Kai’s POV
When she told me she wanted to leave, I felt something crack in my chest—not breaking, exactly, but shifting. Dangerous. Unpredictable.
I stood in her bathroom, watching her mouth form words that dismantled my tentative architecture of hope, and understood that I'd been building on land she never intended to occupy.
You were never part of the plan.
I walked for hours after the dinner party. Not to Petra—though the thought surfaced, seductive in its familiarity—but past her apartment, past the bars, past every destination that offered oblivion.
Oblivion found me anyway, in the form of Tommy and Ean stumbling out of a waterfront bar with Petra between them.
"Kai!" Tommy's linebacker frame materialized from the shadows. "Where the hell have you been? We've been texting you for hours."
"Phone's dead."
"Bullshit. You're surgically attached to that thing." Ean slung an arm around my shoulders. "Come on. We're heading to the boathouse. Tommy's parents are in Monaco."
"Unsupervised access to the good whiskey," Tommy added. "The kind my father pretends he doesn't notice me stealing."
"Come with us," Petra said, fingers finding my wrist. "You look like you need some spectacularly bad decisions tonight."
We walked until we reached Tommy's family boathouse—that secluded dock where we'd smoked our first cigarettes at fourteen, coughing until our eyes watered while pretending we'd done this a hundred times before.
Where Ean confessed he'd lost his virginity to his mother's tennis instructor and we'd laughed until our stomachs ached, not because it was funny but because we didn't know what else to do with information that heavy.
Where Tommy told us his father hit him when the grades slipped, and we'd sat in silence passing a stolen bottle of scotch, understanding without words that some truths don't require responses.
Where I'd admitted, drunk and seventeen, that my mother left because I wasn't enough to make her stay—and neither of them had tried to convince me otherwise, which was the kindest thing they could have done.
"So," Tommy said once we'd settled into the boathouse's familiar shadows, "who died? You look like someone ran over your dog and backed up to make sure."
"Nobody died. I'm fine." I know they won't believe this lie.
"You're absolutely not fine." Ean sprawled across the worn leather couch. "You've been weird for weeks. Ever since that new tutor showed up at Whitmore."
"The stepsister?" Tommy's eyebrows climbed. "The one with the legs and the ice queen routine? Please tell me you're not—"
Of course she'd told them.
Petra collects information the way other women collect jewelry because knowledge is currency in our circles, and she's never met a secret she didn't think would sound better spoken aloud after two glasses of wine.
I couldn't even be angry about it. I'd known exactly who she was when I'd taken her to bed the first time, and expecting discretion from someone who thrived on being the center of every conversation was like expecting a shark to apologize for swimming.
"I'm not anything. Drop it."
"He's definitely something," Petra observed, settling beside me. "Look at his jaw. He's grinding his teeth again."
"I'm not grinding my teeth." But my hand moved to my jaw anyway, betraying me.
"You absolutely are. Right here." She traced along my jawline. "You always do this when you're trying not to feel something. It's your tell."
"Maybe I have an expressive jaw."
"Maybe you're full of shit," Tommy countered, tossing a bottle cap at my head. "This is about the tutor. You've been distracted during practice, barely spoke at dinner last week, and now you're wandering the waterfront like a Victorian widow."
"A Victorian widow. Really."
"With all the brooding and water-staring. Very melodramatic. Very unlike you."
I took a long pull from the whiskey bottle, letting the burn buy me time. The problem with friends who'd known you since before puberty hit is that they'd memorized your tells before you even knew you had them.
"I don't brood," I snapped.
"You're literally brooding right now while denying it," Ean observed, stretching his legs across the dock railing.
"What happened at the dinner party?" Ean leaned forward. "You look like someone cancelled Christmas permanently since that day."
"Nothing happened," I tried to lie.
"Kai." Tommy's voice lost its teasing edge. "We've known each other since we were terrorizing summer camp counselors. I know when you're lying, and right now you're lying badly. Something happened."
The whiskey wasn't strong enough for that conversation. Nothing was strong enough for that conversation, except maybe a medically induced coma or selective amnesia.
"She told me she's leaving for California after the school year ends," I managed finally.
"And you didn't know about this plan of hers?" Tommy asked.
"I thought maybe I could change her mind." I stared at the water, black and indifferent beneath the dock. "Turns out I severely overestimated my powers of persuasion."
"Oh, buddy." Ean shook his head with the slow disappointment of a doctor delivering bad news. "That's rough. You actually like your stepsister, don't you?"
"I don't know what I feel."
I turned to look at her, genuinely caught off guard. Petra had been in love with me for years—a fact she thought she hid well and I pretended not to notice because acknowledging it would mean ending things.
She'd never once encouraged me toward another woman. Never once suggested I chase someone else.
The closest she'd come to discussing feelings was a drunken confession at Tommy's birthday party that I'd graciously allowed us both to forget by morning.
And now she was telling me to fight for Skye.
"So what are you going to do about it?" Tommy asked.
"I don't know. She made her position very clear." My hands tightened around the whiskey bottle until my knuckles ached, the glass warming against my palms while the rest of me stayed cold.
"Since when do you accept defeat?" Ean laughed. "The Kai I know doesn't give up on anything he actually wants."
"This is different."
"Different how?" Tommy pressed.
"She's not just some girl I want to sleep with. She's—" I stopped myself before I said too much.
"She's what?" Petra asked, watching my face carefully.
"She must be something genuinely special, this stepsister of yours." Petra took the whiskey from Ean and raised it in a mock toast.
Her voice was carefully light in the way it always got when she was swallowing something that hurt. The moonlight caught the shine in her eyes that she'd blame on alcohol if anyone was stupid enough to mention it.
The morning after was hell.
Seeing Skye after breakfast, white-faced from whatever Diane had whispered in the hallway, knowing she wouldn't tell me. The car ride was worse—her proximity and her distance, her refusal to engage.
I drove away with my hands shaking, convinced I'd destroyed something before it began. Then I came home and saw the interior door open.
She removed the dresser. She'd been looking for me.
The night that followed felt like a blessing. I memorized her—the sounds she made, the vulnerability she tried to hide. I fell asleep with her heartbeat against my palm and woke knowing I would fight for this.
Now I climb the stairs with a tray balanced precariously—pastries, coffee, the domestic gesture feeling like promise. I imagine her still in bed, rumpled and soft. I imagine talking honestly about what we might build.
I push through the open door with my shoulder, smiling already.
She sits on the edge of the bed, fully dressed, my phone in her hands.
The screen is dark—she's not reading, just holding it like she has already seen what she needed to see. Her expression is closed, distant, the mask she wore when I first met her.
"Where were you last night, Kai?" she asks.
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