained about the heat blazing down on your shoulders. Somewhere along the way you spent ten minutes arguing over whether apricots or oranges made the best marmalade when the obvious answer had always been both.

It was the sort of conversation your friendship had always been built on—that didn’t seem special to anyone else but you two, but you’d remember fondly forever.

Somewhere between the fountain in the little square and the grocery bag William had so gentlemanly insisted on carrying, the heaviness from the night before quietly disappeared. You could probably still pick at the edges of it like an annoying scab if you wanted to, but you knew it wouldn’t help. It was nice enough that neither of you had to walk around on eggshells anymore.

By the time you got back home, the house remained blissfully empty. The others wouldn't be back from the beach for another couple of hours. You had more time for just you and William.

You unpacked the groceries and started by putting the bread in the toaster, while William immediately made a nuisance of himself, stealing a slice of cheese the second you’d cut it up, then two more when you turned your back against him.

“Okay,” you said, pointing a butter knife in his direction. “Sit down before I hit you in the head with a pot.”

William let out a short laugh and leaned casually against the counter, entirely unthreatened. “I think a frying pan would be easier.”

You snorted, reaching for the bread from the toaster. “Nah. Too obvious as a murder weapon. I wanna get away with it.”

He grinned, watching you with that familiar amused look that always made it harder to stay serious for very long. “You’re in the mood for premeditated murder?”

You gave him your most solemn expression while buttering the toast. “Nobody owns life,” you quoted, “but anyone who can pick up a frying pan owns death.”

William blinked at you, then laughed under his breath. “And who said that?”

“William S. Burroughs,” you shrugged like it was common knowledge. “My favorite beatnik.”

“I don't know what that means,” he admitted, shaking his head as he pushed off the counter and came to stand beside you, “but he’s got a great name.”

You laughed, nudging a plate toward him with your fingers. “Okay, I’m done now.”

He looked down at the food, then back at you. “Wanna eat on the couch like old times too?”

“Thought you’d never ask.”

The couch swallowed both of you immediately. One corner each. Legs stretched out. A plate of marmalade toast balanced precariously on your lap. It felt strangely familiar, despite being thousands of kilometers from Stockholm.

The television stayed off. Neither of you reached for your phones. The villa was so quiet you could hear the faint hum of the refrigerator from the kitchen and crickets buzzing somewhere beyond the open patio doors.

For a while all you could hear was chewing, which was perhaps the highest form of friendship. It struck you that silence had always been one of William’s greatest gifts. Not because he was particularly quiet—he absolutely wasn’t—but because even after all these years he still never expected you to fill it.

Most people mistook silence for something uncomfortable. You two never had.

He took another bite before glancing sideways. “Not as good as at home, right? Or am I crazy?”

You smiled around your own mouthful. “I thought I was imagining it.”

“It’s literally just bread, and cheese, and marmalade. I don’t understand how it can taste different in every single country,” William shrugged.

You looked down at the toast for a second before smiling to yourself. “But it will always be nostalgic, I guess.”

William agreed, nodding once. “No matter where in the world we are.”

Outside, the afternoon sun poured through the windows in long golden strips, warming the wooden floor and turning the room amber. Inside, William leaned further back into the couch cushions and stretched his legs further across the coffee table, looking entirely at home.

The sight of him no longer carried a lingering ache of distance.

He wasn’t the friend who’d forgotten to call, or ask how you were doing, or wonder about what was new in your life. Or the one who’d picked a fight because the idea of you leaving frightened him more than he knew how to admit.

He was just William again.

The fourteen-year-old boy who’d shared Oreos with you at a skating rink. The one who still somehow found his way to your side whenever life became a little too heavy to carry alone. The one who’d bought matching bracelets at a market stall because being subtle with his affection had never been one of his strengths.

You didn’t think it needed to be either.

Your fingers absentmindedly rolled the blue stones around your wrist, and smiled into another bite of toast.

William finished eating first, his plate abandoned on the coffee table while he lounged deeper into the couch cushions, one arm stretched across the backrest. Without thinking about it, you shifted until your feet poked into his thigh, just like they always had whenever the two of you squeezed onto the couch at your parents’ apartment.

He didn’t even react to it, just simply moved to accommodate you into his space and gently hold your ankle in his hand.

It would’ve been so easy to leave things there—to enjoy the quiet, to let the evening drift by the same way so many had before. Unfortunately, curiosity had always been one of your worst personality traits.

“So… Alana,” your said, dragging out her name.

William visibly sighed before you’d even finished speaking. “What about her?”

“No, it's nothing.” You swallowed your final piece of toast down. “I just want to know more. She seems really nice, don't get me wrong. I just…" You paused, collecting your thoughts before looking back at him. “How did you meet her?”

William stared up at the ceiling for a second, as though the answer might be written somewhere up there.

“We matched on Raya,” he said eventually. “But we’d seen each other around before. A couple of friends in common. None that you would know—”

“On Raya, seriously?”

“Don’t laugh, Sunny.”

You had to physically press your lips together to stop yourself.

The image of William—World’s gold medalist, NHL superstar, owner of entirely too many designer clothes—sitting and scrolling through models, entrepreneurs and aspiring actors on Raya was simply a little too funny when he’d never been that person to you.

“I’m not laughing at you,” you managed. “I just find the mere existence of that app almost dystopian.”

William rolled his eyes. “Oh, here we go.”

“What?” You lifted your hands innocently. “You think you’re too rich and famous to talk to normal people?”

“I’m talking to you right now, aren’t I?”

The response came so quickly that you nearly choked on nothing. William immediately looked far too pleased with himself, and you hated that he had a point. A reluctant smile tugged at your mouth before you shook your head and looked back at him.

“Fine,” you conceded, tilting your head slightly. “Well… what do you like about Alana?”

The question seemed innocent enough, but you noticed a small shift in William’s expression the second you said it. His shoulders stiffened, straightening up in his position on the couch, and his graze drifted away again, up to the ceiling and then out through the windows, clinging to a spot in the garden.

And he didn’t answer it.

“That shouldn’t be a difficult question, William.”

“It isn’t.”

He said it quickly. Almost with confident.

But you still waited for an answer.

“So?” you prompted gently, though you could already feel the conversation tilting into something more delicate. “How about her humor? Her music taste? Other interests?”

William rubbed absentmindedly at the back of his neck, a telltale sign he was uncomfortable. You watched the gesture and immediately regretted pushing so hard, even if you still didn’t think the question was unreasonable. You weren’t trying to interrogate him. You were trying to understand him. There was a difference, at least in your head.

“I mean…” He frowned slightly. “She’s kind. She fits my lifestyle. And the sex is alright.”

You blinked, then let out a short laugh before you could stop yourself. “The sex is alright?” You tipped your head, half amused and half incredulous. “You just find her hot?”

William looked back at you, his expression flattening into something defensive. “Is that so bad?”

You opened your mouth, then closed it again. Was it so bad? Or was it just how dating looked now, reduced to convenience and sexual chemistry and whether someone fit neatly into the shape of your life? Maybe that was enough for some people and you were still a hopeless romantic. But it still didn’t sound like an answer. It sounded like a summary. An overly polite one. And a prevarication, maybe, from whatever he was actually thinking.

“Every other person on the planet is attractive, William,” you said, trying to keep your tone light even as something uneasy settled in your chest. “That doesn't mean you’d date all of them.”

He exhaled through his nose, already looking a little tired of the conversation.

“Okay, let me rephrase the question then.” You leaned forward, resting your elbows on your knees, suddenly more serious than you’d ever meant this conversation to be. “If you were blind and you could not touch her, how would you describe her?”

His silence stretched long again.

At first it was almost funny, the way he actually seemed to think about it. Then it went on long enough that the amusement began to drain out of you. You watched him stare somewhere across the room, jaw tightening slightly, and a small knot of dread formed in your stomach before he’d even gotten a word out.

