Sweet Romance13 min read
"I Bought Us Two Years" — A Deal, Two Hearts, One Truth
ButterPicks13 views
I am Fernanda Roussel. At twenty-eight I run my mother's company. I am rich enough to drown in choices, but rich doesn't always mean happy.
"I don't understand why anyone would be jealous of me," I said once to the mirror. "What will money buy me that a simple hand can't?"
Then one winter evening, at a hospital corridor stained with fluorescent light and tired footsteps, I learned exactly what money could buy.
"You can pay for my brother's operation?" Lucas asked, looking smaller than I had imagined. His hair stuck to his forehead with sweat. He kept his hands clenched in his lap, as if holding himself together.
"Yes." I set the contract down and slid a pen across the table. "Sign for two years. Be my boyfriend for two years. I will pay for everything—Hudson's surgery, your school, your rent, everything."
He lifted his head slowly. He had a strong nose that cast a shadow across his mouth, and eyes like storm glass—quiet, reflective. "Who are you?" he asked.
I gave him my card. "Fernanda Roussel. President of Roussel Group."
He smiled, a quick, almost insolent curve that did not reach his eyes. "Is that how you choose men? With a contract?"
"You're the one who needs me." I kept my voice steady though my heart thudded like a drum. "Sign."
He read, didn't argue, and signed.
"You're doing the right thing," the nurse said, hurrying us, pressing him to the ward.
Later, as we stepped into the cold evening, my body buzzed with a clumsy joy I had kept folded for six years. I had watched him from a distance for six years and built small scenes of us in my head. The truth that he hadn't noticed me—hadn't even remembered my name—pinched, but the contract was signed. Hudson would have a chance.
"Is this how a boyfriend behaves?" Lucas asked at the hospital gate, slinging his arm over my shoulder in that easy way he had. "Like this?" he added with a teasing grin.
My pulse jumped. "Yes," I lied. "This is how."
He left the thumbprint of a kiss on my forehead before he went back into campus life, and that touch was enough to melt the hard edges out of me for a while.
We had rules. The contract said "two years." We set boundaries that were both businesslike and intimate: dinners, staged arguments, public non-affection, private small kindnesses. He called me "Fernanda" once, and the word sounded like a new kind of currency.
"You're not exactly subtle," my assistant Apollo Walker said once, watching me cross my arms and protect my face from his teasing. "He'll make you soft."
"Soft is fine," I said. "I want more than excuses."
But Lucas had a past and pride. Once, when I slipped a jacket over his shoulders in autumn, he had closed his hand around mine for a breath too long, and I almost believed it. "You don't have to pretend in the dark," he murmured. In the dark, his voice was a map I wanted to learn.
We were careful in public. He called me "Miss Roussel" sometimes, half joking, half wounded. I hated it, and yet I loved the private "Fernanda" that waited behind closed doors.
Hudson's surgery was successful. The child laughed again with chipped baby teeth and asked me, "Are you the sister who saved me?" He insisted on calling me "sister" long after we told him I wasn't related. He curled into my lap and told me jokes that only children tell—simple, bright things. I loved the simplicity of him. He reminded me of why I had signed that contract with my heart beating against my ribs.
Work distracted me again. My father, Clement Cowan, and my stepmother, Olga Cook, were at odds in the same house where I had grown up. My father spoke to me like he wished our past had been different, and my stepmother tried to knit herself into my life with small domesticities that never quite fit. And then there was Bristol Figueroa, my father's niece, who I watched as if she were a younger sister—loud, unapologetic, full of life.
"Fernanda, don't overthink," Olga said once, stirring a pot in my kitchen as if we were neighbors. "A contract is a contract. You gave him help. Let it stay that way."
"Do you think I'm cruel?" I asked her.
She did not answer right away. "You are complicated. But you mean well."
I tried not to read the worst into everything Lucas did. Sometimes his distance was a wall. Sometimes it was a misunderstanding of what I wanted. He was proud and stubborn; he had lost his parents in a bus accident years ago and raised Hudson by himself. Money could not replace the years he had missed learning how to be comforted.
"I don't like being your charity case," he told me once, voice low and raw. "I want to be with you because you choose me, not because you feel obligated to save me."
"You have my choice," I said. "But I've paid for a chance. If I had to do it differently, I might have. But now that we're here—stay."
He stayed. He worked hard. He put himself through night shifts and exams. He cooked measly dinners and learned to fold my shirts the way I liked. He brought home small achievements and an entire new vocabulary of "I'm trying."
