Sweet Romance11 min read
"Don't Move the Fetus" — A Lie That Became Real
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I never thought a white lie about being pregnant could flip my whole life upside down.
"Please," I told him, trying to make my voice steady, "I think I should tell you something important."
"You mean now?" the man across the table blinked, frowning like he had the right to be surprised by anything.
"I—I'm pregnant."
He choked on his fork. "Pregnant? At a match? Are you insane?"
I let my face fall into a wounded smile. "I know it sounds crazy. But it's true. The father... the father is my boss."
He stared. The whole restaurant seemed to tilt.
"I can't believe you'd hide something like this. This is huge!" he hissed, bristling like I had ruined his plans.
"Listen," I said, leaning forward, "if you're looking for someone who'll bring trouble, I'm not her. But if you want someone who will be honest about their life—"
"You work for a big company and you're pregnant by your boss?" He made a face like I'd spat in his dessert. "My family won't accept that."
My heart hammered. The man was a cousin's friend, set up by relatives who treat me like a charity case. He went on reciting budgets and thrift and how they'd live on eight thousand a month as if counting coins could measure dignity.
I closed my eyes and played my last card.
"The truth is," I whispered, "I didn't want to tell you, but—it's his child."
A noise behind me made me jerk. I turned so fast my chair scraped the floor.
"Boss!" I blurted, because the man standing at the back of the restaurant was impossible to miss.
He was calm, taller than in his office doorways, one hand tucked into his jacket. He looked at me the way someone reads a single line in a long, complicated book and decides he knows the whole plot.
"Careful," he said, deadpan, "don't move the fetus."
My mouth opened. The line hung between us absurd and accusing and somehow steadying.
I had just told a stranger a lie about him, and then he answered as if the joke was real.
"Vera," Gallagher said softly—Gallagher Cruz, our office gossip with a grin like a ledge—"are you okay?"
"Gallagher, you idiot," I murmured, then louder, because this wasn't the time for mysteries, "Gallagher, you heard nothing. This is a joke. Boss, please—"
Drake Hashimoto smiled with the same thin curve he used when signing contracts. "Sit. Drink some water."
I sank into my chair like a caught animal. I had two choices: explain, break down, or beg. None of them sounded good.
"Vera, are you actually pregnant?" Gallagher asked, eyes wide as the room.
"No," I said. "I—I'm not."
Gallagher's face broke into a look of sympathetic concern. "Oh, wow. That poor thing."
My stomach dropped. He believed me.
So the lie stuck.
"Vera," Drake said quietly, drawing everyone's attention like a pocket watch at midnight, "if you're not—don't worry. But if you are, don't move anything. Understood?"
"Yes," I muttered.
After that day, I learned how a single phrase could set everything in motion. My lie spread like spilled coffee—sticky, hard to clean. Gallagher told everyone a little more every day, thinking gossip was affection. It reached the company group chat. It reached Drake's mother. It reached my own mother before I could.
"You're hiding things from me," my mother said into the phone, voice rising. "You lived in someone else's house overnight? Don't tell me you bedded someone!"
"Mom, it's not like that."
"Not like that? What does that mean? You better not have—"
I hung up, breathless. Drake had been quiet through the storm like the sea—calm until it crashed. But then he walked into the office like a man who had organized every wave.
"Vera," he said to me in the hallway, not a command but something close, "tonight, pretend I'm your boyfriend at a high school reunion. Help me smooth this."
"Why would I—" I started.
"Because you started the rumor," he said bluntly. "Fix it."
I sighed because arguing was useless. He was my boss. So I agreed. "Fine. But for the record—I'm not your girlfriend."
"Noted."
A high school reunion is a funny place for truth to unspool. Old rumors sleep in the corners, just waiting for fresh gossip to wake them. I had always been the quiet one in my class, the one people made stories about for fun. Tonight, I was wearing Drake like armor.
We arrived arm in arm. People fell silent when he introduced me.
