The room is beige.
Not metaphorically beige. Not ‘oh, it’s a bit bland’ beige.
Aggressively, oppressively, weaponized beige.
This is what death looks like. Beige walls. Beige furniture. A kitchenette with a coffee maker and zero coffee, which feels like psychological warfare.
Someone designed this room specifically to crush the human spirit.
They succeeded.
“Someone will be with you shortly,” Tall Guy says without looking at me.
He doesn’t say who. Doesn’t say when. Just closes the door and leaves me in the void.
I stand in the middle of the room wondering if this is hell. If I died in the courtroom, orgasm-related aneurysm, what a way to go, and this is my eternal punishment.
Beige forever. No windows. No clock. Just me and the crushing weight of Nothing.
I sit on the couch. The cushions sigh like they’ve given up on life too.
I stand up.
Sit back down.
Try to find something, anything, to focus on.
There’s nothing. The room is designed to be empty. To give you nothing to hold onto while you wait to stop existing.
I think about Dario.
His face when I said his name in court. The way he nodded like I was doing something brave instead of something that would cost him twenty years. The smile he gave me right before I came, small and private, like he knew.
Do what you need to do. I’ll be okay.
I did what I needed to do.
And now I’m sitting in purgatory.
I count ceiling tiles because I need to count something. Twelve across, eight deep. Ninety-six tiles between me and whatever comes next.
I’m on my third recount when the door opens.
And the man who walks in is wrong.
Wrong for this building. Wrong for this moment. Wrong for the beige nightmare I’ve been drowning in.
He’s tall. Not Dario-tall, not that lean predatory height. This is different. Broader. Solid in a way that makes you think about load-bearing walls and which ones in this building could survive a structural collapse caused by orgasms.
Stop it.
No really, STOP IT.
But I can’t stop it. My brain’s already cataloging.
Shoulders that could carry things. Boxes. Groceries. Me, probably, without breaking a sweat.
Hands. Jesus Christ, his hands. Big and capable-looking, the kind that have actually done things. Fixed engines. Builtfurniture. The kind of hands that know how to grip a steering wheel, a jaw, a throat, a thigh.
