Sweet Romance15 min read
He Took My Dresses and Gave Me His Silence — Then Came Back with Heart-Shaped Toast
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I am ridiculous and I know it, but I also know my closet like a map of my moods. Every secret purchase, every tag still tucked inside, every silk ribbon—the proof of who I wanted to be. So when my thigh-skimming little skirt and the backless red dress I wore in my dreams vanished, it felt like a theft.
"I want a divorce." I said it loud enough for the houseplants to hear.
Isaiah Dunn took one perfect, slow sip of his coffee and nodded. "Then I'll return that five-carat ring."
I stared at him. "You—what?"
He smiled the faintest, almost apologetic smile that had once made me dizzy. "Next month, then. Go ahead. I love you, muah." He kissed his fingers and tapped his phone as if tapping a screen could close a door.
I felt my cheeks go hot. "Isaiah—what is this? Where are my things?"
He pointed to three huge burlap sacks left by the front door, utterly out of place in our polished foyer. "They're there. For rags."
My hands went cold. "What do you mean, 'rags'?"
"Whatever you were hiding in them," he said, not unkindly. "Chanel, Prada, whatever. They can be used."
I almost laughed and almost cried at the same time. I was losing more than fabric; I was losing the version of myself who could wear a dress that made a room look different.
I called Jessa—my best friend, Hudsyn Montgomery—and I lied through half my sobs. "Do you want a used Chanel skirt? It's perfect as a dust rag."
Thirty minutes later, Hudsyn showed up, giddy as a birthday kitten, clutching the very skirt like a treasure. Isaiah watched us from the doorway with that blank, small smile that made my heart thump with a new, angrier rhythm.
"Black's better," he said. "Dirt hides better."
I wanted to throttle him. "Isaiah, what are you doing?"
"I don't want you in clothes like that. Not in our home." His voice was placid, like a weather report. "Don't buy any more revealing stuff, and don't expect your card to work."
My chest felt like someone had boxed it. "You can't—"
"I can," he said. "I love you, but not those dresses."
That night I lay awake while the house slept like a tame animal. I had married Isaiah three years ago because of a string of fortunate events and my grandfather's insistence—because a practical deal had warmed into something fragile and complicated. When I first saw Isaiah in that dim lobby of the teahouse where the match had been arranged, I was in sandals and a cheap sundress and still rosy with youth. He looked at me with a half-smile and asked if my name was Jamie.
"Yes."
"Jamie Mayer," he had said, as if reading from a list. Then he had handed me a stack of papers—not vows, not a ring just then—but a formal list of assets stamped with "Notarized."
"You'll be taken care of," he said. "All of it in your name."
I thought I had won. I thought it would be simple—beauty and money braided together. But months passed and the marriage had a coldness to it, as if there was a wall between the bed and the living room, and Isaiah preferred files to faces.
He never took me to bed the way movies do. He took the bedroom and carried his laptop like an altar into the study and closed the door each night. He left dinner notes and he left me clothes to wear that more resembled a respectable librarian than the mischievous woman who bought backless gowns at midnight.
I decided to provoke him. I decided to prove that I could tilt his world.
That evening I spritzed my perfume, picked out my sexiest satin slip, and walked to his study with a laptop in my hands. He was on the phone, knuckles white around his device.
"Isaiah." I smiled wide and leaned over his desk like the heroine in a commercial.
He looked up. Time stilled. For a moment his eyes softened—just there, like a lamp turned low. "Can I help you?"
"Our manager needs the contract finalized," I said, voice sheepish, but I set the screen facing him like an offering. "Could you, uh, help me?"
He glanced at the laptop, at me, then reached up and, without touching me, draped his jacket across my shoulders. "I'll send the revised draft later," he said.
I tried to read the moment. His fingers hovered as if to lean on something, then he turned back to his phone. I stepped back, deflated. He didn't look at me again.
"Are you—are you angry?" I asked, a childish thing to ask a grown man.
"I told you," he said softly. "Wear something less revealing at home."
"But—" My protests hung useless.
That night I received an email: "Household policy: clothing must be modest at home. Violation = discretionary spending frozen for one month." He had typed it himself and forwarded it to me with a line: "Consider it for harmony."
