#starsoirees

“I heard there was a party. Felt like checking it out,” He replies casually. You scoff loudly, the alcohol in your veins dulling your usual social filters. 

“Don’t lie to me. You never go to shit like this,” You were right. He usually was either too busy with his studies or never cared enough to attend parties. He felt like they were a waste of time and energy.

“Why are you here? Really?” You ask, probing for the answer you both already know, but that you are infinitely scared to hear. He slides his gaze to meet yours, and his breath imperceptibly catches in his throat. Tears pearl in your eyes, ones that are not from the thick fumes wafting through the house. Your jaw is tense, and your lips are shiny with a gloss that surely isn’t yours. He doesn’t respond, instead gazing at you with his half-lidded eyes. 

“Answer me, ‘haitham,” Your voice wavers, and you lean forward, fingers gripping the carpet. The music is a rhythmic thumping accompanied by lively voices, cheering and clapping and singing along drunkenly to old pop songs. A forgotten phone illuminates, displaying an incoming text message and the time, 3:24 am. 

He knows he’s the last person you want to see. After he left you to pursue his academic dream, you never really forgave him. He knows it by the dent in your brow that appears when you see him, or the fake way you speak, like everything couldn’t be better for you, in your happy little world. He especially knows it by the scent of your clothes, thick with the stench of the cigarettes that you swore you’d never smoke again. Yet here you are, drunk at some birthday party smoking cigarettes at night like you used to, sitting across the floor from your ex who had broken your heart terribly. Your ex who was maddeningly attractive in the clouded atmosphere of the forgotten bedroom lit with tacky purple LED strips that were barely sticking to the ceiling. 

He breathes, and leans forward, his face coming infinitesimally close to yours. His eyes slip down to your lips, then back up to your watery gaze. You’re frozen, eyes wide and lips parted in shock and anticipation. He brings a hand up to your face and rubs his coarse thumb along your cheekbone. His breath is sweet as he exhales. 

“I missed you,” he whispers, and before you know it his lips are pressed against yours, slotting together like they’d never parted. The tears that had risen start to stream down your cheeks, following their previous trails. You kiss him fervently, mouths barely parting to breathe before diving back together forcefully. He slides his fingers between yours and slowly slips the cigarette suspended between your fingers out of your grip, and grinds it onto the ashtray by your feet. Your hands rise and tangle in his gray hair, pressing him closer and closer. 

“I’m sorry,” he murmurs, and he continues to kiss you feverishly, moving from your mouth to the crook of your jaw, where you bite your lip and grip his hair even tighter. The feeling of having you back in his arms is too euphoric to stop, and his arms snake around your waist to pull you into his lap. 

What he really didn’t anticipate when he left was how much he needed you. How he missed the way your body curled into his side at night, how he’d find his soundproof earpieces resting comfortably on your head when he needed them most, how you’d always make him sort the laundry with you because it was too boring to do by yourself. How you’d pressed yourself into his heart and left an absence that he only realized when he was a nation away. The Akademiya challenged him in a lot of ways, but one of the hardest was your absence. Not waking up to your figure on the balcony in the middle of the night, smoking cigarettes when you couldn’t sleep. Those moonlit nights in his new house in Sumeru always felt strangely lonely, even when his roommate spent many nights working vigorously on a new architecture project. 

He never planned to return to Fontaine, assuming that you hated him enough that you’d never want to see him again. And yet here he was, making out with you in a stranger’s bedroom at 3 am, and it was like he was back in your little apartment, kissing you back to sleep after your late-night smokes, tasting toothpaste and cigarettes on your lips. Alhaitham’s vice was much more addictive than smoking, drugs, or alcohol. It was you, and he didn’t intend to quit anytime soon.