Revenge12 min read
He Gave Her Roses Too Late
ButterPicks18 views
I still remember the rain that day, how it tapped on the subway roof like a small, steady accusation.
"Do you want to do something for 520?" I typed, my thumbs clumsy with hope.
After nine years, three of them as his girlfriend, I was still the one who asked first. Mateo Kennedy took forever to answer.
"What holiday?" he finally replied.
I pictured him—brow faintly furrowed, voice always the kind that rolled out like cool water. "It's five two zero. It sounds like 'I love you'—can we at least meet?"
"That's a holiday?" he wrote back.
I tried to soften the ask. "I just want to see you. You've been buried in studio work. We haven't had dinner in a week."
"Fine," he answered after a pause.
"Say you love me?" I pressed.
He did not. He never did.
"Go to work," he sent instead, like putting cloth over a flame.
That was Mateo—always a small error between words and meaning. He was my anchor and my ache. The first time I found him bleeding on the stairwell at fourteen, I couldn't not sit down and hand him a stale bun. He had been cruel to the world and soft with me. That had been enough.
By our junior year he had a studio. I believed in him the way people believe the ground will hold when they close their eyes. I believed my waiting and small sacrifices were proof to make him stay.
Kenia Deleon was my best friend from those studio years. We met in the coffee shop under the same building where Mateo set up his first messy office. Kenia and I argued over broken boys and bad pasta, and we told our secrets like we were trading cards.
"You should keep him on a leash," Kenia told me once with a laugh.
"He's not a pet," I said, but I clipped my words. I loved him with a kind of exhaustion that felt permanent.
On 520, I left work early to buy a small bouquet. I wanted to be visible—so he would remember that we existed in the same city.
When I reached the corner by the studio, I saw him handing a white bouquet to Kenia.
My mouth went dry. Rain puddled at my feet and the petals on the roses shone like wet teeth.
"Mateo," I said, and the name was heavier than I'd expected.
He glanced at me almost as if I were a distraction. "She helped close the Vega deal," he said. "She deserved thanks."
Kenia smiled. "It was nothing. I just passed a couple of calls."
"Thanks," Mateo said softly, the voice he never used with me. The way he looked at her—gentle, measuring—burned a hole in me.
"You gave her flowers," I said, and the air pulled taut like a wire.
"Stop making drama," Mateo said. "It was a courtesy. Don't look for trouble."
I did what hurt more than anything: I believed him.
That night I cried in a car that smelled faintly of the cigar he let slip on studio days, the light cutting the rain into hard lines on my sleeve.
"Don't say you'll leave me," he had said before—one of those moments he dropped his armor and let me in. It was a lie that I used like proof he cared. I was gullible then. I wanted to save him. I thought saving him would make him belong to me.
Weeks passed with small rips I couldn't mend. He started answering my messages with short words. He was at the studio more. Kenia and Mateo bumped into each other on purpose. I told myself they were simply colleagues.
"He's prickly," Kenia told me once. "But he says a lot of things for you only. I like that."
"You don't know him like I know him," I said, full of claims I couldn't prove.
I tried to keep our life ordinary—cooking, watching a film, falling asleep to his even breathing. Once, months in, he kissed me in the parking lot like a punishment and a promise, his mouth bruising mine.
"Don't say you'll leave," he said, eyes rimmed red.
"I wouldn't," I lied and believed it.
Then the posts began.
Kenia at an LV counter, her arm looped through a man's, the watch on his wrist catching the light. I squinted and blew up the photo. Mateo's watch—my gift—glinted. My breath left me in a small, sharp sound.
I called him and he came home to find the light off and me sitting in the dark, the photo an ashen proof on my screen.
"Where were you?" I asked.
"On my way back." He looked tired. "I was at the office."
"With Kenia?" I said. "Where is that photo from?"
He made a strange, small sound. "She said her bag broke. We passed through the mall. I helped."
That evening he sat beside me and kissed my forehead like he had not been mistaken for a stranger. "I won't do it again," he said with a voice that wanted me to forgive.
