Sweet Romance12 min read
He Said "Do I Look Like a Man or a God?" — And Then He Came Back
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I was going home from another blind date gone wrong, pushing my scooter the last hill into the village, when the little disaster of the night — the scooter — finally gave up.
"Great," I spat at the cracked headlight. "Just great."
"Are you okay?" asked a voice out of the dark.
I turned. A small creature with golden fur sat on the roadside, hands folded like a bow. It looked ridiculous and solemn and a little heroic at once.
"Old-timer, what—" I started, then it cleared its throat.
"Old town friend," it said, "countrywoman, do I look like a man, or do I look like a god?"
I laughed, the cold part of me that had survived eight years of blind dates and a mother who drilled marriage into my bones. "You look like a handsome man who is rich, kind, responsible, does all the housework, would never leave me, and would bring ten million in betrothal money," I answered on impulse.
The animal blinked. A soft light pooled around it. Fur became hair. The bowing paws became elegant hands. In the cold shallow mud of the road, the creature grew into a man so sharp he could have been carved from some dark stone.
"Are you serious?" he said, voice low and strange.
"I also want a good voice, eight-pack abs, talent, filial piety, no mama's boy—" I rattled on, getting giddy.
He made a face like someone who had swallowed a lemon.
Then he walked like someone running away from the sound of his own heartbeat and head-butted a rock near the road. There was a spray of light and then the rock had an ugly red pool beside it.
He wasn't dead. He wasn't even in one piece, apparently — the handsome man had vanished and only blood was left on the stone. I felt both sick and disappointed.
"Of course," I muttered. "Of course he would try to die rather than court me."
The next morning, while I was nursing the humiliation of yet another blind date where the man announced, "No mothers please," my mother stood in the doorway.
"January, did you succeed?" she asked.
"Failed," I said. "He told my mother not to exist."
My mother, her face a map of worry and recipes, kicked a chair and cried, "You ungrateful girl, you drive men away!"
"I prefer to die than let you die," I said with perfect honesty.
She threatened the usual parental punishments and then, as if the universe didn't want me to have one simple night alone, someone heavy and sleek pulled up in a car — a very expensive car — on our mud road.
"Is that a Porsche?" Carmen Campbell, the neighbor, gasped from the yard.
"It is a Porsche," I corrected. "And I am not letting this pass."
He stood by the car like someone who didn't ask to be noticed. He looked like a postcard and like every idol on my company's mood boards. His face was the kind that made a crowd hush; even the old men stopping to smoke went silent.
My mother grabbed my wrist. "January, you cannot lose this one."
"Got it," I said, because who wants to deny their mother for five minutes of joy.
I walked up. He didn't move. He offered no hand, no smile. He looked like someone who had been told to be chilly as a job requirement.
"Is this your first time at this location?" I asked, inventing a question.
He inhaled once, steady as stone. "I came to propose," he said.
"You did?" My heart did a dumb little flip.
He said nothing more. He lifted a card and tossed it. "I dug up the village graves," he said matter-of-factly. "I sold the grave goods. I have ten million."
There was a blink of noise. Carmen Campbell almost fell. Neighbors heard and gathered like moths.
"Ten million? On what evidence?" my mother demanded.
He put his hands in his pockets and shrugged — a gesture that was arrogance and apology mixed. "I can prove it," he said, and the card in my hand had numbers. My mother cried, "Aha!" and Carmen whispered, "What a catch."
Later, in my messy living room, he sat like he belonged and behaved like a stranger in someone else's home. He was so handsome that it made you work to be rude. He was also oddly withdrawn. He moved like someone unused to human places.
"You used to be my 'big brother' when we were kids, didn't you?" I asked at one point, because somewhere in the past I thought such a presence had helped me dig corn and been my playmate.
He trembled, briefly. "Maybe," he said. "Maybe I remember."
His name — he told me — was Anders Moreno. He never smiled but he never left either. He paid ten million as a betrothal gift and then politely refused to sleep on the bed. He slept in the living room like a statue.
That night, I did the typical city-girl-in-country thing: I teased him, I tried to make him move, I offered to let him be my model, I promised I'd never touch him. He said nothing.
"Come sleep," I said, "I won't touch, I promise. I am a traditional woman."
