CHAPTER 0012- You're okay

Chloe didn’t go to work the next day.

She woke up late, made a big breakfast, and announced she was staying home to “actually hang out” since I’d been visiting for a while and we’d barely done anything together. I sat at the kitchen island in one of her old hoodies and nodded like that was fine.

It wasn’t fine. My body still felt marked from the night before. Every time I shifted on the stool I remembered the couch. The way his cum had leaked out of me onto the cushion. The way he’d made me clean it with my tongue.

Elias came downstairs in a plain black T-shirt and jeans. He poured coffee, kissed the top of Chloe’s head like any normal dad, and barely glanced at me. The neutrality of it made my stomach twist.

We ended up in the living room. Chloe put on some random reality show and curled up on the exact spot where he’d fucked me the night before. I sat on the other end of the couch with my knees pulled up, trying not to look at the fabric.

Elias sat in the armchair across from us, scrolling through his phone. Every so often I’d feel his eyes on me for half a second before they moved away. Nothing obvious. Nothing Chloe would catch. But I felt it anyway.

Around noon Chloe decided we should do face masks and paint our nails like we used to in high school. I let her put a green clay mask on my face and paint my toenails a deep red. She talked the whole time — about work, about the guy she’d been seeing, about how she was thinking of dyeing her hair again. I answered in the right places. Laughed when I was supposed to. Nodded.

But my mind kept drifting upstairs. To the guest room. To the way he’d looked at me last night after he finished. To the promise about the shower.

Elias got up at some point and said he had to take a call in his office. The second he left the room, Chloe nudged me with her foot.

“You’re quiet again.”

“Just tired.”

She studied me for a second, mask cracking on her cheeks. “You sure you’re okay? You’ve been… I don’t know. Somewhere else.”

I forced a small smile. “I’m good. Promise.”

She didn’t look fully convinced, but she let it go. We washed the masks off, ordered Thai food, and spent the afternoon doing nothing. It should have felt normal. It didn’t. Every time Elias walked through the room the air got heavier. Every time Chloe laughed at something on her phone I felt like a fraud sitting next to her.

Evening came slow.

Chloe fell asleep on the couch around ten, still in her sweatpants, some movie playing quietly in the background. I stayed up a little longer, scrolling without reading anything. Eventually I stood, stretched, and said I was going to bed.

Elias was in the kitchen when I passed through, rinsing a glass. He didn’t look up right away. When he did, his eyes were unreadable.

“She’s out cold,” he said softly.

“I know.”

We stood there for a moment in the low light. No hands. No filthy words. Just the quiet weight of everything we’d already done and everything we still wanted to do.

He set the glass down and exhaled.

“Go upstairs,” he said. Not cold. Not demanding. Just tired. “Lock the door tonight.”

I blinked. “What?”

“Just for tonight. She’s been watching us too closely. Give it a rest.”

Something in my chest tightened. I nodded once, turned, and walked up the stairs without looking back.

In the guest room I sat on the edge of the bed for a long time. The house felt different when he wasn’t coming. Quieter. Heavier. I left the door unlocked for twenty minutes out of pure habit, then finally got up and turned the lock.

I lay down in the dark, staring at the ceiling, thighs pressed together against the dull ache that still hadn’t gone away.

For the first time in days, he didn’t come.

And for the first time in days, I hated how much I noticed.