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Kento listens.

At some point, my voice starts to slow. I’m still talking, something about Dimitri’s terrible taste in music and how he plays it too loud, when my eyelids start to feel heavy.

Kento’s breathing is steady on the other end, and something in me begins unconsciously matching it. In. Out. In. Out. Such a small sound to feel this much like safety.

I don’t remember falling asleep.

But when I do, the phone is still pressed to my cheek, and somewhere in the haze of half-consciousness, I hear Kento’s voice, tender.

“Goodnight, my prince.”

Kento

I’m annoyed I had to leave him that morning.

But Kenji had the bright idea to summon me, and I can’t exactly say I was busy with a green-eyed problem wrapped in my shirt and sleeping in my guest room.

I pick him up from campus for the date he agreed to so easily last night, an ease that made me embarrassingly happy, and the second he gets into the car, he starts talking. Endlessly. Ridiculously. One story bleeding into another before the first has properly finished, complaints turning into tangents, tangents spawning entirely unrelated observations until I have no idea what the original point was.

I love it. It is one of my favorite things about him, this inexhaustible river of thought pouring straight from his mind to his mouth without stopping. And remembering that there are people who have made him feel annoying for it makes me murderous.

“Did you know my sister has a boyfriend?” he says, turning in the seat toward me with enough outrage to suggest this is a national scandal. “I can’t believe you didn’t tell me.”

I glance at him briefly, then back at the road. “Did you eat today?”

“No, don’t deflect.” He points at me like a prosecutor. “You knew. You absolutely knew.”

“I knew.”

“Unbelievable!”

He groans and slumps back dramatically into the seat, then immediately sits forward again. “And you’ve been asking her for information about me. I can’t believe she sold me out. This is what I said I will scold you about, by the way!! In case it wasn’t obvious.”

“I’d have gotten that information with or without her. This was the easy way.”

He glares at my profile. “I should poison you for that.”

“You’ve said that before.”

“I mean it every time.”

“I know. That’s part of your charm.”

He makes a disgusted sound. “Don’t romanticize my homicidal tendencies.”

“I’d never dream of it.”

He huffs. I smile at the road ahead and let him keep talking.

When I take him out of the car, the second his eyes lift to the view in front of us, his whole face rearranges itself into disbelief.

There are lights glittering across the evening. Music drifts through the gates, and somewhere deeper inside, I can hear people shouting on rides.

Ilya stares at it, then he slowly turns to me. “What is this?”

I slide the keys into my pocket. “An amusement park.”

He just looks at me, and then he gestures at the entrance. “Do I look three years old?”