Scene 33¶
Notes26-01-22e¶
✨ Allowed ✨¶
[26-01-22]
Scene 33 — “Allowed” (Celeste POV)
The first thing I noticed was that Charli stopped arriving like she was borrowing air.
Not all at once. Not like a switch.
More like a tide that had turned and, day by day, refused to go back out.
Wardrobe hadn’t changed. The room was the room: steam in the kettle, scissors waking, the long tables holding their familiar clutter of tools and half-finished things. Mara’s ledger still sat where it belonged, heavy with names and notes and the neat violence of accountability. Labels still existed. Rules still did.
But Charli—Charli started to move through it as if the rules were no longer a door she had to beg to be opened.
They were the shape of the house.
She came in early, as usual, bag on the same hook, hands washed the same thorough way. The ritual stayed. What changed was the energy underneath it.
The early-ness used to feel like payment. A quiet offering, an attempt to earn her right to be there.
Now it felt like preference.
Ownership.
She didn’t flinch when someone spoke her name. She didn’t tighten when footsteps came up behind her. She didn’t shrink into herself when the room looked at her; she held her place inside it like she had learned that place was not conditional.
It wasn’t bravado. It wasn’t performance.
It was peace.
And it did something to me every time I saw it, in the same infuriating way the wrong seam line will bother you until you fix it: a quiet insistence that I acknowledge what I was looking at.
Charli wasn’t “improving.”
She was settling.
Mara gave her a task that morning without looking up from the table.
“Cap test,” she said. “Again.”
Charli nodded once. No apology. No “sorry.” No explanation.
“Okay,” she said.
The word should not have been a victory.
It was.
She moved to the shelf, took the cap and kerchief combination we’d refined, and set it out like someone who understood it wasn’t a favour to us. It was work.
Lucy was pinning a cuff. Tahlia was measuring a hem. Sarah sat on her stool, watching in the way she watched anything that might become a social fact.
Charli went to the mirror and began to fold her hair into the shape it needed to be, quick and practised.
No hovering.
No uncertainty.
No waiting for permission.
Her fingers still weren’t perfect—she still had that slightly too-tight twist when she got anxious—but she corrected it herself without being told, loosening it by a fraction until the cap would sit properly.
I watched my own reaction with a kind of clinical annoyance.
I wanted to step in.
Not because she couldn’t do it.
Because I wanted my hands in her hair again.
Because I wanted the intimacy of being allowed to fix her.
Because I wanted to feel her trust as a physical thing.
It was absurd. It was inconvenient. It was mine to manage.
So I didn’t move.
Charli pinned the coil down, set the cap, tied the kerchief, and turned her head left and right like she was checking the fit because it mattered—not because she feared being laughed at.
Sarah’s voice drifted across the room.
“Look at you,” she said, pleased. “Like you’ve been doing it your whole life.”
Charli’s mouth curved.
Not small. Not apologetic.
A real smile.
And then—this was new—she held the smile. She didn’t snatch it back the second she became aware it was visible.
“Thanks,” she said easily.
Sarah’s eyebrows lifted, as if she’d just witnessed a minor miracle.
Lucy didn’t look up. “If you tighten the knot, it’ll dig by lunchtime.”
Charli touched the tie, adjusted it by a hair. “Better?”
Lucy glanced once. “Better.”
No fuss. No praise. No performance.
Just women calibrating a thing together.
Charli turned slightly, checking herself in the mirror.
And for a second—only a second—I saw the exact moment something inside her settled.
It was almost imperceptible: the way her shoulders dropped, the way her chin lifted, the way her own gaze met her reflection and did not recoil.
As if she’d finally decided she believed us.
Not just that we were being nice.
That we meant it.
That when we said she belonged, we weren’t making an exception.
We were recognising a fact.
Mara looked over, took in the fit, and gave a curt nod.
“Move,” she said. “Prove it.”
Charli did.
