Sweet Romance13 min read
I Woke Up Married to My Enemy (And Had a Plan)
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I moaned and clutched at the back of my head.
"Ow," I hissed, fingers rubbing where a bandage was tight and crisp. "What happened?"
A nurse leaned over me with a soft frown. "Don't touch that. We just finished dressing it."
I blinked. The hospital room smelled like disinfectant and lemon soap. Overhead, a clock ticked like it was keeping secrets.
"Who brought me here?" I asked.
"A man." The nurse smiled, then added, "A handsome one."
My palm flattened the sheet until it wrinkled. I had this image in my head like a scratched photograph—an accusation sent by a stranger's message, a hotel room number, a man scolding, a woman hiding her face, and then a flash of pain. I remembered walking into a hotel room, the text on my screen bright and sharp: Eastgate Hotel, 2208, catch him.
"But I don't remember his face," I said.
The nurse nodded with that casual cruelty nurses sometimes had when they were trying to comfort you. "He was very calm. He said he'd wait. He was gone when you woke."
A footstep sounded at the door. The nurse turned, and so did I. The man in the doorway was tall and neat and impossibly calm—he looked like he'd been sculpted for magazine pages, like something reserved for fantasies and product adverts.
"You're awake?" His voice landed like a cool breeze.
My chest went electric. I couldn't find the name of the feeling—only a sharp, childish certainty. He was the cheating man. He must be. Men like him always are.
"You're awake?" he repeated. "Jillian, you really are something else."
He called me by name. My mind scrambled for the face that went with that name and failed.
I lunged forward without thinking and slammed into his chest, burying my face in his shirt. "Husband," I sobbed into him. "Husband, I'm scared."
He froze, then his hand settled on my shoulder like a careful weight. "Jillian," he said slowly. "You caught them?"
"Yes." I squeezed, drama clinging to me like a second skin. "I went to catch him. He was—"
"—a cheating pig," he finished for me.
His hands tightened around me with a possessive warmth. My head buzzed with victory. I had found the wrong man at the wrong time and somehow this was still useful.
"I brought you in. You fainted in the corridor," the man said. His tone had a touch of something I hadn't expected—no gloating, no condescension. Just a cold, careful patience. "You hit your head."
"My husband," I repeated. "Don't leave me."
He stared at me for a long moment. "I'm Jasper," he said at last. "Jasper De Santis."
"Jasper," I parroted, and made the name mine. "My Jasper."
He blinked as if the world had tilted a degree and then, as if deciding it was easier to play along than argue, he put his arm around me and led me out.
Outside the room the corridor was a slice of normal life—people going about their frantic, boring days. Jasper was a stranger from a hotel room and a breath on my neck, but he was the one who'd brought me here. That was enough.
"How did you get here?" Lakelyn's voice was sharp in my ear when she called later. "Are you crazy? You really went to that number?"
"She knocked him into the shampoo rack," Lakelyn said into my phone, indignant on my behalf. "I saw it. The video on the street livestream—"
"Who?" I asked.
"Enrique. You know, Enrique Ferguson. The pig." Lakelyn's tone dragged the last word like a knife. "And that girl, Hana Diaz? She ran."
I stared at Jasper in the passenger seat as he refastened my seatbelt. "He was in the car with me," I said. "The scum. The one I went to catch."
"So you went to catch Enrique?" Lakelyn's voice went very high. "Jill, you are full of surprises."
Jasper's jaw tightened at the mention of the name, but he didn't comment.
We drove home into a city that glowed like a promise. Jasper walked with me up to a door and opened it with a code. "0823," he said, almost shy. "Your birthday."
I blinked. "You—"
"Remembered," he said. "Come in."
The apartment was beautiful and sterile. Paint was either white or black, everything polished and arranged. It felt like someone had designed a life to be admired from a distance. I felt like a saboteur moving through an exhibit.
"Welcome home," Jasper said, hands in his pockets.
I decided to be the storm.
"I'll cook," I declared, and marched into the immaculate kitchen. I had a plan: wreck everything. Make his perfect life messy. Make him notice how he had wronged me.
I did not know how to cook for real. I did know how to make havoc. Pots clattered, eggs slipped, a pan burned. I stood in a chaos of my making and smiled a little at my handiwork. When I slipped with a plate and felt hot oil leap toward my skin, Jasper's arms came around me and pulled me away. His shirt took the splash. I smelled him—something sharp and clean and mysteriously comforting—and I felt the plan wobble.
"You're impossible," he said, rolling up his sleeve. The shirt was stained, but he didn't blink. He cleaned, gathered the mess, and ordered food from a shop that cost more in the time it took to think about than my monthly rent.
