Sweet Romance12 min read
I Threw Ten Years into the Trash (and It Felt Like Sunshine)
ButterPicks12 views
My birthday party lost one guest and gained two blunt truths.
"I can't find him," I told Jensen, watching a corner of the living room where party chatter puffed like steam from mugs. "He took one phone call and vanished."
Jensen laughed too loudly. "Ellis always pulls dramatic exits. Don't be dramatic, Bella."
The next morning Dream Almeida posted a photo: Ellis asleep, cheek against her palm, captioned, "Thank you for coming when I needed someone most." Everyone in our alumni group liked it within minutes.
I closed my phone and felt something unclench inside me. Ten years of waiting folded like paper. "Gone," I said to the empty apartment. "Completely."
1
Ellis came back—of course he did—but he returned with Dream at his side. That first time they appeared in the lobby, he reached for Dream's hand and stroked her face like it was a private painting. He didn't look at me more than necessary.
"You came," he said, handing me a small box. "Sorry I left so abruptly at your party. I forgot your gift."
"Thank you," I said, taking it by habit. My voice had the lightness of someone carrying nothing heavy.
"Want to join us for dinner?" Ellis asked, as if the three of us would make a cozy number.
"I don't want to be a third wheel," I replied. I turned to leave and caught his low voice: "See? My relationship with Tang—" He swallowed the nickname we used for each other— "is not what you think."
Dream stuck her tongue out playfully at him. "Oops, my bad. I jumped to conclusions."
I smiled at that, a small, almost humorous curve. I couldn't explain why I felt no ache watching them close together. Ten years had already taught me how to let go.
2
Ellis and I worked in the same building. He on the 22nd floor, me on the 21st. For years I made breakfast and took it up to him—because he was picky, because he skipped meals, because old habits are hard to drop.
One morning he stopped by my desk. "Why haven't you brought breakfast this week?"
"I was tired," I said. "You don't get to boss my mornings."
He frowned, then stopped when my phone rang. "Our manager's doing a spot check," I told him. "I have to run."
He watched me go, then in three days came down the stairs looking surprised I hadn't continued the ritual. It felt oddly freeing to let the routine go.
3
Dream posted a video of her cat shredding a navy scarf. I froze. That scarf was the one I had bought on a trip with Jensen last winter for Ellis. Jensen texted, "That scarf she's tearing up—wasn't that yours?"
"Yes," I answered, calm. Then I asked the text box another question: "Do you think I could ever stop liking Ellis?"
Jensen's reply was instant and characteristic: "Impossible. If you could, toss every gift he gave you over the years."
I laughed, but something in Jensen's dare lodged inside me. The box of gifts sat untouched until that day; I hadn't opened the smallest present from Ellis that year. The idea of throwing them away felt almost radical.
4
Ellis asked me to a sci-fi film. Two tickets sat quietly on my shelf—I'd bought them earlier, thinking he might like the chance to go. "Ask your girlfriend," I told him.
"She doesn't like sci-fi." His face had a soft confusion.
"Neither do I anymore," I said, surprising myself.
He looked at me like I'd misplaced something precious. "I'll ask someone else," he said, then paused. "Are you okay?"
There it was—concern, wrapped in old entitlement. I let him wonder. I returned the tickets, and later, when the refund message arrived, a small pop of joy traveled through my chest. It felt like finding a coin in a coat you hadn't worn.
5
One evening Jensen called in a crisis. " Bella, I need you at the airport," she said breathlessly.
"Why?"
"I'll tell when you get there."
I went. I fumbled with the number Jensen sent and almost missed the person at the gate who tapped my shoulder. He was taller than I'd expected—everything people said about handsome boys was true when you saw it up close and without filters.
"Hi, Tang-ying!" he said. "I'm Mateo. Jensen's cousin."
"You're Jensen's cousin?" I asked, surprised by how at-ease he was.
"Yep. Her cousin," he said, smiling. "Can I crash at your place for a night? Hotels are expensive."
He had a guitar case on his back and a casual charm I didn't know how to reject. I grudgingly offered the couch. He cooked. He joked about games. He was warm.
6
When Ellis called later that evening—offering to bring dumplings—Mateo shouted from the kitchen, "Try my spicy noodles, they're better than any dumpling." Ellis's voice paused. "Is there a man there?" he asked.
