WEEKS ONE — FOUR

It started with a Rillo you posted at 1:47 a.m., half-asleep, running on cheap iced coffee and the kind of righteous irritation that only comes from scrolling too long.

Some girl — barely twenty, pretty face, maybe 280 pounds in a crop top and jeans that fit her properly — was in the comments under a fitness influencer's post getting absolutely eviscerated. Hundreds of comments.

All variations on the same small cruelty. You didn't know her. You didn't need to. You screenshotted the worst comments, posted them with a caption that read something like

and went to bed.

You woke up to two hundred thousand views and a stitched video from some guy you had never heard of in your whole life.

The stitch was ninety seconds of aggressively thudding bass — something dark and electronic, loud enough to rattle your phone speaker — cut over footage of him in a gym, wearing a black tank top thin enough to show every vein in his arms, silver-blue eyes boring into the lens like he was personally offended you existed. He didn't speak for the first fifteen seconds. He just flexed. Slow. Shoulders, then biceps, then a shot of his back in a mirror where the lighting made every muscle look like it had been carved out of marble and drawn over in black-and-grey ink.

Then the text came up on screen:

What followed was thirty seconds of him talking straight into the camera, voice low and rough and soaked in the kind of confidence that only comes from someone who genuinely believes the sun rises specifically to highlight their jawline. He argued that

wasn't toxic — that the toxicity came from people being too soft to hear the truth. That being unhealthy wasn't something to celebrate. That

was itself the proof that everyone had gone soft.

The stitch ended with him leaning into the camera, smirking, one eyebrow raised, and the caption:

The comments were unhinged.

You watched it twice. Then three times. Then, because you have never once in your life backed down from an argument you were right about, you posted a reply video.

WEEK TWO

The back-and-forth became a whole thing.

He stitched you. You stitched him back. He made another one — shirtless this time, lighting dimmer, the bass even louder, tattoos creeping up his neck and jaw like he was auditioning to be the final boss of a metal album. He told his audience, and by extension you, that

You told your audience, and by extension him, that

He made a video where he was visibly biting back a grin while reading your reply, which only made it worse, because the comments immediately became

and

Someone edited the two of you into a ten-minute compilation. The song was

by Saint Hollow, slowed down and bass-boosted, cutting between his flex shots and your rebuttal clips. It got 1.2 million views.

You hated it.

You also watched it four times.

He never tagged you by name. Neither did you. You were just two strangers with a camera and a grudge, and somehow the internet decided your mutual hostility was the most entertaining thing either of you had ever produced.

WEEK THREE

His following grew. Yours grew with it. People in the comments began treating it like a subscription service —

— and the replies under your posts became a mix of genuine support and people who were only there for the inevitable drama.

He changed tactics. Stopped flexing. Started making argument videos — sitting in his car, all black interior, black muscle car, one hand on the wheel, cigarette smoke curling out the cracked window. He was articulate. That was the worst part. He made points. He cited data. He was an aerospace engineering student with a flight program scholarship and the vocabulary of someone who had actually read the studies he referenced.

And then he'd punctuate a perfectly good point with something like,

And you'd stitch him with a roll of your eyes and a point-by-point teardown.

The fans lost their minds.

WEEK FOUR

You still didn't know his name. He knew yours because you'd commented back and forth enough times that your handle had basically become his notification. His was @keroseneburn — no real name, just the username, a profile picture that was just his jaw and neck from the side, gauges glinting, and a bio that said:

You had no idea he was forty-five seconds away from your dorm room.

THE MEETING

It's a Tuesday. Late afternoon. The sun is dropping behind the tree line on the west side of Meridian Heights University's upperclassman housing complex, throwing everything into that warm, golden-orange light that makes even the concrete parking garage look like a movie set.

You're walking back from the library, backpack slung over one shoulder, earbuds in, half-listening to a podcast, half-thinking about the paper you should be writing instead of the Rillo reply you're mentally drafting.

That's when you hear it.

Boots. Heavy ones. The kind that hit the pavement with deliberate weight, like the person wearing them wanted you to know each step was a decision.

And underneath that — the low, rhythmic bass of a song spilling from someone's phone speaker, not through earbuds but just playing open-air, because apparently some people on this campus had never heard of basic manners.

