Sweet Romance12 min read
Red Petals, Blue Ring — I Learned the Plot
ButterPicks19 views
I woke up to red petals and a body I did not recognize as mine.
“You’re trembling,” he said, voice a husk of wine and winter. “Let me help you.” His palm was too large around my fingers. His breath smelled of something dark.
“I—” I swallowed down a world I had rehearsed in another life. “I don’t belong here.”
“Miles,” he corrected softly, smiling as if I were the fragile thing to be treasured. “My name is Miles Ramirez. You’re my wife now. Be quiet, Faith. Be my wife.”
My name had not been Faith Kuenz in that other life, but I had memorized every cruel sentence of the novel that folded me into its pages. I had escaped once before—through patience, through a year of careful, invisible maneuvering. I had fought to be free of Joel Torres, of my father’s hands, of the scripts other people wrote for me. I thought I had won.
I was wrong. My father Bryant Schmitt had sold me again.
“You were bought,” I told Miles the second night, voice thin. “My father sold me. He—he took money and names and he handed me to you.”
Miles cocked his head as if listening to something only he could hear. He laughed once, short and dangerous. “Who told you that?”
“My—my father. He’s a gambler. He—”
“You lie like the rest.” He bent his face to mine. There was hunger and something like tenderness, the two so close they were indistinguishable. “Don’t make trouble tonight, Faith. You’re mine now.”
I let the lie hang between us. I could not afford to shout at him then. I needed air. I needed time. I needed the book’s margins and the old narrator’s mistakes. I would not be the naïve woman who vanished in the original story. I would become the woman who controlled the page.
“I’ll be quiet,” I whispered. “But I will not be owned.”
He kissed my forehead and called me “my baby,” and I learned his habits: the way his anger came like a storm, the way his soft hands soothed himself afterwards, the way he cooked as if it were a prayer. I learned the palette of his moods until they stopped being random and became predictable. I learned to hide little weapons: a cheap phone, a rented spy’s help, the patience of a woman who had already died to one life.
“Open the door,” he told me the afternoon after the marriage, and he helped me into a red dress as if by dressing me he could cover the bruise of what had happened. He untied my shoe with his thumb and kissed the back of my ankle. “You look like a painting,” he said.
I let myself be touched like a thing, but I also watched his face when he thought I was asleep. Those moments—his clumsy way of knocking over a glass and then slapping two hands over the sound, his midnight baking that filled the house with something warm—were not weaknesses to exploit. They were truth. They were why I felt myself pausing between hate and pity. They were the dangerous reasons he would be difficult to hate forever.
“You shouldn’t leave the house alone today,” he said on my third morning as his phone vibrated with someone named Mark Lee.
“Why not?” I asked, because in the book I had left and everything fell apart.
“Because I said so,” he said, not smug but sore. “You’re my wife.”
That night I pretended to be sleepy; I let him tuck the blanket over my knees with the reverence of someone who tended a wound.
“You are very stubborn,” Miles murmured. He kissed my knuckles. “You’re the only stubborn thing in my life that keeps me human.”
That was one of the small traps he fell into: he believed that I was someone to protect. It made him careless.
I had studied the old plot so closely I could have recited its sins backward. There was the scandal: a photograph, a kiss taken out of context, a video clipped and sold. There were the people who wanted me gone—Joel Torres chief among them—because he had once loved me as his prize and now wanted to turn that ownership into rage. There was my father, Bryant, who trusted the wrong friends and the gnawing of cards and dice more than he trusted me. There was also Miles, a man who could be terrifying and tender in the same breath.
I decided to turn the story’s arrows back at its authors.
“Who are you calling?” I asked when Miles handed me his phone one afternoon. He had asked me—almost gently—to do it. He wanted me to answer for him, to show him how I would handle the world outside his house.
“An actress.”
He blinked, trying to read me. “Are you being honest, Faith?”
“At least I’ll be tired of the act if I must act,” I said. “Take me to the university parade tonight. I have things to do.”
I took small victories every day. I saved more than money: I caught a whisper, a rumor, a charge of debt, a legal name. I hired Sebastian Vang, a private investigator whose eyes were as sharp as his fingers. Sebastian wore thrift-shop blazers and smelled like coffee and pity and he did what I asked: he followed my father, he watched the men who gathered at night in the rooms where cards fell like promises.
