Sweet Romance10 min read
I Woke Up and Found My Future Already Taken
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I woke to rain tapping the window like a question I couldn't answer yet.
"Don't move," a voice said behind me.
I opened my eyes. The ceiling above was the same pale plaster, the motel clock blinked 03:12, and for a breath I thought I had only dreamed the whole terrible night. Then my chest tightened with memory — the bottle, the camera flashes, the hush of conspiracy. The memory that folded me in on itself: how they had burned the house and left me for dead last time. How I had been wrong about so many people.
"This room… it's the same," I whispered.
"It's the same because you insisted on remembering who you were," said the man by the door. His voice was low and even, and it felt like an old thing that should have fit into a pocket. He stood in shadow, and even shadow made him look important.
"You're early," I said.
He smiled the sort of smile that didn't reach his eyes. "You always run into me," he said. "I was waiting downstairs."
I blinked. The scent of vanilla he left behind was familiar in a way that made my body go cold — not with regret, with recognition. "Yale," I breathed. "What are you doing here?"
Yale Bertrand stepped into the light properly. His clothes were tailored; he moved like he owned the space even when he had no right to. "You were here," he said. "You needed a hand. I came."
I pushed off the bed slowly. "I don't need a hand from you."
He watched me, not offended, just patient. "You will, Haven."
I should have hated him. We had been enemies as long as I could remember: public sparring, family grudges, a thousand petty moments that had hardened into old habits. In the last life, that was all I thought he was. But memory was not a clean thing. It kept secrets: a charm we once shared at eight years old, a promise that had gone soft and lost between family dinners and contracts. I had a second life now. I had decisions I could make differently.
"You promised to let me go this time," I said.
He took a step closer and said, quietly, "You promised me once too."
I looked away. "I don't make promises I can't keep."
He smiled with a softness I shouldn't have liked. "Keep one for me then."
Later, when I was dressed and my head stopped humming, I remembered why I had run. The face that had laughed by the motel door came back in waves: Jaxon Flores. He had the kind of smile that earned trust like a counterfeit coin. Beside him always was Kaya Watkins — my supposed friend. Kaya's laugh used to be the kind of bright thing you could bottle. That laugh had turned into thin amusement the night they left me in a room full of empty bottles, the night the reporters found me, the night whispers clipped at my name.
"How bad was it?" I asked Yale as he drove me away from the motel and toward the city that had felt smaller to me since the second chance.
He didn't answer right away. "Jaxon is clever," he said finally. "Kaya is cruel. They plan small things in a way that snowballs. They thought they'd break you and take the pieces."
"Thought?" I asked.
"They underestimated you," Yale said.
We arrived at my childhood house under a shroud of gray rain. My mother smiled like the sun could be rearranged. "Haven, you look well," she said.
I hugged her anyway. Her hands smelled like lemon soap and old recipes. "I'm fine," I lied. "Just tired."
At breakfast I decided the old rules no longer applied. I stood and said, loud enough for a house of relatives and the staff to hear, "I will not marry Jaxon Flores."
My father almost choked on his tea. Jaxon — the man already groomed for a position beside me in the old life — had been waiting with all the easy confidence of someone who thinks the world bends for his smile.
"You can't mean that," he said.
"I mean exactly that," I said. "I won't."
Yale watched me from the corner and for the first time since we had been children together he didn't look distant. He looked like someone making plans.
Two days later, the engagement hall was packed. Cameras flashed like rain. Jaxon stood in white and whites suit him — he always wore charm the way other men wore cologne — easy and practiced. Kaya sat at his side like a queen who had learned how to make a kingdom of spite.
When I took the microphone on the stage, I let the silence find me and then found my voice.
"I cannot go through with this engagement," I said. "Because I'm in love."
"You are?" Jaxon asked, voice sharp with amusement.
I swallowed. "Yes. I'm in love with Yale Bertrand."
The room didn't process it fast enough. Yale watched, solemn and still, as the buzz rose to a roar. Jaxon flushed from amusement to scorn in a second.
"You can't be serious," Jaxon said.
"I am," I said. "And I refuse to be a pawn, Jaxon. If anyone thinks I can be bought or told, they misread me."
Jaxon lunged forward and grabbed my arm. His grip tried to be gentle; it wasn't. "Haven, don't do this — we planned this. You owe us—"
"You owe me nothing," I snapped, tearing my arm from him. "You were cruel. You drugged me before my engagement in the old life and left me to be humiliated. I won't be used again."
"That's a lie!" Jaxon barked.
"Is it?" Yale said. He dropped to the stage and held up a single photo. "Do you remember this, Jaxon?"
