Sweet Romance14 min read
I Woke Up Twice — This Time I Choose Nehemias
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I woke to white light and the punctured scent of disinfectant. For a second I thought I had finally reached the place where people go when everything ends. My body screamed, but the scream turned into a gasp, and the voice beside me was alive, not the echo I had expected.
"Mrs. Powell, you're awake!" Duncan's voice broke like warm bread.
I stared at the short, earnest man who had once been a stranger and, in another life, a faithful servant. Duncan Medina's eyes were wet. My chest tightened. For a sliver of a moment I could not place the day, the pain, the collapse. Then the memory slammed into me — guns, betrayal, blood, the cliff, Nehemias falling because of me.
"No," I whispered.
"Where does it hurt?" Duncan knelt and took my hand like he could make sense of the mess with the force of his devotion.
I wanted to tell him everything: the two screams before waking, the hot iron smell of fear, how Nehemias had thrown himself after me and how both of us had thought we were finished. But the room hummed with machines and people and a reality that refused to be the one I had already died in. I pressed my nails into my palm until I felt the familiar sting of being alive.
"He came," I said, barely a breath. "He—"
Before I could finish, a shadow filled the doorway, sharp and carved. Nehemias Rios looked like he'd stepped out of a storm. Even wounded, even sleepless, he leaned over me like the axis of this small life.
"You woke," he said simply.
Everything else in the world stopped at that single, ridiculous, saving sentence.
I clutched at the clean smell of his suit as if it were an anchor. Tears slid, unbidden.
"Don't you dare leave," I told him, the words harder than I meant because memory had made me foolish and furious and small. "I won't let you go this time."
He didn't answer with a speech. He did what he had always done when words failed him: he tightened his hold on me, like a promise made of muscle.
Then the memories settled. The other life folded into this one like a bad page. I remembered Matilde's smile turning sour, Xander's hand that never stayed clean, the gun hot in my belly, the cliff screaming below, and their laughter over my body. I remembered how blind I'd been, how I had loved the wrong man. I remembered Nehemias's falling shadow.
I had died once. I had been given the impossible again — a second shot. A second "I."
"Listen to me," Nehemias said that afternoon when the doctor's rounds finally left us alone. He sat like a king and a child in one chair. "You don't have to explain everything now."
"I remember," I said. "All of it. Their names, their faces. I remember how long he waited outside that operating room. I remember the gun — Matilde and Xander. I remember dying."
He closed his eyes for a beat, and when he looked back he wore that slight, dangerous smile I had loved from the beginning. "Then don't."
"I can't just… not do anything." I could hear the old selfishness in my voice and wanted to flay it right then. "I almost killed you with my foolishness once. I promised then — I won't be that person again."
"You won't have to be," he whispered.
We fell into a steady rhythm — bed, doctor's tests, Duncan fussing, Olaf Hughes, my silent, hulking guard, in the hall like a calm warship. When I tried to get up before the nurse said so, Nehemias picked me up like I weighed nothing but everything.
"Who told you you could do that?" I sniffed.
"Who told me to let you do anything without me?" he said. His voice became a petulant rumble that had more heat than an oven.
The house, once empty of my laughter and full of other people's whispers, came alive again in patches. Duncan fussed in the kitchen, and the car doors shut with a reassuring click. When Nehemias left for a meeting, I clutched at the last moments we had that morning and practiced not breaking.
At night I dreamed the old nightmare: a woman I couldn't make out stepping toward a throne of white, laughing while I fell. I woke choking on cold air. Once, in that dream, I saw Nehemias's scales plucked by an unseen force — a mythic cruelty that turned the man I loved into a mortal with his wings broken. I could feel the images tearing at me like paper.
"This is real," I told Nehemias one dawn as the sun cut into the room in long orange blades. "I remember both lives. And—" I swallowed. "And something else."
He blinked. "What else?"
"I have power," I said. A strange thing to confess to someone you live with, but this time I had no pokerface. "I don't know how or why, but when I touch something — or when I move — things break. The mirror in the bathroom shattered when I flicked water from my hand. A glass flew across the company floor when someone—" I flinched remembering Xander's smug grin. "—tried to kiss me without asking."
Nehemias's expression shifted from calm to machine-precise attention. He ran a hand through his hair and said, quiet, "Tell me everything. No one else. Ever."
"So help me," I whispered, feeling both guilty and vindicated. "The last time, I used my headless trust to give everything to the wrong man. This time I'm different. I'll use whatever I have."
Nehemias nodded slowly. "Whatever you have, whatever you are — you are mine and you are safe. You do not show it."
"Why not?" I asked.
"Because sight invites hands," he said, like a lesson I'd fail at my first try. "Because people will take what they can if we let them. Because I prefer to hold the ones I love from the inside and the outside."
