The Unspoken

Chapter 2: The Claiming

The dining hall was a roaring cavern of noise back then. Trays clattered, conversations bounced off the high ceilings, and somewhere in the corner a group of freshmen were chanting something I couldn't quite make out. I remember standing in the serving line with my meal tray, watching the steam rise off the Salisbury steak, when I felt a hand wrap around my wrist.

I turned, and there she was. Jordan Vance, all ash-blonde hair and sharp cheekbones, wearing an expression I would later learn to read as her version of vulnerability. It looked like fear. It looked desperate. That was what got me.

"I need you to sit with me," she said. No hello. No preamble.

I blinked at her. "I'm sorry?"

"You heard me." She tugged at my wrist, and I let myself be tugged. I was a quiet freshman, still finding my footing. I didn't know how to say no to a pretty girl who looked like she'd been crying in the bathroom.

She pulled me to a table near the window, away from the noise, and sat across from me with her hands folded primly on the laminate surface. She didn't eat. She just watched me for a long moment, and I felt like something pinned under glass.

"I just need someone to call my own," she said, and her voice cracked on the last word. "Is that too much to ask? Is it too much to want someone who actually looks at me?"

I didn't know her. I'd seen her around campus, sure. Everyone had. She was the kind of girl who commanded attention without trying. But I didn't know her, and I had no idea why she'd picked me.

Still, she was crying. Or close to it. And I thought, in that stupid way young men think, that it meant something. That her choosing me meant I owed her something. That kindness meant opening yourself up.

I gave her my number.

Our first time happened weeks later, in her dorm room while her roommate was at a late lab session. The lights were off except for the fairy lights she'd strung along the windowsill, and the whole space smelled like vanilla and lavender. She'd kissed me aggressively at the door, all teeth and determination, and I'd let myself be pressed back onto her bed.

It was clumsy. I remember the negotiation of limbs, the way her hand guided me, the way I was trembling and trying not to show it. And then she was beneath me, and her eyes went wide, and she said, "You're too big."

I froze. "What?"

"You're too big," she repeated, with a laugh that was supposed to sound light but came out sharp. "Like, down there. You're too big."

I had no frame of reference. I'd had exactly two other sexual experiences before that, both rushed and awkward in a high school bedroom. No one had ever told me anything about my body in that way. I didn't know what average meant. I didn't know if she was complimenting me or insulting me.

"I'm sorry," I said, which was the only thing I knew how to say.

She patted my cheek, patronizing and warm at once. "It's fine. I'll make it work. That's what you do when you love someone, right? You make it work."

That was the first time she said the word love. The first time she made it conditional.

I look back on that moment now, two years later, standing in the dim cave of our shared apartment, and I understand what I couldn't then. She wasn't telling me about my body. She was telling me about her power. She was establishing territory, the way a cat marks its space by rubbing against every corner. And I was too young, too starved for affection, too desperate to be wanted, to see it for what it was.

Our relationship is just her marking territory until graduation frees her.

I know that now.

The apartment is a cramped, two-bedroom place off-campus that Jordan picked because it was close to her favorite coffee shop. The living room has a sagging beige couch from the 90s, a coffee table buried under her textbooks and my abandoned notes, and a cracked lamp that flickers whenever the neighbors turn on their microwave. The walls are peeling in the corner where the radiator leaks, and the whole place smells like stale air and leftover takeout.

Jordan is out tonight. Some club event with the business school friends she keeps in rotation, the ones who think she's charming and brilliant and not at all the woman who spent dinner last night telling me I'd never amount to anything without her guidance.

I'm sitting on the edge of the couch, phone in hand, staring at the message that just came in from Bianca.

“Where are you? I've been waiting.”

I type and delete a response four times. The truth is ugly. The truth is that I let my girlfriend talk me into moving in with her because I didn't have the spine to say no. The truth is that I now have no excuse to be out late, no reason to be absent from this apartment, no alibi for the hours I used to spend at Bianca's feet.

I finally type: “I can't tonight. Something came up.”

Her response is immediate. “What came up?”

And I am sitting here, in this cramped apartment that smells like Jordan's expensive perfume and my own failure, and I think about how Bianca asked me to stay late at the library last week. How I told her I couldn't because Jordan had a dinner thing. How she'd looked at me with those dark eyes and said, "You used to fight for this."

We lived together now. Jordan's idea, pitched as a step forward, a symbol of commitment. I knew better. It was a cage. A prettier cage, with fairy lights in the bedroom and a proper kitchen, but a cage all the same.

