Mia's POV"Are you feeling better now?"

  "Yeah…"

  Lunch was almost over.

  I was sitting beside him, staring at nothing in particur, deeply and completely mortified. I had just spent the entire lunch period crying in front of a boy. Not quietly either — properly, fully, the kind of crying that leaves evidence on your face for hours afterward.

  I was praying for the bell to ring.

  The silence between us had that particur quality that silence gets when two people are both aware of it and neither knows how to end it. I kept cycling through possible things to say and discarding all of them. I had spent years avoiding conversations with boys, keeping distance, keeping walls, and now I was sitting beside one with nothing between us and absolutely nothing to say.

  I regretted every single one of those years right now.

  Rio broke it first.

  "So…" He paused, choosing the words carefully. "Maybe we could catch up sometimes."

  I looked at him. "Catch up?"

  "Yeah. Like — meet up. Talk." He gnced at me briefly, then away. "All those girls are always trying to impress me. It's exhausting trying to figure out who's actually being genuine and who's just — performing. I don't want performers." Another pause. "I want a friend."

  The word nded simply. Without decoration.

  I sat with it for a moment, turning it over, looking for the angle in it and not finding one.

  "Yeah," I said, aiming for casual and nding somewhere reasonably close to it. "That seems fine."

  He looked happy. Perhaps too happy — the kind of happy that's slightly too immediate to be cool about it. His whole face rearranged itself in a way he clearly wasn't trying to manage.

  "Can we exchange numbers then? To keep in touch?"

  There was something in his eyes when he asked — a small uncertainty sitting underneath the question, the look of someone who wasn't entirely sure of the answer but had decided to ask anyway. He said it the way I never would have — directly, without a backup pn, just putting it out there and waiting.

  I didn't know what to do with someone who did things like that.

  I also didn't know what to do with the thing that moved through me when I thought about it — a small, uncomfortable sting somewhere in the vicinity of my chest. He talked to girls easily. Casually. Like it was just something he did. I watched him do it all week.

  "Hey." I looked at him sideways. "Do you actually enjoy talking to all of them? All those girls?"

  His body shifted slightly. His eyes went somewhere distant for a moment — the look of someone taking a second before answering, choosing honesty over something easier.

  "I don't mind it," he said. "But it does get exhausting. Sometimes."

  I believed him.

  I had watched it happen — the way they circled him, the way he never quite got a moment that was fully his own, the way he had stayed behind at lunch specifically to have twenty minutes without anyone asking anything of him. I understood that kind of exhaustion. The kind that comes not from one thing but from the accumution of many small things that never stop.

  He was gentle and he was genuine and this world was going to take complete advantage of both if nobody stopped it.

  Something moved in me then. Not quite a thought — something older than a thought. An instinct, rising from somewhere I hadn't known was still operating.

  The urge to protect.

  The urge to stand between him and everything that wanted to wear him down.

  "Don't worry," I said.

  I looked at him directly, and I felt the smile come — wide and certain, the kind that arrives before you've decided to smile.

  "I'll protect you from all of them."

  He blinked.

  I meant it completely. I knew, sitting there in that empty cssroom with the evidence of my own tears still drying on my face, that I meant every word of it.

  He was different. He was real. And I was not going to let this world do to him what it had done to everything else I had ever cared about.

  "I will protect you, Rio," He chuckled softly

  I knew I would.

  Rio's POV"Sia, where's my towel? I can't find it."

  "Check the bucket."

  I checked the bucket. It was there.

  "Found it," I said, louder than necessary, and sank into the bath with a long exhale that seemed to come from somewhere deeper than just tiredness.

  The tub was rge — rger than you'd expect, the kind of thing that made coming home feel worth it after a day that had been anything but simple. The warm water settled around me and I let the ceiling become the only thing I was looking at for a while.

  The day repyed itself without being asked to.

  "Do you believe me?"

  My mind suddenly filled with the thoughts of the day. I still remember the day. Mia, Sitting beside me in that empty cssroom, eyes still red, voice still slightly unsteady, looking at me with an expression that was trying very hard to be composed and wasn't quite managing it.

  That was the day that marked the beginning of our friendship.

  I hadn't been able to help the smile that had crept onto my face then. I couldn't quite help it now either.

  She hadn't been like that in the beginning. The Mia of the first week was formal, precise, sharp around the edges — someone who kept a careful and deliberate distance from everything, including me. Especially me. She had watched from the perimeter of things, deflecting the crowd when it got too close, never quite crossing into the space where actual conversation happened.

  I wasn't entirely sure when that had changed.

  There was no single moment I could point to. It had happened the way most things happen — gradually, then all at once, until one day I looked up and she was simply there. At lunch. During group work. In the corridor. Beside me in the quiet moments that used to be mine alone.

  "I'll protect you."

  The warmth that moved through me when I remembered it was familiar by now. The particur kind that came specifically from her — from the way she said things like that with complete seriousness, like she had thought it through and arrived at a decision rather than just saying words.

  I stared at the ceiling.

  I couldn't go a day without her now. I had noticed that somewhere in the st month without fully admitting it. The days she was absent felt like rooms with furniture missing — technically functional, visibly wrong.

  "Will you visit my home this weekend?"

  I tensed slightly, the warmth shifting into something more complicated.

  I wanted to go. That was the honest answer, sitting here alone where nobody was asking for a performance. I wanted to see where she lived — what her room looked like, how she moved through a space that was fully hers, what version of her existed when school wasn't the context. I wanted to know her the way you know someone when the edges come down.

  But wanting and doing were two very different things in my particur life.

  Mom. Sia. The alert button. The four o'clock rule.

  I sank a little lower in the water.

  I really have to talk to them about it.

  The ceiling offered no suggestions.