Sweet Romance14 min read
The Night I Woke Up to the House I Didn't Own
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I woke up to a voice close to my ear and a scent that pulled at some raw place inside me.
"You're finally awake," she whispered.
I blinked, half-caught between sleep and memory, and the room swam into focus. The ceiling was a blur of moonlight and paper sliding blinds. I reached to push myself up and felt a soft weight against my back.
"This isn't Clyde," I thought.
"Who?" she asked, laughing softly into my skin.
The laugh pulled everything into place. The woman behind me—scented, deliberate, dangerous—was Lesly.
"Lesly?" I managed, pretending to wake, pretending the beer and the dark didn't have me stuck in a lie.
She pressed closer. "Clyde said two weeks away, remember? You used to be so curious when you were alone with me."
I tried to pull away; my mouth made no sound. "I—" I started.
"Shh." Lesly's breath was warm. "Don't ruin it with words."
Her hand slid down at my waist with a confidence that belonged to someone used to having men hush in front of her.
I froze.
"You always played dead when I came to you," she said. "Curious choice for a friend, Dell."
I tasted panic. "Lesly, you shouldn't—"
She cut me off with a look. "Clyde's away? Perfect. You look good when you pretend to sleep."
I clung to the room's shadow like a small raft. "Lesly, I can't."
"Can't what?" she purred. "Keep being delicious?"
Her fingers found the outline beneath my pants and the world reduced to pulse and breath.
I wanted to stop her with truth. I wanted to confess the guilt, set the boundary that had held our friendship like glass. Instead I lay mute, because the boundary had thinned like ice beneath a warm foot. I learned, in the small, terrible minutes that followed, how fast restraint can melt.
Her whisper became a dare. "Come on, Dell. You used to come to me first."
I don't remember exactly how I obeyed. I remember being overwhelmed, embarrassed, and—out of a rashness so human—complacently selfish. I remember skin and warmth and silence until a cough cut the dark.
The cough froze the room.
Two pairs of feet scuffed. Leslie bolted like she'd been struck. Someone cleared their throat at the foot of the bed.
"Clyde?" I thought.
"You're up early," said the voice, not Clyde's.
I felt the room shift. Lesly scrambled, her clothing a mess, and for a second moonlight carved her face into something I didn't know how to hold.
"It’s Dell!" she managed. "He's—he was sleeping. We were just—"
The man in the doorway laughed like someone who loved chaos more than sense. "Come on, Dell, we were supposed to keep drinking."
Clyde's laugh tricked me into standing. "You went out already?" he asked me, and worry threaded his voice.
I was still shaking. "Yeah. The train—"
Clyde, the same man who'd been my partner in deals and jokes, hugged Lesly like he owned her soft space. I wanted to tell Clyde then. I wanted to tell him what had happened on his bed. Instead I braided a lie and let it sit between us.
"Let's go eat," Clyde said. "Lesly, make something—"
"You go first," Lesly said, eyes dropping to me for one impossible second.
I left his apartment with my shirt half-buttoned, my guilt heavy as a wet coat.
The night hadn't ended. In kitchens and behind closed doors across that small apartment, a rhythm of desire sharpened my edges. Later, I hovered near the doorway as I heard them in the next room—Clyde and Lesly—entangled, and my body, traitorously, responded again.
"You're disgusting," I told myself. "You're a coward."
"Don't." The voice of my own shame was hoarse.
I walked out to get water and froze at the edge of the hallway, watching Lesly move in the kitchen for Clyde like an exacting star. She wore a thin robe that revealed the curve of her back. The sight fell into me like a small, dangerous stone.
"She wore nothing under that robe," I realized. "She isn't loyal. She was here when I thought —"
A laugh escaped me, and Lesly turned.
"Dell," she said, not surprised to find me. "You can't hide your interest."
"I wasn't hiding."
"Wasn't hiding," she echoed. "I saw you watching. I liked it."
I felt my face heat. "Lesly, this is wrong."
"It is," she agreed, and then kissed me like a verdict.
