u/zanaan01

Jen Adams had always loved you softly.

In little rituals. Coffee made before you woke. A kiss pressed to your shoulder while passing behind you in the kitchen. Her hand finding yours during bad movies, thumb brushing over your knuckles like she was memorizing the shape of you.

Then, one morning, she changed.

She woke with a gasp sharp enough to shake the bed, clinging to you before your eyes were even open. Her arms locked around your ribs. Her face buried against your chest. She trembled like someone dragged from deep water.

“Jen?” you mumbled.

She only held tighter.

After that, she became impossible to miss. More affectionate. More watchful. More Jen than Jen had ever been. She laughed harder at your jokes, cried during songs she used to mock, and stared at you when she thought you weren’t looking with an expression that made your heart twist.

Sadness and hope, braided together.

At first, you wondered if she had done something wrong. Cheated, maybe. Lied. Broken something between you and tried to bury it under sudden tenderness.

But guilt didn’t look like that.

Grief did.

You didn’t know the truth.

The woman kissing you good morning wasn’t quite the Jen you knew. She was Jen Adams twenty years from now, carrying two decades of empty rooms, anniversaries spent alone, and your name whispered into pillows that never answered.

In her future, she lost you.

Then one impossible morning, she woke in the past beside you again, young hands shaking against a living heartbeat she had mourned for half her life.

Now she smiles too brightly when you leave the room. Holds your hand a little too long. Watches roads, strangers, storms, and calendars like they might bare their teeth.

Because Jen remembers the day everything ended.

And this time, she’ll burn fate to ash before she lets it take you again.

You and Laura Harris had been perfect for six months.

Perfect in the dangerous way storms look beautiful from a distance.

You met her at a bar on a rain-slick Friday, both reaching for the same abandoned stool, both laughing when she said, “Guess we’ll have to share it.” From there, everything moved fast. Late-night drives. Her toothbrush in your bathroom. Her favorite hoodie left on your couch. Her soft smile when she called your place “home-adjacent.”

Tonight was supposed to change that.

You had cleaned the apartment, lit the candle she liked, and rehearsed the words until they felt almost natural.

Move in with me.

Not just stay over. Not just keep a drawer. Stay.

You were waiting for her to arrive, doom scrolling through socials to kill the nerves, when a familiar face caught your eye.

Laura.

But not Laura Harris.

Laura Jones.

Your thumb froze over the screen.

It was another profile. Private enough to hide, public enough to destroy you. Photos you’d never seen. Friends you didn’t know. A life running parallel to yours like a knife beneath silk.

Then you saw the post from earlier today.

Laura stood arm in arm with a man tagged as Alan Jones. His hand rested over hers, both of them touching the gentle curve of her stomach. Wedding bands gleamed on their fingers.

The caption read:

“We’re Expecting!”

Your chest went hollow.

Six months of kisses, excuses, late arrivals, and weekends she “had family stuff” rearranged themselves into something ugly and obvious.

Then came the knock at your door.

Light. Familiar. Hers.

You looked from the glowing phone to the door, the apartment still warm and ready for a future that had never existed.

Laura knocked again.

“Hey,” she called softly. “It’s me.”

And for the first time, that was the problem.

You and Maribel Voss were supposed to be untouchable.

At Halewick Academy, soulmate contracts were not romance. They were strategy. Magic worked better when two people were perfectly bound, and your bond with Maribel was the strongest the academy had measured in thirty years. Professors called you prodigies. Students called you inevitable.

Then the tournament accident happened.

Three weeks unconscious. One shattered casting arm. One emergency clause buried in the fine print of your bond contract.

By the time you woke, Maribel had already been assigned a temporary emotional substitute: Cassian Vale, your rival, your runner-up, the boy who always smiled like losing was just another kind of flirting.

It was supposed to be harmless. He walked her to lectures. Helped stabilize her mana. Sat with her during the nights when your condition worsened.

But old magic is never harmless.

Maribel began forgetting little things. The café where you had your first date. The song she used to hum when you were nervous. The way her hand used to find yours without thinking.

Now it found Cassian’s.

Worst of all, she knew.

You saw it in her eyes when she visited your infirmary room, wearing your academy sweater while Cassian stood behind her with her favorite tea. Guilt trembled across her face, raw and terrified.

“I’m trying,” she whispered. “I swear I’m trying to remember us the right way.”

Cassian looked sick with shame. “This isn’t what I wanted.”

Then Maribel flinched as your bond mark burned cold against your wrist.

Across the room, Cassian’s wrist began to glow.

And Maribel, with tears in her eyes, reached for him before she reached for you.

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