But she knew one thing: She couldn’t go back.
The sheets were too smooth.
They were high-thread-count Egyptian cotton, crisp and immaculate beneath her body. They smelled faintly of lavender and bleach, nothing wild, nothing real. Olivia stared at the ceiling, motionless in the dark, a single lamp casting long amber shadows across the room.
Her old journals were stacked neatly on the desk across the room, untouched.
Her new one, the one she’d filled in the desert, lay open in her lap.
The ink bled slightly from the page, her handwriting more fluid than it used to be, less defensive and clinical.
She held the pen loosely in her hand, her fingers stained faintly with dried ink and memory.
She had intended to write about her day. To capture the surreal slide from retreat to hospital to house like one would record a strange dream. But what spilled out instead was Emma.
Not her name, just the sensation of her.
The heat of her skin at midnight.
The rasp of her accent curling low against her spine.
The way her mouth found hers in the dark like it had been waiting all day to speak in kisses instead of words.
Olivia shifted under the sheet, her legs bare, her nightshirt pushed up around her thighs. She closed her eyes and could still feel Emma’s mouth on her neck, that slow drag of tongue and teeth that had pulled a sound from her she’d never made before. She pressed her fingers there now, just below her jawline.
Still tender.
Still hers.
The desert was in her blood too. She’d rinsed it off in the shower, but it lingered—coarse, golden, sacred. It was in the way her hips shifted against the mattress, in the way her lips parted with a memory so sharp it could’ve cut glass.
She didn’t cry because she missed it.
She cried because she knew.
Because for the first time in her life, she knew what she wanted.
And it wasn’t this, this mausoleum of status and silence. This cold hallway of expectations. This bed, too large and too empty, tucked into a life shaped by other people’s hands.
She wanted the desert.
She wanted laughter and sunlight on her legs. She wanted Emma’s hands in her hair and sage in the air and to wake up without a to-do list carved into her chest.
She wanted herself.
The version she found out there.Her breath hitched as tears finally came, quiet and unhurried. She wiped them away with the edge of her shirt, exhaling shakily. Then she reached for the journal again and, with steady fingers, wrote just one sentence:
“I want her.”
And for once, she didn’t feel afraid.
The bathtub had always been her favorite feature. Deep and oval, carved from some sleek Scandinavian stone, it had been installed not for comfort but for aesthetic symmetry. A showpiece, just like the rest of the flat.
She had never used it. There had never been time for indulgence before.But tonight, Olivia let the water run hot, steam curling in lazy tendrils against the frosted glass. She poured in oil, desert rose and sandalwood, its scent decadent, almost sinful. The notes reminded her of Emma’s cabin, the slow way twilight had crept across the floorboards, the heat between their bodies sticky with want and dust.
She slipped into the water slowly, her skin blooming pink under the rising heat. It lapped at her ankles, her thighs, her waist, until she was submerged to the collarbones, her breath slow and deep.
And then, she touched herself.
