Every summer during college, Rasmus dreaded making the return to his parents' house, that dark place where his father's constant berating became more than just an argument over the phone. The best thing he could do for himself was to stay as busy as possible, so during the three months between his sophomore and junior years of college, his distraction of choice was playing Warner in one of the local theater's productions of Legally Blonde.

Ava wanted to come see him, of course—now that the vast majority of his performances took place on his college stage a few hours away, she never got to see him perform anymore. Even though Legally Blonde probably wasn't entirely appropriate for a ten-year-old to be watching, he couldn't hold back the grim thought that out there in the audience would still be a safer place for her than their own home, so he let her come to the show as many times as she felt like.

At first, he was paying the small fee for her tickets, but it only took so long for his director, Maria, to realize that the little girl who always scampered to her seat before anyone else was his sister and to recognize that his parents had yet to show up to a single show even though it was a well-known fact that the Norths lived here in town. Maria had been just seventeen when she became a mother, so she saw a little bit of herself in that boy who was clearly trying his best to take care of someone else while he was barely an adult himself. She pulled him aside one day and quietly told him that his sister was free to come free of charge whenever she liked—it wasn't like they were even charging that much per ticket to begin with.

So by the end of that summer, both Rasmus and Ava had every song from Legally Blonde permanently drilled into their brains. When the day of his last performance rolled around, she didn't have the money or the means of transportation to get him a bouquet of flowers as was custom, but that didn't hinder her determination. He was tired and therefore a little on edge that day, but his heart softened when she found him after the show, her sundress smudged with a spot of dirt from picking around in the weeds for as many daisies as she could find. Clenched in her hand was the little bouquet, the stems wrapped with a damp paper towel to keep them moist and tied together with a pink ribbon (à la Elle Woods, naturally). Rasmus knew they were bound to wilt in a day or two, but he would cherish them while he could.

The way home was a twenty-five-minute jaunt through the suburbs, sometimes a pain during the afternoon but pleasant this late at night when the roadways weren't clogged with cars. If he were alone, Rasmus would have found a way to make it twice as long just to avoid going back to the house, but Ava was already yawning in the passenger seat.

He kept quiet in case she wanted to doze off, but just when he thought she was going to rest her head against the window and close her eyes, she spoke up out of nowhere.

"I think I wanna be an actor when I grow up, too."

A startling, clenching sensation seized at his throat like an invisible force was trying to choke him, but Rasmus tried to play calm and lightly asked, "What, you don't like any of Mom's ideas?"

In his periphery, he could see Ava wrinkle her nose in displeasure. "Mom wants me to be a lawyer or a doctor or a dentist."

"Those aren't such bad things to be," he pointed out.

"But they all sound so boring. I wanna have a fun job like you do."

He bit back a sigh. He didn't want to have this conversation, didn't want to burst her bubble of optimism, and yet he knew she was getting old enough now to start understanding some of the nuances of life. And as her big brother, it was his job to ease her into them gently instead of throwing her off the deep end when she was older.

"There are a lot of fun jobs out there, Ava."

"Do you not want me to be like you?"

He glanced over at her as he coaxed the car to a stop at a red light; she had her head low, looking betrayed. The tightness around his throat grew. Fuck. He'd thought that this was all going to get easier as she got older, but he found himself missing the days when he could trust her to be naive to all that was bad in the world. It was so much easier for him to put up with all the shit their parents gave him back when he knew she couldn't see how it was tearing him apart.

"I want you to be whoever you want to be," he promised as the light turned back over to green. "But Mom and Dad...they don't like what I do, and it makes things harder with them sometimes, you know? I just don't want you to go through that. I want you to be supported."

"But you'll always support me, right?" she asked persistently.

"Of course I will," he quietly answered, but the fact that she idolized him this much was making his heart ache. If she was counting on him to be her hero, her rescuer, she was bound to end up hurt and disappointed. "I'm just not sure if I'm enough."

They fell into an abrupt silence, but when his glance eventually darted back over to her, she was looking at him with wide, concerned eyes.

And that was the night when Rasmus realized that his little sister, who had for so long been such a small child in his eyes, was finally old enough to see right through him.

The first time Cora went to Rasmus' apartment for dinner, it was impossible not to wonder if she was walking straight into a trap.

Since he'd already been to her place a couple of times now for various reasons, it hadn't even struck her that she didn't know which unit he lived in until he texted her his apartment number. And after all the time she'd spent trying to steer clear of him, there was something bizarre and yet also peculiarly mundane about riding the elevator three floors down to go see him. Even though she'd tactfully turned Lucas down after that first date they went on, she still felt like she was doing something scandalous.

When he answered the door, there was a slightly sheepish smile drawn on his face, a meekness that she had only recently learned was hidden somewhere within the boy who came across as being so cocky all the time.

"It's not much, but..." he shrugged as he let her inside.

Cora assumed he was referring to the fact that his apartment was a studio, which she hadn't known until she stepped in and allowed herself to briefly glance around. In truth, she hadn't given much thought at all to what his living arrangements might be like—she simply didn't care. It was New York and everything was expensive as hell and it wasn't like she ever sat around wondering how much money he made when they worked the same job. To his credit, for all that it lacked in space, he'd made up for it with solid interior design taste and tidiness. The bed was neatly made; there was no clutter on the floor.

