James’ infatuation with Paige takes on a dark twist. It’s not enough that she is already sleeping with him on a regular basis, he wanted more. How? How can a man own a woman completely? An engineered marriage of course. How do you force a woman to marry you? James has an idea. A dark one.

Please do not attempt any of the stunts in this fiction story

There is something scary about desire. If you can’t control your own desire, it will consume you from the inside.

I know because i was there. I watched myself being consumed slowly by my infatuation for a woman that should not be mine.

The first time I saw her was at the hawker centre two blocks from the office.

Maxwell hawker centre. I was eating alone after dinner, staring at the bus load of tourist leaving URA building after learning about how Singapore squeezes a few million people onto an island.

Paige is 26. She works for an audit firm on the eleventh floor of the building where my own company occupies the fourteenth and fifteenth.

I know this because I started paying attention to her after sharing a lift one morning.

In the beginning it was the ordinary low grade surveillance that urban proximity makes possible.

Simple stuff, not to the point of stalking mind you.

I noticed which lift she took, which exit she used, whether she bought coffee from the cart near the lobby or from the coffee shop across the road.

Small data points that accumulated without me intending them to.

I told myself it was nothing. Men notice beautiful women. This is not a character flaw so much as atmospheric condition.

I noticed, and I would stop noticing, and life would resume its forward motion.

I did not stop noticing.

Let me describe her, because she deserves description.

Paige is your typical Singaporean chinese OL working in Tanjong Pagar. Not too tall, 1.62m, just the right height for me.

Her hair is dark and long and she wears it down most days, letting them rest just above her shoulder. If she ties them up, she exposes the full geography of her face, which is beautiful.

Not in the overly filtered influencer sense.

In the sense that the more you looked at it, the more architecture you found, the way her jaw sits, her eyes large and round, her lashes naturally long.

Her mouth is the thing I think about most. Not in a crass way.

It’s the shape of it at rest, a slight natural downward pull at the corners that gives her a resting expression of a cute pout.

A pout that transforms completely when she smiles.

She dresses the way junior professionals in Singapore accountancy dress.

Always very neat, the occasional flash of personality in a coloured jacket or earrings. But even in the most generic work clothes, the black trousers, the white blouse, the low heels, I came to recognise she had a quality I can only call presence.

Not confidence exactly. More like density.

It was a feeling that sat heavy in my gut everytime i saw her.

She laughs from her chest. Her voice is lower than you expect. She uses Singlish in the way educated Singaporeans do, code-switching fluidly, dropping into it with friends and hawker uncles, returning to careful English in professional contexts.

These are the observable facts. What I cannot fully explain is what they added up to. Taken individually, they describe an attractive young woman in an office building in Tanjong Pagar.

Taken together, assembled in my mind over weeks and months, they became something I no longer had a clean word for.

I introduced myself to Paige 2 months later, or rather, I engineered an introduction. I am good at engineering things.

It is more or less my job.

I spend my days thinking about systems, about how components interact, about how to design situations that produce desired outcomes.

I am methodical by training and temperament. I applied these qualities engineer my meeting with Paige.

One of those after work drinks that the building management organised quarterly.

She was there with a colleague. I introduced myself during the buffet queue, and I said something about the food, and she laughed, and that was it.

That was the whole mechanism.

We talked for forty minutes. I learned that she stays in Bishan, that she had studied accountancy at NUS, that she had a dry sense of humour that she deployed quietly, waiting to see if you’d caught it before she’d let herself smile.

After that, we started having meals together.

Lunches, mostly, at the hawker centre or the coffee shop on Neil Road, occasionally the Japanese place on Keong Saik that she liked.

The geography of our lunches traced the geography of Tanjong Pagar, those few blocks of old shophouses and new towers where Singapore’s past and present exist in their usual state of uneasy adjacency. We walked through it like it was ours.

Meals became a habit. The habit became a ritual. The ritual became the best part of my week, and then the best part of my month.

Six months in, one evening after 11pm when the drinks are gone and the defences are down, she kissed me.

Or I kissed her. The sequence is contested in my memory, which probably tells you something. I don’t care, i only care that i want her.

The kiss led to some fondling.

The fondling led to a hotel check in.

And we fucked each other’s brains out through the night. With protection of course.

I bought a pack of 3 from 7-11, and at 3am bought another packet of 3 from the same employee on duty. He almost saluted me.

Paige and i, we were discreet.

Singapore is a small place, when you are doing something you need to hide, the island shrinks around the secret, every familiar face is a potential witness.

We were careful about where and when. The carpark beneath our building at odd hours, the stairwells of office towers that no one uses after seven, a hotel in Tanjong Pagar that had the advantage of being close and anonymous. We were careful and also, sometimes, not careful at all, because there is a kind of wanting that makes caution feel like an insult to the thing itself.

Careful meant private rooms, private spaces. But sometimes, we were going at it like rabbits in HDB staircases and carparks.

The sex was good, amazing in fact but it was more than sex.

There was something in being with her that felt complete.

I am aware of how absurd that sounds from a man in his mid-thirties. I am aware of all of it. Self awareness was never my problem.

My problem was that I was infatuated with Paige in a way that has long crossed the line into obsession.

I thought about her the way you think about a problem you can’t solve.

Desire I could have managed. Desire has an arc. It resolves or it dissipates, it is not, in the end, an enduring condition.

What I had was something older and stranger than desire.

What I had was an attachment that had gone past the voluntary. An infestation, almost, like a plague.

It was a perverse feeling.

It was the feeling of a man who has confused wanting someone with wanting to keep someone.

It’s not enough that Paige is already sleeping with me.

It’s not enough for me. It’s not enough that she already willingly take off her clothes, get down on her knees, and bend over for me.

I want more. I want her entirely.

Not just for a couple of hours, i want her to be mind forever.

This is the part of the story where I should tell you about Tom.

Tom is my friend.

Tom…is Paige’s husband.

Coming soon