PRICED BY MY BILLIONAIRE NEMESIS

Chapter Ten - The Dream

His mouth is warm against my temple. The room around us is soft with music and low light, glasses clinking somewhere behind us, and he is beside me the way he used to be, easy and certain, his shoulder against mine. Someone makes a toast. I drink without thinking because I am safe. I am with him. I have no reason to think about my glass.

He leans down, his breath warm at my ear. Back in a minute. I watch him cross the room and turn back and the party keeps going and everything is fine.

Then the floor shifts.

Not dramatically. Just enough that I reach for something to hold and find nothing. The music goes underwater. The voices blur. I look at my hand and it feels like someone else's hand wrapped around a glass that is suddenly very far away. I think, something is wrong. The thought is clear and arrives too late and does absolutely nothing.

Jaden is beside me. I do not see him arrive. His hand closes around my arm and I try to pull back and watch my arm not move and he says you need some air and we are already walking. Through the room. Past all the faces. Not one of them turns. I am being walked out of a room full of people who could help me and every single one of them is looking somewhere else.

A door. The party sounds cutting off.

The room is dark and the bed is there and I am on it and I do not know how I got there. My legs have stopped working. My arms have stopped working. I am watching from somewhere behind my own shoulder, watching a girl in a party dress lie still while Jaden's hands move to her face, her jaw, her throat. He opens the first button of her dress. Then the second. Then the third. His hand closes over her breast and she does not move and he leans down and puts his mouth on hers and she does not move and I am screaming at her from the inside, I am screaming with everything I have, and she does not move.

The drug does not take your mind. It leaves your mind running and takes everything else. You stay present for all of it. That is the design.

The door opens.

Light from the hallway. Adrian standing in it. The relief hits before I can stop it because he is here, he is going to see, he is going to understand. I reach for him from inside my own body and produce nothing. Not a word. Not a movement. Not one signal that crosses the distance.

He looks at me. He looks at Jaden. He looks at me again.

I watch him read the scene. The dress. The dark. My silence. I watch him build the only story those pieces tell when you don't know what was in my glass, and I watch the story be completely wrong and I cannot correct it. His face does the thing. Not loudly. No collapse. Just a quiet closing, like a room being locked from the inside, the person with the key already walking away.

He looks at me one more time.

Then the doorway is empty and the dark comes back and the dream will not move forward. He turns and the doorway is empty. He turns and the doorway is empty. The same second on a loop and I am screaming at it to stop and it does not stop.

Then the dream fractures and the rain is already there.

No transition. Just rain, cold and immediate, and Adrian in front of his building with a face that has already finished feeling anything. I am supposed to explain. The explanation exists. I rehearsed it on a bus with shaking hands, every sentence in order. It is right there.

He speaks first.

"You never called all night." Very calm. The calm that has moved past anger into something with no heat left in it. "That's how busy you were."

I open my mouth. The words are gone. The same wall as the night before, the same sealed distance, and I am watching myself not speak while the silence fills with everything he is deciding about me.

"And now you want to see me." He tilts his head. The patience of someone waiting for a formality to end. "You've freed your schedule. Lucky me."

The rain soaks through my coat. I reach for the sentence that starts the explanation and my hand closes on nothing. I know if I do not speak right now I will lose something I will never get back.

My mouth opens.

"We're done."

Eight years and I still cannot explain where those words came from. Not the truth. Not a defense. Just the worst possible thing, in a voice that was not mine, while everything I needed to say stayed locked somewhere I have never found since.

His face finishes.

"You disgust me."

No heat. No grief. A verdict delivered to someone who is no longer worth the anger. He holds my gaze long enough to make sure I have received it and then he turns and the door closes and the rain keeps falling and something inside me breaks along a line I will spend years trying to locate.

Then I am awake and the air burns going in.

My shirt is soaked through. My hands are shaking in my wrists. The room presses in from every side and for several seconds I cannot confirm whether the danger stayed in the dream or followed me out of it. I press my palms flat to my thighs and hold them there. My chest carries that specific old ache below the sternum, the kind that does not respond to time or to the eight years I have spent deciding I am finished with this. My body keeps its own records and has never agreed to forget.

I lie back and stare at the ceiling.

A library surfaces, the way it always does at this point in the night. Winter quiet. A boy at a long table pretending to read, his eyes moving too slowly across a page. His expression closed to the whole room except the one person paying close enough attention to see underneath it. I had been paying attention. I do not know why that afternoon survives intact when the moments I need most are sealed and blurred and gone.

It fades. The rain comes back. His face. My own voice saying the worst thing.

I have until Tuesday. I have one door left. I will knock on it with whatever I have left, and I will not think about the man behind it and what he said in the rain.

I do not sleep again.