His jeans are torn and painted on, clinging to his hips. His muscle vest is ripped at the shoulder, exposing the line of his collarbone and the edge of one nipple that I love to lick when he’s sprawled beneath me and breathless.
He moves like he knows it. Like he knows exactly what he’s doing to people.
Eyeliner frames his eyes, smudged just enough to look lived-in. He didn’t wear it much when I first met him, but over the past six months, he’s been leaning into it, into the look, into the kind of beauty that makes people stare and forget how to blink.
And fuck if he doesn’t look pretty.
He looks like sin.
The song ends. The crowd screams, voices merging into a wall of sound. Rafe steps back from the mic, chest heaving, sweat glistening on his skin. He takes a sip of water and then leans forward again, resting his forearms on his knees like he’s letting the crowd in on a secret.
“All right,” he says, voice low, playful. “I gotta ask something.”
The audience quiets, instantly obedient. I swallow.
Rafe’s gaze sweeps across them, slow and deliberate. “You ever love someone so much it hurts?”
The scream that follows is deafening.
He laughs softly. “Yeah. Thought so.”
My breath catches.
He shouldn’t be able to do that. He shouldn’t be able to say words into a microphone and make my heart stumble like he’s speaking directly to me.
But he does.
“Sometimes,” Rafe continues, “you’re standing in a room full of people who want pieces of you, and all you can think about is the one person who already owns you.”
My heart stutters, constricting painfully, and I go completely still in the shadows.
The crowd loses their minds, of course. They have no idea. They think it’s poetry. They think it’s romance for sale, packaged beautifully and handed to them in exchange for ticket money and devotion.
They don’t know he’s speaking from bone-deep truth.
Rafe straightens. “This next one… isn’t on the album.”
The audience erupts again.
“But,” he says, grin crooked, eyes bright, “we’ve been playing with it. Seeing how it feels.”
Miles hits the first notes, and something in the air changes. It’s slower than their usual stuff. Less aggressive. Still sharp, but in a way that feels intimate, like a confession hidden inside music.
Rafe grips the mic with both hands and sings.
The first lyric lands like a punch.
“I kissed you in borrowed rooms,
left my fingerprints on your skin,
but the morning always stole you back,
like you’d never been mine to begin.”
I inhale sharply and have to swallow against the pressure there.
The crowd sways, captivated, not quite understanding why it feels like something sacred is happening.
