Sweet Romance14 min read
I Went to a Blind Date in Pajamas — and Married a Stranger
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1
"I told them I'd rather wear pajamas than a dress," I said, tugging at the wrinkled cotton of my sleep shirt as if the fabric could prove my honesty.
"You're serious?" Jamie laughed, leaning closer. "You actually showed up like that?"
"I showed up like this." I pressed the heel of my hand to my forehead. "And he—he was in a suit. An actual suit. Sebastian Delgado."
"He sounds expensive," Jamie said, eyes wide. "Like movie-expensive."
"When he smiled, I thought someone edited sunlight into his face," I confessed, and Jamie snorted.
"I asked him the usual questions because what else do you ask," I went on. "I asked, 'Where do you work?' He answered. I asked, 'What car do you drive today?' He said, 'A Maybach.'"
"A Maybach?" Jamie echoed.
"He said he had a big apartment in the city and a villa outside town," I said, half laughing at my own words. "So I told him, 'Sir, please go — I don't deserve you.'"
"And?" Jamie demanded.
"He smiled and said, 'Not satisfied with my face?'" I mimicked his low voice.
Jamie clapped. "Classic."
"Then I said, 'Aren't you afraid my genes will pull down your excellence?'"
Jamie laughed until she cried. "You did not."
"I did. He didn't care," I said. "He said, 'I wouldn't mind.'"
2
"Ask me anything else," Sebastian had said, amused. His eyes had been clear and steady, and for whatever ridiculous reason my heart had slipped and cracked open.
"Ask me anything else?" I repeated now to Jamie. "We ended up at the registry office. I signed. He signed. We took a picture in front of a shabby bench and a bureaucrat with a bored expression. I left with a red booklet in my hand and a man carrying my bag."
"You two just—" Jamie shook her head. "Did you even exchange phone numbers properly?"
"I knew almost nothing," I said. "His name, his job title, the brand of his watch. That was it."
"That's the kind of emotional cliff dive I approve of," Jamie declared. "So he's yours now? Husband Kyla — that's a powerful title."
"I'm Kyla," I said, smiling despite myself. "And he—Sebastian—he walked back to my little rental like he had been doing it his whole life."
The first thing that happened at home was that my red booklet clattered to the floor when I jerked my shoulder away from a knock at the door.
"Baby, what are you doing?" Jamie had asked, more curious than judgmental.
I was still breathing heavily when I answered, "I—it's real. His name is Sebastian Delgado. He's my husband."
Jamie examined the booklet, then her face contorted into mock offense. "What kind of scam? Where did you get a fake actor who looks like a movie star?"
"He is not a fake actor," a voice said from the hallway.
I looked up. There he was, door half open, a faint smile on his face. "Is Kyla Bullock here?"
"That's me," I said. My face flushed until my ears felt warm.
Jamie, without missing a beat, turned and offered a hand that was meant to be flirtatious and a little invasive. "Handsome, add me on WeChat."
Sebastian's brows lifted and his amusement skated to me. "Fake papers?"
"No." I blurted, then quieter, "He's my husband. We just got married."
Jamie's mouth hung open into a perfect O. "You did what?"
3
My parents' living room felt different the day I brought Sebastian home. Maybe it was because I had married—an adult, my mother kept saying—or because both my parents were suddenly on the lookout for jeers and slights.
"Who are you? How did you get in my house?" my father demanded in the booming voice he reserved for neighborhood disputes and stubborn doors.
Sebastian removed his shoes quietly. "Hello, Mr. Willis. I'm Kyla's husband, Sebastian Delgado."
For a second my father, Eldon Willis — retired martial arts coach, the kind of man who could still make a football player flinch with a look — looked like someone who had been given a lemon and suspected deception.
"Don't give me titles," my father barked. "What kind of husband? How old are you? Are you trying to marry my daughter because she's easy?"
Sebastian smiled. "I married because I want to. I think Kyla is the only one I could want."
My mother, Linda Ortiz, who had been busy arranging snacks like a general marshalling troops, cut in on a pleased hum. "You tell him, son. Sit down. Eat. You must be hungry after carrying Kyla's bags."