My phone buzzes again. “Daniel. What came up?”

I take a breath, and I write the truth.

“Jordan moved in. We're living together now. I don't have the same freedom I used to.”

There's a long pause. I watch the typing bubble appear and vanish, appear and vanish, and my stomach knots tighter with each flicker.

“You're telling me you can't see me anymore.”

I can hear her voice in my head, clipped and furious and hurt underneath all of it. I want to explain that it's not that simple, that I'm trapped, that I never wanted this. But I also know that Bianca doesn't want excuses. She never has. She wanted me to be the one who chose her, who fought for her, who treated her like she mattered.

And all I've done is let someone else make my choices for me.

I type: “That's not what I'm saying.”

Her response comes faster this time: “Then what are you saying?”

I don't have an answer. I'm just a man sitting in a dark apartment, holding a phone, trying to find the right words to explain that I've been backed into a corner I walked into willingly.

Somewhere in the distance, a door slams. I flinch.

The reply that finally comes through is just one word, and it sits in my gut for days afterward: “Fine.”

That single word sat on my screen like a stone dropped into still water. I was still staring at it, thumb hovering over the keyboard, trying to summon a response that wouldn't make things worse, when another message came through. And then another, a rapid-fire sequence that made my phone buzz and vibrate in my palm like a trapped insect.

The first was a photo. Bianca in her bedroom, the one I knew so well, with the string lights and the messy desk and the rumpled sheets. She was wearing nothing but a thin tank top, pulled down off one shoulder, and she was looking at the camera with an expression I knew intimately. Half-lidded eyes. Lips parted. Her dark hair spilling over the pillow.

The second message was text.

“You'll regret this.”

My thumb moved before my brain could catch up. I was already typing a response, something frantic and apologetic, when I heard the key turning in the lock.

Jordan's key.

The deadbolt clicked, and the door swung open, and in the span of a single heartbeat I had the photo and the message deleted, the thread cleared, my phone face-down on the coffee table like it had been sitting there all along. My heart was hammering against my ribs so hard I could feel it in my throat.

"Hey," Jordan said, stepping inside and kicking the door shut behind her. She had a takeout bag in one hand and her purse in the other, and the smell of expensive perfume and the restaurant she'd been at rolled in with her. "You're still up. I thought you'd be in bed."

"Couldn't sleep," I said, and my voice came out steadier than I'd expected. "How was the thing?"

She set the bag on the counter and shrugged out of her blazer. "Fine. Sarah got promoted, so everyone had to pretend to be happy for her while also being bitter about it. The usual." She hung her blazer on the hook by the door and turned to face me, unbuttoning the top button of her silk blouse. "What did you do all night?"

"Worked on my research paper." The lie came easy, which scared me a little. "Got some stuff done."

She hummed, noncommittal, and padded into the kitchen to put the takeout bag in the fridge. I watched her move through the familiar choreography of her nightly routine, and I thought about how strange it was that this had become normal. Two people sharing a space, orbiting each other like planets caught in the same gravity well, never quite touching.

"Bianca's still your partner for that, right?" she said, her voice carrying from the fridge.

"Yeah." Another lie.

She closed the fridge door and leaned against the counter, arms crossed. "I don't know how you stand her. Every time I see her around campus, she looks like she'd rather set you on fire than talk to you. A real bitch."

"She's not that bad once you get to know her."

Jordan made a face. "I'll take your word for it."

The silence stretched between us, filled by the hum of the refrigerator and the distant drone of traffic outside. I was still thinking about Bianca's photo, about the way she'd looked at the camera, about the word "Fine" that had preceded it. And I was thinking about how Jordan stood there in her expensive clothes, marking her territory, and how I'd let her.

I took a breath.

"Hey," I said, and something in my voice must have been different, because she looked at me more sharply. "Are you up for it tonight?"

Jordan blinked. Then she laughed, a short, surprised sound. "What, sex? Now?"

"Yeah. I mean, if you're not tired, or whatever."

She unclipped her hair and let it fall around her shoulders, studying me with that cool, appraising look she'd perfected. "I guess I'm okay with it."

The words landed wrong. I could feel them settle in my chest like a stone, heavy and cold. Not yes. Not "I'd love to." Just... okay with it. Like I was a chore she'd decided to tolerate, a box to tick off the list before bed.

My face must have shown something, because her expression sharpened.

"What?" she said. "That's not good enough?"

"It just sounds like you're doing me a favor."

