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It’s Monday, the kind of grey-edged morning where the sun never really commits to rising and the fluorescent lights feel a little predatory, and the thing about working in a hospital in December is that every member of staff is either deliriously festive or one minor inconvenience away from collapse. Will — running on four hours of sleep accumulated in scraps over the last two days — is rapidly trending toward the latter. He already feels like a cautionary tale in human form.
Which is why, when Kayla corners him at the nurse’s station with that particular glint in her eye, all bright purpose and holiday tyranny, he knows instantly he’s doomed.
“Solace,” she says, bracing her hands on her hips like she’s about to assign him mandatory community service. “The holiday party is Friday. You’re coming.”
Will opens his mouth, then closes it again, because all that’s available in his brain is absolutely not and he’s almost certain HR discourages hissing at co-workers. “Kayla,” he manages, voice already fraying, “I would rather… spontaneously combust.”
She ignores this — or worse, interprets it as enthusiasm. “It’s going to be fun,” she insists brightly, which is a lie so bold Will almost admires it. “There’s food, there’s music, there’s an open bar, and if we’re lucky someone will embarrass themselves enough to become a hospital legend.”
“I already have that legend,” Will says weakly. “Remember the blood bank freezer incident?”
“That was different,” Kayla says, already waving him off. “That was May. This is Christmas. Completely new genre.”
Will can feel his pulse climbing into the danger zone. He starts flipping frantically through excuses in his mind, but they’re all either medically implausible, socially unacceptable, or would require paperwork. He needs something quick, believable, airtight — and his brain, fried by exhaustion and caffeine withdrawal, reaches for the dumbest possible option.
“I… can’t go,” he blurts. “I have plans.”
Kayla narrows her eyes. “What plans.”
“Um.” His mind goes blank so luminously it could guide ships home. “Plans with my boyfriend.”
The silence that follows is so complete it feels like the hospital itself has paused. Kayla’s jaw drops as if she’s witnessing a miracle or a felony, and Will — who absolutely does not have a boyfriend, who has not had a date since July, who is in a committed relationship with terrible shifts and third-floor vending machine coffee — checks himself mentally for signs of brain damage.
“You have a boyfriend?” Kayla shrieks, loud enough that three nurses and a phlebotomist look over.
Will immediately regrets every decision that has led him to this moment, the whole chain of them stretching back through the morning, through the weekend shifts, through the moment he chose medicine over something quieter, all of it converging on this single catastrophic lapse in judgment.
He regrets saying it — of course he does — but he also, somehow, regrets thinking it in the first place, regrets waking up at all today, regrets not faking a cold and staying home in bed like a normal, self-preserving human being. It hits him in one sweeping, nauseating wave of mortification, the kind that makes him want to disappear into the nearest supply closet and remain there until January.
Before he can retract the statement — before he can inhale enough oxygen to construct a plausible lie or claim temporary insanity — Kayla is pacing in triumphant circles.
“This is huge,” she announces to absolutely no one. “Oh my gods, I cannot believe you’ve been holding out on us. Solace, this is betrayal. You have a boyfriend and we haven’t met him? Do you hate us?”
“I don’t— he’s— it’s new,” Will stammers, waving his hands vaguely, as if physical motion might somehow conjure a boyfriend out of thin air. His brain is desperately scrolling through possibilities: Could he pretend to be seeing someone? Could he hire someone? Could he claim long distance? Could he leave the country? None of them feel viable.
And that is, of course, exactly when Austin appears, coffee in hand, looking like a man who slept well last night and thus has far too much emotional stability to be speaking to Will right now.
“What’s happening?” Austin asks.
Kayla doesn’t miss a beat. “Will has a boyfriend.”
Austin inhales his coffee wrong and sputters it straight back into the cup, staring at Will as if he’s just announced a previously undiscovered medical condition. “He what.”
Will briefly considers lying on the floor and letting the nearest crash cart roll over him, because that would be kinder than whatever this is evolving into. Before he can salvage the lie — drag it back into something manageable, claim a prank, cite a head injury, fake amnesia, anything — Kayla adds, practically vibrating with glee, “And he’s bringing him to the holiday party.”
“No, he’s not,” Will says, clinging to the last thread of dignity he possesses. “We already have plans.”
Austin narrows his eyes at him, giving him the exact look he uses when a patient insists they’re “fine” while bleeding through three layers of bandages. “What plans could you possibly have on a Friday night in December? You never have plans.”
Will would like to argue, but unfortunately this is devastatingly accurate. He opens his mouth to defend himself and produces a faint, asthmatic wheeze instead — the sound a man makes when his brain has become a barren, windswept snowfield with no tracks, no shelter, no signs of life.
Kayla crosses her arms with the righteous authority of a judge handing down a final verdict. “That’s what I thought. You’re coming. And so is your mystery boyfriend.”
“I—” Will tries, because some reflex in him has not yet accepted defeat.
“Nope,” she says sharply, clapping once as if sealing a magical contract. “Done. Decided. I’m so excited. Austin, aren’t you excited?”
Austin nods with solemn enthusiasm. “Thrilled. Overjoyed. This is, genuinely, the best thing that’s happened to me all week.”
Will looks between them, horrified, and feels his stomach swoop like he’s dangling over a cliff’s edge, the icy wind of impending doom slicing past his ears. He has approximately ninety-six hours to conjure a boyfriend out of thin air.
Even for someone who routinely coaxes coherence out of trauma bays at three in the morning, this feels like a task designed specifically to kill him, something so profoundly outside his skill set that he can already imagine future versions of himself recounting it in therapy, wondering how he was ever meant to endure it with his dignity intact.
***
By the time Will drags himself down the hallway toward the on-call rooms, the whole hospital feels bruised with December — overbright lights, overheated radiators, the slow crawl of dusk pressing against the windows even though it’s barely late afternoon. His scrubs feel stiff with cold air and antiseptic, his spine aches from too much leaning over gurneys, and he has spent thirty uninterrupted minutes dodging Kayla and Austin as they hunted him through the ER like cheerful wolves determined to learn where, precisely, he is hiding his fictional boyfriend.
He can’t take it anymore. He needs darkness. Silence. A room that doesn’t smell like peppermint creamer and surgical masks.
So he slips into an on-call room that looks empty — dark, quiet, bed unmade in the way that suggests someone might have used it at some point this century. He closes the door behind him and lets himself fold forward with the grace of a collapsing tent, emitting a sound that is supposed to be a scream but comes out as a strangled, half-hearted groan of despair.
Which is, of course, when a voice from the darkness says:
“…Dude. Are you alright?”
Will freezes. Absolutely, perfectly freezes.
Because the room is not empty.
Not even close.
He sits bolt upright and fumbles blindly for the light switch. The overhead bulb flickers to life, washing everything in that sickly hospital glow — and there, blinking blearily up at him from the other bed, is Jason Grace, cardiothoracic surgery’s golden boy, hair mussed, tie loosened, lab coat half-crumpled under him like he lost a fight with his own laundry.
Will stares. Jason stares back, half awake, half offended that consciousness has found him again.
“Oh my gods,” Will sputters. “I— I didn’t know anyone was in here— I thought it was empty— I’m so sorry—I wasn’t— that wasn’t— directed at anything specific—”
Jason rubs a hand over his face. “It sounded pretty specific.”
Will makes another noise — strangled, despairing — and sinks down onto the edge of the bed like a marionette whose strings have been severed. “I wasn’t screaming. That was… emotional leakage.”
Jason blinks slowly. “Right.”
And that’s all it takes. Will spills.
Not intentionally — oh no, Will Solace does not intentionally disclose personal catastrophes to surgeons who nap like war veterans — but something in him snaps, and the words begin to pour out with the unstoppable momentum of a burst dam.
“I lied about having a boyfriend,” Will blurts. “To get out of the holiday party. Except it didn’t get me out of it, it got me committed to it, and now apparently I’m bringing this imaginary boyfriend with me, and Kayla thinks it’s some dramatic secret love affair I’ve been hiding out of shame, and Austin thinks I’m entering a manic episode, and I have no idea how to fix any of this, and I haven’t slept in what feels like eight decades.”
