Sweet Romance17 min read
I Called to Check In — Then Broke My Own Breakup Plan
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1
"I need to call him," I told Gianna as if I were ordering coffee.
"You call him every day." Gianna rolled her eyes and nudged my knee. "What, today you're finally going to dump him?"
"I will." I jabbed at my phone screen. "Today I will. He has to be caught."
"By who?" Gianna leaned back and laughed. "By you."
I smiled into the phone's black face. "Watch the show."
"I will." Gianna grinned. "Got popcorn."
The ringtone sounded like a small exhale. I thumbed accept, held the phone to my ear and listened. Static, then—was that breath? I froze.
"Camilla..." A voice came, breathy and wavering. "I'm... busy. Call... later..."
Oh.
"Really?" I pushed the steering wheel harder than necessary. My little Wuling mini hummed, its engine answering with the kind of small, loyal growl that always made me feel brave. "Finally," I said to myself. "Finally a mistake to catch."
I hammered the pedals, traffic forgotten. "If he's cheating, I'm going to humiliate him," I told Gianna. "Publicly. With evidence. With style."
"You and style?" Gianna snorted. "Bring a camera."
"I already have one." I lifted the DSLR in the passenger seat like a talisman. "And I know where he lives."
"Don't die on my watch," Gianna warned. "Bring snacks."
"You're the worst moral support team."
The front door was locked, of course. My hands trembled as I fiddled for the key. "This is fine," I whispered. "This is tactical patience."
The door clicked, and I pushed in like a storm. "Drake!" I called, all theatrical fury.
Silence. No lovers gasping in closets. No mismatched shoes. No perfume trails.
Then I heard it—the low thump of the treadmill. I flung open the door to the study.
Drake Zimmermann jumped, nearly pitched forward on the treadmill. He was an anchor of poise in a white tee and grey sweatpants, and he looked at me like I had appeared out of thin air. Sweat glistened on his temple. He blinked.
"Camilla?" he said.
My planned monologue evaporated. I stood in the doorway, DSLR hung around my neck, cheeks hot. For a ridiculous second I felt like a fish on a chopping board.
Drake padded over and switched off the treadmill. "You scared me," he said, one hand smoothing my hair like it was a friendly hush.
I choked on the words that were supposed to make fireworks. "I—" My rehearsed break-up line dissolved. "I brought the camera to take... our daily photos."
Drake glanced at the camera, amused. "Really?"
"Of course." I hugged his arm, pitching sincerity like a shield. "For memories."
"Don't." He laughed softly and took the camera from me as if it were a heavier truth than my words. "You don't need to record everything."
"You're impossible." I pouted, but the pouting dissolved when he tucked a strand of my hair behind my ear. "You always are."
He smiled in that way he reserved only for me: private, small, almost conspiratorial. "You're dramatic," he said. "But entertaining."
I wanted to scold him, to enact my plan of catastrophe. Instead I watched, embarrassed, as Drake put the camera on the side table and walked toward the bookshelf. "Have you read the articles I sent?" he asked, casual.
"Ugh, I said I don't want to right now." I clung to the frame of the bookshelf like a lifeline. "I don't want to study tonight."
Drake sighed, like someone exhaling a thoughtful puff into a winter morning. "You should. But we'll make it fun."
He was impossible. He was the kind of impossible that educated you, pressured you to become bigger, smarter. Drake was a physician everyone respected. He ate data for breakfast and fed medical journals like candy. At first I thought it was devotion. At first I thought it was sweet.
"You're trying to turn me into a career machine," I told him.
He looked at me with a small, amused tilt. "I want you to have options."
So the plan to be a simple doctor—content, cozy, with no ambition to climb the ladder—slowly eroded. He had maps for my promotions, outlines for my exams, and a steady, heartbreaking patience. It was love with footnotes and references.
"Okay," I decided on the treadmill threshold. "I will dump him. For real."
2
That evening, with resolve burning loud, I texted my five closest allies: Gianna, Lailah, Lisa, and Esme—my mother, because she was the secret weapon.
"Plan: Operation Freedom," I wrote.
