just gonna do it for myself

Cook had built a whole love story around a version of her that had never existed.

People wrote songs about wanting like it was all aching and sweetness, all late-night phone calls, stupid smiles and wanting to be better because someone lovely had looked at you twice. That was bullshit. Wanting her felt less like romance and more like a bad habit he couldn’t quit, something hot and mean lodged under his ribs, fed by every laugh she gave someone else and every smile she wasted like it didn’t cost him anything to watch.

Kingpin’s wore its neon like cheap jewelry: loud, shabby, and fooling absolutely no one. The sign did most of the lying from the car park—red glow, gold letters, the i swapped for a bowling pin wearing a crooked little crown, like the building fancied itself glamorous instead of scuzzy and embalmed in fryer grease. One of the bulbs over the front door flickered when it rained, and the apostrophe in Kingpin’s buzzed loud enough to hear from the smoking area if the wind blew right. Gareth kept saying he’d get it fixed. Gareth also kept saying Cook was on his last warning, so nobody took his promises seriously.

Inside, Kingpin’s was worse where the neon couldn’t blur it pretty. Louder too. Bowling balls cracked down lanes with a violence people cheered for. Arcade machines spat tinny little victory songs at kids with sticky fingers. Prize tickets curled out in cheap pink strips like paper tongues, and the claw machines glowed blue over stuffed animals nobody won unless their parents were willing to be financially ruined by a plush frog with one wonky eye. The carpet was purple and orange but ugly enough to count as workplace abuse, patterned in swirls that hid stains until the lights hit them wrong. The air smelled of chips, lager, warm plastic, shoe spray, and the sugary cleaning stuff Gareth bought in bulk because he thought tropical blast meant sanitary.

Cook loved it there in the way a person could love a place that deserved to be condemned. It was grimy, bright and tacky. It gave him somewhere to be loud, somewhere to lean, grin, flirt, steal chips off people’s plates, vanish for smoke breaks, and stroll back in twenty minutes later like he hadn’t just been dodging work. Kingpin’s suited him because nobody expected polish from a bloke working shoe rental at a bowling alley, and Cook had always been better when expectations were already in the gutter. He was meant to be spraying returned shoes when he caught himself watching her again. Not watching, he’d say, if anyone asked. Looking. Existing with eyes. Perfectly normal thing, having eyes. Couldn’t help where they went. Except he could. He knew he could because every few minutes he dragged them away, told himself not to be a fucking creep, and found her again anyway.

She was behind the prize counter, restocking sweets into the glass case, Kingpin’s polo tucked badly into her jeans, name badge askew because the pin had been broken for two weeks. Birthday glitter clung to the side of her face from some kid’s party crown, catching blue from the nearest claw machine whenever she turned. Her hair kept slipping forward when she bent, and she kept pushing it back with the same impatient motion—not thinking about it, not knowing Cook had noticed enough times that the noticing had started to irritate him.

He knew what drink she bought on break. Knew she hated the left register because the drawer jammed unless you hip-checked it. Knew she skipped the third song on his driving playlist every single time and pretended it was because it was shit, not because it reminded her of a bad night out. Knew she took the long way around the bar when drunk men crowded it. Knew she smiled at old women even when they complained about prices. Knew she checked her phone more when Ryan was on shift. That last one pissed him off. He told himself noticing wasn’t weird if you noticed because you cared. That was what romance was supposed to be, wasn’t it? Paying attention. Remembering things. Knowing the little details everyone else missed and pretending it was sweet instead of evidence you’d been looking too long.

Girls liked that in films, didn’t they? Some quiet, devoted prick knowing their coffee order and the book they mentioned once and the song they hummed under their breath. Some sad-eyed bastard remembering every tiny detail and getting rewarded for it in the end because apparently obsession was romantic as long as the bloke kept his mouth shut and looked tortured doing it. But when Cook knew things, suddenly it was creepy. Suddenly it was too much. Suddenly it was, Cook, why do you know my work schedule?

As if she didn’t keep giving him reasons. As if she didn’t smile at him over the prize counter, steal chips off his tray, laugh at his filthy jokes like she knew exactly where his mind would go and let it go there anyway. As if she didn’t lean past him behind the counter and press herself close enough for him to feel the heat of her through that stupid Kingpin’s polo, then act like he was the problem for noticing. As if she didn’t laugh.

That was what got him, really. The laughing. She laughed at him like it cost her nothing, like it didn’t crawl under his skin and sat there, hot and stupid, even humiliating. Like she could throw little crumbs of warmth around, let a bloke start starving for them, then blink all innocent when he came looking for the whole fucking meal.

“Are you planning to stare until the shoes clean themselves?” she asked without looking up.

Cook leaned his hip against the counter and gave the shoe spray a lazy shake. “I’m supervising.”

“You’re loitering.”

“Same thing with authority.”

“You don’t have authority.”

“I’ve got presence.”

“You’ve got a pile of wet shoes and Gareth doing his angry walk.”

Cook glanced over. Gareth was, in fact, coming out of the office with his head forward and his shoulders tense, which meant someone was about to get blamed for something that probably was Cook’s fault. Cook straightened without actually moving away from her counter. “You worried about me getting sacked?”

“I’m worried I’ll have to do your job when you do.”

“That’s love.”

“That’s self-preservation.”

“You’re flirting again.”

“I’m warning you before Gareth does.”

“Love it when you get bossy.”

She shut the sweet drawer with her hip and looked at him then, eyes narrowed, mouth trying not to smile. “You’re unbearable.”

“But you bear me.”

“Barely.”

“Still counts.”

She shook her head and turned back to the prize case, but the corner of her mouth stayed lifted. There. See. What was he supposed to do with that?

Ryan came through the staff door carrying a crate of bottled drinks, already looking tired of Cook before Cook had even said anything. “Gareth’s asking why the shoes aren’t done. I told him I told you ten minutes ago.”

Cook didn’t look away from the prize counter. “Snitch.”

Ryan followed his line of sight and gave a short, humorless laugh. “You’re not subtle.”

“Subtlety’s for virgins and tax fraud.”

Ryan set the crate down with a clatter. “You’re doing that tragic thing again.”

She glanced between them. “What tragic thing?”

“Nothing,” Cook said.

Ryan smirked. “The thing where he starts eye-fucking you and calls it supervising.”

Cook threw the shoe spray at him. Ryan dodged, laughing, and she made a disgusted little sound even though she was smiling.

“Both of you are disgusting.”

“Say that softer,” Cook said. “I’m close.”

“I’m begging you to develop shame.”

Ryan’s eyes flicked toward her, and something passed between them too quick for Cook to pin down. Not a look, maybe. Not even a proper smile. Just a little beat of familiarity, easy and private, the sort of thing that said there were conversations Cook hadn’t heard and jokes he hadn’t been there for. It got under his skin immediately, mean and sharp, like a splinter he’d rather dig deeper than admit was there. Ryan was too comfortable with her. Had been for a while. He leaned against counters beside her like he had a right to take up space there. Knew when she was in a bad mood before Cook did. Could say her name across the arcade and get her attention without putting on a whole fucking show for it. He didn’t even have the decency to be obvious about wanting her. He just existed around her like access was normal, like being allowed near her was something he’d never had to earn. Cook hated him for it.

Not that he was jealous. Jealousy was for lads who didn’t have options, and Cook had options. Tasha made that clear enough every time she brought him a drink he hadn’t asked for, every time she laughed too hard, every time she touched his arm and let her fingers linger like she wanted him to notice. Tasha had smoky eyeliner, chipped black nail polish, and a habit of biting her lip whenever Cook turned the charm on. Cook liked that. Liked knowing it. Liked keeping her attention close enough to warm his ego whenever the thing he actually wanted left him feeling like some sad prick with his face pressed to the glass. Tasha meant he wasn’t pathetic. Girls did want him.

Just not the one he had stupidly, violently, inconveniently decided mattered.

The night dragged on in shouts and spills. Gareth yelled at lane six for bringing outside vodka. JJ nearly got taken out by the basketball machine when it spat a ball early. A kid dropped an entire tray of nachos on the carpet and burst into tears as hot cheese soaked straight into the purple swirls. Cook spent twenty minutes flirting with a group of college girls at concessions because they were drunk enough to think he was funnier than he was, then looked over to see if she’d noticed. She had. She looked amused. Not jealous. Not bothered. Amused, like he was exactly the sort of idiot she expected him to be. That annoyed him enough to make him flirt harder.

By closing, Kingpin’s looked like the night had chewed it up and spat it out. The lanes were empty under the low lights, polished slick and useless, with only the odd mechanical clunk from the pinsetters breaking the quiet. The arcade still blinked to itself in the corner, cycling through demo screens for nobody. The prize counter shone with fingerprints and smears, and the air had soured into old beer, fryer grease, and the chemical sweetness of mop water. Cook was half-assing the returned shoes while she counted the till, Ryan wiped tables near the bar, and Tasha leaned beside Cook with her chin in her hand, watching him with a smile she clearly thought was subtle.

“You coming out after?” Ryan called.

She paused with her fingers still in the drawer and looked over. “Where?”

“Food. Drinks. Whatever’s still open.”

“After tonight? I should go home and stare at a wall.”

“Stare at chips instead,” Ryan said. “Less bleak.”

Cook tossed a pair of shoes into the wrong cubby. “I’m driving.”

“You’re always driving,” she said.

“Because I’m generous.”

“Because you hate taxis.”

“Two things can be true.”

Tasha nudged his arm. “You giving everyone lifts, or just special people?”

Cook let the pause sit there because he could, because Tasha would wait for him to fill it and they both knew it. “Depends who asks nicely.”

Tasha held his gaze for half a second too long, smile tucked into the corner of her mouth, and Cook looked away just in time to catch her across the lobby looking back down at the register. Cook didn’t know if that meant anything. He wanted it to mean something.

They ended up at a late-night burger place three streets over, the sort of place that stayed open less because people wanted to eat there and more because drunk people stopped being picky after midnight. The windows were fogged from the fryers, the plastic tables had a permanent tack to them, and the woman behind the counter took their order with the tired patience of someone who had already explained twice that extra sauce cost 20p. There were six of them crammed around two pushed-together tables: Cook, Ryan, Tasha, JJ, her, and Malik from the kitchen, who had mostly come along so he could call Gareth a tight bastard to people who already knew he was right.

Cook ended up opposite her because Ryan slid into the seat beside her before he could. That was Ryan’s first offence of the evening. The second was how easily they settled next to each other, like it took no thought at all. Ryan stole one of her chips without asking, and she smacked his hand away without even looking up from her drink. Not surprised. Not annoyed enough. Just used to it, like his fingers on her plate were another bit of background noise she’d stopped questioning. He reached for the sauce before she asked and pushed it toward her, already knowing, already smug about knowing, and something hot and mean pulled tight in Cook’s chest.

Then she complained about the music, and Ryan said, “You always complain about the music,” before Cook could even open his mouth. Always. Cook hated the word immediately. Hated how casual it sounded coming from Ryan. Hated the little doorway it opened into a history Cook hadn’t been invited into, all those shifts and smoke breaks and late-night conversations happening without him there to watch, without him there to stop anything from becoming too familiar.

Tasha was beside him, knee brushing his under the table. “You’re quiet.”

Cook took a chip from her tray. “I’m mysterious.”

“You’re sulking.”

“I don’t sulk.”

“You absolutely sulk.”

“I brood. Sexier.”

She laughed, touching his sleeve. “Sure.”

He leaned closer because Tasha made it easy and because he could feel her watching from across the table, maybe. “You like it.”

Tasha’s mouth opened, then shut and Cook grinned. Across from him, she looked away first. His satisfaction lasted exactly three seconds before Ryan leaned in to say something near her ear and she laughed. Cook hated himself for how fast the feeling curdled.

Outside after, the air had gone damp and cool, the kind that made takeaway grease cling harder to everyone’s clothes. JJ and Malik were still arguing about whether the pirate shooter in the arcade was haunted, Malik insisting the left cannon fired by itself and JJ getting increasingly wound up by the lack of evidence. Tasha had her jacket zipped up to her chin and was still hovering near Cook, close enough that her sleeve brushed his when she shifted, but his attention had already gone past her. Across the car park, she stood near Ryan’s car with her arms folded against the cold, smiling down at the cracked pavement while Ryan said something Cook couldn’t hear. Cook lit a cigarette he’d stolen from Ryan’s pack.

Ryan wandered up beside him a moment later. “That’s mine.”

“Community property.”

“You’re a parasite.”

“A handsome parasite.”

Ryan glanced toward her, then back at Cook. “You’re embarrassing yourself.”

Cook blew smoke out the side of his mouth. “By smoking?”

“By doing whatever this is.”

“It’s called standing.”

“It’s called staring like a pathetic, lovesick prick.”

Cook’s jaw tightened. “Fuck off.”

Ryan’s tone shifted, softer but smug underneath. “Mate, just ask.”

“Ask what?”

“If she likes you.”

Cook laughed. “What are you, twelve?”

“I’m serious. Stop hovering around like a kicked dog.”

“I’m not hovering.”

“You’ve been mentally pissing on her leg all night.”

Cook looked at him. “You got a death wish?”

Ryan grinned. “Girls like confidence, yeah? Ask straight. Worst she can say is no.”

Worst she can say is no. People said that like no was harmless. Like no didn’t make a bloke feel skinned in public, stupid for wanting, stupid for thinking he’d seen anything there in the first place. Like she could just say it and go on with her night, still laughing, still eating chips, still looking at Ryan when he spoke, while Cook had to stand there with the word stuck in him and pretend it hadn’t made him want to crawl out of his own fucking body. Easy for Ryan to say. Ryan, who sat beside her like it was nothing. Ryan, who knew what sauce she wanted and stole food off her plate and got away with it. Ryan, who could tell Cook to be confident because he’d never had to make confidence look like anything. He just had it. Worse than that, people gave him reasons to. Cook looked toward her again before he could stop himself. She was laughing at something Malik had said now, the sound carrying across the car park like she had no idea she was being watched, no idea she was standing there ruining him by looking happy without him.

Ryan followed his gaze and gave a small, knowing hum. “Unless you already know she’ll say no.”

Cook’s head snapped back toward him.

Ryan lifted both hands, grin barely held in. “I’m just saying.”

“You don’t know shit.”

“Then ask,” Ryan said, simple and cruel because he made it sound like there was nothing at stake. “Prove me wrong.”

Cook hated him for that. Hated him more because he was going to.

A skinny red-and-cream box sat on the backseat of Cook’s car, cheap-looking in the way old magic tricks and corner-shop toys were cheap. Curved lettering, smiling cartoon faces, little sprays of stars. AMAZE YOUR FRIENDS! printed along one side like it was supposed to be fun, like there wasn’t something rotten in how badly he wanted it to work. Near the end, tucked into a burst of red, were the words You only get ONE WISH.

ONE WISH WILLOW, it said across the front. He’d bought it three days earlier on his lunch break, after she’d mentioned old folklore while untangling tickets from a machine, talking half to him and half to the mess in her hands about wishing trees, charm bundles, little bits of luck people carried around when they wanted the universe to listen. Cook had called it witchy bollocks to her face. An hour later, he’d found himself in a oddity shop near Kingpin’s, a narrow little place wedged between a vape shop and a nail salon, all dusty shelves and incense smoke and tiny silver bells over the door that made him feel like a twat the second he walked in. The woman behind the counter had watched him pick it up, watched him turn the little box over in his hand like it might bite him.

“For someone you love?” she’d asked.

Cook had laughed too quickly. “Steady on.”

Then he’d paid cash, shoved it under his jacket, and told himself the whole way back that it was funny. A weird gift. A piss-take. Something he could toss at her and make a joke out of before she noticed he’d remembered something soft, something small, something she probably didn’t even remember saying. He was lying, obviously. He’d bought it because she’d wanted it for half a second, and Cook had carried that half second around, polishing it into evidence that he knew her, that he listened, that there were bits of her Ryan didn’t get to have. Now it sat behind him while he drove her home through wet streets, the box catching streetlights in the rearview whenever they passed under a lamp. She had his phone in her lap and was skipping through his playlist with increasing disgust.

“This is terrible,” she said.

“That’s a classic.”

“This sounds like how the carpet at work smells.”

“You’ve got no culture.”

“I work at Kingpin’s. Obviously.”

He laughed because she expected him to, because laughing was easier than admitting his fingers had gone tight around the wheel. The car smelled of smoke, damp upholstery, mint gum, and the cheap air freshener Ryan had hung from the mirror as a joke, still swinging there like another little reminder of him. Rain tapped against the windscreen and dragged the traffic lights into red and green streaks. She sat curled toward the heater, worn out from the shift and everything after, comfortable enough to insult his music, steal his spare hoodie from the backseat without asking, and pull it over her lap without thinking twice. The box was underneath it. Cook caught the flash of red-and-cream packaging when the hoodie shifted, bright against the dark mess of the backseat, and his throat tightened before he could make himself laugh that off too.

He could give it to her now. Reach back, grab the box, toss it into her lap with a grin. Say, saw this and thought of your weird tree thing. Make it sound crude and stupid yet casual enough to hide behind. The kind of gift a bloke bought as a joke, not because he’d carried one passing comment around until it started feeling like something private. She’d probably laugh. Maybe call him an idiot. Maybe turn the little box over in her hands and look at him like she couldn’t believe he’d remembered. The thought hit too soft, too fast, and he hated himself for wanting it. Then Ryan’s voice came crawling back in, smug and easy. Ask straight.

Cook kept his eyes forward. The engine idled low, the heater clicked softly, and the longer he sat there, the less it felt like something he could still choose not to say. Beside him, she shifted under his hoodie, tired and comfortable and completely unaware that he was ruining the night before he’d even spoken. He should have just given her the stupid box. Instead, he opened his mouth.

“You like me, don’t you?”

He knew he’d fucked it before she even turned her head. He heard it. Felt it. Too blunt. Too hungry. Too much like something that had been sitting behind his teeth for ages, waiting for the ugliest possible moment to come out.

She went still. “What?”

He could still save it. He could laugh. Could make it filthy, stupid, harmless. Could say as a driver, as a coworker, as a national treasure, obviously. Could swerve so hard she’d never know there had been anything real underneath it. But fear got there first. Fear, then pride.

“You heard.”

She frowned a little, not irritated yet. Just confused, which was somehow worse. “Are you joking?”

“No.”

“Like me how?”

Cook scoffed because if he didn’t, the silence was going to swallow him whole. “Like me how. Fucking hell, you need a diagram?”

Her face changed. Not much. Just enough. The warmth went careful around the edges, and the whole car seemed to shrink with it, everything was suddenly too close. Everything was suddenly watching. Cook felt the moment tipping away from him and kept talking anyway, because humiliation had momentum and his mouth had always been faster than his sense.

“You and me,” he said. “There’s something there, yeah?”

She looked at him properly then, and he hated that too. Hated the way she didn’t laugh. Hated the way she didn’t make it easy by being cruel. Hated the softness coming over her expression, like she was already trying to find the kindest way to cut him open.

“Cook,” she said.

“Don’t do that.”

“I like you.”

His pulse kicked once, stupidly.

“As a friend,” she added.

There it was. Not sharp. Not nasty. Worse because it was gentle. Because she meant well. Because she had no idea that kindness could gut a person cleaner than mockery ever could. Cook stared ahead, even though they were parked outside her building now and had been for half a minute. He hadn’t even noticed pulling up. His hands stayed on the wheel, locked there, because looking at her felt impossible and looking away felt like losing.

She shifted beside him. “You know that, right?”

He nodded once. The silence got bigger. Then pride, ugly and panicked, threw itself over the wound.

“Jesus,” he said, forcing a laugh that sounded wrong even to him. “I didn’t mean like that.”

She blinked. “What?”

