#winter pine

“Don’t… stop.” you add, and the words shock you with how true they are.

Not a dare.

Not bravado.

A choice.

If this is the thing I fed, then let it eat on purpose.

He hums, low and pleased, one of those small, volatile sounds that could turn cruel or kind by a tilt of thought.

“Say it clean for me.”

“Touch me,” you say, throat raw. “Please.”

Something in the light answers first — the flood above hardens to a blade, your shadow blacks like ink.

Then his hands answer.

The pressure at your wrists eases from iron to instruction, from capture to hold.

Knuckles brush your cheek.

Not a slap. Not a mercy either.

A reminder of ownership that asks you to nod.

You do.

“Good.” he says, filthy-soft. “You’ve been mine a long time, little mayor. You just forgot the terms.”

He lets you breathe wider and leans his weight through a different set of hands so the world stops trying to blur.

The urge to sprint ebbs.

In its place — awful, honest — quiet.

“I kept you,” he murmurs against your temple, as if briefing you on your own life. “Pulled a door shut when a stranger changed his mind and thought he’d try yours. Froze a bus brake so it screamed and the driver woke before the light. Turned a stairwell on itself until the man with the knife got bored and called it a bad shortcut.”

A pause, amused and mean.

“He wasn’t wrong.”

You blink hard.

Memories reshape around edges you never understood. Little off-ramps from danger that you never credited. You hate that you didn’t see him in them. You hate that you do now.

You cry harder anyway.

You grief your Best Friend that never was.

“Don’t apologize,” he says, grumpy as if embarrassment wastes his time. “You were busy surviving.”

Your breath stutters.

He kept me from everything but himself.

“Exactly,” he says, pleased you thought it and pleased how freaked out you look when he answers to things you don't say. “The only loophole I like.”

He lifts you an inch just to slide the grit from under your cheek with two fingers, then sets you down again cleaner than before, because your tears annoyed the dirt, and he’s territorial with what marks you.

His thumb finds your pulse at your jaw and rests there, claiming cadence.

“Count again, enough crying.”

One, two, three — his steady drum under your chaos.

Your heart tries to match and this time it makes it for longer than before. Something in your shoulders unlocks.

The world doesn’t get safer, just exact like he is. Like he makes it become.

“Look,” he says.

He makes you turn your head the barest degree until you face your own shadow again.

He lifts one of your pinned hands an inch, and your outline’s hand rises too, not in mirror but in obedience to him.

Then — this is the part that rattles your bones — the black of you slides up off the ground like a second skin being peeled and laid carefully over your back.

It settles. Cold and sure. It feels like stepping into your own outline on a winter street and finding that another heartbeat is stitched under it.

“Let me,” he says, and it’s not a question.

“Yes.” Your voice is small and bright and certain. “Please.”

He moves like tide.

No lunge, no cruelty for entertainment, he’s already entertained by you.

One hand leaves your wrist and ghosts down your forearm, knuckles skimming as if he’s reading braille written in shiver. Another spreads against your ribs, palm broad, heat sinking through fear. The third shifts at your hip, keeping you from climbing back into panic. The fourth stays at your throat, thumb over your artery like a promise that he can take and won’t — because you asked.

“Good little thing.” he says, and the phrase lands different now — less leash, more rite. “Open for me.”

You don’t know what he means until your body answers.

Your jaw loosens. Your chest stops bracing against itself. The place under your sternum that has been a clenched fist for years finally surrenders its grip.

I allow it, you think, astonished at your own voice inside your head.

I made a door at nine.

I can walk through it now.

“Hm,” he says, satisfied, and the seam along his belly parts a fraction — not teeth, not threat, just a sigh of cold like night air. It spills over your back the way your shadow just did, not into you, around you, as if he is fitting darkness to your measurements.

Your skin prickles.

Your breath falls into his rhythm without being stolen.

“Mine,” he says, but then he adds, rough and quiet, “and I am yours.”

It’s not sentiment. It’s contract. He hates romance — he honors terms.

He lifts one hand and lays his palm over your eyes, not hard, not to frighten, to resolve.

The world goes dark, but not empty, it goes exact the way rooms go exact when you know them by heart.