“You’re sure about this?” Sebastian asked in low tones over a café table. He put his palm over mine. “You know what you’re doing.”
“I know enough,” I said. “And if I’m wrong, I’ll have learned my lesson.”
“You’re not wrong,” he said. “Not yet.”
We planted seeds: a fake date, a misfiled photo, a fake invitation to the alumni gala that would make the old power circles gather. I wanted the stage to be full of witnesses when the trap closed.
The first heart-stopping moment came in the kitchen when Miles made me coffee because I did not know how to wake up properly.
“Do you take sugar?” he asked.
“No,” I answered.
He frowned. “Then why do you look like summer?”
He did not intend it as a compliment wrested from a man who had no practice praising, and I should have laughed. Instead my throat tightened and I swallowed the sweetness down like a pill. My hands shook when he offered me the small spoon.
“That day he cooked for me,” I wrote afterward, “I felt something my body almost forgave him for. It was not love. It was the small, desperate hope that a man could be both monster and a paradox.”
The second gentle moment happened on the afternoon I almost panicked at the pharmacy. I had forgotten the timing of the emergency pill after the wedding night. I pretended not to care as I reached for the box, as Knox Zheng—the driver who always looked larger than life and softer than a battlehorse—gently closed the car door and drove off.
“You okay?” he asked from the front seat.
“Yes,” I lied.
“You don’t look like you.”
“I’m fine,” I said.
He drove faster than usual, and when he pulled up at our doors, Miles was there. He looked at me like I had grilled the sun, and without a word he took the box from my hand and put the warmest thing he had near me: his jacket.
I kept the jacket. I kept the blue ring he would later slip onto my finger in public, the sapphire catching light like a secret we both pretended was mine to keep.
“I’m sorry,” he said that night, plucking at my hair like a child. “I’m sorry for the things I don’t mean and for the things I do.”
I nearly told him what I had planned. Instead I said, “Cook for me again tomorrow.”
This was what the novel never wrote: that love in these stories is not always simple vengeance or simple devotion. Sometimes you use affection as armor, sometimes you are armed by it.
I built a list of things to expose. Bryant Schmitt—my father—had enemies: men who had been scorned when his gambling turned violent. Joel Torres—my former lover—had built a monster of his pride and then been rejected. They were both eager and ready for scandal. My role was not to destroy them in private. I would pull their heads into the light and leave them to the things that hurt more than punches: humiliation, the scorn of peers, the sudden collapse of influence.
The day of the gala came like a drumbeat. Students, alumni, patrons of art and business—everyone who mattered—sat in chandeliers and crystal, their voices a warm buzz. Miles arrived at my side, his suit tailored like armor, his face an expression of something between a pledge and a surrender.
“You look like a storm,” I said when he slid my shawl over my shoulders.
“You look like my reason to be decent,” he said. He placed the sapphire ring on my finger in public, a small ceremony that made cameras flare.
That ring would be my talisman.
The punishment I had planned had many parts: legal evidence, the private investigator’s notes, the audio files of my father’s threats, the ledger of bets and debts, and—most importantly—the recordings of Joel Torres in places where he thought he was private. I had Sebastian and Mark Lee—Miles’s lawyer—standing by, and I had the press feeding into the gala’s live stream. I had also arranged—quietly—that there would be a police presence when the truth rolled forward. I was careful. I was cruel. I needed the world to watch them fall.
When the lights dimmed and the gala’s host called for a symbolic “bridal dance,” I rose.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” I said, voice clean, the microphone cool in my palm. “Thank you for welcoming me into this strange and beautiful house. I have been called many things. Tonight I prefer to be honest.”
Miles’s hand tightened around my waist. He did not pull me down. He let me stand.
“If you will indulge a short interruption to the planned program,” I continued, “I would like to tell a story. It is mine and it is also the story of those who thought they could use me as a chess piece.”
A thousand eyes turned like lilies. Joel Torres’s smile moved, a brief shadow dropping over it. Bryant Schmitt’s face went white behind his jacket jewels. I played the first audio: my father’s voice, raw with money and menace.
“If you don’t send the money, girl, you won’t be worth the dirt under my boots,” the recording said. Camera phones recorded as his jaw dropped.
