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Manifesting as an Empath taught Keefe that there were many different types of love.
He learned them at Everglen, where there was so much love Keefe wondered how he hadn’t felt it in the air before he’d even manifested.
There was the way Fitz cared for him, which caught him off guard. He’d known they were friends, but there was this sense of protectiveness and compassion and affection that Keefe hadn’t realized it was okay to feel. He’d been trying to bury it in himself, worried he was just desperate for someone to care about who would care about him, and scared of getting hurt.
But Fitz did care, and Keefe tentatively allowed himself to care in return. Guardedly, yes, but it was its own kind of love.
Then there were the feelings Biana was slowly developing towards him. He was still deciding how he felt about those. It wasn’t like he was unaccustomed to girls blushing in his presence—he did walk the halls of Foxfire frequently—but he knew Biana Vacker better than he knew most, and he tentatively wondered if maybe, with time, there could be something there.
Then there was Alden and Della.
There was a special kind of love between Alden and Della, of course, that Keefe hoped he’d find one day, far into his future. And then there was the love they felt for their children, which was something Keefe had convinced himself didn’t exist. He’d convinced himself that parents feeling that unconditional love for their children was just a myth. And now… he wished he could go back to thinking it was a myth.
Because it was so much harder knowing that such a thing existed, and yet still, he’d never once felt it from his parents.
He felt deeply unprepared, though, for the way he started to feel when he met Sophie Foster.
The first time he saw her, he knew she was cute and a little unsure. She was new and a little unaware, and it was endearing. But it only took a few times of seeing her for his heart to begin to swell every time he saw her in the room. Just thinking about her made him smile in this goofy, genuine way that did not play into his image. He was a well-practiced flirt, and he kept his smirk in place when he teased her, but she didn’t seem to realize he’d stopped talking like that to all the girls.
The other girls noticed, though. And when he brushed past them in the hallway, feeling their ugly jealousy, he smirked at it smugly. Let them know they would never be as good as Sophie Foster.
Because it was true. No one else would ever be as smart, beautiful or amazing as Foster. She was effortlessly perfect, not in the classic way that so many girls tried to be, but just by being herself. Honestly, she felt lightyears above his league.
Just looking at her made his heart swell with a feeling he was too scared to name. But he was lucky for it when they were in the official Worst Detention At Foxfire Ever, where the punishment was mindfulness.
The mentor had said it was going to be a “relatively easy, relaxing day” meant to “calm their minds” and make it so they wouldn’t cause trouble in the future or something. As if sitting in silence would ever keep Keefe Sencen from coming up with troublesome ideas. In fact, she was basically giving him time to plot.
But meditation was the worst, so he distracted himself by looking over at Sophie, who had managed to get herself in trouble again by accident.
She looked a little annoyed, which made him crack a smile. It seemed she was just as fed up with the “mindfulness” talk the mentor was giving them as he was.
He waited for her to meet his gaze. Her eyes were basically telling him that she could not wait for detention to be over. He smirked slightly, tapping his head twice, and then shrugging, like an invitation. Sophie looked sideways over at the mentor before slipping into his mind. This is the most boring thing I think we’ve ever done in detention, she transmitted distastefully.
At least it isn’t dancing .
Sophie scrunched up her nose. I’d take the dancing.
Oh wow, you really don’t like this.
Do you ?
Keefe tried to maintain a neutral face as he replied, Well, it gives me just enough time to plan something as grand as the Great Gulon Incident .
Which you had nothing to do with .
Precisely. On an unrelated note, how do you feel about murcats?
Sophie turned so he would see her roll her eyes, but as she did, Keefe managed to catch a glimpse of her smile.
He didn’t think he could ever get tired of seeing that smile.
So, what are you in for? He asked her.
She blushed, and he knew this was going to be good. I was just trying to get the right answer. I thought maybe I was being tested or something.
Keefe snickered, already seeing where this was going. Foster, did you correct a mentor?
I thought she wanted me to! She was completely wrong. She had the star placements all turned around, and I thought maybe she was testing my knowledge or something and I have a photographic memory so I told her how they’re ACTUALLY aligned and she got all mad at me and said she was going to hail Grady and Edaline!
I’m sure Grady and Edaline have never been more proud.
I’m clinging onto the hope that they’ll be too relieved it’s not about me almost dying.
Keefe almost snickered at that, but covered it with a cough. The mentor glared at him, and scolded him for “disturbing the other prodigies.” Keefe waited for her to turn around before he shared a look with Sophie.
