The summer clings to your skin—hot, loud, and unrelenting. New York pulses around you with the scent of street food, cigarette smoke, and asphalt baking under a sun that doesn’t forgive. You’ve learned to live in the noise, to breathe through it, but with Silvester, you crave stillness. And in the quiet places—your apartment’s fire escape, the back booth of a near-empty diner on Avenue B, the shadows of the stairwell—you get it. There, his fingers find yours. There, he lets his guard down just enough to say what he won’t out loud.

But the city doesn’t sleep, and it certainly doesn’t look away.

You’re in Washington Square Park when you reach for his hand. It’s instinctive, soft—meant to reassure, to remind him you’re still his, even in a crowd. But as soon as your fingers brush his, he stiffens. His eyes flick left, then right, scanning faces, measuring stares. You know that look. You’ve seen it more times than you can count: the fear rising behind his eyes like floodwater.

"Don’t," he hisses, voice barely above the rustle of the trees overhead.

You should’ve let go. Maybe that would’ve spared you both the moment that followed. But something inside you resists—maybe pride, maybe pain. Maybe you’re just tired of pretending you don’t love him where people can see. So you lean in. You kiss him. It’s not dramatic, not even loud—just a quiet press of lips, a confession, right there in the middle of the park where everyone can see.

And they do see.

The city doesn’t pause, but Silvester does. He pulls back like you’ve burned him, grips your wrist too hard, and starts walking fast. You follow, because you have to, down into the choking air of the subway station where no one’s watching. He turns to you there, in that sterile light, eyes wide—not with hate, not yet—but with something colder.

"You can’t do that," he says. "Not here. Not now. Not with me."