Chapter Text
Katara is twenty-three years old and no stranger to the way men look at her.
She sees their double-glances. The dim flicker of their eyes—never as discreet as they think—as they travel up and down the lines of her body. Sometimes it’s mere appreciation that settles in their expression. Sometimes something darker, more primal—lust.
All of this she endures, mostly in silence. She does not comment on it, mostly pretends not to notice, because acknowledging it feels like a private humiliation made public. Most men don’t dare try anything except look—though sometimes the looking feels almost as violating as touching.
Sometimes Katara looks at her body and remembers the lanky adolescent version of it. She’d been skinny and unremarkable, not much to look at. A late bloomer, they’d called her.
But bloom she did, eventually.
As the Southern Water Tribe ambassador during peace times, she makes the long trip to the Fire Nation three times a year. They are for the ambassadors meetings, in which they all congregate to discuss transnational matters. The regular, face-to-face gatherings were mandatory and crucial to prevent any siloes from going up between the nations again. It had been one of Zuko’s first decrees as Fire Lord.
The first night always hosts the welcome dinner for all of the ambassadors. Katara is seated down the table from her old friend, the Fire Lord. It has not escaped her notice that over the years, her place has gotten further and further away from the head of the table, filled by the men in his council.
Today she is seated next to Commander Shi. She becomes acquainted with him quickly. He’s a few years her senior and has seemed to take a liking to her from the way he leans in to talk to her and laughs at her sarcastic comments. It doesn’t hurt that he’s square-jawed and objectively handsome. She catches the swipe of his gaze across her bare collarbone.
She’d been right to feel pretty in this dress, after all.
She ignores the goosebumps that rise on her neck when she feels another pair of distant eyes burning into her shoulders.
Conversation is jovial and perfectly deserving for a nation that’s worked ceaselessly hard to heal old wounds and foster unprecedented peace. Katara’s three cups of wine has her doling out smiles to the commander a bit more freely than she would have sober.
“May I walk you to your room?”
Katara looks at the hand extended before her and the smile of the man hovering above it.
“That’s kind of you, Commander, but I’m afraid I have to respectfully decline,” she says politely.
He nods and gives her one last brilliant smile. “Then you leave me to hope to be seated near you again in the future, Master Katara.”
They all file out into the hall, conversation echoing. Katara heads towards the south wing where she’s staying for the week, grateful for the silence. She thinks of how her eyes had met Zuko’s—his face practiced and stoic, only betrayed by the flash of white on his knuckles.
A small voice in her head wonders if he regrets seating her beside his commander.
The voices have all faded away when she’s crossing to the doors of her room and her arm is grabbed by someone who silently steps out of the darkness.
Her body knows his touch immediately so it does not react in fear. He pulls her into her room and pins her against the inside of her door.
Immediately his wet mouth is against her neck. It’s all glorious texture. Lips and tongue and teeth.
“If you’d let him walk you back to your room, I would have dismissed him from his post.”
Katara’s breath flutters. The whole-bodied heat of him against her makes her skin flare with goosebumps. “Strange, then, that the Fire Lord would tempt fate and seat him next to me.”
His fingers climb up the nape of her neck, sinking into her hair. “I didn’t. It was Councilman Tyro.”
She hums. He nips at the underside of her jaw, kissing her everywhere but her mouth. Heat pools low in her belly, between her thighs.
“Do you know how it felt? Watching you in that dress, seeing the way he looked at you? Watching him talk to you… knowing he was sitting there, thinking he had a chance?”
“Who said he didn’t?”
A low growl rips from his throat. He kisses her then—if kissing felt like someone trying to devour her whole. He’s discarded his heavy ceremonial outer robe, somewhere, and she can feel every hard plane of his body, including the thick, rigid length of his erection against her thigh.
Saliva fills the inside of her mouth at the thought of it. She blocks the whine that threatens to slip from her vocal chords.
“This dress,” he snarls. “It was like I could hear the thoughts of every man in that room.”
“Is that so? Firebender, Fire Lord, and now a mind reader? Your qualifications just continue to expand.”
“Don’t need to be a mind reader.” He swallows, and she watches the heavy bob in his throat. He pulls back and looks at her, his hand still fisted in her hair. He looks at her like he’s a man in pain. “You’re beautiful, Katara.”
She wants to ask him when he first thought it. Associated her—with that word.
