Sweet Romance15 min read
He was my past. He wasn't my future.
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I signed my name with a pencil that smudged. The lead left a soft gray streak across the corner of the sketch, and for a moment the world felt like it always had: small, quiet, all the colors I trusted inside my sketchbook. Then my phone rang.
"Jean, you're finally answering," Lindsay said, breathless as if she had run the length of the building. "Someone's at the studio. Big client, big problem."
"Who?" I asked, still holding my pencil to the paper.
"Noah Chambers," she said. "And—Ethan Vazquez is at the bar downstairs."
My pencil fell from my fingers and made a small, insignificant mark on the page. It might have been nothing, but I felt it like an alarm bell.
I put down the sketchbook and went anyway.
The bar was loud and cheap-scented, the kind of place where people pretended they were having fun. Ethan sat where he always did, slightly to the side as if he were both a part of the room and never quite in it. He was handsome in the way that made heads turn; he was handsome in the way that had once made my whole life tilt.
"Ethan." I tried to keep my voice steady.
He looked up. His eyes were red around the rims as if he had been crying or uncovered for longer than a night. "Jean."
He stood and, almost before I could think, took me by the shoulders. "Come home," he said. "Let's go home."
Laughter rose up like a wave from the other tables. A woman with red lipstick clinked her glass and yelled, "Make out! Make out!" Someone else shouted, "It's a dare!" as if the world were a stage and I was simply a prop.
I heard a voice in my head—Arnaldo Cameron's voice, my grandfather who had taught me to count my courage and spend it wisely. He used to say, "The people who clap for you don't always know you." The claps in the bar were ignorant and loud.
"Don't be ridiculous," I said. The paper roses on the table between us were already drooping. "Ethan, you're drunk."
"I'm not drunk." He smelled like cheap whiskey and regret. "Don't leave me."
"You're leaving me," I said.
He stared as if the new arrangement of air had surprised him. "I never left you."
"You let her come back into your life," I said. "You sat with her while I waited. You let me be her replacement."
Ethan's face hardened. "Who told you that?"
"The dress, the photos, the way you kissed her like everything about her was new," I said. "You taught me how to laugh, but you never knew how to listen."
"Je—Jean," he interrupted, and his voice went low and fragile. "We'll fix it. We'll start over."
"Is that what you say when she is mad?" I asked. "Do you give her roses?"
He laughed, short and brittle. "Do you want the roses? Take them."
He threw the half-bloom paper roses onto the floor. Petals scattered like small accusations.
"Go," I said. "If you're going to chase ghosts, don't drag me into the ruins."
He closed the door to the future with a slam and left the bar to the noise.
I stayed until the lights dimmed. Then I went home and slept with the taste of metal at the back of my throat and a hand in my pocket where my sketchbook never was safe.
The next morning, Arnaldo's house smelled like citrus and old books. He hugged me with hands that knew how to steady a person who had been falling for a long time.
"Come see your grandmother?" he said in a voice that did not ask for permission. "Bring your sketches. Show her something beautiful."
We had been visiting the care home for months. My grandmother's memory came and went like tides. Some days she recognized my name and traced my face like a map. Some days she only smiled at the sun and called me a neighbor.
"You're late," Arnaldo teased, but his eyes were kind. "Everything okay?"
I held my breath and almost told him everything. Instead I said, "A reader complained. A magazine said my style looked like someone else's."
Arnaldo's jaw set. "Then show them the truth," he said. "No one can take what is yours if you keep holding it."
I wanted to believe that. I wanted to file it away like a good thing.
At noon, a call from Lindsay made my heart sink. "Jean, there's a complaint at the studio. Someone's claiming your series looks like an older artist called Emberly Tarasov. They say the male lead—"
"Who is Emberly?" I asked, though I already knew.
"She's big. She published a graphic romance five years ago. People are making comparisons. Someone uploaded side-by-side images."
I slammed my palm on the table so hard my coffee wobbled. "This is my work," I said. "I write what I see. I drew from my life."
