Sweet Romance11 min read
I Snatched His Glass — Then Chose the Man Who Stayed
ButterPicks13 views
"I took the glass from his hand."
I said it before I felt it. My fingers closed around cold glass, and all the noise in that private room slowed to the sound of my own breath.
"Don't drink," I told him. "Not tonight."
He didn't look at me. Sebastian Fontaine kept his smile with a woman folded into his arm like a prop. He looked at the woman and laughed, like I was air.
"Julia," he said once, as if that was enough.
"I am not your ghost," I answered. I put the glass on the table.
People turned their heads. They loved seeing drama. I hated being the drama.
"You're making a scene," the woman hissed.
"She made the scene," Sebastian said, finally, without looking at me. His voice was calm, like glass sliding. "Let her."
My heart did something small and sharp. I let go of the glass. I tried to let go of him.
"I used to know you," I said to Sebastian, voice flat. "You used to look at me like I mattered."
He raised his chin. "You used to be a child, Julia. Time moves on."
That cut me raw. I pulled my coat close and left. I walked and walked until the city stopped looking like home.
"Why did you tell his parents?" I heard myself say later, standing under a streetlamp where rain was beginning to fall.
He had never answered me that night in the room. He had let me go without argument. It had been years since he stopped being my alarm clock and became someone else's fine thing to hold.
"I told you before," Griffin Ford said beside me, stepping out of a shadow like he belonged on my shoulder. "That was your choice, Jul. But I don't think you should leave like this."
"You didn't stop me," I said. "You didn't make him stop."
Griffin laughed, small and guilty. "I knew you would explode if I interfered. You have my file of past bad ideas."
He had known me since I was twelve. He knew the way I learned to hide the way I wanted people to see me: cool, tidy, untouchable. He also knew the way my chest would crack around people I loved.
"I sold a house," I told him later, once I had a job and a role, a stair to climb. My first sale. I smiled and He smiled like I'd taught the sun how to rise. "You saw me selling an apartment, right?"
"I saw," he said. "I saw you in sneakers and you still looked like you owned the line of the sky."
"You never answer directly," I told him. "Why are you always so soft?"
"Because you let me."
We were small then: me with a drawer full of high heels and a head full of ruined plans; Griffin with a grin that made him look fourteen and the whole world too easy for him.
"You always want me to be someone else," I said one night. "A better me. I can't keep playing catch-up."
Griffin shrugged, like he had all the time in the world. "I can wait."
We lived in a triangle for years. Sebastian was the silver knife, clean and severe — the prince of his family's company. Griffin was warm bread, messy and full of flavor. I kept my feet in both worlds like a dangerous game.
"Will you come to my party?" Griffin asked the night his birthday drained into dawn.
"I will come," I promised. "But I won't be your decoration."
"You never are," he said, but he still made a point of sitting where I could see him.
Then Sebastian brought a woman named Fay to the work party. The world tilted. He walked in and the room bent toward him. I walked in and people must have heard my bones creak.
"You know why he looks at you like that," my father said later, furious. "He's a stepping stone. Stop making a fool of our house."
"He loves her," I told my own body first, and then my father. I had told him the truth in the worst possible way: in a small living room with an old photograph leaned face-down.
"Love," my father spat. "Love is cost-benefit."
That night I bled a little from my forehead where a book fell. I tasted copper and anger.
"Is he worth this?" I cried to Griffin in a hospital room. He sat, perfectly still, and let me melt into him.
"He is not worth being small," he said. "But he is worth your memories."
I thought about that later. I thought about the way Sebastian never looked at me unless it helped him.
Weeks passed. I tried to sell apartments, sold none, walked the street with a placard and a smile, and still the world's roof felt thin.
"You're stubborn," Griffin said once, when I finally sold a unit. He was behind a safety glass, smiling like a proud parent. "You are my stubborn queen."
