The door clicked shut, and Toji sat there in the soft hum of his laptop fan, staring at nothing. His fingers rested against the keys, motionless, like the words he was supposed to type had evaporated somewhere between his heartbeat and the silence Enid left behind.
Enid.
He didn't mean to think about her. Not like this. Not with this strange warmth curling around his ribs, this steady feeling he couldn't quite name. It wasn't that she made him feel light. She made him feel… unguarded. Like he could breathe without checking the corners for ghosts.
She reminded him of his mother in odd, inconvenient ways. Not in appearance, not in the loud sweaters or glittering happiness she wore like armor, but in the softness beneath it. That stubborn, quiet kind of kindness that he used to think only existed in old memories. The kind that reached you without meaning to, the kind that slipped past defenses you didn't even know you still had.
His mother had been like that. Gentle to the bone, but unbreakable in all the places life tried to snap. She held chaos with one hand and hope with the other, keeping the balance steady even when the world tilted too far. He remembered how her voice could quiet storms. How her presence made a room feel safer just by existing in it.
Enid carried the same light, even if hers flickered in a rainbow instead of gold.
And he hated the way that realization softened him.
He leaned back in his chair, exhaling slowly. Wednesday had never made him feel like this. Being with her felt like walking through a forest in winter: sharp, silent, beautiful, but cold. She challenged him, fascinated him, even respected him in her own distant, meticulous way. But she never made him feel like he could be anything other than what he already was.
With Wednesday, he had to be careful. Controlled. Precision over instinct. Logic over feeling. She offered him admiration, but not warmth. Interest, but not ease.
Enid… she scrambled all of that.
She made him feel borderless. Possible. Like there were versions of him he hadn't even discovered yet. And the worst part? She didn't even try. She didn't force it. She didn't ask him to perform or prove or sharpen himself into something impressive.
She just existed, bright and earnest, and somehow that made everything inside him feel less heavy.
He closed the laptop. For once, the company could survive without him breathing down its neck.
He rested his elbows on his knees, palms pressed together, staring at the floor as if the wood might confess something he didn't want to admit aloud.
He shouldn't compare them. He knew that. But the contrast was there, undeniable and unsettling.
Wednesday was a blade. Precise. Brilliant. Icy. A future made of calculated steps.
Enid was sunlight sneaking through a cracked window. Messy. Warm. Soft in all the wrong places and somehow right in every single one.
He didn't know what that meant yet. Didn't know what he was supposed to do with the way his chest tightened when she smiled, or the way the room felt emptier the second she walked out.
But sitting there in the dim glow of his computer, he couldn't pretend he didn't feel it.
He couldn't pretend he didn't want more.
Toji dragged a hand through his hair and let out a slow breath. All that thinking, all that quiet, and the conclusion wasn't a fragile little dilemma.
He wasn't a boy.
He wasn't standing at some emotional fork in the road, wringing his hands over which way his heart would flutter hardest. He wasn't built for that kind of romantic nonsense, and he sure as hell wasn't going to start pretending now.
He wouldn't choose.
Because choosing was for people who needed their lives to fit neatly into one box at a time.
He wasn't neat. He wasn't simple. He was a storm with legs.
Wednesday's edge pulled at him. Enid's warmth steadied him. One made him sharper, the other made him real. And both called to him in different ways, neither canceling the other out. Opposites, sure. But opposites didn't negate. They completed.
And Toji had never been the type to cut off a piece of himself just to make the world more comfortable.
They each touched a different part of him. Wednesday's mind. Enid's heart. One challenged him, the other softened the ground he stood on. One mirrored the calculation in his bones. The other echoed the humanity he kept buried.
It wasn't a triangle. It wasn't even a conflict.
It was truth.
A man could hold more than one truth at a time. A man could want more than one thing. A man could walk forward without asking permission for the shape of his desires.
He leaned back in the chair and let the room settle around him, warm and dim, quiet except for the faint hum of tech and the steady beat in his chest.
He didn't have to choose.
He would take the paths that opened. He would follow whatever pulled him. If both did, then both did. If the world didn't like that, the world could choke on it.
His life wasn't a storybook with a single ending.
His life was a knife with two edges, and he'd long learned how to hold blades without bleeding.
He stood, stretching the stiffness from his shoulders, a faint, knowing smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth.
Both.
Always both.
And the future could deal with him as he was.