Sweet Romance11 min read
Crash, Soup, and the Man Who Wouldn't Lose Me
ButterPicks12 views
I crashed my husband's Maybach into a Porsche.
"Did you just...what did you do?" Creed Crouch's voice over the phone was calm, a low pool of danger and comfort that I had learned to depend on.
"I'm so sorry, I—" I could hear the pavement under my phone, the tinny hiss of someone shouting near the cars. "I took your car without asking."
There was a quiet two seconds. "Okay," he said finally. "Step out of the car. Stay where you are. I'll be there."
He sounded casual, but I knew him. When Creed moved, whatever room he entered changed. He walked into arguments like a judge, into courtrooms like a tide. He moved the same way he debated—precise, unflustered, immediately commanding. I had watched him on TV explaining the law with ivory-knife logic and a voice like a smoked cello. I had watched women in the audience softening, and men trying to grid themselves to his calm.
He arrived in a suit that always fit like it had been carved to him. He took in the cars, the smashed bumper, the furious driver, and then he turned to me.
"Get out," he said. "Stand over there."
I obeyed like a child sent to the corner. It was our private joke and his small ritual; whenever I broke something major or minor, he put me in the corner to think. "You've done this before," people thought it was strange. "Why does she stand there?" they asked. Because when he glanced at me from that distance, I knew he would soften. Because he always did.
The Porsche owner started shouting again. Creed didn't even blink. He said, "I'm Creed Crouch. My wife is with me. We'll settle this."
"You're the famous Creed Crouch," the owner said, licking his voice with vanity. "Oh—Mrs. Crouch, isn't she—"
"Insurance," Creed cut in. "And an apology. That's all."
He covered me with his coat when the wind came up. I wanted to melt into him, but he squinted and fixed me to stand straight.
"Wait till we get home," he murmured. "You will be punished."
My heart did the stupid drum dance it always did when he said that. He reached up the way he always did—took off his glasses, rubbing his temple with long fingers. "If he takes off his glasses, he's about to kiss me," I thought, closing my eyes against the humiliation and the heat.
But then he began unbuckling his watch.
"That watch," I thought. "If he takes off his watch, I am absolutely doomed."
"Creed!" I whispered to myself, but the corner was mine. He drove me home. He was quiet. The rest of the day felt like a small, sad play: my public humiliation handled, my apology accepted, my punishment promised.
"South corner," he told me when we entered the house. "Stand there."
I did, folding my hands behind me. I had done this before—lost keys, burned food, left a lamp on. He always found a measured way to remind me I wasn't above rules. He had said, "Even kids who make mistakes must be punished."
I knew he meant it gently but firmly. I also knew that every time he took off his glasses, it could end in a kiss. And every time he took off his watch—well, that had always meant he was about to be more than mildly indulgent. Suddenly I was thinking about escaping. "Maybe I can run," I thought. "Maybe I can slip out and never tell him."
"South?" he said. "You're sure you haven't got work to finish?"
"I have some things," I called through the study doorway, trying to sound grown-up and responsible.
"Then finish them tomorrow," he said. "Now, go to your corner."
I stood there, dramatically punished, until I surrendered and let myself laugh at his ridiculous firm mercy.
Weeks later, I would replay that moment in my mind and think it was the perfect metaphor: a life that balanced punishment and protection, rule and tenderness. That was Creed—easy sharp edges, then silk.
But every calm has its undercurrent. I had nightmares. I woke with the taste of blood in my mouth some nights, reaching for a ghost that had never left me.
"I dreamed of them again," I told Creed one night, and he kissed my hair the way men kiss the temples of things they consider precious.
"Who?" he asked.
I told him. Ivan Popov's name was like a shut door in my throat. He had been the man arrested for the brutal murder of my parents, the man who had tried to deny intent. He'd been found guilty because Creed had found the gap between the story he told and the truth.
"I won't let him haunt you," Creed said. He always said that. He had defended me at seventeen. He had taken my father's case and turned a legal nightmare into a justice that felt cold and steady. In the courtroom he had been an arrow. Outside of it, he became my refuge.
The past was a dark river that sometimes rose up and splashed my present. I had walked through so much grief that I did not know how to carry joy. Creed taught me small things: where to keep his socks, how he liked his rice, how he hated soup with medicinal aftertaste but would pretend to like it because my motherly instinct made me want to feed him. His mother—Eloise Ewing—would come by with a steaming pot of "ten-herb tonic" and insist he drink, and he would pretend to hate it but drink it to please her and me.
He was jealous in ways that were funny and simple. "I'm not jealous of other men," he told me once when we had our first real fight about an intern who smiled at him in the office. "I'm jealous of anyone who spends time laughing with you."
"You're impossible," I said, and then I said what everyone says when their heart is afraid—"Then don't leave me."
He stayed. He stayed in courtrooms and in our kitchen. He once told me, "I promised you I would protect you when I first heard about your case. That promise doesn't stop."
So I learned to be careful and to trust him in equal measure. Life moved forward in little seasons. I learned how to cook his favorite soup. I learned to stand in the corner when I'd been reckless. I also learned not to take his watch too seriously.
