meropeeonmee

[meropeeonmee]

CHAPTER 2: LITTLE TRAITOR

Description: Hugo’s Halftime Betrayal (again) . . .

Authors note: I know I said I was posting THE LEAK chapter soon… but it’s been two days and I still haven’t posted anything LMAO. Forgive me, I’ve just been busy. I am posting it soon, don’t worry! But for now, here’s more of Hugo and Joe’s moment.

LITTLE TRAITOR 01

MASTERLIST

The Bengals win, and Joe’s shoulders drop like gravity just kicked back in. He still has his pads on when Hugo runs into the locker room with a staffer trailing behind him and red juice on his cheeks. Hugo’s three and small for his age, with wide eyes, a juice box in one hand and a very limp KC Wolf plush in the other. He’s also not wearing shoes. Or socks. He made a scene earlier about not liking “the bumpy ones.”

Joe picks him up mid-run, kisses his forehead, and says, “You got the mascot again?” and Hugo nods very hard. “KC Wolf was sad in the backpack, I think he needed out,” he says, nose crinkling like this is obvious. Joe decides not to fight it today. Not after that fourth quarter.

The door to the press room swings open, and the sound of conversation halts for just a beat. Then comes the avalanche—click, click, click, a sudden storm of camera shutters firing off like applause. Reporters jostle in their seats, phones rise in unison, flashes bloom across the room. They’re not just capturing a quarterback fresh off the field—they’re capturing this: Joe Burrow, sweat-streaked and sock-footed, walking in with his son in one arm and a game ball still tucked in the other.

Hugo squints at the lights but holds his ground, clutching a juice box like it’s his own little trophy. Joe keeps his head low, a smirk twitching at the corner of his mouth. A few reporters call out questions, but he doesn’t answer yet—just nods toward the moderator and guides Hugo toward the table.

They take their seats together, Hugo climbing into the chair beside him like he owns it. Joe leans back, exhaling, and sets the ball on the table between them. His cleats are gone—left in the locker room—and he’s just in socks now, damp and slightly stained with Gatorade and locker room grime. Hugo notices instantly. His face changes with comic speed, eyebrows plunging, lips pressed into a line.

“Daddy,” he says, voice stern and public-ready, full of tiny authority, “Mama said you’re not s’posed to get your socks dirty. No socks on the ground. No socks at the table. No socks in the press.”

The entire front row laughs, cameras still clicking. Joe glances sideways at him, caught, then drops his head into his hand with a smile.

“Guess I’m in trouble,” he mutters into the mic.

Joe blinks. “In the press?”

Hugo nods. “That’s the rules. Mama said.”

“She also said don’t bring juice to interviews,” Joe mutters, glancing at the red ring forming on the tablecloth where Hugo parked his box. Hugo ignores him and leans dramatically on the table like he’s about to start the interview himself.

Everything goes smoothly for the first five minutes. Joe fields questions about red zone coverage and execution under pressure, his voice calm, thoughtful. He praises the O-line without hesitation—“they made the pocket feel like home today”—and flashes a grateful smile toward the reporters scribbling down his words.

Beside him, Hugo swings his feet under the table, content as can be. He’s found exactly two gummy bears in the pocket of his tiny jeans—slightly melted, lint-covered, but precious. He eats them slowly, carefully, like they’re the last two gummy bears on Earth. He chews with quiet focus, eyes on his dad like he’s watching a movie.

Then—burp.

It’s loud, heroic, and sails directly into the mic.

A soft wave of laughter moves through the room. Joe turns to him, eyebrows raised. Hugo blinks, then puts a hand on his chest and says earnestly, “Oops.”

Joe stares at him for a second, trying not to laugh. “You good?”

Hugo nods proudly, hands folded on the table now like a gentleman. “Very good.”

Joe leans in just slightly, lowers his voice like it’s a secret between them. “You saving that last one for later?”

Hugo looks down at his now-empty pockets, shrugs like a philosopher, and says, “Maybe Mama has some more.”

Joe chuckles, shaking his head. “She always does.”

And somehow, the press room doesn’t feel like a press room anymore—it feels like a living room, warm and real, like a good game day ending with your favorite people right beside you.

Then a reporter up front leans into the fun. “Hey, Hugo? Who’s your favorite quarterback?”

Joe smiles. He doesn’t even look down. He just says, “Be careful,” like it’s a joke.

But Hugo doesn’t even pause. He scoots closer to the mic and says, loud and clear and high-pitched and chipper, “It’s still Mahomes.”

The room goes still. You can hear cameras clicking. Joe blinks at his own child. Hugo smiles proudly and continues like this is a speech he prepared. “I like his hair and his shoes. He throws the ball like pewwww, like in Paw Patrol, but better. You throw okay, Daddy, but he throws, like, crazy wow.”

Joe doesn’t speak for a full five seconds. Then he says, “That’s betrayal.”

Hugo shrugs, picks up his juice, and says with the nonchalance of a man twice divorced, “I just like red more.”

Joe rubs his face. “Okay. Sure. Great.” Then he leans into the mic. “If Mahomes wants to pay for preschool, he’s welcome to.”

The reporters are crying laughing by now. The clip’s already halfway to viral.

An hour later, Joe is buckling Hugo into his car seat and muttering, “They’re gonna meme me for weeks,” and Hugo is still humming the Chiefs chant under his breath like a lullaby. Joe leans down, tightens the buckle, and says, “You know you just betrayed your whole family, right?”

Hugo blinks up at him, dead serious. “I didn’t say I don’t like you. I just like Mahomes too.”

Joe sighs. “You said still Mahomes. Like you’ve been thinking about it.”

Hugo shrugs again and pokes Joe’s nose. “Boop.”

Joe raises his eyebrows. “Boop doesn’t fix this.”

“Yes it do,” Hugo insists, with the confidence of a tiny tyrant. Then he grabs Joe’s face with both sticky hands and kisses his cheek so hard it makes a squish sound. “You’re my daddy forever.”

Joe sighs again, this time into a laugh, and starts the car.

By the time they get home, the internet has exploded. ESPN is looping the clip with giant captions. “BURROW’S SON: MAHOMES STILL #1.” Patrick Mahomes reposts it with three laughing emojis and the caption “I got you, lil man 😎.”

Joe opens his phone, shows Hugo the video, and says, “You know what this is?”

Hugo stares at it. “TV?”

“No. This is a betrayal.”

Hugo beams. “Am I famous?”

“Unfortunately.”

That night, after the lights have dimmed and the noise of the day has settled into memory, Joe tucks Hugo into bed. His room is a quiet mess—storybooks scattered like breadcrumbs, one sock flung across the dresser, and Joe’s game jersey balled up on the floor with bright blue Play-Doh mashed squarely into the number.

Joe picks it up with a sigh, holds it up by the shoulders. “Seriously?”

Hugo peeks out from under the covers, KC Wolf tucked tight under one arm. “It’s not Play-Doh,” he says, voice already thick with sleep. “It’s magic dust. For luck. Mama said it’s okay if it’s for something special.”

Joe raises a brow. “She did, huh?”

Hugo nods confidently. “She said you get grumpy but you always forgive me.”

That makes Joe laugh, soft and tired, as he crouches down beside the bed. He brushes Hugo’s curls off his forehead, fingers gentle. “You ever gonna wear my jersey again? Or just ruin ‘em all with your magic?”

Hugo doesn’t answer right away. Instead, he reaches up with one tiny finger and taps the tip of Joe’s nose.

Boop.

It’s soft, instinctive—famous in their house by now. Joe pretends to go cross-eyed like always, and Hugo giggles behind his blanket.

“Maybe if it has sparkles.”

Joe groans.

“Or maybe if it’s red.”

“I’m not—no. That’s not happening.”

“Or if Mahomes gives it to me.”

Joe stands up, hits the light, and says, “Banned. You’re banned.”

From the bed, Hugo whispers sleepily, “I love you Daddy. Even if you’re not magic.”

Joe stops in the doorway. “Love you too, traitor.”

Hugo grins into his pillow and whispers, “Boop.”

[meropeeonmee]

Chapter 5 of THE LEAK is coming later today or tomorrow! Is there any specific moment you’d like to see? Drop your request in my box.

[meropeeonmee]

i’m going insane hello???

[meropeeonmee]

ALMOST - Joe Burrow

Description: And he never thinks of me—except when you put me on TV. . .

MASTERLIST!

The light was blinding. Hot, golden, merciless. The kind of light that didn’t ask you if you were ready — it just exposed you, all at once.

She blinked once, then again, grounding herself in the weight of the envelope still in her left hand, in the cool metal of the Emmy pressed against her ribs like armor. Her fingers curled around the base of it, but her mind was slow to follow. Everything was happening, and yet somehow not.

She had dreamt of this moment — not in vivid color, not in slow-motion fantasy — but in that fevered, lonely kind of gut instinct. The kind you develop after too many years being told “no.” The kind that whispers you’re meant for more, even when you’re broke, nameless, and begging to be seen.

She knew this moment was coming. And yet, now that it was here, it still felt like it belonged to someone else.

She breathed in. The room was standing. People she used to study from a distance were clapping for her like she belonged here. Like she had always belonged here.

The applause didn’t feel real, but the breath she took did. That breath was hers.

Don’t cry yet.

She looked out at the crowd — at the ocean of sequins and diamonds and jawlines too sharp to be softened by joy — and forced her lips into a poised, almost regal smile. The kind of smile she’d practiced in her hotel mirror, the same one she wore on press carpets and late-night talk shows, the one that said: I’m here, I’m composed, I’ve made it.

She spoke the words she’d rehearsed to herself in the quiet of her hotel room an hour before, pacing in bare feet with a glass of water and a trembling heart.

The right names. The right thanks.

The right kind of strength.

But somewhere — somewhere just beneath the applause, deeper than the lashes and the lipstick and the weight of her career now cemented in gold — a memory slipped through the cracks.

A dorm room in Baton Rouge. The faint smell of Gatorade and laundry detergent. His hoodie hanging loose on her shoulders, sleeves too long, her knees curled under her as she ran lines, nervously, again and again. And him, kneeling on the edge of the creaky mattress, mouthing the words with her like he’d memorized them too. As if her dreams mattered to him as much as his own.

“You’re gonna get one of those one day,” he said once, barely looking away from the screen, icing his wrist with a bag of frozen peas, the Emmys playing on a laptop balanced on his knees.

She had rolled her eyes then, half-laughing.

“Sure. Right after you win a Super Bowl.”

They didn’t think they were making history. Just promises.

Now they were both nearly there.

Just… not together.

The music swelled. The moment passed. She walked offstage, heels steady, applause fading behind her as the cameras cut to commercial and the producers pulled her gently toward the press line. Her name had been written into a thousand headlines already.

And somewhere across the country, in a dimly lit room far removed from red carpets and afterparties, someone she used to love was watching.

He wasn’t supposed to be watching. The Emmys weren’t exactly his thing — they were just… on. Left over from whatever show played before, the TV still humming from the rerun of last season’s AFC game.

He’d been skimming film, half-icing his wrist, waiting for another text from his physical therapist or a call from someone reminding him of media day next week. Rehab had been brutal this year. Not the pain — he could handle that. It was the repetition. The stillness. The way time dragged when he wasn’t allowed to move.

And then her name broke through the noise like thunder.

“And the Emmy goes to… Anita Gomez, Oppenheimer.”

He didn’t move.

Didn’t blink.

Didn’t even realize he was holding his breath until the camera cut to her.

There she was.

Anita.

Not the girl who used to steal his hoodies and write notes in his playbook margins. Not the girl who cried in his truck when she didn’t get cast in the spring showcase. Not the girl who once kissed him in the hallway of the LSU weight room at 2am, daring the world to catch them.

No — this was her. The woman the internet now called “the future of Hollywood.” The woman in the Vogue cover story who wore couture and spoke about her characters like they were stitched into her DNA. The woman people argued over on Twitter: Was she better than the lead? Did she steal the film? She always stole it. She just did it quietly.

Her hair was swept into something polished and perfect. Her dress was sculpted like it was made for her body and no one else’s. She moved like she’d been here before, even if she hadn’t. And yet — he saw it.

The breath.

That tiny breath right before she stepped into the light. She still did that. She always had. It was her tell — like she needed to borrow the air before walking into a version of herself the world had never seen.

God.

It had been five years.

Before the fame. Before the playoffs and the headlines and the commercials. Before the injuries and the noise. Before everyone wanted a piece of him — she had wanted all of him, quietly. Fiercely. Without asking for credit.

They had loved each other before the world watched. Back when love meant picking each other up after rehearsals and practices. Back when FaceTime calls were lifelines. Back when “someday” was a shared sentence.

And then life happened. Faster than they were ready for.

He got drafted. She got cast. He went to Ohio. She moved to New York. They told each other they’d try. And for a while, they did. But flights got missed. Calls went unanswered. Schedules became walls. They never fought — they just unraveled. Like string pulled slowly through time.

She left quietly. No ultimatums. Just a soft goodbye in the back of his car, her eyes rimmed red and her voice low as she whispered, “You’re going to be everything.”

And all he could say was, “You already are.”

That was it. No kiss. No one last try. Just the sound of the door closing behind her and the sick feeling in his gut that he’d just lost the most honest thing he’d ever had.

Now, five years later, she was holding an Emmy. And he was watching from a couch, in a hoodie she once wore, clapping so quietly the air didn’t even notice.

She gave her speech, strong and sure.

“To the girls who came from nowhere and were told to be quiet—I see you. I was you.”

No mention of him. Of course not.

But a part of him still waited for it. Still hoped for something — a glance, a breath, a line that only he would know.

There was none. Just the version of her that belonged to the world now.

He picked up his phone.

Scrolled to her name.

Still saved as Anita. No photo. No emoji. Just clean and untouched, like it had waited for this exact moment.

Reached for his phone before he could stop himself, his thumb hovering over a name he hadn’t touched in years. He didn’t even know what he expected. A response? A second chance? No. It wasn’t about that. It was just about saying it. Letting it live somewhere outside his chest. Because the truth was sitting too heavy now. Pressing up against his ribs like it needed out.

He typed the words without thinking, without planning. And even as he pressed send, even as he flipped the phone over and set it face down on the table, he knew she wouldn’t reply. She probably wouldn’t even read it for days. Maybe never. But that was okay. That was how it had always been.

Just to say it.

Joe: Congrats. you were incredible. i saw it tonight. you earned every second of that stage.

They were never meant to live in the same orbit. Not for long. Not when the world kept pulling them in opposite directions — him toward stadiums, her toward spotlights. They had touched briefly, perfectly, in the before. In the quiet. In the years when ambition was still just a dream they whispered to each other in the dark. And now… she was a screen. A symbol. A distant kind of magic. And he was still here, watching from the same shadows she once pulled him out of.

And maybe this is just how they’re always going to be — her on a screen, and him clapping quietly from the dark, proud in ways that don’t need to be seen, proud in ways that ache more than they comfort. Not because he wants her back. Not because he regrets the choices. But because he saw her before. Before the gowns. Before the gold. Before the world caught up to what he already knew.

She’s not his anymore. She hasn’t been for a long time.

But loving her had always felt like witnessing something rare. And even now, after everything, it still did.

And that was enough.

It had to be.

Because he wasn’t nineteen anymore. He wasn’t sitting in the LSU locker room with a scraped-up knee and a girl’s laughter still echoing in his ears. He wasn’t lying in her dorm bed, tracing lines on her forearm while she whispered lines from Chekhov like prayers. He was a franchise quarterback now. A public figure. A name that lived on Twitter and Monday Night Football and the backs of jerseys he’d never see in person. And she—she was a star. Not the rising kind. The kind that had already arrived. The kind whose face lived on billboards and award reels and magazine covers. The kind that people claimed to know, even when they didn’t know anything at all.

But he had. He had known her.

Back when it wasn’t about being seen. Back when their worlds weren’t curated or monetized or televised. She was a girl with chipped nail polish and big, brutal dreams. And he was the boy who believed in her—long before the rest of the world caught on. Before stylists, before reps, before publicists told her what to say and how to say it. Before he had to give interviews about grit and pressure and legacy. Before everything became a performance.

She was another piece of his life before the fame, before the spotlight split him in half and handed one side to the world. And in some way, maybe that’s what made her sacred. She existed in the version of his life that still felt real.

So he let the moment settle. Let the text sit there, unanswered and unneeded. Let the noise of the show fade back into its usual static. He didn’t pause the screen. Didn’t rewind. He just sat with the truth of it.

She didn’t belong to him anymore. But once, she had.

And sometimes, just remembering something beautiful without reaching to hold it again—that was its own kind of love, too.

So he reached for the remote, finally, and turned the TV off.

The screen went black. And the room, for the first time all night, was completely still.

He sat there, eyes adjusting to the dark, the weight of everything slowly settling around him — not like grief, not like longing, just like truth. She didn’t belong to him anymore. But once, she had. In a way no one else ever had. In a way no one else ever would. She had seen him before the jerseys and the parades, before the endorsements and the weight of expectation, when he was still just a boy with tape on his wrist and something to prove.

He’d sent the message without needing anything back. That was the point. To say it without asking. To honor the version of them that only ever existed in the spaces where the world wasn’t watching.

A vibration buzzed softly against the coffee table. He glanced down. Just one message. Just one name.

He opened it.

Anita: I always knew you were watching. that was enough for me, too.

[meropeeonmee]

LITTLE TRAITOR - Joe Burrow

Descriptions: A football player’s worst nightmare? His son cheering for the other team.

MASTERLIST!

It started on one of those slow, sleepy Sunday afternoons where the whole house seemed wrapped in a soft hush—blankets scattered across the couch, the scent of warm popcorn in the air, sunlight slipping through the curtains in long golden streaks, and the sound of the game humming from the television like a steady heartbeat in the background, and Joe was exactly where he wanted to be, stretched out in his favorite corner of the sectional, legs crossed, hoodie sleeves rolled to his elbows, one hand behind his head, the other gently resting on the little body tucked close beside him, where his three-year-old son Hugo sat with his knees up and his feet bare and his entire tiny frame wrapped in a too-big Bengals hoodie that swallowed his arms and bunched around his neck, the kind of sweatshirt he’d refused to take off all weekend because “it’s like Daddy’s,” even though it kept sliding off his shoulders, and for the first part of the game Hugo was quiet, eyes wide and darting, head tilted like he was trying to unlock the rules just by watching, only occasionally reaching into the popcorn bowl and chewing slowly like he had to concentrate to keep up, until midway through the first quarter, when a receiver sprinted down the sideline and the crowd on the broadcast roared, Hugo suddenly sat up straight, tugged on Joe’s sleeve with his small hand, and asked, “Where’s the red team?”

Joe turned his head, confused but patient, and looked back at the screen, saying, “You mean the other team?” but Hugo frowned and shook his head, puffing out his cheeks a little like he did when he was frustrated and said, “Nooo, Daddy. The red team. The one that goes super fast. With Travis. He do the spins. He’s so fun.”

And that was the moment it clicked, like a light flickering on in Joe’s head a second too late—Hugo wasn’t just talking about any red team, he meant the red team, the Kansas City Chiefs, and not only that, he meant Travis Kelce, which meant somewhere between Joe’s last road game and Hugo’s unsupervised screen time, their three-year-old son had picked a favorite player, a favorite team, and that team… wasn’t Joe’s.

Joe leaned back into the couch with a hand on his face, half groaning and half laughing, muttering, “Oh no. Not you too,” and from the kitchen, his wife raised her eyebrows like she’d been expecting it and said, “You left your iPad out last week. He found a whole YouTube rabbit hole of Travis Kelce touchdown dances,” and Joe looked back at Hugo, who was now clapping at a commercial on TV like it had something to do with the Chiefs and said softly, “This is betrayal. Tiny, adorable betrayal.”

But it didn’t stop there—it turned into a full-blown era. Hugo insisted on wearing red socks every day, ran around the house yelling “Go Chiefs!” at the cat, demanded bedtime stories about “Travis and his zoom shoes,” and once, during a FaceTime with his grandparents, climbed onto the table just to shout, “The red team is the best team EVER!” as Joe watched in horror and mild amusement from across the room. At one point, Joe found Hugo building a Lego stadium on the living room rug with one lone red player standing in the middle and when Joe asked, half-hoping, “Is that me?” Hugo looked up, blinked, and said without hesitation, “No, Daddy. That’s Travis’s house. You’re in the other part.”

The internet got wind of it after Joe mentioned it in an interview, trying to play it cool but clearly losing the household rivalry, saying, “Yeah, my son’s been rooting for the Chiefs lately. We’re in a complicated phase,” and a clip of the interview went viral within hours, and days later, Travis Kelce responded on his podcast with a wide grin and a laugh in his voice, saying, “Hugo, I got you, buddy—welcome to the Kingdom,” and from that point on, Hugo acted like it was official, like he had been drafted.

At the same time, something else was quietly becoming a Very Big Deal in Hugo’s world—his first loose tooth, which started wiggling a little after Thanksgiving when he bit too hard into a caramel apple and froze mid-chew, gasping, “Mommy! My tooth is wobbly! It’s gonna fall out forever!” and ever since then, it became his daily obsession, something he checked every morning in the mirror with his mouth stretched open, something he told every barista and grocery clerk about, something he whispered about at bedtime like it was a secret mission, holding his tiny clear tooth container like it was solid gold, repeating over and over, “When it comes out, the fairy’s gonna come with sparkle money,” and he started saying things like, “If I scream really loud, maybe my tooth will pop,” and once during dinner, he stopped chewing mid-bite and said, “I think it’s thinking about falling out,” which made Joe almost spit out his drink from trying not to laugh too hard.

Then came Sunday again—the Chiefs were playing, Hugo had been talking about it all week, even picked out his red hoodie three days early, asked Joe five times that morning if they could watch it together, and Joe had promised, had cleared his afternoon just for this, but sometimes life has a way of messing with perfect plans, and a last-minute team call pulled Joe away right before kickoff, and when he kissed Hugo’s head and said, “I’ll be back soon, buddy,” Hugo didn’t say anything, just curled up on the couch and looked at the TV like maybe if he watched hard enough, the game would wait for him, and when Joe came back that night, the living room was quiet, the popcorn bowl mostly full, and Hugo was asleep under a blanket with his foam finger drooping beside him and his tooth container unopened on the table, and Joe just stood there for a second, heart soft and heavy at once, before kneeling beside him and whispering to his wife, “Let’s fix this.”

The next morning, they didn’t tell Hugo where they were going until they were halfway there, bundled in jackets, snack bag in the backseat, Joe smiling in the mirror and saying, “Want to see the red team in real life?” and Hugo gasped so big he choked on his apple slice and shouted, “WE’RE GOING TO CHIEFSLAND?! TODAY?! RIGHT NOW?!” and then, holding up his tooth container, added with all the seriousness in the world, “I gotta show Travis my wiggly tooth before it pops out!”

Arrowhead was bigger than anything Hugo had imagined, and when they walked up the stadium steps and he saw the sea of red, the loud music, the fans dancing in rows, he clutched Joe’s hand and said, “This is the best place in the universe,” and Joe, trying not to cry-laugh, just nodded and said, “Yeah, it kind of is.” They found their seats and Hugo stood the entire time, foam finger in one hand and juice box in the other, yelling “Go Travis, go Travis, gooooo!” even when the play wasn’t for him, and in the third quarter, when Travis caught a touchdown and pointed toward the crowd, Hugo jumped so high he nearly launched himself off the seat, screamed with all the force in his tiny lungs—and just like that, it happened.

He stopped suddenly, touched his mouth, turned to Joe and his mom with eyes as big as planets and said, “My tooth… it’s gone,” and they searched everywhere—under the seat, in his jacket, in the snack bag—but the tooth had vanished, lost to the loudest scream in Hugo’s life, and when they finally gave up, Hugo curled into Joe’s lap with a trembling lip and said quietly, “Now the fairy won’t come. She won’t know I did it brave.”

The next morning, at the Chiefs training facility, Joe knelt beside Hugo in a hallway that echoed with every footstep, the lights bright overhead and the walls lined with red and gold, and Hugo’s red beanie sat crooked over his curls as he clutched his empty tooth container in both hands like it was still filled with possibility, and when Travis Kelce finally walked in—tall and grinning, hoodie sleeves pushed to his elbows like he wasn’t about to make a three-year-old’s whole year—Hugo went quiet with awe, his small fingers curling tighter around Joe’s hand as he whispered, “Daddy… he’s even bigger than the TV.”

Travis crouched with the ease of someone who’d done this before, who knew how to speak to kids without making them feel small, and said, “Hey, little man. I heard you lost something important yesterday,” and Hugo nodded seriously, holding out his empty tooth container and saying, “I screamed when you did the big spin and the touchdown and then—boop—it was gone, and now the fairy’s gonna be sad ‘cause she doesn’t know where to fly.”

Travis made a big show of thinking, then reached into his hoodie pocket and pulled out a shiny gold Chiefs coin, holding it like it was rare treasure and saying, “Good thing she left this with me. Said it’s for the loudest, bravest, most awesome Chiefs fan in the whole stadium.”

Hugo gasped—audibly, like he’d been holding his breath since kickoff the day before—and looked down at the coin like it was glowing from the inside, then looked up at Joe and whispered, “She really knew I was loud?” and Joe just nodded and said, “She definitely knew.”

They left the facility an hour later, Hugo practically floating out the door, coin in hand, hood up over his curls, asking Joe things like “Do you think Travis eats cereal?” and “Is ketchup still allowed if we’re Bengals again today?” and Joe just smiled, giving his wife a look that said we might be raising a Chiefs fan, but she only raised an eyebrow and said, “Maybe we’re raising both.”

That night, after dinner and bath and one story turned into two, Joe sat beside Hugo’s bed, the room dim and soft with the glow of the nightlight shaped like a football helmet, and Hugo, already blinking slow with sleep, rolled onto his side and whispered, “Daddy…?”

Joe looked up from folding his hoodie on the chair. “Yeah, bud?”

Hugo rubbed at his nose, then said, so small and certain it made Joe’s heart catch, “I still like the red team, but when I grow up, I think I wanna play with you.”

