Sweet Romance12 min read
I Came Back and Broke His Calm (Airport, Hotel, and a Public Reckoning)
ButterPicks18 views
I never expected an airport loudspeaker to rewrite my life.
"Hudson Hughes, I'm pregnant. If you walk away, I'll make sure your son calls someone else 'dad,'" I blurted into the microphone, and then I stood there, heart pounding like a trapped bird, waiting.
People around me froze. Some laughed, some whispered, a few reached for their phones. I had no plan. I had only one idea: force him to come back.
"Juana?" Apollo Duffy's voice cracked next to me. "If you don't get on the plane—you can't just—Juana, where are you going?"
I ignored him, pressed my hands to my cheeks, and waited. The airport thought I was flirting with trouble. The radio booth staff thought I was a prankster. I thought I might vomit.
Then I saw him.
Hudson Hughes stood twenty yards away. He looked like a statue carved to annoy me: tall, rigid, and impossibly calm. His hair was black as night, his suit tailored enough to be cruel. Up close, his eyes were not cold; they were deep, like a well you could fall into.
"Apollo," I said softly to the celebrity who had just unmasked himself as a prankster, "don't make this worse."
Apollo grinned and pulled out a pen. "Want my autograph since you dragged me into your circus?"
"No," I hissed. "You are not to call the paparazzi. You are not to film. If you so much as snap one photo, I'll tell them you are my—"
"Stop," Apollo said, suddenly very serious. "Don't say that."
That made no sense. He laughed, half embarrassed, half pleased, but I did not laugh. I saw Hudson take three quick steps, then five. He wasn't angry. He was moving like a man who had finally decided a thing and would not stall.
I ran.
People screamed, cameras clicked, and I twisted and turned through the crowd. "You're pathetic," I told myself. "You're ridiculous. He will never—"
"He likes you," Apollo breathed behind me.
I nearly tripped on my own feet. I collided with a person who was all bundled up—hat, scarf, coat, the full disguise. The scarf came off, and out came the most famous face on my phone's wallpaper: Apollo Duffy.
He laughed, covered my mouth with one hand, brandished his pen with the other. "Stop shouting. Sign here," he said, his tone a challenge and a dare.
"Don't you dare," I said, then pointed to the direction where Hudson had vanished. "Is he gone? Good. Run."
I yanked at Apollo's scarf. He yelped and knocked a display over. That was how the scene began: the fall, the shout, the crowd closing in.
"Is that Apollo?" the crowd asked. "Is that Miss Chandler with him?"
"Are you two a couple?"
"We want the story! Sign the poster! Sign—"
Hudson appeared then, like a cool wind. He parted the crowd with a single, low, "Move."
Silence was the only honest sound left.
Hudson did not look triumphant. He looked like a man who would not let me be anyone's rumor.
He picked me up by the back of my collar and pulled me into his arms. I squirmed. I wanted to be dramatic and stubborn and foolish. Instead I went still because his chest felt like a small harbor and I had been a storm.
"Get out," he said, to the crowd. His voice was low, and everyone obeyed.
Apollo pouted. "You didn't take me with you?"
Hudson glanced right through his brother and back to me. "What are you doing here?"
"I'm not... doing anything," I lied badly. "I—"
"You're lying."
He said it like a verdict. The trip to the presidential suite of the five-star hotel was a blur: cameras, flashbulbs, hushed voices. Apollo kept playing his part—distracted celebrity. Hudson stayed straight-backed and dangerous.
Thirty minutes later, Hudson's assistant, Ellis Young, shoved Apollo out of the suite with a face that suggested he'd rather wring Apollo's neck than let him breathe near the place. I stood beside Apollo on the plush carpet, feeling like a child caught in a story that still had too many pages.
Apollo sighed, "I was wrong. I shouldn't have—"
"Do you know what she said?" Hudson asked me without moving his eyes.
"Yes," I said. "And you can leave if you want, but—"
"She said she's pregnant with my child," Hudson finished for me.
The room changed. My mouth dried. Apollo fainted—either by choice or because he'd practiced dramatic collapses too many times—and Ellis dragged him away, muttering about liability.
Hudson's jaw tightened. "Did you lie?"
"No," I said. "I did not."
He reached for the back of my collar again, but I had braced myself. "You came here to make me stay."
"I... I came back," I said. "I came back because I couldn't let you leave me like I did before."
