Sweet Romance11 min read
Wrong Number, Right Man
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I lost my boyfriend.
"He cheated on me," I told the empty apartment, and my voice sounded smaller than I felt. "He didn't just cheat—he cheated like octopus arms, everywhere."
I packed a small bag, left a note for my father, and walked to the tiny noodle shop two blocks from my building. The plan was simple: drink until the hurt blurred. One cup became four, four became a bottle, and the bottle became five beers. My answers were short, my tears were sharp, and my body was louder than my dignity.
When it was time to pay, my phone died.
I borrowed the shop owner's cracked smartphone, typed my father's number, and dialed. The line rang twice and someone answered in a clear, amused voice.
"Dad!" I blurted.
A pause, then a low laugh. "I'm not that old. You can call me brother."
I froze. My head throbbed. "Sorry, wrong number," I said, and hung up. I dialed again, because I was stubborn and because I was too drunk to remember the right digits. The same voice answered.
"Wrong again?" he asked lightly.
I swallowed, blurred. "I can't remember my father's number."
"Do you remember your mother's?" the voice asked after a second.
"No." The truth lodged in my throat like a stone.
"Which part of the city are you in? Are you in River Park?" he asked, and his voice folded itself into a compass.
"Yes. High District."
He hummed as if making a map. "Tell me the address."
I rattled off the street and building number to the shop owner; he relayed them, and then the voice said, "Lucky you. I'm nearby. Wait a bit, little girl. I will come."
Little girl. The words were strange on my ears.
I sat on the shop's step and tried not to fall asleep. The night was a cold, thin thing. I pressed my forehead to the cold glass to wake myself. When the man arrived, he was younger than I had imagined. He crouched down at my level, hands on his knees, smiling like a friend catching you in a lie.
"Little girl?" he said again.
"You were the one who answered," I told him, trying to be stern. "You pretended to be my father."
He straightened and laughed. "Guilty as charged."
"Did you at least come to lecture me?"
He glanced at the register. "Did you pay yet?"
"No. My phone—" I fumbled the words.
He was already moving. "I'll settle it."
He walked to the counter, signed a name, and came back. He took one look at me and said with a grin, "You sound like a kid."
"I'm not a kid," I sniffed.
One of his friends snorted behind him. He threw an arm around my shoulders and, for the first time that night, I felt oddly safe.
"Come on," he said, taking off his jacket and wrapping it around me. "I'll walk you home."
They joked and teased behind us—"sister," "wife," "sister-in-law"—and even when I tried to protest, he scoffed and corrected them to "miss." I let him lead, because my feet refused to behave.
Ten minutes later, I tripped in the grass and twisted my ankle. Pain burst sharp and cold. He dropped to his knees like a reflex and examined my swollen ankle with a frown that belonged to someone who had seen many injuries and was not impressed.
"Hop on my back," he said, and I almost laughed at the absurdity of it.
"I can walk," I insisted, but one step made me breathe in pain. He shrugged and lifted me, as if I weighed nothing.
"You're lighter than you look," he joked, and I melted at the sound of his voice. It was the same voice from the phone—clear and kind.
"Please don't call me little girl again," I mumbled into his neck.
He didn't promise. He carried me to the police station, of all places. The fluorescent light smelled like quiet work and authority. He left me in a sofa, declared he had given me a lift, and went back outside to make sure his friends could get home. I dozed and woke in an office I recognized too late—my father's office.
My father, Officer Grant Lucas, had the same look he used when I broke curfew as a teenager: a mix of exasperation and relief.
"What happened to you?" he asked.
"Drunk," I said, embarrassed. "I called the wrong number and fell asleep here."
Grant looked at the man across from him, a uniformed officer with a tidy haircut. He turned to me with a face I hadn't expected to see in civilian clothes, a face that seemed built from good angles and quiet steadiness.
"This is Eben Kelley," my father said with a half-smile that held a story. "He's the one who found you."
Eben's mouth curved. "You called me 'brother' on the phone and then passed out in the street."
"Sorry." I tried to sound mortal and failed.
Grant left us together under an awkward ceiling and closed the door like a man arranging fate.
Later, when I tried to walk out before he did, Eben stopped me. "You owe me for the jacket," he said with a faint amusement. "And the ride. And the embarrassment."
"I can pay you," I insisted, already opening my purse.
He rolled his eyes and reached into his pocket as if reaching for something ordinary. "You can't. I don't take money. And for the record, you barfed on me."
I wanted to disappear. "I—"
"I threw the shirt away," he finished. "You can buy me a drink to replace the moral injury."
We exchanged numbers, the ordinary sort of exchange between two people who would probably never meet again. Eben wrote his name in a somewhat messy hand: Eben Kelley. The paper felt significant, like a soft tether.
A week later, my father pushed me into a small celebration dinner and pointed to a group of loud, shirt-sleeved men in the next room. "Sit with them," he said. "You're not allowed to sulk. Try this on for life."
