Eric is, in the most precise literary sense, a catastrophe. Not the operatic kind — not floods or fire — but the quieter, more insidious sort: six-foot-something, vein-handed, with brown eyes carrying an unfair amount of gold, and he knows it, and does absolutely nothing responsible with that information.

You love him. Despise him. Want to scream at him and crawl into his hoodie and never surface. All of it at once, all of it always, which is the particular madness of him.

Tonight was nuclear.

It unraveled the way things always unravel with Eric — not gradually but all at once, the way a seam gives catastrophically. You'd been screaming in the apartment, the walls absorbing your fury like a confession, mascara tracking dark lines down your face. He'd stood across from you with that maddening stillness — tall, broader than strictly necessary, dark hair pushed back carelessly, the kind of carelessly that requires no effort and costs you everything — tattoos curling from his hoodie like unfinished sentences. A date on his forearm. Something in Latin on his collarbone you'd traced with your finger at two in the morning and never asked about. His jaw flexed once. His voice, when it came, was low and unhurried and infuriating.

"And you're insane."

You stormed out like a woman with a point to prove. And two seconds later — of course — him. Following.

The hallway had no mercy.

The elevator announced itself with a cheerful, indifferent ding. There he was, already inside, one shoulder against the wall like structural support, hoodie half-zipped over a shirt he'd owned for six years, fraying at the collar, gray going pale. That jaw. The specific arrangement of him — the height, the hands, the chest tattoos peeking out like he knew exactly what they did to you, which he did, which was the problem — that your brain, against every reasonable protest, continued to file under devastating.

You stepped in. The doors closed behind you like a verdict.

You stared at the glowing numbers with the focus of someone defusing something. His arm brushed yours and your whole body glitched — short-circuited, rerouted, betrayed. You hate him. You want him. You hate that you want him, which is a third, distinct problem.

"You're quiet," he murmured. "Not like you."

"Don't talk to me."

"You're thinking about me."

You rolled your eyes. Your pulse rolled over completely.

His hand grazed your hip — light, casual, the texture of an accident. Not an accident. Your breath caught anyway and the argument was still in your chest, unresolved, alive, and somehow that only made it worse, made the wanting worse, the way fury and desire share the same square footage and keep leaving each other's dishes in the sink.

You should have moved. You didn't.

He was behind you now, chest brushing your back, warm, solid, that cologne — dark and familiar, a smell attached to a memory attached to a feeling you hadn't finished having yet — his breath ghosting your ear. "Still mad?"

"Yes," you whispered. "Obviously."

He chuckled, low and dark. "You don't sound mad."

His mouth found your neck and you gasped like the air had been reassigned. Your brain threw up its hands. Because you remembered suddenly, involuntarily: the midnight pizza arguments that became laughter before either of you agreed to it; the Tuesday he'd carried you through a flooded street complaining dramatically into your hair — these are not boots, these are decorative sculpture — while doing it anyway, without hesitation, like it was never a question. The way he caught your shoe mid-air once with the reflexes of a man who'd been paying attention longer than he let on.

His hand slid lower, fingers pressing into your thigh just enough to make your knees register a formal complaint. You bit back a sound, pressing against the elevator wall, heat flooding through you in waves.

"You're insane," you breathed.

"And you're addicted," he growled, lips dragging over your jaw with intention.