Sweet Romance13 min read
I Wrote Him, Then He Locked Me In: A Social-Anxious Author Trapped in Her Own Novel
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"I clapped with the sickly-cute man."
"I did?"
"I did," I said, because of course I did. I always applauded my own villains when they behaved perfectly.
"Why are you staring at me like that?" Benedict's eyes were narrow and patient, like he kept a list of everything I ever did and ticked it off in private.
"I—" I swallowed. "I think I am supposed to be an actor. Or a patient."
"You look like a patient," he said softly, and reach—no, he didn't reach. He stopped.
"I have social anxiety," I told him. "I can't—"
"Blue? Francesca?" He smiled a little, the wrong smile for someone who wanted to grab waists and hold doors shut. "You drugged me and then fainted. Is that part of your plan?"
"No!" I buried my face in the blanket. "I didn't plan the fainting. I—"
"You fainted theatrically," Benedict said, and there it was: that small cruel curve of amusement on his mouth.
"I don't know how to faint theatrically! I don't know how to be a scheming supporting actress." I scrunched into my knitted blanket and tried to pull it over my head, like hiding were a skill I had.
"You're the one who put something in my drink," he accused, his voice low enough that the bedside lamp hardly heard him.
"I didn't! I—" I heard the words from a room that belonged to someone else: the author who had written this mess. "I mean, the original Blue-Yin-Yin—no, Blue-something—didn't either. But in my draft she did."
Benedict's eyes flicked over me and did a thing I had written a hundred times: the skewed, insolent smile that meant he half-believed himself, half-played a role I had given him.
"You're deluding me with meta-talk," he said. "You're dizzy. Doctors said get rest."
"Doctor single room." I had to say it. "One doctor, one room. No nurses and no crowd."
He leaned close. "You want one doctor?"
"Yes!" I whispered. "One doctor, only one doctor, because I am socially terrified."
"Because of me?" He smiled like a blade wrapped in velvet.
"Maybe a little."
He clicked his tongue. "I will keep you safe. Stay put."
That was the first night. The first time the pages I wrote folded over into my life and pinched like a small, familiar hurt.
"You wrote me that way," he said that night, when his hands were warm around my shoulders and I felt like a gull with wet wings. "You gave me this need to keep people inside rooms."
"That's forbidden," I said, because behind every writer's smile there was an editor I was still afraid of. "My editor screamed. 'Make him darker! Make him terrifying!'"
"I prefer this version," Benedict murmured. "The one who sleeps quietly and then holds you like property."
"Don't say property," I told him. "Say... cozy."
"Cozy," he repeated, kissing my forehead like a stamp of possession. "Cozy and only yours."
The scene was exactly the kind of thing I had written at two a.m. with a mug of cold coffee on my desk: dramatic, over-the-top, and somehow tender if you squinted. I should have been delighted. Instead I felt like I was standing on the edge of my story and the cliff was wobbling.
"I am the author," I told him one afternoon, because I had to test the truth like a bone.
"And?" Benedict cocked his head at me as if intrigued by a new toy.
"And I know what happens next," I told him. "I wrote the jealous scene. White heroine shows up. There will be drama."
"Does the white heroine annoy you?" He suggested fondly.
"She is my heroine." I said it fast, the way people say prayers. "Abigail. Prim and polite. She's my center. You were supposed to love her."
"For a moment," Benedict agreed. "But you—Francesca—you are different."
"I am a supporting character," I said. "I am supposed to get in the way, then vanish."
"You will not vanish," Benedict announced. "You fainted and then you slept on my shoulder like a kitten."
"I was cold," I protested.
"You're mine," he said, and the world tilted to a private angle.
"Don't say that."
"Say it with me," he coaxed, dangerous sweetness in his voice. "Say you will stay."
"I—" I closed my eyes. I did not want to say it. I had never wanted to be claimed in real life. "I want to go home," I blurted.
He laughed softly. "You keep telling lies," he said. "Then you keep coming back."
That was the second night. Benedict and I slept on a borrowed page of my own plot. Between the pillows, he was both the beast and the prince I had drafted with affection.
"Why did you throw my blanket?" I accused one morning.
"You kicked off in your sleep," he said. "You screamed and spat like a storm."
"I had a panic," I said. "Anxiety attack. You were supposed to keep me safe."
"I kept you safe." He reached and tucked the blanket around my shoulders. "Are you not pleased?"
"I am pleased when authors get to be in control of their worlds," I said. "This world is not my puppet."
He kissed my temple, the motion so small it could be read as either apology or claim. "Then write me kinder."
"I can't." I scowled. "The editor hates kind versions."
"Then be the editor of us," he said. "Rewrite me."
"I... can't change everything," I whispered. "You were written to be a lock."
