To Ruin a Rich Boy

The gallery smells like expensive varnish and desperation. A hundred champagne flutes clink against the dull hum of old money trying to look interesting under high white lights. My boots squeak against the polished concrete, my reflection twitching in sculptures that look like they cost more than my entire collection. I hate the way they stare through me and pretend it’s curiosity, like I’m the garnish on a plate they will never eat.

My suit is cut sharp enough to hurt someone. Black silk with a blood-red lining I only flash when I’m bored. Chest bare under the blazer, tattoos cutting up the center like a roadmap I dare them to follow with their eyes. A chain hangs low across my waist. My hair is shaved on one side, the other side long and slicked back. A man in a dove-gray jacket blinks at my septum ring like it’s offensive. I grin and take his champagne.

“Networking,” my assistant had said, pushing this invite into my palm like a dare. Network with who? These people buy ugly art and call it an investment. They buy designers, too. I sip, and the bubbles bite my tongue. I let them.

A laugh cracks across the room like a car alarm. My head turns before I decide to look. He’s a lighthouse of the worst kind—blonde, blue-eyed, blazer the color of trust fund, teeth too white to be real. The brother. At his side, like a shadow someone forgot to turn off, is the only person in here who feels alive.

I clock him in three seconds. Head-to-toe black that isn’t trying to impress anyone. Black denim jacket, black band tee, black jeans ripped at the knees. Combat boots with scuffs that are earned. Eyeliner winged so sharp it could cut my throat if he glanced too fast. Hair black like fresh ink, falling into his eyes, which are darker than the room deserves. He’s not posing; he’s enduring. His mouth is set like a locked door. He looks bored enough to burn the place down.

The blonde brother keeps performing loudly for a small circle that feeds off him. He throws his head back, that empty laugh, says something about the “vibe” being “so raw” in a way that makes my skin crawl. The shadow beside him—Athan, I’ll learn later—doesn’t laugh. He doesn’t participate. He exists. He stares at a painting like it has personally wronged him. He picks at the corner of a sketchbook tucked under his arm with rings that match the metal in his ears. I follow the line of his throat, the pale slash of skin under the collar. Someone should paint that neck. Someone should put teeth on it.

A curator I’ve met twice flits by with a hand on my forearm. She says my name like it’s a commodity, says their donors love what I’m doing, asks about the fall line. I give her the line I always do—leaner silhouettes, harsher fabric, the color of a bruise. She nods enthusiastically like I’ve mentioned God. My eyes slide past her shoulder, back to the black figure trying to shrink himself next to the blonde noise machine.

If I had to be here—and apparently I do—I’m grateful for a target. He notices me. I know he does because he tenses almost imperceptibly when my gaze lands on him. He doesn’t look over. He looks down, jaw clenching. A ringed thumb rubs over the spine of that sketchbook like it’s the only thing keeping him tethered. I walk closer without meaning to.

The blonde one is telling a woman in pearls that he told the gallerist to “lean in” on curation, that the city needs “edgy” work. He says “edgy” like it’s a word he learned this morning. Athan’s eyes lift and skate across the room like a flat stone hitting water. When they meet mine, it’s a blink, a hit, a refusal. He looks away first. The refusal turns into heat in my mouth.

I circle the space like a wolf in a tux. The art is a sea of white and muted bruises—perfect for people who like to pretend they feel. I’m supposed to shake hands, compliment brushstrokes, flirt carefully with money. Instead, I track that black silhouette like a song I can’t place. Every time his brother’s voice spikes, Athan’s shoulders flinch, and then go still. He’s practiced at being invisible. It makes me itch.

A small cluster forms around me when my name moves across the room like perfume. Younger creatives, two men with soft hands, a woman from a glossy magazine who tries to slot a pronoun into small talk like it’s a party trick. I give them what they want: the sharp tongue, the easy insult delivered like a gift. They laugh. I’m good at giving people what they think they want. But my eyes go back to the boy in black, pulled like tide.

He finally breaks away from the circle around his brother, stepping half a foot to the side. The air around him changes. It’s ridiculous how I can smell clove smoke in a place where no one is allowed to breathe wrong. He slips the sketchbook fully under his arm like a secret. The brother glances at him and puts a hand on his shoulder without looking. Possessive. Dismissive. It lands too hard for casual. Athan doesn’t shrug it off. He goes still under it like he’s learned stillness is safer.

My hand tightens around the stem of my stolen champagne. I let my gaze crawl deliberately up his boots, the frayed laces, the scuffed leather, the pale slice of ankle when he shifts, the tight line of denim over his thigh. He shifts again, and the hem of his tee rides up just enough to show a sliver of skin at his waist, a bruise or ink peeking. The heat in my mouth drops to my stomach.

I angle closer, just enough to catch the ending of the brother’s sentence: “—you know how these people are. It’s all optics. Chill.” He grins, squeezes Athan’s shoulder, returns to preening. The muscle at Athan’s jaw jumps. He drags a thumbnail over the paper inside the sketchbook without opening it. The sound is nothing. It feels loud.

A collector stops me to talk about a gown he saw last winter, the one with the hand-laced bodice that made a woman look like a dangerous confession. He wants to buy the story behind it. I let him think I have one to sell. Over his shoulder, a black shape exhales like he’s drowning in white noise.

I am out of place here. I’m supposed to be. But I’ve never been more clear about why I came. Not for the checks or the champagne. For the boy who looks like a bruise in a room of bleached bone. For the way my body knows a kindred darkness on sight. I let my eyes find his again, only this time I don’t look away. I let him feel it. I watch his pupils flex, the tiny swallow he tries to hide, the way his fingers go still on the edge of his secret.

He looks away. His brother laughs. A server glides past with a fresh tray. I set my empty flute down and step forward.

The server’s tray is a parade of bubbles and tiny salted shells. Bryce plucks one without looking, the same hand still heavy on Athan’s shoulder. His voice swells, designed to be overheard. “I swear, if I have to shake hands with one more diversity initiative in designer shoes tonight—” He bites into the oyster and laughs, eyes flicking toward a Black artist across the room in a striped suit, then back to his circle. “It’s like…do they come with the grants? Is there a bundle deal?”

The air splits. The pearls woman tenses, lips pinched. One of the soft-handed men does a soft, nervous chuckle. Athan’s fingers freeze on the sketchbook, then curl, white at the knuckles.

I set my glass on the server’s passing tray without breaking stride. “You paid extra for the bundle,” I say, stepping into Bryce’s light like I belong there and watching his gaze snap to mine with that bland, entitled surprise. “Did they charge by the slur or the square footage of your ignorance?”

His smile stalls, then restarts, tight. “Excuse me?”

“No, I heard you the first time,” I say, tilting my head toward the artist he targeted, who is very clearly pretending not to hear, jaw working. “We all did. It was very…raw of you.” I give his word back to him, polished sharp. “But hearing you speak like that in here is like watching a man take a dump in the middle of the white cube and call it performance.”

There’s a small, delighted gasp from someone behind me. Bryce’s grip on Athan’s shoulder increases—Athan doesn’t move, but his body goes rigid, breath stuck high in his chest.

Bryce tries another tack. “You must be…Heiylo, right? The trans—”

“Designer,” I cut in, smiling. “Who taught you to say my name? The PR intern you scare when you loom over her desk?” I plant a heel on the conversation and grind it. “If you want to talk about optics, we can. But say your racism with your chest next time, not like a coward hiding behind canapés.”

The pearls woman suddenly discovers her phone. Soft Hands 1 starts nodding too fast. Across the room, the gallerist has noticed, her polite alarm dialed in but not deployed yet.

Bryce laughs again, pitched defensively. “Wow. Okay. Relax. It was a joke.”

“The kind that curdles in your mouth,” I say. “And drips on your shoes.” My eyes flick down to his loafers. Glossy, brown, safe. “Here’s a new joke: every time you open your mouth like that, a donor closes a checkbook. It’s adorable you think you run the room.”

Athan’s throat moves. He’s watching me through the fringe of his hair, face unreadable, an electric crack hiding under ice. The rings on his fingers dig into the sketchbook’s spine.

Bryce leans in, the smell of expensive cologne and stale money. “You don’t know who you’re talking to,” he says, too low for the circle but not for me. He pats Athan’s shoulder like a reminder: his property, his audience. “We’ve been supporting this space since you were DIY-ing holes in shirts.”

I keep my voice bright and public. “And you still haven’t learned how to be a decent human. Imagine spending that much money and buying no taste.”

A snort comes from somewhere on the edge of the group. The Black artist across the room finally looks directly at me, then at Athan, then back, something hard easing by a degree.

Bryce shifts, affronted. “Wow. The moral police in a harness. Cute.”

“Thank you,” I say. “And here I thought your blazer said ‘probation officer for the bland.’ Look.” I gesture to the art around us, the too-clean, too-cold mise-en-scène. “This room is already hostile enough without you turning the vibe into a country club toilet. Keep your jokes in your group chat where you all pretend it’s 1952.”

The gallerist finally inserts herself, a soft, practiced hand on Bryce’s elbow. “Everything all right here?”

“Totally,” I say, eyes still on him. “We were just talking about how some people confuse nepotism with personality.”

Bryce’s jaw flares. He glances around to see who’s watching. Enough people. He pulls his hand off Athan’s shoulder with a brittle briskness, as if he’s the one deciding to deescalate. His grin is too bright. “We’ll take our checkbooks elsewhere, then,” he says, performative, but he doesn’t move. He needs the room to love him.

I step closer by a fraction, voice softened to cut cleaner. “Don’t threaten us with a good time.”

Athan’s eyes flick to mine. The flicker is quick, a shutter opening and slamming shut—something like relief, like hunger, like warning. His mouth doesn’t move. His shoulders are still iron. The tendon in his neck stands out like a seam.

Bryce tries one last grasp at control. He angles his body to block me and pitches his tone to Athan without looking at him. “Let’s go, yeah? This place is a circus.”

Athan’s fingers twitch over the notebook, then lock. He doesn’t speak. He doesn’t move. He is a statue of defiance disguised as compliance. I let the silent acknowledgement between us be nothing more than a spark buried in coal.

I turn away from Bryce as if bored, and address the room, the gallerist, the pearls woman, anyone who needs the cue. “Apologies,” I say lightly. “I get allergic rashes around hate.” I smooth my lapel, letting my chain glint. “They tend to clear up once the source leaves.”

A laugh breaks, softer and more honest. Bryce’s ears go red. He steps back, straightens his blazer, and levels a smile that doesn’t fit his face. “Enjoy your evening,” he tosses, brittle, and cuts through the group, dragging the air with him. He doesn’t touch Athan this time. He doesn’t even look.

Athan’s gaze trails after him for half a breath, then snaps back to the floor. He inhales, small and sharp, like he’s bracing for a blow that didn’t land. When his eyes lift to mine again, it’s through the cracking shell of something I can’t read. Maybe thanks. Maybe hate. Maybe both. He tenses like a wire pulled tight, then turns his body toward the balcony door as if the glass might save him.

I let him go. I watch the black shape cut through white light, a shadow escaping a spotlight. The room exhales around me, chatter filling the vacuum. My heart thuds steady. The taste of him sits under my tongue like iron. The artist in stripes nods once as he passes me, a private pact made with a glance.

I pick up a fresh flute, let the bubbles bite again, and pretend I didn’t just rearrange the room. But my eyes are already tracking the thin line of Athan’s spine as he slips outside, the set of his shoulders pulling the night tight around him.

The balcony door sighs shut behind me, muffling the room’s fake-laugh soundtrack. The night tastes like rain that never arrived, city heat pressed low. He’s there at the edge, hunched into himself, the skyline carving a jagged crown behind his head. The cherry of his clove glows, burns, dies, returns. The scratch of pencil on rough paper rides the back of his breath.

I don’t announce myself. I take the spare spot along the rail, not close enough to spook, not far enough to be mistaken for passing. The wind lifts the fringe from his eyes for a heartbeat. He doesn’t look at me.

“Strong choice,” I say, nodding to the cigarette. “Cloves. Like pretending to cough perfume.”

He exhales through his nose, smoke curving away. “Helps the room smell less like money and hairspray.”

“So we do agree on something.” My mouth wants to be sharp; I sand it down. “You okay?”

His pencil moves like he’s carving a wound into the paper. “Do you ever get tired of being a savior in leather?”

It’s a good hit. Short, clean. I let it land. “I get tired of idiots with microphones. Your brother’s voice is a public health hazard.”

He smirks at the city. “You don’t know him.”

“I know that type. He thinks volume is a personality. And he thinks standing next to him means co-signing.”

Silence clinks between us. His boot taps once, a staccato on concrete, then stops like he punished himself for it. He thumbs dust off the page. I catch a flash of lines: a hard jaw, a soft mouth, an eye like a smudge. It could be anyone. It could be him.

“You draw,” I say.

“Observant,” he mutters. He brings the cigarette to his lips, the tip painting his mouth a deeper red. “What do you want?”

“Air. Another human who hates this as much as I do.” I tilt my head toward the room. “They’re going to spend forty minutes saying ‘interesting’ like it’s orgasmic.”

He finally looks at me, sideways, through lashes that cast bars across his gaze. Up close, the eyeliner is imperfect, thumb-smudged where he rubbed his eye. The small bruise at his hip flashes when he shifts again. My focus slips and claws back.

“You like being looked at,” he says flatly. “Seems like your natural habitat.”

“I like choosing who looks,” I say. “And why.”

He snorts. “Congratulations on your brand.”

“And you,” I say, nodding toward the black on black on black, the nails bitten down, the rings that look like weapons. “Congratulations on your armor.”

He turns, the move small but edged. “You think that was me needing help back there?”

“I think you didn’t need him talking about people like that. I think you hate it and you let it happen.” I don’t flinch from his scowl. “I think I couldn’t not say something.”

He stares at me like he’s cataloging, cross-referencing me with every noise he’s heard about me. He sucks clove-sugar between his teeth and chews at it like punishment. “You really believe you’re some kind of corrective?”

“No,” I say. “I’m a bad habit with good timing.”