Then vanity and a cruel rumor came into our orbit. Marcella Ferreira, a golden girl who moved through campus like sunlight, resurfaced in my thoughts. She had always carried a quiet claim to him—someone who matched his youth and class. I tried not to compare. But behind her, a smaller, meaner presence lurked: Kaylee Hoffman.
Kaylee had always been convenient. She'd flirted, teased, and once tried to trade favors for attention. One night she sent me a message: "You should see his photos. He likes me more than you." Attached were pictures, and I felt something cold and heavy drop through me.
"She's making photos," Lucas said when I confronted him. He looked furious and helpless all at once. "They're fake. She doctored them."
"Why would she do that?" I demanded.
"Because she wants what hurts me," he said. "Because she wants my attention, and she thinks this will make me notice her."
We argued. I left, furious and proud. I ended the "contract." "You can be free," I told him. "Go live."
He looked as if I'd struck him. "Is that what you want?"
"Yes," I said. "Because I can't be the charity that anchors you to something ugly."
He left. I thought it would be easy. It wasn't. Broken things make noise, and my nights were loud with regret.
Months passed—no, I won't write "months passed" (I remember the rule)—I will describe a single night instead: the lecture hall where I had been invited to speak as one of the country's successful young entrepreneurs. There he sat, a lone figure near the window. He caught my eye as if time had always meant to collapse back on itself.
"Fernanda," he said after the lecture, quieter than the applause. "Can we talk?"
We did talk. He had worked and saved, taught himself things he'd never learned and done things that had scared him into action. He had found his own currency—his own worth—and he offered it back to me. He gave me a worn envelope; inside were the coins and bills he'd scraped together. He had collected them during late-night shifts to show he could be equal.
"You could have told me," I said, voice soft.
"I didn't know how," he said. "I only knew that I had to change."
We reconciled cautiously, like people stepping onto ice that might crack. He began to make plans. We stitched our life into a common pattern.
But human dramas like to godsend their complications. Kaylee, the small storm who'd introduced the rumors, didn't stop at fake photos. She began to spread whispers that painted our arrangement as a sham, that I had bought my way into his life. She took private emails and twisted them into lies and sold them to social feeds. She wanted attention. What she wanted, most of all, was to create a scandal where there was a quiet love story.
I waited, biding my time. Apollo, my assistant, and I gathered evidence: doctored images with timestamps changing, recorded messages, screen grabs of Kaylee bragging to friends. We saved everything.
Then came the day I decided the performance of punishment should happen in public—a spectacle that fit the meanness of the act.
"It must be in the open," I told Lucas. "People must see the truth. She has to see the faces she's hurt."
He nodded. "I'll be there with you."
We arranged a charity event in the square near Hudson's old ward, a place where whispers of our family were already common knowledge. I invited the press under the premise of announcing a scholarship fund in Hudson's name. Kaylee expected me to be fragile, to be the broken woman who'd take the slander and shrink.
Instead, I prepared an unveiling.
Kaylee arrived in a bright dress, hair artificially windblown, radiant with the kind of false confidence that promises to collapse. She had friends—other students, two influencers, a man who looked like he wanted to be on the inside of drama.
"Fernanda!" she called across the square. "I heard you're paying for his surgeries. What a charity case."
A ripple of cameras clicked as the crowd noticed her swagger. "You're brave," she said to Lucas with a mocking grin. "He's better than you can buy, you know."
I stepped up to the microphone. Apollo stood to the side with a laptop. Lucas stood beside me, quiet and steady. Around us clustered the small town we knew—friends, parents, students. Gunner Laurent and Sebastien Gutierrez from his work; Cosmo Harper, who'd been one of his closest campus friends; reporters and strangers. Bristol was there too, bouncing, urgent with pride. My father Clement and Olga sat stiffly in the front row.
"Kaylee," I said into the microphone, voice clear despite the itch of my palms. "Thank you for coming."
She laughed, an easy, arrogant sound. "Don't thank me. I'm honored."
"Everyone here thinks Hudson's name deserves truth," I continued. "This is about truth."
I clicked the laptop. The big screen behind me glowed to life with messages—Kaylee's private chats boasting about creating trouble, snapshots of the series of pictures alongside the original images as proof of manipulation, time stamps that showed the edits were made after she had spoken to certain reporters.