She bent to reach fabric on the lower shelves, turned quickly, lifted her arms, moved through the narrow spaces between tables. The cap held. The kerchief held. The pins did their job.
Her body moved like someone who had stopped fighting itself.
Not in an athletic way. In a permission way.
As if she’d been given, finally, the right to occupy her own skin without flinching at every edge.
Bree appeared in the doorway mid-test, carrying a tote bag full of something that looked like lace and chaos.
She stopped dead when she saw Charli.
“Oh,” Bree said, delighted. “You look... you look proper, babe.”
Charli flushed—still bashful, still Charli—but she didn’t fold in on herself the way she used to. She didn’t try to vanish.
She lifted her chin, pink-cheeked, and kept moving.
Bree clapped once. “Yes! That’s it. That’s it.”
Tahlia smirked. “She’s been upgraded.”
“She’s been allowed,” Sarah said, too quick, too sharp to be accidental.
The room went quiet for half a beat at that—just long enough for the words to land.
Not in a mystical sense. Not in a fantasy sense.
In the real sense: allowed by systems and women and paperwork and boring appointments and a mother who did not blink.
Allowed by the world finally meeting her halfway.
Charli heard it. I saw it in the way her breath hitched, the way her hands paused for the smallest moment before they continued.
She didn’t look at Sarah.
She looked—briefly—at me.
Not pleading. Not apologising.
Checking.
As if she needed one more confirmation from the person whose gaze had become... weighty to her. Reliable. Defining.
I gave her a small nod. Calm. Professional.
And inside that calm, something dangerous warmed.
Because the look she gave me—quiet, grateful, trusting—didn’t feel like a subordinate checking a supervisor.
It felt like a girl checking whether the woman she loved was still there.
The thought landed in me like a dropped needle.
I didn’t react.
I turned back to the table and wrote in the ledger with a steadiness I had to manufacture:
Cap + kerchief test: holds under movement. No slip. Adjust knot tension. Approved.
Mara’s pen made a hard line underneath my note.
“Good,” she said.
Then, without looking up, she added, “Tell Lauren I want the constraints updated if anything changes.”
“I will,” I replied.
Charli kept moving through the room, finishing her test, returning the cap to the table, hands calm.
She didn’t ask if she’d done it right.
She didn’t apologise for existing.
She didn’t look like she was waiting to be punished for being happy.
When she passed me, she hesitated a fraction—not enough to call attention, just enough to be felt—and said quietly, “Thanks.”
“For what?” I asked, too quickly.
Charli’s eyes lifted. Clearer than they used to be. Less afraid.
“For... not making it a big thing,” she said.
I felt my chest tighten.
Because it was a big thing.
It was becoming a big thing in me, whether I wanted it to or not.
I kept my face steady.
“That’s what we do,” I said, and hated myself for how close it came to tenderness.
Charli nodded once, satisfied, and walked away.
Not to escape.
Just... to go back to work.
The room turned around her with its ordinary sounds: scissors, fabric, laughter, low talk. The day continued the way it always did.
And yet, in the middle of all of it, I could feel the shift like a new seam line you can’t unsee once it’s there.
Charli’s belonging wasn’t tentative anymore.
It wasn’t borrowed. It wasn’t conditional.
It was real enough to show in her body.
Real enough to show in her smile.
Real enough to make my own composure cost more than it used to.
Because now, when I looked at her, I wasn’t only seeing what I’d seen all along.
I was feeling it.
And the longer she glowed—quietly, naturally, without apology—the harder it became to pretend my investment was merely professional.
I could still be the adult.
I could still hold the line.
But the line was no longer drawn against her.
It was drawn against myself.
Notes26-01-25e¶
Emily: Commute¶
[26-01-25]
✨ Commute ✨
Scene 33 — “Commute” (Celeste POV, past tense)
We left Wardrobe the way women leave a place that has held them all day: quietly, efficiently, without ceremony.