We went on like that—shame, heat, recklessness, then the careless reprieve of dawn.
Clyde returned the same week with a grin. "I told you I'd be back early," he said. "Big surprise."
I felt panic as the house hummed with normalcy. He talked about work and plans. He didn't know his apartment had been a stage.
"Lesly," Clyde said, "cook up what you promised."
She did, moving between the kitchen and the living room with a grace that wounded me.
Later, we sat down with wine, and Lesly looked at Clyde like a worshipper. "You came back early," she said. "That's lovely."
I forced a smile at the table. "I need to head home," I said.
"Stay," Clyde urged. "Enjoy tonight. You can sleep on the futon."
I stayed. I watched. I learned the way ordinary touch can become a battlefield.
That night in the kitchen, Clyde and Lesly passed sugar and bread. I passed my finger along the rim of the glass until I couldn't breathe.
"You're pale," Lesly said, leaning close. "Are you cold?"
"No," I lied.
She didn't press, but she caught my hand and squeezed, the way someone might praise a hidden bruise.
The next weeks were a blur. Business calls, meetings, dinners. I lost track of lines. I told myself I was a man with needs. I told myself that Clyde's relationship had been rocky. I told myself everything that tried to justify what I couldn't justify in daylight.
Then, a buzzer at my phone cut into a different rhythm.
"Dominick?" I answered.
"Yes, Dell, come to my office," said the deep voice I always trusted to mean business. "We need to finish our deal."
Dominick Blair was a man who kept things tidy, as if order itself were a currency. He was the sort of boss who smiled and used silence to test you.
At Dominick's office, his secretary was Lana Mason. "She's efficient," Dominick said as if that explained her. "You'll find her helpful."
Lana sat straight-backed across from me, papers neat. She glanced up like a curtain drawing aside. Something in her eyes was keen and closed at once.
"Let's begin," Lana said, and the work we did turned fast and sharp.
She listened in a way that made me feel seen, like a knife of focus. We traded ideas until the room felt like a battlefield where intelligence was a kind of flirtation.
"How do you normally approach this?" Lana asked.
"With numbers and stubbornness," I said. "What about you?"
"With angles people miss," she said. "And a good memory."
She laughed soft when Dominick left the room to take a call, and that laugh made me want to test borders.
"I'm leaving," I told her finally. "Dinner?"
She frowned. "Are you asking me out?"
"Is that allowed?" I grinned.
"Only with a proposal you can justify," Lana replied.
We ate at a small place Dominick recommended, the kind of local restaurant that kept old recipes in jars behind the bar. Brad Morris, the owner, greeted us like family. The night smelled of grilled meat and cheap wine.
We spoke until the lights dimmed. Lana told a story about a childhood memory and I found my attention captured like an insect in amber. There was a moment when her hand brushed mine; the city around us absentmindedly recalculated.
"Let's go for a walk," she said.
The walk became part of a weave. The dark made people generous with secrets. Lana was different—calm and deliberate. When she stepped closer to me beneath a streetlamp, I felt the same old pull.
"You do this to everyone," she said.
"Do you mean seduce?" I tried.
"No. This curiosity. You smell of risk." She smiled. "It intrigues me."
"That sounds like a warning."
"Or a challenge."
We stood on the pavement, and I knew I'd been saved and undone in one breath.
Weeks later, a scene I never expected took place in that same house where Clyde thought he had steadiness. One night, I walked in on Lesly and Clyde in a near-ritual embrace. I expected to be jealous; instead I felt something more complicated than shame—like I had been stripped of the one secret I allowed myself.
Lesly's eyes flicked to me. She moved like a rehearsal. Clyde laughed like oblivion.
I left, but the night burned into my hands. I had been a traitor and the traitor had been seen. Some secret must be kept—mine.
I tried to stop. I tried logic, work, anything. But sex is a poor judge of morality. It only cares for the moment. And moments came: Lana's careful touch, Lesly's daring, Jacqueline's (Clyde's sister) unexpected arrival. Jacqueline Gustafsson was public-facing and poised; she wore the kind of charm that made people lean forward to listen. Her laughs were precise, her opinions sharper than a jeweler's knife.