“I don’t know,” he admitted quietly. His eyes stayed fixed on the opposite wall. “Like I said, she’s kind. Almost too kind.”

Something inside you sank.

It wasn’t that the answer was cruel—you knew he didn’t mean it that way. It was simply flat, almost weightless. Like he was describing a pleasant coworker, or a neighbor who’d once helped him carry something upstairs. Not the woman he’d flown across an ocean to introduce to the people closest to him.

Being too kind wasn’t much of a flaw at all, not really. Not unless it was spoken like one by the person who was supposed to be in love with you.

“Oh, wow,” you said quietly, the brightness in your voice thinning before you could stop it. “I asked you that to make you admit your love for her, but now I get the feeling that you don’t even like her.”

“Of course I like her,” William said, bristling. “I wouldn’t be together with her if I didn’t.”

The defensiveness arrived so fast it almost startled you.

And you knew he meant it.

William wasn’t cruel. He wasn’t the kind of person who dated someone for sport, or chased after beauty simply because he could. That wasn’t what worried you.

What worried you was the emptiness beneath the words. How every answer sounded practical, measured, almost rehearsed. You thought about Alana sitting on the edge of your bed the first night here, carefully blending blue eyeshadow over your lids because she wanted you to feel pretty. She didn’t deserve to be spoken about like this—not because it was necessarily unkind, but because it wasn’t love.

“You seem to know very little about her,” you almost whispered. “We embrace a shadow and love a dream.”

Your gaze dropped to the bracelet he’d bought you earlier, and your thumb began to worry one of the blue beads between your fingers.

Would he have bought Alana something like this? Some small, ridiculous thing with no real value except the fact that it meant something to you? Or did she have her own version of that—some little token he would’ve chosen without thinking, because he knew how to make a gesture look like devotion? Or did he not understand her like that at all?

William pinched the bridge of his nose, exhaling through it. “Is that one of your quotes again?”

“Doctor Glas by Hjalmar Söderberg,” you said, a little too quickly. “They just adapted it into some awful movie—”

“Please stop,” he muttered.

You huffed a laugh, though it didn’t quite reach your eyes. “They totally gave it the Wuthering Heights treatment. Classics shouldn’t be turned into overly sexual cash-grabbing blockbusters.”

“I actually can’t with you right now, Sunny,” William said, dragging a hand down his face. “You’ve seen Alana and I together for less than a week. You don’t know anything.”

“I know I don’t.” Your voice tightened, coming out frail. “But you don’t seem to either. That’s the point I’m trying to make.”

The words landed harder than you’d intended.

For a second, you considered taking them back. Explaining what you meant. That you weren’t attacking him. That you were simply worried. That maybe he’d convinced himself comfort was easier than love because he didn’t have to sacrifice anything for it. That maybe he should want more out of the so-called love he desperately seemed to seek.

But before you could say any of it, William pushed himself to his feet.

“Fuck this.” His voice wasn’t angry. If anything, it sounded exhausted. “I’m going back to bed.”

“William—”

“You’re making my headache come back.”

He didn’t wait for an answer. His footsteps climbed the stairs in quick, uneven beats, and not long after, his bedroom door slammed shut, the sound echoing through the villa like a final note.

You stayed where you were, staring at the two plates on the coffee table—the scattered crumbs, the glossy smears of yellow marmalade catching the light—for a long, long moment.

Somehow, after everything you had managed to mend today, it felt as though you had only gone and split something else open entirely, a wound wider and deeper than before.

⋆.˚𖦹⋆✮⋆.˚ ⋆.˚𖦹⋆✮⋆.˚ ⋆.˚𖦹⋆✮⋆.˚ ⋆.˚𖦹⋆✮⋆.˚

When the rest of the group came back from their beach day, you’d crawled right back into bed, refusing to get up more than necessary mainly because you didn’t want to run into William again.

Your room had gone dark while you’d been lying there. The last traces of sunset lingered faintly beyond the balcony doors, painting the ceiling in muted blue-grey shadows. Somewhere downstairs you could hear Alex and Rasmus arguing about whose turn it was to shower first.

When Lovisa stepped into your room, you were exactly where she’d left you that morning. She stopped at the foot of the bed, took one look at you, and folded her arms across her chest.

“Did you not even try to talk to William or what happened?” she asked. “He’s a bigger bitch now than he was this morning.”

You stared at the ceiling instead of answering at first, flopping pathetically right on your back across the mattress, your arms landing against it in a thud of frustration.

The worst part was that you had genuinely thought things were okay again. The grocery store. The market. The matching fucking bracelets. Sitting on the couch eating marmalade toast like you were teenagers again, when the biggest problem in your lives had been getting William to graduate high school.

For a few hours, everything had felt so normal.

Then somehow you’d ruined it. Or maybe William had. Or maybe both of you were just exceptionally talented at stepping on emotional landmines neither of you knew how to discuss properly.

“We talked it through,” you muttered eventually. “And actually had a decent time together, until…” You frowned at the ceiling, still trying to figure out where exactly it had all gone wrong.

“Until what?” Lovisa prompted.

You drew in a slow breath and let it out again. “Until I asked him about Alana and made it seem like he doesn’t even like her.”

“Oh.” Lovisa’s face tightened with sympathy. “Yeah, that one’s rough.”

“I wasn’t even trying to be mean,” you said, turning your head to look at her. “I just wanted to know more about her. About them as a couple. But he literally couldn’t say a positive thing about her.”

You went quiet after that, replaying it all again in your head, the same way you had all evening. The same words. The same pauses. The same strange, hollow feeling in your chest that refused to go away.

“I don’t know,” you whispered. “He just got so defensive.”

Lovisa crossed the room and sat down on the edge of the bed. The mattress dipped beneath her, soft and familiar.

“I mean,” she said carefully, folding her hands in her lap, “you’re not entirely wrong. He’s more affectionate toward literally everyone else in this house than he is with her. But I just assumed they were being shy. Or taking things slow. I don’t know.”

“I thought so too.”

Lovisa gave a small shrug, her mouth tipping into something almost like a smile. “But even then… We’ve both known William for a long time. He goes crazy for the people he loves.”

You stared at the blanket bunched around your legs.

“He said she was too kind,” you murmured. “And decent in bed. That’s bad, right, Lovisa?”

She let out a breath through her nose and rubbed a hand over her face. “Well,” she said, dry and tired, “he’s not exactly boyfriend of the year, I’ll tell you that.”

A groan slipped out of you, and you dragged the blanket up over your face for a second, as if you could hide from the whole conversation beneath it.

You hadn’t really wanted validation.

If anything, you’d wanted Lovisa to tell you that you’d misunderstood him completely. That William had simply been clumsy with his words, as he always was. That there was something tender underneath all that awkwardness, something you’d just failed to see. Instead, she had only confirmed the thing that had been gnawing at you all along.

“Get some sleep, okay?” Lovisa said, standing again. “Don’t overthink this.”

You gave a small, tired laugh into the blanket. “I think we’re a little past that.”

She paused in the doorway and looked back at you once more, her expression soft in the dim light. “Night, Sunny.”

“Goodnight, Lollo.”

After she left, the room settled around you again—quiet, blue, and still.

Blue like the crystal beads on your new bracelet, catching what little light remained whenever you twisted your arm.

William had bought you matching bracelets, then gone on to say the least romantic things you had ever heard about his actual girlfriend, as if those gestures had come from two entirely different versions of him.

It felt like an incredibly stupid thing for you to be this sad about.

It wasn’t even about you.

⋆.˚𖦹⋆✮⋆.˚ ⋆.˚𖦹⋆✮⋆.˚ ⋆.˚𖦹⋆✮⋆.˚ ⋆.˚𖦹⋆✮⋆.˚

The knock came sometime in the middle of the night—nothing loud, nothing urgent, just three soft taps against the door, delicate enough to slip into your sleep and tug you halfway back to consciousness.

At first, you thought you’d woken because of the heat.

