Noah finished listing them and immediately wanted to rewind time by about thirty seconds.

  Not because anything he’d said was untrue. If anything, it was the opposite problem: a clean, sensible account of the extra things he'd said yes to this week, delivered with the same calm efficiency he used for lab reports and minor injuries—facts in a row, delivered like a lab report so nobody had to taste the feelings.

  An extra shift because a coworker’s dog “wasn’t doing great.”

  Another because someone else “forgot” they’d asked for time off.

  Three note-taking assignments for the accessibility program, because he already had notes, so this was basically just… sharing.

  A lab partner who “just needed” him to proofread something at midnight for a course Noah wasn’t even taking.

  A neighbour who’d asked, and he’d said yes.

  He’d said it like weather. Like this was just what happened.

  He stopped when he ran out of items.

  Rachel didn’t say anything right away.

  They were in her living room—warm lamp light, too many pillows, a throw blanket that looked like it had been purchased in a moment of optimism and then successfully kept alive. Noah sat on the couch as if the cushions were morally opposed to him. Rachel was in the armchair opposite, legs tucked under herself, hands loosely folded.

  The posture said casual. Her eyes did not.

  Noah checked her face without meaning to.

  And before his brain could decide what to do with whatever it found there, Rachel stood up and crossed the room.

  Noah managed to take one breath—just one—before she leaned down and kissed him. It was decisive. A clean interruption. A period at the end of a sentence his nervous system had been writing all his life. When she pulled back, she was close enough that he could see the fine detail in her expression: not anger, not disappointment—something sharper than either, like concern that had grown teeth.

  Noah blinked, a little stupidly. “Why…”

  “New policy,” Rachel said. “I’m implementing corrective measures.”

  “A—”

  She kissed him again. Shorter this time. Almost clinical in its timing, like she was running an experiment and he’d just hit the trigger.

  Noah’s hands lifted, hovering near her waist in the old, careful way. “Rachel—”

  “Every time you do that,” she said, nodding faintly toward his face, “I’m doing that.”

  “Do what?”

  She made a small, exasperated sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. “That look.”

  He went still, because he knew exactly what she meant. The check. The scan. The quiet mental math. Is she okay? Are we okay? What do I need to do?

  Noah’s mouth opened.

  Rachel lifted her eyebrows in a look that said: Don’t.

  Noah closed his mouth again and exhaled through his nose, cornered by accuracy. “…Okay,” he admitted.

  “Good,” Rachel said, and the simple word landed with unsettling weight—as if it mattered that he’d said it out loud.

  She didn’t go back to the armchair. She didn’t hover in front of him like this was a conversation between two adults who had filed the proper forms. She stepped closer and settled on his lap with an authority that left no room for argument.

  Noah’s hands found her sides automatically, less permission-seeking now, more instinctive. He wasn’t brave enough to pretend he didn’t want her there.

  Rachel settled, palms on his shoulders, and watched his face like she was taking attendance. “Hi,” she said.

  Noah’s voice came out a little rough. “Hey.”

  Rachel held his gaze for a beat, long enough that he felt the old reflex try to scramble for something—humour, charm, a pivot, anything to keep the room from getting too close to whatever she’d seen in those bullet points.

  “I’m not mad at you,” she said.

  Noah answered too fast. “I know.”

  Rachel’s expression didn’t change, but something in her eyes sharpened. “Do you?”

  Noah’s brain offered him several options. None of them passed quality assurance.

  Rachel waited anyway. Not cruelly. Just… there. Like she wasn’t going to let him sprint out of the moment on politeness. Noah’s throat worked. “I—” he started, then stopped, because the honest version was embarrassingly simple: He didn’t know. He wanted to.

  Rachel’s gaze dropped briefly to his mouth.

  Noah stopped breathing for half a second.

  Then she kissed him again—soft this time, but no less intentional—and leaned back just enough to speak.

  “Okay,” she said, and the word had the tone of someone resetting a conversation to its starting point. “I’m going to talk now, and I would like you to listen to me with an open mind, because I have been watching you a lot, and I’ve been thinking about you a lot more than I think you think I do.”

