The bruises had started to yellow at the edges by the third morning, but the memory under them stayed black.
I woke with the sheets twisted around my legs and the phantom weight of his body still pressed along my back. For a long minute I didn’t move. I just lay there listening to the thin winter light push against the curtains and catalogued every place that still ached. The deep pull between my hips. The faint tenderness where his teeth had marked my shoulder. The way my pulse seemed to live lower now, as if it had relocated to the exact center of what he had taken.
Hate was supposed to be clean. This wasn’t. This sat in my chest like wet ash—heavy, smeared, impossible to scrape out.
I showered longer than necessary, water hot enough to redden the skin, and dressed in layers that hid
