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Enid Sinclair spent three months courting Wednesday Addams, a fact known to nearly everyone at Nevermore except Wednesday herself.
She began with the safer methods: saving Wednesday the window seat at breakfast; placing the forensic pathology journal she often borrowed at the corner of her usual library table; deliberately returning on Friday nights with two cups of hot chocolate, one of them without whipped cream, without marshmallows, and without enough sugar to make any normal person happy.
Wednesday accepted the drink and inspected it.
“You have finally understood the damage excessive sugar can cause to the nervous system.”
Enid sat across from her and tried to keep smiling. “I just remembered that you don’t like sweet things.”
“Remembering a roommate’s dietary preferences helps reduce friction in shared living arrangements.”
“...Right. Of course.”
In the second week, Enid advanced her strategy to physical contact. She began casually linking her arm through Wednesday’s in the corridors, pretending it was only to avoid the crowds. When they sat on the bench outside the greenhouse, she would press her knee against Wednesday’s and leave it there longer than necessary. Once, after a full moon, she even fell asleep against Wednesday’s shoulder and made no effort to move away as soon as she woke.
Wednesday lowered her gaze to Enid. Enid’s heart beat like a bird trying to break through her rib cage.
“Your cervical spine is not designed to remain at that angle for extended periods,” Wednesday said. “If you wake with a stiff neck tomorrow, I will not massage it.”
“I didn’t ask you to massage me.” Enid’s expectations died within three seconds.
“Good. It would be an inefficient allocation of labor.”
In the third week, Enid decided to give her a gift that could not possibly be misinterpreted.
The rose took eleven days to bloom. Eugene regarded her plan with considerable suspicion and reminded her that true black roses did not exist; even the closest varieties were only deep red or purple. If she insisted on darkening the petals toward pure black, the plant might become too fragile to survive until it flowered.
“Wednesday likes things that are fragile and close to death,” Enid said.
Eugene looked up at her. “I’m not sure that qualifies as a reasonable cultivation objective.”
“Trust me.”
Enid checked the greenhouse almost every day. She memorized the watering schedule, stopped Eugene from putting a yellow label beside the pot, and spent twenty minutes choosing the wrapping when the bud finally opened. In the end, she abandoned every ribbon and tied the stem with a single black thread.
At first, she planned to give it to Wednesday in their room, but that felt too much like two roommates exchanging an ordinary object. She considered the cemetery as well, then worried Wednesday might mistake the flower for part of a mourning ritual. In the end, she waited outside the music room after Wednesday finished practicing the cello. It was the quietest point in Wednesday’s day. Her black sleeves still held the fine creases left by the repeated movement of the bow, and her expression was slightly less guarded than usual.
Enid hid the rose behind her back and waited until Wednesday closed the door before holding it out.
“This is for you.”
Wednesday’s gaze went first to Enid’s face, then to the flower. She accepted the rose and studied its petals. The deep red had darkened almost to black, leaving only a rim of color at the edges like a trace of dried blood. Enid waited for her to look up, her heart beating fast enough to make her regret not preparing an explanation.
Wednesday touched one petal with the tip of her finger. “The pigmentation is uneven.”
Enid’s smile faltered for an instant. “Yeah. Eugene said true black is difficult to cultivate.”
“The condition of the plant?”
“Stable for now.”
Wednesday continued examining it. “Its rate of decay should be slower than that of an ordinary rose.”
Enid tightened the hand still hidden behind her back until her nails pressed into her palm. “Do you like it?”
Wednesday looked up. That single second stretched long enough for Enid to begin preparing answers on her behalf. Wednesday would not say she liked it. She might call it acceptable or say it had research value. Any of those would be fine, as long as she understood this was not an ordinary flower—as long as she understood why Enid was standing there.
“It warrants preservation,” Wednesday said.
Enid nodded. “That’s great.”
Her voice still sounded bright, even natural. Sometimes that ability was useful. At other times, she hated it.