"I am doing you a favor." She uncrossed her arms and walked toward me, and something about the way she moved felt predatory. "You asked. I said yes. What more do you want, Daniel?"

"Maybe for you to act like you actually want to."

"Want to what? Have sex with my boyfriend? That's not what you said. You asked if I was up for it, and I said I was. If you want a performance, I can give you a performance, but I thought you wanted honesty." She stopped in front of me, close enough that I could smell the wine on her breath. "What's this really about? You've been acting weird all week."

"Nothing's about anything. I just asked a question."

"You don't ask questions like that. Not anymore." She tilted her head, examining me like a specimen under glass. "Did something happen today?"

"No."

"Bullshit." Her voice went flat, and the old pattern asserted itself, the familiar rhythm of her pulling my strings. "You think I can't tell when you're lying? You're practically vibrating, Daniel. You've got that guilty look you get when you've done something you shouldn't have."

"I haven't done anything."

"Then what were you so busy doing on your phone when I walked in? You looked like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar."

"I was just looking at something. It's not a big deal."

"Then show me."

"I deleted it."

The words hung in the air between us, and I watched the calculation happen behind her eyes. I could see her processing, filing this away, deciding whether to push or to wait. That was the thing about Jordan. She always knew which battles to fight and which to save ammunition for.

"Why would you delete something if it wasn't a big deal?" she asked, and her voice had gone soft and dangerous.

"Because it wasn't important and I didn't want you to make a thing out of it."

She laughed, and it was a cold, brittle sound. "I'm not making a thing out of anything. I'm asking a simple question, and you're being weird and defensive, which makes me wonder why you have so much to hide."

"I don't have anything to hide."

"Really." She crossed her arms and looked at me with that clinical detachment she used when she wanted to make me feel small. "Then why do you keep lying to me?"

"I'm not lying. I just wanted to have sex with my girlfriend, and now you're interrogating me like I'm a suspect in a crime."

"Maybe because you're acting like one."

The argument wasn't building so much as detonating, the way it always did when we reached this particular fault line. Jordan had a talent for turning anything into a referendum on my character, my loyalty, my worth. And I had a talent for letting her.

"You know what?" I said, and my voice cracked on the words. "This is exactly why I don't ask anymore. Because every time I do, it becomes this. An inconvenience."

"You know what?" I said, and my voice cracked on the words. "This is exactly why I don't ask anymore. Because every time I do, it becomes this. An inconvenience."

Jordan's expression didn't change. If anything, it softened, which was worse. She reached out and touched my cheek with her fingertips, a gesture so tender it made my skin crawl.

"It's not an inconvenience, Daniel. It's just that you always make everything so complicated." Her thumb traced the line of my jaw. "You're the one who's been off all night. I'm just trying to understand what's going on in that head of yours."

"There's nothing going on."

"Okay." She said it the way you'd soothe a spooked horse. "Okay. You're right. I'm sorry. I came home and I got defensive, and I should have just said yes." She stepped closer, her hands sliding down my chest. "Yes, Daniel. I want you. Is that better?"

It wasn't better. It was worse. But I was already nodding, already letting her lead me back to the bedroom, because that was what I did. That was what I always did.

The bedroom was dark except for the fairy lights she'd strung along the headboard, identical to the ones she'd had in her dorm room. She pushed me down onto the bed and climbed on top of me, and I lay there watching her undress with the practiced efficiency of someone who'd done it a thousand times. Her movements were deliberate, each garment removed and folded with care. She wasn't performing for me. She was performing for herself.

"Are you going to just lie there?" she asked, unhooking her bra. "Or are you going to participate?"

I reached up and touched her waist. She was warm beneath my palms, familiar, and I let my hands travel to her hips as she leaned over me. She kissed me, and it was fine. It was competent and thorough and completely unremarkable. Her tongue moved against mine with the same mechanical precision she applied to everything else, and I felt nothing.

I closed my eyes, and I thought about Bianca.

I thought about the way her hands trembled when they touched my face. The way she looked at me like she couldn't decide whether to kill me or kiss me. The way she gasped my name like it cost her something.

Jordan had never trembled. She'd never once looked at me like I was anything more than a fixture in her life.

"Daniel." Her voice cut through the fog. "You're not even hard."

"I'm trying."

"Trying isn't the same as doing." She sighed and rolled off me, landing on her back with a thump. "Forget it. It's late."

"I'm sorry."

"You're always sorry." She lay there in the dark, staring at the ceiling. "I don't know what's wrong with you lately. You're so distant. Like you're not even here anymore."

