Regret is a house with too many rooms, and I have been pacing through all of them since midnight.
The dinner party's aftermath clings to my skin like a residue that refuses to wash away. Travis's voice, honeyed and venomous. My mother's accusations, each word a blade she wielded without apology.
But above all, beneath all, there is Kai.
The clock on my nightstand reads two in the morning. The house has settled into the particular silence of wealth at rest, but my body refuses to follow.
I pace the length of my bedroom, bare feet against hardwood, counting steps like they might eventually add up to understanding.
Because I genuinely do not understand my feelings. Cannot name the hollow space his absence carved when he walked out of the bathroom, cannot explain why California suddenly feels less like escape and more like exile.
I was cruel. I took his genuine concern and turned it into a weapon because being wounded myself felt like weakness.
You were never part of the plan.
The words replay in my mind. I remember his face—the way his expression closed, the way his shoulders set themselves against whatever I might say next.
I remember the control in his voice when he told me to enjoy California, and I understand now that the control was worse than shouting.
I owe him an apology. At minimum, I owe him that before whatever comes next.
The dresser still blocks the interior door. I shoved it there weeks ago, a barrier against a stranger who walked into my room without knocking. Now I grip its edges and pull, muscles straining against the weight, until the path is clear.
"And what are you going to say?" I whisper to the empty room. "Sorry I told you that you were never part of the plan? Sorry I used your honesty as a weapon because I was too much of a coward to admit I feel the same way?"
The words hang in the air, pathetic and insufficient.
"Sorry I'm terrified of wanting you because the last time I wanted someone, he dismantled me piece by piece until there was nothing left?"
I press my forehead against the cool wood of the door and laugh—a short, humorless sound that scrapes my throat.
"God, Skye. He's going to love that. Very eloquent, very moving."
The door opens silently. I step into darkness.
His room envelops me immediately in warmth and texture, and I stop short just inside the threshold, disoriented by the reality that dismantles my assumptions entirely.
I had tried to imagine it before—minimal, cold, the aesthetic of someone who does not want to be known. I expected empty walls and pristine furniture, the studied blankness of a man who hides his depths.
The space is small but dense with presence.
Books occupy every surface. Stacked on the desk in precarious towers. Piled on the floor in clusters that suggest organization only their owner would understand. Wedged into a makeshift shelf constructed from bricks and wooden planks, the spines cracked and faded from handling.
Too many books for someone failing literature.
"Holy shit," I breathe, turning in a slow circle to take it all in. "You absolute fraud."
The realization lands with the force of revelation. All those tutoring sessions, all those moments when his insights surprised me, all those questions I could not reconcile with his failing grades—this room explains everything.
He reads voraciously, comprehends deeply, and hides both behind a performance of careless indifference that I bought completely.
"You let me lecture you about Marco's choices," I murmur, running my fingers along cracked spines. "You sat there with that smirk while I explained themes you probably understood better than I did."
His bed is unmade. The duvet lies tangled at the foot, pillows stacked against the headboard in a way that suggests reading late into the night, a book propped on his chest while the house sleeps around him.
The room is cozy, lived-in, intimate—the space of someone who has built a nest from the things he loves and keeps it private with ferocious intention.
I have invaded this privacy.
The thought occurs to me with belated shame, but I cannot make myself leave. Not until I say what I came to say.
I wait for my eyes to adjust fully, for the darkness to resolve into shapes I can navigate, for the outline of his body to materialize beneath the tangled sheets.
"Kai?" I keep my voice low, barely above a whisper. "Kai, I need to talk to you."
Nothing. No shift of weight, no sleepy murmur, no irritated grunt telling me to get out.
I move closer to the bed, my bare feet silent against the floor.
"I know you're probably still angry, and you have every right to be." I reach the edge of the mattress, my hand extended toward where his shoulder should be. "But I need you to know that I didn't mean—"
My fingers touch cold sheets. His bed is empty.
The realization arrives slowly, denial giving way to certainty as I stare at the cold sheets, the undisturbed pillows, the impression of his body still visible but absent of warmth.
Of course he went to Petra. Sought comfort in familiar arms, in a body that opens for him without demanding explanations, in a woman who wants him without complications.
I picture it with vivid cruelty. His mouth on Petra's neck, tracing the path I know from the sounds that traveled through our shared wall.
His hands moving with the expertise I felt against my own skin, finding the rhythms that make her gasp, that make her scream his name the way I refuse to scream anything.
I picture her receiving what I rejected. Her body welcoming what mine pushed away.
The jealousy surprises me with its violence.
I grip the bedpost, breathing through the intensity that threatens to buckle my knees. My fingers press into the wood until they ache, until the physical pain provides a focal point for the emotional chaos tearing through my chest.
You have no right to this feeling. You told him to leave. You told him he was never part of the plan.
But jealousy does not care about logic or fairness. It cares only about the image of his hands on someone else, his body moving the way it moved with me on a couch that still holds the memory of our tangled limbs.
I recognize, finally, what I refused to name in the bathroom.
I do not want to leave.
The truth settles into my bones with the weight of inevitability, and I feel something shift in my chest—the locked door I have been guarding since Travis.
I do not want California. Do not want a life built from escape, from running, from the constant calculation of exits.
I want this—this complicated, impossible thing with my stepbrother, my student, my enemy turned something else entirely.
I want to try. I want to see what we become if I stop pushing and start reaching.
I could wait. Could sit on his bed and force the confrontation I fled earlier, rehearse the apology until he returns and finds me waiting in his private space.
But the image of him with Petra—now, tonight, because of me—burns too hot for patience.
I retreat to my own room and close the door with hands that tremble.
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