LOGINTheo’s apartment smells like whiskey and unwashed laundry and like he hasn’t opened a window in days.I know something is wrong before I’m fully through the door because Theo Gallagher has kept his apartment clean since we were fifteen, and the boy who alphabetised his spice rack during a study break would not voluntarily live in a room that smells like a bar floor unless something fundamental had been broken.He’s on the couch with a bottle between his knees and his laptop open on the coffee table showing what appears to be a research document about – I lean closer – domestic abuse warning signs?The search history visible in the tab bar includes “signs someone is being controlled by a partner” and “how to report a professor-student relationship,” and the thoroughness of his research makes my chest constrict because Theo doesn’t do anything halfway, which means he is currently most likely applying his specific methodical energy to dismantling my life.Then he turns his head and I see
IVY'S POVHe pushes inside me without warning and the first stroke is hard enough that my bound hands twist in the belt leather and my face turns into the mattress.The sound that comes out of me is a LAUGH - breathless and surprised because the force of him is so excessive and so Knox that the absurdity of it all is hitting me as comedy before it hits me as pleasure, and the comedy makes the pleasure better because nothing in my life makes sense anymore and the not-making-sense has become the thing I crave.He fucks me with the belt around my wrists and his hand on the back of my neck and with his hips driving forward at a pace that my body meets on every stroke - pushing back against him, CHASING the impact instead of absorbing it.The way I feel it, I am not being punished right now, I am being WANTED with a desperation that tastes like the best drug I’ve ever taken.I cum hard and the orgasm breaks through me like sunlight through glass. I feel GOOD. Not guilty or conflicted, not
KNOX’S POVTheo Gallagher’s apartment smells exactly as I expect - like dryer sheets and instant ramen and loneliness.I’m sitting on his couch uninvited with my boots on his coffee table and a beer I took from his fridge sweating in my hand while he stands in the doorway of his own living room looking at me with the expression of a man who is trying to decide whether running would make things worse.It would. For the record.“Door was unlocked,” I say, and take a drink of his beer which is cheap and tastes like someone brewed it in a bathtub, but I’m not here for the hospitality. “You should fix that. Dangerous neighbourhood.”“Get out of my apartment.”“Sit down, Theo.”He doesn’t obey. He stands in the doorway with his keys in his hand and his jaw set and his pulse hammering at a rate I can hear from the couch – a hundred and twelve beats per minute.I respect the not-sitting. It’s stupid, but I respect it.“I’m fucking her.”The words land in his living room the way I intended the
Theo finally looks at me. The crack in his face has widened into something that looks like the beginning of understanding – because the fear on my face which is real and unperformable is carrying information that his rational mind can’t decode but his survival instinct is starting to read.He walks past me and down the stairs, and immediately the front door closes, I stand in my room shaking with the taste of his mouth fading on my lips and the knowledge that the kiss just activated a countdown I cannot stop.I rush to the bathroom.I brush my teeth twice, then I wash my face with soap and water and press a cold cloth against my neck and my wrists, because those are the pulse points where scent concentrates. I learned that from Knox, and I’m now using it to protect Theo FROM him.I’m patting my face dry when the motorcycle engine cuts through the apartment like a blade.He’s home.I hear the front door open and his boots on the hardwood – the deliberate heavy pace that means he’s scan
Theo is sitting on my bed when I get home from The Grind House, and the wrongness of his presence in this room is so acute that my body does a full-system jolt that starts in my chest and radiates outward. For me now, this room belongs to belt buckles and cage-grips and 1:47 AM and the smell of leather, and Theo Gallagher sitting on my duvet with his elbows on his knees and his kind familiar face looking up at me with an expression I’ve been watching form for months is a foreign object in an ecosystem that will reject it.“Your mom let me in,” he says, and the sentence explains the logistics but not the energy he’s carrying, which is the energy of a man who has rehearsed something in his car and driven here before the rehearsal wore off.“Theo, you can’t just–”“I love you.”The words land in the room with no cushion. His eyes are steady on mine, and his hands are gripping his own knees the way Knox grips his knees when he’s saying something that costs him, except that Knox’s knuckles
My mom finds the gossip post before the risotto finishes cooking the next night. I know because she’s standing at the stove with her phone in one hand and a wooden spoon in the other and the exact expression on her face that she gets when she’s reading something she doesn’t fully understand but suspects she should be concerned about – the same expression she wore when boyfriend number two’s ex-girlfriend sent her a Facebook message at midnight and she spent forty minutes at the kitchen table trying to decode the subtext before deciding it was “probably nothing.”“Is there drama at school?” she asks, sliding the risotto bowl across the table with the tone of a woman who hasn’t decided whether to be worried yet. “Someone at book club showed me some campus gossip page. Apparently there’s a photo of a girl on a motorcycle? Beth said it looked like Knox’s bike.”The risotto hits my stomach like cement. Knox’s boot presses against my ankle under the table – not comforting, ASSESSING, monito
I can’t look at my mother over breakfast and I can’t look at Dominic over breakfast and I’m running out of places to look because the kitchen is small and my toast is only so interesting.The guilt from last night is sitting in my chest like a stone that grew teeth overnight.She’s glowing. That’s
My hand freezes and my walls clench around my fingers as the denial rips through me like something being torn.I was RIGHT there and he pulled me back.The sob that comes out of me is humiliating and desperate, but I can hear him breathing harder through the speaker which means stopping cost him so
My phone rings at 11:47 PM and the screen says PROF. VOSS because I saved his number under something my mother could see without her world ending.Knox is at the clubhouse, my mom fell asleep during her show an hour ago, and the apartment is dark and quiet except for the hum of the refrigerator and
Knox stops pretending on a Tuesday morning by pulling me into the shower while my mom is downstairs making French toast, and the sound of her humming through the bathroom floor – some song from the nineties that she always hums when she’s in a good mood – provides the soundtrack to her fiancé’s son