"Locks can be changed," Benedict said. "Or broken."
He kept me close like a book closed on a cold table. I laughed sometimes when he forbade me the kitchen and hid my shoes and made the windows dark. He said the sunny world was dangerous; he said I might go viral if I stepped outside. He murmured over me in the night like a vow and then would smirk in the morning as if he had been at a rehearsal.
"Who is Abigail?" he demanded one evening.
"She is my heroine," I said. "Abigail Tang. Gentle, polite, the luminous center."
"Then why do you cry when I say her name?" He watched me.
"I don't," I lied.
He pretended to believe me but his fingers tightened. "If she mocked you," he said, "I will tear out her thorns."
"Don't threaten my heroine," I said. "She redemptive. She deserves better than threats."
"But you are jealous," Benedict accused, like a child holding a rolling marble.
"Jealous of what?" I asked.
"Jealous of my bed." He smiled and pointed at the Kobe-printed bedsheet I had noticed the first night. "Jealous of Kobe now."
"You like a sportsman?" I felt ridiculous and delighted.
"I like what I can claim," he said simply. "And the sheet is evidence."
"You can—"
He cut me off by leaning down and pressing his forehead to mine. "Stop trying to keep me on a page," he said. "Stay in the paragraph."
"That's a sentence," I corrected instinctively.
"Stay with me," he said.
I hesitated because even as an author I had prefered to watch the characters from a safe desk. Watching him up close was like watching sunlight through glass: intoxicating and a little dangerous.
The world outside his glass house wanted to applaud and also gossip. When Benedict and I walked to the car, he made the windows black like stage curtains. He said, "If anyone sees you vulnerable, they will applaud you like an exhibit."
"That is rude to the exhibit," I told him.
"A show must have an audience," he murmured. "But I prefer a private show."
"What about Abigail?"
"Abigail will always be an audience," he said, "or a rival."
"You can't have both," I said.
"I can," Benedict said. "I have practiced being impossible."
When I hid in the wardrobe during one absurd meal—because Benedict had suggested people clap every time I ate rice and I had panic glances at the assembled staff—the housekeeper Camilla tipped her head and called, "Blue? Miss Francesca?"
"Don't call me Blue," I hissed.
"Francesca," Camilla repeated. "Miss, the table is ready."
"Tell them I am faint," I directed, because fainting was my safe booth where people couldn't stare.
"Miss faint?" Camilla chimed with honest confusion. "But you are here."
"Do it," Benedict said, and I wormed out from the wardrobe like a timid rabbit.
"Blue, will you say hello?" Benedict offered, heartily wrong.
"Hello," I said in a voice that sounded like a mouse with lipstick.
"Big cheer!" Benedict declared.
The staff clapped like trained seals. Camilla laughed.
"Why is everyone so mean to me?" I asked Benedict later.
"Because you are too precious to them," Benedict said. "And they enjoy the theater."
"They're in on it," I complained. "Everyone's in on my humiliation."
"You staged it," he said.
"I didn't want to stage this," I protested.
"Everyone wants to be seen," he said quietly. "Even you, right now."
"I want to be safe," I said. "That is different."
"What if safety is only a quiet prison?" Benedict asked, and his eyes glittered like a tea cup with a shard of sunlight.
"I'd prefer the quiet part," I whispered.
So he made my room small and soft. He taped my shoes in pairs on the closet shelf like evidence of a life preserved. He changed the Kobe bedsheet and replaced it with a sheet he said smelled like me, which made me both furious and oddly proud.
"You call it my sheet?" I asked.
"Your sheet," he corrected. "My sheets belonged to the past. Now the sheets are yours."
He switched light switches like gates. He forbade me to go to the subway or take taxis. "There is a chance you will be spoken to by strangers," he said.
"I can talk via text," I said. "That's how I talk in my work."
He frowned as if arranging my life in a file cabinet.
"Why are you so protective?" I asked once, because curiosity was an authorly sin I never quite conquered.
"Because you faint in helpful ways," he replied. "Because you cried when you saw Abigail leave. Because you are small in a way I want to keep."
"You said you loved me," I reminded him.
"I do," he said. "I love you like an editor loves a draft."
"Then edit me kindly."
"I will," he promised. "First cut the parts that made other girls cry."
"I can't," I said. "I wrote them with care."
He laughed like a cruel bell. "Careful authors mislead."
"Don't call me an author in a mocking tone."
He kissed me suddenly, so suddenly it was like a spoiler in my own narrative. I pushed back.
"Stop," I said.
"Why would I stop?" Benedict asked, breath warm.
"Because it is my story," I said. "And you keep changing it."
"Stories live through those who tell them," he said. "You tell them."
"Then tell me to leave."
He grinned, suddenly small and terrible. "And where would you go, Francesca?"
