Chapter 75: The Hoodie Comes Off

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 75: The Hoodie Comes Off

The heat wave hit hard enough that even Thessaly admitted defeat, showing up at the apartment with a cooler of drinks and a flat announcement that training was cancelled in favor of the community pool, no negotiation accepted.

"You're all going to overheat and become considerably less useful to me if I don't intervene," she said, which was, everyone agreed, about as close to affection as she generally allowed herself in public.

The pool was crowded but manageable, mostly families and a handful of kids from school scattered across the deck, and Reeve had barely gotten his shirt off before he was already complaining about the water temperature, the kind of complaint that came from someone who intended to swim anyway.

Cole peeled off his hoodie last, mostly out of habit rather than modesty, and the resulting silence from his immediate circle lasted just long enough to be noticeable.

"Okay," Marek said slowly, staring. "Nobody warned me about that."

"About what?"

"That. All of that." Marek gestured vaguely at Cole's entire torso. "You wear a hoodie every single day. Every day. I assumed there was a reason. I did not assume the reason was hiding this."

"I don't hide anything. I just like hoodies."

"You've been quietly walking around built like that this whole time and letting everyone assume you're some skinny kid who forgets to eat?"

"People assume what they want to assume. Not really my problem to correct."

Reeve, already waist-deep in the pool, called over with real betrayal in his voice. "I've seen you shirtless before. Why does it look different right now?"

"It doesn't look different."

"It looks considerably more intentional than I remember."

"Training does that, apparently," Cole said, glancing down at himself with the mild, unbothered curiosity of someone who genuinely hadn't spent much time thinking about it. "Verdict's not exactly a gym membership, but fighting constructs three times a week for months does something, I guess."

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"I want that," Reeve announced, swimming closer, inspecting Cole's arms like they were a museum exhibit. "Not the whole Undefined thing. Just the arms. Can you just, like, sell me the arms."

"Not how it works."

"Disappointing. I've earned considerably more muscle definition than this, and yet somehow you skip the gym entirely and end up looking like a recruitment poster."

"I contain multitudes. Apparently some of them are visible now."

Marek, still recovering, shook his head slowly. "Category Zero. Undefeated in every fight I've ever seen. And the whole time, secretly ripped underneath four layers of hoodie. This is genuinely unfair to the rest of us."

Vesper, sitting at the pool's edge with her feet in the water, had gone conspicuously quiet, and when Cole glanced over, caught her very deliberately not staring, which was, in its own way, considerably more obvious than staring would have been.

"You okay?" he asked, settling beside her.

"Fine."

"You're doing the thing."

"I'm not doing a thing."

"You're doing the exact thing Mia caught you doing at school. Different context, same face." Cole grinned, unable to resist the small, petty satisfaction of finally getting to return the favor properly. "It's fine. I'm allowed to be surprising sometimes."

"I'm not surprised."

"You're extremely surprised. It's very flattering, honestly."

Vesper splashed him, which he took as confirmation rather than protest, and the two of them settled into the easy quiet that had become their default lately, sunlight warm on the water, the whole afternoon stretching out ordinary and unhurried in a way that felt, after everything, like a genuine gift rather than a pause between crises.

Mia found them an hour later, sunburned across her nose and thoroughly unbothered by it, dropping onto the pool deck beside Cole with the exhaustion of someone who'd spent the entire afternoon in the water on principle.

"Reeve's still talking about your arms," she said, deadpan. "It's been forty minutes. I think he's having a small identity crisis about how oblivious he's been."

"Not my fault he wasn't paying attention."

"You wear four layers in July, Cole. Everyone assumed you had some tragic backstory about it, not abs."

"I contain multitudes."

"You contain a truly unreasonable amount of multitudes, apparently." Mia flopped back onto the warm concrete, shielding her eyes against the sun. "This is nice, though. Just — this. No mark, no Choir, no ancient conspiracies. Just a pool and Reeve embarrassing himself about your body in front of witnesses."

"Yeah," Cole agreed, feeling the sun warm against his skin, Vesper's shoulder brushing his, the whole afternoon settling into something he wanted to hold onto a while longer before the world remembered it had other plans for all of them. "It really is."

Elena waved from across the pool, floating on her back with an expression of pure, uncomplicated contentment that hadn't been available to her in four years, and for one long, golden afternoon, the whole found family simply existed together, ordinary and unbothered, exactly the way Cole had once promised himself, months ago, that they deserved more often than the world usually allowed.

[End of Chapter 75]