The project assignment came down like a small, personal disaster: pairs, chosen by the teacher, no exceptions, no trading.
Charlotte and Ethan.
Loid told himself it didn't matter. It was a school project. Charlotte had partnered with plenty of people before — she'd partnered with Loid himself, more than once — and nothing catastrophic had ever come of it. There was no reason this should feel any different.
It felt very different.
Over the next week, Charlotte and Ethan started spending time together that had nothing to do with Loid at all — working in the library after school, meeting up on weekends to put together whatever elaborate presentation their teacher had demanded, texting, presumably, about deadlines and slide decks and whatever else group projects required. Loid knew all of this only secondhand, in fragments, because Charlotte still talked to him about her day the way she always had, mentioning Ethan the same casual way she mentioned anyone else.
That was almost worse. If she'd been secretive about it, he could have told himself something was actually wrong. Instead she was just — normal, unbothered, treating the whole thing like exactly what it was, a school project with a classmate, nothing more.
Loid, meanwhile, was anything but normal about it.
He noticed everything. The way Charlotte's phone buzzed more often lately. The way she mentioned some detail about Ethan — a joke he'd made, a show he liked — that meant she'd been paying attention to him the way she usually paid attention to people she actually cared about. The way, once, he caught the two of them at a table near the library windows, heads bent close over a laptop, both of them laughing at something on the screen, and something in Loid's chest tightened so hard it was almost physically uncomfortable.
He started going quiet. Not dramatically — he still talked, still sat with her at lunch, still walked partway home with her most days — but something in him had pulled back, guarded itself, and Charlotte noticed, because Charlotte noticed everything about him the same way he noticed everything about her.
"Did I do something?" she asked, on Wednesday, after he'd given a particularly unconvincing one-word answer to a perfectly ordinary question.
"No."
"Then why are you acting strange?"
"I'm not."
She looked at him for a long moment, the kind of look that saw straight through the lie, and Loid felt himself flush under it, hating how transparent he apparently was. But she didn't push. She never pushed. She just let the silence sit there a moment, then changed the subject to something easier, and Loid was grateful and frustrated with her in almost equal measure — grateful that she wasn't forcing the conversation, frustrated that some stubborn part of him had actually wanted her to.
It would have been easier if she'd pushed. If she'd made him say it out loud. Then maybe he'd have had to admit, even just to himself, what exactly he was so unsettled about — that watching someone else make Charlotte laugh had started to feel less like a minor irritation and more like watching something slip slowly out of his reach, something he hadn't even realized he'd been holding onto until it started to move.
At home that night, he tried to distract himself with homework, then with television, then with a video game he hadn't touched in weeks, and none of it worked especially well. His mind kept circling back to the same handful of images — Charlotte laughing at something on Ethan's laptop screen, Charlotte's phone buzzing at dinner, the easy, unbothered way she'd said "did I do something" like the answer might genuinely have been yes and she'd have taken it in stride either way.
He thought about texting her. Not to explain anything — he wasn't ready for that — just to say something, anything, to close the small gap that had opened between them without either of them quite acknowledging it out loud. He got as far as opening the message thread, scrolling up through weeks of easy, ordinary conversation, jokes and homework complaints and one truly excellent argument about whether cereal counted as soup, before closing the app again without sending anything at all.
He didn't say any of that. He said nothing at all, actually, and let the quiet stretch out between them for the rest of the walk home, and told himself again, weakly, that it would pass.
It did not pass. If anything, it got worse, sitting there under his ribs, small and sharp and entirely his own fault, because Charlotte hadn't done a single thing wrong, and he knew it, and somehow that only made the whole thing harder to sit with.
That weekend, the project group met at the library one more time to finish their presentation, and Loid — who had absolutely nothing to do with the project, no reason at all to be there — found himself walking past the library twice, once on a made-up errand and once on the way back from an errand he'd also made up, just to glance through the windows and see them sitting there together, laptop open between them, Charlotte's hair falling forward as she leaned in to read something on the screen.
He hated how much that small, ordinary image bothered him. He hated more that he couldn't seem to stop looking for reasons to walk past.
He didn't go in. He told himself there was no reason to, which was true, and also that it would have been strange to show up uninvited to a project he wasn't part of, which was also true, and neither of those true things made the tight feeling in his chest go away as he walked home alone that afternoon, later than he'd meant to be out, the light already starting to fade behind the rooftops.
He thought, not for the first time, that he should just say something. Tell Charlotte how he felt, or at least tell her enough that she'd understand why he'd gone quiet. But every time he tried to imagine the conversation, it came out sounding either pathetic or presumptuous, and he couldn't find a version of it that didn't risk making things worse instead of better.
So he said nothing, again, and let the feeling keep growing in the dark where he'd left it, which was, in hindsight, probably the worst possible place to leave something like that.