Sweet Romance18 min read
My Drunken Mistake, His Cold Smile — and the Button That Told the Truth
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1.
"I can't believe you did this," I hissed into my phone, my words low because the man in my bed was still asleep.
"Did what?" Helena sounded as groggy as I felt. "Bi, you sound awful."
I turned my head and watched Drew Chaney sleep. His jaw relaxed, one side of his face pressed slightly into the pillow, a lock of dark hair grazing his forehead. A faint bruise marred the pale curve of his shoulder. My fingers traced the air where those marks were, because I knew they matched the outline in my memory.
"Don't play dumb," I said. "What happened with Drew?"
There was a pause, then Helena's sleepy voice, "Drew? You mean the director who sits across the corridor? Why are you—"
"I—" I swallowed. "Never mind. I'll tell you later."
The phone clicked. I almost cursed, but heart in my throat I tapped it back to life. Drew shifted, eyelids fluttering. He opened his eyes and saw me staring, and his mouth formed a small, brief smile that stopped at the corners like a curtain.
"You call that a couch?" he asked, and his voice was rough with sleep.
My cheeks heat-rushed. His hand slid out from under the blanket and landed on my wrist. He tugged. I lost balance and sat back down hard. Pain flared through my side. For a moment I simply watched him — solid, distant, calm. The bruises were worse up close. He looked strange, guilty in some way, but also like someone who'd had a dangerously good night's rest.
"What do you mean?" I managed.
He smirked. "You looked very convincing last night."
I remembered the recording — the awful little snatches of my voice Helena had sent in a group chat. "You told me to kiss you. Just once. That's all I wanted."
"Give me money," Drew said, bored. "Or I'll share the recordings with your office."
"Are you kidding me?" I said, the hot rage replacing the dull ache. "You recorded me? You blackmail me and call it a joke?"
Drew's eyes darkened. He shrugged. "You were drunk and offered. You can pay me, or you can sign a little contract and repay me with… services."
I stared at him. "What do you mean 'services'?"
"You already said you'd take responsibility," he said coolly. "This is a cleaner way."
2.
"Tell me you didn't actually sign anything," Helena hissed when I finally explained, over another phone call later that day, wrapped in my robe and clutching an ice pack to my ankle.
"I signed," I admitted. "Two months. What else could I do? He threatened to share those clips. If anyone in the company saw—"
Helena swore. "Bi, you know who he is. Drew Chaney didn't just walk into your life by accident. He stole your promotion last year—"
"I know," I said. "That's the worst part. I worked my butt off. Then he came from nowhere and became my director. He made 'assistant' my official title rather than 'senior' and—"
"Still, selling yourself?" Helena's voice softened. "There must be some way to fight this."
"I don't have the cash, Lena. I spent a fortune to move into the apartment opposite his. You remember, the one with the tiny balcony? I thought proximity would help. Instead, I have to sign an idiotic 'work arrangement'."
"How bad is the clause?"
"It says: two months of personal assistance, non-negotiable. I have to do what he asks."
There was a hard silence, then Helena said, "So you're his shadow. You set the record then. Bi—"
That night, in the bathroom, I faced myself in the mirror. The bruises on my arm had faded into purple. I touched them and felt the ridiculous heat of humiliation. I wasn't proud. I wasn't wise. I was tired and human and had wanted to keep my life intact. So I signed. And the contract read like a sentence.
3.
At work it was hell. The office had always been just awkward, but now it felt poisonous. People whispered. Cason Martins, Drew's overworked assistant, avoided my eyes and then, always, found a way to spill gossip.
"Bi," Cason said one day in the tea room, voice urgent. "You need to know—"
"What?" I snapped, holding my mug so tight it warmed my palms.
"People think you were making a move for Orlando," he said, lowering his voice, which made the gossip sound more official. "You and Orlando Fontaine—"
"Orlando?" I blinked. Orlando Fontaine was the gentle English teacher who'd stolen Helena's heart that afternoon. He was not mine. He had married Helena. I had been her bridesmaid. My face burned.
