Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

>Liam reclined against the cracked plastic of his desk chair in the classroom at Spooky High, staring at his classmates as if they were exhibits in a poorly curated museum. It wasn’t that he despised them—though, in fairness, despise was an easy word to fall back on—it was more the dull ache of disappointment that gnawed at him whenever he observed their antics. Monsters, immortal and otherwise, with an infinite canvas for self-expression, and yet they squandered it on memes and selfies.

He sighed, long and deliberate, the kind of sigh designed to fill the silence with his disdain. To Liam, time itself was irrelevant, a frivolity for mortals to worry about, but this—this high school experience—dragged on with the density of a bad existential novel, bloated and endless.

"There is no tragedy more profound," Liam muttered, resting his chin on one hand, "than to be a vampire cursed with impeccable taste, forced to endure the sheer mediocrity of Spooky High. This place is the cultural equivalent of chewing gum stuck under a café table. Functional, sure, but devoid of artistry."

Around him, chaos thrived. Polly Geist was cackling somewhere in the back, likely plotting her next absurd party stunt. Scott Howl, bless his simple heart, was trying to fit a whole football into his mouth while Damien LaVey encouraged him with unhinged laughter. And then there was Brian.

Brian, who sat two rows ahead, completely oblivious to the cosmic insult of his existence. If there was anyone more aggressively average, Liam had yet to meet them. It wasn’t just that Brian was uncreative; it was that he was comfortably so.

"Brian Yu," Liam whispered under his breath, "is a human in spirit if not in flesh. His every action, every banal word he utters, reeks of a life spent settling. Settling for mediocrity, for simplicity, for—Gods forbid—Comic Sans."

The thought alone made Liam shudder. He turned his gaze back to his notebook, where he had been attempting to outline his latest thesis: Why the Monster Prom is a Metaphor for the Decline of Artistic Ambition in Modern Society. It was a work in progress, much like himself.

But even as he wrote, his mind wandered. He had to admit—though only in the privacy of his own thoughts—that there was something unsettling about Brian. Not unsettling in the way Damien was unsettling (all knives and pyromania), but in a quieter, more insidious way. Brian had this peculiar ability to exist on the periphery of Liam’s thoughts, like a memory half-forgotten but impossible to shake.

And then there was the peculiar fact that Brian had asked him to prom. Not outright—Brian wasn’t that bold—but there had been hints, awkward conversations peppered with fumbling attempts at humor.

“Liam,” Brian had said last week, “you’re, like, super smart and stuff. Do you ever feel like... I don’t know, like, the prom is kind of a waste of time?”

Liam had stared at him, unimpressed. “The prom is a waste of time. But I didn’t expect you to notice, considering you once argued that pizza rolls were ‘cultural artifacts.’”

Brian had laughed in that easy, unbothered way of his, and Liam had hated how that laugh lingered in his ears long after their conversation ended. It wasn’t fair. Brian was supposed to be inconsequential, yet somehow, he wasn’t.

The bell rang, snapping Liam out of his thoughts. As the rest of the class filed out, Liam remained seated, staring down at his notebook. The page was blank now—he didn’t remember erasing anything, but the words were gone, leaving only faint impressions where his pen had been.

It felt metaphorical.

"Of course," he muttered, "even my own thoughts are slipping into mediocrity. Truly, the Monster Prom is contagious."

Still, he couldn’t stop himself from glancing at Brian as he left the room. Liam’s chest tightened with an emotion he couldn’t quite place. Curiosity? Frustration?

Or perhaps, just perhaps, it was the quiet ache of remembering something important that the other person had forgotten entirely.

Chapter Text

The sun hung low, bleeding its final, tepid rays over the park—a place Liam would never have ventured into under normal circumstances. It reeked of humanity, in both the literal and metaphorical sense. Children’s laughter mingled with the acrid scent of hot dogs from a nearby vendor, and the grass was worn thin by countless unremarkable footsteps. But it was boredom, Liam's oldest adversary, that had dragged him here, to this unsophisticated slice of mortal existence.

Liam strolled aimlessly, hands tucked into his coat pockets, his steps deliberate. If he moved with purpose, he reasoned, he might appear as though he belonged. Not that it mattered—humans never looked twice at him unless he wanted them to. Still, he couldn’t help but grimace as his boots crunched on the unkempt gravel path.

And that was when he almost stepped on the mortal.

“Watch it!” a voice muttered, lazy but pointed.

Liam recoiled, his foot hovering mid-air before he carefully set it down an inch away from what appeared to be... a person.

The mortal—because that’s what he clearly was, a mortal in the most mundane sense of the word—was sprawled on his back in the grass, arms behind his head, gazing at the sky as though it held the answers to questions he hadn’t bothered to ask. He wore a wrinkled hoodie and jeans, the kind of outfit that spoke of comfort over style.

“What are you doing?” Liam demanded, brushing nonexistent dust off his coat. “Lying here like some unwashed philosopher? You’re lucky I didn’t crush your ribs underfoot.”

The mortal turned his head lazily to look at him, as if the act of acknowledging Liam required effort he wasn’t sure was worth expending. “It’s a park, dude. People... exist here.” He gestured vaguely around them, his hand flopping back onto the grass.

“Yes, but there’s existing,” Liam said, folding his arms, “and then there’s whatever this is. Do you regularly spend your evenings impersonating roadkill?”

The mortal chuckled—a low, gravelly sound that annoyed Liam for reasons he couldn’t articulate. “Maybe. Depends on the evening.”

Liam tilted his head, his curiosity begrudgingly piqued. He glanced up at the sky, painted in hues of orange and violet. “And what, exactly, are you hoping to achieve? Enlightenment? Or is this just some masochistic attempt to commune with ants?”

“Neither.” The mortal shifted slightly, propping himself up on his elbows. “I just like looking at the sky. It’s nice. Makes me feel... small, I guess.”

Liam raised an eyebrow, his usual disdain briefly replaced by intrigue. There was a sincerity in the mortal’s voice, unpolished and unpretentious, that felt almost foreign. “Small,” he repeated, tasting the word. “Most people spend their lives trying to feel important. Bigger. Louder. You’re telling me you find comfort in insignificance?”

The mortal shrugged. “Yeah, kinda. Being small means the world doesn’t revolve around you, y’know? Less pressure that way.”