For a small space belonging to someone she'd been incredibly hostile towards until very recently, it felt rather homey.

That also might have had something to do with the fact that he'd cooked food for them to eat instead of ordering it. The chicken, salad, and breadsticks waiting for them on the table looked better than anything she would have managed to conjure up herself—Cora was a decent chef when she wanted to be, but she didn't have the patience for it a majority of the time.

"If I didn't know any better, I'd say this looks like a date," she teased without too much thought as she pulled out one of the chairs for herself.

In typical Rasmus fashion, he didn't allow himself to look surprised. Or maybe he truly wasn't. "One step at a time, Coraline."

"Alright, how's this for step one?" she suggested as he sat down across from her, his posture mirroring hers. "Stop calling me Coraline."

Watching each other from opposite sides of the table was like playing a game of chess, always trying to predict the other person's next move before their words actually came out of their mouth. But that wasn't what they had come here to do, was it—it was the mindset they were trying to get out of.

As she sucked in a small breath and tried to reorient her train of thought, Cora realized that she was rather flustered. Flustered that she was here in his personal space, flustered that those blue-green eyes of his were looking at her intently, flustered that she could smell that sweet, musky smell of his cologne and that she liked it so much. He had always been ridiculously handsome, statuesque, but it had never gotten to her in this exact way before. She swallowed a lump in her throat and tried not to look nervous, but she imagined she was doing a pretty bad job at that.

"Would it still bother you as much if it were affectionate?"

It was a good thing Cora wasn't eating or drinking anything at that moment or else she would have spit it out. "You mean to say that you're feeling...affectionate towards me?"

Rasmus shrugged nonchalantly, but the faintest spots of pink rose on his cheeks—the beginnings of the mental walls he instinctively built up against her each day coming down. "Stranger things have happened recently, don't you think?"

Trying to unknow someone was unlike anything else Cora had ever experienced. She spent an unexpected amount of time over the following couple of weeks talking with Rasmus as they attempted to rid themselves of the versions of each other that they'd assembled in their heads over the years. It was an unlearning and relearning, a burning of knowledge to the ground so that it could rise from the ashes.

And it wasn't entirely smooth sailing. Here and there, one of them would accidentally get too defensive and snap at the other, and they'd have to interrupt their conversation to clear the air. But Cora was proud of them for trying to hear each other out instead of simply shifting gears and changing the topic entirely. She hadn't realized either of them had the capacity to be so diplomatic, and though she struggled to wrap her head around the dichotomy of who he was to her years ago versus the person he seemed to be now, she wasn't ready to just give up on it.

Because she liked the Rasmus she was getting to know. She liked the shape of his smile, she liked the way he brightened when he talked about his little sister. He insisted that Ava was much cooler than either of them was back when they were in high school, which now felt like eons ago. That was an easy time for them to reminisce about, Cora found, recent enough that they remembered but distant enough that the memories no longer felt visceral.

As crazy as it was, she really liked him.

And he liked her, too.

It didn't take long for Rasmus and Cora to tumble into an emotional affair of curling up in his bed together at night, whispering to each other about whatever they felt like. It wasn't all that physical—they did plenty of kissing onstage, after all—but it was intimate. Their bodies were barely touching as they faced each other, but he could feel her presence so near to him from head to toe, see each little motion of her chest and shoulders as she breathed. He was certain that he'd never made eye contact with another person for such long stretches of time, but everything was easier in the dark.

No one else needed to know. The two of them were politely distant from each other at the theater and he knew that Cora was keeping her friends in the dark about it. He wasn't foolish enough to think that she wanted him to be anything more than her secret or that he should desire anything greater than that from her.

Tonight, there was more noise than usual thrumming from the streets outside his window. It was the Fourth of July, so everyone was congregating like flocks of birds to go watch the fireworks. But Rasmus and Cora, who had just performed two shows for the holiday, were nearly silent. Her eyes were more bleary than usual as she looked at him, exhausted, and he noticed that her eyeliner had smudged a little bit on one side. She would have wanted him to point it out so she could fix it, but he selfishly let it be, finding it somehow endearing.

She lifted a delicate hand to his face, drawing her thumb along his cheekbone. Her skin was warm and soft to the touch, and had she stayed there brushing along his skin like that for too long, the motion surely would have put him to sleep. But she pulled back her hand to trace her pointer finger along a spot near his hairline instead and he was too tired to realize what she was looking at until she asked.

"What's this from?" she murmured. "I never noticed it before."

He knew immediately that she was referring to a faint scar from many years ago, a small line at the spot where his hairline met his forehead. You had to be looking very closely to notice it—it was so discreet that even he forgot about it most of the time.

His throat tightened. Rasmus had been making a good bit of progress with her as it related to not immediately shutting down at the smallest mention of anything that made him too uncomfortable, but the particular mark she was referring to arose from what was probably the bloodiest of incidents with his dad. He had been...eight? nine years old? when his face was slammed against the corner of the dining room table. It wasn't entirely intentional, but his body was always weaker and lighter than Dad anticipated it to be. It wasn't until Ava was born that Rasmus found the strength to push back at all.

