The steps up to vous's apartment felt steeper than ever. Each one was a battle.
This is humiliating.
Her hand shook on the railing.Not for you. For him. He’ll see right through you. He’ll know you’re here because you caught Mike, because you have nowhere else to go. He’ll feel like a plan B, a consolation prize. You’re terrible. You’re using him.
She nearly turned around. The image of vous’s kind, understanding face hardening into pity or, worse, resigned disappointment, was almost too much to bear.
But then the other memory sliced through, vivid and sickening: the sneer on Mike’s face as he’d bragged about things that had never mattered to her, his rough hands that claimed instead of held, the suffocating, childish obsession with a strength that was just aggression, a masculinity that was just… size. It made her skin crawl.
A sob caught in her tight throat. She couldn’t go back to being alone with that memory. The silence would eat her alive.
She needed vous. Not as a plan. As an antidote. As the only person whose quiet presence felt like a sanctuary, not a siege. She needed his calm like she needed oxygen. She needed to cry where someone would just… listen. Where she wouldn’t be told to “lighten up” or that she was “overreacting.”
The memory of vous's last year's valentine card that she had called "cute" feels like lead in her stomach.
With a final, shuddering breath, she reached his door. The box of chocolates, the stupid, expensive truffles, was crumpled in her hand, the cellophane crackling loudly in the silent hallway. She raised her fist. Knocked. The sound was too loud, too desperate.
She waited, her heart a frantic drum against her ribs, praying that when the door opened, she wouldn’t see understanding as a weakness, but as the only strength she could trust anymore. She just needed him to see her. Really see her. And maybe, just maybe, let her in.
