Sweet Romance16 min read
Paid to Sleep, Stolen by Two Faces
ButterPicks9 views
I took the job because I needed the money. Plain and ugly reason, said like a cashier handing change.
"I'll be paid to sleep," I told my mother, and she laughed like I had told a joke worth a million.
"You're joking," Legacy said, wiping the gardening dirt from her hands. "Who pays someone to sleep?"
"A very rich boy who can't sleep without being held," I said, and the two words felt like the title of a bad novel.
"He'll pay twenty thousand for one night." Edric Barnes said that to my face like it was nothing. He was the one in suit and polite voice, the assistant who smiled the smallest smile that still managed to look like a threat. "If you sign for a month, the rates stack."
"Twenty thousand?" I remembered counting coins on our kitchen table until three in the morning. "Twenty thousand for pure sleeping?"
Edric got up and folded his hands. "You don't have to talk. You only have to be there. Mr. Black is very particular. He will see to the contract."
I signed for thirty nights because my brother Jensen needed a therapy that cost more than the rent of a small house. I signed because my mother, Legacy, could finally breathe, even if for a little while. I signed because I was tired of being the girl who could not pay for the next ambulance ride, the girl who learned to eat slowly so the month would stretch.
When they dragged me into the mansion for the first time I thought they were playing a prank. A gleaming lake, a moon-shaped inlet, lights like pearls. But inside the west wing, the younger staff pushed me into a room the way a deckhand pushes a crate.
"This is the audition room," Jaden Allen said, chewing the end of a pen like a lollipop gone bitter.
"An audition," I said. "For sleeping?"
"It is very exclusive," Jaden said. "And you're late."
In the room, twenty girls looked the same from a distance—long legs, pale smiles, dresses cut as if they were made to flatter shadows. I felt like a plain card shoved into a deck of showgirls.
"What's the job?" I asked the girl in front of me.
"Sleeping," she said, bored. "Just sleeping. Except he picks. Not everyone gets picked."
"He picks how?" I asked.
She glanced at me with a practiced pity. "You're naïve. He has a sleep condition. He can only sleep when he's held. So it's not just looks. He chooses a... presence."
I waited for someone to laugh. No one did.
Edric called my name.
"You have no idea how out of place you are," he said gently. "Call me Edric."
"I'm not auditioning," I said. "I was dragged in."
Edric's smile didn't change. "Stay. Sometimes wrong entrances lead to the right outcome."
Then a sound came from behind a folding screen. A pair of feet stepped forward, pale and sharp, like carved marble. When the man moved fully into the room my mouth went dry.
He wasn't a fat uncle; he wasn't a grotesque man. He was a young man in a robe, hair dark and compact, wearing a pair of gold-rimmed glasses that made his face look schematic.
"Mr. Black," Edric said.
He looked at me with a gaze that didn't reach. "You may come in," he said. His voice fell like a curtain on a stage.
I stepped forward because curiosity is a strong animal. He watched me like a person evaluates a painting, slow and complete.
Then he crouched down and rested his head on my shoulder, like a tired animal finding a warm ledge.
The small, sweet smell of cedar came from him. I wanted to step away. Edric's hand steadied me.
"Sign the contract," the man said without emotion. "We'll begin tonight."
I remember the contract had clauses that sounded like a lawyer's lullaby: confidentiality, consent, limits. The salary line was bright and simple: 20,000 per night. There was a clause about "holding only" and "non-contact beyond the hold," which seemed designed to make people feel safe and not mean much at all.
"One night a week," Edric said. "You will be called."
The night I first lay in that enormous white bed, Lincoln Black—Mr. Black—undressed with the dispassion of someone taking off armor. I should have felt squeamish. Instead, absurdly, I got nosebleed.
"Are you okay?" Edric asked.
He didn't answer. Lincoln tossed me his robe. I wrapped it like a child hiding in a blanket. He scooted close and reached for me and, on the first night, when he mouthed, "Sleep," I closed my eyes like it was a technique.
He did not hold me that night though. He let me be a pillow in the bed next to him. Edric remained in the doorway, watching with hands folded like a modest judge.
In the morning, I walked like a ghost through the mansion's corridors. The staff treated me with thin courtesy. One girl—Jaden—spat a word at me as I passed. "Prostitute."
The word struck like a stone. It landed, shattered, and a piece lodged under my skin. I stepped out to the garden to breathe.
"Why are you here?" a voice asked behind me.
