I'dbeentranscribingaparticularly brutal case—a twenty-two-year-old au pair who'd gone in for a simple appendectomy and come out missing both corneas—when I looked down and found my hands had been busy without me.
It was like the pens had lined themselves up without my permission. Six of them, parallel as railroad tracks, each exactly one inch apart across the desk surface.
The realization hit like cold water. This was how it started, the loss of control. First the small rituals, the soothing repetitions. Then the thumb-sucking. Then the full regression into something small and soft and helpless.
I scattered the pens deliberately, but twenty minutes later they were lined up again.
My body was betraying me in increments. During a file about a teenager who'd lost a kidney while getting his wisdom teeth removed, my thumb found its way to my mouth. Not in it—I had that much control left—but pressed against my lower lip, thepressure soothing something raw in my chest. I jerked it away so hard I bit myself, tasted copper, and typed faster.
The sweater made it worse. Sophie had left a pile of clothes in my room—soft things, comfortable things, nothing like the practical scrubs and jeans I'd lived in for six months. This particular sweater was cashmere, oversized, the kind of expensive softness I'd forgotten existed. It smelled like fabric softener and safety, and I'd been wearing it for two days straight.
Sometime during hour four of transcribing horror, I realized I'd chewed a hole in the sleeve.
Not a small hole. A proper gap where I'd been gnawing at the fabric without conscious thought, the cashmere now damp and ragged around a space the size of a quarter. My body seeking comfort through destruction, trying to self-soothe in the most primitive way it knew.
"Fuck." The word escaped before I could stop it, examining the damage. This was Sophie's sweater. Sophie who'd looked at me with such genuine kindness, who'd made sure I had soft things to wear, and I'd destroyed it like an anxious dog.
"You're hurting yourself."
I hadn't heard him enter. Konstantin stood in the doorway, dinner tray in his hands, those gray eyes tracking from the ruined sleeve to my face with an expression I couldn't read.
"It's just a sweater," I said, tugging the sleeve down to hide the evidence.
"That's not what I meant."
He moved into the room with that dangerous grace, set the tray down, but instead of leaving like he had for three days, he pulled up that same chair. Positioned it across from me. Sat with the kind of deliberate intention that made my pulse spike.
"Show me your hands," he said.
"What?"
"Your hands." He held out his own, palms up, waiting. "Show me."
I could have refused. Could have maintained the distance I'd been desperately building. Instead, my hands moved without permission, extending across the desk toward him.
He took them gently, his massive palms swallowing mine completely. His thumbs tracked across my knuckles, found the raw spot where I'd been picking at the skin around my thumbnail. The nail beds that were bitten down to nothing. The small cuts from where I'd been pressing my nails into my palms hard enough to break skin.
"You're falling apart," he said quietly. Not an accusation. Just an observation, clinical and careful.
"I'm fine."
"You're not." His thumbs kept moving, soothing even as they cataloged damage. "You're destroying yourself in small ways because you think that's better than breaking completely. It's not."
I tried to pull my hands back. He held on, gentle but immovable.
"Eat," he said.
"I'm not—"
"Eat." Harder this time, that command voice that bypassed my brain and went straight to my nervous system. "Three bites. Now."
My hands were still trapped in his, so he released one, keeping the other. Like I might run if he let go completely. Like he knew I was that close to bolting.
I picked up the fork with my free hand, took three bites of what turned out to be stroganoff, rich and warm and almost painful in how good it tasted after days of eating cold sandwiches alone. He watched each bite, counted them, then nodded.
"Good girl."
Two words. That's all. But they went through me like lightning, set every nerve ending on fire, made something low in my stomach clench with want so intense it bordered on pain.
