BOUND BY HER DESIRE

JULIAN'S POV Most men admired the skyline, while I watched a different skyline. The screens never lie. That was what I told myself. Sitting in the dark of my penthouse office, twenty-seven floors below, traffic crawled through the rain like veins pumping blood through the heart of a restless beast. Twelve monitors stretched across the polished black desk before me. Two were occupied for financial reports, three were for international accusations, one was for the stock market, another for security updates from my headquarters. The remaining five belonged to her. Clara. She walks the way she normally does, unhurried, slightly distracted, her bag slung off one shoulder like it might fall any moment, and she genuinely did not care. Holding a black Thermos in her left hand which she had bought some weeks ago. I knew about it because I watched that too. I watched everything. I am not proud of this. I am not going to stop either. My jaw is tight. When the biometric displays on the screen, it tells me her resting heart rate is sixty-one beats per minute. Her average sleep this week has been six hours, forty minutes down from her usual seven. Her fitness band was a birthday gift. I once saw that on her wish list. Clara Alder is a variable. I have not accounted for it. She is nineteen, she has a dimple on her left cheek that appears only when something genuinely surprises her, and I have spent an embarrassing amount of time cataloging the specific condition that produces it. On screen three, Clara pauses outside a study room. She checks her phone. Whatever she reads makes the corner of her mouth pull upward, not a full smile, not the dimple, just that private expression she gets when something pleases her and she doesn't want anyone else to see it. Someone inside that study room had made her feel that way. I didn't look away. I didn't close the screen. I sit with the feeling that moves through my chest like broken glass through still water, slow and quiet. This is what I do. I watch. I monitor. Seventeen years. The gap between us is not a number I let myself forget. I never understood what it meant to want something badly. I understand now. I have built a career in a controlled environment. I am the person people call when the variables are too messy, when the risk needs to be priced. When someone has to sit at a table and remain unmoved while the other side loses their composure. I have never wanted anything the way I want Clara Vance. Screen three again. Clara is in the study room now. I can see her setting her table, bag dropped, thermos uncapped, laptop opened. She sticks one of her beneath her. She reaches up and pulls her hair back without looking. She is highlighting something in her notes, the marker moving in slow deliberate strokes across the page. Her resting heart rate ticks up to sixty-three. She rolled her neck, took a sip from the black thermos. Looked up, briefly at nothing in the middle of the distance, and for one irrationally, electric second I felt seen. She can not see me. That is how cameras work. She is looking at nothing, while I am looking at everything and somewhere in the seventeen-year chasm between who she is and who I am. I pressed my palms flat against the desk. My eyes moved to screen Two as it lit up. Clara sat in the University Cafeteria, eating lunch with a male student. They talked between bites, and every few minutes she smiled an effortless, genuine smile that seemed reserved for him. My jaw tightened as I stared intently at the face of the man, making her smile. She looked comfortable. I hated it. I hated that someone else occupied the seat beside her. No one should. Not close enough to make her smile. I preferred Clara alone. Untouched by the attention of others, the more I watched them, the darker my thoughts became. I had known Clara since she was barely old enough to walk. She was a tiny girl who clung to my hand with complete trust. I watched her grow through every stage of her life. She had once been my little girl. The monitors changed again. Screen one. Clara sat quietly in a lecture hall, her laptop open on the desk in front of her. She listened attentively, occasionally typing notes. Besides her sat the same young man from the cafeteria. My fingers curled against the armrest. Again. She was breathtaking without even trying. Calm. Focused. She was beautiful when she smiled, but she was devastated when she did not. There is something about her quietness that is captivating. Finally, she was alone. The feed shifted. Screen five. She sat alone, scrolling through her phone while lazily chewing a piece of gum. Her lecture had ended. A strange sense of relief settled over me. Her lips moved slowly as she chewed, impossibly soft even through the grainy footage. Now and then, she rolled her eyes toward the ceiling as though replying to a thought in her mind. It was impossible. Whenever she did that, I imagined she was looking straight at me. She could not see me. Yet I allowed myself the fantasy anyway. It was enough to keep me sane. Or perhaps it was driving me insane. Finally, screen four. It was 4:30 pm. The campus day was over. Clara stood near the entrance with her backpack slug over one shoulder, waiting patiently for the driver to pick her up. Like every other day. And, just like every other afternoon, I watched.