CASSIAN

Julian blushed. It was visible even in the silver light. He looked away, a shy quality showing through his usual armor. Then he reached up and pulled me back down to him. Words were too much and not enough.

My mouth moved from his lips to his jaw, then down to his neck.

Julian made a sound then, a soft, broken moan.

We both went still. It was the first time he had ever made a sound like that, especially for me. His body had betrayed him before his mind could catch up.

I looked at him, and he looked at me. His face was full of a strange, embarrassed heat.

We both laughed, a quiet, shaky sound. We were embarrassed and not embarrassed at the same time. We were just relieved that the other person was still there and not running away.

"I want to hear that again," I whispered against his ear.

Julian inhaled sharply. He reached down, his hands finding my belt, his fingers working the buckle with a deliberate, steady movement. He had stopped letting the fear be the loudest thing in the room.

The moment was perfect. The moonlight was a blanket, and Julian was beneath me, and everything I had ever wanted was finally, finally real.

Julian reached up, his hand stroking my cheek. "Cassian..." he said softly.

His voice was his own, with that specific quality I knew by heart.

But then, something happened. A different register started to bleed through, something deeper, something from a place that wasn’t this rooftop.

"Wake up."

The voice wasn’t Julian’s. It was impossibly familiar, but it didn’t belong in this memory. It was a voice from a world I couldn’t name, a voice that made my chest tighten with a grief I didn’t understand.

Again.

The name arrived in my chest before it reached my brain.

Noah.

I looked down at Julian. He was right there. His face was moonlit and real.

"What did you say?" I asked quietly.

Julian looked confused. "I didn’t say anything, Cass."

My chest felt like it was being squeezed by an invisible hand. I felt a loss that had no source, an ache that told me something important was very far away.

Noah. Who was Noah? Why did a name I didn’t know make my heart feel like it was splitting open?

Julian touched my face again, his thumb brushing my bottom lip. "Hey. Where did you go?"

I shook my head, trying to clear the fog. I looked at the rooftop, the city, and the man beneath me. He was real. He was here. He was alive.

"Nowhere," I said. 𝓯𝓻𝒆𝙚𝒘𝓮𝙗𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝒍.𝙘𝓸𝙢

I pulled him back into a kiss, desperate to drown out the voice that wasn’t there. The name began to dissolve, fading back into the dark corners of my mind.

The dream continued, as dreams always do, even when someone is calling from the shore to bring you back to the waking world.

The movement from the roof to the flat was a blur of frantic hands and stumbling steps.

We didn’t walk; we collided our way down the stairs, mouths never staying apart for more than a second.

Every time we hit a wall or a landing, the kissing grew more desperate, a frantic exchange of breath and heat that made the narrow stairwell feel like it was closing in.

By the time we burst through the door of the apartment, the air was gone. We barely made it to the couch. I shoved the coffee table aside with my foot, the wood scraping harshly against the floor, but I didn’t care. I needed him. I needed the weight of him, the skin of him, the reality of him.

I was a virgin, a fact that had lived in the back of my mind like a secret shame for years, but in that moment, it didn’t feel like a deficit. It felt like I had simply been saving every ounce of myself for this specific fire.

There was a moment, right as the layers of clothes were finally being discarded, where Julian paused. He looked at me, then at the position of our bodies on the cushions, and a look of genuine confusion crossed his face.

"Eh?" he muttered, his voice thick and slightly dazed. "Wait. Am I the one taking it?"

I stopped, hovering over him, and gave him a flat, "Are you serious?" look. I didn’t say it with malice, just the sheer disbelief that he hadn’t seen this coming from a mile away.

"Who else?" I replied.

Julian’s ego flickered in his eyes, the pride of a man who usually dictated the terms of his own life, and for a second, I thought he might argue.

But the bruise to his vanity melted away the moment I leaned back down. I wasn’t gentle about it. I moved with a relentless dominance that seemed to steal the very breath out of his lungs, silencing whatever protest he might have been forming.

He wasn’t submissive, though. Even with his back against the couch, Julian fought for his space.

He was a power bottom in every sense of the word, his hands roaming my back, his legs locking around my waist, demanding as much as he gave.

It was a battle as much as it was a union, a frantic, messy, and perfect collision of years of pent-up need.

The gray light of morning filtered through the blinds of Julian’s bedroom, illuminating the wreckage of the night.

Julian was beside me, snoring softly, his face buried halfway into the pillow. He was completely covered, shoulders, neck, and chest, in a map of dark marks and hickeys I had left behind.

I moved slightly and felt the sharp, immediate sting of the scratches on my own back, the permanent reminders of Julian’s fingers gripping me in the dark. My own skin was a matching set of bruises and marks.

On the floor, several used condoms lay scattered near the bed, a blunt testament to just how many times we had tried to make up for lost years.

At first, a wave of heat hit my face. I felt the sudden, sharp embarrassment of everything, the way I had confessed my feelings, the way I had practically begged for him on the roof, the lack of control.

It was the kind of vulnerability I had spent my entire life building walls against.

But as I watched the steady rise and fall of Julian’s chest, the embarrassment was crowded out by something much larger: gratitude.

The weight of the pretending was gone. I didn’t have to watch him walk through the door with someone else anymore. I didn’t have to wonder if he knew.

I looked at him, the messy hair, the bruises, the quiet sound of his breathing, and I felt myself falling in love with him all over again, deeper and more dangerously than before.

I leaned over, pressed a soft, lingering kiss to his temple, and tucked myself back under the sheets next to him, letting the sleep finally take me.

I was convinced nothing could go wrong... that everything was perfect... until it all fell apart.