The ask is a warehouse with a decaying crown of windows and a landlord who thinks “industrial patina” equals three extra zeros. I smile, nod, photograph the rust. It’s not right. Too posed. Too curated in its mess.

I cut south, following a vein of streets where the graffiti isn’t a backdrop, it’s a map. The air is heat and oil and yesterday’s rain still caught in potholes. A neon sign flickers ahead, red and stubborn: needleNerve Records. The glass is warped, the stickers layered ten deep, band logos and anarchist A’s and a sun-faded “no cops, no karens.”

I step in and the bell above the door gives up a tired ring. The room is narrow, bins of vinyl making alleys, the carpet threadbare and honest. It smells like cardboard, incense, and old speakers. A fan churns nothing from the ceiling, the blades furry with dust.

“Give me a second,” a voice says, turned away, and a low track buzzes through old wiring—something with screaming guitars and a drum line like a sprint. I know the sound before I know the back of him: black tee clinging to shoulder blades, jeans hanging off narrow hips, a chain catching the light at his belt loop. Combat boots planted wide. A black hoodie tied around his waist. The curve of his neck where his hair is shaved a little too short under the dyed mess.

Athan.

He looks like the last time unpeeled itself and left him untouched by it. He’s got a pad on the counter, pen tucked behind his ear, a Sharpie biting his thumb. His eyeliner is smudged like sleep or sweat did it, not careful. His mouth is soft, unguarded in the second before he looks up.

Then he sees me.

Everything tightens. The softness retracts like a limb under cold water. He drags the pen from behind his ear slow, plants it on the pad like I’ve interrupted surgery. He drags his gaze down my outfit and back up, deliberately. Today it’s high waist trousers, white tank, leather harness that hugs my sternum like punctuation. Silver chain. Lip gloss that dares.

“You lost?” he asks. The words are deadpan. A flick of his eyes to my boots, to the scuffed floor, to the racks. “Or slumming for a mood board?”

I let the door swing shut behind me. The bell wheezes again. “Location scouting,” I say. “But thanks for the warm welcome.”

He tips his head, fake thoughtful. “No problem. We have a strict no-influencer policy, but I can make an exception if you promise not to photograph our bathroom graffiti and call it ‘raw.’”

His voice in this room is different. Less blade, more gravel. He fits here. It pisses me off a little, how good he looks when he’s not trying.

I move down a bin, flip a record to read the tag. Handwritten, cramped, prices barely there, little hearts next to the bands someone clearly loves. “You write these?”

“Sometimes.” He leans his elbows on the counter. His fingers are ink-smeared. There’s a nick on his knuckle. He watches me with that bored animosity, a cat daring you to touch it.

“You have good handwriting,” I say, mostly to see what he does.

He snorts. “That the part you understand? Letters? Figures.”

“Don’t get too excited,” I say. “I’m fluent in sound, too. And space.”

His eyes flick to the harness, then away. “Yeah. I can tell you’re fluent in space. All that empty negative space in your personality.”

I feel the smile curl slow. “Wow. You practice that one in the mirror?”

He almost smiles—almost—the side of his mouth betraying him for a second before he crushes it. He taps the pad with the Sharpie. “Can I help you with anything, or are you just here to remind the room your shoes cost more than our rent?”

“Both.” I set my camera bag on a stack of zines that say ‘free,’ then lift it again when he glares. “Relax. I’m not going to rearrange your sacred altar. Who curates this? It’s chaos. Two inches of doom, then bubblegum pop from 2003, then a crate that’s just blank sleeves with question marks.”

“That’s our mystery bin,” he says. “You take a chance on the unknown. It’s called taste. You wouldn’t get it.”

“Oh, baby,” I say, too gentle to be kind, “I built careers on gambling on the unknown. This layout’s not rebellious. It’s lazy.”

He straightens. “We like people to talk to us. You know, ask questions. Discover. Not just consume.”

“So leave paths,” I say, walking the narrow aisle, letting my shoulder graze a tower of CDs just to watch him wince. “Don’t make the room do all the work for your aesthetic of disdain.”

“You’re in a record store,” he says. “Not a concept hotel.”

I turn. “I’ve been in both. The hotel had better lighting.”

He laughs once, short, unwilling. It makes something twist low in me, annoying and sharp. I look at him fully, at how his nails are black and chipped, how his ear has three piercings, one healing red. The counter has a lip balm and a chipped mug and a tiny plastic skull. It’s domestic in a way that makes my chest ache.

