Chapter Text
Pau was born with a clock inside him.
Just like you.
Just like every breathing being around you.
Due to misfortune, his clock didn’t work normally. It roared and it rattled in its cage. The doctors said his heart might not be able to go on for long because his chambers were too big for that.
Either way, he lived inside minutes that other people wasted carelessly.
He measured his life in beeps, in each of his breathes. If the clock ticks too fast, the world tilts. If it slows, everything might stop.
But this is not a story about dying.
Not exactly.
It is about a boy made of seconds meeting a boy made of tiny shining sparks. A boy who learned to speak softly, to move slowly, to feel carefully and another one who ran when he was told to walk, who laughed like rules were rumors, who touched the world like he knew he’d leave his mark in it.
This is the story of Pau.
And Lamine.
And what happens when a flicker finds a fuse, when caution is kissed by chaos and the clock doesn’t break. It sings. In its limits, but it still sings for them.
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It all started with loud footsteps, similar to a thunderclap inside a forgotten museum.
Pau didn’t look up.
He was tracing his finger across the lines of a book he had already memorized, though the words and the drawings in it didn’t really matter at this point. It was the silence between them that did. Silence always felt safer, perhaps because it existed everywhere he went. It followed after him in the long corridors of the hospital, in the sighs of nurses changing sheets, in the little sounds of machines trying to keep him alive. It was all he had ever known. Then the door opened and the silence disappeared, forever.
“Whoa. You live in here?”
The way his mother had decorated the room with fresh flowers, a pile of children's books on a portable table, Pokemon posters and family pictures tucked everywhere, made it seem like he really lived there. And he basically did. Most of his days were spent in this hospital, since he was 3. They always said he could leave one day but that day never came.
Pau turned the page.
The voice was too loud for a hospital room in the cardiology department. It bounced off the heart monitor and the metal bed frame, and it brought in a presence that felt like a new sort of weather, a warmer one.
The cover of The Little Prince blinked at him, as if in agreement. He’d been reading the same page for the third time, aware what the next one contained. Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves.
He found that line. He liked it, whatever the meaning of it was.
“I’m Lamine,” the strange boy added.
Pau thought he’d left already after realizing he’d come into the wrong room. That didn’t seem to be the case.
He finally raised his head to get a glimpse of this Lamine guy.
He was wearing a red hoodie that swallowed his shoulders and hung off his frame like he’d borrowed it from some older brother. His socks didn’t match. One was red, the other blue. The combination looked nice. The world must’ve made a mistake and dropped him there by accident. He seemed like he belonged to a playground, quiet the opposite of Pau.
The latter brought his eyes back to the book.
This was new.
“My dad’s your doctor,” Lamine continued, completely unbothered by the patient’s silence.
“He said I’m not supposed to come in, but he also said I shouldn’t ask too many questions, so here I am.”
He flopped into the visitor’s chair, it shifted a little from the impact. His legs swung back and forth, his elbows landing on the armrests, his eyes curiously fixed on Pau’s profile.
It should’ve made the latter uncomfortable but it didn’t. Loneliness was worse.
“You don’t talk?” he asked, softer. The hint of worry coloring his raspy voice.
Pau blinked once. Lamine had a catalan accent, it made him miss home more.
“Hmm. I understand,” there was a pause. A thoughtful one, like he’d just come to a resolution.
“I can talk for both of us.”
🕰♡🕰
For the next fifteen minutes, he did just that.
He talked about a pigeon that flew into his kitchen and how it pecked at the cereal box and made his mother scream. He reenacted it, flapping his arms, leaning sideways in the chair, nearly falling out of it. Pau didn’t react though something in him felt intrigued. And maybe he’d hold his breath as to not laugh.
Then came a theory: that the hospital hallways were designed like video game levels where every section had a hidden boss. The grumpy nurse on the second floor, the ice-cold cardiologist with vampire eyes on the third and so on.
Pau listened.
Lamine spoke like his thoughts had been bottled up all day with no one to spill them to, each word tumbling into the next, clumsy and misspelled.
And then, like a magician revealing a trick, he leaned in and said, “There’s a secret snack stash behind one of these machines on this floor. Like, behind the actual machine. You have to tilt it just a little. Don’t tell anyone. Except you can’t, huh?”
His voice softened, the last words reminding Pau of a very familiar feeling, pity. ‘Huh?’