Wednesday placed the rose in the space beside her cello case, handling it more carefully than she would an ordinary object, but asked nothing else. Enid walked back to the dorm with her and talked about three things entirely unrelated to roses. Only after Wednesday returned to her typewriter did Enid step into the bathroom, close the door, and allow herself one silent, miserable grimace at her reflection.
She did not cry. One disappointing response to a flower was not worth crying over.
Wednesday had never been someone who understood the language of flowers. If Enid gave up because one rose had failed to earn the response she had imagined, she should never have chosen to pursue Wednesday Addams in the first place. Even so, as she cupped water in her hands and washed her face, one unspoken sentence remained in her mind: At least ask me why I gave it to you.
That night, Enid did not notice until she climbed into bed that Wednesday had placed the rose in a narrow black glass bottle on the table between the two halves of the stained-glass window. She had not kept it on her own black side of the room. She had put it in the center.
Enid looked at it for a long time. The disappointment in her chest did not disappear, but it settled beside another hope—smaller, more stubborn, and unwilling to leave.
Perhaps Wednesday had not understood. But she had kept the flower.
By the fourth week, Enid finally abandoned subtlety and moved on to the kind of direct courtship that, in her opinion, no one with a basic capacity for emotional perception could possibly miss. At the dance, she asked only Wednesday to dance. She posted a photo of the two of them with the caption My favorite person in black. During a nighttime walk, she even looked up at the moon and said, “I think I’ve fallen for someone who is very difficult to pursue.”
Wednesday continued along the cemetery path without breaking stride. “That suggests your assessment skills still require improvement.”
Enid stared at her back. “Don’t you want to ask who it is?”
“If the person is that difficult to pursue, you should reassess the cost of your investment rather than require an observer to participate in speculation.”
“What if that person is actually worth it?”
Wednesday finally stopped. Enid held her breath as Wednesday turned around and answered with complete seriousness.
“Then you should provide her with explicit data instead of issuing vague statements in a cemetery.”
Enid nearly lay down in the empty coffin beside them.
Yoko was silent for almost ten seconds after hearing the entire story. “Does she genuinely have no idea, or is she subjecting you to some advanced form of psychological torture?”
“She genuinely has no idea.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Because if she knew, she would at least write me a formal rejection report.”
Yoko regarded her with something approaching pity. “Have you considered saying, ‘Wednesday, I like you and I want to date you’?”
Enid buried her face in a throw pillow. “That wouldn’t be romantic.”
“You have been romantic for three months, and she thinks you’re performing roommate maintenance.”
“I know.”
“Then what exactly are you holding out for?”
Enid did not answer for a long time. Eventually, she pressed her chin deeper into the pillow and said quietly, “I just want her to notice on her own. Once.”
Some of the mockery faded from Yoko’s face.
“I know she won’t respond like a normal person, and I’m not waiting for her to suddenly turn into someone from a romance movie. But... I want to know whether she might look at what I’m doing one day and see it for herself, instead of accepting it only after I place the answer directly in front of her.”
“What if she never sees it?”
Enid looked toward the other side of the room. Wednesday was not there, and her typewriter had been covered neatly with black cloth. The rose still stood in the center of the table between the stained-glass windows. Its petals were darker than they had been on the day it bloomed, but Wednesday changed its water every day and had even trimmed away the leaves that had begun to rot.
“Then I’ll probably tell her eventually,” Enid said. “Just not today.”
The wish might not have been reasonable, but Enid had already spent enough time falling in love with someone who treated emotions as suspicious data. It was difficult not to keep one small, unreasonable hope for a miracle.
The miracle arrived on a rainy Saturday night.
The rain had not stopped since afternoon. Water struck the windows of Ophelia Hall in dense, steady beats, and the sky darkened earlier than usual. Even the students who most enjoyed going outside in hostile weather had chosen to stay indoors. Enid declared it “the perfect movie night.” Wednesday maintained that two hours of visual storytelling could not justify itself unless it provided criminal motives, anatomical knowledge, or verifiable historical information.