A customer pushes in, bell clattering, the air shifting. Athan’s shoulders go down half an inch, the performance shifting to retail polite. He nods at the guy, answers a question about a reissue, rings him up with fingers that are quick and sure. He doesn’t look at me while he’s being useful. He doesn’t need to. I’m looking enough for both of us.

When the door sighs shut again, the room recalibrates. He flips the pad closed and slides it under the counter like I might steal it. “So. Location scouting,” he says, flat. “You dissatisfied with your usual white cube?”

I let my gaze run over the walls, the flyers stapled in constellations, the dim corners where dust glows. “I’m looking for texture,” I say. “And for people who don’t pretend to like me.”

“Congratulations,” he says. “You found one.” He taps the counter. “You can take pictures if you buy something. Two birds.”

I take that as permission because I would have anyway. I lift the camera. He straightens like I pointed a weapon. I angle to the corner, frame the light through the stickered glass, the way the dust hangs. The shutter is soft, a heartbeat. He listens to it even as he pretends not to.

“What do you even shoot?” he asks, forced casual.

“Bodies. Clothes. The space between them.”

“Of course you do.” He drags his thumb across his lower lip, smearing his liner a fraction more. “Figures.” He pushes off the counter, disappears down an aisle, and I follow him without meaning to, my eyes tripping over the scuffed heels of his boots, the worn leather, the way his ankle flexes inside it when he turns. He taps his foot once, an impatient, unconscious rhythm that resonates in my throat.

He stops at a listening station that’s just a beat-up turntable and a pair of headphones wrapped in electrical tape. He slides a record out with reverence I can feel from a foot away. He knows I’m still behind him. He likes it and hates it.

“You want texture?” he says, not looking at me. “Try something that isn’t engineered for runway struts. You all want punk you can steam press.”

“You think I want safety?” I rest my hip on the end of the bin, letting the harness creak. “I want coherence. This—” I flick a finger at a handwritten divider card that says ‘noise-ish? idk’—“isn’t a philosophy. It’s an excuse.”

He puts the record on, drops the needle like he’s setting down a blade. Feedback swells, a wall of it, then the riff tears through. He hands me the headphones, doesn’t say please. I don’t take them. I let the sound hit my skin instead, a scrape I know in my bones.

“Cute,” I say. “You play me a band that learned one chord and a grievance.”

He smiles like a wolf. “Grievances are the point,” he says. “That’s where honesty lives.”

“Honesty lives in craft,” I say. “Anybody can scream. Not everyone can say something while they do it.” I pick up another divider. “You could make this place a map. Right now it’s a dare.”

“It is a dare.” He lifts the headphones back to his own ears, listens for a beat too long, then drops them to his neck. “People who belong here don’t need a map.”

“Or maybe you don’t want new people to belong,” I say. “You like being a gatekeeper because it makes up for the fact that your brother holds the keys everywhere else.”

He turns fast. It hits. He bares his teeth without meaning to. “Don’t talk about him.”

“You brought him into the room,” I say, calm. “When you acted like this place excuses being a coward anywhere else.”

He steps in, crowding my space. He’s shorter, but his anger adds inches. “You think your harness and your gloss make you brave? You’re dressed like an aesthetic mood board. You perform shock for applause. You don’t know what it is to mean it.”

“I mean it,” I say. “Every time I pay my people on time. Every time I hire a kid who’s never been allowed to be weird and make them feel like they’re enough. You worship purity. It’s just another kind of vanity.”

He snorts. “You sell purity with better lighting.”

I lean closer. “I sell possibility. You sell scarcity. That makes you a cop with a better playlist.”

His mouth goes slack for a second, incredulous, then he laughs, sharp. “You’re unbelievable.”

“You’re hiding,” I say, softer. “Behind the sarcasm. Behind this place. Behind a myth about ‘real.’”

“And you’re buying your way out of real,” he throws back. “You think throwing money at a scene means you’re part of it. You’re a tourist with a budget.”

“That line is tired,” I say. “Try a new one.”

He looks me up and down again, slower, taking in the cut of the pants, the edges of my ink, the silver at my throat. “Fine,” he says. “You look ridiculous. That harness is cosplay. You don’t sweat in it. You don’t bleed in it. You take it off for a photoshoot and hang it on a rack and call it ‘edgy.’”

“I sweat in it,” I say, deadpan. “Just not for you.”

Color rises under his eyeliner, a flush he hates. “God, you’re insufferable.”

“And you’re predictable.” I tap a stack of local band demos, stapled zine covers. “You think suffering is a credential.”