Truth be told, Pau wasn’t the most easy-going 10 year old out there. He didn’t do ‘visitors’. His days were portioned out like pills: morning check-ups, breathing exercises, resting hours, ECGs, medication time, more resting hours. People came and went in white coats or child-friendly scrubs. No one stayed for long, except maybe Dr.Nasraoui, Lamine’s father, who sometimes brought Pau little puzzles to solve. A Rubik’s cube once, a jenga tower another time. He had a kind voice and explained his condition like it was just a rare pattern of cells, not the sad story that it truely was.
And then came Lamine, Pau didn’t even know how to introduce the latter. Things were just too easy for him, the kind of ‘easy’ Pau didn’t trust from his peers, nor was used to.
It must run in the family.
That being said, he didn’t know what was more surreal, the fact that the other boy was sitting there like it was a living room, or that Pau hadn’t told him to leave yet. He couldn’t decide if he was annoyed or fascinated. Maybe both or maybe just the latter, because why was a stranger sharing his silly thoughts with an unresponsive, boring Pau?
At some point, the patient realized he hadn’t blinked in a while. His eyes were dry, but he didn’t want to look away. Politeness, curiosity, confusion, envy, all of them took the best of him and he was just immersed in the person next to him.
Lamine caught a glimpse of the clock beneath the heart monitor, still ranting about one of the security guards, and his face changed drastically. He stood up quickly, probably because he had miscalculated his timing.
“Shit,” he muttered under his breath, then glanced at him. “Sorry. I have training. Football. Tuesdays and Thursdays. I almost forgot.”
The other blinked, startled at how quickly the boy who filled the room could empty it. Pau was already starting to get used to his presence.
Lamine took a few steps toward the door, then paused again.
“I’ll come back,” he stated and Pau believed him.
Then he was gone.
I didn’t even tell you my name.
The silence returned slowly as Pau looked back at The Little Prince. He pressed two fingers gently to his wrist and felt his pulse humming like footsteps down countless stairs.
Fast/Faster/Almost normal again.
And later that day he checked every vending machine on his floor for the ‘secret food stash’.
Lamine was right, it was there.
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Pau doesn’t really remember when he had his first attack. He only remembers the pain. It wasn’t in the cinematic way people tend to describe it. It just took the air out of him and made it clear it will return. The doctors had told him the name of his condition when he was old enough to pretend he understood or remember: Dilated Cardiomyopathy, and this meant that his heart was too weak to do what hearts are supposed to do. In other words, it didn’t pump blood like a normal one. It did so like a wounded bird struggling to flap its wings. It could not be trusted, not with running, not with shouting, nor with long laughter or deep crying.
He could live, they said, but not for long. Without a transplant, there would be no future past his twenties, maybe less. It wasn’t immediate, but it was always there, waiting, like an expiration date pressed under his ribs.
This type of news can change a whole family.
His father filled his time with work, meetings, burying himself in international projects as if that might save him from the guilt of having a son with a dysfunction heart. His mother did the opposite. She dissolved into the hospital walls around him. She made his room a home, or at least tried to. There were always fresh flowers, though they wilted quickly under the artificial light. There were posters from Pau’s favorite shows, taped carefully to the wall, and stacks of children’s books lining on the floor, though Pau was too old for some. Her clothes lived in a zipped-up bag behind the visitor’s chair. She never used the fold-out cot, just dozed in that same place with a blanket tucked around her legs and one hand resting lightly on the bedrail. She knew the names of every nurse, the routines of every shift, the sound of every alarm. She could recite the medication chart and could sense, even with her eyes closed, when a monitor’s rhythm changed.
Pau didn’t know what her life outside the hospital had once looked like. There were photos of her speaking in microphones in stuffy studios in their family photobooks. She’d told him she used to tell stories for little kids, sad that now she had to check ECGs for her own son.
Thus, the hospital became Pau’s whole world. He woke up every day to the sound of wheels and people whispering around him. Sometimes he dreamt of blue skies and playgrounds, other times he dreamt of running, fast and free, until he woke up gasping and sweating, reminded again that his body did not belong to that life.
The nurses liked him. They called him sweet, a kind patient. They gave him extra snacks and drew different pets on his meal trays. The doctors admired his calm, his maturity, like a fragile miracle they were responsible for. Pau didn’t hate it. Hate required energy and wanting more from his life was dangerous. He had learned to exist gently so his heart wouldn’t punish him too hard.
