Sweet Romance13 min read
You Think I Forgot? Guess Again.
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"I run when someone I love changes into someone I don't recognize."
That thought is the first thing I repeat when Rowan Forsberg's face appears in the hallway of the private room, as if a bad scene slipped back into my life. My hands are folded over Sebastian Downs' arm—he's agreed to play boyfriend for tonight—and my smile is rented and fragile.
"You look tense," Sebastian murmurs, his voice low enough that only I can hear. "Do you want more water?"
"I'm fine," I say. "Just—music's loud."
He doesn't press. He never presses. He is the kind of man who gives space like a mantle. I cling to that tonight. I need that: someone who will let me breathe in a place where someone else breathes like a claim.
Across the table, the hostess laughs and raises a glass. "To Lina!" someone toasts. "To her wedding!"
I smile because that's what you do at someone else's wedding party, even when your palms are sweating.
Then a glance—one quick, vertical flash—and my world tilts. Rowan's eyes find me in the crowd, and they aren't empty or lost the way the tabloids had said when he came back from his accident. They are sharp. Calm. They look like something that has been paying attention all along.
He stands slowly, an island movement across a wave of chairs, and for the first time tonight he smiles. It's a small thing. But in the way it curves at the edge, I feel a temperature change along my spine.
"You okay?" Sebastian squeezes my hand.
"Fine," I whisper, and I mean the word to be small and boring, a lie so common it will be ignored.
Rowan sits a place to my left without anyone offering him a chair. He smells like lemon—faint, citrus, the exact scent I've been carrying for years because at some point I stopped choosing my soap and started wearing what he liked.
"Claire," he says, and his voice is the kind of low that moves through a room and gathers attention. "Have we met before?"
My stomach turns. For a second the most honest thing I can think to say is: You broke me. You broke me and left, and then you came back and started looking for me.
Instead I answer, "No. Never."
He blinks like he thinks I joke. "You don't remember at all?"
"I don't," I say. "I'm sorry."
A slow slide of laughter, not mocking, but curious. "That's okay. People forget simple things, sometimes. How long have you and Sebastian been together?"
Sebastian looks at me and gives a soft, practiced smile. "We met at the department. A lot of work together, that led to seeing each other more." He keeps his voice warm. "We helped each other with senior projects."
The woman beside him—Lina's old friend—gives a little relieved cluck. "Oh, so you're serious then. Congratulations!"
"But," Rowan says, "if someone worth noticing is across the table, you would tell me, right?" Then he looks at me, and the room deflates into a different temperature. "And if I was interested—now—would you tell your boyfriend?"
"I—" My chopsticks drop. "Why would you ask—"
"Just curious." He smiles, harmless as a knife.
Later, in a moment that should be nothing, he points at a dish and small panic spikes into my throat. "That has peanuts, right?"
Everyone's voices dim. He didn't order this dish; he was late, he didn't know the menu, and he is allergic to peanuts.
"You shouldn't eat that," I say, because instincts are hard to forget. "You could have a reaction."
He looks at me as if I'm reciting lines from our years together. The look is unnerving. The night feels stitched with small needles—things only someone who knew me would notice. He keeps looking at me, at the curl of my hair, at the lemon faint on my wrist.
When the party shifts to a game—'I have, I have not'—the penalty is a hug for a minute. Rowan draws the strip of paper that names me and the room hushes and then laughs, but no one laughs at Rowan's choice. He stands, and though his expression is unreadable, he crosses the floor and takes me into his arms.
He is warm. He knows the shape of my shoulder. His voice is at my ear, dry and amused. "Your heart races."
"How would you know?" I whisper, because his fingers press into the small of my back like he remembers the number of my vertebrae.
"Because you always did," he answers, and the words make somewhere in me swell—anger, shame, a longing that tastes like lemon and iron.
Sebastian smiles across the room, waving like an actor in a play. "One minute!" he calls, and I want to wedge myself into his offered normalcy.
After the crowd thins, after the applause, Rowan catches me at the curb where rain begins in slow, soft applause from the sky. His car is a black ellipsis on the street. "Need a ride?" he asks.
"No, I'm—" I back away. "Thanks, but I can—"
"Claire," he says, as if warning is a memory. "Let me take you. Don't make me ask."
There is a thing about Rowan: he doesn't threaten with words. He threatens with the intensity of a look, the small movements that close space. When he pulls the passenger door open and I find myself sliding into the black leather seat before I realize I've agreed, his hand lands at the small of my back like it belongs there.
"You run a lot," he says as the city blurs past. "Why?"