For a second, something that looks like a laugh almost breaches. Then he shakes it off, shuts the notebook with a soft slap, the elastic band snapping around it with practiced violence.

“Look,” he says, low, the words picked clean. “I get that you have a thing where you roll into rooms and make them bow. And I’m sure it works on donors and interns and people who think your chains are rebellious.” He lets his gaze rake me, not admiring, assessing. “On me? Not so much.”

“Not trying to make you bow,” I say. “Trying to see if you’re a person under all that.”

He flicks ash into the dark. The wind takes it. “I am exactly as much of a person as my brother says I am. Which is to say: his.” He leans on the rail, the bones of his wrist sharp where his sleeve slides back. “So take your lecture about optics and your savior complex and go sell it to people who pay you for your mouth.”

His tone is arctic, precise. The insult lands clean and hard, and he holds my eyes while it does. There’s a tiny tremor in his left eyelid that betrays tension, or caffeine, or both. He wants me to see indifference. He is daring me to flinch.

I don’t. “You can mouth off all you want,” I say, even. “But if you parrot his lines, I’m going to assume you mean them.”

He smiles, not kind. “Parrot this, then: you look like a costume for a personality. The harness, the metal, the curated outrage. It reads try-hard.” His gaze flicks to my boots, my chain, back up. “Next time you want to make a point, do it without using me as a prop. We don’t know each other. And I don’t need you.”

The cigarette burns down to the filter. He drops it, crushes it under his boot with a twist that is too deliberate to be careless. He tucks the notebook under his arm, every move economical, careful, like motion is a language he doesn’t share freely.

“Message received,” I say. My throat tastes like clove and bite. I consider offering my name like a peace; I decide he would spit on it. “Enjoy the circus.”

He gives me a long, up-and-down look, as if to freeze me in memory for later disdain. His mouth slices into something that might be disgust, might be defense. “Try not to trip on your own ego on the way back in,” he says, deadpan, and turns toward the door.

He reaches for the handle, pauses with his palm pressed to the glass like he needs its cold. Without looking back, he adds, almost as an afterthought, “And next time someone comes for my family, don’t expect me to play audience.”

The door opens. The sound spills. He slips into it, swallowing himself back into white light and fake laughs, a black line erased in an instant.

I stay with the night, the imprint of him vibrating on the air. The smoke stings my eyes. I blink and it clears, leaving the taste of refusal and clove. I let the city drill into me, then push the door open to follow the sound of money and performative smiles, his words tucked under my tongue like a cut I can’t stop worrying.

I make one slow lap through the gallery, perform the requisite nods, feel my patience thin into a wire. I’ve done my work here; the donors are warmed, the curator knows my name, the pearl women whisper and pretend not to. I aim for the door, already anticipating the relief of air without perfume.

Bryce peels off a conversation like a salesman spotting a mark. He steps into my path, shoulder squaring into mine with that frat-boy choreography meant to claim space. He is all teeth and aftershave and entitlement heat.

“You,” he says, low enough to pretend civility. “We’re not done.”

Behind him, Athan is a long shadow, black on black, arms crossed, eyes flat. He’s close enough to feel, not close enough to touch. His jaw is set; his mouth is a line. He’s there and not there, a sentinel that refuses to be named.

I let my gaze travel from Bryce’s too-bright eyes to the vein that twitches in his temple. “Actually,” I say, soft, “I am.”

Bryce’s laugh is clipped. “You think you can talk to me like that in front of my contacts? In front of my brother?” He jerks his head in Athan’s direction without looking. “You embarrassed us.”

I tip my head. “No. I embarrassed you. He was a bystander.”

Athan’s lashes flicker once, the only movement. He doesn’t step in. He doesn’t step back. He is a black hole that light skates around.

Bryce leans in, breath heavy with scotch. “People like you,” he says, pressing his smile into an insult, “don’t get invited to rooms like this to run your mouth. You’re here to dress the pictures. You want to be the main event? Get your own gallery.”

“I did,” I say. “It had better art.”

His mouth tightens. He glances around, checks who’s watching, recalibrates to a version of polite that’s all poison and gloss. “Here’s what’s going to happen.” He lifts his hand, counts on fingers like he’s instructing an intern. “You’re going to apologize for earlier. To me and to my brother. You’re going to keep whatever activist performance you think you’re staging to spaces where it plays. And you’re going to remember whose city this actually is.”

“My calendar must have eaten the meeting invitation,” I say, light. “I don’t do briefs from men whose favorite word is ‘optics.’”

“My favorite word is consequence,” he says, with a smile that flashes decorous. “You work here. You sell here. The people who cut checks—talk to me.” He finally angles his head, acknowledges Athan with a flick of his chin like checking that his prop is still in place. “Don’t you, little brother?”

Athan’s jaw works once. He keeps his eyes on the floor between us, hands dug into his elbows like if he lets them go they’ll do something unforgivable. “You done?” he asks Bryce, voice quiet, sanded to dullness. It’s the only line he offers, and it’s placed like a barrier no one plans to honor.

Bryce pretends not to hear him. He keeps his smile pinned to me. “You think a chain and a sharp tongue make you untouchable,” he murmurs. “But I’ve watched people like you burn out. Fast. Loud. Forgettable.”

I let the silence sit. I meet his eyes until he has to look away and then back. “You really want me to apologize?” I angle my shoulder just enough that the onlookers’ line of sight shifts, seeing him crowding me and his silent shadow behind. “For telling you to keep your racism quieter? Your mistake wasn’t the volume. It was thinking the room agreed.”

His facade cracks a millimeter. He inhales like he’s about to spit. Athan shifts, a flinch he kills midway. The sight of him flinching for someone else’s temper strikes something cold in me.

Bryce takes a step closer, trying to force me to give ground. I don’t. We’re close enough now that Athan could touch both of us if he wanted, and he doesn’t move. He is purgatory with eyeliner.

“Be smart,” Bryce says. “Walk this back. Say you misread a joke. It’s nothing.” He bares his teeth. “Or make it something. And see how fast doors shut.”

I smile without warmth. “I build doors,” I say. “And I like them with locks I choose.”

Athan inhales, small, a noise that sounds like a swallowed word. Bryce doesn’t turn to him. He doesn’t need to. He counts on the dynamic doing his work: Athan’s silence as validation, his presence as proof of the hierarchy. It’s so practiced it makes my teeth ache.

“I get it,” I say to Bryce, sliding the blade in without lifting my tone. “You need to win. Here’s your win: you get to keep your contacts. You get to walk out with your brother behind you like furniture.” I let my eyes flick over Athan, slow. His cheek hollows as he grinds his teeth. “I won’t ruin your night. I’m going home.”

Bryce reels like he expected another round. He schools it quick. “That’s wise,” he says.

“It’s bored,” I correct. I step to the side, forcing him either to block me again or let me pass. He freezes for a fraction, realizing that repeating the move will make him look like a child. He angles his body to allow a narrow gap. His hand twitches like he wants to touch my arm and thinks better.

As I slip through, I stop just long enough to tilt my head toward Athan without looking away from Bryce. “Take care,” I say softly, to the shadow. It lands between us, ambiguous. Bryce’s lips flatten.

Athan’s lashes flick down and up. Something like a tremor passes his mouth. He says nothing. He stands taller by a hair, as if bracing.

“Don’t talk to him,” Bryce snaps, finally turning on his axis to face the one who’s been behind him all night. It’s a reflex, ugly and automatic.

I look at Athan then, full. His eyes meet mine for a heartbeat. They are large, dark, ringed in black, and full of a hundred unsent messages. There’s anger in them, yes, but also a cornered animal caution, and something else, a flare of want or curiosity he looks like he wants to amputate.

I give him the smallest nod, my chain catching the light. His throat works. He stares at the floor again, like he can erase the moment by looking away.

I turn toward the door. The gallerist calls my name; I wave without stopping. Heads swivel. I feel Bryce’s stare running knives into my back. I feel Athan’s presence trailing behind my ribcage like a ghost finger. It irritates me, the way he will not move, the way he still chose that side in front of everyone. It intrigues me more. His hostility is stagecraft; I’ve seen enough performers to know when a script is being recited.

At the threshold, the city breathes at me again. I inhale clean air that smells like taxis and wet concrete. Behind me, Bryce’s voice rises, then is tamped down; someone shushes, someone laughs. I don’t look back. I don’t need the image to know what it is: a brother smiling too hard at donors, a shadow keeping pace precisely half a step behind.

On the sidewalk, I let my jaw unclench. My phone buzzes with three messages from a model about fittings. I pocket it. I picture the tendon in Athan’s neck, the way his fingers dug into his elbows when Bryce spoke for him. I picture that tremor in his mouth when I said take care. The irritation hums under my skin like a low-grade fever. The intrigue settles deeper, like a hook I’m pretending not to feel.

A car splashes through a gutter. A couple stumbles by, laughing too loud. I start walking, chain heavy and sure on my chest, the taste of clove still caught between my teeth, his silence tucked into my mouth like a secret I didn’t consent to keep—and already know I will.

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.

I start telling myself I need concrete for a shoot. Alleys, brick, good light off dirty windows. It’s easy to believe my own lie. I take my camera and a tote of fabric swatches, then draw a path that happens to cut past the store. The bell inside gives itself away even when the door stays closed—thin, metallic, a nervous laugh in the throat of the block.

Day one: I walk by on the opposite sidewalk. He’s behind the counter, chin tucked, head bent over a box of new arrivals. He lines records like ribs, palms flat, care like a ritual. He looks smaller without the fight, just a shape in a black shirt with sleeves shoved to his elbows. There’s a fresh marker stain along his forearm near a vein that runs like a thread under paper skin. His mouth does that little press in the center when he’s concentrating. The boot taps, slower now, only when the song overhead hits a spot he hates. I keep moving. I don’t want him to see me wanting.

Day two: I circle the block three times shooting brick texture like it’s rare. I take pictures of a rusted fire escape, a sticker bombed mailbox, my reflection in a pawn shop window. The record store is a square of fogged glass with “OPEN” hung at a tilt. He leans against the back counter, texting. His thumb moves slow. Someone talks to him and he smiles, tiny and unwilling, like he doesn’t trust the muscles to remember how. There’s a band-aid on his knuckle I didn’t put there. His hair is damp at the nape like he walked to work in the drizzle without a hood. The knot in my stomach is messy and mean.

Day three: I bring a coffee and don’t drink it. I stand across the street under a scaffolding, camera strap biting my neck. A guy in a flannel flirts with him by the listening station. Athan’s mouth curves, but not for the guy. It curves because the guitar solo is wrong. He’s mouth-reading the solo, the shape of the notes mapped on his lips. He taps one boot toe, then stills it with his heel like he caught himself. He scratches behind his left ear with his ring finger, the same finger he ran through my hair in the alley before he shoved me away. My skin remembers before I let it.

On my fourth pass in as many days, I get too close to the glass. He doesn’t notice me. He’s counting bills, banded red, then snapping the band and redoing it tighter. Bryce’s voice from days ago is still in the room somewhere, even when he’s not. Every time Athan sets something down, he checks it’s exact, square with the edge. He straightens a crooked sticker on the register till the glue gives. He rubs the old adhesive with his thumb and winces when it burns.

I make the ritual into something with rules. I don’t check the time before I go. I don’t wear the same jacket twice. I don’t look long enough to get caught unless I want to. I stand behind the bus stop map and pretend to study routes I never take. I wait by the bodega across the street with its crates of oranges gone gray around the edges. I learn the shift change by the way the girl with the bangs who works Mondays waves at him through the glass and he lifts two fingers in acknowledgement. I memorize how he looks up to watch the rain without really seeing it, how his mouth opens for a breath and closes like he took the weight back in.

The fifth day, a kid shoplifts a pin. I see it because I’ve been seeing nothing but him. The kid palms it and Athan’s gaze flicks like a knife and then softens when he clocks shaking hands and dirty shoelaces. He lets the kid go with a quiet look. He writes a tiny note to himself on a receipt, like penance for not caring about a dollar. His eyes go dark and far away for a second in the aftermath, like he’s somewhere with Bryce’s hand at the back of his neck again. I breathe and it feels like inhaling his exhale through glass.

I learn his weather. There are good hours when he laughs at something only he hears, head thrown back, throat open, the particular sound of someone almost forgetting. There are bad ones where he holds the counter and stares at nothing, jaw clenched like he’s ready to bite through metal. I love the good ones and I love the bad ones more because they’re mine to witness and no one else here is taking inventory.

I sketch him in my head for a line I’m pretending I’m building for the shoot—lean shapes, fabric that drapes like resolve, boots with wear at the inner heel from nervous tapping. I shoot brickwork and pretend it’s his ribs under my palm. I press my thumb into the seam of my camera as if it’s a pulse.

By the end of the week, the ritual is a quiet hunger. I don’t enter. I don’t break the glass. I trace his day with mine, a shadow that doesn’t touch, the edge that gets closer every time I tell myself I’m just passing through. And still, when he leans down to grab a box and the hem of his shirt lifts, revealing that pale sliver above denim, I have to step away, into the alley, back against wet brick. I count to twenty while my heartbeat catches up to the lie I’m living.

On the eighth day, I bring my sketchbook and don’t open it. He stacks used CDs like a house that’ll always fall. His tongue touches the corner of his mouth when a disc case sticks. He shakes his hand out once, stiff fingers, like he’s been writing too long. He flips the sign from “OPEN” to “BACK IN FIVE” and disappears into the back. The empty counter sits like a dare. I don’t move. My feet stay planted where the sidewalk crack makes a little V, as if the concrete is instructing me to wait here, to keep this distance. I do. I breathe cold air and let it bite. I let the ritual bridge the space between me wanting and me taking, knowing the bridge won’t hold forever.

Rain fattens the air until the neon bleeds. The block thins out; chairs go up, metal scraping tile, gates drop with ridged shudders. Inside the shop, Athan kills row by row of light until the front is a gray aquarium and he’s the last fish moving slow. He drags the mop like he’s pulling his own shadow. He keeps his head down, hair stuck to his cheeks, those sleeves shoved up and damp. The bell gives a tired jingle as he tests the latch, unlocks, relocks, checks the deadbolt twice. He scribbles something on a slip of paper—close count, I know, but it looks like a confession from here—and tucks it under the register tray. He switches the sign to CLOSED and stares through the glass like there should be an audience for finishing.