I laughed that day until my sides hurt. Then Sebastian arrived and the laugh left like wind through a window.
"Don't call him that," I said to Griffin later.
"Call me what you like," he replied. "I don't ask for much. I want to watch you laugh."
One night Sebastian found me on the riverbank, barefoot, shoes abandoned on the steps like evidence.
"Do you want him out?" he asked, without definition. He came close enough that I smelled the rain on him.
"Do what?" I said, honest.
"Step aside," he said. "Make room. Let me be in where I belong."
"Make room for what?" I asked. "For the man who won't look at me?"
He looked angry. His hand shook as it rested on my shoulder. He had never touched me like that, not in the days when we were children and the world was smaller.
"Leave him," he said, more desperate than I had ever heard him since we were twelve. "Leave him and come with me."
I wanted to. I wanted to fix everything by making one choice. But the next day, he kissed me in front of a group at a party, and then pushed me away like I was a used napkin.
"Don't make me crazy," he said. He slapped me at the stairwell when I lost the balance between pride and pain.
He hurt me in public. I ran, crying. Griffin found my shoes on the floor and sat to polish them with his sleeve as if he lavished care on things no one else would.
"You're ridiculous," he told me. "You make me ridiculous."
"I don't want to be ridiculous," I said. "I want to be loved."
"Then be loved by someone who shows up," he replied.
I tried new jobs. Sebastian's people made trouble, come to find me and scatter problems at my workplace. They wanted me quiet.
"I quit," I told them. "I'm done letting people decide for me."
Griffin was there to help pack boxes. He drove me away like a knight who had traded in armor for a hoodie. He did not ask for a crown. He asked for time to stand in the rain while I gave myself away piece by piece.
He kept me safe in small ways. He bought dumplings and ate them the wrong way so I could laugh. He sat by my hospital bed when my father disowned me. He stayed up learning new numbers when his company's books were looted.
"Who took two thousand six hundred thousand?" he yelled in a boardroom full of men who wore their greed like perfume.
"Who messed with us?" I asked later, in the quiet of a hotel room while he rubbed my calf and watched me work. He had found the answer — a cousin, a crooked aging manager trying to keep his place at the table.
He protected me, blunt and clumsy sometimes, but always ready.
Then the phone lit up and the city said Sebastian's car had crashed. His name on a headline can make the world breathe.
My knees gave. I couldn't move. I stared at the phone like it might change what I already knew.
"Go see him," Griffin said. He took my hand like he might dissolve if I let go.
"I can't," I said.
"You must," he replied. "For the green in my mouth, you must go."
So I went. I sat in a sickroom and watched tubes stitch a sleep into his face. His mother held on to his sleeve like a prayer. The doctor came out and said the words we all feared: "He is stable, but there's a long road."
That night I stayed in a chair by the window and stared at my hands like they belonged to a stranger. I had imagined him dead and I had been selfish enough to hope it meant he'd look at me again if he lived.
"Julia," he whispered when he regained top of the world. "I am sorry."
"For what?" I asked. My voice sounded like gravel.
"For all of it," he said. He looked at me in a way I recognized, like he wanted permission.
"Why did you let me go?" I asked.
"Because I thought love could be a safe thing," he answered. "I thought if I had her, it would be simple."
He named Fay again. I had already known. The wound felt dull as an old coin.
"I can't give you what you want," he said at last. "I can't be the man who sits still and loves quietly. I am made for public things, duty. She fits a box my family wants."
"And I'm supposed to be okay with that?" I cried. "I've kept your secrets. I mourned you. I kept your childhood."
He held my hand and there was a truth in it. "You were the best thing I had. But I wanted too much and I'm afraid I'll fail the thing I truly need to hold."
"That's not yours to decide," I said. "You used your fear to build a wall."
He closed his eyes and regret wrote itself across his face. For a moment, I thought he might change his mind. For a moment, anything could have happened.
He didn't.