Our life threaded along the lines of an old warmth: small jokes, the odd tenderness of being caught in each other's orbit. There were moments — three, at least — that shivered through me like glass and left me dizzy.
The first came the night I woke: when he smiled at me like I was the only joke that made him laugh. He never smiled easily, yet that grin slipped out one quiet moment, and the heat behind my ribs turned liquid. "You smiled," I whispered, and he shrugged. "You never smile like that."
"I smile for a reason now," he said.
The second was the morning he hovered with a scarf over my shoulders just before leaving for the office — my hands cold, my mind heavy. "Take it," he said. He had always been practical, not theatrical. That he had thought to fold warmth into a scarf and leave it for me felt like trespassing in a holy place.
The third was the small, dangerous thing he did the first time someone dared him. Xander Bender, that bright, flattering snake who'd spent a year building little traps and polishing his smile, came to the office like he owned the air. He flung himself into the doorway with too-sweet words.
"Xander," Nehemias said, voice a blade. "What do you want?"
Matilde Lane materialized like a slow poison. She always had that look — the kind of friend who makes you spend money on clothes you don't need and then blames you for being ungrateful. She tracked me with her eyes like a hawk. "Oh, Kehlani," she sang. "You look different. Recovered is a good look."
"Back off, Matilde," I said. "I don't want whatever you're selling."
She laughed with the bright cruelty of someone used to being believed. Xander leapt toward me like a hungry thing. Before he could touch my shoulder, I moved my hand in a flash — something primal and strange in me unclenched. He went flying backwards like someone who had laughed himself off a cliff: his cup spilled, his breath left his body with a comic, terrible little sound, and he hit the floor.
Nehemias's eyes were unreadable and vast. "Did you do that?" he asked.
"I think so," I said, fire in my throat. "I think whatever was inside me now woke up."
He did not frown. He simply took my hand and left the room with me in his wake. "We will not let this be seen," he said. "Understood?"
"Understood," I told him, and the promise stuck like glue to my ribs.
A week later the restaurant scene happened — the one that tore the old life into visible ribbons and gave me the chance to deliver other people's justice.
We were dining by the window at a place Nehemias picked that smelled like lemon and promise. The sunset draped an orange dress over everything. I had felt like a queen for ten minutes. Then Matilde walked in with her palace of social armor, and she cast a shadow that was all ifs and onlys.
"Nehemias?" she purred. "Fancy seeing you here."
He didn't look at her the wrong way. He looked at her the right way: with a cold that could slice through lacquer. "Matilde," he said evenly. "This is my wife."
"Small world," Matilde chirped, and sat in my chair as if it were a free bench. She was that kind of person who believed the world owed her the shape of a diamond.
I stood up. "Get up," I said.
"Excuse me?" she asked, startling like a child.
"Get up. There's no chair for you here."
Her smile hardened. "Are you being serious?"
"Dead serious." I stepped closer. "You wanted me to be small once. You've been taking for a long time. Not tonight."
At that moment, Xander came in, flashy and honey-coated. He saw me and his face lit with the old pick-the-weakest-game flush. He made a move across the threshold like a man who used to assume the world belonged to him.
"Back off," Nehemias said, and his voice was so quiet the plates trembled. "Or leave."
Xander scoffed and reached for Matilde's hand like a king reclaiming a crown. She leaned toward him, smiling that practiced smile. It was enough to make my old skin crawl like something alive trying to burrow back in.
"I told you," I said. "Hands off."
He smirked. "What's the matter? You getting jealous?"
I don't remember the exact order of everything that followed. I remember the gasp — that long, collective inhale — and then the crack. I remember feeling my palm open and the air around me fold. Xander's smug expression collapsed like a paper mask. He flew backward across the dining room with a dramatic, ridiculous arc of limbs and landed hard against a glass wall. He coughed blood and a tooth and something like surprise.
For a beat the room held its breath. People turned their heads like flowers. Someone's phone clicked.
"This is unreal," an older woman whispered.
"Is she—" another voice asked. "Is she dangerous?"
Matilde's face first shifted from triumphant to perplexed to colored with panic. "Xander!" she screamed. Then she said something that tried to sound sensible and sane and didn't: "He fainted! He fainted, see? He's unwell!"
"No," Nehemias said. He stood, took my hand like a claim and a shield. "He is conscious."
Xander's expression changed in a way that was both carved and soggy. First he went through indignation, then shock, then the reflexive lie. "You hit me," he mouthed to the gathered audience. "She hit me!"
I looked at him. The room was a theater and I could feel the spotlight burn the edges of my skin. I walked slowly to him, the movement exact, and then — calmly — I reached down and lifted him by his collar.
"Did you think I'd be the one to fall?" I asked.
At first he tried denial. "No." The word was worthless. "I was invited. She—"
"She?" I said. "Matilde, is that true?"