"Because you were different," I say. "Because you—because of what happened before."
He looks at me with a faintly wounded amusement. "So you think I forgot you because of an accident."
"I think you forgot everything," I say. "And I left."
"You left me," he corrects with a tilt. "Do you know how that felt?"
"No. I left you because you tried to own me," I say. "I couldn't breathe."
He laughs once. "You think I didn't know that? Maybe I wanted you to leave, to punish you. Maybe I came back to punish you."
The car slows and he studies me. "Or maybe," he says, "I came back because I was looking for the person who smells like lemon."
I flinch. "That's not a reason."
"It is," he insists. "It has always been the reason."
Two days later, my life tilts again. Paul Dubois—our boss, a man more tired than old—tells me during a mid-morning meeting that there's a buyer. "A major investor," he says, eyes on one of the spreadsheets. "They're interested in taking over the firm."
My stomach drops like bad weather. "Is that—" I don't finish.
"Yes," Paul says. "And he's in town. He's here this afternoon."
The investor is Rowan Forsberg.
"He bought the firm," I tell Collins Baxter later over stale office coffee. "Out of nowhere, Rowan Forsberg bought our small company."
Collins stares. "Isn't that the guy from the party? The quiet one?"
"The quiet one who owns half the skyline," I say. "He bought us and then asked to see me. He says it's for business."
He says the words with a devil's ease. Rowan begins to pull me into his days with the gravity of someone who owns the orbit. He makes me run his emails, answer his calls, sit through client dinners. I become a satellite: visible, close, under his attention, unable to escape.
"You're my assistant now," he tells me on the second week, as if it's a promotion and not a takeover.
"That's not my role," I say.
"Roles change," he answers. "I need someone I trust to manage this transition."
"Why me?" I ask.
"Because," he says softly, "I know you."
I try to resist. I tell Sebastian I'm quitting again. He smiles and says, "If that's what you want." He's kind like that—quiet, helpful. He gives me an exit line and doesn't pull.
Rowan watches me leave the office like someone watching snow melt and seems unbothered. Then one night after a client dinner at his penthouse, when the rain is a curtain against the windows and his house is an edited version of his life, he gets drunk and refuses to leave my side.
When I try to slip out, he anchors my wrist with a hand that is not rough but is precise enough to stop me.
"Go on," he says. "Try to leave." His smile is small and dangerous. "Make me."
I try to be brave. "Rowan, you can't keep doing this."
He tilts his head like a man studying a clock's gear. "Why not? It's been my way for years."
"You don't get to choose my life," I say.
"I know," he says. "That's the difference. You used to be the one who ran. Now I'm the one who will catch."
I leave that night, but the next day he changes the world around me. He guesses—the password to his apartment is our anniversary date. He knows my coffee order. He leads meetings where I am the only one who can answer the questions he is asking. He does everything a man who has reclaimed possession does: he reclaims.
I try to build boundaries. I give Sebastian my address change and ask him to pick me up after work. He does, for a while, like a steady lighthouse, until he can't.
Then something ugly happens to move the story forward in a way I had not wished for, and it forces a public reckoning.
There had been a man—someone who followed me for days and nights. Weird, hungry eyes, the kind that look like they are trying to hold you still. I thought I had shaken him off when Rowan confronted the man outside my building months ago and the man slunk away, face flat with fear. But the man had come back.
One evening, as our new management rolled out a presentation in the glittering main hall of the new firm (Rowan's new employees, a press circle, a handful of the old team), the faint smack of a phone slide broke the pretense of calm. I was on stage beside Rowan—he had insisted—and the room smelled of polished wood and lemon air freshener.
"Before we begin," Rowan said, "there's a matter that requires everyone's attention."
He wasn't smiling.
"Security," he called. "Bring the footage."
The security guard—Paul, the one who once joked about retirement—turned the screen and the projector hummed. A tiny, shaky video filled the stage wall. It showed a man in a hood lingering near my apartment door, pressing his hand to the intercom, looking up like a rat searching for a hole.
"Who is that?" someone in the room asked.
"That's the man who has been following Claire the past week," Rowan said.
I felt heat at the base of my neck. "Rowan—"
"Let him speak."
The guard switched to another tape. The camera footage showed the same man tracking me down the street days before, hurrying when I stopped, slowing when I paused, photographing the number on my door. The room sat on a pin—there was a hush like the world had stopped breathing.
"Who is he?" Paul asked.
"His name is Daniel Pierce," Rowan said. "Arrest records. Several complaints." Rowan's hand was steady on the podium, fingers curled like a man's who has lived decades of practice. "He has been light in the wallet and heavy in the hands of many women in our city."
