Sweet Romance16 min read
I drove a green truck, he stole my silence — then he stole my heart
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“Move!” I slammed my palm on the steering wheel and the engine growled like it agreed.
I breathed slow. The highway was thin, the sky still cold. A flatbed ahead had a blown tire. I climbed down, thumbed the spare, and fixed it.
A horn sounded. A man in a red cab leaned out and shouted, “Hi, beautiful. Need help?”
I raised my cap brim. “No thanks.” I tightened the last lug and wiped grease on my jeans.
He laughed and wrote his number on a bottle, tossed it at my lap like a toy.
I tossed the bottle to the back seat. “Not interested,” I told him. He called my name anyway.
“Saga! Wait.” He spelled the name like he already owned it.
I didn't turn. I started the truck and eased away.
“She's a woman who drives a three-meter-high truck,” the middle-aged man in the other cab said to his mate. “You don't see that much.”
The other man whistled. “She's fine.”
“So what if she’s fine?” the first man shrugged. “I heard she did time. Bad record.”
“That's just gossip,” the other said. “Still, shame.”
I kept my eyes on the road. My palms ached from the cold and the wheel.
A red hauler pulled up beside me and the passenger stuck his head out, shouting, “Hey, give me your number!”
I ignored him.
A bottle hit my thigh. I glanced down. The number was on it. The passenger grinned.
I gave it a quick once-over and then looked forward. The road didn't care about flattery.
He shouted, “I’m Ricardo Lawson.”
“Good for you.” I let my foot find the gas.
Ricardo laughed, called to his friend, and disappeared in my rear-view.
Callen Herve didn’t laugh. He watched me from the passenger side, calm, hands folded like a man who could lift the world if asked.
“You single?” my co-driver, Kelsey Cooper, asked while we drove.
I shrugged. “None of your business.”
“You sure?” Kelsey grinned. “You could use someone to share soup with.”
I glanced at Kelsey. He had pockets full of jokes and a bad habit of borrowing money. He looked messy and warm all at once. He was my whole life pressurized into a person.
“Just keep the snacks,” I said. “And the silence.”
Kelsey picked up a scrap of the empty bottle, frowned at the printed digits, and threw the scrap back into the box.
Callen and I had grown up in the same industrial town. He was the sort of man people trusted. That day he sat, half asleep, half watchful, and made coffee with two hands like it was a small ceremony.
“Give me your phone when you sleep,” he said later. “I’ll watch the route.”
“I can manage,” I said.
He smiled, slow and steady. “We both know you can. I just like being useful.”
“You like being useful?”
“Yeah.” He tapped my knee. “And I like being here.”
We drove on. The routes stitched the map into our bones. I had been driving for years. I had been to places where the sun rose with a sour face and places where it smiled. I had also been inside courts and behind bars. People kept bringing up the same rumor: fraud. They liked to cut the story short and keep the scar.
When Kelsey told me about the woman who had come to the shop asking for five thousand earlier, I froze. “She’s back?”
“Yep,” Kelsey said, crinkling a paper bag. “Said she wants five grand. Threatened the shop.”
I felt the old frost coil under my ribs. “How much did she ask before?”
“Two. Then one end. She keeps upping it.”
I tightened my jaw. “Tell her I’m not here.”
“You can’t run from this. We fix trucks, not lives,” Kelsey said, voice soft. “But we stick together.”
“I’ll be fine,” I lied.
I wasn’t fine. People knew the headlines. They said the word ‘prison’ like a label you pasted onto a person. I had learned to make my silence a shield.
At the market, when I handed the owner the cash and left a big orange on the counter for a small girl, my chest hurt like a small animal trapped.
“Thanks,” the girl said, eyes bright.
I nodded. “Eat up.”
That night in the truck, I held a plush SpongeBob I'd won from an arcade machine like a grown child's talisman. I tasted cilantro from a takeout box, and for a moment the world softened.
Callen called while I tried to sleep. “You awake?”
“I’m trying,” I said.
He laughed. “Your birthday’s coming. You’re not getting any younger.”
“Shut up.”
He paused. “Come see my mom sometime.”
“I’m a thousand miles away,” I said.
“That’s not an excuse for the rest of your life.”
I closed my eyes. Callen's voice was a low hum that pushed at something in me until it shifted.
Later, at a market loading dock, I lifted cases until the cold bit through my jacket. Kelsey pointed to a little girl writing homework on the counter. “She’s doing math,” I said. “She should not be worrying about anything else.”
