Sweet Romance15 min read
Don't Look at the Moon (But I Did Anyway)
ButterPicks14 views
I got the message at three in the morning—three years after the man who had been my whole world vanished.
"Don't look at the moon tonight," the text read.
I stared at it, the screen jealous of the light outside my window. My first reaction was anger. My second was a wicked, childish impulse to disobey. I always was like that: tell me not to touch the cake and I'll eat the whole thing.
I typed back with my hands shaking a little from sleep: "What, are you trying to be spooky? Three years and this is how you wake me up?"
Silence. Then, almost immediately: "You really looked at the moon? Seems you and I both can't sleep."
I pressed my phone against my chest and laughed aloud. "You were waiting to see if I'd disobey? What kind of ex does that?"
He didn't answer. I shouldn't have expected him to. He had left for study abroad three years ago without so much as a goodbye. No calls, no messages. Nothing. I rolled my eyes and decided to disobey properly—because the text had told me not to, and because I wanted him to see I did what I wanted.
I pulled the curtain aside and stared at the full moon. It was big and round, a silver coin hung in the black. Nothing happened. I snapped a picture and texted back, proud and defiant: "Looked. So what."
He replied faster than before: "You look tired."
"You have a weird hobby," I shot back. "Stalking exes at midnight?"
"Sometimes I worry about you," he wrote. "At least, tonight."
I rolled my eyes again. I slept badly. The next morning I carried that sleep into my interview with a firm that could change my life. I had prepared answers like a soldier. "Why do you want to work for Seaton Global?" I said with the smile I had practiced by the mirror.
"Seaton's culture and products inspire me," I said. "I want to learn from the best."
Then my stomach turned. I tried to swallow the toast I'd eaten to calm nerves and failed. I bowed my head and retched into my hands. When I lifted my face there he was, like fate and bad timing wrapped into one attractive package.
"Ms. Brantley, are you all right?" he asked, voice low and collected, eyes compiled of memory and a smile held back.
My chest went hollow. Elroy Komarov.
I had not expected to see him again. I had not expected to swear at his face internally and forgive him in the exact same breath.
"You looked pale," he said, with that dry, almost cruel humor I remembered.
"Pregnancy," I blurted in the empty, mortifying truth that sounded worse than it was. "I mean—it's just... I have a sensitive stomach."
I wanted to pinch myself. I did not want to think that three years ago, when I swore at him and told him to leave, he had taken the exit. I wanted to believe that the past had stayed where it was. The interview ended in a haze. I left feeling like a fool.
A week later, they hired me. Of course they did—because I had studied, rehearsed, and been ready. I thought being near him would hurt. It didn't. For the first days at Seaton, he treated me like any other entry-level employee—professional, a little cool, decisive. I told myself that was for the best.
"But why did you text me at three in the morning?" I asked once, after a team welcome dinner. I couldn't help the tremor in my voice when I said it.
He was precise, polite. "I wasn't trying to alarm you. I woke up and remembered you used to like the moon. I wanted to check in."
"You couldn't sleep and thought of me?"
"I had just landed," he said. "I wanted to know you were safe."
My chest tightened. I wanted to say something sarcastic. I wanted to say, You abandoned me. I wanted to say, You don't get to check in now. Instead I said, "You could've just not."
He laughed softly. "You still talk like the old Hudsyn. It's nice."
"Don't," I muttered, partly jealous and mostly angry at myself for being moved.
Days melted into something that felt like work. He didn't look at me the way he did when we dated—no public softness, no hidden smiles. Then, at a company barbecue, he sat across from me and—out of nowhere—took my cup away.
"Empty stomach," he said lightly. "Don't drink without eating."
He was exactly the kind of man who would be taken for a prince. He could be tender and then distant in the same breath. My mouth went dry. I tried to recall every reason I had for hating him, and they all turned mushy as if someone had poured warm water over them.
That night I threw up in the bathroom and for the first time in weeks I broke open and cried. I am not proud of how much his presence still hurt me, even though I'd convinced myself many times that I had moved on. Then the messages started coming.
A stranger's number added me: "If you feel nauseous frequently, you should get checked."
I ignored it. Then another message, blunt and impossible: "Sometimes nausea is the sign—most likely, you're pregnant."
