They only laugh harder. One bends close enough that I can smell the sour bite of his breath. His hand forces my chin up, and another crack lashes across my ass. Heat floods me, a burn that shouldn’t twist into something else but does. My traitorous body arches into it, seeking, shaming me.
The circle closes in. Hands grope, pinch, prod. Every strike, every cruel touch, sends a shock of unwanted pleasure that coils low in my belly, tightening until it hurts.
“Look at her,” someone jeers. “She likes it.”
“I don’t!” I scream, but the words scrape raw, swallowed by the sound of their laughter.
Another slap. Harder. The pressure inside me snaps, white-hot and unstoppable. My cry isn’t pain this time. It’s worse. It’s release. My body convulses in front of them, the wet heat of humiliation flooding me as they cheer.
I collapse forward, forehead to the ground, tears stinging hot trails down my face. I can’t stop shaking. I want to disappear. To die. Anything but this.
I come awake with a violent jerk, lungs dragging air like I’ve been drowning. My throat burns raw, my voice shredded from a scream I don’t remember letting out. Sweat clings to my hairline, soaking the collar of my shirt. The sheets are twisted tight around my legs, pinning me down like a trap.
For a second I can’t breathe. I can still hear them. The laughter. The cruel, ugly kind that curdles my stomach. I see the shadows moving around me, faceless, heavy. My skin stings, phantom fire racing across it, every crack of pain followed by that sharp, shameful tug deep inside me. I’d begged in the dream, begged for them to stop, begged for my body not to betray me. But it had. I’d come, right there, in front of everyone. Humiliated. Owned.
Shame curls in my chest, alive and snarling, clawing to get out.
I squeeze my eyes shut, palms pressing hard against them. In. Out. In. Out. My therapist’s voice threads through the panic, calm and infuriating. Name things in the room. Ground yourself, Chloe. Don’t get stuck in the nightmare.
The nightstand. My chipped mug with cold tea still in it. The cheap lamp from the thrift store. The wall with its ugly peeling paint that flakes if I touch it. My phone, face-down, glowing faintly.
My breathing slows. Not calm, but less like I’m about to explode out of my own skin. I reach for the phone, flip it over. Six. Almost six. The sky outside the curtain is bruising with dawn.
I force myself to look around. The room is small. So small it would have made me laugh at the beginning of this year. But it’s mine. My little rental with its slanted floors and the window that doesn’t shut all the way. My space. Not marble and glass, not chandeliers that caught the light in cold prisms. Not thesuffocating silence of staff trained to look away and pretended not to hear the arguments.
No. This is different.
I stretch, arms reaching up until the old mattress beneath me squeals in protest. My bones ache. My chest is heavy. My therapist swears yoga will help, that it will let me release the weight strapped to me like an anchor. I don’t buy it. But I drag myself to try anyway.
The mat waits by the window. I step onto it barefoot, tugging down my oversized sleep shirt so it brushes my thighs. My hair hangs in a tangled mess down my back, damp from sweat. My skin is sticky. Gross. But I plant my palms on the mat, breathe, and sink into the first stretch.
Cat. Cow. The creak of my spine echoes louder than my breath. Downward dog. My arms tremble from weakness. I push anyway.
And my mind drifts.
Two months ago still tastes like ashes in my mouth.
The courtroom had been suffocating, hot under the press of too many bodies and too many stares. The gavel had hit wood with a crack that seemed to split my world open. Guilty. Embezzlement. Fraud. The numbers spilled out in neat columns, millions siphoned away from the veins of Pointe and the Chicago Gold Coast. Families stripped. Neighbors gutted.
I’d felt eyes on me—sharp, unforgiving. Nate’s parents. Harper’s. People who’d once sat at our table, smiled at me like I was one of theirs. They looked at me like my blood carried his lies. Like his greed was tattooed on my skin.
I press harder into the stretch, but the weight doesn’t move.
Overnight, I went from golden girl to ghost. Boyfriend dumped me. Invitations evaporated. Phones stopped buzzing. Doors slammed quietly but slammed all the same. Whispers chased me when I dared step out the door.
My mother hadn’t lasted a week. She’d packed up the last shreds of her pride and fled back to Paris. To Neuilly-sur-Seine, where her parents still live in their stone house with its iron balconies and wisteria. She didn’t ask me to come. She didn’t want me. Or maybe she couldn’t bear the scandal clinging to me like a second skin. Maybe I just reminded her of my father?
I guess I’ll never really know.
So I stayed. Alone.
The only thing my father left me that didn’t crumble into dust was the trust fund he couldn’t touch. He thought he was clever, hiding money in shell corporations. I found the paperwork. I used it. Paid tuition. Rented this shoebox of a house near Pointe University on the side of town where no one knows me.
It isn’t much. But it’ll have to do for now.
I sink down into child’s pose, forehead pressed to the mat. The smell of detergent clings faintly to the fabric, sharp and too clean. My body hums with tension that never really leaves.
Today is supposed to be different. The first day of class at Pointe University.
