Regret16 min read
I Said "Okay" — Then He Almost Broke Me and Then I Broke Him Back
ButterPicks13 views
"I think we should break up."
Those five words arrived on my phone like a gust of wind through a cracked window. They were typed by Sijia, the man who once wrote essays about constellations on napkins and called them our future.
"Why?" I typed, because his being tidy with endings felt like an insult.
"He said, 'Our personalities don't match.'"
"Don't match." I said it aloud once, then again, and it tasted like a clean and incontrovertible excuse. I had been practicing how to untie a decade of expectations gently. "If he wants out, fine," I told myself. "People who can't be troubled to argue deserve exits."
"Okay." I deleted his contact instead. The action felt final and kind of stupidly mature. I shoved the phone into my jacket, tightened my scarf, and walked into the cold that smelled like snowfall and wild things.
"Don't move!" a voice bellowed, and the group I was with froze like plastic figurines on a tabletop.
"Officer, please," one of my classmates tried. "We're geology students from the university. We have a permit."
"You light a cigarette and the whole slope burns," said the man in red flak clothing. He slapped the extinguished cigarette between thumb and forefinger until it hissed.
He moved like a wind. He had the organized angles of a soldier and a laugh that made the trees quieter. I watched him take a look at us, then at my student ID. "First time I've seen a student ID look better than the owner," he said, leaning the ID back and forth between thumb and forefinger.
"That's from ten years ago," I said, and in one motion he tossed the card back.
"You'll answer to the command," he said. He called for a radio. He moved away quick when another man in red approached the scene—someone who knew the students had permission.
"You're the ones who have the permit," the newcomer said. He had sun on his cheekbones and tiredness in the set of his mouth. "Don't camp too long. Weather is turning."
When he left, the soldier rolled his masked eyes. "You people," he said, and then the last exchange landed like a stone inside my chest—"First time the photo looks better than the person. Photoshop, huh?" He smirked.
"I'm not photoshopped," I said. "That photo was taken when I was under eighteen."
"Figures." He didn't believe me, but he didn't push. He was more interested in the way my collar tucked against my neck.
He got close enough that I could smell a faint resin of pine and a cigarette he hadn't quite extinguished. When he saw the swelling at my ankle, his tone softened. "You fine?" he asked.
"My foot's stuck," I told him. "I used my hammer to chip at the rock."
"You shouldn't be up here alone," he said, and I bristled. He didn't have to call me a child to make the heat in my face feel like guilt.
He crouched. He gave me his glove. He grinned in that sideways embarrassed way men often use when they expect to be admired. "You're not eight," he said. He shoved the glove at me. "Don't call me uncle."
"I didn't know what else to call you," I said. "Your arm patch says 'Forest Police.'"
"Call me Grant," he said, and the name stuck in my mouth like an unexpected sweetness.
He shouldered my rock samples like they weighed nothing. He said, "You don't look like a field geologist."
"That's because I try not to look like one," I said.
"You okay with this?" he asked as he balanced me. The town in my chest skipped a beat when his shoulder warmed my face. He said something silly about not being able to pick me up if I were heavier.
"I can get down by myself," I said, and when I didn't, he carried me anyway.
Later, when I walked back into the camp and someone joked, "Is she a model?" I smiled because the rookie of me loved that a little.
"What's your name?" Grant asked that night, when the campfire spat and people traded stories like currency.
"Mariana," I told him. "Mariana Espinoza."
"Mariana," he repeated, like it fit him. "I'm Grant."
"Grant Bogdanov," I corrected for his last name.
"You've got a short memory," he said.
"I don't forget much," I said. "I only remember what helps me keep moving."
That winter turned the mountain into a white world. A week later, I was back at the lab in the city, head down in samples that smelled like ancient rain and cold iron. In the quiet of late hours, my bench looked like a crime scene. The data wouldn't fit the model. Values deviated. I ran the numbers again and again.
"You're here again?" Lisa said as she slid a box of steaming buns through the glass. "You tried to sleep yet?"
"Not really," I said, tired as stone.
"That's dangerous," she said. "You collapse and stop writing your stupidly good work."
"I'll finish," I promised, because it was always promises and late hours—less a habit than a way of living.
When the line started for projects at the department, my work—my samples—should have counted. I had flagged the signs, I had collected the core, and yet the official project handover slid to Valentino Cao. "Valentino," I said, and the department head passed the brown folder across the desk like handing a baton.
