Sweet Romance12 min read
Two Messages at Two A.M.
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1
"It was just a wrong chat," I told myself as I stared at the screen.
"Except you, everyone else is settling," the message read.
"As long as you say the word, I'll come right over."
They were the kind of lines that could make a throat dry and a person forget to breathe. They were tender and eager — and they were not meant for me.
My hand trembled. My phone slipped and hit the floor. Tears came before the full meaning did.
"Dexter?" I whispered to the sleeping shape on the bed.
He snores when he's drunk, long and slow. Tonight he smelled of whiskey and something sweet he never bought for me. Two messages lay there on his screen, unread and alone in the chat window. No reply. No little blue check. No clue that they had ever been meant for me.
"I can't believe I finally caught him," I said aloud, though he was asleep.
He pushed me to follow him six years ago. In the beginning I told myself the only reason we were together was because Victoria had rejected him — again and again — and because I was the safe second. I told myself that if I loved hard enough, he would wake up and see me.
"Don't be dramatic," Dexter had always said whenever I wanted to make a scene. "You're thinking too much."
But what do you do when the only proofs you have loved him with are receipts and small passwords, while he keeps a collection of big gestures for someone else? When I scrolled older messages, the pattern was cruel and patient: red envelopes and gift notifications to Victoria, polite disinterest to me, a Pikachu pillow that cost him forty-eight bucks and a thousand apologies that sounded like rehearsed lines.
"Why did you send those to me?" I asked the phone, as if it could answer.
I spent the whole night awake, scrolling, stitching past to present. By dawn, when Dexter left for work, I had taken a decision that felt louder and quieter at once. I boxed my things, called a mover, and had everything sent to Petra's apartment by noon.
"Break up," I typed. Short. Final. Clean.
Two hours passed before he replied. "Don't be ridiculous."
"I moved my things," I wrote back. "Pay the rent yourself next month."
"Whatever," he typed, like he always used to type when he was sure I'd cave.
Petra watched me pack. "Ella, are you sure this time?" she asked.
"I'm tired," I said. "Tired of pretending that waiting will change him."
My mother, Marjorie, surprised me. "Good," she said over the phone. "I've never liked how small you made yourself for him. Do what you need to do."
2
The next day, the office was a landscape of fluorescent calm. Our team was expecting people from the client side — they were the ones who would change project deadlines on a whim, the ones who would make or break our two-month sprint.
When I walked into the meeting room, I saw him. He lifted one hand in a polite wave and introduced himself: "I'm Rowan Vogt, the lead for this phase from Springwell."
He was neat, his voice even and steady. When he looked at me while I spoke about the project layout, his eyes lingered. There was nothing theatrical in his stare — just attentive concentration that felt, for once, like a small warmth.
After the meeting, Victoria followed him like it was inevitable. "Senior!" she called in that singsong that always made me bristle.
Rowan smiled and then turned back to me. "Would you like to go over the details after lunch? I think a walkthrough would help."
I said yes without thinking. I found myself intentionally sending him an invitation — for work, yes, but also for a dinner where I could test how he was when he wasn't in a conference room.
He suggested a small Sichuan place. "Spicy? They're strict about numbing," he said.
"I like spicy," I lied. With Dexter I had learned to eat bland. With Rowan I relished steam and the little red pepper oil that stained my lips.
Rowan picked the table, passed me the menu, and listened when I talked about the code. "Your design here," he said, pointing, "works. I'll sign off on the structure, but let's tighten the integration points."
"Thank you," I said. "You read it."
He shrugged. "I read everyone's work. But you... you wrote clean and accountable things."
That night, he drove me home. "I'm not just a client," he said casually, "and I don't think of you as only the person who wrote the plan."
3
It took me a while to realize how thin my defense had become. Victoria always seemed to live a step ahead of me, not because she was smarter, but because she liked the parts of life that showed in public: the right selfies, the right timing. She smiled at Rowan like someone who owned a reservation in his heart.
One afternoon, when we were supposed to be debugging a deployment, Victoria put on a show. "This is our version," she told Rowan, waving a sleeve. "You can check the rest."