After supper, I declared I needed to shower. "I don't have clothes," I said, sweet and helpless.
"You can borrow mine," he said.
"You don't mind?" I asked, the plan switching from sabotage to seduction in a blink.
His eyes darkened. "Go wash."
Later, I stood in the doorway of the study, wrapped in his black shirt. He was at his desk. The house smelled like him and lemons and very expensive soap. He looked up when I peered in.
"Late," he said simply.
"Just enough time," I told him, and then I pushed and teased and begged until he pulled me into the hallway and pressed me to the wall.
"Don't," I said, and my voice didn't sound convincing.
He kissed me, and for a moment every plan deserted me. He tasted like trouble and coffee and something I had loved in a life I couldn't retrieve.
"Do you want to be my wife?" he asked later, in the kitchen, gentle as a confession.
I laughed, the sound brittle. "Don't be ridiculous."
"Then can you call me your husband?" he asked, eyes like glass.
I tried to be cruel, but I could not be cruel to someone who cleaned my mess and made dumplings and then placed a candlelit cake before me and sang me "Happy Birthday" like he had invented the song.
The world tilted again. Memories slipped through the cracks of whatever had been knocked loose in my head. A courtyard, tin roofs, a boy who always shared his toys—pieces like puzzle corners.
"Jasper," I whispered one night, sleep pulling me. "Do I know you?"
He smiled, soft and real. "You have always known me, Jillian."
I told myself I was playing a game of my own. I would keep him close and I would watch him fail. I would watch him get slapped with the truth. I would not let him have what he had with Hana in the daytime. I would make him jealous. I would make the cheating man suffer.
Enrique Ferguson, the man whose name was a curse on my tongue, did not stay quiet. He found me in the most brilliant way possible—by humiliating himself.
It happened at my apartment.
I thought he would be slick with guilt. I thought he would back away. I was wrong.
"You think you're better than me?" he snarled when he cornered me. "You think you can ruin my life with a fake scream? Who do you think you are, Jillian?"
"Get off me!" I cried, and the neighbor's footsteps quickened.
He moved a hand and I called "Assault!" at the top of my lungs. He tried to flee. The door slammed and men came. Someone pushed him into a policeman's elbow, and he was cuffed in front of the lobby's glass doors. The whole block felt like it had turned into a tribunal.
We went to the station. Lakelyn arrived, furious, and behind her walked a man I did not know—stern, dark, and urgent. He took control of the situation with quiet authority. "Take her statement," he told the desk sergeant. "Make sure the reports include everything."
Enrique raged and ranted. He spat at cameras. "She's lying!" he screamed. "She followed me. She provoked me!"
"Shut up," Lakelyn hissed. "You deserve worse than this."
I sat in the waiting room like an accused noblewoman while officers marched Enrique through glass doors. I felt small and large at the same time—small for having had my life unraveled, large for setting the trap that would prove I had been wronged.
That, though, was not his public punishment. That would come later, at a company gala where humiliation tastes like metal and feels sweet on the tongue.
Enrique was a rising star at an advertising agency. He loved two things: his image and the applause of strangers. So when a popular trade gala announced a panel discussion with the city's notable creatives—including Enrique—he walked onto that stage like a peacock brushing the air.
I arrived as a brand editor—work obligations, a chance of being present. Lakelyn texted: I'm coming. Come with me. I did, though my hands trembled with dread. Jasper stood to the side, dressed in an easy suit that made him look like he belonged in the light. He gave me a look that said Do whatever you need.
The hall glittered. Cameras blinked. Enrique basked in attention, grinning at his colleagues. His mistress, Hana, sat a few rows back with a face painted into innocence—a sunburn orange mask in a gentle body. She smiled at him like she had never lied about pregnancy, like she had never schemed over drinks in the cheap bars near her apartment.
The moderator called the panel to order. Enrique strutted on stage with all the polish of a man who believed himself untouchable.
I stood. A simple action, hardly noticed. The room was a forest of phones.
"Excuse me," I said, voice calm and unadorned. "I need to say something."
There was a stir. The moderator blinked. "Is this—"
"No," I said. "He's been cheating. He hurt me. He lied."
Enrique's smile faltered. He laughed, trying that practiced shrug. "This is a private matter—"
"It's not private," I said. "Not when you do it in hotel rooms and you send messages and you shame people. Not when you humiliate the woman who loved you in public."
I had rehearsed nothing. The words found their teeth and bit.
I pulled out my phone and showed texts, dates, locations—the hotel's booking, the times he had met Hana. I let the room breathe the small, sharp details. People looked. Phones pivoted. The hum of the crowd was a new language. Someone started a recording whisper and then another. The moderator stammered, winced, and let me keep talking.
