Page 57 of What Comes Around

I didn’t know the men. I didn’t know the place. I didn’t know who sent it.

But I knew the feeling that hit me.

A sharp, territorial fury that tightened my vision at the edges.

I snapped the laptop shut like it had burned me, then sat in the dark breathing hard, trying to make sense of the storm inside my chest.

Anger came first. Possessiveness came second.

The third thing didn’t have a name. Something colder. Coiled. Hungry.

It wasn’t my business. She wasn’t mine. I had no right to feel anything.

I didn’t own her time, her body, or her choices. She had every right to live however she wanted outside my company.

And yet the thought of someone else touching her, someone else seeing her like that, twisted something inside me until it hurt.

She owed me nothing.

I repeated it like a mantra.

It didn’t help.

The images clung to the inside of my skull. Every time I blinked I saw her again—her body, the way she moved for someone who wasn’t me. Something ugly began to bloom in my chest.

I tried tracing the sender. Dead end. I considered giving the file to IT. I didn’t.

No one else needed to see her like that.

I deleted the file, emptied the trash, blocked the address.

It didn’t matter. The damage was done.

After that, I started noticing everything. Who spoke to her. Who looked at her. Every man who stood a little too close.

It was irrational.

And I hated that it felt that way.

So when I walked into the break room and saw Jonah leaning toward her, touching her arm, smiling like he had a chance, something in me snapped.

I told myself it was about professionalism.

It wasn’t.

It was about the images still burned into my mind, the ones I couldn’t erase.

She stood there calm and unaware, while my brain kept overlaying those clips onto the woman in front of me.

By the time I called her into my office later, I was already wound tight enough to break.

I told myself I needed the report.

That part was true.

The rest was a lie.

When she leaned in beside me to point at the screen, close enough that I could feel the warmth of her, everything I had been forcing down surged back up at once.