Sweet Romance17 min read
I Want to Break You, Then I Fell Apart
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"I want to sleep with you, Graham."
He looked at me like I had said something impossible.
"Lenore," he said softly, "you can want anything. But not because of someone else."
I heard the words and they made a cold place open inside me.
I had been married to Lincoln Lawson for two years. Our life together was a secret that lived in darkness—curtains closed, lights off, like people who were afraid of being seen. He loved someone else. Everyone knew, or almost everyone. They had gone to the same high school, trained together for years, and everyone called them the perfect couple. Lincoln's white moon was Eri Schmitz.
I had known it from the first day I watched Lincoln cry at a text from Eri on the courthouse steps after we got our marriage certificate. He could still love someone he had known for eleven years. He had once said to me, "Thank you for saving me," when I pushed through a crowd and took a wound meant for him. He never asked about the scar on my arm again. Maybe some things are only meant to be unasked.
"Are you all right?" Graham touched my back when we were the closest we had ever been. He stopped mid-stroke as if he had almost called some other name.
"Yue? Chi—" his lips seemed to form it and then he swallowed.
"It's you, Lenore," he whispered and the pause was a knife.
That night I dressed in a black satin dress and waited until midnight. I had scattered roses across the floor and lit a new candle. I could not make him come back. His phone lit up with her name on it. He went to her birthday party instead of ours. I could not breathe in the apartment that for two years had been a place where I learned how to be invisible.
I left.
At the bar I told the bartender, "Give me the strongest thing you've got."
"Long Island, Margarita, Cuba Libre, Bloody Mary, or Blueberry Tea?" he rattled names like a charm.
"Cuba Libre," I said. The word freedom tasted like salt on my tongue.
"She's sitting there," a man said, lazy and amused.
"Who?" I turned.
A young man with a carefully sharp face was lighting a cigarette. He had the look of someone who did not ask permission to be handsome. Lincoln used to rant about him. "That kid," he had said, "Graham Hu, the director's son, the med student that never shuts up."
The man pressed on in the background. "Graham, introduce us."
Graham's hand moved before he answered. He put his cigarette out and glanced at me.
"I'll sit here," I said, and I did.
He rose, put out the cigarette, and the air between us changed. He wore a quiet that curled around him. He was younger than Lincoln, but also steady in a way that cut straight to the inside of me.
"Do you know me?" I asked, to break the silence.
"Yes," he said simply, holding a glass.
When I slipped out of my coat, the satin clung to my shoulders. I wanted him to see me. I wanted him to know I was not someone to be forgotten. He tilted his head and looked at the small scar five centimeters long on my right arm.
"What's that?" he asked.
"A childhood fight," I lied.
"Does it hurt?" His voice was cool but his eyes had warmth like winter lights.
I touched the scar. The memory of that night was too sharp. "I saved Lincoln from a group of boys," I said. "I got cut. We got a banner from his parents. He smiled at me that day. It was worth it."
Graham reached for something off the bar and came back with a fake tattoo sticker. He pressed it gently onto the scar and peeled. The sticker was a tiny bright rose that grew out of the line of the old wound. He said, half teasing, half earnest, "It suits you."
"Thanks." I felt something fragile inside me loosen.
"That's Borges, by the way," he murmured. "Poetry. A bad habit of mine."
"You read Borges?" I laughed a little. "I didn't peg you for poetry."
"Do people ever peg me for anything?" he answered, smiling, and for the first time the world felt less jagged.
When he drove me home in a white SUV with the city lights sliding past, he told me he hadn't had a drop of alcohol because seeing me made him not want any. His hands were steady on the wheel. He walked me to my building, smoked one cigarette, then put his hand on my shoulder and said, "Don't look back."
I didn't. I promised myself I would not.
The fake rose stayed on my arm for days. Lincoln left small gifts at the door—roses, jewelry. He could be kind and still be loving someone else. One evening I saw his phone light up with Eri's name. She was asking him to come to her house.
My chest fell. I could not ask him why. I was too afraid of the answer.
I started to drink. I went back to the bar. I sat next to Graham because he was the line I could cross without losing everything. He was patient and aloof and when I fell apart in his arms he held me like a harbor.
"You can't use me as revenge," he said once, pulling back when I told him my plan in the bar haze.
"I don't want to use you," I said. "I want to hurt him. I want him to know."
"I won't be used to hurt someone else," he said with the quiet that made me trust him.
That should have been the end of it. But loneliness is a slippery thing. When he let me cry into his chest, when he spooned me in the middle of the night and told me not to be afraid, something changed. I told myself I would not sleep with him. He would not be my weapon.