"Send receipts!" Gianna texted back with a string of laughing emojis.
"Don't ruin my sense of drama," I typed.
Drake called. "What are you up to?"
"Not much," I lied. "Sleeping."
"Are you?" His voice was calm. "You sounded awake."
I heard music faintly—was that a bar? I flinched. "Maybe I'm at a bar."
A pause. "You are?" He sounded amused.
"Sure." I heard Gianna in my head, applauding. "Maybe I'm having a drink with friends."
Drake asked, "Is the music loud?"
"No, it's... low." I kept my voice steady. "We like this kind of quiet music."
He paused again. "We like the same music," he said.
I laughed louder than I meant to. "What are the odds?"
A tiny silence, and then: "Are you in a bar, Camilla?"
"Yes," I lied again.
A few minutes later, I flung open the door of a dim bar with Gianna at my heels. "This will be perfect," I said.
"You're the only one who thinks finding him here is likely." Gianna nudged me. "You always expect grand scandals."
We sat near the back, carefully blending into the crowd. I kept my phone on for the inevitable call.
"Call him now," Gianna urged.
I thumbed his number. The line rang. Static. Then his face appeared: Drake, in a crisp shirt, looking serenely annoyed. "Camilla," he said, surprised. "What are you doing at a bar?"
I swallowed. "Shopping."
"Are you with friends?" He scanned the background on my screen and caught a girl in a short haircut.
"Yes." Panic flared. "Some friends. We were messing around."
He searched the room with eyes that found me. For a moment I thought he'd seen straight through the lie. He leaned forward. "Cute."
"Not cute," I muttered.
He smiled, impossibly calm. "I'll come by."
My heartbeat stumbled. "You will?"
"Maybe." He looked like he was listening to a joke and deciding whether to laugh later.
He arrived within the hour. Gianna's commentary died in my ear. Drake entered like an apology made tangible—clean, composed, every bit the man the hospital whispered about. He saw me and, with a single look, made the whole bar hush around us, in my head at least.
"Camilla, are you okay?" he asked, slow and steady.
I opened my mouth to demand proofs, to present the audio evidence, to explode his world. Then he took my hand and squeezed it like nothing was breaking. "I didn't expect this," he said softly.
"I'm so tired of being lectured all the time," I confessed. "I don't want my dates to be exams."
He blinked. "I didn't mean it like that."
"You mean late-night notes and medical papers and—" I flailed. "And you showing up to point out my mistakes."
He was infuriatingly gentle. "I wanted to help."
"I wanted a date." I said it like handing over a trophy.
"You're right." He met my eyes. "I'm sorry. I'm not trying to strip your fun away."
Something in me softened. "Then stop bringing me textbooks on dates."
"No promises," he said, and kissed the top of my head like a man taking back a tangled promise.
I broke off the plan again.
3
Back at his apartment later, Drake found a faded net bag on the counter. "Is that..." he squinted.
"Jackfruit." I grinned. "From Hainan. You gave me some professional-level guidance on how to pick it last time. I stole your technique."
He laughed and called it ridiculous and wonderful. He let me cling. We made peace with mango-smudged lips.
Then the old problem: he was still the man who measured my potential in steps and scores. "Camilla," he said one evening, "have you considered the next exam schedule?"
"Not again," I said.
He reached out and hooked his fingers around my hand as if fishing for a stubborn truth. "I only want what's best for you."
"You want me to be everything but me," I snapped. "So I'm done."
For ten minutes I meant it. I drew up speeches, practiced leaving lines in my head. I rode the Wuling over to my mother's house for counsel.
Esme McCormick was a marvel of matchmaking mischief. "Bring him home next time," she said in a conspiratorial whisper. "I'll break them apart."
"Break them apart? Mom."
"Call it performance art," she said. "I call what I do damage control."
I loved my mother because she was direct and lethal with older men who overstayed their welcome. She could make a room uncomfortable in ninety seconds. Esme had never once failed to make a pair break up when it suited her whims. She called herself the 'human matchmaking inhibitor' and wore the title like a badge.
"Okay," I said. "Bring him next weekend. For...research."
