I should close my eyes.
I don’t.
The sweater comes off in one pull, revealing a thin camisole underneath, the kind that moves with her, and she reaches up to pull that off too with the practiced ease of someone completely alone in the world, completely unguarded, the trust of a woman who has never once considered that her bedroom might not be empty.
She isn’t wearing anything underneath, and the lamp catches her in amber. The line of her collarbone. The curve of her waist. The unique softness of her. As she turns to the side, I can see the curve of her breasts, the peak of her nipples tightening slightly in the cool air.
Fuck.
My throat dries. She’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. That thought lands in me like a stone dropped into still water, and I can’t stop the rings spreading outward, can’t take it back, can’t file it away somewhere manageable.
I’m already hard—my cock thick and aching in my jeans before I’ve fully registered the decision to want her. I press my palm flat against my dick through the denim. Slow, hard pressure. The kind meant to suppress, to manage, to get through the next sixty seconds without making a sound.
I squeeze, and the pressure detonates something else entirely. A corridor. Dark. The smell of cologne and cigarettes. The sound of a lock turning. A boy who learned to leave his own body because leaving was the only exit they couldn’t take from him.
I fracture. Not loudly. Not visibly. Just—gone. Pulled backward through thirteen years of distance into something cold and airless and inescapable. My body is in her wardrobe, but I’m not in my body. I’m in a room that smells like cruelty and twisted fucks, with hands that didthat, with a version of me that had no language for what was happening and no one to tell even if he had.
Switch it off. Just switch it off.
That’s what I learned. The particular violence of self-erasure. Of making yourself so small and so absent that what’s happening is happening to no one. To nothing. To a body you’ve temporarily vacated like a house you don’t live in anymore.
I got very good at it.
I’m doing it now, in her wardrobe, with her scent in my lungs and her lipstick on my thumb, and I hate it—hate that it still works, hate that my body still knows the route back to that corridor, hate that wanting her of all people is what sent me there.
Jesus Christ. No.
I press my eyes shut. Hard. Both palms flat against the wardrobe walls, grounding myself in the wood grain, in the physical fact of this moment, in the sound of her moving through her bedroom on the other side of this door. I count backward from ten, forcing each breath down slowly, making it controlled, making it silent, because she can’t hear me. She can’t know I’m here.
Eight. Seven.
The wanting is still there underneath the fracture. That’s the worst part. It didn’t leave—it’s just buried under something older and uglier, and both of them are living in the same body simultaneously, and I don’t know what to do with that except survive it.
Six. Five. Four.
The bathroom door clicks shut.
Three. Two.
The shower starts.
One.
I open the wardrobe, rush out of her room, and cross her apartment in a stealth I’ve mastered. Past the shoes I straightened. Past the book she left face down. Past the mug with her lipstick on the rim.
I let myself out, the door locking in place behind me. That’s when I just…pause. Her scent is still in my lungs and her lipstick still on my thumb, but the memories are there too. The worlds—no,myworld’s way of reminding me the cold, hard truth.
I can never have her. Ever.
21
SOPHIA
Ian and Andrei are on either side of Reth. He’s on the floor of the shower with his back against the tile, arms slung over his knees, head dropped forward. The water hits his shoulders and runs off him in pink rivulets, paint and blood thinning together before they spiral down the drain.
“I’d like to be alone with him.”
Ian looks up at me. “Absolutely not.”
