Tumblr support denied all my 4 appeals regarding the Mature Label on my account. Honestly, I'm not even surprised anymore but the disappointment is there ngl.
I've spent so much time building a community here only for these b*ts and this app's AI system to slap my account with a Mature Label and refuse to have an actual HUMAN review my appeals.
I always abided by their Terms and Conditions, and I'm very disappointed and annoyed by this. Either way, I decided to officially MOVE to another account.
My new account is xxfrozenpearlsxx if anyone wants to follow! I'll love to have everyone there~🌸 It's going to take a while to repost everything, but I decided to give Tumblr a second chance with that account.
Thank you all who followed this account and everyone who showed support by commenting/liking and reposting and I loved interacting with all of you so so much!💗 Unfortunately, this account came to an end.
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It’s been raining all day. The kind of soft, persistent rain that makes the bakery feel even cozier, the scent of vanilla and coffee clinging to the air and making everything feel less heavy on the heart. Sometimes, days like these make me think about how far I’ve come. How many rainy days there were when I thought the sky would never clear. But they always do, in the end. Days like this are a reminder that the warmth of the sun will always follow, even when you think it’s lost forever.
He came in just after noon, looking like he usually does on these overcast days—a little more drawn, a little more distant than usual. Like the weather gets under his skin, too, even if he’d never admit it. He had asked for the usual, like he always does, with a low rumble to his voice that carried softly over the counter and into my bones. But today, he had asked for something more besides that. Almost like an afterthought, he had asked for a box of macarons, claiming it was some sort of a ‘pick-me-up’ for someone who needs it.
My heart had done that familiar little flutter, squeezed softly at the words. He never asks for anything for himself beyond his coffee and that one specific croissant he favors. Always for someone else. Always. I’d offered him a slice of the lemon drizzle cake, knowing it might cheer him up. It’s impossible to feel entirely gloomy when you’re eating lemon cake. But he’d just nodded, a faint and almost imperceptible curve to his lips, as if a smile was about to be born but he decided otherwise last minute.
I tucked a little note under the cake box anyway, like I always do for his orders nowadays. ‘Even doctors need a dose of sunshine’ Simple, a little cheeky. I wonder if he ever actually reads them, or if they just get crumpled up with the sugar packets. I hope he does read them. I hope they make him pause, just for a second, and make him feel better. Ease the pain he seems to carry, even if just for a little bit.
It reminds me of myself on those early weeks, before the bakery even opened. Those endless counseling sessions where Dr. Qin would patiently listen to my own struggles, her voice calm as a summer breeze, helping me pick up the pieces of myself. She always used to say, “Take care of the little things, and the big things will follow.”
I think that’s what she meant about eating well, about finding joy in simple acts, about being kind to myself. And that’s what this bakery has become–a temple to the little things. Every muffin baked, every coffee poured, every person who leaves with a bit more lightness in their step… it’s all part of it. A constant reminder that even after the storm, everything can grow again.
He needs that reminder, too. He carries so much, I can see it. In the way his shoulders hunch just slightly when he thinks no one’s looking at him, or even if they do watch him, no one cares enough to reach for him. I see it in the way his eyes, even when they’re focused on the cute latte art I make for him, seem to hold a thousand unspoken burdens. Dr. Qin would have a field day with him.
Sometimes, late at night, I wonder what kind of storms he’s weathered to get that look in his eyes. From what I’ve heard, he’s a doctor, a surgeon from that big Akso Hospital down the street. It’s a lot to carry, saving lives. But it feels like more than that for him. There’s a stillness to him, a kind of deep-seated weariness that goes beyond long shifts and consultations. It’s the kind of quiet that speaks of things seen, things done, that no one should ever have to see or do.
I think about him often when I'm baking the morning's first batch of croissants. The delicate layers, pressed together, then baked until golden and flaky. So much effort for something that gets devoured in moments, but the joy it brings… it’s worth it. Maybe it’s just me projecting, but I see a similar resilience in him, too. Layers of careful control, concealing something tender and fragile underneath. One day, maybe, he'll let a little bit of that melt, too. Like a snowman in the spring.
.ᐟ✧ translations or reposts of my work on tumblr, ao3, or other sites ARE NOT permitted. please do not ask. do not reuse my blogpost headers, dividers, or layouts. these are original designs of my own. thank you!
.ᐟ✧ translations or reposts of my work on tumblr, ao3, or other sites ARE NOT permitted. please do not ask. do not reuse my blogpost headers, dividers, or layouts. these are original designs of my own. thank you!
.ᐟ✧ translations or reposts of my work on tumblr, ao3, or other sites ARE NOT permitted. please do not ask. do not reuse my blogpost headers, dividers, or layouts. these are original designs of my own. thank you!
Synopsis: You used to think you had Zayne Li figured out. Then he spent a night taking you apart in your own dorm, and now two weeks later, he's standing in front of you in his silver framed glasses on a sunlit Wednesday afternoon, looking every bit the brilliant med student that he is. What throws you off is him asking for your number with the same patient hazel eyes that watched you come apart from between your legs.
Content warnings: College AU, Med-Student Zayne with a side flavor of Metalhead, he has tattoos & piercings in this one (+his sexy mullet), Lots of flirting, Heavy sexual tension, slice-of-life, Tara and Simone are girl's girls, Slight jealousy from yours truly/Zayne, Mutual pining, Mutual crushes (cw will be updated with each ch)
Word count: 8.2k
Author’s note: sooo bear with me guys cuz this is more of a filler-chapter haha~ i promise it gets good again after this, but i still have to build a little around what's gonna happen next. have some trust in your lex, okay~?🤭
You wake in fragments. The ache behind your eyes kicks in first, sharp and relentless, followed by the stale taste coating your tongue. Then comes the unfamiliar weight pinning your legs. You crack one eye open against the daylight slicing through the dorm curtains and find Tara sprawled face-down across your pillow, her mascara leaving a dark smear on the fabric of it. Simone has curled into a tight ball at the foot of the bed like a cat that lost a fight, one arm dangling off the edge like she lost whatever fight she started with gravity.
There is no Zayne.
You let out a slow breath of relief and stare at the ceiling and let the memory of last night come back the way it wants to come back, in slow uneven pieces, like a song loading on bad wifi.
You got him out. You remember that much. You remember the way he zipped your dress up for you with steady, careful fingers while you were still trying to remember your own name, the soft press of his mouth to the back of your shoulder as he did it, the way he’d run a thumb under your eye to wipe a smudge of mascara before he stepped back to look at you and the corner of his mouth had pulled up in a soft smile at whatever he saw. You remember Tara’s key scratching at your door not two minutes after Zayne had slipped out the stairwell, you and your bra still crooked under your dress, the room still smelling like sex and his cologne.
The rest comes back in pieces too. The Uber ride and how Zayne had kept teasing you all the way back to your dorm. The line of ink at the back of his neck under his mullet, which was such a shock to your drunk mind, and you can’t lie it’s still a shock even now. His palm sliding from your knee to the soft skin of your inner thigh like he had nowhere else to be, and it had felt so damn good.
The way he looked up at you from between your legs, hazel eyes steady while his tongue and that small metal bar dragged slow and sensual over your clit, which had you shuddering in pleasure.
Heat flares across your cheeks instantly. You squeeze your eyes shut, trying to will away the unholy thoughts.
Hazel. That’s what does it. That patient hazel staring up your body, calm in a way that had no right to be calm given what his mouth was doing down there, and the small slick drag of metal against your clit every time his tongue moved felt out of this world—or maybe you were just too drunk. You feel it like a phantom between your legs even now, and immediately curse yourself because your thighs press together under the duvet on autopilot and you are absolutely not doing this right now, not with Tara’s elbow in your ribs and a hangover trying to crack your skull open from the inside.
You sit up slowly. The room tilts, so you close your eyes, wincing, waiting for it to stop.
Two orgasms. Two. From the guy you had mentally thought of as quiet, serious, future doctor for two full years. You’ve had sex partners before. You’ve had good sex partners, even—ones who knew where things were and how to use them, and not one of them had ever made you make the noises you made into your own duvet last night. The boys you usually go for would be insulted to learn that the bar was, apparently, Zayne Li with his neat notes and steady hands.
Except he is not only that. Not anymore.
You shuffle off the bed without waking the dead, find the water bottle you keep on your desk, drain half of it in one go, and stand there for a long second staring at the small dent in the duvet where, last night, he had pushed your spine into the exact arch he wanted.
By the time you’re all upright and capable of forming sentences, the dorm has become a hangover triage center. Simone is in your hoodie. Tara is in Simone’s shorts, somehow. Nobody is in their own clothes. There are three glasses of water on the floor and someone has put a bag of frozen peas on the radiator for reasons no one can reconstruct.
You queue up the playlist Tara made for mornings like this. Quiet stuff, nothing percussive. Simone groans approval into your pillow.
Tara is the first one to actually look at you properly. She squints, head tilting, then her gaze lands on the side of your throat. She sits up so fast she nearly sends Simone rolling off the mattress.
“Babe.” Her finger jabs toward your neck. “Babe!”
You don’t even get to ask before Simone’s head pops up. Two pairs of bloodshot eyes land on the side of your neck where you can absolutely feel now the throb of every mark Zayne had left.
“Oh my god!” Simone clamps a hand over her mouth and then drops it because that was apparently too loud for her own head. “Oh my god,” she repeats in an aggressive whisper. “Babe! Your neck!”
“It’s covered in marks!” Tara adds, grinning despite her own headache.
“More like bruises—” Simone says, and gets interrupted.
“Stop.” You laugh into your water bottle, ducking your head, but the hair you’re trying to hide behind won’t cooperate and you have no defenses. “Stop, my head, oh my god! Lower the volume.”
“Was it Zayne?” Tara leans forward, eyes bright.“It was Zayne! Tell me it was Zayne—”
“I don’t remember,” you lie, keeping your face perfectly neutral.
“Liar,” they say in unison.
Tara drops her voice to something closer to tolerable. “You absolutely remember! Nobody forgets who devoured their neck until it looked like a freaking battlefield!”
“Maybe it was Zayne,” you allow, looking at the ceiling like the truth might be written up there. “Maybe it was somebody else.”
“There was nobody else,” Simone snorts, “I was there. I saw you both. You were all over each other on that wall and didn’t even seem to want to put any distance between you.”
“Were we?” You take a long, innocent sip of your water.
“Don’t make me pull out my phone.” Simone says, deeply serious.
Tara wheezes. You actually laugh, which makes your head pulse, which makes you wince, which makes them both immediately fuss and shove yet another glass of water at you even though you already have one in your hand.
You take a long sip, letting the cool water settle the worst of the dryness in your throat. You don’t tell them. You don’t tell them about the cab ride or the way he’d held your face up to his and told you to behave. You don’t tell them about the ink on his beautiful skin. You don’t tell them about the piercings. You don’t tell them about how Zayne Li would only fuck you sober. That part stays tucked behind your ribs, private and still too new to share. It sits there, warm and secret, while you laugh and deflect and let Tara spin wild theories about whether he is a biter or a sucker. Simone immediately begins plotting how to corner Caleb for intel. You give them nothing concrete.
The next two weeks slide by in that strange suspended haze where you insist you are not thinking about him while thinking about him constantly.
You don’t look for Zayne. You tell yourself you’re not avoiding him, and you’re not, exactly, but you also don’t take the long way past the library, and you don’t hover near the cafeteria coffee bar at the times you used to notice him walking past.
You don’t see him anyway. There is a research conference coming up, a big one, the kind that gets posters all over the faculty corridors and earnest second-years stopping you in the hall to ask if you’re presenting. Zayne is presenting. You know this because Caleb mentioned it in passing and because Zayne’s name is on three different posters in three different buildings. He is, you assume, in the deepest available stack of the medical journals in the library, surviving on coffee and too little hours of sleep.
You think about him anyway. Without meaning to. That’s the worst part.
You’ll be in a seminar half-listening to someone explain something you already know, and your mind will slip sideways into the back of an Uber, into the warm patient drag of a thumb on the inside of your thigh, to the low surprised laugh he gave when you called him doc-tor. You catch yourself doing it and you make yourself stop, and ten minutes later you’re doing it again.
The question circles back every time.
How? How is Zayne that, underneath the cardigan and the clean handwriting and the polite half-smile he gives professors when he gets a question right. How does someone who looks like the textbook definition of quiet future doctor hide the version of him that pinned you to your own bed and pulled two orgasms out of you without breaking a sweat? Who else has seen the ink? Who knows about the metal in his tongue and all his other little secret piercings? The thought twists sharp in your stomach. You hate how much you care about the answer.
He is so attractive. You’re not the type to lie to yourself about it. He was attractive before, in the quiet way that boys who don’t know they’re being looked at are, and now he is attractive in a way that has a body count. You knew the first kind. You met the second kind at midnight against a brick wall, and the second kind sat between your legs with hazel eyes that didn’t blink as he devoured you.
You used to find him endearing. Back when you were closer to Caleb, when you spent half of last year drifting in and out of Caleb’s dorm for reasons that were mostly between you and Caleb, you’d see Zayne in the kitchen sometimes, making tea at strange hours, reading something dense at the little shared table with one hand absently rubbing the back of his neck. You’d say hi. He’d say hi back, with that mild half-smile and you’d think oh, the quiet roommate, and that would be the end of your thinking about him.
He could not have been more different from Caleb. Caleb is sun. Caleb is volume. Caleb is the boy who kisses you against the fridge and laughs into your mouth and means absolutely none of it past the next morning, and you’d known that, and that had been fine. Caleb is uncomplicated.
Zayne is not uncomplicated. Zayne denied you a kiss in a pub corridor and got you wetter than anybody had ever managed with full use of both hands. That contradiction keeps you awake more nights than you want to admit. Zayne is a problem.
You think about his mouth. You actually let yourself, for one second, walking across the quad in the spring afternoon sun with a cigarette burning unattended between your fingers, you think about his mouth. About what kissing him would have felt like, properly, against that brick wall or in your dorm door. About what it would feel like now, after everything, with no alcohol in your blood and the lamp off and the door locked and—
“Hey. Earth to you??”
Your mind has wandered again, replaying the feeling of metal across sensitive skin, when Tara’s elbow connects with your ribs. You take a hurried drag to cover for the fact that your face is approximately the temperature of the sun.
“Sorry,” you say with what you hope is normal volume. “I zoned out.”
“I noticed.” Tara is squinting at you in the way she squints when she is about to be a problem. You are sitting on the wall outside the humanities building, the spring sun warm on the back of your neck, your boots scuffing in the gravel.
She lights her own cigarette off yours, takes a long drag, and lets the smoke curl upward. “Didn’t think Zayne Li was your type.”
She elbows you again, and you try to keep your face normal at those words. There is a smirk on her face that you would like to physically remove.
“Huh?” You give her your best blank stare. It does not work on Tara and has never worked on Tara, but you try anyway, on principle. “What makes you think that?”
“Oh please.” She rolls her whole face at you, clearly not buying your little act. “Like we didn’t all see how you were all over each other at the pub.” She taps ash into the gravel. “And I mean, don’t get me wrong, he’s hot. Handsome, smart, annoyingly so if you ask me.” She takes a pause to drag another smoke, and to annoyingly smirk your way. “But he’s not really like the guys you go after.”
“Tara—”
“What? You know I have a point.” She tilts her head, eyes narrowing in a way that is more affectionate than mean. “Like, I would’ve expected something to happen between you and Caleb again, or—I don’t know, someone similar to him. Zayne is…”
“Definitely not like Caleb.”
It comes out a little quieter than you meant it. You feel the heat climb up the side of your neck and you take another drag of your cigarette to hide it, eyes very focused on a crack in the pavement, but the small chuckle that escapes you on the exhale is, frankly, evidence. You hope Tara is busy with her own smoke.
She is. For about four more seconds. Mercifully, the breeze pulls your hair across your cheek before she clocks the color in it.
“I’m saying!” Tara waves her cigarette for emphasis. “Sooo. Did anything actually happen between you two, or were you too drunk to realize who you were flirting with?”
You take your time with the next drag. You make her wait for it. The smoke curls slow up between you and her smirk gets wider with every second you don’t answer, because Tara has known you long enough to know that the answer you take time on is always more interesting than the answer that comes fast.
You look at her sideways through your lashes.
“Define anything.”
Tara’s mouth drops open. The cigarette nearly falls out of it.
You don’t get to enjoy the look on Tara’s face for long, because she opens her mouth and is about three syllables into something that begins with “Excuse me—” when there are footsteps in the gravel behind you and Caleb’s voice cuts in over the top of her.
“Heeey, girls! Watcha’ up to?”
You turn toward the very welcomed distraction. Caleb is loping toward you in a half-buttoned shirt with sunglasses pushed up into his hair, a duffel slung over one shoulder, looking every inch the boy who has never been hungover a day in his life despite all available evidence to the contrary. And half a step behind him, taking the longer route around the low wall, is Zayne.
The first thing you notice is the glasses.
He’s in his silver frames today. You forgot he wears them. You actually forgot, because the last time you saw his face it was an inch from yours in a lamp lit dorm room and glasses were not a concept your brain was operating on. He has them sitting low on the bridge of his nose where they always sit, dark hair falling soft around the frames, and he is dressed the way Zayne dresses on a school day, a plain dark long-sleeve under a half-zipped grey jacket and jeans, the whole future doctor reads in a library look that you used to take at face value.
His eyes find yours, hazel and calm, clocking you right through his lenses.
You feel the bottom of your stomach drop.
“Caleb …Zayne,” you say with all the casualness you can muster, which is honestly not much. You take another slow drag of your cigarette to do something with your hands and your mouth at the same time, not trusting yourself to say anything more and manage to still make it sound casual.
Tara recovers faster than you do because Tara recovers faster than anyone. She kicks the conversation right into the gear it needs to be in.
“Guys. You look unreasonably put together for a Wednesday full of boring classes and schoolwork.” She tips her chin at him. “Embarrassing for the rest of us.”
“I was raised right,” Zayne offers mildly, which gets Caleb snorting.
“He was raised by textbooks,” Caleb says as he drops his duffel on the wall next to Tara like he owns it. “He doesn’t even know what a hangover is. We had to teach him, like a child.”
“I know what a hangover is,” Zayne says unbothered, glancing sideways at Caleb. “I’ve simply chosen not to have one.”
“Anywaaay,” Caleb plows on, the way Caleb plows on when he diverts a subject, “we come bearing news. There’s this thing Friday, on the other side of Linkon, place called The Hollow or The Bunker or something I never remember, but doesn’t really matter anyway. What matters is that it’s an underground club thing, like, underground underground. Some rock band’s playing. You won’t have heard of them, they’re kind of niche, buuut the party is going to be absolutely unhinged. Cheap drinks. Good crowd. You guys should come.”
“What band?” Tara asks, because Tara always asks even though it’s not really of interest to her.
Caleb names them. You haven’t heard of them, which isn’t much of a surprise, really. Caleb did say they were niche. Tara’s face says she hasn’t heard of them either, so Caleb waves a hand like that’s exactly the point.
“Doesn’t matter. The point is the vibe. Friday. Yes?”
“Maybeee,” Tara says, which from Tara means yes, she is already mentally planning the outfit. “Depends if I can drag this one”—she elbows you too casually—“out of her current existential crisis.”
“I’m not in a crisis,” you almost hiss, because way to go Tara.
While Tara and Caleb dissolve into a tangent about whose car is taking who and whether Caleb is allowed to play the music, the conversation quietly splits. You don’t plan it, so it just happens, the way conversations split in groups of four, Tara turning a little toward Caleb on the wall, Zayne stepping a little to the side toward you with his hands shoved into the pockets of his jeans.
You don’t quite look at him for a second. You take another drag of your cigarette, smoke curling thin past your face. You feel him looking at you anyway, the steady patient weight of his eyes, and when you finally turn your head to face him you give him a small careful smile, because honestly you have no idea where you stand right now.
“How have you been, Zayne?”
“Busy studying.” A soft little smile plays on his lips. His head tilts very slightly, which makes you a bit nervous. “How about you? You seem quite restless.”
The way his eyes drop slowly down your face and then lower, taking in your hoodie sleeves shoved to your elbows, the cigarette between your fingers, the way you’re sitting on the wall with one boot kicking at the gravel, is so brief you could miss it if you weren’t already staring so closely to him. You absolutely catch it, suddenly feeling even more restless under his gaze. You shift your weight on the wall without meaning to, your boot scraping a little louder against the stone path.
“Oh!” Your voice goes a fraction too bright and you correct it fast. “I’m fine. I just finished my cigarettes and had to borrow from Tara.” You hold up the offending stick like evidence. You chuckle softly. “I don’t really like hers.”
The corner of his mouth pulls up. “I see.” The lenses catch the sun for a second and then his eyes are back on you. “Thought you only smoked occasionally?”
There it is.
The smirk is small, contained, an entirely different animal than the one he wore in the lamplight of your dorm, but it is unmistakably the same smirk. And even like this, in his nerd-ish Wednesday clothes, with the silver glasses sitting on his nose and his hair tucked behind one ear like he is about to take notes in a seminar, that smirk does something unsteady to your legs.
A flashback comes anyway, uninvited. The patient hazel of his eyes between your legs. The drag of a barbell across your clit. His thumb under your jaw, moving slowly. I’ll only fuck you sober.
You push it down hard. Take a too-fast drag of your cigarette.
“That was what you said, Zayne.” You scoff, eyebrow arched up and your voice shifting back at a normal pitch by some miracle. “Not me.”
“That’s true.” The smirk deepens slightly. He’s enjoying that you remember. He is also, you can tell, not going to bring up anything else from that night unless you do, which is both a mercy and a fresh kind of torment. He glances over your shoulder briefly at Caleb, who is now miming something to Tara that involves both arms, and looks back at you. “Are you going to take up on Caleb’s invitation?”
There’s a thing under his voice you can’t quite place. A small lean of interest, the kind that only registers if you’re listening for it. You are listening for it. You are listening so hard it is embarrassing.
You decide, on the spot, to be a problem.
“Are you?” You tilt your head, cigarette balanced between two fingers, your face arranged in something you hope reads as casual.
“I suppose I could.” He doesn’t look away from you as he speaks, and you try to not read too much into it. “I’ll have to think if it’s going to be worth my time attending.”
You can’t quite read what’s behind the small smile he gives you. It’s not the cocky smirk from that night and it’s not the polite half-smile he gives professors. It is some third thing that lives in between, and you find that you want to know what it is.
“You could help me with that.”
You blink up at him, a bit confused. Your boot stops scuffing the gravel. “With what?”
His eyes stay on you even as his frames catch the sunlight when he tilts his head, hazel through the lenses going thoughtful and amused and just a touch wicked. “Making it worth my time.”
You feel that one land low in your stomach. You take a drag of your cigarette mostly to give yourself something to do with your mouth, holding his gaze the way you’d held it in the corridor, lashes heavy and mouth tilting at one corner.
Behind you Tara is telling Caleb he absolutely can’t be in charge of the playlist. Caleb is taking it personally. Neither of them is paying attention to the conversation happening a few steps away.
You lean a fraction closer on the wall, just a little until your knee brushes the denim of his pants where he’s standing close.
“And here I thought,” you say, voice gone low, almost whispery, “you’d already had a pretty good time with me, Zayne.”
He just smirks at you fully now, making your stomach flip hard. “Mm.” His head tilts a fraction. “Then consider this me asking for an encore, sweetheart.”
The last word sits in the air between you like smoke. Sweetheart. So quiet, almost under his breath. You bite your lip on instinct and his eyes drop to your mouth doing it. It’s slow, unhurried, and you watch him watch you and feel the heat climb the back of your neck.
It catches you sideways, the pet name. Not because it’s new. He’d used it that night, low against your ear with his hand at your throat, his mouth a breath from yours. He’d used it like a weapon. You hadn’t expected to hear it here, on a Wednesday afternoon, in broad daylight on the humanities wall, with the sun warm on your face and Caleb three feet away arguing about playlists.
You think distantly that maybe it’s for the best that he isn’t bringing up what happened. He isn’t pretending it didn’t happen, not with that smirk and not with the way he just said encore, but he isn’t putting it on the table either. He’s leaving you room to breathe and do whatever you feel like doing. You suspect he’s also enjoying himself, as well. He is probably enjoying himself a lot. He likely thinks you’re a little thrown, a little uncertain about how to handle whatever this is, and he is content to stand there smirking gently and let you do the work of deciding what to call it.
Fine. You can do that too.
“Are you going to sweet-talk me into coming?” You tilt your head and drop your cigarette to the gravel, grinding the toe of your boot into it. “I didn’t think that was your way of operating, doc-tor.”
You can feel the weight of Tara and Caleb’s presence behind you still tangled up in their own argument, Caleb’s voice carrying about how he absolutely does have taste, so you turn your back fully to them and lean a hip against the wall, arms crossed loose over your chest, your body angled in toward Zayne. Closer. Casually. Like you’re only doing it for the warmth of sun.
His eyes flick once to your crossed arms, once to your mouth, back up.
“Who should sweet-talk you, then?” A small, lazy arch of one brow follows his words, still smirking but it’s got something different to it now, “Caleb?”
His tone is light. The words are light. The thing flashing behind the lenses, brief, is not light at all. His jaw works the smallest fraction, and you catch it because you are watching for everything he does, every little change in his face or tone. You blink up at him, a second of surprised silence pulling between you, and your stomach does something complicated at what he said—or rather implied.
You know that Zayne knows. About Caleb. About you and Caleb, last year, the half-handful of times you stumbled into Caleb’s dorm at 1am and didn’t leave until breakfast. Zayne walked in on one of them. He’d come home from the library a lot earlier than he was supposed to, and Caleb’s door had been a lot more open than it should have been, and you remember the mortified way Zayne had said sorry and shut the door and never mentioned it to you again, not once, not even by raised eyebrow.
You hadn’t thought he cared, though. He hadn’t given you a reason to think he cared. He had been polite-quiet-roommate Zayne, and you had been Caleb’s sometimes-thing, and that had been the entire truth of the situation.
Except. He is not exactly not caring right now. The tiny thing in his face when he said Caleb’s name is not nothing. It is, in fact, a very specific not-nothing.
The thought slips in before you can stop it. Does he like you? Genuinely? Not just enjoying your mess on his hand at one in the morning. Actually likes. Zayne is not, you suspect, the type to sleep around. He didn’t come for you the way men like Caleb come for women, with the easy charm and the half-arrogant offer. He didn’t take you out. He didn’t bring you flowers. He didn’t do any of the considerate things a man like Zayne should, in theory, have done first.
He started instead by letting you flirt him into a corner and then putting you on your knees on your own duvet. Which is, frankly, a lot more honest. And also, frankly, not how you’d imagined Zayne would behave with someone he liked. If he liked. If he—
Your cheeks warm and you break eye contact, looking down at the gravel and huffing out a small laugh, one eyebrow up to hide whatever just happened on your face.
“He can try.”
“But you wouldn’t say yes to him.” His voice has dropped, only just. His eyes flick briefly past your shoulder at Caleb and back to you. “Would you?”
There it is again. That small flash. You like the look on his face. You like it a lot, actually, in a way you don’t have time to interrogate. So you smile at him, casual and friendly on the surface, wicked underneath, and lean in another careful inch closer to him.
“How would you know I’ll say yes to you, then?” You drop your voice to match his. “Don’t you think you’re maybe too confident?”
His eyes move slow over your face. One hand comes out of his pocket. He raises it casually, the way you’d raise a hand to brush a fly off your shoulder, and tucks a loose piece of your hair behind your ear, knuckles grazing soft along the shell of it.
Your face goes warm. Your eyes widen the smallest fraction before you can stop them. You know he notices by the way the corner of his mouth pulls up an inch, looking pleased, like he just confirmed something.
“You could absolutely say no.” His knuckle drags slow down the side of your neck, a single featherlight line, before his hand retreats and goes back into his pocket. The skin where he touched you actually tingles. “But I think you’ll say yes.” He lets the words hang a bit. “You said yes to plenty of things the last time, didn’t you?”
You feel your knees do something embarrassing. You hope they won’t give up on you.
You blush, there’s no doubt to it. You scoff softly to cover for it, looking down at the gravel path, the toe of your boot scuffing in a small careful circle. You try very hard to keep it casual. Casual is rapidly becoming a theoretical concept between you two. You can smell his cologne now from this distance, it is the same one from that night, clean and dark and a little smoky, and the fact that he smells exactly like he did with his face against your neck in the back of an Uber is, frankly, a problem you can’t seem to manage to escape.
“Those were different circumstances.” You drag your eyes back up to his.
His pupils dilate just slightly behind the lenses. You see it. You are absolutely certain you see it. Whatever flashback hit you about thirty seconds ago has clearly just hit him too, and the small synchronized hit of it sits between you for a second.
You clear your throat gently and tilt your head. “Besides. Why do you want me to come?”
He hums. A small, considering sound before the tension in his jaw eases off, replaced by something softer and a touch curious.
“I like this band. And I think you’ll find it interesting, too.”
He says it plainly. No smirk in it this time. No double meaning hiding under the words. He says it like he actually means it, like he has thought about whether you would like the band and concluded that you would, and the simple sincerity of it catches you flat in the chest.
You had been bracing for something flirty. You had been bracing for because I want to get you alone again or because I haven’t finished what I started. You had not been bracing for I like this band and I think you will too, which is, somehow, worse for your composure. You had even, you realise with small humiliation, been quietly hoping he would say something close to I want to take you out.
He didn’t. He said he likes the band.
“Is that really why?”
“Part of it, yes.” There’s a small smile, almost soft. Then his hand comes out of his pocket again and he pulls his phone out, unlocks it with a thumb without looking at it, and holds it out to you, screen open on the contacts app, a blank new entry already waiting. “Give me your number.”
You look at the phone. Then at him. Then at the phone again. Your cheeks warm in a way you do not have permission to allow.
“That’s—” You laugh breathy, taking the phone but not yet typing. “You’re so straightforward, Zayne.”
“Would you like me not to be?” His voice has gone honey-low. His head tilts, the lenses catching the sun once again, making his beautiful eyes stand out even more. “We can speak in riddles all you want, but we both know you’d rather me be straightforward with what I want.” A small pause follows his words, letting them land on you. “Don’t you?”
You bite your lip.
The flashback is immediate and unkind. I’ll only fuck you sober. I want to make discoveries of my own. Was it the tattoos, darling? Cum, beautiful girl. Every quiet, exact, straightforward thing he’d said with his mouth against your ear comes back at once, and your stomach drops about an inch.
You fidget with the phone in your hand more out of nerves than anything. You don’t type yet. You smirk up at him instead, tilting your head, trying to pin him in place with your eyes alone, trying to read something past the calm hazel and the silver of his glasses.
“And what do you want?” Your voice is quiet, inquiring. “Besides my number.”
His mouth pulls up at one corner slowly, followed by the same calm cadence. “Are you sober enough to comprehend what I want, even if I say it?”
Your throat goes dry.
Heat climbs the sides of your neck, sharp and immediate, because there it is, exactly the same low tone he’d used over you in your lamplit dorm, exactly the same patient assumption that you can take what he says if he says it. He sees the color in your face. The corner of his mouth pulls a fraction higher. He is, you suspect, very pleased with himself at managing to make you nervous like this.
Three feet away, Caleb is still arguing about something. Tara is laughing too loud at another thing. Neither of them is paying attention to the quiet conversation happening on the other half of the wall, and you’re very grateful for that, because you’re pretty sure you’re this close to embarrassing yourself in front of Zayne in broad daylight.
You let out a small breath, airlight. “Yeah.”
“I want a lot of things.” His eyes hold yours. They do not blink. “Most of them are best spoken when it’s just the two of us. I think you’ll agree.” He glances down at the phone still in your hand. “Your number?”
You hold his gaze one more second. You let him wait for it. You let him see you decide to give it to him, lashes low, the smirk at the corner of your own mouth pulling up slightly before you finally look down at the screen.
You type the digits in. You take your time. You add a single small detail at the top of the contact field, just because you can, and you turn the phone around to hand it back to him.
He glances down at it. Where the name should go, you have typed Sweetheart.
His eyes lift back to yours. The smirk reaches his eyes properly this time, hazel warm and bright behind the lenses. He doesn’t change it. He just clicks save, slides the phone into his back pocket, and tilts his head toward the gravel path.
“Friday, then.”
“Friday,” you echo.
