Sweet Romance13 min read
My Second Landlord: incense, a haunted room, and the man who learned to live again
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01
"I pay five hundred, and I want a roof and a door," I said, holding my last bills like they were promises.
"Five hundred?" The old man behind the desk snorted, wiping sweat with the hem of his shirt. "Young lady, you sure you can handle the place I'm thinking of?"
"Yes," I said. "Please."
He shuffled papers, peered over his reading glasses, and then, because I looked like someone who wanted to keep her teeth, he softened. "There is one. Cheap because of... history."
"History?" I asked.
"You rent, you live, or you don't," he said. "But I tell you straight—people don't like that room. They leave in a hurry."
"All right," I said, sliding a crumpled note across the counter. "I take it."
When I first opened the door to my new home, the upstairs light was a smear on the curtain and the room smelled like old paper and tin. But I was tired of being priced out of everything. I was tired of counting change. I put down my bags and found, in the back of a shabby drawer, a little rusted incense burner. It looked like a bowl someone had dropped and then fixed with carelessness.
I cleaned it.
Then I spoke into the quiet.
"If you're here already, I know you must be lonely. I'm Elise. From now on, you're my second landlord. I cook for you, I light incense, you don't mess with my life. Deal?"
At first, only the dust answered.
Then a cold pinprick of a voice settled at the edge of my hearing.
"You called me?"
I nearly dropped the incense.
"Who—?"
A figure unfolded from the shadows like a folded letter coming alive.
He looked like someone who had been handsome once. His clothes hung like old promises. His eyes were a little like old glass, calm behind a thin film. "I am..." he paused, as if surprised to remember, "Ellery."
"Ellery?" I laughed because my nerves made me silly. "Well, Ellery, I'm Elise. You mind being reasonable?"
He watched me with a slow, honest curiosity that felt like being read aloud. "You burn incense for me?"
"It helps me sleep," I said. "And it helps you."
He drifted closer and inhaled the smoke like a small, grateful man. "Strange," he said. "I haven't been warmed by gentleness in... years."
"Then accept it," I said, and I meant it. Nobody at the agency had offered me anything but a shrug and a bill; this odd company felt like something I could afford.
02
Days settled into a rhythm. I worked factory shifts, carried textbooks in my bag, saved whatever I could. Nightly, I lit a single stick for Ellery and put a bowl of noodles beside his spot as if he were a tenant with a rent-free agreement. He watched me study, occasionally correcting a grammar or reminding me of a quote I had misread. He taught me one or two words I mispronounced, and when I pulled my hair back with careless fingers, he muttered like an old professor.
"You read too late," he said one night, watching my eyes droop over a page. "You will snap."
"It's only a little longer," I said. "December exam. I have to—"
"Stay alive first," he said, softly.
He belonged to a life I'd imagined was cruel and brief: a man who had ended too much under too many debts and left behind a name that the living had almost forgotten. He ate ash-colored noodles with me, and sometimes, when I came home in a storm, he would be there at the window, feeling the rain like a shame someone else should carry.
"You are good to me," he said once, surprising himself.
"And you're good to me," I said, because that was true.
03
"She's cute," the young man said the first time Kayden Watanabe came to my door. He had a hood pulled up and the kind of skinny smile that thinks everything can be negotiated.
"She's got exams," Ellery said from the corner, unimpressed.
"Excuses, excuses," Kayden laughed. He leaned his shoulder against the doorframe like he belonged there. "Can I stay for a bit? It's late."
I was cautious. "I don't—"
He put on a small charm. "I'll be gone before midnight. I just want company."
Ellery's presence grew colder. He didn't like being crowded. He also didn't like men who assumed things.
"You shouldn't lean on my tenant's door," Ellery told him. "It's rude."
Kayden blinked, then grinned as if at a private joke. "You scared of old ghosts, man? Relax."
He stayed more than a bit. He drank my tea, talked loudly about games and money he "would have" if only someone would "give" it. He asked for favors he couldn't repay. When he touched my hand a second too long, my breath shortened.
"Kayden, I should go," I said.
"He must sleep somewhere," Kayden said, softer. "You let me sleep."
When he followed me toward the kitchen, I knew his plan without hearing the thought. I tried to keep a steady voice. "No," I said clearly. "I don't want—"
He closed the door. His face shifted from boy to something harder.
"Don't be silly. We already kissed. We could—"
"Leave her," Ellery said. The voice came from everywhere at once, like a draft.
Kayden laughed at first, disbelief topping his features. "A haunted house trying to play protector. Cute."
