Sweet Romance12 min read
I Woke Up as Her — and We Sold Pancakes
ButterPicks15 views
I woke up with someone else's eyeliner on my cheek and someone else's life in my head.
"Who are you?" the boy with the sunflower smile asked, leaning closer than anyone should lean toward a stranger on a bar's sofa.
"I'm not your 'baby,'" I said, peeling myself away. My mouth tasted of metal and regret. My legs felt cold in fishnet stockings that had no business in winter. I touched my head. Rainbow hair. Green shadow. I panicked.
"You're awake." He grinned like he'd been waiting for me to finish a play. "Are you all right? You looked...'dramatic' last night."
"I am not 'dramatic,' and I'm not 'yours,'" I said. "Who is... Cillian Bowers? Where's Cillian Bowers?"
The name landed like a coin in a fountain. Something in my memory rippled and took shape. Cillian Bowers — he was my old classmate. He used to be the cold, careful boy who kept one hand on the table to measure the world. He was someone who could make me stop nodding off in winter classes by pressing his cool fingers at my throat. He was also the antagonist from a novel I only remembered as someone else's past: dangerous, possessive, a man who had once been ruined and then found salvation — or revenge — through someone who had walked out of his life for money.
But I remembered more than him. I remembered that when I died — five years ago, pushed down stairs by a stepsister whose name I could not place now — I had been a nobody. I remembered waking into someone else's story. I had become Daniela Chaney.
"You're not him," the boy said when he watched me attempt to stand. "You're not Cillian."
"I'm not his goddamn lover," I snapped, clutching a handbag with a foldable fruit knife inside. It wasn't mine, but it could be handy. I had been Daniela Chaney in a book — Li Wan Yu, or some name like that inside a story — the woman who took money and ran. I should play the role. I should take the money. Run. Live.
"You look... different," the boy laughed. "Less—Cillian."
"Where is he?" I asked. "I need to see him."
"He said you'd collect his... severance and go, remember? He said he'd pay you to leave."
Hearing someone describe my fate, it struck me with a clean anger. "Show me his face."
He handed me a card. I didn't take it at first. The card had Cillian Bowers's name on it and a number. I wanted to shove it into his throat.
"You're wrong," the boy said, fanning himself. "You were—hot last night. You called him 'Cillian' like it was a spell."
"I am Emmeline Pinto," I told the room. It sounded wrong but true. "I am not anyone's pawn."
Cillian finally came, unannounced, half buried in shadow. He smelled of old money and unmatched pride. He bent over me like an accusation.
"You don't have to stay," he said, and he meant it like a rebuke. He placed a card at my knee like payment. "Take it. Take your money and leave."
I stared at the card as if it were a hot plate. I remembered the book: he had given money, she had left, and both survived by burning memories. In that story, the woman who left stabbed him in the back. He fell for a new woman later, and kept punishing himself until it consumed him. The book had blamed him; the book had buried everything. I was inside those pages, and the world I knew had become someone else's script. I chose then — and still choose — to write my own moment.
"Keep it," I said without looking. "I'll stay."
He tried to pull it back; I held on. He was embarrassed. He walked away as if the card had stung him.
I followed. It was easier to run without shoes. I ran over gravel and curse and memory. I ran past a bicycle with a cart attached, a makeshift breakfast stall being readied for the dawn. A white cat blinked at me, restful in the warm eye of the street lamp. Around the stall, a pair of elderly women sat with fans and crackling laughter. Everything felt strangely ordinary, human and safe.
"You're late," Cillian said, and I felt something like a former life stir in my chest.
"Sorry. I had—circumstances," I said.
He sighed, took the card from his pocket again as if intent on burning it, and then put it back. "You can take a bed on the floor. One month. Max."
"A month," I repeated. It sounded shorter than eternity.
A week later, I was living in that small room above the vendor's house. I was sleeping on a thin mattress on the floor, and Cillian kept himself clean and precise. He had a faded pride that refused to be erased, and when he smiled, the world around him warmed.
We began to sell pancakes on a blue-painted three-wheeled cart. I learned how to call the children over.
"Hot pancakes! Two for a song," I'd shout, and the kids would laugh, cheered by the scent of batter and sesame and green onion.
"You're so shameless," Cillian said half-amused, half-scornful, when he'd watch me sing my own dish's praises.
