Sweet Romance15 min read
Buy Him, Keep Him — The Blue-Eyed Man I Stole from the Market
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"I'll give you three silver for him."
I shoved the small coin purse into the seller's calloused hand and stepped back.
"You sure, miss?" the man asked, one brow raised. "He's barely breathing."
"He looked like that so someone would get more coin," I said. "I don't want him to die on the road."
The seller shrugged and spat. "Three silver and he's yours."
I counted the coins once and then again, my fingers steady even though my heart thudded in my chest like a trapped bird.
"Take them."
They carried him like a broken statue. I remembered his face under the dirty blanket: sharp nose, deep bones, and blue eyes like a cold lake. No one here in town had eyes like that.
"Is he… foreign?" my maid Betty whispered as the seller shoved the stretcher into the carriage.
"Maybe," I said. "Bring him home."
I had told myself I was buying a servant for the house. I had told myself charity mattered. It was easier than admitting I could not stand the sight of another human being left to die in the street.
"Don't bring trouble home."
My father had said that last week when he found me wandering the market. He believed a proper daughter stayed indoors until someone strong and wealthy said she could go out. I had an answer then and I had one now.
"He's coming home with me," I told the seller, and the seller pocketed the coins and smiled like he had made a good trade.
They laid him on the straw pallet in my study and left us alone.
I pulled the blanket back and looked. His hair was dark and thick in tangled waves. His skin was the color of someone who had worked under a different sun. He didn't move when I touched his cheek, only sighed and curled into himself.
"Open your eyes."
He did, slowly. For a second I thought my heart would stop; those eyes were blue as ice, the color of a strange sea.
"You okay?" I asked.
He only blinked.
"Can you speak?"
He shook his head.
"I'll call you Knox."
He tilted his head once, a question, and then he nodded.
"Knox."
He learned the sound of the name as if it was a small metal coin dropped into his palm. He said nothing else, and perhaps that is why I felt I could teach him my rules. He owed me his life now.
"Carry him to the west rooms," I told Fillmore, our household guard. "Make him clean. Give him clothes that fit." I handed Knox a spare scarf and a too-large tunic while Betty fussed around and watched his hands. "Don't make him work too hard," I added.
Fillmore obeyed like he always did.
That night I stayed up late with a lamp beside Knox's pallet, watching his chest rise and fall under borrowed cloth.
"You woke up," I said when he shifted and opened his eyes.
He blinked, saw me, then looked at his hands like he didn't know them.
"Do you remember anything?" I asked.
He shook his head and ran a trembling finger along a pale scar on his forearm.
"Names? A home?"
He only pointed at the scar and then at the place where the sun rose on the horizon. He rubbed his belly then pointed at my face and smiled once, small and crooked, like a child pleased at being saved.
"You're safe here," I promised. "I bought you. You're mine now."
He nodded.
Days passed in small things. I made him eat. I made Fillmore teach him simple tasks. He learned to sit properly at the table. He learned to bring water in a bucket without spilling it. He learned to hold a broom without breaking it.
"How's his training coming?" I asked one afternoon when he practiced forms with Fillmore in the courtyard.
"He's a quick learner," Fillmore said, wiping sweat from his forehead. "Better balance than most. Stronger than he looks."
Knox moved with the steady, strange calm of someone who had survived worse. When he practiced a step, the courtyard seemed to listen and hold its breath.
"Stay with me," I told him that night as I tucked a blanket around his shoulders.
He blinked and then smiled, pressing a cold hand to his chest like he was keeping my words there.
I thought of Mason.
Mason Brantley had been my cousin and, secretly for a long time, the only boy I'd allowed to hold my small, steady heart. He had a calm I liked. He had promised things with a smile once that had felt like the world could be set right. He came from wealth. He also came from expectations.
"You're being kept inside," my father had said again the morning Mason visited. "Too dangerous these days."
"I am inside," I lied. "But I went out to the market."
Mason stood with his hands folded and that patient look that could make me forgive a dozen small wrongs. He spoke politely to me, then turned to Fillmore and asked about Knox.
"He seems fine," Mason said. "He was very lucky. Your father was right. You shouldn't go out so much, Elise."
