Sweet Romance12 min read
Fire and Breath: How I Burned the Hands That Touched Me
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"I'll die in your bed one day," he said, sleepy and rough as if the sea had lived in his throat.
"I hope not," I answered, folding a T-shirt over the crumpled white blouse and dropping the ruined shirt into the laundry basket. "Don't say things like that."
"You always say that." Kenji Persson sat up on the couch, messy hair, eyes rimmed with red from last night's drinks. He sounded like a kid and like a danger at once.
"I have work," I said. "I have a proposal due. Tonight I don't have time to play house."
"Come on," he whined. "You're always so cold after you wake up. Can't you be softer?"
I stared at him.
He was nineteen, a freshman at the best university in the city. Kenji was the son of Fitzgerald Zaytsev, my boss. Fitzgerald ran a tower of deals and favors with an iron smile. He had offered me twenty thousand and a promise and a wink when I first started. He had taken liberties that smelled like intent. I had chosen to answer in a way he did not expect.
"What are we to each other?" Kenji asked suddenly, the light catching the edge of his face. "In your head, what am I?"
"You're my bedmate," I said bluntly. "And nothing else."
Kenji's face crumpled a little. "But I—"
"Stop," I said. "Look, change. Go. I have work."
He pouted like a child, then kissed my hand as he left—half apology, half ownership. I let him go.
I had not planned to fall in love. I had planned a plan.
When I took the job at Fitzgerald Zaytsev's company, I was twenty-four and hungry. I had built a map of numbers and ideas until it fit like a weapon. The project I delivered made millions. Promotions followed. I am Elliot Santos. I do not believe in luck. I believe in leverage.
Fitzgerald was bright, fifty-something, immaculately dressed, and a man who thought himself entitled to many things: attention, loyalty, a particular kind of obedience. He brought me gifts and small defeats—hands that lingered, an arm that "accidentally" brushed my back, speeches about loneliness and fidelity. He wanted me to feel grateful, and I wanted precisely to make him uncomfortable.
So I let his son lead me into bed.
The first time Kenji and I were alone in Fitzgerald's car, he smelled of cheap perfume and laughter. I folded against him deliberately. I kissed first like a dare, feeling the power thrum through me when the son of the owner believed he had me. I wanted him to confuse care with purchase.
"You smell nice," he murmured then. "You always smell like—"
"Whiskey and smoke," I said and laughed. "And winter."
He got drunk on the laugh, and on me. I got drunk on the edge of the game. For a while it was clean. For a while I was the one holding the lines.
Then lines slipped.
"You like me?" he asked one night, breath hot on my ear.
"Sure," I said, tasting the lie and the truth with equal appetite. "I like you."
"Do you like me like... like like?" His voice dropped. He sounded like a boy learning a language.
"You know how contracts work," I reminded him. "This is efficient."
He blinked. "That's not an answer."
I held him and told him little white lies. I told him he mattered. I told myself I was untouchable.
He mattered.
He mattered more than the plan.
I also had a past. Garrett Hart was my ex. He was handsome and precise and took from me until the heat in my chest cooled into a neat pile of rationales. Garrett had called me from the supermarket two years later, offering that old, chilling mix of kindness and recommendation. He told me I couldn't be myself unless I let him in. I had shut that door hard.
He would reappear. Of course he would.
"You're back in my neighborhood," Garrett said one afternoon in the grocery aisle when Kenji and I had walked in to buy eggs. He smirked as if the world owed him everything. "Funny running into you, Elliot."
"Funny," I repeated. "What are you doing here?"
"Picking up milk for my sister," he lied. "You look... good."
Kenji's jaw went tight. He stood between us like a guard.
"Who is he?" Kenji asked later when we were out of the store.
"My past," I said. "A lousy one."
"Stay," he said. "Let me watch him."
I thought then I could keep my plans steady. I thought I could make the boss jealous, make Fitzgerald clap as his empire had to bow to me, and walk away with a house and a title and a clean ledger. I had lived on these numbers for so long that affection felt like conjecture.
The bargain shifted the night Kenji left wet prints on my door step and told me he loved me with a tenderness so real it almost broke something inside.
"I love you too," I lied.
