Betrayed By Desire

The Haunting Morning

• CHAPTER 3

As Skylar woke up, her hands still soft with sleep, brushed against the bare sheets on the other side of the bed, he was absent. The space beside her was cold, not just empty. The cold seeped into her skin, a stark contrast to the remembered heat of the night.

She sat up slowly, till under the dover pulling at her waist. The bedroom was magnificent and stately, with elegant and unadorned lines showing the view of the bright blue morning sky. It felt less like a home and more like a museum exhibit, a cold taste.

Her eyes fell to the floor, seeing piles of clothes by the bedside and her clothes from the night before were lying there. The red dress Amelia had lent her was looking discarded and lying on the pile of clothes, a lingering trace of the passionate night. It looked less like a garment and more like a flag of surrender.

She saw a note, her name was on it so she reached for it. Written in scribbled, jagged hand writing she wasn’t familiar with cause it was the normal handwriting she used to see on memos and contracts. ‘Had to head out early, let yourself out. We’ll talk at the office. -H’

The words were a physical blow. *Let yourself out.* The frigid, impersonal tone felt like a slap. No ‘good morning.’ No, ‘last night was wonderful.’ No tenderness. Just a blunt, dismissive instruction, as if she were a tradesman who had completed a job. She felt sick worried, this wasn’t how it was supposed to be. Where was the morning after care? The shared, secret smiles?

Her hands shook as she scrambled out of the vast bed, her body aching in unfamiliar ways. Skylar hastily put on her clothes from yesterday which felt alien and stained against her skin, her hands trembling. The house was deathly quiet and felt utterly empty. Her footsteps on the hardwood floor echoed through the cavernous space, each sound amplifying her feeling of intrusion and exposure. She fled, the solid, heavy front door clicking shut behind her with a sound of terrifying finality.

The journey to work was a blur of rising anxiety. She felt judged by every face she came across, every reflection in the train window showed a woman who looked like her but felt like a stranger, a woman who had been foolish enough to believe in a fairy tale. Had she made a colossal mistake? Was he regretting it? Was she about to be fired? Was the ‘talk at the office’ a prelude to her termination, packaged with a stern warning about fraternization and a generous severance check to buy her silence?

As she made her way through the Brooks Tower lobby entering the lift to the tenth floor, she felt like everyone could see her shame. The lift drive felt like an eternity, her heart racing and beating faster.

She made her way towards his office and there he was. She arrived and Hayden was already present at the office and at his workspace glinting his pen as he signed some documents. His expression was not one of shared intimacy or secret smiles. It was cold. Hard. Impenetrable.

His gaze swept over her as she approached her own, smaller desk. His expression was not one of shared intimacy or a secret, thrilling smile. It was cold. Hard. Impenetrable granite. There was not a single flicker of recognition for the woman he had held in the dark just hours before.

“Good morning, Mr. Brooks,” she said, her voice barely a steady whisper, the honorific tasting like ash in her mouth.

He didn’t smile. He didn’t nod. His blue eyes, usually so calm and analytical, were chips of Arctic ice. “The quarterly reports from the European division are on your desk,” he stated, his voice flat and devoid of any inflection she recognized. It was the voice he used for incompetent junior analysts. “I need them compiled, cross-referenced with the projections, and on my desk by ten. Not a minute later.”

The tone in his voice was so harsh.

“Yes, sir,” she murmured, feeling gutted. Dropping her gaze to the floor.

The entire day was a exquisite torture of silent rejection. He didn’t look at her. He didn’t speak to her directly again, communicating only through a series of curt, brutally efficient emails. The easy connection they’d built over months of shared coffee and discussions about books was gone, utterly erased, replaced by a vast, frigid wasteland. He was punishing her. Or worse, he was trying to erase the memory from last night, he regretted it.

During a moment of breathless panic in the mid-morning, she got a buzz on her phone which was left under the desk, showing a text from an unknown number. The same one from before.

‘You were incredible. Last night wasn’t enough.’

A film of hot, confused tears instantly coated her eyes, blurring the spreadsheet on her screen. How? How could he send such a message while simultaneously treating her with such professional disdain? It was a vicious, cruel game. The text was for the woman in the red dress; the ice king in the office was for the secretary. He wanted both, and he wanted her to fracture under the dissonance.

Amelia called during her lunch break, hiding in a quiet corner of the building. “Well? How did it go? Don’t leave me hanging!” Details, woman!”

Skylar choked back a sob, “It was a mistake, A huge, horrible, catastrophic mistake. He…..he won’t even look at me. He’s absolute ice. But he’s……he’s texting me like nothing’s wrong. I don’t understand what’s going on”.

“I *told* you!” Amelia’s voice was laced with a fury born of protectiveness. “He’s playing with you! You were a conquest, a late-night snack. Now he’s done, but he wants to keep you on the hook. You have to quit. Sky, you have to get out of there now. This is toxic.”

“I can’t just quit,” Skylar cried, her voice a desperate whisper. “The job market… and I… God help me, Amelia, I love him.”

“You love the *idea* of him!” Amelia shot back, her tone fierce. “The man who gave you that first-edition novel and remembered how you take your coffee! Not the man who lures you to a secret house and then treats you like a stain on his carpet the next day! That’s not love, Sky. That’s about power. And you are giving him all of yours.”

But Skylar was too heartbroken to listen, the rest of the week was agony. Hayden’s disdain was a physical presence. A cold front that made the air thin and difficult to breathe.

On Friday, a ruby red bunch of flowers was sent to her desk by a delivery man. Their scent overwhelmingly sweet and cloying. There was no card, none was needed. She knew.

Feeling nauseous with her hands shaking, she immediately stood up, walked to the trash can and threw the flowers directly into the trash without thinking twice.

Hayden’s office door opened at that instant. He came out, his eyes going from her horrified face to the roses in the trash can. He stopped dead, he had a hint of something unreadable and clouded expression, genuine betrayal?! Or simply fury at her audacity?! Flashed across his face before the shutters slammed down again, his expression becoming more closed and terrifying than before. He turned silently and headed back to his office, banging the door so hard which made the windows rattle violently.

Skylar broke down into tears and leaped up, It has ended. She had ruined everything with the man she loved and he hated her for it, it was over. The world dissolving into a watery mess of regret and despair.