Sweet Romance12 min read
The Second Cup of February
ButterPicks14 views
I found out my boyfriend had ghosted me on Valentine's Day because someone sent me a photo.
"Look at this," my friend Jasmine Barrett texted, and I stared at the image until it blurred.
In the photo, a woman in a pale yellow dress sat in a car with her back to the camera. My boyfriend—Kellan Zeng—had his face turned toward her, smiling like a lighthouse. Neon behind them flashed: "Valentine's Day—Second Drink Half Price."
"This isn't me," I whispered to the room, touching the white strap of my dress. My mascara had been applied like armor.
I called him.
There was a long ring, then a flat, practiced voice: "Busy, what's up?"
"Today is Valentine's Day," I said carefully. "We said we'd have dinner."
"Later. I'm stuck at work," he answered. "Order something. Don't make a fuss."
The line went dead. The picture on my phone expanded into a kiss: her hand on his neck, his hand at her waist.
I called Jasmine. I could barely get the words out. "Kellan is with Chen—Gabriela Compton—she's in that picture."
Jasmine tried to calm me. "Breathe. Are you sure it's him?"
"It’s him. I saw him last month, remember? She introduced herself to him when she met us." I remembered a tall man sliding an arm around my shoulder, asking, "Is she your coworker?"
"Stop," Jasmine said. "Come out with us tonight. There's a mixer."
I laughed, a dry sound. "I can't. I can't believe he'd do this."
"He probably has a story," she said. "Come. For once, go somewhere he's not."
I let her drag me to a dim bar with cheap fairy lights and louder-than-necessary pop songs. Jasmine shoved me into the seat in the center of a circle.
"This is Ana," she announced. "Single and ready to be adored."
A man in a doctor's scrub tucked into a shirt steadied me when I stumbled. "Are you okay?" he asked.
"Fine," I lied, and then, because the room felt too full of strangers, because I had been full of Kellan for a year and it hurt too much, I asked, "Do you mind if I kiss one of you for a dare?"
"What?" Jasmine said, eyes wide.
The game spun, the bottle stopped, and everyone laughed. Someone demanded a kiss. My head buzzed with cheap liquor, with the bright heat of humiliation turned outward.
I looked at the doctor—Dustin Buchanan. He had a clean angle to his jaw, eyes like a closed book. I asked him, because my voice came out like a child's dare: "Can I kiss you?"
He smiled the sort of smile that doesn't make any noise. "Okay."
I pressed my lips to his. For a second, the room disappeared.
"That's not right," someone sixtled. "You kissed him on the mouth!"
I stepped back, flushed. Dustin's brow met his hand. "Sorry. Let's keep going."
People laughed, but I felt awake in a way I'd forgotten.
My phone was vibrating. Forty missed calls—Kellan. I answered.
"Kellan? Where are you?" I asked.
"Car accident. I'm at the hospital. We need money. Please come."
"Is Gabriela okay?" I said before I could stop myself.
A different voice answered him in the background. Kellan's voice turned small. "I'm sorry. We're bleeding. Emergency. Eight thousand."
"I'll come," I said, and something, a worn pulley inside of me, pulled taut.
Dustin stood up. "Do you want me to go with you?"
I blinked. "Yes."
Half an hour later, the emergency room smelled like disinfectant and tired coffee. Nurses moved like small storms. Dustin moved like he belonged there.
He took my hand only to steady me in the hall. "You can stay in the acute ward," he said. "I'll check on you. No need to sign anything yet."
A blur of blood and bandages appeared. Kellan stood there with a split lip and a gauze hand, and beside him, Gabriela Compton held an IV.
"Kellan?" I said, voice small.
He blinked, surprised to see me, surprised I existed in front of other people. "Ana," he said. "You came."
Dustin pushed forward, taking the IV from the nurse. "She doesn't have cash," he said to Kellan, flat and precise.
Kellan's expression shifted from mild to panicked to calculating. "She's my—"
"She is not your girlfriend," I said, sharper than I meant to be. "I'm not your girlfriend."
Around us, people looked up. A resident asked, "Is anyone family?" Kellan stammered through a list that had every relative but the truth. The room filled with small, quiet observations: the rhythm of monitors, the shuffle of shoes, the creak of a gurney.