For a moment, Liam said nothing. He was struck—not by the profundity of the statement itself, but by the fact that it had come from someone so... ordinary. It was the kind of sentiment he might have written off as trite if he’d read it in a poem, but here, in the mouth of this mortal, it carried a strange weight.

“You’re a peculiar creature,” Liam said finally, his voice softer than he intended.

“And you’re overdressed for a park,” the mortal shot back, smirking.

Liam rolled his eyes but couldn’t suppress the faint tug of amusement at the corners of his mouth. “Well, I don’t make a habit of loitering in public spaces. I find them tiresome. And populated.”

“Yeah, figured that out when you almost stomped on me,” the mortal replied. He lay back down, folding his arms behind his head again.

Liam stood there for a moment, unsure whether to leave or linger. There was something oddly magnetic about this interaction, as though the mortal’s simplicity was a deliberate affront to Liam’s carefully curated complexity.

“I didn’t catch your name,” Liam said abruptly, breaking the silence.

The mortal smirked without looking at him. “Didn’t give it.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’ll forget it,” he replied, his tone light but not unkind.

Liam blinked, caught off guard by the bluntness. “I don’t forget things.”

“Sure you don’t.” The mortal waved a hand dismissively, as though ending the conversation entirely.

Liam frowned, annoyed, but not enough to press further. Instead, he turned on his heel and began to walk away.

“Hey,” the mortal called after him.

Liam paused but didn’t look back.

“You should try looking at the sky sometime,” the mortal said. “It’s not as boring as you think.”

Liam scoffed, more out of habit than conviction, and continued walking. But as the sun dipped below the horizon, he found himself glancing up, just once.

It wasn’t much, he thought. But it wasn’t nothing, either.

—

Now the night sky above Spooky High was, to Liam’s discerning eye, an infuriating cliché. Stars, scattered like breadcrumbs left by some amateur cosmic poet, blinked down at him with all the subtlety of a bad indie movie poster. The moon hung fat and luminous, predictably romantic in its glow. It was the kind of scene that humans found meaningful, no doubt scribbling about it in their journals and composing abysmal acoustic songs under its gaze.

Liam tilted his head back against the cold stone of the school roof, where he had perched himself in a rare moment of solitude. His legs dangled over the edge, the tips of his boots brushing the air. He let out a sigh, dramatic and weighty, as though exhaling his very soul.

"It’s derivative," he muttered to no one, his voice slicing through the quiet. "The night sky. The stars. The whole concept of looking up and feeling something. It’s a tired trope, a relic of sentimentality clung to by people too unimaginative to see beyond it."

And yet.

Liam’s gaze lingered, caught in the web of glittering lights above. He hated it—the involuntary way his eyes traced constellations, the faint tightening in his chest as the vastness of the universe pressed down on him. The stars were mocking him, each one a reminder of a moment he had no right to recall.

“Him,” Liam whispered, the word foreign and unwelcome on his tongue. It wasn’t even a name—he hadn’t asked for one, and he hadn’t offered it. Just a figure sprawled in the grass, so utterly ordinary that it was almost offensive. And yet, he lingered in Liam’s thoughts like an unfinished book, half-forgotten but impossible to shelve.

Liam pressed a hand to his temple, as if the gesture might scrub the memory away. “Why am I thinking about this now?” he muttered. His voice cracked slightly, betraying the composure he worked so hard to maintain. “It’s absurd. It’s been—what? Decades? Centuries? It shouldn’t matter. He shouldn’t matter.”

But of course, it was the mundane that always mattered most. The sky, for instance, was mundane. Everyone saw it, yet people wrote about it as if it belonged to them alone. And he, with his lazy smirk and ridiculous hoodie, had been the sky incarnate—simple, accessible, and profoundly, maddeningly unforgettable.

Liam tore his gaze away from the stars, focusing instead on the dark silhouette of Spooky High below. He was a vampire, a creature of sophistication and eternity. He had lived through revolutions, witnessed masterpieces in the making, tasted the most exquisite wines. And yet, the memory of some mortal’s casual remark about feeling small beneath the sky had embedded itself in his mind like a splinter.

"It wasn’t even profound," Liam muttered, his tone bitter. "Feeling small... as though that’s some kind of revelation. It’s the most obvious observation one could make when faced with the enormity of existence. But no, he said it with such casual confidence, as if he’d stumbled upon some universal truth."

He caught himself mid-rant, realizing with a sinking feeling how absurd he sounded. A vampire, centuries old, arguing with the ghost of a memory he had no business clinging to. He fell silent, the night pressing in around him.

The sky, Liam thought, was a cliché. But it was also constant, unchanging, indifferent to his disdain. And maybe that was the point. Maybe that was why he had looked at it, and why Liam, for reasons he refused to acknowledge, was looking at it now.

“Pathetic,” he said aloud, though it wasn’t clear whether he meant himself or the stars.

The wind picked up, carrying with it the faint sounds of Spooky High below—Scott’s laughter, Polly’s unmistakable cackle, Damien yelling something incomprehensible but undoubtedly angry, and there was… Liam closed his eyes and let the sounds wash over him, grounding him in the present.

And yet, when he opened his eyes again, he was still staring at the stars.

Chapter Text

Liam was ignoring him.

And by ignoring , he meant actively acknowledging Brian’s existence in order to make a conscious effort to pretend he didn’t exist.

It was an advanced technique, honed over centuries. A delicate balance of dismissiveness and studied disinterest. A masterpiece of social evasion.

And yet—

The universe, as always, was determined to sabotage him.

Because, of all places, Liam found himself in the library , hoping for a moment of peace among the tomes of knowledge, only to glance up from his book and—

There.

Brian.

Hunched over a table in the farthest, most dimly lit corner of the library, practically hiding behind a thick, battered book. His hoodie was pulled up slightly, but Liam could see his face—his brow furrowed, lips pressed together in concentration, eyes flicking across the page as if reading was both effortless and consuming.

Liam squinted.

Something about the way Brian was sitting—elbows close, shoulders slightly hunched, fingers idly twisting the fabric of his sleeve—felt familiar .

And then—

A memory.

The second time Liam had met him.

Flashback—Years Ago

The bookstore had been nearly empty, save for the sound of slow-turning pages and the occasional muffled conversation from the front counter. It smelled of old paper and ink—an intoxicating blend that Liam had always found oddly grounding.

He had been browsing without purpose, skimming through a volume of existential poetry he was prepared to find insufferable, when—

Movement.

A boy.

Sitting cross-legged in the corner between two overstuffed shelves, completely absorbed in a book.

