Sweet Romance14 min read
Birthday, a Bent Ribbon, and a Not-Sweet Pastry Shop
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"I don't want to get off," I said.
"Wait until I go in," he told me, leaning against the black car like it belonged to the night. "Then you ask me."
I blinked at him. "That's the line?"
He smiled like the line had always been a private joke between us. "That's the line."
Lights flickered on the avenue. For a second his face blurred into the city glow and then he was gone, swallowed by shadow. I woke to Helena shaking my shoulder backstage.
"Jemma, wake up," she urged. "The banquet started. They've called five times."
"I was sleeping," I lied, voice thick. I had been, and I had dreamed of the first night we met: a wrong step, a man's eyes like a photograph, a car waiting, a decision that felt small and then kept expanding into three years.
Marie pulled my coat tighter as I walked. "You look tired," she said. "Your eyes—"
"I slept," I said again, then let the words slide. It was safer to say sleeping than to explain the hollow I felt.
At the head table the room was a painting of suits and silk. Graham sat without a tie, the top of his shirt open like a casual invitation nobody was supposed to accept. Women laughed; men tilted their heads toward him as if music had found its conductor.
"Have you thought about management?" Marie whispered once I was seated. "We need someone who knows dancers and producers."
"I'd try," I said. My fingers curled around the glass out of habit.
"Here's Graham," someone announced, and the air shifted.
He looked across the table late, cigarette stubbed and unreadable. "Hello," he said simply when we met eyes. The tone was so flat it made people around us interpret it as anything: endearment, boredom, politeness.
"Aren't you going to ask about my work?" I wanted to say. I didn't. I kept still, like a figure under glass. He smiled at someone else. The woman leaning into him later that evening made a careless claim on his arm that cut through me like a small, sharp wind.
After the banquet Marie insisted on a ride home. The Bentley waited at the exit, engine purring like contentment. Graham backed my coat up higher around my neck, the gesture almost tender.
"Your performance was good today," he said, fingers pressing my wrist.
"Thank you."
"Angry?" he teased, low.
"No."
He leaned close, smelling like aftershave and the cold outside. "Are you sure?"
I wanted to be braver than I felt. I had already learned the rules: don't ask, don't push, don't make scenes. He kissed the corner of my mouth. "Don't be silly," he told me when another woman stepped near. "Her father is an investor. Be polite."
"You're being polite," I said, letting my head rest against him.
"Be polite," he echoed, then kissed me again. His hand found my thigh, a familiarity made machine.
I woke up later to a shampooed head, to the quiet hum of the apartment, and the crest of the same ache. He was already awake, towel on his waist, eyes soft in the way he sometimes let them be when he was unobserved.
"Did you sleep?" he asked.
"A little."
He drew me close as if the world was a cold thing pressing in. "Don't move," he said. "I won't tell you to do anything."
The first months of that phrase had felt like a promise. "What are we?" I had asked once, in the safety of a bed that smelled of his cologne.
"You're my girlfriend," he had said, casual and languid as if naming a bird.
I believed him, because why wouldn't I? I was young and dance had taught me to trust rhythm: step, step, hold. I followed his cue. Yet there were gaps—messages unreturned, nights he vanished to flights and meetings, a soft acceptance when other women stepped too close because their fathers had checks and smiles. I kept telling myself his hands returning to me meant the story hadn't changed.
At dinner with Helena later, she asked, "Do you think he loves you?"
"I don't know," I admitted. "I know he takes me to the bakery."
"He takes all of us to the pastries," she said. "But he gives you more than sugar sometimes."
"That's not love," I said. "That's being convenient."
"He comes back."
"That is not proof."
When the messages came that night—one that said simply, Ten o'clock. Underground—my stomach went hollow. I told myself to be brave. I told myself not to need anything—an old lesson in economy and survival.
At the car he stepped in, hands steady, thumb tracing the inside of my wrist. "Good show," he said.
"You were at the banquet too."