Dustin smoothed my hair and said something in a low voice. "You shouldn't let him manipulate you."
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"He keeps telling you he’s busy. He keeps buying you the cheapest set. He keeps your address on his 'couples' delivery and thinks that's enough."
Kellan opened his mouth. "Ana, we can—"
"Save it," I said. I felt the room narrow into a single bright point where I stood. "You lied to me. You'd rather be with Gabriela than tell me the truth."
Kellan tried to charm. "It was a mistake. We ran into each other. It isn't what you think."
"Then why did your friend get a photo?" I demanded.
He couldn't find a way to answer.
Dustin looked at him as if he'd just misread a scan. "If you were honest, she'd be your girlfriend by now," he said.
Dustin gave me a chance to call the nurse and pretend I needed to sign a form. I did, and in front of him, I said, "I'm dating Dustin."
"You're dating him?" Kellan laughed, the sound thin.
"I'm dating Dustin," I repeated. "So if you want to apologize for betraying me, do it to his face."
People—all the small teams that run a hospital through nights—suddenly noticed. Conversations died. A doctor leaned over a clipboard and squinted.
"What?" Kellan asked, rage and confusion mixing like a bad cocktail.
A colleague who knew Dustin murmured, "He always picks good people."
The rumor stretched out like a banner over us. Kellan's cheeks grew hot. Gabriela stood there, eyes glittering—anger or embarrassment, I couldn't tell—and then, to everyone's surprise, left with a phone in her hand that seemed to write fury.
After that night, the world rearranged. Dustin texted little things: "Drink water," "Did you eat?" He told me to rest. He cooked. He fixed my phone situation and, on the ride home, pressed his palm to my forehead and said, "I'll call my friend Felipe Bray. He can help with the move if you want."
I laughed, incredulous. "You'd help me move?"
He shrugged. "We help people who are honest."
Within a week, I had a new apartment down the street. Dustin called a colleague, Felipe Bray, and Felipe showed up like a cheerful storm—boxes, jokes, a grin that never quite left his face. Dustin's other friend, Ignacio Coulter, offered to pay my deposit if I was worried. It was overwhelming and honest and, oddly, easy.
I did not tell them everything.
I did not tell them how Kellan had used a subscription to deliver me food, how he'd kept me close with convenience, how he'd told me I was "too thin" as a way to ask for small favors. I did not tell them the times I'd waited by a phone that never rang, the times I'd gone to his apartment only to be waved away.
Instead, I started to live like someone who belonged to herself.
Dustin called it "practice." He would say, "Practice being happy," and I would repeat it and it sounded ridiculous at first and then like a new language I could speak.
We went to a theme park. He bought me a silly headband with stars. I cried on his shoulder on the carousel because it was the first time in a year I'd laughed at something small and honest.
We called each other "girlfriend" and "boyfriend" in a hospital lounge once, and when his pager went off, he kissed my forehead and left. I waited. He texted, "Back in two hours. Don't start any wars with the vending machine."
We became a small orbit. I finished a big work project. He cheered. My parents visited and met him, and in the small chaos of introductions, he stood like a steady tree.
Meanwhile, Kellan did not leave me alone.
He called with hollow apologies. He showed up at my apartment with takeout. He tried to modernize cruelty into charm.
One morning, my inbox exploded with an accusation that Gabriela Compton had stormed into Kellan's workplace and "exposed" him. I tried to ignore it, but the story snowballed. Word spread through the office grapevine, then through social media. People began to know what I already knew—Kellan had been boasting that he hadn't slept with me, that he could toy with my feelings without consequence.
That day, I chose not to watch as the rumor mill turned. I walked instead to the building where Kellan worked because the idea of letting him keep any power over my life felt wrong.
A crowd had gathered in the lobby as if it were a small theater. Phones were out. People filmed. The voice that carried above the clamor belonged to Gabriela. She was pale and furious, and she pulled a printed, yellowed phone screenshot from her bag and flung it like a flag.
"You lied!" she shouted. "You told me she was nothing. You told me she was someone to pass the time!"