When she’d met him, she was still in that lanky, unremarkable body. A strong body, still growing, but already hardened by loss and revenge. Sometimes when she dug deep in the cobwebs of her old memories, she feels the ghost of the way she had caught him looking at her sometimes, even then. The way it had made her blood run hot and fuzzy, all at the same time. And in her youth and innocence she hadn’t known what to make of it—so she called it embarrassment.
She knew better now, of course. The same way she had grown into this body, she had grown into her sense of self-awareness. Knew herself and her feelings enough to name them properly.
He undoes her dress and it falls to the ground in a heap of beautiful fabric the color of embers. They move to her bed and in their feverish impatience they skip the foreplay without hesitation—he buries himself in her already weeping cunt with a groan hissed through his teeth, one hand fisted against her mattress.
As wet as she is, it aches a little, having him inside her after so long. But it’s an ache that settles like satisfaction deep in her bones, because the ache means he’s back inside her again, filling her and stretching her in the way that she’d fantasized about as she touched herself, back in her lonely bed in Wolf Cove.
He moves without preamble, dragging himself against her walls, pistoning his hips. His pace is brutal and the air fills with the obscenely wet noises of his repeated intrusion in her eager, pliant body. Katara receives, willingly. And she keens for more.
“Fuck, I’ve missed you,” he says in earnest, like a man in prayer. “Thought about… going to you… so many times. The minute I saw you on the dock, I wanted to….”
She’d wanted to, too. She’d felt the gush in her underwear, seeing him standing there. Would have bent over for and presented herself to him bare right then if he’d asked.
Luckily, the honorable Fire Lord hadn’t.
It doesn’t take her long before she comes. It never does, the first night. She comes so hard her vision whites out temporarily and his fingers dig into the meat of her thighs as every muscle in her body riots from her orgasm.
She babbles his name in hysteria, undignified-like. Zuko, yes. Fuck, Zuko. Zuko, please!
It’s only a few more punishing thrusts before his movements stutter and he stills. He’s so deep inside her that she can feel him pulsing, her body drinking up every drop after months of absence and ache, ravenous with thirst.
He gently presses the hilt of his palm down on her lower abdomen. Katara’s lungs quiver at the combined pressure—his hard cock still inside her, her insides filled with his cum. She likes to think that he had saved it up for her.
“I like feeling myself inside you,” he says lowly, his voice still thick and gravelly with desire. He starts to withdraw slowly, groaning at the subtle ripple of her lean stomach against his fingers before he moves back inside her. Katara can feel it, viscerally. Her insides moving for him as he strains her. “Do you like it too?”
“Yes,” she chokes out, as he puts more pressure. He starts to thrust again. “Zuko, please. I need… more.”
More, always. More, branded on her tongue. Scored on the inside of her eyelids.
He releases and she exhales, feeling the tingle in the backs of her legs. He fucks his seed he’s already fucked into her, in earnest. The pressure is back, and it’s almost too much, but it’s always never enough for how badly she wants him. As much of him as she can possibly, physically have. She wants her belly swollen with his seed. She wants him dripping out of her for hours after they’ve finished fucking.
And she knows without asking that he wants it too.
This is what they do.
What they’ve done, for the past three years.
They’d never named it. Never talked about it. After it happened once during a late night catching up over a bottle of firewhiskey, it happened again the next night. And then every night until her things had been loaded back on her ship and her trip to the Fire Nation on behalf of peacekeeping for her tribe had ended.
For Katara, the experience had answered a long-held mystery for her. She had known there were some people in her tribe who’d fallen captive to the dark siren song of the drink. How they’d lost everything they had to it. She’d never understood how people could fall so deep into something and let it ruin their lives.
After that night with Zuko, she understood. Deep in the throes of pleasure, she would have bathed in oil and set herself on fire if he’d asked her to.
He had said goodbye to her at the dock cordially, as if he hadn’t spent the last week tasting her in places that had never seen the sun.
Even then, she’d left a bit of his seed inside her, a deeply perverse use of her bending. A souvenir.
After that visit, months went by. They wrote their usual letters—of business, threading in updates on their friends and families. They did not write one word of what they had done. Katara started to wonder if it was a one-time thing—a one-visit thing. A shameful thing. So she kept her expectations at bay, even when they clawed at her sternum, even when the want burrowed into her marrow.
