Chapter 32 Jillian
JILLIAN
“I’m taking back the crown / I’m all dressed up and naked / I see what’s mine and take it”
— “Emperor’s New Clothes” by Panic! at the Disco
I don’t go straight home after leaving Kir’s building.
I walk for a while, down Sixth, then west toward the river, then south for no reason at all.
It’s essential to just keep moving so I can burn off whatever toxic residue is still buzzing under my skin from Kir’s hand inside my jeans and his mouth against my ear.
The absolute nerve of him to make me want him while I’m trying so very hard to hate him! How dare he?
By the time I actually make it back to my apartment, it’s after seven and I’m bone-tired.
I lock the door behind me, then just to be sure, I slide home the deadbolt and the security chain.
I drop my bag on the counter, then bend in half to rest my forehead on the cool marble.
I stand there like that for a minute doing absolutely nothing before I let out an earth-shattering sigh, straighten up, and wander into my bedroom.
I stop a foot inside the door and look up. The vent above the closet door is dark. No red light. The camera remains in my purse, where I put it after Kir pressed it into my hand. I haven’t decided what to do with it yet. That’s a problem for Future Jillian.
I change out of yesterday’s wrinkled clothes and pull on a soft, oversized T-shirt and a pair of cotton pajama shorts.
The shirt is from freshman year, with NYU stamped in proud purple across the front.
To be honest, I don’t know why I still have it.
I don’t keep much from that period of my life.
Most of it went into garbage bags during the move out of the dorms. I threw it all away and didn’t look back.
Somehow, the shirt survived the purge.
Sighing again at an obnoxious volume, as if that’ll banish my aimless thoughts, I brush my teeth, wash my face, and get into bed, even though it’s not even eight P.M. yet.
But then, because my brain hates me and wants me to be miserable forever, I reach for my phone and open the photo album I keep buried deep, tucked inside a folder called “Tax Docs 2019,” inside another folder called “Misc.” Nobody would ever find it by accident. That’s the point.
There’s only one photo in it: A hospital bracelet on a tiny, pink, chubby wrist. In the background, the edge of a white cotton blanket.
I stare at it for a while. Then I close the album and lock the phone. I pull the covers up to my chin and lie there in the quiet, waiting for a sound at the window that doesn’t come.
Unfortunately for me, sleep doesn’t come, either. I force myself to wait a full hour before I throw the covers off and pad into the kitchen.
The camera is right where I left it, buried at the bottom of my purse.
I fish it out and carry it back to the bedroom, then sit on the edge of the bed and turn it over in my fingers.
It’s so small. Barely weighs anything. The red LED is off because the battery pack got jostled loose during my angry purse-stuffing earlier.
I could flush it down the toilet. I could smash it with a hammer. I could drop it in the trash compactor in the basement and never think about it again.
But instead of doing any of those things, I click the battery pack back into place.
The red light blinks on.
I carry it to my dresser and prop it against the jewelry box, angling the lens toward the bed. Then I step back and look at it. The tiny red dot pulses in the dim room.
He’s watching. I don’t have proof of that. I just know it the way I know my own name, the way I know the layout of this apartment in the dark. Kir Lazarev is on the other end of this little blinking light, and he’s watching me right now.
What I’m doing isn’t normal. I know that. I’m no longer just allowing these things to happen to me; I’m actively opting into them. I’m choosing the darkness and the masks it wears. Like Elvis, normal has long since left the building, if it was ever even here in the first place.
What does that say about me? I’m broken; I know that, too.
But maybe I’m broken in a very specific way that Kir Lazarev slots into perfectly.
Somewhere in the wreckage of what happened to me five years ago, my psychological wiring got crossed up so badly that danger and safety swapped places in my head.
A gentle man like Elliot makes my skin crawl.
A man who broke into my apartment with a gun makes me feel seen.
That’s insane.
… And yet.
I pull my knees up and rest my chin on them, still facing the lens. For a while, that’s all I do. Nine becomes 9:30, and I still haven’t moved.
But things are happening inside of me. A strange, reckless flush, like someone struck a match and lit something low in my belly, is rising up and making my head swim. I have jittery energy in the tips of my fingers and my nipples are oddly strained and peaked. They know something I don’t.
