Chapter 37
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
-Thalia-
As I wake up in the middle of the night, I see Xander standing near the edge of the bed, unable to sleep after what happened.
He turns to look at me as if he has all the time in the world.
For the first time in what feels like forever, it’s just us.
There are no ghosts, no footsteps in the shadows, no voice in my head whispering fear.
The night feels quieter than any I can remember.
I turn to the side, flicking on the lamp.
The lamplight paints the room in amber, soft and alive, and I realize this is what peace must look like—fragile but finally mine.
I don’t know how long I just breathe, letting the quiet settle inside me like fresh snowfall.
Peace feels foreign, like wearing someone else’s coat.
For months, I didn’t even trust silence. Silence used to mean danger.
Silence meant I wasn’t allowed to speak.
Silence meant he was thinking.
Now, silence means freedom.
Xander’s presence doesn’t fill the room the way Damian’s did, looming, penetrating, suffocating.
Xander simply exists beside me.
Steady. Grounded. Real.
It strikes me now that healing isn’t loud.
It’s not big grand gestures or timelines or checklists.
Sometimes healing looks like lying in bed with someone who doesn’t need to own your air to feel powerful.
Sometimes healing is the absence of fear.
For the first time, the quiet isn’t a threat.
It’s a beginning.
“You’re staring,” I tease. Xander’s mouth curves into that dangerous smile, the one that promises I won’t walk tomorrow.
“I’ve waited too damn long to have you like this. No distractions. No fear. Just mine.”
My breath catches in my chest, and something deep inside thrills at the word.
Mine. He grabs my ankles, pulling me to the edge of the bed so fast that I let out an audible gasp.
His hands on my ankles are rougher than a lover’s touch; they’re the hands of a man who has rehearsed the shapes of me in his head until they feel like destiny.
There’s an intensity in the way he watches me, the kind of attention that could burn or salvage, depending on who holds the flame.
His obsession is the mirror of my own. Where I once shrank, he enlarges; where I hide, he claims. It’s terrifying and intoxicating all at once.
He tells me he has waited, how long becomes irrelevant, and the weight of that waiting folds into the moment like gravity.
I catch myself measuring him back. Is he fierce because he loves me, or because he cannot stand the idea of losing what he thinks is his?
The answer is both. There’s a dangerous tenderness in a man who would let the world burn to keep you, and there is a tenderness that can steady you when the world is already on fire.
I hold my breath and choose to trust the tenderness.
My legs dangle off the side, body open to him, vulnerable and exposed. But this time, it isn’t weakness—it is power. Power used to mean control. His control over my decisions, my body, my breath.
Now power feels like choosing to stay instead of being trapped.
I used to wonder if I’d ever reclaim my body.
I’d stare in the mirror and feel like a stranger lived beneath my skin, a version of me shaped by someone else’s violence.
But here, with Xander looking at me like I hung the constellations… I feel ownership returning to my bones.
Not ownership through possession.
Ownership through autonomy.
My heartbeat isn’t a warning bell anymore.
It’s a declaration.
It was my choice to give him this.
“Color?” he asks softly, eyes locking with mine.
“Green,” I whisper, and I mean it. Xander’s grin sharpens, reaching for the silk tie draped over the nightstand, looping it around my wrists and securing them above my head. It makes me shiver—not from fear but from anticipation. Each knot is a reminder.
I trust him. Trust doesn’t happen all at once.
My therapist showed me breathing patterns, tools that sound so simple I almost resent them.
Four counts in, hold two, and six out. I practice them under the hum of the refrigerator, in the grocery line, while Xander is in the shower and the apartment feels very large and empty.
The exercises are ridiculous and miraculous; they don’t erase panic so much as teach me how to ride its tide.
We also map triggers—sounds, scents, phrases that can jerk me backward.
Sometimes I forget; sometimes I flinch at a wardrobe zipper or the scrape of a chair.
