Sweet Romance16 min read
I Won the Lottery, Quit My Job, and Fell for a High Schooler — Then Everything Changed
ButterPicks12 views
"Today is the day I tell him," I said to my reflection, and wrapped my trembling hands around the little paper lion I always kept in my purse.
"Who?" my friend—no, my reflection—asked back.
"Patrick," I said, and the name tasted like a closed door.
The office smelled like coffee and spit-polished wood at nine in the morning. Patrick Arnold walked like a statue and wore a silence that made people speak louder than they should. My whole life, I had been "Jada, the secretary," the one who remembered passwords and anniversaries and where he left his favorite pen.
"I've wanted to tell him for five years," I told the mirror. "Five years of making schedules nobody reads, of closing his laptop at two a.m. because he forgets to eat. Five years of thinking maybe he'll finally look at me like I'm not air."
"You sound like an air conditioner," I muttered. "Okay. Deep breath."
When I said those words to him, they slid off his shoulders like rain off marble.
"Jada," he said, cool as winter, "you should not mix personal with work."
"Then let me quit and keep personal and professional well separated." My voice was small. "I like you. I like you a lot."
He blinked as if I had just handed him a cup of hot tea. Then the blink widened to a smile that had been used many times before, and he placed it like an expensive tray.
"I'm flattered," he said. "But we can't. Company policy—"
"Then accept it politely," I said, because being rejected while still chained to the same office was the worst form of torture. "Or not. But I need to live."
"Live?" he repeated. "You have no idea what living really looks like."
When the meeting ended I went to the river and threw my phone into the water.
"You are ridiculous," the river might have said if rivers talked. But it didn't. The phone sank slowly and I felt strangely lighter.
Three hours later I was in a tiny shop, scratching off a lottery ticket bought on a whim. The silver coin scraped paper like a fingernail and the numbers rolled into place.
"One, two, three..." I muttered, and my heart stuttered.
Seven numbers matched. I sat down heavily on the crack in the sidewalk and laughed until even the people who passed by thought I was a little crazy.
"I won," I told the nearby pigeon. "I won a billion."
The world tilted. My knees forgot how to keep me upright. I thought of rent, of late nights making coffee for other people's dreams. I thought of Patrick and his cold hands, of all the times his "good job" had been a stamp on invisible paper. I thought of me—of Jada.
I did not cry. I bought a building. I bought a row of cars. I ordered a man who looked like Patrick from a catalog to come to my place and rub my shoulders while I ate noodles. There are many ways to celebrate fortune; mine involved lots of takeout and a ridiculous parade of new shoes.
"You're leaving?" Patrick asked on a rainy Wednesday, like someone commenting on the weather.
"Yes," I said. "I'm leaving. I quit."
He looked as though someone had taken his favorite pen and snapped it in half. "Jada," he said, "you can't leave. You're indispensable."
"Indispensable to whom?" I laughed. "Indispensable to your list of meetings? Indispensable to your bad coffee addiction? No thanks."
The company sent Cody Delgado over like a peace offering with a smile set to 'ear-to-ear'.
"We'll give you a long leave," Cody said, clutching a folder. "Five times salary, benefits, a beach house—"
"I bought a building last night," I said, and opened the folder where I kept the new deeds like one keeps a second heart. "Thanks anyway."
"You're not thinking straight," Cody said. "This isn't you."
"You're right," I said. "This is the new me."
It felt delicious to say it, like stepping into sun after a long winter. The sunset cut through glass and steel and the city looked like a board of little lights I could move around if I wanted.
Everything should have ended there. I should have gone home, made a list of which shoes went with which car, and called it a day.
But life, as I was learning, loved rules and irony the way a cat loves a sunbeam. On the day I became formally free, I stood in the rain holding an umbrella. Patrick's "arranged dates" paraded across town with every piece of choreography I had orchestrated, down to the flowers in her hair. I held her umbrella and carried the expensive coat I had bought three months earlier as a gift for someone else.
She stepped into a puddle and laughed like it was the most unbecoming thing she could imagine, while I looked at the coat, soaked it with my shoes, and something inside me cracked.
"Do you mind?" she snapped, and she stepped into a cab like the whole world obeyed her.
That moment—watching someone I had helped be petty with my money—was a small splinter of ice that dug into my ribcage.
"You're impossible," I told my reflection that night. "You're going to do the opposite of what you always do. You're going to stop."