I crossed my arms and scowled at the screen. I, Jamie Mayer, age twenty-four and newly minted vice-project-lead, had my freedom cut down to sizes and waistlines. Still, I was stubborn in my little rebellions. The next morning my skinfit dress became a knee-length skirt and a conservative top.
Isaiah came home as always, first into the study and then, later, into the kitchen for quiet cups. He showered like someone washing ink from his hands, precise and private. I waited with a television as witness.
"Jamie, can you grab a towel for me?" he called, voice drifting from the bathroom.
I turned off the TV with an exaggerated sigh. "I threw them all to the dry cleaner."
Silence. Then, "Then come out with the robe," he said.
I left the couch, intent on the scene. He stepped out, wrapped in a towel, water dripping against the strong planes of his chest. For one stupid second I forgot everything and stared.
"You shouldn't," Isaiah said mildly. "I don't want to be embarrassed in public."
I tried to be playful, to wrap myself in the moment, to lean into him. He smiled and put on a shirt I hadn't seen him choose. He left—locked the study door behind him.
That little lock prickled me more than the robe ever could.
Days turned into a strange cycle. I nudged and he retreated. I called him "husband" when buying groceries like a kid practicing a new word. He would reply "okay" and that would shore me up until I felt foolish again. Once I entangled my arm in his as we walked into the office, and the office whispered with interest. Someone said, "Is that Jamie's husband? He looks like that model in the magazines."
Isaiah straightened. "He's my husband," I announced proudly.
He nodded once for the crowd. "Yes."
I beamed, thinking the victory mine. Then later, at dinner, I stammered for another kiss and he said with that same flat honesty, "No. I won't kiss you now." Later he procured a car for me—slick, new—like a practical apology that beeped in the driveway.
We existed in that orbit until the misunderstanding unspooled.
One afternoon the company grid went dark—power cut. My day off the schedule. I dressed up and took a lunchbox of heart-shaped toast—because why not?—and walked into Isaiah's world. A receptionist asked, "Who are you here to see?"
"I—Isaiah Dunn," I said, flashing my five-carat ring without thinking, like a cartoon.
The receptionist blinked and called up to the office with feminine interest. A woman passing by the elevator did a double-take and whispered, "Who is she?" People craned. I felt exposed and proud and oddly like a costume.
At the penthouse level, I heard a man's voice inside an office corridor: "Jamie, can you bring this for Lin? She's coming back from overseas tomorrow."
I stopped mid-step. A name I did not recognize. A conversation I was not part of. I listened as Isaiah answered, "I will make sure." His tone was the same he had when he handled contracts—calm, distant, absolute.
My shoulders went cold. "He doesn't have feelings for me," I thought in jagged flashes. "He went to see his childhood friend." I pictured a woman with a lineage, a matching family, a lot of history. I had been only the bride brought in for the paperwork.
When I got home that night, Isaiah came in behind me, close enough to hold the door and not close enough to fold me into an embrace. I couldn't stop my questions. He answered as if I had asked about the weather.
"Why didn't you tell me?"
"I didn't think it was relevant," he said. "June is just a family friend. She is close to my family."
"She—how close?" I demanded.
Isaiah hesitated a beat like a hinge squeaking. "She is family connected. She and I grew up together."
"Together?" My voice grew small.
"She knows the house. I was just visiting," he said.
That evening he left the TV cold and the plates on the counter. He seemed different. The next message he sent me seemed as cold. "I am sleeping at my grandfather's. You don't need to wait."
I stared at the message until the letters blurred. I burned with shame, with the silly hurt that had no noble cause only my heartbeat. I had imagined betrayal because of a stranger's voice.
The next morning, when I drove by the company, I saw Isaiah open the car door for a woman with a laugh like porcelain. I knew then—June Acosta. June was bright, effervescent, pillow-soft. She hugged Isaiah like they had rehearsed sweetness for a lifetime.
I walked toward the shadows and the laughter tugged at my heart like a cruel toy. Isaiah had the look of someone already in practice with her. I turned away. The world was a small place and I was suddenly very, very alone.
