Page 20 of Infamous

The door clicked shut behind him. Soft. Final.

He set the bag on the table and pulled a chair out, the scrape of wood cutting through the silence. Then he sat, his presence filling the room, uninvited and impossible to ignore.

“Coffee,” he said simply, sliding a cup toward me.

I stared at it, then at him.

He didn’t flinch under the weight of my confusion.

My hands moved before my mind did, fingers curling around the cup. It was warm. Real. Grounding. I took a sip. The bitterness burned my tongue, but it made me feel human again.

“Why are you here?” I asked finally, my voice thin, raw.

He looked at me for a long moment, then said, “I thought that would be obvious.”

“Why?” I pushed. “How do you even know where I live?”

He paused, gaze steady. “I walked you home last night. You don’t remember?”

I blinked. The memory was fog - his shape beside me, the silence, the weight of everything I’d said. Maybe I had let him walk me home. Maybe I hadn’t cared enough to stop him.

Shame pressed down on me, hot and sharp.

We sat in silence after that. An empty silence that was thick with everything we didn’t say. I sipped my coffee again, hands trembling.

He watched me the whole time. And somehow, that made it worse. Because I could feel my grief shifting, softening, reaching toward him like something feral that didn’t know better.

I wanted to tell him to leave. I wanted to thank him for staying. Instead, I just sat there, bleeding guilt into the quiet, while he waited - like he always did - for me to fall apart again.

The croissant flaked apartin my hands. Crumbs scattered across the table, untouched. The morning light cut through the blinds in thin, surgical lines, slicing the room into neat little pieces.

When he looked away to peel the lid from his cup, I watched him.

He didn’t belong in my apartment. He didn’t belong anywhere ordinary. His movements were too precise, his silence too deep. The light caught his face, carved him in half; half man, half shadow, built for control.

And when his eyes met mine, I stopped breathing. Blue. Hard. Cold. The kind of blue that didn’t warm - it froze. And yet, I didn’t look away. I should’ve been afraid, but I wasn’t. I felt… calm. Like the noise in my head had gone still for the first time in years. Maybe it was the way he existed without pretending. No small talk. No apologies. Just stillness. Real, unflinching stillness.

We started talking somewhere in between the quiet. I don’t even know how. One minute there was silence, the next I was telling him about medicine. We were discussing my degree, the exhaustion, the nights that blurred into morning. He didn’t interrupt. Just listened, patient as ever.

When I stopped, he said softly, “Sounds like you were born for it. Fixing things.”

His tone was calm. Certain. But he wasn’t talking about medicine, and I knew it.

Something twisted in my chest. “What about you?” I asked. “What do you do?”

He paused, like the question was a test. Then: “Cars. I rebuild them. Old ones. Rusted, forgotten. I strip them down, fix what’s broken, piece by piece.” His eyes dropped to his cup. “Until they shine again.”

It was more confession than answer. The words hit me somewhere deep, the way grief does when it starts to sound like hope.

I wanted to ask what he’d been rebuilding inside himself. But I didn’t. I just nodded and stared at my coffee, afraid to break the fragile thing sitting between us.

He stood then, slow and deliberate. The air changed. I didn’t want him to go, but I didn’t know how to ask him to stay.

“Thanks for the coffee,” he said.

“You brought it,” I murmured. “I should be thanking you.”

He paused at the door, turned once. His gaze lingered, heavy, unreadable.