Until a boy with chocolate skin, short curls and summer in his laugh, made him want to stay longer than fate allowed.
ﮩ٨ـﮩﮩ٨ـ♡ﮩ٨ـﮩﮩ٨ـ
The next time Lamine showed up was three days later. He came in without knocking and Pau barely had time to look up before the door swung open, being flashed with the same cheerfulness as last time. Clearly, whatever day they covered “respecting privacy” in ethics class, Lamine’s parents had been absent.
The slim boy was wearing a football jersey, Barcelona’s. There was a streak of dried mud on one sleeve and a bandaid on one knee. His socks didn’t match again. Red and blue. This must’ve been the reason for the mismatched colors last time. Barcelona’s colors. Cubarsí liked that club too.
Lamine stood at the foot of Pau’s bed and started waving his arms like he was performing a chaotic interpretive dance.
“Hey,” he said, slowly and with emphasis, the same way people do when they are talking to a foreign tourist. “My name is… Lamine Yamal.” He pointed to himself and then at Pau. “You are… Cu… Barsi.”
Pau frowned. He had no idea what this kid was doing.
Lamine kept going, his hands still flailing in strange, clumsy movements. “I don’t know how a heart condition can make you unable to speak…You must have one since my dad looks over you” he said, “but I told my mom to teach me sign language. Give me a week, and we’ll be able to communicate. For real.”
Pau just stared at him for a moment. Then, unexpectedly, uncontrollably, he burst out laughing. His doctor’s son probably didn’t know but it was a rare one, this kind of laugh.
What the hell?
It made his stomach tense, his eyes water and his heart twinge and the monitor next to him registered a little faster.
It felt worth it.
Lamine froze, blinking in surprise. Then he laughed too, almost out of shock. “Oh my god. You can react.”
“Of course I can,” Pau replied, wiping his eyes. The other boy must’ve really thought he was mute. “I just can’t overdo it. And you made me do that. Be thankful my mom’s not here, she’d probably blame you for the monitor going off.”
Lamine looked at the machine, then back at him with a grin. "So, you were messing with me last time?”
“Not messing. I was being selective.”
“I respect that,” He took the visitor’s chair like it was his by default. “Still gonna learn sign language, though. Could come in handy. And it looks cool.”
It looked weird and it was hilarious. But ‘Cu…Barsi’ kept that thought to himself.
For a while, they didn’t speak. Lamine hummed something under his breath, tapping his foot against the floor, one of the many habits of his, while Pau returned to his homeworks. Even a chronic illness couldn’t save him from math and equations. A teacher came twice a week to evaluate him and his mother called it the most important event of the day. Their uneventful days.
Every now and then, the Barcelona trainee would say something random. Some funny, unfiltered thoughts without a sense of cohesion. Something about how one of his teammates carried a stone everywhere with him. He had even named it. Charlie. Or how eating too many bananas might make your blood turn yellow and clean your teeth.
Pau didn’t always respond. He did what he was the best at, he listened. After a ridiculous story about Lamine’s coach sleeping during their drills, Pau glanced up, just once, and said, “Dischead.” He’d heard his mother use that word.
Lamine paused, confused and then started laughing so loudly the nurse poked her head in, suspicious. They both stood still, innocently, until she disappeared again.
“Do you ever get bored here?” He asked before leaving.
“What do you think?”
Lamine smiled. It was bitter one.
🕰♡🕰
Having a friend was nice. Being in Lamine’s company was nicer. Pau had never used that word before to describe anything in his life. His vocabulary was filled with words like stable, normal, low, critical, but never nice. That was Lamine’s effect.
“Don’t you have other things to do? You come to see me even when you are tired from training.”
“We are friends, Cubarsi. Of course I’d come to see you.”
“We are?”
“Yes. We are. Not just friends. Best friends.
Time still passed in sour pills and oxygen checks, but it wasn’t only about that anymore. His condition had improved. He didn’t need constant monitoring now. The treatment was finally showing the results his doctor had always spoken of with optimism. A little progress, a little illusion of freedom to make Pau feel like maybe he could live like other kids his age.
It was enough to make his mother cry happy tears and enough for his father to pay a visit. Pau still needed the transplant though. That hadn’t changed. The worst-case scenario hadn’t vanished, it stepped back, waiting for its ugly turn. Pau no longer thought about that.