Enid ignored her. She dragged the only blanket in the room wide enough for two onto the bed, prepared popcorn, switched off the main light, and left only the strand of warm yellow bulbs beside her bed. Finally, she projected a romance movie that had lingered on the streaming service’s homepage for six months, with a poster saturated in tasteless shades of pink.
Wednesday frowned as soon as she saw the title. “Falling for You Before the Ninety-Ninth Sunset.”
“That’s the one.”
“The title has already disclosed the ending.”
“Romance movies don’t depend on surprise endings.”
“Then what do they depend on?”
Enid lifted one corner of the blanket. “The process. Come here.”
Wednesday looked at her as though evaluating a low-grade trap. Enid patted the space beside her.
“It’s cold outside, and you can’t sit in a chair and criticize the movie for two hours. That would compromise the integrity of movie night.”
“I do not believe movie night possesses an integrity that requires protection.”
“I do.”
Wednesday paused, then finally crossed the room and sat on the other side of the bed. Enid pulled the blanket over both their legs and deliberately let their shoulders rest close together. Wednesday noticed the contact and did not move away.
Five minutes into the movie, the male lead decided fate had intervened because the female lead picked up the wrong sugar packet at a café.
“Statistically, thousands of people pick up the wrong sugar packet every day,” Wednesday said coldly. “If that is sufficient to constitute fate, human society should have collapsed into mass marital chaos.”
Enid grabbed a handful of popcorn. “Shh.”
At the thirteen-minute mark, the female lead ran through the rain without slipping.
“Her shoes are clearly incompatible with the coefficient of friction on wet pavement.”
“Wednesday.”
At twenty-seven minutes, the male lead’s emotionally neglected childhood had left him incapable of understanding the female lead’s pursuit. He even interpreted the carefully prepared dinner she made for him as an ordinary gathering between friends. Wednesday gave a quiet scoff.
“This man lacks the most basic pattern-recognition ability.”
Enid put a piece of popcorn into her mouth and said nothing.
The woman in the movie gave him books, remembered how he took his coffee, and appeared at his door on his birthday. Each time, he was sincerely grateful, yet never understood that she was courting him. Wednesday’s commentary gradually became less frequent. At first, she assumed the film’s errors had simply become too repetitive to deserve individual correction. Another ten minutes passed before she realized that her attention had shifted away from the holes in the plot and begun returning, repeatedly, to the male lead’s increasingly irritating misinterpretations.
He attributed the woman’s memory of his preferences to good observational skills and decided she stayed close because she was cold. When she selected a fountain pen specifically for him, his only comment concerned the flow of the ink.
Wednesday’s fingers went still beneath the blanket.
She thought of the rose. She remembered the color of its petals, its expected vase life, and the fact that she had placed it between the stained-glass windows because the light was best there. Only now did she recall the brief catch in Enid’s smile when she asked, Do you like it?
Enid had not been waiting for an assessment of the flower. Wednesday had supplied one anyway.
She turned to look at Enid. The shifting light from the screen passed over Enid’s profile. She held the popcorn bowl against her stomach, and beneath the blanket her knee rested against Wednesday’s leg as though the distance between them had existed so long it no longer required permission.
Onscreen, the female lead finally lost patience. “I’m not doing these things because I’m friendly. I’m pursuing you.”
The male lead looked stunned. Wednesday did not offer a single criticism. Hot chocolate without whipped cream, a hand extended only to her at the dance, the toe of Enid’s shoe brushing her calf beneath the table, the confession in the cemetery about liking someone difficult to pursue, and the rose she had placed in the center of their room surfaced one after another in her memory.