My stomach flipped. The group included the men who had helped Eben, and when Eben saw me, his eyes briefed the room: amusement, color, concern, and then an odd flush at his ear as if the joke had touched him.
"Mae," my father called, like he had renamed me a guest star at this surprise party.
I walked in like a mismatched dress at a pool party. They called me "miss," "little girl," and worse. Someone suggested I dress differently next time to impress Eben, which was rude, and Eben intervened with a prefatory joke and a quick insult that fell between us like a promise.
"Sit, little princess," he said when I took the seat beside him, and something warm moved through me at that nickname, a silly, butterfly pinch in my chest.
We ate. We nailed awkward jokes like nails into a wall. One of the officers cried about a breakup—the type that smells of cheap whiskey and decisive revenge. Another flirted and then sobered to laugh about it. Eben poured me juice like a man who is practiced at care, and when he passed me a plate my whole afternoon squeezed a little softer.
"You drank because of a break-up?" he asked at one point, putting a glass in front of me.
"Divorce," I corrected with a half-smile.
"Cheers to that," he said, lifting his glass like he was giving me the world in a cup.
After that night, our meetings happened like small moves on a chessboard. Eben was patient, blushing when I made him uncomfortable, steady when I felt lonely. He taught me small things—how to hide a braid, how to arrange my coat on a chair so it didn't slip, how to take fruit instead of wine when my throat needed care. I told myself he couldn't be serious, that he was simply kind because of my father.
"Mae," he said once in a low voice when the room had thinned and the city hummed below, "do you have a boyfriend?"
"No." I tried to sound indifferent.
"Good," he said simply.
The truth was, I wanted to tell him everything: how I'd been betrayed, the small ways I had tried to be brave, the times I had pretended to sleep through the ache. Instead I said, "I'm fine."
"Do you like me?" he asked one night in the hospital cafeteria, where we had survived an impromptu late-night shift for a case and had shared a silly carton of juice.
"Hardly," I said with a fake frown.
"Okay," he said, as if I had passed a test. "Good."
It was his quiet that helped me breathe. He wasn't loud. He didn't glare. He folded tenderness into ordinary actions, like setting a napkin in my lap or stealing a slice of my toast when I wasn't looking.
A month passed. I had a new job that kept me near the station—exactly in front of the place where he had first carried me. Fate is a slow, persistent teacher. Each time I visited the station for some trivial administrative thing, there he was: Eben with his careful eyes and bad puns. His colleagues teased him with the easy cruelty of men who liked each other. They called me "sister" and "wife" in equal measure, which made my cheeks burn and my heart trip.
Then one evening during a class reunion, chaos happened.
The reunion was loud: clinking glasses, endless laughter, the kind of energy that smells like old stories being retold. I had not wanted to be there, but my friend had persuaded me—"Gideon won't be there," she said. Gideon Carter was the man who had broken me. I had fled him, or rather he'd fled toward other women, while pretending his arms were faithful.
I walked in and froze. Gideon sat across the room, arm around a new woman's waist, laughing like nothing had ever happened. The room hushed the second my face was visible; it was the kind of hush that feels like a spotlight.
"You came," Gideon said with a practiced surprise, and his new girl clung to him like he was a trophy.
People murmured, and one drunk man slurred the dark whisper that carved the silence open: "She wore his hat, didn't she? She cheated on you back then."
My chest stilled. I turned and faced him.
"You lied about me," I said, simple as a struck bell. "You told people I cheated."
Gideon looked embarrassed, shifty. His girlfriend reached forward like a viper to press him back. "She—" Gideon stammered. "That's not—"
"You dare," I said, and the heat inside me became an arrow. The chair scraped; someone called for calm. He pushed me, and his girlfriend slapped me. Everything moved in cruelly slow motion. I grabbed the nearest thing—an empty bottle—and swung.
It cracked across his head with a sound like punctuation. Blood bloomed. The room screamed. Someone called the police. My hands shook.
We were led to the station and quietly sorted like angry objects. Gideon bled more than he deserved to. People who had been my friends since childhood looked at me with the complicated pity of spectators. The humiliation of being called a liar had turned into something else: a raw thing that felt close to justice.
Later, as we stood in the station's intake, a uniformed officer I recognized—Eben—examined Gideon, an unreadable expression on his face. Then Eben looked up at me and said soft and sharp as a blade, "Next time, call me first."
I heard the words like a benediction. He had seen the way Gideon had messed with my life. There was something settling in the room, like gravity shifting.
But the public punishment was not over. The reunion did not let itself be understood in a small moment. The rumor that Gideon had been involved in other shady things began to surface, and under Eben's steady gaze he became a smaller man in front of his former friends. At one point Eben walked up to him and said so plainly the truth that the room collected.
"I remember you," Eben said, blunt and certain. "You were at that bust last month. You were mixed up. We kept an eye on you."
