Sweet Romance12 min read
"I called him on live TV and said: Let's get back together"
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1
"I like old men. Rich ones. They don't cling and they die earlier," I said once and then threw the words like a challenge.
Griffith's face froze. He had been handsome in that bruised, reckless way that makes you both laugh and ache. He'd taken my words like a strike. We didn't last the week.
Four years, seven months, and three days later, I saw him again.
"I can't believe she dragged you here," Candace hissed into my ear as we stepped into the KTV room. Her hair was neon green and loud enough to compete with the music.
"Relax," I said. "He deserves a reaction."
People laughed. Glasses clinked. I gave Candace a quick smile and found a corner seat. I was tired from five months of filming a scene that never cooperated with my emotions, but seeing Griffith had woken something like a hunger inside me.
"Where is he?" Candace asked.
"Probably rehearsing a look of indifference," I answered.
He walked in with a group. I recognized him by the way he held himself—straight, small head of hair, jaw like it could cut glass. He scanned the room and locked eyes with me. For a second I saw familiar cold then more distance than I expected.
"Candace," someone yelled. "You brought her!"
"Shut up, Lin," Candace snapped. The man she accused—Garrett—smiled awkwardly and came over.
"Abigail," Garrett said. "You came."
"Hi." I held my glass like a small, polished shield.
"You okay?" Garrett asked. "Did I mess up with Sisi?"
"You? Mess up?" I laughed. "Never."
Children argued and flirted. A girl drifted toward Griffith, giggling like she had a secret. I felt a small, hot stone of annoyance.
"I'm leaving," I announced and drained my glass.
"Stay," Garrett said.
"No," I said. "I'm exhausted."
"Let me walk you," he offered.
"No need." I pinned my soft smile on Candace. "Go enjoy your night."
That was when Griffith stood up. "I'll walk her," he said.
2
The jeep was black and stubborn. He waited with one hand on the window like he owned the street. I opened the door, sat, and gave the address. He did not speak.
"People say you switched jobs," I tried.
No reply.
"You look... different." I tried to read him like a book.
Still silence.
"You seem... hard," I said, more than a little wicked.
He slammed the brake so sharply the world lurched forward. "Get out," he said.
The jeep peeled away, taillights required immediacy.
I walked. The cold rubbed at my skin. I dawdled for forty minutes before slinking into my building.
My phone buzzed and Candace was frantic. "He called—he has your phone."
"Oh," I said and went to dig through my bag. My phone was gone and a small, warm panic rose.
"Did you drop it on purpose?" she asked.
"Why would I?" I smiled a secret smile. "Because this is dramatic?"
Candace clicked her tongue. "You never talk about him. You hide it like treasure."
"Maybe I do."
3
He stood in my doorway like the last thing I expected.
"Why are you here?" I asked.
He handed me my phone with a small, precise look. "Is that what you wanted?"
"Come in," I said. "Sit. Warm up."
He did not unbutton his coat. He looked at me with a hardness that made me both laugh and ache. "I am not interested in you," he said, voice cold.
Of course he said that. My pulse did cartwheels anyway.
"Rude," I replied. "You used to be easier to rile."
"Don't talk about the past." His voice held something like a rule. He tossed the phone on the table and left as though the air between us were dangerous.
That night I couldn't sleep.
4
Candace stormed into my flat the next morning like a hurricane. "Did you sleep with him?" she demanded.
"No," I said.
"Don't lie to me."
"I didn't," I answered. "He's difficult."
She gave me a look like she smelled something terrible and interesting. "I'm driving you to the barbecue. He'll be there."
I agonized over a wine-red dress. I spilled lipstick on my sleeve. I changed twice. Then we arrived at a backyard that smelled like smoke and song and men too proud to admit they wanted affection.
He was at the grill, patched in a black jacket, doing the job of keeping mood and meat warm. He looked at me like I was a memory stuck in his throat.
A kid said, "You're prettier in person," and I signed autographs and smiled because that's what we do.
"Does he look at you?" the boy asked me.
"Maybe." I hummed.
The boy left and told someone else he had seen Griffith look like he'd been caught doing something he liked. My chest warmed.
He ignored me until smoke stung my eyes. "Move," he said finally, as though I were nothing more than a moth to his light.
I stepped closer. "Why haven't you accepted my friend request?" I dared him.
