Not photos. Not a gossip feed. But the same architecture of betrayal: the slow realization that the man you trusted was somewhere else, with someone else, being someone else, while you sat in the dark believing you were the only one.
Billy’s mother told him to end it. He did. Four sentences. No warning.
And now the Prince of Atlantis, who kissed me at my desk three days ago, who had his hand under my shirt, whose breathing went ragged against my neck, who notices myair vent,is in photographs with a Lyccan shifter whose body language screamswe never stopped.
Trish: Zia please answer me
Trish: Those are OLD PHOTOS someone is messing with you
I pick up my phone. Not to answer Trish.
I open my thread with Alexei. The messages are sparse. He doesn’t text much. There’s the logistics message Ruby sent through his phone about the Expo, and one message from him, just one, sent Tuesday morning after the corridor kiss:
The breakfast will include miso soup tomorrow. You mentioned it once to the cleaning crew.
He remembered that I mentioned miso soup to the cleaning crew.
And now there are photos of him with a beautiful Lyccan woman and I can’t breathe.
I type.
I saw the photos. I can’t do this. I’m sorry. Please don’t contact me.
Four sentences. I realize, as I hit send, that I’ve just written Billy’s text. The same structure. The same cowardice. The same running.
I put my phone face down on the bathroom floor and I cry.
Not the dignified kind. The kind where your whole body participates, where your ribs ache and your throat closes and every sob sounds like it’s being ripped out of you by something that doesn’t care how much it hurts. I cry for Billy and for Alexei and for the stupid, reckless hope I let myself feel when he got on his knees in my mind and whispered my name like a prayer,except he didn’t, that was the fantasy I was building, the story I was writing in my head where someone finally chose me and meant it.
I drag myself to bed. I don’t change. I don’t wash my face. I just lie there with mascara on my pillowcase and my phone abandoned on the bathroom floor and the taste of salt in my mouth, and I fall asleep the way you fall when you’ve run out of everything: all at once, without choosing to.
I WAKE UP BECAUSE THEair is different.
Not wrong. Not dangerous. Just...different. Warmer. Charged. That specific shift in atmospheric pressure that my body has learned to recognize in the space of five days, the one that means—
I sit up.
He’s standing by my window.
My third-floor window, which I leave cracked because the building doesn’t have central air and it’s June in Colorado and the landlord’s idea of climate control is a suggestion to “buy a fan.” The window is open wider than I left it, and the curtain is pushed aside, and Alexei is standing in my bedroom in a dark shirt with his sleeves rolled and his hair slightly windblown and an expression on his face that I have never, in five days of stolen kisses and quiet intensity, seen before.
He looks wrecked.
Not angry. Not composed. Not wearing the mask. Wrecked, the way a man looks when something he thought was indestructiblehas just been threatened, and he crossed a city and climbed three stories of brick facade to get to it.
“Did you climb my building?”
My voice comes out hoarse and swollen and I’m suddenly, horribly aware that I’m in a T-shirt and shorts with last night’s makeup streaked down my face and my hair in a state that could only be described as hostile.
“The fire escape,” he says. “Mostly.”
Mostly.
“You can’t be here.” I pull my blanket up like it’s armor. “I sent you a text. I was very clear.”
“You sent me Billy’s text.”
The words land like a slap. Not because they’re cruel. Because they’re true. He recognized it. He read my four sentences and he knew exactly what I’d done, where I’d copied from, what it meant that in my worst moment I’d reached for the same template that destroyed me.