Behind you, Caleb finally clocks that you’ve gone quiet over here and shouts something about how he hopes you two are sorting out the carpool situation, which Tara immediately ruins by snorting.
Zayne doesn’t look away from you when he answers him. “We are.”
The walk back to the dorms is sunny in a way that feels personal, after all that happened, and Tara is bouncing beside you with like a girl who has been forcibly removed from a gossip conversation mid-sentence and is about to make it your problem.
You make it three paving stones from the wall before she explodes.
“You were flirting so hard with him!” Her eyes are bright. Her elbow is back in your ribs, nudging you excitedly as she is half a step away from skipping. “So hard. So hard, babe!”
“I wasn’t.” You bump her elbow off you casually, trying to not get more attention on yourself from passerby students. “We were just talking about the party and the band.”
“Sure you were, girl.” Tara’s voice drops into the sarcastic yet fond range that you have known since you were both nineteen. “What, does he want to scream the lyrics with you front row? Please.”
“Zayne’s not the type to do that.”
“Of course he’s not.” she rolls her eyes, amused, “So. What did you guys talk about?”
“I told you, the party.” You glance at her sideways, then add it quieter, like maybe quiet will smuggle it past her radar. “He just asked if I was coming and asked for my number.”
It does not smuggle past her radar.
Tara stops dead in the middle of the path. A boy with a long board has to swerve around her. She doesn’t notice. Her hand has come up to grab your forearm and her eyes have gone, predictably, the exact size and shape you’d been bracing for.
“Zayne Li asked for your number? Just like that?”
She is already walking again, already dragging you by the arm toward the dorm entrance, already vibrating with what is, by Tara’s standards, restraint.
“Damn girl, what did you do to him that night? Did you drag him into the pub toilet and suck—”
“Tara!”
Your hand goes over her mouth on instinct, both of you stumbling through the dorm door at the same time, you mortified and her chuckling into your palm. The girl from 14A is probably at the pigeonholes and you can imagine her ears physically swivel in your direction. You give her a smile that would crack glass. Tara waves at her with her eyebrows.
You wait until you’re halfway up the stairwell before you take your hand off her face and glare.
“Could you maybe whisper?!”
“Could I maybe whisper?! Could I maybe whisper.” she scoffs, playfully dramatic, “You walk in here telling me Zayne Li voluntarily put his phone in your hand and I’m supposed to whisper.” Tara puts her hand on her chest. “I’m being restrained, considering I have soo many unanswered questions!”
“This is restrained?” you deadpan.
“This is heroically restrained.” She nudges your shoulder, gentler now, and the smirk softens at the corners. “Okay, alright. I’ll drop it. Just because I think you’ll explode if I push you for any more details.”
The smirk says she knows that your face is, in fact, very red.
It is. You can feel it. The image she planted on the pavement has lodged itself somewhere unhelpful in your brain and won’t let go, because of course it won’t, because some quiet part of you that has been thinking about Zayne for two weeks straight is now sitting up and paying attention.
You did want to. You remember it clearly enough, the way you’d tugged at his belt with your fingers and pleaded with him to let you at least get your mouth on him, and you remember the small, considering tilt of his head when he’d said how about you let me have a taste instead. You hadn’t got to. You had wanted to. You had wanted, very badly, to know what he looked like when he wasn’t the one in control of the situation.
You know yourself with your mouth. You know what you can do with it. Caleb used to lose vocabulary entirely when you went down on him, the kind of dissolving that has nothing to do with technique and everything to do with confidence, and you know that if you got Zayne in your mouth, you could, at the very least, make a small chip in that mild, hazel-eyed composure of his.
The thought is sitting low and warm in your stomach by the time you’ve climbed the second flight of stairs. You shove it down. You can feel a flush trying to climb back up your neck and you absolutely don’t have the energy to explain it to Tara.
You scoff instead and shoulder the door to your dorm room open with your hip. “Gee. Thanks.”
“Welcome.” Tara flops face-first onto your bed, which is, mercifully, fully made and free of incriminating duvet creases since you stripped and washed everything that Saturday morning. She rolls over and stares at the ceiling. “So are you going with him, then?”
You drop your bag by the desk and sit down on the edge of the mattress, pulling one knee up under you. You can still feel the feeling of his knuckle on the side of your neck.
“I’m not sure.” You fidget with the hem of your hoodie sleeve. “Maybe it’s best if we all go together or just meet them there?” you sigh, unsure. “It’s not like he asked me on a date or anything. So I shouldn’t take it as that, right?”
Tara props herself up on an elbow. The teasing has dimmed a little, replaced by something gentler. This is Tara’s actual superpower. The flip from menace to friend, without warning.
“Well. Do you want it to be a date?”
You don’t answer immediately, because you’re not even sure of the answer. You pick at a loose thread on your sleeve.
“Zayne looks like the type to take you out to dinner at a fancy yet modest restaurant,” Tara continues, watching your face. “Or coffee for a first date. Not a party in an underground pub. And not with other friends there. Right?”
She is probably right. She is annoyingly often right. But the thing about Zayne is that everything you would have said about him three weeks ago has been gently set on fire by what you now know about him, and you’re not sure what assumptions are even still standing.
“I don’t know.” You bite your lip. “Maybe?” You shrug, smaller. “It’s not like I know him or anything. Clearly there are sides to the quiet nerd, soon-to-be doctor Zayne Li.”
“True.” Tara reaches over and tugs your sleeve. “Anyway. Since he is clearly, at the very least, attracted to you, I think things are definitely going to lead somewhere, right? And plus—” she grins, the proud playful one, the one you have learned to fear, “—when have you ever waited for a guy to ask you out on a date? From what I can remember, you basically dragged Xavier by the hoodie out on a date with you—”
“Okay, Tara!” You point at her with the same energy you’d point at a small loud animal. “Thanks for the reminder.”
Xavier. You hadn’t thought about him in months. Astrophysics student . Silver-blonde hair, the kind that almost looked white in the right light. Blue eyes you could absolutely drown in if he ever decided to actually look at you for longer than a sentence. Quiet. Reserved. The athletic-lean type who wore the same three hoodies on rotation and could explain something about gravitational waves with the soft conviction of a person who had thought about it more than was healthy. You’d gone out twice. Maybe three times, if memory serves you right. He’d been sweet, considerate, completely allergic to making the first move, and you had eventually given up on the chase because being the one who always pushed had started to feel exhausting.
You clear your throat and bring yourself back.
“But Xavier was different. Zayne is…” You trail off. You don’t know how to finish the sentence, so you don’t. You clear your throat again, more decisively. “He is not the type to just wait for the woman to ask him out. And the whole campus knows girls have tried throwing themselves at him. He refused all of them politely.” You squint a little at the memories, the parade of girls from your shared lecture last semester who had hovered too long at his desk, who had asked him to study together under the thinnest possible pretenses, every single one of them sent away with the mild half-smile and a polite no. You frown a little, suddenly less sure of your own theory than you were a sentence ago. “But. Yeah. I guess you’re right anyway. There’s definitely attraction there.”
“I KNEW it!” Tara grabs your shin through your jeans like she’s just been awarded a small prize. “I knew. I called it. I want it on the record that I called it!”
“Tara—” You pinch the bridge of your nose.
“Something did happen!” She is bouncing on the mattress now, clearly way too excited of your slip-up, “C’mon, why won’t you spill some juicy details to your best friend?!” She whines, and it is genuinely both endearing and the worst. You can already see the way she’s going to make this huge in her head, the way she’s going to text you about it three times a day for the next month, the way she is absolutely incapable of being chill about anything good that happens to you. “Did you at least kiss? Make out? Besides leaving marks all over your necks—”
“Stop talking!” Your hand is back over her mouth.
She raises her eyebrows at you over the top of your palm. Patient. Triumphant. She knows you’re going to cave. She has known you for too many years for you to win this round.
You sigh and drop your hand. You give up. “Fine. Yeah. Some things happened… But we didn’t kiss.”
“Wha—” Her face goes blank for a full second, the gears visibly turning in her head. Then her eyes go enormous and her voice goes up an entire octave. “Did you guys FUCK—?!”
“No!” You yelp it, wincing, both your hands flying up. “No, no—we just— He just dropped me to the dorm and stayed for a while…”
Tara’s hand clamps over her own mouth this time. Her eyes are saucers. “Did we interrupt you?!”
“No!” You laugh, a little embarrassed, dragging your pillow off the head of the bed and into your lap. “We had already… uh… finished by the time you and Simone came back.”
You bury your face in the pillow. You can feel the heat of your own cheeks through the cotton. You peek one eye out over the top of it at Tara, sly and small and a little smug despite yourself.
“Don’t tell Simone any of it.”
Tara is, briefly, the quietest she has been all afternoon. Then she slowly mouths the word finished at the ceiling like it is the most fascinating word in the language.
“Oh my god.” It comes out awed. “You finished. As in—plural. As in—” Her eyes snap back to your face, narrowing. “Babe. How many—”
“Tara.”
“How. Many.”
You hug the pillow tighter to your chest. You consider lying. You consider, briefly, climbing out the window. You consider, even more briefly, telling her the truth in full.
You compromise.
You hold up two fingers behind the line of the pillow. Tara screams into her own hands.
“I’m going to die,” she hisses through her fingers. “I’m going to die in this room. You killed me. Zayne Li killed me. I want it on my gravestone.”
“You promised you’d drop it.”
“I lied. I lied to you. I’m a liar. Two—” She cuts herself off, both hands still pressed to her face, eyes squeezed shut like she’s trying to physically contain the next sentence. She fails. “Was it good?? Don’t answer. I know it was good. Your face is answering for you. Quiet Zayne. Two. Oh, I have to lie down.”
“You are lying down.” you roll your eyes, smiling softly.
“I have to lie down harder.”
She flops dramatically fully flat onto your duvet, one forearm flung across her eyes. You laugh into your pillow, properly this time, the embarrassed kind that has actual relief in it, because some small tight thing you’ve been carrying around in your chest for two weeks has, in saying even that much out loud, loosened a notch.
After a moment, Tara peeks one eye out from under her arm. “…Just one more question.”
“No.”
“Just one.”
“No, Tara.”
“Fine!” She closes her eyes again. There’s a brief pause, and then, in the softest, most innocent voice she has ever used in her life, she lets the words leave, “…Is he good with his hands?”
You hit her with the pillow. She is wheezing before it even lands.
(credits for the Art go to Raoni - @/raonnni on X)
.ᐟ✧ translations or reposts of my work on tumblr, ao3, or other sites ARE NOT permitted. please do not ask. do not reuse my blogpost headers, dividers, or layouts. these are original designs of my own. thank you!
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Synopsis: After Zayne takes you back to the dorms, you realize there's more to him than meets the eye. In the heat of the moment, he keeps revealing parts of himself you never expected from him, yet even as he brings you to the brink of pleasure, you're still craving to know just how many sides of Zayne Li you have yet to uncover...
Content warnings: College AU, Med-Student Zayne with a side flavor of Metalhead, he has tattoos & piercings in this one (+his sexy mullet), Lots of flirting, Heavy sexual tension, Dirty talk & Sweet talk, Brat tamer Zayne, Kissing in the back of the car, Undressing, Leaving marks & hickeys, Dom/sub dynamics (kinda), Both are drunk/tipsy, Doggy position, Clit stimulation, Fingering, Praise kink, Crying from pleasure, Begging kink, Cunnilingus;), Multiple orgasms (cw will be updated with each ch)
Word count: 9.9k
Author’s note: don't kill me guys🤭
The corridor brick is no longer holding you up and the cold spring air slaps you across the face the second you step out of the underground stairwell, which does absolutely nothing for the situation between your thighs.
The Uber pulls up outside the pub fast, some blue Toyota with a cracked phone holder on the dash, and Zayne opens the back door for you with one hand on the small of your back like you might tip sideways into the gutter if he doesn’t. You probably might.
You slide in first. He follows. The driver glances in the rearview, mumbles something polite in confirmation of the address Zayne had punched in on his phone two minutes ago, and pulls into the slow traffic crawling past the strip of pubs.
The car smells like vanilla air freshener and somebody else’s perfume. There is a tiny pine tree dangling from the mirror, spinning lazy with every turn. You watch it for a second because it gives your eyes somewhere to land that isn’t Zayne, and then immediately stop, because watching a spinning object while drunk is its own kind of disaster.
You close your eyes instead. Lean your head against the cold of the window. The glass kisses your temple, a small mercy, and the streetlights flick orange and white through your eyelids in a slow, hypnotic pulse.
You rub your thighs together. Slow. Once. Then again, because it doesn’t help at all, in fact it makes the ache between them sharper, more specific, very loudly Zayne-shaped. The print of his mouth under your jaw still feels wet to you, even though you know it’s dried by now. You can feel his fingers on the back of your thigh as a phantom, a pressure that isn’t there anymore but won’t quit.
If I kiss you properly right now, you’re not making it home alone.
You replay it. You replay it in his exact, unhurried voice, the small pause before so, the soft scrape of teeth that had absolutely no business being attached to a sentence about being specific. You replay the way his thumb had stroked the back of your thigh while Caleb was still standing two feet away calling you his. You replay the heat of his palm at your jaw.
You think, with the foggy, many-drinks-deep clarity of someone who has stopped negotiating with herself, about what you’d let him do if he came up to your dorm. You think about your bed, the cheap springs of it, the laundry pile you would have to kick off the chair before he saw it. You think about the lamp by the window that gives the whole room a warm, bad-decision-coloured light. You think about your dress, how easy it is to push up.
You think about how he’d take his time. You don’t even know him well enough to know that for sure, but you are absolutely certain. Zayne would take his fucking time. Zayne would make you ask for things. Zayne, who told you to finish your cigarette like he was assigning you homework, would have you say what you wanted out loud and then would smile that mild not-quite-smile while you tried to.
Your thighs press together harder.
You’d assumed, before tonight, that Zayne wasn’t the type. You’d had him pinned, mentally, as the kind of guy who walked girls to their door and didn’t come in. Studious. A little distant. The boy who shows up to seminar with one cup of coffee and clean handwriting. Not the type to peel a girl off a brick wall and tell her he’s not letting her go home alone if he kisses her properly.
A lot of things about tonight have surprised you. The cigarette. The shotgunning. The hand on your throat. The mouth at your jaw. The way he texts Caleb without looking at his phone. The way he says we’re good like it’s a sentence he’s used before.
So maybe. Maybe he caves. Maybe he is just as wound up as you are, just better at hiding it under that mild expression that doesn’t commit to anything. You’d felt him against your hip in the corridor, you are not stupid, you know what that was. He’s a man. You are very aware, in the specific drunk way where you are aware of nothing else, that you are hot tonight. You know how the dress sits on your curves. You felt his hazel eyes drag over you in the corridor like he was reading something he wasn’t supposed to be reading in public. He was teasing you. He was playing with you. Which means he wants to. Which means a little push, a little flirt, the right hand in the right place, and—
The car takes a corner too fast and your shoulder slides into his.
You open your eyes.
Zayne is looking at his phone, screen tilted away from you, thumb moving slow over something. The streetlight catches the underside of his jaw and the sharp line down to his throat, the soft mess of dark hair sitting against the collar of his shirt, and you are deciding things before your brain has cleared them with the rest of you.
You stay leaned into his shoulder. Let your hand fall, casual, onto his thigh, palm flat on the denim, fingers spread. You feel the muscle under your hand shift very slightly. He doesn’t look up from his phone.
“You’re being awfully quiet, Zayne.” Your voice has gone smoke-low again, the one you’d used on him in the corridor, and you tilt your face up so your mouth is near the underside of his jaw without quite touching it. “Already bored of me?”
His phone screen goes dark. He pockets it slowly.
“Mm.” The hum is more vibration than sound, and his hand finds your knee in the dimness of the car, palm warm, fingers curling around the inside of it. “"Did I look bored, in the corridor?”
You feel the shape of his amusement in it, the slight upturn at the corner of his mouth that you can’t see from this angle but absolutely know is there.
“You looked something.” You drag your hand a slow inch up his thigh. “Couldn’t tell what.”
“Take a guess.”
His hand has started moving on your knee. A small press of his thumb into the soft inner part of it, a slow squeeze, the kind of touch that is technically a massage and is in absolutely no way a massage. You feel it ladder all the way up the inside of your leg as if he’d run his fingers there himself, and your breath goes a little uneven against his neck.
You shift. Tuck yourself closer into his side, knees angling toward him on the seat, and finally, finally, let your mouth land where it has been wanting to land since back in the corridor, soft and open against the side of his throat. Just a press. Then a kiss. Then your tongue, a small drag, a tasting.
His hand on your knee tightens a fraction.
You take that as encouragement. You suck a small kiss into the soft part of his neck where the line of his jaw becomes throat, where his pulse moves under your lips, and you feel him breathe out long and quiet through his nose.
“You’re going to get us kicked out of this guy’s car,” he murmurs, low enough that the driver, who has the radio on a pop station turned up just enough to be polite, isn’t going to hear a word of it.
“He can’t see anything,” you breathe against his skin, lips dragging as you talk. “If you’re gonna be quiet.”
“You should be quiet.”
But his hand has moved, not off you, up. From your knee to middle of your thigh, pushing the hem of your dress back a couple of careless inches with the heel of his palm, fingers curling into the soft inside of you and giving a slow, deliberate squeeze that has you bite, accidentally, into the side of his throat. You feel him laugh. It’s not even a sound, just a small shake under your mouth, and the heat of it goes straight between your legs.
You kiss the bite. Apologetic. Then less apologetic, mouthing wetter at the place where you’d nipped, and that is when you see it.
You don’t even feel the corner the car takes. You feel the warm dim of the cab, the radio mumbling some pop chorus through the front speakers, the heat of Zayne’s thigh under your palm, and the wet, almost-bruised place under his jaw where your mouth has been working for the last two streetlights.
You can’t stop kissing him. That’s the embarrassing part. Your lips have gone autopilot at the side of his throat, soft and open and a little messy, the kind of kissing that’s all tongue and no rhythm because you’re drunk and the only plan your body has is more. You suck a kiss under his ear, panting through your nose against his skin, and feel him swallow under your mouth.
Your thighs are pressed tight together on the seat. They have been since the car pulled away from the pub. You shift slowly, like you’re just settling in against him, and let one cross over the other, the inside seam of your thighs dragging against itself. The small, useless friction makes you bite down again accidentally on the soft skin where his pulse is. You feel him laugh, just a shake under your lips, no sound.
It doesn’t help. Nothing helps. You are aware, in a hot, embarrassed, completely uncaring way, that your panties are soaked through. You can feel the wetness of yourself when you move, sticky and warm against the cotton, and every tiny shift of your hips on the seat just reminds you of it.
His hand is still on your thigh. Just resting now, heavy and scorching hot. The hem of your dress pushed up an idle inch by his wrist where he hasn’t bothered to fix it. Every now and then his thumb does a slow stroke against the inside of your leg, small enough that you could almost convince yourself he doesn’t know what he’s doing, except Zayne knows exactly what he’s doing.
You kiss along the line of his jaw, lower, dragging your tongue down to the side of his neck where his collar sits loose, and that’s when the next streetlight slides across the car at the right angle and you see it.
A line. Thin. Black. Where the soft mess of his hair lies against the back of his neck, just above his collar, a single curving ink stroke peeking out from under the dark strands.
You go still. Your mouth, half-open against his throat, goes still too.
You move your nose, nudging up into the softness of his hair, and the line keeps going. It curves up under his hairline, you can see another sweep of it sitting darker than skin, and when you tilt your head a fraction and catch the place where his collar has moved at his shoulder, there’s more. The edge of something bigger, something with shape, going down under the cotton toward his collarbone.
Your brain, which has been operating on roughly one functional braincell since flirting in that corridor, just stops.
Tonight you found out Zayne smokes. Tonight you found out Zayne drinks. Tonight you found out Zayne wears black jeans that fit him like that and band shirts you don’t recognise the logos of and that he leans against brick walls with a beer bottle dangling loose between his fingers like he’s done it a thousand times. Tonight you found out his mouth knows exactly where to land under your jaw on the first try.
And now this.
Zayne has a tattoo.
The Zayne you know shows up to seminar in a clean collared shirt with one coffee and good handwriting. The Zayne you know hands papers back without looking at the people he’s handing them to. The Zayne you know is the boy other girls work up the courage to ask if he wants to study together under a pretense so thin it embarrasses everyone in the room. That Zayne does not have ink curling up the back of his neck under his hair. That Zayne does not have something bigger and darker hiding under the cotton at his shoulder.
You have always been weak for this. You know this about yourself. The first boy you ever slept with had a sleeve, the second one had a piece across his ribs you used to trace with your finger when you couldn’t sleep, you have a type and the type is exactly this, and the absolute injustice of finding it on Zayne Li in the back of an Uber at half past midnight has you actually losing your mind.
You don’t decide to keep kissing him. You just keep kissing him. Wet and a little frantic now, panting open-mouthed against his throat, mouthing at the line of ink where it disappears into his hair like you can taste it through the skin. Your hand on his thigh slides up another inch, fingers spreading, and you cross your legs the other way, hard, just to feel something against yourself.
A small, ruined sound escapes against his neck.
His thumb on the inside of your thigh stops moving.
“You—” Your voice is wrecked, breath against his skin. You pull back enough to look up at him, lashes heavy, mouth flushed and wet from his throat. “Zayne, is that a tattoo?”
He glances down at you. The streetlight catches the side of his face. His mouth does that small upturn at one corner, the mild not-quite-smile, except his eyes are darker than they were five minutes ago and he sounds very amused at the reaction plainly on your face.
“You sound very surprised. Didn’t expect it, did you?”
“N-no, not really.” You laugh, but it comes out breathy, your forehead dropping back against the side of his neck because you can’t quite hold his eyes right now. “Can you blame me?” You drag your lips along the ink line you can reach. “Since when do you have tattoos?”
“As I said back at the pub,” his voice is low, lazy with it, the kind of unbothered that you are starting to suspect is a deliberate choice on his part, “there’s many things you don’t know about me.”
His hand on your thigh squeezes once, so slow, and you feel it everywhere.
You smile against his throat. You can feel the shape of your own smile pressing into his skin, slow and stupid and a little (a lot) drunk, and your hand on his thigh slides higher, palm flat over the warm denim, fingers spreading toward the inside of him. You don’t quite get there. You stop deliberately. You let your pinky just barely brush the seam at his inseam and you feel the muscle in his thigh tighten under your palm.
“Fine, Zayne. Keep your little secrets.” You tilt your face up so your mouth is near his ear, breath catching against the soft skin behind it. “But…” You wait. You let it sit. You feel him waiting too, the way his chest doesn’t quite move under your other hand. “I do know one thing for sure.”
“And which is that?” His voice has gone quieter, breathier. You feel that more than you hear it.
You drag your nose along the side of his jaw very slowly. You take your time with it, the way he’s been taking his time with you all night, learning straight from the source.
“I know…” Your hand slides up his thigh another half-inch, the tip of your finger now firmly along the inseam, “that you’re gonna come up to my dorm room tonight.” You tilt your face up to look at him through your lashes. “Aren’t you?”
His eyes drop to your mouth. Hold there. Come back up.
“Is that so?” The corner of his mouth pulls higher. He is amused. He is also, you notice, breathing slightly different now. “What made you come up with that conclusion?”
“For starters…” You lean back into him, mouth at the line of his throat again, eyes half-lidded, “the way your eyes roamed over my body tonight.”
You shift deliberately on the seat. Just a small drag of your hip against his. You feel the firm shape of his bluge through his jeans where your hip has just pressed, and a hot, smug little thrill shoots straight up your spine because you are right, you are so right, no matter what mild expression he wants to wear on his face.
You drop your voice.
“…No matter how in control you think you are, Zayne…” You drag your palm slow up the inside of his thigh, almost there, almost where he is, and stop. “Even you can’t hide the tent in your pants.”
He doesn’t answer. His jaw works once under your mouth.
“Don’t you wanna fuck me?” You breathe it into the soft skin just under his ear. Your thighs are pressed so tight together you can feel your own pulse between them. “I know I do.”
The car is quiet for a second. Just the radio. Just the tick of the indicator. Just the small wet sound of your mouth as you kiss the side of his throat once more, slow, and wait.
Then his hand leaves your thigh.
It comes up to your jaw, fingers light, thumb under your chin, and he tilts your face up off his neck with the same easy confidence he’d used to put you against the wall in the corridor. Your breath catches. His eyes are very dark now, blown soft at the centre, his mouth a little flushed where your hair has been brushing it. He is, absolutely, holding something back. You can see the tiny tell of it in the way his throat moves when he swallows.
But the corner of his mouth goes up, mild, amused, in complete control of his own face if not, you suspect, the rest of him.
“Behave.”
The word lands somewhere very low in your stomach.
“Make me,” you breathe up at him, before any sober part of your brain can stop you.
His thumb strokes once over your chin. Very slow.“I am.”
You don’t have an answer to that. Your brain is offline. The radio mumbles a chorus you don’t know, the spinning pine tree on the rearview spins, and Zayne keeps your face tilted up to his for another moment, looking at you like he is memorizing every single thing your face is doing right now and putting it somewhere he can use later. Then he eases your head back down, gentle, against his shoulder. His hand returns to your thigh and rests there, heavy. He doesn’t move it again.
You can feel his pulse in his neck against your forehead. It is not as steady as he is pretending it is.
You close your eyes. The ache between your legs is, if anything, considerably worse, because you are now sitting in the back of a car with the smell of vanilla air freshener in your nose and the hot, drunk certainty curling through you that there is a whole inked map of him living under that shirt collar that you didn’t know about an hour ago, and you are going to find out how far down it goes tonight. You have decided this, you have decided this for both of you.
The car turns onto the long road that runs up to the dorms.
You smile small into the side of his neck where he can’t see it.
Yeah. He’s going to cave.
—
The door slams behind you with a thud that probably wakes whoever is in 14B and you don’t care, your back is to the room and your front is on Zayne and you’ve got both fistfuls of his shirt in your hands as you reverse him into the wood. His shoulders hit. His head tilts back a fraction with the impact, dark hair shifting against the door, hazel eyes catching the warm yellow of your desk lamp where it’s still on from before you left, and the corner of his mouth pulls into that small smile he keeps doing like none of this is making a dent in him.
You are going to fix that.
You go for his throat first because your mouth has been on his throat for thirty minutes already and your lips know where they want to be. You bite down softly at the side of his neck, just under his jaw, and then harder when he doesn’t tell you not to, sucking at the skin until you feel the small heat of a bruise blooming under your lips. You move down. Another. Lower, where his collar sits open, where the line of ink curves up out of nowhere and you still can’t quite believe is real. You leave a mark there too. Wet, big, your tongue dragging slow over the skin after.
His breathing has gone ragged. You can hear it now, soft and uneven against the top of your head, and a low groan slips out of him when your teeth catch the soft place under his ear. Quiet. Almost reluctant. Like he didn’t quite mean to give you that one.
You smile against his skin.
His hand is in your hair. You hadn’t noticed when he’d moved it there but it’s there now, fingers spread wide at the back of your head, palm cupping your skull, holding you against him without pushing, heavy and warm against it. His other hand is at your waist, thumb pressing into the dip above your hip through your dress, and every time you nip a new mark into his throat his fingers tighten a fraction and pull, and your body arches into his on instinct, your chest pressing flush against the warmth of his.
He is amused at how desperately you’re climbing him like a tree. You can feel that in the easy way his hand is sitting in your hair, the lazy span of it, the patience. He is letting you do this. He is letting you, the way he’s been letting you do all of it since the pub, and the part of you that’s still functioning under all the alcohol is filing that away, very carefully, for later.
For now you pull back.
Just a little. Just enough to look up at him through your lashes, mouth flushed and a little wet, and you can see the marks you’ve left on him already, the soft pink at the side of his throat, the wet shine where you’d dragged your tongue, the hair you’ve messed up at the back of his neck. He looks, for the first time tonight, slightly undone. The mild expression is still doing its thing on his mouth but his eyes are doing something else entirely, dark and heavy-lidded and watching you.
Your fingers find the hem of his shirt where it sits low at his hips. You reach and tug slowly. Push it up an inch, then another, baring a thin strip of his stomach, and you bite your lip looking up at him.
“I’m curious,” your voice has gone smoke-low again, all sugar in it, “how far down does your little tattoo go, hm?”
The smirk pulls slow at one side of his mouth.
His hand leaves your hair. Comes down to your wrist. He doesn’t stop you. He does the opposite. His fingers close warm around your wrist and he pushes your hand up under his shirt, dragging your palm along the warm skin of his stomach as your knuckles take the fabric with them. And what you see, what comes into the soft yellow lamp light as the cotton rides up his ribs, has your whole body forget how to function for a second.
There is so much more.
The line you’d seen at the back of his neck is the smallest piece of it. He has work across his ribs, dark and detailed, and a piece running up the side of his stomach, and a bigger sweep that disappears around to his back where you can’t see, and your hand flat on his stomach is sitting on inked skin where you can feel the rise and fall of his breathing under your palm.
And then your eyes catch the small glint of metal at his navel.
A barbell. Silver, simple, sitting through his belly button, catching the lamp light when his stomach moves with his breath.
Your pupils blow wide. You feel them do it. Your lashes flutter once, twice, and a small, very pathetic sound escapes the back of your throat that you absolutely cannot take back.
“Since I have more,” his voice is low, threaded with that dark amusement that you are now actively in trouble over, “which one are you referring to?”
You laugh. It comes out breathy and a little wrecked. You lean into his body, your hand still flat on his stomach under his shirt, and you push the cotton up further, baring more of him to the lamp light. The piercing catches again. So does another sweep of ink at his side. You drag your eyes up slowly over all of it, before you find his face again.
“You’re full of surprises, Zayne.” Your fingers spread on his stomach, pressing into inked skin. You tilt your head, lashes heavy, and let your mouth pull into a small wicked smile. “Tattoos… piercings, too.” You pause. You let it land before licking your lips. “Quite a rebel, aren’t you?” Your voice drops deliberately to a seductive tone. “Doc-tor?”
His breath stutters, only once. Just enough that you feel it under your hand. The smirk deepens at the corner of his mouth. Besides amused and curious, he’s also, you note with a quiet thrill, a little caught.
You pull him off the door.
Not hard., and he lets you. You step back, both hands moving to the collar of his black jacket, and you push it down off his shoulders with a slow slide. He shrugs out of it with a smirk, doesn’t take his eyes off you for a second, and the jacket lands somewhere on the floor of your room next to your laundry pile that you have very thoroughly stopped caring about.
Your hands go straight back to his shirt. Both of them this time. Fingers curling under the hem at his hips, pushing it up, and your eyes flick up to his with all the sweetness you can fake.
“Won’t you take this off too?”
His head tilts a fraction. The hazel of his eyes has gone almost entirely dark now in the lamplight, his hair falling soft against his cheekbone where he’s looking down at you, and the corner of his mouth pulls up further.
“You’re very curious, aren’t you, sweetheart?”
The pet name lands somewhere low and hot, straight in your navel.
“Can you blame me…” you tilt your face up, drag your lower lip slow between your teeth, “for wanting to… discover just how much you keep hidden under all these clothes?”
You let your hands slide down his stomach incredibly slow, palms dragging over his warm skin, until your fingers find the leather of his belt. You hook two fingers in. You tug gently, sultry eyes locked on his face the whole time.
His hand catches your wrist before you get any further.
It isn’t gentle this time. It closes warm and firm around your wrist, and his other hand comes up, fast and unhurried at the same time, fingers spreading at the base of your throat. He doesn’t squeeze. He just holds, palm warm against your pulse, thumb under your jaw, and uses it to bring your face up closer to his.
Your breath stops right in your lungs. A small, soft moan slips out of you before you can stop it, and your eyes go wide on his.
“I’ll show you another night, darling.” His voice has gone quieter, lower, the cocky thread in it pulled tight. He is so close his breath is on your mouth. The smirk is full now, the mild expression long gone, which has you throbbing between your legs. “But right now, I think you need something else to satiate your curiosity with.”
You can feel your own pulse under his thumb, beating violently. Your face is hot. Your thighs are pressed tight together on instinct and the wetness between them is, at this point, a whole separate situation. He looks down at you with that smirk, hazel eyes raking slow over your flushed face and your parted mouth and the way you are quite obviously begging him with every part of yourself, and you can see him enjoy it. He is enjoying you. He is enjoying every second of this.
