Chapter 7 JULIAN #2
The video loads in a slow bleed of motion and breath, the dim lights of a hotel room spilling across the screen, bodies tangled together in soft sheets.
It isn’t posed, isn’t directed, isn’t filmed for anyone but us.
Nathan’s voice is quiet and sweet, drunk on the moment, and mine is softer too—shy in a way I didn’t know I could still be.
I’m on my back. He’s over me. One of his hands is tangled in mine, fingers laced. The other is trailing down my chest like I’m something fragile. He kisses my throat like he owns it. Like he worships it.
“Look at me,” he whispers in the video, and I do. I always did.
My knees pull up around his hips. I say something—God, I don’t even remember what. Some joke, probably. Something stupid. And he laughs. He fucking laughs, then pushes in deep and kisses the words off my mouth.
It’s real.
It’s so real.
I watch myself arch into him, watch the way I reach for his shoulders like they’re the only thing keeping me alive. Watch the way he says “Mine,” over and over like a vow, a brand, a prayer.
And I remember thinking this is what love is. This is what forever feels like. This is safety.
And now—Now it’s a goddamn grave.
The tears fall before I realize it’s happening. First one. Then more. Then I’m fucking crying—full-body, quiet, violent tears that shake me apart while the video plays on, while he fucks me on the screen like he loved me.
Like he didn’t end me. Like he didn’t ruin everything with that same mouth, those same hands.
I curl around the phone and I watch the whole thing. Every second, until the screen goes black and I’m left alone with the silence and the burn of what it meant.
I should turn it off. I should. The second it ends, the second my own voice stutters out in a broken moan and the screen fades to black, I should close the app, lock the phone, bury it under my pillow, throw it across the fucking room—anything.
But I don’t. I just lay there on the floor, curled sideways like something broken at the bottom of a drain, thumb hovering over the screen like I don’t have control of my own body anymore. Like my muscle memory is stronger than my shame.
I hit play again and it starts all over. The bed creaks. Nathan’s laugh, low and quiet. My voice answering. The shuffle of sheets. His fingers trailing down my stomach.
“You want it like this, baby?”
My throat tightens, but I don’t stop it. I don’t look away. I watch myself say yes—watch my eyes flutter, my hips tilt, my mouth fall open around a gasp that’s not quite a word. Watch him press into me slow, greedy, soft in a way he never was when anyone else was watching.
It’s the same every time. Same voice. Same angle. Same filthy, sweet little things.
“You feel so good around me.” “Don’t ever leave me.” “You were made for this, made for me, look at you, Julian—fuck, you’re perfect—”
And I do look perfect. My mouth open, pink and desperate, whispering please, whispering more, saying his name like it means something.
I hit play again. And again. And somewhere between the third and the fifth rewatch, I realize I’m getting hard.
Stomach tight, hips twitching. I’m sweating again, breathing too shallow, watching my own legs wrapped around a ghost. Watching my back arch.
Watching my mouth drop open as Nathan drives into me.
The sound of it—our skin, our moans, our mess—it all feels like someone’s dragging me down by the spine into a place I should’ve burned when I left it.
But I can’t stop. I can’t fucking stop. Because I don’t know if I’m chasing pleasure, or pain, or just the illusion of being wanted again. And it all sounds the same in his voice.
I don’t even realize my hand is moving until it’s already there—dragging down my stomach, slipping under the waistband of my sweats, fingers curling around myself like I’m trying to anchor my own body in place before it shakes apart again.
The video keeps playing. My breath keeps stuttering. And I’m watching myself come undone under a man who isn’t here, who isn’t mine, who never fucking was—and it breaks something in me that was already cracked straight through.
I stroke myself hard, desperate, chasing the sound of his voice.
The way he groans against my throat. The way he says my name in the video like he owns every breath I take.
My hips jerk up into my own hand, fast and messy, head tipped back against the metal wall as the ghost of his mouth drags me closer and closer to the fucking edge.
“Rafe—” It slips out. A broken moan wrapped around a name that shouldn’t be there.
My whole body seizes with it. I don’t mean it. I don’t fucking mean it. But the words are already out, and I hate myself for them the second they leave my mouth. I grit my teeth like I can bite them back, like I can scrape the name off my tongue with my own guilt.
But it doesn’t matter. I came moaning the name of the man who taped me to a fucking goalpost.
Not Nathan.
Rafe.
It happens fast—too fast after weeks of withdrawal, days of starving, hours of needing anything, anyone, any piece of the world that felt like it used to. My back arches and my breath breaks as the pleasure hits sharp and violent, humiliating in the way it rips through me before I can stop it.
I come quietly and frantically into my own palm, shaking hard enough that my forehead drops against the cold steel wall, pressing there as everything inside me finally snaps. The high lasts a second—maybe two—just long enough to trick my body into believing it found something it was starving for.
Then it crashes.
My vision blurs, my throat tightens, and my chest hollows out like a sinkhole opening beneath my ribs.
The tears come fast and hard, angry and hot and completely unstoppable.
I curl forward, away from the wall, away from the phone still glowing on the floor, and wrap both arms around myself like I can somehow hold the pieces together.
But I can’t.
Not this time. Not after watching that, after coming to him, to a ghost, to a memory that should’ve been buried the night he sold me out.
I sob—quiet at first, then louder, broken, shattered, choking on the sounds I swore I’d never make for him again. My whole body trembles like the orgasm wrung something vital out of me instead of giving it back.
I feel filthy. And all I can think is: I want him back. I hate him. I want him back. I hate him. I want him back—The thoughts loop until they blur, until the only thing left is the hollow ache and the wreckage of what he turned me into.
I curl tighter on the floor, tears dripping onto the back of my hand, breath hitching around sobs I can’t swallow. And for the first time since the compound, I don’t try to stop it, I just break.