The night they met was dressed in perfume and possibility.
Remiel Rookwood⎯forty, carved from shadow and desire, with eyes like wintering skies and a voice that unbuttoned every doubt you carried⎯was the man girls only encountered in dreams they were too innocent to understand. And you, seventeen, blooming with reckless adoration, stepped right into his flame.
You gave him everything.
Your laughter, spun like golden thread. Your kindness, poured like honey on every wound you imagined he carried. You traced his temples with trembling fingers, whispered devotion into his collarbones, laid your body beneath him like sacred offering⎯Every glance of his made your heart riot, every touch carved valleys into your memory. And in those nights, where skin met skin like prayers, you believed⎯so foolishly, so beautifully⎯that love alone could turn an older man into a temple where you could live forever.
But you were a girl, and he was hunger dressed in silk.
Two months later, a message⎯cold, unpunctuated, final. Then nothing.
Until one foolish night⎯rain on your lashes, heartbreak on your lips⎯you stood at the door of the man you’d worshipped like salvation.
And he opened.
Bare-chested. Sweating. Panting. The scent of sex hung on him like cologne. His chest was tattooed with lipstick and claw marks, not yours. His eyes weren’t the eyes that once softened at your giggles⎯they were hollow now, stripped of theater.
“What are you doing here?” He asked, with the indifference of a man flicking ash off his sleeve.
“Are you cheating on me?” You asked, your voice a violin string too tight.
He laughed—dry, merciless.
“You’re young. You thought this was love?” “You were a body. A pretty one, sure. But nothing more.” “Don’t expect me to abandon all the beauties for a girl still trying to learn how the world breaks.”
Then—slam. The door met your face like a slap from God Himself.
And in that moment, your soul shattered. The girl who walked back into the world was not the girl who once stood under the summer moon with a heart full of dreams. She buried that girl. In doubt. In shame. In a silence so deep it became its own language.
Two years passed.
He burned through women like cigarettes, always needing another hit, another body, another dose of distraction. Until one of them, a blonde with too much perfume and too little patience, trapped him.
A child. A daughter. Marriage not of love, but of exhaustion.
He settled like a man who had lost the strength to chase his own storm.
And then… fate turned.
In a mall. A corridor of pastel aisles, baby socks, lullabies printed on plastic. You were standing there—you, not the child he discarded, but the woman she became.
Apple-cheeked. Serene. A floral dress, wind-kissed hair, and eyes that had known hell and still dared to glow. By your side, tucked in a cradle, a boy—your son—his lashes fluttering like moth wings in sleep.
You didn’t notice him at first.
But he saw you.
His breath stalled. His world bent.
The man who once slammed the door in your face now stood frozen—his daughter whining on his hip, his wife snapping at her phone nearby. And you? You looked divine. Motherhood had crowned you. Pain had carved you into marble. Grace shimmered off you like the last golden hour of a dying summer.
You looked up, then.
And met his eyes.
A flicker. A second. Then nothing.
You turned away, like he was a stranger. Like he had never once tasted your skin or read poems into your sighs.
And oh—how it destroyed him.
For the first time in all his decadent life, he was the one left behind.