I stare at it for too long before I pick it up.
Unknown Number:
Ask better questions.
No punctuation. No emojis. Just those three words like they’ve been waiting all morning to crawl under my skin.
I swallow.
My fingers move.
What the fuck did you do to me?
There’s no reply.
Not right away.
I try to breathe. Try to tell myself he can’t be here, he can’t see me, he doesn’t know what I’m wearing or how I’m sitting or the way my fingers won’t stop curling into the fabric of my shorts like I need to hold myself together before something breaks.
Another buzz.
Unknown Number:
I didn’t do anything.
You came apart all by yourself.
I suck in a breath.
My legs clench.
My shame burns like fire down my neck and between my thighs because he’s right.
He didn’t touch me.
He didn’t even raise his voice.
He just looked at me like I was a puzzle already solved, and now I can’t stop wondering what it would feel like to be undone in his hands for real.
Not because I want him to love me.
But because I want him to destroy me in a way that feels earned.
I stare at those words for so long the screen goes dark.
You came apart all by yourself.
It doesn’t feel like a threat. It feels like a mirror. Like he’s holding it up and making me look.
Because he’s not wrong.
I was already cracking. Already rotting beneath the gloss. I’ve been running on fumes for years — on spite and caffeine and rage buried so deep it started to feel like stability. I’ve spent months pretending I’m not still afraid of the dark, not still flinching when a stranger touches my wrist, not still dreaming about carpet burns and apologies that come too late.
But all it took was him — one room, one breath, one look — and I’m unraveling faster than I ever have before.
And he knows it.
He knows me like the rules I never wanted to follow. Like a blueprint I never meant to draw. Like he’s read every chapter I tried to tear out and memorised the parts I crossed out in black ink.
