The ruins were a place of solitude, Dom’s sanctuary. Set deep in the woods, what was left of the old house had long been swallowed by nature - skeletal foundations, a half-collapsed stone fireplace, and wisps of greenery overtaking every corner like silent caretakers of the past. The house had burned down over sixty years ago, just another casualty of the relentless brush fires that plagued these hills. Now, it was little more than a crumbled ghost of what it had been, marked only by time and Dom's occasional visits.
Dom had a ritual here. She’d perch herself on the edge of the old stone fireplace, dangling her legs as she absently threw rocks into the shadows of the forest. Other times, she just listened - to the rustle of leaves, the distant hum of a passing train blending into the calls of birds and the scattered chatter of squirrels chasing one another through the underbrush. Somewhere far off, a dog barked, and closer still, the laughter and shrieks of children drifted through the trees. Life, it seemed, found ways to reclaim even the places humans left behind.
This place pulsed with life, unlike her mother’s grave - cold, silent, and heavy with memories Dom didn’t always want to carry. Here, surrounded by wild green things and the echo of a place that once thrived, her mind could clear. This was her haven.
Today, she slipped her backpack off and rummaged around, pulling out her sketchbook. She brushed a smudge of dirt off the cover, remnants of its last tumble, and started flipping through the drawings. Nile had helped her rearrange these, moving pages, slotting them in a way that almost made sense. She felt a familiar warmth at the thought of him.
That boy, there was something special about him. Nile - he had a way of seeing things, organizing them, even her scattered thoughts, and making everything feel... right.
As her fingers trailed over sketches, memories drifted with them, carrying her back to her return earlier that year, and how much fun she’d been having with Nile since then. So much had changed - and yet, with Nile, it had been like stepping back into a memory.
***
It was right after Christmas when she and her father, Jacques DuMonte, returned to Pasadena. Coming back felt strange - like trying on an old jacket, one she’d outgrown but still fit just well enough to keep. Pasadena had been her first real home, the place she’d spent most of her early years until the world swept her away.
Her parents’ lives had been larger than life itself. Her mother, Olivia, had been a test pilot in the US Space Force, while her father had captained the USS Dawnstar. They had met on active duty, at a UN conference on human rights and climate change.
It was one of those stories you’d hear in a romance novel - two people, worlds apart, drawn together in an instant. A whirlwind romance, her father would say. Her mother called it a stroke of random luck, the reason she gave Dom the nickname “Random.”
Pasadena was meant to be the quiet home where they’d raise her, away from the chaos of duty and deployments. Their house in the Pasadena Hills was only a few miles from Pasadena City College, right next door to Nile’s family. She and Nile had met when he was five, and she was four - inseparable from that moment. It had been as perfect as peanut butter and jelly - as natural as breathing.
But time wasn’t kind. When she was eleven, her mother’s sudden illness shattered the world as Dom knew it, stealing Olivia away just before Dom’s twelfth birthday. Jacques was left to care for Dom alone, a new world of single parenthood and constant motion.
He took a commission that kept them on the move, and Dom went along, joining him on endless tours that became her only way of life. But even across oceans and continents, Pasadena always lingered in her mind, like an old friend waiting.
Flying became her solace, something she’d inherited from her mother. Enrolled in the US Air Force Cadets, she practically had wings of her own. She was set to follow in her mother’s footsteps - until a mishap at sea abruptly ended their constant travels.
Her father’s accident on the ship had been a wake-up call, the dislocation so severe he’d almost lost his leg. He’d recovered but never walked the same way again. It forced him to retire, and they finally returned to Pasadena, where he could teach, sharing his love for nautical sciences, mythology, and astronomy with college students.
Dom had kept up with her grades during their travels, and as fate would have it, her final semester at Pasadena High would be spent in Nile’s senior year. Coming back to him was like picking up the pieces of something timeless, something that hadn’t eroded despite all the years and distance. They’d kept in touch, their bond unbreakable, but now, they were truly reunited.
In her absence, she’d taken on a rebellious edge - leather jackets, studded boots, a shock of dark hair cropped close. Nile, with his slacker skater vibes, had grown into himself, too.
She saw right away, though, that Nile wasn’t just the slacker-skater type, no matter how much he tried to play the part. Beneath the surface, he had layers. For one, he was into martial arts, a passion they both shared.
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He also liked to illustrate - mostly comic book-style art, which, she had to admit, was surprisingly good. Dom’s own art tended to be more realistic, with softer, natural lines, but they could both lose themselves in drawing for hours. Photography was another thing they had in common, though for her, it had drifted to more of a hobby lately.
Nile had even developed an affinity for hacking - not the criminal kind but the pure, raw ingenuity of building and breaking technology to see how it ticked. Dom couldn’t help but admire his skill, his knack for inventing things.