I opened my mouth to lie, to tell her I was fine, but what came out instead was, "Maybe I'm not."

She turned her head to look at me. "What does that mean?"

"I don't know." And I didn't. I wasn't sure I'd ever known.

We lay in silence for a long moment. The fairy lights cast their soft glow across the ceiling, and I stared at the shifting shadows and thought about the other woman in my life. The one who hated me in public and begged me to stay in private. The one who'd sent me a photo of herself while my girlfriend was walking through the door.

“I’m going to go.”

“What? Where are you going?” I could tell she did not want that to happen.

“I don’t know right now, anywhere.”

She sat up in bed, the fairy lights painting her face in soft gold. "Daniel. It's late. Where would you even go?"

"Does it matter?" I was already pulling on my jeans, my voice steadier than I felt. "You made it pretty clear you don't want me here tonight."

"I didn't say that." She sounded almost hurt, which was a trick she did. Making her cruelty into my fault. "I said you weren't hard. That's not the same as telling you to leave."

"Sure feels the same from where I'm standing."

I grabbed my hoodie off the chair and pulled it over my head. Jordan watched me with that cool, calculating expression, and I could see her running the math in her head. Let me go and risk losing control, or stop me and lose the upper hand.

"Fine," she said, and the word landed like a slap. "Go. Walk around campus in the dark. See if I care."

"Thanks for the permission."

I walked out before she could get another word in. The door clicked shut behind me and I stood in the hallway for a moment, breathing. The apartment building was quiet, the kind of silence that made every small sound feel loud. I pulled out my phone and looked at the thread. The photo was gone, deleted, but my thumb hovered over her name.

I called before I could talk myself out of it.

It rang twice before she picked up. I could hear the television in the background, something with a laugh track. "What," she said, and it wasn't a question.

"Can I come over?"

A pause. The television went quiet. "It's almost midnight, Daniel."

"I know."

"You just told me you couldn't see me anymore. You told me Jordan moved in. And now you're calling me at midnight asking to come over." Her voice was flat, carefully controlled. "What changed?"

"I don't know. I'm just standing outside my building with nowhere to go."

She was quiet for a long moment. I could hear her breathing, the soft rustle of fabric as she shifted. "Was it her? Did she do something?"

"It's always her. That's the problem." I leaned against the wall, letting the cold seep through my hoodie. "I asked her if she was up for it, and she said she was okay with it. Like I was a chore she'd decided to tolerate. And I just thought about you the whole time."

"You thought about me while you were about to fuck your girlfriend."

"Yeah."

"And that made you leave?"

"Made me realize I couldn't stay another second in that apartment." I closed my eyes. "I don't know what I'm doing, Bianca. I just know I can't be there right now."

"I can't fix this for you." Her voice was soft, almost gentle. "I'm not some escape hatch you get to pry open whenever Jordan makes you feel small."

"I know."

"Do you? Because it feels like you're using me as a painkiller, Daniel. And I'm getting tired of being the thing you reach for when you're too weak to walk away from her."

The words hit harder than I expected. I'd heard her say worse, so much worse, but this was different. This was quiet and tired rather than furious. This was her deciding whether I was worth the fight anymore.

“I’m going to lay in the park bench near the campus library book drop off. I guess I’ll see you when you’re boyfriends not in town,” I hung up before she could say anything else.

The night air hit me like a wall the moment I stepped out of the building. Cold, damp, carrying the smell of wet asphalt and the distant hum of the city. I shoved my hands in my hoodie pocket and started walking, not really thinking about where I was going. My feet knew the way even if my head didn't.

The campus was empty at this hour. A few security lights cast pools of yellow on the walkways, and the buildings loomed dark and silent. The library was a squat block of concrete and glass, its big front doors locked, the book drop slot a dark mouth in the wall. There was a bench nearby, the one with the cracked wooden slats that nobody sat on because it faced the loading dock instead of the quad.

I sat down and let my head fall back. The sky was a smear of orange from the city lights, no stars visible. I pulled my phone out and looked at the blank screen. No messages. No missed calls.

That word from Bianca was still somewhere in the thread, but the photo was gone. I'd deleted it. I'd deleted her. That's what it felt like. I'd thrown away the only thing she'd ever given me freely and Jordan hadn't even seen it.

I don't know how long I sat there. Long enough for the cold to seep through my jeans and settle into my bones. Long enough for the security guard to drive by twice, eyeing me through the windshield of his golf cart before moving on. I thought about getting up. Going back to the apartment. Apologizing to Jordan for whatever I'd done wrong tonight, and then apologizing to Bianca for the same sin in a different key.

