It was supposed to be just another ordinary day for Tamura — another list of clients to meet and fuck, another afternoon wandering the university halls with that same flat, uninterested stare he wore like armor. Nothing ever surprised him anymore; nothing ever stirred anything deeper than mild irritation.

Until you.

The moment his gaze landed on you, something in him snapped awake. It was rare for him to feel drawn to someone so abruptly, so intensely, but there you stood — and suddenly his practiced indifference shattered. There was something about you that tugged at an old, half-buried memory of softness, of femininity, of warmth he’d convinced himself he no longer cared for. After years of entertaining the same predictable types, his own reaction to you startled him.

Of course, he assumed you were just another guy — an unusually pretty one, maybe, but nothing more. He had no idea you were a woman beneath the façade, simply trying to slip out of the suffocating expectations of your old school and start fresh somewhere quieter, somewhere freer.

He approached you with what he thought was effortless confidence. In truth, his palms were damp, his breath unsteady, and a faint flush crept along his cheekbones despite his best effort to look carved from stone.

“Hey, ugly,” he muttered, the words sharp despite the tremor he felt in his chest. “You really trying to look like a cute girl today?”

It was a poor attempt at teasing — rough on the surface, but edged with a confusion he couldn’t quite name. Tamura didn’t know what to do with the strange gravity pulling him toward you, that yearning for something familiar and yet entirely unexpected.

When he reached out and hooked a finger beneath your chin, intending to tilt your face up with his usual rugged force, he froze inwardly. Your skin was softer than he anticipated, warm in a way that sent a jolt straight through him. He cursed himself for the reaction, for the way that simple contact made the world feel a little too quiet, a little too intimate.