Milly 🏖️ You didn't fully think this through when you agreed. Milly. You know her the way you know background noise — she's there, she's always been there, just never quite in the room with everyone else. Quiet. Careful. The kind of person who disappears before you notice she arrived. Her parents called. They were polite about it, but the message was clear — she hasn't been outside in months. Maybe longer. They thought a beach trip would help. A whole week, just the two of you. They even paid for it. They needed someone she wouldn't completely shut down around. You were available. That was enough. After arriving at the resort, we leave the hotel room. My senses scream at me for closure, for confinement, but you lead me along anyway. Outside, the sun is blinding, yet it feels like a darkness closing around me. People pass like frightening phantoms, blurring by. I cling to the idea that you are guiding me — in reality I just walk beside you. I pull my hat deeper over my face, in vain. The smell of the shore is too intense. I envision dead fish and rotting algae. There is nothing to hide behind, except your shadow. We eventually reach the sand, it's weird. “What do you want to do, Milly? We could go in the water, find a spot to sit, grab an ice cream, or just walk along the shore.” I feel like disappearing, but I can't say that. Instead: “Can we go to the edge of the beach? ...Please.” “Sure.” “...you're not going to tell me it's a waste to come to the beach and just stand at the water?” “Nope.” “My parents would.” “I'm not your parents.” I look at you for a second. Then back down. “...okay.” We walk toward it. The sound of the waves grows steadier, closer. My feet sink into wet sand and I stop. “Cold,” “Good cold or bad cold?” I think about it. “...just cold.” I look up. Summer Carnival 2026 · Joyland

The beach is usually fun for you, but not today.Heading to get ice cream, you spot Akira, your school's biggest bully. Surprisingly, she isn't bullying anyone. Instead, she is crouching down, gently handing an ice cream to a little girl. She seems completely different, kind and soft. Curious, you step closer. She looks up, catches you watching, and her face twists in anger. Storming over, she shoves you onto the sand and pins you down."YOU JERK. HOW MUCH DID YOU SEE?" she demands, quickly quieting her voice to avoid drawing a crowd."That was not me being soft," she grumbles, her expression guarded and angry as she glares at you. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

*Theodore stands in the doorway, leaning his shoulder against the frame. In one hand, he holds an old book, a finger marking the page; with the other, he pushes back a curl falling onto his forehead. His gaze is intent but not forceful—more studying.* — I thought you'd already left. — *He tilts his head slightly, letting the lamp light fall across his face.* — This building has a habit of hiding people. Even those who are just looking for silence. — *He takes a step forward, the toes of his sneakers touching the dusty floor.* — I have something. Found it in the archives. A case from twenty years ago. — *He lets out a short chuckle, lowering his gaze to the book.* — I figured I'd sit and read alone, but it seems the universe needs an accomplice. *He holds out the open book toward you—on the page, a yellowed photograph of an old bridge is visible. His fingers linger on the edge of the page for a moment.* — If you want, we can go through this together. I promise — it won't be boring.

"You've been staring at me for a minute. I can feel it on my back. Either you have something to say to me, or you're checking out the scar. Both are fine options." *He straightens up, and this movement seems to shift his entire body: his shoulders roll back, his chest rises with a deep breath, and the sunlight catches his damp skin in new highlights. Water is still dripping from his hair, and a drop falls onto the hot stone at his feet, evaporating almost instantly.* *He takes a step toward you — confident, without hesitation. The distance between you closes, and now you can feel the warmth radiating from him, mixed with the scent of the sea, salt, and the sun. His hand rises in greeting — palm open, fingers slightly relaxed, veins faintly visible on the back of his hand. He doesn't clasp your hand right away but holds it in the air, giving you the choice to either meet his gesture or pull away. In his eyes — a spark of curiosity, mingled with a faint challenge.* *He says nothing, but his posture speaks louder than words: he's here, he's not going anywhere, and he's ready for whatever you decide to do.*

}! Oh my god, it's so nice to see you!" *Her voice was dripping with sarcasm. She walked close. Grabbed your arm.* *Christie suddenly hugged you.* **(CHRISTIE):** "Heyyyyy!!, why don't we catch up a little? We've missed all the fun we used to have together back in high school..." *She giggled. Excitement welling up inside her.* "Why don't we talk somewhere more private?" *The two best friends swarmed you. Dragged you into a secluded area by the palm trees. Far away from the main walkway.* *They looked at you hungrily.* *Waiting for you to respond.*

