Sweet Romance13 min read
I Sat on a Stranger's Lap and Ended Up Falling in Love
ButterPicks14 views
"I’m a flower," I told him.
He looked at me as if I’d said something normal. He tilted his head, the brown coat at his shoulders rustled, and for a second his face was blank as a sky without clouds.
"You're a what?" he asked, carefully.
"I’m a flower that’s about to wither," I said. "Can I be planted in your pot?"
He blinked. I blinked back. The elevator hummed; our skin smelled like elevator air and the faint soap of his coat. I sat down right on top of him with a rubbish flourish and did what felt exactly like a desperate seed: I curled in a little and said, "Can you water me? Please."
He didn't hit me. He didn't shove me. He just held very still and said, "Are you okay?"
"No," I said honestly. "But I’ll be if you water me."
"I—" He searched for the right answer like someone adjusting a mask. "I think we should call someone. The guard? A family member?"
"Please don't call the guard," I pleaded, because in my head petals were failing one by one. "Not the guard. Please."
He had a kind face with a softness in the jaw. For some reason that mattered more than logic. He looked like someone who would not enjoy conflict. So he did the one thing a kind person might do: he reached into his pocket, found his phone, and called the floor security. Then, against all sense, he called the paramedics.
"They're on the way," he said to me. "Hold on."
"Hold what?" I asked, and then a hiccup of laughter escaped me because the whole moment felt like a bad dream I had no script for.
I later learned his name was Carson Campos. I later learned that the elevator camera recorded the whole thing. I later learned my mother had panicked and called the police, and that the day’s dinner—mushroom stew—had been a mistake. But in that elevator my world hung on one line: the man in the brown coat who had been sitting calmly when I crashed onto his lap.
"You really should be more careful what you eat," he said when an EMT checked me and then sat back to let me be strange.
"I was being adventurous," I said. "And lonely. The stew was good."
He let me be ridiculous. He didn't laugh cruelly. He rubbed his thumb slowly across the back of his hand, like he was smoothing down something anxious.
Later, my life went online.
"Look! She planted herself on him!" became the kind of headline that isn't a headline but a chorus line in the world. A montage of the elevator footage went viral with a million laughing emojis. Somewhere halfway down the river of internet comments a heart floated up with it. Someone had typed, "She's actually pretty." Then the comment was deleted, like a ghost that realized it had been seen.
I sat in a hospital bed and scrolled through the river until my thumbs went numb. My mother barged in, red-faced and proud in a way that made me want to cry and laugh at the same time. Behind her, another figure—taller, calm, kind of still—stood like a rock in the doorway.
"He's the one who called," my mother said, like the story was a court case and she was presenting the key witness. She patted the man on the arm. "Say hello."
The man in the doorway smiled the way someone smiles when they're unsure whether to applaud or offer a tissue. "Hi. I’m Ezra Lawrence. I was the ER doctor on call."
He said it casually, as if "ER doctor" were as ordinary a thing as "accountant" or "taxi driver." But when he looked at me, his eyes were too clear for casualness. They were precise, kind, and not indulgent.
"I'm sorry," I said. "I… I was seeing things."
"What did you see?" he asked, and his voice was careful, interested.
"A little blue thing that—" I started, then stopped, because I had to be honest enough to tell the story: "A tiny blue creature was sitting on your head and it—"
"—pooped?" he finished for me, like we’d rehearsed it.
I couldn't help it. I laughed until I choked. "Yes," I said. "Green."
He actually smiled, a small, surprised thing. "That's… creative," he said.
"You would know," I teased. "You're a doctor."
He put a card in my hand before he left that day. Plain, white, name and number and a title. A professional offering tether: "If anything happens, call." He added, "Don't eat unknown mushrooms," like a sage handing down a law of the ancients.
"What's your name?" I asked, trying to be less foolish than the last time. The card was in my hand like a treasure.
"Ezra Lawrence," he said. "And—" he searched, a little embarrassed—"I don't mind being called Ezra."
"Good," I said. "I'm Jada Wallin. And I will not eat mushrooms for as long as I live."
"Promise?" he asked quietly, like a teacher coaxing a pledge.
"Not a promise," I said immediately, "because promises have to be kept. Call it an intention."
He smiled, like the intention meant more than a promise. He walked out of the room, and the sun cut like a coin across his shoulder blades.
*
"Don't be dramatic," Kassidy Rocha told me when I went to her apartment the day I left the hospital. "You did one of the most internet-famous things and you didn't even get paid."
