Sweet Romance15 min read
I Gave You My Heart, You Claimed It — But I Had Other Plans
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I woke with my throat burning and my hands cramped on nothing. "Don't do it," the voice in my mouth kept saying, and I tasted copper.
The hospital room smelled like bleach and fear. I blinked and saw the bag of my blood humming into a tube at my bedside. "You're awake," my mother said from beside me. Her voice sounded too bright. "Jaylah, honey—are you okay?"
"I'm fine," I answered, though my body felt tipped and raw. The memory of the nightmare clung to me: a dark room, a perfect face leaning close, and the cruel demand to 'give me your heart.' I wanted to tell her that the man's eyes in that dream were all too real, but I swallowed and let the hospital lights blur.
"We need to accept an offer," my mother said, the pleasantness cracking into bargaining. "The family wants you to stay for a while. It's best for all of us."
"Stay where?" I asked.
"You know where," she said. "The Dubois house. Wells Dubois's family asked for help because their daughter needed a transfusion. You're the same type. They'll be grateful. They offered room and board—and a chance to keep studying while I work." Her fingers tightened around my hand. "It's an arrangement."
I should have said no, fled back to the cramped apartment and the little life I had kept in place by the dint of evenings washing plates and mornings catching buses to campus. But my mother had been bargaining our rent with promises and threats for months. I had counted pennies into a glass jar and given up on things like safety for a roof. "Okay," I told her. "I'll go."
The Dubois estate was big enough to swallow me whole. Stone steps, iron gates, a scent of citrus and something colder. I watched people move there like they belonged to the architecture—natural, easy. When I stepped onto the carpet of that great house, I imagined my future shrinking into the corridor.
"You look pale, Jaylah." He said it at first like an observation: voice clean, eyes hidden behind gold-rimmed glasses. He looked like a painting come to life—cold, flawless. "Are you feeling dizzy?"
"No," I lied. I wanted to be anywhere but there. "I just want to see where I sleep."
He knelt like anyone might to tie a shoelace, and before my brain had a chance to tell my body how to behave, his fingers brushed my ankle. The touch was a small, accusatory thing. "Your ankle is delicate," he murmured. "It suits you."
"I—" Heat opened in my chest like a secret. The shock of being noticed threw me backward, into a wall and his hand on the small of my back until a sharp breath escaped my lips.
"Easy," he said, so quietly it felt like permission and threat in equal measure. "I'm Wells. Wells Dubois."
"Wells." I repeated, the name like a stone. "Jaylah."
"So, Jaylah, you'll study with us when you can. You saved our girl's life."
"You didn't have to do so much," my mother said, grateful, and I bowed into the role that had been sold to me: grateful, compliant, quiet.
"Don't let them put you through trouble," Wells told me later when it was just the two of us in the courtyard. "If anyone makes a mess, you tell me."
"Thank you," I said. The shape of that gratitude landed in me differently than I'd expected. He smiled, and something warm and bright fissured the cold stone of my fear. That flash—his smile like a promise—was the first of those moments I couldn't have predicted would matter later.
The trouble came quick. I found the house's boundaries like the edge of an ocean: Sometimes you washed and mended and smiled and people ignored you. Sometimes you walked the wrong way—into a hallway with loud laughter and bad intention—and everything fell over.
I didn't know those boys were allowed to hurt. I misread the smirk, the idle cruelty, and they learned fast that I was alone. One cornered me in a room filled with playing people. "Hey, where'd the little kitchen mouse come from?" one of them jeered.
"Leave me alone!" I managed. When they closed ranks, the world tilting under my feet, my chest pressed to someone else's hand and I tasted iron. I slashed at a fist too late. A phone crashed from the second floor like a rain of black hurt. Footsteps surged. The laughter clotted into silence and everyone froze because the house had a kind of silence only strangers noticed.
Wells stood at the top of the staircase, looking at the scene. He did not look like a man who cared for nonsense. He looked like a man who collected results. He moved down the steps like someone about to claim a prize.
"Enough," he said, voice even, and somehow the word landed like law. The worst of them backed away at once. One boy spat: "You're nothing—"
"Go," Wells said. "Now."
