For a flicker of a second, the thought slips in uninvited, ‘He knows me.’ It’s so quiet it barely registers, like a trick of the light or a memory reaching for the wrong place. The idea brushes against something tender in my chest, but it’s impossible. He can’t know me. This is coincidence. Manipulation. A set dressed to make me feel small and foolish for wanting it.
The scent pulls me forward before I decide to move. It’s nostalgic, a memory of Sunday mornings in my mother’s kitchen, her hands dusted with flour, mine sticky with sugar.I miss her.
The glass dome looks delicate, almost pretty, the muffins arranged beneath it like an offering. Like care. Like something placed here on purpose. Meant to blur the line between kindness and captivity.
Something I won’t fall for.
A surge of heat rises up my spine, and before I can stop myself, I sweep my arm across the counter. The glass dome flies, weightless for a heartbeat, then crashes to the floor and explodes, the sound loud and violent in the quiet. Shards scatter, with the pastries ruined on impact, their warmth bleeding out onto the hardwood floor.
I don’t move right away. I just stand there, chest heaving, staring at the mess like my body is waiting for permission to react. Cinnamon still clings to the air, sweet and wrong, curling into my lungs no matter how shallow I try to breathe. Glass crunches under my bare foot when I shift, the sting sharp enough to remind me I’m still real, still here. Still trapped.
I expect something to happen next. A door. A voice. Consequences. Instead, there’s only the quiet and the smell and the slow, sick realization that breaking something didn’t make me feel better. It didn’t make me feel stronger. It didn’t even make me feel safer. Broken glass and ruined muffins are not a victory…it’s just terror with nowhere to run.
June 30th, 2024
I don’t think I’d survive a gentle love.
I’ve tried gentle. Gentle is fine. Gentle is considerate and reasonable and checks in and doesn’t push too hard, and I appreciate all of that intellectually and I am so bored by it I could scream.
I want someone intense. Someone who looks at me like I’m the only real thing in his life. Not in a possessive way—or maybe in a possessive way, I don’t know. I’m done policing what I want at midnight on a Tuesday.
I just want someone whose attention feels like something. Like weight. Like it means something that they’re looking at me and not anything else.
I want to feel wanted in a way that changes me.
I don’t know what that looks like, exactly. I just know I haven’t felt it. I know the difference between someone being interested in you and someone being unable to look away from you, and I have only ever had the first one.
I want the second one.
I want someone who knows the small things without being told. Who noticed before I gave them permission to notice. Who has already decided something about me before I’ve said a word.
Is that insane? It probably sounds insane.
It’s just what I want.
On a Tuesday.
At midnight.
When nobody’s asking.
4
RETH
Flashback
Istand beneath the heat lamps that never help.
The red ribbon in my pocket warms with my body and prints a line across my palm when I squeeze. She’ll be here any moment.
While I wait, I think about the painter. He keeps asking what I want it to feel like, and I never have an answer that satisfies him. Every version is wrong. Too cold. Too romantic. Too perfect. I don’t know what it is, I only know it hasn’t been right yet.
I think about the glass, whether it’ll need films. The property sits high on a bluff, the windows floor to ceiling, the lines severe and honest. No curtains. You don’t hide the view when you’ve bought a horizon.
The moment she rounds the corner, my thoughts cut off like a blade. Everything else blurs, and she becomes the only thing that exists.
On the inside, every instinct is heightened, my nerves scattering. On the outside, I remain unmoved, quiet, steady as my gaze follows her every move.