Jason stares at him, utterly still, in a way only surgeons can manage.
“…Huh.”
Will throws his hands up. “What does ‘huh’ mean?”
Jason shrugs one shoulder, slow and tired. “Just—huh. Like… interesting.” He gestures vaguely. “Creative problem.”
“This isn’t creative,” Will says, pitching forward, hands in his hair. “This is catastrophic. I don’t have a boyfriend. I’ve never even had a fake boyfriend before. There’s no protocol for this. They don’t teach you how to fabricate romantic partners in med school.”
Jason’s mouth twitches, which Will suspects is the closest he ever comes to a smile. “You’d be surprised.”
Will groans into his hands. “Jason, I’m going to die.”
“You’re not,” Jason says calmly, like he’s delivering a prognosis. “If anything, this is one of the least deadly problems you’ve brought into this room.”
Will lifts his head, glaring weakly. “Please pretend to take me seriously.”
“I am taking you seriously,” Jason says, eyes half-lidded but focused, surgeon-calm even in the face of Will’s emotional implosion. “Which is why I’m telling you — you need a plan. Or a boyfriend. Or at least someone who looks convincingly like one.”
Will drags his hands down his face. “Dude, I can’t even get a real boyfriend.”
Jason thinks about this with the solemnity of a man deciding where to make his first incision. He stares at the ceiling, hums thoughtfully, then says, as if it’s the most obvious solution in the world:
“…Do you remember my roommate? Nico?”
Will’s head snaps up so quickly it’s a medical risk. “Your— Nico?”
“Yeah,” Jason says, oblivious. “You met him at my birthday last year.”
And Will goes still. Absolutely, catastrophically still.
Because he does, in fact, remember Nico di Angelo.
He remembers him in a way that sometimes sneaks up on him in the middle of long shifts — like a sudden echo of dark curls, sharp eyes, that unplaceable gravity he carried even while holding Jason’s terrible birthday cake. Forensic scientist. Brilliant in the kind of quiet, cutting way that makes other people recalibrate themselves around him. Beautiful, but in that severe, arresting sense — all cheekbones and winter shadows and something so intensely self-contained that Will had spent most of the night pretending to be interested in the cardiology gossip just so he wouldn’t stare.
He remembers Nico saying three sentences to him. He has replayed all three of them more times than is dignified.
So when Jason looks at him expectantly, Will manages a sound that is probably meant to be casual but comes out closer to a strangled gasp. “Yeah,” he croaks. “I— remember him.”
Jason’s mouth curves into a slow, knowing smirk — the kind that suggests he has been sitting on this piece of information like a loaded weapon. “Cool. Because I know for a fact Nico is free Friday night.”
Will blinks. Hard. “How do you— how do you know that?”
Jason sinks a little further into the pillow, folding his hands over his stomach like he’s about to recite scripture. “Because I know everything about him.” He says it the way most people comment on the weather — bland, factual, utterly untroubled by how deranged it sounds.
Will just stares at him, trying to figure out whether this is normal behaviour for surgeons or a uniquely Jason Grace brand of omniscience.
Jason goes on, serene as a monk. “He doesn’t really go out. He’s either working, reading, or quietly cultivating resentment toward any activity that involves more than three people. Trust me. He’s free.”
Will opens his mouth — maybe to mention boundaries, or the concept of privacy, or to gently suggest that this feels like the conversational equivalent of opening someone else’s mail — but Jason is already continuing, and what he says next derails Will’s brain with such force that blinking becomes optional rather than automatic.
“And,” Jason says, with the offhand tone of someone adding a footnote to a medical chart, “his stepmom used to make him take acting classes.”
Will lets out a laugh — sharp, startled, humiliatingly high in pitch — before he can catch it. “You’re kidding.”
“I’m not,” Jason replies, inexplicably grave. “She said it would ‘cultivate his expressiveness.’” He lifts a shoulder. “His words, not mine.”
Will covers his mouth with one hand, because the mental image of Nico di Angelo being marched into acting classes is so violently at odds with reality it threatens to fold him in half.
Jason leans his head back against the wall, a slow, satisfied tilt of the chin that suggests he has been saving this information for a special occasion. “And I have seen a tape of him in Much Ado About Nothing.”
Will chokes. “He— what?”
“Benedick,” Jason says, nodding like he’s diagnosing him with something terminal. “Very good, too. Scarily good. If you need someone to fake-date you in front of a hundred medical professionals, Nico is your guy. Trust me.”
Will opens his mouth, then closes it again, because his brain has begun projecting an unhinged, high-definition montage of Nico di Angelo doing Shakespeare — Nico with his dark, austere beauty and that frost-touched stillness he carries everywhere, Nico under stage lights with a script in hand, delivering lines with the kind of reluctant, accidental charisma that should not legally be allowed to exist inside a man who looks like he would rather die than participate in a group activity. The entire image is so violently incompatible with reality that Will feels his pulse stutter in protest, as if his cardiovascular system is filing an incident report.
Jason observes all of this with the unblinking serenity of a man who has watched far worse unfold in operating theatres. Then he simply extends a hand toward Will, palm up, like a surgeon requesting an instrument. “Give me your phone.”
Will tightens his grip on it, horrified. “Jason—wait—why?”
“So I can put his number in,” Jason says, already leaning forward, already radiating the quiet determination of someone who fully intends to get his way. “Don’t make this weird.”
“It’s already weird,” Will mutters, but it’s useless; Jason plucks the phone neatly from his hands with a smooth, decisive motion that leaves no room for argument. The violation of privacy should be alarming, but Will is too busy drowning. “I’m not even sure he’d— I mean— we barely spoke at your birthday— he probably doesn’t even remember me—”
Jason doesn’t look up from the phone, thumbs moving with terrifying precision. “Oh, he remembers you. And he needs to get out more. And you need a fake boyfriend. This is the easiest job I’ve had all week.”
“That’s not— I don’t— you can’t just—” Will gestures helplessly, as though gesturing might produce a coherent argument. “Are you sure he’d even consider agreeing to something this insane?”
“He likes helping people,” Jason says, in the same tone he might use to list a patient’s vital signs. “He’s good with people who spiral. You’ll be fine.”
Will doubts that very much, but Jason is already handing the phone back to him, now warm from his hands and permanently altered. Nico di Angelo’s name sits on the screen like a beacon — or a warning label — and Will feels something in his stomach drop clean through the floor.
He drags a hand down his face, trying to muster dignity and failing. “Fine,” he says at last, though the word feels like it is being pried from him with surgical tools. “Okay. Fine.”
Jason nods with brisk satisfaction, as if a complex procedure has gone exactly according to plan. “Great. I’ll text him that you’ll reach out.”
Will stares at his phone and feels the slow, inexorable slide of fate closing in around him. He already knows, with a clarity bordering on clinical certainty, that whatever happens next is going to ruin him in a very specific and irreversible way.
And despite everything — despite the panic, the humiliation, the existential dread — he cannot bring himself to look away.
***
By Monday night, Will is reasonably sure he is living through the longest Monday the universe has ever produced. It stretches on and on, stitched out of fluorescent glare and overcaffeinated chaos, a kind of temporal purgatory where every hour feels both waterlogged and sharply abrasive. He ends up in a small, overly warm coffee shop wedged halfway between the hospital and the forensic lab where Nico works, nursing a cup of tea that has gone undrunk long enough to form moral objections to its own existence.
Outside, the December night presses itself against the windows, swollen with wind and the thick city cold that settles into bones like a warning. The overheated radiators hiss with the particular menace of old buildings, and Will sits there — shoulders hunched, coat still on, hands wrapped around his cup for stability rather than warmth — and tries to breathe like someone who isn’t actively dissolving at a cellular level.
