Sissy Room

Hibiya pinky swears with Kai gives him a motherly smile and starts telling.    Aldra is a girl who was born, reversed so to speak. at birth she looked way more like a grown up then a baby. Her mother sought help at the regression agents who had help her regress too. Aldra was put trough a special development holding treatment. Put simply her body was modified so it matched the child she was. You probably always wondered why she looks as childish as she dose, well its the operation. mentally she may grow, but her body is always a child's I´ve heard saying she even considers permanent age halting too. She's never had it easy making friends. Raised in the regression society and whenever she met children they were scared cause well you know never growing. when she met you, someone who loves regression, I´mm sure she thought she had finally found the perfect partner in life. that's like why she moved so fast with you. when I met her, she begged me to be her "real society mommy" since her actuall mother also abandoned her. 

The headmaster acted calm and kind as if she was that way the whole time. She looked at Alvin with a smile. “Its ok, don’t you worry about it, Accidents happen. I would like for you to meet your new mom, Chelsea.” Chelsea smiled and gently placed her hand on his shoulder. “Hello, and do not worry. Everything will be ok. How about you get changed and packed. Today is the first day of your new life hun.” With that, Chelsea places a soft kiss to his forehead. The headmaster nodded saying “Well, I will leave you two. Thanks again for being kind and adopting.” She walked away back to her office as Chelsea proceeded to help Alvin pack.

Over dinner, Jim broached the question.   “Are you staying over tonight?” “I can if you want,” Pam replied. “I want.” After dinner, they went to the sofa so Pam could nurse him.   As he finished he decided to take one step further.   “It might be easier if you moved in.” Pam smiled.  “I was wondering when you were going to get around to asking that.   I’m not sure I’m quite ready to make a full time move, but I probably should keep some things here for convenience.” It wasn’t the answer Jim had hoped for, but still it was pretty nice.   He could certainly get used to having Pam around all the time. The next day he did his normal administrative stuff at work.  He wistfully thought about the days when he could generate and test code.   He’d been out of that to a large extent while he was director of engineering, but now he had to let Kelly handle all that.   He was pouring over some reports from the CFO when Pam came in and said she was leaving for the day. “I’ve got these reports to get through,” Jim said. “I know.   I’m going grocery shopping and to buy some better cookware for your place.   If I’m going to be cooking dinner there, I’ll need that.” Jim smiled.   “Good idea.” “I’ve still got a key from the days when we were preparing to bring you back from Pleasant Acres.   Take your time.   I’ll have dinner waiting when you are ready.” Jim just smiled.   Pam pulled a bottle from her bag.   “Here’s something to tie you over if you get hungry.” Jim went back to his reports.   Try as he might, he still couldn’t decipher this one section.   He picked up the phone and dialed.   “Are you still in the building, Kirk?” The CFO answered.  “Yep, you need something?” “I’m having some problems understanding part of the quarterly report can you come explain it?” “Sure, I’ll be there in a few minutes.” Jim picked up the bottle, took a few sucks, then put it down and went back to the report.   True to his word, Kirk entered a minute later.   “What’s the issue?” “I’ve got past this stuff on EBITDA, but I’m having issues understanding what these realized costs are.” Kirk explained that while they had received money for certain things, they were to pay for things that hadn’t happened yet, so they really couldn’t count it as income at this point.   He gave a few examples. “Ah, now it makes sense.” The CFO looked at the bottle on the desk.  “Having some late refreshment?” Jim looked a bit sheepish for having left it out.   “Yeah.” “Is that…?” The CFO trailed off. “Yeah, it’s Pam’s milk.” “You lucky dog.  I guess rank has its privileges,” he said with a smile as he left. Jim was a little embarassed but then forced himself to smile.   “Yeah, I guess it does,” he said to himself. Kelly came into the office and dropped a paper on Jim’s desk.  “Here are my recommendations for people who could make use of Pleasant Acres.   I’ve already sent a copy to Kathy, but since you know these people, I thought you’d like to see.” Jim nodded.   Kelly was doing a good job.   He read down the list of names, each accompanied by a short explanation of the target for improvement:  organizational skills, confidence, anger management, public speaking.   All seemed good, and he concurred with the assessment. “Good,” Jim said.   “I agree.   How are things going with you personally?” “Better than I expected.   Almost everybody is supportive of my change.   I’m starting to see some real physical changes from the hormones, too.   I’m happy.” “So you’re going to remain a woman?” “I think so.   I still have a long way to go, but I’m planning to stay with it.   I do have to bring up the issue with my parents yet.   How about you?”  Kelly was looking at the bottle on the desk. Jim leaned back in the chair and took a sip from it.  “It’s going well.  The diaper thing doesn’t bother me.   I figure maybe someday I may do as Dave did and get it reversed, but for now, I’m going with the flow.   Things are moving along between Pam and me, though.” “That’s good.” Kelly left and Jim shuffled through the last item on his stack of things to look at.   It was a report on the construction project.   The room was finished and they were beginning to move the furniture and supplies in.   It would be ready in a week or two.       

Kai: "uhm yeah I pinky promise" *he says holding up his pinky finger*

Chapter 1   I met Damien on the first day of my second year of medical school. The day started like most of my lecture days did: with me getting there early. As a wheelchair user, that was usually the safest option. If I arrived before everyone else, I could get into the lecture hall without fighting through backpacks and knees and people who somehow forgot that aisles were not personal storage space. Dr. Harvosen, my pathophysiology professor, had been kind to me since first year. He always made sure to unlock the room early so I could get my usual spot in the front row before someone dumped their laptop and iced coffee there like they were claiming territory in a war. Then he’d usually go and grab a coffee before class, and I’d get half an hour of quiet. Sometimes I used it to scroll on my phone. Sometimes I hydrated, took my meds, and closed my eyes for a bit. It was a pretty good arrangement, actually. Studying medicine with a disability like mine wasn’t easy. I have mitochondrial disease, which basically means my cells don’t make enough energy to be useful. It affects my whole body. I get fatigued easily. I deal with a lot of muscle weakness and autonomic dysfunction, hence the manual wheelchair. I faint often enough that it’s more annoying than surprising. Part of my digestive system stopped working properly when I was a teenager, so these days I mostly survive on a liquid diet. I’m fully incontinent too, which means diapers full-time. It was a lot. Obviously. But the university was good about accommodations, and I was good at keeping up with the course load. That had to count for something. “Morning, Quincy.” Dr. Harvosen opened the lecture hall door for me. “Come on in.” We exchanged our usual pleasantries, and I wheeled down to my spot at the front. As expected for an eight a.m. lecture, nobody else was there yet. The room was quiet, still half-dim and smelling faintly of whiteboard markers and old carpet. I took the opportunity to drink some water, take my meds, and let my eyes close for a few moments. I was just starting to relax when the door creaked open again. I glanced up, expecting Dr. Harvosen back with his coffee. Instead, it was a guy I didn’t recognise. Tall. Broad-shouldered. Messy dark hair, like he’d run his hands through it too many times on the way over. He was attractive in that very obvious, stereotypical way — fit body, nice outfit, brown eyes catching the early light through the lecture hall windows. My heart did one stupid little kick against my ribs. I immediately told it to calm down. The guy paused in the doorway, scanning the empty lecture hall. Then his eyes landed on me, and a small, surprised smile tugged at his mouth. “Morning,” he said, voice low, like he didn’t want to disturb the quiet. “Am I in the right place for Dr. Harvosen’s pathophys?” “Yeah, come on in.” I nodded toward the mostly empty room. “You’re a bit early. Harvosen just went for coffee. He’ll be back in a minute.” The guy smiled properly then, teeth straight and white like they had never personally experienced a cavity. “Oh, cool. I’m Damien.” “Quincy.” I shifted slightly in my chair, adjusting my posture as best I could under the harness. “Are you new?” “Nah, just starting in-person this semester.” Damien made his way over and dropped into the chair beside me. “I did online last year so I could keep up with work. But obviously this year’s more involved, so I figured I should probably show my face.” I nodded, trying to keep my expression casual even as my pulse did that annoying fluttery thing it sometimes did around people I found attractive. “Smart move. In-person hits different. Especially with labs and group stuff.” “Yeah, I’m realising that already.” Damien leaned back in his seat, stretching his long legs out under the desk. “I’ve been staring at diagrams on a screen for so long I forgot what it feels like to actually sit in a lecture hall. You’ve been here since first year?” “Yep. Local kid, more or less.” I tapped the armrest of my wheelchair lightly. “It’s good, though. Our cohort’s pretty friendly. There’s a tight crew. You’ll fit in once you get to know everyone.” “Oh, good to know.” He smiled. My heart did that stupid badum-badum thing again. It was dumb. Of course it was dumb. Damien had just shown up at an eight a.m. lecture looking like that, and I very quickly reminded myself of what I looked like. Short stature. Blonde curls like some knockoff Shirley Temple. Very obvious wheelchair situation. AFOs supporting my feet. A four-point harness across my chest so if I fainted, I wouldn’t fall forward out of my chair. Then there was the whole strawberry cardigan and white pants thing. And the diapers, obviously, if none of the rest of the list had been enough of a dealbreaker. Guys like Damien absolutely did not like guys like me. That was the end of the story, and I tried to force my heart to remember it. “So, what do you do for work?” I asked, partly to keep the conversation going and partly so I didn’t sit there staring at his face like an idiot. “Aged care.” Damien shrugged. “It’s good, actually. You learn a lot about the residents’ lives, and they get excited to see you every day.” His gaze flicked briefly over my chair, not pitying, just curious. “Gotta say, though, some of the ladies in my ward would kill for your pink chair, Quincy.” Heat rushed into my cheeks as I rested my hands on the pushrims. “Her name is Valerie.” Damien blinked. For half a second, I braced myself for the usual reaction. The laugh. The awkward pause. The oh, sorry, I didn’t realise we were naming mobility aids kind of face people made when they couldn’t tell whether I was joking. But Damien’s mouth just curved. “Valerie,” he repeated, like he was testing the name properly. “That’s a strong name.” “She’s a strong woman.” “She looks it.” He leaned slightly to the side, studying my chair with genuine interest rather than that awful pity-curiosity blend people sometimes had. “Pink frame, white wheels, floral spoke guards. Very classy. Bit intimidating.” “She has a reputation.” “I can see that.” Damien nodded seriously. “I’ll make sure not to get on her bad side.” I hated how quickly that made me smile. It wasn’t even that funny. It was barely a joke. But something about the way he said it — like the chair wasn’t an awkward thing to tiptoe around, but just an ordinary part of the room with an ordinary name and an ordinary personality — made something in my chest loosen. Most