"I know, Jean," Lindsay said. "But it's messy. Come back."
I stepped into the city as if I were still asleep. I had been living inside a small, steady stream of things—drawing, visiting, going to the temple at night—and now the stream had been dammed.
At the studio, the complaint was a hot iron in the air. A reader had posted side-by-sides. Emberly Tarasov's male lead looked like Ethan Vazquez, same slanted mischievous smile, same cold grace. Someone had even pointed out the same cafes.
I stared at the images. Ethan's jawline in Emberly's comic matched the memory-cuts of my own past, and for a moment my chest fell as though it had been plucked and left open.
"No," I said, out loud. "He is mine. I wrote this from what we had."
Lindsay shrugged, helpless. "Some people are mean. Some people make money from making others bleed."
"Then let them bleed from the truth," I said.
I walked back to the apartment where I had lived with Ethan for five years. The door was still the same. Inside, everything still smelled faintly of his cologne. I had packed a small suitcase. I had left a note: "Ethan Vazquez, I don't want you."
Three nights later, a voicemail woke me up. Lindsay's voice was a little panicked. "Jean, Ethan's friends called. He's drunk at the bar near the avenue. Someone gave an address. They say he's alone and—"
I went to find him.
The bar was worse than last time. Neon bled across faces. The crowd was thinner but louder. Someone had started a game: choose a stranger and kiss.
"Play with us," a singer said, smiling like she was wearing a mask of good intentions.
I saw him in the corner, alone and small in a big leather seat. He looked unmoved by the noise, the way a portrait watches the world.
I pushed through. "Ethan."
He looked at me like I had carried a new world in my hands. For a second, I thought he might stand. He didn't.
"Leave it," he said. "Don't do this in front of them."
I crossed to him anyway. The woman in the red dress had already stepped forward to receive a dare. Someone laughed.
"Let's go home, Jean," Ethan said again.
"Home is not a place you hand to another woman," I said. "Home is the person who chooses you. You didn't choose me."
He flinched like a wound reopened. "I am choosing you now."
"Too late," I said, and the room cheered as if I were a spectacle.
People knew our story; fame likes to shape private shames into public entertainment.
We left the bar in silence. There was a car waiting. I had thought this would be the end and it was, in the worst way: he left me at the curb, and he didn't see the way my knees folded.
I moved out the next morning. Five years of life contracted into a small suitcase. I left the dresses he had once said matched my laugh and kept the rough sweaters he had never understood.
Arnaldo stood with me outside the door while I lugged the suitcase down the hall. "You will be all right," he said. "You will make your light in better places."
"I am tired of being someone's second story," I told him. "I am tired of being used as a prop for someone else's memory."
"Then be a first," he said. "Make your story."
I found an old temple on the edge of the city that night. I drew in the small chapel: a quiet, clumsy prayer that my luck might change. I pulled a string, a weight clinked, and the attendant said, "That is a bad charm."
"Aren't they supposed to tell me my future?" I asked.
"No," the attendant said. "They tell you possibilities."
The next morning, strip of paper in hand, I found a slip that read: "Not fate; different paths." Nine times in a row I drew that line before the man bowed and said, "You should let go."
I had already decided. If fate could be purchased by excuses and cheap roses, I would buy my own future with honest work. I would stop drawing someone else's life and start drawing my own.
Weeks passed. I worked on panels with fits and starts. I stopped sleeping in the bed that smelled of someone else’s perfume. I dyed my hair—the color was a soft dark green that made my face look new—and the city looked at me differently. People stared less and read more when they saw the new person at the café.
One afternoon, a man came to the studio to buy a painting. He stood in the doorway as if the light itself had opened with him. I knew the look in his eyes—gentle, patient—the same kind of gaze that sat and listened more than spoke. When he smiled at me, my breath thinned.
"Atticus Carver," he said. "You painted the one with the boats. I liked it."
"I painted the one with the boats because I remember the water," I said. "Thank you."
He stayed. He asked about work. He bought a small watercolour and left his phone number with Lindsay like it was a pledge.
