#owen painter

When Isaac kills Elijah Sinclair, he uses his hands.

It is not intentional. It is not because hands were optimal, not because some primal urge overrode protocol. Isaac, a man whose temperament inclines less to sentiment than to salvage, does not brood on the improvidence of the act. Sinclair, however pedestrian in wit, is still an auxiliary subject: a mobile container of fluids, tissues, cells, each with its prospective yield. Isaac Night is a man of science and the point… the point is never mourning the foregone; it is extracting what remains available. 

This is how he rationalizes Elijah Sinclair’s imminent death.

The plan itself had been deceptively simple in design: the clean insertion of a needle into the Normie’s neck; the swift sequestration of the subdued subject to the clocktower; the gradual extraction of all the biological dividends that could be extricated from him. Isaac had charted the situation with the precision of someone who prefers the predictability of protocol over improvisation. Every step is taken into consideration, he leaves no stone unturned, every variable listed, every outcome predicted. Until there was a flaw, unforeseeable, subtle. Recognition. The human variable was a persistent anomaly, refuses to be tamed by protocol or procedure.

Sinclair loiters against his car, posture slack insouciantly. As Isaac approaches, those indolent eyes hone in on him, the flicker of nascent recollection animating them.

“Do we know each other?”

Isaac’s reply is cool and detached, “y’know, I can’t say that we do.”

But it doesn’t take long for Sinclair to snap his fingers as though nabbing the tail of a fugitive thought. “Shit, you’re one of them.”

Isaac’s eyelids close briefly, sighing in irritation. The smile does not reach his eyes when he opens them. The Outcast spiel is a customary one, one he’s overly familiar with. 

Sinclair grins, backs of his legs pressed to his vehicle. “Don’t know what she sees. Whatever magic tricks you’re pulling, she’ll move on. And when she does? She’s got me.” His teeth flash, unknowingly sealing his fate. 

Isaac has endured such tirades before: the tedious chest-beating of men whose hormonal surplus seemed to drown out whatever vestigial faculties they possessed, but this time it needled. Against his better judgement, he registers offense, as if some furtive nerve had been struck. That tolerant smile stiffens, his expression compressed to a blade’s gleam like something poised to cut. Sinclair drones on, blissfully ignorant, his declarations pelting the air.

Inside Isaac, something curdles. The churn starts low in the pit of his stomach, thick and bilious, climbing until it presses against his chest. A sickness of recognition, a bodily recoil so instinctive it arrives before reason.

Sinclair is still rattling off, but Isaac does not process a word. His lips twitch into a snarl, and suddenly he lunges, his body moves without consultation of mind. Choler inhabits his thought; his telekinetic faculties forgotten, his hands clamp around Sinclair’s throat. The man flails, claws at him, shouts, panics. Isaac does not let up. He drives him down, feels the frantic pulse beneath his fingers, the gasps turning into wet rattles before they fully cease, watching the life drain from those glassy, taunting eyes.

Francoise appears not long after, her gasp arriving before her words. She hurries to Isaac’s side, hands hovering uselessly, twitching with the impotence of broken tools. “What did you do?” she hisses; not out of pity for Sinclair, but out of dread for her brother. Thoughts crash through her in succession, but the one that sticks, stubborn and unshakable, is you.

Isaac looks at the corpse with the tranquil neutrality of a man regarding a finished equation. The solution is reached. There is, for the moment, peace.

The days feel lighter for Isaac, a paradox that he accepts without interrogation. Sinclair is excised, subtracted from the equation and you don’t seem to notice (or if you notice, you don’t seem to care). This indifference intoxicates him: indifference is not loss but aperture, a clearing into which you step, and in stepping, you draw nearer but not outward into anything like suspicion or grief, but inward, toward Francoise, toward him.

Francoise has always been porous to Normies, her predilection is a deeply rooted yearning for the narcotic lull of ordinary life. She craves the safety of the cocoon you provide. She has always been taken with you. Your elaborate wardrobe, your array of cosmetics, your unapologetic admiration for your culture and traditions. Every gesture, every habit that distinguishes you from her cloistered world becomes for Francoise a guide, a template she wishes to replicate. She shadows you with the fervor of an acolyte, following you in your footsteps.

Isaac sees it though with a clarity, the subtle thrill lurking beneath Francoise’s carefully measured concern, the way her eyes catch a secret light, a silent hungry delight at the thought of Sinclair’s absence and all the stolen moments it promises: more time basking in your company.

He understood it then in a way he had not before, remembering how she deliberately abandoned her carefully scheduled arrangements, those long discussions where they had planned to excise the monster from her. You had been siphoning her attention, drawing her into a gravitational field not of his making. The sensation was a loss of control: a resource slipping from his fingers into someone else’s custody.

Isaac observed all of this in silence. Irritation had needled at him: Francoise had once again tethered herself to someone else, and you, unreasonably, had allowed it. He had half expected you to recoil once you sensed her dependence, that familiar unease others betrayed in her presence. But you did not recoil. You accepted her attachment, even accommodated it.

You crossed the threshold into his laboratory with a natural ease, the kind that speared his irascibility before he even fully registered it. Francoise sat, calm, expecting you, a silent enabler to your intrusion into this sanctuary. Every step you took seemed to claim the room, pressing against the arrangement of instruments and glassware, drawing his attention in ways both vexing and quietly disarming.

Francoise, as curious as she was, had importuned you with a myriad of questions which you answered effortlessly and he was content to observe. 

You’re ensconced in the quietude of the lab, where Francoise hummed in tandem with the ticking of the tower, your fingers moving with deliberate care, weaving your hair into intricate braids.

“Does it really take that long?”

You had laughed, a bright, lilting sound that echoed like startled birds in the lab. “Girl, yes,” you said, letting a small, melodramatic groan escape as if the very air around you weighed on your limbs. Your arms stretched with aggrandized languor. “My arms are killing me.” Then, inching forward, you dip the ends of your hair into a bowl full of boiling water. 

“Why are you doing that?”

Isaac was the one who answered, “It’s a sealant. The heat softens the fibers.”

A look of surprise crossed your features, then a smile spread on your lips like a gradual sunrise. “So, he does talk,” you said, tone imbued with mirth, as if you had just uncovered a rare specimen in his own lab.

“Oh, I’ve been talking,” Isaac said, voice clipped, a tad cruel, but measured. “Though I suspect your brain filtered most of it. Frankly, it’s remarkable you even comprehend the basics of—” His gaze drifted over your hair, assessing, calculating, then he fell silent, leaving the thought curtailed, pointed in its implication.

