Sweet Romance13 min read
My Ex, His Empty Smile, and the Stolen Stocking
ButterPicks10 views
I never planned to be anyone's guardian, nurse, or bedtime storyteller.
I certainly never planned to be the one who found out a man I once dated could play a part like a child and a liar at the same time.
It was late when Juniper Kozlov came to my door, a hospital folder clutched like evidence.
"You have to listen," she said as she pushed the paper into my hands.
"I drove him here because he collapsed outside your building."
"What? That's impossible." I stared at the line where the diagnosis read "cranial contusion" and "memory loss."
Juniper's mouth bent with a strange calm.
"Adan Friedrich was unconscious for thirty days. He woke up… different. The doctors say the bleeding dulled some functions. They suggested people and places he knows could help him wake up."
"This is not my fault." I put the folder down like it might burn me.
"He was under your building," Juniper said softly.
"He came for you," she added, almost hopeful.
"I haven't seen him in months," I said.
"Then help him get better. Ten thousand is waiting," Juniper said. She slid a card across the table.
My whole face must have said what my voice held back.
"Ten thousand?" I repeated.
"One hundred thousand," she corrected. "Two months. Help him get better. If things go well, the money is yours."
I looked at Adan sitting on my couch like a statue.
He blinked twice when I asked, "Do you know me?"
"Ma'am," he answered with a solemn, small voice.
Not the voice he used when we argued or the bored sighs that used to fill dinners.
"Try again," I said, because I wanted to rattle him awake.
"Your… boss?" he offered.
"No." I tried the cruel option. "Your owner."
Adan thought that over. "Owner?"
"Yes. You obey me. You listen. You do what I say."
He hesitated, then smiled like a child agreeing to a game. "Okay."
He took the couch like it was a camp bed.
He was the same body — tall, neat jaw, hair I used to braid in my head.
Everything was the same and everything was different.
He spat "Alas" from the oldness of us, but he looked at me like I might be a parent and not an ex.
I was tired and cold and suspicious, but ten thousand beats peace-of-mind thinner than rent.
That first night I made rules.
"No baths together," I said.
"I have to shower," he insisted.
"Later," I said, and relented.
I watched him like a teacher watches a student who might be faking.
"Do you remember your name?" I asked.
"Adan," he said.
"How old are you?"
"Eight," he said, wide-eyed.
Of course he said eight.
My chest closed up with something I should have called pity and nothing else.
"Okay," I said. "You sleep on the couch. You do not undress in front of me."
He did not understand privacy.
He stripped like water running off a summer roof and I slammed the bathroom door and busied myself with my teeth.
When he went to wash, I found myself peeking once or twice.
He looked like a boy who didn't know the rules and a man who had forgotten them.
The second morning came with a voice note buzzing.
"Booty Nice," his contact said in my phone.
I stared. His nickname for me had been "Little Star" in my head, not "Booty Nice."
I changed it to something ridiculous.
"Booty Nice" became "Perky Booty, Great Posture," and I told him how to order takeout in two sentences I practiced.
He listened like a child learning to string beads.
At work, I let my mouth be the size of fake concern.
"What are you doing?" Maxine Baird asked in the break room when my phone buzzed again.
"He's learning," I said.
"From what?" Maxine asked.
"How to be useful."
That night, he asked me to shave his leg hair.
"Why?" I demanded.
"Because it tickles," he said earnestly. "Because the TV boys have no hair."
I looked at him and then at the razor.
He trusted me like a child trusts a parent to put all band-aids in the right place.
I did it with a ridiculous mix of intimacy and control.
His thighs were warm and white and I felt an electric horror at my own hands.
When I finished he touched them and smiled.
"They're smooth," he said.
He began to test the fences.
He would press his hand on my knee while I cooked.
"Don't," I said.
"Why?" he asked.
"Girls don't like strangers touching their legs."
He looked bewildered. "But you touched mine."
I laughed too loud.
"You don't get to say I touch you unless you asked," I told him.
"Sorry," he whispered.
The lines blurred.
He started calling me "Puff" on his messages and leaving voice notes that said only, "I am thirsty."
Sometimes he would say, "I want a hug," with the logic of a child who sees cartoons giving hugs as therapy.
I let him have those things because the money was a small, honest lie I allowed myself.
Then I saw her.
Emma Eriksson moved—quick, quiet, a girl who put lipstick on like it was an apology.
She looked like she belonged in the old coffee ads: clean, composed, and in the middle of moving her things into the same block as me.
My palms remembered that she had been the person who "took him away" months earlier.