I packed up my things. I wrote him a short note, printed and polite. There was a clause in our premarital agreement that said: "Infidelity will cause one partner to leave with no claim on joint property." I arranged my life like a lawyer in thin heels. "Fine," I told the paper. "Then I'll leave."
I boarded a taxi with my suitcase and my pride. Isaiah opened the door to the apartment and looked as if I had started a storm.
"You're leaving?" he said simply.
"Yes," I said, and tried to hold my voice steady. "I signed the letter. I left the keys."
He frowned, almost amused. "This is sudden."
"If you wanted me to stay, you would have noticed me," I replied.
Isaiah's expression cracked for a sliver of time, the way glass fractures under a throw. "If it's what you want, sign it."
"Don't you—"
"When you say you want a divorce, you should mean it," he said like a man reading a rulebook. Then he turned and slammed the door so hard the walls for a second felt like they were leaning in.
I walked out anyway. I felt like an idiot for the way my knees trembled when I stepped into the hallway. I was halfway down the stairs when Isaiah's arms were suddenly around me from behind and he lifted me like iron and tossed me into the bedroom.
"What are you doing?" I flailed, half-hysteric, half-laughing with horror.
"I'll sign. Tell me a reason," he breathed, and his eyes were not the empty ones of the study but the messy, human ones.
"You want me to stay," I said, trying to be cruel.
He froze. "I—" He swallowed. "Give me a reason not to sign."
I said everything I had felt when I watched him hug June—my fear, my small, ridiculous jealousies. He looked small and pained and then—the strangest thing—he cried.
"Please don't go," Isaiah said, voice breaking in a way that made me dizzy. He rubbed his face with his palms like a child trying to keep from confessing. "I wanted a home. I didn't know how to say it. I thought if I kept things orderly, if I kept us tidy and safe, the rest would follow. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to make you feel like a guest."
His apology sounded like someone pressing their palms to a window and expecting a storm to be tamed.
I stayed.
We rode out the awkwardness in a truce that had him placating me with small, clumsy gifts—parking tickets paid, a new blender, an album of photos of my first art show printed and framed without explanation.
Work took me further. Our firm morphed another deal and suddenly I was leading a negotiation with a subsidiary owned by Isaiah's company. I walked into the conference room as the lead on my side and found him across the table as the other company's representative. My stomach did the old angry flip-flop. He looked steady and perfectly in control, calm as always.
"Are you okay?" he asked across the table like we were schoolchildren and I had dropped my pencil.
"Fine," I said, but my hands still trembled. He pinned me with an almost ridiculous smile and signed the contract with one effortless stroke. The deal closed, and my boss congratulated me.
"Let's all go to dinner," said one colleague, insistently chipper.
Isaiah accepted the invitation. He looked at me with that old tilt that meant something had softened.
At dinner, Isaiah leaned in. "You did well," he said quietly. "You should be proud."
I wanted to say things like, "You are the reason I had anything to be proud of," because the truth was he had kept open spaces for me to grow. But I was still suspicious; old wounds make you bleed slow.
One night he came home and found the house dark. I had rejected him again—some part of me loved leaning on the edge. He kissed my forehead and pushed a plate of dinner in front of me like an offering.
"Jamie," he said, softer than the day we signed our papers. "Please don't go. Let me try to be what you need."
"I don't want melodrama," I said. "I won't be your project."
He looked at me as if I had said something tender and not an accusation. "I'm not trying to change you," he said, "I want to be changed."
That little phrase—"I want to be changed"—it crawled under my skin like sunlight through blinds. It made the stiff walls of our house seem smaller, more possible to climb.
Weeks passed. We kept breaking and rebuilding a rhythm; sometimes clumsy, sometimes funny. He made toast for me with a heart-shaped egg, and one night, when I came home exhausted and teary from a minor defeat, he pressed it into my hands.
"For orientation," he said. "For you."
I laughed and then I cried because the house felt more like home than it ever had the day I moved in with my new rings and my bright illusions.
But the storm wasn't over. In the company, rumors about our "marriage contract" circulated. Some people assumed I was the gold digger. Others assumed Isaiah was a saint for sharing his wealth. I existed in the middle, how much of me was shown, how much was banking on a diamond?