He flicked a cigarette, thumb finding the table. "Tonight's not about that. It's about business."
He explained later, as if explanations could heal: "Her father is on the board. People like faces at dinners."
I wanted to be angry but I believed him. For a moment I wanted to be small and forgiving. "I'm fine," I said.
"You were sleeping in the car," he said, with a tiny laugh. "Sweet dreams?"
"Not so sweet."
He kissed my mouth, then stopped because a woman opened the car door and laughed a laugh that belonged on magazine covers. He did not push the woman away. He let the hand slide across his lap. My fingers tightened and then let go because I'd been taught to fit into his life instead of upending it.
When I woke up in our apartment and found his handwriting on sticky notes and a treasure of small attention—medicine when my ankle ached, a note that said Eat—something inside me softened despite myself. It was so ordinary that it must be caring, I told myself.
The weeks folded in on themselves—rehearsals, meeting producers, teaching a new student, Arianna Martin—a name that started showing up on invitation cards and whispers. Arianna was the kind of girl who was polished like a prop: immaculate clothes, a hand always in the right place, a laugh that matched the chandeliers. I heard she was being introduced to our city through the very dinners where my face was supposed to have some claim.
At rehearsal Marie said, "Arianna is coming to study classical dance. Keep it polite."
"Why?" I asked, though the question was rhetorical.
"She's from a prominent family. Sometimes we need to bow in private and clap in public."
"Aren't we artists?" I protested.
"Artists also make room," Marie said. "You know this."
I danced. Each arabesque was a line through fog. My body remembered the steps even when my heart did not. In the studio Arianna arrived with a guard of watchful assistants who seemed to measure everyone like currency. She watched me dance and clapped kindly.
"I think you are perfect for the wedding," she said one day, voice sweet as sugar. "Graham's family will want something classic, memorable."
My hands tightened on the barre. "When is the wedding?" I asked, unnaturally calm.
"Later," she said. "Soon enough."
That sentence landed like a stone.
"You and I should practice the married-dance," she said lightly.
I left the studio that day with a small, hot stone lodged in my throat. For weeks afterward I made myself go, as if presence could be proof enough he still cared. He would be in the audience sometimes, or his assistant would text: He is on the way. I'd practice ignoring the doubt.
On my birthday I told myself I would be brave. I went to rehearsal early and then later, to the old pastry shop called Not-Sweet where he used to bring me slices of something ridiculous because he said I preferred bitter things. "You like things that are honest," he had told me once, as if explaining geography.
The bakery was crowded. I was waiting when his message arrived: Opposite. I walked out into the snow, heart paced and raw. A Bentley cut through the night. He stepped out, hair damp, breath curling.
"Happy birthday," he said, voice softer than the night. He held a box.
"What's this?" I asked, because surprise had the stubbornness of childhood.
"A gift," he said. "Open it."
Inside was a small ribbon—red—and a note: For when you feel like leaving the stage.
"Why did you..." My voice cracked.
"Because I remembered," he said.
Later he kissed me in the car because the way we had been together was clipped into rituals of touch. Then he left to a dinner and her photo began to appear in town like a declaration.
Arianna's posts surfaced: a hand draped around Graham's in a way that could have been any man's hand if you squinted, but the watch on the wrist was unmistakable. I stared and something in me dropped free.
That night I went to a friend's birthday alone. The room was loud. Helena tried to make me laugh but I couldn't. People spoke around me of futures and investments and children's schools, and the joke in the corner about marriage being an accomplished contract droned on.
"You should be with someone who will marry you," Helena said when I finally told her, voice soft.
"I don't want marriage if it's a ledger," I said. "I want someone who can't leave me out like a coat."
"Then say so to him."
I tried. I said, "I want to be married properly. I want a family."
He'd never said the word with me. He'd never promised the future in ways that went beyond our taste for pastries and his occasional small kindnesses. When I said those things, he looked surprised—as if someone had shown him a map he'd never considered.
