Sweet Romance12 min read
The Dark Room and the Weekly Sky
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I crawled over the low ledge.
The frameless clock on the wall ticked to 00:00 and froze there in tiny, indifferent red digits.
The CEO office was empty, lights off. Everything had chrome edges and hard lines; the furniture looked designed to freeze you. There was no warmth anywhere—until a single cabinet door at the far wall stood slightly ajar and let out a strip of intimate, warm light.
The light came from the very back.
There was a hidden room at the back of the bookshelf.
I sat on the leather sofa in my plain black dress, my right leg tucked over my left, the pale curve of my calf visible. My Jimmy Choo pumps dangled off my toes; I gave one small, careless kick and watched the shoe fly.
"Mr. Leone…" I said, my voice soft and cool. "Pick it up for me."
Sawyer Leone—polished in a three-piece black suit—was on his knees on the carpet. He looked up at me, obedient and watchful. He nodded, about to stand, then I stepped down on his shoulder.
I pointed a foot toward the fallen shoe.
"Get on your hands and knees and crawl over," I said, with a faint knit of my brows.
His eyes brightened with something like hunger and delight. He did not speak. He swallowed, a thin vein moving at his throat.
He began to crawl. He was careful, efficient, and ridiculous at once—like a graceful leopard reduced to a pleading dog.
He bit the toe of my shoe in his mouth, crawled back, and presented it to me like an offering.
I took the shoe from his lips and, with a fingertip, smoothed his hair. "Good boy," I said.
He swallowed. He pushed his mouth forward, voice low. "May I… lick you tonight?" His words slid out oddly reverent.
I crossed my legs and looked him over. "Yes," I said after a thoughtful beat. "But not with hands."
He nodded like a child promised candy. Then, eager and careful, he tucked his hands behind his back and ducked his head beneath my skirt.
I let him try. He fumbled under the thin barrier of hosiery. He was warm, breathy, urgent. He could not see and so he had to learn by touch; his nose and mouth roamed, searching for purchase.
"Do you want me to help?" he asked, voice thick.
I pressed the top of his head away with a fingertip. "Who are you begging?"
"My…queen," he breathed. He called me "queen" in the dark room; outside, in daylight, he called me "Alaina," "Lain," or "Ms. Fields." He asked me in the mornings to pull his coffee at sixty degrees, and to correct every arrow on a presentation to a millimeter he preferred. He was precise in the daylight. In the dark, he folded.
"I won't help. If you can't, you don't get it," I said.
He made a small noise, a petulant whimper, and continued to work with his mouth. The nylon slid and squeaked; he finally found a seam and tore it with his teeth. I let my hips lift a little, let him win the inch he needed.
And then the world, for a few fierce minutes, narrowed to one sharp, private pleasure.
When it was done I took the shoe and tapped his cheek. "Behave," I said and left a smile that cost me more than it should have.
He looked at me as if I'd handed him an amulet. "May I… be allowed to—" He stuttered like a child.
"Only my mouth, no hands," I reminded him.
He promised me everything. He was addicted to the ritual: the humiliation, the worship, the small authority I gave.
"Two rules," I said suddenly, because rules are the only armor I keep.
He swallowed. "Yes?"
"One: don't touch me outside this place. Two: never ask me for my heart."
He would always obey the first and try to avoid the second—until he could not.
Months earlier I had been a modest accountant at a small firm. A year later I was the private secretary to Sawyer Leone, the CEO of Leone Pharmaceutical. I had been plucked to the thirty-sixth floor like a chess piece. He was famous for his rules; still, no part of the job had prepared me for the dark room.
"Why me?" I had asked him once, quietly, when our roles didn't belong to daylight anymore.
He had kissed my knuckles and said, "Because you are precise. Because you are useful. Because you are mine to break and to make."
He liked being made fragile. He liked me to be the one who kept him honest and also the one who could hurt him.