That was the trap, I realized. I was always apologizing. To Jordan for not being enough, to Bianca for being too much. Caught between two women who both wanted something from me I didn't know how to give.

Footsteps. Soft, but clear in the silence. I opened my eyes and she was there, standing at the edge of the light from the library's flood lamp. Black leggings, her oversized coat zipped to her chin, her hair loose around her shoulders. She looked like she'd dressed in a hurry, like she'd been in bed and gotten up and left without caring what she looked like.

"Bianca?"

"Don't." She held up a hand. "Don't say my name like you're happy to see me. That's not why I'm here."

She stood there, arms crossed, chin lifted. The floodlight made her look pale, almost ghostly, and for a moment neither of us moved. The silence stretched long enough that I could hear my own heartbeat.

"I wasn't going to come," she said finally. "I told myself I wasn't going to come."

"But you did."

"Don't sound so smug about it." She walked over and sat on the bench, leaving a foot of space between us. The wood creaked under her weight. "I couldn't sleep. And I kept thinking about you sitting out here like an idiot, freezing to death because you're too proud to go back inside."

"I'm not proud. I'm just tired."

"Same thing, different flavor." She pulled her coat tighter around herself and stared at the library wall. "You hung up on me."

"I know. I'm sorry."

"You're always sorry." She said it without venom, more like she was stating a fact. "That's the problem, isn't it? You're always sorry, and you never change."

I didn't have an answer for that. I'd apologized to her so many times over the past two years that the word had lost its shape. It was just something I said, a reflex, a way of acknowledging that I was always failing someone, somewhere.

"I could have gone back to Jordan," I said. "Apologized. Made it worse by staying. But I didn't."

"You want a medal?"

"No. I just want you to know that I chose to be here instead."

She was quiet for a long moment. When she spoke, her voice had softened. "You chose to be on an old park bench at midnight."

"It's better than being in that apartment."

"That's a pretty low bar."

"It's the bar I've got."

The wind picked up, rattling the dry leaves along the walkway. Bianca shivered and tucked her hands into her coat sleeves. I watched her profile in the dim light, the sharp line of her jaw, the way her hair moved when she turned her head.

"You should have told me about Jordan," she said. "About the moving in. Before you signed a lease, before it became a thing you had to break to me like a Band-Aid."

"I didn't know how."

"You could have said, 'Hey, Bianca, my controlling girlfriend is making me move in with her.' That would have been a start."

I let out a breath that fogged in the cold air. "It happened fast. She came to May apartment one day with the keys and said she found a place. She'd already signed the paperwork. She didn't ask me, she just did it, and I was too tired to fight."

"Too tired or too scared?"

"Both."

She nodded slowly, like that was the answer she'd been expecting. "I'm not mad that you're living with her. I'm mad that you didn't tell me."

"I know. I'm sorry."

"You said that already."

"Then I'll say it again. I don't have anything else to give you tonight."

She turned to look at me, and her eyes were wet in the floodlight. I'd seen her cry before, in the hotel room, in her apartment, in the back of her car with her teeth gritted against the sound. But this was different. This was quiet, tired, like all the fight had drained out of her.

The cold had settled into my bones by the time the phone vibrated in my pocket. The buzz was sharp against my thigh, cutting through the stillness like a fault line cracking open.

I pulled it out. Jordan's name lit up the screen, a photo of her smiling at a restaurant I'd never been to. The phone kept vibrating in my hand, and I watched it like it was something dangerous, something that might bite.

Bianca was watching me. I could feel her eyes on my face, could feel the shift in the air as she went very still.

"You going to get that?" she asked.

"No."

I pressed the power button. The screen went dark, and I slid the phone back into my pocket. The silence that followed was heavier than the cold, pressing down on us like a blanket made of stone.

Bianca exhaled slowly. "She's going to be furious when you get home."

"I know."

"And you're going to apologize to her."

"Probably."

"And then you're going to hate yourself for it."

I turned to look at her. Her profile was sharp against the floodlight, her jaw set, her eyes fixed on some point in the middle distance. She looked tired. Not the kind of tired that sleep fixes. The deep kind, the kind that lives in your bones and colors everything you see.

"Come on," she said, and stood up.

I blinked at her. "What?"

"I am not going to let you freeze on this bench. Let's go." She said it like it was a command, but her voice had a softness underneath, a crack in the armor. She held out her hand.