Joe moved closer, brushing Hugo’s damp curls back from his forehead, his chest full and his throat tight, because there it was—not shouted in a stadium, not posted online, but spoken in the quiet of his little boy’s room, that innocent, gentle truth that no matter how many players Hugo admired or jerseys he wore, he still wanted to be like his dad.

“You already do, buddy,” Joe said, voice low and steady. “More than you know.”

And as Hugo drifted to sleep with his gold coin under his pillow and the empty tooth container beside it, Joe sat there a little longer, watching his son’s chest rise and fall, and he didn’t care which team Hugo rooted for next Sunday or the Sunday after that, because in this house full of football and foam fingers and fleeting moments, he knew this one would stay—this small, perfect moment where his son, in his own quiet way, had chosen him.

[meropeeonmee]

FERNCULTURE 1: THE LEAK - Joe Burrow

Description: The iconic, unfiltered era of Fernanda Letrán—louder, messier, and completely uncensored before the events of THE LEAK.

Authors note: This collection of FernCulture moments is my way of building Fernanda’s character as a pop star before because the next chapters will focus on the present, around 2024, when Spring Into Summer was leaked.

Click here to start reading THE LEAK!

MASTERLIST!

By mid-2017, Fernanda Letrán wasn’t just the girl with the cult fanbase anymore—she was the girl. Nineteen, and already with a sold-out tour, two platinum singles, and a tabloid presence she hadn’t exactly asked for but had learned to weaponize. She was magnetic. Messy. Smart. And dangerous when underestimated.

The rumors about her and Drake had been circling since spring.

First, it was a like on her photo—a blurry backstage mirror pic in red lipstick. Then, a late-night sighting at a party in Laurel Canyon where, reportedly, he “wouldn’t leave her side.” Paparazzi got a single shot of the two in the same frame, but Fernanda’s eyes were already halfway rolled and her body angled away. The media framed it as chemistry. Fernanda’s fans saw it for what it was: her being cornered by a man with too much influence and too little self-awareness.

She never confirmed or denied anything. She didn’t have to.

A week later, she flew to Topanga for a secret session. No label reps, no press. Just a dimly lit studio and Kendrick Lamar waiting with a verse he said only she could anchor. She barely spoke as she stepped into the booth.

“You sure you want this heat?” Kendrick had asked her, leaning back with that half-smile like he already knew her answer.

She didn’t flinch. “I live in it.”

They recorded LOYALTY. in three takes.

When the track dropped without warning in early July, the internet didn’t even have time to breathe. There was no rollout, no radio tease—just the sudden appearance of Fernanda’s voice, breathy and lethal, draped across Kendrick’s verses like silk soaked in gasoline.

Critics called it a “genre collision that sounded like a threat.” Fernanda didn’t give interviews. She didn’t tweet about it. She posted one photo—her, sitting on a hotel balcony in Naples, Italy, barefoot in a robe, holding a cigarette she didn’t smoke. The caption read: “loyal to the art. not the noise.”

It was all anyone could talk about. Until Drake opened his mouth.

A week later, he was caught outside Poppy in West Hollywood, clearly drunk, with too much gold on and not enough dignity left. TMZ caught him mid-rant to a circle of hangers-on, slurring his way through a monologue that started as a complaint and spiraled into something bitter.

“She chased me, bro,” he muttered. “Like, y’all don’t know the full story. I could’ve helped her. She switched up. Used me for clout. All fake.”

He stumbled while saying it. The video went viral within an hour.

The press latched on. “Drake Accuses Pop Star Fernanda Letrán of ‘Using’ Him.”

Bloggers pulled out every angle.

“She sampled his heart and handed it to Kendrick.”

“The princess of petty pop has spoken—with a verse.”

Fernanda said nothing.

She was in Capri at the time. Paparazzi caught her the next day—stepping barefoot off a private yacht in a black one-piece, hair wrapped in a towel, sunglasses so big they hid her entire expression. She didn’t smile for the cameras. She didn’t need to.

The following morning, she posted a 15-second clip to Instagram. No filter. No caption. Just her sitting at the bow of the yacht, glass of champagne in one hand, sun catching on her collarbone. Mariah Carey’s “Obsessed” played quietly in the background.

She lip-synced along—calm, collected—until the line hit: “You’re delusional.”

She paused the music. Looked into the camera. Tilted her head like she was genuinely trying to hear something. Then, with a smirk that didn’t reach her eyes, she said—

“Yeah. You’re fucking delusional.”

She didn’t tag anyone. She didn’t have to. The post hit 19 million views in twenty-four hours. Celebrities commented in code. Rihanna liked it. Zendaya dropped a laughing emoji. Even Kendrick posted a single wolf emoji on Twitter, no explanation.

Drake never addressed her again.

And Fernanda? She flew to Paris the next day like nothing happened. She walked into a dinner hosted by Dior, lips glossed, nails black, wearing a backless vintage dress no one could afford. Someone asked her at the table if she’d seen the video of Drake.

She just sipped her wine and said, “I don’t watch reruns.”

Kendrick never tweeted about the drama. He didn’t name-drop. Didn’t post lyrics. But two nights later, a fan account noticed something quietly devastating: he’d liked a meme on Instagram.

It was a split photo.

On one side: Fernanda in a crown, chin high, sunglasses on, the word Queen edited in gold across her image.

On the other: Drake, edited to look cartoonishly sweaty, holding a giant red “L.”

The caption was simple. Three words. No tags.

“Loyalty. Loyalty. Loyalty.”

The internet lost it. Fernanda didn’t flinch.

She never needed to.

[meropeeonmee]

CHAPTER 4: THE LEAK - Joe Burrow

Description: A leaked demo reignites the internet’s obsession with a pop star’s rumored romance with an NFL quarterback—and exposes the heartbreak they both tried to bury.

Authors note: This will be the last chapter (for now) that includes anything happy—wink wink. If you’re curious about blurbs from Fernanda’s life before Joe, or if there’s a specific scene or moment you’d love to see that just reminds you of them, feel free to head to my profile and click “Share Your Thoughts.” I’d love to hear what’s stuck with you

MASTERLIST!

2021 - 2022 | Fernanda and Joe

It started quietly—like most things that matter do.

One lunch turned into a few more. Then came a string of weeks where “you free tomorrow?” became less a question and more a rhythm. And by the time July rolled in, the world still half-locked behind glass and headlines, she was already slipping her shoes off at his door like she belonged there.

They didn’t mark an anniversary. There was no soft-launch or label or champagne toast. Just her toothbrush in his bathroom. Her hoodie folded over his chair. Her playlist looping on their mornings.

At all the times they were together—in early mornings with the coffee half-sipped and the city still muted, in slow Sundays with socks mismatched and his glasses slipping down his nose, in long pandemic afternoons that stretched like spilled sunlight across the floor—Fernanda always found herself quietly amazed by just how much of Joe Burrow’s magic existed in the spaces where no one else thought to look.

He wasn’t loud, not in the way some people expected him to be—he didn’t command attention when he entered a room, didn’t fill silence with stories or charm crowds with over-rehearsed charisma. No, Joe was the kind of man who watched first, who listened with intention, who noticed things most people never paused long enough to see. He remembered the exact way she took her tea—even when she forgot. He knew when her smile was for show and when it meant something. He called her out gently when her laugh didn’t reach her eyes.

And, God, he was a nerd.

Not the cliché kind, not the kind that wore it like a badge or tried to hide it in swagger—but the honest kind, the endearing kind, the kind who could tell you the temperature on Europa and the exact number of Voyager 1’s signal miles from Earth, and who would interrupt a movie just to point out an inaccurate gravitational slingshot. He loved space documentaries, crossword puzzles, defensive film, and the way her voice dipped when she sang songs that hadn’t found their chorus yet. He made her laugh without trying, with dry, observant comments muttered under his breath like they weren’t meant to be heard—but always were.

During lockdown, when the world had slowed to a crawl and every day bled into the next, they had built a rhythm that wasn’t glamorous but felt holy in its own way. Pasta nights and porch talks, workouts in the living room, matching hoodies and shared Spotify playlists. She wrote songs in the kitchen while he iced his shoulder with a bag of frozen peas. They argued about nothing and made up over microwave brownies. There was no audience, no red carpet, no press cycle. Just them.

And that version of Joe—barefoot, hoodie-wearing, space-fact-dropping Joe—was the one she loved most.

Which is why the injury felt like a quiet gut-punch.

It came on slow at first—stiffness, soreness, the way his jaw would clench as he stood, brushing it off with phrases like “just tight today” or “I’ll stretch it out.” But Fernanda knew the way he moved. Knew when he was hiding pain behind stoic calm. She could read it in the tension of his shoulders, in the way his hands fidgeted when he wasn’t holding a football, in the way he sat a little longer on the edge of the bed in the mornings, like convincing his body to cooperate was becoming its own kind of mental game.

Eventually, the pain outgrew his silence.

There were appointments, ice packs, whispered frustrations, nights where the apartment felt too still because he was too tired to speak. And Fernanda, who had lived her own quiet griefs—in vocal rest, in burned-out tour cycles, in the post-pandemic stillness of a career that once moved faster than she could catch—recognized the ache not just in his knee but in the uncertainty. Because when your body is your livelihood, an injury feels like betrayal.

But she never treated him like he was broken.

She treated him like someone who was allowed to rest.

She kept the heating pad ready before he asked. Sat behind him during stretches, counting out loud while gently pressing between his shoulder blades. On the bad days, when the tension wrapped around him like armor, she didn’t force cheerfulness—she just showed up, with soup, with quiet company, with her playlist of sad girl piano ballads that he pretended to hate but never skipped.

They made a little sanctuary out of ordinary things: compression wraps in the sock drawer, post-therapy smoothies on the windowsill, shared naps on the couch where she’d gently rest her head against his good leg, her fingers tracing constellations across the back of his hand.

One night, after a long physical therapy session that left him too sore to sleep, Joe sat slumped against the headboard, staring at the ceiling like it owed him something.

Fernanda didn’t say much. She just crawled in beside him, blanket pulled up to their chests, and whispered, “You’re still him, you know. Even when you’re not moving.”

Joe didn’t reply right away. But when he turned to look at her—really look at her—it was with the kind of softness he reserved for post-game family hugs and fourth-quarter prayers.

“You don’t have to love me like this,” he murmured.

Fernanda just smiled, kissed his shoulder, and answered, “I don’t. I want to.”

Because it wasn’t about the field, or the stats, or what the sports blogs said about his recovery timeline.

It was about the man who kissed her knuckles like they were sacred. Who watched her write songs like he was witnessing a solar eclipse. It was about staying, even when nothing looked like victory.

And so, when Joe healed, he didn’t just return with stronger legs or more tape on his knees—he returned with the memory of her beside him, steady as gravity, quiet as faith, constant as breath.

And maybe that’s what recovery really was—not just getting back to who you were, but realizing who you never had to be alone.

One morning, Fernanda rolled over and caught him watching her like he was memorizing something—not just her face, but the quiet way her breath slowed when she slipped into a deeper sleep, the bend of her arm tucked under her pillow, the way her hair fanned out across his side of the bed like it belonged there, like she belonged there. Since lockdown, she’d basically been living with him—her things tucked into drawers, her voice filling the kitchen, her scent clinging to his sweaters—but she still flew back to New York whenever she needed to, like a bird with two nests. And yet, here, in this bed, in that early light, she didn’t flinch under the attention the way she used to with other men, didn’t try to perform her waking up or smooth down her features or bury her vulnerability under practiced charm—she just stayed soft and sleepy and his, like she didn’t need to be anything else.

“You’re being weird,” she murmured, her voice still thick with sleep, eyes closed but aware of him in that sixth-sense way people are only when they’ve let someone all the way in.

Joe didn’t look away. “Just thinking how I don’t remember life before you got here,” he said, and he meant it—not in a romantic cliché kind of way, but in the way you suddenly forget how silence used to sound before someone started filling it with the sound of their guitar tuning in the other room, or how mornings used to pass without that specific warmth pressed against your side, or how a couch never quite felt like home until someone’s knees tucked into yours on it without needing permission.

She smiled, a quiet, lazy thing, barely tugging at the corners of her lips, then tucked her face back into the pillow like she was hiding from the weight of the intimacy she didn’t know how to carry yet but didn’t want to lose either. “Maybe that’s the point,” she whispered, her words slipping between them like a thread. “Maybe this isn’t something we fall into. Maybe it’s something we grow into.”

He didn’t reply. He didn’t need to. Instead, he leaned in and pressed a kiss to the back of her shoulder, soft and unrushed, not meant to seduce or impress or promise anything big—but just to anchor them both in the moment, to let the truth of it settle in the space between skin and breath.

And for a moment, neither of them moved. The room held its breath with them, wrapped in the kind of hush that only exists when two people are so in sync they don’t need sound to feel understood. There was no urgency to the day, no schedule to outrun, no calendar reminder pinging to pull them out of the moment. Just soft light bleeding through the blinds and the awareness that sometimes, love doesn’t announce itself in grand crescendos—it lingers in the pauses.

Fernanda didn’t open her eyes. She didn’t need to. His presence had become something she didn’t question anymore—like the steady hum of a refrigerator or the weight of a familiar hoodie, like a background noise she didn’t notice until it was gone. It had crept in slowly, without asking for attention, one Tuesday morning at a time, one too-late dinner, one forehead kiss after rehab, one night when she fell asleep mid-sentence and woke up to find he’d carried her phone to charge and covered her with a throw blanket that still smelled like him.

She used to think love had to be loud to matter—that it had to knock the wind out of you or leave you wrecked enough to turn into lyrics and headlines and a heartbreak people wanted to root for. And for a while, it did. With Froy, it was all fire and velocity. They loved each other like a dare, intensity meeting intensity, drama dressed up as destiny. Everything was heightened—every look, every fight, every kiss—and she mistook that intensity for depth. It felt romantic, until it didn’t. Until it hurt more than it held.

Then came Chris.

Chris was the first one who didn’t ask her to perform. Who didn’t want her spotlight—just her. With him, love was softer, steadier, and quiet in ways she wasn’t used to. And maybe that’s why it didn’t last. Not because he didn’t love her right, but because she didn’t know how to receive it yet. He was patient, but she was still learning. Learning how to be still. How to be quiet. How to not fill silence with apologies or charm. And while that love didn’t survive, it gave her something else—proof that there was a different way to be loved, and maybe even a different way to be.

She had to go through him to get to herself.

And then—there was Joe.

This wasn’t fireworks or a proving ground. This was coffee cooling on the nightstand and grocery lists scribbled in sharpie. This was a toothbrush left next to his and a playlist that hadn’t changed in weeks. This was shared space and chosen quiet. No stage, no performance. Just love that was steady and unflinching. Love that didn’t need to be seen to feel real.

For the first time, she wasn’t just being loved quietly.

She was living quietly, too.

This was letting herself be ordinary.

And God, she hadn’t realized how much she needed to be ordinary—how deeply she ached to be the version of herself who didn’t have to sparkle to be safe. The one who could wake up with tangled hair and anxiety in her chest and still be looked at like she was enough. Not for what she gave, or how she looked, or who the world thought she was. Just her.

She used to think being boring was the worst thing she could be.

But boring now felt like freedom. Like stillness. Like the softest kind of arrival.

Across the bed, Joe was still looking at her—not with expectation or possession or the kind of hunger that wanted to claim something—but with a steadiness she didn’t know how to receive without flinching. He looked at her like she was enough. Not because of who she used to be, not because of what she could write or perform or wear to a gala, but because she was real. And present. And here.

Somewhere in the back of her mind, a tiny voice still whispered that she should be scared—that they were both too fresh out of something else, that maybe this was just a soft landing after too many hard years, that maybe it wouldn’t last—but that voice was quieter now, easier to silence, drowned out by the steady hum of his breath against her skin and the way he never tried to fix her or label her or ask her to define what they were.

He just reached for her. And she let him.

His arm wrapped gently around her waist beneath the covers, anchoring them both to the morning, and she didn’t pull away. There was no script here, no milestones to hit, no plan except the one they were quietly writing together. She didn’t need a label. Didn’t need the internet to guess what was happening. She just needed this—the space, the breath, the peace of it.

They hadn’t made it public. Not because they were hiding. But because they didn’t need to explain something that felt this sacred.

She didn’t need to ask what they were.

They were real.

And real didn’t need to be validated to be true.

Sometimes, it just needed to be held quietly. And in that moment—half-asleep, curled into something steady, wearing one of his old shirts and none of her old armor—Fernanda held it fully.

“You bought me a plant,” Fernanda said slowly, blinking down at the leafy green thing he had just placed into her hands, the ceramic pot still cool from the outside, its little plastic tag jutting out like a name badge at a forgotten garden party, and she studied it the way one studies a gift they didn’t ask for but couldn’t stop loving the moment it arrived.

Joe didn’t even flinch under her look, his face calm, almost proud, as if this was the most obvious thing in the world, as if this act—this slightly chipped fern in her hands—made complete emotional sense, and he said, very simply, “It’s a fern.”

“I see that,” she replied, already halfway to a smile, her brow arching with mock suspicion, the kind that always came just before she said something dry, something teasing, something like, “You bought me a plant… named Fern.”

And without missing a beat, with the earnestness that made her insides twist up in that quiet way he never got to see, he said, “It felt poetic.”

She tilted her head, voice softening into playfulness and something far warmer. “It’s a little narcissistic.”

Joe, dead serious, eyes so steady it disarmed her: “It’s a tribute.”

And then, as if that settled the matter entirely, he crossed the room and placed the fern on the sun-warmed windowsill with the careful hands of someone arranging something sacred, adjusting the blinds just so, letting the golden light filter in like grace, and when he stepped back, hands on his hips, nodding to himself like he had just installed something crucial to the structure of their lives, Fernanda didn’t say a word—because somehow, it really did feel like a symbol, like a metaphor that didn’t need decoding, like a quiet vow planted in soil and ceramic.

That night, when the city had shrunk down to its quietest hum and the fridge filled the silence with its subtle buzz and she was sitting cross-legged on the rug, half-heartedly strumming her guitar with fingers more thoughtful than precise, she looked up and caught him standing in the kitchen shirtless, his curls damp from the shower, misting the fern with an old plastic spray bottle like it was a ritual he’d performed for years, his lips moving around some silent sentence only the plant could hear, and she blinked slowly, stunned into affection, like she was watching a private moment she had never earned but had been gifted anyway.

“Did you just say ‘good job today’ to the fern?” she asked, her voice warm with disbelief, the kind of tone reserved for people you know too well to question seriously.

Joe didn’t look up, didn’t even falter in his movement, just kept spraying gently and said, completely sincere, “Photosynthesis takes commitment.”

And the laugh that broke out of her was the kind that didn’t belong to performance or irony or charm, but to something cracked open and unguarded—something real.

It was the same kind of laugh that had echoed through the kitchen the night they tried to make banana bread during lockdown and ended up covered in flour and melted chocolate chips, the smoke alarm screaming in protest as she waved a dish towel in the air while he fumbled with the oven mitts like it was a bomb diffusal attempt, and somewhere in the chaos he told her she looked hot in an apron, and she rolled her eyes and told him he was a menace, but her smile gave her away before she could walk it back.

They’d made boxed brownies instead, sitting on the cool tile of the kitchen floor with their backs against the cabinets and their legs stretched out like lazy questions, the tray between them half-gone before it had even cooled, and she remembered licking chocolate from her thumb and thinking this is what peace feels like—not silence or solitude, but the warm, reckless joy of choosing someone in the middle of the mess.

That was always them—soft in the edges and ridiculous in the best ways, two people who had seen too much of the spotlight to mistake noise for meaning, who had learned the hard way that the truest things often arrived quietly and didn’t need to be captioned or broadcast or wrapped in aesthetic to be worth remembering.

And now, with the fern watching from the sill like a house guest that had always lived there, and the apartment still scented faintly of eucalyptus balm from his physical therapy and whatever candle she lit and forgot to blow out, and the taste of chocolate still lingering somewhere in her memory, Fernanda looked over at Joe—who was now fussing with the leaves like they were part of a delicate instrument—and felt something settle deeper in her chest, something heavier than infatuation and quieter than certainty but far more permanent than either.

Because this was more than just domesticity or playfulness or pandemic boredom.

This was them, growing into something they hadn’t expected, building a space neither of them thought they deserved, letting it happen without rules or titles or the need to say everything out loud.

And when he looked up and caught her watching him—his face open, unashamed, impossibly soft—she smiled, shook her head like she was still trying to believe this was real, and said, “You’re so weird.”

Joe stepped forward, leaned down, and kissed the top of her head, his voice low and steady. “Yeah, but I’m your weirdo.”

And in that moment, with their feet bare, their playlist looping the same four songs, the windows cracked open to a city that no longer scared her, Fernanda realized that the world outside could stay loud and skeptical and obsessed with spectacle—but inside these four walls, there was a fern named after her, a man who whispered to it like it was holy, and a quiet, unshakeable love blooming between mismatched coffee mugs and flour-streaked t-shirts.

And maybe that was all they ever needed.

That night, she sat cross-legged on the rug with her guitar resting against her thigh, a bowl of berries slowly deflating beside her, half a song in her throat and no real urgency to finish it, just a soft need to feel something pass through her fingers, something unmeasured and unfinished, the way certain feelings don’t sharpen until you’re alone with them long enough to recognize their shape.

The apartment smelled like sleep and eucalyptus from his physical therapy balm, that quiet menthol scent that clung to towels and his shirts and the corners of the couch they always ended up on, and the windows were cracked just enough to let in the soft hum of a city that had stopped trying to impress them, the streetlights flickering like lullabies and the distant sounds of sirens dulled by time and routine.

She plucked a few quiet chords without meaning to, the kind that weren’t built for a hook or a chorus or a crowd—just a feeling, just her hands moving out of muscle memory and the need to mark the moment before it passed unnoticed like so many had during the long, slow months when the world paused and they didn’t know how to start it again.

Joe was stretched out on the couch behind her, legs long and tangled in the knit blanket they always fought over during movies, hair still damp from a shower, flipping mindlessly through old game film on mute—something he did when he wanted his brain to be busy without thinking too hard, like putting noise between himself and the pressure without naming what the pressure was.

He wasn’t really watching it—not in the way athletes usually did with their teeth clenched and their minds racing—it felt more like he was keeping the ghosts company, letting the slow motion plays and outdated uniforms remind him who he used to be before his body betrayed him and before rehab became its own kind of performance.

The suitcase was half-zipped by the front door, sitting in the exact spot where her boots usually lived, and its presence pulsed like a quiet metronome in the room, a reminder of what was coming and what wouldn’t fit in the spaces they’d built together these past few months—training camp started tomorrow, and everything already felt like it had started leaving even though no one had moved yet.

He hadn’t said much about it.

Neither had she.

But the countdown had started in everything they did that week—how long the coffee steeped in the French press they always forgot to clean, how many groceries they didn’t bother to buy because they knew the fridge would soon feel emptier no matter what was inside, how her body curled closer in bed like maybe proximity could slow time down, like the ache could be stored in skin instead of memory.

They started taking shorter showers but longer walks, splitting the last orange without offering, letting silence stretch between them without trying to patch it up with fake cheer, and every night she found herself reaching for his hand without thinking and he always let her take it, even when it meant stopping mid-fold or mid-thought or mid-grimace from the soreness in his leg.

“You nervous?” she asked finally, not looking at him, just letting the question float between them like steam rising from a forgotten mug, casual but not careless.

Joe didn’t answer right away.

He sat with the question like it was something he owed respect to, something fragile and personal, the kind of thing you don’t swat away with a joke, and when he finally spoke, it was quiet—“Not about playing. Just about what goes with it.”

Fernanda nodded, still not facing him, eyes on the fretboard like she could see her thoughts mirrored there. “I get that.”

And he knew she did—because she’d lived it in her own way, through album cycles and late-night talk shows and online dissections of her every breath, and she knew what it was to come back after the silence, to stand in front of people again and pretend the time away hadn’t changed you when you knew it had changed everything.

The comeback nerves. The noise. The way even joy started to feel performative when too many people were watching. The strange guilt of surviving the quiet when you were built for the sound.

He ran a hand over his jaw, slow and thoughtful, the way he always did when he was holding something heavy but hadn’t named it yet. “You gonna be okay here?”

Fernanda glanced over her shoulder, a soft smile pulling at her mouth. “You act like I’ve never been alone before.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“I know,” she said, her voice gentler now, softer in the way people speak when they’re saying thank you without saying the words.

And it wasn’t like she needed him around to feel whole—she’d done alone before, too many times and too many cities to be afraid of it—but she liked who she was when they shared space, liked the version of herself that didn’t feel so sharp-edged, who didn’t flinch when someone offered softness without strings or conditions or countdowns.

Joe didn’t want to fix her, didn’t try to make sense of her moods or solve her silences—he just… stayed.

And that made it easier to let the past breathe without letting it suffocate her, easier to remember that healing wasn’t linear and presence didn’t always require noise.

He was good at that—staying without asking for more than what she had in the moment, anchoring her without tying her down, giving her space without stepping away.

And maybe that’s why the silence between them didn’t ache. It just was. Familiar. Steady. Enough.

He looked over then, his gaze resting on the guitar in her lap. “Is that the song?”

Fernanda shrugged, fingers drifting across the strings. “Maybe.”

“Wanna play it?”

She shook her head, her voice almost a whisper. “Not yet. It’s still mine right now.”

Joe nodded, like he understood that deeply.

And he did—because some things weren’t ready to be heard. Just like some things weren’t ready to be defined. Just like some people weren’t ready to say I love you out loud, even if they felt it in every touch, every cup of coffee poured, every charger untangled, every inside joke that became a ritual.

They ended the night the way people do when they know something is about to change but don’t want to name it—him folding a hoodie into his bag and forgetting his charger on the nightstand like always, her setting an alarm she wouldn’t need just to pretend the morning had structure, both of them brushing their teeth side by side in silence, their shoulders bumping once, twice, and neither of them moving away.

They didn’t say goodbye.

They weren’t breaking.

They weren’t even pausing.

They were just turning the page.

And in that turn, in the way time stretched itself over guitar strings and cracked windows and half-zipped bags, they let themselves feel the passing—slow and soft and full of meaning, like a note held just long enough to hurt.

