Substitute10 min read
Not the Rose: My Life Between Two Men
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I pushed open the heavy doors of Night Jade and the light hit me hard.
"Who let the moonflower in?" a voice called from the crowd.
"Moonflower?" I heard another laugh. "More like second best."
They closed in around me. Hands found my waist, my arm, the hem of my dress. I stepped back.
"Get your hands off me," I said.
"What's the rush, moonflower?" one of them purred.
A manager's voice cut through. "Room 702, now. Move."
They spat and scattered. I smoothed my dress and walked toward the corridor. My dress and hair were messy. I could feel the sting of their eyes following me.
I caught my face in the mirror outside the private rooms. My reflection looked small and wrong under the salon light.
"Helena," I murmured to myself.
I had a face people called an angel's face. Pale skin. A small mouth. Eyes that looked like they could get lost. People kept saying I looked like someone else—someone named Jia, a woman Guillermo Brennan had loved. I had learned to live inside that shadow. The world had a place for a look like mine. It paid my rent. It kept me safe.
Then I saw him.
Guillermo Brennan sat on a leather chair, legs crossed, cigarette between his fingers. Black suit. Gold-rimmed glasses. He looked like rich things should look. His eyes sliced through the dim. My heart dropped.
"Mr. Brennan." I tried for calm.
He looked at my white dress. He looked at me. His face hardened.
"Why are you wearing white?" he asked.
My breath hitched. I knew then I had stepped into a line I was not supposed to cross.
"I—" I began.
"Take it off."
The word landed like a cold slap. I looked around. People were watching. My hands flew to the zipper at my back.
"Stop," a new voice said. "Don't make her."
I looked back. Ezra Michel stood in the doorway with a casual smile and a light jacket. He was big in our world — a movie star, a man who could silence a room by stepping in. He was the kind of pretty that had more trouble staying away than staying.
"Ezra," I breathed.
He moved closer, light in his voice. "White dress? Really? Sit. Tonight's my night."
Guillermo stood. He moved like a shadow. "Go out for air," he said, calm as ice.
Ezra laughed. "Truth or dare? Dare, obviously."
They pulled cards. The card read: kiss any woman in the room for one minute.
"Ezra, pick me," several women begged.
Ezra scanned. His eyes stopped on me. "Helena," he said. "Come here."
"No," I said. I meant to leave.
"Come on. It's just a game."
He took my wrist and laid me down on the couch like a gentle thief. The room hummed. People shouted. Someone started filming.
"Helena, aren't you going to play?" Ezra asked, half joke, half command.
"Ezra, I..." My voice shook. I was not ready.
He kissed the corner of my mouth. It was soft and staged and cruel. The cameras rolled. The room roared approval.
When the kiss ended, the room was louder. Someone cheered. A dozen phones glinted.
From the doorway, Guillermo watched. I saw the color leave his face. He moved like a dark machine and grabbed me.
"You're done for the night," he said.
Someone clapped. Someone whistled. Ezra smiled, fingers brushing his lips.
Outside the club, Guillermo pushed me against the wall and tore off my dress.
"Why the white?" he asked, voice low.
"It was not—" I tried.
"Take it off," he ordered.
I froze, red with shame and cold with fear.
Someone's hand stopped me. A small refuge. Ezra's palm was there, warm on my wrist.
"Don't," he said quietly.
Guillermo's hand tightened on my chin. "How many have you been with?"
"It was just a bit of acting," I said. "Please."
He dragged me to the bathroom and turned on the sink like he would wash a plate. He forced water on my mouth until it burned. He held my head underwater until my lungs begged.
"You're dirty," he said when he pulled me out. "You think men won't see."
I coughed. The basin kept spitting the water. He watched me like I had failed him. He walked me back to the bedroom and pushed me onto the bed. He kissed my neck, then my face. He called a name that was not mine.
"Jia," he breathed.
I was supposed to be his. He had told me—at the beginning—that we would keep things simple. We would not talk about love. We would be two people on paper. But his hands told a different story. The way he held me was a test. The way he hurt me was control.
"You're mine," he said. "Do you hear me?"
"Yes." I lied.
Later, as the sun found the windows, he sat across from me and lit a cigarette.
"Take the pill," he said, blunt.
I swallowed what he gave me. I had learned to do what he said. I had learned to pretend. In the quiet, I thought about what it would be to be my own.
A few days later, the city buzzed with a new face. Aurora Matthews smiled like she owned a stage. She had the kind of fragile boldness that fit a man with money and taste. She looked like Jia in a way that made Guillermo's face soften into the expression people wore when they saw things they loved.
"Helena," Ezra said to me later, "look who won the casting."
He tossed me a photo. Aurora held a script in her hands and a man in a suit in the background.
"Is that her?" I said.