“Don’t flatter yourself.” He forced his mouth into a grin because that was the only thing it knew how to do when everything else was fucked. “I meant, do you like me as a person? Like, am I tolerable? Didn’t ask you to start naming our future fuckin’ kids or summat.”

Her embarrassment arrived fast. He saw it hit and felt a nasty little spark of relief, because now she looked stupid too. Now she had something to be ashamed of. Now he wasn’t the only one sitting there with his insides showing.

“Oh.”

“Yeah. Oh.”

“I thought—”

“What? That I was about to profess my undying love in a Vauxhall?” He huffed another laugh, sharper this time. “Give me some credit.”

“I’m sorry.”

“For having an ego? You should be.”

She looked down. For one second, it helped. Then it didn’t. The relief curdled almost as soon as it came, leaving him with the same raw shame underneath and something meaner crawling up around it. Because she was sorry. Because she was embarrassed. Because she would get out of his car in a minute and go upstairs and feel bad for a bit, maybe, then sleep it off, wake up tomorrow, and still not want him.

“I didn’t mean to make it weird,” she said.

“You didn’t.”

“Okay.” Her fingers closed around the door handle. “Good.”

Good.

She got out and hurried through the rain to her door, his hoodie over her head, her shoulders tucked against the cold. She looked back once and gave an awkward little wave. Cook lifted two fingers from the wheel like none of this mattered. The door shut behind her. Cook sat there until the engine noise started to feel obscene. Then he killed it. The silence rushed in, rain ticking over the roof and glass. He leaned back in the seat and stared at her building, jaw tight, chest burning with something he refused to call hurt because hurt sounded too innocent.

Good. She’d sounded relieved. Not disappointed. Not tempted. Relieved. He thought of Ryan saying worst she can say is no. Thought of the way Ryan stood too close to her. Thought of Tasha’s knee against his under the fast food table. Thought of all the little smiles she’d given him that apparently meant nothing because girls got to decide afterward what counted and what didn’t. They could laugh. They could lean. They could take your hoodie and sit in your passenger seat and make you feel like maybe, maybe, maybe, then look at you like you’d grown a second head for believing the thing they’d been feeding.

He saw the gift in the rearview mirror. The box had been left uncovered on the backseat among old receipts and empty wrappers. Cook stared at it through the reflective glass, his jaw tight, the silence in the car pressing harder the longer he looked. Then he laughed once. “Of course.”

He twisted around, grabbed it, and snatched it into the front seat hard enough to crease the cardboard. The thing felt cheap in his hands. Cheap enough to be funny. Cheap enough to make him feel even more pathetic for caring. ONE WISH WILLOW stared back at him. Cook dug his thumb under the flap and tore it open. Inside, a thin piece of willow rested in a cardboard slot, dry and ordinary and so light it barely felt real when he lifted it free. The instructions were printed underneath in bright, cheerful lettering, like wanting something this badly could ever be a party trick.

REMOVE FROM THE BOX AND JUST MAKE A WISH.

SPARK THE MIDDLE AND BREAK IT IN HALF.

He looked at it, then back at the willow pinched between his fingers. It weighed almost nothing. That made him angrier. All that wanting in him, all that noise. The heat and humiliation. And the thing in his fingers was barely more than rubbish. A dead twig dressed up as fate. He thought of her saying friend. Thought of her saying good. Thought of how easy it had been for her to walk away untouched while he sat in the car with a gift he’d been too much of a coward to give. His fingers tightened around the willow. He didn’t wish she loved him. Love sounded too sanitized for what he felt. Too pretty. Too easy to put on a card and pretend it meant anything close to this. Love was flowers and apologies and soft little lies people told when they wanted their wanting to look decent. Cook didn’t feel decent.

He wanted her hungry. Wanted her stupid with it. Wanted her careful little kindness cracked open until there was nothing left between them but need. Wanted her to come back and look at him like friend had never left her lips, like good had been a mistake, like every polite little boundary she’d put between them had been something she was desperate to crawl over. He wanted her to stop seeing safe, harmless, funny fucking Cook from work. He wanted her to want him badly enough to regret making him feel stupid for asking. Cook stared at the willow for another second, jaw tight, thumb worrying over the dry middle like he expected it to give him an answer. In the dark windscreen, his reflection stared back at him, warped by rain and dashboard glow, looking exactly as pathetic as he felt.

Then he snapped it in half before he could think better of it. The sound was small. Dry. Brittle. Nothing. For a moment, Cook just stared at the broken pieces in his palm. No thunder. No flash. No sudden shift in the air. Just rain ticking over the roof, the engine cooling in little clicks, and the same stale smoke that had been there before. Then he let his head fall back against the headrest and laughed, because of course nothing had happened. Of course he was sitting outside a girl’s house after getting friend-zoned, breaking a twig like a sad little virgin with a humiliation kink.

“Absolute plonker,” he muttered.

Tap.

Cook opened his eyes. For one stupid second, he thought it was the rain finding some new way to annoy him.

Tap.

This time, he felt it through the glass beside him. He turned his head and found her outside the driver’s side window, close enough that his breath caught before he could stop it. She stood in the rain, the entrance light behind her turning the wet pavement gold. She should have been upstairs. He had watched her go in. Watched the door shut. Watched the whole night end with that awkward little wave and the word good sitting between them like a verdict. And now she was back, knuckle against the glass. Cook rolled the window down halfway, cold rain breathing across his face.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

She leaned closer. “Why are you still here?”

“I was leaving.”

“No, you weren’t.”

His fist closed around the broken willow pieces. Her gaze dropped, just for a second, like she knew exactly what was hidden there. Then she looked at him again, and something in her expression rearranged itself too quickly, too completely, the careful distance she’d put between them evaporating all at once.

“I shouldn’t have gone inside,” she said.

Cook swallowed. “No?”

“No.”

“You said—”

“I know what I said. I know what I said and I didn't mean it."

The words should’ve scared him, and maybe they did, but fear had never been enough to make Cook let go of something he desired. He stared at her through the half-open window, waiting for the joke, the correction, the cruel little laugh that would make him feel stupid for believing her. She only kept looking at him, and the longer she stayed quiet, the easier it became to hear what he wanted instead. “You didn’t mean it,” he repeated.

She shook her head, her attention stuck on him in a way that made his skin prickle. “Come inside.”

Cook could have started the engine. He could have told her to go upstairs and sleep off whatever this was, could have thrown the broken pieces into the gutter and admitted that something had changed too fast to be real. He could have done one decent thing before the night got any worse. Instead, he got out. The night slapped cold against his face as he stepped from the car. She backed away just enough to let him stand, his hoodie pulled tight around her like she’d already forgotten it wasn’t hers. The pieces stayed clenched in his fist until he shoved them into his jacket pocket, because leaving them behind felt too much like admitting there was something to hide. Neither of them spoke as she led him inside. The stairwell light buzzed overhead, dragging their shadows up the wall as she climbed ahead of him, glancing back every few steps like her body needed proof he was still following. Cook stayed close enough to turn around if he wanted to. He didn’t.

By the time she unlocked her flat, the silence between them had started to feel like pressure. She pushed the door open and waited on the threshold. Cook crossed it, and the door clicked shut behind him. The lock slid home—her hand, not his, trembling around the deadbolt. He stood in her narrow hallway, caught among the small evidence of a life he’d only ever imagined from the outside: a cherry chapstick with the cap bitten rough, an old ASDA receipt tucked into the cracked paperback spine of a battered paranormal romance novel, a single earring dropped into a little ceramic dish shaped like a strawberry, a shopping list on the side table in her own hurried scrawl—milk, batteries, incense, bin bags—with half the words scratched through. None of it belonged to him, which made being there feel worse. She turned to face him before he could decide what to do with his hands, breathing too fast, looking at him with a certainty that felt planted there by something else. Every part of him knew this was wrong. He stayed anyway.

"You okay?" he asked, and his voice came out rougher than he meant. He knew she wasn't. He knew what he'd done. The willow bark was still under his fingernails, probably. Fuck. She didn't answer. Just stepped forward, into his space, and her mouth found his—clumsy, desperate, her teeth catching his lower lip hard enough to taste copper. Her hands fisted in his red bomber jacket, pulling him closer, and he let himself be pulled. Let himself forget the how. Let himself sink into the heat of her body pressing against his.

He broke the kiss first. Grabbed her wrists. Pinned them against the wall beside her head. Her breath stuttered, and he watched her chest rise and fall. "Slow down," he said, and the grin he found was more teeth than warmth. "You dragged me up here. Least you can do is let me look at you proper."

She swallowed, throat moving under his attention, pulse hammering at the base of it as her whole body strained toward him like he was gravity, like she’d die if he let go. But she stopped. Didn’t pull away. Didn’t roll her eyes. Didn’t make some mouthy little comment about him thinking he was in charge because Cook, honestly, fuck off. She just stopped because he told her to, standing there with her wrists caught in his hands and her attention fixed on him like the words had gone straight through her. A sick little thrill hooked under his ribs, and Cook thought of the wish before he could stop himself. He buried it almost as quickly as it surfaced, because putting a name to it would mean admitting this wasn’t just her finally wanting him; it was something else wearing her face like a mask. Cook told himself he wasn’t testing the wish, then gave her another order anyway, just to see if she’d obey.

"Take it off," he said, nodding at the hoodie. She pulled her wrists free—he let her—and tugged the fabric over her head, dropping it on the floor. She’d changed out of her work polo sometime after closing, before they went for food, and Cook remembered noticing it in the chip shop with the sort of attention he had no business giving it. The t-shirt underneath was an old band tee, washed thin, the collar stretching over her collarbone. He could see the outline of her nipples through it. Already hard.

"Been waiting two years," he said, low, almost to himself. His thumb found her bottom lip, pulled it down. "Two years of you being careful. Distant. Looking at me like I was something you stepped in."

She shook her head. "No, I—"

“Shut up.” He said it softly, and she obeyed so fast it made his cock jump in his jeans. Her mouth closed. Her eyes stayed on his. Before the wish, she would have torn him apart for speaking to her like that—called him a prick, rolled her eyes, made him laugh until the moment passed. Now she waited, quiet and ready, and the pleasure of that scared him less than it should have.

“You don’t get to talk right now,” he said, slower, because every word landed and he could see it landing. “You get to listen.” He traced the line of her jaw and felt her shiver. She was still watching him, waiting for the next thing, and the waiting did something awful to him. Made him want to keep going. Made him want to find out how far the wish reached. “You knocked on my window. You brought me upstairs. So you’re gonna stand there and take what I give you. Understand?”

She nodded, small and quick. Cook stared at her for half a second too long. There it was again. No argument. No bite. No careful little boundary set down between them like a warning cone. Just compliance, immediate and sweet, like the part of her that used to push back had been smothered under all that sudden wanting. It should have made him stop.

Cook took it as permission instead.

"Good girl." He leaned in and pressed his mouth to her throat, feeling her pulse jump against his lips. "Now get on your knees."

She dropped. Fast. Like her legs gave out. Her hands landed on his thighs, gripping the denim, and she looked up at him from the laminate floor—that same desperate, unfocused desire in her eyes. It was fucked. He knew it was fucked. But his cock was already rock hard, already straining against his jeans, and the way she was looking at him made it so easy to bury the thought because she was following every direction. Every single one. And the part of him that had spent two years being laughed off, brushed aside, kept harmless, made into a joke, wanted to call that proof. Wanted to call it fair. Wanted to call it finally.

"Unzip me," he said. Her fingers fumbled with the button, the zipper, and then she was pulling him out, her hand wrapping around him. The sound he made was almost embarrassingly raw. Her palm was warm. Dry. She stroked him once, tentative, and his hips bucked into her grip. "Now put that worthless mouth of yours to use for once."

She leaned forward. Her tongue touched the tip, a single experimental swipe, and then she took him in, her lips sliding down his shaft, her cheeks hollowing. He hit the back of her throat and she gagged, pulled back, tried again. He let her set the rhythm for a few seconds—watching her, the way her hair fell forward, the way her jaw strained—and then he fisted a hand in her hair and held her there. His voice was ragged as he told her, "m' gonna need you to breathe through your nose. Remember, you wanted this, so you're gonna take it."

She did. Her throat worked around him. The wet, obscene sound of it filled the hallway. The radiator ticked. Somewhere outside, a car passed, headlights sweeping across the thin curtains. None of it mattered. There was only her mouth, hot and slick as he held her hair in a fist, guiding her pace as he watched her struggle. "Look at you. Pretty little mouth stuffed full and you're drooling like a fuckin' whore." She didn't pull away, she only took it deeper, moan muffled and the vibration made his hips reflexively stutter. He groaned, pulled her off and slapped his cock against her slick lips. "Now suck it clean. Lick every drop of your filthy spit off my cock." She obeyed, tongue tracing the shaft, her eyes never leaving his. "Yeahhhh, that's it, you're such a dirty little cocksucker."

He let her up when his legs started shaking, not wanting to blow his load too early, not until he was inside her. He yanked her to her feet and walked her backward down the hall, one hand on her hip, the other gripping her jaw. Her lips were swollen, wet with spit amd pre-come. He kissed her again—slower this time, meaner, biting her bottom lip and sucking until she whimpered.

Her bedroom was cramped and messy, dirty clothes sticking out of a hamper in the corner, an unplugged charger curled on the night stand, bed unmade and dragged half off the frame, one corner of the fitted sheet peeled loose, a bottle of nail polish left mostly uncapped beside a burned out glade candle. He laid her back down on the mattress, and she spread her legs without being told, her t-shirt riding up to reveal a strip of bare stomach. He took his time. Pulled her trainers off. Tossed them aside. Ran his hands up her calves, her thighs, pushing her knees wider apart. Her jeans were tight, and he took his time with the button, his knuckles dragging against her stomach, watching her breathe.

"Look at you," he murmured. "Soaked through your knickers already." He traced the damp cotton with his thumb, pressed, felt her hips lift into the pressure. "That for me?"

"Yes." Her voice cracked. "Cook. Please."

"Please what?"

"Please, Cook, I can't—I need you inside me—please, please, please—"

He pulled her jeans down and off before her knickers followed, wet enough that they there was a visible damp patch through the fabric. He knelt between her legs and just looked at her for a moment—the slick shine of her cunt, the way her thighs trembled, the way her fingers twisted in the wrinkled sheets. Then he put his mouth on her. The taste hit him first—salt and skin, and then something deeper, muskier, entirely her. He dragged his tongue through her folds, slow, deliberate, and her whole body jolted like she'd been shocked. He held her hips down, flattened his tongue against her clit, and circled. Listened to her gasp. Felt her hand land in his hair, not pulling, just holding on.

He worked her like he had all the time in the world. Two years of want poured into every lick, every suck, every time he pushed a finger inside her and felt her clench around it. She was wet enough that he slid in easily—one finger, then two, curling up toward her stomach, finding the spot that made her cry out.

"That's it," he groaned, punctuating the air with lewd, wet squelches as he finger fucked her. "You're shakin' and I haven't even gotten my cock in you yet."

She was close—he could feel it in the way her walls fluttered around his fingers, in the way her breath came in short, broken gasps. His mouth reattached to her clit, sucked hard, and she shattered with a sound that was almost a sob, her back arching off the mattress, her cunt gripping his fingers as she rode it out. He didn't stop. He worked her through it, gentle now, until she pushed his head away, oversensitive and shaking. He sat back, licked his fingers clean, watched her chest heave. He pulled his jacket off. His shirt. Kicked his jeans down. His cock was aching, flushed and slick at the tip. He saw her eyes track it, saw her lips part before he crawled over her, positioning himself between her legs. "Gonna fuck you now princess but I need you tell me how badly you want it, tell me how badly you want my cock."

"I want it." Her voice was a whine, "I want your cock, Cook please—please, I need it so bad."

He pushed in slow, inch by inch, savoring the feeling of finally. Her cunt was hot, wet and so fucking tight that he had to stop halfway, his forehead dropping to her shoulder, a low groan torn out of him. She stretched around him, her fingers clawing at his back, her breath hot against his ear.

"Fuck," he breathed. "Feel that? Feel how deep I am?"

She nodded, a choked sound in her throat.

"This is what you've been keeping from me." He pulled out, pushed back in, deeper. "Two years. Two years of watching you, wanting you, and now I'm finally inside you."

He found a rhythm. Long, slow strokes that made her gasp every time he bottomed out. He watched his cock slide into her, watched the way her hole stretched around him, slick with their shared juices and the sight made him impossibly harder. He told her to look at him, her eyes idly meeting his, dark and dazed. "When I come inside you, I want you watching."

He drove deeper. Harder. The bedframe knocked against the wall, a steady, frantic beat. She was meeting his thrusts now, her hips rising to meet him, her nails raking down his back. The pain was good. Grounding. He was losing his rhythm, the edge bearing down on him. "Yeah, you like that? You like being fucked like a shameless slag?"

"Yes." She keened, "yes, fuck, yes!"

He wrapped his hand around her throat. Not tight—just there, a promise. "Come on my cock. Now."

She did. Her eyes stayed on his as her orgasm hit, her cunt squeezing him, and the feeling of it pulled him over with her. He drove into her one last time, buried deep, and came with a guttural sound that was almost her name. He stayed there inside her, breathing hard, the taste of her on his tongue. His hand was still on her throat, and he felt her swallow.

He pulled out slowly, watching his come leak out of her, mixing with her own. He collapsed beside her, dragging her into his arms, pressing his face into her hair. She was still—too still, her body limp against his, her breathing slowing. He felt the silence settle. The wrongness creeping back in, cold along his spine. He looked at her face. Her eyes were open, fixed on the ceiling. A single tear slid down her temple and into her hairline, catching the light from the streetlamp outside—or maybe it was just sweat. He didn't ask. He just pulled her closer, his arm locked around her waist, his face buried against her shoulder. What mattered, he decided, was that she was still there. The lie was still warm in his chest.

He held on, and he refused to let go.

Cook woke into a room that didn’t sound like his life. No arcade machines shrieking, no Gareth shouting across Kingpin’s, no Ryan calling him useless from somewhere he couldn’t see. Just grey morning pressed against the curtains, a phone buzzing on the nightstand, and the slow return of a body beside him before memory came with it: the mattress, the weight of her, the scratches down his back, his clothes puddled somewhere by the door. His stomach tightened before he opened his eyes.

She was awake, propped on one elbow with her chin resting in her palm, watching him from her side of the bed with the duvet pulled to her chest. Her attention stayed fixed on his face with the same strange focus she’d had at the car window. The room smelled of something vaguely cozy, of slept-in sheets, of sex—blunt and undeniable. Something pleased and possessive tightened in Cook’s chest. He should’ve made a joke, something filthy and easy, the kind he could use to make all of this normal, but for once nothing came fast enough.

“How long’ve you been doing that?” he asked.

She blinked slowly, like the question had reached her late. “I don’t know.”

“That s'not creepy at all.”

“I like watching you sleep.”

The words should’ve worried him, should've made him pull away. Instead, they got under his skin in the worst possible way. Cook laughed because it was easier than admitting he liked it—liked her watching him, liked being looked at with that much need, liked that wanting him had made her strange. “You’re mental.”

Her expression switched so abruptly his laugh died in his throat. The version of her that had been watching him sleep seemed to blink out, leaving her staring at him with naked panic, taking in the sheets, his bare chest, her own body under the duvet like the memory of last night had come rushing back to her all at once. Her breathing shallowed, quick and jagged. “Why are you still here?” she whispered, and then, before he could answer, “Cook, what happened?”

Cook’s throat went tight, because there she was: the girl from the car, the one who'd said friend, the one who’d left him in the dark with his stupid broken twig and his stupid broken pride. She looked from him to the door and back again, one hand clamped to the duvet, the other pressed against her lips like she was trying not to be sick. “I don’t feel right,” she said, voice fraying. “I don’t—fuck, I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I’m being weird.”