I told myself that the world was a chain of small trades—work, food, shelter. Some chains break. You survive by building new links.
In the truck, the red hauler found us again. Ricardo leaned out, smiling like he had the sun in his teeth. He called, “Saga, give me a chance!”
Callen answered for me. “She doesn’t. Move on.”
Ricardo looked right into my window. “You’ve got my number.”
I rolled up the window and shut him out. Callen’s hand on my leg said I didn’t have to be alone in the silence.
We walked into towns, we ate at service stations with bad gravy, we slept in cheap motels where the door lock clacked. Callen’s laugh filled the room like a borrowed sun.
One night, at a temple, I wanted to be small. I knelt, lit incense, and whispered to a stone I was not supposed to be divided by my past. Callen did everything by the book — bought a jade pendant for me and joked about marriage.
“You’ll be my lucky charm,” he said, fitting the pendant at my collarbone.
I felt the weight of the jade and did not think it would matter until it did.
The museum had an exhibit called “Lost Treasures.” We walked around like thieves looking at things no one could touch. A docent explained the items were seized from smugglers. The word tugged at something in me that had a name—shame. The sign said the treasures were saved. The idea of recovery took me by surprise.
“They say treasure can come back,” Callen said.
“Sure,” I said. “As long as someone wants it.”
At the mountain temple, in the cold wind, a man tried to put his hand where it didn’t belong. He had a voice like a stuck gate. My stomach dropped, then rose like a fist.
“Stop,” I said.
He got closer. Callen moved first.
He stomped on the man’s throat like he was stepping on a match.
“You okay?” he asked me afterward, voice tight.
“I’m fine,” I said, and then I kicked the man in a place that stopped him from breathing curses.
We waited for the police and I felt nothing and then everything. The officers were professional, but their eyes, as they scanned my ID, flicked somewhere that made me want to disappear. The ID read: Saga Zhao—prior offense in system. The guard snorted.
“She served time,” he said loud enough for the temple to hear. “That explains it.”
I slid my gaze away. Shame was a low hum. Callen squeezed my hand, steady as a bolt.
“That man got taken away for a week,” he said later when we were on the road. “He’ll think twice.”
“You didn’t have to—”
“I did.”
At the small hospital when cramps hit, I woke up with a plastic hot bag against my belly and Callen slumped in the chair. A nurse said, “It’s painful but not dangerous. She needs rest and food.”
I said nothing. I was tired of stories about what my body said about me.
After they released me, Callen bought me soup from a woman who sold it like a miracle. He ate the scraps of bread and sat like a man who would not let me fall asleep in the wrong place.
“We can stay another night,” he said.
“No,” I said.
He didn’t argue. He watched me like an honest guard dog.
That day he took me to his friends’ place in the city. Men who drank and laughed. They looked at me, curious, respectful, and some with a little pity. One man Lance, I mean Camden Chen, a slick face, put a hand on Callen’s shoulder too long. The man had a laugh that bit. Callen introduced me with only my name.
“This is Saga,” he said.
Camden nodded. “Nice to meet you.”
I kept my eyes low and my hands clean and the night moved like a film strip through food and clatter. Callen stumbled out half hammered later and walked me to the taxi.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Fine,” I said.
He was not.
At my building, at my thin door, I pulled the curtain aside and breathed in the room. It smelled like old curtains and a life that would not let me sleep easy.
Kelsey had texted about a long haul and I said yes. He had covered for me with the woman demanding money. He said he’d tell her I’d been out of town for months.
Callen leaned against the bed, touching the bruise on his back like checking a map of where an enemy had walked.
“Who hit you?” I asked.
“Some idiot at a table,” he replied. “They were drunk, so I showed them the floor.”
“You showed them the floor and carried on like a saint.”
He laughed, and for once I let a sound out that was not dry.
“Two days,” he said. “Then I go back to work.”
“Back to being a monk?”
“Back to being a detective.”
He always called himself a detective when he was thinking about things hard. He loved to fix the bits of the world that broke.
I went on the trip. Engines, roads, cracked coffee. Kelsey told a story about a kid at the market who wanted his mother and wrote to the moon. I choked and pretended it was the smoke.
The woman who asked for money kept calling the shop. She came again and again. Kelsey, who looked like he’d been made from spare parts and jokes, stared her down and told her she couldn’t.
“She’s asking for five thousand now,” he told me. “She keeps stepping up.”
I bit hard on the inside of my cheek. It hurt.
