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She should have thought it through better. Should have anticipated the consequences of exchanging Valentine's gifts on the exact same day she agreed to become the girlfriend of the fucking Tyler Galpin.
The most irritating part is that he doesn't even expect anything in return. Tyler would be perfectly content with her mere presence—a concept she finds excessive and mildly disturbing—and yet that only makes the situation worse. Because if he decides to put in effort—and he will—it'll be with that unbearable dedication of his, meticulously planned to impress her.
Exactly one week until February fourteenth, and she's completely frustrated.
What the hell could she possibly give Tyler Galpin?
Money isn't an issue. If it were up to her, she could transfer one of the properties in her name over to him and secure his financial future without a second thought. Practical. Efficient. Undeniably useful.
But also impersonal.
And for some reason she'd rather not examine too closely, that feels unacceptable.
Wednesday sighs. She's leaning over her desk, fingers hovering mere millimeters above the keys of her typewriter. She's trying to focus on her novel—a meticulously planned murder is always soothing—but her mind keeps drifting back to the nauseating holiday of love.
From the other side of the room, Enid spins in her chair with a high-pitched squeal of excitement.
"Do you already know what you're getting Tyler?" she asks for the fifth time in under an hour.
Wednesday doesn't look up.
"I'm considering faking my own death," she replies with perfect calm. "It would be less humiliating."
Enid rolls her eyes and flops backward onto her bed, surrounded by colored paper, ribbons, and an obscene amount of glitter.
"It's Valentine's Day, Wednesday. Not a public execution."
"I disagree."
The silence lasts exactly seven seconds.
"You could make him something," Enid presses, sitting up abruptly. "Something personal. Guys love that. Letters, poems, crafts…"
Wednesday's hands curl into fists, knuckles bleaching white.
"I'm not some hormonal teenager scribbling sappy confessions," she says, too quickly.
Enid grins. That dangerous grin that means she's spotted weakness.
"Ah. So you've already considered writing him something."
Wednesday glares at her.
"Don't be ridiculous," she snaps, her composure suspiciously forced. "I write murders and coldly solved crimes. I'm not Neruda."
Enid narrows her eyes.
"Neruda also wrote about things that mattered to him."
"Homicides matter to me."
"Not what I meant."
The silence thickens.
Wednesday turns her gaze back to the typewriter. The blank page stares up at her with insolent defiance. She's described dismemberments with greater ease than this absurd sentimental task.
"Love is a biochemical distraction," she declares at last. "A hormonal reaction designed to perpetuate the species. It doesn't deserve literature."
Enid leans forward, elbows on Wednesday's desk.
"Then prove it. Write something so dark and weird that only the two of you would understand it. That's way more romantic than any heart-covered card."
The silence stretches longer than usual. It's not uncomfortable; it's expectant.
Wednesday keeps her eyes fixed on the edge of her desk, as though weighing a dangerous hypothesis.
"I was thinking…" she starts, finally.
Enid doesn't speak. She barely breathes.
"I could give him a survival kit. Flashlight, multi-tool, compass. Something practical. He used to stay in that cabin in the woods with his father when they went hunting together." She pauses. Her voice is no longer defensive. It's quieter. More careful. "I suppose I could offer to spend a day there with him."
Enid goes completely still.
She looks at Wednesday with such obvious tenderness that Wednesday's stomach twists with an unwanted cocktail of revulsion and vulnerability.
"That would be really sweet, Wednesday. Seriously," Enid says softly, unusually gentle. "I know Tyler would appreciate it so much."
Wednesday barely frowns.
"It's not sweetness. It's strategic emotional efficiency."
"Sure," Enid replies, smiling. "Super strategic."
For once, Wednesday doesn't argue.
And that says everything.
⛧°. ⋆༺♱༻⋆. °⛧
The moon and the flickering tremor of the candles are the only things outlining Tyler’s face in the cemetery’s gloom.
Shadows sharpen his cheekbones. Moonlight dances across his eyes with a softness Wednesday finds dangerously appealing.
They’re sitting on a black-and-white striped blanket, carefully spread between two gravestones tilted by decades of neglect. Cracked marble and damp grass complete the scene with impeccable aesthetics.
She has to admit it: her boyfriend knows her tastes far too well.
A picnic in an abandoned graveyard, in the dead of night, far from any celebration drowning in pink hearts and cloying music… it feels appropriate. Correct. Even thoughtful.