That night he bound himself: wrists cuffed, eyes blindfolded. I had to choose between feeling pity and the thrill of such absolute power. I chose curiosity, then answered with cruelty that tasted like salt. I took a whip once; I used it and watched as his skin rose and reddened. He laughed and cursed and begged; at the moment he sang, the room was his altar.
"Don't," he murmured at one point, and I paused. He tasted of blood and desire.
I saw then the truth in little cracks: he would let himself be wounded to enforce the only intimacy he believed he deserved. He tied himself to the railings because then he couldn't flee.
When the whip tore more than the leather—when the metal core cut his leg—my heart leapt.
"Oh my god," I breathed. Blood looked wrong spilling like a warm confession.
He cracked a dry smile. "It's okay. I am fine."
I was not fine. I had never meant to hurt him so badly. I cried while I tried to clean and stanch his wounds. He insisted I leave before the ambulance came. "You don't need to see this," he said. "You go home. Wait for my email."
"You're a fool," I cried, because I always let the words I couldn't fix slip out.
He looked at me and finally said the worst thing any of us can say to someone we claim to want: "Why should I change for you?"
"Because I'm tired of being your sin-easy vent," I answered.
He let me stay. We tended his wounds together. He called me "Lain" in the dark and "Alaina" in the light.
A public life waited outside our little room: there was Ginevra Clapp—beautiful, luminous, and Sawyer's public fiancée. She was the kind of actress who lit magazines by existing. The Clapp family owned a stake in Leone Pharmaceutical; the engagement was as corporate as the chemical bonds they studied.
Ginevra adored pearls. For her birthday I bought a strand of black pearls—simple, warm, expensive. Sawyer placed them on her neck in front of glittering cameras and smiled like someone who had learned the art of not smiling at home. I watched from a glass panel and felt the sting of being an afterthought in a life that required so much show.
At night, he came back to me.
"Stay and help," he'd said with his clean, dangerous politeness. He was never clumsy with orders.
But the night he hid heartbeat in my hands, he returned with a present for someone else. I had used my own money to buy the pearls; he used his to make a performance of affection. He could be exquisite, generous, and utterly cold.
"You're allowed to meet whoever you please," he said once, eyes quick and unreadable.
"I have limits," I told him.
"Your time is my time," he said and kept a calendar of my life as if it were corporate property.
The pattern was painful and precise: in daylight he was a rigid geometry of rules, and in night he relinquished—then punished his own surrender with self-harm. I improved in the art of not showing how much it hurt. He improved at being more cruel or more tender depending on the day.
When Ginevra hurt herself on a set—an accident that frightened everyone—social feeds lit with concern and speculation. I bought a flight for Sawyer out of habit, fingers working without permission. He didn't go. That night he came after me and asked to be punished. He teased me with his own contradictions.
"You kissed her on the red carpet," I said. "You sat with her on stage. You let other people see you as-I-shouldn't-exist."
His reply was a soft, wounded thing: "Punish me. Hurt me if you'll have it."
And I did. There were nights I gave him tender favors and nights I made him plead like a child for mercy. We were both bad actors who loved the parts we played. We were also, somehow, learning to hurt less.
At times, I thought about running. At times, I thought about staying. At times, it felt sane to pick up a different life: Baxter Brennan, my friend from school, who had grown into a broad-shouldered, warm man who loved foolish things and stuffed me with plush animals. He was safe where Sawyer was a scalpel.
Then the city exploded.
I walked away from a friend's bar with the lightness of someone who had spent the night playing cards and fooling around. I caught sight of Baxter at an arcade and laughed; he chased the last plush for me down the crane and finally filled my collection.
Later, stepping out of a coffee shop for air, the world became a concussion of smoke and glass. I woke up in a hospital bed with skin burning, ears ringing, and a petrifying uncertainty: who had saved me?
"Baxter?" I croaked. He was here, alive. He grabbed my arm and did his best to be hilarious and terrible and present. He said with a grin that he had been wrong place wrong time. He stayed. He stitched me back together.