Then the lights burst. Lamps above the street outside snapped like brittle sticks. The computer screens in the shop near the window went red for a second and then black. A wind that belonged to some other weather pushed through the kitchen, throwing the curtains like a shout.
People in the corridor heard the crash. Voices climbed to the door in ripples. Kayden's laugh dried.
"What the—?"
I shoved him away. He stumbled, hitting a low shelf. His hand closed, ugly and quick. I felt a panic I had not known in years.
"You don't get to," I said. "You don't get—"
He lunged. The next breath lands in my memory like glass breaking. A sound like a man being cut open, not human, came from the corner where Ellery had been watching. Kayden's face drained. He calmed in a kind of sudden collapse, as if a door had been slammed in his chest. He fell to the floor.
I stepped back, heart hammering, and then, because I could not watch someone die at my hand or anyone's, I forced my fingers to his mouth and blew air like my life depended on it.
"Come on. Kayden. Breathe."
He coughed, eyes flickering.
"Keep going," I whispered to myself as much as to him. "One, two—"
"Again," he said, voice thin. "Blow more."
The first time he regained his breath, it was Kayden's voice.
But when he lifted his head fully and looked at me, the look in his eyes had depth that boyish fear never held. It was older, steadier, as if someone who had learned how to lose had crawled back from another room and found a stranger's face.
"You blow a few more," he said in a husk that was not all Kayden's, and then smiled like someone who had memorized a private promise.
04
After that night, the house felt different.
Kayden—who still called himself Kayden—did not go back to the internet café or the shabby circles he had come from. He began to dress differently. He stopped making small cruel jokes. He read while I boiled water. He told me, with a tilt of his head that belonged to Ellery's memory, "People die of things they don't bargain for. I won't let you."
"You're different," I said once, when we sat on the roof after a long day and watched the city breathe. "What happened to you?"
He looked at the scattered lights, then at me. "I woke up," he said. "Or I started remembering. Names are slippery. But I remember someone who loved books and tea and smoking too many cigarettes. He taught me to say 'pour ma capacité d'apprentissage' and to be ashamed of having been small."
He said it with a smile that made something in my chest uncoil. "Will you let me help you? With school? With life?"
"Yes," I said, because even if this man carried someone else in him, he was the only warmth in that room some nights.
05
He found a job within a month. I watched him at work through a window of his life the way you watch a ship leave the harbor and then forget to breathe.
"You're speaking four languages in a minute," someone told him in the HR office.
"Because I read a lot," he said. Then, with a blink, he caught himself. "Because I wanted to be someone who could step into rooms."
They hired him. He came home with business cards, eyes shining. "I did it for you," he told me. "For the rent, for the exams."
He began to save. He started fixing the broken things in our room. He even climbed to the top of the curtain rod and re-hung the clue of lights I had strung up.
He never made me pay for company.
He came to the library when I studied and waited in the corridor until I came out, and once, when I complained of a chill, he took off his coat and draped it over me before I could protest.
That was one of the heartbeat moments. He, who had once been a stranger with a cheap charm, now knelt to make sure my hands were warm. "You shouldn't study with damp hands," he said like it was a secret he had learned from living as someone who feared the end.
"You're being sentimental," I told him.
"Because you make the ordinary feel like a small miracle," he said, and I felt the air thicken and then melt.
06
But nothing reorders a life so completely without tests.
At the factory, people whispered. "She's dating the new manager," a woman said in the lunchroom. "Do you know where he came from?"
"He appeared like a wind," Ellery—now living inside Kayden's body—said one evening in the hall. He had a way of not answering gossip so much as unraveling it. "We come from where people leave things unfinished."
One morning, a rumor arrived like frost. "I saw his records," one of the girls told me. "They say he took his grandmother's money. They say he scammed a woman online. They say—"
I looked at Kayden, who was standing by the vending machine. He met my eyes and smiled a smile that didn't match the news. "People will say things," he said slowly. "If anyone has proof, let them present it."
"Proof?" a woman laughed. "We have chat logs. We have messages. He owes someone a lot."
I saw the small wrinkle at the corner of his mouth. "Then we will answer with truth," he said. "We will not hide."
07
The punishment had to come. If a wrong is to be righted, it cannot be whispered. It must be seen.
There was a training seminar at the community hall—people from the factory, some customers, a few neighbors, and a dozen young men who liked to watch a drama unfold. Kayden was asked to assist with a short presentation. He stood at the front with a neat blazer, hands a little too steady for someone accused of lies.
