Because I know exactly what I am capable of doing to her when I’m trying to comfort her and fail.
That is the part I can’t stop replaying. Not just what happened in the bathroom, but what should have happened. She had come to me half-shattered, her body desperate to outrun whatever memory or terror had grabbed her by the throat. I should have knelt in front of her and taken the phone from her shaking hand. I should have made her sit on the floor and breathe. I should have held her face and told her she was safe and left it there.
Instead, I let her look up at me from the floor with that need in her eyes and lose every clean instinct I had.
The guilt of it should be enough to flatten the rest.
It isn’t.
That’s what makes me sick.
Because underneath the guilt is still the memory of her mouth, her hands, the way she wanted me to stop her from thinking and chose me to do it. Underneath the horror of my own weakness is the brutal, living fact that she came to me. Not Kadin. Not her friends. Me. And some traitorous, selfish part of me still glows with that even now while she cries on the other side of the wall because of things I should have protected her from instead of adding myself to the pile.
Then there’s the phone.
I saw enough of Kadin's screen when she bolted from the room to know the article was about her mother’s grave, but that wasn’t what sent her running to me. That look on her face had been too immediate, too personal, too poisoned. Something else was on her phone. Something worse. Something that hit old wounds hard enough to crack her wide open in front of all of us.
I can’t stop thinking about it.
What did she read?
What the hell was on that screen that sent her spiraling so fast and made her ask for me the way she did?
I’m still trying to decide whether I should ignore the instinct to go to her or surrender to it when a voice grates through the room and kills the silence.
“You look like shit.”
I look up sharply.
Kadin is leaning in my doorway with one shoulder against the frame, posture loose in the practiced way of a man trying to look more comfortable than he really is. The hallway light cuts around him, flattening the expression on his face into something hard and ugly. He shouldn’t be here. He should have taken his hurt feelings and his bullshit concern and gone home with the girls.
Instead he’s standing in my doorway, looking at me like he came back for something.
That alone is enough to taint the air in the room.
“Hoping she’d let you stay?” he asks.
The question isn’t curious. It’s bait. He says it with that low, dry edge men use when they think they’re finally seeing the truth and can’t wait to press on it. There’s no concern left in him now. No clean politeness for the family downstairs. No careful pretense. Just hostility dressed in control.
“Get the fuck out,” I snap at him.
My voice stays low. That’s probably what makes him decide to keep pushing.
He peels himself off the doorframe, walking into the room like I didn’t say anything, like the boundary means nothing because he’s already decided he’s morally superior enough to ignore it. “The girls are gone,” he says, glancing once toward the wall that separates my room from hers. “I’m sure that’s going to sting tomorrow.”
The comment lands where it was meant to. He wants me thinking about her. About what happened. About what she’ll feelin the morning. As if I haven’t already been drowning in exactly that.
I stand.
It isn’t a decision so much as an inevitability. My body is moving before I fully catch up to the fact of it, and Kadin notices fast enough to lift a hand to my chest as I cross the room. The contact is less about stopping me than it is about making a point, about showing me he isn’t intimidated enough to back away.
“Careful,” he says. The calm in his voice is thin now, stretched over something more brittle. He leans in slightly, dragging in a breath through his nose. “You smell like her.”
That sentence does something ugly to the room.
For one beat, the only thing I feel is the recognition of it. He’s right. Of course he’s right. Her is still all over me. Her soap, our skin, the warmth of the bathroom and the rawness of what we did and didn’t say afterward. Her body under my hands before her mouth opened for me when she should have pushed me away.
The smart thing would be silence.
