Sweet Romance13 min read
My Viral Fall, His Cold Hands, and the WQ Necklace
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They all said "new year, new beginnings." At twenty-one, my new beginning was just one thing: more blind dates.
"I can't do another one," I told Cody over the phone, voice thin with the exhaustion of meeting men who could not tell a spoon from a sunset.
"You always say that," she said, laughter in her voice. "Get dressed. Distract yourself. Or jump off a cliff with me."
"You serious?"
"Yes. Meet me at the bridge. Costume optional."
So I went. I wanted a story, not another awkward dinner. I wanted something that would make me forget the faces of the last dozen wrong ones.
"Shout something dramatic on the run," Cody dared as we tied harnesses.
"I am a woman you can never have!" I hollered as I took my sprint.
And then my left foot caught my right, and I went head over heels down through air and terror, my scream knifing the sky.
"Lenore!" Cody shouted, but she was laughing with her hand over her mouth and recording.
"Stop—" I tried; I couldn't. The world turned very fast and then very slow. I crashed, landed, and when I stood the video had already begun its escape.
"You're viral now," she said later, eyes shining. "You're spinning across the internet. They call you 'the whirlwind queen.'"
"Great," I said, dragging a hand down my face. "My parents will be thrilled."
"They did what parents do," Cody said. "They bought tickets and fled to a place with better beaches and worse Wi‑Fi."
That night, suitcase in my hand, I knocked on Angelo Baldwin's door.
"Do you need a charm, or do you need a maid?" he asked when he opened the door. He crossed his arms, amused.
"A maid," I lied, sweeping in like I belonged, hair still dripping from sweat and shame. "I need someone to take me in while my folks hide from being shamed."
Angelo wore white lounge clothes that made him look like he had been carved out of light. Up close, he was all angles, neat hair, the sort of face that made you second-guess whether you had teeth.
"You only have access to the guest room," he said, level and dry. "You leave every hair behind that falls on the floor, and by seven in the morning you're gone."
"Yes, sir!" I saluted with too much drama and slammed the door like I was entering the palace of second chances.
"Stay out of the kitchen," he muttered, shutting his bedroom door with the kind of finality usually reserved for court sentences.
The next morning I walked into his bathroom at the wrong time and nearly broke from shock.
"Lenore." He looked at me without saying anything. "There's a schedule."
"I didn't realize the schedule included accidental voyeurism," I said, stumbling backwards as red as a tomato.
He laughed once—so quiet it might have been a mistake—and told me I could visit his home only when his parents were away, and even then I had rules.
"I have rules," he said, deadpan. "But you are allowed to stay. Patient zero is you."
"You mean patient zero of trouble," I grinned, but my grin was on thin paper.
Days toward normalcy break into tiny moments: he kept a pillbox labeled like a clinical map; he explained which toothpaste to use; he forced me to sit still while he peered into my mouth with a tiny torch.
"Open," he said in the clinic, standing tall, the doctor persona switching on like a flip of a light.
"Again? Can't someone else do this?"
"No," he said. "You get what you get."
The extraction came like something from a melodrama. "It will sting," he warned before he injected. "I'll do it a bit at a time. Signal me when it's too much."
"I—" My face already felt like a drum. "Okay."
He worked methodically, face close and attentive. The pain hit, and my hand flew onto his wrist.
"Don't squeeze like that," he said, voice faltering for the first time. "Sit back."
The surgery was long; a new woman in the clinic—slim, smiling too much for the work she did—peeked in.
"Here to watch?" she asked. Her nails tapped glass.
"She's my patient," Angelo said. "Back off."
"Please," the woman said. "I was walking by. Two hours for one tooth? Dear me."
I wanted to throw up and laugh at the same time. When she took over, her hands moved like she was presenting a trophy.
"You're wasting time," she said to Angelo, but in my mouth she worked like a sculptor, efficient and sharp. The pain faded when she pulled a stubborn fragment free, and she showed it to me like a prize.
"Thank you," I managed, voice weak.
"Don't mention it," she said, and with a curtsy that did not suit a clinic, she left.
Afterward, sitting on his couch with a bag of pills and a bowl of bland porridge he forced into my hands, I felt a tug of something like appreciation and something like heat.
"Eat," Angelo said. "Quiet food."
"You're bossy," I said, but the words were soft.
"You asked to live under my rules," he replied.
I wanted to be braver. "Am I your girlfriend yet?" I joked.
He looked at me like it was the first time he understood a joke. "No," he said. "But you can be my tenant."
Two weeks later, the ache returned. I woke at five, found blood on the pillowcase, and panic made my voice small and thin.