He didn't look away. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a fistful of cash, and tossed it at me. "Take it," he said. "Don't rely on me."
I snatched his wallet without thinking and found an old photograph inside—me at nineteen, sun in my hair. I set it on the grill. He took it and tossed it into the coals.
5
The photograph burned like a small regret. I felt hollow and furious and foolish and strangely alive.
"You're cruel," I said.
"You're sentimental," he replied and walked away.
I stumbled, tripped, nearly fell. He grabbed me less like a rescuer and more like a man who had decided what would happen next. He stuffed me into his car and said, "I'll take you home."
He did. He stood with my keys and smiled like he had all the time in the world. "You left the door open," he said. I stepped in.
"Why are you here?" I whispered.
"Because I want to," he said, like a confession.
6
At home, Paola Bryan arrived in a spectacle of lipstick and anger. "I need to cry," she moaned as she flopped into my arms.
"You were just with a man last night," I said.
"He lied," she sobbed. "He said the worst things about me."
"Men lie," I said.
She sniffed and then stared at Griffith who lingered by my doorway like a question mark. She made a little cheer for him. He rolled his eyes.
He said, "You really like to poke."
"Is that an accusation?" I asked.
He smirked. "You told me once you liked old men who didn't fuss."
"I did say that," I admitted. The words had been a joke, a provocation. He had remembered.
7
"Why would you say that?" he asked finally. "Are you a liar?"
"I said it to hurt you," I admitted. "It was childish."
He looked like he wanted to say a hundred things and then said, "You only ever needed me to be mad. You never let me be weak."
That sounded more like grief than accusation. The shape of his voice shifted.
"Come here." He put a hand on my hip. I gestured like a petulant cat and kissed him first—thin, reckless. He returned it like someone buried.
The night ended somewhere between apology and anger. He left me again with a kiss that felt both like a promise and a dare.
8
The next morning, a rotten echo came back: Hayes Sherman, a man whose name used to make the room tilt, had resurfaced online. He'd been the man who haunted my past.
"A failing director named Hayes Sherman is stirring the mud," Veronica said when she came. She had the tired warmth of someone who had shielded me from storms before. "He posted about 'truth' and 'regrets.'"
"Hayes," I muttered. My mouth tasted like burned sugar.
"You know him," Veronica said. "He hurt you."
"You can't imagine how much," I said.
We all knew Hayes. He had been the powerful man who'd asked for favors and called them 'career choices.' He'd tried to make me lie down for his scripts and for his hands. I had fought back; I'd hit him with a table lamp and run. The aftermath had been a storm of rumors, of accusations, and quiet deals. My manager, Veronica, had kept things from becoming too contagious. We settled. I crawled back to life.
Now Hayes' voice was back in the air and my stomach fell.
9
"He put up an apology," Veronica said later, bewildered. "But there's a photo of him in a hospital bed. Something happened last night."
"Who took a hospital selfie?" I snapped.
"No one knows," she said. "But the post has a long letter, and the police said—"
"Don't tell me the police are involved," I said.
Veronica's phone buzzed again and she paled. "He's being called to a press conference," she said. "He wants to tell the truth."
A press conference for Hayes Sherman. The thought felt like sand in my mouth.
10
I went because you have to stare down the past or it will keep staring back. Candace sat next to me, lips like a line.
"Will you talk?" she asked.
"I don't know," I said.
"Say what happened."
"People already know."
"Then say it," she urged.
We went in. The lights were bright enough to make me squint. Reporters lined up with cameras like teeth.
Hayes appeared looking small next to his old bravado. He cleared his throat. "I've done wrong. I hurt people. I'm sorry," he said in a voice meant to be contrite.
There was a rustle. I could see flashbulbs stutter. He was about to finish when a woman in the crowd shouted, "This is not enough!"
11
She was a young actress, face pale with anger. Then another voice joined. Then another. The crowd thickened. Not many know that truth is noisy.
A man from the back stepped forward—an old assistant who had worked for Hayes. He had a folder in his hands. "We have records," he announced. "We have messages. We have witnesses."
The TV cameras leaned in, hungry.
Hayes' confident mask cracked. "What are you implying?" he accused, voice high and thin.
"That you did more than apologize privately. That you used your power." Another actress, thin and trembling, held up her phone. A video played.
I watched myself, younger, with the lamp. My chest squeezed. The room hummed like a hive.