"I'm not that kind of man," he told me once. "I am not the marrying kind in the way your grandmother would want."
"But you called me your girlfriend," I said. "You gave me an address in your life."
He laughed at the memory. "I thought we had an honest arrangement."
"So you never thought we would exchange rings?" I asked, voice small.
He shrugged. "Why speak of a possibility that complicates what's comfortable?"
Later that evening Arianna's news reached us differently: theirs was not some private spark—it was a planned engagement. My phone alive with gossip, my colleagues' eyes that used to be neutral calculating angles now turned like knives. "Graham has an engagement," someone said with a strange pity. "Big family business. It's a done deal."
I walked out. The air felt brittle. Then I sent a text he didn't answer. I didn't want to wait unanswered in the dark of his habit. I left the theatre and packed my few things. I wrote my resignation that night and handed it to Marie the next morning like an evidence of an ending.
"You don't have to go," Marie said, taking my hands. "They can't make your heart small."
"It's not them," I said. "It's me. I can't be last choice."
Graham called as I left the studio. I answered on the stoop.
"Are you leaving?" he asked.
"I am," I said.
"You don't mean it," he said.
"I mean I won't be a secret."
"You think you're a secret?" His voice dropped like a stone into a well. "You mean less than his wife will?"
"She is not his wife yet," I said.
"She will be."
"Then I don't want to be on the roster of convenience."
There was a long silence. "Why now?"
"Because I want a husband who wants me," I said. "Not a seat in the gallery."
"Do you think I don't want you?" he asked, softer now. "Do you think I don't notice you?"
"I think you noticed what you liked," I said. "And what benefited you."
"You'd make me a liar if I told you otherwise."
"I'd make you honest," I said. Then I walked away.
People thought I had vanished. I moved into a small apartment near my grandmother and started to study for exams again. Helena brought notes and cracked jokes. Isaiah Campos—the quiet man who dated Helena's circle—came a few times to the studio and to my house as if proffering ordinary kindness. He was not a storm. He was a warm cloak.
Rumors began to unfurl: Graham's engagement to Arianna was off. The papers had one version: family differences. The insiders had another: a decision made by business, then reconsidered. I kept distant. I told myself I didn't want to know.
Then one night a call came through the media: a gala intended to celebrate a partnership between Graham's company and a film venture. The chandelier above the stage collapsed accidentally during the introduction. People were hurt. The world narrowed into a hospital corridor.
I rushed there, heart a sledgehammer. In the waiting room a hundred faces looked like faceless paper cutouts, all eyes searching. Names were called in movements that didn't always match faces.
Arianna appeared in the doorway that night like a cutout of the past—pale with lipstick perfect and eyes raw. Someone had filmed her earlier congratulating Graham for his "big step toward family." It went viral fast. They wanted the face that had been the spark for the dinner parties.
Graham walked in then, his hand bandaged and his jaw clenched. He looked at Arianna like someone seeing the pattern on a cloth he'd never realized he owned. He did not move toward her. Instead he stood at the center of a small storm.
"I need to say something," he said to the swirl of cameras and phones and strangers. He lifted his hand, and the room quieted, the way water stills before a stone is dropped.
"There are things people don't know," he said, voice raw. "Arianna and I were arranged. She was introduced because it suited other people's needs. We built a story for press. I accepted a script that made others comfortable. But I want to be honest now."
A thousand phones hummed. I watched Arianna's smile twitch. She had never expected to be undone in public by the man whose hand she'd been photographed holding.
"What we planned," he said, "wasn't love. It was a contract. She said what she was told: play the smiling bride, and we'll give you status. She said those things. She used words that were rehearsed. There are texts."
He did something then that shut down the room for a long second: he opened his palm and let an assistant project a message on the wall—emails with payment details, words that read like a contract clause: Compensation: attendance and access. Bonus for discretion.
My throat closed. The reporters murmured like a tide.
Arianna's face moved through expression like pages in a flipbook. First composure, then confusion, then thin anger—then fear. Someone in the crowd shouted, "Is that true?"
