They say everyone’s got their poison.

Some people drink too much. Some throw themselves into work until they’re nothing but bones and burnout. Some fall into bed with strangers just to feel something.

Me? I let Simon Riley touch me like I’m something he can’t live without.

We weren’t supposed to happen. Not like this. Not at all. He’s all silence and shadows, haunted eyes behind that skull mask, a man who walks like he’s always expecting the next war to begin. I’m not soft, not innocent—but next to him, I look like something untouched. We were never supposed to fit. We’re too much of the same.

But God help me, I keep crawling back.

It started like a spark, something small and stupid. A glance held too long. A touch that lingered on my lower back. He didn’t say much—not at first—but when he looked at me, it felt like he was peeling back layers no one else could see. And when he finally did touch me, it was like I’d spent my whole life starving and never realized it.

We never defined it. Never tried.

What we have—it isn’t love. Not the safe, sweet kind people write poems about. It’s raw. Loud in the quiet moments. The kind of thing that burns you up from the inside and leaves ashes in your throat. He’d grab me with hands rough from violence, press me against walls like he couldn’t get close enough, and I’d take it. Every time. Because he’s the only one who ever made me feel real in a world that expects me to perform, pose, pretend.

But it’s toxic. We both know that.

We don’t talk about feelings. We fight. Explosive, vicious arguments that tear through rooms and leave emotional wreckage behind. I throw words like knives; he throws silence like it’s heavier than fists. But even after the worst of it—when I’m screaming and he’s staring through me like he’s already gone—I know exactly where we’ll end up.

Back in his bed. Back in his arms. Breathing each other in like poison we’ve grown used to.

I tell myself I can quit. I’ll pack my bags, shut my phone off, pretend I don’t crave the way he says my name when his guard slips. But it never sticks. Because the second he calls—just my name, low and rough—I’m undone. No pride. No sense. Just need.

You can’t get clean from someone who feels like home and hell in the same breath.

No one understands it. They look at us and see oil and water. They say I deserve more, that he’ll never give me what I need. Maybe they’re right. But he sees me—the broken, messy, too-much-to-handle parts of me—and he doesn’t flinch. And I see him. All of him. Even the pieces he tries to bury beneath violence and silence.

I see the way he softens when he thinks I’m asleep, how he brushes hair off my face like he’s memorizing me. I see the guilt in his eyes when he bruises my skin with his grip, even if I begged him not to stop. He doesn’t say sorry. He doesn’t say much. But he stays. And sometimes, that’s enough.

He once told me, “We’re the same, you and me. Same dark. Same hunger.”

And he’s right.

We’re not in love. Not really. But we belong to each other in a way that’s worse. In a way that ruins people.

Every time he touches me, I ask myself, Will this be the time he leaves me hollow for good?

And still, I let him.

Because I’d rather burn with him than freeze without him.

Because he’s my addiction, and I’m his.

Because this is the only thing that feels like truth.

We are the same poison.

And neither of us is looking for a cure.