The decent thing was humiliatingly simple: get dressed, leave, let her come back to herself without him in the room. Cook knew it in the way she kept looking toward the door, in the tremor running through her hands, in the terror she was trying and failing to swallow. Maybe she was on meds and had forgotten to take them. Maybe she’d taken something last night and it was still dragging her sideways. He grabbed for both explanations because they kept him away from the willow, and because neither of them changed the part his worst self cared about: she had come back, crawled into bed with him, and let him believe he’d finally won.

Then the panic twisted again. Her face crumpled, and she reached for him so suddenly it startled him, both hands locking around his wrist. “No, wait, please. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.” Her voice climbed, messy and frantic, apologies spilling over each other too quickly to sound steady. “I don’t want you to go. I don’t know why I said that. Please don’t leave, Cook. Please.”

The question sat right in front of him, simple and unforgivable. What happened to you? What did I do? What are you when you look at me like that? Cook didn’t ask it. He touched her face instead, and the alarm in her expression folded inward almost instantly, all that frantic energy narrowing until there was only him. Her grip loosened on his wrist only to slide higher, fingers curling into his forearm, and Cook felt the answer settle heavy in his stomach. That was all it took. Not an explanation. Not an apology. Just him.

“There you are,” he said, softly enough to sound kind.

Her mouth trembled. “Cook.”

He kissed her before she could say anything else, gentle at first, then deeper when she gave in with a shaky little sigh. The confusion left her quick, replaced by something eager and grateful, her fingers tightening around his forearm like she was apologising with her whole body, rightfully so.

When he slipped out of her bedroom later, it was only to fetch his cigarettes and charger from the car. That was what he told himself, anyway. He needed five minutes where she wasn’t looking at him like that, where he could stand outside in yesterday’s clothes and pretend this was just a bad comedown, missed meds, some private little breakdown he didn’t need to understand because she’d still crawled into bed with him. His phone buzzed while he was rummaging through the clutter in his center console.

The messages stacked up fast: come back, then why did you leave?, then are you angry?, then i’m sorry, then please come back upstairs. Cook stood beside his car with the charger in one hand and a cigarette forgotten behind his ear, staring at the screen while something pleased and rotten opened in him.

needy little thing aren’t you

The reply came instantly.

only for you

Cook looked up at her window and let himself smile, because the unease was still there, but so was the want. Hers now. Loud. Clinging. Impossible to miss. Then he went back upstairs.

They arrived at Kingpin’s together later that day.

It wasn’t subtle. Nothing about it was subtle, and that was why Cook liked it. He walked through the front doors in yesterday’s work polo, unwashed and wrinkled from being yanked back on that morning, hair a mess, mouth bitten in one corner, with her beside him in the kind of silence that made talking feel more incriminating. The arcade lights were already on, blinking over empty machines before opening. Gareth was fighting with the coffee machine. JJ was stacking cups. Ryan looked up from the lane desk and went completely rigid. Tasha noticed a second later. Cook noticed her noticing.

He put his hand low on her back, not because he needed to guide her anywhere, but because Ryan was looking and Tasha was looking and Cook wanted the whole ugly, glowing place to know. Gareth stuck his head out of the office. “You’re late.”

Cook grinned. “Worth the wait.”

“You’re always fucking late.”

“Still got everyone looking, haven’t I?”

“You’ve got five minutes before I dock your pay.”

She laughed under her breath.

Ryan’s eyes moved from Cook to her. “You two come in together?”

Cook leaned against the desk. “Observant lad.”

Ryan didn’t smile. “What happened?”

Cook’s grin widened because this was the bit he’d pictured without letting himself admit it: Ryan looking at him, Tasha pretending not to, everyone suddenly understanding that Cook hadn’t read it wrong after all.

“Wouldn’t you like to know?”

Ryan’s jaw ticked. “Cook.”

Ryan’s tone had a warning in it, the kind Cook might have heard if he wasn’t already drunk on being right. Let Ryan look bothered. Let him stand there trying to work out how the sad prick from last night had walked in this morning with her at his side. Later, when she went to help JJ with the stockroom, Ryan cornered him near the shoe counter.

“What the fuck happened?” Ryan asked.

Cook grabbed a pair of returned shoes and sprayed them until the chemical smell hit the back of his throat. “You told me to ask.”

Ryan’s eyes narrowed. “And?”

“And she changed her mind.”

“What does that mean?”

Cook leaned closer, lowering his voice into something mean and filthy. “Means she came back to the car after all that friend bollocks, dragged me upstairs, and spent the night proving her mouth says one thing and the rest of her says summat else.”

Ryan stared at him, and Cook enjoyed it too much, the look on his face dragging something nastier out of him. “Funny, innit?” he said, tossing the shoes into the cubby. “Girls say one thing, then get all upset when you stop believing them.”

Then Ryan asked, “Was she on something?”

The question cut through the bragging.

Cook’s smile twitched. “What?”

“Last night,” Ryan continued. “Was she on something?”

“Why?”

“She was acting weird.”

Cook scoffed. “Jealousy’s ugly on you, mate.”

“I’m serious.”

“Yeah, tragic, that.”

Ryan looked toward the stockroom. “Molly, maybe. Pills. Whatever. She wasn’t herself.”

Cook hated how quickly the idea caught. Not because it made him feel guilty, but because it gave him a way out. Molly was better than magic. Molly was normal. Molly meant the willow was cheap bullshit from a dusty shop and not something that had split her open in the middle of the night. Molly meant she’d wanted him already and only needed a little chemical shove to stop acting so fucking pure about it. Molly meant Cook hadn’t done anything except stand there when the truth finally crawled out of her.

He laughed. “You saying she needed drugs to fancy me?”

Ryan’s expression didn’t move. “I’m saying maybe don’t be a smug prick until you know what happened.”

Cook hated Ryan for saying it, but the excuse was already there, useful and ready-made, some rotten part of him clung to it before he could look too closely. Later, behind Kingpin’s, she followed him into the smoking area and stayed close enough that he could feel her beside him without looking. Rain had left the concrete black and shiny; cardboard boxes slumped by the bins, soft with damp, while the fryer vent breathed hot grease into the cold. Cook lit his cigarette, took one drag, then held it out. She took it automatically, fingers brushing his.

“Were you on something last night?” he asked, casual as he could make it.

She paused with the filter near her mouth. “What?”

“Ryan reckons you were acting weird. Molly or some shit.”

Her expression went blank in a way that made the alley seem louder. For a second, she looked almost confused, like the word had opened a door she didn’t remember walking through. Cook saw her searching for an answer that wasn’t there. Then she looked at him and nodded.

“Yeah,” she said. “Molly.”

Relief opened in his chest so fast it felt obscene. There it was: normal, dirty, easy. Not a wish. Not him. Just drugs, some bad choices and her finally admitting what she wanted.

“There we go,” he said.

She frowned slightly. “What?”

“Nothing.”

She took a drag and exhaled slowly. “I didn’t think it’d hit like that.”

Cook stepped closer. “Hit how?”

Her gaze dropped to his mouth, and whatever doubt had been in her face went soft around the edges. “You know how.”

Cook smiled.

That was the version he chose.

 After that, things were good. Good in the way a bad idea could be good if Cook kept calling it molly and let her look at him like it was love. Good in stolen minutes, bitten mouths, her fingers hooked through his belt loop near the staff corridor while he pretended he was only hanging there because he was lazy. Good in coffee waiting before his shifts and his jacket disappearing over her shoulders during smoke breaks. Good in Cook sitting on the shoe counter with his knees spread while she stood between them, close enough for him to murmur something filthy against her ear and watch whatever she’d been saying fall apart in her mouth.

She started arranging herself around him like it was natural. If he came in at four, she was there at half three with a cold drink already waiting with a smile aimed straight at him. If he closed, she lingered after clocking out and pretended she was helping. If Gareth sent him to unjam a machine, she found some excuse to cross the arcade, drifting through the blue glow and cheap ticket noise until she was beside him again. She fixed his collar before customers came in, plucked lint off his polo, stole chips from his tray during their lunch break, and let him drag her into corners for kisses that left them late, breathless, and grinning like they hadn’t done anything wrong. Cook got used to her hand at his waist, her mouth near his ear, the constant heat of her attention following him from counter to lane to arcade floor. He got used to people looking. To Ryan going quiet whenever she touched him. To Tasha glancing away a second too late. He got used to being wanted loudly, stupidly, without all the careful little limits she’d put around herself before.

For a little while, the wrongness dressed itself up so well he could almost call it happiness. It got into the small things first. Her lip balm in his pocket. Her lighter rolling around his cupholder. Her drink waiting beside his on the counter before he’d even thought to ask. She sat in his passenger seat with her knees tucked up, changed his music without asking, and kissed him over the gearshift when he told her she had shit taste. She took photos of him when he wasn’t looking, laughed when he told her to delete them, then kept them anyway because apparently she liked him best when he was scowling. He called her his girl once as a joke, some filthy little throwaway line near the prize counter, and watched her whole expression change. So he said it again. After that, he said it whenever he wanted to feel powerful.

The texts became part of the weather: where are you? then answer me, then are you with tasha?, then miss you, sorry, i just miss you. Cook liked the apologies best, which was a nasty thing to learn about himself.

At night, she still watched him sleep. He’d surface to grey light or the thin orange stripe of a streetlamp through the curtains and find her awake beside him, chin tucked against her arm, studying him with an almost worshipful stillness. The first cold prickle never lasted. It always got drowned out by the thicker, meaner satisfaction underneath: she was losing sleep over him. She was guarding him from the dark like leaving him alone for eight hours would be some kind of betrayal. Any decent bloke would have hated it. Cook started staying over more.

At first, the missing things were small enough to laugh at. His lighter vanished from beside the till and turned up in her jacket pocket. The pen he always chewed at work disappeared from the front desk. His spare name badge went from the staff room. A torn strip of red gift ribbon he’d tied around his neck during a kid's birthday party at work as a joke somehow ended up tucked beneath her pillow. Each thing had an excuse on its own. Together, they started looking deliberate. One night, searching her drawer for a charger, he found them arranged together: lighter, pen, badge, ribbon, a crumpled cigarette packet with the corner bitten where he’d opened it with his teeth, a receipt with his handwriting on the back, a loose button from the polo he’d split during a shift, and a folded rota with every one of his hours circled in black pen. His stomach turned.

She appeared in the doorway behind him. “Don’t be creeped out.”

Cook looked back at the drawer. “What is this?”

“Nothing.”

“That’s not nothing. That’s a fucking drawer full of me.”

Her voice went small, anxious. “I like having pieces of you when you’re not here.”

A normal person would’ve left. Cook shut the drawer instead. “That’s fucked.”

“I know.”

He looked at her properly then, standing there waiting for him to decide what she was, punishment and forgiveness both written all over her face. Cook stepped closer. “You’re a proper little psycho, aren’t you?” Her expression opened at that, not wounded, not ashamed—grateful, like he’d found the right name for her and she loved him for saying it. That should’ve sent him running; instead, it made him feel like a bastard and a prize at once.

Ryan tried talking to her a few days into whatever Cook had decided this was. Cook was crouched near the ball returns, pretending to inspect a jam that didn’t exist so he could keep slacking off, when he saw Ryan catch her by the staff door. Not touch her. Not block her exactly. Ryan was too careful for that. He just stepped in close enough to make the conversation private. Cook stopped pretending to work.

“You can’t just ignore me,” Ryan said.

She looked past him toward the lanes. “I’m working.”

“You haven’t answered a single text.”

“Don’t text me anymore.”

Ryan’s face changed. “Since when?”

She blinked. Cook saw the question hit something. Not memory exactly, not recognition, but a loose thread tugged too hard. Her mouth parted, and for a second she looked at Ryan like she could almost remember why his voice was supposed to matter. Then she saw Cook. Whatever had slipped in her expression vanished. Her attention locked back onto him, simple and immediate, like the rest of the room had ceased to exist. “Since him."

Cook should have wondered why Ryan sounded less confused than hurt. He should have wondered what sort of texts she’d stopped answering, and why the words don’t text me anymore had come out so cold and clipped, like something in her had already decided for her. Instead, all he heard was the finality. Ryan followed her gaze, and for one second his expression turned black with hatred. Cook, the bastard he was, smiled.

After that, the days started arranging themselves around him: work, smoke breaks, her flat, his car, her hands finding him before he had to ask. Cook let himself mistake it. That was the stretch where his version of things started feeling easier to live with. The willow had been nothing. Ryan had been right about the molly. She’d been too careful before, too sober, too caught up in whatever walls she’d built around herself, and the night in his car had only knocked them down. Cook hadn’t made her want him. He’d just been there when she finally stopped pretending she was too good for him. Maybe he’d been right all along.

He took her bowling after close one night when Gareth dipped out early and JJ pretended not to notice them turning lane seven back on. Neither of them changed out of their work attire. She bowled terribly, as always. Cook wasn't much better, cheating by stepping over the line and then arguing with the scoring screen as if the machine could be bullied into boosting his numbers. She giggled until she had to sit down on the ball return, and Cook kissed her there under the lane lights with the pins resetting uselessly in the distance. Then he took her for 2 a.m. kebabs and watched sauce drip onto her fingers. She licked it off without thinking. And Cook, because he was Cook and apparently incapable of letting anything stay innocent, leaned in and said, “Careful. Keep doing that and I’m gonna start thinking you want something in your mouth that isn’t garlic sauce.” She shoved his shoulder hard enough that he nearly dropped his food, laughing despite herself. She took another one of his hoodies that night and didn’t give it back. He pretended to complain. He liked seeing her in it too much to actually mean it.

She came to his flat and cleared three empty lager cans and a crumbled burger wrapper off his dusty dresser while calling him a slob. Cook caught her by the waist before she could make it to the bin, pulled her down onto the mattress, and she went willingly, eagerly, already kissing him like she’d only been waiting for him to give her the excuse. They fucked with the cans and the wrapper left sitting on the floor and the sheets half off the bed, quick and messy, and too pleased with themselves to care. After, she lay with her cheek near his shoulder and traced the tattoo on his arm until the gentleness of it started crawling under his skin, so Cook said something filthy just to ruin it. She didn’t get annoyed. She kissed him instead. He started to crave the way she changed when he claimed her out loud. Started doing it in front of people because it made her lean closer and made everyone else understand she wasn’t available to them anymore. Started testing small things because testing let him pretend it wasn’t control. Come here. Look at me. Say it again. Don’t answer him. Stay.

She listened. God help him, he loved that she listened.

The party happened on a Friday in a flat belonging to someone Tasha knew, or maybe someone Tasha had hooked up with, or maybe both. Cook didn’t ask. It was small, mixed, and noisy: Kingpin’s people, friends of friends, two blokes from a football team nobody cared about, a girl from the bar down the road, someone’s flatmate smoking out the kitchen window, cheap beer and liquor bottles sweating on every available surface. The living room was too warm and too crowded, music rattling from a speaker on the windowsill, bottles lined along the coffee table, crisps crushed into the rug.

Cook arrived with her tucked into his side and immediately felt better than everyone. That was the point of bringing her. Not the only point, maybe, but the one he liked most. He liked seeing people see. Liked the glances. Liked Tasha’s startled little look before she hid it behind her drink. Liked Ryan watching from across the room with his jaw set like he’d bitten into something bitter. She sat close to Cook on the sofa, thigh against his, fingers wound into the sleeve of his hoodie. Whenever he shifted, she shifted too. Whenever he laughed, her eyes cut to him first, sharp and swift, as if she had to know who’d earned it. A decent man might have been worried. Cook felt worshipped.

Truth or dare started because everyone was drunk and unoriginal. Cook picked dare because truth was for pussies and people with fewer stories. A bloke whose name Cook didn’t remember grinned and pointed. “Kiss the person to your left.”

The room reacted before Cook even looked. Laughter, whistles, someone saying, “Oh, shit.” Someone else going, “That’s Tasha, innit?” Cook turned. Tasha sat to his left, eyes widening before she giggled and lifted her beer like a shield. “No, don’t make it weird.”

Cook looked at her lips. He didn’t mean to for long. He meant to for exactly long enough. Then he looked back at the woman pressed against his side. Her expression had gone empty. The room was still laughing, but Cook felt the change move through her before anyone else noticed. Her fingers tightened around the beer bottle in her hand. At first it was nothing. A little pressure. A little stillness. Enough for him to see because he was watching for it, because some sick, glittering part of him wanted to know what she’d do if someone tried to take what she thought was hers. The bottle cracked. The sound cut through the room. Beer spilled over her fingers and down onto the rug. Brown glass fractured in her grip and scattered near her feet, and the laughter died badly, piece by piece, until only the music kept playing too loud from the windowsill.

Tasha jerked back with a sharp, “Jesus,” and Cook stood so fast his knee knocked the table. “Oi.” She didn’t look at him. She was already crossing the space, not shouting, not rushing, which somehow made it worse, the almost-empty bottle hanging loose at her side while everyone's wide, horrified eyes stayed glued to her. Tasha pressed back into the sofa, confusion giving way to alarm, “What the fuck?”

She stopped close enough that Tasha sank into the shabby cushions, and the jagged neck of the bottle rose between them, amber glass flashing under the light. “If your lips go anywhere near him,” she said, calm enough to make it sound decided, “I’ll smash your teeth down your throat and watch you choke on them, you stupid bitch.”

The room went quiet in a way parties weren’t supposed to. Tasha sat pinned against the sofa, beer forgotten in her lap; cups paused halfway to mouths, knees locked at odd angles on the carpet, and the bloke who’d given the dare looked sober now, his grin gone slack and useless. Sour lager soaked into the rug near her shoes while Ryan eased himself up from the armchair, careful as if any sudden noise might turn her on him. She leaned closer. “I mean it. I’ll carve your face open with this bottle until no one can tell where your slag mouth used to be.”

Cook caught her wrist. “Hey.” She jolted at the touch like she’d been woken mid-nightmare, her stare dropping to the glass in her grip, the beer running over her fingers, the shards scattered near her feet. Whatever blank certainty had carried her cracked all at once. “I don’t feel right,” she said, voice thin enough to nearly disappear under the music still playing from the windowsill. Cook heard her, but he also felt the whole room watching him now: Ryan by the armchair, Tasha with her palms half-raised, everyone waiting for him to handle it because it was his mess, wasn’t it? His scene. His problem. His intense new girlfriend.

He stepped in carefully and took the bottle neck from her before she cut herself worse. “Look at me.” She did. Her breathing hitched. Her attention kept snagging and loosening, and for a blink she was the girl from that first morning after again, the one who’d asked why he was still in her bed, scared and trapped somewhere under her own skin. Cook should’ve let that scare him sober; instead, he touched her jaw. “It was nothing.”

She shook her head once. “I don’t know why I—”

“You know what you want.”

The words came out quietly, and they worked. He felt the exact instant she latched onto them, fear rerouting itself into devotion as her eyes fixed on his. Her free hand grabbed the front of his shirt, and then she was kissing him in front of everyone, hard enough that the awkwardness spread through the room like smoke. Cook let her. Of course he did. Tasha looked away first. Ryan didn’t. Cook got her into the hallway after, away from the stale crush of the living room and the whispers already crawling through it. Someone had turned the music down; someone else was blotting lager out of the rug with kitchen roll. She stood near the bathroom door, staring at her empty hand. “Did I scare everyone?” Cook leaned against the wall opposite her. “It’s a party. People love drama.” Her voice sank. “I scared myself.”

That should’ve stopped him, but Cook only pushed off the wall and came closer. “You’re alright.” She looked at him. “Am I?” He gave her the answer like it was obvious. “You’re with me.” The desperate gratitude returned the moment he gave her somewhere to put herself, and Cook felt the power of it all the way down to his fingertips. He didn’t have to ask anymore, didn’t have to risk humiliation. He could say look at me, and she would. He could say come here, and she’d come. He’d wanted confirmation. Now he had it.

