Sweet Romance15 min read
I Woke Up Inside a Romance — And I Refused to Follow the Script
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I woke to a smell I didn't recognize and a stranger's weight at my hip. My back hit cold plaster and the world went soft at the edges.
"Hey," a man's voice said, close and slow. "This is what you wanted, right? You were the one seducing me."
I pushed. Hard. "No."
His hand locked tighter around my waist.
"Stop," I said. "Leave me alone."
He didn't. He leaned down. His breath tasted of something wrong and sharp.
I found the showerhead and, with the last of my balance, shoved him. He crashed into the bathtub with a sound like a fallen statue.
"Are you mad?" he groaned, then sat up and blinked wet hair into his face.
I sprayed him with the shower until the water stung his eyes. He still reached for me. He still smiled like he owned the room.
A hot, electric pain lanced across my skull. My knees folded. I landed hard on the bathroom tiles and tasted metal.
"Stop resisting the role," a voice in my head said, colder than the water. "Please act like the character. Cooperate."
"Who are you?" I spat, fighting the ache that wrapped around my thoughts like a vise.
"Follow the plot," the voice said. "Complete her life. Learn her spirit. You will be reformed."
I swallowed blood and laughed, wet and bitter. Learn her spirit? The only spirit in the room was my own.
I reached for the showerhead and smashed it into his temple. For a moment he stared at me, bewildered. Then he slid into unconsciousness like a puppet with its strings cut.
When the electricity finally faded, I sat on the soaking tile and listened to the voice. It called itself a system. It threatened punishments for "deviations." It promised "reform." It insisted I act out a life I had never asked for.
"Act how?" I asked it aloud. "Act like someone sold to an old man's scheme? Act like someone who forgives her abuser because the plot demands it?"
Silence. Then the system ticked on, cold and precise: "You will avoid further pain if you cooperate. You will learn the original's resilience. You will complete the story."
"I refuse." I said it aloud, clumsy and human. "I refuse to play a role where I get hurt."
There was a pause, long and hollow, and then the first real voice I heard all day: mine. "Then stop me when I get stupid. Stop me from being gentle to people who hurt me."
"Noted," the system said.
I dressed, wrapped a towel around my damp hair, and made the only call that felt right. "Hello? I want to report illegal conduct at Room 1209 of the Lark Hotel," I said, my voice cold as frost. "Someone's been assaulted."
The system made a noise like a glitch. I kept talking.
Later, I learned the name the system wanted me to wear: Josephine Qiao, a small white-flower heroine with a scarred life. It shoved memories into me like a collage: a child given away to save a family, a night ruined by a man named Ramon Ortega, a son born in silence, a life crushed under other people's choices.
"Why should I become her?" I asked the system later, when the world had gone a notch quieter and the hotel scent had faded.
"Because," it said, steady as a metronome, "you will grow. You will become socially acceptable. You will stop harming men with your flippant heart. Cooperate."
"That's rich," I said. "Teach men to be better, not women to be smaller."
There was a sharp prick of pain in my skull, the system's gentle reminder that it had teeth. I bit down, breathed out smoke from a burned place in my throat, and kept my mouth shut.
I left the hospital in crutches and a temporary truce with the system. A man in a suit—tall, iron-faced—looked oddly familiar when I first saw him properly: black hair ruffled against his bandage, jaw like sculpted stone. His eyes cut me clean.
"Why are you out?" he said.
"Because I'm leaving," I said.
He smiled like a scalpel. "You should apologize. It's proper," he said casually, as if deciding who should breathe that morning.
"No," I said. "Why would I apologize for a crime I didn't commit?"
He leaned closer. "Because the story needs it," he said. "Because I will make it so. Because the world favors people who forgive."
"I won't," I said. "Not for you."
He left, eyebrows not quite disguising the startled wariness behind the mask. The system shivered, like a cat that found a new game.
I escaped the house my adoptive family called home. They called me names, shoved me toward beds that were not mine, and tried to bargain my body like a coin. I learned the hard facts: some people trade kindness for money. Some people map futures for profit. The family that fed me treated me like debt.
I ran. I jumped a balcony with a sheet tied as a rope and landed on my bruised soles in the street. A black car idled and two muscle-bound men shoved me into it.
