Sweet Romance9 min read
I Married the Man I Liked—but Not the One Who Loved Me
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I turned my phone off and laughed at myself in the dark.
"You're absurd," I told the empty living room.
"I thought he'd at least answer once."
The balcony glass showed the city lights, and I killed the last lamp.
I did not want my home to pretend to be one of those warm families tonight.
I packed in silence.
"I'll be gone by dawn," I whispered to the lock.
When the taxi door shut, I tapped out a message I knew would be read: "Three o'clock at the registry. Bring the ring, your ID, the papers."
He ignored nearly everything, but he always read the important lines.
Then my phone lit up. Ian.
"Hello?" I said before I could think.
"Leah, what's wrong?" His voice was thick with sleep or something else.
"I'm done, Ian. I can't live like this anymore."
"The abyss is too dark," he said, as if choosing words from a tragic script.
"Then stay in your abyss," I said. "I'm tired. I'm letting go—for both of us."
He did not argue. He never argued when I left.
1
I met Ian at university. He was sharp in a suit, the kind everyone noticed without meaning to.
"I remember that night," I told myself. "The curtain pulled, his eyes looked at me."
He smiled at the pianist in a kindness that felt like a spell. I fell for that warmth.
"Do you remember the song?" I asked no one.
"It was everything," I admitted.
Ian loved someone else—Victoria Dunlap. I learned that and felt foolish.
"I'll chase what I want," I told my own reflection, and I did. I sat in his lecture hall, fell into his study group, asked for harmless favors until I was necessary.
He was gentle. He helped me study, he fixed my zipper, he laughed at things only I could make funny.
"We should have dinner sometime," he said once. "You always bring the light."
That night, drunk and tender, he kissed me.
"Stay with me," he said the next day like a promise he had only just considered.
"Just a kiss. Don't expect anything." That phrase became the bridge we walked across.
He proposed with a ring and the kind of ceremony practiced by people who think pain has a timetable.
"Marry me, Leah," he said, on one knee under a light that made him look like a different man.
I took the ring. I cried. It was pity and hope braided together.
After we were married, the tenderness I had stretched into daily rituals. I brought him lunch, waited on the sofa for him at night, learned his favorite coffee temperature. I thought routines could become roots. I thought time could make him mine.
Then Victoria's divorce happened.
"He's going to go back," a small voice inside me said.
I found perfume on his coat. My hands shook when I called. His phone answered a woman once by name. I felt small and ridiculous.
One night when pain spiked, my stomach clenched and I called him. A woman answered.
"He's in the shower," she said. "Tell me."
The message on the kitchen counter later said "Draft divorce agreement." My naïve heart saw the truth and broke.
2
I moved back to my small apartment. I told no one, but I told Ainsley Morin.
"Don't let him do this," she cried into my shoulder.
"Let me kill him," she said louder.
"Don't," I muttered, because revenge would leave me as empty as staying.
Ainsley arrived with her brother Canyon Martin, a lanky athlete with a grin that felt like sunrise.
"He's a handful," Ainsley warned when she left.
Canyon just shrugged. "I want to batter him," he said, all teenage heat. He was twenty and declared love like a dare.
"You're a child," I told him. "You're a beautifully stubborn child."
He watched me quietly. He made me coffee when I couldn't stand. He stole my worst hurts with small jokes and bets.
"Do you want me to go with you?" he asked the morning of the registry.
"No," I said, because I needed to be alone when I closed that door. But a boy waited in the car, and when Ian arrived, Canyon was there like sunlight slicing between clouds.
"You two are still married legally," Ian said.
"We will be in a few minutes," I said. "Then we'll be done."
Ian's phone buzzed. He flinched like I had done something to his breath.
"Tell her I never—" he began, but his eyes darted to the screen.
"Say you never did," Victoria said, voice soft on the other end of his call. He stiffened; for a heartbeat I saw the other life he willingly carried around his collar.
I walked away with my freedom and a new ache that something inside me had been used for practice. He called drunk later and pleaded. I recognized the shape of regret but not its depth.
3
Canyon and I began in the small, honest ways. He made food, he washed dishes clumsily, he put his tall body between me and the world.
"You always wear my jacket," he teased once, and with one private smile I felt an old fear melt into warmth.
Heartbeats:
- He laughed at a joke I made no one else understood and for a minute he was lit from inside.
