8 comments/ 2625 views/ 5 favorites Shades of Grey Ch. 00-01 By: shyreaderinohio Hey all. Please bear with me, as this is my first foray into writing anything of this nature. I stumbled across an idea, and what started with a cheesy romance idea blossomed into something totally different from what I had expected. I'm still struggling to piece together all of my ideas, so once again, bear with me. Any and all feedback would be so very appreciated. Please keep in mind that this world is unlike our own in some ways, but very similar in others. This will also be a gradual build-up of a story, and there will not be sex in every chapter. The posting process for this might also be rather slow, so bear with me on that. I am still in school and it's finals week (god knows why I'm up writing this instead of sleeping, but here I am). I want to wait to gather your feedback on the chapters I submit before progressing uploading the next one, so that process might be a bit slow. I'm not sure how long they take to upload things on here. I also apologize, as I know this is rather short. It's more of an introductory set of paragraphs between the prologue and the first chapter, but things should progress better after this. I hate to say it again, but bear with me. Thanks all! Trigger-warning: mention of suicide, self-harm, and reckless behavior. ***** Shades of Grey Prologue: I still remember the day I gained my color. It was a cold day for May, and the chilliness put an extra spring in my step as I hurried on my way to class. My eyes were cast down as usual, trying to block out what I saw around me. I didn't want to see it. Everything was black and white and grey. Literally. Growing up in this world, my mother and father murmured stories of love and beauty. They told me that when you met the one you were destined for, your world became colorful. They used to call them your soul-mate. Since then, most began referring to them as your artist. They made your world vibrant. Beautiful. Whole. Everyone made it sound so romantic, but up until that day, I never believed them. I understood the science behind it. When you met someone with an auto-immune system opposite yours, it triggered a hormonal reaction in your body, signaling a response to a prime mate for reproductive purposes. Years and years ago, that was all it caused. An attraction. Since then, our bodies have adapted. The first child born with aromantic colorblindness was born about one hundred years ago, and since then, we haven't stopped arriving. The last of the color permanent generation have started to die out, and now we live in a world of hopeless romantics waiting for their world to become colorful. Some called it love. I called it adaptation. Instinct. Survival. And until that day, I would have sworn to anyone who crossed my path that those things were all it meant. But then, I met him. It sounds cliché, and it was. But we were young. What's not cliché when you're seventeen and all your peers can talk about is dreaming that the color blue will be as rich as their mother told them it was and the color red as pure and romantic as their father promised? It happened a second before we touched. It was like an explosion. Fireworks. I gasped loudly, overwhelmed and unaware of what happened at first. I heard similar noises of disbelief from him, but I was unaware of what they meant at the time. The world was so much more than I could have ever imagined. I looked down at my own hands, a stunning color, vibrant and full of life. The clothing I wore, once a monochromatic smear made to cover my body, now embraced a bold and stunning message. And then I looked up. I knew the color once I saw it. My mother had described it to me so many times but I'd never understood. Green. That was the color of his eyes. His lips, his skin, the freckles smattered against his face, his shagged out hair, the whiteness of his smile so much clearer now that I could see. And suddenly I understood what everyone had gone on and on about. This wasn't scientific, not a feeling or experience that you could condense down into an equation or hormonal reaction. My cheeks stung as we sat there and gaped at each other, completely unable to take in the world around us with as focused on each other as we were. I'm not sure how long we sat there. God knows it could have been hours, or minutes, or even a handful of seconds. I don't think either of us really cared how long it was. No time spent in a world like this could be long enough. I'd stammered out a shy hello, barely capable of getting through it in one piece without making a total fool of myself. He just sat there and stared, his eyes tracing my face, my body, over and over again. Finally, he whispered, "Dear God, please say you see it too." I looked at him with wide eyes and nodded. I'd never received such a wide, pleasant smile in my life before. Suddenly, it was all introductions. His name was Grant, mine was Taylor. He was eighteen, I was seventeen. We were both in our final year of school, and had both been accepted to the same university. We sat there in the grass, all thoughts of school and classes abandoned as we learned everything there was to know about the artist that had made our world beautiful. If you'd have asked me then, I would have told you that nothing would ever be as incredible as that moment. That first moment. The old idea of love at first sight had nothing on the reality of it. This was the person I was meant to spend my life with. He knew it, I knew it. It happened just the way the stories say. The way my parents told me it felt. This was love. But there's something that the stories don't tell you. It only happens in tragedies. And the stories today aren't tragic. Everyone loves being in love, so we focus on that. But my life wasn't a story. I loved being in love. Unfortunately, it wasn't made to end that way. The day I lost my color is imprinted into my mind more sharply than any other moment. September 14. A Friday. I was at work, at my desk, typing up some