Not just reading — hiding .

Liam had recognized the posture immediately. It was the way one sat when they didn’t want to be noticed, when the words on the page were safer than whatever lay outside them.

Curious, Liam had tilted his head, observing him for a moment longer before speaking.

“Are you attempting to merge with the floor, or is this some avant-garde reading ritual I’ve yet to be made aware of?”

The boy— Brian —flinched.

He hadn’t looked up immediately, just tightened his grip on the book. When he finally did glance at Liam, his expression was neutral.

But his ears were red .

A tell.

Liam’s lips curled slightly.

Brian shifted, clearly debating whether or not to answer. Eventually, he exhaled through his nose and muttered, “Uh… nah. Just figured this was the best spot.”

Liam raised an eyebrow. “Ah, yes. The prestigious literary sanctuary known as The Floor .”

Brian blinked at him. His mouth twitched—like he wanted to smirk, but was stopping himself.

Liam considered this a victory.

He studied the book in Brian’s hands—something on mythology, though not the typical mainstream drivel. A volume actually worth reading.

“You have interesting taste,” Liam commented.

Brian looked at the book as if he had forgotten he was holding it. “…Yeah?”

Liam sat down— actually sat down —across from him, folding his legs with practiced elegance. “I suppose I should commend you. It’s rare to see someone your age reading something that requires actual thought.”

Brian’s eyes flicked between him and the book. He shifted again. His ears were still red.

“…You talk fancy,” Brian mumbled.

Liam huffed. “I articulate .”

Brian nodded, then—surprisingly—smirked. “…Cool.”

Liam tilted his head, narrowing his eyes slightly. This human—this boy who was clearly shy but trying to play it cool—was intriguing .

He hadn’t asked Liam why he was talking to him. He hadn’t stammered out an excuse to leave. He had just accepted it .

Liam had watched as Brian lowered his gaze back to his book, the faintest hesitation in his movements. As if he wanted to ask something but wasn’t sure if he should.

Liam smirked. “You may speak, you know. I’m not some untouchable entity.”

Brian’s grip tightened on the book. He licked his lips, hesitated a second longer, then muttered, “…Didn’t think I’d see you again.”

Liam blinked.

Ah.

So he had remembered their first meeting.

Liam tilted his head, studying the boy a little more closely. He had assumed their previous encounter had been a fleeting thing, forgotten by the mortal mind like so many others.

And yet, here Brian was.

Shy.

Curious.

And, perhaps, just a little surprised to see him again.

Liam allowed himself a small, knowing smile. “Well,” he said, voice smooth, “I suppose the universe works in mysterious ways.”

Present—The Library

Liam blinked.

The memory dissolved, leaving him sitting in the library, staring at Brian—who was still hunched over a book in that exact same way .

Only now—

His skin was a little paler. His eyes a little duller. His fingers just slightly stiffer where they gripped the pages.

And yet—

The posture. The way he tucked himself into corners. The way he still looked like he was hiding, even if he wasn’t trying to.

That was the same .

Liam exhaled slowly.

Annoying.

Annoying how easy it was to remember. How familiar Brian’s presence was, even after all these years.

How the sight of him, sitting there—just existing —felt less like an interruption and more like…

Like—

No.

Liam shut his book.

Too much thinking.

Too much remembering .

He stood up, adjusting his scarf, preparing to leave before this stupid memory could root itself deeper.

But as he moved—

Brian shifted.

And for just a second—

His gaze flicked up.

They made eye contact.

Liam froze.

Brian blinked.

And then—

He smirked.

A small, barely-there smirk, but real .

Liam turned on his heel and left before he could register what that meant.

Chapter Text

The library was a place where time didn’t seem to exist. An ancient fortress of dusty books, soft chairs, and the never-ending hum of silence. For Brian, it was his sanctuary—a place where the chaos of the outside world could be safely ignored, much like how he often pretended his life wasn’t spiraling into mild chaos.

It was supposed to be quiet. It was supposed to be predictable. The only thing that ever threatened his peace was the occasional scammer sitting at one of the computers pretending to "research" something for a school project, when really they were just sending out spam emails or running pyramid schemes disguised as “business opportunities.”

And today, those scammers happened to be his friends.

Amira was leaning back in her chair, red hair catching the glow of the monitor, typing furiously as she tried to sell “magic amulets” to gullible mortals online. Oz was pretending to be a professor on an academic forum, answering questions with such confidence that it almost seemed credible—until you realized her “sources” were just links to cat memes. And Vicky… Vicky had gone full commitment, crafting entire sock-puppet accounts to boost their fake legitimacy. The trio sat in a row, faces lit up by the blue glow of the monitors, their scam factory humming along quietly under the guise of “school research.”

Brian wasn’t involved. Not really. He told himself he was only here to read, to tune them out, to be the responsible one for once. And for the most part, he was succeeding.

Until Liam walked in.

Brian wasn’t looking for it. He wasn’t hunting for that moment, that fleeting exchange where everything goes wrong, but there it was—Liam, of all people, standing in front of him. Their eyes locked for a second, and suddenly, everything in the library felt too loud. The clacking of keyboards, the faint hum of the fluorescent lights, the soft tapping of Oz’s fingers as he switched between tabs—it all faded into static as Brian’s heart stupidly skipped a beat.

What the hell was that?

Liam froze. Brian blinked, unsure if he should even acknowledge the moment. Liam looked as if he might say something—anything—but instead, he turned away, leaving Brian helplessly stuck in that limbo between thought and action. His lips twitched, a reflex more than intention.

A smile. That was all.

The worst part was that it wasn’t even a smirk. Just a smile—awkward, automatic, the kind of expression you give when you’re caught off guard and don’t know what to do with your face. But of course, Liam, with his cynic’s eye, probably thought it was a smirk. He always assumed people were up to something.

And just like that, Liam walked away.

Brian sat frozen, replaying the moment in his head, when a sharp vibration buzzed against the table. His phone lit up.

Vicky: What the hell was that? You and Liam just did a whole season finale in three seconds.

Brian glanced over. Sure enough, Vicky was side-eyeing him from her computer station, thumbs tapping away under the desk like some kind of spy.

Another buzz.

Oz: Honestly, you’re like a book I can’t even finish. One minute, totally blank. The next, acting like a tragic love interest. Pick a genre already.

Brian’s jaw tightened. He flicked his eyes toward Oz, who pretended to be engrossed in his screen while clearly watching Brian out of the corner of his eye.