“Tell her I’ll pay one thing,” I said quietly. “Nothing more.”
“You sure?” he said.
“No.” I lied. “Just tell her.”
He looked at me like I was both foolish and brave. “Okay,” he said. “But next time, let me deal with it. You’re too good at carrying your weight. You don’t have to carry everything.”
I had carried everything for so long that the idea of letting someone else fold things into his hands felt like leaving the steering wheel while the truck moved uphill. Scary, and good.
When I returned a week later, the door to the little shop was open. The pages of a ledger were ripped with shoe prints across them. “She asked for money,” Kelsey whispered. “Five thousand.”
I wanted to crawl under a table. Instead I rolled my sleeve up and counted out the cash from sales.
Kelsey touched my wrist. “Why don’t we go to the police?” he said.
“Because we will be told to add a lock and keep the door shut,” I replied.
“You can’t keep doing this alone.”
“You can try to stop people by owning your fear,” I said. “It doesn’t work.”
Callen came by with a plastic bag of soup and sat down at the table. “How about this: we make her stop without cash.”
“How?” I asked.
“I’ll make her uncomfortable,” he said.
“You mean—?”
“In front of everyone,” he said. “Public. Loud. Make it worse than a simple demand. Make it so people watch.”
For a second I wanted to say no. Then I remembered how a stranger had stuck his hand into my clothes on the mountain. I remembered being small and then being large enough to keep him breathing with a stomp.
“Kelsey, you put up cameras,” Callen said later while I packed my truck. “We’ll know when she comes.”
We put one phone in the corner with a cheap tripod. We told a couple of market vendors to watch for her. The plan was simple: catch her at the act, make people listen, and let her requests become the thing people shared and laughed at.
“You sure?” I asked Callen.
He kissed my forehead. “I’m sure. But promise me one thing.”
“What?”
“Say nothing. Let me handle the scene.”
I promised because he had asked.
When she came that afternoon, she was louder and meaner. “Five thousand,” she snapped at Kelsey, voice high enough to make two people turn.
I watched the video later and my hands went cold. She argued and made threats. People gathered old curiosity like a flock.
Callen came in like a storm.
“Is that how you talk to people?” he asked.
The woman spat at his shoes. “You don’t know what she did,” she hissed.
Callen reached into a pocket and produced a small recorder. “She’s been threatening my friend’s shop. Enough.”
“You don’t understand—” she started.
“I do,” Callen said, voice flat. “Let’s talk this out now. In front of everyone.”
He led her outside. People pressed in like the city wanted to watch a lesson. He played clips. People recognized the voice over and over as she demanded more and more. Her face changed from anger to panic. She stammered. She tried to deny.
“Kelsey, call the vendors,” Callen said.
They produced messages. People in the crowd pulled out their phones and began recording. “Say it again,” someone shouted.
She broke. She cried. She fell to her knees. Her brand of power was gone.
“I couldn’t get work,” she wailed. “She took my money, then I lost my job. I needed—”
“You stole from her,” Callen said, hard. “You threatened her, you pressured her—why?”
The crowd tightened like a fist. A vendor who’d seen the woman buy milk recorded the whole time. The woman wept and reached for us to stop.
“Forgive me,” she begged, voice frantic. “Please forgive me. I have a baby.”
Kelsey’s fist trembled. “You come to our shop and tear the ledger. You leave us scraping by.”
“You people all gather to shame me for trying to feed my kid,” she cried.
Callen went quiet, and then the room shifted. People stopped feeling each other and started thinking about the rules.
“You came asking for money,” Kelsey said. “You made it a payment plan that never ends.”
She began to beg. People around us held out their phones like torches. Someone shouted, “Call the police.”
On the pavement two steps away, she went limp and covered her face. The videos spread like spilled oil. The next day she was the one who could not walk into the market.
We did not press charges. We took photos of her damage for the police so if it happened again, there would be a record.
Later, Callen took my hand while we walked back to the truck. “Did you feel different?” he asked.
I looked at my palms, at the small scab of courage there. “I felt…lighter.”
He smiled like the mission was complete. “Good,” he said. “Now let me be useless and watch you sleep.”
His voice folded into the hum of the highway. I drove and he slept and I looked at the jade pendant at my collar and felt like I was wearing a tiny anchor that kept a man from slipping away.
The months were a chain of small bits. We met at service stations, we ate too much fried food, we argued about what constituted a decent breakfast, and we shared cigarettes and sometimes the blanket in a small motel room.