"Fine. Bring him." She clapped. "I'll scalp him with kindness."
4
The next day, I invited Drake over for dinner on purpose. I had rehearsed my lines and packed divorce-letters of insults in my head. I was ready.
"Drake," my mother said the moment he stepped in, sweeping him with a warm, practiced appraisal. "You're a doctor? Come sit. We have fruit."
He was polite, patient, and polished. "It's a pleasure to finally visit."
I took refuge in the kitchen, pretending to wash fruit. From there I peeked into the living room. My mother was doing her work: praise, a few sharp questions, a gentle teasing of our lives.
"You and Camilla, you spend a lot of time together," Esme said.
"Yes," Drake said, and smiled like he appreciated a rare note of truth. "She keeps me young."
My mother grabbed a grape and shoved it into my mouth. "Be quiet," she said. "Let me charm him."
"You're working your magic," I whispered as I slid back into the kitchen.
He stayed for dinner. He drank tea and listened as my mother stitched stories into an easy warmth. When he left, mother hovered by the door, reluctant to let the guest go. "Come back soon," she told him.
"Of course," Drake said. He took my mother's hand with a respectful bow. My mother waved me off like she had finished a job well done.
I felt myself losing the battle again. Drake was calm. Drake was generous in small ways that made me sting. He texted me the next day: "Study materials. Don't ignore them."
"He's everywhere," I complained to Gianna. "He guards his territory like a librarian with a badge."
"You should be flattered," Gianna said, half-mean, half-fond. "He's likely guarding you."
"I want to be free," I said.
"Then make your move," Gianna said. "Or plan a real scene."
5
Weeks went by with small plays of jealousy and reconciliation. I practiced not being needy; I practiced being brave. I even practiced the act of dumping Drake. Then a photograph showed up in a colleague's group chat—a research seminar picture with Drake standing next to Isabelle Harrison, the hospital flower.
I saw it and my chest hiccuped. She was pretty, poised, everything I secretly dreaded and wanted. The caption read, "Finally got a proper photo with Drake."
My stomach wrenched. "That’s it," I told Xavier—my friend from surgery, gifted and pleasant, and sometimes annoyingly perceptive. "I will step aside."
Xavier raised one eyebrow. "Step aside?"
"Yes. Move on. He's attracted to the smart, graceful type," I said. "Isabelle looks like a patient poster child—perfect, serene. She gets his lectures, probably eats his notes."
"Or she's his colleague," Xavier replied. "You make drama into real life."
"She's his colleague who looks like bait." I was ridiculous.
The truth was simpler and nastier: I wanted him to myself and feared losing him to someone who matched his world.
I started to arrange things for Drake and Isabelle like a clown arranging bouquets for two birds. I bought movie tickets and suggested dinners where I could "accidentally" seat them together. I played hostess to a plan that made my face hot with shame.
"You're matchmaking," Xavier said one night, amused.
"I'm trying to make a graceful exit," I answered.
"Or you're trying to push them together so you'll have a reason to leave that doesn't look like cowardice," he said. "Try honesty."
Too logical. I wasn't built for bluntness. I was built for drama.
6
Then a rumor started at the hospital—Xavier told me later—about me and Drake. He'd seen me laughing at a table; he didn't know I was trying to matchmake. Someone had sent Drake the location of that table. He came.
There was a twinge of something—pride?—when he sat down and watched me argue my case for making him happier with less pressure. "Camilla," he said, moving the conversation like a choreographer. "You're trying to orchestrate romance like a textbook."
"I am," I confessed. "Be honest—am I wrong?"
"No," he said quietly. "You're human."
He always had a way of making my mess feel less explosive.
"Call me when you get home?" I texted him later, because even schemers need reassurance.
"Of course," came his reply.
Then I saw him with Isabelle again—out of context, carrying a stack of marked-up books to the seminar room, those soft laugh lines at the corners of his mouth that I knew, and he looked like home to someone else.
"Okay," I told myself. "Time to go full plan."
7
I went to a bar alone one night determined to stage the perfect meltdown. I had the list of lines: bitter, justified, and heartbreaking. I had Gianna on FaceTime for backup, listening live.