Then came the night of the drunken scene where everything was revealed in the worst way. Isaiah returned late, stumbling in with someone who shouted, "Sister! Thank you!" and then clung to him in a way I had seen before. He smelled of foreign liquor and of something else—chastened pride. He fell into my arms like a child gone astray.
"Take care of him," said the man with a laugh, and left.
Isaiah laid his face on my chest and let out a guttural sob. "I don't want a divorce," he said between hiccups. "Please. I don't want to lose this."
I didn't know what to do. Someone I had imagined as rock broke down into a puddle in my arms. I felt ridiculous and, in that ridiculousness, human.
"Why now?" I asked, voice small.
He sobbed like an old wound opening, "You're everything. I was afraid you'd say the wrong name in your sleep. I didn't know how to be the man you deserved without answering everything you gave me."
I had been so bent on being seen that I had fought him for visibility instead of allowing closeness to be built.
"I don't want to lose you," he said. "I meant what I said at the start—the house, the property—it's yours. I put things in your name for the safety of your life, not to make you a possession. I'm sorry I made you feel like one."
There are moments where a person's true self shows, usually in small gestures. Isaiah had always been practical; the vulnerability now took a shape like vulnerability takes—awkward and sudden and real.
After that night, he was different. He made me breakfast every morning and called me "Jamie" in a way that meant he noticed me. He sat across the table and asked about my day's meetings and actually listened. He let me pick a new dress and didn't make whispers.
"Why didn't you tell me sooner?" I asked one evening when the sky was pink.
"I was afraid," he said simply. "Afraid you would think me cheap if you knew I wanted to keep things safe. Afraid you would see me as a filing cabinet and not a person."
I cupped his face. "You are not a filing cabinet," I said, half-teasing.
We settled into a new cadence. He would appear at my office with coffee, he would send me draft comments on my slides like a nerd and a lover in one. He made a small ritual of calling me at noon to ask if I had eaten. He left me Post-its of thanks on my laptop and little paper hearts in my suitcase.
One weekend he took me to his grandfather's house because he wanted us to patch the gap between me and his family. The house was warm and oddly chaotic with aunts who fussed and teased and a little girl who ran around calling him "Uncle." It was at that house that June Acosta—the friend everyone thought might have been the other woman—came in like a bright song.
"Jamie!" she said, grabbing my hands. "Finally! You're here!"
I watched them interact and felt both relieved and oddly jealous. She hugged me and smiled like we were old sisters. Isaiah looked at her with a steady warmth that was familial and unromantic. I forgave him and forgave myself for the petty possessiveness.
At dinner his grandmother nudged him. "This girl is good for you, you know. Don't be silly."
Isaiah's face softened. "She matters to me."
He later explained that he'd been awkward because of an old fear—he had, when he was a teenager, thought I wasn't interested in him. He had seen me once call another man the name of a university crush in a joke months earlier, and he was terrified I would wake and say the wrong name. He had refused to risk the heartbreak.
Years of assumptions and private fears had built the wall. Once the wall fell, we found the ladder.
"Let's stop pretending we don't want the easy things," Isaiah said one night. "I want to cook for you. I want to be a boring, present kind of good. Can I? Will you let me?"
I laughed and brushed his hair back. "Yes, but only if you make the heart-toasts again."
There were still skirmishes—his rule about modesty returned occasionally as he worried about appearances when guests came. I pushed and he yielded when he could. He explained his rule once: "If we are to be a public thing, I don't want you to feel like you have to be anything other than yourself."
"I don't want to be contained," I said sharply one afternoon by the window. "I want to be allowed to be both alive and comfortable in my own skin."
"Then show me," he replied, and smiled, not in the aloof way but in a way that meant: show me and I will try. "Please."
So I did. I bought a little black dress—modest enough to keep us out of the headlines, daring enough to be mine. He looked at me the way a person looks at the night sky when the stars suddenly arrange themselves into a pattern.
I let him see me that night. He kissed me with patience and a curious wonder, like touching a rare piece of glass.
In time, our private rituals became the small scaffolding of a life. He would say, "Jamie, come eat," and I would pause in the doorway and answer, "Coming."
"Jamie, I'm home," he would announce, and I would meet him at the door. The house filled with small sounds—laughter, the clatter of plates, the low hum of someone who had finally realized that caring could be a craft.
