The sequined dress is a weapon, tiny and silver and throwing light like shattered glass. I slick on red lipstick like I’m drawing a line in the sand, smoke out my eyes until they look like bruises. When I step into the main room, he’s just closing the door behind him, a stack of papers under his arm. Sebastian freezes. His eyes track from my face, down the precarious span of sequins, to my bare legs, and back up. The journey takes a century. “Wow,” he says, the word clipped but airless. “You look… nice.”

“Thanks,” I say, my voice a short, sharp blade. I don’t break stride, scooping my tiny purse from the counter. The glitter feels like a thousand little eyes watching him watch me. “Don’t wait up.” I’m past him, the door handle cool under my palm, and I’m out into the Wyoming night before he can form another painfully proper syllable. The click of the latch behind me is the period on the sentence he started in the pool.

The bar is all polished wood and manufactured cheer, and Lacey is already perched on a stool, a margarita the size of her head in hand. “There’s my glamour-puss!” she crows, then her eyes go wide. “Oh, honey. You are on a *mission*. Who are we destroying?” I don’t get to answer before he materializes. Dr. Mark, resident at the hospital, sandy hair, a smile that’s all straight, white teeth and practiced charm. He’s thirty-two. An actual doctor. Not a pre-med boy playing at it. He buys the next round. His hand finds the small of my back to guide me through the crowd, and it’s warm, competent. It feels like nothing.

An hour later, my laugh is too loud, my touches too deliberate. Mark tells a story about a tricky diagnosis, and I nod, thinking of darker hair and a quieter voice dissecting Byron in a sunlit kitchen. “You’re fascinating,” Mark says, leaning in. His cologne is spicy and expensive. It doesn’t smell like earl grey and chlorine. “A total mystery.” I just smile, the red lipstick a confident lie. When he suggests his place is quieter, I say yes. I say yes like it’s a line from a script I’m finally nailing.

His apartment is clean, modern, beige. He kisses me against the entryway wall, and it’s perfectly fine. His hands are smooth where they grip my hips. I close my eyes and try to feel the desperation of the pool, the raw, gasping hunger, but all I get is technique. My sequined dress ends up on his pristine floor, a sparkling puddle of defiance. He murmurs, “You’re so beautiful,” and all I can think is that ‘nice’ and ‘beautiful’ are both just words that don’t mean a thing.

His hands are on my hips, smooth and practiced, and I close my eyes and it’s Sebastian’s grip I feel—the calluses from his rowing days, the possessive dig of his fingers into the soft give of my waist in the pool, the way they trembled just once before he pulled me against him. The sterile, spice-cologne air of Mark’s apartment melts into the damp chlorine and old-book scent of the pool house. The murmur against my neck isn’t “you’re so beautiful,” it’s my name, gasped like a concession, “Imogen,” in that clipped accent unraveling at the edges.

I make a sound. It’s supposed to be for Mark, but it gets caught in the memory of Sebastian’s mouth on my throat, the desperate scrape of his teeth. My hands, which are flat against Mark’s chest, remember the hard planes of a different torso, sun-warmed and tense. “You’re incredible,” Mark breathes, and I think, *He told me I was a fascinating problem. He looked at me like I was a poem he couldn’t quite scan.*

“I should go,” I say, the words leaving my mouth before I fully decide to say them. My voice is startlingly clear in the quiet, beige room.

Mark pulls back, his handsome face a mask of confused charm. “Go? It’s late. Stay. I’ll make you breakfast.” He smiles, the offer smooth as his bedside manner. “My french toast is legendary at the hospital.”

“I have a… family thing. Super early.” The lie is flimsy and we both know it. I’m already disentangling, the cool air hitting my skin where his body was, a relief. My sequined dress is a cold, glittering heap on the floor. I step into it, the fabric whispering accusations. Mark watches from the bed, the sheets rumpled, his expression shifting from invitation to a slightly bruised pride. “Seriously? Was it something I said?”

“It’s me,” I say, and for once, it’s not a performance. I don’t look at him as I find my shoes. “I’m just… really bad at this.”

The night air is a cold slap, sobering and cruel. My sequined dress offers zero insulation, and the glitter feels cheap under the streetlights, like I'm shedding tinsel as I walk. The click of my heels on the sidewalk is the only sound in the sleeping neighborhood, a metronome for my humiliation. I just fled a handsome doctor’s bed. I am, officially, the worst kind of cliché: the girl who can’t even use a stranger properly because she’s too busy haunting herself with the ghost of a man who called her ‘nice’.

My body feels all wrong. The pleasant, distant throb between my legs is just biology—a hollow echo of a connection that didn’t land. It’s nothing like the full, aching soreness that lingered for a day after the pool. That felt like a claim. This just feels like a transaction that got interrupted. I can still smell Mark’s cologne on my skin, a cloying layer over the memory of chlorine and old books. I want a shower so badly it’s a physical itch.

The mansion is a dark silhouette against the starry Wyoming sky, the pool house a smaller shadow beside it. A single light burns in its main room. Of course. The professor keeps scholar’s hours. My chest tightens. I consider creeping around to the main house, but my things—my sweatpants, my toothpaste, my last shred of dignity—are in the pool house. I have to face the keeper of the rules.

