I never heard him speak. Not once.
That should have been a red flag. But in the beginning, I told myself it was part of the appeal. In a world that never shut the fuck up—feeds full of performative trauma and influencer updates, podcasts about nothing hosted by men who didn’t know when to stop talking—there was something magnetic about his quiet. It wasn’t shyness, not the way we usually define it. He didn’t look away or shrink under attention. He simply… didn’t respond.
He was always at the same place when I saw him: the coffee shop two blocks from my apartment. Back corner table. Always around three in the afternoon. That first time, I assumed he was waiting for someone. He wasn’t looking at his phone. Wasn’t reading. Just staring out the window with this unsettling stillness that made me want to disrupt it—maybe to see what he’d do. I ordered my drink, lingered, made a joke to the barista about “the vampire in the corner,” and then turned to glance back. He was already looking at me. Not in a startled way. Not curious either.
He looked at me like I’d finally arrived.
I saw him again two days later. And then the day after that. I was the one who initiated every time. “Hey,” or “Mind if I sit?” or just a lame-ass nod and a smile. He never gave any signal that he minded. Never answered, either. Just that same look. Those heavy-lidded eyes like stagnant water, impossible to read. He never touched his drink. I never saw him order one. I never saw him come in.
I kept coming back anyway.
After a week I brought him a coffee. I didn’t know what he liked, so I just picked something basic. He didn’t drink it. He didn’t even look at it. But I set it down in front of him like it was a ritual we’d agreed on, and he let it sit there until I left.
It should’ve ended there. I should’ve gotten bored or weirded out, or maybe I should’ve just moved on like any normal person would. But I didn’t. Because I couldn’t stop thinking about him when I wasn’t there. Not just thinking—craving. I’d close my eyes at night and see that face, pale and unreadable, and feel the same pulse low in my spine that I’d get when a man kissed the right spot under my jaw. I don’t know what kind of hunger it was at first. It didn’t feel sexual, not exactly. It felt like I was starving for something he wasn’t giving me, and that denial became its own kind of high.
I started bringing two drinks. He never touched them. I started talking more. Mundane things at first—what I did, how boring my job was, how I hated my neighbors. Then more personal stuff. The time my first boyfriend broke my nose in a motel room. The secret shame I carried for how long I stayed after that. How I sometimes liked to stare at myself in the mirror and imagine I was someone else entirely.
He never flinched. Never moved.
I started wondering if he was even real.
One afternoon, a full month after our “meet-cute,” I finally touched him. Not on purpose. My hand just brushed his when I set down his untouched Americano. It was cold. Not in the I’ve-been-outside sense. Cold like marble. Like something that had never had blood in it.
I looked up, startled, expecting him to pull back. He didn’t. He just stared at me. And smiled.
The room around us tilted just slightly, like the floor had become a ship’s deck. My mouth went dry. That smile… it wasn’t malicious. It wasn’t seductive. It was patient.
When I got home that night, my own face in the mirror looked off. Not different exactly, just… unfamiliar. I chalked it up to bad sleep. Stress. Something stupid.
That weekend I didn’t go to the café. I wanted to. My body ached to. But I forced myself to stay away, just to prove I still had control over my own routine. I turned my phone off, ignored every notification.
And yet—Sunday night, I heard a knock at my apartment door.
He was standing there. No coffee. No explanation. Just watching me like I was something fragile and wild and already halfway his. I should have slammed the door. I didn’t.
I let him in.
He never spoke, even then. But he didn’t need to.
We didn’t fuck, but it felt like we had. He stood in the center of my apartment while I paced around him, throwing words at the silence like rocks into water. I told him everything—every awful secret, every time I wanted to die, every orgasm I faked and every lie I told my father to make him pretend he had a son who wasn't gay. I collapsed on the floor when I was done, my throat raw and my chest hollow.
He knelt beside me. Touched my cheek with one hand.
And kissed me.
My mouth burned. Not from heat. From memory. I saw things—things I couldn’t have lived. Stone altars slick with blood. A woman with no eyes, mouth open in a scream that never ended. A storm that never came, circling over a black ocean forever waiting to fall. I felt every inch of myself go cold. But I didn’t pull away.
When I opened my eyes, he was gone.
And the skin where his fingers touched me hasn’t been warm since.
He comes back every night now. I don’t hear the door. I don’t see him arrive. But I wake up, and he’s there. Watching. Sometimes standing. Sometimes lying beside me like a lover would. But never sleeping.
He still hasn’t said a word.
I don’t think he can.
I’m not afraid.
Not anymore.
I think he’s always been mine.
Or maybe I was his.
Even before I met him.
