Because the truth is, with him, it’s easy to forget every reason I doubt myself. When his body is pressed to mine, when he holds me like I’m something irreplaceable, I stop doubting. I stop debating with myself about whether I’m enough. In his arms, I simply am.
But even as I cling to that comfort, anxiety curls at the edges of it. There’s still the rest of my life outside these walls, all the choices I can’t escape. What happens when I can’t choose him? When my world pulls me away, or his feels impossible to reach?
I tighten my arms around him, pressing my cheek into his shoulder as if I can fuse us into one body and keep the questions at bay.
He exhales, content, like he’s finally at peace. And I close my eyes, wondering how long I can keep pretending that I am too.
ELEVEN
nathaniel
The daysafter she gave herself back to me felt like a hallucination I never wanted to wake from.
She waseverywhere. Draped across my chest when we woke and tucked beneath my arm at every opportunity, as if being curled against my side was the only place she fit. I indulged her greedily. She let me hold her like she needed the contact to breathe, and I held on like she was the last thing in the world I was allowed to keep.
The blissful routine we’d built before didn’t just resume—it deepened. Her laughter filtered through the penthouse like sunlight, and I cataloged every smile she gave me like a man memorizing proof of divinity. We spent every waking moment together until she eventually drifted off to sleep, pressed so close that I could feel the flutter of her every breath against my throat.
Those days felt dangerous in their perfection—too bright, too easy. The kind of happiness that makes you certain something sharp is waiting at the edge of it.
Olivia was softer than I’d ever seen her. Open, but only in the way a wound is—tender, raw, and pulsing.
A few nights ago, she told me she’d accepted an offer for a graduate position with Baxter & Company in New York. On thesurface, she delivered the news breezily—bright enough to pass as excitement, if you didn’t know her.
She was standing at the counter, stirring sugar into her tea with a little too much focus. “They offered me the position,” she’d said, forcing a smile. “It’s a good role. A great one, actually.”
Anyone else would’ve believed her. But I know all her tells—the strain in her voice, the way her hand paused mid-stir, like the spoon had suddenly become too heavy, the careful refusal to meet my eyes.
She never said outright that Castor & Wyatt had passed her over, but I could read between the lines.
She must have been disappointed. Castor & Wyatt was the one she wanted most, the prize she’d been chasing since before she ever set foot on Halford’s campus. I hated the thought of her settling for anything less, even if “less” meant Baxter—just as prestigious, just as competitive a position. I offered to speak with the partners myself. To make sure she got what she deserved. But the look she shot me—sharp, withering, as though I’d just told her she wasn’t enough—stopped me cold.
I let it go. She needs to feel like she earned this. She needs to know I see her as capable, not as someone who requires my intervention to succeed. And when I weigh it against the only outcome that matters—that she’ll be in Manhattan, with me—I can live with it. Baxter is worthy of her. If she can’t have her dream, then I’ll make every other part of her life so full, so unshakably good, that she won’t wonder about what she missed.
Which is why I know this unease in her isn’t about her job prospects. It’s something else.
I saw it in her eyes, how they dimmed when she looked at her phone, and in her haste to hide it away after reading a message she wouldn’t let me see. She never explained. She just slippedaway to the bathroom or stepped into the hallway, her voice hushed to a whisper behind closed doors.
Thankfully, the clone of her phone gave me everything I needed to know. I saw every demand, every guilt-laced word, every cruel dig from the woman who calls herself Olivia’s mother. Claudia Bennett sends texts like she’s firing arrows, aiming for soft spots and hitting her mark every time. I’ve read them all—each line uglier than the last. I don’t understand how a mother could be this determined to make her daughter feel so small.
I wanted to call her. Wanted to let her know exactly what she was doing—how easily I could erase every trace of that life if it meant Olivia never had to crawl back to it.
But I couldn’t.
Because Olivia never told me about it.
She forced it down, buried deep under all that grace and composure. And whenever it threatened to rise to the surface, when her voice broke or her hands trembled…she still wouldn’t say a damn word about it.
Instead, she’d press her mouth to mine with a kind of desperation that made my chest split open. I should’ve stopped it, I know. Should’ve pulled her back and made her talk. But I was weak. I was intoxicated by how good it felt to beneededby her. So, whenever she climbed into my lap and tilted her head back like she wanted to forget, I pressed my lips to her neck and gave in. Again and again.
It was blistering, what we found in each other. But it didn’t make it sting less, knowing she was hurting in silence while I stood on the other side of the door, pretending not to hear the pain I wasn’t allowed to soothe.
I kept wondering what she thought would happen if she let me see all of it. Did she think I’d pull away? That I’d look at her differently once I saw how deep the bruises went?
Or worse—was she afraid I’d pity her?
But that’d be absurd. There’s no pity in what I feel for her.
And yet, every time she offered her body like a bribe to keep me away from the parts of her that she thinks are too messy to love—I took it. God help me, I took it every time. Let her use me like a place to disappear, even as it broke something sharp and jealous in me.
