Dominated (Obsessed II)

21.

Bianca Dawson
Doctor she's out again

It had been a few days since I'd slept with Dominik. And things had felt... easier.

Not simpler, no, my mind was never that generous but lighter in a way I hadn't expected. Like the weight of all the questions I refused to ask had shifted just enough for me to breathe again. Dominik didn't come with conditions. No promises whispered in the dark, no half-truths dressed as affection. He touched me like he understood the damage, not like he wanted to fix it.

And maybe that's why I let him.

Because I didn't need fixing. I needed forgetting.
And I was trying to forget Jude.

I was learning how to let go of someone who wasn't mine to keep. That night, God, that night when our eyes met across the room, I knew he saw me. I mean really saw me. But he didn't move. He didn't reach out to me. And maybe he tried. Maybe he didn't.

The truth is, I wanted to reach out to him. I think I knew I what I'd say but I just didn't know where to start.

Because starting would mean acknowledging there was still something there. And I'd already spent so long trying to convince myself otherwise.

The way he looked at me it was familiar and foreign at once. The kind of look you give someone you used to dream about and now can barely stand to remember. A mix of longing and regret, like we were two ghosts haunting the same unfinished story.

And I hated that he still had that power.

Dominik never made me feel like I was breaking apart. With him, I didn't have to perform. I didn't have to hold my breath in case my truth scared him away. He touched me like I was allowed to feel everything without apology.

But that didn't mean I was healed.

No. It just meant I was functioning. And in my world, that was enough.

I still caught myself wondering if Jude ever thought about me. If the silence between us was pride or pain. If he ever played the same what-if games I did late at night when the world went still and cruel memory played its favorite reruns.

I'd rehearsed so many versions of what I'd say to him. None of them ever made it past my lips.

Because deep down, I knew we weren't just two people who fell apart. We were two timelines that were never meant to meet.

Still, I felt him in the places he never touched.
And that was the most unfair part of it all.

Dominik had asked nothing of me, and maybe that's why I felt safe giving him a part of myself I'd kept locked away. Not love. I wasn't foolish enough to call it that. But closeness. Warmth. A moment of shared breath and silence where I didn't feel like a walking storm waiting to be misread.

I was good at surviving.
But I was terrible at healing.

Maybe that's what Jude never understood about me. Maybe that's what made me too much for him, too sharp, too cold, too full of shadows he didn't know how to sit in. And maybe I resented him for that. For seeing the darkness and walking away instead of trying to understand it.

But I couldn't ask him to stay.
Not when I didn't even know if I would.

The truth is, I missed him. Not just the version of him that laughed and teased and made me feel like I wasn't cursed to be misunderstood forever. I missed the way he made silence feel like safety instead of shame.

But I also missed myself, before him. Before the chaos. Before love started feeling like a battlefield I never signed up to fight in.

I glanced at my reflection, face unreadable as always. I was still Bianca Dawson. Sharp-tongued. Strategic. Composed. A woman born to survive rooms that would eat others alive.