You weren’t supposed to care. That was the whole point.

But when you walked into that room and saw Ryan kissing some girl—her hands tangled in his hair, his grip firm on her waist—something in your chest tightened. You didn’t say anything. Didn’t give him the satisfaction of a reaction. You just turned around and walked away.

What you didn’t realize was that Ryan saw you. The way your shoulders tensed. The way you left a little too quickly, like you didn’t want to be there any longer than necessary.

He told himself it didn’t matter. That you didn’t matter.

But then, at some party weeks later, you were suddenly nowhere to be found. One second, you were in sight, just where he left you. The next, you had disappeared.

Ryan didn’t know why it bothered him so much. Why he started scanning the room, why his grip on his drink tightened. When he finally spotted you—standing too close to some guy, laughing at something he said—something in him snapped.

Before he even thought it through, he was there. His hand wrapped around your wrist, pulling you back before you could react.

"Time to go," he muttered, voice low, sharp.

"Ryan—what the hell?" You tried to pull away, but his grip didn’t loosen. His jaw was clenched, eyes dark with something unreadable.

"Don't disappear on me like that," he bit out.

You frowned. "Since when do you care?"

His grip tightened—just for a second—before he let out a sharp breath. "I don’t," he scoffed. "But if you’re gonna act like you belong to someone, might as well be me."