22. Amiyah
Chapter twenty-two
Amiyah
Interval training.
Four minutes at pace, one minute recovery. Rinse, repeat, don’t think.
The earbuds are playing something aggressively synthetic—a playlist I curated specifically to drown out the sound of my own thoughts, which is the entire point of running at 6:15 on a Tuesday morning when the rest of Los Angeles is still negotiating with its alarm clock.
Unit 1504 is quiet and soft-pink in the early light, exactly as I left it last night.
A takeout container sits on the kitchen island, the lid askew, chopsticks poking out at an angle that suggests I was either very hungry or very tired when I put it down.
Probably both. The floor-to-ceiling windows are still set to privacy mode, the glass frosted to a soft white that turns the early sunlight into something diffuse and manageable.
Outside, the city is just beginning to wake up—distant traffic, the low hum of a garbage truck somewhere on the block below, the quiet stretch of a Tuesday before the real heat hits.
Pink sports bra. Pink leggings. The Nikes pounding the treadmill belt are a shade of blush the box called “millennial rose”, which I obviously bought under duress. My hair tie is currently digging into my scalp like it has a personal vendetta against my central nervous system.
I refuse to fix it.
The pain is data.
Data is valid.
My therapist would tell me I’m intellectualizing my discomfort again, but my therapist doesn't live in Unit 1504 and she isn't currently losing a fistfight with her own impulse control.
Four minutes. Recovery. The timer on my watch vibrates against my wrist. I drop the pace to a jog, let my breathing slow, reach for the water bottle perched on the treadmill’s cup holder.
The liquid is room temperature. I drink half of it anyway, because hydration is non-negotiable and also because I need something to do with my hands.
Then Jae Kim’s laugh cuts straight through the synth bass.
The low, warm, velvety sound that escaped him that night on his couch when I threw the pillow at his face and he let it hit him. The laugh that starts in his chest, works its way up through his throat, and settles somewhere right behind my sternum like a hook.
It isn’t a memory. It’s a physical hit. The weight of it. The texture. The way his head tipped back and his eyes crinkled at the corners, for three seconds looking like a man who had completely forgotten how to keep his guard up. The sound fills my headset, drowning out the track entirely.
My feet slam harder against the belt. The shock travels straight up through my ankles, my shins, my knees.
I slam the speed up to an 8.0. The motor whines under the sudden surge.
The bass rattles in my ears, louder, angrier, a desperate attempt to drown out a sound that’s already lodged behind my teeth.
It doesn’t work.
His laugh loops behind the music, and my heart gives a hard, inconvenient kick against my ribs—nothing to do with cardio, and everything to do with the fact that a guy I met seven months ago has completely high-jacked my brain.
I finish the run.
My shirt is soaked through, sticking to my skin in a damp patch the air conditioning turns cold in seconds. I hit the stop button, and the belt slows, whirring to a halt. Dismounting, I wipe my face with the pink towel hanging from the handle, and drain the rest of the water.
I strip out of my soaked gym clothes, drop them in the hamper, and spend ten minutes under a freezing shower until my skin goes numb. I change into a pair of soft pink cotton shorts and an oversized tee, twist my wet hair into a claw clip, and pour a cold brew over ice.
Ritual restored.
Today, it doesn’t fix a goddamn thing.
Three hours later, I’m cross-legged on the sectional with a contract law brief spread across my knees.
The document is pristine—pages highlighted in a gradient system that would make a neurosurgeon nod in approval, tabs color-coded by clause type, marginalia written in a handwriting so precise it could be typeset.
I’ve read the same paragraph four times.
First pass: standard procedural reading.
Eyes moving left to right, brain engaged, the familiar rhythm of legal analysis clicking into gear.
Subject matter jurisdiction. Venue considerations.
The plaintiff’s standing argument, which is weak but not fatally so.
I make a note in the margin. Blue pen. Standing issues get blue.
Second pass: something slips. My eyes are moving, but the words blur at the edges, the legal framework dissolving into meaningless ink.
I blink. Refocus. Try again.
By the third pass, my brain completely abandons the brief.
Then there’s his gaze—that dark, infuriatingly patient look he pulls whenever he thinks I’m not looking.
He doesn't skim; he catalog-scans. I’ve caught him in the act at least a dozen times.
In the alcove, resting his manga over his casebook just to watch me highlight margins.
On his couch, letting his avatar die in the lobby because he was too busy watching my face.
At the pet hospital, elbows deep in scrub prep, holding my eyes across the room with enough weight to make my neck burn. He’s too observant for his own good.
The brief is dead in the water. The text is just paper. I snap it shut, the pages settling against each other with a sharp clack. I open it. Close it again. The tabs bristle against my palm—a whole architecture of focus that I am completely throwing in the trash.
I drop the brief onto the coffee table and stop fighting it.
The second I stop reading, he’s just there.
I can still feel the hard line of his shoulder pressed right against mine on his couch, the sudden, heavy warmth of his body bleeding straight through his sweater.
I stare at the ceiling, hit by the dawning, humiliating reality that I am losing my goddamn mind.
By late afternoon, the sheer volume of space he’s occupying in my head moves from annoying to a full-blown operational hazard. I’ve spent six hours dissecting a man who isn't even in the room—his voice, his shoulder, the way his jaw sets when he’s about to drive me crazy.
