Sweet Romance13 min read
My Boss Can Hear My Thoughts — And He Has Red Ears
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I never expected the first clue would be his ears.
"Cruz, the awards are next," someone said from the stage, and I clapped until my palms tingled. He stood there in black suit and white shirt, jaw cut like a clean line of marble, and I imagined — idiotic, unspooling fantasies — what his apartment would look like, whether he made coffee like a man who could also write annual reports.
He looked toward our row. His eyes slid over me — and his ears went pink.
I froze. A pink at the ear like that read to me like a headline.
"You're imagining things," Aliana texted beside me as if she could feel my heat. She was always practical to the point of bluntness. "Maybe he just had coffee too hot."
"But his ears," I whispered back. "They turned pink."
"Then it's pink alert," she replied, and smirked.
After the meeting, when I had a pretense to report a trivial update, I walked into Cruz's office with my documents folded like an invitation.
"Please," he said without looking up.
"There's just a small item needing your sign-off," I lied, and sat down. His profile looked dangerous and calm. His sweater today had a soft gray, like someone who was capable of being comfortable and precise at the same time.
I explained the project. I kept my voice nothing but professional. I kept my hands folded on the papers. Inside my head, however, I was an outrageous museum of fantasies — absurd little scenes of wrapping my arms around his waist while he cooked, imagining whether the indent at his jaw hid laughter, and whether his shirt would come undone in a movie I made up.
His ears flushed.
It happened again in the elevator, crowded with bodies and the smell of too many lunches. I stood behind him, close enough to smell his cologne and to be small in the world.
He glanced back, and the red rose of color bloomed at his ear. "Did he see me?" I asked myself. "Is he embarrassed because he's caught me staring?"
I messaged Aliana, "Do you think Cruz likes me?"
Aliana sent a GIF and a single line: "He avoids you."
"He avoids me because he secretly likes me but is shy," I typed, and pressed send with more confidence than I felt.
At my desk I rehearsed the next steps. If someone is shy, persist. If someone is polite, be gentler. I polished my lips on my compact and knocked.
"Cruz?" I called, trying to make my voice tin-lit and charming.
"Yes," he said. The answer was flat, laced with the authority of someone who had signed more than a thousand contracts.
I walked in and took a seat. He set down his whatever-it-was like he was folding the world into files and said, "Go ahead."
I reported. I gestured at the slides, pointed at numbers. He listened like a patient tide. Then I asked, guileless and eager, "Do you like skiing?"
"Sometimes," he answered.
"Next weekend, do you want to—"
I was cut off by two small things: the blush rising to his ears and the sudden tilt of his head. His mouth said "We can consider," and then he said, "I know." Simple, but his voice had a weight. He said it like he knew what I was thinking before I finished.
Later, in the break room, a crate of milk tea arrived for the team. Chen Kiana — I mean Kiana Dyer — stood like she had been built by flirtatious intention, and she chose her bubble tea with the delicacy of a practiced actress. Before I could move, Cruz stepped in and passed me a cup.
I looked down at the label. "Mango passion, no ice, half sugar," mine read — an order I had not vocalized. I hadn't even opened my mouth to ask.
He had lingered at the counter for a moment, flustered, his ears pink. "Enjoy," he said.
My chest corkscrewed. I called Aliana from my chair. She blowed up my phone with laughing faces. "Cruz has a sixth sense," she teased. But I was not laughing. I stared. My mind buzzed with possibilities: telepathy, a trick, a prank.
"Stop being ridiculous," I told myself. "That's impossible."
"Wait." Later he asked me in private, when the office had thinned, "Kinsley, are you okay?"
"Fine," I lied, and the truth was tangled. "Do you... do you hear things?"
A beat of silence. Then he said, very gently, "Kinsley, I can only hear you."
"What?"
He didn't answer for longer than ringing seconds. Then he said, "About two weeks ago I realized words inside my head — sometimes — were her voice. Only yours. It seems to work when you're within maybe four or five meters. I don't know why."
My face went hot like a furnace.
"You mean you can hear my thoughts?"
He looked embarrassed. His ears were — predictably — a perfect tell. "Not all the time. Not like a radio. They sound like... your voice in my head. And sometimes I confuse a thought for a spoken word if you are speaking at the same time."
"All my thoughts?" I asked. I pictured, horrified, every lunatic sentence I'd ever made private: the romance fantasies, the petty insults, the daydreams of command and of mischief.
