The number was a stone in her chest: one hundred.
It was the one-hundredth night since the door had closed, since she had watched Paul turn on the threshold, his face a ruin of joy and promise, his hand lifting in a final, heartbreaking salute. One hundred nights of waiting, of fever, of the slow, cold understanding that her body—this once marketable vessel—was failing her. She lay small beneath the heavy quilt, the window of the cheap rented room painted black by the city's indifferent smog. The only light came from the sliver under the door—the door. Her eyes, clouded with pain and unshed tears, were fixed upon it, a symbol of hope's last betrayal.
Cynthia was dying. The experienced sex worker, the fallen office girl, the reluctant bride—all those selves were dissolving back into the dust of the mattress, leaving behind only a woman who had loved and waited.
The first time she remembered seeing Paul, she was twenty, and the world was made of dust motes dancing in the sterile light of her middle-class office window. He was outside, a ghost of motion, working on the pane of the jewelry store across the street—a traveling window repairman.
Paul: leather apron cinched tight over a simple white shirt, hands that knew the difference between glass and air, a smile that broke across his face like the sun through a cloud. He'd glance up sometimes, catching her eye, and the sheer, unburdened openness of his look would make her pen falter over the ledger.
She was Cynthia, the diligent, the practical, the respectable. Her uniform was a beige skirt suit, her future a calculated ascent up the secretarial hierarchy. Paul was freedom, dust, and the unknown—everything her life was meticulously designed to exclude.
Monologue: The First Mistake
I was a coward, wasn't I? A twenty-year-old coward in sensible shoes. I loved the way the sunlight caught the copper strands in his hair. I loved the smudge of putty on his cheek. I loved him, but I loved my monthly salary more. I told myself it was about stability. About not giving up what I had for a moment of heat. But really, it was just fear. Fear of a world that didn't come with an employment contract. Fear of having to repair my own life if it cracked.
I never even told him my name. I just watched him through the pristine glass I was too afraid to break.
Paul finished his job and moved on. Cynthia breathed a sigh of sensible relief and went back to balancing the books. She shelved Paul away in a cool, private compartment of her mind labeled "What Could Have Been," reserving her real attention for what was.
What was, arrived in the form of Anthony, her boss.
Anthony was a man who didn't work on windows; he owned them. He owned the company that owned the building that housed the glass shop. He was power expressed through tailored wool and quiet, assured footsteps.
He noticed Cynthia during a routine compliance visit. Not her ledger, but her neck.
She remembered the exact moment. She was leaning over the desk, presenting a quarterly report, and the collar of her blouse gaped. Anthony's eyes didn't land on her face; they fixed on the small, perfectly circular beauty mark, high on her chest, just beneath the smooth line of her neck.
"Fascinating," he had murmured, not about the sales figures, but about the mole. "It looks like a perfect period mark, Cynthia. The end of a very interesting sentence."
It was a strange, unsettling compliment, but Cynthia understood the currency of fascination.
He courted her not with flowers or sentiment, but with access: fine dining, silk dresses, apartments with views that made the old office building look like a shack. She was practical, and Anthony was a walking definition of stability. He was offering a life beyond the beige suit. The allure was irresistible, a golden cage with a velvet floor. They were married within a year.
The golden cage was not built for one.
Anthony, it turned out, collected things of beauty and utility, and Cynthia was both. She was the trophy wife, impeccably dressed and poised. But her utility extended beyond decorating his arm at cocktail parties.
He introduced her to his big boss, an older man with the eyes of a tired predator. The first time, it was subtle: a hand lingering too long, a compliment too suggestive. The second time, Anthony had simply excused himself from the penthouse suite, closing the door softly behind him.
The shock was a physical punch, but the luxury—the heavy, sweet intoxication of wealth and ease—had already begun its work. She remembered the sheer shame, but she also remembered the taste of the hundred-dollar champagne and the weight of the diamond bracelet Anthony gifted her the next morning, a silent apology and a heavy payment.
The transactions became routine. She was presented like a fine wine or a new acquisition, passed around the closed circles of Anthony's business world. She was used, as the story goes, like tissue paper—necessary for a moment, then discarded.
The marriage ended in a bitter, financially ruinous divorce, leaving her wealthy in possessions but empty in spirit and, worse, reputation. She had burned all bridges to the middle-class office world, and the gilded world had cast her out. The addiction to the ease of luxury—the freedom from struggle, the power derived from her desirability—was cemented.
Prostitution was not a choice; it was the only open door. She was good at it, efficient, and detached. Cynthia, the sex worker, was merely executing a perfected version of the role Anthony had designed for her.
