My eyes stayed on him. There wasn’t anything to deny or explain. He exhaled slowly through his nose.
“And him,”he added, quieter now.
“He doesn't even try to make it quiet.”
Bartosz.
He didn’t say it, but the image was already there.
I let my gaze flick, just briefly. He saw it immediately. Of course, he did. For a moment, something changed in his expression.
“She used to.”A short pause.
“Not anymore, not since you arrived.”
So I was right, but it landed wrong. Because it wasn’t just information, it was distance. Something he had moved through, left behind, and I hadn’t.
Zwierek carried this natural sense of maturity and authority that made it easy for me to look up to him, but this only added to it. The thought stayed with me just long enough for him to notice.
“You’re still in it, though.”
That time he did look at me. Direct and not blinking. There was something in it that wasn’t observation anymore. This was harsher than that, something that pressed deeper than just the surface.
“You don’t have to be.”
It took a second. Not to hear it, but to understand it. He just let it sit there between us and waited. When it landed, it felt wrong. My head moved before I thought about it. No. A clear, solidrefusal. There was no hesitation in it. That… that was too far. That wasn’t something you, no.
He just stood there watching me. And then, he smiled. Something that didn’t match the situation at all. The whole situation felt absurd, and I couldn’t figure out whether he was joking or actually meant what he was hinting at. Or maybe he wasn’t even hinting at what I thought he was. Maybe that was just my fucked-up brain twisting it into something else.
“You think it’s extreme,”he said, sounding almost thoughtful.
“It’s not.”His fingers moved absently along the bark of a tree beside him, nails pressing just enough to leave faint lines in the surface.
“It’s a small act.”
“People just pretend it isn’t.”
There was no gravity in the way he said it. No emphasis, that was what made it worse. Because to him, it wasn’t extreme. It was simple, obvious, easy to solve. After that day, the conversations changed. He didn’t bring it up directly again, not like that. Instead, he started circling it from different angles. Different words, but same action.
“If something keeps taking from you,”he said once, crouched down, dragging a broken branch through the dirt in slow, controlled lines.
“Then it’s clearly not supposed to stay.”
The lines crossed, overlapped. Became something unrecognizable.
“People wait,”he continued, almost bored by the idea,
“like waiting makes it fair.”His head tilted.
“It doesn’t. Pain is only useful once,”he said. We were standing still that time. No movement, just a deep stillness settling among the trees.
“After that, it’s just repetition.”His gaze shifted to me.
“And repetition is a choice, Rowan.”
That part didn’t sit as easily, because it implied something else. Something I hadn't fully placed yet. He saw that too, he always fucking did. And instead of pushing, he let it sit, let it build, piece by piece.
I looked up to him from the beginning.
