Rosalie

I had exactly one useful skill in that doorway, and it was running.

“Rosalie.”

My name again, rougher this time, like he was dragging it up from somewhere underwater. I did not turn around. Turning around meant a face. A face meant the end of every part of my life i could live like this never happened. So I did the only thing my body still knew how to do. I opened the door the rest of the way and left.

The hallway outside his room felt a hundred feet long. I counted doors instead of thinking, four, five, six, the way I used to count stairs as a kid when the shouting downstairs got bad enough that counting was the only thing that worked. My bare feet were silent on the runner. I had my shoes in one hand and Vivian’s mask crushed in the other, the gold feathers bent now, ruined, which felt appropriate.

He did not come after me. I let myself believe that was mercy and not just the drug still holding him down, because the other would have made it absolutely impossible to keep walking.

My room was two floors below and across the east wing, far enough that by the time I reached my own door my thighs were shaking from more than just the obvious reason. I shut myself inside and stood with my back against the wood, breathing like I had actually run the distance instead of just power walked it in a borrowed panic.

He said my name. Not hers.

He didn’t even mutter it like a question hanging politely at the end of it like he still needed convincing. He said my name, flat and certain, the exact tone he used when he already had the answer and just wanted to watch you squirm before confirming it. I had spent six years learning every register of that voice and I knew this one. This was not confusion. This was recognition arriving a few seconds too late to stop anything.

I slid down the door until I was sitting the floor, which is not a dignified position for a woman who had just done what I did, but dignity had clocked out around the time I put on his girlfriend’s mask.

Here is a fact nobody warns you about the morning after you let your stepbrother believe you are his fiancée. Your body does not know it is supposed to feel ashamed. Mine felt wrung out and sore and, infuriatingly, satisfied, three sensations that had no business sharing the same body at 6:00 AM in the morning. I pressed the heel of my hand against my sternum like that would help sort them into the correct order. It did not.

I thought about the blood that was not there, because I was not a virgin anymore in the dramatic sense some of these stories like to pretend matters, I had taken care of that particular milestone two boyfriends ago with significantly less fanfare. What I thought about instead was simpler and worse. I thought about how he said your pussy is squeezing me so hard like he meant it as a compliment to someone who had earned it over months, when the truth was he had only ever touched me once, in the dark, under a stolen name.

I needed a story. Not for him. For me, for everything that’s left of me when I get up in four hours and finish moving out of this house like nothing had happened, because nothing, officially, had.

The story I settled on, lying there on my own floor with the morning going gray at the edges of my curtains, was humiliatingly simple. Nothing happened. I helped him to bed because he was clearly drugged, I left before anyone noticed, and if he said my name as I was leaving, it was because he was still disoriented, still half dreaming, grabbing at whatever name his brain offered up. People say strange things coming off whatever had been slipped into that drink. I decided I would believe that story with my whole chest if it ever came up. The fact that I did not actually believe it even a little was a bridge I’ll have to cross later Rosalie, who I have never once liked very much and have never had any trouble disappointing.

I made myself stand up eventually, because the floor is not a long term solution to anything. I caught my reflection in the mirror above my dresser. My hair looked like it had survived something. My mouth looked different, swollen in a way makeup was probably not going to fully undo, and there was a mark low on my neck that I was going to need a scarf for, in June, in a house full of people who paid very close attention to anything that looked like a story.

When I got under the shower. I stood there until the water ran cold, scrubbing in the ordinary places and also in the places that had nothing to do with cleanliness and everything to do with needing my hands to be doing something other than shaking. I dressed in the plainest thing I owned, which felt like penance and also like armor, and I sat on the edge of my stripped bed and waited for my pulse to behave like a person who had slept well and done nothing unusual.

After all of that, only an hour has passed even though I felt like I spent three in the bathroom. It was still only seven in the morning. The house had that particular hush that only exists after a party, the kind where even the air feels hungover, staff moving quietly through the halls collecting glasses and every other thing that was left behind. I thought, with my person dark humor that’s gotten me through most of my worse days, that somewhere in that collection of abandoned champagne flutes was almost certainly the exact glass someone had used to drug my stepbrother, and nobody downstairs had any idea they were washing evidence.

I had maybe twenty more minutes before Mom would start expecting movement from my room, boxes needing taping, the apartment waiting across town like a verdict. I used those minutes to practice my face in the mirror. Not the safe smile, that one was for strangers. This was a different exercise, teaching my own features how to look at Roman Grimwood across a breakfast table in a few hours and give away absolutely nothing, when every cell in my body currently remembered exactly what his hands felt like on my hips when I was completely naked on his bed, with his cock complete buried in my pussy.

I almost had it. I had gotten my expression down to something passably neutral, something that might survive eye contact without confessing anything, when a knock landed on my door.

Tap. Tap. Two hard taps, then nothing.

It was definitely not my mother’s apologetic knock. Not Mrs. Alden’s. I’m so familiar, so used to she knows on this door for six years to tell me breakfast was ready without ever making me explain why I was crying.

This was two hard knock and then silence, the kind of knock that belongs to someone who already knows you are awake, who is only knocking at all because he has decided to be polite about something he has no actual intention of letting you refuse.

Roman.

I stood very still in the middle of the room, in my armor dress, with my pulse doing something humiliating and loud, and understood with total clarity that the story I had built for myself in the last twenty minutes was about to be tested a great deal sooner than I had planned for.