Sweet Romance12 min read
He Did Not Love Me
ButterPicks14 views
I never planned to leave Aaron Armenta.
"I can't keep pretending," I told myself in the bathroom mirror the night I finally moved out. I wiped off the makeup, watched the water bead like tiny planets on my hand, and thought of the little wrinkle that had shown up beside my eye. I had loved Aaron for nine years. I had built the small life we shared: the dishes, the throw pillows, the cat that slept on my stomach in winter. But love had a shape, and his shape wasn't mine.
That afternoon he texted, "Business dinner. Don't wait up." His message was the same empty sentence he'd been sending for years. I made instant noodles, fed the cat, and sat in the dim light playing a game until my eyes blurred. At ten, Aaron wasn't home.
Out of habit — a bad habit — I opened Stefania Kuznetsov's feed.
"Stefania," I said the name out loud like it was a memory you could peel off. She was elegant in the way I wasn't: an art student who had left for school abroad years ago and, apparently, come back this month. Two suns, a selfie, a dish on the table. I tapped the photo. A hand rested on the plate — the watch I had bought Aaron last year. I felt the air go out of my chest like someone had unzipped me.
I called him. "Where are you?"
A pause. "Downstairs. I'll be up."
"Okay," I said. The flat response. The cool voice. "Fine."
When he came home, I hugged him from behind anyway because that was the script we'd both learned.
"Stefania's back," I said, calm like stone.
He froze for a fraction and then said, "Yeah."
"Have you met?"
"Yes."
"Why didn't you tell me?"
There was a long breath, a sound that said everything his voice would not.
That night I cried onto my pillow until the cat disturbed me with a soft paw. The next morning the apartment was empty. The photographs seemed stranger without me in them. I packed the boxes with a kind of care that was almost reverent — all the small things I had chosen. The key I left on the shoe rack. I walked out with the cat carrier under my arm and felt lighter and hollow at the same time.
"You're finally doing it," Jocelyn Gustafsson said when she came over. "Good for you."
"I was squatting in someone else's life," I told her. "It's time to be someone else's future."
We celebrated that night with the usual drinks and laughter. I told the story of the first time I saw Aaron at a college orientation dinner — the way his jaw looked, the way he seemed so calmly brilliant. I told it like a fable. When the night quieted and only Jocelyn and her boyfriend remained, my phone vibrated.
He was calling: "Where are you?"
I ignored it, then picked up when he called again. "We're done," I said. "I moved out."
"Where are you?" he repeated, as if location would change the meaning of what I had done.
"Why do you care?" I asked.
"Tell me." His voice had the first crack of urgency.
"You can come if you want, but it won't make you different." I said, and then I put the phone down.
He didn't come. He never came when it counted.
The following weeks were a strange kind of freedom. I started a new project at work that kept me late, hours when the city seemed to breathe softer. I refused to open Stefania's profile again. I stopped checking Aaron's messages like they were small weather reports of my worth. I met Xander Flynn at a friend's gathering Jocelyn had pushed me to attend — an unremarkable evening that turned gentle and honest.
"Hi, I'm Xander," he said. He had a clean T-shirt, a sketchbook, and a way of listening that felt like sunlight.
"Leah," I answered.
We talked about movies, about a hike that made his knees sore but his eyes hungry. He asked about a book I loved and actually remembered the name. He laughed when I tripped on a clumsy joke and didn't let the silence feel like a failure.
After dinner he offered, "Want to see a movie?" and I said yes, because why not.
When we left the theater, there was Aaron waiting outside my building.
He looked thinner, the edges of him softened. He had never been a man who smoked, but there he was with a cigarette, fidgeting like someone carrying a secret too heavy to keep inside.
"Who is he?" he asked before I could introduce Xander.
"He was at the movie," I said. "He's...someone I met."
Aaron's face shifted with a flash I hadn't seen months before. "You moved on fast," he said. The words were jagged, like he expected them to hurt me.
"I moved on from waiting," I told him. "I moved on from loving someone who made room for someone else without telling me."
He dropped his cigarette and ground it under his shoe. "I didn't tell you because I didn't want you to worry over nothing."
"I won't go back," I said. "It's over."