people either ignored Valerie completely, like acknowledging the wheelchair would break some unspoken rule, or they got weirdly fascinated by her. They asked how fast she went. They asked if they could push me. They asked if I’d ever done a wheelie. One guy in first year had asked if he could “take it for a spin,” as if Valerie was a go-kart and not, you know, my legs. Damien just accepted that she had a name. That was dangerous. I could not afford to find that charming. “So,” he said, leaning back again. “What do you do when you’re not being the unofficial pathophys welcoming committee?” I snorted. “Sleep, mostly.” “Fair.” “Study. Sleep. Complain about studying. Pretend I’m going to meal prep and then drink the same vanilla nutrition shake I always drink because chewing is fake and I don’t believe in it.” Damien gave a small laugh, but it wasn’t sharp. “Chewing is overrated.” “Exactly. Thank you.” “I mean, I personally enjoy it, but I support your stance.” “Wow. Allyship.” He grinned, and there it was again. That stupid, unfair face. The kind of face that made a person want to say funnier things than they were capable of saying at eight in the morning with autonomic dysfunction and a resting heart rate that had decided to behave like a trapped bird. I looked away first, busying myself with the cap of my water bottle. Bad idea. The whole thing was a bad idea. Attractive guy. Nice guy. Apparently not weird about wheelchairs. Worked in aged care, which meant he was probably one of those people who could talk casually about medication rounds and body fluids and wound dressings without flinching. That did not mean anything. It did not mean he would look at me as anything more than the small disabled guy in the front row who gave him directions on his first day in person. People could be kind without being interested. I knew that. I was a medical student. I could interpret data. I could recognise patterns. I could take one look at Damien and understand that the available evidence pointed very clearly toward do not get a crush on this man unless you want to ruin your semester. Then Damien looked at me and smiled again, and my brain threw the data directly into the bin. “So how did you find your first year?” He asked. I made a noise somewhere between a laugh and a groan. “That good, huh?” “It was good,” I said. “Mostly. Just… a lot.” Damien nodded like he understood that there were about eight different meanings packed into those two words. “It’s weird,” I continued, because apparently I had decided to keep talking. “Everyone tells you med school is hard, right? Like, they warn you. They say the workload is intense and you’ll be tired all the time and your life will become flashcards and caffeine. And then you get here, and it’s still somehow worse than they said.” “Encouraging.” “Deeply. Welcome.” He laughed, and I found myself smiling again despite every sensible part of me objecting. “But I liked it,” I admitted. “I mean, I hated parts of it. Obviously. Anatomy practicals were a sensory nightmare. The timetable was designed by someone who has clearly never met a disabled person. And if one more person told me I was ‘inspiring’ for attending a lecture while visibly unwell, I was going to start biting.” Damien’s mouth twitched. “Do you have a warning system for that?” “Yes. Valerie’s floral spoke guards turn red.” “Good to know.” “But overall, I liked it. I like medicine. I like understanding what’s happening inside people, even when the answer is terrible. I like that it’s complicated. I like that there’s always another layer.” Damien looked at me properly then, not in the chair way or the medical curiosity way, but like he was actually interested in the answer. That was also dangerous. “Did the uni treat you okay?” He asked, suddenly sounding deeply serious. The question caught me off guard. Not because it was strange. It was actually a pretty reasonable follow-up, considering I had just casually implied that the entire timetable had been designed by an able-bodied villain with access to Microsoft Excel. But people didn’t usually ask it like that. They asked if I had “support.” They asked if the uni was “helpful.” They asked if it was “hard,” in the same tone people used when they were already preparing to call me brave. Damien asked like he actually wanted to know if they had treated me properly. “Better than I expected, to be honest.” I answered after a moment. “They’ve been really flexible. Accommodations, accessible room allocations, attendance flexibility, extensions when my body decides cellular respiration is a hobby rather than a job. It’s been… not too bad. I haven’t had an issue yet.” Damien nodded, seemingly backing down from a fight he had already decided was worth getting involved in. “Well, that’s good to hear, at least.” I didn’t know what to do with that. It was one thing for someone to be polite. It was another thing entirely for someone I had known for approximately twelve minutes to look like he was ready to take on the university administration if I gave him a reason. That was not normal behaviour. Or maybe it was normal behaviour for Damien, which was worse. The lecture hall door opened again, and the quiet began to fracture as students trickled in—then poured in—voices layering over each other, backpacks thumping onto desks, the soft chaos of a room waking up around us. I watched it happen out of habit, tracking movement, mapping space, grounding myself in the familiar rhythm of it. And then I felt it. Not obvious. Not intrusive. Just… there. I turned slightly. Damien was looking at me. Not in that quick, polite way people did when they were checking if you were following along. Not the flicker of attention that came and went without meaning anything. He was actually looking. At my face. His gaze wasn’t fixed on my chair, or my hands, or the harness, or any of the things people usually noticed first. It was steady, thoughtful, like he was trying to understand something—not in a clinical way, not dissecting, just… taking me in. When he realised I’d caught him, he didn’t jerk away like he’d been caught doing something wrong. He just smiled. Small. Easy. Like it wasn’t a big deal. "I think," He said, stretching the syllables out. "I'd like to get to know you a bit more, Quincy."  I was going to have to transfer universities. Possibly interstate. Somewhere cold, maybe. Somewhere with fewer attractive men and more reliable lifts. “W-What?” My mouth stuttered before my brain could process what was happening. Damien’s smile softened. Not in a smug way. Not like he knew he had just taken a baseball bat to my central nervous system and was pleased with the damage. Just gentle. Patient. Like he had said something completely normal and was waiting for me to catch up. “I said I’d like to get to know you more.” “Yes, I heard that part.” “Then why did you say what?” “Because people say a lot of things and sometimes I need clarification on whether they mean them.” Damien’s eyebrows lifted slightly. I regretted speaking immediately. “That sounded less intense in my head,” I added. “It’s okay.” “It’s not. I’ve made it weird.” “You haven’t.” “I definitely have.” “You really haven’t.” I stared at him, deeply suspicious of his calm. The lecture hall was filling faster now. The quiet little bubble we’d been sitting in was dissolving under the noise of early morning conversation and chair legs scraping against the floor. People were arriving in clusters, calling out to friends, complaining about the hour, dropping bags onto desks with the heavy resignation of second-year medical students who had already lost the will to live and it was only week one. And Damien was still looking at me. “What about coffee?” He offered. “After class. We can head out to the cafe near the study garden. Would you come?” There were a million ways I could have answered. Flat out denied to protect my own feelings. Could have told him that I lived on a liquid diet of sadness that didn’t let me drink coffee. Could have told him that my autonomic dysfunction and hot sunlight didn’t normally blend well. But of course, when a man of this stature invited you on what was essentially a date, I found myself nodding before I even realised I was doing so. Damien’s smile widened. Not dramatically. Not in a way that suggested he had won. Just… pleased. Warm. Like my answer had actually mattered. “Yeah?” he asked. My brain finally caught up with my neck. Terrible timing, neck. “Apparently,” I said, because that was the best I could do while my nervous system was actively betraying me. “Cool.” Cool. He said it like this was all cool. Like he had not just asked me to coffee. Like I had not just agreed to coffee. Like my entire life had not just veered sharply off its planned academic trajectory and into whatever this was. “Just so you know,” I said, because panic made me informative, “I don’t really drink coffee.” Damien blinked. “Okay.” “I mean, I can go to a café. I just mostly do liquid nutrition and electrolyte drinks and things that taste like someone tried to describe vanilla to a protein factory.” “Okay,” he said again. No weird face. No awkward little flicker. No quick retreat into oh, never mind then, because apparently he had invited me to coffee for the outrageous reason of wanting to spend time with me, not because he had strong feelings about espresso. “They’ll probably have something you can drink,” he said. “Or you can bring whatever works for you. I mostly meant the sitting together part.” Oh. Right. The sitting together part. My fingers tightened around the cap of my water bottle. “Right,” I said, aiming for normal and landing somewhere near medically sedated. “Yes. Sitting. I can do sitting.” The moment the words left my mouth, I wanted to vanish. Damien’s mouth twitched. “Good skill.” “I’ve practiced.” “I can tell.” I looked down at Valerie’s frame. “Don’t flirt with me before pathophys. It’s unethical.” Damien went still for half a second. Then his eyebrows rose. Then, slowly, his smile turned into something unbearably delighted. Oh no. I had said that out loud. I had said flirt with me out loud. This was how I died. Not from mitochondrial disease. Not from dysautonomia. Not from the long-term consequences of my body treating ATP production like an optional group project. From opening my mouth near a handsome man. “I’ll keep that in mind,” Damien said, voice very carefully even. I closed my eyes. “Forget I said that.” “No.” “Damien.” “I think I’m going to remember it.” Chapter 2   The café was out by the study garden, tucked between a line of jacarandas and a low brick wall covered in climbing jasmine. It was one of those campus places that pretended to be relaxing despite being full of medical students actively speed-running caffeine dependency. There was a small kiosk for ordering, a scattering of outdoor tables, and just enough greenery to make everyone feel like they were touching grass without actually having to abandon their laptops. Damien walked beside me from the lecture theatre, matching Valerie’s pace like he had done it before. Not slowing down with exaggerated patience. Not drifting ahead and then awkwardly stopping. Just staying there, shoulder level with mine, as if my speed had become the default. I noticed. Unfortunately. I was trying very hard not to notice things about Damien. His hands. His shoulders. The way he ducked his head slightly when he listened, like he was giving the answer his full attention. The fact that he had invited me to coffee after knowing me for one lecture and had done it with the terrifying calm of a man who did not appear to be joking. Coffee. Except I didn’t drink coffee. So technically, this was sitting near coffee. A subtle but important distinction. The path from the lecture theatre to the garden was mostly smooth, but the joins in the concrete still travelled up through Valerie’s frame, little bumps that clicked through the footplate and into my AFOs. The plastic shells held my ankles in place beneath the hem of my trousers, firm against the bones, the Velcro straps snug enough that I was aware of them every time my feet shifted. Not painful. Just present. One of those constant background sensations my brain filed under necessary and ignored until I was tired. The harness was the same. The webbing crossed my chest beneath the strawberry cardigan, its pressure familiar over my sternum and shoulders, the buckle resting