SPOILERS BELOW

Mismatched is a dual-POV novella set entirely at the Guardsman Institute of the Americas — specifically at the Pendleton Academy boarding school and the surrounding campus — over the course of Valentine's Day and the day preceding it. It tells the story of the bonding of Handler Taye Douglas Watts and Protector Brandon Fritz McCleod, two young Guardsmen who know of each other but have never been close, and who are in almost every visible respect an unlikely match.

The novella opens with two parallel backstories. Taye, the son of a facilities manager and an associate dean at Johns Hopkins, was identified as a Handler at eleven and shipped off to Pendleton against his will, leaving behind a family that was never quite able to reclaim him afterward. His years at the Institute have been marked by academic excellence, deliberate isolation, and a growing conviction that he does not belong anywhere — including, increasingly, in a bond. By the time the story opens, he is twenty-two or twenty-three, completing a food inspection certification between semesters of a pre-med undergraduate degree at Harvard, and quietly hoping he will end up among the ten percent of Handlers who never bond at all. Brandon, by contrast, declared himself a Protector before he could remember not believing it, was tormented for years by family and classmates for the claim, and manifested right on schedule shortly after his eleventh birthday. He arrived at Pendleton with pure excitement and has spent his years there being broadly admired, athletically gifted, and relentlessly optimistic — a disposition that conceals a deep-seated insecurity about whether he is genuinely loved or simply well-liked, rooted in a difficult childhood in a small Texas town with an abusive father and an overwhelmed mother.

The bonding itself occurs on February 13th, the day before Valentine's Day, in the most inconvenient possible setting: the soccer pitch observation knoll, mid-puppy-training session, with Taye's best friend Louie watching and the Hecklemeyer pair attempting to supervise the chaos. Brandon catches Taye's scent changing — the biological signal of a Handler coming into readiness — and crosses the field without being able to stop himself. What follows is a frantic, barely-contained scramble to get them somewhere private before the bonding hormones overwhelm them entirely, including a brief berserker-adjacent episode in which it takes both Louie and Protector Hecklemeyer to restrain Brandon while Handler Hecklemeyer pulls Taye back. The bonding is consummated in Taye's studio apartment in the guest barracks, and the aftermath is warm and tentative and already slightly awkward.

The awkwardness deepens the following morning. Brandon is a sunrise person; Taye is not. Brandon doesn't drink coffee. Taye is alarmed by this on a near-philosophical level. Brandon suggests camping; Taye declines with prejudice. It becomes rapidly apparent that they have spent years in close proximity at the Institute without actually knowing each other, and that the bond has outrun the relationship. Brandon, who has spent his whole life dreaming of a perfect, devoted Handler, begins to spiral — reading Taye's cynicism and blunt humor as rejection, interpreting every deflection as confirmation that he is not what Taye wanted. He puts enormous effort into their Valentine's Day dinner at the Roosevelt Club, arriving in a tailored linen suit with a bow tie and a sunflower cut from the campus greenhouse, only to feel immediately underdressed in ambition when Taye greets him with a casual suit and no tie, and waves away the effort as unnecessary given that they already slept together.

The dinner is a disaster of small talk and mounting tension. When the argument finally breaks open — Taye demanding to know what they have in common besides sex, and Brandon hearing in that question the same verdict he has been running from his whole life — Brandon strips and shifts on the Roosevelt Club's porch and runs into the woods. Taye, discovering for the first time that he can track his bonded Protector's emotional location, follows him to a campsite lean-to near Harper's Creek. What follows is the emotional core of the novella: Tucker dresses Taye down thoroughly before he leaves, Maisy withholds shoe-urination as a mercy, and Taye tromps through the dark forest tripping over every root to find Brandon curled up at the lean-to. The conversation they have there — with Taye petting Brandon in dog form, Brandon eventually shifting back, and both of them finally saying the true things instead of the defensive ones — resolves the central misunderstanding. Taye is not rejecting Brandon; he is frightened of belonging to someone after years of belonging nowhere. Brandon is not effortlessly golden; he has spent his life performing confidence to outrun the fear that he is fundamentally nothing. They are, it turns out, mismatched in almost every surface way and matched almost perfectly where it counts.

They return to Taye's studio, make plans to relocate to Taye's Harvard apartment for junior year (with a summer of camping — in a cabin, with hot water, Taye stipulates — in between), and fall asleep with Brandon as the big spoon and Taye as the small one, in a bed that is definitively too small for a 6'6" Protector. The final line belongs to Taye, muttered into Brandon's hair: "You feel like home to me too."