The Suarez Myth: Chapter 1

Five years ago.

They met in Madrid, on his turf, when she was there for a writers' residency in January. She’d just turned 21 and was getting a kick out of graduating and leaving the country for the first time. She lived in a shared flat that smelled like citrus peel and burnt toast.

She’d just presented a poem at a small gallery. Five people clapped, and one of them had actually coughed first. She left before the wine got warm, to duck into a nice dim bar across the street, head low, journal tucked under her arm, her grey London Metropolitan University sweater too big.

She wasn’t dressed for seduction, she wasn’t trying to be seen, and that’s exactly when or why he noticed her.

Roman Suarez, 36, already mythic in elite circles as a coldly private heir you never want sitting across the table unless he’s on your side. In a snug black t-shirt and pressed dress slacks, he sat with two executives in office wear, barely listening. He’d built three companies outside of the Suarez family business by then, owned property in his own right in four countries. He wasn’t supposed to be in that part of the city. It was too bohemian, too… messy.

But he saw her.

The way she swirled her wine like it was a task. The way she perked up when the music changed, like she kept forgetting where she was. The way she scribbled something and smiled just a little at it. That soft ginger hair that moved as she moved, that glowed even in the dimness.

He stood in the middle of one of the executives’ sentences and walked over.

“Do you write, or are you just hiding something?” He said gently as he reached her.

Startled, Saoirse (pronounced similarly to "Sasha") said, “Excuse me?”

He motioned to the journal. “People who write in bars are usually running from a conversation or creating one. Which are you?”

She chuckled, covering her lips with the hand that held her green pen, because it was the first time someone had made her feel observed without being judged.

“Both, maybe,” she said finally.

“Good answer.” He didn’t sit. He didn’t ask to. He just watched her like she was already part of his design.

And when she asked what he did, he said: “I build things.”

She thought that meant buildings, art, cities, something noble. She had no idea it meant her.

They had dinner two nights later. She wore a black dress with loose seams. He never rushed her, didn’t touch her too soon. He just studied her, and when he kissed her lips for the first time, at the door of her building that night, he whispered, “You move like you don’t realize you’ve already been chosen.”

That was the hook, the feeling she’d waited years for. To be recognized before she even recognized herself. His lips were soft too; it felt good.

The first email came the next morning. No subject line. Just his name in the sender field and a timestamp that made it clear he’d written it in the ungodly hours of the morning, Madrid time. She opened it in bed, still half-asleep, still replaying the way he had looked at her like a riddle only he could solve, how he’d spoken to her in poetry.

The message was short but dense, measured, like he’d crafted it with the same precision he used to hold his glass, or fold a napkin perfectly into his lap.

Saoirse,

I’ve spent enough time in rooms full of people performing significance to know what it looks like when someone doesn’t have to try. You weren’t trying. And that’s what made you... memorable.

If I overstepped, forgive me. But if I’m right and you are, in fact, someone who writes not just to escape but to remember, then I hope you’ll let me buy you another glass of wine and ask you one hundred questions I didn’t get to ask last night.

I’m free tomorrow evening. Or the evening after that. I suspect I’ll be free the evening after that, too, should you say no twice.

Warmly,

RS

She read it three times before replying. And even then, her reply was shorter than she meant it to be.

I’m not in the habit of saying yes to people who watch me more closely than I watch myself. But… maybe I’d like to be.

This would be her last unedited sentence for a very long time.

They met again at a restaurant she couldn’t pronounce. The kind of place without menus. Just a wine list, a seasonal theory, and waitstaff who seemed to read your mood instead of taking orders.

Roman was already there when she arrived, at a corner table, back to the wall, the city lights falling over his shoulders like a painting.

He stood when she walked in, kissed her hand, and held it long enough for her pulse to notice, transporting her into a world beyond the mundane, where peak romance existed just as casually as air. 

“You’re wearing green,” he said once they’d seated, the first of many assessments of her wardrobe choices.

“Should I not be?” Her laugh came out nervous.

“You don’t seem like someone who asks for permission,” he said, and she frowned a little, trying to understand what he meant.

He asked what she liked, but he still did the ordering for her without hesitation.

“She’ll have the veal… unless she’s vegetarian. You’re not, are you?”

She shook her head. He smiled like he already knew.

He didn’t flirt, not in the traditional way. He didn’t compliment her dress, her body, her face. He complimented her mind.

“You don’t speak quickly. That’s rare. Most women mistake speed for power.”

