Page 96 of Power Play

Ryan: Wouldn’t miss watching you lose a fight with Tennyson.

Her reply appeared while I unlocked the door.

Charm: I hate you.

I smiled as I answered.

Ryan: No you don’t, mi hada.

I slid behind the wheel and tossed the phone onto the passenger seat.

I knew what I wanted, and that had never been the difficult part. Wanting Charm physically had been manageable because I could keep it separate from everything that mattered. I couldn’t do that anymore. I cared whether she ate, whether she laughed, whether she trusted her own thoughts, and whether I was helping her find her way out of the cage or becoming one more person waiting outside it with instructions.

The fear sat deeper than the possibility of Lance hating me or our friends getting caught inside whatever happened between us. Charm was becoming someone I expected to find on the other side of every message, every tutoring session, and every ordinary part of my day. I knew better than to trust permanence simply because I wanted it, but every time her name appeared on my phone, wanting her felt less like a choice I could control.

Giving Charm room mattered. Making sure she never mistook my patience for uncertainty mattered too.

Whatever happened at three, I needed to stop hiding the truth inside vague language and trust her enough to give it to her.

I wanted Charm, and I was already too far inside those feelings to pretend I didn’t care where they took us.

6

Charm

The knock came three minutes before three while the measuring tape was still pulled tight around my waist.

“Shit.”

I released it so quickly that the end snapped against my skin. A faint red line circled my stomach where I had pulled too hard, joining the marks already fading along my thighs and upper arms from the measurements I had taken and retaken over the last twenty minutes.

Ryan knocked again.

I bent over the bathroom counter and tried to breathe while the measuring tape hung loosely from one hand. The first number had been fine. Better than fine. It was smaller than the one I remembered from last week, and for a few seconds, relief had loosened the pressure behind my ribs.

Then I decided I had measured from the wrong place.

The second number was different. So was the third. By the fourth, I couldn’t remember which one had been right or where the tape had rested the first time. I moved to my hips, then my thighs, measuring each one twice because the left looked larger in the mirror even when the numbers said it wasn’t.

My arms came next. One was too soft. The other was too thin. My collarbones looked sharp while my stomach looked wide, and nothing about the body in front of me agreed with anything else.

Some rational part of me understood the contradictions. I knew clothing sizes, measurements, garment construction, and how mirrors distorted angles beneath unforgiving light. I understood enough to know the reflection shouldn’t have looked the way it did to me.

Knowing didn’t change what my eyes insisted was there.

Another knock carried through the apartment.

“Charm?”

My chest tightened.

Ryan was standing outside expecting me to understand philosophy, poetry, and whatever else he had planned, while I stood half-dressed in front of a bathroom mirror measuring pieces of myself like one correct number might finally make the entire woman acceptable.

I wound the tape into a tight circle and shoved it into the drawer beneath the vanity. My hands trembled badly enough that it caught against a brush before I forced the drawer closed.

When I faced the mirror again, my eyes went directly to my stomach.

The ritual came so automatically that I barely recognized it as one anymore. My fingers settled against the edge of the counter while I studied every part of my reflection I had spent twenty minutes correcting before Ryan knocked.