---

She met him in the library.

It was the first snow of the season, and everything was so fucking cold she could feel her individual breaths turn to ice, but it was where he would be, so there she was.

To anyone but her, Jamie Torres was ordinary. He wore a toque that barely covered his curly brown hair, glasses that slid down his freckled nose every five minutes, and the kind of demeanour that suggested he would stop to let a family of ducklings cross the sidewalk.

Willow Hart was exactly the type of girl who wouldn’t be caught dead with a guy like Jamie Torres. Her black hair was sleek and straight, her backpack cost more than her tuition, and she would tear any incompetent person to shreds in front of their own mother.

But damn her if she looked away.

When she initially spotted Jamie tucked into the Archaeology section of the Main Library, it was only a curious glance. He was, after all, writing notes from a Computer Science textbook in the wrong area of the building.

How did she recognize the textbook, you ask?

Because it was the same one she had tucked away in her bag.

Willow would have never known him if she hadn’t been erroneously assigned the course and told that there were no other options left. She was an Archaeology major, for crying out loud. What was she going to do with codes and zeroes and whatever else was going on in that class?

She wanted to dig ancient stuff out of the ground and call it a good day. Was that so hard?

Maybe she wouldn’t be making a fuckton of money like his Computer Science ass, but at least she’d be happy (and far away from home).

After that first time, Willow came to the library every night.

He always sat at the desk in the corner, visible only by someone who traversed the dusty shelves at the back of the library. With no other option, Willow chose the double table on the opposite side of the room because she would have an undisturbed view of him. His right side, but still him.

Maybe it was a little creepy to be following Jamie here, but she told herself it was just a crush. Just a crush. She would never speak to him, would always look away whenever he turned his head and saw her, and she would just otherwise note the way he fiddled with his toque when he was stressed or chewed on the end of his pen.

Studying wasn’t a new concept for her – she just usually didn’t bother with such trivial things. She did well enough that her father wouldn’t be embarrassed in front of his “colleagues” but not so well that she stood out on the student roster.

Jamie was always studying. He was the sort to take ten pages of notes every five minutes, water bottle at hand, and a sheaf of loose papers in his backpack.

If you asked her what, exactly, she found so attractive about Jamie, she’d say, “Fuck if I know.”

Maybe it was the guilelessness, maybe it was the stupid candy bar he had in the side pocket of his bag, or maybe it was just the fact that he always, always smiled whenever he caught her looking.

Her father would shoot this boy if he found out that Willow was distracted by an innocuous do-gooder with no outstanding family wealth.

No, she wasn’t exaggerating.

Willow didn’t have many in the way of friends, and the ones she did have were people she wouldn’t mind never seeing again. They said things behind her back, she knew that.

Daddy’s little girl would never worry about school.

No wonder her Mom offed herself.

But at least her mom was the Fiona Wong.

Fiona Wong?

You know, Fiona Wong. The dragon of the east. Corporate lawyer known for taking down multinational assholes with too much money and not enough generosity toward their employees? Fiona Wong.   

You think her dad killed her mom for the money?

He was one of those multinational assholes, after all.

That kind of shit. Suffice to say, Willow only saw her so-called friends when she was desperate for company, and thankfully, that didn’t happen more than once a year.

“Hey, do you mind?”

Willow’s eyes slid to the boy taking one of her pens out of her pencil case. He had been sitting across from her for the duration of the evening, occasionally peeking at her over the top of his messy pile of shit as if she’d be attracted to a leering, suave Casanova who clearly thought his muscles could draw her attention. Her view of Jamie was blocked by his hulking ass.

“Yes, I fucking mind,” she snapped, yanking her things toward her.

Fucker looked offended. “I just need to borrow your pen,” he defended, as if he had any right to be touching her stuff.

Willow rolled her eyes. “If you’re going to ask, then wait for my response.”

“Who the hell wouldn’t lend someone else a pen?” he challenged, stubborn glint in his eye.