But the past has a way of returning through other people. It came to me in the form of a man who wanted to open a restaurant near the suburbs and needed a mural. "Can you do a few sketches?" he asked. He wore a white cap and called himself a small-time restaurateur. His hands were broad. His voice was patient.
"I'm Camila Barnes," I said. "I can do the mural."
"Great. Follow me," Byron—no, not yet—I called him the owner in my head, while he called me brilliant.
I went with him to the place. It smelled of damp plaster. I walked the narrow room, offered suggestions, said, "You should repaint this wall."
He smiled too much. Then he grabbed me from behind and struck me. Then the world went gray.
I woke in the sort of damp place where light was a rumor. The man — Byron Abdullah — sat across from me, and he had an old photograph. He lit a cigarette, and his face looked weirdly like Ivan Popov's, which was a second knife to the chest.
"You look the same even with time on you," he said. "Do you know who my father was?"
I didn't, though I guessed. He said, like some thing that broke its shell: "My father could have been saved. You had Creed Crouch make sure he did not."
This is where things changed: Creed was the man who took terrible cases and found truth. Byron, whose father had been crushed by the justice system, had decided his father died because of me. He wanted retribution. In his mind, killing me was justice, or revenge, or something that fixed the broken thing in him.
"You're crazy," I said. "He's dead."
"No," he said patiently. "He suffered. You made sure. I will make you suffer."
He tied me to a chair. He told me how he would make me disappear. He showed me the knives and the plan and the places where no one would find me for a long time.
"Call Creed," he said at one point, just to stare at me while I spoke. He wanted my fear to be an audience.
I called Creed.
My phone’s screen lit with his name. He said, "Where are you?" and it was the same voice that had told me earlier to stand in a corner when I wrecked his car. "I'm coming," he said, and then, "I can't—I'll call the police."
Byron snatched the phone away and snapped, "You are not welcome to do anything that could ruin my plan. You are going to let me talk to him."
He forced me to call Creed and lie about being safe; then he listened to the voice on the line and laughed.
Creed's response was not a calm negotiation. It was movement. It was a man who dropped everything and became a force.
He found me because he had eyes everywhere; he had the law and good instincts. He found the restaurant. He pushed past greasy-handed cooks and grabbed Byron before the man could react. There was a rush of fists and the metallic stench of violence. I will always remember the way Creed hit—sharp, efficient, a trained thing. He shielded me with his body. He peeled the ropes from me with fingers that had no tremor.
The police took Byron away. I thought that would be the end.
But I had forgotten a requirement of my life: the world had to see the villain fall so that the scales could truly be balanced.
That is why, weeks later, the courthouse hall filled with the curious and the angry. Byron's case had become a media thing. People wanted spectacle. Creed was the man who would do his job and then make sure the job was seen as done.
He stood there, suit perfectly set, and when the prosecutors made the case clear, Creed turned the microphone toward Byron.
"Tell them why you did it," he said crisply.
Byron's face was a mask of contrition and sneer. "He paid for what he did," he said. "My father—"
"Stop," Creed said. "This is not about your father. This is about you committing crimes, including attempted murder, kidnapping, and threats. You planned to make this woman vanish. You tied her and showed her instruments and boasted of how you would dispose of a body."
Byron started to laugh the way men do when they think being cruel will make them powerful.
"Do you understand what you told me?" Creed asked the crowd. "He told me he wanted to 'make her disappear' for revenge. He is not the judge of anyone's life."
People in the hall murmured. Cameras clicked. I saw faces go from curiosity to cold anger. Creed had an idea. He didn't want a private jail cell to be the only wound. He wanted the man who had boasted of barbarity to be exposed, to feel the disgust of everyone who had listened.
"Byron Abdullah," Creed said, each name like a gavel. "Stand up."
Byron looked startled. He tried to remonstrate, "You can't—"
"Tell them," Creed insisted. "Tell them who paid you to threaten her. Tell them who gave you the plan for the restaurant and the explosives, the phone numbers, the pickups. Tell them who told you what to say when you would get caught."
Byron's lips trembled. "I did it alone," he lied.
"Are you sure?" Creed asked, turning toward the media. The sound recorders leaned in like flowers. "If you lie now, you will only dam yourself more. You threatened a woman and her family. You planned to make death into a lark. This hall deserves the truth."
Byron's face turned a strange, mottled color. He glared at people, spit hatred. "You—" he said.
"Remember when you told my wife that you would do harm if she didn't call me?" Creed said, quieter, so the cameras had to reach for it. "Remember when you laughed about making her body into food? Remember when you said you wanted to carve her up to feed strangers? Do you remember that? You told me that in private."
The crowd tittered as though liquid. A woman near me murmured, "Sick."
Byron's confidence cracked. He began a cycle that would be the performance of his undoing: first shock, then denial, then grandstanding, then collapse.
"No, I didn't—" he began.
"Then explain this," Creed said. He slid a photograph across the podium—images from Byron's phone: receipts, a message chain, the name of a small-time fixer. The hall buzzed. Creed had evidence of Byron's contacts. Creed had collected every thread Byron had pulled at.