  Noah nodded slowly, not trusting words to not betray him more than the warmth in his cheeks already had.

  “You treat your own needs like they’re… optional,” Rachel said, and her voice went very calm in a way that made his stomach dip. “You… You act like it’s normal that other people come first—as if your time matters right up until someone else wants it.”

  The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  Noah flinched internally, even if his face stayed mostly still. Noah tried to salvage it. “I know my schedule sounds busy, but it’s only been five weeks since the start of the semester. ”

  Rachel’s mouth twitched, but it wasn’t humour. It was something closer to heartbreak dressed up as restraint. “Noah,” she said quietly, “you didn’t start doing this in September.”

  His chest went tight. “Rae, I’m not—” he started, and then realized he didn’t even know what he was trying to deny. That he does this? That it’s a problem? That it matters?

  Rachel watched him get tangled in his own sentence and softened by a fraction.

  “I’m not asking you to stop being kind,” she said. “I’m asking you to stop paying for other people’s comfort with your own."

  "It's just... helping," he tried.

  "It's not the helping," Rachel said. Her hands slid from his shoulders to frame his face, thumbs resting on his cheekbones. "It's the speed. The way your yes arrives before you've even heard the full question. Before you've checked if you have time. Before you've thought about what it costs you."

  Noah's throat went dry.

  Rachel's voice dropped lower—not softer, just more intimate. "It's automatic. It's a reflex." She paused, making sure he was looking at her. "It's not a choice."

  She held his gaze, and when she spoke again her voice was gentler but no less firm. "Someone taught you that yes was safer than no."

  Noah blinked hard, eyes going hot. He looked away, focusing on a point past her shoulder.

  Rachel's hands tightened slightly on his face—not painful, just grounding. "Hey."

  He forced himself to meet her eyes again. Rachel held the gaze like she wasn’t afraid of what she’d find there.

  “You keep looking at me like I’m going to wake up one morning and suddenly ‘come to my senses,’” she said. “Like I’m going to realize you’re inconvenient, or complicated, or—” her jaw flexed “—a risk, and then you’ll have to disappear politely so I don’t have to feel bad about it.”

  Noah went very still, because… yes. That had been living in him, half-formed and poisonous, since the day everything changed. Rachel watched the stillness arrive and didn’t flinch away from it.

  “I have thought about it,” she said, calm as gravity. “All of it. How it looks. The Risk. The fallout. The fact that it would be easier—publicly, professionally—to pretend I didn’t want you.”

  Rachel leaned in, forehead nearly touching his, voice steady and absolutely unromantic in its certainty.

  “And I still chose you,” she said. “On purpose.”

  Noah’s fingers dug lightly into her sides, as if holding on could keep the sentence from evaporating.

  “I’m not going to ‘snap out of it,’” she said, her hands steady on his shoulders. “I’m not going to wake up and decide you were a mistake I have to correct.”

  Rachel’s eyes narrowed slightly, not in anger—more like she was furious at whatever had taught him to expect the floor to vanish the moment he stopped being perfect.

  “But… Before I go any further, I also need to hear it from you, Noah,” she said, her voice dropping a register, quiet but demanding. “As you might be able to tell, I’m pretty invested in us. And while I think you are, too—”

  She faltered. It was barely there—just a flicker of hesitation, a tiny, fractured moment where she braced herself, as if she thought she might be the only one falling.

  And that broke him. The idea that she could be this close to him—literally wrapped around him, her weight grounding him to the chair—and still not know the scale of what she’d done to him was intolerable.

  He moved before he could think about it. His hands tightened on her waist, pulling her flush against him, collapsing the last inch of distance between them because he needed her to feel the answer before he could even get the words out.

  “Rae,” he said, the name tearing out of him, rough and immediate. “Don’t finish that sentence.”

  He looked at her, stripping away the polite, functional mask he’d been trying to wear. He let her see the terrified, overwhelming reality of it.