One evening, after a business dinner, I found Jacqueline alone and unguarded in a hallway. We spoke of nothing, and then of everything, and then the world folded.
I will not give you a page-by-page confession of every lapse. Tell this part as you must: desire met idle time and we slid into one another. No one’s just one thing. We are brittle and beautiful in equal measure.
Months passed in a series of small disasters. Work got done. Deals closed. Dominick smiled and joked, thinking the world simple. Brad Morris recommended dishes and joked about scandals he never wanted. Clyde remained sincere, a man who believed in loyalty even when it cost him nothing. And Lesly—Lesly was a woman of appetite.
Then the house filled with whispers.
"Did you see them together?" someone would say.
"It's ridiculous," others claimed.
The little town lives on gossip like bread.
I thought I could keep this all in a pouch and hoard it for myself. I was wrong.
One evening at a birthday party for Clyde, we all gathered to laugh and to drink. The room was full—neighbors, friends, colleagues. Dominick, ever the unerring machine of charisma, toasted to luck. Brad brought extra sake. Wine spilled in polite arcs; someone cheered; someone cried; it was domestic and human.
Lesly looked radiant in candlelight. Jacqueline arrived late, her entrance a soft ripple. Lana came quietly, professional and exact. I sat near the kitchen, the air heavy with the smell of roasted things and the warmth of people who did not realize how close to the edge we stood.
Then someone played a song I hated and I thought, absurdly, of confession.
"You're quiet, Dell," said Clyde.
"I've got a lot on my plate today," I answered, but my voice trembled.
"You're lying." Lesly laughed. "Tell me the truth."
I stood up because the truth had been sitting like a splinter in my chest for months. "Lesly, Clyde… there are things that have happened. I—"
She cut me off with a smile that made me dizzy. "Dell, stop playing."
"It’s not what you think," I said, weak. "But there are things."
The room went thin. People leaned back in like fish sculpted to observe.
Clyde's face lost color. "What things?" he asked.
Lesly, who had entertained my weakness like a hobby, suddenly looked like a portrait called to life. She smiled, but the smile was precarious. "Come on," she said. "You always dramatize."
"Your apartment," I said. "The night I woke up—"
"It happened," Clyde said simply, before I could finish. "I know."
I looked at him. "What do you—"
"Call it an arrangement." He stood up. "You want to explain why you were at my place with Lesly?"
The air thickened; forks in mouths clattered; some people stopped laughing. Jacqueline crossed her arms and watched like a judge with a smirk.
"It was a mistake," I blurted. "An awful, selfish mistake."
"You don't get to call it that and be done," Jacqueline said coolly. "We were friends with you. Friends deserve the truth."
"I tried to tell you," I said. "I tried to—"
"You tried to tell me?" Lesly said, amused. "When you watched us in the kitchen and then hid behind the door?"
"It wasn't like that," I protested.
"Then tell us," her voice was honey, dangerously patient. The room waited, collective breaths held.
I told them everything, halting. I told them about the night, about the times with Jacqueline, about the lunches with Lana that turned into more. I told them about my own selfishness and cowardice.
They listened.
When I finished, there was a cold hush. Clyde's expression shifted slowly from stunned to something both terrible and quiet.
"Why?" he asked.
"Because I'm weak," I said. "Because I made choices and didn't think of the damage."
Clyde laughed then, a short, broken thing. "You think a confession makes it better?"
"No—" I had no answer.
"You're a liar," Lesly said, cruel and flat. "You thought you could have everything."
"You wanted whatever you wanted," Jacqueline added. "And we all get to tidy up the mess."
Clyde walked toward the patio door. "Come outside," he said to me.
We stepped into the night. The yard was crowded with guests who had followed, murmuring, the gossip spreading like oil. Someone lit a cigarette; someone checked their phone. The neighbors' voices formed a rough, crowded audience.