notes for a presentation I had to give to this company about sexual harassment. Working in HR was a bitch sometimes, but I was good at what I did. I remember that my feet hurt, and I was eager to get home and prop them up on the couch beside me while I watched some trashy reality TV. Some celebrity or other was claiming that her artist was this other celebrity, and as fake as it sounded, I loved the drama. I was typing on my computer, so I didn't notice it at first. I thought the brightness of the screen had gone down or something. It was annoying, but nothing more than that. It wasn't until I got up to use the restroom that I realized it. The color. It was gone. I stared around the office space for some time, not understanding. Maybe my vision had just gone screwy. Maybe I needed to get my eyes checked. I blinked hard several times, but still the monochromatic shades remained. Surely there had to be some mistake. There was no way this could have happened. I mean, things like this don't happen unless... The thought was too awful to consider, but the moment it touched my awareness, I knew. A sinking feeling entered the pit of my stomach, and I felt some awful emotion attempt to claw its way out through my throat. My boss told me that I screamed. A sound so horrifying that I ended up quitting because I couldn't stand the way he flinched every time he looked at me. People all around the office came flocking around, asking what was wrong. I was curled into the fetal position on the ground, screaming and sobbing and choking. My eyes were clenched shut. I refused to believe what I saw, but I knew that it was true. He was gone. And I was nothing but a shell of a person, the dirty undesirable color of water that's been used to wash out innumerable paint brushes. My artist. Gone. They say that you don't know what you have until it's gone. The thing is, I thought I knew what I had. I was happy. I had a husband that I loved dearly. My world was beautiful. And then he was gone and there were greys and white and blacks and even the sound of the world around me seemed different and I couldn't understand it. I thought I had hit rock bottom. Surely there was no deeper pain than for the one who completed you to be gone forever. And then the cops came. They sat me in a room, alone, away from everyone else. It was smart that they did. No one needed to hear these dark words. When you lose someone you love, the pain seems insurmountable. But there is no comparison to losing someone you love who chose to leave you. The word suicide stabbed like a knife through the air as the passed me a photograph of a note written in handwriting I could have recognized in my sleep. Taylor, This is a lie. Love is a lie. The color has been gone from my life since the day of our marriage and I can't handle it any longer. The day we met, I found color. I thought it was the most beautiful thing in the world. I've tried to deny it, but I can't any longer. The grey and white and black is back and I don't know what happened but it did. The beauty is gone. And it's been gone for a long time. And once it's gone, you don't get it back. I made a mistake in choosing you. My body and my mind were wrong. And now the only way out is through this. Through death. Maybe in this final journey, I will find color again. Grant I will never understand why they showed me the note. I puked after they did. It seemed that was the only response I was capable of giving. I left the station in a state of numbness. Of greyness. The cops tried to convince me to speak with a grief counselor, but I rejected the idea. A perky, colorful grief counselor would not understand the blackness in my world. I went back to the house. The house that we had shared. Things seemed so normal and yet so empty and wrong. This is where things get blurry. All I remember were a series of vertical lines running along my wrists and grey dripping onto grey. It's been three years since that day. I haven't spoken of it to anyone other than the grief counselor they made me see before being allowed to go back to work. I changed my job, changed my hair, moved to a new house in a new city, and keep to myself for the most part. And nowadays I feel nothing. I don't feel sad. I don't feel happy. I just simply don't feel. And I live in a world of colors and see nothing but grey. Chapter One: It was the last day of the week. Mondays were hard for others, but not for me. I enjoyed the beginning of the work week. I enjoyed the feeling of productivity and responsibility. I enjoyed not being left to my thoughts. For me, it's Fridays that suck. They signify an end to productivity. A collapse back into doing nothing other than thinking. I don't like to think about things. I like to do things. I woke up usually two or three hours before work every day. I liked to start my day off in new and interesting ways. It made up for being a miserable lout most of the time. I tried to do at least one new thing a week. I spent my mornings figuring out what that might be. I talked to my grief counselor about it. She told me I was trying to fill my life with things instead of meaningful experiences. I told her just where she could stuff it. In a way she was right. The only way that these experiences could hurt me was physically. Emotionally, I was safe. If you don't get close to someone they can't hurt you. So I threw myself into doing things instead of being with people. So far it was working brilliantly. I was excelling in the work place and I was in line for a promotion. I was the healthiest I had been in ages. I was now bilingual and working on picking up a third language. My savings account was quite padded, though I wasn't sure when or if I'd ever need it. Although I didn't have people, it would be a long shot to say that my life wasn't fulfilled. Most everyone was jealous of the freedom I have. It was rather nice. I could do whatever I wanted when I wanted. I could watch the shows I wanted, do the activities I wanted. I was only accountable to me. And