Sweet Romance11 min read
The Yellow Bed, The Thousand Days, and the Blue Flower
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I had been back in the marquis' house for only a night when the first thing that made me blush was the bed.
It was yellow huanghuali wood, carved and glossy, old enough to be polite and loud enough to tell secrets.
"Does it always groan like that?" I asked the steward as I tried to hide my embarrassment.
Abel Nasir looked at me without surprise. "It's an old bed, Madam Leanna. The wood remembers."
"Remember what?" I demanded, though my heartbeat already remembered too much.
"Love and storms," Abel said lightly, then lowered his voice. "And... habits."
That night, I met the small marquis in his bedroom.
He lay in a little boat among lotus flowers on the pond, drinking by moonlight. His long hair floated on the water, and his sleeve was open. He looked like a memory in living flesh.
When he returned to the mansion, I followed him with foolish, stunned feet.
Inside, the yellow bed whispered. It sighed and made noises that would have embarrassed a statue of marble.
"This bed is making my life complicated," I told him, trying to sound stern.
He smiled without moving much. "Leanna, this is called charm."
"Charm?" I repeated, bewildered and half furious.
"Yes," he said, and the way he said it made the word soft. "Charm that belongs to the two of us."
He reached for me with such small, confident fingers and closed the distance.
"You're impossible," I said when he kissed me, but my voice trembled.
"This is our life now," he murmured. "You should get used to it."
The bed groaned through the night like a small orchestra. I tried to be offended but failed.
"What do you mean—'our life'?" I asked the next day, fanning myself with a letter.
He shrugged on purpose. "We are husband and wife."
"Technically," I said. "Legally."
"Leanna, wife. It sounds so neat on paper." He made a face like a child who had swallowed too much candy.
I waited for a change of rooms. The house is enormous; surely there is an empty wing.
"Is there an empty chamber?" I asked Abel.
He shook his head twice, very gently. "Not one for guests, Madam."
"How can a marquis' mansion not have a guest wing?" I whispered. "There's always someone in need somewhere. Why do they hide rooms?"
Abel did not meet my eyes. "They say certain rooms in this house keep what they are told to keep. They don't always open for everyone."
That night, the little marquis waited until I was on my phone — yes, here there was 5G — reading things from a life I had already lived. He reached across, took the phone, and said, "It's time to sleep, Leanna."
"It's not even nine o'clock," I protested.
"You tire yourself with glowing boxes," he said, deadpan, and then softened. "Put it away."
I folded my arms and tucked into the corner of the bed like a stubborn child.
"You promised me a quiet night," I said.
"Did I?" He looked at me as if he had never spoken and yet everything he said had weight. "I do not remember."
"You—"
He dropped his gaze to the bed curtain and sighed in such a way that it sounded like a small, dignified ache. "I've been a widower for a thousand years," he said suddenly, as if a century weighed nothing more than a coat. "Who can understand?"
When he said that, I felt something go soft and slippery inside me. "A thousand years?" I repeated.
He let me fall into his arms and then claimed me with a kiss that was both careful and hungry.
"You made me fall for you," he teased. "And I never learned to be subtle."
I thought, for a foolish moment, that I would soften forever. He smelled like lotus and rain and old-time stories.
Days in the marquis' house repeated with small, convincing differences. The little marquis teased and comforted. I kept thinking I was the modern-minded one but the place had old bones.
Then the marquis' tribulation came. He told me he had to "pass through a trial." He had always said things like riddles and then smiled at how I tried to untangle them.
"Will I have to pass a trial too?" I asked, clinging to him in the thin hours before dawn.
"You already did," he said. "Those years you remember — the twenty something years you once called 'boring' — that was your trial, Leanna. You lived as someone else, as Ni Zique."
"If I had refused to come in the first place," I whispered, "if I had not believed—"
He looked at the curtains, thinking. "I would have guarded you in places you cannot see. I would have wished for your safety every night."
"Like you guard me now?" I sobbed a little. "Would you have been here?"
"I would," he said, as if he had never wavered.
When morning came, he left.
I felt empty, suddenly smaller than the marquis' hallway.
Abel came with information and a worn ledger.
"He's gone to his tribulation," Abel told me, opening the old book. His fingers traced letters like a person reading a map of grief. "He will return after his time is fulfilled."
"How long?" I asked.
Abel read the page. "His current life will need thirty years of lifespan to complete. But here, time moves differently."
"What do you mean differently?" I said, my heartbeat quick.
"People outside experience a day, we experience a year. Sometimes the ratio is strange." Abel's voice was careful.
"You're saying—"
"One year here, Leanna, is like three hundred sixty-five days there. He might return in what feels like one month to you."
I thought he had said a thousand years yesterday. I felt dizzy.
"One month?" I whispered.
"Possibly. It depends on merit and the way trials conclude."
I forced a laugh that sounded wrong. So his tearful "a thousand years" had been a thousand days, roughly. He liked language like a magician likes nets.
I waited each morning that followed at the pond where I had first seen him. I watched lotus leaves and the yellow bed's memory drift in my mind. I went to the hospital the city called "modern" and watched births like a witness to a tide.