The workroom behind us was still full of breath—steam residue, starch, the faint sweetness of fabric warmed by irons—but the corridor outside had that cooler, emptied feel. End of day. Lights not yet dimmed, but already less intimate. The building exhaled.
Charli walked beside me with her tote hugged close to her hip. She’d been steady all afternoon—competent hands, quiet yeses—but there was a softness to her face now that read like aftermath. Not fragility exactly.
More like she was still holding herself together by habit.
I didn’t ask about the appointment. Not in the work corridor, not where anyone could come around a corner and hear a private thing turn into gossip by accident. And because I could still hear last night in my head: Some things belong to mother and daughter alone.
Outside, the air had cooled. We stood at the stop with two other commuters and a woman on her phone, and Charli kept her eyes on the road as if she could summon the bus by will.
When it arrived, we climbed aboard. I tapped on. Charli followed. We took the pair of seats near the back where the ride was smoother and fewer eyes lingered.
She sat by the window.
Of course she did.
For a while we said nothing. The bus rocked gently over patched bitumen. The city slid by in pieces: shopfronts, trees, a mechanic’s yard, a school oval gone gold in the late light. The ordinary world doing its ordinary thing, indifferent to the fact that inside this bus a seventeen-year-old had just walked out of a clinic holding a folded piece of paper that felt like a map out of the dark.
Charli smoothed the edge of her tote strap with her thumb. Again. Again.
I watched her hands because watching her face felt like asking too much of her.
After three stops she spoke, still looking out the window.
“She didn’t say much,” she said.
I didn’t pretend not to know who she meant.
“Lauren,” I said quietly.
Charli nodded once.
“She was... steady,” she added, like it surprised her. Like she’d expected anger or humiliation or punishment and had instead found a mother who did something much harder: held the line and stayed.
I felt something ease in my chest.
“Your mum’s good at being an adult,” I said. “Even when it hurts.”
Charli’s throat moved. She swallowed.
“She looked at me like...” She stopped. Started again. “Like she was trying to see me properly.”
The words landed softly, and the ache in them was sharp.
“Yes,” I said. “That’s what she was doing.”
Charli’s fingers tightened on the tote strap.
“And she...” Her voice got thinner. “She said she could learn.”
I glanced at her, careful.
“That’s not nothing,” I said.
“No.” Another swallow. “It’s just... the way she said it. Like she didn’t hate it, but... she didn’t—” Charli’s breath hitched, frustrated by her own lack of language. “It’s new in her mouth.”
I could hear Lauren saying it. Could hear the honesty that hurt and still kept the power clean.
“I think she did the best version of truth,” I said. “The kind you can stand on.”
Charli’s eyes shone in the window reflection. She blinked and looked away before the tears could turn into a thing she had to manage.
A few moments passed.
Then she asked, so small it almost didn’t make it over the engine noise:
“Do you think I made it worse.”
I turned my head just enough to look at her properly.
“No,” I said, and it came out clean. “You made it visible.”
Her shoulders rose and fell, once. Like she’d been holding her breath since yesterday.
“I didn’t want to be... difficult,” she whispered.
There it was again—the learned apology for existing.
I kept my voice low. Not gentle the way you soothe a child. Gentle the way you speak to someone whose dignity matters.
“You weren’t being difficult,” I said. “You were being scared. And then you were being brave.”
Charli made a sound that might have been a laugh in another life. It died before it reached her mouth.
“I don’t feel brave.”
“Most people don’t,” I said. “They just... do the next thing.”
She stared out at the passing houses.
“What if I don’t know what I want,” she said.
The bus turned. Light shifted across her face like a moving hand.
“You don’t have to know the whole future,” I said. “You have to know the next true thing.”
Charli’s voice turned rough.
“All I know is what I don’t want.”
“That’s still knowledge,” I said. “And it’s useful.”
She nodded, tiny, then said it—flat, honest, unornamented:
“I don’t want to be called sir.”
