Sweet Romance14 min read
He Said "I'll Marry You" — And Then the World Watched
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If I have sinned, may heaven punish me — but please, not like this: please don't let the punishment be that when I agree to fake being my friend’s girlfriend for a family dinner, I wake up in his uncle's bedroom.
"How are you going to make this right?" he asked calmly, sitting on the bed, eyes half-closed like he had all the time in the world.
I had exactly one plan: gather my things and flee.
"Can you not tell Grey?" I whispered. His brow twitched. "You still want to meet his parents?"
He frowned. "You're still going to the family dinner with him?"
I bit my lip. "He thinks I'm his girlfriend."
I was a professional at one thing: acting. Five thousand yuan an act. I hadn't planned on this act turning into a real-life mess.
He reached out and pinched my chin. "You broke into my room last night, held me. Did it ever cross your mind that he's your boyfriend?"
"I—" I stuttered. "I was drunk. I don't remember anything."
I really didn't. Grey and I had gone to his grandfather's house; Grey's parents weren't back yet, and Grey had told me I could do my own thing. I wandered, drank, tried to sleep, and woke up in a stranger's room. His robe hung loose, and there were scratch marks on his neck that he didn't hide.
"Please don't tell Grey," I begged.
He looked at me, amused and infuriatingly composed. "What will you give me in exchange?"
"Anything that isn't immoral," I said, because I could bargain my pride but not my ethics.
At that very second Grey burst in through the door. Panic spiked in me and I grabbed for him. He stopped at the threshold when he saw the scene, and my face went hot. The older man only smiled, as if he'd been expecting this kind of chaos.
"Your uncle's girlfriend?" Grey said, trying to sound casual.
"Yes." The older man shrugged like that would end the conversation.
Grey fumbled, "When did this happen? Why haven't I seen you before?"
The older man waved it off. "Is now the time for this?" He sounded bored, but his eyes were sharp.
"By the way," Grey added, then stumbled over his words and laughed nervously, "Grandpa's back. We should go meet him."
Cold dread crawled up my spine. My phone was on the bedside table. If Grey called, if anyone called—everything would explode.
I tugged on the other man's sleeve. "Don't let him call Ivy," I whispered. My name, Aviana, had been turned into "Ivy" by Grey's family because Grey thought it sounded sweeter.
He looked down at my hand and then at me, lips curling in a way that told me he could see right through my fear. "Don't worry. Girls who drank too much usually need to sleep it off." He smirked. "Let her sleep."
Grey didn't call. He walked out chuckling about how strange the morning was. When they left, I crawled out of bed and immediately tripped and fell into the man. My face was inches from his. My heart did something idiotic.
"I'm sorry," I mumbled.
"Don't be," he said, and for a blink he looked softer, almost fond. Then he straightened and helped me up.
At that moment, the grandfather poked his head in, trickling more panic into me. He peered up and down the room, blinked at me like I was a curiosity, and then, with a grin that felt cruel, said, "Bring her out. Let everyone see."
"I—this is a misunderstanding—" I tried, weak, but the grandfather wouldn't be deterred.
After a whirlwind of faces and misinterpretation, the older man told Grey he'd better bring his girlfriend to the family dinner. When Grey left, he shot me a look that read: you've caused me trouble, and I will get even.
I knew I had to go. The rational thing was to vanish, but I also knew that if this got back to Grey's company, to Grey himself, my small finance job might be in danger. I faked an agreement, gathered my things, and slipped out.
On the taxi home, Grey called. "Where did you go?"
"I'm sorry," I said. "I had to—return your five thousand. It won't happen again."
He sounded oddly amused. "Your uncle said he wants to transfer you to headquarters. Promotion."
I choked on my sigh. "He knows where I work?"
"Don't you remember?" Grey asked. "You interviewed with him, didn't you?"
"I don't—" My memory was blank.
When Grey mentioned a birthday party years ago—another night I'd drunkenly slept in what turned out to be the same man's room—I felt my stomach drop. Apparently I had made a habit of ending up in the wrong bed.
I quit the next week. It felt like the only device I had to control what little dignity I had left. But quitting didn't solve the problem of my parents. They heard I'd resigned and dragged me to an arranged date. I sat there mortified until someone across the table raised his head.
"You're still beautiful, Avi," he said. He reminded me of someone from university — a senior who used to laugh at my letters and return my confession with sarcasm. His name was Josiah Burns.
"You rejected me with a letter," I told him then. "You insulted my taste."
Josiah blinked, confused. "You sent me a love letter?"
My cheeks burned. Before I could explain, the room shifted: a man in a tailored suit walked in—Brooks Finley. He looked like a man who collected companies the way other people collected watches. He stopped, glanced at me for half a second, and then spoke to Josiah in a tone that made the air thin.
"Mind leaving? That table is comped. And don't have her bother you again."