The next few days stretched quieter, which made the party easier to file away as a drunken, jealous accident if Cook didn’t think about it too hard. He never thought about it too hard. He took her to breakfast after an opening shift, both of them half-asleep in a sticky café booth while she ordered whatever he ordered and didn’t touch her food until he told her to eat, eyes flicking up to his face after every bite like she was waiting to be praised for doing it right. She fell asleep in his car on the way back to Kingpin’s, cheek against the window, and Cook drove around an extra fifteen minutes because he liked having her there. Soft, submissive, dependent on him to get her where she needed to go.

At work, she helped JJ fix the ticket machine and got grease on her sleeve. She spent ten minutes arguing with a little girl about whether the purple dinosaur prize was cooler than the green one, with such fierce seriousness that Cook laughed from the lane desk until Gareth told him to stop frightening the customers. She kissed him breathless behind the staff door after, tasting like cherry slush and cheese from the nachos she’d snuck. For a few hours at a time, she was almost normal. Almost. Then Tasha would come too close, and it felt like all the air had been sucked out of the room. After the party, Tasha became careful around him. Embarrassed, maybe. Scared of the bottle incident. She didn’t flirt the way she used to, didn’t hover with her drink tucked to her chest or lean too close just because she could. If anything, fear made her quieter with him, anxious at the edges, her concern slipping out in small, stupid ways she could pretend were nothing. She asked if he was okay. Brought him a drink at work and left it beside him without mentioning it. When Gareth shouted from lane five about a jammed return, she came to find Cook by the prize counter with the lane key already in her hand.

“Gareth wants you,” she said.

“Popular man, me.”

“Machine’s eating balls again.”

“Kinky.”

“Cook.”

He grinned, and it almost felt normal. Tasha held the key out. Cook reached for it at the same time she leaned past him to avoid a kid sprinting toward the claw machines, and her fingers knocked against his. Nothing much. A brush of skin. A tiny accidental touch that should’ve meant less than nothing, especially after everything. Except Cook didn’t pull away. He let their fingers stay tangled around the key for one second longer than they needed to, not enough for Tasha to call it flirting, not enough for anyone else to notice, but enough. He felt her watching from the prize station before he looked. So he made himself look. He told himself he was just checking. Testing whether the molly excuse still held up after weeks of this. Whether things had settled. Whether the weirdness was fading. He knew that was bullshit. He wanted to see if she still went crazy for him.

The prize display cracked under her palm an hour later. It happened in the middle of a Saturday rush, with the arcade full of kids and the lanes roaring. She stood behind the counter, hand pressed flat against the glass case full of candy rings, plastic tiaras, rubber snakes, glow sticks, ticket bundles, and stuffed animals with dead little sewn-on smiles. The glass spiderwebbed beneath her. Blood slipped down her wrist. For half a second, the whole prize area froze. Then a child started crying. Cook was already in motion.

“What the fuck?” he snapped, grabbing a towel from behind the counter and wrapping it around her hand.

She didn’t look at the blood. She looked at Tasha then at Cook. “She touched you."

Behind him, Ryan said his name like a warning. “Cook.”

Cook ignored him. He got her into the back office with one hand around her uninjured wrist, kicked the door shut behind them, and grabbed the first-aid kit off the wall. The fluorescent light buzzed overhead, that same broken note that always made his teeth itch. The office felt too small after the noise outside, too bright under the strip light, full of dust, stale coffee, and old paper. Gareth’s desk buried under paperwork he kept meaning to file and never did. A cracked mirror above the sink threw Cook’s reflection back at him: messy hair, mouth set too tight, eyes too sharp for someone pretending he had this under control.

“Sit,” he told her. She sat on the edge of Gareth’s desk with her cut hand held stiffly in her lap, blood smeared across her palm where the glass had bitten into it. Quiet now that there was no one left to threaten.

“Fucking hell,” Cook muttered, dropping the kit open beside her. His fingers felt clumsy as he dug out the antiseptic wipes. “What’d you do that for?”

She didn’t answer. Just watched him too closely, too calmly, like some part of her was still back there, still seeing Tasha too near him, still hearing the bottle crack in her hand. Cook tore open a wipe. “This is gonna sting.”

She didn’t flinch when he pressed it to the cut. Didn’t make a sound. Only breathed a little faster, her chest rising and falling beneath her work polo as he cleaned the blood from her palm. It wasn’t deep, but it bled enough to stain the paper towels red, enough to make the office smell faintly metallic under the old coffee and disinfectant.

“Should’ve seen your face,” he said, not looking up. “When she got near me. Looked like you wanted to kill her.”

Silence. Then, quietly, “I would have.”

His hands stopped. Cook looked up at her. She meant it. There was nothing dramatic in her voice, no shaking, no performance. Just certainty, flat and terrifying, like she was telling him the weather, his voice rough as sandpaper as he asked, “yeah? You’d kill for me?”

“I’d do anything.”

The words cut straight through him. Too much. Too easy. Too fucking far. But heat pooled low in his stomach anyway, and for one second Cook almost hated himself enough to stop. Almost. He wound the bandage around her palm, layer over gauzy layer, then pressed the adhesive down with his thumb. “There. All fixed.”

She didn’t pull her hand away. Her fingers curled around his. “Cook.”

His name sounded foreign in her mouth when she was like this. Starved. Soft. Already reaching. Then her expression shifted. Not much. Just enough for him to see it happen. “I didn’t mean to do that."

Cook went still. She stared down at her bandaged hand, breathing too carefully, like one wrong inhale might split the moment open. “I didn’t. I don’t know why I did that.”

There she was. Not the version who clung to his sleeve and watched his mouth like it was the only thing keeping her upright. Not the version who smiled when he called her his girl. This one looked at the blood drying near her wrist like it belonged to something she’d woken from too late. Cook could have told her then. He could have said, I did something. I made a wish. I think I did this to you. Instead, he touched her wrist, her gaze snapping to his. “You were jealous."

Her mouth parted. “I don’t want to be.”

Cook moved closer, still holding her wrist, thumb pressed lightly over her pulse. “Yeah, you do.”

She shook her head, but there was no force behind it.

“You just don’t like her looking at me.”

“No,” she whispered.

“You don’t like anyone looking at me.”

Her breath hitched.

“That’s alright,” he murmured, making it sound gentle, making it sound reasonable instead of irrational. “I like it.”

Something in her gave way beneath his hand. The dread in her face softened, blurred, turned inward until it had nowhere to go but him. Her injured hand curled against the bandage, and the other reached for his shirt, careful at first, then tighter, pulling him between her knees like she needed him close before she could breathe properly. “Cook.”

“Yeah?”

“Kiss me.”

He should have said no. Should have stepped back, opened the door, left her in the back office with the buzzing light and the stale coffee and the blood on the paper towels. Should have let her surface again before he dragged her under. Instead, he leaned in. His mouth crushing against hers, one hand fisting in the collar of her polo, the other bracing against the desk behind her. The kiss was all teeth and spit, It was pure  hunger—sloppy, desperate, the kind of kiss that said he'd been holding back all day and the dam had just fucking broken. She made a noise against his mouth, something caught between a gasp and a moan. And he swallowed it. His tongue pushed past her lips, tasted the slush, the lip balm, the mint of her toothpaste from this morning. He didn't care what. He just wanted more of it. More of her. His name tag scraped against hers as he pressed closer, the metal edges catching, and he felt her hand—the bandaged one—come up to grip his shoulder. Her fingers dug in, hard, through the cheap fabric of his red polo. The pain was good. Grounding. Proof that this was real.

"Fuck," he breathed against her mouth, reeling back just enough to look at her. Her pupils were dialated, lips wet and swollen. She looked fucked out already, and he'd barely touched her. "You've no idea how bad i wanted to fuck you out there."

"Do it," she said, her voice rough and needy. "Don't stop."

He didn't need to be told twice. This time, he bit her lower lip, tugged it between his teeth, and she gasped—a sharp little sound that went straight to his cock. His hands found her hips, pulled her against him, let her feel exactly what she was doing to him. The hard length of him pressed against her through two layers of denim and boxers, and she rocked into it, a small involuntary movement that made his breath catch.

"Yeah," he muttered, his mouth trailing down her jaw, her throat, sucking at the skin just below her ear. "Yeah, that's it. Fucking move against me."

His hands slid up her sides, under the hem of her polo. The skin of her stomach was warm, soft, and he felt her shiver as his calloused fingers traced upward. He pushed the fabric up, exposing the curve of her ribs, the bottom of her bra—a simple black thing, nothing fancy, and that made it hotter. She wasn't trying. She was just here, wanting him.

"Off," he said, tugging at her polo. "Take it off."

She did, pulling it over her head in one motion, and the name tag clattered against the desk. Cook's eyes raked over her—black bra, collarbones, the slight sheen of sweat on her chest from the rush. He wanted to put his mouth on every inch of her. He reached behind her, undid the clasp with a practiced flick, and the bra fell away. Her tits were perfect as always, her nipples stiff. He didn't wait. He bent his head and took one in his mouth, laving his tongue over the peak, sucking hard enough to make her gasp.

"Oh, fuck," she breathed, her fingers tangling in his hair, pulling him closer. "Cook—"

He switched to the other breast, giving it the same attention, biting down just enough to make her hips jerk. His hand slid down her stomach, past the waistband of her jeans, palming her through the denim. She was wet. He could feel the heat of her through the fabric, and it made his mouth water.

"Been thinking about this all shift?" he asked, his voice rough, his lips still brushing her nipple. "Thinking about me while you were counting tickets, fixing Gareth’s shitty prize display, pretending you weren’t watching me the entire time."

"Yes," she whined, the word coming out broken and desperate. "God, yes. Every time you walked past."

"Good girl." He said it like a reward, and she shuddered. "That's what I like to hear."

He popped the button on her jeans and pulled them down her legs, her knickers going with them, helping her out of them before tossing them aside. He pushed her back onto the desk, laid her out like a feast, and dropped to his knees between her thighs. The fluorescent light above buzzed harshly, casting everything in that sick green pallor, but he didn't care. He just wanted to see her. Taste her.

"Look at you," he said, his thumbs spreading her open. She was glistening, wet, her cunt swollen and ready for him. "Fucking gorgeous. All this for me?"

"All for you." Her voice was barely a whisper.

He leaned in and licked a slow, deliberate stripe up her slit, from entrance to clit, and she bucked off the desk. Her taste hit his tongue—musky, sweet, overwhelming—and he groaned against her, his eyes closing. This was what he’d wanted before he’d ever had it, and having it hadn’t cured him of a single thing. If anything, it had made him worse. Two years of wanting her had turned into something uglier now, something fed instead of satisfied, because the fantasy wasn’t impossible anymore. He knew what she sounded like. Knew how she looked at him when the wish took hold. Knew he could have her in the back office, in his flat, wherever he decided, and the worst part was how quickly that had started to feel like something he was owed. He ate her like a man starved, his tongue circling her clit, his fingers sliding inside her, curling, searching for that spot that would make her scream. She was dripping, soaking his chin, her hands gripping the edge of the desk, her breath coming in sharp little cries. The sound of his mouth on her filled the small office—wet, obscene, rhythmic.

"You like that?" he asked, pulling back just enough to speak, his chin glistening. "You like my tongue in your cunt?"

"Yes—fuck—yes—"

"Tell me." He pressed a kiss to her inner thigh, then bit down, hard. "Tell me what you want."

"I want you to fuck me." Her voice cracked. "Please, Cook. I need you inside me."

"That's my girl." He stood, his hands going to his belt, undoing it with quick, rough movements. His trousers dropped, his boxers with them, and his cock sprang free—hard, leaking, the tip already slick with pre-come. He stroked himself once, twice, watching her watch him. "You see what you do to me? See what you've always done?"

She reached for him, her bandaged hand wrapping around the base of his cock, guiding him to her entrance. He let her. He wanted her to be part of this, to want it as much as he did.

"You sure you want this at work?" he asked, even though he knew he wouldn't stop if she said no. Even though the thought of stopping was physically painful.

"I want it," she said. "I want you."

He pushed in. The first inch was heaven—tight, wet, hot. He had to pause, had to breathe, had to let her adjust. His forehead dropped to hers, their breaths mingling in the stale office air.

"Fuck," he whispered. "You always feel so fucking good."

She wrapped her legs around his waist, pulling him deeper, and he groaned, his hips beginning to move. Slow at first, a long thrust that buried him to the hilt, then a pull-back that left him aching, then another thrust, harder this time. The desk creaked beneath them, the old wood groaning with every movement.

"Yeah," he said, picking up speed. "Yeah, take it. Take all of it."

She nodded, her eyes squeezed shut, her mouth open in a silent moan. He watched her face—the way her brow furrowed, the way her lips parted, the way her breath hitched with every thrust—and it was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen.

"Look at me." He grabbed her chin, forced her eyes open. "I want you to watch me fuck you. I want you to see who's making you feel this good."

Her eyes met his, hazy yet focused, and he felt his balls tighten. He was close already, too close, but he wasn't done with her yet. He pulled out, ignoring her whimper of protest, and flipped her over. Her hands hit the desk, her ass in the air, and he lined himself up again, sliding into her from behind with one smooth thrust. The angle was deeper, tighter, and she cried out, her fingers scrabbling for purchase on the cluttered surface, knocking papers everywhere.

"That's it," he said, his hand smacking her ass with a sharp slap. The sound echoed in the small room. "That's my good little slag. Taking my cock like a fucking champ." He fucked her fast and mean, his hips slapping against her ass, his hand tangled in her hair, pulling her head back. The fluorescent light flickered above them, the buzz a constant backdrop to the wet sounds of their fucking, her moans, his grunts, the creak of the desk.

"You like that?" he asked, his voice a snarl. "You like being fucked like this? Like the dirty little whore you are?"

"Yes—"

"Yeah, you do. You love it. You've wanted this since the moment you saw me, haven't you? All those months of pretending you weren't interested, that I was just a friend, and now look at you. Look at you, lettin' me fuck you stupid at work."

She didn't answer, just moaned, and he slapped her ass again, hard enough to leave a palm print. "I said, haven't you?"

"Yes!" she cried. "Yes, I've wanted this. I've wanted you."

"Good girl." He reached around, his fingers finding her clit, rubbing tight circles as he kept thrusting. "Now come for me. Come on my cock like the good little slag you are."

She did. She shattered around him, her cunt clenching, her whole body shaking, a broken cry tearing from her throat. The sensation pushed him over the edge. He buried himself deep, his hips stuttering, and came inside her with a groan that was almost a sob. Hot, thick, filling her, marking her from the inside. He stayed there for a moment, his forehead resting between her shoulder blades, his breath ragged. The silence was heavy, broken only by the buzz of the light and the distant sounds of the arcade—the beep of a ticket machine, the laugh of a customer, the crack of bowling balls hitting multiple sets of pins. The real world, still spinning, completely unaware of what had just happened. He pulled out slowly, watching his come leak out of her, running down her thigh. Didn't matter how many times he's seen it happen now, something primal and possessive still coiled in his chest.

"We need to get you on birth control," he said, his tone casual, matter-of-fact. "Can't have you getting knocked up. Not yet. Not unless I decide I want that."

She didn't answer. She was still leaning over the desk, her breath shaky, her body trembling. He reached for the box of tissues on the shelf, pulled a handful out, and handed them to her.

"Clean up," he said, already pulling his trousers up, buckling his belt. "We've got another two hours of shift left."

She took the tissues, wiping herself slowly, and he watched her. The bandage on her hand was stained with a faint red, the wound probably bleeding again from how hard she'd gripped the desk. He should redo it. He should take care of her. He didn't. Rather, he lit a cigarette, the smoke curling up toward the buzzing light, and let the lie settle warm and comfortable in his chest. She belonged to him. That was all that mattered. She'd wanted him enough to break glass, enough to bleed, enough to end up here on this grimy desk, her legs shaking, his come still inside her. And if that wasn't real—if the wish had made it happen—he didn't want to know.

After that, Kingpin’s got quieter in the worst possible way. Tasha kept their conversation polite and professional. Ryan watched Cook with open dislike. Gareth complained about the cracked display and threatened to take damages out of everyone’s wages, which everyone ignored because Gareth threatened that weekly. JJ asked if she was okay, and she smiled too brightly and said yes. Later, Cook found her near the women’s bathroom, standing too close to Tasha. She wasn’t touching her. Wasn’t yelling. Just speaking softly beneath the arcade noise, her body angled in that calm, awful way Cook was starting to recognize. He couldn’t hear the words, but he saw Tasha’s face. When Tasha walked away, shoulders tight, Cook caught up with her. “What was that?”

Tasha looked at him. “Ask your girlfriend.”

“She’s not—”

He stopped.

Tasha’s mouth tightened. “Right.”

Cook found her in the staff corridor, wiping nonexistent dust from her bandage. “What’d you say to her?”

She looked up. “Nothing.”

“Didn't look like nothing.”

A tiny smile touched her mouth, and it should have pissed him off more than it did. “She thinks she’s special. She thinks because you look at her, it means something.”

Cook’s throat tightened. He should have told her it didn’t. Should have said Tasha was a coworker, that none of this was natural, that she couldn’t go around threatening people because he had an ego and a wandering mouth. Instead, he asked, “And does it?”

Her expression sharpened, and Cook felt it low in his chest: the warning, the want, the sickness of being answered exactly how he wanted.

The first time someone actually paid for what Cook wanted happened just after close. One of the girls from the party came into Kingpin’s with friends, the one who’d giggled too loudly when Cook got dared to kiss Tasha. Cook didn’t remember her name. He remembered her from later, after the bottle incident had been laughed off badly and the music had been turned up again, when his girl had dragged him down the hall to the bathroom and made him wait outside the door because apparently even pissing required a fucking chaperone. He’d leaned against the opposite wall, basking in the stupid satisfaction of being needed that badly, when the girl had wandered out from the living room with a beer in her hand and stopped at the mouth of the hall. “You’re trouble, aren’t you?” she’d said. The bathroom door had stayed shut. The music had been too loud for anything to carry. His girl hadn’t heard a word, which meant Cook got to enjoy the attention without paying for it. And Cook remembered every bit of female attention if it could be used later to soothe himself or make himself worse.

Near closing, she came up to the front desk and made a joke about the broken bottle.

“Your girlfriend still mad at everyone?” she asked.

Cook glanced toward her restocking prizes. “Wouldn’t call her that.”

“Seemed like she would.” The girl tore a corner from an old receipt then, borrowed the pen chained to the counter, and wrote something down with her shoulder angled so her friends couldn’t see but they were giggling.

“Just in case she ever lets you off the lead,” she smirked , sliding it toward him.

Cook should have thrown it away. He didn’t. He glanced at the number, grinned despite himself, and tucked the scrap under the register because he couldn’t help it. Or because he didn’t want to. Twenty minutes later, when he took the rubbish out through the back, he heard the impact before he saw anything. Not a scream first. Not even a shout. Just the hard, wet sound of someone being driven into brick, followed by a choked cry that seemed to catch halfway up a throat and die there. Cook stopped with the bin bag hanging from one hand. The girl from the party was near the car park wall, bent sideways against the bricks while her friend stood several feet away with both hands clamped over her mouth. The girl’s phone lay near the bins, screen shattered across the wet pavement in sharp little flecks, still lighting up uselessly beneath the rain. Her bag had spilled open near the wheel of a parked car, lipstick and keys scattered through the puddles.

She had one hand twisted in the girl’s jacket and the other pressed against the back of her head. For one horrible second, Cook saw the motion before his brain managed to dress it up as anything else. She shoved the girl forward again. Her face hit the wall with a dull crack. The girl made a broken sound and slid down a few inches before she yanked her back up by the collar. Blood smeared the brick where her mouth had struck it. More ran from her cheek and over her lips, dripping onto the collar of her jacket in quick, dark spots. She tried to turn away, but Cook’s girl caught her by the hair and slammed her sideways into the wall hard enough that her knees gave out. Her friend was screaming, “stop! Get off her!”

