Veyn couldn’t give me explanations.

So he gave me his truth.

In the stillness between us, in the space no words could cross, he reached for my face with one shaking hand. His fingers brushed my jawline with the same gentleness I remembered from years ago—the kind of touch that asked permission, even if it already knew the answer.

Then both hands cupped my jaw, the skin of his palms rougher than I remembered, calloused. And then, slowly, achingly, he kissed me.

It wasn’t the gentle, exploratory kiss from our youth under the garden trees. This was a kiss of desperation, of two years of silence pouring into a single, crushing moment. His lips pressed into mine with both reverence and hunger, a raw and aching need to erase the time we had lost. And when I opened fully to him—mouth, body, soul—it was like the forest inside us both exhaled.

Vines stirred at my ankles. Tiny, unopened buds of moonflowers unfurled along their lengths, releasing a faint, sweet scent into the air. He groaned into my mouth, a sound of pure relief, and his own flora answered. Darker, thornier vines, laced with golden light emerged from beneath his robes, coiling gently toward mine.

My hands came up to his chest, not to push him away, but to anchor myself as the world tilted. His magic, a deep and steady gold, pulsed against my palms. A fine shimmer of silver-veined ivy unfurled along my wrists, trailing up my forearms as my fingers slid beneath his tunic. His breath hitched as my palms found the skin of his chest.

A slow rustling filled the room. His vines, thick and gold-green, rising from the edges of his collarbone, blooming like breath against my skin. One brushed my cheek, curling around a loose strand of my hair, and then another slipped over my shoulder, tugging gently at my robes.

I traced my fingers over the strong lines of his abdomen, my touch light but deliberate. He gasped softly when I dipped lower, just above his waistband. In return, his mouth trailed to my neck, kissing the place just beneath my ear where my pulse thrummed wild. I tilted my head back, baring my throat, my breath shallow and fast.

Neither of us spoke.

There were no words left that wouldn’t shatter the fragile magic between us.

The vines growing from my back coiled forward, as if sensing his presence. Veyn's own tendrils responded in kind, reaching for mine. They touched midair, twisting, intertwining, not merely as a symbol, but as something older, instinctual. We were Wood Fae. This was how we spoke when words failed.

Then he lifted me effortlessly, setting me on the edge of his desk and sweeping aside a chaotic mess of scrolls and quills with one arm, leaving only the dying wisteria. Papers fluttered to the floor, forgotten. He was making a space for me in the center of his guarded, orderly life.

His vines, clever and alive, moved with a purpose of their own. They slithered over my shoulders, gently unlacing the ties of my robes with impossible delicacy. The fabric parted, falling open. At the same time, my own shimmering vines reached for him, their leafy tips finding the clasps of his professor’s robes and unfastening them one by one. It was a slow, sacred undressing performed not by hands, but by our very nature, our magic weaving together to bare us to each other.

He pulled back, his forehead resting against mine, our breathing ragged.

“Shara,” he whispered, a prayer against my lips.

He waited for me to say stop. I didn’t want to, even knowing that nothing but heartache could come of this. I wanted him.

When I didn’t say anything, he kissed the newly bare skin of my collarbone, then lower, his mouth brushing over the swell of my breast. When he kissed and sucked on each of my nipples, my back arched and his office filled with my moans. One of his vines coiled gently around my wrist, grounding me as I trembled beneath him.

His mouth was hot against my skin, and everywhere he touched, my own magic bloomed. A soft, mossy carpet of green spread across the oak of his desk beneath me, cushioning me. The struggling wisteria in the pot on the far corner trembled and unfurled a single, perfect new leaf.

My hands explored him in turn, rediscovering the geography of his body. He was harder now, his shoulders broader, the lines of his chest and stomach more defined. The skin over his ribs felt like smooth, weathered bark. He was the same boy I had loved, but shaped by a world I hadn't been allowed to see. The thought was a brief pang of sorrow, but it was quickly consumed by the heat of his touch.

His lips moved lower, over the soft plane of my stomach. I gasped as he knelt before me, his mouth finding the sensitive skin of my inner thigh, moving toward my center. I moaned at the first press of his tongue—slow, sure, reverent.

I tangled my fingers in his dark, vine-threaded hair, and my hips arched toward him. His vines wrapped around my legs, holding me gently as pleasure spurred my magic to spill wild across the floor like overgrown roots. I whispered his name over and over, cherishing this time with him, reveling in the feelings, new and old, washing through me until a wave of light, pure and white, pulsed from my center and shot through my body, overwhelming all my senses.

He rose then, pupils wide, eyes dark with a need that mirrored my own, parted lips shiny with my arousal. I pulled him to me, fingers at his waistband. His vines helped undo the fastenings, slipping them away like ivy unraveling a ruin. Then he stood there, his body a canvas of dark vines and glowing, golden light. He was beautiful, a perfect, painful embodiment of the wild earth.

He guided me back down onto the mossy bed my magic had created on his desk. Our bodies pressed together, bare skin to bare skin, magic to magic, no barriers left.

When he pushed inside me, it was a feeling of coming home. It was roots sinking into familiar soil after a long drought. I gasped at the stretch, at the way his magic surged into mine like sap rising in spring. Our current of shared magic was a silent conversation more honest than any words we could have spoken.

He moved inside me with aching tenderness, like he was relearning something sacred. I wrapped my legs around his waist, arms around his shoulders, and let myself be held, truly held, for the first time in what felt like years.

Our vines intertwined, his dark and strong, mine soft and silver-lit, wrapping around our legs, our waists, binding us together in a living, breathing cocoon. We moved in a rhythm our bodies had never forgotten, a slow, aching build of friction and feeling.