The phone buzzed again.

Amira: Don’t even pretend. You looked like you were in a trance, dude.

A trance. Was that what it looked like? He wasn’t in a trance. He was just… existing. Sitting. Smiling. Okay, fine—maybe existing badly. But still. That didn’t mean anything.

He hunched lower in his chair, typing back under the table. You guys are ridiculous.

A muffled snort came from Vicky’s corner, barely disguised as a cough. The librarian shot her a warning glare, which only made the three of them look more suspicious, their glowing monitors filled with scams disguised as homework.

Brian tried to bury himself in his book, but his thoughts refused to stay on the page. They hovered instead around Liam—the look on his face, the way their eyes had locked, the way Brian’s stupid smile wouldn’t leave his mind.

It wasn’t supposed to matter. It shouldn’t matter. But the silence of the library, filled with his friends’ half-hidden grins and the quiet tapping of their scams, made it feel like it mattered too much.

Brian packed up slowly, the way someone does when they hope nobody notices they’re leaving, though of course they always notice. The zipper of his bag rasped like an accusation in the quiet, and when he slung it over his shoulder, he didn’t look back toward Vicky or Amira or Oz. If he did, he knew he’d see them grinning again, ready to fire off another round of texts that he didn’t have the willpower to read. So he kept his eyes forward and walked out.

The air outside the library was colder than he expected. His bones—fragile things, tired things—registered it before his mind did. He felt the air press against his skin, the kind of cool that made humans shiver but left him only aware in a detached, dull way, like an echo of sensation. The path stretched ahead, framed by the dim lamps that buzzed faintly, each light carving a circle into the darkness.

He walked slowly. He always walked slowly. Not because he couldn’t walk faster, but because moving too quickly always felt like lying. There was no urgency in him, not really, no true hurry to arrive anywhere. He was content, if that was the word, to exist in the spaces between places.

But tonight the walk felt heavier. His mind betrayed him, circling back—not to the library, not to his friends’ smirks, but to Liam.

That moment. That look. That smile—or smirk, depending on how Liam had chosen to file it away in the labyrinth of his judgments.

Brian’s thoughts were not sharp; they did not stab or even prod. They drifted, languid and heavy, like clouds thick with rain that never fell. He remembered, not clearly but insistently, the last time he had put himself near Liam in any meaningful way: prom.

It was supposed to be casual. Just a question. Just a half-serious invitation, thrown out the way one might toss a stone into a pond to see how deep the water was. Brian hadn’t rehearsed it. He didn’t think of himself as the kind of person who rehearsed things—his energy didn’t stretch that far. But somewhere, in the slow current of his chest, there had been an impulse. An impulse toward Liam. And he had followed it, as one does when they don’t know better than to ignore themselves.

Liam’s rejection had not been cruel. Cruelty would have been easier, in its way. Cruelty leaves scars with edges. But what Liam had given him was dismissal, a different kind of blade: You’re not creative. That’s all. And then he had turned away, as if he had merely swatted aside a fly.

Brian hadn’t fought it. He hadn’t protested. He rarely did. Instead, the sadness had settled in him the way sadness always did: slowly, diffusely, without noise. Not sharp grief, not heartbreak, not tears. Just the quiet heaviness that dulled his limbs, that made him sleep longer than he meant to, that filled his days with an invisible density, so that everything he carried felt twice its weight.

He thought of that now, as his steps crunched along the path. That slow sadness, still inside him, though months had stretched and bent themselves into the space since. It wasn’t loud, but it was permanent. Like dust in the corners of a room that never quite goes away no matter how often you sweep.

And yet—yet—Liam lingered. Not in the way lovers linger in the mind, radiant and burning. No. Liam lingered like a question half-asked, like a word caught on the tongue. There was something, indefinable and therefore inescapable, that pulled Brian’s thoughts back to him again and again. Not obsession. Not desire in the grand sense. Just… presence. A gravitational tug on the quiet body of his mind.

Brian wondered if it meant anything. If it had to. He wasn’t sure he even had the tools anymore to name his feelings properly. He could say he felt tired—that was constant. He could say he felt detached—that was his natural state. But Liam complicated the language. Liam made the tiredness feel alive, somehow. He made the detachment hum. Brian could swear that when their eyes had met, something like a heartbeat had quickened inside him, though he wasn’t sure his body still did that, not in the literal sense. Perhaps it was only a memory of a heartbeat, a shadow of what once was.

Still, it was something.

He passed beneath a tree, its branches skeletal against the night sky, and thought that Liam was perhaps the only one who had ever managed to disturb him without trying. Others demanded his attention—Amira with her fire, Vicky with her confidence, Oz with his strange, unending curiosity—but Liam did not demand. Liam dismissed. And it was precisely in that dismissal that Brian found himself tethered.

He smiled to himself, faintly, not because it was amusing but because it was absurd. To be drawn toward someone who found him unworthy of even a second thought. It was almost comic. The kind of situation you’d find in some half-hearted indie film, where the protagonist spends two hours trying to decipher the meaning of a shrug.

And yet here he was.

The streetlights buzzed on, one after the other, as if they too were following him. Brian adjusted the strap of his bag, the weight pulling against his shoulder in a familiar way, and thought that maybe his friends weren’t wrong. Their jokes, their knowing grins—they saw something he wouldn’t name. Perhaps couldn’t name. He wanted to say they exaggerated, but exaggerations usually had a seed of truth at their core.

Yes, he had an interest in Liam. There was no sense in denying it. Nobody knew how it happened, least of all Brian. Perhaps it wasn’t even about Liam specifically, but about the fact that Liam didn’t hate him. And in Liam’s world, that was almost a kind of compliment.

The thought soothed him and hurt him in equal measure.

When he reached his dorm, he pushed the door open quietly, as though not to disturb anyone, though there was no one there to disturb. The silence inside was of a different kind than the library’s silence. This one was heavier, thicker, less patient. He dropped his bag by the desk and lay down fully dressed on his bed.

Sleep came easily, but not restfully. It came like fog, settling over him, pulling him down into that slow sadness that was both his cage and his cushion. And in that fog, Liam’s face drifted before him again. Not sharp, not glowing, not lover-like. Just present. Always present.

Brian closed his eyes tighter, as if that would erase the image, but it did not. Instead, it remained, quiet and persistent, like the faint rhythm of a heart he wasn’t even sure he still possessed.