It had taken him three hours after Jason commandeered his phone to actually text Nico: three slow, miserable hours in which he drafted message after message, each one worse than the last, all of them conveying the emotional tenor of a man sending ransom notes to himself.
He deleted them all, contemplated buying a new phone and beginning a new life in rural Maine, briefly decided the most logical solution was to find Kayla and Austin and inform them in a grave, subdued tone that he and his boyfriend — his nonexistent, theoretical boyfriend — had suffered a swift and devastating breakup and would they please never speak of it again for the sake of Will’s delicate emotional health. That lie had felt almost plausible for a moment, until it became clear the rumour had metastasised far beyond the reach of any single correction.
By midday, nurses he hadn’t spoken to since orientation were offering smiles and asking whether his boyfriend preferred red wine or white. By two, an ultrasound tech had asked how long they’d been together. By three, someone from neurology — someone Will had never made eye contact with — stopped him in the hallway just to say they were “happy for him.” The entire hospital had collectively decided, with disturbing enthusiasm, to adopt Will’s fictional relationship as a kind of communal emotional support animal. There was no escape. He was well past the point where honesty could save him.
So he texted. Hi. This is Will Solace. Jason gave me your number. I’m sorry, I know this is weird. Then he waited for the crushing silence that should logically follow such a disaster of a message. Instead, Nico had replied within minutes with a calm, succinct message that had filled Will with something that felt unnervingly like hope and horror fused together: Jason told me the situation. I can help. But we should meet first. Straighten out details. Coffee? Tonight?
Which is how Will has ended up here, breathing too quickly and not deeply enough, cycling through every physiological disaster he might be in the early stages of. His pulse is erratic in a way that suggests either an impending panic episode or a textbook arrhythmia. He keeps pressing his fingers to his neck as if monitoring his carotid will teach him something new. His sympathetic nervous system is in overdrive; his vagus nerve is conspicuously unhelpful. The room feels too warm and slightly unstable, its edges threatening to blur if he focuses on them for too long. He is sweating through his shirt despite the cold pressing at the windows, and the edges of his vision keep tightening in slow, disconcerting waves.
He has the distinct, creeping sense that some medical journal in a decade’s time will quietly reference “Solace Syndrome,” a condition characterised by catastrophic physiological overreaction to one’s own poor decisions.
And he is just beginning to reassure himself — in the most unconvincing internal monologue he has ever produced — that he is not, in fact, about to faint or seize or spontaneously flatline when the bell above the café door rings.
Will glances up, heart slamming hard enough to make his ribs ache — and Nico di Angelo steps inside.
Nico spots him almost instantly — of course he does, because Will is sitting there like a man awaiting trial, radiating guilt and crisis into the steam of his untouched tea — and the moment their eyes meet, Will’s lungs stage a brief walkout.
Nico looks devastating.
Not dramatic, not overstated — just… devastating in that awful, effortless way some people manage when they don’t seem to be trying at all. He’s dressed plainly, dark coat, gloves shoved into the pockets, curls damp from the wind outside, cheeks touched with the kind of winter flush that makes him look more alive and more dangerous all at once. The city’s December cold clings to him like a second shadow. Will has a momentary, intrusive vision of him in Shakespeare again — Benedick complaining under moonlight — and it nearly sends him into ventricular fibrillation.
“Hey,” Nico says, voice low and soft in the way that carries more weight than volume. He offers a small, almost shy smile before gesturing toward the counter. “I’m just going to grab a coffee.”
“Yeah,” Will says, far too quickly, far too brightly, like someone trying to prove he is in fact a normal human being capable of speech. “Yes. Coffee. Great.”
Nico nods once and heads to the counter, and Will is left alone for approximately ninety seconds — which is more than enough time to realise he has no idea what to do with his face, his hands, his posture, his entire existence. He sits up too straight, then slumps, then tries to appear casual, then decides casual is suspicious, then nearly spills his tea while trying to adjust himself into some theoretical position that won’t make him look like a man in the throes of a medical emergency.
By the time Nico returns, coffee in hand, Will has achieved a level of internal crisis previously only seen in disaster movies.
Nico slips into the seat opposite him, curls settling around his face, fingers curled around the warm cup, and Will’s brain chooses that exact moment to fail him completely. Words scatter. Coherence abandons him. He makes a sound — something between a laugh and choking — and then blurts, far too loudly:
“So— uh— I don’t usually lie about having boyfriends.”
There’s a beat of silence.
A terrible, immense beat of silence.
Then Nico laughs — quick, warm, almost relieved — and cuts him off before Will can dig himself into any deeper conversational graves. “Don’t worry about it,” he says, leaning back, fingers curling around his cup. “I remember Kayla and Austin from Jason’s birthday. They were… something.” His mouth tilts, amused. “Fun, but also the kind of fun you need recovery time from.”
Will groans gently into his tea. “Exactly. I adore them, but they have the subtlety of a freight train. I say I don’t want to go to one holiday party and suddenly we’re planning a full-scale covert mission with a fabricated romantic backstory.”
Nico snorts into his coffee — a small, warm sound that slides under Will’s ribs in a way entirely unrelated to the café’s heating. “One night,” Nico says, shaking his head lightly. “That’s all it is. We can survive it.”
Something in Will sinks at that — not dramatically, not in any way Nico could possibly notice, but in that quiet internal drop he knows too well, the one that happens when reality presses up against something he didn’t mean to hope for. One night. Nico says it so simply, like the entire thing is a neat, containable task — a finite performance bracketed by appetizers and HR-approved cocktails — something that will dissolve back into normal life as soon as the evening ends. Will nods, pretends the words don’t lodge like grit under his ribs, pretends he isn’t already imagining how empty Saturday morning might feel. It’s ridiculous. They’re strangers. This is fake. None of it should matter. It shouldn’t, and yet it does, in that small, traitorous way that makes him want to roll his eyes at himself.
Nico doesn’t see any of that — or if he does, he’s gracious enough not to mention it — and continues in that same businesslike, gentle voice that somehow makes everything feel strangely manageable. “If we’re going to be convincing, we need to get to know each other a whole lot better. And we should figure out how our fake relationship came to be before someone decides to interrogate us. Which they will.” He says this with the weary certainty of a man who has survived multiple Grace family dinners.
Will nods again, even though the phrase fake relationship carves its own thin, surgical line across something tender inside him. It’s absurd how much the words sting — like being reminded of a bruise he thought he’d imagined. He clears his throat, trying to keep his voice steady, trying not to let the disappointment cling to him like the static winter air. “Okay,” he manages, quiet but agreeable. “Yeah. That makes sense.”
Nico waits, hands curled around his coffee, gaze steady in a way that feels both grounding and faintly devastating. Will feels himself leaning toward it without meaning to — not physically, not noticeably, just in that internal way where curiosity and longing share the same outline.
“So,” he asks, softer than he intends, the question slipping out before he can rehearse it, “what do you want to know?”
***
By Tuesday morning, Will feels the weight of the previous night sitting on him like a second winter coat — heavy, insulating, strangely warm in places he hadn’t realised were cold. He’d expected awkwardness, stilted conversation, the brittle discomfort of strangers performing intimacy for a shared lie; instead, the whole thing had unfolded with an ease that now feels almost suspicious. As if the fake boyfriend scheme had been nothing more than a flimsy excuse for something far more natural to happen on its own.
He knows now that Nico’s mother is dead — not in the clinical, depersonalised way the residents discuss loss in the ER, but in the way someone carries grief like an heirloom: polished, cracked, beloved, unbearable.
She died when Nico was young.His father remarried, disastrously at first; the stepmother hadn’t just failed to bridge the impossible gap — she’d met Nico with a kind of brittle, polite frost, the sort of strained civility adults use on children they don’t quite know what to do with. She hadn’t warmed to him, not then, not for years, and Nico had spoken about that period with the dry, matter-of-fact detachment of someone who has long since stopped expecting an apology. Nico doesn’t get on with her even now, though he concedes the situation has evolved from intolerable to merely uncomfortable, which — given the tone he used — Will interprets as miraculous progress.