"My father will not be tranquilized by snacks," I whispered to Sebastian, mortified.
"Then I will be patient," he said softly, as though the day was a long ocean and he had come prepared to wait.
At dinner, a television broadcast cut into a national news segment: the camera panned to a stage and a suited man handing a giant check to a charity.
"That man is a donor?" my mother asked distractedly.
The TV anchor announced, "Tonight's gala received an unprecedented donation of sixty million. The donor, the founder and CEO of EG Group: Sebastian Delgado."
My father's face went from red to a color I had never seen on him. He blinked like someone who had been slapped by air. "So he's rich, right?"
"I thought you said you didn't want a man with money," I whispered to him.
"It doesn't matter," my father muttered. "If he thinks my Kyla is a prize to be bought—"
Sebastian reached for my hand under the table. "Mr. Willis," he said, "I hope you'll let me be a good son-in-law."
My father scowled, but my mother clapped once and declared, "Child, you have yourself a good one."
4
On the ride home, Sebastian loosened his tie and looked tired in a way that was almost honest. "Do you want me to drop you off?" he asked.
I hesitated. My head was crowded with questions: Who was he really? What did he want from me? How much of our marriage was performance and how much was person?
"I'm serious," Sebastian said, when I didn't move. He opened the passenger door for me like someone who had been practicing small courtesies.
"You always do this," I said, sitting in the driver's seat of his car like an intruder. "You make me stupid quiet."
He laughed quietly. "You make me want to do small things for you. Let me."
At my building he took my bags and walked ahead, carrying them like he had already practiced that role.
"Are you even going to the right address?" I asked, half joking.
"I know," he said, looking at me in a way that made the air around us pause. "I guessed because you mentioned a subway line. I'm not just guessing everything."
He helped me up the three flights to my rental. There were pink rabbit slippers on my narrow hallway floor, and a lace nightgown folded soft and thin on my bed. "I got these from your mother," he said when I looked confused. "She told me things."
We fell into a rhythm of small intimacies. "Watch out, the floor is polished," he warned. "Don't drop anything."
At night I lay under a ceiling that had been painted with a sky full of tiny stars. "Did your father paint this?" I asked.
"No," he said, with a gentleness I hadn't expected, "someone helped." His voice softened. "I hope you sleep well."
5
"You're going to be famous at the kindergarten tomorrow," Isabela exclaimed the next day when I arrived at work. "Who is he? Did you marry a movie star?"
"I married a man who likes lavender and bread that is not burnt," I replied.
"You have to bring proof," Keira added, waving her phone. "Send a photo."
"He gave me breakfast." I hesitated, cheeks hot. "He brought a simple meal, but he remembered the way I take my eggs. He said your mother told him."
"He's obsessed," Keira said, delighted. "Good obsessed."
And obsessed, he was. He found out my allergies. He knew what I could not eat. He remembered a story about a little orange kitten I had once rescued. He showed up in the staffroom with a box of osmanthus cakes and the whole place swiveled like a weather vane.
"Who is he? An admirer?" one coworker asked.
"A husband," I said.
"She's married?" someone squealed and the school had another story to tell.
"Don't be ridiculous," I protested. "We married to solve family pressure. That's it."
"That evening when he left," I told Jamie on the phone later, "he bent, patted my head like a father would."
"You love being patted," Jamie teased.
"I'm terrified and giddy," I admitted. "I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop."
Sebastian's gestures accumulated like breadcrumbs. He would leave a little note on my coat. "Remember to take a scarf." He'd appear with a cup of tea on a rainy day. He'd make some excuse to stand close long enough for warmth to spread.
"Do you think he really knows you?" Jamie asked once.
"I don't know. Sometimes I feel he knows more than I told him. Other times he seems to have learned things from where? My mother? The way I like my eggs? It feels like being observed and loved."
6
"Do you want me to walk you tonight?" he asked one blue-skied afternoon.
"That's fine," I said. "I should be independent."
