Not wanting her. That was always there, whether I admitted it or not.
The real problem is what comes after. The ordinary aftermath. Sitting in the same room. Hearing her father speak kindly to me. Watching her try to butter toast with fingers that I know curled into my shoulders hours ago. This version of intimacy feels more dangerous than the shower did, because the shower was honest. This is performance. This is pretending that breakfast is just breakfast and not a kind of torture built out of fruit, coffee, and withheld eye contact.
It would have been easier if she had looked at me with regret this morning. Easier if she’d recoiled. Easier if she’d decided what happened was a mistake and built a wall high enough for me to recognize.
But she hasn’t.
She keeps glancing at me, and every glance feels like a question she hasn’t asked out loud yet.
Was it real?
Are you going to disappear again?
What now?
I don’t have answers to any of it.
All I have is the knowledge that Jacob is smiling at me across the table like I’m something he helped save, while I sit here knowing that if he ever understood the full shape of what happened last night, he would never look at me like this again.
Somehow, beneath the guilt, the conflict, and the constant threat of my own body betraying me all over again, there is a harder truth I can’t scrape out of myself.
If I look at her one more time and she looks back the way she did in that shower, I do not know how long I can keep pretending I regret it more than I want it again.
The moment only breaks because Steph stands to clear a plate.
Until then, breakfast has been one long act of pretending. Pretending the room isn’t too small, pretending coffee, toast, and ordinary conversation are enough to anchor anything after last night, pretending I don’t notice every time Octavia glances at me and then away again like her own body is keeping secrets from her face. I am already stretched too thin by the effort of sitting at this table and looking like a person who belongs here.
So when Steph drifts toward the kitchen, I follow almost without thinking, mostly because movement feels safer than staying still across from Octavia for another full minute.
It doesn’t help.
The kitchen is only another version of the same problem. Steph moves easily through it, topping off coffee, opening cabinets, making harmless comments about campus and schedules. Jacob lingers nearby, glancing between his phone and the counter, one of those men who can make domesticity look effortless because no one ever taught him to fear the spaces where families eat.
Then Steph looks out toward the driveway.
She pauses just long enough for me to notice.
“I thought today was an off day for both of you,” she says, mild confusion in it, the kind that belongs to a mother trying to keep track of young people’s schedules.
The words are barely finished before I hear the knock at the door.
My attention goes there instantly. Not because I know who it is yet, but because something in me already doesn’t like the timing. The sound is casual enough to be harmless, but harmless things have not exactly been my experience lately.
Steph reaches the door before anyone else can move. Octavia is coming in from the dining room at the same time, her expression already puzzled. The second the door swings open, the air in the whole house changes.
Maria and Cheyenne are on the porch.
And behind them stands Kadin.
For one second, all I feel is disbelief, quickly followed by something much uglier.
Steph smiles with automatic warmth. “Hi, girls. Octavia is in the kitchen…” Her eyes drift to Kadin. “And who is your friend?”
Maria and Cheyenne exchange a look that would almost be funny if it didn’t make me want to break something. They’re too pleased with themselves, too careless with the moment, the waygirls get when they think they are helping move some romance along.
“Octavia’s friend,” one of them says, the other giggling immediately after, as if the phrase itself is hilarious.
The rage that hits me is instant.
