Longing for a Stranger

The city outside my window never used to keep me awake. That week, it did.

I lay in bed each night listening to traffic bleed through the glass, counting the gaps between passing cars like they were something I could use to steady myself, and every time my mind went quiet enough to drift, it went straight back to his hands, his mouth, the low, unhurried certainty in his voice. “Let Daddy hear you.” I would surface from half-sleep with my heart going too fast, sheets twisted around my legs like I’d been fighting something in my dreams, and it took long, disoriented minutes each time to remember I was safe in my own room and not still pinned against that wall with his fingers buried inside me.

The card lived in the bottom of my purse, but it may as well have lived under my skin. I felt it there constantly, a low hum at the edge of every ordinary moment, buying coffee, sitting through a lecture I couldn’t recall a single word of afterward, lying to Aunt Diane’s face about being fine. I took it out more times than I want to admit, my thumb dragging over the embossed numbers until the ink had nearly worn soft, and every time I told myself this was the time I wouldn’t call, my hands betrayed me by dialing anyway.

On the fourth night I got three digits in before my throat closed. On the fifth, I made it all the way through.

It rang twice. A low, familiar voice answered, rough with something that might have been sleep. “Yes?”

The word landed in my chest like a hand closing around my ribs. I couldn’t breathe, let alone speak. I stood in the dark of my bedroom with the phone pressed so hard against my ear it hurt, my whole body gone rigid, waiting for him to hang up so the silence would stop being my fault.

“Hello?” he said again, softer this time, almost careful, like some part of him already suspected exactly who was standing on the other end of that silence and didn’t want to frighten her off.

I hung up immediately. My hands were shaking so badly I dropped the phone onto the carpet, and I sat there afterward on the edge of my bed for a long time, staring at nothing, feeling like I’d touched something live and gotten away with it by inches.

I didn’t sleep at all that night. I kept replaying the strange, frozen look that had crossed his face on that rooftop, the way his whole body had gone rigid the instant before he’d murmured “don’t stop for me,” like whatever he’d seen had cost him something he wasn’t willing to explain. I turned it over and over, unable to place it, unable to let it go.

The days blurred together after that, thin and airless, like I was moving through my own life a half second behind myself. Aunt Diane’s voice arrived to me as if from underwater, fussing over dress fittings and table manners and how important it was that I make a good impression on a man who had funded my entire existence and never once shown me his face.

“He’s a very private person,” she reminded me for the third time that week, adjusting the collar of the dress she’d chosen, her fingers brisk and unbothered at my throat while my pulse hammered beneath them. “Reserved. Formal. You mustn’t take it personally if he seems distant.”

I nodded because it was easier than explaining that distance was the least of what I was afraid of.

By the fifth day, I’d started noticing things about myself I didn’t like. The way I flinched at low male voices in coffee shops, certain for one gut-dropping second each time that I’d hear his voice come out of a stranger’s mouth. The way I caught myself standing at my window some nights, staring down at the street like he might simply appear on it if I looked long enough. The way grief for Marcus had curdled into something almost unrecognizable, replaced by an ache for a man I’d spent less than an hour with and couldn’t stop reaching for anyway, a man who’d called me “good girl” like it wasn’t just a flattery, and crave hearing it again more than I’d ever craved anything else.

It felt less like anticipation and more like waiting for a verdict. Some part of me already knew, in the marrow-deep way you know weather is about to turn, that whatever this dinner held for me wasn’t going to let me walk away from it unchanged, and I had no language yet for why that certainty felt less like fear and more like inevitability.

The night finally came the way dread always does, too slowly and then all at once.

I stood outside the private dining room at the Aurelian, smoothing a dress I didn’t remember putting on, my whole body kept thrumming with that tension that had nowhere left to go. The card was in my clutch, tucked against my palm without explanation, a secret I hadn’t let go of and no longer fully understood why I was still keeping.

“Ready?” Aunt Diane asked, touching my elbow.

I don’t even know if I was, but i said yes anyway, and pushed the door open into whatever was waiting for me on the other side of it.