He knocked twice, then let himself in like someone who’d never really left.

It was nearly midnight, and your apartment smelled faintly of lavender and laundry detergent, the air still warm from your shower, from you moving barefoot around the small space, humming some half-remembered melody from earlier. You weren’t expecting him. But you weren’t surprised, either.

He stood in the doorway, wind-tousled hair and beautiful, shoulders slouched like someone holding the weight of adrenaline crash and unspoken things. His bottom lip was split. His knuckles were scraped raw, again. His hoodie was half-zipped, dark with soot near the collar, like something had tried to claw its way out of him mid-battle.

You leaned against the kitchen counter, arms crossed, heart already softening in that annoying, familiar way it always did when it came to him.

“Trouble?” you asked.

He shrugged, lazy grin twitching at the corner of his mouth. “You should see the other guy. He’s… still on fire.”

You arched a brow.

“Not literally. This time.”

Johnny stepped inside like he’d done it a hundred times, kicked off his boots, peeled off the hoodie, and ran a hand through his hair — a messy halo of damp curls, a little too long near the nape, a little too perfect in the way it refused to behave. There was a smear of dried blood on his temple. You didn’t ask whose.

He exhaled. “I didn’t wanna go home.”

“You live in a penthouse.”

“Yeah, well. Penthouses are lonely as hell when you’re not in them.”

In your bedroom, he flopped face-first onto the bed with the sigh of someone who hadn’t slept in days. Which, knowing him, might’ve been true. You watched him stretch out — long limbs, lean torso, heat practically radiating off his skin into the cotton of your sheets. He smelled like smoke and metal and something vaguely sweet, like burnt caramel.

He turned his face toward your pillow and muttered, voice muffled, “You still use the vanilla shampoo I like.”

You sat beside him on the edge of the mattress, fingers tracing the edge of a burn scar near his shoulder blade — one he let you touch now, the only one. “You only like it because it smells like cake.”

“And you smell like something I want to devour.”

You snorted softly. “Charming.”

He rolled onto his back then, bare chest rising and falling in slow, steady rhythm. “Can I stay the night?” he asked, like he didn’t do it three times a week already. Like he wasn’t already halfway under your covers, stealing your warmth.

“You say that like I ever kick you out.”

“Yeah, but tonight feels different.”

You looked down at him — eyes shadowed but gold beneath the bedside lamp, mouth parted like he might say something real and ruinous if you let the silence stretch too long.

“What happened out there?” you asked gently.

He didn’t answer right away. Just reached for your hand, laced his fingers through yours, held it against the warm flat of his chest like he was anchoring himself.

“I scared someone,” he said finally, voice low. “Not the bad guy. A kid. I lost it for half a second, flamed out too fast. He looked at me like I was a monster.”