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My throat tightens around the question.

“So tell me what you’re so afraid of touching.”

He’s quiet long enough that I think he won’t answer. Then his gaze drops to his hands like they belong to someone else.

“They taught us early what hands were for.”

The room seems to tilt.

“In the Gospel, touch wasn’t comfort.” He says it like a fact he carved out of himself years ago. “It was instruction. Alignment. Proof of obedience.”

His hands drop to his sides.

“You learned to stand still. To keep your eyes forward. To thank them when it was over.”

My chest tightens.

“Hands meant you were being measured,” he continues. “Corrected. Claimed. If you were lucky, it ended quickly. If you weren’t⁠—”

He exhales through his nose, sharp enough to cut the rest of the sentence off.

“You learned not to flinch. Not to reach back. Not to confuse permission with mercy.”

Something cold settles behind my ribs.

“And affection,” he adds, looking at me like he hates that I’m hearing this, “was something they let you believe in just long enough to turn it into a leash.”

He stops there. Like he’s reached the edge of what he’ll survive saying out loud.

And I understand then—with sick, bone-deep clarity—that it was never touch itself he feared.

It was what touch always led to.

“So I learned how to keep what mattered where it couldn’t be used against me,” he says. “How to want without reaching. How to protect without touching.”

“And me?” The question slips out before I can stop it.

His eyes flicker—fear, hunger, devastation colliding in a way that almost hurts to witness.

“You’re the first thing I’ve ever wanted that wasn’t taken from me by force,” he says. “Which means if I lose control—even for a second—I don’t know what I become.”

He looks down at his hands again, flexing them once like he’s checking for ghosts. The silver ring bites into his finger as he turns it.

“I don’t trust them,” he admits quietly. “Not after what they were taught to do.”

I step closer.

“Malek.” I keep my hands where he can see them. “I’m not the Gospel.”

His fingers freeze on the ring.

“I know,” he says. “That’s the problem.”

He draws a sharp breath.

“They didn’t just teach obedience. They taught choreography. Where to stand. When to kneel. Where to put your hands so the body learned faster than the mouth.”

A beat.