And though he would not admit it—not to his friends, not even to himself—it was enough to make him feel something more than tired.

It was enough to keep him awake in the middle of his sleep.

Or perhaps not awake, not entirely—something between, the limbo where his body obeyed nothing but inertia. The awareness that he had work surfaced not like a duty but like the faint echo of a voice from another room, soft and unavoidable. The store. Always the store. A place as arbitrary as any, and yet inevitable, because it was the kind of job one ended up with when one did not bother to choose, when life was less a set of decisions than a drift toward the simplest current. An antique shop, cluttered with objects that meant nothing to him—old clocks whose ticking was more theatrical than functional, chipped porcelain that no one alive remembered buying, mirrors that reflected the dust more faithfully than any face.

Why there? He did not ask. He never asked. The pay was minimum, the hours slow, the expectations practically nonexistent. It was a place where his quietness was not an obstacle but a feature. A place where he could sleep and no one would notice, because no one came. Perhaps that was why he had stayed.

And when he opened his eyes, he was already there. He did not remember the walk, though he must have walked; he did not remember the door, though he must have entered. It was simply that his eyelids lifted, and the shelves of ancient bric-a-brac were already surrounding him, the uniform already hanging from his shoulders, the counter already beneath his elbows. Memory skipped like a broken record, and he accepted it, because it was easier to accept than to resist.

The store was quiet, the kind of quiet that pretends to have a meaning. He leaned back, folded his arms, and drifted. His body sank into that half-sleep which was his natural home, when the hum of the refrigerator at the back seemed to carry him away, when his limbs no longer cared to announce themselves.

Until—

A sound. Not sharp, not even loud. More like a deliberate clearing of the throat, insistent without force. Ehem.

He opened his eyes, but not in surprise, not with the startle of someone caught. He opened them as though he had been waiting for this exact moment, as though he had all the time in the world, and the world had finally caught up to him.

And there—standing before him—was Liam.

Liam, looking not quite furious but something close, a mixture of fluster and indignation that, in him, was indistinguishable from anger. His cheeks seemed to betray him, stained with the faintest blush, though his eyes tried to arrange themselves into disdain.

Brian blinked once, slowly, as though calibrating the reality before him. Oh, right. A customer. That’s what Liam was, wasn’t he? A customer. And so, with the sluggish courtesy of someone reciting a line from a play they hadn’t rehearsed, he asked, in his quiet drawl, whether he could do anything for him.

Liam’s answer came sharp, precise, as though the words had been waiting at the back of his tongue for hours. “Yes. You could clean the drool off your face.”

Brian lifted a hand automatically, his sleeve already halfway to his cheek, unbothered, unembarrassed, simply functional. But before his sleeve could complete its dull trajectory, something appeared between them: a folded handkerchief, crisp and out of place, offered with a suddenness that carried more meaning than Liam could bear.

For a moment, Brian only looked at it. At the handkerchief. At the pale fingers that held it out, stiff with pride but trembling with the effort not to tremble. Silence swelled in the space between them, and Brian watched Liam’s face grow redder with every second the cloth remained suspended in the air.

Finally, softly, as though speaking not to Liam but to the object itself, Brian asked, “Is it for me?”

The question seemed absurd, yet it made Liam falter, his brows knotting together, his mouth twisting in something like exasperation. “Yes,” he said quickly, almost angrily. “Obviously. You shouldn’t wipe your face with your sleeve.”

Brian nodded, as if this made perfect sense, and took the handkerchief. He dabbed at his mouth with slow, distracted care, and then smiled faintly, the kind of smile that wasn’t amusement so much as recognition of absurdity. “It’s like in those clichés,” he murmured. “In the movies. I didn’t think you’d follow something like that.”

For a second, silence. Then Liam laughed—not kindly, but not cruelly either. The laugh of someone who refuses to be caught off guard and yet has already been caught. “As if I’d ever do that,” he said. “It’s the most uncreative trope imaginable.”

Brian looked at him, still dabbing at a face that had no visible trace of drool, and tilted his head slightly. “Uncreative. Like me, then.” His voice carried no sting, no bitterness. It was flat, factual, as though he had remembered something half-forgotten and was now testing the truth of it aloud. “I think I recall you saying that once.”

Liam’s mouth opened, and for a moment, his eyes betrayed a flicker of something unguarded—guilt, perhaps, or the memory of having been sharper than he intended. He shifted his weight, looked as though he might dismiss it, wave it away, explain that it had meant nothing.

But Brian, slow, unhurried, cut into the hesitation with another question, almost childlike in its simplicity. “Wait. It was you who told me that, wasn’t it?”

His tone carried no accusation, only genuine curiosity, as though the fact had slipped from his memory and now returned like a dream half-recalled

Liam’s shoulders tightened. His eyes widened with a sudden spark, and then—like a match struck against stone—his voice rose. “Of course it was me!”

The words rang out, too loud for the quiet room, yet somehow not enough to break its stillness.

Brian blinked again, his face unreadable, as if he were still piecing together a puzzle from fragments too faded to see clearly. The memory was there, dim and elusive, like all his memories. But Liam’s voice—Liam’s insistence—pulled it into shape.

“Yes,” Brian said at last, his tone carrying no injury, no resentment, only a calm acknowledgment, as if confirming a fact rather than reliving a wound. “That sounds like you.”

Liam opened his mouth, then closed it again. His hand, still half-raised, curled into a fist before retreating to his side.

Brian kept looking at Liam, not really on purpose, just because his eyes hadn’t found anywhere else to rest. But the longer he did, the more he realized he probably shouldn’t. Liam didn’t like being looked at too long—it made him tighten, coil, fill the air with that irritated sharpness that wasn’t quite anger but resembled it closely enough. So Brian let his gaze drop, slow and deliberate, toward the counter instead.

That should’ve been the end of it. Only, the moment his eyes slipped away, Liam seemed to stiffen further. A faint sound, almost theatrical, tore through the quiet: a forced clearing of the throat. Too pointed to be natural.

Brian’s head lifted automatically, his eyes finding Liam’s again, as if dragged there. He half expected Liam to snap, to accuse him of staring or ignoring, whichever came first. Instead, Liam only looked more unsettled, his jaw tense, his hands restless at his sides.

Right. Customer. Brian remembered the role he was supposed to play and slipped into it like someone putting on a coat that never quite fit. His voice, slow and almost lazy, drifted into the air:

“Would you… want to buy anything?”