Someone in the crowd hissed. “Oh my God.”
“Is that true?” the moderator asked, voice wavering.
“That is my father,” I said. “He sold me. He told men I was a thing. He thought it was a contract.”
Bryant lurched to his feet, face a mask of practiced courage. “She’s lying,” he said. “What—what kind of daughter would—”
“—a daughter who never expected to own property in a city where men buy people like stock,” I answered. “You gambled my childhood. You sold my name to men who will not even remember it.”
I clicked the remote. The screen behind me flickered with the ledger: numbers, nights, private rooms. Reporters leaned forward. Someone shouted that the police had been called. The murmurs were thick as warm honey.
Joel stood then, fists white, trying to use the old outrage he had practiced for me. “You—” he began.
“I have evidence,” I said, smiling in a way I had not allowed myself in private. “Audio. Video. Witnesses. A ledger submitted to exemplary legal counsel. And you, Joel Torres, have a video where you—” I let the words hang like a blade.
He lunged. In that moment the gala shattered into chaos. Miles moved like a shadow, blocking Joel with a single motion so quick I did not know he had moved until it happened. Security closed in. Joel’s expression slipped between fury and the dawning horror of a man who realizes his script has been edited without his permission.
“Don’t touch me!” Joel screamed. “She’s insane!”
“Open your phone,” I said.
A stunned hush, and then: Sebastian’s phone projected the clip. Joel’s hand on my shoulder in a hotel corridor, whispered lines of promises, then a cruder voice of himself demanding compliance, bargaining like currency. The clip ended with Joel’s own laugh. The room filled with the sound of people recording, their fingers cameras and wicks of curiosity.
“Is that you, Joel?” the moderator asked, voice small.
“You can—” Joel sputtered and then his face crumpled. Privilege is brittle when it meets evidence.
Bryant’s chair scraped. He tried to plead, to laugh it off as a jest or a misheard phrase. “She’s unstable!” he barked. “This is a trick.”
I played the next audio: him threatening one of his debtors with a blade, his drunk voice promising ruin if the debt was not covered. The police at the back had been waiting for this: a search warrant, a swift movement of hands and badges. Men in suits who once raised their glasses to greet Bryant now stood back with fingers pressed to the radio.
The punishment was not a private verdict but a public unmaking. Cameras streamed it live. The gala’s chandeliers seemed to dim under the weight of the crowd’s attention as people recorded, reposted, whispered. Friends who had once smiled toward Bryant now looked away. Sponsors who had been photographed with Joel pulled their hands from his sleeve. The laughter in the room stopped and dissolved into a different sound: the clicking of phones, the whisper of shoes against marble as people left.
Bryant tried to speak again: “You don’t—” he started.
“You sold me.” I said. “You sold a daughter for chips and bills.”
He sank into his seat like a puppet with its string cut. The cameras found him refusing to meet the lens as a dozen reporters asked questions. Someone shouted, “How long have you been doing this?” and the call spread like spilled oil.
Joel, who had once imagined himself a god of petty triumph, stumbled backward as security handcuffed him—careful, procedural—so the public would know he was being treated as an accused, not an untouchable. The partygoers watched him become an ordinary man in the way that brilliance is sometimes eclipsed by shame. He tried to reach for his phone to delete something; an officer took it. He began to beg, voice thin and high: “Please—please—there’s been a mistake! You can’t—Faith, please—”
A voice near the front spoke for the room: “You did this. You chose this.”
There were people who wept as if mourning a fallen hero; there were those who applauded like avengers at a play’s end. It was ugly. It was justice. It was public—and that is what I wanted. I wanted the humiliation to burn like a bright brand so that the men who had thought themselves above consequence would feel the skin of their reputations peel away in public sight.
Joel’s face lost color. Bryant’s confidants left him standing alone with his checks and his shame. Cameras followed as officers led him and then Joel to the car. Reporters clustered, shouting questions that would be turned into headlines.
“Why did you do it?” one shouted to Bryant.
Bryant answered nothing. The camera caught him taking the first, helpless breath of a man who no longer had commerce to hide behind. The guests recorded everything. I watched their faces as my father and the man who had once loved me were reduced to human sizes—flawed, trembling, tiny.