I stood up. "I'll go to the restroom," I said.
She followed and accused me of grandstanding. "Ella, don't bring your breakup into work," she said. "You're two people away from embarrassing yourself."
I looked at my hands, wet from soap. "If you don't want to slow the project down, do the job and leave the rest to us," I said.
Rowan watched us, and then he said something that felt like a small miracle: "Victoria, stay with operations. Ella, come with me. This is the part she's not the main lead on."
I went. He asked me questions that mattered. He didn't just say I was good — he made it clear he had seen the work I did. The contrast was sharp and intoxicating.
Later, when we left the building, Dexter was there.
"You've been upset for a month," he said, trying for concern. "My parents are visiting next week. We planned to get engaged."
"I told you already: we're done," I said.
He took a breath like someone rehearsing a line. "You started this. We were supposed to—"
Rowan put a hand on my charger case and gave Dexter a look that said, cleanly and without drama, "We're not in the habit of interrupting people's personal affairs."
Dexter barked. "You're cheating on me already? Right after she moved out? Give me some standards, please!"
Rowan's hand tightened on the charger. "You have it wrong," he said. "I've been trying to get Ella to come to my company's office for weeks. I invited her; she accepted. If you have concerns about your relationship, take them somewhere else."
"I was trying to be a good boyfriend," Dexter snapped. "I pay the rent sometimes. I bought gifts."
Rowan's voice softened. "It sounds like you never truly saw her."
It hurt me and it freed me at once. "I don't want you to think I'm dramatic. I just want to move on."
4
Rowan and I began to meet more often for project reasons. Sometimes we had dinner. Sometimes he dropped by the office just to hand me a cup of coffee and a review note. He was steady. He remembered the small things — that I liked sugar in my Americano but no milk; that I loved spicy food and would frown at cilantro.
"I saw your post last night," he said once, sliding his phone across the table. "Is this bothering you?"
It was a screenshot of an old campus post. In it, I had been caught in a moment: looking at him across a dining table as if my life depended on his glance. Victoria had posted it with a caption: "Some people are so shameless. Please stop."
I felt my face go cold. "She posted that?" I asked.
"Yes," Rowan said. "And she sent me the screenshot. I told her it was ridiculous and—I removed her contact."
"You removed her?" I asked.
"She was harassing you," he said. "I don't appreciate that." His hand brushed mine for a fraction of a second. Something like permission settled between us.
5
A week later, something happened that would change the air around Dexter and Victoria in ways I couldn't have planned.
It was a Saturday. Petra had texted me: "Guess what. Heard from the office grapevine. Dex got laid off."
"Really?" I wrote back. "What did he do?"
"Company said his projects underperformed," Petra typed. "They were already warning people. Dex's name was on the bottom of the leaderboard the whole quarter."
I felt a strange calm. "Good," I said quietly.
That evening I didn't expect to run into them, but life loves theatrical timing. We were driving back from a celebratory team dinner for the project we had just delivered. Rowan drove, Petra and I shared the backseat small talk.
Out in the parking lot, a crowd had gathered. Voices rose and fell. There was a man on the ground — Dexter — holding a bag to his chest. Victoria stood over him, hands on her hips, red with anger.
"Dexter!" she shouted. "You owe me! You promised you'd pay! These were my things."
He held the bag like a shield. "I didn't mean to mess up," he said. "I'm trying to get a new job. Give me a chance. Please, Vicky."
Someone from his old team recognized him. Phones lifted up, the small bright squares glinting like a sea of accusation. "Is that him? Is that Dexter from Devops?" someone whispered.
I stepped out of the car. Rowan was next to me in a second. "Ella?" he said softly, then moved forward.
"Give it back," Victoria hissed. "You broke the loan agreement. You sold a watch I gave you. You used my help and disappeared."
Dexter's lip trembled. "I can't. I lost my job this week. I have debts. I need a place to sleep."
"Then stop being a parasite," Victoria said. "Stop pretending to be a man."
The crowd around us grew. Eyes turned. Voices recorded. The sticky summer air buzzed with the staccato rhythm of camera shutters and phone recordings.