He breathed out and lay down like a man conceding a small defeat. He had a scent: sunlight and fresh grass. I poked his abs and felt eight firm ridges.
"You're real," I said, grinning like a lunatic.
He closed his eyes. "You always were loud," he grumbled.
He stayed. He played house. He cooked. He became, in the small ways, mine and mine alone: he held my phone while I scolded my boss, he carried me like it was no work at all when my foot started to hurt, he pretended to be patient when my mother asked fifty questions about his family and education.
"Will you stay?" I asked when he drove me back to the city, dropping me at my apartment door.
He parked the Porsche with a grace that made me believe in choreography. He did not answer me right away. Then, quick as lightning, he crouched, pulled me onto his back like I was a light bag, and carried me to my door in a way so movie-perfect it set the neighborhood's gossiping ladies into a hum.
"You're heavy," he said, breathless.
"You're warm," I answered, and that was that.
He stayed in my tiny apartment. The hot water bill went up. My life, which had been a single loop of design sketches and late nights, wound around him. He modelled my garments. He stood like a living hanger. I designed like the besotted and the inspired: he made things better, because he was the right body for the thing I wanted to create.
"Do you want me to model?" he asked one evening.
"Yes," I said, and then, when he shrugged and peeled his robe off with that effortless arrogance: "Holy—"
He posed. I worked. The chemistry between me and him changed my designs; I sold the samples though I had no idea how a shy seamstress's sketches would make it into showrooms.
Then the theft happened.
Nicoletta Ikeda was the kind of woman who could smile like honey and stab like a file. She had been watching me with the slow focus of someone calculating an easy win. She knew about my designs, because I was careless and the files on my laptop had too many names and too many versions.
One afternoon, she "borrowed" a USB drive while I was away. The designs I had perfected for months — my heart on paper — left my computer with a soft pluck.
The next day in the meeting room, Nicoletta presented my designs as her own to the whole company. She named me as "helping" and tried to beam modesty. The boss, Heath Corey, clapped and smiled and the room went warm with fake respect.
I went red, then white, then furious. I stood up. "Those are mine," I said. "She stole them from my folder."
Nicoletta's face froze. "No," she said. "She lent me the files. This is cooperative work."
Heath looked amused and said, "Teamwork is good."
I had no evidence. I left the room as if the floor had cracked open beneath me.
Nicoletta smirked. She thought she had won. She thought she could have my work, my reward, and my reputation. The company boomed. The designs became a hit. But the hurt was not professional only: Nicoletta's success drew attention. My cheap apartment, my daydream of a quiet life with gems like Anders, suddenly had a target on my back.
That night in the stairwell, Nicoletta waited.
"I'll return the files," she hissed between teeth.
She shoved me. Hard. I fell — so hard — down the staircase. The world went red and then gone. The pain was volcanic. When I woke up in the hospital, I had broken bones and a ruptured sense of self. My designs were widely praised, and Nicoletta got the fragile applause.
But she wasn't finished.
Two days later, she was fired — but not before she attacked me again in the elevator. She beat me, she clawed, and then she fled. I had lost months, not just days. I could not walk the way I used to design and I couldn't defend my work.
I wanted revenge but I was weak, and so I called Anders.
He did not hesitate. He moved fast. He found me in the ambulance like someone who had been waiting at the place where the world breaks. He sat by my bed until the doctors left and the night softened. He fed me soup, adjusted my pillow, and corrected the nurses with a single cold look when they were clumsy.
"I will make her pay," he said once, clean as glass.
"Make her pay how?" I asked.
"Publicly," he said, and the vow passed like a lock closing.
Nicoletta's punishment came not in an arrest or a whisper but in a hall of light — and it was long, sharp, and humiliating.
It happened in the company's quarterly showcase, the day the new line would be officially launched. The whole company was there. Clients, journalists, and designers; everyone's faces were a smear of bright intentions. Nicoletta sat in the front row, oak posture, smile on like a mask. Heath Corey was on stage, praising the design that had won the company's biggest client in years. Nicoletta's name decorated the program in tasteful type.
"I will speak," I said.
"You're not supposed to be here," whispered someone. My bones still hurt from the surgery.