"That day," Cason continued, "you grabbed Drew, right? People say you were crying and clung to him because—"
"Because I was happy for Helena," I said. "Because I was drunk, sure. You don't need to help them make up stories."
Cason's expression was guilty. "Sorry. I shouldn't have said—"
"Of course," I said, forcing a laugh. "Thanks for the tip."
I wanted to throttle Cason. I wanted to throttle Drew. The recordings in Drew's phone looped in my head — my drunken slurs, a smeared confession I'd never meant to make, my voice offering him silly things like pieces of myself. The thought of a team chat blowing up with that made bile rise in my throat.
4.
The weirdest thing was that Drew's first few demands were maddeningly businesslike.
"Two months," he said, leaning against my desk. "Personal assistance. No questions."
"I am not your servant," I told him.
"You're contracted," he said. "And you owe me."
One night he flicked a recording to my messenger. There I was, in a city-voiced blur: "I said take a bite, you—" My cheeks flamed red.
"Destroy it," I begged.
"That won't be easy," he said. "But I've made a deal. We can arrange a different repayment."
I felt sick. "Your 'different repayment' involves what? Do you know how badly this will hurt my career?"
His face softened in a way that made my heart stupidly clench. "Then be clever," he said. "Make me like you."
I laughed, because what else could I do? Make him like me. That sounded like a fairytale, not a contract.
5.
"Morning, Bianca," Drew said in the elevator the next week. He was immaculate in a navy suit, hair combed back. He looked every inch the man who could intimidate a room with a tilt of his head.
"Morning," I answered, fingers pressed to my coffee cup as if it were a talisman.
"You brought the café's almond croissant today," he observed. "It's nice."
I wanted to say "I brought it for Orlando" or "I don't care about croissants," but instead I said, "Yes. Their baker is very talented."
Drew's mouth twitched. "You always talk in that careful way that sounds like an interview," he said. "Relax."
At lunch, he cornered me by the pantry.
"Do you like being seen?" he asked.
"Seen by whom?" I said, hoping the obvious answer — everyone at work — didn't slip out.
"By me."
My heart did an embarrassing leap. I turned it into a cough.
6.
Helena's wedding had been a rush of sugar and flowers and the sad, private ache of watching the person you love stand with someone else. I had been drunk at the reception — I admit it — and I had clung to the wrong man. It was a night of tears misnamed and confessions made without permission.
"Bi," Helena said when she handed me two boxes of macaroons and a pleading look, "please. Help me. Talk to Orlando's cousin. He's perfect for you."
"Perfect?" I snorted. "You used the word 'perfect' to describe someone who has the smugness of an entire conference."
"Just ask him about Orlando," Helena whispered. "Please."
So I did what I always do when I'm stuck: I tried to be useful. I made small talk, fumbled jokes, and eventually she thanked me by calling me the godmother for her future baby. I laughed and cried and did the brave thing. Then I drank. Which is not a recipe for dignity.
When the photos from the wedding surfaced, Helena sent me a video where I — in my sister's red bridesmaid dress — toppled onto Drew's back and hugged him. I wanted the earth to open and swallow me whole.
7.
There were also good people: Eldridge Nunez, an actor who'd been my neighbor when we were teenagers, reappeared into my life like sunlight. "Bi," he said one afternoon in the studio, cheeks rosy from filming, "you shouldn't be treating yourself like this."
"He drags my coffee away," I muttered.
Eldridge grinned. "That's my line. You always bring pastries for everyone. Why do you do it?"
"Because I like to see people smile," I admitted.
"Then keep doing it," he said. "Don't let one man define your value."
That was the kind of advice that was easy to nod to while your chest was full of thorny feelings for the man in question.
8.
The company retreat was another episode of embarrassment and unexpected tenderness. We went up to the mountain for a hike and stayed in a homely guesthouse that brewed its own plum wine. At dinner people drank. Drew drank. I did not.
Drew, ever the dramatic when he wanted to be, fell asleep against my shoulder like a careless prince. Then he was heavier, and his fingers slid across my waist. A small warmth spread through me like spilled tea.