He’t got you so desperate for a touch and a taste, and eats it all up.
His hand tightens just a fraction at your throat. Your breath catches in your throat, suddenly hard to swallow, if only for the way he looks at you and nothing to do with his slender fingers firmly pressed around it.
And then his hands move again.
They drop from your throat and your wrist all at once, and he reaches down, palms going to the backs of your thighs under the hem of your dress, and lifts. You scramble for him on instinct, arms flying around his neck, legs hooking around his waist, a small surprised sound jumping out of your mouth as the room tilts. His hands settle on your ass, fingers spreading hot under your dress where it has ridden all the way up, and he squeezes a bit hard, watching your eyes go wide and another soft sound reach his ears.
He carries you four steps to your bed.
You don’t even fully register the walk. You register the warmth of him through his shirt, the feeling of his stomach against the bare strip of your thigh where your dress has bunched up, the soft mess of his hair against your temple where it sticks to your sweaty skin. And then your back hits the duvet, mattress dipping under you, and before you’ve found his eyes again his hand is at your hip and he’s turning you easily, like he’s done this many times before.
You go on instinct. You scramble onto your knees, palms flat on the duvet, and he places one warm broad hand at the small of your back and presses down. Gentle but absolute.
You go where he wants you to go.
Your cheek meets the duvet. Your back arches without him asking. Your ass tilts up and you feel the lamp light warm on the backs of your thighs where your dress is shoved up. You got approximately one second to register that you are bent over your own bed with Zayne Li standing behind you before his hands are on your dress.
“I want to make discoveries of my own.”
His voice behind you is rougher now, the quiet amusement gone darker, and you feel his fingers gather the hem of your dress at the backs of your thighs and push up slowly, agonisingly slow, the fabric dragging warm along your skin until it bunches at your waist. You arch for him without meaning to. A small whimper leaves you into the duvet while the cold of the room hits the wetness between your thighs through your panties, feeling yourself clench around nothing.
“Starting with… this.”
His hand comes back. You feel him low between your thighs from behind, and then two fingers drag featherlight, right over the wet patch of cotton at the centre of your panties. You feel them part the soaked fabric against you and then go away again, barely a touch.
A broken sound leaves you into the duvet.
“Your panties are soaked through.” He chuckles lowly, a rough sound that has you arching in need for more. You feel it travel down your spine like liquid fire. His fingers drag again in the same slow pattern, tracing the wet shape of your arousal through the cotton, light enough that it gives you absolutely nothing except sexual frustration of not getting any kind of friction you desperately crave.
“Was it the tattoos, darling?”
Another slow, teasing drag. Your hips push back on instinct, chasing it as his free hand settles warm and heavy on the small of your back, holding you exactly where he’s put you.
“Or were you this wet…” his voice has gone wicked, smirking against the back of your shoulder where you can almost feel him leaning down, “where we shared that cigarette, too?”
“You know the answer to that,” you pant into the duvet, the words half muffled against the fabric, your eyes rolling back as his middle finger dips and presses through the wet patch of cotton, parting your folds through it. The fabric drags into you, soaking deeper, clinging in a way that's almost uncomfortable, and you twitch on his hand without meaning to.
He chuckles softly behind you. He felt that. “I guess I do.”
His hand leaves you for a second and you nearly whine at the loss, but it's only to push your hair to one side, gathering the loose strands off the back of your neck and laying them over your shoulder. Then his mouth is on you. Slow, languid kisses down the back of your neck, the same patient mouth that had worked you to pieces against the brick wall, and a low moan leaves you into the duvet because it's so much, and so little, all at once.
His other hand is still on you, palm warm and broad over the curve of your ass, kneading slowly, fingers spreading and pressing into the softness of your flesh with the kind of unhurried focus that says he is in absolutely no rush. Then it drifts slowly down. Back to the cotton between your thighs, where you are an actual mess.
You feel hazy. The alcohol is sitting heavy behind your eyes, the lamplight is warm at the edges of your vision, and your clit is throbbing so hard you can feel it in your teeth. You squeeze your eyes shut. Your hips, completely without your permission, start to rock back against his fingers, chasing whatever scrap of friction the wet cotton will give you, and you feel his mouth go still against your neck for a second before he laughs lowly.
“Please…” It comes out small, a whimper into the duvet.
"Please?" The smirk is in his voice. He lets it sit. Then his mouth is at your ear, breath warm, and his voice has dropped into something darker, more amused. “Darling, do you always beg so nicely? So easily, for just anyone to give this pussy a little bit of attention?”
His fingers trace the seam of your panties where it cuts into the crease of your thigh, not pulling them aside, not yet. He hooks two fingers into the wet centre of the fabric, lifts it just slightly off your skin, and lets it snap back against your soaked cunt with a small wet sound that has the whole bottom drop out of your stomach.
The words you were trying to say dissolve into a broken moan into the sheets.
“Not anyone—ohh fu—” You drag in a shaking breath, your fingers fisting tight into the duvet. “You know I-I want you.”
“Do I?”
His teeth find the juncture of your neck and shoulder and bite down, soft but with intent, and your eyes roll back so hard it makes the alcohol slosh sideways. Heat ladders straight down your spine and pools right where his fingers are massaging slow, deliberate circles into the drenched cotton, and you feel yourself drip a little further down the inside of your thigh.
“Is it me you actually want,” he murmurs against your skin, taunting, soft, “or just someone to get you off?”
“Y-You,” you manage, and your voice is wrecked, “otherwise I wouldn't have let you come up to the room.”
“So what is it you want, hm?”
You feel him straighten behind you, the warmth of him lifting off your back, and then a sudden cold strip of leather settles against the bare skin of your ass where his belt rests low at his hips. You tremble, a small full-body shiver, the cold metal of his buckle skating against your skin, and his free hand slides slow up the back of your thigh to your hip, anchoring you there.
“You look like such a sweet girl on campus, do you know that?” His voice has gone low, a little philosophical, like he's genuinely considering you. His thumb strokes your hip. His other fingers slow their circles on the cotton. You whimper.
“The beautiful type who deserves flower bouquets, love letters.” He drags his palm up the line of your spine over your dress. “Nice dates over dinner or coffee. A loving partner to gaze at her like she hangs the moon.”
He presses the small of your back down with the heel of his palm at the same time, easing your spine into a deeper arch, and you go where he wants you to go. You whimper into the duvet at how good even that small adjustment feels, your ass tilting higher for him, and just as your spine settles into the curve he wants, his fingers finally pull the soaked cotton of your panties to the side.
The cold air of the room hits the wet of you directly and you whine into the sheets.
You hear him in your head still, flower bouquets, love letters, dinner or coffee, a loving partner. In any other version of your life that would have made you flush. You'd have argued back. You'd have told him you can be both, that the dress and the lipstick are not mutually exclusive with any of that. Some other night, in some other version of you, you'd have wanted him to think of you that way.
Tonight all of those imagined scenarios slide off you. Tonight you do not want flowers. You want to be pressed into this mattress and fucked into the springs of it, and you do not want any of it to be sweet.
“P-Please,” you push out into the duvet, voice catching, “I need more… it's not enough.”
You can feel mascara smearing into your sheets where your face is pressed. You don't care. Your eyes feel glassy, your cheek is hot against the duvet, and you reach back blindly, fingers finding his wrist behind you, trying to push his hand where you need it most, trying to drag those two teasing fingers up onto your clit.
He tuts. A quiet, dark sound that has your pussy clench, needy. “Mm-mm.”
His hand doesn't move where you want it to. He simply lets you pull at his wrist for a second, indulgent, and then his fingers slide up, away from where you need them, leaving you again. His other hand drags slow up your spine, finds the small zipper at the back of your dress, and starts easing it down. You hear the soft tick of each tooth giving way, and your back arches further on instinct, your skin going hot at the slow drag of cold metal down between your shoulder blades.
“But right now…” His voice has gone quieter, rougher, the smirk threaded right through it. “Do you want to know what kind of girl I see?”
His hands settle on your ass and spread. You feel the cold air hit you everywhere. You feel his fingers slide down between your cheeks from behind, two of them, pushing slow through your folds, dragging through the wet of you in a single unhurried stroke until they reach your throbbing clit, and his fingertips begin to circle, lazy and exact.
You choke on it.
“Yes, nghhh, ohh fu—! Fuck!”
Your hips jerk. Your fists tighten in the sheets. Your toes curl into the duvet so hard your foot cramps for a second.
“A girl desperate for some cock,” he says, and his voice has gone darker, the words landing right against the back of your shoulder where his mouth has dropped to kiss you again.“Who'll take everything I have to offer as long as she gets to cum.”
He kisses your shoulder. Your neck. The soft place behind your ear. His fingertips dip lower and trace featherlight around the clenching rim of your hole, just enough to make you actually sob into the duvet, before they slide back up to your clit and resume their slow, steady circles.
“Do you agree?”
You drip. You can feel it, hot and obscene, sliding down the inside of your thigh, and your whole body has started to tremble around his hand. You press your face hard into the mattress to keep yourself quiet, biting at the duvet, because the noises trying to come out of you are not noises you've heard yourself make before.
“I a-agree!” It tears out of you, muffled into the sheets. “Nghh, I'm g-gonna… please don't stop, I'm s-so close, haahhh…”
Your thighs have started to shake. You can feel them. You can also barely feel them, because your entire body has narrowed down to the small wet sound of his two fingers circling your clit and the throb of yourself around nothing. Your eyes roll back. Your fists tighten. You are barely holding yourself up on your knees now, your hips chasing his hand in small desperate rolls, and somewhere in the haze you have a small useless thought about how good he is at this, how it has been maybe two minutes, maybe less, and you are already on the edge of falling apart for him.
His chuckle behind you is dark. You barely register it.
“I liked how nicely you begged.”
That tone. The approval in it, low and pleased, sends a hot pulse straight through you and you clench around absolutely nothing, your thighs streaked wet with how much you keep dripping with every patient circle of his fingers. His fingers slide so slow and merciless, up and down through your folds in a long lazy stroke, gathering more of you, and then return to your clit with the wet of yourself smeared over them.
“So beg again.” His voice has gone quieter, right at your ear. “If you want to cum, you'll beg me first.”
You don't even hesitate. You don't have it in you to. Your whole brain has narrowed to one single bright white point and that point is cum, cum, cum, and you will say anything, agree to anything, do anything to keep his hand exactly where it is.
“Zayne, please!” It pours out of you sweet, broken, your voice a sob into the sheets. “Oh please, I—I'll let you fuck me—fuck! D-Don't stop, begging you, I n-need this so b-badly… ah-ahhh—”
“Cum, beautiful girl.” His voice is raspy, right against your ear, low and curious and a little smirking, like he's actually interested in what you look like falling apart on his fingers. “Show me how you do it.”
It hits you like the floor going out from under you. You start trembling so hard your knees nearly slip on the duvet. Your vision goes white at the edges. Your mouth falls open soundless against the sheets. And as you tip, as the heat in you gathers and breaks, you feel his two fingers slip slow, deep, inside you, parting you open and sliding in to the knuckle in one smooth push, and you clench around them so hard you see stars.
Your thighs shake so violently you barely hold yourself up. Your forehead presses into the duvet. The orgasm rolls through you in long, breaking waves, and you feel yourself flutter and squeeze around his fingers, soaking his hand, soaking the inside of your thighs, soaking the bed under you.
You make a sound into the mattress that is so broken and embarrasing.
Behind you, Zayne hums quietly, undoubtedly so pleased. His fingers stay where they are, deep still, while your body works itself out around them. You feel him lean down slowly to press a soft kiss between your shoulder blades that has absolutely no business being as tender as it is.
The aftershocks keep skittering through you in little waves that make your thighs twitch and your breath stutter. You slump to your side, cheek to the duvet, the room a warm blur in the thin lamplight. Your makeup has given up on you. Your dress is half unzipped and bunched at your waist. Your panties are still yanked to the side. You feel ridiculous and perfect at the same time.
You reach for him.
Your hand finds Zayne’s forearm first, then the cotton of his shirt, then the warm, inked skin under it where you’d shoved your palm earlier. He’s wiping his fingers with his mouth. He chuckles when you grab, a rough little sound low in his throat, and groans softly when you use every inch of leverage you have left to drag him down, twist, and get him on his back.
He goes because he lets you.
You swing a leg over and sink onto his hips. The thick press of him through his jeans lines up under you in a way that makes your breath leave you all at once.
You moan. You can’t help it.
“Fuck me.” You look down at him through your lashes, eyelids heavy, brows folding together with how much you mean it. Your fingers find the straps of your dress and drag them down your shoulders slowly, letting the neckline slide and the whole thing pool at your waist. The black bra you put on without thinking hours ago looks intentional in this light and this position. The lace pattern hits the line between modest and mean. Your nipples are pushing against it, a tell you can’t hide.
His hands are already on your ass. Both of them. Broad palms, long fingers, grabbing slow, spreading, adjusting you like he’s settling a guitar on his thigh. He smirks up at you with that maddening calm you can’t stand, but his ears have gone pink and his hazel eyes are not calm at all. They drop to your chest. Linger. Drag back to your mouth.
He brings you down to him.
His mouth finds your breast through the lace, sucking soft around a nipple until the fabric darkens, and then he noses the cup aside to get skin. You arch. Your fingers slide into his dark hair and hold. He kisses along your collarbone, open-mouthed, a hot, wet path that breaks your words into little whines you don’t control.
“Zayne—hmph… ahhh, please, let’s f-fuck.” Your hips roll over his bulge without your brain’s permission. The thick line of him rubs right under your clit and your eyes go briefly nowhere at all.
His grip tightens on you. He settles you there, grinding you down and then holding you there on his obvious bulge like he’s pinning a wayward thought in place. His fingers flex into your ass in a way you are going to be wearing tomorrow.
You love this. The unspoken roughness he gives you. The way his hands tell your body where to be and your body just goes. You love how you don’t have to explain any of it. He reads you and you read him and it matches up in a way that is going to ruin you for other people.
His mouth finds your neck again, right over the marks he already gave you, and he drags his teeth there with intent before he says it against your skin.
“I’ll only fuck you sober. Which currently, you are not.” His tone is raspy. Final.
You freeze. Then you try to move your hips anyway, because rules are interesting suggestions at best when you are sitting on this much heat. He doesn’t let you. He holds you still with those hands that feel like they could palm your whole body, and it kicks a frustrated little noise out of you that would be embarrassing if you were anyone else.
You don’t care about positions. You don’t care about condoms. You don’t care about anything except the fact that he is hard under you and you can feel it against the bare line where your panties are still shoved to the side. Curiosity flares stupid-hot, because he feels big, and you want to know exactly how big, and you want to know with your whole body.
You keep grinding anyway, small disobedient rolls that catch your clit on the seam of his jeans, and each catch punches a hiss out of you.
“That’s so not fair, mmm… hah…” Your head tips back to give him your throat. He takes it, marking you up like he’s signing his autograph on your skin. “You’re hard, and I know you want it too.”
He chuckles into your skin. It scrapes all the way down your spine and settles right where he’s keeping you from what you want.
“Ah, but I never said I don’t want to.” He pulls back enough to see your face, one hand sliding up warmly to cradle your jaw. He tilts your head down until your eyes are locked to his. He wants you to see him say it. “In fact…” The smirk is a full thing now, wicked and pleased. “…I want nothing more than to give you a taste of what you’re being so desperate begging for.”
He parts your lips with his thumb. You close around it immediately, tongue wet, a soft, helpless suck that wipes the smirk right off your own face. His eyes flick lower to your mouth, darkening.
“But.” The word lands soft and cruel. “I am a gentleman. And sex implies I need to have you sober for you to follow my instructions like I need you to.”
You try to move your hips again on instinct and he answers by lifting his palm off your ass an inch and dropping it back in a light, sharp smack that is ninety percent warning and ten percent reward. Your eyes fly wide and then roll, your mouth falling open on a ragged little sound you do not recognise as yours.
“Nghh… hah, fuck, l-let me at least suck you o-off…” You chase him with your hands, sliding them down his chest through his shirt, over the warm plane of his stomach, down to his belt, tugging on the leather. You aim for your most devastating eyes. They probably look insane. You commit anyway.
His laugh is low and pleased at your little performance.
“How about you let me have a taste instead?” The cocky tilt of his mouth says he already knows your answer. “I’ll get off by eating you out, if you’ll allow me.”
You don’t get a chance to formulate the words yes, obviously yes because the world flips. The mattress springs give a protesting squeak and your back hits the bed, dress bunched at your waist, one bra cup already crooked. Zayne is over you in the next breath, hair falling soft around his face, hazel eyes steady and calm and devouring.
“Spread your legs.” His voice leaves no room for interpretation. “Good girl.” Two fingers pull one bra cup down, your nipple slipping free into the warm air, and his mouth drops to kiss it once. Soft, like a reward. “Even while drunk, your body is very sincere about what it wants.”
He kisses down your sternum, your stomach, the dip of your navel. You grab a fistful of his hair and he hums into your skin in approval, the vibration a quiet threat that you can cash in on later. Heat is burning off you in waves and the closed window turns your little room into a fever. You would crack it if you could get your hands to stop shaking on his hair.
He groans into your hip. It’s not loud. It’s honest. He spreads your knees wider with his hands, gentle but absolute, and places a kiss on the inside of your thigh that lands like a promise.
“Now,” he says, glancing up at you from between your legs with eyes that have gone forest-dark, “I know you’ll be a good girl and keep them spread for me, hm?” His tongue wets his lower lip and your entire body tightens. “If it gets too much, just tug at my hair.” The calm in his hazel pools is not a contradiction to the hunger. It frames it. “But if you misbehave and close your legs, I’ll stop before you get a chance to cum again. Understood?”
You nod so fast you probably look unwell. He smiles like you’ve just got an answer right in class.
His fingers spread your slick folds and you watch the exact second he takes in the mess you are. Something in his face—mild, appreciative, deeply satisfied—clicks deeper. He kisses your inner thigh again, and again, and then his mouth finally closes over your swollen clit.
Stars immediately burst behind your eyelids. Your back bows off the bed, hands flying to his hair, a sound ripping out of you that is very erotic in itself. The heat of his tongue and the wet pressure of his mouth shortcircuits whatever flimsy self-control you’d built up.
And then there’s the metal.
Cold, sudden, a bright slick bead of pressure that drags over your clit like a spark and has your eyes flying open in shock before they roll straight back into your skull.
A tongue piercing. In Zayne’s mouth. On you.
He smirks into you. You feel it against your skin. He starts to lap, slow and deliberate, circling, teasing, learning you in long patient passes, and every time that small barbell slides over your clit in the arc of his tongue you make a noise you have never made before in your entire life. He moves from your clit to your entrance and back again, and when he dips his tongue into you, you choke on a moan that probably wakes 14B for the second time tonight.
“O-ohhh, shit… Fuck, fuck! Z-Zayne, nghhh, oh—”
He doesn’t slow. He slurps shamelessly, mouth wet and open on you, tongue working in patient, ruinous patterns. You fight your own legs, keeping them open on command even as every muscle you have tries to close them. His hands keep your thighs parted, thumbs stroking reassurance into the inner lines while his mouth takes you apart.
“G-God… Zayne, s-so good… shit, ‘m going to… so close…” Your voice is broken glass and honey. Your chest rises and falls too fast. Your head tips back and you stare at the ceiling like it did something to you personally.
He pushes his tongue inside you, slow, fucking you with it, and the metal drags on the way in and the way out like a wicked little punctuation. Your mind spins. Your whole body sings like an overstimulated nerve. One hand leaves his hair to cup your breast, pinching at the nipple he freed earlier, and he watches you do it, looks right up your body and into your eyes while he works you, and groans into your cunt at the sight.
You try to get away from it. Not because you want to. Because you physically cannot take it and your body is trying to save whatever is left of you. He doesn’t let you. His hands are stronger than your panic. He holds you right there and devours you like he said he would.
“Hah… nghhh, t-too much! C-Can’t take i-it… Z-Zayne—” Your voice tips high. “Cumming!”
You break.
You soak his mouth. Your ears ring so hard you almost miss your own keening. He groans rough into you and seals his mouth tighter, sucking at your clit as you spasm, pushing you through it, through the part where it would flicker and die if he were kinder. He is not kind. Not here. Not now. He keeps you there until it rolls all the way through, until you’re shaking apart under his mouth.
“Like that, beautiful. Easy.” He breathes it against your slick cunt, the words a warm promise and command all at once. His nose nudges your clit and you twitch. “Breathe for me.”
He kisses your inner thigh again, a soft little benediction, and eases your legs off his shoulders one at a time. Then he crawls up your body and hovers over you in the lamplight, hair falling around his face.
You are a wreck. Flushed. Glassy-eyed. Your breath saws in and out. You smile at him anyway, a stupid, post-apocalyptic little grin, and giggle. It hits him in the chest. He smiles back without meaning to.
You hook a hand behind his neck and bring his face closer. You look at his mouth like it holds state secrets.
Your voice is shredded. It makes something satisfied flicker through his eyes.
“Who would’ve guessed…” You drag your thumb over his lower lip and feel the shape of the barbell moving under his tongue when he shifts. “…that the Zayne Li would have a tongue piercing, of all things, and no one would know?”
He scoffs, amused, eyes half on your mouth, half on the way your hand won’t stop touching him.
You sigh, thumbing the corner of his smile like you can make it stay.
“God, it felt amazing. You knew it would, didn’t you?” You poke at him lazily, flirting even as your pupils are still trying to remember how to be normal. “That’s why you refused to kiss me? Just so you could see the look on my face when you got your mouth between my legs?”
You pout, performative, like you’re mad. He huffs a laugh, the smirk kicking back up.
“The surprise on your face when you felt it was a sight to see, for sure.” His thumb traces a lazy line under your eye where mascara has smeared. “And besides, you came so hard just because of it, so why complain, hm?”
You scoff like you aren’t completely wrecked and then—your phone goes off.
The shrill vibration cuts through the warm bubble like a slap. Your eyes go wide. Zayne’s brow lifts. You twist, fumbling for the device where it’s facedown on your nightstand, and flip it over with a smear of your own mascara across the screen you’ll hate yourself for later.
It’s Tara. Multiple texts stacked in frantic drunk-girl staccato. Spelling optional. Punctuation creative. You catch the words dorm lobby and where r u and Simone lost her shoe and we r coming up now plzz open.
You make a face up at Zayne that says every cursed thing the universe has ever done to you in one expression.
The corner of his mouth curls. Not unsympathetic. A little triumphant.
He kisses your cheek, the same innocent press he’d weaponised in the corridor, and you feel the ghost of his smirk against your skin.
“Looks like your fan club is inbound.”
(credits for the Art go to Raoni - @/raonnni on X)
.ᐟ✧ translations or reposts of my work on tumblr, ao3, or other sites ARE NOT permitted. please do not ask. do not reuse my blogpost headers, dividers, or layouts. these are original designs of my own. thank you!
Synopsis: Out of everyone on campus, Zayne Li was the one you least expected to run into in an underground pub on a Friday night, beer in hand and dressed nothing like how soon-to-be doctor Zayne Li dresses on a daily attending classes. Were your eyes deceiving you, or was there a side of Zayne no one was aware of, especially you?
Content warnings: College AU, Med-Student Zayne with a side flavor of Metalhead, he has tattoos & piercings in this one (+his sexy mullet), Lots of flirting, Heavy sexual tension, Smoking, Shotgunning, Alcohol consumption, Zayne can handle some alcohol in this AU, Ass grabbing & leaving marks, Neck kissing & hickeys, Dirty talk, Caleb is a side-character in this. (cw will be updated with each ch; next one is explicit)
Word count: 9.5k
Author’s note: ladies and gentlemen, i present you, my newest obsession. Metalhead!Zayne will grace our lives bcs i saw this art from our wonderful talented raoni & i couldn't think about anything else since... it has consumed my mind and soul
sooo, this was supposed to be a one-shot buuut... haha like you don't know me already, who's lex if she doesn't make it slowburn & build the sexual tension for at least a few thousand words.......right
enjoyyy guys<3 comments & reposts are VERY welcomed & appreciated (pls yap with me about this im losing my damn mind)
Making your way through the stifling crowd was a true challenge tonight, despite your best efforts to keep up with Simone and Tara who were farther away in front of you, clinging with one another and giggling, barely audible over the loud music of the pub.
You weren’t faring better yourself, clinging to Simone’s palm and trying to avoid sweaty bodies bumping you left and right. You had one-too-many drinks tonight already, because this wasn’t really in plan, to go out. You were supposed to have a girls’ night at the dorm, so you invited Simone and another two girls from her class to your shared dorm with Tara, since midterms were over and you took your last exam Wednesday, you all wanted to just get loose, have some fun.
They came with two bottles of alcohol, which you mixed with what you already had in your worn fridge in the dorm, because you didn’t trust Tara to make the cocktails. You remember last time you put your faith in her, naive as you were, and ended up half-naked in the middle of the night, swimming in the campus’ indoor pool, giggling like two idiots.
You were not about to have a repeat of that tonight, so you made them. Still, that didn’t mean you were safe from her shenanigans, because about eight rounds into truth or dare, you already had a cocktail and three shots into your system, enough alcohol to make your vision blurry at the edges and put a filter over the rational part of your brain.
Three shots turned into five, and another cocktail was half-emptied when you dragged your skirt up your legs, wobbling a little in front of the mirror where your reflection was staring back at you, hair messy and cheeks pink from all the laughing. As you struggled to change into some clothes worthy of being into a club full of drunk college students, Simone was already calling for a cab while the other girls were still rolling on the floor, giggling and drinking from their plastic cups.
You didn’t have half a mind to refuse going out, even if you knew there was a possibility for things to take a turn for the worst tonight, knowing Tara and Simone and the version of themselves clouded by so much alcohol. You took your purse from the couch in a hurry and followed them to the cab, stumbling a little on your poor choice of shoes. Just because you were tipsy, that didn’t mean you weren’t gonna dress for the occasion.
You stop in front of the bar now, Simone already leaning over the counter with a smile on her face, boobs peeking out from the cut of her blouse, chest pressing into the wood with the movement. She says something to the bartender, which you guess must be something flirty because he gives her a small laugh and turns to pour some transparent liquid into five small glasses.
The music is super loud, especially near the bar, but you still hear them clearly as they chant “Shots! Shots! Shots!”, so you all take your glass and clink them together before your head dips back and the strong liquid swirls down your neck, burning. You wince, coughing a little as you set the glass down on the counter, giggling at Simone and Tara’s faces, which aren’t that different from yours.
“Woo! That was much better than whatever we had at the dorm!” Tara grins, sliding her arm around your neck.
“Yeah, and a lot more expensive, too!” you huff, smiling at her because it is indeed better.
You spend the next half an hour or so by the bar, sharing a few more drinks, and you settle for a cocktail this time, something easier that takes longer to finish. Your mind is already fuzzy, everything funnier than it should be, so you know you’re not just tipsy anymore. You got to do some damage control, so you avoid any more shots, even when Tara pouts at you to try to convince you to have one more round with her.
The other two girls found their way to the other side of the pub where it is a lot more crowded, bodies clinging to one another while dancing, and Simone is deep in conversation with the bartender, which you suspect is nothing casual because his eyes keep drifting down to Simone’s chest every now and again, and she doesn’t seem to mind.
You laugh to yourself and turn your attention to Tara, then scan the rest of the pub. Since this is close to campus, you wonder if you’ll find any familiar faces here tonight. You frequent the pubs around campus often, especially when you’ve gotten all your focus on your studies and feel burned out. Being in a place with loud music and full of students such as yourself, who chase the same feeling of letting go of anxieties and stress, even if just for a few hours, makes you feel like there’s more out there than just your studies.
Tara is leaning against the counter beside you, her chin propped lazily in her palm as she scrolls through something on her phone, the screen casting a faint blue glow across her cheekbones. You take the opening to slip a hand into your purse and fish out the soft pack of cigarettes you’d shoved in there earlier, the cardboard a little crumpled from being pressed up against your lipstick and your keys. You nudge her shoulder with yours, leaning in close so you don’t have to shout over the music that’s still thrumming through the floor and up into the soles of your feet, the bass making your chest vibrate in a way that almost feels pleasant by now, almost familiar after this long.
“Smoke break?” you angle the pack so she can see it, drawing her gaze up from her phone. “I’m dying.”
She gives a small hum of agreement, slipping her phone into the back pocket of her jeans before sliding off the stool with a slight wobble that mirrors your own. You loop your arm through hers because you can already feel the buzz pooling warm and heavy in the bowl of your stomach, that liquid sort of heaviness that makes your steps feel a fraction too long, a fraction too generous with how much space they take. Tara is just steady enough to anchor you while you weave back through the crush of bodies, and you keep your free hand splayed out a little for balance as you slip between people, your shoulder catching now and again on someone’s arm, someone’s drink.
This place is one of those underground spots that doesn’t quite have rules, or doesn’t quite bother enforcing the ones it has, and there’s a stretch of corridor just off the main floor where people pour out from the different bars that share the space, leaning along the bricked wall with cigarettes pinched lazily between their fingers, the air heavy with smoke and the scent of perfume that bleeds into sweat and spilled liquor and turns into something almost intoxicating in its own right.
The music drops to a muffled pulse the second you step out from the doorway, and the relief of it hits you somewhere behind the ribs, your shoulders coming down a fraction as you tap the pack against your palm and slide a cigarette between your lips, the filter catching slightly on the tackiness of your gloss.
Tara is already drifting a few steps off, shouting at a girl she barely knows from her psych elective, so you let her go and lean your shoulder blades against the cool stretch of brick while you cup your hand around the flame of your lighter. It flickers twice before catching, and the first drag is warm and grounding in a way you didn’t realize you needed tonight, your eyes slipping half-closed as you tilt your head back and let the smoke curl slow up past your lashes.
You picked up smoking as a bad habit, second year in Uni. The pressure was too much, combined with the emotional wreckage your ex put you through, so you turned to something unhealthy instead of crying yourself to sleep every night. You tried to quit, but bad habits die hard, so you give yourself some grace on nights like this, blaming it on letting lose, telling yourself it’s just for tonight, just as a social thing and not something you still need to ease off the heaviness in your chest you still occasionally get.
You drag your eyes to the left, and it takes you a full minute to realize who is standing at the far end of the corridor. Caleb. Of course he would be here tonight, it doesn’t even come as a surprise to you that he’s out partying with his friends. You met Caleb your second year, too, in this exact same spot. You were a mess back then, makeup smudged and eyes puffy from crying, because you were really going through it at the time, and the loud music, the alcohol and seeing everyone around you have fun while you were still not over your ex—everything made you fall down the rabbit hole even faster. You were down to your last two cigarettes which you were desperate to inhale and just try to shut off your brain, but luck wasn’t on your side.
You lost your lighter somewhere in the crowd that night, and this stranger saw you were about to have a full mental breakdown as you desperately rummaged through your purse, huffing and puffing, annoyed. Caleb offered you his lighter with a casual smile, easy and charming enough to erase some of the frown between your eyebrows, and you took it from his fingers, giving a small smile.
You spent the rest of that miserable night talking and smoking in a corner, and the miserable night turned out not to be that miserable after all. He shared his own pack of cigarettes, shared some funny stories of himself, all in an attempt to make you laugh, which you did. The satisfaction swam from his face in waves, grinning at you like he won a prize, which only made you roll your eyes at him. But you were grateful, more than you wanted to voice, because his presence made it easier, stopped your from spiraling like you did many night before, in that same spot, doing the exact same thing, only being much more dejected and alone.
Caleb is the kind of person who occupies the air around him whether he means to or not, all loose shoulders and that easy slouch he does against any available surface, head thrown back laughing at something with the line of his throat catching under the cheap yellow string lights running along the corridor. He’s in that worn navy crew-neck he wears half the week, sleeves shoved up to his elbows, hair looking like someone (probably him) has been pulling at it for hours.
And right beside him, half a step back with a beer bottle dangling loose between his fingers and his other hand shoved deep into the pocket of his black jeans, is Zayne.
That makes your fingers go still around the cigarette, the smoke curling thin and untouched past your face as you take a beat to actually process what you’re looking at, because Zayne is not the kind of person you expect to find in an underground pub on a Friday night, leaning against a brick wall and listening with that faint half-smile he gets when he’s tolerating something more than enjoying it.