“Do you ever want to stop?” he asked once, when the sun was dying and we were in a truck stop with stale muffins.
“Stop what?” I asked.
“Running. Driving. The long roads.”
I thought of my life with its maps and its slams and its small moments of mercy. “I like the road,” I said.
He reached over and took my hand. “You can have the road—and a place to come home to.”
“I don’t know how to be still,” I said.
He hummed. “You’ll learn.”
I did not know if I could learn to be still, but I knew I could learn to breathe while someone breathed next to me. In motel rooms he spoke to me like he was cataloguing the stars. “You’re not a rumor, Saga,” he would say. “You’re a woman who makes a living and feeds people.”
“Thanks for the pep talk,” I muttered.
“You’re welcome,” he said. “Also, please stop stealing the covers.”
When I told him about the ID glitch at the museum—“system flagged you,” the guard had said—he looked at me like the label was a stain.
“It’s a word,” he said. “It doesn’t get to hang on you forever.”
At a small temple in Anhua we put coins into porcelain boxes for peace. I asked for nothing flashy. He asked for me, like a boy saying please. The monk smiled and tied a thread on my wrist for luck, like a promise.
“I bought you this,” he said, handing me the jade again. “So you remember I’m an idiot sometimes, but I am your idiot.”
“I don’t think you’re an idiot,” I said. I let him be.
We rode a bus once, crowded and warm. Someone’s baby cried, someone pushed a heavy sack, and Callen and I smiled and let the city move around us. We joked that the baby had the exact face of trouble and I fed apples to a toddler who kicked his feet like a little engine.
The small things became the main things.
One morning, after a long night, I woke to Callen’s feet on my face. He was coming home from a late call and wanted to see me. He was a man who guarded me for free.
“You smell like night shift,” I said.
“You smell like store soap,” he said back.
He bought milk for the shop like a man who carried responsibility like loose change. I cooked him soup in the dawn and he said, “You should eat more. You look like the wind shook the life out of you.”
I smiled a little.
The months folded into a year. Kelsey found steadier work. Rowan Gentile, the quiet man from the market, came by with a new baby and told stories of his old life like a man who had found a new rhythm.
When the woman who demanded money tried to crawl back again months later, she found warm faces and locked doors. The vendors had phone numbers for local help and the city had a plan. The woman fell silent.
One evening, in the city’s older part, Callen and I found ourselves at a small restaurant lit by bad bulbs. He paid without showing the card like it was a stunt he loved.
“You look happier,” he said.
I put my fork down. “I sleep better.”
“We can make it permanent,” he said. His voice was small like a secret pulled out.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean stay. Less driving. More you in one place. More me being useless in a local way.”
I could hear the caution in his words—the policeman in him making sure I had choices, not a trap.
“I don’t know how to be a stay,” I said. “I built my life in rest stops.”
“Then we create a life that fits both.” He reached across the table and took my hand. “You can still drive, but not run. You can keep the team of one if you want, but you don’t have to fight alone.”
I wanted to say yes with a ring and a promise, but life did not like big words without proof. So I started with small ones.
“Stay tonight,” I said.
He grinned. “Already here.”
We walked home along empty streets. The air smelled of hot oil and night rain. He wrapped his jacket around me when a wind came.
“Where do we start?” I asked.
He paused. “With breakfast tomorrow.”
“And the next day?”
“With pairs of socks.”
I laughed. “Romantic.”
“I’ll take that as a win.” He kissed the back of my hand. “Also, tell Kelsey to stop letting vendors harass you. It’s becoming a civic crime.”
Months later, I had a run at the big route and I left early. Callen met me at a highway fork. He had come out to the highway in his plain truck. He traced the map on my dashboard like a child reading lines.
“You sure?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
He kissed me quick. “Call me.” He watched the road with the same intensity as he watched me.
I drove. For the first time, I did not drive away from something. I drove toward a plan.
The road still tasted of cold and diesel. But now it had a meaning: I carried good rice to a family, a crate of oranges for the shop, a small box of toys Kelsey had left on the seat for me to deliver.
When I returned, Callen had hung a small photo of us in the cab: a sly, half-smile. I put it under the sun visor and left it there like an amulet.
One evening we faced the hardest thing. My past—small stumbles and bigger mistakes—kept getting in the way like a dog on the road. A man tried to make it a headline; a company did an online write-up that used words, and then a small group of people began to treat me like a story.
I felt the old itch to hide. Callen and I sat on the back step of a diner. He was quiet a long time.
“I have something to tell you,” I said.