I sat in the middle row, heart a cautious drum. Ellery had been quiet all morning, the way someone holds their breath before a tide.
"Kayden will speak about client relations," the director announced. "He came with some data."
Kayden smiled and opened his laptop. The projector hummed. He clicked a slide and then, with the calm of a man who had once been a salesman and now needed to be something else, began to talk. He spoke of targets, of turnover, of how to keep a client.
Halfway through, the lights flickered. The projector screen went from business charts to a file of images Kayden had no right to explain: screenshots of conversations, small red messages of money transfers, a photo of an old woman at a kitchen table with worried eyes, bank documents showing a withdrawal and a tiny balance, a video clip of Kayden counting cash and laughing in a smoky room.
Gasps rose like surges. The man in front blinked, then smiled a practiced smile. "Technical error," he said. He moved to close the laptop.
"Wait," a voice said from the back. Ellery's voice. It sounded like paper folding against another sheet. "Let it show."
Kayden's smile hardened. "That's private," he snapped. "Who even—"
The screen kept rolling. Chat logs appeared, and then messages addressed to 'Grandma' where money was asked for and not returned. Then came the worst: a recording of Kayden—caught on a phone in an internet café—admitting he would take advantage of a sleeping girl in a room because "she'd never tell." That laugh, when it played through the hall speakers, was like a blade. People looked at Kayden as if seeing a stranger.
"That's not me," he said immediately. "I—"
"Isn't it?" Ellery asked, stepping into the light as if it were his own. He looked at the faces in the hall, then at Kayden. "Do you deny that voice, or do you deny being cruel?"
Pride flickered in Kayden's face. For a second, he smirked as if all of this were a bad joke. Then shock cut across him when someone from the back held up the old woman's kitchen ledger. The numbers matched. A neighbor piped up with a shaky voice: "My niece lent him money this summer. She never saw him again. He promised to send it back."
Denial followed. "It's doctored!" Kayden cried. "Someone is setting me up!"
He reached for the laptop. Hands from the front rows caught his wrist. He shook free—anger flaring into panic. "You don't know me!" he shouted. "I'm trying!"
"Trying to what?" someone called out. "To take what isn't yours?"
Voices grew. People pulled out phones. Fingers pointed. A gaggle of factory workers surrounded the stage. I watched as the man's face moved through a theater of emotion: arrogance, then a brittle laugh, then eyes flicking for escape, the mouth drying, denial colliding with the hard evidence on the screen.
He tried to bargain. "I'll pay back. I'll—" his voice thinned.
"Pay back what you already spent?" the old woman in the second row said. She stood up on trembling legs. "You owe me my son's funeral fund." Her voice cracked and then steadied into a cleaver. She stepped forward, finger shaking. "You used my money on a game and then laughed when I came to your door."
The room closed like a fist. People murmured. Phones recorded. A few started to boo. Kayden's face drained as his friends—people who had lent him cigarettes or shared food—stepped away, looking anything but generous now. "We didn't know," they muttered to each other, avoiding eye contact.
"Look at him," someone hissed. "He brags about playing the field and then goes home to hide."
He fell into a new stage—panic turned to bargaining turned to supplication. "Please," he said to the crowd now, voice small and raw. "Please, I made a mistake. I'll pay. I'll—"
He sank to his knees right there in the hall, hands clasped like a thief who had been caught. "Please," he begged the old woman. "Don't call the police. I'll return—I'll return everything."
A young woman from the factory—someone he had borrowed money from for cigarettes—stepped forward and slapped him. The sound cut like thunder. People yelled. Someone recorded. Someone else began to clap slowly, the noise growing into full applause of contempt.
He started to shake. At first, it was only his hands. Then his knees buckled. "I'm not— I'm not a bad person," he whispered, a thin sound swallowed by the room. "I can change."
Change was the problem with crime in plain view: it required time and reparation, not just vows. But the public needed an end. After the slaps and the recordings and the lights, the director of the hall—a level-headed man who had had enough—stepped forward and called security.
"You're not wanted here," he said. "Leave."
They led him out, hands firm, and he was not graceful. Cameras caught the collapse of the man who had thought he could keep everything for himself. Outside, people circled, some spat, some recorded, some offered scorn-filled advice. He tried to speak to his friends; they avoided him like he had a contagion. The old woman's hands trembled but she kept her eyes steady.
Kayden's expression as he was pushed out changed again: from the bravado of a boy to the raw, shocked grief of a man who had watched his world—such as it was—strip away.
