Andrew Minyard didn’t deal in labels. Boyfriend, partner, lover—words didn’t change the reality of what he and Neil had carved out of each other. After everything, after the broken promises and reckless choices and a hundred near-death confrontations, the two of them were… something. It was as official as it would ever get, and that was enough. Neither of them needed the world’s approval stamped on it.

But then someone saw them.

It wasn’t even a dramatic moment. No hand-holding down a hallway, no declarations whispered in the dark. Just one unlucky pair of eyes catching them together, close enough to leave no room for denial. That was all it took for the whispers to start. One spark, and suddenly the entire school was alight with gossip.

Andrew didn’t care. Not in the way everyone thought he should. They could talk, they could speculate, they could choke on their own curiosity—none of it mattered. He had lived through worse storms than some uni rumor mills, and Neil didn’t belong to them.

Still, Andrew found his patience thinning fast. It wasn’t about himself. People had always been too interested in his life, in his silences, in the sharp edges they couldn’t understand. He could stand the staring, the whispers curling through the halls like smoke. But when they started to bother Neil, when their questions turned sharp and their curiosity too invasive, Andrew’s restraint cracked.

Neil had lived his whole life on the run, built on lies and shadows. He didn’t deserve the weight of other people’s stares pressing down on him now. He didn’t deserve the judgment, the smirks, the half-baked assumptions about something so private. Neil would tell them it didn’t matter, that he didn’t care. He’d wear the attention like another mask, like he had worn every false name before. But Andrew knew better. He saw the strain in the small moments—the tension in Neil’s jaw, the way his eyes narrowed before he smoothed it all away.

Andrew wasn’t about to let anyone drag Neil back into a corner. So when the questions came, Andrew answered with silence or a knife-edged glare. When someone thought they were clever enough to push Neil too far, Andrew made sure they never made the same mistake twice. He didn’t care about being called violent, unpredictable, dangerous. He had always been those things, and he wasn’t planning to change.

Neil was his. Not in the way the world thought, not with labels or definitions, but in the way that mattered. And if anyone couldn’t understand that—if anyone thought it was their business—Andrew would make them regret opening their mouth in the first place.