Sweet Romance12 min read
I Told Him: Next Month, We Wed
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I never lose. That was the quiet oath I kept for seven years. I never said it out loud, but I lived by it—by the small things I forced on myself and the bigger things I refused.
The night Jacques Wilson announced he was marrying someone else, he did it under bright lights and champagne fizz. He stood before our friends, before the cake, and said, flat as winter, "I'm sorry. I'm getting married. Not to you."
I was holding a plastic cake knife. The flame of the candles winked, then died.
I didn't stab him. I didn't need to. The knife was plastic and, in that moment, useless as the promises he had given me for five years.
I remember the hush, the way faces went into shadow. I remember his friends stepping between us and the way his eyes looked like a locked door.
Afterward I let him give me an amount of money that was supposed to make the break "clean." "Keep the apartment," he said. "I wired fifty thousand. Be reasonable. Be adult."
"Be reasonable," he told me. I laughed without a sound in my chest.
I texted, then I blocked. I did everything people told me I could never do. I shoved the phone under the pillow and rang the bell on the new life I was too scared to enter.
Weeks later Jacques posted a photo. Two smiling faces; one framed like the victory piece of some trophy. Two months, he wrote, and then marriage.
"Is she—" My finger hovered over a comment. A mutual friend replied, "Isn't that Lillian?" My lungs closed.
Lillian Evans. The name swallowed me. That was the secret initial knot in me: he had never stopped thinking of her. He called her his first love back then. He had the nerve to make me clean up my whole life because he wanted an old echo.
I decided in the parking lot of the café, with a cigarette burning in my fingers and the city moving like a river around me, that I would not fall apart. I typed three words to a man I had met a few nights earlier on a balcony.
"Next month. We marry."
I tossed the phone back into my bag and let the cigarette glow. I wasn't sure if I wanted revenge, or to show him I could be gone on my own terms. Maybe both.
"Martina," Gabriella called when she burst in through my door, "you are not allowed to do anything stupid."
"I already did." I smiled and wiped the ash into an empty cup. "I signed the RSVP for my own wedding."
"You what?" Gabriella's hands clapped together. "To who?"
"Jett Chung," I said.
"You met him... at a club balcony?" Her face rearranged into something like admiration and suspicion. "The surgeon? The family guy who looks like he stepped out of an ad?"
"He looks like an ad." I said, "He also came to my rescue when a man in a hospital suit tried to stab him—then me—so I guess I owe him something."
"That's a strange meet-cute." Gabriella grinned. "But did you even talk about marriage?"
"Yes," I said. "He said 'Mrs. Chung' with a grin and I heard myself agree on a dare."
The truth was quieter: Jett did not ask me to change to be liked. He liked the messy, the honest, the blue-coffee habit I'd kept since university. He liked that I drank Blue Mountain in the mornings and cursed softly at public displays of bad manners. He became my steady, and I, who had become very practiced at bending, learned to stand. Standing took time. It took him bringing me tea the night I almost fainted from the truth of Jacques's betrayal, it took him holding my hand at hospital corridors, it took him showing me that a man could be content with "enough" instead of seeking to own everything.
A week after I said "next month," Jacques found me at a friend's gathering. The room folded around my new bob, my new jacket, my new quiet.
He drifted like a storm. He saw me. He saw Jett standing nearby in the shadow and he did not like it.
"You found someone already?" he asked when we were alone for a second, voice low.
"Yes," I said. "You saw him."
"You can't—" His jaw flexed. "You can't just hitch yourself to my family."
I laughed. "I'm not hitching to anything. I'm choosing someone who chooses me."
"You think you win?" he spat. "You think you can buy your way into being happy?"
"You gave me money," I said. "You thought that was the same thing."
"And if you marry him, you'll be his for life." His voice goes thin when he suspects he is being outmaneuvered. "You think you can take everything from me?"
"You lost me months ago," I told him. "Leave me out of your punishments."
That was the first taste of how I would change the rules. I wasn't going to beg or rage in quiet alleys. I would move forward in public, with light and witnesses. I would take my dignity back on stage and in meetings and in the whispers that followed.
"You're playing a dangerous game," Jacques said later in private. "No one will stand with you forever."
"Maybe," I said. "But the person I want standing beside me already is."
