We kissed under flickering lights. Hands on skin, mouths urgent with the ache of forgetting. I didn’t want her. I didn’t even know her name. But I let myself get lost in her anyway. Because for a moment—I wasn’t Theo’s secret. I wasn’t a disappointment. I wasn’t the kid no one stayed for.
I was just Sinclair. Breathing. Dancing. Choosing myself. I was free.
Still, somewhere in the blur of bodies, I felt it—that sensation of being watched. The unseen weight of eyes tracking my every move. The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. It hadnothing to do with the hands slowly moving up my abs to my chest or the hips wrapped around my thigh.
I turned, scanning the crowd for… something. But there was nothing. No one stood out. There was no arrow above a head pointing them out. Just shadows and strangers moving in the darkness. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe it washim.
But I wasn’t here to chase ghosts tonight. I let her pull me deeper into the beat. Sweat slicked our skin as I gasped against her mouth. Hands cupping her firm ass as I moved us through the crowd into a shadowed corner.
“You’re so hot,” she moaned against my mouth, fingers clawing at the buttons of my shirt like they were the only things standing between her and salvation. “Jesus—h—Christ.”
She spun me around, dropping to her knees like a prayer, using my body as cover while her back hit the club wall. Her fingers were already at my fly, working with frantic precision. I barely registered my zipper coming down before I felt her mouth wrap around me, hot and slick and eager.
One arm braced against the concrete while my other hand found its way into her dyed-black-and-blue hair, gripping tight. “That’s it,” I breathed. The words came out like muscle memory—automatic, empty.
Her tongue flicked the tip, teasing me, licking at the slit like she knew what she was doing. And maybe she did. Maybe on another night, with another version of me, this would’ve worked.
But not tonight.
Not when the only thing keeping me upright was a ghost in my bones.
Normally I’d be hard—aching, desperate, ready to bury myself so deep, nothing could drag me back to the surface. But now my body felt like a stranger’s. Detached. Like it belonged to someone else entirely.
I was a goddamn expert in this—a connoisseur of vice, fluent in the language of lust and power and pleasure. I knew how to take, how to give, how to lose myself in the moment until nothing existed but skin and sweat.
But tonight, every moan, every lick, every wet sound echoing off the surrounding bricks fell flat.
Because it wasn’t him.
I let my head fall back on my shoulders, eyes unfocused, searching the dark room for something—anything—that would make this feel like more than a hollow performance.
And then he came to me. Not by name. Not by will. He just rose out of the rot in my chest, uninvited but always welcome. I pulled the memory of his mouth from deep inside me, the way it curled when he smiled that secret smile meant only for me. The way his breath hitched when I touched his skin.
The way he looked at me like I wasn’t broken.
My hand tightened in her hair, but in my mind, it was Theo’s strands in my grip, dark and soft, thick between my fingers as he looked up at me with those eyes—full of defiance, full of hunger, full of fucking everything I tried to forget.
A moan slipped out of me and it felt wrong. Too loud. Too fake. She smiled around my length, thinking it was for her. It wasn’t.
Every time I tried to chase pleasure into oblivion, Theo was the one waiting at the end of it, sitting in my bloodstream like a curse. I used her mouth like a weapon, like a shield, trying to smother the ache. But it didn’t work. It never fucking worked.
I saw his smirk when he teased me. I saw his jaw clenched in fury when we fought. I saw the tears on his cheek when I walked away. The hurt in his voice when he didn’t believe me.
My pulse stuttered. My cock finally twitched with the memory of his voice whispering my name like a sin and a salvation all at once.
“Fuck,” I muttered under my breath, eyes shutting tight as my body started to catch up to the fantasy I was feeding it.
She moaned around me like she thought she was the reason for it. I let her. But inside, I was unraveling.
This was a punishment. A performance. A ritual I’d done too many times to count, chasing numbness with every orgasm, chasing a void with someone else’s hands. But there was no peace waiting for me at the end of this.
There was only Theo. There was always Theo. And I hated him for it.
I hated that he lived beneath my skin, that I couldn’t breathe without tasting him, that each body I touched left me emptier than the last because none of them were his.
I looked down at her, face smeared with spit and hunger and something like victory. I offered her a smile I didn’t feel, fingers stroking her cheek in a way that probably passed for tenderness.
But I was somewhere else.