They left on the order of him. I stayed, trembling. He crouched beside me and held my wrist with such a steady gentleness that my whole body wanted to uncoil. He smelled of linen and something that made my jaw slack. "You okay?"
"I—yes," I breathed. "Thank you."
"Don't say that," he murmured. "I like hearing you say your own name."
It left me bewildered; I had lived my whole life in ways that made sense like currency. Someone saying my name like that felt like an unexpected version of shelter.
The more time I spent with Wells, the more moments like that arrived: small, intimate things that dislocated me from fear and remade me into curiosity. He would place a warm cloth on my wound without taking his eyes from mine. He would correct a mistake in my notes with infinite patience, then let his fingers rest, just so, against the paper and my hand.
"You're doing well," he told me once in the attic where we pretended to study. "You should be proud."
I remembered my mother telling me to be wary of him. "Keep your distance," she'd said. "He is trouble."
But when he pulled his glasses low to peer at my notes, when he reached his hand out and took mine to show the way around a diagram, I felt wanted, and desire spread like light through me. That was another heart-skipping moment. The way he smiled at me only—a soft, private curve—made something tilt in my chest.
He was also dangerous. The house had a rumor inside it like a shard of ice: Wells Dubois loved and he loved in a way that burned. Sometimes he was patient; at other times his patience called to vigilance. People in the house spoke his name with a scalded respect, never certain where mercy ended and property began.
"I'll take you to lessons tomorrow," Wells said once, and my throat went dry with hope and apprehension. "I like teaching. It will be just you and me."
"Only if Sawyer comes too," I said, because stability lies in numbers and Sawyer meant indifference, not intensity.
"Only if Sawyer will behave," he replied.
Sawyer Fernandes—third son, handsome in a careless way—laughed in a corner of the life that Wells controlled. He was loud, selfish, and the kind of person to keep you at a distance by flinging you into public embarrassment. "She's a little mouse," he told his friends once, and their laughter rolled like fat logs. I wanted to shrink into the floor.
When Wells proposed the tutoring arrangement he said formal things, measured, but there was a hidden ferocity in the invitation. "I'll teach you anatomy," he told me in that soft voice, "and you'll learn by touch and sight. Medicine is not just memorized. You must feel."
I wanted to say no, but the tutoring improved my grades. That was the cold fact. His methods were unorthodox: at one point he had me practice palpating muscle groups on his forearm. "Feel," he instructed. "Feel the difference between tension and a relaxed muscle."
He allowed his fingers to be guided by mine; he let me hold his wrist, press my palms to his biceps while he instructed the names of muscles in the hush between us. My cheeks burned, but the knowledge lodged like fire. "You remembered that quickly," he praised. That voice like honey and iron became something I craved and feared in the same breath—a second heart-flutter.
It wasn't tenderness alone. There were nights that turned ugly when something in him soured. His gaze would sharpen, and he would say things that made my skin crawl. "Don't ever look at other men like they are safe," he'd whisper, and the world fell small again. The night he smashed a stranger's hand at the gate—Canyon Dickson, a man who had cornered me before—that man was left on the ground, blood like a shameful flag across his palm. I watched the stone in Wells' face as he pelted him with fist after fist. It was a terrible sight: rage made precise.
Later, after that violence, Wells was calm again. He sat in the courtyard, catching my wrist in his hand as if I was fragile. "You can't run," he told me softly. "I just want the world to stay quiet for you."
I hated him and loved him in the same instant.
And then the worst happened. There are people who think power entitles them to more of the powerless than consent; Gianna Estrada was one of those people. She was the family’s spoiled daughter—soft as porcelain and sharp as a blade. She had always resented me for being within the household, for making her world inconvenient.
One night she cornered me in the great hall where the staff came and went. "You don't belong here," she told me, and then she spit the words as if I were already dirt on her shoe.
"Take it back," I said.
She laughed, a hollow sound. "Or what? You'll hit me? That's adorable."
Before I could move, a hand tightened on my wrist and yanked me forward. Gianna shoved me and I stumbled against the marble. "You will apologize for that in front of everyone," she demanded, voice syrupy. "Or you'll find your life unbearable here."
It was an ugly demand meant to humiliate, and then the house closed in. The servants fell silent; the other young people lined themselves like spectators for an execution. My mother—Megan Bright—stood by, forced into obedience by long practice.