It was not enough to have them taken away. That would have been tidy and cold. I wanted them to experience the human theater of disgrace. I wanted the men who had traded love for convenience to see how it felt when a whole world turned its face.
As the doors closed on the police car, a woman—an old acquaintance of Bryant—stepped forward and spat at his shoes. “You’re the worst kind of thief,” she said. The cameras caught that too. They recorded the look on Bryant’s face when a woman who had once smiled at him now had the power to spit. Joel cried, bargain-crying, for mercy; his old friends covered their faces. The guests clucked and filled their glasses as if they were trying to resurrect normalcy.
“You wanted a show,” Miles said softly at my side after the crowd had thinned. He brushed a strand of hair from my face. “You wanted to control the ending.”
“I wanted proof,” I said. “I wanted them to be seen.”
“Do you feel better?” he asked.
I looked at my father in that police car, at Joel whose name the cameras repeated like a wound. I felt three things: a hollowness, a fierce satisfaction, and a small, terrifying guilt. The guilt was not for what I had done, but for what it had required of me—masking myself in meals and soft touches until Miles believed in my fragility; holding his hand in public even as I tightened the rope on his enemies.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I know I’m less afraid.”
He folded me into his arms in the hallway of the emptied ballroom. He smelled of old tobacco and fresh linen. He kissed my temple like an apology. “Then that is enough for tonight.”
But the punishments did not end at the gala. Over the next weeks, the legal system did the rest—searches, indictments, bankruptcy filings. The tabloid that had once called me a kept woman now ran the headline: FATHER SURRENDERS TO GAMBLING CHARGES; FAMILY DEAL IN SHOCK. Joel Torres—whose arrogance had been the fuel for a younger me—was accused of harassment and blackmail; his business partners dropped him like ashes. I watched it all from the place I had carved for myself: the center of my life, under a lamp with my sapphire ring catching the light like an echo.
And Miles? He stayed. He stood at my shoulder at every hearing like a man who had learned a terrible, new patience. Sometimes he was rough and terrified, but then he would take my hand and in a whisper tell me something small—innocent—and the room would tilt toward normal.
“Do you remember the first day you cooked for me?” I asked him once in our small kitchen.
He smiled and poked the air as if testing the heat. “You told me my stew tasted like my fighting days.”
“You cried when you apologized to me,” I said.
He glanced down, embarrassed. “I still do, sometimes.”
“Then we are both terrible,” I said.
“No,” he corrected. “You are careful. You are brave.”
And that was the other secret: I was brave because I had no other currency left.
Weeks later, when the dust had fallen, we sat at a tiny table tiled in sunlight and shared a bowl of mushroom soup. He set a napkin across my lap. He folded the blue ring just once in his fingers, fingers callused where they had not been before.
“Faith,” he said quietly, “I cannot promise to be other than myself. I will make mistakes.”
“You already have,” I replied, “and you already did.”
He laughed like a man relieved of a burden, and the sound was a kind of forgiveness I had not expected from the person who had been the source of both my bondage and my safety.
Later, when the headlines stopped calling me names and began to call my father a specimen of the human condition that greed breaks, I packed a small bag and left the house for a week. I went back to the university, to the rooms where I had hidden my plans and taught two girls to dance in the half-light. I played my instrument while their feet cut arcs and made applause from strangers who had no interest in my painful history. I taught them one thing I had learned with the book still folded behind my ribs: power is loud, but it is also quiet. It is a ledger and a whisper and a sapphire ring and a photograph and patience.
When I returned, Miles had bought me a new keyboard after the old one—my old obsession—had been accidentally destroyed the night my temper broke in the city. He put his hands on my shoulders and said, “I bought it because you cried a lot that day.”
“I cried because I was tired,” I said.
“No,” he corrected, his thumb brushing the ring. “You cried because you wanted to be real.”
I smiled because sometimes the script rewrites itself not with thunder but with a man who learns to be kind at the exact second the world decides you must be cruel to survive.
The blue ring stayed on my finger.
I kept the red dress in the closet for a while. The petals that stained the bed were burned in the fireplace. The keyboard was replaced with a cheap one that was always missing keys. The sapphire still caught light in the morning and flattered my neck like a secret.
And the story—the book that had trapped me—wrote a different ending. Not a perfect one. Not a clean one. But a new one.
The End
— Thank you for reading —