Sweet Romance13 min read
My Broken Heart, His Unwilling Smile
ButterPicks9 views
I remember the night the bar closed because the summer tourists had thinned and the town finally let out a tired sigh. The bartender, Gunner Donovan, left a soft yellow lamp on the counter and creaked upstairs. I walked down slow steps and found him—Houston Huber—reclined in a lounge chair, a picture book on his chest, white collar open, long legs crossed, asleep like a man who carried the sea in his bones.
"He looks like he could be a painting," I whispered to myself as I moved closer.
I lifted the book off his chest. "Houston?" I tried very soft.
He didn't stir. The light made his collarbone glossy, his chest warm in its brown tan. My pulse went loud and messy, and I surprised myself by sitting on his knee. I had a cheap black slip on, hair like a boy's crop, and I had come to the town as a living advertisement for being fearless.
"Don't—" he said with his eyes still closed, one long finger at my shoulder like a small, gentle barrier. "Before I open my eyes, go back to your room."
"I leave tomorrow," I told him, reckless. "I've liked you for fourteen years. Will you hold me? Just once?"
He pulled his hand away like the polite man he always was and said apologetically, "I'm sorry."
"You're joking," I snapped, and then I shouted, "You don't actually like men, do you, Houston?"
"Who—" A soft thud came from a dark booth. A short-haired girl climbed up, smiling sleepily, bag hanging at her feet. She mumbled an apology and blinked in the lamplight.
"It was okay," she said in a bright voice. "Leg went numb."
He pressed a remote and the lamp glowed. The girl, in loose army green pants and a Garfield T-shirt, shuffled toward the door, clutching a few business cards.
"Excuse me," she said, halting, then, braver, "You both look upset. Mind if I say something?"
"Who are you?" I snorted.
She smiled and handed cards around like confetti. "I'm a relationship and sex counselor—name's Ami Vega."
Houston took a card as if it were a prop. "Can you stay the night? It's cheaper than late-night calls." He said it like an invitation, not a found wallet.
I wanted to slam the card away, but he looked at her differently. "Stay," he said, and she did.
Two days later Ami and Houston were married on paper for convenience—if you asked Houston, it was to deflect a stream of women his father kept sending. To Ami it was a ticket to warmth, to taste more life than hospital rooms and careful breath. "We can be fake," she told him. "We can pretend."
He kept smiling with that polite, slow warmth. "You can ask for anything," he said. "Within reason."
"Then feed me like this every night and don't ask silly legal things," she said, more honest than clever. "Give me food, and I'll give you a wife you can show off."
We found a crooked registrar who sold us real red booklets with perfect stamps. The deed was done in an afternoon, and we ate mushroom and chicken until the plates shone.
"You like my beer?" he asked in a small, amused voice when a frosty pitcher came. He drank half and handed me the rest, a gesture like a tiny sharing of a secret. "You want me to drink more? I can do whatever you like."
"You'll make me fat," I teased, but my heart had already done what my tongue wouldn’t say.
We walked through the market streets with me on his arm like a prize. He slipped a cheap ring onto my finger and insisted I put one on him. "Mine," he said. "Don't take it off until I can buy you better ones."
I wanted to be brave. I wanted to be ordinary. I wanted to be able to run like any other girl. The doctors had told me otherwise. I had a heart that lived faster than its wiring could handle. "No running. No big laughs. No wild storms." My life was a list of forbidden things.
"Then let's not think of days. Let's count right now," I said.
He softened and told me stories about being a stranger to his home: about how his father, Carver Meyer, gave him privileges that turned people’s eyes toward him as if he were an exhibit. He liked distance. He liked the quiet wounds he carried from study and grief and exile in hotels.
"Once in America, I was nearly everything," he said. "But even there my name turned heads. I came back and walked to your town because I wanted to forget. I wanted to be a bystander in my own life."
"Then you found me," I whispered.
"I found you," he corrected, the way he always did with dangerous tenderness.
We were a private project for a little while: I pretended to be heartless about attachment while my insides melted; he pretended indifference until he could no longer pretend.
"Don't tell anyone about the fake marriage," I said once, breath held.
He smiled, but that smile had weight. "I don't want to use your life to amuse people. I'm clumsy at the small things, but I am loyal."
And I began to believe him.
But loyalty has a price. I could not offer a future. My heart ran thin and loud. One night I called Carver Meyer, Houston's father, and I said what I wanted him to hear—that I would be gone, that he should let Houston think I'd eloped for the sake of easier grief rather than allow him to love someone who would be taken.
