11
BEA
The first thing I notice is the weight of the sheets.
They’re heavier than what I’m used to. Softer, too. The light is off as well, slipping through the windows at the wrong angle—bright and exposed. In my place, the sun shows up as a single dull rectangle in the afternoon, assuming the alley even allows it.
This isn’t my apartment.
There’s a tenderness between my thighs, a dull soreness along my inner arms and hips, and my jaw aches faintly the way it does after a long cry. A bruise is already forming where his fingers gripped me. I press my thumb against it under the sheet and feel the echo.
Oh.
It floods back in pieces. His hand on my throat. The window. The cool glass against my cheek while he saidmine. My own voice, breaking apart into sounds I didn’t know I could make.
I roll onto my side. Reach across the mattress without really meaning to.
Cold.
The sheets on his side are cool enough to indicate he’s been gone a while. I don’t know why I checked. I don’t know what Ithought I’d find—him sleeping beside me, maybe. Some tender morning tableau that matches the part of last night where he kissed my neck almost gently before pulling out of me.
That was the same man who pinned my wrists above my head. The same man who made me sayplease.
I stare at the ceiling.
What did I just do?
I expect the answer to come with teeth. With shame. The slow-drip horror of realizing I slept with the man who blackmailed me into working for him. The man whose knuckles were still bloody when he drove me here. The man who paid off my grandmother’s care facility like it was nothing, like my entire life could be settled with a phone call.
But what arrives is warmer than that. A hum somewhere beneath my ribs that pulses lower the longer I lie here. My thighs press together under the sheet, and that only makes it worse.
I close my eyes.
His mouth on my stomach. His fingers tangled in my hair. The moment he flipped me onto my knees and every rational thought I had fell out of my head. The way he said my name—twice, I think, toward the end—rough and wrecked.
I made him sound like that. A small, stupid part of me keeps returning to that fact.
I’m so lost inside it that I don’t hear the closet door until it’s already open.
I sit up fast, yanking the sheet up to my collarbone. My hair is a disaster, I can feel it—heavy and tangled from his hands. My face is probably flushed. I don’t have time to compose anything before he steps out.
Suit. Dark gray today. Tie already knotted. His hair is damp at the roots and pushed back from his face, and there isn’t a single thing about him that suggests anyone touched him last night. No scratch on his neck. No mark I can claim.
He moves across the room toward the dresser and doesn’t look at me.
“Get up. There’s work to do.”
I don’t know what I was expecting. A good morning, maybe. A hand on my jaw. Some acknowledgment that a few hours ago he was inside me.
He adjusts one cuff, then the other.
“The Martinez files need to be finished before the arraignment. I’ve been...” A barely noticeable pause, just a hiccup, and then he keeps going. “Distracted. That ends today.”
Distracted.
I watch him check his watch, pat his jacket for whatever he keeps in the inside pocket. His eyes pass over the bed once, briefly, and don’t settle.
I’m a folded sweater to him right now. An object in the room.
