As soon as I touch him, I feel this ripple course through his body. I don’t even realize what’s happening until it’s over. Until his fist collides with my cheek. Until my ears start to ring. Until the world spins. Until the pain sets in.

I cup my aching cheek as he stands in front of me, looking so much calmer as hot tears spill down my cheeks and the raindrops instantly wash them away.

When I replay the moment in my mind, I can see how my pain brought him some sort of peace from his own internal pain, pain that I would never fully begin to understand. But at the time, I didn’t see it. At the time, I only felt my own pain and shame. My own worry that this meant it was all over.

That I was no longer Odette.

The swan.

That I would become Delilah again.

It seemed so repulsive. So horrifying. To become that girl again. The one no one saw. The one that lived in the shadows.

God, what I would give to be that girl again.

Over the next couple of days, I keep my distance from Dylan, and he seems to be keeping his distance from me. I see him working on his car sometimes, but I don’t dare go out, afraid of what he’ll say to me, afraid he’ll hit me again, afraid he’ll say that’s it’s really over, that he never wants to see me again.

I’d like to tell you that part of the reason I kept my distance was because I was mad at him for hitting me, but sadly that wasn’t the case. Anger over that never crossed my mind. Only fear. I was so afraid of being alone again that it consumed my mind.

The fear only grew whenever I’d spend time in the kitchen, eating breakfast with my mom and her latest one-night stand.

“Your cheek looks like it’s healing,” my mom notes as she pours syrup onto a stack of pancakes. It’s the fifth morning in a row I’ve eaten breakfast with her and a different guy.

I touch my cheek, remembering the snap of lightning before the strike, remembering how Dylan dropped me off at home without saying a word, and how when my mother asked me what happened, I said a got into a fight with a girl at a party. “It still hurts, though,” I say.

“Well, maybe you should walk away from the fight next time,” she says, cutting her pancakes with her fork.

Her twentysomething-year-old with a goatee looks up from his pancakes. “Why? Girl fights are hot.”

She smiles at him, this haunting smile, and I’m pretty sure he catches his breath. It annoys me the way that he’s looking at her, and I want him to stop it. I want him to look at me.

“I get into them all the time,” I say, trying to get him to look away from my mother.

He doesn’t. In fact, he leans in and kisses her. A few touches and groans later, they’re in my mother’s room and music is playing. And again I’ve become Invisible Girl, sitting in the shadows of the kitchen, the quiet wrapped around me.

I eat my pancakes, taking my time, knowing that when I’m done I’m going to have nothing else to do. I’m swallowing my last bite when I hear a knock on the door. I get up and make my way over to the door, sadness overpowering me. I no longer feel like Odette. Not even a swan. My wings are gone, and all the magic that Dylan created is dead, and I feel like I died right along with it.

Then I open the door, and he’s standing there with a single rose in his hand. His eyes are on me, remorse on his face, pain and sadness in shadowing his eyes.

“I’m sorry,” he says with agony in his voice. His gaze locks on my cheek, where a bit of red still remains. “I was just so upset and I… God, I’m such an asshole, hitting you like that.” He pauses, like he’s waiting for me to say something, but I can’t find my voice. So he steps closer into the doorway and I don’t step back. “I was just upset… my mom was yelling at me all morning and it just made me so angry… it always does.” He swallows hard. “I promise, I’ll never hurt you again. I swear to God, if you give me another chance…” He dares to touch my face and holds my cheek in his palm. “Please tell me you’ll give me another chance.”

As his words crash into me, so does the music from my mother’s room. They both overwhelm me, one washing me away, one giving me back the light I so desperately want. I’m not even sure if I fully believe him, yet I tell myself I do as I nod.

“I forgive you,” I say.

He smiles, leaning in to kiss me, and I kiss him back, let his kiss consume me and make everything feel better.

One might look at it as the point at which my fall started, where I made the wrong choice that would lead to five years of wrong choices that ultimately would lead to my half-beaten body being left for dead near the riverbank, reflecting on my life instead of living it.

But I don’t believe it was.

I believe I started falling the moment I put on that red dress; the moment I stopped being who I really was. The moment I changed for someone else simply because he noticed me.

The moment I stopped being Delilah and I became Red.