Sweet Romance13 min read
My "Husband" Is My WeChat Friend? A Bar Game, A QR, and a Million-Dollar Mess
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I lost a drinking game.
"Okay, call someone in the next room and add their WeChat," Iliana said, grinning like a kid with candy.
"You have to call them 'husband'." Kenzie chimed in, louder.
"I can't," I said.
"You can," Iliana insisted. "It's a game. Be brave."
"Just go." Kenzie pushed.
I pushed the door open to the next private room like the bravest person in a rom-com bin—I wasn't brave.
The man in the room sat like a statue. He had a cigarette between long fingers, eyes sharp in the dim. He looked untouchable.
"Excuse me," I said. My voice was thinner than I wanted.
His eyes lifted. For a second we had a standoff. I swallowed and smiled the kind of smile I had used my whole life on customers and strangers.
"Hi," I said. "Can I add you on WeChat?"
He watched me with something unreadable. "Sure. First," he said, with a glint I could not name, "say it. Say 'husband.'"
I froze.
"Say it," Kenzie urged from behind me, a giggle in her voice.
My mouth moved before my brain agreed. "Hu—husband."
He didn't smile. He pulled a phone out, tapped, and then slapped a QR code on the marble table.
The sound was crisp. It cut the air. I scanned the code.
My phone gave me a friend confirmation and, under his name, a note I had written months ago.
Husband.
I stared at the black avatar on my screen. Then Iliana laughed.
"Franny," Iliana said. "You really do have a husband."
My head snapped up. The man leaned back, pinched the bridge of his nose like he'd been dealing with idiots all night.
"Francesca Patel," he said, slower than polite. "You really are something."
I wanted to sink through the floor.
My brain searched memory and landed on a face. He'd been like a painting at a graduation ceremony—handsome, distant—and I had been hit on the head by a falling key, and then life had moved me along. We had married because his family wanted the match, because he liked the idea of someone who wouldn't complicate his work. He left for a new company abroad the next day.
He had sent money. He had given a house and a life that felt like summer breezes and no alarm clocks.
I had thought I could forget the details of his face because the account balance would do the remembering for me.
Then that night, his hands had kept me from tumbling backward; he had pulled me into his lap and said, "Wife."
"Don't freak out," Iliana hissed as we left. "He knows you."
"He is my husband," I whispered.
"Then introduce yourself properly." Kenzie shoved me forward like a catapult.
He guided me out of the bar with a steady hand at my waist. When his breath brushed my collarbone, it felt like lightning.
"Explain," he said in my ear, close enough that I felt his words against my skin.
"He is—Ricardo, this is my friend," I said. "Ricardo Conway, this is—"
He cut me off by easing me onto his lap with a motion that made my heart forget manners.
"Francesca," I said into his shirt, like confession ties our speech.
He finally smiled, a small thing, and then straightened. "Let's go."
The car was quiet; the city outside slid like a film reel. My stomach performed acrobatics. I tried the only thing I could think of.
"Sorry," I said. "I'll remember your face."
He turned sharply. "You will?"
"Yes. I promise."
He softened, raking his fingers through his hair. "I won't let you be lonely," he murmured. "You won't be alone."
"But you're in another country—"
He smiled, slow and secretive. "I won't let you be alone."
My phone suddenly lit up with a call. A junior from the studio, excited and loud, blaring over speaker in a way meant to fracture the silence.
"Senior! Found the model. Super hot. Sending WeChat."
That was a spark.
Ricardo's jaw tightened. He slid one hand down my back, possessive.
"You're listening to him?" he asked.
"No!" I shouted. "I—it's just—"
He started the car and drove like a man with a deadline. Quiet between stoplights tasted like static. When he pulled up, he wound the engine down and said three words that felt like a reprimand and a hug.
"Get out."
I did. He left me standing like a reed in autumn. When he opened the door again a minute later, he had changed.
"How many?" he demanded, voice low.
"How many what?" I asked, terrified of the answer.
"How many models, boy-toy things, do you have?" He said the words like flint.
I laughed because I couldn't cry.
"None," I lied.
He didn't seem satisfied. "Do you know how to say 'I won't' properly?"
"Yes." I tried to be brave. "I won't."
That night started a private war and the sweetest surrender.
Half a year earlier we had been paper-thin strangers. Our marriage certificate had been a stamp, his explanations thin and polite. He left for his new company straight away. He sent money. I painted, I learned to golf, I pursued hobbies because money had given me a map to things I couldn't buy before: time.