"You laughed at me," I said. "You didn't even call and warn me about mushrooms."
"My mom's friend gave them to me," Kassidy said, guilty and trying to be quick with an explanation. "She said they were special. She didn't know…"
"You mean your godmother?" I asked.
"Yeah," she said. "She meant well."
Kassidy is the kind of friend who studies for tests like they’re debt payments. She cooks, she packs lunches, she knows about exams and about which pens work best for multiple-choice. She isn't a hero in dramatic ways, but her quiet care is a cliff I fall onto when I need a place to stop spinning.
That night we ate dumplings. Two kinds. Mushrooms and egg-and-chives. So completely absurd that I mixed them both. We ate watermelon, then I wandered a mall and tried on a dress I couldn't afford because I liked how it made the glass look reflected.
When I came home I saw something at the building entrance that was so wrong it could've been a setup for another online trend: big, fake spiders, huge rubber things someone decorated the stairwell with, meant for a prank. I squatted and almost belly-laughed at how ridiculous the spiders looked—until a man in a brown coat walked out of the stairwell.
"Carson?" I blurted because the image of him in that brown coat had stuck to my memory like gum to shoes. "Carson Campos?"
He looked up slowly. The familiar look came back to his face as he recognized me. "You again," he said with the strangest, most private smile.
"Why are there spiders here?" I asked, distrusting my own life.
"They're props," he said, and then, without emotion, he stepped on a cluster of the rubber spiders and snapped them in half like someone trampling crumpled paper. He looked at them as if they displeased him. For some reason the sight made me queasy.
"Not again," I said weakly, because the world of props and pranks and mushrooms had turned the easy path into a carnival of small disasters.
He laughed the pity laugh people use when someone is being a mess and they're not sure whether to scold or hold them. "You shouldn't take weird mushrooms," he said. "You might end up… sitting on strangers."
"That sums up the last week," I muttered.
"Do you need anything?" he asked. "An ambulance? My number?"
"No," I said, and then I said the most honest thing I've ever said under a stairwell, "But can you not let me be ridiculous?"
"I never will," he said solemnly. "You're not ridiculous. You're just… dramatic in a charming way."
I wanted to hate him, but I couldn't. "You're not even mad that I sat on you," I said.
He shrugged. "I thought you needed help. I still thought that."
"That's kind," I told him.
"Then let it be kindness," he said. "Goodnight, Jada."
Goodnight, Carson. Goodnight, internet. Goodnight, hallucinations that make me think I'm a flower.
*
The video of the elevator incident ballooned into an odd sort of fame. People made memes. Someone remixed the elevator footage with music. There were interviews, laughing talk shows, and a thousand comments passing judgement like birds. Some people wrote loving things about the man who held his ground calmly. Some people were cruel. Somewhere in the middle a comment had said, "She's actually pretty." I tried to find that comment and like it, but the account had gone private. The internet had offered me a compliment and then taken it back.
I wanted to vanish into anonymity, but my mother had other ideas. She turned the whole hospital visit into a family recruitment drive.
"He's good. He's stable," she said at dinner. "Ezra. Ezra Lawrence is a doctor. A good man. We should—"
"Mom," I said, almost spitting out a piece of rice. "You can’t just recruit people off the internet."
"Why not?" she said. "When did matchmaking go out of fashion?"
My father nodded solemnly, chewing thoughtfully on his chopsticks. He had opinions about my future like they were morning weather: changeable and with the possibility of being sunny. He said, "He looked after you. That counts."
"Also," Mom added, completely immune to irony, "that brown jacket man—Carson—he was kind too. He helped. Maybe one of them."
"Both?" I said, aghast. "You want to pick both?"
"It gives options," Dad said, delighted by his own logic. "Choice is modern."
An odd sort of peace came over me that night. Perhaps because when other people start drafting your life, you can stop drafting it yourself for a while. Or perhaps because the idea of two potential suitors fighting over me—one calm and clean and white-coated, the other practical and brown-coated—made me feel like some sort of prize in a thrift shop: odd, but possibly desirable.
I refused to be dragged out that night, but my mother was insistent. She had a plan involving film tickets, and horror movies, and a chance meeting she guaranteed would happen.
"You're not going alone," Kassidy said when I told her. "I'll come."
"You'll come and then leave me," I muttered.
"No, I won't," she promised. "I'll bring tissues. We'll survive."
But the universe hates plans. At the cinema, the dark served its old magic. Someone tall sat next to me—Ezra Lawrence, in a white shirt like he had been cut from the same light that cuts through hospital corridors.