"You're overdoing it," she said. "But go. Commit."
A bulky man at the bar, Lawson Bolton, a regular whose presence felt like swamp-sunshine, slurred something at me. He leaned uncomfortably close, hands landing on my elbows like barnacles. "Hey, sweetheart," he sneered, and the bar's light showed his teeth like danger.
"Back off," I said. "I have someone."
He laughed, a sound with no humor. "So? Guys are never around. Be grateful."
Panic hotwired in my chest. I twisted away, but Lawson followed, talk thick with liquor. "You are single tonight," he said. "Come on."
I said no at least three times and the words didn't hold. He laughed and crossed the line, slapping my shoulder, grabbing for a kiss. I shoved him away.
"Don't touch me," I said.
He grabbed my hair and shoved me toward the bathroom. People saw. The room blurred. My phone slid into my pocket as my breath sped up. I ducked into the small bathroom and locked myself in, hands pressed to my ribs. My face burned.
"Hey, sweetheart," he shouted at the door. "Come back out and be nice."
I pulled the phone out and called Drake. He didn't answer. I called again, and again. The bathroom door shook like a drum.
"Camilla?" A voice outside, and then Drake pushed the door open. He looked like a statue come alive—angry, relieved, lethal calm.
"Are you okay?" His voice split the bar's noise into hush and alarm.
I started crying like a fault line opening. "He touched me," I sobbed. "He grabbed me."
Drake moved like he had rehearsed this motion for years. He grabbed for Lawson's collar and the man stumbled back. "Back off," Drake said.
Lawson cussed and lunged. Cameras flashed inevitably—someone recorded. People gathered. No one was neutral now.
"What did you do?" Lawson yelled, stumbling and holding his face where Drake had shoved him.
"You pick on women," Drake said softly. "You leave us alone."
The bar's eyes devoured the scene. "Call the bouncers," someone hissed. "Call the police."
Lawson got louder and angrier, but his anger looked small under the crowd's judgment. "You can't touch me!" he shouted. "You assaulted me!"
"No," Drake said. "You assaulted her."
Lawson tried to scramble for dignity. He pushed, but the bar's crowd closed in like a net. A video started to spread across phones.
The crowd's reaction was swift and brutal. "Sick creep," someone hissed. "Filthy." People started filming and slid phones into the air like torches. A woman posted an image to social, tagging the bar and the law offices downtown. The bar manager called security, then the police.
When the officers came, Lawson's attitude shifted like a paper mask. He tried to laugh it off at first. "I was just joking," he slurred. "She gave me trouble."
"You're the one who touches strangers," Drake said, voice steady. Officers asked Lawson to step outside, and his bravado crumbled as the lens of public opinion turned on him. He demanded to be believed at first, but each new eyewitness, every phone video that popped up, peeled his lies away. Men at the bar lined up to offer statements about his repeated crossings of boundaries.
A woman with purple hair swore she'd refused his approaches the week before. A barman admitted he'd warned Lawson to keep to himself. Another patron said he'd seen the man harass others on nights before. Texts, videos, names—evidence piled.
Lawson's face shifted through stages. First, bluster. Then suspicion as eyes grew cold. Then denial, with a face red to his scalp. He tried to laugh it off. Then bitterness. Then the look of someone losing a game suddenly without rules, scrambling for anything that remotely resembled fairness.
"You're lying," he spat at me. "You set me up."
People around the bar laughed without joy. A teenager filmed him saying those words; the clip would not age well. "Nobody sets someone up," an old woman said. "You did this to yourself."
Drake stayed close to me the whole time, protective but calm. The police took statements and told Lawson he'd be charged if the evidence was corroborated. He sputtered, then tried to hug a sympathetic woman, who recoiled. The bar manager escorted him out, the door's slam like a final stamp.
Later, the footage had already spread on social media. Lawson's face in the video was not the one you'd see with the neighborhood's lunch crowd. It was uglier, exposed.
