She moves on. I move on. Both of us pretending she didn’t just read my entire emotional state in four seconds flat.
The office. Our office. His chair pushed back from the desk. My laptop where I left it. And on my side, a covered mug. Still warm.
I sit down. Open the laptop. Start working. The covered mug radiates heat against my wrist. I drink from it because the alternative is staring at it. I refuse to think about the fact that he covered it. That he remembered the sugars. That he was in thisroom before dawn, making sure I’d have a warm cup when I got here, and then left before I could see him do it.
Sofia would be so proud.
The data does what the data does. Dead ends that branch into more dead ends. I work through the morning. Through lunch, which I skip because Rosa isn’t here to force-feed me and Lorenzo is wherever Lorenzo goes when he’s not being infuriating at close range.
The compound goes quiet in the afternoon. The guards change shifts. Rosa hums in the kitchen. Somewhere a door closes. The office is empty. The chair across from mine has never been louder.
I can’t sleep. The bed is wrong. The sheets are clean because Rosa changes them every day and now they smell like detergent instead of him and I’m furious about noticing. My body has developed preferences aboutsheets.This is what my life has become.
I lie on my back. Stare at the ceiling. The house settles around me. Pipes. Floorboards. The hum of the security system. He’s three doors away. In his room. I know which one. I’ve learned this house, the way he’s learned which floorboard creaks and where the light falls.
And the fact that I know where his room is and I’m lying here thinking about it instead of sleeping makes me want to put my fist through the drywall.
I’m not walking to his door. I’m a grown woman. I’m Ghost. I’ve brought down networks that didn’t know I existed. I do not need a man to help me sleep.
I need a man to help me come, apparently, which is a separate and more infuriating problem.
The nightstand drawer. I open it. The vibrator sits where I shoved it after Marguerite slipped it into my shopping bag with a wink and a “A woman should have options,cara“ that made me want to die on the spot. I’d rolled my eyes. Put it in the drawer. Figured I’d never use it because I had my own back at the old place. The reliable one. Two AA batteries. Never once pinned my wrists above my head or said my name like it was a confession.
I turn it on. Low setting. The buzz fills the dark.
“Okay.” I’m talking to myself. Standard operating procedure. “This is maintenance. This is what you did since Sofia. Quick. Efficient. Thinking about nothing.”
My eyes shut. The usual spot. The pressure that works. That’s always worked.
Nothing.
I change the angle. Higher setting. The technique I perfected over three years of silent necessity in an apartment with paper-thin walls.
Nothing.
“Come on.”
My nervous system has been reprogrammed by a man with rough hands and a one-word vocabulary and now nothing else works. My body has rewritten the rules without my permission.
I know what it wants. His body pressing mine into the mattress. The scrape of calluses. The way his thumb circled with the precision of a man who reads bodies the way I read data. The command.Stay here. The grip on my wrists that shut my brain off like a breaker flipping. The sound of his belt. His mouth on my throat. The way he saiddon’t hidelike he had any right to ask me for more when he can’t even stay in the room afterward.
“No.” I grip the vibrator harder. Change angles. “I amnotlying here doing this while thinking about him. There are lines. Boundaries.“
I try again. The angle that worked every single time in the apartment. The one I could rely on the way other people rely on their morning coffee.
Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
I throw the vibrator at the wall. It hits, bounces, and keeps buzzing on the floor like an angry insect.
“Fuck.“ I say it to the ceiling. To the compound walls. To the absent man three doors away who broke my operating system with his hands and his mouth and his voice.
“Congratulations, Isabella.” I press the heels of my hands into my eyes. “You’ve conditioned yourself to need a man who can’t string three words together unless he’s telling you not to move. Excellent life choices. Your therapist would be thrilled if you still had one.”
I get up. Cross the room. Pick up the vibrator. Turn it off. Wipe it down. Put it back in the drawer. The drawer closes with more force than necessary.
I sit on the edge of the bed. Stare at the wall.
“This is your fault.” I’m addressing the wall. Or myself. Or the universe. “Years.I had a system. I wasfunctional.I could handle this by myself in under ten minutes and be back at my laptop before the screen dimmed. And now I’m sitting in a borrowed bedroom throwing a vibrator at a wall because a man with the emotional range of a brick brought mewater.“