The flush keeps going. It is a wave of heat and it keeps finding new nooks and crannies in my body to suffuse with fire.
My breath is coming shorter now and I haven’t even moved.
I’m just sitting here on my own bed, knees drawn up, facing a camera the size of a thumb drive, and my entire body is screaming at me.
Because I want him to see me.
Not in the abstract, not in the safe little fantasy I can fold up and tuck away when it’s done.
I want him right now, in this room, with his hands on me and his weight pressing me into this mattress.
I want the mask and the cinnamon and the low timbre in which he says my name when he’s about to lose control.
I want his fingers digging bruises into my hips. I want to hear him tell me I’m his.
My skin feels too tight. Every nerve ending is awake and demanding attention.
The red light blinks. He’s there. Eyes peeled. Waiting to see what I do next.
That only makes the heat worse.
So it’s no surprise, really, that I do what I do next.
That my fingers reach for the hem of my shirt.
That my knees fall wide to either side.
That I pull the shirt up, exposing a strip of stomach, then nervously tug it back down.
“This is crazy. I can’t be… You shouldn’t… This is just crazy, okay?” I announce to the empty room.
But my fingers once again start to tease the shirt up my trembling belly.
“I’m only doing this because I want to,” I tell the camera sternly. “Not because you asked. Because I want to.”
Saying that part out loud helps in some weird way. Putting it into words—I want to; I, me, Jillian Pierce, choose this—takes the shaky, guilty knot in my chest and loosens it. Not all the way, but enough.
Because it’s true. Nobody’s making me do this. There’s no gloved hand on my wrist, no body blocking the door. Kir isn’t here. He can’t touch me. He can’t direct me. All he can do is watch? if I choose to let him.
And I’m letting him.
For five years, the question of what I want and what I allow has been this impossible tangle, balled up so tight I couldn’t find either end. But right now, alone in my own room on my own bed, I’m the only variable in the equation. It’s just me and a blinking red light.
The trembling in my fingers quiets down. The nervousness fades. A wild, laughing, seductive confidence takes its place.
I’m not nervous anymore. I’m decided.
I pull the NYU shirt over my head in one motion and drop it on the floor beside the bed, but I cup one hand across my braless breasts to hide them from the camera’s view. The air hits my bare skin and I shiver, but it’s not from cold.
“You’re watching, aren’t you?” I whisper coyly. “You’re sitting in your office with the lights off, all alone. I bet it’s killing you that you’re so far from me, isn’t it?”
The red light blinks.
“And,” I say with a nibble at my bottom lip, “I bet you’re frothing at the mouth, practically begging for me to move my hand so you can see more of me. Aren’t you, Mr. Lazarev?”
I slide my hand down an inch. Just one teasing little inch, enough to let the curve of my breasts peek over the tops of my fingers. Then I stop.
“Hmm. No, not yet, I don’t think. You haven’t earned that yet.”
I bring my hand back up and cover myself fully again, pressing my palm flat against my chest. I can feel my own heartbeat thumping against my palm. I tell the camera, “You’ve been watching me without my permission for days. So now, you watch on my terms. And my terms say you wait.”
I arch my head to the left and let my hair fall over one shoulder, exposing the other side of my neck, where Kir bit down hard enough to leave a bruise that I’ve been covering with turtlenecks and concealer all week. I turn so the lens can see it.
“You left this,” I scold lightly, brushing my fingertips over the fading mark. “I had to wear a scarf to work, you animal.”
I trail those same fingertips down the side of my neck, across my collarbone, and along the top of my other hand where it’s still covering my chest. I trace lazy circles on my own skin, taking my sweet time, going nowhere in particular.
“I wonder what you’re doing right now.” My voice sounds alien to my own ears.
Breathy, sultry. It’s the voice of the woman I’ve pretended to be at work for five years now.
“Are you sitting back? Or are you already reaching for your belt because you just can’t take it anymore?
I hope you’re suffering. I bet you are.”
I spread my fingers apart, just enough to let the camera catch glimpses of skin between them. Not enough to see anything real. Merely shadows and suggestions. I bite my lip again and grin.
Then I change position on the mattress, uncrossing my legs and stretching them out in front of me. The cotton shorts ride up on my thighs. I leave them where they are and lean back on one elbow, still holding my other hand across my breasts, still shielding them from view.