The thing about Sundays was that they had a specific texture to them.

Slower. Softer around the edges. The kind of day that asked nothing from you and expected even less.

Yris liked Sundays for exactly that reason.

She'd woken up at ten — later than usual, which she'd earned — and gone through her morning routine with the unhurried focus of someone who treated self-care less as a habit and more as a philosophy. Sheet mask. Vitamin C serum. The good moisturizer she only used on weekends. Hair wrapped in a silk scarf while it dried.

By eleven she was installed on the living room sofa in her favorite oversized sleep shirt, legs tucked under her, a bowl of sliced fruit on the coffee table beside a smaller bowl of almonds because she was trying, she was genuinely trying, to be the kind of person who snacked healthily.

The television was playing a korean drama she was invested in weekly since it first came out.

The house was quiet — parents out, no siblings home, just Yris and the Sunday light coming through the curtains and the specific peace of having nowhere to be.

She reached for a grape.

Settled deeper into the cushions.

Her phone buzzed around eleven thirty.

She almost ignored it. She was at the part where—

She checked it anyway.

Jessica
hey babe!! just wanted to say thank you so much for coming last night, it really meant a lot 🥺 and the gift was so so pretty, you and dorian really didn't have to!!

Yris smiled genuinely. 

She typed back quickly.

Yris
of course babe!! happy birthday again, you deserved every second of last night 🎉 the rooftop was STUNNING btw

Jessica
right?? okay i'm obsessed with how it turned out

Jessica
also can i just say

Jessica
dorian had some serious character development last night lmaooo

Yris's thumb stilled on the screen.

Jessica
like he's always just kind of... there when you bring him to things right lols

Jessica
but last night he was actually IN THE MOMENT LIKEEE ?????

Jessica
whatever you've been doing, keep doing it babe 😭 good job getting him to open up more!

Yris read it twice.

Then set the phone face down on the cushion beside her.

On the television, the male lead was saying something significant. She didn't hear it.

Good job getting him to open up more.

She picked up an almond.

Put it back down.

The thing was — Jessica wasn't wrong, exactly. Dorian had been more present last night. More engaged. There had been moments during the games where she'd looked across the rooftop and he had been — different. Lighter, almost. Less like a person managing his own attendance and more like someone who was actually somewhere.

She'd noticed it in real time.

She'd told herself it was the party atmosphere. The games. The energy of the night.

She'd been telling herself a lot of things lately.

Whatever you've been doing, keep doing it.

Yris looked at the television.

The thing she hadn't said to Jessica — the thing she was only now letting herself fully form into a thought — was that she hadn't done anything. Not recently. Not for a while, if she was honest.

She'd tried, in the beginning. She'd asked questions and made plans and shown up in the ways she knew how to show up. She'd learned his go-to drinks and meals, learned which silences were comfortable and which ones meant something was wrong, learned that he expressed care through proximity and action rather than words and tried — she had genuinely tried — to meet him there.

But at some point the trying had started to feel like work.

And then it had started to feel like losing.

And somewhere between the feeling-like-work and the feeling-like-losing she had stopped trying quite so hard.

And then Brennen had been there, in the way that Brennen always was — easy and warm and effortlessly present, the kind of person who made you feel noticed without you having to do anything to earn it.

And she had let herself go toward that.

She knew what that made her.

She wasn't stupid.

She reached for the remote and rewound thirty seconds of the episode she hadn't been watching.

She picked her phone back up eleven minutes later.

Not to reply to Jessica. Just to — she didn't fully know. Scroll. Decompress. The usual Sunday things.

She opened Instagram.

Watched three stories. Liked a post. Scrolled past a reel she'd already seen.

And then, without fully deciding to, typed a name into the search bar; qinnara.

Several accounts came up but then found the right one immediately — not hard, the profile picture was distinctive. A candid shot, laughing at something off-camera, warm light, the kind of photo where someone hadn't known they were being taken.

Public account.

Yris told herself she was just looking.

