After the Failed Kiss

After years apart, the powerful man and his little nightingale each arrive at a banquet with a partner of the opposite sex who far outshines the other.

But true love is true love. No matter how outstanding the two stand-ins look, how warm their personalities are, or how capable they may be, they can only serve as the backdrop to true love.

As the powerful man and the nightingale act out Forced Love 2.0, he stands on the other side of a door, idly turning an old piece of flint in his hand. He glances at the other background character and says nothing.

In the pitch-black corridor, the flint's faint glow illuminates his sharply defined features. A fleeting spark catches at the corner of his eye and brow, making him impossibly beautiful.

With a cigarette between her vivid red lips, she leans closer to light it. Her lashes cast a bewitching shadow as the mild smoke rises. She lifts a brow and smiles. "Old classmate, your girlfriend ran off with someone else. Aren't you angry?"

"No. Someone a little older knows how to treat people better."

He lazily ignores her question and instead hooks a finger around a lock of her hair. His husky voice is like scorching vodka spilling across the floor. "Want to?"

That tiny glimmer is much like the sparse starlight that once shone through the windows of their high school hallway, or the rounded red dots on a crumpled sheet of paper.

"Of all these people, you're the only one I haven't kissed."

"Then leave it that way."

Years later, she puts out her cigarette and, in the darkness, rises on her toes to kiss him squarely on the lips. With a careless, wicked smile, she says, "All right."

[It's my lifelong regret that I didn't tame you into a willing servant at my feet back then. But I won't lose to you a second time.]

A collector of handsome men, the background character x a scheming background character

Theme: The tools strike back