"I want to sleep with you," I whispered in the dark.
He looked at me like I was dangerous and said, "You can want it. Just don't let vengeance be the reason."
We tried, for a while, to stay in the lines. He was careful. He kept boundaries. He kissed my forehead when I sobbed. He put bandages on my paper cuts like they were important. He studied night after night, practiced on grapes and medical kits and stitched like a man rehearsing for a life he hoped to have. Sometimes, though, when he leaned close, his breath warm at my ear, I felt the old loneliness crack into something like wanting.
I married the loneliness to hurt and it nearly strangled me.
One afternoon in the hospital, the world smeared itself into too many colors. I carried a tray of food for Lincoln. He was doing rounds. He took off his mask, saw me, and said, "Lenore, put that in my office."
Graham was behind him, standing at the door with a clipboard.
Eri was in the doctors' lounge. She had the same soft blue eyes that always seemed to be judging. She wore my anniversary watch on her wrist like a prize.
She was at the center of everything I had felt invisible beside.
"Why are you here?" I asked.
"Just passing by," she said. "Not trying to make you uncomfortable."
She stayed.
Later, when a suddenly sliding waste bin sent soup across the hallway and someone pushed me into a bookshelf, my world tilted. I fell back and then he was there—Graham. He wrapped me in his arms and shielded me from a falling cart.
"Are you hurt?" he asked.
I shook. "No. Thank you."
Lincoln watched. Eri watched. People murmured.
Later, when Lincoln's hand reached for me, he hesitated and then disappeared into the room with Eri. I ran away.
Graham followed me down the stairwell. He kept saying, "Sit, don't stand. Breathe."
"Why are you doing this?" I snapped. "You're a young doctor. You should be busy with your life."
"I am busy," he said. "I'm busy with you."
"That's not fair."
"Fairness is not a word I am good with," he said. "But I do know one thing. If you want me, tell me without lies."
We lied, then didn't. We stumbled toward one another. In the days after, Lincoln and I separated. We divorced quietly. The papers were signed. He stood under the courthouse eaves, hair wet from the rain, and begged.
"Lenore, I can change. Tell me what you want."
I looked at him and said, "The rain is heavy. You should go in."
I gave his card back, his bank card, everything. I cut the rope that bound me to him.
The world did not end.
I moved to a cheap apartment on the edge of town and I wrote. I wrote to forget. I wrote to fix the edges of myself. I cleaned the apartment until my hands were raw. I walked until my feet hurt. For weeks I didn't see anyone. I thought I was hollowing out.
One night I stood on the balcony and thought the dark was swallowing me. I did not know then that I had come close to not returning.
Graham knocked on my door with a bag of fruit and a new set of tea. I had been inside ten days. I looked like a ghost.
"Hi," he said, breezing in like he owned my air. "I'm your neighbor."
"Get out," I said. I closed the door on him.
He stuck his foot in the crack. "Lenore, you are sick. Let's go see someone."
"I'm fine."
He sat on my couch and began to clean my plates and fold the laundry I had left in a heap. He saw the bottle of pills on the table and he froze.
"Don't tell me to go away," he said, quietly.
"Go," I said.
He refused. He sat me down and said, "Lenore, I chose to walk into this. I will not leave."
That day he held my hands and told me in a voice I had come to know as safe, "You are not broken beyond repair."
Small things happened after that. He practiced stitches on a grape in my kitchen. He bought me cotton candy at the park and let me press his chin to taste the sugar. He told me to rest, took my pulse, and asked about my medicine. He replaced the bedside lamp and the sheets and filled my life with small appointments I could keep.
"You liked me before as a curiosity," I teased once. "Being needed is a change."
He laughed. "I was always choosing you. The rest was just static."
We fell into each other—less like a cliff and more like a careful ladder. He would work all day and then drive across the city to see me. The city became small where we walked. He wrote me notes in the margins of books that said, "Stop being brave alone."
He was not perfect. He fought with the system that raised him. He called his father to explain his hours and argued politely with chief residents. But he made room for my scars and my quiet.
The first time he asked me to be his girlfriend, my chest clenched with a fear I didn't know how to name.
"Lenore," he said, "will you be my girlfriend?"
"Why now?" I asked, because it felt like a question that could probe every broken thing inside me.
"Because I don't want to be someone's oxygen without being given the right to breathe," he said.
"Will you stay?" I asked.
He smiled that crooked smile and said, "I plan to."
We worked toward ordinary things: groceries, laundry, doctors' appointments, the ritual of tea. He taught me to take walks again. He told me stories about when he was a med student and the smells of the dissection lab that had once made him dizzy. He told me about a time he had taken blood from a girl who wanted to be a donor in the needle room. He said he had felt something then, but he didn't know why.