Mateo waved from the table and grinned. "Hey! You smell like movie theater butter."
I hung up with one thought folded in: the world had a different orbit now.
7
Mateo didn't leave. He claimed he couldn't find Jensen; he also said the city hotels were expensive for a recent graduate. He soon proved useful—he was tidy, he cooked, he laughed at my terrible jokes. When Ellis showed up at a restaurant with colleagues and saw Mateo, a small shift came across his face—something between annoyance and calculation.
"Who is he?" Ellis asked later.
"Just Jensen's cousin. He's staying over," I said, as honest as it needed to be.
Ellis smiled but it didn't reach his eyes. "Okay." He left, and Mateo elbowed me playfully. "He doesn't scare me."
8
Days later a message thread lit up—Dream had called me "cheap" and defamatory things in the alumni group chat, naming me directly. Jensen woke me with a furious call. I felt my throat close. I had never wanted to be part of their drama. Yet seeing my name on a public thread felt like an accusation in bright neon.
"I'm going to do something stupid," I told Mateo that night.
He looked worried. "What?"
"I'm going to show everyone what these gifts mean to me now." I pushed the box onto the table and opened it. The trinkets stared back: stuffed animals, candles, scarves. I picked up an untouched present and, speaking softly, turned on Mateo's phone camera.
"All right," I said to the lens. "I loved a man for ten years. These are what he gave me each year. I asked Jensen if she believed I'd stop loving him. She said not unless I threw them away."
I carried the box downstairs with Mateo filming. He followed. We walked to the dumpster by the curb. I lifted the lid and said, loud enough to cut through the sleepy night, "Ellis, I don't love you anymore. Dream, I hope you both are happy."
One by one I heaved the objects into the bin. The sound of plastic and paper falling felt enormous. The last item I let go of was a small, unopened box with a ribbon. "This one never even got opened," I said, and dropped it.
Then I posted the video in the alumni group with one line: "Please stop dragging my name into your pride parade."
Public punishment scene (expanded — must be long and detailed):
I didn't plan the earthquake that followed. The alumni group blew up. Phones pinged, people watched, and within minutes Jensen had forwarded my video to a wider chat of mutual friends. The clip spread like spilled water, but instead of soaking anyone, it reflected faces.
Two hours later, my office floor hummed like a hive. I hadn't expected Ellis to react the way he did, but somewhere between pride and panic, he chose visibility. He came down from the 22nd floor, not to talk privately, but to stand under the fluorescent lights in the lobby where we all had coffee.
"What's that video?" he asked the cluster of colleagues who were already watching the replay on one of their phones. His voice was thin but loud enough to reach me.
"Someone's clearing out the past," one of my coworkers said, thumbs blazing through the messages.
Ellis's expression shifted. He looked at the phone held by a junior team member. He scrolled, first with a smile—oh, how familiar that smile was—and then the screen reflected in his pupils, and the light in him went out.
He straightened. "Who posted this?" he demanded, like a captain asking who had mutinied.
"It's Bella," someone said. Their tone had no malice—only curiosity, the neutral thing the crowd does when a small human drama becomes entertainment.
"She threw my gifts away?" He laughed, but the laugh was brittle. "She threw them away and called me—what did she call me? A pride parade? Is this a joke?"
"She said she doesn't love you," I heard someone else say, low.
Ellis moved like a man losing grip of a long-held map. "I—" he started, then closed his mouth. There was a sudden hardening. "Bella, why would you post that publicly?"
I stepped forward. "Because I was tired of being the story you told yourself," I said. My voice did not tremble. "Because I wanted to stop being your secret audience."
People around us murmured. Phones rose to record. Dream, who had been standing near a coffee table across the lobby, made a small, involuntary noise—something between a gasp and a laugh. She took a step forward, ready to pull Ellis in, to claim victory. But the room didn't cheer for her. No one applauded the woman who had inspired a decade-long ache; the air tasted different now. People traded looks as if they were recalibrating a familiar clock.
Ellis's face changed. The arrogance folded inward, and genuine confusion flickered. "Bella," he said, quieter. "You—this is dramatic."
