Sweet Romance13 min read
I Got a Second Life — and He Was Madly Mine
ButterPicks16 views
I woke to a voice that crawled under my skin.
"What's wrong? You still want to play with the idea?" he said, low and rough.
The sound of it hit me harder than a slap. I froze. The name that rose in my throat felt like a rusted key turning: Hudson Daniels.
I remembered the night. I remembered everything down to the ache in my bones. I remembered the way it ended last time. I remembered the promise that never got kept.
My heart lurched. I had been given a second chance. I had been thrown back to the night a year before everything broke.
"Don't—let's talk," I whispered, voice trembling. "Can we—just wash up and sleep?"
He didn't answer at once. The dark swallowed the room and I watched the shape of him through the dim. Hudson's eyes were a dangerous red-glass stare. They were like a hunted animal's: bright, fixed, impossible to look away from.
"All right," he said, finally. The breath left him like a soft threat.
I let out a sound that might have been relief. Last time he turned cruel in one violent instant and then turned sweet as if nothing had happened. I had been trapped inside his house for weeks, declared to the whole city as belonging to him, and I had vanished from my old life. I had run, been dragged back, used, and then blamed for breaking everything adults had planned.
This time I knew better. This time I would survive.
"Can I wash by myself?" I asked, voice small.
He moved with that calm, controlled motion that used to drive me mad. He put a robe over himself and stepped out of the bathroom. When I came back, the bed was empty and a cigarette glow flashed at the bedside. He had left a trail of ash and I tasted smoke on his skin in my memory. I made him promise, in my head, he would never smoke again. It was the only small thing I thought I could ask.
"Come here," he said later, sitting at the edge of the bed. His cigarette stub glowed dark.
I sat up. My whole face burned with shame. I had been foolish before—so foolish I still wanted to hit myself. This wasn't a moment to be cute. This was survival.
"Please go get some rest," I begged, more to myself than to him.
"Hum," he answered. Behind that single sound I heard a promise and an animal's hunger.
He wrapped a robe around me and helped me into the tub. He was not rough then. He poured water as if each drop could wash away everything I had been. He said one sharp thing under his breath as a warning.
"If you keep staring like that, I'll take it for assent," he said.
"I—I'll wash," I stammered. "Can I wash myself?"
For a moment his hands stopped. He looked at me only long enough to memorize the angle of my jaw. Then he stood and left the bathroom, muttering something that sounded like he had gone to cool off.
I finished my shower and tried to creep out of the suite. I touched the doorknob. A voice snapped, low and controlled: "Come over here."
I turned. He sat on the bed and his face looked like stone. The cigarette smoke made everything feel unreal. He moved like a man who had once run toward a cliff and now couldn't escape the wind. He had once stopped me from leaving like a man who had lost himself. He had once made me pregnant and I had lost the child. I had made choices that had broken lives—mine and others'—but this time I would not let the same trail lead to the same ruin.
"I want to go back to school," I said later, quietly, catching him at breakfast.
He flinched. His coffee clinked against china. For five days he didn't show. I assumed I had pushed him away with my sudden stubbornness. But he came back on the seventh day like a storm.
"Pack. Tonight you attend my charity gala." He dropped a fitted dress on the table. It was expensive and made for someone else, but he had it anyway. We had a choice: last time I had ruined him on a stage of cameras and gossip. This time I had a plan.
I took the dress back to my room and the woman I had been the last life stared at me from the mirror: the fake braces gone, the dyed wig gone, the thick, yellowed make-up washed out. We replaced "ugly" with skill. A doctor removed the braces. A stylist corrected my hair. The woman I saw in the glass became someone else: simpler, kinder, and pretty enough that the city would notice.
I wanted to be invisible; I wanted to be heard. This life handed me one jagged chance.
At the gala Hudson insisted on holding my arm through a crowd of people whose cameras flashed like rain. Reporters crowded the carpet, whispering. "Who is this new woman?" "What happened to the old girl?" Questions came like knives.
"Get out of the way," Hudson said once, still calm. His assistant, Tatum Sanders, stepped in like a shield and I let him. I smiled like an idiot and let a man I barely trusted act like a castle wall.
We sat down through the auction with nothing much between us, until the auctioneer called a piece I recognized: the blue-ribbon Mikimoto sapphire butterfly necklace. It had been mine once before. I had given it away thoughtlessly. Last time it became the proof of betrayal that pushed the whole chain into ruin.
"Do you want it?" Hudson asked, eyes on me.
"Yes," I said before thinking.
