Page 91 of Lethal in Pink

She snorts—a soft, genuine sound that carries through the headset with a warmth the game audio never quite captured. “I didn’t go easy. You just got better.”

“Liar.”

“Fine. I went easy. You looked pathetic.”

“Thank you for your mercy.”

“Don’t mention it.”

The pause that follows isn’t competitive. It’s comfortable—the kind of silence that exists between two people who have run out of things to prove to each other for the night. I watch her feed, the frozen game map casting a pale light across the corner of her desk where a half-empty water glass sits beside a stack of color-coded notebooks. Law school debris. The organized chaos of her academic life, visible in the margins of the frame.

On my end, the family home has fully surrendered to the small hours. My room is vast, silent, shielded by heavy double-doors that keep the echoes of the estate at bay. My chair creaks as I shift, stretching my legs out under the desk until my ankles cross.

“What time is it there?” Amiyah asks, though she already knows. She’s been tracking the fourteen-hour gap between us for the past week.

“Almost three,” I say. “You?”

“Just past eleven.”

Another pause. Longer this time. I can hear her breathing through the mic—steady, controlled, the same rhythm she maintains during the most chaotic firefights. It occurs to me, not for the first time, that I know the sound of Amiyah Lane’s breathing better than I know most melodies.

“Your English gets weird when you’re tired,” she says.

“My English is perfect.”

“Your English gets stiff. Like you’re translating every word in your head before you let it out.”

I smile at the darkness of my childhood room. She’s right, and we both know it. The more exhausted I get, the more deliberately I choose my words—each sentence constructed with the same precision she brings to a headshot, as if the structure of the language itself is a defense against the vulnerability of the hour.

“Maybe I’m just being precise,” I say.

“Maybe you’re overthinking.”

“Maybe.”

I watch her pull her knees up to her chest on my screen, the gaming chair tilting back to accommodate the shift. Her tank top rides up slightly, exposing a thin strip of skin above the waistband of her shorts—pale and warm under the pink glow. She doesn’t adjust it. The casual, unconscious intimacy of the movement hits me with a force that has nothing to do with the game we just finished playing.

“Jae,” she murmurs, the name dropping into the quiet static of the channel like a weight. “Close your game.”

“Why?”

“Just do it.”

One click—audible through the mic, the sharp tap of her finger on a key—and her game feed dissolves. On my end, I alt-tab out of the lobby and close the application, maximizing her video feed across the main display.

The small window expands, revealing her in sharp, uncompressed detail: her blonde hair falling in messy, bleached waves around her face, undone from its knot; the clean line of her jaw; and those brilliant blue eyes looking directly into the lens with an absolute, piercing clarity. The pink LEDs wrap around her like a halo, turning the edges of her skin gold.

On her screen, my feed switches over automatically—the software detecting that I'm out of the match and bringing my camera up. I watch her eyes track across her monitor, taking in whatever version of my old bedroom the webcam captures: the high ceilings, the monitor glare carving out the hollows under my cheekbones, the transparent exhaustion written across my face.

“Hi,” she says.

“Hi,” I say back, my voice gravel-rough.

For the past week, we’ve existed to each other as voices over a headset while our avatars ran around a screen. Now there’s nowhere to hide. Just her face on my display and mine on hers, separated by an ocean and seven days of winter break.

She doesn’t break eye contact. Neither do I.

“You look like hell,” she says softly.