just low enough that I could feel it whenever I breathed too deeply. It made me look more secured than seated. More strapped in than relaxed. I had spent years pretending I did not notice that. I noticed. “Where do you usually sit?” Damien asked. I glanced toward the tables, already doing my usual scan. Shade. Space. Surface level. Distance from the kiosk. Nearest accessible bathroom. Sun movement. Number of people likely to bash into my wheels with tote bags. Whether I could reverse out without clipping the garden bed. Whether there was enough room if I needed to recline. Whether I looked too obvious planning an escape route for a coffee date that was not a coffee date. “There’s a table under that tree,” I said, nodding toward one near the garden bed. “If no one takes it before we get there.” Damien looked. “The one with the space on the left?” I blinked. “Yeah.” He started that way without making a thing of it. That was beginning to annoy me. Not because it was bad. Because it was good in a way I did not know what to do with. When we reached the table, he moved one of the chairs aside before I had to ask. No announcement. No self-congratulatory little smile. He just cleared the space, pushed the chair neatly out of the way, and stepped back. “That work?” I stared at him for half a second too long. “Yes,” I said, then busied myself with positioning Valerie at the table so I would not have to think about how easily he had done that. “Thanks.” I nudged forward, then back, then forward again until my footplate sat neatly under the table’s edge. The movement shifted the bulk at my hips, the soft padding of my diaper settling with a faint, private rustle beneath my clothes. It was one of those sounds no one else probably heard but that I heard loudly anyway, because bodies had a way of making you fluent in your own humiliations. The waistband sat warm against my skin, barrier cream faintly tacky from the morning routine, and I felt the familiar irrational urge to check that nothing showed even though I knew it didn’t. Damien sat opposite me. Not beside me, where he could loom. Not halfway around the table like he was unsure whether distance had legal implications. Opposite. Like we were two normal people having a normal drink after a normal lecture, and one of us was not actively wondering whether interstate transfers were still open. He pulled his phone out and scanned the QR code stuck to the metal table. “What can I get you?” “I brought my own,” I said, reaching into Valerie’s side bag. “The café tragically refuses to stock prescription vanilla sludge.” “Short-sighted business model.” “Deeply. They’re missing out on a very niche market.” I unzipped the side bag and dug past the usual inventory: electrolyte sachets, spare gloves, medication case, wipes in their crinkly packet, a folded changing mat, an emergency diaper sealed in plastic, a pulse oximeter, two syringes still in their sterile wrappers, and a tangle of tubing I had shoved in there badly that morning because I had been running late and optimistic, which was always a mistake. The medical smell puffed out faintly when I opened the bag. Plastic. Alcohol wipes. The powdery-clean scent of disposable supplies. Not strong enough for anyone else to comment on, probably, but enough for me to feel like I had brought a tiny pharmacy to a garden café. I pulled out my formula bottle and set it on the table. Damien’s gaze flicked to it, then returned to my face. Quick. Neutral. Not pretending he hadn’t seen, but not making it an event. “What are the tasting notes?” he asked. I paused with my hand on the cap. “Of this?” “Mm.” “Vanilla, chalk, despair, and mild institutional optimism.” His mouth curved. “Sounds exclusive.” “Prescription only.” “Very fancy.” “It’s practically champagne.” “Then I’ll get something appropriately inferior.” He looked down at the menu on his phone. “Iced coffee. Basic, but dependable.” “You say that like dependable is a bad thing.” “It isn’t.” “No?” His eyes lifted to mine. “I like dependable.” The sentence should not have done anything to me. It did. I looked down and twisted the cap off my bottle, because apparently my entire survival strategy around Damien involved avoiding eye contact and hoping my autonomic nervous system did not file a complaint. Damien ordered quickly, then set his phone screen-down on the table. That made me nervous. People who put their phones away during conversation were dangerous. It meant they intended to listen. He leaned back in his chair, relaxed but focused, and looked at me like he had settled in. “So,” he said. “Tell me about yourself.” I stared at him. Nobody ever meant that question. Not really. Tell me about yourself usually meant tell me something tidy. A hobby. A hometown. A favourite movie. Something appropriately charming and easy to file away. It did not mean explain the complete operational manual of your highly unreliable body before this attractive man can develop the wrong impression and make your inevitable disappointment worse. “About myself,” I repeated. “Yeah.” “That’s broad.” “I know.” “You’ll need to narrow the question.” Damien’s mouth twitched. “All right. Start with what you’d want me to know if I was going to keep sitting with you.” Oh. That was worse. That was much worse. I looked at my formula bottle. The condensation had already started collecting on the plastic, a cold ring beginning to form on the table beneath it. I shifted slightly, and the harness tightened across my chest with the movement, holding me in its firm X of webbing. My AFOs kept my feet neatly aligned on the footplate below, heels cupped, toes pointed where they were supposed to point. My bag sat heavy against Valerie’s side, full of everything I might need if my body decided to become a situation before clinical skills. I could tell him normal things. I liked pathology. I had a small group of friends. I watched terrible cooking videos even though my digestive system had declared war on solids. I owned three versions of the same cardigan in different colours because soft clothes were one of the few joys left in this collapsing society. But Damien was watching me too directly for an easy answer. Not demanding. Just waiting. “I have mitochondrial disease,” I said eventually. He nodded once. “You mentioned that before.” “Right. Well. It’s not just a wheelchair thing.” I tapped my fingers against the bottle, then stopped when I realised I was doing it. “People see Valerie and assume legs. Which is fair, because she is very visible and very pink. But mito affects everything. My cells don’t make energy properly, and apparently every part of my body took that personally.” Damien’s expression stayed open. Interested, but not clinical in the cold way. He was listening like I was telling him about my life, not presenting a case study. “Fatigue is the big one,” I continued. “And muscle weakness. My legs are unreliable, but so are my arms if I overdo it. Sitting upright takes energy. Pushing takes energy. Thinking takes energy, which is unfortunate, given the whole medical school situation.” “Very inconsiderate timing.” “Exactly. I’ve given my mitochondria feedback. They refuse to engage.” His smile appeared, but he did not interrupt. “I can technically walk a little,” I said. “Transfers. A few steps on a good day with AFOs. But it costs too much and I fall too much, so Valerie is full-time. People sometimes get weird about that. They think if you can take three steps, using a wheelchair is somehow dishonest.” I glanced down automatically, though my braces were mostly hidden under my trousers. I could feel them anyway: the hard plastic along my calves, the straps pressing through my socks, the way they kept my feet from folding in on themselves when my muscles got tired. They were not dramatic. They were not visible enough for strangers to make inspiring comments about. They were just there, quietly doing their job, like so much of my gear. Damien’s jaw tightened slightly. “That’s ridiculous.” “It is. But people are very committed to misunderstanding mobility aids.” I glanced down at Valerie’s frame. “She’s freedom. That’s the important part. She means I can get to class, live independently, do more than move from bed to couch and call that a life.” Damien looked at Valerie properly then, with the same serious respect he had given her in the lecture theatre. “Then I’m glad you have her.” The words hit me so unexpectedly that I had to look away. People usually said they were sorry. Sorry I needed the chair. Sorry things were hard. Sorry, in the vague, helpless way that turned my whole existence into something unfortunate. Damien said he was glad. That was dangerous. “Careful,” I said, aiming for dry and landing somewhere softer. “Valerie gets very smug when praised.” “She deserves to be smug.” “She does, actually.” His coffee order buzzed through on his phone, but he ignored it for a moment, eyes still on me. “Keep going.” I blinked. “What?” “You stopped.” His voice was calm. Not forceful, exactly, but there was a steadiness to it that made my pulse trip. “I asked to know you. Don’t shrink halfway through telling me.” I stared at him. There it was. The thing about Damien that was beginning to feel especially hazardous. He wasn’t pushy. If I said stop, I suspected he would. But if I gave him an answer, he expected me not to apologise for it. There was something quietly dominant in that. Something confident. Like he was perfectly willing to hold the conversation steady if I started trying to wriggle out of it. My mouth went dry. “I’m not shrinking,” I said. His eyebrows lifted. “I’m pausing dramatically.” “Of course.” “For narrative effect.” “Then continue the narrative.” Oh, absolutely not. He could not say things like that. I took a sip of formula to give myself a second. It tasted exactly like chemical vanilla, which was grounding in the most depressing way possible. The cold bottle left a damp line against my palm, and the cap clicked faintly when I set it down beside the straw. My body liked routine. Familiar tastes. Familiar pressures. The strap across my chest. The braces on my legs. The quiet security of knowing Valerie’s side bag was full of things I hated needing but would panic without. “My autonomic nervous system is also a disaster,” I said. “Dysautonomia. Heart rate, blood pressure, temperature regulation. Heat is bad. Standing is bad. Existing is sometimes bad if my body is feeling theatrical. I faint a lot.” Damien’s gaze flicked briefly to the harness across my chest. “That’s what the straps are for?” “Yeah. Four-point harness. Keeps me from falling forward if I pass out in the chair. Very race car. Very toddler. Extremely stylish.” The words came out flippant, but my fingers had already found the edge of the lower strap, rubbing at the ribbed texture of the webbing through the cardigan. The harness held me with the kind of firm, practical intimacy I had long ago stopped resenting and never quite stopped being embarrassed by. On hot days, the straps trapped warmth. On long days, they left faint pressure marks. On bad days, they were the difference between slumping safely and waking up with my face on concrete. “You don’t look like a toddler.” My face warmed immediately. That was not the tone I expected. He did not say it like reassurance. He said it like correction. Firm. Direct. Almost offended by the idea. “I didn’t mean literally,” I said. “I know.” There was a small silence. I looked at him, and Damien looked back like he had no intention of letting me laugh my way past it. “You look like an adult man in a strawberry cardigan and a harness,” he said. “And for the record, it works.” My brain stopped. Completely. It works. What did that mean? No. I knew what that meant. That was the problem. Damien was not saying it with plausible deniability. He was not giving me room to pretend he meant my outfit was academically appropriate or visually cohesive. He meant attractive. He meant he was attracted. To me. Sitting there with formula and a harness and AFOs under the table and a diaper under my soft trousers and a body that required more management than some hospital wards. “You can’t flirt with the harness,” I said weakly. “I’m flirting with you.” He stood, finally glancing toward the kiosk. “And I can multitask.” Then he walked away to collect his coffee like he had not just derailed my entire cardiovascular system. I sat there in the shade, staring