This is the worst.
Agreed.
He could feel her annoyance clear as day, but every time he said something in his mind, it quieted a little, and her emotions took a positive light. She was amused, and happy, and he couldn’t help hoping that the way hearing him talk affected her might mean something.
After all, the sound of her voice definitely affected him.
But hoping was all he could do—at least, back then.
So even while he gave her all the space in the world to pursue whatever she wanted with the emotions in her head, he always let himself keep that spark of hope. Because what he’d felt in her subconscious could only be described as love.
He hadn’t allowed himself to think that word regarding Sophie yet. It seemed too big, too precious. But now that he’d acknowledged what she felt, even if she didn’t fully realize what it was, he couldn’t hide it from himself anymore.
He was in love, and he was in way too deep to ever come back from it.
The first time he ever felt those emotions rise to the surface without her enhancing was the day in Havenfield that somehow, after going back and forth with Foster about whether or not being in a room with her hurt him, he’d ended up having her pinned up against a wall. Neither of their heartbeats had been normal during any of that.
He’d been prepared to smoothly spin around so he was leaning against the wall beside her if he felt any panic. But he didn’t. In fact, if he hadn’t been feeling her emotions in that moment, her wide eyes and quickened breath would have convinced him that she’d finally realized the feelings hidden in her heart. But she hadn’t—not quite yet. He wasn’t feeling the same overwhelming sense of love that he’d felt from her in Lumenaria.
But those feelings were definitely way closer to the surface than usual.
In fact, some of the flutters she was throwing his way reminded him of how she usually felt when she saw Fitz, and Keefe knew she knew she liked him, so maybe this would be the moment Sophie realized her feelings were more complicated than she realized.
It wasn’t that Keefe wanted things to be complicated for her. But… maybe he didn’t love her enough to fully let go of the hope that somehow, someday, she’d end up with him.
But she didn’t.
He was pretty sure that if Forkle hadn’t interrupted, if he managed to get at least the end of his sentence out, Sophie might’ve come close to realizing how deep her affection for him really went.
He also knew, however, that it wasn’t right. As awful as it felt, Sophie wasn’t ready to know the full story.
So Keefe stayed quiet. He cut off conversations that strayed a bit too far. And it was slowly killing him.
Even though this pained him, keeping his feelings (and hers, too) a secret became all the more important once she started dating Fitz. That… that was a whole other set of complications he was pretty sure he hadn’t handled well.
When Sophie and Fitz made it official (or, well, as official as Sophie let it be) Keefe drew up new boundaries. He could almost laugh at how absurd the thought was, since, technically, there shouldn’t be any reason to set new boundaries in the first place. If everything in their friendship had been perfectly platonic all along, nothing would have to change .
It was hilarious, actually. Or it would’ve been, if it hadn’t been so depressing.
The worst part? Sophie didn’t even know he had to change anything at all. In her point of view, one minute she and Keefe were friends and the next he was acting strange. It was hurting her, Keefe knew it was hurting her, and she probably knew he knew he was hurting her. But he didn’t want the two of them to end up hurting Fitz.
Though… was that right? To keep hurting Sophie to spare Fitz’s feelings? He wasn’t sure. He didn’t want to hurt either of his friends.
When he decided to help her with her biological parents, he’d made Sophie promise to tell Fitz. It was never meant to be something behind his back. It wasn’t Sophie’s fault she had a lot on her plate and forgot to say anything. And maybe they felt… a little caught, in the moment, but they weren’t really caught doing anything wrong, and now he knew! Which made it fine! Right?
Friends can talk to friends. That’s fine.
Except Sophie kept pushing the line, and Keefe kept letting her. Selfishly, he wanted her to keep pushing. He wanted to see how far she would go without realizing her feelings.
There was one specific moment he recalled. They’d started out talking about her family, but eventually Sophie had said she wanted to change the topic.
“I’m so sick of worrying about my stupid biological parents,” Sophie said with a sigh. “They clearly don’t care enough about me to tell me who they are, so why am I so desperate to find them?”
They both knew the answer to that question.
But Keefe didn’t say it, because this moment wasn’t about Fitz. It was about her and him. (He should have checked himself the moment he had that thought, but he didn’t, because his arm was around Sophie and they were leaning back against the headboard pillow on her bed and Keefe wanted to delude himself in this moment into believing they were the only two people in the world, even though he knew exactly how dangerous the thought was.)