When I tell Xander what I learn, he listens the way someone receives a map to a place they love but do not know.
He asks questions that are small and respectful.
‘Do you want me here? Do you want me quiet? Should I hold your hand?’ If there is a single gift this trauma leaves me, it’s that I know what I need now, and I am allowed to ask for it.
He makes himself an apprentice to my safety.
It’s not a switch that flips; it’s a bridge built plank by plank.
When Xander ties my wrists, he doesn’t bind me to hold me down.
He binds me so that I can choose to stay.
Damian took choices.
Xander gives them back.
Sometimes I wonder if that’s what love really is. Not possession, not the hunger to consume… but the willingness to hold without taking.
He leans down, lips brushing the edge of my ear.
There are nights when desire arrives, not as a demand but as a patient, polite guest. Xander waits at the doorway of my consent, checking in with whispered questions that sound like prayers.
“Do you want this?” he asks in a hundred different ways.
A look, a touch at the knuckle, the slam of a palm replaced by the feathering of a thumb.
I start saying ‘yes’ differently, intentionally, considering the word a small victory.
Reclaiming my body is slow. It is green light given and taken back.
It is negotiation. It is the shock of wanting and being allowed to want without apology.
Sometimes the wanting is messy, a mixture of fear and need; sometimes it is clean and soft.
Xander’s hands learn the difference between force and guidance.
He learns when to press and when to soften, when to stay and when to step back.
We build a cadence together that feels less like a rescue and more like a duet.
“I’m going to ruin you tonight, Thalia. And you’re going to beg me for more.” My body trembles as his hand closes gently around my throat, applying just enough pressure to remind me of his strength, but never enough to steal my breath.
His other hand slides down my body, lingering on every curve until he reaches the heat between my thighs. I’m already wet, aching and ready for him.
“See?” he murmurs, slipping two fingers inside.
“Your body knows who it belongs to.” I moan as he muffles it with his mouth, crashing against me, teeth and tongue claiming me with brutal tenderness.
Every thrust of his fingers pushes me higher until I writhe against the restraints, my body begging for more.
But Xander isn’t about to make it easy.
He pulls back just as I teeter on the edge, his smirk infuriatingly smug. “Not yet, baby. You’ll come when I say you can.”
There’s a strange beauty in anticipating pleasure instead of fearing pain.
There are things Xander does that unsettle me and make me feel worshipped at once.
He walks the stairs to my building twice at night just to check.
He replaces the bulbs in my balcony light with stronger ones.
He knows the names of my neighbors and the makes of their cars.
He times his arrival to be early enough to be across the street when I leave and late enough to be waiting by the mailbox when I return.
It could be overbearing if it were possessive; instead, it reads as devotion.
But I’m not na?ve. I have watched men care in ways that suffocate.
I need him to remember the difference between keeping me safe and owning me.
When he sees that hesitation on my face, he breathes and shows me the receipts, like the way he declines friends who joke about owning their partners.
He says he would move heaven and earth for me; I believe him.
But the promise must always come with permission.
That is the bargain we make over and over.
The restraint isn’t a cage; it’s a promise.
Damian took because he could.
Xander waits because I want.
Consent isn’t just a word.
It’s a feeling, like falling without ever hitting the ground.
The frustration only sharpens my need, the fire building inside me until it feels like I might explode.
He flips me onto my stomach, pulling my hips up and slamming into me with a force that steals the air from my lungs. My scream is muffled by the pillow he presses into my face as my body shakes with the force of his thrusts.
“Louder,” he demands, yanking my head back by my hair.
“Let the world hear who owns you.” And I do.
I scream his name until it’s the only word left in my mind.
When he finally lets me come, it’s violent, shattering, my whole body convulsing with the force of it.
He follows seconds later, collapsing over me, his weight pinning me into the mattress.
I don’t feel trapped. His touch isn’t a trigger; it’s an anchor of safety.
Safety isn’t the absence of danger. It’s the presence of someone who chooses not to hurt you.
