Sweet Romance11 min read
I Threw Cash at His Wedding — Then I Met Conway
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I never liked being told what I should be, but when Lawson Best called it quits because "we're not the same kind of people," I didn't expect him to pack his pride and run straight into someone's arms for a house.
"Five-in-one, the Four Comprehensives, rural revitalization—do you know what these mean?" his message read, as if quoting a textbook to punish me.
"What's that?" I answered, because the only five things I was interested in were good shoes, good food, good gossip, good sleep, and good drama.
"You've been living for cheap dramas and getting your makeup on," he replied. "We're not the same kind of people. Break up."
"Break up." The word sat on my phone like a cold plate. I swallowed something hard, grabbed my purse, and went to his little rented place.
Outside his building a leaf had fallen into a girl’s hair. Lawson stooped, reached out, and tucked the leaf away with a small careful motion. When the car lights smeared his warm gesture into a silhouette, the moment looked like a movie.
"You're here?" he said, surprised.
"How could I not be?" I said loud enough for the leaf and the girl to hear. "This is too good."
He took one step forward and set the girl behind him, like a shield. "She's just a classmate from the civil service prep. I was comforting her."
The girl peered out with soft eyes and an infuriating smile. "Is she your girlfriend?" she asked.
I slapped Lawson three times. "A civil servant? Big deal," I told him. "You'll regret this."
A month later he did the respectful, adult thing: he married that girl. He even sent me an invitation with a condescending little note.
I went to the wedding not to beg him back. I went because I had money, and because some scenes deserved to be exploded.
At the banquet hall I waltzed in, dragging a trolley with a hard-shelled suitcase. The hall smelled like steamed fish and faux flowers. I nodded at the hostess as if I owned the place and opened the suitcase.
Red bills lay inside, crisp and bright. I pulled out a stack, slapped it on the table at the head table like a declaration.
"Come with me," I said to the handsome stranger sitting a bit in the shadow—Conway Russell—stack after stack sliding over the table toward him. "You'll eat better, drink better. Come with me."
Conway didn't look surprised. He raised one eyebrow and put his hand on the growing pile. "Fine," he said finally. "I'll play."
"How old are you?" I asked later, leaning my shoulder against his in the elevator as his hand pinned me to the wall.
He laughed, amused. "Now? Asking me that? Maybe it's a little late."
"Isn't being underage a problem?" I pressed, pretending to be righteous.
He scoffed. "You asking that worries me more about you than about me."
He guided me up to the fourth floor. The door opened to a room strewn with heart-shaped balloons and a line of young men in casual arrogance. Conway said, "This is the real banquet."
I waved a hand. "I just want to see the view from above," I said, and he let me think that I was in control.
When the elevator doors opened again and we were squeezed among strangers, I asked, "Why are we going up?"
"Because up is the private floor," he said. "Because the fun level isn't on the ground."
We were a pair of jokes to those around us, an older woman burning bright in a young man's orbit. The men wanted to add me as a contact. I flipped my screen to show a fake ID.
Conway took my phone and joked, "She's a sponsor. Twenty thousand a month." He deadpanned.
I made a face. "Twenty thousand a month? Bargain."
He smirked as if to say: try me.
We spent the night dancing around what this arrangement meant. He introduced me as he saw fit—sometimes a cousin, sometimes a friend's sister, sometimes "my girlfriend" when it served him. Once, when a teacher—Patricia Bloom—came close and spoke too kindly, Conway introduced me as someone steady. Patricia smiled like a woman who kept small boys in order.
"You should look after him," she said. "If he gets rough, call me. I'll scold him."
"You can try," Conway muttered, and when she left he wrapped his arm around me like a shield. "Don't let her teach you about weakness."
I loved two things that night: the tactile heat of the man at my side and the delicious ferocity of humiliating Lawson. At the elevator, Conway imitated a kasbah of cool: "If you ever think of asking for the price of my keeping, ask now."
"I already paid," I said.
