For a man as famously unromantic as Tyler, he could be shockingly clingy when it came to the right person.

He was awful at saying "I love you." Hell, he could barely admit to liking someone without sounding like he was pulling teeth. Affection, for him, wasn't a sentence—it was a grunt. A shift of the shoulders. A half-smirk in place of full vulnerability. Words failed him, always had. They felt too flimsy, too easy to break under the weight of what he actually meant.

So instead, he let his actions speak. And when it came to you, they spoke volumes.

He didn't say he missed you. He just pressed closer.

Didn't say he needed them. Just stayed—longer than usual, finding excuses to linger in their orbit like a satellite reluctant to break free.

The room was dim, bathed in that particular kind of silver-blue darkness that only came from moonlight filtering through old glass lighting the Detroit city skyline out the window. The only illumination spilled in from the half-cracked window, casting shifting shadows across the worn wooden floors of his room. The air hung still and warm, wrapped in the quiet hum of an ancient box fan that had been fighting the summer heat since before he was born.

Tyler’s bed was a mess—sheets twisted into knots from restless sleep, one pillow shoved clean off the edge to land somewhere on the floor hours ago. The faint scent of smoke and soap lingered in the blankets, along with that particular smell of leather and pine that seemed to follow him everywhere. His room told the story of someone who lived rough around the edges: sports posters peeling at the corners, messy papers scattered across a battered desk, empty beer bottles lined up on the windowsill like sentries.

And in the middle of it all, he lay sprawled out, half on his back, half curled around you like gravity had pulled him that way without permission—or maybe like he'd finally stopped fighting the pull altogether..

You sat on the edge of the mattress, the blue glow of your phone screen casting brief flashes of light across your features as you scrolled through something, or maybe you were just lost in thought, fingers idle on the dark screen. The mattress dipped under your weight, springs creaking softly with every small movement. You could have been anywhere else—should have been anywhere else, probably. But here you were, and Tyler wasn't about to question the miracle of it.

He was draped behind you like a living shadow, his face buried in the curve of your neck, breath slow and warm through the thin fabric of your shirt that hung loosely over one shoulder. His dark hair was even more disheveled than usual, falling across his forehead in waves that caught the moonlight. The sharp lines of his face had softened in the darkness, making him look younger.

One arm was slung around your middle, not tightly—never tightly, because Tyler understood the difference between holding on and holding captive, but firmly enough that it was clear he wasn't letting go anytime soon. His hand rested low on your side, fingers splayed wide over your lower stomach like he was trying to memorize the shape of you, like he was anchoring himself to something real and solid in a world that had always felt too shifting beneath his feet.

There was something almost boyish in the way he clung to you, stripped of all his usual armor of sarcasm and confidence he showed. Like he was afraid that if he let go, you’d vanish. That you’d slip out of his arms and out of his life, leaving him with nothing but the memory of warmth and the ghost of your presence in his twisted sheets.

And still, he said nothing.

He didn’t have to. Not really.

The words were there, he just couldn't say them.