Miley pointed down the hall. Caleb walked into the coat closet, walked back out without acknowledging it, found the correct room, and closed the door behind him. I heard the groan through the wood.
Miley looked at me. "Your brother is adorable."
"My brother is going to need therapy if you keep looking at him like that."
She raised a brow. "Like what?"
"Like you think he's adorable."
"He walked into a closet, Anna. That's peak adorable."
Caleb spent the rest of the weekend trying to recover. He brought Miley coffee every morning and got her order wrong every time and she drank it anyway without telling him.
We had dinner together, including Jace, and Caleb tried to explain his engineering coursework and got so flustered by Miley's eye contact that he knocked over his water glass. Twice. At the same meal. Jace watched this as though he was observing a species he'd only read about. At one point he leaned over to me and whispered, "Is your brother malfunctioning?"
"He has a crush," I whispered to him.
"On Miley?"
"Since he was eighteen. Miley visited me in Charlotte once. He hasn't recovered."
Jace watched Caleb accidentally compliment Miley's elbows and then try to recover by saying elbows were underrated as a body part and then stop talking entirely.
"I feel seen," Jace said. "And vaguely nostalgic."
"For what?"
"The fitting room. The parking garage. Every interaction I had with you before the cabin where my brain stopped working and my mouth said things my dignity hadn't approved."
I kissed his cheek. "Your dignity survived."
"Barely," he said, smiling.
Jace
The Wynwood farmers market on a Saturday morning.
The same market. The same stalls. The honey vendor was still there, sealed jars lined up in rows—the same setup I’d stared at nineteen minutes into my exposure therapy assignment—before a woman hit me from behind, poured coffee down my shirt, crashed her face into mine, called me a pervert, and changed the molecular structure of my entire existence.
"Why are we here?" Anna asked. She was holding a cup of coffee from the stall on the corner.
"This is where Adler sent me for exposure therapy," I said. "Thirty minutes in a crowded, uncontrolled environment. I was nineteen minutes in when you collided with me."
She smiled, the one that reached her eyes and stayed. "I remember."
"I remember too." I stopped walking. She stopped beside me. The market moved around us, vendors calling out prices, people laughing, a musician somewhere playing guitar. The Miami sun pouring down hot, the kind of heat that clung to everything.
"Dr. Adler told me to face crowded spaces," I said. "Instead I found you. And you became the thing that made every space manageable."
I took a breath.
"You counted to four in a dark elevator and I could breathe. You held my face when my nose bled and I didn't flinch. You sanitized your desk with my brand, wore indoor shoes, and none of it came from pity. It came from you. From who you are, without even trying."
She was looking at me with those brown eyes, morning light catching the gold in them. Vanilla and coffee in the air between us. I wanted to kiss her more than I wanted to keep talking.
I reached into my pocket.
"I'm not good at this," I said. "I've never been good at the people part. My hands are better with cubes and pianos and charcoal. But my hands found you in the dark and you counted to four and I could breathe again."