By August, she’d memorized the way he liked his eggs—over-medium, a little salt, toast just a minute longer than necessary because he said he liked it a little too crunchy, like it gave breakfast some edge—and he, in turn, learned the way she curled her fingers around the handle of her mug twice before her first sip, the way she never looked at the phone first thing in the morning anymore, not since she started waking up to someone who didn’t ask her to be anything but present.

They had a couch groove now—his thigh, her legs, the blanket they always fought over but never actually moved, the same Netflix profile they never updated from “guest” because it made them laugh every time it asked, “Are you still watching?” as if the question had ever stopped being rhetorical—and somewhere between her dropping bobby pins in the sink and him always leaving his socks by the armrest, they built a rhythm so quiet it almost didn’t look like love from the outside, but on the inside, it was everything they hadn’t known how to ask for.

Some nights they didn’t speak for hours—not out of tension, not out of avoidance, just that rare comfort that comes from knowing you don’t have to fill the room to feel full, that sometimes the silence between two people is the loudest way of saying I know you’re here, and I’m glad, so they let the hours pass in guitar strings and muted sports replays, in bowls of blueberries and mismatched tea mugs, in glances that said you okay? without needing to ask out loud.

It started with her humming.

Not a melody she was writing, not anything that would ever make it to an album or a demo or a late-night voice memo—just something soft and aimless, the kind of sound that spills from you when your body is relaxed and your heart isn’t rehearsing anymore, drifting out of her as she folded laundry on the bed, barefoot in one of his old hoodies, hair in a loose knot, moving around like she belonged to the moment and nothing outside of it.

Joe leaned against the doorway, arms crossed, watching her the way people watch sunsets they weren’t expecting to catch—still and warm and a little in awe, not making noise, not announcing anything, just being there in the doorway like maybe he wanted to memorize the way she looked when she thought no one was looking.

She looked up and caught him staring.

“What?” she asked, half-laughing, one eyebrow raised, a sock in one hand and the other resting on her hip like she already knew he was about to say something stupidly soft.

He shrugged, unbothered. “You’re just… hard to look away from.”

Fernanda narrowed her eyes, suspicious. “You’re laying it on thick.”

“I mean it,” he said, stepping into the room like it was nothing, like it was everything. “You’re the prettiest person who’s ever folded socks.”

She rolled her eyes, but her smile gave her away—crooked and unwilling, the kind that crept out when she wasn’t guarding it. “You’re so annoying.”

He walked up behind her, wrapped his arms around her waist, and rested his chin on her shoulder like he belonged there, like there was no other place his body knew how to rest. “You adore me,” he murmured into her neck, breath warm and sure.

“I do,” she said, quiet but sure, not “I love you,” not yet, but something about “I adore you” felt more true anyway—less worn, less borrowed from every song she’d ever written, more like something they’d made up themselves.

And he felt it, in the way her hand came up to rest on his forearm like it always did when she wanted to say stay, in how she leaned back just slightly, letting him carry a little more of her weight, in how neither of them flinched from the closeness anymore, like it wasn’t fragile or borrowed or temporary, just real.

They hadn’t said the words—not out loud, not yet—but it was there, in every morning coffee he brewed just the way she liked it, in the way she never asked what he was thinking—she just knew, in how he checked on the fern every night like it was part of their family, like it held meaning even in its silence, in the fact that she never rushed him to say it first and he never asked her to perform it for him.

Because they didn’t need the word to prove anything.

They lived it, quietly.

They adored each other in the acts, not the labels.

Fernanda turned around in his arms and rested her hands on his chest, eyes soft but steady. “You look at me like I’m a miracle,” she said.

He shook his head, smiling, something quiet in the curve of his mouth. “You are a miracle. Just one who leaves her tea cups all over the apartment.”

She gasped, mock-offended. “They’re not all over. They’re strategically placed for creative thinking.”

“Sure,” he said, forehead leaning against hers. “I adore your mess.”

“Good. Because I adore your weird space nerd facts and the way you pretend not to cry during underdog sports documentaries.”

He pressed a kiss to her temple, his voice low like a vow he didn’t know he was making. “You make it really easy to want to stay.”

They didn’t say the three words. They didn’t need to.

Not when everything else they did already whispered it into the quiet, not when every habit, every glance, every fight over the couch blanket and shared playlist and fridge magnets said I’m still choosing you.

And later, when she fell asleep with her head on his chest and her hand curled into his t-shirt, Joe just watched her breathe, thumb tracing slow circles against her shoulder, thinking—If this isn’t love, then what is?

But he didn’t say it.

Not yet.

He just let it live between them, like a song with no chorus.

Just verses unfolding, one slow, soft line at a time.

And later, when she fell asleep with her head on his chest and her hand curled into his t-shirt, Joe just watched her breathe, thumb tracing slow circles against her shoulder, thinking—If this isn’t love, then what is?—but he didn’t say it, not yet, because some truths felt too sacred to name out loud when they were still unfurling between two people like the slow, steady blooming of something that had finally stopped bracing for winter.

But the world didn’t stop just because they’d built a quiet.

One night, long after the dishes were washed and the windows had gone soft with condensation, she saw a photo while absentmindedly scrolling—just a blurry one, old maybe, her and Chris on a red carpet under harsh lights and louder headlines—and it wasn’t even the image that got her, not really, it was the caption underneath, biting and lazy in the way tabloids always were: “From America’s heartthrob to the heartbreak muse. The popstar’s pattern continues.”

Joe didn’t say anything.

He just reached out, took her phone gently from her hand, set it face-down on the coffee table like it was nothing, like it didn’t deserve oxygen, and then passed her the remote without a word, a small act of grace disguised as detachment, a gesture so simple and quiet it made her chest ache harder than the headline ever could.

She didn’t cry.

But something curled in her ribs and didn’t let go—because no matter how peaceful their bubble felt, the world still had opinions, still had claws, still had a way of taking her softness and dragging it into a punchline.

She looked at him then—sockless, sleepy-eyed, hair in need of a trim, the tiniest bit of toothpaste on his sleeve—and wondered how long they could keep this unbotheredness alive, how long their silence could shield them from a world that loved nothing more than to dissect what it didn’t understand.

Long enough, she hoped.

Long enough to make it through the noise.

It was late—well past midnight—and they were curled up on the couch again, legs tangled, the weight of the blanket uneven across their bodies but neither one caring enough to fix it, the TV humming low with the kind of documentary that didn’t beg to be watched so much as absorbed, something about deep space and old satellites and the echo of signals no longer expected to land, and Fernanda, eyes half-closed and fingers curled around the hem of his shirt, had barely registered the shift in sound when his voice sparked to life, soft but animated, like a thought he’d been waiting all night to remember.

“Did you know Voyager 1 is still sending signals back to Earth?” he said suddenly, his thumb tracing lazy circles on the inside of her wrist like it was just muscle memory now. “It’s been out there since 1977. And it’s still going. Still trying to talk to us.”

Fernanda blinked up at him, her voice a sleepy rasp. “You’re watching space again, aren’t you?”

He grinned—not wide, just that subtle tilt in his lips that only appeared when he was caught doing something nerdy and pure, that quiet amusement that made her want to freeze-frame the moment. “It’s insane, right? We sent this tiny piece of metal out into the void, not knowing if it’d last a week, and it’s still moving. Still reaching back.”

She didn’t answer immediately—just let the idea float between them, the way you do when something resonates deeper than you’re willing to admit. Then finally: “That’s kind of sad.”

Joe looked down at her. “Why?”

“Because it’s out there,” she said softly, “still trying to connect. And no one’s really listening anymore.”

He paused—just for a second—then nodded, slow and reverent. “I think it’s beautiful.”

And maybe that was the difference between them—she saw ache where he saw persistence, she felt the absence, he noticed the reach, she carried the weight of being misunderstood while he believed, in that gentle, stubborn way of his, that just existing with purpose was enough; that you didn’t need applause to matter.

Fernanda shifted closer, resting her cheek against his chest, heart pressed to steady breath. “Of course you do,” she whispered. “You’d romanticize a machine if it meant proving loyalty’s still a thing.”

Joe laughed under his breath, but didn’t argue. “I just think there’s something noble about it. Still doing what you were built for. Even when no one’s clapping.”

She closed her eyes again, smiling. “That’s such a quarterback answer.”

And he didn’t deny it—because it was.

But that was Joe: the boy who studied constellations and injury reports with equal reverence, who knew the average temperature on Europa but couldn’t figure out how to flirt without sounding like a scientist, who believed in dark matter and second chances and the slow, quiet gravity of showing up even when the cameras were off.

Fernanda pulled the blanket tighter around them, her foot nudging against his knee, like the contact was enough to anchor her. “If I ever disappear,” she murmured, “I hope you send a spacecraft after me.”

Joe didn’t even blink. “Already building the playlist.”

She cracked one eye open, smirking. “Let me guess. All sad girl music and David Bowie?”

He kissed the top of her head, still grinning into her hair. “And maybe a track or two of you, talking in your sleep.”

She groaned. “I knew you were recording me.”

“Only for the historical record,” he said, his eyes drifting back to the screen, where some scientist explained radio waves with reverence, and the stars blinked on quietly like secrets waiting to be understood.

It had been a long day.

The kind of day that clung to him like sweat—film sessions, treatment, drills, endless eyes tracking every stride he took. The trainers said he was progressing perfectly, but that didn’t quiet the noise in his head. Perfect was subjective. Perfect didn’t tell you how you’d feel once the pads went on.

He got home later than usual, shoulder sore, brace mark faint around his calf, and dropped his duffel in the entryway with more weight than necessary.

Fernanda looked up from the couch, one leg tucked under her, guitar set aside. She took one look at his face and asked nothing.

Instead, she stood, crossed the room, and pressed a kiss to his cheek.

No questions. No jokes. Just that quiet gesture like I see you and I know today was loud.

Joe exhaled for what felt like the first time all day. “They kept timing my dropbacks,” he murmured into her shoulder. “Like if I’m off by half a second, the season’s already lost.”

“Are you?” she asked softly.

“Maybe,” he admitted. “Maybe not. But I feel like I have to be perfect just to break even.”

Fernanda pulled back slightly, her fingers brushing a stray curl from his forehead. “You don’t have to be perfect. You just have to be you.”

He snorted under his breath. “You say that because you haven’t seen the Twitter threads.”

“Oh, I’ve seen them,” she said, walking him toward the kitchen like she wasn’t about to get into it—but she was. “Some people think I’m your distraction. Others think I’m a lyric-writing witch who ruined two actors and is now allegedly collecting quarterbacks.”

Joe grinned, finally. “You do have chaos witch energy.”

She opened the fridge, tossed him a Gatorade. “And yet, here you are. Still walking. Still throwing. Still mine.”

That last part? That landed. Hard.

He popped the cap open and leaned against the counter, watching her move around like this was her home too. Which, in all the ways that mattered, it was.

“I don’t care what they say,” he said finally. “About you. About us. I just… I don’t want you dragged into something you didn’t sign up for.”

Fernanda leaned across the island, chin resting on her hand. “Joe. I’ve been dragged across red carpets, canceled for tweets I didn’t write, blamed for breakups I didn’t cause, and blacklisted from the Met Gala for wearing a dress with bones on it.”

He blinked. “Bones?”

She waved him off. “Long story. The point is—I can handle it. But I choose you. So if people want to speculate? Let ’em. We’ve got soup, your weird space documentaries, and my ugly socks. That’s all I care about.”

Joe chuckled. “Those socks are awful.”

“They have moons on them,” she said, mock offended.

“They have faces on the moons.”

She grinned. “So you were looking.”

He just smiled and stepped around the island, arms looping around her waist. “I adore you, you know.”

Her face softened. “I know. I feel it.”

And when he kissed her, it wasn’t for comfort or because the world was heavy or because the headlines were louder than they liked—it was because she reminded him who he was without needing him to prove it. Because with her, he didn’t need to rehearse. He just got to be.

It started with a photo.

Blurry, grainy, clearly taken from the nosebleeds—but it was them.

Joe in sweats, hoodie pulled low. Fernanda beside him in sunglasses and an oversized flannel that was probably his, leaning in close. Not kissing. Not holding hands. Just close. Laughing at something only they heard.

And yet… that one photo sparked a wildfire.

By the time Fernanda woke up the next morning, “FERNANDA AND JOE” was trending on Twitter. Again.

She walked into the kitchen half-asleep, hair tied up in a claw clip, scrolling absently through her phone as Joe poured coffee in two mismatched mugs.

“You’re trending,” he said without looking up.

She deadpanned. “We’re trending.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Technically your flannel is trending. One tweet said, ‘she ate in that parking lot fit.’”

Fernanda snorted, sitting on the counter like always, legs swinging. “The internet has too much free time.”

“They’re making slideshows now. Us. Froy. Chris. The fern plant. Your foot in that one blurry mirror selfie from months ago.”

“My foot?”

“It had rings on it. People made fan edits.”

She sipped her coffee, unbothered. “Sounds like they’re in love with me.”

Joe grinned. “Same.”

For a moment, there was only the quiet hum of the morning—their playlist echoing faintly from the living room, the soft tap of Fernanda’s nails on her mug. Then she asked it, not as a demand, but gently. Like a question they both already knew the shape of.

“Do you want to say anything?”

He paused. “Publicly?”

She nodded.

He set his mug down slowly, walking over to stand between her knees, thumbs brushing the inside of her wrists. “Only if you do.”

Fernanda leaned forward until their foreheads touched, eyes closed. “I like us here,” she whispered. “Without an audience. Without the commentary. I’m not hiding. I’m just… choosing stillness.”

Joe nodded. “I like here too.”

She opened her eyes and smiled. “Okay. Then let’s stay here.”

They didn’t need to post anything.

No joint statement. No soft-launch carousel. No cryptic caption with matching emojis.

Just coffee in the kitchen.

Just him kissing her knuckles like it was a reflex.

Just a mutual knowing: we’re real even if we’re not broadcasted.

The world could theorize all it wanted.

But love like theirs didn’t need a press release.

It just needed mornings like this.

The nights were starting to blur in that slow, sacred way only early autumn could manage—warm lighting bleeding across the walls like memory, soft pillows stacked and reshuffled depending on which side of the couch they collapsed into, the quiet creak of the apartment settling like an exhale, as if even the building had started to recognize the rhythm of two people learning how to rest beside each other.

Most evenings landed the same way now: Fernanda on the couch with her guitar balanced lightly against her legs, one sock barely hanging on, the sleeves of Joe’s hoodie swallowing her hands, her feet tucked across his lap like they belonged there, like the space between them had always existed, waiting to be filled.

Joe sat beneath her, one hand absently resting on her shin, the other adjusting the frozen pack on his knee that had been rehabbing in half-quiet rituals since July, the television flashing muted game replays in front of him, though he wasn’t watching—not really, not when she was humming like that, not when the soft, unfinished melody floated through the room like steam from a forgotten cup of tea, not when her fingers brushed lazy chords that didn’t belong to any album or setlist or audience, just to her, and now, to him.

She had come to understand his game film habits—not as obsession, but as devotion, not as ego, but as discipline—how he would sit there for hours sometimes, eyes narrowed but calm, rewinding clips over and over to study the way his foot planted before a throw, or the millisecond delay in his shoulder when he read a blitz, like he could solve pain if he just understood it better; like knowing the mechanics of injury might prevent the heartache of it returning.

She saw the way he loved the game—not loudly, not for the applause or the fame, but for the order it gave him, the way it tethered him to something greater than himself, something that required both violence and grace, that demanded he show up with his whole body even when it was failing him, and still stay quiet in the face of either glory or collapse.

And Fernanda, who knew what it was to give your body to the stage and your soul to strangers, recognized the quiet ache of performance in him, too.

She saw it in the way he exhaled before every rehab stretch, as if bracing for disappointment.

In how he wrote plays in a notebook he never showed anyone.

In how he touched the football on the kitchen counter like it was alive.

She didn’t always understand the rules.

But she understood him.

And at some point, in the middle of one of those evenings where everything felt both temporary and permanent, where the air was equal parts eucalyptus from his physical therapy balm and the cinnamon candle she kept relighting, she looked up from the strings, eyes catching his in the half-glow of the room, and asked—half-laughing, half-serious—

“You ever feel like you were built just to make someone softer?”

Joe didn’t blink. Didn’t flinch. Just answered in that low, steady voice she had grown to trust more than her own reflection. “No,” he said, thumb brushing against her leg in a slow arc. “But I feel like I found the person I want to be soft for.”

And there it was again—that moment that almost tipped, almost turned, almost said I love you out loud, but didn’t, because some words are too important to rush, too sacred to say before you know the shape of what you’re giving away; and yet, it didn’t matter, because love lived between them already—in soup reheats and whispered jokes, in the way he let her cry without offering solutions, in the fact that he never complained when she stole all the blankets or forgot to buy milk.

She knew he’d leave soon—back to stadiums and headlines and locker rooms that didn’t smell like home—but she also knew that he would carry this softness with him, that he would tape his wrist the same way he had learned to touch her spine when she cried, that the patience he practiced with her songs would steady him when the pocket collapsed, that he would look at the field like it was a language they’d both spoken in different tongues.

Because football was his purpose.

But she had become his peace.

She didn’t go to the first few games—not because she didn’t want to, but because the timing hadn’t allowed it. September blurred into early October with back-to-back shoots in New York, studio sessions that bled past midnight, campaign deadlines that demanded her face and voice in equal measure, and though Joe never said anything about it, she’d caught the slight pause in his voice when he asked how long she’d be gone, when she told him she probably wouldn’t be back in time for Sunday.

But she always watched.

Even in hotel rooms with blackout curtains and spotty WiFi, she streamed the games from her laptop, the glow of the screen lighting up her face as she bit her lip through fourth quarters, mouthing come on, come on under her breath like it could reach him somehow through the miles and the noise and the crowd.

And then, when the calendar eased and her voice finally rested, she started going.

Not every game. Not loudly. But enough to make it count.

And when her schedule finally cleared—when her team rescheduled a campaign shoot and her label pushed back a deadline—she brought it up the way someone does when they’re testing the air for a storm that hasn’t hit yet.

“So I was thinking,” she’d said that night, casually, from the other end of the couch, legs tucked under her, sleeves of his hoodie falling past her wrists, “I might come to the game this week.”

The TV was still on, playing some documentary about cold water diving or cave science—one of those things he always half-watched while icing his knee—but the sentence seemed to still the room anyway.

Joe didn’t respond right away, and maybe that’s why it stung more than it should have—because it wasn’t loud, it wasn’t harsh, it wasn’t even argumentative; it was just quiet, the kind of quiet that fills a space when someone’s weighing their words too carefully, like whatever he was about to say would be more for her protection than his.

“I just think…” he started, slowly, voice cautious, his gaze flicking toward her and then away again, “it might be better if you didn’t.”

Fernanda blinked, her head tipping slightly, not out of surprise, but because the answer felt heavier than she expected—like she’d walked into a room that suddenly got colder.

“Better for who?” she asked, her voice calm but edged with something she couldn’t quite swallow down.

Joe exhaled through his nose and rubbed the back of his neck, the way he always did when he was trying not to fumble something important, and that’s when she understood—this wasn’t about her being at the game; it was about what it would look like if she was.

“You know how it goes,” he said softly. “If someone sees you in the box, or walking in, or even catching you on the sideline for five seconds—it’s headlines. It’s noise. And then suddenly it’s not about football anymore, it’s about us.”

She stared at him, the warmth in her eyes dimming just slightly, not because she didn’t understand, but because she did—and she was tired of understanding.

“You think I’d be a distraction?” she asked, not flinching, not accusing, just asking.

“No,” Joe said quickly, his voice sharper now—not with anger, but with urgency. “God, no. You’re the opposite. You’re the only thing that makes any of this feel… quiet. But the world doesn’t know that. They’ll twist it. They always twist it.”

Fernanda looked down for a moment, then back up, her fingers curling into the blanket on her lap.

“So… we just keep pretending we’re nothing?”

Joe’s eyes dropped. “It’s not pretending. It’s just… keeping it ours. For a little longer.”

Her chest tightened—not because he didn’t want her there, but because he did, and he was afraid of what the world might do with it. And still, the fear landed the same way—on her, on her visibility, her presence, her career.

“You want me to stay home,” she said, her voice low now, more sad than sharp.

“I want to protect this,” he said. “I’ve seen what the noise does to something good. I’ve seen it ruin people.”

She stood up then—not fast, not theatrical, just with the kind of deliberate movement that says I need space to think, and walked toward the kitchen without looking back, pausing only when she reached the fridge, her fingers trailing across the handle before turning.

“You’re not the only one who knows how loud the world can get,” she said quietly. “I’ve had headlines written about me since I was nineteen. I’ve survived every narrative they threw at me. And I’m still standing.”

Joe didn’t say anything at first, just watched her with a kind of helplessness that felt too big for the room.

Fernanda exhaled. “Sometimes being careful feels a lot like being ashamed.”

That one landed. It hit—right in the place where his worry had been living, turning over and over like a coin he couldn’t spend.

He crossed the room slowly, stopping just in front of her, his voice softer than it had been all night.

“I’m not ashamed of you. Not ever. I just—this is the only thing in my life that feels untouched. And I don’t want to lose it to a headline.”

She stared at him, quiet for a moment, then stepped a little closer, enough that she could press her hand to his chest, right where she felt his breath catch.

“You don’t have to protect me from the world, Joe,” she said. “You just have to stand next to me in it.”

And maybe that’s what cracked something open in him—not because she was asking for more than he could give, but because she was asking him to believe in what they’d built outside of the shadows, to trust it enough to risk being seen.

He nodded, slowly.

“Okay,” he said. “Come to the game.”

She smiled, small but steady.

“You sure?”

Joe gave a half-shrug, honest to a fault.

“No. But I want you there anyway.”

And maybe that’s what love looked like in a life like theirs—not grand gestures or kiss cams or matching jerseys, but a quiet agreement to walk side by side, even when the flashbulbs start, even when the headlines spin, even when fear says hide—because the only way to live without hiding is to stop waiting for permission to be seen.

And this time, they weren’t going to wait.

It was colder than she expected.

Even inside the suite, insulated by thick glass and corporate comfort, Fernanda pulled her coat tighter around her shoulders—not because she was cold exactly, but because being there, really being there, felt bigger than she’d let herself anticipate, like every inch of her body suddenly understood she wasn’t watching from a distance anymore but stepping into something that could easily shift the axis of what they’d built.

She hadn’t meant to draw attention—had slipped in with sunglasses, a low cap, her hair tucked and styled to not scream her name—but the moment she walked through the private entrance and someone looked just a beat too long, she felt it in her gut: the soft spark of recognition, the shift in energy, like someone whispered “Is that—?” and another phone quietly angled upward.

Still, she stayed.

Still, she sat.

Because she’d promised she would.

Because she knew what this meant—to show up, to be seen not as a headline or a blurry Instagram story, but as a presence in his world, not hidden behind studio doors or half-answered texts but there, watching number nine warm up with the kind of focus that had always made her chest ache in the best way.

She watched him stretch, helmet in hand, body taut with purpose, and remembered the way he’d looked that morning—hair still damp from the shower, hoodie askew, trying to butter toast while reading an injury report, and how he’d kissed her temple without saying anything, just pressed his mouth there like a promise and a thank you all at once.

And now he was down there—her quietly chaotic quarterback, pretending not to glance up toward her suite while absolutely, definitely doing it.

She knew the look.

Knew the way his eyes skimmed the crowd like he wasn’t searching for her until the second they landed on hers—and didn’t move.

She raised her hand slightly, not a wave, just… a presence.

A confirmation that yes, I’m here. I said I would be.

And his expression didn’t change, not in any loud way, but she saw the breath he let go of, saw the set of his shoulders shift like something loosened inside him, like her being there was the last click in the lock.

She turned back to the field when the anthem started, but not before she noticed the group of girls a few rows down whispering, phones half-out, one of them pulling up a paparazzi shot of her from last year’s Met Gala.

She heard the words “Joe’s girl?” and “Wait, is that—?”

And for a split second, her heart jumped.

But then the music swelled.

And the lights shifted.

And the game began.

And none of it mattered.

Because even with all of that—whispers, glances, the press sure to come by morning—she stayed.

She clapped when he ran out of the tunnel.

She leaned forward during third downs.

She gripped the edge of the seat cushion like it could change the outcome of a two-minute drill.

Because she wasn’t just there as a pop star.

She wasn’t there for headlines or for proof.

She was there because he made her tea with lemon when her voice cracked, because he sang the wrong lyrics to her songs on purpose just to make her laugh, because he kissed her wrist when he thought she was asleep and called her his favorite quiet.

She was there because love is not a secret.

And when Joe looked up at her after a touchdown, subtle but unmistakable, not raising his arm, not blowing a kiss—just looking—she didn’t flinch.

She smiled.

Small. Steady. Certain.

And somewhere below, helmet still on, he smiled back.

Not a big one. Not the kind that made highlight reels.

Just the kind that meant I see you. And I’m glad you’re here.

It wasn’t extravagant—not the kind of birthday anyone would flex online or fold into a highlight reel—but when Fernanda walked into Joe’s living room on November 3rd and saw what waited for her—soft lighting, foam panels, a makeshift recording nook tucked beside the bookshelf—it hit her like the kind of moment you don’t prepare for, the kind that doesn’t need balloons or champagne to feel sacred, just intention, quiet and golden and completely disarming.

She hadn’t expected much, not this year. Not with him back in season, balancing practices, press, and the constant rhythm of game prep. She assumed he’d forget—not in a careless way, but in the way people do when the world’s loud and time slips through your fingers. Maybe a text, a dinner squeezed between film study and sleep. But not this.

She blinked, taking it in—the mic stand she thought she left in L.A. somehow here, her beat-up headphones hanging from a hook, a small interface already lit up beside his laptop, the DAW open with a blank project titled Studio F, and the sticky note beside it, messily scribbled with press record whenever you’re ready. It felt less like a gift and more like an invitation back to herself.