A week later, in line at the women's clinic, the world tilted. I watched the clinic door open and two people step out—Mateo, and Kenia, arm linked to his as if they were the same object now.
"Mateo?" I whispered, numb.
He looked up. The color left his face like someone had wiped it. "What—"
"You were here for what?" I asked. My voice came out small and brittle.
He reached for me. I backed away and the hand dropped, heavy with something that had no right in it.
Kenia smiled. "I—" she said, and the laugh in it was a thing that would become a cup of ice in my chest. "It just happens, you know? Life moves quick."
She said "it just happens" like a tag on a shirt.
"Don't touch me," I said, and the words were clean and final.
I packed in a blur. Mateo cried—once, then he was calm as glass.
"I can't do this anymore," I said. "You lied. You hid her in places I was supposed to be."
"Nine years," he said. "I never meant for this to—"
"Don't," I said. I could not stand the look in his eyes, the half-mannered guilt. "Please don't."
I moved back home for a while. I stopped going through our old messages. I stopped answering when he called, but he found a way. He left flowers under my door. He wrote my name on the windshield of his car in condensation and waited. He called at odd hours with the same tired voice pleading.
"Esther," he'd whisper—my name crossed into his throat like a plea. "Please."
One day, a bouquet of ninety-nine roses arrived at my work. Kenia delivered it herself, all smiles and a small throat-clear.
"It was a mistake," she said. "I wanted to give it to you."
"Why?" I asked.
"Because you deserve them," she said. "Mateo wouldn't buy them. I did."
She put the bouquet in my hands and I felt every petal like a splinter.
That night I found Mateo at my door. He looked like someone hollowed out.
"We can fix this," he said. "We can go somewhere. I can be better."
"Why didn't you tell me when you realized you were slipping?" I asked.
He did not move. "I thought... it was nothing."
"You thought 'it was nothing'?" I echoed. That phrase was a small, iron coin dropping into the deep of my trust and shattering.
The truth was worse than I imagined. Not long after, a girl from school—Jane Roussel—emailed me asking for work references. She'd been the junior who accompanied me to a clinic one bright morning; she was warm and understated. Her brother, Caleb Kiselev, would later become the man who taught me to make coffee for two again.
While I was unraveling, Mateo and Kenia kept a rhythm going that had nothing to do with me. I found out that Kenia had been pregnant. They had been in the clinic because the pregnancy had been terminated. It was a raw humiliation to watch them leave a hospital hand-in-hand and for Kenia to say in a slow, triumphant voice, "I'm sorry you didn't have the chance."
After that day the decision was clear. I left. I said I was done, and I meant it.
I didn't tell them how I sewed my wounds shut and put my life on my feet. I sat in interviews. I trained. I met Caleb not long after—he had been the kind stranger who sat beside me in a hospital waiting room and held a carton of orange juice like an offering. His sister had babysat me into a taxi and he'd chased the cab to make sure I was alright. He was honest in the way light is honest: he didn't hide things in shadow.
"Do you want to get out this weekend?" he asked once, when the ache had gotten quieter and my heart had learned to beat like a practiced thing.
"Yes," I said. He made tea the next night and left little notes on my fridge. He taught me the small confidence that is not loud but steady. He asked me for nothing that felt like rescue.
Years went by. I built a career. I levied no revenge, because I found peace in the ordinary: a good job, a roof that was mine for the rent, soft Sundays with a man who said "I love you" like ordering breakfast—simple, necessary.
Then, three years later, a letter arrived. It was an odd, handwritten thing with no return address. The envelope smelled like soil.
"Meet me," it said simply. "I planted them for you."
At first I thought it a prank. Then the address—outside the city, on a road lined with shrubs—led me to a hill I had never seen. There, roses rolled across the land, red as a stopped pulse. Mateo stood small in the middle like a dark statue, hands dirty, hair gone thin at the temples. He looked older than the boy I had once rescued. He looked like someone the world had chewed and spat out.
"I built this," he said, voice rough. "For you."
"Why?" I asked. The sun sat on the roses like a smear of varnish.
He stepped forward. "To prove to you that I can change. To prove that the thing you wanted—I have finally learned to give."
