Sweet Romance11 min read
He Picked Me Up in a Maserati (and Made Me Screw Screws)
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"I said I'm wearing a white sweater," I told the phone like I always did, because strangers deserve a little help when they're trying to find me.
There was a pause on the other end. "I'm the Maserati," the young voice answered casually.
I laughed, half to myself, half because I couldn't help it. "Right. Sure."
The deep-blue Maserati stopped in the traffic like it belonged to the road. I took two steps back without thinking. The car looked like money looked if money could sit down.
"Where are you?" I asked.
"I'm here. Double flashers on." He said it like he didn't think flashing lights were a kindness.
I walked toward the car and then farther away, because people in movies never stood right beside cars like this, did they? The driver lowered his sunglasses and peered into me through the rearview mirror.
"You sat in the back?"
"Yes?" I answered, because that's how I get home. "I— I sit in the back."
"Sit up front then," he said with the quiet authority of someone who was used to things obeying him.
I climbed into the passenger seat like a tiny invasion. He smelled like a neat cologne and money and maybe cedar. I clicked my seatbelt, sat up straight and tried to look like someone from a respectable university, not like the intern I was.
"Do you work here?" he asked.
"I do," I said. "Intern. Small company. Low pay."
He didn't seem impressed. "How much?"
"Four thousand five a month in my internship period." I said it quickly. Saying the number out loud felt like an apology.
He hummed. "That's not a lot."
We drove. He talked with that flat, young voice, like sentences were ornaments and he only picked a few to wear.
"My stepmother is younger than me," he said out of nowhere.
"Really?" I said. "That's—"
"Yeah," he continued like he was unpacking something. "I came back from abroad and everything shifted. My father married again. My mother has... her own life."
"I can imagine." I didn't, really. I imagined late-night ramen and shared laundry and the kind of life that was about stretching rent money, not new wives.
"People didn't tell me any of it," he said. "No one walks you through your father's life. I learned Alipay a week ago. Chinese is rusty for me."
"You speak well," I said, because civility felt safe.
He turned and looked at me properly for the first time. "Do I?"
I laughed too loudly. "Yes!"
He smiled, small and private, then the clouds slid over his face. "My father's girlfriend used to like me. She used to call me 'Wang ge.' Now I call her 'Aunt Zhang.'"
I couldn't help it. I snorted.
"Don't hide your laugh. I find myself laughable too," he said. "They sent me abroad young. They gave me money, not childhood. Now they expect me to pick up the company."
"That's... a lot," I said.
"Sometimes they give money and expect business acumen in return. They forget the kid is still someone. I don't like it," he said.
When I got out of the car that night, I checked my phone. My ride fee had been refunded.
"Of course," I told my empty apartment, soft and private. "Of course the boy in a Maserati would pay for me."
The next night, my thumbs were barely off the phone when another ping came: "Driver accepted."
I looked up and found the same deep-blue Maserati waiting again. My heart did a small, embarrassed jump.
"He came again," I told myself. He waved me in like it was nothing.
"Coincidence?" I asked.
"Probably," he said.
"I'm Jonas," he didn't say. He introduced himself that night as Giovanni Ivanov, name flowing like a single foreign syllable.
"Giovanni," I repeated. "That's nice."
He told me he'd had a fight with his father, he'd said he wanted to move out. "I'm moving out," he said. "I don't want to be around him."
"I support you," I said before I could stop myself.
He turned to look at me with an eyebrow lifted. "How? Verbally?"
"Yes," I said, and felt like a coward and a friend at the same time.
We drove around, though. He offered to take me on a loop, "Don't worry. No charge."
"Why are you doing this?" I asked.
"Because," he said, "sometimes you need a different company." He watched the sunset blanketing the city as if he were trying to memorize it.
When he dropped me off, he'd paid again. "Don't forget," he told me, like we had a history we shared.
Three days later, there was a blue Maserati waiting again. This time the office gossips were ready the minute I stepped out of the elevator.
"You've been taking a Maserati?" one sneered. "Who's the sugar daddy?"
"It's just a ride," I muttered. "I swear."
Giovanni stood against the building like it was made of him. A red convertible pulled up right after; he had apparently been listening. He stood in the doorway and said, "I'll take her."
The boss—Jaime Booker—saw red where a boss sees red. Jaime always smelled faintly of aftershave and certainty, the type of man who assigned more work than existed. He took my late-night grin as a license to his petty tyranny.
"You're getting a lot of favors," he said to me later in his office, with the air of a man explaining the obvious. "Remember your place."
"Sir, I'm just doing my job," I said. My heart did that small defeated flip again. "The car's a coincidence."
He tossed a folder at me and it landed like a final paper on my desk. "You're memorizing this for tomorrow's business trip," he said. "Six times next month. Do not be incompetent."
"I—I'm an intern," I protested. "This is too much."
