Sweet Romance10 min read
He Picked Up My Ride, Then Picked Me Up — On Screws, Suits, and Shared Bikes
ButterPicks14 views
I did not expect a Maserati to be part of my commute.
"I wore a white sweater today," I told the app when I posted the ride request. "Please pick me up near the second crosswalk."
A deep-blue Maserati slid out of traffic and stopped right in front of me. I took two steps back.
"Hello? Where are you? I don't see you," I said into the phone.
A young voice answered, casual and almost bored. "I'm flashing my hazard lights."
"I'm by a Maserati," I said. "I'm standing next to a Maserati."
"I'm the Maserati."
I opened the door anyway because that's what you do when a car squeezes you into embarrassment. I sat in the back at first, like a normal passenger.
"Why are you sitting in the back?" he asked through the mirror.
"Because—" I started, then climbed into the passenger seat because the mirror look said I should.
He wore sunglasses. He smelled faintly of good cologne. He spoke like someone had taught him to sound bored on purpose.
"Do you work around here?" he asked.
"Yes," I said, voice tight like an interview.
"Is it well paid?"
"That's none of your business," I wanted to say. Instead: "It's okay. I'm in probation, four thousand five hundred a month."
He made a small "oh" that dripped judgement. "Only that much?"
"Yes." I tried to sit perfectly still.
The car idled at a red light. He rolled down his window, rested his left arm on it, and said, "You know my stepmother is younger than me."
"Really?" I managed.
"I came back home to find everything changed," he went on. "My dad married young. My mom's been with men so many times that I lost count. Nobody told me any of this."
I laughed because that's what you do when someone dumps his private mess into your lap.
"People act like it's normal," I said. "Things change fast."
He smiled like something inside eased. "When I was in high school they sent me abroad. No one taught me to live here. I forgot how to use Alipay. I come back and everything feels foreign."
"Your Chinese is fine," I said, ridiculous and earnest.
He glanced at me and raised an eyebrow. "Is it?"
"I'm joking."
He laughed a little. "My father's girlfriend is someone I used to know. She used to call me by a nickname. Now I have to call her ‘Aunt.’"
I covered my mouth to stop myself from giggling.
"You don't need to hide your smile," he said. "I think it's funny too."
When I got off, he waived away the fare.
"Your ride's on me," he said.
I left feeling twenty yuan richer and very confused.
The next day, the same car appeared under the same sun. I got in like it was a normal Tuesday.
"You're back," he said. "I argued with my father and I'm moving out."
"I support you," I said too fast.
"How do you support me?" he turned and asked, curious.
"In words," I admitted. We both laughed.
Traffic crawled. The sky went pink. "Want to take the longer route and just drive for a while? I won't charge you."
"No one offers me free rides," I said, and agreed.
He took me out by the lake and asked if I had friends.
"Not really," I said. "I have colleagues but not friends."
"Lonely?" he asked. "I had no one when I came back. Today is my birthday and no one said happy birthday to me."
I bought a small cake for twenty yuan at a bakery. He'd vanished when I came back to where I'd left him, and I scolded him out loud.
He took the cake gently from my hands. "I couldn't stop. I went to park the car."
"Happy birthday," I said, embarrassment and cake in my hands.
"What's your name?" he asked when I started to leave.
I shrugged. "This is just a ride. We probably won't meet again."
He said, softly, "Who says that?"
The third time he showed up, the rumor mill at the office had already started. "Who is he?" people asked. "Is she being sugar-baby?"
"I told them he's a driver," I told him. "Please, don't come again."
"Why?" he asked, genuinely puzzled.
Because the boss, Ramon Rodriguez, loved to make me small. He liked to hand me impossible piles of work and then laugh at my stuttering answers. He would make sexual jokes around me, clear and loud so everyone heard. I had no time or money to fight him.
"Because my boss will think I am an opportunist," I said. "He will ruin whatever chance I have."
He frowned. "Who is he?"
"Ramon Rodriguez. He assigns me travel for cheap allowance and never lets me refuse." I explained.
"Why does he bully you?" he asked as if this was the most foreign concept in the world.
"Because he can."
The next evening, when the clock dared me to go home, I saw a Ferrari parked where the Maserati had been. My mouth went dry. Colleagues whispered and pointed and smiled like cats who had smelled fish.
Ramon was on my case already. He shoved a thick folder at me. "Memorize this and go on the business trip," he said. "If you can't handle it, then maybe this job isn't for you."
