dark fame | obsession | corruption | rockstar au
she went on tour because she was done letting her band be overlooked.
he was never supposed to become that part of the story.
By the time I get back to the hotel, my phone is warm in my hand from how many times I’ve checked it.
I tell myself I don’t know why I keep checking it. That’s a lie. I know exactly why. I know why, because every time the screen lights up, and it still isn’t him, my stomach drops anyway.
The private floor is too quiet when the elevator opens.
Not emptiness. Quiet. The kind of quiet that only exists in expensive places where people are paid to make noise disappear. The carpet swallows my footsteps. The lights are low and gold and deliberate. Everything smells like polished wood, cold air, and the lingering trace of someone’s expensive perfume. My pass card feels damp in my hand. My pulse feels wrong. Too fast, like I can still blame it on the show if I don’t think too hard.
I should go to my room. I should keep walking. I should stop giving this much power to a closed door.
Instead, I stand in the middle of the hallway, still in stage makeup, hair half-fallen, hands cold even though the rest of me feels too hot, looking toward the turn at the end of the corridor like I already know something is waiting there.
Luke is leaning against the wall outside his room like he has been there long enough for it to stop being a decision. Black shirt. Black jeans. Sleeves pushed up just far enough to show the ink on his arms. One hand in his pocket. The other was hanging loose at his side with his phone caught between his fingers. He looks up the second he hears the elevator. For one second, I hate him for being there already, for making the whole hallway feel smaller just by looking at me.
He never does, not at moments like this, when the air between us is already wrong, and one word could turn the whole thing ugly.
“You shouldn’t be up here,” I say.
My voice sounds wrong to me. Too flat. Too quiet. Like it might break if I put any more feeling into it.
He doesn’t move, and neither do I.
The worst thing about Luke has never been what you notice first. It isn’t the silence, exactly. Or how fast he can go cold, so fast it feels deliberate even when I’m not sure it is. It isn’t even the way everyone else mistakes his distance for calm. It’s the way he says simple things as if they carry more weight than they should, the way he can make one sentence feel like a hand at the back of my neck.
I swallow and start walking anyway, because standing there like I’ve forgotten how to move is humiliating, and I have already done enough humiliating things for him. My room is farther down, past his. There is no way to get there without passing him. I know it before I move. I feel it with every step.
He watches me walk toward him. I hate that I can feel it before I’m even close.
The hallway feels longer than it is. My boots sound too loud until the carpet swallows them again. My heartbeat moves into my throat, then my wrists, then somewhere stupid like the backs of my knees. He doesn’t straighten when I get near him. He doesn’t step into my way. He stays there against the wall, looking at me like stillness is something he knows how to use, and I tell myself I’m going to walk past him. Keep walking. Go to my room. Be done for the night.
Then I draw level with him, and he says my name. “Sienna.”
Quiet. Low. Barely a word. It still stops me.
I close my eyes for one second because I hate that it works. I hate that after tonight, after every reason I should know better, one word from him still works.
He is looking at me the same way he was before, but closer now; it’s worse somehow. More tired. More worn through than he usually lets himself look. There is a dark mark near one of his knuckles, like he hit something or caught his hand on something hard and didn't bother to care after. His hair is a mess in a way that looks accidental until you know him well enough to know when it means he has been dragging his hands through it too much. He looks like someone coming apart in expensive lighting.
I should keep walking. Instead, my feet stop. “What?”
The word comes out sharp enough to cut, and maybe that is the point. I can’t tell anymore. He makes me feel like every part of me is trying too hard.
His thumb moves once along the edge of his phone. He looks past me for half a second, then back at my face.
Something in me laughs, ugly and humorless and tired.
“That’s what people do when they’re done.”
The words hit me so fast that my whole body went still. There’s nothing soft in it, nothing romantic enough to excuse the way it lands. They’re worse than that. They’re the kind of words that mean too much and still not enough.
I stare at him, and he lets me.
The gold hallway light makes the shadows under his eyes look bruised. I can still feel the ghost of the crowd in my body — bass, heat, stage lights — but all of it feels far away now. Now it is only this hallway, this air, and not enough distance between us.
“You don’t get to say things like that after tonight,” I say.
His jaw tightens, just slightly. Most people would miss it, but I don’t. I don’t miss anything about him anymore, and maybe that is the problem.
“After tonight,” he repeats.
