Sweet Romance11 min read
Not My Job — But I Married a Tyrant
ButterPicks14 views
I never thought getting free would feel like stepping onto a stage, lights and all.
"Look," Francesca said, tapping my phone like she owned it. "Is that his signature?"
"It is," I slurred and smiled all the way to my ears. "Simon Bryant actually signed. I'm free."
"Congratulations, Angela." Francesca lifted her glass. "You survived the ceremonial desert called marriage."
"I survived three years. That's a whole anthology of endurance." I leaned back, dizzy from the celebration and the wine and the ridiculous relief of finally having a piece of paper.
"Two minutes," Francesca warned when I started scanning the room for mischief. "Pick someone or we'll go home."
"I saw a face," I told her, eyes locking on a man who looked like the ghost of my failed marriage in a much nicer suit. "He's got the exact same profile as Simon."
"You mean—" Francesca's voice thinned.
"Come on, let's play a little," I said, wobbling to my feet. "Two minutes. Pick one, Angela. Live a little."
The man looked like a statue someone had made alive for bad reasons—too handsome and too cold.
"Hi," I said, and my bravado tripped on a hiccup.
He turned slowly like he had all the time in the world. "Why are you here?"
"You look like my ex-husband," I declared proudly, sloshing wine on his cuff by accident.
"Is that so?"
"Yes! Exactly. You have the same angle." I grinned like an idiot.
Francesca arrived just in time to see me fawn. She narrowed her eyes at him. "You should know better than to get in trouble."
"I'm new here," he said, and the way he said it made him sound like an accusation. "I'll be fine."
"Actually," I whispered, putting on my most conspiratorial expression, "you look like the man who left me at the altar and hid for three years."
"You're drunk," he said, low, unreadable. "And loud."
"I can be loud," I said. "But I'm also generous. One night—just to prove a point."
His half-smile turned the room colder. "I can be expensive."
"I have money," I said, and meant my ex-husband's money as if it were mine, because for a while it felt like it should be.
"Fine." He lit a cigarette and then surprised me by asking, "Does the price go up if I look like him?"
"Depends on the performance," I said.
When he stood, Francesca grabbed my arm. "Angela, please. Let's go."
"Not yet," I said, clinging to the last of my courage. "Two minutes—see what fate does."
He didn't move his hand away when I reached out to feel his waist. His skin was warm against my fingers. "Please leave," he said softly.
"May I touch?" I asked, like someone trying to read a menu in a foreign language.
"Stay where you are," he answered, the cigarette turning to smoke between syllables. "And don't call me by that name."
"Call you what?"
He glanced at me as if reconsidering whether I was a pest or precious. "Call you Angela, and don't call me Simon."
"Then why do I feel like I'm talking to my ex?" I said, laughter hiccupping.
"Because I am Simon," he said simply.
I burst out laughing and then stopped. "Impossible. He left."
"Not impossible," he said. "He just wasn't very present."
We left the club together because I had declared tonight good for resolutions, and because Simon Bryant had a way of making a proposal sound like law.
"Wake up," he said, tapping my cheek the next morning, and I opened my eyes into a view that made my head swim differently.
"Who are you?" I croaked, the sheets tangling my voice.
"Someone who works with what he has," he answered, buttoning his shirt with deliberate slowness. "And someone who wants to make sure your transaction last night was worth the money."
I remembered flashing like a moth at a flame, and then the fog came back. "We—did we—"
"We were practical," he said dryly. "And then you slept, and I left you to your dreams."
"Did I—" I paused, pressed my palm to a stain on the sheet. "Did I——"
"A bit messy," he admitted. "And you left me a tip."
He fished a bill from the bed and tossed it at me with a look like a dare.
"I didn't intend for any of that to happen," I said.
"Fine," he answered. "Then let's make a deal."
He pulled out a paper that used to be a threat and turned it into an invitation. "Sign this: before our divorce is legally final, you follow a set of 'rules.'"
"Rules?" I repeated, gaping.
"Only a few," he said. "Five basics. For your safety, and my sanity."
"You're joking," I said. "I am the one asking for the divorce!"
He smiled in an odd way, and that smile was the exact opposite of conciliatory. "Then make me want to sign the papers. Or don't, and we'll see who has more patience."
I chewed on the edge of a crisis. "This is extortion with perfume."
"It might be therapy," he said. "Pick whichever."
"I will not be told how to live by a man who ghosted our wedding," I told Francesca later, clutching the torn contract.
"Have you thought about playing along for now?" she asked.
"And sign away my dignity?"
"Sometimes you let a snake bite and you take the venom as medicine," she said, waving her hand.
I nearly did. I had three years to be empty; now I had a chance to be loud and to be clever. "Fine," I said at last. "We play. But on my terms."
We made a tentative treaty of sorts, and he added a mischievous clause: "If you follow me, you may get paid—in other ways."
"You're impossible," I said. "And yet," I admitted aloud more than once, "when he smiled, I could have sworn a lock unlatched."