Small days had begun to collect into something brighter: Atticus showing me a painting he had bought for his grandmother, walking me to the market and watching me choose vegetables, holding an umbrella with no theatrics when it rained. He spoke like someone who cared for words as if they were fragile things. He listened the way other people breathed.
Then the world that had been my old life tried to crash through the new door.
Ethan's name drifted back like smoke. Emberly Tarasov—Ethan’s former flame, famous for the comic that had made her a household name—returned to town and walked into my life as if she owned it. She had memories shaped like diamonds and she used them.
She came to my studio like a queen visiting a lesser court. She walked in, took a look around as if the world had been redecorated for her return, and said, "Nice place. So quaint."
Her arm hooked into Ethan’s the way a vine finds a trellis. He walked like the vine had grown into his chest.
"Ethan," I said. My voice was smaller than I had hoped. "Why are you here?"
"She's back in town," he said. He looked at me with tired, gullible eyes and said, "I was hoping you'd understand."
"Understand what?" I asked.
"That she matters," he said.
I had rehearsed a thousand things to say. None of them were good enough then.
"Then take him," I said. "Take whatever is left of what you call us. But don't ask me to be proud of being your copy."
He grew angry with me then. "You are being dramatic," he said. "You have always been dramatic."
"Drama does not hurt people," I said. "People do."
The weeks that followed were public and sharp. Someone posted side-by-side comparisons between my strip and Emberly's old work. The click and clack of the internet became a background drum. My comic was under investigation and my reputation teetered. Someone wrote nasty things about me online and called me a fraud. A few people accused me of copying because I had once loved the same man Emberly had loved. They assumed my work borrowed his face, not his absence.
Atticus came to the rescue more gently than a crusader. He stood by me in the studio and at the gallery where someone left a slanderous review. He covered the small, practical things: he photographed pages for me, contacted the artist legal team, offered to host a private showing for collectors who would appreciate the honesty in my line work.
"Let me handle it," he said. "You keep making what you make."
"You are doing a lot," I said.
"It is little," he answered. "It is enough for me to be around you."
There were moments that felt new and dangerous—small hand touches in grocery aisles, fingers brushing at the edge of a canvas that made me dizzy. He made space without closing doors. He made promises like a map, not a chain.
The city watched. People loved spectacle, and the next spectacle came at the auction.
I was invited to attend as Atticus's guest—an honor for a small artist like me. We walked into a room luminous with lights and expectations. I felt like I was wearing a borrowed universe.
The auction began with trinkets. Then a painting that I admired came up. Atticus raised a paddle; someone else matched him; Ethan, who had been there, suddenly lifted his hand too. Price escalated like war.
"Jean," Atticus whispered. "You okay?"
"It's fine," I said. It was not fine. Ethan had his mouth set in lines I had seen when he was fulfilled in other people's praise. He looked like a man who believed he could buy everything but thought love was as cheap as an accessory.
The bids soared. But when the last and most famous item—an enormous blue diamond called "Asia's Heart"—came to the stage, something changed. The price began at a million. Emberly’s eyes burned like a camera light. The number crept up and up.
Atticus raised his hand and and scoffed an amount so large that the room held its breath. He made a joke out of the money and then he made a point: the stone was ridiculous in price and yet he made it look like something small he could cradle. He outbid Ethan without breaking a smile: ten million, then a number beyond.
Ethan flushed. He was human, suddenly, at the edges. He tried to keep up. He couldn't.
The room leaned forward like a tide. The diamond went to Atticus, who smiled at me with a calm so quiet I felt the urge to laugh out of happiness.
Ethan backed away. He looked as if someone had told him the world had ended and he had misunderstood—he had woken up into a less comfortable reality. Emberly was horrified that he had been outbid by someone who wasn't her past.
The thing about public places is that they are loud with very decisive ears. I found myself wanting to shout the truth. I wanted to reveal the small things: the dress he had bought Emberly last month, the way he answered her messages, the telephone call I had listened to in the kitchen long after he thought I slept. But I kept quiet. My silence felt like dignity.