The man in the screen was no longer a vague silhouette; he was real. Someone in the back muttered, "He looks dangerous."
"Daniel Pierce is here," Rowan announced. "Bring him."
A guard pulled open the side door. The man was dragged in—not brutally, but with a firmness that made the room narrow. He was hooded; when the guards pushed his face up into the light, his eyes were frightened and small.
"Is this the man?" Rowan asked, pointing.
Several voices said, "Yes."
"Daniel," a woman in the second row whispered.
The man shivered. For five minutes the room was an electric current. He opened his mouth to speak when Rowan tipped his chin with a finger.
"Tell everyone why you were following my employee," Rowan said. "Tell them why you stood at her door."
Daniel's voice came out like a whispered paper. "I—it's because—"
He stopped. We leaned closer.
"I thought she might be someone I knew from before," he said. "I thought—"
He began to cry, poorly held. There was a wetness he could not hide.
"Enough," Rowan said. "We have security footage, witness statements, and messages you sent to her. Why don't you explain why you thought that justified following?"
The guards showed the group texts where Daniel's messages were obsessive and obscene, the photos he'd snapped. The camera showed him hiding behind hedges, peering. The room shifted into the kind of disgust that builds with evidence.
"I didn't know she was anyone," Daniel cried suddenly. "I just—she looked like someone I couldn't stop watching. I thought—"
"Look," Rowan said, and his voice lost the distant softness it sometimes carried. "This isn't romantic. This is illegal. This is dangerous. Look at these faces." He swept his hand in an arc across the room—employees watching, clients with their phones, a woman who used to be my neighbor with mascara smudged from leftover worry. "You followed someone who didn't want you to follow them. You tried to take their privacy."
Daniel's face folded inward. He started to babble, apologies tumbling. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry—"
"No," I said, and my voice snapped like ice. "You are not going to apologize like the whole world didn't matter. You are not going to make it about your feelings. You made it about my fear."
There was a ripple of approval.
Rowan's jaw went tight. "Clerical," he told the guard. "Call the police. I want a full report. I want this on record."
"We will press charges," Paul said. "This is unacceptable."
Footsteps in the corridor—police officers arriving because Rowan had sent the message—came into the hall like pages flipping. The officers led Daniel out in handcuffs. The press smelled blood and took flashes. In the corridor, on the stairs, the staff whispered. "He'll go to jail," someone said like a benediction.
Then Rowan did something I hadn't expected.
He stepped down from the podium, came to stand directly in front of me, and looked at the man in cuffs as if cataloging his expression. The man's eyes were small and frightened. The people around pressed closer.
"Do you see what you did?" Rowan's voice was calm and precise. "You wanted to own her. You wanted to know when she slept, who she spoke to. You were dangerous. You will answer for that."
The man's face crumpled. He began to plead for leniency. Around him, reactions varied: some mouths shaped 'good', some phones recorded, some people clapped softly—relief turned into applause. A few staff hugged each other, murmuring that finally someone had acted.
"Is anyone else obsessed with owning someone who doesn't want to be owned?" Rowan asked then, and his eyes flicked to the room. "If you are, I suggest you leave before the cameras do."
There was a freeze of faces. A woman near the back, who had once joked loudly about how a girl's choices amuse her, sat very still, her color gone. She had been cruel before—she had whispered rumors about me, called me "boss's wife" in the hallways, and sent barbed messages to anyone who would listen. She had laughed when Daniel's shadow loomed earlier, treating fear like a story.
Rowan turned slowly to her. "And you," he said, "you profit from gossip. You peddle lies to get ahead. People in this room value your mirth less than they value a person's safety."
Her mouth opened and closed. Her colleagues' eyes moved away like people turning from a small wound.
He was quiet for a second. "We will inform Human Resources of your behavior. Your privileges are revoked. You will not represent this firm in any capacity for the foreseeable future."
She flinched like a struck animal. "You can't—" she said, voice thin.
"Watch me," Rowan said. "You made someone else's life the subject of your small jokes. You will answer to that too."
Public humiliation spread like a quiet currency. Her phone had already begun to buzz with texts from others who had been on the receiving end of her gossip, from employers who had been asked if having her on the team was wise. People started to look at her with that slow, social accounting that follows when power finds your ledger.
She left the room within the hour, face gone white, a dozen people glancing away from her as she passed. In the corridors, someone whispered, "Good—finally." Another took out their phone and posted the story. The firm buzzed with a different energy—responsibility, consequence.