"Elise," I hated the sound of my proper name when it was used like a scolding. "You came just to scold me?"
He laughed like a bell. "I came to see you."
"Then stay," I told him, and for a moment he did.
But one day I saw him on the street with another woman. She wore fine cloth and the stamps of wealth were in the way she let the sun catch her earrings. She smiled like someone who expected to be given things. Mason walked with her like he belonged to that path.
"He is with—" I froze. My chest hollowed. The sight was like a cold knife.
I walked away and ran until I could not feel the burning air in my lungs. I did not want him to see my tears. When I reached home, my hands were shaking so hard I could not hold the coins in my purse.
I went to the study where Knox sat quietly, reading the way a person reads a room.
"You saw him?" he asked without words. He pointed to my face, to the wet tracks I had tried to hide.
"He's with her," I said. "He must have forgotten me already."
Knox only pointed at the place where his throat was and at his small chest, then at me. He shook his head slowly, as if to say: Not yet. Not this.
That night I walked out to the lantern market with Betty because she dragged me, insisting that I had to see what people made of light. The air was full of oil and sugar and laughter. Lanterns bobbed like tiny moons.
"Look at this one," Betty said, thrusting a small jade rabbit lantern in my face.
It reminded me of the way Mason used to pluck flowers for me when we were children.
We pushed through a crowd and a wave of people shoved me forward. A man bumped into me hard.
"I'll crush you," I muttered, and then the world tipped.
Hands were under my arms, lifting me before I hit the lantern stall. I opened my eyes to find Knox, his grip like a rock.
"You okay?" he asked.
"Let go," I told him, embarrassed. "You can put me down now."
He did, reluctantly.
"Where did you come from?" Fillmore asked him later.
He only pointed to his chest and then to me.
"He's mine," I announced when I saw Mason near the jade rabbit stall, laughing with the same woman.
"Don't be silly," he said later when I chased him back to the lane between our houses. "She is merely an acquaintance. I had to attend a meeting."
"You could have walked past and lied," I snapped.
"You're angry," he said softly. "Tell me why and I will stay away."
"I don't want explanations! I want someone who chooses me without price," I spat, and the shame of saying it was worse than anything.
He grasped my hands like a lifeline and for a moment I let myself believe he would hold on.
"I promise," he said. "I will speak to my mother tonight. Do not be cruel to me."
I left him in the lane and went to my room. I wanted to be alone. I wanted Knox.
Knox had become a quiet presence at my shoulder like a shadow that was more real than the people who loved me for what I could give them. He cooked simple stews with Betty. He swept the path. He practiced the small forms Fillmore taught him in the yard until his moves were carved into the air.
One night I woke up dizzy and thirsty. I went to the small pavilion in the garden where no one would knock on the door and found a bottle of wine.
"A sip won't hurt," I told myself and drank until the world swam in a soft, clumsy blur.
I stumbled and then I remembered nothing until I woke with my head on a stranger's shoulder and the smell of cedar wood and warm skin beside me.
"Who are you?" I whispered, and then the sound of my voice, raw and loud, cut through the fog.
"You're safe," the man said. It was Knox.
I pushed away and looked at his face. Blue eyes met mine and sent a flash of heat through me. For a second I forgot everything else.
"You came to save me." I remembered the seller's voice. I remembered throwing three silver. "You came into my life because I paid for you."
Knox put his hand on his chest and then on mine. He opened his mouth and the first words left like a small bell.
"I am yours," he said.
My breath stalled.
"You can speak," I said, and it came out like a question and a complaint all at once.
He did not meet my eyes at first. Knox nodded slowly, embarrassed and honest.
"I didn't tell you," he said quietly. "I thought—"
"Why did you hide it?" Anger rushed up. "You made me tell you things no one else knows. I told you secrets."
"I had to."
"What were you afraid of?"
He swallowed and then looked at the curve of my hands. "I was sold," he said. "I ran from a place where my name meant chains. I thought silence would be safe. I did not want more talking to make me known."
"You lied to me."
He flinched as if the word hurt him. "Yes."
I wanted to throw him out of the house. I wanted to lock the door and never see his blue eyes again.