"Ramon Ortega?" I asked once inside.
He gave me the flat smile of celebrities and predators. "You keep running into me."
"Keep running away," I said.
He gave a half-scoff that didn't reach his eyes. "You think I'm a villain in a play?"
"You think you're not," I said. "You think you can act like a gentleman and then vanish."
For a week I played a careful game. I slept on borrowed floors, turned down offers I didn't want, accepted an odd job teaching math to a kid named Forrest Wagner who could eat a watermelon like it was air.
"Forrest," I said on his first day as he slumped into his chair. "You will sit up straighter."
He blinked and said, "Okay, Miss."
"Good."
We stayed in a tiny house with an old woman, Celeste Nakamura, who had a laugh like a bell. She fed us and pretended the kitchen had belonged to heroes. "Eat," she kept saying. "If you don't, where will courage come from?"
"Forrest likes to bike fast," Celeste told me. "He'll catch up to anything he wants."
Forrest didn't ask many questions about me. "Where are your parents?" he'd ask once, and I'd blink.
"Far away," I'd say, and then we'd get back to equations.
I taught him the basics, the greedy little steps of algebra and grammar. His face would change right in front of me: concentration, frustration, victory. I liked that change. I liked making a footprint in somebody's day that didn't swallow me whole.
He was eighteen and fierce and rough at the edges like a cliff cut from the sea. He had dark skin like warm honey and a laugh that could scrape the rust off a door. He also kept asking things like, "Do you need money?" and "Are you sure you'll be okay?" and "Will you come back tomorrow?"
And then, in the queue of the market—because small towns had queues and the city had edges—there he was, riding behind my car in a bicycle so battered it had no real brakes. He waved. I smiled.
"You're not supposed to see me this way," I said to myself, and laughed because it felt like a confession at the bottom of a well.
Forrest got closer to my life without me planning it. He brought me a cheap umbrella with a tassel the color of apricots. He showed up with bottles of water and an earnest anger at anyone who looked at me funny.
One night he sat me on the roof and we watched the stars. He said, "I want to go to the university where you might be."
"Do you know which one?" I asked.
"The one you like," he said. "I'll get there."
"Promise?" I asked.
"For you?" he said. "Yes."
"Okay," I said. "Now go make me a proud liar."
He smiled and—God help me—kissed my forehead like it was a quiet prayer.
The system punished me for that. The pain hit like an earthquake, like hot wire through bone. I folded and didn't make a sound. I remember the way Forrest ran his hands over my shoulders like a man trying to warm a bird that had fallen from its nest.
"It stopped," I lied, once the shocks subsided. "I'm fine."
Forrest frowned. "No, you're not. I'm taking you to a doctor."
"No," I said. "No hospitals. Stay. Teach. Learn."
He snorted like a man who believed me for a while. We both knew he didn't.
The world kept spinning screws. At first I thought the system wanted me to become gentle and faint-hearted. But it hadn't counted on my dislike for two things: being cheated and being ordered.
When I was pulled into the orbit of the man with bandaged hair—Ramon Ortega—I saw the other pages of the script. I found a document slipped across a polished mahogany table: a bloodline report, ancient-looking and clinical, claiming I was Gilbert Schroeder's daughter. Gilbert Schroeder, a name the papers said meant money and power.
"Your birth certificate," he said one day, in a voice that tried to be easy. "We have proof that you are mine."
"Am I?" I asked. The system hummed, thrilled.
"Yes," he said. "You were named for frost. Eliza. Eliza Dickson. It's poetic."
I stared at the papers, at the stamp. My life was being auctioned like a painting. I thought of Forrest's small hand on mine. I thought of Celeste's laugh in the kitchen. "What do you want from me?" I asked Gilbert.
He blinked. "Recognition. A child. A reconciliation. A story with a pretty ending."
"I don't sign because you want a story," I said. "I sign because I want my life to be mine."
There were smiles like knives then. There were offers of rooms and of polite dinners and the faintest suggestion of jewelry. I compared a necklace to the taste of coins in my mouth and said nothing.
Then the gala happened.
They asked me to attend because a "family reunion" looked good for the cameras. I refused. They called me selfish. "You must be grateful," they said. "We gave you a home."