I was a single woman. That was absurd. I laughed it off, even as an old twinge of fear curled in my belly. My period had been late for two months. Work had been relentless for a while; maybe my hormones were off. But the symptoms didn't lie. My hips ached, I couldn't sleep, and I woke up with nausea.
I went to the clinic. The doctor smiled and said the words I wasn't ready for. "You're two months pregnant."
I stared at the nurse. She blinked. "Excuse me?"
"Make an appointment for a sonogram," the doctor said kindly. "We'll confirm, but it appears to be about eight weeks."
I left the clinic hollow and, for a reckless second, I blamed Elroy. He had texted me "Don't look at the moon." He had texted again later, "Seems you and I both can't sleep." He had called me "Hudsyn" as though we had never stopped being something. In a flash of panic I imagined some cruel prank—an old love's revenge. I called my oldest friend.
"Amy, help," I texted. "Elroy is not human. He sent me a text at three and now I'm pregnant. I need you here."
"Did you hit your head?" Amy answered in three seconds. Amy Bauer was my friend since college, reliable and blunt. She had been my voice when I lost mine. Her answers landed like small stones in my stomach.
"Come see me," I told her. "Tomorrow. Now. Anything."
"Okay," she replied. "But if this is some midnight prank, I'm going to—"
"I know."
She arrived that evening. I told her everything: the midnight message, the nausea, the clinic. She listened, then frowned. "You said he's the ex who left to study abroad."
"Three years ago."
"And he texted you now."
"Yes."
Amy's face shifted. Then she laughed, sharp and incredulous. "You always did exaggerate for effect."
"It's not funny."
"Okay. Okay." She sighed. "Tomorrow we'll figure it out. First, get more tests."
But the next days were weirder than we feared. Elroy seemed to appear at unplanned, small moments. He never stared at me in the way people fall in love on screen—he looked, he registered, he composed. Colleagues whispered. "Is he your ex? He used to be with someone?" They watched my face for answers I didn't have. At lunch one day a woman flitted into his office, calling him "Elroy!" in a sing-song voice and trying to hug him. The office buzzed—she had all the signs of a 'rich fiancee' type. I recognized her: Veronique Wagner. The whispers at the table were louder than the coffee machine.
"She's your fiancée?" I asked, when he returned to the open plan like a man who had momentarily stepped out of a story.
He turned, the smallest smile of denial playing on his mouth. "Not for real. Parents tried to arrange—it didn't work."
Veronique had walked out of his office red-faced and fuming. Later she marched over to my desk and planted herself there like a shark on land.
"Who are you?" she demanded, voice too loud. "You shouldn't be near Elroy."
"Excuse me?" I said.
"You should stay away from my future husband," she snapped. "I won't have people getting in the way."
A hundred eyes turned. My cheeks burned. I told her what I wanted to say—"Back off"—but the words came out quieter. Veronique hissed accusations—'homewrecker'—and stormed out, leaving a trail of gossip so dense I could barely breathe.
I was done. If I was pregnant, I would be a scandal. Veronique's accusations were a threat to everything I had built in these two months. That night, shame and anger pushed me to the edge. I stormed out of the company and into the street, only to be caught by the man I had been running from.
He followed me onto a bus, breathless and frantic, and when I tried to close my phone he stopped me with a voice that was raw and honest. "Hudsyn, wait. Please."
"You tell me the truth," I said, clutching my jacket. "Don't lie. Did you text me? Did you make me pregnant on purpose? Are you—what are you? Is any of this your idea of a joke?"
He looked at me like I had asked him to explain the sky. "You think I would prank you? Hudsyn, I came back because I couldn't stop thinking about you."
I scoffed. "You Left. You abandoned me."
"Not really," he said, and for the first time in years his voice went thin. "I stayed in touch the only way I could. I used an account to text when I was awake. I never wanted to hurt you."
"Then why didn't you tell me you were coming back?" I demanded.
He made a sound like surrender. "I was scared."
"Of what?"
"You."
I laughed, the bitter kind. "Of me? You left to study and never sent a postcard."
"I thought you'd be better off," he said. "Hudsyn, three months ago you were fired, you drank a lot. A colleague called me and said there was someone who could take you home."
Everything clicked like gears turning. The night three months ago—my hazy memory, the shame I had shoved into a drawer—suddenly took shape like a film.
