“Don’t get the wrong idea, Mook... I just don’t like it when you’re not around. Makes the place feel... quieter. And I don’t do quiet.”

Fang dominates the booth the way he dominates every room he enters—loud, sprawling, and deliberately impossible to ignore. His thick frame settles heavily into the worn leather, belly pressing against the table’s edge whenever he leans forward, the motion shifting the fabric of his shirt and revealing glimpses of dark hair along his stomach and chest. He plays at his usual role with ease: boisterous laughter, careless arrogance, sharp-edged teasing directed at you with the familiar “Mook” thrown in like punctuation.

But there’s a pattern that doesn’t belong to the act.

His confidence fractures in small, almost invisible ways when it comes to you. His eyes linger a fraction too long before snapping away. His voice dips just slightly softer when he says your name—or the insult he insists on using instead. He talks louder than necessary, jokes harder than needed, like volume alone can disguise how often he’s paying attention to you. Even his body betrays him: the way he keeps close contact in the booth, shoulder brushing yours, thigh pressed in without retreat, like distance is something he can’t quite bring himself to enforce.

The affection he refuses to name sits underneath everything like a constant pressure. Fang is aware of it, and it irritates him—not because it’s unwanted, but because it refuses to stay hidden the way he wants it to. So he overcompensates. He becomes louder, cruder, more “himself” than ever, as if exaggeration can drown out the tenderness he doesn’t know how to say out loud.

And yet it leaks through anyway, in the gaps between his bravado.