after him. This was terrible. I was enjoying it. That was worse. Damien returned with his iced coffee and one napkin. He placed the napkin under my formula bottle without comment, then sat down again. I looked at the napkin. “For condensation,” he said. I stared at it a little longer. Thoughtful napkin. Very dangerous artefact. Potentially cursed. “You’re doing a lot,” I said. His mouth curved. “Getting a napkin?” “Not making things weird.” “Do you want me to make things weird?” “No.” “Then I won’t.” “That’s not how people work.” “It’s how I’m trying to work.” I had to look away again. He was not allowed to be that good at things. “The fainting,” he said after a moment. “Do you usually know before it happens?” “Usually. Not always. Grey vision, ears ringing, sudden nausea, light-headedness. Sometimes I get enough warning to recline or get somewhere safe. Sometimes I just wake up confused and annoyed.” “What should someone do?” I looked up. There was no hesitation in his face. No dramatics. No panic. Just practical interest. “If I say I’m dizzy, get me out of heat if we’re in it. Don’t crowd me. Ask simple questions. Electrolytes help. Don’t unclip the harness unless I’m vomiting, not breathing properly, or in danger. It’s doing its job.” He nodded once, taking it in. The fact that he did not look down at the buckle again made it easier to breathe. He knew it was there. He knew what it was for. He did not need to study it like a puzzle. “If I’m on the floor, recovery position if I’m breathing normally. Time it. If it’s more than five minutes, I hit my head, breathing is weird, seizure activity, or something seems very different, then ambulance. Otherwise, don’t let random people panic-call one because they saw a disabled person do a known disabled person thing.” His mouth tightened. “That happens?” “Yes.” “People are exhausting.” “That’s why I sleep so much.” He laughed quietly, but his eyes stayed serious. I appreciated that more than I wanted to. “My digestive system is also useless,” I said, lifting the formula bottle slightly. “Hence this. Gastroparesis, dysmotility, general GI betrayal. Solid food is complicated. Sometimes I can eat tiny amounts. Sometimes I can’t. Sometimes tube feeds enter the chat. It depends.” “Do you miss eating?” The question was quiet. Careful. I looked toward the kiosk display. Muffins. Banana bread. Something lemony dusted with icing sugar. The smell of coffee was everywhere, bitter and warm, cut through by sugar and toasted bread. My stomach gave a dull, uninterested twist, less hunger than memory. “Sometimes. Mostly I miss not having to think about it. I miss the social part. Sharing chips. Cake at birthdays. Ordering something without making it a whole medical explanation.” I shrugged, and the harness resisted the movement slightly. “But it’s not the end of the world. It’s just annoying.” Damien watched me for a moment over his iced coffee. “What would you pick?” “What?” “If it wasn’t complicated. If your body gave you a day off. What would you pick?” I stared at him. Nobody asked it like that. People asked if I missed food in a way that made me feel like a charity advertisement. Damien asked like he was collecting a preference. “Lemon tart,” I said before I could overthink it. His eyes flicked to the display cabinet. “And hot chips,” I added. “The beach kind. Too salty. Wrapped in paper.” “Good choice.” “And mango.” “Very Queensland.” “I contain multitudes.” “You do.” He said it softly enough that the words sank under my skin. I looked down at my bottle. “And strawberries?” he asked. I glanced up. His gaze had dropped to the embroidered cuffs of my cardigan. My face went hot again. “Obviously,” I said. “Obviously,” he echoed, smiling. I hated how much I liked that. The conversation could have stayed there. It could have remained safely on lemon tart and hot chips and the tragedy of chemical vanilla. But Damien had asked to know me, and I had apparently decided to be reckless with the truth. “I’m also incontinent,” I said. The words came out blunt. Too blunt, probably. There was a small pause. I kept my gaze fixed on the bottle because looking at him felt impossible. “Bladder and bowel. Full-time diapers. Supplies in Valerie’s bag. Very glamorous. Very much not first coffee material, but if we’re doing the whole tell me about yourself thing, there it is.” The air seemed to get louder in the second afterward. The hiss of the coffee machine. A burst of laughter from another table. The plastic crackle of my side bag shifting against Valerie’s frame as the breeze nudged the strap. I could feel everything at once: the diaper’s warm padding between me and the seat cushion, the faint ridge of the waistband beneath my shirt, the harness buckle against my ribs, the AFO straps holding my feet still under the table. All of it suddenly felt visible, even though none of it was. Damien did not answer immediately. That scared me. Then his voice came, steady and close. “Look at me.” My heart kicked hard. I did. Slowly. His expression was calm, but there was something firm underneath it. Not cold. Not controlling in a way that made me feel trapped. Just grounded. Like he was not going to let me throw the fact at his feet and then stare at the table while I waited for disgust. “I’m not bothered,” he said. “You don’t have to say that.” “I know. I’m saying it because it’s true.” “It’s different when it’s not work.” “Yes,” he said, and the quick agreement surprised me. “It is. I work in aged care, but this isn’t work. You’re not a task. You’re not a resident. You’re a man I asked to sit with me because I wanted to know him.” My throat tightened. Damien leaned forward slightly. His voice lowered, not enough to become secretive, but enough that the words were clearly for me. “Bodies need things, Quincy. Yours needs more planning than some. That doesn’t make you less attractive. It doesn’t make you less adult. And it definitely doesn’t make me less interested.” I forgot how to breathe. Again. A common theme. “You barely know me,” I whispered. “I know.” His gaze stayed steady. “I’m not pretending this is everything. I’m saying I’m not scared off by the information.” “You should be.” “No.” The word was quiet, but absolute. I stared at him. He stared back. “No?” I repeated. “No,” he said again. “You don’t get to decide for me that I should be scared.” My mouth closed. There was something deeply unfair about that. The confidence of it. The way he said it without raising his voice. The way he made no sound like a full sentence. “You’re very direct,” I said. “I know.” “Has that ever caused problems for you?” “Sometimes.” “And yet?” His smile returned, small and dangerous. “I’m direct when I want something.” My pulse stumbled. “And you want something?” “Yes.” The café noise blurred a little. “What?” Damien’s eyes did not move from my face. “Right now? I want you to stop listing parts of yourself like warnings.” My fingers tightened around the formula bottle. “I want you to tell me things because you want me to know them, not because you’re trying to talk me out of being interested.” His voice stayed even, almost gentle, but there was no softness in the certainty. “And I want you to believe me when I say I am interested.” Oh, that was too much. Entirely too much. My body, traitorous and dramatic, responded by sending a rush of heat up my neck. My blood pressure gave one unhelpful wobble, not enough for actual danger, but enough to remind me that I was strapped into Valerie for good reason. The harness took the tiny slump before it could become anything else, webbing pulling firm across my shoulders. Damien noticed. Of course he noticed. His expression softened without losing that steady focus. “Too much?” That was the worst part. He could push, then stop. He could be bold and still leave the door open. I swallowed. “No.” His smile was slow. “No?” “No,” I repeated, quieter. “Just… effective.” He looked pleased. Very pleased. “Effective,” he echoed. “Don’t make me regret that.” “I won’t.” “You look like you will.” “I’m enjoying it.” “I can tell.” “I like making you blush.” “It’s autonomic dysfunction.” “It’s adorable.” “Damien.” “I know what I said.” I pressed the cool bottle against my cheek. “You are medically irresponsible.” “I’m willing to be supervised.” “That somehow made it worse.” His laugh was low and warm. I looked away, but I was smiling before I could stop myself. For a few moments, we let the conversation breathe. Damien drank his coffee. I drank the chemical vanilla. The magpie beneath the neighbouring table successfully stole a piece of pastry and strutted away like it had achieved tenure. Somewhere under the table, my right foot shifted half a centimetre inside its brace, plastic creaking softly against the strap, and the ordinary little sound grounded me more than I wanted to admit. “So,” Damien said, a smile biting behind his lips. “Tell me the haircare routine.” I stared at him. Of all the questions I had expected, that was not one of them. “Sorry?” “The curls,” he said, gesturing vaguely toward my head with his coffee cup. “I’m assuming they don’t just happen like that.” I stared at him because, out of every possible follow-up question to the complete medical inventory I had just given him, that was not the one I had prepared for. I had braced myself for something practical or uncomfortable. Did I need help transferring? How often did the incontinence happen? Was mitochondrial disease progressive? Did I have a normal life expectancy? I had answers for those. I had tidy versions and blunt versions and versions polished smooth by years of watching people decide how sad to be. I did not, however, have a prepared response for a very attractive man leaning across a café table and asking about my hair like it was a point of personal interest. “They mostly happen like this,” I said, which was not strictly true but felt safer than admitting I had a whole routine. “My hair has strong opinions.” Damien’s gaze lingered near my temple, where one curl had escaped the rest and was hanging too close to my glasses. The look was not clinical. It was not that detached, observational thing med students did when they were trying to identify a rash without appearing to identify a rash. It was warmer than that. Slower. Appreciative in a way that made my skin prickle under the soft collar of my cardigan and along the edges of the harness straps beneath it. “I can tell,” he said. “They suit you.” I made the mistake of looking directly at him. Damien had this way of saying things like he had already decided they were true and was simply letting me catch up. Not careless confidence. Not arrogance. Just certainty. It settled over the table with the same weight as his earlier no, and I found myself gripping my formula bottle with both hands, as if chemical vanilla could anchor me to the earth. “You’ve moved from medical disclosure to hair compliments very quickly,” I said. “That’s a dangerous conversational pivot.” “It seemed like the right time.” “The right time?” “You looked like you needed to stop trying to scare me away.” My mouth closed around the reply I had been building. The air under the tree shifted softly, carrying the smell of coffee and damp soil and jasmine from the wall behind us. Damien’s iced coffee sat near his wrist, condensation sliding down the plastic cup onto the table, but he did not reach for the napkin this time. His attention was all on me, and there was something almost unnerving about being looked at by someone who seemed to notice both the things I offered and the things I tried to hide behind them. “I wasn’t trying to scare you away,” I said, even though the lie was weak enough to need mobility support of its own. Damien’s mouth curved, but he did not argue. He only leaned back a little, giving the silence room to expose me properly. That was becoming another problem. He did not rush to fill spaces. He let them sit there until I had to decide whether I was brave enough to step into them. “I was providing relevant information,” I corrected. “Mm,” he said. “Relevant information like your cells being dramatic, Valerie having management energy, and your hair forming a union.” “All essential.” “Very.” His eyes dropped again, not to the bottle or the harness, but to the loose curl brushing my cheek. “Especially the hair.” It was completely unfair how a person could make especially the hair sound like something that belonged