Tatum frowned. Sebastian Boone—the other man—sat across the room. He had been a boyfriend once, a boy I had planned to marry, a man who had been all careful plans and quiet greed. He expected me to be his obedient girlfriend, to help him take everything his eyes fell on. Last life he had used me as bait. He had the kind of mind that made enemies invisible and then crushed them.
I toyed with the bid paddle like a loaded weapon.
"Five million," a voice said.
"Ten million," Hudson answered.
I saw the flash in Sebastian's mouth. He had thought this game would go his way—buy the relic, show the town he had the advantage, humiliate Hudson with a scandal that might take him down. He wanted me to be his ticket into power. Sebastian had always been cruel in the way of men who learn to calculate: he would plan how to use a woman and toss her when her usefulness ended.
I raised the paddle. "One hundred million," I said, smiling like the devil.
The lobby split into stunned silence. Tatum made a face that might have tried to be surprised. Hudson looked at me for a heartbeat, then allowed himself to accept the seeming madness. He raised the paddle in reply.
"One hundred and fifty million," he called, and the room exploded into noise.
I pinched his hand when he handed me the delicate box after the hammer.
"How much do you like it?" he asked softly.
I shut the lid on the box and kissed his cheek in private, right there, small and scandalous. "Very much," I lied.
On the walk to the ballroom I saw them: Megan Petrov and Sebastian Booth—no, Sebastian Boone—standing from across the room. Megan's optimism always hid a sting. She had been my friend in college. She had been someone I trusted with secrets. Last life, she had been the one who helped me fail, who helped me get poisoned by a plan to make me look like I wanted the wrong things.
Sebastian didn't hide his smile. He thought his wheels were still turning. "She'll come running," he had told Megan over the phone last time. "Get her to pick a side; she'll pick the side with the most power."
Tonight they pounced on that thought like wolves. They had expected me to trip, to let everything fall out. They didn't realize how I had changed.
At the small courtyard during intermission another phone buzzed hard against my ear: Sebastian's voice, angry and urgent.
"You had better be careful," he said. "You think you can play both of us? We know everything about you."
I laughed, a soft, terrible sound. "You underestimate me," I said. "You always did."
I left the hall to go to the powder room, to check the necklace, to breathe. A text arrived: "You can record the truth, remember what we discussed." It was from someone working with Sebastian. A trap.
I had expected an ambush at the gala. I expected cameras. I expected Megan to smile like a saint and then push. Instead I had a plan I had built over nights: files, backups, a friend with a way into the media, whispers that could be set like seeds.
I had a plan to flip the pile of frozen smugness onto their faces.
"You can expose him," Sebastian had said earlier on the phone to someone else, meaning Hudson. "If you can get proof he did anything…"
He thought Hudson's reputation was soft. He thought that an accusation would burn him. He had used the past to learn his trade: manipulate, record, play.
I thought of the boy I had tried to protect, the one Sebastian would destroy to win.
Before the gala I had fed his old plot back at him in a quiet voice and then bawled in a recorded call to Sebastian's hand-picked editor. "He wouldn't stop," I sobbed in the script line I planned for him. "He—he wouldn't let me go and he did things I couldn't forget."
Sebastian loved when a victim obeyed his script. He leaned forward. Megan clutched his arm and I let them assume: perfect. The city tuned in to a live stream—Megan had decided not to be patient this time. She would not wait for Sebastian's polished release. She wanted live chaos.
It started small: whispers, a deleted video clip. Within minutes, the gala's big screen lit up with our staged drama—the footage of me running, of Sebastian's pointed words, of a whisper meant to sound like a confession. The crowd turned and watched jaws drop.
Hudson held out his cigarette and killed it with his boot. His hand was shaking like someone who had been given a blade and no instruction on how to use it. He looked at the screen, at me, and then at me again. Pain slid across his face.
Then Megan stepped forward from her seat and did exactly what we all expected: she played hurt, stage lights catching the fake tears she painted on. "I can't believe she would—" she said, voice trembling like a violin.
"Wait," I said, sharper than I expected. "Do you think this will work again?"
Sebastian's face cooled. He had read the room wrong. He had believed the plan would make Hudson crumble and me surrender. But the audience was not as simple.
We were both playing parts but I had chosen mine elsewhere: I had a hidden file in my phone and a friend who knew how to stitch things right. At the very second Megan and Sebastian thought they had won, I pushed a small hidden app and opened a live broadcast of my own.
"Good evening," I said into my phone, voice calm and steady. "Since some recordings were convenient tonight, I think it's time to show the other side."