He drags a hand through his hair. It sticks up in spikes that make him look even younger, even meaner. “You know what your work does? It scrubs the dirt off things until rich kids can touch them without feeling contaminated.”

“And you know what yours does?” I counter. “It guards the dirt like a dragon, so no one sees the gold under it. You keep your world small so you can feel big inside it.”

He opens his mouth, shuts it. The track on the turntable thrashes itself toward silence. The needle clicks into the center with a soft, insistent tick. His foot starts tapping again, hard now, heel beating the floor. The sound goes straight through me.

“You’re in my store,” he says finally, the edge gone dark. “If you don’t like the way it’s laid out, leave.”

“If you didn’t want me here,” I say, “you wouldn’t be arguing. You’d be ignoring me. You like this. The friction. It’s more honest than the quiet you do for your family.”

He looks like he might shove me. I want him to. I want to shove back. Instead, he turns to the wall of flyers and rips down one that’s half falling, pinning it back straight like control is possible if paper lies flat. “You think you can just walk in and—”

“And tell you I see you?” I say. “Yes.”

Silence. The fan licks the air uselessly. He swallows. His jaw jumps. “You don’t know me,” he says, but it’s less certain. “You don’t know anything about what I love.”

“Then tell me,” I say. “Don’t hide behind a ‘mystery bin.’ Put a sign on something. Put your name on what you stand for.”

He stares at me like I’m daring him to step into a street with no crosswalk. “Fine,” he says, and reaches under the counter. He slaps a record down between us, the sleeve soft at the corners from use. A band I actually respect. A deep cut. He meets my eyes, defiant. “Start here.”

“Now we’re talking,” I say. I pick it up, weigh it like a trust he didn’t mean to hand me. “And after I buy it, I’m going to move your listening station to the front where people can actually see it.”

“Touch my layout and I’ll break your fingers,” he says, but it’s halfway to a smile he fights down like a bad habit. He snatches the record back to ring it up, the old drawer slamming open with a bruise of a sound.

The bell over the door jangles. We both flinch, glancing toward it like we’ve been caught doing something intimate. A shadow falls across the threshold, large and wrong. The air shifts colder in an instant. Athan’s shoulders climb back to his ears in a heartbeat, anger swapping out for that tight, brittle posture I recognize from the gallery.

He doesn’t need to turn for me to know who it is. He doesn’t need to say a thing. His foot stops tapping. His hands go still on the counter, the ink on his knuckles stark against skin gone pale. The silence between us tightens, humming, about to snap.

Bryce’s shadow blots out the doorframe, but it’s just some kid in a varsity jacket behind him, laughing too loud into his phone, oblivious. The kid squeezes around, bell clanging, and heads for the pop-punk bins. The wrongness lingers anyway, a phantom hand at the back of Athan’s neck.

I watch it ride him. His shoulders square into that practiced, polite readiness. The sarcastic mouth shuts. He pushes the record into a paper bag, slides it to me like we never snarled at each other, like none of it mattered.

The kid mumbles a question from the endcap. “You got the new Pressed Flowers vinyl? The pink one?”

Athan inhales, slow, muscles unsticking with visible effort. “They pushed the ship date,” he says, voice neutral. “Check back next week.” He turns, and the heel of his boot ticks the floor once. It’s small, but I feel it down my spine.

He bends to pull a milk crate from under the counter, and the laces on his left boot are frayed to white threads at the aglets, tied in a hard double knot. The leather is softened where it’s bent around his ankle so many times that it looks like a second skin. Scuffs draw crescents at the toes, gray and matte where they’ve hit concrete. There’s a crack near the eyelets, a thin, pale line that catches light. The tongue is split, the edge curling back where he’s grabbed it too rough. A faint ring of dirt traces the welt from rain dried fast and mean.

His foot taps again, once, twice, then goes still when he realizes it. But the echo keeps going for me. Something low and sharp blooms in my chest, unwanted and hot. I swallow and it doesn’t go away.

He leans his weight to the outside of his boot while he lifts the crate, and the leather creaks. It’s intimate like a body sighing. I imagine the sweat darkening the insides, the imprint of his toes, the place his heel has ground down the insole. I imagine those boots on my chest, on my face, the dry scrape and the weight pinning me exactly where he wants me. I imagine him bracing the toe under my jaw, tilting my head with nothing but a twitch. It’s stupid and immediate, and I hate that it’s happening here, under fluorescent lights, with a teenager humming along to a radio.

