Yuna missed feeling warmth. It was one of the reasons she was drawn to heat- like a moth to a flame. 

Yuna's idea of warmth had always been scientifical. She knew the concept of it: Heat that is transferred from one physical body to another, due to the contrast in temperature. Her mother's hands were never warm, the result of being in a patient's ward for years, as if the chill had settled beneath her skin. Her father rarely smiled, and his hands were always crisp and frigid, like all of his ironed suits that had adsorbed the coolness from the air-conditioner in his cars.

     The house,even with all the heating, still echoed with the cold from the quiet. The bedrooms were only filled in the spare hours of sleep, and the marble floors gleamed with quiet cold, numbing Yuna's toes as she came home from school to a dark, still house.

      Her meals were cold, and she spent hours in the bath for some sort of meager replacement for her deprivation of heat. She'd sit, the water up to her chin,  until her fingers wrinkled and the glass screens fogged. 

     Yuna would then go to her room, finish her homework. Recopy her notes, and count the trophies that lined her shelves, lifeless suns that glinted faintly in the dark as Yuna tried to go to sleep. 

     Sometimes she would leave her bed and drift to the park, taking the overgrown dirt path until she reached the old playground, where the jasmine trees coiled and bloomed. Yuna would then crawl into the tunnel, feet dangling outside, inhale the scent of jasmine. Sometimes she would fall asleep right in the tunnel, and wake up to the sound of early traffic- people returning from night shifts at dawn. Yuna would then walk back home, and then prepare herself for school.

   She felt safe in the tunnel, even though it was dangerous for a teenage girl in various ways, and she was occasionally exposed to things like rain and bug bites, it was still the only place where she could sleep . Slowly, Yuna moved an set of blankets and pillow to make a makeshift bed in the tunnel, and made some sort of a door at both ends of the tunnel with some scrap wood and wire, which she could slide open , and close when it was raining. Eventually, the tunnel became a safe haven, and Yuna plastered its insides with glow-in the-dark-stars after she had wiped it clean with disinfectant. Sometimes the tunnel would had adsorbed all the heat from the sun, and Yuna would lean against the walls, at peace.

      She'd thought no one knew about her hideout.

      Until he'd found her, shirt cuffs damp, mouth wet as his eyes took in the scene.

       And it took all the warmth from her, and left her freezing cold.