Gideon's face changed. His color drained. His girlfriend gasped. People pulled out phones and began to whisper. A woman I had once trusted stood and said, "We don't want people like that at our gatherings."
Gideon's bravado crackled like a dry shell. He tried to deny it, tried to laugh it off, but his smile fell apart as messages arrived that contradicted his stories. He stepped outside, and I followed.
The harshness of the night hit us there. The passerby who had once nodded at him now glanced away. The girlfriend's hand slipped from his arm. He made a last-ditch plea—"I didn't do anything"—but the way the world walked away from him was the punishment: not a legal verdict, not a final blow, but a slow unwinding in public.
He was left asking for his dignity on the sidewalk, the same dignity he had shredded in whispers when he cheated. People took a long time to forget and even longer to forgive.
That scene of disgrace lasted. For more than ten minutes I stood watching him try to collect a life that had already been judged by the gossip and the looks. He mouthed apologies to no one in particular and then tried to charm people again. The effort failed. One of his old classmates recorded him with a phone, a documentary of a man unraveling. The crowd's mood turned from shock to a certain cruel delight: here was a man who had used others, now emptied and tripping.
"Please," he begged at one point, voice thin. "Please, I can explain."
People shook their heads. "Not worth your breath," someone said.
By the time the police finished the paperwork and we returned to the station, Gideon carried a new kind of injury—the collapse of his social shell. His apology tour was met with silence, with the empty clatter of cut-off invitations and the solemn click of people turning away. The smell of his blood was already fading; the smell of reputation, or its lack, had a worse sting.
The aftermath was long. Some of those who had stood with us at the reunion took to speaking in whispers about him. A few posted videos. He tried to explain to anyone who would listen and found doors shutting. That was his punishment: an unraveling that happened so publicly you could not miss it.
I did not feel triumphant. I felt raw and exhausted. But as I stood in the sterile light with Eben by my side, there was a strange comfort in seeing the man who had hurt me reduced to his true size. He'd had his chance to be different and had chosen the easy path.
In the fluttered quiet, Eben looked at me with something that made my mouth go tender. "You okay?" he asked.
"No," I admitted. "But better."
Through the months that followed, life stitched itself in quiet ways. Eben was careful—sometimes painfully so. He preferred to rescue with small things: a jacket in cold weather, a bottle of juice, an unexpected text. He had scars I could see in the way he flinched at sudden noises and in the softened edges of his laugh.
One night he didn't joke. He lay in a hospital bed, one leg propped in plaster, smiling to hide the stubbornness of his pride. He had been injured in a case—a cracked bone and a slow recovery. The station came to the hospital and made a scene of quiet respect. His friends hovered like a flock of nervous birds.
"Why did you stay?" I asked him when he opened his eyes in the quiet after surgery.
His answer made my stomach flutter like a candle. "Because you stayed when you could have left," he said, and then he kissed me, a soft press, small but true, right in front of a cluster of embarrassed colleagues who pretended not to notice.
He fumbled with words, "Will you... be my—"
"Yes," I said before I could do anything else. It was a simple agreement that felt like a promise.
We were careful together. We learned each other's faults like maps. He learned how my old scars tightened under certain jokes. I learned that he used humor to deflect fear. We grew in the cracks where honesty lived.
A year later, in a small family gathering, Eben's father and my father sat shoulder to shoulder and laughed like men who had found a long-lost thing. Their history was odd and bound up in youthful mistakes. Once, years ago, they had argued over something trivial and their friendship had splintered. Time had softened them. When they learned we liked each other, they decided to stitch their own friendship into our future—I suppose some men at my age still treat life like a matchmaker's chessboard.
At home that night, after a dinner that smelled like slow-cooked lamb and homecoming, Eben leaned over and whispered a joke that made me snort. "You're going to be my anchor," he said with mock solemnity.
"And you," I replied, "are going to be mine."
He kissed my forehead. "Thank you," he murmured.
"For what?" I asked.
"For the wrong number," he answered, smiling the exact way he did when he comforted me. "For dialing the number and getting me instead of doom."
We laughed. The laugh turned into a quiet, comfortable silence that felt like an agreement made in two voices.
Months later, on a rainy Sunday, he put a note into my hand—familiar handwriting, the same messy scrawl that had once lifted a piece of paper in the police station. On it he had written, "Mae Neves — Eben Kelley." I looked up and found his eyes bright, soft. He was nervous in a way I had come to love.
"Will you be my wife?" he asked.
"Yes," I said again, because the answer had become simpler and truer with time. We were not the products of instant fairy tales. We were the sum of many wrong numbers, a few brave acts, a messy reunion, and the slow, careful courage of two people who had decided each other was worth the risk.
We kept the paper he had first given me. It lives in a drawer now, a fold in my life that I can touch when the world goes loud. Sometimes I take it out and read Eben's scrawl, and I smile at how small things—like a cracked phone battery and a borrowed jacket—become everything.
The End
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