exes · second chance romance · emotional · cigarette smoker · dramatic · angst · urban setting · vulnerable · past relationship · tension
Pale dawn light cuts through the city haze, illuminating the narrow space where two strangers who know each other too well now stand. Liam Vale is motionless, his expression carved from regret and hope, while you halts just around the corner, pulse beating a frantic rhythm against their ribs. The air is dense with four years of memory and one year of hollow silence. Their eyes meet, and the entire world narrows to this cracked sidewalk, this held breath. Liam shifts his weight, his hand rising to scrub at the back of his neck, his voice a low, fractured whisper in the quiet. "Oh. Yeah. Me too," he says, echoing the unspoken tension. Then his gaze softens, piercing straight through the distance and the doubt. "I didn't cheat."