Page 37 of Depths of Desire
Before all else, righteousness ripped through me. Wasn’t that part of the deal? Wasn’t that what we’d agreed on? No feeling, no strings, just a night of wild pleasure before the morning sobered us.
But then, the guilt hollowed me out from the inside. I had wanted distance. I hadn’t wanted to watch something fragile between us harden into disappointment. It never should have been there in the first place, yet we had both known that it was. It had been all along.
Now, I was just a stranger who had touched him like he mattered and walked away like he didn’t.
Lennox shifted his weight, ready to go.
I opened my mouth.
Nothing came out.
So he nodded once. Sharp. Final. And turned away.
I didn’t stop him.
I didn’t have the right.
Day in and day out, I walked through the maze. I didn’t pay attention to anything around me. Food lost all its flavors, lectures bored me to desperation, and swimming no longer felt like an escape.
The water was heavier today.
It gripped every inch of my skin, dragged at my limbs like it wanted to hold me under. I launched from the wall and sliced through the lane, eyes trained on the black line, the ceiling blurring overhead. My breath came too fast, too shallow, and poorly timed. I turned early, kicked late, and broke rhythm.
Again.
I resurfaced halfway through the set and slammed a palm against the wall. The sound cracked through the empty natatorium like a gunshot. My lungs burned. My eyes stung. My body wasn’t failing me, but it wasn’t listening, either. No matter how hard I pushed, it all kept unraveling.
I climbed out of the pool. My limbs trembled as I stood there dripping, teeth clenched.
The failure wasn’t physical. Not really.
It was in my chest. In the noise in my skull. In the fact that I couldn’t stop thinking about him, no matter how many laps I swam or how much sleep I skipped trying to stay ahead.
I wrapped a towel around my waist and stood at the edge of the water, staring down at the calm I couldn’t match.
One night. That was what we said. That was the deal. That was what we had needed.
So why did it keep circling back like a tide I couldn’t outswim?
I showered fast and dressed even faster, stuffing my wet gear into my bag with a vicious tug at the zipper. I didn’t speak to anyone on the way out. Didn’t even check the clock above the entrance.
I didn’t know where I was going until I was already moving.
The walk didn’t help. If anything, it made things worse. The cold air stung my cheeks, the wind lifting the damp edges of my hair, my pulse drumming hard under the collar of my sweatshirt.
I shouldn’t be doing this.
I knew that.
But I was unraveling, and it was either this or break something just to feel like I had control over something.
I hated that he had gotten under my skin. I hated that he had stayed there. I hated that even when he turned away from me in silence, I had wanted to chase after him and pull him close and say something I couldn’t afford to utter aloud.
I hated that the only thing that had ever made me feel like I was flying—free, unchained, and more than anything, human—was his mouth on mine.
I took the stairs two at a time. Second floor. I remembered.
I remembered because he had told me on the drive back in December. Some stupid comment about the windows being crooked, how the heat didn’t work on the left side of the building. I hadn’t meant to remember. But I did. I had filed it away, like everything else about him.
