Sweet Romance12 min read
My Contract, His Cold Eyes, and the Mole That Won
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I learned to count money the night he closed the door.
"One house, two cars..." I whispered, tapping the calculator like it was a tiny drum. The numbers sounded better than crying.
"Lea?" His voice from the doorway made me drop the calculator so hard it jumped once and died. Gabriel Conrad stood framed in dark, a man in a suit who looked as if he belonged behind glass. He watched the way my lips curled when I counted, and his eyebrows went up.
"With you leaving, you look happy." He said it like an observation. Not angry. Not soft. Just a fact.
"Am I?" I tried to stitch my face back into alarm. "No, no—"
He raised a hand. "Don't lie, Lea."
I blinked. I had rehearsed being heartbroken. I had practiced missing him like a religious duty. Instead my cheeks split with a grin I couldn't clamp down.
"You're smiling."
"Maybe I'm imagining things," I said. I tried to scowl, but the grin kept playing at the corner of my mouth. I slid the property paper deeper into the pillowcase like a child hiding candy.
"You're supposed to be my girlfriend," Gabriel said. He sounded surprised. "You said you loved me."
"I did." I said it fast. "I did, I did, I—"
He stepped in, let the door click shut behind him. "The contract ends today. I'll be staying for the quarantine. We'll be roommates." He said room-mate like it was an instruction manual.
"Roommates," I repeated, counting in my head. Roommates meant more nights with his shirts in my closet. Roommates meant access to his pantry, his expensive coffee. Roommates could be profitable if I played it right.
"Also," he added, looking past me at the pillow, at the way my fingers tightened, "no illusions."
I laughed out loud then, too loud. "Of course. Why would I have illusions? Unless you have another villa you forgot to tell me about."
He took off his coat and left it on the sofa like a flag. "Second floor study," he said. His voice smoothed into the same flat calm I'd learned to read as danger. "Stay out. The agreement stands."
That was the first night he slept upstairs in the study, and I slept with the property certificate beneath my pillow and calculations whispering in my ear. I had been his "girlfriend" on paper for two years. He had called the shots, paid the bills, signed my name on things. I knew how to perform.
"How long will she stay?" I asked the next morning, because I had to know.
"She is at the airport. She will be quarantined first." Gabriel said, like a man who had already strategized the chessboard.
"And you?"
"I'm stuck," he said, and his jaw formed a soft line. "We keep the rules. No games."
I learned his rules quickly. Wake up, make coffee for him, play the obedient girl if the cameras at his parties were near. When he watched me, it felt like being under a microscope. When he didn't, that same distance was a small knife.
One morning, he stopped me in the kitchen. "What are you wearing?" he asked.
I was wearing his oversized shirt as a dress, because I did not have anything else. "Not much," I admitted.
He looked at me as if surprised and, for a split second, there was something warm behind his eyes. "Here," he said, and threw two crisp shirts onto the bed. Later when he left for a meeting, I cooked and set a plate for him. He came down and examined it like a critic.
"This is your idea of love?" He eyed the instant noodles in my hand.
"You didn't say you wanted a banquet," I said, and set the bowl on the table. "This is the price."
"How much?" he asked.
"Ten bucks," I lied, and showed him the QR code with a flourish. Money could be an honest language.
He smirked and scanned it without a word. "Fair."
When he was around, his attention was a winter sun: sharp and rare. When he wasn't, he was law and logic and a man who did not believe in feelings. Once, when a video call from my friend Brecken snagged my screen, Gabriel watched the little square with a cold head tilt.
"Multiple lines are breach of contract," he said flatly. I flinched.
"He's just a friend," I blurted.
"Then prove it."
That day I learned how to improvise. I called Brecken a hundred times to stage a fake family argument, to show I had family and history and not an appointed lover. Brecken—who is loud and messy in a way real people are—came through with a messy, genuine warmth I wasn't paid to show.
"You okay?" he asked when we finally met at the tattoo studio. He had the kind of grin that bruised the air into light.
"I'm fine," I said. "Broke, but fine."