Simon wasn't just a puzzle to be solved; he was a man with edges. He was not a machine who performed at my command.
"Why won't you sign the divorce?" I snapped one afternoon when he ignored the papers and tried to feed me ramen he had no right to touch.
"Because I didn't marry a contract," he said, and the evening sun painted his cheekbone gold. "I married you."
"You married your ego," I shot back.
He took my hand, placed it in his palm like it was an object he had been studying for months. "I married a promise I thought could be broken if I pretended hard enough. Turns out—" he dragged my wrist to his mouth and kissed the scar on my knuckle, "—things resist being broken when you look at them."
We had rules, ridiculous and private things that read like a child’s list of demands. I made my own on the back: clause seven—no interference from his mother or her clan in our home.
"Sign," I said.
He raised one eyebrow and then, with that odd, lazy affection, he signed. His ink left a darker mark than my own.
That first small victory tasted like mint and smoke and a promise I didn't trust myself to believe.
"I don't like her," his aunt said sharply when she visited. Her mouth was a hard line.
"You don't like anyone I choose to be," I said, and signed the agreement with another cocky flourish.
"Don't become someone who kisses strangers," she warned.
"I don't know how to stop being myself," I answered, with a laugh that meant I couldn't stop if I wanted to.
We kept circling each other like cramped planets.
He would leave and then return with a bag full of breakfast, and his driver would call to tell me not to worry.
"Does he always let his assistant decide whether I miss him?" I asked Francesca, annoyed and amused.
"It means you're important enough to be in his schedule," she said.
"Then why does he make me feel like a side quest?"
Because he was Simon, and Simon liked the long game.
At a bar called The Ripped Night I tried to prove a point—an audience was useful for that.
He came to one of those nights where men with titles and women with painted smiles shared a stage of pretend intimacy.
"Stay away from him," Francesca hissed as I put on a uniform hidden in her bag.
"That's the plan," I said, slipping into a skirt too short and a courage too big.
He was in the corner, not touching anyone. He watched me like a king watches a jester, and then he made me help him pour his drink.
"You're trying to drown me," he said softly when I put a cup to his lips.
"No," I said, "I am teaching you to be thirsty."
He laughed like a wound that healed, and when he pulled me into his lap, the room blurred into motion and everyone else disappeared.
There were three moments when my heart did something unreasonable:
- When he, who never smiled for anyone, curved his mouth for me like a secret joke and the world trembled.
- When he put his jacket over my shoulders in the rain without thinking about witnesses and, in that small courtesy, turned everything private into ours.
- When he stroked the edge of my knuckle in a crowded room and said, "Stay," as if I could refuse.
We found leverage. I started to play his world abroad his terms. I took dinners arranged to test him, had my father, Ramon Russo, show up to provoke a scene, and saw the way Simon’s jaw tightened and then relaxed when I stood my ground.
"You are reckless," he told me once.
"Only when I need you to notice," I answered.
People around us picked sides. Gracie Blanchard and Berkley Zhao tried to tend the embers of rumor, and they had weapons: gossip and images and a hunger for spectacle.
"They think they can humiliate me," I told Francesca. "Let them. I will make sure the audience forgets the rumor and remembers the truth."
So we staged a public unmasking—because a face-slapping that isn't seen is just whispering in a room.
"The charity gala," I whispered. "We will turn their theater into a confessional."
The night of the event was bright with crystal and cameras. Simon stood beside me, distant and present in the same breath. Gracie preened under lights, Berkley leaned into a crowd of cameras.
"Smile," Gracie mouthed to a cameraman, sure of the script.
"Tonight," I told Simon, "we do it my way."
I walked up to the microphone as if I were announcing a trivial charity award.
"Ladies and gentlemen," I began. "Tonight is a celebration. But I believe a celebration can tolerate truth."
"What's going to happen?" Simon asked quietly at my elbow.
"Watch," I said.
I told the story—not of last night's chaos or the bar—but of three years: the silence, the absence, the brand that tried to sell us as a headline.
"And when I couldn't find my husband, I found a man who looked like him and paid for a night—because I wanted proof that the marriage had been an illusion," I said, and let the hush grow thick.
"Then I realized something: Simon Bryant didn't run away because of me. He ran because he couldn't fight something inside. He wasn't absent to hurt me; he was absent because he was lost. But I am done being the headline."
A camera zoomed and Gracie's smile faltered.
I called their bluff. I showed a series of messages, a set of arranged bookings, inconsistencies in stories that Gracie and Berkley had fed the press. I had quietly documented months of gossip transactions. The audience leaned forward.
"This," I said, and held up the printouts, "is proof that malice was being peddled. And we have receipts."
Gasps. Whispers. Phones lifting like a thousand small moons.
Gracie's face, so made-up and controlled, drained of warmth. Berkley, who had braced herself in public, sagged like a puppet whose strings had snapped.