When he left the hospital, he asked me to give him a chance to be right. He gave a different apology to his mother and the boardroom. He did not fight me for my heart.
I found myself at the hospital again — this time with Griffin, sleepy like a dog and furious like a storm.
"You could say that," Griffin said. "You could choose to be with someone who will never leave in the night and call it bravery."
"I love him," I told Griffin once, in the safe light of his apartment, the one room that had never belonged to any corporate plan. "I loved him and I still do."
"Then love him," Griffin answered, simple and cruel. "But not at the cost of yourself."
I thought of the small things: the way Griffin would walk into my empty apartment and find all my shoes lined like flags; the way he would make dumplings the home way; the way he would fall asleep with his head in my lap and wake smiling like he had no reason to be anything but joyful.
"Promise me you'll not vanish," I asked him one winter night. "If I'm wrong and I choose poorly, promise you'll not leave."
"I will not leave," he said. "I will outlast the bad weather."
So I started to choose. I kept painting. I re-opened my small shop. I sold paintings and some days I almost forgot the holes we had left inside.
"You should come to Beijing with me for work," Griffin said. "Stay a week. Help me run a small office. We can call it together learning."
"A week?" I said.
"A week to see if you can stand me this long," he said. "I promise good coffee."
I laughed and went. It was easier to say yes to Griffin. He never asked me to be anyone but Julia.
But storms were not done. The gossip in A City churned. People liked to keep a story of a beautiful girl and two beautiful men. The world needed the triangle.
"You kissed both of them on the trip," people said. "You ought to choose."
So I did something stupid. I kissed both — a provocation, a test, a childish claim. It backfired. Griffin saw red. Sebastian closed his heart.
"Are you a child?" Griffin asked, hurt fresh and fierce. "Do you think you can keep people like toys and then pick your favorite?"
"I'm scared," I admitted.
"Then be brave the right way," he said. "Tell him the truth. Tell him whatever small heart you have left. But don't pick out of fear."
I thought about it until my fingers cramped from painting. I thought of my mother’s photograph on the shelf. I thought of all the times I had cried into Griffin's chest and he had laughed softly, like someone with a lot of surety.
"You decide," Sebastian said once at a business dinner, then reached across the table like he wanted to touch my knuckles. "I want you to be happy, Julia."
"Do you?" I asked.
"I do," he said, quietly. "I might not be the man you need. But I am what I am. Forgive me for being coward."
The night I finished my largest painting, I called Griffin.
"Are you home?" I asked.
"I'm here," he said. "Come over."
When I arrived, the small apartment smelled like coffee and lemon soap. He had spread my canvases across the floor.
"What's this?" he asked.
"A show," I said. "My first one."
"You didn't say a word," he said. "Why didn't you tell me?"
"Because it's for me," I answered. "And for the people who chose to stay."
He came close. "Stay," he said. "Stay with me in Beijing after the show. Help me build that office. Let me be part of your life in small, fierce ways."
I looked at his hands. They were rough at the knuckles from work, not the kind of hands used to fine silverware and boardroom decisions. They were the kind that steadied ladders, held dumpling wrappers, and polished forgotten heels.
"Will you promise?" I asked him.
"I promise," he said. "I will promise the small things, and the big ones."
That night he made me a terrible bowl of noodles and fed me by hand and I didn't care. I kept thinking how little theatrics were needed to fix everything. The simple acts were the ones that cemented things.
I opened my show two months later. The gallery was small and white. My paintings hung like bones made beautiful. The city came in waves. There was the woman who had once laughed with Sebastian; there were clients, glittering but polite.
"Julia Harper?" a voice asked as I pinned a small heel — the little shoe I had abandoned years ago — to the corner of my main painting like a relic. Booker Burgess, the secondhand collector, stood smiling.
"You donated a lot of money," Booker said. "That's a brave move."
"It was time," I said. "Time to thin the garden of memory."