And then we had the painting student, Everett Bonnet.
He was the kind of young man with messy hair and a beaming smile that meant trouble with the shape of my chest. He taught in the art association. He helped everyone. He called me "senior" with the kind of warmth I hadn't felt from older people since childhood.
"Francesca, your lines are off here. Let me show you," Everett would say, gentle fingers adjusting my hand. He was a soft, earnest presence who made me forget the practical parts of my life.
A month after I met Everett, a photo of us appeared—me smiling, leaning into someone, a cheek kissed. Nothing salacious. A group reenactment after a film, a quick joke. Ricardo saw it.
He almost exploded.
I scrambled to explain. Everett had been nothing more than a friend, a fellow painter, maybe flirtatious, but harmless. Ricardo's reaction oscillated between shifting ice and dark thunder.
"Explain," he demanded that first night. "Explain now."
I said, "It was nothing. A joke. A reenactment."
He asked to see me explain it in front of him. He wanted to own the story. He wanted the GPS on my life so he wouldn't be surprised again.
"Say that you are mine," he said, quiet and dangerous.
So I said things I never thought I'd say publicly in a marriage I thought transactional: "Ricardo, I am yours. I have been yours."
He held me like he wanted to protect me from men like Everett. That protection felt like an invitation, and I accepted.
"Then be mine," he said. "Prove it."
I took to doing the things he liked: cooking, lunches to his office, planning dates. The phrase "compensate me with a sweet romance" left my mouth like a dare after he told me I owed him for me being careless and giving suitors an opening.
"You owe me," he said one night at the wheel.
"I do," I said.
The dates were awkward at first. He graded them. He had a checklist, delivered by Kenneth James, his efficient, patient secretary, whose face was always a straight line and whose advice was always blunt.
"Francesca," Kenneth said one morning, handing me an itinerary. "Try to be present."
"Present," I repeated. "Like present for you?"
"Yes."
The first date included a roof-top dinner and a billboard across the river that scrolled "Ricardo Conway, you are the most handsome man." He rated it a fifty.
"Fifty?" I sputtered.
"Not enough heart," he said.
"Heart?"
"Yes."
Kenneth smirked. "The man is mysterious. He wants simple, daily intimacy. Not big fireworks."
"Meaning?" I asked.
"Make him laugh. Make him cook. Sit in the kitchen and do the silly things."
So I did. I made lunches. I learned recipes. I burned something and he ate it anyway.
"You're stubborn," he said, sleepy. "Stay."
"Do you like it?" I asked.
"Better," he said.
We made awkward, clumsy advances that somehow felt honest. He would tie my scarf the wrong way and I would scold him, and in the scolded moment he'd press a kiss to my temple and murmur, "Noted."
We did escapades—camping, cliff walks, surfing—while we tried to learn what "us" meant, and in all the in-between moments I felt him soften. The guard in his face dropped like curtains.
And then Everett crossed a line.
He came to my home when Ricardo couldn't be there. He came with a sweetness that was a trap: "Let's be friends," he'd told me earlier, but time and closeness had idea of something else. One afternoon, he picked me up and threw me into a car, and my pulse dropped like a stone.
"What's this?" I demanded.
"Be quiet," Everett said. He had a seriousness I hadn't seen before.
"I will call the police," I said.
"It'll be worse," he said, "if I make a scene."
It was the first time I saw menace in his soft face. He held a photo he had doctored—an image that implied that I had been meeting other men.
"I thought you liked surprises," he said. "I thought you wanted me."
I felt the room spin. He locked the doors. We drove to an industrial area. For a moment, I allowed the worst images to flood—Ricardo finding the photos, money, divorce papers, a life lost.
I didn't scream. I breathed.
When Everett finally stopped and looked at me, his voice broke.
"I love you," he said, raw. "I will win you."
"Everett," I said. "This isn't love. This is theft—of my time, my choices. You will not own me."
He laughed, a sound too sharp. "You will fall for me."
He did not expect me to answer him like a married woman who had a very particular set of resources.
I turned on my heel and opened the car door, and in the same motion I sent a message to Ricardo.
"Everett Bonnet is taking me somewhere. He has fake photos. I'm scared." I typed with a finger trembling. I hit send to the one person who could, in seconds, rearrange the world I was in.
Ricardo's reply came: "Where?"
"Industrial park by the old mill. Parking lot three."
"Stay there. Don't move."
