The Steps Towards You

📣random little thing i did like a year ago 📣 Rowan has spent eighteen years perfecting the art of being invisible. In a city like Oxford where ambition echoes off ancient stone and everyone seems to know exactly who they are-fading into the background feels safer than being seen. He keeps to the edges, unnoticed, untouched, unremarkable.
Until Avery Cole says his name.
Avery is everything Rowan isn't: confident, bright, effortlessly present. The kind of girl teachers trust and students orbit. But the closer Rowan gets, the more he realises her confidence isn't effortless at all-it's deliberate, practiced, a shield she holds up even when her hands shake behind it. Beneath her easy smile are hairline fractures she never lets anyone see.
When they're paired for their final English Literature coursework, Rowan expects polite distance. Instead, Avery pays attention-to his silences, his habits, the things he never says out loud. And Rowan, despite every instinct to retreat, finds himself noticing her too. The cracks. The softness. The way she looks at him like she's trying to understand something she's never been allowed to name.
Study sessions turn into long afternoons, shared glances, and moments thick with unspoken meaning. Rowan's walls begin to crumble. Avery's begin to show. And the line between partnership and something far more dangerous starts to blur.
In a city full of secrets, Rowan has always been one of them.
But Avery Cole might be the first person determined to uncover him... even as she hides parts of herself no one else has ever bothered to see.