"This is Vera," Drake said casually, the way one mentions a rare wine at a dinner.
"You two?" Milo Andre, the old class star and the center of my younger embarrassment, looked shocked. He had been the "polite rejection" in my youth, the one everyone remembered. "You're... together?"
Drake smiled. "Yes."
Once he said it, the room reordered. The same people who had once smirked at me now offered sympathetic looks and whispered envy. The reunion became a stage. I watched Drake handle every conversation with a kind of controlled amusement—patient, protective. He answered questions with a practiced ease: how we met, how long we'd been together, and every time the story landed better than the last.
"Is he really from the Hashimoto family?" someone asked.
"Drake is Drake," he said, dryly. "Titles bore me."
When Milo stood up to leave, his face tight, his friend Jean Leone turned to me with a look like someone watching a small miracle. "You look good," she said.
"Thank you." I tried to mean it.
But the reunion was only the prelude. The lie had made things worse and then stranger. Drake's casual command—"don't move the fetus"—had become a joke everyone told like a secret handshake. His mother came to my house. My mother showed up like a parade. My life shrunk to the size of the rumor.
"Vera," Drake said at one point, when the gossip exploded into the company chat like a thrown stone, "we need to control this."
"I started it," I told him. "I should be the one to clean it up."
"Then help me," he said. "Come to my meetings. Be my date at dinners."
"I can't spend all my life telling everyone I'm your girlfriend so they stop saying I'm pregnant," I protested.
"Then tell the truth."
It turned out telling the truth wasn't simple. Every time I tried, something else skewed the picture. This was the office; truths here bend around power as rivers around stones. Drake knew how to steer the current. At times I suspected he enjoyed the game. He would brush my hair back from my face in a way that made my breath shorten. He would mock my dramatic outbursts with the same dry wit that could make another man vulnerable.
"You always overcomplicate things," he said once, handing me a coffee. "Drink."
"You're not helping my moral culpability," I grumbled.
"Who said I cared about your morals? I advised on optics. Same thing."
I laughed despite myself. He was infuriating that way—emotion and strategy folded into the same sleeve.
We played the part until the company rumor mill gave us an audience we couldn't ignore. People started asking when we'd announce our engagement. Women speculated, men quietly measured themselves beside him. The anonymous power in the office chatter had become a wall that pressed against my ribs.
Then the real trouble came. At a company banquet, a table of old class rivals—Jean Leone and Jennifer Poulsen among them—raised a toast to "the happy couple," giggling like cruel children. Jean pretended ignorance; Jennifer aimed petty arrows.
"Vera," Jean said sweetly, but I'd heard the undertone, "you wear his name well."
The laughter felt like frost.
Before I could make the lie right again, Drake stood.
"Ladies and gentlemen," he said, voice even, "I'll propose a solution. If anyone in this room believes something they shouldn't, speak now."
He swept his gaze across the table like a lighthouse. The air tightened.
I watched as those who had slung words like stones shifted. The tension cracked in a single sharp sound when Drake's hand dipped into his pocket and produced a small box.
"I thought it was time," he said quietly, and then louder with amusement, "to put rumors to rest."
Gasps circled. He clicked the box open. It wasn't an engagement ring. Instead it was a tiny, ridiculous silver spoon—an office joke between us now, the sugar spoon he had once used to make me choke with sweetness when he'd "salted" my drink.
"Don't move the fetus," he said, eyes on me, the phrase now a private joke transformed into a public proof. "Vera is not pregnant. She never was. She started a rumor to scare off a bad blind date."
The table jolted. Jean's face went blank. Jennifer's smile flattened.
"You lied to make a point?" someone asked.
"Yes," I said, voice small but clear. "I lied."
"And I defended it," Drake added calmly. "Because when someone humiliated her in public for no reason, I thought she deserved my defense."
There is a kind of silence that thins the air. People leaned back like they had been pushed.
"Why the spoon?" someone demanded.