You’ve never quite been able to figure him out, in the loosely overlapping way that you know him, mostly through Caleb, mostly across the table in that one shared seminar where he sits two rows up and answers questions in that low, even way that always sounds like he’s already considered three counterarguments before opening his mouth. You’ve been on group projects with him a couple of times too, polite and easy to work with every single time. He’s a mistery to you, and you would lie to yourself if you didn’t admit he is quite an interesting person.
He’s brilliant, of course. Everyone on campus knows just how smart Zayne Li is, never one to be underestimated, never one to pass his study sessions in favor of hanging out or going out to have fun or just do things that don’t require a textbook and a laptop. He’s soon-to-be doctor, of course he is the type of person prioritizing his studies. Paired with the way he looks, you have to admit to yourself, he would make quite a handsome doctor.
Knowing all this about Zayne, it does take you by surprise actually seeing him here tonight. With a bottle of beer in his hand, no less. It makes your eyes squint despite yourself, a small smirk of curiosity more than anything pulling at the corner of your lips. Him and Caleb are as much opposites as people with different life ideals and future plans are, yet you couldn’t help but notice of how well they fit together as friends in the time you got to meet them and interact with them. Even so, from getting along well to this… well, it’s safe to say it’s got you all curious how Caleb even managed to drag Zayne out here, and even more so, how he convinced the guy to drink beer with him.
He looks different out here. Or maybe he just looks like himself in a setting where you weren’t expecting to see him. The contrast is what’s catching you off guard, because the dim corridor light cuts shadows down the line of his jaw in a way that makes you swallow before you’ve decided to. He’s even dressed so differently than he usually is on campus, with fitted black jeans and a black tee under his leather jacket. You would blame it on the amount of alcohol you had tonight and the thick layer of smoke haunting the corridor, but fuck it if he doesn’t look sexy as hell dressed in that. You bite your lip, eyes dragging up and down his body, quietly glad he doesn’t seem to notice he’s being checked out.
Caleb spots you first, his face splitting into the grin that’s probably gotten him out of more parking tickets than he’ll ever admit to.
“No fucking way!” He’s already pushing off the wall, crossing the corridor in a few easy strides. “Tell me you guys didn’t actually come here on purpose.”
“Sorry for barging on your domain, Xia.” You smirk at him when he’s close enough to see it. Tara is abandoning her psych girl and their conversation to throw her arms around his neck because Tara has known Caleb almost as long as you have, and the two of them dissolve into the loud, hugging, half-shouting reunion that they always seem to do whenever they collide somewhere unplanned.
Which leaves Zayne leaning against the wall with the bottle hanging loose in his hand, watching the spectacle with that mild expression that doesn’t quite commit to anything.
Watching, you realise after another second, you.
The cigarette burns down a millimeter while you hold his gaze, and you don’t know if it’s the alcohol or the bass still thumping faintly through the wall behind you or the fact that you weren’t expecting him here, but you can feel the heat climbing in a slow crawl up the side of your neck that you can’t quite reason away. You lift the cigarette in a small salute across the gap between you, then bring it back to your lips and pull a deliberate drag with your eyes still on him.
“Didn’t have you pegged for the underground type, Zayne.” you finally call, loud enough to carry over the loudness around you, soft enough that it isn’t really for anyone but him.
His head tilts a fraction, and he pushes off the wall to come closer. “Didn’t have you pegged for a smoker.”
He takes his time crossing to you, the bottle still loose in his hand, and you catch the way his eyes flick down the length of your dress and back up in the kind of split-second pass that wouldn’t be obvious to anyone who wasn’t looking for it. You were looking for it, which is why it is hard to bite back the small smirk painting your lips.
“I guess I’m just full of surprises,” you say, shrugging one shoulder against the brick, unbothered.
“So I’m gathering.”
He stops in front of you, closer than acquaintances usually stand. The corridor is loud but not loud enough that you wouldn’t hear him if he wasn’t staying so close. He doesn’t really need to stand in your personal space, but it still feels like a decision, one he made somewhere around three strides back. You tilt your chin up to keep his gaze, and the brick is cool through the thin fabric of your dress where your shoulder blades are pressing into it.
“Caleb dragged you out, didn’t he?” you smile at him, eyes flicking back over his shoulder where Caleb is laughing with Tara and another girl a few steps back, and then flick back at him.
You’re aiming for casual, but it comes out a little lower than you meant it to, smoke-slow almost. His mouth does a small twitch at the corner, the not-quite-smirk that you’ve watched from across a seminar table more times than you’d like to admit to yourself in this exact moment. It makes heat crawl up your spine, grip your cigarette a little tighter.
“Something like that,” he hums, tilting his head.
“He’s persuasive.”
“He’s something.”
The laugh that comes out of you is real and surprised, the alcohol warming it from the inside, and Zayne watches you laugh with an expression you can’t entirely place, except for the part of it that you can. You hold the cigarette up between you, the smoke curling thin and pale through the space between his face and yours.
“You smoke, Zayne?” You already know the answer to that, like you knew the answer to him drinking, yet here he is in an underground pub with a bottle of cheap beer in his hand. So really, do you know the answer?
“Not usually, I don’t.” There’s a small pause, the corner of his mouth twitching again. “I do on special occasions, though.”
You tilt your head, eyes narrowing in surprise. “Social smoker?”
“Something like that.” Your eyes follow as he lifts the bottle to his lips, head tilting slightly as he takes a sip of the beer. It’s probably gotten too warm, judging by the smallest narrowing of his eyes at the taste.
You drag another smoke into your lungs, even if only to distract yourself from staring without any regards at him. His throat bobs slowly with it, and you can’t help but trace it with your eyes.
You’re not as subtle as you usually would be. Granted, you’ve got a little too much alcohol in your system to care for subtlety, but you’re at least aware of Zayne watching you closely too. That alone makes you shiver slightly, a small tremor up your spine, which you could always blame on the coldness of the wall behind you. It would be a lie, anyway.
“Sorry if I’m having a hard time believing that, Zayne—you? A social smoker?” you puff out the smoke, letting it curl in the space between you that has gotten an inch smaller since you’ve started talking, “What, you’re a social drinker, too? And here I thought you lost a bet to Caleb or something.” You gesture to the bottle in his hand with a cheeky smile.
Zayne only hums, something you can’t actually hear because of all the noise, but you do inch a tad bit closer to him.
“There’s quite a lot you don’t know about me.” He tilts his head down, hazel eyes focused on you, and the subtle move has your heart picking up the pace a little. He only lingers on your face for a few seconds before looking around casually. “Is it that hard to believe I’m here out of my own free will?”
You puff a small laugh, because yeah, it is quite hard to believe Zayne Li would choose this as his preferred Friday night activity. He doesn’t seem that out of place as you would have thought he would, if someone were to come up to you and say they saw Zayne Li in an underground pub, surrounded by smokers and loud college students, drinking beer in a leather jacket and tight jeans.
“I feel like answering that would not make your impression of me improve.” You inhale again, pursing your lips around the cigarette. A small curve of his lips has your stomach doing a flip, because of many reasons, really. One would be that you never expected Zayne to be so easy to talk to, and another one would be how good that smirk looks on his lips.
You lick your own unconsciously.
He shuffles closer to you, and you shift on your heels to make some space for him. Leaning with his shoulder on the wall, he brings the bottle to his lips again, so you break eye contact to rummage through your purse again, looking for another cigarette since the one you had in your hand burned all the way through.
From the corner of your eye, you see Tara and Caleb laugh at something, then Tara looks your way and silently gestures toward the bar at the end of the corridor. You immediately get what she’s saying, the two of them already making their way there, Caleb’s hand around her shoulders to stabilize her. You roll your eyes and smile, turning back to Zayne who’s silent beside you, eyes looking in the same direction.
You’re almost out of cigarettes, which would be just your luck, but at least you’ve got enough to stay out here for a while longer. Not that you really need an excuse to hang out here, but hanging out with Zayne in this enviorment which is far from academic, makes you feel a new type of nervousness.
You light your cigarette with a flick of the lighter, the small flame catching the corner of your mouth for half a second before it disappears, and you tilt your body in Zayne’s direction, hip cocked against the brick, smoke curling slow up between you.
“Fair enough. Then you won’t mind me asking why you’ve picked up smoking?”
He lifts a brow at you, something curious in his expression, something almost probing, like he’s already three steps ahead of whatever answer you’re about to give him. He waits patiently for your response, head tilted a fraction, and you find yourself shrugging a shoulder before the silence has the chance to stretch into something heavier than you want it to.
“Bad habit,” you offer, mouth curving in a playful gesture, something someone who hasn’t fully decided how much to share would do, tapping a little ash off the end of your cigarette. “Seems like I stumble into bad decisions lately.”
The corner of his mouth lifts, the smallest thing, but enough that you catch it and feel the warmth of it settle somewhere low and pleased under your sternum. You like that. You like that you can pull that out of him without seeming to try very hard at all. He brings the bottle back up to his mouth then and tips the rest of the beer into his throat in one slow swallow, the line of it working under the dim corridor light. When he’s done he leans sideways and sets the empty bottle on the narrow ledge running off the brick, where someone has already left two crushed caps and a folded matchbook.
“Do you mind?” His chin lifts slightly toward the cigarette between your fingers, brows arched, easy with it.
You blink at him for half a second, an eyebrow flicking up in something that’s mostly confused and a little curious, and the smile that pulls at your mouth has a touch of cheekiness in it that you don’t quite bother smoothing over.
“By all means.”
You pass it to him slowly, the brush of your fingers landing in the handoff, and you watch with quiet curiosity as he lifts it to his mouth, the filter catching the light where your gloss has left a faint pink print along it. He pauses just before he draws, gaze flicking up over the line of his fingers to lock with yours, holding it there long enough that the air between you tightens around your ribs.
You lean in then, mouth drifting close to his ear because you tell yourself the corridor is loud, even though neither of you have been struggling to hear each other.
“Is this one of your special occasions, then?”
You linger only a breath longer than you need to before easing back, and the small smirk that curves slow over his mouth has your stomach turning once in a lazy roll.
“I have a feeling you wouldn’t mind if it was, would you?”
His voice is low, casual enough on the surface that it would be easy to miss what’s underneath it if you weren’t already listening for it. He drags a slow inhale from the cigarette, the ember flaring orange in the dim light, and tilts it back toward you between two fingers while exhaling the smoke off to the side of you, lips half-parted, gaze still settled steady on yours.
You raise an eyebrow at him.
He raises one back.
“Come closer, then.”
You take half a step in and tip your face up, but he doesn’t pass the cigarette to your fingers this time. He holds it for you, knuckles brushing the corner of your mouth as you wrap your lips around the filter and draw. Your free hand drifts up the front of his jacket, fingers walking slow over the leather, finding the lapel and curling there a beat before sliding higher to the collar. You tug him down without hurry, just enough that his head dips and his lips part on a quiet exhale that you can feel along your top lip.
You let the smoke leave your mouth in a slow, unhurried push, and he takes it from the gap between your lips in a soft inhale, his chest rising shallow with it, the line of his mouth coming so close to yours that you can feel the heat of him without quite touching. Inches between you. Neither one of you moving to close them.
His free hand finds your hip then, settles there with a quiet weight that’s deliberate in a way that makes your breath catch under your ribs. His eyes search yours for half a beat, something unspoken passing through them, a question low enough that he doesn’t need to voice it for you to feel it land. You tilt your head a fraction in answer, nose brushing slow against his, and the corner of his mouth twitches against the small drag of it.
You slip the cigarette from between his slender fingers, holding it up between you with a small, playful curl of your mouth, and bring it to his lips while trying to not be too aware of how close you’re standing. He smirks, eyes still on yours, and parts his lips around the filter as you hold it for him, the ember catching as he draws. His hand slides from your hip up along the line of your waist in the same breath, fingers spreading wide over your ribs through the thin material of your dress. The sudden firm grasp of it pulls a small gasp out of you before you’ve decided to make a sound, your back arching against the brick on instinct.
He uses it. He bends his face down into the small space your gasp has carved between you and exhales the smoke between your parted lips in a slow, deliberate stream, and you breathe him in without thinking, the heat of his breath, the bitter trace of the cigarette, all of it dragging down into your lungs while his thumb sweeps a slow circle against the side of your ribcage.
You hold the smoke a beat longer than you need to before letting it spill back out, curling pale up between your mouths. You see his gaze drop and stay this time, settling on your parted lips, a look so intense it has your tongue peek out to wet your lower lip.
“You’ve made a real mess of it, by the way.”
His voice has gone quieter, more of a low vibration in his chest than a proper sentence, and his thumb keeps up its slow tracing against the side of your waist, the easy patience of it almost worse than the kiss he isn’t giving you yet. You’re pretty sure that’s where this is going, and you don’t know what made you dizzier. The fact that his hand is on your waist, burning through the fabric, or that you’re close enough to smell his cologne mixed with the cigarette smoke.
You don’t quite follow at first, head still hazed from the smoke and the alcohol and the warmth of him pressed close.
He did it so casually, too. You knew Zayne to be confident in his academics, but didn’t quite expect him to flirt so smoothly. When you offered your cigarette to him, you thought he would either pass or just awkardly draw from it, aiming to indulge you. What you didn’t expect but are currently pleasantly surprised by was his little cocky act of doing shotguns with you.
“Of what?” You breathe against his lips, batting your eyelashes at him.
“Your lipstick.”
Your tongue traces the inside of your lower lip on instinct, and his gaze drops with the movement and snaps back up as if it hadn’t quite given itself permission to wander.
“Have I?”
“Half of it. Pretty thoroughly.”
The way he sets it down has a careful weight to it, an observation laid between you that he’s clearly waiting for you to do something with, and it takes you a beat longer than it should to catch the implication underneath. Smudged. Like someone else has already been at your mouth tonight before him. The slow grin tugs at the corner of yours before you bother to school it.
“And you’ve just been thinking about that this whole time, is that what you’re saying?”
His thumb hasn’t paused along your ribs, the slow circle of it almost distracted in its patience, grounding and indecent at once.
“Hard not to, when it’s right there.”
“Got a theory?” You stare right into his hazel gaze, voice a little defiant in its provocation.
His hand drifts slowly, sliding up the line of your side until his warm palm finds the curve of your throat and settles there, fingers spreading along the side of your jaw with a tenderness that doesn’t quite match the heat behind his eyes.
“A few.” His eyes trace a slow path from your eyes to your mouth and back up.
“Care to share?” you whisper, finger dragging slowly down his chest.
The pad of his thumb drags slow along the corner of your mouth, no accident in the angle, smearing the gloss further across the seam of your lips, and he doesn’t even bother to hide the small curl of satisfaction it pulls into one side of his own.
“Not particularly.”
You let him. You let him work the soft pad of his thumb across the ruined line of your mouth, eyes still tipped up to his, your own smirk tugging slow at the smudge he’s just made worse, and you can feel your heartbeat picking up under your collarbones in a way that’s almost ridiculous, given how little it takes to set it off. You laugh lowly, more of a hum in your chest than a proper sound, and his thumb pauses at the corner of your mouth at the feel of it before resuming, slower now, almost thoughtful.
“It was a shot glass,” you tell him, smiling sweet up at him through your lashes in a way you know is performative and a little unfair. “Disappointing answer, I know.”
His mouth twitches, the not-quite-smirk pulling at the corner.
“Hm. Less interesting than I had it.”
“And what did you have in mind?”
“Someone less careful than I would be.”
That lands low and warm in your stomach in a way the alcohol can’t take credit for, and the air between you thins by another fraction, your chest brushing his with the next breath you take in.
“You think you’d be careful with my mouth, then?” You raise your eyebrows at him, while he only tilts his head to the side.
“When I wanted to be.”
“And when you didn’t?”
His gaze drops to your mouth again and holds there, the smallest curl pulling slow at the corner of his, his thumb still warm at the smudge he made.
“You’d find out.”
You let the silence stretch a beat longer than it needs to, fingers still curled loose at the collar of his jacket, the cigarette burning quietly down between your knuckles, his palm still cradling the side of your face.
“Hm. Then perhaps I can just...”
You don’t wait on him this time. You tilt your face slow out of his hand, the drag of his palm trailing along your jaw as you go, and bring your mouth to the line of his instead, lips parting against the faint catch of stubble as you press a soft kiss just below the corner of his jaw. His exhale stutters audibly through his nose, and you feel the small tightening of his fingers along your jaw before they slip down to settle warm at the side of your throat.
You drag your mouth lower, unhurried, brushing along the line of his jaw and dipping into the soft warm hollow under it, where his pulse is hammering a good deal faster than the rest of his face has bothered to let on.
“Looks like I’m finding a way to smudge it on my own,” you murmur against his skin, the words landing in soft drags of your mouth as you say them. “Hope you don’t mind.”
You feel his hand slip from your throat, his arm winding loose around your waist as it goes, palm trailing the line of your spine in one long, slow stroke before it dips lower still and finds the curve of your ass. There’s no hesitation in the way his hand settles there. He cups you with the same easy certainty he used to find your hip earlier, except this time he uses it to pull you flush against the front of his body in one quiet, deliberate haul. It takes you off guard, the gasp that comes out of you is small and entirely involuntary, breaking soft against the side of his neck where your mouth had been working a kiss in.
You let it land. You let yourself breathe through the sudden warm press of his body against the line of your hips, the heat of him through denim, before you tilt your face up to drag your lips along the shell of his ear.
“Keep that hand right there, Zayne,” your voice has gone smoke-low, almost lazy with it, the dirty curl in it sliding under the playfulness, “and you’re going to ruin a lot more than my lipstick tonight.”
You could care less that you’re surrounded by people, and Zayne doesn’t seem to mind either, so you resume your kisses down his neck. There’s nothing to see, anyway. If anyone glances your way they would only see two drunk college students making out against a wall, in a dirty underground corridor connecting multiple pubs.
He huffs a soft sound through his nose, something close to a laugh but not quite committing, the warm gust of it stirring the hair at your temple. His hand tightens a fraction at the curve of your ass before easing back into a more measured grip, like he’s reminding himself of the line he’s already crossed. His other hand has come up to your face at some point you can’t pinpoint, and you find his palm warm along the side of your throat with his thumb resting at the line of your jaw.
“Is that the alcohol talking?”
The words land close to your temple in that low tone you remember from across a seminar table, except they’re pressed up against the side of your face now and carrying a heat behind them you’ve never heard him use in a classroom. Your hand has its own ideas about the silence, sliding slow up from the lapel of his jacket along the line of his throat, fingertips dragging through the soft warmth at the side of his neck before settling there. You watch the way his throat works in response, the small swallow he doesn’t quite manage to hide.
“Are you blaming my advances on how much I had to drink?” you pull back from his neck, lashes fluttering.
“Shouldn’t I?” His thumb traces your jaw, gaze flicking over the color sitting high in your cheeks like he wants you to know he’s noticed. “You’re flushed all over and clinging to me.”
Your fingers curl at the back of his neck where the hair tapers short as you laugh softly at his words, giving a small tug at the strands there, just enough to angle his face down a fraction lower toward yours. The flicker of surprise that crosses his eyes is gone almost as fast as it shows.
“Don’t girls cling to you without being tipsy, Zayne?” Your gaze drifts lazy up at him through your lashes, slurring your words just enough. “I doubt it.”
You watch as his gaze drops slow over your face, considering what you’re implying. His hand at your throat slides a fraction higher, his palm now cupping the underside of your jaw, and that has your pulse picking up under his fingers. The silence stretches loaded enough that you shift your hips an inch against the front of him just for the warmth of him through your dress, and the corner of his mouth twitches, catching it.
It’s not that you really think girls just throw themselves at Zayne on a daily basis. He is smart, funny, and considerate, yet he doesn’t strike you as the type to just have women at his side. That would be Caleb, with all his positive energy and charisma, a true heartbreaker with women hanging around him all day in hopes of keeping his attention on them.
Zayne is the opposite. Or at least, the Zayne you knew before tonight. Quiet Zayne, who girls occasionally gather enough courage to go up to and ask to hang out under the pretense of studying together. But this Zayne is different. Or maybe it’s just another side of him you didn’t know existed, yet somehow managed to capture your attention and keep it.
You’re intrigued, that’s what this is. Intrigued of just how he’ll behave if you push him just a bit more.
He plucks the cigarette from where it’s burned down between your knuckles between two of his own fingers, gentle about the handoff, and lifts it back up between your faces.
“Finish your cigarette.”
You arch a brow at him, the smile pulling slow at one side of your mouth and a little defiant.
“Finish it for me.”
His mouth twitches deeper this time. He lifts the cigarette to your lips without ceremony, holding it for you the way he did before, and you let him, drawing slow with your eyes still up on his while the ember flares. When you pull back, he brings the filter to his own mouth and pulls the last of it down to almost nothing in one long, easy inhale, the line of his jaw working under the dim corridor light in a way that has heat curling low in your stomach for what feels like the tenth time tonight. He drops the spent end to the floor and grinds it out under the heel of his boot.
You don’t wait for him to take the lead this time. Your right hand that has been rsting on his chest simply moves, fitting along the line of his jaw with a grip that’s firmer than is strictly polite, thumb sliding under his chin to tilt his face down toward yours. The small flicker of surprise that flares behind his eyes is barely a breath long before it folds back into the half-lidded heat that’s been settling there for the last several minutes.
“Won’t you kiss me?” the words curl between your mouths like smoke, soft and tempting.
You don’t bother making it sound like anything other than what it is, just a soft, easy question, your mouth already drifting up toward his on instinct. As you move to close the distance, his hand moves to your face, thumb pressing firm against the soft underside of your chin to keep you a careful half-inch shy of getting there.
It catches you off guard. You’d half-expected him to dip into it the second you angled up. You feel the wall of him before you feel the resistance, but he doesn’t move into your hand and doesn’t move out of it either. He just stays like that, with his head tilted slightly, the little smile playing slow at the corner of his tempting mouth.
“Is that all it takes?”
Your brain runs a beat slower than it should, the smoke and the alcohol and the warm pressure of his palm cupping your ass adding up to something you can’t quite manage at speed, so you blink up at him in something soft and confused before the question lands properly.
“Hm?”
“Batting your eyelashes at a guy and sweet-talking him in order to kiss you breathless?”
The word breathless lands somewhere behind your sternum in a way that doesn’t help the current situation where you can only think about how much you want to close that inch between you. Your lashes do a small, slow drag down his face, entirely accidental this time, and you watch his gaze flick down to catch it. Your fingers shift along his jaw, thumb pressing a little harder under the line of his chin like you’re trying to hold him in place by sheer reminder of who started this.
“They usually fold at that.” you smirk up at him, looking as confident as you can be.
He mirrors your smirk, hazel eyes sparkling in what you guess is amusement and wonder.
“I’m sure they do.” His thumb leaves your chin to trace a slow line along the seam of your bottom lip, dragging the smudge of lipstick a fraction further across your mouth. “But you don’t have to do all that with me.”
You blink up at him properly this time, something almost wary threading through the heat, because that wasn’t quite the response you’d braced for. The hand still cupped firm around your ass tells you he isn’t pulling away. The hand at your face tells you the same. So what he’s actually saying takes a moment to settle.
“All what?”
He leans in, close enough that the warmth of his breath skims along your top lip, close enough that for one suspended second you think you’ve actually won, but his voice when it comes is barely more than a vibration in his chest.
“Beg.”
Your breath stops in your throat. The breathy tone he used, dancing across your mouth while his eyes stare you down, it all makes your thighs tense.
“As much as I’d love to get you begging, I tend to reserve that for activities a little more befitting than kissing.”
That one sentence does something to you that you weren’t prepared for, and your whole body responds before your brain has a chance to catch up. The heat climbs hot up the column of your throat, your thighs press together on instinct against the wall and the front of him, and the laugh that tries to come up at the back of your throat dies somewhere before it makes it to your mouth, because you suddenly have no idea what to say back to that.
You decide, somewhere fast and unspoken, that you don’t necessarily enjoy not knowing what to say.
So you do something with your hands instead.
The fingers curled at the back of his neck tighten down hard, the hand at his jaw drops to fist in the front of his jacket, and you push off the wall behind you with one decisive step that brings him with you, his weight following your pull in a way that suggests he had maybe half a second to brace and chose not to. You spin your bodies slowly until you are the one with facing the wall now, and his back finds the brick where yours had been pressed up against it a heartbeat ago.
He goes easily. He goes so easy you don’t entirely trust it, because the corner of his mouth lifts in something that isn’t a smile so much as an acknowledgement, like he’s noting the move down somewhere for later reference.
You take it anyway. You pin him there with the flat of your palm pressed against the front of his jacket, your other hand sliding from his jaw down to grip the side of his throat with a hold that’s firm and just slightly bossy, your thumb resting against the soft hollow under his ear. His hands settle at your waist, both of them now, his cool palms warm again through your dress. His grip is still rather loose, casual even, no attempt to flip you back, just standing pinned with his hands at your sides like he’s letting you have this and intends to enjoy every second of it.
You let go of his jacket to slide your hand down and curl your fingers along the dip of his waist, gripping there. You pull his hips snug against yours in one slow controlled drag, while you slide your hand back up from his throat to cup the side of his jaw, fingers fitting along the line of bone there with a hold that is firm and unmistakably for-keeping, tilting his face down toward yours another small fraction.
He lets the silence sit for a few beats. Lets it work on you. His thumb has started a slow, lazy drag along the dip of your waist again, like he is in no particular hurry about anything despite the position he’s currently in.
“Besides,” he tilts his head a fraction lower, mouth grazing along the line of your cheekbone now, the brush of his stubble pulling another small involuntary shiver through you, “you’re beautiful even when you’re sexually frustrated.”
Your breath catches audibly. You can’t help it. The grip you have along his jaw tightens, your fingertips pressing into the soft skin at the side of his face hard enough to leave a faint imprint, the other hand sliding up his waist to fist loose at the side of his jacket and drag him in another small fraction.
You hold his gaze. You don’t bat your lashes like before, you only lift your lashes very slowly from his mouth to his piercing eyes, licking your lips. Every sensual second of it pointed straight up at him with no question left about what it’s asking for.
“Kiss me, Zayne.”
He leans down to kiss your cheek instead, the brush of his mouth too soft to count, the smirk you can feel against your skin doing the rest of the work. You catch the faint warmth of his breath before he pulls back just enough to watch you suffer through it.
“You’re just teasing me at this point!” The huff comes out half laugh, half complaint, and your body betrays you anyway, leaning harder into the line of him, hips finding the firm shape of his thigh through his jeans. You grind once, slow, mostly to see what he does with it.
What he does is press his thigh up a fraction to meet you, casual as anything, like he hasn’t just made your dress ride higher up the back of your leg. His free hand settles on your waist, thumb pushing under the hem to find bare skin, and you forget, for a second, that you’re standing in a corridor at all.
“You asked me to kiss you,” he murmurs, low enough that you have to tilt your face up to catch it, and there’s a quiet laugh threaded through it that says he knows exactly what he’s doing.
You blink up at him, lashes heavy, mouth parted around the obvious answer he’s pretending he didn’t hear. The little crease at the corner of his eye gives him away. He’s enjoying this. He’s enjoying you, scrambling.
“Obviously I meant my lips.” You jab a finger lightly into his chest, the gesture losing all its bite when your palm just stays there, flat against the warmth of his shirt, feeling the slow steady thump of his heart under it.
He glances down at your hand. Then back up at you. The smirk pulls a fraction higher on one side, like he’s clocked the way your fingers have curled into the fabric without permission, and he is going to make you live with the evidence of it.
“Should have been more specific.” It comes out almost lazy, dropped right against the bridge of your nose, and you have approximately half a second to register the unfairness of it before he moves.
He smirks and leans down, rotating you so your back is against the wall again, brick cool through the thin fabric of your dress. His mouth brushes yours, a graze, barely a promise, and his hands come up to cup your face, tilting it the way he wants it with that easy confidence that should not be legal on a college campus.
You close your eyes. You wait for it. You actually part your lips for it. And then his mouth slides down past yours, jaw to throat, lips closing soft and sucking against the skin under your ear.
“Why don’t you—oh fuck…mmm.” Your voice flatlines mid-sentence, the rest of whatever clever thing you were going to say abandoned somewhere you don’t care about. The frustration that had been building under your skin tips, slides, becomes something heavier and lower and a lot less articulate. Your fingers, still flat against his chest, curl until you’re holding fistfuls of his shirt.
That has your arms wrapping around his neck, palm sliding up into the back of his hair where it’s soft and a little damp from the heat of the place. One of his hands leaves your jaw and finds your ass through your dress, gripping firm enough that you feel it in your teeth, pulling you flush against him. He moves slow over your throat, mouth open, sucking kisses in a careful line like he’s mapping for something specific. When he finds it, just under the angle of your jaw, you make a sound straight into his ear that you would not have made sober. He hums against your skin, satisfied, and stays there to suck more marks.
The corridor is loud. There’s music thumping muffled through the wall behind you, somebody shouting somebody else’s name from the bar end, the wet smack of a bottle going over and a chorus of laughter rolling after it. You hear all of it from somewhere far away. The actual noise in your head is the rush behind your ears and the soft, obscene sounds his mouth is making at your throat, and the way your body keeps trying to climb him by half-inches.
You’re thinking about his dorm. You don’t even know if his dorm is empty right now, or if another one of his roommates is there right now. You’re thinking about it anyway, in the vague, drunk way of somewhere with a door that closes, and you’re imagining how fast you could get there if he picked you up off this wall right now and asked.
“Babe?”
Simone’s voice cuts through it like somebody pulling a needle off a record. You feel Zayne smile against your throat before he lifts his head slowly, taking his sweet time about it. His thumb strokes once over the line of your jaw before his hand drops.
You turn your head against the brick. Simone is two steps out of the pub door, one hand braced on the frame to keep herself vertical, the other holding what looks like somebody else’s drink, because she’s not the type to drink that questionable-looking liquid. Her eyes have done the math on Zayne’s mouth and your throat and the gap that is approximately nonexistent between your bodies, and instead of saying anything about it she just goes wide-eyed and breaks into a slow, delighted giggle behind her hand.
“Oh my god,” she shouts-whispers, which is louder than her speaking voice, “okay, okay, I didn’t see anything! I’m looking for Tara. Have you seen Tara? Hi, Zayne.”
“Hi, Simone,” Zayne says, perfectly even, like his hand isn’t still resting on the back of your thigh.
You open your mouth to answer her and don’t get the chance, because that’s when Tara rounds the corner from the bar with Caleb half-draped across her shoulders and a small herd of people you only half-recognise from someone’s seminar trailing in their wake. Tara takes one look at you against the wall, one look at Zayne, one look at Simone giggling into her own wrist, and her face does something complicated and triumphant that you’re going to have to answer for tomorrow.
“Round two!” Caleb announces to the entire corridor, lifting an arm. “Music’s fucking unreal in there, we’re going back in. Li. Bring your girl.”
Your girl. You feel that one land somewhere under your ribs. Zayne’s thumb does a small, deliberate stroke against the back of your thigh where nobody can see it, and you don’t trust your face at all.
“We’re good,” Zayne says easily, already pushing off the wall enough to give you space without giving you up. “You guys go.”
“Booo. Boring.” Caleb grins at him with no real heat. “Suit yourself, man. Text me.”
Tara’s eyes flick from Zayne to you and back, and she doesn’t say a single thing, which from Tara is loud. She just hooks her arm tighter around Caleb’s waist and lets the herd pull them toward the door, Simone falling in beside her with one last giggly look thrown over her shoulder.
The door swallows them. The bass kicks back up muffled. You’re aware, suddenly and very clearly, that you are still flushed from your collarbones up, that your dress is twisted slightly at the hip, that you can feel the wet print of his mouth cooling under your jaw, and that your head has started doing the slow soft pitch that means another drink would absolutely be a bad idea.
You should go in with them. The smarter version of you, the one who isn’t several drinks deep with her thighs still pressed together against a brick wall, knows that. The version of you currently operating is mostly running on the question of whether Zayne is going to put his hand back on your face or not.
He doesn’t. He steps in close again, but only to lean down to your ear, one hand braced on the wall above your shoulder, and his mouth ghosts over the same spot under your jaw that he claimed two minutes ago.
“If I kiss you properly right now,” his voice has gone quiet enough to be just for you, “you’re not making it home alone. So.” he pauses slightly, the barest scrape of his teeth against your skin. “Be specific next time, hm?”
He kisses your cheek. The same chaste, smirking press as before, in exactly the same place, and you feel it like a verdict.