When it’s over, Xander does the smallest things that say we are okay.
He pulls the blanket up; he tucks a strand of hair behind my ear; he places his palm on the small of my back and breathes until my own breath steadies.
Aftercare for him is not theatrical. It is cooking me instant coffee, bringing a cool washcloth for my forehead, or asking if I want to talk and listening when I do.
He never asks the wrong questions. He holds me while I cry, and when the tears stop, he tells me, without drama, that he is proud I asked for help, proud I sat in the chair and said the hard words out loud.
Those words—proud, not pitiful—become a new language.
They thread into my nights, snagging my fear with something warmer and truer.
Nightmares still chase me sometimes. Corridors without doors, familiar faces contorted, the sensation of motion with no agency.
But waking has become a different thing.
I open my eyes and find Xander’s hand on my shoulder, his breathing slow and steady.
He will hum a nonsense chorus until the dream dissolves.
He will say, “You’re with me,” like an anchor drop.
I tell him the fragments when I can, sometimes coherently, sometimes in a stuttering list, and he listens without flinching.
In the beginning, I would hide the vividness of it because shame whispered to me.
Now I say the details, because naming them steals them of power.
The next morning, the world looks a little less sharp. I can make coffee without trembling. Those small wins pile up like bricks.
We talk about the future the way other people discuss movies, casually and with startling hope.
Sometimes Xander names ridiculous things—a tiny balcony swing for the back of the apartment, getting another dog who will insist on walking at dawn, a shelf where I can stack books I’ve written without feeling ashamed.
I say things back—a stable job he doesn’t have to apologize for, a ritual of Sunday pancakes, a plan for a weekend where we do nothing at all.
The plans are pretend at first, but then they become reality.
We pick paint chips. We save for a piece of secondhand furniture that neither of us needs but both of us covet.
I start to imagine a life where the past sits like a museum piece in the corner, acknowledged and important but not where we live.
The imaginings are soft and fierce at once; they are rebellion and sanctuary.
Sometimes the past is a weather system that passes through my day, a sudden sound that drops me to my knees, a flash of headlights that makes me catch my breath.
Even now, in the small light of our kitchen, I can have a day where the world ruptures for no visible reason.
In those hours, I feel the ghost of being small, of being made to feel like I do not have the right to speak.
Xander has learned the signs—the way my jaw tightens, the circular route my fingers take on a glass, the way I refuse the first offer of water but accept the second. He never forces help; he offers it.
Healing is not a linear arc; it’s a series of tiny surrenders and small recoveries.
After Damian, I didn’t think softness existed for me anymore.
I didn’t think intimacy could be anything but survival.
But Xander shows me that desire can heal.
That surrender can be power.
That choosing someone with open hands is braver than fighting with closed fists.
When we finally catch our breath, Xander unties my wrists and gathers me against his chest, kissing my hair.
“You’re mine, Thalia. Always.”
I smile, exhausted but radiant. “Always.”
Always doesn’t feel like a trap anymore.
It feels like a future.
He brushes a loose strand of hair from my face, his touch feather-light.
I don’t flinch.
That alone feels like victory.
The silence that follows is not the same kind that used to haunt me. It isn’t the heavy, suffocating quiet that comes after screaming. This one is soft and warm. The kind that lives in the space between two steady heartbeats.
Xander’s breathing evens out behind me, his hand tracing lazy patterns on my skin.
I let my eyes close and try to remember the last time I felt this kind of calm.
It doesn’t come easily. My mind still wants to wander back to the night when touch meant pain, when silence meant danger.
But here, in this bed, wrapped in him, I can finally start to rewrite what safety feels like.
There’s a difference between submission and surrender.
Submission is survival.
Surrender is choice.
I think of the girl I was, trembling, small, apologizing for taking up space.
Now I take up space in every room.
I speak without asking permission.
I breathe without apologizing.
That is my rebellion.