Here is Chapter 5 of my original fiction. In chapter 3, Cela’s aunt mentioned “there is a festival happening in about two weeks’ time. It’s a big mid-summer event. All the town attends.” (Chap 5 is about this)
Here is Chapter 4 of my original fiction samples that I was putting on Ao3 in 2nd draft. (there’s no sexual stuff at this stage in the story, but it’s about the early stages of their friendship)
Cela and Syden have not interacted much up to this point, but they will begin to interact more in the next chapter. This is just how their arc goes. They don’t interact much for the first 2 months that she is at their house, mostly because of him and his internal issues, and the first 3 chapters are showing that. It’s supposed to make more sense later in context of the larger story.
Also, I know these chapters are very long. I am writing them that way on purpose since I am only going to put up a limited amount of full chapters on here and therefore these details are to give context. If I were to make this a longer story, I would redistribute some of the exposition into other chapters so that these would be smaller, without dropping the important stuff overall (just moving some segments into other chapters instead).