"You can't just decide to hide your voice and then choose my trust," I said. "You had no right."
"I took your trust," he whispered. "I will repay you."
I laughed in a sharp, hot sound. "Repay me? How? You're a servant. You're a man who had to be bought to live."
He met my eyes then and there was a new thing in him—steel, maybe a promise.
"I will be with you," he said. "I will stand between you and whoever would harm you. I will be what you need."
"You speak like a man who means to marry me," I said, and heat passed through me like a current.
"I will keep you," he answered, quiet and raw and true.
I slapped him then, not because I believed his words were false but because I could not imagine gentleness in a life built from market coins and bowed heads.
"You can't promise me what you don't own," I said. "You can't change the world we live in."
He took the slap like the rest of his life—without complaint and with a steady sorrow behind his eyes.
That night I told Fillmore and Betty what Knox had said.
"Don't let him leave," I said, surprising myself with how small my voice was.
"He won't," Fillmore assured me. "He owes you his life."
"Then he owes you a lot," Betty whispered.
The days that followed were small and steady. I started to notice the way Knox stood close enough that when danger brushed the edges of our household, he was the first to notice. When Mason's attention turned outward to make alliances, Knox planted himself in doorways.
The town prepared for the Lantern Festival. Lantern makers sold rabbits carved from white glass, and boys shouted for coins with a freedom I envied. I told Betty to buy a white lantern for Knox and told Fillmore to have a new tunic made. I asked nothing of Knox but his company.
"Will you go to the festival?" I asked him.
He only smiled and shook his head.
"Why not?" I frowned.
"Too many people," he said. "I will come for you."
The night of the festival was cold and the air smelled like sugar and smoke. I walked between lanterns with a pleasure that trembled on the edge of childishness.
"Elise!" Mason called and for a second I forgot Knox exists.
He stood with Katharine Perry, the senator's daughter, again. Katharine smiled like she was used to men bending easily. She looked at Mason like she was already promised a future.
"You look well," I said to Mason. "You look like a man who can make choices."
"Only if I can keep both of you happy," he said, and his eyes were soft.
That night I went to a place with a small pool at the edge of the garden because the festival crowds were too loud. I sat on the stone and drank until the world blurred again. I do not know why I sought the edge. I do not remember who pushed me.
I only remember cold lake-water filling my mouth and then hands under my shoulders and Knox's face above me like a comet.
"You're done making jokes," he said with a dry laugh as he hauled me up. "You will stop testing Lord Fate with wine."
"You pushed me," I said when I could breathe. The words sounded like a confession.
"I did not touch you," he said. "Someone else did."
"Then who?" I demanded.
He looked at the water as if it spoke. "Someone who hates you," he answered. "Someone who wanted to shame you."
"Who?" I asked and the word fell into nothing.
We rode home in silence. I could not stomach Mason's face. I could not stand the idea that anyone thought me so small as to be pushed for sport. The next morning I accused Birgit—the cousin who had always made a bitter joke of my life.
"Why would she do such a thing?" Bashful, I thought out loud.
"Jealousy is not a pretty crown," Knox said.
"She swore she did not do it," I said, remembering Birgit's oath with a flare of something between relief and disappointment.
I studied the edges of people. I watched the way Katharine's carriage had lowered men on the street. I watched the way merchants' sons smiled at Knox with a hard curiosity.
One day Mason came to the garden alone. "I need to talk," he said.
"Then speak," I told him.
"You blamed my mother for the match," he said. "You blamed me. You think I'd throw my life away for comfort? I would, if my family demanded it. But I don't. Elise, I can choose differently."
I've heard that line so many times. It was a promise and a sword-carved wish. I wanted to believe him.
"Prove it," I said. "If you want me, choose me in the open."
He closed his eyes as if he felt the weight of choosing. "I will," he said.
I nodded and we both backed away like wounded animals. I felt suddenly small and raw. I felt Knox's eyes at the edge of my world.
The days slid by. Knox grew more than anyone's servant ever could. I taught him to read a few words, and then many words. He loved syllables like a man finds new tools. He loved names.
"Knox," I told him once when he brought me a cup of tea, "did someone give you that name? Or did you choose it for yourself?"