He set his jaw like a man bracing. “I know you,” he said. “Say it.”
“I’m not clean,” I said. “I did things to survive. I know the fear will come back.”
He looked at me and then looked out at the darkening road. “Your past is part of you. It doesn’t have to be your future.”
“People talk,” I said. “They use my story like a weapon.”
“So we change the story,” he said. “We make the new story louder. You don’t have to erase it. You can tell them what you did and why and then show them what you do now.”
I thought of the museum where a recovered relic shone under glass. Recovery was possible. So was making a new life.
We planned it like we planned a route. Small steps. A talk with a local reporter. A chat at the community center about second chances. We told our story as plainly as a truck log: the miles, the work, the truth.
When people came, they listened. They asked questions. Some left. Some stayed. Kelsey stood at my side and when the crowd asked if I had changed, he said, “She’s always been this—hard-working and kind. Some people don’t give people room to breathe.”
The man on the podium who had been ready to make a meal out of my past tried to find a shock. He found a plan. The public did not shout him down. They looked instead at the woman who drove a truck and the man who sat beside her.
The old words still stuck to me like tar. But not as many people wanted to throw them. We were catching the story back like a net.
One late afternoon, after I had spoken at a small community meeting, Callen took me to the river. There were lights on the far shore and a gull made lazy circles.
“I told my mom,” he said.
“You told your mom?” I laughed.
“Yes. She thinks I should marry you for your driving sense,” he said.
I stopped walking. “You told her what?”
“That I—” he took my hands, “—that I want you to choose a home. If you want to.”
I didn’t scream, though my heart was a drum. I looked at him and his face was an honest open thing.
“Are you asking me to stop driving?” I asked, half-teasing.
“No.” He laughed. “No. I’m asking you to stop fighting alone. And to let me try being the person who makes you supper when you’re homesick.”
The river made a steady sound. I swallowed and felt the way my whole life could bend a little.
“Promise me one thing,” he said.
“What?”
“Keep driving,” he said. “Just tell me when you’re scared. Share the heavy things.”
I looked at him. The simplicity of the ask made it feel like a soft trap. I squeezed his hand.
“Yes,” I said.
He smiled like a sunrise. Callen pulled a small box from his pocket. My breath faltered.
“You don’t have to say yes,” he said. “But I’d like this to mean I get to be the person who sits in the passenger seat. Permanently.”
I opened the box. Inside lay a ring that looked like a piece of road salt—simple and bright.
“I don’t do stars,” I said. “I do mileage. I will not promise you everything. But I promise I will not drive alone unless I choose to.”
“Then that’s enough,” he said, eyes damp like the river.
We kissed under the lamps and the gull flapped once and settled.
After that night, the world felt different. People were kinder, or we were choosing better roads. Kelsey laughed and said, “I knew you liked him.”
“I did not know,” I said.
“You did,” he said.
At the market, when a vendor from years back apologized for gossip, I accepted. It was a small circle in the long map of things.
There were hard days still. Sometimes I had to leave on a long haul and Callen fidgeted at the gate. Sometimes the old labels came over the internet and made my stomach a stone again. Yet when the road got thin, I had someone who would meet me halfway.
Months later, as the sun went down and diesel fog rose, I loaded up for another long run. The pendant sat against my collar. Callen stood with a thermos and peanut butter sandwiches.
“Bring me a real souvenir this time,” he joked.
“What do you want?” I asked.
“Surprise me,” he said.
“You mean like a broken windscreen or a new friend?” I teased.
He winked. “A postcard from the road.”
I got in. He clasped my hand and then, with the old serious face he used on important nights, he pulled me closer and said, “I love you.”
The words were small but they filled the cab like light through a crack.
“I know,” I said. I buckled the seatbelt and checked the mirrors. The rear-view showed his face and the pendant glittered.
“Text when you stop,” he said.
“I always do.”
I pulled onto the highway. The engine hummed. I drove and felt the safe weight of the world at the wheel, and the safe warmth of someone who said he would be there at the end of the road.
When I finally reached the town outside the city, the streetlights painted a map of gold. Callen met me by the driver’s door like a man who was always on time.
We climbed into the cab together. He draped his arms around my shoulders, and his head fit like a key against the cup holder.
“What’s our next stop?” he asked.
“Home,” I said.
He kissed my cheek and the jade pendant knocked lightly against my collarbone like a steady heartbeat.
I put the truck into gear. We rolled forward.
The road kept going. So did we.
The End
— Thank you for reading —