I felt my jaw tighten, the reflex of anger at a world that could press a word into someone like a stamp.
“And I don’t want...” Her fingers knotted around the strap. “I don’t want son.”
There was a pause, and in it I heard what she didn’t say: and I don’t know what that makes me.
I didn’t push.
Instead I gave her the rope of something she could hold.
“Okay,” I said. “Then we don’t use those words.”
Charli’s shoulders lowered a fraction. Relief, not joy. Safety, not celebration.
Her gaze flicked sideways to me for the first time since we boarded. A quick look, like checking whether I meant it.
“You don’t mind,” she said, and the question was absurd in the way fear always makes questions absurd.
I kept my eyes forward. I didn’t want to turn this into a performance of reassurance.
“I mind the idea of you being hurt,” I said. “I don’t mind you.”
Charli’s breath caught. She looked away fast.
We rode another stop. Another.
And then she said, very quietly, “You didn’t come with us.”
It wasn’t accusation. It was noticing.
“I didn’t think I should,” I said.
She worried the strap again. “Why.”
Because I wanted to say: Because Lauren needed that space. Because you needed your mother without me in the air, changing the temperature of every sentence.
But what came out was simpler, truer.
“Because you deserved a conversation that wasn’t about me,” I said.
Charli’s fingers went still.
The bus’s lights flickered on as the day dimmed, and suddenly the windows held more reflection than view.
“I thought you hated me,” she said.
The sentence punched the breath out of my chest. Not because it was rational.
Because it proved how much she’d been reading my distance as judgement.
I turned toward her then. Fully. Not dramatic. Just honest.
“I don’t hate you,” I said.
She stared at the seat in front of her as if it might protect her from the look in my eyes.
“I kept my distance,” I went on, and my voice stayed controlled even as something in me softened. “Because you’re young. Because I didn’t want you to confuse structure with... attachment. And because I didn’t trust myself.”
Charli blinked fast.
“Why,” she whispered.
I should have kept it neat. I should have kept it safe.
But after last night, after today, after seeing how close she’d come to solving a terror with a bottle and a secret, neatness felt like cowardice.
So I gave her the truth in a form she could carry.
“Because from the beginning,” I said, “I noticed you.”
She looked at me, startled.
“Not the way men notice,” I added, because she needed that distinction like she needed air. “Not as a thing. As a person. As someone who was trying very hard to be good, and who kept thinking goodness would make her safe.”
Charli’s mouth trembled.
“I thought you were disappointed in me,” she said.
“No,” I said. “I was... careful.”
Her eyes filled. She didn’t wipe them away. She just let them sit there, bright and unspectacular.
“What did you think of me,” she asked, and the question was so vulnerable it hurt.
I held her gaze.
“I thought you were brave long before you ever believed you were,” I said. “And I thought you were lonely in a way you shouldn’t have had to be.”
Charli’s face crumpled slightly, then steadied, like she was learning how to let feeling exist without it becoming collapse.
The bus slowed for the next stop. Doors sighed open. People got off. The world continued to not care.
Charli wiped one cheek with the edge of her sleeve, quick and ashamed.
I didn’t comment on the tear.
I let it be what it was: evidence.
When the doors closed again, she spoke without looking at me.
“So,” she said, voice thin, “you don’t think I’m... pretending.”
There it was. The fear of being accused of theatre.
“No,” I said. “I think you’ve been surviving.”
A long exhale left her. Like she’d been holding her breath for months.
We rode the rest of the way with our shoulders not quite touching. Close enough to count as company. Far enough to count as respect.
And in that narrow distance, something new settled—not romance, not resolution.
A shared understanding that the next true thing could be done together.
Notes26-01-25eb¶
Emily: 33 End¶
[26-01-25]
✨ 33 Ending ✨
The bus hissed to a stop and the doors folded open.