He crouches to shelve a stack, the denim of his jeans stretched at the knees, and his calf flexes under it, a thin line of tendon visible above the boot’s collar. The laces bite over his instep, a tidy lattice that I want to worry loose with my teeth. I want dirt under my tongue, the metal tang of the grommets, the sour-salt ghost of clove smoke soaked into leather. It hits me like an electrical low-voltage hum, constant.

He stands and the heel clicks again, impatient. He keeps his face blank for the kid, but his foot can’t lie. It tells on him, tapping when he’s irritated, stopping when he’s afraid, shifting when he’s about to say something he knows he shouldn’t. It’s a metronome of whatever’s underneath.

“Find everything?” he asks the kid, the script back in place.

“Yeah,” the kid says, dropping a record on the counter. “Uh, do you validate parking?”

Athan’s mouth twitches and the line of his foot stills. “We validate existence,” he says flatly, “not parking.” He rings him up anyway and scribbles something on the back of a crumpled flyer, sliding it over. “Show them that and tell them you cried.”

The kid laughs, charmed without knowing it. Athan flicks his gaze to me for half a second like he’s checking that I saw him be human. I did. My skin is too tight for it.

He moves to the end of the counter and kicks the cabinet shut with the side of his boot, a casual little violence. The mark it leaves on the wood is a new scuff on old dents. He goes to put the record on for the kid, and I follow because I don’t want to stand still with the feeling crawling over me.

He bends by the turntable and presses the cue, and the muscles in his forearm jump under a sleeve pushed up with no care. His ankle rolls in the boot, a circle so small it might be for him more than for balance. The boot kisses the floor, a whisper of rubber. I imagine that same foot on my sternum, pressing until my breath is a decision he makes. I imagine those toes shoving between my lips until the lace tips knock against my teeth. My hands twitch. I tuck my thumbs into my belt loops and hold, steadying myself on leather.

I’ve had attraction flare hot and vanish a hundred times, clean arcs of want I can aim. This isn’t clean. It’s messy and low and has nothing to do with his face or his mouth. It’s the boots that undo me, the lived-in hunger of them, the way they make him more real and more dangerous at once.

He straightens and looks at me. His eyes track down and catch where mine are stuck, a flicker of comprehension so quick I’d miss it if I didn’t live in the space between looks. His foot curls minutely inside the boot, like his toes are pressing against the leather. He notices me noticing and tests the pressure on me with a barely-there shift of weight.

He could exploit it, if he let himself. He could plant that heel on the edge of my shoe and hold me there. He could push the toe against my shin and ask me if I’d move. He doesn’t. He swallows instead, pushes his tongue against his cheek like he’s punishing himself for letting anything show.

The track starts. The kid sways, oblivious, and Athan’s boot starts its rhythm again. Tap. Tap. Pause. Tap. I count it because I can’t not. I can hear where his patience runs out. I can tell where the mask slips.

“Anything else?” he asks the kid without looking away from me now, not really. I shake my head at how ridiculous it is that an old pair of boots just rewired my brain.

The kid leaves, bags rustling, bell a little softer this time. The door clicks shut. The air settles. The quiet between us is crowded and new.

Athan drags his toe along a crack in the concrete like he’s tracing the fault line. “So,” he says, tone dropping, not mocking now, not anything I’ve heard on him yet. “You got what you came for?” His foot is still. I can feel my heartbeat in my mouth. I want to say yes and I want to say no and I want to drop to the floor and put my cheek to the laces until the tapping starts again.

“Yes,” I say, because it’s the truest lie I can manage. “And no.”

He doesn’t get a chance to pry. The bell tears through the room like a blade. The draft that rides in is cold and chemical—aftershave, dry-cleaning, money. I know the shape before I turn. Broad shoulders in a pale blazer that doesn’t belong in this light. Polished loafers that squeak once and then go deadly quiet. Bryce.

Athan goes rigid in my peripheral vision like someone killed the switch. The jaw that was cutting retorts two minutes ago tightens, then smooths. His shoulders pull back. His hands flatten on the counter. The tapping dies like someone put a finger on a pulse.

“There you are,” Bryce says, smiling like a photo. His eyes skip over me like I’m a fixture—a mannequin, a caution sign—and land on Athan with a proprietary warmth that makes my stomach curdle. “We’re late.”

Athan’s mouth opens, then shuts. The sound he makes is a soft, automatic assent. “Right.” The word is lighter than anything he’s used on me. He reaches for something without looking: keys. The practiced choreography of obedience.

Bryce steps in, bringing the outside world’s shine with him, and it looks ugly against the shelves and scuffed floor. He takes in the store with a curled lip. “Smells like mildew,” he says, almost pleasant. His gaze flicks to my boots, up my legs, clocking threads, piercings, everything, then dismisses it. “We have a reservation, Athan.”

