"I don't even know where to start," I admitted, and the honesty of it surprised me—how easy it was to be honest with them, how the usual filters I applied to conversations with other people seemed unnecessary in this room, with these women, who wore pink ribbons in their hair and understood without being told that the world was both more dangerous and more tender than most people believed.
"Start with the part that's eating you alive right now," Clare said softly. "Because something is. I can see it."
My fingers tightened around the chamomile. The warmth of it seeped into my palms, but it wasn't the right warmth—not the cedar-and-coffee warmth of Xavier's hands, which was the warmth my body had been calibrated to respond to for two weeks and which was currently somewhere across the city in a briefing room, attached to a man who'd turned his head when I tried to kiss him.
I opened my mouth to say I was fine but "He doesn't want me," came out instead. I didn’t know which one of the three of us was more shocked.
"Define 'doesn't want you,'" Emily said carefully. I glanced at her.
“I didn’t mean to say that.”
But she waved it off. “We Littles have to stick together.”
I took a breath and it just came pouring out. "He calls me little one. He calls me sweetheart. He calls me baby and good girl andhe cuts my food into microscopic pieces and he holds me while I sleep and he told me—he told me he wanted me to be his, but it’s too soon. But what if he was just placating me?" My voice cracked on the last word. "I tried to kiss him this morning. On the mouth. A real kiss. And he—" I pressed my lips together, hard, against the trembling. "He turned his head. Like I was his kid sister. He kissed my forehead and said 'be good' and left."
Silence.
"Okay," Emily said, and her voice had shifted into the careful, measured tone of a woman who'd learned to navigate emotional minefields by moving slowly and testing every step. "Can I ask you something, and will you promise to actually hear it instead of just using it to confirm whatever story you're already telling yourself?"
I nodded, though my jaw was tight.
"How long has it been since you were rescued?"
"Twenty-eight days."
"Four weeks." Emily repeated it like she was placing it on a scale, weighing it. "And in those four short weeks, you've gone through acute withdrawal from forced sedation, hormonal chaos from fertility drugs administered without your consent, severe malnutrition, PTSD that's still actively manifesting in nightmares and panic attacks, and you're sitting here in this man's house wearing his shirt and sleeping in his bed and he has not left your side for more than fifteen minutes at a time until today."
"Yes," I said, because all of that was true and none of it was the point.
"Molly." Clare leaned forward, her tea forgotten, her brown eyes earnest and bright with something that looked like recognition—the particular recognition of someone who'd walked a road similar enough to mine that she could read themile markers. "Do you know what a good Daddy does when his Little is barely a month out of the worst trauma of her life?"
"Apparently he dodges her kiss and calls her 'good girl' like she's a golden retriever."
Clare snorted. Actually snorted, tea nearly coming out her nose, and the sound was so unexpected and so human that it punctured something in the tight, airless space my chest had become. "Oh my God," she said, wiping her face. "Sorry. I'm sorry. It's not funny. It's just—Maddox did the exact same thing to me."
I stared at her. "What?"
"The exact same thing." She paused, and the brightness in her face flickered, a shadow passing behind her eyes like a cloud crossing the sun. Quick. There and gone. She mimicked turning her head, a smooth, practiced redirect. "Cheek. Forehead kiss. 'Get some rest, little one.' And I wanted to die."
"What happened?" My voice came out barely above a whisper.
"I cried for about six hours and convinced myself he thought I was damaged goods. That he was just being a good Daddy because that's what Daddies do—they take care of things. Broken birds, stray kittens, traumatized women. It's like a biological imperative for them. They can't not fix things." Clare set her tea down and curled her knees up to her chest, hugging them. "And honestly? Part of that was true. Not the damaged goods part—that was my brain being a garbage fire. But the imperative part. Maddox has this—this need to protect. It's hardwired. It's who he is before it's what he does. And when he pulled me out of that situation and I was broken and terrified and clinging to him like a life raft, every single protective instinct he had activated at once, and the absolute last thing he was going to do was take advantage of that."
"He wasn't rejecting you," Emily said, picking up the thread with the seamless coordination of two women who'd clearly hadthis conversation before, possibly about each other, possibly about themselves. "He was protecting you. From himself. From the possibility that what you were feeling was gratitude or relief or trauma bonding dressed up as desire, and that if he kissed you back—really kissed you back—he'd be crossing a line that he could never uncross, with a woman who might wake up one day with a clear head and realize she'd never actually wanted him at all."
"But I do want him," I said, and my voice broke on the word want like it was made of glass. "It's not gratitude. It's not—I know what gratitude feels like, and it doesn't make your heart rate double when someone walks into a room. It doesn't make you memorize the exact way someone's stubble feels against your forehead. It doesn't make you really wish you slept naked—"
Clare chuckled and I managed a weak smile. Because saying it out loud was the first time I realized my body was recovering as well. Not just physically.
"I know," Emily said gently. "I know it's real for you. And I'd bet everything I have that it's real for him too. But Molly —he doesn't have the luxury of trusting that. Not yet. Because he's the one with the power in this dynamic, and he knows it, and a man like Xavier—a man who's built his entire identity around protecting people who can't protect themselves—would rather cut off his own hand than use that power in the wrong way."
I wanted to argue. I wanted to saybut he should know, he should be able to see it, he reads me like a book every other time so why can't he read this?But the argument dissolved before it fully formed, because somewhere underneath the hurt and the rejection and the Maria-voice whisperinghe doesn't want you, a quieter voice was saying something else entirely.
He told you this. He literally told you this. Three weeks ago, in this bed, with his forehead against yours. He said he wantedto wait until you could choose him with clear eyes and a healed heart. He said he wanted you to be able to walk away and survive without him. He said he didn't want you to need him—he wanted you to choose him.
And then you tried to kiss him four weeks into recovery, while your endocrine system was still in free fall and your nightmares still required his physical presence to survive, and he did exactly what he said he would do. He protected you. Even from himself.
"Oh," I said.