The next morning, a car cut me off. I spilled my drink, stumbled, and my phone flashed with a notification: a strange, electronic voice saying, "Congratulations. You have gained Koi-Blessed Constitution. Countdown: 30 days."
I laughed then too. The world on that day kept offering me things like a street magician pulling scarves out of a hat.
I should have been dead. There had been an accident: a loud crash, airbags, blood, fear. But instead I was whole.
"Miss, you hit my car," a young man said, tapping on my window.
He looked like someone out of a shampoo commercial—dark hair plastered to his forehead, mouth split with a quick grin. "You okay?"
I stepped out and realized the other car had one chip in the paint and mine looked untouched, as if a gentle god had smoothed the dent before anyone could say anything.
"I'm so sorry," I said.
He accepted two hundred dollars and a favor: "Say 'baby' for two hundred dollars."
He said it easily and laughed when I bubbled with embarrassment into my phone call to Patrick.
"Jada," he said on the line, "come in. Meet me."
"Not today," I said. "I have better plans now."
His voice got softer and I felt a corner of old self still attached like a bandage. "You're not the same without your work."
"You're not the same without my work," I said, "because you counted on me. I don't count on you."
I told the man in the van, whose name was Finnegan Cannon, to fake-date me for two hundred dollars and a warm smile. He said my heart was making the right noises and he owed me nothing, but he did the worst favor a young man with eight-pack abs could do: he made my heart thump.
"How old are you?" I asked, once the rain had stopped and the umbrella smelled of steam.
"Almost twenty," he said. "Sixteen days until the test that decides most of the next four years of my life."
"You're a student?"
"Final year," he said. "High school stuff. I'm a special sports candidate."
"You're... perfect on paper," I said, and then pinched myself. "But you're too young."
"I turn adult soon," he said, the kind of naive thing that doesn't know the weight of its own argument. "And I want you to come to my exam. If you come, I can say I have family here."
So I went. Not out of pity. Not out of boredom. Because even billionaires have rooms in their brain with only one chair and sometimes someone new sits in it.
At the testing yard, girls shouted Finnegan's name and waved balloons. He was a boy-magnet, and he carried the attention like one would carry sunlight—warm without being arrogant.
"Is she your sister?" a girl asked whispering.
"Yes," I said, and laughed. "Sister sounds good."
He thanked me softly, taking the charm I had made him for luck and tying it to his pencil case. "I'll bring you good luck," he promised.
"Don't be silly," I said.
But I didn't know the rules the Koi-Blessed gave me. It gave small, ridiculous gifts—free phones, more instant wins—and one giant, impossible one: a man who would ride into my life in the exact time I most needed him.
The days unreeled. I bought seven phones in seven colors because the world suddenly became too loud with options and I could not decide. I spent money as if paper had no limit, but my chest hollowed with a hollow that money could not fill. I began to look forward to messages not from the bank but from a boy who sent me five-emoji texts.
"Are you real?" Finnegan asked after our third dinner, sitting across the table like he weighed each word before letting it go.
"I'm as real as your algebra," I said. "But I have a confession."
"What?"
"I used to work for someone who looked at me like I was all the places his attention didn't reach," I said. "I loved someone who never loved me."
He frowned, trying to hold every part of me that I let slip through. "Then let him go," he said, as if it were easy.
"It's not easy," I told him. "It takes a kind of small bravery to walk."
"Then be brave," he said. "Be brave and let me hold your bag."
I found myself leaning on him. He carried my weight like it was nothing important and made me feel lighter for it.
Patrick, of course, did not vanish. He followed me like a dog with a bad memory. He tried to turn my new life into a negotiation.
"Five-time salary," Cody said, but I had already laughed.
One evening he came to my doorstep with his assistant and a list of incentives the company was prepared to hurrah me with. "We would like you back," he said. "The board values you."
"Board or you?" I asked.
"Both," he said, and then his face—calmer than a midnight lake—broke like thin ice. "You are making a mistake."
"I bought a building," I said, holding up the title as if it were a fan to cool him. "I don't mistake being alive any longer."
He opened his mouth and words tried to tumble out. "Money isn't everything."
"That's where you're wrong," I said. "It's not everything. It's mine."
There are people who think power is always quiet. Patrick taught me that power can be a whisper, a tilt of the head. He thought he had me under a glass bottle, that I would always inhale his approval.
One night he came back, and he was not alone in his plans anymore. He brought along other executives, Vaughn Jesus, a face like an argument, and a small group to make his point.