He had been gone from my life for almost a lifetime. The memory of the last time—of being left with my father and that weird, loud, expensive absence—was a scar. I had died in my last life thinking his absence was final. I had come back for a second chance, and my voice trembled on the truth.
Hudson's face softened for a bare second. Then he asked like a judge, "Do you love me?"
I could have said yes, but my last life taught me the cost of "yes" cheapened. I swallowed, met his eyes, and said, "I like you. Maybe more. I can't promise yet, but…" My mouth flapped in panic. "I don't only want your warmth. I want to stand at your side."
He held me like I was fragile, like I might break. It took him all his breath to say, "You will have—an opportunity. I will give you a chance."
"A chance?" I echoed like a child.
"Yes. Don't turn this into a rumor anymore," he said. "Prove you can stay by me. Not as a rumor. Not as a stunt. Prove you can be steady."
"I will," I promised. I meant it so hard my voice shook. "I will sign whatever, do whatever. I will not fail."
Hudson looked at my wrist and sighed. Then he said, barely audible, "If you hurt me—publicly—if you make a game of my trust, I won't forgive you."
"Neither will I," I said. "I don't want games."
When he left for a night flight two days later, I thought he might not come back. He had always left before—gone on long trips that took months, perhaps forever. I had made peace with being left in the last life, but now I had a chance to change all the things.
I worked. I learned every line and chore the agency—Eloise Phillips—threw at me. The world decided to be cruel and kind in turns: the first photo spread went viral. I woke to messages from Apollo, from fans, and from a thousand strangers who liked the face I wore like armor. I also woke to headlines: "Apollo Duffy Caught with Campus Girl?" The line between truth and fiction blurred into popcorn gossip.
"Juana," Apollo said once during a late-night shoot, "you should be careful."
"With what? Being pretty?" I scoffed.
"With being labeled," he warned. "People love neat stories. They love names. They love scandals."
"I don't want to be neat," I said. "I want to be real."
He smiled. "Then be stubborn. Be yourself. But, um—" He glanced sideways. "Also lie a little when necessary."
If I had listened to Apollo for everything, maybe I would have avoided trouble. I didn't. Trouble walked in elegant shoes.
At a lavish banquet—one arranged to celebrate a business merger—my past and present collided. The father's family drama burst into the room like a storm. My father, Antonio Sokolov, stood up and praised Vivienne Cooley's daughter, Leanna Larsen, as if Leanna had been born in a palace. Leanna smiled like a porcelain doll. Vivienne whispered things that smelled of strategy.
I kept my face straight. I had learned to make calm my armor. I had learned to let words hit and slide off my skin. I knew how to bite back.
"You look tired, Juana." Leanna said in a tone that dripped garnish and sugar. "Aren't you supposed to be modest?"
"I'm fine," I said lightly. "Are you sure your dress isn't stealing the light?"
Her friends laughed. I laughed with them. Inside, my head filled with old scenes—how my father had let my mother die in shadows, how Vivienne had stepped into their lives wearing a smile. Reborn on top of that, I had a map of their faults and the patience to use it.
Rohan Madsen—the heir everyone liked for his money and a little for the charm—walked in, eyes like polished coins. He bowed to Leanna as if she had invented the sun, and people gasped. Rumors started like moths. There were whispers we were being pushed into a match to secure business lines.
I did not fade. I took a walk outside, where the night was honest and cold. Rohan found me.
"Juana," he said softly, "I know there was talk between our families. I just wanted to say—I'll do what's fair."
Fair. I had used that word before in other lives. It never meant the same thing.
"You mean you will be the perfect groom for Leanna?" I asked.
His smile diminished. "I like you," he confessed suddenly, perhaps because he was used to owning the unexpected. "I thought I should tell you, in case."
"I am flattered." I turned back to the hall lights like they might be a key to something. "But I have other things to do."
Before he could recover, a man with a camera stepped forward. The big screen flickered and, without my knowing, began to play a video—one meant to destroy.
It showed Rohan and Leanna in a light that suggested private familiarity. Their whispers were edited into something worse. The room froze. Drinks stopped mid-air. Leanna's face drained of color. Rohan tried to pull her close in a pose that looked like love but read as guilt.
"Wait," Leanna began. "This is—"
"It's footage from this morning," someone called. "It looks bad."
