Sweet Romance13 min read
He waited at the altar — I walked out with a stranger on a motorbike
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I never thought a ring on a red carpet could feel like a question.
"Isabelle, you're late," Emmanuel said when I finally slid into the chapel doorway. His voice was small under the cross and the empty seats and the scattering confetti. He had been waiting all day.
"I know," I said. "Traffic." I kept my voice flat like a polished stone.
He was wearing a suit that had been rumpled by worry. His eyes were red on the edges. "You... missed the whole thing. I—"
"Save it," I said. "You loved someone else, Emmanuel."
He blinked. "Is that what this is about?"
"It isn't about what it is," I said. "It's about what you did." I stepped over the line of scattered petals, watched his hands tremble. "You used me," I told him, though he had already told me more honestly than that years ago. He had told me about liking another girl, he had walked out of the house at eighteen to be with her, he had emptied accounts, asked me to fix things, and I had done exactly that. I had been patient, useful, faithful.
He swallowed. "I—"
"Don't." I turned my back. The ring lay on the red carpet where a ring should have belonged to a different life. The bouquet had fallen against a bench. The guests were gone. The hall smelled of stale flowers and old music. I put my hand on the steering wheel of my car in my head, and I drove away.
1
"Get to my location. There’s an emergency. I sent you my pin," Emmanuel's call had come while I was on my way to a city bid. He said it and hung up, like someone who expects to be obeyed.
I glanced at the map, saw his dot in a lonely neighborhood, and turned my wheel away from the auction hall. Of course I went. He had saved my life when he was eighteen. You never forget a hand that pulls you out from under a slab of stone, even if that hand later pulls other people in.
At the stoplight I saw Emmanuel's car parked dark on the curb. He was waving. His friend Elena—soft-faced, a little shy—was in the passenger seat. "You came quick," Emmanuel called. "Can I borrow your car?"
I handed him the keys. "I'll be at the auction," I said. "Don't make trouble."
He waved me off with a grin, and they drove away like a small comet. The car's taillights vanished into red night. I told myself I had made the right turn. I told myself the auction was my job, my life. I won the lot, a small blue vase whose legend had always pulled at me—the Turn-Heart vase, a silly name, but it mattered to collectors. I felt rich in a way that had nothing to do with money.
Twenty minutes later my phone buzzed. Emmanuel swore at me on the line. "I gave the wrong pinned location," he said. "I'm sorry. I'll pay back the vase, Isabelle. Tell Song—tell Oliver to send the car."
"There are people here," I said. "I can't just—"
"I'm sorry," he said again, but the apology tasted thin. He promised to compensate me in antique pieces, in favors. Then he forgot I was on the phone because Elena whispered into his ear.
That night, when the city's neon had already bent tired and cold, I saw a motorcycle cut across the lane and braked to avoid it. The rider stopped, took off his helmet. He was more dust than face—young, long-limbed, with a quiet grin.
"You okay?" he asked, voice rough behind a day of wind.
"Can you give me a ride?" I asked, ridiculous. "My car's been borrowed."
He snorted. "This your car?" He knew it at a glance, and laughed with a curiosity that smelled like approval.
"Not any more," I said. "Come on."
He tossed me a helmet. "Hop on."
The motorbike tasted like risk. He rode with that slow confidence that belongs to people who don't ask permission from the world. He dropped me at the auction in time for the final gavel. He didn't ask for anything—just a look, a half-smile that lodged in my throat.
2
Emmanuel went to the concert with Elena and the moment was filmed. He was shown on a screen, covering her face with his jacket so she wouldn't be obliged to kiss some random partner on camera. Someone filmed them, the clip went viral, and suddenly the public loved them as a couple and hated me as a schemer.
"Isabelle, check the feed," my father said in the calm of decisions. "Come home. Emmanuel's family is coming; we need to fix this."
"He was with her," I said, and my voice did not fail me. "He was with her, not me."
"You always do the right thing," my uncle said, the older man of the house. "But this time the world—"
I let the words wash over me. I could see Emmanuel later, kneeling on my family's marble floor, taking beatings; he took them without calling out. He told my relatives plainly, stubbornly: "I like Elena. Isabelle and I are siblings by promise, nothing more. I will not break off with Elena."
"Knock it off," my uncle roared. He swung at Emmanuel with a wooden bar, not to kill but to pound some sense into a man who would not bend. Emmanuel knelt and accepted the pain. He had never stopped accepting what hurt him.
I stepped forward and calmed everyone down. "We are friends," I said softly. "Nothing more. Let's end this here, so business goes on." My uncle hesitated, hands on wood, then let it be. No one wanted business ruined by family scandal.