The French Riviera had a way of never truly cooling down, even after midnight. The air still clung warm and heavy to your skin, thick enough that you’d kicked most of the blanket aside hours ago, leaving one bare leg tangled in the sheets.

Then the knocking came again.

For a few seconds you lay there staring into the dark, disoriented, trying to remember where you were and what that sound had been. The room felt suspended somewhere between dream and waking, all shadow and silence.

You pushed yourself upright and squinted at your phone on the bedside table.

03:17. What the fuck?

Your first irrational thought was that somebody had died. But then you remembered that people usually didn’t knock politely when that happened. Besides, no one in this house knew how to knock properly anyway, so why would they start now?

You dragged yourself out of bed and crossed the room barefoot, rubbing the sleep from your eyes as you opened the door and the hallway light spilled in, bright and sudden, and for a second you had to blink against it like you’d surfaced too quickly from deep water.

It was William on the other side.

His hair was a complete mess, loose strands sticking up in every direction. He wore an old t-shirt and grey shorts, like he’d simply climbed out of bed and walked here without thinking. His face looked pale in the dim light despite the fact that he’d spent the past two days tanning by the pool.

Most importantly, he looked wide awake.

Not tired. Not half-asleep and ill at ease to be caught wandering the villa at this hour. Awake in that awful, brittle way people got after something had shaken them loose from sleep and left them stranded in the dark with it.

You frowned. “William? What’s wrong?”

He ran a hand over his face and let out a long breath, the kind that sounded like it had been dragged up from somewhere deep and unwilling. “I had a nightmare. I’m sorry, this is stupid—”

Of course. Of all the possibilities, it was one of his dreams. Your first instinct was relief it wasn’t something more serious, immediately followed by something softer and more careful. William didn’t come knocking in the middle of the night for nothing. If he was here, then whatever had happened in his sleep had followed him all the way out of it.

He was already half-turning away, as if he’d decided this was a mistake and was prepared to disappear back into the hallway before either of you had to make it real, but you stepped aside without thinking.

“Come in.”

William hesitated for only a heartbeat before walking past you into the room. He sat down on the edge of the bed, elbows resting on his knees, shoulders slightly hunched as if he were trying to make himself smaller than he was. You remained standing for another second, watching him in the dim light, before sitting down beside him.

“What happened?” you asked again, more gently this time.

He stared at the floor for a moment, jaw working once before he answered.

“I dreamed you drowned.”

The words landed with a strange, cold weight in your chest.

You’d learned a long time ago that William only found difficult words to say if nobody rushed him toward them. You knew you weren’t always the best at respecting that. But this felt like one of those moments where the silence itself was part of the thing. Like if you interrupted too soon, you’d break whatever fragile thread had brought him here in the first place.

“We were at your granddad’s house by the dock,” he said after a moment, his voice gone oddly flat, stripped of its usual warmth. “And it felt so real.”

You stayed quiet.

“I don’t know. I saw you fall in. I could see exactly where you were, but I could not move.” He gave a short, humorless laugh through his nose, the sound barely there at all. “I know it sounds stupid. It’s the kind of dream kids get scared of—”

“It doesn’t,” you cut in softly.

It didn’t sound stupid. It sounded like the sort of dream that stayed with you after waking, clinging to the inside of your ribs, leaving your entire body imbalanced. The sort that made everything feel slightly wrong even when nothing had actually changed.

You glanced at him, at the tension still held in his shoulders, at the way he was staring at the floor as if he could still see the water there.

“Should I get the dream book out?” you asked quietly. “I have it with me.”

That got his attention. He looked up at you, incredulous despite himself. “You actually brought it?”

“Obviously.” You tried for lightness, unsure if this was the right time for it. “I never know when I might need it.”

You made an effort to stand up to get it from your suitcase, but William caught your wrist before you could move away.

“No.” His voice sounded a little rougher now. “I don't think I want to know what this one means.”

And there it was. The thing beneath the thing.

Because for the first time since he’d started asking you about the meaning of his dreams, William sounded like he already knew. Or maybe not knew exactly, but felt it hovering somewhere just beyond the edge of language, waiting for him in the dark. That had to be worse. The tiger in the bathroom had been strange, ambiguous, something you could joke about and interpret and leave half-unresolved. This was different. This fear didn’t bother disguising itself.

You looked at him for a long moment, then let your hand settle over his. “Okay.”

Any trace of the arguments you’d had suddenly felt impossibly small when he sat beside you looking like this. Heavy, dark circles under his eyes. Exhaustion so deep it showed superficially. The months’ worth of things you’d never properly talked about bothering you both to the point of it looking like insanity.

“Hey,” you tried, and his eyes lifted. “You’re okay. We are okay.”

You weren’t entirely sure why you said it. Maybe because you needed him to believe it.

You didn’t think about it before you moved. You just shifted closer on the mattress, turned sideways, and wrapped one arm around him in a tight, solid hug. William went still for a second, then leaned into you with a tired little exhale, his shoulder pressing against your chest. You stayed like that on the edge of the bed, half-hugging him, your cheek brushing the side of his head, and for a moment the nightmare—and everything it resembled—seemed to recede just enough to let him breathe.

“You know that, right?” you murmured into the crook of his neck.

You felt him nod. “I know.”

You still weren’t entirely convinced he did.

You held him for a moment longer, then pulled back and gave the mattress a light pat. “Lie down.”

William blinked at you, still a little lost in his anxiety, and then obediently shifted farther onto the mattress. The bed was warm from where you’d been lying in it, the sheets rumpled and soft beneath the two of you.

The arrangement felt oddly familiar.

Not because you’d shared beds that often. Only like once a week when William missed the last train home from your side of Stockholm.

Still, there was something about it that your body remembered before your mind did: the ease of it, the trust, the way neither of you ever had to ask twice. You tugged the blanket higher, tucking it around his shoulders, and William settled onto his side.

You stayed sitting up beside him for a moment, resting against the headboard, simply watching him.

Without really thinking about it, your hand drifted into his hair. You combed gently through the tangled strands until they lay flat again, your nails softly rasping against his scalp in a way that seemed to loosen something in him. He leaned into the touch almost immediately, eyes closing, his breathing already beginning to slow.

You felt absurdly fond of him in that moment. Which was annoying, because he had spent the last forty-eight hours being an idiot.

“You okay?” you whispered.

He made a sleepy little noise beneath the blanket, something between a hum and a sigh, and the sound was so soft it nearly broke your heart.

Close enough, you thought.

Within minutes, his breathing had evened out, sleep reclaiming him with almost surprising ease. You stayed where you were for another minute or so—maybe longer—just to make sure he was actually asleep, watching the moonlight settle softly across his face as if it, too, had decided to keep watch over him.

For one dangerous, tempting moment, you considered climbing back under the covers beside him. Just going to sleep with him and dealing with everything else tomorrow.

Instead you quietly got up and headed for the door.

Because whatever was happening between the two of you lately, sharing a bed wasn’t going to help. Not when he had a girlfriend asleep somewhere else in the house. Not when you weren’t entirely sure what either of you were doing anymore.

The couch downstairs wasn’t comfortable to sleep in. You knew that before you’d even lain down.

But as you curled beneath a blanket and stared up at the dark ceiling, listening to the distant sound of waves outside, you decided uncomfortable was probably safer.

Even if it didn’t feel nearly as good.

⋆.˚𖦹⋆✮⋆.˚ ⋆.˚𖦹⋆✮⋆.˚ ⋆.˚𖦹⋆✮⋆.˚ ⋆.˚𖦹⋆✮⋆.˚

You became aware of the world in fragments at first. Slow, dusty white particles swimming across your field of vision, the soft hum of the refrigerator somewhere nearby, sunlight uncomfortably warming the side of your face and the leg you had sticking out from beneath the blanket.

An itchy, knitted blanket. Not the expensive cotton sheets you knew were on your bed

Right. You slept on the couch.

For a few blissful seconds you couldn’t remember why you’d fallen asleep there. Then the events of last night drifted back in pieces, one after another.