"What are you doing?" Berkley hissed into the shoulder of a PR woman.
"What do you want from me?" Gracie snapped. "You're ruining my reputation!"
The microphones caught everything. Someone recorded. Everyone records everything now.
Simon stepped forward then, the man quiet people defer to, and looked at us all with the weight of a verdict in his dark eyes.
"This is slander," he said, voice like gravel, and then, "and it ends now."
He read the details calmly, the names and the paid posts, the staged 'leaks' that had been planted to paint me a certain way.
"Do you deny it?" he asked Gracie, and the cameras roamed across her face.
"I—" she began, and her voice was shrill with the sound of being caught.
"No," Berkley said after a beat, because truth is sometimes a tidal shove that drowns planning. "No, we were hired to stir reaction."
The room spun, then steadied on them like a jury.
"What do you have to say to everyone you lied to?" I asked, very simply.
Gracie's expression crumpled from arrogance to pleading. "It was for business—"
"For money," Berkley finished, tears sudden and dramatic, but no one believed the tears because the lies had been slow and calculated.
The cameras closed like a maw.
"You're hired to spread poison about a woman to make headlines," I said into the microphone. "Tonight you are exposed. You will apologize publicly, and you will atone. Your names will carry this night forward—"
Their reactions were a study. Gracie shifted from outrage to denial, from denial to anger, then to a small, thin panic when people turned their phones to them.
"People took pictures!" someone whispered, and the first wave of comments appeared on screens around the room.
They tried to lie, then blamed others, then their composure cracked. A cluster of socialites who once circled them like moths stepped away.
Berkley tried to call for dignity. "We were given assignments!" she pleaded.
"So you sold people's reputations for assignments," a reporter said, sharp as a knife.
They could not steal the night back. For the first time in months they were not on stages. They were the spectacle—and the crowd is a cruel mirror.
"You're fired from the agencies involved," Simon announced. "You are under contract claim for damages. You will issue a public apology in every outlet you maligned."
The audience moved like wind. Those who had turned a blind eye now felt sudden clarity. Phones clicked; cameras recorded the slow collapse.
Gracie's expression moved from rage to hollow incredulity. She tried a last charge at dignity—"This is cruel!"—and a dozen people quietly echoed: "No, it's accountability."
They were escorted out, not with shouts but with the exhausted silence of people who had watched a lie die.
I didn't shout. I didn't gloat. The point was not humiliation for its own sake; the point was exposure to end the market for false stories.
They were left in a lobby full of mirrors and captured lights; their faces were photographs in strangers' feeds within minutes.
That was the punishment—public, complete, and different from what anyone might script. No arrests, no juries, just truth and witnesses.
I left the stage and Simon's hand found mine like a claim.
"Thank you," I whispered.
"For making me see what I was hiding from," he said, and his voice trembled with something like apology and more.
They had been punished differently: stripped of theatre and left to the hard light of cameras and people's real opinions. The hurt on their faces slid into history; public opinion rearranged itself.
After that night Simon and I tripped over our rules less often.
"You're my woman," he said once, not as a claim but as a fact. "I won't let them make you small."
"I won't let them make you small either," I answered.
We had negotiated terms and laughter and a hundred fights that taught me one essential thing: he wasn't a tool, and I wasn't an audience.
He took my hand in front of whatever remained of our rivals and steady-lit me with one sentence that startled me from the inside.
"Stay with me for a year," he said, quiet and steady. "Let's try being honest first."
I grinned because I was full of stubbornness and because his eyes, that rare flash of private sunlight, were soft on me.
"One year," I said. "Make it worth the contract."
And that is how I learned that a married life could be a battlefield and a refuge at once.
We signed silly agreements and kissed in front of broken whispers. We argued like children and made amends like adults. We worked and fought and slowly replaced the headlines with small honest histories.
When my father, Ramon Russo, started asking crude questions at dinner, Simon took my hand and told his own truth with calm words that made a man who sells charm for leverage go quiet.
"She is my wife," Simon said with the kind of finality that feels like a promise.
"Proof," I said once, joking, and he lifted his wrist to show the faint print of my palm on his skin.
I slept easier.
The contract remained a paper thing—important, silly, and binding only by the weight each of us chose to place upon it.
We negotiated absurd clauses, like who could visit and who had no right to cross our door.
We signed, tore, and signed again, sometimes in public and sometimes in private, and with every repair we learned how to hold a thing that was harder to manage than the divorce: each other.
I never lost my taste for mischief.
"Do you promise to stop leaving me messages that set the world on fire?" he asked once, mock stern.
"No," I answered. "But I promise I will not let them write my story for me."
He kissed me like someone agreeing to the most dangerous treaty of all: the one where two stubborn people choose to stay.
And if you ever ask me what the unique thing of our story was—the tiny object that would let you know me in a single line—it's this:
I kept his shredded divorce agreement in a drawer. When I open it, the paper rustles like the beginning of a language we are still learning.
The End
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