"Away," I said. "Back to the desk, back to the draft, back to my one-room apartment with an overworked lamp."
"You are already written in my arm," he said, and there was truth in his words that made me afraid and oddly pleased. "If you leave, I will find you."
"You are a fictional man," I insisted. "You don't get to knock on my apartment door."
"Say that when I knock," he replied.
One night, exhausted from the soft tyranny and the sweetness and the terror, I told myself I would leave. I packed a small bag. I told Benedict, "If you really love me, open the door and let me choose."
He opened his eyes and watched me for a long, unbelieving minute. "Choose what?"
"Choose to let me live," I said.
He stood and walked to the door. He paused. He opened it with a flourish, and the corridor was long and empty, like a stage before the audience enters.
"Leave," he said.
I braced myself and ran.
I found myself blinking into the harsh light of my own one-room apartment, my desk lamp buzzing, my half-written manuscript flicker-frozen. The bed in my bedroom was a squeaky mattress with a thin sheet and a mismatched pillow. I sat on the edge, stunned, the scent of mid-grade coffee and cheap detergent filling my nose.
For a long while, I believed it had been a dream. For a longer while, I told myself that characters did not cross the borders of pages. For a longer while than that, I kept re-reading the paragraph where Benedict had said, "I will find you." I felt ridiculous and thrilled all at once.
Then my doorbell rang.
I froze.
"Don't open it," I told the air. "He is fictional."
"Open," said a voice behind me.
My heart tripped over itself. I moved like an elevator that had been unplugged. When I opened the door, Benedict Jordan stood there, exactly as I had written him the night before: narrow eyes, a dark coat, an indignant set to his mouth, and worry like a second coat under his shoulders.
"Why are you here?" I asked before I could stop myself.
"Did you miss me?" he asked.
"I—" My words scattered. "You're not supposed to be here."
"Are you surprised?" Benedict took a step inside without waiting for an invitation. "You wrote me and then you told me to leave. You thought I would listen."
"You're a character," I whispered.
"And you're the one who knocked on my pages," he countered. "Open your windows."
"I can't," I said.
"Then stay here." He reached out and caught my wrist. He was warm and real, and an impossible thing.
"Did you come to the wrong apartment?" Camilla had once asked me over the phone when I said I was too nervous to cook. "Are you sure?"
Benedict smiled like a private joke. "But you wrote me to find you. Now I'm here."
"You can't—" I insisted.
"Stay," he repeated like a command or a question. "Stay and write the rest with me by your side."
"I don't know how to handle this," I admitted. "I have social anxiety. I have a job. I have bills. I have—"
"I will help with all those things," Benedict said, suddenly earnest. "But I'd like to be the one who helps. Can I?"
"Can you be trusted?" I asked.
He smiled faint and something like vulnerability tugged at his mouth. "Trust is a negotiation," he said. "But I promise to ask."
This was a new Benedict: not the precise, practiced monster I had penned, not quite the warm slaver of the novel, but someone who had the same edges and still a hand that wanted to close around me.
"Will you let me edit you?" I asked suddenly.
"If you wish," Benedict agreed, with a tilt of his head that was almost, almost tender.
So I let him in. We arranged my life like chapters. We placed small rules: no sudden doors in the middle of the night; no public scenes unless I agreed; a single doctor allowed for checkups when I felt the walls closing in. We made lists like authors on a deadline. We learned to make tea without starting a press conference. He learned to give me distance like a present. I learned that possessiveness could be worn like a scarf, comfortable if the wearer warmed the other person gently.
"Abigail," I said one day, as Benedict and I sat in a kitchen that smelled faintly of lemon and paper and the promise of new drafts. "Tell me about her."
He looked at me like he had been waiting for that question. "She is patient," he answered. "She forgives easily. She is all the things you planned."
"Is she cruel?"
"No," he said. "Only human."
"Then perhaps she will be more gracious in real life," I mused.
"And you?" he asked. "Will you be gracious?"
"I want to be brave enough to not run," I said. "Maybe home is where the chapters are messy but alive."
He took my hand. "Then we will write each messy chapter together."
"There is one thing," I warned. "If you become monstrous—if you stop asking—I will rewrite you."
He laughed like a man relieved of a burden. "Then rewrite me kindly," he said.
Outside, a small bird shrieked pleasantly like gulls in the city. Inside, we lived like a paragraph that had learned how to breathe.
"I will not be your cage," Benedict promised.
"I will not be your escape," I answered.
We sat and we wrote. We made rules and broke them carefully. We argued like editors about commas and affection. When the world outside applauded, the applause felt like wind. When the world gossiped, we listened and put everything into a drawer labeled "plot devices."