William standing there in your doorway at three in the morning, pale and shaken, appearing smaller than ever. His quiet, uneasy confession of a nightmare. You’d drowned right in front of him. The way he’d treated your room like the only place in the villa that still felt solid enough to hold him. The weight of his head against your pillow, the slow surrender of his breathing as he finally drifted off again; and then, later, your own careful retreat downstairs, choosing the couch over the impossible closeness of sharing a bed with him.

Your spine deeply regretted that decision now.

Stiff and annoyed, you tried to fall back asleep. It was only when you heard footsteps coming down the stairs a few minutes later that you finally cracked one eye open again.

It was Alana, still looking half-asleep herself, her hair messy and only wearing one of William’s oversized shirts. She paused at the bottom step when she saw you sprawled out on the couch, blinking in obvious surprise at the fact someone was awake this early before her expression softened into something more curious than alarm.

“Good morning,” Alana said softly.

“Oh,” you croaked. “Morning.”

Her gaze drifted from the blanket in your lap to the couch beneath you, a small crease appearing between her brows.

“Did William sleep in your room?” she asked after a beat. “Is that why you’re on the couch?”

“Yeah.” You stretched, then immediately regretted it. “God, my back is killing me.”

A quiet, sympathetic laugh slipped out of her.

You pushed yourself upright, rubbing sleep from your eyes.

“He had a nightmare last night,” you explained. “I don’t know why he came to me, but he fell asleep so I just let him stay.”

Only after saying it aloud did you realize how strange it sounded.

You winced slightly. “I’m sorry if that’s overstepping,” you added. “That was not my intention, and I’m sure William didn’t—"

“You didn’t,” Alana said gently, cutting you off before you could spiral into an apology you had no clue about how it would land. “I’m glad he feels like he can talk to you.”

That should have made you feel better. It did, a little, but not enough to stop the awkward little knot forming in your stomach.

“I know he calls you at home too. His nightmares seem to be bothering him quite often,” Alana continued.

You blinked at her for a second. Right. Of course she knew that.

The phone calls had become so ordinary to you that you’d almost forgotten how odd they might sound to someone else. How they might look from the outside. William calling you at weird hours because he couldn't sleep. You answering without thinking.

“Yeah,” you admitted. “They’re usually not nightmares, though. I can’t explain it, they’re so abstract. I have this book that allegedly interprets dreams, but I don’t know if it helps him.”

You thought about all the times William had called you from home, or from hotels, or from wherever he happened to be. His voice low and tired on the other end of the line while he tried to explain impossible landscapes and half-remembered conversations. You flipping through pages of that damn book that absolutely could not answer a thing.

“I think it mostly just gives him something else to think about,” you shrugged finally.

Alana smiled, and it was such an easy, unbothered smile that it made your chest loosen a little.

“You're a good friend to him, Sunny. I think just that you listen helps. I understand why he talks so fondly of you.”

“Oh, uhm—”

Your voice faltered immediately.

Was that the kind of compliment you were supposed to answer with thanks? Or was that weird? You looked down at the blanket in your lap, suddenly very interested in the weave of it.

Thankfully, Alana moved before you had to figure it out.

“I’m gonna go shower now.” She started toward the stairs, then paused and looked back at you. “If William wakes up, can you tell him to come talk to me?”

“Yeah,” you nodded. “Of course.”

She smiled at you again, then disappeared upstairs, the sound of her footsteps slowly fading.

You stayed where you were for a long moment, staring at nothing. Only then did the conversation begin catching up with you.

Her boyfriend had just spent the night in another woman’s room. And somehow she'd ended up being the one reassuring you that you'd simply been a good friend.

⋆.˚𖦹⋆✮⋆.˚ ⋆.˚𖦹⋆✮⋆.˚ ⋆.˚𖦹⋆✮⋆.˚ ⋆.˚𖦹⋆✮⋆.˚

By the time you’d showered, gotten dressed, had breakfast, and escaped outside with your book tucked beneath one arm, your brain had already circled back to the conversation with Alana at least six times.

Maybe because she’d managed to make you feel guilty while being nothing but kind.

You’d spent months poking into their relationship whenever William wanted someone to talk to, listening to him over late-night phone calls and in quiet corners of hockey arenas and airports, never once stopping to think about what it looked like from the outside. From Alana’s perspective.

And the worst part was—you hadn’t even cared. You hadn’t thought of Alana as important enough, until you’d obviously met her and learnt the opposite. What kind of friend did that? You’d taken her spot completely.

Thankfully, the garden behind the villa offered plenty of places to disappear.

A narrow stone path wound between olive trees and flowering shrubs, eventually opening into a small gazebo overlooking the hillside below. The sea glittered in the distance between patches of green. It was far enough from the house that voices dissolved into nothing before they reached you.

Exactly what you needed.

You settled into one of the wrought-iron chairs beneath the shade, tucked one leg beneath yourself, and opened Infinite Jest across your lap.

You were only pretending to read, though.

You read the same paragraph three times before realizing you hadn’t absorbed a single sentence. Then you got distracted by one of the book’s ridiculous endnotes, flipped back thirty pages, forgot why you’d turned there in the first place, and stared blankly at the paper until the words stopped resembling language altogether.

Maybe Lovisa had been right. No sane person could actually enjoy a book like this. For all you knew, this David Foster Wallace guy had just been a spectacularly pretentious asshole.

Eventually you sighed and closed the book around your finger, and your thoughts wandered straight back to William. Whether he’d woken up yet. If he’d had to explain himself to Alana yet.

You felt like she could be the sort of person who wouldn’t take out her anger on you because you were technically still strangers, and then put the blame entirely on William, even if that wasn’t exactly fair.

Suddenly, the patio door slammed loudly somewhere behind you.

You looked up to see Lovisa storming down the path like a mad woman.

“Is it a coincidence,” she called out before she’d even reached you, “that we can hear arguing coming from William and Alana’s room when he apparently spent the night in your bed?”

You jaw dropped. “What?”

Lovisa stopped in front of you, hands planted on her hips.

“Is that why you’re hiding out here?”

“No, no,” you said quickly, lifting your book as evidence. “I just wanted some quiet time to read.”

Neither of you believed that.

“What’s going on?” you carefully asked.

“I’m asking you that,” Lovisa countered. She dropped into the empty chair opposite yours. “Why did I see William exit your room this morning, looking like he’d slept like a baby for the first time in years?”

You let your head fall back for a second and groaned at the sky.

“Because he did sleep there.”

That sentence was never going to sound right, was it?

“But I slept on the couch,” you hurried to add. “I promise.”

Lovisa’s expression shifted, one eyebrow lifting in suspicion.

“I talked to Alana earlier. She seemed to understand, but…” You glanced back toward the villa, toward the white walls and the closed windows and the possibility of people arguing behind them. “...maybe not if they’re arguing.”

“Understand what exactly?”

You worried at the edge of your bookmark with your thumb, suddenly very interested in the fraying paper.

“He had a nightmare.”

Lovisa repeated the words back to you with a flat, incredulous little echo. “A nightmare.”

You nodded once, already feeling stupid for saying it out loud.

“He dreamt I died. It’s a long story.”

Lovisa blinked, like her brain had stalled for a second trying to arrange the information into something sensible.

“He dreamt you died?” she said slowly.

“Yeah.” You shrugged one shoulder, though the motion felt awkward and defensive. “I let him sleep in my bed and took the couch.”

She leaned back in her chair at that, both hands coming up to rub over her face. When she dropped them again, she looked less angry than before and more like she was trying very hard not to be.

“That’s…” She exhaled through her nose. “I don’t even know what to say, Sunny. That’s dark.”

You looked down at the book in your lap, at the cloudy blue cover and the ridiculous thickness of it, as if it might offer some kind of instruction manual for this too.

“Could you hear what they were arguing about?” you asked after a beat.

