My legs burn as I take the final flight of stairs up to my floor. Sweat cools against my skin, my mind still racing ahead of me, planning, fearing, hoping. I push open the stairwell door andstep into the hallway. The cool corridor air wraps around me, a stark contrast to the heat still clinging to my skin from the run. I reach into the pocket of my running shorts, fingers fumbling for my keys, but they slip through my damp grip, hitting the floor with a sharp scatter of metal.
“Great,” I mutter, bending down—but another hand reaches them first.
I look up, startled.
Matteo stands there.
His hair is damp, like he’s just come from a shower, curls falling messily onto his forehead. His T-shirt clings to him in a way that makes looking at him feel like a dangerous choice. His eyes track me with a quiet intensity, as though he’d been passing by for some other reason but now can’t seem to look away.
“Here,” he says softly, holding out my keys.
I straighten, my breath catching despite my best intentions. “Thank you.”
“You okay?” The question is simple, but his voice carries weight, like he’s asking something infinitely larger.
I force a smile—thin, brittle, nothing like the real thing. “Just clumsy today.”
He studies me for a moment too long, long enough that the air between us feels charged and unsettling. His gaze flicks from my eyes to my mouth and back again, not with hunger, but with a kind of restrained concern that makes my chest tighten.
“You don’t have to pretend with me,” he says, his tone low and steady, cutting straight through the facade I’ve been wearing for days.
My fingers curl around the keys, knuckles whitening. “That’s the problem,” I answer quietly. “I’m tired of pretending. Even with myself.”
Something shifts in his expression—recognition, maybe, or the kind of understanding that feels almost dangerous to receive.
I break the moment first, turning toward my door.
“Good day, Matteo,” I murmur.
His voice follows me—quiet, roughened at the edges, impossible to ignore.
“Good day, Beatrice.”
And even as I close the door behind me, that soft, restrained echo lingers against my spine, stronger than the run, stronger than my resolve, stronger than anything I want to admit.
The apartment is tooquiet when I step inside—quiet in that hollow, echoing way that leaves too much room for thoughts I’ve tried to outrun since the gala and everything after. My body still hums with the memory I shouldn’t be reliving, the one I warned myself to forget before it could burrow too deep, and yet it clings to me stubbornly, pulsing beneath my skin.
His mouth on me, coaxing pleasure so intense it stripped me down to something raw and real.
His hands anchoring me, steadying me, claiming me in ways I had never allowed anyone to do.
The startling revelationthat for the first time in months—maybe years—I felt alive.
I shake the thoughts off, or try to, moving deeper into the apartment as if motion itself could silence the fragments of him sliding through my mind. I drop my keys on the counter and kick off my running shoes, my socks damp with sweat, and that’s when I notice the envelope propped neatly beside a vase of lilies—white, flawless, arranged with precision. A gift meant tosoothe, to distract, to gloss over the tension and fear he pretends he never causes.
But tonight, the sight of them does not tether me to him. If anything, it pushes me further away.
My fingers tighten around the envelope as I unfold the note inside.
Gone for business. Two weeks. Big deal to close. Miss you already. —G.
Two weeks.
Two full weekswithout the weight of his watchful eyes, without monitoring every tone, every expression, every breath. Two weeks without the carefully constructed smiles that have left my cheeks aching. Two weeks where silence might finally mean something other than dread.
A slow, unexpected breath slips from my chest. Relief—warm, illicit, unmistakable—moves through me like sunlight cracking through storm clouds.
I set the note beside the lilies and study them closely. Their petals are soft, pristine, beautiful in a way that feels painfully ironic. They are meant to signify peace, purity, remembrance… yet here they sit, trying and failing to disguise the wounds beneath my skin that have been bleeding for months.