He arrived in silence. He did not step out of the car to shout or fight. He walked in like a tide and stood between Everett and me.
"Get out of my car," Ricardo said.
Everett looked at him and, for the first time, the cocky bravado dropped like a mask.
"Who are you?" Everett whispered.
"I'm the man who married her," Ricardo replied, voice as even as metal. "And I'm the man who pays for this house you're trying to ruin."
Kenneth and a few security men, who had accompanied Ricardo like a small cavalry, stood by. Ricardo didn't need to shout. He did not need to do more than state the facts.
Everett's face trembled. He tried to lie. He tried to say he had a right to be there.
"You're a predator in art's disguise," Ricardo said. "You manipulate young men into worshipping you. You manipulate women into petty fantasies."
"That's not true," Everett stammered.
"You're a liar." Ricardo's voice had a calm fury. "You made false photos. You kidnapped her. In public, you blackmail her. Now you will answer publicly."
The punishment scene that followed was immediate and intended not to be a private retribution, but a public setting that would dismantle Everett piece by piece.
Ricardo walked into the security office and demanded that the parking lot's CCTV footage be pulled. He called the association where Everett taught and asked seemingly casual questions in a way that never is casual: he asked for schedules, for access logs, for names of students who had been alone with Everett. Kenneth coordinated like a conductor—calm, surgical.
By the time we walked back outside, people had started to gather because there was a woman I knew and a well-known businessman in a heated whisper. A few passersby slowed. Two students peeked around a van. A guard tsked and looked interested.
Ricardo didn't need to yell. He presented the facts as if reading a contract.
"This man pretended to help paint," Ricardo said to the small crowd that had collected because our city loves a drama. "He gained trust. He took advantage. He took pictures meant to humiliate. He has been forging messages and photos to manipulate not only Francesca, but other girls who trusted him."
"That's not fair!" Everett shouted, spitting.
"Is that your voice when you manipulated her?" Ricardo asked, and then he handed out the sequence of messages Everett had sent that very day—the ones Everett had thought he erased. He had sent them to students. He had boasted of his plan. He had photographed girls without consent and bartered the images for attention.
His hands began to shake. He tried to back away.
The crowd drew closer. Phones were out.
"Who sent those?" someone asked.
"Everyone's sending them to everyone else," a voice said. "Check his profile. He's been flagged."
Everett's bravado crumbled. He flailed through denials like a man trying to hold water in cupped palms.
"You're a liar, Everett!" a girl cried, pointing a finger. "You sent me a photo last month and asked me to meet at night."
Another student piped up, voice strong, "And he wanted us to say 'sister' in front of older artists. He controlled it like a game."
Everett's face went white. He pleaded with the small crowd, then with me. "Francesca," he said, voice breaking, "I never meant—"
"You meant to control me," I said. My voice was steady. I wanted to be the one to say it in front of everyone. "You meant to pull me into a show. You meant to get his attention. You meant to create chaos."
The crowd's reaction was immediate—a ripple of disgust, a few gasps, someone muttered, "What's wrong with him?"
Phones recorded. A security guard called the police because there had been a car lock-in. Everett tried to sit down on the curb; his knees wobbled.
"Are you ashamed?" Ricardo asked quietly, to the crowd, not to Everett. "Because you should be. No one here is amused by lies. None of us likes a man who abuses trust."
Everett's face folded. He looked small—no longer poetic, no longer talented in anyone's eyes, just a boy who had been allowed to be cruel. He tried to stand tall, but the people who had admired his skill for a semester now saw someone who had used skill as a weapon.
"Please," he said, voice cracking. "Please don't—"
People around him laughed, not kind laughter. A former student spat, "You deserve worse."
The police arrived. They took statements. Everett was escorted away with a crowd following him, recording every step. People called him names. His temple burned red in a way that his paint had never done.
Before he left, he looked at me with eyes that pleaded for redemption.
"Please," he begged. "Please forgive me. I—"
"You didn't deserve my trust," I said. "You didn't deserve mine."
He tried to say "I love you," then, in the public throat of a man becoming a lesson, his voice dissolved into sobs and a prayer that no one answered kindly.
The punishment was not violent. It was worse for him—public exposure, loss of the students' trust, the secretary of a powerful man pointing out his manipulations in front of one small street. He could not hide behind a gallery's soft lighting now. He had to be seen.
And he was. We all watched him shrink.
