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He wipes my mouth with the edge of his thumb and lifts one side of my headphones. “I’m heading to bed. Don’t stay up too late.”

I don’t respond. The next sequence is loading, and my fingers are already positioned.

He kisses the crown of my head, his lips warm through my hair, before he disappears down the hall.

The bathroom light flicks on, then off. Same pattern for his bedroom.

The strike zones keep coming.

Green, green, green.

My ring finger steadies, the tremor finally gone. Each flawless strike is a connection reforged, the movement flowing from brain to fingertips without a thought.

The tension drains from my neck. My knees lower, and I sink into the couch, the cushions molding to my shoulders.

Another car passes outside. I count the seconds between the sound of its engine appearing and disappearing. Twelve. The next one takes fourteen. The one after that, I don’t hear at all.

I clear the beat-map, and when the high score notification pops, I tap through to the next one without pausing.

The beat-map quickens, the strike zones appearing in clusters of three and four, demanding both thumbs and at least two fingers on each hand. My breathing syncs with the rhythm as my combo keeps climbing.

One hundred.

Two hundred.

Three hundred.

Every perfect strike lets a little more of the Blue Note drain away. Hit or miss. Green or yellow. No conversations to sort through. At the end of the next level, I pull off my headphones, and the last of the pressure dissipates.

One more round.

My thumb moves to hit Start when the three descending notes of Downshift drift from Kain’s open bedroom door.

The riff repeats once.

Twice.

My thumb pauses above the screen, and my eyes burn with fatigue. I remember Kain going to bed, but the memory never made it past the balloon filling my head.

I blink, my dry eyelids sticking, and check the time on my tablet.

Two seventeen in the morning.

That can’t be right. We left the Blue Note around eleven. The drive home was twenty minutes. I’ve been playing for...

I set the tablet on the cushion beside my headphones. After thirty seconds of inactivity, the screen goes dark, and the room sinks deeper into shadow.

Exhaustion crashes over me. A heavy ache settles in my shoulders, the muscles along my forearms stretching thin as a stab of pain in my lower back protests the hours spent hunched over the screen.

I stand, my vertebrae popping. The floor chills my bare feet as I walk to my bedroom, where the door sits half open. I push it wider and stand in the doorway.

The bed is made, comforter smooth, pillows fluffed. An empty charging station waits on the nightstand.

It’s a pristine, untouched space, and I recoil at the thought of breaking that order.

I can’t sleep here.

Across the hall, Kain’s door stands open. I step into a deeper darkness, where only a thin line of streetlight from the cracked blinds cuts across the far wall.