Because of Billie and what she’d allowed. Because of what she’d done.
She needed to fix it. She needed to see her, and she needed to make it right, even if she didn’t deserve to. Her gaze caught the harness on the floor; a startling reminder of everything she couldn’t outrun. Billie’s breath trembled again as she rose to her feet, but this time there was a thin thread of resolve attached to it.
She would go to Debra tonight,right now, and if she never wanted to look at Billie again, she would take that punishment. She deserved far worse.
Tonight, she would show Debra the one truth she’d never allowed anyone else to see. That Billie Brown and all her control, poise, and armour were nothing more than a woman who was terrified of hurting someone she cared about.
But she had, and now she would break herself open if it meant Debra knew she was sorry. She pressed her palm flat against the ache in her chest and whispered the only apology she would ever make again. “I’m sorry I remembered how to want.”
Billie barely remembered lockingthe shop. She knew she must have—via muscle memory if nothing else—but the act itself passed through her without registering, the way everything else had since Debra’s face had fractured in front of her eyes.
The city blurred around her. Pavements slick with rain, headlights smearing white and red across the wet road, strangers passing by without looking twice. She welcomed that,the anonymity. The fact that no one knew who she was supposed to be. It felt fitting, given the fact that everything in her life had smashed into pieces she no longer knew how to gather.
She hadn’t bothered to take a cab. She’d needed the cold and the movement. She’d needed the punishment of each step striking the ground as though she could walk something out of herself that had been buried for too long. Her collar was skewed and her hair was a mess from constantly pulling at it before she’d made her way over there. Anyone looking at her would have seen a woman coming undone, but no one looked closely enough. They never did.
Her mind replayed it all in relentless detail.
Debra standing in the doorway and that sound Billie would never be able to scrub from her mind. Small, wounded, and involuntary. The way her eyes had searched Billie’s face, desperate for reassurance that never came…and how she’d searched for something to hold on to and found nothing solid enough to stay for.
Billie clenched her jaw as her throat burned again.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” she whispered into the night, the words torn from her before she could swallow them back. “I didn’t mean to lie.”
But she had. In fact, she’d done something worse. She’d let Debra believe something true enough to feel safe in, only to rip it away the moment it mattered.
She hadn’t meant for it to happen. Not like that. Notthere. She’d told herself she was reclaiming something, slipping back into something familiar because familiarity felt safer than the open,terrifyingwant Debra had stirred in her. She’d told herself she was in control.
Control.
Billie scoffed to herself.
Her feet slowed as Debra’s building came into view, her palms growing clammy as she reached that fight or flight stage. She stopped across the street, soaked through from the rain, and stared at the darkened windows.
She could still leave.
That instinct flared, the same one that had carried her out of bedrooms and cities and entire lives before anyone had the chance to hurt her. She had left in the middle of the night before. She was excellent at vanishing.
Leave before you’re seen.
Leave before you make it worse.
Leave before you kneel for something you don’t deserve.
But this time, her body refused to move.
Because this wasn’t about escape. This was about penance. It wasn’t about deserving; it was about owning what she’d done.
She crossed the street slowly, each step heavier than the last, her shoulders curling inwards. The building loomed ahead of her, ordinary yet terrifying in its normality. This wasn’t a club. This wasn’t a controlled space. This wasn’therplace. This was Debra’s home…the one place Billie had never let herself sit in fully.
When she entered the building and took the several flights of stairs to Debra’s flat, her legs trembled not from exhaustion, but from memory. By the time she reached Debra’s door, her breath was shallow again, her heart hammering so hard she wondered if Debra could hear it through the wood.
She lifted her hand to knock but stopped herself and lowered it again.
When an old reflex reared its head, her posture folding without warning, Billie lowered herself to her knees outside Debra’s front door and placed her palms flat on her thighs.
Be still. Be quiet. Be small.
She didn’t flinch, and she didn’t rush. She knelt there carefully, as though the act itself required ultimate precision.