"Please," he said again, and this time his plea was not to the crowd but to himself. He looked at Ellery—through Ellery, at me—and something like recognition flared. He had been unmasked. There was no smirk or excuse left.
He went away with his debts and a public record, and the city, like a living organism, digested the event. People returned to their work, to their gossip, to their food, and in corners the recordings multiplied. Some said justice had been served. Some said it was humiliation. He was left with the echo of his own voice reading back what he had been, recorded and shared and repeated.
08
Afterward, Kayden stopped answering calls. He stopped going to the net cafes. He tried to go back into neighborhoods, but people saw his face and turned away. He would sometimes pass our window, hat down, shoulders smaller, and I would sit on the sill and hold a cup of tea and watch him walk by, paying his debts in the only currency left—silent work and the weight of shame.
To me, he started to change for reasons more than public punishment. Ellery inside him refused to be the kind of man who used weakness to get warmth. He was gentle in ordinary ways: he warmed my hands, he watched me sleep floors away as if guarding a fragile thing, he came to the hospital when a fever swept me and held me while I shivered.
He would sometimes stand in the doorway and say, "You gave me breath."
I would laugh, sleepy and content. "You mean I restarted the phone?" I'd say.
"No," he'd correct, voice very small. "You gave me a reason."
09
We married quietly. Not because the world asked us to or because we needed to be fixed by ceremony—but because after the long nights, the small dinners, the practice exams and the fire scares and the public collapse, there was a tenderness between us that was honest and hard to break.
On our wedding night, under a small lamp and with incense in a new, nicer burner that Kayden—Ellery—had bought with his own, clean hands, he said, "We keep this old life in corners, but we don't need to live there."
I put my head on his shoulder. "You used to be a ghost," I said softly.
"And you?" he answered. "You used to be a girl with a busted purse."
We laughed.
"How did you change?" I asked him later, when the laughter was gone and the city was thick and quiet.
He thought. "I remembered that someone once told me a story in an old book about mercy. I had to learn how to give it rather than take."
"Which someone?" I pressed.
He smiled, that rare, sunlight-smile that had first warmed me. "A man named Ellery."
10
If you ask me what the strangest part was, I would say it's this: living with someone who had been dead, who carried two names and two memories. Sometimes, when he sorted through old things in Kayden's pockets—an id card, a few coins—he would pause and touch them like they were chapters he'd rescued.
"Will you ever be just Kayden?" I asked him once, as we stood over the little incense bowl that had traveled with us from the old place to the new.
He looked at the smoke and then at me. "Some days," he said, "I am tighter, shorter, younger. But when you need a man who will come for you in the night and stop the gas from killing you—"
He smiled and took my hand. "—I am whoever you need."
I remembered the first time I breathed life back into someone on a kitchen floor, the first time I called someone my second landlord and meant it. I remembered how cheap the first incense was and how perfect this life had become, made of small things: a burned stick, a bowl of soup, a borrowed coat draped over shoulders on a cold night, the way his hand found mine in a crowd.
"Do you remember when you told me to blow for Kayden?" I asked, teasing.
"You kept blowing," he said. "Like a litany. I thought, 'This one will not let go.'"
"Good," I said. "I wasn't ready to let go either."
He kissed the top of my head. "Then don't."
11
We kept the old incense burner. It sits on a high shelf in the kitchen now, not because it's precious but because it's honest. When we moved, I almost threw away the ragged dream-catcher that had hung from my cheap light, but he stopped me.
"Keep it," he said. "Little things stitch people together."
So the gray catch-net hangs in the new apartment too, swaying a little when the fan is on. Every so often I run my finger over a coarse thread and think of the night the lamps burst and the curtains went wild and the boy with the smirk fell and then woke with a steadier heart.
"Do you ever regret—" I began.
He kissed my palm. "Regret is a heavy thing. I would rather change. I would rather keep breathing and learn to be kind."
"Promise?"
"No promises," he said, smiling in the way he'd learned from reading too many novels. "Only a habit."
We laughed and then we went on, because life is mostly small habits stitched together: one light on a desk, a book left open at an important page, a bowl of noodles on a winter night. Ellery—Kayden—my man with borrowed breath—learned to stay warm and to warm me back.
When the nights get cold and I light an incense stick, I whisper, "Thank you, Ellery. Thank you for staying."
Sometimes he answers, not with voice but with action: a blanket pulled up, a boot left by the door, a chair placed within easy reach for me to climb on when I need the highest note of courage.
And every so often, when someone asks about the time I lived with a ghost, I just smile and point to the old burner.
"That's my second landlord," I say, "and he taught me how to live."
The End
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