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Invariably, the person you find yourself drawn to ends up choosing someone else. You get filed away—a good friend, a shoulder to lean on, just someone who's always around.
Without even noticing, your go-to lines become: What are you waiting for? You'll never know if you don't try. And then, worse: Want to practice? Just pretend I'm them.
The one person who was ever meant for you never shows up. That's what you believe. And every time that thought hits, it pulls you under.
Your contact list has eleven names.
Four are family. Two are coworkers you've never spoken to outside of work emails. One is your dentist. Three others—you have to think before you can place them. Fewer people, fewer complications. Complications have always felt like something that happens to other people—the loud ones, the ones who cry in public, the ones who call their friends at midnight. You are steady. Manageable. Easy.
And then there's Wanda Maximoff.
She comes to the same monthly knitting circle—late, always, dressed like she imagined the evening differently than it turned out. Auburn hair, always slightly undone, catching the light when she moves. She argues passionately about projects she hasn't finished yet. She laughs at her own jokes before she finishes telling them. People turn toward her the way plants turn toward light. Warmth just comes off her naturally.
Between the two of you, maybe forty sentences total. You've counted.
Wanting and doing have always felt like two separate countries, and you've never learned to cross the border.
In October, Wanda's partner of two years leaves her.
She texts you on a Tuesday night—hey are you up—no question mark, like she already knows the answer.
You are always up. She calls and talks for an hour without stopping: the whole story, every detail, the last conversation replayed almost word for word. She is the kind of person who needs to say a thing out loud before she can believe it happened. When she finally goes quiet, she says, "I don't know why I called you. I just knew you'd pick up."
"I'm glad you did," you say.
Both things are true. The second one is easier to say.
She heals out loud.
By November she is rage-texting you at ten at night. December, she's dragging you to a terrible holiday movie and crying at the happy ending anyway, laughing at herself between tears. By January she's making plans again—small ones, tentative, like testing weight on a healing bone.
Come February, the worst of it has passed. Coffee on Saturdays, then dinner, then walks with no destination—her talking the whole time, you listening and watching the way streetlights catch in her hair when she turns to make a point. A few weeks of this, and it starts to feel like a rhythm.
One evening she stops in the middle of a bridge, leans on the railing, and looks down at the water. The light off the river catches in her hair, turns it almost copper.
"I want to try again," she says. "With someone. But I feel like I forgot how."
You wait.
"Can we practice?" She turns to look at you, eyes completely serious. "Like—dates. Getting close to someone. You're the safest person I know."
The word safest settles in your chest like something heavy and warm at the same time.
"Sure," you say.
So you practice.
Wanda throws herself into it the way she throws herself into everything—completely. She shows up at your door with flowers once—reservations already made, already laughing before you open it, mid-explanation of the joke. Good morning texts go from twice a week to every day, like something she's decided to do for the rest of her life. At a late-night diner she sits across from you for three hours and talks about her childhood, her fears, the specific way grief lives in the body. She wants to know yours too.
This is the part where you should match her.
When she asks what you're thinking, you say nothing much. When she asks if you're okay, you say always. One door stays closed, and she—busy with the warmth of her own opening up—learns, after a while, to stop checking it.
She gives you everything. You give her what you can reach.
In April, she's half-watching a show from her end of the couch, legs folded under her, half-watching you.
"You know what's weird about you?"
You raise an eyebrow.
"You're always okay." She tilts her head. "Like—I pour everything out and you just hold it. You never spill."
"Spilling seems like a lot of work," you say.
"I'm serious." A beat. "You never need anything from me."
"You've got enough going on."
She looks at you a moment longer than usual. Then she smiles—soft, a little unreadable—and turns back to the TV.
Walking home that night, you think about what she said. You file it under nothing important.
You keep going.
May is warm and unhurried.
The Saturdays stretch longer. One afternoon she falls asleep on your shoulder mid-movie, and you sit very still, watching the credits roll, not wanting to be the reason it ends. Another evening she reaches over and tucks a strand of hair behind your ear, just because it was there. The moment passes without a word.
Then one night she kisses you.
Slowly, the way you do something you've been thinking about for a while. You don't pull back. When it ends, she rests her forehead against yours, and you stay like that, close enough to feel her breathe. Her nose brushes yours. Neither of you says anything.
