The letter arrives on a Tuesday morning, slipping through the letterbox with the usual clutter of bills and circulars. Elena almost misses it. The envelope is thick, expensive, cream-coloured paper that feels wrong in her hands, too substantial for the digital age they live in.
Inside, the offer is simple and strange: translate the private journals of a deceased poet. Six months' work. More money than she's earned in the past two years combined. The poet's name is Daniel Ashworth. She's never heard of him.
Elena sits at her kitchen table, the letter spread before her, and searches for him online. There's almost nothing. A handful of obscure publications. A small collection released by an independent press fifteen years ago. No Wikipedia page. No social media footprint. It's as though he existed in the margins of the literary world, barely there.
But someone thinks his journals are worth translating. Someone thinks his private thoughts deserve to be brought into English from the Italian he apparently wrote them in. The letter doesn't explain why he wrote in Italian when he was British. It doesn't explain much at all, really. Just an address in Bloomsbury where she's to collect the journals, and a date.
She needs the money. Her freelance work has dried up over the past months. Her savings are nearly gone. The rent is due in two weeks and she's not sure how she'll pay it.
She goes.
-------
The house in Bloomsbury is narrow and tall, squeezed between more imposing buildings like an afterthought. A woman answers the door, elderly, elegant, her white hair pulled back severely. She introduces herself as Mrs. Ashworth, Daniel's aunt.
"You're the translator," she says. Not a question. "Come in."
The journals are waiting in what must have been Daniel's study. They're stacked on a desk beneath a window that overlooks a small garden gone wild. Twelve leather-bound volumes, numbered in faded gold on their spines.
"He wanted them translated," Mrs. Ashworth says. "It was in his will. Specific instructions. They're to be translated into English and then..." She pauses, her fingers touching the top journal as though it might burn her. "And then destroyed. Both versions. He wanted someone to read them, to understand them, but not to keep them. Do you find that strange?"
Elena does find it strange, but she doesn't say so. "When did he die?"
"Three months ago. Heart failure. He was only forty-two." Mrs. Ashworth's voice is steady, but there's something beneath it. Grief, yes, but also something else. Confusion, perhaps. "He was always so private. Even as a child. These journals... I've tried to read them, but my Italian isn't good enough. I can catch fragments, but not the whole."
Elena nods. "I'll do my best to honour his wishes."
"Good." Mrs. Ashworth turns to leave, then pauses at the door. "Miss Marchesi... he was a good man. Strange, perhaps, but good. Whatever you find in those journals... please remember that."
And then she's gone, leaving Elena alone with twelve journals and a dead man's secrets.
-------
Elena begins that same evening, in her flat in Kentish Town. She makes tea, settles at her desk and opens the first journal.
The handwriting is small, precise, almost obsessively neat. The Italian is surprisingly beautiful, literary, flowing, the kind of prose that makes translation both a joy and a torment because you know you'll never quite capture it in English.
The first entry is dated fifteen years ago. Daniel would have been twenty-seven.
I see her in my dreams now. The woman. Not a specific woman, or perhaps she's every woman, a composite of desire and longing that my sleeping mind has assembled from fragments. Dark hair. Eyes I can never quite see clearly. A way of moving that suggests both confidence and vulnerability. She exists only in my unconscious, and yet she feels more real than anyone I know in waking life.
Elena reads on, intrigued. The entries continue in this vein. They're descriptions of dreams, of encounters with this phantom woman. Daniel writes about her with an intensity that borders on obsession, but it's all abstract, all imagined. The woman has no name, no specific features beyond the vague impressions dreams leave behind.
Last night we were in a house by the sea. She was showing me her books. Shelves and shelves of them. "This is who I am," she said. "These words." And I understood completely. She squeezed herself past me in the limited space between the bookcases, brushing her abundant breasts against me, and it felt like the most natural thing in the world. I didn’t move, afraid that even the smallest motion might betray how disarmed I was feeling by such closeness, how she was making my blood stir and how much I desired to lay my hands on those two wonders of nature. When I woke, I ached for her. For this woman who doesn't exist.
Elena translates carefully, trying to capture the lyrical quality of Daniel's Italian. There's something compelling about his writing. He has this odd way of transforming lust into something almost spiritual, a way of finding beauty in longing itself.