I opened the folder. The trips inside were nonstop—more than I could handle.
"Can I say no?" I asked, calm but inside a roaring tidal wave.
"Don't be ridiculous," Ramon snapped, going red with triumph.
Then the door opened and he was there—Cade. He had my employee badge between two fingers like a trivial proof he could use.
"I think she is here to work, not to be your punching bag," Cade said quietly, the kind of quiet that slows a room.
Ramon's lips curled. "And who are you to talk?"
"Someone who doesn't like bullies," Cade said. He dropped the folder like it was an insult and it fluttered open, pages like a fallen flag.
Ramon lunged to shove the folder at me, a bossly gesture that felt meant to humiliate. Cade stepped between us and caught the folder with one hand, throwing it aside. The papers burst into the air.
"She's not your puppet," Cade said. His tone was low and full of a sudden gravity that made heads turn.
The room froze. The fluorescent lights hummed loud as breathing. Coworkers stopped mid-step, eyes wide.
Ramon sneered, "Do you think you can tell me how to run my team?"
"You're not running a team," Cade replied. "You're running your ego."
Ramon went crimson. "How dare you—"
"Out," Cade said.
For the next twenty minutes the office transformed. People circled, like a little theater audience watching a scandal they had expected for years. Phones came out. A woman who normally laughed with Ramon now tutted and shook her head.
"You're aggressive," she said to Ramon. "You scare people."
"He's just jealous," Ramon snapped. He tried to summon allies. Two older men shifted uncomfortably, unwilling to side with public humiliation.
"Jealous of what? Of making people miserable?" Cade walked closer, unblinking. "You use power to force people to work until they break. You make jokes that make others small in order to feel big. That ends now."
"Everyone—" Ramon sputtered, his voice losing control. "Everyone knows my way keeps efficiency. If anyone thinks they can talk back—"
"People here are not numbers," Cade said. He looked at me and then at the room. "She came to work. She is not your game."
I felt lightheaded. On one side Ramon flailed, his face a map of color as his control slipped. On the other side colleagues watched like jurors with popcorn.
A younger colleague, Kimber Hernandez, stepped forward. "I've seen you cornering new hires," she said, voice trembling with something like courage. "You leave them crying. You laugh when they're nervous. Today you humiliated her. We won't let that be normal."
Phones were held high now. Someone whispered, "Record this."
Ramon's denial broke into pieces. He raised a hand as if to strike, then stopped because every eye was on him. His face gnarled through denial to anger.
"This is—" he tried.
"Stop," Cade said. He grabbed Ramon by the sleeve and pushed him back toward a chair as if steering a wild animal into a cage. "Sit."
Ramon stumbled and sat, breathing hard. "I have worked here for twenty years," he said. "I am the senior manager."
"You are a manager without respect," Cade replied, steady and hard. "People here respect hard work. They don't respect cruelty."
At that, heads nodded. A chorus of murmurs rose, then a few voices became louder.
"I've seen you degrade interns!" a voice called. "My cousin quit because you wouldn't stop."
Another voice: "You call it management. It's abuse."
Ramon's face shifted from smug defiance to stunned disbelief. He tried to laugh and it was brittle. He reached across the table, like a drowning person grasping at anything to save an image.
"You're making a scene," he said weakly. "Do you want to ruin my reputation?"
"Your reputation is already being rewritten in this moment," Cade said. "You can either listen and change—or you can leave. Publicly apologizing might be a start."
Ramon tried to backpedal, throat working. "I—I'm sorry," he said, because when the court of witnesses gathers, words come out like confessions from a person with a sudden conscience.
No one applauded. The room was too stunned for applause. But the tone had shifted permanently. Where once he walked like a lion, he now sat small and boxed by his own behavior.
A junior associate cleared her throat, remote and precise. "Human Resources will get involved," she said. "We can't work in fear."
Ramon's jaw trembled. "I didn't—"
"You did," Cade said, simply. "And now people know."
Outside, the cesspool of office gossip that had always bolstered Ramon began to turn against him. Messages lit up group chats. Someone posted a short clip of the confrontation. Comments filled with anger, with long-stored grievances. A few veterans who had tolerated him for years sat in silence, ashamed to have been bystanders.
Cade walked me out by the elevator with the same calm I've seen in people who have been sure of themselves all their life. "You okay?" he asked.
"I'm fine," I lied, because I had never seen a man make an abusive manager shrink into himself like that.