"It was you," I told him one night.
"No, I thought it was the idea of someone brave," he replied, soft.
We were small together. He kissed me in the kitchen, and the world felt less cold.
But a person cannot rebuild alone without a test.
There was a hospital gala—a charity evening with food under chandeliers and a crowd of people who loved to be seen. Lincoln and Eri were invited. They decided to come together, of course. Some people will never sit separately from their habits.
I decided I would go too. Not to be vengeful, but to end the thread in a public place so it could not haunt me again. I brought Graham as my date. He pinched the edge of my dress and told me I looked like a light.
We arrived into a hall full of murmurs. Colleagues shook hands. Photos were taken. Lincoln moved through the room with practiced charm, and Eri glided by his side with a smile like a blade. I kept my distance.
"Lenore," someone said, "the director wants to say a few words."
The director—Arturo Benton—was a tall man with a voice that carried. People gathered around. A camera crew hovered for charity content. All the right eyes came to watch.
I had decided to speak. I had decided to end it with truth in the center of the room where everyone could see.
Graham squeezed my hand. "You don't have to do this," he told me.
"I have to," I said.
I stepped forward.
"Ladies and gentlemen," Arturo began, holding a glass. "Tonight we celebrate—"
I walked to the microphone. The room hush fell like snow.
"Good evening," I said. My voice sounded too loud in my ears. I had practiced these words in the mirror until they didn't sting. But saying them was different. "I married Lincoln Lawson two years ago."
Gasps rustled like birds. Someone laughed in surprise and then swallowed.
"He loved someone else before me," I said. "He texted her on our wedding day. He chose her on our anniversary. That isn't just personal pain—it's a betrayal that touches colleagues, families, and the trust we put in one another."
Eri's face went white. Lincoln's mouth opened and closed like a fish trying to find air.
I looked at him and said, "You made me invisible for two years."
There was a hum of conversation. People leaned in.
"This is not about revenge," I went on. "This is about truth." I held up my arm. The little rose tattoo Graham had given me caught the chandelier light like a small sun.
"What is she doing?" someone snapped.
"Listen," I said. "Eri Schmitz wears the watch he gave me. You carry my wedding picture in your bag. I am not trying to humiliate you—I am finishing a story."
I began to speak of the late nights where he would not come home, of phone calls at midnight, of the night when his eyes filled with tears at a text that named another. I spoke of the hospital corridor where Eri was found on my anniversary, where soup spilled and people protected me—and where I learned who would truly hold me when things fell.
"Lincoln," I said, "you left me to hold everything and you leaned into someone who has taken pieces of you."
"You cannot—" he blurted, voice breaking, looking small.
Eri stepped forward, her face a mask of shock. "You have no right—"
"Right?" I laughed, a short, rough sound. "You took my watch. You wore it to the lounge and you smiled like you had won. You didn't win anything. You won a lie."
The murmurs amplified. Phones came up. People were filming. The charity evening had become a stage.
Eri tried to speak. "Lenore, you—"
"Don't," I said, and the room shushed. I had rehearsed this—what to say and how to protect myself. I had not planned the way oxygen would rush in and make me sharp with it.
I made them watch. I told a story—the small things that build up: the quiet returns of jewelry at the door, the phone lighting up with her name, the nights spent in an empty bed. I told the nurses who had seen exchanges and guarded secrets. I mentioned that Lincoln once said, "If you ever need to ask about medical bills, tell me." He had never asked about my scars.
People shifted. Some looked at Lincoln as if seeing a stranger. Eri's smile faltered. The camera kept rolling.
"And there is something else," I said. "It is not only my pain. We are a hospital. We care for people. When someone chooses to make secrets out of their life—when someone does not put patients first because they are tangled with private loyalties—that matters."
"She's making it public," someone breathed.
I let it be public.
Then I told the story of how he failed to step in when something dangerous happened in the corridor. I told how I had been knocked, how Graham had caught me, and how Lincoln had chosen not to go into the room with Eri. The room shifted. People exchanged looks of worry and disappointment.
Eri's face changed through color like a tide. Pride, then disbelief, then a hot flare of anger.
"You can't tell lies about me!" she yelled. Her voice boomed and then broke.
"My phone has the messages," I said. "My friends have photos. The staff has noticed your presence."
"That's a lie!" Lincoln shouted, voice cracking. "I never—"
"Enough," the director said, and for a moment the direction of the night teetered. "Arturo, please."
Arturo stood between us like a gatekeeper. He had watched quietly, and now his voice was steel.