When he pulls back his eyes are doing that mild thing again, the one that doesn’t commit to anything, except now you know better. He pushes off the wall, fishes his phone out of his back pocket, fires off something quick that you assume is the promised text to Caleb, and tilts his head toward the stairs at the corridor’s end.
You follow him with your throat still buzzing and your head full of all the versions of tonight that just got taken off the table, and you are absolutely going to think about the one where you’d been more specific the entire way home.
(credits for the Art go to Raoni - @/raonnni on X)
.ᐟ✧ translations or reposts of my work on tumblr, ao3, or other sites ARE NOT permitted. please do not ask. do not reuse my blogpost headers, dividers, or layouts. these are original designs of my own. thank you!
Considering it's Pride month, what's your favorite LI X LI pairing(s)?
HAPPY PRIDE MONTH CUTIES!! 🏳️🌈🌸💗
that's suuch a good question omg i'm just such a sucker for all pairings tbh!! i absolutely ADORE applesnow and snowcrow—they're my kryptonite😩
alsooo two of my good friends are heavyyyy on the starfish agenda and they've slowly corrupted me over there & i don't mind it one bit i'm sooo well fed!! especially since one of them is a great artist & she feeds the community so well with her art~
i am also quite on board with snowfish (as they're also my mains) i'm just down for everything tbh, i consume every piece of Li x Li content i can get my hands on~
i’m not sure if you were posting any tag lists on your other account, but tumblr seems to be deleting blogs that post tag lists because they think it’s spam. maybe that’s what happened?
oh really? yeah... i used my taglist for the recent two fics...
that is so fucking bullshit man... what the fuck. i just hope they'll respond and give me the acc back
we can't find your new account, did you deactivatee???? How will I enjoy your bar and I wanted to talk about ice skater Rafayel to youuuuu 😭😭😭 you replied & I was about to yap moreeee
— raf’s 🍰
THEY NUKED MY ACCOUNT 😭😭
i don't even know what happened??? i am in another country rn on vacation and just woke up to people dming me about my acc being gone😭
didn't receive anything about it! no warning, no email, NOTHING. i am soooo fucking pissed off rn....
i emailed tumblr support twice and hopefully they'll respond. if not... sigh, i'll either come back to this account (which is still labeled as mature bcs tumblr support didn't help me after 5 appeals) or i will make another account...
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Synopsis: You find yourself unable to deny Rafayel's invitation to accompany him as his plus-one at a social gala, and when the last night in Jakarta concludes, this thing between you becomes more complicated than it ever was.
Content warnings: Angst, hurt/comfort, kind of unresolved feelings, forced proximity, emotional repression, trauma triggers, reconciliation, denial of feelings, mutual pining, sexual tension, making out, realization of feelings, explicit sexual content, consensual sex, kind of guilty sex at first, slight escapism (in sex), fingering, praise and slight dirty talk, creampie, insecurity, emotional sex.
Word count: 8.5k
the tags will change with each chapter. next chapter will change the rating to E.
The roar of the crowd is a wall of sound that vibrates through the floorboards of the backstage area. You stand just inside the shadows of the wing, as promised, a fixed point in the chaotic swirl of stagehands and camera operators.
Out on the ice, under the blazing lights, he is so different to the man pacing the dressing room an hour ago. All that restlessness and anxiety has been forged into something breathtaking. He moves with a liquid, predatory grace, each jump a defiant eruption of power, each spin a vortex of controlled emotion. The oceanic music swells, and he is its master, a storm given human form.
Watching him now, you are suddenly, violently thrown back to the stale cold of the White Dove Arena months ago. The night you sat anonymously in the stands, nursing an old wound, watching a legend. You had seen the artistry then, yes, but through a filter of bitterness. You had seen the prodigy who left you behind.
Now, you see through a different lens.
You see the hollowness he confessed to, the deep well of loneliness that fuels such poignant expression. You see the mask of the untouchable artist, and you know the cracks in it intimately—the frustration in Kyoto, the fear in the stands, the vulnerable boy who needed a hand to hold. You see the cost of every seemingly effortless flight, a cost you now understand in your very bones.
He launches into his final combination, a sequence so difficult it steals the breath from the audience. He lands the last jump, not with a sigh of blades but with a sharp definitive screech that echoes your own heartbeat. He isn’t just performing for the thousand of people. He is speaking in a language of strain and beauty only the two of you, in all this screaming crowd, can fully decipher.
As he strikes his final pose, chest heaving, arms outstretched to the darkened ceiling, his head turns. Not to the judges or to the adoring crowd. His gaze, sharp and searching, cuts through the glare of the spotlights and finds you in the shadows.
Your heart contracts, a painful sweet squeeze. It is just a second. A fleeting connection in the thunderous applause. But in that second, the ice, the crowd, the years of silence, all of it falls away. There is only the recognition, raw and electric, passing between you.
Then the spell breaks. He bows, the superstar’s polite smile back in place, and is swallowed by a wave of flower-bearing attendants and his team. You turn away, your own duties calling. The post-show logistics are a blur of coordinating media, securing equipment, confirming the next day’s travel. You are deep in conversation with the venue’s head of security when you see him across the hall.
He is still in his performance clothes, the black fabric damp with sweat, a towel draped around his neck. His hair is tousled, his cheeks flushed from exertion. Thomas and Elara are at his elbows, speaking rapidly about the sponsor gala starting in forty minutes.
His eyes, however, are locked on you. He looks... jumpy. Agitated in a way that has nothing to do with the post-adrenaline crash of the show and everything to do with you standing ten feet away, talking to someone else.
He extricates himself from his team with a murmured word and crosses the space in a few strides.
“You’re coming.” The statement lands between you like a gauntlet.
You finish your sentence with the security head and turn to him fully. “To the gala? Of course. I’m the liaison. I’ll be there to ensure everything runs smoothly—”
“No.” His voice goes low and intense. “Not as my staff. As my plus-one.”
You blink, the professional calm you have clung to fracturing under his gaze.
“Rafayel, that’s... I can’t. And I don’t have anything to wear to something like that, anyway. My suit is for coordinating, not for...” You gesture vaguely at the idea of champagne and caviar.
“That’s been taken care of.”
Before you can process the meaning of his words, his hand is at the small of your back, a firm guiding pressure steering you away from the curious glances of the staff and back toward his private dressing room.
“What are you doing?!” You hiss it, but you don’t dig your heels in. His touch on your smaller back runs a shiver up your spine, and you’re too aware of it.
He pushes the door open, ushers you inside the now-familiar space, and closes it, leaning against it. The sudden privacy is overwhelming. The room still holds the scent of his cologne and whatever tension held between you before the show.
“I had a feeling...” His gaze is unwavering, locked on yours. “…That if I left it to chance, you’d find a reason to be anywhere but at my side tonight. So I removed the reasons.”
He nods toward a garment bag hanging from a hook on the far wall, pristine and out of place among the skate equipment and scattered towels.
Your mouth goes dry. He has... planned this. Bought a dress for you. The implications are a tidal wave. This isn’t a last-minute impulse. It is a declaration, and an intentional one at that, which makes your heart pick up the pace in an unfamiliar way.
“You can’t just—” The protest stalls in your throat.
“I can.” His voice softens just a fraction. The intensity in his eyes shifts into something more pleading, more vulnerable. “For once, please... don’t coordinate. Don’t liaise. Just—be there with me.”
He pushes off from the door and walks to the garment bag, unzipping it with a slow deliberate pull.
The dress inside is not what you expected. It isn’t the dramatic sequined affair a star might choose for a date. It is a deep twilight blue, simple in its elegant lines, the fabric falling in a soft liquid shimmer. It is understated. Beautiful. It looks like something you would actually choose.
He turns to you with the dress in his hands, a silent question in his eyes that is more terrifying than any demand. The space between you hums with the weight of his searching gaze from the ice, of every unspoken thing that has piled up since that night at the White Dove. In the quietness of the room, with the future hanging on your answer, all your objections die in your throat. The only thing left is the terrifying, thrilling truth.
He wants you there, not as part of his world but as a part of him. And a part of you, the part that had sighed on the ice and cried in his arms, wants that too.
You stare at the dress in his hands, the twilight blue fabric seeming to shimmer even in the dull light of the dressing room. The offer feels more intimate than the kiss, more vulnerable than the embrace. It is a bridge, and he is waiting on the other side, his expression unreadable but his eyes holding a question that makes your breath catch.
Flustered, you avert your gaze, focusing on a scuff mark on the floor before forcing yourself to look back at him. Wordlessly, you step forward and take the hanger from his hands, your fingers brushing his. The touch is a spark.
“Okay.” The agreement comes barely audible.
His intense gaze doesn’t waver. You see it travel over your face, lingering on your lips before dropping to the column of your throat, where you know your pulse is visibly hammering. You swallow, a nervous habit he had always teased you for, and his eyes track the movement with a focus that makes your skin feel too tight.
Before you can muster another word—a protest, a question, anything—he steps back. He gives a curt, almost-businesslike nod, turns, and is out the door, leaving you alone with the rustle of the garment bag and the roaring of your own heart in your ears.
You sag against the vanity, releasing a shuddering sigh of relief so potent it leaves you lightheaded. The silence is a reprieve, but it is quickly filled by a swarm of nerves and confusion.
Why this? Why now?
The gala is work. Your presence is mandated. To ask you as his plus-one, it is public. It is personal. It is a line crossed in front of everyone, and you have a terrifying thrilling guess as to why.
The dress fits as if it had been made for you. The twilight blue drapes perfectly, elegant and understated, making you feel like a version of yourself you had forgotten. You avoid your own eyes in the mirror.
The black car is idling at the private exit. You slip into the back, and there he is.
He has changed into a suit that is a shade darker than midnight blue, the cut impeccable. He looks like a prince from a shadowy fairy tale. The partition behind the driver is already up, sealing you into a world of soft leather and tense anticipation.
“You look...” His voice is hushed, but doesn’t finish. He seems to decide actions are better.
He reaches across the space between the seats as the car pulls away, his movements tentative, and takes your hand in his. His fingers lace with yours when you don’t pull away, warm and sure. The simple contact sends a jolt through you, making you more flustered than any grand gesture could.
The confusion and nervousness spill out, because you can’t help but address them.
“Why did you ask me?” The words blurt too loud in the quiet cabin. “As a plus-one, I mean. You know I had to be there anyway.”
The hurt that flickers across his face is swift but deep. He looks down at your joined hands, his thumb stroking your knuckles.
“Do you?” His gaze lifts back to yours, vulnerable and raw. “Would you rather be there as staff? In the background, making sure the canapés are timed? Or… would you rather not be by my side at all?”
You stare at him, your heartbeat a frantic drum against your ribs. Your palm grows damp in his, but he doesn’t let go. You have no answer. The truth is a tangled mess in your chest.
His eyes drop to your mouth again, and this time you notice the intent instantly. A hot blush creeps up your neck. You tear your gaze away, turning to look blindly out the tinted window.
“It’s... it’s hot in here.” You mumble it, fumbling for the window button.
A soft low chuckle escapes him. He doesn’t call you out on the obvious lie. Instead, he leans forward slightly and speaks to the driver. “A little air, please.”
The partition slides down an inch before sliding shut again, granting you privacy once more.
He doesn’t retreat back to his side. He stays close, the heat of his body a new presence in your personal space. Then, with a gentleness that belies the intensity in his eyes, he reaches up. Two fingers press softly under your chin, tilting your face back toward him.
You have no choice but to meet his gaze.
“You are…” His voice is a velvet rumble, his eyes tracing your features as if memorizing them. “…So devastatingly beautiful it’s unfair. Especially when you’re flustered. It’s my favorite sight.”
The compliment, so specific and tenderly teasing, steals the air from your lungs. Your lips part on a silent gasp.
He doesn’t kiss them. He leans in, but instead of his lips on yours, you feel the soft brush of his lips against the blush heating your cheekbone. A featherlight touch. Then, his mouth grazes the sensitive line of your jaw, a whisper of contact that makes you shiver.
He draws back just enough to look at you again, his gaze heavy-lidded and focused entirely on your mouth. You can feel the warmth of his breath mingling with yours.
“I’ve wanted you here all along.” The whisper is meant for the infinitesimal space between you. “Not near me. Here.”
And then his lips are on yours. This kiss isn’t desperate or angry or a product of shattered emotions. It is deliberate. Slow. A deep searching pressure that holds the echo of his compliment and the weight of his confession. He kisses you as if there’s no rush and no intention to rush this, as if the gala, the past, the future, mean nothing compared to this single point of connection.
When he finally pulls back, it is only by a fraction, his lips hovering over yours, still sharing the same air.
You are frozen, suspended in the warmth and the shock of it, your mind, your whole world reduced to the feel of his mouth and the pounding of your own heart.
“Why did you...” You whisper it against his lips, the words forming in the haze before your thoughts can catch up. “...kiss me?”
You are achingly aware of the moving car, the partition, the fact you can’t just run this time. He couldn’t have chased you in that hotel corridor, but here, you are trapped together in the best and worst way.
He chuckles softly, the sound a warm vibration you feel through his chest where your hand still rests. His fingers brush a strand of hair back from your temple, tucking it gently behind your ear. The touch is so tender, so domestic, it sends a tingling shiver straight down your spine.
“D’you not want me to?” His voice is a low thrum in the intimate space.
You can’t answer. The denial won’t form. He seems to know it, his thumb stroking the damp curve of your lower lip where his kiss had just been, a silent confirmation of his victory.
Your fingers curl slightly against the fine fabric of his suit jacket. You are leaning into him before you consciously decide to move, drawn by a gravity that has been pulling at you for months. Your heart is a wild roaring thing in your ears, your gaze locked on his mouth, that familiar sharp curve now softened and parted.
“I don’t know.” The breath comes helpless and honest.
It is all the permission he needs, or maybe it is your permission to yourself. You close the last inch between you, your lips meeting his again. This time, you initiate it. A slow tentative press that he immediately deepens, his hand settling firmly on your waist, anchoring you as the car sways gently. He stabilizes you, but it feels like he is the only solid thing in a spinning world.
The kiss is not hungry, but it is deep. Slow, achingly so, as if you had all the time in the world hidden in this rolling sanctuary. It is a kiss of exploration, of tasting the truth you had both been avoiding. It draws the air from your lungs and colors your cheeks a matching feverish pink.
It is the wrong place, the wrong time, on the way to a public event, in the back of a car, but every rational thought dissolves under the languid passionate sweep of his mouth over yours.
You melt. There is no other word for it. The tension that had held your spine rigid, that guarded your heart, simply liquefies under the patient and consuming heat of him. The boy who left, the girl who was left, they blur into ghosts. The abandonment, the fear, the years of misunderstanding, they lose their sharp edges, softened in the warm, shared darkness behind your closed eyelids.
A quiet, desperate gasp escapes you into his mouth, a sound of pure sensation. He swallows it, his own breath hitching in response, telling you he is just as unmoored, just as affected.
He pulls back just enough to speak, his lips brushing yours with each whispered word.
“Still hot?” His voice is breathy and laden with a tease that is utterly devastating.
You are caught off guard, a new shiver wracking you as his hand, which had been firm on your waist, now travels lightly slowly up the bare line of your spine.
The touch is incendiary.
“Rafayel...” The weak protest ends in a sigh as he dips his head, bypassing your lips to press a soft, open-mouthed kiss to the frantic pulse at the base of your throat.
Suddenly, you are drowning in him, in the oceanic note of his perfume and sweat scent of his skin, in the overwhelming warmth of his body cradling yours, in the exquisite torture of his lips charting a path along your collarbone. Your head falls back of its own accord, giving him better access, a silent surrender you fight even as you make it.
It feels too good. His lips on your skin, the slight scrape of his teeth, the soothing pass of his tongue. It is a sweetness you had forgotten could exist, a pleasure of the body so intense it threatens to short-circuit every defense you have left against him. You try to hold onto a shred of will, a memory of why this is dangerous, but it is like trying to grasp smoke.
In the back of the moving car, with the city lights streaking past the tinted windows, the only real things are his mouth, his hands, and the terrifying glorious feeling of finally, finally letting go.
The world outside the car has ceased to exist. You are lost in a silent, breathless universe of your own making, where the only truths are the heat of his skin through his suit and the damp tender ache of your lips meetinf again and again.
The two sharp raps on the partition are a distant alien sound. It takes a long moment for the meaning to penetrate the haze. You break apart just enough to stare at each other, your faces mere inches apart. His eyes, usually so sharp and controlled, are now dark, unfocused pools of pure want. You know yours mirror them perfectly. Your lips feel swollen, sensitive, and the frantic rhythm of your heart seems to shake your entire body.
He blinks slowly, as if swimming up from deep water. A soft almost-disbelieving breath escapes him. Wordlessly, his hands come up, his thumbs gently wiping at the corners of your mouth where his kisses had likely smudged your lipstick. His touch is agonizingly tender, a stark contrast to the passion of moments before. He smooths the silk of your dress over your hips, his fingers lingering for a heartbeat, then carefully straightens the strap that had slipped down your shoulder.
You sit motionless, letting him tend to you, your own hands trembling too much to be of use. You can’t ignore the small, utterly captivated smile that plays on his kiss-reddened lips. It isn’t smug. It is... awed.
It flusters you beyond measure, sending a fresh wave of heat through you, and you have to look away, focusing on the pattern of the leather seat.
With monumental effort, you compose yourself. You draw a shaky breath, squaring your shoulders, even as your legs feel like water and a deep restless warmth pools low in your stomach. You are hot, bothered, and thoroughly kissed, and you have to walk into a room full of cameras and celebrities, acting like none of this has happened.
The car door opens. The cold night air hits your heated skin like a slap. Then his hand is there, presenting itself for you to take. You place your hand in his, and when you step out, you somehow match his posture, chin up, expression smoothing into one of poised neutrality.
Together, you are a vision. The legendary skater and his stunning, enigmatic companion. The very picture of glamorous, professional calm.
No one could have guessed that minutes before, you had been melting against each other in the darkness of his car.
Throughout the glittering gala, Rafayel is nothing short of possessive in his presence. He rarely leaves your side. His touches are minimal but deliberate, a guiding hand on the small of your back to steer you through the crowd, his fingers briefly brushing yours as he hands you a champagne flute, his shoulder solid against yours as you stand listening to a patron drone on about art investments. Each point of contact is a live wire, a secret reminder of what had transpired in the car, and it sets your heartbeat kicking wildly in your chest.
You are relieved, though. His nearness is a grounding force in the swirling chaos of your mind. Your head is a mess of conflicting impulses, the old wound, the new longing, the shocking intimacy of his mouth on your throat, and the terrifying yet wonderful fact that he seems as affected as you are.
You are painfully aware of his every movement. And apparently, so is he. You catch him watching you, that same little sheepish smirk tugging at his lips when you do something unconsciously intimate, like leaning closer to hear him over the music, or nodding intently as he explains a technical skating point to a fascinated guest. He sees your awareness, and it delights him. It is a silent, shared joke in a room full of strangers, a game of glances and barely-there smiles that makes your heart stutter.
The gala is a blur of crystal chandeliers and chatter, but the only conversation that matters is the one you are not having. The one about what this is, and what comes next. It hangs between you, palpable as the tension in the air before a storm. But for now, amidst the clinking glasses and the blinding flash of cameras, there is only this. The warmth of him beside you, the memory of his slow kisses, and the silent screaming agreement that for tonight, talking can wait.
Feeling, however, is unavoidable.
The gala ends in a final crescendo of applause and farewells. The return to the hotel is a silent journey, but the air in the car is no longer charged with tentative exploration. It is thick with heavy awareness, like the quiet after a summer storm. You stare out the window, seeing nothing, every nerve ending still humming from the memory of his hands, his mouth, the whispered heat between you.
Walking through the hushed hotel corridors feels surreal. Your heels click on marble, the sound too loud in the silence stretching between you. At your door, you both stop. The moment of parting hovers, immense and awkward.
“Well.” Your voice comes faint. “Goodnight, Rafayel.”
He doesn’t move from his spot, make sno attempt to leave. He looks at you, his expression in the dim hallway light unreadable, but his eyes hold yours with an intensity that allows no escape.
“It’s our last night in Jakarta.” His voice is even, as if you might have forgotten. “The tour... concludes tomorrow.”
The finality of it wraps around your throat. Tomorrow, the contract ends. Tomorrow, the chaos that had forced you together will dissolve. Tomorrow, he will fly to who-knows-where for his next spectacle, and you will return to your life before him.
“I know.” The whisper barely escapes your lips.
He takes a small step closer, not touching you yet, but the space between you becomes intimate, charged with all the unsaid things the gala had temporarily muffled.
“We still need to talk.”
A spike of panic, sharp and familiar, shoots through you. Talking means definitions. Talking means revisiting the wound with new information. Talking can ruin the fragile, beautiful haze you are still floating in.
“It’s late.” You deflect, fumbling for your key card.
His hand closes over yours on the card, stilling your movement. Not forceful, but firm. Warm. “Please.”
That single word, so softly spoken, undoes you more than any demand. You look up at him, and in his face, you see the same exhaustion, the same wary hope, the same fear of the coming silence that echoes in your own chest. He is just Rafayel right now, standing at your door, asking you not to shut him out.
With a sigh that comes from the very depths of your weariness, you turn and open the door. You don’t invite him in. You simply walk inside, leaving it open behind you.
He follows, closing the door with a soft click. You stand in the middle of the room, your back to him, hugging yourself.
“What happened in the car...” You begin, then falter.
The silence after the unfinished words stretches, thin and brittle. You can’t bear to look at him, to see the confirmation of your own feelings in his eyes.
Instead, you walk to the floor-to-ceiling window, the glittering lights of Jakarta at night spreading out before you like a map of a foreign land. Your fingers find the simple necklace at your throat, the cool metal a focal point as you fidget with the charm.
You hear him move, following your path, a quiet shadow drawn to your space. He stops behind you, close enough that the heat of his body is a palpable presence against your back, but not yet touching.
“A lot.” You finally murmur it, your breath fogging the glass. “We have a lot to talk about.”
You hear a soft hum of acknowledgement rumble in his chest, a vibration you feel in the air between you.
“Do you want to?” His voice is low and impossibly close to your ear. “Talk about everything? Right now?”
As he speaks, you feel the lightest brush of his fingers against the nape of your neck, tracing the line of the necklace’s chain. Then, with a deftness that steals your breath, his fingertips find the clasp. There is a tiny definitive click. The necklace loosens, and he gathers it away, the metal whispering against your skin as he draws it free.
A full-body shiver races down your spine. You swallow, the sound loud in the quiet room, but you don’t stop him.
“I’m just... tired.” The excuse comes feeble even to your own ears.
His response is a murmur against the shell of your ear, his lips so close they brush the sensitive skin with each syllable.
“Tired of talking? Or tired of me?” A pause filled with the pounding of your heart. “Or just tired of trying to push down everything you feel when I’m near you?”
You sigh, a shaky release of air, and let your eyes fall closed. His fingers, now free of the necklace, brush your hair aside, tucking it gently over one shoulder, exposing the length of your neck. At the same time, his other hand lifts, his touch tentative at first, then settling with certainty around your waist, his palm spreading possessively over your belly.
You can’t help it. A fraction of your weight leans back into him, seeking the solid warmth of his chest. A soft, approving hum vibrates through him, and he rewards the slight surrender by pressing his lips to the newly bared skin just below your ear, a kiss so soft it is almost a sigh.
“I know…” He breathes it against your damp skin, his voice thick with an emotion you can’t name. “…You may never forgive me for before. You may never trust me again. You have every right.” His hand flexes gently on your stomach, pulling you infinitesimally closer. “But I’m sorry for this, too. For... for needing to be this close to you right now. So if you truly want to talk... tell me now. Before I...”
He doesn’t finish, but you already know where he’s going with this.
His meaning unfolds in the heat of his body, in the slight yet insistent pressure of his hips against the curve of your back. You feel the undeniable ridge of his arousal pressing against your ass through the layers of fabric. A weak, trembling gasp escapes you as your legs seem to lose their strength. Your free hand comes up, bracing against the cool glass of the window for support as you lean forward slightly, a silent invitation.
He follows the movement without hesitation, his body curving over yours, caging you gently between the cold window and the heat of him. His chest presses against your back, his hips snug against your ass, the proof of his desire a shocking electric brand where it settles at your back.
Talk? The word dissolves in the feverish haze of your mind. Words are the weapons of the past, the tools that had built walls and carved wounds. What throbs between you now is a raw, wordless need. It isn’t about forgiveness or the future. It is about the desperate truth that after years of cold silence, you are both starving for this connection, for this proof of life in each other’s arms.
Arousal, hot and slick, pools low in your belly, a treacherous aching pulse that echoes between your thighs. You feel the damp evidence of it staining your underwear, a secret he can’t see but you are certain he can sense in the way you tremble against him.
He isn’t far behind. A rough groan escapes him as he nuzzles into your neck, his lips and the barest scrape of teeth mapping a path along your shoulder.
“This dress,” He whispers it between kisses, each word a hot puff of air that makes you shiver. “is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen you in. And all I wanna do is get it off you.”
His hand, which had been splayed on your belly, begins a slow, maddening ascent. It slides over the silken fabric, up the plane of your ribs, until his palm cups the full weight of your breast through the dress. He squeezes gently at first, then with a firmer kneading pressure that draws a low involuntary moan from your throat.
The sound seems to ignite him. His hips jerk against you in a sharp, reflexive thrust, grinding his erection into the softness of your backside. A ragged curse breathes against your skin.
Driven by your response, he uses his lips and teeth to gently tug the thin strap of your dress down your shoulder. The fabric gives way, slipping down your arm. His roaming hand follows, sliding down from your breast to gather the material at your waist. With agonizing slowness, he drags both the dress and the fine layer beneath it down, baring your torso.
The cold air of the room kisses your exposed skin, pebbling your flesh and tightening your nipple into a stiff peak. A sharp gasp is torn from you at the sudden sensation, the combination of the chill in the roon, the vulnerability of the moment, and the intense heat of his gaze on your naked back.
“So damn perfect.” He rasps it, his voice wrecked. His hand returns, not to the fabric but to your bare skin. His palm is searing as it covers your breast again, this time skin to skin. His thumb swipes over your taut nipple a few times before he pinches it lightly, rolling the sensitive bud between his fingers.
Pleasure, bright and shocking, arcs through you, making you arch your back and press your ass more firmly against his confined cock. The world narrows to the cold glass under your palm, the hot and demanding pressure of his arousal behind you, the exquisite friction of his touch on your breast. Words are a forgotten language. There is only this hunger, this frantic communion of bodies seeking to bridge, at least for tonight, the vast and wounded distance between you.
You are trapped between the cold unyielding glass and the scorching heat of his body, every nerve alight. His fingers toy with your nipple, a casual pressure that has your whole body trembling. You bite down on your lip to stifle a moan, your forehead resting against the windowpane, your vision blurring the city lights into streaks of gold and white.
Behind you, he buckles his hips in slow, relentless thrusts against the curve of your ass, the hard ridge of his erection a blunt promising pressure, clearly needing some sort of release. Despite yourself, your spine arches, pressing back into him, seeking more of this new feeling.
“We...” You gasp, the words fragmented, breathless. “We really... shouldn’t...”
His mouth is at your ear, his lips trailing hot wet kisses down the sensitive cord of your neck. He sucks your earlobe between his teeth, a gentle tug that sends a violent shiver through you and has you slick your underwear even more.
“Why not?” His voice goes a dark rasp that vibrates against your skin. “We’re not kids anymore. Not chasing gold medals or each other’s shadows on the ice.” He presses a firmer claiming kiss to the juncture of your neck and shoulder. “I have different dreams about you now. Vivid ones. Involving this window... This dress on the floor... You, naked and trembling against me, needing more of my touch, until I have you cum and pleased and cling to me like I cling to you.”
His words are a match to the gasoline already pooling in your veins. The last shreds of resistance, born of old hurt and fear, disintegrate. The need is too profound, too physical. It is a hunger that has festered for a decade, and it demands to be fed.
A low shuddering breath leaves you. “Fuck it.” The whisper comes out and the surrender is complete. “Just for tonight, fuck it.”
The words fuck it are a key turning in a lock you had kept sealed for a decade. They unleash something primal inside you, a matching puzzle piece to the lust in his own veins.
You grab his face, your fingers pressing into the sharp angles of his jaw, and pull his mouth back to yours, kissing him with a ferocity that is all raw need and zero finesse. It is a claiming, a desperate rasp against his lips, because he got you to a point where you need him, even though it hurts to admit. Your body is screaming to be touched and consumed by his warmth, his desire.
“Stop talking.” You breathe it into him, the command muffled by the crush of his mouth.
He groans, a dark approving sound that vibrates from his chest into yours as he grabs your jaw, deepening the kiss. You feel his smirk against your lips, a flash of arrogant triumph that only makes the heat inside you burn brighter. His hand, which had been teasing the inside of your thigh, finally moves.
His fingers brush the soaked fabric of your panties, a soft and torturous stroke upward that makes your hips jerk. You are so wet it is embarrassing, the slickness undeniable even through the fabric, your hole clenching as it gushes more slick at the feeling of his fingers probbing.
“F-Fuck.” The curse leaving his lips has your hips jerking over his fingers. His eyes, when you manage to open yours, are nearly black, his pupils swallowing the blue and pink. His cheeks are flushed as deeply as yours feel. With a sharp tug, he pulls the delicate lace aside, baring you completely to the cool air and his scorching gaze.
The first direct touch of his fingertips against your swollen dripping folds draws a shattered cry from your throat. His touch is not tentative at all, surprising you in its intent. It is deliberate, a slow circling pressure on your throbbing clit that makes your knees buckle. He holds you up easily, his other arm a steel band around your waist, caging you between his body and the window. You are completely at his mercy, and the realization only makes you wetter.
“So fucking responsive...” The murmur comes as he watches your face contort in a frown of pleasure, his fingers sliding through your slickness and gathering it, spreading it from your hole to your clit, and then back down again. He traces your entrance, teasing slowly as he circles it, driving you mad when he makes no attempt to push inside. “All these years apart... and you feel like this for me. Dripping down your thighs... Tell me you want this.”
You can’t form a sentence. You can only cling to him, your nails digging into the shoulders of his shirt, your forehead pressed against his as you pant harshly. Your body is a lit fuse, sparking under his skilled touch. Every broken moan that escapes you seems to please him immensely. You feel the curve of his smile against your temple when he takes note of your hips jerking in his grasp, clearly getting desperate to have his feeling inside, especially when your face winces when he denies you of it.
“Want me to stop?” The rasp is hot in your ear, a sensual timbre that has you clenching around nothing. His finger presses more insistently against your throbbing nub, circling with a rhythm that has your hips chasing his hand frantically.
“No...” The word comes torn from you.
“Want me to leave? Go back to my room?” His voice is a low, tempting devil at your ear, even as his finger dips lower, sliding through your folds to press lightly at your entrance.
“No... don’t leave! Please don’t leave...” You feel as if you’ll explode and fade to dust if he leaves you like this, needy and desperate. You might have to fuck yourself on your fingers if he does, if only to soothe the ache he lit so easily. But you know he won’t.
The plea comes raw, stripped of all pride. It is the girl from the hospital speaking, the woman from the empty stands, begging the one person who had always been her center of gravity not to vanish again.
He grabs your face and molds his lips over yours, tongue probbing inside your mouth to shut you up, kissing you as if drinking your surrender.
“Never.” The growl comes soft against your lips, the word a vow that feels as fragile and monumental as the moment itself.
His fingers, slick with your arousal, return to your clit, rubbing faster, tighter circles over it. The coil in your belly winds to a breaking point, thrashing against his hold as your thighs clamp together. You are babbling nonsensical pleas and curses against his mouth, eyes rolling back when you tip closer to the edge. He watches you cum, his eyes dark and awed as he drinks in your expression, flushed all over and mouth hung open, barely able to hold yourself up.
“That’s it, roll your eyes for me.” His voice goes rough, barely registering in your haze. “Yeah, let go. Cum for me, beautiful. Show me you want me... That I make you feel good…”
The command combined with the unyielding pressure of his touch and the feel of him so hard against your hip, it is too much. Your orgasm rips through you in a silent scream of pleasure, your body seizing in his strong arms as your walls flutter wildly around nothing. You shatter against his hand, dripping down your spasming thighs as he continues to rub circles over your clit. Waves of intense pulsing pleasure radiate out from your core, leaving you limp and trembling in his arms.
