Sweet Romance10 min read
The Purple Slippers and the Man Who Faked a Faint
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I was this close to finishing the last chapter.
"My fingers are flying," I told myself, eyes fixed on the screen. The scene in my head had to land perfectly: one line, one shift, and the story I’d been nursing for years could finally take off.
"Adeline? Adeline!" my mother yelled from the hallway like a cannon, and I pretended not to hear.
"Adeline, did you hear me?" Her voice climbed, thick with annoyance.
I kept typing. One paragraph. Just one more.
The door crashed open.
"Giana, what are you—" I began, but my words died when my mother, breathless and furious, slapped the side of my computer tower like it owed her money. The screen went black. My heart slammed.
"You lazy girl," she said, tugging my ear the way moms pull ears when there's no other weapon. "You're twenty-eight. No job? No boyfriend? I'm done. I found you an interview. You go, or I'm gone."
I stared at the paper on the desk: a recruiting slip for Dunlap Holdings, assistant to the chief financial officer. It sounded safe, respectable, far from the romance scenes and midnight coffee of my writer life. I grabbed the slip.
"Fine," I said, kissing my ruined draft goodbye. "Fine, I'll go."
At the building I dressed like a confident woman: red dress, heels, makeup. I climbed the stairs when a sign said the elevator was broken and felt every step in the calves I usually ignored. By the time I hit the twenty-first floor, I was gasping, hair a mess, lipstick smeared.
A voice barked, "Out."
There was a man in a wheelchair—powerful shoulders slumping like a storm cloud. He groaned and his hand shivered. I moved to help. He fell, and I fell under him.
He pressed down on me. For a second I thought I'd suffocate. I called out until someone came: a showman with a grin, Hugo White, who burst in singing off-key and then panicked and shouted, "Call a doctor! Heart attack! Call help!"
Hugo ran away to pretend he wasn't the director of this little spectacle, and everyone scurried. A doctor told me to give mouth-to-mouth. I had never even kissed a boyfriend, much less saved a stranger with one. My heart did not care—it hammered, and I did what felt right: I breathed into the man's mouth and tasted wine and cold air.
Noah Dunlap's eyes fluttered. He wasn't weak; he was calculating. He let the acting continue until a stretcher came. Hugo played the dutiful brother, the hero. Noah was wheeled out. While people fussed, he looked at me and said, black as winter, "Stay."
Then, he left.
I stood in the hallway, cheeks burning, the whole lobby staring. I learned two things that day: one, I had been photographed—someone had a snapped picture of me kissing a man; two, my name had already been mistaken for someone else. Hugo called me "Ning" as the ambulance left, and later story threads wove and tangled: he was a prankster, an instigator; Noah Dunlap was the company's cold, unsmiling financial director; and here I was, sticky with embarrassment and suddenly without a home—my mother had left, carrying the keys.
Isla Ribeiro pulled up in a red Porsche and saved me with a flood of hugs. "Come," she said. "Drink, vent, and don't tell me any of this is romantic."
We laughed at first. Then she found the photo in my phone.
"Who is this?" she asked, eyes wide.
"Who knows," I said, but my stomach turned. The photo showed me kissing Noah—my match to the face I'd only half seen.
"You're lying," Isla said.
"I'm not," I said. "I don't know him. I kissed a man to save his life. That is not boyfriend material."
She didn't buy it. "Then prove it. Let me call him."
Isla dialed. A cool voice answered: "Who is this?"
"Are you his—" she began.
"No," the voice said, clipped, and hung up.
We argued and drank and played stupid games until I lost. I woke in a hospital bed with a bowl of congee at my side. A nurse said, "Your friend called. Your...friend left you here." The nurse called him "your boyfriend." My stomach sank.
Later, when a care package was slid into my hands—a neat purple box—my embarrassment turned to shock. In it was a pair of soft, lilac cloth shoes. Isla laughed. "Either he thinks this is precious, or he's tone-deaf."
An old man who'd been sweeping the hall stopped and told us a story: the shoes were a family relic at Dunlap Holdings, once meant for the founder's wife. "Whoever wears these," he said earnestly, "is tied to the family." I laughed out loud, then quieted. I had been tossed into a life that already had stories written.
I started at the company the next day. My new desk was tidy, a pot of violets waiting like a calm promise. People whispered that I was a special hire. I sat down to sort finances and then saw him again. Noah Dunlap. He appeared at my desk with winter cold on his face and dropped his hand like a gavel on the table.
"You're new," he said.
"I am," I replied.
He didn't leave. He sat with a cigarette and asked, "Are you really qualified?"
