Revenge11 min read
My Card-Deck Boyfriends: Sparks, Storms, and a Stubbornly Honest Man
ButterPicks16 views
I.
They handed me a menu at the coffee shop and I almost missed his face.
"He never smiles," Juliana warned me on the phone. "He keeps to himself."
"I like mysterious," I said.
He did not smile that day. He answered ten questions with one word and only ever used "hm," "oh," or "ah." He looked like a statue carved from moonlight—cold, silent, impossible. When he gave me one of those single-word replies, I felt like I had been given a secret.
"You're not going to be late for the subway, are you?" he asked once.
"Oh," I said, because that was all I had.
After I went home that night, my phone buzzed.
"Flirt?" the message read.
"Who is this?" I wrote back.
"Your expression when you speak is so cute."
"I can't stop thinking about you," came the next line. "What should I do?"
"Will you be in my dream tonight?"
My Chinese New Year felt less like a celebration and more like harassment.
"That's creepy," I told Juliana. "Someone's messing with me."
"Report it!" she said with one of those dramatic gasps that she thought improved matters. "He could be following you."
I imagined a shadow behind every corner. I filled out the police report the next day. The officer in charge was kind but brisk and said the messages were tame—misplaced flirting, maybe, but not yet illegal.
"You sure you want the full investigation?" he asked gently.
"Yes," I said. I wanted more than the officer's protection. I wanted certainty.
That's when I saw him again.
He stood up from a gray wooden table when they introduced me to the desk officer. He wore the same expression I'd seen at the coffee shop—stone calm, uniform pressed.
"I thought you were the officer's nephew?" Juliana whispered.
He glanced at me once, briefly, and then stared away. It was the most impatient look I'd ever been given and also the most strangely protective. The officer said, "Alejandro, would you take this case?"
"Alejandro Gonzales?" I said, because his name felt like another secret. He nodded.
"Do you have anyone to protect you?" he asked.
"Not really."
"Then you'll stay at my family's place," he said, as if logistics were the same as telling me the time of a meeting.
I laughed because my brain wanted to. "You mean move in with you?"
"My parents are out of town," he said. "You won't disturb anything."
"That's a lot of trust to lend a stranger," I said.
"You'll be safe," he replied.
That single sentence was all it took.
He arrived in six minutes when I called later in the evening, and I found the world less scary. He stood in my doorway, eyes alert, hair still wet from wind, cheeks flushed.
"You came," I whispered.
"Hm," he said.
"I asked you to stay because of a stalker."
"I will protect you."
"Add me on WeChat," I said before I lost my nerve.
"Ah?"
"Ah as in yes," I teased. "Add me so you can follow up."
He reached into his pocket and handed his phone over, exactly like a deliberate person following a principle. "I will."
"What if the messages stop?" he asked later, when we were alone. He breathed out the question like it mattered.
"Then what will I do without you?" I said, a silly thing born of relief that someone was taking me seriously.
He was surprised I thought of him as a rescue. I was surprised he wanted to be one.
"Protecting means action," he said. "Come stay."
Juliana loved the idea. My mother called him "a fine young officer." His mother asked me to speak to her on the phone and welcomed me like family. I moved into the guest bedroom next to his and learned odd little things about Alejandro Gonzales: he liked coffee ground extra-fine, he dreamed of being a chef when he was ten, and he could not smile the way most people do because of an old accident that made his facial muscles stiff. When he tried, it looked like a twitch, a hint—an expression that did not match his eyes.
"I don't smile well," he said once, face pinking the way a shy child would.
"Your smile is terrifying," I teased.
"Only to you," he murmured, and that made my stomach do one of those dangerous flips.
We learned each other in small ways. He sent me messages like, "I didn't see anything." When I threatened retribution with a heroine-worthy sass, he corrected himself, "Correction: I didn't see clearly."
We cooked together, he teaching me the right fan speed and the precise chop of onions; I taught him formless things like laughing at his confusion.
"Do you like me?" I asked him on the night he invited me to a film and pressed a ticket into my hand. It was my first real attempt at bravery.
"Yes," he said, like someone pronouncing a verdict.
"Like-like?" I prodded.
"No."
"Then? You said yes."
"I mean I like you," he clarified with the kind of stubbornness that belongs on the small, important stages of first love. "I want you."
He kissed me against my doorframe when I tried to walk away. It was sudden and careful, a pressed demand and a soft plea. When his forehead hit mine, he said, "Don't leave."
"I won't."
We moved from awkward to intimate at the speed of late winter sun: slow, surprising, and brightening. He introduced me to officers at the station who joked about "bringing home brides," and he introduced me to a side of steadiness that felt like a steady heartbeat I could trust.
II.
Three years earlier, I had said yes to a very different kind of man.
"Just three months," I told myself. "Three months and a ticket to some safe life."
