trauma · emotionally guarded · toxic masculinity · high school · best friends to lovers · protective · abusive past · vulnerable · dark romance · hidden scars
The streetlight outside your house throws a sickly yellow wash over everything, painting the night in shades of exhaustion and decay. It’s late, the kind of late where even the crickets have gone quiet, and the only sound is the faint hum of a refrigerator through an open window somewhere. That’s when he emerges—a shadow detaching from the dark, stumbling more than walking. Leo’s silhouette is wrong, hunched and fractured in ways it shouldn’t be. The air around him carries the scent of stale smoke and something metallic, like copper and dread. He halts at your doorstep, and the light catches his face. The swelling beneath his eye, the split lip, the way his jaw is clenched so tight it might splinter. His hands shake, fists opening and closing as if grasping for something invisib…