(Vanessa's POV)

He didn't stop.

His hands shot up and caught both my wrists, pinned them above my head against the concrete wall, and kept kissing me. His grip was iron. I couldn't move. I could feel the whiskey on his breath, the pressure of his mouth, the cold wall against my shoulder blades.

My eyes burned.

I hadn't cried in front of anyone in years. I wasn't going to start now. But the tears came anyway, sliding down the sides of my face without permission, and I couldn't wipe them away because my hands were trapped above me.

I couldn't breathe through it. Couldn't think through it. The familiar weight of him, the pine soap, the shape of a kiss I'd spent five years trying to forget - it was too much, and it was wrong, and it needed to stop.

So I bit him.

Hard. Right on his lower lip.

Julian jerked back with a sharp sound - somewhere between a hiss and a curse. His hands released my wrists. He stepped back and pressed two fingers to his mouth.

I stood against the wall and looked at him.

His lip was bleeding slightly. His chest was rising and falling too fast. His eyes were dark and unreadable, and for one disorienting second he looked exactly the way I remembered him - and nothing like it at all.

The Julian I had known for four years had never once touched me with anything but gentleness. He'd held my hand in crowded places so I wouldn't get jostled. He'd learned to sleep on the side of the bed closer to the door because I'd mentioned once, offhandedly, that I didn't like sleeping near walls.

That Julian would not have done this.

Which meant he had changed. Or I had changed him.

The thought drove into my chest like a needle, small and precise and unbearably sharp.

He didn't move away. His hand was still braced against the wall beside my head, and the distance between us was barely a foot. His breath was warm against my face.

When he spoke, his voice was low and rough and completely controlled.

"You chose to disappear from my world." He looked at me directly. "So disappear properly. Don't show up in front of me again."

Every word landed clean and deliberate, like he'd been saving them.

I held his gaze. I kept my voice level.

"Fine," I said.

One word. That was all.

He searched my face for something - I didn't know what. Then he straightened, pulled his hand away from the wall, and touched his split lip once with the tips of his fingers. He looked at the faint red on his fingers without expression.

Then he pushed open the stairwell door and walked back into the corridor.

The door swung shut.

The fluorescent light hummed above me.

I stood there for a moment. Then my legs gave out slowly, and I slid down the wall until I was sitting on the cold concrete floor with my knees pulled up and my hands loose in my lap.

He had never disappeared from my world. That was the thing I hadn't said. Couldn't say.

I'd read a line somewhere once, years ago - you should never meet someone too captivating when you're young, because you'll spend the rest of your life missing them. I hadn't understood it then. I understood it now.

I pressed the back of my hand against my face and wiped my cheeks.

Then I pulled out my phone and typed a message to Stella: Something came up. Heading out. Can you ask someone to send my bag to mine? Sorry for bailing.

I sent it, then pressed my palm flat against the wall and pushed myself upright. I tilted my head back and blinked until the pressure behind my eyes receded.

I took the stairs down. All the way to the ground floor, avoiding the corridor where he'd gone.

By the time I reached the lobby, Stella had replied.

I saw his lip. He deserved it. Stay away from men who already have someone. You okay?

I stared at the message for a moment.

Yeah, I typed back. Tired. Go enjoy your night.

I walked out through the hotel's main entrance into the cold air.

(Author's POV)

The party ended just past midnight.

The main road was quiet, only a few cars moving through the amber wash of the streetlights. Serena drove with both hands on the wheel, her knuckles tight, a rigid silence around her that she hadn't bothered to disguise.

Julian sat in the passenger seat with his elbow against the window and his eyes on the dark outside.

She'd noticed the moment he came back to the table. The slight stiffness in how he held himself. And the cut on his lower lip, small but unmistakable.

"This city is enormous," she said. Her voice came out sharper than she intended. "How is it that you manage to run into her?"

Julian turned his head slowly and looked at her.

"How did you know I was there?" he asked.

A beat of silence.

"I asked Bradley," she said.

"Don't do that again." His voice was flat. "Don't push your way into my circle like that."

"I just wanted to see you-"

"Serena."

She stopped.

He turned back to the window.

"Are you really going to just let it go?" she asked, after a moment. "After everything she did to you? You're still protecting her?"

"What she does with her life is not your business," he said. "And it's not mine either. Drop it."

"Julian, she walked out on you without a single-"

"I said drop it."

His voice didn't rise. It didn't need to. There was something in it that cut the sentence clean off, and Serena fell silent.

She gripped the steering wheel and stared at the road ahead.

She knew. That was the worst part - she knew exactly what Vanessa had meant to him, and knowing it didn't make it easier to watch. Five years ago, when it ended, Julian hadn't been stoic about it. He'd been wrecked. She had seen it with her own eyes: the two weeks he barely slept, the way he'd gone quiet in a way that was nothing like his usual composure.

And then there was the night in October. She hadn't been there, but Bradley had told her afterward - Julian had stood outside Vanessa's apartment building in pouring rain for seven hours straight. Seven hours, while Vanessa said every terrible thing she apparently needed to say to make him leave. He'd collapsed eventually. An ambulance. A night in the hospital.

Even after that, he hadn't let go. Not until Vanessa graduated, changed every contact detail she had, and left Washington D.C. entirely.

Only then had it finally ended.

Serena kept her eyes on the road and said nothing else.

(Vanessa's POV)

My phone pulled me out of the dream.

I'd been somewhere warm in it. A beach - the one I'd described to Julian once, the one I'd said I wanted to get married at someday, with the pale sand and the low bluffs and the way the light came off the water in the early morning. In the dream he'd been standing beside me, and he'd said after graduation, then - we'll do it after graduation.

The ringtone cut through it.

I grabbed the phone off the nightstand before I was fully awake. The name on the screen made my stomach drop.

Caleb Thorne.

I let it ring one more time. Then I answered.

"It's time to pay up." His voice was blunt and unhurried. "Come by the hospital."

"I heard you," I said.

I hung up.

I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the far wall.

Five years ago, my father Thomas had put a man in a permanent vegetative state. That man was Caleb's father. The court had sentenced my father to twenty-two years and ordered $800,000 in compensation, plus all ongoing medical costs for as long as the victim remained hospitalized.

My father had sworn, from the day of his arrest, that he was innocent. That he'd been set up. That the witnesses had lied and the evidence had been planted.

I had believed him.

I still believed him. That belief was the reason I'd spent the last five years studying law, building a case file, filing for retrial after retrial, chasing down every lead I could find. I was going to clear his name. I had promised myself that.

Caleb's call was a reminder of what the failure to do so cost, every single month.

I set the phone face-down on the nightstand and sat in the dark for a while.