Kellan stood behind a coffee table, hands curled into fists, and his face moved through a sequence of expressions—smugness, confusion, then raw panic.
"Stop," he said. "Gabriela, don't do this here."
"Don't do this here?" Gabriela's voice cracked like a whip. "You told your friends, 'I never slept with her.' You told us you didn't want to hurt me. You called me when you needed to brag, and you called her when you needed to be soft. Which one of us is real?"
I had my phone in my hand. My message to him—two months of screenshots, the "I can't with her" line—glowed on the screen. And right in the center of the lobby, where brass handrails and potted ficus kept a path open, a dozen colleagues circled like an unplanned jury.
"Is this true?" a woman asked the receptionist. "Did he really throw her aside?"
A man with a badge shook his head. "Not here. HR."
No. I stepped forward.
"It is true," I said. My voice didn't quaver. "He said he hadn't slept with me, and he told others not to take me seriously. He told me we were 'not serious' while he took pictures with Gabriela and called her his 'other.'"
Phones clicked. Somebody hissed, "Unbelievable."
Kellan's face drained to a greenish gray. He opened his mouth, shut it, tried a smile that looked too desperate to be real.
"You think you can control the narrative?" he said finally. "I made choices."
"Choices?" Gabriela echoed. "You used her. You used me."
An HR representative came from a side door, their expression trained into careful neutrality. "Sir, we need you to step into my office. Ma'am, if you have evidence, please provide it."
Gabriela handed over a pile of screenshots and messages. I had my own folder. The lobby murmured as the documents were organized.
I watched Kellan try to weave a story out of fraying threads. He first tried to minimize: "We ran into each other. It was nothing." Then he tried to charm: "Ana, won't you tell them the good things?" Then, when that didn't work, he tried denial: "You made this up."
His face flickered. The crowd around us became a net. People whispered judgments that were literal and chemical: "He was always a talker," "I thought he seemed off," "She seemed so sweet."
Kellan went through stages. First, he smirked as if the jokes were still on. Then he blinked, thinking of the evidence. He asked Gabriela to stop, flung accusations at her: "You're making this up to ruin me!"
She laughed, a high, bitter sound. "Do you know what it's like to be the joke in his stories? I am not the only one you've played."
The HR rep opened the policy binder and read out the clauses about professional conduct and relationships with coworkers. People in the lobby recorded it all.
Kellan's denial became a stutter. He tried to pull in allies—"Colleagues, you must understand, it's personal"—but the crowd only felt heavier. Someone took a flash photo. Phones made a chorus.
Then things broke.
A junior employee who had been quiet stepped into the ring. "He told me he never wanted anything serious!" she shouted. "He told me how he uses people for fun!" Her voice trembled with the kind of anger that starts as a whisper and becomes a crack in the floor.
Another person piped in, "We heard him! He bragged at the Christmas party!"
The tide turned into a roar. It carried Kellan away from smugness toward desperation.
He lunged toward Gabriela, grabbed at her phone. People gasped. Security moved in. Kellan's hands were shaking. His face was a ruined sunset.
"Stop," I said, quietly, and then louder, "Stop this."
Security pulled Kellan away. He staggered, then collapsed against a lobby pillar as if the world had finally revealed itself to be heavier than his swagger.
Gabriela stood on the steps, breathing hard, eyes bright with a fury that had sharpened into clarity. "You used me," she said to the crowd. "You told all of us lies."
Someone clapped. Then another person clapped. It was not a polite clap. It was a release.
An HR manager read Kellan the company's interim measures. "You are suspended pending investigation," she said. "We will notify you when a decision is reached."
He turned to me, pleading, "Ana, please, I can explain. I can—"
Dustin pushed forward then. He didn't shout. He didn't need to. He just put a hand on Kellan's shoulder—the same steady hand that had steadied me in the ER—and looked at him as if at an x-ray. "You lie to people who trust you," Dustin said. "You think that makes you clever. It makes you cruel."
Kellan flinched.
He looked around for validation and saw none. He had traded warmth for convenience and thought no one would notice. Now everyone did.
He tried to bargain. "I'll quit. I'll—"
"No," Gabriela said, and her voice was small and strong. "You need to face this."