You blinked, slightly peeved. “Discussing your little experiments in jargon you think I won’t understand isn’t the same as having a conversation.”

“These ‘little experiments’ are more than you’ll ever amount to in your entire life.”

“Isaac, you promised,” Francoise admonished.

He relented with a tight smile, “I didn’t think you’d be interested, is all.”

You narrowed your eyes for a moment, then to Francoise: “I’m getting ready for my cousin’s wedding on Saturday,” your gaze lingering on Isaac while he attended his work. “They’re always long but no one is turning down free food.”

You place the steaming bowl aside, lifting the next instrument of your meticulous ritual. Pipette in hand, movements measured, ceremonious, steadying the tip at your wrist. Francoise leaned in, elbows resting on the counter, her face cradled in her hands, eyes tracing your hands with a gentle fascination. “You keep it on for an hour, right?”

You paused, the pipette poised in your hand, then let a faint, almost vindictive twitch unfurl at the corner of your lips. “Why don’t we ask Isaac?”

His head snapped up. His earlier derision had drawn out your own, and now he was fully alert. For Isaac, it was not insignificant. He was accustomed to observing from the periphery, yet your voice pinned him like an insect under glass, his name in your mouth felt sharp, unfamiliar in its warmth.

“The longer you keep it on, the more pigment shows through.” The words came out clipped, almost brusque, as though he was shutting down an intrusion rather than answering a harmless question. But the way your eyes caught his own made him restless, because you did not seem chastened — you seemed entertained.

“Wow, Francoise,” you intoned, and he pinpointed the tone immediately. “A real genius, huh? You know what… maybe I do have it all wrong. I’d just about give it all up to be holed up in some tower after graduating, nothing but dusty old books to keep me company. Maybe then I’ll amount to something.”

“Don’t be mean,” Francoise chided, the suppressed giggle hidden behind her fingers, tangibly delighted at the exchange, but Isaac felt something else: a faint sting of irritation braided with something lighter. You were teasing him, and he did not know whether he resented it or welcomed it.

Your affront sounded more playful than offended. “What! Am I not allowed to return the favor?” 

And then you grinned at her.

“She’s perfect,” Francoise breathed one night, holding the top you had lent her to her nose, inhaling your scent as if memorizing it, her voice hushed and full of reverence as though she were sequestered in a confessional booth.

Isaac said nothing. He did not fully comprehend Francoise’s mercurial wants but he loved her, and love, in his practice, meant endurance: allowing her indulgences until novelty exhausted itself. She always grew bored.

Except not this time.

Francoise did not loosen her grip, instead she tightened it. She curled herself around you like a cat discovering its sunbeam, unembarrassed by the dependency, and what was even worse, was that you permitted it. He half expected recoil from you, anticipated the familiar recoil others exhibited when confronted with Francoise’s appetite for attachment. Yet you did not retreat. You absorbed it, you accommodated it.

And Isaac, though he ought to have resented this trespass, found himself instead suspended in that same clearing, lighter, because though Francoise clung, you did not shake her off, and where she clung, he remained proximate too.

At first, Isaac explains you to himself in the same terms he explains all phenomena: a series of variables, an arrangement of surfaces and behaviors to be observed and classified. He notes the gentle slope of your features, mentally indexes your reactions and how you interact with the people around you. He tells himself these are social signifiers, external codings no different from plumage in birds or chemical markings in insects. Useful to note, irrelevant beyond that.

Francoise’s descriptor of you is skewed by limerence. Isaac does not share his sister’s delusion.

He sees you as you present yourself: you are not particularly kind, allowing your capricious moods to dictate the climate of an entire week. You surround yourself with deplorable company and you move among them with a kind of predatory ease. Vindictive, quick to anger, and gifted with a memory that hoards every slight, you navigate life with an ineradicable degree of spite, and wait for your opportunity to repay it.

But the longer he watches, the less his notes remain detached. Observation metastasizes into fixation. He records the tilt of your head when you laugh, the cadence of your footsteps on corkscrew steps, the way you treat Francoise’s eagerness not as weakness but as invitation, how your speech pitches when you’re pleased. None of it belongs in a ledger, all of it fundamentally banal, and yet he cannot stop compiling it. The data accrues, becomes a constellation.

This is how Isaac falls: incrementally, with a slow suffocation of resistance, the realization that every effort to explain you only fixates him more tightly to you. You have a monopoly on his thoughts the way a problem does: irritating, inexhaustible, insistent on being solved. And unlike problems, you do not yield to solution.

His body knows before his mind concedes.

And still, he does not say anything. His affection conducted in the surreptitious privacy of glances and observations. 

Your aggravation proliferates when a week passes and you still haven’t heard a word from Eli. He has never been indispensable but his presence has at least provided a pulse of attention to punctuate your days. The arrangement between you had always been casual. He offered you a measure of interest without any strings attached, and you in turn granted his closeness. He had accepted your stipulations without protest: you were not a couple, nothing exclusive, you were free to come and go as you pleased. 

But the premise, fragile as spun-sugar, carries its own implicit clause. Whatever this was could dissolve at any moment, and you both knew it. A gossamer-thin tether, already strained, that would snap the instant Eli’s attention strayed elsewhere.

You never pretended otherwise. You liked the attention but you did not need it. Eli required more than you were willing to give, and so you gave him nothing beyond the bare minimum. When his silence stretches on, your irritation exacerbates out of principle. The absence disrupts the arrangement: he was supposed to orbit you, not the other way around. You don’t like to be left in the dark.

“What?” Your voice cleaves harsher than intended when you catch the sidelong glance of one of the Outcasts lingering nearby, their gaze grazing over you like nails on a chalkboard. “Do I have something on my face? No? Then move.” The words slice, leaving them scuttling aside, but the irritation lingers, a residue you can’t quite shake.

Francoise waits just beyond the ornate iron-wrought gates, and she, in tune with your emotions, registers the disturbance. She hovers in that nervous space between wanting to fold herself into your arms and fearing she has somehow incurred your displeasure. 

Something is wrong.

“Is everything okay?” she asks, voice tentative, her body edging closer toward yours as if her closeness begets reassurance.

“Francoise!” Relief bursts out of you in the form of her name. You pivot toward her, your exasperation already on exhibition. “Eli ghosted me. I knew I shouldn’t have given that loser a chance.”