  “I’m not just invested,” he said, his voice shaking. “I know I have things wired wrong. I know I do. But this?” He tightened his arms around her, ensuring she could feel his heart, which was hammering a frantic, undeniable rhythm against his ribs. “This part is the only thing that’s ever felt right. I’ve never had anything I was this terrified to lose. I’m not unsure. I’m just scared, because I…”

  He swallowed, his gaze dropping to her shoulder, unable to hold hers for the admission. “I don’t know how to be worth keeping.”

  The words hung in the quiet apartment—too honest to take back.

  Noah waited for the familiar patch job: the don’t be silly, the gentle minimization that made everything easier.

  He didn't get it.

  Instead, Rachel’s hands—firm on his face—started to tremble.

  She stared at him with devastation so naked he wanted to take the words back and swallow them whole. For a long, suffocating moment, she didn’t say anything at all. She just looked at him with a kind of shattered devastation that made him want to take the words back, to bury them, to start cleaning again just to make that expression stop.

  “Noah, you aren’t listening,” she whispered. Her voice was thick, tight with the effort of holding herself together. “You’re still doing math, and I’m telling you the equation doesn’t exist.”

  She pulled back just enough to force him to meet her gaze.

  “You think I want you for what you do?” she asked, the question sounding wet and raw. “Noah, I can hire a cleaner. I can buy a table that comes assembled. I can make my own coffee. If I wanted utility, I’d buy a robot.”

  She brushed her thumb over his cheekbone, tracing the line of him like she was memorizing it.

  “I like the way you smell,” she said, listing it like a hard fact, like data he couldn’t refute. “Not the soap. You. It serves no function. It fixes nothing. But it is my favourite scent in the world.”

  Noah’s breath hitched, but she didn’t stop.

  “I like the way you look when you’re focusing on something small,” she continued, her voice gaining a steady, quiet rhythm. “I like that you hum when you’re cooking. You don’t even know you’re doing it. It doesn’t make the food taste better. And I love it.”

  She pressed her palms flatter against his cheeks, holding him there, making sure he couldn’t look away from the truth of it, even as his cheeks grew red and his eyes became blurry.

  “And mornings?” She shook her head slightly, a frantic, desperate motion. “You think making coffee is why I want you around? Noah, you make my day better the second you open your eyes. Before you leave the bed. Before you fix a single thing. You make the day better just by being inside of it.”

  She searched his face, desperate for him to understand.

  “You don’t have to do anything to be worth keeping, Noah. You just have to be.”

  The silence that followed was thick and heavy with the salt-sting of tears, a slow, shared exhaling of years of held breath. They stayed anchored to one another, foreheads pressed together, until the frantic rhythm of their hearts finally leveled out, finding rest in the slow steadiness of being home.

  “So,” she said with a sniff, brisker now, like she needed structure or she’d start shaking, “if we’re doing this, we need to figure out how to move through it without grinding you down.”

  Noah’s mouth opened. Closed. He tried to find a joke. Couldn’t.

  Rachel kissed him again, slower. Certain.

  When she pulled back, Noah’s eyes were still glassy in a way he couldn’t hide, and he hated that he couldn’t hide it nearly as much as he hated how good it felt not to.

  “I don’t know how to—” he started, and the words snagged. He swallowed. Tried again, more honest because there was nowhere left to tuck it. “I don’t know how to stop.”

  “I know,” Rachel said, soft and unsurprised. “We’ll learn.”

  Noah let out a breath. “Okay.”

  Rachel’s mouth curved, just slightly—regaining a touch of her somewhat ferocious determination from before.

  “Now,” she said, and her tone shifted into the kind of practical energy she reserved for lab demonstrations and stubborn lids. “We build the system.”

  Noah nodded. “The system.”

  “Yes,” Rachel said. “A version where you don’t volunteer your whole life away because someone looked tired at you.”

  “That sounds nice,” he admitted, quietly, and felt something unfamiliar settle in his ribs.

  It was something quieter than the usual scramble, like he could put his weight down without being asked to move.