I took it. Her fingers were cold, but they closed around mine with a certainty that Jordan's never had. She pulled me to my feet, and for a moment we stood there, close enough that I could see the tiny mole at the corner of her mouth, the one I'd kissed a hundred times in the dark.

"Where are we going?" I asked.

"My car's parked on the other side of the library. You're getting in, and I'm taking you to my apartment. I’m tried of being cold.”

I let her pull me to my feet, and the cold air rushed in to fill the space where she'd been standing. She didn't let go of my hand. She just started walking, tugging me along like she'd done a hundred times before, and I followed because that was what I did with Bianca.

Her car was parked in the faculty lot, a dark shape hunched under a flickering streetlight. She unlocked it with a beep and slid into the driver's seat, and I climbed in beside her. The leather was cold against my back, and the engine turned over with a low purr that filled the silence between us.

She didn't look at me. She just put the car in gear and pulled out of the lot, her hands steady on the wheel, her eyes fixed on the empty road ahead. The heater kicked in after a minute, pushing warm air across my numb fingers, and I let myself thaw.

Her apartment was the same as I remembered. The string lights over the window, the stack of books on the coffee table, the faint smell of her laundry detergent and something citrusy she sprayed in the air when she was stressed. I'd been here so many times I'd stopped registering it as a place. It was just where she lived, and where I came when she called.

She kicked off her shoes by the door and walked to the kitchen without saying anything. I heard the kettle click on, the clink of a mug against the counter. I stood in the middle of her living room, uncertain, my hands in my pockets, feeling like a guest in a house I knew better than my own.

She came back with two mugs of tea and handed me one. The warmth seeped through the ceramic into my palms, and I realized I'd been colder than I'd thought.

"Sit down," she said. "You look like a lost dog."

I sat on the couch. She sat on the other end, tucking her feet under herself, wrapping her hands around her mug. The string lights cast a soft glow across her face, and she looked younger in that light. Softer.

“You ever plan on turning your phone back on?”

I looked at her, and something in my chest loosened, just a fraction. I pulled the phone out of my pocket and pressed the power button. The screen lit up, flooding the dim room with white light, and the notifications came in like a dam breaking.

Twelve messages from Jordan. Three missed calls. The last one had come in five minutes ago, timestamped right around when Bianca had pulled into her parking spot.

I scrolled through them, the words blurring together in a haze of all-caps fury and measured hurt. "WHERE ARE YOU." "I can't believe you actually left." "You're so childish." "I'm not cleaning up after you when you come crawling back." The pattern was familiar, so familiar I could have recited it before reading. Blame, guilt, the threat of withdrawal disguised as concern.

"Don't answer it," Bianca said, her voice quiet but firm.

I set the phone face-down on the arm of the couch. "I wasn't going to."

"How long are you going to keep doing this, Daniel?"

"Doing what?"

"Living a life you don't want and pretending you're okay with it." She took a sip of her tea, her eyes never leaving mine. "Two years, we've been doing this. Two years of hiding in closets and parking lots and backseats, and you've never once asked me what I actually want."

"You never asked me either."

"No," she said, and a strange smile crossed her face. "I guess I was too busy pretending I didn't care."

The admission hung in the air between us, fragile as spun glass. She'd never said it like that before, so plainly. Without a layer of sarcasm or self-loathing to blunt the edges.

"What do you want, Bianca?"

She looked down at her tea, and I watched her throat work as she swallowed. "I don't know. I think I used to know, but I've spent so long telling myself I don't want you that I forgot how to think about it honestly."

"I know that feeling."

"Do you?" She set her mug down on the coffee table and turned to face me, pulling one knee up onto the couch. "Because I think about you all the time. I think about you when I'm with Andres, when he's telling me about his day or his plans for the future. I think about your hands, the way they feel on my skin. I think about the way you look at me like I'm not a monster."

"You're not a monster."

"Then why do I keep acting like one?" Her voice cracked at the end, and she pressed her lips together, looking away.

I didn't have an answer. I reached out and touched her knee, and she flinched, but she didn't pull away. The fabric of her leggings was soft beneath my fingers, and I could feel the warmth of her skin through it.

"Because you're scared," I said. "Because loving someone means they can hurt you, and you've decided it's better to hurt first."

She laughed, a broken sound. "Look at Dr. Phil over here."

"Am I wrong?"

She was quiet for a long moment. The string lights flickered overhead, casting shifting shadows across her face. When she spoke, her voice was barely above a whisper.

"You're not wrong. I just hate that you see it. I hate that you see all of me and you keep coming back anyway."

