Sweet Romance13 min read
The Honey Water, the Photo, and the Wedding That Didn’t Happen
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I woke up to the smell of honey and a man’s breath on my neck.
"Stay with me forever, okay?" Lucas said, his voice thick, his face tiny against my collarbone.
I hugged him because my heart wanted to. I held him because everything in me was soft for the moment.
Then his pocket buzzed.
"Who is it?" I asked, already knowing.
He pulled away, thumbed the screen, and answered, "I already got her home, don’t worry."
"It’s not a joke," the message read. "Think about it. Marriage isn’t a game."
I watched Lucas look at the messages and say, "I’ll call you back," and I felt the air go thin.
That afternoon he sent me a text. "Baby, sorry. Overslept."
I wrote back, "I left honey water for you. Drink it."
Then I saw his post.
A photo of a glass of honey water on the kitchen counter, sunlight making it look like liquid gold. The caption: Who doesn’t have a wife I won’t say.
Underneath, his friends laughed the way men laugh about a private joke.
"Lucas is off the market," one wrote.
"Don’t be smug," another said.
"Wait until the certificate," someone cautioned.
And the very last message was from Jewel.
"Can we meet?"
Lucas replied, "Not convenient, sorry."
I read that little exchange three times and felt something lock in my chest.
I’d been with Lucas for three years. Two of them I held his hand while he healed from his last breakup. The last year he had been gentle, pulling me closer like he was trying to learn how to love me. His parents liked me. My parents liked him. We were scheduled to take our documents and get our certificate in three days.
"Are you sure you’re ready?" my mother had asked on the phone.
"Of course," I lied.
When Jewel asked to meet, I said yes because I couldn’t say no to my own heart or to what I needed to know.
"I look a lot prettier than before," she said as soon as we sat. She smiled the old smile that had once been the brightest thing in the lecture hall.
"You do," I said. I did not mean to be cold. I meant to be polite, to be the woman who has already learned to play certain music for other people’s moods.
Jewel stirred her coffee and looked at me like I was a puzzle.
"I still love Lucas," she said without preamble.
I choked on the word. "You—what?"
She took my hand. "I know it’s wrong. I left him to go abroad. He stayed. I realize my mistake. Can you give me a chance?"
"Why would I give you my boyfriend?" I asked, but the question sounded stupid even as the words came out.
"I went to see him last night," she whispered, "and he said he was going to be with you. He said he needed to be responsible to you."
I stood up. "You should tell him that."
She grabbed my arm. "Please, Mia. Please."
People in the coffee shop were staring. I pulled my arm back and walked out.
That evening we were supposed to be taking our official pre-marriage photos. Lucas called, "I have to go to the hospital. Jewel cut herself."
"Go," I said.
He left before I could feel anything, as if released.
Ross, my friend Hadlee’s brother and the man who ran a small photography company, looked at my face and raised an eyebrow. "Wedding canceled?" he asked, half a question.
"Something like that," I said.
Ross was trouble in a suit—handsome, dangerous, and the kind of man who’d say reckless things and then smile as if he hadn’t. He used to chase me in college. I always turned him down. After what happened with Lucas, Ross started showing up again like a map I could follow out of a maze.
"Want me to take the photos anyway?" Ross asked.
"No. I want to breathe."
"You’ll get those photos later. Eat," he told me and handed me a crepe.
"Thanks," I said. I ate like it was the last thing in the world.
Two months earlier, I had been the kind of quiet girl who loved books more than night outs. I’d watched Lucas and Jewel as a perfect couple in college, the bright couple everyone envied. Jewel went abroad. Lucas got a chance at a research team at home. They broke up. I watched Lucas drift for months. I wrapped myself around him in the broken hours and when he needed someone, I was there.
"You like me?" he asked one night, drunk and fierce.
"Yes," I said. It was the truth that began everything.
He kissed me then—not with the tenderness that belongs to lovers who had chosen each other—but with the force of someone grabbing a lifeline. I fell in love with the idea that I had become important to him.
"I’ll marry you," he said months later, and my heart leveled like a field.
But even when things were good, there was always an undercurrent. His friends teased him about his past. They sent him messages: Are you sure? Weddings aren’t forever for everyone. They pulled at him with the voices of people who had seen him with Jewel.
I wanted to be the woman who could stay. I tried to have faith.
The hospital call that night sent everything tilting. Lucas left, and when I saw him run out the door, my legs felt hollow. Ross slammed his palm lightly on the steering wheel and said, "You okay?"
