“You?” I blurt. “Talking about your feelings voluntarily?”
She gives me a look. “I would kick you, but my therapist says that’s ‘regressing.’”
“Why?” I ask, before I remember my one-question rule.
She smiles faintly. “Wow. Didn’t even pretend to think of another question.”
I gesture for her to answer anyway.
She shifts in her seat, pulling one knee up to her chest.
“I had a panic attack,” she says quietly. “At work. It was… not cute. Couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see straight, convinced I was dying. HR wanted me to take time off. I convinced them not to. Went home and cried in the shower like a cliché.”
I blink at her.
“I hated it,” she says. “The feeling. The helplessness. The fact that my own brain turned on me. So I found a sliding-scalecounselor and showed up. Told her everything. She told me my amygdala is a drama queen and gave me homework.”
“Did it help?” I ask.
“A lot,” she says. “Not overnight. But… enough that I don’t feel like I’m constantly one glitch away from blue-screening.”
She flicks the pen cap toward me, and it hits my chest.
“You know what the worst part was?” she adds.
“What?”
“I kept wanting to text you,” she admits. “Like, hey, the coding drama queen in my brain is DDoS-ing my nervous system, please patch? But you were… you. Busy. Distant. Wrapped in your own storms. And I convinced myself I didn’t get to ask for that.”
A quiet, sharp guilt slices through me.
I had no idea she almost reached out.
I would’ve… what? Told her to breathe? Sat on the phone with her all night, talking about stupid movies? Written her an anxiety-tracking script and hidden in the doorway while she cried?
I don’t know.
I should’ve made space to find out.
“Next,” she says, maybe sensing where my thoughts are going. “Your patch note.”
I roll the pen between my fingers. The urge to retreat into sarcasm is strong.
Instead, I go with something that feels like handing her a piece of my source code.
“Knight v3.1 critical bug report,” I say. “I don’t know what to do if you stop… seeing me the way you do.”
She blinks. “What?”
“You say you’ve had a crush on me forever,” I continue, staring at the notebook instead of her. “You look at me like I’m some… cool, collected vigilante who has his shit together and knows what he’s doing.”
“Youarecool,” she protests.
“I learned to hack credit cards at fourteen because I wanted to eat,” I snap, then force my voice back down. “I barely graduated. I screw up more missions than I’ll admit to. I’ve ghosted people who cared about me because it was easier than telling them they should run.”
I take a breath.
“I like you,” I say, the words heavier than they sound. “More than I should. More than I know how to handle. But there’s a part of my brain convinced that once you see the whole ugly picture, the… non-heroic parts, you’re going to realize you built a pedestal out of fumes and bail.”
