Skye’s POV
Today is a good day.
I realize this sometime between third period and lunch, the knowledge settling into my shoulders like a physical weight lifting.
No literature class with Kai today. I haven't seen him once—not in the hallways, not at the coffee cart where he sometimes looms like a threat dressed in loosened ties and cologne, not even a glimpse of his car in the student lot.
The absence feels like oxygen after weeks of holding my breath, and I let myself relax into it.
The afternoon unfolds in rare peace: a productive tutoring session with a sophomore who actually wants to understand metaphor, a sandwich eaten outside in the weak autumn sun, no confrontations or dark-eyed stepbrothers appearing in doorways.
By evening I'm almost lightheaded with the unfamiliar sensation of safety. I have time. Actual, unclaimed hours stretching ahead of me like a gift I haven't earned and don't trust.
Heinrich and Diane are at some charity event in the city. Mrs. Aldén left at five. The house belongs to me tonight—or at least, the illusion of ownership is convincing enough that I can pretend.
"Just me," I say to the empty hallway, and my voice sounds strange without anyone to absorb it. "Just me and several thousand square feet of someone else's money."
I change into soft clothes in my room: black leggings, an oversized cream shirt that still smells faintly of pipe tobacco and wool and my father.
I found it in a box my mother was going to donate, rescued it like contraband, and haven't washed it once in the five months since his death.
The smell is fading now. I try not to think about the day it will disappear entirely.
I settle against my headboard with Hannah Armstrong's latest. I've been saving this one, rationing it like the treat it is.
‘Why do you read these?’ Travis used to ask like he believed his literary tastes reflected his superior intellect. ‘They're so predictable. You always know how they end.’
"That's the point," I should have said but never did.
I never told him that predictability was what I craved—that I returned to these books again and again because they offered a world where desire is simple, where wanting doesn't require armor, where two people can touch without calculating the damage.
In real life, I've learned that wanting makes you vulnerable. It hands people weapons and invites them to aim. In romance novels, wanting makes you the heroine.
The scene I'm reading now is a slow build. The hero's mouth mapping the heroine's shoulder, tracing the curve of her clavicle while she trembles beneath him.
Her fingers are tangled in his hair, pulling him closer even as she tells herself to push him away.
Armstrong writes physical sensation with precision that makes my own skin feel sensitized, the words creating phantom pressure against my throat, my hip, the inside of my knee where the fabric of my leggings suddenly feels too warm.
"God, Hannah," I mutter, turning the page with fingers that aren't quite steady. "You're not playing fair."
I adjust my position, legs shifting restlessly against the sheets. I read the same paragraph twice because the first time I was too distracted by my own body to process the words.
Then I hear a sound from beyond my wall.
Not quite words. A gasp, maybe, or a moan caught halfway in someone's throat and strangled before it could escape. Muffled by plaster and distance but unmistakable in its texture—the kind of sound that doesn't belong to pain or surprise but to pleasure so acute it borders on both.
I go still, book forgotten in my lap, listening with the intensity of prey animals who've spotted movement in tall grass.
Another sound follows: rhythmic, deliberate, unmistakable. The particular percussion of a headboard meeting a wall—once, twice, then settling into a steady tempo that makes my stomach clench.
You've got to be fucking kidding me.
A woman's voice rises, climbing octave by octave, then breaks into a cry that might be Kai's name or simply vowels stretched and desperate, strung together in the universal language of approaching climax.
The sound is high and breathy and theatrical in the way that makes me want to pound on the wall and ask if she's auditioning for something.
The rhythm accelerates. The headboard protests louder, wood groaning against the wall we share, and I can feel each impact in my own bed frame—a subtle vibration that travels through the floor joists and into my mattress, into my spine, into places I refuse to acknowledge.
Of course. Of course he's doing this tonight. The one night I thought I had to myself.
The girl—whoever she is—moans again, longer this time, the sound curling at the edges like she's savoring it. She is not making any attempt to be quiet. Like she knows these walls are thin and wants me to hear every goddamn second.
My body responds before my mind catches up. Heat floods me in a wave that feels like betrayal, starting low and spreading upward until my face burns with it.
I recognize the sounds now—the particular cadence of sex building toward its peak—and my own arousal answers like an echo I never invited.
This is sick, I think. This is wrong.
I am angry immediately. At Kai, for doing this in a house where anyone could hear. At myself, for the dampness gathering between my thighs.
At the girl in his room who seems to be performing rather than simply feeling, each moan pitched a decibel louder than necessary, each gasp calculated to carry.
The anger doesn't diminish the other thing. The wanting that Armstrong's words had already awakened and which Kai's activities are now feeding with gasoline.
I grab my headphones, shove them on, turn the volume high enough that the bass vibrates against my skull. Try to find my place in the book again.
But the girl in Kai's room is too loud. Or the walls are too thin. Or my own imagination is too willing to supply the visuals.
His hands gripping her hips the way he gripped mine in that classroom, his mouth at her ear whispering words I strained to hear when I watched him with Ms. Dotson, the concentration I know from his face when he's studying something he wants to understand.
The headphones don't help. I still feel each cry as a vibration in my chest, still picture things I don't want to picture, still sit in my bed with my book forgotten and my body aching.
I'm aroused. I'm furious. I am so lonely it feels like a physical illness—a hollowness in my chest that has been growing since Travis, since Dylan, since my father's funeral when I stood beside my mother and understood for the first time that I was truly, fundamentally alone.
The loneliness could be diagnosed and treated if I were willing to name it out loud. If I were willing to admit that six months without being touched has left me desperate enough to get wet listening to my stepbrother fuck someone else.
The girl screams.
I throw my book across the room. It hits the wall with a satisfying thud and lands spine-up on the hardwood, pages splayed like broken wings.
I cannot stay in this room. I cannot lie here surrounded by these sounds, pretending I am unaffected, pretending the ache between my legs is anger and nothing more.
I cannot go downstairs where Heinrich or Diane might return and ask why I am flushed, why my hands are shaking.
There is only one private space in this house that locks.
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