She let go so suddenly the girl dropped. She hit the asphalt on one hip, palms skidding through dirty water and broken bits of her own phone. Her friend lunged forward, then froze when Cook’s girl turned her head, slow and empty, blood smeared across the knuckles of one hand. Cook’s first thought wasn't, Is she alive? His first thought was, Fuck. Then she looked at him. His jacket hung from her shoulders. Her hand flexed at her side, fingers uncurling one by one like she was only just remembering she had them. Her knuckles were split. A thin red line ran down from her wrist and disappeared under the sleeve, but her expression was calm enough to make the cold air cut sharper in his lungs.

Ryan came through the back door behind him. “What happened?”

The girl on the ground sobbed into the pavement. Cook didn’t answer. She stepped closer, eyes fixed on him and nothing else. “She gave you her number.”

Ryan swore under his breath. The friend was crying now, one hand shaking around her phone as she tried to dial with wet fingers. The girl from the party curled in on herself near the wall, one hand pressed hard to her bleeding mouth like she was trying to keep her face together. Rainwater carried thin red threads through the cracks in the pavement, around the smashed phone, around the dropped keys shining under the security light. Cook stared at all of it. The blood on the brick. The girl’s hair gummied to her cheek. The receipt corner still tucked under the register inside, stupid and flimsy and somehow louder than anything in his head. The stain on the sleeve of his jacket like something he’d signed for and forgotten he could be charged with. He thought of the willow snapping in his fingers. Her tap on the car window. Molly, stupid and convenient. The way she kept waking up confused. The beer bottle. The prize case. Tasha backing away near the bathroom.

He had wanted her to want him so badly it ruined her. Now there was blood outside Kingpin’s, and he still had to bite back the part of himself that wanted to call it devotion. He’d wished to be wanted; the wish granted him violence, and some sick part of him still mistook it for love.

By morning, Kingpin’s had turned the blood into gossip. No one had been charged. That was the first miracle, if Cook was still stupid enough to call anything about it miraculous. The girl from the party and her friend gave one version, shaking and crying under the ugly security light while rainwater thinned the red on the pavement. Cook gave another, mouth tasting of smoke and lies, saying he’d come out too late, saying she was already on the ground, saying maybe there’d been lads hanging about near the bins earlier. Didn’t know them. Didn’t get a proper look. The camera over the back door didn’t reach the car park wall. The one that should have covered the bins had been dead for months because Gareth refused to pay for anything that didn’t immediately stop customers complaining. There was no clean footage. No simple story. No neat little clip to play back and prove what had happened in the dark.

Just two scared girls saying one thing. Cook saying another. And Gareth getting red in the face because he liked any explanation that didn’t come with police sniffing around his business, compensation claims, or questions about why half the security system at Kingpin’s existed purely for decoration.

By open, the car park had already been sanded down into something easier to repeat. She’d mouthed off. She’d slipped. She’d been drunk. She’d got unlucky. Whatever blood was left on the pavement had been hosed away before the first birthday party arrived. The broken phone went into a black bin liner with the rest of the rubbish, and by ten the neon was buzzing again, the fryers were coughing grease into the air, and the arcade machines were shrieking over each other like nothing bad had ever happened in the back parking lot.

Only the staff knew how to move around the lie. Tasha now completely avoided whatever station she was on unless Gareth made it impossible: prize counter, front desk, shoe rental, arcade, the break room. Especially the break room. JJ kept looking at the back doors like he expected the night before to come stumbling in again, wet and bleeding under the security light. Ryan watched Cook with the kind of hatred people stopped bothering to hide once fear had worn the politeness off. Gareth paced by the lanes, scratching at his beard, muttering about CCTV, statements, and how if anyone brought police round Kingpin’s, he’d personally shove them headfirst into the ball return.

She behaved like none of it had happened. That was worse. She brought Cook a bacon roll wrapped in a napkin because he’d forgotten breakfast. Fixed his collar while he was talking to a customer. Stole a chip off his plate, then fed him one back with a smile so sweet it made his stomach turn over. When he yawned, she asked if he’d slept. When he said he was fine, she touched the inside of his wrist like she could take his pulse by instinct now, like his body had become a thing she was responsible for. Cook let her. He told himself it was easier that way. Told himself the girl outside had been walking and crying by the time someone called for help. Told himself there was a difference between hurt and dead, between jealousy and danger, between a one-off and a pattern. It was amazing how many lines a person could draw when he was desperate enough not to see the picture. Ryan cornered him by the staff lockers before lunch. “You need to stop acting like this is normal.”

Cook shoved his jacket into his locker. “Morning to you too, mate.”

“I’m serious.”

“Yeah, noticed. You’re always fucking serious now. Proper inspiring.”

Ryan’s jaw flexed. “That girl ended up in hospital.”

Cook slammed the locker shut hard enough to rattle the row. “And what, you reckon I did it?”

“I reckon you know more than you’re saying.”

Cook laughed, ugly and short, because the alternative was admitting Ryan had stepped too close to the truth. “You’ve been watching too much telly.”

Ryan looked past him, toward the lanes where she was leaning over a ticket machine with a screwdriver in one hand, hair falling forward as she worked. She glanced up at the exact second Cook looked at her, like his attention had tugged a string through the room. Her face lit up. Ryan saw it happen and tensed. “She wasn’t like this."

Cook’s smile faded.

Ryan looked back at him. “You know that, right?”

Cook shouldered past him. “Maybe you just didn’t know her that well.”

The words came out meaner than they needed to. That was how Cook knew they had struck a nerve. It got worse in ways that were small enough to excuse until there were too many of them. She knew his shifts before he told her. Waited outside his flat in the rain with her hood up and his hoodie under her coat, smiling like she hadn’t been standing there for forty minutes. Texted him so often his phone never settled. Texts like: where are you? are you busy? did i do something? cook? cook answer me. Then, when he finally did, the relief came back so fast it was embarrassing, all hearts and apologies and i just missed you, like he’d been gone for days instead of ignoring her through half a cigarette. She wore his clothes more than her own now. His jacket. His hoodies. A red Kingpin’s polo he’d meant to bin because the collar was stretched. After the drawer, she didn’t even bother pretending the little thefts were accidental anymore. When Cook noticed his lighter missing again, she pulled it from her pocket with a guilty smile and said she liked having it because it smelled like him.

“That is mental,” he told her.

“I know.”

“You know, and you still do it?”

Her smile twitched, nervous and wanting. “Do you want me to stop?”

He should have said yes. Instead, he took the lighter from her hand, flicked it open, watched the flame jump up between them. “Depends what I get for being nice about it.”

She kissed him before he had to ask. That was the problem. He stopped having to ask. At first, he made it a joke because jokes were easier to live with than commands. Say you’re mine. Don’t look at him. Tell Ryan to fuck off. Come here. Sit there. Kiss me like you mean it. He said them with a grin, with his hand around a cigarette, with his shoulder propped against a wall, like he was only winding her up, like Cook had ever known when to stop winding someone up. She obeyed too quickly. If Ryan came near the desk, she went silent and looked to Cook first. If a customer flirted with him, she slid beside him and poseessively tucked herself under his arm before he could decide whether he wanted the attention. If Cook clicked his fingers just to be a prick, she shot him a look that should have been annoyed and came anyway, cheeks hot, mouth pressed into a line as if some real, stubborn part of her knew she ought to tell him to fuck off and could not force her mouth to form the words.

The first time he told her to say it properly, they were in his flat with rain tapping hard against the window and takeaway boxes going cold on the floor. She’d let herself in with the spare key he’d stupidly given her and waited with the food while Cook went to the local off-licence for cigarettes, took the long way back because being missed had started to feel better than it should, and didn’t answer for twenty-six minutes. Twenty-six. She had counted them. Every single one. She said it like an accusation, then cried because she hated sounding like that, then apologized because apologizing had become another thing she gave him too easily. She’d tried texting first. Then calling. His phone had buzzed on the mattress beside the takeaway boxes, lighting up with her name over and over while Cook stayed gone, which somehow made it worse. He hadn’t missed her messages. He’d left himself unreachable.

“Something’s wrong with me,” she said, voice shaking in a way that took the heat out of the room. “I can feel myself doing it, and I still can’t stop.”

Cook sat on the edge of the mattress and watched her come apart in front of him, barefoot in one of his old Man United jerseys, his phone still clutched in her hand like evidence. The girl from before was there again, fighting through the devotion with panic in her mouth and shame all over her face. She looked at him like he had the answer. Like he was the only person who could put her back together.

“Tell me what to do,” she whispered.

Cook went cold. For once, he understood the line in front of him. Not guessed. Not felt it somewhere vague and inconvenient. Understood. She was asking because the curse had taught her to, because his want had taken something private inside her and rewired it toward him. He could have said, Go home. He could have said, Call someone. He could have told her to run from him and keep running until whatever rotten thing lived in the willow lost his scent. Instead, Cook held out his hand. “Come here.”

She came. Of course she came. Her knees sank into the mattress on either side of his hips as she climbed into his lap, the washed-out red jersey riding up high enough to show the crotch of the cheap boxers she’d grabbed from his drawer. He watched her the whole way—the way her eyes stayed fixed on him, the way her breath came shallow, the way her bandaged hand caught his shoulder and left a faint red mark against the cotton when she braced herself.

“How’s the hand?” he asked, voice neutral.

She looked down at it, flexed her fingers. “Still hurts.”

“Good.” He reached out and took her wrist, turning her palm up, studying the blood that had bloomed through the gauze. “You’re gonna have a scar.”

“I know.” She didn’t pull away. Her fingers curled around his, and the touch was hot, almost feverish. “Cook, I—”

“Shut up.”

He pulled her closer, mouth finding hers before she could finish whatever honest thing was trying to crawl out of her throat. She tasted like rain and the cheap cherry lip balm she nicked from Boots. Her hands came up to his face, her injured one fisting in his hair, and the pressure was just sharp enough to hurt. Good girl. He bit her bottom lip, hard enough to taste copper, and she gasped into his mouth. “You been thinking about this all night?” he asked, pulling back just enough to see her face. “Coming here, sitting in my room, pacing—been thinking about what I’d do to you?”

She nodded, a jerky motion, her pupils blown so wide her irises were just thin colored rings.

“Yeah,” he said, sliding his hand down her throat, feeling the flutter of her pulse under his thumb. “That’s your problem, innit? You can’t stop thinking about it. Can’t stop wanting it. Even when you don’t know why.”

Her breath hitched. Her hand tightened in his hair. And for a second—just a second—something flickered across her face. Something confused. Scared. The real her, trying to break through once again. He kissed her again before she could get there. Hard. Deep. Tongue sliding against hers, tasting the rain and the salt and the wrongness. He pushed her back until she was flat on the mattress, following her down, his weight pressing her into the sheets. Her legs fell open without him asking. Like a reflex. Like she’d been trained.

“You remember what I told you after the clinic?” he asked, mouth against her jaw, teeth scraping her pulse point. “When you sat there all quiet in that waiting room wearing my jacket, acting like you weren’t squeezing my hand every time the nurse said implant?”

Her hips bucked up, searching for friction he didn’t give her.

“Y-yeah.” Her voice was wrecked, breathy, barely there.

Cook smiled against her skin. “What’d I say?”

Her fingers tightened in his shirt, shame and want moving through her at the same time. “You said…” She swallowed, eyes squeezing shut. “You said now you didn’t have to be careful with me.”

“That’s not all I said.”

She made a small, desperate sound when he pulled back just enough to make her look at him.

“You said you’d fuck me full,” she whispered. “Every time. Whether I wanted it or not.”

“That’s right.” He sat up, pulling her with him, and her jersey came off over her head in one rough motion. The boxers followed, tossed onto the pile of takeaway boxes. She was naked now, sitting on his mattress, the streetlight cutting a stripe across her ribs, her hair tangled, her lips swollen. “And you let me. Because you don’t say no to me.”

She didn’t argue. Her eyes dropped to his lap, to the visible line of his hard-on through his joggers, and her tongue wet her bottom lip. She was already reaching for him, fingers hooking into the waistband, pulling the fabric down over his hips. His cock sprang free, hard and flushed, the tip weeping pre-come. She wrapped her hand around him—the bandaged one—and the sight of that white gauze against his skin made his stomach tighten. She’d bled for him. She’d break glass for him. She’d do anything.

“Good girl,” he breathed, and the words tasted like a confession. He grabbed her hair, pulling her head back, making her look up at him as she started to stroke. Slow at first. Experimental. Her thumb dragging over the head, smearing the slick bead of pre-come down his shaft. Her grip was too dry. Not tight enough.

“Spit on it,” he said.

She did. Her mouth opened, a thick glob of saliva landing on the head, and her hand spread it down his shaft, slick now, the sound of it wet and obscene in the quiet room.

“Faster.”

Her hand moved faster, her grip tightening, the wet slap of her palm against his cock filling the space between rain-gusts. He let his head fall back, eyes half-closing, and watched her from under his lashes. She was staring at where her hand worked him, focused, hungry, her lips parted, her breath coming in soft, desperate sounds that didn’t quite form words.

“Look at you,” he said, voice low. “Look at you jerking me off like you’ve been doing it your whole life. Like you were made for it.” He reached down and caught her wrist, stopping her. “You like being my little hand-job machine?”

“Yes.” No hesitation. Her eyes were wet, but he couldn’t tell if it was tears or rain.

“Yeah, you do.” He released her wrist and grabbed her chin, tilting her face up, forcing her to meet his eyes. “Open.”

Her mouth fell open and he spat into it, watching her throat work as she swallowed. The wet shine on her lips, the way she looked at him like he was the only thing in the room—it made his cock throb, and the feeling was so clean and so wrong that he almost laughed.

“That’s it,” he said. “You’re my personal little—d’you know what I called you in my head? Before all this?”

She shook her head.

“My little cocksleeve. That’s what I thought every time you walked past the prize counter. Every time I watched you clock out. Every time you smiled at someone else.” His grip on her chin tightened until she winced. “You were always gonna end up here. Just took the long way.”

He pulled her up, positioning her straddling his lap, his cock pressed against her stomach, leaving a wet smear against her skin. Her knees bracketed his hips and she was already sinking, grinding down, trying to find the angle, and he caught her by the hips and held her still.

“Not yet,” he said. “You gotta earn it.”

He laid his palm flat against her cheek, not hard, just present. She leaned into it, and the way she pressed her face into his hand, like a cat asking to be pet, made something shift in his chest. He let it settle. Then he slapped her. Not hard enough to knock her over. Hard enough to make her gasp, her head snapping to the side, a lightly bruised bloom spreading across her cheek. Her eyes went wide, and for a second he thought he’d broken her—broken the spell, made the real her surface again. But she turned back to him, looked at him, and her pupils were still blown, her lips still parted, and she said, “Again.”

His blood sang. He slapped her again, the other cheek this time, and her body jolted, her nails digging into his shoulders. She didn’t pull back. She rolled her hips against his, the wet heat of her cunt dragging across the underside of his cock, and he groaned despite himself.

“You’re such a desperate little slag,” he said, fitting his hand around her throat. Not squeezing. Just holding. Letting her feel the weight of it. “You know that? For so long you didn’t want me, and now look at you. Can’t get enough. Can’t stop shaking on my cock.”

“Please,” she breathed, and the word broke on its way out. “Please, I need—”

“I know what you need.” He lined himself up, the head of his cock pressing against her entrance, slick with her wetness and spit. He held there. One inch. Just the tip. And watched her face as she tried to take more, her hips twitching, her breath coming in ragged, punched-out sounds. “Ride me. Show me how much you want it.”

She sank down. Her cunt gripping him, tight and wet, and burning hot. The sound she made when she was fully seated was a low, wrecked moan that vibrated through her chest into his. He grabbed her hips and let her set the pace, and she started moving—a grinding, circular motion that pushed him deeper, her body learning the rhythm, her hands braced on his shoulders.

“Fuck,” he hissed, his head dropping back against the wall. “Fuck, that’s it. Just like that.”

She found a rhythm, her hips rolling, grinding, her thighs working to keep her up, her breath coming in time with the motion. She watched him—her eyes never leaving his face—and the intensity in her gaze, the way she was looking at him like he was oxygen, like she’d die if she stopped—it was everything he’d ever wanted. Everything he’d stolen.

“You feel that?” he asked, his hands sliding down to grip her ass, his nails digging into the soft flesh. “Feel how deep I am? How full you are?”

She nodded her head vigorously, her mouth hanging open.

“That’s where I belong. Inside you. Filling you up.” He reached up and grabbed a fistful of her hair, yanking her head back. “And you’re gonna take it. You’re gonna take every drop, and you’re gonna thank me for it.”

Her hips stuttered, her rhythm breaking as a shudder ran through her. “Cook—”

“Shut up and ride me.” He pulled her down onto him harder, meeting her grind with a thrust of his own, and the air punched out of her lungs. “You don’t get to talk. You don’t get to think. You just get to be my good little cocksleeve, taking what I give you. You understand?”

She nodded again, her teeth catching her bottom lip, her rhythm finding its way back. He loosened his grip on her hair and let his hands fall to her tits, rolling her nipples between his fingers, watching her arch into the touch.

“Such pretty tits,” he said, the words half-buried in a groan. “Wish I could see you like this every day. Wake up to you bouncing on my cock, go to sleep with my come still dripping out of you. Would you like that?”

“Yes.” The word was barely a whisper, cracked and desperate. Her hips were speeding up, her grip on his shoulders tightening, her breath coming in pathetic little gasps. She was close—he could feel it in the way her cunt pulsed around him, the way her rhythm went sloppy.

“You gonna come on my cock?” he asked, his voice dropping, rough and quiet. “Gonna soak me? Make a mess?”

She whimpered—an actual whimper—and he felt the first flutter of her orgasm ripple through her, her body tensing, her cunt clenching around him like a fist. “That’s it. That’s my good fucking girl. Come on me. Come on my cock, show me what you’ve got.”

She came with a broken cry, her head falling forward, her body shaking, her hips grinding through the aftershocks. He watched her—watched the way her mouth went slack, the way her thighs trembled, the way she kept moving even after she’d come, like she couldn’t stop, like she’d keep riding him until she passed out if he told her to. He grabbed her hips, stilling her, and she slumped against him, her forehead pressing into his shoulder, her breath hot and ragged against his skin. He held her there for a moment, feeling the aftershocks ripple through her. Then he pulled out, pushing her down onto her back as he rose to his knees so he could kneel over her, stroking himself, watching her lie there spent and open.

"I'm gonna come on your face. And you're gonna thank me. Every. Single. Drop." She nodded, lips parted, waiting. He shuffled closer, aimed, and the first rope hits her cheek, hot and thick. "Thank you." Second rope across her mouth. "Thank you." Third across her chin, dripping down her neck. "Thank you." He stroked the last few drops onto her tongue, and she closed her lips around the head, sucking him clean, then pulled off and said, "Thank you, Cook." He smeared come across her face with his palm, spread it into her skin like lotion. "Good girl. Now don't wipe it off. I want to see it dry on your face. I want you to feel it crack when you smile." She didn't move. Just laid there, his come drying on her skin, her eyes fixed on him like he hung the moon.

He kissed her, gently this time, and the tenderness tasted like poison. He didn’t care. He crawled out of bed then, his legs unsteady, and walked to the bathroom, catching his reflection in the mirror—hair a mess, lips red, eyes dark. He looked like someone who’d gotten everything he wanted. He grabbed a towel and walked back to find her still on the mattress, curled on her side, her hand resting between her thighs. She was staring at the wall, and he couldn’t see her face, but he could see the way her shoulders rose and fell, slow and steady. Not crying. Just…breathing. He tossed the towel at her feet. “Clean up,” he said, and this time the words were flat.