"Valentino has field experience," he said. "He'll lead."
"You can analyze the data," Valentino told me later. "You earned this."
"It wasn't mine to earn," I said. "It was a shared find. Maybe it's just this is the way things roll."
"Don't be angry," he said. "We want you on the team."
I said "I'll think about it." That was my pause; it was meant for choosing. Someone else made it for me.
At home, our apartment was a jitter of voices and cigarette smoke. Angel—my kid brother—slung open my door when I stepped into the kitchen. "Mariana," he called. "There's trouble."
"What now?" I said, because house-situations were constant responsibilities scraped against my head like a rough brush.
"Car trouble. The guy at the net café says I owe him money."
"I'll pay him," I said. I did. I sent the transfer and told the owner with a voice that was too light: "Make sure he learns to sit one week, or hell. Make sure he thinks twice, okay?"
She sent back "Also your dad owes me lottery money." She threw in a "haha" for tone. Because in our world "haha" often meant "you better pay."
My world then was a ledger. Payment was a line. I paid the fee to get the boy to bed.
"You're always the one," Angel said once as we left a lecture. "You pay everything."
"Then stop making me your bank," I told him, and he blinked. He crammed his hands into his pockets and went quiet, like pocketed coins.
"You're going to be okay," a voice said behind me. I turned. It was Grant, who had shown up at the campus because, in his words, "I like mountains; I don't like too many people."
"You're persistent," I said.
"Or I just like to check on people I almost carried down a slope."
And so the days became a messy ledger of favors. Grant sent tools. I sent samples. One night, he stood in the doorway of my lab with a look I'd seen on men who'd been in snow too long—crowded into a silence. He said softly, "You need a ride?"
"No," I said. I had already changed. I had expectations. I had a list.
"You shouldn't live like this," he insisted.
"Like what?" I asked. "You mean like sleep in between two classes and scrub samples until the night eats you?"
"No," he said. "Like being ashamed to ask."
"I'm not ashamed," I said. "I'm practical."
"Practical is a big word when you're eighteen or when you're thirty," he said.
We made a pact like two exhausted soldiers: he would fund some logistical parts of the project if I did the fieldwork he couldn't. "You do the geology," he said. "I'll handle the rest. You don't have to pay me back with more than you can give."
"Are you sure?" I asked.
"Yes," he said, and he said it with a paternal promise I didn't ask for.
So we worked. We climbed together. I taught him how to read the grain of rock. He taught me how to relax my shoulders when a storm came. He disliked my stubbornness like a cat dislikes a bath. We matched each other in ways no permit ever did. The department's project went on with Valentino as team lead, the paperwork smelling like diplomacy and common sense. But the field—up there—was mine.
"Why do you care?" I asked Grant the first time I caught him arranging supplies like a man laying out his armor.
"Because," he said, and then he laughed. "Because of that time I saw you chip at a rock with numb fingers. I wasn't sure you were trying to prove something to the world or trying to die."
"I was trying to work," I said.
"You work like a machine," he said. "Machines should have maintenance."
We set the field schedules. I climbed the faces that no one else on the team would risk. I read layers like someone reading letters—slowly but accurately.
Then something else happened. My family, the noise that had been a background of my life, became an earthquake that demanded a response.
Angel had scraped a car. He called me and cried. "They want compensation," he said. "They say the owner is rich."
"Who is the owner?" I asked.
"A man who looks like he always gets what he wants," he said.
The man—God, I am still trying to tell this story without the word "man" collapsing into "monster"—was Grant.
"How much?" I asked, because the world that kept my brother felt like it needed exact numbers.
"A lot."
I walked into the alley where Grant and his crowd lounged and found him sitting too relaxed given the night. He had a cigarette like someone wearing their memories between fingers.
"You hit my car," he said when I walked up.
"No," Angel said, and then burst into a panic of grammar. "He—"
"Who?" Grant asked.
"Angel," I said.
"Okay," Grant said, and the room tightened as if ready for a performance. He looked at Angel with mild curiosity and then at me like a colleague.
I felt ridiculous holding a handful of folded bills in the dim light. "I'll pay," I said before I thought. "I'll give you a deposit."
"You have one?" he asked.
"I do," I lied—until the breath came out as truth. "I sold the scooter."