There are two sisters in the story, too. Hazel, alive and adored. And Bianca — gone. Bianca’s name had come out of Nico with a softness so rare, so unguarded, that Will had found himself going still, like noise might bruise the moment. The grief wasn’t theatrical or performative; it simply existed, steady and unhidden, like weather. It shaped him. It lingered. Nico spoke of her with the kind of reverence people usually reserve for lost cities or constellations, and Will felt something deep inside him twist — not pity, not even sorrow, but that unmistakable pulse of recognition: I know this terrain. I have walked it too.
And then there was the work. Nico described forensic science with a kind of quiet, anchored conviction — not the morbid fascination people assume, but purpose. Respect, he’d said, voice soft but certain. Justice. Someone has to care about them when they can’t speak anymore. And Will, who spends his days trying to keep hearts beating long enough for someone else to say they matter, had been struck by the strange symmetry of their professions — one of them protecting the living, the other defending the dead. Two halves of the same vow, carried out on different sides of the threshold.
There were lighter details too — the kind that painted Nico in unexpectedly human colours. Coworkers who alternated between tolerable and maddening; the origin story of his friendship with Jason, which involved two nineteen-year-olds united by academic suffering and a shared tendency to look like they’d rather be anywhere else. Nico had described their college years with such wry disdain that Will mentally catalogued every detail for future blackmail. (Jason, he suspects, will regret ever giving him Nico’s number.)
He learned Nico speaks Italian fluently — of course he does — and the single offhand phrase Nico muttered while searching for an English word had nearly detonated something in Will’s chest. He plays piano, too, apparently well, though he’d said it so offhandedly that Will suspects that means very well. He has an orange cat who hates everyone except Nico and one elderly neighbour. He drinks too much coffee, eats too little breakfast, once tried yoga and immediately despised it, sleeps with a book next to his pillow, and still hasn’t forgiven the MTA for an incident involving a delayed train and a ruined pair of shoes.
Nico learned things about him too — or rather, Will found himself admitting things he hasn’t said aloud in a long time. His parents, both musicians, beautifully chaotic and romantic but not together had deeply committed to co-parenting him into a functional adult. The older brothers he used to have — Lee and Michael — both gone now, leaving gaps in his life that never quite stopped echoing. Will had stumbled over the words, felt his throat tighten, but when he glanced up, Nico wasn’t staring at him with pity or discomfort; he was simply there, gaze steady, posture quiet, carrying the same kind of grief-shaped understanding Will had recognised earlier. It made the story easier to tell than it had any right to be.
From there, they’d drifted to safer ground. Hospital lore. Which coworkers Nico would have to fool. Which ones would gleefully pry. Kayla’s unhinged enthusiasm. Austin’s misguided optimism. The residents who operated like gossip-sensing drones. The nurses who would interrogate every emotional beat of their “relationship timeline” with the precision of federal agents. Nico absorbed every detail with that sharp, methodical focus that left Will both impressed and faintly alarmed — the kind of focus that makes a man devastating in his profession and equally devastating in matters far more personal. Of course he’d be good at fake-dating. He was meticulous. He was observant. He was, in every possible way, dangerous.
And then — because it had to be done — they’d begun constructing their official fake history.
At first, Will had panicked, stumbling through several catastrophic possibilities (a chance meeting in the subway, an argument over coffee lids, a dramatic save in the rain) before Nico, bless him, intervened with the exasperated calm of someone much too familiar with chaotic people.
“Why not the truth,” he’d said, voice mild, “but… adjusted?”
The truth, when pared down, was simple: they met at Jason’s birthday. They exchanged a handful of words. Nico went home and Will spent the rest of the night pretending he wasn’t staring at the door Nico had disappeared through. That, unfortunately, could not be their fake-dating origin story, because it sounded less like a convenient lie and more like an admission Will had no intention of making.
So they built something nearby — close enough to plausibility, far enough from humiliation.
They decided they’d run into each other again a few weeks later — at the bodega down the street, both of them reaching for the same overpriced carton of soup because New York had frozen itself solid that week and survival required sodium. They’d talked. Nico would pretend he’d offered a small, unexpected smile. Will would pretend he hadn’t almost walked into a display of canned beans. From there, the story meandered into increasingly safe territory: exchanging numbers, grabbing coffee once, then twice, then three times, and somehow quietly finding themselves involved before either of them realised it.
Nico said it all so simply, as though he’d given relationships this kind of logical structure before — as though pretending to fall for someone was just another task he could complete with enough preparation. Will, meanwhile, had sat there trying not to visibly melt at the way Nico said we and our story with his hands wrapped around a paper cup.
By the time Will had finally walked home through the brittle cold, coat open, breath fogging in front of him, he realised he wasn’t cold at all — not really. Something warm had settled just beneath his ribs, something steady and treacherous and entirely at odds with the phrase Nico had used the night before.
Just one night.
Will tries not to think about how desperately he already hopes it won’t be.
***
By Thursday evening, the whole week has taken on a rhythm Will hadn’t meant to fall into — a steady current of messages that began as logistical necessity and gradually blurred into something more fluid, more familiar, more like habit than preparation. The early texts had been purely functional: stray details they’d forgotten on Monday night, favourite foods, sleep schedules, coffee preferences, a shared declaration that under no circumstances would their fictional anniversary involve Times Square.
But as the days unfolded, the conversation stretched into stranger territory. Will sent Nico a picture of the hospital’s lopsided holiday tree, decorated by the night staff with a string of lights that only blinked when they felt like it and an ornament shaped like a pancreas; Nico replied with, Appropriately unsettling, followed by a photo of his lab’s attempt at seasonal décor, which involved a wreath hung directly over the evidence fridge. There was something reassuringly bleak about the symmetry.
By Wednesday, the messages drifted toward daily irritations — Nico complaining about a coworker who kept playing the same playlist on loop, Will responding with the saga of a patient who’d insisted he had “holiday spirit poisoning.” They commiserated with the dry resignation of two people who had spent far too long in professions that required equal parts competence and emotional fortitude. At 11:47 p.m., Nico texted, He is intolerable. Will, lying half-collapsed in the on-call room and contemplating the structural integrity of his own spine, didn’t even need clarification. Jason? What did he do this time?
Nico’s reply came quickly: He keeps insisting I wear something “colour-coordinated” with you. As if we’re attending a wedding, not a hospital party.
Will rubbed his face, exhausted but quietly delighted. That’s psychotic even for him.
Nico: He says it’ll “sell the romance.” He used those exact words, and I haven’t been well since.
Will: Please understand I take no responsibility for anything Jason Grace does or says.
Nico: Cowardice doesn’t suit you.
Will snorted so loudly a nurse looked over to check whether he was choking.
The next morning, Jason cornered him beside the nurses’ station with the smug, unearned confidence of a man who believes himself responsible for all good things in the universe. “So,” Jason said, leaning against the counter like he was auditioning for a medical drama, “how’s the fake boyfriend?”
Will did not dignify that with an answer. He simply picked up his chart, gave Jason a look that conveyed centuries of suffering, and walked away. The second he was out of sight, his phone was in his hand: He’s bothering me too. This is a crisis. Nico replied within seconds: Mutual suffering builds trust. Or trauma. Hard to say. Then, after a beat: But yes. Crisis.
What surprised him most was how easily everything settled into place: messages in the morning when they were both too tired to function but too wired to rest, updates in the afternoon about cases or coworkers or the general absurdity of their workplaces, dry commentary at night that slipped into the kind of quiet honesty that feels safer in the dim hours. Sometimes just small observations — a picture of Nico’s cat glaring at him from atop a stack of files, a video Will sent of Kayla’s holiday sweater lighting up in seizure-inducing patterns, Nico’s reply of a single unimpressed period. Sometimes the messages stretched longer, looping through work and memory and the strange, bone-deep grief they each carried without ever needing to explain it.