The screen split and a dozen clips started to run. Some were texts; some were recordings of meetings. The footage showed something else: Megan's message to a reporter arranging a live switch. Sebastian's private audio planning meeting. A spreadsheet of payments. A little map of the arrangement showing who would do what, when, and why.
Gasps rolled like thunder.
"No—no—" Sebastian tried to move, but his words were wet and small. Megan's face turned the shocked red of someone whose mask had slipped.
The crowd shifted from speculation to fury. Cameras swung to Sebastian and Megan and didn't cut away.
"You—this is—" Megan tried, but the microphone had caught more than she wanted.
"How could you—" someone from the crowd shouted. "You spent a million on edits and you were trying to ruin lives."
Sebastian looked like a man who had counted all his coins and suddenly realized his pockets were empty. He went from smile to bravado to a face that was nothing but flinching light.
"She lied to me!" Megan cried. "She planned this to make out like I'm the villain!"
"You set this up to destroy Hudson!" I said, the live feed making every word public. "You thought you could take him out of his company and then use that to take everything."
The room was close now, hot with cameras and phones. Journalists shoved mics forward. "Is it true?" they shouted. The live stream clock spun. Online viewers climbed like a fever.
Sebastian, who had once believed in the quiet cruelty of manipulation, faltered. At first, denial. "That's edited. It's not real." He tried to hold onto the old rules.
Then the playback rolled: a recorded voice, his, planning times, praising Megan for playing the "hurt friend" angle. It was there, raw. The crowd was louder. Someone around me was clapping.
"Look at her," Megan said. She had no answers left. Her hands shook and her smile had dropped. The people around her started to back away.
Sebastian's expression turned cold for a final fraction of a second—then it collapsed. Denial, anger, pleading, nothing remained but the rawness of a man losing an argument he'd thought would be private.
I had learned how to throw a stone into a pond. The circle spread out until even the reporters who had come for spectacle couldn't ignore the set of receipts and digital evidence. It was complete. It was public. There was nowhere to hide.
They had to face the world like this. They had to ride the unstoppable wave of their own making. The live chat filled with comments, someone recording on their phone. A woman beside me wept with fierce delight.
"This is not just me," I said. "This proves they were making a plan to manipulate public opinion, to hurt Hudson's reputation, and to take advantage of me. This is not how you treat people."
Megan tried to speak again, but no one listened. Voices grew meaner and rougher. "Shameless!" "How could you?" "Shame!"
From smug predator to collapsed defendant in a matter of minutes—that was the arc of Sebastian Boone. He went through a sequence of reactions as if someone had turned a volume knob up on his panic: smug, then fluster, angry, frantic, and finally hollow.
People in the hall pulled out phones. Some began filming them. Others looked at Hudson as if to ask whether he had known. He did not. He looked shell-shocked, bleeding in his palm from an earlier glass he had pressed too tightly, and oddly relief floated across his face in quick waves. The man who vowed not to care about reputation had been forced to confront what it meant to let hurt happen in his family.
The punishment played like a slow-match in the center of the gala. I had not wanted retribution for vengeance's sake. I wanted justice. I wanted the truth to be visible so that other people would not be hurt the way I had been.
The next day the story exploded. Sebastian and Megan couldn't hide. Journalists combed through every file, every message. The company boards asked questions. People who had seen the live feed sent messages that burned like small coals. Sarah, a reporter from one of the big networks, called me.
"Do you have more?" she asked.
"I have everything," I said.
Then she asked, "Will you come to press? Will you show the public?"
"Yes," I said. "Let's give them the whole playlist."
What followed was the punishment scene I had imagined for nights—it was a long, slow, public undoing of their plans. It was not cheap humiliation for delight. It was exposure. It was the city watching two architects of shame have their house in order fall apart.
I walked into the press hall and felt the air change. Cameras clicked like a metronome. People chewed their words. I set down the box with the sapphire necklace. I opened it. The stone gleamed with blue like a little brave sky.
"Good morning," I said. "You all saw part of what happened last night. You saw a staged record. Today I want to show you the whole thing. These recordings show meetings where Mr. Boone planned the release of false videos. They show emails where Ms. Petrov set up a live feed. They show receipts for payments to a freelance editor."
The reporters leaned forward as if my voice had become a magnet. One camera zoomed in. Sebastian watched from the audience, his face melting like candle wax. Megan sat beside him, already drained of defiance.
"I won't read every email," I told the crowd. "You can read them yourself. But I will show you the evidence that proves their plan."