She sat up slowly, reaching for the towel, and he watched her wipe his come from her thighs but not her face just like he told her to, slow and mechanical, like she was doing it in her sleep. The bandage on her hand was stained a deeper red, the wound bleeding again. She didn’t seem to notice. Or care. He climbed back onto the mattress beside her, taking the towel from her hands and tossing it to the floor. He pulled her close, her back to his chest, his arm locking around her waist, and pressed his face into her hair. She smelled like rain, sweat, and him.

“Where’s your head at?” he asked, and the question came out before he could stop it.

She was quiet for a long moment. Then: “Here.”

He tightened his grip. “Good.”

He didn’t ask again. He closed his eyes and let the lie seal over him, thick enough to keep the truth from getting air. She was his now. That was all that mattered. She fell asleep after with her cheek pressed to his chest, one hand twisted in the fabric of his shirt like she was afraid he might vanish if she let go. Cook stayed awake longer than he wanted to admit, staring at the ceiling, listening to the quiet flat around them: the hum of the fridge, the drip of rain from the gutter outside, the slow drag of her breathing against his skin.

Then a phone buzzed where it had slipped beneath the bed. Not his. Hers. The cracked screen lit the floor in brief, cold flashes. Ryan’s name appeared across it. Cook didn’t move at first. He told himself not to. Told himself only jealous little freaks checked phones. And he was many things, obviously, but he was not that pathetic. Then it buzzed again, and the excuse arrived clean and useful: he needed to know if Ryan was a trigger. Needed to know what had set her off. Needed to know if Ryan was a threat. He reached down carefully and picked it up. The phone needed her thumbprint. For a moment, Cook stared at her sleeping hand where it rested against his shirt. Then he lifted it. Her thumb opened the screen. Of course it did. Everything opened for him now. The messages were older, buried under weeks of unanswered texts from Ryan that got angrier and more worried the longer she ignored him. Cook scrolled past are you okay? and did he do something? and you need to talk to me until he found the ones from before the car, before the willow, before she had looked at him like he was the centre of the room. missed you after you left. you still got my hoodie?. don’t tell cook, he’ll be weird about it. he’s already weird about everything. you coming round later? maybe. depends if you behave.

Cook’s hand tightened around the phone. There were no declarations. No grand romance. Nothing he could point at and call betrayal because there had been nothing to betray yet. That made it worse. Casual was worse. Easy was worse. The thought of her choosing Ryan without magic, without pressure, without a broken twig and a stupid fucking wish in a rain-smeared car, put something hot and black behind Cook’s ribs. He looked down at her asleep against him and for the first time, he hated the version of her the wish had buried. Not because she had been taken. Not because she had been changed. Because before she was changed, she had wanted someone else and laughed about him in the same breath.

By the next shift, Cook had started turning that into something he could use. She had lied. She had pretended. She had acted too good for him while going round to Ryan’s like that meant nothing. The more he thought it, the easier it became to breathe. If the old her had been cruel, then maybe the wish had not ruined anything worth saving. Maybe it had only stripped away all the bullshit and given him the version honest enough to stay. Tasha ruined that by seeing him too obviously. She found him near the back corridor while he was stealing five minutes he hadn't earned, one shoulder against the wall, cigarette unlit between his fingers because Gareth had started threatening to check the cameras. Her eyeliner looked smudged, and there were shadows under her eyes that hadn't been there before the party.

“We need to talk,” she said.

Cook groaned. “Christ, everyone’s desperate for a chat lately.”

“I’m not joking.”

“Can tell. Whole vibe’s fucking tragic.”

Tasha stepped closer, keeping her voice low. “Something is wrong with her.”

Cook looked away. “She’s having a rough time.”

“She threatened to carve my face open.”

“People say things when they’re pissed.”

“She put that girl in hospital.”

“You don’t know that.”

Tasha stared at him. “You keep acting scared when people are watching, but I saw your face when she snapped at Ryan. You liked it.”

Cook’s mouth opened and nothing decent came out. No joke arrived fast enough. No insult covered the little flicker in his chest when she said it.

Tasha nodded once, like that told her everything. “Meet me after shift. My car. I’m not doing this in here.”

“Bit dramatic, that.”

“Cook.”

The way she said his name was not like the curse. Not worshipful. Not desperate. Just tired and worried but also real. It landed somewhere he hadn't meant to keep open.

He looked at her properly then. “Why do you care?”

Tasha’s face tightened. For a second, she looked furious with herself. “Because maybe I’m stupid enough to like you, okay?”

Cook felt the pleasure of it before he could stop himself. Normal. That was the thing. Tasha saying it with her jaw clenched and her eyes annoyed was normal. No wish. No shaking hands. No broken glass. Just a girl looking at him and choosing the embarrassment of admitting she cared. He should have hated himself for enjoying it. He didn’t. After close, he told her he was taking rubbish out and slipped through the back instead. Tasha’s car sat in the far corner of the lot where Kingpin’s neon painted the wet bonnet red and gold. The rain had stopped, but the air was still damp, cold enough that the windows had started to mist at the edges. Cook could see Tasha’s silhouette behind the wheel before he reached the passenger side, both hands fixed at ten and two like she was scared she’d change her mind if she let go.

He slid into the car. “This better be good. I’ve got a very demanding friend waiting who’ll start chewing through plaster if I’m gone too long.”

Tasha didn’t laugh. She kept staring through the windscreen. The vanilla air freshener hanging from the mirror swung slightly when Cook shut the door, fake-sweet over rain-damp fabric and the faint stale smell of old chips and flavored vape smoke. Her knuckles were tight around the wheel.

“I talked to her before all this,” she said.

Cook’s grin thinned. “Okay? Congrats.”

“Properly. At work. At parties. When you weren’t around.”

“Mad concept, people talking when I’m not there.”

“She said you were fun,” Tasha went on, careful enough that it already felt like cruelty. “But too much.”

Cook looked out at the empty lot. “Yeah, well, I am a lot. That’s famously the charm.”

“She said you were a friend.”

The word hit harder than it should have. Friend was nothing. Friend was easy. Friend was the sort of thing he called everyone because names took effort and feelings were embarrassing. From her mouth, through Tasha, it felt like a door closing.

Cook scratched at the side of his jaw. “That all?”

Tasha swallowed. “She said you weren’t someone she’d ever go for.”

The car seemed to shrink around him. Somewhere across the lot, a loose sign creaked in the wind, and Kingpin’s apostrophe buzzed like a trapped insect. “She said you were more like an annoying brother than anything else.”

Cook froze. That was the version with no magic in it. No hidden desire. No fear of wanting him. No sweet little crush buried under sarcasm and bad timing. She had looked at him and seen noise. Trouble. A laugh. A friend. Something too familiar to want and too exhausting to touch. The wish hadn't revealed anything. It had replaced her entirely. Tasha turned toward him, eyes shining with fear and pity, which was a combination Cook wanted to smash out of the air. “I’m sorry.”

“Yeah,” Cook said, voice flat. “You look devastated.”

“I’m trying to help you.”

“Why? Because you fancy me now? Bit fucking convenient.”

Her face flinched. “Don’t be a prick.”

He laughed under his breath, but there was no life in it. “Bit late for that.”

“I mean it, Cook. Whatever’s happening, it isn’t love. She wasn’t secretly waiting for you. She wasn’t playing hard to get. She was herself, and now she isn’t.” The truth sat between them in the fogged-up car, plain and brutal. Cook could feel it pressing against his teeth. He could also feel the other thing, the nasty little satisfaction that Tasha had said she liked him, that another girl had looked at him without the curse and wanted him anyway. For half a second, even with the truth bleeding through him, he let himself enjoy that.

Then the driver’s side window exploded inward. Glass burst across Tasha’s lap and Cook’s knees in a freezing spray. Tasha screamed. Cook jerked back hard enough to hit the passenger door, one arm coming up over his face as cold air and broken safety glass filled the car. She was already there. No warning. No slow silhouette appearing through the misted glass. Just her hand through the broken frame, fingers clamping hard in Tasha’s hair, yanking her sideways with a force that smashed her shoulder into the door.

“Fuck!” Cook shouted, lunging across the gearstick.

Tasha clawed at the seatbelt, panicked, half-trapped, blood striping down from a cut near her temple where the glass had caught her. “Cook!”

The first impact drove her face into the steering wheel. The horn blared, one long, ugly scream across the empty lot. Cook grabbed at the sleeve of his own jacket hanging from her shoulders, but she was braced outside the broken window with both feet planted, expression emptied down to one terrible point of focus. Tasha’s head. The wheel beneath it. The friend who had told him the truth and admitted she wanted him in the same breath. Again. The horn punched the night open. Tasha’s cry broke into something wet and stunned. Her mouth hit the wheel wrong, teeth clicking hard enough for Cook to hear through the blare, and red smeared across the grey plastic where her cheek dragged sideways. She tried to twist away, but the seatbelt had locked tight across her chest, pinning her in place while panic made her hands useless.

“Stop!” Cook yelled, dragging at her. “Stop, fucking stop!”

She looked at him then, just for a second, and the calm in her face was worse than rage. “She wanted you.” Tasha made a small sound, a breath trying to become a word. The next blow cut it off. Her face struck the wheel again with a thick, awful crack that made Cook’s stomach drop. The horn stuttered under the impact, screaming, choking, screaming again. Blood spotted the windscreen from the inside in a fine red spray. Tasha’s hands flew up too late, fingers scraping over the dashboard, nails catching against the plastic before slipping. Cook shoved the passenger door open so hard it bounced off the car beside them. He stumbled out, glass crunching under his shoes, then rounded the front of the car and grabbed her around the waist from behind. She fought him like she didn’t know him. Her elbow cracked into his ribs. One heel scraped down his shin. Her hands stayed locked in Tasha’s hair, trying to pull her forward again even as Cook hauled her back from the window.

“She wanted you,” she said again, voice rising now, not calm anymore, breaking into something wild and wounded. “You lied to me! Why would you lie to me?!”

“I didn’t,” Cook gasped, dragging her away from the door. “I didn’t fucking do anything.”

The lie came out on instinct, which told him everything. Tasha sagged against the wheel. The horn kept blaring beneath her, muffled by the weight of her body, one long animal sound trapped under the bonnet. Her face had turned toward them at an angle that looked wrong in the red-and-gold wash of the sign. One eye was half-open. Her lips moved, but all that came out was a wet little breath that fogged the glass in front of her. Cook got one arm around her middle and wrenched her back. This time, her fingers came away full of Tasha’s hair. For one horrible heartbeat, she stared at it in her hand. Then Tasha twitched. Small. Barely anything. Her fingers curled against the seat, searching for the belt, the door, a way out, anything. The sight of it snapped the curse back into motion. She surged forward so violently Cook nearly lost his grip. Her hand shot through the broken window again, palm slamming against the back of Tasha’s head, and before Cook could pull her off, she shoved down hard.

Tasha’s face crushed into the centre of the wheel. The horn screamed clean this time. Cook heard cartilage give. Heard the blunt, final sound of bone meeting plastic with nowhere left to go. Blood ran down the steering column and dripped onto Tasha’s jeans in heavy spots. Her body jerked once, shoulders locking, then slackened all at once. The horn stopped. The silence after was so sudden Cook could hear the tick of cooling metal, the buzz of Kingpin’s neon, the thin patter of rain starting up again on the roof. Tasha’s hand slid from the wheel and fell limp beside the seat. She went loose in his grip. The change came fast enough to make him dizzy. One second she was all force, all violence, all jealous purpose. The next, she was staring through the shattered window at Tasha’s body with the devotion draining out of her face, leaving only terror.

“What did I do?” she whispered.

Then she looked past him. At Tasha. Whatever had been holding her together split all at once. Her breath hitched, stopped, then came back wrong, too fast and too loud. She staggered toward the car like she meant to help, then recoiled before she got there, staring at her own hands as if they’d been put on her body by someone else.

“No,” she said. “No, no, no. Cook, what did I do?”

Cook caught her by the arms before she could back into the broken glass. He could feel every tremor ripping through her now, violent enough to shake into his palms.

“Cook?” Her voice climbed, thin and panicked. “Why am I here? Why is there blood on me? Did I—” She choked on the rest, eyes snapping back to Tasha. “Is she dead?”

The chance came back to him with the cruelty of a joke. He could tell her. He could say, I did this. I made a wish. I broke you because I couldn’t stand wanting someone who didn’t want me back. He could give her the truth even if it came too late for Tasha, too late for the girl outside Kingpin’s, too late for whatever decent version of himself might have existed before the willow snapped in his fist. Instead, he looked past her to the car park, the cameras mounted near the back entrance, the broken window, Tasha not moving in the driver’s seat. Self-preservation arrived before grief, before guilt, before anything that should’ve made him human. Cook released one of her arms and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, leaving a smear near his knuckles that wasn’t all his.

“Did anyone see you?” he asked.

She stared at him like he’d spoken another language.

“Listen to me.” His voice came out harsh, urgent. “Did anyone see you come out here?”

“I don’t know.” She shook her head hard, tears spilling now, breath breaking into ugly little sobs. “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t remember. Cook, please, I don’t remember doing that.”

“Fuck.”

He checked the lot, the back door, the red blink of the camera, trying to remember which angle Gareth had said was broken because he refused to pay for a new one. His thoughts moved horribly fast. Cameras. Police. Ryan. Gareth. The girl in hospital. Tasha in the car. His fingerprints on the passenger door. Her wearing his jacket. She was unraveling beside him, hands hovering in front of her face, fingers opening and closing like she didn’t understand what they were capable of. She wiped at the red on her skin and only smeared it worse, a broken sound tearing out of her throat when she saw it spread.

“I didn’t mean to,” she said. “I didn’t mean to, I swear I didn’t. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

Cook looked back at her. That was when it changed. Her hysteria didn’t vanish so much as bend toward him, terror dragging itself into devotion because the curse knew where to put all that pain. Her eyes found his and stayed there. Her hands dropped from the red on her fingers to his shirt, gripping tight, pleading with him to make the world smaller.

“Tasha confused you,” she said, voice shaking. “I saw her. I saw how she looked at you. I fixed it. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

Cook should’ve pushed her away. He pulled her behind the bins instead, out of the camera’s cleanest line. He did call eventually. Not straight away. Not before he’d wiped what he could from the passenger handle with the inside of his sleeve. Not before he’d taken his jacket off her shoulders and shoved it behind the bins. Not before he’d told her to go to his flat by the back way and wait there, no texts, no calls, no stopping for anyone. When he finally stumbled into Kingpin’s shouting for Gareth to call an ambulance, his voice sounded convincing enough that everyone ran. By then, Cook had already learned something about himself he could never unlearn. His first instinct had been to live with it.

The One Wish Willow box was still under the passenger seat of his car because Cook had never been good at throwing away evidence of his own stupidity. He found it later with shaking hands, after the ambulance lights had gone, after Gareth’s voice had turned hoarse from shouting, after Ryan had looked at him across Kingpin’s like he finally understood Cook was worse than a coward. The box had slid half under the seat rail, red-and-cream cardboard damp along one corner from whatever had leaked down there, the cartoon faces still grinning up at him like they knew the punchline. Cook sat in the driver’s seat with the door open, one foot on the wet tarmac, the heater blowing stale air against his knees. His hands smelled faintly metallic no matter how many times he’d wiped them on his jeans. The car park was mostly empty now, Kingpin’s neon buzzing overhead, gold and red dragging itself across the puddles like the place was trying to make even murder look tacky. He turned the box over. The hotline number waited on the back in small printed text, tucked beneath the instructions and all the cheery little promises the packaging had no business making anymore.

NEED HELP? CALL TODAY! 1-323-747-7118.

Cook laughed once. It came out wrong. He dialed before he could think too hard about it. The line rang twice, clicked, and then a bright recorded voice filled the car. “Thank you for contacting One Wish Willow support. For wish dissatisfaction, press one. For unintended romantic escalation, press two. For injury, pursuit, fixation, or violent attachment, press three. If your wish has resulted in death, please remain on the line.”

Cook stared through the windscreen. “You’ve got to be fucking joking.”

A soft beep sounded. “Your call may be recorded for training and liability purposes. One Wish Willow is not responsible for unclear phrasing, malicious intent, emotional negligence, activation while intoxicated, activation during heartbreak, humiliation, rejection, social embarrassment, romantic jealousy, or poor judgment.”

Cook shut his eyes. “Yeah. Brilliant. Very helpful.”

The hold music started. Tinny. Cheerful. Some little nursery-rhyme version of a pop song he couldn’t place, plinking away while Tasha’s head hitting the wheel replayed behind his eyes. Cook gripped the phone so hard his knuckles hurt. The line clicked again. A man came on, voice flat enough to sound like he’d been saying the same thing all day and hated every person who made him say it twice. “One Wish Willow support. Name and nature of your wish-related concern?”

Cook stared at the grinning cartoon branch. “You lot are real?”

A pause. “Yes.”

“Right. Okay. Yeah. Course you are.”

“Name?”

“Cook.”

“First name, surname, or nickname?”

“Just Cook.”

The man sighed softly. “Fine. Nature of concern?”

Cook rubbed a hand over his mouth. “Hypothetically, if someone wished for a girl to fancy him and now she’s gone a bit murdery—”

“We don’t process hypotheticals after activation.”

Cook looked up at the rain-specked windscreen. “Fine. Not hypothetically.”

“Thank you. Was the willow broken cleanly or splintered?”

“I don’t fucking know. It was dark, I was pissed off, and I was having a moment.”

Paper shifted on the other end of the line. “Was there blood at activation?”

“No.”

“Witnesses?”

“No.”

“Was the desired party named clearly in the wish?”

Cook’s throat tightened. The car seemed smaller suddenly, the box too bright in his lap.

“Clear enough.”

“Was the wording romantic, sexual, possessive, punitive, corrective, or retaliatory?”

Cook blinked. “What?”

“Closest category.”

“All of them,” he muttered.

Another pause.

“Not recommended,” the man said.

“Yeah, well, we’re a bit past recommended, aren’t we?”

“Describe the escalation.”

Cook leaned his head back against the seat. The fabric was cold against his skull. “She’s jealous.”

“Expected.”

“She’s clingy.”

“Expected.”

“She watches me sleep.”

“Within range.”

Cook’s laugh scraped out of him. “Within range. Brilliant.”

“Has the desired party displayed violence toward herself or others?”

Cook saw Tasha’s fingers slipping off the wheel. Saw the horn blaring under the weight of her body. Saw the girl in the car park folded against the bricks, mouth red, phone smashed near the bins. “Yeah."

“Severity?”

Cook swallowed. “Bad.”

“I need more specific than bad.”

“How violent is violent?”

“Recently?”

He let his eyes close.

“Hospital,” he said. “Then worse.”

The operator went quiet. For the first time, he sounded less bored. “Is the desired party currently with you?”

“No.”

“Do you know where she is?”

“My flat.”

“Did you instruct her to go there?”

Cook’s jaw tightened. “Yeah.”

“Has she disobeyed direct instructions since activation?”

He thought about it. No texts. No calls. No stopping for anyone. His stomach turned. “No.”

“Then the bond is stable.”

“Stable?” Cook snapped. “She just—” He stopped himself, glancing toward Kingpin’s like the walls could still hear him. “She nearly killed someone.”

“Nearly?”

Cook said nothing.

The man exhaled. “Understood.”

“Can you fix it?”

“That depends on what you mean by fix.”

Cook leaned forward, elbows on his knees, the box creasing slightly under his grip. “Can you make her, like…less murdery but still into me?”

The silence on the line was worse than judgment. “Alterations after activation are not supported.”

Cook stared at the rubber floor mat. There was a tiny dark flake caught in the rubber grooves. Blood or mud. He couldn’t tell anymore.

“So what, that’s it?” he asked. “She’s just like this?”

“The wish persists until the object of devotion dies.”

