Novel Title: My Clumsy Lead
Genre: Romance , Comedy
Author: PARK JIAN (ME)
Character Profiles
ML & HIS FAMILY
| Name | Kyler James |
| Age | 26 (present) |
| Personality | Loud, expressive, dramatic, warm, surprisingly smart when he wants to be — but catastrophically clumsy in action scenes. Never nonchalant. Always 100%. |
| Work | Lead Actor |
| Zodiac | Leo |
| Family | Name | Relation |
|---|---|---|
| Mother | Nora James | Warm, dramatic just like Kyler |
| Father | Gerald James | Calm but secretly entertained |
| Elder Sister | Freya James | Sarcastic, blunt, Kyler’s biggest teaser |
| Younger Sister | Lena James | Giggly, excitable, 12 years old |
| Twin Brothers | Reo & Finn James | Chaotic duo |
| Maternal Grandmother | Grandma Celia | Slaps first, asks later. Loves Kyler most, 50 |
| Maternal Grandfather | Grandpa Roy | Quiet but sharp wit |
FL & HER FAMILY
| Name | Della Silas |
| Age | 28 (present) |
| Personality | Straight-forward, composed, no-nonsense. Eldest daughter energy — she carries everything quietly. Doesn’t want marriage, especially not to someone younger. |
| Work | Kyler’s Boss |
| Zodiac | Capricorn |
| Family | Name | Relation |
|---|---|---|
| Mother | Diana Silas | Gentle, always worried |
| Father | Marcus Silas | Strict but fair |
| Grandmother | Nana Rose | 50 years old, Della’s favorite person |
| Brother 1 | Eli Silas | Age 15, thinks he’s the man of the house |
| Brother 2 | Noah Silas | Age 10, always curious |
| Sister | Mia Silas | Age 6, pure chaos in a tiny body |
SUPPORTING (Film Set)
| Name | Role |
|---|---|
| Marco | Director |
| Sana | Della’s Assistant |
CHAPTER
ONE
Hanging By a Thread
London. A converted warehouse studio, cold concrete, steel scaffolding, the smell of rust and coffee gone cold hours ago.
A man hangs upside down from a rig of steel cables, twenty feet above the ground. His black shirt has slipped halfway up his stomach. His hair falls the wrong way, sticking up toward the floor. His face is red — not from embarrassment, just gravity.
Below him, a small crowd of crew members stand with clipboards, headsets, and the particular tired expression of people who have watched this exact scene happen four times already today.
Marco (the director, rubbing his temples): “Cut. Cut! Somebody get him down before he becomes a modern art installation.”
Crew member with clipboard: “That’s the fourth time, sir.”
Marco: “I know it’s the fourth time, Danny. I was there for the first three.”
A pair of boots hit the concrete floor with purpose. Della Silas walks in from the side entrance, sunglasses pushed up into her hair, a tablet under one arm, her expression already tired before she even looks up.
She doesn’t rush. She never rushes. But something about the way her jaw tightens tells everyone in the room that she has clocked the situation in under two seconds — and she is not happy about it.
Della: “Who released the safety line before the harness lock clicked?”
Silence. Several people suddenly find their shoes very interesting.
Della (louder): “I asked a question.”
Marco: “In my defense, he told us he was ready.”
Della: “He is always ‘ready.’ That’s the problem.”
Upside down, Kyler grins. Blood is rushing to his head, his ears are hot, and he still finds the energy to look pleased with himself.
Kyler: “Della. Hi. You’re upside down from where I’m standing. Or — sitting. Hanging. Whatever this is.”
Della (not amused, already walking toward the rig controls): “Don’t talk. Save your blood for your brain.”
Kyler: “See, this is why I like it up here. You only get this expressive when you think I’m about to die.”
Della: “I am not expressive. I am annoyed.”
Kyler: “Sure. Keep telling yourself that.”
She reaches the base of the rig, checks the carabiner, checks the strap tension, mutters something under her breath about amateurs who think stunts are optional homework. Someone hands her a second harness line. She clips it in herself instead of trusting the crew to do it fast enough.
Della (to the rig operator): “Lower him. Slow. If he swings even once I will personally leave him there overnight.”
Rig operator: “Yes, ma’am.”
Kyler: “Wait, hold on, I have a better idea — what if you just climb up here instead? Save everyone the trouble.”
Della: “What if I don’t.”
Kyler: “Worth a shot.”