“Someone who doesn’t want idiot germs on her stuff,” Willow said, voice soft and predatory smile on her lips. “Someone who expects common fucking courtesy from other people.”

“Whatever,” he muttered under his breath.

People glanced over at their exchange, the silence of the library erasing any sort of privacy, and Willow mentally flipped them all off.

One of them flinched from the force of her glare.

Good.

Feeling eyes burning a hole through her temple, Willow turned her attention forward to see Jamie already staring at her.

He gave her a small smile.

And then –

And then he waved.

She felt a flush creeping up her cheeks, and his smile widened to a grin.

A dork, really, but damn, he was cute.

Willow darted her eyes back to the subject at hand. Yes. Archaeology. Material culture. She could focus on this. She had to focus on this because Jamie was still staring and she could see his smile imprinted on the forefront of her mind and there was a good chance he’d die if she let him into her fucked up life.

Well, that worked.

A few hours later, Willow was sick of reading. She had half a page of notes from over a hundred pages of textbook, and she was confident that her photographic memory would pull her through the exam season.

Well enough to please dad but not so well that she effortlessly climbed to the top of the class.

Checking her watch, Willow shoved her books into her backpack, uncaring of the way it would scrape against the inside layer of satin. She had eight minutes to get out of the library. With music blasting through her ears, she shouldered her backpack on one side and picked up her unfinished Starbucks drink from where the condensation would leave a mark on the table.

Six minutes.

A foot stuck out on her path toward the exit.

If her dad hadn’t instilled her stellar instincts from a young age, she would have sprawled across the floor. But (un)lucky enough for Fucker, Willow was quick enough to “trip” and dump her coffee all over his smug face.

“Oh, my goodness, I’m so sorry!” she exclaimed, faux concern on her face. “I must have tripped on your leg.”

Fucker wasn’t happy. His hair was all droopy and sad now. “What the fuck—”

“You might want to go change,” she suggested sweetly. “Coffee might stain.”

People whispered as she walked past them, and a few of them mimicked giving her a fist bump because Fucker was popular for his manwhore ways. She never even bothered learning his name in the three years she’d been spying him around her classes.

She had just made it a few feet beyond the entrance when her phone rang. Ten o’clock, on the dot.

“Hey, Dad,” she greeted.

“Hey, sweet pea. How are you?”

Her mom taught her that it was best to stop somewhere safe to talk on the phone rather than risking a distracted walk, so she rounded the corner of the library steps to lean against the cold stone.

Snow was falling. Fuck, it was cold.

“Willow? Are you there?”

Shit.

“Yeah, I’m here. I’m good. Just finished studying in the library.”

Dad laughed. “That’s my girl. Do you need anything? New textbooks? I could get Maria –”

“I don’t need anything, Dad.” Especially not from Maria.

“You know, I was just telling the guys about you,” he told her, a smile on his voice that used to warm her heart.

“Yeah? What did you say?”

“I told them that my daughter is an Archaeology student at one of the most prestigious universities in the country and that she can dig out an artifact like no one else,” he boasted, proud and happy and everything he had no fucking right to be.

“Thanks, Dad. Nice to know you think so highly of me,” she said, unable to hide the sarcasm.

“It would be nice if you had gone into Economics—”

Here we go again. “No, Dad.”

“Willow –”

“I know about the drugs, Dad.”

Silence.

“Next time you want your cheap whore to dig around the apartment for your stash, you could at least tell me. I could’ve saved her a few hours.”

“Now, sweet pea, you don’t understand–”

“No, I do understand. I understand that you can’t stay clean just long enough that you pass your parole hearing so you can come home. Or maybe you don’t want to come home because Mom is dead and all you have left is the daughter who doesn’t meet your business savvy, your business instincts which landed you in prison.”

Tuesday nights were his allotted time for calling family, and she had been waiting five days to call him out on his shitty decision to have Maria rummage around his closet for the secret stash of heroin. She’d kicked the bitch out as soon as she retrieved the white brick from under the bathroom sink.

