I kissed him back.
My hands found his chest, and beneath my palms his heart was hammering – wild, uneven, the heartbeat of a man who couldn’t believe what was happening and was terrified it might stop. I felt that fear, recognized it, shared it. We were both standing at the edge of something neither of us had planned, and the ground beneath us was new and uncertain, and neither of us cared.
The kiss lasted seconds. It lasted years. It lasted exactly as long as it needed to.
When he pulled back, his forehead rested against mine, and his breath was ragged, and his eyes were closed, and between us existed a kind of silence that I’d never experienced before – not empty, not full, but sacred. The silence of something that had just been born and was taking its first breath.
“Goodnight,” he whispered.
My cheeks were burning. My lips were tingling. My brain was attempting to process approximately seventeen emotions simultaneously and succeeding at none of them.
“Goodnight,” I managed, and the word came out as barely a breath, carried more by air than voice.
He smiled. One last look – long, warm, weighted with everything we’d shared and everything we hadn’t yet – and then he turned and walked inside, and I stood alone in the entrance light with my fingers pressed against my lips and my heart trying to beat its way out of my chest.
I stood there for a long time.
Then I went inside. Climbed the stairs. Entered my room. Changed into my pajamas – the old flannel ones, the ones that knew every version of me – and crawled under the covers. The sheets were cool against my flushed skin. The ceiling was dark and familiar and gave nothing away.
I lay there and replayed the evening in sequence, like rewinding a film: the restaurant, the vines, the candles, the wine, his voice saying “I was fifteen when my father died,” and the way the words had changed the air between us. The dance – his hands on my waist, my palms on his chest, the piano stitching us together. Lysander’s grin. The drive home. The silence that wasn’t silence. And then – the kiss. His lips. His hand on the back of my neck. The way he’d held me as though I were the most valuable thing in the world and also the most fragile.
Sleep was impossible. Obviously. My mind was a carousel that had lost its off switch, and every rotation brought me back to the same place: his face, his voice, the word goodnight spoken against my skin.
But I didn’t mind. For the first time since I’d signed that contract, I lay in the dark and felt something that wasn’t grief, wasn’t anger, wasn’t fear. It was small, and it was new, and it glowed in my chest like an ember in a room that had been cold for a very long time.
I closed my eyes and let it burn.
The dream always started the same way.
Sterling’s face, too close. His breath warm and sharp with champagne. His eyes – those eyes she’d once thought were beautiful, the way a blade is beautiful before you understand what it’s for – narrowed into something she barely recognized.
“You deceitful bitch.”
The words hit her like a closed fist, even in the dream, even knowing it wasn’t real, even as some distant, sleeping part of her brain whispered: this already happened, you already survived it, wake up.
“You don’t love me,” he snarled, and his voice was doing that thing it did when he was losing control – climbing, sharpening, becoming the voice of a boy who’d been told no for the first time and couldn’t fathom it. “If you truly loved me, you would have done what I asked.”
“Sterling, I can’t-“
“No need to explain.” He turned away. The back of his head, the set of his shoulders, the finality of his spine. “It’s over.”
I woke up gasping.
The gasp was loud enough to echo off the bedroom walls, and for three disoriented seconds I didn’t know where I was – not the old house with the ivy, not Sterling’s mansion with the oil paintings, but here, in this room with the absurd thread count and the floor-to-ceiling windows and the city glittering beyond them like a circuit board someone had left on.
Sweat. My t-shirt was stuck to my back. My heart was pounding the way it does after sprinting, except I’d been lying still, except the only thing chasing me was a memory of a boy who didn’t deserve the real estate he still occupied in my subconscious.
“What is wrong with me?” I said to the dark room. The dark room, predictably, offered no diagnosis.
I sat up. Pressed both palms against my face. Waited for the adrenaline to drain, for the boundary between dream-Sterling and real-Sterling to reassert itself. Real Sterling was somewhere in the city, living his life, probably not thinking about me at all, and dream-Sterling had taken up permanent residence in the part of my brain that processed fear and regret and the particular flavor of shame that comes from having loved someone who wasn’t worth the effort.
It was 6:47 AM. The sky through the windows was doing that thing where it couldn’t decide between purple and gold, settling for both, like a bruise healing in fast-forward.
I swung my legs out of bed and headed for the bathroom. My reflection greeted me with the enthusiasm of a mugshot: tangled hair, puffy eyes, the general aura of a woman who’d been emotionally assaulted in her sleep. “Stunning,” I told the mirror. The mirror agreed to disagree.
Toothbrush. Toothpaste. The rhythmic, mindless motion of brushing. I was mid-stroke, foam building at the corners of my mouth, when my phone chimed on the counter.
New Book: Back Home to Marry Off Myself
Loredana’s father left the family for his mistress, leaving them to fend for themselves abroad. When life was at its toughest, her father showed up with “good news” after 8 years of absence: To marry off Loredana to a paralyzed son of the wealthy Mendelsohn family.