The Gangster's Secret
The afternoon sun filtered through the park trees, casting checkered shadows over the wooden bench.
It was the bench everyone on campus called the losers' bench, tucked into the emptiest, most overgrown corner of the park - the one stretch nobody with anywhere better to be ever bothered walking through.
It helped, in a way, that the bench had its own quiet reputation - the corner of the park where campus's most forgettable students gathered, comfortably beneath anyone's notice. Nobody who mattered ever bothered listening in on that bench, which was exactly why Elliot felt safe enough to say any of this out loud in the first place.
"Seriously, you look so innocent and naive on the outside, but you turned out to be a total dark horse. You know that?"
Nadia shook her head, grinning, then let her eyes drift for a second to the dark clouds gathering at the far edge of the sky before coming back to Elliot.
"You've loved her since childhood, and you didn't let a single soul catch even a whisper of a hint that you care for her this much?"
Elliot rubbed the back of his neck, ears going warm, eyes dropping to some fixed point on the ground.
Nadia's grin faded fast, eyes narrowing as she leaned in and fixed him with a hard, searching stare.
"But I must say, you are completely out of your mind. Look at you, and look at her - you two are total opposites!"
Her hands gripped the front edge of the bench on either side of her, fingers and thumbs curled under the lip of the wood, knuckles pale with the pressure.
"Out of all the girls on campus, you fell for the resident gangster?"
Her brows were pulled together, mouth twisted somewhere between a laugh and a wince.
Without shifting an inch of that position, she turned only her head toward the ground, shaking it slowly.
"Honestly, one has to look closely just to realize she's a girl. Otherwise, she looks like the boss of every bad guy in college."
Then, still gripping the bench, she turned just her neck back toward him - her face gone flat, all the amusement drained out of it.
Somewhere far off, thunder rumbled, faint enough that neither of them cared to look.
Her head dipped in a slow nod.
"You do know what she did to the last guy who tried to propose, right?"
Her nodding stopped. Her head went still, eyes narrowing back onto him, her voice dropping into something low and careful - the tone of someone delivering a warning out of genuine concern rather than mockery.
"Couldn't get his hand back for a full minute."
Her head jerked slightly toward the cafeteria beyond the park.
"Right there in the cafeteria - the whole hall watching him turn three different shades of red. He left the city within the week."
She shook her head, hands giving a small, disbelieving shake, like she was flicking dust off her own fingers.
"And that's not even counting whose daughter she is."
He just shrugged, unbothered, like it changed nothing.
She let go of the bench with a short exhale, sitting back at last, and looked off toward the trees, half to herself now, her mouth pulling into something tired and fond at once.
"What's the use of being gorgeous," she muttered, "if she doesn't have a single feminine trait?"
The clouds finally rolled fully overhead, swallowing the last of the afternoon light into a dull grey, and a cool wind swept through the trees with them, brushing cold against the backs of both their necks.
He never seemed to notice it - not consciously - but his eyes drifted shut for a second anyway, face tilting up toward the sky, before he blinked it away and dropped his gaze back to his shoes.
Nadia caught the smallest breath of it too, her shoulders easing by a fraction she wouldn't have admitted to.
Somewhere in the clouds, thunder rumbled again, closer this time, after a long pause.
"I'm not confessing." Elliot kept his eyes on his shoes. "I just needed to say it out loud to someone. Once. That's all I want."
"Then say it."
He hesitated, his voice dropping quieter than before, his face angling slightly toward her without fully lifting - eyes still mostly on the ground, just tilted her way now.
His mouth pulled into a small, defensive twist, like he was answering a blame she hadn't even said out loud.
"See, it's not like I'm actually going to propose to her. I'm happy to be a secret admirer. I know we have nothing in common. But ever since we were kids, she's just... had this hold on me."
He went quiet for a moment, mouth opening and closing once like the words wouldn't quite come.
Then, all at once, his head snapped toward Nadia, eyes locking onto hers.