One night, on a cold, unsympathetic street corner, the past collided with the present.
She was smoking a cigarette, waiting for a signal, when she saw him. Paul. The window repairman, older now, maybe a little thicker around the middle, but with the same familiar kind eyes. He was walking with a purposeful stride, then he stopped, his gaze locking on her face, and the smile faded. The shock was mutual and devastating.
She expected judgment, scorn, or pity. She braced herself for the shame to flood back. Instead, his expression settled into a deep, consuming sadness, mixed with an unmistakable tenderness.
He walked toward her, not running, but with the slow, inevitable movement of fate.
"Cynthia," he said, the name sounding foreign and beautiful on his tongue.
"Paul," she whispered.
He booked her for the night. Not out of lust, but out of a desperate, consuming need to retrieve a piece of his lost history.
That night was not a transaction; it was an excavation. They talked for hours, stumbling over the debris of two decades, filling in the gaps. He told her how he had often looked for her, how he never married because no other woman had eyes that held the promise of sunlight the way hers did. She told him the curated version of her life—the marriage, the divorce, the necessary turns—leaving out the worst degradations, but letting him see the weary truth in her gaze.
The truth of her profession was laid bare, but Paul didn't flinch. He just held her hand, tracing the veins on her wrist.
"I always loved you," Paul finally admitted, his voice rough.
"I loved you too, Paul," she confessed, the phrase a prayer spoken twenty years too late.
The lovemaking that followed was not the practiced routine of her profession. It was a fierce, passionate attempt to cram a lifetime of missed connections into a single, perfect night. In their last, deep, parting kiss, a promise was sealed.
"We'll be together, Cynthia. Tomorrow, I'm going to get my things. We'll get a small place. I'll fix the windows, and you can manage the books. We'll just start over."
It was a reckless, beautiful fantasy. She held onto it tightly as he finally left the room, his promise hanging in the air.
Paul did not return.
He had walked out that door and gotten a few blocks away, the triumphant adrenaline of rediscovered love coursing through him. Then the fatigue hit, a crushing weight he couldn't shake off. He was taken to a hospital, where his long-undiagnosed illness—HIV/AIDS—finally claimed him.
Unaware, Cynthia waited.
The next morning, she did not go out. She canceled her bookings, sold a piece of jewelry for cash, and waited.
Day one stretched into week one, then month one. She was too proud, too afraid, and too hopeful to call the police or the hospitals. He had promised. He would come back.
Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the fever that had been a dull heat began to climb. The constant waiting, the guilt, the heartbreak, and the silently working virus Paul had unknowingly passed to her that final night began to exact their toll. He was her hundredth client in the months since the divorce—and her last.
She spent the hundred nights recalling every single detail of their one night.
Monologue: The Hundred Nights
It wasn't just the night, Paul. It was the repair. You fixed me. Not the broken part, but the window to the world. And now, for 100 nights, that's all I've had: the memory. The rough feel of your shirt against my cheek. The way you knew exactly where to touch me, not with the rehearsed skill of the wealthy men, but with a simple, genuine hunger that was only for me, for Cynthia.
I remember your voice when you said my name. I remember the shock of seeing you, seeing the boy who sold me stability for a sensible suit, standing right there, real, wanting me despite the street. Every night, I replay the conversation. The laugh lines around your eyes. The absolute panic in my own when you asked for the price, and the relief when you just nodded, treating me like a person, not a product.
The others saw the body and the mole—Anthony's perfect period mark. You saw the beginning of a new sentence. And now, on the hundredth night, I've realized the decree is ending anyway. It was always going to end, Paul. The virus was just fate's final, cruel joke, ensuring that the love that saved us also killed us. We only had one night, but it was worth a hundred lives.
On the hundredth night, the fever peaked. The cold sweat turned to a deep, consuming heat that seemed to evaporate her very soul. She could no longer feel the heavy quilt. She could barely feel her own breathing.
The room began to dissolve around her, the peeling wallpaper, the cracked ceiling, the cheap lamp—all fading into a grey wash. Only the door remained, stark and black, a clean rectangle in the gloom. The door from where Paul had left, promising to return.
She summoned every last ounce of her dying will, fixing her gaze on the wood, willing the promise to be kept.
She saw him, not as the dying, unknowing man he was, but as the ghost of the boy, apron tied, sunlight in his hair, smiling that unburdened smile.
A sense of vast, encompassing peace settled over her. The waiting was over. The number was complete. She had lived a life of calculation and ended it with an act of desperate, pure love.
Cynthia closed her eyes. The fever broke, taking her with it.
The last thing she saw, burned onto the inside of her eyelids, was the shape of that door, finally opening.