Page 68 of Lethal in Pink

My therapist would tell me I’m intellectualizing my discomfort again, but my therapist doesn't live in Unit 1504 and she isn't currently losing a fistfight with her own impulse control.

Four minutes. Recovery. The timer on my watch vibrates against my wrist. I drop the pace to a jog, let my breathing slow, reach for the water bottle perched on the treadmill’s cup holder. The liquid is room temperature. I drink half of it anyway, because hydration is non-negotiable and also because I need something to do with my hands.

Then Jae Kim’s laugh cuts straight through the synth bass.

The low, warm, velvety sound that escaped him that night on his couch when I threw the pillow at his face and he let it hit him. The laugh that starts in his chest, works its way up through his throat, and settles somewhere right behind my sternum like a hook.

It isn’t a memory. It’s a physical hit. The weight of it. The texture. The way his head tipped back and his eyes crinkled at the corners, for three seconds looking like a man who had completely forgotten how to keep his guard up. The sound fills my headset, drowning out the track entirely.

My feet slam harder against the belt. The shock travels straight up through my ankles, my shins, my knees. I slam the speed up to an 8.0. The motor whines under the sudden surge. The bass rattles in my ears, louder, angrier, a desperate attempt to drown out a sound that’s already lodged behind my teeth.

It doesn’t work.

His laugh loops behind the music, and my heart gives a hard, inconvenient kick against my ribs—nothing to do with cardio, and everything to do with the fact that a guy I met seven months ago has completely high-jacked my brain.

I finish the run.

My shirt is soaked through, sticking to my skin in a damp patch the air conditioning turns cold in seconds. I hit the stop button, and the belt slows, whirring to a halt. Dismounting, I wipe my face with the pink towel hanging from the handle, and drain the rest of the water.

I strip out of my soaked gym clothes, drop them in the hamper, and spend ten minutes under a freezing shower until my skin goes numb. I change into a pair of soft pink cotton shorts and an oversized tee, twist my wet hair into a claw clip, and pour a cold brew over ice.

Ritual restored.

Today, it doesn’t fix a goddamn thing.

Three hours later, I’m cross-legged on the sectional with a contract law brief spread across my knees. The document is pristine—pages highlighted in a gradient system that would make a neurosurgeon nod in approval, tabs color-coded by clause type, marginalia written in a handwriting so precise it could be typeset. I’ve read the same paragraph four times.

First pass: standard procedural reading. Eyes moving left to right, brain engaged, the familiar rhythm of legal analysis clicking into gear. Subject matter jurisdiction. Venue considerations. The plaintiff’s standing argument, which is weak but not fatally so. I make a note in the margin. Blue pen. Standing issues get blue.

Second pass: something slips. My eyes are moving, but the words blur at the edges, the legal framework dissolving into meaningless ink.

I blink. Refocus. Try again.

By the third pass, my brain completely abandons the brief.

Then there’s his gaze—that dark, infuriatingly patient look he pulls whenever he thinks I’m not looking. He doesn't skim; he catalog-scans. I’ve caught him in the act at least a dozen times. In the alcove, resting his manga over his casebook just to watch me highlight margins. On his couch, letting his avatar die in the lobby because he was too busy watching my face. At the pet hospital, elbows deep in scrub prep, holding my eyes across the room with enough weight to make my neck burn. He’s too observant for his own good.

The brief is dead in the water. The text is just paper. I snap it shut, the pages settling against each other with a sharp clack. I open it. Close it again. The tabs bristle against my palm—a whole architecture of focus that I am completely throwing in the trash.

I drop the brief onto the coffee table and stop fighting it. The second I stop reading, he’s just there. I can still feel the hard line of his shoulder pressed right against mine on his couch, the sudden, heavy warmth of his body bleeding straight through his sweater. I stare at the ceiling, hit by the dawning, humiliating reality that I am losing my goddamn mind.

By late afternoon, the sheer volume of space he’s occupying in my head moves from annoying to a full-blown operational hazard. I’ve spent six hours dissecting a man who isn't even in the room—his voice, his shoulder, the way his jaw sets when he’s about to drive me crazy.

I need a hard reboot.

I set my phone face-down on the granite island hard enough to make the stone ring. I pull up a dating app, flicking through profiles with the cold eye of a border guard inspecting passports. Four minutes of fast, ruthless scrolling. Every single face is aggressively uninteresting. I lock the screen, watching the display cut to black, reflecting the flush rising up my neck under the kitchen lights.

Seven months.

Four months of spring semester, three months of summer break, and zero casual hookups. No low-stakes friction to clear my head. My system isn't broken; it’s just starved. The math is simple, biological, and completely unromantic: my body is throwing a localized tantrum over a seven-month dry spell, and because I’ve spent all morning listening to Jae’s voice run on loop, my brain is confusing basic physical drive with something deeper.

It’s just a physiological glitch. And glitches get fixed.

I pull my laptop onto the bed. The duvet is still tangled from this morning, pushed to the foot of the frame. The white canopy hangs soft overhead, fairy lights threaded through the fabric casting a warm glow that makes the room look like an Instagram aesthetic board—a ridiculous contrast for a bedroom owned by someone who removes people for a living.

I open a tab, navigating straight to the kind of video designed for fast, efficient results. High-production, clean angles, athletic actors. No plot, no fake romance.

I reach into the nightstand drawer, past the lavender lotion and melatonin, and wrap my fingers around my dual-density silicone dildo. The vein detail runs thick along the shaft, the textured head molded into a deep, defined ridge. It’s firm, heavy, and already warming against my palm. I flick the base—full charge—and lay it on the duvet next to a bottle of lube.