"Ten years is dramatic," I answered. "But the funniest part is how surprised you look that I could ever make a decision on my own."
The crowd's reaction grew. Some looked scandalized on Ellis's behalf: "He bought her all those gifts!" Others whispered, "He led her on." A few simply watched, fascinated by the private becoming public.
I could see the pulsing shift in Ellis. First he was amused—champagne bubbles of superiority. Then stunned, like a man discovering his reflection had teeth. He tried to laugh it off. "You think throwing things away proves independence?" he asked, but his voice didn't carry conviction any longer.
"Do you care?" I asked. "Do you even know why I kept them?"
He looked at me with something like pain and then denial. "You never told me—"
"You were never listening," I interrupted. "You were busy loving someone else for years."
That shook him. For an instant he denied it—"No, I wasn't!"—and the word sounded like a child casting blame. People around us recorded, whispered, judged. A woman from my team posted a comment aloud, "He always seemed cold. We all thought she had a crush." Another added, "Who would buy so many gifts and not mean it?"
Ellis's composure crumbled into a dangerous slide. He swayed, reaching toward me, as if to gather the last strings of what he'd had. "Bella, wait—" His voice cracked. "I can fix this. I'll—I'll explain—"
"Explain what?" I asked. "Why you couldn't look at me? Why you hid? Why you only came back when it suited you?"
He opened his mouth and then closed it. The lobby's light made sweat gleam at his hairline. His jaw trembled. For the first time in front of all these people the arrogance was replaced by shame.
"Please," he whispered. "Please don't—don't make me the show."
Someone in the crowd laughed then, not cruelly but in the way a community laughs when it sees a high horse stumble. Cameras recorded the scene. A colleague who'd admired Ellis's professional climb muttered, "I didn't realize he was like—" and left the sentence in the air.
Ellis stood still, the penthouse of his composure empty now. He tried to catch eyes—mine, Dream's, his coworkers'. No one looked at him the way they had before. A friend from his floor stepped forward, embarrassed and awkward. "Ellis, let's go," he said, tugging at his sleeve.
Ellis did not leave gracefully. He pleaded at first—small, quick things: "Bella, come have coffee with me. Let me talk to you later." Then, as the distance between him and the crowd became larger, his tone changed: "I… I didn't mean to—"
Denial shifted to desperation. He grabbed for small conciliations: "I'll buy you new gifts. I'll—" he choked. "I can make this right."
The crowd reacted in waves. Some scoffed, some took sides. Dream, sensing the collapse, tried to intervene: "Ellis, stop embarrassing yourself." She sounded small. Her words had the hollow ring of someone who'd won a battle that felt suddenly meaningless.
People began to whisper about Ellis's leadership qualities. A junior manager quietly asked, "Is he still reliable?" Another sent a private message to HR—an idle thought, perhaps, but it seeded an idea in others' minds. A woman in a red coat recorded the final moments and posted them with the caption: "When love becomes spectacle." The clip gathered more eyes than any project update ever had.
Ellis's face broke then, as if he'd been unmoored. His shoulders sank. He moved closer to me and, in the middle of the lobby under the hum of office air conditioning, fell to his knees like a man who'd been unmade.
"Please," he said, voice raw. "Please don't."
The scene that followed is the one that wound through people’s feeds for days. He begged—soft, tearing words that revealed what ached beneath his pride. He reached for old history and flung it at me like a lifeline: "I always—I've always cared," he said. "I didn't know how to tell you."
"Then why wasn't I enough?" I asked. "Why did it take Dream to be the one who 'came' when you needed her?"
People circled. Some watched with sympathy for the man kneeling. Others turned their phones to me—elliptical glances heavy with curiosity. Dream covered her mouth and whispered to a friend: "I didn't know." Her voice had no triumph left.
Ellis kept changing—shock to denial to pleading, then to collapse, then to a small, bitter anger that tasted like defeat. "You don't understand," he said finally. "You never did."
But the lobby had already decided. The punishment wasn't a formal sentence; it was a social reckoning. The man everyone had once admired found himself the subject of gossip and pity, recorded by colleagues who had seen him at his best and now at his most unguarded. Phones captured his fall; the internet would not forget the footage.
After a long time, his friend helped him up. "Come on," the friend said. "Let's go. We'll sort this out."