Cook’s hand went cold around the phone. For one stupid, shameful moment, he thought of her. Her body under the same ugly security light. Her blood on the same wet tarmac. A clean ending that required him to lose the thing he had wanted badly enough to ruin. Then the operator clarified.

“To be clear, you are the object of devotion.”

Cook stopped breathing.

“The wish ends when you die.”

The heater hummed. Rain ticked lightly against the roof. Somewhere upstairs, in his flat, she was waiting because he had told her to. Because she did what he said now. Because he had made her into someone who would.

Cook laughed once, quiet and empty. “So I’ve got to die?”

“That is the termination condition.”

“Any alternatives?”

“None that work.”

Cook lowered the phone from his ear and looked at the box in his lap. The little doodled faces on the front stared up at him, a man and a woman drawn in soft, stupid lines like this was still some novelty you bought for a laugh. Bright colors. Cheap promises. The sort of thing that belonged in a gift shop beside scented candles and mugs that said things like follow your dreams. Not under his hands. Not after Tasha’s skull had met the steering wheel. Not after the truth had finally crawled out from under every excuse he’d built and sat there in front of him, simple as. He thought of the girl from before all this. Not the one in his bed. The real one. Laughing at the counter because Ryan had said something stupid. Rolling her eyes at Cook because he’d made something filthy out of nothing. Sitting in his car, rain on the windows, telling him in every way except the actual words that he wasn't what she wanted. He thought of Tasha’s voice in the car. She wasn’t secretly waiting for you. He knew then. Properly. With horrible clarity. He had stolen her. Not won. Not uncovered. Not seduced. Stolen.

The knowledge landed with no softness around it, no pretty little way to dress it up. The world gave him one simple equation: his death for her freedom. His life for her curse. One simple answer, sitting there in his hands, waiting for him to be the sort of person he had never once managed to be. Cook sat with that until his breathing steadied. Then he hung up.

For a while, Cook just sat there with the phone in his hand, listening to the dead line that wasn't a line anymore, only his own breathing and the heater coughing stale air into the car. The answer stayed where the man had left it. The wish ends when you die. Simple. Clear. Horrible. Cook looked at the box again. The cartoon faces smiled back at him from his lap, cheerful and stupid, and untouched by consequence. It had no blood on it. No shaking hands. No girl waiting upstairs with pieces of herself missing. No Tasha slumped against a steering wheel. Just bright colors and soft rounded letters, as if all of this was still a joke you could buy at a counter and give to someone for a laugh. His thumb pressed into the cardboard until it bent. For one second, he imagined doing it.

Not properly. Not with any plan. Just a flash of it, sudden and ugly: stepping into the road, swerving the car into a wall, taking a knife from the kitchen and making himself brave for once in his miserable fucking life. Ending it. Ending her. Giving her back whatever part of her he had stolen. The thought lasted long enough to make him feel sick. Then it passed. Not because he couldn't picture it. Because he could. Because, in the picture, she was free. And Cook wasn't there to see it. He deleted the call from his phone. Then the number. Then he checked it twice, because panic made him thorough in ways guilt never had. He wiped the box down with the hem of his shirt even though his fingerprints were everywhere by now, then shoved it into the glove compartment beneath old receipts, a cracked CD case, and a packet of Rizla with two papers left inside. The cartoon faces disappeared under rubbish. Cook shut the compartment. There. Gone. That was how people like him handled the truth. Put something over it and decided it was buried.

When he got back upstairs, the flat was quiet. Too quiet at first. The kind of quiet that made his skin prickle before he saw her. She was sitting on the edge of his bed in one of his shirts, knees drawn up, bare feet tucked under the mattress frame. Her hair was damp at the ends like she had tried to wash more than her hands. The bathroom light had been left on behind her, striping the hall in yellow. His towel lay abandoned on the floor, streaked faintly pink where she must have scrubbed at her skin until the worst of it came off. Not all of it. A thin crescent of blood still clung under one nail. Cook saw it before she curled her hands into the hem of his shirt. Her face lifted the second he came in.

“Are you angry?” she asked. Cook closed the door behind him. The lock clicked. He felt it in his teeth. He should have said yes. Should have said worse. Should have told her he was scared of her, scared of himself, scared that the only way to undo any of it required him to stop breathing. Should have told her about the box, the call, the man on the phone, the termination condition sitting in the glove compartment under receipts and dust. Instead, Cook crossed the room and touched her face. She went quiet instantly.

“There you are,” he said, because the line still worked and he hated that it did.

Relief crossed her so fast it looked painful. “I didn’t know where I was.”

“I know.”

“I saw her.” Her voice shook. “Tasha, and then outside, and then glass, and then—” She swallowed hard, staring at him like he could decide how much of the memory survived. “I hurt her.”

Cook kept his hand on her cheek. “You were upset.”

“She was bleeding.”

“You were confused.”

“I hurt her, Cook.”

His thumb brushed her cheekbone once. “She got in your head.”

The words changed the air between them. Her brow pulled in. “No.”

“Tasha got in your head,” he repeated, gentler this time, like he was reminding her of something she’d forgotten. “She was trying to make you doubt yourself.”

“I don’t think—”

“That’s the problem, isn’t it?” Cook stepped closer, until her knees brushed his legs. “You keep thinking there’s some other you under all this. Some better version waiting to come back and tell you I’m bad for you.”

Her mouth trembled. “There is.”

The honesty of it cut through him so cleanly he almost stepped back. Almost. Instead, Cook’s hand slid from her cheek to the side of her neck, not holding tight, not yet. Just there. Present. Familiar. A reminder.

“No,” he said. “That’s what everyone else told you to be.”

She stared up at him.

“This is you.”

Her breath caught.

“You just finally stopped pretending.”

She shook her head once, small and frightened. “That’s not true.”

“Isn’t it?” Cook asked. “You came back to the car.”

Something fractured behind her eyes. Cook saw it and pushed.

“You remember that, yeah? The night it started. I was sitting there like a fucking idiot, and you came back. Could’ve gone home. Could’ve left me there. But you didn’t.”

Her hands twisted in the hem of his shirt. “Because I wanted you,” she said, but it sounded like someone had placed the words on her tongue and made her taste them.

Cook’s stomach turned. He smiled anyway. “There you go.”

Her eyes filled. “Cook…”

“You wanted me.”

She shook her head again, weaker this time. “I was scared.”

“You wanted me,” he said, and now his voice had an edge under the gentleness, something he couldn’t keep buried. “Not Ryan.”

The name cut through the fog. Her expression emptied. “Ryan?”

Cook’s grip firmed before he meant it to, not enough to choke, enough to make her attention snap back to him. “You remember him?”

“I…” She blinked hard. “I don’t know.”

“You liked him.”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe?”

“I don’t know,” she said, panic rushing back into her voice. “I don’t know, Cook. I can’t tell what’s mine anymore.”

That should’ve stopped him. It sat right there in front of him: the truth, plain as Tasha’s voice in the fogged-up car. She couldn’t tell what belonged to her. He had done that. His wish had taken her wants and bent them around him until every thought came out wearing his name. Cook leaned down until their foreheads nearly touched.

“Then let me tell you.”

Her eyes searched his. His heart was going too fast, ugly living proof that he had chosen himself once already and was about to do it again.

“You didn’t want Ryan,” he said.

Her mouth parted.

“You didn’t want Tasha.”

A tear slipped down her cheek.

“You wanted me.”

Her voice broke. “I wanted you.”

Cook closed his eyes briefly. It felt like winning. “Say it properly.”

“I wanted you,” she whispered. “I only wanted you.”

She was crying now, silently, like her body knew it had been made to lie and couldn’t stop obeying the lie anyway. Cook wiped the tear away with his thumb. The tenderness of it was almost obscene.

“Good,” he said.

The word ruined her. Her shoulders sank, relief cutting through the panic, devotion closing over the wound he had made. She leaned into him like he had saved her from something, when all he had done was press his hands over her mouth until her own voice came out wrong.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry I scared you.”

Cook took in the bathroom light glowing behind her, the towel on the floor, the tiny red crescent under her nail, his shirt on her body, his name in her mouth. Then he thought of the operator’s voice again. The wish ends when you die. His hand moved into her hair.

“I’m still here, aren’t I?”

She nodded quickly.

“And you’re still here.”

“Yes.”

“So stop looking like that.”

She tried. That was the worst part. She actually tried. Swallowed it down, rearranged herself into something he could bear to look at without seeing the car park reflected back at him. Cook kissed her, not because it was the right thing, not because she needed comfort, but because the alternative was standing there with the truth between them, and Cook had never known what to do with truth except make it uglier. She kissed him back after a moment. Of course she did.

By morning, pretending had gotten easier than remembering. Cook woke with his arm still locked around her waist, her body tucked against his like she’d fallen asleep mid-apology and never finished the sentence. For a few seconds, the flat was ordinary in the miserable way his flat was always ordinary: cold air near the window, stale smoke in the curtains, a mug on the floor with tea dried brown at the bottom. Then she shifted, and everything came back. Tasha’s car. The horn. The hotline. The wish ends when you die. Cook stared at the ceiling and didn’t move.

Beside him, she made a small sound in her sleep and pressed closer, fingers curling against his shirt. The red under her nail was gone now. She must’ve scrubbed it out sometime in the night, or he had, or both of them had done enough cleaning that his head had folded the details into one ugly blur. His shirt had slipped at her shoulder, showing the edge of the bruise his mouth had left there, and the sight of it still gave him that same sick, satisfaction.

Mine, he thought.

Then, immediately after, because the universe was a sadistic little prick: Stolen.

She woke up with his name already in her mouth. “Cook?”

He shut his eyes. There were a hundred things he could’ve said. He could’ve told her about the hotline. He could’ve told her the truth while morning made everything less dramatic and more damning. Instead, he rolled toward her and put a hand on her hip. “Morning.”

Her expression changed too quickly, nervousness bending toward him before it knew what else to be. “Are you still angry?”

“No.”

“Are you lying?”

Cook’s mouth twitched. “Obviously.”

She didn’t smile. That was new. Or old. He couldn’t tell anymore. Her eyes searched him like she was trying to read his answer before the curse finished deciding how she felt about it.

“I remember some of it,” she said.

Cook’s hand stalled.

“Not all,” she added quickly, like she was scared the memory itself would upset him. “Just bits. The car. Tasha crying. You pulling me back.” Her fingers curled into the sheet. “I remember asking what did I do.”

“You were upset.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“No,” Cook said. It's the only one you're gonna get. “It’s the only one that matters.”

She turned away toward the curtains and the weak morning light leaking around the edges. For a moment, she looked like someone trapped in a room she didn’t remember entering. Then Cook touched her face, and her attention came back to him too fast.

“You need to stop picking at it,” he said. “You’ll only make yourself worse.”

“I hurt someone.”

“I already told you, Tasha got in your head.”

“She’s dead, isn’t she?”

The room went silent.

Cook felt the question land in his chest and stay there. He hadn’t meant for her to know. Not yet. Maybe not ever. He’d imagined keeping it vague, messy, something she’d done but didn’t have to name. Hospital. Accident. Bad night. Anything that left the final shape of it blurred.

“Cook.”

His jaw worked.

“Yeah,” he said.

The answer hollowed her out. No sobbing. No screaming. Not at first. Her fingers slipped from the sheet, her mouth parting around a sound that never made it out, and for the first time since the wish, Cook saw her look at herself like she was the thing in the room to fear.

Then Cook ruined it.

“You didn’t mean to.”

Her eyes filled. “That doesn’t make it better.”

“I know.”

“You don’t.” The words came out small, but they came out hers. “You don’t know that.”

Cook’s hand dropped from her face. The loss of contact seemed to scare her more than the confession. She reached for him instantly, then stopped herself halfway, hand hovering between them like she didn’t trust it to be her own. That should’ve killed something in him. Instead, it made him angry. Not at her. At the pause. At the tiny stubborn piece of her still trying to choose. Cook sat up.

“Get dressed,” he said.

She blinked. “What?”

“We’ve got work.”

“Cook—”

“Gareth’ll be watching everyone. Ryan too.” He swung his legs off the mattress and found his jeans on the floor. “You don’t show up, it looks weird.”

“It is weird.”

He turned back to her. She flinched before he even spoke. Cook saw it. Cook hated it. Cook kept going anyway.

“You want everyone asking questions?” he said. “You want them looking at you?”

Her defiance drained, replaced by fear so quickly it proved him right in the worst way.

“No.”

“Then get dressed.”

She stared at him for another moment, eyes wet, mouth trembling around something she didn’t say. Then she nodded.

Of course she did.

Kingpin’s opened late, which was Gareth’s version of respect.

By noon, the front doors were unlocked, the arcade machines were shrieking, and the fryer was back to pumping grease into the air like nothing human had ever happened within fifty feet of the place. The back corner of the car park was still taped off. Tasha’s car was gone. Someone had thrown sand over the worst of what had been left on the tarmac, but rain had dragged some of it thin, carrying it in faint reddish trails toward the drain near the bins. Cook saw it before she did. He stepped in front of her without thinking. Not to protect her from it. To stop her reacting where anyone could see.

She almost walked into his back. “Cook?”

“Eyes on me.”

Her fingers were cold when he took her wrist, disappearing almost completely into the sleeve of his old jacket. His jacket. Because apparently even after everything, Cook still couldn’t stop making little claims on her where people could see. No. Worse than that. He liked seeing her in it. Inside, Gareth was pacing by the front desk with his phone in one hand and a clipboard in the other, face blotchy, beard rough where he kept dragging his fingers through it.

“No one says anything that isn’t what they already said,” he snapped before Cook had even clocked in. “Police come back, you cooperate. Customers ask, you don’t know a bloody thing. Press ask, you don’t know a bloody thing louder.”

JJ stood near the shoe rental, arms folded tight across his chest, staring at nothing. His face had a greyish cast to it. Every few seconds his eyes flicked toward the back corridor and then away again, as if looking too long might bring Tasha through it. Ryan was behind the lanes. He looked like he hadn’t slept. The second Cook walked in, Ryan’s attention fixed on him with a hatred so evident it made the room feel hotter. Then his eyes moved to her. She was standing half a step behind Cook, quiet, hands tucked into the sleeves of the jacket. She looked smaller when she wasn’t performing devotion. Not physically. Just dimmed somehow, like the morning had drained the violence out of her and left her with the echo of it. Ryan looked from her to Cook, and whatever he saw there made his jaw tighten. Cook felt her shift beside him.

“Don’t,” he said under his breath.

“I wasn’t.”

“Yeah, you were.”

Her fingers brushed his wrist. “I just don’t like how he’s looking at you.”

Cook almost laughed. Almost. Because Tasha was dead. Because the back lot still had caution tape around it. Because Ryan’s grief had teeth, and all Cook could think for one sick second was that she still cared more about Ryan looking at him than the body that had been dragged out of the car. He leaned closer, mouth near her ear.

“Then don’t look back.”

She went still, then her eyes dropped to the floor. Of course they did. Gareth clapped his hands once, sharp and desperate. “Right. We’ve got two parties booked, one staff member down, and if anyone starts crying where customers can see it, I swear to God I’ll join in and then we’re all fucked. Move.”

It should’ve been impossible to work. It wasn’t. That was the worst part. Shoes still needed spraying. Lanes still jammed. Kids still shoved tokens into machines and screamed when the claw dropped half an inch from a stuffed plushie. The world had a disgusting talent for carrying on. Tasha had been alive yesterday. Today, a man complained that lane five had swallowed his daughter’s pink bowling ball and could someone please fix it because they’d paid for the full hour. Cook fixed it. He crawled half under the return while the machinery coughed and rattled above him, grease and dust sticking to his forearms, and tried not to think about Tasha’s head hitting the wheel. Tried not to think about the hotline, about the box in his glove compartment.

When he came back out, Ryan was waiting. Not by accident. He stood near the staff-only door with a bucket of lane cleaner in one hand and murder in his face. Not the messy kind she had. Ryan’s was quieter. Human. The sort that still knew what consequences were and hated itself for wanting them anyway.

“We need to talk.”

Cook wiped his hands on his work trousers. “Popular fucking phrase lately.”

Ryan didn’t blink. “Now.”

“No.”

Ryan stepped closer. “Did she do it?”

Cook’s eyes flicked, just once, toward the prize counter.

She was there with JJ, sorting tickets into bundles because Gareth had stuck her somewhere visible, somewhere bright, somewhere he could pretend visible meant safe. Her hands moved carefully. Too carefully. Every few seconds, she looked over at Cook like she could feel the distance tugging. Cook looked back at Ryan.

“Careful.”

“Did she do it?”

“You grieving, mate? Or interrogating?”

Ryan’s face twisted. “Don’t call me mate.”

Cook’s smile came on out of habit. It didn’t reach anywhere real. “Alright. What do you want me to call you?”

“I want you to tell me why Tasha’s dead.”

The word hit the air between them. Dead. Not hurt. Not hospital. Not accident. Dead. Cook felt it move across the room even though Ryan had kept his voice low. It seemed to find her anyway. Her head lifted at the prize counter, eyes locking onto him. Cook’s stomach dropped. Ryan saw it. Saw her. Saw the line between them work. His expression changed.

“Jesus,” he said quietly. “You know.”

Cook grabbed his arm and shoved him through the staff-only door before Ryan could say it any louder. The back corridor smelled of damp cardboard, bleach, and the bins outside. The fluorescent light overhead flickered hard enough to make the walls twitch. Cook let go first, because keeping his hand on Ryan felt too much like admitting Ryan had made him move. Ryan shoved him back. Cook hit the opposite wall, shoulder first.

“There he is,” Cook said, breath coming sharp. “Knew you had a little fight in you.”

Ryan’s eyes were red. Not crying now. Past that. “What did you do to her?”

Cook’s mouth shut. Not what did she do? What did you do to her?

Ryan stepped closer. “She wasn’t like this.”

“Everyone keeps saying that.”

“Because it’s true.”

Cook laughed, short and ugly. “You all experts now, yeah?”

“I knew her.”

The words landed exactly where Ryan meant them to.

Cook’s hands curled at his sides. “Did you?”

Ryan stared at him. Then something bitter moved through Ryan’s face, grief and guilt and cruelty all getting tangled together.

“Yeah, Cook. I did.”

Cook’s jaw flexed.

Ryan took one more step. “You read her phone?”

Cook said nothing.

“That’s why you’ve been looking at me like that.”

Cook’s smile came back wrong. “Careful, mate.”

Ryan laughed then, but there was nothing funny in it. “You’re unbelievable.”

“Yeah? Go on.”

“She was coming round mine,” Ryan said. “Before all this. Before you started acting like she’d been yours the whole time.”

Cook felt the corridor tilt. Ryan saw it and kept going.

“She was texting me. Wearing my hoodie. Getting in my bed because she wanted to, not because I had to hover over her every second like a fucking creep.”

Cook’s hand curled into a fist.

Ryan’s voice shook, but he didn’t stop. “And the worst part? I told you to ask her out because I knew she’d say no. I knew she didn’t want you like that.”

Cook hit him. It wasn’t clever. Definitely not planned. His fist cracked across Ryan’s mouth hard enough to snap his head sideways, and for one beautiful second the only thing in the world was impact. Ryan stumbled into a stack of flattened cardboard boxes, caught himself, then came back swinging. His knuckles caught Cook in the cheek. Pain flashed white. Cook laughed through it because laughing was better than making the sound he actually wanted to make. He shoved Ryan back towards the door at the end of the corridor, the one that opened behind the lanes where the machinery ran loud enough to eat voices. Ryan grabbed the front of his Kingpin's polo.

“You ruined her,” Ryan spat.

Cook drove his shoulder into him, slamming him against the wall. Ryan’s breath punched out.

“You don’t know shit.”

“I know she was scared of you.”

“She came back to me.”

“Did she?” Ryan’s mouth twisted, blood bright at the corner. “Or did you finally wear her down enough that she stopped sounding like herself?”