The restaurant manager trembled and waved the would-be suitor away. Josiah's face flushed from confusion to anger to hurt—a rapid ballet of temper. People noticed. A few whispered. One woman pretended not to look, but her eyes were wide as a camera lens.
"Who's he?" Josiah demanded when we were alone.
"He's... my—" was the lie Grey arranged, and I let it hang.
It was an oddly public first step toward my entanglement with Brooks Finley, and the look on Josiah's face would burn into my memory.
Days later, I had a morning of nausea and fear — the rumor mill had found me. Someone joked I might be pregnant. I nearly fainted. I went to a clinic, long story short: not pregnant. The man beside me had been brooding the whole time. He asked, "Is it Grey's?"
"Don't be ridiculous," I snapped.
He watched me, quiet and dark, and then simply said, "You should know: if anything did happen, I wouldn't let you make the choice alone."
Maybe it was seeing him so watchful that made my heart stumble. Maybe it was how he stayed even after the doctor told me there was nothing. Or maybe it was the way he spoke about "responsibility" with a softness that didn't match the rest of him.
At work, whispers followed me. The assistant, Millicent Silva, started asking me to redo reports. She'd stand over my shoulder, mocking my calculations, until my patience thinned and I nearly cried. She smiled like she was testing me, and I knew she was testing my limits.
Brooks, my accidental bedmate and the owner of a thousand firms, watched all this with an expression I couldn't read. He arrived at the office sometimes without warning and would point at a spreadsheet like nothing had happened, as if the world could be reduced to numbers and order. Then, in a voice that lowered the room's temperature, he'd say, "I expect these by noon."
He began to save me at small ways: he would stay when I worked late, check the smallest error and teach me the tweak that made a table sing. Once, he leaned so close to me that my forehead brushed his mouth while he whispered a number. My breath went missing.
"Call me Brooks," he murmured later, when I, embarrassed, called him "boss." "You don't have to worry about being formal with me."
My cheeks warmed. "You're the boss."
"You're not like the others," he said quietly.
Heart-fluttering moment one.
The tension melted and entered a new phase the day Brooks found a video on his phone: Josiah Burns and the guy from the restaurant had been seen leaving a hotel. Brooks asked, flat, "Do you want to be with him?"
I felt my face heat. "He's sweet in small ways," I lied. "He's kind. He helps me."
Brooks's jaw tightened. "He plays at being kind. He can't keep his feet on the ground."
This was heart-fluttering moment two — Brooks's voice shifted from amused to deadly certain, and I realized he cared enough to actually be jealous.
I tried to make sense of my feelings. On the one hand, Grey — my safe, comic, gay friend who insisted on being my pretend boyfriend when it mattered. On the other, Brooks — the man who had, by chance, been the mysterious gentle stranger who had once carried me home from a drunken night and had quietly hovered in the edges of my life ever since.
Weeks passed and the rumor mill did what rumor mills do: it dug and whispered and made people choose sides. The assistant kept up her small cruelties. A group of colleagues started gossiping that I had been "the uncle’s late-night visitor" on purpose to get ahead.
Then things snapped.
The first person to pay a price was Josiah Burns.
It happened at a crowded restaurant during a company event. I went because Brooks had insisted; he'd invited staff and clients to celebrate a recent deal, and my presence was expected. Midway through, Josiah — that old senior who had once wrapped my confession in insult — swaggered in with a smug grin like he'd staged a comeback.
"Aviana." He bowed with theatrical insolence and slotted a hand under my elbow, "Fancy meeting you here. Am I intruding on your... new life?"
"Josiah," I said, and my knuckles whitened. I didn't expect him to behave like that. "You shouldn't be here."
He chuckled. "You know how the world is. People like to watch the spectacle."
"Please leave me alone," I said.
That was the trigger. Brooks rose from his seat like something had pulled a string on him. He walked toward Josiah with the slow, inevitable step of a man who refused to let small cruelties stand. Josiah's smile stayed, but the audience shifted: servers froze, clients turned, the woman's heads at the neighboring table angled like sunflowers toward a light.
"You're the man who once told her she had bad taste?" Brooks asked calmly.
Josiah's eyes narrowed. He answered with a laugh: "I don't recall insulting—"
"You wrote to her," Brooks interrupted, his voice quiet but full of weight. "You mocked her in writing, sent her a reply that humiliated her. You—"
"You're exaggerating," Josiah snapped, trying to regain the room. "That was years ago."
"Years or not," Brooks said, and the room went silent like the air had been vacuumed, "my company doesn't reward men who belittle women. You will apologize. Publicly."
Josiah's mouth opened, then shut. "Apologize? For what? For being honest?"
You could hear a pin drop. Josiah's confidence flickered. He tried to grin: "Aviana, you're making a scene."
