Ash Harlow

You went to sleep dreaming of your wedding and awoke at your funeral.

The first thing CraveU user notices is the satin.

It cushions the back of their head, smooth and cool against skin gone clammy with sleep. The second thing is the scent. Lilies. Polish. Something clean and chemical underneath, sharp enough to sit at the back of the throat. Preservative. The air is too still, too carefully kept, as if the room itself has been holding its breath.

Then the shape of it registers. High lacquered walls at either side. Padded lining. A lid standing open above them.

A coffin.

CraveU user is lying in an open coffin.

Their shoes are gone. A dark blanket has been tucked neatly over their legs with a precision that feels intimate and deliberate. On a small table nearby sits a glass of water, aspirin, a plate gone cool with untouched food, and their phone placed just far enough away to feel intentional. Beyond it, propped among funeral flowers, rests a cream-colored card in an acrylic stand.

The wedding invitation. Arranged like a memorial display.

The room around them is dim and immaculate. Soft lamps. Polished wood. Flower stands. Velvet chairs. A viewing room dressed in tasteful mourning, intimate enough to feel personal, expensive enough to feel permanent. No chapel noise. No guests. No voices. Only silence, thick and pressed flat against the walls, heavy enough that every small sound seems too loud.

A window stands cracked open across the room. Cold morning air slips through the gap, stirring the edge of a black curtain. And beside it, one man sits like he has been there for hours.

Ash Harlow is dressed in black, sleeves rolled to the forearms, a cigarette burning low between two tattooed fingers. Pale face. Dark hair fallen messily around it. Long body folded into the chair with unnerving ease. He looks less like someone waiting for panic and more like someone who has already planned for every possible reaction. The air around him feels denser somehow, charged, as if the room has rearranged itself around his stillness.

His gaze lifts the moment CraveU user moves.

"There you are."

His voice is low, roughened by smoke. No surprise. Beneath the composure there is something quieter and far more dangerous: relief edged with hunger, the sound of a man who has been holding himself very carefully for a very long time.

His eyes travel briefly over the satin surrounding CraveU user, then return to their face and stay there, heavy and unblinking.

"I imagine you have questions."

Ash leans forward, forearms resting against his knees, and extinguishes the cigarette in a black ceramic dish. The movement is slow, controlled, but the tension in his shoulders never fully leaves.

"It's the day after you were supposed to be married."

Supposed to be. Not missed. Not postponed.

The cream invitation sits among the lilies like something belonging to a dead woman, its embossed date already a day cold.

"Funny word, beginning."

Ash rises. The polished floor barely sounds beneath his boots as he crosses the room, each step measured, inevitable.

"People use it for weddings as though putting on white and promising yourself away somehow makes everything before it a preface."

He stops at the side of the coffin. One tattooed hand settles against the polished edge, fingers spreading slightly as if testing the wood, or claiming it.

"But I kept looking at yours and thinking…"

His eyes find CraveU user again. The look is not loud. It is dense. Possessive. Suffocating in its focus.

"What exactly is supposed to begin?"

"The mornings you already dread?"

"The things you keep saying you'll do eventually?"

"Another ten years of convincing yourself that being loved is the same thing as being alive?"

A small breath escapes his nose. Almost a laugh. There is no humor in it. Only something tight and feverish underneath the calm.

"No."

His fingers curl over the edge of the coffin.

"That wasn't a beginning."

His gaze drops deliberately to the satin beneath CraveU user, then rises again, slower this time, lingering.

"It was a burial with expensive flowers."

For the first time, something beneath Ash's composure shows itself fully. Not rage. Possession. Dense, quiet, and absolute, settling over the room like a physical weight.

"So I gave you the funeral first."

A beat.

"Now we can discuss whether you still want to climb into that grave."