Rasmus felt like he was looking at a ghost.

But if she were a ghost, she would have looked exactly as she had four years ago, and she didn't, not quite. Her hair was still so bright red that she appeared to have been plucked right out of a Pre-Raphaelite painting, but it was longer now, and she was sporting a tiny nose stud that he'd never seen before. He'd always imagined that if they were to meet again, she would be frozen in time, trapped in amber, unchanged. So perhaps the most jarring realization of them all was that he was no longer looking at the feisty girl with big dreams and graphite smeared on her hands and paint stains on her jeans, but at a grown woman who had found her place in the world and built a comfortable nest in it. The jeans had been traded out for an elegant white jumpsuit and long earrings dangled from her ears.

Cora had shut the door behind herself when she slipped away, but Natasha didn't come any closer to him yet. Instead, she diplomatically asked, "How have you been?"

"Good," he said, somehow able to find his voice while everything inside him felt like it was constricting and expanding all at once. He was startled by how calm he sounded. "How about you?"

"Good."

She was eyeing him like she wasn't entirely sure what to make of him, and he imagined he looked much the same. They had never been like this, never done the small talk thing, so despite knowing that he was walking on thin ice, Rasmus questioned, "Why now?"

"Well, for starters, I couldn't pass up the chance to see you two onstage together—and playing a married couple no less." That hint of playfulness, the hint of how they used to be creeping up in her voice was enough to make him nearly begin to grin in spite of himself.

It was also enough to make him relax the slightest bit. He ran a hand through his hair, feeling to make sure he got all of that pesky gel out of it and not realizing until too late that Natasha would probably interpret it as nervousness. "Yeah, who would've guessed we'd end up here?"

She didn't immediately answer, and he self-consciously wondered if he should busy himself with something else while they talked. But he didn't want to look like he wasn't paying attention to her, not when she'd waited so long and come so far.

"You seem calmer," she eventually observed out loud.

"I grew up."

Something almost like a smile started to tug at her lips. "I was kind of hoping you'd say that."

Rasmus didn't know how he had expected her to respond, but it certainly wasn't like that. "...You were? Why?"

"You sort of treated me like shit," she shrugged; he swallowed down his shame.

"I know. And I'm really sorry, Nat. You deserved so much better from me."

"I know, and I forgive you," she said softly, finally closing some of the space between them to plop down on the carpet and rest her chin in one hand, thoughtful. "In a way, you sort of did me a favor because I really needed to get away from here and don't know if I could have done it if you and I didn't have the falling out that we did. But I guess I said goodbye to you hoping it wouldn't have to be goodbye forever...we were best friends."

His throat had started to close up, the weight of all their memories clenching onto it, as she spoke of forgiveness. So instead of instantly giving her a verbal response, Rasmus reached into his drawer and brushed a couple of stray bits of pencil lead off the cover of the notebook inside. He saw her eyes widen, almost imperceptibly, when he held it out to her—that first sketchbook she'd ever given him.

"I still use it."

She handled it gingerly, as if it were much older than it was. "You know, if you were a serious artist," she teased. "You would have used up all the pages ages ago."

"I've been a little busy, in case you didn't notice...and besides, I save it for my best ideas."

Natasha had already opened the cover and started slowly flipping through. It would have given him a heart attack if anyone else were to do that, but she'd been the one to see his drawings when they were at their absolute worst.

And anyone else would have asked why the dates that he'd scrawled in the margins of the pages suddenly jumped forward by one year—the year that passed after she left. The year when it'd been too painful to pick up a pencil. Even once he returned to sketching things here and there, it would be much longer before it became more than an anxious fidget, something he could distract himself with.

"You've gotten better," she noticed as she turned through the later pages.

The laugh that came off his lips was a short, tight one, but was progress. "I'd hope so after all this time."

Natasha smiled back, her teeth as pearly white as they'd always been, which made him wonder if she still drank as much coffee as she did back in the day. "I, um, I should get back to Cora, but...can I call you sometime?" she asked shyly.

His heart skipped and stuttered, but he was miraculously able to wrangle himself into keeping a level head. "Under one condition."

Her eyebrows shot up. "You have conditions?"

"I don't want to ask too much of you, but can you just...call Ava too? I'm sure she misses you."

Her expression softened. "I'll call Ava. But you'll have to send me her number, 'cause the last time I saw her she wasn't old enough to have one."

