I shower too hot. I stand there until the water runs out of stories to tell me about comfort and the mirror fogs so heavy it forgets I exist. I love that part—the moment before I wipe the glass where I could be anyone. Where the girl in the corn maze and thewoman in the office and the daughter on the top row of Section 103 all dissolve into a shape that has not yet been chosen.
When I wipe the mirror, my mouth is still my mother’s and my eyes are still my brother’s and my stubborn, hungry heart is my own.
In bed, I do not sleep. I think about auction lots and table assignments and whether anyone will notice if I pull the second dessert because the first one is better. I think about my father and the way he looked at me like breathing near wolves is an invitation. I think about the maze and what it felt like to stop running on purpose.
I think about Christmas. Not the kind people wrap. The kind you earn by telling yourself the truth in the dark and then opening your eyes and saying it out loud.
When sleep finally drags me down, the last thing I see is the ribbon lying on my dresser like an answer, and the last thing I feel is the weight of a gaze I did not witness and did not imagine and did not deny.
December has a sound. It also has a promise.
Nine days. Then the gala. Then the dress. Then whatever I am under velvet when the world looks away.
Chapter Two
Sammie
The morning tastes like peppermint and regret.
I wake to find the ribbon exactly where I left it—draped over the edge of the dresser, blue-black and quiet, like a question that slept without me and didn’t need my answer to exist. The room is dim, winter light stalled behind a sky the color of old paper. December refuses to hurry, so everything moves through a slower hourglass: coffee drips thicker, heat climbs the vents grudgingly, and my heart takes its time admitting it never stopped running.
My phone is face down on the nightstand, as if I’m the kind of person who can silence what she craves by denying eye contact. I don’t reach for it. I lie still and listen to the house around me make the soft domestic noises people mistake for safety—the baseboards popping, the fridge kicking on, the wind shouldering the windows. I could stay like this for five more minutes and pretend I’m a woman with a mild life crisis. Then I remember I’m me, and that pretending is a costume that never fits.
I flip the phone. The lock screen blooms with the day’s obligations like I planted them there and forgot a harvest was coming: call theauctioneer, confirm the DJ, finalize the seating chart, send the volunteers a schedule that doesn’t haunt them. One notification hovers at the top like it belongs there. No name. Just a number I know better than my own heartbeat.
Unknown:Don’t wear red today.
I stare at the words until they blur and then refocus onto something sharper than morning deserves. He never calls himself anything. The number has lived in my phone since November, the week after the maze, under no name and every name. I could block it. I could rename it DANGER and turn off alerts and pretend I sleep better when I amputate pieces of myself. I haven’t. I won’t.
I type and erase three responses before I say nothing at all and set the phone on my stomach like it might learn to breathe with me. A line from last night plays in my head on a loop:breathing near wolves is an invitation. In the half-light of my room, with the ribbon watching, I admit I am the girl who opens the door to her own hunger and doesn’t pretend she was forced.
The second text lands before my inhale is done.
Unknown:Wear what you want. I’ll live with it.
The contradiction is a knife turned flat—edge present, pressure gentled. Consent threaded through control. He does this on purpose, the pull and release, the tether and the slack. People say obsession is all grip, but the most dangerous kind is patient. It lets you step back just far enough to believe you chose your distance.
My thumbs move like they belong to someone who’s slept.
Me:Why do you care what colorI wear?
The dots appear, disappear. I imagine him in the unkind bathroom light at the rink or in his apartment with the kind of white walls athletes live between, thumbs low and deliberate, the rest of him a study in containment. It’s both insane and true that I can see his hands when I read his messages. I know what they feel like without having held them properly. I know the weight of them on a railing, on a steering wheel, stealing heat from a glove. I wonder what they would look like wrapped in velvet ribbon, and an electrical storm walks across my skin, no warning, no apology.
Unknown:Because I like the way blue looks when you pretend it isn’t for me.
I swallow hard enough to feel my pulse trip against the swallow. I look at the ribbon, that strip of midnight left on my dresser like a promise and a dare, and I do the only thing that makes sense when sense is a fiction: I laugh, once, almost silent, like a person overhearing a secret about herself she was trying to keep.
Me:Stop leaving things.
The answer is instant, and it lands like breath on the nape of my neck.
Unknown:Tell me to.
I stare, fingers hovering. The point of a line is to either cross it or not. The point of me has always been messy.
Me:Don’t leave things where my father could find them.
There’s a long pause. The kind that makes your stomach mimic free fall. When the bubbles return, I hold my breath like it might convince time to behave.
