CHAPTER THIRTEEN
SIXTEEN YEARS OLD
· · ·
There were days like this sometimes.
Not often enough.
But they existed — days where Cassian showed up without the weight of everything he usually carried.
Where something easy moved between us that felt like who we used to be before things got complicated.
This was one of those days.
I’d learned not to expect them.
I’d also learned to hold on when they came.
· · ·
It was my idea.
I’d figured out earlier that year that if you went out my window and grabbed the drainpipe on the left side — the thick one, the one that had been there since before we moved in — you could get enough leverage to pull yourself up onto the overhang above the garage.
From there it was an easy crawl to the flat section of the roof above the living room.
I’d done it alone a few times.
Never told anyone.
I told Cassian.
The look on his face was immediate — that flash of something that made him briefly, completely young and carefree again. Delighted in a way he usually kept hidden.
“Show me,” he said.
· · ·
Getting up was an ordeal.
I went first — window, drainpipe, the scrape of the overhang edge against my palms — and made it look easier than it was.
Cassian got stuck halfway up the drainpipe and refused to admit it.
“I’m fine.”
“You’ve been on that pipe for thirty seconds.”
“I’m strategizing.”
I lay flat on the overhang and reached my arm down.
He looked at it.
Looked at me.
“I don’t need —”
“Cassian.”
He grabbed my hand.
I pulled. He pushed. There was a moment where we were both laughing too hard to do anything useful and he nearly took me down with him and then suddenly he was up, half on top of me, both of us breathless and ridiculous on a strip of roof in the dark.
He was laughing.
Really laughing.
Face close. Breath warm. His hand still in mine from the pull up.
I became aware of every single point of contact, against my will.
“Come on,” I managed. “The flat part’s better.”
· · ·
We settled with our backs against the slant, legs stretched out, the neighborhood spread below us.
He’d brought snacks from somewhere — gas station contraband,thekindmymomwould’vequietly confiscated. Sour candy. Chips. Something fluorescent orange that defied classification.
The sky was doing something extraordinary.
All amber and deep blue at the edges, the first stars coming through in the middle. The kind of sky that makes you feel small in the right way.
Like the universe is reminding you it’s still running even when your life feels like it isn’t.
We ate without talking for a while.
The silences were never uncomfortable.
That was one of my favorite things about him. The silences were never uncomfortable. With anyone else I’d be filling them, performing, making sure no one noticed the gap.
With Cassian the quiet just sat between us like something familiar. Like it had always lived there.
· · ·
I would remember this moment for the rest of my life.
That’s the thing about the good ones — you know them while they’re happening.
I already knew this was one of those.
· · ·
“I forget it looks like this,“ he said eventually.
“Like what?”
He gestured vaguely at all of it. The neighborhood. The houses. The lights coming on one by one below us like something being slowly lit from the inside.
“Normal,“ he said. ’From up here it just looks — normal.“
Something in his voice made me look at him.
He was staring out at it with an expression I didn’t see often. Unguarded. Quiet in a way that wasn’t his usual closed-off quiet. Something else.
· · ·
“Do you ever just —“ He stopped. Started again. “Do you ever think about leaving?”
“Leaving where?”
“Here.” A pause. “Home.”
I thought about it honestly.
“Sometimes. But I’m not in a hurry.”
He nodded slowly.
“I think about it all the time,“ he said.
There was something underneath it. I waited.
“Just away.”
My chest tightened. Away from me?
“Away from what?”
He was quiet for a long moment. The kind of quiet that meant he was deciding something.
“My dad’s —" He stopped. His jaw moved. “He’s not easy to live with. You know that.”
“I know.”
“You don’t know all of it.”
He said it simply. No drama. Just fact.
I looked at him and he was still looking out at the neighborhood, his profile sharp against the darkening sky, and I wanted so badly to ask him what all of it was.
To finally be let through the door he’d always kept closed.
But I didn't push. I took whatever he was willing to give. Every time.
“I know,” I said again. Softer this time.
· · ·
He turned and looked at me.
For a long moment he just — looked. Like he was checking something. Making sure I was still the same person he’d always found here.
I was. I always would be.
“Your family,” he said. Then stopped. Shook his head like he was editing himself.
“What?”
He looked back at the sky.
“Nothing.”
“Cassian.”
A long pause.
“They’re the reason I —" He exhaled. Slow. Careful. “I don’t know what I would’ve done without them. Without your mom and her hugs and your dad’s terrible jokes and — all of it.”
His voice had gone low. Almost rough.
“I don’t know who I’d be.”
· · ·
The words landed somewhere deep. I didn’t trust myself to speak for a moment.
“They love you,” I said finally. “You know that, right? It’s not — they just love you.”
I love you . I didn’t say.
He didn’t answer.
But something in his face shifted. Something that looked almost like relief.
· · ·
We stayed up there until the stars were fully out. At some point we’d migrated closer together without deciding to — his knee against mine, our shoulders touching, the warmth of him solid against my arm in the cooling night air.
He was pointing out constellations with the wrong names, completely confidently, and I was letting him because I liked the sound of his voice when he was like this. Unhurried. Here.
“That’s the Big Dipper,” I said.
“That’s what I said.”
“You said Big Dripper.”
“Same thing.”
“It’s really not.”
He shoved me lightly with his shoulder and I shoved back and we were grinning at the sky like idiots and I thought — this. This is what I’d choose. If I got to choose anything.
This exact thing.
If it was up to me.
Which it never was.
· · ·
At some point his hand found mine again.
Just — slow and deliberate, his fingers sliding between mine in the dark like it was the simplest thing.
I stopped breathing for a second. He had this effect on me every single time.
He didn’t acknowledge it. Just kept looking at the sky.
So I did too.
Heart loud in my ears. Fingers laced with his.
· · ·
“Hey.” His voice was quiet.
“Yeah.”
He turned his head toward me. We were close enough that I could see the stars reflected in his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “For the last few weeks. I just —"
He stopped. Didn't finish.
But his hand tightened around mine.
· · ·
And that — that was the most I’d ever gotten. From him.
About any of it.
“It’s okay,” I said.
And this time —
I actually meant it.
We’re okay.
· · ·
Getting back down was worse than going up. He went first this time, dangling from the overhang with significantly more confidence than the situation called for, and dropped to the ground with a thud and a muffled curse word.
“You okay?”
“Fantastic,“ he said from the dark below.
I laughed into the back of my hand so my parents wouldn’t hear.
He caught me at the bottom — hands at my waist as I dropped, steadying me, his face very close when I landed.
Neither of us moved for a second. I didn’t dare. His hands didn’t move. But I felt him slightly tremble.
· · ·
Then he stepped back. Like he remembered something.
Like he always remembered something.
He left through the window. The way he always did.
But at the sill he stopped and looked back.
“Ro.”
“Yeah.”
“I meant it.” His voice was low. Serious in a way he rarely let himself be. “What I said. About your family.” A pause.
“About needing them.”
He held my eyes for a long moment.
Then he looked down. Like he was deciding something.
Like he was standing at the edge of something and hadn’t made up his mind yet.
But I was always stuck at the edge with him, waiting for one of us to jump off.
“Cassian —"
“I need you so much, Ro.”
Quiet.
Simple.
Like it had been sitting in him for a long time and just — came out.
He didn't look up when he said it.
And he was gone before I could answer.