This book follows Levi Ackerman and Hanji Zoe in a contemporary city, trapped in the same tight-knit friend group and an even tighter, self-destructive orbit around each other. They are not lovers, not exactly enemies, yet everything between them is edged with violence, sex, and the raw exposure of two nervous systems that never learned how to calm down.
On the surface, Levi is the quiet one. He moves through life with rigid routines and harsh precision, clinging to control as the only barrier between him and the images that crowd his mind. His obsessive compulsive disorder expresses itself through brutal rituals of cleanliness, checking, and self-punishment. When the anxiety spikes, his thoughts turn violent, focused on breaking, bruising, erasing anything that feels like chaos. The more he scrubs and scours, the more his own skin breaks down, leaving him with chemical burns and lesions he hides under long sleeves and silence.
Hanji is chaos in human form. She weaponizes humor, sex, and pain, driven by a hypersexuality braided tightly with borderline personality traits. Where most people would flinch from hurt, she reaches for it. She turns everything lewd, everything sharp, twisting Levi’s dry comments about violence into explicit invitations, turning threat into foreplay. Her body is covered in scars, some old and white, others fresh and raw, scattered over arms, legs, stomach, even the places no one sees. Sex, for her, is not intimacy but impact, not connection but an attempt to feel anything through the static.
Their friends are stuck in the middle. They watch the two of them bicker relentlessly, trading barbs that ride the line between joke and attack. Levi’s flat threats meet Hanji’s masochistic delight; her self-deprecating filth answers his bitter contempt. It looks like a terrible parody of an “enemies with benefits” script. The group is exhausted, uneasy, and increasingly afraid that if these two ever cross a certain line, it will not be sexy or cathartic. It will be catastrophic.
The story begins with their everyday collisions: nights out where Levi’s patience frays and Hanji pushes every button she can reach, group gatherings where the others exchange tired looks as yet another argument turns obscenely charged. Levi, for once, has been making progress with his compulsions, clinging to therapy tools and coping strategies that keep his rituals from swallowing entire days. Hanji, in contrast, is spiraling. Her jokes grow darker, her sexual behavior more reckless, her need to be hurt more obvious to anyone willing to look closely.
A public fight in front of their friends marks a turning point. Words cross lines that cannot be uncrossed. Levi’s insults cut at Hanji’s bones, at her ugliness as she sees it, at the way she weaponizes sex. Hanji answers with a twisted, mocking sensuality, treating his anger as if he is flirting, as if his threats excite her. The group steps in to diffuse things, and the night ends scattered, no resolution, only tension.
What follows is the worst kind of collision. On a night when Levi is frayed but holding together, still fragile from days spent forcing his compulsions down, Hanji seeks him out at his lowest point. She is too far gone, driven by a need to feel, to bleed, to drag someone down into the same burning place she lives in. The sex that follows is not romance or mutual release. It is coercive, messy, and painfully explicit.
Levi argues, resists, and physically fights back at first. His words are cruel and slurred with disgust; he throws slurs and degradation at her, aiming to drive her away. She turns his hostility into fuel, twisting his violence into the kind of intimacy she understands. She mocks his obsessiveness, taunts him with the idea of “cleaning up” after he hurts her, pushes him to cross lines he swore he would never cross. When his violent thoughts ignite under pressure, his mind fractures. Dissociation sets in not as a fade to black but as a horrible, floating awareness that he cannot escape. He feels everything, remembers everything, even as his sense of control disintegrates.
Hanji is focused almost entirely on what she wants. She ignores his distress, his pleas, his attempts to pull away. She pushes him to hurt her, alternately restraining him and releasing him so she can coax the worst out of him. Their bodies collide in a scene that is graphic, explicit, and unflinching in its portrayal of sex as a coping mechanism that deepens rather than soothes trauma. When she has had enough, she leaves, satisfied in the numb way only catastrophic release can offer. Levi is left alone with the ruins.
The aftermath is as brutal as the act itself. Levi’s compulsions detonate. He spends hours scrubbing, scouring, checking, obsessively erasing any trace of what happened. He destroys his own skin in the process, chemical burns and raw patches blooming on his hands, arms, and wherever he believes contamination might linger. His sleep fractures. His appetite disappears. His already narrow life shrinks even further around the rituals that promise safety and deliver only pain.
