I cried for a while. Let the tears run down my face and mix with the bathwater. Let myself be small and overwhelmed and not okay, because I was alone and the door was locked and no one was watching.
When I emerged, wrapped in a towel, skin pink and pruned and finally warm all the way through, he was waiting.
Not in the bathroom—he'd respected that boundary, stayed outside like he'd promised. But he was there in the hallway, sitting on the floor with his back against the wall, the coloring book and a tin of colored pencils arranged in front of him like sacred objects.
He looked up when the door opened. Those warm brown eyes, soft with something that looked like relief.
"Better?"
I nodded. The word came easier this time, even if it didn't quite make it out of my mouth.
"Get dressed," he said gently. "Then we'll color."
Thecoloringhelped.
It always helped—had since I was a child, since my grandmother had handed me my first box of crayons and taught me that sometimes the best thing you could do for an overwhelmed brain was give it something simple to focus on. The repetition. The precision. The particular satisfaction of watching color fill white space, staying inside the lines, making something orderly out of chaos.
I'd put on his grandmother's shirt. It hung past my thighs, soft against my still-damp skin, smelling faintly of laundry detergent and age.
We sat on his living room floor with the coffee table between us. The coloring book lay open to a mandala—intricate circles within circles, patterns that demanded attention without requiring thought. I'd chosen a blue pencil first, then green, working my way around the outer ring with careful, deliberate strokes.
Maks sat across from me.
He wasn't coloring. Wasn't doing anything, really—just watching. Being there. Present without pressure. His eyes followed my hands as they moved across the page, but there was nothing demanding in his attention. No expectation. No impatience.
He was just there.
Ghost had relocated to the space between us, his long body forming a bridge across the carpet. His head rested on his paws, eyes half-closed in the particular contentment of a dog who'd been fed and walked and was now basking in the presence of his two favorite people.
Still a traitor. But a comfortable one.
The words started coming back somewhere around the third color change.
Small ones first. Fragments. The kind of language that required almost no processing, just the basic acknowledgment of existence.
"Thank you."
My voice came out rough. Unused. But the words made it out, which was more than I'd managed in the kitchen.
Maks looked up. His expression didn't change—no surprise, no relief, just that same patient attention he'd been giving me since I'd walked out of the bathroom.
"For the bath. The—" I gestured vaguely at the coloring book, the pencils, the whole careful architecture of care he'd constructed around my breakdown. “All of it."
"You don't need to thank me."
"I do, though." The pencil kept moving, blue giving way to purple along the mandala's inner ring. "I'm sorry I couldn't talk. In the kitchen. I know it must have been—"
"Auralia."
He said my name quietly. Not a correction, exactly. More like a redirection.
"You never have to apologize for that."
The words landed somewhere deep. I kept coloring, watching my hand move, not trusting myself to look at him.
"I know how your brain works, Ptichka. I've known for months."
He was the only person who knew, really—not just the autism, but the Little underneath it. The part of me that needed this, that craved structure and care and someone to tell me I was doing okay. I'd told him everything. Late nights and early mornings, typed confessions in the dark, the whole messy truth of who I was laid out across five months of careful conversation.