"Yes," he said, and his hands folded in that neat manner he had. "Only you. I don't know why. I'm sorry if it's awkward."
I wanted to run around the office screaming, but instead I did something more embarrassing: I confessed. Because if he could hear me, why hold back?
"Kinsley," he said, "if it's too much, I'll do my best to ignore it."
"Don't ignore me," I blurted. "I like you." The words fell out like confetti.
He blinked. His ears flushed. "You're being dramatic," he said, but the smallness in his mouth told me otherwise. I typed out a message later, because it felt safer on screen: "I like you. Although you already know."
He replied: "At work, don't."
My pride collapsed into a silly paper boat. I texted, "Then at night?"
He wrote back, "You are my subordinate."
I wanted to crumble into a puddle and also arrange the rest of our lives.
That weekend I took an extra day off with a cold because — as a professional in the art of melodrama — I needed time to compose my next step: the simplest, most dangerous thing. "If you can hear me," I told myself, "then let's use this to get your help."
Because old-score Jaxon Lefebvre — the man I dated in college who had turned out to be a four-boat skipper with a dazzling smile and a pocket full of excuses — had organized a reunion. He'd posted a photograph with a new girlfriend and an olive branch of smug.
Aliana wanted revenge, like every good friend does. "We'll give him a show," she said. "We'll hire a stand-in, we'll do a fake boyfriend... or wait, Kinsley, you have access to Cruz."
I considered this for exactly twelve heartbeats. Then I texted Cruz: "Help me. One fake boyfriend for public humiliation."
There's a silence in response that was both long and loaded. Then he wrote back, very spare: "Why would I help?"
"Because you'll be good at it," I typed. "Because you can hear me. Because I already ruined you with my thoughts and now it's time to use that as compensation."
He replied with three dots, then "Meet me."
He came — of course he came. He drove across rain-slick streets to the place where I'd been standing by my scooter after a small traffic fender-bender. He'd called me ten times, and when he finally found me it was like some scenes from those cliché films where rich men come to rescue innocent women. He looked wet and heroic and very inconveniently attractive.
"You could have called," I said.
"I did," he said. "You didn't pick up."
"Phone was in my pocket." Truth. "You drove across the city."
"Yes."
"Why?" I pressed.
He answered, "Because it's what you do for people you care about."
He hadn't said "because I like you" but the color in his ears said it for him. From that day, the balance shifted. He started to listen to me — and not in the creepy workplace way, but as if he'd been given a private script to be gentle with.
Our alliance became a performance. I asked him to be my boyfriend at the reunion. He said no at first, which made me do the one thing I should never do: threaten.
"If you don't play me," I wrote, "I'll tell everyone you can hear my thoughts."
He stopped. "That is reckless."
"Then help me," I said.
He finally relented with a single condition: "At the office, keep it inside. After hours, you get me."
"Deal," I whispered like a negotiator who had stolen something precious.
The reunion was in a high-end restaurant. I walked in wearing a dress I'd practiced smiling in, and Cruz followed, composed and slightly damp from rain. He linked his arm with mine. People glanced, some with admiration, others with the bland curiosity reserved for old acquaintances.
Jaxon Lefebvre saw me and his face briefly split like a cracked façade.
"Well, look at that," he said loud enough for people around the table to hear. "Someone upgraded."
I heard the room breathe. Aliana smiled sharp like a knife. I felt Cruz's hand on my elbow. He was steady.
"Meet my boyfriend," I said, bright as a coin. "Cruz."
He nodded, like a man accustomed to doing things exceedingly well. "Pleasure," he said, as if introducing himself was a matter of decorum.
It went smoothly at first. Cruz anticipated things I wanted without looking like he anticipated them. He fed me, he joked when prompted, and he answered every probing question with a soft competence that made Jaxon bristle.
Then Jaxon tried to play clever. He puffed up in that way men do when they think they're cornering you. "So how long?" he asked with a smile meant to be a trap.
"A month," Cruz said immediately. "Enough time to know despair and enough time to know her favorite pastry."
The table laughed. Jaxon tried to come back with trivia about my life, to embarrass me, and Cruz answered in ways that were small and precise — a fact here, a memory there — the on-the-spot knowledge of a boyfriend who knew you because he had been listening. The room responded with delighted whispers.