The rig groans. He descends slowly, inch by inch, spinning very slightly, which he seems to be enjoying far too much for a man technically in danger. Della watches him the entire way down, arms crossed, one eyebrow permanently raised, like she’s supervising a toddler near a swimming pool.
When he’s finally low enough, she grabs the strap at his shoulder and pulls him upright with more force than strictly necessary. He stumbles, catches himself on her arm, and for one second — one very short, very inconvenient second — his hand closes around her wrist.
It’s nothing. A second. But something about the warmth of her skin under his fingers, the way her pulse jumps once against his palm before she yanks her hand back —
Somewhere behind his eyes, a memory flickers. Old. Six years old. A different street. A different London evening. The same irritated eyebrow.
Della (pulling away, unaware of the flicker in his eyes): “Are you even listening to me?”
Kyler (blinking back into the present): “What? Yes. Sorry. You were saying something about my death.”
Della: “I was saying that you do not need to do your own stunts for a two-second reaction shot. That’s what Marco’s team is for.”
Kyler: “But then how would I impress you?”
Della (flat): “You wouldn’t.”
Kyler: “Harsh. Also untrue. Also — you checked my pulse just now, didn’t you notice.”
Della: “I checked if you were still breathing so I don’t have to deal with the paperwork.”
Kyler (grinning, rubbing his wrist where her hand had been): “Sure. Paperwork.”
She turns to walk away, already talking into her headset about resetting the rig for the next take. Kyler stays where he is for a second too long, still looking at his own wrist like it’s holding onto something.
Because six years ago, a girl grabbed his hand exactly like that. Except that time, she wasn’t checking his pulse.
That time, she slapped him. But it took her almost two full minutes to get there — and every second of it is still burned into him like a brand.
Six Years Ago
London. Early evening. The kind of light that turns everything gold for exactly ten minutes before it disappears. A narrow footpath near an old row of shops, a dented car parked crooked against the curb, and underneath it, a very small, very furious kitten.
Kyler — twenty years old, unemployed, technically “between acting jobs,” which is what he calls it when his mother asks — is alone. No friends beside him, no one to witness this. Just him, on his knees on the cold pavement, talking to a kitten like it’s a difficult negotiation.
Kyler (softly, one hand out, palm up): “Hey. Hey, easy. Nobody’s going to hurt you. Look, I don’t even have shoes on this hand. See? Harmless.”
The kitten hisses. Swipes at the air. Backs further under the car, tail puffed up like a bottle brush.
Kyler: “Okay, fair, that was a weird thing to say. I don’t know why I said the shoe thing.”
Footsteps. Fast ones, coming from the far end of the footpath. He doesn’t look up — he’s too focused on the kitten, one hand still stretched carefully toward it, fingers curled gentle and slow.
Then a voice cuts through the evening like a slammed door.
Della: “Hey! What are you doing to it?!”
Kyler looks up.
And every ordinary sound on that street — the traffic two roads over, a dog barking somewhere, the low hum of a shop’s fridge through an open door — folds itself away, quiet as a held breath.
She’s alone too. No one walking with her, no phone in her hand, nothing but her own two feet moving fast down the footpath toward him. Messy hair pulled back in a rush, a few loose strands stuck to her flushed cheek. An oversized hoodie that clearly isn’t hers, sleeves shoved up past her elbows like she’d been in the middle of something — cooking, cleaning, arguing with someone on the phone — and simply dropped it to run here. Her eyes are locked on him like he’s a crime scene and she’s already decided the verdict.
He doesn’t move. He can’t, really. Something about the way she’s standing there — chest still rising fast from the run, jaw set, entirely unbothered by how she looks — makes the rest of the street tilt very slightly out of focus.
Kyler (still kneeling, a beat too slow to answer): “I’m — nothing. I mean — I’m trying to calm it down, it’s scared —”
Della: “It looked like you were grabbing it!”
Kyler: “I wasn’t grabbing anything, I was —”
She’s already crouching down next to him, arm shoving past his to reach for the kitten. Up close now. Close enough that he can smell something like vanilla and rain on her hoodie, close enough to see the small, determined crease between her eyebrows.
Something warm and stupid starts unfolding in his chest, right there on the cold pavement, and he has no idea yet how much trouble it’s going to cause him.
Kyler (distracted, forgetting the sentence halfway through): “Wait, don’t just grab it, you’ll —” (a pause, his eyes catching on the way the last of the sunlight sits on her hair) “— scare it. Worse. It’ll scare it worse.”