The memory was a cut that didn't look infected but throbbed at sudden cold weather.
I tried to be reasonable.
"Maybe he came for closure," I told myself.
I tried not to watch them together, but they crossed my path, hands brushing like small weather.
When Adan saw her, even feigned childishness fell away for a second.
He stood straighter, looked sharper.
He told me one night, "She called once and I remembered she brought me soup when I was sick."
I should have known better than to trade logic for hope.
I asked Emma in the stairwell once.
"Did you know him before?"
"He's a cousin," she lied quickly and then swallowed. "A second cousin."
Later she told me, "Juniper asked me to say that to make you move faster."
Juniper.
Juniper had a look like a woman who stacked complications like books and always reached the top shelf.
"She thought you might react," Emma said with a tired look.
I felt like I had been a lab rat who thought the leash had been a ribbon.
We negotiated boundaries.
"Stay," I told Adan when he wanted to sleep in my bed because he couldn't stand the dark.
"Only until you don't bite the covers," I said.
He made me tea, he tried to help and he pressed his forehead to my hair and said, "Tell me a story."
I told stories and he listened like a child who adored the sound of a clock.
He would say, "Another, Puff?" and I'd answer, "One more," and his hands would find my waist and remember how to hold.
Those moments were not harsh. They were honey-smearing-slow warm.
I found myself expecting him. That was the trap.
Then the underwear.
I walked in on my sofa to find a pair of my silk stockings gone.
The world crackled.
"Where did you buy this?" I shouted, pulling a dark, lacy thing from the couch corner. I could feel the walls gathering a crowd of opinion.
Adan looked at me blank.
"I liked it," he said.
"You stole my stockings," I said flatly.
"I liked it," he repeated.
I was stunned into action.
"You cannot take things," I told him. "That's wrong."
He blinked, "But I liked them."
I cried into my pillow that night and thought about every small eccentricity I had tolerated.
When Maxine came over and laughed at my life, she asked, "Is he for real?"
"Of course he is," I said. "He's very committed to the role."
Time moved.
He became more brazen.
He started leaving his keys in my door, slipping into my room in the middle of the night and touching my face with the softness of someone who had been trained to reverence.
"You're like my mother," he said in one small, terrible voice.
I pushed him away and told him to leave.
"Why are you doing this now?" I asked Juniper once when she visited.
"Because he's stubborn," she said. "Because he wanted a reason to stay with you."
"To stay? To play child? To steal stockings?"
"To show you he cared," Juniper said, like it was enough.
I should have told her that there is a difference between care and coercion.
But I was tired and there was money and I had let his quiet hands find the curve of my back.
The city moved on like a slow, ruthless river.
Then the night of my birthday—when everything changed.
I came home to a tiny apartment lit like a church.
Adan had hung a small tree with cheap lights and pinned little, ridiculous gifts to it.
"Happy birthday," he said, grinning like the child in a car-commercial.
My heart did a soft sprint.
"You did this?" I asked.
"Yes," he said.
I wanted to be angry. Instead I peeled an apple he had offered from the kitchen and bit it and then kissed his cheek before I could stay stern.
It felt wrong in every practical way and right in the softest one.
Morning, after that, my courage returned like a tide.
I started to look more closely through his house, his pockets, his life.
In the sofa cushions I found proof. A small, folded lace that used to be mine and a receipt from a boutique downtown with Emma's name on it.
He had taken my stocking after a night we had fought and hid it like a talisman.
I felt filthy and betrayed.
I asked him.
"Why did you keep that?"
"It was soft," he answered.
"It was mine," I said. "You stole it."
He crossed the room with that pure look and kissed me—this time not a small peck but a pause like a punctuation.
"Stop," I said and pushed him.
He did not argue. He did, instead, hold my fingers and look at me like a child who had broken something important without knowing.
"Don't punish me," he whispered. "I thought—"
I couldn't finish the sentence after that. I needed to leave.
I packed like someone leaving a bad job.
Juniper called and cried that she was taking him to Emma's and that I should be kinder.
Emma, when I confronted her at the bakery downstairs, spilled the truth like warm milk.
"Juniper told me to be nice to him," she said and the fork of her jaw tightened. "She said he'd come to you. I... I thought I was helping."
I should have been furious at both of them.
I was stunned instead.
All of this, designed around me like a stage I hadn't auditioned for.
The next week Adan drove me to my job and asked me to sit down.
"I didn't want to scare you away," he started.
"How not to scare me? You acted like a kid and then stole my things and slept in my bed," I said.
