Page 8 of Watching You
I take a slow sip of my coffee, then glance at her. “So… your parents still around?”
Her head jerks a little, like she wasn’t expecting me to go there. “Yeah,” she answers after a beat, voice flat. “Somewhere.”
“Somewhere,” I repeat, letting the word roll off my tongue. “That’s vague.”
She shrugs, eyes fixed on the passing trees. “They travel. A lot.”
I can hear the lie in the way she says it. Not the kind of lie meant to fool me, more like the kind you tell yourself so you don’t have to say the truth out loud.
“Travel for work?” I press, keeping my tone casual, like I’m just making conversation.
Her jaw tightens. “Travel for… themselves.”
I file that away. Selfish parents. Absent. Probably why she clings so hard to her routines, because no one else ever gave her stability. That must have been why she stayed at our house a lot when she was younger.
“Must’ve been quiet growing up,” I say.
She finally looks at me, and there’s something sharp in her eyes. “Quiet’s not always a bad thing.”
I smirk. “Guess that depends on who’s filling the silence.”
Her cheeks flush, and she turns back to the window. I let the moment hang, then reach over and adjust her vent again, just to watch her fix it. She does, immediately, then folds her hands in her lap like she’s trying to keep them still.
She thinks I’m just being an ass.
That I’m teasing her for the hell of it.
She has no idea I’m studying her.
Every time I nudge her vent, hand her the wrong cup, take a turn she’s not expecting, it’s not random. It’s a test. I’m watching how she reacts, how fast she moves to fix it, how deep the discomfort runs before she breaks.
Blair lives in rules. I’ve seen it since we were kids. The counting. The symmetry. The way she clings to order like it’s the only thing keeping her from falling apart.
And maybe it is.
But here’s the thing: if I can disrupt that order, I can make myself the new constant. I can make her need me the way she needs those routines.
That’s why I push her. Why I press just hard enough to make her squirm, but not enough to make her run.I want her off-balance, thinking about me every time something feels wrong. I want her to start associating the relief she gets, not from fixing it, but from me letting her.
It’s not cruelty. It’s control.
And control is how you claim something so completely that it can’t remember what it was before you touched it.
She doesn’t see it yet. But she will.
By the time I’m done, her rules won’t matter.
Her routines won’t matter.
The only thing that will matter is me.
Four
Blair
The campus gates rise ahead, all wrought iron and ivy, and my chest tightens, not from excitement, but from the way my pulse has been out of rhythm since we left his driveway.
Five hours.