"We will not accept this," he said to me, making a speech as if the house were a courtroom.
"Then make it quick," I said.
He reached into the pocket of his coat and produced my phone. He had somehow dredged it from the river, and when he turned it on, my wallpaper—his sleeping face—gazed back at me. The room tightened.
"You like me," he said. "You've always liked me. Don't you see you're throwing away stability for a fantasy?"
I found my breath. I could have told him about the lottery, the building, or the boy who waited for me with a charm on his pencil case. I could have shown him the files that proved how much I had done for the company and been angry, but that would be the old me.
Instead, I let a smile I had been saving slide onto my face.
"You've been collecting pieces of my life like trophies," I said. "My emails, my bank statements, my unreturned texts. You thought that would tie me to you. It didn't."
He took a step forward, incredulous. "Listen—"
"Cody," I said, turning to the assistant. "Would you like to give Mr. Arnold the folder with his own emails where he schedules personal surveillance?"
Cody's smile dropped. He took the folder like a hot dish. "Patrick," he said softly, "what is this?"
"Confidential," Patrick stammered. "Irrelevant."
"Is it?" I asked. "Do we have a say about what is relevant? Do we have a say when someone uses their resources to cross boundaries?"
The room held its breath. It was the kind of moment where the sound of the clock made a decision louder than any suit's argument.
Cameras that had been present for the "reconciliation" suddenly perched their lenses like curious birds. The corporate gala was a stage and everyone knew their lines. I did not. I made my own.
So I stood up. Not dramatically, but like someone stepping out of a shadow.
"Patrick Arnold," I said, loud enough for the chandelier to listen. "You have been monitoring me."
He froze, the way a statue freezes when a weather report is wrong.
"You're making wild accusations," he said.
"Wild?" I laughed. "You installed cameras. You sent people to my apartment. You treated my life like raw material."
His face did something that made the room tilt: it went from composed to shocked to angry, like a storm changing wind.
"That's a lie," he spat. "I've done nothing wrong."
Vaughn moved slightly and people around him leaned in.
"Do you deny sending messages from my bank account?" I asked. "Do you deny bending company policy to keep me at your desk? Do you deny the texts where you sign off, 'Sleep well, Jada'?"
Silence.
I played the recordings.
"You cannot—that's illegal," Patrick said, and the word legal made his face pale.
"It is illegal," said a woman's voice from the crowd. "And wrong."
Phones were out. Hands were small and eyes were wide and people began to record. The assistant turned colors and found no words. Patrick tried to take a step, to grab a folder, to do anything that would make him the center again, but the center had moved.
"You have no idea what you've done," he said, rising to his full height, which was considerable. "You think throwing money around makes you superior?"
"Money bought me freedom," I said. "Freedom from your expectations, freedom from your chokehold. I bought a building, and I bought my own life back."
He laughed—at first a small laugh, then a noise that fell apart.
"You think because you have money you can publically embarrass me?" he said. "People like you are temporary."
"Are you threatening me?" I asked.
"I am telling you consequences," he said.
"And I am telling you," I said, "that those consequences should have been thought through before you decided to spy."
The room hung on the tilt of his jaw and my steady eyes. Then something remarkable happened.
Cody Delgado stepped forward.
"I signed the forms," he said. "I typed the memos. I have a file. I have dates and payments and the names of the vendors you told me to hire."
Patrick's mouth opened and closed. "Cody," he said, "no."
"I will not be silent while you call a woman's life a resource," Cody said. "I was wrong to help. I'm sorry."
"Apology?" Patrick hissed. "You will apologize to me."
"No," Cody said. "To her."
A murmur rolled like wind. Then Vaughn Jesus, an executive who had watched Patrick for years, tapped his glass.
"This is a matter for the board," he said. "We cannot have this leak."
"By leak do you mean truth?" I asked.
The crowd turned. Phones glinted and recorded. Patrick's face lost blood color.
"Do you know who I am?" he demanded. "Do you know the power I hold?"
"Do you know who you were to me?" I asked, softer now. "You were a man who made me invisible. You were someone who thought my kindness was free."
He reached for his phone like a drowning man reaching for a rope.
The first reaction was shocked silence. Then a woman shouted, "Shame!"
"You're disgusting," someone else said.
A man near the bar spat on the floor in disgust. Others clasped hands to their mouths. It was the sound of a mirror breaking in a room full of people who had once looked into it and admired themselves.