I open the door as quietly as I can. He’s at the small kitchen table, back to me, bathed in the glow of his laptop. He doesn’t turn. The rigid line of his shoulders tells me he’s aware. He’s always aware. “You’re back early,” he says, his voice neutral, academic. He takes a deliberate sip from a mug. Tea, probably. Always tea.

"Plans fell through," I say, the lie tasting like cheap vodka and regret. I try to sidestep him, a glittering fish trying to slip past a very solid, very displeased rock. My bare shoulder nearly brushes his chest as I move. He doesn't yield an inch.

"Did they." It's not a question. He still hasn't turned from his laptop, but the set of his shoulders is different now—not just rigid, but actively containing something. He takes another slow sip of tea. The silence stretches, filled only by the hum of the laptop and the sound of my own breathing, which feels stupidly loud. "You look like you've been through a warzone fought in a disco."

I glance down. My sequined dress is wrinkled, one strap slipping. Flecks of glitter dust the floor around my feet like sad, metallic snow. A slow, hot wave of humiliation climbs from my chest to my throat. "It's called fashion, Sebastian. Look it up." I force a breezy tone, aiming for the door to my room. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I need approximately three gallons of soap and a memory wipe."

"Imogen." He says my name like it's a command to halt. Finally, he turns. The blue of his eyes in the lamplight is shockingly vivid, and they’re not analytical now. They’re frustrated. Dark. They track the glitter on my collarbone, the smudged line of my eyeliner. "Who was he?"

The question, so blunt and utterly lacking his usual academic detachment, stops me cold. I spin to face him, the movement making my head swim a little. "What?"

“Is this something you do on a daily? First night back, me, tonight another, and tomorrow?” His tone isn’t just sharp—it’s a scalpel, cold and clinical, meant to dissect. He finally pushes back from the table, the chair legs scraping the tile like a scream. He doesn’t stand to his full height, just leans against the edge, arms crossed over that broad chest. The lamplight cuts across the furious line of his jaw. “Should I get tested?”

The words hang in the air between us, toxic and glittering. My own breath feels trapped in my lungs, a solid, painful block. I stare at him, at the man who quoted Keats with his mouth between my thighs, now looking at me like I’m a public health advisory. A laugh bubbles up, hysterical and thin. “Tested? For what? Poor taste?” I take a step closer, the glitter on my skin catching the light, a galaxy of shame. “He was a doctor, Sebastian. Very clean. Very… competent.”

His eyes flash, that cool blue going arctic. “Competent,” he repeats, the word dripping with disdain. He uncrosses his arms, his hands flexing at his sides. I see the tremor in them, the same one I felt in the pool. It’s the only thing that makes this feel real. “You stumble in here at half-two, smelling of another man’s…” He trails off, his nostrils flaring as he finally names the scent clinging to me. “*Cologne*. Your makeup is a catastrophe. You look…” He searches for the word, and lands on the one he knows will wound. “Cheap.”

“Cheap?” The word is a slap. It ignites something raw and furious in my chest, burning away the last of the vodka haze.

The word hangs in the air, toxic and glittering, and something in me snaps. I don’t think. I just move. Two sharp steps forward, the sequins hissing, and my hand arcs through the lamplight. The slap cracks through the quiet of the pool house, a shocking, visceral sound. His head snaps to the side. A faint red imprint blooms on his sun-gilded cheek. My palm stings, a bright, clean pain.

He goes perfectly still. The only movement is the slow, deliberate turn of his head back to face me. His blue eyes are wide, not with hurt, but with a kind of furious, arrested shock. The academic detachment is gone, incinerated. “Cheap?” I hiss, my voice trembling with a rage so pure it scares me. “You arrogant, hypocritical bastard. You, who has a girlfriend waiting back in England that your family adores. You, who fucked me in a pool and then served me tea and told me to be quiet about it. You don’t get to call me cheap.”

He doesn’t flinch. He just stares, his chest rising and falling in a controlled rhythm that feels more dangerous than a shout. “Is that what this is?” His voice is low, graveled. “Retaliation? You thought you’d go find the first available body because I…” He cuts himself off, his jaw working.

"I laugh. A sharp, ugly sound. 'Retaliation?' I shake my head, the glitter raining from my hair. 'No, Sebastian. That implies you were worth the effort. This was just me, living my cheap little life. You go back to your proper, uptight, tea-drinking one with your perfect girlfriend. Don't lose sleep over it. It meant nothing to me, too.' I’m already moving, brushing past him toward the bathroom. 'Now, I’m going to shower this one off so I can get on with the next one tomorrow.'

The bathroom door slams behind me, the lock clicking with finality. I lean against it, my forehead pressed to the cool wood, my breath coming in ragged gulps. The adrenaline is gone, leaving a sick, hollow tremor in its wake. I peel the sequined dress off like a second skin, letting it fall into a sad, sparkly heap. My reflection in the medicine cabinet mirror is a stranger—smudged, furious, glitter in her eyebrows. *Cheap*. I turn the shower on full blast, steam billowing to fog the glass, to erase her.