They don’t know how silence can be a comfort and a prison all at once. How their voices twist when they realize I won’t answer the way they expect. The quick flicker of pity, of impatience, before they mask it with politeness. The forced smiles, the awkward pauses. I give them a nod, a practiced smile, and pretend I don’t notice.
My fingers brush my hearing aid. Four years in, and it barely helps now. Everything is still blurred, muffled, like sound wrapped in cotton. Medically, I’m “hard of hearing.” To most people, I’m “Deaf.” To me, I’m… outside. Navigating the world with sign language, silence, and five years of traumatic mutism. Years of isolation that have become a habit.
I hand off a coffee and muffin with the same practiced smile, then bury myself in the tablet, sorting sales.
That’s when I feel it.
The shift.
The air tightens, like the room exhales all at once and forgets to breathe back in. My body notices before my mind catches up—a shiver crawling up my spine, the prickling heat across my skin, my shoulders locking tight.
I look up slowly. He’s here.
My breath stutters.
The man from the alley.
My grip tightens on the tablet. No. No, no, no. For three days, I told myself I wouldn’t see him again, and I imagined it. That he wasn’t real, that the wide eyes, the blood, the violence were just a trick of my exhausted mind.
But he’s real. He’s standing in this café like he belongs here, like he didn’t shatter something in me that night.
The sight of him is wrong, and yet…My chest twists.
He looks at me. Only at me.
And I can’t move. Fight-or-flight surges through me, screaming to run, to hide, to do something. But my body refuses.I’m frozen, caught in his gaze, like he’s pinning me to the floor without even touching me.
A nightmare, or a dream. I can’t decide which.
Those eyes—icy blue, unrelenting. The same ones that locked on mine that night in the alley, searing themselves into me even when I tried to forget. Eyes that watched me as if I were prey.
Cold. Sharp. Impossible to read.
And now, here they are again, pinning me down with terrifying precision.
My hearing aid hums faintly, a reminder of the world’s noise, but it’s drowned out by the pounding of my heartbeat, heavy and uneven in my chest.
He’s taller than I remember. Dark clothes stretch over broad shoulders, the fabric catching the café’s warm light but softening nothing about him. His face looks as though it were carved from something ruthless, inhumanly perfect. Beautiful and dangerous.
Too much. He is too much.
He moves closer, and the distance between us shrinks. The café around me feels foreign now, as if he’s torn me out of my safe orbit. He doesn’t belong here. Neither do I—but for entirely different reasons.
“Hi! What can I get you?” Megan’s cheerful voice cuts through the haze of my spiraling thoughts. She leans forward on the counter, smiling too brightly, too practiced. I don’t need to hear every word to know when she’s trying too hard, flirting with customers the way she always does.
I force myself to glance at her, but it doesn’t matter.
Because I can feel him. Watching me. His stare doesn’t waver, doesn’t slip to her. Not even once.
My breath leaves me in a shaky exhale. My body’s betraying me, reacting in ways I don’t understand. My chest is tight, racing—but not just with fear. Something else coils in me, something I don’t have a name for.
Megan falters, her smile faltering under the weight of his silence. Confusion flickers across her face.
I lift my hands, signing slowly, deliberately: “Don’t worry, Megan. I’ll take care of it.”
She sighs, rolls her eyes, and walks off with a flick of annoyance. She doesn’t understand. She can’t.
And then it’s just us.