12
"Where did you get those?" Hayes shouted. "You can't—"
"From your own people," the assistant said. "The ones you bullied into silence. They kept copies."
People gasped. A reporter yelled, "Did the police take action then?"
"There was a private settlement," a lawyer admitted. "Because the institutions protect their own. Not anymore."
Hayes tried to look angry, then scared. "This is slander!" he barked. "You petit—"
The crowd drowned him out with a chorus of names, of testimonies, of a thousand small hurts stitched together. "Enough!" someone cried. "We are done being quiet."
13
It was at that moment I stood. My legs trembled. The room seemed far away until I heard my own voice ring clear.
"I was there," I said. "He broke my face and my trust. He tried to make me choose between my body and my career. I refused."
The cameras swung toward me like a wave. "You?" a reporter asked.
"Yes," I said. "And I hit him with a lamp. And yes, there was a settlement. And yes, I lived in the shadow of what he could do for years."
People listened. Candace squeezed my hand. Veronica's mouth tightened. Griffith watched from the back like a man waiting for something he had learned to fear—a truth he had refused to know.
14
Hayes' face moved through stages: startled, incredulous, fury, denial, panic, then the slow unfurling of collapse.
"This is a lie," he said, voice growing smaller. He turned to the press. "Who recorded this? Who is this traitor?"
"Your assistant," someone shouted. "Your producer."
Phones were held up like lances. A young PA who had once been terrified of Hayes stepped forward. "He hit me if I didn't do what he asked," she said. "I was scared for my job."
More people came forward. Stories amassed like falling bricks.
Griffith's face softened and then condensed into something like steel. He walked to the microphone without permission, and the room stilled.
15
"Hayes Sherman," Griffith said. His voice was low and precise. "You preyed on women because you thought your name protected you. You were wrong."
"I—" Hayes stammered.
"You hurt my friend," Griffith said. "You turned careers into currency. You used fear to keep people quiet."
The cameras clicked. Voices rose in a chorus that was no longer about Hayes but about the world he'd been allowed to build.
Hayes turned red. He groped for words. "I was young—"
"Don't," Garrett said from the aisle. "No one wants your excuses."
A woman who'd been quiet until then stepped forward with a stack of photos—grainy images of Hayes at parties, Hayes with young actresses, Hayes with drinks, Hayes smiling as if innocence could be a costume.
He staggered as the evidence was set in front of him. "This is false," he lied.
"It isn't," the assistant said. "And if you think this ends tonight, you are wrong."
16
He tried to shout his denials. A cameraman asked for details. Someone else read emails where Hayes bribed agents and threatened careers.
I wondered if he would cry. He didn't cry. His mask fell apart ugly.
"People saw you," someone in the front said. "Your neighbors. Your housekeeper."
One of his long-hidden allies, a producer, sat down and shook. "I didn't know," the producer said. "I didn't know how deep it was."
An ex-PR man stood and said, "We buried stories because we were paid to bury stories."
The mood turned from revelation to verdict.
17
Hayes tried to claw back dignity. He raised his face, an animal trapped. "You can't ruin me," he said.
"I don't want to ruin you," I said. "I want you to see what you did. I want other people to be safe."
A hundred flashbulbs exploded. People cheered. A few reporters clapped. Some held phones to record the man who had festered in shadows now shriveling under light.
He fell apart in stages.
18
First, he panicked. "I never—" he choked. Then he tried to deny and attack us: "You're spreading lies!" The old tactic.
Then he played the victim. "I have health problems!" he cried, voice thin and ridiculous. The producers who once protected him looked sick.
Then he pleaded. "Please." It came out like someone begging for air.
"It's too late," someone hissed.
He collapsed into a chair. People circled him like sharks and vultures. Cameras zoomed in on his shaking hands. A woman in the crowd spat words at him that I will never repeat, the way a cornered animal is insulted. His face went white.
19
There were whoops when a famous columnist slapped Hayes' name across the front page. There were photographers who refused to photograph him. There were executives who said, "Cut ties now."
Hayes begged for help, but the places that had once sheltered him were already issuing statements. His name became a bad word. He was a man who had tried to buy futures and had failed.
I watched him shrink from the podium like someone inflating and then being deflated. I felt cold and hot at once.
After the press conference, outside, people circled in clusters. Some called his methods condemnable. Others cried and hugged one another. I stood with Griffith and Veronica and Candace.