I went anyway. I dressed in the robe they'd chosen—something soft and white like linen and pity—and carried the apricot tassel umbrella Forrest had given me. I kept my voice inside like a warm stone.
There were lights and flowers and a hundred cameras. People I had never seen before practiced pity behind their hands. My name was murmured like it could be smoothed into the pattern of their evening.
"The bloodline is clear," said Gilbert, standing on the stage in a suit that looked like midnight. "We welcome our daughter."
Someone in the crowd laughed, cruel and bright. It was Katharine Day—she wore chains of pearls that rattled like coins. Katharine had been everywhere: behind the scenes, the one who took hands and orchestrated. She had been the answer to prayers and the beginning of cruelty. She had taken children for lunch and left scars for dessert.
"Sit with us," she said, like an invitation to a cage. "Let us pour you wine."
I smiled politely and sat. Katharine went from guest to guest, operating like a conductor, until she was beside me, her pearls grazing my sleeve.
"Welcome, daughter," she said. "Isn't this beautiful?"
"Very," I answered, cold as cut glass, and held Forrest's umbrella tassel in my palm.
Ramon Ortega was there, too—handsome, smiling, the same man who had thought he could decide my shape. He sat in the second row, the memory of the bathtub like a small stone lodged in my throat. I watched him watch me, like a man studying a puzzle he had already solved.
"Eliza," he said, rising. "May I have a word?"
"No," I said.
He kept rising. He walked onstage, toward the podium, and—God help me—he began to speak about fate and forgiveness. He read what sounded like a made-for-TV confession of love, and the room breathed like a captured animal.
At my elbow, Forrest clutched the tassel.
Then I did something the script had not predicted: I stood.
"Stop," I said into the microphone when the toast was beginning. Silence fell like a dropped curtain. "No more stories."
Gasps. Broken silverware. Someone whispered, "She's the one."
I stepped forward and put my umbrella on the podium.
"You want a narrative," I said. "You want a happy ending. Then sit and listen, all of you."
Ramon moved as if to stop me. Katharine smiled, thinking this was only another part of the night. Guests began filming with phones, their screens like tiny jurisdictional courts.
"I have this," I said, and I opened my phone. I had captured the man in the bathtub, blurry and humid and human. I had recorded his voice when he called me words I had not needed. I had his messages where he joked about taking me like a prize. I had recorded the rumors that Katharine had bought the nanny who'd stolen a child. I had documents that traced manipulations. I had photos of ledgers, and payments, and names.
"You're insane," Katharine hissed.
"Maybe," I said. "But we live in a world that records everything now."
I played the file. The lights dimmed to the churn of cameras and the noise of voices watching their illusions shattered. The video bled across the room's huge screen and filled it with evidence: messages, payment records, a voice that laughed when it should have been sorrowful.
Ramon's face went through five stages, one after another, like gears shifting too fast.
First: Slippery Triumph. He smirked, sure that charm would dissolve the moment.
Then: Confusion. He blinked at the screen, trying to absorb the evidence.
Next: Denial. He waved his hand and said, "This is edited. Made up. Fabricated."
"Is this a lie?" I asked, voice low. "Is this Photoshop? Who recorded you telling a friend 'She was only convenient'?"
"I—" he started. "You can't—"
He faltered. Faces around him shifted. Phones raised higher. A woman near the front began to cry openly.
Denial curdled into Fear. He looked small, like a wounded animal.
"Stop that," Katharine said, voice shaking. "This is a setup. You brass-faced—"
But the crowd had moved. Smartphones bloomed like lichen. A hundred witnesses now had the same angle, the same timestamp. Comments already pulsed across live streams: "Scandal", "Ramon Ortega exposed", "Is this true?"
Ramon's mouth opened. He tried to speak again. "This recording is doctored. I demand—"
"Demand what?" I asked. "Demand you be believed no matter what the world shows? Demand pity because your charm worked in the dark?"
He dropped. For a terrible moment, he bent at the knees and crumpled forward, palms splayed on the podium as if to steady himself. He held himself up by the idea of himself and then the idea failed him.
"Please," he said, the word small and animal. "Please."