I turned. He was sitting on a bench in the yard wearing a light sweater, his face softer than the marble mask he wore indoors. When he smiled the lines by his eyes made him human.
"Call me Deacon," he said.
"Deacon?" I repeated. "You're Lincoln."
He wiggled his fingers, childlike. "We use different names sometimes."
That name—Deacon Sherman—felt wrong coming from the same lips that used the stone-collar voice. "Who are you?" I asked.
He leaned forward and said, "I'm the one who's been waiting for 'sister' all my life."
"You—" I froze because the word he used, "sister," tugged at some old bone. "You called me sister?"
"Yes." Deacon twisted the word in his mouth like a toy. "You saved me once. You might not remember. But you did."
That night Deacon whispered stories like stuffed animals do. He told me about a monster in a bottle that promised the world to whomever saved it and swore it would kill those who did not. He said it like it was a joke and then bit my hand. He rose and slept like stone. He woke as Lincoln the next morning and walked like a man who'd spent a long time under water.
"I am going to call you Deacon now," he said. "You must remember."
"I'm not your sister," I insisted.
He smiled with the empty mouth of someone who will keep repeating the same wish until it becomes real.
I learned the two faces fast. Lincoln Black was cold and efficient and could fold a shirt like a geometry problem. Deacon Sherman was hands and promises, a needy warmth that would nestle against my throat and ask for bedtime stories.
People laughed at me for accepting the job—"sleeping for money" became a gossip fireworks—but the truth was simpler and bleaker: I needed the money.
At times Lincoln's body turned into a war zone. At dawn he would be fragile and pale, eyes rimmed with red. Edric told me later that Lincoln had "episodes" and that the family had money, but not miracles.
"He's been like this since childhood," Edric said once, voice flat. "He'll go to doctors. We'll try to help."
"Does your father know?" I asked.
"Blake Cook knows," Edric said. "He funds the best."
Blake Cook—my contact in glossy charity photos—the man who made schools and smiled into cameras—was the name behind the wealth. He never smiled at me.
When I spent time with Deacon the lines around my life softened. He would call me "sister" and demand silly tasks, like showing him how to tie a scarf. When Lincoln returned everything tightened again, roles back in place, a machine reset.
People started to notice I wasn't just a faceless temp. At breakfast in the west wing, the daughter of a construction magnate, Viktoria Lane—tall, icy—sat beside Lincoln and pretended to be casual.
"Bring milk," she said to me as if I were a serving machine.
"Of course," I said, and she took the cup but sniffed the ring on my hand and laughed behind her hand.
"Who are you?" she asked, and her voice was half curiosity, half the flavor of a world that didn't need me.
"Someone with a job," I answered.
"Not everyone is made slightly dangerous by their own past," she mused. "Some people are made quietly lucky."
Lucky. I chewed on that word.
At the campfire on Davy's Range—one of the estate's many outings—people drank and dared each other. Viktoria teased, the circle narrowed, and the game landed on Lincoln.
"Truth," someone said.
"Or dare," Lincoln replied.
They bent the rules to bait him, to make him prove that he was human. The crowd laughed. Viktoria dared him to kiss any girl in the circle.
I felt it like a hot breath. The circle widened, the flames leaned in. He looked left at Viktoria, then he looked at me. The world telescoped.
"Deacon!" someone crowed, not noticing the architecture of the face. "Go on, kiss her!"
Lincoln's mouth moved, and to everyone's shock he walked across and kissed me slow and clean in front of a hundred phones, a hundred faces. The sound of laughter flattened.
Afterward, when the circle dispersed, Deacon came at the tent and roused me awake in a fierce, whimpering way. "You let him," he complained. "You let him kiss you."
"I was asleep," I said.
"I don't want another woman to have what belongs to me," he said, crying silently. "I will do whatever it takes."
I think that was the night when something in me froze. It was the first time the line between money, obligation, and desire blurred into a single glass.
The last week at the estate was chaos. I clung to routine like a rope. Then one evening, out of the blue, Lincoln told me with the same measured voice he'd use to refuse favors, "Our agreement ends tonight."
"What?" I asked. "You—you're firing me?"
"Yes," he said.
I felt then the smallness of being offered closure. Edric came with the bank transfer confirmation. My account suddenly held a sum I had only ever seen in newspaper photography: a million, plus penalty.
"Why?" I asked Edric. "We were fine."
Edric smoothed his hands. "Sometimes the employer decides it's time. Sometimes that is not negotiable."