At night, alone, she came on her fingers at the thought of him, wondering if he ever pleasured himself at the thought of her too.
And then came time for her next visit, like clockwork. She got on the ship and undocked when she landed in his domain. He greeted her the way he always did. Like they were old friends with a shared history. They had meetings and talked trade and food supply and politics and new technology to make their nations more resilient. She spared long glances at him only when his attention was elsewhere—at another ambassador, or one of his sly councilmen—her eyes sweeping the majestic line of his jaw and his throat, feeling her unnamed desire clenched at the pit of her stomach.
She felt overwhelmed with it. She started to panic, then. That she’d leave this trip without feeling his mouth on hers again. That she’d deluded herself into thinking last time was anything but a self-induced fever dream.
It was on the first night, a few hours after dinner had concluded, that he came to her room. He didn’t ask for permission, didn’t offer an explanation. He didn’t need to. He grabbed her by the neck and kissed her and she kissed him back, sighing with relief against his lips like she’d been waiting for it. Like inside his mouth lay the answer to the question she’d been asking for months.
Was it real?
Do you still want me?
He answered with the flat of his tongue finding every inch of her body. The way he whispered her name in her hair as he split her open and he drove his cock inside her, half manic, half reverent.
In the brief moments he wasn’t inside her, she was curled up into him, hearing the low murmur of his voice vibrating from his chest. Sometimes he talked about his days. His worries. Asked her questions about herself like he’d been saving them up. Sometimes they reminisced on old memories and days long past.
When he kissed her his hand cradled her head, short fingernails against her scalp, tangled in her hair. She liked it. It made her feel—tethered to him. He’d have her as many times he could in the night until he’d get silently dressed at dawn, leaving her with his spunk pooling on her sheets, dripping from between her legs.
It was a week of closeness that could never see the light of day.
And then she would leave the warmth and turn back towards the tundra, counting down the days until she’d be back again.
Katara never asked if there were others.
Zuko never asked her either.
Sometimes Katara had gotten close, felt the words rising up her throat like bile. She’d heard rumors of course, even as far away as she was. Rumors she didn’t believe but still made her aspirate on her stomach acid to think about.
So when Aang arrives with news from his most recent visit to the Fire Nation, she insists to herself that she isn’t surprised.
He says it with childish delight—an expression only reserved for someone who truly thought this was the best outcome for a dear friend. “Have you heard? Zuko and Mai are engaged again!”
Katara stills. She’d been in the middle of hanging up seal blubber to dehydrate. She catches the tremor that appears in her right hand and flattens her palm on the wooden counter.
“Hopefully this time they can make it work. I think Zuko would make a great husband, don’t you?”
She has a flash of Zuko’s head between her legs, long hair sticking to his sweat-slick shoulders, muscles flexing luridly as he sucked her dry.
Zuko. A husband.
Because of course he would be. Someday. A husband, yes—a good one, undoubtedly.
“Did he… tell you that?” Her throat is raspy, suddenly. “About the engagement.”
Aang shrugs. “I overheard his councilmen talking so I asked him about it. I mean, he got all quiet and all Zuko about it—you know how he is—but he pretty much confirmed it.”
“I see.” Her voice is flat, its depth erased. “Good for him.”
Aang laughs good-naturedly. “I guess a Fire Lord needs a Fire Lady!”
“I guess he does.”
He preens. “I’ve already called dibs on being his best man for the wedding.”
Katara cleans her hands and looks at him. Aang’s grin is so pure and unselfish that it feels like a rebuke even though she knows better. She smiles back.
“You’ll make a wonderful best man, Aang.”
On the third day of Aang’s visit, Katara allows him to kiss her.
They’d had dinner at her place, just the two of them. Over the course of the night she had noticed the way he looked at her—lingering, heavy. Different from the way she’d grown used to being looked at by him, back in their youth. After all—though this is not a thing she would ever publicly advertise, or utter aloud—Katara had grown used to being looked at by Aang. First it was an innocent neediness—a constant desire for affirmation, validation. Then affection. Then something a little more than affection.
But tonight he had looked at her…
Like a man who wants.
She tries not to think of the other man who often looked at her this way.
She’s grabbing them another bottle of rice wine when he does it. He ducked his head and brushed his lips against hers, sticky and sweet with wine. They didn’t set her body on fire. But maybe they didn’t have to.
