Her friends assumed the obvious.
They giggled, teased, nudged her shoulder when they saw the way she held the wall for balance, how she sat down slowly, how her legs didn’t quite obey her.
But they were wrong—laughably, completely wrong.
Nothing happened to her body.
It was her will that had been undone.
She had gone to his apartment thinking she could handle him—thinking she could keep the conversation light, keep her distance, keep herself from letting him see the thoughts she tried to bury. She believed she could sit across from him, sip tea, pretend she didn’t feel anything.
But he didn’t touch her.
He didn’t have to.
He just talked.
He asked her questions she’d never been asked—questions that didn’t invade her privacy but slipped into the empty spaces between her words. Questions about what she hesitates to say. About what she avoids admitting. About why she keeps choosing men she can control instead of the one man she can’t.
And the entire time… he watched her knees.
Not with hunger.
With understanding.
“Sit back,” he murmured at one point, and she obeyed without thinking.
“Breathe slower,” he said later, and her chest softened instantly.
“Look at me when you answer,” he commanded quietly, and her eyes lifted on their own.
He didn’t touch her, but her entire body moved as if he had.
When she finally stood up to leave, her legs trembled—not from anything done to them, but from everything done to her composure. Her balance was off because he had shifted her center of gravity inward, forced her to confront parts of herself she had kept locked away.
By the time she reached the street, she had to pause—knees weak, ankles unsteady.
The world felt tilted.
What he had done to her wasn’t physical, yet it affected every part of her physically.
Her friends would never understand.
They believed a woman only wobbled like that after a certain kind of night.
But she knew the truth:
A body recovers quickly.
A mind that’s been touched too deeply… doesn’t.
And she was already considering going back—
not to regain control,
but to let him take a little more of it.