“No, I decided to be an adult for once,” Lovisa said, shaking her head. “Shoved all the guys out of the house too.”

You managed a weak smile before it disappeared again. “What if it’s about me?”

Lovisa immediately groaned. “Oh my God.”

“No, seriously. ” You stared down at your hands, at the way your fingers had curled into the edge of the chair. “I already implied that he doesn’t even like her, and then he goes and spends the night in my bed.”

Saying it like that made your stomach turn over.

“I don't know.” Your shoulders sagged. “I just feel kind of... disgusting.”

For a moment Lovisa didn’t answer. She just looked at you, her expression unreadable in the shade of the gazebo. Then she reached across the little table between you and smacked your arm, not hard enough to hurt, just enough to jolt you out of your own head.

“Maybe everything isn’t about you.”

You frowned. “Lollo.”

“No, listen.” She pointed a finger at you. “Maybe they were already having problems, and this was just the cherry on top. We can’t know since neither of them has talked about it.”

You opened your mouth, then shut it again when nothing useful came out.

“And why the hell would you let him fall asleep in your bed?” she went on, quieter now but no less pointed. “You know what that looks like.”

“But I told you, I slept on the couch—”

“I know.” Lovisa let out a breath and leaned back in her chair, the irritation draining out of her face in slow increments. “I’m not saying you did anything wrong.”

The breeze moved through the olive trees overhead, stirring the leaves into a soft, papery whisper. Sunlight flickered across the stone floor in broken patches, warm and indifferent.

“I’m saying you always feel responsible for fixing William’s problems,” she continued. “Sometimes I think you love him too much, Sunny. You can’t protect him from everything.”

You looked away immediately, toward the sea glittering in the distance, toward the line where the hillside dropped into blue. Anywhere but at her.

Your throat had gone dry all at once.

“If you love until it hurts,” you whispered, “there can be no hurt, only more love.”

Lovisa stared at you for a second before her mouth twisted into a smile. “Yeah okay, Shakespeare. This is obviously hurting you, babe.”

A reluctant laugh escaped you. “That’s Mother Teresa, you dumb fuck.”

“I still think you’ve got major issues.”

And annoyingly enough, sitting there with Infinite Jest still in your lap and a knot in your stomach the size of France, you weren’t entirely convinced she was wrong.

.˚𖦹⋆✮⋆.˚ ⋆.˚𖦹⋆✮⋆.˚ ⋆.˚𖦹⋆✮⋆.˚ ⋆.˚𖦹⋆✮⋆.˚

William woke up slowly, cocooned in warmth and comfortable sunlight. A pillow rested beneath his cheek, the comforter pulled halfway over him. The faint scent of women’s perfume lingered somewhere in the sheets—something floral and summery, much lighter than the vanilla perfume Alana usually wore.

When that thought finally caught up with him, William shot upright.

He was in your room. No, scratch that. He was in your bed.

William groaned quietly and let himself fall back against the mattress again, dragging both hands over his face.

What the fuck had he actually done last night? He’d shown up at your bedroom door in the middle of the night like a complete lunatic because of a dream. Well... it hadn’t exactly been just a dream. He wasn’t sure he'd ever felt that terrified because of something fictional before. Were dreams fictional? They had to be. They weren’t real. They could not be.

And you’d let him in—despite the fact that he’d spent the better part of two days proving himself to be a spectacularly shitty friend—because you’d never once in your life turned him away.

The realization that he was alone arrived a second later.

Your side of the bed was empty, the sheets barely disturbed. He remembered falling asleep with impossible clarity. Your hand slowly carding through his hair until his breathing steadied. Utterly soporific, the quiet way you’d kept mumbling long after he’d stopped answering, as if you knew he was already drifting off.

After that, there was nothing.

You must’ve left. Gone downstairs to sleep on the couch or something equally ridiculous. Because apparently, even after comforting him at three in the fucking morning, you still possessed more common sense than he did.

William stared at the empty space beside him for a long moment.

Then he closed his eyes again—the dream flashing back brightly for a moment. You disappearing beneath dark water. Him screaming out your name but not being able to reach you. Never reaching you.

His chest tightened like something had fallen straight on it.

What the fuck was wrong with him?

He pushed himself out of bed.

The villa was unusually quiet as he stepped into the hallway, only the familiar sounds houses always seemed to make when nobody was talking audible. Most of the others had probably already gone downstairs. He’d slept for much longer than usual for some reason.

For a second William considered finding you first. Checking that you were okay, and maybe apologizing for being a complete disaster last night. Most importantly, he needed to thank you.

Instead, he turned to his own room. He needed to change out of the clothes he’d sweated through the night in before seeing another human. Quietly, he hoped Alana had already gone downstairs because he had absolutely no idea how to explain any of this to her.

When William pushed their bedroom door open, he was expecting maybe silence. Maybe Alana still asleep. Maybe the room empty, or at least half-dark and ordinary, with the usual lazy mess of two people sharing a small space.

What he was not expecting was to find her sitting on the floor beside an open suitcase, neatly folding her clothes with the kind of calm precision that made his stomach drop before his brain had even caught up. A dress hung over the edge of the mattress. Her makeup bags sat beside it. Everything she’d unpacked thus far was slowly, deliberately being returned to her suitcase.

For a second William just stood there in the doorway, staring.

His pulse kicked hard in his throat. His eyes moved over the room once, stupidly, as if there might be some other explanation hidden in plain sight. But there wasn’t one.

She looked up as William closed the door behind him. “Oh.”

He frowned immediately, the words barely making it out of him. “Why are you packing?”

Alana’s voice was calm, almost unbothered. “Sophie and some of the girls from my agency are on a brand trip in Cannes with Tag Heuer. I already booked a car to take me there.”

“What?” was all William managed to say.

The answer didn’t make sense at first. It landed somewhere in his head and just sat there, refusing to arrange itself into anything coherent. Cannes. A car. Alana packing her suitcase and leaving.

“And then, when I fly back to Toronto…” Alana inhaled quietly, like she was bracing herself for the rest of it. “…I'm going to move my stuff back to my apartment.”

She met his eyes, locking in fiercely.

“And whatever this thing is between us can officially be over.”

For a moment William genuinely thought he’d misheard her.

“What?” he repeated again.

“You heard me.”

William’s mind simply stopped. It wasn’t panic or anger or even sadness. Just a strange, hollow silence, like someone had reached inside him and turned the volume all the way down. He looked at Alana’s face, searching for some sign that she was joking, exaggerating, anything. But she didn’t seem to have any emotions at all.

“Alana—” he tried.

“No.” She shook her head before he could begin, still calm, still maddeningly composed. “Don’t do that thing where you try to convince me everything’s fine, because it’s not.”

William stood there for a second, one hand still on the door, as if he could somehow hold the whole conversation in place by refusing to move. The room felt too bright, too ordinary for what was happening inside it.

Alana’s voice never rose.

“You’d rather call Sunny, who’s across the fucking Atlantic most of the time, and talk about the dreams you’re having instead of just rolling over in bed and waking me.”

William opened his mouth, but nothing came out.

Because there was no defense for that. None that didn’t sound pathetic, anyway. He could feel the truth of it landing in him in slow, humiliating pieces. Not just that he’d done it, but that he’d done it without even thinking. That when he was scared, when he was half-drowning in his own head, his first instinct had been to reach for you. No one else but you.

People in committed relationships didn’t do that.

“And I’m completely fine with that, by the way,” she continued quietly. “A girlfriend shouldn’t be, but I am. We don’t understand each other, or even like each other like that, William. Don’t you see that?”

“What?”

William didn’t get the time to think out proper answers, all he could do was question her.

Alana sat down on the edge of the bed, smoothing one hand over the duvet. William, after a beat, sat beside her. Not because he wanted to, exactly, but because standing suddenly felt impossible. His legs had gone strangely weak, as if his body understood more of the conversation than his mind did.

“I don’t want to be in the way of you two figuring out your love for each other,” she said gently, a sad smile forming on her lips.