“Of course, I want to come home,” he insisted. “I just – it’s hard being in here, sweet pea.”

Quietly, she asked. “You know what’s harder, Dad? Knowing you’ll never see either of your parents again.”

“Willow –”

“But at least Mom has a good reason. You’re just fucking selfish.”

“Willow, please –”

“Don’t call me until you’re clean.”

She hung up.

Her cheeks felt colder than usual, and it didn’t take more than a casual swipe to know that her tears had frozen on her skin.

The snow had covered the ground by now, the Massachusetts weather utterly predictable in November, but the streets were quiet, at least. There were no frat guys shouting and whooping from their front porches, no sorority girls giggling as they headed for the next party.

Peaceful, almost.

“Are you all right?”

Willow felt the mask go back up, stoic disinterest on her face as she realized her phone call had been overheard by some sneaky little –

Jamie. It was Jamie. Winter coat swallowing his slight frame, backpack straps over both shoulders, glasses fogging up from the cold.

“Are you okay?” he asked again.

Clearing her throat, she said, “I’m fine, Jamie.”

His eyebrows disappeared under his toque. “You know my name?”

Ah, shit.

“I – we’re in the same class,” she offered.

“Doesn’t mean I know your name,” he returned smoothly, too smoothly for a guy who apologized every time he dropped a pen in the library.

“Well, Jamie, I’m fine. Thanks for asking.”

Willow ignored the way his mouth opened to ask another question and strode away before he could.

It was, perhaps, naïve of her to assume that either of them would be satisfied with one conversation.

The next night in the library, Jamie was in her spot.

He was already studying, nose buried in the same textbook, scribbling notes in a way that suggested he was far more used to typing than handwriting.

Willow had regained her brash countenance and walked right up to the table. Foot tapping on the ground, hand on her hip, she whispered, “This is my seat.”

“It doesn’t have your name on it,” was all he said to her, ink flowing unbroken.

Sighing, she sank down into the seat across from him, the seat that had been occupied by Fucker yesterday. Taking out her stuff, organizing her pens in order of least to most ink, and trying to pretend like Ancient Greek architecture wasn’t the most boring thing she had to learn about this year.

They studied like that for a few hours. Willow never glanced over at him, and she never once felt his eyes on her. It was almost…peaceful.

Until it was eleven o’clock and he stupidly asked, “Food?”

Heart leaping but mind freezing, Willow just said, “No.”

Eventually, she succumbed to hunger. It was three weeks later, the final few days before winter break, and Willow had woken up almost late for class. She hadn’t eaten anything in over twenty-four hours.

Every night without fail, the both of them had studied in the library together at the same table. Neither ever really spoke, but once one of them sighed and pushed their chair back, that was the only sign they needed.

“Food?” Jamie asked, innocent hope written plainly on his face. The cliché description would be to say he reminded her of a lost puppy, but there was a strength in Jamie she had slowly discovered over the last few weeks.

He was kind, yes. So, so kind. Always led by his belief that people were good and deserved basic respect. But he defended her seat when she showed up late to the library once. He accidentally knocked over Fucker’s bag every time the idiot dared show up within ten feet of her.

Jamie was everything she wanted to be, and sometimes, in the quiet of the night, she admitted that he was everything she needed.

“Willow?”

Her eyes focused back on his. Though she hadn’t ever told him her name, it wasn’t too hard to figure it out when they shared a damn class. That and, of course, she had it written on all of her notebooks along with a don’t fucking touch my notes.

“Yeah?”

“Food?” Jamie asked again. His hope hadn’t faltered in the last few weeks. He only ever said a maximum of three words to her, but he was always there. Never asking for more, never wondering why she checked the time a million times on Tuesdays, never doing anything that he believed would spook her.

Dad is in prison. Who the hell is gonna know about Jamie?

“Sure,” she agreed.

Her second mistake.

Jamie engaged in this strange little dance-off until the end of the year. Mid-May, after exams were finished. He found her just as she was leaving the hall, a huge grin on his face that mirrored hers because she was done with third year!