And once, when Abigail came to the door, furious and bright and accusing, Benedict took one look and, in front of the staff and Camilla and two visiting cousins and every uninvited witness his household could collect, he did the most terrible and comic thing an over-literal man could do: he let his mask drop and told the truth.
"Abigail," he said loudly, the house stepping in rhythm. "Stand there. Look at Francesca and say to her face what you told others."
Abigail's eyes flashed and she threw a word like a pebble. "You are nothing but a page of trouble!"
"Prove it," Benedict invited. "Explain to Francesca what you wanted, in detail. Tell her why you called her names behind her back."
She opened her mouth to flee the trap and the staff leaned forward like a tide.
"Tell her," Benedict said, not cruelly but with a kind of clinical insistence that made the air sharpen like a knife. "Tell her now."
Abigail's face caught the light and she stammered. "I... I thought—"
"Thought what?" Benedict demanded. "That it would be easy?"
"I thought you were mine," she said at last, and the confession hung like steam.
"Why did you say unkind things about her?" Benedict asked me.
She looked at me like at the author of a story she had misunderstood. "Because I was afraid you'd like her," she said. "Because I was afraid you'd be kinder to her."
Benedict's eyes softened and then cleared like a window after rain. "She is not a thing to be divided," he said. "And you—"
He turned to Camilla and to the cousins and the small audience. "If you speak ill of Francesca again, you will explain to her, here, why."
People blinked. They murmured. Camilla shuffled plates, suddenly a jury. Abigail stood and her voice turned thready with shame. She apologized awkwardly, as if eligibility to be good required tuition.
It was not a punishment of humiliation but a dismantling of malice in front of witnesses. It had teeth; it was not vicious. It was real.
After the awkward truth hour, someone clapped softly, embarrassed by the applause.
"Enough," Benedict said, reaching for my hand. "We are done. Francesca, are you well?"
I nodded slowly. "A little," I said.
He squeezed my fingers. "You are mine," he murmured, but this time the words had a promise that glowed rather than burned.
"I am not your property," I corrected.
"Then be my partner," he said.
"Deal," I said.
Weeks passed as we learned the rules of a life that had been written into being. I learned to say no. Benedict learned to ask. Abigail learned to be less sharp. Camilla learned to make tea that did not singe my patience. Jazmine, my editor-friend in the real world, texted me and thought I had invented Benedict as the perfect imaginary boyfriend for marketing.
"How is he?" Jazmine typed.
"Imposing," I wrote back.
"Keep him," she replied. "This sells."
"He's real," I said.
"Then it's art imitating life imitating art," Jazmine murmured.
I smiled. "Then let it."
Once, months in, when the days had stretched into cozy drafts and the novel felt like a shared house rather than its own tyrant, I sat at my desk and wrote a line I had always wanted to see in real life.
"I will not be a cameo," I wrote on the page.
Benedict came up behind me and whispered into my ear, "Then write a longer part for yourself."
"I will," I said.
We kept living like that. We were both careful and reckless in equal measure. He would still close my windows sometimes when storms came, but he always asked first. I still had panic flares but they were softer when he wrapped his arms around me and hummed like a lullaby. Abigail dated less, less recklessly; Camilla made a pie and offered it around the staff table with a conspiratorial wink. Life settled into a rhythm like a line of prose with commas placed exactly where they were needed.
One morning, months later, I woke in our shared room to the sound of his voice from the hallway: "Francesca, are you sure you do not want me as your guard for the press conference today?"
"I am sure," I said. "I can do small rooms."
He paused, heard my conviction, and then chuckled. "You are braver than you think."
"I am learning," I said.
"Then learn with me," he offered.
"I will," I said.
At the end of a long season of coffees, drafts, and minor melodramas, I typed the final line of that segment of our story with a shaky hand: "I put the manuscript aside and opened the door to the world we had written together."
Benedict stood behind me with a smirk. "And then?"
"And then," I said, "we called the next chapter by our name."
He pressed his forehead to mine like punctuation. "Francesca."
"Yes?"
"Stay."
"I will," I promised. "But only if you promise to ask before you build walls."
He laughed. "Deal. I will ask."
"And if you forget?"
"I will let you re-edit me."
We both smiled. It was not the perfect ending; endings rarely are. It was not the tidy happily-ever-after the editor demanded. It was closer to something like real life — messy, gradual, sometimes brutal, but living and ours.
On the bedside, a small piece of paper fluttered where I had once scribbled "bed sheet: Kobe." I picked it up and laughed. "You promised you'd change it."
"I did," Benedict said, and lifted the sheet off the chair. It had a new pattern, a subtle print of small, boring, lovely stars. "For you."
"For me," I echoed.
And in the quiet room, with the afternoon light spilling like an accidental blessing across the bedsheet, I felt like the author who had finally begun to live the sentences she'd written.
The End
— Thank you for reading —