"You look like you're trying very hard to be independent," he said with an expression that was nothing but tenderness. "Let me carry your umbrella."
I told him, late that night between two breaths, "You know everything about me, but I hardly know anything about you."
"Then ask me," he said.
"Why did you marry me? With the way you live, you could have anyone."
Sebastian's eyes softened as if he had been waiting for permission to say what was inside. "Because the first time I saw you, you weren't performing. You weren't selling anything. You were messy and real. I was tired of constructed life. I wanted someone who would be real."
"Is that a reasonable excuse for marriage?" I made a face.
"It felt right," he said simply.
We started to travel together because he could, because he wanted me to see the world without worrying. "Where would you like to go?" he asked one evening.
"Anywhere with lavender," I answered without thinking. "France, Provence."
He looked at me with the unbearable affection of a man who keeps a list. "We will go."
7
"Keep your passport," he said later as he held my hand. "And don't be careless with your notes."
"Notes?" I looked at him. "I wrote some notes for a report."
"Bring them when you come down," he said. "I will pick them up."
I took them and went to the parking curb without thinking about the approaching cars. I waved at a commuter with a file, hardly paying attention, and then everything went white.
At the hospital later I sat in an aluminum chair while a clinician talked about fractures and surgeries and a waiting line of beeping machines. My chest hammered like a bird that won't stop.
"How is she?" Sebastian asked, voice thinner than it had ever been.
"The doctor says she may not wake up," someone told him.
I remember hearing that, like a sound from far away, a phrase that belonged to other people, other tragedies. I watched Sebastian fold in half. The man who could sign checks that could buy islands looked like a child scraping his knees.
8
Sebastian did not sleep for days. He drank bourbon in large, clumsy gulps. "It is my fault," he told the nurse once. "I made her cross the street."
"Accidents happen," she said.
"They shouldn't have to be their life," he said. He stopped shaving around the third day and looked as if his face had been carved out of regret.
One rain-bent morning, a woman in a white coat came to the ICU and spoke to him quietly. "We might be able to help," she said. "There's an experimental protocol — we can link you to her brain activity. We cannot promise. There are risks. You may not wake. You may lose parts of yourself. But there is a chance to reach her and keep her engaged."
He looked at her as if she had offered him a rope. "What do I sign?" he asked.
"Remember everything," she said. "There are no guarantees."
"I have to try," he said.
9
"Sebastian, it's Olivier Werner. We will attempt a deep sleep induction and neuro-sync protocol," the doctor said before the operation.
"I will be careful," he said, throat tight.
"Do you understand the consequences?" asked Emmie, a gentle doctor with hands that didn't tremble. "You may be in a sleep state for an extended time. There are ethical limits; we will monitor closely."
"I understand," he whispered.
I became a presence with eyes closed and a mind that could not move. He described later what he saw: a street where he had first met me wearing pajamas, my sleep shirt wrinkled in the sunlight. "You looked at me and asked where I worked," he said when he told me the story later with a face drained and miraculous. "It was a small, gentle thing."
He was in that place and he could touch my hair, smooth the tiny crimp that appeared when I worried. He said he could smell the tea and the osmanthus cakes, that everything in the dream was like a set he had chosen because it comforted me.
10
"Why did you choose these settings?" I asked him later when I could string words.
"Because you liked the simple things," he said. "I wanted to be what you would accept without thinking: someone who knows where to sit at a café, who carries your umbrella, who remembers your eggs. If I made something grand, you might have run."
In that dream he learned me with a patience that was undeserved. He left tiny proof of attention: a photo of me with sheep in Holland, a note about my favorite pastry, a rabbit slipper left at the door.
"You planned it all," I told him, incredulous.
"I planned it so that if you woke up, the world would be small and gentle and convincing," he said. "I wanted you to open your eyes and find traces of yourself, not a foreign future."
11
The hospital lights were cold the day I opened them for the first time. There was an ache like a bruise in every limb, and I could not remember the sound of the sky. A doctor in a white coat smiled gently. "Kyla?" she asked.
"I'm here," I said with a voice like rustling paper.