"You sold your scooter?" someone said, amazed.
"For my brother," I said, and the man in their group smirked like we were in a play.
Grant grunted. "Give it here."
I handed the money over. He counted it and put it in his pocket. "You should not have," he said.
"I couldn't have him go to court," I said.
He took off the jacket that always smelled like motor oil and left. I walked home with nothing in my pockets.
"That's the first time I've seen you pay for a thing willingly," he said later as he put his hand over the map of the slope. "Why do you keep doing everything for people who won't lift a finger to help you?"
"Because it's what I know," I said. "Some things don't compute differently."
He looked at me then. He said quietly, "Tell me honestly—do you ever get tired of being the grown-up?"
"Every day," I said.
"Then teach me to be better," he said.
Sometimes people have the courage of being tender in public places. Sometimes they fail to notice where the courage comes from. I taught him fieldwork; he showed me how to bristle less.
The oddest thing of all was that being close to Grant turned the edges of my life into a tally I could not discount. There were nights I wanted to be alone and he sat quietly and let me be. And there were nights when someone in his circle would make a greedy joke and he would tilt his chin and walk away. He was not the hero of every story, but he was a better man than the rumor around him.
"Do you trust me?" he asked one night after a long rain, when the road had turned into a river.
"What kind?" I said.
"Completely," he said.
I wanted to say yes and I wanted to protect myself and my brother. "I don't live by full trust," I said. "I live by evidence."
"Fair. Then give me time to earn more."
He earned time. He earned a lot. He arranged a kid's school for a small deaf girl he had taken in—Soledad Dyer. He began to move pieces in a game I had thought was all ledger. He began to soften the edges of every moment he touched.
But then the other kind of man showed his teeth.
Eamon Roy was a man whose name belonged to offices and slick glass towers. He was the father of Grant, an old voice that could decide a project's fate with a nod. He was a man who wore patience like a glove and cruelty like a cufflink. When Grant brought home the news about a child and asked if Eamon might help, Eamon showed only white-faced disappointment and a scorn that did not stick to any one place.
"She is not part of our line," he said in the drawing-room that tasted of lemon oil and money. "You came home with—" he crushed the words in his mouth. "You came home with a child and expect me...?"
Grant, who looked like he had been used to the soldier's cadence to match him, didn't flinch, but his jaw tightened.
"Work," Eamon continued, "and we will see. Keep the child away from the public, keep your affairs in order. Do not embarrass the name."
That word—embarrass—installed itself like a root in my stomach. That night, Grant left without an answer, and I understood the contract I had made by showing up at the mountain with my hammer: my work would be used, and my life would be a collateral.
I worked on the geology anyway. I walked cliffs until the afternoon sun felt like a hand on my shoulders. I found that there were places where the rock had already split and there were places where it would never split.
"That one," I told Grant, "is no good."
"You sure?"
"Yes."
"Okay," he said.
And then the festival of the project's grand reveal arrived in a way it could not have avoided: a public gala at which Eamon Roy—a figure of local prominence—would announce the official backers for the 'Dark Ridge' route. It was a stage for flashy names, a place where money breathed and the press licked the gutters for stories.
I was asked to attend as a 'consultant,' which was the department's way of putting me into the frame without credit. I went because I had spent nights in quarries and because I wanted to see what the proudest men of our city looked like when they smiled in front of cameras.
There were glasses and teeth and lights. People I barely recognized smiled glassy smiles. Valentino stood beside the podium like someone with a script he had practiced for months. Grant lingered near the back, arms folded like a man who had learned to keep his temper as a secret.
"And now," said a man with a perfect suit and a strained grin, "we will thank our developers."
They walked up, one by one. There was applause. There was motion. Then Eamon Roy stepped to the microphone with a smile that had been carved. He spoke of investments, of "legacy," and of how the project would bring "development to our region."
I watched him and felt a hollowness like the slow cooling of molten rock.
There was a moment, when the microphones were open and the press had relaxed, that my phone in my pocket buzzed.
"Live-edit," Valentino mouthed, and his face said the words tolerant.
Grant's hand found mine before it could get away. "You ready?" he asked.
I held the phone up and launched a single video file into the press feed that was routed to a dozen local reporters. It showed documents—bank transfers, a list of illegal permits, and a recording of an email Eamon had written, instructing a junior official to "make the records look good" in exchange for a donation.
