Chapter 639 | I’m Tired of Being Patient

The bus ride back took forty-seven minutes including an unscheduled stop while the driver argued with a man who wanted to bring a full-size keyboard onto the bus and could not understand why the fare reader would not accept a Costco membership card. I sat in the front seat where the grey-haired driver had claimed me on day one, my head against the window and the city scrolling past in orange and glass.

At Central Station I transferred to Route 14 without incident. The night driver was not my morning driver, and this one charged me the full fare and made no attempt at conversation or hard-boiled eggs. I ate the last of the protein bar from my jacket pocket and tasted lint alongside the chocolate.

The checkpoint at the ridge waved me through when the rock-skinned Hero recognized my face. The WARDEN pillar at the main gate greeted me by name and wished me a restful evening, then paused and added that my cortisol levels were elevated and it recommended hydration.

I told the pillar to mind its business. The pillar responded that it was designed to mind everyone’s business and that this represented its core function.

Prometheus House sat quiet at eleven twenty-eight on a Tuesday night, the common room dark except for the blue standby light on the television and the glow from Caden’s abandoned phone charger draped across the kitchen counter like a neon snake. I took the stairs to the second floor, passed Percy’s door where a thin line of light at the threshold suggested he was either studying or conducting reconnaissance on someone’s insurance paperwork, and kept walking to the stairwell.

I texted Felicity: “Gate.”

She replied: “Door’s open.”

Third floor. West tower. Room 304.

The hallway smelled of whatever expensive candle Petra had burning three doors down and the industrial carpet cleaner that maintenance ran every other Tuesday. Felicity’s door sat cracked open by half an inch, and warm light leaked through the gap alongside the sound of an acoustic guitar playing through a speaker at conversation volume.

I pushed the door open and stepped inside.

Felicity sat cross-legged on her bed in a pink sleep shirt that fell off one shoulder and cotton shorts so short they vanished beneath the hem when she sat. Her hair hung loose and freshly washed, blonde waves catching the fairy lights strung above her headboard in a way that turned each strand into filament. No makeup. No performance. The freckles across her nose stood unfiltered, scattered like someone had flicked a paintbrush at her face and called it perfect.

She held a mug of something steaming in both hands and looked up when the door moved, and the expression on her face was the one she showed to no one, the version that existed underneath the bubbly and the flirting and the four thousand words per minute social energy. Soft and open and a little scared that I would see it and a little more scared that I would not.

“You smell like the bus,” she said.

“You told me to come anyway.”

“I have opinions about your choices, not your hygiene.” She set the mug on her nightstand beside Mr. Whiskers, who sat propped against the lamp with the resigned posture of a stuffed rabbit who had witnessed too much. “There’s French toast ingredients in the mini fridge. I’m not making them tonight. The offer was aspirational.”

I closed the door behind me and felt the click of the latch travel through my palm. The room was small and warm and smelled of vanilla and the particular floral thing that Felicity’s shampoo did to every space she occupied for longer than ten minutes. Fairy lights painted everything in soft gold. The speaker on her desk played something acoustic with a woman’s voice carrying a melody that felt like late summer through an open window.

“Sit,” she said, and patted the space beside her on the mattress.

I sat. The bed shifted under my weight, and Felicity’s knee touched mine through the cotton of her shorts, warm and present and deliberate in the way her touches had been since the day she decided I mattered.

“You look tired,” she said, studying my face from eight inches away. “Not the sexy kind. The kind where I can see the bus schedule in your eyes.”

“I filed two hundred and twelve incident reports today.”

“That’s a weird flex and I’m into it.” She pulled the stolen blanket from behind her and draped it across both our laps, her fingers brushing my thigh through the fabric in a way that could have been incidental but was not, because Felicity Hardy did nothing by accident and everything with intent. “Tell me about the raccoon.”

“You heard about the raccoon?”

“Percy sent me the laminated report. He laminated it, Lukas. With his own laminator that he apparently brought from home. I have a lot of questions about Percy’s luggage priorities.”

I laughed, and the sound surprised me because it came from somewhere below the exhaustion and the calculations and the sixteen different complications waiting in my morning like landmines with scheduling conflicts. Felicity watched me laugh the way she watched everything, with that specific quality of attention that filed the moment into a category she would reference later with devastating accuracy.

“Nnhh… you’re doing it again,” she murmured. Not the social butterfly voice. Not the bestie register or the class clown pitch or any of the fourteen vocal modes she cycled through in public. This was the real one, low and warm and a little rough at the edges.

“Doing what.”

“The thing where you forget to be strategic for a second and I can see the actual person.” Her hand found mine under the blanket and threaded her fingers through with gentle pressure. “I like the actual person. The strategic one is impressive. The actual one is worth losing sleep over.”

Her thumb traced a circle on the inside of my wrist, right over the pulse point, and my heart rate did something that the WARDEN pillar would have flagged as concerning.

“Felicity.”

“Mmm.”

“You sent a period earlier. After goodnight.”

Her cheeks flushed pink beneath the freckles, visible even in the fairy light, spreading from her cheekbones down her throat and into the neckline of the sleep shirt where it fell open across her collarbone. She squeezed my hand hard enough to feel her pulse in her fingertips.

“I typed three different paragraphs before that,” she admitted. “One of them had the word ‘yearning’ in it. Unironically. I deleted it so fast my phone asked if I was having a stroke.”

“Yearning.”

“Shut up.”

“I’m not making fun of you.”

“You’re smiling. That counts.”

I was smiling. The muscles in my face had arranged themselves into it without consulting my brain, which was still busy processing the fact that Felicity Hardy had typed the word yearning and meant it and deleted it and sent goodnight with a period instead, and that this single punctuation mark contained more honest vulnerability than most people managed in a lifetime of conversation.

“Hey,” she said softly, and pulled on my hand until I turned to face her. The fairy lights painted her pupils gold. Her lower lip was caught between her teeth, bitten soft enough to leave an impression that her tongue chased when she released it.

“Hahhh… I’m going to do something,” she breathed, her voice dropping into that low register I had first heard in a movie theater when the lights went down and the world narrowed to the warmth of her in my lap. “And you can stop me if you want. But I’ve been thinking about it since you walked in and I’m tired of being patient about things I want.”

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