You belong to me.
And sitting in the quiet of my apartment, mapped in evidence of everything we'd done, I couldn't find a single thread of regret.
I swung my legs off the bed and stood. The ache between my thighs sharpened, and I paused, letting it settle into something manageable. His cock was a weapon all its own, and I still wasn't quite sure how I'd managed to take it all. My feet counted the distance to the bathroom. Three steps. Turn right. Hand on the doorframe.
My spatial control was steady. No clipping drawer handles this time, no fumbling. Because the violence covering my body hadn't been donetome. It had been donewithme. On my terms. At my invitation.
That distinction mattered.
I turned on the shower and stood under water hot enough to sting. Every bruise announced itself under the spray. On my throat, breast, hips, thighs. I didn't scrub them the way I'd scrubbed the blood from my sneaker that night. I ran my fingers over each one with deliberate care, and wondered how I'd feel when they healed. When I no longer had the proof of the memory.
I shut off the water, and the apartment was too quiet again.
Then I stood dripping on the bath mat, steam curling against my skin, and let myself sit inside the feeling I'd been circling since I woke up.
It wasn't love. I wasn't naive enough to call it that. Love was a word for people who exchanged house keys and met each other's families and argued about whose turn it was to do the dishes.Love was mundane. Ordinary. Built on a thousand small, boring acts of showing up.
What I felt for Milo wasn't ordinary.
It was like standing in the alley with blood under my shoe. That electric, full-body awareness of being close to something lethal. The exhilaration of standing at the edge of a cliff and leaning forward instead of stepping back.
Before the accident, I'd chased that feeling behind the wheel. Ninety on a back road with the windows down, the world rushing past in a blur I'd never see again.
Now I chased it in dark alleys and darker men.
My therapist would have a field day with this.
I frowned, knowing exactly what she'd say. That this wasn't a healthy way to live. That I wassensation-seeking as a trauma response. She loved that phrase, trotted it out every time I did something that wasn't sitting in my empty apartment waiting to heal on her timeline. That the adrenaline I craved was a maladaptive coping mechanism, my nervous system chasing the activation state of the accident because unprocessed grief had wired me to confuse danger with feeling alive.
She'd say I wasdisplacing. That I'd transferred my need for control onto a man who couldn't give me safety, and that the bruises I was currently cataloging like love letters were evidence of a pattern she'd been warning me about since I stopped crying in her office and started going quiet instead.
She'd say the marks on my body weren't proof of agency. They were proof I hadn't finished grieving.
And maybe she was right. She usually was, in that clinical, bloodless way that made everything true and nothing useful. She'd been right when she said I needed to simplify my environment. Right when she systematically stripped my apartment of every trace of the woman I'd been before until I lived in a sterile void that didn't remind me of anything, including myself.
She was very good at being right. She was shit at understanding that sometimes the wrong thing was the only thing keeping you alive.
My therapist could go fuck herself.
I reached for my towel. My hand closed on fabric and something else—a piece of paper, folded once, tucked between the towel and the rack.
I froze.
Nobody came into my apartment. Nobody moved things. I knew the position of every object down to the millimeter, and there had been no paper on this rack when I'd hung the towel yesterday.
He'd left me a note.
Not on the pillow, where it would've been obvious. Not on the counter, where I might have missed it. On the towel. Because he knew the first thing I'd do after waking up alone was shower.
He'd been paying attention.
I unfolded the paper. My fingertips skated across the surface.
It was blank.
No. Wait. Not blank. There were pen indentations. He'd written something, pressing hard enough that the letters were raised and spaced far apart. Readable by touch, if you knew how to feel for it.
He'd written it so I could read it.