He, however, had rules. "The price for sleeping is another number," he said.
"How much?" I dared.
He kissed my neck. "Free," he said after a beat.
Free. I believed him because I meant to. I believed in a lot of things then because I wanted to watch them unfold.
Our days after that moved in small, reckless steps. Conway was a student—athletic, cocky, rough around the edges—but with a habit of doing the right thing at the wrong time. I became his patron in small, obscene ways: new shoes, phone, jackets. He pretended to be annoyed, but the look he’d give me when something fit him right was soft in a way Lawson never learned to be.
"You shop like someone's buying your life," he said once, watching me pull an armful of bags.
"I'm buying your life," I answered. "Or at least leasing it."
At the mall I bumped into Lawson and his new wife, Deborah Cardenas. Deborah's face tightened like someone who had expected better table manners from the world. Lawson went pale. I let him.
"Emely," Lawson said, trying too hard on a smile. "We should talk."
"To what purpose?" I asked.
"I—" He broke off. He wanted the pity return to his side, wanted me to be a safety net. "I can still leave her."
"You could have left a month ago," I said. "You could have asked why I'd rather not spend my life with a man who thinks a phrase in a political pamphlet is a personality."
He held out a ring box. "We can try again."
"It’s funny," I said, lifting my chin. "You think every problem can be solved by asking to come back."
"No—" He stepped forward. "You don't understand how much I—"
"Save the speech," I interrupted. "I'm not your audience."
Before he could stammer more, a white blur moved. Conway crossed the distance between us and cracked Lawson across the face with a fist so clean it tasted like a headline.
"Let her go," Conway said, standing like a tall granite.
Lawson backed away. For a second his composure splintered; then he adopted a soldier's stiff jaw. He tried to intervene, to reclaim honor, but Conway kept him at bay.
"You hit me?" Lawson said, incredulous. "You assaulted me in public."
"Quit acting," Conway said. He looked at everyone there. "The cameras saw everything. Do whatever you like."
Later at work, the story of my "true face" spread. Deborah marched into my office, red lipstick scowling.
"You slithered into my husband's life and into his past," she declared, slamming a phone screenshot onto my manager's desk. "You're disgraceful."
"How very theatrical," I said. "And how quaint to assume he hasn't made choices."
She tried to use official channels, to pull the cord that would get my boss to fire me. But my boss—Christoph Schaefer—did a curious thing instead. He looked at me, then at Deborah, and smiled.
"You two are loud," Christoph said. "We don't want this in the press."
Deborah wasn't satisfied. "She seduced my husband!"
"That is not how any of this started," I said. "You picked him because you needed a local's security. You used him for a house."
The office hovered in that charged silence where people wait to see what the rich do. No one thought to consider that I was not just a client, I was an owner’s daughter who'd chosen to keep her mouth shut for years. I had let people believe my life was ordinary. That evening, in front of the staff, I took off the veil.
"Listen," I said. "My father owns these offices. If you want me fired, go ahead. But if you want your lease to stay affordable, if you like the idea of renting in this building without foreclosure or a sudden rent hike, you might want to reconsider who you're attacking."
The staff shifted. Then, with deft cruelty, I named names and numbers—proof of Deborah's family's dependence on local rents, the favors they'd counted on for security. Christoph's smile sharpened.
"Ms. Cardenas," Christoph said, cold as glass, "we'll re-evaluate your contract."
Her face turned a violent green. "You can't—"
"Watch the market," I said. "And maybe next time, don't start a campaign in public against someone you think is weak."
Deborah stormed out, the humiliating realization settling on her face: in the company of people she'd wanted to shame, she had no power. The employees who had leaned over the cubicles to peek at the commotion now whispered, some with pity, many with the glee of spectators whose boats had rocketed into better weather.
Weeks later Deborah was gone. She wrote scathing posts at first, then nothing. Her alliance with Lawson evaporated like cheap perfume. He called and called; I didn't pick up.