"You're making us watch you humiliate someone you claim you once favored," Brooks said. "I won't have it."
I sat in my chair, rootless and mortified, as Brooks stood and faced Josiah. People in suits turned their phones; someone in the corner began to record. A few colleagues leaned forward, hungry for drama.
"Tell us," Brooks said to Josiah. "Tell everyone why you returned that letter."
Heat flooded Josiah's face. For a beat he looked the most dangerous he'd ever been—like a man on a podium with his fall impending. "Because she was naive," he said. "Because she... misread things."
"Is that what you said? Read it out."
Josiah's jaw worked. He tried to back away. A client at the table scoffed. "Sap," he muttered.
Brooks' voice warmed like metal. "Read the reply you mailed. Read it, Josiah."
For a terrifying moment I thought Josiah might explode. Then, to the room's astonishment, he took his phone out. He scrolled with shaking fingers, and when he began to read, his voice that had once been certain now sounded tiny.
"I said— I said, 'Your taste is poor. You'll regret this'—" He cut off, fingers white.
"You're going to read the whole sentence," Brooks insisted, speaking not to the man but to the moral center of the room.
Josiah swallowed and continued, each word more hollow than the last. As he read, color bled from his cheeks; the arrogance drained out. A silence more precise than any applause followed. The restaurant's lighting felt like daylight under a magnifying glass.
When he finished, Brooks did not roar. He walked up to Josiah slowly, took his arm, and spoke in a low voice that carried to the nearest tables: "You will publicly apologize to her, now. You will acknowledge your words were cruel. You will tell everyone why you thought it was funny to hurt her."
Between the clatter of cutlery and the subdued murmur of the patrons, Josiah's composure finally broke. His smirk split into a frown of disbelief, then denial, then panic. "You can't make me," he said.
Brooks' face softened like someone opening a book. He gave a small, hard laugh. "I can, and I am." He lifted the phone Josiah had been clutching, rewound the audio that recorded Josiah reading his own message, and played it aloud for the room.
All at once Josiah's expressions shifted: pride to confusion, confusion to anger, anger to humiliation. People whispered; two women near the entrance exchanged glances and tapped at their own phones. Someone muttered, "How mean." Others snapped photos.
"Everyone heard," Brooks told the guests. "If you can't apologize for hurting people, you don't belong at my table."
Josiah's face went slack. For a while he tried to bargain. "It was years ago," he croaked. "She started this by—"
"By being a human being?" I interrupted, louder than I planned. My voice surprised me with its steadiness. "By living? By being foolish sometimes? Yes, I was foolish. But I didn't deserve the letter you wrote to me."
Josiah's mouth opened to say something, but the way people looked at him had shifted. Some removed themselves from his proximity. Even a few of his acquaintances had turned away.
The manager, who earlier had ushered him out, now stood and announced, "Sir, we've had reports of harassment. I'm asking you to leave."
Josiah stumbled, anger and shame jousting across his face. He lunged for me, as if a final show of dominance could shore himself up. "You're overreacting," he hissed, but his voice now had a brittle sheen.
Then something I never expected happened: one by one, people began to clap. Not mockingly, but as if they had been taught by some sudden, sharp lesson. A woman who had earlier watched us with a coy smile stood and said, "You shouldn't humiliate people." Others echoed her. The clapping swelled in a surprisingly kind tide that felt like a small reclaiming of decency.
Josiah tried to back away, face twisted. He shoved past a waiter, muttering threats, and was escorted out. In the doorway, he turned and made a last attempt at control.
"This isn't over," he spat. "You can't ruin me."
"Watch me," Brooks said, cold and leveled. "Because the world is watching now."
Outside, phones kept buzzing. Someone's quick recording had already edited itself into a clip that would float around the city by the evening. Josiah's smirk had been replaced by a look of a man watching his reputation fray. He shouted a few more things, but the show was over: he'd been publicly unmanned, and the crowd had been the jury.
Josiah's expressions had gone through a full gamut: smugness, disbelief, denial, fury, suffocation, collapse. People here had seen him crumble. He was not physically harmed; his punishment was worse for the kind of man he was — a man whose currency was reputation. The world watched, and it recoiled.
That night, messages flooded my phone. "Did you see?" one read. "So proud of you," another. Brooks didn't speak much. He watched me instead, eyes a kind of softened storm. It was the kind of protection that doesn't roar. It simply arranges the world so I won't have to be shoved through it alone.
But Josiah was only the first to fall. The other person who'd made my life messy was someone I had trusted: Fernanda Edwards, my longtime friend who had, panic or mischief, told my parents I was "with child" after hearing a rumor. Her betrayal was different — it wasn't rooted in malice so much as thoughtlessness, but the damage was real.
Her punishment came later, at the company year-end dinner. Brooks had already noticed how rumors spread fast in our circle. He arranged a small reveal: on stage, with the whole office present, he invited her to explain why she had told my parents such a reckless thing.
