I stood in the corridor for a long time.
The amber light was very pretty.
I was very, very confused.
But also, and this is the part I keep circling back to, the part that won’t let me sleep, I was something else. Something I haven’t been in seven months.
I was wanted.
Not secretly. Not shamefully. Not in the dark, in whispered phone calls after midnight, in a relationship that a boy kept hidden because acknowledging it would cost him something he wasn’t willing to pay. Alexei kissed me in a corridor at 8:52 in the morning where anyone could see, and then he announced breakfast deliveries like he was reorganizing the laws of physics to account for the fact that I skip meals.
The difference between that and what I had with Billy is so vast it makes me dizzy.
Which brings me to the other thing that’s happened this week: everything.
Everything has happened.
The office is different. Not in a bad way, exactly, but it makes me feel like I’ve been moved to a different planet that looks identical to my old one but operates under entirely different rules. People hold doors for me now. Not just polite-holding, but that particular attentive door-holding that saysI’m aware that you are connected to someone powerful and I’m adjusting my behavior accordingly.My coworkers in the design wing, who were friendly before but in a normal, unremarkable way, now look at me with this mixture of curiosity and caution, like I’m a weather system they can’t predict.
Kirsten came back to work on Tuesday, took one look at me, and pulled me into the supply closet.
“Are you okay?” she asked, in the direct, no-nonsense way that I love about her.
“I honestly don’t know,” I told her, which was the most truthful thing I’d managed to anyone all week.
“Is he pressuring you?”
I thought about the corridor kiss. The breakfast announcement. How my name sounded in his voice, like it was something he’d been waiting to say.
“Not...exactly.”
Kirsten studied me for a long moment. Then she nodded. “If that changes, you come to me. I don’t care who he is.”
I almost cried. I didn’t, because I was standing in a supply closet surrounded by printer cartridges and that felt like an undignified place for an emotional breakdown, but the impulse was there. Because Kirsten meant it. She would take on the Prince of Atlantis for me, and she’s five-foot-three and human and probably couldn’t take on a moderately aggressive squirrel, but she would try, and that mattered.
My mom calls every day now instead of just Sundays. She has opinions about wedding colors. She has sent me fourteen articles about preter-human marriages from various lifestyle magazines. She has started a group chat with three of her friends called “Zia’s Royal Wedding Planning Committee” that I was added to without my consent and still can’t figure out how to leave, no matter how many times I mute it.
I haven’t told her I haven’t actually said yes.
And that brings us to kiss number four, which happened approximately two hours ago, which is why I’m currently sitting in a bathroom stall on the sixteenth floor texting Trish and begging for tips on how to resist a guy who’s irresistible in every way.
Aaargh!
I put my phone away and press my hands against my face and try to remember what it felt like to be a person whose biggest daily concern was whether Beans 4 U would survive another health inspection. A person who went home to her third-floor studio apartment with the window she leaves cracked because there’s no central air and the landlord’s idea of climate control is a motivational poster that says STAY COOL, and ate onigiri alone and didn’t think about princes.
Because here is the thing I haven’t said out loud, not to Trish, not to my mom, not even to myself in the privacy of my own apartment at night when the books on my windowsill catch the lamplight and the silence is thick enough to hold secrets.
I’m not stopping him.
He keeps kissing me, and I keep not stopping him, and the reasons I’m not stopping him have nothing to do with the power imbalance or the fact that he’s my employer or the engagement that I didn’t agree to that the entire preter world is apparently celebrating.
I’m not stopping him because I don’t want to.
Each kiss takes a piece of the wall I built after Billy and dissolves it. Not violently. Not with force. With patience. With the quietcertainty of a man who has decided something and has a lifetime of practice at waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.
He notices things.
That’s the part that’s destroying me.