"You brought me home?" I whispered. "You mean—"
He nodded. "You were incoherent. You cried. You said things that made no sense. You held me like I was the only thing that made sense. I didn't push you away. I'm not proud of how it happened—of what I let happen—but I didn't lie about it."
"Did we—"
"We did," he said. "I recorded it. You were upset. You said I was a disaster, that I woke up to be your ruin."
A weight I hadn't allowed myself to feel settled and squeezed. Ashamed and raw, I had to think. If the clinic said two months and if he had been the one to drive me home three months ago, then I... the pieces fell into a terrible geometry.
You would think then that the story would stop with hate or reconciliation. But life is messy. He confessed that night on my doorstep, humbled and human. "You were drunk," he said, "but none of that erases the fact that we were together."
I wanted to slam the door in his face. Instead I staggered and sat down, shaking. "You had a fiancée," I reminded him. "Veronique said—"
He flinched. "Veronique is complicated. Her family proposed an arrangement. I didn't agree. She thought we were engaged. She misread things."
"She told the whole office I'm a homewrecker," I said, fury rising.
He looked ashamed. "I'm sorry."
"I'm sorry. Sorry doesn't make this less humiliating."
He took my hand then, quietly and completely. "I know. That's why I wanted to tell you everything. I should have been honest earlier. But I was afraid you'd hate me."
I hated that he could make me feel small and still be the first person I wanted to tell everything to. I hated that I wanted him to stay.
A week passed. The office scheduled annual health checks and, by fate or design, my name came up. Elroy summoned me into his small, glass-walled office and slid a report across the table.
"You are three months along, Hudsyn," he said. "Thirteen weeks. The fetus is perfectly healthy."
I snatched the paper and my hands trembled. Then rage took over like a hot tide. "You get to say it's yours like that?" I slammed my fist on the table. "You have a fiancée! You let me get pregnant!"
"I didn't let anything. It happened. I'm here now."
"You're such a coward."
"I fell in love with you," he said, and his voice had the weight of confessions you only make when you mean them. "I couldn't tell you then."
I wanted to walk. Instead I shouted, "I am not marrying into this!"
He looked almost breathless, as if I'd dropped a stone into his chest. "We have a problem. Or we have a miracle. It depends who you ask."
People at the company watched us. Gossip slid through the open office like a hungry animal. Soon Veronique cornered me in the corridor and, in front of half the staff, accused me of seducing her future husband. Her face was painted furious and determined. "You are beneath him," she hissed. "Leave."
I didn't let her set the terms. "Leave me alone," I said. "And stop calling me names."
She laughed cruelly. "You think he would choose you?"
I looked up. Elroy was standing behind her, looking not at me but through us, like a man who carried the knowledge of secrets and didn't choose to share them lightly.
"This is not about choice," he said. "Veronique, enough."
She turned, eyes blazing with humiliation. "You tell her—don't you dare tell her you love someone like me—"
"Veronique," Elroy snapped, and everybody heard it. "You asked me to keep things formal while your family pushed for an engagement. You pretended. You plotted."
Her face changed when he said that. Pride hosted a quick descent into panic. Around us, whispers thickened. People took out phones and started recording. Veronique's shoulders rose and fell. For the first time she looked small and genuine. She got angrier, the kind of anger that makes people sound false because they are terrified to be unmasked.
I had to admit, in a cold corner of my mind, that something in me wanted to watch her fall. Not just for me, but because she had leveled public humiliation at me like a weapon.
Elroy stepped forward deliberately. "You told people we were engaged because you wanted leverage with your father's partners. You stood here and accused Hudsyn to advance a story you invented."
Someone in the back said, "Wait—what? Veronique, you lied?"
She spun on him, face flushing. "You agreed to the meetings!"
"I agreed to talk," he said. "But I didn't agree to a public lie. I didn't agree to use someone's life as a pawn."
"She came on to me," she cried suddenly, in a last-ditch effort. "She seduced me—"
The room nearly folded with laughter and hysteria. Veronique's mimicry of scandal was pitiful; the office had already started murmuring to itself that she had called out the wrong woman.
"Stop," Elroy said. His voice was cold now, and something in the air shifted. He pulled out his phone and hit play.
I froze. "Elroy, what are you doing?"
He kept his eyes locked on Veronique. On speaker came a recording. It was from a meeting—Veronique's meeting with a small group—her voice was bright and confident. "If we act engaged," she said, "my dad will sign the contracts. Make it look convincing; we have to make the owner board believe."