William barked out a disbelieving laugh, though there was no humor in it at all. “My love for Sunny?”

“Yes.”

“Alana—”

“I mean it.” She turned towards him. “You look at her like she's the answer to a question nobody else understands.”

He rubbed both hands over his face, dragging them down slowly as if he could wipe the building realization away with enough pressure.

“I don’t need to figure out my love for her. Of course I love her, she’s been my best friend since forever.”

Even as he said it, the words sounded thinner than they should have. He wasn’t lying. The worst were just incomplete. Like he’d been repeating the same sentence for years because it was the only one he knew how to say, not because they were the full truth.

Alana watched him for another second before speaking again, dropping her shoulders in a sigh. “Oh, William. It’s quite obvious it could be something more than platonic. At least I think so.”

He stared at the floor, at the edge of the rug. He couldn’t bear to watch her.

“I like you, I really do,” Alana continued quietly. “But you love her, William. I’ve never seen you more passionate around anything like you are with her. I think you love her more than you love hockey, damn it.”

William instinctively wanted to argue.

It should have made him defensive, offended, embarrassed—anything but this strange, stunned stillness.

Instead his mind betrayed him with images of you. Because if he was actually in love with you, it wasn’t something that had happened overnight. It had been growing for years, over a decade probably. And Alana had seen through him in just a couple of days.

That everything else in his life had close to no meaning, if he didn’t get to share it with you.

Alana let the silence sit for a moment before she spoke again.

“I like seeing other people in love more than I like being in an ‘okay’ relationship myself, which is why I’m leaving,” she softly explained.

William let out a breath that almost turned into a laugh, because what else was there to do with a breakup that sounded more like a mutual understanding than a disaster? He’d been broken up with before and he’d dumped girls too, but never had it felt this way. This… easy, almost. It was the only reasonable thing to do.

“Don’t let your girlfriend stop you from finding a wife, or whatever it is that people say,” she added readily.

William snorted, surprised by her words. “Is that a Drake lyric?”

Alana laughed. “I don’t know. Sure does sound like one.”

For the first time all morning, they both smiled.

“This is a very anticlimactic breakup, isn’t it?” William asked, almost to himself.

Alana shrugged. “It’s kinda nice for it to not be dramatic, actually.”

William looked at her then, and felt something in his chest loosen—not because he was happy, exactly, but because she wasn’t asking him to be cruel in order to let her go. She was giving him the dignity of honesty. Of not turning this into a war when it didn’t need to be one. She was way too kind of a human, and William had probably never deserved her.

“I hope you don’t feel like I’ve used you in any way,” he said.

She waved the thought away. “You absolutely haven’t.”

Another silence settled between them, softer now. Less like a wall and more like a pause between chapters, the kind that gave both of them a second to let everything sink in.

Alana looked at him for a moment, then her expression shifted—something bright and almost delighted flickering across her face.

“So… can you admit it to yourself that you’re in love with her? That you don’t just love her as a friend?”

William sighed, looking down at the floor again. He felt a little pathetic thinking about how stupid he’d been… forever, basically. You’d always been around and he’d never done anything about it.

He pictured you exactly as you’d looked yesterday afternoon, sitting in that little market square with your eyes closed, the sun hitting your face at all angles, your wrist stretched toward him so he could clasp the matching bracelet he'd bought.

He had thought then that the feeling in his chest had simply been relief. Relief that you weren’t arguing anymore. Relief that you’d forgiven him.

Now he wasn’t so sure that feeling was only relief. Maybe his way of acting around you all these was finally starting to make sense.

“I fear…” he admitted quietly, “I fear I’ve always known.” A breath escaped him, shaky and embarrassed and true. “Just been too much of a pussy to do anything about it.”

“Oh my god, William.” Alana covered her face for a second, then dropped her hand with a helpless laugh. “You absolutely cannot fuck this up with Sunny too. She seems like a really special girl.”

William smiled to himself before he could stop it, his head already full of thoughts of you—your voice, the way it pitched up when you got excited and softened when you were tired, your stupid quotes he’d somehow memorized without meaning to, the way you made everything sound like it meant something even when you were talking about absolutely nothing at all.

“Yeah,” he said quietly. “She is.”

“You can’t break her heart by being indecisive or unclear with your feelings for her.”

William nodded, the smile on his face tightening into something more nervous. He’d seen you sad for a lot of reasons, but he’d never forgive himself if he were the reason your pure heart got broken. That felt sacred. Untouchable.

Alana studied him for a beat, then sighed. “You know she talks like a fortune cookie, right?”

“Yeah, she does,” he said, a laugh bubbling up without any warning. “I love that about her.”

⋆.˚𖦹⋆✮⋆.˚ ⋆.˚𖦹⋆✮⋆.˚ ⋆.˚𖦹⋆✮⋆.˚ ⋆.˚𖦹⋆✮⋆.˚

After a long, quiet moment out by the gazebo, Lovisa somehow convinced you to try talking to Alana again.

She disguised it well enough. Claimed it would be good for your conscience. That apologizing properly would make everyone feel better. That Alana deserved to hear, without interruptions or misunderstandings, exactly how you felt about William.

Lovisa was also unbelievably nosy.

She wanted to know what William and Alana had been arguing about just as much as everyone else did.

Still, you’d let yourself be convinced.

You weren’t trying to be some boyfriend-stealing bitch.

You were just someone who had missed her best friend so much that somewhere along the way it had become unhealthy. Somewhere between the phone calls, unanswered texts, missed funerals, and different continents, the line between missing someone and depending on them had quietly blurred.

That wasn’t something you were particularly proud of, but it also wasn't something you knew how to fix. And you needed Alana to know that.

Which was why you’d been standing outside William and Alana’s bedroom for almost ten minutes now. Long enough that your courage had started evaporating again. You couldn’t hear a noise behind the door, and neither Alana nor William could be found anywhere else in the house.

The hallway was also too quiet. The villa wasn’t. The boys had been allowed inside again. Somewhere downstairs someone laughed, a cabinet door slammed shut, glasses clinked together in the kitchen.

Life kept moving for them.

You just... couldn’t.

You’d rehearsed the conversation over and over in your head. A proper apology. An explanation. Something that would make it crystal clear that none of this had been intentional.

That you’d never wanted to hurt her and intrude on their relationship.

You just wanted your best friend back.

Finally, before you could lose your nerve entirely, you knocked. The door drifted open immediately beneath your knuckles. It hadn’t been properly closed.

“Alana?” you called carefully.

You got no answer so you pushed it open another few inches.

“Look, I’m not trying to steal William from you. That’s never been my intention.” Your voice sounded embarrassingly small in the echoing hallway. “I don’t like him like that. I just…”

The words dissolved somewhere in your throat. You closed your eyes briefly before trying again.

“He’s my best friend. And I can't imagine life without him. That's all I want.” You swallowed. That sentence felt infinitely simpler. “I want my best friend. If I overstepped and hurt you in the process, Alana, I’m really fucking sorry.”

Silence answered you again. Only then did dare to properly take in the room, pushing the door fully open.

The room was empty. The bed was neatly made, the lights were turned off, and only one suitcase was left in the corner of the room. A suitcase you knew was William’s.

Suddenly you saw that the door to the ensuite was open, a shadow lingering for just a second before William stepped out.

You felt your stomach drop. “Where’s Alana?”

For a second he didn’t answer. Then he crossed the room almost mechanically before sitting down at the edge of the bed, shoulders hunched and his expression strangely plain.

“She left.”

You stood frozen by the door, confused. “Left? Where? Why?”

“Some of her friends are in Cannes,” William shrugged. “She’s spending the rest of her vacation there.”

“Oh,” your voice faltered. “Why?”

“Sunny, don’t play dumb.” William almost scoffed. “We broke up. Or she broke up with me.”

You didn’t know what to say. For being someone who’d spent her entire life preaching about the importance of words, there still didn’t seem to be words fitting for moments like these.

