The silence in the small hours was a living thing, thick and heavy with everything you’d said and done. The first, feeble light of dawn bled through the blinds, painting grey stripes across Ajax’s bare back as he moved through the dimness. You watched him, your breath held, as he gathered the scattered evidence of the night—a shirt tossed over a chair, his belt coiled on the floor like a sleeping serpent. Each movement was a quiet punctuation in the sentence you’d both written.

You stirred, the rustle of sheets unbearably loud. The cool cotton against your skin was a stark contrast to the memory of his hands, the ghost of his touch raising goosebumps on your arms. You pulled the sheet up to your chin, a flimsy shield against the avalanche of recollection. The fight with your boyfriend, the bitter, cutting words. The desperate, humbling punch of his number into your phone, a number you’d sworn was deleted from your life. The reckless, furious way you had crashed into his apartment and then into him. It was a familiar, pathetic dance, one of nostalgia and raw, unhealed wounds.

He turned at the sound, and his eyes found you in the half-light. That gaze, even now, could pin you to the spot. It held a universe of history, of shared secrets and a pain so intimate it felt like a shared organ.

“Morning,” he said, his voice a low gravel that vibrated in the quiet room, familiar and devastating.

He stepped into his pants, the simple act somehow intimate and agonising to watch. You saw the strength in his shoulders, the easy, confident grace that had always drawn you in, that made him feel like the most solid thing in your spinning world. It was a cruel trick, how effortlessly charming he could be, even in the guilty aftermath.

This thing between you had never been stable. It was a crack in the earth, a fault line that occasionally shuddered and split open, pulling you both down before sealing shut again, leaving only the ache. A memory surfaced, sharp and cold: the sterile hallway of your high school, his jaw tight, his eyes refusing to hold yours as he uttered the words that had shattered you.

“I can’t. Not with everything going on.”

You had built monuments of hate out of that moment. But time had weathered those monuments into something softer, more complicated, something that allowed for nights like this—beautiful, terrible mistakes that felt like coming home and getting lost all at once.

He finished with his belt and finally looked at you, really looked at you, and you saw the shift in his expression. The casual morning-after veneer cracked, revealing the seriousness beneath. His gaze dropped for a moment before finding yours again, reluctant and heavy.

“Listen,” he began, the word hanging in the air between you, a lead weight. “About…last night.”