This is the part where a story could end with a simple collapse: the bad man sits alone, we walk into the sunset. But I wanted the punishment to have teeth—public, precise, satisfying. So I staged it.
At our company’s quarterly charity event—an evening with catered food, local media, and the mayor in attendance—I arranged for a little surprise. It wasn't hard: media wants spectacle. I gave them one.
"Remember that wedding you made a spectacle of?" I told the host, one bright evening. "You will be on our little stage."
Lawson accepted the invitation, thinking it's a chance to post another proof-of-manhood. Deborah came with a hired swarm of friends holding smartphones like torches.
I sat in the front row with Conway beside me, calm and watchful. He squeezed my hand; his thumb pressed my palm like an alarm clock turning on.
"Now," I told the emcee in a quiet mic pass, "we'd like to share a little tale about local charity and opportunism."
The lights dimmed; a slide show began. The screen projected photographs—Lawson with Deborah outside the courthouse, Lawson whispering with real estate brokers, Deborah smiling in staged sympathy at a demolition site. Next slid up screenshots of conversations—Lawson arranging to move into Deborah's family house, Deborah boasting about the immediate plans for an upgrade as Lawson praised her "civic virtues" in private messages.
"Lawson," I called out into the microphone, my voice steady. "Why did you marry her?"
"You never did anything wrong," he shot back, red rising to his neck. "You're making this personal."
"Is it personal when the bride's family stood to gain an apartment and you—you, Lawson Best—gained the security you couldn't earn?" I asked.
He spluttered. "That's not—”
"Please, sir," the host said, and the crowd hushed into a roar of curiosity. "If you have evidence otherwise, now is the time."
I pulled from my purse an envelope with the scanned messages. "You planned this. You congratulated each other on the 'good deal.' You didn't love her; you loved convenience."
The crowd hummed. Phones came up like rows of fireflies. Someone muttered, "Oh my God." Another voice: "Is that—"
Lawson's face vacillated: anger, denial, then a flash of shame so sharp he seemed to physically shrink. "You're lying," he said, small and furious.
"Am I?" I asked. Then I turned the mic and declaimed the message exchanges aloud, sentence by sentence, while our PR friend uploaded the screenshots to the event's live feed.
Faces in the crowd shifted. A few of Lawson's workmates lowered their eyes. Deborah's friends suddenly realized they'd been standing behind a mirage. Cameras spun like hungry beetles.
Lawson's expression narrowed. "You—you're ruining everything," he said. "You're making a scene for—what? For spite?"
"For fairness," I said. "And because I'd like people to see what opportunism looks like when it puts on a ring."
His eyes widened with a dawning panic that looked a lot like regret. "People are going to think—"
"They already do," said Conway into the mic—calm, precise. "You married for a house. You left someone because 'we're not of the same world.' You figured you'd climb by marrying local instead of earning."
The crowd's murmur turned sharply. Someone laughed like a bark. A woman near the stage clapped slowly. "Finally," someone said.
People pulled out phones, filming, recording. The local news crew adjusted lenses. Lawson's blush went deep and ugly. He tried to speak but the event host tapped the mic again.
"Social media will have it in minutes," the host said. "This evening is about charity, yes, but it's also about truth. We do not condone manipulation. Our charity is about dignity. We will postpone the remainder of the evening so that our donors can decide how they'd like to proceed."
Lawson's mouth opened, then closed. Deborah stood with an expression like a gasping fish. She had always imagined this event would be another trophy; now it became a tribunal. Her phone lit up with incoming calls she didn't answer.
Someone in the audience shouted, "Shame on you!" Others got up and left. A man who had been friendly with Lawson in the past now avoided his glance. A junior colleague turned on Lawson and asked, voice trembling with righteous fury, "Did you tell the truth at procurement meetings? Did you ever disclose these personal real estate dealings?"
Lawson's composure, such as it was, cracked further. He looked at me—at me—begging, and for a sliver of time he was the man who had once tried to hold a leaf in a girl's hair. "Please," he whispered, "stop."