"We are here for a charity," he said. "But we are also colleagues. If there is misconduct, there will be a review. If there is betrayal in personal life, that is not for this stage—"
"Then let it be for the stage," I said. "Because he will keep doing this unless someone looks and decides it's not acceptable."
Phones kept recording. The faces around us shifted. Some looked sympathetic; others looked like cats watching a fight.
Eri moved toward me like a striking animal. "You think you can ruin me?" she hissed.
"You have already tried to ruin me," I said. "You wore my watch like a badge. You tried to take my place."
She laughed at that—sharp and ugly. "He loved me first," she said. "Did you think you were special?"
Lincoln's hands trembled. He had not expected to hear all of this in public. His expression moved through stages—surprise, denial, anger, then an ugly, crumbling regret.
"Am I a villain?" he asked, suddenly small. "Lenore, I—"
Graham stepped forward. He had been quiet the whole night, a shadow behind me. He put his hand on my shoulder.
"Lenore is not playing a game," he said to the room. "There are boundaries we all must respect. If those boundaries are broken, we face consequences. We do not get to make pain for others a private joke."
"Shut up," Lincoln snapped.
"Not tonight," Graham said. "Tonight we care for truth."
Eri's face changed as the crowd's murmurs turned from gossip to scorn. Her fake smile was gone. People began to talk—without shame—in low voices. "Did you see that?" "She took the gift." "No, I think she wore the watch."
Journalists photographed. Someone shouted, "Tell us more!" Others asked about hospital ethics. The director cleared his throat and said, "This will be dealt with by the office. For now, we will ask Mr. Lawson and Ms. Schmitz to leave."
They left like defeated actors. But the real punishment had not yet finished.
Two days later, a notice went up in the hospital. An internal committee had been convened. Photos from the gala and messages were brought as part of an inquiry. The hospital has code. It investigates conduct that can harm workplace trust.
Eri tried to charm her way out. She walked through corridors with her head high until people stopped smiling. Her friends avoided eye contact. Nurses who once joked with her now called her by formal titles. In the break room, folks whispered. It was not one blow, but a slow erosion.
Lincoln tried to defend himself. "It's personal," he said. "This is my life."
"Your personal life affects our work," Arturo told him, publicly. "You will be suspended pending review of your behavior."
Lincoln's face turned white. He tried to argue. He spoke of lost sleep, of how he had always been a good doctor. But the cameras had recorded the gala. Colleagues who had once envied him now shook their heads.
Eri's fall was different. At the nurses' station one afternoon, she walked in like she owned the floor. No one applauded. A group of residents, who had heard the truth, confronted her with calm pettiness that stung more than shouts.
"You took his anniversary gifts," one whispered close so that others could hear. "You sat in his chair."
Eri bristled. "You have no idea what you are talking about."
"Then tell us," another said. "Tell us it was all professional."
"Was it?" a voice asked. Phones were out. People recorded her cold response. In the cafeteria, people refused to sit near her. Her social invitations dried up. She found herself alone during night shifts. For someone who thrived on attention, the isolation burned deeper than any single shout.
Lincoln tried to come back to work, but the ethics committee suspended him with a reprimand and mandated counseling. His colleagues whispered and some avoided him. When he walked the corridors, people glanced away.
On a Saturday morning, a group of nurses gathered in the staff room. They wanted to say something that would sting properly.
"She thinks she can step into another's life and take the warm parts," one nurse said. "We will not let this be celebrated."
They organized a small, but public, removal of Eri's privileges. No one invited her to teaching rounds. Supervisors would no longer allow her to lead certain cases. Her mentor, who had once defended her, sent an email copying the board—professional behavior needs boundaries, he wrote.
The humiliation built up like winter. People who had once applauded Eri for her efficiency now questioned her motives. She started to crumble.
One afternoon, during morning rounds, Eri walked into the room where we all gathered. The chief resident, Arturo, stopped mid-sentence and looked straight at her.
"Eri," he said, "due to concerns raised about your conduct and its possible impact on patient care, we cannot have you representing this team in upcoming external rotations."
She laughed at first, then tried to argue, then her face went red, then pale. She tried to explain that she cared for patients. Nurses whispered. The room felt very large and very small at once.
"People will remember," someone muttered. "They will remember how she acted."
Her reaction ran a full course in front of witnesses: pride to shock, to anger, to denial, to a sudden collapse as if someone turned off the spotlight. She shouted that she would sue. She called names. She begged. Her voice lost clarity and became a tremor. People took out their phones and filmed.
"You're making a scene," Arturo said quietly. "This will be on record."
