My eyes open slowly.
The lights flash blue across us both. I turn just enough to look at him. Those icy eyes lock on mine. He looks like the ocean before a storm. Blue and endless and dangerous.
I’m lying to him.
I’m betraying him.
Icravehim.
Any truth can drown me first.
His hand slides up my spine, pulling me flush against him.
Blue.
I’m covered in it.
And I don’t know if I want to swim or sink.
***
He’s dying his hair again.
The shower is running too hot, the kind of heat that turns the whole bathroom into a fogged-up, breathing thing. I pause in the doorway and watch him through the haze.
Shirtless. Jeans low on his hips like he couldn’t be bothered to finish getting dressed before deciding he needed to change himself.
His head is bent under the water, hair plastered to his skull, dark ink washing out and spiraling toward the drain.
It looks like he’s rinsing off a version of himself.
“Are you dying it black?” I ask.
No. Purple.”
“Purple?”
The water shuts off. He straightens, wipes his face with one hand, and the sound of it—water slapping tile, his breathing, the steady rush of steam, fills the room in the space where his words don’t.
He turns his head slightly, just enough to look at me through wet lashes.
“Purple,” he says.
Water slides down his torso in clean lines. He grabs a towel, drags it once over his hair, not bothering to dry it properly.
He moves like he owns the space between us. My eyes linger.
There’s a box on the counter, dye already opened, tube squeezed, the cap tossed like he didn’t care where it landed.
No gloves in sight.
“You’re not using gloves?” I ask.
His mouth twitches like he might laugh, but it doesn’t turn into anything warm. “Why would I?”
“Because your hands are going to be stained.”
He looks down at his fingers, then up at me. Flat. Unbothered.