Joe stood a few feet behind her, trying not to smile too much, hands shoved in his hoodie pocket, still faintly smelling like eucalyptus balm and black coffee, the kind of scent that lingered on his game-day towels. His hair was a little messy from the helmet earlier, his shoulders still loose from post-practice rehab, and the circles under his eyes told her he hadn’t slept much.

“You did this?” she asked softly, awe folding into her voice.

He scratched the back of his neck, a little awkward but not apologetic. “Technically, yeah. I mean—I built it. But I definitely panicked about acoustics and called in some help.”

Her brow lifted. “Help?”

He nodded. “Got someone to track down your usual setup. Screenshots, late-night gear hunting, the whole thing. I might’ve bugged your producer, too. But I didn’t tell him why, so I think we’re good.”

She laughed, and it came out so easily—like a relief more than a sound, like something being unknotted in her chest. And he watched her with that same look he always did when she laughed: like nothing else in the room mattered.

“You did all this,” she said again, more to herself than him, turning to run her fingers along the desk edge, touching the soft foam of the panels.

“You built albums out of hotel rooms and heartbreak,” he said, stepping beside her. “Figured I could give you at least one corner of peace.”

And that was him. Not flashy. Not loud with love. But deliberate. Thoughtful. A little nerdy. A little awkward. But always watching. Always listening.

He didn’t plan the day off. Didn’t make some elaborate dinner or rent out a rooftop. Hell, he had film to review and bruises that hadn’t faded. But he gave her something better—time carved out of chaos. Space in the middle of the storm.

She looked up at him, the fullness in her chest almost too much to speak through, and whispered, “You know you’ve ruined every birthday going forward, right?”

He grinned. “Guess I’ll have to keep outdoing myself.”

And that night, when she curled up in the glow of fairy lights, guitar in her lap, voice soft and unsure as she tested a new melody, Joe sat beside her on the floor—cross-legged, hoodie sleeves pushed up, not interrupting, not offering notes. Just watching.

Because in a season filled with cameras, blitzes, and interviews—he made space for something quiet. And that was love too.

In the fluorescent buzz of the locker room, the win still humming through the walls like static, Joe sat at his cubby with his head tilted slightly down, towel draped around his neck, hair damp with sweat and exhaustion and the weight of another game behind him. The room around him was noise—cleats clattering against tile, the slap of back pats, the faint sound of press chatter outside the double doors. But Joe was quiet, his focus narrowed on his phone screen like it held something holy.

“She gone already?” Ja’Marr asked from two stalls down, unlacing his gloves with a smirk that barely tried to hide the tease.

Joe didn’t look up. “Yeah.”

“Damn. Cold.” Sam Hubbard laughed, stepping past with a Gatorade, catching the corner of Joe’s grin before it even fully formed. “She didn’t wait for the post-game hero speech?”

“She just got off a flight,” Joe said, though his voice held no real defense, only fact. “Came straight to the stadium. She was tired.”

“Man,” Ja’Marr drawled, flopping onto the bench like he had nowhere to be. “She flew in, watched you win, and ghosted.”

“She didn’t ghost,” Joe muttered, and now the smile was there, tugging at the corners of his mouth like he couldn’t stop it even if he wanted to. “She left me food at home.”

That earned a low whistle.

“Ohhh,” someone said behind them. “She a keeper.”

Joe didn’t respond. He just stared at the message still lighting up his screen—You looked good out there. Get some sleep. Left your favorite pasta in the fridge. I’ll be in the studio if I can’t sleep.

There was no kiss emoji. No heart. Just her—unfussy, quiet in her care, a presence even in absence.

And when the team moved on to louder jokes and victory stats, Joe sat still for a moment longer, thumbs brushing the edge of his phone, heart pacing slower than it had an hour ago on the field. He didn’t say much. He never did when it came to her. But his silence had changed. It used to be armor. Now it was something else—something gentler.

Something that sounded a lot like peace.

She didn’t mean to write that night, not really, not in any structured, deliberate way—she’d only come into the studio nook to escape the hum in her chest that wouldn’t let her rest, a kind of quiet ache that followed her home from the stadium and hadn’t let up even after the makeup was wiped off and the cheers had faded to memory, and now here she was, cross-legged on the carpet with her guitar resting against her thigh like it belonged there, fingers idly tugging at old, familiar chords that never made it into songs but always managed to unlock something true.

The glow from the laptop screen was soft, the DAW already open from earlier in the day when she tried and failed to write something lighter, something casual, something people could dance to—but this wasn’t that kind of night, and she wasn’t that kind of calm.

She plucked out a chord progression without thinking, something minor, something that sat heavy in the air, and before she could talk herself out of it, she hit record, leaned in to the mic with her headphones half-on, and sang the first words that had been pressing against her ribcage for weeks.

We were crazy to think / Crazy to think that this could work / Remember how I said I’d die for you?

She paused, breath catching slightly—not because it hurt to say it, but because it was the first time she had, and there was something holy about putting it into melody, about admitting that loving Joe had always felt a little reckless and impossibly sacred at the same time.

She closed her eyes, let the next verse pour out without filtering it through image or expectation, because this wasn’t for a label or a rollout or a room full of writers trying to make heartbreak feel catchy—this was for her, just her, and maybe him, if he ever heard it, though she wasn’t sure she was brave enough for that yet.

And I can’t talk to you when you’re like this / Staring out the window like I’m not your favorite town / I’m New York City, I still do it for you, babe…

The words weren’t subtle and they weren’t polished, but they were real, and that felt more important than perfection.

She thought about the fights—small ones, rare ones, but heavy in their own way, full of that silent fear that maybe the outside world would get too loud and they’d stop hearing each other, the way he sometimes looked away when she wanted him to hold eye contact, the way she dared him to leave before she could beg him not to, because part of her was still learning how to trust that love could stay when it wasn’t being chased.

She thought about the way he touched her wrist instead of her waist, how he sat on the floor while she recorded and never asked to hear what she was writing, how he didn’t say I love you yet but somehow made her feel it in every quiet thing he did.

And then she sang it—

Religion’s in your lips / Even if it’s a false god / We’d still worship this love…

There was something devastatingly honest about calling it a false god—because she didn’t know if they’d last, didn’t know if what they were building would survive the season, the press, the distance, but she knew it was sacred in its own way, that she would kneel at the altar of this feeling for as long as it lived in her, even if it broke her someday.

And she knew it was him—of course it was him, the way he built her a studio when he should’ve been sleeping, the way he watched the stars like they had answers, the way he looked at her like she was some kind of miracle wrapped in mess.

She wasn’t deeply religious, but she grew up in a house where faith filled every room—her mother prayed out loud, believed in signs, lit candles on Sundays. Fernanda never rejected it, just held it differently, more quietly.

But some nights, when Joe touched the side of her face like he was checking to make sure she was real, when he whispered “good job” to the fern like it needed encouragement to grow, when he kissed the top of her head after a loss and never asked her to perform joy she didn’t feel—on those nights, she started to wonder if maybe God had made him just for her.

She didn’t stop recording.

She just kept singing—line after line, verse after verse—until the truth no longer felt terrifying, only tender.

And outside the door, down the hallway, where she didn’t know he stood listening in the dark, Joe stayed still, barely breathing, letting her voice fill the spaces he hadn’t known were empty.

She wouldn’t know until later.

That he’d heard.

That he’d understood.

That maybe her song said what her mouth hadn’t dared to.

That maybe they were already worshipping something real.

Even if neither of them had named it yet.

In December, when Joe got injured again, Fernanda was there—quietly, without the performance. She moved in the margins of the hospital and postgame press chaos, her presence never loud, but never absent either. The media caught pieces of it: a blurred photo, a headline, a guess. They didn’t run, didn’t deny, didn’t feed the noise. They were just… there. Calm. Unshaken. Almost like they’d learned how to exist under pressure without flinching, like they were built for surviving impact.

Because Joe never loved anyone loudly. He didn’t make grand speeches or post tributes or kiss anyone under stadium lights. He loved in the smallest ways possible—in watching her shows from the corner of the room, in making sure her tea never went cold, in learning how to be still beside someone who never stopped moving. And Fernanda, for all her chaos and color and noise, never asked him to be louder. She just asked him to be there. And he always was.

Maybe that was what made it love. Not the volume, but the constancy. Not how the world saw it, but how it held them, quietly, when everything else got too loud.

And in the end, that was what mattered most. Not how they started. Not even how they’d end.

But the fact that for a while—through all of it—they chose each other, gently, every day.

[meropeeonmee]

Told myself to lock in, then ended up watching some Joe Burrow edits on TikTok. I can confirm that Chapter 4 of THE LEAK is coming later!

[meropeeonmee]

TYRANT - Joe Burrow

Description: She was there before the fame. Now he’s everywhere—but not with her.

Authors note: I’m obsessed with this song dang. It got me feeling angsty

MASTERLIST!

I don’t want him back. God, I don’t. I’ve said it a thousand times—to friends, to strangers, to the mirror, to the ceiling above my bed on nights when the silence presses too heavy to sleep. I don’t want him back. I don’t want to retrace our steps or beg for another chance or believe in something that already proved itself breakable. But even now, long after he stopped being mine, long after I stopped being anything at all to him—I still can’t let go.

Not because I want to relive it.

But because I never got to leave it properly.

Not because I miss the way his hand fit around mine when the world felt too heavy—

But because I gave him everything when I still didn’t know what I was made of.

There are parts of me that only exist because I was with him. He saw them first. He named them. He made me believe I could carry his future without losing myself. And then he let go like it never mattered.

I keep telling myself it wasn’t him who broke me. That maybe it was what he belonged to.

The real tyrant.

Football. The god I could never compete with.

It was never another girl, or a lie, or even a betrayal.

It was always the game.

Hangman, answer me now.

Why does it always feel like I was the sacrifice?

I never hated the game. I never cursed the stadium or the playbook or the schedule that stole birthdays and anniversaries and Sunday mornings from us. I knew what I was signing up for when I fell for a quarterback. I knew there would be injuries and rehab and missed dinners and media obligations. I knew I’d be second—sometimes third, sometimes last. And for a while, I could live with that. I could sit in the stands with his parents and cheer for him with love that swallowed every disappointment whole.

But it didn’t matter how loyal I was, or how many home games I stayed up packing for, or how many nights I spent massaging ice packs into his shoulder. One day, he just didn’t have time for me anymore. He didn’t say it outright, but the silence between his texts got longer, the calls started coming only after games—not before. And I realized then that I wasn’t part of the dream anymore. I was the thing he left behind to become what the world told him he was destined to be.

They all say, “He’s living his dream.” And I smile. I nod. I repost the highlights like a good memory would. Because he is. He’s doing exactly what he said he’d do. I just wasn’t supposed to disappear from the picture.

But no one talks about what it cost me.

No one sees the debt.

You owe me a debt.

You stole him from me.

And by you, I don’t mean the girl he’s dating now.

Not even her. Not anymore.

I mean the machine that made him untouchable.

The destiny. The NFL. The path he carved so cleanly that there was no space for the girl who held his jaw steady in locker rooms and memorized his post-game silence like scripture.

Time took him. Ambition polished him. The spotlight erased me.

I was there for the soft years. The injured seasons. The nights he doubted everything and whispered, “What if I’m not good enough?” while I laid with him in the dark, hand over his heartbeat, promising that he already was. I loved him when no one knew his name. I watched him become everything. And then I watched him let go of the version of himself that needed me to get there.

College sweetheart turned ghost in the rearview mirror of his rising career.

That’s the version of me no one remembers.

And yeah—there was a time I hated her.

Whoever she was.

The new girl with the manicured nails and the glossed-over past. The one who met him after the scars had already healed. The one who didn’t have to pour him into sweatpants and drive him to physical therapy. The one who didn’t wait up alone during draft week or press her forehead against his when he thought he might not make the cut.

The one who didn’t have to earn him.

But got him anyway.

I hated her once.

But now?

I envy her.

Because he smiles differently now.

Like nothing ever cracked in him.

Like the past never left bruises.

Like I was never the girl who pulled him through the lowest years of his life.

And she gets that version.

The glossy, polished, post-trauma version.

The Joe who never needed to call at 2AM from a Walmart parking lot asking if I still believed in him.

The Joe who learned how to be comfortable in the spotlight because someone like me held him when he was still learning to breathe there.

She gets him after the work. After the climb. After me.

And I’m still here.

Alone in the echo of everything I gave, everything I lost.

Still wondering why the girl who stayed through the storm was the one asked to leave when the sun came out.

I told myself I was done thinking about him.

But then in 2024, the burglary happened.

I saw it on the news while scrolling in bed, mindlessly watching the world unfold. “Quarterback Joe Burrow’s home broken into late last night. No injuries reported.”

I told myself not to react. I told myself not to feel it.

But my breath caught anyway.

My body still flinched at the idea of him hurt.

Even after everything, I still cared that he was okay.

And just a few days later, his new girl’s name started trending. A blurry clip surfaced—just her, stepping out of a car, smiling when someone asked, “Are you dating Joe Burrow?” She didn’t say yes. She didn’t say no. Just that smile—small, knowing, practiced. I watched it on loop, trying to read her eyes like they held answers I wasn’t allowed to ask anymore.

I read the comments, the tweets, the fan edits that painted them into something perfect. And I didn’t want to gloat. I wasn’t bitter in the way people think.

I just hated the fact that I still worried.

Still wondered if he was okay.

Still imagined how his hands might shake when the cameras turned off.

Still had the nerve to hope he wasn’t handling it all alone. I hate that I still care.

Just tell me how.

Tell me how.

Tell me how he walks past our old diner on Vine Street without even flinching.

Tell me how he drives by the exit to our first apartment and doesn’t even take it for memory’s sake.

Tell me how he forgets the smell of that shitty lavender lotion I used to rub on his knees every time they ached after practice.

Tell me how he forgets my voice saying, “You don’t need the world to believe in you—I already do.”

Tell me how.

How do you delete someone who made a home in your ribs?

How do you stop wondering if his new girl ever hears him mumble my name in his sleep?

Because I know he did.

He used to.

One night, back when the weight of it all was too heavy and he couldn’t speak without choking, I held his face and whispered, “I’ll carry it if you can’t.”

And he let me.

For years.

And now he carries none of it.

No trace.

No guilt.

Just highlight reels and trophy cases and clean slates.

Tell me how to stop hating the fact that I still check the scores.

Still read the injury reports like they’re eulogies for the version of him I used to know.

Still get sick when I see her in my spot.

Still feel the phantom weight of his championship ring on my hand—because he promised it’d be mine first.

Tell me how.

Tell me how to let go of someone who never really said goodbye.

How to unlove someone who was mine in every way but the one that counted.

How to walk away from a future I was halfway through building in my head.

Because I don’t want him back.

I don’t.

But I do want to scream.

I want to scream until the world knows that before he was theirs, he was mine.

And I don’t want him back—

But I want the version of myself I lost when he left.

The girl who believed that loyalty was enough.

That love could outlast ambition.

I don’t want him back.

But I want to stop waking up thinking I still matter.

I want to stop hurting like I do.

I want to stop being the silent casualty of a dream I helped build.

So tell me how.

Please, God—just tell me how.

[meropeeonmee]

Chapter 4 of THE LEAK low-key got me giggling and kicking my feet fr

[meropeeonmee]

Please put your fics under a read more. They are too long for you to not be doing that.

Thank you and i’ll definitely take note of that! I’m still new here in writing, so if you don’t mind, could you kindly explain how the ‘Read More’ feature works and what it’s for?

[meropeeonmee]

CHAPTER 3 (PART 2): THE LEAK ( LOML ANNOUNCEMENT )

Description: A leaked demo reignites the internet’s obsession with a pop star’s rumored romance with an NFL quarterback—and exposes the heartbreak they both tried to bury.

CHAPTER 3 (PART 1)!

MASTERLIST

@FERNLETRÁN

Liked by @Joeyb_9, @oliviarodrigo, @Harrystyles, @phoebebridgers and 3,024,117 others

FERNLETRÁN LOML, tonight at midnight.

View Comments . . .

@user9823__: girl said ✨subtle trauma dump✨ and logged off.

@ava.wav: 🤭🫠🫠🫠🫠🫠

@burnbookbaby: she dated captain america and STILL ended up the one crying on the floor. feminism is a lie

@devonleecarson: My Girl 💕

@emowifiblues: me listening to this while fully in a relationship like yeah… he could destroy me too

@girliepopgraves: someone check on chris evans he’s about to be soft-canceled by a ballad again

@user4839crying: girl soft launched a heartbreak and hard launched my spiral

@oliviarodrigo: 🤍🤍🤍

@griefwithlipgloss: someone check on Joe. someone check on Froy. someone tackle Chris.

@burnbookburnt: not her dedicating a whole song to america’s ass. we need peace.

@user32819: girl you can’t just drop the loss of my life and go to sleep like we’re not gonna spiral

@thatgirlwiththetheory: not me hearing “it was legendary it was momentary” and immediately thinking about chris, froy AND joe

@justinbieber: Cool

@sadgirldirector: this is the La La Land breakup letter but more poetic and slightly more unhinged

@fernsfroyera: the silence from the Froy camp is so loud it’s making me believe again

@chrisevanwife: America’s Ass is officially CLOSED for business.

@marriedtothetrauma: we embroidered the memories of the time I was away” i can’t believe she made long distance sound romantic and homicidal in the same verse

@selenagomez: you did it exactly how you were supposed to 💌

@Popbaby98: “i wish i could un-recall how we almost had it all” soo is the engagement rumorstrue?

@user726373: not y’all turning one poem into a three-act fanfiction 💀

@joeburrowupdates: joey we see that like 👀

@burnbookquotesdaily: this is for the version of you that loved quietly and broke privately

@ladygaga: Collab soon

@burnbookera: JOE BURROW PICK YOUR GIRL UP BEFORE SHE WRITES A PART TWO I’M BEGGING

@Girlypink: the timeline matches: she wrote this post-label fight, mid-joe soft era, post-chris/lily james mess 👀

Load more comments . . .

Twitter/X

@froyfiles

am i the only one thinking abt froy rn be fr

22.8K Likes • 6.3K Retweets

@Fern4ever

why is chris evans lowkey creeping around twitter after fernanda dropped LOML

18.7K Likes • 6.4K Retweets

→ @spilledguts77: lmao I saw his likes page

→ @cryinginfenty: sir it’s been YEARS why are you liking heartbreak tweets

→ @fernsfling: he typed her name and scrolled like he was checking stock prices

@highinfemininity

she dated chris evans like a villain arc, dated froy like a fever dream, and now she’s in her joe burrow era like it’s a redemption plot

29.1K Likes • 9.7K Retweets

@livelaughburnbook

is the pandemic really hitting us right why is my girl ferns relapsing over a man who wears khakis and doesn’t post captions

28.4K Likes • 10.7K Retweets

@cryinginheels

why are you guys STILL delusional about froy and fernanda?? isn’t he allegedly dating richard madden?? be serious

37.5K Likes • 14.2K Retweets

→ @burntmenace: you can’t just erase froynanda because he maybe kissed a british man

@burnbookera

LOML stands for “Love of My Lawsuit” bc no way she cleared that second verse without legal threats from her past

16.8K Likes • 3.4K Retweets

@popcultparanoia

fernanda this is not the 2016 pop star party la girl we used to know…

33.4K Likes • 12.8K Retweets

@burnbookhistorian

if this was 2016 fernanda she would’ve gone live, cried for 3 minutes, leaked her own song, and said “oops”

41.2K Likes • 14.7K Retweets

→ @fernsdisasterera: and then tweeted “u guys didn’t hear that” like 10k people weren’t screen recording

→ @exposingnanda: girl was her own PR nightmare and we ATE IT UP

→ @ghostof2016: 2016 fernanda once leaked a demo and blamed it on “bad wifi”

@nostalgiafern

we didn’t take 2016 fernanda for granted. why is my girl all grown up… is captain america dih that good LMAO

38.9K Likes • 13.2K Retweets

@theorybrainrot

i bet you 100 bucks that taylor and fernanda are texting again bc NO human can produce that kind of bridge without unlocking deep feminine rage

29.4K Likes • 11.1K Retweets

@notthisagainplz

i miss when fernanda was problematic in latex. now she’s emotionally complex in knitwear

26.7K Likes • 9.9K Retweets

→ @traumachiccore: her fits went from “bad press” to “breakup brunch”

→ @cancelledinheels: she used to subtweet men. now she sings in lowercase

→ @lafernandaera: bring back the menace

HEADLINES

Is ‘LOML’ Fernanda’s Final Goodbye to Chris Evans? Fans Say the Bridge Isn’t Just a Metaphor”

With lyrics that feel surgical and timed just days after Chris was seen with Lily James, the internet is convinced Fernanda finally told her side—through melody.

Joe Burrow’s Subtle Support Sparks More Rumors After Fernanda’s Emotional Comeback Drop

A single like. No caption. No follow-up. But Joe’s silent digital nod to ‘LOML’ was loud enough to send both pop girl and football Twitter into a spiral.

New Era Incoming? Fans Spot Hidden Clues in ‘LOML’ Cover Hinting at Fernanda’s Next Album

From handwritten timestamps to her signature lowercase font, fans believe Fernanda is breadcrumbing a full-blown album—and LOML is just chapter one.

Fernanda Releases ‘LOML’ Days After Chris & Lily Resurface Together: Twitter Connects the Dots, As Always

The timeline is a little too convenient — fans are convinced Fernanda’s emotional comeback wasn’t just a coincidence, but a quiet response to that London sighting.

New Era Incoming? Fans Spot Hidden Clues in ‘LOML’

Fans are dissecting the LOML cover like it’s a breakup crime scene — from faded initials to barely-visible timestamps, theories are flying that this isn’t a one-off single… it’s the opening chapter of Fernanda’s next emotional era.

Joe Burrow Likes Fernanda’s Tweet. Fans Say She’s a Distraction, Stans Say It’s the Plot of Her Next Album

One like from Joe and suddenly it’s war. Sports bros are calling her a curse, while Fernanda’s stans swear she’s just soft-launching her heartbreak lore in real time — starring a quarterback who doesn’t talk, but feels.

From Private Rings to Public Silence: Inside the Alleged Engagement Between Chris Evans and Fernanda Letrán

They never confirmed it. But the timeline was suspiciously tight. Now, years later and one LOML drop deep, fans are reexamining Fernanda’s quietest heartbreak — and wondering if Chris Evans was the man behind the music all along.

Too Sad, Too Soon? LOML Sparks Debate Over Whether Fernanda’s Comeback Is Brave or Just Brutally Timed

With Chris and Lily reuniting, Joe quietly lurking, and no promo in sight, LOML dropped like an emotional grenade. Some call it raw and brave. Others say it’s calculated pain. Either way — she’s not whispering anymore.

Reddit

r/Am I the only one who still thinks the Chris Evans x Lily James situationship was PR or just plain weird???

u/spilledtheburnbook

Posted 3 hours ago • 4.2K upvotes • 1.3K Comments

I know we’ve all moved on but sometimes I wake up at 3am and remember when Chris Evans and Lily James were randomly photographed together in London at like 2AM outside a private club and we were just supposed to believe that was real and normal?? Like no context. No follow up. No quotes. No red carpet. Just blurry TMZ photos, them “accidentally” walking together in the exact same clothes the next morning, and the internet exploded for 2 weeks before everyone forgot???

And meanwhile Fernanda disappeared from the face of the earth around that same time after being seen wearing a very non-subtle ring and tweeting stuff like “I guess forever meant until it got inconvenient.” Everyone said she and Chris were never official but if you were around during that era you KNOW the vibes were off.

Also Lily never addressed it. Chris never addressed it. There was no denial, no confirmation, just silence and weird tension and a bunch of people pretending that wasn’t messy as hell.

I’m not saying it was fake but I AM saying it felt like when your ex starts posting thirst traps with the girl he told you not to worry about and you’re forced to deactivate.

TLDR: The Lily + Chris “thing” never felt real, and I think Fernanda’s music is the only place we’re ever gonna get the truth.

Top Comments:

u/fernsleftboot: literally the weirdest non-relationship i’ve ever witnessed in real time. she got the headlines. he got the silence. fern got the trauma.

u/cryinginla: it was giving “my PR team needs a distraction” not “we’re in love”

u/popcultsoftlaunch: if they were real why does it feel like no one remembers it happening unless they were on Twitter in 2020 at 2am

u/notmycaptain: fernanda never tweeted through that breakup and that says everything

u/froywasinnocent: y’all act like that wasn’t the same month fern wiped her socials and joe burrow suddenly started showing up in the background of things

u/luxuryproblems: i mean we all know fernanda is messy as f*ck. like this girl thrives on emotional damage and dramatic eyeliner. i still don’t get why evans stuck with her for as long as he did??

r/Joe Burrow and Fernanda Letrán?

u/softlaunchdetective

Posted 1 hour ago • 5.2K upvotes • 2.4K Comments

Top Comments:

u/justarandomlistener: it’s not even confirmed they’re dating y’all are reaching off a song and a blurry hoodie 💀

u/qblosscontrol: we were ONE good O-line away from a ring and now he’s out here dating a Tumblr girl

u/lipglossinlockerroom: why are y’all acting like she showed up in a Bengals jersey and called shotgun? he LITERALLY breathed near her

u/retireheralready: she’s been problematic since 2016 idk why people are pretending this is cute now

u/defensivefern: even if it’s true… she’s unproblematic now. lowercase era. let her cook.

u/lostthelockerroom: imagine being his teammate and finding out your QB’s situationship is trending on stan Twitter

u/joesneutralface: joe hasn’t even blinked on social media y’all doing Olympic-level reaching

u/maddenovermenace: i don’t wanna see her at our stadium unless she’s selling hotdogs or leaving

u/stopdatingpopstars: first the rehab, now the rebrand girlfriend. bro pick a struggle.

u/cleatsandcurses: he’s not even holding her hand and they’re already blaming her for next season 💀

u/helmetsonfeelingsoff: this is why we don’t win rings. man’s distracted by glitter and metaphors

[meropeeonmee]

CHAPTER 3 (PART 1): THE LEAK - Joe Burrow

Description: A leaked demo reignites the internet’s obsession with a pop star’s rumored romance with an NFL quarterback—and exposes the heartbreak they both tried to bury.

