Chapter Nineteen

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Riley's Perspective

I don't think I've ever met someone who liked me as much as Archer Wilson.

I didn't even think it was possible.

I built walls high enough to keep anyone from climbing over. Yet, somehow, he never needed a way in—he just existed, and the walls crumbled.

Was it the way he smiled, all bright sincerity, as if the world had never given him a reason to stop?

Or was it the way he carried kindness like it was second nature, like it had never once failed him?

I never questioned why he was the way he was—why he laughed so easily, why he gave without expecting anything in return.

But I always questioned why, out of everyone, he chose me.

Someone closed-off. Someone who snapped too easily.

Someone who was, in every possible way, his opposite.

I wasn't warm like him. I wasn't easy to love.

He grew up in warmth—summer trips to Cape Cod, bonfires, and shotgunning cans of sodas, a home where love filled the spaces between words. I grew up in the cold— Moscow's brutal winters, a cramped apartment where silence weighed heavier than snow.

During winter, while he sat by a fireplace with his family, hanging ornaments on a fresh pine tree, I sat by a cracked window, letting the winter wind bite at my skin, a half-empty bottle of vodka in my hand.

We were a contradiction, something that shouldn't have made sense.

But somehow, no matter how many times I pushed, he stayed.

No matter how many reasons I gave him to leave, he kept coming back.

I tried to hate Archer Wilson. God, I really did.

He was everything I wasn't—bright, easy, untouchable. The kind of person who could walk into a room and make everyone feel like they belonged. The kind of person who never had to fight to be loved.

It was pathetic, really, how effortlessly he existed. How he smiled at me like I was someone worth knowing. Like he didn't see the cracks in my walls, or worse—like he saw them and didn't care.

I wanted to hate him for that. I wanted to hate the way he looked at me, like he wasn't afraid of what he might find.

And yet, there were moments—small, fleeting moments—where that hate felt like something else entirely.

Like when he laughed, and for a split second, I forgot how to be angry.

Or when he said my name, slow and deliberate, like he enjoyed the way it felt on his tongue.

Or when he leaned in just a little too close, and I felt warmth in places I swore had frozen over long ago.

I told myself it was nothing. That he was nothing.

But then he'd smile at me, all easy and unshaken, and I'd feel my walls crack just a little more.

And that terrified me more than anything.

Fuck, how long have I been thinking about Archer again? Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with me? I can't believe I'm wasting time thinking about that insufferable, clingy, golden-boy freak.

But it's hard not to when I woke up in his bed this morning. Yeah, his bed. Like some kind of stray he decided to take in. Even now, it pissed me off just thinking about it. I should've left the second I woke up, but no, I had to sit there like an idiot, letting the whole situation sink in.

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