The footage went viral in small circles. Her friends who had admired her felt betrayed. Some who had been charmed by her early warmth now whispered in a tone that felt like a stone thrown into the river.
Her mother called once, then never again. Invitations dried up. Her supporters vanished. Lincoln, who had tried to stand by her, now found himself watching his own reputation fray. He tried to apologize to me at first, and I heard him with a flatness that shocked him.
"Lenore, I didn't mean—"
"You didn't mean to stop loving me," I said. "You didn't mean to let me be hurt. But it happened."
He went home to an empty apartment. The house that had once seemed to contain our life suddenly felt too quiet. The hospital suspended him for a while. He took counseling and did the things people do when the scaffolding around their life is removed.
Eri, who had once walked like someone in a painting, fell to pieces in public. She begged for forgiveness in a small, empty room with no cameras. People watched from the hallway while she wept and tried to repair her image. She came to the office of the director to plead. He listened and then delivered a formal warning and a plan for professional rehabilitation.
"Your actions had consequences," he said. "You must earn respect back."
Her reaction was the same pattern: first outrage, then bargaining, then a desperate collapse. People took pictures. People took notes. Some clapped at the director's firmness. Others watched quietly.
That was my condition for closure: to make it visible so the lie could not keep thriving. I did not bask in the ruin. There was no joy in watching people fall. There was a steadying calm like a storm that had finally released its pressure.
Graham stayed with me through all of it. He held my hand while I listened to what had to be heard. He did not perform anger on my behalf. He stayed present.
After the hospital storm, we rebuilt our small life. We bought a new lamp for the living room. He wrote tiny poems in the margins of my notebooks. He practiced with me how to answer people who would ask too much.
"Are you happy?" he asked once on a Sunday when the city seemed to sleep.
"I am living," I said. "That's enough."
Months passed, but not in the bland way the phrase usually means. We had small victories—like making dinner together without one of us storming off. We learned to trust. I cleaned up the last piece of the thorny vine he had left around my heart.
One evening, months after the public humiliation, Lincoln came to the hospital in a plain coat. He saw me in the hallway and stopped.
"Lenore," he said. For the first time his voice carried no performance.
"I have a life," I said. "I am not your refuge anymore."
He looked like a man who had been taught how to be small. He reached out, then drew back.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I am sorry for everything."
"You might be," I said. "But I need more than 'sorry.'"
He left. I watched him go.
Eri's face occasionally crossed my mind—not with hatred, but with a complicated pity. Her downfall had been public, yes, but it had human consequences. She tried to repair things on paper; meetings were held. Some doors closed. Others stayed open. Life continued, with dents and with light.
Graham and I kept building. He liked to call me "my little rose" and I would flick his shoulder. We kept the fake tattoo on my arm for a year until one day he carefully peeled it off and put the sticker in a small box.
"Keep it," he said, "as proof that scars can bloom."
We married later in a small ceremony by the river. It was not dramatic. There were no roses strewn across a hotel floor. There was a single bouquet and his hand in mine—firm, warm, and honest.
At the reception, someone asked about the biggest lesson I had learned.
"Trust the people who choose you," I said.
Graham looked at me then, small smile, and pulled me close.
In public, Lincoln and Eri continued their own paths. Lincoln changed his ways; people said he was quieter and kinder. Eri tried to rebuild at a different hospital. She wore her hair plain and her smile was guarded. Consequences had not destroyed either of them entirely, but they had taught them how eyes watch when choices are made.
Once, months after everything, I bumped into Eri at a conference. She looked at me and said, "Lenore, I—"
She paused. There was no accusation, no pretense. Just a human who had learned the cost of a wrong step.
"It's okay," I said. "We all learn."
She exhaled like she had been holding her breath for years and then let it out.
Graham squeezed my hand.
"Do you ever regret it?" I asked him later.
"What?" he said.
"Choosing me. Being with me. After all of that."
He smiled. "I regret nothing. You were brave. And brave people deserve the quiet after the storm."
We kept the little tattoo rose in the box. Sometimes at night, when the city hummed, I would take it out and rub the edge of the sticker and remember how fragile and strong I had been.
"Will you ever be afraid again?" he asked once.
"Yes," I said. "Fear is part of being alive."
"And?"
"I will be afraid, but I'll have you," I said. "And that is enough."
That night, as we turned the lamp off, I thought of the hospital gala, of the microphones, and of the quiet way he used to put my coat on. The ending is not a perfect choreography. It is a hand that tucks the blanket in, the light left on the bedside, and a rose tattoo kept in a small wooden box on the shelf. It is proof that a scar can be dressed and still bloom.
The End
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