When a dare rose — "Kiss them" — the whole table leaned in. I looked at Cruz. He looked at me. He nodded like a conspirator.
I kissed him. The world narrowed and then widened in an impossible way. His lips were not like mine had been in the past; they were steady and careful. The table lost their composure and applauded like gulls at a fishing boat.
Jaxon's face changed. It was the beginning of something. After the applause, he lunged, words sharp as thrown knives.
"You two are playing me?" he said. "This is theater. You are hired — or she is —"
"Your ex is a drama expert," I said softly, and I meant every inch of satisfaction that leaked into those words.
Kiana Dyer leaned forward, eyes slitted like a cat's. "Is any of this true?" she asked casually, but there was a blade in her tone.
Cruz's response happened in a few moves: he set his hand over mine and said, "It seems you have a gift for storytelling. We prefer honesty." He said it like a man delivering a verdict.
"Why?" Jaxon spat. "What do you know about her?"
Cruz's voice dropped. "What I know is this: he has a habit of calling half a dozen women 'my darling' in the same week." I felt Cruz's fingers tighten on my hand. "And that he once told someone he was keeping his options open as if people were choices on a menu."
There was silence. I had a flash of the three messages I'd sent in the past to girls who had been hurt by Jaxon. Aliana's furious group chat. My own little paper-proud evidence that I'd once exposed him.
I stood. "Jaxon, you told me that you were alone," I said. "You told me I was the only one. You lied."
"You don't know what you're talking about," he said, and the rictus of defiance showed his self-protection.
I smiled like a guillotine. "Oh, I have proof."
I reached into my bag and opened my phone. I showed the room the messages I'd preserved: screenshots, times, little threads of betrayal. The faces at the table shifted like weather.
Jaxon scrambled. "Those are old. Those are out of context."
Aliana slammed her palm down. "They're crystal clear."
Kiana Dyer's mouth dropped. People began to murmur. The woman at Jaxon's side — his new girlfriend — looked stunned. Her face bled from sunshine to cloud. "Is this true?" she asked, voice small. "Jaxon?"
He stammered. "They were... friends. It wasn't—"
The table was no longer a place for performance. It became a theater of consequences. I had expected humiliation; I had intended it. I had not expected the satisfaction: the dizzy pleasure of watching truth land in a room like a stone and make ripples.
"This isn't just about the messages," Cruz said quietly, and everyone turned. "It's about trust. If you treat people like a buffet, we all pay."
He said it like a judge and a man who had been wronged by his own reflection. Jaxon tried to pick his way out of it, but the group had moved. Friends who had dined with him now turned their heads. The woman who had sat at his side now stood slowly, the color drained from her cheeks.
"Why didn't you tell me?" she asked him in a voice that wanted reasons.
He could not answer.
That was the first punishment: social exposure. The room turned on its heels. The man who had thought himself clever sat suddenly small at a table with empty chairs around him. People whispered. Someone took out a phone and started taking pictures. I heard the scrape of chairs, the shrugging of friends who had once laughed with him now practicing polite distance.
Then came another punishment, tailored by time and by personality. At that moment, the woman who had been dateless for his string of boasts — the newest girl — stood and addressed the table with a calmness that cut deeper than any rant.
"Do not talk to me about his kindness," she said. "I believed him because I wanted to. But I do not want to share the man I care about with a history of 'options' he treats like trophies."
She turned to Jaxon. "You thought the world was made of mirrors for your reflection. It isn't."
Around us the auditorium of friends and acquaintances split into several verdicts: some seethed in private, some called him a liar openly, others simply collected facts and left like clerks of a slow bureaucracy. His phone began to ring: messages, one-line questions from women who wanted to know.
Jaxon tried to hold a conversation, to deflect, to joke. Each attempt fell flat. He realized the pattern of how people drew back — a slow social unraveling where he would be left with fewer chairs at the table. People he had counted as allies began to take sides or to step away. The man who had once thrived on the number of interested gazes lost them one by one.
But I had asked for more than social fallout; I wanted him to feel the sharpness of public judgment, a measurable fall.
At a point, when whispers felt like knives, Cruz took a breath and asked Jaxon to stand.
"Explain," Cruz said — not angrily but with the steady draw of a metronome. "Explain it to everyone. Not his version, but the facts."
Under the warm lights everyone listened. Jaxon faltered. Then his voice tightened, and the excuses poured out.