AUTHORS NOTE: THIS TOOK ME A WHILE HUH? This is a veryyyyyy long chapte, have fun reading!

CHAPTER 3 (PART 2) !

MATERLIST

The sun was already too high by the time Fernanda opened her eyes. It slid through the cracks of the blackout curtains like it had snuck in just to find her, spilling across the edge of the hotel bed in a gentle diagonal. For a moment, she didn’t move. Her arm was flung over her forehead, bare skin soft against linen, the only sound in the room the low hum of the A/C and the distant, muffled rhythm of a city that never slept long enough to dream.

Her phone was face down on the side table, vibrating every few seconds like it had something urgent to say but didn’t want to speak up. She didn’t reach for it.

Instead, she stared at the ceiling. Not thinking. Not empty. Just… paused.

Last night had been fine. Actually, more than fine. She’d looked good. Felt steady. Didn’t flinch at the flashbulbs. Didn’t let the questions dig. She’d even sung—unplanned, unbothered. And she didn’t hate it. That alone was growth.

But then she made the mistake of opening Instagram. Not to post—she rarely did anymore unless it was required. But just to scroll, passively, to remind herself that the world was still spinning in filtered images and sponsored captions.

She hadn’t even searched his name.

But there it was.

A blurred shot of Chris Evans and Lily James leaving the same hotel lobby. Maybe London. Maybe Paris. Maybe nothing. Somewhere only they know.

But people didn’t post “maybe.”

They posted “new couple alert 👀,”

“he’s clearly upgraded,”

“she looks like Fernanda if Fernanda had her sh*t together.”

And suddenly, the air in her hotel room wasn’t still anymore. It was the kind of silence that made everything louder—the hum of the AC, the ticking clock, even the sound of her own heartbeat. Her heart pounded like it was screaming for something it couldn’t name—just loud, desperate, and alive.

She sat up slowly, pulling the sheets around her like armor, her eyes finding the edge of her suitcase, the clothes she’d tossed over the chair the night before. Her dress was still draped over it—creased now, not glamorous, just fabric. Just something she wore.

Chris had been a chapter she never thought she’d open, much less reread. She was twenty-two when they met—wild in that sharpened, vulnerable way, a paradox of high heels and hot takes, constantly dragged by the media, constantly expected to either apologize or explode. And he was… quiet. Solid. Steady in the kind of way that made her realize she’d spent years dating men who ran on chaos because it made her feel like she was still alive.

With Chris, things slowed. Not in a boring way. In a grounding way. Like he was a fireplace in the middle of winter, and for the first time in her career, she could exhale without being told it was too loud.

She changed for him—though not because he asked her to.

She started sleeping early. Reading. Drinking less. Listening more. She stopped tweeting impulsively. She stopped fighting strangers in comment sections. She started seeing herself the way he saw her—not as a story, but as a person. And maybe that’s what scared her. Because when someone sees you that clearly, you either grow into it or you start to shrink.

She didn’t shrink.

But she outgrew the version of herself that needed that kind of calm to survive. She found her own stillness. Her own spine.

And then, just like that, it ended.

He said she didn’t need him the way she used to.

She said that was the point.

No slammed doors. No final fights. Just two people sitting on a balcony, one too old to start over again, the other too young to stay still forever. She remembered the way his hand felt on the back of her neck when he kissed her goodbye, the weight of it. Not romantic. Not desperate. Just… final.

And now he was allegedly dating someone blonde and British and uncomplicated, the internet’s favorite type of revisionist history. The kind of person people could root for without having to defend it.

She didn’t feel jealousy exactly.

She felt replaced in theory.

In concept.

Because she knew what people would say:

Lily James makes sense. Fernanda was a phase.

A lesson. A mistake he made once before remembering who he was.

And yet, none of that reflected the truth. The real truth. The one that never made it into the threads and think pieces and YouTube commentary videos.

The truth that he loved her. Quietly. Patiently. Fiercely.

That she loved him back.

That they both tried. That trying wasn’t enough.

She padded into the bathroom barefoot, her voice still stuck in her throat from sleep, or maybe restraint. Her reflection greeted her in the mirror like an echo. Smudged eyeliner, pillow-creased cheek, hair falling in soft waves down her back. She looked like a woman now.

Not the messy popstar who’d made headlines for feuding with other girls and accidentally flashing paparazzi in 2016. Not the teenage girl who wrote diss tracks from her bedroom and cried backstage at her first award show because someone she admired called her annoying. Not even the girlfriend who once called Chris “the calm after the storm” in a profile that would be dissected for months.

This version of Fernanda was quieter.

And not in the way the world demanded women be quiet. But in the way a woman becomes quiet when she no longer feels the need to defend her place in the room.

She washed her face slowly. Brushed her teeth. Tied her hair up.

She ignored the missed calls. Skipped the texts from her publicist. Let her assistant stew in the panic of “Fern, have you seen the internet?”

She didn’t need to reply. Not yet. Maybe not ever. The world would spin itself dizzy whether she said anything or not.

By the time she pulled on a hoodie and opened the curtains fully, New York had already moved on. The streets below pulsed with that unbothered rhythm that only big cities had—cars honking, dogs barking, coffee cups balanced on window sills, someone yelling into their phone on the corner like the rest of the world didn’t exist.

She poured herself a glass of water. Sat on the windowsill.

Scanned the headlines half-heartedly.

Most were about last night. About her. And not in the way that used to scare her.

“FERNANDA LETRÁN UNEXPECTEDLY PERFORMS AT PRIVATE NYC EVENT – IS A COMEBACK LOOMING?”

“THE VELVET DRESS. THE SONG. THE LOOK. THE MOMENT.”

“FERNANDA LETRÁN SINGS ‘CAN’T TAKE MY EYES OFF YOU’ AND THE INTERNET LOSES ITS MIND.”

One gossip account had posted a video of her stepping out of the SUV. Slow motion. Rain. Lights. A ridiculous caption underneath:

She’s not the moment. She’s the memory.

Fernanda laughed. It was small, but real.

Then her eyes caught another tweet—one she hadn’t expected. A grainy photo. Her on stage.

In the background, slightly out of focus, someone stood still—tall, calm, watching her with a kind of unshaken stillness that felt too intentional to ignore. He blended into the crowd, dressed as casually as the rest of them, but there was something about the way he stood—grounded, unconcerned, quietly separate from the noise—that stayed with her longer than it should have.

Even through the blur, she could make out the stubble along his jaw—barely there, but enough to soften his face in a way that made him seem older, more lived-in than the curated image she vaguely remembered from highlight reels. And now that she had seen him in person, even briefly, that detail clicked—he wasn’t trying to impress anyone. He wasn’t trying at all.

The tag confirmed what she already knew.

Joe Burrow.

She didn’t zoom in. Didn’t screenshot. She just stared for a moment, letting the image settle in her chest like a pebble dropped in still water.

He’d asked her about Batman. That was the moment it shifted—subtly, but enough. She hadn’t expected that from him, especially not in that room, not from someone like him. Most men in those spaces led with forced compliments, self-referencing jokes, or some thinly veiled attempt to connect their lives to hers. But he had just asked, almost shyly, if Robert Pattinson was nice in real life. If the rumor that they were friends was true. He hadn’t even tried to make it charming. It just was.

And now, knowing what she hadn’t known then, it made even more sense—he was recovering. The ACL tear, the rehab, the months of physical therapy. Someone had mentioned it in passing at the party, and she’d tucked it away, but now it came back in sharper focus. He had no business walking around New York like that—let alone standing through a crowded industry event—but he did, unbothered and unannounced.

For a second, she’d wondered what it must’ve taken to get on that plane, to get through the event, to be still healing and still choose to show up. Maybe his recovery was going better than expected. Or maybe he just needed a night that wasn’t about the comeback.

Either way, it made her look at him differently.

She turned her phone over and let the screen go dark. That wasn’t her story. Not now. Maybe not ever. But still, something about that moment stayed with her—not because it was cinematic or dramatic or fate wrapped in flashbulbs, but because it felt like something real had passed beside her in a room full of smoke and mirrors. And instead of chasing it, she let it move on. Quiet. Undemanding. Just in case.

But maybe twenty minutes later—after she had gone to the kitchen, reheated a croissant, taken two bites, abandoned it, wandered back to the couch, and stared at the ceiling—she turned her phone back over.

Not because she was thinking about him. Obviously not. That would be ridiculous. She was just… curious. About the timing. The injury. The photo. She was simply fact-checking.

She opened Safari and typed in a completely normal, totally detached search query:

“Joe Burrow injury recovery timeline 2021.”

A few articles came up—ones about his rehab schedule, some local news outlets quoting his physical therapist, and an ESPN piece that praised his quiet work ethic and called him “ahead of schedule.”

She kept scrolling.

Then she saw it.

A headline tucked neatly between player stats and practice footage:

“Joe Burrow and longtime girlfriend reportedly split earlier this year.”

Her thumb hovered.

Then, as any rational human being would, she tapped.

The article was vague. No names. No dramatics. Just a polite “sources say” and some references to timelines.

She blinked, locked her phone, leaned back against the couch, and muttered a completely unaffected, “Okay. Weird. But whatever.”

Exactly ten seconds passed.

Then she unlocked her phone again.

Opened Instagram.

Typed his name into the search bar—just “Joe B,” because efficiency was key—and clicked on the first tagged post that came up.

She scrolled quickly, casually, in the way one does when one is not stalking, until she nearly liked a post from three weeks ago, panicked, and tossed her phone across the couch as if it had personally betrayed her.

“Nope,” she hissed, catching it mid-air with reflexes she didn’t know she had. “I’m not one of those girls.”

And she wasn’t.

She wasn’t interested. She wasn’t invested.

She was simply conducting light research. Casually. Elegantly. Like a woman with boundaries and self-respect and exactly zero crushes.

And maybe she skimmed the comments on a fan-run page.

And maybe she paused a little too long on a photo of him in a hoodie, hair unstyled, holding a coffee, looking suspiciously like someone who listened well and didn’t post about it after.

And maybe—maybe—she said, to no one, in the quietest possible voice,

“Of course he just got out of something serious. That tracks.”

But that was it. She wasn’t spiraling.

She wasn’t spiraling at all. She was just informed. Girl math.

—

The brunch was invitation-only—of course it was—and tucked inside a loft that pretended not to care how exclusive it was, all raw brick and minimalist floral arrangements and seating charts that just happened to place the most photographed people in the most photographable corners.

Fernanda arrived precisely twelve minutes late—enough to be noticed but not gossiped about. Her assistant had offered to come. She declined.

She wore a deep slate-blue slip dress barely visible beneath a boxy black blazer, her hair twisted back in a no-nonsense sweep. The sunglasses stayed on until the lighting demanded otherwise, and even then, her eyes didn’t linger. It wasn’t an entrance. It was an exit disguised as a presence. She wasn’t trying to turn heads—she was hoping not to be part of the conversation at all.

As soon as she entered, conversations shifted—not dramatically, just enough. A pause here. A laugh cut short. People looking without looking. The polite choreography of attention. She didn’t scan the room. She didn’t need to. She already knew the faces that showed up at events like these. Industry veterans. Rising stars. Power-adjacent men in monochrome suits who whispered about “brand alignment” like it was sacred scripture. Producers who used to call her “firecracker” in 2016. Stylists who had once begged to dress her and now pretended they hadn’t. A new generation of actresses who looked at her like a cautionary tale in mascara.

Someone passed her a mimosa. She took it without looking at who handed it over.

She slid into her seat at the long central table—beside someone she vaguely recognized from an A24 film and across from a woman who had just directed a critically acclaimed series about grief and girlhood. The conversation was soft and intentional, the kind of dialogue that knew how to find its way into Variety pull quotes. When someone asked how she was, she said “fine,” which in this room meant still valuable.

It didn’t take long.

“So,” said a tall executive with skin like porcelain and a smile like a trademark, tapping her glass with two fingers, “is the heartbreak album coming?”

Fernanda didn’t blink. Didn’t smile. She tilted her head slightly, thoughtful, her gaze unreadable behind her lashes. Then she shrugged. One shoulder. Slow. Elegant. Dismissive without being impolite.

A few at the table laughed like she’d delivered a punchline. She hadn’t.

The director across from her, the one with the grief series, raised a brow. “So that’s a yes?”

Fernanda picked up her mimosa and took a sip like it was the only thing in the room worth responding to.

Someone leaned in—an A&R rep from another label, one who’d tried to poach her during her most chaotic year. “Just saying,” he murmured, “if you dropped something even close to last night’s energy… the game wouldn’t survive it.”

She didn’t answer. Just stared past him, eyes fixed on the soft white flowers drooping over the center of the table. Hydrangeas. Beautiful and fragile. They wilted fast.

The topic shifted, as topics always did in rooms like this—politely, with precision. Soon people were whispering about another scandal, someone’s secret engagement, and the back-end data from a new single that was allegedly “underperforming, but in a cool way.” Fernanda listened with half an ear, her expression perfectly neutral, one hand curled loosely around her glass.

But a word kept echoing underneath it all, persistent and quietly invasive in a way that made her skin prickle even beneath the lights—heartbreak, said not with empathy or understanding but with the easy detachment of someone turning a feeling into a trend, a talking point, a storyline they could trace on a chart.

They treated it like a genre she had mastered, like a branding tool she was expected to wield again now that the song had hit a nerve, as if her grief belonged to the public and was once again available for download.

The way they said it—soft, loaded, expectant—made her realize they didn’t want healing; they wanted her to bleed elegantly, consistently, and profitably, as if closure was boring and anguish made better art.

So she excused herself early, not out of rudeness or rebellion, but because staying any longer felt like handing over parts of herself she hadn’t even fully reclaimed yet, and because no amount of poise could protect her from the quiet, exhausting truth that they weren’t celebrating her—they were circling her, waiting for the next break to write about.

The label meeting was at 4:30. She almost didn’t go.

But Fernanda knew better than to ghost her own career. She walked in alone, face bare, hair in a sleek low bun, a long trench coat thrown over a plain black top. She didn’t greet anyone with hugs. Just nods.

The room was full: her manager, her A&R rep, two execs from the digital marketing side, and someone new from the branding team who smelled like ambition and almond perfume.

“We just want to float a few ideas,” her manager began, which in label-speak meant prepare to be sold to.

They showed her a deck—soft colors, aesthetic moodboards. “Fernanda 2.0” in bold. Talk of authentic vulnerability, of controlled intimacy, of a modern renaissance for pop women reclaiming their narrative.

They played a clip from her performance at the party—iPhone footage, shaky but moving.

And then the pitch: drop a single. Maybe a live version of “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” as a teaser. Roll it out with a minimalistic cover. A campaign built around silence and reemergence. The word “intentional” was used at least six times.

Then came the kicker.

“Or,” said the almond-scented strategist, smiling like she was suggesting a toast, “we lean into the mystery-man narrative. The internet’s obsessed. It’s tasteful. We don’t name names—we let them fill in the blanks. Implied muses are hot right now.”

Fernanda was quiet for a long moment.

Then she leaned forward, one elbow on the table, her voice steady and soft.

“I didn’t survive the noise just to be used by it again.”

Silence. Then, a nervous laugh from the intern taking notes. The execs glanced at each other.

“I’m not saying no,” Fernanda added, standing now, collecting her things. “I’m just saying not like this.”

She left before they could decide how to repackage her resistance as part of the pitch.

That night, the rain came back—not a storm, not dramatic or insistent, just a quiet, steady rhythm against the windowpane, the kind of soft repetition that matched the stillness in her chest, the kind that invited thought without demanding it. Fernanda sat curled in the corner of the rooms wide windowsill, legs drawn beneath her, her sweats slightly too long and the faded T-shirt on her shoulders still holding the faintest scent of a different time, not because she missed the past but because softness was rare and she knew how to hold onto it when she found it.

The city beyond the glass was blurred and glowing, the lights from distant buildings bleeding into the fog, like a watercolor version of New York —muted, restless, unreal—and inside the room, everything felt too quiet to sleep, too late to move, too early to reach for something new. Her laptop lay beside her unopened, her phone buzzing once with some calendar reminder she didn’t bother to read, and for reasons she didn’t overanalyze, she opened her browser and typed in his name.

Joe Burrow.

She didn’t know what she was looking for—maybe just proof that what had happened the night before had actually happened, that the conversation they’d shared wasn’t a byproduct of champagne or low lighting or the surreal filter of parties where people wore charm like armor. The screen filled with interviews, clips, slow-moving thumbnails of post-game pressers and podcasts and sideline shots where he looked mostly the same: hoodie up, shoulders relaxed, eyes steady but distant, not uninterested, just quiet in a way the world didn’t often allow men like him to be.

And as she clicked through the videos—listening, watching, observing without really meaning to—she found no shift in tone, no mask slipping into place, no version of him more polished than the one she’d already seen. There was no change between the man who stood under the chandeliers and asked her about Batman and the one who sat in these clips answering questions with long pauses and unhurried honesty; no air of performance, no curated persona trying to fit a mold. He didn’t seem to be trying to charm anyone, didn’t adjust his cadence to the room or throw words around just to fill silence. He was just him.

And maybe it was that consistency—so rare in the world she’d spent years trying to survive—that caught her off guard more than anything else. Maybe it was the fact that he hadn’t tried to become more likable in the clips or more clever or more captivating, just remained exactly as he had been: thoughtful, quiet, a little awkward in a way that didn’t need fixing. And for the first time in a very long time, Fernanda felt the unfamiliar sensation of recognizing someone not because they reminded her of something, but because they didn’t remind her of anyone at all.

She didn’t finish the clip. She didn’t watch the next one. She didn’t save the tab or take a screenshot or send it to anyone under the pretense of irony.

She just sat there, the glow of the screen fading into sleep mode beside her, the city still whispering through the glass, and the rain—soft and rhythmic—continuing its quiet confession against the window, while something in her that had felt stretched thin for months slowly, silently began to return to shape.

It had been nearly a year since Fernanda last saw Ava in person. Not that anyone would’ve noticed—on the surface, there were still signs of life between them. The occasional like on a birthday post, the rare comment under an old tour photo, a one-minute voice note that sat unopened in Fernanda’s inbox for nearly a month before she finally replied with nothing more than a thumbs-up emoji. It wasn’t tension. It wasn’t betrayal. It wasn’t anything dramatic enough to name. Just space. Unannounced and quiet, the kind that builds slowly in the spaces between missed calls and “we should catch up” texts that never become plans. They had been close once, closer than most—threaded into each other’s routines, each other’s work, each other’s memories. But time is cruel in how subtly it pulls people apart. And eventually, it just happened: they drifted. The way people do when life becomes noise—when schedules fill up, when silence feels safer than vulnerability, when your own head starts to sound louder than anything outside of it.

But that night, after hours spent staring at a half-written song she couldn’t finish and lyrics that didn’t sound like her anymore, Fernanda sat alone in her hotel room, legs curled beneath her, and scrolled through her messages until she found Ava’s name. No unread texts. No ongoing thread. Just a blank space waiting. And without overthinking it, without knowing exactly what she wanted to say, she typed:

“You up?”

It was 10:42 p.m.

Ava: Always. Want me to come over?

Fernanda hesitated before typing back:

“Yeah. Please.”

They sat on the floor of Fernanda’s apartment, cross-legged with takeout boxes scattered between them like offerings from a simpler time. Ava still looked the same—hair pulled up messily, hoodie three sizes too big, eyeliner that never smudged even when she cried. Fernanda looked different, but Ava didn’t comment on it. She never had to. That was part of the comfort.

“I miss this,” Ava said, breaking open a fortune cookie and not even reading it. “Us. Talking without cameras.”

“I didn’t mean to disappear,” Fernanda murmured.

“I know,” Ava said. “You just started needing armor. And I didn’t fit under it.”

Fernanda nodded, picking at the rice with her chopsticks. “Sometimes I think I forgot how to be soft.”

“You didn’t,” Ava said gently. “You just got tired of being punished for it.”

It was the kind of line that could only come from someone who had seen every version of her—who knew the reckless 2016 interviews, the crying phone calls at 3 a.m., the giddy voice notes after first dates, the diary entries turned into songs.

Fernanda looked up. “Everyone thinks I’ve changed.”

Ava shrugged. “You have. So have I. That’s not a bad thing.”

“But they think it’s because I got broken,” Fernanda whispered. “Like the old me was a lie, and this new me is just sad and tame.”

Ava tilted her head. “Or maybe the old you was raw and loud, and this version of you is just… healing. People don’t know what to do with that. They think growth has to come with glitter.”

Fernanda didn’t respond. She just sat with it. Let it settle.

Then, softly: “You’re still my only real friend.”

“I know,” Ava said. “And you’re still you. Even if you’re quiet about it now.”

—

The next morning, Fernanda had another meeting at the label—nothing dramatic on paper, just a quiet block in her calendar labeled creative strategy, which was always code for something bigger. She showed up in muted tones, her hair swept into a low, efficient twist, glasses perched on her face like armor. No entourage. No dramatics. Just her and a coat that looked more expensive than it was.

It wasn’t meant to be a high-pressure conversation—just projections, possible tour talk, some vague suggestions about reentering the public consciousness now that the worst of the rumors had faded. The kind of meeting that only pretended to be casual because everyone in it had already decided what they hoped she’d say.

But on the way to the second-floor conference room, she passed a hallway she hadn’t walked in years.

It wasn’t the kind of place you ended up by accident. A narrow corridor off the main atrium, dimly lit, the walls lined with framed photos—landmarks in the label’s history. Platinum plaques, tour posters, vintage magazine spreads. Faces that had once ruled charts now frozen in time. Some she’d known personally. Some had treated her like competition. Some had warned her. Some had vanished.

She hadn’t appeared on that wall in years.

But there—tucked near the corner, beneath a flickering light and half-shadowed by the bend in the hallway—was a photograph she hadn’t seen since her early twenties. Her first tour.

She stopped walking.

The assistant in front of her paused, glancing over her shoulder. “Everything okay?”

Fernanda didn’t answer right away. “Yeah. Just… give me a second.”

The hallway was quiet. That kind of manufactured quiet that came from too much insulation and too many closed doors. The air smelled like pine cleaner and recycled ambition.

She stared at the photo.

Nineteen. Glitter eyeshadow. Smudged lipstick. A ripped fishnet sleeve. Her arm thrown around her guitarist’s shoulders like nothing could hurt her. And a smile—wild, crooked, a little cracked around the edges—that felt so loud she could almost hear it.

That girl had meant everything she said. Had sung every note like it could break or save her. She hadn’t known what selling out meant. She just knew how to feel things too hard and too publicly. She’d been called impulsive. Too open. Too much.

But she’d also been free.

Fernanda stepped closer, brushing her fingertips gently along the edge of the glass—not on her own face, but just beside it. The space in the frame no one ever noticed.

She didn’t miss the fame. But sometimes she missed that version of herself. The one who hadn’t yet learned how to shrink.

Her earpiece buzzed.

“Fernanda, they’re ready for you upstairs.”

She gave the photo one last look. Then turned and walked toward the elevator, something quiet settling behind her ribs—part memory, part decision.

She wouldn’t write from nostalgia. Not from the version of herself the world had turned into a storyline. She would write from the space just outside the frame—the part that had never been curated, captioned, or controlled.

The elevator ride was slow.

Fernanda stood near the back, hands in her coat pockets, eyes on the floor numbers blinking upward in soft, synthetic light. Her reflection in the brushed steel looked back at her like someone she was still becoming. Not yet defined. Not quite comfortable. But still standing.

When the doors opened, she stepped into a smaller conference room than she expected—long table, filtered morning light through frosted glass, two A&R reps seated on opposite ends like they were waiting for a verdict. A screen behind them displayed a paused slide:

Fernanda Letrán — Q4 Vision Meeting: Creative Concepts & Tour Projections

She didn’t react. But something shifted in her chest—just slightly, like a piano note held too long.

“Morning,” one of the reps said, standing to greet her. “Thanks for coming in. You look great.”

“Thanks,” she said, calm but distant, lowering herself into the chair at the end of the table. She crossed one leg over the other, her hand curling loosely around a pen she didn’t intend to use. The chair was leather. Too soft. She didn’t sink into it.

“We wanted to walk you through some of the early frameworks we’ve been discussing,” the second rep said, tapping his keyboard as the screen clicked forward. “Obviously, with the world still how it is, we’re not talking about hitting the road tomorrow. This is more about shaping the narrative now, so when it’s time, the foundation is already in motion.”

They were careful with their phrasing. Everyone in the industry was still walking around the idea of normal like it was a sleeping animal.

Fernanda nodded once. “So… 2023.”

“Realistically, yes,” the first one said. “Maybe soft shows in ‘22 if the climate allows it. But a proper world tour? Two years out, minimum. What we’re thinking now is vision. Momentum. Building anticipation.”

The screen changed again. Mockups. Logos. Concepts. Stylized fonts scrolling across a projected backdrop: photos of Fernanda—some old, some recent—filtered into grayscale, with taglines in serif print.

No more noise. Just music. Fernanda, as she is.

Another one followed.

She never disappeared. You just stopped listening.

Fernanda blinked once.

She didn’t speak.

The rep continued. “The point is, you don’t need a dramatic reinvention. You’re not starting over. But there’s power in the stillness. You’ve been quiet, and that’s created space. People want to know what you’ve been building in the dark.”

“And do they know I haven’t recorded anything yet?” Fernanda asked, her voice quiet, but sharp around the edges.

“Which is exactly why this is the right moment,” the other rep jumped in. “This isn’t about rollout. It’s about reclaiming voice. You start the story before the music drops. You control the lens.”

Fernanda looked at the screen again. One of the slides showed a mock stage design—minimalist lighting, stripped-down visuals, venues circled in places like Copenhagen, New York, Berlin, Tokyo. Cities that hadn’t been able to gather in years. Cities that might still not be ready.

“This is just the pitch,” the rep added quickly, as if sensing her unease. “No pressure. Just thoughts. You wouldn’t be committing to anything but the intention. The album would still come first.”

Fernanda didn’t answer right away.

