Nicholas's Story
Copyright© 2025 by writer 406
Chapter 21
Sonja hadn’t expected to see Nicholas at the hotel pool. She’d come early for her morning swim; that was her ritual before the chaos of Fashion Week engulfed her day. Maya and Valentina had joined her, all three, sharing the same need for a moment of peace before their schedules diverged.
The Waldorf’s pool was quiet at 6:30 AM, populated only by business travelers doing perfunctory laps before meetings. It was one of the reasons Sonja preferred it—no scene, no photographers, no industry people to perform for—just water and silence.
They were midway through their swim when Nicholas appeared, wearing simple black swim shorts and nothing else. Sonja noticed him immediately, her eye trained by years in fashion to register physical presence. He moved with the same economical grace she’d observed yesterday, no wasted motion, just the efficient movement of a body accustomed to physical work.
She nudged Maya and nodded in his direction. All three paused at the edge of the pool, observing as he set down his towel and prepared to dive in.
His body was what she would have expected—tall, lean but powerfully built, with the defined musculature of someone who used their body for work rather than vanity. But what caught her attention, what made her breath catch, were the scars.
They mapped his torso like a strange geography—a long, jagged line across his left side and a circular depression near his right shoulder that she recognized with a chill as a bullet wound. These weren’t the kinds of scars one got from sporting accidents or childhood misadventures. These were the marks of violence.
Nicholas noticed them watching and gave them a smile before diving into the pool and swimming with focused efficiency.
“Jesus,” Maya whispered. “Those scars.”
Valentina nodded, her expression somber.
Sonja felt a strange sensation in her stomach. In her world, bodies were surfaces to be perfected, carefully maintained and presented. Scars were flaws to be hidden. Nicholas’s scars were history written on skin, a record of survival.
They finished their swim in silence, each lost in their thoughts. When Nicholas completed his laps and prepared to leave, Sonja impulsively called out to him.
“Breakfast? In an hour?”
He seemed taken aback, then nodded. “Sure, you want to meet in Peacock Alley?”
“Perfect, give us an hour,” she said after exchanging glances with Maya and Valentina, who nodded their assent.
An hour later, showered and dressed, Sonja sat with Maya and Valentina, waiting for Nicholas. She couldn’t shake the image of those scars, couldn’t stop wondering about the stories behind them. She’d suspected, of course, that his life had differed from hers. His cryptic comment told her that. But the scars suggested something more.
“Should we ask about them?” Maya whispered.
“No,” Valentina said firmly. “Not polite.”
“But—”
“If he wants to tell us, he will,” Valentina insisted.
Nicholas arrived precisely on time, dressed in jeans and a white button-down shirt.
Breakfast began with light conversation—their schedules for the day, his preparations to head back home. Observations about last night’s ceremony. But Sonja found herself unable to maintain her usual social animation. The image of those scars kept intruding, raising questions she wasn’t sure she had the right to ask.
There was a lull in the conversation. As they waited for more coffee, Sonja felt the question rising in her throat, knew she shouldn’t ask it, but asked anyway.
“What did you mean when you said you had spent some time alone?”
Maya’s eyes widened in alarm. Valentina shot her a warning look. But it was too late—the question hung in the air between them.
Nicholas gave her a steady look, his gray eyes neither offended nor particularly surprised. He glanced around the Oak Room, at the well-dressed hotel guests enjoying their expensive breakfasts, at the attentive waitstaff, at the ornate decor speaking of old wealth and established privilege.
“Do you guys really want to know?” he asked quietly.
It wasn’t a deflection or a rebuke. It was a genuine question. Did she actually want this information, or was she merely expressing a passing curiosity?
Sonja looked at Maya and Valentina, then back at Nicholas. All three women nodded.
“When I was fifteen years old, I was convicted of grand theft auto and sentenced to three years’ incarceration in a prison for juvenile offenders. I spent eighteen months of that sentence locked up in solitary confinement,” he began, his voice even, matter-of-fact.”
“What was it like?” Sonja whispered.
He paused, taking a sip of water. Sonja was acutely aware of their surroundings—the clink of silverware against fine china, the murmur of pleasant conversation, the soft background music—all the comforts that made the reality he was describing seem impossibly distant.
“The cell was the size of a parking space. Two months into solitary, I made friends with Molly and Polly,” Nicholas continued, a small smile appearing briefly at the corners of his mouth. “I made up their names. I had no idea what their little cockroach names were in real life, but they were my friends for a while. I had long conversations with them, gave them a little of my food.”
Sonja felt a chill creep up her spine. She glanced at Maya, whose eyes had grown damp, and Valentina, whose face had hardened into a rigid mask that Sonja recognized as her way of controlling emotion.
“One day I accidentally stepped on Polly, maybe Molly as well.” Nicholas said, a small, sad smile returning briefly. “I cried for days. More than I did when my mother OD’d.”
He shrugged slightly, as if to say, “that’s all,” and reached for his coffee cup. “Anyway, that’s what solitary was like.”
The simplicity of his conclusion, the devoid of self-pity or dramatic emphasis, made it devastating to them. Sonja felt something shift inside her chest, a painful expansion that made it momentarily difficult to breathe.
She had known hunger growing up poor in Sweden—real hunger, not the fashionable deprivation of models watching their weight. She had known uncertainty and fear. But nothing in her experience had prepared her for the matter-of-fact way Nicholas described forming a friendship with cockroaches because there was no one else to talk to for a year and a half.
A fifteen-year-old boy. Alone in a cell. For a year and a half.
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