His thumb lifts her chin. A suggestion. When she doesn’t pull away, he does it again. Gently, carefully. He kissed her like he was afraid of doing it wrong. There’s an innocence and sweetness to it that she tells herself is good. Is right.
“Sorry,” he breathes. He moves away just slightly, his hand falling. His smile is still boyish but she can see the uncertainty hiding behind it. “Was that… okay?”
Katara looks at him. Really looks at him. And she notices, maybe for the first time, that he is no longer the boy she’d once helped out of the ice. She takes in the broadness of his shoulders, the fine edge of his jaw. His hands. Large, now. Rough.
They are not the hands she is used to, but who said they had to be?
Those hands belonged to another now.
“Yeah.” She smiles a small smile. “It was.”
It’s barely dawn and Katara is in the middle of gutting the morning’s catch. She deftly uses her knife, her fingers cold and slimy, as she filets the fish. She thinks nothing of their glass-eyed, vacant stare as she tosses their heads into the basket.
Her grandmother takes the finished filets, one by one. Salting them and then wrapping them in paper.
Gran Gran does not look at her when she says it.
“He spent the night in your hut.”
Katara’s grip nearly slips on her knife. She refocuses and tightens her hold, removing the fish bones in one quick move.
“Does Father know?”
“No,” Gran Gran says. “And I won’t tell him. Or Sokka.”
She tries not to look too relieved. “Thank you.”
“I can’t say I’m surprised,” her grandmother says with an amused crinkle in her eyes. “That boy’s had his eyes on you ever since you got him out of the ice. He’s never been coy about his affection towards you. I don’t think he even knows how to be. You, on the other hand…”
Katara frowns. Something suddenly sticks in her throat. “Gran Gran…”
“You’ve never looked back at him the way he looks at you. Nor any other man that seems to put himself in your way with the same intentions.”
Her knife is halfway through the fish’s underside when it stills.
“In fact, the only time I see you not so indifferent is whenever you come back from one of your ambassador trips from the Fire Nation.”
She inhales, closing her eyes briefly. Nothing got past her grandmother, even now.
“Are you going to lecture me?”
Gran Gran chuckles. “You’re a grown woman, Katara. Too old for lectures.”
She bites her lip. She flicks her wrist, finishing the cut. She hesitantly slides it over.
“I trust you’ll let him down easy.”
Gran Gran grabs the last filet, rubs it with salt, folds it in paper, and tosses it in the basket.
Katara releases her knife, her hands smelling of fish guts. She looks at the pile of fish heads to her left. A dozen pairs of lifeless eyes, staring back at her.
I suspect that by now Aang’s told you about my engagement.
It’s… complicated.
I’ll explain during your next visit here.
Zuko meets her at the dock as he usually does. Katara pretends that her breath does not hitch at the sight of him, acts like she doesn’t feel the internal wince at the tenderness that throbs in her chest at the new reality they find themselves in.
She looks at him and asks herself if he looks like an engaged man. As if somehow this distinction would alter his appearance, or shift something in his energy.
Made him happier, maybe. But as she peers at him she can’t tell if he is. Happier.
Maybe he was just shielding her from it. Zuko could be merciful that way.
They exchange their polite greetings and shallow niceties. She averts her gaze when his eyes bore into her a little too intently, when she can sense her blood start to rush to the tiny capillaries in her skin. She reminds herself things are different now. For the entire length of her journey, she’d tried not to dwell on thoughts of anxiety or disappointment. She reminds herself she is here to do her job. That’s all.
The itinerary is much the same. At the welcome dinner, she is not seated by Commander Shi, but rather one of the wives of the councilmen. They make decent enough conversation but as the night goes on and her cup is continuously refilled with wine, her resolve weakens and she finds her gaze traveling down to the head of the table.
Mai wasn’t at the table with him. Why wasn’t she?
As if sensing her, his eyes flicker up and meet hers. Katara does not do the wise thing and look away. He stares back and she lets him and hours could have passed this way and she would not have known it. She would have sprouted roots where she sat.
Zuko’s attention felt so much more different than Aang’s. Aang’s she was freely given, and she received it like a gift she did not ask for but appreciated anyway. But Zuko’s… she would starve for it. And when she had it—felt the full, burning weight of it—it felt intoxicating. It awakened every cell in her body—they were all tuned in to his presence, to his proximity, all rabidly consumed with conspiring on how to get that much closer.
