Sweet Romance13 min read
Double Eleven, I Met the Wrong Man — and Kept the Right One
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Double Eleven, I went to meet him in real life.
"I called your name in the dark," I whispered, holding the sheets like a child hiding from thunder. "Dion—no—Emmett?"
"Who kisses you without learning names?" he said, and the room went cold.
My heart stopped. "What do you mean? You're not Emmett?" I started to tremble. "Then who are you?"
He pulled his arm back like he was brushing off a fly and said, "Not Emmett, anyway," with a voice that was all smirk and danger.
I had come to the wrong man.
I covered my face with the blanket. "Who are you? What did you do to me last night?"
The blanket slipped, and sunlight drew hard lines across his chest. He had abs that made me forget how to breathe.
He tilted his head. "Who am I?" he laughed, then used a corner of the sheet to cover my eyes. "You called me 'brother' last night."
"Brother?" I wanted to bang my head on the wall.
I heard voices in the hall, muffled and wrong. I panicked and peered under the blanket; he was getting dressed, calm as if he'd done this a thousand times.
"The 'brother' thing—" I started, voice cracking. "We just kissed, right? We just—kissed."
He paused while putting my clothes in my hands and shook his head like he was choosing between two desserts. He was smiling, a little cruel. "That's not what you said."
My stomach dropped. I tried to breathe through the shame.
He tugged me closer. "Throw those in the trash," he said, pointing at the plastic shopping bags on the floor.
I looked and counted two. My heart clenched.
My phone vibrated.
"Where are you? I bought breakfast," Emmett's voice said on the other end.
I glanced at the man sitting perfectly calm on the chair. "I don't know where I am," I admitted.
"Intercontinental," the man said from the chair, deadpan.
My mouth fell open. "What? Who said that?"
He shrugged. "You did."
"Emmett's here?" the voice on the phone sounded surprised. "Is Lu—Dylan with you?"
"Dylan?" I covered the phone, eyes wide. "Who is Dylan?"
He leaned over and whispered into my ear, "Next time, ask the name before letting someone do physical labor for you."
I hadn't even realized that last night my brain had shorted out. "He was your roommate?" I said into the phone weakly.
"Yeah, he’s my roommate. He’s a good guy," Emmett kept going, and I listened like someone reading about a stranger's life.
When I hung up, time felt sticky. We went down to breakfast with Emmett's loud friends. The truth came in little, chaotic pieces: Emmett had been busy double-eleven shopping; he sent Dylan—his roommate—to pick me up. I had mistaken Dylan for Emmett and kissed him like everything was meant to be.
They all laughed and ruffled Emmett's hair like he was a cartoon. "This is my brother. He books five-star hotels. He's worth getting close to," Emmett said, slinging a hand around Dylan’s shoulder.
"You could learn from him," someone teased the group, and a chorus of college boisterousness swelled. I sipped my congee and watched Dylan. He lounged like he belonged to the air itself—careless, some kind of trouble that happened to look good.
Later that morning, Emmett realized something off. "Why did you book a room?" he asked, puzzled.
Dylan just took a bite of his soy milk and said, "My aunt runs the place. Why, can't I stay there?"
The guys groaned in admiration. "You can stay, then!" Emmett joked, trying to smooth the awkwardness.
I said, "We're all just friends." My voice was thin.
Dylan's stare landed on me like cold sunlight. "Friends," he repeated, half amusement, half warning.
We all agreed to hike the nearby ridge that day. My body betrayed me as we climbed; every step felt heavy. At the break, Dylan sat with me. "You still have strength?" he asked.
I shook my head. "I said I'd go with Emmett."
"You're an idiot," he said, harsh.
"Excuse me?"
He said it low, then softened. "Don't cry later."
I started crying before he’d even finished speaking. Emmett offered to carry me up. I clung to him like a lifeline and we ascended while Dylan pretended not to watch.
At the top, the air tasted sharp and clear. The boys made jokes, but I felt entirely raw. A day that should have been ordinary had become a knot I couldn't unknot.
That night, I decided to message Dylan.
"In case you want to know," I typed. "I'm sorry. I was drunk and called you 'brother.'"
His reply was almost instant. "You called me 'brother'?"
I typed, "Yes. I'm sorry."
"I and Emmett don't look the same," he sent back with a single mocking emoji, and I realized—how had I even mixed them up?
"You should have pushed me away," I scolded myself into my phone.
He answered with a line of ellipses. "You accused me of not being a good man because I didn't push you away."