It had been months of studying their asses off in the library together. Willow didn’t really need to study, of course, but it was still nice to actually read the textbooks. Having Jamie across the table from her kept her mind from wandering to her father and her dead mom and the fact that she would have to graduate in a year.

Dad hadn’t called her since that night. Maybe the drugs were more important to him than getting clean for her, after all.

The weather was unusually warm, but Willow was rather attached to her lace up black boots, so she let her feet burn.

“How’d you do?” He made a move as if to hug her, and she artfully sidestepped the embrace. “I know you killed it in there.”

“It was…not as hard as I was anticipating,” she said honestly. For her photographic memory, no exam had ever been hard, but he didn’t know that. Nobody knew that. It was just another thing people would twist and use against her, as if the way she was born or the family she was born into required her personal opinion.

“Food?”

Willow knew that she was putting him in danger. People tended to die when they wandered into Hart territory, and she didn’t want him to be a casualty of her father’s insanity. Jamie Torres was a library crush turned best friend turned person she would kill for – and she wasn’t willing to corrupt him.

He didn’t know everything about her, didn’t know more than the occasional scraps, but he had never demanded more.

Summer would begin in a few days. She’d be going to New York as soon as she finished packing up her shit, and she would likely never see Jamie again because they were supposed to be on entirely different parts of campus. As long as she avoided the Main Library, the student hotspots, and studied mostly at home, then she should be able to get away with not seeing him again.

“Willow, are you all right?” he asked, hand on her arm.

“I’m not hungry,” she told him, tracing her gaze over the line of his freckled nose, the curly hair, the worried tilt of his lips.

“Are you sure? We could get –”

“No, Jamie. I’m not hungry.”

She smiled to let him know nothing was wrong when, in fact, everything was, and he let her go.

Willow didn’t see Jamie again until she was about to leave for New York. She had successfully pretended not to be home when he came to her front door – she’d been drunk at New Years and required an escort home – and he didn’t have her phone number, so that was his only mode of contacting her.

She ordered food, packed her shit, and waited for her departure date to arrive.

With the money from her mom, Willow planned to stay in New York for a few weeks. Maybe cross the Atlantic to see some new places in Europe. Hell, she could go to Africa if she really wanted. The only reason she usually refrained from leaving the country was because her father would be unable to find her.

Lately, that sounded more and more appealing.

Her father still had people in the outside world willing to do his sordid bidding, but that didn’t mean Willow wasn’t smart enough to stay under the radar. She was her mother’s daughter, after all.

Jamie found her just as she was watching her driver put her last suitcase in the trunk.

“You’re leaving without saying goodbye?” he asked quietly.

He still looked like someone who would fall over when a child blew out their birthday candles, but that hard edge to Jamie had grown the longer he kept her company.

“I have to go,” she said, shoulders rigid.

“No, you don’t.” Jamie shuffled a step toward her. The heat of the season meant that he could no longer wear his favoured toque, so his curly brown hair was left to the mercy of the winds. “You could stay here. With me. We could study in silence…or eat. I have candy bars.”

Willow had never wanted to be before, but with Jamie standing there, she wanted to be ordinary. The kind of ordinary that would smile genuinely and go home with him to visit his grandmother, the kind of ordinary that was assured nobody would die for associating with the wrong people, the kind of ordinary that could just love him.

Because she did. Somewhere along the way, she’d grown to love the boy who somehow always knew when she needed a hot cup of coffee and made her smiles turn to grins. It was stupid of her to think she could avoid such a fate.

She took a step back. “I can’t, Jamie. I’m sorry.”

“Why?”

“Because I can’t.”

“Willow –”

“No, you don’t understand –”

“Then, help me understand –”

“I can’t –”

“You know how I feel about you, Willow –”

“I know—”

“Why can’t you be with me, then?”

“I just can’t –”

“Can’t you, for once, just tell me the fucking truth?”