Athan nods. He doesn’t roll his eyes. He doesn’t throw a quip like he did at the kid. He tucks a stray strand of hair behind his ear with the same neatness Bryce’s tie has. He hits the register button and the drawer opens; he tucks money in, counts like he’ll be graded.

“We still on for seven thirty?” Bryce asks, but doesn’t wait. “Mother’s already seated. Don’t make me explain to her why you look like this.” He gestures loosely at Athan’s T-shirt, the ink on his fingers. The tone is light. The words bruise.

Athan’s hand pauses over the receipt paper. A beat. Then he tears the strip clean, changes out the till tape with quick, competent movements that suddenly look small. The muscle at his cheek jumps once and disappears. He does not meet my eyes.

“Give me two minutes,” he says. Polite. Bland. He moves around the counter and the boot that had me by the throat a minute ago is quiet, careful. He bumps his hip on the endcap and apologizes to the wood under his breath. The Athan from seconds ago—spiky, mean, electric—leaches out of him with each step toward Bryce like ink in water.

Bryce watches him. Approval is withheld and dangled all at once. “And wipe your hands. We’re not bringing grease to the table.”

Athan wipes his fingers on a rag that used to be black. He doesn’t look at what it leaves behind. He folds the rag, neat edges, puts it exactly where it belongs. He grabs his jacket from a hook, black denim faded to thundercloud, and shrugs into it like armor that no longer fits.

I hear myself say, “He was helping me.” It comes out flat. It’s a hand on a hot stove. I shouldn’t touch this. I do anyway.

Bryce turns fully at that, finally regarding me as a person. His smile tightens. “I’m sure he was.” He scans me like a hazard to be contained. “This is private. You can ring your… hobbyist purchases some other time.”

Athan flinches so fast it barely counts. He takes a step toward Bryce, then checks himself with a tiny settling of shoulders, a nod. “It’s fine,” he says to no one. He takes the paper bag with my record in it, folds the top, holds it out to me with careful fingers that don’t brush mine. “Here.”

I take it. Our skin doesn’t meet, and I still feel heat. He keeps his eyes down, lashes a blackout curtain. The toe of his boot hovers over the crack he was tracing earlier and doesn’t touch it.

“Now,” Bryce says, already turning, ownership practiced and bored. He touches Athan’s wrist with two fingers like he’s steering a child across a street. Athan goes. He doesn’t jerk away. He doesn’t make a scene. He moves with him, pliant, the hard lines of his body slackened into something that makes my throat close.

“Do you lock up?” I ask him, uselessly, and he nods, automatic, reaching to flip the deadbolt with that quiet competence that just made me want to ruin him. He doesn’t look at me. He looks at Bryce’s reflection in the window to see if he’s moving too slow.

“We’ll circle back to this.” Bryce glances at me as if we had a meeting on the books. “If there’s anything to circle back to.” The smile doesn’t reach his eyes. Inside it, there’s an old cruelty he thinks is discipline.

Athan swallows and it’s loud in the silence of tinny guitars and air that’s stopped moving. He tucks his chin, a nod I’ve seen on dogs who’ve learned not to bark. He slides past me, careful not to brush. The leather of his boot kisses the floor one last time, weight pulled in, all the edges tucked away.

The door opens. The bell cries. The cold follows them. Athan glances up once—not at me, but at the ceiling, like he’s checking the weather in a room he can’t control. Bryce’s hand settles at the back of his neck. Athan drops his gaze, steps through.

They leave a vacuum. The bag crackles in my hand. The record inside is heavier than it was. I stare at the place where his boot had been tapping. The crack in the concrete looks like a line someone drew to tell him where to stand.

I want to smash the bell, the register, Bryce’s smug, neat mouth. More than that, I want to get close enough to press my palm over the part of Athan that just went quiet and keep it beating hard. Not to save him. To see it, raw. To know what he looks like when he’s not for them.

The music keeps playing for no one. I tuck the bag under my arm and step into the doorway, watch the two of them cross the street. Athan’s shoulders are set in a shape that isn’t his. His hands are in his pockets so he won’t fidget. His boots are silent on the wet pavement.

Bryce says something. Athan nods. He doesn’t tap. He doesn’t laugh. He disappears into the metal mouth of a car that reflects nothing back.

I stand there until the exhaust thins. The bell dings again as the door closes behind me on an empty store. The air, finally, moves. It smells like dust, ink, and the afterimage of clove smoke clinging to old leather. I breathe it in and let it burn.