We never had the grand scandal. There was no villain to parade on stage. The only real crime had been silence and fear. Isaiah's redemption was plain and patient: he let himself be seen and, in being seen, he allowed me to see him—flaws and all.
Finally, the things he had done at the start—the notarized assets, the careful protections—came into the light. "It was never to own you," he said one evening, placing my hand in his. "It was to make sure that if anything happened to me, you'd have a life that was yours."
I blinked at him, the truth reshaping itself into something like trust.
"Then why the cold?" I asked.
"Because I didn't know how to be tender without being intrusive," he said. "I thought order was tenderness. I didn't have the words for fear."
We laughed about it later, in bed, when the house was quiet and the night was ours. "You are an enigma," I teased, "a man who purchases rags and gives five-carat rings."
He kissed the corner of my mouth. "You are stubborn."
"In a good way," I corrected.
We found our way. He surprised me with my favorite perfume on the day of my promotion. I surprised him by stopping a plan to leave when I realized I had built more of my life inside the marriage than I had admitted.
The turning point never felt cinematic. It was a series of small arcs: his hand finding mine in the car, his email subject line reading "For you: heart breakfast," and the day he chose to sign a public photograph with "Jamie, my wife, my favorite mistake" scribbled on the back.
One afternoon, after a long week where both of us had been pulled in opposite directions, Isaiah came into the kitchen with a piece of toast on a plate. The egg in the middle was cut into a sloppy heart, slightly burnt at the edge.
"For the woman who refuses to fit into boxes," he said, grinning.
I took it and fed him a bite. "And for the man who refuses to let go."
He looked at me and swallowed. "I put the house and cars in your name because I want you to be safe. I didn't know that would scare you. I will tell you everything from now on. No more locks on the study."
"And no more shipping my clothes to the yard," I added.
He nodded, solemn as if swearing a treaty. "No more rags," he said.
We found the rhythm of our strange marriage: it was less about perfect romance and more about the accumulation of small rituals—a warm cup left on my desk, a ring tucked back onto my finger when I left it on the bedside table, a heart-shaped egg appearing just when I thought I was about to break.
One evening, as summer turned to a warm, golden fall, we stood in the doorway for a minute, both of us caught in the hush between tasks. I had on a new dress—modest, sleeves at the elbow, but it hugged me in the right places. He looked at me the way people look at photographs of the past and say, "We were younger then," and he kissed me like we were making a new promise.
"Will you marry me again?" he asked, smiling a little wildly.
"Again?" I laughed.
"Because I have been a terrible husband and a good protector and I think the world owes us a redo."
"Do you know how melodramatic that is?" I asked. "Do you really want more paperwork?"
"No paperwork," he promised, "just a redo. And I will cook."
I remembered the ring at the start and the sacks at the door. I remembered leaving. I remembered returning. I looked at him—my husband, my sometimes-enigma, the man who once threatened to send my garments to be used as dust rags and who now baked bread with my silly heart-shaped toast.
"Yes," I said. "Marry me again. But this time make the toast a little less charred."
He laughed and kissed me like he meant every charred moment they had endured, every soft reconciliation, every awkward tear. Around us, our home hummed on with the little everyday things—the slightly-chewed toast, the forwarded emails with corrected contracts, the small print of what it means to be a person who chooses to stay.
"Jamie," he said, softening as he always did when something honest came up, "I put the assets in your name because I want you to be safe. But I've already given you more than that."
"What?" I asked.
"My mornings," he said. "My bad jokes. My stubbornness. My attempts at being better."
I crushed him with a laugh. "That's sentimental blackmail."
He kissed my forehead. "Then consider this: you can keep my name when you want. But keep the heart-shaped breakfasts too."
I reached for him and he reached back. The study door was open. The dry cleaners were a city away. The five-carat ring sat on my dresser like a small sun.
"I will keep the breakfasts," I said. "And maybe the ring."
He tapped his chest like a middle-aged drummer. "And I'll keep making them, every day, if you'll let me."
"Deal," I said, and in the light of our kitchen, among the cups and the crumbs and the unreturned calls, we rebuilt the promise into something ordinary and therefore strong.
The End
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