Sweet Romance12 min read
I Fed My Neighbor a Chicken Leg and Broke Two Hearts
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I moved out six months ago because Gordon Jackson slept with someone else.
"Marina, are you really okay?" Josie asked the night I told her I was leaving.
"I'm fine," I lied, and Josie said, "You sound like my grandmother when she eats lemon pie."
I wasn't fine. I taped my heart back together and put it in a cardboard box labeled MOVE FORWARD. I found a tiny apartment in a new building, started a new job as a concept artist at a game studio, and worked insane hours.
One late night, elevator lights humming, I stood with my hands full of coffee and a sleeve of stress. A tall man got on before me.
"Watch your step," he said.
"Watch my—" I almost answered with a joke I didn't remember thinking, but the way he said it made my ears want to keep that sound forever.
He turned. When he turned I knew a line in me had been crossed. Not because of anything he said, but because he was beautiful in a way that made my tongue trip.
"Careful—" he repeated, quieter, and then he lunged.
The elevator doors came together in a mechanical breath. A corner of my skirt was caught.
"Hang on!" he said, and his hand yanked the fabric free.
"Ow—" I said, but there was no time; in his hurry he pulled so hard the skirt slipped down and my floral lace undershorts flashed for a beat.
He blushed, froze, and then apologized like a man who had just committed a crime.
"I'm so, so sorry," he stammered.
"It's fine," I said, absurdly. "It's totally—"
"Five," said the elevator screen. "Floor five."
He stepped out like a gentleman escaping a scandal. I stood there mortified. I vowed to never, ever wear those ridiculous undershorts again.
I didn't expect to see him again.
I ate at the little Shaxian chain near my building because it was fast and because it had the best fried chicken leg. One evening I sat with my noodles, pressing my face into a sad drama about a handsome man who loved someone else.
Two silhouettes passed the window: Gordon and a girl.
"Gordon?" My blood did a small, ugly flip.
She called him "husband" in a voice that sounded like candy. I wanted to retch. I wanted to be the kind of person who would ruin them without blinking. I remembered all the nights we had planned a life and the times he had lied.
I caught the tall neighbor's eye. He noticed me looking at the table. He was the one from the elevator. He had a calm face that didn't need drama.
I pulled. I grabbed his arm the way a kid grabs a hand to cross a street. "Sweetheart!" I said, with the grin of a woman about to ruin a marriage.
He froze. He looked down at me. Then he mouthed, "What?"
"Help me," I mouthed back, because it sounded better than "Help me feed you a chicken leg in front of my ex."
He understood.
Gordon and the girl walked in. Gordon's face passed through three colors: confident, surprised, then sour confusion.
"Marina," Gordon said, like a man calling for a pet.
I ignored him and turned the full, embarrassing beam of my smile on the neighbor.
"This is my boyfriend," I announced.
"Really?" Gordon said, voice with a small crack.
"Yes," I said.
The girl—Anais—leaned toward him. Her eyes slid over my neighbor like someone trying on a dress. "Cesar?" she asked.
Cesar Delgado blinked. He looked like he could have been plucked from a sunlit campus brochure. He was quieter than his height suggested. He nodded, embarrassed but cooperative.
"He's my boyfriend," I said, louder. "Isn't he?"
"Yes," Cesar said, the word like a small surrender.
Anais's face tightened. "Are you dating him?" she asked him.
"He's my friend," Cesar began, and I squeezed his hand under the table. He gave me a tiny, sheepish nod and said, "We're...together."
Gordon's smugness stuttered. His mouth opened. He had no ready line for this.
Cesar pushed a braised egg toward me. "Eat," he said softly.
I ate. Anais stared at us like a child who'd picked up a hammer and discovered the world could break. A small victory, like a firefly in a jar.
That night, when I got home, my friend Josie called and spilled something she shouldn't have kept.
"You won't believe this," she said, breathless. "After you left, everyone asked Gordon about you. He told people you dumped him. He made you the villain."
"Of course he did," I said. "Of course he wrapped himself in excuses."
"Listen, there's more," she said. "He asked Anais to move in with him."
