Sweet Romance16 min read
A Billion Reasons to Stay Quiet — Or Not
ButterPicks13 views
I woke up to darkness and a weight across my hips, and for a second I thought the floor had turned into sea. Then my hand found skin and the world made a different kind of sense: warm, slow, breathing.
"Who is—" I started, and my voice came out thin.
A hotel lamp clicked on somewhere; a strip of weak light painted the man beneath me. He looked like a photograph come to life: black eyebrows, a nose that would photograph well from any angle, lips that might have been carved for a movie close-up. He wore a robe half open, and I touched his chest to make sure the steady rise meant he was alive.
"He's alive," I told myself. "You're alive, and not in a book this time."
"Wake up," said a voice behind the lamp. It wasn't angry. It was precise.
I pressed my fingertip to his jaw. He smelled faintly of cedar and soap. A wheelchair sat near the bed like a quiet promise. I felt a tide of memory slam into me and nearly tipped off the mattress.
"This is not my life," I muttered. "This is not my life."
I had read too many grand novels, and somehow I had slipped between pages onto someone's plotline. The memories came in flashes — a scheme, a drugged drink, a setup for scandal, a plan to force a marriage. My brain offered up the old script in a mean, helpful whisper: you are the woman in the book who climbs into bed with the hero to bait a trap. You are the woman who will be crushed.
"Someone's at the door," I heard people say outside. Panic made my limbs clumsy. I rolled off the man as if he were lava and landed half under the table. The door burst open. Hands clapped. Voices gasped.
"How dare—" a woman screeched.
"Get her out," another voice ordered.
I scrambled up. An aggressive palm slapped my face with the honor of a headline.
"Get out!" the woman's voice screamed again, but the slap came from inside the family and the world narrowed to a few faces I did not know and one face I suddenly knew too well.
A hand — strong, decisive — pushed the woman away. She hit the bedside table, blood blossoming on her forehead. Someone called for help. The man I'd been on top of sat up and looked at us with cool, unreadable eyes.
"Who are you?" he asked. His voice had the brittle cold of winter glass.
"Who do you think," the woman sobbed, clutching her head, "how could you—"
"You drugged him?" one of the women accused me, words pouring like stones. "You seduced my brother."
"Don't talk nonsense," I snapped. "You have a bleeding head. Go to a hospital before you lose more."
They were too busy performing a theater of shame to notice that an accusation could be traded for care. A daughter fainted. A man bundled her out, and the woman with the broken forehead was left shaking in the lamplight before the man in the robe.
He pushed his robe aside like it didn't matter and looked at me.
"My name," he said, slow as a clock, "is Edwin Lewis. I need a wife."
The absurdity of it might have been funny if I weren't trying to remember whether the last thing I'd read promised a marriage contract. As it happened, I already knew.
"I don't do marriages," I said. The truth was simpler: I did not do entanglements. For most of my life I had been Johanna Lundberg, small in a big city, a woman who worked late, read novels at midnight, and had a habit of falling asleep on the subway with a paperback over her face. I had been tired to the bone and I had died in my other life; in this one, I woke up in someone else's chapter.
"You drugged me," Edwin said. His eyelids were the color of slate, his stare precise. "Either you consent to a marriage of one year, legal and public, or my team will make sure the images and the pills put you where people like you belong."
It was a threat, and it was merciless. My hands went cold. He slid a folder across the nightstand and within was a contract that smelled of lawyers and late meetings. One year of legal marriage. He would pay my expenses during that year and give me a sum large enough to unmoor me from any previous life at the end.
"You will sign," he said, "and you will play along."
"How much?" I asked, because I had the decency to be practical even when the world tilted.
He looked down his nose at me. "One billion. During the term, your spending is my concern. At the end, ten percent of your compliance is unpaid if you step out of line."
I laughed because there are moments when the human mind decides the right thing is to laugh. I'd read about bargains like this. I'd read about women who used cunning and tears to squeeze all they could from life. But my life had been different on the other page. I wanted to be small, to hide. Instead, an offer for one billion dollars landed like sunlight in my lap.
"I sign," I said almost immediately. Ten million? A billion? Names on a list mean very little when you have one of those numbers waiting in your bank account. "Sign me."