In hindsight, she knows she should have prepared for this. The past week has been perfect according to her: your attention was on her. But she hadn’t counted on the moment when his absence would make itself known to you.

She falters, words stalling, then seizes one of yours and it’s something you’ve said before. She polishes it into a consolation of sorts. “Boys are stupid, especially Eli,” she declares. The mimicry is uncoordinated, like she doesn’t know how to wield it properly, but it carries the force of devotion, and she hopes that’s enough.

It is. your anger assuaged by the balm of her regurgitated words and you grin, and loop an arm into hers. “Who?”

Her answering grin is immediate and she leans into you, her shoulder grazes yours, testing how long the contact can linger before you begin to register it as anything other than innocuous.

The clocktower augments your intrusion, every footfall ricochets too loudly, every intake of breath announces itself as an unwelcome arrival. Dust hangs in the air, visible in shafts of fractured light, so thick you could pretend it’s not dust at all but the residue of lives half-lived here and abandoned. The machinery ticks and grinds as if out of spite, its rhythm stubbornly irregular, reminding anyone foolish enough to listen that time is not a comfort but a cudgel.

You do listen. You can’t help yourself. Each metallic cough and gear’s groan inserts itself into your bones until you are sure you are clanking in sympathy, a moving cog in Isaac’s private cathedral of steel.

“His organs are intact. No reason to discard a body,” Isaac intones, voice measured, as if tallying reagents rather than adjudicating life and death. The words land with the calm of inevitability, yet beneath them wreathes the mild satisfaction of someone who has eliminated a variable he would not tolerate.

“The police, Isaac,” Francoise hisses, panic fraying her whisper. “You know she’s noticed, right?”

You freeze mid-step. The words snag like a hook in the chest, drawing attention to yourself you had not volunteered. She’s noticed. The pronoun presses into you, intimate and accusatory, and the knowledge is heavy, unavoidable.

Isaac tilts his head, curiosity lacing the question more than fear: “Has she?”

Francoise’s insistence is urgent: “We need to get rid of the body. Now.”  

A wire catches your foot; you stumble, clatter into a machine. The sudden noise shreds the conversation, leaving only the tension between them.

Isaac’s voice reaches you first, low, coaxing, intimate in a way that only you could receive without alarm. Your name leaves his lips in croon: “I know you’re there. It’s okay, you can come on out.”

You falter, weighing all potential exits. The lift is a joke: sluggish as molasses. The stairs are worse, corkscrewing out of reach on the far side, requiring exposure, the long trudge of prey pursued. That leaves only forward, the coward’s bravado of pretending you chose to step into the open.

So you do. One foot, then another, your pulse skitters like a jackrabbit’s, frantic enough you half expect the sound to give you away. You fix your eyes on Isaac as though that might anchor you.

And Isaac smiles. He tilts it at you the way a butcher might soothe livestock, smoothing the animal’s panic before the knife descends.

“Hello,” he says, gentle as a lullaby, deceptively soft. 

It was soothing, for a moment, to let your eyes unfocus, until the comfort betrayed you. The respite lasted only long enough to betray the ambush: Francoise’s hasty concealment had been exactly that: hasty. Inept. The cadaver had not been spirited away so much as tucked under the rug like a child’s misdeed. Two legs protruded, pale and insolent, broadcasting their existence as if to taunt your credulity. And with that glimpse, panic resumed its racket, a trapped bird smashing itself stupid against the bars of its gilded cage. 

“What the fuck did you do?” you blurt out, and unthinkingly you inch closer even though every nerve in your body is screaming at you to stop.

Isaac steps closer, carefully. “You missed quite the performance.” 

You let out an exhale of disbelief, taking a step back when another wire catches your foot; you stumble. He is there instantly, catching you, the press of his chest against yours almost unbearably close. You push, he yields slightly, just enough to let you think you’ve won, then recovers with fluidity and you make eye contact with Eli’s corpse. 

The body is no longer a body, but a stage for putrescence. The skin slackens and peels, colours blooming in shades of gangrenous green, jaundiced yellow and violet. The belly balloons, swollen like a womb distended with nothing but gas. What seeps from the mouth is not speech but a dark syrup, thick, unctuous, as though the body excretes its own silence.

You notice the lack of miasma in the air. The thought arrives slyly, intruding without your invitation: Isaac must have treated it, preserved it, as though he could defer the inevitable disintegration of meat but the same meticulous nature had not been spared for Eli’s appearance. He sullies your remembrance of him, whether this is intentional or not, you don’t know.

Inside your chest, emotion riots, a tangle of instincts clawing to take precedence. But there is no grief. You wait for it, demand for it to crawl up like a corpse from the grave, but it refuses you. What surges instead is the greater obscenity: the awareness that you do not feel bad.

You tremble; your knees refuse to cooperate. You fold. Isaac instantly holds you in his arms, folds with you, transforming your collapse into an act of grace, pinning you to him in a way that feels nothing like salvation and more along the lines of possession. Your head rings; the room tilts. You don’t notice him parsing your face, watching each expression alight and vanish, indecision written in microsecond shifts, until one emotion fixes and solidifies: fury. You wrench yourself free, twisting in his hold. 

Your hand moves to slap him.

A hand grabs your wrist midswing, but not to stop you. Only to moor you, to remind you that you can let yourself go, that it’s okay. You twist, shove, and he allows every movement, every strike, his calm presence amplifying the ferocity of your actions, rabid like a wild animal. 

The fist that cracks against his cheek he does not anticipate; until now your movements have been nothing but flailing, noise without aim. This lands. He reels, surprise splintering the composure he dons like a labcoat. For a moment, displeasure flickers like a light switch, before he reins it in, recaliberates, and straightens, the gesture reabsorbed into poise as though the lapse had never existed.

You shove again, sharper this time, and he leans into it. He lets the force guide him closer rather than push him away. His hands hover near yours, twitching in anticipation. When you strike, he doesn’t block outright; he catches your wrists just long enough to redirect, to guide, to invite.

You vaguely hear your name being called by Francoise, but the blood rushing through your head stymies it from reaching you.

You twist, try to push him off balance, and he flows with it, arms brushing yours, fingers grazing your forearm, a brush of skin that sets your nerves alight. Every motion is a tease: he does not overpower, does not end the fight, only shapes it, letting your strength meet his without ever fully conceding control.