"Nice," I said. "A new woman who calls him husband before the license. A real fairy tale."
"I heard Anais had a crush on someone else in college," Josie said. "White moonlight, unrequited. She wanted him and couldn't get him. She cornered Gordon when she needed security."
"What a plot twist," I said. "The girl's trophy did not become a trophy husband."
"Look, if it makes you feel better, Cesar added you on the neighborhood group," Josie said.
I opened my phone. A friend request came from "Cesar Delgado, Floor 5." I accepted immediately like a child taking free candy.
Then Cesar sent me a photo. A tiny, pink pair of Crayon Shin-chan underwear, like a comic note sent across a hallway.
"Is this yours?" he asked.
My palms turned to porridge. "I—" I typed. "Yes. It fell."
"It landed on my balcony," he wrote.
I felt like a circus act. I walked downstairs, heart clanging, like a bell no one had trained. I knocked at Cesar's door.
He opened it and his apartment was neat; cartoons flickered in the background, childlike and harmless. He offered the underwear like a peace treaty.
"Thanks," I said, embarrassed.
"You're welcome," he said.
I left, missing my keys. Of course I had left my keys. The universe enjoys neat moral ironies.
Cesar found me in the lobby with a watermelon in hand. "I brought an extra," he said. "You looked like you needed one."
"I—" I blinked. "Thank you."
"Sit with me?" he asked.
So I went to his place and we ate watermelon and watched a silly show. When my mother called on video, I scrambled, tried to hide everything that might make her worry.
"Marina, who's that man?" my mother asked.
"Friend," I said, but Cesar didn't walk out of the frame. My mother gasped.
"Is he your boyfriend?" she demanded.
"No!" I said, because I was not ready to admit anything.
Cesar smiled like a man who understood the game. "Don't explain," he said. "Let it be a scene."
I didn't know whether to forgive him for being so calm and useful.
When the neighborhood group pinged later, it was an invitation.
Gordon and Anais were having an engagement ceremony—yes, engagement—at the campus they used to haunt. He had invited me in a group message and tagged me like a prize he thought he still owned.
I almost said no. I almost wanted to curl on the sofa and eat noodles to the end of my days. But Josie gnawed at me with relentless logic.
"Go," she said. "You need to be out there. Bring your handsome neighbor."
"I don't have a handsome neighbor," I grumbled.
"You do tonight," she said. "Bring him and make them squirm."
I called Cesar. He paused a long time and then said simply, "I'll go with you."
We walked into that hall like actors. I smoothed my skirt, and he took my hand the way a person takes a license.
Someone from Gordon's old circle jeered, and my heartbeat thudded, but Cesar didn't flinch. He stepped between me and a drunk voice, cool and steady.
"Are you with her?" a man sneered, leaning forward.
"Yes," Cesar said, like a verdict.
"She's his ex," the man said. "Why are you playing house?"
"Because she wants to be," Cesar replied.
There was a hush. People looked. Gordon shifted like a guilty man in daylight.
When the couple stood to accept blessings, I held Cesar's hand. He squeezed back and said under his breath, "Say something when it's our turn."
So I did. I walked up and looked at Gordon and Anais.
"Congratulations," I said, loud and clear.
Gordon's smile was thin. "Thanks," he said.
"I'm glad to see you happy," I said. "Truly."
There was an odd pause, as if someone had turned a radio to static.
That night, after the ceremony, life didn't end for them. It only started to unravel.
I kept working. Days collapsed into concept files and caffeine. Cesar and I texted sometimes, ordinary things at first, like official looking neighbors: "Power outage?" "Package at the door?" Then small cracks of intimacy opened.
Half a month later Josie came with news like a bell.
"Gordon and Anais broke up," she said, eyes bright.
"What?" I said, and three words later the world popped.
"They had a huge fight," she said. "Anais found messages. Gordon flirted with someone at work. Anais blew up. They split."
"Good," I said, and then felt a small, guilty twitch. It wasn't enough that they split. I wanted consequences.