I’m already holding the coffee. It’s one of those obscene third-wave cups with a logo you can smell before you taste. I watched them pour it—thick crema, the barista’s tattooed wrist twisting for a leaf I’ll ruin by walking. I walked in the drizzle bareheaded so it would be hot in my hands and the rain would put that clean, wet smell in his hair when I got close.

He turns the key. The bell barks once. He steps out into it, shoulders curling like he expects the rain to slap. His boots take the water like they’ve been waiting. He checks the door, palm flat, the same way he checks every choice he makes: is it shut, is it mine, will it hold. Then he looks up and sees me.

For a second, he doesn’t flinch. The exhaustion smooths out how much he hates me. His eyes are raccoon-ringed, red at the rims, bruise-blue where sleep should be. The rain makes him look younger and old at the same time. He glances down, like his body is telling him to keep walking, and then he stops because the bus stop is only twenty feet away and the awning looks like mercy.

I lift the cup. “It’s not pity,” I say, because I can hear him building that wall already. “It’s coffee.”

He stares at the lid. He’s wet enough that his shirt is sticking along his ribs. He looks over my shoulder at the street because looking at me feels like a choice he doesn’t want to own. Within that, there’s a tiny, greedy flicker at the word coffee. Of course there is. He’s been on his feet all day and Bryce is a migraine with teeth. He walks toward the awning because rain will always make you honest.

We stand under the compromised shelter. Water drums a foot away, hard enough to strip paint. Behind us, the glass shows two ghosts refusing to touch. I hold the cup out. He eyes it like I offered him a weapon.

“From Kestrel,” I say. He knows the place; he’s rolled his eyes at the crowd there. “Black. No sugar, no syrup, no art.”

He huffs. The smallest sound. He takes it. His fingers brush mine and jump, both of us pretending it didn’t happen. He brings the lid to his mouth and winces when the heat hits. He doesn’t moan or thank me. He swallows, throat working, eyes closing for a heartbeat like he’s letting something inside that isn’t pain.

We’re quiet. The bus doesn’t come. A taxi passes slow, throwing water. He holds the cup like it’s the only thing keeping his hands from shaking. The caffeinated smell makes the wet concrete smell cleaner. I keep my hands in my pockets because I want to touch his jaw and I shouldn’t.

“How was it,” I say. Stupid half-question in a long night.

He shrugs. His hair sticks to his cheekbone and he doesn’t wipe it away. “Long.” His voice is roughened down. “New shipment. Bryce on the phone. Some kid tried to steal a pin and I let him.”

“That sounds like a good choice,” I say.

He looks at me like I don’t know the rules. “It’s a dollar,” he says, like that explains the whole economy of guilt. He drinks again, small sip, careful.

My eyes drop to his boots. Wet leather, lace ends darkened, a small tear near the third eyelet that wasn’t there last week. His big toe presses against the inside of the cap like he’s bracing. I force my gaze up. He catches it anyway. Something in his mouth softens and then hardens, like I should get penalized for wanting that part of him.

“You hate that place,” he says, chin lifting at the cup, the awning, me. “You said so.”

“I hate the people who think the latte art is a personality,” I say. “I like that they roast it right.”

He nods like that’s acceptable honesty. He leans back against the bus schedule, eyes tracking the rain. His clothes cling. The outline of his necklace chain under his shirt is a thin dark string. He breathes like it hurts a little less with heat in his hands. The silence between us stops being loud. It just exists.

I think about telling him I’ve been walking past every day like a coward. I don’t. I let him drink. I listen to his swallow. He watches the road, not looking at me but not leaving either. A bus hisses somewhere far away and doesn’t turn.

He shifts, foot knocking mine, not an accident but not on purpose. We both pretend to ignore it. The rain slides off the awning in sheets, inches from his shoulder. He pushes a wet curl back, finally, and fumbles the cup, catching it with a little gasp. He looks embarrassed like he dropped his armor for a second and I saw him human.

“I don’t need—” he starts, then stops. He tries again, softer. “I don’t need anyone doing things for me.” He stares into the dark hole of the lid. He takes another sip because he does need this.

“I know,” I say. True as rain. “This is just caffeine.”

He swallows like it’s a compromise, not a concession. Ten minutes of us under cheap plastic while the city drowns itself clean. He finishes half, then two-thirds, the heat working under his skin until some color comes back. His shoulders lower a notch I didn’t know they could. He looks at the remaining contents like there’s a right amount to leave so he doesn’t owe me.

He pulls the lid back and checks the level. The steam curls like a map he refuses to follow. He exhales, tight. With no ceremony, he steps out into the rain, walks the two steps to the trash can, drops the cup. The cardboard thuds wetly, too loud.

He turns back, hair plastered, eyes darker. “I don’t need your pity,” he says, and it lands dull, like he’s reciting something he promised himself. He doesn’t wait for my answer. He pushes into the rain like a swimmer, shoulders set against the cold. The awning spits on my shoes. I watch his back go, the dark of his shirt merging with the night until he’s just the rhythm of boots hitting water, carrying that small heat away until the street takes it.

He only makes it three steps before the rain gets vicious and herds him back under the awning like it’s got a hand on his neck. He doesn’t look at me when he returns, just stands a foot closer than before, water streaming off his hairline, the line of his throat moving with a swallow he pretends isn’t about me.

“No sugar, right?” I say, because I have to say something.

“Right,” he mutters, then corrects himself. “Yeah.” He takes the cup back like he’s doing the coffee a favor, not me. The heat has bled enough to let him take real sips. He drinks like someone who isn’t used to having anything handed to him that doesn’t come with a price.

We lean into the same patch of dry, our shoulders not touching, the space between our elbows pulsing like another body trying to wedge in. Traffic noise is muffled by the rain, every sound softened except the small ones we make. He breathes. I breathe. His fingers drum the cardboard once, twice, matching the rain gutter’s pulse. I match it without meaning to. He notices and goes still, like we were syncing and that scared him more than the storm.

“Long day?” I ask, lower.

He shrugs, the motion tugging his collar open another half-inch. His skin is pale where the fabric meets it. “They’re all the same.”

“Not true,” I say. “Today you let a kid steal a pin.”

He huffs again, that almost-laugh that’s too tired to climb out. “You ever steal anything?”

“Yes.” I do not tell him what. I let it sit, a piece of honesty that doesn’t demand anything back.

The bus tracker buzzes and then dies. Water patters along the plastic above us. He tips the cup and I watch his mouth, the way the lower lip takes a shine that isn’t from rain. His knuckles are red with cold. The caffeine starts to loosen something in his face; the muscle by his jaw stops twitching. He glances at me then, quick, like a bird checking a sky for hawks. No curl to the lip, no eye roll. Just... a look.

“Why the hell do you keep showing up?” he asks, quiet and flat, the sharp edges sanded down by exhaustion. It should sound like accusation. It sounds like curiosity trying not to beg.

“Because you make that place look like somewhere I’d want to be,” I say, and it comes out rawer than I planned. “And because I hate that I want to see what happens when you look at me without Bryce in the room.”

He studies the middle distance like the answer might float there. “Nothing,” he says, but his voice doesn’t land on it hard. “Probably nothing.”

“You’re not very good at lying,” I say.

He takes that, lets it slide through him. “You are,” he says, which should sting and doesn’t.

A car splashes close and a sheet of water arcs at us, hitting the edge of the awning. He flinches, the movement bringing his boot into my toe. He doesn’t move it. Neither do I. It’s nothing. It’s everything.

“You looked different at the show,” he says, the words almost lost in the drum of rain. “Less… polished.”

“I was doing something honest,” I say. “I didn’t have to sell it.”

He nods once. “You were ugly,” he says, and I laugh because he’s right and because who else would give that to me like a gift.

“You liked it,” I say, and he doesn’t deny it. He watches the rain, jaw set, the cup hovering near his mouth but not moving. The pause stretches, not dead air but a held note.

“You stare at my boots,” he says suddenly.

“You tap your foot when you’re about to fight,” I answer, and his throat clicks. “And when you’re pretending not to run.”

He stares at my coat, my hands, everywhere but my eyes. “You’re observant,” he says like a complaint.

“It’s my job.”

“Fashion,” he says, as if it’s a diagnosis.

“Control,” I counter. “Which you also like.”

His breathing stutters. He hides it with another sip. He’s almost done and I want to give him another just to keep him here. I don’t move. I let the need sit in my chest and make me honest inside my own skin.

His mouth opens like he’s going to say something that will change the temperature of the night. He doesn’t. He closes it, looks at the puddle forming by his boot, watches the ripples like they can decide for him. The silence between us is heavy, not empty. It’s a room with a door we aren’t ready to open on purpose.

“I don’t have anything for you,” he says finally, the words quiet and careful, like he learned them as armor. “Not whatever you think I do.”

“I think you have exactly what you do,” I say. “And I’ll take what you offer or I’ll take nothing, but I’m not here to make you perform for me.”

His eyes flick up, surprised like I cut along a seam he didn’t know was there. For a moment, the brutal guard in his stare thins. I see the tired, the scared, the stubborn, the part of him that wants to put his head on someone’s shoulder and sleep for six years. It’s there, and he hates that I saw it, but it doesn’t snap shut as fast as it did before.

“I don’t sleep,” he says, unprompted. A confession disguised as complaint. “Coffee doesn’t help. It just makes me feel like I’m doing something.”

“You are,” I say. “You’re standing still.”

He snorts. “That’s your bar now?”

“Yes.”

Another beat. He finishes the last swallow, sucks a drop from the lid with a small sound he can’t take back. We both freeze around it. He looks away, ears pinking under wet hair. The air between us goes tight and electric. Neither of us moves closer. Neither of us steps back.

A bus finally groans around the corner, headlights dragging light across his cheekbones. He watches it approach like a reprieve and a punishment. His hand tightens on the cup and relaxes. He takes one step toward the curb and stops, like he remembered something mid-stride.

He turns his face toward me, not fully, just enough for the line of his mouth to align with mine if one of us were stupid. “This doesn’t mean anything,” he says, and it’s not tough; it’s tired and defensive and a little pleading. Don’t make it bigger, he’s telling me. Don’t put a name on a thing I can barely hold.

“Okay,” I say, even though it does. Even though the rain seems to change pitch around us like it’s listening.

He breathes out. It fogs between us, a small cloud that dissolves instead of settling. The bus door sighs open. He doesn’t move. For ten seconds, we let the world wait. His eyes finally meet mine and hold, and in that look, something tight in both of us loosens by a fraction. It’s not soft. It’s not safe. It’s a hairline crack and I feel air coming through it.

The bus hisses like an animal and he uses the sound like cover. He takes two steps, then jerks back to the trash can like the coffee bit him. He peels the lid with his teeth, scary-precise, and dumps the rest in with a wet slap, cardboard rattling loud enough to make an old man on the bus look over. He drops the cup on top, like burying it makes this whole ten minutes disappear.

“I don’t need anyone’s pity,” he says. Not sharp. Bleak. He doesn’t wait for my face or a rebuttal. He pivots into the rain, shoulders hard, elbows tight to his ribs like he’s holding himself together by force. The awning lets him go like it never knew him, and the storm eats him immediately, plastering shirt to skin, dragging black fabric down the ridge of his spine. He doesn’t pull up his hood. He wants it to hurt.

I don’t follow. Not because I can’t. Because the point is not to drag him anywhere he didn’t walk into. My hands curl in my pockets until I feel nail crescents through lining. The bus doors wheeze, then close when no one boards. It pulls away, leaving wet diesel smell and the hollow quiet of a city that loves to watch exits. He’s a block away by the time the red tail lights smear and vanish.

I go to the trash like a fool. The cup sits there, lipstick-free, his mouth only marked in the memory of how he held it. Coffee drips into the bin’s bottom in a brown line and I think of the way his throat worked, how he swallowed like he was negotiating with himself. Pity. He thinks everything is pity. He was raised on it like poison. I know because it’s on him like a scent, under the cloves and sweat—other people’s condolences, other people’s judgment dressed up as love.

The rain blows sideways and soaks my sleeve. My breath fogs in front of me and I watch it go to nothing. He gave me that look. He gave me a confession dressed as throwaway. He’s not ready for what I am. Good. I’m not interested in being something soft that gets wiped on. I want the thing under his no. I want the place that made his voice thin when he said he doesn’t sleep. I want the part of him that opened and panicked at the same time.

I step out from the awning and the rain nails me in the face, sharp and cold. It helps. It strips the last fantasy off the moment. He’s not mine and I’m not savior. The water runs under my collar and down my spine. It will smell like wet wool and tobacco when I get home. I let it. I look down the street where he went, a dark smear moving fast, then gone around a corner that spills light from a bodega. The sign buzzes. The puddle by the curb trembles with each car, each choice.

He thinks walking away makes him in control. Maybe it does, for now. Maybe he needs to stage-manage his drowning. I can respect that. I can also be patient. Not kind. Patient like a tailor, pins in mouth, waiting for the exact moment someone breathes without realizing and you catch the real shape. He gave me his foot tapping. He gave me the twitch in his jaw, the way he doesn’t lie well when he’s tired. He gave me that small sound on the lid. He’ll give me more. He’ll give me what the rage is trying to keep intact.

A couple rushes under the awning I just left, clinging and laughing, the sound bright and stupid. I walk the other way, past the record store’s dark window. The reflection gives me a ghost of my own face, eyes flat and hungry, hair wet, mouth set. The security gate is down like a mouth shut against too many questions. I rest my fingertips on the cold metal, feel its curl under my skin. He locks this up and works inside it anyway. Same with his body. Same with the story he tells himself about what he deserves.

I pass the alley that smells like beer and piss. My boots hit a slick patch and slide half an inch. I catch myself and think of his boot hitting mine earlier and how neither of us moved. Small contact, big earthquake. His shoulder in the pit, his mouth on the lip of that cup, the way he said ugly like a compliment. He wanted me honest. He wanted himself gone. He wanted both and hated wanting anything.

