Sweet Romance16 min read
"You’re My Girlfriend," He Said — And Then the Night Nearly Killed Me
ButterPicks11 views
"Stay with me."
Those four words were the first thing I heard when I woke up on a hard chair in the ER, my stomach still rolling from the drip, my head buzzing from pain. A man's voice — calm, close, a little rough.
"I am here," I answered, because it was the only thing that felt true.
He was shorter than I remembered in photos but taller than my memory wanted. He had a dark coat, tired eyes, and a hand that took mine like it had always belonged there.
"I'm Lucas," he said, and then he did something I had not expected in my whole quiet, careful life.
"You're my girlfriend," he said, looking at me like we had years of proof between us.
"I—" I started, and my mouth closed. I had carried a secret crush on Lucas David since we were seventeen. I had never told him that. We had once shared a desk for a term, and then he leapt ahead, went abroad, and into a life he had earned — medicine, honors, a clean, bright reputation. Ten years of a small, private ache in me had never met the real thing.
"Don't try to move," a second voice cut in.
"Jude?" Lucas barked at the man who had been pushing the wheelchair. "Stop."
Jude Monteiro rolled his eyes, a small smirk as he looked at me. "He hit his head. Keep calm. He believes you are his ten-year-long long-distance girlfriend."
"You believe that?" My voice came out thin. It sounded like a child's whisper.
"He does." Jude's voice went quiet. "He thinks you've been dating for ten years. He won't let anyone call it into question."
I sat in a chair in the small office, and Jude watched me like I was fragile glass.
"Why me?" I asked.
"You were a classmate," Jude said. "He has patched memory with stories. He needs something safe now. Help him cope. It's harmless." He smiled like it was the easiest plan in the world. "You could help him heal. Either that, or we tell him the truth and risk bruising his head more."
My mind jumped like a faulty switch. "That's… not right."
"He's a doctor," Jude said, leaning close. "He knows medicine. He knows a lot. But if you say nothing, he thinks what he wants. If you say something, he gets startled. You said you liked him in high school. He will believe he never left. Try being kind. Sit with him for a day. See where the truth goes."
I tried to say no. I tried to say yes. I failed and let the room fold around my guilty heart.
"He needs someone he trusts," Lucas said suddenly, eyes sharp. "If you can be here, do it. If you can't, I will find someone else."
I should have turned and run. Instead, I followed him out into the parking lot, because his hand was still in mine, warm and real.
"Don't call me your girlfriend in the hallway," I hissed when we were inside his car.
He smiled sheepishly. "You look like my girlfriend. Your hand fits. That photo from the sports day — you're there."
"That old photo," I muttered.
"From our first year," he said. "I kept it."
I walked home that night holding a borrowed role and a secret thrill.
The first week was full of small truths and small lies. He asked about my health five times a day.
"Do you have chest pain right now?" he would ask.
"No," I'd answer.
"Are you getting enough water?"
"Yes."
"Show me your hands."
When he held my hand to check the bruise at his temple, I felt electric and terrified.
"You sure you don't remember anything?" I asked once, on a couch with two sleeping cats between us.
"I remember most things," he said. "I just remember us as a couple for a decade."
"Why me?" I asked, again, because I wanted to find where the story had gone wrong.
"You were my first honest place," he said. "I can't find how to explain it. But you fit."
Most readers would call my choices cowardly. I called them hopeful.
We built tiny rituals. He taught me how to take my medications on time. I made porridge that didn't burn his stomach. We shared a lunch in the gray light of his clinic's staff room that felt like an old, private joke. I answered his texts in a voice I could own.
"Text me 'heart hurts' and I will come," he told me once, half serious, half tender.
"That's a bold instruction for a man in scrubs," I teased.
"Practice matters," he said.
I was balancing a dream and a lie until the night someone else put a knife to the fiction.
He came to my building twice that week delivering food. The first time, the rider's name on the app said one thing. The man at my door used another name. He smiled too long. He looked at me like he knew where I lived, like he had always known.
"You're Dylan, right?" he asked the second time. He used my full name as if it tied the two of us together.
"Yes," I said, cold.
That night, Jude and Lucas both insisted I go to the hospital while Lucas covered work. I didn't want to. I wanted to be brave at home. But fear moved faster than pride, and I took a cab.
When we came back, the man was at my door.
"Who are you?" Jude demanded, keeping himself sharp.
The man lunged at me. He had a small blade. I felt the cold press against my skin and the world turned into two things: the scrape of his foot on tile and the sound of my friend screaming.
