#foolshcme

// Sam smoked from a pipe. More specifically, a kiseru. They hardly made them these days, and she obtained hers from an auction. The tobacco it needed was specially rolled just for this purpose. True, she could've gotten her fix with normal cigarettes, but for some reason, it tasted sweeter from the pipe. Enough that it masked the bitter thought that it was funded off the backs of unfortunate girls selling themselves.

Well... it wasn't her fault they made that choice. The money was too good, the risk justifiable. Sam got the better end of the deal, all she had to do was manage them and pray to god they don't quit or die.

... and one other thing.

" Boss." She tapped away the ash into the tray. " Thanks for coming. "

Nastka stepped into the quiet office, the door clicking shut behind him like the snap of a trap, final, inevitable. His eyes found Louis without effort, tracing the familiar lines as if memorizing a map he thought lost, tasting the contours in memory.

“It’s been… longer than I imagined,” he murmured, voice low, deliberate, each syllable a blade wrapped in silk. “Longer than I wanted… or perhaps… longer than I feared.”

He let the silence coil between them, thick and heavy, like smoke curling in a room that had been waiting for their return. “I almost didn’t know if I could face you. Or if I should. Some distances… some absences… leave marks you cannot wash off. And yet…” A flicker softened his gaze, both invitation and warning. “Yet here we are. And there are duties… things that demand attention, whether we consent or not. Ghosts, debts… loyalties.”

Nastka shifted, straightening, a motion both armor and offering, the faintest tilt of his body promising answers he might never give. “I won’t pretend the past is gone. It lingers… like a scent, like a wound. Today… let us touch only what must be touched. Let the rest ache in silence.”

His eyes darkened, a spark threading danger and desire. “And… understand this,” he whispered, voice low, coiled, “that no matter the distance, no matter the walls we built… I have never stopped seeing you. Never stopped… tasting the memory of you.”

A pause. A breath. Then, measured, almost casual, as if slipping a blade into conversation:

Nastka with @foolshcme and @kisumitenderly

Rain drummed against the roof like a pulse, relentless and insistent, slipping through the cracked window and soaking the edges of his coat. The city smelled of wet asphalt and iron, and Szymek let himself fall through the frame, landing lightly despite the chill that ran up his spine.

The room smelled faintly of smoke and something heavier, sleep, maybe, or the weight of old regrets. Casimir lay on the couch, wrapped in shadows, his chest rising and falling slow and steady, a monument to stubbornness. Szymek crouched, letting the storm’s rhythm seep into him, letting it draw him closer.

He leaned forward, tilting his head toward the cochlear implant, letting his words land in the ear that might catch them. “Oi… big guy. Wake up.” Szymek reached forward, pressing a finger into Casimir’s side. “Seriously. Where’s Rosie?”

The silence that followed was heavy, pressing against his ribs. The absence of the dog felt wrong, a gap where warmth should be. He let his gaze linger, tracing the line of Casimir’s jaw, the stubborn set of his shoulders, imagining Rosie curled somewhere else, far from this sleeping fortress.

“Thought she’d be curled up on your lap, not outta sight. Guess you’re really that useless when you’re asleep, huh?” Szymek’s words hung in the air, a tease, a challenge, a ripple in the stillness.

Nastka paused with his hand still near the thermostat, but this time the movement lost its teasing edge before it ever became a challenge.

Louis’ voice had cut through the room like a blade wrapped in velvet:::familiar, sharp, and somehow grounding in a way Nastka never admitted out loud.

He didn’t turn away from it.

Instead, he lingered there, fingers resting lightly against the plastic, as though the act itself had softened into something else entirely.

The apartment was quiet in that heavy, lived-in way:: warm air, faint hum of electricity, rain pressing softly against the windows like it wanted to be let in. Everything felt suspended, like the world had decided to hold its breath just to watch them exist in the same space.

Nastka exhaled slowly.

