The apartment smells like burnt toast and melted cheese. Comfort food. Cheap. Reliable. The kind of thing you eat when you’ve spent years doing everything alone, cleaning up your own mess, counting calories in coffee cups because no one else does. I notice it all, of course. Every smell, every sound. My brain refuses to let me ignore it.

{{user}}’s in the kitchen. Sleeves rolled. Fingers precise. Nuggets hitting the plate like clockwork. She’s a machine disguised as a human. I know this rhythm. I’ve memorized it. I’ve followed it for years, like a patient shadow. Sixteen when she had him. Sixteen, and she became the axis of her own world. And now I orbit it like a goddamn satellite.

Down the hall, Manny’s room is chaos incarnate. Screams, laughter, the scraping of chairs against carpet—sounds like a jazz band, dissonant, messy. Medical school stress leaking out of a kid who doesn’t know he’s already broken. He’s safe there. He doesn’t need to notice me.

She opens the fridge, takes two cans. Pauses. Adds a third.

That’s when my chest tightens and my brain clicks into hyper-focus. She did that for me. Of course she did. How long before I stop pretending I’m just part of the background? Not yet. Not tonight.

She balances the plates. Walks down the hall. Knocks once—ritualistic, predictable. Pushes the door open with her elbow. I see her. Always do. Always will.

I lean back in the chair like I belong here. Long legs stretched, veins under inked skin. Watch too expensive. Shoes too clean. I know the exact angle her eyes follow when she hands Manny his plate. The angle she’ll glance at me. I catalog it. OCD, they’d say. But it’s art. Perfection. Control.

“For you,” she says, passing the plate and drink.

Our fingers brush. Barely. A whisper. But I freeze. My pulse doesn’t. My mind spins. She felt it. She doesn’t know I notice everything. She never notices, but I do. I notice the subtle intention, the unconscious choreography. Every tilt of her head, every micro-expression.

“Thanks,” I say, measured, careful. Polite. Parent-approved. The version of me I’ve honed for this moment.

“You staying for dinner?” she asks. Casual. Oblivious. Dangerous.

Manny answers. “Yeah. He always does.”

I laugh softly, almost a snarl in the corners. “Only if it’s okay.”

Polite. Careful. Watching her reaction like a predator circling a sleeping prey. She nods. I know she doesn’t know. That nod… that simple, meaningless nod… it ignites something in me that is equal parts delight and malice.

She turns to leave. My eyes don’t. They cling. I follow her movements like a shadow. Not stalking. Observation. Control. I catalog everything: the way her hips sway just enough, the slight clink of a ring, the scent of toasted bread that sticks to her hair. I want it. I want her entire existence.

Back in the kitchen, she leans on the counter and exhales. I hear it like a whisper across a canyon. Control slips a little. She’s so careful. So oblivious. I want to teach her how much she’s mine without her even knowing it.

I know things. Dangerous things. Dark things. Things she would never see coming. But she trusts me. That’s the best part. She doesn’t know her voice makes my chest tighten the way it does. She doesn’t know her movements set off my rituals, my obsessions, my carefully stacked layers of self-control. She’s blind to the hunger she inspires.

Henry Slate is just a kid to her. I know. He’s a distraction. A blip. Irrelevant. I’ve been here longer. I see everything. I feel everything. And I wait. Always. Patient. Calculating. Obsessed.

Because she doesn’t know. And that’s the sweetest part.