Matilde opened her mouth and her practiced mask cracked like paint under pressure. She had a thousand rehearsed excuses — we flirted, he tripped, it was an accident — and they spilled out, fragile as eggs.
Then I did something I had sworn never to do again: I told the truth, not subtle and quiet but loud and public and surgical.
"You ruined things for me," I said. "You told me lies about Nehemias. You planted poison. You dragged me away from the man who loved me for his ends. You pushed me into other arms until I hurt the person who mattered most. You played a game with people's lives and ideas of loyalty."
Matilde was still smiling at first, the way people do before they step off a ledge. The room had begun to murmur. I saw phones rise, as if the world itself had decided this was an event.
"You did this for what?" I pressed. "To be first in pictures? To be crowned by gossip? To keep a mattress warm?"
Her face went through stages: the first was denial. "That's not true," she said. "Kehlani, don't say that—"
Then the crowd turned.
"Stop," an older woman hissed. "Don't be dramatic. Sit down."
A young man whispered, "Who do you think you are?"
"Who are you to touch people?" another asked.
But they were asking small things for all the wrong reasons. I had promised Nehemias I would not show power if I could help it. That promise did not include letting these people keep being invisible predators.
"Matilde," I said, voice level. "Is that all you have? To ruin a woman's life to get a better seat at dinner? Look around. Everyone here is watching."
The first change was physical — people shrank back from her like from a smell. Phones flashed; fingers jabbed. Someone started clapping lightly, then harder. The applause was a small, delicate blade. Matilde tried to pat her face as if she were the injured party and no one bit. She looked around, and instead of allies, she found curious faces and cameras waiting for her to do the one thing she had always counted on: keep her lies pretty.
Her composure cracked slowly, then all at once. She became a pantomime: denial, then anger, then feigned injury. "You can't do this!" she cried. "You're a—"
"Am I a what?" I asked. "A liar? A monster?" I let the words hang.
She recited the old lines: abused, wronged, misread, misunderstood. The audience began to boo, a deep, human sound like wind going through a field. Matilde went from elegance to exposed wire.
Then the crucial moment came: she begged. Not for sorry, but for her life as a social animal. "Please, please, please," she said, and — unbelievably — she looked around for someone to catch her fall.
Xander — who was trying to get up and failed — crawled toward her on shaky knees. He started to defend her, then to deny things; then, under a wave of cameras and a pressing, personal truth I had offered, he snapped.
"You think you can ruin what I've built?" he spat, suddenly vicious. "You think you can embarrass me and walk away?"
"Watch me," I said.
Now: public punishment has to be more than words. A punishment for someone like Matilde must strip away the audience and the stage she used to hide behind, while Xander's punishment must separate him from the levers he'd hoped would prop him up.
The restaurant's manager, a small gray man who had been watching with an equal measure of horror and fascination, cleared his throat. "Sir," he said to Xander, when Xander rose sputtering, "you've caused quite a scene and you will have to leave now."
"I will not be told what to do," Xander snapped. He pushed at the manager with the arrogance of privilege.
"Security," the manager said into his phone. "Please help."
Olaf Hughes was in the doorway by the time the manager had spoken. He moved like a large, careful shadow. He put a hand on Xander's arm as if he weighed a cow. "Sir," Olaf said, quietly and calmly, "time to go."
Xander threw a hand out and screamed that he was being kidnapped. Cameras flashed. People said unkind things under their breath. Matilde screamed and clutched at Xander like a child.
Then college kids began to form a perimeter. A woman in a red dress, who had overheard enough of Matilde's petty gossip to have a score to settle, stepped forward and held up her phone, live streaming. "This is for people who prey on others," she said.
That's when the social hunt began. Messages flew. By the time the three of us walked out of the restaurant — Nehemias with his stare like iron, me with a hand on his arm, Matilde in a heel unfit for the sudden jolt of reality — the first calls had already come.
"Someone recorded the whole thing," the woman in red announced. "You're all over the internet."
Matilde's eyes went huge. "No," she whispered. "No. Delete that—"
But the cameras had born witness. The crowd's reaction changed from satisfaction to cruelty. People took photos and posted them. Matilde's other "friends"' faces froze into minor curiosities. Xander's phone started ringing wild. An anonymous tip to a local gossip account — composed by someone who hated Matilde for cheap reasons — posted a precise, damning collage: messages she had sent behind my back, receipts for parties, and the cheeky, quiet little file of a rich boy who wanted to play with the weak and call it generosity.
"Do you want me to call your publicist?" Nehemias asked Matilde, and his voice was very slow and very cold.
"For once," I said, feeling the old ice and new fire combine, "let's be public."