On the day a child named Daniel Serra entered the world, I walked through the white corridors unseen. I stepped past nurses and parents. In the nursery, all the babies looked the same to anyone not paying attention. But there he was — that tiny face, eyes wide and wary like a small sovereign.
"Hello," I told him, leaning close. He blinked slowly as if considering an old acquaintance.
"Daniel?" a nurse said as she adjusted a blanket. I could not stay. "I'll see you again," I whispered to the infant. "Tomorrow."
Years folded like pages. He grew. I saw him at two years old in a busy living room full of toys. Hazel Grant, the nanny, scolded the toddler while she talked on the phone. I took him into my arms and smelled the warm, honest milk-scent of infancy.
He babbled at a panda plush. "Ah... ah," he said, and then, startling me, "fish."
My own name — Fish, or "Yu" in another life — bubbled out of him, a small human compass.
Hazel squealed and recorded video for the parents. "He's talking! He wants fish!" she cried.
"Don't interrupt the child's hour," I muttered, though my voice was quiet and only he might have heard.
At three, his eyes lost the ability to see me. The superstition that children lose the "third eye" around that age held true; he no longer saw ghosts or things half-remembered. Yet I did not vanish from his life completely. I visited from the sidelines and watched him grow into a man with a quiet carriage and an unreadable face.
The more he lived, the colder he seemed. The regal sensitivity that had made the little marquis so unforgettable hardened into a distant, well-mannered crust. Girls trailed behind him, but he kept them at arm's length.
I told myself I would stay a silent guardian. I would not touch his choices. I would look and not change.
But one night, on his eighteenth birthday, a letter slipped from a backpack — a pink envelope tucked like a shy confession. He had come home drunk from some celebration and collapsed into his bed, blind to the world.
I picked up the envelope like a small curiosity. It smelled of powder and of an earnest heart.
"Don't!" his voice came suddenly.
He was on the bed, one leg hanging, one hand shielding his face like a prince who does not want to see a tiger. He turned his head, and our eyes met. For a breath I suspected he could see me.
"Who are you?" he said, voice rough.
I tried to hide the envelope. "I found it in your bag," I lied. "I was curious."
He stood and took the envelope anyway. His fingers were warm. He read with slow interest. Then he looked at me and smiled in a way I had not seen in years — sharp, dangerous, and very alive.
"You?" he asked, as if wondering whether I had slipped from a painting.
"Not me," I said weakly. "Not really."
He moved closer then. "What is your name?"
"Leanna," I answered, the first name that felt like home.
"Leanna," he repeated, and the word landed like a small spell.
I had never expected him — Daniel — to be so forward. He reached and kissed me, and the room tilted.
"I thought you were a ghost," he murmured. "Or a dream. What a bad dream to let me dream every year."
"You can't—" I managed.
He grinned like a man who had found a loophole. "Years? How many times have you visited?" he asked.
I wanted to tell him the truth: that I had loved him across names and rooms, that he had been a small marquis on a pond, that I was his wife in a life that had already been lived. But telling the living things the whole of the past is dangerous. It folds their mornings and nights into knots.
So I stayed silent, and he kissed me again as if rehearsing a promise he could not keep.
Years continued. I kept my promise to be less present. I only visited when the day's calendar allowed, only a taste of presence to keep him real, to keep his world unruptured by knowledge he did not have to carry.
At twenty-two, he was grown into his shape fully. He brushed me off with a practiced hand. Then one strangely private evening, when he came home from work tired and irritable, his hand grabbed my wrist.
"Don't you leave me," he said, jaw set.
"I didn't come to leave," I answered.
He was rough then, a man made of decisions. He chased me and punished me with kisses the way a storm punishes a foolish farmer.
"Promise me you'll return," he murmured at last, in a voice that had some of the little marquis' softness. "You have to promise."
"All right," I whispered.
We made a pact to keep the pattern. He would live his life and choose as one man. I would be the secret center, a warm secret he could not name. Every year, at a particular time, he would find me like a hidden song.
At twenty-six his parents began to press him to marry. The matchmaking shadow grew like ivy on the house. He resisted. He pushed away the women they introduced. I ached in my chest.
One evening, he lay with his head on my lap, face ashen from a phone call.
"My parents..." he said. "They don't listen. If I marry as they wish, will I become someone else?"
"Who you are will remain," I said, gentle and firm. "But you don't have to yield to the first script they give you."
He squeezed my hand until my bones protested. "You always know what to say," he whispered.
"Not always," I answered. "Sometimes I have no words at all. Then I just sit."
"Sit with me," he asked.
"I will," I promised.
Then the ledger of his life turned pages I could not stop.
One week, a truck rolled down an incline in the city. Children were crossing the crosswalk, a line of small bodies in yellow coats. Daniel saw the onset of danger, the terrible math of momentum and flesh.
He steered his car in a manner I will never be able to replay without my throat tightening.
He stopped the truck and put himself between metal and child.
In a second, everything became nothing. The truck did not stop. The world sharpened into a copper smell and then a silence that filled rooms.
