Like she needs me to prove I’ll take her anyway, like she needs the choice removed so she doesn’t have to carry the guilt of making it herself.
The air shifts the moment I move her, as if the world has already adjusted to the outcome, as if reality itself has bent to accommodate what’s happening. No one looks over from the scattered pedestrians further down the street. No one interferes. The street gives her up without protest, indifferent to one more girl disappearing into the dark.
And I do exactly what she needs.
I open the door, the interior light spilling out onto the wet pavement.
She turns her head like she’s going to scream—mouth opening, breath drawing in—but no sound comes out because part of her doesn’t want to fight this anymore.
Part of her wants to know what happens when she finally stops pretending to be someone she isn’t.
The leather inside is dark and clean and impersonal, Italian craftsmanship that cost more than most people’s cars. Not a place designed for comfort—designed for control, for containing, for making absolutely clear who holds the power.
She twists in my grip once, just once, muscles coiling.
Like a test to see what I’ll do.
And I pass it without hesitation.
I shove her into the car—not hard enough to hurt, not violently enough to cross lines I haven’t decided to cross yet, just enough to show her what I am and what I’m capable of being.
Unstoppable when I want something.
She lands on the leather seat with her knees still drawn together like modesty matters now, like closing her legs can somehow undo what’s already been set in motion.
The door frame casts a shadow across her legs, a dividing line between the world she knows and the one she’s entering, and she doesn’t cross back over it.
I don’t climb in beside her yet.
Not yet, not until I’ve made my point.
I lean down, grip the doorframe with my good hand, let the hook catch the light.
Lower my voice until it’s just between us and no one else, intimate as a secret.
“You don’t have to want this yet,” I tell her, watching the way her chest rises and falls.
I watch her chest rise—fast, shallow, betraying everything she’s trying to hide.
“You just have to stop pretending you don’t.”
Then I shut the door with deliberate force.
Hard enough to make the frame shudder and the lock clicks like a promise being sealed, like a contract being signed in invisible ink.
The sound is final, mechanical, absolute in its certainty. It echoes longer than it should in the quiet street, reverberating like the closing of a chapter.
She doesn’t sit still, doesn’t accept what’s happened.
Not even for a second.
The moment I shut the door she launches herself across the seat, hand slamming against the opposite handle with desperate force, trying to open it before the lock clicks home—but she’s too late, has always been too late.
Of course she is.
I built this car like I built everything else in my life—sealed, soundproofed, and immune to panic, resistant to the kind of desperate escape attempts that girls like her always make.
The windows mute the outside world to a dull blur, triple-glazed and tinted dark enough that no one can see in. Whatever life passes beyond the glass doesn’t reach her now, can’t save her, can’t even witness what’s happening.