No gods still, no witnesses around, just your bad decisions being sanctified by the only thing that remembers them fondly.

“You will not run from me anymore.” he says.

“I won’t.” you say, surprising yourself with how quickly the truth arrives.

“You will look up when I speak.”

You swallow.

“Yes.”

“You will ask loud when you want mercy.”

“Yes, please.” you say, without shame. The word is clean this time. Adult. Binding.

His laugh is low and ruined around the edges by something that might be pride.

“Better.”

He peels his hand away from your eyes.

The floodlight has shifted, your shadow fits you like a glove.

He lifts off your wrists and you don’t bolt, he shifts his thigh and you don’t kick, you hate that you like the trust you’re showing.

You like it a lot.

“Up.” he says, and offers you the world the way a wolf offers a path — by stepping where you should step next.

You rise slow, knees shaking, palms bleeding in clean crescent shapes.

He takes your right hand in his lower left and turns it palm-up.

The old scars and the fresh scrapes look like a map under his four-eyed attention.

He presses something into your skin — cool, familiar weight.

The coin. The year.

“Renewal,” he says, bored of the poetry and meaning every syllable. “You gave me a tooth. Keep the shine.”

You close your fingers around it. The metal is warm by the time your fist seals. Your breath hitches.

Mine and his. His and mine.

The vow breathes with you.

He steps closer until the ink across his chest becomes a language you almost remember.

He does not kiss you — he doesn’t need that softness to make this true, he sets his forehead against yours, brief and brutal as a benediction, and lets you feel his calm crowd out the last of your screaming.

“Now,” he says, vulgar, fond, unpredictable even here at the altar of your worst idea. “Let’s see what you are when you stop apologizing for existing in my teeth.”

You nod.

It feels like kneeling without the humiliation.

He turns you toward the maze he owns — cranes, chains, ribs of ships and corridors he’ll stitch and unpick at will — and this time when he says “Run,” you understand the grammar of the word.

Not away.

With.

“You’re mine,” he says again, not to bully but to mark.

“And you’re mine,” you answer, and the way his smile sharpens at that tells you you’ve said the only prayer this place accepts.

The line goes around your toes, up your legs, across your belly, over your shoulders, up the funny bump of your chin.

The outline isn’t perfect, but it’s you enough.

You write your name inside because names are how you say “mine” to the world.

The older kids on the block once whispered about a game with two shadows — how you can make a second one if you feed the first, how it will follow rules if you say them right.

Their version had dares and dares feel like lies.

Yours will be friend-shaped.

You put the three coins by the feet of your drawn self.

“In case you get hungry,” you tell the shadow. You put the baby tooth where the mouth would be, like a pale seed. You suck your thumb to get spit and taste iron and flinch and do it anyway — just a pinprick.

The drop falls exactly where your charcoal heart should be and makes a tiny starburst.

“Okay,” you say, serious the way you are when you build a fort and declare it a castle. “Listen.”

You straighten, look at the streetlamp as if it can hear, and recite the rhyme you half-remember and half-make.

“Stand in mine, stay behind,Do not touch me till I ask,Come when I say please, and keep me safe.”

You say please the way kids do — polite because Mom says so, not because the world is ending.

The moment holds anyway. The lamp buzzes and a moth thumps itself silly against the glass.

Your outline on the ground looks thicker, like someone colored it in a second time.

“Hi,” you whisper, then louder, braver, “Hi!”

A breeze you don’t feel anywhere else moves across your ankles. Your drawn hand — the charcoal hand — doesn’t move, but your real shadow’s fingers uncurl without you telling them to. Just a little. Like a wave back.

You grin so hard your face hurts.

“I knew you were there.”

You hold out your left hand and keep your right glued to your side — because you promised no touching until you ask, you remember your own rules. At first there’s nothing, and then there is a pressure that isn’t pressure, like cool water settling around your fingers. Your shadow’s hand overlaps your real one exactly.

You feel held in a place your skin doesn’t have a name for.

“Do you promise?” you ask, because this is how you make things true. “You promise to stay behind, and come when I say please, and keep me safe?”