The boss's punishment wasn't chains or arrest. It was worse for him in a modern office: exposure and the sudden realization that his power was conditional. He had been humiliated in front of his peers, and the memory of their looks would follow him. The senior people who used to let him slide now saw him as someone who had been called out. His voice in meetings would be quieter. His threats would carry less weight. Most of all, he had to watch as people he had used as leverage stepped forward to speak their truth. That ripple effect would haunt him: whispers in the corridor, HR notices on his desk, and the knowledge that the team no longer backed him. For the first time in many years, he learned what it felt like to be the one stripped of dignity while everyone watched.
"Thank you," I said to Cade when the elevator doors opened.
He shook his head. "You don't owe me anything," he said. "But don't let anyone make you small again."
After that day, my life tilted.
Cade offered me a job. "Be my assistant," he said that evening with the same casual command he'd used on the road. "A thousand a month. You have to be on call, though. Can you do that?"
"Two conditions," I said, because dignity is its own currency. "I am not for sale. And if a real job comes, you let me go."
He grinned. "Deal. And no selling of any kind."
So I became his assistant in name and a companion in truth. "You will do light things," he told me. "Cook? Pack? Be around."
"More like a live-in aide," I muttered when he suggested we begin the next day in the factory.
"Yes, in the factory. Real work. Real life." His face was soft when he said it. "If I am going to run something, I should know it from the base."
The factory was loud and bewildering, the smell of metal and oil thick in the air. He handed me a power driver like a prop from a different life.
"Today you screw," he said. "We tighten one screw, then pass the part along the line."
"I studied for exams and internships, not for screws," I said, incredulous. "If I'd known life ends like this, I might have left school earlier."
"Do you hate it?" he asked.
"Not yet," I said. The drill bit whirred in my hand. The rhythm made a kind of toughness settle in my bones.
At noon, after my hands shook through a full morning, he clapped my shoulder like a friend in a field.
"One day this will be a story we tell and laugh about," he said.
After weeks of greasy jumpsuits, we were promoted off the line to watching machines instead of burying our hands in oil. He traded the Maserati for a shared bicycle plan, because the factory eyes were too sharp for showy cars. We rode side by side down sun-baked avenues, and he chased me when I sped off at the lights.
"You said I don't fit," I said once while pedaling.
"Because you were used to being judged," he said. "But you are the only person I know who chooses to stay true to herself, even when money can buy everything. That matters."
We went shopping once on his insistence. "Try this," he told me, handing me a white dress. The dressing room mirror did an impossible thing: it showed me as someone I had never seen before.
"Too much," I whispered when I saw the price tag.
"Try it anyway," he urged. He paid without blinking. Later, in the hotel restaurant that sits high above the city like a second sky, he told me, "I want you to know what it's like so you never think it's beyond you."
"Then why do you work in the factory?" I asked, puzzled.
"For the same reason," he said. "To know how things are built, to know the people who build them. And because I don't want to be the person who buys virtue instead of earning it."
"Will you be different?" I asked, because we all change and promise not to.
"Depends on you," he teased, but his eyes were serious. "If you stay, I'll be better."
At night, under cheap lamps or bright chandeliers, we shared slices of life: his father who loved business but feared softness; his complicated family; my small apartment and the thrift-store coats. He learned my limits. I laughed at his jokes. We fought about dignity and paid wages and whether one could be proud while accepting help.
"Don't think you have to become someone else to be with me," he said once on a balcony overlooking the city lights.
"I don't want to be someone else," I replied, leaning my head on his shoulder. "I just don't want to be looked down upon because I am not what others expect."
He kissed my temple. "Then we'll be our kind of strange," he said. "Shared bikes, screwdrivers, and a dinner that tastes like stolen time."
Time did its soft, steady work. The boss never regained the old swagger. The factory taught me rhythms and patience. The city gave me a taste of expensive air. The Maserati became an odd chapter, a bright thing that kept returning when it was least expected.
One night, as we walked home from another too-loud, too-honest dinner, the shared bicycles stood silent under the streetlight. Cade took my hand.
"You can be the person who rides shared bikes with me," he said. "You can also be the person who walks into a five-star restaurant. You can be both because you are you."
"I am not a princess," I said.
"Good," he said, with a grin. "Because I don't like princesses either."
We laughed and rode off into the urban dusk, two very ordinary people who had learned to make an extraordinary life between screws and suits.
The End
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