Callen Carey was a headline waiting to happen. He was handsome in a magazine way, rich in an obvious way, and he asked for my time with the casual gravity of someone issuing a decree.
When I refused his marriage proposal in front of everyone—at his intended grand gesture in his garden—he had a look on his face that was like a closing door.
"Not married?" he asked softly, like someone testing the integrity of glass.
"No," I said, for once honest and not afraid.
"Why?" His voice cut, not because it was loud but because it sounded like an accusation.
"I don't love you."
The truth surprised him into silence. He pressed his fingers to his forehead and laughed in a way that meant the room tilted.
"You've been mine for three years. You can't tell me you suddenly don't love me."
"I was forced into it," I said, and the words reclaimed some of my courage.
He raised his hand and hit the teacup beside him. Glass broke. People talked, forks clattered. He held himself like a man who had lost a toy.
"Who forced you?" he demanded. "Who told you to say no now?"
"Me," I said. "Me and my life."
In the weeks that followed I ran to Juliana's writing desk and hid. He texted my phone, called my mother, sent lawyers like bouquets. When I told him that I did not want his life or his name entangled with mine, he laughed.
"You're young," he said once. "You don't understand the convenience of being loved by someone like me."
There is a moment in every story when the victim turns and decides the villain's theatrics will not go unexposed. Mine came at a gala he had planned to turn into our engagement. It was a charity gala in his company's name, all glass and glitter, full of donors, cameras, and the kind of polite laughter that expects to be directed. He had rented the hall, the orchestra, and the cameras. He had asked me to stand by his side as his fiancée.
"I won't," I told Juliana.
"You can't just tank his night," she said.
"Watch me."
I prepared something stricter than "watch me." I prepared to tell the truth.
I took the microphone when the host called for speeches. I had the charity's permission—I was there as a senior volunteer, and the directors agreed that truth is a thing worth hearing.
"Good evening," I said. "I'm Ivy Harris. I work with this foundation. I want to speak about honesty."
The cameras tightened. Callen's smile faltered a little.
"You see a man," I said, looking directly at him, "who's generous with money but stingy with respect. He calls his gifts 'protection' and his demands 'care.'"
A ripple of confusion crossed the room.
"Callen once told me that when he wanted a woman he had never met, he used the people around me—assistants, drivers, and PR agents—to invite me into his life. He told me that if I refused, doors would close, and he would make sure no other door opened. He said he would ruin us financially and burn bridges for those who helped me."
I held up a stack of messages.
"This," I said, "is a transcript of threats. This is a recorded call where he told my mother he could make our lives impossible. This is a lawyer's letter that tried to bind me into silence."
I saw the color drain from his face in a way I had not before. He had always been sure of his stage, of his script. The spotlight turned, now, on him.
"It is not only my story," I said. "There are others."
I had spent weeks contacting the women he'd left, the assistants he'd pushed, the employees who'd dodged his power plays. They came forward. They wore the courage of being heard.
"The first thing he did," a woman standing behind me said, "was tell bank managers we were close, then he froze our accounts if we didn't comply."
"He told investors to avoid us," said another.
"At a board meeting last year," said an executive, "he sat here and promised to 'handle' anyone who opposed him. He is using the company like a personal kingdom."
More people rose. Where there had been polite seats, there were witnesses now. The head of PR could not meet my eyes. Journalists in the room clicked record. A woman in a black evening gown pointed at Callen with tears in her eyes.
"You took our choices away and called it care," she said. "We will not be silenced."
Callen stood. He was contained fury, a man whose scripts had always worked. "This is slander," he said.
"You decide," I said, and I presented the evidence on the projector: messages, voice recordings, bank statements. The file names were simple: "Threat_Contract_2019," "Calls_Chain." The audience watched. Murmurs blossomed into a low roar; mobile phones lifted like tiny suns.
He attempted denial. "Those messages were misinterpreted." "Those recordings have been edited." "She took things out of context."
The room answered.
"He threatened my mother with a lawsuit," a man in the back called. "He promised to ruin my sister's career if she testified. He told my friend she would never work in this industry again."
Faces turned in unison. His powerful friends looked away. A woman from the donor table stood and handed me a photograph of a man like Callen, but younger, in ugly headlines. She said, "We didn't know how to say this aloud either."
The directors of his foundation convened on stage. I watched Callen's confidence crumble into a series of attempts to control the narrative—blocked calls, sharp whispers to PR staff, the calculation that somewhere his money could take the sting out of scandal.
It failed.
"Callen," said the lead director, steady and quiet, "you have misused funds to silence people. We cannot be associated with that."
There was a long, terrible second where the room waited for a miracle. Callen's jaw tightened. He tried to plead, "You don't understand—"
"Everyone understands now," a woman near the front shouted. "Don't tell us we can't be angry. You've been playing with lives."