"You were injured in a traffic accident," the doctor said. "We need to monitor your recovery."
I blinked, trying to remember. Pieces came back like postcards: pajamas, a man in a suit, a registry office, rabbit slippers, a sky with painted stars. My chest throttled with grief. "Sebastian?" I mouthed.
He was in the corner, waiting like someone who had been saving himself for me. "Kyla," he said. He had the lines of someone who had not slept, but his hand was a home on my fevered skin. "You woke up."
I tried to smile and failed. "Was this a dream? Are you here?"
He laughed — a raw, wet sound. "I'm here. I am here and I'm a fool. I tried something that nearly broke me to keep you."
"Why?" I whispered.
"Because you were awake in my head long before you opened your eyes," he said.
12
The months after my waking were stitches of appointments, physical therapy, and small victories. I relearned how to walk without my body complaining and relearned how memory could be a gentle thing.
Sebastian sat in the hospital coffeeshop reading, then took to bringing me unfamiliar foods with a grin like a secret. He sent me little jars of tea and cards that said, simply, "Remember to breathe." He came to every therapy appointment with the patient countenance of someone attending to a fragile instrument.
"You remember the star ceiling?" he asked one afternoon as we sat on a bench in the hospital garden.
"I remember the way it felt," I answered. "Like someone had turned off the world and just left the universe for me."
He touched my fingers. "I painted it in the dream," he said. "Not because I can paint, but because someone should put the sky in a place we can rest."
"You put the sky there?" I said. "You did all that for me in a dream?"
"I didn't think," he said. "I felt. I would do it again."
13
"Do you remember the accident?" I asked him one evening when the sunset painted our tiny dining room gold.
He nodded. "You had run to give me a file. I think you didn't see the car. I could blame construction and rain and the city's hunger for chaos. But that's nonsense. I should have been with you. I wasn't."
"You couldn't have known," I said, but his face was a map of blame.
"I could have held you," he insisted. "I could have been there."
He told me the whole process: how he became a man who wanted to trade legrooms for hospitals, his decision to sign away the right to his own waking for a chance to reach me, the cold of the machine and the certainty that he would do anything.
"You asked me, in the dream, if you had my consent to come close," I said then, because in that dream he had been the kind of cautious lover who asked for permission to be soft.
"I asked because I didn't want to take more than I had to," he said. "But when it was you, it changed the rules."
14
The press was present at odd hours. When I finally walked out of the hospital with my walker, people took photos and left whispered comments. "CEO marries teacher," one headline whispered. "A billionaire's tender trap," another said.
"Do people ever get tired of headlines?" I asked him.
"Only the mean ones," he replied. "The good ones are like prayers."
One summer afternoon, at home, we sat with a plate of osmanthus cake and a cat — the orange kitten from years ago, now plump and comfortable on my lap. "You were always putting little things in place," I said.
He smoothed the cat's belly. "You said you liked the kitten because it was brave despite being small. I wanted you to have that bravery back."
I rested my head on his shoulder. "Do you love me because I rescued that kitten once? Or because of the pajamas?"
He kissed my temple. "I love you because you existed before I wanted to shape you. Because you were a human being without instruction, like a book someone misfiled. I fell into your margins and found the story."
15
After three years of recovery, the doctors told me my body could bear a pregnancy. "We can try," Sebastian said with tears in his eyes.
"Are you sure?" I asked. "I don't want another hospital."
"Yes," he said. "This time I'll hold you every second."
A year later a daughter arrived, hair like a little comet and eyes that flashed in my cheek. We named her "Corinne" in our private language, but every day we called her "Heart" when she smiled.
"She likes the stars," I told Sebastian once, when we watched her sleep under a ceiling of stickers. "She turns her head to the little glow-in-the-dark planet when she's upset."
Sebastian laughed. "Of course she does. We did start a family in a sky."
He watched Corinne as if seeing the future laid between her fingers. "We will tell her about pajamas and registry offices and a man who thought he could find love by trading his waking," he mused.