He tried to grab my hand. I stepped back. "Leah, come home," he begged.
"I already did," I told him. "A long time ago. I'm just finally leaving for good."
Xander held my arm like a promise. "Do you want me to come up?" he asked.
"No," I said, but my voice wasn't stern. It was gentle. "But stay."
The days with Xander were full of small kindnesses that felt like stitches to an old wound. He planned dinners, listened when I said small things about my family, noticed when I was tired and wrapped a blanket over my shoulders. He wasn't dramatic, and he wasn't perfect. But the thing I loved more than anything was the steadiness of his eyes when he saw me.
"You're different with him," Jocelyn said one afternoon over coffee. "You don't look like you're waiting for something."
"He's a sun," I said, because it was true. Xander was a sun.
We traveled, small trips at first: a coastal town where we got lost between alleys and found a market with fruit that smelled like home. We climbed a mountain at dawn to watch the sky thin into light. He kissed me in the car at a red light in the middle of the city, his lips warm and certain. The world allowed me to be soft without fearing it would be used as a weapon later.
But Aaron never stopped circling. He would appear at the edges of my life, a sudden name on my phone, a message left by mistake on Jocelyn's group chat. Once he found a way to make me stop breathing for a second: a thick scrapbook he handed me like contrition.
"This is everything," he said. "Our places, our photos." He had used the Polaroids he knew I loved, the ones we used to hang over our kitchen table.
I stared at it. "It doesn't make you different," I told him.
"I'm trying," he murmured.
I refused. "No," I said. "I'm trying, Aaron. But trying doesn't mean you loved me the way I needed. You wanted to prove yourself to someone else. I can't be your project."
He put his hand over mine like he had many times in the past and said, "Please."
He said everything in that voice I had loved: steady, low, the voice that made me think the world could be turned gentle if only I leaned on it. But I didn't lean back.
"I have a boyfriend," I told him. "Xander is my boyfriend. He's not a placeholder."
"Who is he?" Aaron asked, not unkindly, but with an edge.
"Xander Flynn," I said. "He's the one who cooks for me and remembers my coffee order and holds my hand when there are fireworks."
"Do you love him?" he asked as if testing himself for something.
"I think so," I said. "More than I loved you at the end."
"If you go back—"
"Don't," I cut in. "You brought this on yourself."
He looked like he might fall apart. I walked away.
Weeks slid into months. Xander and I made a life that felt like knitting — small loops that would, over time, keep warmth in a winter I couldn't have imagined.
And then the invitation came.
"Weddings are strange," Jocelyn said when she handed me the envelope. "But you invited him. He might come."
"I didn't," I said, but a part of me had always wanted to see how the chapter would close. "If he comes, it will be fine."
He came.
On the day my friends and family filled the hall, I stood at the front with a bouquet trembling slightly in my hands. Xander's thumb found mine under the table. He squeezed and smiled like a person who knew everything would be okay.
The ceremony passed in a pleasant blur. When the reception opened, and people circled like bright, warm birds, Aaron showed up late. He stood in the doorway, coat unbuttoned, eyes catching every movement as if he were memorizing us like a map.
I felt a pull — not for him, but for what he had been: my first love, the man who had taught me to endure and to forgive things that didn't deserve forgiveness.
"Get him to sit," Jocelyn hissed into my ear. "Please."
"I don't want a scene," I whispered back.
But it was too late. A scene is elastic like a balloon, and the smallest pressure can make it pop. Aaron moved through the crowd, and then the punishment began.
It started with Jocelyn.
"Why did you do it?" she asked, loud enough that the people near us turned.
Aaron stiffened. "Do what?"
"Make her compete for your attention," Jocelyn asked. She held up her drink like a shield. "Make her apologize when you were the one who kept secrets. Make her doubt herself."
"Stop it," Aaron said.
"Stop it?" Jocelyn shot back. She was a quick woman who had never much patience for slow apologies. "Do you know what she did for you? She cooked, she waited, she carried the cat when it hid from you during storms. She picked out the dishes in that kitchen upstairs. And what did you do? You collected trophies. You collected accomplishments like they made you human."
A hush flowed in the room. Conversations trailed off and eyes slid toward us.
"Jocelyn," Aaron said again. His voice had shifted; he sounded smaller.
