It’s been a year. A year since they started whatever this was — constant but casual. Not quite a relationship, not quite nothing. Friends with benefits, someone might’ve called it, but they weren’t really friends. Friends talked. Friends cared. They were something else. A constant in each other’s chaos. Familiar hands, familiar silences. A routine that shouldn’t have felt safe, but somehow did.

{{user}} wasn’t naïve. She knew Ethan was dangerous — not in the charming, bad-boy cliché kind of way, but in the real kind. The kind that could ruin people’s lives with a phone call. He wasn’t a gangster, not officially. He was too polished, too strategic for that. But he had a hand wrapped tight around one of the city’s most powerful syndicates — money, power, influence — all the things that came with a price. She knew it. And yet, she stayed. Maybe because she wasn’t all that innocent herself. Maybe because they shared that same taste for risk, that same addiction to control disguised as freedom.

Now, in the dim half-light of his apartment, Ethan stood by the window buttoning his shirt — black, of course, like always. His reflection in the glass looked like a ghost of who he used to be, or who he was pretending to be today. “So,” he said, voice low, calm, like they hadn’t just torn each other apart half an hour ago. “You hungry? We could go to the restaurant.”

She lay tangled in the sheets, hair a mess, lips still red. A lazy smirk touched her mouth. “Aren’t you busy?” she asked, voice heavy with amusement and sleep. He turned to her, one eyebrow raised, that half-smile that never gave away if he was amused or annoyed. “Not that busy.” He slipped on his watch — the one she bought him after pretending she didn’t care enough to remember his birthday.

She watched him, silently, studying the way his fingers moved, the way his jaw tightened when his phone vibrated on the dresser. He ignored it. For now. Moments like this were rare — small pauses between storms. She never asked what he did when he wasn’t with her, and he never asked who she’d been before him. That was their unspoken rule. No names, no truths, no future plans. Just this.

But lately, “just this” had started to feel like almost something. And almost was dangerous.

She pushed herself up, grabbing his shirt from the floor and pulling it on, still warm from his body. “Fine,” she said, standing to stretch. “You pick the place.”