When the police took Daniel away, crowd noises rose and collapsed. Reporters pushed toward the building's entrance, and the firm arranged a brief statement.
I stood on stage while cameras recorded my hands fidgeting, while reporters asked questions I could answer with simple flat facts: the incident had been recorded, the man arrested, the staff supported me. Rowan stood by me like a shield without touching me, a presence more solid than a promise.
That evening, word of the event spread. People who had once whispered about me now looked at me like someone who had stood in a place and made something stop. They used a different tone—the one used for survivors. It felt strange and sharp.
"That was… brutal." Collins said later when we sat in a small cafe, steam curling from cups.
"It had to be," I said. "If it had been me alone, it would have been hidden in the city two blocks away."
Rowan's presence, the public nature of the punishment, the many witnesses—these things changed the shape of the danger. Daniel's humiliation was not meant to be revenge; it was meant to be a clear wall. The woman who spread rumors faced a different ruin: social exile and professional consequence. Both punishments were public, but different: one legal, one social. Rowan had orchestrated both with a precision that left no room for the insinuation that I had been to blame.
After the police left and the crowd thinned, Rowan walked me to the street where the rain had returned it to its old measured rhythm.
"You okay?" he asked.
I wrapped my hands around my coffee like armor. "I am," I said, but the word tasted like something I might lose again.
He looked at me in a way I had not seen before—less claim, more calculation. "I don't want you to keep being frightened," he said. "If you want me to stop, tell me to stop."
"I don't know what I want," I admitted.
He smiled, a soft, bewildered thing. "Then let me show you what I can be like without memory guiding me."
Days stretched. Rowan tried to be different sometimes—gentler choices, softer words. He bought the firm not to own my life but, he claimed, to protect me. He would be jealous, still; he would test limits. But there were real moments—small ones—that used to hurt and now warmed like small, honest lights.
One morning, after a week of working side by side in a new cadence, I brewed coffee and sat down at the kitchen table in his penthouse. He came in with two cups and sat across from me.
"Do you remember anything else?" I asked.
He looked at his cup. "I remember how your laugh used to pull me out of bad days," he said. "I remember lemon. I remember the way you used to scold me for spoiling your favorite novel."
I half-laughed. "You remembered a scent and books. Not much."
"You remember what matters more than the facts sometimes," he said. "Muscle memory is stubborn. So are feelings."
"Are you saying you love me because muscle remembers or because you chose me now?"
He reached across the table and covered my hand with his. "Because I remember enough to miss you and enough to want to do better. Because I want you to feel safe."
The words were small and honest, and for the first time in a long time I felt the shape of something I could build on—not perfect, not painless, but real.
We didn't rush. He didn't apologize with a single scene and then expect absolution. He learned the lines I needed to hear. He stopped deciding things for me without asking. When he slipped, we argued. When he listened, he learned. When he worried, he told me why.
There was a weight to the public moment we had shared—the exposure of the stalker, the humiliation of gossip—and it left a trail that changed how people looked at me and at him. In the wake of that public scene, I discovered a different currency: accountability.
One night months after Daniel Pierce's arrest, sitting on the sofa with an old throw draped over our knees like an awkward answer to the past, Rowan looked at me and said, "Marry me and I'll never be the kind of man who leaves you again."
I thought about the poison that used to be in his love. I thought about how he had used control like a language before. I thought about the law and the public punishment and the soft rebuild of our days.
"Do you want that too?" I asked him.
He smiled, and the answer in his eyes was small and steady. "I want everything that keeps you safe, Claire. I want our small life."
"I don't know about everything," I said. "But I know I don't want fear."
"Then don't," he said.
We didn't say "always" or "forever." Those words had been cheap in the past. We said smaller things—things we could actually build into existence: "Ask me." "Tell me." "Don't presume." "Come home."
The lemon scent faded from habit and became only memory. We cultivated new scents together—coffee in the morning, the citrus of a Sunday market, the faint wax of a polished office table—and with them the world refitted around us.
I don't know if he ever remembered everything—names, dates, old hours. I know the important parts: he learned to ask permission, to stop the reach before it happened, to step back when I needed distance. He paid for what had been done in the public square and learned to make amends in small private ways.
Once, months later, at the annual holiday party, someone in the crowd nudged me and said, "I remember that night. I remember what you did. You were fierce."
I smiled. "We were all fierce that night," I said. "We made sure it couldn't happen again."
Rowan took my hand then in front of a room that had once turned its face from me. He didn't press. He just held my fingers and I felt the warmth of a man who had learned that love is not about owning someone, but about choosing them—every single day, and listening when they say 'no.'
The End
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