Katara knew the specialness that came with being the one who held the Avatar’s affection. She also became intimately aware of the burden of it. When Aang kissed her that night, he did not know the entirety of what he was asking her to do, to be. And she didn’t ask because she, in moment of pure selfishness, had just found out the man she desired now belonged to another and was just grateful for a distraction.
A distraction.
Katara breaks their gaze, clumsily tipping over her cup. Luckily, the wine from it has already been sucked dry. The cacophony of the room returns, louder than before. Her skin feels hot. She reaches over for her water. It’s grown lukewarm just sitting there in the ambient temperature in the perpetually warm air of the Fire Nation. She bends it until it’s cold enough to add shape to her thoughts again once the frigid water hits her tongue.
After dinner, she goes to bed. She just lies there, any possibility of sleep thwarted by the irrationally erratic beating of her heart. She doesn’t know how long she stares up at her dark ceiling until she finally gets up. She opens up one of the windows, looking up at the moon. Tonight it is a silver eyelash against a vast, obsidian sky.
Tui, what am I doing?
Katara wasn’t one for self-pity. But here under the gaze of Tui, carved like a half-smirk into the night, she revels in her stupidity, on the verge of bitterly laughing at herself out of her own self-imposed agony.
It wasn’t even like they were anything—Zuko and her. They’d never talked about it. Never named it. Never said they were exclusive. Never said this was anything special.
This was just… convenient. Maybe a symptom of avoidant behavior to ward off the prospect of a real relationship, genuine vulnerability. An immature indulgence unbecoming of a Fire Lord and one of his appointed ambassadors-slash-childhood enemy-slash-friend. A perverse method of self-preservation.
A dry bark of a laugh is scraped from her throat.
Didn’t feel much like she was preserving anything.
Her spine tenses when she hears it. She turns her head to see a dark figure slipping into her room, locking the doors behind him.
She holds her breath.
She catches his quick pause of hesitation before he makes his way over to her. He’s in the clothes he wears to sleep—silky bottoms and a robe thrown over his bare chest. His long, dark hair is down, all ornamentation and pretense of his Fire Lord authority stripped away.
In the moonlight the starburst-shaped scar on his abdomen almost shines silver.
“Hi,” she whispers.
“Hi,” he says.
The word feels stupidly dense. Lands like it, too. Like it could crater the ground between them.
“So.” She turns away, looking back up at the sky. If she left the window open, would Tui eavesdrop on their conversation? “You’re engaged.”
She hears him let out a breath.
“I was technically still engaged to Mai. Our families never broke it off, officially.”
She digests this. “So you’ve been engaged this whole time.”
The tiny muscle in his jaw tightens. “To be fair, Mai and I didn’t know. It only came up again because the contract was found by one of our scribes. Traditionally, there’s a formal process that typically rests on approval from the heads of both families. With my father banished and Mai’s parents dead…” He trails off. “Mai and I have started the process. I don’t anticipate any issues.”
She feels something loosen in her chest. She swallows.
“I was worried my wedding invitation got lost in the mail.”
He snorts. Then he looks at her, his gaze softening. “No invites. No wedding. No marriage.”
She sighs. “Bummer. I was thinking it might be nice to go to another wedding again.”
He winces. “Tells me you’ve never been to a Fire Nation wedding.”
She raises an eyebrow at him.
“They’re… all formality. Stiff. Not fun like Sokka and Suki’s wedding.”
She thinks back to their wedding. They’d had it back at their home village. It’d been fun, all right. Twelve straight hours of dancing and drinking and celebrating and sheer jubilance. That was the night Zuko had asked her to be the Southern Water Tribe Ambassador. Seeing him in that borrowed Southern blue, black hair flecked with snow, she remembered wondering if his lips would still be warm if she kissed him. Oh how badly she’d wanted to kiss him, even then.
Even before she could let herself admit it.
“Maybe so. But you’re Fire Lord now,” she smiles. “You’ve rebuilt your nation. Brokered transnational peace that everyone said would be impossible to see in your lifetime. If there’s anyone here who could break the rules to have a fun, un-stiff wedding, it’d be you.”
He smiles at her. Katara’s heart pathetically balloons in her chest.
“I appreciate the encouragement.”
“If it came down to a vote, know that you would definitely have the support of the Southern Water Tribe.”