"She told me she was pregnant," I said. "She lied to me to get to a house. He used her. He used me. He uses people."
Enrique's face went from amusement to offended to white-hot with rage in seconds, like the flicker of a candle snapped into wind. Hana rose, indignant, and opened her mouth to stab at me with the usual déclassé venom of a woman who'd been propped up as an accessory for gain.
"You—" Enrique began.
I turned and looked at Jasper. He rose, his presence like a tide. He walked to the edge of the stage and stood behind me, a quiet anchor. No words, just a hand on my shoulder. His gesture changed the room. People shifted. The cameras moved from me to him to Enrique.
"That's enough," Jasper said, voice soft but with a fracture of ice. "Tell them the truth."
Enrique's lips worked. "Everyone thinks I'm successful. They'll just think—"
"Speak," Jasper said, and his voice had teeth. "You will stand here and tell them what you told her."
For a brief second, the man who once thought himself untouchable tried to bully and charm his way out of it. "She's making it up! She wanted attention! She followed me—"
A murmur from the crowd. A journalist clicked a mic closer.
I played him the recording from the night at the hotel—the slurred, sure-enough voice caught between a shameful laugh and a confession that he had been meeting Hana.
Faces in the crowd tightened. Someone gasped. A woman near the back whispered, "Oh my God."
Enrique's expression rippled. First he was smug. Then he was bewildered. Then he tried denial. He turned to Hana. "Is this true?"
Hana's cheeks flushed. The room leaned in. She had been so polished a minute ago that her edges were razor-sharp. Under scrutiny, she was a paper tiger.
"Yes," she hissed. "We—"
Her words crumpled when a reporter flashed a photo on the screens behind us. There she was, wide-eyed and smiling with a man who owned a furniture shop. Not Enrique. Not the image she wore in the agency payroll. People started to recognize the pattern. A woman sitting near the front pushed to her feet and shouted, "He had me too!"
The audience tasted scandal like a ritual. It moved through the air, a delicious thing to witness. People started to pull out their phones and stream. The moderator's face had gone the color of old newsprint. The charity officers looked at each other and then at Enrique, at the woman who had lied, and at the man on their stage who had been exposed by a quiet, steady hand on mine.
Enrique's mask shattered in stages. First came anger. "Lies!" he yelled. Then bargaining. "You don't understand—she's crazy—" Then incredulity as his colleagues' faces hardened. A few people stood and walked away. A woman reached for a little girl and moved her to a safer seat. I watched his pupils shrink to black beads.
"Confess," Jasper said. There was no theatrics, just the smallest of commands.
Enrique slumped, then straightened, then attempted one last defiant sneer that looked foolish under the lights. His shoulders drooped as if real weight had settled on them. He tried to claim misunderstandings. Then, under the pressure of phones and faces and the crispness of evidence, he began to unravel.
"I'm sorry," he said. His voice was brittle. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean—"
"Say it properly," Jasper insisted. "Say what you did."
"I cheated," Enrique blurted. "I lied. I slept with Hana. I lied about the pregnancy. I'm a liar." The words tasted like ash. There was no dignity in them.
Around us, people exhaled. Some applauded like a verdict. Others muttered like jurors. Someone in the crowd swore softly and then laughed, a sharp burst of joy. I watched Enrique's face bleed color and expression—relief mixed with embarrassment, then shame. His mouth tried denial, then dropped. He tried to remedy with excuses, but each attempt was drowned out by the very recordings and photos he had once believed he controlled.
Someone in the front row shouted, "Resign!" A voice from the agency's board said, "We will investigate." A young woman near the back clapped. The cameras swirled and zoomed.
"Do you want to apologize to her?" Jasper asked, but his eyes were not asking. They were seeing, cataloguing. Enrique looked wild for a moment—like an animal on a ledge. His hands twisted together.
"I—Jillian," he said, his mouth open in a painful grin. "I'm sorry. Please—"
He had the look of a man who was trying to bargain back his life with a single, fragile apology.
I looked at him. "You broke people," I said. "You lied to girls who trusted you. You used them. You will pay for making people a game."
Enrique collapsed into private shame. "I'm sorry," he said again, but this time his voice had the nakedness of someone who had been stripped of pretense. He was wrong because the world had watched him be wrong. There were no private corners left to hide in.
The crowd's reaction was a chorus. Some hissed. Some recorded. One man booed. A teenage girl, seeing the man who had once sold her a dream, screamed something I couldn't make out. Cameras kept rolling. A reporter walked down the aisle and asked Enrique direct questions—about contracts, about his conduct, about whether he had misused company funds for gifts. The board members busied themselves, whispering. Phones displayed comments in real time. The agency's PR manager took a step back and then stormed off.