I learned the details slowly, like picking at a scab. Anais showed up at Gordon's office, furious, and accused him of emotional cheating. Gordon fired back, awful and loud, telling everyone that Anais had been after him from the start. The gossip engines churned. Their reputation crumpled like old bread.
But rumor is wispy; I wanted the kind of public shaming that stings, that leaves an imprint.
So I did something I had barely believed I could do: I called in a favor with someone who worked at Gordon's department. A friend who still remembered me kindly. I asked if they would arrange a presence where people could see the truth.
The plan was simple, blunt, and delicious: a public unmasking during a monthly department meeting where Gordon's "faithful" record would be compared to evidence, and Anais's complicity would be made visible. Not a legal prosecution—no arrests, no lawyers. Just truth served plainly before a roomful of colleagues and clients.
On the day, I sat in the back of the conference room and felt my knees go cold. Cesar was at my side, hand warm and steady.
"Are you sure about this?" he asked.
"I am," I said.
The room filled with the even hum of polite professional life—laptops, paper, the occasional cough. Gordon walked in with the posture of a man ready to be admired. He sat at the head of the table, the center of gravity in a world he assumed belonged to him.
The manager called the meeting to order. "Today we have a few items," she said, voice calm. "First, updates on the East Project. Second—"
"Marina?" A voice from the doorway. Gordon had recognized me at once.
I rose slowly. My legs were an orchestra of nerves. People looked up. The air tightened.
"She?" someone muttered.
I didn't speak. The manager's assistant took a breath and then started the slideshow. "Slide one," she said.
The screen showed emails and messages. The assistant clicked through with a serene, almost surgical precision. Private texts, messages from Gordon to several young colleagues, evidence of flirtation and invitations that turned from flirty to heavy-handed. The room grew hotter under the weight of fact.
"What's this?" Gordon said, voice high.
"These are copies of messages between you and coworkers," the assistant said. "They were submitted after complaints."
"That's private," Gordon stuttered. "This is—"
"We are not publishing private material for malice," the manager said. "We are presenting information relevant to workplace conduct."
People turned their chairs, phones lifted. A client at the long table clicked his pen. Faces rearranged into attention.
"One more," the assistant said, and the screen flashed a photograph: Gordon with someone at a promotional event, hands on a thigh, the kind of pose that belonged in a late-night PR stunt, not a professional portfolio.
"Is this—" someone whispered.
Gordon's face shifted. For the first time he looked small in a room where he had always felt large.
"But he's always been professional," a coworker tried to say.
"He invited me to his hotel room," a woman from Marketing said, voice flat. "I turned him down, and later I found out he was telling another person he had done nothing wrong."
The room began to hum. I could see heads tilt, browsers open, fingers tapping. Eyes moved to Gordon, then to me, then to the assistant displaying the last slide.
Anais stood in the doorway like someone who had just realized the costume she'd been given no longer fit.
"What is this?" she said, but her voice had slid sideways. Her eyes darted until they found Gordon's. He finally looked back at her—and the expression on his face was not anger but calculation giving way to panic.
"Marina," he said. "This is—this is ridiculous."
"Is it ridiculous?" I asked. "You messaged interns in the middle of the night. You asked one to send a private photo, and you told another you would help her promotion in exchange for 'time.' You called our past a mistake you never planned to pay for."
The silence was a kind of verdict.
"You knew about this?" Anais asked, voice small and raw.
Someone in the back cleared their throat. "We heard rumors," they said. "But the evidence is here."
One by one, colleagues stood. A manager who had always smiled at Gordon's jokes now looked at him like a man who had made an error in accounting.
"Explain," the department head said.
Gordon opened his mouth and said the things men like him say when the room turns against them: "I—it's complicated. She was clinging. She—"
"Stop," Anais hissed. Her face crumpled. "You asked me to be quiet. You told me you'd marry me. You then sent me pictures of other women. You told me to accept whatever I could get."
"It wasn't like that," Gordon said, and the words sounded small and thinner the more he tried them.
Around the room, people clicked cameras; phones rose like stalks of curious grass. Someone whispered, "Wow." Another said, "He lied to her?" People shifted in their seats, savored the collapse.
