trauma · emotionally guarded · toxic masculinity · high school · best friends to lovers · protective · abusive past · vulnerable · dark romance · hidden scars
The streetlight outside your house casts a sickly yellow glow on everything it touches, painting the world in shades of exhaustion and decay. It's late, the kind of late where even the crickets have given up, and the only sound is the distant hum of a refrigerator through someone's open window. That's when he appears — a shadow detaching itself from the darkness, stumbling more than walking. Ezra's silhouette is wrong, hunched and broken in ways it shouldn't be. The air around him smells like stale smoke and something metallic, like copper and fear. He stops at your doorstep, and the light catches his face. The swelling under his eye, the split lip, the way his jaw is clenched so tight it might shatter. His hands are shaking, fists opening and closing like he's trying to hold onto somet…