"Only the shameless make this much money," I'd reply. "You sell, you count. We sleep."
Cillian would grumble, but he would also teach me. He pressed the batter with hands that had once signed papers worth fortunes. He taught me to press the dough thin, to keep the heat steady, not to rush.
It was honest. The best part of being in a story that had once been someone else was that I could change small things. I can make the cart brighter — so I painted it with a rainbow and painted a little pig on a sachet that I kept in my pocket. I sewed tiny charms and sold embroidered pouches to the old women, and they cheered.
"You're a useful nuisance," Cillian said one evening when we closed.
"I'm an indispensable nuisance," I corrected. "And if you won't let me cook, I'll do other things."
People began to stand in line. The old woman across the way, who had once shouted about us eating small children, finally smiled and offered us spare ribs. Kids began to call me "sister" when they bought a pancake. When a camera from the local paper came by, Cillian bristled, then posed as if he'd been born in that dignity.
We worked. We laughed. We bickered like two compasses that started to align.
There were enemies along the way.
"That bag is mine," said Jaxon Larson one morning as he thrust a designer bag at me. It was the same man who had smiled at me in the bar. He recognized me as a convenient target. He smirked when he saw me in the bright sunlight selling pancakes.
"You left this last night," he said. "You owe me—"
"Save your lines," I said. "If it was yours, keep it. But what you really want, Larson, is to buy me dinner and feel bigger."
Jaxon was the sort of man who thought attention was property. He used his camera, his power at a small newspaper, favors to press down on anyone who showed a bit of light. He'd photographed me earlier and sent those images to people at the paper with captions designed to make me look cheap. He'd whispered to other men that I was using Cillian for a payday. He found pleasure in making someone else small.
"But you slept in fishnet stockings last night," he said insolently. "Maybe you are—"
"Shut up." I slammed a spatula on the cart in front of him. The children looked. The old ladies frowned. "Don't you ever call me that."
Jaxon laughed too loud and left.
He returned later that week. He came crowded by a camera crew. He had smiles and a plan to swat us like flies. He wanted to turn our humble stall into a news item — not for our skill, but to humiliate us: petty "scandal" with photographed close-ups, with a headline about a "fallen beauty" and a "fallen gentleman." He wanted a show because he suspected he could drown us in gossip.
He was not the only one with claws. A woman named Kendall Dunlap, a neighbor and one-time suitor for Cillian, plotted to edge me away with sweetness and a thousand rules. She would offer Cillian comfortable dinners, remind him of "appropriate" girls and "good prospects." She warmed the path for herself with honeyed words, while Jaxon cut lanterns.
The story should have gone the same way as the book. But I had the notebook of someone who had read the old script, and I had something the novel's characters did not: the will to change what was written.
We worked, and we made the stall ours. And then came the festival.
A city food festival was never meant to be a courtroom. It was music and laughing kids and rows of tents that smelled of chili and sugar and smoke. We painted the cart a brighter blue. The old women hung little bags of embroidered pigs like charms. Cameras buzzed polite and hungry. The mayor came, and the stalls smiled.
Jaxon came with his cameramen, smug and ready. He had plotted for days, planting a story, trying to buy off one of the festival coordinators to kick us out for "unsanitary practices." He whispered a lie to the press that a child had gotten sick from our food — a small lie designed to bloom into a public disaster.
"Emmeline Pinto," he leaned forward with a microphone in front of my face. "Is it true you sold pancakes with... improper ingredients last night?"
"Improper ingredients?" I repeated, and the crowd's laughter tightened into curiosity. "You mean greed? Because that is a spice you add?"
"You're being rude," he said with practiced shock. He had cameras. His voice was velvet. "You can't just—"
"Watch me," I said.
I had a plan. A stupid, dangerous, brilliant plan.
"Cillian," I hissed, "get the screen."
He did. He thought I was mad. But he brought the cart's old tablet onto the stand.
"Everyone," I called, "I have something to say."
They thought I meant to apologize. Jaxon smiled as the festival's PA system tuned up, certain of a headline.
"I know how to play your game," I said. "Few of you know this, but Mr. Larson has been taking pictures and passing them to a local news desk with lies about my life. He has texted other men suggesting they invite me out to wreck me. He has—" I paused to let my voice be quiet and cold. "—threatened people who defended us. He thinks his camera makes him judge."