"I will speak," I repeated.
They made me sit in the back. I asked Anders to come. He arrived in the quiet that follows a storm; he didn't need to speak to be heard.
When Heath opened the show, applause rose like a tide. I stood. The room hummed like a hive. I walked up the aisle.
"I have something to say," I said, and my voice wobbled, then found courage in the way of people who have nothing left to lose.
Nicoletta's smile tightened.
"You are here, because you praised a design that turned out to be not hers," I said. "You applauded someone who took my work."
Murmurs. Nicoletta's lips parted.
I stepped forward and asked Heath to show the original files. He obliged, because the project had been digital, and because we now had a stage and cameras and a client who wanted clarity. Heath projected my old folder on the screen — the messy icons, the old drafts with dates and notes. He projected the drive logs.
"Anders," I said, and he took the clicker.
He tapped a few times. The audience saw metadata, timestamps, and a log of transfers. There was a sequence: my drafts, my sketches, my saved images; an external access at three in the morning the week before Nicoletta presented the work.
"Nicoletta," I said, voice clear, "did you copy these files?"
She laughed, high and brittle. "Teamwork looks better in the light," she said. "Some people share ideas."
"That's not sharing," I said. "That's theft."
I pressed play. Anders had arranged for a recording — not of my designs, but of another kind of proof. He had been there the night Nicoletta tried to "borrow" a drive. He had the receptionist log and a witness: the IT assistant Edwin Schumacher, who had helped me after my computer crashed. Edwin stepped up, throat dry, and said, "I saw Nicoletta with the USB. She smiled and put it in her bag."
Nicoletta's face changed — first shock, then denial, then fury, then the last brittle spiral: she slammed into excuses.
"You can't prove intent!" she shouted. "I thought she shared them."
"Intent is shown by action," Anders said. He looked mild and terrible all at once. "You copied files not shared with you. You presented them as your own. You attacked her to avoid discovery. You have been getting invited to events and praised on the basis of stolen work."
The room changed its face. People hissed. Cameras that had been neutral now tilted like vultures.
"Nicoletta Ikeda," Anders continued, "we have the logs, we have witnesses, and we have the surveillance footage of your stairwell attack." He pressed a button. The elevator cameras rolled a sequence of images — her as the instigator, her face hard, her shove. For thirty seconds the whole room watched Nicoletta push me down the stairs.
Something in Nicoletta cracked. People gasped aloud. The client at the table stood up, face white.
"She assaulted you?" asked a woman near the front.
"And she tried to cover it up by offering excuses," Anders said. "We have police reports, and I filed a full complaint. She was dismissed last week, but she remains unrepentant."
Nicoletta's composure collapsed. She rose like a drowning woman and began to pace. "You can't do this!" she cried. "This is slander!"
"Stop," said one of the journalists, who had been recording the whole thing. "Are you denying that's you?"
Nicoletta's hands trembled. She started to retort, then crumbled into a hollow, "No," that sounded like a tired animal. The crowd had turned. Phones came up like mirrors reflecting her face in real time. Her colleagues looked at her as if she had betrayed them personally.
"You put yourself in this place," I told her, finally giving voice to a grief that had been mine in the dark. "You made choices. You stole my work. You tried to kill me."
People around me reacted: shock turned to indignation, indignation turned to whispers. A woman near me snapped a photo. Someone started a quiet chant, "Shame. Shame." It spread like wildfire.
"Nicoletta," Anders said quietly, and that quiet carried like thunder, "you leave or we call the police for harassment and assault again."
She tried to regain control, to raise her voice, but the hall was no longer hers. Her colleagues averted their eyes. Clients shook their heads. Social media took the live stream and turned it into hot iron.
I watched Nicoletta's face go through the stages: arrogance, disbelief, rage, then utter collapse. She begged the boss, "Heath, please—"
Heath pressed a hand to his forehead. "This is company policy," he said. "We cannot and will not tolerate this. We will send the footage to the authorities. We will issue a public apology. Her accounts will be blocked. Her name will be removed from the program. We will hire an independent investigator."
Nicoletta went pale. People around her whispered that the client would withdraw their contract. People took out their phones and tweeted. Someone recorded and posted the elevator footage with a caption that included her name. Angry comments began to pile up under her public profile. The company's PR team rolled like an emergency squad.