in a dimly lit restaurant and not outside a university café while a pastry-thieving magpie conducted organised crime three metres away. My face warmed. I knew it did because Damien’s expression shifted minutely, pleasure flickering across it before he controlled it. Not smugness, exactly. Worse. Satisfaction. Like he enjoyed affecting me and was disciplined enough not to pounce on it unless I gave him room. “You’re enjoying this too much,” I muttered. “I am,” he admitted. “You make it very easy.” “My autonomic nervous system makes it easy. I’m mostly a bystander.” “I don’t think you’re ever mostly a bystander.” That should not have hit the way it did. It was not even overtly flirtatious. It was worse than flirtatious. It sounded like he had formed an opinion about me from the way I talked, the way I joked, the way I admitted humiliating things at a café table and tried to make them sound like footnotes. It sounded like he had seen agency in a body most people interpreted as limitation. My throat tightened, so I looked down at the napkin under my formula bottle and pretended the tiny spreading ring of condensation required study. Damien shifted forward. The movement was small, but my whole body noticed. My hands tightened instinctively around the bottle, and his gaze flicked to them, then back to my face. He did not reach immediately. He lifted his hand slowly enough that I had time to understand the intention before it happened, slowly enough that I could have moved away. His voice, when it came, was quiet and maddeningly steady. “You’ve got a curl in your eyes.” I stopped breathing properly. The curl was not in my eyes. It was near my eyes. Adjacent, maybe. A mild visual inconvenience at most. But Damien was looking at it with such focused intent that I could not make myself correct him. He reached across the table, his hand broad and warm-looking, and for one suspended second his fingers hovered near my cheek. I should have said something. Anything. A joke, preferably. Something about workplace rights for politically ambitious curls. Something about professional boundaries and hair-based interventions. Instead, I sat absolutely still as Damien tucked the curl behind my ear with a touch so careful it felt indecent. Not indecent in the crude way. Nothing about it was crude. That was the problem. His fingertips brushed the side of my face, barely there, and the contact was so gentle it went straight through every defence I had carefully built over twenty-two years of being handled by necessity. Doctors touched me to assess. Nurses touched me to treat. Physios touched me to position. Support workers touched me to help. People touched my chair without asking, touched my shoulder to get my attention, touched my life with their assumptions and called it kindness. Damien touched me like he wanted to. Like he had chosen the smallest possible gesture and still meant every second of it. I melted. There was no dignified word for it. I simply lost structural integrity. My shoulders softened against the harness, the straps catching me before the movement turned into a slump, my fingers loosened on the bottle, and my entire face went hot with a speed that was, even for me, clinically impressive. The curl stayed tucked behind my ear. Damien’s hand lingered for half a breath longer than necessary, his thumb passing once, almost accidentally, near the curve of my cheekbone before he withdrew. By the time he sat back, I had forgotten every language I knew, including English and the formal academic dialect required for tutorial participation. Damien looked at me over his coffee, and the expression on his face was not triumphant. It was worse. It was tenderly amused, like he knew exactly what he had done to me and was pleased, but not because he had won anything. Because he had been allowed. “You okay there?” he asked. That was a cruel question, given the circumstances. I was clearly not okay. I was a pile of medical symptoms and strawberry-coloured feelings held upright by a four-point harness, rigid ankle braces, and the sheer grace of Valerie’s engineering. I opened my mouth and produced no sound whatsoever. Damien’s smile deepened. “Quincy.” Using my name like that should also have been illegal. He did not say it sharply. He said it like an instruction wrapped in velvet. Like he expected me to come back to myself because he had called me. I did, unfortunately. “That was not medically responsible,” I managed. “No?” “No. You can’t just reach across a table and—” I stopped because describing it would require admitting that the curl tuck had almost ended me. “And what?” I glared at him, or tried to. “You know what.” His eyes warmed. “I do.” “Then why ask?” “Because I like hearing you say things.” I made a faint, wounded noise and pressed the cool side of the formula bottle against my cheek. It did almost nothing. Damien watched this with visible enjoyment, and I was horrified to discover that I did not want him to stop. Being wanted by him in this gentle, deliberate, unembarrassed way was doing something catastrophic to my sense of self-preservation. “You’re very pretty,” Damien said. The words were quiet enough not to carry beyond the table, but they landed with the force of a dropped textbook. I stared at him. My brain tried to reject the statement on technical grounds. Pretty was a word for other people. For people who could sit at cafés without calculating bathroom distance. For people who did not have to plan their outfits around braces, straps, pressure points, absorbency, temperature regulation, and easy access to medical supplies. Pretty was for people whose bag did not smell faintly like antiseptic and vanilla formula. Pretty was for people who did not come with explanations. Damien looked at me as if he heard every one of those objections before I made them. “You don’t have to argue,” he said. “I wasn’t going to.” “You were preparing to.” “I was collecting evidence.” “Against me?” “Against your eyesight.” His smile flickered. “My eyesight is fine.” “You’ve had it checked recently?” “Quincy.” “What? I’m concerned about clinical accuracy.” “You’re deflecting.” “Obviously.” “Don’t.” Again, there it was. Not a request exactly, and not an order in any frightening sense. Just a firm hand on the runaway trolley of my panic. Damien’s voice stayed calm, but it carried enough authority that I stopped. I hated how effective it was. I hated how much some part of me wanted to be stopped before I could turn myself into a joke and disappear inside it. He leaned forward, forearms on the table, gaze steady on mine. “You told me a lot about your body because you thought the information would change how I looked at you. It did.” My stomach dropped. Damien held up a hand slightly, stopping my panic before it could fully launch. “Not like that.” I swallowed hard. “It changed how I looked at you because now I know more,” he said. “I know Valerie means freedom. I know the harness keeps you safe. I know the formula isn’t just a drink, it’s how you get through the day. I know the braces under the table are part of how you make transfers possible. I know you carry supplies and instructions and contingency plans everywhere you go because your body makes you. I know some of that hurts and some of it is boring and some of it is humiliating because people have taught you it should be.” My eyes stung. I looked away, but Damien’s voice followed, steady and low. “And I still think you’re pretty,” he said. “I still think your curls are distracting. I still think the cardigan is adorable. I still want to sit here and learn what makes you laugh. None of the information made me want you less.” I could not look at him after that. Looking at him would be fatal, or at least deeply compromising. I stared at the tabletop until the little wet ring under my bottle blurred slightly, and I blinked hard because absolutely not. I was not going to cry over a curl being tucked behind my ear and a man with a dangerous voice saying he still wanted to sit with me. Damien did not call attention to it. He did not soften into pity. He did not apologise for being kind, which was good because I might actually have died if he had. He only nudged the napkin a fraction further under my bottle when the condensation threatened to creep past it. The napkin. Again with the napkin. “You’re doing it again,” I said, voice embarrassingly rough. “Doing what?” “Being… effective.” His smile was audible before I was brave enough to see it. “That’s still the word we’re using?” “It’s medically precise.” “I like it.” “You would.” When I finally looked back at him, Damien’s expression was open and warm, but there was still that controlled edge beneath it. The quiet confidence. The sense that he knew exactly what he wanted and was allowing me the time to believe it without ever pretending he was uncertain. It should have scared me more than it did. The curl he had tucked behind my ear slipped free again almost immediately, because my hair was treacherous and had apparently chosen chaos. Damien noticed. His eyes flicked to it, then to me. “No,” I said. He raised one eyebrow. “I didn’t say anything.” “You were about to.” “I was considering my options.” “Your options are limited.” “Are they?” “Yes.” “What if I asked this time?” My face went hot again, which was deeply unfair because I had not yet recovered from the first incident. Damien’s mouth twitched, but he waited. Patient. Watchful. A menace with excellent boundaries. The curl brushed my cheek. I could have tucked it back myself. Easily. I had hands, mostly functional ones, and a lifetime of managing my own hair when it became politically active. But Damien was looking at me like the choice belonged to me, and the terrible truth was that I wanted him to do it again. Possibly I was dying. Possibly this was what dying felt like. “Fine,” I said, barely above a mutter. “But don’t look so pleased about it.” Damien’s smile turned slow enough to be classified as severe flirtation. “I’m going to look pleased.” “You’re impossible.” “I know.” This time, when he reached over, I knew it was coming. That did not help. If anything, it made it worse. His fingers brushed my temple, warm and careful, catching the curl and guiding it behind my ear with deliberate softness. My eyes nearly closed on their own, which was humiliating and also completely beyond my control. The touch lingered for one breath, and when he drew back, his gaze stayed on my face like he had found something he intended to remember. “There,” he said, voice low. “Better.” I sat there, utterly ruined. The magpie stole another crumb from under a chair. The coffee machine hissed from the kiosk. Somewhere nearby, a student complained about renal physiology. Life continued with astonishing disrespect for the fact that I had just been reduced to a faint blush and a half-empty bottle of prescription vanilla. “I need you to understand,” I said, after several seconds of trying to reassemble myself, “that I am going to be useless in clinical skills now.” Damien laughed, and the sound was soft enough to make me smile despite myself. “Because of the curl?” “Because of your criminal conduct.” “I asked the second time.” “The first offence still counts.” “I’ll accept a warning.” “You’re on probation.” His eyes warmed. “Does probation involve seeing you again?” I stared at him, and for once I did not have a quick enough joke. Damien’s smile gentled. “That wasn’t rhetorical.” My hands shifted in my lap, fingers brushing the hem of my cardigan, then the edge of the lower harness strap beneath it. The webbing was solid under my touch. Real. So were the braces against my calves, the diaper beneath my clothes, the bottle on the table, the bag full of supplies at my side. So was Damien, sitting across from all of it after everything I had told him, looking at me like I had not become less possible. It would have been easy to retreat into sarcasm. Easier still to tell him that this was too fast, too strange, too unlikely. But the curl was still tucked behind my ear, my cheek still remembered the brush of his fingers, and Damien was sitting there looking at me like my maybe would matter. “Maybe,” I said. It was the smallest answer. Cowardly, almost. But it was real. Damien accepted it like I had handed him something precious. “Maybe is enough for now.” I looked down before my face could betray me further, but the smile came anyway, helpless and shy