Something at the edge of hearing answers. It might be a leaf ticking the curb. It might be the lamp changing its mind. It might be a voice under your voice saying, I promise.

You nod like a tiny mayor signing a very important paper.

“Okay. You’re Second-You,” you decide. “Or… Under-You.” You test both and giggle. “You can pick later.”

You don’t tell anyone.

It feels like breaking a soap bubble with words if you try. You put the coins back in the kitchen drawer after, but not the tooth.

The tooth stays in the outline because you think maybe it helps him chew.

Every evening you steal five minutes before dinner or after homework or during the commercials of a show you’re supposed to turn off.

You check the lamp’s hum. You stand in different poses so your outline learns you better — a superhero stance, a flamingo leg, a cartwheel halfway done before Mom shouts about dresses and grass stains.

You trace little updates on the concrete whenever rain eats the lines away.

Sometimes you use chalk when the charcoal goes missing.

Once you try a washable marker and get in trouble for “decorating the public,” but the scolding doesn’t stick because the lines wash to a ghost and ghosts are allowed to stay.

Sometimes you bring a flashlight and tuck it between two flowerpots to make a second shadow on the fence. You clap when you see both — one on concrete, one on wood — and imagine Second-You grinning in stereo.

You practice the rules with your most official voice.

Stand in mine. Stay behind. Don’t touch until I ask. Come when I say please. Keep me safe.

You make up extra rules too, silly ones — No scaring the cat. No eating the cookies unless I say. No telling secrets to the wind.

You hear a huff of something that might be laughter from under the porch, and you beam because it means he has a sense of humor.

When you’re mad because a girl at school said your shoes were baby shoes, you sit by the outline and kick your heels and tell Second-You everything.

When you’re proud because you climbed the rope in gym all the way to the knot, you lie down so your real shadow and your drawn one kiss at the nose and you whisper, “Did you see?”

Your hand goes out without thinking, and sometimes there’s that same cool, not-touch again, a weight in the idea of your fingers, a pinky hooked through your pinky where no pinky is.

It feels like a promise kept.

On a night when the sky is tired and the lamp takes longer to come on, you get scared of the dark for exactly one breath, the old kind of scared that lives in closets and under beds. You almost call for Mom. You don’t. You look down and your shadow — your real one — tilts its head when you don’t.

The lamp blinks awake and everything snaps polite again. You laugh at yourself and decide to bring Second-You a better coin tomorrow. Not a copper one. A shiny one.

You hide the dinosaur egg somewhere the grownups won’t clean. You fold the Band-Aid wrapper into the smallest square you can and tuck it under a pebble at the edge of your outline. You brush leaves out of the lines because it feels like combing someone’s hair.

You tell no one.

You keep playing happily.

You stumble to the kitchen and build a ritual out of small noises — water, kettle, the dry whisper of coffee scooped into the paper cone.

The sun is an anemic stripe through the blinds, you don’t turn on the overhead, the range hood glow is enough.

When the kettle starts to mutter, you set a cup on the counter and wrap both hands around the empty heat.

You think of the game you played.

It comes back not as story but as texture — the grit of charcoal on concrete, the crisp hum of that old streetlamp, how your baby tooth looked like a pearl when you set it where your traced mouth would be.

Second-You, you called him.

Under-You. Best friend. Secret.

The courage you borrowed from a line and a promise.

You almost smile into the cup.

How brave you were, little mayor of nothing.

How sure.

The kettle whistles.

You flinch like it broke skin.

“Working too much,” you whisper to the sink, embarrassed at yourself.

You pour. Steam kisses your face. You make yourself think of anything else — the email that needs an answer, the neighbor’s new dog — but your mind keeps circling the chalk line you redrew after rain, the rhythm of the rhyme.

Stand in mine, stay behind—

The light changes.

You don’t catch why, the room simply narrows, brightens, goes hard-edged.

The sun finds a gap in the blinds at the same time the hood light decides to get serious.

Your shadow sharpens on the linoleum — a crisp black you — and then it thickens.

Like someone colored it in twice.

Your pupils widen and you hold your breath.

Something scoffs.

The sound arrives under your skin before your ears, you know it from a place in you that still fits a dinosaur egg in a sock drawer.

