My heart does something stupid. Flips. Actually flips, like I'm sixteen and someone's touched my hand for the first time.
He nuzzles closer. His nose traces along the tendon of my neck—not deliberate, not purposeful, more like a body seeking warmth in its sleep. Instinct. The way a cat turns toward a hand. His lips brush my skin.
And then—
A kiss. So light I almost miss it. His mouth against the side of my neck, just below my jaw. Barely a press. Barely anything. The ghost of a kiss from a boy who's been broken open and stitched back together in the space of a few hours and is reaching for the only safe thing he can find.
Every nerve in my body ignites.
My stomach drops. My pulse hammers against his lips—he has to feel it, has to know what that one tiny point of contact just did to my entire nervous system. Heat floods through me—not rut, not biology, justwant. Pure, devastating, inconvenient want. In a concrete cell. With zip-tied hands. While the person I want is traumatized and exhausted and trusting me with the most vulnerable version of himself.
I don't move. Don't breathe. Don't do anything that might make him pull away.
His lips press again. Slightly longer this time. Deliberate. He knows what he's doing. He's choosing it.
"Bane?" His voice is muffled against my neck. Drowsy. The adrenaline finally burning out, the crash arriving.
"Yeah?"
"Will you lay with me?" A pause. "On the bed?"
I swallow. Hard. "Yeah. Okay."
We get up. It takes effort—his legs are unsteady, my head is swimming from the sedative, and we lean on each other more than either of us would admit. The mattress is thin foam on a bolted frame. Not built for two. We make it work.
Max lies down first. Faces the wall. Curls onto his side, knees drawing up, making himself small the way he does—the way he's always done, I think. The habit of someone who learned early to take up as little space as possible.
I crawl in behind him. Press my chest against his back—carefully, aware of the welts, adjusting until I find the angles that don't make him flinch. My zip-tied arms loop over him, hands settling against his chest. I can feel his heartbeat through the thin scrub top.
Steady now. Slowing.
He pulls my arms tighter. Threads his fingers through mine where they rest against his sternum.
Through the wall—faint, wavering—a girl's voice. Singing. A lullaby, thin and sweet, drifting through six inches of poured concrete like smoke.
"That's Wren," Max murmurs. His voice is going soft at the edges. Dissolving into sleep. "She's nineteen. Whenever we get out of this place, if we do, she’s coming with us." A pause. His thumb strokes across my knuckle. "But I don’t want to think about her right now. Right now–"
He doesn't finish. Doesn't need to. His breathing changes—lengthens, deepens, the rhythm of someone letting go. Surrendering not to captivity but to exhaustion. To safety. To the animal certainty that someone is at his back and the door is between them and the world.
I hold him. My face pressed into his hair. I breathe him in—sweat and skin and the faint ghost of vanilla underneath the institutional soap, underneath the fear, underneath everything they tried to scrub away. It's there. He's there. The real Max, the one who reads with a pen between his teeth and can't pass a stray cat and makes his mother laugh.
The one who makes my heart race so fast I think I might combust.
My nose traces the back of his neck. The skin there is warm, slightly damp, and I breathe him in again—deeper this time, greedy, filling my lungs with him. His scent settles into me like something coming home. Like a key turning in a lock I didn't know was there.
He's asleep. Truly asleep. His body heavy and warm against mine, his fingers still laced through my zip-tied hands, his breathing slow and even and trusting in a way that makes my chest ache.
I don't think I realized it.
The thought arrives quietly. Not a revelation—more like a door opening onto a room that's been furnished for months while I wasn't looking. Everything already in place. Just waiting for me to walk in and see it.
My heart isn't my own.
It hasn't been for a while. Maybe since the library, when he slipped and I caught him and his face was inches from mine and I felt the ground shift under my feet. Maybe since the night I went to his room and said the words I'd been choking on for weeks. Maybe since before that—since the first dinner, when the hurt in his eyes split me open and I spent the rest of the night staring at my ceiling wondering why a stranger's pain felt like my own.
It doesn't matter when. It'shis.
It's belonged to this boy for longer than I care to figure out. And even if he destroys it—even if he hands it back in pieces, even if he decides that what I said at that dinner is the truest thing and everything after was the lie—I'd never want it back.
