I forgot, for exactly four seconds, that the house had a fourth person in it. Four seconds was long enough. I pushed open the door to the shared bathroom the way I had every morning for a year — without knocking, without thinking, the way you move through a space that has only ever belonged to you — and found Elara standing at the mirror with her shirt half-lifted over her shoulders, the fabric bunched at her collarbone, her back a long pale line interrupted only by the dark fall of her hair. She didn't move to cover herself. For one impossible moment, my body forgot to be embarrassed too. There was something almost unbearably soft about the way the morning light came through the frosted window and settled along her spine, the curve of her waist, the small private geography of her shoulder blades — the kind of beauty that arrives before shame does, that exists for a half-second outside of any rules about who is allowed to look. I remember thinking, absurdly, that she looked like something painted rather than someone caught, still and golden in the light, entirely unbothered by being seen. Then my brain caught up to the rest of me, and I said something — sorry, I think, or her name, or nothing coherent at all — and grabbed for the door. She still hadn't moved. I stood frozen in the doorway, half a step into retreat, waiting for the scream, the flinch, the arm crossing over her chest, any of the small violent instincts a person is supposed to have when they're caught undressed by someone who isn't supposed to see them. None of it came. She simply looked at me in the mirror — not at my reflection, but through it, like she was checking something against a reference only she could see — and her expression stayed perfectly, unnervingly still. "Elara—" "It's fine," she said, and her voice had the right words in the right order, warm and easy, but it landed a half-second too late, like audio that had drifted out of sync with the video of her mouth moving. "You didn't do anything wrong." "I should've knocked. I forgot you were—" I gestured uselessly at the room, at her, at the whole impossible fact of a girl living in a house that had been mine and mine alone for a year. "It's fine," she said again, and this time she smiled — and the smile arrived the way the reaction should have arrived the first time, delayed, deliberate, a shape assembled a beat after the moment that was supposed to produce it. She pulled her shirt back up over her shoulder, slow, unhurried, the gesture of someone who had watched modesty performed many times but was only now, carefully, trying it on. I should have left. I didn't. "Doesn't it bother you?" I asked, my voice smaller than I wanted it to be. "Someone seeing you like that?" She considered the question with a tilt of her head, the same tilt she'd used on the day she arrived, the same borrowed gesture. "Should it?" "...Yeah. Usually." "Then it does," she said, simply, as if agreement were the same thing as feeling. She turned to face me fully now, unbothered by the door still standing open, unbothered by my eyes that hadn't quite managed to look away. "Does it bother you, Haru-kun? Seeing me?" The question hung there, soft and impossible, and my body answered before my mind could stop it — the warmth climbing up my neck, the way my eyes moved once, briefly, over the line of her collarbone before I forced them back to her face. She watched me do it. She watched the whole small betrayal happen in real time, and something in her expression sharpened, focused, like she'd just found the exact frequency she'd been listening for. "No," I said, which was a lie, and also, somehow, the truest thing I'd said all week. "Good," she said, and stepped closer instead of further away, close enough that I could smell something faintly floral on her skin, close enough that I had to make a decision about whether to retreat and didn't. "I'd hate to be something you were afraid of." "That's not—" I started, and stopped, because I didn't actually know how to finish that sentence. That's not what I'm afraid of felt too honest. That's not what this is felt like a lie. She reached up, slow, and straightened the collar of my shirt with two fingers, an intimate little correction, the kind of gesture reserved for people who've touched each other a thousand times before. Her fingers were warm. Ordinary. Human in every way a hand should be. "You're very easy to read," she said quietly, not unkindly. "It's nice. Most people aren't." I stood there a moment longer than I should have, caught in the specific, humiliating tension of wanting to step back and not doing it, and it was only later, lying awake with my pulse still uneven, that the wrongness of the whole thing finally caught up to me the way it always did — delayed, the way everything about her seemed to be delayed, a half-second behind the moment that should have produced it. She hadn't been embarrassed. She hadn't been afraid. She hadn't, I realized, reacted at all — not really, not from anywhere underneath the skin. She had simply watched me react first, and then, carefully, correctly, given me back a version of what a girl was supposed to feel in that moment, assembled just quickly enough that I'd almost missed the seam. Almost. I lay there turning it over until the ceiling blurred, chasing the one detail that wouldn't let me sleep — not the shape of her in that light, though that stayed too, warm and unwelcome — but the four full seconds of nothing before she remembered what a person does when they're seen. Four seconds. I'd counted them without meaning to. Long enough to notice. Long enough, I thought, staring into the dark, to wonder what exactly had been standing in that bathroom before it decided to be a girl who blushes.

Book 1, Chapter 3: The Wrong Reaction