NICK

The drive from the hospital to my apartment was a mechanical sequence of turns and paces.

My body knew the route by heart, navigating the uneven pavement and the press of Monday commuters while my mind remained elsewhere, filing away the day’s debris.

The city at this hour was a study in collective fatigue. I watched the faces passing me, slack-jawed, dull-eyed, carrying the specific, heavy exhaustion of the start of the week.

I felt none of it. Instead, I felt a low, persistent itch. It was a sensation I couldn’t cleanly categorize, which in itself was an irritation.

I stopped at the convenience store a block from my building. I didn’t need groceries, but I needed the ritual. I stood at the counter and waited for the clerk to look up.

"Two packs," I said, pointing to the shelf behind him.

He didn’t comment. Nobody ever commented to my face about the cigarettes.

I knew exactly what they cost me in professional standing. I knew the hypocrisy of a thoracic specialist burning his own lungs while lecturing patients on theirs.

I simply didn’t care.

My hands remained steady, steadier than most of the surgeons I worked with, and that was the only metric that mattered.

Smoking was the pressure valve. And today, the pressure had been building higher than I was willing to admit.

As I walked the final stretch home, I did a clean accounting of the day.

The project was still mine. I was still the lead. But I had been moved. Someone else was now assigned to the direct meetings with Cassian Wolfe. It was Cassian’s doing, obviously. He had reached out over my head and rearranged the board.

Does it matter? I asked myself.

No. The work would proceed. I didn’t need the meetings. I didn’t need the man.

Does it itch?

Yes. It was the particular irritation of being a piece moved by someone else’s hand. I have spent my entire life ensuring I am the one doing the moving.

I felt the dull throb in my jaw. The bruise was a silent, persistent announcement under my skin.

Every time I spoke or chewed, it reminded me of the pavement. I had stopped touching it hours ago, but I was aware of it in every fiber of my face.

My apartment was a sanctuary of cold, expensive precision. It was large for one person, intentionally so.

I required a specific amount of square footage to exist without feeling the walls closing in.

It was clean, ordered, and impersonal. I had never let it become a "home" in the traditional sense, because home implies permanence, and permanence implies an attachment I had no interest in cultivating.

I decided to cook. The kitchen was usually reserved for coffee and the occasional glass of water, but tonight I wanted the control of the process. I didn’t want a delivery driver choosing my route or a chef choosing my seasoning. I wanted to make something efficient.

I prepared a meal with the practiced movements of a man who knows the chemistry of heat and salt but finds no joy in it. I ate in the living room with the television on. The flickering blue light provided a background noise that filled the silence without demanding my engagement.

I sat there with a glass of scotch and my first cigarette of the night, a man comfortable in his own company. Or at least, a man who had convinced himself that comfortable was the same thing as fine.

But the day wouldn’t leave. The pieces of it kept returning, uninvited, like a recurring fever.

I saw Noah outside the XUM building. I saw the way his practiced composure had frayed at the edges the moment I arrived.

He had been transparent, as he always was to me. But he had stood his ground. There was something different in the set of his shoulders, a new kind of defiance that I filed away for later study.

And then, there was Cassian. The way the very air of the street had rearranged itself around him the moment he spoke. The effortless authority.

And the itch sharpened. Not because of Cassian, but because of the face that wouldn’t blur. The pink hair. The rings. The complete, baffling absence of hesitation before the strike.

I tried to file Cyan away as "irrelevant," but the image persisted.

It was annoying. I move past things; I don’t dwell on them. Yet this specific memory kept returning to the front of the filing system, demanding a space it hadn’t earned.

The doorbell rang, a sharp intrusion into the quiet. I didn’t move. I pulled up the camera feed on my phone and looked at the screen.

Lila.

She was standing in the hallway, looking at her reflection in the polished metal of the doorframe. She held a nylon bag that likely contained beer. She always brought beer when she came unannounced, as if the presence of alcohol made her intrusion an invitation.

I considered ignoring it. I could sit here in the dark and let her ring until she got bored. But the apartment was too quiet, and the itch in my jaw was too loud. She would be a distraction, noise that required no professional performance.

I got up and opened the door.