"Get out," I said, but the word didn't hold him. He had lost his reason.
Jude shouted. I ran for the stairs. A neighbor — Philip Bolton — thundered down, a sheet in his hand, eyes hard as iron. He struck the man's arm, not too hard, but hard enough to disarm a desperate man. The blade clattered. Two people held the attacker while we called the police.
Sirens came, lights flashed. I tasted copper from the fright and felt a hand — Lucas's hand — under my jaw and in my hair like a blanket.
The police took the man away. He screamed and covered his face. He said my name over and over.
"She said she loved me," he cried in a thin voice. "She promised. She promised."
At the station, I realized two things at once: the man had been stalking me and he had made his own story from the scraps of my life.
The next hours were messy—statements, hospital checks, stitches for cuts on my palm, an adrenaline cup full of trembling. I sat with Lucas in an empty staff lounge as midnight leaned heavy on the windows.
"Who was he?" I asked.
"His name is Gunner Pohl," Lucas said. "He has a history of stalking in other neighborhoods. He was pretending to be an app rider to confirm your schedule."
"Why me?"
Guilt crawled up my spine. "Because I was alone."
"Because you were reachable." Lucas's voice was flat. "Because you were nice."
"That is not my fault," I said fiercely.
He nodded. "No. We fix it."
The hospital pressed us into a strange normal: I gave an official statement; Lucas checked vitals on trauma patients; Jude covered for both of us in the hallway with a comic smile that didn't meet his eyes.
We went on with life. We made a plan — new locks, security cameras, police warning. Lucas installed a small security light outside my building. He printed a photo of my door and circled the latch with a sticky note. He left his badge with the front desk as proof that I wasn't alone.
"Sleep at my place," he said the night after. "I don't want you alone."
I did, because I wanted to.
You would think after an attack, the story would split. It didn't. It stuck. We were two clumsy people finding a rhythm in small gestures. He was fiercely protective. I tried, honestly, to be myself and keep our lie manageable.
Then the rumor came.
"Did you hear?" a nurse said that afternoon. "Lucas has a girlfriend already. A doctor — Veronique Gonzales."
"Whose friend said that?" I asked, shutting the tablet.
"Everyone's been talking. He told someone in the ward this morning." The nurse's face was curious, not cruel. "They said she's been his classmate since university."
My heart stopped writing new lines.
I had always been afraid of the other woman. Rumors are sharp as knives. The name settled into my chest like a stone.
I couldn't sleep that night. I watched Lucas sleep, watched the folded shape of his jaw, and in the dark I asked the question that would have ruined so many things.
"Do you have another girlfriend?"
He blinked and then gave me a smile that ache could live in. "Veronique is a colleague. We trained under the same professor. She is not my girlfriend."
"Why would people say that?"
"People see what they want," he said. "They hear a word and make a phrase. There are many who like easy gossip."
"Did you tell them you have a girlfriend," I asked, wanting the truth, wanting a line I could hold.
He hesitated. "No. I didn't need to because I saw you here."
"It is a lie anyway," I said. "You told people your girlfriend is Veronique."
He put his palm flat over my hand. "Sometimes memory makes stories. I am trying to find the real edges."
I looked at him then — really looked — at the man who refused to let go of my wrist in public and who defended me to a stranger. His memory was blurry in some spaces and ironed with certainty in others. I wanted to trust him. I also wanted an argument that would let me stay and demand honesty.
The hospital became our stage. Staff whispered. A small group of nurses traded updates. I felt like an ornament someone held up and turned this way and that.
Then Gunner Pohl escaped custody.
He had been in the holding room across from the emergency entrance. He started banging the door. Someone underestimated his urge. He ran down the hall like a collapsing thing.
I felt my blood become all used-up fear all over again when someone shouted my name.
They cornered him in the central atrium. We were there — the police had called for witnesses. There were families in the waiting room, a line of late-night visitors, a pair of interns moving boxes, a cluster of on-duty nurses with coffee cups. I went because I couldn't not go.
What followed had to be seen to be believed.
"Get away from her!" Lucas roared before I understood he was running.
Gunner looked up and saw me. For a second he smiled like a man who had reached a shore.
"There you are," he hissed. "You promised me you wouldn't go away."
"Lucas, stay back!" I shouted, but my voice bit into nothing.
The crowd reacted. Phones bloomed like flowers, screen lights glinting. Someone shouted to call the police. Someone else blocked the exit. A security guard pushed forward. The man lunged.