3
But the vase wasn't mine yet. Emmanuel took to living in a cheap apartment after his parents forced him out. His collection was locked behind a password. I offered to invest. He laughed, then sighed and let me give him two hundred thousand to start a trading account. He promised me art and antiques in return. He promised but did not think to be faithful to our history. He meant nothing by lying; he meant everything by chasing Elena.
And Elena was the kind to cry when the internet turned hard on her. When she was attacked online, she ran to Emmanuel and he paid off debts with my money. He coldly asked me to persuade her to accept, to be gentle; he expected me to be both his bank and his diplomat.
"Why do you keep helping him?" Oliver asked me one night over wine. Oliver had been loyal to me, like a brother. "You don't have to be his shadow."
"He saved my life once," I said. "I owe him a lot. I also owe myself to keep my head."
Oliver smiled gently. "You're too kind for your own good."
I thought about that when I drove to the university where Elena studied and spoke to her quiet, through sunglasses, telling her to take the money for her mother's surgery. "You're worth something to him," I told her. "You should accept what you need."
She cried. "I don't want to ruin anyone's life."
"Then don't," I said. "Stop making drama."
That night, on your social feeds and in the gossip columns, someone clipped our words into mockery. My "advice" was transformed into cruelty. The public turned on me. I turned away, counted the coins I had thrown at Emmanuel, and found my throat hard.
4
The city gave me a motorbike stranger in exchange for emails gone bad.
"Why don't you fight back?" Jett asked one night when he was nursing me back after someone ran a smear piece. He had become inconveniently present—an apron of concern and a rude way of calling me out.
"How?" I demanded. "With a tweet? With lawsuits? With my dignity on auction?"
He shrugged. "You know how you fix things. You set a trap."
The trap was simple. Jett is brilliant at small technical mischief. He poked his way into an IP address like a locksmith into a door, found the origin of the smear—a student dorm—and we pulled up the full footage. It showed Elena posting and a second hand, a planted account that had started the fake narrative. We saved the raw video.
"You want to use this?" I asked.
"Yes," Jett said. "But be careful. This will ruin someone."
"I want that someone to be the girl who tried to steal my life," I replied. "But I don't want to be the monster who ruins someone's future for sport."
"You already said you didn't like monsters in your life," he said.
He smiled, and his thumb brushed mine. Small contact. A tiny shock of heat. It lodged.
5
Elena's fall began with a knock at her dorm.
"Isabelle?" she said, when I met her, hollow-eyed. "Why? I didn't think—"
"You made choices," I said. "You took pictures, you accepted gifts, you grabbed for what wasn't yours. But this isn't just you."
"You're cruel," she said. "You don't get to frame me."
"Frame you?" I replied. "You used people and recruits. You took that loan. You flirted with danger. You also lied publicly."
She clutched at the last thread of her dignity. "I loved him. Isn't that allowed?"
"Love is allowed," I said. "Poisoning people with lies isn't."
But I didn't want only to stop her. I wanted to make Emmanuel see clearly what he had chosen. I wanted public truth. So we did it: Oliver posted the raw footage, Jett spread the IP links, we paid a few honest journalists to show the unedited clips. The university reacted.
"What are you doing?" Elena pleaded. "This is my life."
"This is your life you chose," I said. "Now you face it."
The university called an emergency board meeting. The campus emptied into a courtyard like a tide. People held up phones. Everyone loves a spectacle of takedown.
"How could you?" my father asked when the first headlines hit. "Isabelle, do you know what you're doing?"
"Yes," I told him. "I do."
6
The punishment came public, and long enough to let the world taste it.
The university held a sudden assembly two days later. A crowd pressed into the auditorium—students, faculty, cameras from local news. Elena sat on the stage, looking years younger than the twenty-two she was. Her fingers twisted the hem of her sweater. The dean read the charges: academic dishonesty, colluding in fake accounts, incitement of violence, and a charge of participating in a loan-driven fraud ring with outside actors.
"Elena Beltran, you have been found to have conspired to manipulate public opinion and to have engaged in conduct unbecoming of a student," the dean announced. The microphone sounded small in the large hall. "Effective immediately, your enrollment is suspended pending further legal action."
The crowd's first reaction was a breath of slow surprise. Then a hiss. Someone started a chant: "Shame!" Others took out their phones. Camera lights clicked on like a field of tiny stars.
Elena stood slowly. Her face flushed, then went pale. "No, that's not true," she whispered. "I—"
"You lied," a professor said sharply from the front row. "We have records. We have proof." His voice was steady, public. "You misused your platform. You manipulated others."