"Yes," I snapped. I did not want him to think I was the drunk in the photo. He watched me like a scientist watching a rare specimen, amusement twitching.
"Do not stare," I told him.
He did not leave easily. He lingered across from me the next day, next week—appearing like rain you can't predict. There was friction. He said cruel things once: "Don't waste my time," and I wanted to answer fire with fire. But I needed the job. So I kept my voice tight and my head down.
"You're the financial assistant," he said one afternoon.
"Yes. I am," I answered.
He smirked. "We'll see how long you'll last."
A week later, in the quiet of his office, he called me in. My pulse thrummed. He offered me tea.
"I don't drink tea," I said.
He smiled. "This is the tea you made for me. You won't poison me now, will you?"
I took a sip. Bitter. Wrong. He watched me like the world was a chessboard and I was a pawn making an unpredictable move. He forced me, playfully cruel, into small talk and then into something softer. I wanted to batter walls. Instead I learned to make tea. I discovered he was more than the cold mask. Under his rough edges I found flashes—tiny, ridiculous, dangerous ones—that softened him.
"Why do you avoid me?" he asked once in the elevator when he cornered me and turned all his height toward me like a cliff.
"Because you make me nervous," I said, honest. "You are unpredictable."
He cocked his head, a slow smile that looked nothing like the newspaper photographs. "Are you scared of me?"
"Yes," I said, and meant it. He laughed, a short dry sound.
Days moved into quieter skirmishes. He stole my tea, I corrected his spreadsheets. He gave me impossible deadlines; I met them. He made a joke about my purple shoes once—those foolish cloth things—and I bit back a laugh. He rolled his eyes.
Then the company crisis burst open.
At a gala for Dunlap Holdings, where chandeliers burned like trapped stars and the whole building seemed to hold its breath, Hugo White stepped forward to speak. My hands crumpled my program. He was joined by certain board members—one of them, Bernabe Hofmann, had always smiled the wrong smile. People whispered about doctored ledgers and paper trails—a slow poison left in files to make Noah look incompetent.
"You're making this about a woman and her shoes," Hugo said in the microphone, a hint of triumph in his voice as he stared directly at me from the stage.
I stood. "You'd better watch your words," I said, and my voice blazed. "You started rumors. You planted false entries. You set me up to look like a liar at my first interview. You tried to ruin someone to make yourself look clever."
The room shifted. Faces turned. Someone clicked a camera. The air smelled like perfume and panic.
Hugo's grin hardened. "Adeline," he said, "you misunderstand the situation."
"No, you misunderstand," I said back. "You misunderstood that I would stay silent."
Noah stood beside me. His presence was a blade of quiet. "Show them," he said.
Hugo scoffed. "What, a drama? Where's your proof?"
"Care to hear from the people you sicced to do your work?" Noah asked. "Care to explain the emails? The altered entries?"
Phones lit up all at once. I had a list in my pocket—the little proofs I'd kept for myself: screenshots, timestamps, the obvious flaws in what Hugo had tried to create. Noah motioned and my friend Isla stepped out, confident now in a roomful of people who had once whispered.
"I have the messages," she said. "They were all bought and staged. Hugo coordinated it."
One by one, more voices rose. A junior accountant who'd obeyed Hugo's orders to move numbers stepped forward, hands shaking. "He told me to change the dates," she said. "He said it would be temporary."
Hugo folded, at first a practiced disbelief. "That's absurd," he said. "You're all making this up. I would never."
"No?" Noah's voice was low, and when Noah's voice is low, the room listens. "You told my assistant—" he began, "—to create confusion and to fabricate an incident to make candidates like Adeline feel humiliated. You hoped she would quit."
Hugo's face flushed. At first there was the practiced stoicism, then the flicker of unease, then the rage that comes from losing a stage. He tried to laugh it off. "You can't prove anything," he said.
"She can," I said. "I saved the screenshots. I recorded the calls. I kept the trail because people like you always lie."
The audience gaped. Phones rose. Cameras clicked. People murmured, then shouted, then stopped as Hugo's world unraveled. I watched his expression change in stages—control, denial, pleading, collapse. He was a man stripped onstage, the hinges of his braggadocio buckling. Colleagues who'd laughed with him turned away. A few began to applaud; most watched in stunned silence.
Hugo's reaction went through the required phases: first the vanity-driven denial, bright and loud. "You're mistaken!" he snapped, voice strained. "I didn't—" He pointed at various people as if that could stitch reality back together. He lowered his eyes, refusing to meet mine or Noah's.
"You're lying!" he shouted toward the accountant who had confessed. "You were coerced. You were bribed."