At the corner, the walk sign flickers red to white. I don’t cross. I look back one more time like an idiot and then I force myself forward. Anger warms me faster than the coffee ever could have. Not at him. At Bryce, at the entire line of men who taught him that pity is a leash and care is a trap. They broke something delicate in him and made him proud of the break. That will be mine to touch, to test, to press until the shape changes and it’s ours.

By the time I hit my building, water runs off my jaw in a steady line. I key in, climb, peel the coat off, and leave it to bleed on the tile. The loft is the same as always, quiet and curated and ruthlessly mine. I hate it for twenty seconds because he isn’t in it, dripping on my floor, telling me I’m lying. Then I love it again because this is where I will make space for whatever he brings me when he can’t hold it alone.

I unlace my boots and think about his. Thick rubber soles, scuffed toe. I picture the scuffs under my tongue, the push and resistance, the taste of rain and old leather. It makes my hands shake; not from sex, from want that feels bigger than that. I sit on the edge of the bed and let the city thrum through the brick. My phone stays facedown. I won’t text. I won’t undercut what he thinks he has. He’ll come when the noise in his head gets louder than the storm. He’ll come when Bryce’s voice wears itself hoarse and he needs a new sound.

The rain keeps up, steady now, less violent. The drip from the window frame measures the room. I stretch out, watch the ceiling, and replay every second: his eyes finding mine and not flinching, the bus waiting and leaving, the tiny cloud of his breath dissolving between us. He wants the door closed. I can stand in the hallway as long as it takes, back against the wall, listening. Determination is not romance. It’s a decision to meet someone in the worst light and not squint. I make it. I turn onto my side and press my fingers to my mouth, still tasting the sweetness of a coffee he didn’t finish, and I plan nothing except the next time I will be where he is and not ask him to be anything he isn’t. The rest will happen the way rain does—inevitable, indifferent to whether he thinks he needs it.

The basement venue is a box with no exits that matter—cinderblock walls sweating condensation, a stage barely a foot off the floor, and lights that burn everything violent red. The air is beer sour and hot skin, bodies packed tight enough that the music doesn’t hit you so much as occupy you. I came for the band. I stay because every face in here is a mirror I actually like—pierced, painted, filthy with purpose.

I clock him in seconds. All black, throat strung with a chipped chain, eyeliner dragged hard like he did it angry. Athan stands near a pillar with a plastic cup, back against the concrete like he needs something unmovable at his spine. He doesn’t see me yet. That gives me one breath to decide whether I’m walking or hunting.

The guitars start like a fist through drywall. The crowd convulses forward, a wave of bodies I let take me. I slide closer, not to him. To the heat. He’s a corner of it, an edge I can trace without touching.

He lifts his chin and scans the room. His eyes catch on me and stop. There isn’t surprise. Just that flat recognition that lands between ribs. He looks away first. Fine. We keep our distance like adults playing at indifference, two magnets angled just wrong. He tips his drink back with an economy that makes my mouth tight. The singer screams about chewing glass and loving it, and the floor moves like it might split open.

The first song is a brawl disguised as music. Pits open and close like lungs, elbows up, boots churning. I let it jostle me, shoulders loose, knowing how to bend so I don’t break. A kid bounces off my back and laughs, and then Athan is three feet away, black hair pasted to his cheek, a curl stuck to the corner of his mouth. He must feel me because his mouth tightens, a private thing I wish I could bite.

We pretend the other doesn’t exist. It lasts half a verse. A new surge pushes from stage right, and a guy with a shaved head slams into my shoulder so hard my teeth click. I stumble sideways and my hip hits Athan’s. He turns, eyes sharp, and in that flash we’re face to face, breath mixing, sweat slick.

“Watch it,” he says, but it’s not for me. His hand is on my ribs—when did that happen?—fingers digging in to steady me or himself. His palm is hot through my shirt. I don’t flinch. I lean.

The crowd swallows us again and spits us together, bodies forced into the same rhythm whether we want it or not. Someone crashes into my back and I go forward, chest to chest with him. He’s solid under the thin fabric, lean muscle holding me up as much as I push him into the pillar. His cup tilts, beer sloshing cold across my stomach. I hiss, he smirks, and the expression yanks heat down between my legs so fast my knees go soft.

He tries to shift away and the crush of people won’t let him. We move like a single organism now—my arm curls around his waist to keep him from going down when a boot clips his ankle, his hand fists in the back of my shirt and hauls me closer so neither of us gets separated and trampled. The slide of him against me is obscene in its inevitability. Sweat, breath, friction. His chain snags my collarbone and bites. He smells like clove and salt and the expensive soap he pretends not to use, and it punches a memory—rain, a bus, the shape his mouth made on a lid.

He grinds his jaw and says nothing. The bass drops and the floor becomes a trampoline. We jump because our bodies decide for us. My thigh wedges between his and his knee lifts between mine, pressure hitting sweet spots that make good sense turn thin. His lips part like he’s about to curse me and the sound gets torn away by a chorus. It’s loud enough that I feel it inside my teeth; it drowns the last of my restraint.

I angle my face, shielding us from the room with the line of his throat and my shoulder, and nose along his cheek as if that’s accidental. It isn’t. His stubble scrapes my skin and I watch his pupils blow wide. He looks at my mouth. He doesn’t step back.

Another shove from behind slams me into him. It forces us into a rhythm that’s about survival and reads like something else. My hand spreads at the small of his back, pressing him to me. He breathes a sound I feel more than hear—frustration, want, fear. His heel comes down on my boot and he uses it to shift, to line us up so his thigh is right where I need it. He knows what he’s doing. Of course he does. We’re liars about everything except our bodies.

The song changes and the pit surges harder, people ricocheting off us like we’re the only solid thing. We become a wall together, unspoken. He hooks his fingers in my belt, uses me as anchor. I taste blood where I bit my lip and imagine his. Sweat runs down his neck and into the collar of his shirt. I want my tongue there. I don’t move it. Not yet.

We ignore each other by touching everywhere there’s space. His breath paints my jaw, my ear. “Don’t,” he mouths, no voice left, like a prayer to either of us. My hand drifts lower by a fraction and rests on the ridge of his hipbone, thumb pressing into a little crescent of skin exposed above his waistband. He shivers, small and violent.

Someone slams into the pillar and the shock knocks us flat to chest again, full contact. My pelvis hits his and there’s no way he misses what I’m carrying for him. He freezes for a split second and then pushes back, a challenge or a mistake. The lights strobe and in every white flash I see a different version of him—eyes cut with contempt, pupils huge with want, mouth stubborn, mouth soft.

We don’t talk. We don’t smile. We let the crowd do what we won’t allow, and we use it like cover. I breathe him in and name the exact point where pretending stops: when his fingers, clamped in my belt, flex and pull me tight into the grind of his hips for one brutal beat before he snatches his hand away like it burned him.

The song bleeds out. The room roars between tracks, a ragged animal noise. The gap is a gasp we both refuse to take. He slips sideways, shoulder skimming mine, and the mass of bodies flows and separates us by inches that feel like miles. His eyes cut back once, dark and wrecked, before a new riff detonates the floor and the crowd lurches, ramming us together again like the universe has an agenda.

The riff detonates and the room convicts us. There’s nowhere to go but into each other—my sternum locked to his, my mouth at the hinge of his jaw, our ribs arguing for space. His shirt is thin and soaked through, clinging to the shallow ladder of muscle under it. I can feel every line—pecs tight and flat, the subtle ridge where his abs cut in, the dip of his bellybutton pressed to my own when the crush snaps us closer. He’s not bulky; he’s wire and heat and restraint. He’s the kind of strong that never asks permission, the kind that reminds you of knives more than fists.

His chain scrapes my collarbone and I take it, file it away. His breath is hot and wet against my cheek, spiked with clove and beer. The clove sits sweet at the roof of my mouth even though I haven’t tasted it; it’s in the sweat running down his temple, in the way he swallows like it hurts. I breathe deeper because I’m greedy and because I want to know exactly what he is when the world is reduced to impact and noise. He smells like smoke and skin and something expensive that refuses to be drowned by the room’s stink. It slides under my tongue and becomes hunger. It’s unexpectedly intoxicating, the way the clove blends with salt and heat and the ghost of rain he brought in on his hair. I want to mouth his throat and find where the taste changes.

Our thighs tangle. He shifts to dodge a flying elbow, and his hip bones slot under my hands like I have rights. My fingers dig through fabric to the hard edge of him and the thin sheet of his shirt does nothing to blunt it. My palm spreads at his lower back, and his spine is a straight line until the base, where it curves into something I could bruise if I were unkind. He’s holding himself taut like he refuses to melt, like he thinks I’ll respect him more if he stays stone. The lie makes my teeth ache. I press him harder into the pillar and he presses back to match the pressure, not to escape it.

A guy crowd-surfs overhead, boots skimming dangerously, and Athan’s arms come up instinctively, bracketing us both, caging me with his forearms like he decided without looking that I’m his to protect or to use. His bicep flexes against my cheek. Sweat oils it and I drag my face across his skin like I need to know exactly how it feels to be held by a man who doesn’t admit he can hold anything. He smells like clove there, too, and the taste is the same—sweet, acrid, wrong for a church and perfect for an alley.

He shoves my hip with his thigh to create a pocket of space. It lines us up better. It’s also a mistake, because the second he does it my cock slides against the top of his thigh through denim, unavoidable, and the growl in my chest isn’t a choice. He hears it, or feels it, because his eyes flash down and up, and the glare in them is nothing compared to the heat. The muscles under his shirt jump, a tell he doesn’t mean to give. I take it like a gift and push. The seam of his jeans grinds into me and the heat spikes so fast I see static behind my eyes. He’s hard in fits and jerks, like anger. Undeniable, unavoidable, deniable later. Now, it’s a fact.

The lights go dead-black, then strobe to blind-white. In those half-seconds I watch sweat run from his hairline, track across his cheek, catch on his mouth. His lips are chapped, bitten through, pink despite everything else about him being grayscale. If I put my tongue there, I’d taste clove first, then salt, then him. My mouth floods just imagining it. I don’t kiss him. I orbit his mouth with the edge of my breath, not accidental, watching the tendons in his throat move as he swallows. He inhales shallow, as if he’s afraid of how I smell, of how I might stick to something inside him.

“Fuck off,” he mouths, but the words have no breath, just shape, and the heat fogs between us in proof he doesn’t mean it. My hand slides up his spine, counting bones under damp cotton, stopping at the knot where his neck meets his shoulders. He’s tight there, clenched like he’s been bracing for years. I press my fingertips in and he jerks, not away. His pulse hammers under his ear and I map it with the side of my nose, letting the beat dictate my patience. I could push now. I do the opposite. I let us suffer.

The band barrels into a chorus and the floor buckles. People slam from every angle, an ocean trying to break down our two-person wall. He uses the chaos to bury his face in my shoulder for a second, purely practical, to keep his teeth. The accidental intimacy is assault-level for him, I think, and a feast for me. The clove is deeper there, soaked into his hair and the hollow below his ear. I breathe him like I’ve been drowning and it’s the first air I trust. He realizes what he’s done and drags his face back up, eyes cutting to mine with a fury meant to cauterize the moment. It doesn’t. It brands it.

We’re past animosity. Our bodies are past it, at least, doing the arithmetic of want without asking permission from the parts of us that talk. Every press reveals another angle—his ribs narrow under my palms when he exhales hard; his stomach clenches when my thumb grazes the edge of his waistband; the inside of his thigh is stronger than his outside, power hidden against me where no one else can see. He’s not soft anywhere. He’s responsive everywhere. He’s a storm held in by a shirt that’s sticking to him like it’s begging to be peeled.

We sway because we must. We grind because we can’t help it. The scent of him threads me to the room, to the beat, to the stupid cup he dropped, to the ashtray he doubles as. I let my mouth hover at his jaw, close enough to feel his stubble scrape my lower lip when he turns to spit a curse at a pushy kid. He doesn’t finish the curse because I don’t move away. The stubble catches and holds, and then we’re stuck, caught on a millimeter of friction. His breath hits my mouth and mine hits his, and the man who told me to watch it twenty minutes ago watches nothing now but the inch between our mouths, like it’s a cliff.

The riff spikes again and the room howls. It gives us a sudden, mean shove that slams me fully into his chest, his nipple dragging across my sternum through our shirts, a scrape that sends a jolt straight down my spine. He flinches and then leans into it like his body is smarter than his pride. My hand drops back to his hip and he lets it, hips tilting, breath tearing, clove ghosting my tongue like I stole his smoke from his mouth. I don’t kiss him. I let the moment crouch, feral and waiting, under the roar.

The song snaps off mid-scream and the room heaves forward like a lung exhaling. I take the opening. My hand is still on his hip when I peel us sideways, carving through sweat and denim and elbows until the exit door punches cold on my back. We stumble into the alley and the night clamps down—wet brick, stale beer, an oil-slick moon in a puddle. The bass is a muffled heartbeat through the wall. Athan rips free of my touch like it cost him skin.

He doubles over, palms on his thighs, dragging air in. Hair plastered to his forehead. He spits onto the cracked concrete, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, and glares at me like I engineered gravity.

“What the hell is your problem?” His voice is hoarse, husked raw by noise and cigarettes and me.

“You,” I say, too easy. “You keep pretending you don’t want what you’re trying to climb inside of.”

He laughs without humor. “Keep flattering yourself. You think because you dress like a runway ate a thrift store and spat you out, you get to diagnose me?”

“I think because I can feel your cock against my thigh through two layers of denim, I get to call bullshit on your purity act.”

He straightens, shoulders up, chin set. Rain beads on his lashes and rolls down the cut of his cheekbone. “I don’t play your games. I’m not one of your little projects, something you can fix and display next to whatever leather thing you bought to feel edgy.”

“Baby, I’m the leather thing,” I say, and watch the twitch in his jaw. “And you’re not a project. You’re a closed door I’m enjoying opening.”

He steps into me, close enough that his breath scalds my upper lip. “And you’re a walking brand. You live off people looking. You’re addicted to being seen, to making a scene. You don’t know what it’s like to have to keep your head down because if you raise it someone like my brother will cut it off at the neck.”