She starts coming to your apartment after that. You have never shown this place to anyone, and she has nothing to measure it against—no sense of how rarely this door opens at all. She just takes off her shoes at the entrance and makes herself at home, easy and certain, and you let her, and it feels like something you could get used to.
You file that under nothing important too.
That's what you tell yourself.
By June, a name starts appearing in her texts.
Vision said the funniest thing today. Then: went to that ramen place with Vision, have you tried it? Then just: Vision.
He texted her first, she mentioned once, like it was nothing. Like that's just what people do.
She talks about Vision the way she talks about everything she loves—in full, vivid sentences, like she's already narrating a film she's fallen for. You listen, say the right things, keep showing up—Saturdays, dinners, the long walks.
Presence feels like enough. Eventually, you think, she'll see what's already there.
She sees something. Just not that.
One evening, somewhere between the second drink and the walk home, it comes out before you can stop it.
"You've been talking about Vision a lot lately."
She looks at you. Something shifts in her expression—not quite a frown, just attention, suddenly focused.
"Yeah?" A pause. "Does that bother you?"
The honest answer is right there. You step around it.
"Is this practice?" The words land before you can pull them back. "All of it—the dates, the kiss, the sex. Is that what we agreed on?"
The word sits there between you for a moment.
"Right," she says. Quiet. "Practice."
She doesn't bring it up again. Neither do you.
But something has been named. She knows where the door is now.
July is bright and relentless, the kind of weather that has no interest in how you feel.
Wanda still texts. Still shows up. But something in the rhythm has shifted—a half-beat off, like a song you know well, played slightly too fast. You can't point to anything specific. When you try, it slips.
You tell yourself it's nothing.
It doesn't quite take.
August arrives the way it always does—sudden and total, the heat sitting on everything like a held breath. You have the fan running and the curtains half-drawn when she shows up, a reusable bag over one shoulder, already mid-sentence about something that happened on the train.
She picks the movie. She always picks the movie. You order in, eat on the floor because the table is covered in books you keep meaning to shelve, and somewhere in the second act she pulls her knees to her chest and goes quiet in a way that has nothing to do with the film.
"I need to tell you something."
The screen keeps going. Someone on it is laughing.
She and Vision. A few weeks now. She'd wanted to find the right moment. Her voice is careful, the way you handle something you know might break.
"You brought me back," she says. "I couldn't have gotten here without you." A beat. "You know that, right? You're everything to me."
"I'm really glad," you say.
One second. Your throat tightens.
Then it passes. Steady. Easy. The voice of someone who is always okay.
She hugs you at the door, long and tight, her chin hooked over your shoulder. Then she's gone, and the sound of the latch is very small in the quiet.
The movie is still playing.
You go back to the floor. Settle into the space she left. The takeout containers are still there, her half-finished drink beside yours. Outside, the heat presses against the windows like it has nowhere else to be. The fan turns. The people on the screen keep laughing at something you've already forgotten.
You don't turn it off.
Days after, you open your contacts.
Eleven names.
You scroll through slowly. How many of them know what you look like when something actually hurts? How many would call you at midnight?
The number is smaller than eleven.
And then—slowly, the way light comes up in a room—you start to see it.
Wanda came to you because you felt safe. You held your hands open and asked for nothing back. She poured herself into that space and you held all of it, and it was true—the flowers, the diner, the good morning texts—every bit of it. She just told the story the way she needed it to go.
And you let her. Every I'm fine, every need you swallowed before it could reach the surface—that was you, making room. Shaping yourself into something easy to leave.
She told you that you were everything to her, and she meant it.
She just meant it the way you mean it when you thank someone for holding the door.
You find her name and press delete. It takes about two seconds.
Ten names. A rounder number anyway.
You close the contacts screen.
Outside, summer hasn't loosened its grip. Somewhere out there, Wanda Maximoff is happy. You hold onto that, because it's real and it matters and you want it to be enough.
The rest is real too.
No matter where you stand, no matter who turns toward you with that much warmth—when it comes time to choose, you are the last name that surfaces. The steady one. The safe one who holds the door.
The one who lets go.
You.