"No," she said. "No more quiet. Not tonight."
She opened her phone, fingers shaking, and waved it like a flag. "This is what she saw," she said. "Polaroids you bought her and then hid. Texts you sent to other women while you were with her. Messages where you said you were 'proving' something."
She turned the screen. A cluster of messages carried a casual cruelty: "I should show her I'm enough," "I'll prove I'm not the man who lost her," "Watch me win."
"You used her," Jocelyn said. "Not with malice, maybe — but you used her. You used her like practice."
People around us murmured. A woman at the nearest table stood to look. Someone began to record. The air felt sharp, like ice against the throat.
Aaron's face went white. "You don't understand—"
"Then explain," Jocelyn said. "Explain to the room how you compared every breakfast she made to some imaginary standard. Explain why you never came to her friends' dinners. Explain why you kept her in the dark when you met your ex."
He opened his mouth and closed it. Pride gave way to panic. He tried to appeal to the crowd.
"Everyone! Listen—" he started. The assembled guests quieted, leaning forward like they'd come to watch a play.
"I loved her," he said. "I thought I did."
"You thought you did," Jocelyn echoed, and the words were a blade. "You thought you did while you left her to ask you for the smallest courtesies."
"Maybe I was afraid," Aaron said, and for a second he looked like a man who had just found the truth too heavy to carry.
"Afraid of what?" someone called from the back.
"Afraid of not measuring up." He looked around as if searching for an ally. None came.
"We trusted you," said a woman I'd grown up with, standing near the buffet, her voice steady. "We trusted you with Leah's laughter and her quiet mornings. You made it sound like you were building a future, but you were building an armor to hide inside of."
A man near the speakers, a coworker of Aaron's, laughed harshly. "You mean the same Aaron who would work until two a.m. and then tell her it was 'for us'?" He shook his head. "He used the language of love to make his ambition sound romantic."
The recording on someone's phone spread across the hall. A few guests already had their own phones out, broadcasting the confrontation quietly online. Faces turned, eyes narrowed. Sympathy for Aaron shrank like a shadow at noon.
"Please," Aaron pleaded. "It wasn't—"
"What was it?" Jocelyn demanded. "Was it love, or was it an experiment?"
"You don't have to answer," Xander said, and the room grew still. He too had had pockets of the pain I'd had. But he said it with calm that cut deeper than anger. "She doesn't owe you anything anymore."
"If you love her, let her go," someone else offered. "Let her have peace."
Aaron's expression crumbled. He reached for me. "Leah. I—"
I stepped forward. My palms were warm, my throat thick. "No," I said. Two syllables, and the room leaned in.
He looked like he might faint. "Please," he whispered. "Give me one chance."
"After everything?" I asked. I thought of the nights I had sat across from an indifferent face, of the times his focus had been elsewhere, of the cat he never comforted when it hid from fireworks.
"You asked me to be your consolation," Jocelyn said, and laughter bubbled weirdly in the air. "You wanted someone who would stay and make the house. She wanted to be wanted."
"You don't get to humiliate her in the name of making yourself whole," Xander said. "You don't get to do that to someone who chose you when there was nothing."
Aaron crumpled. The transformation was sudden, public, complete.
"You're making me into a villain," he said, and the words were thin like paper. "I wanted to be better."
"Look at yourself," Jocelyn said. She was merciless, but not cruel. "You wanted to be better for yourself, not for her."
People had their cameras out now. A circle formed. Some whispered. A woman I recognized from Aaron's office shook her head slowly. "He used the words 'for us' like a shield," she said. "But for whom was he working? For the version of himself he wanted someone to admire."
Aaron's face changed a dozen times in three minutes: shock, denial, anger, bargaining, desperation, then quiet collapse. He slid down against the wall and covered his face. Someone muttered, "He always had a way with logic; never with feeling."
"Shame," Jocelyn said softly, and more people nodded than I expected.
"Be quiet," Aaron begged. "Stop recording, please. Stop."
The doorways to the hall were crowded with people who had once been our friends. They watched in a kind of reverent cruelty as the man who had walked away from the small, tender things in daily life — the breakfasts, the midnight dishes, the tenderness — folded like paper.