I held my bouquet of lilies—my bridal bouquet, that I had bought for an upcoming wedding I was preparing for with Caleb. The lilies smelled like the clean inside of a room.
"I'm going to marry Caleb next month," I said.
This time, his face did what it had not done during our fights. Pain did not make him human; instead it made him desperate.
"Esther," he said. "Please. Come back. These are for you."
"You gave them to Kenia first," I said.
He flinched at the word. "I didn't know what I was doing."
"Then why deceive me?" I asked.
He sank to his knees among the roses. "I thought I needed to be... someone else."
"You were someone else the day you stood in the rain handing her white roses," I said.
He cried then, the man who wore sorrow like a second skin. "I begged her to leave. She stayed. I was stupid. Forgive me, please."
"I can't," I said. "It's too late."
When I left the roses behind, walking away felt like doing the last honest thing of my life. Mateo called every day for three months after. He planted roses until his hands bled. When the farm gained a small following online, a few people called it poetic. He had become a cautionary tale.
But Kenia? She did not simply fade.
Two years after he left me by the clinic door, Kenia had a rise at her mother's firm. She took the space and talents that had once been my world—client lists, charm, introductions—and climbed. The same lady who told me "it just happens" wore silk and a watch that caught light in photos.
When the company she worked with planned an opening gala for a new branch, she accepted the invitation to speak. It was the kind of event with velvet ropes and a marble staircase, with people in glass heels and crisp suits.
I was there, by accident, because of work. My PR team had insisted: "Go, it looks good." I told them I'd be fine to skip, but I went. I expected nothing. I expected a sea of polite faces.
The room was liquid with applause and low laughter. Kenia took the stage speaking about "new horizons" and "team values." She smiled the smile of someone who had never told the truth and expected no consequence.
Halfway through, a woman at the back—someone I used to know by sight—stood and spoke into the microphone.
"Who here remembers a certain day at the clinic?" she called. Silence folded in like a curtain. "Who remembers the man who left a girl at the clinic and the girl who thought 'it just happens'?"
I felt my pulse in my throat. Kenia's smile tensed like a drawn wire.
On the big screen they showed an old broken video—security footage from a nearby clinic from years ago, a time-stamped moment I had once sworn to forget. In it, a man and a woman, whose faces were caught in the cold fluorescent light, walked out together, laughing after a closed door. Then, an exchange of a large bouquet. Then a hand passed across and a lighter, leather handshake of a plan. The crowd watched with the kind of attention the social world reserves for ownership-change.
Kenia's hands went white on the podium. "What is this?" she demanded. The woman at the back spoke calmly.
"We're offering context," she said. "We believe in full disclosure."
A ripple circulated through the audience. Someone gasped. Phones rose like wands. Cameras blinked.
Kenia's co-workers—people who had applauded her hours earlier—shifted in their seats. A reporter walked up to the stage with a microphone like a small blade.
"What do you say to these images?" she asked.
Kenia's face moved through stages: delight, then confusion, then a hard, brittle denial. "This is slander," she said. "This is not true."
"Is this why Ms. Deleon made certain promises to clients?" another voice asked. "Is this why some clients were passed over?"
The questions edged like fingers along the truth.
Kenia's mouth opened and closed. "I have done nothing wrong," she said. "I—"
Someone near me stood. "She lied to the woman she called a friend," he said loud enough for Kenia to hear. "She slept with her boyfriend and then took money from their deals."
The murmurs hardened into a roll of whispers. Phones were already recording. People leaned closer as if to watch the unraveling of an expensive costume.
Kenia's manager—who had once praised her efficiency—came forward. She cleared her throat, shock painted thin on her face. "I need time to look into this," she said. "We will suspend Ms. Deleon pending investigation."
The words struck as if the building had decided a verdict on its own.
Kenia collapsed into a chair. She was beautiful in disaster, like a glass fallen and catching the light wrong, edges sharp. People leaned forward: some with pity, most with judgment.
"Aren't you all forgetting something?" she asked, fingers trembling. "We are in a room full of people. My life is public business."
