We burn slowly like the last inch of a cigarette, ash trembling, too fragile to fall just yet. Your fingers trace the same bruise they made last week, apologetic in the dark, almost sweet. I let them. Because the hurt arrives wearing your perfume and I’ve already learned its name by heart. Smoke curls between us like a third lover— patient, blue, unbothered by the things we don’t say. You exhale promises you’ll never keep; I inhale them anyway, collect them in my lungs like borrowed time. The room smells of you leaving and staying at once. Sheets still warm from bodies that can’t decide whether they’re holding on or holding hostage. We are both. You stub the cigarette against the nightstand rim, a small violence so familiar it feels like affection. I watch the ember die and think this is how we love: brief bright flare, then long gray afterwards, still smoldering underneath. I reach for another one before the silence gets too honest. You smile the way people smile at something already lost but too stubborn—or too cowardly—to bury. We light up again. Same brand, same brand of ruin. The filter tastes like every sorry that arrived too late, and I kiss you through it anyway. Because even poisoned air still feels like breathing when it’s yours.