CHAPTER 5: THE MOVIE

BELLA'S POV

I should have walked away the moment I heard the sound.

That was the smart thing to do. The right thing. The thing any normal person would have done, turned around, gone back to their room, closed the door, pretended they'd heard nothing.

But I have never, apparently, been particularly good at doing the smart thing.

So instead I stood there in the gap of the doorway, my hand still raised from where I'd been about to push it open further, and I watched the screen.

I don't know what I expected when I followed the sound down the hall. A television playing the news, maybe. A documentary. Something ordinary and explainable that would dissolve the strange, restless energy that had been crawling under my skin since the bathroom. Since the first aid kit and his hands on my collarbone and the way he'd looked at me when he thought I wasn't paying attention.

What was playing on the screen was not the news.

The room was dim, just the blue-white light of the television casting everything in shifting shadows. A large private lounge I hadn't been in before, paneled in dark wood, with a leather sofa that probably cost more than my mother's entire previous wardrobe. Bookshelves along one wall. A drinks cabinet along another. The kind of room that was designed to be occupied by one person at a time, privately, and the fact that I was standing in its doorway uninvited felt suddenly very clear to me.

But I didn't leave.

On screen, a woman was lying on a bed. Her hair was spread across the pillow like dark water. Above her, a man, broad-shouldered, his back to the camera, moved with a slow, deliberate rhythm that made the woman's breath catch and lift in a sound that filled the room's speakers with startling intimacy.

The woman's hands gripped the sheets.

Her head fell back.

I felt heat flood the back of my neck and pour down my spine.

Go back to your room. Turn around. Walk away right now.

My feet did not move.

The thing about watching something you shouldn't watch is that the wrongness of it becomes part of the pull. Like the wrongness adds a layer of electricity to the air, charges everything. Makes it hard to breathe normally, hard to think in straight lines. The sounds coming from the screen were low and warm and entirely too real, and I stood in the doorway of a strange man's private room in the dark and I couldn't look away.

The woman on screen said something. Just a name, or what might have been a name, broken in the middle by a sound that wasn't language at all. The man answered her with his hands, with his body, with the particular focused attention of someone who was not thinking about anything else in the world.

Something pulled tight in my lower stomach.

Stop it. Stop it. Stop it.

"What are you doing out there?"

The voice was so sudden, so calm, so completely controlled that I actually flinched backward, my shoulder hitting the door frame. My heart slammed into my ribs.

He was sitting on the leather sofa with his back slightly angled toward the door, which meant he'd been able to see the reflection of the hallway in the dark glass of the bookshelf across the room. He'd known I was there. Maybe from the moment I'd appeared in the doorway. Maybe before.

I couldn't see his face clearly from this angle. Just his profile, sharp against the television light. The line of his jaw. The straight line of his shoulders. His forearm resting on the back of the sofa, loose and entirely at ease.

The screen was still playing.

The sounds were still filling the room.

I wanted to die.

"I…" My voice came out wrong. Thin. I cleared my throat. "I was just getting some water. I heard…."

"You were asked to rest." His voice was even. Conversational, almost. Like he was commenting on the weather. "You've been standing in that doorway for three minutes, Bella."

My face went from warm to scorching.

Three minutes.

He'd let me stand there for three minutes.

"I wasn't..." I started, and then stopped, because I had been, and we both knew it, and finishing that sentence would only make it worse.

On screen, the woman's voice climbed slightly. The man said something to her, low and deliberate.

I pressed my back harder against the door frame.

"Don't be a stubborn girl," Dominic said, in the same even tone. "Go and have some rest."

He still hadn't turned to look at me directly. He was still watching the screen, or appearing to watch it, it was impossible to tell in this light whether his eyes were actually on the television or somewhere else entirely. His profile gave away nothing. He sat the way he did everything: contained, composed, the architectural stillness of a man who spent a great deal of energy making sure nothing showed.

"Right," I said.

My voice was completely steady.

I have no idea how.

"Goodnight," I added, because for some reason that felt necessary. A closing of the thing. A door being shut.

He didn't respond.

I pushed myself off the door frame and started back down the hallway the way I'd come, my bare feet silent on the polished floor. Behind me, the sounds from the television continued for another five or six seconds.

Then they stopped.

The silence that replaced them was somehow worse.

I lay in bed and stared at the ceiling and listened to the house breathe.

The estate had its own night sounds, the settling of the structure, the faint hum of climate systems running in the walls, the occasional distant sound of the grounds, wind through the hedgerows in the formal garden. Different from our old house, which had creaked and shifted in a language I knew as well as my own name. This place spoke in a register I hadn't learned yet.

My room was beautiful in the dark. The curtains were heavy and good and blocked most of the outside light, so the darkness was complete, the kind of deep and finished dark that made it easier to pretend you were the only person anywhere. That there was no one on the other end of this hallway sitting in a dim room with their forearm on the back of a leather sofa and their jaw like a blade in the television light.

Stop.

I pulled the duvet up to my chin and turned onto my side and stared at the wall.

The woman's voice from the screen had been low and real. Not the exaggerated performance of the movies Jennifer and I used to watch on her laptop with the volume down in university halls, half-embarrassed and half-fascinated, giggling at the wrong moments to prove we weren't taking it seriously. This had been different. This had been the sound of someone entirely inside their own body, not performing anything for anyone, just — there. Just feeling.

I turned onto my other side.

My body had not gotten the message that this was not the time for this.

I had a boyfriend. I had Harry, who loved me, who called me sweetheart and had been patient with me for eighteen months while I held onto my virginity like it was something I was still deciding about. I had a plan: Harry, and normality, and a life that made sense. I had all of that.

I turned back onto my first side.

The woman on the screen had gripped the sheets with both hands.

Do not think about that.

Do not, under any circumstances, think about the fact that you stood in that doorway for three minutes and your stepfather knew and said absolutely nothing.