"I don't know what you're doing," Grant hissed into my ear.
"Just watch," I said.
The music in the hall faltered. A phone chimed. "What is that?" someone cried, and more people turned their heads.
The video was on every screen. It began with Eamon's signature and moved into the pile of receipts that tied his developers to a chain of illegal land grants. There were photos. There were the most damning lines—"Move it under the private ledger. We cannot have environmental issues on the books."
At first the crowd made the polite noises people make when they don't yet understand the scale. Then a reporter gasped. The hush collapsed.
Eamon's face didn't change. He put the microphone down. His lips pressed into a line. He took two steps back and then three forward, and anger sharpened like a blade in a gentleman's hand.
"Who put this on?" he demanded. "Who dares—"
"That," I said, stepping onto the stage like someone not knowing which foot to trust, "was you."
"You!" he roared. "You?" He pointed at me. The room spun in a way that made my knees wobble and then found its center.
"You," I said again. "You signed these permits. You paid to have records altered. You threatened communities and threatened protected land. You took the river, and you wiped the footprints of animals. You lied in committee meetings."
The flashbulbs stitched light across the room. Hands pulled out phones.
Eamon's face went through stages that belonged to a bad film. He began in brittle denials. "Fake," he said. "Fabrication."
"It isn't," I said.
He went bright red. He moved his hands like a man drowning in his own cord of excuses. "This is slander!" he shouted. "You will be sued!"
"You already are," someone said. The union of environmentalists in the back had quietly filed a complaint days ago; my video had merely lit the fuse.
The reaction of the room was immediate. Conversations turned into storms. People whispered. Someone shouted, "Shame!" Phones were up, and a dozen different angles turned the night into an orchestra. People recorded. People began taking voices of judgment: "How could he?" "All this money?" "Where is the regulator?"
Heath in his sharp suit—no, Eamon—began to lose his polish. He tried to laugh it off. "This is a misunderstanding." He turned to people he considered allies and found faces like slates. "This will ruin me!" He had forgotten how to sound human. The air in the room thickened with the sound of disappointment.
"You're under investigation," a reporter said. "The environmental commission confirmed a query."
His denial shifted toward panic. "You are lying," he kept repeating. He started to look like the man who had never expected his chessboard to fall over. "This is politics," he insisted. "You are being used!"
The crowd shut him down. People called for transparency. Someone peeled off a paper from a folder and thrust it in his face—a transfer that matched his handwriting.
His face stopped having color. He gasped. He looked at me through the frames of a life he'd been careful to shield. He started to sway.
"You'll be fined," said someone from the back. "You'll lose contracts."
"You're finished," someone else said—not kindly. The cameras were making his panic into a public commodity. A woman began filming with a steady hand while the room closed in on him like a book slowly snapping shut.
"Please," he said at one point, and for the first time, his voice softened into pleading. He wandered past the podium and dropped to his knees as though he had been struck.
"Please," he said again. "I can fix this. I will repay. I will—"
No one clapped. No one cheered. Someone behind him took a long breath and said, "Why should we listen? You already destroyed the land."
"They are filming you," a voice in the crowd noted. People recorded the moment: the sudden collapse of a man who had expected to be untouchable. Cameras clicked. Recordings uploaded. The video went viral within the hour.
He crawled like a child before a jury of his peers. "Please," he whispered. He begged to those who had power to do what his money had done before him: bend the world away from consequence.
No one moved. A hundred small human acts of resistance appeared—people turned off their phones, they walked away, they clapped like they did not mean it, and they left him on the floor.
He wanted to be saved. He wanted the tide to lift him. Instead, he found the dry scrim of society's attention, a thousand small lenses set closer than any magnifying glass. People filmed. People cried. People murmured. He stammered and then offered numbers and apologies. No one accepted. He begged at the feet of those he had once assumed were beneath him.
"Please!" he said, the last of his voice gone raw.
Someone in the crowd—one of the environmental lawyers—stepped forward and did something no one expected: she read the evidence aloud in a steady voice. "This is a list of bribes," she said. "This is a list of illegal permits. These are photos of destroyed habitats." She kept reading like someone reading a deed.
Heath—no, Eamon—slid further into shock. Someone clapped from the back and the sound was not admiration but relief. People who had been waiting for a reckoning let out small noises of vindication. The room hummed with reflection.
