Page 33 of Saint Céline
“Yeah, it’s been hard.”
He softened immediately and pulled me into a hug that felt warm and brief, one hand smoothing down my back as he murmured that I should have woken him up.
I closed my eyes against his shoulder and almost laughed at the bitter irony of it. Instead, I let him hold me for five or six seconds and imagined telling him. Not everything, but just enough. That Professor Moreau had been in his apartment last night. That he had knelt between my thighs while Thad slept. That he had given me the orgasm Thad could never manage, even when I faked every sound and every tremble. But the words died before they reached my mouth.
Thad would not believe me in the right way. He might believe the facts if I cried at the right moment and let him become angry on my behalf, but he would turn it into something about locks and police and security cameras and masculine outrage. He would call his father. His father would call someone else. By the end of the day, my life would belong to men with money and opinions, and Vincent Moreau would still be standing in the middle of it, smiling politely while everyone tried to decide whether I was unstable from grief.
He knew too much about me, and I still did not know what, so I kept my mouth shut the way I had learned to do years ago.
“I’m fine,” I said, pulling back. Thad looked relieved before he looked guilty, and he kissed my forehead in that soft, careless way of his before he went back upstairs. I stood outside his building until the door closed behind him, then wiped my mouth with the back of my hand as if I could erase the memory of Vincent’s lips on me.
The walk to campus took twenty minutes, and I felt every second of it. The cold moved under my coat and through my sweater and beneath my skin. My body felt wrong in a way I did not know how to name, like someone had entered a room inside me and moved everything one inch to the left. Nothing looked different on the outside, yet nothing was where I had left it.
By the time I reached our residence hall, Sophia and Anya were already awake. Sophia sat in the living room wearing silk pajamas and a robe the color of rubies, one leg tucked beneath her as she drank coffee from a tiny porcelain cup. Anya was curled on the opposite sofa under a blanket, scrolling through her phone. Both of them looked up when I walked in. Sophia’s face changed first. It was subtle. Her posture stayed relaxed, and her cup remained poised between her fingers, but her eyes sharpened instantly with concern.
Anya sat up straighter and said I looked terrible.
“Good morning to you too,” I answered, but Anya shook her head and pushed the blanket off her lap.
“No, I mean, actually terrible. What happened?” She asked.
Sophia set down her cup and said my name in that soft, careful way that always made me want to crawl out of my own skin because it almost worked. I hated the softness in her voice. I hated it because it made me want to tell her everything. The truth about Katherine, about Vincent’s mouth on me while Thad slept, about how my body had betrayed me so completely in the dark. Instead, I took off my coat and hung it carefully by the door, my hands moving too slowly, so both of them noticed.
“Thad’s parents were exhausting,” I said. “His father spent dinner talking about shoreline development and grief as if they belonged in the same sentence.”
“Rich men should be legally banned from speaking after wine.” Anya grimaced.
Sophia did not smile. “Did Thad do something?”
“No, of course not,” I say so quickly that Sophia and Anya tilt their heads in question.
I walked toward my room before either of them could get up and told them I was going to shower. Sophia followed me to the doorway but did not come inside because she knew better than to trap me when I was like this.
“Do you want us to hang out with you today?” She asked, and I paused with one hand on my bedroom door.
The words should have made me feel safe. Instead, they made me think of Vincent standing in the dark, coat still wet from the rain, and I said no because I had lab, and I needed to see him today.
Anya made a sound from the sofa and asked if I was really going to that lab after everything.
“I don’t have a choice. I need to keep up my grades.” I told her.
Sophia’s mouth tightened, “You always have a choice, Céline .”
I looked back at her and almost told her that choices were things rich girls were taught to believe in because consequences bent around them, but Sophia was rich, and Anya was rich, and Katherine had been rich, and all of them had wanted things they could not have and still got them. So I only said I would be fine.
In the shower, I stood beneath water so hot it turned my skin red. I washed my hair twice, then my body, then my hands, trying to scrub away the memory of Vincent’s tongue sliding through me, the way my hips had rolled against his mouth evenwhile I fought him. I did not think about the bedroom or the way Thad had slept through all of it, or how my body had clenched and shaken around Vincent’s fingers when it had never done that for Thad, no matter how hard I tried. I stayed under the water until the mirror fogged completely and the room turned thick with steam.
When I stepped out, my phone was ringing on the sink.
Mom.
For one second, I only stared at the screen. Then I answered.
“Hi.” Her voice came through soft and worried. “Selena? Are you awake? I’m sorry, I know it’s early.”
“I’m awake, Mom.”
“You sound tired, sweetheart.”
