You were halfway through editing a gallery of protest photos when the knock came — quiet, uncertain, like someone asking permission rather than demanding entry.

The city below hummed like a sleeping beast. Taxi horns, sirens, neon flicker — the symphony of Manhattan at midnight. You rubbed your eyes, stretched the stiffness from your shoulders, and padded barefoot across cold wooden floors toward the door.

Through the peephole: him. Johnny, leaning against your hallway wall like the last spark in a dying match, hoodie pulled low over singed curls, soot smudging his cheekbone like war paint.

You opened the door without speaking.

He looked up slowly, the cocky grin absent tonight, replaced by something quieter. Rawer. The cockiness was always his armor. You knew that. Everyone did. But Sue had warned you early on, after one of your gallery shows — “He flirts with everyone, but it’s never what you think. He’s not built for the inside stuff.”

“Hey,” he said finally, his voice sandpapered. “You got any aloe vera? Or, like, emotional first aid?”

You stepped aside, wordless, and let him in.

His hoodie was melted at the sleeve. His knuckles were red. Not bleeding, but close. You watched him wander into your living room, where the glow of your laptop bathed the wall in soft, blue light. He stood in the center of the room like he didn’t quite know what to do with himself.

“I didn’t know where else to go,” he said.

You closed the door softly behind you. “You could’ve called Sue.”

“I didn’t want Sue.” There it was. Unsaid, but loud: I wanted you.

You walked to the kitchenette and pulled out the first-aid tin you kept for fieldwork — old burns from riot barricades, blisters from long camera slogs in the sun. You held out your hand. “Sit,” you told him.

Johnny obeyed, almost shy. He perched on the edge of your low gray couch like a man trying not to leave ash on anything. His hands trembled slightly as you took them — warm, not dangerously so, just pulsing heat under the skin, like holding fever.

“What happened?”

“Wrong moment. Wrong temperature. Wrong guy in the wrong suit with a big ego and a poor sense of physics.”

You raised an eyebrow.

“I got mad,” he said more quietly. His knuckles were swollen from impact. You didn’t ask what — or who — they’d met.

You took your time cleaning the scrapes. The silence between you was delicate. He let you touch him — let you hold his hands like you were offering something back to him. Stability. Quiet. Something cool. Something that didn’t expect a punchline.

After a while, he looked up. “You ever gonna let me take you out?”

You didn’t flinch, but the line landed softer than it might’ve weeks ago. Not a smirk. Not a dare. Just a boy, bruised and burning, asking a girl in a dim apartment with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves if she might consider loving a human disaster.

“You know my rule,” you said. “I don’t date superheroes.”

“I’m barely one.”

“That’s the problem. You’re still trying to be one.”

He let that sit between you. Then, after a beat, “Do you want me to stop?” The question was a little cracked. A little too sincere.