- On the balcony he removed his jacket and draped it over my shoulders when the city wind cut through my nerves.
- Once, when the crowd at a game cheered his name, he tipped his head and mouthed mine—everyone around us noticed.
We grew like a small bright thing, not sudden but insistent. He was earnest. He was fierce. He told me he would wait, and because his eyes did not waver, I believed.
4
Then came the restaurant.
I had arranged to meet Victoria—she asked to talk. I brought Ainsley. I told myself I would be calm. I would be logical. I would be wise.
We sat in the private room. Victoria smiled that practiced smile, as if she had authored every small drama she triggered. Ian sat across the table as if he belonged to both of us; his apology trembled in his throat.
"I just want closure," Victoria said. "We are together now. You should walk away."
"No," I said. "We could stop this circus now."
"What are you implying?" Victoria's voice sharpened. She had that dangerous talent of twisting truth into weaponry. She accused me of two-timing with Canyon.
"Excuse me?" I asked, because her accusation was a flung knife into the idea of me as a decent person.
"Yes. Sleeping with your friend's brother while you're married," she said, elegant and poisonous. "How dare you."
The room tightened with breath. Ian looked panicked, like a man who realized he had been nominated for punishment but didn't yet grasp the jury.
"You're delusional," Ainsley barked. "She's not that kind of woman."
"It's true," Victoria said. "People talk." She looked smug as if gossip were a power she controlled.
I had, before I came, printed pages. I set them on the table like evidence in a calm trial. My hands did not tremble. The other diners were distant and irrelevant until the first phone camera lifted.
"These are messages," I said, "between you and my husband's assistant. These are drafts. This is the divorce you pretended was his idea."
Victoria's face shifted.
"Where did you get those?" she asked, and the smile that once settled like armor cracked.
"From your inbox." I slid another paper. "And from the draft on the office printer signed by you with instructions."
Phones were out now. Someone whispered, "Is that...?"
"Who sent these to you?" Ian demanded, rounding into the center of his own trouble. He sounded like the one pleading for a verdict he hadn't yet accepted.
"Does it matter?" I asked. "You didn't love me. You used me as escape. She set the stage. She gave you the lines."
Victoria's expression moved: smugness, then the slow sinking of a ship realizing the hull was breached. She opened her mouth.
"I didn't—" she started.
"You did," I said, and my voice cut clean. "You wrote the divorce. You placed papers where he would find them. You got him to believe a story about freeing himself. And when he couldn't resist you, when he returned to the scent on the collar you knew he missed, you called him your prize."
Around us, other diners stopped. A waiter froze mid-step. A manager appeared at the doorway, his face apologetic and curious.
Victoria's lips thinned. "You're lying," she spat.
"You told my husband's assistant, 'This will make her go.' You signed the draft: 'Start with her patience, then break it.' Do you deny that handwriting?" I slid the page forward. A hush fell.
She laughed, high and thin. "This is petty. You are disgracing yourself."
"It is not petty," I said. "It's public manipulation. It's calculated. You stole my life and wore it like a costume to your better life."
Phones leaned closer. A man at the next table muttered, "Wow." A woman filmed, whispering, "She's reading everything."
"You are making this up to ruin me," Victoria shrieked now, the first crack showing. People looked, the air thick with expectation and moral appetite.
"Do you deny sending the messages to Ian that said, 'If you leave her now, I will handle the rest'?" I asked. Victoria's color drained. Her hand flew to her necklace as if to steady herself.
"No." She said nothing—and that moment was worse than any denial.
"You have always loved the taste of control," I continued. "You wanted him back and you engineered it. Not love—strategy."
Her face went through a sequence that I watched like a cruel film: triumph, doubt, panic, deflection, collapse. She snapped, "This is a lie! I—"
"Enough." Ainsley stood, steady as a statue. "You don't get to rewrite who we are."
Victoria's supporters—two friends who had been whispering at the next table—stood up. One muttered, "This is too much." Their exit was a retreat and an accusation in two hurried steps.
Phones were everywhere. Someone said, "Police?" but no one called. Instead, the restaurant filled with a different law: witness.
Victoria's face was now pale and glassy-eyed. Her hands shook. She made the mistake of reaching for her phone to delete messages. A young woman at the back called out, "Don't touch your phone! Someone's recording." The plea was a verdict.
