14 - Isa #2
This is who he's always been. The warmth was real, but it was also the trap. He loved me like a collector loves a butterfly. Beautiful in a case, wings pinned, perfectly preserved and perfectly dead.
"We're done." I turn toward the door, needing distance from him and from my body's response to him. "Don't contact me. Don't speak to me. Don't bring me coffee. We're done, Adrian."
"Never." The word follows me, certain as gravity.
My hand reaches for the exit, already planning the police report, the restraining order, the immediate move to anywhere that isn't next door to him. This ends now.
But Adrian moves. Fast. Faster than I've ever seen him move, with a predator's grace I should have recognized before. He blocks my path to the door, his body suddenly between me and the exit. His hand finds his pocket, and I hear the mechanical click of the lock engaging electronically.
"Open it." My voice stays level despite the spike of adrenaline.
"No."
He's locked me in. Actually locks his apartment door with me inside. The reality of it makes my pulse hammer in my throat, at my wrists, between my thighs.
"Adrian, open the fucking door."
"You're not leaving." Matter of fact. Simple. "Not until we sort this out."
"You can't just…" I reach around him and pull at the handle, testing it. Solid. Professional-grade lock from the feel of it. "This is kidnapping."
"Yes."
The simple acknowledgment makes my breath catch. He knows exactly what he's doing. No delusions, no justifications. He's choosing to trap me here, fully aware of what that means.
"I have a knife."
"I know." He blocks my exit completely, doesn't move aside, doesn't give me any path to freedom. Just stands between me and the locked door with that terrible calm. My hand drops from the useless door handle, but I don’t step back.
The heat of his body radiates toward me, making me dizzy. "You won't use it."
Within a moment, I press the tip of the blade to his neck, eyes narrowing. "You sure about that?"
"Yes." He sets the key fob on a shelf, deliberately, where I can see it but can't reach it without going through him. "Because part of you wants to stay."
He names what my body is screaming even while my mind rebels, and it makes me want to scream. He's right. The locked door is doing something to me, feeding that same broken need that kept me in the chamber. Trapped. Captive. Kept.
The word makes me wet, and I hate myself for it.
The click of the lock echoes through my mind, through my bones. He's caging me, and my body responds like it's been waiting for this moment. Like every cell recognizes its captor and wants to lean into his chest, let him wrap those arms around me and… No.
I stand facing Adrian with my knife still at his neck.
He waits with that patient certainty that makes my skin burn.
The apartment air feels thick, charged with everything that's breaking between us. His cologne fills the space, mixing with the coffee scent until I’m drowning in the familiar smell of what I thought was safety.
My body wages war with my mind. Fury at being caged battles with the liquid heat spreading through me at the thought of being kept. And the worst part, the part that makes me want to put my knife through his throat or my mouth on his, is how my body responds to the cage.
My whole body is turned up too loud, nipples aching against my shirt. My pussy throbs with each heartbeat, responding to his proximity, his intensity, the sheer wrongness of being held here against my will. I can feel the heat of him, the way his breathing has gone deeper, like he's affected too.
"Let me out." The words emerge, small and useless, their urgency drowned out by the electric silence between us. I want to believe I'm the one in control—I have the knife, the threat, the moral high ground. But even I can hear how unconvincing it sounds, how my voice fractures at the edges.
His eyes never leave me, not even to blink. "No, carina," he says softly, like he's settling the matter for both of us. "Never."
The refusal sends heat straight to my clit, makes it pulse with need.
He steps aside, slow and deliberate, sliding out from between me and the door.
The movement is graceful and terrifying, like watching the ocean recede before a tidal wave.
Suddenly there's nothing between me and the exit but air and the knowledge that I will have to go through him to reach it.
My hand tightens around the knife, willing myself to surge forward.
But I don't. Can't. The loss of his heat is a grief, a vacuum, and my treacherous body wants to walk backward into his arm instead of forward to freedom.
I stand there, paralyzed, watching him put himself between me and the key fob on the shelf.
The meaning is obvious: if I want it, I'll have to fight him for it.
The scenario is absurd, almost laughable, except for the way my core clenches at the thought.
At the way the idea of a struggle, of a contest of wills, of being overpowered, makes my skin come alive.
I turn slowly to face him, my back to the door.
"You want me to beg?" I spit out, desperate to reassert ground. "You want to see me on my knees?"
"I want you safe," he says. "I want you here. With me. Where you belong."
The words land with a force that feels like a punch and a caress. My hands shake on the knife, but I don't advance. Instead, I remember the chamber in the Aviary, the way I surrendered inch by inch, the way I had to be forced to accept comfort even when it was all I wanted.
"You don't get to decide where I belong," I say, but my voice is already giving it away, softening at the edges.
All my life I've prided myself on being strong, self-sufficient, in control. The last fourteen years have been an exercise in never needing, never asking, never depending. The idea of being someone's possession should make me sick—but here, now, it electrifies me.
"You think this is love?" I whisper. "You think trapping me, forcing me—"
"I think it's inevitable," he says, and there's a sad joy in his voice. "I think we were always going to end up here."
The truth of it is so clear it hurts to look it in the face. I want to run, but the thought of escaping this apartment is suddenly so much smaller than the craving to stay and see what happens if I give in just a little.
Adrian takes a careful step closer, holding his hands out where I can see them, like an animal trainer approaching a wounded thing. "You can hurt me, Isa," he says. "If that's what you need. But it won't change anything. You want this, too."
I almost want him to be wrong, to be arrogant and delusional and stupid. But he's not, and that's what undoes me. That's what melts the last icy layer of resolve inside me and leaves me standing, empty-handed, in the middle of his living room, wanting to hate him but wanting him more.
The knife weighs heavy in my hand. I could use it.
Could force the issue. But he's right. I won't. Because underneath the rage, underneath the betrayal, underneath the violation of everything I thought I knew about him, there's this: the appalling pull of surrender.
Of letting someone else hold the keys, make the choices, take control.
The same need that made me stay in the chamber at the Aviary. The same hunger I can't name or escape.
"You were never getting on that plane, mi amor," he says softly. "Lisbon was never real. There's nowhere you can go that I won't follow."
My body pulses with heat I hate myself for feeling. I'm his captive, and I'm undone, and I can't tell anymore which one is causing the other.