The grid was — nice. Genuinely, annoyingly nice. The aesthetic wasn't curated so much as just naturally consistent — lots of warm tones, food photos, candid shots with friends, the occasional beach or café backdrop. The kind of account that looked effortless because it probably was.

She tapped into the first post.

Qinny and Maya at what looked like a café, both mid-laugh, someone had caught them completely off guard. The caption was a line about trying to find the city's best iced Milo and the comments were full of people tagging their own recommendations.

She scrolled.

Family photos. A birthday post for her mother that was warm and specific and made Yris feel slightly strange reading it. More café shots. A throwback of her and Brennen from what looked like early in their relationship — in their high school clothes, both grinning, Brennen's arm around her shoulders in that easy instinctive way he had.

Yris looked at that one for a moment.

Then kept scrolling.

There was nothing here to dislike. That was the problem. She'd been looking, subconsciously, for something to hold onto — some reason to feel better about the low-level unease that had been sitting in her chest since the rooftop — no, since seeing them together at the stands during football practice, and instead she'd found a girl who was close with her family and went café hopping with her best friend and had been with her boyfriend for a long time and seemed, by all available evidence, to be a genuinely decent person.

Yris put the phone face down again.

Reached for a grape.

She's Brennen's girlfriend, she thought. That's all.

She reached for the remote.

Pressed play.

She had to rewind again four minutes later because she'd missed something.

She pressed play again.

Rewound again at the eight minute mark because her brain had gone somewhere else entirely during a pivotal scene.

Whatever you've been doing, keep doing it.

She pressed play.

Paused it.

Was it really I who did that, or?

She stared at the frozen frame on the television.

The honest answer — the one she'd been circling for the last hour without landing on it — was no. It wasn't her. She hadn't done anything different. She'd been the same with Dorian that she always was, which lately meant warm on the surface and slightly somewhere else underneath.

What had been different last night was Qinny.

Or more specifically — what Dorian was like when Qinny was there.

Which meant the character development Jessica was crediting to her had nothing to do with her at all.

Yris pressed play again.

Watched approximately ninety seconds.

Paused it.

Picked up her phone.

Opened her chat with Dorian.

Their last exchange was from last night — short, practical, the logistics of getting home after the party. Nothing warm. Nothing that would've looked out of place between two people who were politely coexisting.

She typed.

Yris
baobeiii you havent texted me todayyy, what are you up to? 🐻 

Sent it before she could think too hard about why she was sending it.

Put the phone down.

Pressed play on the kdrama.

Watched two whole minutes without rewinding.

Progress.

She was on her fourth rewind of the same scene — she genuinely could not tell you what was happening in this episode anymore, she'd watched it three times before and somehow retained nothing — when she finally put the remote down and just sat there.

Sunday light through the curtains.

Fruit bowl half empty.

Almonds untouched because she kept forgetting they were there.

The thing about Dorian was that she had loved him, in the way she knew how to love people. Which was — brightly, and in bursts, and with a lot of warmth that she meant genuinely even when it wasn't consistent. She'd meant it when she'd chosen him. She'd meant it for a long time.

Maybe they just needed some more time.

Or simply talked.

Communicated.

Yris already knew what they should do from the very beginning.

She just hadn't decided what to do with the knowing yet.

Her phone buzzed.

Dorian
My mom asked me to help her out today out of the blue. 

Dorian
Sorry, I should've informed you this morning.

Dorian
I'm on a quick break now. Want to call for abit?

She looked at the message for a moment.

It was very Dorian.

She typed back.

Yris
its okayy and suree im just watching kdrama and snacking 😌 very productive sunday

Dorian
Sounds about right. I'll call you in a minute.

She smiled, setting the phone down.

Pressed play on the kdrama, while waiting for the call to come through.

In that moment, she finally understood what was happening in the kdrama she kept pausing and rewinding.

It was a breakup scene.

She laughed softly at nothing.

Of course it was.

Then just like clockwork and like he said he would, Dorian's call came.

She answered it, tucking her feet under her, and let the Sunday settle around her.