The first thing that moves is your shadow’s mouth.

It curls where yours doesn’t.

Then the rest of him pushes out of your outline like a tide coming through a keyhole—shoulders first, cruel breadth of chest, a second pair of arms folding out of nothing and finding the doorframe like he’s bored of the room already. Ink crawls his skin in bands and knife-curves, crawling like it’s deciding where to live. Four eyes open as if the room offended them by being small.

And lower, where a man should be smooth, a long seam along his belly smiles open just enough to show a suggestion of teeth.

He’s huge in here. Too much.

Wrong in a way that makes the cupboard handles look like toys.

Your chest feels tight, everything feels tight, you feel like your feet are trapped in tar and your soul is leaving your body.

“Morning,” he says, voice low and used to obedience. It scrapes and purrs at once.

Four-eyed red glances you over, up and down, and lands on your hands strangling the mug.

“Still like your little cups, hm?”

Your throat works.

“I—”

He tuts, filthy amusement tucked into the sound.

“After all that fuss last night, you wake up and file me under dream.” He tilts his head, grumpy now. “That’s rude.”

You can’t lift your eyes. You look at his forearm instead, because that’s safer, because the ink there is something you can make sense of — lines and shapes — unlike the fact of him.

The tattoos shift when he breathes.

They look old and new at once.

“Say hello.” he murmurs.

“Hello.” you manage, quiet as you are with everyone, you hate how it sounds — childish, apologetic, nothing like the girl who traced herself and made the rules.

He hears the hate in it and smiles with only one mouth.

“There she is again. The little mayor with the charcoal crown.”

You go still.

The kettle ticks cooling.

Your coffee turns into a prop, you forget what it’s for.

“You remember.”

He steps forward and the room steps back the only way it can — by squeezing closer around you.

A lower left hand drags along the counter just enough to make the spoon ring.

“Three coins,” he says, counting on his fingers, lazy and precise. “A tooth. A drop.”

He taps his sternum with a knuckle.

“A promise.”

Your fingers tighten on ceramic until the cup squeaks.

Your throat tightens and you make it loose so you can speak.

“I was nine.”

“You were exact.” he corrects, irritated and pleased. “You didn’t flinch when it mattered the most, I liked that, that's why I stayed.”

You keep your eyes on the counter, because the ceiling of your mouth feels thin and your stomach wants to turn inside out.

“I didn’t forget.” It comes out too small. You try again. “I didn’t forget you.”

“You filed me. You put me in a box labeled ‘night terrors’ and shut the lid.”

He leans into the cheap light and it obeys him, moving so his shadow ties cleanly to yours again.

“Then you said please with your whole throat and I came like I promised. Dormant isn’t gone, little thing.”

His upper right hand flicks the blind pull.

Slats tilt, edges sharpen, your outline sticks to the floor as if nailed.

“I am not amused by neglect.”

You swallow. Stare at the line where tile meets wall.

“I’m… I’m okay,” you say, as if saying it makes it true, you add, because this is what you do with loud things. “You’re… real.”

He laughs, a mean curl of sound, fond of how you flinch.

“Of course I’m real. Your fear has a very good palate.”

The stomach seam grins a little wider and then shuts, as if bored.

He reaches — slowly, so every nerve has time to register it — and sets something on the counter between his knuckles and your mug.

A coin.

Not the same one — polished bright.

It rolls in a wobble and settles with the date facing up.

You were nine.

Your breath breaks.

“That’s better,” he says softly. “Now you sound like you.”

You shake your head minutely.

“I’m not—”

Brave, you mean.

Whole, you mean.

You can’t finish either.

“Mm,” he answers, unconvinced. “You’re still mine.”

He nudges the mug out of your grip with the back of a knuckle, you let it go because your hands forget how to be hands.

He pushes it aside without looking, bored by coffee, interested in you.

A lower palm lands near your hip on the counter, not touching, caging without contact.

An upper knuckle lifts under your chin, slow as a sunrise you didn’t ask for.

“Eyes.” he demands.

You look up — four red points catch you and hold.

They are cruel and bright and not entirely unkind, they are a storm deciding which house to take.