There it is—Bryce like a stain on his tongue. “Your brother uses you like a prop. You still stand behind him like a shadow and call it loyalty.”

A muscle jumps under his eye. “You don’t know a thing about my family.”

“I know what I saw. Him mouthing off like a caricature and you shrinking so small I could’ve slipped you into my pocket. Then you talk big in a crowd because noise gives you cover.” I flick my gaze down and back up, slow. “Except your body doesn’t know how to lie.”

He reaches out and fists the front of my shirt. Not a pull. A warning. “Don’t talk about me like you’ve earned it. You show up where I work, you pick fights in my lanes, and then you act like you’re doing me a favor by breathing near me.”

“I show up where good music and bad men are,” I say. “Sometimes they overlap.”

He shoves me back into the damp brick. It bites the back of my shoulders. He follows, cage close, the alley tight as an apology he won’t give. “You think you’re better than everyone in there because you can afford the version of this they try to copy. You think a studio loft and a nice coffee means you’re the truth. You don’t belong at that gallery any more than I belong in your bed.”

“That’s funny, since your body begged me in a language you don’t speak well yet.” I angle my face so the tip of my nose almost touches his. “And I don’t think I’m better. I think I’m honest. I like what I like. Including the way you smell like cloves and bad decisions.”

He huffs a laugh that isn’t one. “You get off on wreckage,” he says. “You saw me next to Bryce and you smelled blood.”

“I saw you next to Bryce and I smelled potential.” I let the word sit. “You hate that he owns the script. You hate that you read it anyway. And you hate that I don’t care about his rules.”

“His rules keep me employed.”

“His rules keep you quiet.”

Lightning flashes somewhere behind the cloud cover. He drags a hand through his hair, smearing rain and sweat across his temple. “God, you’re insufferable.”

“And you’re a coward,” I say, low. “You’ll throw your coffee away instead of admitting you wanted it.”

His eyes snap to mine, bright with anger. “Says the person who kisses strangers in alleys because it’s easier than asking their name.”

“You already gave me your name,” I say. “You gave me a lot more, too.”

“Shut up.” He says it without heat this time, more plea than command. He looks past me for the first time, at the neon smear of the club sign, at the wet dark, anywhere but my mouth. “We are not the same.”

“No,” I agree. “You hate money. I make it and spend it. You worship authenticity. I curate mine. You pretend you don’t want to be touched. I don’t pretend anything.” I take a breath and let the truth land between us. “We both lie. We just pick different ears to tell it to.”

He steps back like I shoved him. The air between us expands and snaps. He paces three steps, turns, paces back, restless, boots splashing in a shallow puddle. The silver chain at his neck glints, and the motion of his throat when he swallows is obscene to me, like a promise.

“You think you’re breaking me open,” he says. “You’re not. I don’t break for people who perform their feelings.”

“I don’t perform. I stage. There’s a difference.” I push off the wall and invade his space again because being farther away feels like losing an argument I didn’t consent to. “And you don’t break. You bend. You bent around me in there. You bent and you liked it.”

His nostrils flare. For a second his hand lifts like he might hit me. He doesn’t. He grabs my wrist instead, fingers iron, and drags my hand up to his chest. He sets my palm flat over his heart, hard and fast under skin and thin cotton. “Congratulations,” he says. “You found a pulse. Doesn’t mean you own it.”

I curl my fingers, feeling the heat of him, the slick fabric, the little ridge of his nipple under my ring finger. His heart stutters like it tripped on a step. “Never said own,” I murmur. “Said learn.”

He jerks my hand off and throws it aside, like my touch burns. Maybe it does. “Stay out of my store,” he says, breathless. “Stay out of my nights. Stay out of my head.”

“You came into mine,” I say, because leaving it untrue would be the bigger lie. He flinches like I struck him, and the wall bass thumps once behind us, a pulse answering his.

“Go back inside,” he says finally, voice thin. “Find someone who wants to be your next art piece.”

“I already found him,” I say. I don’t say the rest. I let the words hang and sour between us.

A siren yawls three blocks away. A door across the alley opens and slaps shut. He takes a step backward, then another, like detaching from a magnet. His eyes rake me once, cruel to be kind or kind to be cruel; I can’t tell.

“Eat shit, Heiylo,” he says, and turns, shoulders knotted, hands fists in his pockets as he walks toward the mouth of the alley and the wet city beyond. I let him go three paces. Four. My teeth cut the inside of my cheek. My palms itch. The night tastes like clove and salt and the threat of something I won’t name.

I don’t let it go to five.

I cross the distance like I’m built for it, grab the front of his jacket, and slam him into the brick he shoved me against. His shoulder hits with a dull thud. His mouth opens on reflex to spit another insult and I take it. I take his mouth so hard my teeth clack his, my tongue pushes past his lips like a shove. It’s ugly and direct and not a question. I taste clove and beer and the metallic bite of rain, the edge of his breath cutting like a blade that likes being used.

He jerks, hands slamming to my chest to push me off, but I pin his wrists to the wall with my forearms and bear down. I grind my mouth over his, hard, punishing, biting his lower lip until he gasps. I swallow the sound. He swears into me and tries to turn his face away. I follow the turn, hunting, finding. I bite again, not to draw blood, just to mark the line. I don’t gentler it. I take.

He makes a sound, low and broken, and then the world flips. He surges forward, meets me, devours me back. His hands tear free and get in my hair, both fists knotting at the roots. He yanks my head to the angle he wants and kisses me like he’d rather fight. Our mouths bruise each other, teeth rasping. Our tongues fight, slick and frantic, nothing sweet. He pulls my hair hard enough to water my eyes and I groan into him, a raw, involuntary noise that he swallows like he owns it.

The rain dots our faces, cold against heat. The bass from inside shakes the door against my shoulder. He drags my head back by my hair and licks into my mouth, curses me in a whisper that sounds like prayer. He tastes like smoke and stubbornness. I suck his tongue, drag it between my teeth, suck his lower lip until it shines. He shoves me harder into the wall with his body, thigh jamming between mine, and I feel the hard line of him through denim, hot and mean. He grinds once, sharp, a punishing drag that makes my hips react, grinding back without permission. I palm his hipbone and pull him tighter. He gasps, breaks the kiss to breathe, and I take his mouth again before he can think, push him open and deeper, claiming every ounce of his fight and turning it to heat.

He groans and bites my top lip, vertebrae arching under my hands, and then his fingers are everywhere—at my jaw, digging, at my throat just enough to say he could, at my belt like he hates the idea of me wearing anything at all. He doesn’t unbuckle it. He anchors there, knuckles pressing, a threat and a promise. His other hand fists in my hair so hard it burns my scalp. It makes me meaner. I suck his tongue and then pull back to bite the corner of his mouth until he gasps again, head hitting brick with a soft curse.

We breathe each other’s air like we’re drowning. He takes my bottom lip into his mouth and sucks like he wants to erase me with it. I let him for a beat, let him take, then I flip the grip again, fingers digging into his jaw, thumb sliding against rain-slick stubble, forcing his mouth open so I can kiss him filthy and deep, fucking into his mouth with my tongue until his whole body shudders against mine. He groans, the sound guttural, and grips my hair harder, hips rolling once more against my thigh, and I feel the answer in my own cock, thick and aching, pressed into his hip. I don’t hide it. I rock into him, slow and deliberate, and he snarls into my mouth and shoves back like he wants to fuse us there, a grind that sparks up my spine.

His breath goes ragged. Mine tears. I don’t stop. I don’t pretty it. I kiss him until my lips feel swollen, until the edges blur, until he’s kissing me like he’ll choke without it. He breaks away to pant, our foreheads knocking, then lunges back in, catching my mouth with a quick, brutal press that says don’t. It says do. It says nothing I can name.

Then he’s gone.

He rips out of my hands, shoving me in the same motion. My shoulder clips the wall and I stumble a half step. He backs off with a raw sound, hand to his mouth like he’s checking what I took. His lips are red and wet, his breathing shredded. His eyes cut up to mine—wild, hurt, hungry, furious. It lands in me like a match to gasoline.

“No,” he says, voice wrecked, pointing it at me like a weapon he just remembered he has. It shakes. He curls his fingers into a fist and drops it. “No.”

He spins on his heel and bolts, shoulders hunched, head down, boots splashing through the alley’s shallow rivers. He doesn’t look back. He hits the mouth of the alley and turns into the street, swallowed by neon and rain and the smear of people moving. The bass kicks hard through the wall behind me like a heartbeat I can’t put back in my chest. I taste clove and blood-salt on my tongue, my lips throbbing where he bit, my scalp stinging where he held me like an anchor.

I press two fingers to my mouth and feel the ruin there. My hand is shaking. I drop it, stare at the slick on my skin like evidence. The door thumps again with the music, the world resuming around the crater he left. I lean my head back against the brick, wet and rough, and breathe in air that doesn’t smell like him. It doesn’t help. He’s already in my lungs.

I don’t chase. I don’t move. I let the night flood the space he tore out of me, and I stand in it, throbbing, waiting for the ache to learn my name.

The buzzer snarls at two in the morning. I’m awake, because sleep has been refusing me, because my mouth still tastes like him. I jab the intercom. No answer, just breathing—ragged, familiar. I hit the door and wait.

The elevator is broken again, so it’s the slow drag of footsteps on the stairwell, water slapping concrete, the pause at my landing like a skip in a record. Then the knock, dull and off-center, like he barely aimed.

I open the door and he’s there. Drenched—hair plastered to his forehead, black liner smeared into bruises under his eyes, jacket dark and dripping. He looks like he walked out of a flood and forgot to come back. His skin is too pale under the streetlight glare, his mouth a cut that hasn’t closed since the alley. He doesn’t speak. He doesn’t ask. He pushes past me, water tracking his boots, the smell of wet denim and smoke and cold night following him like a warning.

The door swings shut. The loft holds its breath with me. He stops in the middle of the concrete, shoulders rigid, hands in his pockets like he’s keeping them from shaking. Rain taps out a steady drip from his cuffs to the floor. He stares at nothing, jaw clenched so tight I can hear his teeth grind when he swallows.

“Athan,” I say, low, because volume feels like violence. My voice puts his name into the room and it fills everything. He flinches, just a twitch, like the sound grazed him.

He turns his head. His eyes burn. It’s not tender. It’s not safe. It’s a flare in a storm. Shame and hunger, fury and please. It’s the same look right before he ran. It spikes under my ribs and stays there.

He shrugs out of his jacket in a jerky motion and slaps it onto the back of a chair. Water sprays. The black shirt underneath clings to him, transparent where it’s soaked, nipples hard under fabric, silver chain colder against his throat. His chest is rising too fast. He drags one hand through his hair, wrings water out like he hates it for being there. Then he looks at me again and walks.

He doesn’t stop until he’s inside my space. The wet of his clothes chills my bare arms. He doesn’t touch, not yet. His breath hits my mouth, sharp and uneven. He looks at my lip where he split it and his gaze trips, falls lower, climbs back. He swallows again and says nothing.

I don’t ask why he came. That’s obvious. I don’t ask what he wants. That’s louder. I lift my hand slow and set my fingers light on his jaw, feeling the rasp there, the tremble under his skin. He closes his eyes like the contact is too bright. Then his mouth is on mine.

It’s not a kiss. It’s an impact. He shoves me back a step with it, hands gripping my shirt, wringing it, pulling me down. He’s cold and wet and open in the wrong ways until my mouth heats him. He tastes like rain and fear and the clove he’s always hiding behind. He bites my lip the same place as before and I groan. It scrapes something raw and eager in me. I don’t make it gentle. My arm locks around his waist and I pull him flush, water soaking the front of me, his belt pressing into my hip.

He breaks to breathe, head bowed, forehead at my chin, breath punching my throat. “Don’t talk,” he says, voice thrashed. A command and a plea.

“Wasn’t going to,” I tell him against his hair, and he shudders once, like relief hurts.

We stumble, mouths on each other again—teeth, tongue, breath. I walk him backward until his knees catch the couch and we go down hard. He lands straddling my lap, knees bracketing my thighs, soaked denim grinding into my crotch. He gasps and stares at me like he hates that it’s good. I drag my hands under his wet shirt, palms skating up chilled skin, ribs like piano keys under my fingers. He jerks and sucks in air through his teeth. His nipples are tight, pebbled against my thumbs. I circle them until his throat works on a sound he tries to swallow and can’t.

“Shut up,” he whispers to me like I’d said anything. His hands claw at my shoulders, nails biting through cotton. He rolls his hips once, then again, slower, testing. I answer with a deliberate lift of my own, letting the friction talk. He makes a broken noise that isn’t language and spits out, “Fuck.”

The wet clothes are a problem. He solves it like they offended him, grabbing the hem of his shirt and hauling it off in a harsh drag that leaves his hair wilder and water spattering my face. He throws it. His chest is all pale strength and a black ink line under his collarbone I didn’t know about, some band logo, some prayer in sharp letters. I lick into his mouth because I can and because he came here for that. He takes it like a punishment he asked for.

His hands go to my belt and he fumbles once, curses, tries again. The leather gives. He yanks at my fly and I catch his wrist and squeeze, not to stop, just to make him look at me. His pupils blow wide. I nod, one small movement, and he exhales like he’d been holding that breath since the alley. He drags the zipper down and shoves his hand into my briefs. Heat, slick, the shock of his fingers wrapping around my cock. We both swear. He squeezes harder than he should and I push into his palm, jaw tight, a warning I don’t voice. He adjusts, learns the pressure I want in seconds, and strokes once, twice, slow and mean enough to make my eyes slide closed.

“Take these off,” he says, ragged. It’s the first thing he’s asked for that sounds like it belongs in daylight. It steals something soft out of me I didn’t plan on showing him. I lift my hips and he shoves pants and underwear down to my thighs. My cock springs free, heavy, flushed, leaking. His gaze drops to it, flickers, and sticks. His throat works. He lifts his hand and wraps it again, skin to skin, rain chill still on his fingers. The contrast drags a groan out of me I can’t find shame for.