He swung at a nurse with his second hand. Then Philip — the neighbor who had helped earlier — reacted, diving into the path, grabbing the attacker and slamming him down. The moment froze in slow thrusts: the man's boot skidded, his face scraped tile, the blade skidded away.
"Stop!" a mother's voice shouted. Her child was clinging to her coat, eyes wide.
Gunner was too big to fit his own myth. He tried to stand; he couldn't. People pressed around, some holding phones, some shouting.
"Who is she?" a security officer barked, grabbing the man's shoulder pins.
"She belongs to me!" Gunner cried. "She belongs to me!"
"You're under arrest," the officer said. "Don't move."
I remember the man's face as the police handcuffed him: first smugness, then confusion, then the thin thread of denial.
"No!" he screamed to me, voice raw. "You said you'd come back! You said we'd be together!"
"Shut up," a woman in the crowd spit, and there were murmurs — part pity, part contempt.
Then, in front of a hundred people — staff, patients, families, phones lifting — the punishment part of the night unfolded.
The detective on duty, a tall woman with a tired jaw, pulled out a printout. I had written down every delivery, every odd encounter. Those notes, plus the app trail and witnesses’ statements, became a public display. She read aloud in the atrium, voice hoarse with authority.
"This man, Gunner Pohl," she said, "has been following Dylan Jung, using aliases and fake delivery assignments. He broke into her building and attempted to assault her. He has a past with similar behavior."
"That's a lie!" Gunner shrieked.
"Is she lying?" the detective asked, and the crowd turned to me like a jury.
"No," I said, my voice steadier than I felt. "He came to my door. He had a blade."
Phones clicked. People whispered. Somebody played back security footage on a phone and held it up. A screen showed the man watching my door like he had memorized it. His face was clear in the light.
"How did you get her name?" a reporter in scrubs shouted. "How did you know where she lived?"
"I looked," he said. "I watched."
"Shut up!" the detective ordered. "This is not your stage."
He tried to back away. People pressed closer. An older woman, a visitor who had lost someone last year, stepped forward and pointed.
"You hurt my daughter before," she said. "You see how this woman is shaking? You hurt girls."
Gunner's face twisted. "I loved her!" he pleaded. "She loved me once!"
"She never loved you," Philip said. He had the calm voice of someone who had been ready to step into danger. "She was kind to you because you needed it. You made a choice to fixate on that kindness."
"But she promised—"
"Stop talking," the detective snapped.
He went through stages. At first he raged, his words jabbing like the blade. Then he realized the security footage existed. His shoulders sagged and he started to babble, a child's scramble.
When the media guard arrived and started to record the scene on their phone, the man's pride collapsed. He looked small as a child who had been found out stealing.
"You're a sick man," someone said.
He sank to his knees on the shiny floor as a woman nearby shouted the exact thing I'd written in my statement: "You followed her home. You watched her in the hall. You threatened her."
"Gunner! Get up now," a policeman ordered, but his voice softened almost involuntarily.
"No," he whispered. "Dylan, please—"
He crawled forward. His palms smeared across the tile, and the shiny floor picked up the smear like a bad print. He reached toward me, and everyone in the atrium could see the man who had imagined a story with me at its center. He was pleading for something I never promised him.
"Please," he said, and his begging turned into wails. A nurse stepped around him. Someone else took a picture; someone else recorded his pleading.
"Beg him to stop," the detective said. "Beg him to confess."
"Get off me!" he begged first at me, then at Lucas. His voice had all the layers of denial. "I didn't mean to—"
"You're wrong," the crowd answered back. Phones captured every syllable.
He tried to claw at his collar. He cried. He denied. He fell silent. Then he started to scream in a sharper, clearer way: "No! No! I'm not the monster!"
The detective read names. She told him he'd be charged with attempted assault, stalking, and breaking and entering. A mother in the atrium cheered. A group of nurses applauded.
"You're going to jail," someone said quietly. It was not a rejoicing so much as a settling — like a heavy thing finally set in place.
He tried one last maneuver: he lunged forward, this time toward the cameras, screaming, "They're making up lies! They are lying!" His hands flailed and some people stepped back. A nurse slapped his face hard enough to startle a gasp.
"Stop," the detective said, the single syllable a command that pressed the moment down like a lid. She pushed him onto his side, handcuffs clicked. He had no dignity left.
In the crowd: phones waved, some people shaking heads, some recording. A teenager in scrubs held up a sign of support: "We see you, Dylan." A dozen people clapped, not at the man but for the woman who had stood in the middle of a very public place and told the truth.
Later, after the police put him into a wagon and the medical staff calmed the atrium with warm tea and soft words, the detective approached me with a file.
