Our Dark Fantasies

Chapter 3: Fault Lines

Damien

I stand under the shower at 5:47 a.m., letting the scalding water punish my skin. The marks Sofia left on my back sting like accusations. I watch the water swirl pink, then clear, and still don’t feel clean.

By six-thirty I’m back in the office, door locked, blinds half-drawn. The room reeks of last night’s s*x, jasmine, and something metallic I refuse to name. I open every window, crank the air to arctic, and spray cedar disinfectant like I can erase evidence. The city outside is still asleep, gray and indifferent. I wish I were.

The torn black lace panties sit in the bottom drawer of my desk now, wrapped in a silk pocket square like contraband. I don’t remember putting them there. I do remember the way Sofia’s pulse fluttered under my palm when I pressed her to the glass. I remember her whispering thank you afterward, soft and broken, like I’d given her something no one else ever had.

My calendar blinks with the day’s patients. Good people. Safe problems. A hedge-fund manager with panic attacks. A surgeon who can’t sleep. A sixteen-year-old girl starving herself to death. They trust me. They pay me obscene money to hold their pieces together.

And last night I f****d a patient against my office window hard enough to leave bruises shaped like my fingerprints.

I pour coffee I don’t taste and open Sofia’s file again. The official one, not the one I’m writing in my head. The referral letter is clinical, bloodless:

“…pattern of escalating interpersonal risk… disregard for long-term consequences… possible borderline traits with histrionic features…”

I close it. The words feel obscene now.

My phone vibrates. A text from an unknown number.

I still feel you inside me.

I’m on a plane in four hours.

I need to see you again before I go.

Please.

Four hours. That’s how long I have before she disappears to Tokyo and whatever life she keeps escaping from. Four hours to decide whether I’m going to refer her out, end this, and pretend I still have a moral compass. Or whether I’m going to let her pull me under.

I type back before the sane part of my brain can intervene.

My place. 8 p.m. tonight.

No session. No titles. Just us.

The reply is instant.

I’ll be there.

I spend the day pretending to be Dr. Damien Woods…competent, unflappable, the man magazines call “the city’s most sought-after mind”. I nod in all the right places, ask all the right questions, write prescriptions I’m not sure will help. My 3 p.m. patient cries about her failing marriage and I hear myself giving measured, compassionate advice while remembering how Sofia’s thighs trembled when I told her she wasn’t allowed to come yet.

At 6:12 p.m. I cancel my last two appointments with a vague excuse about a family emergency. My assistant doesn’t question it; I’ve never done this before.

I drive home through rain that finally decides to fall in earnest. My penthouse is too quiet, too clean. I pour two fingers of Laphroaig and stand at the window watching the storm tear across the harbor.

I think about my own file, the one no patient ever sees. The one that starts in a trailer park in Ohio, with a mother who loved pills more than her son and a father whose name I never learned. The one that ends with scholarships, sleepless nights, and a career built on never letting anyone see the cracks.

Sofia saw them in under ten minutes.

At 7:58 p.m. the doorman buzzes. She’s early. Of course she is.

I open the door and she’s soaked, hair dripping, white silk blouse clinging transparently to her skin, no bra, n*****s dark against the fabric. She’s carrying nothing but a small leather weekend bag and a look that says she’s already decided tonight ends one of two ways: with me inside her again, or with both of us in pieces.

She steps past me without waiting for an invitation.

“You canceled your patients for me,” she says. Not a question.

“How do you know that?”

“I have sources.” She drops the bag, turns, meets my eyes. “I needed to know if I scared you off.”

I close the door. Lock it.

“You don’t scare me, Sofia. You undo me. There’s a difference.”

For the first time since I’ve known her, the mask slips entirely. She looks suddenly young, exhausted, terrified.

“I don’t know how to stop this,” she whispers. “Whatever this is. I’ve spent years chasing the thing that would finally make the noise in my head shut up. And then I found you, and it got quieter, and now I’m afraid if I leave I’ll never find quiet again.”

I cross the room in three strides and stop just short of touching her.

“Then don’t leave,” I say, the words out before I can stop them.

Her eyes search mine. “You know I destroy everything I touch.”

“I’m not everything.”

Rain lashes the windows. Thunder rolls low and distant.

She steps closer until her wet clothes soak into my shirt.

“Tell me what happens if we keep going,” she says. “Real answers, Damien. Not the pretty ones.”

I give her the truth, raw and ugly.

“We lose everything. Licenses. Reputations. Maybe people we love. We hurt each other in ways we haven’t invented yet. And we still won’t be able to stop.”

She exhales, shaky. “And if we stop now?”

I think of the silence waiting for her on the other side of the world. I think of my own life—safe, sterile, immaculate returning to the way it was yesterday morning.

“We survive,” I say. “But we stay broken.”

Another crack of thunder. Closer this time.

She reaches up, fingers brushing the stubble along my jaw.

“Then break me on your terms,” she says quietly. “Not the world’s. Just yours.”

I close the last inch between us and kiss her, not like last night, all teeth and conquest. This kiss is slow, deliberate, almost tender. It tastes like goodbye and beginning at the same time.

When we pull apart, her eyes are steady.

“Tonight,” she says, “no doctor. No patient. Just Damien and Sofia. Tomorrow we decide what we’re willing to burn.”

I nod, throat tight.

She takes my hand and leads me toward the bedroom, leaving wet footprints on the hardwood like evidence.

Behind us, the storm breaks wide open.

A witness to our defiance.