I’ve been thinking about this, and that’s the truest way I can say it. I don’t want to be weighed and considered and chosen after careful deliberation. I don’t want to be the conclusion someone reached.
I want to be the thing they couldn’t reason their way out of.
The thought that comes back no matter how many times they push it away. The name that sits at the back of the throat before they mean to say it. The person someone tries to forget and can’t—not because forgetting is hard but because some part of them refuses to.
I don’t want to be a choice.
I want to be a compulsion.
The kind that arrives without permission and stays without invitation and makes absolutely no sense and cannot be helped.
I want someone to want me the way you want something you know isn’t good for you.
Completely. Helplessly. Against their better judgment.
Without being able to stop.
10
RETH
Islam the door shut, tear a piece of fabric off my shirt and wrap it around my hand. My phone vibrates against the desk. I don’t need to look at the screen. No one else has this number.
I answer on the second pulse. “What.”
Ian doesn’t waste time. “How’s the hand?”
I glance down at my palm. It aches now that the adrenaline is gone. A dull, persistent throb that my body keeps trying to bring to my attention. I keep ignoring it.
“Superficial.”
“Bullshit.”
I flex my fingers slowly. The skin pulls open slightly along the deepest part of the cut. “It’ll scar.”
“You can’t do shit like that.”
“Like what.”
“Grab a blade with your bare hand in front of her like you’ve got something to prove.”
My jaw tightens before I can stop it. I don’t answer immediately, which is an answer in itself, and we both know it. “You were watching.”
“Yeah.”
The admission sits there. Calm. Unapologetic. Ian has never once pretended to be something he isn’t, which is either his greatest quality or his most infuriating one, depending on the hour.
“I told you not to run feed when I’m inside.”
“You tell me to do a lot of things which I ignore.”
“That’s not how this works. You fucking know that, right?”
A chair scrapes faintly on his end. I picture him leaning back, boots up on something expensive that doesn’t belong to him, a cold cup of coffee somewhere at his elbow. He runs surveillance the way some men fish—patient, unhurried, faintly smug about it.
“You pay me to protect your interests,” he says evenly. “Ignoring you half the time is me doing just that.”
My hand throbs, and I press the cloth tighter. Pain is familiar. Predictable. It goes into a box, gets labeled, shelved. I’ve been doing it since I was old enough to understand that reacting only makes it worse.
