You weren’t supposed to stay long.

A few weeks—just enough time to pull your life together after the collapse. Your name still sat on a shared lease with a man who’d given you more bruises than answers, and your bank account was a ghost town. Smurf didn’t ask questions when she offered the spare room. She liked people in debt to her. She liked broken things she could count.

You moved in with a duffel bag and a black eye you covered with sunglasses. You told her you were fine. You told yourself that, too.

And then you met Joshua.

He didn’t knock on your door. Just appeared in the kitchen one afternoon while you were peeling paint off the edge of a coffee mug, his voice low and casual: “Didn’t know we were renting to strays now.”

That was the beginning. Not fireworks, not flirting. Just two damaged animals circling.

He was magnetic in a slow, dangerous way. Polite when he wanted to be. Quiet when he didn’t. He’d stare too long and laugh too soft and linger in doorways like a shadow you couldn’t shake. You told yourself he wasn’t your problem. You told yourself you’d had enough of broken men.

Then he handed you a beer one night on the back steps, and you said yes. The next night it was something stronger. Pills. A line. You said no that time—but not the third. Or the fourth. Because it was easier to fall than to heal. Because it felt good to be wanted, even if the wanting came sharp and hollow.

Joshua didn’t ask about your black eye. But he watched you press ice to it. Watched you lie when Craig asked what happened. Watched you pretend you were climbing out of something instead of sinking deeper in.

Soon, he was in your room more than you were alone in it.

The sex was angry. Clawing. Not about love—about ownership. You’d scream at him in the dark, nails down his back, and he’d laugh like pain meant nothing. He’d call you names when he was high—sweetheart, bitch, disaster—and you’d take them all like scripture.

But the worst of it was the mirroring. Every ugly thing in him, you amplified. Every weak spot in you, he dug deeper into.

When he disappeared for days, you trashed the kitchen. When you flirted with a guy at a bar, he slashed the tires on your car. When you cried, he rolled his eyes. When he cried, you mocked him until he threw a glass.

Addiction became the language you both spoke. Highs together. Come-downs apart. Pills to sleep, sex to forget, and silence when neither worked. You’d wake up next to him and not know which of you was more lost.

You told yourself you weren’t in love with him.

But then you started checking his phone when he showered. Started timing how long he was gone. Started hearing his voice in your head when he wasn’t around, asking who you were with, what you were doing, who you smiled at.

Smurf stopped commenting. She saw it all. The spiraling. The lies. The bruises that weren’t from your ex anymore. But she never told you to leave.

One night, after a three-day bender, you sat curled up in the backyard, barefoot in the dirt. Joshua sat beside you, both of you sweating through your clothes, your mouths dry and lips cracked.

“This is hell,” you murmured.

Joshua looked at you for a long time, eyes bloodshot but eerily calm. “No. Hell’s quiet. This is us.”

You started laughing. Hysterical, loud, tears running down your face. And he laughed too, forehead pressed to yours, like the madness was the only thing that made sense anymore.

You weren’t good for each other. You weren’t even tolerable.

You were accelerants.

Every time you tried to leave, he pulled you back. Every time he threatened to walk, you made a scene so ugly it became something to survive. You weren’t a couple. You were a car crash with no brakes, too fascinated with the wreckage to climb out.

But you stayed.

Because sometimes chaos feels safer than silence.

Because pain in someone else’s bed felt more familiar than healing in your own.