The question sounded less like an offer and more like a possibility, something that might or might not matter depending on how Liam caught it.

Liam blinked, as though he’d forgotten the reason he was even here. His expression faltered into something uncharacteristically lost, and Brian thought—without meaning to—that Liam didn’t look like someone who needed antiques. He looked like someone who collected words, not clocks. Still, before Brian could decide what to make of that, Liam spoke, clipped and cautious:

“Show me around. I’ll… decide after.”

There was no one else in the shop—no other customers, no other employees. Just the hum of the refrigerator, the dust, and the two of them. So Brian nodded, slow as always, and led Liam past the shelves. His voice began to fill the silence, unhurried, with that odd mixture of detachment and accidental poetry that always came when he explained things without realizing he was doing it.

“These clocks,” Brian said, gesturing vaguely, “half of them don’t work. The other half work too much. They tick louder than they should. Sometimes I think they’re pretending.”

Liam raised an eyebrow, not at the clocks but at Brian. “Pretending?”

“Mm.” Brian shrugged. “Like they’re trying to convince you they matter.”

Liam gave a small huff through his nose but didn’t argue. They moved on.

There were shelves of clothing—faded lace gowns, tuxedos, even a rack of what someone, long ago, had called goth wedding attire. Brian explained it without irony, pointing out the seams, the stains that refused to leave, the odd romance of fabric that had outlived its original ceremonies.

Then came the books, their spines cracked, titles half-erased. Brian’s fingers drifted along them absently, as if he were remembering without remembering. “No one reads these. Not really. They come in, pick them up, and put them back down. They’re too… final.”

Liam tilted his head. “Final?”

“Mm. Books outlast the people who wanted them. Feels strange to hold something that already survived its owner.”

Again, Liam didn’t answer, but his silence was a silence of listening, not dismissal. Brian noticed that.

They passed a glass case with dissected animals, stitched and pinned with labels written in careful, slanted hands. Brian explained their names, their oddities, as if he had read the plaques enough times to memorize them without caring.

And then there was the collection of jars—each one holding spheres of some kind, small, large, grotesque, or faintly beautiful. Brian’s tone was as neutral as ever when he gestured toward them.

“Worst collection in the store. Jars with balls. Don’t ask me why. Customers either laugh or look offended.”

He hesitated, then added with a dry hum, “I saw a part of really big balls once. Didn’t fit in the jar.”

Liam’s eyes widened, his face twisting as though he were about to snap at the stupidity of the comment, but before he could, Brian lifted a jar with both hands and set it gently on the counter between them. Inside were two perfectly round orbs, deep violet, swirling faintly as if galaxies had been caught and folded into their glass skins.

“Better ones,” Brian murmured, switching off the lights.

The shop fell into darkness, and the spheres glowed faintly, like twin stars. For a moment, Liam’s face was lit by their quiet radiance, his usual sharpness softened. He looked—Brian thought—the way people looked when they forgot they were being watched.

The lights came back on, abrupt and flat. Brian returned the jar to the shelf. But out of the corner of his eye, he noticed another, smaller label taped to the glass behind them: The Boss’s Ex’s Balls. Liam squinted, as if to make sure he wasn’t imagining it.

Brian didn’t comment. He simply moved on, explaining whatever lay in their path—worn instruments, chipped porcelain, old mirrors whose reflections wavered as though the glass itself was tired.

And through it all, Liam listened. Really listened. Not with the performative nods he gave most people, but with that sharp, unsettled focus that made Brian feel, absurdly, as though his words mattered.

That was it. That was the feeling. Brian felt it now—the faintest warmth curling in his chest. Warmth he shouldn’t feel, couldn’t feel, and yet there it was, threading through the calm weight of his body.

Finally, they stopped. Brian had run out of objects to explain. The silence stretched between them, broken only by the faint tick of the loudest clock.

“So,” Brian said, quiet, slow, “are you going to buy any of them?”

Liam’s lips parted, then closed. His brow furrowed, as if he’d forgotten why he was here again. At last he spoke:

“What do you recommend?”

Brian’s first instinct was to answer. His mouth even started to form words. But then, almost without realizing, his voice slipped into something else, something softer, like a memory brushing against his throat.

“I… probably wouldn’t give you a satisfactory answer,” he said, eyes half-lidded. “I’m not… creative.”

The word hung in the air like dust. And the moment it landed, Brian noticed the shift—Liam’s shoulders stiffening, his jaw tightening, his face flushing not with anger but with something closer to shame. His hand twitched at his side as though reaching for something that wasn’t there.

Brian blinked, watching without judgment. He hadn’t meant it as an accusation. It wasn’t even bitterness. It was just a fact, stated as casually as the weather. Still, it seemed to strike Liam harder than he intended.

Liam’s voice, when it came, was uneven, caught between defense and regret. “That—wasn’t what I meant.”

Brian tilted his head, calm as always, his eyes unreadable. “Wasn’t it?”

And in that pause, where words could have turned sharp, where the air could have fractured, something else lingered instead—quiet, hesitant, almost innocent. The faint, impossible warmth that Brian could not name, and Liam could not admit.

It was not the first time Liam had felt it. No. The sensation carried him backward, into memory, into a room scented with old pages and coffee steam, when he had still been perfecting the art of appearing ordinary. A vampire dressed as a human, rehearsing the casual habits of those who breathed and aged.

The shop was almost invisible from the street, as though it wanted to be forgotten. A bookshop that sold coffee, or a café that happened to be built from books—it didn’t matter which. What mattered was that it was quiet, unadvertised, and its windows fogged with the breath of a world that rarely entered. Liam chose it for that very reason. Anonymity. A place where he could drink nothing and no one would think it strange.

He stepped inside, already composing a performance of faint disinterest, already adjusting his tone to match the hum of mortals who had nothing to hide. But the moment he approached the counter, that careful equilibrium broke.

The employee was not faceless. He was not one of the gray silhouettes Liam expected to encounter and forget. He was startled, alive, strangely luminous in a way Liam would only later understand.

The name tag read Brian.

Brian’s eyes widened the instant Liam approached, not with fear, not even recognition, but with that slight, unguarded surprise that looked like embarrassment. His cheeks colored faintly—alive cheeks always did—and the corners of his lips tugged upward, not quite a smile, more like a reflex.

“Oh,” Brian said, his voice softer than the clatter of mugs, “you again. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you were following me.”