He left the next day to train with his team. He sent messages. He made pancakes. He left notes. He turned up at my door like a small sun.
"You don't have to hide," he said once when he saw the bruise I tried to hide on my arm. "You can let me do the fighting."
That was the first crack in my plan.
When Fitzgerald first invited me to lead a tender, his hand lingered on my coworker's shoulder, his voice turned to a different kind of honey. "Elliot," he said privately while I brought him the final deck, "you are so good at keeping things together. You should be rewarded."
"I like my job," I said. "I like the numbers."
"Don't pretend," he said. "Accept what you can get."
He meant more than the promotion.
I laughed inside and planned, but planning is a strange thing. It believes itself far from rivers of feeling, but water finds the path.
Kenji changed the path.
He started small: making breakfast, learning to cook (awful at first), sitting with me through edits and late nights, and smiling when I won a clause or a win. He loved trivia and better music, and sent me tickets to bands I loved. He watched me read through financial models like a lover understands the other's face.
We had three heartbeats I won't forget.
"I don't smile for them like this," Sebastian Clarke later told a mutual friend. "He only ever looks like that for you."
One: When he gave me a cheap paper ticket he'd lined in a calligraphy he tried to sell as art, and he said, "I saved up," and his face went bright.
Two: When he quietly wrapped his jacket about my shoulders without being asked and someone in the conference room said, "He's never done that before," and his jaw tightened in a way I did not own.
Three: When he fumbled with the car keys in front of my mother and said, "I'll take you anywhere," and I could hear the people at the corner cafe noticing my pulse.
I guarded the plan less neatly.
Then the other pieces started to move.
"Do you like him?" Garrett asked one night when I was too tired to keep the farce up and he appeared at my table anyway.
"I like some things," I told him, too tired to be clever. "You?"
"You weren't the only person I wanted," he said, smooth as glass. "You walked away, Elliot. I thought you'd learned."
"You never deserved to be taught," I said.
Garrett took everything like someone collecting rare objects. That was his crime.
He also decided to use his connections. He worked at a rival firm that had its claws in the project Fitzgerald wanted. He had reasons to make my name look small.
On the day of the big meeting the two firms merged bids, I wore Fitzgerald's approval like an armor and Kenji sat two rows away with the calm about him that would have once made me laugh. Garrett walked in with a smile like a blade.
"Hello, Elliot," he said. "Still doing battle with the big house?"
"Always," I said.
The meeting began with charts and numbers and polite frames. Fitzgerald leaned back in his chair, an island of silk and arrogance. He made jokes that were meant to bind people, but I had a different script.
"Fitzgerald," I said quietly, standing up, "do you want to comment on the ethics of company spending?"
He raised an eyebrow at me in the way a lion might toward an animal that dared speak.
"What are you implying?" Fitzgerald asked.
"Nothing I can't prove," I said.
I had those proofs. I had the recordings I had kept. He had been careless. He had touched me in a stairwell and called it mentoring. He had given favors with an expectation. Kenji had helped me, in ways I had not expected, with tiny camera angles and quiet questions. He had a sense of loyalty I thought impossible. He had gathered things while I made the deals look pretty.
"You're making a scene," Fitzgerald said, smiling like a man who always owned the next sentence.
"A scene?" I said. "What do you call buying silence?"
The air in the room shifted.
People noticed.
"Is this true?" someone asked.
"Eric," Fitzgerald said, flicking his wrist, trying to make light. "Elliot likes drama."
"And you like property," I said. "Do you like the idea of it?"
He went pale. "You—"
"Yes," I said. "I have recorded emails. I have messages. Your pattern is clear. You used your position to touch and to demand. For years."
The whispers started low and then rose.
Fitzgerald's expression moved from amusement to alarm to anger.
"This is nonsense," he said. "You're disrupting the meeting with lies."
"Then challenge me," I said. "Open the agenda. Let us go item by item. My figures speak for themselves."
He took a breath. The task had slipped under him. He had been sure he was the tide that could carry everything. He was not prepared for a current.
Kenji stood beside me.
"Play it," he said simply.
Kenji had handed over a phone. He pressed play.
Fitzgerald's voice filled the room—sweet, intimate, abusive in the way of men who think choice ends at them. The room fell silent. Fitzgerald's face emptied like someone whose currency was suddenly worthless.