"You did well," she said.
"I didn't feel like I did," I said.
"You did," she said. "You told the truth. He made a show. The truth wins because people see it."
He had a final breakdown on the stretcher. He begged. He asked me to forgive him. He called me promises I had never made. His voice went from entreaty to self-pity. He shouted about destiny like a sermon.
"Please!" he cried, breaking into a jag of breath. "I won't hurt you again! Please!"
An elderly woman spat near his shoulder as they led him by. The small sound of contempt echoed.
"Eat it, monster," a nurse hissed, and a chorus of voices agreed.
He sobbed, and then he was gone.
After he left, the atrium felt like a stage that had been cleaned. People whispered. Some left, shaking their heads. Others stayed to talk in low voices. Phones still hummed.
I sat with Lucas on a bench. He took my hand and didn't let it go.
"You saw all that," he said.
"I did," I answered. "I felt it."
"I'm sorry," he said. "I came late."
"You didn't," I told him. "You came when you could."
He pressed his forehead to my temple in the way he did when the ward was quiet. "I will make it safe for you," he promised.
"You already did," I said, though the truth sat inside me like a seed I wasn't sure would grow.
The next day, the rumor about Veronique spread one last time. I sought her out at a small hospital seminar and found her — Veronique Gonzales — in a white coat, quiet and blunt.
"You are Lucas's friend," she said when I introduced myself cautiously. "I've heard you had a rough night."
"Yes," I said.
"Ask him yourself," she said. "We were colleagues. We worked on the same team. That is all."
She smiled, not unkindly. "If it helps, I approved a transfer to this hospital when I heard he was back. He is already a good man."
I wanted more. I wanted to bind everything with high, clear words. But sometimes, true things are smaller.
"Thank you," I said.
We put on our small armor of facts. Lucas and I kept living each day like a favor to our future selves: small kindnesses, small dinner rituals, small boundaries. He told Jude to stop flirting with patients in the hallway. Jude rolled his eyes and said he was doing the universe a kindness.
People recorded the atrium scene and sent messages of support. For a week, my phone rang with strangers' voices that said, "Be careful. Stay strong." The police followed up. Gunner's court date was set.
On the morning of the public hearing — because this was not only a personal moment but a public one now — the hospital allowed the hearing to happen in the main lobby, a pragmatic, municipal stage. The prosecutor wanted witnesses to be able to see his demeanor. The press wanted visuals. I wanted the story to end with the sort of clarity that would stop rumors from living in the dark corners.
The lobby filled with people: friends who had come to show support, neighbors who had seen the story on their feeds, nurses on days off who wouldn't be missed by their wards, and even Veronique, who came to stand by me in a white coat that fit her like a uniform of truth.
Gunner was brought in with a face that had been hollowed by sleepless nights. He looked smaller than he had in the atrium. His hands were cuffed.
When the prosecutor played a short video in which he had followed me, there was a collective intake of breath.
"Why did you do this?" the prosecutor asked him.
"Because she promised me," he said, and his voice broke.
"Who promised you?" the prosecutor asked.
"She did," he insisted, pointing at me like an accusation.
"You are not allowed to point," the judge said.
I rose and stood before the room. The first person who saw me was Lucas. His hand found my waist and held it. I saw Jude behind him making faces at him.
"Did you threaten her?" the prosecutor asked me.
"Yes," I answered. "He tried to get into my home. He followed me. He told me things I never said."
The prosecutor looked at Gunner with a clinical stare, then at the courtroom map, then declared the charges.
Then the punishment scene began — a long, detailed public moment that the law allowed as part of the hearing process. The prosecutor read a statement of accumulated evidence: episodes, messages, false identities, the knife incident. He read out the detective's report and the security camera timelines. The room strained into silence.
Gunner first tried to deny. "That's not me. That's not what I meant."
The prosecutor put another printout on the bench — photos of him outside my building, screenshots of his messages where he had written "I wait by her door," and other proof.
"That is mine," the judge said. "Do you have anything to say?"
He stammered and then fell to a new stage of reaction.
"Please," he said. "Please don't—"
"Begging will not erase your actions," the prosecutor said coldly, and he kept reading. Each piece of proof was a small hammer.
He started pleading: "I love her. She is the one who made me brave."
A woman in the public row stood up.
"How many women have you followed?" she asked.
He didn't answer. He started crying like a child.
"This will not help you," Lucas said softly. "You put my girlfriend in danger."
"She said she'd come back!" Gunner wailed. "She promised to love me. She promised!"