and far too honest for a person who had been trying to maintain a safe emotional distance. “Don’t be smug,” I said. “I’m not.” I glanced up. He was absolutely smug. But underneath it, he looked happy. That was what got me. Not the confidence, not the flirting, not even the curl tuck that had temporarily destroyed my motor planning. It was the happiness. The fact that my maybe had mattered to him. I took another sip of chemical vanilla and tried to pretend my whole world had not just tilted two degrees toward Damien. It had. Unfortunately. And when his eyes dropped once more to the curl behind my ear, his expression soft and unapologetically pleased, I realised with a sickening amount of warmth that I was probably going to let it. Chapter 3   I expected Damien to become a one-day phenomenon. That sounded dramatic, but I had evidence. Very attractive people had a habit of appearing briefly in my life, saying one or two things that rewired my nervous system, and then returning to whatever higher plane of existence produced jawlines like that. It was the natural order of things. They passed through. They were charming. They made eye contact for a medically inadvisable length of time. Then they disappeared into friendship groups full of other symmetrical people who could eat sushi without consulting a gastrointestinal management plan. Damien did not disappear. In fact, he did the opposite, which was much worse. He showed up. The next lecture, he arrived eight minutes after me and twenty minutes before everyone else, carrying an iced coffee in one hand and a paper bag in the other. He came down the aisle without hesitation, took the seat beside me like it had already become habit, and placed the paper bag on the desk between us. “For the magpie,” he said. I looked at the bag. “You brought tribute?” “Insurance.” “That magpie stole twice from the café yesterday.” “Exactly. I respect strategy.” I stared at him for a moment, then at the paper bag, then back at his face. He looked entirely serious, which was a devastating choice on his part. Damien’s seriousness could be funny in a way that made me forget to protect myself. He had a talent for delivering nonsense as if it belonged in a patient handover. “The magpie isn’t here,” I said. “Not yet.” “It’s a lecture theatre.” “Ambitious birds go where the opportunity is.” I should not have laughed. Laughing encouraged him. Unfortunately, my body had not received the memo about emotional restraint, and the sound escaped before I could make it smaller. It bounced softly in the empty room, startlingly bright against the dull smell of carpet and disinfectant and morning marker fumes. Damien smiled like he had been aiming for it. That was another thing I was beginning to learn about him. Damien liked making me laugh, but not in the noisy way some people did, all performance and demand. He did not throw jokes at me and wait for applause. He just placed small ridiculous things in my path and watched to see whether I picked them up. I did. Often. It was becoming a concern. “What’s actually in the bag?” I asked. “A blueberry muffin.” “For you or the hypothetical lecture theatre magpie?” “For me. But I’m open to negotiation if the bird union escalates.” “Wise.” He opened the bag, and the sweet smell of baked sugar and warm berries drifted out, mingling with the sharper scent of his coffee. My stomach twisted with an old, pointless kind of recognition. Not hunger exactly. It was never that simple anymore. More like memory. Blueberry muffins were soft and crumbly and used to leave purple stains on fingertips. I remembered eating them in high school, back when I still thought digestive issues were temporary plot devices and not a long-term structural feature of my life. Damien glanced at me, just once. He noticed. Of course he did. Damien noticed everything in a way that was starting to feel less alarming and more… careful. He did not apologise. He did not hide the muffin like food had become morally offensive in my presence. He just tore a small piece off, ate it, and nudged his coffee a little further away from my notes so the condensation would not spread. I hated how much that mattered. The room was still mostly empty. Outside the high windows, the morning light lay pale and flat across the campus buildings, catching on wet leaves left over from overnight rain. My hands rested on Valerie’s pushrims, thumbs tucked against the smooth metal, the familiar coolness grounding me. The footplate hummed faintly under my shoes whenever someone walked past the back of the lecture hall. My AFOs held my ankles in their usual firm grip, plastic cupping bone and muscle, Velcro straps snug beneath the hems of my trousers. The harness crossed my chest in its steady X, warm already under my cardigan despite the air-conditioning. I had chosen a pale yellow cardigan today. Lemons embroidered on the cuffs. Damien noticed that too. His eyes dipped to my sleeve. “New cardigan?” “No.” “New to me, then.” “That is not the same thing.” “It is from my perspective.” “You’ve known me for one day. Everything is new to you.” “Not everything.” I looked at him suspiciously. “What does that mean?” Damien leaned back in his seat, the morning light catching on the side of his face. “Valerie has a reputation. You have strong feelings about chemical vanilla. Your hair gets political when unattended. You use sarcasm when you’re nervous, which seems to be most of the time around me.” My face heated instantly. “There it is,” he said, far too pleased. “It’s dysautonomia.” “It’s still cute.” “It is medically mediated.” “And cute.” “Stop diagnosing me with cute.” “I’m not diagnosing. I’m observing.” I opened my mouth to argue, but Dr. Harvosen walked in then with his coffee and a stack of notes tucked under one arm, sparing me from whatever foolish thing my panic was about to produce. Damien looked forward, smiling into his coffee like he knew exactly how lucky I had just been. I spent the lecture learning two things. The first was about inflammatory pathways in chronic disease, which was academically relevant and probably examinable. The second was that Damien had very neat handwriting for someone with hands that large. That was not academically relevant at all, and yet my brain recorded it with distressing commitment. He wrote in dark blue pen, not black. His notes were tidy but not decorative, with little arrows linking concepts and the occasional underlined phrase when Harvosen said something in his this-will-be-on-the-exam voice. He leaned forward when he concentrated, one elbow on the desk, fingers curled loosely around his pen. Every now and then, when Harvosen changed slides too quickly, Damien made a quiet noise of irritation under his breath. By the third time, I had to press my lips together to avoid smiling. Halfway through the lecture, my right hand started to tremble. It was small at first. A flutter through my fingers, annoying more than anything. Then it deepened, enough that my pen tapped irregularly against my notebook. Tick. Tick-tick. Tick. The sound seemed very loud to me, though it was probably swallowed by the room full of keyboards and shuffling paper. I set the pen down and flexed my fingers against my palm. Damien’s gaze flicked over. Not to my face first. To my hand. Then to my notes. Then back to the slide. He did not say anything. For one awful second, I expected the usual. Do you need help? Are you okay? Should I get someone? The whispered concern that somehow managed to make a lecture hall feel like a stage. Instead, Damien turned his own notebook slightly, sliding it a fraction closer to the edge of his desk. Not toward me in a grand gesture. Not dramatically. Just enough that if I glanced over, I could see the sentence he had just written. I looked. He kept writing. His notes were clear. Better than mine would have been, actually, because mine tended to collapse into medical hieroglyphics after the first hour. I swallowed. It was such a small accommodation that it barely qualified as one. No fuss. No permission slip. No moment that made me feel like I had become a problem for him to solve. He simply noticed that I could not write for a bit and made the information available without making me ask. Dangerous. All of him was dangerous. After class, the cohort erupted into motion around us. People stood, stretched, complained, compared notes, made plans for coffee, groaned about the lab later. I stayed where I was until the aisle cleared enough for Valerie to move without performing vehicular manslaughter. Damien packed slowly. I noticed that too. He did not hover. He did not look like he was waiting for me in a way that made me feel guilty. He just took an unreasonable amount of time putting one notebook and one pen into his backpack. Finally, when the aisle was clear, he stood and slung his bag over one shoulder. “Clinical skills?” he asked. “Unfortunately.” “You say that like you don’t enjoy being academically judged under fluorescent lighting.” “It’s one of my great passions.” We headed out together. Together was also becoming a concern. Damien walked beside me like he had the day before, matching Valerie’s pace without theatrics. The corridor outside the lecture hall smelled faintly of rain-wet shoes and burnt coffee from someone’s travel mug. Students moved around us in loose clusters, their bags knocking against hips and walls, their voices bright with the manic energy of people pretending week one had not already taken something from them. The floor changed near the exit from carpet to polished concrete, and the sound changed with it. Valerie’s wheels rolled more sharply, pushrims cool under my palms. Each join in the concrete clicked up through the frame and into my legs, where the AFOs held everything neatly in place. The harness tugged against my shoulders whenever I pushed a little harder, reminding me to stay upright, reminding me that gravity had never been on my side. Damien held the door open at the end of the corridor, stepping aside before I reached him. “Thanks,” I said. “No worries.” He did not touch Valerie. He had not touched Valerie once without asking. It was such a low bar, and yet there he was, clearing it with the ease of an Olympic athlete. Outside, the air was damp and bright. Overnight rain had left the campus washed clean, every path shining under the sun. The jacarandas dripped from their leaves. The smell of wet bark and warm concrete rose around us, thick enough that I could taste it at the back of my throat. My body immediately disliked the humidity. Of course it did. A flush crept under my collar, trapped beneath the cardigan and the harness straps. Heat gathered at the back of my neck. My pulse, always overdramatic in warm weather, started to climb in that unpleasant way that made every heartbeat feel too close to the surface. Damien glanced at me. “Shade route?” I looked up, startled. He nodded toward the covered walkway that curved around the garden rather than cutting across the open courtyard. It was longer by maybe two minutes. Cooler by significantly more. I wanted to say I was fine. I said, “Yeah. Shade route.” Damien’s expression did not change, but something in him seemed pleased. Not smug. Not triumphant. Just glad I had answered honestly. That was another new thing between us. Honesty, apparently. Very inconvenient. We moved under the covered path, where the air cooled at once and the light softened against the concrete pillars. The relief was immediate. My shoulders dropped before I could stop them, the harness catching the shift. Damien noticed that too, but all he said was, “Better?” “Unfortunately, yes.” “Why unfortunately?” “Because it means you were right.” “Ah.” He took a sip of coffee. “A difficult day for you.” “You have no idea.” “I could pretend I was wrong.” “No, you couldn’t.” “No,” he agreed. “I’d be bad at it.” The clinical skills building sat at the far end of campus, all glass and pale walls and artificially cheerful signage about professionalism. I usually liked clinical skills, in theory. In practice, it was a lot of positioning and reaching and pretending my body was not quietly plotting against me while I learned how to examine everyone else’s. That day, we were doing cardiovascular examination. Of course we were. There were few things more personally offensive than sitting in a harness with a heart rate that behaved like a small dog during fireworks while someone