The bed is unfamiliar but it’s horizontal and that’s all that matters right now.
I lie down. Stare at the ceiling. Count to ten.
My hand slides under my waistband before I consciously decide.
This is healthy coping, I tell myself. Very therapeutic. Processing trauma through physical release. My therapist would...
Actually, my therapist would have so many questions. So many forms to fill out. Possibly a direct line to a psychiatric facility.
I touch myself anyway.
Think about Dario first. His eyes across the courtroom. The way he nodded at me.
Do what you need to do. I’ll be okay.
His hands on my arm that night. Steady. Warm. The way he stayed when he should have run.
What those hands would feel like everywhere else.
My breath hitches.
Then Saul. Because apparently I’m an equal-opportunity disaster.
His voice saying my real name. Stevie. Like it mattered. Like I mattered.
The way he stood against that wall watching me lose my hair, my name, my entire self, and didn’t look away.
Those forearms. Those hands with their specific calluses. The way he’d grip a steering wheel, a jaw, a throat, an ass.
Then my mind drifts to Enzo’s perfect ass. The way he looked as he ate my cookies. His mouth.
I come hard and fast and absolutely silently because the walls are thin and Beth Taylor probably doesn’t do this.
Beth Taylor probably has a meditation app and drinks herbal tea and processes emotions in healthy, socially acceptable ways.
But I’m not Beth Taylor yet.
Right now, in this moment, I’m still Stevie Reeves. Still the woman who gets off thinking about men she shouldn’t want. Still incapable of making good choices or being anyone other than exactly who I am.
I lie there in the dark, breathing hard, my hand still between my legs.
“Hi, I’m Beth Taylor,” I whisper to the ceiling. “I definitely don’t masturbate thinking about mobsters and marshals. I’m extremely normal and very well-adjusted.”
The ceiling doesn’t believe me.
I don’t believe me either.
I get up. Finally change into the soft t-shirt I packed. Climb into the unfamiliar bed with its unfamiliar sheets.
In the dark, I say it again. “Beth Taylor.”
It still tastes wrong.
But tomorrow Saul will come back. Bring groceries. Help me figure out how to be whoever I’m supposed to become.
Tonight I just survived. With my hand between my legs and three men in my head and absolutely zero shame about any of it.
I close my eyes and think about Dario’s smile. And Saul’s hands. Enzo’s rough edges. And the fact that I’m supposed to be Beth Taylor but all I know how to be is Stevie Reeves with bad priorities and worse timing.