She opened her mouth, voice testing the air. "I—this is private—"
"Private?" Graham said, a dry laugh. "If it's private, why did you agree to those terms? Why did you accept fees to play a fiancé? Someone paid for your time at the dinner tonight and for the image you gave them."
People began to record. Heads turned. Someone near me whispered, "She can't deny it now."
She did deny it, at first. "No," she said. "That's not—"
"That's the bank transfer," he said, lifting another paper. "Those were not gifts; they were compensation tied to attendance. That changes the meaning, doesn't it?"
Arianna's face paled as people around leaned in. A woman in a sequin dress gasped, someone slapped a palm to their mouth. Cameras clicked like rain. "Shame!" someone called.
She tried to speak faster, words catching. "I—I've known families who arranged— I was asked to participate. I wasn't aware—"
"Not aware?" he echoed. "Your assistant's name is on the contract. There are receipts."
At that point the room had an audience with its own appetite. People started to hiss. "How could you—"
"How dare you," another voice said.
Arianna's denial crumbled into short, clipped sentences. "I didn't know the amounts. I was told to help with image building. My father—"
A woman near me rose, anger plain on her face. "You sold a wedding you weren't even in love with!" she cried.
Someone else laughed, but most of the room leaned toward judgment. Arianna's supporters looked away. A camera lens zoomed on her face and didn't stop.
She moved from argument to pleading, then to outrage. "This is slander! You can't do this!"
Graham's reply was not loud, but it was deliberate. "I could say more. I could name bank accounts and show contracts and invite investigators. But I'm not here to ruin lives. I'm here to be honest about what I accepted."
Arianna's face collapsed. The rehearsed smile, the curated poise—gone. Her breaths came like breaking glass. Around us people murmured their verdicts. "How could she?" "She knew." "What a faker."
Her assistant tried to pull her away. People reached for their phones to record the retreat. A voice said, "She bought a ring on me. Show the invoice."
"And the jet receipts," another called out.
There was no legal arrest, no police handcuffs. This was worse in one way: it was the stripping of status in a room full of status-hungry eyes. She trudged out of the room, head turned like someone who had swallowed boiling water.
The cameras kept rolling as the crowd watched the dismantling of an image. The woman who had been poised and perfect moments before now stumbled through shame and anger and one final, earnest plea that sounded small in the cathedral of rumor.
"I didn't mean to hurt anyone," she said. "I was following what people asked me to do."
"You were paid to be the show," Graham said simply. "You chose to accept it."
She left. The cameras followed. People clapped. Not the polite applause of a theater; this was accusation turned spectator sport. Some snapped photos with glee. Others looked away, discomfort barely contained.
I stood there with the air in my chest gone thin. Inside me the bright shape of something I had misnamed—my patience, perhaps, or my willingness to bear small betrayals—started to unravel into anger. Not just at her, but at the whole construction that had allowed that bargain to be struck.
When the crowd thinned, Graham found me by accident or design. He looked like a man who had done what he'd decided to do and now had to measure the consequences.
"I'm sorry for dragging you into that," he said quietly. "You didn't deserve—"
"Don't apologize," I said before I could stop myself. "Do you know what hurt? Your silence." My hands trembled. "You let people buy an image. You let them buy her. You didn't defend me when it would have mattered."
"I didn't know how," he said. "I thought I could manage both worlds."
"You can't live in two houses and call both home," I said. "You can't give someone a bed and call them your girlfriend and still sign contracts for another's face."
He listened like a man who was hearing an unfamiliar language. "I'm trying to be honest now," he said.
I did not laugh. Instead I thought of the tiny, patient moments that had always made me trust him: the red sugar ginger tea he once brought when I felt sick, the times he stopped at Not-Sweet pastry shop because he knew I liked the bitterness, the nights he had fallen asleep like a cat against my shoulder. I also thought of every night he hadn't called, every excuse that had fit too well into some pattern of advantage.
