Sweet Romance12 min read
I Married My College Crush—By Contract, By Chance, By Scar
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I married Henrik Brennan.
"That's the truth?" my friend asked over steaming noodles. "You? Married? Like, legally?"
"Yes," I said. "Legally." I lifted the chopsticks with hands that trembled more than I wanted. "But it's not what you think."
"It never is," she said, and laughed.
Three months before, I had broken up with someone bland and safe. "We should break up," I had said, and meant it. He was a placeholder my mother liked. He was polite enough to stay. He was a man you could tell your mother about without worry. I wanted a life that required struggle and risk, not that kind of comfortable. So I pushed him away.
"You and your drama," he said, as if I'd invented storms.
"I can't do this," I told him.
"Fine," he said, like letting go of a balloon, "it's only natural."
I should have expected calm endings. I should have expected the world to sigh and go on. What I did not expect was the surreal, fluorescent-lit moment when my coffee ballooned out of my hand and splashed across a suit—high-end, black, expensive—and the man in it looked up at me and said one name that sounded like a bell I recognized.
"Henrik?"
He sat, legs crossed like a statue, the wet on his shirt slowly darkening. He did not look like a man I had once loved. He looked older, colder, and his eyes said, clear as a courtroom, "Do you really not remember how you hurled me out of your life?"
I tried laughter. "Long time no see. When did you get back?"
"You dumped me in front of everyone," he said. "Do you remember that? Or are the details fuzzy?"
"I—" I stared at the suit, at the expensive cut, and at the strange calm in the stranger's voice. "I can take your shirt to the cleaner. Or buy you a new one."
He smiled once, and it was not a smile meant for me. "You can try," he said. "But I think you know better than anyone what you did to me."
It was true. I had walked away from his proposal in the quad—the ring still burning a phantom on my hand in memory—even as the sunset stained the campus orange. "Ava," he had said, dropping to one knee, "marry me."
My answer then—"I'm sorry"—had been cruelly simple. I had told him I was only playing him, and I had meant it in a moment of shame, in the crash after my father's debts spilled into our lives. I had thought I was protecting him from my family's flames. I had thought I was saving him.
He had not forgiven me.
"I'll pay for dry cleaning," I said, my voice too bright. "I don't want to make a scene."
He waved me off. "Keep your money. But listen to me, Ava West. If you ever need to learn how men fold, you should stop with the drama."
His voice had the old bite. He left, and I went home with a washing bag and an old ache.
Three years later, when I slept and dreamed, I had nightmares of a parking garage and masked men. I dreamed he came to my rescue brandishing a phone as a weapon, of him pushing the bad men away and handing me a lollipop like a scarred knight. I dreamed of the proposal I had left splashing into the campus lake. I dreamed he left the country, and I thought I had lived with the weight of that wrong.
Then one day, not long after I had split with the bland man, my phone buzzed.
"Downstairs," he said, in the same low voice that could still command a room.
I went. His car was a black purr in the street. He leaned against it with a cigarette that smelled like distance.
"Why are you here?" I asked.
"Contract," he said.
"Contract?"
He unfolded a paper on the apartment table like a hand-crafted trap. "One year," he said. "You play my wife. I pay you. We both get what we want. You act like you're married to me. You make me look good at the right times. I erase the past."
"That's absurd," I said, though my palms were slick.
"You told me you wanted no ties," he said. "This is a tie you can cut when it suits you."
I stared at his face, the scar across his abdomen, the long pale line that made him look like a map of pain. He had not shown it before. The first night we were "married"—the first night after we signed the paper and stood at the clerk's window and stamped the book—he came home with drink on his breath and eyes that saw right through me.
"Do you remember?" he said, dragging his thumb over the scar like he could read the history there. "When you had someone beat me up in front of everyone, did you think I'd be okay?"
"I was protecting you," I said, and the excuse tasted like metal in my mouth. "From my father's debt. From... everything."
His lips curled. "Protecting me? You made me bleed in a hospital bed."
I saw it then—the echo of the young boy who had saved me in the parking lot. The echo was a man who had been broken, and who had decided to be dangerous with his repair.
That scar would be a truth between us.
