Chapter 2
Scarletta
The cursor blinks on my screen. Forty-three thousand words into See Me, Spank Me, Cure Me and I'm right there with her, my protagonist, feeling the exact moment she realizes she can't run anymore.
His hand is on her throat—not squeezing, just there, just claiming—and she's about to say it, the words I've been building toward for sixteen chapters. The words that will break her open.
"I'm yours."
My fingers are flying. I'm not even thinking anymore, just channeling it, the way her resistance finally cracks, the way she lets him see?—
Footsteps in the hallway.
Heavy. Deliberate.
I freeze mid-sentence, hands hovering over the keyboard like I've been caught doing something illegal. Which is stupid. I'm just writing. I'm always just writing. Nobody cares what I do in this apartment. Nobody even knows I'm here most of the time.
The silence after the footsteps is worse than the sound.
Reality slams back into me like waking up from anesthesia. That horrible jarring sensation of oh god where am I what wasI doing who am I except I know exactly who I am and that's the problem.
I'm not her. The brave one. The one who surrenders because she's strong enough to choose it.
I'm Scarletta Mae Desmond. Twenty-two. Alone. Wearing leggings I put on three days ago—or was it four?—and Daddy's old hoodie that smells like the coffee I spilled Tuesday morning. Or maybe Monday. Time does this thing when I write where it stops being linear and becomes this soup I'm swimming through.
My apartment is a shoebox. Studio. Four hundred square feet of pretending I have my life together. The door is open.
Shit.
When did I?—
Oh. The mail. I went to check the mail. There was nothing but grocery store flyers and a credit card offer for someone who doesn't live here anymore. I came back and had this idea about the scene where he first collars her, the way the leather would feel against her throat, heavy and permanent and terrifying, and I just... started writing.
The door's been open for?—
I check the clock. 11:47 PM.
I went to get the mail at 7:30.
Jesus Christ, Scarletta.
The hallway light buzzes like it's angry about existing. Fluorescent. Institutional. The same light that's been flickering for two months because the building manager doesn't care about anything that isn't an actual fire.
I should get up. I should close the door. I should?—
Yellow envelope.
It's stuck to my door like a parking ticket. Like a scarlet letter. Like every bad thing that's ever been official, and terrible, and unavoidable.
My body moves without permission. That's how it feels when panic takes over—like I'm watching myself from a distance, like I'm narrating my own life except I don't want this scene, I never wanted this scene.
The envelope is thick. I know what it is before I touch it.
Yellow envelopes never bring good news. They bring the things you've been pretending aren't real. The things you've been hiding from by staying inside your head, inside your stories, inside the fantasy that you can just not deal with it and it'll go away.
My fingers shake when I pull it down. The tape makes this horrible ripping sound, loud in the silent hallway, fully pulling me back to the reality that it's almost midnight.
I can't open it in the hallway.
