Page 7 of Heat Unwritten
I wasn't in my hallway anymore. The smell of expensive teak and rain vanished, replaced by the cloying stench of floor wax, industrial cleaner, and stale gymnasium popcorn. The floor beneath my hands wasn't concrete; it was varnished wood, slick with my own humiliation.
I squeezed my eyes shut, pressing my face into the floor, but the memory was brighter than the room.
Look at her.
The whispers came from the walls, from the ventilation ducts, hissing like steam.
Top of the class and she can't even hold it together.
Disgusting. Look at the mess.
I curled into a ball, pressing my forehead against the cold floorboards. I was eighteen again. I was wearing the cheap blue graduation gown that scratched my neck. I could feel the eyes of the entire senior class drilling into my back, dissecting me,reducing four years of straight As and perfect attendance to a wet spot on the stage.
I waited for the hand on my shoulder. I waited for the Class President to stand up from his seat behind the podium.
He was right there. In my mind’s eye, I could see him clearly. He was just a boy, but he already wore a rigid posture and golden-haired armor of perfection. I could smell him, clean, sharp winter air and expensive soap, cutting through the scent of my own disaster. He was the rule-keeper. He was the Salutatorian. He was supposed to fix things.
"Help me," I whispered into the dark, the words destined for a ghost who hadn't listened ten years ago. "Please, just get me out of here."
Silence answered me.
He wasn't moving. In the memory, in the hallway, in the nightmare he sat like a stone statue, terrified of the mess I had become. He stared straight ahead, his icy blue eyes fixed on the exit sign, refusing to acknowledge the girl disintegrating at his feet. He wouldn't touch me. No one would touch me. I was contagious. I was a spectacle.
The heat cramped my stomach, doubling me over with a gasp that sounded like a dying mechanism gears grinding to a halt. My wrist flashed red, painting the walls in the color of emergency, of danger, of blood.
Critical. Critical. Critical.
The tears finally came, hot and scalding, mixing with the cold sweat on my face. I was a bestselling author. I was the invisible queen of the genre. I lay on the floor of my multi-million dollar fortress, surrounded by scattered pills and the wreckage of my own career, waiting for the dark to swallow me whole.
I was exactly where I had started. Alone on the floor, while the world watched and laughed.
FOUR
Simon
The silence in the sleek, ultra-modern rental house wasn’t peace; it was the heavy, pressurized quiet of a bomb counting down, the kind that makes your ears pop before the explosion even hits. It was a sterile vacuum, devoid of the messy, chaotic noise of actual life, and it set my teeth on edge.
I sat on the white suede sofa, a piece of furniture so aggressively impractical it offended me on a structural level, and dragged a thick stick of compressed charcoal across the tooth of my sketchbook paper.
Scritch. Scritch. Snap.
The tip broke. Again. Beheaded by my own tension.
"You're going to grind that black dust into the upholstery," Anders stated flatly.
He didn't turn around from the kitchen island, where he was presiding over his laptop like a general in a war room, illuminated by the harsh blue light of a spreadsheet. His posture was rigid, the line of his tailored charcoal suit jacket unyielding even after hours of travel. He smelled like expensive stress, sharp aged bourbon and the ozone crackle of electricity,radiating a need for control that made the air in the room feel physically thin, as if he were inhaling all the available oxygen.
"Send the cleaning bill to the studio if you're so worried about the deposit," I muttered, blowing the loose black dust off the page. It dispersed into a fine cloud, settling on my jeans.
It didn't help. The drawing was garbage. It was just a frantic, frenetic mess of heavy, angry lines and jagged shadows. I had been attempting to capture the violence of the storm raging outside, but the sketch lacked the one thing I needed: a focal point. It was all noise, no signal. Just like us, sitting in this glass cage, waiting.
Daniel was in the kitchen, organizing the pantry with the terrifying serenity of a man who believed Earl Grey tea could solve structural failures. He moved with a soothing largeness, his broad shoulders stretching the fabric of his flannel shirt as he aligned boxes of pasta.
"Ten minutes until the hour, Anders," his deep voice rumbled, smooth as polished timber and warm as the spiced chai scent clinging to his skin. "Maybe she’s just having connectivity issues. Look at the weather. It's nasty out there."
"This isn't a rural bed and breakfast. She has military-grade satellite internet," Anders clipped out, tapping a key with unnecessary force, the sound echoing like a gunshot in the open-concept room. "I paid for the installation myself three years ago, buried the cables, and secured the server. If she’s offline, it’s a choice. And right now, it’s a breach of contract."
I looked out the floor-to-ceiling windows that made up the entire western wall. The world was a wash of violently grey slate and charcoal. The rain wasn’t falling; it was being thrown against the glass in sheets, a deluge so thick it distorted the coastline into a blurred, impressionist nightmare of dark shapes and whitecaps.