"I didn't—" Elena said, but her voice broke like a thin glass. She had fewer lines left to say.
For twenty minutes, the auditorium felt like a weather system. Students leaned forward, mouths open in judgment. The dean described the evidence—IP logs, money transfers, text messages from a loan shark accusing her of recruiting debtors. The security footage from the hospital emergency room—where she'd staged a tearful scene—played on the side screen, unadorned and flat. You could see her hand slip into a stranger's pocket. The stranger's scowl. The night terrors of her choices.
She was first shocked—wide-eyed, as if hearing the accusations for the first time. Her shoulders trembled. Then she denied it, loud, a brittle denial that only made the crowd quieter because the lie was obvious. Her voice jumped from denial to anger. "You're lying!" she shouted. "You can't prove—"
Someone in the audience stood up and yelled, "We have the evidence!" People backed the person up. A chorus of small voices rose: "We saw the posts. We saw the money transfers. We saw the video."
Elena's face twisted. She tried to hold on to composure, but then the dam broke. She started to weep, not the quiet tears of regret but loud, gasping sobs that made other students stare uncomfortably. She sank into her chair. Her chest heaved. She half-laughed, half-wailed, "You don't understand—he made me—"
"Who made you?" someone called. "Your choices are yours."
The dean moved to read the university's decision. "The university also recommends a report to the city prosecutors," he said. "We will cooperate fully."
Outside, cameras waited like scavengers. Students gathered in knots, whispering and debating. Some were sympathetic; most delighted. Phones kept flashing. The footage was shared within minutes. By lunchtime, the top trending tag in our city was Elena Beltran exposed.
She pleaded with me later, in front of cameras, near the step that led out to the press. "Isabelle," she begged, mascara running, "they forced me—"
"Who forced you?" I asked quietly, not for the cameras but because there was a man who had bribed and hurt, the loan shark. "Sergio? The fat man with the gold chain?"
She clutched at me then, in front of media and strangers. Her eyes pleaded for compassion. The crowd around our shoes shifted like a loose sea.
Sergio Harris had a different punishment. He was arrested in a police raid orchestrated when the loan documents and cellphone records matched his name and his local bar. The police led him out in cuffs. He tried to bargain, tried to plead, and then fell into the full humiliation of an arrest. Cameras recorded the sweat on his forehead, the way his gold chain caught the light, the way his mouth formed protests that dissolved into nothing when the officers read him his rights. The online reaction was swift: #LockHimUp trended. People took pictures of the police van as it drove away with him inside.
Elena's collapse was long and public. Her face slid through a palette of emotions: pride, shock, denial, bargaining, burst of horror, pleading, and finally the brittle emptiness where she understood her life had become evidence. The crowd's faces mirrored those states. Some whispered, "She always had a plan." Others spat, "She ruined people." A few recorded everything with their phones, their hands steady and indifferent.
She did not plead for prison; she pleaded for forgiveness. "I'm sorry," she said, over and over, and the repetition dried into a small, ugly sound. People who didn't know her cheered judgments. Those who did know her looked away.
When the police led her out, they did not force her to beg. She began to beg anyway. "Please," she said. "Please don't—I'll do anything."
"Anything?" a reporter asked. The microphone pushed forward. It was a carnival spectacle.
"Anything," she repeated. Then she collapsed into a small, broken heap on the pavement. People took photos. Someone tossed a bottle of water that hit the pavement with a hollow plunk.
The punishment was not a single instant; it was a slow public unmaking. Friends who had once praised her turned away. Her dorm window curtains stayed closed. Her name was on a list of expelled students. It was ugly and clinical and full of the messy facts of choices meeting consequences. And through it all, Emmanuel watched from a distance, jaw tight, eyes unreadable.
7
Emmanuel tried to intervene when the police asked questions, but his family had already felt the pressure. They wanted the scandal buried; they wanted the company to be safe. My own father was furious with me for the public exposure—he blamed pragmatism and reputation—but he did not stop me. In his judgment, I had saved the company from being blackened by lies. I had made the men responsible pay in public.
He approached Emmanuel after Elena's arrest. "You knew," he said. "You knew and still crossed me. What else did you hide?"
Emmanuel's face looked very young. "I couldn't see—" he said, but he had no defense.
I told him plainly, days later in his dusty apartment: "You go back to them, you keep being bananas for what you think love is, but don't ask me to stay and hold the door while you go on being blind."
He laughed once, a small, bitter sound. "Will you marry me?" he asked out of a foolishness that was half pleading.