Later, when the auction ended, Atticus wrapped his arm around me and walked me out. People looked at us like we were a single bird, whole and sure.
Ethan followed us out. He stopped just before the doors and looked at me. "Jean," he said. "You took it."
"You left me," I answered. "You chose your past."
He looked like a man losing a bet he didn't know he'd made. Emberly looked like a woman who had thought the throne would be easy to reclaim.
It was not the end.
The public punishment that would change everything arrived at the starriest place possible: the subscription gala where corporate patrons, critics and fans exchanged sighs and business cards. In the foyer people sipped champagne and refreshed their scandals like perfumes. Emberly had been invited as a guest of honor. Ethan had been invited by his own circle.
My name had not been on the guest list. But Atticus held my hand and brought me in as his partner.
The band played as if the music itself wanted to write a letter. The lights were soft; everyone looked made of glass.
"Ethan," one of the hosts said, smiling with a wallet's certainty. "You look well."
"Yes," Ethan said. "Very well."
The speech portion came and went. When the lights dimmed, a projector flickered and Emberly's old comic rolled across the wall as a retrospective. Then, with an almost cruel timing, side-by-side images appeared—the one the internet had viralized. A hush passed over parts of the room. My stomach turned over.
"Allow me a moment," Atticus said into the hush. He turned to the crowd. "People like stories. People like characters. But people don't always like truth. Tonight I would like to read a few lines that are proof. Proof of originality."
He stepped forward, and with a calmness that felt like a blade, he narrated the timeline—how Emberly's comic had debuted years earlier, how pieces had similar elements because many artists read the same books, visited the same cafes, and used the same archetypes. He spoke of difference—the way a line finds a face when it is drawn from memory rather than imitation. He took out my sketchbook without missing a breath and opened it.
"Jean Gardner has been drawing these panels for years," he said. "These pages are dated. These pages are her life. She drew the man she loved, and time will show that the faces are not theft. They are records."
Whispers exchanged like coins. Emberly's smile turned brittle. Ethan sat like someone who'd been asked to define loyalty and was found wanting.
"Do you have any comment?" the host asked, eyes like cameras.
Emberly's hand went to Ethan's arm like a trap. "Jean is talented," she said. "But the world borrows. We are all inspired by each other."
"Is that what you call it?" Atticus said. He had a voice that did not shout but persuaded the crowd closer. "Borrowing a life is not art. It's theft."
That is when my proof came down like a curtain. Lindsay had, at my request, gathered the timestamps, the drafts, emails, and a scan of a receipt showing I'd bought the tiny picture book that influenced both of us years before Emberly published. The timeline matched my notes. It matched my dates. It matched the panels. The room filled with a new sound: the sound of people reorienting.
Emberly's expression shifted. For all her composed face, the edges of her poise cracked. Ethan's face went very pale.
"You two were friends," a woman near the back said. "Why didn't you speak up sooner?"
"Because she didn't know to," someone else muttered.
The projector flashed again: a private message thread between Emberly and a publicist arranging a PR narrative. A hush fell heavy. The sound of crystal clinking faded into the room like an embarrassed cough.
"What do you have to say to that?" Atticus asked, quiet and careful.
Emberly opened her mouth like a seamstress who had been caught with her thread snagged. "It's complicated," she said. "I—"
"Complicated?" someone said. "You claimed originality. You timed your posts when it helped your book. You pushed the narrative."
A murmur rose into the room. People who had enjoyed the spectacle of comparing comics were caught on two sides: the glamour of a famous artist, and the reality of a younger artist running to defend herself. Emberly tried to compose herself. She looked out and saw cameras. She saw skeptics. Her smile was a practiced thing that could not mask the tilt.
Ethan's reaction changed faster than the light. First he was stunned; then he began to explain; then he denied; finally, his edge cracked into panic. "I— I never—" he started.
"You loved her," Atticus said, with the terrible calm of someone sanding away varnish. "You loved the memory. You built a life around someone who left. But letting someone else be your echo doesn't make you whole."