He crawled on his knees and tried to reach the table where his lawyers sat, but they had already put their heads together and were calculating how to salvage public sentiment. Some walked out. The cameras filmed his failure to be redeemed.
"Don't," he said when the police walked in. "This will destroy my company."
"It may," the officer said politely. "But we will let the law decide."
He tried to stand and couldn't. He grabbed at anyone within reach like a drowning man grabs for a log.
His face broke. "Please," he said, again and again, until the sound had less strength than earlier. Cameras rolled; people recorded his fall and later broadcast it.
When they led him out in the lights, the crowd parted like the sea. He was a different man—small and broken and stripped of the arrogance he'd worn like armor. He tried to beg again as they walked him away: "Please, don't—"
No one answered. They filed the footage away as evidence. They uploaded it. The next morning, Eamon Roy's name was on every feed as the developer who tried to hide the damage he'd caused.
Later, Grant came to me and he looked older by a measure I couldn't name. "You did that," he said.
"I told them to block him," I said. "But I didn't expect the way he'd fall apart."
"He deserved it," he said. He sat like a man who had spent the night wrestling loneliness. "He deserved everything."
I thought about my mother complaining about money and my brother's pocketed promises. I thought about the mountain that held secrets like a mouth keeps teeth. "Do you feel better?" I asked.
He hesitated. Then he touched my hand. "I think I finally believe the things you said about consequence."
"That's not consolation," I said.
He squeezed my fingers. "Sometimes it's enough."
A few weeks later, things rearranged. Eamon's empire limped. Contracts froze. The environmental commission issued fines. Some of the projects were halted. The community that had been crushed and paid in silence stood up and the photos of the destroyed slopes found their way into reports. The man who had knelt and begged could no longer buy back his silence with checks.
People said the humiliation had been total. He'd stood up as a powerful man and walked away as an accused one. The cameras hadn't left his knees.
After that, the story narrowed to smaller things. I finished the lab corrections. I wrote the papers I needed to write. Valentino and I made ugly peace with the grant process. Grant and I learned how to be two people who could hold a fragile truce and then make room for more tenderness.
"You're stubborn," he said one evening, handing me a cup of soup he had insisted on making.
"You've been patient," I said.
"Not always," he admitted. "I'm new at letting things be unresolved."
"That's okay. So am I."
Our friendship rearranged into something else: careful, slow, and quiet. There were days we didn't speak; there were days when we did nothing but breathe the same air. We argued—often about money and often about who would take the bus. We kissed—once, by accident, when the rain had made the world small and our mouths were close because thunder cracked like a spoon on a pot.
"You kissed me," I said later.
"You smiled first," he said.
"That doesn't absolve you," I told him.
"Then consider us both in the wrong."
We moved forward mostly because we had no other place to go. Our lives drew lines—family, work, the mountain—and we met at intersections. I learned how to trust in the narrow things: a promised call, a hand steady during a climb, a man who cleaned his own mess without making a show of it.
One late night, after so many small reckonings, my brother sat on the kitchen stoop and said to me, "You should let someone lift your leathern heavy boxes."
"Those boxes," I said, because sometimes I open old boxes just to see what is left, "are mine."
"Not everything," he said. "You can let others carry the weight."
I had spent a long time being the only person who would make certain sacrifices and it had been both an armor and a chain. There was no magic. There was only the moment you decide to hand some of the chain to someone else.
In the months that followed, grant checks came through. The project's first run cleared the near slopes and left us hoping. Eamon's fall had been a dangerous kind of miracle. We didn't celebrate. We continued to work.
"One day," Grant said, "we're going to climb something no one thinks possible."
"Maybe," I said. "We will need more rope."
He smiled. "And you."
"Only the parts that buy us time," I said.
"Agreed."
We kept the ledger of days. We kept the list of nights. We kept each other.
And sometimes, when I am tired and a little older, I remember the way a man in a red jacket once ripped the cigarette from an irresponsible kid's mouth and handed me a glove. That small act set off a chain of inconvenient consequences and improbably tender things.
I think of the way I deleted a name. I think of the way I answered a call. I think of the river and how we all drew new banks on its edge.
In the end, I learned that trust can be earned and that when the powerful fall, sometimes they do so because we finally stop being afraid.
And that is a kind of justice that tastes like cold coffee in the dawn after a long night of work—a bitter, hard thing with a sweet edge.
The End
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