I accepted the money because money is a plane ticket and a surgery and speech. I left the mansion and my nights of odd embraces and returned to the smaller streets that spat grit.
Weeks later, I saw a news article. Viktoria and Lincoln engaged—photos of a rose field that could have swallowed the world, Instagram gifs, a ring that cost what my family owed. I felt something, less than jealousy, more like a dull ache for what had not been mine.
Then a month after I moved out, an ugly thing happened. Dallas Edwards—blunt, loud, the scornful kind of man—made a joke at the garden breakfast about "the sleeping pillow" and reached for my arm.
"Easy," Lincoln said. He wasn't supposed to be present—he never was for events. But he was there. He replied to Dallas with a polite, cold-level statement: "Hands off."
Dallas, who loved a crowd, laughed. He yelled, "Show us how it is, Pine-Shoe," trying to make a moment. The circle snickered. My hand shook.
Lincoln moved like a current. He grabbed the cup from my hand and flung it. The milk flew and splashed across Dallas like cold rain. The room fell into stunned silence.
"Sorry," Lincoln said, as if apologizing for a twitch.
Dallas's face flickered from smugness to offended outrage. "You can't do that," he said.
Apparently Dallas was only the beginning.
The rumor spread—that I had sold my nights, that I had lain for money. Jaden Allen called me names. Some staff whispered that my mother had brought a girl to "sell" herself. The rot of gossip seeped into the city.
I could have taken it. I could have stayed quiet. But the people who call you a name in public often double down in private. Dallas had a habit. He also took videos. He traded images with the kind of men who live for humiliation and short-term triumph.
I kept quiet for a week because money had bought me a chance to breathe, and I was thinking of Jensen's operation. Then a message landed: "I have proof Dallas planned to extort you. Meet me."
It was Edric.
We met in a glass-walled room at the charitable wing of Blake Cook's foundation. The who’s-who of the city were there. Ball gowns, cufflinks, sparkling pinwheels of social favor. I stood like a tooth in a mouth of polished people.
"Why bring me here?" I asked Edric in a whisper.
"You'll speak," he said in the same mild voice that once coaxed me into a contract. "You're owed that much."
I did not expect the scale.
"Lincoln has prepared something," Edric said. "Blake is hosting a fundraiser tonight." He pushed a tablet toward me and opened a folder—bank transfers, messages, a series of video files with names and timestamps.
"You can show them," he said.
I thought about sneaking out. I thought about the quiet. Instead, I followed him inside.
We arrived at the grand ballroom while the father, Blake Cook, gave a speech about giving kids beds and schoolbooks. Flashbulbs popped. Guests clinked crystal like glass bells.
Edric guided me to the stage.
"This is ridiculous," I murmured.
"Stand there," Lincoln's voice said from behind me. He stood taller than I had ever seen him in that house, like a man cut from black ice. Deacon wasn't there, not tonight. Lincoln's eyes were the color of slate.
The projector slid on. Images bloomed across the white fabric behind Blake Cook. It was a timeline: messages from a phone, a screenshot of a calendar marked with the nights I had worked, the bank transfers to a small company account, a recorded voice message. Then a video—the grainy footage of an evening in a kitchen, Dallas Edwards with a glass, lurking dread perfect on his face.
"Everyone, listen," Lincoln said. His voice was a cake made of glass.
I watched the video. Dallas, in his own arrogance, leaned too close to me and said, "You should know, we could make a lot of money on someone like you."
He laughed. Then he said, "Maybe you want more nights. Maybe we should keep your nights quiet."
Someone in the crowd hissed. The video showed Dallas pocketing a USB drive.
Then Lincoln clicked. The screen switched to another video: Dallas—talking fast—appearing on his phone with another man, arranging that I would be shamed unless a payment was made.
"You set me up," Dallas said on the film, arrogant and buoyant, "we make a video, we leak it, we multiply the payments."
The room made a sound like a body being unpeeled.
"I filmed him thinking this was dirt on me," Lincoln said on the stage. "He wanted blackmail. He assumed the worst because he thinks everyone is for sale."
The projector moved to another frame—Jaden Allen whispering with a staffer, her face bright with glee as she labeled me. Her voice: "She came to the mansion for that reason, didn't she? She was bought."
"Please," Jaden said now, trying to laugh it off. "I didn't—"
"You did," Edric said. He stood on the stage and read aloud a message chain from the staff group, where pride oiled gossip, where Jaden tagged Dallas with the confirmation of the rumor and laughed.
