Three weeks. That's how long he left me.
No Acts, no calls to his office, no punishments, no visits.
At first, I thought it was a test. Then I thought it was punishment. By the end of the second week, I realised it was neither. It was absence, and that was worse. He was still here , somewhere, but hiding.
And I didn't know if I missed him or the familiarity and the pain that came with him. I didn't even know which part of me was doing the missing. The girl he took? Or the version of me he'd made?
Every day I half-expected a knock, a voice through the door. Even a message slipped under it — something cruel, terrifying, and distinctly his . But there was nothing, not even his footsteps in the corridor.
I spent hours sitting on the edge of the table, staring at the wall like it held answers. I traced the cracks in the paint with my eyes until they became lines on a map I didn't know how to read.
When I lay down and tried to sleep, my mind wouldn't allow it. It kept playing the same scenes on loop. The blood. Dylan's eyes. The feel of the pistol in my hand, the weight of it and the coldness of the metal.
And the kiss. God, the kiss...
I replayed it too many times. His hands on my face, his breath against mine, the way his whole body shook.
He hadn't just kissed me. He'd unravelled , like something inside him had imploded the second our mouths touched. Like the mask he'd been wearing before had broken.
And then he ran, scared of what he'd done. Like he was scared of me.
It should've made things simpler, but nothing about him ever did.
I hated myself for thinking about it, for remembering the tremble in his fingers, the heat in his breath, the look in his eyes like he was starving. I pressed my fingertips to my lips to remember the shape of his.
I cried a lot, too. I didn't know why.
Other times, my stomach turned so violently I thought I might throw up. And I did vomit a few times. Once, after eating, I regurgitated it all back up into the sink in my room — undigested slop mixed with bile. I stared at it after, feeling nothing.
At some point, James came to my room again. He knocked three times, quietly, and walked in tentatively like he thought I might lunge at him.
I didn't speak.
Eventually, he asked: "How are you feeling?"
I shrugged. I didn't know. Part of me wanted to say "numb," but even that wasn't enough to sum it up.
It seemed like he expected that, too. "You've been through a lot recently."
I nodded slowly, staring at the floor, my vision unfocused. The shapes of his shoes blurred and reformed.
"Understandable," he said softly, writing something on his clipboard. "Do you want to talk today?"
I didn't answer. We didn't get far. I wasn't ready to talk about what happened, or what came before it, or what came after.
And I definitely couldn't tell him about the kiss.
I couldn't explain the way it left me feeling scraped out and hollow. Like I'd been filled with something that didn't belong to me. Like Tyler had taken something from me, and I didn't even know what it was yet.
James didn't push, but he figured something had happened. He wrote a few observations on the clipboard and stood up to leave when I didn’t answer his questions.
Just before he reached the door, I asked him to take me to the cafeteria. He didn’t refuse, didn’t question it, just nodded and took my hand.
The cafeteria hadn't changed much.
Same grey trays, grey walls, grey food — overcooked mush and watery soup. Same fearful glances from other patients when I walked in.
I got my food and sat in the corner. James told me not to take too long, said he’d come back in a bit to escort me back, which surprised me. He left me unsupervised.
Tom wasn't there that day. Lee wasn't either.
Just nameless, tired faces and the quiet clatter of spoons. I picked at my food. Barely tasted it. Then dumped the tray when I couldn't force down another bite.
It had all started to feel mechanical. Like someone had unplugged the world and left it running on backup power.
I was stared at by a young girl who noticed my different clothes. She clutched the neckline of her grey sweatshirt and scowled. I didn't take her on.
I wondered if they knew who I was. Not in any selfish or narcissistic way — I’m not like that. But it crossed my mind if they'd heard of me. If there were rumours. If they knew that Tyler treated me differently. If they saw me as one of them, or his. Or didn’t know me at all.
I left the cafeteria before James appeared. I waited for a while but he didn’t come. So I walked out.
It felt freeing. The first bit of freedom I’d felt in… however long I’d been locked up here.
At first, I tried to retrace my steps back to my room. There were patterns in the corridors I’d come to recognise — certain doors, number plates, cracks in the walls, etc. But with everything playing on my mind still, I didn’t actually make it to my room.
I ended up padding down the corridor to Tyler’s office.
I don't know how long I stood outside the door. Not close enough to knock, just… listening. Waiting for a sign, to hear him breathing, mumbling, talking. Anything . But the room was silent.
Afterwards, I hated myself for standing there so long, hated how much I wanted him to open that door and drag me back inside.
What kind of person waits at the door of their abuser?
It all felt like limbo .
The institution ran as usual. James ran sessions. The orderlies cleaned the halls. The patients still screamed and cried through the walls.
Dr. Thorne passed me once in the hallway, glanced at me, but didn't speak. He looked tired and distracted, rushing past me like he was running to an emergency.
Someone in the room next to me sobbed one night. Not a cry for attention, or a tantrum, or an outburst. Just soft, broken sounds leaking through the wall. I lay still, listening, but didn't have the strength to reach out.
Suddenly, I remembered Faisal. Wondered what had happened to him. My stomach twisted at the thought. I tried not to speculate but couldn't help it.
The building groaned at night, like it held its breath during the day and exhaled at night. The pipes creaked. The walls breathed. Like the building itself knew something had shifted.
I went through the motions and developed a routine to help me cope, because it was either that or break down.
Wake up. Sit. Walk for a bit. Eat. Sleep. Repeat.
But everything underneath — my thoughts, my memories — kept twisting back to the same point.
That kiss. That moment. The second where something unspoken cracked wide open and neither of us knew what to do with it.
It didn't feel like an ending. It felt like something had begun — something neither of us understood, and neither was ready for. I didn't know if he was staying away for my sake or his. And I didn't know which answer scared me more.
What scared me most was that he might never come back. That he'd crossed a line neither of us understood, felt something real for a moment — and then vanished into the silence he used like armour. That he'd touched me, gotten scared, and walked away before I even knew what had changed. And that I'd been left alone to deal with the aftermath.
That night after the kiss, I sat on the edge of my bed, staring at the dent he'd left in the wall when he threw a tray at it that time. The paint had chipped around the impact. Even in my room, there were reminders of him.
And in the silence he left behind, I was starting to understand why.
But silence can't last forever, and I knew he'd come back.
I also knew we wouldn't be the same. We wouldn't be able to pretend it didn't happen, or that it didn't mean anything.
Because I was convinced it did.