Page 11 of Waiting for You

Our friendship fused into something unbreakable that afternoon.

Hours later, Samara called up the stairs, her voice bright and singsong, as if the things she'd said to Violet had never happened at all. Downstairs, the long dining table was set for five. I counted the plates.

"Who's the fifth setting for?" I asked.

"My other child," Samara tossed over her shoulder, already bustling back into the kitchen. "Xavier. He should be pulling in any minute."

I snapped my head toward Violet. She'd never once mentioned a brother. I raised an eyebrow, and Violet just shrugged.

We took our seats. The food started coming around, and I reached for my fork on reflex.

"Hold on. We wait for Xavier," Samara snapped.

As if the tension summoned him, the front door clicked open and a man stepped into the foyer. He wore wrinkled blue surgical scrubs and wire-rimmed glasses shoved high up his nose, his whole posture carrying the bone-deep exhaustion of a brutal shift. His dark hair stood on end where a surgical cap had flattened it.

He froze in the archway for a second, and the moment I looked at him, the only thought my brain could supply was that he was devastatingly beautiful.

He and Violet shared an undeniable bone structure in their faces, a resemblance strangers could spot as shared DNA in a heartbeat. But the resemblance died at the surface. Where Violet was an open book, Xavier was guarded and still. His dark eyes scanned every face at the table like a security sweep before landing on the empty chair.

Samara leapt from her seat.

"Xavier!" She rushed him and threw her arms around his neck. All the warmth she'd withheld from Violet, all the fake pleasantry she'd performed for me, poured out of her now in a genuine rush. His father stood, clapped a hand onto the younger man's shoulder, and the entire room rearranged itself around him.

Violet stayed glued to her chair. I sat frozen right beside her.

Then Xavier's gaze drifted across the table and caught on mine.

He locked his eyes on me, and I stared back, blind to everything else. A charge crackled through that suspended moment, a terrifying pull I had no name for and couldn't break.

I found him alone on the back porch after dinner, sleeves shoved up, nursing a glass of water like it was something stronger.

"Rough shift?" I asked, leaning against the railing beside him.

"Sixteen hours." He didn't look over. "You're the roommate who wasn't supposed to be here."

"And you're the brother who never got mentioned." I let that sit. "Guess we're both the family secret."

That earned me a glance, and the corner of his mouth tipped up, the first crack in all that armor. We stayed out there long after the porch light pulled in moths, trading easy talk that should've felt awkward with someone I'd just met and somehow didn't.

After that night, we found a way to talk every single day.

It started over trivial things: trading book recommendations, debating movies, a heated argument over whether some pretentious indie film was worth the runtime that turned into a plan to watch it together. The casual banter mutated into deeper talk. We confessed what empires we were trying to build, what failures kept us up at night, the toxic family dynamics we were both clawing to escape. He asked me probing questions and sat in the silence to wait for my answers. I handed him secrets I'd never said out loud to another living soul.

I told Violet first. I sat cross-legged on my dorm bed and admitted I was falling hard for her brother, and I promised that if it went south, I'd never let it detonate our friendship. Violet just smirked. "I honestly think you two would be lethal together." That was the end of the debate.

Our first official date was a quiet dinner downtown. He came straight from a grueling rotation, smelling faintly of clean antiseptic, his dark curls still dented from his scrubs. When the waiter came, I ordered the most expensive steak on the menu. It was a covert stress test I ran on every man I dated, not out of cruelty but because I needed the intel up front.

The fragile ones who couldn't handle a woman ordering the pricey cut, the ones who made passive-aggressive comments or went quiet or asked to split the bill through their teeth, always told me everything I needed to know about them.

Xavier glanced at my menu, looked up with a lazy smirk, and said, "Good call. The chicken here is dry garbage."

That was the second I knew I was done for.

He covered the bill without a flinch. He walked me back to the campus gates and told me goodnight with an unshakeable confidence that promised he already knew there'd be a second date. I stood frozen in the damp brick hallway long after he disappeared, my hand still tingling with the memory of his warmth.

We dated through the chaotic blur of the rest of the semester and straight into the next year.

He proposed in the final weeks of my senior year.