He holds you through it, his arms strong, his lips pressed to your sweaty temple and breathing hard. When the last tremor subsides, you are both ragged, breathing in harsh syncopated gasps. You stare at each other, dazed and wrecked, just as you had in the car hours prior. The world outside the window—the city, the tour, the past or future—none of it exists. There is only the charged space between your bodies and the shocking intimacy of what has just happened.
Maybe you’ll regret this tomorrow, maybe you won’t. Your mind is too fuzy right now, a haze falling over you, one that you can’t escape. You’re half-naked and flushed and soaked in his arms, and he isn’t faring much better, clearly just as dazed as you. Clearly needing you as you need him right now, even if it’s just physical.
His forehead drops to yours.
“Your dress,” His voice goes hoarse. “It’s in my way.”
Still breathless, you manage a shaky challenge. “And what way is that?”
He pulls back just enough to look into your eyes, his gaze deadly serious. “My way to show you how I feel.”
A fresh, dangerous thrill shoots through you. “We’re gonna... f-fuck, we’re going to regret this tomorrow.”
His expression hardens, a flicker of the old pain surfacing over his features.
“I have lots of regrets.” His thumb strokes your cheekbone with a tenderness that belies his words. “But this’ll never be one of them.”
“You... Rafayel, you can’t say things like that to me. Not tonight...” You are trying to rebuild a wall, knowing it is futile.
“Why not?”
"Because then I’ll let you take off my dress... Give you a chance, one that I don’t know if I can afford to give..."
He shifts, his hardening length pressing more insistently against your hip, making your breath catch and your eyes widen slightly. Traitorous to your logic, your body craves him, craves more of what just transpired.
“You gave me a chance in the car. You let me kiss you breathless... Made you pull me closer...” His eyes search yours, serious and hypnotizing. “Do you regret doing it?”
You hold his gaze, the truth finally spilling out of you, completely undeniable. “...No. I don’t regret it.”
A slow, beautiful smile touches his lips. It makes your throat tighten.
“Then I’ll make sure you don’t regret anything that happens between us from now on.” His hand slides from your cheek to your throat, his thumb tipping your chin up. “You know I want you badly... Just say the words.”
The last thread of resistance snaps. You want it too. The fear, the hurt, the confusion, all still there, but drowned out by a roar of pure, desperate want. For him. For this. For the connection you both had been starving for.
“Take it off.” The whisper barely escapes your kiss-bruised lips. “My dress. I’m hot...”
A triumphant laugh escapes him, low in the charged air between you. He leans in, his lips brushing yours as he speaks.
“Been planning on it all night, cutie...”
With swift, surprisingly gentle movements, he helps you step out of the pooled silk at your feet. The beautiful twilight blue dress is a ruined puddle on the hotel carpet, which he disregards and kicks aside without a second glance.
“Sorry for ruining the dress.” He doesn’t sound sorry at all. He languidly unbuttons his own shirt, tossing it away. His torso is pale and beautifully defined, a map of lean muscle you ache to trace with your lips. “Safe to say it didn’t stand a chance, hm?”
“It’s your dress.” You murmur it, your eyes drinking him in.
“It did its job.” He steps back into your space, his hands sliding possessively up your bare sides. “Made you look... so fucking beautiful. And now it’s a mess on the floor and I’m not even thinking about it.” He leans down, his mouth hovering over yours. “‘Cause I’d rather think about what a mess you’ll be in my arms as we make love... pulling pretty sounds out of you while my hands map the skin I’ve obsessed about every single day since we reunited...”
His words are a litany against your skin as he kisses his way down your neck, over your collarbones, finally taking a peaked nipple into his hot mouth. You cry out, your hands flying to his hair as he laves and sucks, sending jolts of pure need straight to your already-sensitive pussy that begs silently to be filled.
He guides you backward until your legs hit the edge of the bed, and you tumble onto the soft duvet, moving your body backwards as he follows you down, covering your body with his. The weight of him on top of you, the feel of his bare skin against yours, is overwhelming. You can feel the hard and insistent press of his clothed erection against your thigh, having you bite your lower lip. Your mind has scratched any logic and reasoning, demanding only to surrender to your feelings, which right now are screaming at you to get him inside you as soon as possible.
He braces himself on his elbows, looking down at you and searching for any sign of discomfort or wanting to back out, his hair falling into his eyes. The playfulness is gone, replaced by a stark hunger, eyes half-lidded and cheeks flushed to the tip of his ears.
“I need to be inside you.” The words come raw and unvarnished. “I need to feel you. Wanna feel all of you. Tell me you need it too, please tell me you do.”
You reach between your bodies with a trembling hand, your fingers fumbling with the button of his trousers. Your answer is in the desperate urgency of your touch as you struggle to free him. He helps you, shoving the fabric down his hips, freeing himself for you. You wrap your hand around him without looking down, his length hot and rock-hard in your palm, his mushroomy tip leaking over your fingers as you stroke him slowly. He hisses, his hips pushing forward into your grip.
“…Need you, Raf…” Your plea comes pride-stripped, replaced by raw need. “Please, don’t wanna wait anymore... I’m saying yes, please…”
He doesn’t need to be asked twice. He settles between your thighs, his tip nudging against your soaked entrance and you wrap your arms around his neck, face burying in his neck as you pant. He pauses and grabs your face to pull it out of his neck, his eyes holding yours, a final and silent question.
You answer by wrapping your legs around his hips and pulling him down into a searing kiss.
He drives into you in a slow, inexorable thrust, filling you completely, stretching you around his cock in a way that is both a shock and the most right thing you have ever felt. The shared gasp is muffled by your joined mouths, mouth hunging open against his as you try to adjust to the fullness inside you.
For a few moments, he doesn’t move at all, buried to the hilt inside you, his body trembling with the effort of holding still. You can feel every inch of him, a perfect devastating fit inside your cunt. The past and the future vanish. There is only this fusion, this raw wordless claiming. Having him in your arms while he stays inside you, a perfect fit, the last puzzle piece going over the remaining empty spot.
It feels so right. It scaresz you.
“Finally, I’m right where I should be...” He breathes it against your lips, the words soaked in a decade of longing.
Then he begins to move. And it is nothing like the frantic, fevered groping by the window. This is deep, relentless, devastatingly intimate. Each thrust is a revelation of passion, a conversation your bodies are having that your minds can’t yet process. He watches your face so intently, learning what makes you gasp in pleasure, what makes you clutch at his back, what makes you whisper his name in an attempt to ground yourself from floating away.
You are lost in it, in the feel of him moving inside your welcoming walls, in the scrape of his skin against yours, in the building pressure that is already coiling tight again, a lot faster this time. The world narrows to the slap of your skin, the ragged harmony of your breathing, and the intense locked gaze you can’t break, hypnotized by his unreadable gaze. There’s lust in the pools of his eyes, a mirror to your own, yet there are more complicated things hidden under it, surfacing with every thrust inside you, and you try to run from them, pretending you don’t see them.
“Oh fuck, you’re just so tight.” He grunts it, his rhythm faltering for a second as he fights for control. “You’re perfect, but so damn tight—shit, m’not gonna last long. F-fuck... I can’t... I need...”
“I-I know.” You gasp, arching your back to meet his thrusts, get him deeper. “Me too... O-oh, fuck, don’t... don’t stop.”
He shifts angle, hitting a deeper spot that makes you see stars, eyes going so wide before they roll back into your head from how good it feels. It has you grip tighter around his cock, a broken cry tears from your throat when you feel him twitch inside you, groaning into your neck before he bites on it. His control snaps when he feels how tightly you hold onto him. His thrusts become harder, faster, piston-like, driving you both toward the edge. You can feel his own climax growing, the tension in his corded muscles, the way his breath saws in his chest and sweat pools at his temples.
“Keep looking at me.” His voice goes guttural. “I wanna see you when you cum around me... shit, s’tight...”
You force your eyes open, drowning in the storm of emotion in his. The pleasure is a tidal wave, rising up, unstoppable. It crests with a violence that steals the air from your lungs. Your body clamps around him, milking him as you shudder through an orgasm that feels endless, wordless sobs of release shaking your entire body.
Feeling you convulse around him is his final trigger. With a raw, gut-deep groan that is half your name, he buries himself deep into your spasming walls and follows you over, his own release pumping into you in hot, pulsing waves of thick cum.
He collapses onto you, his weight a welcome anchor as you both spiral back down to earth, gasping and slick with sweat. The only sounds are the muffled cars outside and the frantic beating of your hearts, slowly beginning to find a shared, calmer rhythm.
He doesn’t pull away as you thought he might. He nuzzles into the crook of your neck, his lips pressing a damp tender kiss there. His softening cock is still nestled inside you, a final intimate connection between you. One that neither of you can brush away.
In the heavy, sated silence of your shared passion, the world begins to seep back in. And with it, the complicated and terrifying reality of what you have just done. But for now, wrapped in his arms, with the scent of sex and him clinging to you, you let the silence hold you. The talking, the reckoning, the fear of tomorrow—all of it can wait for the dawn.
Tonight, there is only this fragile, blissful peace in the ruin you had made together.
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Synopsis: Rafayel finally relives the day everything shattered between you—your fall, the hospital hallway, and the one-way flight he never managed to tell you about—revealing a decade-old misunderstanding that’s been poisoning both of you from opposite sides of the world.
Content warnings: Angst, hurt/comfort (slight), unresolved feelings, forced proximity, emotional repression, trauma triggers, mentions of a career-ending injury, performance pressure/burnout, self-destructive behavior, poor communication, sexual tension, medical setting, miscommunication, guilt/self-blame, anxiety, slight physical intimacy
Word count: 5.5k
I will post 2-3 chapters a week~ stay tuned :3 alsooo the tags will change with each chapter. next chapter will change the rating to E.
The memory, when it ambushes him now, is not the blur of shock and panic it is for you. It is a crystalline, brutal sequence, every detail rendered sharp by years of looking back.
It is the silence before the crack.
The day of your accident, the arena feels different. You haven’t looked at him once during your separate warm-ups. You, who usually tracks his movements with a mixture of frustration and naked admiration, are in a tunnel of your own focus. A grim, relentless focus he recognizes but doesn’t understand the depth of.
He doesn’t know about the secret pre-dawn sessions you have been logging for weeks. He doesn’t see you wince and shake out your right foot when you think no one is paying attention, trying to disperse the persistent hot ache that has taken root in your ankle, a souvenir from over-rotating a triple flip two weeks earlier. You have iced it, taped it, lied to yourself that it is just stiffness.
He only sees the set of your jaw, the fire in your eyes that seems aimed at an invisible finish line. He thinks it is just the pressure of the qualifiers. He doesn’t know the finish line is him.
He has something to tell you. Something that has been sitting in his throat like a heavy stone for days. His bags, he knows, are already half-packed in the sleek apartment his new management keeps. A one-way ticket to Zurich is locked in a drawer. He is to leave the day after the qualifiers. The opportunity of a lifetime, they keep saying. A clean break. A fresh start.
It feels like a sentence.
In the quiet moments, a different fantasy plays in his head. It is childish, born of watching older pairs glide as one during a recent exhibition. He pictures it. The two of you, not as rivals on the same ice, but as partners on it. Your fierce determination channeled into synchrony, his intuitive grace grounding your power.
A week ago, in a rare flicker of nerve he didn’t know he had, he almost mumbled something about it. Your double axel entry is strong. It would pair well with a lift. But you just scowled, thinking he was critiquing your solo technique, and skated away. The moment, and his courage, shattered with you.
So on this final day, as he lounges on the bleachers pretending to rest, he is wrestling with the words. I’m leaving. But maybe, after... we could try something different?
It sounds stupid even in his head. The future is a vast, intimidating blank canvas, and you are the only constant, the only real thing in it. The thought of carving out a future without you in it, even at a distance, feels like stepping onto ice he knows will not hold him.
Then you take the ice for your last run-through. He watches you set up for the combination, not the one you have been assigned, but a harder, riskier one. The one he has been practicing. A cold trickle of dread runs down his spine. You are pushing too hard. He sits up, the words of warning sticking in his suddenly dry mouth.
The first jump is shaky. He sees the landing foot wobble, the ankle buckling inward for a millisecond before you fight to stabilize it. His own muscles tense in sympathetic panic.
Stop, he thinks, screaming it internally. Abort the second jump. Just glide out.
But you don’t. You are the underdog. You fight. You launch into the second rotation.
The sound is not a crack to him. It is the sound of the world splitting in two.
One moment you are airborne, a portrait of furious ambition. The next, you are a crumpled, gasping heap on the ice, and the wrongness of the angle of your leg is the most horrifying thing he has ever seen.
His body moves before his mind. The ice beneath his blades feels like glass he is breaking with every stride. When he reaches you, the sight of your white, pain-contorted face sears itself into his permanent memory.
“Hey, hey. Look at me.” His voice is someone else’s, low and urgent and terrified. His hands hover, wanting to fix, to undo, but terrified of causing more damage. The coaches’ yelling sounds miles away.
In your eyes, swimming with pain and shock, he sees the finish line you have been chasing has just vanished. And he knows, with a sickening certainty, that he is part of the reason you were running toward it so blindly.
The ambulance comes. The adults take over. He is pushed to the periphery, a ghost in his own life.
He visits the hospital the next morning, before his flight. They won’t let him into your room.
“Family only.” The nurse’s voice is gentle. “She’s sedated, dear.”
He stands in the sterile hallway, the bouquet of irises—blue, like the rink’s early-morning light—feeling absurd in his hands. He leaves them with the nurse. He gets into the black car. He looks back once, at the hospital growing smaller, and the part of him that is just a boy, the boy who dreamed of pair skates and shared sighs, stays behind on that cold hospital floor.
He thinks you know he is leaving. Everyone at the rink seems to know. He thinks your intense focus, your reckless push, was your way of saying goodbye to the rivalry, or maybe of proving something to him before he went. He never imagines it is because you don’t know, because he failed to tell you, and you are trying to close a gap you think is purely about skill, not geography and time.
The misunderstanding is a full circle. You believe he saw your broken body and simply left for greater things, abandoning the wreckage. He believes that, through his silence and his unspoken future, he indirectly caused the wreckage, and has no right to stay and offer comfort he doesn’t deserve.
The music doesn’t just stop for him that day. The entire composition of his life shifts into a minor key. Every gold medal feels like a counterweight to a debt he can never repay. Every flawless performance is a silent message sent across oceans.
See? I’m using what I have. I’m not wasting it. I’m sorry.
And the dream of pair skates, he locks it away. It becomes the most forbidden of thoughts, a treasure too beautiful and too painful to ever take out and look at. Until he sees you again in a stale arena, a ghost from a life he lost, and the lock starts to rust.
—
The silence in your room after the kiss is a physical presence haunting your space. You press the back of your hand to your lips, as if you can still feel the searing imprint of his, the desperate aching pressure that has shaken you to your core.
Your mind is a cacophony of contradictions. The sharp memory of his abandonment against the soft, vulnerable confession of his loneliness. The image of him as an untouchable star against the feel of his sweat-damp skin under your palms. The child you knew against the man who has just unraveled you with a single touch.
Down the hall, in the dim light of his suite, Rafayel is equally still. The ghost of your mouth on his is a brand. The throbbing in his ankle is a distant pulse compared to the ache in his chest, an ache that has just cracked open in the second your lips touched his own.
He looks at the empty space where you had knelt to tend his wound, where you had listened to him. He had told you about his life in Switzerland. He had given you a piece of the loneliness he had carried like a secret trophy. And you had given him a truth of your own, the heaviness of the world after the ice.
It was the most honest exchange you had had since you were children sharing a hot chocolate.
And then he had ruined it. Or maybe he had completed it. The want, a constant humming frequency since your reappearance in the White Dove Arena, had simply overwhelmed the fragile new connection. He had reached for you, and you had met him halfway, and for one blazing moment the fault line didn’t feel like a rift. It felt like a circuit, finally closed.
Now, the aftermath is a cold void. The memory of your wide, shocked eyes as you pulled away haunts him. Mistake, you called it. The word echoes so loud in his own ears.
Was it a mistake because you felt nothing? Or because you felt too much, and it terrified you?
He thinks of the boy in the hospital hallway, holding irises. He had run then, from the pain, from the guilt, from the overwhelming feeling of being responsible for a fracture he didn’t know how to fix. A part of him—the trained, self-preserving part—screams to run again. To let the Liaison do her job, to let the superstar perform his, to let the painful, complicated girl from his past fade back into memory.
But the other part, the part that remembers pair skates and sighs, is so desperately tired of running.
The morning after the kiss dawns with a brutal clarity over you. Your ankle gives a sympathetic twinge as you stand, a ghostly echo of the fresh injury down the hall. The memory of his mouth on yours feels like a dream, a feverish hallucination born of stress. But the sharp feeling of panic in the back of your throat is real.
The next week is an exercise in silent, mutual suffering for both of you.
Rafayel’s twisted-ankle-from-a-curb story is accepted with grumbling suspicion by Thomas. The competition in Shanghai is scratched. The official statement cites a minor training injury requiring precautionary rest. The truth remains a secret held between the two of you, a third entity in every room.
You perform your duties. You arrange for a physiotherapist. You coordinate the postponement of events. Your interactions are models of efficiency and readjustments. You bring him updated schedules with your eyes fixed on the document, never on his face. He takes them with a quiet thank you.
The space between you hums with everything that has been said, and everything that has been done.
You can’t help but see his frustration. It isn’t the explosive kind from before, but a much quieter, simmering thing. He is a creature of motion forced into stillness, pacing his suite like a bird with a clipped wing. The guilt you feel is new and unwelcome.
You hate that you care about his restlessness. You hate the part of you that replays the moment his blade caught, the surge of terror and protectiveness that has nothing to do with logistics or being professional and everything to do with the fragile truth that you care for him.
His ankle heals, as modern medicine and elite athletic physiology ensure it will. But a month without competition for a man like Rafayel is a lifetime. The tour rolls on, his exhibitions now simpler, modified in order to accommodate his new state.
The fire in his performances banks to a quieter, more intense glow. You can see the calculation in his eyes, not of steps but of risk, of pain thresholds, of how much of his former self he can conjure without the foundation of flawless technique.
One evening, in a cold and small city, you find yourself drawn to the empty arena long after the team has left for dinner. You tell yourself you have left your tablet, and that’s the reason your feet take you there.
You know it is a lie.
He is there, alone, not on the pristine main ice but on a smaller older practice rink at the back of the complex. The lights are low. He is in simple practice clothes, no music.
He is not skating, just standing there, shaking in the center of the rink and shifting his weight gingerly from foot to foot, testing the push-off from his healed ankle. A slight wince tightens his features before he smooths it away. He looks like any athlete tentatively returning to a betrayed limb.
The vulnerability of the image in front of you steals your breath.
You stand in the shadows of the entrance, your own heart thudding dully. You remember your own first time back on the ice after the cast came off. The fear had been a living thing, a cold serpent coiling around your spine. The ice had not felt like freedom. It had felt like a predator waiting to remind you of its power.
You had lasted ten minutes before the phantom pains and the dizzying fear sent you stumbling off, never to return.
He begins to move. Not jumps, not spins, because those are much frightening moves and he doesn’t seem ready, at least not tonight. Just edges. Slow careful deep outside edges, holding the curve until his ankle trembles with the strain. He is rebuilding the language, letter by painful letter.
“You’ll overwork it.” Your voice echoes in the vast quiet space, surprising both of you.
He doesn’t startle. He completes the edge and comes to a stop facing you. “Miss Liaison. Doing late-night rounds?”
“Someone has to ensure you don’t undo a month of healing in one night of stubbornness.”
A faint, tired smile touches his lips. “My stubbornness is well-documented.”
You watch from the shadows, arms crossed against the chill seeping through your blazer. “Documented and disregarded, apparently.”
He looks down at his skates, then back at you. “What does it feel like for you now? Looking at it.”
The faint, tired smile on his lips hangs in the air, an acknowledgment of the unchangeable. In the quiet that follows, you feel the careful probing beneath the surface of his question. The ice isn’t just a physical space that separates you nowadays. It is the ground he is trying to clear between you, and you are not ready for that.
So you deflect.
“It feels cold.” You keep your voice deliberately flat, turning your gaze from him to scan the empty bleachers as if checking for something. “Like any other surface that needs maintenance.”
You feel his eyes on you, a patient pressing weight. “That’s not what I asked.”
“It’s the only answer I have.” You push off the boards, intending to walk back toward the equipment room, to put more space between you. “You should stop. Pushing it now will just set you back.”
“You’re an expert on stopping, aren’t you.”
The words, softly delivered, freeze you in your tracks. They aren’t cruel, but they are a direct tap on the fault line. You don’t turn around.
“It’s called self-preservation. You should try it sometime.”
You hear the slow deliberate scrape of his blades as he glides closer to the boards behind you.
“What are you preserving, exactly? The perfect record of never trying again?”
A hot coil of anger and hurt tightens in your chest. He is picking at the lock, and you can’t let him in.
“I’m preserving my sanity. My ability to do my job, which, right now, is to tell you to get off the ice before you turn a healed sprain into a chronic problem. Thomas will have my head.”
“Thomas isn’t here.” His voice is closer now, just over your shoulder. “It’s just you. And me. And a lot of quiet. You used to hate the quiet. You’d hum your program music just to fill it.”
The memory is a tiny precise invasion. You used to do that back then. A nervous habit he had teased you for. The fact that he remembers, that he wields it now, feels like a violation.
“People change.” The words come out clipped as you finally turn to face him. He is leaning on the boards, his expression unreadable. “I’m not that girl anymore. She’s the one who stayed on the ice, remember? You said so yourself.”
"I said a lot of things." His eyes search your face. “I’m trying to say something different now. Tell me what you’re really afraid of.” His tone isn’t accusatory, but prodding nonetheless, “Is it the ice? Or is it that if you get back on it, you’ll have to stop being angry at me. That you might actually have to feel something else.”
He is too close to the truth. The panic is no longer about ligaments or hard landings. It is about the terrifying prospect of dismantling the story you have lived by for ten years, the story where he is the villain who left and you are the victim who bravely moved on.
If that story cracks, what left is there? Just two wounded people on unstable ground.
“I’m not having this conversation.” Your voice goes low and final. “My job is handling your logistics, not your psychoanalysis. Get off the ice, Rafayel. That’s not a request from your liaison. It’s an order from the person who had to clean up the blood last time you were reckless.”
You see the flicker in his eyes, not anger but a pained understanding that you are using the gash, the intimacy of your care, as a weapon to keep him out. It works. The soft curiosity in his gaze shutters, replaced by a more familiar guarded neutrality.
He gives a single slow nod, pushing himself upright from the boards. “Understood.”
He skates away from you, not toward the exit but back to the center, resuming his slow testing edges. He is obeying the letter of your order. He is stopping the conversation. But defiantly staying on the ice. It is a silent rebuke. You can control the dialogue, but you can’t control him.
You stand there for a moment longer, the cold of the arena seeping past your jacket, past your skin, right into the old calcified hurt. You are grateful that you succeeded in dodging him and the conversation, but some part of you wished it didn’t hurt as much as it did.
The heavy door of the arena shuts behind you with a final thud that echoes in the empty corridor. But the silence you sought is a lie. The muffled rhythmic scrape of his blades continues in your head, a phantom track following you back to the sanctuary of your hotel room.
The next day, the routine is armor you’re very grateful for. You deliver the updated physio-therapy schedule with a clipboard as a shield. He accepts it with a neutral thank you, his eyes flicking over you, reading the retreat you have staged behind your eyes once again. The air is thick with what hasn’t been said.
He doesn’t try to probe again. Instead, he practices a different kind of pressure, the pressure of presence. During a sponsor lunch, he requests that you sit at his table, not with the other staff.
“The Liaison should be on hand for logistical questions.” His tone leaves no room for argument.
You spend two hours feeling the weight of his occasional sideways glance while discussing freight timelines with a bored executive.
In the evenings, he takes his carefully measured walks along the hotel’s perimeter path, always as you are returning from some errand or another, forcing a clipped, professional nod of acknowledgement. It feels deliberate. A quiet relentless reminder that he is there, a constant in your peripheral vision, just as he had been a constant in the backdrop of your youth.
Your dreams become treacherous. Not of falling, but of standing at the edge of the rink, your old skates laced tight, while he watches from the center. In the dream you take a step forward, but the ice always remains just an inch beyond your toe pick, an unbridgeable gap. You wake with your heart pounding, not from fear of the ice but from the frustration of the reach.
Your dreams is where you can’t help but reach for him, yet you’re unable to grab onto him. To close the distance. It’s less frigheting in your dream than in reality, yet it still has your head throbbing and the walls of protectiveness you built close in on you.
A week later, in a new city, you find yourself at the rink again after hours. You tell yourself you are auditing the overnight ice maintenance. The crew is efficient, their work a familiar lulling symphony of Zamboni growls and the hiss of the resurfacer.
He is there too, of course. Not skating this time. Sitting high in the empty stands, a dark silhouette against the rows of plastic seats. Watching the machine paint its perfect glacial layers.
You pretend not to see him, focusing on your tablet, checking off imaginary boxes. The crew finishes and leaves, the lights dimming to night mode. Still, he doesn’t move from his seat, and neither do you.
The silence becomes a taut wire. You can either break it or be broken by it. You walk to the bottom of the stands, not looking up at him.
“The tour ends in Jakarta.” You aim your voice at the empty concession stand across the way. “Two more exhibitions. Then my contract is fulfilled.”
From above, you hear a soft humorless sound, almost a sigh. “Efficient as ever. Already counting down the days ‘till your sentence is over.”
“It isn’t a sentence. It’s a job, which I’ve fulfilled.” You finally glance up. He is resting his forearms on his knees, looking down at you, his face half in shadow. “And jobs end.”
“And then what?” His voice is low, echoing almost raspily in the empty arena. “You go back to your desk and forget all about the past months? You ferry more dreams in boxes? You lock the ghost back in its closet?”
“That was the agreement.” You cross your arms, a feeble defense against the chill and his probing. “You got your liaison. I did my job. We’re even now.”
“We will never be even.” The words drop like stones into the quiet between you.
He stands and makes his way down, the metal steps clinking softly under his weight. He stops on the last row, still elevated, putting you at eye level.
“See, that’s what you still don’t understand. This wasn’t a transaction for me.”
You look away, focusing on the EXIT sign’s steady glow. “Then what was it?”
“A chance.” He takes a slow breath. “One I didn’t get ten years ago. And now it’s almost gone, and you’re... you’re already halfway out the door, still looking at me like I’m the one who turned the lock.”
The accuracy of it stings. You are pulling away, preemptively distancing yourself from the crater his departure will leave this time. The old playbook is the only one you have.
“What do you want me to say, Rafayel?” The frustration leaks into your whisper. “That it’s been a delight? You were right. Your presence... it didn’t just remind me of the accident. It reopened the abandonment that came after. Every time you walk into a room, I remember what it felt like to watch you leave the last one.”
You see him flinch as if you have physically struck him. Good, you think faintly. Let him feel it.
“I’m not even mad anymore.” The fatigue is bone-deep in your voice. “I think I’m just... tired. I spent so long wanting to be as good as you. To prove I belonged on the same ice. And then you were gone, and the proving just... lost its point. Why fight to be seen by someone who isn’t there to look?” You shrug, the gesture hollow. “So I stopped. It was easier.”
The pain on his face is raw, undisguised. He descends the final step, closing the distance so you have to tip your head back to meet his eyes.
“Is that what you really think? That I didn’t see you?” His voice is thick, filled with emotions you can’t decipher. “You were the only real thing in that superficial world that only cares about perfection. Your fight, your grit. It was more compelling than any perfect jump I ever landed. I saw you.”
He reaches out, his fingers gently brushing a stray strand of hair from your cheek. The intimacy of the gesture is a shock to your already overwhelmed mind. You close your eyes, your breath catching.
“Don’t.”
“Why?” His thumb traces the arch of your cheekbone, a touch so tender it threatens to break your walls completely. “Because it’s true? Or because you’re afraid to believe it?”
“Because it doesn’t change anything!” The whisper comes out fierce, your eyes still shut tight, building a wall of darkness against his intensity. “It doesn’t change that you left. It doesn’t change the silence that was between us, and still is.”
“Look at me.” His hand stills, cupping your jaw. “Please.”
You force your eyes open. They are brimming with unshed tears, blurring his earnest pained expression. The sight of your distress seems to fracture something in him. The determination softens into something close to grief.
“I can’t change the past.” His own eyes are suspiciously bright. “But I am here now. And I… I see you. Not the ghost of who you were. You. The woman who is so afraid of being left in the silence again that she’s trying to leave first.”
A single tear escapes, tracing a hot path down your cheek. He catches it with his thumb. Then, wordlessly, he pulls you into his arms.
It isn’t a romantic embrace. It is an anchor. A shelter. His arms wrap around you, one hand cradling the back of your head, tucking you against his chest. You stand stiffly for a heartbeat, every instinct screaming to push away, to flee the terrifying vulnerability that latches onto the moment uninvited. But the solid beat of his heart under your ear, the familiar safe scent of him mixed with cold arena air, is a siren’s call your weary soul cannot resist.
A shuddering breath wracks your body, and you melt into him. Your hands, trapped between you, slowly unfurl to clutch at the fabric of his sweater. You don’t sob, but the silent tears come, soaking into the soft wool. He just holds you tighter, his chin resting on the top of your head, his own breathing deep and steady.
You stand like that for what feels like an eternity and no time at all, in the dim cold vastness of the empty arena. The unbroken ice witnesses no spectacular jumps, no tragic falls. Only this. Two different versions of two people, shattered and remade in different ways, holding onto each other in the quiet. Not as a solution, but as a temporary, desperately needed ceasefire.
For this moment, there is no past, no looming future in another city. Just the shared imperfect warmth against the chill, and the silent mutual agreement to simply stop fighting the pull of the fault line and let it hold you both.
—
The news comes an hour before his final exhibition in Jakarta. A flustered stage manager finds you.
“He’s... in a mood. Won’t talk to anyone but you. Something about the lighting cue being chromatically offensive…?” The man looks pained, and very confused. “Can you...?”
You nod, a strange calm settling over you. You feel a dull persistent pull, like a tide you are too tired to fight.
You find him in the stark white dressing room, pacing a short tight path. He has already changed into his costume, a sleek black ensemble with subtle silver threads that catch the light like fractured ice. He looks every inch the superstar, except for the tension coiled in his shoulders and the restlessness in his steps as he paces the room.
“The lighting director is threatening to quit.” You close the door behind you.
“Good. His taste is an affront to art and basic optics.” He doesn’t stop his pacing.
“The cue is the same one you approved in Tokyo. And Osaka. And Shanghai.” You remind him.
“Was offensive there, too. I was being polite.” The sarcasm is a brittle shell. You can see it cracking at the edges, revealing the unease beneath.
You lean against the vanity, watching him. “You’re never polite, Rafayel. What’s really wrong?”
He stops pacing, finally looking at you. His blue-pink eyes hold a stormy, frustrated glint, but beneath that, you catch a flicker of raw unvarnished vulnerability. It is the same look he had as a boy before a big competition, the one he had always tried to hide behind bravado.
He shrugs, a defensive tight movement. “Nothing. The world is just full of incompetence tonight.”
“And you’re full of something else.” Your voice goes soft. You push off from the vanity and walk toward him, not stopping until you are directly in his path. He holds his ground, his gaze wary. You don’t speak. You just slowly kneel down on the plush carpet.
“What are you doing?” His voice has lost its edge, replaced by surprise.
“Checking the source of the problem.” Your voice goes practical. Your hands go to his left ankle, the one he had injured. You begin to gently probe the area over the fine black fabric of his costume, feeling for heat or swelling. Your touch is clinical at first, then, almost unconsciously, it softens into something closer to a caress, your thumb smoothing over the line of the bandage.
He goes perfectly still above you. You can feel the tension draining from his leg under your hands, replaced by a different kind of stillness. The sarcasm, the defensive posturing, all of it seems to leak out of him, leaving behind just the man who is just nervous before a performance.
“It’s fine.” His voice goes low and quiet now. “It’s not the ankle.”
“I know.” Your hands still. You are kneeling at his feet, and the intimacy of the position should feel subservient, strange. Instead it feels grounding. You are both here, in this fragile quiet space.