"I thought you'd finally see me. I thought if I couldn't get you with words, I'd get you with time," he said. "And I couldn't stand the idea of losing you."
His face, when he switched from smallness to adult, was something fragile.
He put his hand in mine. For the first time the grip was not a child's but a man's.
"I can be normal," he said. "I did it because I love you."
That should have ended it, but Juniper and Emma had set a net in the neighborhood, and rumors were a hungry animal.
I decided, then, to expose the whole scheme.
I planned a public reveal.
"You're serious?" Maxine asked when I told her.
"Completely," I said.
"I don't know if you want to publicly shame people," Maxine said.
"They lied," I replied. "They deserve to be seen. And if Adan played along, he will be asked why."
"Are you sure about him?" she asked quietly.
"I am sure I don't want the plan to stand," I said.
So I set the evening.
The little community center in our building has a hall with plastic chairs and a low stage.
I sent a small invitation to a list of neighbors and friends under the pretense of "Birthday and Housewarming." Enough people came: Maxine, Juniper, Emma, Juniper's coworkers, the building manager, and a scattering of people who liked neighborhood drama like a small breakfast cereal treats the eye.
My heart pounded as I stood at the front.
"Thank you all for coming," I said.
Adan sat beside me, perfectly composed and wearing the face of a man who had rehearsed tears in private.
Juniper smiled like a woman proud of an essay she graded herself.
Emma looked nervous, hands twisting a napkin.
"I'd like to start with a small question," I said. "Why did a woman fake my ex-boyfriend's brain injury so he could stay in my house?"
A low rumble: eyebrows raised, chairs shifted.
Juniper's smile faltered for the first time.
"I wanted him to be safe," she said quickly. "He was injured and he needed to be near people he knew."
"Is that what you call calling other people to lie?" I asked, voice quiet and controlled. "Do you call that kindness? Or manipulation?"
Juniper's excuses slid off her face like rain off a leaf.
"You think you helped?" I asked.
"If you had known the whole thing, you would have stopped him," Juniper snapped.
"Is that true?" I turned to Adan.
He looked down, silent.
"Adan?" I said.
He lifted his head slowly, the house a held breath.
"I wanted to make you notice me," he said softly. "I didn't know how else."
"Adan," I said, and it was the adult in me asking the child to account. "How many lies did you tell to keep this right?"
"I—" He swallowed. For the first time the actor's script slipped. "I told Juniper I would be helpless if she wanted me to be."
The room breathed out like it was leaking.
I stepped forward and asked Juniper for the texts.
"No," Juniper said at first, but the building manager, a blunt woman named Claire Volkov, crossed her arms.
"This is a community," Claire said. "If you played with someone's life, you'd better show your cards."
Juniper's hands trembled as she handed over her phone.
The messages were raw and careful.
"I will pretend to be forgetful," one read.
"Tell him to make up excuses to stay with her." Another.
"Get him to steal something she loves so she'll feel protective," a line that made the air new and bitter.
You could hear the chairs creak from surprise.
"It was to help him heal!" Juniper cried, but the final text had a line that read, "Also, if it doesn't work, we'll call it off."
"Also, you wanted her to feel jealous, to chase him," I said.
Emma looked like someone setting down a hot kettle.
"She told me to be friendly," Emma said, "and to say I was close to him."
"Did you know you were part of a plan to manipulate me?" I asked.
"No," she said quickly. "Yes. I did what Juniper asked."
The crowd reacted.
A neighbor snapped, "You all turned a real injury into a drama."
Someone clapped; another took out a phone and recorded Juniper's face.
Juniper's expressions traveled fast: surprise, then shame, then denial, then the brittle laugh of a woman losing her script.
The building manager spoke up. "This is beyond bad taste. You manipulated an injury. You used community sympathy as bait."
Juniper's shoulders dropped like a curtain.
"You think I'm a villain," she said.
"Yes, I do," said Maxine, voice cold and bright. "Because you used a person, and you used his pain to play with someone else's heart."
Juniper's field of allies had thinned.
She tried to explain herself: "I thought—he needed stability. If she could see him as a child, she would take care of him."
"By lying," I said. "By hiding the truth. You made me complicit or at least you gambled on my compassion."
She tried to cry; the camera-phones clicked like crickets.
A neighbor recorded Juniper handing over the rest of the cash she kept for "treatment" and then stopped.
"You have to take it back," she murmured.
"Take what?" Juniper asked, voice small.
"Your dignity," someone said.
I looked at Adan then.
We had a moment, two of us on a dim stage.
"Did you lie to me because you loved me?" I asked.
