In two more hours, we were done.

Sahil stood at the door, his jacket slung over his arm, casting one last worried glance at my neck before walking out. The door clicked shut behind him, and the flat went quiet. Too quiet.

Advik didn't come out of the room. Not a sound. Not a shadow shifting beneath the door. Not the creak of floorboards or the clatter of a keyboard.

So I went inside.

He was standing by the dresser, his back to me, changing his clothes with sharp, jerky movements — yanking a shirt over his head, his muscles tense and rigid under his skin. I walked closer, my footsteps soft against the carpet, and reached out to touch his arm.

He shifted slightly.

Just an inch. Just enough that my fingers grazed empty air instead of skin. The distance felt deliberate. Calculated. It stung more than any cruel word he had ever spoken.

"Where are you going?" My voice sounded small in the sudden vastness of the room.

"There's a party." He didn't turn around. His voice was flat, stripped of the growl and the hunger and the terrifying tenderness from this morning. "At a friend's place. Most probably I'll stay there tonight."

"What?" I stepped closer, close enough to smell his cologne, close enough to see the tension in his shoulders. "Why didn't you tell me sooner?"

"It was decided just now."

And then he left.

No smile. No kiss. No backward glance. No acknowledgment that three hours ago he had pinned me against a wall and bitten me like he was trying to crawl inside my skin. Just the click of the door and the heavy, suffocating silence of his absence.

I stood in the middle of the room, staring at the closed door, and felt something cold settle in my stomach.

I couldn't understand this man. Hot one moment, cold the next. Possessing me against walls, feeding me noodles, whispering that he was drowning — then walking away like I was a stranger he had accidentally shared space with. Like the morning had never happened. Like the marks on my neck were someone else's work.

By the time it was eight, I was getting anxious.

The flat felt too big, too empty, the walls stretching outward like they were breathing. I paced the living room, my bare feet silent against the floorboards, checked my phone obsessively — no texts, no calls, nothing — and wondered what could have happened. Had he met someone at the party? Was he punishing me for Sahil? Was this the beginning of him finally letting me go, now that he knew I wouldn't run?

Then the phone rang.

An unknown number. I answered with my heart in my throat.

"Hello?"

"Hey." A male voice, loud music pounding in the background. "I'm Advik's friend. Can you come pick him up? He's fully wasted. Like, can't-stand-up wasted."

I gripped the phone tighter. "Okay. I'm coming. Send me the address."

The address led me to a crowded apartment in a part of the city I didn't know, music thumping through the walls, bodies spilling from the doorway into the hallway. I pushed through the crowd, my heart hammering, my eyes scanning faces I didn't recognize.

I found him in a corner.

Advik was slumped against the wall, fully wasted, his legs sprawled out in front of him, his head tipped back at an angle that looked painful. He couldn't get up on his own — I could see that immediately in the way his arms hung limp at his sides, in the slackness of his jaw. His hair was a mess, his shirt unbuttoned to the sternum, a half-empty bottle of whiskey resting against his thigh like a fallen soldier.

For a moment, I just stared at him.

This morning, he had been a god — sharp, controlled, terrifying in his certainty. Now he was a ruin. A beautiful, broken ruin, and I was the only person in the room who knew how to put him back together.

Or if I even wanted to.

I touched his arm gently.

Just a brush of my fingers against his sleeve, a tentative claim in a room full of strangers. But he jerked away like I'd burned him, his eyes glazed and unfocused, swimming with alcohol and something that looked almost like fear.

"Stay away." His voice was slurred, thick and clumsy. "You can't touch me. I have a girlfriend."

The words landed like a stone in still water.

What girlfriend? What was he talking about? The girl from the diner? Someone else? Someone from this party, this crowd, this life he lived when he wasn't watching me sleep or cooking my favorite noodles?

A cold knot formed in my stomach, tight and nauseating. Had everything today been a lie? The wall, the mirror, the bite marks, the drowning — had he been playing me while someone else waited for him somewhere?

"Who is your girlfriend?" I asked, my voice barely above a whisper, bracing for an answer I didn't want to hear. Bracing for a name that would make me feel like the fool I probably was.

He looked at me.

Really looked at me, his eyes swimming with whiskey and something else — something vulnerable and raw, stripped of all the armor he wore when sober.

"Hazel." He said it like a prayer. Like a confession. Like the only word he knew in a language he'd forgotten. "Only she can touch me."

I laughed.

It burst out of me — hard, broken, so forceful my eyes burned and my chest ached and my throat closed around a sob I refused to let escape. This man. This impossible, infuriating, beautiful disaster of a man. He had pushed me away, dragged me back, called me worthless, called me his, and now he was sitting in a puddle of his own ruin telling strangers that only I was allowed to touch him.

I grabbed his arm firmly and pulled.

"Come on, Advik." My voice cracked, but my grip held. "I am Hazel. I'm here to pick you up."

He squinted at me, his head lolling to the side, his gaze struggling to focus through the haze. He studied my face for a long moment — my eyes, my nose, my lips — his expression shifting from suspicion to wonder to something that looked painfully like relief.

Then, when he was sure, absolutely sure that I was real, he smiled.

A slow, drunken, devastating smile that crinkled the corners of his eyes and softened his jaw and made him look like the boy I used to know — the one who fed me noodles in the garden and never let me fall.

He got up and put all his weight on my shoulders, his body heavy and warm and impossibly large, his breath tickling my ear as he leaned into me.

"My Hazel." His arms wrapped around my neck, clinging like a child. "You came."

And I held him, staggering under his weight, wondering how someone so strong — so terrifying in his control, so brutal in his certainty — could feel so fragile in my arms.

I somehow managed to get him into the car.

His heavy body slumped against the passenger seat, his head lolling with every turn, his eyes drifting shut only to snap open again, searching for me in the dark. The drive home was slow, my hands gripping the steering wheel too tight, my heart still racing from his confession.

Only Hazel can touch me.

The words looped in my head like a song I couldn't stop. I kept glancing at him — at the way his chest rose and fell, at the slackness of his jaw, at the hand that had pinned me against a wall now lying limp in his lap. He was helpless. He was mine. And I didn't know which fact terrified me more.

When we reached the flat, I pushed him onto the bed. He collapsed with a groan, his limbs sprawling across the sheets, his breath coming slow and deep and heavy with alcohol. He reeked of it — whiskey and something sweeter, vanilla or bourbon or maybe just the sugar he'd used to chase the burn, clinging to his skin, his clothes, his hair.

I sighed, reaching for his jacket.