We signed the contract for reasons that made practical sense. He needed appearances. I needed a foothold: money, a place that was mine, distance from a mother who watched my life like a ledger. We promised nothing real. We promised legal fiction.
We married.
"Do you want dinner?" he asked the first night, appearing like a ghost with a grocery bag.
"Yes," I said. "I made food."
He looked surprised. It was the same small surprise he used to give me when I did something domestic that had no place in the corner of his life I'd loved. He offered to wash the dishes. He kissed me when I bent down to tie a shoelace and the house smelled suddenly like spring.
He'd be both tender and terrifying. He'd be both.
"You're not my toy," he said once, when I tried to pull away and hide behind an apology.
"I'm not asking to be," I said. "I'm asking to be honest."
He laughed, and it made me want to throw myself into the sound. "You are a mess, Ava."
"I am," I said. "But I'm your mess now. For a year."
We settled into awkward rhythms. I moved into his flat, a big high-ceilinged place that felt too grand for my thrift-store habits. He went to work early, came home late, and sometimes he would be a phantom, only a note on the table left beside an espresso cup. Sometimes he would be a volcano, his temper exploding over trivialities—my forgetting to cross a T on a slip, my laughing too loud at a phone call. My heart learned to brace.
But little things happened between the bristlings.
"You're cold," he'd say, and without a word he would reach for the blanket and tuck it around my shoulders.
"Henrik," I'd protest. "We have a contract."
"But I can't help it," he'd say, when his hand found the small of my back and held me as if I were the only thing steady in the room.
Those small reveals were like coins of warmth in the wallet of our life.
He surprised me at the most mundane moments. One afternoon he found the DVD of a silly old movie I loved and pressed play, flopping beside me on the couch. "You always cried at this," he said.
"I always cried," I said. "It was dumb."
He smirked. "Dumb things are the only honest ones."
He began to haunt me in good ways. He started leaving his sweater on the back of a chair I sat in. He started remembering the exact way I needed the tomatoes sliced. He smiled at me across rooms without a contract in view. He would, in the middle of a phone call, drop the pen and walk over to tuck a strand of hair behind my ear.
"You're different," a colleague said once when we arrived at an event together, watching him take my hand in a way that looked casual but wasn't.
"Different how?" I asked.
"Like he's always been cold—none of that warmth. Now with you, he looks softer."
"That's because you never saw him in love," I said.
And then the storm returned.
Rumors. A woman in red. A purple nail. A phone picture. Henrik's father, Amos Faulkner, insisting on business alliances by marriage. Katrina Schumacher, glossy and aggressive, meant to be the announced match. My heart sank when I saw the photo—Henrik with a woman whose manicure looked chipped at the edges but never cheap. Her text was a weapon disguised as a hand in his pocket: "Tell Ava to hush, or I'll make things noisy."
"She tried to blackmail you?" I demanded, fingers tight on his wrist.
"She wanted money," Henrik said. "She wanted five million to go away."
"Five million?" I laughed with disbelief. "For what—being a woman?"
"Yes," Henrik said, "for existing in a way their family wanted her to. She thought Henrik would fold."
We met Katrina in an absurdly lit corner of a hotel bar. She smiled like sanitizer—slippery, slick.
"You're the wife?" she said when Henrik introduced me. "Cute."
"Don't," Henrik said.
"People like me don't do nice," she said, and the air tightened.
I could have walked away. I could have let Henrik handle it. But something in me had hardened over three years of absence and apology. I had learned about standing up. So when she cornered me at a charity event a week later, I did what I'd done only in my head before: I refused to flinch.
"You want money?" I said. "Five million isn't charity. What do you have on us?"
She smiled venom. "You really don't know? I was on a date with your husband. He gave me his phone. I called you. I wanted to prank. But then—"
"You tried to extort me under his face," I said. "Why?"
"Because I don't save money," she said, shrugging. "Because I like things."
"You think you can buy a place at a table and throw someone off it?" I asked. "You think you can tell me how to live?"
She laughed. "I can tell you how to be realistic."
At that moment, the room's chatter dimmed. Henrik came up behind me and his hand landed on my shoulder like a guarantee.
"Katrina," he said. "You will never set foot in our house again."