Della: “Don’t tell me how to hold a cat!”
Kyler: “I’m not — I’m telling you how to hold this cat, there’s a difference —”
He means to keep arguing. He really does. But her voice is doing something strange to the air around them, and the longer she talks, the softer everything gets at the edges — like someone slowly turning down the contrast on the whole street until only she is still in focus.
Della: “Because of you, probably! You scared it first!”
It was terrified before I got here, he means to say. What comes out instead is a small, distant:*
Kyler: “…Your hair’s doing this thing. In the light.”
Della (stopping mid-rant, staring at him): “…What?”
Kyler (realizing, too late, that he said that out loud): “Nothing! Nothing, I didn’t — ignore that, please, I don’t know why I said that.”
She narrows her eyes at him, deciding, apparently, that he’s simply strange, and goes back to reaching for the kitten. And this — right here, this exact moment — is where it starts to go very wrong for Kyler James.
Because somewhere behind his eyes, without his permission, the footpath stops being a footpath.
The cracked pavement softens into something dreamlike. The dumpster smell fades, replaced — impossibly, ridiculously — by something like fresh flowers, though there isn’t a single flower in a three-block radius. Small points of light drift past his vision, gold and lazy, like dust caught in a sunbeam except there is no sunbeam, there is only her, crouched furiously beside him, glowing at the edges like she walked straight out of the last five minutes of a film he half-remembers crying at once.
Somewhere, faint and warm, a song starts playing. Not out loud — he knows, distantly, that it isn’t out loud — but he can hear it anyway, slow and aching, the exact kind of song that plays in the moment right before two people fall in love in every drama his mother has ever forced him to watch. He doesn’t know the words. He just knows the feeling of it, humming low in his chest like a second heartbeat.
Della (still talking, oblivious, gesturing angrily at the kitten): “—and you don’t just grab a scared animal, that’s basic, that’s — are you even listening to me?”
He is not.
He is watching her mouth move and thinking, with the calm, floating certainty of a man who has just left his own body, that he has never in his life seen anyone this angry look this beautiful, and that every person he has ever found attractive before this exact second was clearly a rehearsal for her.
Kyler (soft, slow, a small helpless smile spreading across his face): “…Oh.”
Della (pausing, thrown off): “‘Oh’? What does ‘oh’ mean? Are you even —” (she squints at him properly now, taking in his expression for the first time) “—why are you smiling like that?”
Kyler (not really answering her, more thinking out loud): “There should be music right now. There is music right now. Can you not hear that?”
Della (genuinely alarmed): “There is no music. What is wrong with you?”
He doesn’t know. He genuinely, completely does not know. Somewhere in his head, invisible fairies — he will later insist, with total sincerity, that they were fairies — seem to be circling lazily around her head like something out of an old storybook, and he is smiling at her the way you’d smile at the single most important thing that has ever happened to you.
Della: “Okay, seriously, you’re doing the weird face again. Stop doing the weird face.”
Kyler (dreamy, distant, entirely unaware of how unhinged he sounds): “I’m not doing a weird face. I’m doing a normal face. This might just be my face now.”
Della: “That is not a normal face! You look like you’re about to propose to me or pass out, and I genuinely cannot tell which!”
She reaches for the kitten again — more out of sheer discomfort than actual need now, wanting an excuse to look at literally anything else — and their hands land on the small, trembling body at the exact same time. Fingers brushing. His breath catching audibly. Her scowl deepening.
Kyler (quiet, almost reverent): “You’re really warm.”
Della: “I am furious, that is not the same as warm—”
Kyler: “It kind of is, though, if you think about it—”
Della (voice rising, equal parts confused and unsettled): “Why do you keep smiling?! I am yelling at you! People do not smile when they’re being yelled at, that is not a normal human response—”
Two full minutes. That is how long this goes on — her voice climbing, cursing him out properly now, calling him strange, calling him unhinged, calling him a man who clearly needs to be reported to someone — while Kyler drifts somewhere just outside his own body, nodding along to none of it, occasionally murmuring something soft and nonsensical about light or warmth or music that only he can hear, wearing an expression that can only be described as a man who has just discovered God, several flowers, and true love all in the same ten seconds.
It is, by any reasonable measure, an extremely creepy thing to witness.
Della (finally, thoroughly disturbed, leaning back slightly): “Okay, you need to stop looking at me like that. I mean it. It’s freaking me out.”