He set the cup down and smiled. "You gave it to me," he answered. "It fits."
"Don't ever leave," I told him, the words slipping out as if from a dream. "Promise me you won't leave."
He pressed the promise like a coin in my palm. "I won't."
Lateness crept into our house as gossip and envy. The senator's daughter sent more invitations. Mason came less. Birgit smiled but not kindly. The market sellers whispered that a foreigner had been seen near the docks with a man who sold men away.
I felt the pulling of a net I could not see. One afternoon someone set out a story about Knox. Someone said he came from a noble house across the sea. Someone said he was a prince disguised as a slave. Another said that he had been a thief.
"Don't listen," I told Knox when the rumors reached the study like crawling insects.
He looked at me and his lips thinned. "Let them say what they need to say," he replied simply. "I am the man who stands for you."
"Are you" I asked, and I could not swallow the ache in my chest when I asked. "Are you not afraid of being who you are to me?"
He took my hand then and the world fit. The garden fence, the lanterns, the river birds—they all held breath.
"I am your man," he said, and his voice did not falter. "I am the one who takes what is thrown at you."
The confrontation came at the midsummer market when I was standing too close to the cart of lanterns. Katharine's carriage rattled past and a boy shouted a lie. The crowd pressed in like a tide.
"That man is a foreign thief!" someone cried. "That man stole a golden brooch from the senator's household!"
My heart slammed. People pointed at Knox. The seller who had sold Knox to me—his eyes sharpened with profit.
"Mason!" I called.
He pushed through the crowd with a brutal calm.
"Is this true?" he asked, turning to Knox. "Are you a thief?"
"Not true," Knox said in my ear, low and steady.
But the market judge frowned. "We must see proof," he said. "If you stole from the senator, you will be punished."
"Take him to the judge?" Mason said. "Is that what you want?"
I felt the world tilt with fear.
"Stop," I said. "No one takes him anywhere."
"You can't interfere," someone hissed.
I walked into the center like a small wind and took Knox's hand.
"He belongs to me," I said, and no plea could have been softer or prouder.
"Then stand beside me and tell them who you are," I told Knox.
He looked at me like a man seeing his home for the first time.
"I will not be forced," he said softly. "But I will tell them my truth."
He spoke then, not only for us but for himself.
"My name is Knox Popov," he said, and his voice carried. "I was from a land you do not know. I was sold. I was beaten. I was freed by her, Elise Daley. I stole nothing. I am not a thief."
The judge listened and then asked for witnesses. Somebody from the senator's house had seen the brooch fall from Katharine's carriage strap when she climbed out. The brooch—discovered stuck under the cushion—was returned and the accuser's chest went flat with shame.
Mason's face went white. Katharine's smile dissolved. The market turned and looked at Knox with something like wonder.
"You have a good tongue," the judge said finally. "If you speak of truth, I believe you. Go, Knox Popov."
People stepped back as if the air around him had turned live.
I laughed and I cried all at once. The crowd melted into a bustle. Mason looked at me like a man who had lost a fortress. Birgit's jaw slackened. I turned and found Knox watching me with an expression like a sunrise.
"I didn't know if I dared to take your name," he said that night as Fillmore handed him a new tunic. "But now that I have, it feels like a shield."
"Don't call it a shield," I said, and then I took his hand and kissed the back of his knuckles the way a queen might bless a soldier.
The days after the trial were warmer. Mason retreated to his family's house and wrote letters about duty and regret. Katharine found another campaign and left. Birgit bit her lip and stopped speaking in the same hard way.
I let Knox sit with me in the study while I read aloud from foolish romances. He practiced the words until his tongue fit them like birds settling on a wire. He flinched when anyone called him "servant" and he smiled small and fierce when children in the lane called him "sir" by mistake.
"Do you ever talk about the past?" I asked him once as we walked by the river.
"I dream," he said. "Of a house by the sea, of songs in a language I cannot say. And of a name I once had that tasted of foreign honey."
"Will you tell me someday?" I asked.
"I already told you," he said. "Knox Popov is the name I carry now. But if one day you wished to hear the old word, I will tell you."
