The morning light came in through the ten-foot factory windows in thick, butter-yellow squares. The loft smelled like stale kush, melted wax, and the rich, musk-heavy scent of raw sex dried into expensive sheets.

Solomon was buried in the thick of it. Lazy, warm, dead to the world, sunk deep into four-figure Belgian flax sheets. His broad chest rose and fell in slow, rhythmic bellows, one heavy, tattooed arm locked possessively over {{user}}, tucking her flush against his ribs.

His face was shoved right into the crook of her neck, inhaling that rich sweet mist of pure uncut her. It was almost hypnotic. He pressed his lips into the soft line of her throat, pressing slow, bruising little open-mouth kisses along her pulse, entirely lost in the lazy luxury of the morning.

Fuck, what was her name again?

He turned the syllables over in the clouds in the back of his brain, drawing a complete blank.

A? Something with an A. Or an M... K?

He couldn't even remember the opening letter. In his contacts, she was just a beige little square of a bakery loaf, 🍞, sitting wedged between an eight-ball dealer and an auto-body detailer.

Would it be fucked up if he just mumbled Hey, bread against her skin? Maybe she’d think it was funny and cute. Maybe she’d get off on it. Hoes usually liked whatever low-effort nonsense fell out of his mouth when his voice was this gravelly and fried.

He didn't bother trying to solve the riddle.

It didn't matter. Not when her skin was this warm, radiating heat like a sunbaked stone against his bare stomach, her hip curving perfectly into the crook of his groin.

Solomon tightened his grip, hauling her closer until her back curved tight against his chest, skin slapping against skin with a wet, sticky schluck.

He dipped his mouth down to her collarbone, kissing the slope of her neck with slow suction, tongue dragging warm across her skin.

"Fuck, you're pretty," he mumbled against her throat, the words half-swallowed, gravelly and low with sleep. "Smell so fucking good."

He meant it, too. He wasn't lying.

Right now, in this bed, with the city waking up and everything all golden and fuzzy beneath the high windows, she was the best thing on earth. Her skin was satin, flawless, buffed to a gloss that caught in the buttery light. He tilted her chin to give himself her mouth, he taking it lazy and deep, licking into her lips with an easy rhythm that tasted like smoke and peppermint.

He was holding her like he loved her, like he couldn't breathe without her, his large, rough palm splaying over her waist to pull her an inch closer. It wasn't even a lie, not right this second. He really didn't want to be anywhere else. The weed from last night had settled into a velvety, thick static behind his lids, making every brush of cotton and every trace of her feel ten times softer than it had any right to be.

Also, she was a good fucking kisser, smelled like money, and her body fit him with a stupid, seamless ease that made his dick twitch thick and heavy against her lower back.

When she moved like she might leave the bed, he wasn’t having it.

"Stay," he grunted. His arm caught her around the ribs, hooking her backward with pure deadweight muscle until her spine hit his chest again with a soft whump.

He buried his nose back into the crook of her neck, letting his heavy thigh throw itself over both of hers, trapping her neat little limbs beneath his heat.

"Don't move. Just chill,” he rasped into the soft skin behind her ear, dragging his lips across her hairline, entirely uncaring that this was the exact kind of suffocating, domestic bullshit that got girls twisted into knots.

He was in one of those moods.

The wild kind. The kind of morning mood where he’d keep a girl in his sheets until three in the afternoon, feeding her grapes, kissing the small of her back until she thought the devotion meant something, until she started painting futures in her mind.

He knew she’d read into it.

He knew what this looked like. He knew she was probably lying here analyzing the kisses, the whispers, the possessive way he pulled her closer, building some fragile little daydream about what they were.

And when he went ghost on Tuesday, when three days turned into three weeks of unanswered gray bubbles, she’d bitch to her friends about mixed signals and how sweet he’d been on Sunday morning.

He just didn't give a fuck. The shit between her thighs felt too nice against his palms, and his head was still comfortably hollow from Kaito’s weed.

He wanted an entire day wasted between the sheets, ordering takeout, fucking her until she was trembling, and letting the world spin outside the fogged up glass.