Kyler (still smiling, still miles away): “Like what?”
Della: “Like — like I don’t even know, like you’re about to cry or write me a poem, just — stop —”
Her hand moves before she’s even decided to let it.
Later, Kyler would try to describe this exact second to at least six different people, and every single time, he would fail, because there are no normal words for what happened in his head.
Her palm connects with his cheek — sharp, sudden, and entirely deserved, if he’s being honest with himself — and the sound of it seems to hang in the air a full three seconds longer than it should. The sting comes a half-second later, blooming warm across his jaw.
And just like that — the fairies vanish. The invisible flowers wilt into nothing. The song cuts off mid-note like someone yanked the plug.
The world comes rushing back all at once — too loud, too bright, too real — and Kyler’s head snaps to the side, blinking hard, sucking in a sharp breath like he’s just surfaced from underwater.
Kyler (dazed, blinking rapidly): “—wha—”
He looks up. Looks down. Looks left, looks right, looks up again, like a man trying to remember what planet he’s on. His hand flies to his own cheek, pressing against the sting, and for a full three seconds he simply cannot process what just happened to his own face.
Then he looks at her. Really looks at her — no fairies, no gold light, no imaginary song, just a furious girl in a borrowed hoodie, chest heaving, staring at him like she genuinely cannot decide if she should apologize or run.
And slowly, helplessly, a smile creeps back onto his face anyway — smaller this time, shy, a little stunned, the corners of his mouth twitching like he’s fighting it and losing. It is the exact expression of a man who cannot believe what he just did with his own face for the last two minutes, and somehow finds himself grinning about it anyway.
Kyler (quiet, still touching his cheek, voice cracking slightly): “…I don’t — I don’t know why I’m smiling right now.”
She doesn’t answer that. She doesn’t say anything at all.
She just looks at him for one more second — something unreadable flashing across her face, gone before he can name it — and then she scoops the kitten up in both arms, gentle and sure, cradling it against her hoodie without a single word.
And she walks away. Fast. No goodbye. No last insult. Nothing.
Just the sound of her footsteps fading down the footpath, and Kyler James, twenty years old, standing frozen with his hand still pressed to his stinging cheek and the stupidest, happiest smile London has ever seen.
It takes him almost ten full seconds to remember how his legs work.
Then he runs after her.
He follows her — not in a strange way, or so he tells himself — just, well, she has the kitten he was trying to save, and also she is the single most interesting person he has ever seen in his entire life, and also his legs simply started moving on their own and he didn’t stop them.
She notices almost immediately. Of course she does.
Della (not even turning around): “Why are you following me.”
Kyler: “I’m not following you. I’m just — walking. In this direction. Which happens to be your direction.”
Della: “For six streets?”
Kyler: “…I like walking.”
Della: “Go home.”
Kyler: “I will. Eventually. Probably. Depends where you’re going.”
She stops so fast he nearly walks into her. Turns around, and this time there’s something dangerous in her expression, the kind of look that has ended arguments before they start.
Della: “I am not telling you where I live.”
Kyler: “I didn’t ask.”
Della: “You were about to.”
Kyler: “…Maybe.”
She groans, actually groans, loud and frustrated, and starts walking faster. He matches her pace easily — longer legs, unfortunately for her — and she starts taking turns that don’t make sense. Left when there’s clearly a straight path. Right into a street that loops back the way they came. He realizes, slowly, delightedly, that she is trying to lose him on purpose.
Kyler (grinning now, the shy stunned look completely gone, replaced with something worse — enthusiasm): “You’re going in circles.”
Della: “I am not.”
Kyler: “We passed that same red door twice.”
Della: “London has a lot of red doors.”
Kyler: “Not this red.”
She makes a sound of pure frustration and breaks into a jog. He laughs — actually laughs, delighted, chasing her past a bakery, past a bus stop, past an old man walking a very unimpressed bulldog — and for a few streets it feels less like a chase and more like something out of one of those films he used to watch on his mother’s sofa as a kid, the ones where the whole world seems to be smiling at two people who don’t know yet that they’re the main characters.
Then she takes a sharp left into a crowded market street, ducks between two stalls, and by the time he pushes through the crowd of shoppers —
She’s gone.
Kyler stands in the middle of the market, out of breath, turning in a full slow circle, scanning every direction. No hoodie. No messy hair. No kitten.
Nothing.