"It will hurt less this way," I said because I believed cruelty could be kindness in shape.
He listened and accepted my arrangements. Houston thought I was safe; Carver thought I was disposable.
When the ambulance came because I had another collapse, everything turned faster. Houston called and cursed in a voice I had only heard in memory. "Where did you take her? Which hospital?"
The man who had sent me away, Carver, had all the books and lawyers. He gripped hospitals like chess pieces. "You weren't careful," Houston said into the phone. "You told me to watch them. I told them. I told them to wait..."
"You let her go," I felt from the other end of the line, that dry silence like a stone thrown at me in the dark.
My surgery saved my heart but not my brain. I slipped under and woke with a different map for my days. Carver Meyer declared our connection null and void. "She is no relation to the family," he said into the telephone with the kind of anger that could buy a town.
Houston retreated into work. He rebuilt the company and became a machine that worked through pain. He sat with emptiness like it was a glass he could not put down.
"You looked like a ghost," he told his brother, Hayes Crane, once, and Hayes tried to nudge him into dinners and different air. "You look like a machine. Like you are not a person."
"Did I do wrong?" Houston asked that night to no one, to the snow falling against his window.
"Maybe," Hayes said. "But your old man is the kind of man who will burn everything to keep his garden tidy."
Months churned into a year. I lay under hospital light and dreamt of sun on the beach. Houston's rituals—small, without flourish—kept me tethered: a market ring for my finger, an ice cream he let me taste once; he ate the rest. He bought the seawater for me, cleaned sand from the boardwalk, and stood close enough that breath could be counted.
He kept his promises in quiet ways. He learned the names of my favorite things. He fed me every night like a ceremony. "What do you like?" he would ask, as if the answer was a key.
"I like you," I answered once, and he simply held my hand and pretended it was steady.
The break came when he went home. Carver Meyer, furious at the spectacle of his son marrying a "sick town girl," ordered that I be handed over for the best surgery money could buy. They flew me toward a hospital that promised miracles. They promised an operation that would, according to Carver, 'fix me and be done with it.' They made deals in corridors where my name was a currency.
But the operation left me in a coma. My brain had bled, and the doctors repaired my heart but could not erase the damage to the rest of my life. Carver called the shots. He decided my relation to his house was over. I learned later that he had a list of women to whom his son might be married—women with proper names and proper lives.
"She wasted our time," Carver told board members over smoked cigars. "She has no pedigree. She has insulted our name."
I woke months later to a company that had expanded and a family that had hardened. Houston had turned his grief into structure. He stood in meetings like a man trained to hold storms at bay.
For a long while, he allowed himself to become a business god and not a human being. He slept with the photos of our messy smiles in his drawer and spoke in quiet to cameras on financial channels and said, "I'm married."
He let the television play our faces to me in the ward. For the first time in a long while, something inside of him was resisting his father's commands. He kept calling my name at night and would not let go of the hope.
It did not take forever before I stirred and came back. The hospital room smelled like antiseptic and never-to-be-forgotten alarms. When I opened my eyes, Houston was there, his cheek warm on my hospital blanket.
"Is it you?" he breathed. "Ami, is it really you?"
I laughed through panic. "It's me."
We discovered there was a whole rebuilding to be done—not only my recovery, but the rebuilding of his trust that life could be messy and beautiful. He could not relax. He watched my plate like a warden, read every hospital report as if it were scripture, and followed me to rehab with schedules and careful hands.
"Don't run," he would say, eyes raw.
"Then hold me," I said.
I needed to make a life that could hold a child. I wanted to plant a future that did not evaporate with my next fainting. I wanted Houston to not be alone when the lights went out again. So I did the unreasonable: I told him I was pregnant.
"For real?" he asked, voice a mixture of terror and wonder. "How?"
"I don't know how things like miracles happen," I said. "But if we have a child, maybe both of us will keep going."
He was furious a single time. He went silent and built walls of space. The anger came from fear, not from mean design. He thought our child was a threat to my life, to the safety of what had been bought with worry and staff and strict diet.
"I am afraid," he admitted when he could no longer hold the silence. "I watched you die slowly in my imagination every day."
"Then be afraid with me," I told him. "I will carry my fear; we can carry it together."
He sat at the hospital door while we were ready for the operation that would take me into labor. He did not move. He placed his face in his hands like a man who would unmake himself to remake me.
When the first newborn cry cut through the machine hum, everyone in the corridor laughed through tears.