"Johanna Lundberg," Edwin said quietly, as if reading my name for the first time. "Twenty-two. Height? Measurements? All of this — trivial. But I require compliance."
"You will get my compliance," I told him, not entirely lying. I would comply for the money. I would be a year-performance artist. A rented bride. An actress in a contract play where the stakes were, for once, not only my dignity but my future.
The weeks that followed were fast and dizzy.
We stood at the registry office and the camera clicked. The clerk put our married name under the public record and then asked me to smile.
"This is not what I expected today," I told Edwin. He steered his wheelchair out into the daylight like a general with an agenda.
"You will keep your distance from the press," he said, "and from my family."
His family showed up the moment the story hit the tabloids. Messages bloomed like mold. People wondered if I was a gold digger, a seductress, a runaway bride. "She climbed into bed with him," they said. "She drugged him for capital." Someone wrote a tagline that would make an entire week of gossip columns.
"I don't like paparazzi," I told the woman who stitched my bruised lip back into a smile for the cameras. She asked me how I could possibly be calm.
"Practice," I said. "I spend a lot of time watching other people's lives on screens. It helps."
We moved into a large apartment that smelled faintly of cedar and old money. Edwin had a lawyer named Yahir Haas with a face that did not change when a crisis arrived and a friend named Thierry Beck who could make a hospital corridor bend to his will. Edwin's assistant kept schedules and gate-crashed champagne. He had a reputation for being cold and precise, and on TV he was heroic because he never gave anyone a real window into his life.
My father was Reed Falk, a man who loved a quiet life and never quite fit into the high-society mold our new position demanded. My sister, Svea Zaytsev, had been engaged for months to a man in Edwin's orbit — Bodhi Emerson — and that complicated things in ways gossip columnists could not immediately manufacture. My mother, Kora Beard, had found pride in my new status and behaved, for a time, like someone who had finally been vindicated.
But one of the first lessons of my contract came when a package of truth arrived at my door.
"Someone took my things," I told my mother. She was busy adjusting the placement of an inexpensive trinket as if it were a prize. "Two bags. Two necklaces."
"What do you mean 'took'?" she asked and for a millisecond her eyes went cold. "Johanna, you bought them, we put them away."
"I called the police." I found the bravest thing I had in me and used it. "Finders are not keepers when you stick them in your closet. Little thefts add up."
A small, green uniformed officer arrived. He was polite and professional and I watched my mother rearrange her face like a woman changing a mask at a play. When we went upstairs to my room, the items were under a neat pile at the foot of Kora's bed.
"I haven't touched your things," she said, mouth tight. "I would never—"
"Then why are they here?" I asked. The police officer wrote notes. My father looked shocked. My sister went white.
"I had them in my room to keep them safe," Kora said. Her voice was small and stupidly theatrical.
"Are you admitting you took them?" the officer asked.
Kora looked like a woman who had been measured and found wanting. The room held its breath.
There is a kind of cruelty that happens in front of witnesses. The article prints of my supposed scandal were still warm; the cameras loved a story about a woman who would go to any lengths for money. Kora's theft would have been a private humiliation, but I had a need to stop the whisper-cycle in its tracks. I set my sight on a different kind of victory.
"At ease," I said softly. "Kora, if those are mine, you return them now. I won't make this a criminal case if it's returned."
She hesitated. Two necklaces gleamed from her hands like small crescent moons. Her face had an odd, childlike panic.
"Please," I added. "Leave them here on the bed."
She put them down like a woman surrendering a plot twist. The officer took statements. My sister's eyes brimmed.
Later, news channels ran a short segment: "Local socialite reportedly reclaimed property after family fight." It sounded tame on the news crawl but in the group chats it became butter to the rumor-mill: family drama, a bold heroine, a mother exposed.
"You're very dramatic, Jo," Edwin said once, that evening, when I told him the truth. "You also get results."
"I like results," I said. "I have a year. I will use it."
He watched me with the same look his family gave everything: that measured cool that could be read as either understanding or assessment. "Don't fake sincerity," he warned quietly. "People see through that line."
That night, in the dark, I leaned against the headboard and tried to picture the future. The money at the end of the year was enough to let me be small or loud or to vanish completely. For once I had a lever.
A month into the contract, the hospital called to say I was pregnant.