"Help me," I called, knocking on Angelo's door like a child.
He opened, hair messier than the day he had carved himself out of light. "Again?"
"My mouth tastes of rust," I said.
He sighed, but he put the kettle on. "Sit up. Don't lie on the side. Come back to the clinic."
At the hospital the following day, when they sent me to a different doctor, a woman with a slow smile and hair made for magazine covers leaned over me.
"Your surgeon's technique?" she said, eyes sliding between Angelo and me. "Hmmm."
"She's my patient," Angelo answered, close, protective.
"Really," she said, voice like silk. "And who is he to you?"
"He's my neighbor," I said, panic prickling. "He let me stay."
"Neighbor? That's charming."
The woman's name was Johanna Calhoun. She was older than us, composed, and her smile carried practiced stories. She moved like someone who had never had to prove she belonged. When she looked at Angelo there was something in her face—a memory—so bright it almost hurt.
"Do you folks have history?" Johanna asked. "Because we have protocols with neighbors."
"Nothing," Angelo said.
There it was. The words of a man who had not known how to keep a quiet thing to himself. "Not nothing," he corrected, eyes flicking toward me with something that might have been a secret he'd kept too long.
When Johanna later mentioned she'd been the one to train him, I understood why her hands had been light and why she might have thought herself entitled to a glance.
And then there was another woman: Alejandra Gordon, the doctor who had the bright laugh and the clinical hands. She passed me like I was a breeze, and later, at the clinic, she brushed past me and said, "It seems the internet tells a better story than you do."
I hated how small that made me feel. I also hated how Angelo's face changed when he listened to Alejandra talk: taut, like someone pinched at the edge of a map.
I stopped being delicate and became persistent. I learned how to hold my face still while my hand trembled, how to swallow glass and still smile.
"Do you want to come with me?" Angelo asked one afternoon. "My parents will be hosting a small thing for the New Year. You are welcome—if you can behave."
"Behavior isn't my long suit," I said. "But I can try."
He gave me one condition. "Meet someone," he said casually. "A friend. Don't be embarrassing."
"Is it a man or a woman?" I asked, faintly interested in the rules of his world.
"A woman." His face was a neutral slate. "Just be smart."
Then the day arrived and he brought me into a living room suffused with warm lights and the smell of orange peels. Angelo's mother and a visitor—tall, elegant, with a calm, practiced beauty—were there: Johanna Calhoun, his ex.
"I thought you were with another hospital down south," Alejandra said, an easy smile, but eyes like knives. "Small world."
"Not that small," Angelo answered.
Johanna looked at me clear as a bell. "You are Lenore?"
"Yes," I said, hand fluttering like a flag. "Pleasure."
"Angelo told me about you," she said. "He said you were like a whirlwind."
"That is very accurate," I replied. "Cody captured it for the internet."
"How delightful," she said. Her smile said less than her tone.
After dinner, while people exchanged holiday small talk, whispers began that would not stay small. Someone saw my social media post about the DR necklace I had once woken up with. Someone else recognized the name on a pendant Angelo kept in his dark box. "WQ," they'd murmur. "WQ, what does it stand for?"
"Do you know what the WQ stands for?" Johanna asked, angled toward Angelo.
"It stands for something I chose then," he said quietly. "It stands for a mistake I made and a memory I keep."
"Did you buy it for her?" Johanna's voice was small. "For someone else?"
"No," Angelo said. He looked at me like I was a fragile cup he was not sure he could set down without cracking.
A hush spread. They all waited for me to be embarrassed, to crumble.
"I—" I began. "I don't remember."
"Don't remember?" Johanna repeated, and the tone of her voice pulled the room in like a tide. "You don't remember buying yourself a necklace?"
"I don't," I said. "I remember a dinner, a blur. I wake up, and there it was."
It felt like confessing to a theft I hadn't committed. Then Angelo's face shifted in a way that made me feel both seen and strange.
"You told people you bought it for yourself."
"I did," I said softly. "I scrolled through it as self‑love. If that's wrong... I wasn't trying to hurt anyone."
"That's rich," someone else muttered.
Angelo's jaw tightened, and then, unexpectedly, I moved forward, the kind of crazy bravery that comes from being cornered.
"You know," I said, loud enough, "a necklace does not measure a love. If someone wears a piece of jewelry, that doesn't mean they were bought. It could have been gift, or it can be gratitude, or sometimes, yes, poor judgment. But it's not a prize you can take away."
"You should not be defensive," Johanna said, coolly. "This is not about judgments. It's about facts."