The way he says it sends heat up the back of my neck again, immediate and humiliating. He sounds angry, but underneath it, there is something less controlled. Something tired and sharp, almost wounded, which would be easier to resist if I didn’t know how dangerous that could make him.
He pushes off the wall, finally moving. It is only one step, but it changes the whole shape of the hallway. My body reacts before my mind catches up. My spine goes tight. My hand closes harder around my key card. He notices, because of course he does. His eyes drop to it, then back to my face, and the look is so quick, so unreadable, that it almost makes me angrier than cruelty would have.
“You think I don’t know what this is doing to you?” he asks.
My throat goes so tight it hurts. I laugh again, and this time it sounds worse. Thinner. Fraying.
“No,” I say. “I think you know exactly what it does to me. I don’t think it stops you.” Silence. Heavy, immediate, almost visible.
He is close enough now that if I move wrong, I’ll be against him, and the thought reaches my body before it gets anywhere useful. My skin goes hot. My stomach twists. My pulse feels too violent for this — for a conversation, for a man who has already done enough damage to me without touching me at all.
His eyes do that thing I hate, the brief flick down and back up, like he has noticed something I wish he hadn’t.
“I told you,” he says quietly. The words are so low I almost don’t hear them.
His mouth shifts once, like he regrets the sentence before he says it. “That you didn’t know what it would cost you.”
There is a second where all I can do is look at him. Of course, he remembers. Out of everything else he could have forgotten, denied, or made meaningless, he remembers that. And it hurts more than I expected, which makes me hate it more.
My eyes sting, sudden and hot, and I look away before he can see it. If he hasn’t already. The hallway swims for one ugly second, not enough to make me lose it, just enough to make me furious that my body even tries.
“You don’t get to do this now,” I say, and my voice is shaking, actually shaking, which makes everything worse. “You don’t get to wait until everything is ruined and then act like you were trying to warn me.”
He says my name again. Just that, like he knows what it does. And somehow that is worse, because there is too much in it: exhaustion, restraint, whatever this is that always feels like it is about to become honesty and never fully does.
I look back at him. He looks tired enough to scare me. Not like he needs sleep. Like something in him has been pulled too far, and everyone around him keeps mistaking the strain for control.
“You should go back to your room,” he says. I blink at him.
The change is so abrupt it almost makes me dizzy. “That’s funny.”
His expression doesn’t move. “Sienna.”
“No, go on,” I say, and now that I’ve started, I can’t seem to stop. “You don’t get to stand here waiting for me and then decide I should leave once this starts sounding too real for you. That isn’t how this works anymore.”
His hand goes to the wall beside him, fingers flexing once against the paint. Almost nothing. I catch it anyway. I wish I didn’t.
“That’s exactly how it works,” he says.
Something in me drops. He doesn’t raise his voice. He doesn’t step closer. He sounds calm, which is worse, because calm from him has never meant safe.
For one awful second, I can’t breathe right. The private floor feels too warm and too cold at the same time. I can hear the blood in my ears. I can hear somebody laughing far away on another level of the hotel, a small bright sound from a different universe than the one I’m standing in now. My grip on the key card hurts.
I should leave. This time, I make myself.
I move around him before my body can betray me and stop again. It’s close — too close. My shoulder almost brushes his arm, and I can feel the heat of him without contact, which is somehow more unbearable than if he had just touched me outright. My room is only a few doors down. I can see it. I can make it there. I can get inside, shut the door, and let this night end where it should, instead of wherever he always manages to drag it.
Then his voice comes from behind me, low enough that it barely sounds like speech at all.
“I waited because I knew you’d come up angry.”
My body stops before I can force it forward.
“And?” I don’t turn around when I say it. My face would give me away.
A pause. Long enough to hurt. “And I wanted to see if you still would.”
It feels like something inside my chest gets caught in a fist.
I turn around. I shouldn’t, but I do.
He is still standing where I left him, one hand in his pocket again, like that can make him look less affected, less dangerous, less like the kind of man who would say something like that and leave it between us to do all the damage for him.
He doesn’t look away, and neither do I.
The whole hallway feels suspended and silent, expensive in a way that seems rotten beneath, as if the building itself is holding its breath with me.
I hate him a little in that moment. I hate myself more. Because even after tonight, with everything in me scraped raw and shaking, I know exactly why he waited.
And worse, I know exactly why I gave him what he wanted.
if anyone wants to be tagged when i start posting it, lmk
