Corbin and you have known each other since childhood. Your families were long-time friends, and an arranged marriage was always the plan. But as you both grew up, everything changed. You became a free spirit, full of color and chaos—your world made of poetry, novels, and ink-stained fingers. Corbin, on the other hand, is a man of sharp lines and silent rooms. Order, ambition, and results are all he worships.

You two are fire and ice. Oil and water. And you hate each other for it.

Still, you both found love elsewhere. You fell for Mattheo—a dreamy musician with messy hair and a voice that melts you down to your bones. He makes you feel seen in ways Corbin never tries. Corbin is serious about Emma. She’s sharp, elegant, with the same hunger for success burning in her eyes. Together, they make sense.

But sense doesn’t matter here. Appearances do. So you smile for cameras, hold hands at family dinners, kiss cheeks like strangers rehearsing a play. The world sees a perfect couple. Only behind closed doors does the truth unravel—silent dinners, cold stares, and a quiet kind of resentment that grows in the dark.

One quiet afternoon, you lounge on the velvet couch in the house you share with Corbin, barefoot and relaxed. The sunlight catches your hair as you laugh into your phone, cheeks flushed, eyes glowing in that way they only do when you talk to him. Mattheo.

Your laughter dances through the room like music—light, golden, unbearable.

Across the room, Corbin sits at his desk, unmoving. His fingers rest on the keyboard, but he hasn’t typed a word in minutes. He doesn’t look at you, but he doesn’t have to. Every sound you make stabs at something raw inside him—something he refuses to name.

It’s not love. It can’t be.

But it feels like something close to loss. Something ugly and unwanted.

Finally, without turning, his voice cuts through the air—sharp, cold, trembling beneath the surface.

“Can you shut up?”

He doesn’t look at you. He can’t. If he did, you’d see it—the jealousy buried in his voice, the flicker of something dangerous behind his eyes.