LUCIAN
Ask me where my head’s been these past few days and I wouldn’t be able to give you a clean answer. Not a useful one, anyway. It’s irritating. Distracting. A lapse I don’t usually allow. I don’t lose focus, especially not over women. I don’t wake up thinking about someone who has no place in my life.
And yet.
Somehow, she’s quietly slipped into the entirety of my thoughts.
I tell myself it’s curiosity. An itch that comes from something unfinished and unresolved. She doesn’t fit any pattern I know. Not the women who orbit men like me. Not the ones who want access or money or proximity to power. She looks at me like I’m an inconvenience and just something she tolerates.
That alone should’ve been enough to dismiss her from my head.
Instead, I find myself anticipating the way her
