Page 66 of Power Play

I laughed hard enough that two students walking ahead of me looked over their shoulders, and for once I didn’t immediately lower my voice or wonder whether I had been too loud.

That had been changing too. Ryan made it harder to remember I was supposed to be careful.

We saw each other most days, even when we didn’t plan to. Sometimes he showed up at the Book Nook with coffee and a stack of books. Sometimes I ended up at his apartment and stayed until midnight because I had one more question that somehow became four. He had started teaching me Spanish in pieces small enough that he could laugh every time I butchered a vowel without completely destroying my confidence, and I had started sending him voice notes solely because hearing him correct me had become one of my favorite forms of entertainment.

When we weren’t together, we texted constantly. When we were together, pretending the flirting was harmless had become impossible.

Ryan touched me casually now in ways that never felt casual. His hand found the small of my back when he moved behind me. He pulled my feet into his lap while we studied. He tucked my hair away from my face when it fell over whatever I was reading, and I had stopped pretending the movement didn’t send warmth through my entire body.

We kissed often enough that the first one no longer felt like an accident we had stumbled into. Sometimes the kisses stayed soft and lazy, followed by Ryan returning to a book while I sat there wondering how he could possibly read after doing that to me. Other times, one kiss turned into another until I was pressed beneath him on the couch or sitting across his lap with my fingers in his hair while every intelligent thought I had learned to form disappeared.

Then he stopped.

Every single time.

He never made it abrupt enough to feel cruel. Ryan usually slowed the kiss, rested his forehead against mine, and waited until our breathing settled before saying something designed to make me laugh. Once, after I discovered that biting lightly beneath his ear made his entire body tense, he physically lifted me from his lap, placed me on the opposite end of the couch, and handed me Jane Eyre.

“You’re an asshole,” I told him.

His breathing was still rough while he dragged one hand over his face. “You’re trying to kill me.”

“I was reading.”

“You were biting my neck.”

“I can multitask.”

His stare had dropped to my mouth before he muttered something in Spanish and opened his own book again.

I knew what he had told me in his kitchen. I remembered every word. He wanted me enough that rushing into sex felt wrong to him, and some part of me understood the care inside that decision even when another part kept searching for something uglier.

The first time Ryan stopped, I believed him.

By the sixth or seventh, my own mind had started rewriting the explanation. Maybe he had changed his mind after touching my waist. Maybe my body looked different from what he imagined beneath clothes. Maybe I was too thin in one place and still too soft in another. Maybe he liked the flirting because it was easy and stopped whenever it came close to becoming real because Ryan could have almost any woman he wanted and eventually remembered that.

I hated that part of myself most.

Ryan had given me no reason to believe any of it. My brain rarely required evidence before deciding I was the problem.

Saturday morning, I stood barefoot in front of my bathroom mirror wearing silk shorts and a bra while August humidity pressed against the windows. My phone rested beside the sink with a message from Ryan glowing across the screen.

Ryan: Brown give homework or can I steal you later?

I read it without answering because the woman in the mirror had already ruined my mood.

My stomach looked wrong.

I turned slightly and watched the shape change beneath the bright vanity lights. My waist seemed thicker than it had yesterday, which didn’t make sense considering I had barely eaten dinner. I pulled the skin flatter with one hand, hated the shape that created too, then let go.

My thighs looked heavier from the front. My collarbones looked too sharp from the side. Nothing agreed with anything else, yet every angle managed to be wrong.

The phone buzzed again.

Ryan: You alive, mi hada?

I picked it up.

Charm: Unfortunately. Brunch and shopping with my mother today.