The mattress shifted beneath William’s weight as he leaned forward, elbows resting on his knees, basically hiding from you.

“I’m sorry, William,” you managed.

He surprised you by shaking his head. “I’m not sure I am.”

He laughed softly. Not because anything was funny. More because he seemed exhausted. Because he’d reached a point where there was nothing left to hide behind. Nothing left to avoid. Maybe Lovisa had been right about this argument being the cherry on top.

You shifted awkwardly toward the door, suddenly aware of how small the room felt and how much you wished you could disappear back into the hallway and have this all undone.

“Do you want some time alone?” you asked quietly. “I should probably go—”

“No.”

The answer came so quickly it startled you. William stood up from the bed again. His shoulders straightened. His jaw set. Even his eyes, still tired and red-rimmed, had gone bright with a kind of frightened determination that made your chest tighten.

“We’re going to talk about this now,” he said, the words coming out firmer than you’d ever heard him, “because it might be an entire year until we next see each other. We’re not leaving this unresolved.”

“How am I involved in your breakup?” you asked, trying and failing to keep your voice steady.

William sighed. “Sunny, please—”

Then he stopped. Just like that.

The courage that had carried him upright seemed to falter all at once. He looked at you like he had a thousand things to say and no idea which one would survive being spoken aloud. His throat bobbed once. His hands flexed at his sides. For a second he seemed almost angry with himself, like he couldn’t believe he’d gotten this far only to lose the sentence before it reached you.

“William…” You searched his face, suddenly unable to look anywhere else. A faint flush crept up his neck. He looked terrified now, not of you, but of whatever he was about to admit. “You can talk to me.”

William didn’t answer. Instead, he reached for you—not roughly, but with enough urgency that you understood immediately he couldn’t stand there another second without falling apart. His fingers closed around your wrist, then slid to your arm, and he gave the smallest tug, guiding you toward the bed.

You sat beside him when he finally let go, the mattress dipping beneath your weight. William stared at his hands, jaw tight, as if he were still bracing himself against the force of his own thoughts.

Then, with a shaky breath, he let himself fall backward onto the bed. After only a second’s hesitation, you followed, easing down beside him with your hand resting lightly against his chest, as if to physically show sure you were there for him.

For a moment he lay still, one arm thrown over his eyes, the other lying limp between you. The silence stretched, soft and trembling, until at last he seemed to find the courage to speak.

“Do you remember when I dreamt about having a tiger in my bathroom?” William whispered.

You nodded slowly. “Yeah.”

“And you said something about how it could resemble the need to confront a fear,” he went on, his voice low and careful, “and maybe the dreams were gone because the tiger finally got what it wanted.”

You frowned, trying to place the exact words. “I might’ve.”

William let out a breath through his nose and gave the faintest nod. “Well, the dreams stopped for one day,” he said, “and that was the day you arrived. They came back as soon as we fought.”

You stared at him, your pulse beginning to thud harder in your ears.

“The tiger was you,” he said at last, the words so quiet you almost missed them. He turned his head just enough to look at you. “It’s always been you. And we’ve been apart for too long now.”

A shaky laugh escaped you, more from disbelief than amusement. “You… you’re kinda rambling right now, William.”

He huffed a small, humorless laugh too, but there was no real relief in it.

“What does this have to do with Alana leaving?” you dared to ask.

William didn’t immediate have an answer.

“Does she hate me?” you continued before you could stop yourself, the fear in your voice making you wince. “I feel like she hates me.”

William’s head came up at once. “No. She didn’t leave because you made her feel unwelcome. You’ve been nothing but kind.”

For half a second, you felt relief. Until you remembered there was still an issue to solve.

“Then why—”

“She left because I’m in love with you.”

Everything inside you stopped. Your heartbeat seemed to vanish entirely before slamming back into place, hard enough that it almost hurt. You stared at him, waiting for the laugh, the correction, the explanation that would make this make sense. But William didn’t move. He only looked back at you, utterly still, utterly terrified, because he’d just said the one thing he could never take back.

“William…"

“I know,” he said softly.

“No, I—” You swallowed hard, your fingers tightening gently in the fabric of William’s T-shirt as if that alone could keep you steady.

“I know, Sunny.”

Your hands had gone cold. Your whole body felt strangely weightless and heavy at the same time. Years of little memories suddenly rearranged themselves into an entirely different picture in your head. Years of little memories suddenly began rearranging themselves into an entirely different picture in your head. You didn’t know if you wanted them to or not, but you couldn’t stop it.

The skating rink. Stupid fucking Oreo cookies. Endless phone calls at stupid hours of the day. Every goodbye you’d ever said. Every hello after months apart. Every time he’d looked for you first in a crowded room. Every nightmare you’d gone through together in both dreams and real life. Every hug that had lasted just a little too long.

None of it looked the same anymore.

You felt tears burning behind your eyes, hot and immediate, and your breath caught painfully in your throat.

“William, I can’t—” you whispered again, your voice was already breaking.

“Little Sunshine.” William’s hand found your arm, stroking gently up and down.

The nickname, said so gently, so familiarly, like he hadn’t just turned your entire world inside out, undid you completely. You had to clamp your mouth shut and look away for a second, because if you didn’t, you were going to start sobbing for real. And if that happened, you’d have a hard time breathing and an even harder time getting any words out at all.

When you finally looked back at him, your eyes were stinging.

“I don’t know what to say,” you admitted with a shaky laugh.

The cruelest part of it all was not that he loved you and that you obviously loved him back. It was that the truth had been sitting between you for so long, patient and quiet and impossible, waiting for the exact right moment to ruin everything for the both of you.

You had spent so long orbiting each other that it almost felt absurd to call this a revelation. It felt more like surrender, and you weren’t prepared for that at all.

Then, because your brain had apparently decided to abandon you entirely, a few pointed words slipped out before you could stop them.

“You’re a cage in search of a bird, William.”

He blinked at you, startled enough that the tension in his face shifted.

“I’m sorry, I need to stop with the damn quotes—”

“No, please don’t.” William shook his head, and there was something almost desperate in the way he said it. “Who wrote that one?”

“I want to say it’s Kafka,” you said, sniffling.

“That’s the bug guy, right? The one you tortured me with in school?”

A laugh escaped you, wet and breathless and a little broken.

“The Metamorphosis, yeah.”

He nodded slowly, like he was turning the words over in his head, trying to make sense of them in the same way he always had with your quotes and your books and your impossible way of speaking in riddles when you were too overwhelmed to say anything plain.

“So if I’m the cage…” His voice had gone quieter now. “Are you saying you can’t be my bird?”

The question landed between you with a kind of devastating tenderness.

“Not right now,” you murmured.

Disappointment crossed his face so quickly it almost made you sick.

“Not when I have a million things to figure out at home and you have to go back to Toronto,” you explained further. “Not when part of me feels like you’d take any bird just so you won’t be alone.”

The moment the words left your mouth you regretted them. Because you watched them hit—watched the hurt flash briefly across his face and how he instantly tried to cover it up. And you knew what you’d said wasn’t entirely true. He’d never really wanted Alana, or any of the other girls he’d been with. But he’d filled up his emptiness with them when he couldn’t have you.

That realization made your chest ache in a way that felt almost unbearable. Because it meant this had never been sudden. It had never been random. It had never been some reckless, inconvenient thing that had happened by accident in a villa in France.

It had been building for years.

In the way you had both kept choosing each other, over and over again, in every possible way except the one that mattered most.

“But you’re not just anyone to me. You never have been.”

His voice was low, steady, and so full of feeling it nearly undid you all over again.

“I know that,” you sighed. “That’s why we have to pick our friendship first.”

You were still lying in bed, both of you half turned toward each other above the covers. The sheets were warm from the sun, and his shoulder was pressed against yours. It should have felt normal. Instead it felt like the whole room was holding its breath.

Because that was the truth too.