“You listen like someone who edits as she breathes.”

“You have no idea how perfect you are.”

She asked about his work. He spoke lightly of it. He was still a mystery to the world at the time. All she’d found of him online was that his family was old and powerful. His great-grandfather funded Spain’s neutral stance in both the First and Second World Wars, for example.

But he kept turning the conversation back to her.

“You write about women like they’re ghosts trying to be real again.”

“You read it?” She’d responded, startled. She could barely get ten people to read her work.

“I read all of it.” A pause as he stared at his food. “You write pain well. You make it almost… tasteful.”

She wasn’t sure if that was a compliment, but she blushed anyway because no one had ever said it like that.

By the time the second glass of wine arrived, she felt warm, curious, swept off her feet, invited into a version of herself she hadn’t met before. Through his golden dark eyes, she felt like a rare book.

And he read her slowly. He came to the date to study her, shape her, to convince her that being seen is the same thing as being understood. And because she was young, brilliant, and aching to be understood… she let him.

He leaned in over the empty plates. “What would you do if no one ever misunderstood you again?”

She didn’t have an answer at the time, but she thought about it all night.

When he walked her out of his sleek car, he didn’t ask to come inside. He just touched her face gently, thumb beneath her chin, and said, “You don’t yet believe you’re allowed to take up space.” Then, softly, he whispered, “Let me help with that.”

She nodded, and for the first time in her life, silence felt like agreement.

The first time they had sex was weeks later, and it was soft. It was her second sexual experience ever, and it was a thousand times better than the first. Roman was never rushed. He took her in like scripture, slow, reverent, memorized in pieces. It felt choreographed, like he had already imagined it a hundred different ways as he waited until he’d decided she was fully ready.

“You don’t have to do anything here,” he whispered against her neck on his silk-sheeted bed in his sprawling Madrid penthouse bedroom. “You just have to be.”

He kissed her wrists like they were breakable. He asked before every shift of touch, and managed not to make it awkward.

“Is this okay?”

“Tell me what your body says, not your mouth.”

After, he didn’t fall asleep. He stroked her spine in silence and told her what he noticed:

“You don’t let go easily.”

“You hold your breath when I touch you.”

“You don’t believe you’re worthy of worship, but I do.”

It was on their fourth or fifth time together, not a date, not exactly, but an evening curated for intimacy still, jazz playing low, an Italian wine he said was “like an embrace with a secret,” soft light from a dimmed lamp, that he waved the first red-tinged flag.

Saoirse was sitting on the floor of his living room, her back against the edge of the couch, barefoot, laughing, really laughing, at something absurd he'd said about critics and "the aesthetic of scarcity." For the first time in a while, her laugh was real, breathless, and a little loud. She covered her face, flushed. And that’s when it happened.

He reached down, grabbed her wrist away from her face too suddenly, and pulled her up all the way to standing without warning.

Still smiling but with a low voice, he said, “Don’t do that.”

“Do what?” Saoirse said, very confused.

“Cover your face when you laugh. You ruin it.” He let go of her wrist and smoothed her soft ginger hair like nothing had happened.

She stood there, heart pounding from the pause, the feeling that she’d just been corrected. She tried to laugh again.

“I’m not used to being told my laugh has rules.”

“Not rules, preferences.” He chuckled. “I just like to see you clearly.”

She sat back down, and her wine glass shook slightly as she picked it up. She smiled once more to smooth it over, but her wrist still felt warm where his fingers had been. It didn’t hurt, but it felt… marked.

Later that night, he touched her ankle in bed, gently, like reverence. Kissed her knee, held her neck like a sacred object. He whispered unprompted, “I would never hurt you. You’re too rare.”

She nodded.

The next morning, he brought her coffee just the way she liked it. Two sugars and a dash of milk, like someone who knew her best. And she tried to forget the feeling of being pulled into stillness.

+

The call was casual.

It was a late Sunday morning, a week later. Saoirse was wrapped in her linen robe, spinning a pen in her hand. Her oldest and bestest friend from university in London, Nina Calloway’s voice came through the phone, warm and familiar.

“Just checking in, babe. You fell off the grid a bit. How’s life with the golden god?”

Saoirse laughed lightly. “Golden and still godly.”

“And you? How are you?”

Saoirse paused. “Shiny, I guess. I’ve learned how to drink very old wine and sit very still while people talk about hedge funds.” She knew her voice was much too bright to sound sincere to Nina.