The more I tried to forget, the more the world kept circling incidents of the past like buzzing flies. I ran into Lillian twice—at a supermarket, at a friend's birthday—her smile soft as syrup and careful like a trained bird. She clung to Jacques the way someone clutches a warm blanket in winter, and I bristled, but I didn't apologize for it.
"Martina," Lillian said once, all honeyed inquiries and small hands folded. "Why did you leave?"
"Because I could," I said. "And because I finally realized I didn't have to be small."
"You could have told me," Lillian said, and there was a hurt in the corners of her voice that I didn't trust to be honest. She left with a sympathetic smile and walked like all the doors in her life had been opened.
The weeks went on. Jett and I prepared. He was calm about guest lists but fierce about my comfort. "Tell me everything you want," he'd say. "If you want a red dress, get a red dress. If you want to spend the night at the seaside after, we'll do that."
"You're not the type who fought for things," I said once.
"I'm the type who chooses what to hold," he answered. "Holding is different."
On the morning of our wedding reception — because of course life had to make its little complications — Jacques decided to appear. He did not come alone. He came with a stiff jaw and a face like someone who had practiced misery into art. He had learned how to fit the expression that said he had been wronged while demanding pardon.
The banquet room smelled like lilies. Our guests laughed in measured clumps. Jett wore a suit that fit like armor and did not shine. I walked in on his arm. The murmurs thrummed through my chest, but I kept my chin up. This was not the place for the ghosts of seven years.
Jacques stood near the bar. He had been invited in the sense that air is invited to exist. He showed up like weather.
He waited until the toasts started. At the third glass, he stood and the room folded.
"May I have a word?" he asked, and his voice moved like glass across the crowd. Everyone turned. There was a small silence as if someone had cut the string that had been holding them in place.
Jett's hand tightened on my arm the way it always did when a storm approached. I felt the hum of other people's curiosity like a tide. Jacques moved to the center of the room as if he had always been designed to take up light.
"You shouldn't interrupt," Jett said quietly, but his voice reached the nearest table and made the men there shift.
"I have something to say," Jacques announced. He leveled his eyes at me. "Martina, you never—"
"Jacques." I said, loud enough that anyone could hear, and my words laid out like a map. "Sit down."
He hesitated, and the room breathed. "No. You should listen. You should know—"
"I know," I said. "You used me for comfort. You kept me close when you needed me and kicked me when you didn't. You lied about Lillian. You told me I should be 'reasonable.'"
A hundred faces turned. Someone's fork clinked like a bell. Jacques blinked as if the words had sounded like stone hitting water.
"You don't have the right to stand here and make noise," I continued. "You don't have the right to make a scene that would have wrecked me alongside you. You had years to speak clearly. You chose not to."
He moved suddenly, stepping closer. "You think— you think you can just laugh this off? You think you can—"
"I can do more than laugh," I said. I reached into my bag and pulled out my phone. There was a brittle moment when the room realized what I was doing, then leaned forward.
"What's that?" someone breathed.
"This is a copy of the messages you sent me the night you first told me you'd marry her," I said. My voice didn't shake. "And these are the texts you sent to Lillian in January. These are photos of conversations with other girls from when you were supposed to be with me."
I scrolled. The screen held the evidence like a small sun. Jett stood behind me and put his hand on the small of my back. "Do it," he whispered.
Jacques's face changed. He went from a man expecting applause to a man suddenly naked to everyone's view. The smugness drained like water.
"You can't—" he said. "Those aren't real."
"Then explain the dinners you had that you told me were business," I said. I read a line aloud. "You told me 'I'm with you' and then sent Lillian a picture of a ring. 'Can't wait to do this right'—you wrote. Who were you with when you sent that?"
A murmur. Men's eyebrows climbed. Ladies at my table held their china like shields.
Jacques's nostrils flared. "You're lying. You're making this up for attention."
"Which part is attention?" I asked. "That you ghosted me? That you sent fifty thousand and thought that would buy me as if I am a debt? Or is the attention that you're now trying to make me look small while you still measure my worth?"
He laughed then, a brittle sound. "You think you can humiliate me in front of everyone and they'll pity you?"