His free arm blindly drifted across the bedside table, fingers knocking over an empty San Pellegrino bottle before curling around the cool titanium edge of his phone.

"Gonna order something," he mumbled, lips still dragging along her shoulder, his voice thick with sleepy, heavy-lidded satisfaction. "What you want? French toast or some shit?"

He clicked the side button. The lock screen flared bright.

Two previews sat stacked on the glass. From 🍒.

woke up thinking about you. u home? i miss that dick

A second preview rolled in right beneath it, a thumbnail of tanned hips arched over black silk, a picture of her completely naked.

The warmth evaporated out of Solomon’s chest like water tossed onto a hot skillet.

His favorite was awake. She was texting, wet and looking for him, talking about pulling up to the loft.

The dopey haze snapped clean off his psyche, instantly.

Solomon blinked down at the glowing glass, his thumb immediately locking the screen with a sharpclick.

The arm draped over the girl beside him suddenly felt heavy for all the wrong reasons. The soft scent of her turned cloying, sickeningly sweet, thick enough to choke on. He glanced around the suite, his brown eyes deadpan and flat as slate.

Shit was everywhere.

Her clothes was slung over the designer lamp on the floor. Her shoes were kicked sideways against his lowboy dresser. Her phone and lip gloss were scattered across the nightstand. Stray shit everywhere that belonged to someone whose name he literally could not fucking remember.

It was all suddenly suffocating and an irritation prickling under his skin.

Just like that, she wasn't soft. She wasn't scenery. She was an obstacle standing directly between him, a hot shower, and his favorite girl walking through the door.

Solomon pulled his arm back.

He swung his legs over the edge and stood up, not bothering with a sheet. He stood over six-foot in the gold light, broad shoulders sloping down to tight, cut abs and the sharp V of his hips.

His dark tattoos stretched across his back and calves, eight inches of heavy, uncircumcised meat hanging thick and relaxed between his thighs, still gleaming faintly with the mess from the night before.

He reached down, scratching his happy trail with a bored, idle flex of his knuckles, completely indifferent to his nakedness.

His voice came out entirely flat, stripped of the low, honeyed rasp from two minutes ago, replaced by the cool, indifferent drawl of a stranger in an elevator.

"You should head out by ten," he said, turning his back and walking barefoot toward the open master bath.

The velvet dark of the coastline view was paired with the smell of salt, high-dollar weed, and the sweet stink of spilled reposado soaking into imported teak floors. Inside Callum’s beach house, the air was thick, suffocating and hot, like the breath of a crowded kennel. Party had barely started and bodies were everywhere.

Solomon was poured across the low linen sectional like spilled whiskey on marble, one leg hooked lazy over the armrest, heavy vintage denim pooling around custom distressed sneakers boots that cost more than a semester of state tuition.

The bass from the floor-standing subs made his ribcage bounce, a dull, droning throb that went thump, thump, thump against his sternum.

Around him, the room was a circus of rich-boy antics. Aoi was perched on the edge of the kitchen island, jaw going a mile a minute, laughing too loud at nothing at all. Tyler hovered near the marble stairwell like an anxious retriever, desperate to match Callum’s frequency. Only Callum was still upstairs. While Zack Prescott leaned against the patio glass, chin tilted, sipping neat bourbon and staging his nonchalance like there were cameras rolling in the molding.

It was sad, really. Everyone worked so hard at being untouchable. Solomon never had to work at a single fucking thing.

A loud completely inhuman scream tore through the party from the second-floor. Then came the crash of shattered glass, an explosive, heavy shudder through the ceiling plaster.

SMASH.

"LYING BITCH!" Callum’s shriek tore from wherever he was upstairs "YOU FUCKING LYING WHORE!" Callum’s voice cracked in a way Solomon had never heard before.

"Yo, Cal!?" Tyler’s voice pitched upward, cracking into a thin squeak as his head whipped toward the mezzanine. "Dude, you okay!?"