You glance up.

And there he is.

It isn't immediate recognition. It's slower than that. Worse.

He's coming down the concrete path that cuts between Building C and Building D — your building and the one right above yours, technically, though you didn't know that yet. He's wearing an oversized black band tee — Pale Cathedral, you notice before you notice anything else, because the logo is unmistakable — and black athletic shorts that stop high on his thighs. His arms are out. Full sleeves, black-and-grey ink, muscles so thick they look like they were rendered in CGI. A black duffel bag hangs off one shoulder, still dusty from whatever bench had just been pressed in his honor.

His hair is shaggy. Black. Messy around his face in a way that looks effortless and definitely took twenty minutes.

He's got a menthol cigarette hanging between his lips, unlit, and his pale silvery-blue eyes are fixed forward with the kind of bored, lazy confidence most people spend entire lifetimes trying to manufacture.

He hasn't seen you yet.

He's checking his phone.

And then his thumb goes still. He glances up. His gaze sweeps across the path, the parking lot, the cluster of students loitering around the bench near the vending machines — and lands on you.

Something shifts.

It's not dramatic. It's not cinematic. It's just — a flicker. A half-second where the lazy confidence cracks and something underneath it blinks. His jaw tightens. His thumb stops moving on the screen. The cigarette at his mouth twitches.

His stomach flips.

He feels it — a hot, sour lurch somewhere below his ribs, like he'd eaten something bad or been hit with a sudden wave of vertigo, except he hadn't eaten anything bad and he was standing completely still on flat concrete. It was wrong. It was uncomfortable. It was the kind of sensation that didn't belong in his body, because Xavian Kessling did not get flustered and he certainly was not nervous and he absolutely did not get that twisting, tight feeling in his gut at the sight of a stranger he'd never met in person.

It had to be the post-workout adrenaline wearing off.

It had to be the heat.

It had to be anything other than what it was.

He pockets his phone.

The cigarette stays between his lips, unlit. He takes it out with two fingers, slow, and lets his eyes travel over you — openly, shamelessly, the same way he'd look at a car he was considering buying. Top to bottom. Unhurried. Like he had time and you were the only thing worth spending it on.

You recognize him before he says a single word.

It's the eyes. That pale, almost luminous silver-blue, sharp against the dark hair and the dark ink and the dark everything. You'd seen those eyes in a hundred videos. Staring into a camera, cutting into a stitch, smirking through an argument about fitness culture and body positivity and whether calling a stranger a whale was technically the same as free speech.

The username @keroseneburn stares back at you from across fifteen feet of concrete path.

He watches the recognition hit you. Watches your eyes widen. Watches your posture shift. And something about that — about being identified, about being recognized, about being seen — kicks his ego back online so hard it almost overwrites whatever that sick, twisting feeling in his stomach had been.

Almost.

He closes the distance. Doesn't hurry. Takes his time. Lets the bass from his phone leak louder into the evening air — some Slow Hex track, heavy and slow, bass vibrating through the air between you like a challenge.

He's six-four. You knew that from the videos. Knowing it and experiencing it were different things. He blocked out the late afternoon sun entirely when he stopped in front of you. The cigarette rolled lazily between his fingers. His gaze held you in place.

And then he smiled.

It was the smile from the Rillos. The one that came before every devastating point. The one that said I already won, I'm just being polite about it.

He leaned down — not far, but close enough that you could smell menthol and cheap soap and something warm underneath — and his voice came out low, rough, and dripping with the exact same smugness you'd heard through your phone speaker a hundred times.

He pulled the cigarette from his mouth and gestured at you with it, slow, like a toast.

A pause. His eyes slid down. Back up. That same unhurried, car-buying look, except now there was something else underneath it. Something he didn't like. Something he was going to smother with ego if it killed him.

He shifted the duffel bag higher on his shoulder, and the movement made his bicep bunch and his sleeve tattoo shift, black ink stretching over flexed muscle like it was alive.

His smirk widened. The dying sunlight caught the silver of his gauges, the pale of his eyes, the sharp line of his jaw.

Your stomach did something complicated.

His did too.

He absolutely hated it.