I bristled. "You must have known."
He replied, "If a pretty, tipsy woman comes to me... What am I supposed to do? Not be a man?"
We argued in small messages that night. I told him I thought he had a girlfriend. He said "ex-girlfriend" and shrugged it off. He messaged in three dots a few times and then sent one line: "My ex texted us last night." He wasn't ashamed, just bored.
The more I thought about the night, the more flashes came back—shards of memory that didn't fit together. His courage in the game, his confidence, the way he'd sit with a cigarette between his fingers while commuting from the edges of the room. He seemed like someone who had one foot out of every door.
A few days after, when I felt dizzy and nauseous for longer than a normal hangover, I bought a pregnancy test on a shaky impulse. I couldn't bear not knowing.
The twin lines on the stick were undeniable.
I sat on my bathroom floor, the world tilting. "How could this happen?" I whispered.
At the clinic, the nurse asked me gently, "Is this planned?"
"No," I said. "It isn't."
She typed on her computer, then looked at me. "Your bloodwork shows a viable intrauterine pregnancy—about six weeks."
The room turned white. "Do you want to continue?" the nurse asked.
"I—" My voice dissolved.
Later, I walked out into the clinic corridor and ran straight into him washing his hands.
"Dylan?" he said softly.
"Don't—" I almost ran back into a stall. I'd wanted him not to see me here, not to know.
He turned to the doctor standing nearby and simply said, "Mom?" The doctor's face crumpled into a smile as she recognized her son.
My throat closed. He and his mother spoke casually, and then he followed me outside as I left.
"You came to see what? Your mother's schedule?" I snapped, terrified and ashamed.
He looked at me with an odd, fierce tenderness. "If you need someone to check, I can have Mom run an extra test."
"Don't—this is personal," I said, trying to tug away.
He didn't let me. "Tell me where you live," he demanded.
I resisted then gave the address. "Don't knock on my door," I said.
He didn't promise. Five minutes later, he was downstairs with a plastic bag: a bus card, a hot meal, and a cup of brown sugar water. There was a hot water bottle wrapped in a towel. He said, "Heat this when it hurts. My mom told me that helps."
I stared at him, stunned at the care hidden under his gruffness.
"And pay me back?" he asked, attempting to joke. "Pay the hotel and the candies."
I almost hit him. "You can't be that petty."
He said only, "You are gullible." Then he left with the kind of decisive swagger that made my knees wobble.
Days later I confirmed the pregnancy with an ultrasound. I was at the hospital for a follow-up, and then my entire life made a sudden circle—he was there again, sitting in the waiting room. "You should rest," he said. "Do you live alone?"
"I do." I couldn't stop shaking. "You came here—why?"
"Because I thought you were here for your period," he said, and then, softer, "No. Because I worry."
"Why?" I asked.
He hesitated, searching my face. "Because I can't not—" He left it there.
He was stubborn in the smallest, maddest ways. When I told him I couldn't afford taking care of a baby, he scoffed. "Is it my fault you're mature?" he asked, half teasing, half cutting. "I'll figure things out."
"You're still a college kid," I said, incredulous.
"I'm almost done," he said. "My father will help. I'll work. I'm not going to let you do this alone."
When I tried to talk about ending the pregnancy, he flinched like I'd punched him. "I want to keep it," he said without hesitation.
"I don't want it to ruin you," I whispered.
"You think I need to be ruined," he said. "I can try."
I tried to stay practical. I called my mother and, in the quiet midnight hours, confessed everything. She came down. "My child, don't cry," she said, and that is when the dam broke. Mothers are good at making you feel less small. While my mother fretted and made me salty orange slices and told me old wives' tricks that somehow soothed me, Dylan came and helped in other ways—he called his mother, he signed me up for appointments, he hovered with an odd, breathy tenderness.
He was both ridiculous and perfect.
One evening, sitting with him in my living room, he picked up my phone and typed a name into my contacts: "Dylan Sanchez." "If anything happens, call me," he said. "People don't always look at messages." He surprised me by asking for my bus card. He stored it away like we were already a team.
We tried to be normal. At my office, he dropped me off at the back alley. "Don't pretend I don't exist," he muttered when I argued about where to park.
"You're being ridiculous," I told him.
He kissed me in the elevator the way someone would reclaim a territory. "Don't make me fight your coworkers."
They gossiped anyway. They asked who the handsome guy outside was. I wanted to sink into the floor.