He leans down and bites my jaw, hard enough to anchor his mouth there while his fist works me slow. His breath is hot, his hair tickles my cheek. I slide one hand into the back of his waistband, dragging wet denim down his hips. He lifts, helps, impatient. The top of his ass is cool and smooth under my fingers, the cleft damp and hot. He shudders when my hand finds it, a jolt he can’t control. His cock is trapped against me by his jeans, hard and straining. I press my palm to him through the fabric and he swears into my throat, hips jerking.

He pulls back enough to strip his jeans down to mid-thigh, boxers with them, cursing the cling of wet denim. His boots stay on, laces soaked, toes leaving dark arcs on the rug. He doesn’t care. He straddles me again, bare now, cock flushed dark, the head so slick it shines. Precum strings to his belly when he moves and snaps, wet and indecent. My mouth waters. I want it everywhere.

He slides his hand from my cock to his, aligning us, grinding the shafts together. It’s messy and perfect, slick on slick, sensitive skin dragging. The first drag kicks through me like a pulse. I catch his hip and hold him to it, force the rhythm slow because I want to see him lose it, not sprint to it. He glares at me like I’m the enemy that knows his safe word, and then his lashes drop, and his mouth falls open.

He moves. Slow, and then not. He ruts against me like he’s trying to erase the rain with heat. His hand brackets both our cocks and the glide is obscene. I thumb his nipple and he spasms, hips jerking harder, a strangled sound breaking in his throat. He bites his lower lip until it bleaches white and I touch it with my finger, press until he lets it go, until I can see the red there. He answers by bending down and biting my shoulder through my shirt, teeth sinking just enough to mark. I groan and hold him tighter.

His breath starts to hitch. Mine is already dirty. He drags his mouth up my neck, over my lip, catches my tongue with his teeth. His pace slips out of his control and he hates it and chases it anyway. There’s nothing pretty here, just need grinding need, the slap of wet skin, the sound of our breath breaking apart. Water still drips from his hair onto our mouths, our chests, mixing with sweat. He whispers something like sorry into my cheek and then follows it with don’t stop and that’s the prayer I answer. I don’t. I let him take what he came for and get ready to take him apart.

I flip him. One hard surge of my hips and a twist at his waist, and he’s on his back across the couch, spine arched, knees wide, jeans snarled at mid-thigh. He snarls at me like this is war and grabs for my throat. I catch his wrist midair and slam it into the cushion above his head. His other hand claws at my shirt, trying to yank me down and over him. I plant my palm on his sternum and press until his breath stutters, until his ribs flare under my hand like trapped wings.

“You wanted rough,” I say, voice low. “So take it.”

He spits, misses my cheek, hits my jaw. My cock throbs hard enough to hurt. I push his wrists together and pin them in one hand, knuckles grinding into the cushion. My other hand tears at his soaked shirt where it bunched. It’s already off, so I go for the next layer that still pretends to be a barrier: his mouth. I kiss him hard, teeth knocking teeth, nothing soft. He bites, I drive my tongue into him anyway, force the taste of me into that sullen mouth until he’s gasping. When I break, he shoves his head back and sucks air like I’ve drowned him. I like the sound too much.

I drag my hand down, rough over his chest, pinch his nipple until he flinches and tries to twist away. “Stay,” I tell him, pinning his wrists harder as he bucks. My palm skids down to his belly, the trail of hair pointing me where I’m already going. His cock is thick and bare and wet against his stomach, leaking like he’s angry about it. I wrap my hand around the base, squeeze until his eyes slam shut. He lifts his hips, trying to thrust up into my fist. I hold him down with my forearm across his pelvis, force him to feel the denial. He swears, voice cracking.

“Say you want it,” I tell him. My thumb rubs under the head, slow, just shy of what he needs. His abs jump.

“Fuck you,” he grits.

“Already working on it,” I say, and squeeze harder. He groans, the sound torn out of him, raw. I stroke up, slow, then twist my wrist at the head and drag my palm back down, thick and slick and controlled. His hips try to chase, but my weight pins him. Water beads on his throat, sweat slicks under it. He’s all heat under the cold.

His boots scuff at the rug as he fights the restraint, legs spreading wider, knees hooking over the couch arm to get leverage. He tries to yank his wrists free; I tighten my grip and plant my knee on the couch by his ribs. “You’re not going anywhere until I say.” The words land between us like a lock. His eyes go wide and darker, a flicker of something that knocks the wind out of me. I double down instead of naming it.

I let go of his wrists long enough to wrench at my own shirt. He uses the second to swing at me again, open-palmed, aiming for my face. I catch his hand and slam it back, shove my shirt over my head and throw it. He stares at my chest like he wants to scratch it bloody. I give him the option—grab both of his wrists, drag them to the front of his body and pin them to his own chest, elbows bent tight so he can feel the strain. “Hold them there,” I order. “You move, I stop.”

He glares. Holds. His knuckles are white.

I slide down him, bite a line from his jaw to his nipple, close my teeth and tug until he hisses. His hands twitch but stay put, muscles jumping under my mouth. I keep going, a hard scrape of teeth and tongue over his ribs, my stubble burning his skin, down his belly to the tight pull of his jeans tangled at mid-thigh. I fist both our cocks together again and stroke once, mean and slow. His head smacks the cushion, a broken gasp ripped out. I lift off him before he can catch it, grab the waistband of his jeans and yank. The denim fights. I swear and pull harder, peel them lower to his knees so his legs can open wider. His boots keep them there—fine. He looks filthier like this, restrained by something stupid and real.

“Turn,” I snap, and slap the outside of his thigh. He hesitates a fraction of a second, then flips, face into the cushion, arms still forward like I left them, ass up. The sound I make isn’t civilized. I grip both cheeks and spread him, watch him clench, then deliberately relax because he knows I’m watching. His hole is tight and flushed, slick with sweat and the pre I’ve smeared everywhere. I spit, watch it drip and shine, then rub it in with two fingers, slow circles that make him push back without meaning to. He growls into the cushion, frustrated and needy and furious that he’s both.

“You’re going to tell me what you need,” I tell him, lining my cock up against the crease of his ass, dragging the head through the slick mess I’ve made there. I don’t push in. I tease the ring, press just enough to make him feel the threat of it. He shudders, his hands clawing at the cushion.

“Hard,” he grinds out. “Don’t—” He cuts off, jaw locking.

“Don’t what?” I press the tip again, just dipping in, feeling the tight pull around me, then out. He swears viciously. His back flexes, muscles tight under skin. He’s shaking.

“Don’t talk,” he pleads, voice wrecked. “Just—”

“Just what.” I rub the head over him again, a slow slide that has him gasping.

“Fuck me,” he spits into the cushion, like it costs him blood to say it.

I push. Not all the way, not yet. Enough to breach him, to open that first ring and hold there while his body fights and then grabs. He’s tight and hot and swallowing me slow. I grab his hips, fingers digging into bone, and press deeper, inch by inch. He snarls, the sound ragged, and shoves back to take more. I meet him, a harsh thrust that seats me to the hilt. We both swear at the same time, the sound sharp and helpless.

I hold him there, buried, stretch burning sweet around me, and count three heartbeats while he adjusts. He tries to hide how he needs the pause; I feel it in the tremor that runs through him anyway. I lean over, chest to his back, hand sliding up to twist in his hair and yank his head back so I can speak against his ear. “Feel me,” I tell him. “All of me.”

He groans, a raw, open sound that lashes my nerves, and I start to move. Hard, not fast, driving thrusts that grind him into the couch. The slap of skin, the slick slide, the wet drag of our sweat and rain—everything is loud and ugly and perfect. He pushes back on every stroke like he’s trying to bruise me from the inside. I fuck him into it, a steady punishment that isn’t punishment at all.

“Look at you,” I grind out, pulling him up by his hair so his spine bows. His eyes are glassy when they flick back to me, mouth open, breath broken. He tries to bring his hands back. I smack his wrist. “I said hold.”

He claws the cushion again, knuckles paling, and obeys. The wordless submission is a punch to the gut, too pure for what we’re doing, or because of it. I shove it down and take harder strokes, my hips hitting his ass with a sharp rhythm. He starts to lose the fight to keep quiet, sounds slipping: choked gasps, a cut-off whine, a whispered yes that he tries to swallow.

“Say it again,” I order, panting.

He squeezes his eyes shut and obeys, barely voice at all. “Yes.”

I let go of his hair and slide my hand under him, find his cock heavy and slick and angry at being ignored. I fist it rough, timed to my thrusts. He chokes on a shout, hips jerking between my hand and my cock. The couch complains under us. Water-smudged eyeliner stains the cushion where his cheek presses. He’s a mess and he’s stunning.

He tries once more to twist for control, to flip us, to set pace. I pin him flat with my weight, press his chest to the cushion, hips still snapping. “No,” I say into the sweat-wet nape of his neck. “You wanted me to take it. Let me take it.”

His whole body shudders. His hole tightens, grabs at me like a fist. He’s there, right there, and it hits with no grace at all—his cock throbs in my hand and he spills over my fingers, hot and thick, his voice cracking into a hoarse cry he can’t bite down. His ass clamps hard around me and I follow, grinding deep and coming with a rough groan against his shoulder, teeth sinking in just enough to mark him while everything snaps white in my head.

We stay locked, breathless, my weight heavy on his back, our sweat and rain cooling fast. He twitches under me, a tiny aftershock, and sucks in air that rattles. I ease out of him slow. He hisses, then relaxes all the way into the couch like his bones gave up. I don’t take my hand from his chest. I press it there, feeling his heart slam against my palm, a frantic, living beat I want to command and soothe at the same time.

He turns his face just enough that I can see the smear of black at his lashes, the new red at his mouth where he bit it. He doesn’t look at me. He doesn’t have to. I can feel the fight going quiet in him, not gone, just breathing hard. I keep him pinned one heartbeat longer, then two, then let the pressure ease without letting go. Outside, the rain keeps tapping its same dumb rhythm, waiting. Inside, we’re not done. Not even close.

I slide off him to the floor, knees hitting the rug. He makes a rough noise of protest, like he thinks I’m abandoning him. I’m not. I shove at his calf, tug at the laces of one boot with clumsy, wet fingers. The knot fights me. I snarl at it, rip it, get the first boot off with a wet thud. The sock underneath is threadbare at the heel, damp, clinging. I curl my fingers under the edge and peel it away. His foot is pale, narrow, long toes tipped in chipped black polish. The arch is high, tendon flexing when I grip his ankle. It’s the first time he looks scared.

I take his other boot next, quick, strip him down to bare skin, both feet exposed on the couch cushion. He tries to tuck one under, embarrassed without knowing why. I catch it. “No,” I say, and bring it to my mouth.

He jolts hard when my tongue meets the ball of his foot. Salt and rain and the faint smoke of cloves. I drag a slow lick over the arch, flattening my tongue, following the curve like a path I already know. His whole body reacts: a sharp inhale, a tremor running up his calves, his hands fisting the cushion like he’s trying to tear it open. I wrap my hand around his ankle, thumb riding the jut of bone, anchoring him while I take his big toe between my lips and suck.

He makes a sound I haven’t heard from him—small, youth-raw, strangled. His hips jerk. I don’t touch his cock. I don’t touch anything else. I focus, mouth working his toe, teeth scraping lightly, tongue circling the pad, then moving to the next. I suck each toe with slow care, wet and obscene, spit slicking my chin, dripping to the inside of my wrist. He can’t decide whether to run or push his foot deeper. He does both in micro-motions, ankle flexing, toes spreading helplessly when I press my tongue between them.

“Don’t,” he says, but there’s no weight in it. It’s not a command. It’s a ruined prayer.

I kiss the soft line under his toes, kiss the tender skin like it deserves worship, then bite. Not hard. Enough to make his back arch. He gasps into the cushion. His thighs quiver. A ripple travels up his hamstring when I thumb the ridge of his arch and dig in. I knead it like a sore muscle. He moans, shocked, trying to muffle it. I chase every twitch, map it, memorize the way the tendon rolls under my mouth. I suck the side of his foot until it shines, then push his big toe deep into my throat and swallow around it, obscene and slow.

“Fuck,” he breathes, and it shivers. I look up the length of him: his shoulders are hunched, his neck corded. Pre glistens at the base of his spine, smearing where he’s pressed to the cushion. His hole flutters empty, slick and open, his body confused by not being filled and being owned anyway. I tighten my grip and slide my mouth to his heel. The skin is rougher there. I lick it like it’s sweet.

He bends his knee without thinking, bringing me closer, offering it. I take his ankle higher, push his knee toward his chest, open him, and run my tongue up the inside of his ankle to the soft, vulnerable skin where the bone meets flesh. I suck there, slow, draw a bruise. His breath fractures. His fingers leave the cushion long enough to claw at his own hair, then slam back down, obeying the earlier order even now.

“Look at me,” I say against his skin. He turns his face, eyes liquid dark, cheeks streaked black. When he sees my mouth around his foot, the wet mess I’m making of him, something in him buckles. I hold his gaze while I tongue the seam between his second and third toes, slow, relentless, and let him watch me swallow him down like he’s the only thing that matters.

He chokes. The first sob tears out of him like it surprises him as much as me. He tries to smother it. I won’t let him. I switch feet, grab the other, and do it all over with a rougher edge, more suction, more teeth, making the nerves light up in a rhythm that has nothing to do with his dick, everything to do with the wiring he hides. I palm his arch, thumb circles deep into the center, and suck the middle toe until my cheeks hollow.

He breaks. His body bows off the couch, muscles stringing tight, a strangled sob ripping free and then another, his throat open, no control left. His hole pulses uselessly, clenching at nothing. His cock drags wet against the cushion and spurts without my hand on it, leaking in helpless pulses that smear his stomach and the couch in streaks. His foot shakes in my grip and I hold it tighter, keep sucking, keep licking, ride him through it. Tears cut clean lines through the eyeliner on his cheeks. He can’t stop making noise. He doesn’t try.