Because this wasn’t just about songs or venues or strategy. It was about deciding what voice she would return with. Whether she even wanted to return at all.

People missed the idea of her. They missed the chaos, the commentary, the girl who had said too much and danced too hard and cried in public. The avatar of emotion they could quote on Twitter and sell back to her in gifs.

But did they miss her?

Did she?

She picked up her glass of water and took a slow sip. The silence didn’t feel uncomfortable—just unfinished.

Then she set the glass down, uncrossed her legs, and said carefully, “I’ll think about it.”

And that was it.

Not a yes. Not a no.

Just a held breath.

A promise that if she came back, it would be on her own terms—after she made something that sounded like truth, not product.

Something she could live with.

Something that didn’t just frame the fire—but honored what survived it.

Fernanda sat curled in the corner of the couch, knees tucked under her, the sleeves of her sweatshirt pulled over her hands. Her phone lay face up on the cushion beside her, screen still lit from the last thing she’d opened—a voice memo titled “For Nanda ♡.”

Ava’s voice came through the speaker, low and crackling. A quiet melody hummed between breaths—a song they used to half-joke about writing when they were fourteen, passing notebooks back and forth in the back of a classroom, dreaming out loud between math tests and after-school rides. Back then, everything felt like it could be a beginning. They didn’t know anything about the industry yet, just that music made things make sense. That song had never been finished. It barely had a chorus. But Fernanda remembered the feeling of it—the way they both believed, without saying it, that one day it might matter.

The recording wasn’t perfect. Ava sang a little flat. There was a laugh caught in the middle, like she hadn’t meant to take it seriously. But Fernanda closed her eyes and listened to it three times. Ava hadn’t said anything in the message. No “miss you.” No “you okay?” But the song was enough. That was how they always communicated best—between the lyrics, not outside them.

She let the message end and then, without really thinking, scrolled to the next notification.

Her mother’s voicemail.

She almost didn’t press play. Her thumb hovered over the button for a few seconds too long, like opening the message might open something else inside her. But she did.

“Mija,” her mother’s voice began—soft, measured, the kind of cadence she used when she didn’t want Fernanda to mistake gentleness for pity. “Just checking in on you. You don’t need to call back. I just—” A pause. A breath. “Don’t let the silence fool you. You’re not lost just because you’re quiet. You’ve always needed time to make the right noise.”

Fernanda swallowed. Sat up a little straighter.

“I know it feels like everyone’s watching. But they don’t really see. That’s something you give, not something they’re entitled to. So give it only when it’s yours.” The voice cracked slightly, not from sadness, but time. “Whatever you make next—it doesn’t have to save you. It just has to be true.”

The message ended.

Fernanda didn’t cry. She just nodded slowly, like her mother were sitting across from her, not hundreds of miles away. Like she could feel the permission in those words even though she hadn’t asked for it. She left the studio not with answers, but with fewer questions—and that, somehow, felt like movement.

She stayed in the stillness a while longer. No rush. No plan. Just the quiet.

Then, almost without thinking, she stood and walked across the room, barefoot, steps soft against the wood floor. Her fingers hovered for a second above the switch, then clicked on the small lamp in the corner. A warm pool of light spilled out, barely enough to fill the space, but just enough for what she needed. The piano sat near the wall, untouched for weeks. Maybe months. She hadn’t kept track. The top was dusted but closed, the keys hidden like a secret she wasn’t ready to tell.

Until now.

She lifted the lid.

The familiar creak, the small mechanical sigh of it, made something in her chest loosen.

She sat down.

Didn’t touch the keys right away. Just looked at them, like they might disappear if she reached too fast. There were so many versions of her that had sat at this same bench—frantic, devastated, euphoric, half-drunk, heartbroken, hungry. The girl who wrote angry anthems. The woman who wrote whisper-quiet confessions. The one who begged the music to save her. The one who didn’t need saving anymore.

She pressed a single note. Low. Heavy. Let it ring out.

Then another.

Then, without overthinking it, her hands moved slowly into a chord. Not one she recognized. Not one she planned. Just the shape that felt right.

Her voice came next, hesitant but steady. A hum, then a word. Not a full melody. Not a full verse. But something.

She reached for the small notebook on the windowsill—creased at the corners, pages half-full from years ago—and opened to a blank sheet.

She didn’t start with the chorus.

She started with a line.

Small. Honest. Maybe even forgettable.

But real.

“I wish I could un-recall how we almost had it all.”

The pencil scratched softly as she wrote it down. No fanfare. No overthinking. She didn’t even pause to check the rhyme. She just let the next thought come, like breath. Like muscle memory.

“Oh, what a valiant roar… what a bland goodbye…”

The chords darkened. She shifted down a half-step, instinctively.

“The coward claimed he was a lion… I’m combing through the braids of lies…”

Her breath shook—not from weakness, but from recognition. These weren’t lyrics. These were facts in verse. The kind of things you never say out loud because no one believes you unless it rhymes.

“‘I’ll never leave.’ ‘Never mind.’”

She stopped and looked at the ceiling, blinked a few times, then let her fingers find the next notes.

“Our field of dreams, engulfed in fire… your arson’s match, your somber eyes…”

The notebook lay open beside her now, ink bleeding slightly into the paper from how tightly she’d pressed the pen down.

“And I’ll still see it until I die…”

She slowed, but she didn’t stop.

“You’re the loss of my life.”

There it was.

The truth. Not the headline version. Not the palatable arc. Not the story the label wanted to spin. Just hers.

She stared at those words for a long time.

They weren’t clever. They weren’t sharp. But they were exact. They weren’t trying to redeem anyone. They weren’t looking for closure. They weren’t weaponized.

They were just honest.

And for once, that was enough.

She sat back, hands still hovering just above the keys. The silence around her wasn’t empty. It was full—of history, of grief, of something final that no longer asked to be rewritten. She wasn’t sure if it was a song. But it was real. And that mattered more.

In the corner, the lamp flickered slightly. The rest of the room remained still.

She didn’t get up right away.

She stayed there, letting the chords ring and fade, one by one.

Not because she was lost.

But because she finally knew where to begin.

The TV cast a soft blue glow across the room, flickering against the pale walls while muted commentary from a late-night sports show droned on without purpose. Outside, the Cincinnati streetlights bled through sheer curtains, the occasional car passing slow enough to blur. Joe sat at the edge of his bed, shoulders hunched, an ice pack velcroed around his right knee, condensation soaking into the hem of his sweatpants. One socked foot pressed flat against the cool hardwood, the other planted in the throw rug like he couldn’t decide which part of him wanted comfort.

His phone rested in his hand, screen dimmed from inactivity, though he hadn’t set it down in almost an hour.

The ache in his knee wasn’t unbearable tonight, just persistent. A steady reminder. Not just of the rehab schedule or the medical updates, but of how easily everything could stall. He was used to pushing through things—pain, pressure, noise. But now, he was being asked to wait. To sit still. To not do the very thing that made him feel alive.

And still, somehow, that wasn’t the thing keeping him up.

Earlier that day, the locker room had been loud, and not in the usual way. Not pregame nerves or midweek trash talk. Just noise. Jamarr had been the loudest, as always—his voice carrying across the space like it was engineered to fill arenas.

“Yo, Joey B out here locking eyes with a popstar like it’s a Nicholas Sparks movie!” Jamarr had shouted, holding his phone up like it was evidence in a trial. “Bro, you better call Robert Pattinson and tell him to step aside!”

Laughter exploded around them. Teammates throwing in their own edits. “Look at the body language!” “He’s fully mesmerized!” “You see the way he’s gripping that drink? Man was locked in.”

Joe had just smirked, rolling his eyes without lifting his head. “You all need better hobbies.”

But he hadn’t denied it.

And when the noise died down and the tape came off and the ice went on and the room emptied out—he didn’t forget it either.

Now, hours later, the photo was still stuck in his head. Not because of how he looked, or what people said. But because he remembered the moment. The actual one. Not the meme version. She had been singing. Just… singing. Not performing. Not selling anything. Like she wasn’t trying to impress anyone in the room.

He hadn’t realized he was watching her like that. But maybe that’s what made it real.

He shifted his leg, winced slightly as the ice pack pressed colder against his skin. His phone buzzed faintly—another group chat notification. He ignored it. Instead, his thumb hovered over the search bar. He typed her name before he could talk himself out of it.

Just a scroll.

Nothing dramatic.

A couple of photos. A recent headline. Then autoplay took over and started running a grainy clip—some old interview, probably from 2018 or 2019. Fernanda looked younger. Softer in the face, but sharper in tone. Her hair was messier, her voice quicker, her posture looser. Like she hadn’t learned to hold herself yet. Not in the way she did now.

He nearly skipped it.

Then her voice shifted midsentence—no warning, no big tonal shift. Just a pause. A recalibration.

“I don’t want to be defined by the things I hate,” she said, one shoulder lifting like the words weren’t meant to be profound. “I want to be defined by the things I love. That’s where joy lives.”

He didn’t smile. Didn’t analyze it.

He just breathed. Slowly.

And for the first time all night, the weight in his chest softened a little. Not because she said something groundbreaking. But because she said it like she believed it.

And belief was rare.

He watched a few seconds more, then closed the tab and set the phone face down on the nightstand. The hum of the TV still droned in the background, but he didn’t turn it off. He liked the flicker. It made the room feel less like waiting.

The ice pack had gone lukewarm now. His leg stiff beneath it.

He didn’t move.

Whatever that moment was—whatever part of her had meant those words—it wasn’t his. And he didn’t want to pretend it was. But something about it had found him anyway.

And tonight, that was enough.

She arrived before the team. No stylist, no assistant, no label exec with a latte and a fake smile. Just her—barefaced, hoodie zipped up to her chin, hair pulled into a low bun, sleeves of an old sweatshirt bunched at her wrists, her journal tucked under one arm like it was something sacred.

The city hadn’t fully woken yet. Neither had she.

She wasn’t here to make a hit. She wasn’t even sure she was here to make a song. LOML had already been written—at home, days ago, in the quiet hours after her mother’s voicemail and Ava’s half-finished melody had shaken something loose inside her. She hadn’t shown it to anyone. Hadn’t said the title out loud. Hadn’t decided what she wanted from it. But something in her knew it needed air. Even if just once.

She sat at the upright piano tucked into the corner of the room—an old one, a little out of tune, the kind with a soft pedal that made everything sound like memory. Her pen tapped lightly against the edge of the keys as she flipped open her journal, scanning the lyrics she already knew by heart.

“I wish I could un-recall how we almost had it all…”

She didn’t whisper the line. She just looked at it, breathing it in again like she needed to be sure it still hurt.

The room was still—dimly lit, faintly scented with velvet curtain dust, old coffee, and the hum of stale electricity. It wasn’t her usual studio. Too hollow. Too impersonal. But she hadn’t wanted the usual. She’d asked for a space where no one would talk, where no one would ask what it was about or who.

The producer, one of the few people she trusted, kept his head down as he set up the mic and checked the input levels. No pep talk. No expectations. Just a nod when it was time.

She stood in the booth, headphones over one ear, a page of lyrics curled in her palm like she didn’t want to let them go yet. The melody lived in her body now, delicate and frayed around the edges, and this wasn’t about chasing the perfect take. It was about seeing if she could survive the sound of it.

She didn’t sing loud. Didn’t perform. Her voice came low and clean, like a cut that hadn’t scabbed yet—steady, soft, reverent. No flourishes. No filter. Just the words.

“It was legendary…”

“…It was momentary…”

She didn’t try to make it sound polished. She wasn’t sure she wanted it to sound like a song anyone could sing back. This was hers. And for the first time, she wasn’t trying to translate it into something easier to carry.

Through the glass, the producer didn’t move. He let her finish the verse, then the chorus. That was all she had ready to record. No bridge yet. No outro. But she’d needed to say it out loud, to trap it in air.

When the last note faded, she stepped back. Slowly. Pulled off the headphones like she was waking from a long nap. The producer glanced up but didn’t ask how she felt or what she wanted next.

“Want to do another take?” he asked gently.

She looked down at the lyric sheet, then at the mic, then shook her head. “No… not tonight.”

“Okay.”

He saved the file under her initials and the date, just as she asked, and promised not to send it anywhere. She didn’t need anyone’s ears on it yet. Not even hers, maybe.

She left quietly. Hood up. Sunglasses on despite the hour. The weight in her chest still there—but different now. Centered. Less brittle. Like something had finally cracked open the right way.

Not to bleed.

But to breathe.

Somewhere across the Country, in a half-lit recovery room that smelled faintly of sweat, metal, and the citrus disinfectant they used on gym floors, Joe had his knee elevated and a cold wrap snug around the joint. The rehab suite was quiet, except for the low hum of conversation and the occasional squeak of sneakers on linoleum. He wasn’t really listening to anyone. His mind drifted the way it always did after training—tired, unfocused, running on that weird edge between physical calm and mental static.

Across the room, a practice intern was scrolling TikTok on mute, until a faint melody filtered out from his phone speaker. It wasn’t loud. Wasn’t even clear. But Joe heard something in it—something raw, unpolished, not quite finished. He didn’t look up at first. He just furrowed his brow, paused mid-reach for his water bottle.

The voice was familiar.

The intern noticed. “Oh—sorry, man. Didn’t mean to interrupt. I just saw this clip going around. Fernanda Letrán, I think? Someone said it’s a demo that leaked this week.”

Joe’s hand stilled in midair.

He didn’t ask for the link. Didn’t say her name out loud. He just gave a small nod and turned his attention back to the ice wrap, adjusting the strap across his thigh. But later—when the gym lights dimmed and the hallway fell quiet and he was alone again in his apartment—he found himself humming the melody under his breath. Not because it was catchy. But because it felt like something someone hadn’t meant for him to hear.

Something that hadn’t been ready yet.

Fernanda didn’t find out until the next morning. Her phone buzzed with a screenshot from Ava—no greeting, no “can you believe this,” just a fan tweet;

@LetranUpdate

“It was legendary / it was momentary / it meant everything to me…”

[blurry photo of Fernanda at a 2023 event]

LOML (leaked demo)

259.7k likes · 50.1k Retweets · 8.9K saves

She blinked at it. Once. Twice. Then stared.

Her heart didn’t pound. It deflated. Like something small and private had been torn out of her chest and flung across the room without warning. She didn’t panic. She didn’t scream. She just stood still in the kitchen, phone still in hand, and tried to remember the last time music had felt like a place instead of a product. Like something she could hold without watching it slip between fingers the moment someone else found it.

It wasn’t the first time something of hers had leaked. But this time it wasn’t a studio single or a rehearsed track. It was a demo. An unfinished one. No bridge. No mix. No name. Just a half-built truth whispered into a mic less than 48 hours ago.

And now it had a title.

LOML.

She hadn’t even decided if she liked that acronym. But someone else had.

She wasn’t sure how it got out. Maybe the rough file had been ripped straight off a studio computer. Maybe it was emailed to someone too quickly. Maybe it was played on the wrong speaker in the wrong room. It didn’t matter. It was out.

And people were already dissecting it like it was fair game.

The leak moved fast. Not like wildfire, but like an undertow—quiet, relentless. It wasn’t the kind of thing that trended on charts or made headlines overnight. It moved through curated TikToks with faded filters and whispered captions like “this part wrecked me.” Through Discord leaks and fan graphics with grainy photos and lyric overlays. Through Twitter threads analyzing who it was about.

Just one line.

They didn’t have the rest of it—just the one fragment where her voice cracked slightly, where the lyrics buckled under the weight of something too personal to be staged, the part she hadn’t filtered or sanded down, the part she hadn’t cleaned the emotion out of before she dared to hit record, and somehow that rawness, that imperfection, became the only thing they latched onto.

She didn’t sleep that night—not in the way people meant when they said they couldn’t sleep—but instead drifted in and out of that shapeless, static-filled haze where your mind loops through half-formed thoughts while your body lies perfectly still, humming with a tension you don’t have a name for, and every time she closed her eyes it felt like someone else was in the room with her, not physically, but spiritually—listening, watching, interpreting the unspoken parts of her before she even had the chance to understand them herself.

It wasn’t fear, not exactly, and it wasn’t embarrassment either—not the kind that stings with shame or awkwardness—but something heavier, older, quieter: grief, the kind that arrives when something soft and sacred has been taken before you were ready to give it, when a version of yourself you hadn’t even finished being yet gets dragged into the light and repackaged as spectacle.

It was grief for the girl who had sat at a piano in bare feet with no audience, no agenda, no armor, and whispered a truth so vulnerable she barely dared to hear it back, only to wake up the next morning and find it turned into noise—into narrative, into a hashtag, into something too many hands had already touched.

By morning, the responses started rolling in, not like support but like a press cycle dressed in affection: Ava’s message came first, clipped and direct—“They love it. You know that, right?”—as if that made the exposure worth it, as if love from strangers could counter the hollow feeling of being prematurely unwrapped.

Then her manager’s voice memo, chipper and unnervingly excited, came next, bubbling with that brand of PR optimism that made her skin prickle: “Honestly? This could be a blessing in disguise. People are talking. It’s all organic! No rollout stress!”—as if the chaos could be excused so long as it drove engagement.

And just after that, her A&R rep sent a Google Drive link labeled Fan Sentiment Tracking – LOML Demo (July), accompanied by a screenshot of statistics that read like a Wall Street ticker—Engagement up 62%, Saves up 80%, Shares up 90%—followed by the phrase she’d come to dread in every meeting that followed a leak or scandal: “We’re witnessing a natural reentry moment. This is good. You just have to lean in.”

She didn’t respond to any of them.

Instead, she sat on the cold tile of her kitchen floor in the same sweatshirt she’d been wearing for four days, legs folded tightly to her chest like a barrier against the world, eyes straining from the blue-white glow of her phone screen, trying—really trying—not to fall apart under the weight of being watched when she hadn’t even meant to be seen, and the worst part wasn’t the comments or the headlines or even the fans pretending to know what she felt—it was the quiet, sick realization that they weren’t reacting to the music itself, not really, but to the wound buried inside it, the part she hadn’t healed from, hadn’t even processed yet, and now it was everyone’s.

Because beneath the fan theories and the lyric breakdowns and the trend thread titled “Letrán’s post-Chris Evans heartbreak era begins now”, there was something smaller, sharper, more painful—something she hadn’t even allowed herself to speak out loud: the fact that Chris had moved on, publicly, effortlessly, like it had cost him nothing at all, as if she had been just a season, a misstep, a phase between two better-fitting lives, and now he was out there clean-shaven and photogenic in pap shots with a girl who smiled softer and dressed simpler, the kind of woman you could take home without explaining the headlines first.

And maybe Fernanda really was past it.

Maybe she didn’t want him anymore—not in the visceral, desperate way that she once did—but there was still a particular kind of ache that settled deep when someone you once bled for seemed capable of walking into new love without limping, without pause, without the faintest shadow of what you had been together. She didn’t post a note or a caption or a blurry photo. She didn’t jump in to reclaim the narrative or clarify the lyrics or deny the origin story everyone had already assigned her. She didn’t defend her choices or lash out at the fans or even offer a wink of acknowledgment.

She just poured herself a glass of water with shaky hands, sat down at the edge of her kitchen table in silence, and stared blankly at the ceiling until the persistent buzzing of her phone felt like it was rattling through her molars. Because it wasn’t the leak that broke her—it was the fact that they took something sacred before she’d finished holding it in her own hands, before she’d decided what it meant, before she was ready to let it go. And still, beneath all the noise, under the headlines and metrics and theories about whether LOML stood for Chris or someone else or some poetic lie, one thing remained steady in her chest—anchored, sharp, and immovable: she knew what she meant, she knew who it was about, and she knew what it had cost her to write those words out loud. So no, she wasn’t going to let the world tell the story before she did.

Not this time.

Not again.

Which is why, later that afternoon, she walked into the label’s office without a glam team or a press advisor or even a carefully rehearsed moodboard of her own, just a hoodie zipped to her chin, sunglasses still on despite the fluorescents, her phone silent in her back pocket, her expression unreadable as she passed the framed 2017 poster of herself in the hallway—lip-glossed and smirking, frozen mid-chaos—and stepped into the elevator like someone stepping back into her body after too long away.

No one asked how she was feeling. They asked what came next.

The creative director wanted visuals; the social team wanted teaser clips; her A&R rep asked if she could finish the demo into a full track by Monday, “since momentum is on our side.”

She let them talk. Let them plan. Let them assign meaning to something they hadn’t written, hadn’t lived, hadn’t even listened to with their whole hearts.

And then, when the noise finally settled into a breathless pause, and someone asked—flat, transactional—if she was okay with LOML being used as part of the comeback rollout, Fernanda didn’t smile or soften or explain.

She just sat a little straighter, crossed her arms like armor that didn’t need polishing, and answered with the only thing she had left to protect:

“It’s not part of a rollout. It’s a beginning. And I decide what comes next.” And she didn’t say it to sound brave. She said it because it was the only thing in the room that still felt true. And—for once—that was enough.

She hadn’t meant to remember, hadn’t invited the memory in or set the table for it or even whispered its name, but memory never asked for permission—it arrived unannounced, as it always did, slipping through the cracks of a quiet moment and making itself at home like it had never left.

One moment she was curled into her couch, knees tucked beneath the oversized hem of her hoodie, the low hush of late afternoon light spreading across her apartment like breath held too long, the soft amber streaks crawling across the hardwood and climbing the legs of the coffee table before brushing the edge of her sock, the closed journal by her side untouched for hours, her tea long gone cold, and in the next moment she wasn’t there at all—she was back in his house, not the physical one with address and keys, but the one that lived in her, the one preserved in fragments and texture and color and warmth and that peculiar kind of stillness that only ever exists before you know what you’ll lose.

It was winter in 2019, and the version of herself that existed then was a quieter one, still learning what silence could take, still hopeful that softness didn’t always have to come with sacrifice, still unaware of the cost that would eventually be named in hindsight, long after she’d left it behind.

His place had never been curated like hers was—there were no candles selected for mood, no warm-toned lamps strategically placed for ambiance, no intention to make it look effortless for the camera—but it had a kind of lived-in comfort, a low hum of ease that made her feel like she could exhale without thinking, like her shoulders had dropped the moment she stepped inside and hadn’t noticed until she left again.

She remembered the chipped blue mug that never moved from the nightstand, the floorboards that creaked in that charming, lived-in way, the green notebook that always found its way to the end of the couch even when she swore she hadn’t left it there, like it belonged in the fabric of the space just as much as she did.

He’d been on the floor, back resting against the couch with a half-read book in hand, sleeves pushed up in that casual way that made him look more like a Sunday morning than a movie star, wearing the same sweater she always stole when she was cold or dramatic or both, and her notebook sat next to him—unopened, untouched—not because he didn’t care, but because he never read without permission, never asked for access, only listened when she offered, and that was one of the things she loved most: the stillness, the patience, the way he made space for her voice without demanding it.

Back then, the silence between them had felt full instead of hollow, not laced with tension or pretense or anything waiting to be fixed, but with the kind of mutual ease that let her write until two in the morning, bare legs folded beneath her on the carpet, her pen moving across the page while he padded around in the kitchen or read aloud in a voice so lazy and steady she once joked it could put her to sleep if she didn’t love it so much.

And for the first time in a long time—or maybe ever—she hadn’t felt like she had to perform, hadn’t felt the need to shine brighter than her own truth or fill the room with noise just to be allowed to exist, because in that space, in that fleeting, unrepeatable moment of her life, she had just been herself—unguarded, unfiltered, unplanned.

But now, years later, in a different apartment with no hum in the next room, no voice filling the silence with softness, no chipped mug or creaky floorboard or familiar sweater tossed over a chair, she finally understood that the ache in her chest had never really been about Chris, not in the way the headlines liked to frame it or the way the internet tried to dissect her lyrics into blame.

She didn’t miss him—not really, not anymore—but she missed her.

The version of herself who hadn’t yet learned to shrink, who still believed she could be loved and loud at the same time, who wore her metaphors like armor instead of apologizing for them, who thought being tender didn’t mean dulling the sharp edges that made her work electric.

The end of their relationship hadn’t arrived with scandal or betrayal or an explosive fall from grace—it had arrived quietly, like a slow leak in a boat she didn’t notice was sinking until her feet were wet, like a pressure that started out subtle and manageable until it became suffocating, until every choice started to feel like a compromise dressed as grace.

The age gap, the headlines, the persistent commentary that treated their love like a temporary press cycle, the interviewers who kept asking if she was just a “phase” for him, a wild chapter before something more reasonable—she remembered how she began to disappear, not out of shame or fear, but out of strategy, because she thought if she made herself smaller, less controversial, less loud, maybe their love would survive the weight of public scrutiny.

But it didn’t.

And slowly, piece by piece, she gave parts of herself away—not in a dramatic, one-time sacrifice, but in the quiet edits no one noticed: a lyric softened, a song reworded, a bridge cut because someone thought it sounded “too bitter,” and she didn’t fight it—not with the fury she used to have—because by then, she was tired of being difficult, tired of being the firestarter, tired of always having to defend her sharpness in rooms that preferred her rounded out.

And when it ended, no one mourned her silence.

Not even her.

She wasn’t angry that he had moved on, wasn’t bitter at the woman who came after her—if anything, she had made peace with the ending, with the idea that sometimes good things end not because they’re wrong, but because they can’t survive the version of the world they’re placed in.

But still, every now and then—like now—she found herself alone in her apartment, swaddled in oversized clothes, staring into the middle distance, wondering how easily she had let herself vanish in someone else’s comfort, how silently she had chosen to stop taking up space just to make love easier to carry.

And what if now—now that she was writing again, now that the music was coming back in slow, hesitant waves—the girl she once had been was gone?

The 2016 girl.

The one who set things on fire with her voice and didn’t flinch when they called her reckless, who stood on stage and cracked her heart wide open, who made mistakes in public and owned every one of them because she believed her art was worth the mess.

What if that fire had burned out?

What if all that remained was this: a measured, cautious, tired woman trying to build something new without knowing if the same heat lived inside her?

She closed her eyes, head resting against the worn cushions of her couch, and let the memory flicker across the backs of her eyelids—not for him, not to mourn what they’d lost, but for the girl she used to be, the one who hadn’t yet learned to flinch when the world said she was too much.