People laughed cruelly. Comments flew like knives. I felt a hand at my wrist: Broderick Cuevas, my friend, who had always had an odd way of smiling at trouble.
"Who played that?" I asked him.
"I didn't," he said. "But I know who did."
The truth exposed on the big screen was not the worst of it. Antonio—my father—then stepped onto the stage and, with a voice that never once warmed to me, revealed that Leanna was his daughter; he said in a speech that many would later call the most confusing justification of hypocrisy that the room had seen. He declared the lineage, called for congratulations, and announced to everyone that political marriages—business marriages—were the order of the day.
After the spectacle, I was pushed aside, ridiculed, hit proud and then shoved down. My father struck me across the face in the corridor outside, and my cheek smoked with the sting of it. Broderick grabbed my arm. "Don't," he said. "Let them drown in their own lies. Come with me."
I wanted to scream. I wanted to break glasses and shout betrayals. Instead I did the thing I had trained for.
"Come on," I said to Broderick, "help me get my phone."
We found proof. We found the raw files. We found the trickle of messages, the paid hand, the detective who'd filmed a private conversation and sold it to the highest bidder. The banquet had been set to ruin me so Leanna could be elevated. Broderick's face was a map of rage and focus. I thought then he might be dangerous in the best way.
We took the files to the one person I trusted to cut through this mess: Hudson.
He came back the way heroes come in films—unexpected, insulated, with a private army of intent. He sat before the crowd that morning and, with one quiet sentence, changed the wind.
"You filmed these two," he said, and pointed at the person who had supplied the footage. "Who paid you?"
The man stuttered. He tried to say it was a gift, a public service. Hudson smiled the kind of smile that said he had already known the answer.
"You were paid by Vivienne Cooley," Hudson said. "By Antonio Sokolov. You were paid to make my Juana look bad. You were paid to make people laugh at a woman they do not know."
Vivienne's smile cracked. Antonio roared. Leanna wept. Rohan's jaw tensed.
"That's a lie!" Vivienne cried. "We didn't—"
"Shut up," Hudson said simply. He turned to the crowd. "Listen. We have the full footage. We have the messages. We have the contracts."
He did not raise his voice. He did not need to.
Hudson then pushed play.
The full raw footage played. It was not edited. It showed Leanna and Rohan's conversation, but this time the context was clear: it was negotiation, not intimacy; it was performance, not passion. Leanna had been coached to act desperate. Rohan had been told lines. The feed showed a hotel manager—Ezra Bruce—placing a tiny device in the room to capture private moments. It showed a courier accepting cash to delete the camera's metadata. It showed the moment Antonio had promised Vivienne special favors for a "favor" in return.
People's mouths fell open. The same crowd that had cheered now began a chorus of shame.
Vivienne's face loss of color was not quick; it was public. She went from smirk to meltdown like someone flipping through channels. "This is—this is—"
"—evidence," Hudson finished. "You bribed people. You arranged this."
Leanna sobbed, and Rohan's expression turned to stone.
Vivienne's change of mood went from furious to frantic, then to denial, then to desperation, then to collapse. She reached for her pearls, then for explanations, then for people to defend her. The band of elite friends around her finally scattered, leaving her with a single thought: abandonment.
Antonio tried to keep control. "You can't—" he began.
"You tried to hit your daughter," Hudson said, and the room inhaled. My father's face turned red in the way that always meant he had been found out.
"I fought to preserve my family," he lied.
Hudson looked down at him. "You destroyed your family to preserve an alliance. You slapped a daughter who kept the house. How's that preservation working out?"
At that, the room went cold. Heads turned. Phones were out. Someone took a picture of my father's trembling hand. It went viral in the space between breaths.
Vivienne, seeing that the tide had turned, tried to run. She found the doors blocked by security—Hudson's people had already closed them. People cheered as if they were spectators at a show. Paparazzi circled like vultures.
At the worst moment, Vivienne begged. The progression was movie-perfect: she pleaded first with shock, then with denial, then with anger. At one stage she screamed at me, "You will never be part of this family!"
"She doesn't want to be," I answered steadily. "She wanted truth."
The crowd watched. Some took video. Others recorded the scene as if it were a lesson. The important thing was we had proof, and proof is a shape that refuses to be smooched into rumor.
