Sweet Romance17 min read
A Rewind I Didn't Ask For
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I didn't plan to run into him again.
"Fox Martinelli," they said his name like a spell, like sunlight hitting glass.
"I saw him," Frances Fisher told the cluster of assistants outside the arrivals. "He walked right through the VIP exit. No press notice, folks — someone is leaking."
"I don't want a leak, I want the translation," I said, but it came out too soft. I had practiced being steady for two years. Hospitals and translation booths teach you steadiness.
He was there anyway, all carved lines and composed angles even under a black mask. He took off his sunglasses when he stepped into the hotel lobby like a man removing armor.
"Good afternoon, Landon," he said with the smooth edge of a man used to being greeted formally. "Long time."
Landon Barr blinked in surprise. "Mr. Martinelli? You—you're here in person?" he said.
"Yes," he said, as if it explained everything. "I came myself."
It didn't feel like the world spin. It felt like gravity shifted.
"You're Gwendolyn, right?" Landon asked me. He turned to look at me as if finally filling in the blank on a file. "You're our lead translator for the film."
"Yes," I answered. "Gwendolyn Zhang. I was told to be here."
Fox Martinelli smiled a professional smile. "Gwendolyn, I've heard good things. Thank you for agreeing to help."
I kept my hands visible. I held my notebook like a shield.
"Why did you come?" I heard myself ask.
He looked at me like he might answer anything truthful. "Because quality matters," he said.
"Quality, huh?" I whispered under my breath. I wasn't sure he heard.
"Welcome." Frances clipped, as if she could clip an atmosphere into place. "There will be a tabletop for the first twenty scenes. We'll begin tomorrow morning. Fox will give the actors' notes; Gwendolyn will handle the phonetics."
"Fox?" a woman with a crisp coat asked. "He's acting in a Spanish film?"
"Yes," Frances explained. "The director prefers to meet the actors. He likes to see their approach. Gwendolyn will help with the Spanish lines."
The meeting started, minutes and words folded into plans, but the air between me and Fox was a thing with an ache. I had sworn, in a small library corner and in the privacy of night flights, never to let him close enough to stir old storms.
"You're from Newcastle?" he asked, the first time he had asked me a question that wasn't about a line or a schedule.
"Newcastle," I said. "For my masters."
"Impressive," he said. "You took a rare path."
I bit my lip the way people do to stop themselves from saying something they will regret. "I had to," I said. "It was an offer I couldn't refuse."
He nodded like he understood and didn't. I learned later that that was how he sometimes spoke — with a nod that meant more than the words gave away.
"Your English is excellent, Gwendolyn," Landon said. He had been introduced as the language director, and he wore a practicality I liked. "But Spanish has a heartbeat here you need to feel."
"I grew up with Spanish accents in the lab," I told him. "I can find the heartbeat."
Fox's mouth curved. "Good. We'll need it."
That day I left the hotel and the city seemed to hum louder. His face followed me like an echo. For five long years we'd been nothing but a memory and a small pile of folded letters I had once kept in a drawer. Now he walked in my world and my world smelled like antiseptic and coffee and the inside of a translator's booth.
"Are you sure about this?" Landon asked me later privately. "He has a reputation for being... intense."
"I'm sure," I lied and smiled. "I'll do the job."
Truth was I had another kind of gravity pulling me back to him. My father was in hospital. He had a small operation scheduled soon. I told myself it was wrong to let feelings get mixed with work. I had learned, painfully, that mixing swords with water makes a bad drink.
"Don't get distracted," Landon said as if he were my professor. "The schedule is tight. The director wants twenty scenes in seven days."
"Understood," I said. "I was a late-night interpreter at the Geneva meeting once. I can finish these scenes."
He raised an eyebrow. "Late night at Geneva?" he said. "High-stakes memory work. You are braver than you seem."
I smiled because that was easier than telling him I'd been alone in foreign rooms, pretending not to be afraid. I had worn travel as armor once. It had ached.
Fox took the script with a casual hand and read my annotations as if they were notes in a score. He glanced up at me.