"Is that possible?" I asked the nurse, more surprised than I expected. "We did tests because of the rumor. They told me to come back."
"Your test is positive," the nurse said gently. "We need to make a plan."
I felt dizzy. For a moment I thought about the book: those plots always used pregnancies as leverage. But the doctor — Thierry — was kind and professional, and the truth sat on the hospital table like an egg.
"This will change things," Edwin said when I told him. He didn't say the words about property, but they hummed like background radio: marriage, duty, the family, lineage.
"Do you want to keep it?" I asked. It was the wrong question to ask someone if your life is now a public commodity.
"Do you?" he replied, and I realized the question was mine to answer.
I didn't want to be used. I did want security. The story bent two ways: island or house. I chose both, or neither. "We'll decide together when the time comes," I said.
The months passed like a silver train. I learned to be the contract wife. I learned to smile perfectly and to be present. Edwin let me out into the world in guarded steps. I went to boutiques with a black card that opened velvet doors. I bought everything that glittered like an apology for the years I had not spent on myself.
When the tabloids said I was buying my way into a life, I posted pictures of meals with friends and concerts. I learned the rhythm of speeches by heart and the steps to be taken during openings. But the one night that mattered most came at the company anniversary gala, a silvered hall full of lights and lenses and people who rehearsed their applause like prayers.
"Don't be loud," Edwin told me in the limousine as we moved toward the lights. "Just be precise."
"Be precise?" I echoed, and then smiled. "Then precision I will be."
The gala was everything I had imagined and less: the world in glass and faux-sincerity, the stage set for announcements and opportunities. People chewed on compliments like food.
A host announced, "We will now draw the winner of our special opening-dance privilege." Cameras drifted. My number was called. Someone had put my name in the draw without my knowledge — or so I told myself.
"Come on," a voice in the crowd whispered. "She can't dance."
"She was born to," someone else answered. The words landed like a challenge.
I stepped up. The other dancer — a young artist named Cade Said — introduced himself with a shy bow and a smile that didn't know the shape of my life. When I took his hand and looked out over the crowd, all the petty things people had said at me folded into something sharp and single: my heart did not belong to the internet; it belonged to the man whose fingers were cold with calculation.
"You will dance with me," I said into the room's hush. "One song, only one."
There was a breath of surprise. "For whom?" someone asked.
"For Edwin," I said. "Not to humiliate anyone. Not to scandalize. For one person."
The music started. I moved in ways I hadn't in years because I had once been an athlete, because my body remembered joy. Cade was steady and earnest, and our movement said things my words did not.
From the front, someone began a chant. It wasn't a chant of jeers but of awe. People who had prepared hot takes for the evening didn't know what to do with the thing they were witnessing: a woman claiming her heart in public.
"You're not supposed to be genuine," muttered a voice near me.
"I am," I whispered. I wasn't sure to whom I spoke.
After the dance, when the applause felt like a small thunder, a reporter interrupted and pulled a microphone.
"Miss Lundberg," she said, "is this an act? Did you plan this to repair your image?"
"Yes, I planned to dance tonight," I said. "But I didn't plan to be honest. Honesty demands no rehearsal."
I stepped down and sat with Edwin. He didn't clap. He didn't need to. There was a flicker in his eyes — perhaps approval, perhaps the calculation that comes right before a man decides to change the ledger. People kept talking, and the next day the feeds spun new stories about the woman who danced for her husband and about the cold man who allowed emotion.
But somewhere beneath the glitter, something had to break open.
I had set out to be small. I had promised myself a year, a contract, a bank transfer large enough to make mountains move. Then the world kept intruding with its little cruelties: a mother who thought small crimes were family secrets, a past lover who thought the best way to hurt me was to whisper the truth about my old life, a sister who wanted the same man for different reasons.
One thing I had learned: if you wanted peace, you had to be louder than the echoes.
So I chose to expose more than petty theft. I chose a public punishment for the people who would hurt me and everyone who might follow their example.
It took months of careful work. I kept records. I saved messages. I learned the habits of liars. When the right night arrived — the gala that would be broadcast and shared and quoted — I pressed the button.
"Everyone," I said into the microphone I had arranged to be passed, "thank you for coming. There is one more thing." Cameras moved toward me like moths.
I showed the messages.