Lila was already talking before the latch had fully cleared. "Don’t give me that face, Nick. I know you were thinking about pretending you weren’t home."

She brushed past me, already moving into my space with the ease of someone who had been here many times before. She set the bag on the kitchen counter, already knowing which cupboard held the glasses.

"I brought beer. And the barbecue wings from that place on Seventh. You’re welcome," she said, tossing her jacket onto a chair.

"Why are you here, Lila?" I asked. My voice wasn’t unkind, just direct.

"To hang out," she said, popping a cap off a bottle. "It’s been a little while. You never call. You never text. I had to come find you before you turned into a literal statue."

She made herself comfortable on the sofa, reaching for the pack of cigarettes I’d left on the coffee table. She lit one, her movements fluid and familiar. She began telling me about her day, a narrative I hadn’t requested and didn’t particularly care for.

Lila worked at one of the largest and popular multi-platform media outlet in the city, the gossip and celebrity division. She wrote the kind of content that existed so people didn’t have to think.

She talked about her boss, a scandal involving a wife, and a "situation" that had turned into a "different kind of situation."

I sat beside her, taking a cigarette for myself. I deployed my usual silence, letting her words wash over me like white noise while the television flickered in the background.

The table lamp beside the sofa was angled just right. When I leaned back to ash my cigarette, the light caught the side of my face, illuminating the dark, mottled skin of my jawline.

Lila stopped mid-sentence. I heard her sharp, dramatic intake of breath.

"What happened to your face?" she asked, her eyes widening. 𝒻𝘳ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝒷𝘯ℴ𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝑐ℴ𝑚

"Nothing," I said. "A small disagreement."

Lila leaned forward, her gaze fixed on the bruise with a mix of shock and something that looked uncomfortably like admiration.

"You? A bruise? On your actual face?"

She let out a short, breathy laugh. "I genuinely thought I’d never see the day. I didn’t think anyone was brave enough, or fast enough, to catch you off guard." She tilted her head, her expression shifting. "It suits you, actually. Makes you look more dangerous than you like to hide. Less like a pristine machine."

I waited for her to finish. I didn’t help her.

"Who did it?" she asked.

The face returned. Sharp. Specific. The pink hair and the flash of silver rings. The memory of the punch was so vivid I could almost feel the impact again. Cyan was back at the front of my mind, uninvited and infuriating.

I looked at the television, the silence stretching between us. I had decided not to answer, a decision Lila usually read as a challenge to keep digging.

"Oh, come on," she teased, nudging my shoulder. "Was it a jealous husband? A disgruntled patient? Did the great Dr. Bennett finally get caught in a—"

"Drop it," I snapped.

The sharpness of my voice shocked her. Even I was surprised by the lack of control. Lila flinched, her eyes rounding.

"Fine," she said, her voice small and wounded. "Jesus. I just came over because I missed you. I thought you might want some company, but if you’re going to be a prick..."

I knew the move. It was emotional blackmail, a low-level manipulation she used whenever she wanted to regain the upper hand. I played along anyway because I didn’t want her to leave yet. I didn’t want to be alone with the itch.

"I’m sorry," I said, forcing a weary sigh. "It’s been a long day. I’m not in the best mood."

Lila’s expression softened instantly. She smiled, that slow, seductive curve of her lips that she saved for moments when she felt she was winning. She inched closer to me on the sofa until I could feel the heat of her body.

"That’s what I’m here for then," she whispered.

She pressed herself against me, the soft weight of her breasts brushing my arm. Her hand moved to my lap, her fingers finding the hem of my trousers and sliding inward. She began to stroke me, a slow, deliberate rhythm designed to pull me out of my head and into my body.

I leaned back and closed my eyes. I had seen this coming the moment I opened the door. It was a transaction, one I was perfectly willing to make.

I let her hands work, letting the sensation of her touch drown out the dull throb in my jaw and the nagging, pink-haired ghost of the afternoon.

As she moved closer, whispering something I didn’t bother to hear, I focused on the feeling of her skin. It was easy. It was manageable. It was a move I understood.

But even as her hands got faster and my breath caught, the itch didn’t go away. It just moved deeper, settled into the bone, waiting for the room to be quiet again.