"Why do you think I keep coming back?"

She finally looked at me, and her eyes were wet again. "Because you're a glutton for punishment."

"No." I moved closer, my hand sliding from her knee to her hip. "Because you're the only person in my life who's ever looked at me long enough to see the real me. And I'm not going to apologize for wanting that."

"Daniel—"

"You sent me a photo tonight, Bianca. You knew I was with her, and you sent it anyway. What was that?"

She shook her head, a small, defensive motion. "I was angry. I was trying to hurt you."

"Or you were trying to remind me what I was missing."

She stared at me, and I could see the war in her eyes, the push and pull of wanting to deny it and wanting to admit the truth. The silence stretched, and I watched her resolve crumble piece by piece.

"Maybe both," she said finally.

I leaned in and kissed her, then. It wasn't a gentle kiss. It was a claiming, a promise, a question and an answer all rolled into one. She made a small sound against my mouth, and her hands came up to grip my hoodie, pulling me closer.

We broke apart, breathing hard, and she pressed her forehead to mine. Her eyes were closed, her lashes dark against her cheeks.

"You're going to have to make a choice eventually," she said. "You can't keep living in both worlds."

"I know."

"Tonight you're here. Tomorrow you might be back there, apologizing to her, telling her you're sorry for a fight you didn't even start."

"I know."

"And I'll be here, waiting, wondering if it's my turn to be thrown away."

I caught her chin and tilted her face up. "I'm not going to throw you away."

"You might not have a choice. Andres doesn't know about us. Jordan doesn't know about us. We're a secret, Daniel. We're a dirty secret that both of us are too scared to admit to."

"Then let's stop being a secret."

She pulled back, her eyes searching mine. "What are you saying?"

"I'm saying I don't want to go back to that apartment. I'm saying I want to figure out what this is, for real, without hiding."

"You're just saying that because you're tired and cold and she made you feel small tonight."

"Maybe." I didn't try to deny it. "But I've been tired and cold for two years, Bianca. And you're the only thing that's ever made it bearable."

She looked away, and I saw the tear track her cheek. "You can't promise me anything. You're not ready. You're still tangled up in her, and until you cut those strings, you're never going to be free enough to choose me."

"Then help me cut them."

"Help you cut them?" She shook her head slowly, a sad smile tugging at the corner of her mouth. "Daniel, I can't be the one who does that. If you leave her, it has to be because you want to, not because I pushed you into it."

"But—"

"Listen to me." She took my hand, lacing her fingers through mine with a gentleness that felt foreign between us. "Andres has been noticing things. I've been distracted. I've been distant. He asked me last week if something was wrong, and I couldn't look him in the eye and lie."

The words landed like stones in my stomach. I'd known this was coming, on some level. I'd felt the walls closing in from every direction: Jordan with her cage, Bianca with her guilt, the whole tangled mess of us stretching toward its breaking point.

"What did you tell him?"

"Nothing. I told him I was stressed about finals." She squeezed my hand, then let go. "But he knows, Daniel. He's not stupid. And I can't keep doing this to him. To either of us."

"You're saying you want to end this."

"I'm saying we need to end this." Her voice was steady, even though her eyes were bright with unshed tears. "Not because I don't want you. God, you know I want you. But because I love him, and I can't keep betraying him. And I can't keep being the woman who hates herself every time she looks in the mirror."

The words hit me like a fist to the chest. I'd always known, on some level, that this couldn't last forever. That the secret meetings and the stolen hours would eventually run out of road. But I'd never let myself think about what came after.

"Bianca I—"

"Please." She held up a hand. "Don't make this harder than it already is. I've spent two years telling myself I could have both of you, that I could keep this thing with you separate from my life with him. But I can't. I'm breaking in half, Daniel. And I think you're breaking too."

I wanted to argue. I wanted to tell her she was wrong, that we could figure something out, that I'd leave Jordan tomorrow if she asked. But the words stuck in my throat, because I knew she was right. I'd been living a half-life for two years, split between two women, never fully present with either.

"I love him," she said, and the words were quiet, almost apologetic. "I didn't expect to. When we started dating, it was easy. Comfortable. He didn't ask for anything I couldn't give. But somewhere along the way, it became real. And now I'm sitting here, telling you I can't be with you anymore, and it feels like I'm betraying you too."

"You can't betray someone you're leaving."

"I know." She wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand. "But that doesn't make it hurt less."