She grinned, remembering the first time Nile had shown her his makeshift invention - modified sneakers with a twist. He’d rigged them with a row of mini rollerblade wheels that popped out along the sole, complete with a metal skid plate in the middle for rail slides.
He’d been so excited to show her, wide-eyed and boyish, practically glowing with pride. And for the first few seconds, it looked like he’d nailed it. But then, as he jumped onto a rail to demonstrate, one of the wheels caught. She’d watched, heart pounding, as he went down in an undignified heap, face-planting on the pavement.
She’d rushed to his side, the knot of anxiety in her stomach loosening only when he grinned up at her, laughing at his own clumsiness. She couldn’t help but join in, that little ball of anxiety in Dom’s stomach unclenched and she joined him in laughing at what an ass he was.
***
Dom smiled to herself, the memory of Nile’s grin as fresh as if he were standing right there beside her. Even in her memories, he had this way of making her laugh without trying - his energy, his total lack of shame when he face-planted off that rail. She chuckled, tucking the memory away with all the others, one of so many she’d collected with him over the years.
She’d developed her own tastes and hobbies in the time they’d spent apart, filling her life with what the world had to offer. Photography became her escape - a way to capture the world as she saw it. Animals were her favorite, especially ocean life, its strange beauty and alien grace. She’d even won an award once for her work, though she kept the accomplishment to herself.
Dom had also become something of a cinema buff, drawn to the dark corners of film - classic horror, twisted thrillers, even the cheesy B-rated horror flicks that no one else took seriously. She loved the camp, the drama, the unapologetic absurdity of it all. When inspiration hit, she’d scribble out a few short horror stories of her own.
Nile had insisted they had the potential to be turned into movies, like something out of a Stephen King collection. She took it as a compliment, though she half-believed he only said it because they were friends. But she had to admit, it was cool when he’d start drawing out storyboards, turning her ideas into comic-style sketches.
And then there was the trouble they got into whenever she was back in town. Dom and Nile had this knack for blending into chaos, for turning everything around them into their own private playground. They were a reckless combination, like an untested compound that no one dared mix for fear of the inevitable explosion.
Together, they’d pulled off prank after prank, a streak of mischief that left a trail of bewildered teachers and fuming authority figures. One time, they hacked the school network, switching around the teachers’ lesson plans so thoroughly that the math teacher tried to run a history lesson on the French Revolution, while the English teacher attempted to explain algebraic equations to confused freshmen.
And then there was the gymnasium incident - maybe their masterpiece. They’d managed to sneak over a hundred homeless people into the underused school gym under promises of free food and board, setting up a makeshift community while half the school was out on a field trip.
They actually delivered on their promise, bringing enough food to keep everyone fed. But when the gym turned into a full-fledged homeless shelter, and a "mysterious benefactor" leaked the story to the local media about the school’s “progressive” initiative, the administration was livid.
It had taken days to arrange a dignified relocation, and for weeks, the story kept popping up on social media feeds. Every time Dom and Nile saw it, they’d break into snickers and try to keep a straight face as the school board swore off “unapproved charity events” in the future.
Before this year, every time she came home, they’d been just two kids getting into trouble, the whole boy-girl thing irrelevant to either of them. To Nile, she was his best friend from next door, his scrappy sidekick in a pair of sneakers - not a “girl,” not something different.
They’d been inseparable, and being a girl had never factored into it. She was just Dom, a tomboy with a capital T, the girl who could beat him in a foot race and nail a three-pointer just as well as he could. The differences between boys and girls had seemed trivial, even silly.
Friends were friends and it didn’t matter how they dressed or who they hung out with.
But this time... there was something else. Something different simmered beneath the same old jokes, the shared defiance against authority, the thrill of breaking the rules together. She could feel it in the way he looked at her sometimes, the way his gaze lingered a beat too long, how he’d laugh a little quieter when she caught him staring. And she wasn’t blind to her own growing awareness of him, either.
Dom wasn’t exactly sure where Nile’s head was, but she had a pretty good idea it was in the same place as hers. She’d catch him watching her when he thought she wasn’t looking - noticing how she laughed, how she brushed a stray strand of hair behind her ear. And his gaze… she often saw his eyes wandering in a way that was not totally on the “friend” side of the road.
She was well aware of how she’d grown up, of the looks she’d started to draw from the boys around her. She knew that she was considered attractive by conventional standards, that she’d grown up in all the right places.
She’d had one or two minor boyfriends, though nothing had ever felt particularly serious. But with Nile... Nile was different. If something happened between them, she knew instinctively that it would be a line that if they crossed, it would be different.
With him, it would mean something. And maybe that was what kept her from making the first move - that strange, unspoken sense of what was hanging in the balance, waiting for them both to decide.