Simone was the earthquake. A visiting professor in architectural history, she was sharp-tongued, brilliant, and wore emerald-green glasses that made Kayla’s carefully structured world tilt. They met at a faculty mixer—Kayla reluctantly attending, Simone holding court about the erotics of brutalism.
Now, at 32, Kayla lives alone with I-Beam in a converted warehouse that she renovated herself. The space is a masterpiece of industrial minimalism—exposed steel beams, concrete floors, and one deliberately unfinished corner: a small room with no walls, just framing and a view of the river.
And that, perhaps, is the most terrifying thing of all.
The breakup wasn’t a fight. It was a quiet subtraction. He left a note tucked into her hard hat: “You build beautiful cages, Kay. But I need to fly.” onlykaylaowens - Kayla Owens SExIEST
For the first time, Kayla tried. She talked about her father’s fading memory. She admitted that she was afraid of being forgotten. She let Simone see her cry—once, in the dark, after a nightmare where she was building a bridge that led nowhere.
Her first love was Ethan, a quiet boy who sketched galaxies in the margins of his calculus homework. They were the odd-duck power couple of their small Oregon town: her, the daughter of a contractor who taught her that anything built could be demolished; him, the son of a librarian who believed stories could save lives.
Their romance was a slow-build indie film. First kiss under the bleachers during a rainstorm. Prom night in the bed of his truck, counting satellites instead of stars. But the fault line was always there: Ethan wanted to roam—Portland, then Berlin, then anywhere with a coastline. Kayla wanted roots, a foundation so deep that nothing could topple it. Simone was the earthquake
But the problem with building a relationship on the absence of chaos is that life is chaos. When Kayla’s father was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s, she didn’t lean on Marcus—she retreated. She worked longer hours. She stopped talking. Marcus, for all his warmth, didn’t know how to hold space for a grief that refused to be extinguished.
The attraction was a slow-burn dismantling. Simone didn’t just challenge Kayla’s emotional walls; she refused to acknowledge them as real. “You treat love like a truss system,” Simone said one night, after their first kiss—a kiss that happened against a bookshelf in the university library after hours. “You think if you put enough tension in one direction, you can control the outcome. But love is not a structure, Kayla. It’s weather.”
She never forgave him for the poetry of it. For the next four years, she dated no one. Instead, she poured herself into a master’s degree in seismic retrofitting—literally learning how to keep buildings from collapsing. The metaphor was not lost on her. Now, at 32, Kayla lives alone with I-Beam
But Simone had her own ghosts. A divorce from a man she still loved platonically. A deep, unresolved grief for a country (Nigeria) that she’d left and couldn’t return to. The relationship became a series of intellectual duels masquerading as intimacy. They were two people so fluent in the language of critique that they forgot how to just be together.
For a while, Kayla let herself believe in the lie of simplicity. They moved in together, adopted a rescue dog named I-Beam (she named him, of course), and talked about a future that looked suspiciously like a suburban blueprint.
The breakup was mutual and devastating. Simone left for a fellowship in Cairo. At the airport, she said: “You are not unlovable. You are just very, very good at making sure no one can prove otherwise.”
Kayla Owens doesn’t fall in love. She constructs it, brick by painstaking brick, as if she’s building a cathedral to house the parts of herself she’s too afraid to name. A structural engineer by trade and a pessimist by nature, Kayla believes that if she can blueprint every variable—every exit, every load-bearing wall, every potential point of failure—love will finally be something she can trust.
Marcus was her attempt at “normal.” A firefighter with a crooked smile and a laugh that filled a room, he was everything Ethan wasn’t: present, tactile, grounded. He showed up. He brought her coffee at 2 AM on job sites. He told her she was beautiful with concrete dust in her hair.