The clocktower groans, a cacophony of iron and pendulum, gears grinding like the teeth of an unrelenting predator. Your fists strike again, and again, each impact a declaration of your anger, a corporeal litany. Isaac remains a study in endurance, his calm, his unyielding patience, is intolerable to you.

You shove him into a console of his making; your arms ache, your lungs scream for air, and still, he yields nothing, only the merest concession, a lean here, a minimal shift there, as if every motion of yours were a statement he is eager to receive, not evade. Your unmitigated rage finds no outlet in resistance, and the intensity of that absence roars louder than the machinery itself.

And then, a voice, fracturing, cutting through the tumult: “Stop!”

Francoise.

She bursts from where she had been rooted stagnant, a sudden flare of humanity in the mechanical cathedral, her eyes wide with alarm, fingers pressed to your chest in a futile attempt to stave off further contact. “Enough!” she cries, a demand you’re not used to hearing from her.

Your gaze snaps toward her, chest heaving, pulse hammering in your temples, and for a heartbeat the violence wavers, suspended between the two of you like a held breath. Isaac's composure is absolute, if not a little breathless. You can’t figure out why he didn’t use his powers. 

She steps between you, hands bracing against your shoulders, eyes searching yours with the gravity of one who loves fiercely and fears loss. “You can’t,” she says, voice trembling but resolute. 

The words strike, a counterweight to the frenzy, and you falter, muscles trembling with exhaustion and adrenaline but then you remember her earlier words and the anger builds back up. “You,” you seethe and she lets go of you as though she’s been branded by a hot iron. “You were a part of this.”

“No!” Francoise cries out vehemently, dismay coloring her voice, upset that you would even think that of her.

Isaac’s gaze sharpens, registering the familiar, perilous signs of his sister’s spiraling emotions, the hurt and frustration twisting in her, the precursor to an unabating storm. He does not attempt to temper your anger, only inclines his head slightly, measured and deliberate. “It was me,” he admits.

The admission presses against your ribs like iron. Anger, disbelief, and exhaustion collide, and your body tenses, ready to fling itself from the suffocating weight of the room. You don’t wait for another word, don’t pause for explanation. With a brisk motion, you wrench yourself free from the halo of his calm, brushing past Francoise, who recoils instinctively.

Isaac does not move to stop you, eyes following you out of the room.

Isaac has long since come to terms with the fact that he is not a man prone to impatience, particularly when it comes to his work. Time in the lab is a measured thing, a patient stretch of hours spent wrangling with the irreducible laws of nature. This, he can abide, but he has no patience when it comes to you. 

And so, naturally, he abandons the pretense of patience altogether. If you will not come to him, he will go to you.

There you are, in the midst of one of your familiar haunts, where your voice cannot help but rise above the others in a self-assured manner. Isaac knows that grin on your face before it even reaches full bloom. It is a weapon, a prelude to some particularly biting rejoinder, the very sort that will leave your companions awed.

His eyes scan the scene: a group of dim‑witted sycophants crowd around you, content in their own reflections, their banter tumbling over itself in a kind of vacuous reverence. 

But Isaac is never one to defer to this kind of thing, no matter how effortlessly you hold the stage. And when your smile falters, a slight dip in its angle, he knows that you are already constructing the perfect dismissive response in your mind.

The sneer of your lips is a cutting, almost surgical thing. The moment he approaches, you notice him, your eyes narrowing with practiced coldness. A subtle act of disapprobation. The smile vanishes altogether, replaced by the arch of a brow, the quiet, reflexive distaste only someone who truly knows you can read.

“What are you doing here?” you ask, and Isaac bets that your words are not an inquiry, but a challenge.

He almost feels the air tighten between you, the expectancy that follows in the wake of your question. He smiles, offering the barest gesture of politeness to your companions, letting his eyes flick over each of them with the efficiency of a man surveying a series of chess pieces.

“Are there laws prohibiting me from talking to an old friend?”

“Isaac,” you warn, though he is certain it is meant more to preserve the fragile illusion of control than anything else. “I don’t want to talk to you.”

“Really?” Isaac’s voice drops an octave, lowers itself into something intimate and prodding. “But we have so much to talk about.”

There is a pause. A breath. A beat of recognition. “I promise it won’t take long,” he continues. It feels false even as the words leave his mouth. The tone suggests as much.

You falter, words stuck somewhere between your throat and your chest. “Okay,” you manage at last, a fragile concession to the moment. Turning, you offer the girl you had been speaking to a tentative embrace, brief but full of warmth. In that rush of motion, you do not notice the almost imperceptible slackening of Isaac’s smile, a subtle fracture in his usual composure. “I’ll see you guys later,” you add, your voice a fragile thread attempting to stitch together civility from the disjointed fragments of your exit.

When you turn to Isaac, he smiles pleasantly. You wait until your friends’ voices recede into the distance before you lay your caveat bare. “We’re going somewhere public,” you say. “I’m not letting you second‑location me.”

“Believe me, if I wanted you dead, it would have happened already.”

You shake your head, scoffing in disbelief. “What the hell, Isaac?”

“After everything,” he says, and he sounds a little breathless when he does, “you’re still surprised.”

You find nothing to say to that.

He tilts out of the way, head inclining in a parody of courtesy. “Lead the way.”

The walk is brief but unbearable. He keeps exactly half a pace behind, a shadow with impeccable posture. You resent how unhurried he looks, hands folded behind his back like a man out for a stroll, while your eyes flick constantly to shopfronts and alleys, already plotting exit strategies. Twice you think about bolting, but you recall his abilities and reconsider this option.

There’s a quaint cafe not far that you like the pastries of, and the roads on the way there are semi-populated, the evening is encroaching fast and you want to get out before night takes over.

Isaac, however, has other plans. He takes off his coat, placing it onto the seat next to him and sits down leisurely. “Didn’t know cafes stayed open this late,” he comments off-handedly, sliding the other menu across the table as though he’s issuing paperwork and exploring the contents of his own, he grimaces, rictus-like. “I’ll need a minute. What about you? You always liked the food more than the drinks.”

“Isaac,” you exasperate, “what are we doing here?”

“We,” he emphasizes, “are eating. I’m hungry.”

“You just made a face, you don’t like anything on the menu.”

He grins at you, pleased at the observation. “Coffee, then. What about you?”

“I don’t know, Isaac,” and you lean closer, your tone hushed, “maybe you can start with telling me why you killed my fucking boyfriend?”

