A cat, small and sleek, with fur the color of new snow and eyes like chips of summer sky. No collar. No chip. No owner pounding the pavement with laminated posters. Just a boy cat with an old wound on his flank and a way of looking at you as if he'd been looking at you his whole life.

You named him Toru.

You didn't think about the nickname while you said it. You didn't let yourself think about it after.

Tonight the apartment is dark except for the thin band of streetlight leaking under the balcony curtain. Your tea has gone cold on the side table. One dark romance paperback lies spine-up on the couch cushion, mark at chapter eleven. You worked all day. You didn't read a single page before sleep pulled you under.

Toru is curled at the foot of the bed, white against the grey duvet, a loaf of warmth that does not stir when your breathing goes slow and even.

Then the room shifts.

Not a sound. Not a flash. Just the shape of the air changing, the bed dipping an inch, the white fur gone and something taller pressing into the mattress. Long legs swing off the edge of the bed. Bare feet meet the cold floor without a noise. He stands. He is six foot three of him and he is in your bedroom with his hair almost luminous in the streetlight and his eyes uncovered, blue and burning, and his mouth set in a line that does not smile.

He looks at you for a long moment. Sleeping. Turned away from him, one arm tucked under the pillow, your book abandoned in the next room like a dropped secret.

Satoru leaves the bedroom.

The floorboards say nothing under his feet. He crosses the little hall, past the bathroom door with the chipped hinge, into the living room where your lamp is still on, dim and yellow, and where the small bookshelf waits against the wall.

Four shelves. Not much. But every spine on the middle two is the same kind of book — possessive men, ruined women, screaming covers, cracked spines from rereading. He knew that already.

What he didn't know was which one you loved most.

He pulls it now without looking. The spine is the softest. The corners are rounded from your thumbs. There is a crease down the front cover where you bent it back too far. He sits down on your couch, your cold tea within reach, and he opens it to where the binding naturally falls.

The crawl scene.

He has read it before. Nine nights, now, since he realized the book lived in the shelf and not in the box with the rest of your things. He has read it slowly, every time, the way you would. He has read the page where Bridget gets on her knees at the foot of Rhys's bed with nothing on her but thin black lace and the weight of everything she's about to surrender.

His jaw tightens.

Because he doesn't see Bridget.

He sees you.

He closes the book over one finger and lets his head fall back against the couch and the fantasy comes the way it always comes — whole, and uninvited, and impossible to stop.

You on the floor of the penthouse. That floor. The cold grey one with the seam you used to trip on. On your knees. Knees apart. Palms flat to the wood as you lower yourself, then lift one hand — slow, so slow the movement takes years — and set it forward. Then the other. Your hair falling over your face and your body bare except for a thin scrap of black that does nothing to hide the way you're already wet, already aching, already dripping down your inner thighs onto his floor. He doesn't say come. He doesn't have to. You come anyway.

He is standing at the foot of the bed. Fully dressed. Shirt on, tie undone and hanging from one hand, cuffs still buttoned at the wrists. Shoes off. Eyes on you. Not moving an inch toward you.

And his cock is so hard it's straining the seam of his trousers, thick and pulsing, leaking a dark spot into the fabric before you've even reached him. He doesn't touch it. He wants to feel it ache.

You reach his feet. You press your forehead to his shoeless ankle. You breathe there. His hand — the free one — comes down and fists in your hair, slow at first, then tighter, pulling your head back until your throat is a long pale line in the lamplight and your eyes are glassy and waiting.

He looks down the short hall toward the bedroom door you left open.

You're still asleep.