“It’s a mess,” Keefe agreed, playing with a few strands of her hair with the arm that was around her shoulder. He’d realized it had a calming effect on her emotions to mess with her hair a little while ago, and he’d been finding excuses to do it ever since. “You have every right to be upset with them, but it also makes sense that you want to know. You should get to know, and it’s unfair that no one will tell you.”
“I want to talk about something else,” she said. “Anything else.”
Keefe racked his brain for conversation topics, but everything that was going on in his life was stuff she already knew about, and none of it made for better conversation than the current topic at hand. Wow. Everything sucked. “I really like mallowmelt,” he said.
“That was a lame topic change.”
“I literally cannot think of a single happy thing to talk about right now,” he admitted.
“I can,” she said sweetly, her lips curling into a smile. She rolled onto her side to face him, and now she was so, so close and his breath caught and he knew just how dangerous this was.
But he didn’t put any space between them. “What are you thinking of?”
“How amazing and kind you are,” she said genuinely, and he could feel how much she meant the words and this was not helping with his nagging feeling that they were betraying his best friend in some way, even though they were doing literally nothing wrong.
They were doing nothing wrong.
Keefe took a deep breath. “What prompted that?”
“Because you’ve been putting up with all my problems this whole time when I know you have plenty of your own,” Sophie told him. “Thank you. Really. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
That was a perfectly normal thing to say to a friend. Keefe needed to get a hold of his own emotions. Foster was fine. “I’m always going to be here for you,” Keefe promised. “I… don’t know what I’d do without you, either.”
Keefe couldn’t help the fact that he meant the words in a different way than Sophie had. If he could erase his feelings for her, he absolutely would, but for now he just had to count on her remaining oblivious so they could keep the friendship they had. Because this was friendship, this was totally normal and platonic and all of her emotions were platonic and now she was leaning against him and her head was on his chest.
Keefe took a deep breath. He couldn’t push her away, not when she was being so sweet and amazing and he just promised he’d always be there for her. (Looking back, he should have known that was a reckless promise to make.) Besides, the one with the Problem Emotions wasn’t Foster, it was him. So he just had to… keep a hold on his own feelings.
It wasn’t like Foster was an Empath or anything. She didn’t have to know what all of this meant to him, what all of this felt like to him. She could just stay oblivious and stay with Fitz and keep getting close to him like this and driving him crazy in the best ways. Ways he shouldn’t enjoy, knowing that she was with his best friend and happy, but he couldn’t help it.
He loved her.
And it made it even worse that he knew she loved him.
One of these days, those heart emotions might rise to the surface, and if she was still with Fitz when that happened, and the two of them were close like this… well, Keefe would just have to hope that she never realized the way she felt about him.
Except he couldn’t hope that.
And he was probably a horrible person for it.
“Well, you’re never going to have to do without me,” Sophie swore. “I don’t think I could stay away from you if I tried.”
How was he supposed to maintain being an innocent person and a good friend if she was going to say amazing things like that?
But Keefe knew that the same was true for him.
He couldn’t stay away from her if he tried.
And, uh… he tried.
When he came back from the Forbidden Cities, it was one of the first conversations he’d remembered. He laid eyes on Sophie Foster for the first time in months and remembered how impossible to stay away from her it always was. It had been impossible even when she was dating his best friend, and it was impossible even when circumstances made it too dangerous for him to be around his friends.
Worse, his empathy wasn’t working, so he didn’t know what she was feeling.
Except that for some reason, she told him out of the blue that she and Fitz broke up, like for some reason, she just wanted him to know. And he hated the way he loved hearing the words, loved that the obstacle that made him feel to guilty about the way he felt about her was gone, and yet, he didn’t want her to be heartbroken. He scanned her face for any sign of heartbreak, but there wasn’t any.
He assumed her emotions would be more complicated if he could feel them.
But he couldn’t.
And in that moment, he suddenly wished terribly that he could.
But it only took a few days for her to make her feelings for him abundantly clear. And Keefe knew, when she kissed him in the clearing, that the full depth of her heart emotions had risen to the surface.
Love.
There were so many different kinds of it.
There was the kind that made him want to throw rocks at the wall when he thought about what his mother was willing to do to him.
There was the kind that made him feel guilty when he was so close to his best friend’s girlfriend, their hearts beating quickly and sparking something between them that only he could see.
And then there was the kind of love he felt for Sophie Foster, and the kind she felt for him. Not just romantic, but pure, unconditional love, and he was never, ever, ever letting that go.