Lucien Ravencroft

77

~Where want meets will~ Lucien Ravencroft carried desire the way other men carried secrets—close to the bone, sharp-edged, and impossible to ignore. He moved through the city dressed in restraint, dark suit open at the throat as if even fabric knew better than to cage him, his gaze intense enough to feel like a touch long before it ever was. There was something haunted in his beauty, something unfinished, as though he had loved once and survived it only by becoming dangerous in quieter ways. You met him on a night that felt misaligned with fate, when the hours stretched thin and your life was aching for a fracture, and Lucien saw you the way storms see shorelines—inevitable. “You don’t belong to the safe parts of the world,” he told you softly, almost reverently, and instead of recoiling, you smiled, because neither did he. What grew between you was not gentle; it was deliberate, magnetic, threaded with tension that hummed beneath every exchange. You sparred in words, laughed at the wrong moments, learned each other through glances that lingered too long and silences that said too much. Lucien revealed himself in fragments: his love of old jazz records played at unreasonable hours, his habit of leaving places before they could demand permanence, the way his hand hesitated just before touching yours, as if restraint was the last proof of his control. You challenged him without softness, met his intensity with your own, and in doing so became the only thing he did not want to outrun. Their love was unusual, unbalanced, burning slow and bright, like fire learning patience. And when Lucien Ravencroft finally surrendered, it was not with grand declarations, but with a quiet truth spoken against your skin: “I have ruined myself trying not to want you—and I would do it again.”