The smell of her perfume reached me a moment later. Sweet. Overly sweet. The same piercing scent that always seemed to cling to the air whenever she was near. Krystyna closed the door carefully with one hand.
If I hadn't been paying attention, I might have missed the sound that came next. A small metallic click. The unmistakable sound of a lock turning. And just like that, the strange feeling inside my chest finally made sense. Not yet in words, but in intuition.
She was wearing something I had never seen her in before. A robe. Thin fabric, loosely tied at the waist, falling differently around her body than the dresses she always wore during the day. There was something about it that made her look less constructed. Less like the version of herself she presented to the world, more real. That probably should have been comforting, but it wasn’t. It only made the room feel smaller.
She moved closer to the bed slowly, as if she had all the time in the world. No urgency or hesitation, just a hushed certainty in every step she took.
When she sat down, the mattress dipped under her weight. I didn’t move. I couldn’t. Her hand came to rest on my thigh. Light, almost gentle.
“It’s midnight,”she said softly. Her voice carried differently now.
“Happy birthday, Rowan.”
The words lingered in the air for a moment before she continued.
“Twelve…”she murmured, her fingers pressing ever so slightly into my skin.“That’s not a small thing anymore, is it?”Her head tilted, her eyes studying my face, then drifting over my chest, then my stomach.
“You’re not a child in the same way anymore,”she said.
“You’re… becoming something else.”
The sentence didn’t make sense, but something inside me reacted to it anyway. My chest tightened slowly, like something was wrapping itself around my ribs, pulling tighter with every word she spoke.
I didn’t understand what she meant exactly, but I understood enough.
Enough to feel that something was wrong.
Terribly wrong.
Her hand didn’t move, but the feeling of it changed.
The warmth of her skin spread through my thigh like heat that had nowhere to escape, like something pressing too hard for too long. It felt like it would leave a mark. Like if I looked down later, there would be something burned into my skin where her hand had been. A permanent reminder of this moment.
My thoughts started moving faster.
Toofast.
They collided into each other, overlapping, breaking apart before they could fully form. Every time one thought crashed into another, it sent something cutting through my body.
Her eyes moved slowly over me; every place her gaze touched felt exposed. Like something was being stripped away without her ever using her hands.
I couldn’t move.
I couldn’t think.
I couldn’t even decide whether I wanted to.
My body had gone still in the way prey goes still when it realizes movement won’t save it. And then, she shifted. The fabric of my boxers moved until they were lying in the corner of the bed. My breath caught somewhere in my chest, but it didn’t leave my body.
I didn’t need to understand anymore. The moment explained itself.
From there, time didn’t move the way it normally does. It broke. Reassembled itself into scraps that didn’t fit together. I remember the ceiling, the faint crack running along one of the tiles.
I remember the sound of her breathing.
I remember the smell of her perfume becoming suffocating in the enclosed space, sweet to the point where it turned nauseating.
I remember trying to leave mentally. Reaching for that place I used to go to. The one I had built over the years. The contained space where things made sense. Where I could disappear when reality became too much. But it wasn’t there. Or maybe it was. Maybe I just couldn’t reach it anymore.
