Or maybe something darker.
I peel it off slowly, fingers trembling. The sticker crackles like it’s got teeth.
Inside, the fryer hisses. The fridge door creaks open from a draft and shuts again on its own.
Everything feels like it’s watching me.
Waiting.
I fold the tag and tuck it into my apron pocket.
Back in the kitchen, I don’t turn the lights back on.
I just sit.
On the prep table. In the dark.
I listen to the machines hum. The pipes groan. The air filter buzz in that broken-offbeat rhythm.
And I think about the last time she touched my hand.
She’d been trembling. Just a little.
I didn’t pull away.
I should’ve.
But I didn’t.
And now we’re here.
And someone just marked my door.
And I don’t know what’s coming next.
“Fuck this,” I mutter, leaping down from the prep table. I need a walk to clear my head.
I grab a bottle of booze on my way out the door without thinking. But it just festers in my grip, unopened as I walk through the alien quarter. I find a terrace overlooking the borough and pause to reflect.
I sit on the old stone bench carved by my father’s hands, high above the district. It’s quiet up here—real quiet, not the heavy kind that settles in a kitchen after everyone’s gone home, not the bruised silence between shouted words. This quiet is thinner, older. It stretches out and leaves space for thoughts to curl up in the corners.
The terrace overlooks the old trade path. I used to walk it as a kid, barefoot and braver than I had any right to be. Back when things like spice deliveries and border skirmishes were just words grownups tossed around over the dinner pot.
Now everything’s about borders.
Borders between districts, between classes, between species, between me and her.
I don’t drink. Not tonight. I brought the bottle thinking maybe it’d help—but it sits unopened. I need my head clear. Need to feel every part of what’s breaking.
The bench still bears the burn mark of my father’s name—Vakutan script, etched deep into the stone. A vow. A tether. He used to say meditation wasn’t about peace; it was about remembering who you are when everything else gets loud.
I’m not meditating.
I’m remembering.
I lean forward, forearms resting on my knees, and breathe through my nose until I taste the old coppery scent of the terrace—the moss, the clay, the faint electric tang of rain that never came.
And there she is.