"I can explain," he began, panic sharpening his voice.
"Explain," I said.
He stumbled. The company counsel moved in.
"You're fired," I said—half of it a dare and half of it the right thing to say. "And this needs legal work. The board will want to hear how long this has happened."
Fitzgerald's transformation was visible frame by frame: from confident to crushed. He tried to laugh, to redirect, to call for decorum. None of it worked. Phones came out. People whispered. A reporter from our industry blog stepped forward, phone raised.
"It never occurred to you that you would be seen," Kenji said to him. His voice was ice and perfect. "You thought you were careful."
Fitzgerald's denial came next—loud, passionate, ridiculous. "I never—she's lying—this is about a deal!" He snarled, grabbing for words like someone grabbing for a rope.
"No," I said. "You grabbed hands. You grabbed knees. You used power. Those are facts."
Someone clapped. A few in the room laughed—harsh, brittle sounds. Fitzgerald's face flushed purple as the room turned on him. The CEO of a partner firm, whom Fitzgerald had charmed half a dozen times, walked away.
"You're going to be investigated," I said.
He sputtered, "You can't—this will ruin—"
"It already is," Kenji answered.
I watched the face of a man who had thought himself above consequence crack in the light of his own recording. That slow unravelling became its own kind of justice.
Fitzgerald tried to reach for his phone. The counsel's assistant quietly moved between him and any exit. People took photographs. They took videos. The entire meeting swiveled into a spectacle.
"You're finished," I said, not shouting but steady. "You will not touch anyone again."
He tried to laugh at me as if it were a joke.
Then he broke.
He lunged for me, for old patterns. Security closed down like a trap. He was restrained, his hands failing, his mouth shouting for staff, for lawyers—anyone to save him. He became a creature unmasked: furious, small, finally human.
On the floor of that glass-encased room, he pleaded, "My work—my legacy—can't you see what this will do? It's a lie! I never—"
The crowd around us turned like weather. Some people filmed. Some whispered: shock, scorn, vindication. Some cried out that they had known. Someone slapped the table and said, "How could you—"
Fitzgerald's mask fell away completely. He begged, begged for silence like a man begging for oxygen.
"It ends now," I said. "This is public. You chose to build your empire with hands like that."
He sank down, exhausted, shaking like someone older than he had ever been.
The punishment was not a sentence handed down from a court that day. But the public exposure was worse. Pride, credibility, influence—everything that man had built on the assumption of invisibility—crumbled in front of eyes that now saw clearly.
The crowd's reaction was a film all its own. Colleagues who had once avoided me came forward, faces split with the effort of courage. A few applauded. The industry blogger who had arrived a week earlier for a different story stayed, her recording live-streamed and the clip trending by lunchtime. The board chair had to step into the room, stunned, to quiet the uproar.
Fitzgerald moved from haughty to furious, to shocked, to pleading, to collapse. Kenji watched him like a judge. Kenji's face never broke except for a flash of something like pity—then resolve. The man who had fed off fear and favors buckled beneath waves of evidence, and the waves were carrying him out.
We were not done.
Garrett Hart had played his hand as well. He had used numbers and favors to undermine our bid and to plant rumors about me. He had sent emails with thin lies and called friends who hated me. He believed himself smart. He believed he could ruin my life.
One evening, at a joint industry dinner where Garrett smiled as if he had never wielded a scalpel, Kenji came bearing a second set of proof: messages, bank slips, a conversation where Garrett had arranged to shift a client to a shell company to force our failure. The picture was clear.
"Garrett," I said, and the sentence cut like an iron. "Why would you do this for Fitzgerald?"
He blinked. He tried to joke, "Is this drama night? Elliot, you always were theatrical."
"No," I said. "You were paid. You used my past to manipulate my future."
He made a step toward me, as if to charm, and then people started to murmur—the table postured against him like a tide. Someone whispered the words "fraud" and "conflict of interest." Garrett tried to hold the room: he raised his hands, tried a laugh, tried deflection. When the board's deputy leaned forward and asked him point-blank for an explanation, he lost rhythm. He began with denial. Then he sought excuses. When the ledger and emails were laid on the conference table, he went pale.