"These are the texts that show my so-called 'lover' offering assistance only in exchange for cash and claiming he'd ditch his family as soon as he found a better deal," I said. I let the screen lift so the words were legible to anyone with an eye to read them. "He called me a 'withdrawal machine' and promised divorce when the money landed."
"That is Bodhi Emerson," I said. The name announced like a gavel. Bodhi sat red-faced in a corner of the hall, and the crowd's hum shifted. Cameras panned like predators.
He first went through a cycle of casual dismissal. He laughed. "That's not true," he hissed. "It's a lie."
Then came denial. His voice became louder, pitch rising like a faltering kite. "It's an old joke," he said. "She made that up."
Then came the color leaving his face. Someone pointed to the screen where the timestamp matched his own.
"You are a liar," I told him. "You used me. You thought you'd get more than headlines. You thought you'd get a marriage and leave me with nothing."
He stood up like a man trying to reassemble himself. "You— you can't say that!" he shouted. "My—"
"Shut up," the room said at once. People had become jury and witnesses and their own entertainment.
"You sold me to the tabloids," I told him. "You told them you had evidence and dared them to print it. You wanted the story to be about me, so you could be a 'wronged' man. You never thought we'd verify things."
His breathing quickened. "I didn't—"
"Then explain this," I said, and a new screen rose, this one a ledger of transactions, notes, recorded offers. It showed a pattern: payments, enticements, promises. It showed the truth weaving through his earlier lies.
The room held its breath. Phones were already up and recording; people had foreheads creased with either shame or anticipation. When Bodhi's face changed, it happened like a movie reverse: from pleased predator to a man with his stage stripped.
"That's not how it was," he said, and the sound was small.
He fell through the stages I had been taught stories about: from arrogance to confusion, from confusion to denial, from denial to pleading.
"Please," he said suddenly. He took a step toward me. "Johanna, please. I didn't mean—"
Laughter spread through the room like a tide. Someone started to applaud. A woman I had never met before filmed and shouted, "Say it! Say you're sorry!"
"You wanted headlines," I said softly. "You wanted to be the hero. Look around. Are you a hero?"
He got louder, trying to wrestle back control. "You're making this up! I loved you!" The words clattered under their own weight.
"All lies," I said. I turned the microphone toward the cameras and let everyone hear. "You told reporters you were engaged to someone else and used me for sympathy. You seduced me and then named me an instrument."
Then the scene shifted. The family's cameras caught the small things: the woman who had taken my jewelry, my sister's pale face, Bodhi's crumpled expression.
"I don't owe you," he said, finally, and his voice broke. "Please. I—"
"Get down on your knees," someone in the crowd shouted. "Beg."
He looked at them and then at me, and for a second I saw a man splinter. The room watched like an audience at a play. He took one trembling step, then another, then collapsed, shoes scraping the floor as loud as stage slaps.
"Please," he whispered. His voice had lost its armor. "Please. Forgive me."
People recorded. Someone laughed. Someone clapped slowly. A child to one side pointed. Journalists leaned in for a good frame.
For nearly an hour — long enough for the galleries to fill with a hundred reactions — the cycle repeated. He started by rage, moved to denial, then insisted it was a joke and that the world had misread him. When the evidence became a ring of light around him, his face turned first pale, then angry, then panicked, then silent. He tried to stand twice and was forced back into the place his own actions had carved.
Crowds are cruel and also cleansing. The sound that filled the hall was not fortune's vindication but human spectacle. People who had been baited into cruelty before now turned their gaze on Bodhi. He begged, then wept, then ranted incoherently as the cameras recorded everything. An older man stood up and told a story about character and honor; someone else took pictures and organized them into a trending thread.
"Stop filming," he cried once, voice raw.
No one listened. Not because they were mean but because the public needed a picture of ruin; the feeds demanded corruption's downfall.
At the end, when a woman in a navy suit — a legal counsel friend of mine — left the dais with a quiet nod, police walked in the back and asked him to step outside. He collapsed into a collared shoulder and for a moment I saw the tiny seat of nakedness that accompanies a fall.
He knelt in the center of the stage before the cameras and begged again. His pleas were wet and shameful. "Please," he said. "Please don't ruin me the way I ruined you."