"I am so sorry," Griffith murmured.
"For what?" I asked.
"For everything you went through because of him," he said.
20
"You don't have to say anything," I said. "We both lived through that."
He touched my arm—gentle. "I want to make it right," he said.
"How?" I asked.
"By being here," he said simply. "By sitting in the light with you."
He kissed my forehead like it was the final stitch on a torn tapestry.
21
The fallout was brutal on Hayes. Sponsors dropped him. Talks of legal action resurfaced. People who had defended him found themselves apologizing in fawning, frightened statements. For the first time in a long while, his name had a cost.
They watched him become small in public—no longer a boss, no longer invincible. He sat alone in hotel lobbies. One night the tabloids printed photos of him leaving a hospital with a bandage on his head. Rumor said he'd been confronted by someone who'd grown tired of his manipulations. What mattered was that the safety net he used to have had been cut.
22
After the press conference, the crowd thinned. Candace and I walked in a snowfall that felt like mercy.
"Do you hate him now?" she asked.
"I don't want to waste any more love on him," I said. "But I want the world to be better."
She squeezed my hand. "You did it," she said proudly. "You spoke."
23
Griffith came to my place that night. He was quiet. He looked like a man who had been through seasons of thought.
"Will you forgive me?" he asked.
"For what?" I said.
"For not seeing sooner," he said. "For letting you fight alone."
"You couldn't have known," I said.
"But I should have fought with you."
He sat and told me he had filed to change departments at his family business, had tried to make space between him and the things that had kept us apart. He said simple things that sounded like a plan. "I want to be with you without the past between us," he said.
24
We argued foolishly about what forgiveness meant. We talked until dawn like two people who had practiced almost everything else but these words. He kissed me like he meant it, and I let him kiss me because I wanted him to be true.
"I am not asking you to marry me," he said at one point. "I'm asking you to be here. Be with me today."
"That's not audacious enough," I grumbled.
"Today is brave," he said.
I laughed and let his hand find mine.
25
We were not perfect. We were two people who had loved and broken and loved again in the small ways that last longer than promises. He learned to be less dismissive. I learned to be less dramatic. We both learned to be present.
Candy and Veronica and Garrett were there, sometimes in the middle of fights, sometimes in the quiet places. We were messy, sure. We were alive, even in the smallness.
26
Years passed in quick beats. He moved offices to be closer. I kept working. Life balanced between dates and sets, between scripts and dinners.
"You're like a statue waiting for your lover," Candace teased over dinner once.
"I'm not a statue," I shot back.
"Behave." She clinked her glass.
27
Seven years later, I got a call to do a silly prank show.
"You can't back out," Veronica said with a teasing lilt. "They want you to call your first love and propose."
"I am not calling Griffith on live television to propose," I said.
"Watch you," she warned.
They filmed me in a studio with lights that made me look golden. The host leaned close and whispered, "Call him."
I laughed and finally dialed Griffith. My heart stuttered.
When he answered I said with all the melodrama I could muster, "Griffith, let's get back together."
Silence.
Then he sighed low, like a man who knew the limelight. "I'm twenty-seven," he said with a quiet bite. "I'm not dying that soon."
The studio roared laughter. I flushed and dropped my head into my hand—but then his voice, softer, came through. "But if you really mean it, Abigail Powell, don't ask me in a studio full of lights. Ask me when the room is ours."
28
I smiled into the phone like a fool and felt a warmth that had nothing to do with cameras.
He had changed, but not in the ways that mattered. He had grown steadier, less fragile but more open to the idea of being seen.
"Okay," I said. "When the room's ours."
He laughed—a dangerous, low sound. "Good."
We both knew we'd been through fires. This was not a fairy tale finished. This was two people deciding to keep trying.
29
After the camera stopped rolling, Griffith sent a text: "Griffith De Luca to Abigail Powell: you owe me dinner."
"I will collect that debt," I replied.
He answered with a heart and a single, small message: "Come home."
30
Seven years later, together did not mean forever. It meant the honest smallness of being present. It meant public truth and private tenderness. It meant a press conference where a predator finally fell and a man who had once been my pain learned how to stand with me in the light.
And sometimes, late at night, in the dark between us, I would hear him say, low and true, "You are my small, stubborn miracle."
I would whisper back under my breath, "So are you."
The End
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