The Stranger I Married

The silence afterward was suffocating. The kind of silence that didn’t come with peace or satisfaction—just weight. Heavy. Ugly. Filled with things unsaid, regret curling like smoke under Adrian’s skin, tightening around his throat.

He sat at the edge of the couch now, shirt half-buttoned, hair a mess, staring down at his hands as if they might offer answers for how the hell he ended up here. His reflection flickered faintly in the blank TV screen across from him—a distorted version of himself, blurred, distant, unfamiliar.

Clara curled into herself beside him, an oversized sweater swallowing her up, mascara smudged to gray shadows beneath her eyes, lips red from the bruising scrape of desperate kisses. Her bare legs were pulled to her chest, thin arms wrapped tightly around them like she was trying to make herself smaller, to disappear entirely.

But she wasn’t disappearing—not yet.

Adrian could still feel the imprint of her against his skin, the phantom echo of her nails dragging down his back, her mouth at his throat, the tears, the shaking. All of it. All of her.

She looked like a porcelain doll dropped too many times.

And he hated that this felt familiar.

Clara always cried afterward.

That’s how it was with them. Lust, desperation, colliding needs—and then her tears. Over and over again. Each time, Adrian told himself it would be the last, that he wouldn’t let himself fall into the wreckage of her gravity again. But the truth was brutal and simple: he was weak where she was concerned.

He should’ve known better.

But he didn’t move.