Drake lifted it. "Because it was in the story before any of you were clever enough to say it. It's absurd. But it's truthful in one way: she was wronged. We're done with gossip."
A hundred petty laughs could not resurrect the feeling I had—relief, shame, something tangled.
After that night, the mockery shifted. It turned inward for the ones who had laughed loudest. Jean and Jennifer felt it first. Rumor, when met with a person of power, finds its authors.
I didn't want to gloat. But the rules demanded that bad people face some public consequence. So I pushed Drake—not because I wanted revenge, but because I wanted honesty.
Weeks later, at a charity launch where the press had come, Jean and Jennifer were sitting at the head table, prim and slick. As Drake stood to speak, he invited me to the stage.
"Vera has something to say," he murmured.
They gave me a look like I had no right. I stepped forward, feeling my hands tremble, the microphone cold.
"People say cruel things and laugh about them," I started. "But they forget that those jokes fall on real people." I looked at Jean and Jennifer directly. "You spread lies about me. You used my name to make yourselves feel bigger."
The audience shifted. Cameras swivelled. I felt the world compress into that moment.
"Why?" Jean said, too loud. Her voice cracked. "You—"
"You started rumors." I kept my voice steady. "You mocked a woman's reputation for entertainment. Tonight, you will apologize."
They tried to smile, to deflect. Drake interrupted with a slow, modulated voice that seemed to have been practiced for moments like this.
"I'm going to ask something simple. You will stand and say: 'I apologize to Vera Alvarez for spreading gossip, and I retract my words.' You will do it in front of everyone. You will mean it or at least say it loud enough that the cameras hear."
Jean flushed, then paled. "That's humiliating."
"It is," Drake said. "But you humiliated someone first. The floor is yours."
There was a hubbub of whispers. People filmed. The click of phone cameras was a drum.
Jean swallowed. Jennifer's hand trembled. The crowd watched with a hunger that felt hungry and clean all at once.
"I'm sorry," they said, together, stiff as marionettes. "I apologize to Vera Alvarez for spreading gossip, and I retract my words."
It went on for three minutes—repeats, stammers, attempts to qualify—and each repetition dissolved a layer of their condescension. The audience, that fickle jury, shifted from curiosity to condemnation.
Outside, the social feeds bloomed with the video. The clip of two women forced to apologize on a public stage for their small cruelties went viral. The comments were brutal. Not violent—just a steady, relentless exposure of the pettiness they'd trafficked in.
"How does it feel?" a reporter asked the next day when Jean tried to do damage control.
"People make mistakes," she said, but the notes of tremor didn't hide.
Their private messages leaked. Their allies withdrew like flags folding. For the first time in months, they found themselves measured, not measuring.
The punishment was public, procedural, and yet it stripped them of their vanity better than slander ever could.
I didn't shout. I didn't gloat. I sat with Drake at a small table away from the cameras and let it burn out.
"You didn't have to make them say it," I told him.
"They needed to hear themselves," he said simply.
Soon the harassment slowed. The company chat stopped replaying the old rumor like a favorite record. People who had leaned into mockery moved on. Life, in the small way it does, resumed.
And in the quiet left behind, something honest grew.
It wasn't immediate. Drake and I were still boss and subordinate, and that line matters. But the more time we spent together, the less it felt like an act. He stood up for me with a defiant, unexpectedly tender loyalty. He carried my coffees like a reflex. Once, when I muttered about the cold, he shrugged off his jacket and put it over my shoulders.
"You're overdramatic," he told me later, surprised at his own voice.
"I told you," I said, warm from the jacket, "you owe me for all this."
"I do," he replied. "Start with dinner. And later, maybe more."
We had small, ordinary moments that managed to be more intimate than any staged gesture. He caught me looking at something and came over not to tease but to listen. He listened when I told him about the awkwardness back in school, when the memory of a wet umbrella and a stupidly misplaced love letter still made my chest tighten. He told me, softly, that he'd seen me a long time ago.
"You saw me when I was fourteen?" I asked, incredulous.