"Tell her everything the way it happened," I said. "Even the parts where people were selfish."
He squeezed my hand. "We'll tell the parts with the rabbit slippers loudest."
16
Years later, I still find small proofs of the life he painted in the dream. Little notes taped under my pillow: "Don't forget to eat," tiny packets of my favorite tea, and a photo of me, mid-laugh, with sheep on a Dutch hillside. Once, when I opened the closet, a pink lace nightgown laughed at me like an old secret.
One evening, when the sunset stitched gold across the living room, our daughter toddled in with a battered red booklet she had taken from a shelf.
"What's this?" she asked, holding it up like a flag.
"That's the registry book," I said, stroking her hair. "That's where I put the day you accidentally married a billionaire in pajamas."
She looked at Sebastian, eyes wide. "Daddy wore what?"
Sebastian bowed theatrically. "I wore the suit of a man who couldn't stop loving your mother."
"Tell it again," she insisted.
So he told it again, the whole ridiculous, miraculous story — the pajamas, the registry office, the rabbit slippers, the sky. We told her about being brave for each other, and about how sometimes a man might give up his waking to make sure the person he loves could find their way back to the world.
When he got to the part about the machine, he added, "And I learned that you don't have to be a hero to love. You just have to be present."
"Present," Corinne repeated, as if it were a new toy.
We laughed. Later, when she fell asleep, Sebastian and I sat on the balcony and watched a sky that he did not need to paint anymore because it was in our home and our daughter.
"Did you ever regret the risk?" I asked him.
He took my hand. "Every night," he said. "And every morning I wake up and look at you and understand that none of those regrets mattered. They were the price of the story."
I pressed my forehead to his. In the distance, the harbor lights blinked like a private audience.
17
Sometimes, at midnight, when the house is still and the orange cat snores like a small diesel engine, I will take out the red booklet and open to the page with our names. I can still feel the texture of the cotton sleep shirt I wore that day.
"Do you ever think about finding someone else, an easier someone?" I asked him once in the dark.
He kissed my knuckles. "Whoever 'someone else' might be, I'd tell them the truth," he said. "That the most honest way to love is to keep showing up. That the bravest thing is to be small sometimes and ask for help."
I smiled, thinking of rabbit slippers and star ceilings and an orange cat bigger than our problems.
"Do you remember the dream street?" I asked.
"Yes," he whispered.
"In that dream," I said, "you told me 'I'm here' a lot."
"Because I wanted you to have time and proof," he said. "Because promises are less useful than presence."
We sat a while in the dark, my child's tiny snores a lullaby in the background. The city breathed below us like an animal at rest.
"One more thing," Sebastian said suddenly. "You once asked me if I could read your mind."
I snorted. "Yes! You remember."
"I would not be allowed to," he said. "But if I could, I would still choose to listen."
I leaned my head back and looked at the ceiling — the faint glowing dots like spent city lights. "You painted this for me once," I said.
"For when you couldn't open your eyes," he said. "Now it's here for when you do."
We were two people who had met on the cracks and the convenience of an impulsive registry office decision. We had made our lives in the space between fear and tenderness.
"Do you ever think of the first night?" I asked.
"Often," he said. "Because that's when I learned my favorite truth: small things save us more than the grand gestures. A rabbit slipper, a note, a cup of tea. They are the stitches."
We kissed with the familiar, soft complexity of people who knew each other's rhythms.
Outside, a boat blew a horn in the harbor as if clapping. Inside, our child slept with a thumb in her mouth and a small stuffed cat beside her. The orange cat moved and rolled, as if granting itself permission to be a small, loud king.
"Are we okay?" Sebastian asked finally.
"We are better than okay," I said. "We are ordinary and lucky and full of small proofs. We are home."
He squeezed my hand and said, quietly, "I would paint the sky again if I had to."
I smiled. "Just keep leaving notes. And the osmanthus cake. And the rabbit slippers."
"I will," he promised.
And the promise was a small thing, but it held—like the starry ceiling, like the red booklet, like a kitten that grew into a big, orange, sleeping guarantee.
The End
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