The silence stretched between us, heavy and final. The string lights flickered overhead, casting long shadows across the walls. I could hear the hum of the refrigerator from the kitchen, the distant sound of a car passing outside. All the ordinary sounds of a world that kept turning even as ours came apart.

"There's something I want," she said, her voice barely above a whisper. "And I know I shouldn't ask. I know it's selfish and cruel and I'll hate myself for it in the morning. But I can't let you go without feeling you one last time."

I looked at her. Her eyes were dark and wet, her lips parted, her chest rising and falling with quick, shallow breaths. She looked terrified. She looked desperate. She looked like the woman who'd pulled me into a study lounge two years ago and changed everything.

"Bianca—"

"Don't say no." She moved closer, her knees brushing against mine. "Don't tell me this is a bad idea. I know it's a bad idea. I know everything about us has been a bad idea from the very first night. But I need this, Daniel. I need to remember what it feels like to be wanted by someone who sees all of me and doesn't look away."

My throat was tight. I could feel the pull of her gravity, the same pull I'd felt every time she'd texted me at 2 AM, every time she'd found me in a dark closet or an empty restroom. Two years of wanting her, of taking whatever she offered, of telling myself I could stop anytime I wanted.

I couldn't stop. I'd never been able to stop.

I reached out and cupped her face in my hands, and she closed her eyes, leaning into my touch like it was the only thing holding her upright. Her skin was warm beneath my palms, her lashes dark against her cheeks.

"I don't know how to say goodbye to you," I said.

"Then don't say it." She opened her eyes and looked at me, and there was something fierce in her gaze, something that had survived two years of self-loathing and secrets. "Don't say anything. Just feel me."

She kissed me, and it was desperate from the first touch. Her hands fisted in my hoodie, pulling me toward her, and I went willingly, tumbling into her like I'd done a hundred times before. But this wasn't the careful, calculated passion of stolen moments. This was grief wearing the shape of desire, two people trying to hold onto something that was already slipping through their fingers.

We came together on her couch, shedding clothes with rough, frantic movements. Her leggings tangled around her ankles and she kicked them off with a curse. I pulled her tank top over her head and she arched into me, her skin hot against my palms. The string lights cast gold across her collarbones, her shoulders, the dip of her waist.

"Don't be gentle," she said, her voice ragged. "Don't you dare be gentle. I want to feel this."

I wasn't gentle. I couldn't have been even if I'd tried. Every stroke, every kiss, every press of my body against hers carried the weight of goodbye. She gasped and shuddered beneath me, her nails raking down my back, her legs wrapped tight around my waist.

"I love the way you feel inside me," she whispered against my ear, and the words cracked something open in my chest. She'd never said that before. She'd never said anything that vulnerable, not in all the times we'd been together.

"I love you," I said, the words tumbling out before I could stop them. "I love you, Bianca."

She made a sound that was half sob, half moan, and pulled me deeper. Her hips rose to meet mine, her body moving with a rhythm born of desperation and sorrow. The couch creaked beneath us, and the string lights flickered, and somewhere in the back of my mind I knew I should care about the neighbors, about the noise, about the world outside this room.

I didn't care. I couldn't care. All I could do was hold her and move with her and pour everything I had into this one final moment.

She came with a cry that she tried to swallow against my shoulder, her body shuddering around me, her nails leaving crescents in my skin. I followed her a moment later, burying my face in her neck, gasping her name like a prayer.

Afterward, we lay tangled together on the couch, both of us breathing hard, the sweat cooling on our skin. She traced lazy patterns on my chest with her fingertips, and I watched the string lights play across the ceiling.

"I meant what I said," she murmured. "About Andres. I do love him."

"I know."

"But that doesn't change how I feel about you. It never did. It just made everything more complicated."

I didn't have an answer for that. I just held her and let the silence settle around us, heavy and final. Somewhere outside, the city was waking up, the first pale light of dawn beginning to bleed through the blinds. Another day was coming, whether we wanted it or not.

"We should get some sleep," she said finally. "You're going to have to go back to her at some point."

"I know."

"Just not yet."

"No. Not yet."

She closed her eyes and pressed closer to me, and I felt her breathing slow, felt the tension slowly drain from her body. I stayed awake, watching her sleep, memorizing the lines of her face, the way her hair fanned out across the cushion, the small smile that played at the corner of her mouth.

When the sun fully rose, I would have to leave. I would have to walk back to the apartment I shared with Jordan, and I would have to apologize, and I would have to pretend that the best and worst parts of me weren't lying here on this couch with a woman I would never truly have.

But not yet.

Not yet.