"It's a girl," a doctor announced.
He walked into the room like a man coming home. He touched our daughter's hair and then mine. He was a little boy again—stiff with unfamiliar tenderness. He had a tear on his cheek I hadn't seen in a year.
We named her Dream True—Dream Zhen, in my old tongue. She was the kind of child who woke at dawn and announced the world again.
Months passed and the small domesticity we had woven into the corporate machine altered everything. Houston, once a statue behind a desk, softened. The company changed holidays and left generous benefits because someone with a messy heart sat at its heart.
But there was still Carver Meyer, proud and undisputed, who had used his power to try to erase me. He had shut me out and had threatened hospitals for daring to save me. He had decided for us both without asking if we wanted to be decided upon.
People suffer when the powerful walk unchecked.
One winter evening, at the annual company gathering when the mansion filled with chandeliers and speakers polished their speeches, I saw Carver at the head table, as brittle and unbent as always. He sat like a crown on pain. He laughed with his fellow directors and wore the exact expression he wore when he dismissed my life.
"My father thinks he owns the sky," Houston said to his brother Hayes Crane once, low. "He thinks his will is what the world must follow. But we have learned to stand differently."
"Tonight," I told Houston, "I'd rather not confront him. But if there is to be a reckoning, it should be fair."
I did not know then how public the reckoning would be.
The boardroom was crowded—shareholders, old partners, field staff and some guests from the town. Carver arrived in a practiced hush of respect. He took his place at the head of the long table as if he had always been carved from the same chair.
"Mr. Meyer," I said into the microphone that had been set for the speech, my hand trembling only a little. "There are things you did that were not for the good of the company. There are things you directed in the name of family you did not consult. Tonight, we will bring them into light."
Carver's eyes coldly narrowed. "This is a board meeting," he said. "Family matters are not for the public."
"Then let's treat this as business," I answered. "Because what you did touched both. You used hospital contracts to coerce treatment locations. You threatened medical staff with building over hospitals if they failed to perform to your desires. You directed the relocation of a patient—myself—under false pretenses. You adopted policies that led to temporary but serious harm to an employee. These are not family matters; these are professional breaches."
He laughed—a sharp, hazardous sound. "Who are you to accuse me? A consultant? A guest?"
I had documents. I had accounts from doctors who had been threatened, from nurses who had been shamed, from administrators who had been paid hush money. I held invoices and text messages between his legal counsel and hospital administrators. I had a transcript of the phone call where he threatened to "turn an entire hospital into a slaughterhouse" if the surgeon did not follow his demands. The words were ugly, and when they played over the room's speakers everyone heard the sick scrape of a man who had believed he could buy mercy.
Faces around the table shifted. Shareholders who had once looked adoringly at Carver held their breath. Some bowed their heads. Some glanced at their phones. The room crackled.
"Are those your documents?" one of the directors asked, voice suddenly thin.
"Yes," I said. "And I brought witnesses."
A group of nurses from the city hospital rose. They told, in a chorus of steady voices, how they had been called to the middle of the night, pressured, and bullied to reroute an ambulance because the family had chosen a preferred facility—an action that nearly cost a patient critical time. Another doctor recited the moral cost of being told to expedite or be fired.
Carver's face changed like weather. First, the color left and the jaw tightened. Then he raised his hand and waved as if to bat away mosquitoes. "This is slander," he said. "You have no proof."
"We do," Houston said, standing for the first time. His voice was not his usual measured tone. "I didn't know when I let the family handle this that these were your tactics. I can't be part of a company run that way."
There was a whisper—a ripple through colleagues who had long excused Carver's iron will as necessary for profit. Some of those same people now whispered that profit at the cost of lives was not profit but theft.
"Chairman Meyer," Hayes Crane said, quiet and sharp, "what you call protection is coercion. You threatened doctors into compliance. You threatened tens of thousands of lives' worth of trust because you thought your son had to be protected from trouble."
Carver's smile split. "You dare judge me? I built this house—"
"And we will not let this house be built on fear," Hayes interrupted.
The room found its voice. Workers, town vendors who had once benefited from Houston's tourism investment and had been silent, spoke up about the fear that pervaded every village when the family moved in. "You bulldozed our hospital parking to make room for your valet," one elderly woman said. "You told us what to think about illness and what not to think. You told us what our daughters could be."
By then Carver's face had gone from hard red to pale. He clenched his fists. "You are all traitors," he hissed.
"You're the one who betrayed trust," one woman yelled. "We trusted a family to help a community, not to make us servants of a prideful man's whims."