Some of Jaxon's smile faltered. He leaned back like he might be lunged at.
"Show them." I nodded to Cillian.
He tapped the tablet. The large screen above the festival booth flickered, then brightened. The first thing we showed was a string of messages. The text was direct — Jaxon's messages to a friend: "Make her look cheap. Make Cillian miserable so the paper can take him apart." Then came his pictures, carefully staged. Then came wire transfers: small payments to a service to "manage social." The next thing on the screen was a feed: Jaxon himself, caught on a security camera visiting a certain alley late at night, appearing to meet a man who later posted fake complaints.
The crowd shifted. The laughter stopped. Cameras rotated to Jaxon. I let the silence settle like a net.
"Is this true?" the festival coordinator demanded.
Jaxon stepped forward with his practiced poise — the poise of a man used to hiding his hands in velvet. "This is nonsense," he said. His mouth formed a solid line. "I was merely—"
"Your messages say different," someone shouted from the crowd. A woman held up her phone. "You told my husband to take a picture and send it. He did, for money."
"Not true," he said. His voice thinned.
"Isn't this fraud?" the mayor asked from a small riser. "We don't tolerate this at our festival."
I watched his face catch fire with a pattern I'd seen too often: arrogance cracking. The crowd that had once paid him a polite head-tilt now leaned forward, hungry for the show.
"You're lying!" he cried, moving a hand to his chest as if to protect the truth. "You can't prove—"
"Proof is on the screen." I pointed. The tablet scrolled, showing bank notification screenshots, timestamps, voice notes. Jaxon tried to turn, tried to swipe the tablet away. "You paid to manipulate photos and plant a scandal. Do you deny this?"
"I didn't—" His eyes darted. He clenched his jaw. "You have no idea what you're talking about."
A woman in the crowd — a mother with a stroller — recorded him on her phone. "He told me my daughter's photo would be used," she said, shaking. "He said he'd make sure we'd feel shame for defending you."
Jaxon stepped back. The initial smugness was gone. There was a long, raw second when he reached for denial like breath.
"You're a liar," he whispered. "You're making this up."
Someone near the PA took his phone. The feeds were still live. The security camera had been recording; someone had already streamed the alley footage to the screen. In the frame, Jaxon's shadow met an older man. The older man handed Jaxon an envelope. The camera had caught Jaxon's hand sliding a very small packet into another hand. Someone from the crowd — a vendor we had befriended — whispered to the mayor, "I saw him hand money to that promoter. He promised to smear you."
I heard the murmur change pedestrian gossip into judicial rumor. I felt it like a storm front. Jaxon walked from contempt to confusion. He began to speak faster, trying to outpace evidence.
"This is nonsense! This is slander! I will sue!" He drew breath to defend himself.
"Then sue," I said. "But first tell us why you paid for these pictures."
He staggered under the weight. "You can't—" His voice broke.
"Answer," the festival coordinator commanded.
He stammered. He did what guilty men do — he tried to make the world move on his terms.
"I wanted to get the story," he said at last, small and exposed. "I wanted to— it was for a scoop. I didn't think—"
"You wanted to hurt people for a scoop," I said. "For clicks."
Then the most human thing in the room happened. People began to boo. Not a few. Not a handful. A ripple that began as shock rolled into anger. Phones poked into the air. "Record his apology," someone said. A dozen cameras trained on him like a jury.
His face went through stages as required by truth: smugness; shock; denial; collapse; pleas. He shifted like a man spinning a top that wouldn't stop.
"This is slander!" he cried. "You can't—"
"Look," the mother said, voice loud. "He told my husband to take photos and sell them. He took money. And he lied about where the photos came from."
People murmured and turned to Jaxon. Some spat. The festival volunteer took a step forward. "Please leave," she said.
He backed away, eyes huge. Then, in a move that seemed both instinctive and theatrical, he sank to his knees on the festival's grass, his palms dirty. "Please," he begged in a voice that was a blow torch. "Please, I didn't mean—"
Cameras flashed. People around him took videos. Some in the front row laughed in bitter pleasure. Others shook their heads in disbelief. A teenage boy hissed, "He tried to ruin them for views."