“Mm, still there.” he murmurs, and the way he says it makes your lungs forget their job for a second. “The child who wrote laws in chalk and meant them with her whole self. Stand in mine. Stay behind. Don’t touch till I ask.”

He bends, amused and annoyed in equal parts. His breath is heat and winter both when it traces your jaw.

“Then you said please last night like a prayer you hated.”

“I didn’t—” You did. It tears out of you. “I was scared.”

His mouth lifts at one corner, mean and nearly fond.

“Good.” He tips his head to listen to your pulse. “Count then, like you used to do.”

You don’t want to.

You do, because the word lands on your spine like a switch.

One—two—three— steady, his.

Yours tries to keep up.

You hate that too.

He hums, satisfied when you match him for a handful of beats.

“See? Still obedient under all that quiet.”

You find your voice in a moth’s wing.

“What do you want?”

He blinks at you slow, like a cat pondering the window.

“Breakfast,” he says, and then lets the filthy smile bloom. “You.”

Your stomach drops like an elevator with the cable cut.

“Relax,” he drawls, grumpy at the way your shoulders crawl toward your ears. “I keep my promises. I came when asked. I kept you safe—” he tips his head toward the living room, where the shadows sit well-behaved, “—from all the stupid little things that wanted to touch you before me.”

Before me lands like a gavel.

He straightens and the kitchen becomes small again because he takes the distance away.

“We’re done pretending I’m a bad night.”

He gestures, and the hood light brightens to a hard white slice; the sun obediently finds another gap.

Your shadow snaps crisp and he steps into it with one foot, pleased at the fit.

“We’re back to work.”

Your mouth is dry.

“What work?”

“The only kind worth doing.”

He leans, low voice gone almost gentle, ruining it with what he says.

“Teaching you to be brave the way you were when you fed me. Making you stop looking at the floor when you talk — you made me wait for so long, I want you fierce when I have you.”

A pause, a thin smile.

“Being properly hunt.”

The word puts frost along your teeth.

He watches the way you shake and looks satisfied, not at the misery but at the honesty of it.

“My good little girl,” he murmurs, and it’s not praise so much as a diagnosis. He taps the coin once with a nail. “Finish your coffee.”

You look at the cup like it belongs to a stranger.

He grunts, amused.

“Fine. Don’t. We’ll make do.”

He pushes off the counter and the room exhales. Already the light wants to soften. Already your outline wants to blur. He catches the blind cord again between two fingers and tightens the geometry until the shadow of you is a leash on the floor.

“Don’t run yet,” he says, smiling with teeth that aren’t all in his mouth. “We haven’t said grace.”

The elevator dings and doesn’t arrive. You spin to the stairwell and crash through, the fire door slamming like a gunshot that ricochets down thirteen flights.

Emergency lights turn each landing into a wedge of blistering brightness, throwing your shadow long and thin.

He steps comfortably inside it like it’s a well-worn coat.

When you take the stairs two at a time, he strolls, never out of step, his feet inside the shape of your feet, his shoulders filling your outline until he’s taller than the wall can hold.

“Good,” he says, and you hear the sound as if it’s made with your throat. “I hate when you freeze.”

On floor ten the light flickers. Your shadow stutters. For a half-heart you think maybe that breaks him — but the bulb steadies and he’s still there, closer, his mouth moving where your trapped reflection’s should.

“Don’t worry,” he croons, bored and pleased. “I’ll keep the lights on.”

You feel shivers run down your spine as if a cold, dead hand was tracing lazy circles directly on your bones.

You shove through another door into the parking garage. It’s cavern-wide, full of thick pillars and oily water and the soft ticking of cooling engines.

Sodium lamps smear everything the color of old bruises. Your shadow spills across concrete and under cars, a black flood.

He wades in it.

He enjoys how you watch him with your breath, the way fear overrides dignity.

Your chest hiccups. He laughs, a low scrape.

You cut left, duck behind a pillar — your shadow forks out around it.

A palm, in shadow, rests against the floor inches from your ankle.

You feel heat on your skin like a sunbeam that hates you.

“Found you.” he says, as if disappointed it was that easy.