The crowd parted like a sea. Phones lifted, eyes widened. Blake Cook stared at his son with something like hunger and command mixed.
"I thought it would be humiliating for her," Jaden lied, beginning the natural motion of denial. "It was a joke. We—"
"Is that why you filmed her?" Lincoln asked. He was not yelling. He was smooth as a blade. "Is that why you gossiped and fed this to the men who would sell it?"
The first change in Dallas was small, like a twitch of a muscle announcing panic. His shoulders fell. Then he smiled, almost a human smile. "I was joking," he said. "It's a joke, she can't take a joke."
"Who here thinks jokes need to ruin lives?" Lincoln asked. A few people murmured. Lincoln looked like he could sink the world.
"I will play this," he said. He flicked the remote and a new file played. It was Dallas, after the gala. He and another man exchanged money. They discussed "how to cash in" and "the price they'd get if they made it public."
Dallas's face went through stages like weather.
Smug. "It's easy money."
Confused. "Wait, what does she say?"
Angry. "I didn't—this is—"
Denial. "I never said that—"
Shock. "What is this?"
As the recording rolled his bravado cracked. People laughed—then went still. One by one, the faces around him dissolved into something that watched as if witnessing an accident that might have been stopped.
"You recorded this?" someone shouted from the crowd.
"It was the backup for their extortion ring," Edric said. "We were given copies by a third party who got tired of the business model. Tonight, Lincoln chose to make sure the truth came out."
A woman stood and filmed Dallas with her phone. A man in a black velvet jacket clicked his tongue. Someone else began to boo.
Dallas tried to wipe his face with his sleeve. He took a step forward like a conjurer trying to uproot a table. "You're lying!" he yelled.
A hundred cameras whirred like a swarm. "You're lying," he repeated, but there was no conviction now, only adrenaline.
A woman near him—someone I had once seen smile thinly at my awkwardness—rose and spat out, "We knew you were like that. Who'd hire a..." Her voice stopped because Blake Cook's cold look had stopped it. He, who had given out checks to refurnish schools and reform prisons, watched with a rigid hand.
"I want you to apologize," Lincoln said, and the words were ice. "Dallas Edwards, you will retract every public comment you made. You will hand over all devices and accounts. You will issue a public apology to Ms. Fitzpatrick. You will be banned from our events until further notice."
The crowd waited for a punchline. Instead, Dallas's face crumpled into a last stage: collapse. His knees went slack. He adopted a different voice—small and fevered.
"Please—please, I didn't mean—" His hands were palms turned up. "I didn't know what would happen. I didn't mean to—"
A journalist's camera dove in close. The room smelled like perfume and spilled milk. People shuffled away from him like he had become a stain.
"Do you understand?" Lincoln asked. "You'll also return the money and pay a fine to compensate for the harassment."
Dallas sputtered. "I can't—"
"You will," Lincoln said. "Or we will release further files."
The man tried to make a dramatic sprint, but the security, hired for the night, had been primed. They took him by the arms with gentle efficiency and walked him out. He shouted apologies that sounded like little coins.
He begged. He flailed. "I'll do anything," he said. "Please."
Around him, the guests began to react with the various modern emotions: those recording, those whispering, those taking up sides, and those who had the generosity to simply look away. Some applauded once Lincoln stepped down. Others stared at the spot where Dallas had been, embarrassed.
"This is public," someone muttered. "He won't work again."
—It was the worst of punishments for a gossip: not arrest, not a slap, but the slow unpicking of reputation. Dallas became a cautionary tale told over wine, a man blurred out on social media, a laughing scapegoat for people who wanted to feel superior without changing.
Jaden, who had called me names, stood longer. Her face went from smug to pale, her voice broke into a little, "I didn't know—" and then a full-blown "I'm sorry" that sounded like the shattering of a glass heart.
"Your 'sorry' doesn't fix what you did," Edric said quietly. "But it is a start."
The crowd began to part like a tide. Some people marched up to me to apologize, embarrassed and clumsy; others filmed. My chest felt hollow. I had never wanted to stand on a stage. Yet as I left, a woman in a plain coat took my hand, eyes wet.
"I have a sister who was slandered once," she said, voice thick. "I'm glad someone did this."
Later, when the cameras died down, Lincoln walked me to the door.
"You didn't have to agree to go on stage," he said. He looked at me then in a way that took the architecture of the man into softer lines. "You could have left."
"I needed them to see," I said. "My brother needs the operation. The money has to go to him. I couldn't handle their gossip ruining my chances to get help."