"Dexter," I said, voice low but carrying across the asphalt. "Is this the way you repay someone who sent you gifts?"
"She gave me gifts!" he cried. "She bought—"
"You thought you could buy loyalty," I answered. "You thought her favors meant you could treat people like collectibles."
Rowan stepped closer, and his voice found a place between quiet and clear. "We took a decision this afternoon. Dexter Schmitt is no longer with Springwell Tech." He said it like it was a fact, not a condemnation. But the crowd heard the two words and something electric struck the air.
Someone laughed. "He got the sack."
I watched Dexter's face fold inward. "No," he said. "You can't—"
"You're past the point of pity," Victoria spat. "You got yourself into debt buying me things. You wanted more than I wanted to give."
Phones recorded his humiliation. Petra, standing by my side, crossed her arms. "You used Ella for rent and dumped money on someone else," she said to him coldly. "Don't act like you're a victim now."
Dexter's cheeks went pale. He raised both palms like a child asking not to be hit. "Please," he whimpered. "I'll—I'll fix it. I'll pay back. Give me time."
"Time?" Victoria laughed so hard it sounded like a breaking plate. "Time? You had time. You had six years."
Rowan found a microphone voice. "Everyone here has seen how this has gone for months. You were choosing someone who rejected you, then you discarded someone who loved you because it was convenient. This isn't sympathy. It's accountability."
A hand from the crowd shoved a business card toward Dexter. "Here's an email," someone said. "Maybe apply. But as for the gifts, if you want to retrieve them, go through proper channels."
He sank onto a concrete step. The cameras kept rolling. The crowd murmured.
I stood there, heart thudding. The man I once loved was folded up tiny, humbled in a fluorescent halo. "Why are you doing this?" he asked me, voice thin.
"Because you made me small," I said. "Because you used me until I wasn't useful."
He reached for me like a child. "Ella, please. Come back. We'll start over."
Rowan stepped forward then, his presence a shield and a statement. "She doesn't have to come back to anything that once made her shrink," he said. "This isn't theatrics. It's a reality check."
There was a small, horrid sound from the crowd — a mixture of applause and disgust. Someone shouted "Karma!" Another person filmed the whole scene and uploaded it. Within an hour, the parking lot spectacle had sliding video and comments. People I didn't know messaged me. "Heard about Dexter. Wow." "Is that really the guy from your stories?" "Victoria deleted him off her socials hours ago."
Victoria, who had played the part of the calm favorite for so long, felt the wind reverse on her. Her chest heaved and her eyes flicked to the phones in everyone's hands.
"You're making a circus," she spat at the crowd. "You're nothing but vultures."
A woman from the HR team who had come outside shook her head. "This is unprofessional," she said. "Everyone, go back to your homes. We will handle this with the legal department."
But the damage was done. Dexter—dismissed, humiliated, recorded—had no script left. He curled on the step like a small defeated animal. Victoria, who had once moved through spaces untouched, now found herself on the defensive. People whispered behind their hands. The same phones that had once captured her best angles now showed her in real-time anger and pettiness.
"Will you apologize to him?" someone asked.
Victoria's face contorted. "I don't owe him anything," she said. But even as she said it, the certainty was gone.
The crowd dispersed slowly, voices running ahead to the next scandal. I felt a strange emptiness settle where fury had been. "I didn't want this to be public," I said to Rowan.
"You didn't plan it," he said. "But sometimes things cut through in public because private words never did."
6
After the parking lot, the aftermath felt like a slow-release spring. Dexter's name was discussed in corridors. Victoria found fewer lunchtime companions. She sent an angry email to me once, accusing me of orchestrating "a trap." I replied with two sentences: "I moved my things out. I found someone who sees me."
Rowan and I grew closer in small, honest ways. "I like you," he said one night under the hum of a streetlamp at the night market when we ate skewers and the smoke painted us in gold.
"I like you too," I answered.
"I mean it," he said. "Not because anyone told me to. Because I want to."
That clarity mattered. He didn't want a trophy or a project deliverable. He wanted me — the careful, stubborn Ella who once waited at a window for a boy who never woke up to her.
