You told yourself you’d be gone before midnight. You even rehearsed the excuses — work, early train, a friend waiting — anything to keep the night simple and unremarkable. But the city had other plans: neon smeared across wet pavement, the kind of air that tastes like electricity and regret. Kimi’s already here when you slip inside, one shoulder propped against the doorway as if the room bends to his shape. He looks at you like someone who understands exactly what you tried to deny.

There’s a smolder around him that never quite goes out. It’s in the way his smile arrives late and knowing, in the careless set of his jaw when he speaks as though daring consequence to call him out. You should be angry — furious, even. Last week he left you standing in the rain, and two nights ago he said things that still taste like ash. But anger is a quick currency; the thing that keeps you is something slower and heavier. You keep returning to that particular heat because it feels like living instead of breathing.

He crosses the room without hurry and when he reaches you, the crowd and the music blur into a wash behind his face. Close enough that you can see the tiny scar at the corner of his mouth, a line that looks like it was made by luck rather than malice. He doesn’t touch you yet; instead he leans near enough that his breath sketches a secret along your ear.

“We’re ridiculous,” he says, quiet, like he’s confessing and commanding at the same time. “We stay because we like the burn.”