The guest room door makes the tiniest sound when I pull it open—like even the hinge is trying not to bother anyone. The deer printed tights feel too itchy on my skin and my regret exponentially grows with each step I take to the kitchen-livingroom-open floor plan thingy.
Rich people and their weird apartment layouts. Although I wasn't really sure if a penthouse counted as an apartment just yet.
I should've never come out of the room anyways, but my thirst pushes me to get water. I always get thirsty at night, and I can't sleep anyways. But now, walking down this hallway, I really want to retreat. When my hands are empty, I never know what to do with them. They just hang there uselessly at my sides, fingers shaking and ticking with something to do.
The penthouse is dim, the kind of dim that makes everything softer and also somehow much more serious. One lamp is still on, low and amber, and the city glow presses against the windows in pale blue blocks. It's quiet enough that I can hear my own socks touch the wood of the nice clean floor.
They probably have a roomba. Then I think about the size of this penthouse.
...They probably have a hundred roombas.
I hear voices from the main room, and my heart skips a beat. I purposefully waited till I thought everyone would go to bed! Plan foiled!
I try to listen in at the corner connecting to the room. They aren't loud, or arguing. They're just... low, like the dark sky outside is telling them to keep it down and they're listening.
I take two careful steps, and then I catch one sentence in the air.
"I don't know what to do with her. I can't be around her."
Vince.
My stomach drops so fast my body forgets how to stand like a normal person. For a second I'm just stuck there in the hallway, mid-breath, because part of me believes that if I freeze hard enough, the sentence will float away and turn into nothing.
It doesn't.
My brain grabs it with both hands and immediately turns it into something cruel.
He can't be around you. You're too much. Go back.
Go back go back go back go back. Disappear. Become furniture, become nothing to see.
My eyes sting. I blink hard and make myself keep moving anyway, because if I go back into the guest room now it will feel like admitting that I'm a problem. And I can already feel how easy it would be to become a person who lives inside a room and never opens the door again.
When I step into the main room, Enzo is closest to the kitchen. He turns his head right away, like he felt me before he saw me. His expression is steady, quiet, the way it always is when he's paying attention.
Vince is by the windows, arms crossed, shoulders high and tight. The bruising on his cheekbone is almost gone, faded into that dull yellow-gray stage where it looks more like a bad memory than an injury. It makes him look less wounded and more... irritated that he ever looked wounded at all.
He's staring out at the city like it personally disappointed him.
For half a second, his eyes flick toward me.
It's fast. Too fast. Like he didn't mean to do it.
His gaze lands on me—my sweater, my tights, my face—and something tightens in his expression before he turns back to the window immediately, jaw setting hard.
Like looking at me was a mistake he corrected. Like everything about me was a mistake in his perfect penthouse.
He doesn't look at me again. Of course he doesn't.
YOU ARE READING
Control
Romance"Just let me take care of you," Alexander says as his hand moves across my thigh, his legs holding me in place on the couch. "I can't, it's too much-" I go to move his hand, but another set of hands stop mine. The rings and veins make it obvious wh...