When I insisted the man who had saved me was Sawyer, Baxter squeezed my hand and left. The hospitals—helplessly overwhelmed—had no record of Sawyer checked in. The city had no proof that the person who carried me from the blast had been Sawyer Leone. I felt ridiculous, like someone with half a secret.
Months unfolded. A long winter went by. My mother grew worse with a slow, excruciating disease. My father retired early. I left the university job I had clung to and entered auditing to earn steady money. The world went on. I told myself not to look back.
Then one ordinary evening after a week's audit sessions I stepped into the empty thirty-sixth floor of Leone Pharmaceutical and, by some muscle memory, pushed open the hidden door.
The dark room had changed.
All the soft golden light had been replaced by a crisp white. The dungeon of toys and knots was gone. In its place, a single white wall. On it: hundreds of instant photographs, arranged with unstinting neatness. Each was a picture of sky. Blue, grey, thunderous, calm. Each was labeled with a note: a city, a date, a week between them.
One photograph bore a smudge of black ash in the corner. One photograph bore London sky from the day the coffee shop exploded—shot thirty minutes before the blast.
A cold, crazy thrill pushed through me. Someone had been following my skies for years. Someone had been flying, clicking, returning, making the same weekly pilgrimage. I held my breath and the whole collection held me.
The next day I called Sawyer and the phone swung like a pendulum.
"Alaina," he answered, the single syllable a rope I felt pull.
"I want to thank you," I said, my voice smaller than I intended. "For—" I could not name the indebtedness. "Can we meet? Dinner?"
He said "okay." He did not ask why I had come back.
At the table he was the same in his suit: severe, angular, precise. Yet when he slid two slices of fish across the center of our shared table, I understood his strange protocol. He had been letting me have the cleanest pieces of his day for weeks, maybe years—this was how he shared.
"Why all the airplanes?" I asked when the noodles came. "Those photos—why?"
He said, calmly, "My therapist told me to find a hobby. He said I needed a light to go to, and a task to make it home. So I watched the sky in cities you would be in, every week. I take one photograph and I came back."
"Why never say anything?" I said.
"Because you told me to stay away. Because I wanted to be patient." He put a forkful of fish on my plate. "Because I wanted to be—safer."
We began to try the small things other couples take as spoken liturgy. Movie nights. Coffee that was not a penned order for an office. He drove me home but did not posture the way CEOs posture. He learned to be clumsy in private.
Once, in a restaurant bathroom carved like a tiny hotel room, we undressed each other with the earnest, ridiculous tenderness of two people relearning how to be human. I found a long scar across the length of his back. I didn't ask where; he didn't deflect. We were both people with maps we didn't expect the other to read.
We were fragile. We were an exasperating pair: I had ambitions that tired him into a far-off melancholy; he had fears that made him pull inward when the world wanted him to anchor.
"You would like me if I were less… burnt?" he asked one night, voice small.
"I like you for the parts that are awake," I said. "Not for the parts that hurt."
"Would you be patient?" he whispered.
I wanted to say yes in the way people say yes when they mean it with their whole bodies. Sometimes I did. Sometimes I failed.
There was a cliff of small betrayals—my lunches with Baxter, our shared jokes with other colleagues. Once, my mother, still confused and fierce, mistook him for some neighbor and screamed at him for following me. That evening Sawyer left without a word and the fall of his departure hurt more than any argument ought to.
We came back from that—slowly. He began to change shape under my fingers. Not all the way. But he learned to smile that was not like a contract or a wound. He went to therapy. He did the immovable daily tasks: flew when he needed to; stayed when he needed to.
We had foolish fights. Once I lost my temper and threatened to never see him again. He stood there and let me cut him down, then followed me when I tried to leave, and said: "I will not force you. I cannot. But I will wait."
He proved he would wait in ways that made me dizzy: the photographs on the white wall, the fish he cut for me, the way he tried to make symmetry out of my small fears.
There were nights I wondered if I had fallen in love with the idea of being needed. There were nights I knew I loved him for his quiet, stubborn self.