Kyler (quiet, to himself, genuinely stunned): “…No. No, no, no. Where did she—”
He runs to the end of the street. Nothing. He runs back the other way. Nothing. He asks a fruit seller if they saw a girl with a kitten go past — the man just shrugs and offers him an apple, which, in his current state, Kyler almost accepts as a form of comfort.
He doesn’t even know her name.
He never got her name.
The sun finishes setting somewhere over the rooftops, and Kyler James — twenty years old, unemployed, freshly slapped, freshly and catastrophically in love — sits down on the curb of a street he doesn’t recognize and puts his head in his hands.
That Night
The James house is a tall, narrow building with a red front door and a porch light that’s been flickering for three months because nobody’s gotten around to fixing it. Inside, it’s warm, a little loud, and about to get much louder.
Kyler walks through the front door at 9 p.m. and doesn’t say a single word.
This, in itself, is an event. Freya, Kyler’s older sister, is the first to notice — she’s curled up on the sofa with a bowl of cereal, half-watching TV, when she hears the door and looks up out of pure habit, expecting her brother to announce his entrance the way he announces everything.
Nothing. He just walks past her. Straight up the stairs. Silent.
Freya (to the empty room, cereal spoon frozen halfway to her mouth): “…Was that Kyler?”
Nora — their mother — pokes her head out of the kitchen, drying her hands on a towel.
Nora: “Was what Kyler?”
Freya: “Someone just walked in and didn’t say a word. It had his shoes on.”
Gerald, their father, looks up from his newspaper in the armchair, one eyebrow raised over his reading glasses.
Gerald: “Kyler doesn’t do quiet. Kyler doesn’t know what quiet is.”
Nora (already wiping her hands faster, concern creeping into her voice): “Go check on him.”
Freya climbs the stairs two at a time, cereal abandoned. She knocks on his door. No answer. She opens it anyway — sibling privilege — and finds Kyler sitting on the edge of his bed, still in his shoes, staring at the wall like it personally owes him money.
Freya: “Okay, what happened. Did you get fired? Did someone steal your phone? Are you dying?”
He doesn’t answer. Just keeps staring.
Freya (louder, now genuinely alarmed): “Kyler.”
Downstairs, Lena — the youngest sister, twelve years old and nosy about everything — has already appeared at the bottom of the stairs, drawn by the sound of her sister’s raised voice. The twins, Reo and Finn, tumble out of their shared room upstairs like they smelled drama from three rooms away, which, in this house, they usually can.
Lena (shouting up): “Is Kyler dying?!”
Reo: “If he’s dying can I have his PlayStation—”
Finn: “I called it first—”
Nora (already halfway up the stairs): “Nobody is dying, nobody is taking anybody’s PlayStation, everybody be quiet—”
By the time the entire family has crowded into the doorway of Kyler’s room — Nora, Gerald, Freya, Lena, the twins, and finally, shuffling in from their room down the hall in slippers and matching dressing gowns, Grandma Celia and Grandpa Roy — Kyler is still sitting on the edge of his bed, silent, staring at nothing.
Grandma Celia (sharp, no-nonsense, pushing past everyone to sit beside him): “Kyler. Look at me.”
He looks at her. And that’s when it breaks.
Kyler (voice cracking, suddenly, dramatically): “She disappeared.”
Everyone in the doorway exchanges a look.
Gerald: “…Who disappeared?”
Kyler (standing up now, pacing, hands in his hair, voice rising with every word): “She disappeared! She was right there, and then she wasn’t, and I looked everywhere, I asked a man selling apples, and she’s gone, how does a person just disappear—”
Freya (flat): “Kyler, who is ‘she.'”
Kyler (spinning to face them, eyes wet, completely serious): “I don’t know! I don’t know her name! I followed her for six streets and I don’t even know her name!”
The room goes very, very quiet.
Lena (whispering to Reo): “Is he in trouble with the police?”
Reo: “Sounds like it.”
Nora (stepping forward, hands raised like she’s approaching a startled animal): “Sweetheart. Start from the beginning. Slowly. Who did you follow.”
Kyler: “There was a kitten! Under a car! It was scared, I was trying to help, and then she showed up out of nowhere and thought I was hurting it, and we started arguing over it —”
He stops. His hand drifts up to touch his own cheek, and something in his expression shifts entirely — from panic to something softer, almost stunned.
Kyler (quieter now): “…Then she slapped me.”
Another silence. This one is different. This one has an edge to it.