"Wells!" I choked. "Please."
He walked out like a man returning after a hunt. "Gianna," he said, as if he were stating the weather. "What is the meaning of this?"
She clicked her tongue, regal and cruel. "She insulted me," she said, making a show as though my presence scented the air.
"You will apologize to her," Gianna said, addressing the room as if they were jurors. "On your knees."
My limbs were treacherous; the wall seemed like an ally to push against. "I won't—" I started, and then Wells was at my side, the world tilting with his shadow. His hand at my elbow was steady, but when my mother shook and pushed me forward like an obedient puppet, something inside unearthed.
"No," Wells said. The tone wasn't like the soft tutoring man. It was a different instrument entirely. "She will say nothing to humiliate herself. Instead, you will tell the truth."
The room felt like stone. "The truth?" Gianna sneered. "What truth?"
"That you have been pressuring and threatening a servant in our home," Wells said. "Everyone, come closer."
He pulled out his phone and, with calm deliberation, played audio and projected messages that had been collected over the weeks—messages Gianna had flung to staff and whispers from her friends, recorded moments of threats. He had gathered witnesses. The room was electric with the sound. I watched Gianna's face go from smug to pale to incredulous.
"You're lying," she said at first, clutching at the edge of control like a child at a cliff. "Those are fake. You can't—"
"Watch the video," Wells said. "Tell them what you said to Jaylah."
There it was—the footage of her stepping toward me, grabbing my wrist, her mouth forming the words that had tormented me. I felt every eye fix on her. People in well-cut jackets exchanged looks. The house staff murmured. My chest loosened, and tears slipped down my face like a prayer.
Gianna's expression curdled. "This is a trick," she sputtered. Her hands went to her throat, as though she might strangle the truth. "You planted that. You must have—"
"Enough." The word was a blade. Wells stepped forward until he was like a wall. "You threatened a servant of this house. You used your position. You will answer for it."
Her face changed; her peacock plumage began to fall. "No—no—everyone knows who I am—"
A dozen phones lifted as Wells flicked off the projector and the video went to more than one screen. The staff had photos, notes, witnesses. Gianna recoiled as the room closed in, the faces of witnesses no longer silent, now loud.
"Ms. Estrada," Wells said, voice cold. "You have humiliated a girl in this home. You have threatened and used your influence to coerce others. You will apologize openly."
"I won't," she said, but the voice slid into frightened fragments. "I won't—"
"Apologize now, or we will make your actions known to the school, to your sponsors, to anyone who will listen." Wells's words were low and certain and the kind that carry consequences.
She tried to spit and produced only a wet sound. "You can't," she gasped. "You can't ruin me."
"We can," Wells said. "And we will tell the truth."
I had expected some small, private apology, or a hush handed down by the house. Instead, Wells did something I had never imagined: he arranged for the family to call a meal in the courtyard and invited every staff member, every domestic helper, and the younger siblings of the family into the center. He sat Gianna in the chair in the middle with the sunlight blunted by the hedge, and he asked her to speak.
"Say it," he instructed. "Explain why you thought you could treat her like this."
She began with rehearsed lines, then broke into tears and blame. The crowd shifted. "I am sorry," Gianna said at last. The apology sounded like glass.
"No." Wells's hand was on the arm of the chair. "Not enough. Tell them what you think of a servant's life."
Her face flamed and she muttered, "They are lower. They exist to serve us."
The servants around me were quiet for a beat—and then, like a tide, they pelleted her with every indignity they'd swallowed for years: names, frequencies, the nights she'd demanded service and punished those who were slow. They told, in small, honest pieces, what it had cost them. The crowd circled, some with tears, some with anger. A cleaner I scarcely noticed before stepped forward and placed Gianna's favorite bracelet on the table like a judge laying down a gavel. "This is the bracelet you threw at me," she said. "When I couldn't find it, you labeled me clumsy." The voice in that sentence was the voice of a life.
Gianna's color collapsed into something gray. She turned on Wells. "You set me up!" she screamed. "You planted your people!"
"I didn't plant anything," Wells said. "I asked people to speak. You gave them reasons." He paused. "You chose cruelty."