We stood with the other passengers and filed out into the cooled evening air. The streetlights had come on while we were riding; their glow made the pavement look slightly unreal, like a set dressed to resemble ordinary life. Charli adjusted her tote strap and stepped down to the footpath, careful of her footing, careful of everything.
I let her take the first step away from the curb.
Not because I didn’t want to walk beside her.
Because I wanted her to feel—physically—that she wasn’t being guided like cargo. That she still owned her own legs.
We turned toward home. Our footsteps found a shared pace without either of us asking for it. For a few metres we walked in silence, the sort that didn’t ask to be filled. I could feel the residue of what she’d said still hanging around her like humidity: sir; son; the tight, stubborn knowledge of what she couldn’t bear.
At the corner she faltered—just a half-step, as if her body remembered fear before her mind did.
I didn’t reach for her hand.
I didn’t touch her shoulder.
I simply moved closer, closing the air between us until my presence could be felt without making a claim.
She glanced sideways at me, quick and searching, then looked ahead again.
We kept walking.
And I understood, with a calm that felt almost clinical, that whatever distance I’d been calling discipline was starting to look less like safety and more like absence. That if I kept standing back for the sake of being “proper,” all I would teach her was that care had to be earned.
The street was quiet. A porch light flicked on as we passed. Somewhere a kettle whistled in a house we couldn’t see.
Charli’s breath steadied. Her steps matched mine.
Home was only a few blocks away.
And for once, it didn’t feel like a place we were returning to.
It felt like a place we were about to begin.
Notes26-01-28rv1¶
My Edits¶
✨ Commute ✨
[26-01-28]
Scene 33 — “Commute” (Celeste POV, past tense)
We left Wardrobe the way women leave a place that has held them all day: quietly, efficiently, without ceremony.
The workroom behind us was still full of breath—steam residue, starch, the faint sweetness of fabric warmed by irons—but the corridor outside had that cooler, emptied feel. End of day, lights not yet dimmed, but already less intimate. The building exhaled.
Charli walked beside me with her tote hugged close to her hip. She’d been steady all afternoon, with her competent hands and quiet yeses, but there was a softness to her face now that read like aftermath.
Not fragility exactly: more like she was still holding herself together by habit.
I didn’t ask about the appointment. Not in the work corridor, not where anyone could come around a corner and hear a private thing turn into gossip by accident. And because I could still hear last night in my head:
Some things belong to mother and daughter alone.
Outside, the air had cooled. We stood at the stop with two other commuters and a woman on her phone, and Charli kept her eyes on the road as if the bus arriving depended on her watchfulness. When it arrived, we climbed aboard. I tapped on. Charli followed. We took the pair of seats near the back where the ride was smoother and fewer eyes lingered.
She sat by the window.
Of course she did.
For a while we said nothing. The bus rocked gently over patched bitumen as it sped away from the Faire. The city came into view in pieces: shopfronts, trees, a mechanic’s yard, a school oval gone gold in the late light: the ordinary world doing its ordinary thing, indifferent to the fact that inside this bus an eighteen-year-old had just walked out of a clinic holding a folded piece of paper like it was a map out of a cave.
Charli smoothed the edge of her tote strap with her thumb. Her thumb moved again. And again. I watched her hands because watching her face felt like asking too much of her. After three stops she spoke, still looking out the window.
“She didn’t say much.”
I didn’t pretend not to know who she meant.
“Your mum,” I said quietly. Charli nodded.
“She was... steady,” she added, like it surprised her. Like she’d expected anger or humiliation or punishment and had instead found a mother who did something much harder: held the line and stayed. I felt something ease in my chest.
“Your mum’s good at being an adult,” I said. “Even when it hurts.”
Charli’s throat moved. She swallowed.
“She looked at me like...” She paused, biting her lip. “Like she was trying to see me properly.”
The words landed softly, but the ache in them was jagged.
“Yes,” I said with an acknowledging tip of my head. “That’s your mum.”
Charli’s fingers tightened on the tote strap.