"He won't speak," a woman said sadly. "Not because he can't find the words, but because he realizes the words don't help."
It was a public unmasking that didn't need violence. It was a group of witnesses reminding him that actions were louder than trophies. He had to sit there and listen to the account of his life as others had lived it with him: the indifference, the absence of explanation, the lack of care. He had to watch faces he once knew tilt in ways that measured disappointment more than spite. He had to feel the slow, steady rejection of a community he once took for granted.
Finally, Aaron dabbed at his eyes with a hand that trembled. "I'm sorry," he said, a small, fragile thing.
"Sorry usually comes before the leaving," Xander said. "You didn't say it then."
"I know," Aaron whispered. "I know."
People began to disperse like birds after a storm. The few who stayed behind left small packages of kind words at the edge of the ring around him: "Learn," said one. "Be brave enough to admit it next time," said another.
I walked past him on my way back to my table. He looked up, desperate. "Leah," he said.
I stopped. "Goodbye," I told him.
He swallowed. He wanted to cry louder, to call me back. People around him muttered their own versions of the farewell. "He had everything and he didn't see the person who loved him," someone said. "Let that be the lesson."
That night, Aaron did not follow the guests into the last dance. He stood in the doorway, a silhouette that a few cameras had captured and that would float for a while on a dozen phones. Jocelyn later told me that she had sent the recordings to several mutual friends and to a few of his colleagues, not to shame but to show him what had been missing. "The world can't leave you in your mistakes," she said. "Sometimes it has to show you your reflection."
After the crowd thinned, Xander pulled me close.
"I'm sorry that happened," he said.
"I'm not," I corrected him. "It had to happen."
We left together that night in soft shoes and softer promises. He tucked his hand into mine and said, "I will never put you in a place like that."
"I know," I said. "I know."
Years later, people would ask me if I forgave him. I would say yes and no. Yes, for the boy he had once been, who had been decent in some simple quiet ways. No, for the life I had wasted hoping action would follow his words.
"Do you regret not taking him back?" people asked.
"Sometimes I wonder," I confessed once to Jocelyn. "Then I remember the Polaroids and the nights I felt invisible."
"Then you know," she said simply. "You chose breathing over suffocation."
A year later, Xander and I filled a small hall with people who had come because their lives had touched ours. Aaron was not invited, and yet the rumor of him dissipated like smoke. I put my hand on Xander's as we stood under a ceiling of string lights. He smiled with the warmth of the sun that had been pulled around me for months.
"Do you?" he asked softly, the way people ask small important things.
"Yes," I said, and I meant it. I had chosen.
Behind us, someone clapped. My cheeks hurt from smiling. On the small table by the doorway, a stack of old Polaroids — the ones Aaron had compiled — lay in a neat pile, a reminder of a history that once fit like a second skin. I thought about the scrapbook, and then at the end of the night, I carried it out to Jocelyn.
"Keep this," I told her. "For the lessons. For the laugh."
She opened it, flipped through, and then winked. "We'll hang it somewhere people won't forget."
On my way back to our table, a hand brushed mine. It wasn't Aaron's. It was Xander's. We walked into the light together.
Later, when the music slowed to a soft rhythm and the last of the guests drifted away, I found a small white box on the table. Inside was a simple star map — a night of dots and light, a gift from Aaron meant as a piece of what I had once been to him. I looked at it and felt no ache. Instead, I smiled.
"Thank you," I told the star map, the scrapbook, the cat photos, the Polaroids and the small, ordinary things that had made up a life. "I know now how to love and be loved in return."
"Do you ever miss him?" a neighbor once asked me years later, when I had learned to trace the constellations on our living room wall.
"For the person he could have been," I answered. "Not for what he was."
We pinned one of the Polaroids above the mantle — not as an offering, but as a memory and a map. It was a small picture of us at a college dinner, both young and stupid and honest. Xander kissed me as I pinned it, and he whispered, "We'll make better pictures."
"Yes," I said. "We will."
And every night, when I walked past that little photograph, I smiled at the woman in it. The woman who had loved and left and learned. The Polaroid's white border had faded in one corner, but its picture stayed bright. I knew exactly which pieces of the past to keep, and which to let go.
The End
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