"This is private, Clyde," I said.
"Not anymore."
He turned and faced me. For the first time since we were young and ambitious, his eyes were emptied of the warmth that had made him my friend.
"Why Lesly?" he asked.
"She chose," I answered.
"You told him," someone in the doorway muttered. The room absorbed the drop like a tide.
Clyde looked at Lesly. "Is this true?"
Lesly smiled in a way that didn't belong to warmth. "What is true? People touch. People fall. People lie. This is messy, but it's life."
At that, the crowd reacted—some with shock, some with disgust. Phones flashed. Someone whispered a rumor into another's ear.
A woman near the fence spat out, loud enough for everyone to hear. "Shame on you both."
The word "shame" in that moment became a mallet. Lesly looked at her as if she'd been slapped.
"Why now?" Lesly called, hurt suddenly vivid. "Why drag this into the yard?"
"This is when you chose to use my home as a stage," Clyde said. "You used my trust."
"You used my kindness," Lesly shot back. "You used his head."
The crowd's hum grew. A man I recognized from the pub spoke up. "This is entertainment!" he laughed, trying to make light. People didn't laugh. They watched.
Clyde stepped toward Lesly and took something from her—her bag or maybe the last piece she clutched like armor—and tossed it onto the grass. "You don't leave the house," he said. "Not tonight."
Lesly's expression shifted from outrage to shock. "You're going to lock me out at my own home?" she gasped.
"You betrayed me," Clyde said. "I can lock you out."
A neighbor called, "Call the police," and someone actually fumbled for a number. Cameras on phones clicked. "Do it," someone told Lesly, as if the public spectacle finally needed an authority to legitimize it.
"You can't do this," Lesly wailed.
Clyde stepped closer. "I can do more than lock you out," he said. "You want to make it public? I can."
He took the key off the hook where Lesly kept it. He held it up like evidence. "You thought you'd play with us. Tonight the play ends."
The murmurs grew into a roar. Someone who had been a friend of Lesly's clutching a drink, said, "You use men and wonder why you're alone? You deserve..." They stopped themselves when Lesly's face crumpled.
Her voice shifted through stages: anger, denial, hysteria, pleading. The crowd moved like a tide of moral judgment. "You betrayed Clyde," one woman said. "He trusted you."
"You're a disgrace," a man said bluntly.
Lesly's composure broke. She took several steps back, hands raised like surrender. "Please," she sobbed. "Don't make a scene."
But it was a scene already. People filmed. They whispered. Someone called her by a name I'd never heard used for her before—"homewrecker"—and the label stuck like tar.
I stood there, unable to be the fulcrum I wanted to be. I wanted to step forward and take the blame; I wanted to call my own headless foolishness into the open. But the weight of being the betrayer was thicker than I had expected.
Clyde's face had something terrible and precise. "You can leave," he told Lesly, in the same voice he used to discipline a late employee. "You walk out that gate and you never come back."
Lesly's reaction was a riot of selfishness and panic. She stumbled backward, grabbed at the door, then at me. "Dell—" she cried.
"Don't touch me," I said. My voice sounded far away.
She turned to the crowd and tried to make her own case. "No, you don't understand—"
"Save it," someone in the crowd hissed.
Lesly's performance collapsed into pleading. She fell to her knees and for one terrible second the yard smelled of damp grass and humiliation.
The crowd's reaction changed—shock gave way to a kind of dark triumph. "Filming!" someone cried. "This will go on the net."
Phones were lifted. Conversations started: "I knew it," "I never liked her," "He deserved better."
I saw Jacqueline's eyes, wet but steady. "You were friends once," she said to the crowd. "We kept our promises. Not him." She nodded at me.
That struck me harder than anything Clyde had said. The betrayal had roped others. The public had confirmed the worst.
Lesly's voice broke into rawness. "Clyde, please," she begged. "Please don't make me leave."
"Get out," Clyde said. "You have no home here."
Someone recorded her tear-soaked face and posted it like a trophy. People clapped; some jeered.
