Like I passed the first test just by not screaming.
And when he finally speaks, it’s low. Smooth.
“Get in the car, Tahlia.”
Hook
She doesn’t move, not right away.
The street hums around us in that muted, city-after-rain way that London does best—tyres whispering over damp asphalt slick with reflected streetlight, a distant siren swallowed by concrete and glass and the indifferent architecture of a city that’s seen worse than this. But inside this moment, everything feels sealed, contained, as if we’ve stepped into a vacuum where the normal rules no longer apply. Like the world has politely stepped back to watch what happens when a girl meets her reckoning.
She just stands there on the pavement, spine rigid as iron, arms locked at her sides like she’s trying to convince herself she still has a choice in what comes next.
And that’s fine, perfectly fine.
I let her hesitate, let her take her time coming to the conclusion we both know is inevitable.
Because hesitation is just obedience with slower timing, submission dressed up as consideration.
I can see the calculation happening behind her eyes—the flicker of exits she already knows won’t matter, the reflexive scan of the space around us she learnt a long time ago when stayingalert felt safer than running, when being aware of every shadow and doorway meant the difference between surviving the night and becoming another statistic in someone else’s story.
She showed up.
That’s what matters in the end.
She walked straight into my world on her own legs, breathing my air, tasting my silence, letting my presence seep into her skin like smoke, and now she wants to pretend there’s still a door out of this, still a way to undo the choice she made the moment she agreed to meet me.
The car idles behind her on the rain-slicked kerb, engine low and patient, a sound that doesn’t rush because it doesn’t have to, because it knows how this ends. I built it that way, chose every component for exactly this purpose. Everything waits for me—the car, the night, the inevitable moment when her resistance finally crumbles into something more honest.
There isn’t a way out anymore.
Not from this moment.
Not from me.
“Get in the car, Tahlia.”
I say it quietly, smoothly, not like an order—but like gravity, like the only logical next step in a sequence that was always going to unfold exactly this way.
The name lands between us heavier than the words themselves, weighted with knowledge and possession, and I watch the way her shoulders shift—not back in defiance, not away in retreat, just inward, like something in her curls tighter around itself for protection.
She turns to look at me fully now, chin lifted in that stubborn way of hers, eyes sharp as broken glass, fire still flickering behind them like she hasn’t decided yet if she wants to fight or fold.
She’s already leaning towards the second option.
Even if she doesn’t know it yet, even if she’s still telling herself she has agency in this.
“No,” she says, voice tight with false conviction. “I’m not doing this.”
The lie costs her more breath than the truth would, and I can hear it in the slight tremor underneath the defiance.
I tilt my head, studying her like a specimen under glass.
Watch the words fall out of her mouth like they still hold weight, like they might actually change the outcome.
Watch the fear behind her defiance, visible in the way her pupils dilate. The want behind the fear, betrayed by the way she doesn’t step back even when she could.
She’s not afraid I’ll hurt her, not really.
