Chapter Eleven
Margot
For the past few days, I've been waiting to fall apart.
It seemed reasonable to expect it after walking out on Soren.
I'd booked that session because I missed him, kissed him because I was angry and wanted him anyway, then said red and left him standing there with heat pouring off his skin and enough restraint in his body to make staying almost harder than leaving.
But the collapse never came.
I wake up hungry instead.
For a while I lie there staring at the ceiling, almost offended by how ordinary I feel.
My chest still hurts when I think about him, and there's a horrible little drop in my stomach whenever my brain supplies the memory of his face after I told him what I'd been thinking, but heartbreak doesn't exempt me from breakfast.
I get up and make eggs.
It isn't until I'm halfway through eating that I notice I'm sitting at the table.
There's toast on the plate, tea beside it, and I haven't once thought about whether Soren would approve.
A month ago, I needed his rules to make me do this.
I ate because he told me to eat, slept because I knew he'd ask whether I had, and felt absurdly pleased every time I could tell him I'd done what he asked.
Now I'm doing it while actively trying not to think about him.
Somewhere along the way, I stopped needing the rules to come from Soren. Breakfast is just breakfast now. Sleep is something I make time for. Even saying no has become easier the more I do it.
Whatever happens between us, I don't have to give any of that back.
It doesn't make missing him any easier, but later that afternoon, I do something else that doesn't come naturally.
I call Tess and tell her I need her.
She asks if I'm okay, I say not particularly, and forty minutes later she's at my door with a bottle of red wine.
"You look terrible," she says as she comes inside.
"Thank you."
"I meant emotionally. Your skin actually looks annoyingly good."
"That's much better."
She holds up the wine. "I brought medical supplies."
That gets the beginning of a laugh out of me. "Glasses are in the kitchen."
"I know where your glasses are."
Of course she does. Tess has been walking into my kitchen and helping herself since we were nineteen.
She doesn’t ask what happened once we’re settled on the couch. She pours the wine, tucks her feet beneath her and waits.
So I tell her everything. Monica in the parking lot, what Soren told me when I got upstairs, the kiss that probably wasn’t my finest response to an emotionally complicated situation, and everything that unraveled afterward until I finally said red and left.
Tess stares at me over her glass. “You kissed him?”
“I was angry.”
“Those two things are not mutually exclusive, apparently.”
“It made sense at the time.” I take a drink. “Then I panicked and safeworded.”
That wipes the amusement from her face. “What did he do?”
“Stopped immediately. He didn’t ask why or try to talk me out of leaving. He just backed off and stayed there while I got dressed.”
Something in Tess’s expression softens. “Okay.”
I look at her. “Okay?”
"I'm thinking."
"That's rarely reassuring."
"Shut up, I'm trying to be wise."
Despite everything, I laugh.
Tess takes a drink and studies me over the rim of her glass. "You saw one woman leave his workplace looking happy and decided that meant everything he'd done with you was something he did with everyone."
"He has other clients."
"Exactly. You already knew that."
"Knowing it and seeing it are very different experiences."
"I'm not saying it wouldn't have bothered me." She pauses. "But you filled in a lot of blanks from one damp-haired woman walking to her car."
I don't particularly enjoy how reasonable that sounds.
"She looked like me when I leave there."
"Of course she did. Presumably the business model falls apart if everyone comes out looking traumatised."
"Tess."
"I'm serious." She shifts closer. "Margot, you don't know what happened in her session. Maybe he ran her a bath. Maybe he didn't. Maybe she likes being wrapped in cling film and serenaded in Latin. I have no idea what people are paying for in that house."
A laugh escapes me before I can stop it.
"There. Progress." She points her glass at me. "What you do know is what he told you about you."
I sink further into the couch. "That's the part I don't know how to believe."
Tess goes quiet.
There it is. The actual problem.
Not the woman in the parking lot. Not the sessions or the money or whether peonies fall under some premium aftercare package I somehow failed to notice on the website.
Soren told me I was different.
And some part of me would rather find evidence that he was lying than risk believing him and discovering later that I was wrong.
"I think I wanted her to prove it," I say.
Tess frowns. "Prove what?"
"That I'd imagined the whole thing." I roll the stem of my glass between my fingers. "I saw her and immediately decided I knew exactly what it meant. Then Soren stood there telling me the opposite, and somehow that made me angrier."
"Because?"
"I don't know."