explained how to assess pulse rhythm. Our tutor, Dr. Singh, divided us into small groups. Damien ended up in mine, because apparently the universe had committed to this bit. Also in the group were Priya, who had immaculate eyeliner and frighteningly organised notes; Mateo, who wore novelty socks to every lab; and Jess, who had been in my anatomy group last year and had the rare gift of being able to complain without lowering morale. Damien fit in quickly. That should not have surprised me. He had the kind of presence that made people relax. Not because he was loud. He was not. If anything, he was quieter in groups than he was with me. But he listened well, laughed at the right moments, and did not try to dominate the conversation even though he could have. When Priya corrected his hand placement for palpating an apex beat, he thanked her with such genuine focus that she blinked, visibly recalibrated, and then corrected him again with even more confidence. I watched that happen with reluctant admiration. Attractive and teachable. Horrible combination. When it was my turn to practise, I positioned Valerie beside the examination couch and assessed my options. The couch was too high, because of course it was. The adjustable mechanism had been broken since last semester, which the university had acknowledged via email in the same tone people used to express regret about delayed parcel delivery. I could do the exam from my chair. It was fine. Mostly. Not ideal, but fine. Damien’s gaze moved from the couch to me. He did not speak. I braced myself, pushed up slightly against my armrests, adjusted my hips against the cushion, and felt the diaper shift beneath me with a soft, private compression. Heat rose in my face, irrational and immediate. Nobody had heard it. Nobody was paying attention. Priya was arguing with Mateo about whether he had found the correct intercostal space. Jess was sanitising her hands with the grim determination of a surgeon entering battle. Damien was looking at the model poster on the wall with great, deliberate interest. Deliberate. My chest loosened a fraction. When I glanced at him, his eyes flicked back to mine, calm and steady. He had heard. He had chosen not to make that my problem. I hated how close I came to liking him more in that moment than during all the flirting. The actual practice went reasonably well. I examined Mateo, who declared that he had “a magnificent thoracic cavity” and made Jess threaten to leave the profession. Damien watched me work with quiet focus, his arms folded loosely, his mouth neutral. I was used to people watching my hands during skills practice with a certain anxiety, as if weakness might leap out and ruin the learning environment. Damien watched like he expected competence and saw it. When I finished, he said, “You explain things well.” I looked up from sanitising my hands. “That sounded dangerously sincere.” “It was.” “Be careful. You’ll damage your brand.” “What’s my brand?” “Unfairly handsome menace with good door etiquette.” Priya coughed into her sleeve. Jess looked between us like she had just discovered a new species of entertainment. Damien, to his credit or perhaps his guilt, only smiled. “Good door etiquette is important.” “Foundational,” Jess said solemnly. I regretted every decision that had brought me to that room. The rest of the morning passed in a blur of radial pulses, stethoscope bells, and Damien’s shoulder brushing mine once when he leaned in to see a diagram. Not touching exactly. Almost touching. Somehow worse. By the time clinical skills ended, my body was flagging in the slow, creeping way it did when adrenaline had carried me further than energy actually allowed. My arms felt heavy. My neck ached from staying upright. The straps of the harness had started to feel more present, pressing warm lines through the soft layers of my clothes. My AFOs were doing their job quietly, but my legs still buzzed with fatigue inside them, muscles twitching against plastic they could not overpower. I should have gone home. Instead, when Damien asked if I wanted to study for a bit in the library, I said yes. This was because I was intelligent in an academic sense only. The library was cool and dim, smelling of paper, carpet, and the faint metallic dust of old air-conditioning vents. We found a table near the back where the lights were softer and there was enough room for Valerie to sit without blocking the aisle. Damien moved a chair out of the way, then stopped with his hand still on the back of it. “Still okay if I do that?” he asked. The question took a second to land. The chair. The space. Yesterday he had moved one automatically because it had been obviously necessary. Today he was asking because we were no longer at a café table and he had realised automatic help could become assumption if repeated too easily. My throat did something inconvenient. “Yes,” I said. “Still okay.” He nodded and moved the chair. I settled at the table and let out a breath that felt like it had been waiting all morning. The library’s cool air slipped under the edge of my cardigan, calming the heat trapped beneath the harness. I unclipped the top of my side bag and retrieved my formula bottle, electrolyte drink, medication case, and the small fabric pouch where I kept spare pens and lip balm and the tiny strawberry-shaped hand sanitiser my friend had given me as a joke. Damien sat opposite me, pulling out his notes. For nearly forty minutes, we studied. Actually studied. That was the strangest part. Damien flirted like it was a hobby, but he worked like it mattered. He asked good questions. He did not pretend to know things he did not know. He had a careful way of circling back to concepts until they clicked, drawing little diagrams in the margins of his paper. When he explained something, he used his hands without seeming to realise it, palms turning, fingers shaping invisible anatomy in the air between us. We’d been sitting in the library, comparing anatomy notes at one of the long tables near the windows, when a dark patch started to bloom on my jeans. My diaper had been fairly wet by that point, as it often was during these sorts of study sessions. Most of the time I didn’t mind a wet diaper - I had a fairly good skincare situation happening, and the warm wetness could feel kinda nice sometimes (not that I’d ever admit it). I knew I was due for a change soon, but I didn’t realise to what extent until Damien lightly tapped my arm. Not my shoulder, which would have made me jump. Not the table, which would have made me look up too publicly. My arm. Two fingers, brief and careful against the soft sleeve of my cardigan. When I looked at him, he did not glance down in the obvious way. He did not widen his eyes. He did not make the face people made when they realised something private had become visible and were already trying to decide how loudly to pretend they had not seen it. His expression stayed the same, calm and focused, except for the tiny change at the corner of his mouth, not amusement, not pity, just concentration. “Quince,” he said quietly, low enough that the girl across the table kept typing with her headphones in and the guy beside the stacks kept highlighting his textbook in violent yellow. “Do you want your bag?” My stomach dropped before I understood why. Then I looked down. The first feeling was not embarrassment, oddly. It was disbelief, sharp and stupid, because part of me saw the dark patch spreading over the denim at the top of my thigh and thought, no, surely not, as if my body was the kind of institution that responded to formal complaints. Then the heat arrived, horrible and immediate, rushing up my neck and into my face while the rest of me went cold. The fabric clung damply where my jeans pressed against the padding underneath. The chair cushion beneath me felt too warm, too known, too suddenly part of the problem. My harness straps seemed to tighten all at once, holding me upright in the precise posture of someone whose dignity had quietly left the building. I froze. That was my least helpful response and my most reliable one. Damien’s gaze stayed on my face. Not the patch. My face. “You’re okay,” he said, and somehow he made the words sound less like reassurance and more like instruction, like my body had not just betrayed me in the middle of the medical library while three future doctors and a potted fern witnessed my undoing. “We’re going to move.” I opened my mouth, but no sound came out. I could hear everything suddenly. The whisper of pages turning. The soft clack of laptop keys. The air-conditioning vent above us breathing cold air down the back of my neck. Somewhere nearby, someone unwrapped a muesli bar, and the crinkle of plastic sounded obscene. My side bag hung from Valerie’s frame, just out of easy reach, full of everything I needed and everything I hated needing: wipes, gloves, spare diaper, change mat, barrier cream, disposal bags, a clean pair of soft cream joggers folded so tightly they looked like an apology. Damien closed my anatomy notes with one hand, not rushing, not slamming them shut, just gathering the papers into a neat stack like we had simply finished studying. “Bathroom?” he asked. I managed a tiny nod. He stood first, and because he stood first, he became the thing people noticed before they noticed me. It was not dramatic. He did not throw himself between me and the library like a bodyguard in a terrible romance film, though honestly by that point I might have appreciated the commitment. He simply moved with purpose, broad shoulders blocking the sightline from the nearest table while he lifted my bag from the back of Valerie and settled it carefully into my lap. The weight of it was grounding and humiliating. It landed against my thighs, pressing the damp denim harder against my skin, and I flinched before I could stop myself. Damien saw that too. Of course he did. “Do you want my jacket over your lap?” he asked, already reaching for the black zip-up hoodie hanging over the back of his chair, but not putting it there yet, not assuming, not covering me like an accident scene. The answer should have been no, because no was automatic, no was independence, no was the tiny brittle shield I held up whenever my body became too visible, but the library was full and the accessible bathroom was past the printers, past the group study rooms, past a corridor where people liked to stand and chat as if loitering was a credited elective. “Yeah,” I whispered. He placed the hoodie over my lap so carefully that it almost made things worse, because there was nothing careless in the gesture, no awkward dumping of fabric, no frantic attempt to erase what had happened. He laid it across me like it belonged there, adjusting one sleeve so it covered the worst of the stain without catching on Valerie’s wheels, and then he picked up his tablet and my notes with one hand while the other hovered near my push handles. “Can I?” My throat was too tight for words, so I nodded again. Only then did his hands settle on Valerie. The movement out of the library felt endless. Every small vibration of the wheels over the carpet tiles travelled up through the footplate into my braced ankles. My AFOs held my feet in their usual neat position, almost absurdly tidy while the rest of me felt like a disaster. The hoodie was warm over my lap, smelling faintly like Damien’s soap and rain and whatever deodorant he used, which was unfair, because I was having one of the most humiliating moments of my university career and still some traitorous part of me noticed that he smelled good. We made it to the accessible bathroom, and Damien gently brought the chair to a stop inside the door. “Would you like me to wait outside?” The tears were already starting to gather on my eyelids as I shook my head. “I m-might need a hand-” He helped. Not with fanfare, not with hesitation that would have made it worse. Damien simply stepped inside, closed the door behind us with a soft click, and locked it. The accessible bathroom was mercifully large—enough room for Valerie to turn, for him to move around me without crowding. The fluorescent lights hummed overhead, clinical and unforgiving, but his presence somehow softened the edges of it. I couldn’t look at him. My hands were shaking too badly to manage the brakes properly, so he did that too, crouching briefly to set them. When he straightened, his voice was low