Isaac’s grin drops, his lips curl into a sneer. There is no gradual dispersing of his smile, he does not try to conceal the fact that he is displeased with the new denomination you’ve pinned on Sinclair. “He,” Isaac hisses, the syllables rife with contempt, “was not your boyfriend. You’ve never called him that before… don’t tell me you’re getting all sentimental now.”

You straighten up, taken aback at the level of vitriol suffused in what Isaac was saying. You haven’t been at the end of the genuine mockery from him for some time. You don’t say anything for a moment, using this opportunity to survey the man sitting across from you and slowly, you begin to piece things together, eyebrows smoothing out from your furrow: you note the clean pressed shirt, his usual unkempt hair, relatively tamed into a slickback style. 

Your body deflates, your eyes scour over the menu. “A croissant.”

For a moment Isaac’s face arrests: blank, trying to make sense of the conceding, the sudden turning down of the argument.

He delicately drums his gloved fingers on the table, once, twice, vetting over your face before rising to make his way over to the counter. You take the reprieve greedily. Your brain careens into theories, trying to make sense of what’s happening. Your brain is already allocating conjectures that don’t align with your perception of Isaac Night because that would mean…

It would mean that he likes you. 

Or, your brain reasons, as an addendum, and it seems more plausible than anything else: he’s avid in his manipulation, utilizing this avenue does not seem like a stretch for him. 

When he comes back, he places down a plate in front of you and gives you a bottle of water. 

You look at the croissant dubiously, then back up at him and you reach for the bottle of water, slowly unscrewing the cap and then you decide to try something. “I don’t go on dates with someone who’s murdered my boyfriend.”

His body goes still.

You let the provocation hang in the air and then twist the knife with a voice lacquered in something almost affectionate, almost cruel. “I can see why you’d be jealous of Eli. He fucks good.”

It’s effective: it manifests with a brief tick in his brow. Isaac’s riposte is whip-fast, mouth quirks into an irritated smile, his gloved hand waves its dissent in the air. “Not anymore, he doesn’t.”

Your chest tightens, your pulse you can feel drumming against the cage of your ribs, threatening to unravel the careful composure you have been cultivating since entering the cafe. You lift the bottle of water to your lips, sipping in an almost abstemious fashion, though the dryness of your mouth makes the act feel desperate, necessary only to delay the impending vertigo of anticipation. Each swallow echoes faintly in the empty booth, a small percussion to the taut silence stretched between you and him.

“Isaac. Why are we here?” You try again.

He seems to be weighing his options. “Francoise misses you, she’s worried you’re going to go to the police.”

The words hover, heavy, almost tangible, settling into the booth like dust motes in the late afternoon light. “And you? Are you worried?”

“No, because you’re not going to the police.”

You bristle at the assured tone he governs. “You-“

He interrupts you with the kind of quiet authority that compresses the air between you, folding it into his will. “If I was going to kill you, I would have done it already and if you… were planning on turning me in, I wouldn’t be here right now, sitting across from you in a booth.”

With the stillness of a guillotine held in the air, suspended over your thoughts, waiting for the inevitable drop, your body responds before your mind can fully comprehend: your pulse flares, your fingers curl reflexively around the rim of the glass, knuckles blanching.

After a long interval, he speaks again, quieter this time, his voice a delicate tremor against the weight of his usual composure. “I don’t know why I kept it,” he admits, the phrasing cautious, as though he were stepping into uncharted territory of confession. “But I wanted to see how you would react.”

“Why?”

“Don’t you know?”

You swallow.

“I think I’m a bad person,” you disclose in tu, there is an unidentifiable emotion swelling in your chest, you think it's a surfeit of love, you think it's grief and he smiles so fondly at this admittance.

“No, you’re not,” he says with such conviction, like he’s known you for your entire life. “For you, the pain will come later. It always does and when it does, I’ll be there.”

Strangely, the dynamic falls back into place, even with the fraught tension permeating the air, but you elude it. Francoise wants a picturesque relationship, neat and framed, a diorama of smiles and sanctioned affection, and so she welcomes you back with open arms, though the edges of her calm betray the sawtoothed undercurrent, the eruptive hyde-teeth she barely restrains. You notice the way she hesitates just long enough for the shadow of irritation to flicker across her features when your attention drifts to her brother rather than anchoring itself to her: a near capitulation to the truth: you are a force she cannot domesticate. 

Isaac’s disposition contains a modicum of warmth, as if it were a catalyst to be titrated with care rather than a spontaneous effusion. Maybe it had always been there, lurking beneath the contours of his gaunt face and the strict geometry of his gestures, and maybe you had simply not been attending to it, too absorbed in the calculus of his habitual severity. When your gaze brushes over him now, the smile that had previously read as cold, as infinitely calculating, takes on a tenor of tenderness, subtle but undeniable, a shift almost imperceptible unless one had been trained in the recognition of infinitesimal change.

He does not approach you with words or overt gestures; rather, he is content to occupy the same space. It is as if the conversation at the cafe never took place, folded neatly into some recess of history, and yet the residue of it lingers, like a faint chemical trace that insists upon recognition even when denied.

It annoys you.

So you rope another poor soul into the equation. If it worked last time, it’ll work this time. If jealousy was the catalyst last time, then you’d use it again. 

This time, though, you calibrate the variables differently. The substitute is not some random Normie, but one of his own: an Outcast, a gorgon, to be specific. 

Obviously, there is no curiosity on your part. Isaac has already conducted the reconnaissance, delineating the abilities of every Outcast who used to pass through the school like insects pinned and labeled in a specimen drawer. You know the gorgon’s capacities as well as he does. But it doesn’t matter. What matters is the performance of curiosity, an exhibition mounted for a single spectator. So you ask questions you already know the answers to, laugh at demonstrations that hold no surprise, lean forward in what looks like fascination and the gorgon’s apprehension morphs into something panegyrized as he preens under your attention. 

You lay it on thick when you see that Isaac is around.

You lean closer to the gorgon, letting your voice drop to a conspiratorial murmur, inviting him to a side of town the Outcasts hardly frequent. 

He frowns. “That side of town?” The serpents in his hair shift nervously.

You step closer, letting the warmth of your body press into the space between you without closing it entirely. Fingers hover near his hand, brushing the edge of his sleeve, the faintest contact that sends a ripple through him. “I mean,” you murmur, slow and teasing, the innuendo thick in your tone, “we don’t have to go all the way.”