Vines around the room flowered, then burst into quiet bloom. Moss thickened under us. Light spun in slow circles from the skylight, dappling our skin like blessing.

Each thrust deepened the connection, not just of body, but of self. I whispered to him between kisses, his name, my love, my sorrow, my hope. He replied with touch, with breath, with the way he held me like I was home.

As my second release crashed over me, I cried out his name, a blinding wave of coppery light that made every plant in the room pulse in unison. He followed a moment later with a guttural groan, his own golden-green magic flaring so brightly it filled the office with the light of a false dawn. The wisteria on his desk didn't just bloom—it exploded into a cascade of fragrant, impossible flowers, their perfume thick and heavy in the air.

We lay tangled in the aftermath, cocooned by our interwoven vines. For a long moment, we stayed like that, our breathing slowly returning to normal. The glow from our vines softened, dimming to a gentle, pulsing warmth. He held me, his arms a safe, solid presence around me, and the silence that settled was no longer an enemy. It was a sanctuary. A fragile, temporary peace built not on words, but on a truth our bodies both remembered.

His exhales were warm whispers against my forehead, while his hand drew soft circles over the bare curve of my hip. My fingers traced the lines of his back, over the smooth bark-like texture of his skin and the faint, pulsing glow of his magic, now a soft, golden-green ember.

For the first time in two years, the aching hollowness inside me felt full. This small office, filled with his quiet life, felt like the center of the world.

A fragile peace settled over me, a stillness I hadn’t realized I’d been so desperate to find. It was a dangerous feeling, this sense of safety. It made me want to believe that the silence between us was a choice, not a cage. Safe enough to ask a question that had nothing to do with Halven, or the tunnels, or the secrets he carried. A question just about us. About him.

I brushed a stray strand of dark hair from his forehead.

“When you left,” I whispered into the quiet, my voice barely a rustle of leaves, "where did you go?”

It was a simple question. A soft one. An offering of normal intimacy, a plea for a single piece of the life he’d lived without me.

He froze.

It wasn't a gradual stiffening; it was an instantaneous, absolute stillness, as if he’d been turned to stone. The warmth seeping from his skin cooled. The gentle thrum of his magic against my palm sputtered and went silent.

He didn't pull away, but the man holding me was suddenly gone, replaced by a guarded professor, a keeper of secrets. His vines retreated from me, curling back inward.

I swallowed past the lump in my throat. “I just want to know where you were.”

It wasn’t a demand. It wasn’t even about Halven. I wasn’t asking him to betray his silence, just to let me in—to offer some piece of himself that wasn’t wrapped in secrecy.

But he didn’t speak.

He didn’t look at me when I shifted just enough to see his face.

He closed his eyes like the question physically hurt. And maybe it did.

The silence that followed was devastating. It wasn’t the peaceful quiet of moments before; it was the suffocating silence of a locked room.

The fragile peace inside me shattered. I untangled my legs from his, my vines recoiling as if they’d touched frost. I sat up, pulling the edges of my robe around me, suddenly feeling cold and horribly exposed.

“You can’t even answer that?” I asked, not angry, just heartbroken. “Not even that?”

He sat up as well, pulling on his robes with stiff fingers. “Shara…”

“No. Don’t.” I swallowed hard, fingers fumbling at the fastenings of my robes. “I’m not asking for secrets. I’m not even asking about Halven anymore. I’m just asking where you were. Where did you go when you walked out of my life without a word?”

Still nothing.

A simple question about his past, and he couldn’t give me a single word. The wall between us was absolute. A cold, sick feeling coiled in my stomach.

My voice came out hollow, brittle. “Did you make love to me to keep me from asking more questions?”

He ran a hand through his hair, his vines retreating into his skin, leaving him looking stark and alone. When he finally spoke, his voice was raw. He didn't deny it. He couldn't.

“I wanted to give you something I could give.”

The words were a blade. It wasn’t a confession of manipulation, but one of utter helplessness, and that was so much worse. It meant this was all he had to offer me. Touch without truth. Presence without access.

"I see," I whispered, the words tasting like ash. I swung my legs off the desk, my feet finding the cold stone floor. The bed of moss my magic had created withered and turned brown, crumbling into dust. "You left me then, and you're still leaving me now. Even when you're right here."

The heartbreak wasn't that he was a liar; it was that he was fundamentally inaccessible. A locked door I would never be given the key to.

I finished dressing in silence, pulling the last clasp into place with trembling fingers. My vines had all retreated. The magic in the room was still thick, but subdued now. Quiet. Like something sacred had bloomed, then withered in the same breath.

I moved toward the door.

“Wait,” he said.

I stopped, just barely, and looked back over my shoulder without meeting his gaze. I couldn't. If I looked at his face, at the pain I knew I would see there, my resolve would break.

“I can’t,” he said, his voice cracking. “But maybe… maybe you can.”

He crossed to his desk. When I finally turned, he was standing there, holding out his faculty ID card. The one I’d noticed when I first walked in.

“You’ve been in the tunnels,” he said, his eyes pleading with me to understand. “You know about the Docilis Vault. Use this card and your fingerprint. Enter my ID number.”

He pressed the card into my hand. His fingers brushed mine, and the brief touch was an agony of what I was about to lose all over again.

His voice broke slightly. “It may not give you the answers you want, but… maybe it will show you something I can’t.”

I looked down at the card in my palm. It felt heavy, a burden and a key all at once. I took it. I didn’t know why, except that some part of me, the part that still stupidly loved him, couldn't refuse this last, desperate offering. But as my fingers closed around it, I knew.

He was giving me a key to a vault, but he would always be the locked room.

No matter how much I loved him, there was a door to his life I would never be allowed to walk through. And I couldn’t stand outside it forever.