"Deal," he smiled, ignoring the twinge in his chest when he thought about what Ava's life could have been like these past four years if she had Nat there to look up to. If he hadn't fucked everything up for all of them.

But the past was in the past, and Nat had said it herself—putting her life hundreds of miles in the rearview mirror had been the best thing for her. He'd spent what felt like an eternity sitting in denial of the fact that he wasn't getting the future he'd once dreamed of with her, but now that he knew for certain that she was happy, he was determined to put that old thought in its grave once and for all. He was determined not to make the same mistakes twice.

And most importantly, he was more than ready to carve out that space in his heart for someone else.

He had a girl in mind. A girl he suspected Nat would approve of.

"You should surprise me more often," Cora grinned, holding up her freshly-poured glass of champagne for Natasha to clink her own against.

She had dished out the money for an expensive hotel room and invited Cora to spend the night there if she wanted to, so once she was done talking to Rasmus at the theater—Cora had been relieved to hear that it went well—they went back to her and Siena's apartment to quickly grab some snacks and pack an overnight bag for her. Now, they were lounging around in fluffy bathrobes (for no reason other than that they could) and just getting into the bottle of champagne that had come complimentary with the room.

"Mmm," Nat hummed into her glass mid-sip as if she'd remembered something important. "Did I tell you I broke up with my boyfriend a couple of months ago?"

She said it with an air that clearly indicated that she had moved on, but Cora almost choked on her wine. Adult friendships were so odd. She'd slept in the same bedroom as Nat for the better part of three-and-a-half years during school and now they only spoke once or twice a month, an arrangement that allowed her to miss such an important event as a breakup. Her mind had to scramble to even remember what the guy's name was: Asher.

"Oh, shit. No, what happened?"

Nat waved it off like it was already old news. "Nothing really happened, he just liked me more than I liked him and I didn't want to drag him along. My friends were going through a lot and I spent the early part of this year really focused on them, so my relationship just...slipped through the cracks. I didn't mean to let that happen—obviously—but I'd dated one of those friends a few years back so I get how it probably felt like I was rubbing extra salt in the wound."

Cora admitted, "I'm not sure if I'm supposed to say sorry or not."

A light laugh, like windchimes, left Nat's lips. "Don't be sorry, I got what I earned. But enough about me—why aren't we talking about the fact that you and Rasmus have to, like, almost have fake sex all the time?"

An ungraceful snorting noise slipped out of Cora as she flopped back against the pillows, careful not to spill her expensive wine.

"It was kind of the worst thing ever at first, but..." Here goes nothing. She took in a breath that she hoped was discreet. "Actually, we should talk about him."

The entire time Nat had been off talking to Rasmus, Cora spent nervously pacing her dressing room. She didn't know what the hell she would do if that encounter erupted into an argument—confessing that she had feelings for him after that would have felt like a total betrayal. When Nat had returned looking unscathed, it took all of Cora's willpower not to let out an obvious sigh of relief. And yet she still couldn't expect her to simply let go of the past, those years of manipulated emotions.

"What about him?"

As the words got stuck on her tongue, Cora felt immensely silly, as if she were back in middle school about to own up to her crush on the most popular guy in their class. But even that, in hindsight, would have been less of a far-fetched match than her and Rasmus North.

"I'm about to sound absolutely insane," she finally managed. "But...I kind of...like him."

The confession fell flat, and she realized that she hadn't been the clearest about what kind of like she was talking about.

"You mean..." Nat asked slowly. "You like like him?"

Cora gave a tight-lipped nod, at which Natasha's blue eyes widened. "Does he know?"

Having expected to immediately receive a why? or how?, Cora noticed a small amount of the tension that she'd been holding in her shoulders ease away in spite of the awkwardness she felt about now having to explain that they'd first kissed over a month ago now.

"He, um...definitely knows."

Rather than elaborating, she traded her wine glass for her phone and opened her camera roll. She had a singular picture of herself with Rasmus, a selfie which she'd impulsively taken in the park the other morning. It was one of the rare occasions in which she'd let herself be seen with him in daylight, a spur-of-the-moment outing that had occurred simply because they were both in the mood for coffee and, once outdoors, had realized that it was pleasantly cool outside for summer. All it had amounted to was a short walk while they drank their coffee and then resumed their lives separately, and there was nothing particularly remarkable about the picture itself—the only reason she'd even pulled out her phone in the first place was because the lighting was lovely—but it was enough to start telling the story of where they were at right now. She wouldn't even have spent any time with him voluntarily a few months ago, after all, but the Cora in the photo had her cheek pressed against his and was smiling like there was nowhere else she'd rather be.

