Scars That Smell Like Him

Chapter 2

The word landed with the weight of all the nights she’d shoved her pride back into her throat. Lanry’s face went red, not from passion but from being exposed. He barked a curse, the sound high and ragged, and shoved her — not hard, not dangerous, but performatively, the way a man shoves a woman to make a point in front of an audience.

Maylen let herself fall backward, palms skidding across the carpet, and for a breath the room expected the old crumble. Instead, she laughed — sharp, bright, and unbiddable.

“You think that will break me?” she snapped, rising with the steadiness of someone who’d practiced standing up to herself. She crossed the room in two strides, grabbed the woman at Lanry’s side by the shoulders, and met her eyes.

“You didn’t sign up for a king,” Maylen said, voice calm now, fierce. “You signed up for a man who still carries me in his mouth when he sleeps.” The confession was a blade; it was the truth and a wound. “If he tosses you aside later, remember this moment. Remember that you were complicit in his theater.”

The woman’s lips trembled. Lanry’s jaw tightened with the sting of being read aloud. He shoved past Maylen and stormed for the door, the bat of his ego swinging in his steps. The discarded companion stood where she was, suddenly too small for the scene.

Maylen watched Lanry go — watched the door close on him, on the pride he brandished like armor. When the hallway light swallowed him, she felt the ridiculous relief of someone who’d survived a mild collapse.

She was trembling, yes, but it wasn’t from shame. It was from the adrenaline of reclaiming herself.

Outside, rain began to stitch the night into neat, indifferent threads. Maylen stepped into it without an umbrella and let the cold strip away the aftertaste of humiliation. She had been paraded. She had been tested. And she had walked away, not perfect, not unhurt, but unowned.

If Lanry wanted drama, let him write his own theater. She would, from now on, write the rest of her scenes for herself.

The sunlight crawled across Maylen’s floor like an accusation. It found the lipstick stain on the sheet, the empty tumbler on the nightstand, the way her hands still remembered the shape of someone else. She let it lie; she wouldn’t feed the shame today. Shame, she decided, was only a resource if you knew how to refine it into fuel.

Her phone buzzed with messages she didn’t owe: “Are you okay?” “Saw—” “Don’t go back to him.” She read them with the same distance she used to read branded press releases now, and then she silenced the whole lot. Let them narrate whatever they needed. She had more useful things to rehearse.

She showered until the water ran cool and steady. She dressed like someone who’d learned how to armor herself in public — a cream blouse that skimmed the line between elegant and unremarkable, a sleek pencil skirt, hair pulled back so no one could mistake vulnerability for softness. At the last second she spritzed the perfume Lanry had once said he couldn’t stand to be away from. Not for him. For evidence.

The PR firm smelled like citrus cleaners and ambition. The lobby’s glass mirrored faces like a gallery; she watched herself become a deliberate exhibit — composure, heels, the small practiced smile. Orientation blurred into introductions. She made small talk with women whose names she filed under future acquaintances. She took notes that she’d never let anyone use against her.

She should have felt accomplished. Instead, a cold prickle threaded down her spine: the subtle, impossible certainty that she was being watched.

He found her the way tides find low shore — inevitable, patient. Lanry leaned against the marble partition by the elevators as if he belonged to the architecture, sunglasses low enough to be coy, a cigarette hanging from an idle finger. He looked like a man who’d never aged out of being dangerous.

“Maylen.” He said her name with the same slow reverence he once reserved for worship. A flush of something old and sharp rose behind her ribs.

She didn’t flinch. She walked past him with deliberate calm, heels tapping an even rhythm. He was loud now in how he invaded space, the way dark drama clung to him like a cologne.

“You’re here,” he said, not a question. He stepped into her path. Up close, his scent—aftershave and something mineral, the ghost of every midnight—flattened against her like a claim. “New life?”

“New job,” she corrected. “Hardly the same as life changes.” Her voice was even; she let no tremor show.

“A job?” He tilted his head, amused. “Is that what you call it now? You always had a way of making exits sound more cinematic than they were.”

She smiled then, a thin thing turned on purpose. “And you always had a flair for making yourself the star of someone else’s bad scene.”

People clustered at the reception desk stared; gossip is a curious animal and humiliation had been its favorite food. Lanry didn’t care. He never had. He cared about spectacle and ownership.

“You look good,” he said. Not a compliment. A statement of property. “That blouse—my mother would like it. It smells… familiar.”

Maylen felt the perfume she’d chosen like a small, private victory. “Smart of you to notice scents when you’re so good at collecting them.”