I ease my mouth away only when his ankle goes slack, his toes relaxing, the tension bleeding out in a trembling flood. I kiss the top of his foot, soft, a benediction I never give, then rest my forehead to his arch, breathing hard. He’s still shivering, hiccuping on leftover breath, eyes blown and wet, face cracked wide open. He looks wrecked and young and unbearably beautiful like this, all the armor gone because I found the hinge and pressed.

“Good,” I tell him, low, palm smoothing up his calf now, not asking for anything. “That’s it. Let it.” His chest stutters. He exhales like a surrender. I curl a hand around his heel and keep him grounded to me while the last tremors pass, while the rain keeps whispering at the windows and the room learns the shape of his quiet.

He doesn’t fight when I climb back onto the couch and haul him into my lap. He comes easy, boneless, his limbs folding where I put them. I sit with my back to the armrest and drag him across me until his spine fits to my chest, his knees bent, his feet still in my hands like they belong there. He trembles, small aftershocks, breath snagging and letting go, snagging and letting go. The couch is a mess under us—rain, sweat, spit, the smear of his release shining on the fabric, on his stomach, streaked up his ribs.

“Hey,” I say, not soft, just steady. My palm spreads over his sternum, feeling the fluttering there slow and even out under pressure. He leans into it. He actually leans. His head tips back to my shoulder, jaw slack, eyes half-lidded, lashes clumped and black. He looks like he doesn’t know where his body ends or begins. I know. I keep him from floating off.

I lift one of his feet again and set it over my thigh, thumb riding the knotted tendon at his ankle. He watches without speaking, glazed and trusting. I work my thumb in circles, slow and sure, until the tremor in his calf eases. His toes curl, lazy. His breath drops lower. He makes a sound that isn’t sex, not exactly—more animal, more human. Relief.

The sharpness I met on that balcony, in that store, in the alley—every edge is sanded down right now. The sarcasm, the bite, the withholding. Underneath is a raw thing, sensitive like skin under a scab, hungry like he’s been starving himself on purpose. He wanted to be handled and he didn’t have words for it. He does now. The words are touch. Pressure. Being seen and not punished for it.

“Good,” I tell him again, and the word lands in him like a weight. His eyes flicker shut on a shiver. I squeeze the arch of his foot and feel the way it answers me, a pulse of electricity straight through him. He whines—small, involuntary—and turns his face into my neck like he’s embarrassed by what his body gives away. I don’t let him hide. I slide my hand up from his chest to his throat, two fingers resting over the hollow, feeling the swallow move through them. I don’t press. I hold.

His hands, which earlier were clawed into the cushion, now hang empty. I take one and place it over my thigh, guiding his fingers to the damp patch on my skin where his foot had rubbed, slick with saliva and sweat. He pets it mindlessly, grounding himself on the mess we made. I breathe it in, the clove and rain and sex smell, and let my own body cool around him instead of pushing for more. There will be more. It doesn’t have to be now. The hold is the point.

“Can you breathe?” I ask at his temple.

He nods, the motion small. “Yeah.” His voice is wrecked, broken glass softened by water. He clears it and tries again. “Yeah.”

My hand slides down his sternum, over the sticky trail on his stomach, palm catching on the tacky edges, collecting it. He shivers when I rub it idly into his skin, spreading it over the faint lines of his abs, lower. His cock lies heavy and soft against his thigh, flushed, a smear of white drying at the tip. I don’t touch it. I thumb at the crease where hip meets thigh instead, and his pelvis tilts without thought, offering. He’s gone past pride. The need to perform is gone. All that’s left is what works.

“You did what I told you,” I murmur into his hair, tasting salt. “You let me.” The truth sits between us, clean.

He licks his lips. “Didn’t know it would be like that.” A shaky laugh ghosts out of him, derailed by a breath. “Fuck.”

“I did.” The words surprise both of us. I don’t apologize for them. I saw it in the way he couldn’t keep his heel still behind that counter, in the way his eyes flinched when I stepped too close at the show. Every part of him is wired to feel too much and pretend it’s nothing. He needs someone who sees the wires and doesn’t cut them.

He’s quiet for a long beat, just breathing with me, my hand moving slow on his ribs, counting them, memorizing the shape. He nuzzles my jaw, then goes still as if he’s worried about making it mean something. I don’t give him an out. I press my mouth to his temple in a dry, unhurried kiss and keep it there.

“Stay,” he says, barely audible, and I know he means me, my hands, this state. The word is a surrender dressed as a request. It hits low in my stomach, heavy.

“I’m here.” I tuck his nearest foot between my thighs, trap it there, the heat of me holding the heat of him. My other hand slides down his thigh to the back of his knee, the skin thin and sensitive. He twitches. I smooth it with my palm until he sighs. He’s pliant as if he’s been melted and poured into me.

He shifts, turning slightly to face me, cheek dragging against my shoulder. He blinks up, pupils huge, and there’s nothing guarded in his eyes now. Just burned-out need and the quiet thing underneath it that looks a lot like trust. He reaches a hand up, hesitates, then drags his fingers along my jaw, clumsy, like he’s learning the shape of me. He stops at my mouth, thumb catching on the swell of my lower lip. I part for him and kiss it, not a show, just contact. He exhales into it.

“Okay?” I ask when I pull back.

He nods again. “Yeah. I… yeah.” His throat works under my fingers. He swallows and adds, like it costs him, like he’s handing me a weapon and daring me not to use it wrong, “Don’t stop doing that. To my feet.” The last word is thick with shame and relief at once.

I let it sit in my chest, heavy and furious with tenderness. “I won’t stop unless you tell me to.” I squeeze the foot caught between my thighs, the bones and tendons and soft parts under my grip. It belongs in my hands the way my name belongs in his mouth.

His shoulders fall as if he put something down he’d been carrying for years. He sinks deeper into me, all the edges gone. The rain keeps on, softer now. His breathing steadies into mine. I hold him through it, through the settling, through the first quiet I’ve heard from him that isn’t armor. I stay until his eyelids droop and the last tremor passes, my palm spread over his heart like a promise, my fingers around his ankle like an anchor, the room learning the new weight of us.

He leaves before dawn, soft-footed, the kind of slip that says he’s learned to disappear before anyone can see what he looks like when he stays. I watch from the window, a shadow behind the sheer curtain, and force myself not to go after him. He glances back once on the sidewalk, hood up, hair a wet dark halo from the mist, and then he’s swallowed by the gray. I make coffee and don’t drink it, listening to the building wake, trying to ignore the itch under my skin that says I should have locked the door behind him and told him he doesn’t get to run.

By noon I’m halfway through sketching a pattern and half out of my head, scrolling his name just to feel the ghost of it, when my phone lights with nothing from him. The silence has a taste—metallic, like blood before you notice the cut. I dress and go to the shop, because pretending I have errands is easier than waiting.

I’m a block away when I see Bryce. He’s impossible to miss: crisp button-down, laughable loafers on a street that would eat them, hair so tidy it looks like a helmet. He stands like a cop in front of the record store, arms crossed, jaw tight. I slow, instinct sliding me into the shadow of a doorway. I already know what this is, and the sour burn of it climbs my throat.

Athan steps out to toss a flattened box in the alley bin, shoulders hunched under a threadbare hoodie, the one that smells like smoke and rain and me. He freezes when he sees Bryce. It’s subtle—the drop of his chin, the way his hand tightens on the edge of the cardboard. He sets the box down without looking away.

“Morning,” Bryce says with that bright, fake tone people use before they slap you. “Imagine my surprise. Early riser, huh? Didn’t think you had it in you unless someone else was pulling your strings.”

Athan’s mouth flattens. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“Neither should you, apparently.” Bryce steps closer, ignoring the sign on the door about loitering, ignoring the way Athan takes a half-step into himself to make space around his nerves. “I took a little detour this morning. Cute building. Didn’t realize you were spending your nights in a freak show.”

My hands curl inside my pockets. The urge to step in and grind Bryce’s cheek against brick until he coughs up whatever he swallowed at prep school is bright and savage, but I hold. I want to see what Athan does when the air gets thin.

“Don’t,” Athan warns, voice low, the kind of low that comes after he’s been gutted and stitched back together by my hands. “Don’t talk about them.”

“‘Them,’” Bryce parrots with a smirk. “Right. That’s generous. You know, Athan, it’s bad enough you’ve been slumming it in this dump, playing cashier in a place that smells like mildew and failure. Now you’re screwing—what?—some confused dress-up project with a man’s jaw and a woman’s clothes. You’ve always been dramatic, but this is a new level of pathetic.”

Athan’s fingers flex. The ring finger on his left hand shakes once, then stills. “Watch your mouth.”

“I’ll watch your future, if you want.” Bryce leans in, voice dropping, sugar cooling into poison. “I called your boss this morning. Nice guy. Old. He doesn’t need the headache that your… lifestyle brings. I told him you’ve been late, distracted, bringing your mess to his doorstep. I suggested he think about letting you go before this place gets a reputation.” He smiles like he’s done a mercy. “He’s considering it.”

Athan flinches like he can’t help it. It’s small, but it guts me. The shop is his sanctuary, the one place he walks like he belongs.

“And then there’s your rent,” Bryce continues, crisp, practiced. “Your phone. The insurance Dad still covers because you can’t be trusted to make an appointment on your own. You think I won’t shut all of it off? You think your little charity case who plays dress-up will pick up the slack? Please. You’re a hobby. A phase. They’ll get bored and you’ll have burned the last of your good graces. I’m trying to save you from yourself.”

“By making sure I can’t eat?” Athan’s laugh is a sharp crack with no humor. His eyes are dark pits. “By telling my boss something’s wrong with me because I like someone you don’t?”

“Because you like someone who doesn’t know what they are,” Bryce snaps, true face flashing. “Because working here is bad enough without adding public perversion. This neighborhood might tolerate your eyeliner and tantrums, but there’s a line. You want to hold hands with a—” he bites off the slur he wants to say and picks another knife—“with that thing, you do it in the privacy of your shame. You don’t drag our family name into it. You don’t make a spectacle.”

I inhale through my teeth, slow, counting down from a number I don’t believe in. Athan’s pulse is visible in his throat. He’s not looking at me—hasn’t seen me—but I feel the charge in him like a wire I could grab and burn on.

“So that’s it,” Athan says, quiet. “You stalk me. You watch where I sleep. You threaten my job, my landlord, my phone. You want me alone so you can fix me.”

“I want you to stop humiliating yourself,” Bryce says. He reaches out, like he might touch Athan’s shoulder, like he has the right, and Athan steps back, a flinch that’s also a refusal. Bryce’s hand hangs there, fingers flexing. He drops it. “Text that person. Tell them it’s over. Tell them you made a mistake. Tell them you’re not going to let them use you to feel special.”

Athan’s mouth works. He swallows. “And if I don’t?”

“Then you’ll find out how quickly your little world collapses without me making sure the lights stay on.” Bryce’s smile returns, brittle and bright. “Grow up, Athan. You want to play at being a rebel? Pay your own bills. Until then, you obey the people who keep you from sleeping under a bridge.”

The words hang in the wet air. Athan looks past Bryce at the door like he can see through wood to the counter, the bins, the regulars who nod at him like he’s part of the place. He looks like he’s trying not to fold in half. The wince that passes through him is quick, then gone, replaced by the flat mask I’ve seen him use to survive.

“Fine,” he says. It’s not agreement. It’s survival triage. “I’ll handle it.”

Bryce’s satisfaction is ugly. He adjusts his cuff, smooths a nonexistent wrinkle, like he thinks he’s tidied away a mess. “Good. Do it now. Show me you can be reasonable.”

Athan stares at the cracked concrete instead of Bryce’s face. He pulls his phone from the pocket of his hoodie with hands that don’t shake. His thumbs hover. He types. The motion is efficient, brutal in its lack of flourish. He hits send. The message lands on my screen a second later: short, cold, not him. We’re done. Don’t come to the store again.

Bryce doesn’t see the way Athan’s jaw goes tight, the way his shoulders lift like he’s holding his own ribs together. “There,” Bryce says. “See? Not so hard.”

Athan slides the phone back into his pocket like it might bite him. “Are we done?”

“For now.” Bryce gives the storefront a disdainful sweep. “I’ll check in later. Don’t make me come back.”

He turns and walks away, already scrolling, already erasing the texture of what he did. I stay in the shadow, fingers digging crescents into my palms until I feel the sting. My phone is a weight in my pocket, that message like a stone.

Athan stands alone in the doorway for a long beat, then goes back inside without looking around. The bell above the door jingles, a too-bright sound in the dark weight of the block.

I exhale. The urge to storm in and set the place on fire for him is visceral. Instead, I straighten, the decision already forming like a blade in my mouth. If he thinks he can push me away to save something, he’s wrong. I step out of the shadow and toward the door.

The bell screams when I shove the door and step into air that smells like cardboard and dust and vinyl sleeves. The old guy at the turntable barely looks up, needle hovering. Athan is behind the counter, head down, a stack of used CDs fanned under his hands like he might build a wall out of them if he moves fast enough. He hears me before he sees me; I watch the tightness hit his shoulders, the shutters slam down in his spine.

“We’re done,” I say, throwing his text back at him as I move to the counter. “Come say it to my face.”

He lifts his gaze like it costs him something. His eyes flick to the window, to the aisle where two kids in patched denim are flipping through a crate, to the old guy who pretends to be deaf when drama threatens to make him work. Then he looks at me, and the cold lands. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“Too late,” I say. “You don’t get to dump me by text because your brother threatened to dock your allowance.”

His mouth hardens into a line. “You don’t know what he can do.”

“Try me.” I lean on the counter, palms flat on the scuffed glass. My rings click. “Tell me why I should stand outside while you slice yourself out of your life to make him comfortable.”

Athan’s laugh is empty. “This isn’t about him being comfortable. It’s about me not getting fired today. It’s about having a phone tomorrow. It’s about eating something that isn’t ramen packets and pride.” He drags a hand through his hair, jaw tight. “You think this is noble defiance? It’s math.”

“The math where you cut me out so he can keep stepping on your neck?” I say, soft enough to be private even in this space. “You think that’s going to fix anything? You think he stops just because you bend?”

He shakes his head once. “You don’t get it.”