"It is," Ezra said. "And lucky her. She's already under his wing."
I called Guillermo. His voice was flat. "I'm at work."
From his side of the phone, a breathy voice answered, like a silk curtain being pulled. "Guillermo?" It was Aurora, and she laughed like she had stolen something.
"You're not my wife," I said.
"You never were," he said and hung up.
The industry kept turning. Ezra handled the mess the way a man like him could — he bought the footage from the phones and paid to keep the worst away.
"You didn't do anything wrong," he told me. "They made it look like this. You walked in and you did what you were told."
"I was trying to fix it," I said. "I thought if I smiled, it would stop."
Ezra looked at me like someone looking at a broken thing.
"You are not a thing," he said. "You have to stop letting them decide you."
I laughed, a dry sound. "Easier said."
That night, Guillaume and Aurora strolled into view like stage actors. He signed papers. He smiled like a man who had broken something and then bought a new one.
"He's choosing her," Ezra said softly.
"He's choosing who he loves," I said.
Ezra studied me. "You care for him."
"I thought I did," I admitted.
"Because he looks like Jia."
"Yes," I said. "He does."
Then my life tilted in a new direction. On the set for our period drama, I was assigned to help the camera team. The author-producer Declan Bryant came by, a quiet man with a calm face and hair that fell into his eyes. He had rescued a small white cat that followed me back to his hand. He had found it earlier, meowing under a van.
"Is it yours?" I asked.
"It likes you," he said. "It might pick you."
He had soft eyes that stayed calm even when the set was loud. He was not a man of grand statements. He saved me once in a stairwell from a director with a hand that stayed too long on my shoulder. He stepped between us and said my name like a promise.
"Are you okay?" he asked.
I nodded. My voice was small. "Thanks."
He smiled. "Sit with me a while."
Over days, the cat — called Snow — wrapped itself around our feet. Declan brought lemon ice and red bean cakes, little things that fit inside my palm.
"Helena, you don't look like the rest of them," Declan told me once as we watched the sea from the location. "You look like someone who belongs in quiet."
"What's that supposed to mean?" I asked.
"That you don't belong to anyone who uses you as a mirror," he said.
I held my breath. His words were small but heavy. The set hummed. Declan kept giving me these small, necessary gifts. When they tried to push me onto a director's lap with a laugh, he got up and claimed me as if by right.
"I said she stays," Declan said.
Later, in a corridor, Guillermo found us. He watched Declan hold my hand. For a long second, two tall men stood facing each other, both with the same kind of cool, the same kind of dangerous calm. Declan smiled like sunlight on water.
"She's with me," Declan said, like it was the hardest thing he'd ever said.
Guillermo scoffed. "You think a writer can keep what's mine?"
Declan's voice was soft. "You can keep what you buy. Not what she gives."
Guillermo's jaw tightened and then he took me away. He was never content to lose. He made me sit on the edge of a pool that belonged to his villa and watched him parade another woman inside the water. He told me to watch how a man was happy without me.
"Watch," he said. "This is what you missed."
I watched. My skin went cold. The pool water hit her hair and beads slid down his shoulders. I looked and felt all the old hunger for his approval slip away into anger.
"I don't want this," I told him later.
"Then leave."
"How?" My voice shook.
He took out his phone. "You will lose everything. Your cameras, your access, your small place here. You will be just a shadow again."
I thought about the nights he had filled with words that made me small and the times he had made my mouth taste of other men's hands. I thought about Declan, who had pressed a cake into my hand and smiled like it mattered. I thought of Ezra, who had taken off his shoes to carry me across a puddle like a fool. I thought of my own face in the mirror — hollowed out from pretending to be someone else.
The day after the pool, I ran.
I packed a single bag and left my apartment. I walked out while the city slept, clutching the camera bag Declan had given me. I went to a small hotel two blocks from the studio and cried until the water hurt.
Declan found me there.
"You left," he said, sitting on the bed beside me.
"I had to," I said. "I couldn't be his mirror anymore."
He took my hands. "Then come with me. I'm leaving the city next week. I want you to go with me."
I looked at him. "Where?"
"A small town by the sea. Quiet. No mirrors. Just a house and a cat and me."
It felt like a promise. I wanted to believe it.
"Will you be okay?" I asked.
His eyes were steady. "I will be better if you're there."
I stayed.
The first months were soft. Declan taught me to make tea the way his grandmother had taught him, to buy lemons at market, to make photos of things that didn't need to be fixed. He read to me at night. When he talked about the book he was writing, his voice rose like a slow music. He spoke of memory and loss and how stories stitch people back together.
One evening, as the light leaked through the curtains like warm honey, he turned to me.
"Helena," he said, "there's something I need to tell you."
I braced myself.
"I wasn't always Declan Bryant," he said quietly.
