Check the little green light.
Recording.
No.
No, no, no, no, no.
The room tilts. My breath comes too fast, too shallow, like my lungs are trying to outrun something my body already knows it can’t.
I’m shaking before I even switch to my call log. And there — at the very bottom — a number I don’t recognise. Last night. Ten minutes after I got home.
No voicemail.
I delete it. I delete the app. I turn the phone off and throw it into the couch cushions like it might bite.
And then I do something I haven’t done in years.
I lock myself in the bathroom.
I slide down the wall until my arse hits tile, wrap my arms around my knees, and force myself to breathe. Four seconds in. Seven hold. Eight out.
My therapist calls it grounding.
It doesn’t work.
Because the air in this apartment suddenly feels wrong. Too still. Too thick. Like someone’s already been here and left a piece of them behind. I don’t hear anything.
But I feel it.
A presence.
Like heat in the floorboards.
Like breath on my neck.
Like the memory of his voice, still lodged between my thighs like a bruise I can’t stop pressing on.
You’ll scream. But not for help.
I squeeze my eyes shut.
I don’t want this.
I don’t want him.
I don’t?—
My fingers slide down. Just to check. Just to see.
And that’s the worst part.
Because I’m wet.
I press my hand flat to the tile. Cold. Solid. Real.
But my body isn’t buying it.
My chest is tight. My stomach is doing that hollow flutter it used to do when I was sixteen and hiding in the school bathroom, trying not to cry because someone said my laugh sounded like a porn star’s moan. Trying not to lose it because my maths teacher stared at my arse again and no one said anything. Trying not to break because my boyfriend had a new lock screen and it wasn’t me.