She had catalogued those events separately as remembered dietary preferences, social invitations, unnecessary but tolerable physical contact, gift exchange, and ambiguous emotional statements. Each item had other reasonable explanations when examined alone. Once the data was considered together, however, the system of independent classifications she had maintained for months could no longer support the evidence.
Wednesday’s breathing slowed. The realization that Enid had been pursuing her was less unsettling than what followed: Wednesday had already been waiting for the pursuit to continue.
She noticed whether Enid sat beside her. At breakfast, she checked to see whether the strawberry would still appear on her plate. On Friday nights, she left open the hours she would otherwise have used for writing. When Enid danced with other people, Wednesday experienced a form of interference she had so far refused to name. After the rose began to wilt, she had even researched three preservation methods before pressing its petals into a pathology atlas she rarely opened.
This had plainly exceeded the reasonable boundaries of ordinary roommate maintenance.
The male lead asked, “If I only realized it now, am I too late?”
Something drew tight in Wednesday’s chest. Enid sniffed beside her, and Wednesday turned again.
“Are you crying?”
“No.” Enid wiped the corner of one eye with the back of her hand. “That was a reflection caused by the movie lighting.”
“Your explanation lacks credibility.”
“Then stop looking at me.”
Enid pulled the blanket higher and hid half her face behind it. Her ears had turned pink, but her eyes remained fixed on the screen.
The movie had reached its final scene. The two leads stood on a city rooftop beneath a pink sunset that violated several obvious meteorological conditions. The man finally admitted that the feelings had always been there; he simply had not known what to call them.
The admission lay uncomfortably close to the conclusion Wednesday had just reached. For once, she left the sunset unchallenged.
The woman asked through tears, “Do you know now?”
The man nodded. The music swelled, and they moved slowly toward each other until they kissed.
Enid hugged the popcorn bowl to her stomach and let out a small sigh. “I’m so jealous.”
Wednesday turned toward her. “What, specifically, do you envy?”
Enid clearly had not expected the question. Her entire body went still. “Just... someone finally understood.”
“The male lead required ninety-eight sunsets to complete an extremely obvious act of emotional recognition.”
“I know he’s stupid.”
“You remain envious.”
Enid was quiet for several seconds, looking down at the cold popcorn. “At least he got there in the end.”
The scattered data reorganized itself around that answer. Wednesday understood Enid’s months of carefully measured closeness, the easy smiles she produced whenever hope gave way to disappointment, and the reason Wednesday herself had gradually stopped criticizing the movie. The male lead had held her attention because, without realizing it, she had been recognizing herself. Only now could she identify what Enid had truly been waiting for all this time.
The discovery came late and irritated her, though the feeling itself was not entirely unfamiliar.
Wednesday moved closer. Enid was still watching the screen and did not notice, so while the characters in the movie continued kissing, Wednesday leaned in and brushed her lips against the corner of Enid’s lips.
The kiss was brief—shorter than any of Enid’s tentative touches—but it was enough to bring every visible system in her body to a halt. The popcorn bowl tilted on her lap. She neither reached to steady it nor remembered to blink, remaining frozen as the credits rolled upward behind them.
Wednesday waited three seconds. “Enid.”
There was no response.
“Your respiratory rate is abnormal.”
Enid finally blinked. “You just...”
“Kissed you.”
“I know you kissed me!” Her voice rose abruptly, then dropped again at once, as though speaking too loudly might invalidate the event. “I mean, why?”
It was a reasonable question. Ordinarily, Wednesday should have taken more time to organize the answer, establish new classifications, confirm causality, and eliminate the possibility of temporary emotional contamination from the movie. Enid’s mouth still held the shape of surprise left by the kiss, however, and Wednesday found that she did not wish to defer the answer.
“I understand now.”
Enid’s eyes widened slightly. “Understand what?”
“Your romantic interest in me.” Wednesday spoke with the calm of announcing a research finding. “You have prepared beverages according to my preferences, given me nonessential gifts, increased the frequency of physical contact, and repeatedly attempted to establish exclusive social situations. You also stated directly that you had feelings for someone who was difficult to pursue.”