"Not really."
He drove me to the hospital because it was what he did when something was broken. He often did things that were more than polite. He learned how I liked coffee and what kind of music made me breathe slower.
At the hospital, Jewel was pale and small in a white bed, holding a bandaged wrist.
"She did it for attention," I said flatly, but the nurse scolded Lucas for leaving someone alone. He stayed. He stayed because he had always stayed where someone needed him.
Later that night, I opened my phone and saw Jewel’s latest stories: a sleeping photo of her hand intertwined with a man’s; a caption that said, "My boyfriend is clingy, help." The photo was taken three hours earlier. It was blatant.
I wanted to hate her. I wanted to make her feel what I felt. I wanted Lucas to see how brazen she was.
"Use him," Ross said casually one night. "Use any mistake he made to wake him up. Make him see you."
"Like what?" I asked, my voice small.
"Live," he said. "Be loud in the things that were quiet. Let him find you gone."
So I started moving. I let Ross lead me to places I had never gone: a karaoke room at dawn, a fishing trip at sunrise, the kind of loud, small adventures that patch holes where someone else’s care had failed. Ross laughed and braced the world with me. He would take a photo at just the right moment—my hair in the wind, my laugh with my head thrown back—and send it where he wanted.
Lucas saw. His messages stopped being frequent. He appeared only when something from his old life flared up.
One evening he caught me with Ross by the car. He grabbed my arm.
"Stop," he said. "You can’t keep doing this."
"Doing what?" I asked, and the answer was simple and true.
"Seeing him."
"Since when do I need your permission to breathe?" I flung the words like stones.
Lucas tried to speak. Ross stepped closer. Ross smiled in that way he kept for when he wanted to make a point. He slid his hand into mine.
"Come on, Mia," Ross said. "Let’s go."
Lucas looked at us like he had been punched. "You’re with him?"
I felt suddenly reckless. I allowed Ross to draw me closer and kissed him lightly on the cheek, not to prove anything, not even to thrill, but because I wanted to feel solid against someone who was present on my side.
"You used to love her," I said to Lucas quietly. "You used to love that memory."
His face went white then flushed red. He tried to gather something like an argument and found only apologies.
"It’s not that," he said. "I told her nothing."
"Then why did you run to her? Why did you leave your fiancée at home?"
That night I slapped him—hard, clean—and left. The slap was a punctuation mark I had needed.
When I told Ross later, he hugged me and said, "Good. You finally had a line."
"You’re funny," I said, and he kissed the corner of my mouth like a priest blessing a small miracle.
I decided to stop being small. I told myself that if Lucas could not choose, then I would choose me.
During the weeks before our scheduled trip to the registry office, Lucas grew distant. He claimed he was busy at work, he had meetings, a conference. But his posts kept showing up in Jewel’s feed. She posted the kind of photos that invited the world to look—the sort of photos that carry signals and flags. They left comments and hearts like small knives.
The day before our appointment, I went to our place to try on the shirt I'd planned to wear for the official photos.
He was there, lounging with a glass of whiskey, the end of the week slack on his shoulders.
"My friends are forcing a party," he said, and when I smiled at him like a simple thing, he laughed and pulled me close. He promised he would be back.
He didn't come back.
At three in the morning I woke to the echo of the kitchen. The one place in our apartment where he had left a photograph for me—glass with honey water in it, the gold light—was on social media earlier that evening. I opened his friend’s posts and found the jokes. It felt like a rip, not of fabric but of something from the inside.
The next day I packed a small bag and walked out.
"Where are you going?" my mother asked when I told her.
"To my life," I said.
I sent a simple message to Lucas before I left: "We need to talk."
He called. "Mia, listen—"
"Don't," I said. "I don't want to be the reason you stop living a half-life. If you want Jewel, go. If you want me, show me without other people's help."
He stuttered and promised things and then asked for time. I gave him none.
I booked an appointment at the registry office anyway—no papers, no formalities, just a seat by the window where I could watch the courthouse life and feel the air that promised different things.
"Why the registry?" Ross asked, half bewildered, half proud.
"Because that's where they would sign," I said. "And the people they love might show up."
Ross's eyes softened. "You want witnesses?"
"Yes," I said. "And a camera."
We planned a quiet kind of confrontation, the one that would be public enough for the truth to be seen but private enough for me not to feel like I’d lost myself. Ross would be there with his camera. Hadlee would stand by me. My parents would not come. Lucas and Jewel would—if they were committed to the final act—show their faces.