On a cold New Year's Eve I ran across town and burst into his dark house right before the bells. He lifted me and kissed me in the falling snow; it sounded like a promise. "Happy New Year," he breathed into my mouth, and the kiss was not like our rehearsals in the hidden room. It was clumsy and honest and new.
We were bad at being a couple and good at trying. He would sometimes still do things that hurt—like lash at himself until he bled, as if punishment could prove devotion. When I found him with stapler pins in his hand and his skin stung with small, clean rows, I nearly screamed. He let me pull them out, let me bind him up with tenderness that smoothed his edges.
"Don't do that," I said, voice raw.
He looked at me like a boy caught taking a dangerous taste. "I don't want to scare you."
"You did," I answered. "You did scare me."
He crept into my life a little at a time. He learned to accept my life: the deadlines and the certifications and the small avalanche of responsibility that had become mine. I learned to accept some of his darkness and to push back where it hurt the people I loved.
We had laughter—real laughter. Baxter remained a loyal friend with a ridiculous grin. Ginevra kept a public life and a private cushion; she was not a villain who sought to destroy me. She was a woman in a place we all had to share, complicated and alive.
There were, of course, days when I thought of packing up and leaving—times when the sum of the reasons not to be with Sawyer became a very tidy arithmetic. But then there would be a photograph on the white wall: a sky that matched my breath, the light where I had been when I thought of him, a small signal in a sea of weeks.
One evening, when the world felt very large and my mother’s medicine was beginning to have a slow, halting effect, Sawyer took me to the white-walled room.
"Do you want to choose one?" he asked.
There were two—London, rain, and a clear blue one from a summer I had not felt like I would ever find again. I chose a photograph I did not understand at first: a tiny blackout in one corner where smoke had rubbed the paper. It was the photo that had been taken an hour before the explosion that nearly claimed my life.
He reached across the bench and laid his fingers over mine. "I took that," he said simply.
I looked at him and saw all the messiness the world collects when you love someone: freckles of grief, smudges of guilt, pages of small, imperfect courage.
"Why?" I asked.
He slid his thumb over the corner of the picture, as if smoothing out a harbor for a stormed boat. "Because you told me once to stay away. Because I wanted to stay alive long enough to be allowed near you."
I let my head fall against his shoulder. The choice to be with someone like Sawyer was, every morning for the rest of our lives, a negotiation. I had to take his edges and he had to not hurt me with them. I had to teach him that I wanted his life entirely, not just the parts he thought he deserved to keep.
"Will you keep taking skies?" I asked.
He smiled without showing teeth. "Yes. Every week, if you'll let me. So when you wake up and the world is ugly, you can rip out one of these and see—it's been a while, but I went and I saw the sky you saw."
I kissed him then, rigid and soft at once. Around us, the wall of skies hummed like a map of a life moving toward us. In that tiny surrender I learned that love is not a sudden, perfect avalanche. It is a thousand small gestures: a photograph, a fish shared, a bandage wrapped, a hand reached out in the dark.
"Are you satisfied?" he asked later, kneeling on the stone floor of the room, suddenly boyish.
"Very," I said, and meant it.
There are still things that ache. He still has nights he cannot sleep without some ritual that right now I cannot fully bear. I still have moments of fear—of being erased, or made small, or living in a life borrowed from somebody else's need.
But there are also many mornings where he brings me coffee with the foam salted just the way I like. There are evenings where he stands in the doorway and watches me eat and does not talk but is present like a made thing, silent and true.
Sometimes, when I stand in front of the white wall, I count the weeks he has made for me. Two hundred and five photographs, each a week given. Ten thousand miles between some of them. I can add the math like my father taught me: it's a huge number. It's not a tidy promise, but it is a real one.
I tuck the newest Polaroid into my pocket sometimes—the sky the night he first told me, by mistake, that he didn't want to lose me. It is a small thing to carry, a little paper weight of the dangerous, wonderful fact that someone is trying.
I don't call him a monster anymore, not because he stopped hurting, but because he began to try to stop hurting himself. I love him not because he is whole but because he keeps bringing me a sky.
The End
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