Chapter 3: The Midnight Visit
The lavender scent of her room did nothing to calm her. Emily stared at the photo on her phone until the blue glow burned into her vision. The dirty bandage looked like a accusation. Or a offering. She didn't know which was worse.
She spent Sunday buried in a psych textbook, the words blurring into nonsense. Every time her phone buzzed, her heart jackknifed. It was never him. By Monday night, the silence from the house was a physical weight. She lay in her narrow dorm bed, the rumpled sheets twisted around her legs, listening to the heater click on and off.
Lock your window, Emily.
She hadn’t. It was cracked open, letting in a slender blade of cold night air and the distant sound of a siren. A stupid, reckless part of her—the same part that had gone to that party—had left it that way.
The digital clock on her desk flipped to 3:07 AM.
The scrape at the window was soft, almost imaginary. Then it came again, metal on metal. A shadow blotted out the sliver of sky. Her breath caught, solid in her lungs.
The window slid up with a shuddering groan.
He was a silhouette against the city-lit clouds, huge and unsteady, hauling himself over the sill. He landed with a thud that shook the bookshelf. The romance novels trembled.
Emily sat bolt upright, clutching the comforter to her chest. “Jake?”
The smell hit her first. Whiskey, sharp and sour. Rain. And beneath it, the clean, dark scent that was just him. He straightened up, a tower of disorder in her ordered little room. His jacket was damp, his hair plastered to his forehead from the drizzle outside. His eyes found her in the dim light from the streetlamp.
They were black, unreadable pools.
“You didn’t lock it,” he slurred, his voice thick. He took a step toward the bed, stumbled, and caught himself on her wobbly desk. A pencil cup rattled.
“You’re drunk. You need to leave.” Her own voice was a thread.
“You left your drink.” He said it like it was the most important fact in the world. He fumbled in his jacket pocket and pulled out something crumpled. He tossed it onto the bed. It was the dirty bandage from the photo, now dried into a stiff, brown-stained curl. “Forgot this, too.”
“Get out.” She said it louder this time, pushing herself back against the headboard.
He moved then, fast for someone so unsteady. In two strides he was at the side of the bed, his hands slamming down on either side of her, caging her in. The mattress dipped violently under his weight. His face was inches from hers, his breath hot and alcoholic. The faded yellow bruise under his eye was a sickly shadow.
“You wanted to see the real me?” he growled, the words gritty, torn from somewhere deep. “At the party? Well, here I am, Emily. No mask. No fucking performance for the brothers or the blonde-of-the-week.” His gaze dropped to her mouth, then back to her eyes, which were wide with fear and something else, something that sharpened the ache in his gut. “Is this what you were looking for?”
Before she could answer, before she could even draw a breath to scream, his hand came up to cup the back of her head. It wasn’t gentle. His fingers tangled in her hair, pulling just enough to tilt her face up to his.
He kissed her.
It wasn’t a kiss. It was a collision. A punishment. His mouth was hard and desperate against hers, tasting of regret and whiskey and wild, furious need. She froze, her hands trapped between their bodies, pressed against the solid, unforgiving wall of his chest. She could feel the hammer of his heart, a frantic echo of her own.
He kissed her like he was trying to erase something, or become something, or destroy them both. It was all teeth and pressure and a raw, unraveling hunger that terrified her. She made a small, choked sound against his lips.
It was the sound that did it. That broke him.
The violence bled out of him all at once. The brutal pressure softened. The hand in her hair loosened, his fingers trembling. The kiss slowed, deepened into something painfully tender, a stark contrast to its violent beginning. His lips moved against hers, searching now, asking a question he’d never dare voice.
Then, just as suddenly, he tore himself away.
He staggered back from the bed as if she’d burned him, breathing ragged. He looked at her—her lips swollen, her eyes huge in the dark, her whole body visibly shaking—and a wave of pure, unadulterated self-loathing washed over his features.
“Fuck,” he breathed, the word a shattered thing. “Fuck. Emily, I…”
He didn’t finish. His legs buckled. He didn’t fall so much as fold, collapsing sideways onto her threadbare beanbag chair with a soft whump. He lay there for a second, one arm flung over his eyes, his broad shoulders hunched.
Then his breath evened out, turning deep and slow.
He was passed out.
Emily sat there, her fingers pressed to her tingling, bruised lips. The taste of him, of the storm and the whiskey and the devastating sadness of him, was still on her tongue. Her heart was a wild bird slamming against her ribs. She stared at his slumped form, at the vulnerable line of his throat, at the bandaged hand now resting limp on the floor.
The furious, dangerous boy from thirty seconds ago was gone. In his place was just a broken, drunk kid in a too-small beanbag chair.
She should call someone. Campus security. Her mom. Someone.
She didn’t move.
Slowly, her trembling subsided. The adrenaline seeped away, leaving a hollow, aching curiosity in its wake. She swung her legs out from under the covers, the floor cold on her bare feet. She padded over and stood above him.
In sleep, all the hardened edges were gone. He looked younger. Tired. The tattoos scrolling down his arm seemed less like armor and more like a story she couldn’t read. She reached out, her hand hovering over his shoulder. She didn’t touch him.
Instead, she bent and picked up the stiff, discarded bandage from her rumpled sheets. She held it in her palm, this pathetic, blood-crusted token he kept returning to her.
With a sigh that came from the very center of her bones, she walked to her closet, pulled out the spare blanket, and draped it over him. He stirred slightly, a low murmur escaping his lips that sounded like ‘sorry’.
She didn’t go back to bed. She sat at her desk, in the dark, watching the slow rise and fall of his chest under the blanket, waiting for the dawn to break and make sense of any of this.