5. Tatum
TATUM
Ileft while he was getting dressed.
I didn’t sneak out. I simply told him I needed to go home, and he’d looked at me with those eyes and said, “Okay.”
No argument. No pressure. He’d kissed my forehead, handed me my blazer, and walked me to the elevator with his hand on the small of my back.
The ride down to the lobby was seventeen floors of silence and the smell of his soap on my skin.
I summoned a car on my phone and sat in the back seat with my wet hair soaking through my blazer collar, watching the city slide past. My body was still humming. My brain was trying to catch up.
He’d washed my hair.
That was the part I couldn’t get past. Not the couch, not his hands, not any of the rest of it. The shower.
I’d stepped under the water expecting something heated, another round, and instead he’d turned me around and worked shampoo through my hair with both hands. Slow. Thorough. His fingers against my scalp, his chest warm behind me, steam filling the glass.
He hadn’t said a word. Just took care of it. Like it was obvious. Like of course he’d do that.
Nobody had ever done that.
I’d stood there with water running down my face and my walls breaking down.
So I did what I always do. I’d made a joke. Something sharp about his taste in shampoo. He hadn’t laughed. He’d just rinsed my hair and wrapped me in a towel and looked at me like he could see those walls and was choosing not to push.
That was worse. The pushing I could handle. The patience terrified me.
The car dropped me at Pixel Lofts. I climbed the stairs to the third floor, my legs tired in a way that had nothing to do with the steps. The hallway was quiet. My keys were loud in the lock.
I walked into 3A and stood in my own apartment.
Clean. Organized. Every surface exactly where I’d left it.
The dish rack empty, the counter wiped, the throw pillows on the couch arranged because I arranged them every morning before I left.
No dishes in the sink. No shoes by the door.
No evidence that anyone lived here except someone who kept things handled.
Through the wall, I could hear Eliza in 3B.
On the phone, her voice muffled but animated.
Passionate about something. A donor, a fundraiser, someone who needed convincing.
She was laughing between sentences, fully alive at 11:30 on a Thursday night, caring out loud about something that mattered to her.
I stood in my silent kitchen and listened.
My apartment sounded like my childhood.
The thought hit me so hard I leaned against the counter. Not to steady myself. Just to feel something solid.
I’d spent thirteen years building this. The sharp edges, the competence, the jokes that kept people close enough to like me and far enough to never need anything from me.
I’d turned myself into someone who could handle everything because I’d been the kid who had to.
And it got me through school, through the first nine months at Pleasure Valley Capital, through every room I’d ever walked into.
I handled things. That was what I did.
But standing in my kitchen with the smell of his shampoo still in my hair and the phantom pressure of his fingers still on my scalp, I couldn’t pretend this was peace.
This was the same empty house I grew up in. I’d just made it prettier.
My dad worked doubles because he had to. He came home exhausted because the world didn’t give him a choice. But I had a choice. I’d been choosing this every single day. The clean counters, the silent rooms, the controlled, managed, organized loneliness that I’d been calling independence for years.
Sayer Drake had washed my hair, and I’d made a joke and walked out of his building.
Because letting someone take care of me felt like becoming the kid at the kitchen table again. The one who waited. The one who needed someone who wasn’t there.
I stood in my kitchen for a long time. Eliza’s voice through the wall faded. The building settled into quiet. The clock on the microwave changed from 11:47 to 11:48 to 11:49.
My keys were still in my hand.