[Tantalism] 🕶️ Jobs

[tanuno]

[Tantalism] Angel 63-66

She pulled away from his lingering hands, from the possessive weight of his gaze. The warmth of his laugh still echoed against her back, a ghost of a feeling that had felt, for a suspended second, like something genuine. A treacherous flicker of comfort in the pit of her stomach, immediately doused by the cold dread of what his visit might mean. A naked man ran up behind her, licking her shoulder and offering her a million dollars for a night in her bed. “Only if I not there,” she said. She walked back through the corridor alone, and closed her door behind her.	I may have to visit you later. The words punctured her soul. She pressed her palms flat against her thighs. The problem was the heat. That was the problem. It was still there, low and persistent, and she couldn't pretend it wasn't his hands that had put it there, couldn't pretend that her body had not made its own arrangements without asking her first. She did not remember falling asleep. One minute she was climbing into bed. Naked in case Vance visited. The next minute it was half past six.
She lay still and let it come back to her in pieces. The dress. The room. The hands. She pressed her eyes closed and felt the fuzz behind them, the Prosecco still moving through her blood in a slow and unhelpful tide. Her family. That was the one she kept circling back to. Somewhere in a compound she had never seen, in rooms she couldn't picture, behind a door she didn't have a key for. Her mother and father. Her nephew. Their freedom sitting in the palm of a judge she had never met, a man whose hands would be all over her body in twelve hours. The price she had to pay.	Something childlike grabbed her. One moment she was sitting on the edge of the bed with the sheet pooled at her feet and the weight of the last twenty-four hours pressing down through her shoulders, and the next she was on her feet, moving, the cool tile rushing up under her bare soles as she went through the door and into the corridor and then through the glass door at the end and out into the grey morning air without breaking stride.