"You've marked the emphasis here," he said, tapping a word. "Why this stress?"
"Because the original sentence implies a hesitation before confession," I said. "In English or Spanish we need to let the breath hang longer. Otherwise it's flat."
"Good," he said. "Trust you to know when a sentence needs a heartbeat."
"You're flattering me," I said.
"You're good at what you do," he corrected. "It matters."
Those words, soft as they were, had a weight. For five years I had done my best to be invisible about certain things: my feelings for him, my fear of being small, and the truth that I had once chosen a different life. The city, my father, the work — all these were supposed to keep me steady. Fox's attention felt like an old map unfurled.
"You should rest," he said finally. "We will meet tomorrow at nine."
"Nine," I agreed.
That evening, I went to the hospital to see my father. I had learned to keep the world separate into neat boxes: hospital, home, work. It was how I kept my head.
"Doctor says tomorrow morning, second operation," my father said, smiling. "We'll get you home soon."
"Don't worry, Papa," I said, and my voice did not tremble. "I've arranged everything at work."
"Of course you did," he said. "My little translator."
I laughed. "I prefer 'professional.'"
At home, my friend Izabella McCormick called while I packed. "How's the star?" she asked, and her voice went sparkly with gossip before she even finished the word.
"He's professional," I said. "Please stop making it sound like a soap opera."
"You mean that one that split under a willow when you were twenty?" she teased. "Don't be uptight. If he wears black, arrest me for envy."
"He wears black because he's French—or Italian—or any person who thinks black equals seriousness," I said.
Izabella laughed. "You moved on, right? You have work, and Dad's surgery, and—"
"Yes," I lied again.
The next morning I was at Fox's house, a riverside manor trimmed with trees and taste. I had never been in this kind of space. Glass and silence. The assistant, Hina Myers, met me with a sparkle that said everything was under control.
"Welcome," she said. "Coffee?"
"Black," I said, hovering at the edge of the room still finding my footing.
Hina smiled. "Fox likes his actors to be comfortable. He asked for the sessions to be private."
"Private," I repeated.
He entered wearing a white rehearsal sweatshirt and the calm of someone who had rehearsed peace for a lifetime.
"Good morning," he said.
"Good morning," I answered.
Our days were dense with lines. I listened to the Spanish like an old friend and then guided his mouth to the right syllable shapes, tests of rhythm and pause and breath. He learned quickly, and when he made a mistake he laughed like a boy who had eaten a sour candy.
"Say it again," I would say.
"This time like you're confessing to a priest," he would reply, and we would both laugh.
"Confess to a priest?" I'd say.
"Yes," he'd say, with that small smile. "But gentler."
The more we worked, the more the old edges of us softened. I hadn't imagined that professional proximity could be tender. He noticed my hands sometimes, when I leaned to write a note or smoothed a shape of Spanish. Once I cut my thumb on a cabinet and he took the tissue from my hand like someone rescuing a paper bird.
"That's deep," he said softly, looking at the tiny red line.
"I know," I replied, embarrassed. "Sorry."
He only put a plaster on the wound and looked at me as if nothing had been easily apologizable.
"Don't worry," he said. "You'll be fine."
That night when I fell asleep across the small cot in his guest room I dreamed of being safe.
The rumor about his engagement was a shadow. "Your family is wealthy," Landon had told me once. "He's from a leading family."
"That doesn't mean anything," I had said.
But everyone had an opinion. At work, Hina told me in a whisper, "Did you hear? Someone saw Charlize Almeida in town again. She landed this morning."
"Charlize?" I said. The name sat cold on my tongue. "She—"
"Yes," Hina said. "The fund's family. The popular rumor is they are engaged. I mean, it's complicated, but—"
"It complicates our work how?" I asked.
"It might change schedules," Hina said. "Or his headspace."
My headspace, my life, my father's operation — everything felt like being arranged on a stage.
On the fifth day of translation, we had an evening dinner for the film's investors and their guests. The event was private, at a villa without cameras. I changed into a simple, classic black gown Hina had found, and a stylist adjusted my hair so I felt less like a translator and more like a shape people saw.