He thought about Lamine.
When would he show up? Would he come today? What would he bring? Would he stay long?
They met almost every day and it still didn’t feel like it was enough. Lamine would bring a ball and kick it around the garden while Pau sat nearby, a book opened on his lap, partly paying attention to it, partly watching the blur of his friend weaving between trees.
Other days, they sprawled on the fluffy carpet of his hospital room and got lost playing Nintendo games. Pau had asked his mother to buy him one after Lamine spent three days bragging about his Mario Cart records.
“Do you really enjoy this? Being here with me?”
“Do you think I’d run to come here if I didn’t?”
Sometimes they just wandered around the hospital, playing hide and seek, turning the corridors into their secret terrain.
“Is it because you feel bad for me?”
“Is that what you think of me?”
“No.”
“Good.”
Even his mother noticed the change. She started staying home a little longer in the mornings, or left earlier in the afternoons. At first, she hesitated, lingered in the doorway, asking if he’d be okay, if he’d need anything. But Pau would just nod once, eyes already drifting back to the comic Lamine had left behind or the vending machine chocolate bar he’d gotten for his friend.
Pau’s mother would also ask questions about their friendship, light ones, carefully expressing her curiosity, and when Pau answered without annoyance or resistance, she seemed to let go of something that had always bothered her.
She started smiling more (again Lamine’s effect, it was contagious), she said he was a good friend, and that she had to thank his father for helping Pau with both his illness and the loneliness that came with it.
It was incredible the way one boy could come into their lives and just rearrange everything in a better composition, allowing more light to come in and brighten their dull routines.
“Will you be able to play football with me some day?”
“I achieved five thousand steps for the first time in my life this week, Lamine. Let’s not go there.”
“But I think you’d be great at it. If your heart was okay.”
“We wouldn’t have met then.”
“Maybe…Or maybe we would’ve met on the pitch. As rivals or teammates ... Teammates fit us more.”
And then three years passed just like that. Lamine kept coming, Pau kept waiting for him. Sometimes there were gaps, days when Lamine couldn’t make it. School, holidays, football tournaments, training camps, his life outside the hospital was pretty busy for a 13 years old. But Lamine was on his way to become someone great, so that was okay.
They called him a young phenomenon, a future star. It didn’t take a lot of ball knowledge to understand that he was that good. Lamine would record himself playing and then show it to Pau, explaining every rule and strategy and the latter would envy the ones who got to play with him.
And even during the days Lamine was away, his absence didn’t erase what was left of his presence in every corner of Pau’s room. Pau had grown so used to the latter that when he wasn’t there, the space he left behind pulsed like a missing heartbeat. Ironic, Pau missed quite a lot of heartbeats.
Then, as days went by and Pau’s condition didn’t worsen, another piece of good news arrived.
On the morning of his fourteenth birthday, Pau was allowed to go home.
His heart had stabilized enough for the doctors to trust him outside the hospital. He still had to return weekly for check-ups and conversations with those who used terms that were too hard to understand without a google search, but it was a new beginning, small steps towards having a normal youth.
The world felt a little more exhilarating as he stepped out of the hospital with a discharge note in one hand and Lamine’s latest doodle folded in the other. And he found himself smiling at the memory of his best friend crying the other night, after wishing him a happy birthday and finding out he could leave this place.
That idiot.
He had shown up just before midnight when Pau was already asleep, slightly out of breath like he’d run to make it in time. His cheeks were flushed pink from the cold outside and his eyes sparkled enthusiasm. Pau blinked up at him, vision blurry.
“Come on,” Lamine whispered, tugging gently at his wrist. “Get up.”
“What?” He mumbled, a little surprised.“It’s late.”
“Exactly. It’s about to be your birthday. You can’t sleep through it.”
Still asleep and completely unconvinced, Pau let himself be pulled out of bed. He didn’t even put on his slippers, just shoved his feet into hospital-issue socks as Lamine guided him down the hallway, holding his hand.
They took the stairs two floors up, the concrete cold from the winter air that entered through poorly sealed windows. The terrace door was supposed to be locked, but Lamine had found a way in anyway. Perks of being the son of someone influential.
The night air hit Pau’s skin immediately, his hospital shirt fluttered in the breeze and the back of his neck prickled, but it wasn’t uncomfortable. He stood like that for a moment, soaking it in.
