The rain hasn't stopped since morning. It falls in sheets now, silver slashes against the café windows, loud enough to drown out thoughts if you let it. But Isabella doesn't. She hears every drop. Feels it, almost, like it's needling through the glass, pricking at her skin, trying to burrow its way in. The rhythm is maddening steady and off-kilter all at once, like a metronome with a broken heart.
Inside Café Espira, the air is steeped in an amber gloom. Shadows pool in the corners, curling like smoke, softening the edges of worn brick and dark wood. The place smells of burnt espresso and old books, intimate, nostalgic, a little bitter. Jazz hums low beneath it all, the saxophone dragging long, aching notes across the room like a slow exhale after a scream. It's music that knows how to hurt gently. Music that knows how to wait.
Isabella sits in the far corner, tucked beside the rain-blurred window. She doesn't belong here, not really not in this warmth, this cozy, curated hum of safety. She's a blade in a velvet drawer. A shard of ice pressed against the skin.
Her coat is midnight black, tailored, severe. It cuts across her frame like armor. The collar is flipped up around her jaw, hiding the place where her breath trembles. Her sleek bun is pulled so tight it's a tension headache waiting to happen, every strand slicked back like she's trying to erase herself into symmetry. Her lipstick has faded to a bruise-colored outline; she hasn't reapplied it. Her nails, once perfectly manicured, show tiny chips along the edges details she'd normally obsess over. Not today.
Her fingers rest on the rim of the mug. Just rest. She hasn't taken a sip. The latte has gone cold, the foam sinking, breaking apart in soft swirls like a storm seen from above. It was a comfort order. She isn't comforted.
One earbud is still in, the other lying limp and forgotten on the tabletop, like she couldn't decide whether to listen or not. The voice on the line is speaking in that clipped, brisk tone corporate people use when they want to seem efficient but not rude. Something about timelines. Deadlines. Board review materials. She could be taking notes, offering feedback. Instead, she stares through the rain, past her reflection.
She's not here.
She's back in that goddamn room, the one with too much silence and too many shadows. Back with him.
His face drifts into focus like a ghost behind glass half in memory, half in menace. That lazy smirk. That look that made you feel like you were the only person in the world and the most disposable at the same time. The way his voice could slide beneath your skin, warm and toxic. He'd had this uncanny ability to read her, to reach past her defenses before she even knew she'd dropped them.
He was a mirror. The worst kind, the one that shows you what you most want to see, right before it cuts you.
She'd known what he was. She had. And still, she let him in. She let him rewrite her edges, redraw the lines of who she was, make her feel like surrendering was a kind of strength. But that strength had teeth. It had a cost.
Her stomach tightens. She shifts, barely, as if shaking the memory loose. Her hand retreats from the mug like it burned her. She hasn't noticed how cold her fingers are.
The café's warmth doesn't reach her.
She pretends to listen, nods when appropriate, lets out a small sound of agreement when the voice on the other end pauses. But it's mechanical. Her attention is a puppet on strings she's barely holding.
There's a conversation playing inside her head, louder than the one in her ear. A loop of what she should've said. What she didn't. What she still wants to scream. Her throat aches with it.
And under it all, a single thought:
I'm not fine.
I wasn't then. I'm not now. And I don't know if I ever will be.
Outside, the rain slides down the glass in long, trembling streaks. It looks like the world is weeping. Inside, Isabella doesn't move. She just watches.
And listens to the sound of blue.
Her legs shift beneath the table a restless, unconscious twitch that betrays her. Small, maybe. To anyone watching, barely perceptible. But to her, it feels seismic. A fault line cracking wide beneath the surface of her skin, threatening to split her open from the inside. Her thighs tighten instinctively, a fast, almost panicked reaction. She crosses her legs, clamps them together with the urgency of someone trying to trap a live wire as if she can cage the sensation, stopping it before it climbs. But it's already moving. It snakes up her spine, slick and hot, curling low in her belly, blooming in that place she hates to name.
And she does hate it.
Hates that her body remembers him like this. Viscerally. Reflexively. Hates that she's sitting here in a café filled with rain-soaked coats, strangers hunched over laptops, the soft clink of ceramic and the hum of a saxophone and she's wet. Not from touch. Not from words. Just the memory. The echo of him in her mind.