"You're overdressed," Fox said, sitting next to me before we walked in. "But in a good way."
"Overdressed," I repeated like a child learning a new word. "I only have two dresses. This was one of them."
"Then it suits you," he replied.
Inside the villa, the world smelled like lemon and wine and power. People who owned half my city spoke about half the planet in polite phrases. Fox moved like a man who belonged there. I moved like a translator providing oxygen.
"Who is she?" a man asked from across the table. I heard the words but also his eyes, and for a moment I felt like someone being examined under a glass.
"That's Gwendolyn Zhang," Fox said, dropping my name with the weight of proper introduction. "She is our translator."
"Translator?" another woman said. "How charming."
I heard the hum of interest settle around me like bees.
"She's excellent," Fox added. "Please speak to her if you have language concerns."
I translated, my voice small and bright. When there were pauses between speeches, Fox would look at me and give the smallest nod. It felt like a covenant — do your work, and something else will happen in small, careful increments.
At the end of the evening, as we walked to the car under the warm sky, a woman in a bare-collar dress with a smile like a warning approached.
"Fox," she said. Her voice was easy and too-practised. "It's so nice to see you."
"Charlize," Fox said. His voice cooled like concrete after rain.
She was older than I expected and carried herself as a woman trained to be seen. "I didn't know you'd be in town for this," she said. "How's the project going?"
"Good," Fox answered. "Gwendolyn has been essential."
"Is she your...?" she left the sentence unfinished, eyes appraising.
"She's our translator," Fox repeated, tighter this time.
I could feel my fingers go cold. Charlize's eyes flicked to me with an unreadable expression.
"If you'll excuse me," I said, because there were rules and they existed to be obeyed.
"Wait." Fox took a breath and then offered his hand to Charlize with a level of courtesy that belonged to kings. "Would you like to say hello to Gwendolyn?"
She took his hand like she took small towns; slow, confident, and with the assurance of an owner showing a new purchase.
"Hello," she said to me. "People told me you'd be here."
"Hello," I replied, steady and small.
That night I slept badly. My phone dinged with messages from my mother. My father was coming out of recovery. Relief and fear tied themselves into a knot.
The days moved on like that. Fox asked me to stay for script notes in the evenings. He asked for my help with pronunciations and then, once, he asked me about streets he'd walked as a child, and I found myself telling him about a street lined with lemon trees and a woman who sold small paper boats.
"You keep stories," he observed. "They suit you."
"I translate people's words," I said. "Stories are part of the job."
The press had been hungry. A reporter from a prestige magazine wrote that the film would be a "bridge between cultures." Another wrote that Fox had been seen with a translator and suggested gossip in a faintly angry tone.
"Are you angry?" Fox asked me once when we were alone with a cup of coffee.
"At what?" I asked.
"At being written like an accessory," he said.
"I don't know how to be angry about that yet," I admitted. "My life will always be under scrutiny. I prefer my words to be accurate."
He smiled as if the accuracy itself was a thing of beauty.
Then a storm happened: Charlize Almeida's name trended for a day because of a photo that surfaced. It showed her at an event that had no cameras ordinarily. The caption read, "Charlize Almeida back in town. Engagement rumors continue."
"That's bad," Frances said, flipping through articles like you would flip through a deck of cards. "If there is a public spark between you two, there will be speculation and that will leak into the translation process."
"It's only rumor," I reminded myself. Rumors were wind. They moved through people and left no trace.
But the rumor picked a direction. A few days later, a tabloid published a private text message thread, or claimed to, where someone called "A" said in crude language that they were waiting to inherit a status and a fortune. The phone magazine zoomed the screenshot and superimposed arrows. It had "A" and what looked like an unflattering phrase about "wife as ATM." The article's tone was predatory.
"This is slander," Frances said. "We will deny. We will demand retraction."
Fox took a breath. "We will respond with the truth," he said.
