He pulled me into a hug. His arms wrapped around me – familiar, unwanted, an invasion disguised as affection – and for one paralyzed second, I was back in the study at his mansion, seventeen and trusting and too young to know the difference between a man who loves you and a man who wants to own you.
Then the second ended, and I came back to myself.
I ripped free of his arms the way you rip a bandage – fast, violent, without regard for what tears.
And then I slapped him.
The sound cracked through the hospital lobby like a starter pistol, and every head within earshot turned. Nurses at their stations. Patients in wheelchairs. Visitors mid-conversation. Everyone stopped, and the silence that followed was the specific, breathless silence of a public space that has just witnessed something raw.
“How dare you.” My voice came out low and shaking, not with fear but with the kind of anger that’s too big for shouting. The kind that whispers because it knows the whisper is worse. “How dare you touch me.”
Sterling’s hand went to his cheek. The mark was already blooming – red, vivid, a perfect print of my palm on his skin. But his expression – God, his expression – wasn’t shocked. Wasn’t hurt. It was calculating. The slight adjustment of a man who’d received unexpected data and was already reworking his strategy.
“Marlowe.” His voice softened into that register he used when he wanted something – the velvet tone, the practiced tenderness. “I’ve missed you so much. I love you. I’ll do anything to see you. Remember – you’re my girlfriend.”
The audacity of it – the sheer, breathtaking, physics-defying audacity – was almost impressive. Almost. Here was a man who had dumped me, lied about sleeping with my best friend, tried to coerce me into bed, and vanished from my life with the casualness of someone canceling a subscription. And he was standing in a hospital lobby, with my brother’s blood still drying on my shirt, calling me his girlfriend.
“Girlfriend?” The word came out like something I’d bitten into and found rotten. “I’m married, Sterling. So take your hands, your lies, and your performance, and get away from me.”
Something shifted behind his eyes. The velvet dropped. What was underneath was harder, uglier – the real Sterling, the one who lived beneath the charm like a shark beneath calm water.
“Married?” He laughed, and the sound had no joy in it. “Married to who? Come on, Marlowe. You and I both know you can only marry me. We love each other. Whatever this ‘marriage’ is – it’s not real.”
“Love.” I tasted the word and spat it back at him. “You don’t know what that word means. You use it the way you use everything – as a tool, to get what you want, and discard when it stops working. I know what love is now, Sterling. And I learned it from someone who’s nothing like you.”
People were gathering. I could feel them – a loose semicircle of spectators, drawn by the volume and the spectacle, the way pedestrians gather around a car accident. The attention should have embarrassed me. It didn’t. I was past embarrassment. I was operating in a space beyond social awareness, a space where the only things that existed were my brother behind those swinging doors and this man who kept inserting himself into my life like a splinter.
Sterling reached for my hands. Not gently – urgently, possessively, his fingers closing around my wrists with a grip that was more cage than caress. “You belong with me,” he said, and the words were compressed, tight, the voice of a man losing control of a situation he’d expected to dominate. He pulled me toward the exit.
I yanked free. The motion was sharp, deliberate – a refusal that involved my whole body.
“Don’t. Touch. Me.”
He turned, frustration distorting his features into something I barely recognized. “Why do you keep pulling away?”
I slapped him again.
Harder this time. Hard enough that his head snapped to the side and stayed there for a beat, as though his neck needed a moment to process the instruction. The red mark on his cheek deepened. The lobby audience collectively inhaled.
And then – incredibly, impossibly – he smiled. That slow, toxic smile that I’d once mistaken for confidence and now recognized for what it was: the expression of a man who interprets resistance as a challenge and pain as entertainment.
“Is that how you show love now?” he said.
I hit him a third time. Not because it was strategic. Not because it would change anything. Because some responses are physical before they’re rational, and my body had decided, independently of my brain, that Sterling’s face was a surface that required repeated contact with my palm.
The smile went out like a candle.
I turned on my heel – sneakers squeaking on the linoleum, which somewhat undermined the dramatic exit, but I was past caring about aesthetics – and marched to the reception desk. The nurse looked up with the expression of a woman who’d just witnessed a daytime soap opera and was reconsidering her career choices.
“I need you to cancel every payment that man made for my brother’s treatment,” I said. “All of it. Refund every penny.”
The nurse blinked. “Ma’am, the hospital’s policy-“
“I don’t care about your policy. I will pay for everything myself. I want his money out of this hospital and out of my brother’s care.”
“Ma’am, I understand you’re upset, but once payment has been processed, we can’t simply-“
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.