Somewhere between those exchanges, something unspoken but steady formed — a sense of expectation woven into the rhythm of each day, a weightless thread that tugged every time his phone lit up. Will kept telling himself it meant nothing, that it was all scaffolding around the lie they were building, the necessary structure of a story they’d have to sell convincingly on Friday night. He repeated it like a diagnostic mantra whenever he caught himself rereading Nico’s messages or catching a small, traitorous spark of anticipation every time the vibration buzzed in his pocket.
But by Thursday evening, even Will had to admit that whatever was building between them didn’t feel like scaffolding at all — more like the shape of something real, quiet, and dangerously easy, a warmth creeping in under the door he’d meant to keep firmly shut.
***
The hotel lobby is already too warm, too gold, too aggressively December, and Will arrives in a state that can only be described as medical freefall. He is late — properly, unforgivably late — because of course the universe waited until the last ten minutes of his shift to hand him a patient who decided to crash spectacularly right as he was meant to escape, and of course Will, who cannot physically leave a crisis unfinished, stayed until the new team came in, and then had to sprint to the staff showers with half his clothes in his arms, and then had to wrestle himself into a suit that refuses to behave like fabric should. By the time he reaches the hotel corridor outside the event ballroom, he feels like a malfunctioning snow globe someone shook too hard.
The noise hits him first — laughter, clinking glasses, Mariah Carey inescapably present like a seasonal haunting — and then the thought arrives, quiet and fatal: Nico is already in there. Alone. With Kayla and Austin. And Jason.
Jason — who now knows Will has been armed with several of his most catastrophic college disasters, courtesy of Nico’s loose mouth, and whom Will had very foolishly begun teasing far too early — is suddenly a volatile variable. A man with motive. A man with means. A man who might, out of pure retaliatory instinct, detonate the entire fake-boyfriend arrangement just to watch Will suffer.
Will steps inside the ballroom and the Christmas aesthetic assaults him instantly: evergreen garlands, warm amber lights, tablecloths that are trying too hard, a dessert table with sculpted chocolate pinecones, and that hotel-scented mix of cinnamon, carpet shampoo, and the faint moral despair of corporate festivities. He tries to catch his breath, but the room is enormous and loud and filled with people he knows and people he vaguely knows and people he has treated at two in the morning who will absolutely greet him like they’re old friends.
And then he sees him.
Nico, standing near one of the tall cocktail tables, dark hair catching the light in a way that feels illegal, black suit immaculate, posture elegant in that subtle, self-contained way he has — as if he were carved out of shadow and good tailoring. He’s surrounded by Kayla, Austin, Jason, and what looks like an entire semicircle of hospital staff orbiting him like curious planets. And somehow he’s handling it — effortlessly, impossibly — answering questions with steady calm, smiling in that small precise way that makes people lean in as if they’ve been granted a rare moment of sunshine.
Will feels his soul leave his body.
He moves toward them in a kind of panic-walk, trying to look casual, trying not to trip, trying to remember how to fake having a boyfriend when he barely knows how to breathe right now, and then Nico turns, sees him, and something — something terribly gentle — brightens behind his eyes.
“Ciao, caro,” Nico says, low and warm, leaning in to kiss Will on the cheek as if they’ve been doing this for months.
Will nearly forgets how to stand upright. He is suddenly, violently aware of the heat of Nico’s lips, the scent of his cologne, the way his hand briefly settles at Will’s waist in a gesture that feels astonishingly real. He reminds himself — urgently — that this is fake, this is theatre, this is a single night of pretending, and he has to act like he isn’t dying.
Kayla practically vibrates. “Will! Finally! Nico has just been filling us in on your relationship. He’s much more forthcoming than you.”
Will tries to form human speech. What emerges is a noise that resembles a scoff filtered through emotional whiplash. “Well,” he says, grasping desperately for dignity, “go and work for Nico then.”
Nico laughs softly beside him — an elegant, amused sound that lands warm against Will’s skin — and Will realises that if he’s not careful, he’s going to forget entirely which parts of this are fake.
The night moves strangely after that: not in clean lines but in little shards of conversation, fragments Will keeps storing away like they might matter later.
There’s Katie from paediatrics — flanked by Piper from psych and Beckendorf from ortho, all three of them guarding the cookie table like it’s a crime scene — cornering Nico with the tactical precision of someone who has interrogated toddlers for a living.
“So how did you two meet?” Katie demands, already vibrating with narrative anticipation.
Nico, who looks devastatingly composed in the amber hotel lighting (which feels rude, unfair, and almost certainly illegal), answers smoothly, “Jason’s birthday. Technically. Though Will didn’t speak to me for the first twenty minutes because he was too shy.”
Will — mid–snowflake cookie — inhales crumbs and dignity in equal measure.
Piper claps her hands together like she’s discovered a new species. “Oh, that is delicious. Classic slow-burn setup. I love it.”
Beckendorf nods solemnly.
Katie sighs, dreamy and unhelpful. “Adorable,” she says, probably already designing engagement photos in her head.
Will tries to smile. It comes out more like he’s passing a kidney stone.
***
They barely escape before they’re dragged into the next gauntlet: Lou Ellen from imaging, Mitchell from infectious diseases, and Travis from admin — the Meddling Trio — all circling in with the same energy as seagulls who’ve spotted chips.
“So,” Lou Ellen begins, swirling her drink like she’s about to hex someone, “who confessed first?”
Will opens his mouth, but Nico — devil, menace, saboteur — answers before Will’s brain even boots. “He did,” Nico says, utterly mild, tilting his head toward Will with that quiet little smile that could collapse civilisations. “Sort of blurted it out.”
Will makes a noise that absolutely should not exit a grown man.
“Classic Solace,” Lou Ellen declares, nodding with academic authority. “All heart, zero strategic planning.”
Mitchell takes a thoughtful sip of his wine. “Honestly, it tracks with his charting style.”
Travis chimes in, because of course he does. “I had money on it being Nico.”
Nico hides his smile behind his glass. Will feels it, embarrassingly, somewhere cardiac.
***
They drift. The conversations accumulate like flurries: small, sharp, relentless.
The respiratory team traps them near the bar to debate holiday travel, immediately forgetting the topic to interrogate Nico’s coat, his accent, his job, what instrument he plays, and whether he and Will exchange Christmas gifts “as a love language or just for fun.”
Will wants to crawl into the decorative poinsettia display.
Then Mitchell returns — because infectious diseases is nothing if not persistent — and keeps trying to diagnose Nico with something “rare and intriguing” while simultaneously asking how often they kiss.
Nico answers calmly, “Often enough,” which sends Mitchell into raptures and Will into immediate cardiac distress.
***
And then Clarisse from trauma elbows through the crowd like someone who has fought wars and won.
“So,” she says loudly, hands on hips, “do you two bang a lot or what?”
Will inhales his drink. Through his nose.
Nico pats his back once — gently, almost clinically — before answering with infuriating composure, “We have a healthy dynamic.”
Clarisse cackles, delighted. “Good for you, Sunshine,” she tells Will. “Didn’t think you had the spine for it.”
Will considers fleeing the country.
***
And then, inevitably, there’s Jason.
He materialises through the crowd exactly the way he always does — with that faint glow of moral superiority, as if he’s just returned from advising gods on ethical conduct. He claps Will on the shoulder with the force of someone who has absolutely forgotten his own strength, rearranging three vertebrae and possibly Will’s entire life trajectory.
“Look at you two,” he says, grinning like a benevolent saint who has absolutely committed several felonies. “Walking proof that my matchmaking abilities are unparalleled. Honestly, I should start charging.”
Will gives him a look that could sterilise surgical equipment. “You did nothing. You shoved your roommate’s number into my phone while half-asleep and immediately went back to snoring.”
Jason lifts a hand to his chest in a gesture so theatrical it borders on performance art. “Ah, but the heart is a delicate organ, Solace. It requires a skilled hand to guide it. Fortunately, this is my area of expertise.”