“And she said...” Her voice got thinner. “She said she could learn.”
I glanced at her, careful.
“That’s not nothing.”
“No.” Another swallow. “It’s just... the way she said it. Like she didn’t hate it, but... she didn’t—” Charli’s breath hitched, frustrated by her own lack of language. “She said it was new in her mouth.”
I could hear Lauren saying it, with an honesty that hurt and yet, still managing to keep her authority intact.
“I think she did the best version of truth,” I stated carefully. “The kind you can stand on.”
Charli’s eyes shone in the window reflection. She blinked and looked away before tears were another thing she had to manage. A few moments passed. Then she asked, so small I almost didn’t hear it over the engine noise:
“Am I going to have to… accept biology?” She swallowed. “Become something I can’t stand?”
I turned my head just enough to look at her properly.
“No,” I said. “Biology isn’t a verdict. It’s a starting point. You’re allowed to choose what you live as.” She thrust her chin forward, as if in defiance, setting her lip and glancing at me. “Besides,” I continued, “You don’t ‘accept’ misery just because it came factory-installed.”
Her shoulders rose and fell, once. Like she’d been holding her breath since yesterday.
“I didn’t want to be... difficult,” she whispered.
There it was again: the learned apology for existing. I kept my voice low. Not gentle the way you soothe a child. Gentle the way you speak to someone whose dignity matters.
“You weren’t being difficult,” I said. “You were being scared. And then you were being brave, you tried to find a solution. Not the best one, but it looked good to you at the time. That’s not being difficult.”
Charli made a sound that might have been a laugh in another life. It died before it reached her mouth.
“I don’t feel brave.”
“Most people don’t,” I said. “They just do what they think is best.”
She stared out at the passing houses.
“What if I don’t know what I want.”
The bus turned. Light shifted across her face like a moving hand.
“You don’t have to know the whole future,” I said. “You have to know the next true thing.”
Charli’s voice turned rough.
“All I know is what I don’t want.”
“That’s still knowledge,” I said. “And it’s useful.”
She nodded, tiny, then said it—flat, honest, unornamented:
“I don’t want to be called sir.”
I felt my jaw tighten, the reflex of anger at a world that could press a word into someone like a stamp. “And I don’t want...” Her fingers knotted around the strap. “I don’t want son.” There was a pause, and in it I heard what she didn’t say:
and I don’t know what that makes me.
I didn’t push.
Instead I gave her the rope of something she could hold.
“Okay,” I said. “Then we don’t use those words.”
Charli’s shoulders lowered a fraction. Relief, not joy. Safety, not celebration. Her gaze flicked sideways to me for the first time since we boarded. A quick look, like checking whether I meant it.
“You don’t mind?”
The question was absurd in the way fear always makes questions absurd. I kept my eyes forward. I didn’t want to turn this into a performance of reassurance.
“I mind the idea of you being hurt,” I said. “I don’t mind you.”
Charli’s breath caught. She looked away fast. We rode another stop in silence. And another. And then I said, very quietly,
“Because you deserved a conversation that wasn’t about me.”
She nodded once, but it wasn’t agreement. It was the kind of nod people give when they’re trying to accept something they don’t understand. Her fingers kept worrying the strap. The bus rattled over a seam in the road.
I watched her swallow, watched her hesitate, and I knew there was a different question sitting under the one she’d asked. When it finally surfaced, it came out raw.
“I thought it was because you hated me.”
She stared straight ahead, shoulders locked, as if the seat in front of her could take the impact for her. The sentence punched the breath out of my chest — she’d been reading my distance as judgement.
I turned toward her fully. No half-angles.
“Charli,” I said quietly. “I don’t hate you.”
She didn’t look at me. She kept her eyes fixed on the plastic handle of the seat ahead, jaw set, like looking at me might make it worse.
“I kept my distance,” I went on, and my voice stayed steady even as something in me softened, “because you were fragile, and I didn’t want to get between you and your mum.”