I stood there breathing. The room around me shifted like sand. Nicoletta sat down. Her shoulders shook. A murmur of pity surfaced and then vanished as someone remembered the video.
But the punishment didn't stop at shame. Anders had planned for that. He arranged the legal route. The company publicly announced Nicoletta's dismissal. The client rescinded endorsement. The social feeds ate her reputation. Her bank of clients dried up like a drained pond. Friends un-followed. People who had laughed with her turned their faces.
At the meeting's end, Nicoletta went to the reception area where the staff's personal accounts were projected for a charity auction. Her name was removed from the board, literally scrubbed. When she turned to the crowd, the receptionist handed her a bag with her desk's items — pens, a mug, a small cactus. People watched the scene and some clapped. Some spat. Someone said: "Serves you right."
She tried to ask me for forgiveness in front of the cameras. I said, "You hurt me. You hurt others. Forgiveness is a private thing, not a public show."
She fell to pieces: denial, then pleading, then sobbing. For the first time I saw how small she was. I also saw the weight of what had been taken from me — months of work, my body broken, my trust smashed.
Around her, people recorded. They took selfies. They asked, "How could she?" A few colleagues who had been friendly avoided her like a contagious rumor.
At the end of the day, Nicoletta's world shrank to the size of a street corner. She found herself leaving the building with an empty bag and a mob of messages from former clients. Her mother called and didn't pick up. Her lover's messages were unanswered. The pity people had felt at first had curdled into scorn.
And yet I felt no triumph. I felt an odd emptiness. Justice had been satisfied in eyes and contracts, but not the tender parts that had been broken.
That night, sitting in the hospital with Anders beside me, I tried to explain. "This is not sweet."
He put his hand over mine. "It is better than silence," he said.
After the storm — after the lawsuits and public shaming — I started to recover. The designs that Rose (my useless but dear friend) and I made made it onto racks. The company apologized, and clients pledged new projects. Heath came by with slightly embarrassed eyes. Edwin and Sebastian and the others were more careful.
I healed slowly. In the middle of the nights, I would think of the first time I met Anders when he was a noisy little golden thing, and how he had gone from small miracle to man to godlike figure again.
"Will he leave?" I asked him once in the hospital, half afraid to speak.
He tapped my phone on the table. "You keep me," he said. "You gave me a place. You fed me. You dug a field with me. You never asked me to be anything else."
We joked and teased and created. He modeled, he cooked, he learned about fashion. My designs sold far better than I dared hope. But the strange, half-metaphysical truth lingered: he had been a creature of the wild, a being who bent between two worlds, who had been struck by lightning more than once.
"Did you — were you a real animal?" a reporter asked much later when the story blew up online.
"Anders smiled, "Ask my mother-in-law," he said.
There were nights when I could still hear the echo of the little golden thing in the dark. I went back to the old stage that I had refurbished with some of my money. I sang the old songs at the village festival and remembered everything.
A lifetime later — not so long, maybe five years — the village had changed. We had a new road, fruit orchards, lights, a proper stage. People who had mocked me now brought their children. I ran the orchards and the small workshop; Anders helped with recipes and video edits and sometimes with the harvest.
One moonlit night, after a show, I walked to the place the creature first appeared. I sang softly. A small golden shape moved in the moonlight. It bowed, the same joke, the same line.
"Old town friend, countrywoman, do I look like a man or a god?" he asked.
I laughed until I cried. "You look like both," I said.
He glimmered, then transformed, and this time he stayed as Anders — solid, present, home. He grabbed my hand and off we went into the cornfield where we had once fallen and risen.
When we married, people watched and laughed and clapped. When we had a child, my heart nearly broke from fullness. The child smelled faintly like cut grass.
"Don't worry," Anders teased the new, watching father, "I'll keep the lightning to myself."
He did. Mostly.
We built a life with a thousand small ordinary days full of the scent of sun and grass, the sound of my song, the rustle of corn, and the quiet laugh of a man who once bowed in the road and asked, "Man or god?"
"Man," I would say.
"But sometimes, god," he would answer, and kiss me, steady and warm.
The End
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