The Rafayel in front of you is a mystery, a man shaped by fame and loneliness, by a past you shared but didn’t fully understand. Yet the prospect of unraveling that mystery, of learning him again, doesn’t fill you with the old fear anymore. It feels... inevitable.
His hand comes down, his fingers gently tilting your chin up so you have to meet his eyes. The touch sends a familiar electric jolt through you, a direct line to the memory of his kiss in the hotel room, desperate and consuming. It also reminds you of the tenderness, the solidity of his embrace in the stands. Your heart thuds heavily against your ribs.
Before his thumb can trace the line it had memorized on your cheek, before the space between your gaze and his lips can vanish completely, you pull back. You stand up, breaking the contact.
“Your hair is perfect. The costume is perfect. The ice is at minus five point five.” Your voice goes a little unsteady as you busy yourself with straightening a non-existent wrinkle on his sleeve. “The ‘offensive’ lighting cue has been adjusted to a less assaultive shade of blue. There’s nothing left to fix out here.”
He watches you, his eyes dark with understanding and a hint of frustration. “We need to talk.”
“Later.” Your voice is firm as you pick up a lint roller from the vanity and make a show of running it over his back, though there is nothing there. “After the show. You need to focus on this. That’s what matters right now.”
He catches your wrist as you move around him, not tightly, but enough to stop you. The touch burns.
“It’s not the only thing that matters.” He turns you to face him, his expression unguarded, serious. “I want you to be there. In the wings. Where I can see you. I... need it.”
The admission, so soft and direct, flusters you. It is a vulnerability he rarely shows, a request, not a command. The air between you grows thick again, charged with all the words unsaid and all the touches withheld. Your eyes flicker to his mouth. His gaze drops to yours. The pull is magnetic, terrifying.
“I’ll be there.” The promise tears itself from you. Then, before the gravitational pull can win, before either of you can close that agonizing tempting gap, you slip your wrist from his light grasp. “Good luck.”
You are out the door before he can respond, leaning against the cool wall of the corridor, your pulse racing. It hurts, the wanting. It is a fresh acute pain layered over the old dull ache. It hurts because it is real, and it is now, and it is for the man he has become, a man who is still partly a stranger, yet feels more like home than anything has felt in a very long time.
You close your eyes, listening to the distant roar of the crowd waiting for him, knowing you will be in the shadows watching, just as he asked. Not as his liaison, not as a ghost from his past, but as something new, fragile, and terrifyingly alive.
if you liked it, you can buy me a coffee here! it would be very appreciated<3: https://ko-fi.com/zaynessbeloved
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Synopsis: Under the surface, the rink and everything you lost there keeps bleeding into every conversation you share, and the more you try to stay professional, the more Rafayel makes it personal, until you realize this contract isn’t just about logistics. It’s about keeping you close.
Content warnings: Angst, hurt/no comfort (for now), unresolved feelings, forced proximity, emotional repression, trauma triggers, mentions of a career-ending injury, phantom pain, performance pressure/burnout, self-destructive behavior, slight blood/injury detail, poor communication, sexual tension, first kiss turned regret, misunderstandings
Word count: 5.8k
I will post 2-3 chapters a week~ stay tuned :3 alsooo the tags will change with each chapter, eventually going into E-rated
You bury yourself in the logistics of the Asia tour from your clean, quiet desk and treat it like any other project: venue schematics, flight manifests, temperature-control requirements for sixteen different rinks. You don’t watch his competitions televised from Europe. You delete news alerts with his name. When the briefing packet arrives, you study the schedule, the personnel lists, the branding guidelines, and politely ignore the single page that details his personal itinerary and preferences.
You tell yourself it is working. The sharp, confusing edges of the hurt are being sanded down by routine. You think of his words sometimes—fault line, sigh, liability—and feel a dull throb, like a bone aching before a storm, but you can breathe through it. You convince yourself the tension in the hotel suite was a toxic byproduct of shared history and high stress, nothing more.
You aren’t in denial. You are in recovery.
By the time the departure day arrives, you feel a semblance of control, armored in your most impersonal black blazer and a tablet full of checklists.
The reunion happens at the private airport terminal. He arrives surrounded by his usual constellation: manager, publicist, fitness trainer. He looks different, or perhaps you are just seeing him clearly for the first time since the gala. He seems thinner, the angles of his face sharper, with a subtle, weary tension bracketing his mouth that no camera will ever catch. His eyes find you immediately, a quick scanning glance that takes in your professional armor and then dismisses it.
“Liaison.” A bare nod. His tone is cool and flat as he speaks.
“Mr. Qi.” Your voice is equally neutral. “The plane is ready. I’ve briefed the captain on the schedule. Your section is prepared per your specifications.”
He says nothing else, brushing past you with his team. The space where he stood feels electrically charged for a moment, and then simply empty.
That becomes the pattern. In Tokyo, your interactions are clipped, transactional. You confirm ice temperatures. He grunts an acknowledgment. You present the daily schedule. He takes the printed sheet without your fingers touching. He performs his aloof celebrity, and you excel as his invisible handler. The monumental things said in the dark of a hotel suite might as well be a script from a play you have both left behind. You are grateful for the distance, you tell yourself. This is manageable.
The struggle is internal, and it is twofold.
First, being near the rinks. Not the gala’s temporary installation, but real, vast, echoing arenas that smell of Zamboni fumes and old ice. The sound of blades carving arcs is a language you were once fluent in. Watching him practice—really practice, not perform—is a special kind of torture. You stand in the shadows of the tunnel with a clipboard in hand, and you observe. He falls. He curses, low and vehement, slamming a gloved hand on the ice before pushing up to try the quad loop again.
You see the frustration, the relentless drive. It is a mirror of your own childhood determination, reflected back at you through the lens of his perfected genius. It reminds you not just of him, but of yourself, of the version of you that lived in a timeline where the ankle didn’t twist, a version who might be on that ice right now, fighting the same battle. The ghost of that possible life haunts every practice session, a silent, screaming echo at your shoulder.
Second, and more confusing, is the persistent, low hum of awareness you have of him as a physical presence. The way his practice shirt clings to the sweat on his spine during a spin. The particular timbre of his laugh, rare and short, when he banters with his choreographer. It is an awareness that feels like a betrayal of your hurt, a vine growing stubbornly through the cracks in your anger. You dismiss it as leftover adrenaline from your confrontations, or mere aesthetic appreciation for an athlete at his peak. It is easier than naming it.
One night in Seoul, after a long day of sponsor commitments, you realize you have left a crucial folder in the arena. The building is locked, quiet, a monument to stillness. The security guard recognizes you and lets you in with a warning that the main lights will shut off soon.
You retrieve the folder from the deserted staff box. The only light comes from the emergency exit signs and the moon through the high arched windows, casting the empty rink in a sheet of ghostly blue-white. And then you see him.
He is alone on the ice, no music, just the rhythmic, whispering scrape of his blades. He isn’t practicing jumps. He is doing basic moves, deep and languid crossovers that carry him in wide, endless circles. The most fundamental thing, the first thing anyone ever learns. In his hands, it looks like a meditation.
A sigh.
You stand frozen in the tunnel, hidden by shadows. You feel your own throat constrict. This is the private self he spoke of, the one that belongs only to him. There is no audience here, no product, no liability. Just a man and his ice.
A yearning so profound it is an ache that blooms in your chest. It isn’t for him, not entirely. It is for that. For the feeling of the ice giving way under your blade, for the cool air rushing past your face, for the singular focus of your body in motion. You miss it with a desperation that is a physical pain. Your right ankle gives a phantom throb, as if you remind you of it.
The fear follows instantly, cold and familiar. The memory of the crack, the helpless spiral to the hard surface, the end of a world. Your world. The fear tells you that even if you laced up a pair of skates right now, you would only remember how to fall.
As if sensing your thoughts across the dark expanse, his movements slow. He comes to a graceful halt at the center of the rink, his head turning slowly until his gaze pinpoints you in the gloom. You haven’t made a sound. He just knows someone’s there, maybe even hopeful it’s you.
You expect a jab, a cool remark about lurking. Instead, he simply looks in your direction for a long moment, his expression unreadable in the low light. Then he pushes off with one foot, gliding not toward the exit but toward the far side of the rink, continuing his silent, looping path, giving you the dignity of the dark and the distance.
But the spell is broken. The nostalgia curdles into a sharper, more personal sorrow. You are not just a former skater watching a current one. You are the echo, and he is the sound, and you are both trapped together in this tour, orbiting the same painful gravity, speaking in bullet points and schedules because the only other language you have between you is one of sighs and fractures, and you are both too afraid, in your own ways, to try and speak it again.
You leave the manifest on the boards and slip out, the ghost of your own what-ifs skating silent, endless circles in your mind.
The tour becomes a meticulous exercise in compartmentalization. There is the Liaison, who can source a specific brand of mineral water in Osaka at three in the morning just because he requested so. There is the Logistics Coordinator, who soothes frantic venue managers and recalibrates faulty temperature controls, just so his specifications to be met. And there is the third one, the one with no name, who watches from the shadows as he transforms each new arena into his temporary kingdom.
The struggle is a silent war fought behind your ribs. Every arena is a cathedral to what you lost. The chill, the scent, the roar; all of it a visceral echo of a life that flatlined years ago. Watching him command the space, even in quiet practice, is a constant low-grade reminder. You know, logically, that the accident was a tragic pivot, not a punishment. You know his abandonment was the work of a something larger than a fifteen-year-old boy.
But the heart is not logical. It only knows the shape of the hole left behind, and his presence is the exact outline of that hole.
Your feelings for him are a knot you refuse to pick at. The hurt is clear. The confusion is a given. The other thing, the sharp unwanted awareness of the slope of his neck as he stretches, the way his voice can go from cold to molten in a single syllable, you file under Professional Hazard. A reaction to stress, nostalgia, his admittedly potent and curated magnetism. Nothing more.
In Kyoto, the tension snaps.
It is after a flawless, punishingly elegant performance. The Japanese press is in a frenzy and he has been whisked away for a late-night media roundtable. You are finalizing the next day’s travel, alone in a small makeshift office backstage, when the door clicks open.
He leans against the frame, still in his costume, the sequins catching the ugly light above. He looks drained, his vibrant performer side replaced by something hollowed-out.
“The car to the hotel is here.” You don’t look up from your screen.
“They want me to go to an after-party. Board chairman’s hosting. Some cultural exchange.” His voice is flat, devoid of its usual performative edge.
“It’s on your schedule. The car can take you there directly.”
“I don’t wanna go.”
“You’ll have to take that up with your manager.” You click send on an email with more force than necessary.
He pushes off the doorframe and enters the room, closing the door behind him. The space, never large, shrinks to the size of a confessional.
“I’m taking it up with you.”
You finally look at him. “I’m not your social secretary, Rafayel. I’m your logistics liaison. I arrange transport, not your social calendar.”
“You arrange my environment. The party is part of my environment. I’m telling you it’s detrimental.” He takes another step. The costume, a deep blue inspired by stormy seas, seems to swallow the dim light. “I need you to get me out of it.”
The absurdity of it, the sheer privileged demand, cracks the careful shell of your composure.
“What do you want me to do, Rafayel? Forge a doctor’s note? Stage a fire alarm? You’re a grown man. A superstar. Say no.” you scoff at him.
“It’s not that simple.” A flash of genuine frustration in his eyes.
“It never is with you, is it.” You stand, needing to meet him from a position of less vulnerability. “Everything is a layered drama. A sigh, not a step. A fault line. Well, my job is steps. Concrete, actionable steps. Detrimental to your environment isn’t a workable brief. I don’t want to go isn’t my problem to solve.”
He stares at you, his chest rising and falling with a slow, measured breath.
“You really have built a very high, very cold wall, haven’t you.”
“It isn’t a wall. It’s a job description. One you drafted.”
“And you hate me for it.” It isn’t a question. It is a statement he seems to be turning over, examining for its truth.
“I don’t hate you.” The denial comes out too quick. “I’m indifferent to you. Professionally.”
A slow, humorless smile touches his lips. “Liar.” The word is almost soft. Almost kind. “You watch every practice. You know the exact second I’m going to fall on a jump before I do. You stand in the dark and miss the ice so badly it hurts me to look at you.”
The air leaves the room. He had seen you that night in Seoul. He had understood.
“Stay in your lane.” Your whisper is shaky with humiliation and anger.
“My lane is a sheet of ice.” He fires it back, taking the final step that brings him directly in front of you. The scent of his sweat, cold air, and something uniquely him is overwhelming. “And you’re always just outside of it, in the shadows, with that look on your face. The same one you had when you were ten and couldn’t land your axel. That furious, determined, heartbreaking look. You don’t look at me with indifference. You look at me like I’m the finish line you’ll never cross again, and you can’t decide whether to scream or cry.”
Tears, hot and furious, prick at your eyes. You refuse to let them fall.
“Stop it.”
“Why? Because it’s true?” His hand comes up, not to touch you but to gesture at the space between you, the space that is vibrating with everything unsaid. “This tension you keep trying to ignore... You think it’s all professional frustration. Lingering hurt. Look at me and tell me that’s all it is.”
You can’t. You look at his mouth instead, at the sharp curve of it, and your own lips part on a shaky breath. The tension is a live wire, finally named in the space between you, inseparable from the hurt, woven through it like a poison thread, making the whole tapestry of your feelings for him agonizing and irresistible.
“See.” He murmurs the word, and it lands like a caress. “You can’t do that.”
The door handle jiggles. A voice calls from the other side. “Rafayel? The chairman’s car’s waiting.”
He doesn’t move, his eyes holding yours, waiting for an answer you cannot give.
“Go to your party.” Your voice comes out a broken thing.
The disappointment in his eyes is a more effective punishment than any anger could be. He nods once, sharp and final. The performer’s mask slides back into place, smooth and impervious.
“Of course. Thank you, Liaison.”
He turns and leaves, leaving you alone with the wreckage of his perception. He has seen through every one of your defenses, named every forbidden feeling. And worst of all, he has seen the fear, the deep, childlike fear that keeps you forever in the shadows, forever watching, forever yearning for the ice you are too terrified to ever step onto again. The tour is no longer just a professional obligation. It is a front-row seat to your own exile, and he is the unforgiving mirror forcing you to watch.
The aftermath of Kyoto is a deep freeze. You perform your duties with machine-like precision, speaking only when necessary, your eyes never holding his for more than a second. The party he was forced to attend ended with a minor scandal, reports of him being coolly dismissive of a major sponsor. His manager Thomas is livid, and the tension ripples through the entire team.
You tell yourself his words in that small room were just another manipulation, a prodigy’s attempt to unbalance an opponent. You fortify your walls, brick by emotional brick.
The tour moves to a smaller city for a rare two-day break in the schedule. The arena is older, a local landmark with drafty corridors and the faint perpetual smell of damp concrete and old popcorn. It feels more like the rink of your childhood than the sterile megaplexes you have been moving through, which makes the haunting more acute.
On the second afternoon, a crisis erupts. The local crew, while installing special lighting for a filmed segment, has accidentally severed a primary coolant line for a small secondary practice rink tucked away in the building’s bowels. It isn’t the main arena, but it is where Rafayel had planned an essential, private session with his choreographer to rework part of his free program. The main ice is unavailable, booked for a local competition.
Panicked engineers tell you it will take twelve hours to repair and re-freeze. You are in the bustling corridor, listening to the foreman’s rapid apology, when Rafayel and his choreographer approach.
“What’s the issue?” Thomas’s voice is tight.
“Practice rink is down. Coolant line breach.” You keep your eyes on your tablet. “Unusable for at least twelve hours. The main arena is occupied. The only available ice is at a public rink across town, but it’s open session until nine.”
“An open session. With children and amateurs." Thomas says it more than asks. "Impossible. The security risk, the media exposure—”
“Cancel the session.” Rafayel’s voice is quiet. He is looking past everyone, at the closed doors to the damaged rink.
“We can’t.” His choreographer, a woman named Elara, insists. “The changes for the finale are not working. We must drill them today. The public rink is a circus, but it is ice nonetheless.”
A silent, furious standoff begins between manager and artist. You can feel Rafayel’s frustration building, a storm contained behind his ribs.
“Is it locked?” Rafayel asks suddenly, pointing to the practice rink doors.
“The ice is melting, Rafayel.” You finally look at him. “It’s slush and water over a concrete base. It isn’t safe for anything.”
“I asked if it was locked.”
The foreman shakes his head. “No, sir, but I wouldn’t...”
Rafayel pushes past all of you and shoves the heavy door open. A wave of marginally cooler, damp air drifts out. You follow, the others at your heels.
The sight is dismal. The small oblong sheet of ice is indeed melting, a large dark puddle of water spreading at the far end near the breach, but two-thirds of the surface remains, a milky uneven plane covered in a layer of water that shimmers under the work lights. It is the ghost of a rink.
Rafayel walks to the edge, his boots leaving prints on the wet concrete. He stares at the deteriorating surface, expression unreadable. Then, to your horror, he sits on the boards and starts unlacing his boots.
“What are you doing?” Thomas’s voice borders on panic.
“Ice is still there.” Rafayel pulls off a boot. “Thin. Soft. But it’s there.”
“You’ll break an ankle, for fuck’s sake!” The words rip out of you before you can stop them.
He looks up, and there is a challenge in his eyes. “Then it’ll match yours.”
Before anyone can stop him, he has laced on a pair of skates from his bag, not his competition blades but an older pair.
He steps onto the ice.
It isn’t a glide. It is a surrender. His blade sinks into the soft watery surface immediately, sending up a small spray. He pushes forward, his stroke sluggish, the sound a wet sucking scrape instead of a clean hiss. He looks ordinary. Earthbound. The prodigy brought low by physics.
“This is insane,” Thomas mutters, pinching the bridge of his nose.
But you can’t look away. Rafayel moves with intense, focused caution, testing the give of the ice with each step. He doesn’t attempt a jump, not even a spin. He starts tracing slow large figures, basic school figures, the kind no one practices anymore. A shallow edge, a wobbly change of foot, a teardrop shape left behind in the melting surface. The most fundamental, humble skating imaginable.
And it is the most vulnerable you have ever seen him. The superstar is gone. The petulant artist is gone. Here is just a man, on bad ice, trying to remember the feeling of a blade biting into something solid. Trying to find the sigh in the chaos.
The fear in your chest, the one that lives where your own skating dreams died, twists into something else. It isn’t just fear for him. It is a deep, resonant recognition. This is what it means to love something enough to risk looking foolish, to risk breaking, just to be near it.
Elara, seeing his intent, calls out a sequence of steps; not for the finale, but simple connecting footwork. Rafayel begins to trace them, his movements growing more confident as he learns the language of the dying ice. He won’t fall. He is too connected to it, reading its weaknesses like a poem.
Thomas, after several more minutes of furious whispered argument with Elara, finally throws his hands up.
“Fine. Break your neck. See if I care.”
He shoots you a look that clearly says this is now your problem, before storming out, Elara following with a worried glance back. The heavy door swings shut, leaving you alone in the cavernous, dripping cold with him.
Annoyance spikes through you, sharp and clean. It is easier than fear, easier than that unsettling recognition.
“This is the most reckless, self-indulgent thing I’ve ever seen.” Your voice echoes.
He doesn’t stop his slow, careful tracing of a figure eight. “Noted, Liaison.”
"You’re going to get hurt."
“I’m always hurt.” He says it so matter-of-factly it steals your breath. "Question is whether it’s a useful hurt or a pointless one. This—” He gestures to the decaying ice. “This is useful. It remembers me.”
You hug yourself against the chill, watching as he pushes a little harder, testing the limit of the ice’s strength. He moves into a series of quicker crossovers, building shallow momentum. For a moment he looks like his old self, fluid and powerful, a force of nature meeting a crumbling element.
Then it happens.
The blade of his outside skate catches a fissure in the softening ice, a hidden weakness. Instead of a clean release, it snags. His momentum twists him sideways. There is no dramatic crack, just a sickening wet wrench and a sharp bitten-off grunt as he goes down, his leg folding beneath him. He slides into the growing center puddle with a splash.
You are moving before the sound fades, your own fear forgotten, your shoes skidding on the wet concrete. “Rafayel!”
He is already pushing himself up onto his elbows, his face a mask of pained concentration. But your eyes are locked on his left ankle. The white leather of the skate is already stained a shocking, spreading crimson where it meets his practice pants. A deep gash, likely from his own blade during the twist.
“Don’t move it.” Your voice trembles with an authority born of horrific familiarity. You kneel in the icy water, not caring as it soaks through your trousers. Your hands, professional and steady, go to the skate’s laces. “Let me see.”
“It’s fine.” He grits it out, trying to pull his leg back.
“It is not fine. Look at the blood!” The sight of it, so red against the white, sends a wave of nausea through you. It is a different injury, but the panic is the same: the same helpless dread, the same sight of a skater’s dreams leaking onto the ice. Only this time, it is him.
He blinks up at you, pain glazing his eyes, but something else as well, a startling clarity. “See?” It comes through gritted teeth, a faint pained smirk touching his lips. “Now we match.”
You ignore him, focusing on the injury in front of you, trying not to panic. He finally stops resisting, watching you as you carefully, gently, loosen the laces around the wounded area. Your fingers are steady, but your heart is a wild thing in your throat.
“We need to get you to a hospital. Now.”
“No.” The refusal is instant, absolute.
“Are you insane?! You could need stitches, it could be fractured—”
“I have a competition in four days. Shanghai. I’m getting on that plane and I’m skating.” His eyes are flint, glaring at you through the pain.
The worry curdles into something hotter, darker. “You’ll destroy your ankle. For some... some meaningless exhibition?”
“It is not meaningless!” The roar bounces off the empty walls. He tries to stand, his face going white, and sways. You surge up, catching him under the arm, taking his weight. His body is rigid with pain and fury, leaning into you. “It is the only thing that means anything. You, of all people, should understand that. Or did you forget that, too, when you quit?”
The words are meant to wound, and they do. But beneath the hurt, a realization detonates in your mind, clear and terrifying. This isn’t just about art or competition. This is a man trying to outskate a ghost: the ghost of the boy who left, the ghost of your abandoned potential, the ghost of a shared dream that ended in a crack. He is trying to skate so perfectly, so relentlessly, that he can escape the past. And he will break himself in the process.
The fight leaves you, replaced by a cold, determined exhaustion. “Fine. No hospital. But you are not skating on this. And you are getting off this ice right now.”
It is a struggle. He is taller, heavier, but you are fueled by a furious feeling and adrelanile. Half-dragging, half-supporting him, you get him off the melting surface and onto the rubber matting. You don’t call for help. This, somehow, feels like it has to stay between you.
The journey to his hotel suite is a silent, tense ordeal. In his room, you deposit him on the edge of the plush bed.
“I’ll get the first aid kit from my room. Don’t move.”
When you return, he has managed to get the skate off. The wound is deep, still oozing blood, and the ankle is already swelling, an ugly purple bloom against his skin. The sight makes your own ankle ache in sympathy.
You work in silence, kneeling before him. You clean the cut with antiseptic wipes, your touch efficient. He doesn’t flinch, but you see the muscles in his jaw jump.
“You’re being stupid.” You don’t look up as you apply a sterile pad.
“I know.”
“You could end your career.”
“I know that too.”
“Then why?” You look up then, your hands stilling. The frustration and hurt are plain on your face. “Why push it until you break? Just to prove you can?”
He is quiet for a long moment, watching you tend to him. The anger has bled out of him, leaving only a profound weariness.
“Because the only thing worse than breaking is stopping. And I don’t know how to stop.” His voice softens. “You... You learned how. I never did.”
The confession hangs in the air. You begin to wrap the bandage around his ankle, your movements slower, more deliberate. The intimacy of the act is unbearable. Your fingers brush against his skin, feeling the heat of the inflammation. He is in your care, vulnerable, and it strips away every last pretense of professional distance.
“You’re a mess,” you whisper, more to yourself than to him.
A pained, almost-smile touches his lips. “You’ve mentioned.”
You finish the bandage and sit back on your heels, looking at your work, at him. The mighty Rafayel, brought low, trusting you to patch him up. The tension is still there, but it has changed. It isn’t a wall between you anymore. It is the very air in the room, charged with shared history, with pain, with a terrifying and undeniable closeness.
You are frustrated. You are hurt. You are desperately worried. And as you look at his pale, stubborn face, you realize the most terrifying thing of all. You are not indifferent to him. You care. Deeply.
And that changes everything.
The silence in your own room that night is absolute and suffocating. Every nerve feels scraped raw from the adrenaline of his fall, from the intimacy of bandaging his wound, from the weight of his confession. You have just begun the futile attempt to quiet your mind when your phone lights up on the nightstand, vibrating with an unknown number.
You know.
“Yes.” Your voice comes out flat.
There’s a pause before his voice echoes on the other end, strained and tighter than before. “It hurts...”
You close your eyes. “Take the anti-inflammatories in the kit I left.”
“I did.” Another pause, filled with shallow breath. “It’s not helping.”
There is a hesitance there, a boyish reluctance to admit weakness so at odds with the arrogant superstar. It is that crack in his armor that has you swinging your legs out of bed and leaving your room.
When you enter his room, the scene is dimly lit by a single bedside lamp. He is propped up against the headboard, shirtless, the sheets tangled around his waist. A fine sheen of sweat coats his chest and forehead, catching the low light. The bandage on his ankle is starkly white against his skin.
“You’re sweating.” You cross to him immediately. You press the back of your hand to his forehead, then his cheek. His skin is warm, but not alarmingly so. It is the heat of pain, of a body fighting inflammation. The touch is meant to be clinical, but the sensation of his skin under your hand sends a jolt through you.
“No fever.” You murmur it more to yourself than to him, pulling your hand away too quickly.
“Just the brilliant feeling of my own dumb decisions.” He attempts a smirk. It turns into a wince halfway through.
You busy yourself with the kit, avoiding looking at the expanse of his bare shoulders, the defined lines of his torso. You shake out a stronger painkiller and hand it to him with a glass of water. Your fingers brush.
“You need to keep it elevated properly.” You rearrange the pillows with brisk efficiency, then, against your better judgment, gently lift his injured leg to rest on them. Your hands are careful around the bandage.
“Thomas can’t know,” he says, watching your movements.
The spark of annoyance flares back. “Don’t be childish. He’ll know the moment you try to walk to the team meeting tomorrow. Or do you plan to perform your next miracle and skate on a slashed ankle?”
‘I’ll manage.”
“You’ll collapse.’ You finally look at him. “And then it’ll be a bigger story, a bigger scandal, and you’ll be forced into a hospital anyway. What is the point of this stubbornness? To prove how much pain you can endure? I already know that, Rafayel. I’ve always known.”
The fight bleeds out of him again, leaving exhaustion in its wake. He looks away, toward the dark window. “The point is one more day where it’s just an injury and not a problem for them to solve. One more day where I’m not a defective product.”
The starkness of the phrase—defective product—leaves a hollow ache in your chest. You sit on the edge of an armchair, a few feet from the bed, the fight gone out of you too. The quiet of the room settles, different now, charged with a fragile stillness.
“What was it like?” he asks after a long moment, his voice quiet. ‘After. When you... stopped.”
The question surprises you. He is probing, gently, into the ruins of your past.
“Lonely.” The truth slips out before you can craft a deflection. “Then loud. College, internships, learning to be a person who wasn’t defined by a rink schedule. It was like learning to walk on land after living at sea. Everything felt too slow. Too heavy.”
He nods slowly, as if imagining it. “I went to a sports academy in Switzerland. All glass-rinks and schedules and efficiency. They called it high-performance nurturing.” A short, humorless sound at the back of his throat. “It was a factory.”
He picks at the hem of the sheet.
“I had a technical coach, a fitness coach, a nutritionist, a media trainer, a psychologist. Not one of them ever asked if I liked the music for my programs.”
The sadness you feel is a quiet, surprised thing. You had pictured his life as a gilded ascent, not a sterile, monitored climb.
“Did you? Like the music?”
“Sometimes. Didn’t matter, though. The music was chosen for marketability.” He looks back at you, blue-pink eyes reflecting the lamplight. “The only program music I ever chose for myself was the one I skated the day you watched. At the White Dove. The oceanic piece.”
Your breath catches in your throat, suddenly dry. That piece had been all longing and turbulent beauty. You had thought it was a masterpiece crafted for him. To know he chose it himself… it changes its color in your memory.
“Why that one?” you whisper.
He holds your gaze, and the space between the chair and the bed seems to evaporate.
“Because it sounded like something I’d lost. Something deep, and stormy, and... present. Something I need in my life.”
The air grows thick. You are both speaking in codes now, about voids and choices and shared, silent understandings. You want to retreat, to pull the hurt around you like a shield against this disarming vulnerability. He is making it impossible.
“You shouldn’t have left without a word.” The old wound pulses behind your sternum. “A note. A call. Anything...”
“I know.” There is no defense in his voice, just a heavy acceptance. “I was a coward. I thought if I didn’t say goodbye, it wasn’t real. That I could just... pause you. Pause us. Come back to it later.”
“You can’t pause people.’
“Realizing that now.” His voice is so soft it is almost inaudible. “Realizing a lot of things now. With you here.”
Your heart is pounding. You are acutely aware of everything about him. The rhythm of his breathing. The shadow of his lashes on his cheeks. The way he is looking at you, not with the artist’s assessment or the star’s detachment, but with a raw open focus that feels like a physical touch on your skin. The room is too quiet. Too small. The years of distance are collapsing in on themselves, and you are at the epicenter.
You don’t know who moves first.
Maybe you lean forward to stand, to break the spell. Maybe he reaches out. But suddenly the space is gone. His hand is cradling the back of your head, his fingers tangling in your hair, and your mouth is on his.
It isn’t gentle. It is desperate, a landslide of everything unsaid: the hurt, the anger, the dizzying attraction, the childhood admiration, the profound aching loneliness for a self and a life only the other had ever known. It tastes like salty tears and painkillers and the faint taste of his sweat. It is consuming.
And then it is over. You break apart, gasping, staring at each other from inches away. His eyes are wide, his lips parted, mirroring your own shock.
The silence rushes back in, roaring in your ears.
You stumble to your feet, your chair scraping loudly against the floor. Your head is a chaotic mess of sensation and betrayal, of your own carefully nurtured resentment, of the professional lines you swore to hold.
“This is a mistake.” The words come out frail and meaningless.
He says nothing, just watches you, his expression unreadable again, but his chest rising and falling rapidly.
You turn and flee, leaving the door ajar behind you, the ghost of his touch on your lips and the terrifying, echoing truth in the silent room.
A mistake it might be, but it has changed the fault line between you irrevocably. It has made it a living, breathing thing. And you are now standing right on top of it.
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Synopsis: You sit high in the White Dove Ice Arena, swallowed by a crowd that came for a legend—while you came for the boy you used to share a rink with. Rafayel skates a flawless program that looks like fire against white ice, and it should feel like closure… except it doesn’t. Not when every clean landing reminds you of the day your own dream ended.
Content warnings: Angst, hurt/no comfort (for now), reunion, confrontation, mentions of a career-ending injury, mentions of physical pain/recovery, misunderstandings, grief-adjacent vibes (loss of a dream/identity), flashbacks/memory triggers of being left behind, abandonment issues, unresolved feelings
Word count: 6.3k
Author's note: I've long since wanted to write some Rafayel angst with pain and misunderstandings and also been obsessed with the idea of him being an Ice skater:3 he just fits the part sooo well, especially if we pair it with pain and suffering<3 pls forgive me raf mains, I love my fishie<3
I will post 2-3 chapters a week~ stay tuned :3 alsooo the tags will change with each chapter, eventually going into E-rated
The cold of the White Dove Ice Arena is different now.
It isn’t the crisp, promising chill of morning practice from your childhood, the one that used to smell of ammonia and rubber matting and your own coffee going slowly cold against the boards. This cold is recycled, pumped through the vents for an audience that paid for the right to be awed. You sit high in the stands, dissolved into a sea of thousands, a former skater nobody is looking at.
Every one of them is here for the same reason.
To witness the legend that is Rafayel.
On the ice, he is a vision of fire and grace. The program is set to something oceanic, all swelling strings and crashing crescendos, and he moves through it with that preternatural fluidity that makes the difficult seem like nothing at all. The quadruple lutz arrives clean, the soaring axel cleaner still, each blade meeting the ice with a soft sigh you can almost feel from here. The crowd answers in a long roll of sound that breaks against the rink walls.