“Happy birthday, Cubarsi,” Lamine said softly, his face tilted up to the sky. It was already midnight.
There weren’t many stars, the city drowned most of them but a few glimmered faintly above the orange glow of rooftops and antenna towers, and Lamine looked at them excitedly. His shoulders were hunched, his hands buried in the pockets of his jacket, but his eyes were open wide, reflecting the light and the missing stars.
Then he started talking like he always did. The topic drifted from the path of constellations he couldn’t name, to a theory that mermaids existed and they sang every night to honor the moon, to how he wished people grew taller on their birthdays like in cartoons. Pau didn’t comment. He barely heard most of it. He just watched Lamine speak, focused on the shapes his mouth made, the way his breath formed clouds in the cold, the way his hands occasionally moved and his voice rose when he felt satisfied with his stories.
It was strange. Good, but strange. It felt like his body had unlocked a feeling he would cherish silently for too long. He might’ve also felt grateful for being born.
Then he cut through the other’s rambling, saying, “You know I get discharged tomorrow.” Just because it felt like it was the right moment to do so.
And Lamine stopped in the middle of his sentence, blinking. “Wait, what?” He said, turning so fast, he nearly slipped on the damp floor.
Pau nodded. Without hesitation, Lamine threw his arms around him in a hug that could’ve knocked the wind out of someone healthier.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he said, squeezing tightly. “I’m so happy for you.”
“Lamine, you’re killing me,” Pau wheezed. “Too tight.”
“Oh. Shit. Sorry.” He stepped back, flustered, still holding his shoulders,“But, that’s good, right? It means you’re… like, totally fine now?”
Pau shook his head slowly. “It means I have more control over it. That’s all. It’s not gone.”
“When will it be gone?” There was so much hope in his voice that the birthday boy almost didn’t want to answer.
“It won’t,” He had always hated this part. The part where he had to see others accept the truth he had long come to terms with. “Not unless I get someone else’s heart.”
“Oh,” his friend muttered, voice dropping like the temperature around them. “That’s… hard, right?”
“Yeah.”
“And if that doesn’t happen?”
The silence that fell made Pau look away from him, down at the dark outlines of parked ambulances below. “Then I have until I’m twenty. Maybe.”
Maybe.
It was never his intention to hurt Lamine but tears welled in the latter’s eyes, fast and clumsy, and the next thing Pau knew, he was crying like a little kid does, ugly and loud, gasping between words, his hands wiping furiously at his eyes as more tears kept coming.
Pau just stared at him in awe.“Lamine,” he whispered, voice wavering, a little taken back, a little touched. “God. You’re such a baby.”
Was it cruel that his best friend was crying and he found himself smiling?
“You can’t just say that! Lamine sobbed, fingers still on his cheeks. “You can’t just tell me you might die and expect me to be chill about it!”
“Why not?”
“Because I want to grow old with you, Cubarsí, that’s why!”
Pau blinked, stunned would be an understatement. And then, incredibly, he just laughed. Louder than Lamine’s crying. If the security guard had missed the latter's outburst, he had definitely heard Pau’s by now.
“Are you proposing to me?”
“What…no! I mean, whatever!” Lamine’s face turned red as he buried it in his hands.
“You’re proposing to another guy,” Pau teased, still smiling. This was better than seeing his friend sad. “Brave.”
“Shut up. You’re mean.”
“You’re embarrassing.”
Lamine groaned. “This is not how I wanted this to go.”
Pau reached out, the grin never leaving his face, and gently pulled him into another hug, softer this time, warmer. “Come here, you crybaby.”
Lamine hugged him back. His face was still damp and his breath shaky, and they just stood there, small against the wide sky, as the night turned colder and quieter around them.
Birthdays had always felt pointless to Pau. The nurses always tried to make it special for him, his mother also tried her best, but he could sense the unspoken truth hiding in the celebration, a reminder that another year had passed and he was a candle closer to the inevitable. The math of it had never felt like progress, it wasn’t supposed to anyway, even for the healthy ones.
“We have six years left.” He eventually said in an afterthought. A thrilling realization hitting him.
Lamine’s arms tightened around his frame.
“We have an eternity.” He whispered, voice muffled from the tears.
Perhaps time really bends for the ones who believe more.