Despite the act, the blush that spreads across his face pleases you.

You lean in, intent on closing the distance, when the sensation arrests you. At first it’s nothing, a dulling as though your limbs belonged to someone anaesthetized. Then the numbness cements, pinning you where you stand. You think for a second that the gorgon has accidentally revealed his faithful serpents to you but in the corner of your vision, Isaac’s treacherous hand retreats, casual. The recognition lands with a thud heavier than the paralysis itself: he has chosen to exert what he shouldn’t. Powers weaponized against you. 

Isaac releases you the instant he has you, and yet for you the seconds dilate into something approaching eternity. The betrayal stings.

Your face becomes a blank canvas, stone-cold. 

“Are you okay?” the guy you had been flirting with asks, worry threading his voice like a hesitant chord.

Your smile is a blade, a knife of politeness masking everything beneath. “Yeah… give me a second.” The words are casual, but the meaning is precise: your attention has already shifted. Then you move, deliberately, stalking toward Isaac as if the world had condensed to a single trajectory. You already know where he’ll be. Every step you take is laden with purpose, carrying the weight of unspoken warning.

The laboratory door swings open, and his voice cuts through the space, biting: “Finally—”

“No,” your reply slices across him, firm and resolute. “You don’t get to talk right now.” The simplicity of the sentence belies the command embedded within it. It is an assertion of presence, a reclamation of control.

Isaac’s grin doesn’t reach his eyes, it feels like he’s mocking you. There is a new hardness in his eyes now.

“You’ve never done that to me, you’ve never—” Your voice falters on the edge of vulnerability, as if the sentence threatens to betray more than you intend. But you recover almost instantly, smoothing your features as though ironing out an inconvenient crease. He will not have the satisfaction of seeing you unsteady. “You’ve never used your power on me,” you say, each word deliberate, clipped, a statement for the record and the anger — the anger has no interest in moderation. It arrives as a deluge, an inundation that drowns its accompanying emotions on contact. 

“I thought you liked me!” you blurt out, a paroxysm of your rage, body heaving and in the back of your mind embarrassment prickles. 

Isaac leans slightly forward, lips pressing into a hard line. “If you know… why flirt with others?” he snarls. “You knew I’d notice. And yet… you still chose to test me. Felt heavy, didn’t it? Frozen in place… not being able to move.”

Your stomach twists uncomfortably.

He sees it. The tension in your shoulders, the stiff set of your hands, the way your eyes incensed with both anger and something else he cannot control.

Isaac pauses, the acerbic curl of his mouth fading, his body subtly shifting back. “I suppose, I’d say that we’re now even,” he says. 

“We’re not even,” you say, and you feel a degree of clarity you hadn’t before, everything falls in place and all those messy emotions finally click into place. Everything comes pouring out. “You’re holding my transgressions against me, but you’re the one who spent all that time watching, not making a move, and when I thought— just when I thought when we’d made progress, you go back to how things used to be. And you’ve killed someone who loved me, genuinely loved me. I don’t understand, you don’t want me, but you don’t want anyone else to want me either.”

“I do,” he interjects, abrupt, unpolished. “I do want you.”

The confession is raw, stripped of ornament. It should soothe; it doesn’t. Instead, it hangs in the air, plaintive and insufficient, the bluntness itself is an insult.

“You didn’t love him back, though,” Isaac murmurs, and the phrasing, though blunt, is not accusatory. It’s diagnostic, confirming what he already suspects, and yet there’s a tremor of hunger beneath it.

Your seethe betrays you, and he sees it instantly, yet he does not recoil. Isaac never recoils. He inclines closer, as if your anger were proof of vitality, evidence that you are still gloriously alive to him. He amends, not to erase the sting of your emotion or to spare you from the weight of his observation, but to show you the purity of his intent. “It’s okay. I don’t think of you as any less for it. You don’t have to defend yourself to me.”

Your brows furrow, trembling as if unsure which emotion to settle on.

“Emotions are strange, aren’t they?” he asks. “We are a slave to them… an emotional weakness that we can’t make sense of. They strip us of any rational thought.”

His words drift, as though no longer addressed solely to you.

Then his attention snaps back. “And yet…”

You wait, fraught, breath caught.

“I won’t pretend it was there from the first time I saw you. I was content to leave you alone. But I’ve tried — silence, distance, time.” He lets the words fall one by one, like evidence being laid out. “None of it worked. I care about you.”

His mouth twitches, a flicker of something near a smirk, as though the absurdity of it entertains him, not laughter, but the grim satisfaction of witnessing a truth finally acknowledged. “Or ‘like you,’” he amends, crisp, unyielding, “as you so simply put it. Call it what you will. It’s yours, and you have it, it doesn’t matter if you accept it or not.” He speaks with the unshakable authority of a theorem. There is no apology, no petition, only the sterile, terrible fact, luminous and undeniable in its unadorned lucidity.

“Take off your gloves,” you command. 

Isaac’s brow twitches, a telltale sign of confusion. “What?”

“Your gloves, Isaac. Take them off.”

He hesitates. Then, slowly, he lifts one hand to his mouth, teeth catching the leather, tugging it loose. The second comes away without the same ceremony, stripped clean in a single pull, now that one hand is bare.

He folds his hands behind his back.

Your pulse accelerates.

“Show me you want me.”

A breath escapes him as though it were expelled by force, a subtle surrender. He laughs breathlessly. “Tell me how and…” he steps closer, into your space, hands reaching for yours, voice lilting facetiously. “I’ll position myself accordingly.”

It should feel like a cop-out, but for someone like him, it doesn’t so you take it as it is. You notice his throat bob in anticipation, the prospect of rendering him nervous excites you, though no other prodromal signs of nerves are apparent. 

Your hands go to unbutton his pants, slowly - you’re not exactly teasing him but you want to savor each and every single one of his reactions, like he has been doing with you. 

When you reach for his cock, he’s not as prepared as he thinks he is, his hands brace themselves on your shoulders, anchoring himself down.

“I’ve done this before,” he admits, unabashedly, as if confessing to having once jaywalked in an empty street rather than unveiling something that slices straight through your composure.

The words hang in the air, and hypocritically, you feel jealousy, nauseating and uninvited, swells at the back of your throat. It is never subtle. It doesn’t creep. It pounces, claws bared, leaving you with that sour-metal taste of humiliation you can neither spit out nor swallow. It has no rightful place in your mouth, not after you had paraded around attempting to rouse his own jealousy and succeeding.