And maybe—just maybe—this was part of healing too.

Not reaching backward to resurrect a past that no longer fit, but standing still long enough to admit that she didn’t quite know who she was without the fire.

Not yet.

But maybe soon.

It was nearly 10 p.m. when she slipped through the studio doors again, unannounced, wrapped in an old hoodie and the kind of quiet resolve that didn’t need witnesses. She didn’t turn on all the lights—just the overhead lamp by the soundboard, its amber glow spilling across the floor like the start of a secret. The space didn’t feel unfamiliar, but it didn’t feel entirely hers either. Still, it was where she needed to be. She walked slowly, like the walls might listen differently tonight, and set her bag down with the kind of care that had nothing to do with the contents and everything to do with intention.

There was no one there to ask if she was ready, no producer waiting with a thumbs-up from behind the glass. Just the familiar silence of a room that knew her through every version—through rage, through heartbreak, through reinvention and retreat. She didn’t rehearse. She didn’t play back what she’d done before. She simply pulled out the worn lyric sheet from the front pocket of her notebook, unfolded it gently, and laid it flat beside the piano bench like it might break if she rushed.

The bridge was still missing.

She looked at the page, not with frustration but with something softer—curiosity, perhaps, or maybe reverence for the part of herself that hadn’t been ready to finish it until now. Her fingers tapped absently along the edge of the piano keys. The rest of the room waited. There was no urgency, only the hum of clarity that had been building in her since the day it all cracked open. She thought about the night it ended—not just the relationship, but the illusion she had held onto for far too long. The idea that if she stayed quiet enough, soft enough, agreeable enough, she could somehow hold onto both her voice and her peace.

But silence had never protected her. It had only diluted her.

She wasn’t writing a song about Chris anymore. She hadn’t been for a while. This wasn’t about the man or the headlines or the breakup that had been analyzed to death by strangers on the internet. This was about the version of herself she had lost when she stopped trusting her instincts. The one who second-guessed every lyric. Who shrank herself into something palatable. Who mistook survival for growth.

She didn’t rush the pen across the page. She let each word arrive slowly, not demanding space, but claiming it anyway. When the bridge finally surfaced—quiet and sure, like it had been waiting for her to be still enough to listen—she wrote it without flinching. No edits. No workshop sessions. No overthinking. Just the truth, line by line, shaped in her own language.

She sang it through once, low and steady, not trying to impress anyone, not even herself. There were no flourishes, no dramatic pauses, no manufactured ache—just the simplicity of a voice reconnecting with its own center. When it was done, she didn’t cry. She didn’t smile. She just sat in the stillness and breathed. Because in that moment, she knew the song no longer belonged to what had happened. It belonged to her. And that was enough.

—

The next morning, a message from Elise was waiting in her inbox—professional, warm, full of corporate optimism dressed in creative respect.

Subject: About “LOML”

To: Fernanda Letrán

From: Elise Grant

Date: Monday, 10:04 AM

Hi Fernanda,

Just wanted to check in about LOML.

We’ve seen the response online—people are really connecting with the demo, even though it wasn’t meant to be out yet. A lot of fans are asking for the full version. If you’re open to it, we’d love to help you record and release it officially. No pressure—we’d move at your pace. You’d have full creative control.

Let us know what feels right for you.

Warmly,

Elise

She read the email twice. First with her eyes. Then with her breath held, as if the second read might shift the weight of the words. It didn’t. It wasn’t a bad message—in fact, it was the kind of email most artists would consider a quiet victory. Her label was listening. Her fans were moved. The machine was ready to move with her.

But instead of feeling affirmed, Fernanda felt exposed.

By noon, she was seated across from her team in a glass conference room that looked like it had been designed by someone allergic to joy—too cold, too white, too eager to sanitize anything that resembled emotion. Her manager was there. PR. A&R. Digital strategy. Someone from sync who kept name-dropping Netflix placements. All of them with smiles that felt like strategies. All of them already sketching the narrative before she could define it for herself.

“We really think this could be your moment,” one of them said, tapping on a slide deck showing hashtag spikes and streaming projections. Another added, “It’s the most emotionally honest thing you’ve released in years,” as though that wasn’t the exact reason she hadn’t wanted anyone to hear it yet.

“Let’s ride this wave while it’s fresh,” her manager offered, trying to sound encouraging. “People want to hear from you again.”

Fernanda nodded slightly—not in agreement, but in acknowledgment. A small courtesy, not consent. The meeting wrapped with follow-ups and suggestions and a teaser post she never approved. She walked to the elevator with her coat in her arms and her stomach twisted not with nerves, but with something heavier. When the doors closed behind her, she didn’t feel like a creator. She felt like a moment—one that wasn’t being made, just monetized.

Later that week, the temperature in the same boardroom dropped a few degrees—metaphorically and otherwise. This wasn’t the excited tone from earlier. This was control. Framed in language meant to sound supportive. Fernanda sat at the head of the table again, hands folded in her lap, calm, unreadable, wrapped in the kind of silence that didn’t invite interruption. She let them talk. Let them explain how “this is a window you don’t want to miss,” how the attention was “organic,” how she didn’t even need to promote it—they’d do all the lifting.

“And if I don’t want to release it yet?” she asked, voice smooth, edged with steel.

A pause.

“Why wouldn’t you?” one of them said, carefully. “It’s your best work in years. People are connecting. We’re not pressuring you—we’re supporting your momentum.”

She leaned forward, just slightly, but enough to tilt the power back toward herself.

“What if I don’t want to meet the moment?” she said, her tone calm, but no longer soft. “What if I want to make it?”

They blinked. Caught off guard by the question, and more so by the certainty behind it.

“I’ll release it,” she continued. “But not like this. Not like I’ve been cracked open for campaign strategy. This isn’t a comeback single. It’s not a marketing arc. It’s mine. And if you want to put it out, fine. But I decide when. I decide how. I decide what it says about me.”

No one interrupted her. There was no pushback—only silence. And in that silence, Fernanda felt something settle. She wasn’t waiting for them to say yes. She already had.

That night, long after the city dimmed and the studio emptied, she sat alone in the vocal booth with only her breath for company. She didn’t touch the keys. Didn’t sing. She just opened her phone and scrolled until she found an old clip—a short, chaotic 2016 interview with a version of herself she hadn’t seen in years. She was loud. Sharp. Unfiltered. Everything she was once punished for being.

And yet, as she watched, she didn’t flinch. Didn’t mourn.

She recognized her.

And for the first time in a long time, she didn’t just feel inspired.

She felt ready.

She stayed off her phone all afternoon.

It wasn’t protest. It wasn’t strategy. It was just… preservation. She cooked dinner slowly, barefoot, the playlist off. Let the silence stretch long enough for her thoughts to settle without turning into noise. It had taken her so long to find stillness again, to write from a place that wasn’t apology or defense or expectation. She didn’t want to lose that now.

But around 9:47 p.m., just as the city outside her windows began to dim into something soft and blue, she stood up, walked over to the desk, and quietly pulled open the drawer.

The phone blinked once as she picked it up. Notifications piled like footsteps she didn’t invite. She didn’t open them.

Instead, she opened her Notes app. Pasted in the words she’d written days ago and re-read a hundred times since. Words that weren’t trying to be poetic—just honest.

Then she opened Instagram.

Uploaded the image. Black and white. Soft light. Skin and denim. Hair wild, face hidden. She’d chosen it because it didn’t look like a promo shoot. It looked like a moment—half-private, slightly exposed, and fully hers.

She pasted the caption beneath it.

She read it once. Then again. Then clicked “Share.”

She didn’t stay to refresh. Didn’t open the comments. She didn’t need to. The moment wasn’t in the reaction. It was in the act.

Because for once, she wasn’t releasing a song to prove something.

She was releasing it to reclaim something.

And whatever the world decided to do with it—project onto it, praise it, dissect it, distort it—none of that could touch what the song already meant to her.

It was no longer a wound.

It was a boundary.

A truth.

A beginning.

And tonight, it belonged to everyone.

But it started with her.

The song dropped at midnight.

No teaser. No countdown. No behind-the-scenes video stitched into a carousel of press-ready moments. Just a black-and-white photo, a caption quiet enough to feel handwritten, and the kind of timestamp that only matters when you’re brave enough to let the world hear you break.

And still—it spread like wildfire pretending to be a whisper.

By 12:07, LOML was trending worldwide on X.

By 12:19, a fan account had paired the leaked demo with old footage—Fernanda at nineteen, laughing too hard, pulling her mic cord like it owed her something, the words “you’re the loss of my life” echoing over it like a last confession.

By 12:42, Spotify’s algorithm cracked. A curated playlist updated without warning: New Music Worth Crying To.

And by 1:00 a.m., the narrative had arrived. Gentler this time. But still—inescapable.

She didn’t sleep the night LOML came out. Not because she was nervous or afraid, not because she was waiting for reactions or watching the numbers climb—she’d done all that before, in past lives, in louder eras. She stayed awake because something in her refused to close. It wasn’t adrenaline; it wasn’t pride. It felt more like her body was giving her space to stay present in the quiet. To feel it as it happened. To witness herself without looking away. The post was still up. A black square, centered with soft white serif text—her handwriting digitized, still imperfect, like ink that had bled too long into the page. i lived it. that was enough. No caption. No tags. Just that. And the link. The song sat on every streaming platform with no playlist placement, no banner rollout. It just… existed. Like a wound left open, trusting the world not to touch it.

She sat on her bedroom floor, back against the edge of the bed, knees drawn in, the blue light of her laptop flickering against the soft skin beneath her jaw. The air felt thick—not suffocating, just weighted, like the kind of silence that follows a long cry or the final scene of a film that refuses to tie things up neatly. She didn’t refresh the streaming stats. Didn’t open Spotify. Didn’t check TikTok. She had a pretty good idea of what was coming. But the first notification buzzed anyway—Ava. Just the name on her phone, a message she didn’t read right away. Then a few more. People from the past. One from a producer she hadn’t worked with since 2017. Another from someone who had ignored her last three texts. “You okay?” “This one feels… raw.” “You didn’t have to gut us like that.” “It’s beautiful.” She didn’t answer.

Her hands were still clasped loosely in her lap, fingertips brushing her knuckles, her mind somewhere in the space between the studio and the release—between the moment she wrote it and the moment the world claimed it. A strange grief had followed its release. Not because it was gone, but because now it belonged to other people. To their stories. To their edits. To their commentaries. It wasn’t just hers anymore. And somehow, she was okay with that. Because deep down, she knew she had written it for herself first. And that had to be enough.

By morning, the internet was ablaze. Twitter threads dissected every lyric. “Who’s the love of her life?” “Is this about Chris?” “No way—this is giving Joe Burrow energy.” Fernanda didn’t bother correcting them. She’d learned by now that people didn’t want the truth. They wanted a version of it that fit their narrative. TikTok was worse—girls in bathrooms crying, lighting candles, whispering the lyrics over montages of exes, first loves, faded text messages. Some duetted the bridge like it was a prayer. One video used her spoken-word poem over childhood footage of two best friends who no longer spoke. Another stitched the line “the song was mine before it was yours” over a screen recording of an unanswered DM. It was everywhere.

Spotify emailed the label. Apple Music wanted to feature it. NPR reached out for an interview. One journalist wrote, “Letrán has shed the glitter and left us with blood.” Her label left a voicemail: “It’s exploding. Do we want to talk visuals? Should we prep a short film? Maybe a stripped acoustic version? Let’s strategize—this could be big.” She deleted the voicemail.

She went out that afternoon with no team, no glam, just a hoodie and a pair of sunglasses she hadn’t worn since her last tour. No destination—just distance from her phone, from the leak, from the questions in her own head. She ended up at a quiet café two blocks from her place. No music. No noise. Just the hiss of the espresso machine and the low murmur of strangers’ lives. She ordered a tea she wouldn’t drink and sat in the corner with a paperback she didn’t open. She didn’t need distraction. She needed stillness.

A girl sitting at the next table kept glancing over. Early twenties, maybe younger. Alone. Nervous. And then, eventually, brave enough to stand up and walk toward her. “Sorry,” she said, voice low, fingers gripping the strap of her tote. “I don’t wanna bother you. I just… that song? LOML? It felt like you cracked something open. And I don’t know how, but it made me feel like I wasn’t crazy. For leaving someone I still loved.” Fernanda looked at her—really looked. The girl didn’t want a photo. Didn’t ask for a signature. She just wanted to be seen. “You’re not,” Fernanda said, simply. The girl nodded once. No drama. No introduction. She walked out the door like nothing had happened. But for Fernanda, something had.

She stayed at the table long after her tea went cold. Still didn’t touch the book. But this time, she wasn’t just sitting in silence. She was processing. All this time, she’d been afraid the leak would misrepresent her. That her unfinished words would be taken out of context. That saying too much, too soon, would be the thing that undid her. But that stranger hadn’t cared about rollout plans or polish. She cared about the truth in it. Maybe Fernanda hadn’t messed up. Maybe she had just spoken from a place people weren’t used to hearing her speak from anymore.

She opened her Notes app. And without thinking, typed: is it cool that i said all that? is it too soon to do this yet? She stared at the words for a while. They weren’t a caption. Not yet a verse. But they felt like something. A thread. A door. A start. She saved them without editing. And for the first time since the leak, she didn’t feel like she’d lost control of the story. She felt like she’d just written the next line of it.

That night, the clip leaked. The studio video—the one she hadn’t posted, hadn’t planned to—had made its way online. She didn’t blame anyone. She didn’t even know who uploaded it. All she knew was that it was there, and that it didn’t feel like a betrayal. It felt like someone had wanted the world to see what they saw. No edits. No lighting tricks. Just her, sitting at the piano, her voice a little shaky at first but full of something unnameable. She wasn’t trying to be perfect. She was just trying to be. It spread like wildfire. The words raw, real, stripped, undone trended by sunrise. And still, she said nothing. She didn’t tweet. Didn’t repost. Didn’t explain. Because what could she say that wasn’t already in the song?

By the next afternoon, her inbox had mutated. Brands. Talk shows. A podcast she admired. The Grammys, suddenly curious. A flood of interest from people who hadn’t cared for two years. Her label scheduled a quiet meeting. No pressure, they said. Just a brainstorm. A light suggestion. A world tour. They slid the folder across the glass table, filled with cities, venues, merch prototypes, setlists that pulled from eras she no longer recognized. They talked in upbeat tones about reintroducing her, about momentum, about capitalizing on the moment. She nodded, flipped through the pages, smiled at the right cues. But all she could think about was the song. How simple it was. How quiet. How true. And how she wasn’t sure yet if she wanted to tour, or just… be.

She excused herself before the meeting ended. Said she needed to think. Said she had somewhere to be. She didn’t. She went back to the vocal room instead. Sat down at the upright piano. Pressed record on her phone, not to write something new, but to remember how it felt. The way the keys sounded like breath. The way the silence in between was a kind of language too.

By the third day, the noise wasn’t louder—it was sharper. Less awe, more analysis. Less love, more speculation. And the thing about being quiet for too long is that when you finally say something, people think it means everything. Fernanda knew this part. The pattern. The cycle. The “what does it mean?” phase. The “who is it about?” phase. The “has she changed or is she broken?” phase. But even knowing what was coming didn’t soften the ache in her chest when someone tagged her in a post that read: This isn’t the old Fernanda. She used to be fire. Unapologetic. This feels like heartbreak softened her. Another: She used to be fun. Now she’s just sad.

She read them without blinking. Not because she was immune. But because she didn’t want to give them anything more than that. What they didn’t understand was that she hadn’t gotten sad. She had gotten real. The world had loved her when she was chaos—2016 Fernanda in glitter boots, mascara-smudged, kissing strangers in bathroom mirrors, showing up at parties with headlines waiting before she even left. The girl they could mock, adore, cancel, revive. She had been messy. Loud. Deliciously destructible.

But then came the pause. The heartbreak. The growth. And Chris—stable, older, endlessly patient. He had offered her peace. Not perfection, not rescue. Just a mirror held still. And for a while, she wanted to live in that stillness. She had softened—not because he made her, but because for the first time, she could. Now, two years later, people looked at that softness like it was evidence of defeat. Like growth was something to be ashamed of.

She didn’t know who she was supposed to be anymore. Too much and not enough. Too wild and too quiet. Too glittery to be deep, too introspective to be fun. Too emotional for pop. Too pop for emotion. And that’s why she couldn’t write. That’s why she hadn’t finished a song in months. Because every time she sat at the piano, every time she opened a notebook or pulled out her phone, she heard them. The fans, the critics, the voices in her own head. Demanding she pick a lane. Pick a mask. Pick a version. And she didn’t know how to do that anymore.

Her phone lit up again. A new voicemail. She almost didn’t check it. But something in her hand moved before her brain did. It was her mom. Just her voice, soft, steady, filled with that kind of love that didn’t need translation. “Mija… no tienes que ser todo para todos. Just come home when you’re ready.”

That was it. No lecture. No strategy. Just home.

She didn’t cry right away. Not until the message played a second time. And then it came—not loud, not violent. Just one clean breath that caught in her chest

She hadn’t planned on staying awake, hadn’t set an alarm or pressed her phone to her chest like she used to on album nights, but sleep never came—not because she was anxious, not because she was waiting for validation, but because something in her refused to power down, like her body was holding open the door to this moment, daring her to sit with the strange, sacred quiet of it all.

The post was still there, untouched on her feed: black square, soft white serif text in her digitized handwriting that looked like it had been bled into the screen from a page too long folded in her coat pocket—“i lived it. that was enough.” No caption. No rollout. No strategy. Just the song. Just the link. Just the moment, left bare.

The air in her bedroom felt heavy—not in the way grief presses, but like something important had just happened and her body was still trying to catch up, still trying to file it somewhere between memory and meaning.

She sat on the floor with her back pressed against the bedframe, knees drawn in tight, her hoodie sleeves tucked between her fists, the soft buzz of the refrigerator the only sound in the distance as she stared at the quiet light of her open laptop, refusing to check the stats, refusing to open Spotify or read the early reactions, because deep down, she already knew what they’d say—she could feel it building online the way a storm gathers pressure in your bones before you hear the thunder.

And then it happened. The first buzz. Ava’s name on her screen, a name that always felt like a lifeline—but this time, she didn’t open the message right away. Then came another, and another. Some were from people she hadn’t heard from in months, others from collaborators who’d once ghosted her only to resurface now that the song had cracked something open.

The texts weren’t cruel—they were reverent, admiring, well-meaning. But even the kindness made her flinch.

“You okay?”

“This feels so raw.”

“I don’t know how you did that.”

“You didn’t just write a song. You opened a door.”

“This is it. This is the one.”

She didn’t respond. She didn’t want to make it real with words. Not yet.

There was a strange grief blooming in her chest—not because the song had been released, but because it was no longer just hers. It now belonged to a million other moments, to strangers who would use it to soundtrack endings she hadn’t lived, to fans who would assign it to romances she never confirmed, to Twitter threads and aesthetic TikToks and comment sections that would chew on it like it was evidence instead of art.

And just as she was almost able to let herself breathe, her screen lit up again—Ava, this time with a single sentence that made her heart lurch without reason:

someone leaked the studio video.

She clicked before she could think, before she could brace, and there it was—her in the vocal room, sitting at the upright piano, hunched slightly, hair tied up messily, hoodie falling off one shoulder, and that voice—not rehearsed, not belted, not produced, but fragile and unvarnished, trembling slightly on the high notes, her fingers playing cautiously like she wasn’t sure yet if she deserved to be heard.

She watched it once in complete stillness.

Then again, this time slower, with her breath caught just beneath her collarbone.

She hadn’t even saved that version of the clip. She wasn’t angry it existed—wasn’t even sure how it got out—but there was a particular kind of ache that came with seeing yourself at your most exposed through someone else’s lens, especially when you hadn’t given the world permission to look.

The reactions were instant and relentless.

The clip was everywhere by morning, embedded into fan pages, reposted by musicians she admired, dissected in soft-voiced YouTube essays that paused and rewound her falter like it was sacred, captioned by strangers with phrases like “real music is back” and “this is what pop used to feel like.”

She still said nothing.

Didn’t tweet. Didn’t repost. Didn’t issue a thank-you or an explanation or even a half-smile emoji in her Instagram story. She didn’t need to, because she knew anything she said would flatten it—would reduce the moment to content, to currency, to spin.

By the second day, her inbox had evolved into something she didn’t recognize. There were invitations—from the brands who had quietly dropped her during the quiet years, from the talk shows that had once framed her heartbreak as clickbait, from the Grammy team that had barely returned her calls after her last album missed a nomination. Everyone wanted a piece now. Everyone had a new angle. Everyone was ready to call it a comeback—like she hadn’t been here the whole time, quietly surviving in plain sight.

Her label asked for a meeting.

They kept it “low-pressure,” in that carefully engineered way corporate people say low-pressure when what they really mean is you owe us now. They brought pastries. Water bottles in glass. Slideshows and soft smiles and a folder with the word “TOUR” printed across the tab.

She flipped through it slowly—dates, venues, international flights, staged merch prototypes, a moodboard for a live visual that looked more like a funeral than a concert.

They pitched it like a celebration, like a return to something she wasn’t sure she missed.

She smiled where she was supposed to. Nodded once.

Then, without making a scene, she excused herself mid-sentence. Said she had another call. Said she needed to breathe.

She didn’t.

She went back to the studio instead. Slipped into the same vocal booth where LOML had been born. Sat down at the piano, placed her phone beside her, and recorded nothing. She didn’t even play. She just sat there, her fingers resting on the keys like they were bones she was relearning how to move.

And in that silence—full, heavy, honest—she finally admitted what had been buzzing in the background since the night the song went live.

It wasn’t the attention that scared her.

It was the expectation.

The fear that the world would now want more.

And not just more music.

More her.

And she wasn’t sure she had that version to give anymore.

Not because she didn’t want to. But because she didn’t know which version they wanted. The firestarter? The ghost? The girl in the black hoodie whispering into a demo mic? The woman who quietly let go?

They had all been her once.

But she wasn’t sure who she was now.

And maybe that—not the leak, not the praise, not the plans—was what finally made her feel like she couldn’t move.

Because even in the aftermath of telling the truth, she still didn’t know what to do with it.

Joe had slept like he always did—too little, too light—waking to the familiar sound of morning playlists bleeding through the kitchen wall, the kind of sonic wallpaper that marked time without meaning to, and even as the team group chat filled with memes, inside jokes, and training schedules he usually skimmed without thinking, something in him paused the moment his thumb hovered over a YouTube link, one without a caption, just a thumbnail with her face washed in golden light and a softness in her eyes that looked nothing like performance and everything like confession.

He didn’t open it, not right away, not when he told himself it probably wasn’t about him, not when he muttered something under his breath about ego and projection and how the world didn’t revolve around coincidences and chemistry and two people colliding at a party once, but his logic collapsed quietly under the weight of what he already knew—her voice, not the one piped through arenas or radio edits, but the one that lingered after the crowd went home, the one that asked about Rob and laughed like she didn’t trust herself to laugh out loud.

It wasn’t love, and it wasn’t nothing, but it was real in a way that felt unspeakable, which made it worse, because real things—quiet, unexpected, unscripted things—were harder to forget, especially when they arrived like echoes that didn’t know when to stop bouncing off the inside of your chest.

He pressed play with the volume low, still barefoot, still shirtless, the morning still gray and unfinished around him, and as the first notes spilled out, not loud but immediate, like someone whispering a secret you weren’t sure you deserved to hear, he listened—not like a fan or a friend or even a ghost of something almost-was, but like someone who had been mentioned without being named.

By the time the chorus came, he was already sitting at the edge of the couch, not blinking, not thinking, the phone still in his hand like a dare he hadn’t fully accepted, and though the lyrics never said his name, though the verses never gave away their location or time stamp, something in the way she said momentary felt like it had been plucked from a conversation they never got around to finishing.

In the locker room hours later, when one of the rookies asked if he’d seen the song blowing up, he said no—just heard it once—and maybe that was technically true, but the melody had embedded itself in the space just behind his ribs, looping faintly beneath everything else like the hum of a fridge in an otherwise quiet kitchen.

—

They made her sanitize her hands twice before stepping inside, the smell of disinfectant sharp against the filtered air of a stadium that still carried the breath of other people’s noise, and as she walked forward—coat pulled tight, mask halfway down, hair tucked behind her ears like she was trying not to be seen by a world that had already memorized her face—Fernanda let the stillness of it wash over her in pieces, each echo of her boots against concrete a reminder that this place was built for something far louder than she was ready to be.

“Just take it in,” her manager had said that morning with a rehearsed optimism that tried not to sound like pressure, but she knew the difference, could feel it in the space between words, could hear it in the way he said we’re not locking anything in yet like they weren’t already having meetings and whispering about the comeback like it was inevitable, like it was owed.

She didn’t say anything, not when they passed stage markers in neon tape, not when someone—too young to remember her debut but old enough to fake the reverence—gestured toward the rafters and asked if she could imagine the opening night, because imagining was easy, and that was the problem; it was the feeling that tripped her up, the way her body remembered things her mind hadn’t caught up to yet—the adrenaline, the exhaustion, the way your name sounded differently when screamed by a stadium versus whispered by someone who didn’t want anything from you.

This was just one stop, one maybe in a string of maybes, cities bleeding together like time zones and turbulence, none of it announced, none of it confirmed, because if she said it out loud, it would start becoming real, and she hadn’t decided yet if she was ready for that kind of permanence again—if she could walk back into a world that only wanted the version of her that could set a room on fire without flinching.

Still, the silence followed her.

She stepped through another gate, into another tunnel, into another breathless corridor that smelled like sweat and last season’s dreams, and as she tilted her head back to look at the curve of the bleachers, that precise moment—the one before she turned the corner—felt like it should have lasted longer, because the next thing she knew, she was colliding softly into someone else, not painfully, not dramatically, just enough to make her stop moving.

He wasn’t wearing a mask—just a black hoodie and gray joggers, eyes wide for a second before softening into something quieter, something familiar, like recognition without all the weight of expectation.

“Fernanda?”