By the second journal, the dreams have become more explicit. Daniel describes their encounters in detail, the way the woman touches him, the way her voice seems to cut right into his most primal self, each word melting before it reaches him. It’s the kind of voice that doesn’t ask for attention, but takes it.
There’s something about her that unravels me. It isn’t merely sound or the way her smile breaks through all of my defenses, it’s a pull, invisible yet irresistible, as though she’s looped an unseen leash around my mind and tugs it wherever she pleases. I tell myself I could resist if I wanted to, but I don’t. I follow her willingly, almost gratefully, through every inflection, every pause, every word drawn out just long enough to make me ache for the next. She speaks, and my thoughts stop obeying me. It’s unnerving and exquisite all at once, this surrender to her rhythm, her tone, her quiet command.
It grows darker now, not just outside Elena's window against which the rain's now pattering incessantly, but inside of her too. She can feel the distance between him and herself thinning with every exchange, as if his writings are seeping through the keyboard of her laptop, through the screen, straight into her bloodstream. The woman’s still a stranger in his tales, a shadow behind gestures and yet she knows how to move him in ways no-one ever has. It frightens Elena, this intimacy that has no face, no body, no past. Sometimes she imagines his hand reaching through the static, brushing against that woman's skin as if it were her own, and she trembles because she’d... let him. There’s power in his words, a quiet dominion that feeds on her curiosity, her loneliness. And she can’t tell anymore whether he’s drawing closer to that woman or to her.
"Am I the one being pulled into his darkness?"
It's a question that cuts through her like a knife and leaves a bleeding wound that refuses to heal.
Also the particular choreography of their imagined intimacy seems to move into the realm of shadow. It's breathtakingly erotic, yes, but there's this undertone Elena struggles to catch in her translation. An undertone of surrender, perhaps, or... danger. Something that trembles beneath the words like a half-remembered pain. The rhythm of their sentences mirrors the push and pull of their bodies, but behind it she senses a deeper current: a longing so raw it borders on self-destruction. She pauses, fingers hovering above the keyboard, unsure whether she’s still translating a story or trespassing into someone’s confession.
She likes to be in control. To set the pace. There's a moment when she closes her eyes and her breath catches, and I know I've found the right rhythm, the right pressure against her insatiable cunt. She sighs then, evoking this particular quality of acquiescence within me that undoes me completely as she keeps riding me. Harder, and harder still. She doesn't allow me to find release. She demands that I follow through on her unstoppable craving to fuck and she will not have me yield beneath her, slamming her ass against my thighs, time and time again as if she's desperate for something she’s been denied all her life. Each thrust feels less like lust and more like an unravelling, a furious attempt to close the distance between two lives that should never have met, and yet somehow always were meant to. Afterwards, she rests her head on my chest and traces patterns on my skin with her fingertips, and we don't need to speak. The silence between us is perfect.
Elena finds herself reading late into the night, pulled forward by the intimacy of Daniel's words. She should feel voyeuristic, perhaps, reading such private thoughts. But there's something in his writing that transcends mere sexual fantasy. He's searching for something... is it connection, understanding or love, she cannot yet tell. And he's finding it only in dreams. And these dreams are turning her on.
She often finds herself with her hand in between her thighs, trying to find relief from the fire that's blazing through her entire body, so raw and visceral and so unequivocally alive. She buries her fingers in her slit, but it's never enough. Daniel writes about desire with such precision, such attention to detail, that it's impossible not to respond. Elena's mind's drifting, imagining herself in the place of his dream woman, experiencing what he describes: a deep, irresistible urge to fuck.
She shakes her head, trying to clear it. This is work, she reminds herself. Professional work. She shouldn't be reacting this way.
But she can't stop reading.
-------
By the fourth journal, something changes. The woman in Daniel's dreams begins to acquire more specific features. Not all at once, but gradually, like a photograph developing.
I remember her hair being longer than I first thought. Almost to her waist. Black, with this particular shine to it. Her eyes are the colour of the open sea... that shifting, restless blue that could soothe you one moment and drown you the next. She's gifted with a body that carries the quiet symmetry of sculpture, the natural balance of curves and grace, as if time itself has lingered to perfect every line. And there's a birthmark on her left elbow. It's small, shaped almost like a comma. I don't know why I notice these details, or where they come from. Dreams usually blur specifics. But she's becoming clearer to me. More defined.