Patrick looked like a person on a small ledge. His hand shook. He attempted to step away but cameras recorded. He tried to call for security but his voice thinned.
"You're making a scene," he said.
"I am," I said. "Because you made a life a scandal for your ego."
At that second, the gala's host—Vaughn—stepped forward. "You have crossed the line, Patrick," he said. "We will have an investigation. You will be suspended until then."
Patrick's face went through cycles: indignant, then furious, then sinking into a kind of childish denial.
"This is corporate bullying," he insisted. "This is revenge. She is making false claims."
"Do you deny the footage?" I asked.
He stammered. "I... I didn't know. I didn't—"
"Stop," Cody snapped. "You're lying, and you know it."
He fell silent. His vanity, which had been the armor he wore as a shield, cracked.
People began to turn toward Patrick as if they had found a rotten apple in a bowl of fruit. His colleagues who had once nodded at his jokes now avoided his eyes. Someone whispered, "I can't believe it," and the whisper multiplied.
"You're fired," someone in the crowd muttered with a kind of private glee.
"Not yet," Vaughn said, dry. "But you are on leave. The board will review."
And then the change became public: a corporate press release, sent by someone with stronger ethics than Patrick, went out within the hour. Within the day, the news had teeth. People texted me support. The hashtag—God help us—caught on: #RespectJada.
Patrick, who had spent years believing his name could be a shield, found he had to stand in front of dozens of lenses and say, "I made mistakes." He tried to look regretful and then sneered when he thought cameras were off. A journalist cornered him and asked, "Why did you monitor your employee?"
"Privacy was invaded," he said, clumsy. "I—"
"By you?" the journalist pressed.
He could do nothing but listen to the public's verdict unspool. People commented on message boards, then the board released an interim statement: an external inquiry, suspension pending review.
Patrick's reaction turned from denial into panic. He called names, tried to set his team to spin the story, but the social tide had turned.
At a shareholder event two weeks later, Patrick attempted to regain his ground. He stood at the podium and cleared his throat. He had prepared a speech, but the room no longer afforded him the same indulgence.
"Mr. Arnold," I said into a microphone the organizers handed me, "we're all tired of polite silences."
The crowd's cameras turned like sunflowers.
"I invited everyone here today for two reasons," I said. "One, because the truth belongs in the open. Two, because the cost of cloaking a person's life is too high."
Patrick's face reshaped: he looked for allies and found faces turned.
"Do you remember," I asked, "the woman with the soaked coat? The one you joked about to your friends? Do you remember the way you asked people to 'keep an eye' on her? Do you remember writing, 'Make sure she stays'?"
He swallowed. It was a mark in the record. The CEO's authority peeled like old paint.
"Public humiliation?" someone in the audience demanded. "That's not justice."
"No," I said. "Real justice is people learning from what they did wrong."
The attendees watched, rapt, as Patrick stood small and accused and then began to crumble. He had never been asked to apologize in front of people whose faces were not his own. His reactions ran through the required steps: the small anger, the loud denial, the denial's collapse, then the debt.
"I was wrong," he began, voice raw. "I... I wanted to keep good people. I thought I knew what was best."
"That is not an excuse," Cody said from the side. "Not for spying."
A long silence opened. Someone clapped, then another. Applause for confession tasted odd, but it was there.
Patrick tried to bargain, "You don't understand—"
"A lot of us don't," I said. "But we will."
His colleagues' faces hardened. The people who had clapped for his jokes when he was safe now looked at him with the thinness of people who had lost trust.
Then the worst thing for a man like Patrick happened: his allies began to look at him not as an alpha but as someone who had used power for private ends. Donations dried. Invitations were postponed. Friends who had made careers with him began to make excuses.
He fell through the social grid like an old internet file being deleted.
The final blow came when one of the shareholders stood up and said, "We will be appointing an external firm to review all practices of the management, effective immediately. Mr. Arnold will be on leave pending that review."
"You're not going to fire me," he protested, eyes wet and furious.
"You're going to face the consequences," the shareholder said. "Public or private, reckoning is coming."
At that moment Patrick's face changed from cold to the face of a man who had miscalculated. His mouth opened, then closed. He wanted to bargain; he wanted to beg; he wanted to be the man people applauded again. But the chorus of cameras, whispered disgust, and the board's statement had turned the tide.
He staggered back as if hit. Tears, then fury, then a small, pleading silence. In the end, he retreated to his office to a different kind of quiet: the kind filled with those who would not lie for him anymore.