Hudson stood close to me. He did not hold my hand for show; he held my wrists because I had bruises there. The crowd watched him hold me like a shield. He did not speak for an hour. He let the evidence speak, and speaking created a punishment that was perfect—a public unmasking.
Vivienne's collapse was complete and messy: her charity foundations were called into question, a few board members resigned, and the city's social pages wrote elegies for a woman who had fallen from power. Antonio's company stock dipped for a day. Rohan's public image took a hit and then rebounded because he had not truly been a villain—he had been naive, which is different. Leanna's reputation crumbled, but soon people felt pity for her. The punishment was not brutal—the law did not come knocking that night—but the humiliation was sharp and exactly on public record. They had used the press as a weapon; the same press turned, chewed, and spat them out.
My father's final attempt at control was to strike again. He raised his hand toward me, furious. I stared at him, and then Apollo—who had come back flustered and brave—stepped forward.
"Leave her," Apollo said. "You will not do this."
For the first time in my life, my father listened to me. Maybe he was worn down. Maybe he saw that the room's chorus had changed. His shoulders drooped like a man with pockets empty of leverage. He turned and left.
The crowd's whispers rolled into a chant: "Shame. Shame. Shame."
It was cathartic, like a cleansing. My cheek stung where he'd hit me, but I felt oddly cleansed. I had been taken down, but then lifted up—by proof, by people who thought justice mattered more than appearances.
Hudson and I did not go public with more than necessary. I signed the agency papers with Eloise Phillips, who became a constant friend and a fierce manager. Apollo resumed his messy, charming life and became my ridiculous ally. Broderick stayed by my side in steady ways that made my heart safer.
A week later, Hudson stood in the office of the company he ran and said the thing that made my knees go weak.
"I will protect you," he said.
"Are you making an offer?" I asked.
"A promise," he replied. "But it costs nothing to make it. Keep your part."
"What's my part?"
"Don't play games," he said. "Be honest. Stand beside me like you said."
"I will," I said. "I will stand."
He smiled, which was a rare thing.
We learned to earn trust slowly, like planting a garden. I cooked him badly and then better. He taught me how fragile the top of the world could be and how to keep my feet. Apollo made a million jokes about house names and wedding plans; Ellis trained me on how Hudson liked his meetings arranged. Eloise got me my first small behind-the-scenes acting role and coached me on posture.
We were careful. We were clumsy. We were tender.
On a rainy evening some months in, I found Hudson in the kitchen, sleeves rolled, cooking eggs like a man who had been practicing kindness.
"You're good at this," I said.
He didn't look up. "I do not boast about such things in meetings."
"Then you should boast here," I said, and handed him the tea towel. "You made the mess of my life make sense. You rebuilt one of the books of my days."
He did not say, "I love you" then. He did not have to. Instead he put the plate on the table, sat across from me, and said in a voice like a lock turned, "Stay."
"I will," I said, and held out my hand. He did not take it for show. He took it because he wanted to.
We learned that staying is not a single act. It is an accumulation—of dinners, of support, of public defenses, of quiet mornings. It is the way Hudson, who never did small gestures, started leaving his suit jacket on my chair like a quiet claim.
Months later, when agency shoots turned into offers, and when the city finally decided to forgive some and forget others, the one constant was the photograph he kept in his phone: a picture of me in a white shirt, hair undone, eyes unreadable.
I was no longer the girl who used a microphone to force a man to notice me. I was the woman who had used a second chance to make a different life. Hudson never said the words, but he showed me how to be steady. The city watched. The cameras watched. But the quiet thing that mattered—our small kitchen, the sofa that remembered us, the very private jar of noodles we shared—those things knew the truth.
We had been awkward, brave, and silly. We had been hurt and healed. We had made a public spectacle out of private wounds, and we had used evidence as armor.
When my father left for a long country home and left Vivienne's world to crumble, he checked his accounts, and so did she. Private losses are messy, but the public proof was enough to make people repurpose gossip into lessons. They had wanted to ruin me. I had wanted him. We both wanted the better story.
That night Hudson asked me, quietly, "Do you trust me?"
I looked at the scar on my cheek and smiled. "I do," I answered.
Hudson didn't say it back. He didn't always say what he felt in the language I wanted. He didn't have to. He kissed my forehead, a guard's chaste salute, and turned out the lights.
I slept then—close, safe, and certain that the work of staying was the best work I'd ever signed up for.
The End
— Thank you for reading —