Elena pauses. A birthmark on the left elbow. Shaped like a comma.
She rolls up her sleeve. There, on her left elbow, is the mark she's had since birth. Small. Shaped like a comma.
Coincidence, she tells herself. Lots of people have birthmarks. But her heart is beating faster.
She keeps reading.
Today I dreamt we were in her flat. Small, cluttered, books everywhere. There was a particular print on the wall. Modigliani's "Reclining Nude." I remember thinking how perfect it was, how it suited her. We fucked on her bed whilst rain was hammering against the windows, and the whole World felt very far away.
Elena's breath catches. She looks up at her wall. At the Modigliani print hanging there. "Reclining Nude," the one she bought years ago at a museum shop, the one she's never got round to properly framing.
This isn't coincidence. This can't be coincidence.
She stands abruptly, pacing her small flat. Her mind is racing. How could Daniel know these things? Her birthmark, her flat, her print? Unless...
Unless he knew her. Unless he'd been in her flat. Unless he'd seen her naked.
But that's impossible. She's never met Daniel Ashworth. She's certain of that. She would remember.
Wouldn't she?
Elena forces herself to sit back down, to keep reading. But her hands are shaking now.
She has this way of moving when we fuck. She likes to be on top, to control the rhythm. And there's a moment — always this same moment when she's getting close — when she throws her head back and her hair falls down her back like a curtain, and she makes this sound. Not quite a moan, more like a sigh mixed with a laugh, like the welcoming of an old friend as she meets her orgasm, as though pleasure surprises her every time. I live for that sound. I live for that moment.
Elena feels cold all over. Because she does make that sound. That exact sound. She's been told about it by her ex-boyfriend, the way she sighs and laughs simultaneously when she comes, the way it sounds surprised, delighted, almost innocent.
How could Daniel know that? How could he possibly know that?
She keeps reading, unable to stop now, her dread growing with each entry.
I can see her cunt clearly now, through the generous triangle of curls she's never tamed. She has this small sort of ridge just below her vagina which stretches so nicely around my cock when I give it to her from behind. It's sensitive there. A good sensitive. She guides my hand to it sometimes, wordlessly asking me to pay attention to that spot.
Elena pulls up her skirt and lowers her undies. Yes, she too's never been afraid to embrace her body hair as a gift, rather than a burden. But that ridge? She didn't even realise... She grabs a mirror and sits down in front of it with her legs spread. And to her horror, she does notice a small crest of skin there that envelops the lower part of her vagina and runs up to meet her inner lips.
This is impossible. This is insane.
Elena slams the journal shut. She stands, knocking her chair backwards. She's breathing hard, her mind spinning.
This isn't fantasy. This isn't dreams. Daniel has somehow... impossibly, inexplicably... described her. Her flat. Her body. Her most private parts. Her responses to touch. Details that only lovers would know, that only someone who'd been intimate with her for a while could possibly know.
But she's never met him. She's certain of that. She's looked at his photograph... Mrs. Ashworth reluctantly showed her one. She didn't recognise his face. She has no memory of him whatsoever.
Which leaves only darker possibilities. Had he watched her somehow? Stalked her? Installed cameras in her flat? The thought makes her skin crawl. But even that doesn't explain how he'd know about that small piece of skin, about the sounds she makes, about her preferences in bed.
Unless he'd drugged her. Unless he'd...
Elena runs to the bathroom and vomits. When she's finished, she sits on the cold tile floor, shaking.
She should stop. She should take the journals back to Mrs. Ashworth, explain that she can't continue. This isn't right. This is disturbing, violating. Whatever Daniel was... a stalker, a voyeur, something worse... she doesn't want any part of it.
But she needs the money. The rent is due. She has £200 in her account and no other work lined up.
And more than that — god help her, more than that — she needs to know. Needs to understand how this is possible. Needs to see where this leads.
Because there's another possibility, one so absurd that she's barely allowing herself to consider it. What if the dreams came first? What if Daniel somehow dreamed about her before he knew her, saw details through some inexplicable means, and then wrote them down?
What if this isn't stalking but something else entirely? Something stranger and more impossible?
Elena gets up. Washes her face. Looks at herself in the mirror. She looks terrified. She looks obsessed.
She goes back to her desk. She opens the journal again.
She keeps reading.
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