yet. My world was still grey. And I could do nothing to get that color back. You could say I tried to get some of it back through the things I did. Skydiving, bungee jumping, racecar driving. You'd think those would do the trick, but somehow, they just didn't compare. Nothing compared to the thrill of being in love. I needed to stop thinking about that. I already knew what my next fix was going to be. I'd thought about it for a while, but I'd never really had the guts. In spite of all the crazy things I did, the one area I'd shied away from was sex. But it'd been three years. Three years. I mean, sure, I'd orgasmed between now and then. But it was different with someone else there. Even when the emotions weren't real. I should know. I sat at my computer and nervously opened up the browser. I needed to find the perfect person for it to happen with. They need to be just as disinterested and one-track minded as myself. Yet, clean and nice. But not too nice. And most of all, this needed to be a one-time thing. I thought about going to a bar and meeting someone there. Casual hookups were pretty common. But I didn't want to give the wrong idea to everyone there and let them think they could have their way with me any old day. So I figured that online would be the best way of going at it. I posted an ad. In several places, rather vague and suggestive, but an ad nonetheless. Oh god, I essentially tried to sell myself. As awful as it sounds, this seemed like the most convenient way to go about it. Of course, I would be taking several steps to keep myself safe. I wasn't that dumb, and I'd grown a lot since three years ago. A death wish was no longer on my radar when I had so many other things to do. I quickly brought up all of the sites that I'd posted the ad two nights before, hoping for the best but assuming the worst. I had two replies. The first I automatically ruled out. Though he certainly seemed detached from the idea, his objection to providing documented proof of his lack of STDs concerned me. I deleted the response with ease. I then opened the second one. Dear Taylor, Hello. I hope your day is going well. I stumbled across your ad by accident and it took me by surprise as well as piqued my interest. I would be more than happy to provide any documentation for this encounter. However, I do have interests of my own. Send me a message and we can chat to see if this might work out. Mark Below this, an email address was listed. I still had about two hours before work, so I decided to take a chance. I copied the email address over to a new email and sent: Mark, Hi, it's Taylor, from the ad. I was glad to see a response, and I'd be interested in chatting with you more as well. Taylor I figured it seemed detached, which was what I was going for. I didn't want this to be emotional, after all. I sat there for a few seconds, staring at my screen, then stretched and decided to get ready for the day. I could always check my email again before going to work. Sitting here now and waiting wasn't going to make the response come any sooner. It took me about an hour in all to get ready. While Friday is a day of casual dress for almost anyone you might ask, it's the day I spend the most time on my appearance. I found that dressing nice and staying focused on that made it easier to lose track of other errant thoughts wandering through my head. I was wearing a tasteful white blouse with a black blazer and black slacks. I slid gold hoop earrings into place, and topped off my makeup with a bold red lip. As I lived fairly close to my work, I did not need to leave for another thirty five to forty minutes, and I would still be early. Once I was totally dressed and put together, I studied myself in the mirror. This had become a habit of mine since the incident. I always checked to make sure that the scars weren't visible and that I looked appropriate. I never wanted to make anyone worry about me. That just led to emotional entanglement and then there were problems. So I did everything I could to convince everyone, including myself, that everything was fine. And it was. I'd stopped crying after two weeks, and I hadn't looked back since. I had cut out everything about that part of my life, and it was only for the better. With more time to kill, I found myself in front of the computer again, opening the email. After all this time, the scratch was desperate to be itched, and I found myself facing that delicious adrenaline rush as the inbox loaded. One new message. From Mark. Taylor, Glad to hear from you. I was hoping I would sometime soon, and I would be happy to speak with you at length before we decide if this will work for both of us. As I mentioned in my response, I do have some interests of my own. They can be rather unappealing to many at first glance, but I ask that you bear with me. I am involved in the BDSM lifestyle, and my interests cater to that. I am not looking into anything long-term. A hookup, if you will. However, I would need a partner who would entertain at least certain aspects of that lifestyle for me. I am not looking for a woman I can abuse, punish, threaten, or harm. I am looking for a partner that I can take to another realm of feeling and sensation. Still interested? Mark I sat back in my chair, frowning slightly. My mind was racing. I knew the term BDSM. I knew what it stood for. Wife-beaters, creepy people, abuse, etc. The whole idea was disgusting. How could people do that to each other? And yet... My heart was beating faster than it had in months. It was so wrong for me to even entertain this thought. But what was the harm in asking a few more questions? I sat down and typed out a response, detailing a few of the more surface level questions I held, and before I could talk myself out of it, I hit send. The rush of adrenaline that flooded through me was intoxicating. This was it. I found my new high. I set off to work shortly thereafter, confident that the only thoughts I'd be left alone with this afternoon would be rather pleasant to peruse.