Joe.

She hadn’t rehearsed this, hadn’t prepared for it, hadn’t built the wall she usually kept between her and anything remotely personal, so the way she said hey came out slower, less guarded, more human than she intended.

They stood there in a narrow hallway lit by motion-sensor fluorescence, surrounded by crates and coiled cable and years of metaphorical noise, and she realized in that moment that she didn’t feel small here—not because she was ready, but because he wasn’t asking her to be.

“I didn’t know you were in Cincinnati,” he said, voice low and measured, like he didn’t want to startle whatever thread had just quietly connected them.

She nodded. “Just for today. Venue stuff.”

He gestured slightly toward the field behind her, one hand still in his pocket. “For the tour?”

“That’s what people think,” she said, not quite confirming, not quite denying.

Joe smiled—barely. “You don’t usually let people think.”

She looked at him closely, how real he looked in all this cold steel and absence of cameras, how unlike the internet version of himself he was, and said, “They’re gonna think whatever they want either way.”

Neither of them said much after that, just stood in the hallway like they were figuring out what to do with the timing, with the fact that this had happened again, naturally, without press or strategy or a calendar invite.

“You here for practice?” she asked eventually.

“Sort of. Logistics.”

She nodded slowly, her fingers tightening slightly around the tea cup that had long since gone lukewarm. “So we’re both here for things that may or may not happen.”

“Yeah. Pretty much.”

Another long silence, but not an uncomfortable one—just the kind that came when two people realized they were circling the edge of something neither of them had quite named.

“There’s this deli not far,” he said suddenly, tone casual but body a little too still. “No cameras. Real food. I was gonna grab lunch.”

She tilted her head, not suspicious, just curious, always curious now. “Are you inviting me?”

He shrugged. “Only if you’re hungry.”

She was.

Not for food. For stillness. For something that didn’t need to be documented to be real.

So she said yes.

He didn’t know why he’d asked—not really, not in the way he usually knew things, because he was the kind of person who ran numbers in his head even when no one was asking him to, who double-checked flight times, replayed game footage until the timing was perfect, mapped every choice like it was part of a playbook—but this wasn’t that, this wasn’t planned, this wasn’t calculated, it just came out of his mouth before his brain had the chance to intercept it.

It wasn’t like him, not even close, and the second she said yes—without hesitation, without sarcasm, without armor—he felt the echo of the question in his own chest and wondered what part of him had asked it in the first place.

He wasn’t looking for anything. Not today. Not with her. Not like that.

But there was something about seeing her in this space—not lit up onstage, not composed for cameras, just standing there in a coat that didn’t match the stadium air, clutching a lukewarm cup of tea like it was the only thing anchoring her to the moment—that disarmed him in a way he didn’t fully understand, like someone had hit pause on the usual noise and all he could hear was the silence between them.

And maybe that was what made him say it—not romance, not nerves, but the rare pull of stillness, the kind that didn’t ask anything of him except to be present, which was ironically the one thing he always struggled with when he wasn’t holding a ball or standing under stadium lights.

He wasn’t even sure if it counted as asking her out, not really, not in the way people meant it—there was no script, no intention beyond the moment, just a quiet offer born from the strange, unshakable feeling that they were both carrying something unspoken and maybe, just maybe, it would be easier to hold it in the same room.

And so, even as they started walking—side by side, steps echoing in sync down the cold cement tunnel—he still wasn’t sure what he was doing, but for once, that uncertainty didn’t make him want to retreat; it just made him more aware of her presence, of the fact that she hadn’t looked away, that she was still here, and that maybe some things didn’t need a reason to happen.

Joe sat in the driver’s seat longer than he meant to, eyes fixed on the street ahead, the quiet hum of the engine the only sound between his thoughts, which were starting to cluster too fast to name, because he couldn’t quite figure out why he’d invited her to lunch in the first place—not really, not in any clear or traceable way that lined up with the way he typically moved through the world, slow and careful and thoughtful, like everything had to pass through three filters before he committed to it.

He wasn’t impulsive by nature, not with his body, not with his career, and especially not with women, and yet something about the way she’d looked standing there in the stadium corridor—low voice, tea in hand, eyes steady but unreadable—had pulled the invitation out of him before his brain had caught up, like his instinct had made the call and his logic was still scrambling to make sense of the play.

It wasn’t attraction in the traditional sense, not the kind that ignites fast and burns out faster, and it wasn’t curiosity either, because he already knew what kind of public story followed her name around—what headlines, what rumors, what noise—but none of that had factored in when he asked her to lunch, because what he was reacting to wasn’t the image of her, it was the silence that seemed to follow her when the image slipped.

And he couldn’t explain why he’d wanted to sit across from her while she wrapped both hands around a chipped coffee cup and leaned back in her seat like she hadn’t been handed a stadium the size of a small country last week, but he had, and the moment had been so simple, so ordinary, so free of spectacle, that it shook something loose in him he hadn’t realized was tight.

Because he was used to pressure, used to attention, used to moving through rooms where everyone expected something, but that lunch hadn’t felt like pressure and hadn’t felt like expectation—it had felt like reprieve, like two people letting their guards rest without saying so, and when she laughed at his fossil metaphor or rolled her eyes at his Batman comment, he felt more like himself than he had in weeks, maybe months, which was stupid and irrational and had no place in the life he was trying to keep disciplined.

Still, he kept replaying the way she’d said, “Bye, Burrow,” like it was a joke and a dare and a memory all at once, and he wondered if she even knew she did that—gave things weight without trying, made ordinary words feel like moments you’d come back to later, after the adrenaline wore off and the silence crept back in.

He wasn’t falling for her. He knew that. It wasn’t that deep—not yet.

But it was something.

And it scared him a little that he didn’t feel the need to define it right away.

Because usually, when something unexpected came into his orbit, he broke it down, labeled it, filed it somewhere safe in his mind—but this time, he didn’t want to dissect it, didn’t want to ruin it with too much clarity, because maybe part of him needed something undefined, unbranded, untouched by the playbook.

So he let the moment sit, undisturbed, and drove off slowly, without music, without a podcast, just his own thoughts filling the space, quiet and sprawling and unfamiliar, but not unwelcome.

“So wait,” Fernanda said, turning in her seat with the kind of ease that didn’t match the weight she carried online, one bare foot tucked under her and her eyes narrowed in mock accusation like she was preparing cross-examination rather than casual conversation, “you just walked up to me in New York and asked about Batman—no ‘hi,’ no ‘hey, loved your performance,’ just straight into the caped crusader?”

Joe glanced at her, barely suppressing the smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth, the kind of smile that felt almost reluctant, like it didn’t ask for permission to form and didn’t need one, because something about her tone—half teasing, half testing—made him want to hold his own ground but also make space for her, which wasn’t a position he found himself in very often.

“Technically,” he said, voice even, “I said hey.”

“Oh, technically,” she echoed, lifting an eyebrow, already unconvinced.

“And I meant the compliment about the performance,” he added, not quite defensive, just clarifying, because that’s what he did—correct things softly when they veered too far from the truth—“I just thought it’d be funnier if I asked about Robert Pattinson first.”

He said it with the same casual tone he always used when he didn’t want to admit he cared how it landed, but inside, he was already analyzing how strange it was that he’d even brought up Robert that night, how weirdly comfortable he’d felt jumping into a random inside joke with a woman he’d never spoken to before, how rare it was for him to feel that kind of pull without calculating what it meant.

“So instead of being charming,” she said, unimpressed, “you went with cryptic nerd?”

“Exactly,” he replied with a dry nod, because it was easier to own it than to explain what he couldn’t, like the fact that he had absolutely no idea why he’d walked over to her in the first place, only that he had watched her sing like the whole room didn’t exist, and by the time she was done, something in him had shifted without his consent.

“You realize I genuinely thought you were joking,” she said, her voice trailing into a quiet laugh that didn’t try to impress, didn’t need to.

“I wasn’t,” he said simply, “I still want to know if he’s seen the Batmobile.”

She rolled her eyes in mock exasperation, but there was a trace of something softer underneath it—something like curiosity or warmth—and he caught it in the way her mouth twitched before she smiled, the way her shoulders relaxed a fraction like she’d finally let herself be in the car with him and not just a version of herself she kept for the public.

“I should’ve known this would happen,” she said, shaking her head, “I say one thing about knowing Rob at a Vanity Fair shoot and suddenly I’m everyone’s Gotham hotline.”

Joe gave her a solemn nod, playing along, but somewhere deep beneath the surface of his voice was a real admission, one he wasn’t brave enough to name, which was that she could’ve said anything in that interview and he still probably would’ve found an excuse to talk to her.

“To be fair,” he said lightly, “it is important intel.”

“You are so weird,” she muttered, laughing again, shaking her head like she couldn’t believe the person sitting across from her was the same guy they always showed on ESPN highlight reels with unreadable eyes and a frozen mouthguard stare, and he knew she was right—he was weird—but he also knew he liked who he was around her.

“And you hide it behind that whole broody quarterback thing.”

“I’m not broody.”

“You literally spent the first ten minutes of this drive staring at traffic like it insulted your entire family.”

“That’s just me… driving.”

She snorted, hand brushing through her hair as she looked out the window with the kind of half-smile that made his ribs feel tight in a way he didn’t have a playbook for, and he wondered—really wondered—how the hell they’d even gotten here.

Because the truth was, he didn’t ask people out on a whim, didn’t extend invitations without at least three mental checklists already sorted through, and yet when he saw her in that corridor—tea in hand, voice low, presence unchanged—he had said it without flinching, without calculating, and now here they were.

And if he were being completely honest with himself—which he wasn’t always, not when it came to things like this—he knew that whatever he was doing with Fernanda Letrán didn’t make sense on paper and didn’t belong in the structured, compartmentalized life he tried so hard to maintain.

But it didn’t feel like a mistake.

It felt like he had blinked and something honest had slipped through the cracks of his usual restraint.

And she hadn’t made it easier—not with the way she asked questions that hit too close, or with the way she listened when he answered, or with the way she turned silence into something that didn’t feel empty.

She’d asked him once—half-joking—if he was using her for Rob.

He didn’t know how to explain that he wasn’t using her for anything.

He just wanted to be near her voice.

The one she didn’t use on stage.

The one that came out when she wasn’t trying to be Fernanda Letrán™.

And maybe that was the thing.

Maybe he didn’t need to know why he asked her to lunch.

Maybe it didn’t need to be strategic or logical or convenient.

Maybe—for once—he could just follow the part of himself that wasn’t always calculating outcomes, that didn’t need a reason beyond the fact that something about her felt like peace he hadn’t realized he was missing until it showed up in his passenger seat with no shoes on.

And for a guy who always thought two plays ahead, that was saying someting.

Fernanda sat in a gray conference room, one leg crossed neatly over the other, her iced coffee melting too fast on the glass table. She was surrounded by half a dozen people from her label—marketing, A&R, tour production—and they were all excited. Buzzing. Talking at her, not to her.

“So we push ‘LOML’ to radio first week of may, lead with the heartbreak narrative. We already have 2.4 million reels using the bridge line. The story’s writing itself.”

“We’ll start teasing the new album mid-tour, call it her ‘rebirth era’—strong visuals, slow drip.”

“She’s never had a Billboard #1, this is the moment to go full press. Jimmy Fallon, Tiny Desk, Spotify billboards—”

Fernanda blinked, fingers tight around the sweating cup.

She wanted to scream. Or sleep. Or turn into a chair and disappear into the corner of the room.

But instead, she smiled. Polite. Controlled. “I don’t want the story to be about a heartbreak album,” she said softly.

They didn’t hear her.

Or maybe they did and chose not to.

“Of course,” someone said, “but we can lean into the emotion. People are really responding to the honesty. It’s a return to Fernanda.”

“Was I gone?” she asked quietly.

A pause. A few polite laughs.

The meeting continued.

She sat still, but inside, she could feel the splintering. That quiet pull between who she used to be, who they wanted her to be again, and the strange version of herself that had emerged in a Cincinnati SUV asking if it was okay to not want the noise.

When the meeting ended, she stood last.

No one noticed.

She left her coffee on the table, still mostly full, and didn’t say goodbye.

Her apartment greeted her with stillness, the kind she usually sought out after a long day, but tonight it pressed in differently, like the quiet wasn’t resting beside her but watching her instead. She stepped inside without ceremony, dropping her bag near the door and slipping off her boots in slow, unbothered motion, her body already curling inward as if to protect something tender she hadn’t named yet. The living room was dark except for the faint glow of city lights behind the curtains, and she didn’t bother turning on the lamps. She didn’t need the distraction of television or the noise of another half-ignored playlist.

Instead, she pulled the softest blanket from the arm of the couch and tucked herself into the corner like a thought folding in on itself, her knees drawn up, her shoulders tense beneath the fabric like armor that didn’t quite fit anymore. Outside, the rain had started up again, the steady kind that didn’t demand attention but refused to be ignored—like static gently wrapping itself around the city.

Her phone rested in her hand more out of habit than intention, and although there were no notifications from him, no missed messages, Joe was still in her head—the cadence of his voice, the unbothered rhythm of his laugh, that unexpected line in the car: “Maybe you’re different now.” It hadn’t been delivered as a judgment or even a compliment. It had just been a fact, one he spoke without ceremony, and that simplicity was what made it stay.

He hadn’t tried to fix her. He hadn’t tried to solve anything. He had just sat in that car with her like he didn’t need her to perform for him, like whatever version of her existed in that moment was already enough. And in a life filled with people who constantly measured her against the noise she used to make, that kind of attention felt like a rare species—quiet, unintrusive, almost fossil-like in its stillness, something buried and precious and meant to be discovered gently, not mined for headlines.

She closed her eyes, trying to recall the exact moment she had felt safe enough to slip off her heels and fold one leg beneath her while he drove, the way her laugh had landed without being dressed up, the comfort of not being required to impress. But she couldn’t remember deciding to let her guard down. It had just… happened. Like something ancient resurfacing without force—just there, as if it had always been waiting under the surface.

Was that what being seen was supposed to feel like? Not the spotlight or the applause or the perfectly lit magazine spreads, but the quiet act of being witnessed without pretense, of sitting across from someone who didn’t need a reason to like you, who didn’t ask for the version of you the world had decided to remember.

She looked at her phone again. Still no text. And strangely, still okay. Maybe this wasn’t a story she needed to control, or a moment she had to narrate into something bigger than it was. Maybe for once, it didn’t need a hook or a headline, didn’t need to be labeled a comeback or a redemption arc.

Maybe—

Her phone buzzed.

A message lit up the screen.

Joe: did you end up recording more today?

A smile pulled at her lips before she even realized it, the kind that came from being remembered without obligation. She typed something quickly, then paused, deleted it, and typed again—something truer.

Fernanda: Not really. Just thinking a lot. Might write tomorrow.

There was a pause on his end, the kind that didn’t feel anxious but respectful, as if he knew the tempo of her thoughts and didn’t want to interrupt the rhythm.

Then:

Joe: thinking counts. Want to hang this weekend? No Batman talk this time. Maybe.

She laughed quietly, the sound muffled by the pillow she pressed against her mouth, not because she needed to hide it, but because it felt warm enough to hold onto. He didn’t press. He didn’t charm. He just asked.

She stared at the message for a few seconds longer than necessary, then answered:

Fernanda: maybe.

And for the first time in what felt like years, “maybe” didn’t feel like a non-answer or a soft way of saying no. It didn’t feel like a detour or an escape hatch. It felt like a beginning. Not a dramatic one, not a perfect one—just quiet and honest and exactly enough.

A fossil of something new, still forming.

And this time, she was going to let it take its time.

The lights were too bright again.

Fernanda sat in the makeup chair with a croissant in her hand that she hadn’t bitten into, skin dewy under layers of tinted moisturizer, her hair curled into the exact same soft waves she’d worn on two magazine covers and one album rollout poster. She could hear someone arguing softly behind a closed dressing room door—something about timing, or lighting, or both—but she didn’t turn.

She was used to chaos happening around her like weather.

“Three minutes,” someone called out.

She nodded automatically, eyes locked on her reflection.

The woman staring back didn’t look tired. She looked… composed. Polished. A version of herself she’d learned how to shape like a second skin. And lately, it felt like that version was the only one the world still recognized.

It had been weeks since LOML dropped, and the reaction had been louder than anyone predicted—viral clips, dissected bridge lyrics, interviews packed with headlines. The song wasn’t even finished when it leaked, but somehow, it had spoken louder than anything she’d released in years. She was booked out. Shoots. Panels. Press. Everyone wanted to know what she had to say now.

As if healing had a soundbite.

And yet… somewhere in the chaos, she had started to feel herself again. Not the bold, glitter-gloss version the world used to orbit. Not the one who lived in push notifications and award show reactions. But someone quieter. A woman trying to make peace with her own pace. A woman not afraid to want something simpler.

Her phone buzzed in her lap.

Joe: you look calm as hell. That interviewer’s voice would’ve sent me into hibernation.

Her lips curled—barely.

Fernanda: Don’t tempt me. I’ll fake a signal loss and walk out.

Joe: What a legend

Fernanda: You’re a bad influence.

Joe: Someone has to be. Eat something when you wrap, yeah?

She didn’t reply right away. She didn’t need to.

He wasn’t looking for banter. He was checking in. Quietly. Consistently. Without expectation.

And that—whatever it was—felt like a fossil she hadn’t dared to excavate in a long time. Not a relic of who she used to be, but something preserved. Waiting. Something real beneath all the layers.

He didn’t ask for the girl from 2016. He didn’t try to remind her of what she used to sound like or why people used to listen. He saw this version—frayed, cautious, unfinished—and didn’t flinch.

That was rare.

That was enough.

Joe hadn’t expected her to pick up—he really hadn’t—not because he thought she was brushing him off, but because he knew what the end of a day like hers looked like, knew the kind of exhaustion that settled deep in the body when you’d spent hours being watched, heard, dissected, and maybe even adored, but still came home with a hollowness the world couldn’t see, and so when her face lit up the screen—glam smudged, hair pinned back, eyes tired but not dim—he felt something in his chest settle, like tension unwinding without being told to.

“Hey,” she said, voice scratchy in a way that made it sound like the day had taken everything except the truth.

“You made it,” he replied, the words simple but full, like he was glad just to see her land on the other side of everything.

And as they talked—banter about interviews and dumb questions, something soft about soulmates and miso soup—he listened more than he spoke, not because he didn’t have things to say, but because he’d learned that sometimes the most important thing a person could offer was not a perfectly timed reply, but space, real space, to be heard without interruption or expectation.

But under all of that—under the hoodie, the quiet grin, the half-jokes about cheekbones and tired souls—his mind kept moving in that slow, steady rhythm it always fell into before camp, before pressure started building again, before the countdown clock in his body reminded him that he didn’t have the same kind of time to give away as other people did.

His leg wasn’t one hundred percent. Not yet. The team was watching closely, trainers keeping tabs on every lateral move, every ounce of weight he put into a throw. He’d been here before—rehabbing, proving, staying even-keeled—but this time felt different, not worse exactly, just heavier. Like everything he said yes to now needed to be earned twice over. And so even as he watched her laugh—genuine and worn-out and real—some part of him whispered, What are you doing?

Because there was a version of this—of her—that lived entirely in fantasy, in screen-lit conversations and lazy texts and the occasional lunch that didn’t require explaining. And then there was the real thing. The real her. The one who didn’t ask for much but deserved way more than just good intentions and a half-available man rebuilding his throwing mechanics.

Still, the words left him before he could stop them, not because he was trying to lock anything down, but because something in the silence between them made him want to be honest without angling toward an outcome.

“I want to see you again.”

And the moment it hung in the air—heavy, clean, irreversible—he felt that flicker of doubt, the one that always came later, always quiet, always wearing reason’s voice: Did you just offer to stretch your already razor-thin recovery schedule to fly across the country for someone you’ve only seen in person once?

That’s not who he was. He wasn’t reckless. He wasn’t twenty-two anymore. He didn’t throw himself into things blindly—not relationships, not risks, not flights that might cost more than they gave. And yet, here he was, offering—not to fix, not to impress, not even to date—but just to be present, just to show up in the way no one ever seemed to show up for her.

And when she paused—when her eyes softened and her voice came slower, guarded—he didn’t flinch, didn’t try to close the distance with charm or reassurance. He just waited.

Because if there was one thing he understood better now, after years of being on camera and in huddles and under scrutiny, it was that trust wasn’t about speed or intensity or declarations that didn’t leave room for the other person’s uncertainty. It was about time. About showing up when it wasn’t convenient, about saying the thing and letting it breathe, about not trying to fill every silence with control.

So when she said she didn’t have time for a relationship, he didn’t fold or fumble. He just nodded. Not because he was unaffected, but because he meant what he said—no pressure, no labels, just more of this.

And “more of this” didn’t mean throwing off his rehab schedule or ignoring the expectations that were already stacked up against him when the season kicked in. It didn’t mean turning her into a distraction or pretending he could build something with someone while pretending his body wasn’t still recalibrating under the surface. It just meant he was willing. That he wasn’t afraid of slow. That he didn’t need a label to keep caring.

Because maybe that’s what steadiness looked like now—not big gestures or certainty, but offering to sit in the gray with someone without needing to turn it technicolor.

And when she finally said, “Yeah. I’d like that,” he didn’t grin or pump a fist or breathe out like it was a touchdown.

He just let it land. Quietly. Solidly. Like something he didn’t have to outrun or chase.

Because there were plays to memorize, throws to rebuild, headlines that would surface the minute his cleats hit turf again. But in this moment, on this couch, with her voice still ringing soft in his ears and no need to decide anything beyond this screen, he let himself feel what was real.

And real didn’t need to be rushed.

[meropeeonmee]

The next chapter of THE LEAK is going to explore more of Fernanda and Chris’s relationship. It’s honestly making me want to write a blurb for them. SOMEONE STOP ME. I will be posting the chapter 3 soon..hopefully..

[meropeeonmee]

OKAYYY SO I WAS SUPPOSED TO POST THE LEAK CHAPTER 3 BUT apparently I reached the blocks limit with text? now I have to start over again. AGAIN. Lord have mercy

[meropeeonmee]

PROLOGUE: THE LEAK

Description: A leaked demo reignites the internet’s obsession with a pop star’s rumored romance with an NFL quarterback—and exposes the heartbreak they both tried to bury.

AUTHORS NOTE: Sooo this is just a prompt, I’m just trying something out and want to see if my work could go somewhere. Let me know if you’d like to read more.

THE LEAK CHAPTER 1 - Next chapter !

MASTERLIST

🚨 BREAKING: “SPRING INTO SUMMER” DEMO LEAKS ONLINE — FANS CONVINCED POP STAR IS SINGING ABOUT NFL STAR JOE BURROW

At 2:17 a.m., a Reddit post with no caption and no context quietly dropped a link. No one expected the storm that would follow.

It was a SoundCloud upload titled “Spring Into Summer (Demo).” A stripped-down, three-minute acoustic voice memo—fragile, emotional, and clearly never meant to be public. Her voice cracks. Her timing stumbles. It doesn’t sound like a single. It sounds like a secret.

By morning, it was everywhere.

She hasn’t released anything in almost two years—not since 2022, when her name was tangled with NFL golden boy Joe Burrow. The two were never confirmed. No red carpets. No PDA. Just rumors, fan whispers, and one now-iconic photo:

April 29. Blurry, chaotic, and grainy—but unmistakable.

They were walking together, allegedly leaving a dinner in Manhattan. Heads close. No security. No handlers. Just them. Fans have argued for months whether it was really them, but now? The leaked file name—Apr29demo.mp3—has turned that blurry photo into undeniable lore.

And then there’s the song.

“Spring into summer, and the winter’s gone / I try to hold on to it, but the current’s too strong…”

“Somebody finds me in the shallow end / Love you like I mean it when I know I can’t…”

“We have too many years between us / If I could jump into the past, I’d only change one thing— / I’d never hurt you first. I’d never let you leave.”

“I’m always, forever, runnin’ back to you…”

There was no press release. No announcement. No warning. Just a time stamp. A heartbreak. And the sound of someone finally saying what they couldn’t say back then.

On Twitter/X, the meltdown is immediate:

@imjustaburner: “This wasn’t a leak. It was an open wound. And she let it bleed.”

@qbdramaqueen: “Joe Burrow hasn’t said her name once. Not once. She just sang it without even using it.��

@itsyourgirlmika_: “‘I’d never hurt you first’ is insane. That’s not a lyric. That’s what you say when you still check if they blocked you.”

@whodey: “We SAID that photo was them. She just confirmed it in stereo.”

Over on TikTok, one fan edit is already at 6.4 million views. It opens with that same blurry April 29 photo—cropped, filtered, enhanced—overlayed with:

“She kept quiet. He stayed distant. Now the song’s louder than both of them.”

The video cuts to Joe walking off the field postgame, eyes on the ground, followed by a clip of her at an awards show, unsmiling in a storm of cameras.

The chorus plays: “I’m always, forever, runnin’ back to you…”

Top comments:

“This isn’t a demo. This is a goodbye she never got to give.”

“She disappeared for two years. And this is the first thing we hear? She meant every word.”

“He left her in silence. She left him in a song.”

“April 29 is a national heartbreak now. She made it immortal.”

She hasn’t posted. She hasn’t followed him. She hasn’t even acknowledged the leak.

But the silence feels strategic now. Like the song said it all.

And Joe?

One sports insider claims he was late to Bengals training the morning after. Hood up. Headphones in. No eye contact. When asked by a reporter about “the noise online,” he just shrugged. But someone close to the team allegedly said, “He looked like someone who finally heard what he wasn’t ready to admit.”

There’s still no official confirmation of what happened between them. There never was.

But now, there’s a blurry photo.

A timestamp.

And a demo that never needed to name him—because it already did.

She gave the world what he never gave her:

Closure.

And she did it without ever saying his name.

And the man it’s about?

He’s finally listening.

Too late. Too quiet. But loud enough to echo.

[meropeeonmee]

I’ve finished Chapter 3 of THE LEAK! Just adding a few more details here and there. Gonna get some sleep and finish it after. The new chapter is coming soon! So far, it’s at 16k words.