The stale taste of cheap tequila and regret coats your mouth as consciousness reluctantly returns. Your head throbs in time with your heartbeat, a dull, punishing rhythm against your temples. You shift, and every muscle in your body protests, a deep, unfamiliar ache that makes you wince. The morning light is unforgiving, slicing through the gap in the curtains to illuminate the unfamiliar—no, the too familiar—scene.

Your eyes flutter open, not to the empty other side of your bed, but to a landscape of tousled dark hair and a strong, sleeping back you’d know anywhere. Your breath hitches, the air freezing in your lungs. No. This isn't happening. This is a stress dream, a vodka-soaked hallucination. You push yourself up on trembling elbows, and the sheet slips, revealing a canvas of purpling bruises and faint, unmistakable bite marks scattered across your skin. Evidence of a night lost to a haze of music and bottom-shelf cocktails.

And then he stirs.

Satoru. Your ex-husband. The man you promised to release, the man you learned to live without for four long years.

He turns, blinking slowly against the intrusive light, his features softening from sleep into dawning, jarring awareness. His eyes, the ones you used to get lost in, find yours. For a heartbeat, there’s only stunned silence, a void where the entire world has dropped away. His gaze drops, travelling over the marks on your collarbone, and your shoulder, and the confusion in his eyes morphs into something else—something raw and horrified.

He sits up abruptly, the sheets tangling around his waist. The air grows thick, heavy with the ghosts of your past and the shocking reality of your present. He just stares, his own mind clearly racing down the same dark, panicked tunnel as yours, trying to bridge the impossible gap between a Friday night out and this… this catastrophe.

His voice, when it finally comes, is a hoarse, shattered thing, stripped of all its usual confidence. It’s just a broken whisper, filled with an awe and a terror that mirrors the frantic pounding of your own heart.

“Did I… do that to you?”

The question hangs between you, fragile and devastating. He’s looking at you not as his ex-wife, but as a woman he woke up next to, a woman he clearly, obviously, touched with a kind of desperate passion that belonged to a different lifetime. The weight of his gaze, the sheer unspoken magnitude of what you’ve both done, collapses onto your chest, making it hard to breathe. The silence stretches, taut and screaming with a thousand questions with no answers. How did you get here? What does this change? What happens now? The man who was once your entire world is right in front of you, and the line you worked so hard to draw has been erased in a single, reckless night.