This was the public punishment the internet does now: exposure. No gavel-laden courtroom, but a court nonetheless—phones, witnesses, the bar's boss, the police. He was disgraced, reduced by one recorded moment to what he had been all along. Lawson's influence evaporated in three sentences on twenty people's phones.
I watched as he tried to maintain pride and failed. He hit denial, bargaining, then fear. People hissed as he tried to push his way out. Someone shouted curses. Someone else clapped.
"You did the right thing," Drake told me softly.
"Did you see my call logs?" I asked, ashamed. "You came when you could."
"I came as soon as I could," he corrected.
It was messy, and it was public and it was right. Lawson's attempt to intimidate the room had turned on him. He tried to stand tall and failed with the sound of a thousand small judgements. By the time the police walked him past, his cheeks were ashen. The bar's patrons pointed, whispered, filmed. One woman who had once shrugged off his comments now followed him to the door and spat, "Don't you ever come back." The camera caught every micro-expression—shock melting into shame, then pleading, then the cold finality of being rejected by your own small world.
Later, lawyers called. Newspapers asked for statements. Lawson's name spread with the shame attached. His ex-friends sent short messages of distaste. His online presence dwindled under negative reviews and screenshots. He became the cautionary tale bar staff repeated over cigarettes outside at 2 a.m.
This was the punishment. It was public, it was immediate, and worse for Lawson than any quiet fine: his reputation dissolved in the light of cell phones and witness testimony. He staggered from the bar a man defended by no one, the record of his reach held up into every camera showing his aggression. He had been loud and predatory; he became small and seen. He ranted in videos later that the world had turned on him, but those were a stranger's bleats into the void. The people who had gathered in the bar that night moved on with drinks and stories and a new sense of safety.
"You're safe," Drake said finally, and held me.
The crowd's applause for his restraint and my survival felt odd—like a small benediction.
8
After that night, something inside the hospital shuttered. People who once whispered about me inside the coffee room now offered sympathetic smiles. Drake's hand in mine became less of a shield and more of a known quantity.
We moved between small reconciliations and grand fights, like two comets circling a sun. He taught me driving, I attempted to win small domestic wars. He bought protective scarves and read me nutrition papers with the devotion of a man reading poems.
"Why do you keep me?" I asked once, sitting in his car with the hand bouquet he had given me after a wedding. He had grabbed it off the platform like an offering to me.
"Because you annoy me," he said, "and because you are mine."
"Yours?" I tested the word.
"Yours in the only ways that matter," he said. "When you need someone, I will be there."
I smirked. "That sounds like a promotion."
"It is," he said.
9
Work days were a tangle of light and small chaos. Patients came and left, colleagues whispered, and the rumor mill ground on. Xavier, the bright and respectful younger doctor, teased that I had officially become "Drake's Mystery." He was sweet and loyal in the way of apprentices and admirers.
"Call me 'Camilla'," I told him.
"Camilla," he said, grinning. "You and I will teach each other bad habits."
"Good," I said. "You teach me surgical technique; I teach you taglines."
At a conference where Drake lectured on cardiology, he came to the rows between us and tossed a question my way. I blushed and pretended expertise. He walked away like a stone, and I felt like a weather vane.
Xavier sat beside me afterward. "He was looking at you," he said.
"Probably reading my notes for typos," I muttered.
"Or he was smiling," Xavier said. "I have issues with making everything a test."
We laughed until we were quiet like two conspirators.
10
Sometimes I schemed again. Humans are hard to fix; I am one of them. I tried to put myself aside, to engineer him toward Isabelle, then toward anyone who fit better to my fear of being small. But at every step, Drake's presence undercut the plan. He seemed to know just when to be distant and when to be tender.
Once, at a wedding where I was a bridesmaid, a silly party game forced me to kiss someone on the spot. I chose Drake, because what else do you do when you have to pick between rashness and dignity?
The kiss shocked the room into brief silence, then into applause. Drake kissed back. People clapped. My heart stammered. "Are you satisfied?" he asked, afterward.
"I am," I confessed.
"Good." He looked pleased and oddly smug. "I can be generous."
"I like it when you are." I teased him and stole sugar crystallized candies from the plate he had placed beside my hand like a small offering.