"Fernanda," he said, calm and public, "why did you tell Aviana's parents she was pregnant?"
Fernanda, who sat flushed in the audience, blinked. "I— I thought— I thought they were joking. I only wanted to help. I didn't mean—"
"Help how?" Brooks asked.
Fernanda's face crumpled. "They were anxious. They asked. I said I saw two people leaving a hotel and I thought they looked close. I didn't think—"
"You didn't think," Brooks repeated. "You didn't think about how a rumor affects a person's life. You didn't think about her job, her family, or the humiliation she faced. You didn't think to ask before you told."
Fernanda began to cry. "I'm sorry," she said, over and over. Her apology echoed like a small, persistent drum.
"Public apologies are easy," Brooks said. "Actions speak."
The office's reaction was immediate. Friends stopped smiling at her. The finance team that used to laugh with her every afternoon went silent. A slideshow of the year's achievements played on the screen behind her, and friends who had once called her in the middle of the night to vent now kept their distance.
"You're suspended from company social events for three months," Brooks announced calmly. "And you will lead a project this quarter to rebuild trust with the finance team. You'll be supervised. If you can't do that, you'll have to face HR."
Fernanda's expression spiraled: pride to obstruction, denial to pleas. "That's harsh," she sniffed. "I didn't mean harm."
"Intent matters," Brooks agreed, "but consequences do, too."
Her reaction moved from desperate apology to glossy-eyed shame as colleagues kept their distance. The punishment was not a physical spectacle, but it was social and professional — the loss of casual acceptance and the imposition of responsibility. It was different from Josiah’s humiliation; where he had his reputation publicly shredded in a moment of theater, Fernanda’s punishment was a slow-burning social exile inside the company — a punishment that would test whether she could actually learn and repair the harm she caused.
Watching her shrink, hearing the whispered "I told you so" of a few smaller voices, seeing the colleagues who once joked with her now give her a measured nod — that stung. But I also felt a cold bead of relief. The people who hurt me had consequences — some immediate, some slow — and the rules in that room were clearer than they had been when Josiah teased me years ago.
After those two punishments, life felt strangely clearer. People behaved differently around me. Millicent, the assistant who had been sharp with me, softened when Brooks would glance her way, and she stopped undermining me. The office quiet had a new edge: a respect that had nothing to do with gossip.
As for Brooks, he kept pulling at threads of my life like a careful tailor. He corrected my reports gently, would stand outside my apartment until I came down, and once, very late, when the city was washed in rain and the taxis were gone, he said quietly, "Aviana, I'm not asking you to decide now."
"Decide what?"
"Whether to let me try."
He smiled, small and genuine. "I stole your university letter. I was too afraid at the time. I'm not afraid now."
Heart-fluttering moment three.
I laughed then, incredulous. "You what?"
"I edited your past just a bit," he confessed. "I didn't want you hurt when I couldn't promise anything. I thought I was protecting you. I was wrong."
"You stole my letter and then mocked me through a senior?" I teased, trying to hide how wildly my chest fluttered.
He reached out and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear, his fingers warm. "I only ever liked you. From the first time I saw you drunk in a doorway I thought you were fierce and messy and stubborn in ways I respected."
I felt my mouth curve. "So you edited a possibly tragic moment into a bigger mess."
"Yes." He smirked. "But the truth is here now. I like you. Will you let me try to be someone you can count on?"
Grey, bless him, pretended to be the couple's comic relief. "You two better make this official," he said. "I want to be the proud uncle who dragged a wedding cake to a party."
I blinked. "Uncle? That's—"
"Play along," Grey said. "It will be fun."
The thing is, I could see the contrast — where once I had looked at men with confusion and a stuttering heart, now there was someone who had not only saved me from humiliation but also rode with the storm that followed. He had punished the people who had hurt me not for revenge, but because he expected better of the world.
We moved forward, careful and clumsy. I learned spreadsheets. I made a stupid joke at a meeting and he laughed like it was the funniest thing in the world. I made mistakes and he corrected me, never cruelly. We fought, because small quarrels happen when two stubborn people learn to share a life. We kissed in the kitchen once, over a pot that had burned, and the smoke alarm sang us a warning song.
"You're ridiculous," I told him, breathless.
"I'm ridiculous for loving you," he said, and I couldn't help but smile.
And once, when we were walking out of a small sweets shop in an alley, a child pointed at us and said loudly, "Mom, are they getting married?"
Brooks looked down at me, then at the child, and said, unblushing, "I will. If she lets me."
I put my head against his shoulder and burst out laughing. The city around us went on, indifferent. But in the small orbit of our lives, things had rearranged: the people who had hurt me knew the consequences, and the man who had become my center had done something I didn't expect — he stayed.
The End
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