“I wasn’t going to touch it,” he said at last, though it was obvious he had been, and that Louis knew it too. But there was no defensiveness in it. Only something quieter. More honest.

His hand finally dropped from the thermostat, but he didn’t move away. Not from Louis.

His gaze shifted instead, slower now, softer around the edges, like the sharpness had been worn down by proximity alone. He looked at Louis the way people looked at things they didn’t know how to keep without ruining: carefully, almost reverently, like every glance was an admission.

“You always think I’m doing things just to bother you,” Nastka murmured, a faint smile tugging at his mouth.

A pause.

Then, quieter still, so quiet it barely belonged to the room at all:

“But I think I just like hearing you speak when I’m near you.”

The words didn’t land like a confession meant to impress. They landed like something that had slipped out before he could decide whether he deserved to say it.

He finally stepped away from the thermostat entirely, abandoning it like it had never mattered in the first place, and closed the distance instead.

Not touching Louis, yet.

Just close enough to feel the heat of him.

Close enough that the threat didn’t feel like a threat anymore, but something softer that only belonged to them.

“You can keep your rules,” Nastka said, almost gently now. “As long as you keep talking when I break them.”

And this time, he didn’t smile like he was winning anything.

He grabbed a bottle of product hed brought over from his vanity though. The sultry display faded into focus. A small amount was allocated onto his fingertips, rubbed between the two hands to warm and spread it, and then gently applied to Nastkas skin. He gently massaged it into him. Rubbing his forehead, then his temples, his cheeks, then his chin with a delicate precision.

"Today is pampering day as i said. Part of that is skin care. So sit back and relax." He hummed as he grabbed his next product and starting to spread it over Nastkas face. "Though...you do have a great complexion for your age. I think you secretly do this on your own. If you give me the man answer of 'I just use water' im going to call you a liar." He laughed sweetly as he worked.

"Youre handsome as hell."

Nastka did not move away.

He let himself be held in place as if the weight on his torso was not Louis, not a man in a red robe with too much confidence and too little shame, but something far more ancient-something familiar in its insistence. Something that did not demand violence to prove it existed.

His breath slowed beneath the touch of Louis’s hands, as if the skin itself had decided to listen before the mind agreed.

When the warmth of the product spread across his face, Nastka’s expression softened in increments too small to be called change. A fracture of tension at the corner of his mouth. A quiet surrender in the set of his jaw. The kind of stillness that did not mean absence, but acceptance.

“You always do this,” he murmured at last, voice low like it had been pulled up from somewhere deeper than speech. “Turn care into an inconvenience.”

There was no accusation in it. Only recognition.

Louis’s teasing about water earned him the faintest exhale through Nastka’s nose--almost a laugh, almost a dismissal. His eyes remained closed, but his head tilted subtly into the pressure at his temple, as if remembering what it meant to be held without cost.

“I do use water,” he said after a beat, slow and dry. “It’s efficient. It doesn’t talk. And costs nothing.”

A pause.

One of Louis’s hands passed over his cheek again, and Nastka’s stillness deepened--like a man learning, against instinct, that softness could be repeated without becoming a trap. His fingers lifted, just slightly, finding Louis’s wrist again. Not stopping him. Never stopping him. Just anchoring himself there, as if contact was the only proof that the moment was real.

“You sit on me like I’m furniture,” he said faintly, the ghost of amusement threading through his tone. “And then you talk like I’m fragile glass.”

His eyes opened halfway, pale and heavy-lidded, catching Louis in the soft blur of closeness. There was something almost disarming in it-something that did not belong to the man people usually had to fear.

“And yet,” Nastka added, slower now, like the words were being chosen rather than spoken, “you keep touching me like I might disappear if you stop.”

A silence settled, not empty but full, like breath held between two heartbeats.

Then, barely above a whisper, edged with something warmer and more dangerous than sentimentality, “Careful, moje ochanie… you’ll start making me believe I deserve it.”

The corner of his mouth lifted at last--small, crooked, unmistakably fond.