The days following Adrien's revelation were strange for Élisa. The secret he held hovered between them, invisible but palpable, like the heavy heat of a Casablanca summer after a storm. She constantly replayed their fleeting embrace in the garden, the vulnerability she had briefly glimpsed in him before he closed off again. Unexpectedly, instead of completely repelling her, this ephemeral connection had planted a troubling seed within her.
Élisa found herself thinking of Adrien, of his intense gaze, of the way his hand had brushed her arm. Fleeting images of him surfaced in her mind at the most unexpected moments: his dark profile in the twilight, the low sound of his voice. She tried to focus on Clara, on the truth he claimed to hold, but Adrien's magnetic pull was becoming a force she had to reckon with.
Her own journal became the receptacle for this new inner turmoil. She wrote in it late into the night, by the light of a lamp, words she never thought herself capable of writing. Fragmented sentences, descriptions of sensations, a nascent and confused desire that caught her off guard. She confessed her fascination with the mystery surrounding Adrien, with the complexity of his pain, and with the strange connection that had formed between them despite everything.
Her nights became the stage for increasingly vivid fantasies. She often dreamed of Adrien. In one particularly vivid dream, they were in the pouring rain, in the middle of a deserted square in Casablanca's old city. Water streamed down their faces, plastering their clothes to their skin. He looked at her with a burning intensity, his dark eyes filled with a desire she mirrored. Slowly, he raised his hand to her face, wiping raindrops from her cheek. Then, he kissed her. A deep, passionate kiss that cut her off from the outside world. His hands lingered on the buttons of her shirt, undoing them one by one with deliberate slowness. She didn't protest, absorbed by the sensation of his wet skin against hers. He murmured inaudible words against her lips, then more clearly, with a troubling possessiveness: "I already belong to you." She woke with a pounding heart, her body vibrating from the memory of that dreamlike embrace, wondering with a mix of dread and excitement if her dreams were revealing a truth she refused to confront while awake.