The days after

The next three days passed in a strange, muted fog that Isabella could not seem to shake no matter how hard she tried.

She woke each morning before her alarm, already tense, the sheets twisted around her legs from restless sleep. Daniel still slept deeply beside her, one arm thrown loosely across the mattress where she had been. She would lie there staring at the ceiling, listening to his even breathing, and the memories would start whether she wanted them or not. The weight of David’s body. The way the desk had felt under her cheek. The exact moment he had forced himself inside her and held her there while she cried. She would slip out of bed carefully so she wouldn’t wake Daniel, go into the bathroom, and stand under the shower with the water as hot as she could stand it, trying to scald the feeling off her skin.

It never worked.

At campus the days blurred together. She taught her morning lectures on autopilot, moving through slides she had prepared weeks ago, answering student questions with a calm she did not feel. During one class she completely lost her place mid-sentence because a student in the third row shifted in his seat the same way David had when he had been watching her undress. She recovered quickly, but her hands were unsteady for the rest of the period. Afterward she locked herself in her office, sat at the desk, and stared at the blank computer screen until the trembling stopped.

The bruises on her hips faded from deep purple to a sickly yellow-green, but they remained sensitive. Every time she sat down she felt them. Every time she crossed her legs in a meeting she was reminded of how hard David’s fingers had dug into her flesh while he fucked her. She started wearing higher-waisted skirts and darker colors, anything that made her feel more covered, though no amount of fabric could hide the way her body still reacted to the memory.

Daniel noticed she was quieter. He asked about it gently on the second night while they were cooking dinner together. Isabella stood at the counter chopping vegetables with more focus than the task required and told him the start of the semester was heavier than usual. Department meetings. New students. The usual excuses. He accepted them the way he always did — with a soft nod and a kiss to her temple — and the guilt of lying to him sat in her chest like something solid and cold.

At night it was worse.

She would lie beside him in the dark and try to match her breathing to his, hoping sleep would come. Instead her mind replayed the office scene in fragments. The sound of his belt. The wet noise of her own mouth around his cock. The moment he had bent her over the desk and told her he was going to mold her to him. She would turn onto her side, pull the blanket higher, and force herself to think about anything else — lecture plans, grocery lists, the plant on her office windowsill that needed water. The thoughts always circled back. Sometimes she got up and went to the living room, sitting in the dark with a glass of water she never drank, waiting for the images to lose their sharpness. They never did.

By the third day she felt frayed. In the middle of grading a stack of quizzes she realized she had been staring at the same page for twenty minutes without reading a single word. She set the pen down, pressed both palms against her eyes, and breathed slowly until the urge to cry passed. Then she picked the pen back up and kept working, because there was nothing else she could do.

She did not text David.

He did not contact her.

The silence somehow made everything heavier.