A week later, I was in my bed, feeling increasingly fragile, and Dylan was at my side like an island. He was jealous in small, pathetic ways, like when Emmett’s friends teased about "who's his girlfriend now?" and he would answer with clipped chuckles. He would also sit and play games with me, carrying our team through victory after victory. I knew the in-game name "LuY" because everyone cheered when LuY saved a match. I didn't know then that "LuY" was him.
"You're good," I told him one night.
"Because I wanted to find you," he said simply.
We were still figuring out what this all meant when the fireworks came.
Everything broke at a lunch in a private room where Dylan had invited Emmett and half a dozen other guys who called themselves brothers.
They sat, forks clinking. The air hummed like a sting. Emmett stood up and pointed a finger, face flushed with that familiar mix of bravado and wounded pride. "So who is she? Who is she to you?" he demanded, the room leaning forward.
Dylan, cool as an untouched lake, answered: "She's my girlfriend."
A fork flew. A porcelain cup sailed like a comet and shattered on the wall behind Dylan, a bright, ugly crack. The cup's shards glittered and fell like tiny blots of accusation.
Emmett staggered back like he’d been slapped.
The room exploded into noise.
"You what?" Emmett's voice cracked on the words. "You? You are—"
"You were too busy letting people down to notice," Dylan said. "You used your account and your time to try and win a girl who wasn't yours to win."
I felt everybody watching me, like I had become a scandal and a prize at once.
I stood there small in the center of a hurricane of eyes.
"Are you serious?" Emmett demanded, trying to find armor in words. "You actually say that to our faces?"
Dylan leaned forward. "For months, I've been logging in under your ID," he said, "because you asked me to help you. I played all night so I could talk to her. I fed her. I built small, silly worlds in a team game where we could be ordinary. I did more than you—"
"You're lying!" Emmett cut him off, voice high with outrage and shame, hands trembling. He tried to laugh it off, but the laugh was thin. "I supported her. I booked hotels. I—"
Dylan's expression didn't go hot. It went cold. "You booked hotels so you could window-shop. You made promises you never kept. You left folks to run after your favors. You owned the easy parts and abandoned the rest."
One of the roommates—a stocky, red-faced guy—shook his head. "Dude, this is messy. We're friends," he said, but even he was sweating.
Emmett's face wilting, he stumbled to the table and grabbed for his phone. "No, no—" He swiped at the screen, but the screen showed a dozen comments and half a dozen voices buzzing in the group chat like hungry flies.
"Everyone here is witness," Dylan said. "You expect sympathy from the men you didn't treat like men. You expect me to step aside because you want to reclaim a trophy you never built."
I felt dizzy. "Dylan—" I tried to speak, but he turned and took my hand like a promise.
Emmett's face went white. "This is humiliation," he whispered. "You can't—"
"Humiliation?" Dylan repeated. "You chained a girl to your convenience and called it courtship. That's not how any of this works." He let silence sit on the table like a judge.
Around us, the group reflexively divided. Some were shocked; some were muttering; others were already scrolling for the drama. A woman in a crisp skirt at the next table slid her phone out and began filming, her mouth open in delighted astonishment.
"You said you wanted to be friends," Emmett tried to explain lamely. "I thought—"
"You thought?" Dylan laughed, the sound short and sharp. "You thought I'd play second fiddle forever? You used Jubilees and hotel rooms as bargaining chips and forgot people have hearts."
For a moment, Emmett's façade cracked. He sank into the chair, hands drooping. He tried to stand and be the cocky man he had always played, but the room had already turned on him, eyes oversized and suspicious.
"I—I didn't mean—" He made a small, pathetic gesture that looked like contrition but felt like theater.
People started to talk louder. "Who does that?" someone whispered. "He acted like a hero but he always wanted the spotlight."
A voice from the other side of the table said, "You always blew hot and cold. She deserves better."
Emmett's lips trembled. He tried to make a face like regret—then denial. "You're lying! You're making this up!" he shouted. His fists clenched until knuckles bleached pale.
Dylan's face hardened. "You tell her you love her when it's convenience hour," he said. "You leave when it's not. You're a collector of perfect moments, not a builder of life."
"You can't say that!" Emmett protested, utterly unglued now. "I—" He broke off, and for the first time I saw real fear there: the fear of not being adored, the fear of reputation crumbling.
People rose from their seats, leaning forward to witness the collapse. A cousin on Emmett's side whispered to another: "This is going bad." Someone snapped a photo as if to stamp the moment onto eternity.
