The Distance
Delores
It’s Sunday night and the annex living room has achieved maximum entropy—blankets draped like accidental tents, three distinct piles of reference books, two coffee mugs abandoned to coldness, and one small sand cat sprawled diagonally across a chair like she owns it all.
I’m curled in the center of the couch with a tartan throw over my knees and a highlighter tucked behind my ear.
My notebook is open and half-filled with lines of handwriting, while my tablet shows the textbook I’m working from.
The TV’s got the volume set low, but playing a British mystery.
Every time I focus on my task, a crisp voice from the flat screen pipes up to accuse someone new of murder-by-poisoning, which would be much funnier if I didn’t know ‘who dun it’ from the first fifteen minutes of the show.
It’d be nice if that instinct would help me solve all the damn puzzles here, but alas.
Across the room, Chessie is at the whiteboard, and the marker squeaks as he updates the ‘Surveillance’ and ‘Outreach’ columns.
He’s got his sleeves rolled up, hair pulled back in a cute topknot, and his glasses make him look so nerdy-cute that I have to look away quickly.
Every so often, he checks a note on his phone and then annotates with a little flourish, never quite looking away from the board.
Felix is at the dining table, which is technically not in the living room, but with the open layout here, it might as well be.
He’s surrounded by fanned-out lesson plans with an actual red pen in hand, his posture so severe it would make my ballet professor proud.
Occasionally, he underlines something in his binder, then sighs and flips a page with the drama of a man carrying the weight of the empire on his traps.
My dragon is in his big chair with a glass of scotch and his glasses perched precariously, as he frowns at the text.
There’s a literal tower of library acquisition forms teetering on the ottoman, which he works through with mechanical regularity, stamping, initialing, and sometimes circling with a green pen before setting each one in a neat stack on his left.
He’s so serious that I want to tweak his nose, but I don’t because we’re supposed to be getting our work done before tomorrow morning.
Sitting cross-legged on the rug, Rennie has a botany syllabus on one knee and his phone on the other, flipping between the two with a studious focus as well.
His hair is messy, and he’s getting a little bit of a tan from all the work in his garden, but no one has told him because it will fuck with his whole emo appearance.
I notice, though, because it’s just barely there until he blushes and then you can really tell.
If we mention it, he’ll do something crazy like buy a giant floppy hat, and Fitz will never leave him alone.
Speaking of Fitzy, he’s at the far end of the couch.
He’s got his laptop open, but instead of a proper table, he’s balancing it on one knee, legs stretched out and feet resting in my lap, which is both annoying and somehow comforting.
His fingers fly over the keys and I don’t know if he’s doing work or some crazy revenge plot shit.
Either way, I’m amused as hell by his tiny men’s athletic shorts, tied-off sleeveless dress shirt, and knee-high anime socks.
Each time I think he’s gotten more outrageous, he does something like wear his hair in dual space buns while dressed like he found clothes in the dark.
It’s making him happy, so I don’t really give a fuck if he’s indulging his inner toddler now.
I stare at the wall for a minute and try to will myself back into work mode.
This is what Sunday nights are for, by the way.
We create a gentle portrait of domesticity: everyone home and accounted for, every voice at a low volume except the TV’s, and me, the world’s most overachieving prey animal, too tired to move but too wound up to relax.
Of course, that’s because we didn’t do any of our work the past forty-eight hours and the weekend is ending, but that doesn’t matter.
Friday night, we played poker, although half the table was incapable of keeping a poker face, and the other half was playing for blood.
Chessie made rosemary popcorn with Maldon salt and a little bit of lemon zest, and Fitz produced a dish of those bar nuts dusted in five kinds of chili powder.
After the third hand, everyone was too busy licking their fingers to hide tells, and the game devolved into who could say the most outrageous bluff while not losing their tongue to spice-induced paralysis.
I still won more than I lost, helped by Aubrey spending the last half hour of the tourney accusing Fitz of counting cards while Fitz loudly accused Aubrey of using dragon breath to heat-mark the deck.
Nobody could prove anything, and no one cared because everyone was tipsy.
Our chill-time couldn’t have been more perfect, to be honest.
When I woke up Saturday, I had Pred Games practice at eight a.m. because Coach Z lives to punish us.
The field was frosted over, and I left a trail of visible breath through every shuttle drill.
Zhenga was in rare form, but a little looser around the shoulders now that her secret relationship with Cori was out.
Unfortunately, she could still make me want to puke with the sheer energy of her practice routine.
The Khan twins watched from the stands, neither of them needling, nagging, or interrogating the lioness about her family drama.
It was a minor miracle, and I spent half the practice waiting for the other shoe to drop, but it didn’t.
The only shoes that dropped were my own when it ended, and I limped back home barefoot.
I spent the afternoon gardening with Rennie, which, if you haven’t tried it, is like taking his class while flirting constantly in French.
The gargoyle can coax anything into thriving, and he didn’t judge that I forgot to water a seedling for days.
Instead, he just moved it quietly to a zone where I’ll see it every morning.
My thumbs are not green; they are whatever the opposite of green is, but Rennie acts like every minor effort is a victory.
He spent thirty minutes correcting my grip on a root bundle, moving my hand the way a piano teacher would until I could feel the tension in the stem loosen and the whole plant just…
settle. It was so patient and so weirdly intimate that I almost started crying.
Then he said, “You are doing well, ma cherie, but you need not squeeze the life out of it,” and I started laughing instead.
After that, I did yoga and acrobatics with Fitz in the courtyard, which means he talked the entire time and I helped him not crash a lot.
We made it three minutes into our flow before he cracked a joke about my pigeon pose, which made me laugh so hard I lost my balance and face-planted.
He immediately tried to help, but his idea of help was to demonstrate a handstand and then fall on top of me so we were both laughing and clutching our stomachs, completely helpless.
The rest of the session devolved into giggling and competitive planking, which I lost by a landslide.
That tiger has insane core muscles, and I will never beat him, I swear to Apollo.
I took a very necessary shower, and then I helped Chessie with dinner.
He put me in charge of chopping shallots, which I did badly, and he fixed my grip twice but never said a word about it.
Instead, he focused on teaching me the difference between a dice and a mince, and how to avoid weeping the onion.
We made a pan sauce together, Chess’s hands guiding mine on the spoon, and the kitchen smelled so good that even Felix wandered in to ask what we were making.
Dusk came quickly, and we all ate on the terrace, under a string of fairy lights, and there was a real-life, honest-to-god moment where I forgot the world was on fire and just existed with my people.
There was a movie later—a classic comedy rewatch, all of us snuggled up in a lump of bodies and blankets—and then some extremely satisfying post-movie activities, which left me wrecked and slightly starry-eyed.
This morning, Felix had me up at dawn again, which should be illegal, and dragged me out for a run before I was awake enough to object.
My knees hated it, but it made him happy, and when we got back, he pressed his cold nose to my cheek and told me I was the toughest bunny ever.
Afterwards, I crashed in the archives with Aubrey for two hours, helping him re-sleeve old books and relabel spines while he muttered about students with no respect for history.
I liked the smell of the stacks and the way the light came in through the big windows at mid-morning.
Now it’s Sunday night, the dinner dishes are done, and I have a stack of homework that isn’t even artsy—dry Diplomacy reading, emails, a note to myself to deal with Creative writing, and the one task I’ve been putting off all weekend.
I have to email the Heathers about Friday’s class project, or they’ll complain to the professor and then weaponize the delay against me.
Just thinking about it makes my stomach hurt.