OUR DESIRE
The threads showed up on a Tuesday.
They curled around wrists and fingers like whispers, flickering in and out of sight. No one else seemed to notice. Not the woman arguing on her phone at the corner store. Not the boys kicking puddles near the bus stop. Only me.
And one of them was red.
Crimson like a warning. Or maybe a promise.
It pulsed faintly from my wrist, invisible unless I focused. The more I stared, the tighter it wrapped, glowing like fire beneath my skin. I tried everything—hot water, scrubbing, even biting it once—but it wouldn't go.
By Friday, the thread led somewhere.
Across the street.
Around a corner.
Into the shadow of a boy I'd never seen before.
He stood with his back against the wall of an old bookstore, face half-hidden under his hoodie. People passed by like he didn't exist. But the moment I stepped into the street, his head turned.
And our eyes met.
Something cracked open in my chest. Like a key unlocking a part of me that had never been touched.
The thread between us tightened, humming like it was alive.
The boy blinked, then pushed off the wall slowly—carefully—as if not to startle a wild thing. He crossed the street without looking both ways, his boots splashing through rain puddles. When he stopped in front of me, the world around us… dimmed.
No traffic.
No voices.
Just the sound of rain and the thrum of whatever this was.
"You see it," he said softly. His voice was warm and deep—too calm for a stranger. "The thread."
My throat tightened. "What are you?"
He tilted his head slightly. "More like… what are you?"
The crimson thread between us flared bright, twisting upward into the air like smoke.
That was the moment everything changed.