Wet tile.
Her body slick beneath my palms.
The way she stopped trying to be angry somewhere in the middle of it and started being honest instead. The way she looked at me after, not ashamed, not cold. She had looked at me openly. Worse than openly. She had looked at me like she wanted more, like she wanted me not to vanish again, like whatever she saw under all my damage had not scared her away nearly as much as it should have.
Taking my seat slowly, every movement in this room feels dangerous now.
It is not only the memory of her body that is making my pulse too loud. It is the context. The table. The family. The way Jacob and Steph move around us, offering coffee and conversation, while I sit here knowing exactly what happened a few hours ago in a room up those stairs. The distance between night and morning should have helped. It should have put enough air between us for me to gather some version of myself back together.
It didn’t.
Now all that exists is the awareness of her across from me and the unbearable fact that she is no longer a possibility. She is a memory I can taste.
I can’t stop looking at her mouth.
That’s the part that keeps undoing me. Not her legs under the table or the shape of her in that thin shirt. Her mouth. Every time my eyes drift there, I’m right back under hot water, right back to the sound of her breathing breaking when I stopped holding myself together, right back to the moment she looked at me like I was not made entirely of things that ruin what they touch.
Forcing my attention down to my plate, it doesn’t stay there for long.
Trying not to look at me, she’s failing in a way that makes everything worse. Every few seconds her gaze catches onme, before slipping away, quick and nervous, as if she’s still adjusting to the fact that I am sitting here dressed, pretending to know how to exist in daylight after what I did to her last night. What she let me do. What she asked me not to pull away from once I started.
That distinction matters more than I want it to.
It means I can’t file this away under the usual categories. Drunkenness. Mistake. Need with nowhere else to go. She was not passive in it. She knew who I was. Knew enough. Saw the moth. Saw the scars. Saw all the pieces I hide behind anger and still asked me not to disappear.
I’m not built for being seen like that.
Which means now I don’t know what to do with myself.
Jacob’s voice cuts through my concentration before I can drown in it completely.
“It’s nice to finally see you at breakfast again, Silas,” he says with a warm, oblivious smile.
The sentence lands like a slap.
I look at him, really look at him, and for one ugly second all I can think is that he has no idea who he’s talking to. No idea what I did only hours ago to the girl he calls his daughter. No idea how thoroughly I lost every remaining line I had left to protect him from the truth of what he invited into this house.
It’s nice to finally see you at breakfast again.
He says it like I’ve just been adjusting. Like this is about transition, timetables and the ordinary difficulty of dropping a fostered, damaged boy into a new life. He says it like he’s pleased to see me trying.
They have no clue what I’ve done to their daughter.
The thought arrives cold and merciless.
He would not be speaking to me, let alone letting me sit in this house with coffee in my cup and his wife setting down toast within reach, if he knew the things I did to her last night. If heknew how she sounded with my name in her mouth. If he knew where my hands were. If he knew how many times I nearly lost myself completely and how little of me wanted to be found again once I did.
The guilt of that should be consuming.
It isn’t.
It tangles with satisfaction too quickly, with the possessive, selfish part of me that is still reeling from the fact that Octavia did not just survive my touch. She answered it. Wanted it. Held onto me like I was not poison even after I gave her every reason in the world to believe I was.
Muttering something back to Jacob that sounds enough like a response to pass, I don’t know what it is. The room has already started receding around the edges again.
Steph asks whether I need anything for campus. Jacob mentions some paperwork. I hear words, but none of them stay. All of my concentration is divided between keeping my face neutral and trying not to look at Octavia again, because every time I do, I can feel the memory under my skin. Not abstractly. Physically. Like my body is remembering faster than my mind can regulate it.
This is the part I never accounted for.