He raised a hand. "Find a way."
He did not let it go. It became harder each day. The office whispered about me, then he pushed harder, piled business trips onto my calendar with a kind of glee. One day I couldn't take it; I stood up, I threw the file on his desk. People paused and looked. The room smelled like someone had pushed a glass to the edge of a table and hoped it would fall.
Giovanni caught the thrown folder with a hand so casual he might have been rearranging his tie. "She is here to work, not to be bullied," he said simply, his voice small but steady.
Jaime walked straight into it—straight into public humiliation.
"Who are you to stop me?"
Giovanni didn't shout. He moved like someone who knew where the exits were. "I'm the person who will not let you humiliate someone I care about."
He took my pass from the ground and waved it in the air. "You make a point of delegating impossible work to our youngest, and then you scold her for not managing the impossible. Tell me, Jaime, how many interns have you set up to fail this quarter?"
The meeting paused. People in the open office crowded like they had been waiting for an argument to lean on. Some filmed with phones before anyone knew what would happen.
Jaime scoffed, the laugh a thin sharp wire. "You're a guest in this company," he said. "I am the manager."
"You are a manager who hides behind cruelty," Giovanni said. "You tell others to 'find a way'—and you never help. You create scarcity and then blame the people who are hungry."
Jaime's face changed—first a curl of anger, then a thinner, paler confusion. "You don't know what you're talking about," he said.
"Then explain this month," Giovanni said. "Why did you schedule six trips? Why did you argue to give her the toughest trip? You assigned her to be alone with a client who complained once about interns. Why?"
The room held its breath. Jaime's managers tried to slide in with their best neutral faces, but the crowd had started to tilt.
"You're bullying. Publicly." Giovanni's voice was not loud. It was the kind of soft that made people lean forward. "Her work performance is not the problem. You're the problem."
People around us began to whisper into their phones, hands shaking. A woman laughed nervously to disguise that she was filming. Another started to clap, lightly, then louder. A man at a nearby desk turned and yelled, "Enough!"
Jaime's expression cracked; the confident veneer muffled. He shifted his weight like someone discovering his shoes were glued. "You—" he began, tried to collect himself.
Giovanni smiled a little. "If you want to use staff for your sense of power, we're done. If you want to be a leader, let's talk about mentoring."
"You're threatened by me," Jaime said, exposing the only refuge he had.
"People are recording," someone said clearly.
Jaime's face went a shade whiter. "You can't—"
"Call HR," Giovanni suggested. "Call every person in this room who saw how you treat people. Let them see for themselves."
Jaime stumbled for a retort. He looked at me, as if to find some permission or complicity, and found my eyes steady on him. The office had filled. People who had been silent for months found their voices.
"You'll be investigated," Giovanni said, not loudly, but in the way that ends songs. "If you choose to be an obstacle in people's lives, the company will see."
Two colleagues from HR materialized like angels who knew the building's weak spots. "Jaime," one said carefully, "we've had complaints."
Jaime's mouth opened, closed, opened again, like a trapped fish. The floor felt too public for him. Phones buzzed with notifications, the small, terrible evidence of an instant audience.
"You're not the manager of humiliation," Giovanni said, and people started to clap—hesitant, then sure. Jaime's face moved through denial to a blank, shocked silence, then desperate pleading.
"This is outrageous," he said. "You're making a scene."
"You're the one who made a scene," Giovanni replied. "We are just asking for fair treatment."
Someone laughed; it sounded like water. "You pretended to be a tough boss," said another voice. "Now you're pretending to be surprised when people call you out."
Jaime's hands trembled. "You don't— you don't understand the pressure I have."
"Then let HR help you," Giovanni said. "Let them do their job."
"Don't," Jaime said, his voice small and pleading. "Please. I'm sorry. I—I'll apologize. I'll apologize publicly. Please."
The crowd quieted. The word "apology" hung, insufficient and suddenly vital. Jaime, caught between ego and the bright teeth of exposure, sat down heavily, his face collapsing into a heap of bad actor and broken man.
An hour later, the official email arrived. Jaime was suspended pending review. The office that had watched him lord around for years watched him shrink into a form that fit an email: accused, embarrassed, and for the first time not untouchable.
Outside the building, someone posted the video. Within the day, people I didn't know messaged me: "I saw your co-worker stick up for you." "You should be proud." It was, in a way I had never expected, because the public had always been some hush—but now it was a blaze.
The punishment part wasn't about fame. It was about the quiet things: Jaime's regular invitation to impress superiors had turned to dismissal; his name was now discussed in water-cooler conversations not with reverence but with pity and a lesson about being a small person with big authority. People who had once laughed when he barked now offered their sympathy to the ones he'd tormented.
When the dust settled I sat in the break room with Giovanni. He didn't look triumphant. He looked tired and oddly normal.
"You didn't have to," I said.
