I pushed away from the door, my legs trembling. The adrenaline that had fueled my brass-lamp stand-off was evaporating, leaving behind a jagged, hollowed-out exhaustion. My body felt like a house that had survived a hurricane, structurally compromised, stripped of its siding, creating a draft where there shouldn't be one.
My hands were shaking as I clutched the heavy black sketchbook to my chest. Simon’s bag lay abandoned on the floor, spilled open like a gut wound, but this… this was the heart.
I walked to the bed. The sheets were still tangled, smelling of sweat, stale fever, and the faint, lingering spice of Daniel’s skin. I ignored the impulse to strip the bedding, to scrub the scent of them out of my fortress. I didn't have the strength.
I sat down on the edge of the mattress; the springs groaning softly. Outside, the storm had reduced to a sulky, grey drizzle, casting the room in a flat, clinical light.
I opened the book again.
I needed to see it. I needed to know the extent of the violation.
The first drawing I had glimpsed earlier was still there, the woman on her knees, head thrown back in ecstasy. It was confusing, disorienting. But as I turned the pages back toward the beginning, toward the older, yellowing paper, the narrative shifted from confusion to something sharper.
Here was the gymnasium.
I traced the date scribbled in the corner in a hasty, jagged pencil.June 14th.
I remembered that day in high-definition horror, the way my cheap polyester gown scratched my neck. I remembered the smell of floor wax and the crushing weight of thousands of pairs of eyes. In my nightmares, I was a monster. A snot-nosed, sobbing, leaking mess, dragged off stage like a bag of wet laundry.
But that wasn't what Simon had drawn.
The charcoal sketch was dark, heavy with shadows, but the figure at the podium wasn't pathetic. She was terrified, yes, he had captured the white-knuckle grip of my hands on the microphone stand with devastating accuracy, but he hadn't drawn a victim.
He had drawn a singularity.
The composition centered entirely on me. The crowd in the background was just a wash of grey noise, faceless and insignificant. The focus was the girl. He had exaggerated the arch of my spine as the heat hit, turning the convulsion into a line of tragic, balletic beauty. My hair, escaping its pins, wasn't messy; it was wild, windswept by an invisible storm.
He made the moment of my destruction look like the moment of my apotheosis.
Meaningless. It was just art. Just a filter he put over the ugliness to make it palatable.
I turned the page, my fingers leaving faint sweat marks on the borders.
Another sketch from that day. This one was from the side. I was on the floor of the stage, half-obscured by the podium.
In reality, this was when I had started to dry-heave.
In the drawing, I was curled in on myself, protective and sharp. But it was thewayhe drew the gaze that stopped me. In the foreground, he had sketched the back of a boy’s head. Neat, golden hair. Broad shoulders in a suit jacket.
Anders.
Simon had drawn Anders watching me. And he had drawn himself watching Anders watching me. There was a tension in the lines of Anders’ shoulders that I had never noticed, a rigidity that wasn't just indifference. It looked like restraint. Like he was vibrating apart.
"You saw," I whispered to the paper. "You saw everything, realized what was happening, and you just… kept drawing."
I should be furious. Iwasfurious. It was voyeurism of the highest order. He had stolen my trauma and turned it into portfolio content.
But I couldn't stop looking.
I flipped forward, skipping years of blank pages or random architectural studies, until the paper turned white and crisp again.
Yesterday.
My breath hitched.
The sketches became frantic. The lines were darker, pressed harder into the paper, as if the artist was trying to carve the image rather than draw it.
First, the doorway of this house. The storm raging outside.