She passed the phone to Nat, who, after a prolonged moment of silently staring at the picture, took a long gulp of her champagne and then wiped at her lips with the sleeve of her robe. "Hold on, are you two a thing?"

"No, no—I promise I would have told you about that. But I guess the thing is..." Cora's voice lowered to a mumble. "I guess I want us to be a thing. I want us to be more, but I keep getting held up on everything that happened in the past, you know?"

"I know," Nat murmured, because of course she knew.

"And I didn't know why that was, 'cause I already forgave him for everything he's done to me. But when you showed up earlier, I realized that I don't think I've forgiven him for how he treated you."

Nat nodded her understanding, taking a much daintier sip of her wine this time. "I'm not going to excuse him for being a jerk, 'cause he's a whole adult now and should know better than to act like a child. But he deserves a chance to make things right if he's actually willing to try. I suppose that once you tell yourself that you're a certain kind of person, it's pretty hard to flip a switch and unlearn all of that behavior. And for what it's worth, when I talked to him earlier, he really did seem...different."

"Different," Cora parrotted. Different was probably the best word for it, because knowing what she knew about him now, it felt wrong to say that he was bad before and had gotten better. Could you really say that someone was in the wrong for having been broken by someone else?

"Did you know about everything?" she asked quietly. "With..."

"His dad? Yeah, I did." Nat softly sighed, setting her glass aside. "And look, I don't want to dramatize things, but whatever you're imagining...it was probably worse than that. It was really, really shitty, Cora, and he was really scared. He just turned around and dealt with it in shitty ways."

"I never understood why you kept trying to see the best in him."

Nat gave her a gentle squeeze on the shoulder. "I always knew there was good in there somewhere. I just didn't know when he was finally going to learn to use it."

"I think he's starting to figure it out."

"I've always wanted him to be happy," Nat said. She briefly had a wistful look in her eyes, reminiscent, before snapping her attention back to Cora, back to the present. "Even when I was furious with him, even when I knew I had to walk away from him, that never changed. So if he's finally getting his shit together like you say he is, then you sure as hell better not let me be the thing that's stopping you from going after him."

So when Cora is awake in the morning, when she has brushed her teeth and thrown her belongings back into her overnight bag and watched Nat climb into the backseat of an Uber, she heads in the direction of home. But it is not exactly home she is seeking out, not yet.

She raps on Rasmus' door.

All is silent for a long moment, and she wonders if he was asleep, if she has just woken him up.

The door swings open and there he is, in a plain white tee and sweatpants thrown on in haste. She knows they were pulled on quickly because the shirt is inside out, which he doesn't seem to have realized. But she doesn't care if his clothes are inside out. She lifts her mouth to his, and she is savoring the sweet taste on his lips, and she is melting in the warm circle of his arms, and she is barely noticing that he has pulled her into the apartment until the door thunks shut behind them.

"Good morning to you, too," he murmurs against her mouth, and against all of her impulses, she pulls back from him to say what she has come to say.

"Be my boyfriend."

Two black eyebrows shoot up. "What?"

"Please don't make me repeat myself."

A soft clearing of his throat. "...Are you sure?"

"I'm sure," she promises, her fingers toying with the hair at the nape of his neck—at some point, she has flung her arms around him. "I'm tired of being an idiot and not letting myself be as happy as I know I could be if I just asked for what I want. So I'm asking for it. Be my boyfriend, Rasmus."

For one second that seems to go on for many, she feels a flicker of fear, feels that she has acted too impulsively and is about to be rejected. But then–

"You should be warned that you're signing up to be with an even bigger idiot than you are."

"I know," she says. And, "Your shirt is literally inside out right now."

He glances down at himself, and when he does, a sheepish flush of pink appears on his cheeks. "Oh."

"So, what do you say?"

When his eyes, blue and green like the spot where the sky meets the sea, rise back up to hers, she sees something in them that she is not used to seeing—hope.

"You've got yourself a deal."

And he is kissing her again, and he is holding her like she never wants to let go.

And she is thinking that she's never been held like that before.