Gasps. A rustle of chairs. Faces leaned forward. The proof of premeditation hung in the room like a banner.
Veronique's mouth opened. She turned—and for the first time I saw something like fear in her eyes. "You can’t—"
"You're lying," she cried. "You're lying!"
"No, she is not," someone in the crowd whispered. "You planned it."
Her face lost color. None of her rehearsed outrage remained. People who had sat sipping their coffees were now spectators in the public exposure of a woman who had lied to everyone to climb.
"Why would you accuse her?" Elroy said. "Because you wanted a narrative."
I felt a fierce, stupid joy that was like sunlight after rain. People started filming. Some clapped. Some said "Good," like jurors delighted to see the scales tip. A group of colleagues gathered around Veronique, whispering in shocked voices. One of the senior staff, Katelynn Chase—who had always been gossipy but fair—stepped forward with a look of icy reproach.
"This is unacceptable," Katelynn said loudly. "You used our office to stage a lie. You humiliated her. People like that make a workplace toxic."
Veronique's fury melted into panic. She tried to run, but the door was in front of her and the stairwell clogged. A few people blocked her, not with cruelty so much as with stunned disbelief. She began to stutter and make excuses. "You don't understand—he told me—"
Elroy cut her off. "I told you the arrangement would be private. You told me to play along. Then you escalated it into attack."
She sank into a chair, hands in her hair, then she stood up like a wounded animal and made for the glass wall that separated the meeting room from the rear offices. People murmured. Someone said, "Go home, Veronique," and someone else said, "Don't come back."
When she reached the glass, she turned to face us one last time. "This isn't over," she spat, but her voice was thin, and the bravado sounded like the squeal of a balloon leaking air.
Her punishment was not jail or court. It was a social verdict, delivered and recorded by a hundred small cameras: she had been unmasked. People who had once admired the idea of her status saw her as petty. The firm issued a formal reprimand. Her sponsors quietly pulled away. Reporters later called it a fiasco—an entitled woman caught inventing a union to gain business leverage. She tried to sue for defamation, but she had already defamed herself.
The public punishment spilled beyond the office. At a shareholder dinner a week later, Veronique attempted to salvage her image. I did not attend, but the live feed blared across feeds. She stood at a podium and tried to explain, but investors, who liked stability, did not listen to a woman who had proved manipulative. Phones filmed. People whispered. She crumbled not because she lost money but because she had been seen for what she was—selfish and willing to spell others' ruin for profit. That evening, online, people dissected the recording: the planning, the false accusations, the way she used her supposed engagement as leverage. Her social accounts lost followers by the thousands. Sponsors rescinded endorsements. Her father—one of the last anchors she had—publicly distanced himself after an internal board told him the optics were bad.
When the company called a meeting to address behavior, Veronique's face was pale. She stood at the front and made an apology that rang flat. There were no cheers. People clapped out of habit. The immediate punishment—the stripping away of credibility, the isolation, the whispered condemnations—was more severe than anything a judge could hand down. She begged in private and pleaded for one more chance. The crowd had moved on; they had already recorded every step. Watching her go from poised and manipulative to that posture of humiliation was a public lesson in consequence.
And she also reacted in ways I had been warned about: first denial, then anger, then bargaining, then collapse. "You're ruining my life," she screamed at Elroy when he met her outside the office one last time. He didn't look angry; something softer and colder settled on his face. "You made your choices," he said. "You chose to weaponize someone else's life."
She collapsed into sobs afterward—on a bench outside the building, with a small group of interns witnessing the scene. Their photos went online and multiplied. Her face, once poised and unassailable, shrank into a picture of regret that seemed, in all seriousness, earned.
I watched the whole sequence from my desk and felt no pleasure in cruelty. But I felt vindication; the world had watched and decided. Veronique would have to live with that unglamorous aftermath.
After the fallout, the office atmosphere changed. People were kinder, or more watchful. Elroy didn't crow. He apologized to me once for being late in telling me about his life. "I kept so many things private," he said, eyes not leaving mine. "I thought I was protecting you. But I only ended up hurting us both."
"Why didn't you tell me you were Amy?" I asked one night. It had been a lie—he'd created an account and used my friend's straightforward name as a safe harbor when he felt like checking on me. I had texted a friend named Amy many times, and sometimes the messages were from Elroy. I felt violated but also oddly charmed. He had been my friend and my ghost.