"Then let's talk facts," I said. "You left him without word, didn't you? You moved cities and didn't tell him. Isn't that true?"
"That's not fair," she snapped.
"It is fair," Angelo said, voice low. "Because you left. I waited. I tried. You had your life. I had mine."
"It was complicated," she said.
"Everything is complicated when no one tries," I answered. "But here's the thing: being complicated is not the same as being cruel. Leaving without a reason is cruelty."
Johanna's eyes flashed. The room hummed like a kettle.
Later, days became practice sessions for living with a man who spoke sharp truth with gentleness. He lectured me about my diet, offered me blistering honesty about my choices, reprimanded me for being reckless. I in turn learned to pick my battles, to pick him, slowly and stubbornly.
But the clinic world has its side dramas. Alejandra, who had once scoffed at me and played judge in a hallway, kept showing up in circles. She would smile at the wrong time, make a joke that felt like a paper cut, and the more she did it, the more I noticed the people who quieted when she entered. One nurse whispered that Alejandra had a temper and another said she had been harsh with patients.
"I don't like her," I told Angelo one night, embarrassment and honesty battling on my tongue. "She makes people small."
"She's ambitious," he said. "She works hard."
"Ambition doesn't need to be cruel," I said.
The public punishment came unexpectedly—and it was nothing like the vengeful fantasies people have. It was a slow, honest exposure at a hospital staff meeting.
"Today we need to review complaints," the director announced, paper in hand. "There have been concerns raised about bedside manner and record keeping."
Alejandra sat in the front row, immaculate as ever, perfect posture and a smile trained for projection. She had fans in the room: residents who learned from her, nurses who admired her precision.
"Who filed the complaints?" she asked, voice glossy.
"Multiple patients and staff," the director said. "There are clear discrepancies in follow-up notes, medication timing, and at least one case where informed consent is questionable."
"That's unprofessional," Alejandra said on cue. "Either show who's accusing me or let me go. I have an OR block."
"Evidence is here," said the director, and he set down a tablet. "Audio logs, patient testimonies, and recorded complaints."
I sat at the back of the room, my heart a trapped bird. Then a nurse I knew stood, voice steady, and began to speak. "On January third, you told a patient you were 'too busy' for her questions. You told her to leave. She cried in the corridor. I filed that."
Another voice, clear and dry, "I saw the recorded incident. You belittled a junior. This is not acceptable."
Alejandra's face tightened, the smile cracking like thin ice. "That is not how it was," she said, breath sharp. "You'd all turn against me for a gossip."
"Listen," a patient said, voice hoarse with emotion. "I am here. She said she would 'speed things up' even if it meant risk. She said 'we can fix it later' while cutting corners during my surgery. I've been in pain since."
The room fell into a kind of stunned silence. I could feel the oxygen of attention shift to a hot, dangerous focus on her.
"Do you have proof?" Alejandra demanded.
"Yes," said the director, and he pressed play.
We heard a voice, crisp and cold, counting steps like it was a production script. "We don't have time for bedside stories. We do efficiency."
"The patient is scared," the recorded voice said.
"Efficiency," Alejandra said. "That's the word I used. And if efficiency means better outcomes, then we choose results."
Around us, murmurs rose. Staff exchanged looks—some confused, some furious. The recordings continued: a nurse calling to complain, a junior resident's whisper, a patient's sobbing.
"How could you?" someone cried. "You risked someone's trust for speed."
Alejandra's eyes were wide now. "This is a witch hunt," she said. "They want to ruin me."
"Because this isn't the first time," the nurse said. "You dismissed concerns before. You humiliated junior staff in public and you minimized patients."
"Your surgical tally is enviable," the director said without malice. "But your follow-up is lacking. Your notes lack detail. We cannot ignore the people harmed."
Alejandra's facewent through the stages: first indignation, then fight, then a flicker of fear. "You can't do this," she whispered, breath hitching. "I'm Dr. Alejandra Gordon. I have reputations."
"So do patients," another voice answered. "They deserve to be heard."
Phones came out. Colleagues checked notes and shared screenshots. "How long did you think this could hide?" murmured a senior nurse. People started to gather around Alejandra like circling daylight; some looked at her with pity, others with cold resolution.
"I didn't—" she began, and the words fell like brittle leaves.
"You're suspended pending review," the director said. "We will investigate. For now, step down from your clinic list and don't contact patients."
The room reacted. Some applauded quietly. Others shook their heads. Alejandra rose, unable to meet the faces.
"Do you want a statement?" the director asked.
"No," she said. Her voice shook. "I—" Then the hard shell broke and she began to cry, sudden and loud.
