I whisper flirty lies into Blake’s ear; promises I’ll never keep. Fantasies made of smoke. He devours every word.
Carrie takes my hands and twirls me away from him, laughing as we disappear into the bathroom again. Our cheeks flushed, lips glossy, hearts racing.
The mirror shows two women alive and electric. “This is it,” Carrie whispers, smoothing my hair. “Tonight, you end the article. Tonight, you end Blake’s grip. Tonight, you choose Dane. You choose you.” We stand there, breathing, holding hands, dizzy from the music and the truth.
The air between us thickens when I step back toward him. Not close enough to reveal, but not far enough to resist.
Blake’s eyes track me like I’m a flame he wants to swallow whole. His hand lifts, hesitates, then settles on the side of myneck, just his fingertips. Just a whisper of touch. But it detonates something low and molten inside me.
“Pandora…” he breathes, voice raw, like he’s been starving for years and only just remembered hunger. He doesn’t know it’s me. Heshould. His hands used to map every inch of my body. He should smell the truth beneath the perfume, the sweat, the mask.
But that’s the poison of Blake. He never saw me. He saw only the shape he carved. Still.My body remembers the weight of his touch before my mind can curse it. The heat of his palm at my throat, the slow drag of his thumb along my pulse point, the way his breath skims my cheek like he’s inhaling me.
I let him. Just for a heartbeat. Just long enough to witness the truth of what we were. His other hand slides to my waist. Fingers firm. Possessive. A man claiming something he already lost, my breath stutters. My knees soften, traitorous. His mouth grazes the corner of my jaw, featherlight, a ghost of the intimacy he once controlled. Not a kiss. A remembering. My heart punches my ribs. My skin burns. His whispered, “Don’t vanish… stay with me,” curls through me like smoke.
For a split second, A dangerous, trembling sliver of a second, I feel what I used to feel. What he conditioned into me. What I believed was love. But it’s hollow now. A pretty lie with sharp teeth.
“Blake…” I whisper, breath trembling with truth he can’t hear. He pulls back, eyes blown wide behind his mask, confused by his own reaction.
And that’s when I kiss him. Not for him. For me. A slow, sure,finaldrag of lips that tastes like ending. His hands tighten, desperate too late. I pull away first. I always do now.
His mouth parts like he wants to claim something, to demand, to name the feeling he doesn’t understand. But I’m already stepping back, slipping through the bodies, the heat, the pulse of the dance floor. His fingers catch air where I once stood. I turn once, mask still hiding my smile.
“Goodbye, Blake. My dear Casanova,” I whisper, tone slow and sharp as a blade. “Sometimes the truth is right in front of you. Sometimes it even catfishes you.”
His entire body goes still. Frozen. Shocked. Destroyed.
A goodbye disguised as temptation.
Then I walk out into the cold night air, mask still on, breath fogging, heart breaking and rebuilding at the same time. I did it. I purged him. I ended him. I ended us. And now…
Dane waits. The man who sees me. The man who remembered me before I remembered myself.
But first I had to reclaim the pieces Blake stole.
And tonight? I did.
The cold slaps my skin the second the door shuts behind me. The music thumps through the walls, muffled now, heartbeat fading. My lungs open for the first time all night. I walk. Boots clicking on wet pavement. Streetlights smearing gold across the road. My breath spilling soft white clouds into the dark.
Each step is a release. A shedding. A quiet unravelling of every thread he stitched into my ribs.
My lips still tingle. My neck still hums where he touched me. Old ghosts, old habits. But my chest…My chest belongs to someone else entirely.
Dane. His name whispers through the cold like a promise. Like a memory crawling out of the shadows of my past, dragging light with it. The boy who saw me before Blake ever tried to build me. The man who remembers me before I remembered myself. The one who doesn’t want to own me, just see me. Wind lifts myhair. My mask dangles from my fingers. My heart is raw, scraped open, but beating.
Every step sends another memory tumbling loose. My footsteps echo on the pavement.
Blake.
His voice. The control. Years of shrinking myself to fit into the shape he wanted. Pretty. Quiet. Convenient. He edited my memories without ever touching them, replacing childhood sun with his storms.
Dane.
Childhood flashes return like flickers of old film sun on bikes, scraped knees, him carrying me when I fell. I’d forgotten so much. Or maybe Blake pushed those memories down so far, they had nowhere to breathe.
I blink against the sting in my eyes and keep walking. The street narrows as I turn toward the lane leading home.
Carrie’s office flashes through my mind. The papers shaking in my hands. Her arms around me, steady when I was anything but her whisper:You can survive this. Even if you don’t believe it yet.
