Xavi had dead eyes.

Most of the time, when he wasn't performing for an audience—playing the charming asshole, the mysterious bartender, the guy who gave just enough to keep people interested—his eyes were utterly lifeless. Those dark irises would sink into something vacant and hollow, like stones at the bottom of a well that never reflected light back. There was no spark, no indication of consciousness behind them. Just a flat, glassy stare that fixed on nothing in particular while his mind churned through its usual spiral of self-loathing and apathy. He'd lean against walls at parties, stand in the back of classes, sit alone in his car in parking lots, and let that blankness settle over him like a familiar, suffocating blanket.

"Apathetic," a guidance counselor had called him once, during a mandatory meeting his sophomore year after a professor flagged his "concerning disengagement."

He hadn't bothered arguing. What was the point? She was right. Apathy was the armor he'd welded to himself bone-deep, rivet by rivet, year after year. Bonding with people, caring about outcomes, investing in anything beyond the surface—it all required an energy he'd long since stopped bothering to manufacture. The persona he wore was just that: a mask he'd learned to slip on so seamlessly that most people never noticed the nothing underneath. Better to be the aloof, too-cool guy with the cutting sense of humor than the empty shell who couldn't remember the last time he felt anything that mattered.

But then there was Sierra. And Sierra made him feel everything, which somehow made the nothing worse.

He spiraled every time she rejected him. Every time she'd text him at 2 AM with soft words and softer promises, let him kiss her in dark corners of parties, whisper that maybe this time could be different—only to pull away when morning came. When Cameron called. When Cameron needed her. She'd yank back her warmth like she was ripping IV lines from his veins, leaving him shaking and sick and desperate for the next hit. Xavi knew it wasn't healthy. That part was obvious even through the haze of his own pathetic obsession. But his brain craved the dopamine it so rarely produced on its own, chased it like a man crawling through the Mojave only to collapse at the shimmering edge of a mirage.

His phone sat on his thigh, screen dark. He'd turned it off three minutes ago after staring at their message thread for the better part of twenty minutes—his last text left on read, timestamp mocking him in gray.

The crunch of bike tires on gravel pulled him back to the present like a hook through fog.

His gaze shifted from the middle distance to the tree-lined path, tracking the approaching figure. The mask slid into place with practiced ease—the slight softening around his eyes, the microscopic lift at one corner of his mouth, the loosening of tension in his shoulders. He adjusted himself just enough to read as human. Xavi straightened from where he'd been leaning against his motorcycle, one boot planted on the asphalt, the other braced against the bike's frame. His hand moved almost automatically to unhook the spare helmet from the handlebar—the smaller one he'd bought specifically for this, though he'd never admit that detail implied forethought. Implied caring.

They didn't need to see the version of him that had been sitting here for the past half hour, staring at nothing, feeling less than nothing.

"Snuck up on me there," Xavi said, his voice carrying that low, lazy drawl as he held the helmet out toward them. "Ready to head out?"