"Good. Let me take you somewhere," he said, sliding me behind him on his bike. He was the kind who threw his jacket at you and expected you to laugh. He was loud, and life with him felt like the sun.
"Why do you defend me so much?" I asked him once, watching him wash the plates like it was meditation.
"Because you stick to what you want," Brecken said, soap foam on his hands. "And because you'll let people make things easy for you if you let them."
"Even if the thing is the richest man in the city?" I teased, remembering Gabriel's underlined rule: keep distance.
"Especially then." Brecken smiled. "Don't get used to the velvet cages, Lea."
I had fallen in love with Gabriel in a way that made sense then: he was everything I had dreamt in a picture—quiet, wealthy, a man whose face your tongue stumbled over. I had lied on stage, played poor, recited lines of gratitude for a camera, made donors look like heroes. He didn't come to applaud that performance. He came to object to the performance itself, as if forms of honesty shamed him.
"Do you love me?" he asked me one night, the day we drank until the bottles were a messy landscape.
"Yes," I said more honestly than before. "I love money. I love not being cold. I love being safe. And I—maybe—like you."
He laughed, unexpectedly soft. "You are honest in the wrong way," he said, which made me laugh even more. It was a little tender, like a mistake.
That night he fell asleep on my shoulder the way a child would fall asleep: trustingly, temporarily. His head hitched and his breath warmed my neck. He murmured, "Sorry," like an apology for something I hadn't felt was owed.
"Why are you staying?" I asked the next day, because quarantine stretched like a long, thin rope between us.
"Because she's here," he said. The name of the white moonlight had weight—Claudia Kristensen—my old schoolmate and the woman whose picture lived in an old wooden frame on Gabriel's desk. "And I need to be near her."
"Then why leave me a house?" I asked.
He didn't answer. He put his fingers on the document under my pillow once and then left it there like a present you didn't want to open.
Weeks passed in small collisions. He was abrupt, then unexpectedly kind. He would help me with homework one evening, then be a stone the next. He would wince when I burned rice, and then scold me for being too loud when the kettle boiled.
"Tell me your story," he said one midnight, when the rain tapped the glass.
I told him the truth. About father gone in a crash, about the debts, the day mother went missing. I told him about being handed a script of sadness to read onstage, how we were told tears were better for the camera. I told him about Brecken who once smashed a shampoo bottle over a man's head and then sat on the stairs smiling like he'd done a good thing.
"Why did you let them make you into a story?" Gabriel asked, quietly.
"Because stories feed us," I said. "Some stories buy food."
He was strangely quiet and then light. "I thought I understood you because I had bought pieces of your life," he admitted. "A car, a deposit. But I didn't know how to buy the real parts."
"Maybe you can't," I said. And then, because we both liked edges, "Unless you pay more."
We drank, we hurt, we agreed on nothing, and then one night the city cleared of quarantine and we went out. I drank more than I had planned. I cried when he smiled and said, "I thought I was the only one who didn't play along."
The years had taught me that a man's softness could be a good trick, and fear kept me rehearsing distrust. But when he pulled me close that night, his lips brushed my ear and he said, "I will try."
"Try what?" I asked.
"Not to be only a contract," he said.
But there were other people on the board. Callahan Sorensen—young, entitled, the nephew Gabriel's family liked—kept orbiting us like a bird that thinks too highly of its shadow. He smiled the smile of someone who believed his money had already bought everything in the world.
"Stay away from my sister," Callahan said once, loud enough that the table fell silent. "Or your girl won't like it."
"Which sister?" I asked, because the table was full of faces I didn't know.
He blinked, laughed, and then the next week his hand was tangling with Claudia's in the town square as if ownership were contagious.
"He's your nephew," I told Gabriel a day he had come home pale. "So you either let him do as he pleases or you stop him."
"I will not be embarrassed by him," he said. "If he makes trouble, I will fix it."
He did not fix it at once. Instead Callahan pushed small, sharp things into my life: a rumor here, a whisper there. He let others think I had been bought because that made a good joke. I tried to ignore it. I smiled at parties and kept my invoices hidden in a folder that smelled faintly of coffee.