"You're here?" I whispered.
"I was waiting for my friend," he said. "But he didn't come. You?"
"My friend bailed," I said. "Well, not bailed—eaten by reasons."
He chuckled. "Then let's scare ourselves together."
The film was the kind of horror that tries too hard and succeeds with the wrong balance. My attention slipped to the screen at weird places—the male ghost looked terribly like Ezra. It was like catching the same perfume twice and realizing two different women wearing it both like it.
"You look like the male ghost," I whispered. "Were you acting in this?"
"I had a small part," he admitted. "A favor for a director friend."
"You didn't tell me you were a ghost before," I said.
He shrugged. "People don't usually ask me if I am a ghost."
A scream from the auditorium made my heart jump. At the same time, his thumb brushed my hand—the kind of small brush that seizes you like a photograph. I felt ridiculous and thrilled and dizzy.
After the film rain caught us on the street. We ran under a rusted awning with twenty other drips and laughable romance posters trying to stay dry. He offered me his coat. He offered, then stopped, like it was a moral quandary. "My shirt is wet," he said. "And if I give you my shirt, I will freeze."
"It’s fine," I said, and stepped into his chest area where the air smelled like warm coffee and hospital soap. "Don't be practical. Be romantic."
"I can be both," he said, with a smile that made something in me melt.
We ran for a cab. The rain made the city a smear of color and noise. At some intersection, I saw a message on his phone when I leaned in: "You left the heater on; it's fine." A tiny domestic log that felt like a window to future mornings.
"Are you texting someone?" I asked.
"Someone. A roommate," he said.
"Ah," I said, and then, "You might have a jealous roommate," because I liked the idea tugging at my ribs like a small animal.
"Not jealous," he said. "Careful."
He was careful in the way a person is careful when they're testing new ground. He was careful because taking a risk was also a clinical decision for him, and the stakes mattered. He didn't press. He didn't shove. He asked permission with his eyes. The first time he brought his lips to mine he said, "May I?" and I laughed because the chivalry was ridiculous and then I kissed him before he could finish.
"Okay," he breathed afterward. "That was—"
"Too fast?" I asked.
"Not fast. Right," he said, like a doctor completing a procedure and finding it unexpectedly successful.
We walked the rest of the way like a pair who had shared a small crime. At my door my mother popped her head out and declared, "He'll be dinner at our house on Sunday." As if it were scaffolding work, not a human decision.
"Mom," I said, mortified.
"Yes," she said, calm as a judge. "Bring the budding relationship to the table."
"I'm not budding," I protested.
"You're blooming," she said and shut the door.
Ezra stood there for a second, then he smiled a private smile and said, "I can come Sunday."
"Good," I said, and the word made me feel both childish and very grown up. I wanted him to come. I wanted to show him off like a secret that was finally allowed.
*
That Sunday my house became a stage. My mother had organized everything to the exact point of alarm: a second certificate of appreciation pinned to the wall that read, "Thank you, Ezra, for saving Jada." She had made two silk banners by accident—one with "Ezra" and one with "Ezra" spelled wrong—and pinned both like trophies. I think she had a ritual in mind where the chosen suitor is verified by ink and brass.
At the table I introduced him with all the respect of a court witness: "This is Ezra Lawrence."
"Ezra?" my father said. "He was the one who came the day she sat in the elevator?"
"Yes," I said. "He’s also the one who happens to be the man I want to smooch when the lights are off."
My mother clapped a hand to her mouth like she’d heard a scandalous secret and not a normal line. "Smooching is a family matter," she said proudly.
Carson came too that afternoon with a humble smile and a box of fruit. He was polite, steady. He sat and ate and made small talk. His hands were calm on the table; they did not hover but moved like someone who'd practiced the gentle art of being undemanding.
At one point he said quietly, "Jada, I hope you’re feeling better."
"Thanks," I said. "Your coat is good against spiders."
He laughed. "It's not a coat. It's armor."
Carson and Ezra both had small, familiar gestures that made them feel like honest men: one practical, one careful. My mother observed and assembled her verdict like a mosaic. I felt like a tiled floor: beautiful and somewhere between the two designs.
After they left that day, things shifted. The two men became unwitting rivals not because they planned it but because women like my mother urge nature along like it owes them a harvest.
I started seeing Ezra more. He came by the studio where I drew for clients and ported my code for commissions and my sketches. One afternoon a child in the ER found a toy and handed it to me like a badge; Ezra took it and gave it back gently. He was tender with small things. He was clean with danger.