Emmett's voice sank lower. "Everyone thinks I—" He coughed, then barked a laugh that sounded like a sob. "Everyone? Fine. If this is how you want it—"
He grabbed his jacket and staggered out, tripping over the threshold like a man stripped of faith. The door clicked. Outside, his steps were loud—too loud, like someone were dragging a stone behind them.
"Look at him go," one of the roommates muttered.
We sat in the silence after, surrounded by the buzz of the restaurant, the clink of utensils, the shimmer of the cup's broken ceramic on the floor.
People around us whispered: "He used her," "What was he thinking?" "She deserves someone steady."
Dylan reached out and smoothed the hair from my forehead. "You okay?" he asked.
I nodded, tears in my eyes. "I thought I had to be careful," I said.
"You don't," he said. "Not with me."
He looked tired as if he'd been to war and come back with his hands raw. "I didn't want to make a scene," he said quietly, "but I couldn't let him keep acting like he owned your story."
"You humiliated him," I said.
"You were humiliated. You deserve better than theater." He kissed my forehead. "We stay, we tell the truth. We do the quiet work."
That humiliation scene lasted minutes but also stretched for years in my memory. Emmett's expressions had changed like weather—smug, confused, then collapsing denial, then an attempt at bravado that fell apart. The bystanders reacted by filming, judging, murmuring. He left in disgrace; his ego slammed against the floor like the cup that shattered behind him.
After that moment, things settled into a new sort of life. The pregnancy progressed. Dylan became both riot and rest. He moved in, mostly sleeping on the couch because he didn't like to impose, but in quiet hours he would come in and kiss my forehead until the world slowed. He went to meetings with my mother. His mother, Marina Faure, stopped by the clinic and helped calm me with the kind of no-nonsense kindness only other mothers can offer.
We registered, we argued, we made plans like two idiots pretending we knew how to be adults. One night, after we had argued over something petty—what to paint the nursery wall, what time to pay the bills—he slid a ring onto my finger like he'd been carrying it around for months. "Sign the papers," he said. "Make it official."
I looked at the little book and laughed until I cried. We signed. The red booklet was a tiny, absurd thing in our hands, both ridiculous and sacred.
We called the baby our crazy November miracle. He called me "sister" sometimes to tease me—"sister, don't stay up too late"—and I called him "brat" to punish him. We were silly, and we were real.
One evening in late spring, after everyone had gone to bed and the apartment hummed with the small noises of a life that contained a baby, Dylan sat beside me on the couch. He looked half-awake, and he said, "You know why I made an account under Emmett's name to play? Because sometimes the world makes rules, and I didn't know how to break them. But I knew that when I logged in under that name and watched you laugh in the chat, I could stay near you."
I touched his hand. "You did all that for me?"
He smiled like a fool. "For you. For your laugh. For all of it."
I leaned my head on his shoulder, feeling the steady, impossible thrum of him. "You saved me," I said.
"No," he said. "You saved me. You made me something I didn't know I wanted."
On the dresser that week sat the little hot water bottle he had given me the night he waited under my building's ficus tree—worn and a little duct-taped where we'd used it too much. I picked it up and held it to my belly. The world felt small and good.
"Promise me one thing," he murmured.
"What?"
"No more guessing. If you need help, say it. If you need anything, tell me." He sounded like a man asking for a map through fog.
"I promise," I whispered, and then I laughed at how brave those words felt.
We did not end with a universal line or a cliffhanger. We ended with a hot water bottle on my stomach, the little sticker with LuY's name still on my gaming account, and a red booklet tucked into a drawer. Life kept going in messy, mundane, beautiful ways rich with diapers and arguments about paint and late-night game sessions where he played guardian like a knight with a joystick.
The day I heard our baby's heartbeat for the first time in a duplex clinic, I remembered the cup shattering on the wall. Where there was once gossip and humiliation, there was now an honest, small heart beating faster than either of ours, and the sound rearranged the shape of everything.
I would call what happened to Emmett his comeuppance—public, messy, a punishment that changed him from the inside out. People still whispered in the halls about him; he learned what it meant to be watched, to have your shallow armor stripped. But for me, the true reckoning was different: it was finding someone who would keep the hot water bottle at the ready and call me his sister in private and sign a piece of paper in a county office and then go to work the next morning like none of it was impossible.
We named our son something small and stubborn. Sometimes at night, when he slept, I would take the hot water bottle and press it against my belly and think of that disintegrating cup and a crowded room, and I would smile.
The End
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