On the morning of what would have been our registration, I walked to the civil affairs building in a dress Ross said made me look like sunlight. He carried his camera like a soldier carries a sword.
"Ready?" he asked.
"Always," I replied.
We arrived early. The registrar’s office smelled of varnish and paper. Couples in neat suits laughed quietly as they waited their turns. An old man sat with a thick stack of documents. A young woman checked her reflection in a compact. The room was ordinary and human, like a waiting room for promises.
Ross took a picture of me near the window. "Keep breathing," he whispered.
"Why so dramatic?" I whispered back.
"Because this matters," he replied.
At the appointed hour, Lucas arrived. He looked like someone who had been pulled awake. Jewel followed, clutching her wrist, the hospital bandage still visible. She made the faintest of cries on seeing me.
Lucas’s face changed when he saw me. Confusion, then guilt, then a dawning panic.
"What are you doing here?" he asked.
"I thought I'd stop by to return the honey water," I said. "And pick up my certificate."
"You’re joking," he said. "We—"
"Don't," I said. "Sit down."
Jewel's eyes landed on me with a kind of animal calculation. "Mia," she said. "I didn't want to—"
"You intentionally cut yourself to pull him back," I said, each word like a clean coin. "You posted pictures of him in your stories and called it 'clingy boyfriend.' You wanted him to find his way home."
"No, that's not—" Jewel tried to laugh it away. "It's not like that."
Ross stepped forward and clicked the camera once. "Do you want me to show them the timeline?" he asked.
Lucas looked at him and then at Jewel and then at me. "You have no proof."
"I do," I said. I lifted my phone and showed the messages. There were photos with timestamps. There were comments. There were hospital receipts with the wrong times that matched the photos. I had Ross’s timestamps for the photos he had taken when he and I had been out. I had messages from Lucas's friends urging him to think. I had Jewel's message asking me to meet. The proof was not a verdict but a map.
The room grew quieter. A woman in line stopped chewing her gum. A clerk folded his hands and leaned forward.
"Is this—do you want to make a complaint?" the registrar asked, uncertain.
"I want them to see," I said. "I want Lucas to see what he let happen while I stayed quiet. I want Jewel to see how visible she was."
Lucas's face hardened. "You set this up," he accused.
"No," I said. "You made the choice to run into her arms. You made the choice to leave me."
Jewel stood, and the bandaged wrist trembled. "He's mine," she said, then tried to smile. "We were together."
Ross pressed his camera into my hand. "Show them the posts," he said.
I scrolled. There was Jewel’s story, the photo of a sleeping man with the caption. There were screenshots of her messages. There was a conversation where she wrote, I need him to be mine tonight. There were my messages: I left honey water. Drink it. And Lucas's reply to her, Not convenient, sorry, and then later, when he left me at the photoshoot, Sorry, she needs me.
A woman waiting at the counter gasped. A young man pointed his phone at us and whispered to his friend. "Is that the girl in the wedding dress?" he asked.
"Play the hospital audio," Ross said quietly, and I did. The nurse's voice, Lucas asking for the ward, a clerk giving numbers, all the sounds arranged like witnesses.
Lucas staggered as if struck.
"No," he said. "This is a setup."
"Lucas," I said, my voice calm but loud enough for the room to hear, "why did you go?"
"I had to," he whispered.
"For what?" I demanded. "For what reason did you leave me standing there with the white shirt?"
People were beginning to record. The woman with the gum had stopped chewing. The clerk at the desk put down his pen.
Jewel's face shifted through a dozen colors—smug, frightened, defiant, then collapsing into pleas.
"Please," she began. "Please don't—"
"Don't what?" I asked. "Don't what? Make you look like the martyr you are not?"
"She provoked him," Jewel said, pointing at me. "She went with other men, she was flaunting—"
A chorus of small voices rose. "Video her!" someone said. "You're being cruel," another muttered. A couple whispered, "This is awkward."
I drew myself taller. "I never flaunted, Jewel. You posted staged photos to make him pity you. You staged a crisis."
"That's a lie!" Lucas cried suddenly. He had been quiet, his hands curled into fists. "You—she kept pushing me away and I—"
"You left," I said. "You left before this became real."
Lucas’s denial broke like glass. "I'm sorry," he said finally. "I'm sorry, Mia."
