Page 102 of What You left in Me

I put my phone down. I sit on the edge of the bed and stare at the carpet like it can explain how to be a person who didn’t do what I did for a lie. My mouth tastes like metallic. My body betraying me by remembering his touch.

A memory surfaces uninvited, whole and almost violent.

The driveway five years ago, during high summer with cicadas drilling the air to pieces. Finn was leaning against a silver Mustang with that look he wears when he’s already won and is pretending to be bored by it. I was twenty and fascinated even when I claimed I wasn’t. Richard had that complicated expression fathers get when their sons remind them of themselves and also of something they never were.

“He wanted it,” Richard told me then. “Told him no. Thought it would teach him patience. Three months later? Hemade the money himself. I didn’t ask how and I don’t want to know. He walked in and bought it in cash. Once Finn wants something, he gets it.” He paused, the softest warning in his voice. “No matter what.”

I thought it was a story about a car. Now, it feels like a story about me.

I’m up without remembering standing. The hall is dim, the lights low in their sconces, and the carpet soft enough to trick you into feeling safe. I walk it like I always do, past the painting of a harbor that belonged to someone else’s grandparents, past the little table where a bowl always holds keys to cars that can go anywhere I don’t. I stop outside Finn’s door.

It’s closed.Silent. I half-expect him to materialize behind me like a shadow, to put his hand on the back of my neck and bend the world into focus. It’s embarrassing how much I want it, how my skin buzzes like it’s already been touched. I reach for the handle but I don’t touch it. I step back. Then, I step forward. I make a stupid, soundless loop of hesitation. Don’t second guess yourself, Ariane.

He isn’t here. He hasn’t been here for two days. My ankle whirrs like it can feel his attention even across distance, and I hate that it can calm me like that, a talisman pressed to a bruise.

I go back to my room because I am, despite everything, a person who still tries to do the right thing at least every other Wednesday. I close the door and lean my forehead against it and let my shoulders drop like a curtain. The bed is cool. It’s too big, tidy and empty. I sit. I lie down. I curl. I flip the pillow. I flip my heart. But none of it works.

With Julian, sex was… practical. A checklist. We learned the moves you can do without catching your breath. We learned the shapes that are allowed to be seen if someone walks in byaccident. He made sure I finishedsometimes, like a courtesy, and when he didn’t, I made sure to make the right sounds so we’d both feel like we lived in a movie rated for polite company. I thought that was what grown-up love looked like…logical and quiet and easy to dust around.

With Finn, there’s nothing to dust around. There’s just the mess and the wanting and the way my body answers him like it recognizes its true master. He tied me up and I didn’t panic. He blinded me and I didn’t reach for the light. He put a band around my ankle and my body shivered like the truth had a temperature. And I enjoyed it. I enjoyedhim.I enjoy the way he takes, because he gives with the same ferocity. It feels like a confession even when I’m alone.

I hear a sound in the hall. Someone walking toward the stairs, a door closing farther down. Not his stride. I know his stride like I know my own heartbeat now. The idea that I could tell a man by the sound of his step in an old house should disturb me. Instead, it comforts me, which is probably worse.

My phone lights again. This time it’s Penny.Home? Alive? Do I need to come back with carbs?

I typeAlive. Carbs still welcome.Then, after a second:He’s still gone.

She sends back three knives, a heart, andApply to three jobs before midnight or I’m calling your mother and telling her you said the koi are gauche.

I grin despite everything and send her a photo of my laptop open to a school district site with the caption:Behold: professionalism.

She sends a gif of a woman fainting.

Friendship is weird and perfect.

I do listen to her. I open a blank document on my MacBook for a résumé update. I stare at the blinking cursor, which looks like a heartbeat. I type my name. I delete it. I try again. I list experience. I list strengths. Under strengths, I do not typeable to function while wanting a man who ruins me with a look.I do typecurriculum designandstudent advocacyandcrisis de-escalation,which is funny, because I cannot de-escalate the crisis currently living in my ribcage.

At some point my hand slides down to touch the anklet through the thin cotton of my pajama pants, just a press, just a reminder. It’s ridiculous how much that calms me. It’s worse how much it thrills me. Because the thing isn’t just a tracker; it’s a fact. It says:I belong to someone, at least in the ways that count for him. I should hate that. I only hate that I don’t.

It’s midnight when I give up pretending to be productive. I brush my teeth mechanically. I turn off the lamp and house rearranges itself into its night shape. Softer and dimmer. I lie on my side and stare at the thin line of light under the curtains. Somewhere, the koi machine hums like a tiny, persistent argument. Somewhere, a floorboard ticks as it settles. Somewhere, maybe, Finn is in a car, in a room, in a city that doesn’t know my name, doing something that will set all of our lives on fire.

The thought turns my pulse into a drum.

I press my face into the pillow to muffle the sound I don’t make. “God, I’m an idiot,” I whisper into cotton, because sometimes prayer needs a target. “Stupid for missing him. Stupid for thinking I was anything other than a distraction in a tailored suit.”

Silence answers me, honest as always. Then another thought slips in, traitor and true: even if I’m just a distraction, I want to be the one to distract him.

It’s humiliating how relief floods me when I imagine him opening my door. It’s worse how heat follows relief like a shadow. Memory is a cruel director: the way his hand covered my mouth when I cried out, the way his breath broke against my ear, the exact rhythm of the things he said that I would never say out loud to another soul. My thighs press together on instinct. I roll onto my back and stare at the ceiling that won’t change. My body buzzes with recognition, with want, with a hunger that makes me feel like there’s a second version of me under my skin who isn’t interested in my best intentions.

“I hate you,” I whisper to the ceiling, meaning him, meaning myself, meaning the part of me that is alive in a way I didn’t know I could be.

Chapter 31 – Finn – Receipts of Ruin

The house feels like a coffin. I walk its halls like a fucking ghost, but I’m no less alive than the secrets rattling in my head. The files are heavy in my pocket even when they’re not there, a weight like a loaded gun I haven’t fired yet. Proof. Receipts. Blood.

I should be in bed, lying there with the sound of her breathing in my head, but I’m not. I’m in the car instead, pushing it down country roads with the windows cracked and the cold night cutting my face raw. Headlights stretch like blades across the blacktop. I tell myself I’m out here because I need air and don’t want to put stress on Dad. He’s barely a week out of surgery. Another fucking shock and the old man could stroke out again. But the truth is that I’m out here because if I stay inside, I’ll break something. Someone. Probably her. I’ve already been harsher than I meant to be.

I grip the wheel tighter and I see Eleanor’s face in the reflection of the glass, smiling that pearl-strung smile, rehearsed for sympathy, for adoration. And beneath it, I see what I know now. The files. The money trails. The bar in Rhode Island where she cut her teeth. Waren’s filthy smirk as he whistled his way into hell. All of it sits in my chest like fire, waiting for me to open my mouth and burn the whole fucking world down.