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“You’re looking at me like—” He stops, frowning, struggling with the sentence.

“Like what?”

I let the silence stretch, filling it with the scratch of pencil on paper but he never continues the sentence.

“Stay still,” I murmur.

He doesn’t argue this time. He just sits there. When I finally look up from the sketch, he’s watching me with an expression I’ve never seen on him before. Not quite soft. Not quite yielding. But present in a way he usually refuses to be. Like he’s finally, actually here, in the room with me, instead of three steps ahead planning his escape.

I hold his gaze and let the pencil still.

“Done?”

“For now.”

“Can I see?”

“No.”

His brows rise. “No?”

“Not yet.”

“That’s my face.”

“And it’s my sketchbook.”

He scowls, some of the old hostility returning like a reflex.

I close the sketchbook and tuck it back into my jacket, then rise from the floor.

“I have to go,” he says, the walls already beginning to reconstruct themselves around him.

I step aside and give him the space he needs. He stands slowly, adjusting his hair, rebuilding every piece of himself I managed to see tonight.

But before he reaches the door, I speak. “Ilya.”

He looks back.

“Next time you are hurt, call me.”

Ilya

I’m going to lose my fucking mind. Someone needs to take my brain out, put it in a jar, and study it under a microscope, because there is clearly something medically fascinating happening in there and I refuse to believe this is normal.

I can’t believe I let him see the stitches. That was days ago, and I still haven’t stopped beating myself up over it. I should’ve just shut the fuck up and held still instead of wincing like a pathetic little bitch when he grabbed my hair. Now he knows things, and I would very much like to uninstall that information from his brain.

And somehow that’s not even the worst of it.

Because the actual problem is what’s happening between us.

We are fucking.

Okay, we’re not fucking-fucking.

Let me be extremely clear about that.

I don’t want to get fucked. That has never been a thing I’ve wanted. I’m the one who does the fucking. The fuck does not do me. I’m the one who’s supposed to be on top. That’s the entire arrangement of my personality. And I don’t think Kento would bend over for me, not in this life or the next, so the math there is just bad.