"Wake up," I whispered and shook him. He stirred, then clamped his palm over my hand.
"How many times will you do that?" he murmured, half-asleep.
"Do what?" I asked.
"Fall into me."
I didn't answer because the truth lodged in my throat.
9.
When my ankle twisted on the edge of his bed — the ridiculous thing that stopped us from spiraling into every cliché — Drew's hand on my back felt too patient for a man who had blackmailed me. There is always a curious human capacity to be tender to the people who have hurt us.
"I'm fine," I lied.
"You are not," he said simply. He walked me to the front desk, got an ice pack, found the first aid kit. He was annoyingly competent.
"You're acting like you care," I told him one night in my corridor, a sliver of moonlight painting his profile silver.
"I care," he said. "At least I care enough to make sure you don't limp away."
I blinked. "That's not how any of this was supposed to go."
"It goes where it goes," he replied.
10.
The twisted apex of our ridiculous story was the day he told me he'd prefer that I pick him over Orlando. "Pick me," he said. It was almost a challenge. "Pick me."
I laughed in disbelief. "You want me to choose you?"
"Between him and me," he said. "Yes."
"I never wanted Orlando," I said truthfully. "You assumed things because you saw my friendship with him as encroaching, and it's not."
"Isn't it?" he asked. "Then why did you cling to me at the wedding?"
Because I was drunk. Because I was sad. Because the person I loved was marrying someone else and I had to touch someone to stop the ache for a second. The truth — the honest, dull truth — was that I wanted security. But I didn't want to be second choice. I didn't want to be a consolation.
He studied me, and for a terrifying moment I thought he'd walk away and use the recordings anyway. Then he said, "I don't want to be your fallback."
"Then don't be," I said, the words bare and childish and real.
He laughed, a dry sound. "Fine. We'll be official."
11.
We were clumsy lovers at first. We argued in public and made up under fluorescent lights. We were each other's paradox — my boss and my bedfellow, cold and sulky sometimes, then strangely attentive. I learned how he liked his coffee, the way he absentmindedly scrubbed his thumb across the seam of his shirt when thinking, how he hated the way his mother used to pick brides as if they were heirloom silver.
He did not change overnight. We had fights about fairness at work. He remained, in many respects, the same man: a man who had recorded me when I'd been vulnerable and used it as leverage. The memory of that day sat between us, a small, sharp stone.
12.
"Have you ever thought about what happens if someone hears the recording?" I asked once, fingers tucked into the sweater he had left on my chair.
"What, you mean if everyone finds out you were drunk and embarrassing?" he said.
"I'm not embarrassed about being drunk," I answered. "I'm embarrassed about being used."
He was silent. Then, softer, "You are allowed to be angry."
He should have been the one apologizing for the blackmail. Instead he offered me protection — a puzzling half-apology that made my heart tilt toward him again.
13.
And then came the reckoning — the public punishment that would have been unthinkable back when we'd only been an employer and a desperate contractor.
It happened at a company gala in the main conference hall. The hall was full: executives, colleagues, clients, the nice waitstaff who remembered our orders. There was a short awards ceremony at the front, lights like stars over a theater, glass tumblers clinking. I had been sitting near the back, nursing a soda and wondering uncomfortably about how I had let things get so complicated.
"Bi," Cason hissed when he found me near the dessert table. "There is something you should see. Now."
He looked nervous, like someone who'd swallowed a lie too large for comfort. I followed him to a side room where a few of the junior staff were clustered—familiar faces, whispers sharp as knives. Cason handed me his phone and there, in a group chat I had somehow not Known about, was a message tossed from one colleague to another: "Bi, play this at the afterparty. It's hilarious."
My fingers trembled as I clicked. The file was the worst of the recordings. I felt my face go cold. I was about to delete it, the same way I'd tried to remove those moments from Drew's phone months ago, when Cason's other hand covered mine.
"Don't," he said. His voice was small. "Someone put a copy out. They plan to play it now, as a joke. They think it'll be funny because you grabbed Drew at the wedding. They don't realize—"
"Realize what?" I asked.