I paused. My hand tightened on my bag strap.
“And because I didn’t trust myself.”
That did it.
Charli’s eyes snapped to mine. She blinked fast, baffled.
“Why?” she whispered.
I should have kept it tidy. Safe. But after last night — after today — after seeing how close she’d come to trying to solve terror with a bottle and a secret, tidy felt like a lie.
So I gave her the truth in a shape she could carry.
“Because from the very beginning,” I said, softly but with emphasis, “I saw you.”
Her mouth fell open. Her body sagged a fraction, as if she’d been bracing for something heavier. A frown creased her brow, head tilting — trying to understand what I meant without letting herself hope.
“Not the way people usually notice someone,” I added, because she needed the distinction like she needed air. “Not the outfit. Not the surface.”
I watched her throat bob as she swallowed.
“I mean… you as a person. The part of you that was trying so hard to be good... like goodness would make you safe.”
Charli’s mouth trembled.
“I thought you were disappointed in me.”
“No.” I shook my head. “I was careful.” My patience slipped a notch — not with her, with the fear that kept hijacking every sentence.
“I had to be,” I said. “Not because you did something wrong. Because you mattered, and I didn’t want to be another person who confused you.”
Her eyes filled. She didn’t wipe them away. She just let them sit there — bright, unspectacular — as the bus carried us forward and the windows turned us into ghosts.
“What did you think of me?” she asked, and the question was so vulnerable it hurt.
Something in me went sharp — not at her. At everyone who’d trained her to ask that like she was asking permission to exist.
I turned my hand palm-up on the seat between us. Not a grab. Not a demand. An offer.
Charli stared at it for a second. Then her fingers slid into mine, careful, as if she was afraid of doing it wrong.
She looked at me, and something like relief eased the anguish that had brought on the tears.
I squeezed once — light, deliberate.
“I thought you were worth being careful with.” I paused. Her eyes never left my face. “I thought you were brave, and I thought you were being asked to carry things you shouldn’t have to carry.”
Charli’s lips parted. She watched me as if she couldn’t afford to miss a syllable.
“I thought you were… beautiful,” I added, because withholding it would have been another kind of cruelty, “but that you didn’t know you were allowed to be.”
Her breath hitched.
“And I thought,” I finished, steady as the bus itself, “that if someone didn’t step in soon, you’d keep trying to solve pain by becoming smaller. I wasn’t going to let that happen.”
The bus slowed for the next stop. Doors sighed open. People got off. The world continued to not care.
Charli held my gaze as if she was trying to memorise it.
Her fingers tightened around mine.
“What if—” she began, and stopped. The word hung there anyway, full of everything she didn’t dare say. What if they never see it. What if I’m not enough. What if this ends and I fall back into sir.
I felt it, the flood behind her eyes — not tears now, but panic assembling itself into sentences.
I didn’t let it.
I squeezed her hand once, light and deliberate.
“Hey,” I said, and my voice dropped into that calm register I used when I needed someone to stop bleeding internally. “Not here.”
Her breath caught.
“Not because you’re wrong,” I added, because she would hear that if I didn’t say it. “Because you’re tender, and this is a bus.”
Charli blinked. Her lower lip trembled, held back. She nodded once, almost ashamed of herself.
I angled my palm a little more into hers, closing the circle so she had something solid to hold.
“Follow me,” I said, simple as an instruction. “Get home. Get warm. Let me look after you.”
Her shoulders dropped a fraction, like a weight had been unhooked.
“You don’t have to solve your whole life in public,” I went on. “You just have to stay with me for the next ten minutes.”
Charli’s eyes shone again. She didn’t wipe them. She just watched me, as if the steadiness of my face was a place she could sit down.
“Okay,” she whispered.
“Good,” I said.
The bus finally carried us out of the reflected dark and into the familiar streets.
I held her hand like a vow I intended to keep.