The color spread from Enid’s ears down the sides of her neck. “You only realized now?”
“Yes.”
“Wednesday, I’ve been pursuing you for three months.”
“Twelve weeks and five days.”
Enid opened her mouth, then closed it. “You were counting?”
“I did not understand the significance of the data at the time. The information itself was retained.”
Enid covered her face with both hands. “I’m going to die.”
“There is currently no physiological evidence supporting that conclusion.”
“That is not the point.”
Wednesday watched the red tips of Enid’s ears through the gaps between her fingers as the unfamiliar tightness returned to her chest. This time, she made no attempt to classify it as a cardiac irregularity or environmental interference. She already had a more accurate designation.
“I understand something else as well,” she said.
Enid slowly lowered her hands. “What?”
“My feelings appear to be reciprocal.”
Enid stopped responding again. Wednesday waited several seconds and began to wonder whether excessive happiness could induce temporary aphasia in werewolves.
“Reciprocal?” Enid repeated at last.
“Romantically.”
“You’re in love with me?”
Wednesday frowned. The phrase was less precise than reciprocal romantic feelings and provided considerably less protective distance. Yet in the low-quality movie they had just watched, the male lead had required almost two hours to admit something obvious enough to be irritating. Wednesday had no intention of reproducing his inefficiency.
“Yes.”
Enid’s eyes lit at once. Wednesday’s gaze shifted away for a fraction of a second, though not because the brightness disturbed her. On the contrary, she discovered that she wanted to produce the same response again. This might be another phenomenon requiring verification.
“Based on the available data,” Wednesday continued, “we should start dating.”
Enid stared at her. “Are you asking me to be your girlfriend by presenting a research conclusion?”
“It is the most reasonable next step.”
“Wednesday.”
“Furthermore, formalizing the relationship would allow us to verify whether these feelings are persistent, exclusive, and—”
Enid launched herself forward. The popcorn bowl finally overturned on the bed. Several pieces rolled into the folds of the blanket, while the rest scattered across the floor. Wednesday should have addressed the disorder first, but Enid’s hands were already cupping her face, and Enid was smiling as though she had just received some absurd form of lifetime achievement award.
“You should answer first,” Wednesday said.
“Yes.”
“I have not finished explaining the conditions.”
“Yes to all of them.”
“That is a decision made without adequate risk assessment.”
“I’ve been pursuing you for three months. The risk assessment was completed a long time ago.”
Wednesday could not refute that.
Enid was still smiling. It was not a polite smile or one meant to conceal disappointment. She looked at Wednesday without any remaining defenses and with no apparent concern for werewolf dignity. As Wednesday studied her, she suddenly understood why she had remembered every expectation and every disappointment on this face over the past twelve weeks and five days. She also understood why Enid had never simply placed the answer in her hands.
Enid had wanted Wednesday to see her. Acceptance after a direct confession would have answered a different question. She had wanted Wednesday to recognize the care folded into every cup, every touch, and every attempt to come closer.
The recognition had come late, but not too late to matter.
Wednesday caught Enid by the collar of her pajama top and drew her close again. “Further verification is required.”
Enid’s smile widened. “Of course.”
This time, Wednesday did not stop at the corner of her lips.
The end credits continued behind them while an unoriginal love song listed fate, sunsets, and love finally understood. The blanket slipped to their waists, popcorn lay scattered everywhere, and Enid kept laughing helplessly between kisses.
Wednesday had previously believed that laughing during a kiss would interfere with operational efficiency. Several seconds later, she revised that conclusion.
Enid’s laughter lingered against her lips, every breath carrying joy too open to disguise. The evidence could not have been clearer.
Enid Sinclair had been pursuing her for a long time, and Wednesday had only understood tonight. Fortunately, Enid was still here.
Wednesday had no reason to make her wait for the ninety-ninth sunset.