and all that we intend is scrawled in sand
Flora almost waves him off when he circles back, her fingers half-lifting as if to tell him to keep pacing, to keep moving if it helps—but the gesture dies before it finds shape. She watches him sit instead, leg bouncing like it’s chasing the heartbeat she can feel thrumming through the space between them. Later, she’ll turn this moment over and over again in her head, trying to figure out how it had all gone so sideways, how something so carefully planned could unravel so completely in the open air of the Wildwood. And maybe she’ll wonder—not with bitterness, but with the soft ache of something being let go—if she ever really knew him at all. Or if she just loved the version of him she’d held like a wish between her palms, imagining it into shape because she’d needed someone solid to believe in.
Still, her voice is quiet when it comes, her gaze drifting across the rippling stream and the shadowed roots of the trees that watch them with moss-draped silence. "I mean, he never asked me to be his girlfriend or anything," she murmurs, a small, humourless smile tugging at her mouth. "So I don’t know exactly when it started. But...no, we were definitely something before I ever knew what he was."
Her fingers curl around a nearby flower, pulling it gently toward her, letting it spring back like a bowstring. Her laugh is soft, but it doesn’t reach her eyes. It slips out like seawater from a cracked hull—contained for now, but only just. "When he told me, it felt like getting slapped. Like, a proper open-palm-to-the-face moment. I was furious, and shocked and just..." The clover at her side gets another absent brush of her fingertips, and she exhales slowly through her nose. "It felt like a violation and a manipulation all at once, because it wasn’t just a secret. It was me. Every thought. Every doubt. Every single time I thought I was holding something close, and he already knew."
She glances at Koa then—not sharp, not accusing, but with a flicker of something unguarded and raw in her expression, the kind of look that trembles on the edge of laughter or tears or rage but never quite chooses. "You have no idea," she says, her voice low and steady, “"how fucking stupid you can feel. Thinking you were impressing someone. That you were charming them, pulling it off, playing it just right. Thinking if you could just be a little better, a little smarter or prettier or more mysterious, maybe you’d be enough to keep their attention." Her hand tightens briefly around the clover stem, grounding herself in something green and living as she breathes through the memory. "And then you find out they knew. The whole time. Every thought. Every crack. Every time you second-guessed yourself or wished you were someone else or knew a different way to be. They knew."
Still, her voice is quiet when it comes, her gaze drifting across the rippling stream and the shadowed roots of the trees that watch them with moss-draped silence. "I mean, he never asked me to be his girlfriend or anything," she murmurs, a small, humourless smile tugging at her mouth. "So I don’t know exactly when it started. But...no, we were definitely something before I ever knew what he was."
Her fingers curl around a nearby flower, pulling it gently toward her, letting it spring back like a bowstring. Her laugh is soft, but it doesn’t reach her eyes. It slips out like seawater from a cracked hull—contained for now, but only just. "When he told me, it felt like getting slapped. Like, a proper open-palm-to-the-face moment. I was furious, and shocked and just..." The clover at her side gets another absent brush of her fingertips, and she exhales slowly through her nose. "It felt like a violation and a manipulation all at once, because it wasn’t just a secret. It was me. Every thought. Every doubt. Every single time I thought I was holding something close, and he already knew."
She glances at Koa then—not sharp, not accusing, but with a flicker of something unguarded and raw in her expression, the kind of look that trembles on the edge of laughter or tears or rage but never quite chooses. "You have no idea," she says, her voice low and steady, “"how fucking stupid you can feel. Thinking you were impressing someone. That you were charming them, pulling it off, playing it just right. Thinking if you could just be a little better, a little smarter or prettier or more mysterious, maybe you’d be enough to keep their attention." Her hand tightens briefly around the clover stem, grounding herself in something green and living as she breathes through the memory. "And then you find out they knew. The whole time. Every thought. Every crack. Every time you second-guessed yourself or wished you were someone else or knew a different way to be. They knew."