"They pity me?" I walked forward. "Stand up, Jacques. Tell them why you lied for seven years."
He stepped back as if to think of an answer. People leaned in. Light from the chandelier caught his eyes and made them look glassy. He was suddenly young and ridiculous, a man who had practiced pride so hard he had forgotten how to be honest.
"Why should I?" he said.
"Because you have called me 'too much' as an insult," I said, voice even. "Because you told me I was 'reasonable' like it was a favor, and you gave me money like a bandage. Because tonight you came to make me small in a room full of witnesses."
The table near us erupted. Someone shouted, "Tell them the truth!" Another hissed, "You coward." A phone camera lifted. The air around him thickened into a net of judgment.
Jacques felt it. I saw his face change through a string of emotions so filthy and honest I couldn't help but watch. First came the flash of anger—scarlet and bright. Then a scrambling denial, a hedging to reframe his actions. "I— I wanted to protect you," he stammered. "I thought—"
"No," Lillian said then, stepping forward in a motion that surprised me. Her voice was low and steady. "He didn't protect you. He kept you so close he thought you'd stay usable when he needed comfort. I didn't know. I just..."
Her eyes flicked to him, and I saw her shock, the realization of what she had helped to keep. The crowd began to shift like a school of fish sensing a net.
"Everyone," I said, "isn't it odd? For years I thought love means giving everything until you have nothing left. Now I know love means not asking one person to be everything for you. It means choosing someone who chooses to stay even when it's not convenient."
Wherever the band had been, the music stopped. People who had come to celebrate whispered into phones. Cameras caught Jacques's breath as if it were an animal running away.
And then the punishment happened—not the legal kind, not a courtroom scene, but simpler and worse for him: social collapse.
It began with a round of cold questions. "Why did you leave her without a straight answer?" "Did you tell your parents any of this?" Servers paused in their tracks. His friends, the ones who had been there when he announced dates and shrugged off my crying, turned away or looked down. There was a woman at the corner table who'd once joked about his pickiness; she now shook her head slowly and muttered, "Shame."
He tried to protest. "You don't understand—"
"I understand perfectly," I said. "You told me 'be reasonable.' You meant 'be silent.'"
Faces shifted into judgement: a chorus rather than a single voice. People who had once cheered for him at tournaments and listened to his jokes were narrating the small turns of his betrayal out loud, not in malice but because truth finds air.
Jacques felt it tighten like straps. His bravado cracked. "Stop this," he said suddenly, voice now thinner. "Stop—" He looked like a man on a cliff, reached for an explanation and found only acrid wind.
Someone had already called the person he worked with. A girl who had once been tagged in an old photo with him stood up and said, "I thought he was sincere." Another friend spoke up: "He'd show us his relationship stories but never the whole story." A hush became a roar. Phones recorded. The room, which had wanted a scene, found that the scene had become a moral theater where everybody could judge.
Jacques' face buckled. He tried to flee the room. A few people shook their heads. I watched his hand curl into a fist, tremble, and then—then he did the thing I had expected from my darkest nights: he begged.
"Martina, please," he said, dropping to his knees on the carpet by the cake table. The gesture was cinematic and raw. "Please. I was wrong. I'm sorry. I can fix it. I can—"
Someone gasped. Jett's fingers tightened, but he didn't move to stop it because part of the punishment was watching the man who had hurt me get the response he had demanded: witnesses. Eyes burned holes in him. Camera phones glinted like sharpened teeth.
He went through the stages everyone had warned me about in summer gossip: shame turned to denial again, denial to pleading, pleading to collapse. "I didn't mean to hurt you," he said, voice breaking. "It's not what it looked like."
"It looked like you used me," I said. "It looks like you still are."
Around us, the reactions were quick and merciless. A table of women hissed and whispered. A man came over to stand by me; he had been Jacques's friend and now he said, "You've been such a fool." He realized he had backed the wrong side. The cameras panned. The video went online within forty minutes. Men who had once admired Jacques for his looks looked small and ashamed as they deleted their earlier posts supporting him. Lillian's face, once flushed with a shy victory, paled, and then she walked away, not ready to be dragged into more of this.
"You wanted everyone to know you hurt me, Jacques," I told him. "Now everyone knows what you are."