People stepped back, awkward with the public collapse. Some whispered that she'd always been like this in private. Some looked away. She crumpled in a chair, one hand on her face, one on the wooden table, and the dignity she had carried like armor fell like a curtain.
"Do you have anything to say to the patients?" someone asked.
She lifted her head, eyes glossy. "I'm sorry," she said, but the words felt small and weird in such a formal room. There were no cameras in the meeting, but the humiliation was public enough. Nurses looked at each other; a resident I knew started to cry; Alejandra's demeanor changed from invincible to human: trembling, pleading, raw.
"You're being filmed now," a junior staffer said softly as people recorded for the hospital's records. "This is part of documentation."
Her face went white. "Please," she breathed. "Please—"
"I think people want to hear how you're going to make this right," the director said quietly.
She turned to the room. For a long moment she stared at the floor, then looked up, meeting the eyes of a patient who had been there. "I...will accept the review. I will cooperate. I will apologize directly if asked. I was wrong to be dismissive. I will—"
Some believed her. Others remained skeptical. But the scene was complete: the woman who had once scoffed at me had been called to account. Her reaction moved from anger to denial to fragile contrition. Staff members whispered, some supportive, some cruel. A few nurses hugged each other. A resident took a photo of the notes and posted an internal memo; people captured moments and filed them where they should be filed.
After the meeting, Alejandra's shoulders sagged. She came out into the corridor, alone. A few students stood near the elevator; some avoided her eyes. Another doctor looked at her with pity. Her reputation would need rebuilding. She had been powerful and she was now publically exposed.
The punishment was not theatrical revenge. It was procedural, true, and public: a suspension, a review board, notes circulated that would follow her. She saw the faces she'd hurt. She stood in the corridor and wept small, bitter tears while staff walked by, whispering. Her mask was gone.
That satisfied the part of me that needed to see cruelty answered. It also made me understand how small and how human all of us could be when stripped of theater.
After that storm, life with Angelo settled into a softer rhythm. He showed up with herbal soup when I had a fever. He taught me how to make a list and stick to it. I learned to laugh more carefully, to face the camera less. My parents came back from the beach and talked like strangers on the phone. They arrived quietly at Angelo's house and were welcomed—surprisingly—with open arms.
"Lenore, you look well," his mother said. "You're welcome anytime."
"I like him," my mother said later, voice warm. "He is quiet but kind."
Angelo's family greeted me as someone who had drifted into their orbit and might stay. They asked me simple domestic questions about noodles and tea, and I became less afraid.
"Why did you keep her?" a friend texted about Johanna. "Why keep someone who left?"
"Sometimes people leave because they have their own storms," I wrote back. "It doesn't mean the man is broken. It means he has space for new things."
On New Year's Day, Angelo took an old velvet box from his drawer. The chain inside held the tiny "WQ" charm and the ring that J had once whispered about.
"What is that?" I asked, whispering like a thief.
He watched me. "You know this," he said. "It's a past tongue tied into a present."
"Did she—" The question died.
"No," he said. "I keep things. They are part memory, part apology, part promise I never gave. I was stupid before. Maybe I still am."
We stood in the quiet, looking at the jewelry like relics.
"Keep it," he said suddenly. "Wear it if you like it. Or throw it away if you don't. It's yours now."
I laughed, a real chuckle that warmed him. I took the chain and the little ring, and when I put it on, it felt silly and holy all at once.
"Will you stay for the next year?" he asked.
"In your rules?" I teased.
"In mine," he said, and his cheeks softened. "Some rules are negotiable."
"I'll stay," I said.
The last night of the holiday, I replayed the bungee video on my phone. The wind, the scream, the tumble, Cody's half-laugh. My face in midair looked unguarded and terrible and free. Angelo sat beside me on the couch, his hand warm on the small of my back.
"You are ridiculous," he murmured.
"So are you," I said, and when I saw him look at me, at the half-faded bruise near my jaw, at the little smile that never quite left my mouth, I felt a warmth like a hand drawn across the back of my neck.
The necklace ticked against my throat—a tiny, cheap sound like a metronome counting out a day I hadn't planned and somehow wanted.
"Promise me one thing," I said softly.
He looked up. "What?"
"Keep the WQ," I said. "Not for what it was, but for what it can be."
He tilted his head, considered. "Deal."
I clicked the video off. Outside, the winter world whispered. Inside, a man and a woman who had tripped through strange, sharp hours were learning how to be less alone.
I lay my head on Angelo's shoulder and listened to the small clink of the "WQ" charm. The sound was tiny, familiar, and unmistakably ours.
The End
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