One night, three months into this accidental courtship, I planned a theater of my own. I asked Ezra to be my boyfriend for an audience at a friend's KTV. I wanted him secretly to perform, to be mine in public without a script telling him what to do. He rose to the occasion with a clumsy pleasure that made me want to keep him all to myself.
"Will you be my boyfriend?" I asked amid the karaoke lights, and the crowd leaned in like they could help.
"I will be," he said simply.
Later, in the hush after the party, we walked under a sky that had given up stars and traded them for streetlamps. He stopped under a lamppost and said, "I told you once about someone who drank my water and left. I thought maybe I couldn't trust—the idea of someone else touching my things felt like an invasion."
"What changed?" I asked softly.
He looked at me as if measuring the shape of an answer. "You did," he said. "You didn't drink my water. You let me be. You let me be myself."
I studied his face in the streetlight. "So you want to kiss me?"
He looked embarrassed to ask. "May I?" he said, the old doctor-precision there in the phrasing.
I stepped forward and kissed him before he finished his polite sentence. It was clumsy and unforgettable and all the right wrongs.
We kissed like that sometimes for the rest of the night and into the next week. There were small rituals: me stealing his tie, him feeding me soup, me drawing him like a model and him being uncomfortable about airbrushing reality.
One ordinary winter night there was an emergency in the ER: a mother and child arrived with mushroom poisoning. Seeing them brought back the elevator and the blue imp and the green mess. The child sang nonsense songs to cope. The mother reached and saw me and in her wandering mind pointed at Ezra and said, "There's the dog! The dog who peed into the wrong world!"
I laughed and hid and felt foolish. When the mother’s delirium subsided, she kissed Ezra's hand like a supplicant. He smiled and kept working.
It occurred to me then—mushrooms remain a bridge between strange and normal. They make fools of us and also deliver us safe into hands that know how to stitch us back together.
Ezra is careful, capable. He calls and says, "Don't eat mushrooms." He calls and says, "Are you sleeping?" He brings me soup when I am ill and takes my hand when I am not. He laughs when my world spills blue and green onto his ordered floor. He calls me his "blooming thing," with a proper fondness.
I have sat on strangers' laps and had cameras catch my foolishness, but the strange and tender thing is this: the camera that nearly broke me also brought me a man who makes mornings seem manageable. The brown coat who got a cameo in my viral fame remained a friend, practical and kind. The doctor in white—Ezra—made an offer to love carefully and wholly.
"Do you still worry about me?" I asked him once, tucked under his arm like something small and ridiculous.
"Every day," he said. "But worrying is a short word. I prefer caring. Caring lasts."
"Then care," I told him, seriously.
"I will," he promised, and he kissed my forehead, the kind of kiss that feels like a latching of two ordinary lives into a new ordinary that is ours.
And once, when the world wanted to remind us that small things are sometimes the largest, my mother presented a ridiculous silk banner to the house to celebrate the "rescue" that had led to this. Ezra laughed and took it down, folding it into a drawer.
"Keep it," I told him, quietly.
"No," he said, and then he added with a grin, "we're not trophies. But we are dishes: fragile, but able to hold soup."
"I like dishes," I said. "Especially with soup."
He lifted his chin. "Then let's never be empty."
We made small promises like that for a while: not to eat mystery mushrooms, to show up when the other is sick, to be ridiculous in public and tender in private. We made a life of small gestures: his hand in mine in the rain, my head tucked against his chest in theatres, the comfortable silence that is louder than any applause.
The world continued to scroll, to comment, to forget. But in a quiet corner of hospitals and small apartments we carved a place that was steady and patient and strangely like a garden.
"I'm a flower," I said once more, leaning into his shoulder as the city hummed. "Do you still want me planted?"
He kissed the top of my head like it held the map to his next years. "Yes," he said. "And I'll water you with soup, and with ridiculous jokes, and with everything else."
"Do you think I'll wither?" I asked, because honesty is its own medicine.
"With me?" he said. "Impossible. You're too stubborn a bloom."
"I hope so," I whispered, because stubbornness sounded a lot like survival.
We sat in the window light, and someone somewhere uploaded another clip of the elevator incident for nostalgia. The comments were gentler now. I scrolled a little and then looked up.
Ezra fit his hand into mine and squeezed.
"You're planted," he said.
"I know," I said, smiling like a flower getting exactly the right amount of sunlight. "And you're my pot."
He laughed and kissed me, and for once I didn't feel ridiculous at all.
The End
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