Fallout

Elena walked back to the bonfire with sand in her shoes and Noah's warmth still pressed into her skin like something she'd never asked for and couldn't give back.

She almost turned around twice.

Didn't.

The fire had gotten bigger—someone had thrown on more driftwood—and the group was louder, drunker, easier. A girl was doing a terrible impression of their Spanish teacher and everyone was losing it. Normal. God, so embarrassingly, achingly normal. Elena stood at the edge of the circle and blinked at it all like she'd just surfaced from underwater.

"Hey." Liam materialized at her elbow, appearing from nowhere the way he always seemed to. He handed her a drink—just lemonade, she realized, fizzy and cold, like he'd somehow known. "Where'd you disappear to?"

"Just needed some air." She took the cup. Wrapped both hands around it. "It got loud."

He nodded. Didn't push. But his eyes moved over her face, slow, like he was cataloguing something—the flushed cheeks, maybe. The slightly too-deliberate blankness she was trying to wear.

"You warm enough?" he asked.

"Yeah."

"You sure? You look—"

"I'm fine, Liam."

Too sharp. She felt him pull back and immediately hated herself for it. He didn't deserve the clipped answer. He hadn't done anything wrong. He was literally standing here handing her lemonade like a person who still believed the world could be decent.

"Sorry," she said. "Headache. Starting to kick in."

He bought it. Or he let her think he did. "We can go whenever you want. You don't have to stay."

"No, I—I want to stay." And the weird part was she meant it. Not for the party. Just for the noise. The noise was covering something she didn't want to sit alone with yet.

She stayed by the fire after that. Laughed at the right moments. Asked a girl named Priya about the music she was playing. Nodded at the story someone told about a camping trip gone wrong. Mechanical, maybe. But she kept moving, kept smiling, kept drinking the lemonade until the cup was empty.

Noah didn't come back to the bonfire.

She knew before she'd consciously started looking. It was the absence of a particular weight—the feeling of being watched from across the fire—that told her he was gone. She checked once, casually, toward the log where he'd been standing before. Empty. She didn't check again.

Good, she told herself. Fine. Better.

Except her eyes kept drifting to the dark stretch of beach beyond the firelight. The place where the sand met shadows. She could still feel the exact pressure of his hands—one braced beside her head, one sliding under her sweater, palm hot against bare skin. The way he'd kissed her like he was angry about it. Like wanting her was something he resented. She pressed her fingers to her mouth briefly, then stopped herself. Someone nearby glanced over. She smiled. Turned back to the fire.

The flames popped and spat. She watched them and tried to think about literally anything else.

It didn't work.

She thought about what his face had looked like in that last second—forehead pressed to hers, breathing ragged, torn open in a way she suspected he showed no one. *I can't stop.* He'd actually said that. Out loud. And then walked away anyway, which was somehow both better and worse than anything else he could have done.

Around ten-thirty the group started thinning. Couples drifting off. People calling rides. Liam walked her up from the beach, their shoes crunching on the wooden boardwalk, and the quiet between them was comfortable in a way that almost made her feel worse.

"Can I ask you something?" she said.

"Always."

She paused. Chose her words carefully. "Noah. You said you've known him since you were kids?"

Liam's expression shifted—not closed, exactly, but thoughtful. He exhaled through his nose. "Yeah. Since we were maybe nine? His mum and mine used to do this neighbourhood dinner thing. He was over at my house practically every weekend." He shoved his hands in his hoodie pocket. "Things got complicated when his dad got arrested. Noah kind of… went somewhere else after that. Still don't totally know where."

"Is he okay?" She asked it too quickly. Tried to smooth it out. "Like—generally."

"I worry about him," Liam said simply. "He doesn't really let people in. He'll act like nothing's wrong until he's got four broken ribs and blood on his shoes and then he'll look you dead in the eye and say he's fine." He half-laughed, but it wasn't really funny. "Classic Kane."

Elena stared at the streetlights smearing yellow onto the wet pavement. "But you stay."

"He'd do it for me." No hesitation. "Already has."

Something in her chest pulled tight and uncomfortable. There was something in the way Liam said it—not performative, not rehearsed—just the plain, undecorated truth of someone who had already decided. She thought about Noah's face again. The crack in it. The way he'd stepped back like closeness was a thing he didn't trust himself with.

Two boys. Same history. Completely different ways of being broken.

She didn't say anything else.

Liam dropped her off at the green door at eleven. He waited on the porch step while she found her key, which took too long because her hands were doing this slight trembling thing she was choosing to attribute to the cold.

"Thanks for coming," he said when she finally got the door open.

"Thanks for the lemonade."

He smiled. It reached his eyes. "Sleep well, Elena."

She stood in the doorway and watched him go and thought: this boy is everything uncomplicated. Kind. Present. The sort of person who hands you exactly what you need before you've said it out loud.

She went inside and told herself—firmly, immediately, before she'd even taken off her jacket—that what had happened on the beach meant nothing.

It was a moment. A stupid, shortsighted, adrenaline-soaked moment. Noah was intense and wounded and she was still raw from losing everything and of course she'd been drawn in. Of course. It made complete psychological sense. A traumatised person seeking sensation to cut through grief—she'd read about that somewhere. It was practically a medical phenomenon.

She sat on the bathroom floor for a bit. Not crying. Just sitting.

Then she brushed her teeth, washed her face, went to bed.

Lay there staring at the ceiling.

Her phone buzzed. Unknown number. One text. 'You should've stayed away.’

That was it. No name, but she knew…