Her head moved in rage and denial and then, finally, small, terrified collapse. She began to plead, "Please—please don't tell my father. Please—"
"Please apologize," said a woman at the back, and the request wasn't for the girl any more; it was a demand for accountability. One by one, people who had been crushed by power rose and named the cost of her arrogance. I watched Gianna's mask crack. The sounds of phones clicking and cameras whirring captured her exact words and the exact tone she had used.
She tried to fight, then tried to deny, then finally, in a long shocking sequence, her school mentor and one of the family sponsors were contacted. The man she'd been using as leverage to get away with cruelty learned the texts she'd sent and the videos of her. He sat in the garden with his face gone pale and cold and asked for an explanation.
"They were true," he said at the end, the final blow made by someone beyond this house, someone truly in power. "If you thought you were untouchable, you were wrong."
Gianna's reaction shifted like a thing unglued: arrogance, shock, protests, bargaining, and then a final brokenness. She did everything—denial, indignation, then pleading. People recorded, watched, whispered, some clapped, some wept, some took pictures. Her sponsor withdrew a promise to finance her studies; the club she fancied said a disciplinary hearing would start; favors dried like paint in the sun. The faces I'd feared looked on her now with a steady indifference that had the character of revenge served neatly.
She tried to regain dignity, stumbling, "You don't know—please—"
"No," Wells said, and I watched the way his jaw flexed. "You do. You knew all along."
The crowd reacted. The woman who'd had her pride shrunk with threats stepped up, and the sound of applause came from a place I had never expected. People clapped for the truth, for the airing, for the idea that shame had a price and power had limits. Gianna sank into herself. Her reactions were recorded, repeated, and shared. People snapped pictures of her as she stood in the center of a garden where once she had ordered others to bow. The public nature of the humiliation was like an exorcism: once aired, the poison had to go.
Gianna's face moved through a terrible arc: arrogance, panic, denial, desperate bargaining, then collapse. Her father had to be called. "You have embarrassed the family," he screamed on the phone, but his anger was redirected at her, not Wells. "You will apologize." He insisted on damage control. It was a public unravelling that made me unsteady because I'd never seen consequences like that happen so openly.
"Wells," I whispered afterward, stunned. "You did that for me."
"You did not deserve it," he said simply. "And you still don't."
That was the second monstrous act of mercy he'd given me in public. The way he moved to protect me felt like someone else taking responsibility for my small dignity—and I could not help but feel the pull toward him. He saw me. He defended me. I could imagine, absurdly and horribly, a life that stayed small and contained under the umbrella of his regard.
But there were consequences. Gianna began a campaign of private retaliation. She sneered at me in hallways, one corner of her mouth a knife. She had more resources than I did, a money reserve and a capacity to spiral me into difficulties. Her public unmasking made things worse in some ways: she found new venoms to press into my mother's agreements, and my mother—fragile, afraid of losing the salary paid by being near the Dubois family—did what she always did: she bent.
"Keep your head down and you'll have food and a roof," my mother told me, not unkindly, but with a hard edge as if someone else held the knife. "We can survive a little longer."
But I couldn't always keep my head down. I wanted to study and leave and breathe somewhere where air didn't taste like waiting. Wells kept teaching me, and it was under his instruction that I learned something terrible and important: I could sharpen knowledge into tools.
There was a long stretch where I learned to hold my own. With Wells' help, I improved—anatomy, diagnosis, sutures. He taught me to recognize blood and how it read someone as a landscape. He taught me to find the boundary between compassion and ownership. The tutoring sessions were a strange mix of clinical distance and personal closeness. We were never alone in any safe way: the house had ears, walls, servants who watched. But sometimes he'd let me sit on his lap while he explained vascular pathways, and the warmth of that contact during flashcards made me dizzy.
"You're getting better," he said after a few weeks, and for the third time in the small span of days my heart did something I had trouble naming. "You will pass your modules."
"I hope so," I said. "I can't keep failing."
"You won't," he said. "Because I won't allow it."
Months passed, but not as an abstract time-skip. Instead, days fleshed into exams and corrections and nights where Gianna tried to destroy my peace with rumors. Once, she spread a false tale that I had stolen from the family's medicine cabinet. Wells had to step in again. The thing about someone like Wells was this: his protective instincts were exercises in domination as much as care. He loved to fix what bothered him by removing the obstacle. That meant he could become the obstacle.