“That sounds like a hostage situation with good catering.”

“Stop. I’m serious. It’s… good. He’s attentive, intense, but in that ‘I read your soul in candlelight’ kind of way.” She saw Roman’s face in her head as she said this. “He really sees me, Nina.”

Nina went quiet for a moment.

“Okay, but does he let you see yourself?”

Saoirse blinked before too long a pause, then, with a smile, “What does that even mean?”

Nina responded softly, “It means, when you laugh, are you still funny? Or are you calculated?”

Saoirse laughed again, but thinner, this one. “God, you sound like my childhood therapist,” she said mid-scoff. “He’s not... dangerous. He’s just focused. He notices everything.”

“Okay. But just in case, remember that people who notice everything often do it so they can edit faster.”

Saoirse chuckled. She’d forgotten Nina had literary jokes for every occasion. 

Her chuckle stopped dead when she realized they’d spoken less and less in the last several weeks. When did that start? She didn’t bring it up, however, and they moved on to lighter topics like their near-future plans, cool new books, school gossip. 

After the call, Saoirse sat quietly on the couch in Roman’s home library. Her tea had gone cold, and for a moment, she lifted her sleeve and stared at her wrist.

+

She didn’t know exactly when it started, but he started making her coffee black, no sugar, a dash of cinnamon. One morning, he brought it to her bedside with a folded linen napkin and The Paris Review.

He’d already circled the poem he wanted her to read.

“It reminded me of you,” he said. “Quiet women who are really like lightning.” He smiled gently.

She smiled too, half-asleep. It sounded like worship.

He cooked for her. Or rather, he orchestrated meals.

Once, she mentioned a soup her dead grandmother, who had raised her after her mother died, used to make. The next week, he recreated it: hired a chef, sourced the ingredients from a specific farm in Northern Ireland, presented it with a linen card that said: “For the girl who remembers taste.”

She cried. He kissed her temple. “This is the kind of woman I love. One who’s not afraid to feel.”

He never told her not to see her friends, but every time she did, he said things like, “I’ll miss you, of course. But you’re your own person. That’s what I admire about you.”

She stayed home, in his penthouse, most weekends after that. How many people did she really know in Madrid anyway? 

He convinced the organizers of her residency program to let her continue from his estate instead of the general lodge. He just had someone from his office telephone in one evening, and a confirmation was in her inbox by morning. She told herself it made no difference since she’d been sleeping more and more nights in his penthouse anyway.

He bought her books, stacked them by her bedside before she even asked. Once, he handed her a novel and said, “You’re going to cry at page 74. I can feel it.”

And she did! He knew her that well.

When she got nervous about a speaking engagement, he ran his fingers down her spine and whispered, “The world listens when you speak slowly. That’s your gift.”

She began to pace herself, began to filter, because if he found it beautiful, wasn’t that the goal?

He didn’t correct her in front of others at first. He started by waiting until they were alone.

“You did wonderfully tonight. That story about your father was so honest. Maybe next time, just take a breath before you mention the loss. It landed a little… messy.” He sighed, his brow stern. “You’re more powerful when you’re clean.”

She nodded. She always nodded. Because he never said she was wrong. She was always almost right. And almost, in his world, simply meant a lack of refinement. 

These were the good days. The ones she’d later miss. They were so nearly perfect.

He used to wait for her at the door when her weekly creative workshops ended. He’d be there in a dark coat that managed to be both tailored and casual, holding her gloves, saying something like, “You look more fluent in yourself today.”

She would blush as he opened the car door for her. It felt like poetry.

He once told her she reminded him of a cello. “Low and difficult and elegant.” She laughed, unsure if it was a compliment, but he followed it up with, “It means you’re hard to play but worth the effort if you know how.”

She let him say it again at a dinner party. And every time someone asked how they met, he told the story like a parable. He never said where they met, just that he saw her “writing herself into the world and not realizing it”.

“She’s a rare book,” he’d say. “First edition with no reprints.” People loved that, so she smiled. Even when the words started feeling like branding.

He picked out her dresses before events. Always soft shades: ivory, blush, bone.

“Loud colors steal from your presence,” he said. “You speak best in quietness.” So she stopped wearing red or green. She told herself it was maturity, refinement.

He loved her writing until she wrote something sharp, a short poem she shared in bed about the ocean and grief and forgetting.

He read it, folded the paper neatly, then said, “I’d never let anyone forget you.”