"Tell me honestly," he said, some sudden, unfamiliar urgency taking over him, eyes wide as though the memory of hers had stunned him all over again, leaning in like the answer already sat settled in his chest and all he needed was for her to say it back to him, "have you ever seen eyes as big as hers? You could fit the whole world inside them."
The first cold drops of rain began to fall, unhurried, carrying up the smell of wet earth.
Neither of them noticed.
Elliot leaned in closer, elbows braced against his knees, fingers laced tightly together between them.
His eyes gleamed, and his voice rose with a sudden, restless passion.
"I know anyone would think I'm only saying this because I've loved her unconditionally since childhood."
His head dropped all at once, like the weight of his own frustration had pulled it down - eyes dropping back to the ground between his feet.
"How do I convince you that her eyes are truly that massive? That the entire world could genuinely fit inside them? No one will ever believe me, I know-"
His fingers came apart. His palms opened wide toward the sky, trembling - the fire that had carried him this far already burning itself out, leaving something quieter and almost defeated in its place.
"-but I am the only one who knows this absolute truth."
A long breath tore out through his nose, loud enough to hear, and Nadia just stared at him, completely dazed, watching his wild expression and the sheer, unfiltered excitement he'd worked himself into, like a literal madman had sat down across from her, talking pure nonsense.
It struck her, somewhere beneath the shock, that she'd known him since they were children and had never once caught even a flicker of whatever odd, wild thing had been hiding in him all this time.
Her mouth had only just begun to part - some reaction rising in her - when he cut back in before it could reach her lips, eyes narrowing on her again, fingers already lacing back together, only his face turning her way this time, the rest of him still bent forward exactly as before.
"And when the wind gets into her hair," he went on, the urgency rushing back into him all at once, a slow, peaceful smile easing across his face like the memory alone was enough to settle him, fingers dancing through the air as though playing a piano only he could hear, "it moves like a hundred serpents all deciding at once which way to look. Even Medusa would lose to her. And her lips-"
His eyes drifted, caught somewhere in empty air, lost completely in whatever picture of her mouth he'd built for himself.
"And what about my lips?" a voice cut in, flat and cold - and both of them knew, even before they turned to look, exactly whose voice it was. He was yanked back all at once, dropped out of wherever he'd been and landed hard on solid ground.
Lightning split the sky exactly as the word left her mouth - so close and so bright that a knot of girls further down the path yelped and grabbed each other's arms.
Nadia flinched hard enough to lose her breath entirely, and both of them turned.
The sky lit up again before the dark could fully settle, flickering like a strobe - bright, gone, bright again - and in those broken seconds of light, the storm seemed to assemble her for them one piece at a time: an arm, a shoulder, and finally that flat, unblinking stare.
Scarlett was standing at the edge of the path, arms crossed, the posture that made freshmen cross the street, wind pulling loose strands of hair across her face.
But something in her face had already slipped - the corner of her mouth was not quite steady.
The rain broke loose all at once, hammering down against the path.
Somewhere behind them, the last few students who'd been drifting toward the cafeteria through the earlier drizzle broke into a run for shelter - but none of the three of them moved.
Elliot's stomach fell through the ground. He tried to speak and produced nothing, his knees trembling faintly beneath him.
Beside him, Nadia's legs had gone entirely numb, rooted to the spot as if she'd forgotten how to use them at all.
What their fear kept either of them from noticing was how slowly she was actually moving toward them - nothing urgent in it, nothing that looked like a threat at all.
Scarlett took one step closer. Her arms uncrossed slowly, dropping to her sides.
And then - impossibly - her chin dipped, and her eyes, the same eyes he'd just spent five minutes describing, filled up.
The rain sliding down from her hair and over her face made it impossible to tell, in that moment, that some of what fell past her chin wasn't rain at all.
Somewhere underneath his fear, a smaller, useless part of him refused to look away - tracing the wet line of her jaw, the strands of hair stuck to her cheek, the thin, faded scar cutting through one eyebrow that only made the rest of her face look sharper for it - before some scrap of self-preservation dragged his eyes toward Nadia instead, silently hoping she had some way to talk them both out of this alive.