Someone in the front stood and laughed, not kindly. "Your life was public business when you used a friend's pain to hide your maneuvers. Actions have costs."
Cameras pulsed. Comments began to stream in on the big screen where someone had already queered the live feed. The crowd watched the room become its own tribunal.
Kenia began to cry then, a raw, loud sound that did nothing to soften the steel in the room. A woman near me whispered, "I used to order her things for events." Another tapped her phone. "She ghosted my daughter at an intern placement."
As the night wound on, Kenia's apologies were swallowed by the noise of cameras and whispers. She tried to reach out to colleagues for help; people shrank from her touch. A social media meltdown followed; clients withdrew, press statements were issued.
Her fall was not one of violence. It was a slippage—a market and a court of public opinion rendering its judgment in fine, surgical cuts.
Kenia stood at a microphone later, trembling, eyes swollen, and said, "I am sorry. I did not realize the pain I caused."
Her apology did not settle. It cracked against the room like thin ice. People watched and recorded, counted the words for sincerity. The industry that once accepted her charm now catalogued her as risk.
Mateo's punishment was different and public in its own cruel way.
He lost his studio. His business partners walked out when the project delays became visible in the press and when clients who had ties to Kenia's firm withdrew their support. The hand that had once held the studio's reins found itself empty. His name appeared on message boards not as "brilliant designer" but as "the man who left a woman at the clinic."
When he sought me out months later, the studio a memory and his credit to the wind, he tried to bargain with me in public spaces—outside my office, under the eaves of buildings, in coffee shops where colleagues might see.
"Please," he said once, in a courtyard where students passed. "I will rebuild. Look at these roses—"
"They're not for me," I said in front of a crowd of curious faces. "They are for the woman you used."
A public story picks up speed because people want to be on the side of the hurt. Mateo found himself reenacting the old scenes with a new audience. People would come with phones and ask why he had done such a thing. He tried to explain himself in a video that went slightly viral. He turned from guilt to anger to pleading to breakdown on camera. He lost privacy. He became an object lesson.
For Mateo, the punishment was the slow, steady unraveling in which every kind thing he once did was reinterpreted as manipulation. For Kenia, the punishment was exposure and loss of professional standing. For both, their choices became the currency of public contempt.
I watched both of them fall like two different kinds of ruin: one was personal and delicate, the other corporate and scandalous. Both were ugly to see. Both were just.
"Do you regret it?" I asked Mateo once on a late autumn day when he had found me by chance in the market.
He stared at his hands. "Every day," he said.
"But it didn't hurt you alone," I said. "You didn't break yourself; you broke us."
He had no answer.
I married Caleb later that year. He asked me why I kept a small white rose in my wedding bouquet. I told him the truth.
"Because I used to wait," I said. "Because I learned what patience feels like when it becomes grief."
On the day of our wedding, Mateo came to the edge of the field with a single red rose and a shirt buttoned wrong, and he watched from afar.
"Esther," he called once.
"I am promised to someone else now," I called back.
He sank down on a stone and watched me walk out in white, a bouquet of lilies in my hand. He stayed among the roses he had planted, small and private, while I stepped into a life that answered back.
Years later he sent a final letter—no grand prose, only a note: I am sorry. I grew many roses. I hope they find good soil.
I kept a white rose from my bouquet pressed in my diary for a while. Sometimes I take it out and smell it, and I can almost feel the weight of the person I used to be: soft, hopeful, foolish.
When people ask how I forgave, I say, "I didn't. I chose life over revenge. I chose Caleb, not because he erased the past, but because he offered me a steady hand."
On our wedding night, I placed the pressed rose in my husband's pocket.
"Thank you," he said, a small, marvelous thing that made my heart fold itself like paper planes.
When the sun hit the rose field where Mateo worked, the petals turned like coins. I walked past once, and he lifted a hand, an offering that meant nothing now. I nodded and kept walking.
"Sorry," he mouthed.
I smiled, because in that small world of soil and thorn, apologies were too late, but also inevitable. I thought of the lilies in my hand, heavy with the promise of tomorrow.
"I'm sorry," I said aloud, though he could not hear. "But you came too late."
The End
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