[ Reva ]
We were walked out of their, took cab and reached hotel. That journey was loud hidden in silence. Neither we talked while reaching to hotel nor we faced each other.
But both of us know how terrible feeling rushing though my veins that it curbed my ability to speak for a while.
The ceiling of this hotel room was very white.
I'd been staring at it long enough to know that. Long enough to also know that crying doesn't actually help anything and that I was going to do it anyway.
Sean sat somewhere behind me. I could feel him there the way you feel a lamp in a dark room — not looking at it directly but aware of the warmth. He hadn't said much since the lobby. Hadn't asked anything. Just followed me up and sat down like it was the most natural thing, like he had nowhere else in the world to be at 10 pm in Melbourne except this small hotel room watching me fall apart.
"You don't have to stay" I told him while starring at the pillow.
"I know" he said.
I cried harder. Typical Sean. Answering the thing you actually meant instead of the thing you said.
The thing I actually meant was — please don't go.
I don't know when I stopped being angry and started just being tired. Somewhere around the second hour the heat behind my eyes cooled into something heavier. Dull and waterlogged. The image of that brown door kept floating up — Sasha a person with genuine warmth her smile the way she welcomed me how can someone hate her? but why?.
Why she was there she's not subjected to my anger but somehow it landed on in my heart— and every time it surfaced I pushed it back down and it came up again anyway.
Why didn't he tell me.
Not even about her. About any of it. We'd talked for months. Hours of chatting, voice notes, that one call that went till 4am because neither of us wanted to hang up first. And not once did he mention her. Not once did he say — hey by the way there's someone. Hey by the way don't fly across the world with chocolates and flowers like an idiot.
Hey by the way.
I turned over. Stared at the ceiling some more. Sean had moved to the small couch at some point, elbows on knees, looking at his shoes with the focused expression of a man solving a very complex equation that happened to be his shoelaces.
"I'm embarrassing" I said.
"Deeply" he agreed, without looking up.
I almost laughed. Almost.
"I brought him flowers Sean."
"I know."
"Like an actual bouquet."
"Red ones" he confirmed. "I noticed."
"Why didn't you stop me."
He looked up then. And there was something on his face — just for a second, something quiet and unreadable — before the familiar half smirk came back. "Would you have listened?"
I thought about it honestly. "No."
"Then we've answered that."
The weight of those feeing sinking me hard he notice and get glass of water, sat besides me and made me have a couple of sip.
I pulled the blanket up. The Melbourne night was doing that thing where it looked warm through the window and wasn't. Outside the city carried on completely indifferent — lights on the water, a tram somewhere, laughter drifting up from the street below. Everything just continuing as if Reva Vals hadn't made a spectacular fool of herself today.
My eyes were getting heavy. The kind of heavy that comes after you've cried yourself genuinely empty. I shifted toward the edge of the bed, toward the couch, toward the general direction of Sean's steady quiet presence without quite deciding to.
And somewhere between one breath and the next I stopped fighting it.
His shoulder was there. So I leaned.
My fingers found his shirt and held on — not dramatically, just the way you hold something solid when the ground feels uncertain like a child so scared and searching for safer space. He went very still. I noticed that. The way he just — stopped. Like he was afraid to move.
It's okay I thought but didn't say. Just stay.
The city hummed outside.
I slept.
[ Sean ]
She was asleep.
He knew the exact moment it happened — the small fist in his shirt loosened just slightly, her breathing dropped into something longer and slower, and the tension he'd been watching in her shoulders for the past three hours finally, completely, let go.
He looked down at her.
The eyeliner had not survived the evening. Dark smudged crescents under both eyes, one streak across her cheekbone, evidence of every wave she'd tried to hold back and couldn't. Her face was soft now in a way it rarely was when she was awake — no performance, no deflection, just Reva with her guard entirely down.
He looked away.
Then looked back because he was apparently a glutton for this particular kind of punishment.
Elliot his mind supplied helpfully. She did all of this for Elliot.
He told his mind to find something else to do.
His arm wanted to move. Wrap around her. Pull her closer so her neck wouldn't ache from this angle in the morning — completely practical, completely medically reasonable, absolutely not happening. He held himself exactly still the way you hold yourself still near something you're not allowed to touch.
Because that was the thing nobody understood about Sean — the thing he kept carefully buried under the jokes and the Cherry tomato and the teasing — he'd made a decision a long time ago and he stood by it.
He knew what he felt. He wasn't confused about it, wasn't in denial, wasn't waiting for some perfect moment to announce it. He knew. Had known probably longer than he was comfortable calculating. The kind of knowing that sits quietly in your chest and doesn't demand anything, just exists.
And he'd looked at what he had — this, exactly this, her and him and hotel rooms in cities they didn't grow up in, the shoulder, the 3am conversations, the way she called him when things went wrong before she'd even figured out what to say — and he'd decided it was enough.
More than enough.
Better the edges of her world than the center of a world without her.
Was that sad? He'd examined it honestly and kept arriving at the same answer. No. Not sad. Just the truth he'd chosen to live inside of.
He moved carefully when her breathing deepened fully. Slow, precise. Lifted her, settled her against the pillow, pulled the blanket up to her shoulder. Stood one moment too long looking at her face.
There you are he thought. The real one. The one she didn't show people.
He'd always been the one she showed it to anyway. Even when she didn't realize she was doing it.
He let himself out quietly. Walked the short corridor to his own room. Clicked the door shut.
And stood in the dark.
The warmth crawled up the back of his neck the way it always did when he'd been near her too long. His body keeping its own embarrassing record. He laughed once, quietly, at himself — at the sheer absurdity of being this person, of feeling this much and filing it away so neatly every single time. Its like he yearning for totally , deeply and enormously but its too fragile he might brake the shield he's carrying to hide it.
He changed his shirt. Folded the smudged one. Didn't examine why he folded it instead of tossing it.
Splashed cold water on his face. Looked at himself in the mirror for a moment — glasses slightly crooked, eyes tired, the particular expression of a man who has just successfully done the right thing and found it both completely worth it and quietly devastating.
"Yeah" he told his reflection. "You're fine."
He went back to her room.
Settled onto the couch. Glasses on. Cold coffee from the thermos he'd ordered an hour ago. Phone open — work emails, a message from his father he left unopened, three from his uncle regarding matters that had nothing to do with software development and everything to do with the life he'd quietly stepped sideways from. The Reinholt name opened doors Reva didn't know existed. He preferred it that way.
Her breathing filled the room steady and slow.
Sean tilted his head back. Looked at the ceiling. Felt the city hum outside.
He could do this. Sit here. Be present. Be the person who was simply and reliably there — not because she'd asked, not because he expected anything back, but because when she woke up hollow and confused the way people do after crying themselves empty, he would already be in the room and that would mean something even if she never quite knew what.
It always meant something.
He turned his phone screen back on and waited for morning.