“Then make me get it,” I say. “Stop hiding behind that dead tone and talk to me.”

His face flickers, something raw flashing before he smothers it. He straightens. “No. Because you don’t stop. You push. You want to pull me into your world and I can barely keep mine from collapsing. I can’t do both. I choose the one that keeps me breathing.”

The kids in denim snicker at something on a sleeve. The old guy scratches his ear. I want to vault the counter, wrap my hand around Athan’s ankle the way I did in my bed, remind his body what it already chose. I settle for leaning closer, lowering my voice until it’s just heat. “Breathing isn’t living.”

“You make it sound poetic,” he says. “It’s not. It’s ugly. It’s me taking what I can so I don’t end up on a couch at my parents’ house while Bryce counts how many times I piss, reminding me that I’m a charity case—”

“You’re not,” I cut in.

He holds up a hand, palm out, stop. “You can tell me that because you have money, Heiylo. You have options. I have a job that barely covers rent unless Bryce keeps the safety net. If I piss him off, he’ll cut everything off on principle. He already called my boss.” His throat works. He swallows it down. “He’ll do it. You can’t fix that by kissing me in the back room and telling me to be brave.”

I blink once. The honesty burns. It makes me want to tear this place down plank by plank until there’s nothing left for Bryce to threaten. I temper it, grind it down into something sleeker. “I’m not here to kiss you,” I say. “I’m here because you sent me a text meant to make me leave, and I won’t. You want to end it? Fine. But you do it without pretending it’s for me.”

He flinches, small and sharp. “It is for you,” he says, and for a second the mask slips. There’s fear in there, thick, and love’s outline around it that he’s trying to erase. “You don’t need this. You don’t need to get dragged into the mess that is my family or my paycheck or my panic. You wanted a fight and a fuck. You got them. Now go.”

“You think that’s all I wanted?” I ask. “You think I pressed my hand to your heart last night and held your ankle because I was bored?”

His lips part. He looks like he might say my name, then clamps it off. He glances past me; the kids drift to the zines, the old guy lifts one finger and drops it again, like a warning not to turn this into performance. Athan lowers his voice until it’s ground glass. “Please. Don’t make me pick you over rent in front of my boss.”

“Pick you,” I say. “Pick the version of you that didn’t text me like a stranger. Pick the one who shoved Bryce’s hand away. Pick the one who made himself soft under my mouth and stayed.”

He breathes out, fast, a tremor running up his forearms. He grips the edge of the counter until his knuckles pale. “Stop.”

“Say it,” I demand. “Look me in the eyes and tell me you don’t want me. Tell me you want me gone.”

He meets my stare. His pupils are blown; the muscles in his jaw jump. “I want you gone,” he says, and the words don’t land right. They thud, limp, a lie too heavy to throw.

I hold there, letting the silence hum. The old boss sighs and lifts the needle; the music dies. The shop feels like it’s breathing with us. Athan swallows, eyes glossing for a flash before he looks down.

“I’m not walking out because you typed two sentences,” I say. “I’m not a phase. I’m not a hobby. If you’re ending this, you’re going to do it like it matters. And if you’re not—if you’re trying to survive for a day—then you’re going to let me stand next to you while you do it.”

His hand lifts off the counter, hovers, lands again, indecisive, like he wants to reach for me and can’t afford it. “If Bryce comes back and sees you here, he’ll—”

“Good,” I say. “Let him. I’d like to hear him say it to my face again.”

The old guy clears his throat, eyes finally cutting over. “Take it outside or take it to the back,” he mutters, not quite looking at us. “You’re scaring off the kids.”

Athan flinches like he’s been caught doing something filthy. He slides out from behind the counter, moving with that careful economy he uses when he’s about to bolt. He tilts his head toward the stockroom door. “Five minutes,” he says, the words brittle. “Then you leave.”

I push off the counter, pulse steadying now that he’s given me a door. “I’ll take what you give.” I follow him past the posters and milk crates toward the dark slit of the back room, where the walls are close and there’s nowhere to run.

The back room is a narrow throat of shelves and busted speakers, the hum of the fluorescent light like a migraine. He closes the door behind us but doesn’t touch me. He looks like a wire about to snap.

“Say it,” I tell him, low. “If you want me gone, use the five minutes to make it stick.”

His mouth opens, closes. His hand lifts, and for a half second I think he’s going to touch my chest—then the door slams open so hard it bites the wall. Bryce fills the frame like a bad smell, eyes already lit with triumph.

“There you are,” he says, disgust sharpening every syllable. “Of course you’re hiding in a closet with this—” his eyes cut me up and down, landing on my boots, my rings, “—thing.”

Athan goes still in a way that’s worse than flinching. Bryce stalks in, crowding the space, and his hand snaps out, catching Athan’s hoodie at the shoulder and yanking him forward hard enough that the fabric bites his neck.

“Are you stupid?” Bryce hisses. “You think I wouldn’t check? You think I wouldn’t follow that trash text with an actual visit?” He shoves Athan back, body slamming the shelf. Something rattles, skitters to the floor.

I move without thinking, sliding a step between them. Bryce’s gaze swivels to me like a scope. “Back off,” I say.

He laughs, loud. “You don’t give orders here, freak. You don’t belong in civilized spaces.” He shifts his stance, making sure I get a full hit of his cologne, the smell of power and old money. “I talked to Morris. One phone call. You? You don’t have that number. You have—what? Cheap lingerie and a mouth that makes men stupid.”

Athan’s breath stutters, but he stays where he is, back to the shelf. Bryce reaches toward him again, fingers hooking the neckline of his hoodie, dragging him forward so their faces almost touch.

“You embarrass me,” Bryce says softly, too soft. “You always do. You can’t even hold a job without my help. And you repay me by letting this deviant crawl under your skin?” He flicks a venomous glance to me. “You think he cares? He’ll dump you the second you’re inconvenient. He’s a predator. He’s—”

“Say my name,” I cut in. “If you’re going to spit on me, use my name.”

He doesn’t. He sneers, the kind of practiced curl of lips born in country clubs. His knuckles press into Athan’s clavicle, a not-quite-pain he can escalate any second.

“Let him go,” I say.

“Or what?” Bryce leans in, voice dropping. “You going to what, sweetheart? Throw a fit? You’re a joke. And as for whatever you think you are—” he finally spits it, “—a man in a dress? You’re an insult.”

The word lands like a slap that doesn’t surprise me. It’s not new. What’s new is the sound Athan makes. Low. Surprised even to himself. He stares at Bryce’s hand on him, at the pale marks forming where fingers bite. He looks at me, at my face, then back at Bryce. Something aligns.

“Get your hand off me,” Athan says. His voice is steady, not loud. It thrums.

Bryce’s smile ices over. “Excuse me?”

Athan lifts his chin. The fear is still there, coiled, but he steps forward into it. “I said, get your hand off me.”

Bryce tightens his grip instead, making a point. “You don’t tell me what to do.”

It happens fast. Athan’s hands come up, not to pry but to hit. He shoves Bryce’s chest hard, using all that stored anger like a spring. Bryce’s shoes skid; he slams into the door frame with a grunt, shock cutting through his face like a blade.

The air changes. I feel it in my teeth.

Bryce recovers, lunging, but Athan steps in again, this time putting his body between us, palm out, shoulders squared. “Don’t touch him,” he says. It’s calm, lethal. “And don’t touch me.”

Bryce’s gaze jumps from Athan to me and back, recalculating. The old script he’s read from his whole life doesn’t fit this scene. His lip curls. “You’re making a mistake,” he says, but there’s a tremor of disbelief under it. “You think you can survive without me? You’ll be back in a week. Begging.”

“I won’t,” Athan says. He doesn’t look at me to borrow courage. He stares at his brother, eyes dark and clear. “I’m done.”

Bryce laughs again, brittle now. He straightens his jacket like he can smooth this away. He jabs a finger toward me, but it never lands. Athan’s hand snaps up and slaps his wrist aside—a small, precise movement that says more than any shove. “Don’t point at him,” Athan says. “Don’t talk to him.”

“Who do you think you are?” Bryce spits. “You are nothing without me.”

“Not your problem anymore.” Athan takes a half step forward, forcing Bryce to step back without thinking. “Get out.”

The words hang there. The light hums. Something drips in the sink. Bryce blinks, like he misheard.

“Get. Out.” Athan adds it, each syllable a nail in a coffin he should have built years ago. “You’re not welcome here.”

For a second, I’m sure Bryce will swing. His hand flexes. His jaw ticks. Then the math he loves so much does itself behind his eyes. Public place. Witnesses. Not worth the legal snarl. He drops his hand, steps back into the doorway, fixes Athan with a look meant to cauterize. “You’re going to regret this.”

“Maybe,” Athan says. “But not as much as I’d regret never doing it.”

Bryce holds my stare one beat longer, trying to burn me. It doesn’t land. I watch him without blinking until he looks away first. Then he’s gone, the door rattling in his wake, his perfume thinning as he strides through the shop like it offended him by existing.

Silence swallows the back room. Athan’s shoulders drop a fraction. His hands shake, the adrenaline singing through him, but the line of his mouth is solid. He turns to me, the fight still bright in his eyes, terror braided with something fierce and new. He opens his mouth, but no words come.

I take one step closer, not touching. “You did that,” I say. Quiet. True.

His throat works. He nods once, a jerk, like if he moves too much he’ll fall apart. He sucks in a breath, and for the first time since I walked in, it goes all the way down. He looks at the door, then back at me, and the decision sits between us like a live wire, humming, dangerous, irresistible.

He closes the distance first. Not to kiss. To put his forehead to mine and breathe like he’s learning how. His hands find my wrists and wrap, trembling. Not restraining—anchoring. I don’t move, just let him map the heat of my skin, the reality of me.

“I can’t be here,” he says, voice gone rough. “Not for another second.” He swallows. “Come with me.”

“Yes.”

We step out together. The shop’s bell jangles, too bright, too cheerful. The old guy behind the counter pretends to read an invoice, but his eyes flicker. Athan doesn’t look at him. He grabs his backpack, yanks the hoodie straight, and shoulders past the last racks, chin up like a blade. I keep half a step behind, enough for him to feel me at his back.

Outside, the afternoon is a slab of gray. Traffic blur. Cigarette stubs mashed into wet concrete. Athan stops just off the curb, sucks in city air like it’s water. His hands are shaking harder now that no one’s watching. I peel my jacket off and drape it over his shoulders. He doesn’t argue. He drags the zipper up, buries his mouth against the collar, and closes his eyes. My smell sinks into him; his lashes flutter.

“You did it,” I say.

He opens his eyes and there it is: the new hunger. Not just for my mouth. For consequence. For whatever happens because he chose himself in front of someone who’s always chosen for him.

“Don’t let go,” he says. Not a plea. A rule.

“Not planning to.”

We walk. Not to the train, not toward anything sensible. Just moving, our bodies burning off the residue of adrenaline. His shoulder brushes mine every three steps, a metronome. He doesn’t talk. I don’t force it. My hand slides down and finds his, fingers threading. He squeezes like he’s trying to fuse bone.

A block later he veers into an alley between a pawn shop and a shuttered salon. It smells like damp cardboard and fryer oil. He doesn’t care. He shoves me back against the grit-stained brick and finally kisses me, the kind of frantic that tastes like heat and relief and salt. His mouth is open, uncoordinated with urgency, biting, sucking, taking. His hands are at my ribs, my hips, my throat, grabbing like he needs proof of solidity. I let him take what he needs and give back enough to keep him from floating off—palm at his nape, tongue dragging slow to steady him.

“Say it again,” I breathe against his mouth.

“I’m done,” he says, like a prayer that hurts. “I’m done with him. With them.” His teeth catch my bottom lip, hold. “I want—fuck, I want you.”

“You’ve got me.”

He groans into my mouth, body folding to me. His knee slides between my thighs, not subtle. The denim friction hits and I feel the throb-settle in my pelvis, a mean satisfaction that has nothing to do with winning and everything to do with the way he’s choosing me like oxygen. I cup his jaw and tilt him, feeding him a kiss that’s not punishment, not performance. He goes slack in the best way—surrender, not collapse—and then tightens again, a spring resetting.

Footsteps echo at the alley mouth. He breaks the kiss and presses his face to my neck, breathing me in until the steps pass, his pulse hammering into my collarbone. He laughs once, a shredded sound, half-hysterical, half-wildly alive.

“Come home with me?” I ask. I mean my place, our place, the only place that’s felt like he could be soft and still be whole.

He nods. “Yeah. Please.”

We don’t separate. We walk out of the alley linked by wrist and jacket, like a single organism with four legs and one intention. At the corner, he hesitates, a ghost of the old habit of looking over his shoulder for permission. He catches it himself and shakes it off, jaw setting. When the light changes, he pulls me into the street first.

We cut through crowds and the city feels different—like a stage we just burned mid-scene and kept acting anyway. At the crosswalk with the mural of a mouth screaming flowers, he stops. He turns to me. The wind catches his hair, and for a second, he looks young in a way that breaks me open. He lifts our joined hands and presses our knuckles to his sternum like a vow.

“If he tries again,” he says, voice level, “I still pick this.”

“Good,” I answer. “So do I.”

On the train, he takes the window seat and keeps his palm splayed on my thigh, thumb stroking a small line back and forth like a worry bead. He watches the city smear past, nodding to some internal beat. He looks at our reflection in the dark glass—their black hoodie, my rings, our hands—and smiles, small and feral. His breathing is back to normal. Mine too. But the air between our skin stays charged, an electrical field.

When we climb the stairs to my building, he’s ahead of me, taking them two at a time. At the landing, he stops, turns, and catches my mouth again, less frantic, more sure. It’s not about sex here; it’s about searing the earlier moment into something indelible. He kisses me like a signature.

Inside my loft, he doesn’t drop his bag. He leaves it slung on one shoulder, steps to the middle of the room, and faces me like he’s bracing for a verdict he’s already decided to take.

“I did that,” he says, echoing me. He squares his shoulders. “And I want what comes next.” His eyes are steady, dark, and blazing. “All of it.” He lifts our joined hands between us, laces our fingers tighter. “With you.”