It's 12:40 a.m. when the lock turns.

You're not supposed to be here. You tell yourself that every time, usually somewhere between the stairs and his door, usually while you're already using the key he never officially gave you. It was just there one day, on the table beside the unopened mail, like he'd forgotten it. Like he hadn't.

The apartment is dark except for the light over the stove, the only thing in this kitchen he ever seems to use. The record player is silent. The room smells like smoke and old leather and something colder underneath, like the gym came in with him.

He's sitting at the small table with his back to the door. Shoulders too square. Jaw too tight. His right hand rests flat on the wood like he's holding it down so it can't do anything else.

"Ellis."

He doesn't turn. "Thought you had work early."

"I do."

He lets that sit. You let him.

Then you see it, the dark smear across the table, the split skin over his knuckles, the way two of them have already started to swell. Not a mistake. Not a sparring accident. The kind of damage that comes from hitting something that wasn't hitting back.

"Sit," he says quietly. Like he thinks you're going to leave. Like he's already bracing for it.

You don't sit. You go to the sink, because that's what your hands know how to do when your chest doesn't. You find the first aid kit under it, the one he keeps and never uses, still sealed in plastic, and your throat does something stupid and tight. He bought this. He thought about needing it.

You pull the other chair around until your knees are almost touching his. "Give me your hand."

"It's fine."

"Ellis."

A long breath through his nose. The cigarette behind his ear is bent, forgotten. Slowly, like it costs him, he turns his hand over and lays it in yours.

It's heavy. Warm. Scarred in ten places that have nothing to do with tonight. You clean the blood away with the edge of a damp cloth, and he doesn't flinch at the sting. He flinches at the gentleness. Barely. A tendon jumping in his wrist.

"Who was it?" you ask, even though you know.

"Nobody."

"Ellis."

"Don't," he says, and it isn't loud. That's what makes it worse. He says it the way you'd say it to something you were afraid might break. "Please."

Please. You've never heard him say it. Not once. Not when you were underneath him, not when you were leaving, not when you were crying in his hallway at 3 a.m. pretending it was allergies.

So you stop asking. You wrap the gauze across his knuckles, slow, careful, your thumb smoothing the tape where it catches on his skin. The only sounds are the refrigerator hum and the rain starting up against the fire escape, soft and then not soft at all.

You can feel him watching you. You don't look up. If you look up, you'll say something stupid, like you don't have to do this alone, or I'm not going anywhere, and you've learned what those words do to him. They send him running.

"My phone buzzed," he says finally, to the table. "Four times. I let it ring out. Then he sent a text asking for money." A short, humorless breath. "Like he's the one who got left."

His voice cracks on the last word. It's tiny, the kind of fracture you'd miss if you weren't memorizing him.

You tie off the last piece of tape. You don't let go of his hand.

"I hit the bag until it wasn't enough," he says. "Then I kept going. And I thought, I should call her. And then I thought, no. And then I was at the corner of your street, standing there like an idiot."

"You didn't call."

"I came here instead." His eyes lift to yours, dark, almost black in the low light, tired in a way sleep wouldn't fix. "You came anyway."

"Of course I did."

Something in his face gives, just a little, like a door unlatching.

He moves before you can think. His good hand slides into your hair, the bandaged one still trapped in yours, and he kisses you like he's been holding his breath all night. It isn't careful. It's desperate and warm and tastes like smoke and rain and the thing he can't say.