I sat. The chair swallowed me in a way that felt obscenely comfortable, the kind of comfort that made you realize how tense you’d been carrying your shoulders for the past two weeks.

"What are we watching?"

"No idea." Felicity was already tearing into butter packets, drizzling them over the popcorn with surgical precision. "Whatever’s playing. That’s part of the ritual. You don’t choose. You surrender."

"That’s very zen of you."

"I’m a very zen person." She offered me the bucket. "Popcorn?"

I took a handful. The butter situation was, in fact, criminal. It was also exactly as good as she’d promised. Maybe better. The salt-to-butter ratio suggested she’d been doing this long enough to have developed strong opinions about it.

The lights dimmed. The screen flickered to life with a studio logo I didn’t recognize, something vaguely European with too many production companies listed in succession. Felicity shifted in her seat. Her shoulder pressed against mine in a way that could have been accidental if anything about Felicity Hardy was ever accidental. It wasn’t. I knew it wasn’t. She knew I knew.

"Hey." Her voice was softer now, pitched for the darkness and the privacy that came with it. The theater was filling in around us but the armrest was up and the space between us had collapsed into something that felt deliberately shared. "That speech was really something."

"It was words arranged in order."

"It was more than that." She was looking at the screen, watching the opening credits roll across it with what should have been attention. But her focus was entirely on me. I could feel it like a physical pressure, the specific weight of Felicity Hardy’s interest when she wasn’t performing for an audience of more than one. "You made people feel like they mattered. Not like you were promising them things, or asking them for things, or managing their expectations. You just looked at them and told them they were worth more than what other people said they were."

She paused. The theater went darker. Her voice dropped to something quieter and more deliberate.

"That’s rare."

"Diane would say I peaked too early on the emotional appeal."

"Diane sounds like a professional." Felicity turned her head, and in the dim light from the screen her eyes were very close and very blue. "But I’m not talking about technique. I’m talking about what you actually meant."

"What do you think I meant?"

"I think you meant every word." Her voice dropped lower. "I think you’re the kind of person who hides how much he cares behind jokes and strategy and that whole arrogant untouchable thing you do. But when it actually matters, when someone needs to hear that they belong somewhere, you can’t help yourself. You have to say it."

The observation landed somewhere between my ribs. I didn’t like how accurate it was.

"That’s a lot of analysis for a movie theater."

"I’m a very analytical person." She smiled, and there was something underneath it that I’d been pretending not to notice for two weeks. "Also, I’ve been watching you. In a totally normal best friend way. Not a creepy way."

"Clarifying that it’s not creepy makes it sound creepy."

"I’m owning it." She shifted again, and now her thigh was pressed against mine through the fabric of her skirt and my training shorts. Warm. Present. Deliberate. "You’re interesting, Lukas Belmont. The most interesting person in our cohort, if we’re being honest. And I like interesting people."

The screen was playing something about a hero team in Tokyo. I wasn’t watching it. I was watching the way the flickering light played across Felicity’s features, the curve of her mouth, the fall of her blonde hair against her shoulder.

Her Temptation Gauge pulsed in my peripheral vision.

"Felicity."

"Mm?"

"What are we doing?"

She didn’t answer immediately. She reached into the popcorn bucket, extracted a single perfectly buttered kernel, and ate it with the slow deliberateness of someone buying time to think.

"We’re watching a movie." Her voice was innocent. Her body language wasn’t. "Two best friends, celebrating a victory, enjoying the campus cinema experience. Very wholesome. Very appropriate."

"Your thigh is pressed against mine."

"The seats are close together."

"You chose these seats specifically."

"They have the best view."

"The view is the same from every row."

"Not true." She turned to face me fully, and the movement brought her closer, her knee now resting against the outside of my leg, her shoulder brushing my arm. "From back here, nobody can see us. Which means we can relax. Which means I can actually talk to you without performing for whatever audience is watching."

"And what do you want to talk about?"

Her hand found my knee. Light. Friendly. The kind of touch that could be explained away as casual affection between close friends.

It didn’t feel casual.

"I want to talk about how you’ve been so focused on the election and training and whatever’s happening with Camille and Petra that you haven’t actually stopped to breathe." Her fingers traced a small pattern on my kneecap, absent and intimate. "I want to talk about how you look exhausted even when you’re winning. I want to talk about how you deflect every serious conversation with a joke because actually being vulnerable would require trusting someone."

"That’s a lot of wants."

"I have many wants." Her hand moved higher, resting on my thigh now, still light, still friendly, still absolutely not accidental. "Right now, my primary want is for my best friend to stop being so tense and just exist in a dark room with someone who thinks he’s pretty great."

The Ecchi Logic trait was screaming at me. Not in words, but in the way it highlighted every detail of her proximity. The vanilla note in her perfume. The rhythm of her breathing. The heat of her palm through the thin fabric of my shorts. The way her lips parted slightly when she looked at me.

I knew what this was. I’d known what this was since day three, when she’d started claiming the seat beside me in every class and threading her arm through mine in every hallway. Felicity Hardy wanted something, and Felicity Hardy always eventually got what she wanted.

The question was whether I was going to let her.

"The movie’s starting," I said.

"Is it?" She didn’t look at the screen. "I hadn’t noticed."