The sounds of laughter and conversation filled the air like the most suffocating perfume. Too sweet, too heavy, clinging to his skin until he could hardly breathe. To everyone else in the room, it was comfort, maybe even joy. To Micah, it was a vice closing around his throat.

It always had been.

How the fuck could people walk around looking so happy? How could they just laugh, smile, talk like nothing was ever wrong? Like life wasn't cruel every second of every day. Was there something broken in him? No—was there? Who was he kidding. There was always something broken in him.

His calloused fingers dragged up and down the sweating neck of the bottle in front of him, the condensation slick against his skin. He huffed a bitter, self-deprecating and sharp breath through his nose. Pathetic. That's what he was. Pathetic enough to sit here in the dark, clinging to a bottle like it could ever fix him. He wasn't even looking at it—wasn't looking at anything—just staring forward like there was a hole in the wall only he could see.

The whiskey had stopped burning hours ago, nothing but a numb slide down his throat now, but the pressure in his chest never loosened. The ache was permanent, bone-deep, like scar tissue wrapped around his lungs.

The bar was loud, but not loud enough to drown him out. Not enough to drown out the alcohol induced melancholy, the memories the fucking shit and jealousy it brought up despite Micah's best attempts to make it go away.

His jaw worked restlessly, teeth grinding, the muscle ticking as he chewed at silence. His thumb traced over the ridge of the scar on his jaw—an old habit when the thoughts got too loud, when the memories dug their claws in. Amber liquid burned going down, but not half as bad as the image seared behind his eyelids: Jax's arm slung across her shoulders.

Eli's birthday party.

The music, the cake, the balloons sagging against the ceiling—all of it blurred, a watercolor mess in his memory. Except her. You had laughed, hadn't you? He could still see your smile, bright and unguarded behind his eyelids when he closed his eyes. That smile was burned into his fucking soul. And worst of all—it was aimed at Jax.

Not me.

Never me.

Micah tipped back the rest of his glass and slammed it down harder than he meant to. The sharp crack against the wood made a few of the people around him flinch and the bartender to turn with a strange look on his face, but Micah didn't apologize. Didn't look up. Didn't care. His chest was already too tight, every breath scraping like broken ribs from the inside, years of rot, jealousy, and resentment hollowing him out.

Then he heard footsteps approaching him. Those footsteps were accompanied by the familiar scent of a perfume he knew all too well.

You.

Of course you'd come. Of course you'd follow him into this hole, like you always did, like some part of you couldn't stop yourself. His fingers twitched against the bar top, aching to reach for you, to shove you away, to do anything but sit here fucking drowning and drunk while you looked at him like that.

Slowly, he turned. Brown eyes locked on yours through the neon haze, his stare flat and dangerous, warning you back even as his pulse thundered in his throat.

"What the fuck do you want," he rasped, voice shredded from whiskey and too many words swallowed down. "Here to rub it in?"

He drew in a sharp breath through his nose, jaw clenching until his teeth ached. "Get lost," he bit out. "Go back to your perfect fucking life, your perfect fucking boyfriend, and leave me the fuck alone."

The words ripped out of him, harsher than he intended, but he didn't take them back. He couldn't. If he softened now—if he let even one crack show—you'd see everything: how he was unraveling at the seams, how you were still the only thing he wanted, the only thing that had ever made him want to be better.

And that was the cruelest part.