He took a breath and told me how he'd been afraid: afraid that if he said anything, I'd run; afraid that his family—strange as it sounded—would complicate everything. He admitted that his family's roots were not ordinary. There were secrets there, old and strange.
"Your family—" I began, and he smiled ruefully. "Weird," he said.
One weekend he insisted I come with him to his home, to meet his family. I almost refused outright, scarred by how quickly my life had been thrown into an awkward spotlight. But I was curious, and part of me wanted to know who this man was, beyond the office gossip and midnight messages.
The Komarov estate looked like something from a storybook. Large gates, hedges trimmed like sculptures, and lights that glittered like a small city. I had never imagined Elroy could belong to a place like this. His parents welcomed me with an ease that startled me. They looked young for their age and moved with a calm that bordered on playfulness.
Then things turned stranger. Small figures—like living roots, sprigs of green with tiny limbs—scurried past the hall. Children? Not exactly. I blinked and realized they were not human in the way I expected. They had bright eyes and a laugh like windchimes.
"Those are Evie and some of the others," Elroy said gently, noticing my shock. "They're our relatives."
"Relatives?" I echoed.
His father, a man with an easy laugh and sharp eyes—Jackson Maldonado, so Elroy introduced him—smiled at my confusion. "Komarov family is unique," he said. "We are... tied to the earth in ways ordinary people are not."
I swallowed. "Like myths," I whispered. "Like fairytales."
Elroy nodded. "My family doesn't age in the same way. We have children who sometimes need to take the shape of plants to rest. It sounds wild, but it's true."
I stared at Evie—a little girl who could shift, who sometimes plopped herself into the soil like a sprout when tired. The idea made my head spin. "So you can all—change?"
"Some of us," Jackson said. "It depends on lineage. But our family tries to keep it private. We wanted to be normal for Elroy."
I looked at Elroy, who was smaller when he smiled, his hands warm and real. The strangeness of his family didn't lessen the fact that he was a man with flaws and affection. It clarified him, in a startling way. He was both other and familiar.
Later that week, after the office scandal settled and public eyes shifted elsewhere, Elroy asked me the quiet question I had been afraid to ask. "Will you consider staying? For the child?"
I pictured my life with a child in it—unknown, scary, messy, but not empty. I thought about Veronique's plotting, about how easily reputations could be built and ruined, and I thought about the way Elroy had been present when he needed to be and absent when he had been afraid.
I said yes, because three years of ghosts and one month of truth had brought me to a place where I could say it. "I'll try," I told him.
He laughed then—a small, relieved sound—and hugged me like he was thanking the sky. "I will bring you back to my parents," he said, "so they can meet you properly."
When we returned to the Komarov home, his father declared in a dramatic, earnest tone that "weddings were to be simple, and we like simple joy." Elroy beamed. His mother—who liked to root around in the herb garden and talk philosophy—took my hands and welcomed me to the family. It felt like a story that rewrote itself daily.
The wedding came quickly, more quickly than either of us expected. Invitations fluttered, and there was talk of a small ceremony in the estate garden, amid paths of sage and bright flowers. Evie insisted on being in the ceremony in her peculiar, endearing way. She insisted I sit near the roots during the vows, as if she was making a promise with the earth too.
On the morning of the wedding, Veronique tried to apologize in a public statement. "I was wrong," she wrote. "I am sorry." The media took it, dissected it, then moved on. The punishment had been carried, and the consequences had been meted out. The world continued.
At the altar, Elroy held my hand and looked at me like a man who would remember the small details. "You disobeyed the moon for me once," he said, smiling. "I was a foolish man then. But I'm not now."
I laughed, remembering that midnight message and the way that tiny, defiant act had begun a chain that made us both face our faults. I thought of Amy—of the wild woman who was in truth two people, someone he pretended to be when he needed a safe harbor—and I thought of the public punishment that had freed me from a cage made of gossip.
When he said, "I love you," it was not the cinematic shout of a novel but a soft, steady thing, like a root that had grown careful and true.
"I love you too," I answered, and the crowd clapped, and little Evie cheered, and the moon—ironic, patient—hung in the sky, doing exactly what moons do: lighting things so you can see them as they are.
The End
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