You meet him at the end of the block, where the streetlights flicker. He grins when he sees you, hands shoved deep into his pockets, posture easy. Comfortable. Like he belongs here, like he was always meant to be out in the night, while you are simply trying it on.

“Hey,” he says, like this is nothing. Like you do this all the time.

You smile. Tuck your hair behind your ear.

The two of you walk, the houses thinning, the spaces between them stretching wider, until there is only the road and the woods and the distant sound of music pulsing from somewhere just out of sight.

A party. Not your first. But the first time you have chosen to go.

There are people you don’t know. People who don’t know you. The lights are too dim, the music too loud, the smell of smoke and sweat and wet hay in the air. He moves through it effortlessly. You follow.

Someone offers you a drink.

You hesitate.

You tell yourself it is because you are responsible. Because you don’t want to be like him.

But that is not the whole truth.

Because you do want to know.

You want to know why it mattered more to him than you did. Why he let it consume him. What it feels like, what it does to you, how it grips you and takes hold.

You want to understand.

You take the cup, fingers tightening around the plastic. You lift it to your lips—

And…and I don’t know what happens next.

Not by choice. Not because I want to leave you.

But because I cannot stay.

Something pulls at me, something heavy, something unravelling inside my chest, inside my ribs, inside whatever it is that makes me, me. I felt it the moment we left the home – a muscle too far flexed.

I am drawn away, the night stretching long and open around me as you become nothing more than a distant star.

I should stay with you.

But I can’t.

The air shifts. The weight of the house calls me back. I feel it settling over my shoulders, dragging me home.

And I let it.

Because I have no choice.

And I hope—God, I hope—that you will be okay without me.

Even as I know, deep in whatever I am, that if I want to protect you forever—

I have to figure out how to stay.