Ricardo stood next to me the whole time and didn't touch me. He kept his space like a sentinel. That day's humiliation was calculated to be the most complete kind of social justice: an exposure where the weaponized intimacy he had tried to use turned back on him and the social world took witness.
When the police took Everett away, people gathered around me, some angry, some curious, some supportive.
"You okay?" Iliana asked, voice thin.
"I'm fine," I said. "I am."
Ricardo took my hand and squeezed.
"Thank you," I said.
"Don't thank me," he said. "Thank yourself for standing up."
He kissed my forehead in the middle of the parking lot, loud and absurd and private. The crowd shifted away as if not to intrude upon a small kingdom.
The next week was quieter. Everett's name circulated, his classes emptied. The art association posted an apology to those he had hurt. Everett's presence in the city dissolved like chalk in rain. He called me once from a pay phone, voice broken. I didn't answer.
Ricardo's life returned to business. He still graded my dates with a ridiculous thoroughness. He allowed fluttering small things to count—like the 3D-printed chicken breast he had given me as a joke for my painting practice. He liked my lunches. He liked watching me watch sunsets.
One lantern-lit evening at the hospital, after he had gone to visit a friend, I saw him with a newborn in his arms because he had gone to support a childhood friend who had given birth. He stood in a doorway framed by sunset like a classical painting—half in light, half in shadow.
"Is it his?" someone whispered.
Ricardo folded like a question mark and simply said, "No."
Later he held me close and said three words I had been waiting to hear in a voice that had never been loose with sentimentality before.
"I love you," he said.
It was small, true, and it made me dizzy.
We walked home that night past the river where a billboard still occasionally ran the silly message I had once paid for as a joke. I had planned it as a gift but he had liked it because it made him laugh.
"Keep the 3D chicken," Ricardo said, catching me petting the silly print. "Keep it in your drawer. It's our joke."
"I will," I said.
He kissed my temple. "Be mine," he whispered.
"I already am," I said, which was true in the way a sentence is when two people have decided to learn what love means together.
The rest was a steady smallness: lunches to his office, walks across bridges, mistakes, apologies, and the occasional absurd artifact like a printed fake chicken that we kept because it made us laugh.
It turned out that marriage wasn't a dramatic reveal every hour; it was a hundred small demonstrations of trust, the daily tests that either built or broke a life. Ricardo kept proving his loyalty, and I kept choosing him.
Weeks after Everett's humiliation, the art association exchanged emails with Kenneth about damage control. Kenneth, as kind as he was blunt, said, "Make sure everyone knows consent matters. Make sure the community is safe."
We hosted a small afternoon where students could speak about boundaries and privacy, and Ricardo came as a quiet sponsor in the back row. He didn't need to spearhead anything grand. He sat, watched me speak, and squeezed my hand.
At the end of that meeting, a student—once shy, now braver because he had seen what happens when people speak—stood up and said, "Thank you, Francesca." The applause made me cry.
Ricardo smiled at me and then asked, "How would you rate today's apology?"
"Full marks," I said.
He laughed. "Good. We will use that as a template for future improvements."
"That's oddly practical," I teased.
"Everything worth saving is," he said.
We had our fights. We had our tests. He graded my dates with a ridiculous system and I sometimes bristled, but every day he offered proof in small, domestic things. I learned to cook better; he learned to speak openly; Kenneth kept tabs; Iliana and Kenzie remained conspirators in my mischiefs.
On a night when the river was quiet and the city lights blinked like stars that had descended for a holiday, Ricardo took my hand and led me to a rooftop that smelled of jasmine.
"Remember the first QR code?" he asked.
"How could I forget?" I said.
He laughed. "You were priceless."
"I thought I would be embarrassed forever."
"You were. In a beautiful way."
We watched the billboard flicker with an old phrase I had once bought as a joke. We watched each other.
"Promise me one thing," he said.
"No promises," I said, smiling.
He kissed my knuckles. "Then let me be your proof."
"I will take you," I said.
He tucked the small 3D-printed chicken he had bought for me into my palm. "Keep this," he said. "For every time you doubt my sincerity."
I looked at it—ridiculous, plasticky, absurd—and put it in my drawer. It would stay there, a private talisman.
That night, I felt safe in a way I hadn't imagined when I foolishly added a WeChat contact out of dares and laughter. A game had led to a code that opened a life I hadn't expected.
"Goodnight, husband," I whispered.
"Goodnight," he answered.
And under the jumble of city lights and the lint of stars, our life folded into the shape of small, honest things.
The End
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