"Is this what you want?" the manager asked me.
"I want honesty," I said. "We all deserve workplaces where truth matters."
The hum of the room turned into a roar of judgment. Clients who had once nodded at Gordon's polished smile looked uncertain. Partners who had relied on his reliability exchanged messages under the table. A colleague I barely knew stood up and said, "I filed a complaint last month."
Gordon's face changed through a whole weather map of denial. First he was angry, then baffled. He tried to rationalize—"It's personal"—but the term had lost its shelter. He begged, "Please, this isn't fair."
"Fair?" someone near the front scoffed. "You turned people's careers into your playground."
I watched him shrink as people spoke. He tried to look around for allies and found only faces of clients and coworkers with polite horror. There was no applause. There were no notes of sympathy. He stood in a room where his arrogance had been traded for proof and where proof mattered more than charm.
Later, after the meeting dissolved into quiet murmurs and HR began its formal intake, I walked past Gordon. He looked at me, and for a second the smell of regret was as clear as rain.
"Marina," he said, like a man trying to find footing, "I'm sorry."
"Sorry?" I said. "You should be sorry to the people you hurt. Not me."
He tried to reach for me; I stepped away. Anais stood beside him, the two of them suddenly unmade, like a portrait someone had dragged through water.
The staffers hovered, curious and cold. People texted screenshots. Within hours his name had been whispered across other departments. The manager sent HR documentation. The clients wrote quiet notes to the head office. Gordon's reputation had been a balloon; now it leaked.
I stayed until the chairs were put back and the lights dimmed. Cesar stayed with me outside. We walked in the wet street and he slipped his hand into mine.
"You didn't need to—" he started.
"I needed to," I said. "I needed the world to see."
He nodded. "You were brave."
We went home together, hands warm and the shininess of the city making small promises.
After that day, Gordon moved away from the center like a man avoiding a spotlight. He resigned from his position, took a transfer to a quieter branch, and later his name became a rumor. Anais lost her job when her boss found patterns of her compromising behavior. People whispered that she had been fired for "fit." She was spotted later in town with an older man; rumor sat across coffee like a third person at the table.
They each suffered public consequences, but they also reacted differently. Gordon tried to sue once, but his lawyer told him the cost would be worse than the loss. He attempted to call me from a blocked number. "Marina, I never meant—" he said.
"Save your voice," I told him. "You meant what you meant."
Anais's unraveling had a different cadence. One day she posted a long, defensive message about misunderstanding, then deleted it. The next week she sat in a café with someone who did not look at her kindly. A colleague told me Anais begged for forgiveness at work, but people had already formed an image of her that would not let go.
"What's your favorite part?" Cesar asked me months later, as we ate a chicken leg together at the same Shaxian where it all began.
"The part where I stopped waiting for someone else's apology," I said.
Cesar smiled. "And the chicken leg?"
"It tasted like the first time I let myself laugh again," I answered.
He put his hand over mine. "Stay," he said.
I glanced at him. There was no drama, no noise. Just an ordinary hand and the steadiness of his eyes.
"Okay," I said. "I'll stay."
We ate and watched a cartoon on his phone, and sometimes he called me "sister" and sometimes "Marina." He kissed my forehead one night the way someone pins a small flag to a map and then says, quietly, "This is mine."
Life returned to its small routines: work, a little less lonely living, the neighbor's knocks on my door, a watermelon shared, and the occasional dramatic wave of gossip about people who had thought themselves untouchable.
I didn't become someone else. I became myself.
The thing that tied the whole mess into an odd ribbon was simple: the chicken leg. A small, greasy golden piece of public kindness that had held more power than I expected. It had been an offering and a seed.
Cesar once said, "You stood in front of them and gave them the last word. You gave them a chance."
"I gave them their mirror," I said. "And sometimes a mirror breaks."
He laughed and reached for another chicken leg. "Then let's keep breaking bad mirrors and buying more chicken."
I looked at him and felt the future like a warm thing crawling into the palms of my hands.
The End
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