"I'm telling the truth," she answered. Her voice steadied. "He forced me. I have the messages."
"You can't," Hugo said, now shrunken small. He faltered, eyes pleading with those around him. "Please. Stop. This is a misunderstanding."
Around us, the crowd started to record, to whisper not out of curiosity but judgment. A woman near me said, "I can't believe he would stoop so low." Phones shot up; someone posted a clip. Comments began to fly across feeds in real time.
I watched Hugo pivot into performance: he tried to laugh to recover dignity, tried to win sympathy: "We all play hard," he said. "Can't a man make a joke?" But even his jokes were brittle.
Then came collapse. His voice broke. "I'm sorry," he whispered, and it was neither sincere nor sufficient.
There was no police on stage; this was not a trial. This was public undoing. People who had once flattered Hugo pulled away like moths from a flame. A few young employees snapped photos, passed them on. The woman who had once been his unofficial ally—Bernabe—looked at him with the cold calculation of someone removing a weak pawn. He was isolated; his inner circle shrank visibly in minutes. Hugo begged for forgiveness like a man clinging to a branch that's too thin.
When the gala ended, the crowd disbanded with a different rhythm: some applauded the truth, some recorded, some stared. Hugo left with his head down, escorted not by gregarious colleagues but by a single legal counsel who read him the company memo: suspension pending investigation. His fall wasn't a legal binding sentence; it was social ruin in the instant-communication age. The humiliation lingered: whispers, screenshots, video loops labeled "Hugo's set-up," a trending topic for a day.
He tried to plead with me once in the hallway days later. "Adeline, please," he begged. "Forgive me. It was supposed to be a prank. I didn't mean—"
"You meant to control," I said. "You meant to humiliate. There is a difference."
He sank into a chair like a man unmade. No one filmed the private shame; the public one had been far worse. A few colleagues avoided the elevator where he waited. His mother—Elena Werner, who had always praised his cleverness—wore a face of disappointment. People spoke in low, disappointed tones. His reputation, once a bright, polished object, dulled and then cracked. He experienced the cascade of being left out: meetings moved without him, invitations stopped, messages went unanswered. The man who'd believed in social currency found his credit revoked.
"Do you regret it?" I asked once, not in fury but flat curiosity.
He stared, jaw tightening. "Yes," he said simply, like a verdict.
"Then own it," I said. "Tell people the truth, publicly. Apologize in front of everyone you hurt."
He did. The apology video was weak and wobbly, but the crowd watched. The humiliation didn't vanish. The consequence was not a single loud courtroom, but a melt-away: friends gone, trust broken, privilege withdrawn. He learned what many cruel men do not when the stage they built collapses—how quiet isolation teaches better than scorn.
After that, things changed between Noah and me in ways neither of us planned.
"No more pranks," Noah said once, and we both laughed. He stopped the cold remarks and started small acts: a message to check how my sleep was, a coffee left on my desk, a quiet hand on my shoulder once when I felt I might break.
"Why do you help me?" I asked him one night in the small kitchen off the finance floor.
"Because you are stubborn," he said. "Because you make tea that isn't poison now. Because you were decent when it cost you nothing. Because something in you doesn't look away when people are cruel."
He called me by name as if it was a new, private thing he liked. Our barbs softened into jokes. There were three moments that made my breath stop in that season:
- The first time he laughed with his eyes—not at me, but because of me—and it felt like the sun moving.
- The morning he noticed my trembling and took off his jacket without a word, wrapping it around my shoulders.
- The time he said, half-serious, "You make this place less dangerous," and then reached across the table to hold my hand when the audit numbers came up wrong.
We were careful. The company watched. Noah—once a fortress—learned to be a man who reached. I, a woman who once hid behind pages, let him see the draft of my life.
At the awards ceremony a year later, Noah and I stood onstage, and my purple cloth shoes—the ridiculous, intimate token—peeked out of my dress. They had become a joke turned talisman. He took my hand in front of everyone and said, "She kept my bank of mistakes from sinking me. She kept me human."
"You're sentimental," I teased, squeezing his fingers.
"Only about small things," he said. "Like old cloth shoes, like your stubbornness, and like you."
We laughed as cameras clicked.
When the story ended, I closed my laptop and sent the last chapter. My fingers remembered the rhythm of that first night—the same fingers that had saved a man's breath once. Outside, the city carried on. Inside, a pair of lilac slippers sat in a small box, ridiculous and perfect, a reminder that beginnings could be messy and sharp, and endings could be quietly magnificent.
The End
— Thank you for reading —