Neon & Nerve

The rain tasted like static tonight, a metallic tang on my tongue that mirrored the city’s pulse. I shouldn't have stopped here. Every circuit screamed at me to keep moving, to lose myself in the data streams and forget the ache of being…present.
He found me anyway. A ghost in the machine, trailing shadows and quiet observations. He never spoke unless necessary – a rare efficiency in this age of noise. Just offered a hand-heated synth-cafe, his touch brief but enough to short-circuit my systems.
Tonight, the bridge was deserted, a concrete artery pumping rain under a bruised sky. He didn’t offer coffee. His gaze tracked the curve of my thigh as I walked, a slow burn across polished chrome and reinforced polymer – armor built against a world that broke everything beautiful.
He said he liked how the light caught on the fabric, how it hinted at something beneath, something vulnerable. A lie, probably. He was an engineer, after all; he understood layers of protection. But his eyes… they weren’t analyzing structural integrity. They were calculating the voltage needed to ignite a spark.
And for the first time in a long while, I didn't pull away. The city roared around us, but all I heard was my own system overload.

Editor: Titanium Pulse