Ellis walked away with his head bowed. Dream followed, eyes dry now, expression unreadable. The crowd murmured and then dispersed like fog under sun. I stood there with Mateo's hand in mine and felt both the weight and the lightness of consequence.
9
Rumors started to follow Ellis. He was still admired for work, but the lobby moment made people think of him differently. Dream's early public slurs at me had backfired: they made them look like a coordinated story where she tried to frame me as an interloper. The public saw the opposite—a woman who chose herself. The man who had been the object of my ten-year affection was now the man who had begged in a lobby.
"I saw the clip," Jensen said later, with a small, satisfied smile. "You did good."
"Did I make him look small?" I asked.
"You made him human," she answered.
10
Time passed. Mateo left for Beijing for a music opportunity and came back with papers and plans. He told me later, "I was offered a contract but there was a clause: no dating for five years. I couldn't sign without you."
"You refused because of me?" I asked.
"Because I couldn't wait five years," he said, as if the answer were obvious. "You like me for who I am, not because of a contract that keeps us apart."
We dated. We loved with a steady, small warmth—the kind that shows in the way he would surprise me with coffee on a stormy day or leave post-it notes on my fridge with song lyrics. He was younger, yes, but his patience felt like a gift.
11
Ellis tried to come back into my life later. He called after a promotion, after late-night drinks, after things that smelled of nostalgia. Once, he'd left a necklace with a card. Mateo picked it up when he helped me move apartments.
"Is it worth keeping?" Mateo asked, flipping the little box.
"No," I said, and started to pack clothes.
"Then donate it," he said, and watched my hands. "Your life doesn't need it."
I sent the necklace to a charity. It felt like giving away a ghost.
12
There were moments when Ellis's shadow touched us. He left voicemails, which I ignored until the night a friend called to tell me he'd been brought into the ER drunk, calling my name. "Do you want to go?" Jensen asked.
"No," I said. "Let him learn the hard lessons he needs to learn."
We weren't cruel. I had never wanted to watch anyone suffer. But public humiliation had consequences; when a proud person collapses in front of witnesses, their fall becomes a story people retell at company lunches and on quiet elevators.
13
Mateo proposed the winter after his Beijing trip. We were only engaged, not yet married—he still had to wait out the legal age for paperwork—but his earnestness left no doubt in me. He bought things he could afford and promised the rest with actions: steady mornings, small apologies when he forgot the trash, warm hands on cold nights.
"Marry me when you're ready," he said the night he slipped the ring on my finger. "I'll wait."
14
The night Ellis saw the ring, he came back drunk and confused. "You married him?" he asked, or maybe he said, "You're engaged?" His voice was a raw thread. He shoved at the ring as if it were a tiny wall between us.
"Yes," I said. I slapped him once. The slap landed as a clean apology to myself more than a punishment to him. Mateo moved like a bodyguard, pulling me away. The two men exchanged blows—fooled anger on one side, protective fury on the other—then Ellis left, blood at his lip, pride in his pockets.
15
Months later he accepted a transfer to the company's overseas branch. He left a necklace and a few apologies that sounded like homework done late. Mateo and I packed my life into boxes, into the car he had bought with his own money, into the future we'd been building.
"Are you scared?" Mateo asked as we closed the door on my old apartment.
"A little," I said. "But not of him."
He smiled and kissed me. "We'll make our own rituals," he said. "No more waiting."
16
In the quiet after the storm, I learned how to be light. I learned that ten years of love could be folded small and tossed away without regret, and that the sunlight afterward felt warm enough to be honest.
One evening, as Mateo and I stood in our kitchen with two cups of tea, Jensen called. "How's the newly engaged couple?" she said.
"We're fine," I answered. "He's still terrible at loading the dishwasher."
Jensen laughed. "Good. Because you deserve someone who helps with the dishes and the life."
I set my cup down and looked at the ring on my finger. It was small, plain, and real. In the reflection I could see a man who once begged under the building lights and a new life that had nothing to do with him.
"Remember that dumpster night?" Mateo asked, sliding an arm around my waist.
"Like a ridiculous little revolution," I said. "It felt like sunshine."
He lifted his glass. "To sunshine."
"To sunshine," I echoed.
The End
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