Chapter 5: The Reply
The phone buzzed against her thigh, a sharp vibration in the quiet room.
Lily-Anne jerked, a tiny gasp catching in her throat. She stared at the dark screen for three whole seconds, her heart thudding a chaotic rhythm against her ribs. Slowly, she picked it up. The notification glowed.
Marcus.
She unlocked it. The message was there, simple and stark against the white background.
'Good girl. Sleep well, little one.'
The air left her lungs in a soft, shuddering rush. She read it again. Then a third time, her eyes tracing each letter. Good girl. The praise was a warm, heavy blanket settling over her shoulders. Little one. The term was a key sliding into a lock she’d kept rusted shut for years. It didn’t feel like a label. It felt like a fact, seen and named without hesitation.
A shiver ran through her, starting at the base of her skull and traveling all the way down to her toes. It wasn’t fear. It was the unraveling of a constant, low-grade tension she’d carried for so long she’d forgotten its weight. Her eyes prickled. She pressed the bunny sock to her nose, inhaling the fading scent of Club Velvet’s Cozy Nook, and let out a shaky, soundless laugh.
For a while, she just sat there in the lamplight, holding the phone and the sock, letting the words echo in the hollows of her mind. The silence of her apartment transformed. The yellow walls seemed warmer. The clutter of books on the coffee table looked cozy, not chaotic. It was just her space. Her safe, soft space.
Finally, she moved. She placed the phone face-down on the cushion, a private smile playing on her lips. The evening wasn’t over. She had a ritual.
In the bathroom, she took her time. The water ran warm over her hands as she washed her face with the lavender soap, the suds creamy and familiar. She brushed her teeth, meeting her own wide green eyes in the mirror. The woman looking back seemed different. Less blurred at the edges. She brushed her hair with long, slow strokes, until her blonde waves were a soft cloud around her shoulders.
Back in the bedroom, she pulled her floral sundress over her head and folded it neatly over the armchair, a silent thank you to the garment that had felt safe enough. She slipped into an oversized sleep shirt, the fabric worn to perfect softness. The air was cool on her bare legs.
Then, she went to the bed. She lifted the pillow.
There he was. Button eyes, a little worn but still bright. One velvety ear was permanently bent from years of being clutched in sleep. Her bunny. Not a sock, not a talisman hidden in a bag. The real thing.
“Hi,” she whispered, her voice small in the room. She gathered him up, pressing her face into the plush fur. It smelled like her laundry detergent and, faintly, like childhood. “I’m sorry I left you behind tonight. I was scared.” She cradled him against her chest as she climbed under the duvet, arranging the pillows just so. She pulled the faded floral blanket up to her chin.
Holding the bunny, she looked at the ceiling, the events of the night playing across her mind not as a frantic replay, but as a series of quiet, vivid images. The feel of the building blocks in her hand. The solid calm of Marcus’s presence beside her on the floor. The way he’d watched the room, giving her space to just be. The weight of his hand on her shoulder in the parking lot.
No one had ever called her ‘little one’ before. In her past relationships, the needs she tucked away were treated as quirks at best, burdens at worst. Something to be tolerated, then resented. She’d learned to shrink those parts of herself down to nothing, to perform a version of adulthood that felt like a bad-fitting costume.
But tonight… tonight, she hadn’t performed. She’d just been. Anxious, awkward, silent, and then… quietly content. And he’d seen it all. He hadn’t tried to fix her nerves or rush her silence. He’d just made space for it.
A deep, full-bodied warmth spread through her. It was the feeling of stepping into a sunbeam you didn’t know was there. She squeezed her bunny, nuzzling his head.
“It was perfect,” she whispered to him, to the room, to herself.
The thought didn’t spiral into anxiety about the next time, or if there would be a next time. The promise, “I’ll be there, if you want,” felt like an open door. She could walk through it or not. The power of that choice, given so freely, was its own kind of comfort.
Her eyelids grew heavy. The last thing she was aware of was the soft weight of the bunny in her arms, and the ghost of two phrases woven into her half-dreams: Good girl. Sleep well. For the first time in a very, very long time, she believed she might actually do both.