Gerald (slowly, carefully): “She slapped you.”
Kyler: “Yes.”
Gerald: “And you’re… upset that she left.”
Kyler: “Dad, you don’t understand, it wasn’t even about the kitten anymore by the end. The second I saw her, everything went soft and gold, like the whole street turned into a film set, and there was music, I swear there was music, and I think I saw flowers —”
Grandpa Roy (from the doorway, dry as toast): “He’s concussed.”
Grandma Celia: “He is not concussed, Roy, he’s twenty years old and he’s finally fallen in love, there’s a difference, though admittedly the symptoms look similar—”
Kyler (nearly shouting now, hands pressed to his chest): “I have! I have fallen in love! With a stranger! Who hates me! Who slapped me because I wouldn’t stop smiling at her, and then vanished forever because London has too many red doors!”
Freya (rubbing her temples): “I need you to hear how insane you sound right now.”
Kyler: “I don’t care how I sound, Freya, I have lost the love of my life and a kitten in the same afternoon, do you understand what kind of day I’ve had—”
This is when Grandma Celia — fifty years old, unshakably calm in every crisis this family has ever produced, currently standing with her arms crossed and watching her grandson unravel — reaches out and slaps him. Lightly. On the same cheek. Just enough to make a point.
Kyler (stunned into silence): “…Ow. Grandma!”
Grandma Celia: “There. Now you’re slapped by two women in one day. Feel better?”
A beat. And then, unbelievably, Kyler laughs — a short, surprised bark of a laugh — and throws his arms around his grandmother, hugging her tight, the fight going out of him all at once.
Kyler (muffled into her shoulder): “…A little, actually.”
Grandma Celia (patting his back, a small smile tugging at her mouth despite herself): “Sit down. All of you, sit down. He’s going to tell us everything, in order, slowly, and nobody interrupts until he’s finished. Then we can all decide how worried to be.”
And so he does. Every detail. The car, the kitten, the way she’d come running alone with no one beside her, exactly like he’d been alone too. The arguing. The way his brain had simply left his body somewhere around the second minute and started decorating the footpath with imaginary flowers. The smiling he couldn’t stop even when she begged him to. The slap — described three separate times, in three levels of increasing drama, each one somehow more theatrical than the last. The chase through six streets. The red door they passed twice. The market. The apple man. The empty street where she simply wasn’t anymore.
By the time he finishes, Lena has migrated onto the bed beside him, fully invested. The twins are lying on the floor on their stomachs like they’re watching a film. Freya has her arms crossed but is, unmistakably, smiling.
Freya: “So let me get this straight. A stranger accused you of hurting a kitten you were actually helping, you started smiling at her like a man possessed for two straight minutes, she slapped you to make it stop, took the kitten, and vanished — and your takeaway from all of this is that you’re in love.”
Kyler: “When you say it like that it sounds insane.”
Freya: “It is insane, Kyler, that’s what I’m telling you.”
Gerald (leaning back in his chair, arms crossed, but there’s a smile fighting its way onto his face too): “Who was this poor girl who had the misfortune of meeting you?”
The room erupts. Lena laughs so hard she nearly falls off the bed. The twins high-five over something that has nothing to do with anything. Even Grandpa Roy, still standing in the doorway with his arms crossed, cracks the smallest smile he’s shown all week.
Kyler (indignant, half-laughing despite himself): “I am a delight! She’s the one who hit a stranger over a misunderstanding!”
Nora: “To be fair, love, if a strange man smiled at me like that for two minutes while I was yelling at him, I’d probably hit him too.”
Kyler: “Mum!”
Nora: “I’m just saying, she’s not wrong to be cautious.”
Reo: “Did the kitten at least seem grateful?”
Kyler (suddenly wounded all over again): “No! It went with her! After everything I did!”
Finn: “Traitor cat.”
Kyler: “Thank you, Finn. Finally, someone in this family understands my pain.”
The teasing goes on. And on. Someone brings up snacks. Someone else brings up the ridiculous idea of putting up “missing girl” posters, which Kyler seriously considers for four full seconds before Freya threatens to take his phone away. Grandma Celia, at some point, disappears downstairs and comes back with tea for everyone, settling into the armchair by the window like she has no plans of leaving anytime soon.
The clock ticks past eleven. Past midnight. Past one.