Matilde went through a progression I watched like a student of human collapse: first denial, then rage, then negotiation, and finally shriveling persuasion in the face of distance. She tried to smile and sap sympathy and bargain with false tears, but people had already seen the person behind the curtain and the mask was brittle.
Xander, meanwhile, tried to rise. People spat words at him. One man in a suit said, "You better hope your phone is off." The man had been the subject of a corporation that Xander's tiny, waxy company had been trying to flirt with. "Don't you dare come at us."
By the time the police were politely called to separate the spectacle from the street, Matilde was crying on a bench, her glamorous face collapsed into something common. Her hand trembled where someone — a clear-eyed woman — had posted a screenshot of an email showing a pattern of behavior: a plan. The plan worked like this — lure, lie, leave. Suddenly everyone had the blueprint.
Xander's punishment was more structural. Nehemias made three calls from the parking lot with a voice like steel poured into ice: one to a lawyer, one to a private investigator, and one to a man who owed a favor. Within an hour, Xander began to receive messages at both his home and work: "We need to talk." People who had been considering him for partnerships suddenly withdrew. A quiet phone call left him pale. His investors, who had been coaxed by Xander's warm smile, got "cold feet." Offers vanished. Over the next week his public standing collapsed like a house of cards.
Matilde's social life crumbled faster. Friends who had been allies pruned their contact lists. Where she had once been entered with a small fanfare, she found doors closed and whispers replacing applause. The media coverage painted her as a manipulator who had used relationships to climb. The hundred little advantages she had taken all at once turned into the hundred small injuries she suffered publicly. People who had cheered her on now scrolled and judged. Her carefully built illusion burned into public shrapnel.
Both Xander and Matilde watched, helpless in different ways. Xander's wall of business had a hole shot through it, leaving him reckless and frantic. He tried to sue, to threaten, to cry, to bribe. Nehemias only smiled once, that small, private smile reserved for certain late nights.
Matilde's face met a different kind of collapse. At first she screamed that I had ruined her. Then, when everyone had her conversations in their hands and her messages on their phones and the whispering of "Did you ever suspect?" traveling like a rumor, she began to bargain: "I'll apologize. I'll donate. I'll—"
But the world at a certain point takes over. The mob is no more moral than the one who feeds it. What was satisfying was that the people around us — the ones who had seen, the ones who had suffered for small cruelties — breathed easier. They clapped as we left, some in approval, some in bewildered delight. The manager, a trembling man who had once feared loss of face, offered us his card.
Nehemias squeezed my hand as we walked away. I felt a peace so foreign and fierce it could have been a blade.
"You wanted them to be punished," he said.
"I wanted them to stop," I said.
"And they will," he promised, as if he were promising the sun. "And they will remember today."
For the next months the punishments took shape with a slow, satisfying cruelty. Xander's investors left. Matilde's invitations stopped. Friends who had been used as props slipped free and left their old co-conspirator to the hum of gossip. They tried to rebuild. They failed in front of cameras.
I do not revel in ruin, but I keep what I have promised: I do not let the wolves leave their tracks on our door without being seen.
After that day, nothing felt small anymore. The house hummed with a steady life. Nehemias sat across from me at our big table and picked at his food the way a man who had survived storms might. When he noticed me looking, he slid a plate near me and said, softly, "You don't have to be small here."
"I won't be," I promised.
Days moved into the comfortable cadence of being married to someone who loved me for reasons I was still discovering. I learned when to stop and when to push, when to hold my power like a secret and when to use it like a hammer. Nehemias taught me restraint with the patient cruelty of a general. "Power without aim is noise," he would say.
"Who taught you to phrase everything like an order?" I asked, one morning when we lay with our limbs tangled like careless vines.
"You did," he replied, and then kissed the small, brave place behind my ear. "After you came back, my language got a new dictionary."
There were quieter tests. A man from a nearby firm once tried to make a deal that smelled awful; he sent a glossy card and a smile as if money could be wielded as sympathy. He did not last five minutes in our parlor before he left a little blinder than when he arrived. Another time, a panicky investor called Nehemias, voice high and tiny; Nehemias took his complaint and — in private — made sure a reminder of public humiliation found its way into the man's inbox. I saw the man fall from the ladder he had been climbing; the world, it seems, had its ways.
At night, when the house fell soft and the city lights winked, Nehemias would whisper, "Tell me something you remember from before."
"I remember the cliff," I said. "I remember two guns and how small the world can make you in a moment. I remember your hand when I last went down."
His hand closed around mine like gravity. "You will not fall again," he said.
The second life is not an immaculate redemption. It is a hard, patient reweaving. People still hurt me. People I used to trust still hang in the background like old songs. Occasionally a tremor of fear catches my breath. But above everything else is a fact I hold like a talisman: I woke twice. The second time, I chose where to aim my hands, whom to trust, whom to protect.
And I chose Nehemias.
The End
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