The bottle of wine was already open on the counter from two nights ago when I had poured a glass and didn't drink it. I drank it now. Standing in the kitchen in the dark, still wearing the clothes Julian's eyes had scanned before he decided I was draining and left to go find someone who wasn't.
The first glass went down too fast . I poured a second and drank that one slower but not by much. I wasn't a drinker, never had been. Denise didn't keep alcohol in the house when I was growing up because she said she'd seen what it did to people who used it as a solution instead of a beverage and she wasn't raising that kind of woman.
Sorry mama.
The wine hit my empty stomach like a warm fist. I hadn't eaten anything real in days, just grapes and crackers and bites of things I forced down. The alcohol didn't have to fight anything to get into my bloodstream, it just walked right in and made itself comfortable.
By the time I finished the second glass my edges were softer. The tightness in my chest loosened slightly, not gone but manageable, like someone had turned the volume down on the noise in my head from a ten to a six. I thought about pouring a third but I knew if I did I wouldn't leave this apartment and I needed to leave. I needed to not be in this space surrounded by Julian's things and Julian's smell and the ghost of every lie he had told me within these walls.
I grabbed my keys and my phone and walked out the door without thinking about where I was going because if I thought about it I would talk myself out of it.
The drive was fifteen minutes. Dominic lived in Tribeca in one of those buildings that didn't look like much from the outside, no flashy signage, no doorman in a top hat, just clean lines and tinted glass and the kind of understated wealth that whispered instead of screamed. I had been here hundreds of times during my two years working for him. Late nights dropping off documents he needed to review. Early mornings picking up files he had marked up in red pen at three in the morning because Dominic Laurent didn't sleep like normal people. He existed in a state of perpetual alertness that I used to find concerning and then impressive and then oddly comforting because no matter what time I showed up his lights were always on.
I pulled into the garage and sat in my car with the engine running for a long time. Long enough for the wine to settle deeper into my body and my courage to either build or dissolve. I couldn't tell which one was happening. My hands were tingling on the steering wheel and my heartbeat was louder than the engine.
What was I doing here? What was I actually doing here? I hadn't spoken to Dominic in four months. Our last interaction was the day I placed my resignation letter on his desk and watched his jaw tighten as he read it. He hadn't tried to stop me, hadn't asked me to stay, hadn't said anything at all for about some seconds that felt like thirty years. Then he'd looked up from the letter and said "if that's what you want" in a voice so flat it could have been a computer generated response. I said it was and he nodded once and went back to whatever he was working on.
That was it. No goodbye speech. No thank you for everything. No I'll miss you. Just "if that's what you want" and a nod and I walked out of his office and out of his life and that was supposed to be the end of it.
So why was I sitting in his parking garage at eleven something at night with wine on my breath and tears I'd already decided weren't coming threatening to prove me wrong?
Because I had nowhere else to go. That was the honest pathetic truth. Aria would ask questions I wasn't ready to answer. My mother would hear my voice crack and be on the next train to Manhattan and I couldn't put this on her yet. I didn't have many other friends because the last two years of my life had been consumed by Julian and the Laurent world and somewhere along the way I had stopped nurturing the relationships that existed before him.
Dominic was the only person who wouldn't ask me questions. He never asked questions he didn't already know the answers to and he certainly wouldn't probe me for emotional information he had no interest in processing. He would let me exist in his space without requiring an explanation and that was all I needed right now. Space to exist without performing.
I turned off the engine and got out of the car.
The elevator to his floor required a code. Six digits. I typed them in from memory, my fingers moving on autopilot, and the panel lit green. He hadn't changed it. I didn't know if that meant something or nothing but my wine soaked brain wanted it to mean something so I let it.
The elevator opened directly into his foyer because of course it did. When you're Dominic Laurent your elevator doesn't open into a hallway like a normal person's, it opens into your private space like the whole floor exists just for you.
I stepped out and the first thing I registered was the lighting. Low, the way he always kept it. Dominic didn't like bright lights in his home, said they made him feel like he was still at work.
My phone buzzed in my hand. The doorman. Calling me, probably because he had seen me on the camera pulling into the garage and was trying to alert Dominic. Too late for that. I was already inside.
I should have stopped walking. Something in the air had shifted, that instinct women have when they know they're about to see something they can't unsee, the same instinct I had ignored at the engagement party when my feet carried me down that hallway toward Julian and Camille. I should have learned my lesson then. I didn't.
I walked further into the apartment. Past the foyer, past the kitchen where I used to make his coffee at six in the morning, black with one sugar even though he told everyone he drank it without, past the living room where I had sat across from him on countless nights going over his schedule for the next day while he listened without looking up from whatever document had his attention.
The sound reached me . A soft wet sound accompanied by a low groan that vibrated through the walls of the hallway leading to his bedroom. My feet stopped but my brain had already processed what I was hearing and was now sending signals to every nerve in my body that felt a lot like the ones from four nights ago. That same sinking, that same freefall sensation in my stomach, except this time it was laced with something I wasn't prepared for and didn't want to examine.
I turned the corner.
Dominic was sitting on the edge of his bed, his head tilted back slightly, one hand gripping the sheets beside him. He was still partially dressed, his shirt unbuttoned but still on his shoulders, his pants undone. A woman I had never seen before was on her knees between his legs, her head moving in a rhythm that left absolutely nothing to the imagination.
My breath caught in my throat so hard it made a sound. A small pathetic little gasp that I would have given anything to take back because it cut through the silence of that room like a blade.
Dominic's head snapped forward and his eyes found mine instantly. No confusion, no gradual realization, just immediate locked in recognition. His eyes were dark and heavy from whatever he had been feeling seconds ago but the moment he registered that it was me standing in his doorway something shifted behind them. Something cracked through the surface of that carefully maintained coldness he wore like armor.
The woman between his legs hadn't noticed yet. She was still going and Dominic's hand moved to her shoulder, stopping her with a firmness that made her pull back and look up at him with an expression that was equal parts confused and annoyed.
For what felt like an eternity but was probably three seconds, Dominic and I just looked at each other. I was standing in his doorway, wine drunk and heartbroken with my fiancé's nephew's release still glistening on a stranger's lips, looking at the only man who had ever made me feel like I didn't need to shrink myself, and he was looking at me like I was the last person he expected and the only person he wanted to see and somehow both of those things were true simultaneously.
I opened my mouth to say something but nothing came out. My brain had short circuited somewhere between the gasp and the eye contact and all I could do was stand there feeling the full weight of how ridiculous this situation was. I came here looking for a safe place to land and walked straight into another woman's mouth on another man's body and somehow that still felt less devastating than what Julian did to me because at least Dominic didn't owe me anything. At least Dominic had never promised me forever while giving pieces of himself to someone else.
At least Dominic had never called another woman baby while I stood twenty feet away in a dress I bought to look beautiful for him.
Dominic's jaw tightened and without breaking eye contact with me he said one word.
"Leave."
Author note:So I have exams coming soon and I also want to reach a good amount of chapters before posting more , but let me know what yall think ?