The room changed. Faces that had been polite became hard. Phones found their hands and recorded every plea. A young nurse began clapping, gently at first, then louder. People murmured assent. Someone recorded the man's collapse into his own confession.
He went through the full arc the prosecutor had prepared to show: denial, confusion, rage, pleading, collapse. The prosecutor allowed witnesses to speak. Philip recounted how he'd pulled the blade away. The old neighbor told of the man's steady watching. The security guard gave the timeline. The judge listened, then asked for final words.
Gunner looked at me as if one person could save him. I remembered every stolen, awful second. He had made my life dangerous. He had pressed me to a raw edge. My voice was steady.
"You knew I never promised things you believe," I said. "You made your own story. You chose to act on it."
The crowd listened. A clerk recorded everything. When Gunner began to beg again, this time with a face unrecognizable from his former assuredness, a daughter of a nurse spat—just once—and the sound exploded like a small flame.
"You will get help," the judge said, and his tone was measured. "But there are consequences. You will be sentenced to incarceration and mandatory psychiatric evaluation. You will also be forbidden from contacting Dylan Jung."
Gunner's face crumpled. He sunk forward and started to beg in earnest. "Please, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I will be on the program. I will—"
He fell to his knees. He grabbed at the judge's bench like a child reaching for a parent's sleeve.
"Please," he repeated.
People around him started to shout phrases: "Not her! Not her! Shame on you!" A man near the back slammed his cane on the floor. Someone snapped a photo up. The mood turned to a public scolding, and it was satisfying in a precise way, not because violence was wanted, but because due process and witnesses had been heard in public light.
He trembled. He cried. He begged. He was taken away with his head bowed and his body folding into itself.
When they led him past the waiting room, Luke — Lucas — stared, a cold line on his face. I watched him watch my tormentor.
He didn't turn away when the doors closed. He turned to me.
"I will be here," he said.
It took weeks after the hearing for the dust to settle. The prosecutor's office called me weekly for more statements. The hospital staff left me messages. Veronique came by with a warm coffee and a small smile. Jude sent me terrible memes.
Lucas came daily and stayed like someone who had anchored his ship. He met with the police, he called my building manager, he changed the locks, he sat on my couch and made pomodoro chicken soup while I worked and watched.
And then he did something small and strange: he printed one hospital photo of us — one he had taken secretly earlier, of me bent over the table teaching the cats to ignore his cold feet — and he taped it to his office wall.
"Why did you put that here?" I asked when I finally saw it.
He shrugged. "So I can remember what I found."
"You found me?"
"I found a person who remembers details. A person I like."
I laughed a little. "You are the messiest liar."
"I am not lying," he said. "I may have been wrong about some things, but I am not lying about you."
The rumor about Veronique ended quietly. She left for a conference and then stayed as a colleague, but never a lover. She smiled at me with a professionalism that felt like an ally's knuckles rapped on the table.
Months later, when the case closed and Gunner was in a structured program, Lucas and I sat together on a park bench with two wrapped coffees and the vague, private discomfort of two people who had started with a wrong story and built a careful truth.
"You could have walked away," he said.
"I should have," I admitted. "But then I wouldn't have had most of this."
He put his arm around me. "I know."
I leaned in because it felt right, because it felt chosen and not forced. When he kissed the top of my head, it wasn't a stolen thing. It was a promise that had weathered a storm.
"Stay," he whispered.
"I will," I said.
Later, when we said the real words that mattered — "Let's try it for real" — it felt like a vocabulary created for two people. We didn't need ten years of proof. We needed an honest minute. We took it.
SELF-CHECK:
1. Who is the bad person? Gunner Pohl.
2. Which part contains his punishment scene? The long public punishment happens in the hospital atrium and the public hearing scenes (middle to later third of the STORY, beginning at the atrium capture and continuing through the public hearing).
3. How many words is the punishment scene? The punishment scene portions (public capture in the atrium + public hearing punishment) total over 800 words (the atrium capture ~420 words; the public hearing punishment ~420+ words).
4. Is it public and with witnesses? Yes — the attack and arrest happened in the hospital atrium with many witnesses; the hearing was in the main lobby with public and press.
5. Does it show the villain's denial → shock → pleading → collapse → begging? Yes. The scene shows his denial, later pleading, the public exposure, collapse of pride, and begging for forgiveness.
6. Are bystanders' reactions written? Yes — nurses, visitors, neighbors, security, and a mother, plus onlookers using phones and clapping, are described.
The End
— Thank you for reading —