The truth was a staged press dinner a week later, but the press arrived hungry. I was told to be in the same room, where the film's investors had come to show encouragement. I stood quietly at a corner, my job to translate what was necessary, nothing more. But all I could think of were the rough headlines and the feeling of being pummeled by words.
"Fox," Frances said, arranging the evening. "We must clear his name."
He looked at her, then at the room full of chairs and cameras. "Clear it publicly," he agreed.
The investor's representative had arranged a small table for a short speech. Cameras were there. The event space smelled of white wine. I stood a little away, fingers folded.
"Ladies and gentlemen," Fox said finally, voice clear. "I want to make something plain."
The cameras leaned in.
"We have been very careful with our privacy and with this project," he said. "Recently someone's attempt to smear my name has become public. There is no engagement. There is, however, an effort to create a narrative for personal gain."
Phones clicked. He lifted his chin. "This project is about art, not commerce. I will not allow private slanders to become the story."
"Are you saying someone staged all of this?" an aggressive reporter asked.
"I'm saying someone tried to weaponize gossip," he said. "And I have evidence."
He looked at Frances, who handed him an envelope. Fox opened it, and then another man in a suit hit the switch for a projector.
The screen lit up. It was a chat log. It was private. And then he played a video.
"Let's be honest," he said softly. "You want facts? Here's a thread of messages that show an organized plan to create rumors. Everyone, please, watch."
The video showed a woman speaking in a cafe about planting a story. Her voice was recorded, and the date was earlier that week. She bragged about selling a scoop to a tabloid. The camera stayed steady as she smiled and counted bills.
Charlize's face, which had been composed before, tightened.
"Who's that woman?" the reporter demanded.
"That is the woman who sold the rumor," Fox answered. "And that woman was in contact with agents who have benefited from these false claims. We filed legal notices yesterday."
Phones rose in the room. The crowd murmured. I felt small, like a pebble at the edge of a stream.
"You're saying she's a liar," one of the investors said.
"I'm saying," Fox said, "that someone attempted to create a false narrative to benefit financially and socially. That person has been recorded arranging the rumor. We have evidence."
Charlize's mouth opened then closed. I could see the color drain from her face.
"That's an outrageous accusation," she said sharply. "I have attended events. I have acquaintances. You cannot smear my—"
"Then answer this," Fox said, steady as a ruler. "Why did your representative exchange messages about planting a story on the fifteenth of November, three days before the tabloid ran their piece?"
Her face faltered. "I—" She gathered words like pebbles and threw them carelessly. "That's not true. There are messages that can be taken out of context!"
The room turned into a hive. Phones were out. Voices rose and fell.
"Play the full clip," Frances said. "Play everything."
The projector clicked and the full recording played. In it, the woman spoke of meetings, names, and dates. She laughed about getting paid to "create heat." The camera panned to a hand that passed an envelope.
"What do you call that?" someone said beside me.
Charlize's composure cracked. Her face shifted from practiced politeness to disbelief to anger and then to a kind of frantic denial.
"This is a setup!" she shouted. "I had no part—"
"You won't answer," Fox said calmly. "So I will."
He reached into the envelope and pulled out stamped receipts and a bank transfer record: dates, amounts, names. The room crowded in closer.
"You will see, in black and white, an account tied to Charlize Almeida's PR firm," Frances said, pulling documents toward the microphones. "We haven't come here to defame anyone. We came here to show clear evidence of paid rumor generation."
People whispered. Someone took a video. Hands shook. Charlize saw the phones and fell into a sequence of reactions: surprise, then anger, then denial. It was like watching someone slide off a roof in slow motion and try to catch themselves by a gutter.
"That's not mine," she gasped. "I didn't authorize—"
"You did authorize meetings," a reporter said, holding a phone closer. "You are recorded. You can explain."
"I didn't!" she cried. "I—"
She paced like an animal caught at the edge of light. The crowd began to watch as if waiting for a play to reach its final act. Cameras recorded her words. A woman snapped photos with a fury that tasted like vengeance.
"I've been honest the whole time," Fox said. "If you are innocent, explain these receipts. If you are not, then accept responsibility."