There it was: meltdown. He crawled to the floor with the grace of a man who had never imagined humiliation in the daylight. He looked around like a beggar on a stage, like a child who'd been caught lying.
The crowd's reaction rippled in real time. Some people stared, mouths open. Others booed. A group near the back cheered. Someone laughed high and brittle. Phones buzzed as strangers recorded the scene for strangers they would never know.
"Ramon!" Katharine screamed, then added, "Don't you dare—"
He tried to stand. He could not. The floor seemed to have given way under him. He dropped to his knees near the dais.
"Please," he said again, trembling. "Forgive me. I didn't mean—"
I stamped my boot. "You meant everything you did," I said. "You made choices. You think apologies will undo years of hunger and camera lights? You think humility will let you buy your way out of blood?"
He looked up then, eyes wide and pleading. He lifted his hands like a man bargaining with gravity. People in the hall began to whisper and film. The press scrum surged.
"Ramon Ortega," someone shouted. "Were there payments? Did you blackmail? Where's the bank wire?"
He babbled. Denial came back, thinner now. "No bank wire. It's not—"
A young woman at the back shoved a paper forward: she had the ledger. Another guest's call blared, "We have transfers!" The air filled with the facts that refused to lie.
He crawled, clutching at his name like a lifeline that frayed under his fingers. "Please," he said again, the repeated plea now a chant. "Please, not here. Not now. I'm sorry."
People around us began clapping—not in praise, but in the relieved, savage applause of witnesses who had been waiting to see a liar fall. Some clapped for justice; some clapped because the evening finally had a story they hadn't walked into already scripted.
Ramon's face went white. He tried to drown the calls of the crowd by babbling more words—conditionals, denials, mitigations. "It was a misunderstanding. It was years ago. I meant nothing more than—"
"Hands," I said quietly. "Hands up. Say it."
He raised his hands like a supplicant. Humiliation hollowed his eyes.
"Say you're sorry," someone shouted.
"I'm sorry," he whispered. "I am. Forgive me."
The crowd's mood skewed. Some took pity. Others, the ones who had seen damage done by men with smooth words before, hissed and walked away in disgust. A dozen phones captured the moment. Ten or twenty commentators already called it "the fall".
Katharine—her face had calcified into something brittle—sank into a chair and began to weep like someone who realized she'd put her fate in a man whose hands couldn't hold it. The sponsors whispered; investors leaned forward. The word "liability" floated like a moth in the chandelier light.
When it ended, there were people cheering and others recording with shaky hands. Some left to vomit. Some left to call lawyers. The gala had become a tribunal. For me, standing in the center of that storm, the tassel in my hand felt small and absurd and perfect.
A reporter caught me afterward. "Ms. Dickson," she said, breathless and bright. "Did you plan this?"
"No," I said. "I planned to stop being someone's afterthought."
She smiled like a woman who would write the headline. "Will you press charges?"
"Yes," I said.
I walked out with the apricot tassel in my fist, Forrest at my side like a bodyguard who didn't know he had become one. Katharine and Ramon were behind us, small and frantic and real. Cameras clicked like a mechanical heartbeat.
The next weeks were a blur of statements and subpoenas. Prosecutors took interest. Fans flipped from devotion to disbelief. Ramon's empire—built on charm and sheen—crumbled in the press like cake.
People asked me why I had shown the world a broken man. "What did you want?" they asked. "Revenge? A public crucifixion?"
"No," I told them. "I wanted to stop a future. I wanted someone else to be safe. Punishment was secondary. Truth was primary."
Ramon's public unmaking stretched into a long, shameful performance. He stood on stages and kneelt before cameras until the knees marked the floor with dust. He begged. He accepted fines. He watched his partners walk away. He spent nights sleepless while reporters waited outside his door.
"Please, I'm sorry," he said into microphones more times than anyone should have to listen. He slid from arrogance to pleading in a week's time.
He did not become my redemption. He became an object lesson—a man whose taste for power had become his own undoing.
The system buzzed in my head less often after that. It had been defeated at its own game, insofar as the plot could be broken by facts. But the system adapted: it kept reminding me to "follow the arc," to forgive, to accept.