Nadia's mouth had already begun to part, some half-formed plan rising in her - but before a single word made it out, Scarlett tilted her head to one side with a strange, childlike softness, and got there first.
"How long," she said, her voice dropping to barely more than a breath, "were you going to keep this to yourself?"
It was only then, watching the rain run over a mouth that wouldn't quite hold still, that either of them noticed her lips were trembling.
She screwed her eyes shut the moment the words were out, head tipping toward her own shoulder, chin tucking down and away.
Something hot bloomed in his chest at the sight of her - Scarlett, the one an entire campus swore had never once cried in front of anyone, tears slipping freely down her face now - the feeling tangled somewhere between fear and a deep, aching tenderness he couldn't fully separate.
His jaw tightened, anger aimed squarely at himself, at every day he could have said something and hadn't.
His hands, when he noticed them again, were still shaking - but whatever fear had been sitting on his own face was gone, burned off by something sharper.
Her tears had lit something in him that looked, for the first time all afternoon, like certainty.
His shoe caught the edge of a puddle, sending up a small, quiet splash as he crossed the last of the distance between them in two steps, stopping right in front of her.
He blinked once and looked to Nadia, whose mouth had fallen open at the sheer nerve of it.
But whatever she saw on his face steadied something in her too.
Her eyes flicked to Scarlett - head still bowed toward her own shoulder, eyes screwed shut against tears she was losing the fight to hold back - and something in Nadia's spine straightened.
She nodded, quick and certain, three times in a row.
He turned back to find Scarlett still lost inside her own bowed head, unaware of how close he'd already come.
He reached out, his fingers brushing hers first before taking her hand properly in his.
It was shaking - his, not hers - and she looked down at their joined hands like she couldn't quite believe them.
Then her eyes lifted back to his face. She blinked once, slow and disbelieving, like she genuinely hadn't expected this fool to go through with it.
For a moment she seemed lost in whatever steadiness she found in his eyes.
Then she felt it - how badly his hand was still shaking in hers - and her gaze dropped to it before lifting back to his face.
A smile broke across her face, lips pressed together, still tangled up in the last of her tears - one that hadn't quite decided whether it was crying or smiling.
Her jaw finally unclenched.
"Are you still scared of me?" she asked, almost delighted.
"Terrified," Elliot admitted, and pulled her into a hug before he could think better of it.
She went rigid for half a second - then let herself sink into it, forehead dropping to his chest, both arms circling around his waist.
He rested a hand against the crown of her head and kissed it, and she tightened her hold at that, adjusting into him like she meant to disappear into the space he'd made.
He pulled back just enough to see her face. "You too?" He swallowed.
Scarlett nodded, quick and certain, her expression caught somewhere between fresh tears and a smile she was fighting to hold steady - like this was a question she'd been waiting her whole life to be asked.
"But - since when?"
Her eyes narrowed, mock-offended, and a fist landed twice, light and quick against his chest, one for each word. "Since when? Since when?" she repeated instead of answering, like saying it twice - and hitting him twice - was punishment enough.
Then, softer: "A teacher caught me staring at you like a fool, back in school. And you never noticed - not even now."
His mouth fell open slightly, disbelief written plainly across his face, like this one detail alone had knocked something loose in him.
She shook her head, the gesture itself a complaint. "You're an idiot, you know that?" she whispered.
He admitted it with a small nod, lips pressed tight together, and pulled her back in, her face tucked against his chest once more, her eyes falling shut against him. His own eyes fell shut a moment later, face tilting up toward the sky, rain striking his skin without him flinching once - and this time, unlike before, he knew exactly why.
The rain hammering around them didn't ease for a second - if anything, it came down harder, as if it had been waiting for exactly this.
Behind them, Nadia pressed her folded hands under her chin, shaking her head slowly, a disbelieving grin breaking through the tears she was blinking back.
"Unbelievable," she muttered. "The one man I was sure would die single, and he goes and lands Scarlett - the most beautiful, most feared girl in the whole city."
