Chapter 2 Gilded
968 Words
She slapped him.
She hadn't planned it. One second she was pinned against the wall, listening to him reduce her to something owned—a thing I keep—and the next her palm connected with his jaw and the c***k of it split the quiet apartment like a gunshot.
The room went very, very still.
Lorenzo turned his head back slowly. The reddening mark on his jaw was already visible. His thumb traced it—unhurried, almost thoughtful—and when his eyes found hers, something had shifted in them. Past anger. Past the warning that had been there a moment ago. Past whatever system kept him contained.
"No one's ever done that," he said. Quiet. Factual.
Run. Her spine screamed it. Run right now.
She didn't make it far.
His arm locked around her and the ground dropped away. She fought—clawed at his back, kicked at air, screamed his name until her throat burned—and his grip didn't give an inch. He carried her down the hall like she weighed nothing. Like she was nothing. Like she had always been nothing, and he was only now bothering to make it official.
The bedroom door swung shut.
---
Afterward, he held her.
That was the part that broke something she hadn't known was still intact. Not what came before—though that had broken other things—but the way he gathered her against his chest afterward, his heartbeat slowing toward sleep, his hand moving in slow circles on her back like she was something that needed soothing.
"Shh." His voice was back to its usual register. Lazy. Unhurried. "You're okay."
Am I.
She lay still and stared at the ceiling and said nothing.
He fell asleep within minutes.
She didn't sleep at all.
---
The days that followed were a kind of slow erasure.
The key card stopped working first. Then the apps—silenced one by one, her contacts going dark the way stars go dark: individually, gradually, until you look up and realize there's nothing left. She tried calling Emily a dozen times. Busy signal, every time.
He got there first.
The apartment was everything it had always been—forty floors up, floor-to-ceiling glass, the best neighborhood in Manhattan—and it had never felt smaller. She walked its perimeter like a caged thing learning the dimensions of its world.
Morning: the kitchen. The hiss of the espresso machine he never offered to make for her.
Afternoon: the window. That same flat grey horizon she couldn't stop looking at.
Night: whatever version of him came through the door.
Sober, he sat on the couch with his laptop and occasionally looked up at her—the way you check on something you're responsible for, not something you love. Drunk, he didn't say a word before reaching for her.
She stopped fighting.
What's the point.
She started sitting at the window for hours. The city down there was all noise and movement and life going on without her, and she'd press her forehead to the glass and think: somewhere out past all that glass and all those locked doors, there is something called freedom. She believed it. She just couldn't see it from here.
One morning she woke up and her eyes were wet before she was fully conscious.
She didn't know why.
That's the worst part, she thought, staring at the ceiling. Not knowing.
She just lay there and let the tears fall because she didn't have the energy to do anything else.
---
Lorenzo noticed. Of course he noticed—he noticed everything, catalogued everything, filed it away in whatever cold interior space he used for information.
"You're not eating," he said one evening, standing in the kitchen doorway.
"I'm not hungry."
"That's not an answer."
She looked at him. The man who had taken everything—her freedom, her dignity, her future—standing in her kitchen doorway in a tailored shirt, looking mildly concerned, like she was a problem to be managed rather than a person he'd destroyed.
"What do you want from me?" she asked. Her voice came out flat. Hollow. "What exactly are you expecting here?"
His expression shifted—something moved through it too quickly for her to name.
"I want you to be okay," he said.
A sound escaped her that might have been a laugh in another life.
She went back to the window.
---
She found that she could still feel things, occasionally. Anger, when it bothered to show up. A numb sort of grief that sat in her chest like packed earth. And once—only once—something that frightened her more than either of those: a flash of the way things had been in the beginning, when she'd believed his hands on her face meant tenderness and not ownership. When she'd thought the warmth in his eyes was for her.
She let herself feel it for exactly three seconds.
Then she pressed her forehead to the cold glass and exhaled slowly.
That person is gone, she told herself. You are not her anymore.
She wasn't sure that was true.
She was sure she needed it to be.
---
The city glittered below, indifferent and beautiful, every window lit by someone else's life.
There is an out, she thought. There has to be an out.
She just hadn't found it yet.
She would.
She had to.
Somewhere below, a car horn sounded. Then another. The sounds of the living, going about it. She pressed her palm flat against the glass and felt the cold of it travel up through her bones, and she held onto that small sensation—cold, real, present—like it was the only thing keeping her tethered.
Hold on, she told herself.
Just hold on.
- Writer
