35

Marianna

I'm standing in Duane's elevator, watching the floor numbers climb, feeling my body betray me in real-time.

My skin is crawling.

Not metaphorically. Literally crawling, like there are things moving just beneath the surface, tiny electric impulses firing in places I don't want them to fire.

The elevator dings. The doors slide open.

I make it exactly seventeen steps into Duane's apartment before my body decides it's done cooperating.

The bathroom is cold. The marble floor is cold. Everything is grey and expensive and cold, and I'm on my knees in front of the toilet, emptying my stomach of everything I ate today, which wasn't much, just coffee and a protein bar.

Acid and bile and that specific kind of heave that comes from somewhere deeper than your stomach. The kind that feels like your body is trying to expel something that isn't food at all.

I retch again. Nothing comes up. Just the sound of my own desperation echoing off Italian marble.

More retching. My throat is raw, my eyes are streaming, and I'm gripping the toilet bowl like it's the only thing keeping me from falling through the floor.

What was that?

*Under your shirt.*

*Under your waistband.*

*While you lay there frozen like a corpse.*

I flush the toilet. Sit back on my heels. Try to breathe.

I turn on the faucet. Splash cold water on my face. Watch it drip down my chin like tears I refuse to cry.

I splash more water. Colder this time. Nearly scalding in its iciness.

My hands are shaking. When did they start shaking?

The apartment is empty. Duane is still wherever Duane goes—probably some place where beautiful women throw themselves at him and he can feel justified in telling me I'm not his type.

Good. I don't want him here. Don't want anyone here. Don't want anyone to see me like this—this broken thing, this creature that freezes instead of fights, this body that doesn't work the way it's supposed to.

I need to sleep.

I strip off the Kinetic polo and leave it on the bathroom floor like evidence at a crime scene. Pull on Duane's hoodie—the $340 one, the one that smells like him, the one I should stop wearing but can't seem to give up—and crawl into the guest bed like I'm wounded.

Which I am.

Maybe.

I don't know.

My body is heavy. Like my bones have been replaced with lead, like gravity has increased specifically for me, like the bed is trying to swallow me whole.

That would be nice, actually. Being swallowed whole. Disappearing.

I close my eyes.

---

The hands come back in my dreams.

They always do.

The shape of them, the pressure, the way they move across my skin like they're reading something written there, something I don't know how to say.

*His* hands. Dr. Hartley's hands. The hands that wrote textbooks and gave TED Talks and pressed into places they shouldn't have pressed.

But also—not his hands. Bigger. Older. Different.

A hand on my stomach. A hand on my hip. A hand sliding lower, lower, to places that make my body respond even when my brain is screaming stop—

There's heat. The kind of heat that pools low in your belly, the kind that means your body is doing something you didn't ask it to do. I feel it building, feel the ache of it, and I hate myself for feeling anything at all.

*This is what you want*, a voice whispers.

No, I don't want this. I don't want—