I had moments of small sacrament with him—when he covered me with his jacket in the rain without asking, when he laughed on purpose at an awkward joke, when he tucked a stray bit of hair behind my ear and called it art—and each touched me in ways I'd never expected. But I also had nights where the old dream came back: that dark room, a hand pressing into the center of me and the command to give up my heart. Wells noticed my nightmares and would hold me differently the next day, softer, almost reverent. It made me forgive things that in light should have been naming.
Then something else happened: a plan I had born from waking nightmares and study. I had a new edge to my mind—medicine, anatomy—and I discovered there were ways to take back power without having to beg. Wells taught me the anatomy of restraint and release. The knowledge became a tool: I could, with a little understanding, make people see the truth.
Gianna's arrogance had not dissipated. She kept firing barbs. One evening, after a month of quiet progress and small victories, she tried to humiliate me by cutting me off in front of guests, saying I was only a borrowed servant. I felt the anger curl inside like something alive.
"No more," I decided.
I began to document as Wells had. I found small ways to collect evidence: notes she had left, the proof of her threats, the witnesses who'd been too frightened to speak earlier. I compiled it not for revenge but for safety; for the moment when the house would finally be forced to recognize the pattern—that her cruelty was not random but a habit.
Then the day came when she tried to force me into an even uglier position. She demanded I do something beneath me—insulting tasks in front of guests. I refused. She pushed. I refused again. She laughed and slapped me. It was humiliating, raw. My mother watched with her mouth pressed thin.
In that moment, I did what I'd learned: I stood. I confronted her with the evidence, with witnesses waiting in the wings. When the sponsor called and the truth came out, Gianna's empire of entitlement crumbled in spectacular fashion. She flailed between fury and denial and then collapsed into a thin, humiliating plea.
And it was public. There were cameras, phones, and the household crowding around. The world watched as the girl who had once commanded others was commanded to answer. Her fall was long and bitter and yet clean. It was an ugly, necessary justice, and it changed the power map of that house. When the sponsor withdrew funding, Gianna's position shifted from untouchable to precarious.
I stood there—hands clasped, a witness to my own empowerment—and watched someone who had tried to make me small become small in return.
After that, the house was altered. People treated me with a steadier respect. Wells kept teaching me. He kept being both my protector and my captor in ways that never suited a simple word. He had a way of being gentle and then being absolute. He made space for me—but he also wanted me.
We spent long afternoons in his library where the sun slanted through tall windows and dust motes made us both look holy. He'd hand me a book and point to a passage, then lower his voice and say, "Say it aloud." When I did, he'd half-laugh, half-ask: "Is there anyone else you want to be close to like this?"
"No," I'd answer, because the truth hung inside me like something endangered.
Sometimes I wanted to run. Sometimes I wanted to stay. He noticed those contradictions and didn't reply with promises; he replied with action: soft hands on my wound, fierce defense in the courtyard, and gentle insistence when I pulled away. I wanted to believe he could be only the good things he showed me. But there were days my body remembered the dark room, and I couldn't.
In the end, the house learned boundaries. Gianna had been publicly exposed. Her private campaign of small abuses could no longer act without repercussion. My mother stayed, but she stayed in a new posture, less eager to sell me out.
And Wells—Wells kept being Wells. He loved me enough to unmake power when he could. He taught me anatomy and he taught me ways to be seen. He kissing me once in the quiet of an empty library, soft and changed, was the last of the small fluttering acts that shaped me. I met his lips and said nothing. His mouth on mine wasn't a command; at least that time, it was a question. I answered with the tiny, astonished acceptance of someone who had lived on the margins and was suddenly, dangerously, being offered shelter.
"Say you belong," he whispered between us.
"I belong where I choose," I answered.
His smile was the kind that broke something small in me and made room for something new. It was not perfect. It was not safe in the strictest sense. But it was mine.
And when the house finally quieted and the seasons turned, I learned that giving someone your heart was not always a loss. Sometimes it was a trade: you gave it to someone who could guard it—and sometimes you taught yourself how to take it back.
The End
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