Page 142 of What Goes Around

She held my gaze a second longer than necessary. There was something she wanted to ask. Something she decided against.

“Okay,” she said finally. “Then we do this properly. No digital footprints leading back to you. Or me.”

“I know.”

She turned back to her screens, fingers already moving.

“Start with what you have.”

I knew exactly what faces I was looking for.

I described them carefully. A scar across a knuckle. A lazy eye that drifted when he was tired. The way one of them walked, weight pitched forward like he was always about to lunge. The other never stopped tapping his fingers. First names. Approximate ages. Accents.

I framed it all as secondhand memory. Borrowed trauma. Inherited details.

Amy typed fast, efficient, already deep in her element. Databases. Cross-referencing. Facial recognition tools. It was like watching someone try to pull a needle from a haystack.

Sometimes I had to step away.

Amy thought it was the emotional weight of the work. The cruelty of it. She thought I was overwhelmed.

She didn’t know it was memory pressing too close. The smell of stale beer. The sound of a door locking. The way time had slowed when I realized I wasn’t getting out.

When she glanced at me with concern, I redirected. Focused on logistics. On data. On process.

On the idea that if we found them now, someone else might never have to remember what I did.

Around the same time, something else began to surface. Maybe it was all the work with trafficked victims, or maybe it was the consistency, the way I kept circling the same darkness.

It started with a dream.

Nick was there, but not the careful, kind lover I remembered. He didn’t ask. He didn’t wait. He took. He held me down. There was no romance, no tenderness, no dialogue that mattered.

And my body responded. I orgasmed hard.

I woke up shaken, breath uneven, sheets twisted around my legs, my body betraying me in the most humiliating way possible. Pleasure, sharp and undeniable, still lingered when consciousness caught up.

I felt sick.

Ashamed. Disgusted. Horrified by myself.

For a long time after my rebirth, I had believed I was asexual. I felt no desire, no urges, no pull toward intimacy. I assumed that after everything that part of me had simply shut down. Permanently.

Over the next days and weeks, I tried to forget it. I told myself it meant nothing, that bodies misfire under stress, that trauma distorts everything. That it was just a fluke.

But the dreams kept coming.

Not always Nick. Sometimes men with no faces. The details shifted, but the pattern didn’t. Always force. Always control taken from me. Always rough hands, pressure. No illusion of equality.

And always my body responding.

I woke from each one unsettled, angry at myself, angry at my body, angry at the part of me that responded when I wanted nothing to do with it.

I had spent years surviving without choice. How could my body crave something that broke me before?

Months passed like that. I ignored it. I doubled down on control. Studying. Routine. Solitude. I told myself I was above all of this now.

It was a lie.