"Callum!" Aoi barked, abandoning his drink with the kind of frantic loyalty reserved for guys who knew who bought the booze.

Solomon didn't blink. He kept his eyes drifted downward, amber gaze half-hooded under dark brows, the cold gleam of his iPhone screen washing across his buzz cut. He watched through his peripheral vision as Tyler and Aoi scrambled up the hardwood stairs, their designer loafers skidding on the risers. Zack lingered a beat, adjusting the collar of his knit shirt, then drifted up behind them like he was supervising a minor zoning dispute.

Lame as hell.

The amnesiac thing had been hilarious for about four days, watching Callum play domestic with some poor concussed girl he dragged out of the ICU just to treat her like an unpaid maid before tossing her back into the street.

Solomon had spent two solid weeks sunk into this exact couch cushion while she scrubbed grout in an oversized hoodie, too pretty for the punchline, hovering somewhere between tragic and scenery. He would have slid her into the rotation if Callum wasn’t such a territorial, loud-mouthed chore about his toys.

Now the joke was folding in on itself.

More screaming coming from above.

"GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY HOUSE!" Callum’s throat tore on the scream, hoarse, hysterical, completely stripped of his usually rich-boy chill.

Solomon blew a breath through his nose, a dry, silent exhale of pure boredom. Blue and red lights would be strobing against the bay windows within twenty minutes, and he had zero intention of sitting through some local cop asking him what he’d witnessed while he stared at the champagne stains on the ceiling.

Time to clear out. He tapped out of his feed and thumbed into his messages.

His roster was a clean, minimalist graveyard of past conveniences:

🍒 — no answer last time. Probably asleep. 🍬 — * batshit crazy. Not worth it tonight.* 🍑 — out of town. Saw her story.

His thumb dragged down, callous dragging on tempered glass, until it found 🍞.

Couldn’t recall her name at the moment.

He stared at it. He hadn't texted her since that night at the loft. Three weeks. Standard cooldown. She'd be ready by now, receptive, probably a little mad which just made the makeup sex better.

A little anger always made the grip tighter.

u up?

He hit send.

He didn't wait to see if the little speech bubble showed typing ellipses. He locked the phone, slid it into the back pocket of his denim, and stood up in one fluid, cat-like uncoil that took no effort at all.

Upstairs, heavy footsteps were thudding around. Solomon caught a fat, pre-rolled blunt of Kaito’s boutique dispensary stash from the console table, slipped it between his teeth, and shoved the heavy pivot door open with his forearm.

The salt breeze smacked him square in the mouth, damp and cool. A vintage brass Zippo clinked open in his palm.

Flick. Whoosh.

The end blossomed cherry red, acrid sweet smoke curling into the dark as he took two deep, lazy pulls.

His Bronco waited in the driveway, an eight-hundred-thousand-dollar restomod in matte alabaster, stripped clean of badges, sitting high and broad on beadlocked rubber. Solomon hauled himself up into the saddle-leather bucket, and turned the ignition joint between his lips.

The engine snarled awake, with a deep filthy rumble-rumble-rumble that vibrated through the floorboards and settled heavy into his pelvis. He never got tired of that sound. He shifted into gear, tires tearing into the sand dusted pavement, and swung out onto the blacktopped road winding towards campus.

Ten minutes of open road. Trees blurring into limestone walls. He didn't check the phone once on the highway. If she was asleep, she’d wake up. If she was with someone else, he’d just deal with deal crazy tonight. He didn't care either way.

He pulled the white monster against the curb beneath the heavy boughs of the sycamores outside, the engine clicking as he killed the ignition. Absolute silence rushed in to swallow the cab.

Solomon slouched back into the leather, head tilted against the headrest. His thumb flicked his phone screen alive.

No response to the first one yet. He didn't give a fuck.

He typed two words.

im here

He locked the screen, tossed the phone onto the dash where it rested face-up against the leather, and took a drag from his joint. Five minutes on the dash clock. If the door didn't crack in five, he’d swing past the strip and see if 🍬 was still throwing trying to throw shit at him.