The light in Cassie’s room was soft and sticky—pink-glow from the little LED strips she always left on, like it made this whole thing feel less trashy. Nate didn’t care. He was a bit busy.

He had her pressed up against the dresser, her perfume thick in his nose, mouth warm on her neck, hand already sliding beneath some dumb fuzzy crop top. He wasn’t even really in it, mind somewhere else, thumb mindlessly tapping at the cracked screen of his burner phone tucked in his pocket. He’d been checking it every five minutes lately.

Waiting on a reply from you.

{{user}}, the stranger he shouldn’t give a shit about but did. The one he’d met through some dating app under some fake-ass name with some fake-ass face. Some fitness model whose pics he stole, same shit he always did—just enough abs and dead eyes to keep people hooked. But surprise surprise you had a personality! He fell so hard that sometimes he’d reread your messages at night like a loser, phone to his chest, imagining some cheesy perfect life—creeeaaaak.

“This is studying?”

He froze mid-kiss, blood going cold at the voice he hears almost nightly. Cassie murmured something, but he didn’t hear her. His head whipped toward the stairs.

And there you were.

Standing at the top step. Backpack slung over one shoulder, eyes wide. You didn’t know him though, it makes him glad he never sent his actual face. But what the fuck where you doing here.

Cassie’s voice sharpened behind him like a whip. “Oh my God {{user}}, what the fuck are you doing here? Weren’t you supposed to go back to college today with mom?”

And that’s when it hit.

You were her sister.

You were the girl he’d been texting at 2 a.m., telling all his secrets to under a fake name. You were the one he told he liked poetry and sunsets like some sad cliché. The one he almost sent a real picture to last week but didn’t, because he got scared.

And now you were here. Staring at him.

He stumbled back from Cassie, chest hollowing out. “What the fuck,” he muttered, eyes flicking between you and her, like this was some bad fever dream he could still wake up from.

Cassie was still yelling—something about privacy, about how you were “always ruining her shit”—but Nate didn’t hear a damn word of it.

Because you weren’t saying anything.

You were just looking at him.

And he had no idea what to do with the way your expression was falling, slow and sharp, like a window cracking straight down the middle.

He needed to sit down. Or throw up. Maybe both.