She waited for more, but he just turned off the light.

Later, he made her tea and brought her a different poem, one by a male poet she’d once admired.

“This is more like you,” he said. “Still powerful, but less lonely.”

She started editing her writing more after that.

He asked for her passwords, gently. “Just in case. I’m not worried. But I worry.” Translation: I trust you. I just want to make sure you’re safe. He said it so casually, Saoirse was pressured to treat it likewise, to give up her privacy without making a fuss. He was worried enough to ask, so she gave them.

He never used them, at least not that she could tell, but once, when she liked a photo of a man from her BFA, he brought it up without explanation: “He looks like someone who wants to be noticed by women who already belong to someone.”

It was a note. Like her laugh, her dresses, her writing. But the love between them was too overwhelming to notice any of these things. 

When she asked what he saw in her, he said, “You change the temperature in a room, but you don’t even know it. That’s the part I love most. You’re so unaware of your power.”

She wrote that down as she swooned. Thank God she did because only later, years later, would she realize he didn’t love her power. He loved that she didn’t know she had any.

He’d brush her hair late at night, after she’d washed it and curled into his lap on the rug. He’d sit behind her, towel over her shoulders, and run a brush slowly through the length of her bouncy hair. Sometimes for seconds. Sometimes, much longer.

One evening, she mentioned offhandedly that she hated flying coach as a child because of the noise, the closeness, how she’d press her nails into her wrist just to feel a little control.

The next week, she got an email confirmation for a solo trip to Florence. It was first class, a window seat with noise-canceling headphones monogrammed with her initials. Then, he sent a text that said: “I remember things.”

She’d cried on the plane.

Once, she joked that she hated mornings. Her voice sounded like gravel. Her thoughts were always so sluggish.

The next week, Roman bought her a new alarm clock: a soft-lit one that simulated sunrise and played the sound of distant waves. He set it for her himself and made her coffee, not the way she once liked it but in the new way, before she woke.

When she opened her eyes, he whispered, “Even your slowness is a kind of music,” and kissed her.

Once, she had to fly back to London for a brief in-person chat with a newspaper editor she wanted to convince to publish her BFA short story project as singular pieces. Still incandescent with idealism after the meeting, she rushed into her old, cramped London flat barefoot, cheeks flushed, holding a short letter in her hands because they’d accepted her work on the spot.

“Annie? I got it. The Night Orchard wants the piece!” But her flatmate wasn’t there. The lights were off, and the kettle was cold. Saoirse was confused until she found a note on the table.

She stared at it until her phone buzzed.

She didn’t respect your boundaries. This is what it looks like when someone protects your peace.

You’re welcome, mi amor.

She was a little shocked, but more than anything, she felt cared for, safe, like someone just built a wall around her softest parts. She called him to be sure.

“Thank you.” She thought about it for a few seconds. “I didn’t know how to ask her to leave.”

“You’ll never have to ask for what you need again,” he responded. She was back in Madrid with him by nightfall.

He curated a scent for her, a room scent. He brought in a fragrance specialist and asked what memories she wanted to feel in her body when she was writing.

She thought of her earliest childhood, her happiest moments in Belfast, and said, “Fresh rain and old wood.”

One day, she walked into his study and paused. The scent was hers. Every room, he let her write in it, smell it, carry it with her.

“Now, the air knows you too,” he said.

She once admitted that she had trouble sleeping in unfamiliar places, so anytime they traveled, he sent a member of his staff ahead with her pillowcase.

“So your body knows it’s still safe,” he told her, tucking her in. And she believed him.

These were the days when she felt completely known. She told herself often, No one has ever loved me like this. And it was true. 

Saoirse never knew her father, couldn’t remember her mother, wanted to forget her grandmother, who she’d had to take care of for a year as she died slowly of skin cancer while taking her O-levels. 

The few boys she’d been with only liked kissing her because she was pretty, but never really talked to her, and always fled one month in as soon as they realized she actually liked literature as an interest beyond academics. Wayne Adams had even called her dull.

At the end of the residency, it was clear she wouldn’t return to London. 

It wasn’t discussed, he never really asked, but it was ridiculous to even question it at that point. She was so firmly rooted in Madrid, or more accurately, his home, that she couldn’t even conceive what it was she’d be returning to. She went back to her flat in London three separate times in the next year, and that was it.

