"Mph… mmm."
The wet, unmistakable sound of lips moving against lips echoed through the damp, chlorine-scented air of the locker room.
I froze, my hand hovering over the zipper of my duffel bag. I didn't need to look around the corner of the lockers to know who it was. Enzo and Stefan. My volleyball teammates. They thought everyone had gone home after practice, but they were wrong. I was still here.
My stomach churned violently, a familiar wave of nausea washing over me. It wasn't that I was disgusted by them. I was disgusted by myself. The rapid beating of my heart, the treacherous heat rising in my cheeks, it was a glaring, flashing neon sign of the truth I spent every waking second of my twenty-two years trying to bury.
I'm fucking gay.
And I hate it.
I clamped my eyes shut, my nails digging into the strap of my bag. If my parents ever found out, it would be over. They were loud, proud, and unapologetically homophobic.
I was their golden ticket, Tristan Harrington, top of his class, a fourth-year medical student at the prestigious Blackwell University. If my perfectly constructed facade cracked, they wouldn't just disown me. They would take their rage out on my two younger sisters, and they already treated the girls like absolute garbage. I couldn't let that happen.
Damn it, I cursed internally, the kissing sounds growing heavier, more desperate.
I need to leave. Grabbing my bag, I bolted, not caring if the squeak of my sneakers against the tiles alerted them. I shoved the heavy double doors open and burst out into the freezing night air, gasping like I had just run a marathon.
The campus was dead silent. I pulled my jacket tighter around myself, my mind racing as I started the long walk back to my off-campus apartment. I just needed to get home.
My roommate, Haruta Shidou, a Japanese transfer student who spoke maybe three words a week, would probably be asleep or quietly reading.
Haruta Shidou was…..fine. He was fine. Third year engineering, made very good instant ramen and left the bathroom cleaner than I did. We had a system. The system worked.
The system was: we did not ask each other questions.
I had chosen him as a roommate specifically for that system.
The apartment would be quiet. Safe.
I turned down a narrow, dimly lit street, taking my usual shortcut.
"SOMEBODY, PLEASE! HELP!"
I stopped dead in my tracks. The scream was raw, tearing through the quiet night like jagged glass.
Eh??
What was that?
My medical student instincts, or maybe just plain stupidity, kicked in before my brain could stop me. I dropped my duffel bag and sprinted toward the sound, rushing into a pitch-black alleyway between two abandoned brick buildings. "Hey! Is someone—"
POW.
The gunshot was deafening, echoing off the narrow walls and making my ears ring.
I froze, the breath knocked entirely out of my lungs. A warm, wet mist sprayed across the side of my pale cheek.
What the fuck...
I slowly reached up, my trembling fingers brushing my skin. When I pulled them away and caught them in the dim, flickering light of a distant streetlamp, they were coated in crimson. Blood. Splattered across my face.
A heavy thud echoed through the alley as a man's body crumpled to the concrete pavement, lifeless.
My legs turned to lead. I couldn't scream. I couldn't run. My wide, terrified eyes slowly dragged up from the corpse to the figure standing in the deep shadows.
He stepped forward, the moonlight slowly revealing him piece by piece.
He was holding a suppressed handgun, but that wasn't what made my heart stutter in my chest. It was his face. Dark hair fell over his eyes, styled into a sharp, rebellious mullet that brushed the nape of his neck. A pair of silver lip rings glinted dangerously in the low light, resting on an irritatingly perfect smirk.
He tilted his head, his dark, piercing eyes locking onto mine. He didn't look panicked. He looked amused.
He stepped over the dead body, his heavy combat boots crunching against the gravel, and stopped just a few feet away from me.
"Oh?" His voice was a low, smooth baritone that sent a completely inappropriate shiver down my spine. The smirk widened, pulling at the metal in his lip. "Look what you've done."
"What I've done?" My voice cracked, pitching up an embarrassingly high octave. "What...?"
I stared at the gun, then at the dead body bleeding out on the concrete, and finally back at the psycho with the lip rings.
Fight or flight was supposed to kick in, but my body had apparently chosen a secret third option: freeze and sound like an absolute idiot.
"I'm.…." I stumbled backward, my heel catching on a stray piece of gravel. My bloody hands frantically patted down my jacket pockets, searching for the rectangular shape of my phone. "I'm calling the police!"
The amused smirk didn't drop from his face. If anything, the dark glint in his eyes only grew sharper, like a predator watching a cornered rabbit try to negotiate its way out of a snare.
"You'll do no such thing," he said. His tone was too calm. Too smooth and authoritative for a guy who had just blown someone's brains out in a dirty alleyway.
I opened my mouth to yell, to scream for anyone who might be in the abandoned buildings, but before I could even draw a breath, he moved.
A gust of cold wind hit me as he materialized right in front of me. Up close, he was even taller, completely eclipsing the moonlight. He smelled of gunpowder, expensive cologne, and something darkly metallic.
Blood.
My eyes widened. I didn't even see his hand move.
A sudden, sharp strike hit the side of my neck.
The world instantly tilted on its axis. My brain disconnected from my limbs, and my knees buckled. The dim streetlights above blurred into streaks of blinding yellow, then quickly began to fade into absolute darkness.
As my body collapsed toward the cold, unforgiving concrete, a strong arm wrapped firmly around my waist, catching me before I could hit the ground.
The last thing I heard before slipping entirely into the void was a soft, mocking whisper brushing right against my ear.
"Sleep well, blue eyes."