Tyler offers her a glass—an iced quad, no doubt bitter enough to melt her taste buds under lunar light—and smiles with that blend of shyness and restrained pride.
“Happy Valentine’s Day, Wednesday.”
She holds his gaze a second longer than necessary.
She doesn’t hate this day.
She hates that he’s managed to make it bearable.
“Venus is currently positioned in the constellation of Pisces,” she says, locking eyes with almost surgical seriousness.
Tyler blinks.
“Is that… good?”
The candle flames waver between them.
“In astrology, Venus governs love, relationships, pleasure, and the way we value others,” she explains, as though delivering a lecture. “In Pisces it takes on a particularly… inconvenient quality.”
She tilts her head just slightly.
“It’s the romance of willing martyrs. The kind that loves until it dissolves. The kind that finds beauty in someone else’s wound. The kind that turns longing into art… and abandonment into ecstasy.”
Tyler watches her in silence, trying to decide whether she’s being poetic or threatening.
“Sounds intense.”
“It is.”
The wind carries the wet smell of freshly turned earth.
“Venus in Pisces tends to idealize,” Wednesday continues, her calm too deliberate. “To offer more than is prudent. To stay even when fleeing would be the rational choice.”
For the first time since she began speaking, her voice drops a fraction.
“It’s a dangerous placement.”
Tyler doesn’t smile. Doesn’t joke.
“Dangerous for who?”
The question hangs between the headstones.
And Wednesday, for one imperceptible second, has no answer that won’t betray her.
“Venus in Pisces isn’t simply romanticism,” she goes on, eyes fixed on him as though studying a rare museum specimen. “It’s devotion.”
The word lands between them with unexpected weight.
“It speaks of souls that melt into fog. Of lovers who look at each other as though they’ve already drowned together in a previous life… and still chose to do it again.”
The wind snuffs out one of the candles. Neither moves to relight it.
The tension that forms between them isn’t imagined. Wednesday feels it with anatomical precision: in the electricity racing along her nerves, in the silent pressure behind her ribs, in the unsettling urge to close the physical distance until they become one silhouette beneath the moon—until someday they return to indistinguishable stardust.
She knows it’s irrational. She recognizes it. She categorizes it.
And still she doesn’t pull away.
Tyler watches her without interrupting. He’s no longer confused.
He understands.
This isn’t an astrology lesson. It’s a coded confession.
His fingers reach for something beside him, movements slow, almost ceremonial.
“I think I picked a good moment,” he murmurs.
Wednesday arches one brow.
He offers her the first item: a book of terror stories. Not supernatural—political, raw, uncomfortable. Exactly the kind of stories that fascinate her for their surgical dissection of human cruelty.
“First edition,” he says with a small smile. “Took me forever to track down.”
Before she can fire off a dry retort, he hands her a small box.
Inside, an anatomically correct ceramic heart. Perfectly sculpted, delicate arteries traced with care.
“I made it myself,” he explains, quieter now. “Watched a bunch of YouTube tutorials. It’s not perfect… but I wanted it to be… real.”
Wednesday holds it carefully. It’s cold. Solid. Vulnerable.
And then, the final gesture.
A bouquet of black dahlias.
Her favorite flower.
For her favorite crime.
Tyler doesn’t joke when he hands them over.
“Happy Valentine’s Day, Wednesday.”
The moon catches the faint shine in his eyes.
“I brought something for you as well,” Wednesday says at last.
Tyler looks at her with that unbearable tenderness that threatens to take her apart piece by piece.
She offers him the first gift: a dark leather case.
Inside, a compact flashlight, an antique compass, a perfectly sharpened multi-tool, and waterproof matches.
“A survival kit,” she explains in neutral tones. “Functional. Efficient. Moderately romantic if analyzed from an anthropological perspective.”
Tyler smiles but says nothing. He listens.
“I know you used to go to a cabin in the woods with your father. To hunt,” she continues, voice softer now. “I think it would be… instructive to accompany you someday.”
She pauses, almost imperceptibly.
“I’d like to watch you hunt. Even in your Hyde form.”
The silence that follows isn’t awkward. It’s profound.
Tyler’s face lights up with genuine surprise and emotion. No irony. No mask.
“Wednesday… I—”
She cuts him off before he can finish.
“I’m not finished.”
From inside her coat she draws a single carefully folded sheet.
No envelope. No decoration.
Just paper.