Enrique's face fell. He had not expected his life to rearrange itself in front of this many witnesses. He had not expected his own reflection to be so unforgiving.
He left the podium shaking. His colleagues avoided eye contact. Someone snapped a photo of him on the stage and posted it on a business forum with a caption that read YOU CAN'T BUY CHARACTER. Within minutes, the hashtag trended locally.
He was not physically beaten. He did not kneel and beg in the street. But the punishment—public, immediate, and irreversible—was worse. Colleagues whispered behind hands. Contests he had planned for the year were postponed. Invitations stopped coming.
At the end of that night Enrique was not jailed, but he was destroyed in a social and professional way that mattered to him. He tried to call for mercy, but the people who mattered most to him—the ones who had smiled at his jokes and bought into his charm—turned away. He watched the world that fed his vanity shutter.
And in the crowd, Jasper stood a little straighter.
After that evening nothing was the same. Enrique's face was a lesson. People would not forget. Hana's phone buzzed with messages from angry clients. The agency put out a brief statement and then retreated into damage control. Enrique's empire of quick favors and flirtation collapsed not because one person demanded vengeance but because the world reached for its phones and recorded.
"I wanted to make him hurt," I told Jasper later when we sat on Jasper's sofa, the city's lights stretching like a ribbon beyond the window. "I wanted him to taste it."
"You did more than that," Jasper said, fingers tracing the rim of his cup. "You made him see himself where hundreds could see him."
He looked at me like someone searching for the right phrase. "Are you all right?"
"I remember things in fragments," I said. "I remember you—kind, stubborn, ridiculous—giving me your cookie when I was small. I remember being jealous, and I remember wanting to be better than him."
He nodded as if the past fit into him. "You were always brave." He hesitated. "And you were always my stubborn little neighbor."
I laughed and then cried quietly into my hands. "I thought you were an enemy."
"You did?" he asked, surprised. "Because of my grandmother?"
"Because she loved you, and I didn't like being second," I said. "I hated the way she looked at you like you were a saint."
He leaned forward and brushed my hair back. "I remember you being loud and mischievous and always trying to make me laugh."
"I remember you giving me that wooden horse," I said, smiling despite the ache. "Then you said, 'For Jillian, because you like it.'"
He smiled back, as if discovering a treasure he had been carrying in his chest.
We were married like a play—an easy, messy beginning where the two of us both pretended until pretending became true. We signed papers in a tiny registry office with my parents and Jasper's parents smiling like they had known all along. The first night after the papers, he said, "Call me husband," and I giggled because it felt like a dare I could not refuse.
Later, when my memory came back in splinters and whole waves, I learned how near we had been all along. We had been neighbors, and then not; children and then strangers, and then, slowly, a pair of people who found one another again.
People asked if I forgave myself for the months I had spent scheming and testing and wanting. I smiled. "I did what I needed to do," I told them, and Jasper squeezed my hand as if to seal the sentence.
There were more moments—the small ones, the ones that built intimacy in quiet increments. The way he wrapped a scarf around my neck when it was cold. The way he ironed my shirt and left a faint crease on the collar. The accidental brush of palms under a grocery counter. The nights we lay awake while the city sighed and he whispered, "You really are mine."
The real test, though, came with forgiveness. At a small family dinner, Jasper told his parents how he had felt—ignored, overlooked, then wildly protective—and how he had waited for me to wake up from one of the most confusing phases of my life. His father laughed and called him a fool; his mother toasted us in a voice that cracked with relief.
Enrique faded into a string of headlines and a ruined promotion. I read about his new job applications being ignored and felt nothing but a small, steady relief.
The most surprising thing was not the lawsuits nor the gossip but the way ordinary life returned and settled like dust. We learned each other in the everyday light. He loved my bad coffee, I loved his careful neatness. He let me be loud. I let him be silent. We both kept a box in the kitchen for the little things—receipts, tickets, notes. On top lived a black shirt with a button missing, the one I'd worn that first chaotic night in his kitchen. It smelled like lemon soap and a coward's promise to try. Sometimes I took it out, pressed it to my face, and thought of how strange, how impossible, and how tender life can be.
"Jasper," I said once, fingers tracing the shirt's missing button hole.
"Yes?"
"Do you remember the code? 0823?"
He smiled. "Every birthday, every wrong step, every time we started again. It fits us."
I laughed. "Then never forget."
"I won't," he said, and kissed me like he meant it.
The End
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