His jaw flexed once, subtle but there.
“Awareness,” he said.
That word again.
It threaded through everything now. My thoughts. My body. The way I existed in proximity to him.
“I see you differently,” I said before I could overthink it.
Silence.
Then, “How?”
I swallowed, trying to put it into something that didn’t feel too revealing.
“You’re not just …” I trailed off, searching. “What I expected.”
His mouth curved faintly. “You expected something simpler.”
“Yes.”
“More predictable.”
“Yes.”
A pause.
“And now?”
I turned my head, meeting his gaze for a brief second before he looked back at the road.
“Now, I think you choose more than I realized,” I said.
That landed.
I saw it in the slight shift of his shoulders.
“And you didn’t think I did before?” he asked.
“I thought you operated on instinct,” I admitted.
“I do.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“No,” he agreed. “It isn’t.”
The car fell quiet again, but it wasn’t the same silence as before. It held something new—something layered, aware, alive in a way that made every small movement feel amplified.
“What about you?” I asked after a moment.
His brow lifted slightly. “What about me?”
“You see me differently now.”
It wasn’t a question.
He didn’t answer right away.
