Chapter 17—Official

Elara's POV

I sat back down and looked at him and waited, my hands folded in my lap, my heart considerably louder than I would have liked and my face doing its best to stay neutral about all of it.

Ravin looked back at me for a moment, then leaned forward with his arms resting on his knees and said, "I like you, Elara. Not casually. Not the way I have been pretending this is. I mean it and I think you already know that but I wanted to say it properly."

The garden was very quiet around us.

I held his gaze and felt something inside me let go of whatever it had been carefully holding onto for weeks. "I like you too," I said, my voice quieter than I intended but steady. "I stopped pretending it was casual a long time ago. Probably around the time I started caring what I looked like before coming to the garden."

He looked at me for a moment. "Your hair always looks fine."

"That is not the point," I said.

"What is the point?"

"The point is that I was trying," I said, "which means it was never casual, which means you were right and I am admitting it."

The corner of his mouth moved. "I did not say I was right."

"You were thinking it."

"Maybe," he said, and something in his eyes was warm and easy and entirely directed at me, and I felt my chest do something I had absolutely no control over.

Something shifted in his face, small and real, the kind of shift that happened when someone heard something they wanted to hear and let themselves feel it instead of filing it away.

"Good," he said softly, and reached over and took my hand and held it in both of his, and we sat there in the quiet of the garden with everything finally settled between us in a way that felt like exhaling after holding your breath for far too long.

"So we are doing this," I said after a moment, because I needed to hear it said out loud properly and not just implied.

"We are doing this," he said.

"Officially."

"Officially," he agreed, and the way he said it, warm and certain and completely unlike the careful version of himself he showed most of the world, landed in my chest like something that had always belonged there.

I laughed a little because the alternative was doing something embarrassing with my face and laughing felt considerably safer.

Ravin watched me with that quiet expression of his, the one I had spent weeks trying to read past, and then reached up and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear, his fingers warm against my cheek, and the laughter faded into something quieter and the space between us felt suddenly very small.

He was looking at me the way he sometimes did where it felt like the rest of the world had simply stopped mattering, and I found I had nothing to say to that that was not going to embarrass me, so I said nothing at all.

"You have been arriving at the garden early," he said.

I looked at him. "How do you know that?"

"Because I have been arriving earlier."

I stared at him for a second and then laughed, properly this time, and he smiled, not the small corner of his mouth version but a real one, full and unhurried, and I realised in that moment I had never seen him smile like that before and it did something to me I was completely unprepared for.

"That is embarrassing for both of us."

"Equally," he agreed, and there was something warm and easy in his voice that I had not heard from him before, like the version of him that existed when the walls were fully down, and I wanted to stay in it for as long as he would let me.

We sat talking for a while longer, easier now than it had ever been, moving between things without effort or agenda, and somewhere in the middle of it he said, "I notice everything about you. The way you tuck your hands under your sleeves when you are nervous. The way you laugh before the funny part of the thing you are about to say. The way you look at people when you think they are not watching, like you are deciding whether they are worth trusting."

I went quiet. "That is a lot to notice."

"You make it easy," he said simply, and held my gaze, and I did not look away.

"What else?" I said, because apparently I was someone who asked follow up questions now.

"You pretend things bother you less than they do and you are very good at it. But not with the people you actually trust."

I looked down at the bracelet on my wrist for a moment and then back up at him. "You noticed all of that in a few weeks."

"I was paying attention," he said.

I did not have a response to that, that was not going to embarrass me so I said nothing, and he seemed to understand that because he let it sit without pressing it further, and the space between us had gone very small without either of us deciding it should, and neither of us moved to change that.

"Come here," he said softly, and I closed the distance between us and he kissed me, and it was different from the others, deeper and less careful, like now that everything had been said out loud there was no reason to hold anything back anymore, his hand coming up to cup my face and mine finding the front of his jacket and holding on, and the garden and the school and everything outside the two of us simply ceased to exist.

Neither of us pulled away.

The kiss deepened and the evening settled soft and unhurried around us.