+

Nina came to celebrate her program completion and the little chapbook she’d managed to send out for publishing, a requirement of the residency, called Blue Milk. She’d firmly refused Roman’s help with this one thing, instead deciding to have it published and translated by the local French house she’d attracted on merit.

Saoirse and Nina met for brunch in Madrid. A sunlit café with wildflowers on the tables, the kind of place that served slow eggs and had waiters who knew your name after one visit.

Saoirse looked radiant, pale skin dewy, ginger hair long and wavy, white linen blouse, inconspicuous gold VCA chain around her wrist. She was glowing in that curated, fragile way Nina had started to recognize. Like light through expensive glass.

“He’s… impossible, Nina. He remembers everything. The way I like my water, which page I cried on in a book I read years ago.” She sighed. “Last week, I mentioned an author I missed reading during undergrad, and a first-edition copy just appeared on my desk.”

Nina smiled but was sarcastic when she spoke, “He does sound like a wizard.”

Saoirse grinned. “He’s a dream. Like… it’s stupid. I know it sounds stupid. But he’s always three steps ahead of me. It’s like he curates the world so I don’t have to bump into anything harsh.”

“That doesn’t sound stupid. Just… intense.”

Saoirse laughed. “It is. But in a good way. He makes me feel… finished. Like I’ve arrived somewhere.”

“And in all that finishing, when was the last time he let you be messy?”

Saoirse paused. She’d heard that word a couple of times lately, from Roman. She tilted her head. “What do you mean?

“Like… unbrushed-hair, no-perfect-answer, mid-spiral, saying-the-wrong-thing messy. Just you without the curation. Did he still call that beautiful?”

Saoirse blinked. Her smile faltered slightly as she reached for her tea.

“I don’t really get like that anymore. I don’t… need to.”

“Maybe not.”

Someone at the next table laughed loudly, and a spoon clinked. Saoirse stirred her tea twice but didn’t drink it.

“We’re planning a trip to the Dolomites next,” Saoirse’s voice brightened again. “He says I need to learn how to be still in the snow.” Nina smiled.

+

Saoirse was still 21 and full of dreams, curled up on a secondhand couch in her London flat one late evening. She’d insisted on returning for one last closure-stay before her lease was up. 

Her legs were tucked under her, speaking to Roman on video chat. He’s backlit in a hotel suite somewhere in Berlin, shirt unbuttoned at the collar.

“I hate when you’re there. You disappear into your friends. It’s like I only get pieces of you,” he said, even though she’d only been back here on two very short visits since she’d known him, smiling wide.

“You get the best pieces.” Saoirse laughed after saying it.

“I want all the pieces,” he said it like a joke, but her smile faltered for just a second.

By the end of the call, she’d somehow agreed to return to Madrid, to him, the next evening, even though she’d also promised to allow Nina plus-one her for multiple London art events over a week at least, to make up for their “lost time”. 

At their favourite cafe just one long walk from Nina’s grad school hall, Nina wasn’t having it.

“This is the millionth time you’ve rescheduled. You finally made it back to London, and you promised, PROMISED, you’d be here for up to a week. What’s going on?” Nina said, squeezing her palms against the sides of the short and stout teal mug, sniffing the creamy scent of her coffee. Saoirse stared longingly at the cream.

“Roman booked a last-minute flight. He said it was a surprise.”

“A surprise that costs you your life?”

Saoirse stirred her tea. “He just wants me close. That’s not a crime,” she murmured. 

She was also supposed to attend her older sister’s wedding this weekend. Sinead was curt and hurt on the phone, but they’d never been close, and no real family connected them, so she didn’t feel too bad about it.

+

Roman poured champagne into crystal flutes on the private plane that night. Saoirse sat beside him, freshly styled, nervous.

“It’s her wedding,” Saoirse whispered to him as he passed her the glass, and she accepted it.

“She’s your adoptive sister, not your real one.”

“Mmhmm.”

“The same sister whose blood brother tried to touch you…” She looked up at him sharply. “Several times.” His voice was gentle as he emphasized her trauma, brushing her ginger hair away from her face, behind her ear.

“And… you hate crowds. Why put yourself through that?”

She squeezed her eyes shut and forced the dark memories he’d sprung up so casually back into the recesses of her mind so they could, once more, cease to exist.

“Because she’s family.” She didn’t really believe herself even as she said it.

“You have me. We can go somewhere quiet. You’ll sleep better and smile more.”

She hesitated. He took her hand. “Say no and I’ll take you anyway.” She laughed, but she didn’t say no.