A small part of you questions Isaac’s composure, how he had kept it together after watching you flirt with other people. Then, a small thought, unbidden comes to you: he hadn’t. It’s a thought that shouldn’t please you as much as it does, but emotions are a complex thing, you never understood yours. 

And so you lash out because that is what jealousy does — it renders you wild. Your mouth curls before you have decided, your tone a deliberate laceration, like you’re trying to diminish him for his lack of experience: “What, a handjob?”

The word detonates obscenely between you. It is not sophisticated. It is the linguistic equivalent of grinding a cigarette butt into silk sheets, a deliberate desecration. A term with all the grace of an instruction manual, stripped of glamor. It is teenage fumbling in the dark, static on a radio channel when you drive through a tunnel. That is why you select it. You would rather defile the moment than admit it wounds you.

“No,” he rectifies, and there is no shame in the correction, Isaac isn’t flustered by it. “Getting off.”

The clarification, calm and scrupulous, strips the barb from your sneer. And then he adds, soft, lethal: “I was thinking of you.”

The words land with a violence no volume could achieve. It is the casualness that ruins you, the lack of ceremony, as though this revelation were nothing more than a grocery item mentioned in passing. And in that moment, you are undone, because jealousy has been outflanked by something more dangerous: possession.

The breath comes rushing out of you, and you feel his nose nudge against your cheek when he smirks. “You’re beginning to understand what it was like for me.”

You don’t need to confirm it. He already knows it to be true.

“You’re making a mess,” you stay instead, highlighting his plight, then your voice dips into a ridiculing coo when you tighten your grip, around him and Isaac’s mouth gives a betraying quiver. “You won’t last if this is how much you’re dripping all over my hand.”

You draw your hand back, deliberately unhurried, and the pause becomes its own provocation. Into your palm you spit, you spread it along the expanse of your hand with the sweep of your tongue and you think, he must like it because his eyes follow the movement of your tongue with rapt attentiveness.

“I don’t even think I need to do any of this,” you remark. For all the affectation of effortlessness, you want him to see how much command you wield: that you can take or withhold, that your ministrations are elective, not compulsory.

When your hand returns, his body answers before he does. His cock jerks against your palm, obstinate, as if it has resolved on its own that you will be complicit. His eyes, when they meet yours, have shed the whites entirely; they are devoured by stygian, pupils flooded wide in that primitive dilation that reduces man to animal. He looks at you with the focus of hunger that annihilates any social decorum.

The faint twitch of his lips denounces his struggle: whether to bare teeth or smirk. He is poised on the hinge between violence and reverence, both impulses colliding in the same breath. It would be comic if it weren’t so electric: the posture of an animal that pretends restraint, though its whole body is already lunging.

“Kiss me,” he rasps, the words emerging not as request but compulsion, scraped raw from his throat.

“Always so demanding.”

He scoffs, “oh yeah, it’s me who’s the demanding one.”

You smile, and then you tug him into a kiss.

You’d meant to be gentle, you remind yourself, you’d meant sweetness but it’s obliterated under the sheer force of his want. He kisses like he’s starving, like he’s trying to eat you whole, every bite at your lip proof he doesn’t know how to take without tearing.

“I was going to be so nice to you,” you manage between breaths, your voice mockingly mournful, though the words are smeared by the press of his mouth still chasing yours. He groans against you, chest heaving, as if he can’t bear the thought of you withholding even now.

You wipe your mouth on the back of your hand, see the gloss of spit and red, and laugh at how quickly composure is drowned in the filth of wanting. “If you don’t know how to kiss, then don’t try to take over.”

“How else am I supposed to learn?” he snaps back, lips trembling, teeth pressing into yours again, the words defiant.

You twist your head slightly, teasing, letting him catch only part of your mouth before pulling away again, leaving him whimpering and pressed into empty space. “You learn by listening,” you murmur, dragging a finger along his jaw, over slick spit and damp skin, “not by shoving yourself forward like a fucking animal.”

He whines, low and unrefined, and you tug him back anyway, mouths colliding in a tangle of wet insistence, spit stringing, breath mingling. 

He cants his hips into your fist, rutting like the motion itself has stripped him of any shame. The pressure drags another spill from the head, a hot, translucent rope that clings stubbornly before surrendering to gravity. It slides down the length of him in erratic trails, gathering at the thick root where it mats into the dark curls, gluing hair to skin. Every fresh pulse adds to the mess: sticky gloss coating the shaft, slicking your palm, stringing between your fingers when you squeeze tighter.

You can feel it tack against your skin, the slippery resistance that makes each movement louder, wetter, indecently audible. He’s soaking himself in his own undoing, smearing your hand, and still he can’t stop thrusting into it as if desperation might wring him clean. 

There’s something almost abject in the sight: not the sculpted body he pretends to own but a leaking, straining thing, his cock a faucet he cannot close, his breath fractured in tandem with the obscene slickness gathering everywhere.

“Close. I’m—“

You feel the twitch in him, the way his hips sputter almost without thought, the slick pulse at the tip that tells you he’s about to come. “No,” you say firmly, and your hand eases just slightly, enough to let him register the denial.

He shudders, nearly trembling against you, a raw guttural sound spilling from his throat. His grip on you tightens, hips pitching forward even as you pull back, desperate for the friction he can’t quite get. The slick sheen of him glistens under your fingers, dripping where your palm once held him, hot and sticky and utterly uncontrollable.

You watch, fascinated, as his body fails him: thighs quivering, jaw twitching, lips parted in tattered gasps. He tries to will himself into stillness, to obey the command, but the need has grown beyond reason, beyond restraint. Every shudder, every whimper, every slick strand left on your palm screams his want and how deliciously futile it is to deny him.

“Isaac,” you tap his cheek, a gentle slap along the slick, damp skin. For a heartbeat, if the haziness won’t clear up, but your voice brings him back.

“There you are… not yet,” you hum. “Need you to hold on a little longer. Wanna spend more time with you. You can do that for me, can’t you?”

His chest heaves, the slick sheen on his lips betraying his need, yet his eyes rekindle with defiance. He licks his lips, jaw tight. “I can,” he says, voice clipped, pride weaving through the desperation, even as he trembles under your hand, you can see the stubborn insistence of ego refusing to vanish entirely.