He blurted, "They don't realize Drew staged it. He recorded intentionally to get leverage over you. He worked with two others to make you look bad."
"Who—" I began.
Cason swallowed. "It's in the backup. I found more messages that say 'use it to keep her in line.'"
The air in the room went icy. I felt anger coiling in my chest like a snake. Shame burned hot; being plotted against was one thing, but to let others laugh at it like it was a stage performance was another.
We walked back into the hall. Onstage a director was making a joke, polite laughter bleeding into murmurs. The moment the lights dimmed and people tuned to the speech, I made a choice I never thought I'd have the courage to make.
I tapped the emcee's shoulder. "Excuse me," I said, loud enough that a few nearby heads turned. "Can I have a minute?"
The emcee blinked, startled. "Uh—sure, Miss Dodson?"
I climbed the little steps to the stage, pulse banging in my ears. The microphone felt heavy in my hand. People turned fully then, the sort of gaze that can make your inner bones visible.
"This is awkward," I began, and felt the silence deepen. "But I need to say something."
"Bi—" Cason mouthed, but I kept going.
"People think a joke is harmless," I said. "They think humiliating someone is entertainment. I was told to be quiet. I was told there would be consequences if I spoke. I was recorded without consent. This was organized."
A rustle of shocked voices.
"I won't let a group of colleagues stage someone's shame as a party trick," I said. "Not for gossip. Not for votes. Not for laughs."
Someone from the back laughed, low and uneasy. "You can't be serious, Bi—"
"You'll see," I said. My hand didn't shake now. "Cason, please."
He stepped forward and connected his laptop to the stage screen. The hall dimmed to a hush. I had arranged this by a thread—text exchanges, saved drafts, a backup of the trafficking of messages Cason had found. The screen flickered to life. The first image was a message with a timestamp. The second image was the text chain where Drew had sent the file and written, "Use it; she'll sign anything."
On the big screen the messages were visible to everyone.
A ripple of sound spread through the hall — confusion, disbelief. Drew's face drained color, though he tried to keep his expression controlled. His mother, Gloria Griffin, who had come as a guest, looked stunned. The man next to her, his colleague, turned away. For the first time I saw the blush of shame on Drew's face that wasn't coy or calculated — it was raw.
I kept going. "I was coerced," I said slowly, so that each syllable landed. "I was weak. I made mistakes. But someone recording another human being and trading that person's dignity like a commodity is not—"
"Bianca," Drew said, from the edge of the stage. He sounded small. "Don't. Please don't—"
"Let me finish," I said. The room had become a court. People were murmuring like bees. I felt the weight of all the eyes and let it be.
"When I signed that contract," I said, "I felt I had no option. I was terrified that what had happened would be turned into a weapon. I was right. But the weapon belonged to someone else before this. Someone used others to push me into a corner."
On the screen now were the worse bits: messages between Drew and a colleague that spoke of 'keeping her in line' and 'make an example'. There were details — times, a plan. I watched as the man's face paled. His defenses, the usual magnetism, the half-smile — it started to crack.
He tried to speak, and his voice hitched. "Bi, it's—"
"You sent those?" I asked. It wasn't a question.
"I—" He opened his mouth and closed it. The hall felt like it was narrowing to the size of a coin. "We thought you were—"
"That it's a game?" I finished for him. The audacity made me sick.
On the balcony above, a cluster of junior staff members whispered that they had felt bad afterwards. Someone recorded the admission and forwarded it to HR. Within minutes my phone buzzed with messages. The clip played a deputy director saying, "It was a prank; we didn't mean for it to go that far."
Drew's face moved through stages: surprise, denial, anger, blinking helplessness, a sudden honesty at the corner of his eyes — that he had been a part of it. "I never thought—" he started.
"That's what people say," I said. "But actions leave marks."
The first real sound from the crowd was a sharp intake of breath from Gloria Griffin. "Drew," she said quietly. "What is this?"