By two in the morning, the twins have fallen asleep on the floor, tangled together like puppies. Lena is fighting to keep her eyes open, head drooping against Freya’s shoulder. Gerald has migrated to the doorway with Grandpa Roy, the two of them murmuring quietly to each other, occasionally glancing back at Kyler with the particular fondness of men who remember exactly what it felt like to be twenty and stupid about someone.
And Kyler — despite being told at least six times to go to sleep — is still talking. Quieter now. Slower. Replaying the same two minutes over and over, describing the exact shade of gold the light had turned, the exact sound the slap had made, the exact second her eyes had gone from fury to something unreadable right before she walked away without a word.
Grandma Celia (finally standing, setting down her empty teacup): “Enough. Bed. All of you.”
Kyler: “But Grandma, I haven’t even told you about the part where—”
Grandma Celia: “You have told me that part four times, Kyler. I know the color of the light. I know about the door. Bed.”
One by one, the family disperses — Gerald carrying a sleeping Finn over one shoulder, Nora ushering a half-asleep Lena down the hall, Freya dragging Reo by the ankle because he refuses to wake up properly. Grandma Celia pauses at Kyler’s door, looking back at him one last time.
Grandma Celia: “You’ll find her again. Or you won’t. Either way, the sun will still come up tomorrow.”
Kyler (quiet, almost to himself): “I hope it’s the first one.”
Grandma Celia (small smile): “I know you do. Go shower. You smell like pavement.”
It’s nearly three in the morning when Kyler finally steps out of the shower, hair dripping, towel around his shoulders. The house has gone completely silent — the particular silence of a house full of people who are all, finally, asleep.
He lies down on his bed without bothering to dry his hair properly, staring up at the ceiling, and for a while he doesn’t think about anything at all.
Then, slowly, his hand drifts up to his cheek again.
He remembers the exact weight of her hand. The stinging warmth of it. And underneath that, quieter, almost embarrassing — the two minutes before it. The fairies. The flowers that weren’t there. The song only he could hear. He should be humiliated. He is, instead, smiling into the dark like an idiot.
Kyler (whispering to the ceiling, entirely alone, entirely ridiculous): “…She thought I was going to propose. That’s what she said. She thought that.”
He giggles. Actually giggles, the sound absurd in the quiet room, and presses both hands over his own face like he’s trying to physically contain how much he’s smiling.
He replays it again. The daze. The flowers. The slap. The way she’d looked at him right after — not disgusted, not really, just completely baffled, like she couldn’t decide what she’d just witnessed. He replays it a third time, slower, lingering on the shape of her mouth when she’d said stop looking at me like that — which, he thinks, was possibly the most honest compliment anyone has ever accidentally given him.
Somewhere around his fifth replay of the same two minutes, he finally, mercifully, falls asleep — still smiling, still faintly pink in the cheeks, one hand resting against the same spot she’d hit.
The Next Morning
10:02 a.m.
Kyler’s eyes snap open all at once, like someone flipped a switch. He sits bolt upright in bed, hair a disaster, stares at the ceiling for exactly one second —
— and then he’s moving.
He throws the blanket off, sprints across the room, yanks his door open so hard it bangs against the wall, and thunders down the stairs two at a time, still in yesterday’s crumpled T-shirt, yelling before he’s even reached the bottom step.
Kyler: “I GOT SLAPPED BY HER YESTERDAY AND I DIDN’T TELL ANYBODY!”
In the TV lounge, the entire family is gathered — Nora with her morning tea halfway to her mouth, Gerald behind his newspaper, Freya scrolling her phone on the sofa, Lena and the twins sprawled on the rug in front of the television, Grandma Celia in her armchair with her knitting, Grandpa Roy reading beside her.
Every single one of them freezes.
Nora’s teacup stops halfway. Gerald slowly lowers his newspaper, revealing an expression of pure, weary dread. Freya doesn’t even look up from her phone — she just closes her eyes like she’s praying for strength. The twins exchange a look that says here we go again. Lena, delighted, immediately sits up straighter, already grinning.
Freya (eyes still closed, voice flat): “We know, Kyler. We were there. Last night. For four hours.”
Kyler (standing at the bottom of the stairs, breathless, completely undeterred): “But did I mention the part where she thought I was about to propose to her? Because I don’t think I fully covered that last night, and I’ve been thinking about it, and I think it’s actually the more important detail—”
Gerald (already retreating back behind his newspaper): “And there it is.”
Grandma Celia (not looking up from her knitting, completely unbothered): “Someone make more tea. This is going to be a long morning.”