Cora was waiting for an answer, surely expecting him to offer up some innocuous story of a clumsy mistake he'd made as a child. He'd tripped on the sidewalk, perhaps, or gotten into something he wasn't supposed to. But her total naivete to his situation was enough to make him wonder. What would she do if they knew—what would anyone do? He had never risked finding out lest the consequence far outweigh the reward. The only person to ever know the truth aside from Ava had been Natasha, and that had only happened because it was impossible to hide it from her. But the older he got, the more tactful he became, and he realized now that he might be able to say everything while saying very little. The human brain was remarkable at assembling a full picture when offered very few pieces so long as they were the right ones.

Maybe all Rasmus had to do was hand her the right piece. A risky gamble it was, giving up a portion of his heart in hope that allowing someone else to understand him would make it worthwhile. But if Cora Kline could find it in herself to feel empathy for him, he'd know that anyone could.

"Do you remember," he replied quietly. "On opening night, when we talked about me not getting along with my parents?"

The moment it took for his words to register with her felt unbearably long. Confusion crept into her eyes at first, confusion as her tired mind tried to process what his relationship with his parents could have to do with this. But he couldn't fault her for that, not really—a person who grew up receiving affection from their family would find it unnatural for anything else to be the case. But when her eyebrows furrowed and that confusion started a slow melt into concern, he knew that she was working her way closer to the truth.

"You don't mean to say..." she said cautiously, the rest of the sentence dying on her lips. But he knew what the words that would have followed were.

One of them did this to you?

So he whispered, "Yeah, I do."

The silence that followed was as dense and heavy as the air right before a thunderstorm, and he worried for a second that he'd made a horrible mistake that he couldn't take back. But Cora was never one for letting herself be knocked down for too long, so she spoke again.

"I didn't know."

How could you have? he thought. "I would have hated you more if you did."

Her eyes, dark like shadows yet warm like the sun, strayed down from the scar and back to his. "Why tell me now, then?"

The words dried up in his mouth. Rasmus could have told her that this was an experiment, that he just wanted to see if holding out the smallest bit of information like bait was beneficial to him. But he was already realizing that it wasn't the whole picture, that it was an excuse he'd conjured up for himself to cover up the whole truth.

That his soul was reaching out to hers, and it was hurting him to try to stop it.

"Because I'm really damn tired of hiding it," he managed to say, swallowing down a lump in his throat. "And you deserved to hear a long time ago why I probably seem so angry all the time. I shouldn't have let you think it was all directed at you when the thing that's always been tearing me apart is feeling like I can't do enough for Ava."

His heart was aching from saying this much. This was the point when he'd have to retreat—he couldn't bear to expose any more of himself right now.

But Cora wouldn't ask him to, and after the pain would come the relief. As she started to speak again, it dawned on him that she was trying to reciprocate his moment of vulnerability. An eye for an eye. Her hand fell between them and rested on the sheets.

"It wasn't always about you for me, either," she confessed. "Honestly, I argued with almost everyone. The other girls in my theatre programs, my parents. I was petty and turned against anyone who fueled my insecurities even if it wasn't intentional on their part."

"What did you have to be insecure about? I just—I guess I always assumed your life was pretty perfect."

"My body, mainly," she sighed. "I don't know how my own skin became my worst enemy, but it did. It still gets to my head sometimes; that's why I was freaking out when Anais was teaching you how to lace up my dress."

Rasmus blinked. Cora thought she was ugly? Cora, with her pretty chestnut hair and her doe eyes and those full lips that he'd always been at least a little bit curious about kissing? Cora, who he'd secretly admired against his own will in class when she wasn't looking because it was impossible to take his eyes off of her?

"But you're beautiful," he ungracefully blurted. "I thought you were beautiful even when I hated you."

A satisfied smile snuck onto her lips at his admission, but it quickly turned bittersweet.

"And parents shouldn't hurt their children," she murmured. "Yet we still go through hell for no reason."

The succinctness, the accuracy of it sent an unwanted prick of goosebumps up his spine. But it was replaced by a sudden warmth all over when Cora took his face in her hands and pressed her lips against that little scar on his forehead, a motion which felt infinitely more intimate than a kiss on the mouth. Rasmus closed his eyes when she rested her forehead against his, taking in the sweet, slightly floral scent of her and feeling the stutter of her breathing. He gently raised his hand to the back of her head, holding her there, feeling the silkiness of her hair against his palm and his fingertips.

Perhaps they were always destined to find their way back to each other, their hearts tied together with a red string. Or maybe it was their sheer stubbornness, their refusal to let the other person win, that got them to where they were now. Rasmus wasn't sure if he believed in fate, but what he did know was that this felt a hell of a lot better than their grand mistake of assuming that the other person had it easy.

Outside of his window, a black sky was exploding into bursts of color, but neither Rasmus nor Cora noticed it at all. For something very similar was happening inside of these four walls, the slow melting of two cold hearts into something much more tender.

Finally, finally, finally. For the first time in a long time, he didn't feel lonely at all.