EdGray21
Julian Wren is nineteen, a first-year at a university he didn't have to work very hard to get into. His father is a cardiothoracic surgeon; his mother is a name partner at one of the city's oldest firms. He has never wanted for anything materially, but what actually sets him apart isn't the money - it's that he has never been a person who wavers. That certainty is what reads as age to everyone who meets him; it isn't a costume, it's just who he is, and it's precisely why Elena never suspects him of being anything other than a self-possessed man in his mid-twenties.
Elena Voss is twenty-nine, a rising associate on the edge of partnership track, sharp enough that people mistake her composure for coldness. She has built her entire adult life around control - of her cases, her calendar, her heart. Every major decision she's made has been deliberate, researched, defensible. Julian is the one thing in twenty-nine years that simply happened to her, without a plan behind it, and for a while that's exactly what she loves about him.
They meet at a rooftop industry mixer the week before Julian's semester starts, a party he's only at because Theo's older brother works at the firm hosting it - Theo, Julian's closest friend since they were kids (their fathers are colleagues at the same hospital, and the two boys grew up in and out of each other's houses long before they ended up as college roommates by design). Elena clocks him as young - twenty-three, twenty-four, she guesses - and decides she doesn't care. Neither of them asks the question that would end the night before it starts.