One night, Brecken slammed a cup down and said, "Enough."
"Enough what?" I asked, because I didn't know where his temper came from.
"Enough letting them talk," he said. "Tomorrow we go to the charity gala. You listen to me."
I hated being the center of a public thing. I had been a prop for so many cameras that my skin flinched whenever lights pointed at me. But Brecken had a plan: a public showdown that would expose Callahan and leave no shadow he could hide under.
The next evening the city was full of glossy cars and perfume. The charity hall smelled like lemon and lies. Gabriel came in quietly, his shoulders a calm cliff. Claudia was at his side, other people's idea of a girl made for pictures. Callahan strutted like a man who had already read the reviews.
"Don't do anything dramatic," Gabriel whispered, and I wanted to laugh; everything I did felt dramatic.
Brecken had arranged for the event host to show a "surprise" video about donors. The screens flickered, and the hall went hush. I felt every gaze as if it were gravity.
"Good evening," the host said. "Tonight we celebrate truth."
The lights dimmed. The video started with a montage of charity photos. Then the footage cut to a phone, a shaky clip recorded behind a door. It showed Callahan speaking in a low voice, snapping a contract and laughing as he boasted about "buying influence" and "setting people up to look needy." He named prices, and he named favors.
I couldn't breathe. Around me, people made small sounds—clicks of recognition. The clip ended with Callahan's face, caught red-handed, stunned.
"Who sent this?" someone hissed.
I stepped forward before I thought. "Me." My voice measured, small but loud enough. "I did."
"Why?" a woman asked.
"Because he lied about people," I said. "Because he made a joke out of lives. Because he said masks are for the cameras and not for people."
Callahan's face went white. "This is a setup!" he shouted. "This is blackmail!"
"Is it?" Brecken yelled back. "Or is it you being you? Because you're always saying awful things when you think no one hears you."
The hall was a tidal wave. People leaned forward. Cameras panned. Callahan looked like a man who had dropped his knife and discovered it was made of glass.
Gabriel stood up slowly. He walked to the stage like a tide coming in. He didn't shout. He didn't pull anyone. He reached out and touched Callahan's shoulder—the touch of a man who owned the sky—and then he said, "Leave."
"Are you serious?" Callahan stammered. "What are you doing?"
"Leave," Gabriel repeated. His voice was calm. "We don't need your kind here."
For a moment Callahan tried to protest, to wave his hands, to call on his family's name. But the footage was already doing his work. People had phones up. The whispers were quick as moths. The cameras ate his face and fed it into social media.
"Get him out," someone called from the edge of the podium.
He was escorted out, not by bouncers but by a society that had suddenly decided it despised him. The host wiped his hands of the mess. The donors whispered. The tabloids had a new dessert. Callahan's allies left their chairs like rats leaving a sinking ship.
That scene—the punishment of Callahan—was not just a tidy end. It played out like a slow unwrapping. He went from smirk to denial to anger. His shoulders tightened. He tried to laugh. He tried to claim he was joking. Then he saw his phone—messages, videos, tags—and something in his face broke into panic.
"You're being filmed," a woman shouted. "It's on my story."
"I'm telling my husband," another whispered.
The last layer was the worst for him. People he had thought would cushion him did not. They turned away. They took their photos away from him. A few people clapped when he was pushed toward the exit. The hallway was a theater and he was the bad play.
He begged, at first small, then loud. "Listen—" he tried to reach for Gabriel, who only looked at him with something colder than disappointment. "Please—"
Someone recorded him kneeling on the marble steps, phone lights like cold stars. The kneel lasted long enough for him to look small. People took pictures, not like vultures but like citizens marking a lesson.
I watched and I felt no joy. I felt a hollow, like the belly of a theater where a show had ended. People around me murmured. Some took videos. A few applauded. One person muttered, "About time."
Callahan's breakdown was raw and public. He cried in a way that was not cinematic—ugly and human. He asked for forgiveness. He begged for privacy. He tried to bargain with the cameras. The cameras answered with glassy silence.