But people had the evidence now. Screenshots had been shown. A friend leaned forward and said, "If you were honest from the start, you wouldn't be here having to explain the same thing over and over." There was pity in the voice.
The worst part — the punishment that hammered more than humiliation — was watching his new girlfriend's eyes. She folded herself like paper and then, slowly, put down the glass in her hand.
"I believed you," she said. "But I will not be an afterthought. I'm leaving."
She left like a curtain closing. The table exhaled.
Once the girlfriend stepped away, people began to distance themselves further. Phone texts translated into scathing paragraphs. A wing of friends that had been his circle now flinched. It was quiet, but bigger than noise: it was the sound of someone losing social capital at the rate of one message at a time.
Jaxon sat as if struck. His shoulders sagged. He had been popular; now his popularity had a leak. People kept their distance. Some snapped photographs for proof; others wrote subtle posts about honesty and trust, and some wrote nothing at all — just a new pattern of absence.
This was punishment number two: public unraveling of reputation.
But the third punishment was the one I had wanted in secret. People who once claimed they'd stand by him at drunken parties and business lunches now turned away. A woman he had once invited to a weekend escaped by claiming a call. Men he considered pals subtly declined to join his conversation. The slow erosion of camaraderie is crueler than a scandal: it is the silence left in the chairs.
Jaxon tried to reassert himself by standing, to present an apology, but his words were thin, and no one wanted to make the effort to believe them.
My heart pounded. I hadn't expected pleasure to have edges, but it did. That the man who had bruised so many hearts should now be left to count the absence of friends felt, admittedly, like justice.
He wasn't arrested, he wasn't shouted off a cliff. He wasn't forced to kneel. His punishment was a modern one: the sudden drifting away of social warmth, the faces that would not look at him, the younger women who would not entertain his messages. He was left with his self and the consequences of a web he had spun for himself.
Cruz's final line that night — the one that made people nod and close their forks — was very simple.
"You will have to rebuild trust," he said. "Trust is the currency you spent foolishly. It is not easy to recover."
Jaxon looked at me, then at the woman who had left. He looked smaller than I remembered, and I felt nothing but a closing of a book.
The crowd dispersed quietly. People gave me sympathetic looks, or applause in loose form. Aliana hugged me and whispered, "Kinsley, you were brilliant." She was happy, and I was happy in that private, small victory way.
After that, life at work shifted like tectonic plates adjusting. Cruz and I had a new accord. We were careful at the office, and at night we were not. I stopped cleaning my mind like a criminal and instead let it be private in the sweet ways only he heard it. Sometimes I'd think of impossible, intimate scenes and he'd flush and offer a small, embarrassed smile. Other nights he'd call, low voice telling me to sleep.
When work threatened our careful balance, we'd navigate it with the care of sailors steering a small ship. There were moments of clumsy intimacy: him feeding me stubbornly at team dinners; me pretending like I needed someone to arrange my paperwork only to pull his sleeve and kiss his wrist.
Office gossip was inevitable. Kiana Dyer tried to undermine me once by hinting that Cruz and I were a show. He would answer with a look that said, "Stay out of it." He had become protective in the softest way: shielding me at meetings, rescuing me when I faltered in presentations with a phrase that saved me. "She knows the numbers," he'd say, plain and proud.
In private, he told me how frightening it had been to discover this odd power. "I heard you on a business call once," he told me, "and I thought I was losing my mind." He would laugh about it now, but his voice still had reserve. "It was almost as if the world had been turned up and only you were broadcast."
"Do you wish you couldn't hear me?" I asked once, foolish and curious.
He looked at me a long time, fingers laced. "Sometimes. But mostly, no. It's the strangest kindness to know you."
We built a life of small proofs. He was there when my scooter had a flat. He bought me coffee in the mornings and left a small sticky note on my keyboard that said, "Good luck." I wrote wine-bottle labels in my head, and he read the little sketches of life I was too shy to say aloud.
And because stories like ours always like to end with a small unique thing: once, when he was particularly embarrassed, he told me a strange detail.
"My ears," he said with a laugh that turned into a little groan. "They're like a liar. They turn pink when I hear you. I can't stop them."
"You are impossibly human," I told him. "And I love that because you blush."
He let out a sound that could have been a laugh or proof of relief. "Then blush in peace," he said.
It was a simple sentence and a promise in one. I believed him.
The End
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