"Katrina's not that stupid," she snapped. "Henrik, you owe me something. My future becomes real if you—"
"Enough." Henrik's voice was a blade. He stepped forward and, in a move that startled even me, pulled his phone out and opened a video feed.
"Recording?" she asked.
"Yes," he said. "You're about to insult the wrong woman in the wrong room."
Slowly, Henrik walked to the center of the venue—a blessing of a charity auction where every eye could see, every phone could point. He raised his voice. "Ladies and gentlemen," he said. "This evening was supposed to be about rebuilding. Apparently, extortion is part of someone's business model."
"Henrik, don't—" Katrina hissed.
"I will." Henrik's voice did not shake. "Katrina Schumacher has been asking me for five million to back off a perceived engagement. She brought false accusations about Av a West to me. She offered to sell a story and blackmail a family for money."
I felt the air shift. Glasses had paused halfway to mouths. Phones had risen to capture the scene.
"You're a liar," Katrina said, first cool, then faltering. "You can't—"
"Watch," Henrik said. He tapped his phone and the screen showed a handful of messages, a photograph of Katrina in a café, her own admitted plan to stage a scandal. The venue—rich in listening ears—suddenly felt like an amphitheater for judgement. "Everything here is her own confession."
"No, you—" Katrina's face reddened. She tried to regain composure. "That's edited."
"That's what you said to my assistant when you asked for money," Henrik said, and the words were a rope around her neck. "You tried to threaten my wife with a fake scandal. You asked for payment in order to stay away."
The crowd, at first just confused, now began to buzz. Someone laughed. Someone muttered, "What a mess." Someone pulled out a phone to record. A woman near the table whispered, "Good for you, sir."
Katrina's expression shifted. Her confidence cracked. "Let's talk privately," she said.
"No," Henrik said. "This is public. You made it a public business. Now we respond publicly."
Katrina's face moved through denial, anger, humiliation, and finally collapse. Her lips trembled. "You can't—" she said, and the voice shrank.
"You can't extort people and expect kindness in return," Henrik said, and then, softer, he looked at me. "Ava, say it."
I swallowed. The floor felt too small under my feet, but I found my voice. "Katrina, you tried to blackmail us," I said. "You told my husband you'd spread lies unless we paid you. You had no proof, only greed. We won't be coerced. We will not give in."
A murmur rose and solidified into scorn. People turned away from Katrina. A few shook their heads. Others whispered that such extortion was common among the entitled—someone who could not earn a living honestly. I watched Katrina go through the publicly humiliating cycle: from fury to denial to plaintive pleading. Phones collected every second.
"Look at her now," someone said behind me. "She thought she was untouchable."
Katrina's reaction was vivid: first she smiled, sure she could charm the crowd. Then she tried to insist she had been framed, that the video and messages were fake. People streamed the posts that had already started appearing. Comments flowed. Her boyfriend at her side—scared and shrinking—did not step forward. The crowd's stares were like snow, slow and inevitable.
"You're finished," Henrik said not unkindly. "Because we stopped you."
Katrina's face collapsed into a plea. "Please," she said. "Please don't—please. I'll leave. I'll leave town. I didn't mean to—"
"You meant to," I said. "You meant to capitalize on our lives."
Around us, people began to clap—not the raucous applause of celebration but a sharp, moral clapping. Someone snapped photos. A few stood, whispering support. "She tried to blackmail a man and his wife," another voice said. "Shame on her."
The humiliation took its course, public and thorough. Katrina's bravado evaporated. Her attempts at rationalization fell flat. She asked for one private conversation, then another, but each plea was met with a colder glare. Eventually, she left in a taxi, her exit photographed by three dozen phones.
The punishment was not violence. It was exposure. It was the dissolution of the social currency she traded in. It was being reduced from an instigator who thought herself above reproach to a cautionary tale trending on the charity event's social feed. It was the sound of the room turning on her—murmurs, whispers, looks of disgust.
Weeks later, the effect deepened. Her sponsors received messages. People who had once danced at the edges of her life unfollowed. A columnist wrote a sharp piece on ethics and extortion. A once-easy door was shut.
Katrina's internal collapse was worse than the outside world. She called contacts and allies who refused to take her calls. Her boyfriend abandoned the plan. She tried to sue, but the documentation already outshone any claim. People she needed suddenly couldn't be found.
