He found her the next day, after school, deliberately this time, making sure to catch her before she could slip away toward home without him.
"Can we talk?" he asked, and something in his tone must have carried enough weight that Charlotte actually stopped, turned to face him properly instead of offering some polite, distracted excuse.
"About what?"
"About whatever's happening. Between us. You've been distant, and I think I have too, and I don't want to just let it keep going until it turns into something bigger, like last time."
Charlotte was quiet for a long moment, and Loid could see her deciding something, some internal argument playing out behind her eyes before she finally spoke.
"I thought you didn't need me anymore," she admitted, quiet, the words clearly costing her something to say out loud.
Loid felt something twist sharply in his chest. "That's not true. Not even close to true."
"Then what's been going on? You've barely talked to me all week."
"My grandmother had a fall. Nothing serious, but I've been helping out more at home, and I got distracted, and I didn't think about how it might have looked from your side. I should have explained. That's on me."
Charlotte's expression softened slightly, some of the guarded tension easing out of it, though she still looked uncertain. "I didn't know that. I just — I started assuming things. That maybe I'd become too much, somehow. That you were pulling back because of me."
"You're not too much," Loid said, immediate and certain. "You're not a burden, Charlotte. Not even close."
"Then what am I to you?" she asked, and the question landed heavier than either of them had probably expected, hanging there in the space between them, demanding an answer neither of them had ever actually put into words before.
Loid froze. This was the question he'd been circling for weeks now — at the festival, on the night walk, in a dozen half-formed thoughts he'd never let himself finish — and now it was sitting right there in front of him, asked plainly, with nowhere left to hide from it.
He thought about every clumsy, careful non-answer he could give. Every safe deflection. And then he thought about how tired he was of deflecting, how much energy he'd spent over the past month talking himself out of saying the thing he actually meant.
"You're someone I don't want to lose," he said finally, quiet but steady, meaning every word of it completely.
Charlotte's eyes softened, something shifting in her expression — surprise, and relief, and something warmer underneath both of those. Neither of them said the actual word, the one that had been building under every unspoken moment for weeks now, but it didn't need saying, not exactly, not yet. The meaning was there anyway, clear enough in the way he'd said it, clear enough in the way she was looking at him now.
"I don't want to lose you either," she said, quiet, and something about hearing it said back, plainly, without hesitation, settled something in Loid's chest that had been unsettled for a very long time.
"So we're okay?" he asked. "Actually okay, not just pretending okay?"
"We're okay," Charlotte confirmed, and this time there was no pause before the words, no hesitation for him to catch and worry over later. Just certainty, plain and simple, standing there between them in the fading afternoon light.
They didn't say anything else for a while. They didn't need to. Something had shifted, quietly and permanently, in the space of that one honest conversation, and both of them seemed to understand it without requiring further explanation.
Eventually they started walking, the same familiar route home they'd taken so many times before, though it felt different now — lighter, somehow, the tension of the past week finally, fully dissolved. Charlotte told him about her week, the ordinary things she'd been too distracted to mention while she'd been quietly convincing herself he was pulling away, and Loid found himself relaxing into the conversation more completely than he had in days, relieved to have the easy rhythm of it back.
"I'm sorry," she said, at one point, apropos of nothing in particular. "For assuming the worst instead of just asking you directly."
"You don't have to apologize. I get it. I did the same thing to you, remember, over Ethan."
"I guess we're both a little bad at this."
"A little," Loid agreed, smiling. "We're working on it, though."
"We are," Charlotte said, and there was something warm in the way she said it, like the acknowledgment of their shared clumsiness was its own kind of comfort — proof, maybe, that whatever this thing between them was, it was worth the occasional stumble, worth figuring out slowly instead of getting it perfectly right on the first try.
They reached her street eventually, and this time, when they said goodnight, there wasn't any of the earlier awkwardness lingering between them. Just an easy, settled quiet, the kind that came from having actually said the difficult thing out loud instead of letting it sit unspoken and fester.
"Feel better?" Loid asked, before she turned to go.
"Much better," Charlotte said, smiling. "Thanks for finding me."
"Anytime," he said, and meant it completely.
She headed inside, and Loid stood there on the sidewalk a moment longer, watching the light in her window switch on a floor above, feeling something settle in his chest that had been unsettled for the better part of a week. It was a strange kind of relief — not the giddy, electric feeling he'd had at the festival, but something steadier, quieter, more like the feeling of a foundation finally holding weight it had been uncertain about carrying.
Walking home, he thought about how close they'd come to letting the whole thing spiral the way the Ethan argument had — two people, both hurting, both too proud or too scared to simply say what was actually wrong, drifting further apart on nothing but assumption and silence. It would have been easy to let it happen again. It had almost happened again, this time over something as small and fixable as a sprained wrist and a few distracted weeks.
But they'd caught it. Both of them, in their own way — Loid by finally paying attention and refusing to let the silence sit unexamined, Charlotte by being honest the moment he actually asked. It felt, walking home under the darkening sky, like proof of something important: that whatever this was between them, it wasn't fragile in the way he sometimes worried it might be. It could bend, apparently, without breaking. That was worth something. That was worth a great deal, actually, and Loid found himself smiling the rest of the way home, entirely without meaning to.