The flash of the photo made everyone lean in. It showed Jaxon and Kaya in the parking lot the night my life had broken: Jaxon fiddling with a bottle's lid, Kaya laughing as she watched. The proof didn't need words. Cameras ate it up. The press snapped and sent the image out like a blade.
"You said this was private," Kaya hissed. Her smile fell into something tight. "You can't do this."
"You're done," Yale said.
The room turned. I felt the momentum shift like a tide underfoot. Jaxon and Kaya were proven liars, their careful mask cracked. They tried to salvage dignity with words, but the world had learned to love spectacle, and spectacle loves a fall.
Over the next forty-eight hours the city turned Jaxon and Kaya into examples. Reporters camped outside Jaxon's father's office. Partners who had tolerated his private cruelties politely began to distance themselves. Kaya's sponsors quietly removed their tags from past posts. Jaxon woke up to a viral clip of himself at our engagement. The comment section read like a verdict.
I had promised myself: retribution, yes, but made fair. I wanted them to be exposed, to see the faces they'd scarred turn away. I wanted them to have to answer to everyone they had smiled at and betrayed. I didn't want blood. I wanted them to learn in public the thing I had learned in private: that every cruelty leaves a mark and that reputation can be a fragile glass.
The punishment scene that followed was ugly and necessary.
They arranged for a charity gala — a place that thrives on spectacle and attention. I agreed to appear because I knew Jaxon and Kaya would be there surrounded by their allies. Yale and I arrived arm in arm. Cameras came alive. People who had once toasted Jaxon now shifted as if something in them had stung.
"Keep calm," Yale murmured. "Let them speak. Let them fall."
Kaya took the stage first. "This is gossip," she said with a rehearsed laugh. "People are jealous. We were framed."
"Is that what you say?" called a voice from the crowd. It was a worker — one of many whose careers Jaxon and Kaya had stepped on. He held up a small stack of receipts and text conversations — evidence of payments, favors, and lies. The crowd's murmurs went long and low. Phones pointed like accusing fingers.
Kaya's face changed as she realized the receipts were not in her control. "Those are doctored," she said. Her voice tightened. "They are lies. You people — you can't believe everything."
"Can you explain this?" someone asked. They held a photo of Kaya and Jaxon entering a cheap motel the night of my humiliation. The photo wasn't flattering; it was damning.
Jaxon tried to laugh. "Such cheap theatrics," he said. His voice broke. He wasn't the practiced man before a room now; he blinked and his composure cracked. "Aren't we above these—"
"No," replied Yale slowly. "You are not above anything. You are accountable."
The crowd around them shifted. Former friends started to record, to whisper. A prominent sponsor — a woman who had once stood on stage beside Kaya — stepped forward.
"This organization stands for ethics," she said. "We do not condone deception. We will be severing our relationship."
Her voice was steady, and like a taut wire it cut through the room. Heads turned. People stepped back.
Kaya's eyes widened to the size of saucers. She went through the phases I had known from watching manipulation: first shock, then denial, then fury. "You will regret this!" she screamed. "You'll ruin me and my family—"
People hissed behind their hands. Someone shouted, "You ruined Haven!" A reporter shouted, "We have texts and payments, Miss Watkins — will you explain them?"
Kaya's face drained. Her denial grew thin, threadbare. "It's not real," she kept saying, but under the words she sounded like someone repeating a broken record.
Then Jaxon spoke. "This is a misunderstanding. We... we meant no harm," he said. His voice began to tremble. For the first time he was no longer in control. He tried to summon the arrogance that had carried him, but the room instead pressed in with questions: who had paid who, who had been threatened, where had the schemes begun?
"What you have done," the city's leading business editor said into the microphone, "is criminal, at best unethical at worst. Our legal team is consulting. Sponsors are distancing themselves. Investors will want answers."
Jaxon's cool façade collapsed. He moved from anger into fear. His mouth tried to shape excuses and found nothing honest to say. "You can't—" he faltered.
"You stole lives," a woman called from the audience, tears in her voice. "You ruined someone I loved." She pointed at Jaxon. "You used your charm to punish the weak. You thought you were invisible."
Around them, the crowd churned. Phones were up. Videos were made for evidence, for shame. Jaxon went pale, lips trembling. He thought he could weather this — he had weathered other storms — but this was public, immediate, and viral. Sponsors called their lawyers. Partners sent terse messages. People he had counted on to look the other way did not look away this time.
Kaya's face collapsed last. It was the most human I had ever seen her: the smile gone, the mask shattered. She reached for Jaxon as if to steady him and found only panic. "Jaxon!" she cried, like some petulant child exposed before a class.
"Please," he whispered. The word had lost its arrogance.