He looked at the crowd, and for the first time I saw him truly alone. His lawyers tried to form a small screen of men in dark suits, but the cameras pierced them. Phones recorded his face as he fell from crafted dignity to frantic denial.
"Stop this," he said, voice breaking.
People began to clap—not for him, but for exposure and truth. Some clapped skeptical, some clapped with open hope. The donors announced they would withdraw funding. The board removed his name as a sponsor. A chorus of former executives, men and women who had been quiet to protect themselves, now called their own statements to the press.
He tried to run, but the front doors were cluttered with reporters. Security officers blocked his path now in the way of accountability. Some former partners stepped away; his mother—who had been polite at my family's dinner—stood and looked down the table and then walked out without a word.
He went from a person who could flick lives like cards to a man who mattered only because people were watching his collapse.
"Do you have anything to say to the people you're hurting?" I asked, because I had learned to be direct in the face of manipulation.
"No," he whispered. "I... I didn't mean—"
"You meant power," I said.
He shifted. He fell into the chair and covered his face. The cameras kept rolling; the crowd murmured; a woman near me wept with furious relief. Men who had once refused to look at us now shook his hand and said, "I'm sorry, Callen, I think we should do what's right."
Within the hour the corporate board suspended him pending inquiry. Within a day his name threaded through headlines with the clear verbs of culpability. Within a week, his family connections whispered. Within a month, investors froze. He watched his empire slip like sand through fingers too used to grip.
I did not stand on a balcony and gloat. I stood and told the truth in a hall full of people who now had the opportunity to hold a man accountable. He saw his power evaporate under the eyes that had finally opened.
When he came looking for me afterward—two weeks later, humiliated and ruined in the way only power can be when it is revoked—I let him speak and I let him beg. He went through the typical curves, shame to rage to bargains to pleading. In public, his pride was stripped; in private, his attempts at apology were a tangle of excuses and old entitlement.
"I can change," he said once.
"Change is an action, not a plea," I answered.
He left with nothing but a few boxes and a car. People recorded his departure; some clapped as he walked. The woman in the black dress—one of his former conquests—caught my hand and said, "Thank you."
I breathed in the oxygen of my own name. I had not only rejected him; I had reclaimed the story he had tried to write about me.
III.
Rage can be reckless.
After Callen's fall, to punish a minor petty villain who had humiliated me, I allowed myself a small indulgence: I went after his nephew for breaking my heart in college. That plan landed me in a midnight kitchen facing a man I did not expect.
"Law? Really?" he said, eyebrow raised. "And you touched my abs without my permission?"
"Assault!" I shot back, half laughing, half mortified.
Henry Mortensen—my target's uncle—was an odd mix of inflexible law and soft mercy. He made me write a three-hundred-word apology and corrected nineteen mistakes. He then lectured me for an hour about integrity.
"You will not do this again," he said. "And you will keep your hands to yourself."
The next morning, Corbin Hassan—his nephew—arrived, sulking. Henry had called him on his behavior. Corbin apologized, real and shaky, and promised to start being better. Henry made him do it in a corridor filled with students and professors, and Corbin's red face and public contrition tasted like a small victory.
Henry then surprised me by offering me an internship at his law firm. "We need people who seek truth responsibly," he told me. "Come and learn."
I learned how to write motions and coffee orders, how to prepare briefs and how to steady my nerves in the face of complaint. I learned to sit with people who had been wronged and to hold space for silence when clients did not know how to speak their grief.
The firm became my second home. Henry asked questions that were direct and odd, like, "What scares you at night?" and "What do you want people to remember about you?"
I learned to answer.
"That I tried," I said once. "That I did not run from fear."
He smiled, soft for the first time, and said, "Good. Try harder."
Work, of course, is not all romance—but it can grow it. Henry taught me to hold a pen like a shield and to deliver arguments like a promise. He modeled a brand of integrity that did not court drama. He let me be small and then asked me to be brave a little bit every day.
We were careful. He was careful. We were both adults with histories. Over time, our exchanges grew from professional to private. He would text, "Are you eating?" and I would answer truthfully. "Coffee, black," he'd say, and I would deliver it with a paper note of a joke. His shyness was not the absence of feeling; it was the presence of law and a moral insistence that we bear witness.
"Will you be with me forever?" I asked him one late night after papers were signed.
"Forever is not mine to promise," he said. "But I will be here when you need me."
"I will be here when you need me, too," I answered.
People cheered for us when we finally held a small gathering and announced our engagement. It was not a parade, and it had no cameras. It had our friends, our family, and a quiet sense that the person beside me was not buying me—he was choosing me with his whole name.
When I look back, I see three men like cards on a table: one who taught me to read a hidden message, one who forced me to speak the truth loud enough to be heard, and one who stayed honest enough to walk beside me.
"Ivy, say the three words," Henry teased the night before we signed the papers.
"Will you?" I teased back.
"I will," he said, and he did.
The End
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