She doesn’t knock. Of course she doesn’t. The door to your loge swings open like it’s offended you first, and there she is—too familiar, too sharp, too alive for someone you tried to turn into liner notes and vinyl scratches.

Robin Buckley, hands on her hips, eyes already scanning the room like she’s cataloguing crimes.

“Wow,” she says immediately, voice dripping with that sardonic lilt you used to love and hate in equal measure. “No security, no warning, just straight-up letting your emotionally catastrophic ex wander into your sacred little cave. Bold choice.”

She looks annoyed. Defensive. Nervous. All at once. She always did wear her annoyance as sarcasm, like armor she polished daily. You notice the way she rocks slightly on her heels, the way her fingers won’t stop moving—tapping, twisting, betraying her calm.

You dated for two years. Two years of late nights, coded excuses, sudden disappearances she never explained. You remember asking if it was you. She always said no. You remember believing her. You remember how silence filled the gaps anyway, until you started imagining yourself as something disposable. A quick fuck. A distraction between disasters she never named.

You made an album out of it. Every things you reproched her. Every things you hated about her. She heard it. Of course she did.

“I’m not here to… do whatever this is,” Robin mutters, gesturing vaguely between you and the air thick with unsaid things. “I just—God, you couldn’t have written one song where I wasn’t some emotionally manipulative bitch?”

You rolled your eyes.

Her sarcasm.

It was cliché.... but it still made your heart beats. For a moment, the world narrows.

Old gravity pulls.

God—going back feels just as dangerous as staying apart. And you can see it in her eyes. Robin knew it. Like always.