ﮩ٨ـﮩﮩ٨ـ♡ﮩ٨ـﮩﮩ٨ـ
The day Pau got the green light from his doctor to attend high school, a real high school, with classrooms and lockers and other breathing, unpredictable teenagers, he tried not to cry. For the first time in his life, a door had opened and it didn’t lead to a scan room or an operating table. It led to something ordinary and that made it extraordinary.
He texted Lamine two words: I’m in.
Twenty minutes later, they were screaming into a karaoke mic, sweating under disco lights in a corner booth that reeked of mustard and overheated fries. They stayed until the sky turned black and their parents started spam calling. Neither of them answered. Lamine’s voice eventually cracking and Pau laughed so hard he had to sit down. They picked songs they had never heard before and sang lyrics they guessed wrong. They were were celebrating that night.
They had spent the last year in a similar rhythm, texting each other through Pau’s study breaks, playing games online, syncing their schedules around Pau’s check-ups and Lamine’s football training. Every time Pau came back to the hospital for monitoring, Lamine would be there, leaning against the wall with a drink in each hand, smiling. Each time growing an inch taller.
“Can you believe we went from hospital hang outs to this? You have no idea how glad I am. Cubarsi, you were made to live life at the fullest.”
“Quite a statement there... But I’m glad too.”
When Lamine was done with school, they’d meet, mostly at the park outside Pau’s building, or in the alley behind the football grounds. Sometimes they did nothing at all. They sat next to each other, playing music, counting down until the next hang out.
Their days were stitched together by those ‘later plans’ and maybe, hopefully, Pau had started to await for them as a promise that perhaps time wasn’t done with him yet.
One summer afternoon, he sat in the bleachers and watched Lamine play. It took him a bit by surprise to see his friend play so seriously, different from how he used to joke around in the hospital, kicking a ball between chairs. Lamine moved like he was the only one who belonged on that field. Every sprint and every first touch of the ball had a poetry attached to it, written with his body, a language only he knew how to speak, one that Pau could never hope to learn.
But he swears he’d never been happier. Just sitting there, sun on his face, his heart allowing him to make it through the whole game without discomfort, eyes fixed on the colorful jerseys and his friend stressing opponents, was enough to make the chambers of his heart soften up.
It was beautiful, witnessing someone you cherish doing what they love, and knowing you were allowed to be there for that.
Pau was always careful. He took his medication with precision, rested more than he wanted to, drank water in measured cups, did his cardio exercises exactly as programmed, because he refused to give this up. This new routine of being outside the hospital, being beside Lamine, being part of the life he used to only get a glimpse of through the other’s storytellings. He wanted to stay in it, in this, as long as he could. He wanted to cheat some more because it was the only happiness he knew.
They walked side by side afterward, slowly, with Lamine’s duffel bag slung across his shoulder and the taste of sports drink lingering in their mouths. Pau’s mother was waiting at the station, eyes ready to scan for signs of fatigue he might’ve hidden.
Even now, with months of good news behind them, she still walked around with an emergency plan tucked in her purse.
Yet, she hadn’t said no when Pau had asked if he could go see Lamine play. She liked him too much. They all did. Even his father, who barely showed up, had smiled at the mention of the boy who had colored his son’s grey hospital days.
“Was I good?” Lamine asked, wiping sweat from his forehead, squinting into the sinking sun.
“The best,” Pau said, bumping their shoulders lightly.
The catalan grinned. “I’m gonna make every girl fall for me when high school starts.”
Pau rolled his eyes. “Of course you will.”
It started in less than a month. A new chapter was waiting for them.
“I mean, look at me.” He struck a pose, flexing dramatically. “Speed. Charm. Jawline.”
Lamine had a point. He had grown a lot the last couple of years. The intense training added more to it, making him look more mature. He also cried less now. But he was still cute, especially when he acted smug.
“Ew, you’re too full of yourself.”
“I’m the total package.”
“You’re gonna trip on your own ego and take three girls down with you.”
“That’s still three more than you.”
“Fair.”
They both laughed and Pau’s smile lingered longer because Lamine turned, eyes meeting his, all lit up with a joy that made Pau’s chest do things no ECG could explain.
His friend didn’t look away.
The summer breeze that blew between their figures, brought the faint smell of marigolds and in the hush of that golden hour, they let the silence speak for them, without yet knowing how much the next turn in their story would ask for everything to change.