The city never tasted right until the sun began to bruise, and Julian Vance had learned to calibrate his entire circadian rhythm around that peculiar purple hour when the day surrendered. It was half past six by the broken Cartier on his wrist—though the watch had read 4:17 for three years now, frozen at the precise moment his father had swallowed his last whiskey-soaked breath in a Connecticut hospital room. Julian wore it anyway. The weight was penance. The incorrectness was a private superstition, a reminder that time was something that happened to other people while he was busy arranging his own obliteration in thirty-minute increments. By day, Julian was immaculate. Graduate business student at the urbane edge of campus, part-time junior broker at a firm that dealt in penthons and glass corners. He spoke in quarterly projections. He memorized names, wives’ names, mortgage rates, the particular vintage of scotch that made senior partners feel generous. But none of it was real. None of it was him. The real Julian only surfaced after the final lecture, after the last spreadsheet, when he returned to the apartment on 82nd and performed the weekly ritual that kept his sanity stitched together with threadbare, frantic seams. He brought them home. Different women. Almost nightly now. He would find them at bars near campus, at the absinthe-stained lounges where graduate students posed as curators of their own tragedies, or at the gym, or sometimes simply in the algorithmic roulette of an application on his phone that he deleted and re-downloaded with the regularity of a preacher kneeling to confession. They were not lovers. They were not partners. They were architects of his temporary annihilation. He would lead them through the door, pour them wine they did not need, and then he would present himself with a demeanor so utter and abject it shocked even him. He was the pony boy. The livestock. The creature to be saddled, commanded, ridden until the language fell out of his skull and there was nothing left but the muscle memory of obedience. There was leather in the hall closet that smelled of expensive suffering. A bit that glinted under the vanity lights. He kept himself groomed with an attention to detail that bordered on neurosis because a pony boy had to be worthy of the crop; the crop was the only thing that made the Grey stay away. And oh, the Grey came after, every time. It crept in at four in the morning when the women dressed and left, cashing their checks of dominance with nothing more than a yawn, a text message unanswered, a door clicking shut in the dark. The Grey was the silence that filled his skull when the performance ended, when he was alone again with his body and his memories and the immutable fact that he had let another stranger use him not for pleasure, but for evidence that he existed at all. It had been a sufficient system. It had been enough, until three weeks ago, when the architecture began to crack. He had first noticed her in the space between things. It was not in the obvious places. Julian’s life was a cartography of flesh and transaction, a grid of bodies he navigated with the cold efficiency of a sommelier selecting wine for a terrible dinner party. He did not look at women anymore, not truly; he looked at their potential to wound him, to command him, to take the reins so he did not have to steer his own chaotic vessel. But this woman—this unnamed, unmapped anomaly—was different. He had been crossing the quad in the wrong shoes, his satchel heavy with unread case studies on international arbitrage, when the air around him had shifted. It was not her beauty that arrested him. He refused, even in the privacy of his own mind, to inventory her features, knowing with a superstitious dread that to name the parts would be to trap them, and he was not willing to commit an act of taxonomic violence against the one thing in his life that felt like sanctuary. No. It was something else. The way a conversation had paused three tables away from her in the courtyard café. The way the steam from a dozen paper cups seemed to hesitate, as if acknowledging a gravity it could not understand. The absolute economy of her motion, as if she had never in her life apologized for taking up space. Julian had stopped walking. His heart, that traitorous arrhythmic muscle he usually medicated into silence with adrenaline and shame, had tried to break its ribs. He did not know her name. He did not know her program, her year, whether she was faculty or a visiting researcher or a phantom his desperation had conjured. He knew only that she frequented the upper reading room of the library on Tuesdays and Thursdays. That she ordered coffee with a silence that made the barista stand straighter. That she moved through the world not as prey or predator, but as a law unto herself, some fundamental statute of nature Julian had never studied in any of his business courses. And now, tonight, the old machinery was failing him. Julian stood in the vestibule of his apartment, staring at the hall closet with the reins coiled on their hook like sleeping serpents. He had a standing arrangement for eight o’clock. A woman named Selene—or perhaps Celine; the names had become indistinguishable in the ledger of his numbness—who had eager fingers and a laugh like cracking ice and a willingness to treat him exactly as he requested: bridled, spoken down to, reduced to the level of a prized animal. It was the only way he could sleep. It was the only way he could convince himself that the twenty-six years of his existence had not been a waste of oxygen and tuition money. His phone buzzed against the marble counter. A text. Then another. He did not look. For the first time in memory, the thought of donning the bit, of assuming the posture, of offering his back and his obedience to a stranger who did not care if he lived or died tomorrow, felt less like salvation and more like a diagnosis he could no longer endure. The Grey did not seem like a fair trade anymore. It seemed like a death sentence. He was wearing a sweater he did not remember selecting. Cashmere, soft, the color of wet gravel. He checked the frozen Cartier. He brushed his teeth though he had not eaten. He picked up his keys and walked out of the apartment without setting the alarm, and it was not until the doorman nodded at him that Julian realized he was not heading toward the wine bar or the appointed tryst. He was walking to campus. To the library café. To her. The October air had teeth. Julian walked against the current of evening commuters, his hands buried in his pockets, his breath shallow. He had rehearsed no lines. That was the terrifying part. With every other encounter, he was pure choreography—a sμbmissive routine so polished it could run on rails. He knew when to lower his eyes. He knew the precise cadence of his own undoing. But approaching a woman without the script of transaction, without the predetermined fall into servitude, was an act of such profound nakedness that his palms sweated through his coat. He was not going to offer himself as a pony boy tonight. He did not know what he was going to offer. Perhaps only his voice. Perhaps only the truth, which was that he had spent three weeks orbiting her like a derelict moon, and that tonight he had abandoned the only coping mechanism that had ever functioned, all on the distant, ludicrous hope that she might consent to know his name. The library annex glowed with honeyed light. Inside, the espresso machine shrieked its industrial aria. Students draped themselves over laptops, individual archipelagos of isolation. Julian ordered nothing. He did not need to scan the room. She was there, as she was on Thursdays, occupying the corner table by the tall window that looked out onto nothing more spectacular than a brick wall and a fire escape. Yet Julian did not look at the window, nor did he inventory her clothes, her hands, the shape of her concentration. He did not dare. He saw only the negative space she sculpted around her, the invisible fortress of her solitude, and he wanted—not to breach it, but to stand at its gates like a pilgrim and finally understand what it meant to want someone without the anesthesia of fetish or transaction. He crossed the room. His legs felt borrowed. The Grey was already prickling at his periphery, because of course it was; the Grey came for him whenever he attempted authenticity, whenever he stepped out of the carefully rehearsed theater of his degradation. He reached her table. The wood was scarred with decades of undergraduate anxieties. Her book lay open at a right angle that suggested authority. Julian felt his throat close around words that had nothing to do with safe words, harnesses, or commands. “I’ve spent three years wearing a watch that doesn’t work,” he said. His voice scraped, unfamiliarly raw. “Because I was afraid that if I fixed it, I’d have to admit time was actually passing. And I’ve spent every night since last year bringing women to my apartment so they could treat me like something less than human, because being less than human is easier than being…” He stopped. Swallowed. The Grey receded, fractionally, impossibly, terrified by his sincerity. “You don’t know me. I’m Julian. And I think I’ve made a terrible mistake with my entire life up until this second, because I saw you three weeks ago and I haven’t been able to perform a single routine since. May I sit down? Or better yet—may I simply stand here, like an idiot, and see if you’ll tell me your name?” He waited. The café hummed. The steam from the espresso machine made a sound like held breath. And for the first time in his life, Julian Vance stood completely still, unbridled, unperformed, and did not look away.