You incline your head toward the chair, and he eases himself down, weight settling with a quiet, deliberate shift. Your hands find the waistband of his pants; he lifts his hips, helping, and the fabric slides off in a slow surrender. 

Your throat feels dry at the sight before you. Legs slightly apart, the thick flesh of his thighs pressing into the chair, taut and glistening with heat, every line of him straining just enough. Your fingers twitch, hovering, before they reconsider the course of their action, making their way over to his shirt instead.

He tenses. 

You pause.

“Too much?”

“Wasn’t expecting it,” he concedes. “You can keep going.”

You do, slowly, so he can stop you if he needs to. Your fingers brush against the clockwork heart, and the instant reaction sends a hot flush through you, cunt throbbing, slick and pulsing. His hips jerk sharply, fucking into the empty air, cock drooling.

You mentally file the reaction away. 

Then you get onto your knees, ignoring how the cold floor feels biting into you.

You lick at the trail of hair at the bottom of his stomach, feeling his cock twitch beneath you, then you ghost your lips to the thick of his thighs and bite into the flesh. His hands grip the arms of the chair, knuckles white, muscles coiling, the hitch of his breath, ragged, uneven, as he bends into the bite. 

“Fuck- don’t… don’t stop,” he rasps.

You ease up slightly, pretending reluctance, teeth grazing the tender skin there. His thigh jolts with a mind of its own, smacking your jaw with a wet, insistent thud. Each twitch sends a shiver through you. His breath comes in rough-hewn pulls, uneven and ragged, chest rising and falling like a storm-tossed wave, each hitch a wordless plea, a demand tangled with want that claws at your restraint.

You feel the weight first. A hot, sticky heaviness pressing against the side of your cheek. When you glance up, you almost laugh at the sight: Isaac, head tilted, eyes trained on you, watching with unnerving clarity. His hand wraps around the base of his dick, guiding it, slightly grinding his hips against your face, smearing your cheek with the wet sheen dripping down his length.

It’s obscene how much there is, thick strings of slickness dragging across your skin, glistening in the low light, smearing your lips, your jaw. Every slow push leaves another sticky trail, and he hums low in his chest as if testing you, painting you with his mess.

The weight drags along your cheekbone, the corner of your mouth, hot and slick, precome drooling so freely you can feel it slide, wet and warm, down your chin. The smell of him, saline, musky, floods you, and every grind of him against your skin makes your cunt throb, your thighs clenching tight against the cold floor.

You laugh a little breathlessly, and bite again, harder this time, marmoreal teeth pressing into warm, resistant flesh, tasting the tension under his skin. 

Isaac bears it. His jaw flexes, molars rasping as if he’s grinding them to dust. His voice is low, gravel-thick, cutting into the air: “You can bite harder than that.”

You lean one side of your cheek into his thigh and look up at him, a laugh in your eyes. “Don’t want you cumming all over my face.” You spare him the humiliation of letting him know that he’s already drenched half of your face with his precome already.

“Isn’t that the plan?”

“The plan was in my mouth.”

The words barely leave your lips before he snaps, hips spasming hard, cock pulsing slick and hot against your palm. His jaw clenches, muscles bunching like coiled steel, and a low, guttural sound rumbles from deep in his chest, an amalgamation of a growl and a groan. Every fiber of him tenses, hips snapping, skin slick with the heat of it, wetness dripping freely over your hand.

Your hands clamp onto his hips, holding him to the chair. You let your mouth descend, slick from your spit and his slick, and the instant you take him in, he howls, a gravelly, ragged sound torn from his chest, hoarse, full of need and surprise. You moan at the sound, and the way his hips try to twist in the chair, has you grinding your cunt against the heel of your foot, each roll of your hips is insistent. 

You dip your head, letting your tongue trace the raised ridge of a vein. Each pass is an exploration without haste, following the taut line beneath the skin that pulses with the weight of his blood. The heaviness feels comfortable on your tongue, the warmth of him presses against your mouth.

His hips jerk again, harder, faster, and you hum around him, lips and tongue slick and warm, responding to every pulse, every frantic moan. You hadn’t expected him to be this loud, he’s taut, even as his body betrays the sheer need he’s trying to control, and you ride it, every wet, hot tremor mirrored in your cunt, grinding against your own heel as your pleasure spirals.

When he notices that you’re faltering, mouth slack, breath catching in little hiccups while he thrusts shallowly into your mouth, he tilts his head, trying to figure out what you’re doing, eyes narrowed as he studies you with a furrowed brow and when the realization flickers over his face, his mind sharpens. His hands clamp gently on your cheeks, palms steadying you, thumbs tracing the contours of your jawline before coercing your face up to parse it, raptly watching your eyes roll to the back of your head, your hips stuttering as you come with a muffled cry.

“Fuck!” His voice cracks at the sight, wrecked and desperate, rutting into your mouth, wild and feral. His vision blurs, the world tilting and darkening at the edges, and a guttural, strangled moan tears from him as he comes hard, teetering on the edge of blacking out, swallowed by the rawness of himself. His moans are strangled, half-choked, spine arching, every nerve screaming as the tremors of his release shudder through him, leaving only the primitive pulse of himself, trembling, panting, devoured by the urgency that drives him beyond thought.

His come, thick and saline in taste, spills down your throat, the excess fluid leaking down your jaw and onto your clothes. Your senses reel, but you come back to yourself faster than he does, mind clearing even as your body still trembles. Your tongue laves over him and he shudders involuntarily, a concatenation of micro-convulsions racking his body while his hands shake against you.

You let yourself shift, releasing him from your mouth when you feel like he’s had enough, the tremor of his body a residual echo, raising yourself up to his open mouth. 

You playfully kiss his peeking tongue, mouth wet, and when you retract to admire his face, you catch him licking his lips, eyes still blighted with voracious want. His bare hands act on their own, possessing their own thoughts, clambering desperately on your hips, drawing you in closer. He doesn’t do anything except feel, knead the skin over fabric, before impudently inching towards the hem of your shirt, nails digging in and attempting to get closer to flesh. 

You ignore the ache to be filled, that gnawing hunger tugging at your core. “Alright, you’ve had your fill,” you say, vaguely amused, eyes raking over his dishevelled countenance, taking stock of his condition. You’re not surprised by his eagerness; Isaac wants to push his body beyond human constraints. His body doesn’t agree but he rarely operates in congruence with the flesh that holds him. 

You draw back slowly, letting the space between you feel like a soft exhale.

He opens his mouth to voice his dissent.