“You’re a cardiothoracic surgeon,” Will says flatly, because someone has to be the adult here.
“Exactly. Professionally trained to make hearts behave.”
Nico snorts into his drink, the sound low and warm and edged with wicked amusement. “Jason,” he says, voice soft but carrying, “if you don’t walk away right now, I will tell the story about the dorm fire alarm and the pumpkin spice candle.”
Jason goes still in the way prey animals do when they hear a twig snap.
“You wouldn’t,” he whispers.
Nico raises one eyebrow — a slow, elegant gesture that promises carnage.
Jason flees like a man chased by the ghosts of his own poor decisions.
Nico looks quietly triumphant, which is unfairly attractive. Will, meanwhile, looks at him with the faintly stunned expression of someone who has momentarily forgotten this is supposed to be acting, that all of this intimacy is staged, choreographed, temporary — except the way Nico’s shoulder keeps brushing his, and the way his laugh keeps slotting itself under Will’s ribs, doesn’t feel temporary at all.
The night continues to warm around them: music swelling into the kind of festive, borderline deranged pop remix that only December can justify, fairy lights blinking overhead in a rhythm that feels suspiciously like a heartbeat, the air soft with the hum of people who have survived another year and are choosing to celebrate that survival with open bars and questionable dance moves.
Everywhere they turn, someone stops them — questions dressed up as friendliness, curiosity sharpened just enough to bruise. Clarisse’s interrogations cut cleaner than the rest, her gaze lingering a beat too long, as if she can see straight through the act even when no one else seems to notice. Each conversation loops and spirals, teasing and intrusive in equal measure, making Will’s pulse stutter every time Nico’s hand grazes his back or his arm or, once, his wrist, as if to tether them to the same orbit.
And throughout it all, something quiet begins to form — not a declaration, not even an intention, but a shift, subtle as the way winter light bends through hotel windows.
Every time Will moves, Nico adjusts with him, as though the two of them have been orbiting long before tonight. Every time Nico speaks, Will feels his chest tighten with something that is not professionalism. Every time Will glances over, Nico is already looking back, eyes steady in that way that makes Will feel seen down to the marrow.
They are performing. They are pretending. Yet nothing about this feels remotely false.
And somewhere in the noise — the questions, the watching, Clarisse’s too-knowing scrutiny — Will realises, with a soft, dreadful clarity, that the night has slipped into a different register entirely. Something warmer. Something sharper. Something he might not be ready to name but is absolutely powerless to stop.
Something that feels, disastrously, like possibility.
***
By the time the night begins to fray at the edges, Will finds himself wedged between Kayla and Austin at the bar — the traditional formation for when December excess has finally claimed the hospital staff as its chosen victims. Nico has slipped outside for a smoke, and his departure had been preceded by what everyone around them clearly interpreted as an old married couple routine: Will lecturing him about carcinogens, winter air, and “lung tissue being a finite resource,” while Nico rolled his eyes with bored elegance and said something about needing “five minutes of quiet before Clarisse asked about their sex life again.”
It had earned them a small round of applause.
Now the world has dissolved into the kind of warm, glittering chaos that only medical professionals unleashed upon an open bar can produce. Austin’s tie has given up entirely and is hanging around his neck like a defeated serpent. Kayla is barefoot, heels dangling from one hand, cheeks flushed pink in a way that suggests several cocktails and at least one ill-advised shot. Austin keeps nodding off against Will’s shoulder; Kayla keeps hiccuping in a rhythm that feels almost festive.
“You’ve done very well for yourself,” Kayla announces, nudging him with her elbow so hard his drink nearly sloshes. “Nico is… wow. He is… like… stupidly gorgeous.”
Austin, who seems to be dreaming with his eyes open, nods solemnly. “Absurdly hot,” he murmurs, as if diagnosing a condition. “On a cellular level.”
Will tries to smile, tries to deflect, tries to look like someone whose pulse isn’t currently ricocheting off his ribs. “Okay, both of you need water.”
“No,” Kayla says gravely, pointing a heel at him like a sword. “What you need is to accept that your boyfriend is hot and we’re proud of you. You’ve finally stopped dating disasters.”
Will snorts, because even drunk Kayla has a point. He does, unfortunately, tell her and Austin everything about his terrible dates — the man who brought his own tarot deck and predicted Will’s “impending romantic downfall,” the guy who spent an hour describing his crypto portfolio, the one who insisted all doctors were part of a shadow government conspiracy. There are more. Too many more.
But Kayla softens suddenly, the alcohol smoothing out the sarcasm until only warmth remains.
“I’m really happy for you, Will,” she says quietly, hiccup folding itself into the words. “He seems like a great guy. And it’s so clear he cares about you. You deserve that.”
Something in Will’s chest shifts — not gently, not easily, but with the sudden ache of a pulled stitch.
Because Kayla means it. Because Austin, half-asleep against him, means it too. And because none of this — none of this tenderness, none of this pride, none of this uncomplicated belief in him — is attached to anything real.
He feels it all at once: the heat of the room tightening around him, the press of bodies and music and fairy lights blurring at the edges, the rising tide of guilt curling under his ribs. The devastation is absurdly quick — a kind of emotional vertigo. He feels nauseous. He feels claustrophobic. He feels the exact, crushing weight of lying to people who trust him.
“I—” he manages, breath hitching. “I’m just going to get some air. Too warm in here.”
Kayla nods, slow and dazed. “Good idea,” she murmurs, already half in Austin’s shoulder.
Will slips away from the bar, pushing gently through the warmth and noise and the dizzying glow of hanging lights, the laughter and music and clinking glasses all rising behind him like a tide he can’t keep his balance in. He isn’t thinking of direction or destination, only escape — colder air, quieter air — and so when the lobby doors swing open and he rounds the corner too fast, he collides straight into a solid chest and a familiar winter coat that smells faintly of smoke and December wind.
Nico’s hands come up automatically, steadying him. “Whoa—” he starts, soft and surprised, but Will is too flustered to register anything except the sudden nearness, the press of Nico’s palm against his arm, the halo of lamplight turning Nico into something that makes Will’s throat tighten.
“Oh gods— I’m sorry, I wasn’t— I didn’t see you— I just needed—” Will stammers, words dissolving in the rush of cold air and panic.
“Hey—” Nico says quietly, leaning in instinctively, eyes sweeping over Will’s face with that careful, measured concern that makes Will feel both seen and terribly unprepared for it. His voice drops, softer still, as if the moment requires something more intimate, and the pet name slips out in that low, unthinking way that tells Will it isn’t calculated at all. “Tesoro, what’s wrong? You look—”
He doesn’t finish, because Will is already reeling.
The pet name lands like a hand pressed gently against a bruise: tenderness where he has no defences, sweetness where guilt has been gathering all evening. Nico’s concern feels too real, too close to the thing Will has been trying not to notice, not to want, not to imagine.
And all at once everything inside him tilts — not slowly, not reasonably, but in a sudden, helpless drop.
He pulls back. Harder than he means. Too fast for Nico to mask the way his hand slips away, fingers curling slightly as if unsure what he did wrong.
“There’s no one here,” Will says, the words coming out sharp because he has no grip on anything softer. “You don’t have to fake it anymore.”
The silence that follows feels colder than the snow outside.
Nico freezes with a small, stunned stillness that hits Will harder than anger ever could. His eyes widen by a fraction, the brown of them deepening in confusion and hurt, and his expression shifts in a way Will catches the exact second of: open, questioning, then closing in on itself with a quiet kind of ache, one he clearly hadn’t expected to feel at all tonight.
And Will realises, with a dull, sickening punch to the gut, that he caused it.
Of all the chaos swirling inside him, this is the one truth that lands with perfect, merciless clarity.
His breath leaves him in a rush, white in the cold air, and he feels his entire posture soften and fold as if his body is trying to take back the words, trying to retreat from the damage he didn’t mean to inflict.