7
Time did the ordinary work of changing things. Dexter found temp gigs. He sent a sheepish message the next month asking if he could borrow my charger. I didn't answer. Victoria tried to apologize at a company event. I nodded, but something in her confidence had chipped. She no longer strutted next to Rowan; she sat alone in meetings, glancing at the door as if expecting a rescuer who had already left.
Rowan asked me to be his partner — not for a project, not as a convenience, but in the soft, spare way he asked needed things. "Will you come to the campus anniversary with me?" he asked on a rainy Thursday.
I thought of the old photographs, the silly ways I had loved once. I thought of the Pikachu pillow once thrown aside. "Yes," I said.
We went back to the campus for the eighty-year celebration. He stood by me and when someone recognized him, he introduced me without hesitation. "This is Ella Clark," he said. "She's brilliant and stubborn and she made our delivery better."
When we posed near the newly opened swimming center, the photos felt like a reclamation: the me who had once bent toward someone else now standing straight. I found a tiny campus badge in my bag — Petra had slipped it in as a joke — and I pinned it on my shirt. Rowan watched me with a look I would learn to trust.
That night, at a little stall near the gate, he leaned close. "By the way," he said in a conspiratorial whisper, "I took one of your old posts and put it in my notes. I wanted to remember where you started."
I laughed. "Why?"
"Because people who see where you came from understand what you've overcome," he said.
I looked at him. "Do you still hate Victoria?" I asked.
He considered. "I don't hate her. I just don't make room for people who don't make room for the people I love."
8
Months passed and the small certainties of life rearranged. Our project closed and new ones opened. Dexter's name became a cautionary tale in the office gossip chain. Victoria stopped tagging the office; she developed a private list of friends and kept them close. I found myself eating hot pot at midnight because we were both tired and needed warmth. Rowan caught me laughing with my friends, and the way he looked at me made me feel like the luckiest quiet person in the world.
One evening, Petra knocked on my door with a box. "You left something here," she said.
Inside was the Pikachu pillow. Two years earlier, it had been the most expensive thing he gave me, and now it looked small and sad. I carried it to the closet and placed it in a drawer. On top of it, I put the tiny campus badge Rowan had once pinned on me at the ceremony.
Rowan came over and sat on the bed. "Keep it," he said. "It tells a story."
"I don't want to throw it away," I said. "It belonged to a version of me."
"Then keep it," he said. "But don't let it be the only thing that defines you."
I pressed the badge to the drawer. Outside, a car alarm beeped once and then fell silent. Inside, the lamp threw a rectangle of light across the room.
"Do you regret anything?" he asked after a moment.
"I regret the time I wasted waiting for someone who never woke up to me," I said.
He smiled and kissed my forehead. "Then it's a good thing you woke up."
9
At the team celebration a month later, someone made a toast. "To Ella," the manager said, "for carrying this thing through."
I raised my glass. "To seeing the truth," I said, and the room clinked.
Rowan whispered, "To being brave enough to leave."
I smiled. "And to choosing better coffee."
He laughed. "Always the small comforts. I like that."
As the night wound down, Victoria lingered at the fringe. A few colleagues came up and greeted her waspishly. "We all have pasts," she said finally, in a tone that sounded like a plea and a defense. "I didn't mean to—"
"People can change," Rowan said, "but they must own what they did. That means not weaponizing others' lives."
Her face crumpled in a way that made me feel odd empathy. She had been unkind, yes, but she was also smaller for having been petted by others. I didn't gloat. I only felt the clean lightness of someone who had stepped out of a shadow and into a room with windows.
10 — Ending, distinct and specific
That night, when I packed my bag, I put the Pikachu pillow in the drawer under the campus badge Rowan had given me. The small things had a strange power: the cheap pillow, the badge from a ceremony, the tiny charger he had once returned to me. They were evidence that I had loved and been loved in different ways.
"Do you want to keep that badge on you sometimes?" Rowan asked.
"Maybe," I said. "Maybe I'll pin it when I need a reminder."
He kissed my temple. "Then pin it."
I closed the drawer, and the soft thud sounded like an end and a beginning at once.
The End
— Thank you for reading —