"I won't forgive for the sake of someone else's drama," I said one night to the machine. "Forgiveness, if it comes, is for me."
Then there was Gilbert Schroeder, who wanted legal ties and a portrait of a family. He wanted me to be how the storybook listed: grateful, smiling, the rescued heiress. Katharine wanted influence and access and the soft face of a child who could be a symbol.
"I don't want your statue," I told Gilbert. "I want a choice."
He replied, hands clasped, "You will be comfortable."
"Comfortable isn't the same as safe," I said.
I took my own choices. I left the white house of the family that bought me like a story prop and moved back to the tiny house where Celeste still made soup that smelled like summer. I slept in the small room with the apricot tassel umbrella and the stack of books about literature and weather. Forrest came and went. Sometimes he biked by, and I rode beside him in an old bicycle with a lock like a secret.
"Will it hurt again?" Forrest asked once, after another night of court hearings had left my hands shaky.
"It already did," I said. "The worst is behind me. The next part is learning to live."
He nodded and pushed his hair back. "Can I help?"
"You already do," I told him.
The system kept whispering about arcs and moral growth and social compliance, but words without pain were less persuasive.
Sometimes I still said the wrong thing, sometimes I smiled when I should have shouted. Sometimes I let people assume I would forgive too quickly. I found myself choosing differently more often than the old plot allowed.
One afternoon there was a charity for children's education—ironic, I know—and a woman from the board came up to me with a check and eyes that measured me like a ledger. She said, "Thank you for joining. Your story will inspire donors."
"We don't need inspiration," I answered. "We need action."
She blinked like someone who had read instructions wrong.
"You're dangerous," she said, and blamed me like fire blamed wood.
"Then be careful near me," I said, and laughed, a clean sound.
Forrest watches me when I teach now. He brings me tea. He hands me an umbrella with a new tassel, the shade now apricot threaded with a very small blue bead. "For luck," he says. "For staying stubborn."
I open my hand and touch the bead. It looks like a star.
"Remember," I tell him, and I tell myself, "I didn't come here to replay someone else's suffering."
I didn't have to be a martyr, a saved object, or a forgiving statue.
I was allowed to be a woman who taught a boy how to do algebra and who watched the sky on a roof with him and who answered the system only with a single sentence when it shouted: "Comply!"
"No," I said, and for once the voice stalled.
At night I tie the little tassel to the umbrella and sometimes open it inside, just to hear the dry scrape of fabric. The system's voice is quieter, like a radio with the signal slipping. It still says things from time to time—"You will regret this"—but I have learned to answer with a different sound.
"Maybe," I say, "but not today."
And when trouble approaches, when a man with polished shoes and soft promises thinks he can rearrange my life, I stand.
"Please," they may whisper. "Forgive me."
I keep the tassel between my fingers and I remember the gala lights and the wet, stunned face of a man who had thought the world was his.
"No," I say. "I do not forgive because you asked. I forgive because I choose, and that is not the same thing."
The umbrella's tassel slips between my thumb and forefinger; apricot and blue, frayed at the edges from being handled by small, earnest hands and used again and again. The system's hum goes soft.
"Then learn," the system says, almost like a warning.
I unfold the umbrella under the rooftop sky, and the tassel flutters like a little flag.
"I already did," I tell it. "I learned to stop being a character in someone else's story."
Forrest opens his mouth and laughs, soft and astonished. "You can't be improved," he says.
"I'm not a product," I answer. "I'm a person."
And then I close the umbrella, tuck the tassel into my palm, and look down at the city that tried to write my life for me.
"I'm going to teach," I say. "And I will be with you when the sky goes dark. I will be stubborn, and kind, and weirdly stubborn again."
Forrest grins like a champion. "Good."
We go downstairs. Celeste is humming in the kitchen. The radio plays a song someone once called a lullaby. Outside, the world keeps inventing new ways to be cruel.
Inside, the apricot tassel drums my palm like a heartbeat. It's small and oddly perfect, the proof that someone gave me something to hold.
"If anybody asks," I say to the empty room and to the system and to the distant judge and the cameras and the world, "tell them I kept the tassel."
For a long time the world will keep telling the old stories, but the tassel will be there if I need to remember I once chose my own ending.
The End
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