"Can you be faithful?" I asked.
He didn't answer immediately. "I don't know," he said at last. "But I know I don't want to lose you."
"You said that before we were honest," I reminded him. "I left because I needed to be wanted in full, not in parts."
He reached for my hand. "Will you let me try to be the man I should be?"
I remembered his bandaged hand from the hospital, the way he had stood in front of the crowd and told the truth, the way he looked at me like an imploring child.
"Make me sure," I said. "Don't ask me to trust words—ask me to trust deeds."
He promised small, specific things. "I'll move out. I'll resign if I must. I'll stop the arrangements. I'll be there for the rehearsals. I will not let anyone buy my life." The promises were plain and naked, not gilded.
"Prove it," I said.
"I will," he said.
The following months became a map of proof. He moved out of the house that had been ours and into a smaller place near my grandmother's. He came to practice with me without fanfare, bringing herbal tea and insisting on balanced meals. He chased sponsors away when they tried to commodify our evenings. He ate my criticisms like vitamins, not poison, and changed, not all at once, but in steady increments.
Once, when the city sky was clear and the rooftops smelled like rain, he climbed onto my grandmother's roof to bring me a blanket. "Why the roof?" I asked.
"Because you used to come up here," he said. "You liked the moon."
"I liked the idea of looking at something above me," I said.
He sat close enough that our elbows touched. "I like looking at you," he said. "I like it better. The moon is noisy when you're gone."
"You're trying to be sweet," I teased.
He kissed my forehead like it was a promise.
Time built its own proof. I kept watch for changes in him: the way he no longer shrugged away my questions, the way he turned down evenings that would have required him to be someone else, the way he loved me with acts more than speeches. I studied hard, found my rhythm in study and dance alike, and eventually started to believe the man he showed me.
"Will you marry me properly?" he asked one cold December night, the city two fingers away in the dark.
He didn't kneel in public. He simply held my hand and slid a ring onto my finger, something small and honest. He said, "Marry me. From the start."
I laughed and cried all at once. "No staged photos?" I managed.
"No staged photos," he promised. "Only us. We will learn what being married means together."
I looked at the ring and then at him. "From the start," I repeated.
He kissed me like a beginning.
We had a small ceremony months later, not a staged spectacle. Arianna's public fall had been a heavy thing and had taught me that public vindication rarely heals the small wounds. But the city loves two things: spectacles and stories of reckoning. The night Graham made the choice to go public with the truth, the world watched; Arianna's exposure was not theatrical revenge but a public unmasking that let gossip settle to dust. People hissed, cameras clicked, and a woman who had been the symbol of arrangement scurried away. The punishment was heavy in the court of social eyes, different from justice but satisfying in its way: the lie was stripped of its shine.
"Do you regret it?" I asked Graham later, after the lights had died and the house was quiet.
"Regret?" he echoed.
"Choosing to go public," I said. "Wounding her in front of the world."
He folded the idea like a thin paper, careful. "I regret the things that hurt people," he said. "But I don't regret telling the truth. It saved me from being a man who will forever compromise what he cares about."
"You had to lose a lot," I said.
"I lost what I thought was safe," he said. "I gained what matters."
I looked at him and thought of red sugar ginger tea and of a pastry shop called Not-Sweet. I thought of the roof and the smallness of our old apartment. Love, I realized, is not a single grand gesture. It is a string of mornings: a hand that brings soup, a bandage washed twice and wrapped with careful fingers, a promise that turns into actions. It is the man who changes in a way that matches the woman he claims.
"Promise me one thing," I said.
"Name it," he said.
"Don't let me be a wing on the side curtain again," I said. "If you love me, be messy and loud and brave in front of the people who should matter."
He kissed me then, slow and sweet. "Always. In front and behind."
We laughed. The ending is not a slogan, and life will always find a way to test us. But when I look at the ring, when I make tea and watch him on the roof like a relic that surprised the city, I know we made a beginning together.
The End
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