He begged. He alternated between cries and denial. The crowd's mood hardened into a chorus: shame, judgment, the public spectacle searing like sunlight.
"Get up," the mayor said quietly, voice as cold as a bank. "Security will escort you away. There will be an investigation. We do not condone this."
Jaxon looked up at me, then at Cillian. His eyes were not just humiliated; they were terrified. He had been the hunter. Now he was the one preyed on by truth.
"Please," he whispered again. "I—I can explain. It was only to get a story—"
The crowd didn't want explanation. They wanted accountability. They wanted the man who used images to grind people's lives to a stop to feel a measure of the hurt he'd inflicted.
"Record this," someone called in the crowd. "Make him remember."
Phones recorded his pleas. The market hummed with the satisfying sound of justice — small, noisy, communal. People came closer. Old women snapped at him with words. A man wept and turned his head away. Someone clapped. The recording would be shared and shared; the city would see what the cameras so loved to hide: the hunter humbled.
Cillian stood silent as I watched the scene. When the security men led him away, he looked at us and gave a small nod, part triumph, part something softer I couldn't name.
I felt my chest loosen in a way I hadn't known I needed. It wasn't just revenge. It was a community standing up to a small predator.
Jaxon crawled to the festival exit, hands splayed on the pavement, then turned and begged to be let go. Someone recorded his plea; someone else took a picture. The crowd's reactions were as required by the certain rules of humiliation: shock; gossip; cameras; applause.
He crumpled like paper. He tried to stand, then could not. He covered his face. People took photographs. A teenager offered him water; he refused. He begged, "Please, I will do anything."
"No," the organizer said, and people around him clapped like a verdict. "You will answer for this." And he did.
After that afternoon, everything glistened. The news carried the video, but the shots were different: a woman who called out a liar, a man who owned his armor and then could not keep it on, and a cart painted by two stubborn fools that sold good pancakes.
We kept selling after that. The festival people put up a sign for us in the city newsletter: "Cillian & Emmeline — Honest Breakfasts." People came and stood in line.
"Good work," Cillian said later as we packed up.
"You thought we'd let someone like that win?" I asked.
"I thought you'd make us more trouble," he admitted.
"I make good trouble," I said, folding.
"Good," he said. "Then keep it coming."
Days stitched into weeks. Cillian and I worked beside each other and grew rough with affection. We argued about money, and I painted the cart when he slept. I embroidered small pig pouches and sold them to the old women who laughed and declared their fortune at possessing one. I bought two air conditioners with the card he had meant to pay me with and hid the receipts like small civilities.
Once, when we were closing, a woman came by with a basket. "My granddaughter is going away for college," she said. "Can she have this?" She pushed a pouch of embroidered luck into my hand. "For travel."
It was small, ordinary. Cillian watched and then took my hand under the table as if to draw a line between us and the past.
We were hardly a perfect couple. He refused to call me by my real name at times, insisting I was someone else. He had been betrayed; he feared it again. But in the quiet hours when we washed the day away, he would say, "Stay."
"One month," he had said at first.
"One month," I would echo, and then I painted another strip of rainbow across the cart. We had a future so ordinary I could touch it: a cart, a cat, an old woman who liked sugar ribs and a little pouch with a pig stitched on it.
One evening I buried the little embroidered pig into a pocket of my coat. I pulled a small watch from the pocket — the tiny brass watch I had found in the cart's drawer when I first moved in. I wound it with a finger.
The minute hand began to turn.
"Tick," it said.
"Tick," I said back.
We listened together.
It felt like the beginning of another thing. We had no more right to the book's ending than a stray cat has to the sun, but we had found each other and a three-wheeled cart painted with rainbows, and the whole city could keep its secrets and lies where they belonged — in the pages that we chose to close.
"I'll keep winding it," Cillian said, voice soft.
"Keep it wound," I said. "And keep our cart painted."
"Deal," he said.
I slid the little embroidered pig into the drawer, shut it, and turned the brass key. The tick of the watch was small, but it was ours — and every morning we would set the stove and the batter, and every night we'd count the coins and laugh into the humidity.
This was my new chapter: pancakes, pig sachets, old women who gossip like saints, and a three-wheeled cart that looked like a tiny, stubborn rainbow. The watch on the drawer ticked and counted the days we chose to stay.
The End
— Thank you for reading —