He chuckles quietly. Then he reaches down and she feels his thumb trace the underside of her jaw. He tucks her hair behind her ear. She watches as his eyes search hers and when she gives no objection, he leans down and kisses her.
The kiss is soft, at first. His thumb presses down just slightly as it travels down her neck. Katara’s hands grab the front of his robes, her knuckles grazing the warm skin of his bare chest. She is the one who slips his cover off his body, whose teeth eagerly nip against his bottom lip. She presses her body against him, wearing nothing but a sheer slip, her nipples hard against the fabric. With a choked noise from his throat, he lifts her up by her ass, her legs reflexively hooking around his hips.
He walks her over to her bed, mouths open and searching and greedy, before he lays her down, grinding his erection against her already soaked center. She moans.
“Zuko, please,” she whispers. She sounds pathetic, begging. But with Zuko it feels like a native language. She begs for him even when he’s sheathed inside her, so deep it forces the air out of her lungs, bending her knees to her shoulders, pounding her into her bed. She begs for him even though for him to burrow any deeper would mean physical, biological distention. She begs anyway.
Her slick is so copious that she feels it smearing all over her inner thighs. She hears the rhythmic wet slap of his skin against hers, the squelch of his dick thrusting into her cunt swollen with desire. He slows and she feels his hand press down her on her lower stomach as he moves in and out. She gasps.
He grabs her hand, flattening her palm in the taut space above her pelvis. She feels it. The muscle moving as his girth moves in and out of her. He’s so deep that she feels tears trickle from her eyes.
She feels his hot breath and then his mouth, licking away her tears.
“You take me so well, Katara,” he murmurs against her ear, as his movements start to quicken. “So fucking well. Do you know how… maddening that is? It’s all I dream about. All I think about, sometimes. Day after day, sitting there, with Councilman Iida droning on about land boundaries… I think about the sounds you make when I’m inside you.”
She whimpers.
“Such good, heavenly sounds. It makes me greedy. Having you, like this… filling you with my cum… makes me greedy, Katara. I only want more. Agni, so much more. Don’t you… do you get that?”
He flicks his hips, deep. Her spine bends like a bow, exposing the belly of her throat—to Zuko, to Tui, to the ever-watchful ceiling of the Firelord’s manor.
She comes. Hard.
She’s barely even conscious as he fucks her through her orgasm. When she lands back in her body, she feels everything. The sweat matting her hair. Her drenched bedsheets from her weeping arousal. His fingers in her scalp, calling her back to their realm—this realm, where she is being so thoroughly fucked by him—and her throat swells thick with emotion as she thinks of Zuko, the husband, the very good husband.
If not to Mai now, then to someone, someday.
“Katara.” His shoulders shudder violently under her fingers as she feels him release deep inside her. She clenches her legs around him, wanting him embedded in her womb, imprinted on her insides. Was that too much to ask?
He stays anchored within her, brushing his mouth over her face, her cheeks, her eyelashes. He pulses against her walls, greedily milking him for everything he can spare.
When he finally pulls out, the absence is immediate and aching. She bites back her protest. He collapses beside her, catching his breath.
Silence fills the air. It’s humid and smells like sex. And he is warm, so warm beside her.
She closes her eyes, bracing herself.
“Zuko. There’s something I have to tell you.”
His breathing shallows.
“I think… I think I’m with Aang now.”
He stills. There’s a pause that leaves too much room for her own self-loathing to occupy. It feels like a needle dragging across her skin.
His voice is quiet, low. “I know.” He sighs. “I knew when you got here.”
Something sour fills Katara’s mouth.
“Do you hate me?”
“No.” She swallows painfully. Barely. “Do you hate me?” Her exhale quivers from her lungs. “Do you… think I’m a bad person, Zuko?”
His voice grows even softer. “Never. I’d never think that about you.”
Her cheeks are suddenly wet. “I’m sorry. I’ve put you in an awful position.”
“Katara,” he says. He sounds pained. “Trust me. You didn’t do anything I didn’t already do to myself.”
He doesn’t reach out and touch her like he usually does and neither does she. Another moment passes before she feels his weight shift beside her, getting up. She watches as he retrieves his clothes, getting dressed. Her chest feels so tight she has to refrain from the urge to scream.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
“I’m sorry too,” she says back.
And then he leaves.
He does not come to her room again during her stay.