A clerk wheeled a laptop to the podium. For two hours the feed exposed what they had planned. Comments ran live. People who had attended the gala that night watched the same playback. Old gossip was revealed for what it was: not rumor, but manufacture.
Sebastian watched, and he tried every trick. First, he tried to be defiant. "This is a set-up," he said when allowed to speak. "She's having us on."
Then he moved to denial. "It's doctored." He had thought he could scare people into backing away. He had spent years learning to be smooth. But each file came with headers, with server info, with timestamps that refused a nice lie. The audience had ways to check and verify.
Then he tried to shame me, but the air had shifted. People refused to take his bait. He moved from silence to pleading. "Please," he begged at one point, voice breaking. "Not tonight."
Megan tried to place blame on me—on me, who had been the victim of so many small cruelties. "She seduced me," she said, sheltering her hands as if I had done violence upon her.
A woman in the front row, who had been filming since the start, shouted back, "You set her up!"
Another woman stood to her feet, "You tried to ruin a man for your own gain."
The crowd started to chant, a single sentence: "Truth over lies."
By the end of the day, both Sebastian and Megan had been forced into a corner that did not include the high ground. Funders withdrew offers. A charity returned the check. The city council asked for records. Their names, once instruments of control, became a cautionary tale.
They crumpled in different ways. Sebastian's smugness shattered into frantic bargaining. He begged for quiet meetings, for private apologies that would bleed into public silence. People only laughed. Megan's rage slid into denial, then into the awkwardness of a woman whose friend had turned away. Her eyes became small, the brashness hollow.
The crowd's reactions were loud and varied. Some people recorded everything. Some whispered behind cupped hands. Some clapped. An older man stood up and left slowly, shaking his head as if he'd been shown a mirror.
I watched them both fail and I felt something I had not expected: not joy, but a cool, clear sense of balance returned. They had tried to arrange my ruin as a favor to themselves. Now the city had turned the mirror.
In the weeks that followed, the fallout carried far. Companies who had been itching to work with Sebastian pulled contracts. Megan's social circle diminished by the day. People who had once laughed in rooms that were meant to be private now kept their distance. For every small victory they had planned, ten public doors closed.
I did not take pleasure in their collapse, though I had the right to be angry. I took pleasure in the fact that the truth had teeth.
After the gala and the public exposure, the rest of my plan moved into motion with quieter steps. I kept my relationship with Hudson complicated on purpose. He learned to be gentle. I learned to be honest.
We did not melt together in a single day. We had arguments, terrible nights, and long apologies. He once kissed me until I forgot to be afraid. I made sure to hold onto the memory of the boy I had saved at the basketball court that day. I could still see him—Jameson Berry, the player; he had once been a boy with a future that had been cut by someone else's vengeance. I had saved him from a spiral that would have wrecked more than one life.
My second life taught me two things. One: never give away your power because a plan promises safety. Two: people who hurt others often do so because they fear being hurt.
At the basketball game, Sebastian and Megan had tried to bait me into a public scene. I refused. I stood in the crowd and watched the play unfold. When a player—Jameson Berry—was about to make a move that would cost him everything, I ran onto the court and shielded him with a simple act. I showed up for the people who could have been casualties of the scheme.
Hudson watched from the stands and his face changed. It turned hard, then soft, then something more like fear. He had thought he had the power to make me stop. He had thought he could clip my wings. He was wrong.
After that night he apologized like a man releasing a weight for the first time. "I won't let you go," he told me. "Even if you want to run, I will follow, and I will do better."
We built a life that used both of our strengths. We fought in the small ways that real people do. We kissed in the ways fiction only promises. We argued about small things like dinner times and big things like trust. We learned to forgive when the apology came from a place of looking at the damage and wanting to clean.
There were times I faltered. I thought of the child I had lost in my previous life, the life where fear had been louder and kinder decisions were absent. I sometimes heard a tiny, furious voice inside my head: never let them take it again.
Hudson built me a small altar of normal things: a kettle that sang sweetly, a watch whose ticking reminded us both how fast life can move, and a necklace box with a sapphire butterfly. He never wasted money on barbed gifts. He became the man who could change and did.
"Promise?" he asked one night, when we were quiet and the city had drifted to sleep.
"I promise," I said, and this time I meant it with every small misstep between us.
In the end, the blue butterfly remained on my neck like a small pact. It reminded me that second chances arrive like lightning—they are rare, sharp, and once you catch them you better hold on.
I had been reborn into a life where I could be brave. I chose it. I built it.
It wasn't simple. But then, simple never changed the world.
The End
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