Chapter 3 An Uncomfortable high.

The insistent buzzing of her phone dragged Heaven from sleep like a fish hook through water. She fumbled for the device, squinting at the too-bright screen that announced Adaline's contact photo-all cleavage and pouty lips.

"What time is it?" Heaven's voice came out rough, unused.

"Almost noon, sleeping beauty. I went to Meridian last night looking for you, but you'd vanished into thin air. Please tell me you didn't get murdered and this is your ghost talking."

Heaven sat up slowly, her body reminding her of the previous night in ways that made her cheeks burn. "I'm alive."

"Well, that's anticlimactic. I was hoping for at least a kidnapping story. I'm coming over-I need details and I need them caffeinated."

The line went dead before Heaven could protest. Twenty minutes later, Adaline was letting herself in with the her key, carrying two oversized coffee cups and wearing the kind of outfit that suggested she'd slept in someone else's bed.

"You look..." Adaline paused, studying Heaven's face with the sharp attention of someone who'd made a career of reading people's sexual histories. "Different. Glowy. Like you've been properly fucked."

"Jesus, Ada." Heaven pulled her robe tighter, suddenly self-conscious.

"Don't you 'Jesus Ada' me. I can practically smell the pheromones from here." She settled onto the couch, tucking her legs under her like a cat preparing for a long conversation. "Who was he? Was he at Meridian? Did you take my advice about talking to strangers?"

"Where were you, you're never home" Heaven asked.

"You usually don't complain". She asked with a smirk. "My absence let's you hoard our space for yourself". She said making air quotation marks with her fingers before handing her the cup.

Heaven accepted the coffee gratefully, using the act of drinking to buy herself time. How could she explain what had happened when she barely understood it herself?

"There was... someone," she said finally.

"Someone!" Adaline clapped her hands together like she'd just solved a particularly challenging puzzle. "I knew it. You've got that post-orgasmic glow that no amount of expensive skincare can replicate. Was he good? Please tell me he was good because after eight months of vanilla Mario, you deserve a man who knows what he's doing."

"Ada..."

"Oh my God, he was good. Look at you blushing! You never blush. Not even when I told you about that thing I did with the tennis instructor and the-"

"It wasn't supposed to happen," Heaven interrupted, surprising herself with the admission.

Adaline's expression shifted, the playful teasing replaced by something more serious. "What do you mean?"

Heaven set down her coffee cup, her fingers automatically finding that familiar spot on her arm. The pinch was sharper today, more necessary. "I don't... I can't usually... you know how I am with sex."

"Yeah, you go somewhere else. Like your body's there but you're not." Adaline's voice was gentler now, the way it got when they touched on the deeper damage that shaped Heaven's relationships. "But last night was different?"

"Last night was..." Heaven searched for words that could encompass the complete rewiring of her understanding of physical pleasure. "I stayed present. More than present. I felt everything."

The admission hung between them, loaded with thirteen years of carefully managed trauma and the sudden, terrifying possibility that healing might actually be possible.

"Honey," Adaline said softly, "that's huge. That's like... monumentally huge."

"I know." Heaven's voice was barely above a whisper. "I don't know what it means."

"It means you found someone who understands your body better than you do. It means maybe all those years of therapy are finally paying off. It means-" Adaline paused, her expression growing suspicious. "Wait. What's Prince Charming's name?"

Heaven felt heat flood her cheeks. "I don't know."

"You don't know his name?"

"We didn't... it didn't come up."

"It didn't come up?" Adaline's voice rose to a pitch that made the neighbor's dog start barking. "Heaven Hallsey, you let a complete stranger rock your world and you didn't even get his name? What if he's married? What if he's a serial killer? What if he's both?"

"He's not a serial killer."

"How do you know?"

"He's a doctor. A psychologist."

"Oh, great. So he's a head case who specializes in head cases. That's so much better." Adaline ran her hands through her hair, leaving it looking artfully nappy. "Honey, I love that you finally had a breakthrough, but anonymous sex with mysterious strangers is usually my department, not yours."

They sat in silence for a moment, both processing the implications of what had happened. Finally, Adaline's expression softened.

"How do you feel about it? Really?"

Heaven considered the question seriously. How did she feel? Confused, certainly. Vulnerable in ways she wasn't used to. But underneath all of that...

"Like I want it to happen again," she admitted.

Adaline's grin was pure wickedness. "Now we're talking. Did you get his number? Make plans to see him again?"

"No."

"Jesus, Heaven. It's like you're actively trying to make your life more complicated." She checked her phone, then groaned. "I have to get to the club-Mrs. Henderson wants private lessons and she tips like a drunk oil baron. But we're continuing this conversation later. And next time you meet a mysterious stranger who gives you life-changing orgasms, get his fucking name."

After Adaline left in a whirlwind of perfume and unsolicited advice, Heaven found herself alone with thoughts that felt too big for her apartment. She tried to dismiss what had happened as an anomaly, a perfect storm of chemistry and circumstance that would never be replicated. But her body seemed to have its own memory of the previous night, responding to thoughts she tried to suppress with a warmth that pooled low in her belly.

By the time she walked into Dr. Philippa Chen's office that afternoon, Heaven had almost convinced herself that the whole experience had been some kind of elaborate hallucination.

"You seem different today," Dr. Chen observed, settling into her chair with the kind of stillness that invited confession. "More... present."

Heaven had been seeing Philippa for three years, working through layers of trauma with the patience of an archaeologist uncovering artifacts. The older woman had a gift for seeing through Heaven's carefully constructed defenses without making her feel exposed.