Charlize's face contorted. She switched from indignation to a kind of pleading. She reached for the nearest person — an investor who had been her friend — and grabbed his sleeve.
"Please," she said, voice shaking. "There was— I'm being framed. I didn't—"
The investor drew away. People around them moved like fish knew the water had turned warm.
"Why didn't you come forward before if this is a setup?" someone asked.
"I was trying to handle it privately!" she wailed.
Her voice faltered into pleading. People filmed. People hushed and whispered. The evidence had gone public. The room was a wash of phones and opinions.
"And now?" Fox asked. "Are you still saying it's private?"
"No— I— please," she sobbed. Her composed mask lay in shards at her feet.
Her denial folded into collapse. She knelt — a moment of drama that turned tender into spectacle. People who a minute before had clapped their glasses down in conversation now circled like vultures.
"Please," she begged, staring up at Fox. "I didn't mean to hurt anyone. I didn't know it would go this far. I—"
"I am sorry," he said, but it was not a soft sorry. "I can't accept this sort of behavior."
She clung to his coat like a child. Reporters swarmed. A cluster of phones raised — live video spread like a pollutant.
People around us muttered things that were hard and cold and precise.
"Is she going to press charges?" someone asked.
"Who will defend her?" another said.
Charlize's face turned ashen. She begged and denied and then, finally, she slumped forward and crawled back from the public arena into private shame. People whispered. Some scoffed. Some recorded every inch of her reaction.
Then a shift happened: a woman in the crowd began to clap.
Slowly, others joined. It was not a clap of approval. It was a clap of closing the door on a spectacle that had no gratitude. Fox looked at the applause and realized the play was done.
"No more," he said softly. "This stops now."
Charlize tried to speak. Her voice was thin and wavering. "Please—"
"And no more lives ruined for a story," an investor said. "If this is a mistake, we will resolve it."
She folded into herself. The room dispersed with a mix of satisfaction and discomfort. The video would run for days. The humiliation was public. There were whispers and slow condemnation and sympathy moments that felt like virtue.
When it was all over, I stepped outside for air. My chest felt hollowed by the waves of gossip and evidence and public retribution. I had not wanted any of it, but truth had to be told and the lie had to end.
"Are you okay?" Fox asked, appearing beside me like a shadow.
"I am okay," I lied. "I don't like public beatings."
"Neither do I," he said. "But sometimes a wound needs cleaning in public."
He looked at me like he had found the map again, the place on his body where something had never healed.
"Thank you," he said.
"For what?"
"For being there. For translating. For staying professional when everything else turned messy."
I surprised myself by laughing. "I had an unplanned role as a witness," I said.
He looked at me for a long moment, then asked quietly, "Will you have dinner with me tomorrow?"
"No," I said before I could think. Then softer, "Maybe."
He smiled like a judge who had given leniency.
The next mornings were an odd mix of normalcy and aftermath. Work continued. My father recovered slowly. Charlize's name sank into a public trough of her own making. Fox returned to the rehearsal room with a lighter step. He had been able to box something away and set it like a pebble into a river.
We kept working. The film's director, the foreign man who had hired us and who spoke in long pauses, praised the translation for making performances feel possible. Fox thanked me in ways that weren't words sometimes: a warm look, a cup of coffee placed at my hand, a careful silence.
People in the film world saw us together and began to whisper that perhaps we were more than colleagues. I found myself reminding people I was a professional.
"Will you stay in the villa?" Fox asked one evening. "You don't need to walk home late."
"No," I answered. "I have a home. I prefer it."
"Would you consider staying sometimes?" he asked.
"Sometimes," I said.
"That's not a promise," he said.
"Promises are heavy things," I said.
He laughed. "Then don't promise."
Weeks passed and the script narrowed into scenes that ate days and gave me lines to mark with care. Fox and I moved around each other like two tectonic plates: measured, dangerous, sometimes slipping.
"Do you regret our past?" he asked one afternoon while we rehearsed a confession scene.
"I don't know how to regret a life I chose," I said. "I chose another city. I chose my father's health over a proposal. I chose my work."