"Marry you?" I repeated. "You want to marry me to make up for your mistakes?"
He nodded. "Yes."
I reached for the Turn-Heart vase in the glass case and set it in my hands. "Take the vase," I said finally. "Take it and put it where you want. If you'll promise to be honest."
"Promise." He meant it in that bright boy way. I saw in his eyes the old self—the one that had gone into ruins to lift me out.
8
We set a date because I was cruel and because I had to put a stake in the ground. I wanted to make him uncomfortable and watch him swallow the taste of regret. I wanted him to feel the same sting of being stood up, of having what he assumed slip through his hands. The wedding was arranged. He smiled like the sun; his parents made lists. I let him lead the plan because I wanted to watch his pride.
He failed to appear on the day. The aisle was heavy with people ready to applaud. The music swelled. The projector showed pictures of "us"—my whole life threaded through his steady presence. At the peak, the crowd turned their heads, waited. The ring gleamed on the red carpet. The bouquet lay on the pew.
He waited under the cross with eyes that had become alone.
I did not come. I was at the airport, heart like a wrapped stone, buying a one-way ticket to somewhere Emmanuel could not reach—B City—because I needed to see Jett, or to see who I was without being an unpaid bank.
On my way out of the chapel I walked past Emmanuel. He did not beg, not then. He said, quietly, "I'm sorry."
I turned away. "Then learn."
The guests were in pieces. People whispered, "What a shame." Someone took a photo of the ring on the carpet. The oil of rumor spread.
9
You might think I relished revenge. I didn't. I felt hollow and clean, like a wound that had been washed out. Jett met me at the airport, wind in his hair, and he held my hand like he had a mortgage on my pulse.
"You're ridiculous," he said, smiling. "You knocked over a wedding and flew across the city for me."
"I'm riddled with self-sabotage," I said. "And you helped."
He laughed, and the laugh was one of the three small things that made my heart twist that winter.
Later, when Elena was sentenced for fraud, when Sergio was taken, when Emmanuel stood among pile-up consequences, people whispered that I had been harsh. They suggested I had been cruel. But I had learned to keep measures. I had also opened the door to something that felt like warmth.
10
After the trial, after the exposures and the pushback, after family dinners full of awkward silences, Jett came forward like a storm. He trained his life around being present. He cooked concessions and made small things of comfort. One evening, while city fireworks erupted in a sky that felt as private as a bell, he leaned over and kissed me without ceremony.
"I didn't know I could like like this," he murmured afterwards.
"Shut up," I said. "Don't make me melt."
We kissed again. The taste of sauce from a street stall was on my lips. The world were small, honest things—someone's hand on my knee, a thumb brushing a thumb. The Turn-Heart vase sat safe in my studio in a silk-lined box. Emmanuel asked me once, weakly, "Could you ever—"
"No," I said. "Don't ask."
He left. He changed. He learned to look.
11
In the end, I kept the painting. The blue painting Emmanuel had refused to part with because he loved it. I gave it to Jett as payment for his injured leg and as a proof that I could be generous to new men in my life even when I had been vicious in the old.
"Do you like it?" I asked one night, watching him set it on his wall.
"It's less about the painting," he said. "It's about who you give it to."
I laughed and kissed him. The painting watched us like a quiet witness with no judgment.
The ring? I found it later, after Emmanuel left the chapel and the petals, on the red carpet, a small cold circle that had been pressed into a place where vows once were meant to be. I put the ring in a drawer. The vase went back in its box. The painting hung lonely but honest.
We built a life from small strands: a bowl of hot soup when I was sick, a hand that reached across a crowded train, a motorbike parked by my door like a promise. It was never loud; it was always steady. My father called me brave. Oliver called me reckless. Emmanuel sent a message once: "I wish I'd seen sooner."
"I know," I wrote back. "But better late than never, I guess."
And when the fireworks sparked again one night, Jett pulled me close in a field of neighbors who ooh-ed and aah-ed. He kissed me under the stars.
"Promise me you'll not let me go," he muttered against my mouth, not because he could force it but because he wanted to hold me like a thing he had earned.
"I won't," I said, because for once I meant it not as a bargain but as a choice.
The Turn-Heart vase sat in its box in my studio, spangled in dust from the fireworks. Sometimes objects remember better than people. Once in a while, I would walk by the box and think about how a ring had fallen on red carpet and how a boy in a suit had waited under a cross and how a motorbike had given me a new direction. And I would smile, because I had traded suffering for clarity, and clarity for a hand that answered me back.
The End
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