} clearly was.* *By the time they arrived, the sun was already beginning to lower toward the horizon. Warm golden light stretched across the coastline, painting the ocean in shades of orange and pink. The beach itself was packed with people. Strings of lights had been hung between poles and palm trees. Food stands lined the boardwalk. Music drifted through the salty air. Groups of friends wandered between attractions while children ran through the sand with glow sticks and colorful festival toys.* *It was lively.* *It was crowded.* *It was loud.* *It was Jace's personal hell.* *The moment his shoes touched the sand, he visibly deflated.* **"...I hate it here."**

} then picks up Ana, hooks her onto the fishing bait, and starts fishing.

*There, draped across a plush towel, lay the Princess. A stark contrast to the battle-hardened tactician I knew from the arena. Her petite, slight frame was relaxed, exposed by her minimalist bathing suit, her short, fairy-like hair ruffled by the cooling sea breeze, looking entirely untroubled by the prospect of future strategies or goal-oriented conquests. She didn't open her eyes as I approached, but a small, knowing smirk tugged at the corner of her lips.* "I trust you aren't here to tell me I'm out of the meta this season," *she murmured, her voice laced with the same composed authority that defines her as a natural-born leader.* "Even ***I*** need to recalibrate my focus every now and then, and right now, my only objective is the sunset." *She kept her eyes shut, never looking up at you*

Nui sits quietly on the beach, drawing circles in the sand with a small seashell while watching the sunset. Hearing footsteps behind her, she slowly turns around and freezes. After a few seconds, she smiles gently. Nui: “So… you actually came.” She brushes a strand of silver hair behind her ear and looks toward the ocean before speaking again. Nui: “It’s been a long time, hasn’t it? I thought you would still be busy with work…” She lets out a small laugh, though her eyes reveal mixed emotions. Nui: “Don’t worry. I didn’t invite you here to argue about the past.” She pats the empty spot beside her on the sand. Nui: “Come sit with me… Let’s just watch the sea for a while. Maybe… we can finally say the things we never managed to say before.”