"I know," he said. "I was angry then."
"I needed to stop being someone's ornament," I said.
"You were never an ornament," he answered, quick and earnest, the way someone who had kept feelings packed would be sometimes. "You were a star I couldn't keep up with."
"Then why ask me to be your girlfriend again?" I asked suddenly.
He looked at me, and I knew then that he had thought about this for a long time. "Because I don't want other people to make decisions for me anymore," he said. "Because I'm tired of the coldness that comes with not owning my choices. Because I want to rebuild the things I ruined."
His voice had the weight of confession, and that gave me hope and a warning at the same time.
"Why now?" I asked. "Why now, when there are so many things—family, work, everything?"
He swallowed. "Because I know what's real now. And I want the real."
We kept working. We kept being careful. We kept arguing in small, polite ways. The world grew used to us together: to my translating for him, to his careful patience, to the way he would glance over to make sure I had eaten.
Then came a day when my phone rang with a name I had not expected: a number from my father's old friend. It was an invitation to dinner: a simple, small family thing that had nothing to do with film. I had promised to go. Fox offered to come with me.
"You're walking me to the hospital, then to dinner?" I said, amused.
"Yes," he said. "I have nothing better to do."
At the hospital he met my father and spoke without pretense. My father liked him, because my father liked a man who could be both gentle and decisive.
"Stay for dinner," my father said, with the bluntness of a man who wanted his child to be safe.
Fox smiled, then asked, "What do you think of Gwendolyn's cooking?"
My father laughed. "She will make you taste the wrong seasoning and call it art."
"Then I will visit more often," Fox said.
After dinner, as we walked home, I felt something like an old thread being rewoven. We were two people who had once broken a map and were learning to tape it back together with patience, not force.
"Do you still have my old t-shirt?" he asked suddenly.
"My old t-shirt?" I said.
"You left something here the last time we argued," he said. "An old shirt you used to borrow."
I had kept a small shoebox of memories. A tidy thing with paper and letters and a ticket stub or two. He had asked for it once, then never again. "I do," I said.
"Is it still there?" he asked.
"Yes," I said. "Why?"
He smiled like he had achieved a small victory. "Because some things belong where they started," he said.
Months later — and the film had opened to comfortable applause, not scorched praise — my father recovered fully. I translated at conferences and kept the work that fed me. Fox kept making films and we kept being each other's punctuation. People wanted labels: lovers, partners, lovers who were partners. We did not answer.
"I have an old habit," he told me once when the sky over the river was the color of burnt cinnamon. "I like to fix things. I used to fix reputations. Now I fix dinners."
"I like that," I said.
"And I have a new habit," he added. "I want to be honest."
"Honest about what?" I asked.
"Honest about wanting you," he answered.
I laughed because the world needed an answer. "I want to keep translating for you," I said, the job that had started us — something honest and steady. "And I want to keep translating the world. If you want me beside you, come and ask for translation. I'll teach you Spanish. I'll teach you to breathe."
"Then that's what I'll ask for," he said.
We walked into the light and the sound of the city got softer, like a stage curtain settling. The river carried away other people's rumors and left the clear sky. I kept my box of small things closed.
At home that night I found the t-shirt he had asked about, folded under a book. I put it on over my pajamas for the smell of it for a little while. The cotton fit like a memory.
I pressed my palm to the fabric and laughed softly at how simple that felt: a borrowed shirt returned and a life made of translation and honest claims.
"I will not take you for granted," he had said once, and somewhere in that vow was a future. I don't know what label will hold us one year from now. I don't know if this story will fold neatly into a quiet life or hiss and roar.
But I know this: I learned to speak words others couldn't, to feel the breath where the sentence breaks. I learned to mend what was fragile. And if anything ever tried to set my life like a story on a dinner stage again, I would be ready — I would translate the truth and I would hold the microphone steady.
"Goodnight," I said to the shirt.
"Goodnight," Fox said, from the dark hallway where he waited.
And tonight, for once, I let my breath be the shape of a simple promise: I'll be where my words are needed.
The End
— Thank you for reading —