Page 45 of Captive Promise

My skin still feels hot everywhere, in a way that has nothing to do with the temperature of the room.

I can feel my own pulse in my throat, in my hands, in my mouth where hers was.

I put my head in my hands. I still smell her on them. God—she is everywhere. The soap on my palms is her.

The inside of my wrists are her.

When I turn my head my own hair is her, because she had her hands in it.

And now I’m sitting in the dark wrecked from the inside out, and if I lie down on this bed I’m going to spend the rest of the night bringing her here in my head and pretending it’s the same thing, and it isn’t. It isn’t even close.

She was here.

She was on me.

And she left.

She left. That’s the thing that keeps hitting me in the chest fresh every time I try to shove it away. She kissed me and let me have her. But then she looked at me at the end of it like she’d made the worst mistake of her life, and she left.

After a while I make myself get up. I remove what’s left of what I’m wearing and drop it, one piece at a time, on the chair by the wardrobe. I catch myself in the mirror on my way to the bathroom and I stop short.

Goddamn, I look like I’ve been hit by a car. That’s fair. I feel like I have. My hair is a mess from Katerina running her fingers through it.

There’s a red mark low on the left side of my throat where she bit me and a scratch running down my ribs where her nails caught me on the way down my back.

My eyes are dark and bloodshot and there’s a shine to them I have not seen on my own face in a long time, maybe ever.

And my mouth…

With a trembling hand, I touch my lips.

My mouth still looks like it was kissed, red and swollen. I can still feel her breath on my mouth, the taste of her tongue…

I make myself drop my hand.

If I keep touching my own face like that I am going to lose whatever thin grip I have left on being a person.

And I can’t do that because a new day is dawning whether I’m ready for it or not, and I have to be someone people can look at again. Which means at some point I have to go into the bathroom and rinse this off me.