"I didn't know—" he said. "Maybe I didn't think—"
"Maybe you thought you could buy our silence," I said. "Maybe you thought you'd be smart."
Garrett's unraveling was different from Fitzgerald's. His pride was pride of craft, not empire. His reaction followed the stages: first a scoff, then confusion, then denial, then a grasping attempt at pleading, then the face of a man who watches his world close like a trap.
People at that table turned. Their looks ranged from disgust to a brittle satisfaction. Garrett's professional friends moved away. He stood there, hands empty.
"You're done with this company," the deputy said calmly. "And we will be referring this to counsel."
Garrett's voice hitched. "You can't—this will ruin me. I have clients. I—"
"You ruined others," someone said.
He fell apart quietly then, the way a person who thought himself clever and untouchable collapses into a heap of small regrets. No dramatic begging this time—only a drained, "Please," as if he expected pity and found none.
The punishments were public, varied, and complete. Fitzgerald faced humiliation and legal consequence, the board distancing itself and the industry watching. Garrett faced loss of reputation, clients, and the kind of exile that clever people fear most. Both men watched the crowds as judgment and justice took turns like two trains passing.
After the meetings, after the cameras backed away and the chatter cooled, I stood with Kenji in the empty office. He looked at me like someone who had lost and found pieces of himself in the same day.
"I'm sorry," he said simply.
"For what?" I asked.
"For dragging you into things," he said. "For not telling you how much it hurt. For making you use your anger like that."
"You did the right thing," I said. "You killed a monster and woke everyone to the world he made."
He smiled, small and tentative. He took my hand.
"Will this change us?" he asked.
"It will change everything," I said. "It already has."
We were visible now, both in the worst and the best way. I had meant to use him. He had meant to protect me. We had both been wrong about the other and also right. The messy part of me—cheap negotiator, careful survivor—softened at the sight of his scarred loyalty. The honest part of me—the one that once wanted only leverage—found new rules.
We spent months cleaning up the mess. The company launched an investigation. Fitzgerald fought and flailed and eventually was removed from his position with a settlement and a quiet, angry retreat. Garrett lost deals and, with no clients to prop him up, drifted out of our orbit. Some of the people who had once smiled at me when I made the numbers right now kept their distance, as if contact were contagious. Others came close and began to rebuild trust like we rebuilt the proposal.
Kenji built a small live venue on the side. He opened his heart like he opened the doors to a space: tender, clumsy, brave.
"You're still reckless," he said once in the dark, when we were too tired to dress. "But it's different now. You don't only push people away. You pull them in."
"That's new growth," I said.
"We can grow," he murmured. "We can be soft in ways you were never allowed to be."
And I let him teach me. He taught me to be less alone. He taught me that some things are worth the risk of being seen.
I loved him then, painfully and in public, and he loved me back.
There were many small scenes of tenderness. He carried my bags. He cooked badly and smiled when I praised the courage. He stood in the crowd at tiny gigs and whispered the wrong lyrics and made me laugh. At a stadium game once, he threw his hat in the air and caught my eye as the ball left his hands.
"He never does that for anyone," his friends told me. "He keeps you like a sun."
I kept replying, "He keeps me like a home."
We were not perfect. There were times my old instincts, honed to survive, rose like a blade. I wanted to leave. I wanted to burn the ledger of the past and never look back. He wanted to stay and stack small days like building blocks: pancakes, tickets, dumb jokes in a car. I wanted fireworks. He wanted a shared stove.
But we stitched the seams.
And then, when the dust settled, when Fitzgerald was gone and Garrett had been stripped of influence, I faced the other quiet truth—my family. My parents called with a new voice, softer and angrier at the same time. They wanted money, and then shrank back when I refused. I told them I was done being their bank. They cursed. I recorded the call.
When Kenji and I stood outside the venue he had made into a livehouse, he turned to me and said, "Will you be my—"
I put a finger to his lips.
"Say words without contracts," I told him. "Just say them because you mean them."
He took a breath. "I love you," he said, simple and true.
"I love you too," I said, and meant it.
We had burned the hands that touched us without consent and the flames had not consumed us. They had, oddly, changed us. I had started a fire to survive. In the ash, we planted something like a garden.
The End
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