He answered like a man and like a child at once. "Yes."
The room was not kind now.
"You used her," Claire said. "You used sympathy and you used a dangerous thing—an injury—as a prop."
Adan's face went blank.
He put his head in his hands.
"I didn't think it could be so awful," he said in a small voice.
"Awful?" Juniper cried. "You still call it awful? You wanted me to confess my deep wrongs. You wanted me to learn to be honest."
"No," Maxine said. "You wanted control."
Juniper's rebuttal fell into thin air.
She had been unmasked and the crowd—neighbors, coworkers, strangers—meted out the judgment of the day.
People whispered. Someone said "sick."
Someone else said "brave girl, Katherine."
I felt an odd power sitting in the chair, the kind that comes from having the facts in your hand and the right to tell them.
Juniper left first, shoulders hunched, someone taking her coat.
Emma followed, head bowed, and Adan went after them because he did not want to be alone.
He paused at the door and looked back at me.
"Can I speak with you?" he asked.
"Outside," I said.
He followed, stepping down into the night where the air smelled like damp pavement and truth.
Outside the building, Adan confessed the whole plan again in smaller, more honest sentences.
"I wanted you to choose me," he said. "I didn't want you to see me as a man who never tried."
"You wanted to deprive me of consent and rationality," I answered without much heat but with deep clarity. "You wanted me to fall in love with a performance."
"I was ashamed," he said. "And then I started to like the way you were when you took care of me."
"You liked me asleep and obedient and flattering to your shame," I said.
He was quiet for so long I thought he might fall asleep there on the curb.
"I'm sorry," he said.
"I'm tired," I said.
He did not beg the way a man who had used theatrics might expect to be begged to stay.
He held his silence like a ballot and then folded it up small.
"I will leave if you want," he said.
"No," I replied, "you will go home and you will be honest to yourself first."
We did not reconcile that night.
He walked away the honest way: quiet, head bowed, finally aware of the fiction he had inhabited.
I went upstairs and sat awake until morning, thinking about pears and Christmas lights and the way someone can be both a child and a choice.
Weeks passed.
Adan stopped pretending.
He apologized to people he had lied to, to Emma for her part in the plan, to Juniper for letting her steer him wrong.
Juniper offered a half-hearted public apology in the lobby, her voice thin.
Emma moved away from the building, leaving a pair of her sandals by the door and a note that said simply, "I am sorry."
And Adan?
He came back after a while, but not as the ploy.
He returned with an ardent, adult apology and a patient attempt to rebuild trust.
He sat with me when I needed him and he stood back when I asked.
Three moments kept me remembering the entire affair like a stitched wound and a faded scar:
1) The night he set up that ridiculous tree and hung gifts on it like a child's postcard to make my birthday a small miracle.
"Happy birthday," he had said, with an earnestness I could not fake.
"Thank you," I told him, and we both cried a little like people who had been starving for recognition.
2) The time he shaved his own leg hair at my request and looked surprised and pleased at himself.
"Are they smooth?" he asked.
"Yes," I said.
He touched them and looked like he had discovered a small freedom. "They are smooth."
3) The morning he stood by my door in the rain after climbing the hill to see a meteor shower because he couldn't stand the thought of me with someone else staring at the sky.
"Why did you follow us?" I asked.
"Because I didn't want to miss you," he answered.
Those moments felt like a promise and a threat at the same time.
Promises because he had tried — awkwardly, damagingly — to be present.
Threat because of how easily a man could stage pain and make the world react.
In the end, I decided not to be cruel.
We had used each other badly and beautifully and foolishly.
He had done something monstrous and something sweet.
I set boundaries.
He learned to ask permission.
He kept his hands to himself unless I asked.
And when he slipped, when he left my stockings on the sofa and then brought them back with a sheepish smile, I sent him to the corner with actual calm.
On the day I finally let him sleep closer than a couch, I moved a small stocking onto the top of the Christmas tree.
He smiled like a child.
"Do you remember when I said I liked your apples?"
"Yes," he said.
"Don't," I told him, softer this time. "Don't steal. Ask."
He nodded.
And when the seconds ticked—when time and regret dissolve into something like forgiveness—he kissed me in a way that was adult and quiet and asked, "May I?"
"Yes," I said.
We learned how to be honest, how to rebuild.
We rejected the scripts other people wrote for us.
We agreed that if love needed manipulation, it wasn't love.
And we kept the little glowing tree as proof that sometimes people will try to win you back with lies and lamps and that sometimes they will learn to stand in the sunlight of truth.
The End
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