You bolt, shoes sliding on a slick patch.

Your heart is thundering against your chest, your breathe is uneven, catching, shallow.

What the fuck is happening?

Somewhere a key fob chirps, then chirps again.

Lights flash, red-white-red-white, making a strobe of your terror.

Are you hallucinating? Did someone drug you?

In the stutter, your shadow multiples — a ragged flipbook of you falling.

He’s in every frame, a smear of grin, a bored monarch in your silhouette.

“Up.” he orders.

You obey before you can think not to.

A ramp leads down.

You take it.

The lamps below are closer together, your outline locks to the floor like a chain.

He keeps pace without touching, the shadow is contact already.

When he brushes your shoulder in the dark, the touch happens inside your nerve.

It feels like being grabbed through the bones.

You gasp for air and a not so dignified whimper leaves your lips, your face is already stained with the path of your own tears.

“Listen to yourself,” he says, almost gentle, like he’s critiquing a song. “Those little noises. Someone’s scared.”

He sounds pleased and faintly annoyed, the way someone might be at a meal that arrives a minute late and perfectly cooked.

You aim for the far exit, the security gate half-open — the bar is down, there’s a gap if you duck low enough.

You hit your knees and crawl.

Your shadow squeezes with you, thin as a ribbon.

He follows as a taller darkness spine — that’s the only name your mind coughs up — folding to stay inside you.

Past the gate, the alley is night and neon and wet, signs buzz and spit in colors that make the puddles look like oil slicks on a throat, a storm is somewhere close enough to taste, you angle toward the street where there might be people, but he turns one of the signs off with a lazy command you don’t hear, and your world narrows to a single cone of light under a broken streetlamp.

“Stay there.” he murmurs. “Good girl.”

You don’t.

You break for the darkness across the way.

But the darkness across the way throws your shadow against a corrugated metal shutter, large as a mural.

He stands inside it with his arms behind his back like a patient executioner.

“Again.” he says, almost sighing. “Run better.”

You try and try again.

Tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap.

You run until your breath tastes like pennies and your calves clench and your heart feels like a brick someone is trying to break with a hammer.

You take a hard right, then a harder left, catch a toe, slam shoulder-first into a door that doesn’t move.

The door’s little wired-glass window shows your face pale and bright.

Behind it, your shadow stares without blinking.

“Open.” you plead, to anything, voice small, almost a crying whisper.

From the glass, your shadow’s mouth says, amused.

“No.”

You stagger back into the alley, palms skinned, breath going ragged, you think about calling — who? There is no name that fits this. You fumble your phone out and it’s dead, or he decided it should be.

You throw it anyway, it hits the wet hard and slides under a dumpster, your shadow bends smoothly, picks it up on screen, and hands it to you, you feel the weight pass into your palm.

It’s still dark.

“How—” you start.

“Shh,” he says, because questions are boring when answers are obvious, he is wearing the shape that the world assigns you.

He has you at the level where light lives.

You belong to geometry and he belongs to you.

Glass breaks somewhere above — maybe a bulb, maybe a window.

He’s changing your map.

The alley brightens.

A security flood snaps awake, throwing a white rectangle across you.

Your shadow goes crisp, so does he — the shape of a very large man inside your outline, shoulders bracketed with ink that shouldn’t exist in negative space, a grin that shows teeth he didn’t borrow from you.

He steps forward inside your shape until the edges almost touch your toes.

“Close,” he says, a little pleased. His voice is low and rough, a growl tucked into amusement. “You keep trying the dark. That’s cute.”

“Please,” you say, and hear the way it breaks.

He hears it too.

It’s what he came for.

“Beg louder.” he says, bored with bravery.

“Please.” you beg, a louder hiccup.

He huffs.

“Better.”

The floodlight pops, darkness floods back. For a second you think you’re free, because the shadow goes soft, but you can feel him anyway, like pressure in your gums, like a storm moving through your bones.

When the next light snaps on — across the street, over the loading dock — your shadow leaps to meet it and he’s already there, smug in the fit.

“Left,” he says, and you go right because you are not an obedient animal, you are panic in shoes.