He shrugged. "You get used to seeing people treated badly. Sometimes you think it will be easier. Sometimes you see someone bent too far, and you can't breathe."
"You made him get an apology," I said.
"He offered it," Giovanni corrected me. "But now he has to show it. And people will watch. That will be worse."
"And better," I said. "For everyone."
He looked at me, and then he laughed, small and private like before. "You're stubborn." He reached across the table and squeezed my hand once. "You asked me to stop childish jokes. I did more."
"I asked for no jokes about money," I reminded him. "Not for apologies, heroics."
He smiled. "We'll refine the terms."
After Jaime's suspension, the office's gossip cooled. People were kinder in small, domestic ways. Someone left a packet of instant coffee in my drawer with a Post-it: "You deserve real coffee." People started to ask me questions about my life with genuine interest, not derision. I learned how quickly culture can change once someone refuses to let cruelty be quiet.
Giovanni and I kept seeing each other. He started to come to the factory floor, not as a visitor beaming in designer things, but as a man who rolled up his sleeves and learned how to tighten bolts and operate machines. The first day he insisted I come with him. "So you'll see I'm not playing at it," he said, as if it needed proof.
"You're making a show of humility," I grumbled.
He grinned. "No. I'm just getting my hands dirty."
We wore worker uniforms and hard hats and learned the rhythm of a production line: screw, pass, check, repeat. It was honest and awful and quiet in its repetition. The work taught me a new patience. The work taught him something about expectations.
"Are you sure about this?" I asked as we toiled in a corner. "You're giving up a lot for this."
He looked at me with a calm I couldn't fathom. "I'm not giving up. I'm choosing."
We rode shared bikes to work the next week because he wanted the anonymity and I wanted the simplicity. People at the factory knew him now because he worked there, not because he was escorted in; the transition was slow but real.
One night after a long day of tightening bolts and checking seals, Giovanni surprised me again. "It's my father's wife's birthday tonight," he said. "We should go. For civility."
"Civility?" I sniffed. "In work clothes?"
"Yes," he said calmly. "Bring your smile."
We showed up on shared bikes, helmet straps dangling. The valet looked at us as if we had crossed genres. Giovanni made one phone call, and soon someone from the hotel greeted us by name. The contrast was absurd: grease-smudged and exhausted, yet at the center a calm man in ordinary clothes.
At the party, he introduced me as someone who helped him understand something important. "She came with me to the factory," he said. "She knows work."
There were the familiar judgments—some eyes flicked to my callused hands—but others looked at us as if this disruption pleased them. My dress and shoes and the way I had my hair done were all gifts; Giovanni wanted me to feel the world that had seemed reserved for others.
"How does this feel?" he asked later, handing me a fork with a piece of cake.
"Strange," I admitted. "And expensive."
He laughed. "You always say expensive as if it were a curse."
"Because it's not mine," I said.
"It will be," he answered without hesitation.
The real change wasn't the gifts, though. It was his small, careful ways: removing his jacket when I was cold, carrying my cake so I wouldn't drop it, answering the gossip with a grin that made the words harmless.
We learned each other's edges. I learned that he could be serious about responsibility. He learned that money didn't fix small humiliations. We negotiated terms: I would be his assistant for a while, with a real salary and hourly rates, and he insisted he would still go to the factory. "I'll learn," he repeated. "And you will leave if you want."
"Deal," I said.
One evening, on the roof of his apartment, we sat in the faint city glow. He fished out a tiny candle and a cake—cheap, meant for two. He held it as if it were precious. "Happy birthday," I said because he had told me once that no one had sung to him.
"We're not doing dramatic promises," he said. "No 'forever' lines."
"Good," I said. "I hate those."
"You can ride shared bikes with me," he said.
"I will," I answered.
He smiled. He looked at me like the world had finally settled into a shape that fit. "You can be whoever you want," he said. "Maserati in the morning, shared bike in the afternoon. Screwdriver in the hand, cake in the night."
"You sound like a broken proverb," I teased.
He leaned close. "I sound like me."
We laughed. He tightened the tiny candle and the cake between us. "If anyone asks," he said softly, "tell them the Maserati was only the beginning."
"I will," I promised.
And later, when I think back, I remember the small, ridiculous things more than the big ones. I remember that first refund on my trip record. I remember him offering to pay for a cake that barely fit two forks. I remember us screwing bolts together in silence and the way his hand rested on my shoulder when fatigue made the work feel heavier.
"You can be poor and proud," he said once. "You can be rich and grounded. You can be messy and loved."
"I like the sound of that," I said.
He smiled like a single private sun. "So do I. Now—" he squeezed my hand— "let's go eat red-braised pork."
"Deal," I said. "But you pay."
He laughed. "I already bought your dress."
I slipped my fingers into his, and we walked down the stairs like we belonged there, which was the first time it felt true.
The End
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