They begged. They denounced the footage as forgeries. They accused others of framing them. The room watched them cycle through avowal to desperation and back again.
I remember the exact moment when I stopped feeling anything like triumphant and felt only cold and steady. I stepped up to the microphone.
"This is not about revenge for its own sake," I said. "You hurt me and others. You set fires behind our backs and expected us to walk away quietly. You made choices publicly and privately that cost lives. Today you answer to us."
A hundred shutters clicked. A hundred phones recorded. The crowd swelled with opinion. The sponsors filter their own statements. A lawyer read from a prepared statement: "We will press charges where appropriate and provide restitution where possible." The camera lights stung.
Jaxon tried to bargain, to offer a public apology. "I apologize," he said, voice thin. "I am sorry."
"Your apology is a performance," a woman said coldly. "You performed apologies before. We need accountability."
That was the end of their illusions. In the next weeks, Jaxon found himself stripped of board seats and reputations. Invitations vanished. His father took him home and kept him away from meetings. Kaya's posts were stripped from brands and her accounts withered under the weight of lost sponsors. They were not humiliated privately — they were made to see what their actions had cost in the light of day. No one cheered when the bailiffs served papers, but the public watched. Jaxon's face, once so polished, filled feeds with a new expression: bewildered regret.
I did not dance on their ruin. I watched, because I had to. I used the second chance not to burn but to rewrite. The city had found a new story — a story where power did not always protect the guilty.
Afterward, when the cameras thinned and the papers sold fewer copies, Yale and I sat on the roof of his old townhouse and listened to the rain.
"You were brilliant," he said.
"I had a script to follow," I replied. "Only this time I wrote the ending."
He touched the small amber charm around his neck — the one our families had once given us as children. "You always have had the guts to change the ending," he said.
"And you had the courage to stand when everyone else hesitated," I countered.
He didn't answer. He only looked at me. He looked at me like a man who was finally considering a life that matched his wishes.
"You asked for an answer," he said after a long silence. "I want it on record."
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"Marry me," he said simply. "Not because it's convenient. Not because of family deals. Because I want to stand beside you and keep you safe. Because I want to wake up and find you here."
My chest hammered. I thought of the years I had given to anyone who asked, the price I paid for kindness, the way I had let myself be used. I thought of Yale's steady hands and private smiles, the nights he had stood at my side because he always had. I thought of all the moments in this second life when someone else had decided for me.
"Three days," I said. "I'll give you three days to make the case beyond the roof and the charm."
"Three days is all I need," he said.
We married quietly, not because we had to, but because we wanted to reclaim the narrative from the hands of others.
After the fall came small lovely things: Yale waiting with a scarf because I said my ears got cold, his hand finding mine in the dark when a thunderstorm made the lights flicker. He teased me in the elevator and then would stand outside my office like a knight who had found new terms for chivalry.
"Don't leave for too late," he would say.
"I won't," I'd answer.
Our days were not all soft. There were still meetings, invoices, and conversations with people who wanted to repair reputations and get the city to forget. I worked at Yale's company, and under the bright fluorescent lights I learned how to build stories that people wanted to watch — and how to protect the people who made them.
Jordyn Barton, my old friend from the set, got out of a place that had been eating her alive. She started to breathe again. She learned to say "no" out loud. Lin — Jordyn — would call me at two in the morning with a problem and I would listen and sometimes I would give advice that I had only just learned.
"Don't fall for the kind of love that makes you small," I told Jordyn once over noodles.
"What if that's the only love there is?" she asked.
"Then you teach yourself there are other loves."
One night, as the city lights blinked beneath us like slow applause, Yale turned and asked me, "Do you regret the other life?"
I looked at him. I thought of the motel room, the photograph that unmade a lie, the bargain that had become something real.
"No," I said. "I learned what matters. I learned I can write a different ending."
He smiled. "Then let's keep writing it together."
We did. There were small scenes I held close: his impatient laugh when I refused to let him drive in a storm; the way he offered his jacket before he realized I was cold; the little dimple that appeared when he was pleased. Those were my daily proofs.
Weeks after the gala and the fall, I walked past the small vendor stall near my old home. The old woman who sold charms smiled at me.
"You are the one with the amber charm," she said, touching my sleeve. "Take good care of it."
I did. I tucked it inside my palm and felt the skin-worn loop like a promise we both kept.
That night, rain again tapped the window.
"Do you remember this sound?" Yale asked.
"Always," I said. "When it rains, I remember my first life and the choices that made me that person. I also remember the moment I chose differently."
He nodded, fingers finding mine in the dark, and the charm, warm and small between us, promised nothing except the safety of being held.
The End
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