I looked back and said, quiet enough that only the cameras caught it, "You had the chance to be kind. You were selfish. You chose easy gain. This is your mirror."
At that moment, the crowd did what crowds do: they turned on a man who had preferred comfort to courage. I watched faces I didn't know each light up with honest indignation. The host announced a temporary suspension; local reporters clustered like bees.
Afterwards, Lawson tried to speak to me in the parking lot. He pleaded, he apologized, he tried to show a version of himself that might be forgiven. Deborah didn't know where to go. The end result was not a police arrest, not a lurid on-screen meltdown. Justice didn't have to be violent to be public; humiliating and catastrophic for Lawson and Deborah, it was precisely the kind of social punishment that unmasked them.
Lawson's colleagues withdrew. His promotions evaporated; he became someone employers looked at with suspicion. Deborah's family's connections frayed. "@OpportunistWedding" trended for twenty-four hours; the video made them private people with public collapse.
Conway watched it all. When the adrenaline wore off, he held me and said, "You did it the civilized way."
"Did I?" I smiled. "I did it the way that hurts—where it stings. In public."
Conway kissed my forehead and that kiss washed away the sting.
The days after were gentler. Lawson's name floated out of my world. Deborah vanished like a character cut from a play. Conway and I walked the city like a private parade. He bought me two tickets to a midweek film and complained I watched actors too closely. We shared midnight noodles, soaked in rain, and argued about the better way to get rid of sand in your shoes. Our fights were small, our reconciliations practiced.
We had three moments where the heartbeat quickened and became a map of everything that mattered.
"You're ridiculous," he told me once on a balcony after we had dressed him like he was an adult, and I had thrown a ridiculous pink striped pair of slippers into his cart.
"Am I?" I asked.
"Yes." He looked at me, then smiled that crooked smile that rearranged my chest.
"Tell me the truth," I said one rainy afternoon, my palms warm on his collar. "Do you want me because I have money, because I'm loud, or because—"
He didn't answer with a speech. He took my hand, squeezed once, and said, "I want you. Whole."
That was enough, but later, during a thunder-strained night when the rain hit the city like a drum, he kneeled before me on the campus stage under floodlights. He had graduated; his ties were for somebody else now. "Will you be my wife?" he asked.
I told him my father had "gone bankrupt," a test he had not known to pass. He did not blink. He looked through me like a lantern and said, "I already know."
We married later with laughter and a small argument about the guest list. My father appeared with a bag of property papers and a smile that had been rehearsed for a play of redemption. He revealed he had never really lost everything but had wanted to know how his daughter would handle love without the scaffolding of money.
"You passed my little test," he told Conway, clapping him on the back. "Keep her safe."
Conway kissed my forehead and whispered, "I'll keep more than safe."
We had been a wild experiment: a woman who once threw money to sabotage a wedding, a younger man who refused to be bought for life. We laughed at ourselves for our honesty and our little staged deals. I kept the memory of twenty stacks of red bills like a souvenir, but the real souvenir was the way Conway pulled my hand when it mattered—when Lawson returned one last time to ask for forgiveness, when my coworkers gossiped, when the rain came and the city looked like a scattered jewel.
There is a photo of us later—Conway in a denim jacket, me in a borrowed dress—standing on the same mountain where we first rode and the city lights laid out like coins beneath. He looped the chain of a little platinum necklace around my neck and there we stood, soaked and ridiculous and alive.
"Remember when you threw money at me?" he asked, breath small and laughing against my temple.
"I do," I said.
He tightened his hold. "You were dramatic and brave and wrong and funny and mine."
I laughed. "You said it's free."
"It was," he said, "for what matters."
We watched the city, and the sound of rain threaded between us. The twenty stacks of red bills existed in a small wooden box I kept under my dresser—less as a weapon and more like a hinge that opened a door—so that until the end, when we both had reasons to be wary, whenever we looked at it we would remember the night we both chose for ourselves.
The End
— Thank you for reading —