By the time the security team leaned in, he had stopped speaking and was holding his head in both hands as if to physically keep his thoughts from spilling out. Some guests applauded—not for him, but for the truth being spoken. Others turned away. A child at the next table asked loudly, "Why is that man crying?" An elderly aunt whispered, "Men like that grow old without learning how to be kind."
When he finally left, a few guests threw glances that would long live in his memory. It wasn't a prison, but it was worse: social death. People who had once smiled for his future phone posts would now feel the sudden habit of flinching when his name came up. He tried to call later. I didn't answer. He texted apologies. I read them and let them sit like ashes.
Jett held my hand that night in the quiet of our hotel. He didn't say we had won. He said, "You did the right thing."
"No," I said. "I did what I had to do."
He kissed my knuckles. "Then at least do it with me beside you."
The thing about punishment is that it is never tidy. It colors the punished man with new edges, and sometimes he changes, and sometimes he sinks. I had not wanted to revel in his collapse. I had wanted closure. Watching him fall felt like standing in a room where an old engine had finally seized—necessary to stop the leak, but not pretty.
Days passed. Jacques retreated from social events. Lillian boarded a plane and left the country. Rumors scattered like feathers. People who had once pitied me now asked how I was. "You look good," they said. "You glow."
After the banquet, the rest of our lives seemed to happen in softer focus. Jett and I had our simple moments: picking out a coffee mug with a tiny chip in its rim—my Blue Mountain cup—buying a cat named Cherry, cooking badly together until we laughed, arguing over how many plants the apartment could really hold.
"Do you ever regret it?" Jett asked once as we stood in the kitchen and watered an overzealous fern.
"Regret what?" I asked.
"Marrying in a hurry to spite a man who didn't deserve you."
I looked at him. He had that small crease of worry in his brow that appears when he cares too much.
"I married because I wanted to," I said. "Not to spite. But if someone hears it that way, let them. I married a man who made me feel ordinary and cherished, and that is no small thing."
Months passed and the rumor mill slowed. Jacques's friends gradually filtered back into normal rhythms, but when anyone tried to speak of him to me, they'd say, "He learned. He seems quieter." I wasn't sure if quieter was the same as better.
When my mother, Monica Neal, hugged me at the second wedding we finally held with family and friends, she cried in way that was full and obvious. "You deserved happiness," she whispered.
"Thanks, Mom." I pressed my forehead to hers.
Later, I saw Jacques at the wedding. He approached, and for a moment something like pity crossed his face.
"Congratulations," he said, finally.
"Thanks," I replied. "I wish you well."
He watched me go, then raised his glass. For a moment I half expected him to bow the way he had once begged, but he didn't. He lifted his glass and drank, and something in his shoulders hinted at the quiet education of losing.
We danced badly, and perfectly, because we laughed. Jett whispered something about booking tickets for a long trip. I told him to pick the place with the best coffee, and we argued playfully over Blue Mountain versus something bitter from the north.
"Will you ever miss him?" he asked in the low hours as we lay awake, the room lit by airport-vague streetlight.
"I used to," I said. "I used to be all hunger and not enough. Now I am full in different ways. I won't miss the man who couldn't be brave, but I will remember what it taught me."
"And what is that?" Jett murmured.
"That I refuse to be anyone's second choice," I said. "And that sometimes the quickest way back to yourself is not through forgiveness alone, but through choosing someone who sees you for all your colors."
We kissed. I smelled of hospital detergent and jasmine tea and something like the promise of ordinary days.
At the end, when the crowd had thinned and the band played the last song, I walked to the small table by the window. On it sat a chipped blue coffee cup—my Blue Mountain cup—the first one I'd kept after the breakup because it had coffee stains that looked, to me, like little constellations. I picked it up and rubbed the rim with a thumb.
"This," I told Jett, "is what I kept."
He smiled and kissed my temple. "And what will you keep next?"
I put the cup down and turned to him. "You," I said.
Outside, the city breathed, indifferent and vast. Inside, I held a hand that chose to hold me back.
And when I whisper the truth one last time, it's simple, and it is mine: I told him, "Next month. We wed." The world heard the promise, the reckoning came and went, and now mornings begin with a chipped blue coffee cup at my side, and that sound is enough.
The End
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