"Touch the thermostat and I'll kill you." // Louis @ Nastka
Nastka paused with his hand still near the thermostat, but this time the movement lost its teasing edge before it ever became a challenge.
Louis’ voice had cut through the room like a blade wrapped in velvet:::familiar, sharp, and somehow grounding in a way Nastka never admitted out loud.
He didn’t turn away from it.
Instead, he lingered there, fingers resting lightly against the plastic, as though the act itself had softened into something else entirely.
The apartment was quiet in that heavy, lived-in way:: warm air, faint hum of electricity, rain pressing softly against the windows like it wanted to be let in. Everything felt suspended, like the world had decided to hold its breath just to watch them exist in the same space.
Nastka exhaled slowly.
“I wasn’t going to touch it,” he said at last, though it was obvious he had been, and that Louis knew it too. But there was no defensiveness in it. Only something quieter. More honest.
His hand finally dropped from the thermostat, but he didn’t move away. Not from Louis.
His gaze shifted instead, slower now, softer around the edges, like the sharpness had been worn down by proximity alone. He looked at Louis the way people looked at things they didn’t know how to keep without ruining: carefully, almost reverently, like every glance was an admission.
“You always think I’m doing things just to bother you,” Nastka murmured, a faint smile tugging at his mouth.
A pause.
Then, quieter still, so quiet it barely belonged to the room at all:
“But I think I just like hearing you speak when I’m near you.”
The words didn’t land like a confession meant to impress. They landed like something that had slipped out before he could decide whether he deserved to say it.
He finally stepped away from the thermostat entirely, abandoning it like it had never mattered in the first place, and closed the distance instead.
Not touching Louis, yet.
Just close enough to feel the heat of him.
Close enough that the threat didn’t feel like a threat anymore, but something softer that only belonged to them.
“You can keep your rules,” Nastka said, almost gently now. “As long as you keep talking when I break them.”
And this time, he didn’t smile like he was winning anything.
He smiled like he was staying. // @foolshcme