I found out through hospital whispers, through a wooden box on a coffee table, and through tears that did not belong to my own face.
"He's gone," someone said. Arturo Hamilton and Elisabetta Hansson, his parents, sat together like two halves of a broken hourglass.
I cupped the small wooden box in my hands like it might bloom back into flesh.
"They say he saved children," a visitor said quietly. "He was brave."
"He died at thirty," someone else added.
My knees stopped trusting the pavement. The ledger had always said thirty years. I had tried to arrange myself for that eventuality, but nothing can brace the heart when the page turns in reality.
When a life ends, there is a hole where the sound used to be.
I traveled back to the marquis' house like someone traveling to an old wound for salve. Abel met me at the gate.
"He hasn't come back yet," Abel said, eyes unfaltering.
"Why not?" I asked, feeling naive and furious all at once.
"Sometimes when one dies with merit," Abel explained, "their return is not instant. There are detours, records to be read, debts to be cleared."
I imagined Daniel's life like a ledger with neat columns of kindness and error. He had paid the biggest price with a courage that was not theatrical.
The days were knives; my skin raw from waiting. Three days I waited and then four, and the house was a slow ocean.
"You said one month," I told Abel, once, and he looked at me like a man who had seen fire before.
"You took him to your heart," Abel said. "That changes the rhythm."
On the morning of the fourth day, I woke to birds. Blue jacaranda petals — the blue flower I had loved since the first day in the courtyard — drifted like confetti into the room. One landed on my hand.
I reached to touch it and found my own fingers taken by a hand that was large and perfectly familiar.
He had the sleepy smile of someone who had crossed seas and finally sat ashore.
"Leanna," he said softly, like someone reading the beginning of a letter. "I have returned."
I put my forehead against his chest and cried until the world unraveled like string.
"You were late," I said between sobs.
"I know." He laughed a little, embarrassed. "I was delayed by courtiers and debts. And a truck. But I'm home now."
"You were my thousand-year widower," I said, tired and satisfied.
He pressed his lips to my hair. "Only a thousand days," he corrected, and then sobbed himself against me.
Abel and Hazel came into the room, faces full and strange. Hazel's eyes were wet but delighted.
"You're back," Abel said simply, as if the world only needed that one fact to make sense again.
Outside, the yellow bed stood patient and proud. It had been the witness of many small foolish things and large true ones.
"We will tell no one more than they need to know," I said, voice weak.
"Good," Lorenzo—no, Daniel—he allowed me to call him by either name now—said. He used both as if he had been stitched from them. "A house should hold its secrets."
"Are you sure you want to stay?" I asked, thinking about the ledger, about Abel's book of days.
"I have missed the groaning bed," he said, grinning with a ridiculous earnestness that had always made me forgive him. "And you."
"I have missed you," I answered, and then I laughed because saying that was a small and honest confession.
He bent and kissed the place where my collarbone met my neck, a spot that belonged only to me.
"This is not an ending," he said.
I looked at the blue petal still clinging to my sleeve. "No," I said. "It's a circle that comes back to the same flower."
He tightened his hold and the yellow wood gave a small groan, like a cat settling in for a nap.
"Do you remember the first night?" I asked.
"Which first night?" he teased.
"The one when the bed made all the noise and you called it charm."
He smiled in the kind of way that forgave and chose. "I called it charm because I wanted you to stay."
I pressed my palm to his cheek. "You stole my sleep and my time."
"And you stole my centuries," he returned, solemn and amused at once.
We sat there for a long stretch of minutes that felt like a whole small year. The house exhaled and the blue petals settled on the pillows like timid stars.
Outside the window, a breeze chased away the last of the morning. Inside, the yellow bed listened and kept its own secrets.
"Promise me something," he said unexpectedly.
I thought for a moment. The rules of our lives had always been made of small trades.
"I promise," I said, but he shook his head.
"No," he said. "Don't promise. Just stay."
So I did. I stayed because staying was itself a kind of promise. I closed my hand around his and felt the two names — Daniel and Lorenzo — woven into one pulse.
When people in the courtyard later asked how the marquis had returned, Abel replied with a smile that made the story smaller and kinder.
"He came back," Abel said. "In his own time. And he brought the blue flower with him."
I went back into the room and ran my fingers over the yellow huanghuali. It was warm to the touch, and when I lay down beside him I could still hear echoes of old groans.
"You were late," I said again.
"So were you," he countered, as if time were a court with two defendants.
We laughed and the room answered back. Outside, someone chewed on a piece of bread and a child shouted a question into the wind.
"Fish," Daniel murmured, tasting the old word like a madeleine.
I smiled and tapped the center of his chest with my knuckle. "I'm here," I whispered.
He curled his hand around mine and his fingers fit like a returned heirloom.
"If the world ever asks for another ledger," I told him, eyes closing, "we will write a new chapter."
"Good," he said. "I prefer blue flowers to ledgers."
The yellow bed creaked once and settled. A single jacaranda petal fell into the space between us, as if blessing the whole ridiculous, simple, stubborn thing we had become.
The End
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