When the dust settled, she stood on the edge of a smaller life. She had been loud and important, and now the world ignored her like a turned corner.
That was public punishment: not jail or fist, but a social excommunication—the exact mirror of the social power she had used.
People asked later if I had felt satisfied. "Yes," I said. "But also hollow. Seeing someone crash is never nice, even if she tried to hurt us."
Henrik took my hand after the event and squeezed. "You did well," he said. "You spoke up."
"I learned from you," I said.
His face softened like wax near a flame; I watched him become human around me.
We still had other battles—Amos Faulkner's objections, the small wars of family acceptance—but the Katrina debacle was a clean cut, a public ritual of ending. It showed not only that Henrik would defend me but that I could stand up for myself.
There were also sweeter, quieter moments. When I couldn't reach eight places on my own back to put ointment after a stray hot water burn, Henrik found a way to fix it with affectionate patience, the same way he had once stroked my hair in a dorm hallway. When I once fumbled the key and he smiled at me as if I’d performed an act of divine clumsiness, that smile softened something in me.
"You're still immature," he told me one dawn when we sat on the balcony with coffee. "But you try hard."
"I try because you don't run," I answered.
"Maybe I don't run because I finally learned what I was running toward." He turned and showed me the old ring I had thought lost. It was tucked in his drawer, polished. "I kept it."
My heart splintered. "Why?"
"Because," he said, "some things you want to keep even if they hurt. Because I couldn't throw away the chance of us."
That night we were not actors. We were two people who had been both cruel and kind to one another. We were both stubborn and tender. We argued like old married folks, teased like new lovers, and sometimes, in quiet, fell asleep on the couch in each other's arms.
Months passed, whole vanishing stretches of ordinary life—work, dinners, small calls, little betrayals and apologies. I grew stronger in business. He grew softer in private. His parents began to relent when they saw he was unshakable. Marjorie Burns—his mother—started calling with recipes. Amos Faulkner—his father—did not forgive easily, but he attended a dinner where I cooked and did not leave early.
We had more storms. Amos pressed hard at one board meeting, threatening an arranged marriage. I stood beside Henrik and listened as he told a man grown old on other people's agendas that he would live his life the way he wanted. The room watched. Marjorie watched and wept quietly when we left. Henrik's scars—on his body and his heart—got the respect they deserved.
At the end, the ring that had sunk in the lake somehow resurfaced; he produced it again as a joke the day I announced a new promotion at work. He said, "I kept this because I thought I'd throw it at you someday."
"And if I run?"
"You won't," he said. "You run toward trouble, maybe, but not away."
We had three heart-flutter moments that I still replay like favorite songs.
"Once," he said softly in the laundry room, where the hum of machines made privacy, "you left me without a reason. You can't make me forgive you overnight. But you can make me feel less angry if you stand with me."
I laughed and bumped his shoulder. He glanced at me like a man surprised by joy. He hadn't smiled like that in years.
Another time, in the middle of a crowded gallery, he reached across the room and brushed a strand of hair behind my ear. "You keep looking like the person from my best memories," he said.
And the third was the night he showed me his scar and did not ask me to be sorry. He asked, "Were you afraid?" I said yes. He said, "You don't have to be anymore."
We were a strange pair: a contract that had shifted into an arrangement, then into a life. Exposure and punishment had been necessary. But more necessary was the slow, awkward rebuilding—the forgiveness that required work, the trust that had to be stitched and restitched.
"Will you stay?" he asked once, in that brutal way Henrik could be intimate: blunt, honest.
"I will," I said. "Because this time I choose us without fear."
He laughed like a man released. "Then don't break any more hearts," he said.
"I won't," I said. "Unless you ask me to, deliberately."
He rolled his eyes and kissed me hard.
Sometimes I still think of that day in the café—the coffee, the wet suit, the scar—and I realize how many small turns of fate and choice made the map of us. We had started in a mess and kept choosing one another.
The scar—his and ours—keeps a steadiness. When the needle of worry vibrates in me, I touch that long pale line under his shirt. It reminds me that things can be torn and still be whole.
And when I hold the ring he never threw away, I whisper, "We did it wrong for a while, but we did it together."
He answers, "I wouldn't want to have done it any other way."
The End
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