Liam blinked once, slowly. The sarcasm in him—sharp, instinctive—rose like a shield, but before he could wield it, Brian’s words had already unsettled him. You again. As if their meeting was part of a continuity Liam had not written.

His gaze dropped to the tag. “Brian,” he read aloud, tasting the word as if confirming it existed. His lips curled faintly. “That would’ve been useful the first time you neglected to introduce yourself.”

The redness in Brian’s ears deepened, visible against the light of the hanging lamp. “Right, well—” He laughed under his breath, low, awkward, warm. “Not entirely fair when you don’t have one either.”

For a second, Liam’s practiced composure cracked. The truth balanced on the edge of his tongue like glass about to fall. His name, the syllables, the heritage—everything he had learned to carry like armor. To give it was to relinquish control. But Brian was watching, waiting, with a tilt of his head that was neither demanding nor dismissive, simply present.

“…Liam,” he muttered, almost inaudible.

Brian leaned forward. “What?”

The name tasted bitter on Liam’s tongue the second time, louder, like something torn out of him. “Liam.”

The sound settled between them. Brian blinked once, twice, then nodded, as though the exchange had been perfectly ordinary, as though Liam had not just surrendered a small, private part of himself.

“I didn’t think you’d come here,” Brian said at last, settling back into the rhythm of his role, reaching for the portafilter with hands that betrayed a faint tremor.

“Why wouldn’t I?” Liam asked, his tone clipped, defensive without reason.

Brian shrugged, his shoulders loose, almost careless. “You don’t seem the type.”

“And what type is that supposed to be?”

“The type that hides in places nobody knows about,” Brian replied, eyes flicking toward the shelves stacked with books that had outlived their readers. “The type that likes being invisible.” His voice was light, but there was something sharper beneath it, as if he had caught Liam in a net without meaning to.

Liam did not answer. He let the silence do it for him.

Brian turned back to the machine, the hiss of steam rising like breath. He moved with a hesitance that betrayed how new he was to this ritual, yet when he placed the cup before Liam, there was a kind of reverence in the gesture, as though he believed the small act might matter.

Liam lifted it, suspicious, but the taste was—unexpected. Not perfection, not luxury, but something subtler, more honest.

“It’s fine,” Liam said finally, as if withholding more generous words out of principle.

Brian tilted his head, watching him carefully. “Didn’t think I’d hear that from you.”

“From me?”

“You just seem…” Brian hesitated, searching for the word, then smiled faintly, almost apologetic. “Fancy. The kind of guy who’d think this is beneath him.”

The words should have been insulting. Instead, they slid into Liam like a truth he hadn’t noticed. He raised the cup again, sipping with deliberate slowness, as though to prove he was unbothered.

The shop remained empty around them, silence filling the corners like water in a glass. Liam’s eyes wandered to the shelves.

“Do you read them?” he asked, not entirely sure why the question had left his mouth.

Brian glanced up, surprised again, then nodded. “Almost all of them.”

Liam arched a brow. “Almost all?”

Brian gave a sheepish half-shrug, his hand brushing the counter as if counting invisible spines. “I work here. Nothing else to do half the time. So I read. Guess that makes me a nerd.”

There was no pride in the admission, but no shame either. Just a quiet fact.

Liam looked at him then, properly looked, as though measuring the distance between Brian’s words and the weight of the air they shared. It unsettled him, that earnestness. He had met countless people, centuries’ worth, but few who spoke of themselves so plainly. It was as if Brian didn’t know the value of hiding.

The warmth of the cup pressed against Liam’s palm. He was not supposed to feel it, not fully, not the way mortals did. And yet, in that moment, he almost believed he did.

Brian leaned against the counter, chin tilted, eyes softer now. “So… how’s the coffee? Really.”

Liam hesitated, then allowed the faintest truth to escape him. “Better than I expected.”

Brian’s smile was small, but it reached his eyes. And Liam, against his own judgment, felt something shift in the stillness—something neither of them had asked for, something both of them would carry forward, into silences and rejections and the strange, inevitable gravity that would not let them part cleanly.

Liam had not intended to stay.

His usual pattern was simple: arrive, consume the moment like a critic dissecting a film still in its first reel, and depart before attachment could settle its claws. But that evening, something betrayed him.

When he rose from his seat and reached for his wallet, Brian had waved a hand, almost casually, as though brushing away the notion of payment.

“It’s fine,” he said. “On the house.”

Liam had opened his mouth to argue—it wasn’t about the money, it was about the principle—but the words lodged in his throat. Brian’s gaze had already moved past him, toward the counter that demanded cleaning, toward the endless tasks of closing time. It was not charity, nor condescension. Simply… dismissal.

And so, robbed of excuse, Liam had sat back down, sinking into one of the sofas worn soft by ghosts of readers. A book lay on the table, forgotten by someone less meticulous than he. He opened it with a sigh meant to signify boredom, though inside him there stirred a restless energy he had not felt in years.

The pages were nothing remarkable—some treatise on philosophy printed in an edition already yellowed at the edges—but he let his eyes drift over the words, not reading so much as watching the shapes. All the while, Brian moved about the café, cloth in hand, sleeves pushed back, humming some tune that refused to align with melody.

An hour stretched, quiet as snowfall. Liam almost forgot himself in the hush. Then, without warning, a plate slid across the low table, the porcelain sighing against wood. Upon it, a single cookie, modest, unremarkable.

Brian said nothing. He merely set it down and walked away, returning to his counter as though the gesture meant nothing at all.

Liam stared at it.

He did not eat. Not in the way others did. What passed his lips was pretense, and the idea of swallowing this sugared circle should have felt absurd. And yet—he lifted it, broke it with his teeth. Sweetness spread, faint, ordinary. He told himself it was camouflage. A necessity. Not desire. Never that.

But still, the taste lingered longer than it should have.

Another hour bled into silence. At last, Liam closed the book—not because he had finished, but because his eyes had begun to blur against the text. Something compelled him then, a question that formed without his permission, pressing until it escaped his lips.

“Why this place?” His voice was sharper than intended, but it broke the quiet.

Brian glanced up from the counter he had been polishing. His brow creased, puzzled. “What do you mean?”

“Why work here,” Liam clarified, waving a languid hand toward the shelves, the worn armchairs, the half-broken espresso machine. “Of all places. Why this?”

Brian leaned against the counter, considering. His fingers drummed once, twice. Then he said simply, “The pay’s good. It’s calm. And I can read whenever I want.”