Her statement was not petty. It was public. The crowd watched as the company escorted him to a security room to wait for formal questioning. Phones continued to click. Someone shouted, "Good riddance."
For Kellan, it was not a quick ending. He had to watch his image crumble in real time. Colleagues who had once laughed with him now looked at him like someone who had been pretending to be a person. He went through contempt, then confusion, then the slow burn of realizing his choices had consequences. He mouthed apologies to strangers.
Gabriela did not leave the lobby when they took him away. She took a breath and then—without theatrics—put her evidence on the receptionist's counter, signed a statement, and walked out like someone who had been carrying a stone and finally set it down.
The aftershocks were immediate.
Kellan's manager called a staff meeting. HR prepared forms. Rumors went around the building like hot tea. For Kellan, the public unraveling burned longer than a private shame. He lost face, then colleagues, then, a few days later, his job.
He tried to go home. People avoided him. A food delivery driver refused to accept his order. The man who had once had so many small comforts found his phone calls unanswered. He posted apologies on social media that looked like solicitous confessions, but the comments piled up with the kind of honesty he had never invited: "We saw who you were," "You played with people."
Gabriela, surprisingly, did not vanish. She filed a complaint with the police about the altercation, but she also refused to be a mere victim. She met with a counselor and started teaching a workshop on workplace boundaries two months later.
The public punishment was not a scene of humiliation where people screamed. It was a precise, slow collapse: his status pealed away; his coworkers stepped back; his family asked for explanation; offers dried like puddles under a hot sun. He watched the network of favors and reputation he had built dissolve.
That was the thing about being a person who treats feelings like disposable props—there are always people willing to film when you stumble.
After Kellan was gone, the office buzzed with a new kind of safety. People who had been quiet found voices. I stopped having to explain myself to strangers. Dustin worked late, and Felipe and Ignacio kept bringing up small jokes that never felt sharp.
We moved in together slowly. Dustin never rushed me. When he said, "I want to be with you," it wasn't a question of claiming or possession. It was an offering.
Months later, when HR announced its final decisions, the company fired Kellan for violating conduct policies. Gabriela's complaint had led to disciplinary action on her side for the way she'd confronted him, but she had also been offered options for legal support to press for protection orders against hostile approaches. In the end, two people who had tangled in lies and secrets were forced to consider their actions in public.
When Kellan first read the termination notice, he didn't sob. He just sat on the curb outside the office like a man waiting for a bus that would never come back. The neighbors watched. A group of interns slowed down their stride. The city's digital appetite had already digested his misdeeds. He was left with an emptiness wider than any he had previously known.
And there I was, with Dustin, learning how to bake bread. He taught me to fold the dough gently, to listen for the window in the oven.
"You're lucky," he said once, watching the brown crust bubble. "A lot of people never get to learn that."
"No," I said. "I'm the lucky one."
He wiped flour on his cheek and kissed the smudge like it was a medal. "You told people the truth," he said. "You didn't let him keep you small."
"I was small for a long time," I admitted. "But once you stop being someone else's proof of a life, you can be your own life."
We were married in a small ceremony two years later. Felipe read a poem he had not rehearsed. Ignacio grinned until his cheeks hurt. Dustin's parents came and hugged both of us like it was obvious we belonged together.
At our reception, I found the tiny paper card that had started the whole mess months before—the little "couples delivery" card with its monthly subscription offer. I held it up and laughed. "Remember that?" I asked.
Dustin wrapped an arm around me. "The thing that started your divorce from him?"
"Let's call it a break-up," I said. "And a better beginning."
He kissed me, slow and gentle. I thought of the lobby and the fluorescent lights, of the time when the world had been small and full of holes only he seemed willing to mend.
"This," he said into my hair, "is us."
I nodded. I had learned that the bravest thing was choosing yourself in front of plenty of witnesses. The crowd might have filmed, gossiped, pointed—and it had helped, in the end. It was messy and loud and public, exactly the way justice often is.
I kept the little subscription card in a drawer as a talisman. Whenever I opened it, I'd smile and remember the moment the photograph became a promise of a different life.
The End
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