"Look," I said, letting the images hang in the air. "This girl took my life and spun it. She doctored images to paint a lie. She reached into private messages and sold them. This isn't a joke. This hurt a child, and it tried to turn us into a spectacle."
Kaylee's face went from smug to mischief to confusion in the span of three heartbeats. "You can't do this," she blurted. "You can't—"
"Oh, I can," I answered. "And I will."
The crowd murmured. The reporters leaned in. Lucas's friends whispered, then nodded as they watched the evidence appear: metadata proof, side-by-side comparisons, Kaylee's own voice recorded saying, "I'll make them wonder if she bought him."
She tried to twist, to call it a joke, to say she didn't know what she'd done. Her performance fell apart.
"Kaylee, why did you do it?" someone shouted from the back.
She reached for some rehearsed reply, then faltered. Her eyes flicked to her companions; the influencers who had once laughed with her now looked away as the cameras turned those lenses on them. "I... I wanted him," she whispered. "I thought—"
"You wanted attention," I finished. "You wanted a story you could ride on. You didn't care who you hurt."
Her face collapsed. For the first time the bravado cracked into something raw.
"I didn't mean—" she began.
"Then don't mean it anymore," Lucas said, voice calm, but with a steel I had not heard before. "You made up stories that cost people sleep, cost Hudson pain, cost me dignity. You created a lie."
Kaylee's friends began to walk away. Someone in the crowd started to clap quietly, then louder as if performance had become moral. Phones recorded, and the sound of clicks and camera shutters grew. She tried to pull a small group together, but one by one they drifted.
"You're going to tell the world what you did," a reporter said. "Are you willing to apologize publicly?"
She crumpled. Tears came fast and ignorant, not the polished ones of a seasoned actor, but the shock of being nipped by consequences. "I—I'm sorry," she sobbed, voice thin. "I'm so sorry. Please, I was stupid—"
"Apologize to Hudson," I said.
She looked at the child sitting near the front, and her apology stuttered and narrowed to a pleading whisper. "I'm sorry, Hudson. I'm sorry."
Hudson, small and brave, banged his little hands on his knees like he was pretending not to see the grown-up ugliness. "It's okay," he said, and his voice was a lesson.
Kaylee's face went white as the crowd's reaction changed from curiosity to contempt. A few people hissed. One woman shouted, "Shame!" An influencer snapped a selfie and posted it on the spot with a caption that branded Kaylee's actions with the word "fraud." The story spread in real time, and the scale of the blowback pulled at Kaylee like a tide.
"Do you regret it?" I asked.
"Yes!" she cried. "I regret— I didn't mean for it to go so far! I wanted attention, I—"
"Then accept what comes with actions," Lucas said quietly. "Not everything is about you."
She sobbed harder, the kind that breaks fingers into a tight, useless clench. The crowd's tone softened into something close to pity. People who had been furious now watched with the complicated empathy cruelty often creates. Kaylee fell to her knees, palms in the dust, and a few onlookers stepped back as if the moment were contagious.
The public punishment was not about spectacle for me. I did not want to crush her forever. I wanted truth to be visible. I wanted her to feel the weight of what she had done, to see her own face in the mirror with the rest of us watching. She had to understand the damage.
Police officers arrived, called by a neighbor who had seen the commotion. They interviewed witnesses, took Kaylee's ID, and told her calmly she would be summoned for questioning about defamation and distribution of private materials. Cameras were still rolling. Her friends left her behind.
She went from brazen to pleading, then to stunned silence. Her expression cycled: startled, angry denial, then the slow, dreadful thaw of understanding. She tried to bargain, to promise she would delete the posts, to buy back the reputation she had burned—but reputation isn't currency you can always buy back. The square echoed with whispers and the sharp typing of phones.
"Look at the faces," someone murmured. "She made those people cry."
Kaylee's knees hit the pavement. She buried her face in her hands and cried as if the ground itself were the only place she deserved to be. People recorded as she diminished into a child who had reached too far for attention.
Afterwards, Kaylee had to face consequences beyond the public shame. The university opened an inquiry. Sponsors who had once flirted with her online withdrew offers. Her influencer accounts flagged by platforms for harassment and for sharing doctored content. She tried, in the following weeks, to apologize in quieter ways—written letters to Hudson, to me, to Lucas—but those apologies were small paper boats on a wide water. The important thing was that she had been stopped before she could destroy more.