“I’m sorry,” he says, and the apology comes out rough, uneven, coloured by exhaustion and something much heavier. “I didn’t— that’s not what I meant. I swear it wasn’t.” He drags a trembling hand through his hair, the cold nipping at his fingers, the hotel lights spilling too bright across the pavement as if illuminating every inch of his embarrassment. “This is… gods, this is so much harder than I thought it would be.”
He inhales shakily, trying to find the edges of the truth, trying to bring it into focus. “I don’t know what I was thinking, asking you to do this. Asking myself to do this. Pretending it’s nothing when it’s—” He cuts himself off before the sentence betrays him entirely. “I don’t know how I thought I could get away with faking something like this.”
Nico nods once — a small, controlled gesture that seems to steady something inside him more than it conveys agreement — and when he speaks, his voice is even in that careful, deliberate way that telegraphs effort rather than ease, the tone of someone trying very hard not to make anything worse for either of them.
“Okay,” he says quietly. “That’s… fair enough.”
The words drift between them like frost settling on glass, delicate and cold, and Will feels the ache of them settle under his ribs in a way he isn’t remotely prepared for. Nico exhales, not sharply, not angrily, just with a quiet resignation that feels strangely heavier than either. His gaze skims briefly toward the hotel doors as if already calculating the cleanest exit, then returns to Will with a gentleness that makes the moment hurt all the more.
“I’ll just go, then,” he continues, still steady, still unbearably composed. “You can tell your friends I had to be up early for work, or that I wasn’t feeling well, or whatever version makes this simplest for you. They’ll believe you.”
There is no accusation in it. No pettiness. Nothing defensive or wounded or dramatic. Just a man offering him a way out, a man trying to protect both of them from discomfort, a man performing kindness even in the space where Will has just hurt him.
Will’s lungs feel too tight in his chest, as if breath has become an unpredictable thing — rising too quickly, catching too sharply. He wants to speak, he wants to reach for him, he wants to apologise properly, in a way that matches the significance of the wound he has just inflicted, but the words gather and shatter, none of them good enough, none of them safe.
Nico watches him for a moment, something soft and sad lingering in his gaze, and then adds — still quiet, still reasonable in a way that makes Will feel worse — “Maybe give it a couple of weeks before you tell them we broke up. Makes it cleaner. They’ll be disappointed, but they’ll get over it.”
And that is the line that undoes Will entirely, with the sickening drop of realising a truth too late — that he has been imagining some version of a future without knowing he was doing it, that the idea of a fake breakup feels catastrophically more painful than the lie that led them here.
“No—” The word bursts out of him unfiltered, pulled up from somewhere instinctive and panicked, and he moves a half-step forward before he even understands he’s done it. “No, don’t— don’t say that.”
Nico’s brows lift a fraction, confusion knitting into the remnants of the hurt still hovering in the lines of his face. He doesn’t look angry — he looks bewildered, as though Will has disrupted an equation he thought he understood.
“It’s the logical next step,” Nico says, still maddeningly calm, though there’s a thread of caution beneath it now. “We fake-dated for a night. Now we fake-break up. Easy.”
But the thought lands inside Will with a kind of quiet devastation, and he shakes his head before he finds words, breath fogging sharply in the cold, hands unsteady where they curl into fists against his sides.
“I just— I didn’t—” He drags a hand down his face, the hotel lights painting gold across his knuckles, the winter air biting at the spaces where his gloves don’t quite meet his sleeves. “I never thought that far. I was so focused on getting through tonight, on getting through one impossible thing at a time, that I didn’t think about what comes after.”
He swallows, throat tight, the next words arriving in pieces he tries to shape into something whole.
“I didn’t think about the… upkeep of it. The explanations. The pretending. The way it would end. I didn’t think about a fake breakup because—” He exhales, shaky, defeated. “Because I didn’t want this to be the end.”
And as soon as he hears himself say it — the softness of it, the honesty in it, the small, helpless hope tangled inside it — he realises how long it has been lodged there, unacknowledged, quietly shaping every choice, every glance, every too-careful laugh across the evening.
He lifts his eyes toward Nico, the streetlamp behind him turning the falling snow into bright, drifting ash, and sees Nico standing very still — not withdrawing, not stepping forward, but watching him with an expression Will cannot decipher, a mixture of surprise and something else that pulls tight beneath his ribs.
Will has the sudden, dizzying sense of a precipice — not the fall but the moment just before it, where gravity pauses, where breath rises and stays suspended in the cold, where the entire night seems to hover between realities, one where this ends neat and polite and false, and one where something else, something terrifyingly alive, could begin.
Nico watches him through the drifting snow, shoulders drawn tight beneath his coat, expression guarded but not closed, the hurt still there but softened now with something quieter, something almost — impossibly — hopeful.
“So,” Nico says at last, voice low, even, painfully careful, “this wasn’t just an act for you?”
The question hangs in the space between them like the softest thread, delicate as frost tracing its way down a windowpane. Hope flickers in it. Caution wraps around it. Nico isn’t demanding an answer so much as bracing for one — bracing for the version that wounds less, the one he expects, not the one he wants.
And Will, who has spent the whole night trying to swallow the truth, suddenly can’t hold it anymore.
“It wasn’t,” he says — too fast, too unsteady — and then the words rush out of him in one long, tumbling flood, like someone finally cracking open a dam. “Gods, Nico — I’ve had a crush on you since Jason’s birthday last year.”
Nico’s breath catches, almost imperceptibly.
Will pushes on, because now that he’s started he cannot stop; the truth unspools in him like a ribbon finally given slack. “You were just—” He gestures helplessly, searching for language large enough, honest enough. “You were moving around that room in this quiet way that still made everyone look at you, and when you spoke — gods, the way you spoke — you have this subtle, wry, careful charm that pulls people toward you without you ever trying, and I remember standing there thinking I didn’t understand a single thing about you, but I wanted to.”
A soft wind carries the warmth of his breath away into the cold as he keeps going, words spilling faster, his voice thick with the kind of honesty that only comes when someone is too tired and too frightened to hide anymore. “But it felt impossible. You barely looked at me. Then the night ended and you disappeared and — honestly, I figured I hallucinated half of it. And then all these months passed and I never saw you again and I thought, okay, fine, that’s it, crush over, move on.”
Nico doesn’t interrupt. He doesn’t even breathe loudly.
“And then this whole disaster happened,” Will continues, shaking his head at the absurdity of it, “and Kayla cornered me and Jason shoved your number into my phone and I still thought it was useless, completely pointless, but then we met.” His voice softens around the memory, around the hours in that coffee shop. “And we talked. And then we kept talking. And every time my phone buzzed with your name I felt— gods, I don’t know, lighter, or steadier, or something I probably shouldn’t have let myself feel.”
He laughs once, breathless and miserable and thick with sincerity. “And then tonight happened and you were—” His throat tightens, because how does he say this without falling apart? “You were everything I could have ever wanted. Every version of you I’d imagined was real, except more. Better. Worse for me. And I couldn’t fully enjoy any of it because the whole time I knew it wasn’t real for you.”
He exhales, finally, a long, shaking breath that fogs in the cold air like the spirit of his confession leaving his body.
“Well,” he whispers, steady now in the aftermath, “that was a lot. But in summary — no, Nico. It wasn’t an act for me. Not even close.”
Nico steps toward him — not with any theatrical flourish, not with the sharp certainty of someone making a declaration, but with the slow, deliberate gravity of a man crossing a threshold he has been circling all night. The air shifts with him. The snow seems to slacken its descent. The cold that had settled like frost along Will’s spine thaws by inches as Nico moves into the fragile pocket of warmth between their bodies, close enough that Will can feel the softened heat radiating through layers of wool and winter air, close enough that Will’s pulse tries and fails to keep an even rhythm.
“We didn’t cover everything in our crash-course get-to-know-each-other session,” Nico murmurs, his voice low enough that it seems to seat itself directly beneath Will’s ribs.
