Oakley Ponciano bit her lip before she even knew she was doing it.
Grace Barron must want a home, she thought. Not the rental-with-a-couch kind, but the soft, ordinary kind—where someone waits for you, where your jacket knows its hook. She wore indifference like a well-cut coat, yes, but maybe that was just for speed, for weather. Maybe the wanting was still there, only pressed flat so she could walk faster, steadier.
Underneath, Oakley felt, Grace was probably lonely. How else could a sentence like that have slipped out of her, glinting and bare?
What am I doing? There it was again—the bleeding-heart reflex she had promised to cauterize. This was exactly how the odd ones, the takers and the drifters, had found her in the past: she left the porch light on and then wondered why moths came.
And what was she supposed to be doing right now? Finding someone to grab dinner, not circling back to Grace like a bird that can't quite leave the boat.
Oakley shut her eyes, shook her head, and backed out of Grace's old feed. She reopened the dinner-partner app.
At last, a ping from a woman: "Hiii~ pretty lady! Free tonight? Wanna eat together?" The tone bounced like a rubber ball, capped with a little bunny emoji. Soft girl energy. Easy to be around.
Oakley was about to type yes when—traitor brain—Grace's old post surfaced again, the one about family dinners and warm lights.
Insane. Ridiculous. Absolutely unhelpful.
She typed, deleted, typed again, combed the sentence with a frown, and finally sent: "So sorry, tonight might be tight. Can we swap apptalk IDs and plan for next time?"
"Yay, sure~" came back.
They traded handles and added each other. After the greetings and neat little notes to self were done, Oakley slid out of that thread and found Grace's avatar in her list.
She hesitated, then shut her eyes and jumped.
"Grace," she typed, "will you be out late after work tonight?"
No immediate reply.
Oakley exhaled, stood, and stretched in place, phone pinched in her hand, her thoughts pulling in opposite directions like unruly dogs.
When Grace's phone had buzzed, she'd been mid-surgery on a rookie novelist—a stubborn one, and allergic to edits. The debut had done well, enough to lift her off the ground, and now her second serial for the magazine was ricocheting between "ethereal minimalist heroine" and "petty tyrant with a crown." The tone was off, the gestures wrong; mist was supposed to drift, not stomp. To put it unkindly, the character read like she had… issues.
The author, of course, thought she was brilliant. She accused Grace of being sanded down by the corporate wheel, of seeing shallow, of not accepting that people are complicated, powerful, gloriously contradictory.
It wasn't just her. In Grace's experience, anyone who could sling words had a tendency toward delicate pride. Call it artistic spine if you're generous—call it fussiness if you aren't.
And then there were her dad's runway kids, beautiful and impossible in a different key.
Anyone with a live wire of art in them, Grace had learned, came with sparks.
At the beginning she'd been naïve—believing there was nothing she couldn't fix with good notes and a late night. She could fix it, as it turned out. The problem was what it cost. Weeks when she lived on adrenaline and bitterness, when she was always on the brink of anger or already past it, shredding her patience by noon.
Back then people called her a powder keg.
She hadn't cared until her gut did—the acid and the ache and the fatigue that wouldn't soften. She taught herself to smooth it out, to be approachable, to hold the fuse. It took more books and breathing than she liked to admit.
Today, though, patience was thin as glass. Even her eyes felt colder.
"Same note as before," she typed, voice in her head stripped of ornament. "Either change the character brief or change the scenes. Your call. If you can't fix it, do not send it to me."
She hit send, dragged her gaze off the screen, and pinched the bridge of her nose.
After a beat she shook out a mint, let it rest on her tongue, and closed her eyes while it dissolved—bitter, brisk, just enough to fake energy.
Still tired. She rolled her neck, slow circles, until a thread of comfort eased down her spine.
Only then did she remember the earlier buzz. She reached for her phone, slouched back, and unlocked it.
"Grace, will you be out late after work tonight?"
The message had landed twenty-some minutes ago. Funny—she had been so wrung out, but seeing Oakley's name seemed to lift a small weight she hadn't noticed she was carrying.
So this is what it's like when someone is home waiting. Before, there was no one to text. Work was work; off was off; home was just a place to sleep.
Oakley changed the surface of the day. A still pond twitching into motion. That, Grace realized, hadn't happened in a long time.
She thought for a moment and typed: "No. I'm beat. Not staying out. Heading straight back."
When Oakley read it, she was in the kitchen with a honey date between her teeth. She smiled around the sweetness.
She set the phone down and turned to the spoils spread across the counter, a small festival of groceries she'd hauled up the stairs: tomatoes, tofu, a clean white fish, smoked tofu, a coil of cured sausage, green bell peppers. All top-shelf, glossy with promise.
Traveling with Grace, she'd noticed—Grace loved tomatoes. And anything in the tofu family. And sausage, the briny, chewy kind.
Oakley pushed up her sleeves with a ceremonious rustle, opened the bags, and began aligning ingredients like chess pieces. She lifted a tomato and a carton of tofu and tapped them together in the air, grinning with ridiculous confidence.
If the way to a woman's heart is through her stomach, then watch me. How hard could dinner be for a bona fide genius?
She could practically see the banquet in her mind already.
A new bubble slid in from Grace: "What's up? Do we need to do something?"
Why else ask where she'd be?
"Nothing urgent," Oakley wrote. "I just thought—if you're free tonight, I'll wait and we can have dinner together. And after, maybe a movie? What do you think?"
A movie. She hadn't taken one all the way to the credits in ages—no time, and when there was, her restlessness gnawed.
Grace considered it. "Sure," she said. "Let's do it."
"What kind of movie do you want?" Oakley typed, a spray of confetti hidden in the question.
What kind? Grace realized she no longer had a ready-made answer. She'd been away from that part of herself so long it had dust on it.
She opened Letterboxd like a person borrowing a compass, scrolled a few curated lists, read the comments with editorial rigor, and clipped a screenshot.
"Word of mouth on this one's great," she sent. "Shall we?"
"Yesss," Oakley wrote. "I don't think I've ever watched that genre! Now I'm curious. It's a date. I'll cook and wait for you?"
Grace's mouth tilted. "Okay."
Then another beat of thought. "You're cooking?"
Wasn't Oakley a delivery-app gold member? A world-class avoider of hassle? And now—volunteering to make dinner? The mind boggled.
"Yup," Oakley said.
Grace couldn't say why, but a siren of worry rose up—instinctive, insistent. "Forgive the question," she typed. "What do you think of me as a person?"
"You're great," Oakley replied, breezy.
"Then you're probably not going to poison me… right?" Grace wrote.
"What's that supposed to mean?" Oakley shot back. "In your mind am I some catastrophically disabled domestic gremlin?"
Grace laughed out loud. "Who said that? It's not that bad."
"Only… mild."
"You—unbelievable," Oakley spluttered. "Just wait. I'm going to expand your horizons and show you what a real Iron Chef looks like."
"Okay, little homewrecker," Grace returned, one brow climbing—teasing sharpened to a point.
"Cancel it. Don't come home tonight," Oakley typed, outraged and grinning.
Grace looked at the screen and smiled, the kind that softened the line of her mouth.
She set the phone down, took one more quiet breath, and turned back to her work. Outside, the light had shifted a fraction. She noticed—and without deciding to, she moved faster. The thought of going home pulled like a tide.