People around us reacted. A young woman in a coat murmured, "How could he do that?" A man shot a video and laughed nervously. Hadlee stood beside me and gripped my arm, her face hard as flint.
Jewel began to cry theatrically. "He never told me to go," she wailed. "He stayed with me. He said he'd help."
"Where?" I asked. "Where were you when he said he'd marry me?"
Silence pressed at Lucas. He looked like someone who had discovered he was naked in public.
Then things changed fast.
A woman at the counter stood and said, "My sister's an ER nurse. She said a girl came in with a cut wrist last night at 9 PM and the timestamp shows it's 11 PM now in her post. We don't take ‘marginal’ injuries. Why would you post it as proof of devotion?"
Another man said, "If you wanted to be with someone, why post the time and tag him? That looks like a plea, not love."
Around us, phones were up, videos were being recorded. People whispered and pointed. The tiny room had become a small arena.
Jewel's smile had drained. Her pleas turned brittle. "I—I'm sorry. I didn't mean—"
"You faked a crisis," I said. "You wanted sympathy. You dragged a hospital into your drama. You used his kindness as a trophy."
"That's not—" Jewel stopped as a woman in line called out, "You are pathetic."
The registrar, who had been neutral, tapped his bell. "This is not what the registry does," he said in a voice meant to be calm. "If you have complaints, you can take civil steps."
But civil steps are slow. For my purposes, the registry room was enough. In public, with the camera light making faces sharper, everything looked truer.
Jewel's expression collapsed. She began to flail: "You're lying! He still loves me! He told me—"
"Lucas," I said, quiet now, the way a tree might be quiet before a storm breaks, "do you love me?"
He hesitated. He looked like he wanted to reach for me and then did not. "I thought I did," he said. "I thought I could—"
"You thought," I repeated. "I don't want to be your thought."
That snapped something clean.
Jewel sobbed and stumbled away toward the door. Her face was streaked with mascara. Lucas did not follow. He stood there, looking suddenly older than his years.
A woman in the corner clapped slowly. It was sarcastic then real applause as others joined in unseen ways. People murmured, "Good for her," "Finally she said it," "About time."
Jewel turned and tried to lunge toward me, to make one last melodramatic scene, but the crowd kept its distance, and she found the door hard and cold.
The registrar asked if I needed help. "No," I said. "Thank you."
We walked out into the sun. Ross took my hand and squeezed.
"How do you feel?" he asked.
"Like I swallowed a lemon," I said, and then I laughed, a short dry sound, because it was true. I felt lighter.
The video footage of the registry room spread, like a small wind. A hundred strangers had watched a private thing become visible; they had watched a person stand in her own skin and speak.
Jewel and Lucas were not arrested; they were not put in court. They were punished by the sharpest thing that can happen to two people who pretend: public clarity. People who watched them turn away. People who shook their heads. People who whispered and saved the video.
For Jewel the change was quick. She had planned crises as a way to cage a man. Now, in public, her theater failed. She had to face the faces of strangers who saw the trick. Her mask slipped, and for a long time she wore the look of someone forced to wear her own lies.
Lucas's punishment was slower. He had the kind of shame that comes from being seen indecisive. He tried to apologize, then tried to explain, then tried to run. Each attempt failed under the public lens.
That afternoon, messages from friends poured in: "I cannot believe he did that," "Do you want me to throw away his suits?" "Come over." My phone filled with offers of comfort and photos Ross had taken of me, candid and alive.
That night, at my apartment, I looked at our honey glass photo. I thought of the registry room, of the way the sunlight had landed on the table and made an ordinary thing glow. I deleted Lucas's contact.
Ross sat beside me, his camera bag on the floor, his fingers warm.
"I told you," he said, soft.
"You did," I answered.
He kissed my forehead like it was a promise.
Days later, people still stopped me to ask, "Are you okay?" and I began to say, "I am," and mean it.
We did not get a certificate. We did not stand in a civil affairs window together. Lucas and Jewel’s story became a small cautionary tale among the friends who had known us.
Ross and I—our story—was not an instant fix. He was not the white knight who took away pain with a single gesture. He was a man who listened, who offered a hand and then took mine. We took photos; we traveled; we fought like people who test the edges of trust. We had moments where we were sweet and clumsy and honest.
At the end, I kept one small, private ritual.
"Drink your honey water," Ross would say, and I would sip, thinking of sunlight on glass and of the day the registry room watched me claim my life back.
The End
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