I bought more than a building that day. I bought my peace.
"Thank you," Finnegan said later, taking my hand in a park where pigeons still thought change was bread.
"You didn't do anything," I said.
"You saved me," he replied. "I wasn't just pretending that time on the van. I really like you."
"I used to think liking someone was proof," I told him. "But sometimes, liking someone is simply a choice you make every day."
He smiled and kissed my forehead like someone sealing a promise without knowing its length.
Two weeks later, the Koi-Blessed countdown hit zero.
"Do you think it will make you forget me?" I asked, half-joking.
"No," Finnegan said. "If it does, I'll write the days down on my skin and tattoo them into memory. Or I will remember because of the way you made me feel."
That night there was a fire in a building at the mall. We had gone to make a list of the last few things on our 'fifty things' list. The stairway became a tunnel of smoke. The alarms screamed; the lights went red and the world smelled like iron.
"Come," he said, and he tore off his shirt to wrap my face and led me. When a chandelier fell, he put his shoulder to it and took the crushing blow.
I could have run—but my Koi-Blessed magic had tricked me. It kept me safe, but this time it didn't pick who took the blow. Finnegan let the chandelier smash across his shoulder and then pushed me through the door. The entryway collapsed right after me.
I lay on the cold pavement and heard the fire brigade through the ringing in my ears. People pulled me aside. And then I watched, stomach like lead, as they carried him out on a stretcher.
"He saved you," someone said.
"No," I cried. "He chose to save me."
In the hospital he was pale but alive. He smiled in that fragile way that made my chest break.
"You're going to be okay," I kept saying.
He took my hand and squeezed, and it did not feel like a memory erasing. "We dated for nine days and four hours," he said, smiling weakly. "And I remember each one."
"You remember everything?" I asked.
"I remember your laugh in the rain," he said. "You laughed so loud I almost drove off the road."
"And the way you said 'baby' for two hundred dollars?" I asked.
He laughed, breath rasping. "That was the best two hundred dollars I've ever made."
I cried then, the kind of cry that makes you feel like you are pouring yourself into someone else's hands and they are holding every drop.
"Don't let me go," I whispered.
"I won't," he said. "I wanted to be brave and I was—because you were brave first."
The doctors kept him overnight and then promised a slow recovery. I learned small things: the way his hair smelled of antiseptic, how he hummed when he slept, and the pattern of scars that would one day be a map of where he'd been brave for me.
Later, when the company had shifted and Patrick's humiliation had become a case study in what not to do, I went back to the river and found my old phone. It had been fixed—he had dredged it and tried to show me the truth. I took it and set it on the ledge, and then I dropped a golden sunflower seed into my pocket.
"Why a seed?" Finnegan asked, watching me.
"It reminds me I can plant things," I said. "A life, a love. I can't control the weather, but I can water whatever I want to grow."
He smiled and kissed the knuckle of my hand.
We kept doing small things. I lent him my good umbrella once and he called me a fool for worrying about his hair. He asked me to come to his high school graduation and I cried with all the proud things I had never expected to feel.
When the board eventually settled things, Patrick paid fines and received professional mandates and public censure. He had lost more than a job; he had lost the easy admiration of people who once believed he was the sort of person who deserved unfettered power. I never wished him harm—only that he would learn to stop thinking people's lives were his to claim.
At night, when all the city lights are small and patient, he calls sometimes as if things had never happened.
"Are you coming back?" he once asked.
"No," I said. "I am living."
Finnegan laughs at my joke and kisses my forehead and the last thing I do before sleep is hold the tiny golden seed in my hand. It lives in a jar on my kitchen shelf like proof that fortune can be anything you make of it: a building, a car, a boy who chooses to stay.
"Will you marry me?" he asked one afternoon, two years after the fire, when the scar on his shoulder had become a small silver line.
"Not yet," I said, and he pretended to weep.
"Then be mine," he pleaded, folding his hands like a child bargaining for dessert.
"I already am," I said. "And that is enough—for now."
We kept our promise in the little ways. He still calls me 'sister' when we joke, and 'Jada' when he tucks my hair behind my ear. Patrick is a lesson in my past, a cautionary tale I tell people who ask how I became brave enough to leave. My jar of seeds sits on the shelf. Sometimes I open the lid and hold the shiny golden one and remember the night I threw my phone into the water.
"I won a billion," I tell anyone who will listen, and they always gasp.
"No," I tell them when they expect a list of lavish things. "I won a life."
The End
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