Cook froze. The corridor seemed to narrow around the sentence. Ryan’s chest rose and fell hard. He looked past Cook then, toward the small rectangular window in the staff door. Cook turned. She was there. Standing on the other side of the glass. Watching. For a long moment, no one moved. Her eyes went from Cook’s split cheek to Ryan’s bleeding mouth. Then to Ryan’s hands, still twisted in Cook’s work shirt. Something in her face went empty. Ryan let go first.

“Don’t,” he said. Not to Cook. To her. That made it worse. Cook opened the door before she could.

“Go back out front,” he said.

She looked at Ryan, then at Cook. Ryan shook his head slowly. “Don’t listen to him.”

Her hand flexed at her side. The bandage pulled tight across her palm. Cook felt the whole thing balance there, awful and delicate. He should’ve told her to leave. He should’ve told Ryan to run. Instead, because Ryan had said she was coming round mine and Cook could still feel the words chewing through his ribs, he said, “He’s upsetting me.”

Her face changed. Ryan saw it happen.

“Oh, fuck you,” he said, voice cracking. “Cook, don’t—”

She didn’t run at first. That was what made it scary. She walked through the staff door with the same terrible focus she’d had outside Tasha’s car, shoulders still, bandaged hand flexing at her side. Ryan backed up on instinct, one hand lifted like he could talk her down, like there was anything in the room left to reason with. Cook saw the exact second Ryan understood he wasn’t looking at someone angry. He was looking at someone aimed.

“Stay back,” Ryan said.

She didn’t even blink. “You hurt him.”

Cook’s split cheek pulsed with heat, and some rotten little part of him thrilled at how quickly she’d made it simple. Ryan had blood on his mouth. Cook had blood under his skin. That was enough. That was all the curse needed. It didn’t care about Tasha, or the phone, or the way Ryan had said she was coming round mine like it was a knife and he knew where to jab. It only needed Cook hurt and Ryan close enough to punish.

Ryan looked past her. “Cook.”

Cook should’ve said something. He should’ve grabbed her, should’ve pulled her back by the waist and told Ryan to get out, should’ve used the same horrible obedience that made her drop her eyes and come when called. The command sat ready in his mouth. Stop. Leave him. Come here. But Ryan’s words were still lodged under his ribs. She was coming round mine. Wearing my hoodie. Getting in my bed because she wanted to.

Cook said nothing, and she closed the distance.

Ryan shoved her away when she reached for him, not hard enough to hurt, just enough to keep her off. That was his mistake. Her shoulder hit the wall, and the sound she made wasn’t pain. It was surprise, followed by something low and furious. She came back faster, catching his wrist with both hands and twisting it down so sharply Ryan swore and stumbled sideways into the door behind the lanes. The machinery was louder back there, all clatter and hum, the ugly industrial guts of Kingpin’s hidden from customers by painted walls and ugly carpet. A return motor coughed somewhere beyond the door, belts turning, rollers dragging, pins knocking together in hollow plastic thuds. Ryan tried to wrench his arm free, but she went with him, body pressed close, face blank with effort.

“You touched him,” she said.

Ryan’s eyes flashed with panic. “I didn’t—”

“You made him bleed.”

Cook moved then, too late to be innocent and too slow to be useful. “Alright, that’s enough.”

She didn’t hear him. Or she did and chose the stronger command: his hurt, her rage, the wish turning both into permission. Ryan stumbled through the half-open service door and hit the narrow space behind lane seven. The air changed at once, hotter and worse, thick with dust, oil, and old rubber. The ball return was exposed in pieces back here, not the glossy customer-facing mouth that spat balls neatly onto the rack, but the underside: belts, metal runners, wheels turning with a grinding patience that made Cook’s stomach tighten.

“Get her off me!” Ryan shouted.

Cook grabbed her shoulder. “Stop it.”

She jerked out from under his hand so violently his fingers slipped off the jacket. Ryan tried to swing again, but she caught his arm and shoved forward with everything in her, driving his hand down toward the moving gap beside the return belt. Ryan realized what she was doing half a second too late.

“No—”

His hand went into the machinery.

The sound was immediate and awful, a wet crunch swallowed under the churn of the return motor. Ryan screamed, high and shocked, his whole body folding toward the trapped hand as the belt dragged and bucked around him. The machine didn’t care. It kept trying to do its job, kept pulling, kept grinding, the rollers knocking his knuckles sideways in a way hands were never meant to bend. Cook lunged for the emergency switch. His palm slapped the red button hard enough to hurt. The belt stopped, but the silence after was somehow worse because Ryan was still screaming. He dropped to his knees, clutching his wrist with his free hand, his other hand caught at a wrong angle inside the metal mouth of the return. Blood ran fast over the black rubber belt and dripped onto the concrete in thick, ugly spots. One finger twitched when it shouldn’t have. Another didn’t move at all.

“Fuck,” Cook breathed. “Fuck, fuck.”

Ryan sobbed through his teeth, trying not to look at it and looking anyway. “My hand! Oh my God, my hand!”

She stood over him, chest rising and falling, the bandage on her palm red again where the fight had split it open. Her face wasn't blank now. It was bright with purpose, eyes locked on Ryan like the machine had only done half the work.

“He hurt you,” she said to Cook, almost pleading with him to understand.

Ryan looked up at her, ruined hand still caught, face pinched in pain. “You’re sick.”

That did it. Cook saw it happen and still didn’t move fast enough. There was a rack of spare pins against the wall, scuffed and dirty from practice lanes, their white plastic bodies scarred with black marks. She grabbed one by the neck with both hands. Ryan tried to scramble back, but his trapped hand kept him anchored in place, dragging a gutted sound out of him when he pulled against the crushed fingers.

“Don’t,” Cook snapped.

For once, the word hit her. She hesitated, pin lifted, breath shaking in her throat. Her eyes cut to him, and for a second the whole room balanced on the thin, disgusting edge of what he wanted her to do. Ryan was crying now, properly, sweat and tears and blood all mixing on his face. “Please.”

Cook looked at him, at his hand, at her holding the pin.

Then Ryan said, “She’s not yours.”

The pin came down.

It cracked against the side of his head with a hollow, brutal sound that seemed too loud even with the machines around them. Ryan’s body jerked sideways, his shoulder slamming into the return housing. Blood opened at his temple and ran immediately into his hairline, down along his ear, over the corner of his jaw. He made a noise like air leaving a bag. She hit him again. Not clean this time. The pin glanced off his cheekbone and caught his mouth, splitting his lip wider, knocking his head back against the metal. His teeth clicked together with a sound Cook felt in his own jaw. Blood sprayed across the pin in a curved red stripe, then onto her shirt, Cook’s jacket, the concrete between them.

“Stop!” Cook grabbed the pin before she could swing a third time, wrenching it hard enough that she nearly came with it. “I said stop!”

She fought him for it, wild for two seconds, then all the force went out of her at once. The pin slipped from both their hands and rolled across the concrete, leaving a thin red track behind it. Ryan sagged beside the machine, half-conscious, his breath coming in broken, wet pulls. His trapped hand was still caught in the return, mangled and slick, and Cook couldn’t look at it for more than a second without his stomach trying to turn itself inside out. The door behind them banged open. JJ stood there, face drained of all expression, one hand still on the handle. His eyes took in Ryan first, then the pin, then her, then Cook. For one long second, nobody spoke. The only sound was Ryan breathing through blood and pain, the soft drip of something hitting the concrete, the muffled shriek of children out front winning tickets from a machine.

JJ whispered, “What the fuck?”

Cook moved before anyone else could.

“Get Gareth,” he said.

JJ didn’t move.

“Now,” Cook barked, and that finally snapped him out of it.

JJ stumbled back through the door, nearly tripping over his own feet as he ran. Cook turned to her, grabbed her by both arms, and dragged her away from Ryan before she could look down long enough to understand what she’d done. Her breathing was too fast. Her pupils were blown wide. Blood dotted her cheek in tiny specks that weren’t hers.

“Look at me,” Cook said.

She did. Of course she did. The obedience hit him like nausea.

“Go to the toilets,” he said. “Wash your hands. Wash your face. Don’t talk to anyone.”

Her lips parted. “But—”

“Now.”

She obeyed, but not before glancing back at Ryan. The sight of him seemed to cut through something. Her face buckled, horror pushing up through devotion, and Cook saw her almost say his name in that scared, lost voice from the car park. He stepped in front of her before she could.

“Go.”

She went. Cook crouched beside Ryan, hands hovering uselessly because there was nowhere safe to touch. Ryan’s eyes rolled toward him, unfocused but aware enough to hate.

“You did this,” Ryan rasped.

Cook swallowed. “Shut up.”

“You did.”

“Shut the fuck up, Ryan.”

Ryan’s mouth twitched, a bloody, terrible attempt at a laugh. “She didn’t even know why.”

Cook’s throat tightened. Boots pounded down the corridor. Gareth arrived first, JJ right behind him, both stopping dead at the edge of the service space. Gareth’s face collapsed into something Cook had never seen on him before. Not anger. Not annoyance. Fear, pure and stupid and useless.

“What happened?” Gareth shouted.

Cook looked at the stopped machine, the blood on the concrete, the pin against the wall, Ryan folded beside the return with his hand ruined inside it. A dozen lies came running at once, each worse than the last.

“He slipped,” Cook said.

Gareth stared at him. “He fucking what?”

“He was messing with the return.” Cook stood, wiping his palms on his trousers even though that only spread the red thinner. “Hand got caught. Hit his head when he went down.”

JJ made a sound behind Gareth. Not belief. Not disagreement. Just panic trying to find somewhere to go.

Ryan coughed, blood bubbling at his mouth. “Liar.”

Cook looked down at him. Ryan looked back. For a second, Cook thought Ryan might say it. Might say her name. Might say everything in front of Gareth and JJ, and whatever police came crawling back into Kingpin’s after this fresh disaster. But pain broke across his face before words could, and he folded over his trapped hand, choking on another scream when he shifted wrong. Gareth snapped into motion then, not because he believed Cook but because the emergency gave him something easier than the truth. “JJ, call an ambulance. Now. Cook, don’t fucking touch him. Nobody touches anything.”

JJ ran. Gareth turned on Cook, voice low and shaking. “Where is she?”

Cook’s heart dropped. “Who?”

“Don’t,” Gareth said. “Don’t you dare, not now.”

Cook’s cheek throbbed. His ribs hurt. His hands smelled like blood and rubber and old grease. Behind the customer wall, someone laughed loud enough to carry, bright and horrible, followed by the crack of pins at the end of a lane. Gareth stared at him like he was finally seeing the thing everyone else had been circling. Cook held his gaze and said nothing. The toilet door opened somewhere down the corridor. She stepped out with wet hands, face scrubbed clean enough to leave the skin rubbed raw-looking under the harsh lights. Her bandage was soaked through again. She looked at Gareth, then JJ’s empty spot, then Ryan on the floor. Her face crumpled.

“What did I do?” she whispered.

Gareth turned toward her. Cook got there first. He caught her by the wrist, careful of the bandage this time, and pulled her behind him. “Nothing,” he said.

Ryan made a broken sound from the floor. Cook didn’t look at him.

“Nothing,” he repeated, and felt the lie take shape around all of them.

The lie didn’t hold this time. Not properly. It got them through the next ten minutes because panic was louder than truth. Gareth shouted. JJ came back shaking with a phone pressed to his ear. Ryan kept slipping in and out of sense, groaning through his teeth whenever the smallest movement dragged pain through his ruined hand. Cook stood between her and everyone else like his body could block the whole scene from becoming what it was. But no one looked at him like they believed him. Not JJ, pale under the fluorescent lights, eyes darting between the blood on the pin and the blood on her sleeve. Not Gareth, whose face had gone hard in a way Cook had never seen before. Not Ryan, half-folded beside the machine, mouth bloody, eyes glassy with pain and still full of enough hate to keep finding Cook through it.

“She did it,” Ryan rasped when the paramedics came.

Cook’s stomach dropped. Gareth looked at her. She stood behind Cook with both hands tucked into the sleeves of his jacket, bandage soaked red, face scrubbed raw from the bathroom sink. She didn’t deny it. That was the worst bit. She didn’t cry, didn’t argue, didn’t perform innocently. She only looked at Ryan like some part of her was trying to wake up and couldn’t get past the fog. One of the paramedics asked her to sit down.

Cook answered before she could. “She’s in shock.”

Gareth snapped his head toward him. “Enough.”

Cook’s mouth shut. One word, and it hit harder than any of the shouting had. Not from Ryan. Not from Tasha. Gareth. Red-faced, cheap, useless Gareth, who’d spent years caring more about broken lane motors than broken people, looking at Cook like he finally knew exactly what kind of rot had been spreading under his carpet. Police came after the ambulance. Of course they did. This time, there was too much to sand down before opening. Too much blood. Too many witnesses. Too many broken things happening around the same two people. Cook gave his statement in Gareth’s office while an officer with tired eyes wrote everything down and asked the same question six different ways.

Had Ryan attacked him first? Yes. Had she intervened? She panicked. Had she used the bowling pin? Cook didn’t see. Had she shoved Ryan’s hand into the return? Cook didn’t see. The officer stopped writing. Cook smiled like his cheek wasn’t throbbing. “Bit busy getting punched, mate.”

The officer didn’t smile back. Through the glass strip in the office door, Cook could see her sitting on a plastic chair by the staff lockers with JJ beside her and another officer crouched in front of her. She looked small under the strip lights, not because of her body, but because the room seemed to have stripped all the command out of her. Her hands sat open on her knees. The red bandage glared against her lap. When the officer asked her something, she looked toward Cook. The officer followed her gaze. Cook looked away too late.

By the time they let them leave, it was because no one had enough straightforward answers to do anything else yet. Ryan was in hospital. Tasha was dead. The girl from the car park was still alive but no longer some one-off bit of violence they could bury under bad luck and Gareth’s lack of CCTV. Everything had started connecting itself in people’s heads, thin red lines between nights Cook wanted kept separate.

Gareth caught Cook near the back door. He looked older than he had that morning. Not softer. Never that. Just worn down, as if Kingpin’s had finally asked too much of him and he hated them all for making him notice.

“You don’t come in tomorrow,” he said.

Cook blinked. “What?”

“Neither of you do.”

“Gareth—”

“I said don’t.” Gareth’s voice shook once, then steadied into something ugly. “I don’t know what the fuck is happening, and I don’t want to know. But if she comes near this place again before police sort it, I’m calling them myself.”

Cook’s laugh came out thin. “Bit late for principles, innit?”

Gareth stepped closer. For once, he didn’t look ridiculous. “Get out.”

Cook wanted to say something clever. Nothing came. Outside, the late afternoon had gone grey and wet, the sky sagging low over the car park. She followed him without speaking, footsteps too quiet behind his. The tape was still around the corner where Tasha had died. Rain had softened the edges of everything except the memory. Halfway to his car, she stopped. Cook noticed because the distance pulled at him now too, some sick echo of the way she always felt him. He turned and found her standing by the drain, staring at the car park like she could replace the scene of every bad thing she’d done printed over the concrete.

“I don’t want this,” she said.

The words were quiet, but they carried. Cook’s chest tightened. She looked at him then, and for the first time in days, maybe weeks, there was no worship in her face. No softening. No automatic reach toward him. Just fear and grief and something exhausted enough to be honest.

“I don’t want this,” she said again.

Cook took a step toward her. “You’re upset.”

“No.” Her voice shook. “No, don’t do that. Don’t tell me what I am.”

He stopped. Rain caught in his hair, cold at the back of his neck. Her hands curled against her sides. “I can feel it when you say things. I can feel myself changing around them. Like my head turns wrong. Like I’m there, and then I’m not.”

Cook swallowed. She pressed both hands to her chest like she could hold herself in place. “I remember Ryan. I remember liking him. I remember Tasha. I remember thinking she was nice to me when you were being a dick about something. I remember all of it until you talk, and then it moves. It all moves.”

“Come here,” Cook said before he could stop himself.

She flinched. Then her body took one step. Only one. She froze with horror on her face, staring down at her own foot like it had betrayed her. Cook felt the bottom drop out of him and hated, viciously, that some part of him still wanted to see if she’d take another. Her eyes lifted to his. Wet. furious. terrified.

“Don’t,” she whispered.

Cook’s mouth went dry.

“I don’t want you,” she said.

The sentence landed exactly where he’d always known it would. Not like Ryan saying it. Not like Tasha reporting it. Her. Standing in the rain, shaking under the weight of everything his wish had done to her, finally getting one clean line through the curse and putting it between them.

“I don’t want you,” she repeated, and the second time it broke her voice. “Not like this. Maybe not ever. I don’t know anymore. I don’t know what’s mine.”

Cook looked at her and saw the whole horrible truth of it. The car. The willow. Her at the window. Her in his bed. Her hands in Tasha’s hair. Ryan’s hand caught in the machine. Every time he’d said come here and watched her obey. Every time he’d told himself it was close enough to love if she kissed him back. He could still do it. That was the thought that ruined him most. He could say her name the right way. Step closer. Touch her face. Tell her she was confused, that she was his, that she’d always been his. The curse would help. It always helped. It would take the pain out of her eyes and put the devotion back. It would make her easier to hold.

Instead, maybe because the rain was cold enough to feel like punishment, maybe because Ryan’s scream was still in his ears, maybe because Tasha’s last breath had followed him all the way into daylight, Cook finally said it.

“I made a wish.”

She stared at him.

His voice came out rougher than he wanted. “That night. In the car. After you got out.”

Her breathing changed.

“I had that stupid fucking willow thing,” he said. “The gift. From that oddity shop by Kingpin’s you told me about. I broke it.”

Her face lost everything.

“I wished for you to want me.”

For a second, even the rain seemed to go quiet. Then she took a step back. This time, it was hers. Cook felt it like a door slamming in his face.

“No,” she said.

He almost laughed, because of course that was what people said when the truth was too ugly to fit into the room. No. As if refusing it could make the world rearrange itself. As if he hadn’t spent days doing exactly that.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and hated how useless it sounded.

She looked at him like she didn’t know what sorry was supposed to do with all the blood.

“You made me?”

Cook said nothing.

“You made me want you?”

“I didn’t know it would—”

“Don’t.” Her voice cracked hard. “Don’t you dare say you didn’t know. You wanted it.”

He looked away.

She laughed once. Small. Broken. Nothing like amusement. “Oh my God.”

“I didn’t know it’d be like this.”

“But you knew enough.” She looked down at her bandaged hand, then back at him. “You knew enough to keep going.”

That was the bit he couldn’t answer. She came closer then, slow and careful, like approaching him cost her something. Cook didn’t move. He didn’t trust himself to. She stopped close enough that he could see the rain caught on her lashes, the tremor in her mouth, the terrible clarity in her face.

“Then I’m yours because you asked,” she said.

Cook shut his eyes.

“No.”

“Yes.” Her voice was soft now, and that made it worse. “That’s what this is, isn’t it? I’m yours because you asked something to take me.”

He opened his eyes. The curse moved under her grief like something waking up. He could see it, and he hated that he could see it: the way her anger bent toward pain, the way her pain bent toward him, the way even this truth tried to make her reach for the person who had caused it. Her hand lifted. Stopped. Shook in the space between them.

“I hate you,” she whispered.

Cook nodded, because she should. Then her fingers caught in his shirt.

“I love you,” she said, and broke on it.

That was the worst thing the wish had done. Not the blood, not Tasha, not Ryan, not the girl by the bins. It hadn’t erased the hate or spared her the truth; it had left both alive in her mouth and made the love louder. Cook caught her wrist before she could come any closer. For one breath, he almost let her go. Then he pulled.

Here’s the first cover I made (mainly cause it’s the one I want for myself)

Some of the text are just filler text until I find something more fitting!

also ignore the colored scribbles

I will leave the poll up for a week so there’s no stress and any feedback is appreciated!! Thank you <3