"I didn't mean—" Victoria's voice cracked into admission and then denial and then a sob. "I... I was scared. I wanted him. I didn't know—" Her words fell apart.
"Begging doesn't undo damage," I said. "You engineered a marriage to breathe like safety for one minute and burned the rest."
Her posture slumped. "Please," she whispered to the assembled space. "Please, don't. I can explain. I'm sorry."
The crowd murmured, with two clear currents: some scorned, some pitying, some curious. A man clicked his camera, a teen pushed a phone forward, a woman whispered into another woman's ear about betrayal she'd seen in novels.
Victoria's reaction moved faster now: denial ("No, I didn't!" which dissolved into), anger ("You're insane!"—a stage the crowd met with stony silence), then shock when the printed pages were passed around, then a slow, physical collapse into a chair as people leaned back from the sudden intimacy of watching a downfall.
"I will tell the manager to ask you to leave," she said finally, and the manager did. Her friends were gone. Her composure was a relic.
Ian stood there, small and more visible than I'd ever seen him. He looked like a man called to the carpet who had no answers. He tried to speak.
"Leah—" he began, voice tiny against the steam of whispered cameras.
"Don't," I said. "You had chances to be honest. You lived in the warm spot and let me stand in your shadow. I am done with being shelter for someone who cannot commit."
He paled. Around us, the room tilted in that peculiar way the world does when judgment comes quick: forks paused mid-air, eyes measured us like a jury. Someone clapped quietly, not from amusement but from the satisfaction of witnessing truth.
Victoria's transformation was the most violent. She who had been confident could not recover; she tried to call for help, begged for privacy, then begged strangers to understand. People filmed her, whispered, and then turned away. A waiter refused to take her side; a child asked his mother, "Is that the bad lady?" The mother scolded softly, "Don't say that."
When she finally stumbled out, head bowed, tears streaking mascara down her cheeks, there was a chorus of phone shutters, a cardboard-like rustle of paper as the printed messages circulated, and the soft, precise clink of cutlery returning to plates.
The punishment was public, messy, complete: her social poise dismantled by the very thing she used—manipulation—exposed with evidence. She moved from being a whispered threat to a spectacle of ruin. She was left to the worst part of modern cruelty: being watched and remembered for a single, bad act.
Ian's punishment came as an aftermath. His colleagues texted; his messages were read aloud in group chats; he became, overnight, the man who had chosen convenience over love. At work, I heard how his assistant asked for a reassignment. At the building lobby, a neighbor said, "I always thought he looked tired." The chill afterward felt heavier than any single scene.
5
After she left, Canyon took my hand. He squeezed it like he could keep me from slipping.
"You okay?" he asked.
"No," I said. "But I was tired of pretending."
He kissed my forehead. Around us the world resumed—some laughed, some gossiped, some already had new stories. I left the room with Canyon's arm across my shoulder like a promise.
We walked out into the city's ordinary noise. His presence felt like a light you could open on a dark road.
"I want to be normal with you," he said later, on a mountain trail where we went to clear all the small things away.
"Not a rescue, not a fix—just real."
"Can you wait?" I asked.
"For as long as it takes," he said.
We made a slow life: games, dinners, a thousand small moments. He taught me to cry without being ashamed. He tucked me in when I fretted. He stood on the sidelines at his games and winked when the crowd called his name.
Heartbeats kept coming: his unplanned smile, his hand on my back as he guided me through a crowd, the way he said my name like it was a private joke.
In public, Ian found the empty space he had earned. People whispered. He tried to apologize. I listened once and then closed the door on the chapter. The city moved. So did I.
At the final scene, months later, I climbed the small mountain we chose as our place. I carried in my pocket a scrunched paper: the divorce certificate. Canyon wore his team jersey that had the number 5 on the back, and I wore his jacket.
"Hold it," I told him. "This is mine now."
He wrapped his arms around me. "Always?" he asked, smiling.
"No," I said, because I had outlawed those easy promises. "But today and for enough tomorrows to make the past a smaller thing."
He laughed and kissed me.
The city below kept its bright pulse. We stood on the summit, the basketball jersey pressed between us like a small flag.
We did not need grand vows. We had a proof: a handful of small mercies, and the fact that on that rocky peak I was not pretending to be someone else.
The End
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