There was a line, somewhere, between justice and spectacle. I used the bright lights to show truth rather than revenge. The evidence was harsh, the punishment public, but it also made an important argument: if someone sought to weaponize love, if someone tried to sell humanity for a headline, then a public correction would be made.
He knelt there in a pool of light and the crowd, that strange chorus of silent judges and recording spectators, reacted: some cried, some laughed, some turned away. Cameras kept rolling.
"Please," he said again, softer. "Please, Johanna. Please."
I step forward, and for a moment the camera found my face. "You wanted me to beg for you," I said. "You taught me how this works. I know how to ask for mercy. But I don't owe you mercy."
He tried to cry out that he was a human, that he had reasons, that life was hard. He begged for forgiveness. People recorded him, and they uploaded it. The clip would be shared and re-shared until it fed into the slow mechanics of public ruin. He went from pride to a crush of regret and then to the worst of human places: pleading for a mercy he had not earned.
Afterwards, when the feed slowed and the last cameras dimmed, Edwin took my hand.
"Did you want this?" he asked quietly, so low only I could hear.
I looked at the pile of phones, at the crowd who had watched someone fall because he pushed so many others, and I said, "I wanted them to stop believing cruelty is private. I wanted my family to stop thinking stealing was okay. I wanted him to stop preying."
He squeezed my hand with a pressure that said more than his words. "You were brutal," he said.
"Sometimes," I said, "brutality is truth."
The next day the feeds ran out of breath. Bodhi's public fall was the story everyone consumed like sugar. My mother took a few weeks in the corner of her face to hide away ashamed, and the tabloids had to find their next morsel. Edwin's family regarded me with a new restraint: caution instead of contempt.
Something changed between Edwin and me after that night. It wasn't warm love, at least not yet. It was not simply the contract. There were moments — tiny, almost ridiculous — when he did something that showed he was no longer merely calculating: he would hold the car door for me as if it were more than duty; he would come home and leave a note with my name written on it; once he pushed back his own plate and said, "Eat. It's late."
"You're softening," I said once.
"A little," he answered, and the word was private and a little dangerous in my palm.
I did not fall in love that night. I had promised myself to be small, to be an actress earning a solo performance fee, but the world has a way of changing the script. There were a thousand reasons to leave: the contract, the lies, the public roastings, the way my family made market of everything. There were a thousand reasons to stay: the child that might be under my skin, the money waiting like a harbor at the end of the year, and the way the man beside me, despite his chill, sometimes did something remarkable and human.
A year was long and the world kept spinning in gossip and gold. I learned how to say nothing and show everything. I learned to take the money and spend it like a person with a stake. I learned to make friends out of people who didn't want me until I had something they could see.
One night, when the rain came soft and slow like apology, Edwin and I sat with curtains closed and no cameras to lick our traces. He reached for my hand and held it like a man who wanted to anchor both of us.
"Do you still want the money?" he asked.
"Yes," I said. "And no."
He let my words sink, like stones into quiet water. "Then we make better terms," he said, and for a moment his family, his status, his history fell away. "Tell me what you want."
I looked at him. He looked back. The contract that had begun with a threat and a folder had turned into something else: a fragile negotiation. I had wanted a way out, but I found that the bargain would ask for more than money; it would ask for trust.
"I want to decide," I said finally. "Not to be decided for."
He nodded, a small, steady movement. "Then tell me what the rest of the year looks like."
I thought of every public humiliation, every private kindness, every small victory that had left crumbs on my door. I told him about the baby, about the lawsuits I didn't want, about the people I would help if only someone would help me help them. I told him about the boutiques where I wanted to place work and the small theater I had once promised myself.
He listened.
"Good," he said. "Then we do it. Together."
There are no tidy endings in the books I used to read, only the answers that seem hopeful enough to keep a character going. I did not know if this was the beginning of a love story; it might prove to be a temporary truce. But Edwin's hand around mine felt like more than a contract now. It felt like a bridge I could choose to cross.
Outside, rain kept time like a metronome. Inside, I closed my eyes and let myself dream a different kind of script: one where a woman could trade in her fear for a plan; where a man who once wielded threats might learn to keep promises; where a family that lied could be brought, if not to healing, then at least to exposure.
I had a billion reasons to play the part. But for the first time in a long time, I had reasons to want more than money.
The End
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