When the doors finally closed behind him, the room exhaled. Gabriel stayed, collected himself, and then returned to my side.
"You didn't have to do that," he said softly.
"I did," I answered. "Someone had to make sure he couldn't do it again."
We walked out into the rain. The evening seemed changed, like how a room changes after a window opens. Brecken slid his arm through mine and squeezed.
"You okay?" he asked.
"I'm okay," I said. "It hurts, but it needed to end."
"Good," he said. "Because you belong to yourself, not to his gossip."
Gabriel was quiet for a long time. His hand found mine, not like a contract but like a confession.
"I should have protected you sooner," he said.
"You should have," I echoed. "But better late than never."
He squeezed back. It was small. It was human.
After the gala, things between us rearranged. Gabriel stopped sleeping in the study sometimes. He left a shirt for me without sarcasm. He started doing tiny kindnesses that were not investments—bringing the kind of coffee I liked, asking me to teach him a math problem, sharing a joke. He was still corporate and cold in the morning, but at night he would light a lamp and read to himself just to have the same soft light on his face.
I was not innocent. I had plans, files, a ledger in my head. I still counted. But something else counted too: his thumb finding the mole at my waist the first time without asking. It felt like a secret stamp.
One afternoon, as I packed the last of my things into my own apartment—my own, with no names on the door—Gabriel sat on the bed and watched quietly.
"Why are you leaving?" he asked.
"Because I want to," I said.
"You will be okay?"
"I will be fine." I folded a shirt and put it into a box. I tried to keep my hands steady.
He reached out and left a small paper on top of the pile. It was not a contract. It was a tiny note with one word.
"Stay."
I laughed. "That's your new clause?"
He didn't smile. "No." He cleared his throat. "Stay if you want. Stay if the house is a home. Not for the deed."
"That's dangerous," I said, because I loved the safety of danger. "You know dangerous men."
"I know people who hide behind numbers," he said. "I used to be one."
I looked at his face, at the warmth in his eyes. For the first time I could see a man who was learning not to be only a ledger.
"I don't want to be your invoice," I said. "I want to be a person."
"Then be," he said.
The mole at my waist—tiny and like a punctuation mark—felt like a secret to the world. He found it with a thumb one quiet evening and smiled like he'd discovered a star.
"You found it," I said.
"I had been looking," he admitted.
We didn't seal things with a ring or a speech. We sealed it with small days: a bowl of soup, a math question solved, a jacket to ward off rain. The world still had its judgments and tabloid lights. Callahan's scandal had burned for a week and then the news cycle moved on. But Brecken kept texting me stupid memes, and Gabriel texted a photo of a coffee mug with a bad joke written on it.
One night, on my bedside table, the property certificate folded like an old joke, I whispered, "I won, didn't I?"
"You did," Gabriel said, and he sounded like he meant it.
When I finally closed the door behind me in a house with my own name on the mailbox, I put the deed at the bottom of the drawer. I left it there like a memory of how I had learned to bargain with the world.
I slept, and in the morning my phone buzzed. It was Brecken, sending a photo of him and a pizza. "And you?" he wrote.
I typed back a picture of the mole by my waist, a silly emoji, and then a text: "Found: more than money."
He replied with eight laughing faces and one heart. Gabriel called soon after, and I answered.
"Coffee?" he asked.
"Yes," I said.
"Bring the calculator," he joked.
I laughed. "No. Bring a spoon."
He was silent for a beat and then said, "Okay."
We met at a small café that smelled like cinnamon. He ordered two coffees. I stirred mine, counted nothing, and listened.
"Do you regret anything?" I asked, because it was a hard thing to ask.
"Yes." He looked at me like an honest man. "I regret being late."
"Me too," I said.
He reached out without ceremony and touched the mole at my waist over the thin fabric of my shirt. "Don't ever put a number on yourself," he said.
I smiled. "I won't."
The rain outside wrapped the city in a soft hush. The world would continue to try to name us, to sell our stories and fold them into headlines. But here, in a small café with two coffee cups and the quiet press of his thumb at my waist, I felt for once that I was something without a price.
The End
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