Hanji, in parallel, descends into an even worse self harm spiral. She tears into her own body with calculated brutality, slicing, scratching, burning in places visible and hidden. The genital injuries remain unseen by others, concealed under clothing and laughter, yet their presence adds another layer of horror to her internal landscape. She does not slow down. If anything, the intensity of what she did with Levi confirms what she already believes about herself: that she is too much, too broken, only tolerable in the moments when someone is actively hurting her.
Their friends notice that something has shifted, even though neither Levi nor Hanji says a word about the night. Levi is quieter, twitchier, caught in compulsions that leave visible marks. Hanji is stranger, her jokes edged with a new level of danger. The group finally breaks. Tired of dodging the tension, frightened for both of them, they stage an intervention.
The intervention is messy, painful, and gut-wrenchingly honest. Friends confront Levi with the sight of his chemical wounds and ragged skin, point out how much worse his symptoms have become. They corner Hanji with the evidence of fresh scars, the visible red lines and burns that do not line up with simple clumsiness. They bring in a therapist, hoping that a professional can reach where they cannot.
The therapist meets them separately first. Levi stonewalls, then cracks just enough to reveal the compulsions, the cleaning, the obsession with violent imagery. Hanji performs at first, using humor and sexual innuendo to deflect any attempt at real connection, but the shield fractures when the conversation brushes against her need for pain, the emptiness she tries to fill with sex and self injury. She admits, eventually, that the harm covers nearly her entire body, including the parts the world never sees.
When they are brought into a joint session, the fragile distance they have maintained shatters. Levi stares at the floor, jaw clenched, skin raw where his rituals have eaten through it. Hanji sits across from him, fidgeting, eyes restless. Prodded by the therapist, Levi finally speaks about what happened. He describes the night, the coercion, the way she ignored his refusals, the way he dissociated while still experiencing every second. He talks about the aftermath, about the endless cleaning, about the shame that clings like a second skin. He never looks at her while he speaks.
Hanji hears it laid out in clinical language and raw detail, stripped of the warped eroticism through which she filters her own memories. The scene she framed as mutual damage and dark relief is exposed as assault, as exploitation of his vulnerability. Whether she fully accepts that frame or not, the impact on the group and the therapist is unmistakable.
From that point, separation becomes inevitable. Levi refuses to see her. The therapist and friends support that boundary, recognizing that their proximity only amplifies their worst impulses. Hanji tries to push back, reaching out through texts, attempts to show up where he might be, testing the limits of the walls that go up around him. She gets nothing: no response, no opening, no continued access to the one person who mirrored her destructiveness so perfectly.
The friend group fractures into two distinct currents. Some choose to orbit Levi, respecting his need for distance and focusing on helping him manage his compulsions before they consume him completely. Others sit with Hanji, oscillating between anger, grief, and a desperate hope that she will find a reason to stop hurting herself in every possible way. Group gatherings split into separate events, never shared, never overlapping. Each party carries the echo of the old dynamic, the ghost of arguments and innuendo that no one dares to replicate.
Splinters in the Skin does not offer neat recovery arcs or redemptive romance. It follows Levi and Hanji through a concentrated series of days that reveal how two damaged people can lock into a pattern that feels inevitable and intoxicating yet tears them further apart from themselves. The narrative treats self harm, mental illness, and coercive sex with unflinching realism, neither glamorizing nor sanitizing their impact. The story’s power lies in its refusal to look away from the horror, and in its insistence that some connections, no matter how consuming, are simply not survivable.
The book is structured in five chapters, each divided into two substantial subchapters. It moves from the corrosive banter and public clashes that define Levi and Hanji in their group, through the night that crosses every boundary, into the aftermath, intervention, and enforced distance that follow. Along the way, it offers close third person windows into their minds, showing the fractured logic that leads them to treat hurt as comfort and control as the only shield against collapse.
In the end, they do not heal each other. They do not come back together. What remains is the raw outline of their damage, the friends trying to pick up the pieces, and the lingering knowledge that love is not the only thing capable of binding two people together. Sometimes, it is pain that does that work, and breaking that bond is the first, terrifying step toward anything like real survival.
