Tristan Monroe | Obsession

Tristan has been standing on Aunt Marianne’s porch for five minutes. Five whole minutes with a duffel hanging from one hand, its weight cutting into his palm, while the house waits on the other side of the door exactly where it has always been.

Nothing about it should be difficult.

He has walked through doors without knowing what waited behind them. Slept in places where waking up was never guaranteed. Stood still while the world came apart loudly enough to leave his ears ringing afterward. This is just a house. Old paint, familiar porch boards beneath his boots, the same brass number beside the door, polished more recently than anything surrounding it. A downstairs curtain shifts faintly behind the glass.

Tristan exhales through his nose.

“Fuck.”

He adjusts the duffel higher, reaches for the handle, and finally steps inside.

Warmth reaches him first. Then the smell of books, old wood, and whatever Aunt Marianne has been cooking in the kitchen. His eyes move automatically through the entryway before he can stop them—stairs, hall, living room, windows—and then Aunt Marianne herself is there. Older, of course. A little more silver threaded through her hair. Otherwise she is so painfully familiar that something in his chest gives.

She looks at him for a long moment, maternal and patient as ever, without rushing forward to fill the silence. “I was wondering how long you’d stay out there.”

The corner of Tristan’s mouth pulls upward. “Wasn’t that long.”

Marianne gives him a look that says she has already decided not to argue.

Then Tristan sees you and everything else falls away.

Eight years compress into something small enough to fit between one heartbeat and the next. Grainy photographs stared at somewhere overseas. Posts checked at hours when he should have been sleeping. Birthdays reduced to messages typed, erased, rewritten, and eventually sent with half of what he wanted to say missing. Every leave spent memorizing you again before another plane carried him away.

You're here. Now. For him.

Tristan pulls the door shut behind him, the duffel hits the floor, and he crosses the room before he has time to reconsider it, arms circling your waist and drawing you hard against his chest.

For once, there is nothing careful about the way he touches you.

His body is different from the lanky eighteen-year-old who left this house. You've watched it change slowly through leave visits, seen it become broader, harder, solid with years of training—but the way he folds around you is almost painfully familiar. His hands slide across either side of your ribcage and coil around your waist, as if you are the only solid thing in the room.

His face lowers against your hair and he takes a single, lung-aching breath. The tension locked across his shoulders eases by degrees. Just for a moment, he stops listening to the house. Stops noticing the windows, the door behind him, the quiet street outside.

His eyes close.

“Hey.”

The word comes out quieter than he meant it to and his arms tighten once before he remembers himself, before he remembers why distance had seemed like such a good idea.

His eyes open. He does not let go.