"You were a small storm," he said, amusement and something like awe in his voice. "I kept watching."
For the ordinary moments to be real, they had to face the extraordinary. Drake surprised me when he told me he loved me. It wasn't thunderous or cinematic. It was a day between meetings, over boxed lunches in his office, the city outside a gray smear.
"I like you," he said, then corrected himself, "I don't like you—Vera, I love you. I've loved you for a long time."
My whole chest stilled. There it was—a truth I hadn't expected to be brave enough for.
"You what?" I made a weak laugh because my voice felt too small.
"I said I love you," he repeated, patient. "Do you... do you feel the same?"
I looked at him. For years, I had made jokes about him in the quiet places of my life. For years, he'd been a figure at the edges, a hand that sometimes steadied and sometimes pricked. Who knew how to turn that into us?
"Yes," I said finally. "I think I do."
It wasn't fireworks. It was not an ending of drama. It was a decision, small and full, like choosing to eat an apple rather than peel it forever.
Then there were the awkward adjustments. My mother called and demanded to meet Drake's mother. Sandra—Drake's mother—smiled like someone with plans played through years of rehearsal. They compared recipes and grandchildren lists like professional negotiators. I sat between them and listened and sometimes spoke. It felt like diplomacy.
Work wise, Drake remained thorough and infuriating. He pushed me hard, indulged me sometimes, and still insisted on calling things by their names. He teased me in public, and in private he could be gentle in ways that surprised even himself.
The office settled into a new rhythm. The rumor that had been a wrecking ball was now an anecdote we could tell at dinners with conspiratorial smiles. People stopped treating me like a spectacle. Gallagher continued to be loud but kinder. Milo Andre and I, once a sketch in the margins of each other's lives, had a conversation that ended in something like a friendship.
"Why did you help me?" I asked Drake once, the question raw and simple.
He folded his napkin and looked at me with an expression I have no language for. "Because when you were small and the world laughed at you, you didn't laugh back. You held your spine. I respect that. I didn't want that to change."
"That's not the reason you decided to play boyfriend for months and buy my shopping," I teased.
He raised one eyebrow. "That was an excellent cover."
We learned each other. We managed small fights. We had quiet reconciliations that felt more intimate than any long declarations. We had the special line that started it all—absurd and a little mortifying—turn into our private joke.
One evening, after another day where he had been impossibly patient with office nonsense, he gave me back the little silver sugar spoon. He set it on the table between us.
"Keep it," he said. "So you remember how ridiculous this all was."
I laughed. "Or you give it to me as a proof of ownership."
He smiled in a way that made me forget to breathe. "Or both."
We sealed the joke with a clumsy kiss, and then he whispered the line that had shifted from mockery to affection.
"Careful," he murmured against my hair, "don't move the fetus."
I pushed him gently. "Don't be ridiculous."
"Ridiculous suits us," he said.
I rested my head on his shoulder and watched the city lights. The rumor that had started as my desperate shield had become a bridge. We had forced the world to look at a lie and, by choosing to be real after, remade it. People who had been cruel learned, in their own small ways, what it meant to be caught.
If anyone asked what had truly changed—what made me decide to stay with this man who had the patience to show up and the audacity to make a joke into a promise—I would say it was the way he read me. How he took my stubbornness not as offense but as a language. How he could, with one dry remark, make me laugh and then, with a softer word, make me trust.
"Promise me one thing," he said one night later, voice low.
"Which one?" I said, smiling.
He grinned. "Keep that spoon. When things look bleak, remember that we survived on sarcasm and an office rumor."
I put the spoon into my pocket.
When we stood on the low balcony outside his apartment later, looking out at the city that had been a stage for everything ridiculous and tender in our story, I felt steady for the first time in months.
"Don't move the fetus," he murmured again, softer than before.
I touched his hand. "I won't."
It wasn't a promise to a rumor. It was a promise to the life we were building—awkward, real, and quietly ours.
The End
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