The guests swam in, and then the two men came. I'd asked neither to come, and still they stood both at the doorway, two different silhouettes.
Sebastian looked like a man who had been told the weather had changed for him and was learning to accept it. He wore a dark suit that fit perfectly.
Griffin walked in with a leaky smile and the paint on his hands. He had changed his shirt for me and his hair still looked like he'd been painting.
"You don't have to stay," I whispered to Griffin, when I caught his eye.
"I told you I'd stay," he said. He was steady like gravity.
I had rehearsed my choices in the mirror many times. I had written long letters and thrown them away. I had tried to be brave and had only made small steps.
The lights dimmed, the host made a speech, and then someone called my name.
"I would like to say a few words," I managed, voice barely louder than a moth.
"I used to sell apartments and wear shoes like weapons," I said. "I used to think love was for other people. But the people you choose will teach you what love looks like. They will be small moments and big nights. They will be the bread you eat when you are cold, the hand that steadies you when you fall. That is what I painted."
I walked the room. Sebastian watched me with that fine, pained look that had taught me so much. Griffin watched me like a man guarding something precious.
"And those who stay," I said, "I will keep."
People clapped politely. I set down a small box on the podium. Inside, tied with a strip of ribbon, was the single heel I had once lost in a stairwell. It had been polished by Griffin and put carefully into a small velvet case.
"I will never throw away the past," I said. "But I am not its prisoner."
I looked at Sebastian. "Thank you," I said. "For teaching me to stand. For being part of my life. But I have chosen someone who shows up not because it is public duty, but because he wants to."
Sebastian's face softened. He took a breath, long and honest. "You deserve a love that doesn't come with a board meeting," he said. "I'm sorry I couldn't be that man."
He left the room not with a scene but with a small bow — the kind someone makes when they finally let go.
Then I turned to Griffin.
"Would you do me the honor?" I asked.
He blinked. "What's that?"
"Stay," I said, and the word was smaller than a marriage vow, and larger than any business clause. "Stay for the art runs, the bad breakfasts, the long nights. Stay to help me make a life that isn't loud but is loud enough for both of us."
Griffin laughed, then took my hands. "I will stay. And I will guard you like a very tired knight."
He kissed me then, slow and sure. Not a rescue or a spectacle. It was a beginning.
After the show we walked home in the small rain that had always smelled like the city before it cleaned itself. I reached out and he took my hand. I felt like a person who had been returned, not repaired but whole in a new way.
We kept our lives with the same messy beauty. I painted and sold my work. He opened a small office with me and filled the walls with paint and plans. Sebastian called once, apologetic and kind. He married the woman his family liked. He sent a card at Christmas.
"Are you happy?" my sister Janelle asked me one night months later as we sat on my balcony.
"Yes," I said. "I am happy. It's not fireworks. It is not an empire. It's a bowl of dumplings at midnight and someone who finds my old shoes and polishes them like treasure."
She smiled.
One winter morning, Griffin found a small canvas tucked under my bed. On it I had painted three small shapes: a heel, a dumpling, and a steering wheel. He laughed and asked what it meant.
"It means," I said, "that we keep the parts of the past that made us better. We put them on the shelf. We move on."
"Then should I make space?" he asked, mock solemn.
"You always had the space," I said. "You were always the one who waited."
We married in a small way, with cheap coffee and my paintings folded into the decorations. Sebastian sent a note: "You were brave. You chose honesty." It was the last peace offering I needed.
On our table that night, where the light could catch paint, I put the little fine heel in a framed box. Not as a trap. As a memory. I pinned it like a piece of truth and then took Griffin's hand.
"Do you remember the first house I sold?" I asked.
"I do," he said. "You danced like a queen."
"I sold another today," I said. "But this time the price was a lifetime."
He kissed my fingers and laughed like someone who had won, and I let myself be won.
Outside, the city hummed. Inside, I had a man who stayed.
The End
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