Something in her snapped, the yearning to tell him everything he wanted to know and damn the masses because he didn’t deserve any of this.

“Because you are good and I’m not and you’re just – you don’t know what you’re getting into!”

My father is a dangerous man. He’s the type with enough money to get whoever he wants killed. My mom died so that he wouldn’t have to kill for her. We’re so fucked up, Jamie. Please.

“Shouldn’t you let me decide that for myself?”

She stopped. Willow just…stopped. She saw him, saw the enormous weight she had put on his shoulders just by existing, and she made a choice.

But how do you tear out the part of you that feels most human? How do you tell it, “I love and want and need you, but you are the last drop of pure water in a pool of refuse?”

How do you break your own heart knowing that it would be worthless without that single ray of hope?

“No, Jamie. I can’t.” For one moment, Willow wished she had done what her mother had and gotten out of this life, because if she wasn’t around then maybe she wouldn’t be the match that set a house of cards alight. “I can’t let you decide. I’m deciding for you. I hope you’ll forgive me.”

One last look at him, at his heartbreak, and then she left.

---

Her dad was found dead in his cell six years later. She verified the corpse at the morgue, and after a few papers were signed, Willow received the Hart-Wong fortune in full. Basically, she was rich.

Despite the angry Board of Directors, Willow officially dissolved the Hart Corporation and donated all of the proceeds to various social justice reforms throughout the world. She only kept her mother’s money because that, she knew, wasn’t earned through blood.

Willow never went back for her final year at university. When she left Jamie on the doorstep of her apartment building that day, she left the country altogether. She traveled Europe and Asia and, yes, even Africa. People didn’t mind hiring the quiet foreigner who memorized the menu after mere minutes and served with a perfectly symmetrical smile.

Any man or woman who tried to hit on her always failed. A few times, Willow was lonely enough to try and find solace in the arms of someone she found acceptable, but those nights were few and far between.

She was currently in Tokyo. Five months since she moved here, and one since she learned enough of the language to get by working in a nearby restaurant. There was no need for her to earn a living when she literally had gold bars stored in a safe, but it distracted her from everything else.

It relieved her boredom.

Life was dull without passion, without care, without the willingness to discover new things and write new stories.

So, she never stayed in one place longer than six months. She figured her next stop would be Sydney or Auckland or somewhere else far away.

Funny how plans never really work out the way you’d expect them to.

It was the month of November again. Snow wasn’t rare in Japan, but it was gorgeous when it appeared. Drawing her scarf tighter around her neck, Willow hurried across the street to the row of boutique apartments just a few blocks away from the city centre. Tokyo was bright, so bright that the sun never truly went away, and there were more people here than she’d ever seen before.

Still, a shell on a sea of sand would attract attention.

“Excuse me, Miss, do you know where the subway station is?”  

Something about the voice stirred an old memory in her mind.

“It’s one block north from here. Just down that street,” she answered automatically, gaze never straying from the blinking crosswalk light.

“Where?”

She sighed and turned, pointing to the sign. “Right there.”

“Okay. Thanks, Willow.”

Shit.

Willow braced herself, prepared to face one of her father’s colleagues or a snooty classmate or a one-night stand she had ditched by morning.

But fuck, it was Jamie.

Jamie Torres.

His hair was shorter, curls sticking tight to the top of his head, and he was carrying a briefcase like every other man around here. There was a small scar on his jaw, an expensive watch on his wrist, and his glasses were now contact lenses.

Still, she would recognize Jamie anywhere.

She remembered everything she said that day to him, everything she had ever said to him. She told herself that her father was dead, that he had died because his own addiction had pushed him to take his own life. She reminded herself that she was free to live the life that she wanted.

“Do you have nothing to say to me?” he asked, though he was smiling.

She didn’t ask what he was doing there, why he was in Tokyo of all places, or how on earth he suddenly grew big enough to fill out a suit like that. She didn’t ask for forgiveness or how he was doing or what he was up to nowadays.

“I’m hungry,” was all she said to him. “Food?”