Time moves with a strange indifference. I grew thinner and kinder in ways I did not recognize. Knox became the man who took my bad days and made them small. He was there when a neighbor tried to cut a price at our family stall. He sat at my side at dinners where old men played chess and told jokes that were cruel and dull. He would stand and look untouched by the world until I laughed and then he would break like a candle and join.
One rainy night I stood on the balcony and let the rain wash the heat of a long day away. Knox came up the stairs and stood besides me, wet and dark as wood.
"Promise me something," I said.
"What?" he asked.
"Promise me you will never leave," I told him. "Promise me you will not take back your promise."
He smiled and cupped my cheek with his hand, rain sliding between his fingers like fine glass.
"I promised once," he said softly. "My life is no longer mine to sell."
"If you ever change your mind," I said, half joking to hide the ache, "I will hammer your eyes out."
He laughed and the sound was bright against the rain.
"I will never let you go," he promised.
We were married in a small ceremony beneath a lamp-lit tree. Mason sent a polite note and a pair of gloves and said he hoped we would be happy. He never said he was sorry exactly, but his eyes were softer when he bowed.
"Are you my wife now?" I asked as I tied a simple cloth at my waist.
"You are," Knox said.
"Then you are my man," I said, and the words were not absurd anymore.
At the wedding feast someone gifted us a lantern carved like a rabbit—the same kind I had seen the night I first bought him. Knox held the lantern and his fingers trembled.
"Keep it," he murmured. "For when you forget."
I kept it by the bedside and at night I would lift it in my hands and see the light color the room like a small sun. Knox slept beside me with his strong arm draped over my hips, his breath even and slow.
One evening Mason came to the garden. "Elise," he said, and I felt the old ache like an echo. "I came to say that whatever path you took, I wished only to see you smile."
"You did not choose me," I said.
"No," he answered. "But I hope you chose well."
"You were the first," I said.
"And you were patient," he replied. "And stubborn."
We stood a while and then he bowed and left. I turned back to the house and found Knox waiting on the doorstep in a plain shirt.
"You were afraid of losing him," he said quietly.
"I was," I admitted.
"You didn't," he said, and the way he said it was like a promise and a crown.
Later that night, when every light in the house was put out and the lantern rabbit swung softly in the draft, I whispered the truth.
"I bought you," I said. "But I didn't know if buying you meant binding you."
He wrapped an arm around me and pulled me close so my head was against his chest.
"You bought life," he said. "I will never let you regret it."
I had feared so many things in the months since the market. I had feared gossip and shame and the cold of being left out from weddings. I had feared that a life bought with silver could never be whole.
I was wrong.
Knox knelt one day in the garden and asked me, with a youthfulness that made me laugh, to take his name.
"Take it," he said. "Because it is as honest as I have."
"I will keep it with me," I promised. "And I will keep you."
He laughed and then bent his head to my hand and kissed it like a vow. We had no grand hall. We had only the house and the streetlamps and a lantern that glowed like a small promise. But we had each other in a world that tried to be clever with the weight of things.
"Do you remember the first night?" he asked later, lying on the grass with the rabbit lantern glowing beside us.
"Of course," I said. "You were blue-eyed and bruised and you fell asleep when I sang nonsense to you."
"You sang like a spoon hitting a pot," he said, and we laughed.
"Do you ever regret?" I asked.
"Only that I waited so long," he said. "To find a place to rest."
"Where do you rest?"
"With you," he said, and then, because the night asked for it, he kissed me full on and the world steadied like a table finally set.
I had bought him with three silver because I could not bear to see him die in the street. In that market I had thought I was small and brave. I had not believed I could find a life large enough to hold two people who began by bargain.
But bargains, if looked after, can grow into promises. Lanterns bought and hung with care can become suns. A man who once pretended to be mute to hide himself turned out to be the only voice I ever needed.
Years later I still keep the jade rabbit on the shelf where the light catches it in the morning.
"Don't let go," he would say to me when the world pushed, and I would squeeze his hand.
"I won't," I would answer.
And that is the sound we made when two small things decided to be more than they were given: the knock of two promises that fit like a coin in the hand.
The End
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