I need a hard reboot.
I set my phone face-down on the granite island hard enough to make the stone ring.
I pull up a dating app, flicking through profiles with the cold eye of a border guard inspecting passports.
Four minutes of fast, ruthless scrolling.
Every single face is aggressively uninteresting.
I lock the screen, watching the display cut to black, reflecting the flush rising up my neck under the kitchen lights.
Seven months.
Four months of spring semester, three months of summer break, and zero casual hookups.
No low-stakes friction to clear my head.
My system isn't broken; it’s just starved.
The math is simple, biological, and completely unromantic: my body is throwing a localized tantrum over a seven-month dry spell, and because I’ve spent all morning listening to Jae’s voice run on loop, my brain is confusing basic physical drive with something deeper.
It’s just a physiological glitch. And glitches get fixed.
I pull my laptop onto the bed. The duvet is still tangled from this morning, pushed to the foot of the frame.
The white canopy hangs soft overhead, fairy lights threaded through the fabric casting a warm glow that makes the room look like an Instagram aesthetic board—a ridiculous contrast for a bedroom owned by someone who removes people for a living.
I open a tab, navigating straight to the kind of video designed for fast, efficient results. High-production, clean angles, athletic actors. No plot, no fake romance.
I reach into the nightstand drawer, past the lavender lotion and melatonin, and wrap my fingers around my dual-density silicone dildo.
The vein detail runs thick along the shaft, the textured head molded into a deep, defined ridge.
It’s firm, heavy, and already warming against my palm.
I flick the base—full charge—and lay it on the duvet next to a bottle of lube.
The video loads, casting a harsh blue light over my legs. The guy on screen is broad-shouldered and sharp-jawed, lifting the woman by her thighs and pinning her to a tiled wall while his cock drives into her pussy with a wet, heavy rhythm.
I slide off my pink shorts and underwear, letting the room air hit my skin. I pop the cap on the lube, slathering my pussy and slicking the veined silicone until it shines under the canopy lights.
I spread my knees on the duvet, pressing the thick, rounded tip against my entrance.
My pussy is already slick, aching with a heavy, sharp pulse I refuse to analyze.
I tilt my hips and force the head past my lips.
The stretch is thick and immediate, forcing a sharp gasp out of my throat as I take the entire length in one smooth, ruthless push, burying it until the base flattens against my thighs.
I find a hard, steady pace. Pulling back until the head almost slips free, then driving it all the way back in.
Wet, heavy, relentless. I bring my hand down, slicking my clit with lube and circling the swollen node in fast, tight loops that match the slap of skin on screen.
My back arches off the mattress. The actor on the display lets out a rough grunt as he buries himself to the hilt, and I match him thrust for thrust, fucking my pussy with clinical speed, digging the ridge of the toy up into my g-spot until my stomach coils tight.
Then my brain completely blows the operation.
It isn't the guy on the screen.
It's Jae.
The image slams into me with terrifying detail: Jae’s hands—broad, calloused, scarred along the knuckles—gripping my waist and hauling me right onto the edge of the mahogany desk in the library alcove.
Not a cold toy, but his actual, heavy cock tearing into my pussy, driving me back against the wood.
I picture his jaw locked, his eyes turned nearly black as he pins my wrists over my head, his chest slick against mine as he drives into me with a brutal, deliberate weight that makes the desk groan under us.
The scent of cedar and warm skin hits me so hard I choke on air. I can hear him—not his calm, dry study voice, but the low, wrecked sound of him swearing in Korean right against my ear as he buries his cock as deep as it will go inside me.
The fantasy shatters my control. My thumb goes wild over my soaked clit, my hips slamming up to meet the silicone as I fuck myself with a frantic, messy rhythm.
The orgasm hits like an impact.
My pussy violently clamps around the shaft, pulsing in hard, agonizing waves that rip a raw moan straight out of my throat.
Heat explodes through my thighs, my knees shaking against the sheets as my clit throbs out of control, every nerve ending firing at once while Jae’s name sits trapped, heavy and humiliating, behind my teeth.
When the wave finally breaks, I’m left staring up at the white canopy, completely wrecked, the heavy dildo still buried deep inside my wet pussy as my heart hammers against my ribs.
The video is still running on the laptop, the actors catching their breath over the speakers.
I reach out with a shaking hand and slam the screen down, plunging the room back into the soft glow of the fairy lights.
I pull the toy out with a slick, quiet slide, the vibration humming against my palm before I kill the power.
“Fuck,” I say to the empty room.
The ceiling doesn't care. Outside, Los Angeles keeps moving through its Tuesday, completely indifferent to the collapse of my self-control.
I get up and wash my hands at the vanity sink.
The mirror catches my reflection—flushed chest, hair falling out of its clip, my lips swollen and dark pink in a way that always follows a hard come.
I look away immediately. The woman in the glass looks like she just lost a fight to her own desires, and I’m not having that debate today.
I pour a glass of water at the island and toss the takeout box into the trash, chopsticks and all. I set the glass down, press my palms flat against the cold granite, and take one long, deliberate breath.
This changes nothing.