I blinked. "What do you mean?"
He held my hand tighter. "I had a name once that I can't quite remember fully. I was in another country for a long time after an accident. I lost pieces. I used to be someone else. I used to be—" He stopped. His eyes filled in the oddest way. "I used to have memories that I think came back wrong."
My heart thudded. "What are you saying?"
He smiled without humor. "I think the face you loved — the one in your dreams — might be me. Or I might be him. I don't know yet."
I thought of the man Guillermo used to love. I thought of the way Declan's hands fit mine like they had been made for me. I thought of the letters I had once written in my head to someone whose name I did not know.
"Do you mean... you might be him?" I asked, voice small.
"I might be," he whispered. "I found things in an old travel bag. A coin from a town by the sea. A card with his handwriting. I have a scar on my wrist like an old map. People say I look like him. I don't remember enough to be sure."
I reached for his face. It was warm and real and familiar in a way that made the world slow. "Do you want to find out?"
He kissed me like the answer.
We searched. He dug into old files. He called doctors. He checked a name, then another, and then again. As we sifted through the past, something slipped into place like a lost photograph in a frame.
"Helena," he said one night, breathless. "I remember a song. The melody. And a small apartment with a mirror. There was a woman who left a lemon cake on a table."
My head spun. "My lemon cake."
He looked at me with something like recognition. "I think I loved a woman who loved lemon cakes."
I laughed, a sudden helpless sound. "You remember that."
He held my face like he would never let go. "I think I'm him."
We did not know then if the world would accept it. But we had what mattered. He was here. He was warm and kind and he wanted me.
Guillermo married Aurora in the winter with cameras and champagne. The city said he had finally found his white rose. He sent a message once — a single line that said congratulations, with a photo of his wedding cake.
I sent back a photo of Declan and Snow and a lemon cake on a small table in a house with light in the windows.
"Does it hurt?" Ezra asked me once.
"To see him be happy with another?" I said.
"Yes."
He sat beside me in a café, tired and oddly gentle. "You didn't deserve what he did to you."
"You think?" I said.
"I think he's afraid of things he can't control," Ezra said. "And you are not a thing."
The last day on set, the director clapped. The team hugged. Aurora waved and Guillermo clapped with a smile like nothing would ever crack. I packed my camera and a small pile of memories.
Declan knelt by my side. "Will you marry me?" he asked then, in front of a handful of friends and the cat and the sea we would call home.
My throat closed. It was not a question about Besitz or rings. It was a vow to stay with someone who had offered me tenderness when the world had offered threats.
"Yes," I said.
We married quietly. The town smelled like salt and lemon and warm bread. My old life felt like another world, one I had visited and left behind. Declan told me a story once about a man who lost himself in another country's night and came back with eyes that looked like a memory. He said he had found himself in the shape of a small cat and a lemon cake and the way a woman laughed.
Years later, our house would be filled with the little things: a camera on the shelf, a cat on the couch, a small stack of books with my name in the covers. Declan would leave notes on the table about the next chapter. Sometimes he would remember a line of a poem he had written in another life, and I would hear the words like a dream I had already loved.
One night, after a long day and a quiet dinner, he traced the scar on my wrist and said, "I'm sorry I took so long."
I took his face in my hands. "It doesn't matter," I told him. "You came back."
"Will you wait for me again?" he asked, joking and serious at once.
"I already did," I said.
He pulled me into his arms, and the cat jumped up to complain about being left out.
Outside, the sea knocked at the rocks, the sky a thin pale smear. In the small window by our kitchen, a single lemon tree rustled in the night. We had what I had always wanted: a person who would notice. Not a mirror. Not a shadow. Not a substitute.
"Are you happy?" Declan asked softly as we sat on the porch.
I breathed in the salt and the lemon and the small warm weight of his hand.
"I am," I said. "I am finally happy."
He smiled, and for a moment I could see a flash of someone else in him—the same face that had once been like a memory. He covered my hand with his and held it like someone holding a map he had finally read.
"I'll keep you safe," he said.
"You already have," I said.
He kissed me then, the kind of kiss that meant home. The stars came out above us, indifferent and kind.
I had been a substitute for a long time. I had learned how to be what someone else wanted. But now I had a life that belonged to me. I had a man who remembered small things I liked and kept them like treasure. I had a house that smelled of lemon and tea.
When I look back, I think of the nights at Night Jade, of white dresses torn and dreams sold. I think of screaming into pillows. I think of Ezra's sharp laugh and Declan's steady hands. I think of the moment I stepped into the sea and decided not to let a mirror define me.
"In the end," Declan said once as he jammed a lemon tart into my mouth, "you were never a substitute."
I smiled. "I was always me."
And that was the whole story.
The End
— Thank you for reading —