Will blinks up at him, genuine confusion threading through the panic already simmering there. “I— what do you mean?”
Nico takes the remaining half-step that erases any polite distance, the kind of closeness that asks for nothing and reveals everything at once. Snow clings to the dark curl at his temple, melting slowly, glistening against the faint flush warming his cheekbones. Will can smell the smoke from his earlier cigarette hanging in the wool of his coat, mixed with whatever quiet, clean thing Nico seems to carry with him everywhere — something like winter light, something like warmth kept carefully under control.
“Listen,” Nico says, and the word is a soft anchor, weighted with something steady and real, “I’m not a bad guy, and I like helping people, and if someone needs me I’ll usually step in without thinking too hard about it.” His gaze drifts, then returns, sharper, searching for fragile edges. “But I’m not some saint wandering around handing out emotional charity. I don’t just… offer myself up for things like this.”
There’s an undertone in it — a tension in the phrasing, a faint quiver beneath the calm — that sends Will’s thoughts spiralling down two opposite paths at once. Either Nico is about to walk away cleanly, or he’s about to open a door Will hasn’t stopped looking at since Jason’s birthday, and both possibilities burn in the same place in his chest.
Nico sees the flicker of fear cross Will’s face — that tiny crack of doubt, so quick it could have been missed by anyone else — and something warm and unbearably gentle enters his eyes, like the moment before a candle is cupped by a protective hand.
“What I mean,” he continues, softer now, the confession rising like breath against the cold, “is that I wouldn’t do something like this for just anyone.”
Will swallows around the thickness in his throat, the cold scraping against the back of his teeth as he tries to breathe evenly.
Nico’s gaze flicks downward for a moment — a quick, unconscious sweep toward Will’s mouth — before lifting again with a steadiness that feels almost tactile. Will can feel it along his sternum, the way one feels a hand hovering just before it touches.
“Jason knew that,” Nico says, the faintest wryness tucked into the corner of his mouth, “which is why he gave you my number, and why he said yes on my behalf before I had the chance to overthink it. He knows me better than I’d sometimes prefer, and he knew I wasn’t exactly… neutral.”
The words slide into Will’s chest like heat spreading through cold water, slow and disbelieving.
Nico steps even closer — barely an inch, but enough that Will could count Nico’s eyelashes if he had the nerve to look directly, enough that the world behind Nico blurs into hotel lights and drifting snow and the faint hum of a holiday party he can no longer hear.
“I’ve had a crush on you since that same party,” Nico says, the admission soft but impossible to mistake, each word warmed by something painfully sincere. “Jason didn’t suggest me because I was convenient. He suggested me because he knew I wouldn’t fake-date someone I didn’t —” his breath catches, a fraction, but he holds the gaze, holds the moment “— someone I didn’t already want to date for real.”
Nico’s confession lingers in the cold like something luminous — a small, impossible truth suspended between their breaths — and Will feels it hit him with the kind of force that steals not just air but sense, a dizzying rush that leaves him staring at Nico as though language itself has abandoned him.
He hears himself inhale — too sharp, too fragile — before the words slip out, unsteady and scraped raw. “Do you mean it,” he whispers, voice soft in the way a wound is soft, “or are you just… saying what you think I want to hear?”
Nico huffs a small laugh, not mocking, not distant, but something warm-edged and disbelieving, like he’s startled that Will could even doubt him. “Of course I mean it,” he murmurs, and the certainty in it — quiet, steady, real — sends a shiver through Will far deeper than the winter air ever could.
And then Nico closes the final inch of distance, his hand lifting to Will’s jaw with a gentleness so careful it feels like the world narrowing to fingertips and breath and the soft, electric pause before something changes forever. Will tilts into the touch without meaning to — instinctive, inevitable — and the cold breaks around them like glass as Nico leans in and presses his mouth to Will’s.
The kiss is slow. Deep. Not tentative, but reverent — the kind of kiss that feels like stepping out of a long winter and discovering warmth was waiting the entire time. Snow gathers in Nico’s hair, melts against Will’s cheek, traces cold along his collar while Nico’s lips draw heat from him with aching, devastating precision. Will feels the whole night buckle around them, the hotel’s golden light flaring at the edge of his vision, the city noise thinning into nothing but heartbeat and cold and Nico’s breath brushing warm at the corner of his mouth.
It is everything he’d wanted to feel and everything he didn’t dare hope for, tangled together in one impossible moment of winter air and soft pressure and the quiet, overwhelming relief of being wanted back.
They are still kissing — slow, indulgent, greedy in that careful way two people kiss when they suspect they’ve already wasted too much time — when a noise rises behind them, something slurred and enthusiastic and unmistakably fuelled by free alcohol.
“Oh my gods,” someone wails.
Will startles, breath catching; Nico doesn’t so much as flinch. He only draws back a fraction, forehead resting against Will’s, eyes half-closed in a way that suggests he isn’t quite ready to relinquish the moment. Warm breath drifts across Will’s lips, soft and steady, before Will finally gathers enough nerve to turn toward the commotion.
The sight nearly knocks him sideways.
Half the hospital appears to have spilled into the doorway, a tangle of winter coats and blinking fairy lights and people who clearly should not be unsupervised in public spaces. Kayla is barefoot in the snow, heels dangling from one hand like a defeated weapon; Austin blinks at them with the glazed solemnity of a man who clocked out mentally an hour ago. And front and centre — naturally — are Jason and Clarisse.
Jason looks obscenely pleased with himself, as if he has single-handedly solved romance. Clarisse looks like she’s measuring the distance between Jason and the nearest snowdrift and debating trajectory.
Jason holds out his palm toward her with a serenity that should be classified as a medical delusion. “Pay up,” he says, voice calm, almost gentle, which somehow makes it worse. “You owe me fifty.”
Clarisse mutters a string of syllables that sound only loosely connected to the English language, then digs into her pocket with the air of someone committing a felony. “There is no universe,” she grumbles, shoving a wad of notes at him, “in which Will Solace has been hiding a boyfriend for months.”
Jason pockets the money with a flourish that should be illegal in several states. “And yet,” he says, beaming, “here we are.”
Kayla pushes a hand through her hair, staring between Will and Nico, and Jason and Clarisse as if trying to decipher a plot twist in real time. “What is going on,” she breathes, the question soft with awe and outrage and the faintly manic joy of someone who thrives on gossip.
Nico’s fingers slide along Will’s jaw — barely a touch, more a quiet tether — and it grounds him instantly, the warmth seeping through layers of coat and nerves until Will remembers how to stand upright.
Jason, unsurprisingly, cannot leave it alone. He steps forward with the air of a man narrating the final act of a nature documentary. “Clarisse didn’t believe Solace had a real boyfriend,” he proclaims, smugness radiating like heat off a radiator. “She insisted he’d invented a fake date as a last-ditch attempt to avoid the party. Evidently, she was mistaken.”
Will contemplates spontaneous evaporation; pavement seems like a viable escape route. The crowd murmurs, thrilled and feral. Clarisse looks one mishap away from violence. Kayla is doing an excited little hop that should probably concern him more than it does with Nico still so close. Someone in the back sighs like they’ve just witnessed the finale of their favourite show.
Through all of it, Nico is maddeningly unruffled. He simply reaches for Will’s hand — no performance, no flourish, just the quiet confidence of someone who has already made up his mind — and threads their fingers together as if it’s the most natural conclusion to the night.
The warmth of his palm hums through Will’s bones, steady and sure, grounding him in a way the crowd and the cold and the chaos can’t touch.
And standing there, with snow settling in Nico’s hair like some soft, deliberate blessing, Will’s heart stutters against his ribs — not with panic this time, but with something quieter, deeper, something he doesn’t dare name aloud.
He realises, in a slow, breath-stealing rush, that the snow is still drifting gently around them, the hotel lights are still casting their golden glow across the wet pavement, and Nico’s hand is warm in his — and for the first time all night, there isn’t a single part of him trying to pretend.