Ethan tried to reach across the small stage. "Jean," he said. "Please."
I walked forward. My own voice was thin as paper, and yet it carried. "You left me," I said. "You asked me to be someone else. You told me to smile like another woman's memory. I did that for five years." I glanced across at Emberly. "And you—" I paused as she lifted her chin. "You tried to claim my pain as your art."
The crowd breathed as if someone had lit a match. Cameras flashed. Someone started a low applause.
Emberly went through the motions: indignation, then tears, then a bossy display of hurt. But the truth was unglamorous for her. The people who had once courted her applause now tilted their heads and read the timeline. They were quick to let their opinions change.
"How do you plead?" the host asked, as if this were a courtroom where celebrity could still be judged.
"Isn't this a bit mean?" Emberly said. "I didn't mean to—"
"Mean?" a woman cried. "She accused you publicly, and then the evidence came forward. The meanness isn’t in response. It's in the act. You used someone’s likeness for attention."
Ethan's face collapsed. For a moment, he looked dizzy. He tried to protest, to say he was merely a man who had made mistakes, but the room refused to let him hide. The friends who had laughed at my humiliation turned away. People filmed. Some clapped. A woman in a fur stole reached for her phone and called a gossip column.
The punishment was not one merciful law or a long sentence. It was many small things stacked together into heat: Emberly's sponsors pulled back, not with headlines but with private calls. The publisher who used to buy her dinners withdrew the next project. The brand that had put her photo at the center of a lipstick campaign said they had to protect their image. The man who posed as the villain found that one by one, the doors he expected to be open were closed.
Ethan was cut out of invitations. He saw his friends' faces harden. He tried to call them but he was passed around like an inconvenient story. His humiliation was not a public sentencing so much as a social desertion: meals canceled, texts unanswered, people who used to be a part of his comfort turning their faces.
Crowds gathered near the velvet ropes the following days to gossip. Photographs of Emberly on street corners sold for pennies to tabloids. People he used to meet at golf clubs stopped returning his calls. The accounts he'd used vanished from his social feed. The woman he had left me for seethed in a private misery that no camera could soften.
Meanwhile, Atticus and I quietly resumed our life. He did not post a victorious selfie. He bought me a sunflower that smelled of summer and said, "There is your morning."
We lived in small normal things: running to the market, drawing until our hands ached, laughing at a joke with the loud middle sound of it. Once the storm had passed, things became less dramatic and more honest. People in the art world who had shied away now came back with letters of appreciation. Readers wrote emails about how my characters helped them through a night. A magazine that had once sided with fame offered me a column to talk about craft and truth.
Ethan's punishment was public and private. He was excluded from friend circles; sponsors withdrew; his name was a door that people rarely opened. Emberly returned to a smaller press and took to teaching. Together, they gathered their dignity like paper and tried to rebuild.
I married Atticus nine months later at the little temple where I had first thrown my bad-luck notes into the offering box. My hair was still a soft green in the light. Arnaldo came forward with steady hands and placed a small book into my palm—my first sketchbook, filled with the work I had done when I still believed a man could fix a life like a broken toy. I opened it for the guests. I read one small passage aloud:
"I will not let my life be an echo. I will make a sound of my own."
Atticus took my hand. "Jean Gardner," he said, solemn and sweet, "I am not here to own you. I am here to hold you, to help you see the colors you are too humble to name. Will you?"
"Yes," I said. It was impossible to put everything I felt into one word. But the word fit like a seam.
On the day that counted, I did not throw away all memory. Sometimes memory is a careful thing: it teaches you where you have been wrong and where to build. Ethan remained a cautionary chapter. Emberly remained a complex image: a woman who had been both hurt and hurting. And Atticus became the daily morning light—steady, patient.
We kept one ritual: at our little table every Sunday, I placed a small sunflower in a jar. Atticus would look across at me and say, "We begin again," as if we needed a reminder.
When I tell the story now, I say it like this: I was not a replacement. I was not a second choice. I was a person who learned to be first.
The End
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