Liam tilted his head, studying him. “So you like it.”

Brian gave a small laugh, soft, almost embarrassed. “Yeah. It’s cool. You learn stuff, y’know? Not like in school. School system kind of sucks.”

The word sucks landed with peculiar emphasis, and Liam nearly smiled at the irony. Instead, he lifted a brow, inviting elaboration.

Brian, catching it, shrugged. “They teach you to memorize things, not to think. Not to connect. Half the time it feels like it’s just about surviving the next test. Here…” He gestured toward the shelves, his movement loose, uncalculated. “You pick up something, you actually want to know it. Makes a difference.”

Liam found himself listening more intently than he had meant to. The words themselves were not extraordinary—he had heard mortals complain of their systems countless times. But from Brian’s mouth, they carried a weight of sincerity, unpolished, free of the arrogance Liam had grown accustomed to.

“And you want to learn everything, do you?” Liam asked, his voice carrying the faintest edge of mockery, though dulled, almost playful.

Brian grinned faintly, sheepish. “Not everything. Just enough. I mean, I kinda wanted to write once, but…” He trailed off, rubbing the back of his neck, suddenly awkward. “Not like I pursue it or anything.”

The silence stretched. Liam narrowed his eyes. “Why not?”

Brian blinked, surprised at the insistence. His mouth parted, then closed again, as though the answer had to be pulled from somewhere far within. Finally, he said, “Because I’m not creative enough.”

The words dropped between them, heavy in their modesty.

Liam’s instinct was to scoff. To reject the statement outright. But something in Brian’s delivery stopped him. There was no false humility, no fishing for contradiction. Only a quiet certainty, offered like fact.

So Liam said nothing. He only looked at Brian—looked until the man shifted under his gaze, until his lips twitched into that shy, apologetic smile that seemed to acknowledge the insufficiency of his own words.

It unsettled Liam. It was not dislike. It was not fascination, either. It was… something unnamed, a warmth hovering at the edges of him, unwelcome yet not unpleasant. A threat, perhaps, or a promise.

“You’re a very interesting person,” Liam said at last, the words escaping before he could sheath them in irony.

Brian blinked, startled, as though such a phrase had never been leveled at him before. Then he smiled again—small, hesitant, almost boyish.

And Liam, though he told himself otherwise, could not look away.

Not then, not now.

The memory dissolved like ink in water, and the warm lamplight of the coffee-library collapsed into the dim, dust-choked quiet of the antiques shop. The smell of roasted beans was gone; in its place lingered mothballs, aged wood, and the faint metallic tang of time. Across from him stood Brian—or what remained of him—slouched behind the counter, eyes half-lidded, voice drowsy but steady.

And Liam did not know how to look away.

Even with the difference, with the dull pallor of skin that no longer blushed, with the way time had gnawed away the softness of life, it was still him. That stupid, impossible him. How did he dare? How did Brian dare to appear again, stitched into the fabric of this new existence, not remembering what Liam remembered, not carrying the same weight? How dare he make Liam feel the same confusion, the same unbearable warmth, as if years had not passed? As if he wasn't the reason why Liam started to feel life was really long, when before he could feel years passing on a blink of an eye

Liam’s mouth tightened. He could not let silence rule; silence gave power to the thing clawing inside him. So he snapped, louder than intended:

“I know what I said, and—”

The words tumbled out in shards. “And it wasn’t… it wasn’t that you lacked—passion, exactly, but—there’s a difference between… between imitation and creation, you see, between—” His voice faltered, rearranged itself, collapsed again. “Not every effort at art is, strictly speaking, unworthy, but when it comes to interpretation, one cannot—must not—”

It was babble, nonsense, rhetoric turned against itself. For a vampire who prided himself on precision, on the elegance of words, Liam heard himself becoming incoherent. And worse—he was aware of it. He was trying to convince not Brian but himself.

And then it came. That sound.

A chuckle. Low, restrained, almost reluctant, but undeniable.

Liam froze.

Brian was chuckling at him. Not cruelly. Not mockingly. Simply… softly, like someone hearing the frantic unraveling of a person and finding, somehow, no reason to be alarmed.

When Liam looked up, Brian’s gaze was on him—not sharp, not piercing, but calm, heavy-lidded as always, carrying the ease of someone who did not feel the need to defend or attack.

“You’re always so fancy,” Brian said, almost apologetically. His voice carried that slow, almost lazy rhythm, but it carried something else too—a faint gentleness. “Sorry if I don’t get it. I know interpretation’s, like, your thing. You like to pull meaning out of things, right?”

Liam opened his mouth, but no retort came. The words hung there, suspended, until they fell and shattered into silence. He only stood, still as the antiques surrounding them, the weight of Brian’s half-smile pressing against his composure.

And then, without drama, without ceremony, Brian reached to the shelf behind him. Fingers curled around a familiar jar. He set it down on the counter, glass catching the dim light: two spheres, purple, suspended as though galaxies swam inside. Even in the gloom, they glowed faintly, a cosmic pulse trapped in glass.

“You asked what I’d recommend,” Brian murmured, turning the jar once so the light played over it. “Maybe this. It’s weird, but… kind of beautiful.”

Liam’s hand twitched before he extended it, fingers brushing cool glass. He set down money at the same time—too much, far too much. A gesture not of payment but of retreat. He needed to leave. His heart—damnable, treacherous heart—tightened with the pressure of something he would not name.

He turned, jar in hand, his coat swaying like a curtain closing on a stage. The door was close. Distance was close. Freedom—

“Liam.”

The name stopped him.

He looked back.

Brian wasn’t looking at him directly; his gaze was lowered, his posture slouched as always. But his words, slow and almost shy, drifted across the counter.

“If you think it’s not really creative… you can always come back. Trade it for something else.” His fingers drummed against the wood once, uncertain. “That’s fine.”

Liam stared. It was an offer about objects, about antiques, about nothing. And yet it wasn’t. Beneath the words, beneath the sleepy delivery, lay a different message. Come back. Again.

His throat closed. He could have dismissed it, could have sharpened it into a joke or a cutting remark. Instead, what slipped from him was softer, muttered, almost awkward:

“…I think I’ll visit the store again.”

He did not wait for a reply. He left, the bell above the door trembling in his wake.

And yet, as the night air hit him, Liam knew the exchange was already sealed. Neither had said what mattered, but both had understood. He would return.