“… Bastian?”
The mattress dips as he kneels beside it. Then comes a sound that makes my blood freeze: the unmistakableshhhhiinkof a blade puncturing fabric.
“What the?—”
Tearing. Ripping. The wet, violent noise of foam being gutted like a fish.
He’s carving up the fucking mattress.
“Bastian, what the hell are you doing?!”
“I’m solving a problem,” he replies calmly.
I stand frozen, listening to him murder my mattress. A dozen emotions pop up their heads in my chest like a really bizarre game of Whack-A-Mole.
This is insane,says one.
This is manipulative,says another.
This is exactly the kind of high-handed bullshit you’ve been trying to set boundaries against for weeks,insists a third.
The whole rodent chorus is correct. But instead of anger, I succumb to something else entirely: a crazed laugh bubbling up in my throat and escaping before I can stop it.
It’s just so completely, absurdlyBastianto solve a problem by taking a damn knife to it. So predictable that I can’t even be mad.
Springs pop free with metallictwangs. Stuffing spills onto the floor in cottony clumps I can feel falling against my bare feet like snowflakes.
“There.” He settles back on his haunches. “Now, you have no choice.”
“Have you lost your mind?”
He rises to his feet and tosses the knife on the counter with a metallicclank. “The couch was an obstacle. Now, it’s not.”
The laughter keeps coming, ripping out of me in violent waves that leave me breathless and dizzy. It’s not even funny. Nothing about today has been funny. But my body apparently didn’t get that memo.
“So,” he asks with terrifying calmness, “are you going to keep arguing, or are you going to come to bed?”
Any therapist worth their salt would point at this moment and say that I cannot give in. If you yield an inch now, you’ll yield a mile later. It’s batshit behavior to literally carve your problems out of existence.
But I’m exhausted. Traumatized. And quite honestly… a bit relieved to have the decision taken out of my hands.
Is that fucked-up? Probably. Dr. Whoever-I-See-Someday will have a field day with that one.Tell me more about the time you let a murderer slice up your mattress and found it just oh-so-swoonworthy.
“You’re insane,” I tell him again, just in case he didn’t hear me the first time.
But maybe I’m insane, too.
Because I’m already moving toward his bedroom.
Bastian’s hand on my hip steers me down the hall. Violent one second, heart-wrenchingly tender the next—the enigmas contained within this man never fail to make my head spin.
The bedroom smells like him. The sheets, when I slip beneath them, do, too. When my head hits the pillow, my whole body releases knots I hadn’t noticed I was carrying and melts into the mattress.
But I can’t fall asleep quite yet. I listen to Bastian undress on the other side of the room. His zipper drags down and I picture it revealing the low cut of his abs. His shirt hits the floor with a softwhumpand I imagine the swell of his biceps, the thatch of honey-colored hair on his chest.
My mind drifts back to this afternoon. A kiss on a curb, a ripped-up hospital gown and hands that couldn’t stop searching for more.
Be my good girl. Come for me.