Her fingers twitch against the table. Once. Twice. Sharp little spasms she doesn't notice until they're already happening. She stills them quickly, jaw tightening, breath catching. She inhales slowly through her nose, tries to convince herself it's nothing. The coffee is too hot. The chair is uncomfortable. The rain outside is pressing against the windows like a body trying to get in. But even the lies feel thin, gossamer and desperate. They can't hold back the truth.
She clenches her thighs again. The motion does nothing but make her more aware of the ache sharpening inside her, the slickness between her legs, the slow throb in her core that pulses like a drumbeat. It's not just physical. It's chemical. Primal. Her skin prickles beneath her blouse, sensitive and tight. She shifts again, but it's useless. She's unraveling, thread by thread, and no one around her seems to notice.
Two days. That's all it's been.
Two days since she gave in. Since she let him touch the part of her she's spent years pretending didn't exist. Since she lets herself be seen not as the polished woman, the self-contained storm she shows the world but the soft, aching, hungry thing beneath it all. The thing he pulled out of her like a secret, like a song.
And it was just one night.
She keeps telling herself that. Like a defense. Like a curse. It was just sex. Just a lapse. Just a mistake. But the words don't sit right in her mouth. They taste like blood. Like denial. She tries to swallow them, tries to bury them beneath the weight of logic and shame and the steel-cold discipline she's honed like a weapon.
But her body won't forget.
It remembers the weight of him. The way his mouth moved against her skin not just kissing, but claiming. It remembers his voice, low and rough, pressing into her like a thumb against a bruise. You want to push me? The line echoes in her skull like a gunshot. She doesn't just hear it, she feels it. Like it's happening again. Like he's behind her now, close enough to breathe her in.
Her breath catches, shallow and jagged. Her spine straightens, but it's not in self-defense. Her body is a battlefield, a contradiction. Her mind screams for stillness, for order, for logic. But her skin is on fire. Her muscles are trembling. Her pulse is thunder in her throat.
She had told herself she could walk away. That she could wipe him off like dust. That the version of herself she became in his arms wild, raw, unrecognizable was temporary. A fever dream. But the truth? That woman hasn't left her. She's crouched just beneath the surface now, pacing, feral, waiting.
And worse she doesn't want her gone.
She wants to feel it again. That terrifying clarity. That edge of surrender. That exquisite undoing. It wasn't just the sex. It was freedom. The way he saw through every performance she's spent her life perfecting and touched the core of who she is. No masks. No walls. Just breath and sweat and yes.
Her nails press into her palm now, deep enough to hurt. She needs the pain, needs the anchor. But even that can't ground her. She's floating in the aftershock of memory, dragged under by the ghost of his hands, the shadow of his mouth, the way he took her apart with a look.
And if he walked in now?
If he stepped through that door rain in his hair, hunger in his eyes and looked at her the way he did that night?
She wouldn't move. Wouldn't speak. Wouldn't think.
She'd fall.
Again. Without hesitation. Without armor. Because for all her shame, for all the guilt she wears like perfume, there's one truth she can't silence not in her body, not in her blood:
She has never felt more alive than when she was his.
And that, more than anything, is what haunts her.
It doesn't come back in order. It never does.
Memory doesn't unfold like a movie, not smooth, not clean. It stutters, skips, crashes in jagged pieces that cut her as they come. Slices of that night, sharp and vivid, carve themselves into her as if it's happening all over again. And she lets them. She lets it consume her because she doesn't know how to stop it anymore.
His voice comes first.
That rasp low, deliberate, dangerous curls through her like smoke. "You want to push me?" The words slam into her chest with the force of a blow. She hears it exactly as he said it: quiet, not a shout, but no less commanding. It wasn't a question, not really. It was a warning. A promise. A trigger pulled mid-sentence.
She hadn't even meant to provoke him. Not intentionally. But something inside her that deep, buried part she usually strangles into silence had clawed to the surface that night. Bold. Reckless. Hungry. She remembers the look in his eyes when she met his challenge, the moment his restraint cracked open just wide enough for the real him to show through. That was the first time she felt that terrifying, exhilarating drop in her stomach. Like standing at the edge of a cliff and realizing she might jump.