She holds it a second longer than necessary before placing it in his hand.
“This lacks practical utility,” she says, with only the slightest forced stiffness. “You may discard it if you find it irrelevant.”
Tyler takes the page with near-reverent care.
“I won’t.”
The moon lights the edge of the paper as he unfolds it.
Wednesday keeps her chin high, but her fingers lace together with a tension that betrays everything her face refuses to show.
Tyler reads.
I love you the way one loves the storm that chooses to linger
over the house where you sleep,
I love you with my tongue tracing the raw edge of your open wound,
not to close it, but to live inside it with you.
Your mouth splits into two smiles:
one for the world that doesn’t understand,
and another that belongs only to me—
the one that keeps its fangs hidden like someone guarding a secret both sweet and lethal.
I don’t want to save you.
I want to drink the night you carry inside with you,
to stroke the warm scab you leave on the sheets,
to sleep pressed against the cold you exhale when you dream
of breaking things that are still breathing… and to wake you by kissing the wreckage.
Your monstrosity doesn’t frighten me:
it calls to me.
It recognizes me.
It’s the only true temple I’ve ever stepped inside:
towers of bone that curve as though in prayer,
windows of skin that breathe,
a basement where you keep the names
of everyone who ever asked you to be something else.
I don’t want you to be anything else.
I want the hot dimness of your throat
when you swallow fear and desire at the same time,
I want the wet murmur of your chest
when something inside you cracks and you let me hold it.
I adore you crooked,
I adore you venomous and soft in the same breath,
I adore you with skin that peels away in slow strips
like petals from a black flower,
and sex that smells of wet iron and rain-soaked earth.
Come.
Sink your nails into the soft part of my throat
and carve your true name there—
the one that doesn’t fit on any page,
the one that only glows when the light goes out.
There is no redemption in this love
and that’s exactly why it’s sacred:
filthy and clean at once,
terminal and eternal,
devouring and tender,
tasting of copper and of promises that don’t need to be kept.
You are my favorite plague,
my fever that never breaks,
my religion that smells of burnt incense and your hair.
While everyone else begs for salvation,
I kneel at the edge of your abyss
and whisper, almost moaning:
more.
deeper.
more ours.
more forever.
Come destroy me slowly, mi amor.
Come rebuild me slowly with the pieces.
It’s the only way I know
to be sure we’re still alive.
I love you whole.
And whole is how I want you.
Tyler finishes reading.
There is no immediate smile. No joke to cushion the blow.
His hands tremble just slightly as he holds the page. The candles illuminate his eyes, and Wednesday catches something she rarely allows herself to see in him: pure, unguarded vulnerability.
He draws in a deep breath. Then another.
“Is that what I am to you?” he asks, but there is no doubt in his voice. Only wonder.
Wednesday holds his gaze. She doesn’t flinch.
“Yes.”
The answer is simple. Brutal.
Something inside Tyler breaks. Or perhaps finally comes loose.
He leans toward her without overthinking it, as though the space between them has suddenly become unbearable. His hands find her waist with steady strength—not to dominate, but to make sure she’s real—and he kisses her with an intensity that doesn’t ask permission.
It isn’t a gentle kiss.
It’s urgent. Deep. Almost desperate.
As though the poem has torn open a bright wound in his chest and she is the only one capable of holding it closed.
Wednesday doesn’t pull away. She grips the front of his coat, answering with the same restrained force she’s been carrying for weeks. Their foreheads brush lightly when they part just enough to breathe.
And then she sees it.
The tears.
Warm. Salty. Sliding down his face without any attempt to stop them.
Tyler rests his forehead against hers, still holding her with that near-animal intensity, now laced with something infinitely more fragile.
“No one,” he murmurs, voice cracked—“No one has ever looked at me like that.”
Wednesday feels something contract beneath her ribs. She doesn’t rush to wipe his tears away. She doesn’t make any obvious tender gesture. Instead, she lifts one hand and lays it against his cheek with a solemn firmness.
“You are not an aberration that needs correcting,” she says, voice low. “You are a choice.”
He lets out a choked laugh through the tears.
“You’re ruining me for anyone else.”
“That was the intention.”
Tyler kisses her again, slower this time, but no less fierce. As though he’s memorizing the exact shape of the way she fits against him.
The cemetery stays quiet.
The candles flicker.
There are no monsters now. No masks.
Just two people who decided not to save themselves.
But to stay.