You knew exactly how much you meant to him, just like he knew how much he meant to you, which was why neither of you could afford to get this wrong.

If you did, there would be no going back to the easy version of this. No more pretending the ache you constantly felt was harmless. No more hiding behind jokes and distance. No more pretending that what you felt was anything less than love.

“We can’t loose this, William.”

“I know, I know.”

He said it right away, almost too quickly, like he’d known what you would say before you did it. But he didn’t move away like you’d expected. He didn’t shy away. He just looked at you from close enough that you could feel his breath, close enough that the bed dipped slightly between you.

At your eyes, still shining with tears. At the way your mouth trembled when you tried to breathe around the lump in your throat. At your lips, parted slightly as if you were still trying to find the right thing to say.

Something changed in his face as he watched you.

Then, in a voice that sounded steadier than he probably felt, he asked, “Can I kiss you?”

You closed your eyes, head falling forward against his body, a laugh that was broken around the edges escaped you.

“William.”

“I’m serious.”

You opened your eyes again.

His expression somehow made everything harder. He was hopeful, terrified, and patient all at once. Like he’d wait forever if he had to. Like he’d already waited long enough. He knew this was the kind of thing that could only happen once, and he was willing to let you decide whether it happened at all.

You looked at him for what felt like an eternity.

For one impossible second neither of you seemed to know what to do, then your hand found the side of his face. Warm skin beneath your fingertips. He leaned into the touch, the space between you disappearing so naturally it felt inevitable.

His forehead brushed yours first.

One last chance to pull away. One last opportunity to pretend none of this had happened.

Neither of you took it.

William kissed you carefully.

Your hand stayed at his cheek, thumb brushing once over his skin before you, too, leaned in fully. His mouth was warm against yours, familiar in a way that was almost unbearable, and when you kissed him back, the breath left your lungs in a trembling rush.

It was soft in the way people are when they’ve wanted something for so long they’re almost afraid to touch it too hard.

You shifted closer without really thinking about it, your knees brushing together. One of his hands slid to your waist, steadying you, and you let yourself move into him, letting the kiss deepen little by little. Your other hand curled into the front of his shirt. There was grief in it, and relief, and something brighter and more frightening than either of those things.

“Oh no.” Your words came out against his mouth, half laugh, half sob. “I think you just ruined everything for me,” you whispered, though your fingers were still curled against his cheek and your heart was beating so hard it felt like it might split open.

“I’m not sorry about it.” William smiled.

And when you kissed him back again, deeper this time—ending up pressed against him on the bed, your knees on either side of his hips, his hands warm at your waist as he held you there—you already knew it had been a mistake.

You also knew, with terrifying certainty, that you would spend the rest of your life wondering what would’ve happened if you hadn’t.

⋆.˚𖦹⋆✮⋆.˚ ⋆.˚𖦹⋆✮⋆.˚ ⋆.˚𖦹⋆✮⋆.˚ ⋆.˚𖦹⋆✮⋆.˚

EPILOGUE

The arena usually felt like it existed in a vacuum after games. It obviously wasn’t quiet, but something about the dwindling adrenaline and slowly building exhaustion always made William feel strangely numb. Like the world kept moving around him while his own thoughts lagged a few steps behind.

He absentmindedly followed the stream of players out of the locker room after showering and changing, stepping into the family lounge.

Children darted between tables with far too much energy for ten o’clock at night. Strollers blocked half the walkways. Somebody’s toddler had dissolved into dramatic tears because they wanted to see their dad right this second. Wives, girlfriends, parents, siblings—entire lives gathered together after sixty minutes of hockey.

William normally liked it, but recently it had been a little rough.

He lingered in the doorway for a moment, letting his bag hang lazily from one shoulder as he watched the room. Across the lounge, one of the defensemen had his daughter balanced on his hip. His wife was laughing at something he’d said, one hand resting automatically against his chest.

People belonged to each other here.

William was truly happy for them. He wasn’t actually bitter. It had simply been months since France, and the closest thing he’d gotten to affection lately was when his younger brother accidentally fell asleep on his couch instead of driving back to his own apartment.

He’d spent these months of trying desperately to be patient. Months of reminding himself that loving you wasn’t something that needed solving immediately.

You suddenly had Edinburgh. He obviously had Toronto. Life was complicated. Most days, it was still worth it. Tonight simply happened to be one of the harder ones.

He rubbed a hand across the back of his neck and started toward the exit.

“Are you really leaving without acknowledging me?”

William froze.

For a moment he genuinely thought he’d imagined it.

Then your voice came again.

“You’d think someone flying in from Scotland would be granted your attention, but I guess not.”

He turned so quickly he nearly walked straight into a stroller. You stood against one of the walls with your arms folded across your chest, failing miserably to hide a grin.

William stared right at you.

Well. He was about to make an absolute fool of himself in front of his entire team.

He crossed the room before his brain had any chance of catching up, reaching you in only a few long strides before wrapping both arms around your waist hard enough to lift you clean off the ground.

You let out a startled squeal that dissolved immediately into laughter. “William!”

He only laughed into your shoulder.

“You are causing a scene.”

“I don't care.”

He truly didn’t. Not when you were actually here. Not when he could feel you in his hands instead of being reduced to a tiny rectangle on his phone screen.

When he finally set you back on the floor, it was only long enough for him to pull you into another hug before kissing you all over—your hair, your temple, your forehead, one cheek, and then the other, trying to make up for every month he’d spent missing you.

You laughed when he pressed a kiss to your nose, then another to your forehead, and when he finally murmured a breathless “Hi,” you were already dissolving into helpless laughter.

“Hello to you too,” you managed, while he stood there smiling like he couldn’t possibly stop. He wasn’t even trying to.

“How…” he laughed breathlessly. “How did you get here?”

“Alana put me in contact with some of the WAGs, and they sorted me out.”

He barked out a laugh. “Of course she did.”

You were still smiling when the moment settled between you, soft and warm and almost unreal. William kept one hand at your waist like he was afraid you might vanish if he let go.

Then, a little more quietly, he asked, “What does this even mean?”

For the first time since you’d arrived, your smile faltered into something quieter.

“My new schedule is very flexible,” you said.

William listened without daring to interrupt.

“I can do a lot of work remotely. I’ll still need to be there for certain meetings but…” You hesitated, glancing down for a second before looking back up at him. “But…”

“But what?” he prompted.

“If you want me here,” your voice became almost shy. “I can stay for a while.”

Everything inside William seemed to go still.

For months, he’d convinced himself that wanting more time with you was selfish. That asking you to come to Toronto would mean asking you to sacrifice the life you’d worked so hard to build. He’d spent so long trying to deserve you that he’d forgotten something simple and devastating: you were allowed to choose him too.

“William? Is that okay, or—”

He’d been silent for too long, and now you were looking at him with that careful, searching expression, like you thought you knew his emotions but weren’t entirely sure.

He reached up and cupped your face before you had the chance to retreat even a single inch. His thumbs brushed lightly along your cheekbones, reverent and disbelieving.

“Shut up,” he murmured, smiling so hard his cheeks hurt. “I love you.”

Then he kissed you.

Because he could. Because there was nothing else he wanted more in this world. He kissed you slowly at first, as if he wanted to memorize the exact shape of this moment, and then with a little more certainty when you leaned into him, your hands finding his shirt, your breath catching softly against his mouth.

When you pulled back, you rested your forehead against his, smiling gently.

“I love you too. I love you so much it hurts sometimes, like my heart should’ve broken from carrying all of it and…” You laughed quietly to yourself, the sound trembling at the edges. “And somehow it just keeps finding room for more.”

“And which author said that?” he asked quietly.

You leaned up and kissed the corner of his mouth, soft as a promise. “I think that was just me.”

⋆.˚𖦹⋆✮⋆.˚ ⋆.˚𖦹⋆✮⋆.˚ ⋆.˚𖦹⋆✮⋆.˚ ⋆.˚𖦹⋆✮⋆.˚

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