We made a kind of fragile truce—he would not smother me with books every night, and I would let him be the man he was: driven, quietly ferocious, and soft with me in the way that counted. We were imperfectly matched, both of us carrying baggage and professional limbs, but together we became a single small weather system: wild at times, sweet in others.
11
After the bar incident, the hospital's gossip smoothed into a new texture. Drills, rotations, tests—life again. I found myself sleeping in his bed too many nights. I refused to call it attachment at first. Then I called it exactly that.
"Camilla, are you sure?" Xavier asked one night as we reviewed patient charts. "You two are... complicated."
"Are we?" I laughed. "Yes. But everything I'm doing is deliberate."
"You seem less deliberate than usual."
"Maybe I'm tired of being dramatic," I admitted. "Maybe I like him."
He nodded like a man taking notes on human folly. "Then be careful with your heart. It's sticky."
"Is that a medical term?"
"Sort of."
12
Time was not linear. It folded. Drake presented small miracles and grand annoyances. He rescheduled my life to include him, brought me jackfruit from far away like a holy offering, wrote little notes, and—most dangerously—kissed me in front of the world.
The hospital ran its own soap opera. Isabelle, the elegant colleague, eventually stopped being a threat. She was kind and professional, and she and Drake were friends—colleagues. Nothing more. My attempts at matchmaking evaporated like mist. I had engineered a hundred endings only to discover the simplest: honesty.
"Tell him," Gianna said. "Tell him you love him instead of planning his life like a textbook."
"Tell him what exactly?" I asked.
"Tell him you hate being second to his job. Tell him you want dates with the kind of fun he doesn't understand."
I thought about it, practicing phrases like a performer.
"Tell him I love him," I finally said to Gianna, franchise of honesty and fear.
"You will say it?"
"I will," I promised. "Maybe."
13
So one wet evening, I stood in the kitchen in his apartment and took the risk. Drake was rinsing cups. His movements were so steady, the way he'd been steady for months now. "Drake," I began.
He looked at me, eyes bright.
"I—" I swallowed. "I don't want textbooks for every date. I don't want you to always lecture me or show me diagrams of how to feel."
He set the cup down and smiled the smallest smile. "Do you want me to stop?"
"Stop making me small," I said, finally. "And stop interrogating me with PDF files. I'm a person."
He took my hands, and for once the silence wasn't heavy. It felt possible. "I want you," he said.
"I want you too."
He leaned close, and the kitchen lost its edges. "Say it," he asked, warm and honest.
"I love you," I said. It felt like a brave demonstration.
"Good," he breathed. "I love you too."
We kissed like people who had been rehearsing for a lifetime.
14
After that, life smoothed into small rituals. He still pushed me to study sometimes, and I still fought him—softly. He brought me jackfruit to soothe fights. My camera sat on the shelf, sometimes used for the tiny library of our days. I kept the mini Wuling in the parking lot, and sometimes Drake learned how to complain about its color.
We were messy and human. We still bumped into each other's edges. But at dinners and conferences and the bar where it had nearly fallen apart, we kept returning to each other.
Once, months later, I opened my phone and scrolled again to the footage from that night. Lawson had tried to regain tarnished dignity by posting angry videos and denials. They existed like burned pages you can't unsee; no one believed him in the end.
I had my camera. I had my stubbornness. I had Drake—who, despite his lectures and file notes, wrapped his hands around me like no one else did.
I looked at the small plastic box he had once fished from a shopping bag in my kitchen and laughed. It had been silly—a small present—but it had been sincere. I kept it on the bedside table like a relic.
"Here," I told Drake one evening, a finger pointing at the jackfruit-scented kit beside our bed. "If you ever think about reading me like a textbook again, remember this."
He smiled. "I will," he said. "And I'll also remember you caught me checking on you in a bar once."
"You were jealous," I teased.
"I was worried," he corrected.
I leaned into him. "I know."
The world went on. People gossiped in staff rooms. Weddings happened. Babies were born on the third floor. But our small orbit steadied into something like love that had edges and leather and the occasional lecture, and it was ours.
The End
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