"Yes, you do."
I give her a look.
She smiles sweetly. "You called me, remember? This is what happens when you voluntarily request the friendship package."
I hate her.
Unfortunately, I also know she's right.
Tess stays until the wine is gone and the conversation has moved on to other things. By the time she leaves, nothing is solved, but my head is quieter than it was before she arrived.
The question she left behind isn't.
Why was it easier to believe I meant nothing to Soren than to believe he might actually want me?
I sit with that longer than I want to.
Daniel comes to mind first, although blaming one mediocre ex-boyfriend for the entire architecture of my personality seems generous. Then my mother. Bree. Richard. Different people, different relationships, all of them tied together by the same thing.
I know exactly where I stand when somebody needs me.
My mother calls because something has gone wrong and I'm the person who makes it manageable.
Bree calls because there's a problem she doesn't know how to solve.
Richard drops something on my desk because he knows I'll make sure it gets done.
Even with Daniel, I spent years being the person who remembered, organized, anticipated and fixed.
There was always something I could do to justify my place.
Soren took that away from me almost immediately in the best way possible.
He didn't want me arranging anything for him. He didn't need me to make his life easier, remember his appointments or anticipate what he wanted before he asked. Every time I tried to make myself useful, he stopped me.
And somehow he still wanted me there.
That should have been easy to accept. Instead, it terrified me. Somewhere along the way, I learned to make myself useful before anyone had the chance to decide whether they simply wanted me. Being needed felt safer; if someone relied on me, at least I understood why they kept me around.
I'd spent so long confusing being needed with being wanted that I'd almost forgotten there was a difference.
And suddenly I understand why I left.
I didn't run because I thought Soren was lying.
I ran because some part of me believed him.
The realization keeps me on the living room floor for a while, staring at nothing while the feeling slowly comes back into my legs.
Eventually, I get up.
I don't call him. I think about it, more than once, but I wouldn't even know what to say yet. Sorry I safeworded and fled because you told me I mattered to you seems like something I should probably understand myself before attempting to have it with the dragon involved.
I don't book another session either.
For once, I leave the problem alone.
The hardback I bought is still on the coffee table, abandoned a few chapters in when my brain became incapable of concentrating on anything that didn't breathe fire.
I pick it up, find my place and discover that if I force myself through the first few pages, eventually I stop rereading the same sentence.
An hour later, I've finished two chapters and haven't thought about Soren for at least ten consecutive minutes.
I'm calling that progress.
A little before ten, I'm curled into the corner of the couch with the book when someone knocks on my door.
I look up.
Nobody knocks on my door. Tess would text, Bree would call from downstairs because she'd forgotten which apartment was mine, and my mother considers arriving without warning an offence when other people do it.
I mark my page and cross the room.
I check the peephole and stop.
For a second, I genuinely think my brain has finally given up.
Soren is standing on the other side of my door.
I stare at him through the tiny warped circle for several seconds before I remember that doors are generally supposed to be opened.
I unlock it and pull it back.
I've only ever seen Soren at the mansion, where everything around him seems designed to make him look even more imposing. Dark clothes, old stone, low light, a house full of monsters where a six-foot-something dragon with gold eyes somehow makes perfect sense.
He looks very different standing in my apartment hallway.
He's wearing jeans and a dark sweater beneath his coat, his hair slightly out of place, and there's something so strangely ordinary about seeing him under the terrible hallway light that I can only stare.
Then I notice what he's holding.
The peonies.
Not the fresh ones he gave me. These have been pressed beneath glass, their pale pink petals flattened and preserved.
I look from them to him. "Hi, what are you doing here?"
Soren's expression shifts slightly. "I was hoping we could talk."
"How do you know where I live?"
A pause.
"Your client file."
My eyebrows go up.
"I'm aware that was inappropriate."
"You looked up my home address?"
"Yes."
"And then came here?"
Another pause. "When you put it like that, it sounds so much worse."
Despite myself, something dangerously close to a laugh catches in my throat.
His eyes drop briefly to the flowers in his hands before returning to mine. "If you tell me to leave, I will. I won't come back, Margot. I only wanted one chance to speak to you somewhere that had nothing to do with a session or what you paid me to be."
I look at him standing beneath the hallway light, holding flowers he saved after they died.
For the first time since I met him, there's no room waiting behind him, no booking on a calendar, no rules telling either of us what happens next.