He laughs, genuinely this time, and the sound shreds the last of your clean thoughts.

He likes disobedience.

It gives him a reason to close the distance.

You hit a chain-link fence and the fence rattles but doesn’t fall and your hands don’t have the strength to pull you up.

Behind you, the loading dock light purrs.

Your shadow clings to the metal, fingers elongated in diamond shapes.

He laces his longer fingers through.

“Up.” he repeats, and you try, and he watches you fail, and he’s patient with that too, because the climb is for him, not for you.

“Why me?” It rips out of you without permission.

A pause.

Then—

“You were under the right lamp.” A shrug in your silhouette. “And you make good little sounds I enjoy.”

There’s a slow step that isn’t yours.

It’s beside you, not behind.

He is peeling out of the plane he’s been wearing, unbuttoning night from itself.

He arrives in the alley like a tide arriving in a throat — too much, too big, too inevitable.

He isn’t a smear anymore.

He’s a man, inked and terrible, the smile not needing the trick of light to live.

Four eyes in the dark, red and bored and fond of what you are doing to his heart rate.

Filthy mouth tugged into a mean curve.

“Hi,” he says in a tone you suddenly remember from years you had long forgotten, and his tone is conversational, as if he didn’t make you run until your lungs scraped. “Close your eyes.”

You don’t. You can’t.

Your chest rises and falls quickly, your breath is still shallow, you think you will pass out.

He tilts his head, amused at your defiance, grumpy at the same time. His hand comes up and you flinch. He doesn’t touch your throat, he touches your cheekbone with his knuckles like he’s checking quality.

“There she is.” he says, voice all warm razors. “The little thing who thought darkness was safe.”

He glances at the fence, then back down.

“It’s adorable how you keep choosing the losing door.”

You wedge your hands between his and you, as if there’s a distance to be won.

He lets you. He’s generous like that with hope.

He leans in until the air between you has to flee.

“Listen,” he murmurs. “Hear me?”

You do.

His heartbeat is steady and slow. Yours is a trapped bird.

He lowers his mouth to your ear and allows a sigh, theatrical and real at once, like he’s savoring a glass of something expensive.

“Run again, just for me.” he says, soft. “I want to hear your pretty little sounds once more.”

You shake your head so hard your vision tilts.

“No.”

“Brat,” he says, fond and irritated, and gives you a second anyway, because the hunt is the point.

You pull left, you run, try to slip under his arm.

He lets you almost make it and then he puts a hand on the back of your neck, not hard, just decisive, and the world goes narrow as a funnel.

The floodlight across the dock dies, another ignites behind you.

Your shadow stretches forward on the asphalt like a leash.

He watches it, amused.

“See? Even the light knows whose you are.”

Your knees give.

He holds you up by that easy grip, thumb resting at your hairline. His other hand takes your wrist and puts it to his chest.

Calm, calm, calm.

You try to tear away. He keeps it there, patient.

He's warm, no— he's hot. Really hot, but not searing.

“Count.” he says.

You do. You don’t want to. You can’t help it.

One, two, three— steady.

“You always were a good girl.” he breathes, and you want to spit and you want to scream and all that comes out is a ragged sound that makes his eyes warm the way alarm lights warm toxin.

He steps backward and your feet follow because his hand tells them to.

The alley narrows to a doorway of shadow.

He is both man and silhouette again, his edges blurring as he slides you into the place he lives.

The cold there is a thought, not a temperature.

Your pulse slaps your tongue.

You let out another terrified cry, shaking from head to toe, you feel like you're vibrating with fear.

“Shh,” he says into your hair. “Almost done.”

“No,” you say in a wet plea, because saying it feels like a law. "Please?"

“Mm,” he answers, unconvinced. “You’re very loud for something so small.”

He turns you so your back rests to his chest and the wall is inches from your nose.

The floodlight across the dock clicks.

Your shadow on the brick kisses your own mouth and you feel it like a real touch.

He laughs softly, filthy and pleased, and his breath slides along the rim of your ear like a promise and a verdict.

“Lights out.” he murmurs.

Somewhere, something pops.

The alley drops into a darkness that isn’t empty.

He doesn’t need the shadow anymore.