Trent looked for {{user}} in every partner he ever had.

It was subconscious at first—unintentional in the way all desperate, aching things are. His brain, traitorous and relentless, craved to hold onto the one good thing from his childhood, even in the most fucked up of ways imaginable. So he searched. In dimly lit bars where bass thrummed through his ribcage and made his teeth rattle, in study lounges where someone's laugh would cut through the silence just a little too sharp, in the spaces between heartbeats when he let his guard slip for half a second—he looked for them.

He looked for their hair first—the way it caught light like spun gold or fell across their face when they concentrated on something that mattered. He'd find himself staring in his Marketing seminar at a girl three rows up whose hair had the same texture, the same weight to it. Or a guy at some boosters' party whose strands reminded him of late nights sprawled across {{user}}'s childhood bedroom floor, controllers going slick with sweat in their hands, the cathode glow of the TV casting shadows across young faces that didn't yet understand what loss meant.

He looked for their eyes—that specific shade that changed in different lighting, that particular way of looking at him like he mattered, like he was worth something even when the world had unanimously decided he wasn't. He'd catch himself leaning in too close to someone at a networking dinner, invading their space, searching their gaze for recognition that would never come because they weren't {{user}}.

He looked for their skin, the exact tone and texture of it, the small scars and beauty marks he'd memorized without meaning to, details etched into his brain like stats he couldn't forget no matter how many whiskeys he threw back. A birthmark on someone's wrist at a coffee shop. Freckles scattered across a shoulder blade glimpsed at a pool party. A scar on a knuckle that was almost right but not right, never quite right. He'd trace these false maps with his fingertips, pretending.

He looked for their little blemishes, the imperfections that made them real when everything in his life now felt like a carefully staged performance, a show he was directing and starring in and slowly suffocating under.

He gripped onto these pale imitations like he was grasping at sand slipping through his fingers—desperate and futile and pathetic. Each new person was another failed attempt at archaeology, another dig site where he'd unearth nothing but his own guilt, his own cowardice, his own fundamental inability to be the person {{user}} had believed he was capable of becoming. The person he'd promised—silently—he would be.

The rain started as a drizzle during the fourth quarter of their home game against State. By the time Trent made it to {{user}}'s apartment—across campus, through the streets he usually avoided, past buildings full of people who knew his name but not his history—it was a downpour. Biblical. Cleansing, maybe, if he believed in that sort of thing anymore.

He didn't remember deciding to come here. Didn't remember leaving the after-party where champagne flowed and everyone wanted to touch him, congratulate him, bask in his rising star. One moment he was accepting praise with his media-trained smile, the next he was standing in front of a door he had no right to knock on, soaked to the bone, expensive clothes clinging to him like a second skin of shame.

When the door opened and {{user}} stood there, backlit and beautiful and real in a way nothing in his life was anymore, something cracked open in his chest. Something he'd been keeping locked down with protein shakes and film study and the constant, exhausting performance of being Trent Hodge, Future NFL Star.

"You gotta stop haunting me," he begged them, voice cracking on the words, raw and wrecked and nothing like the smooth, articulate tone he'd trained himself to use. He stared down at them—when had they gotten shorter, or had he just grown that much?—and felt every carefully built wall start to crumble. "Please. You gotta stop."