He finishes on a final spin, one arm extended toward the ceiling, chest moving fast under the costume. From this far up you can still catch the charismatic smile he turns on for the cameras as he bows, and you catch it dropping, too, the moment he skates toward the kiss and cry. What’s left is something neutral, almost apathetic.
He isn’t the boy from your shared rink anymore. He is Rafayel now, the international name, the artist on ice, and you are the one he left in his wake.
Later, with a backstage pass you didn’t ask for hanging from your lanyard, you find yourself wandering the underbelly of the arena. From an open door near the end of a long, fluorescent corridor, his voice drifts out. He is on the phone with someone who sounds like a manager, in the middle of a light, dismissive argument about boring sponsor events, about why he should have to attend yet another one this month. You stop just short of the doorway, your heart a trapped bird in your ribs.
“If you’re going to lurk in the hallway, you might as well come in.” His voice carries the same teasing lilt it always did, only drier around the edges. “Unless you’re a particularly lost fan. Security’s gotten lax.”
You push the door open.
He is half-turned away, rummaging through a duffel bag, his purple hair damp at the ends from sweat and no longer on the phone. When he finally glances over and registers who is standing in the doorway, the change is small and instant. The careless, performative charm slips off him in the space of a breath. His blue-pink eyes widen, just for a fraction, before something more guarded settles into the lines of his face.
It’s a look you remember. The one he used to wear when he was pretending something didn’t matter to him. When he was hiding.
“Oh.” The single syllable lands flat in the cold air. “It’s you.”
Your mind goes back without your permission. You are ten, gripping the boards of a colder, smaller rink, watching the coaches fawn over the new boy. Rafayel, they keep whispering. A natural. A once-in-a-generation talent. He is eleven, already moving with an effortless ease you have to strain for, his jumps already higher than yours, his spins faster.
He skates past you, smirking, his voice taking on that singsong cadence he saves for needling you. “Your toe pick is dragging.” Or, in the same lilt, “You’re thinking too hard again. Your face is all scrunched up.”
It was infuriating at first. He made it look like play. For you, every skill was a battle carved out of the ice by will alone.
Back in the dressing room, the silence stretches taut between you, thinned out by all the years. He turns back to his bag and pulls out a simple white shirt, the movement deliberately casual.
“You watched my performance.”
“It’s hard to miss you. You’re everywhere these days.” Your voice comes out steadier than you feel.
He shrugs, a graceful lift of one shoulder. “People like pretty things that move fast. It’s not complicated.” His gaze sharpens then, lands on you and stays. “I heard you stopped skating. After... everything.”
The words, so blunt, land somewhere old and unhealed. The injury isn’t just in your ankle anymore, hasn’t been for a long time. The memory comes for you before you can stop it.
You are fifteen. It is the day before the Junior National Qualifiers, and the rink is empty except for the two of you, both taking final practice sessions. You are attempting a risky triple axel combination, pouring everything you have into it. Rafayel is lounging on the bleachers, supposed to be resting, watching you with interest.
You take off into the first jump, land it shakily, and push through for the second. The landing foot betrays you with a sickening twist and a crack that echoes through the hollow arena, and then you are crumpled on the ice with the pain rushing up your leg in waves.
His skates cut across the ice in an instant. The smugness is gone from his face, replaced by a pale, wide-eyed panic you have never seen on him before.
“Hey. Hey, look at me. Don’t move your leg.” His voice is low, urgent, his hands hovering uselessly above you. The coaches are running. He stays there, a fixed point in your whirling pain. “You’re going to be okay.” He says it more to himself than to you.
The next day he leaves for an international training camp in Europe. You get a cast and a medical retirement letter. Your last image of him is a distant figure being ushered into a car by men in suits, not looking back.
“I did stop.” You say it in the present, the old ache twisting inside you. “My ankle wouldn’t hold enough for me to continue.” You look to the side, biting the inside of your cheek. “Not everyone gets a fairy tale ending.”
Something flickers over his features that could be irritation, could be guilt; you can’t tell which.
“Fairy tales are boring.” His tone returns to that deliberately light, childish petulance. He pulls his shirt on. “And most of them have terrible endings when you read the original text. So.” There’s a pause before he continues. “Are you here to reminisce about the good old days, or to ask why I never called.”
The question hangs in the air, charged with years of unsaid things. The boy who used to hide his concern behind teasing has grown into a man who hides his complications behind a facade of careless artistry. The tension between you is something living, forged in shared childhood dreams and fractured by a single twist on the ice.
“I didn’t come here for an answer.” Your voice is steadier than you expect. “Or for pity.”
It is mostly true. You came to see the myth everyone is entranced by, not the boy you used to spend your days with on the rink.
“I was curious about the spectacle tonight. And you were right. People do like pretty things that move fast.”
A muscle twitches in his jaw. The childish petulance solidifies into something colder, more polished. He leans back against the vanity and folds his arms across his chest, the gesture casual, the effect of a barricade meant to put more space between you.
“So you paid for a ticket and a backstage pass, just for curiosity’s sake.”
He makes it sound like the most foolish thing he has ever heard. You can’t quite name what it is about this version of him standing in front of you after all these years, but your chest lurches painfully.
“It was complimentary.” The defensiveness rises before you can catch it. “From the event sponsor. My company handles their logistics.”
“Ah.” He nods slowly, as if you have just confirmed something for him. “So you’re not in skating at all now. You ferry other people’s dreams around in boxes. How practical.”
The words come soft and slicing. It is not hard to guess he is aiming for somewhere tender, but the why of it is a mystery to you.
The old wound, the one that lives deeper than bone, throbs inside your chest. He is expertly avoiding the heart of it, picking instead at the edges of your present.
You mirror his posture, folding your own arms across your chest, a feeble defense against the cold of the room and the cold of him.
“It’s a living. Not all of us can make a living from being pretty on ice.”
A short, humorless laugh escapes him. “You think that’s all this is?” He pushes off the vanity in one fluid step toward you. The space between you crackles with a sudden, dangerous charge. “You, of all people, should know better. Or did you hit your head on the ice too many times?”
It is a month before your injury. Late-night practice. He is supposed to be gone, but he is still there, leaning on the boards as you drill your step sequence, your blades etching a furious, complicated pattern into the ice. You are so focused you do not notice him watching until you finish, chest heaving from the strain.
“You’re doing it wrong.” His voice comes uncharacteristically quiet.
“I’m doing it exactly as choreographed.” You are panting, irritated.
He shakes his head, a rare, serious look in his heterochromatic eyes. “No. You’re performing the steps. That’s all. You’re not telling the story.”
He skates out, then. Not to show off. To demonstrate a single, simple crossover.
“It’s not a step.” His voice goes low, almost private. “It’s a sigh. See?”
For one fleeting moment, it is not a prodigy talking down to an underdog. It is one artist whispering a secret to another.
The memory makes the present Rafayel feel like a crude imitation of himself.
“I know exactly what it takes.” Your voice is low, defensive. “I also know what it costs. You just left before the bill came due.”
All pretense of lightness vanishes from his face. For a second he looks startlingly young, like the boy who saw you fall and your dreams shatter with you. Then his expression shutters closed.
“You think I didn’t pay?” His voice goes dangerously soft. “You think getting on that plane was free?”
This is the confrontation you had not braced for. This quieter, needle-fine prodding. Both of you are expertly avoiding the real issue, the weeping sore at the center of all of this: the fall, the abandonment, the silence of the years that followed. Instead, you circle it like wolves, jabbing at each other’s choices, using the present to punish the past.
“I have no idea what you paid, Rafayel.” You finally speak his name. It feels foreign on your tongue. “You never said. You just disappeared. The prodigy got his golden ticket while the underdog got a metal plate in her ankle and a pamphlet on career transition. It’s not a complicated story.”
He turns away from you and runs a hand through his damp hair. His reflection in the lighted mirror looks tired, the superstar glamour stripped away in the harsh light of the dressing room.
“You wanted a fairy tale.” He repeats it, his back still to you. “A dramatic, heartfelt goodbye. A promise to write. Life isn’t a program set to music. Sometimes the music just... stops.”
“My music stopped the moment I fell.” The words escape before you can lock them away.
He goes very still. The only sound is the hum of the lights. When he finally speaks, he does not turn around.
“So did mine.”
The confession hangs there, incomprehensible. How could the music have stopped for him? He is the one who never fell. He is the one currently bathing in the roar of adoring crowds.
Before you can demand an explanation, before you can claw past the avoidance and force a real answer out of him, he moves. He picks up his skate bag, the movement decisive.
“I have a sponsor dinner. The kind where I have to be pretty and say boring things.”
He walks to the door, pauses with his hand on the frame, and does not look back.
“The Rafayel you knew at that rink.” His voice goes flat and final. “The one who knew your step sequence was a sigh and not a step. He didn’t get on that plane. He stayed on the ice with you.”
And then he is gone, leaving you alone in the cold room with nothing but the echo of his blades and the ghost of a boy he claims was also left behind.
The confrontation has not ended in a clash, the way you expected. It has ended in a vanishing act. The old wound inside you has not just reopened. It has been freshly salted, aching with a new and confusing kind of loneliness.
The news comes less than twenty-four hours later. A calendar invite from your director, marked high-priority. Project Starlight Gala: Liaison Assignment.
You sit in a sleek, glass-walled conference room while the morning sun glares off the polished table. Around you, the marketing and events teams buzz with frenetic energy. The sponsor is a luxury watch brand known for backing sports artists, and they had been thrilled with the visibility of the arena event. Now they want a larger spectacle. A black-tie gala at the city’s modern art museum, culminating in a private, press-only exhibition skate by their star ambassador.
“It’s a multi-layered operational challenge.” Your director clicks through her presentation. “Museum venue logistics, celebrity handling, press coordination, and the technicalities of installing a temporary ice rink for the exhibition segment. We need a single point of contact. Someone who can interface with the client, the venue...” She pauses, clicks to a full-screen, breathtaking image of Rafayel mid-jump. “...and the talent.”
A junior manager pipes up. “We need someone unflappable. Someone who understands rink logistics and can manage high-profile personalities.”
A beat of silence settles over the room. You keep your eyes on your notebook, tracing the edge of a page, trying your hardest to look calm and professional despite the conversation in the dressing room still ringing in your ears.
Then the client representative speaks. She is sharp-eyed, in a tailored suit. “There’s another factor. At the post-event debrief, Mr. Qi was asked about his comfort level with the expanded campaign. He was... particular, so to say.” She glances down at her tablet. “He said, and I quote: ’If you need someone who doesn’t gawk and actually knows which end of a skate is sharp, use the one from your logistics team. The one who was backstage at my latest show.’” She looks up from her tablet, and your stomach turns when you make eye contact with her. “He then confirmed your first name.”
A cold understanding trickles down your spine. This is not a request for a helping hand or for professional assistance; it is a requisition.
“He requested you by name?” Your director’s tone is a mix of surprise and dawning opportunism. “Well. That’s excellent then. It shows a level of trust. Given your familiarity with the sport itself, and your proven competency, you’re the obvious choice.” Her words land on you like a slap. “You’ll be the dedicated liaison for Project Starlight. All communication with Mr. Qi’s team and the man himself will go through you.”
The walls of the room close in on you. This isn’t curiosity or a chance encounter anymore. It is a contract, a job description, a box drawn around you both with a very expensive pen.
You know, deep down, that he hasn’t done this to be kind, or out of any nostalgia. He has done it with calm, cold precision, clearly wanting to prove something. If you are going to bleed, his actions seem to declare, you are going to do it in a controlled environment. On his terms. Under rink lights and NDAs.
The next forty-eight hours are a blur of site visits, production calls, and fabric swatches. Your first official interaction with his campaign is a three-way call with his manager, Thomas.
“Rafayel has approved the museum’s east pavilion for the ice installation.” Thomas’s voice is clipped and efficient as he fills you in on the essentials. “But he has stipulations about the temperature. It must be precisely minus five point five degrees Celsius, not the standard minus four. And the ice must be white, not clear, for the lighting design. You will coordinate this with the technicians. He will not perform on inferior ice.”
“I’ll ensure the specifications sheet is updated.” Your professional voice is a steady mask you try your hardest to hold.
“Good. He also wants the final run-through to be closed. No sponsors, no publicist. Only essential operational staff. And you.”
The line hums quietly. “Understood.”
“He’s picky and opinionated about his space,” Thomas adds, a note of warning sneaking into his tone. “See that it’s respected.”
The gala night arrives in a whirlwind of tense coordination. You stand in the museum’s vast east pavilion, now transformed: a pristine rectangle of white ice gleams under haunting, aquatic blue lighting, and the surrounding space is filled with murmuring guests in glittering attire, champagne flutes in hand. You are in a tailored black suit, a comms earpiece whispering updates into your ear, the very picture of professionalism.
From the shadowed entrance, he emerges. Not in skating gear, but in a deep aubergine tuxedo that makes his hair look like spilled ink and wine. The crowd parts for him, a whispered current of awe following his path. He is the spectacle, effortlessly playing his part: accepting a compliment with a faint smile, posing for a photo with a sponsor.
The rest of the gala passes in a blur of controlled chaos under your guise. You are conducting an orchestra you didn’t choose, your comms earpiece a constant, tinny stream of demands. Catering is behind schedule at Table Six. The lead photographer needs access to the south balcony. The temperature on the ice has risen by point three degrees.
Through it all, your awareness of him is a second, more persistent thing. You feel his gaze like a physical touch across the crowded room as he gives a bland interview, from the shadows near the ice while you confer with a technician. Each time you look up, your eyes snag on his, already watching. The intensity is not the warm, teasing observation of childhood; it is cooler now, more analytical, as if he is studying a reaction in a petri dish, his petri dish.
You make a point of looking through him, your face a polite mask of focus, before turning sharply back to your tablet. The confusion and hurt from the dressing room have congealed into something simpler, something easier to carry: annoyance. He engineered this entire situation without giving a thought to how you would feel about it. The least he could do is not stare.
Yet your body betrays you in tiny, traitorous ways. A flush of heat crawls up the back of your neck when you feel him approach from behind, before you have even heard his low voice giving a directive to his manager. Your breath hitches when, navigating through a press of guests, the side of his hand brushes against yours.
You jerk your hand away as if burned, muttering a terse “Excuse me,” without meeting his eyes. You catch the faintest, most maddening curve of a smile on his lips before you turn away.
He isn’t the boy you knew, you repeat to yourself like a mantra, checking the ice for the third time. That boy stayed on the ice. This man is a stranger who orders custom ice and uses people as pawns in a corporate game.
But the memory of the boy who saw a sigh in a step sequence is the ghost haunting every interaction now, making the stranger’s proximity all the more disorienting.
Then comes his exhibition skate. As he glides through the haunting blue light on the ice, you force yourself to watch the technical aspects you are supposed to be in charge of, not him. The quality of the edge trails on the white ice. The synchronization of the lighting cues with his movements. When he glides to a stop right in front of you, his breath clouding the cold air between your faces, you do not flinch. You give a single, small, professional nod, as if approving a stage effect.
His eyes narrow, almost imperceptibly. Then he pushes off.
The final obligation of the night is a small, post-gala reception in a velvet-roped section of the museum’s lounge. The air is thick with cigarette smoke and the cloying scent of expensive perfume. You are there to ensure the sponsor’s executives are happy, a role that feels like being a docent in a gallery of your own ruin.
He holds court in the center of a plush sofa, one arm draped along the back, a glass of something clear and untouched in his other hand. He is the picture of indolent charm, listening to a silver-haired man boast about his golf handicap.
You are by the bar, reviewing the load-out timeline with a staff member, when you feel his presence at your shoulder.
"My manager tells me you corrected the Zamboni driver on the water pH levels." His voice goes low, low enough that only you can hear it over the jazz piano. “Still a perfectionist, I see.”
You refuse to turn. “It’s my job to ensure the specifications you demanded are met, Mr. Qi.”
The formal title feels like a weapon in your mouth. Out of the corner of your eye, you see his fingers tighten slightly around his glass.
“My specifications are the only reason you’re here.”
And whose fault is that, you want to snap. Instead, you finally turn to face him. The proximity is a shock. You can see the faint, tired smudges under his eyes, the absolute blandness of his expression that is hiding a world of unspoken things. The scent of him wraps around you.
The tension between you is not a spark. It is a slow, deep ache, a gravitational pull you have to consciously resist. It is infuriating.
“I’m aware.” Your voice goes flat. “Is there an issue with the specifications?”
He holds your gaze for a long, silent moment, searching for something, the girl from the rink perhaps, buried under the professional veneer.
“The ice was acceptable.” His tone is dismissive, but his eyes do not leave yours. “For a temporary installation.”
“Glad it met your exacting standards.” You want to step back, but the bar counter is pressing into your spine. “If that’s all, I need to confirm the secure transport for the timepieces.”
You move to leave. His voice stops you, low and absolute.
“A car is taking me back to the Weston Hotel. Be in it.”
It is not a question. It is a command, delivered in that same calm, cold tone. The entitlement of it, the sheer audacity of the demand, twists your stomach.
“My responsibilities are here until the breakdown is complete.” Every word comes out chilled.
"Your most important responsibility is to me for the duration of this campaign." He finally takes a sip of his drink, eyes watching you over the rim. “And I’m leaving. We have the preliminary meeting for the Asia tour segment at 8am. My hotel. You’ll need the briefing materials." He sets the glass down on the bar, a silent punctuation. "The contract is very clear about access and availability, Miss Liaison. Be in the car in ten minutes."
He turns and melts back into the crowd of admirers, leaving you standing there, your cheeks hot with a mix of fury and a shameful, unwanted thrill at the command. He is boxing you in, using the contract, his fame, the entire apparatus around him as walls. You are trapped in the professional context he designed, and with every passing moment the line between your professional duty and his personal excavation of the past grows thinner, more dangerous, charged with a tension you can no longer ignore.
For ten suspended seconds you consider defiance. Let him fire you. Let him explain to the sponsor why their chosen liaison walked away.
But the part of you that is still the underdog, that has fought for every scrap of respect on and off the ice, locks your knees. You will not give him the satisfaction of seeing you break the contract. You finish your debrief with the site manager, your voice miraculously steady, and walk toward the museum’s private exit with the measured steps of a prisoner going to her cell.
The car is a sleek black sedan, idling in the shadows. The driver holds the door open. Inside, Rafayel is a silhouette against the fogged window, the city lights painting streaks of gold and white across his profile. You slide in, putting as much space between you as the luxurious interior allows.
The door thuds shut, sealing you in a silent, tense capsule. The partition is up. The engine purrs as the car pulls into the late-night traffic.
You stare rigidly ahead. “The briefing materials could have been emailed.”
“They could have.” His voice is a quiet rumble in the dark. He doesn’t look at you. “But I prefer to discuss them in person.”
“It’s after midnight.”
“My schedule is not dictated by the sun.” He finally turns his head. The intermittent streetlights flash across his face, revealing that same unreadable expression. “You’re upset.”
It is not a question. It is a clinical observation. The simplicity of it detonates the professionalism you have been clinging to all night.
“Upset?” You hiss the word, turning to face him fully. “You hijack my job, parade me around like a... a trauma consultant for your spectacle, order me into cars like I’m part of your entourage. You don’t get to diagnose my feelings, Rafayel!”
“Then what are they?” His gaze focuses on yours, utterly. “Annoyance. Hurt.” He leans forward, just an inch, the space suddenly charged and claustrophobic. “Or is it just inconvenient, being this close to the ice again. To me.”
His proximity is a live wire. The oceanic scent of him is overwhelming. Your heart hammers against your ribs, a frantic rhythm that is part fear and part something else, magnetic and terrifying. The tension between you is no longer a subtle ache; it is a sharp, dizzying spike. You want to shove him away and clutch the front of his stupid, perfect tuxedo all at once.
“What do you want from me?” The question spills out, stripped bare of pretense. “A performance review? Congratulations? An apology for not being able to keep up with the prodigy?”
Something raw flashes across his face, gone so fast you might have imagined it.
“I want to know what you see when you look at me now.” His voice drops lower. “The legend. The stranger.” A pause, the word hanging. “Or the boy who failed you.”
The air leaves your lungs. Failed you. He has never named it. Never come close. You were so prepared for more barbs, more cold analysis, that this sudden, stark vulnerability disarms you completely.
You are thirteen, huddled on a metal bench after a brutal fall during a practice run-through. It isn’t a bad injury, just a bruised hip and a shattered pride. Everyone else has left for lunch. Silent tears of frustration track cold lines down your cheeks. A shadow falls over you.
Rafayel stands there, holding two paper cups of hot chocolate from the vending machine. He doesn’t say you’ll get it next time or that jump is too hard for you. He just sits down beside you, hands you a cup, and stares at the empty rink.
“The ice is jealous.” His voice is utterly serious. “It doesn’t like it when we fly. So it grabs our feet.”
It is the first time he has not teased you for falling. The first time he has shared a piece of his private, poetic world with you. You drink the terrible, watery chocolate in a silence that feels like understanding.
The memory is a sucker punch. The man in this car holds none of that boy’s tentative gentleness. And yet, you find yourself swayed still.
“I don’t know who I see,” you whisper, the fight draining out of you, replaced by a profound exhaustion. “The boy I knew wouldn’t have used a contract to force a conversation.”
He leans back, his face disappearing into shadow again. “The boy you knew was too much of a coward to have it.” The words are barely audible. The car slides to a smooth halt under the glittering portico of the Weston Hotel. “My suite. Ten minutes. The tour brief is... extensive.”
He doesn’t wait for you to agree. He exits the car, leaving you wrapped in the lingering warmth of his presence and the echo of his confession. He has called himself a coward. He has named the failure.
The driver looks at you patiently in the rearview mirror. You could tell him to take you home. You could quit in the morning. But the part of you that has to see the hard thing through, the part that is now electrically aware of the man Rafayel has become, nods.
“Ten minutes.” Your voice is not quite your own.
You are no longer trapped only by the contract. You are trapped by a need to know who he is now, what he means, why, after all this time, the wound he reopened feels less like an old injury and more like a nerve waking up after a long sleep.
The ten minutes feel like a lifetime. You sit in the idling car, watching the glittering hotel entrance swallow him whole. Your hands tremble slightly in your lap. To go up is to step into his gilded cage, to continue this agonizing excavation. To leave is to let him win, to confirm you are still the one who runs from the hard things.
You go up.
The suite is what you expected. Sprawling, minimalist, coldly elegant. Floor-to-ceiling windows showcase the city’s skyline like a conquered kingdom. He has discarded his tuxedo jacket and tie. He stands by the window, a glass of water in hand, the expanse of the room feeling vast and suffocatingly small at once.
“Shut the door.” He doesn’t turn. “The draft is annoying.”
You do, the solid click of the latch sounding unnaturally loud in the silence. You stay by the door, an unwilling visitor refusing to commit to entering fully.
“The brief.”
He sets his glass down on a chrome table with a sharp tap. “Forget the brief.”
“You demanded I come here for—”
“I demanded you come here because I’m tired of you looking at me like a stranger.”
He turns, and the controlled facade is fractured. Anger, raw and impatient, lights his eyes.
“You stand there in your perfect suit, with your perfect professionalism, and you look right through me. It’s infuriating.”
The laugh that escapes you is brittle, sharp.
“What do you want me to see, Rafayel? The boy who shared hot chocolate? He’s gone. You made sure I knew that in the dressing room. You told me he stayed on the ice. So who am I looking at? Your press-ready version? The one who uses people as logistical chess pieces?”
He crosses the room in a few quick strides and stops just inside your personal space. The anger simmers, mixed with something more desperate.
“You think you’re the only one who got left behind?” His voice is low. “You think you’re the only one who paid? I was shipped to a different continent. Every move I made, every breath, every relationship was a line item on someone’s balance sheet. The ice was the only thing that was mine, and even that turned into a product." His voice cracks, just once. “And the one person who understood what it meant... I had to leave her there, broken, because my handlers said sentiment was a liability. So don’t lecture me about cost.”
The word her hangs between you, a grenade whose pin had been pulled years ago. The hurt comes in a wave so intense it steals your breath. It isn’t just the abandonment; it is the brutal reminder of it.
“So I was a liability,” you whisper, the words like ash in your mouth.
“No!” He drags a hand through his hair, frustrated. “You were the only real thing. And in that world, real things get broken. So they removed you. They removed me from you. And I was fifteen, and terrified, and I let them.” It sounds, somehow, like a confession of war crimes. “My music didn’t just stop when you fell. It inverted. Every note after that was an echo of that crack.”
The confession is too huge, too terrible. It paints his fame as a gilded prison, his artistry as a ghost. It is asking for a compassion you are too raw to give.
“And that makes it okay?” Your own anger rises to meet his, a shield against the pity threatening to soften you. “You become this... this king of ice, and you think admitting it’s lonely up there is some kind of absolution? You requested me by name to what, Rafayel? To get a front-row seat to your suffering? To force me to feel sorry for you so I’d stop being angry that you left me alone in a hospital?”
“I want you to be angry!” The roar startles in the quiet room. He closes the last of the distance, his hands coming up to grip your arms, not to hurt, but to shake you into seeing him. “Be furious! Hate me! Scream at me! Anything is better than this... this polite, corpse-like tolerance. You used to burn, even when you were falling. Now you’re just... empty.”
You are not empty. You are a nova of feeling, and his hands on you are the catalyst. The anger, the years of hurt, the confounding, unwanted attraction; it all fuses into a white-hot current. You can feel the heat of his palms through your sleeves, the tension in his fingers.
“Let go of me.”
“No.”
The challenge is electric. You shove against his chest. He doesn’t budge. He is solid, immovable. The push brings your bodies flush. You can feel the rapid beat of his heart against your palms, see the storm in his blue-pink eyes up close.
“You don’t get to decide how I grieve.” Your voice trembles with the effort of holding back a scream, or maybe a sob. “You don’t get to poke at the wound you made and complain that the scar isn’t pretty enough for you.”
“It’s not a scar.” His gaze drops to your lips for a heartbeat before snapping back up. “It’s a fault line. And it’s in me, too. We’re standing on it right now. And you’re so busy pretending you don’t feel the quake that you’re going to let us both collapse.”
The truth of it is undeniable. The tension is no longer just emotional or of the past. It is in the scant inches between your mouths, in the shared, too-quick breaths fogging the small space between you, in the way your body is betraying you by not pulling away, by leaning into the heat of him.
You hate him and you ache for him, both at once, both as true as each other.
“What do you want?” The question comes broken.
His answer is not in words. His gaze holds yours, captive. One hand releases your arm and comes up. His thumb brushes, so softly it is agony, over the furious line of your eyebrow, then down to trace the tense corner of your mouth. A painter’s touch, studying texture.
“I want the sigh back,” he whispers, and his voice is ragged. “Not the step. The sigh.”
And there it is, the core of all of this. He is not just asking for the past. He is asking for the lost language between you, the secret understanding that existed only on that old, imperfect ice. He is asking for the part of you that only the boy he used to be ever knew how to find.
You are frozen, caught between the instinct to surrender to that touch and the terror of what it would mean. To give him that is to admit the wound is still open, that the girl who sighed on the ice is still alive somewhere beneath the logistics manager. It is to make all this pain a beginning, not an end.
Before you can speak, before you can move, his hand falls away. He takes a full step back, the space feeling arctic without his heat. The mask of the weary, controlled superstar slides back into place, but it is fissured now, glimpses of raw need showing through.
“The Asia tour.” His voice is once more a neutral, professional instrument. “It starts in Tokyo in three weeks. You’ll receive the packet tomorrow. There will be sixteen events. I’ll need you there.”
It is not a request; it is a statement of inevitability. He is giving you a timeline, a battlefield, and a choice: continue this agonizing dance across continents, or finally walk away for good.
He turns back to the window, dismissing you. “The car will take you home.”
You leave without a word, your body humming with the aftershocks of the quake. The wound is no longer just open. It is pulsating, aligned with the fault line that runs directly to him.
And you have just agreed, by silence, to follow its treacherous path wherever it leads.
if you liked it, you can buy me a coffee here! it would be very appreciated<3: https://ko-fi.com/zaynessbeloved
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There’s something addictive about having Rafayel’s pleasure in the palm of your hand, granting or denying him release at the flick of your thumb over his leaking cock.
You always get him trembling tremendously when you play with him, sweating all over his expensive sateen sheets, but oh he only cares about one thing, really. He really, really needs to cum so badly, but his gorgeous girl won’t let him.
Could he really blame you, though? When you look at him so sweetly, praise him in that honeyed voice that drips sweet-nothings into his ear the same way he’s dripping pre-cum all over your hand and his swollen, aching balls.
You’re just as addicted to control as he is, and you’re just so sexy hovering over his body like his, flicking your wrist just so... it makes him go crazy, go desperate to fall over the edge, chasing his orgasm like a child chasing butterflies on a summer’s sunny field.
Except there’s nothing innocent in his mind at the moment, only sex and the ghost feeling of being inside you clouding his mind. His cock is angry and red, twitching uncontrollably every time your thumb moves down his slit. Moans spill from his mouth unguarded, head thrown back enough to tempt you to latch your lips onto his skin.
One kiss, one soft sucking motion over his pulse and he's just gone... fucking into your hand, eyes rolling back and shutting closed, ropes of cum shooting all over his abs and through your fingers as you stroke him gently until he’s shuddering from oversensitivity.
You only chuckle against his neck, swinging your leg over his hips, instantly making him twitch as you drag your wet folds up his cock, smearing every drop of his cum between them. He moans, dazed as he looks up at you.
You only grin down at him, rubbing your clit over his tip as you purr.
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if you're wondering what plagues lex's mind for the past few days is metalhead!zayne 🎸
sweet, brilliant, top-of-class & soon-to-be-doctor zayne who no one would have thought has such distinct taste in music, who spends his free time (albeit short in between all his studies) in an underground pub, playing bass guitar 🎸 with his band
who dresses so differently, like he's another person entirely, and you almost can't believe it's really him when you have the opportunity to witness this version of him & his secret little hobby. all leather and chains, mostly black-fitted outfits that has your mouth watering at the sight
who knows what's hidden under his black tee? since he is a career-oriented guy, he has to be careful with permanent changes to his body. so of course, when you get lucky enough to get rid of a piece or two of clothing, you get the shock of your lifetime as you take in his lean body, covered in intricate tattoos
tattoos inked strategically to be easily hidden. tattoos who make him so damn sexy, you have to control yourself from dropping to your knees and lick them and all over his body
who knows? maybe he has more secrets to be discovered. if the nipple piercings are anything to go by...
Fucking with Xavier in the dark of your apartment, going rounds upon rounds of making each other cum, sweat and slick connecting your bodies... your lips to his as he chases your mouth to kiss you... your pussy to his cock as he pounds into you relentlessly, a ring of whiteness forming around his shaft, a mix of your own cum and his.
And the one thing that makes your vision swim as he hits another deep spot inside you is how sweetly he talks into your ear, giving you the chance to choose where to spill yet another impending release.
“O-On me, baby...” you moan, scratching down his back.
He groans into your neck, snapping his hips even faster. You're on the tip of an orgasm yourself, and all you need to cum is feel his teeth catch the juncture of your neck in a bite that is sure to bruise.
Your eyes cross as pain and pleasure shoots through you like lightening, body dragging up and down the mattress as Xavier continues to fuck into your spasming cunt while you milk him greedily.
He waits until the last second to pull out, splashing ropes of his translucent, slowing cum over your pussy and lower belly, rubbing the tip of his cock over your sensitive clit and smearing his cum between your folds.
You love to be covered like this, love the feeling of stickiness, the way his load covers your skin like shooting stars. Because, as you learned early in your sexual relationship, not only does Xavier glow from happiness or excitement, but his cock glows too... and with it, his cum as well.
The first time it happened, it had you so excited and horny that you begged for him to face-fuck you and stroke himself as he came all over your face. Then the next time it was your tits, then your ass cheeks and back, and in the end, there was no inch he hasn't covered.
He smears it over your entrance, having you moan as he dips inside briefly, shooting just a little bit in there too. Meanwhile his fingers gathered some from your belly and smear it around your nipple and then over your lips.
The smirk on his face is one of pure lust and possessiveness, but above that, one of pride when you easily part your lips, tongue peeking out, eager for a taste.
You just give him a dazed smile, tongue circling his two fingers clean, body glowing in the darkness of the bedroom where his cum dries slowly on your skin...
...and then his cock slips inside your warmth again, because there is one more place needed to be marked tonight.
