Lahat ng Kabanata ng Forbidden Little Pet: Kabanata 171 - Kabanata 180

I lasted two days.The light in the garage apartment stayed on until past two both nights. I watched it from my kitchen window while pretending to read, the way Julian had admitted he watched mine.On the third evening the sky went the color of bruised fruit and the air turned heavy with the threat of rain. I crossed the yard without a hammer, without a package, without any remaining pretense of a practical reason.I climbed the stairs and knocked once.Julian opened the door as if he had been standing near it. He looked at my empty hands, then at my face, and the contained expression he usually wore shifted into something more direct.“No tools this time,” he said.“No tools.”He stepped aside. I walked in. The door closed behind me with the same soft finality as before, but the sound carried more weight now that both of us had stopped pretending about the board.The apartment smelled of coffee and rain about to fall. The stacks of paper on the desk had been straightened, as if he ha

The rain returned on a Sunday and stayed for two days, turning the grass between the house and the garage into a soft, dark path that neither of us bothered to avoid anymore.I stopped counting the times I climbed the stairs. Julian stopped treating my arrivals as interruptions. The manuscript on his desk grew a new stack of pages that had nothing to do with the undisciplined writer he was paid to edit; I recognized the handwriting as his own when I once waited for him to finish a sentence before he stood and crossed the room to me.We did not speak about what those pages contained. The blank walls had already begun to hold more than either of us had originally allowed for.On the third evening of the rain I found him at the large window watching the water sheet off the roof of my house. He did not turn when I entered. I locked the door out of habit and set my keys on the table. The sound of them landing was soft and ordinary.“The lease renews in six weeks,” he said to the glass. “I

Roman closed the door and the house rearranged itself around the sound.I stood in the middle of his childhood bedroom with the unzipped dress loose on my shoulders and the weight of every previous version of myself still hovering near the walls.The twin bed had been replaced years ago by a larger one that looked temporary, as if he had never expected to stay long enough to choose furniture that belonged.A single lamp on the dresser threw low amber light across the floor. Outside, the last of the daylight was thinning toward evening.Roman turned from the door and looked at me. The composed older-brother expression was gone. What remained was older, more deliberate, and fully aware of the line we were about to finish crossing.“Last chance to go back downstairs and pretend the plants needed you,” he said quietly.“I’m past that.”He crossed the room. One hand lifted and settled against the side of my neck, thumb resting at the hinge of my jaw the same way it had on the couch.He stu

The texts became the new key.Short. Practical. 'Now.' or 'After seven.' or, once, 'The house is empty until midnight.' I answered each one by locking my own door behind me and driving the familiar route with the windows down, the humid night air doing nothing to cool the low-grade current that had taken up residence under my skin since the first time Roman closed his bedroom door.We stopped using the living room. The couch still belonged too visibly to the old version of the house — to movie nights with Sophie and the particular sprawl of a friendship that had never required this kind of silence.Instead we went upstairs as soon as the side door shut behind me. Roman’s childhood bedroom became the only room that could hold what we were doing without the walls themselves seeming to object.On a Thursday that smelled of rain and cut grass, I arrived at 8:10. Roman opened the side door before I could knock. He looked at me for a long second in the dim kitchen light, then walked me back

I had been back in town for six days before Callum Voss appeared on my mother’s porch.The knock was polite. Two short raps, the kind that assumed they would be answered. I opened the door in an old T-shirt and the shorts I had slept in, hair still damp from a late shower, and found him standing there with both hands in the pockets of a dark jacket, looking exactly as composed as he had every time I had seen him across a dinner table while dating his son.Forty-nine. Tall. Silver starting at the temples in a way that made the rest of him look deliberate rather than aging.The same quiet intensity that used to make me sit up straighter whenever he entered a room. Julian had always called it “Dad’s courtroom face.” I had always found it harder to look away from than I admitted.“Tessa,” he said. My name in his mouth still carried that low, measured weight.“Mr. Voss.”“Callum is fine. It always was.” A brief pause. “Your mother mentioned you were home for the summer. I wanted to see how