The rating's K+ and before I forget... I don't own anything but the story.
This is set sometime during their affair. I'll post more from time to time and make it a series of short JS vignettes. They're undated, but each one takes place in the same hotel room, on a different night. Thanks to Mariel for beta-reading this!
Aliases
What is
life? An illusion, a shadow, a story,
And the greatest
good is little enough: for all life is a dream, and dreams themselves are only
dreams.
−Pedro Calderon
de
la Barca
I.
Shadows
There was a spot in the room that never saw light. They had found it the very first time, when he had walked through the door on an unusually chilly summer night, and when she had followed him, not knowing where he was going, not knowing what they were doing.
She loved the room, loved how the darkness they crossed every time blinded senses and shut out reason. Only the feelings remained, swirling in the air, teasing them with possibility, turning a vision into reality− and for these stolen instants they spent incognito, it seemed only natural that they would give everything they owned to each other.
It was fairly simple. He wasn't here as Jack Malone, and she wasn't here as Samantha Spade. This didn't qualify as an affair− for he was no longer married. The ring around his finger no longer meant what it would mean to anyone on the outside. It didn't speak of vows and promises, didn't scream of infidelity when it scraped her skin. That ring held no more signification than the tie he hastily took off or the shoes he quickly discarded. It was an accessory, and just that; it was a golden band, but it wasn't the golden ring that binds your heart and ties your hands and turns you into an adulterer if ever you forget what it represents.
As she had done countless times in the past, she entered the hotel room behind him, and before she passed the door that led to the small bathroom on her right, her face was momentarily plunged into darkness. He lost sight of her eyes, and when she emerged from the shadows, she was changed, divested of her name and everything that attached her to him through office ties− and he was changed too, losing his title and everything that could remind them that he was her boss, her employer, that man she'd dreamt about and knew she'd never have and sworn to her mother that she wouldn't go after.
She had never meant to fall for him and he had never meant to fall for her, but they had, and for this hour, she would be just Her and he would be just Him and those would be their only aliases for the moment. On days like these, coming here was the only way to forget about the outside, to forget about blood and guns and murderers. On days like these, he shared her desperate, frantic need to make it go away, make it stop, make it all somehow disappear. And on days like these, on nights like these, their aliases were names borrowed from strangers and superimposed on expressions that belonged to them only− a wordless understanding, a mutual craving, a burning desire to find themselves in each other.
He'd taken off that fake smile and stepped off the stage for the very first time in his life, and she'd followed him, discarded the makeup and forgotten about the pre-planned scenario, and in losing their names and attires and scripts, they'd managed to stop being Samantha Spade and Jack Malone. They were no one and they were nowhere, for there was a spot in the room that never saw light, a spot he'd crossed once and that she had crossed after him, on an endless day when all seemed lost.
And on that day, and on the days after that, they kept entering this room, still not knowing where they were going, and they kept going there together.