Smart phones came up, recording. Someone hit the live stream. The chatter that had been hushed minutes earlier rose to a roar. Board members who had sat silent at his side shifted to the other side of the table to avoid him. Carver rose like a man who had been wholly unprepared for a scene where his power lost traction.
"We have votes now," Houston said, measured again. "We are a company that answers to shareholders and to the law."
A formal motion was put forward: an independent investigation. It was seconded, and in the swirl of equations and minutes, Carver found himself stripped of emergency vetoes, his unilateral privileges paused until inquiries were complete. He had to hand over access codes to hospital contacts, and legal protections that had kept him insulated were put under scrutiny.
For the first time in years, he sat in a room where his commands did not instantly produce obedience. He flailed—denials, then bargaining. "You don't understand—this is about reputation. This is about legacy."
"We understand legacy," Houston said quietly. "Legacy isn't the marks you make on ledgers; it's the people you don't break."
Carver's mask slid in public. He attempted to bluster and fail. At the crescendo, shareholders who had once clapped for him turned their backs. Cameras showed his face on feeds; his empire's glow dimmed for public consumption.
He tried to apologize in a low, frantic tone. "I only wanted to protect my family—"
"But you used power to hurt one of us," a nurse answered. "Protections you gave to yourself turned into shackles for others."
Carver rose, then sat, then rose again. His composure shattered.
A younger director—someone who had idolized him—rose and spoke with a saddened tone. "We are voting Carver Meyer out of his emergency powers until the investigation completes."
The vote passed. It was not dramatic with smashing gavel sounds. It was simple, bureaucratic, and final.
Carver's face crumpled in a way I had never seen from him. He tried to gather flattery and anger and make them into a last defense. "You will regret this," he warned, throat raw.
We did not regret the moment. We had witnessed a man see his throne dissolve because he had believed himself greater than the small, tender lives around him.
There was no single instant of theatrical humiliation like some cruel storybook. Instead, it was the constancy of faces around him turning: the staff who liked him once stepping away, the shareholders choosing principle, the nurses and doctors telling truth. He went from dominance to isolation in the span of an hour.
He left the room with his shoulders lowered. The hallways he once owned felt narrow. People who had once laughed at him now folded their hands and breathed shallowly, then moved on.
That night, when he found himself alone in a small parlor, someone—no one in particular, a staff member from the hospital—came up and said aloud the name of the patient he had ordered rerouted.
"It was Ami," she said. "She nearly died because someone thought he could force mercy."
Carver's reaction was not the theatrical collapse I had sometimes imagined. He sat in the dim light and touched his forehead as if to feel if power still pulsed under skin. His face did something like regret, like iron bending.
He was punished not by ropes or prison in that hour but by the slow, public shrinking of his domain. The people who had once bowed quietly watched him make his way back to smaller rooms. His phone calls no longer opened doors. His voice no longer commanded immediate obedience.
That day, the public watched a man whose empire had been built on fright learn how fragile that empire is when fear turned to truth.
After the meeting, people came up to me and to nurses and said, "Thank you." Houston did not gloat. He walked up to his father—then a reduced man—and said quietly, "You made mistakes. Fix them."
Carver could only look away. He left the gala, not in disgrace as in the stories, but carrying the weight of a man who had finally seen what his pride had cost.
It was not a revenge scene written for delight, and no one cheered for personal ruin. But there was a reckoning, a public accounting. The steely man who had ordered hospitals to bend would now be watched by people who knew what he had asked them to do.
After that, the company softened its policies. The hospital signed new agreements negotiated by honest administrators, not by a single angry hand.
And at home, the domestic fixes we made outshone the corporate ones. Houston learned that sometimes to protect someone you love you must also let them have their small rebellions. He learned to laugh more, to hold less tightly, to trust.
We learned to survive on the small mercies: the way he fussed over my meds and the way our daughter Dream True woke up and announced the world. The town's markets kept selling mushroom chicken; the sea still licked the sand. Gunner Donovan still left a low lamp on at closing, but now there was always a children's laugh to make it less lonely.
One night, I caught Houston watching me as I put our baby to sleep. I pressed myself to his side and kissed his temple. "You saved me," I said in a whisper.
"I didn't save you," he replied. "You saved me."
Years later, when someone asked me about the night in the bar when I first sat on his knees, I would laugh and say, "We were two foolish people who pretended to be practical."
He would say, with his small, flawed smile, "We were two people who became brave."
The End
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