Byron's face went from red to pale. He moved his palms, looking for something. "You—how did you get those?"
"You tied yourself to a plan," Creed said. "You used a restaurant as a cover. You used the idea of vengeance because you thought you'd be redeemed by it. You are not."
The first public moment of collapse was small: a cough. Then another. Then Byron's voice rose into a type of pleading I had never heard from him—"No, no, I didn't do it like that—"
A cluster of people started to shout, "Liar!" "Monster!"
Cameras were merciless. People in the hall pulled out their phones. The very men who may have been Byron's patrons now twisted toward him with photos and whispers. A woman pushed forward and spat, "How could you? You wanted to hurt her—and for what? For a man's death that you decided to avenge?"
Byron's chest heaved. "He took my father. He deserved—"
"That is your cruelty," Creed said. "Violence will not breathe life back into anyone."
Byron's breath hitched. He tried to blame his father—tried to name names of those who had wronged his family—but every name fell flat. What he had done was his own. He had allowed his rage to become plan.
"You thought you would be a hero in your own story," Creed said. "But here is the truth: you were a cowardly man who stole a terrified woman, who used the idea of justice as an excuse for killing."
The murmurs in the hall grew to a chorus of disgust. A man shouted, "Arrest him!" Cameras flicked. Somebody hissed, "Shame!"
Byron's face contorted. He thought to twist the story into martyrdom, but there was no audience for that. People who had listened to his boasts were now disgusted. A woman near the press gallery shouted, "You are sick! You will rot!"
Byron tried to pull himself together. He stammered, "I'm not—"
"You are," Creed said softly. "And you will answer."
At that, the hall shifted. It wasn't just law now. The courtroom had become a public square where the community decided its contempt. People stood up from the benches—some clapped, not in joy but in righteous repudiation. Teenagers filmed with wide eyes. Journalists sharpened their lenses.
Byron's defenses broke like thin ice. He started to cry, then to plead, then to curse. "Forgive me! Forgive me! I didn't mean—" His voice broke into paroxysms of selfishness.
I watched him break under the gaze of so many. He had wanted a private terror; he got public collapse. He begged Creed to help him, to save him from the crowd's judgment.
I will not pretend I was magnanimous. I tasted a kind of satisfaction. He had wanted me to be silent, to be taken. He had wanted me to vanish. There was no vanishing now. The hall had his name on its tongue like a wound.
"Let the law do its work," Creed told me later, once Byron had been led away and the cameras had packed their lenses like hunting birds. "But it is right the world saw him for who he is."
He was not content with private retribution; he wanted the moral ledger to show a clear balance. The public shaming—while crude in its way—was a necessary airing. Byron's downfall did not end with handcuffs. He had been contemptible and he crumbled in public.
That day, people who had been witnesses to his cruelty were on my side. They were angry on my behalf. They told their friends. Videos circulated. From that day forward, the restaurants he had planned to open remained empty on the signboard. Banks called to ask about his accounts. People who had once mumbled about the "family's tragedy" now shook their heads and walked away. He had been stripped of the theater he had tried to build.
After the trial, life returned to the small, domestic things. Creed would still take off his glasses and rub his temple, and I would still feel my heart beat like a foolish bird. He still had that watch, and it still slid around his wrist like a promise. We had fights about inane things—milk types, the correct thickness of curtains, whether he should let me go to an exhibition alone—but those were harmless weather. They were not plans of violence.
We healed in little increments. The hospital nurse told me my wounds would get better. Eloise, his mother, fussed over me with soups and herbs until I begged her to let me make her coffee instead. Kiley Vega took me shopping and lectured me passionately about savings. Alice Bogdanov, Creed's assistant, asked me in the office if I wanted to bring lunch sometimes. Kenia Flores, who had once looked to be a rival for Creed's attention, sent me an awkward message apologizing for the misunderstanding and slipped me a small origami crane on my desk like a peace offering.
"She wasn't what she seemed," I told Creed one night, when we were alone and the city slept like a soft animal under us.
He smiled, a slow, private smile. "People are messy," he said. "But now you are safe, and you have your life back."
I looked at him then, at the hair at his temples, at the scar on his hand from a case long ago, at the way he softened when he watched me sleep. There were several small things that stole my breath: the way he always took off his watch on Sundays and put it in the second drawer; the way he folded his shirts in a peculiar pattern; the way his laugh got small and sheepish when he tried to be ridiculous.
"Promise me something," I said, because promises are a childish language but sometimes a necessary one. I knew he hated promises. But he took my hands.
"I promise nothing," he said, with mock gravity.
"Okay," I said. "Then do this: if there's thunder, come find me. If I'm gone, come looking."
He kissed my forehead, the spot behind my eyebrow that always made me feel a child again. "Always," he said. And that wasn't a universal ending. It was as unique as our midnight soup, as particular as Eloise Ewing's ten-herb tonic in her battered pot. It was not one of those sentences one could paste at the end of any story.
That night, I tucked the Maybach keys into the drawer with his second watch. They clinked—small, metallic, familiar. The sound was private. It was mine.
The End
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