BE GOOD FOR ME

He told her to be good. He never asked what it cost.

Collette arrives in Paris expecting a weekend with the man she has loved for five years.

By midnight, he is already travelling home to his wife.

Left alone in an expensive hotel room, Collette lies across the ruined bed in the black lace he chose. A blue silk tie remains looped around her wrist. Dark rose petals stain the sheets, broken pearls are scattered like tiny moons, and the second pillow is still waiting for someone who will not return.

She was nineteen when they met. He was older, married and certain of exactly what she needed. He helped pay for appointments, medication, clothes and surgery. He called her beautiful, extraordinary and brave. He chose dresses, lipstick, jewellery and photographs until his support began to resemble authorship-and his admiration began to feel dangerously close to ownership.

But Collette was already a woman before him.

He did not create her. He found her at a vulnerable moment, helped illuminate what was already there, then built a private showroom around her and mistook the price of admission for possession.

As the wine disappears and the hotel grows quiet, Collette begins to examine the five years behind her: secret journeys, stolen breakfasts, expensive apologies, promises of "soon," and all the distant cities where she was briefly allowed to pretend she belonged beside him.

One week from now, he will attend a fashionable art exhibition with his perfect wife.

Collette was invited first.
Now she has been told not to come.

The invitation is still waiting at home.

She has no plan. Not yet.

But somewhere between the broken pearls, the final rose petal and the silence of her phone, a dangerous possibility begins to appear: she could walk into that gallery without screaming, threatening or exposing anyone.

She could simply allow herself to be seen.

Be Good for Me is a sensual, gothic verse novella about forbidden love, transition, secrecy, power and the quiet violence of being cherished only in private. It is the story of a woman who has spent five years looking magnificent for the wrong witness-and the night she begins to wonder what might happen if she stopped asking his permission to exist.