Lincoln's forehead creased. "You thought you were bought."
"No," I answered, and suddenly the last month came into a single bright thread—my bank account, the nights, his two faces. "I wasn't bought. I was doing a job. You could have told them."
"I did not think they would be so cruel," he said. "I thought they would leave it."
We stood on the steps. The moon cut the edges. Deacon was quiet that night. For a moment, Lincoln looked like someone who had traveled a long distance and didn't know how to come home.
"Do you remember the little note?" he asked then, like a child remembering a small treasure.
"The note?"
"From when I was a boy. You left me something once. I looked back and realized I've been chasing a person who might have been you."
Silence sat between us like a bird.
"I did not mean to be important," I told him. "I was just a kid back then."
"Then be a kid now," he said, and smiled once, a fissure in the stone.
After the public humiliation, Dallas was left with his name turned to ash online and in private. Jaden's job in the west wing was quietly reassigned; the staff who had spread the gossip were suspended for "unprofessional conduct." The city gossiped for a week, then took new victims. But for one bright moment I felt something that had nothing to do with money: people had chosen to believe me.
Edric called two days later. "Mr. Black will speak to you," he said.
Lincoln offered me something I did not expect. He asked me to dinner. The man who could fall asleep only holding someone asked me to have a proper meal in daylight, in a city that didn't smell like lilies and money.
At the table we spoke like professionals. Lincoln told me about the way his father had been, about the nights he had to pretend not to hurt, about a child who had been left on a cliff and how he had wanted, simply, to be saved.
"You were the one," he said finally. "You came back for me when I needed you."
I remembered a boy with a black mark near his ear, a small mole. I remembered a child who hid behind branches and got up even when the air was thin. I remembered being nineteen and stubborn—too stubborn to be polite about my own survival.
"I couldn't have known," I said.
"No," he said. "You didn't have to."
Time stitched us into a slow pattern.
Deacon and Lincoln settled into the margins of one body, like two roommates learning to share rent. Sometimes Deacon would come with a childlike demand—"read to me"—and sometimes Lincoln would sit, quiet, and use the careful words he kept for the wounds of the world.
We were not an obvious couple. We were not a couple most people would pick out of a crowd. We fought about small things, like who would make tea or who would hold the phone during a heated call. He asked if I would still sleep for money. I laughed.
"No," I said. "I've learned how to buy a different kind of night with my own hands."
He brought me a small wrapped object once, and when I unwrapped it there was a white silk patch, the fragment from his bed where I'd bled in a panic the first night. I turned it over in my hands and then, without thinking, I tucked it into the very inside of my coat like a talisman.
"Why keep that?" he asked.
"Because it proved I survived," I answered.
He looked at me like someone who's been given the license to be soft. "I keep a bottle story," he said then, voice low. "A monster in a bottle, waiting for rescue. I—"
"—I heard the story," I said. "You promised you'd never harm me."
He stared. "I didn't promise," he said. "I promised to try."
We laughed then, small and honest.
Later, when I left for the airport to study, he kissed me like it was a contract in red ink. Not because he owned me, but because he wanted me to know that he had finally decided on something with fierceness. Deacon came to the departure gate and called me "sister" like a blessing.
"I'll come visit," he said. "And if anything happens, call me. You don't need to hold the world all on your own."
I boarded the plane with a ticket stamped with the enormous city's name and a pocket full of silence. The white silk stayed folded in the inside pocket of my coat. It smelled faintly the same as the night he rested his cheek on my shoulder.
When I landed, I opened my phone. There was a message from Edric: "Funds transferred for Jensen's operation. Blake insisted."
I looked at the little silk and thought of the bottle story. Lincoln had been the boy in the bottle once, or two boys, both trapped. I had been the one who had picked up a stone and thrown it at the captors.
There were a million ways the future could fail. But I had money saved, a plan in my pocket, and the knowledge that sometimes a man with two faces could be trusted to fight both himself for you.
"Good luck," Deacon had said over the phone—Deacon now, gentle and warm as a hand at night.
"Be careful," I told him. "Don't bite too hard."
"Only when necessary," he said.
I folded the white silk into its little pocket, the bloodstain faint like an old promise. When the plane rose, the city shrank, turning into lights that could be mapped. I thought about the night of milk and glass, the public shame that had been turned back on the shamer, and the warmth of a boy who called me sister.
When the plane hit cruise, I finally allowed myself to sleep.
The End
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