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I’m fantasizing about it.

I’m not fantasizing about it I’m not I promise.

If I think about it enough, it’ll actually happen. I’ll snap and break something in my hands. It’s getting stuck and playing over and over and over.

I wouldn’t think about it so much if I didn’t fucking WANT IT.

And then Felicity is gasping for air and laughing and kissing me, and I can’t take it anymore. I pull away. Grab their wrist. Turn it one direction, and then the other, looking for bruises I can’t remember putting there. There are no bruises. I can’t convince myself I didn’t do something.

“Hey,” Felicity says, “what are you—”

I pull aside the collar of their shirt to look at the bite. The wound on their ear, the gouges across their jaw and neck, they glare at me. I don’t look at their thighs. If I do, I’ll think I did it to them, and there’s no coming back from that.

“You didn’t hurt me,” Felicity says.

I break away. “Okay.”

We’re both sitting up in bed now. Felicity pulls down their bra, and then their shirt, and tries to finger-comb their frizzy hair into some semblance of order.

Felicity says, “If it helps, you’re the first boy that’s been nice about it.”

I end up on the balcony because I can’t breathe the air in that house anymore. It’s not a huge balcony. Just a few square feet, a chair, a potted plant. Looking down, there’s the stone backyard and the rest of the neighborhood—looking up, in the distance, there’s the Washington Monument, standing tall and stark white against the dark sky.

On a whim, I pull out my phone and search the sales records for the property to see the purchase price.

Four million dollars. Gross.

I wish I smoked cigarettes.

After a minute, the balcony door slides open and Felicity joins me. They’ve wiped off all their makeup and changed into baggy athletic wear that covers the bite I left.

“Hey,” they whisper, like they don’t want to startle me.

“Nice view.”

“Right?” They offer a wobbly smile and lean against the railing, surveying the landscape. “Thanks for not being weird about …” One of their hands vaguely waves toward the top of their thighs. “That.”

“I’m not going to lecture you.”

“There was one guy at my old school who did this whole You’re so beautiful, don’t do this to yourself thing, and, like, it was so stupid, oh my god. You know the type. So.”

I say, in reference to the last fifteen minutes, “You wanted to do that, right?”

“What?”

Shouldn’t have mentioned it. “It’s fine.”

“Of course I did.”

Felicity eyes me with something bordering on concern as I open my text history with Daniel—where he was talking about his Tesla, and going out, and his friends, and our deal.

Our deal.

The words sit bitter in the back of my throat as I stare at our messages. This is the son of a bitch who didn’t tell me there was a recording device under my chair in the Box. This is the man who put me here.

Morgan

heyyy