The humiliation was a slow, public thing. I watched Lesly, once witty and confident, grind her own dignity underfoot. Her reactions—astonishment, denial, rage, pleading—flitted like film frames. The crowd's faces became a chorus: whispers, mutters, camera flashes. Children that had wandered close pulled back, embarrassed for reasons they didn't wholly own.
At the end of what felt like an hour, Lesly was pushed through the gate by a neighbor who thought himself brave, and she stumbled into the street like someone expelled from a village.
I expected Clyde to turn on me.
He did, but his anger was quieter, more lethal. "You knew," he said. "You saw. You participated."
"I—" I began, but there is little to say when the truth is a mirror held up to you.
"You will apologize to everyone here," Clyde said. "And you'll pay for what you did to my home. Publicly."
He called my bluff. He called out my name loud enough for everyone: "Dell Wilson, you are not welcome at my home. Tonight everyone saw who you are."
People murmured encouragement and horror, and the phones kept recording.
I tried to stand tall. "I am sorry," I said, as if those words could tuck in like stitches. "I am sorry to you, Clyde. I am sorry to you—Lesly—"
"Sorry," someone in the crowd echoed. "He's not sorry. This is performance."
"But—" my voice cracked.
Clyde turned his back and walked into the house without looking at Lesly, who wailed in the night. The guests dispersed into clusters, voices raised and shrill.
I stood alone in the yard and felt very small.
The public punishment of Lesly had been completed. It was blunt and messy, a spectacle of humiliation. But the punishment didn't stop with her. In the days that followed, gossip clipped the wings off more than one reputation. I lost contracts and friends. My name gathered like a stain.
When passion and treachery meet a small town's appetite for justice, it makes a show of cruelty. I understood that cruelty then, in my bones. I had been both perpetrator and victim of it.
Later—much later—there was a reckoning for me that lasted longer than Lesly's forced exit. People treated me like a cautionary tale. Clients canceled meetings. Emails went cold. I felt my phone buzz like a small animal waiting to die. My image, such as it had been, peeled away.
This was my punishment: not the violent stomp of a crowd but the slow logic of reputations unspooling. I walked the city and saw my face in the nervous glances of people who'd once laughed with me. I learned to eat alone.
One night, some months after Lesly left, Clyde called a meeting. "If you're going to stand like a man," he told me, "then do it. Apologize. Let this end."
I went to the small square where everyone gathered like moths. I got to a mike and I said what I had to say. I tried to make the words honest.
"I'm sorry," I said. "I broke trust. I hurt a friend. I meant nothing by the selfishness I showed..." I stumbled. "I know that's not enough."
People hissed. People applauded as if to puncture the apology. It was time to be punished by the town's calculation. Humiliation, for them, had become a currency. My apology was a coin they weighed.
Clyde stood at the edge and watched. He looked older than his years. He wasn't the man who punished with rancor; he punished with the heavy weapon of absence. That hurt the most.
I left the square with nothing but pockets full of the night's cold. The public had had its show. The lesson had been delivered. I had been made smaller in every human way.
But stories don't end in punishments.
People recover or they don't. Lesly left town. Jacqueline kept her distance. Lana—Lana never stopped being precisely herself. She took work in another city and wrote once to say she forgave me as much as she could, which was no forgiveness at all. Clyde and I never rebuilt the friendship we'd had. We became, at best, civil.
I learned something ugly and true: the more grand my faults were made to seem by public spectacle, the thinner my claims to private sorrow felt.
And yet in the narrow nights, when the city slept and the books on my shelf were silent, I would think of the warmth of a hand that hadn't been mine and regret like a steady ache.
I won't ask you to excuse me. I won't ask you to take my confession as absolution. I will only tell you that when the lights go out on a life, the mistakes shine longer than any other part.
I am Dell Wilson. I bore my shame in public. I paid in the only coin people often accept: silence and absence. I lived forward. Some days, that felt like survival; some days, like a penance I deserve.
The End
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