and steady. “Tell me what you need, Quince. Step by step.” That helped more than anything. The specificity. The lack of pity. I swallowed hard. “Bag. There’s a change mat in the side pocket. And… wipes. Gloves if you want them. Clean clothes at the bottom.” He moved efficiently, unpacking with the same calm focus he used in practical labs. The mat unfolded across the wide bench beside the sink. He laid out supplies in a neat row like he’d done this before, though I knew he hadn’t. Not with me. Not like this. When everything was ready, he came back to Valerie. “I’m going to lift you to the bench. Okay?” I could have said no. I could have told him that I could manage the transfer in wet jeans and began the process of dragging myself over. But in that moment, where my own self pity had all but swallowed me whole, the softness of being cared for was overwhelming. I nodded. He was strong. I already knew that from the way he casually shifted heavy lab equipment or carried both our bags without comment, but feeling it—his arms sliding under my thighs and around my back, supporting my weight so my harness didn’t dig in—was different. He lifted me like I wasn’t a logistical problem. Like I was simply his to hold for a moment. My head tucked briefly against his shoulder before he settled me on the mat, and I caught that same clean scent again, stronger now. The wet denim clung coldly as he eased my jeans down. The soaked diaper sagged heavily between my legs, the leak having spread further than I’d realised. Humiliation burned through me again, sharp enough to make my eyes sting. “Hey,” Damien said quietly. He was kneeling now, eye-level with me even though I was on the bench. One hand rested lightly on my knee, above the brace. “Still with me?” I managed a shaky breath. “This is so fucking mortifying.” “It’s a diaper leak. Not a war crime.” His thumb brushed once, soothing. “You’re okay. I’ve got you.” “Yeah, b-but, I should’ve sorted it.” I could feel my bottom lip trembling. “I knew I was wet- I knew it needed changing- I just didn’t wanna- I liked the way it felt and then it just-” The words tumbled out, raw and unstoppable. I squeezed my eyes shut, cheeks flaming hotter than the leak itself. I had never said that out loud to anyone. Not even in the safety of my own flat, whispering it into the dark like a shameful secret. Damien’s hands paused on the tapes of the sodden diaper. For a terrible second I thought he might pull away, but he didn’t. Instead, he peeled it open carefully, the cool air hitting my skin as he began the thorough wipe-down. His voice stayed even, almost thoughtful. “So it feels good sometimes,” he said. Not a question. Not disgust. Just quiet acknowledgment. “Warm. Heavy. Intimate. Like it’s holding you.” I let out a broken sound—half sob, half laugh—and nodded jerkily. His gloved fingers worked gently between my legs, cleaning every fold with clinical care that still somehow felt tender. “That’s not a crime either, Quince. Bodies are complicated. Yours has a lot to deal with. If a wet diaper feels nice until it doesn’t… then it does. Simple as that.” He applied the barrier cream with slow, warm strokes, making sure the sensitive skin was protected. The touch lingered just enough to make my breath hitch, but never crossed into anything I wasn’t ready for. When he slid the fresh diaper underneath me and brought it up snug between my thighs, taping it securely, I finally dared to open my eyes. Damien was watching my face again, not the process. Always my face. “You don’t have to explain or apologise for what your body likes,” he continued, voice low. “Not to me. If you want to stay in it longer next time, tell me. I’ll help you time it right so it doesn’t leak. Or I’ll help you change sooner if you decide you’re done. Whatever you need.” He pulled my clean joggers up my legs, easing the soft fabric over the bulky padding and around the AFOs with practiced care, making sure the cuffs didn’t catch on the Velcro or twist around my ankles. He adjusted the waistband so it sat comfortably beneath my shirt and not directly under the harness buckle, smoothing one small fold at my hip only after I gave a tiny nod.  “I like taking care of you,” he said simply. “All of you. The parts that are easy and the parts that aren’t. Including this.” For a few seconds, I could not answer. Not because I did not understand him. That might have been easier. If Damien had said something vague or clumsy or painfully noble, I could have corrected him, mocked him, turned the whole thing into a joke sharp enough to keep my dignity standing. But he had said it plainly. Like it was allowed to be true. Like care was not automatically pity, and need was not automatically debt, and my body was not a collection of unfortunate exceptions to the person he was trying to know. The bathroom hummed around us. Fluorescent lights. Air vent. The faint chemical smell of hand soap and disinfectant. Rain ticking somewhere beyond the frosted window in soft, irregular taps. My clean joggers were warm from his hands where he had eased them over my legs, the fresh padding beneath them dry and secure, bulky in the familiar way that made my hips settle differently against the bench. My AFOs held my ankles with their usual firm certainty. The harness still crossed my chest, one strap twisted slightly from the transfer, pressing at an angle against my cardigan. Damien noticed that too. Of course he did. “May I fix that?” he asked, nodding toward the strap. My throat felt scraped raw. I nodded. He adjusted it gently, fingers careful at my shoulder, smoothing the webbing back into place so it sat flat and even. It was the least intimate part of the entire last ten minutes, probably, and somehow the one that nearly undid me. The strap settled properly over my chest, no longer biting, just holding. Damien checked the buckle without tugging too hard, then stepped back. “There,” he said. “Better?” I gave a small nod. He did not push for words. He turned away to gather the used supplies into a disposal bag, tying it off with neat, practical motions. There was nothing theatrical about it. No scrunched-up face. No heroic efficiency. No heavy silence. He simply dealt with things because they needed dealing with, the same way he had moved the chair in the café, the same way he had slid his notes into view during the lecture, the same way he had chosen the shade route and then allowed me to pretend I had done it for strategic reasons. My eyes burned again. This time I did not have the energy to stop it. A tear slipped down my cheek before I could catch it. Then another. I turned my face away quickly, staring at the soap dispenser mounted to the wall like it might contain answers if I read the ingredients hard enough. Damien’s movements slowed. “Quince,” he said softly. “Don’t.” He crossed the bathroom and knelt in front of my chair, gently reaching a hand up to cup my cheek. With a gentle caress of his thumb, he wiped the stray tears away, and hummed softly. “I think,” He said slowly, “That you haven’t been taken care of in the way that you deserve.” I didn’t know what to do with that sentence. It sat between us like a scalpel—clean, precise, and capable of cutting straight through every defense I’d spent years sharpening. Damien’s thumb brushed my cheek again, slow and deliberate, catching another tear before it could fall. His hand was warm, slightly calloused from whatever he did outside of lectures and labs. I leaned into it before I could stop myself. Just a fraction. Just enough to feel the solid reality of him. “You don’t know that,” I whispered. My voice cracked on the last word. “I’m starting to.” He didn’t pull away. Didn’t rush to fill the silence with reassurances that would feel like wallpaper over cracks. “The way you freeze when someone offers help. The way you brace for pity every single time your body does something it’s entitled to do. Someone taught you— or life taught you—that needing anything makes you less. I don’t believe that. And I’m not going to let you keep believing it if I can help it.” The tears came faster now. Quiet ones. The kind that didn’t sob, just leaked out like my body had finally found a leak it was allowed to have. Damien stayed right there on his knees in front of Valerie, one hand on my cheek, the other resting lightly on my thigh just above the knee brace. Steady. Present. Not crowding. I hated how safe it felt. How much I wanted to stay in this stupid accessible bathroom forever, where no one else could see me falling apart and where Damien kept looking at me like I was worth the mess. Eventually the tears slowed. I sniffed, ugly and ungraceful, and he reached for the paper towel dispenser without being asked. He tore off a few sheets, folded them neatly, and offered them to me. I took them with shaking hands. “Thank you,” I managed. “You’re welcome.” He smiled, small and crooked. “For the towels. For the rest… you don’t have to thank me. But you can. If it helps.” I wiped my face, then balled the paper in my fist. “I liked it,” I said suddenly, the confession spilling out before I could cage it again. “The wet diaper. The warmth. The way it feels… private. Like something soft is holding me when everything else is loud. I know it’s weird. I know it’s—” “Not weird to me,” he interrupted gently. “Different, maybe. But not weird. And not shameful.” His fingers traced the seam of my joggers where they covered the fresh padding. Not pressing, not groping. Just acknowledging. “If it feels good for a while, we work with that. If it stops feeling good, we change it. Simple. No performance. No judgment.” We. The word lodged itself somewhere behind my ribs and refused to leave. Damien rose to his feet, but didn’t step back. Instead he leaned down and pressed a kiss to my forehead—light, almost chaste, but it lingered long enough for me to feel his breath against my skin. When he pulled away, his eyes were dark and serious in a way that made heat pool low in my belly, separate from any diaper or harness or brace. “Alright, sweetheart. Ready to get out of here?” The endearment landed softly, like a blanket thrown over my shoulders on a cold morning. I hadn’t expected it. It should have felt too soon, too much, but coming from Damien in that low, steady voice—still kneeling in front of me, eyes patient—it simply felt right. Like he’d already decided I was worth the softness. I swallowed, nodded once. “Yeah. Ready.” He stood, gathered the disposal bag and my side bag, then took the handles of Valerie with quiet permission. The walk back through the library was easier this time. The hoodie stayed over my lap until we were clear of the main seating area, then he folded it neatly and tucked it into his own bag. No one stared. No one whispered. The potted fern by the exit still looked unimpressed, but that was probably just its personality. Outside, the air had cooled further. The post-rain dampness clung to everything, but it no longer made my body rebel quite so viciously. Damien matched Valerie’s pace without comment, one hand occasionally brushing my shoulder or the back of my chair in a silent check-in. We didn’t go back to the table. Instead, he guided us toward a quieter corner of the library grounds—an alcove with a bench under a wide overhang, shielded from the main paths. He parked Valerie beside it, dropped his bag, and sat facing me so our knees nearly touched. “You don’t have to keep studying if you’re not up for it,” he said. “We can just sit. Or I can walk you home. Whatever you need right now.” I looked down at my hands, still trembling faintly from the adrenaline dump. The embroidered lemons on my cuffs stared back at me, cheerful and absurd after everything. “I don’t want to go home yet,” I admitted. “I… I don’t want to be alone with my brain right now.” Damien nodded like that made perfect sense. He reached over and gently took one of my hands, lacing our fingers together on top of the hoodie still draped across my lap. His thumb stroked slow circles over my knuckles. “Then we stay. And when you’re ready to move, we move.” We sat like that for a long time. The campus sounds drifted around us—distant laughter, the whirr of bicycle wheels on wet paths, someone calling out about a group project. Inside our little alcove it felt separate. Safer. Damien didn’t fill the silence with questions or fixes. He just held my hand and let me exist in the aftermath.