"I had an unusual evening last night," Heaven said carefully.

"Unusual how?"

"I met someone. A man." Heaven paused, choosing her words with surgical precision. "We talked. Had dinner. It was... engaging."

"That's wonderful. It's been a while since you've mentioned enjoying someone's company."

Heaven shifted in her chair, uncomfortable with how much she wanted to share and how little she actually could. "He was intelligent. Perceptive. He seemed to understand things about me that I don't usually reveal."

"What kinds of things?"

"My art. The way I see the world. He didn't try to fix me or explain me away. He just... saw me."

Dr. Chen leaned forward slightly, her expression encouraging. "How did that feel?"

"Terrifying. Exhilarating." Heaven's fingers found her arm through her sweater. "I felt like myself for the first time in years. Not the version of myself I've constructed to get through daily life, but the person I was before..."

"Before your trauma."

"Yes."

They sat in comfortable silence while Heaven processed the weight of that admission. Dr. Chen had a gift for allowing space for difficult realizations.

"What do you think made this interaction different from others you've had?" Dr. Chen asked finally.

Heaven considered the question seriously. "He didn't want anything from me. He wasn't trying to save me or change me or possess me. He was just... curious. Like I was a puzzle he found interesting rather than a problem he needed to solve."

"And how did you respond to that curiosity?"

"I opened up in ways I usually don't. I felt safe being seen."

"That's significant progress, Heaven. The ability to feel safe with another person, to allow yourself to be vulnerable-that's something we've been working toward for years."

After the session, Heaven drove to her studio in the arts district, a converted warehouse space she shared with several other artists. The familiar smell of oil paint and turpentine should have been comforting, but today it felt overwhelming, competing with memories of cologne and careful hands.

"Heaven! There you are!" Jasper's voice carried across the studio space, cheerful and slightly out of breath. He was crouched beside a large canvas, his curly hair escaping from the man-bun he'd attempted, paint streaks on his vintage band t-shirt. "I was starting to think you'd been abducted by aliens. Or worse, decided to become a morning person."

Despite her complicated headspace, Heaven found herself smiling. Jasper had that effect on people-his enthusiasm was infectious, even when delivered through a constant stream of self-deprecating humor.

"Just had a late night," she said, setting down her bag and examining the piece she'd been working on before... before everything changed.

"A late night doing what? Please tell me it involved something more exciting than reorganizing your art supplies by color intensity, because that's what I did and I'm having some serious life-choice regrets."

Heaven picked up her palette, focusing on mixing colors rather than meeting Jasper's expectant gaze. "Just out with Adaline."

"Ah, living vicariously through the adventures of City Alto's most legendary party girl. I respect that. Much safer than having your own adventures." He paused his work to look at her more carefully. "Though you look different today. Good different. Like you've remembered that you're an incredibly talented, devastatingly beautiful woman instead of a hermit who happens to paint."

"Jasper..."

"I know, I know. I'm being weird again. It's just-you seem lighter today. Less like you're carrying the weight of the world in your paint brushes." He gestured toward her canvas with paint-stained fingers. "Speaking of which, Miss Von Domme came by earlier looking for you. She's very interested in commissioning something specific for her private collection."

"Shit. I completely forgot she was coming by."

"Don't panic. I charmed her with my extensive knowledge of post-modern expressionism and my ability to make terrible coffee taste slightly less terrible. She'll be back in an hour."

Heaven began working on her piece with renewed focus, losing herself in the familiar rhythm of brush against canvas. The painting was part of a series exploring themes of constraint and release-figures caught between surrender and resistance, rendered in colors that suggested both violence and ecstasy.

Today, though, the work felt different. Where before she'd been painting from memory and imagination, now she had new experiences to draw from, new understanding of what surrender could actually feel like.

Her phone rang just as she was achieving the perfect shade of midnight blue.

"Heaven, thank God." Adaline's voice was higher than usual, tight with something that might have been panic. "I need you to come home right now. There's been... there's an emergency."

"What kind of emergency? Are you hurt?"

"Just come home. Now. Please."

The line went dead, leaving Heaven staring at her phone with growing dread. She'd never heard Adaline sound genuinely frightened before.

Twenty minutes later, Heaven was climbing the stairs to their shared apartment, her heart hammering against her ribs. The front door was ajar, which sent another spike of adrenaline through her system.

"Ada?"

"In here."

Heaven found Adaline sitting on her bed, surrounded by what looked like photographs scattered across the comforter. Her usually perfect makeup was smudged, her hands shaking slightly as she held up one of the images.

"I forgot my lucky bracelet ," Adaline said without preamble. "Had to come back to get them before my date tonight". The door was unlocked when I got here, which should have been my first clue that something was wrong."

Heaven moved closer, and her blood turned to ice water in her veins. The photographs were of her. Of her and the mystery man from the previous night. Intimate, explicit images that captured every moment of their encounter on the hood of his car.

"There were dozens of them," Adaline said quietly. "Scattered all over your room like someone wanted to make sure you'd see them. Professional quality. Like someone was watching you with serious equipment."

Heaven picked up one of the photographs with trembling fingers. The image was crystal clear, shot from an angle that suggested the photographer had been positioned in the trees above their location. Her face was clearly visible, lost in an expression of ecstasy she'd never seen on herself before.

"Who would do this?" she whispered.

"I don't know, honey. But whoever it was, they wanted you to know they were watching. The question is..." Adaline's voice trailed off as she studied Heaven's pale face. "What are you going to do about it?"