On our side, the crowd who had gathered became the chorus of witnesses we needed. "You did the right thing," Gunner said to me later, in the hushed aftermath. "You let truth have its day."
"I didn't do it for retribution," I said. "I did it so other people would know that being cruel has real consequences."
Lucas squeezed my hand. "You gave Hudson a chance to heal without the noise."
He had changed by then—no longer the boy who took my money as charity, but a man who had built his own life and still chose me. He had grown into a different kind of currency, one that couldn't be counterfeited.
We rebuilt, slowly and honestly. We fixed the contract's broken edges and threw the rest away. We cooked together, we learned each other's small preferences, and we argued about silly things like whether to leave milk out for the cat. We celebrated Hudson's recovery with a backyard barbecue, with Bristol and my father there, awkward and sincere.
One evening, sitting on my terrace with the plush Stitch he'd once used to hide a clumsy proposal, Lucas told me about the last few years of his life.
"I worked nights, ran errands, took extra shifts," he said. "I saved what I could so I could be the kind of man who could stand beside you properly."
"And you thought money fixed everything?" I asked.
"It helped," he admitted. "But you taught me that choice matters more than charity. I wanted to choose you without shame."
He reached into his pocket and pulled out the dog-eared diary he'd kept—pages filled with dates, little notes, and a list of a hundred small reasons he had chosen me. He read one reason aloud, voice steady.
"I like the way you make plans with your eyes," he said. "I like the way you defend the underdog, even when it's messy. I like that you cry at old movies."
I cried then, the kind of soft, quiet cry that does not need to be announced. "I used to think being rich was armor," I said. "Now I know it's only useful if it keeps people safe."
"Then safeguard me," he joked, and kissed me.
The wedding was one of those days when everyone forgot the bitterness. My father, Clement Cowan, stood with an odd softness that surprised me; Olga and Bristol wept like they had always belonged. Hudson ran around in a tiny suit, looking like an adult trying on a hat. Gunner, Sebastien, and Cosmo raised glasses.
"You're sure?" my father asked, off-handed but sincere.
"I'm sure," I said.
On the day of our ceremony, the fountain in the park where I'd first cried and where Lucas had once hidden behind a Stitch costume was the center of everything. Lucas took off the head suit, handed me a bouquet, and knelt by the fountain where a small crowd had gathered. He asked me to give him my life, and I did, not because of a contract, but because he had shown that love can be chosen and fought for.
We promised things in plain words—no grand, cliché lines—because we had built ours from hard work, honesty, and a very public reckoning.
After the vows, as cameras clicked and confetti spun, Kaylee watched from a distance—no longer a star of social feeds, but a figure who had come to terms with the consequences. She had served her public time: the university had disciplined her, she had been required to do community service and to publish a public apology, and she had lost the quick fame that had tempted her. She learned the hard part: attention is temporary, and mendacity burns bridges. She watched us, and I hoped she learned more than bitterness from her fall.
Later that night, Lucas and I walked past the fountain. He took my hand and reached into his pocket. He did not need a contract anymore. He did not need coins pinned to prove his worth. He simply said, "I choose you."
"I choose you too," I answered.
We found a quiet bench. Hudson fell asleep on my lap, Stitch tucked under his chin. Lucas kissed my forehead, then my nose, then my mouth, as if mapping every small country on my face. Outside, the city pulsed with indifferent light. Inside, we had stitched ourselves together with the honest, stubborn thread of two people who had been willing to fight and to forgive.
This story is not an ode to money. It is a record of choices—how money bought a chance, how truth took the stage, how punishment had to be public so lies would stop spreading, and how two stubborn, imperfect people learned to choose each other without strings.
When the night finally settled, I sank my fingers into Lucas's palm. He turned the small, worn diary over in his hands and tapped the last page. "You keep the first," he said. "I'll keep the rest."
I smiled. The bracelet of streetlights hummed above us. Hudson slept, breath soft. The little Stitch head lay on the bench like a silly crown. My mother was not there to see it, but I felt her in the clean line of the pledge I made to myself: to protect what mattered, to find tenderness in business, to let truth have its day. We had signed a contract once; now we wrote our own terms.
"Would you sign a new one?" Lucas whispered.
"No," I said, leaning into him. "Love doesn't need a contract."
"Good," he said. "Then let's keep choosing."
And we did. We chose each other in small things, in hard things, and in the quiet fountain-light that remembered our first real promise.
The End
— Thank you for reading —