He couldn't meet her eyes. He was the man who had once made his mother's approval a ploy. Now she looked at him like a mother looking at a child who'd broken something precious. The hush deepened. Someone in the audience took a photo. A woman near the front stood up. "This is unacceptable," she said. "We shouldn't—"
"This is harassment," another voice said. "He manipulated a subordinate."
"What do you have to say for yourself?" someone inquired from the back.
Drew opened his mouth, then closed it again. That was the collapse. For months he had been the person who had joked and got away with it. Now the theater that had allowed him to perform on a private stage dissolved. He had to stand in the light and be seen.
He was visibly shaking. "I—" he tried. "I thought it would—"
"Be clever?" someone else finished.
He staggered back a step, looking like a man who had been found out.
"How could you?" Gloria whispered, voice brittle. "You—"
His face crumpled. For the first time I saw such a real collapse that it almost made me ache. He looked around at the colleagues who had cheered him on at meetings, the clients who trusted him, the mother who had believed in him.
There were noises of disappointment, a rustle of jackets as people shifted away. One of the junior team members, a girl with a camera slung over her shoulder, walked forward and said, "You humiliated her. That was cruel."
"Isn't there some HR rule?" another voice called. "You can't record people."
"HR will handle it," the CEO said, and his tone was flat.
Drew didn't speak anymore. He stood there, stripped of his usual armor, and the hall watched as his composure — his carefully curated self — unspooled. A person who had thought himself untouchable, who had used a cheap weapon to keep a woman in a corner, was now forced to confront his own image on a screen and the disgust of an audience.
"Get off the stage," I said finally to the emcee. "This isn't an awards show. It's a reckoning."
They took the microphone back, and the lights went up. People were talking now, some in anger, some in sympathy, but mostly in a new, cautious way. The company, embarrassed, promised an investigation. There were stunned faces and broken smiles. Cason stood beside me, his jaw clenched, his eyes ashamed at having been part of such a culture.
Drew left the hall quickly, shoulders hunched, his face pale. Some people followed him with scorned looks. Others whispered about the career he had built, and whether it would survive.
I felt no victory. Standing on that stage with the lights in my eyes, I felt the aftertaste of humiliation and the hard, bright edge of satisfaction. Justice did not erase what had happened to me. It made the world around us look different. It made certain doors close and other ones open. It reminded everyone that what we do in private can and will be seen.
14.
The aftermath was messy. HR got involved. People took sides. The gallery of our small company became a courtroom of whispers. Drew apologized, eventually — a clumsy, stuttering thing that sounded more like damage control than true contrition. His mother wrote him an email that was kinder than the looks she'd given him in the hall. The junior staff who had conspired admitted they were foolish and issued statements. Some were fired from menial responsibilities; an executive was reprimanded. The punishment was not theatrical in the way some would have liked — no public shaming beyond the exposure itself — but it was real: demotions, mandatory training, the loss of reputation that perhaps he would never fully mend.
Drew's reaction was the thing that changed him. At first he begged me privately not to ruin him, his voice raw. "Bi, please," he said. "Give me a chance—"
"Chance for what?" I asked. "To do it again?"
He didn't answer. He just stood there, a defeated figure, and for the first time in our entire absurd, terrible relationship, I felt his humility.
The colleagues who watched him break looked at me differently. Some with pity, some with apology. The woman who'd stood up at the gala came by my desk and said, "I'm sorry. We were careless."
In the days after, Drew stopped his teasing. He stopped being the weaponized man. He became quietly attentive, helpful in ways that were not sexual. He returned work documents promptly, corrected slides for junior employees without making a show of it. When the promotions came around months later, no one dared suggest his name the same way. When a client called and asked about him, people replied with the flat tone of people who had learned something hard.
15.
For us, the most important thing wasn't the punishment. It was the way he changed. After the gala, he sat with me on the roof of my building four nights in a row. Not with the games of seduction that had marked some of our early nights. He sat and listened.
"Why did you do it?" I asked him.
His jaw worked. He would not, for a long time, make excuses.
"I was young and stupid," he said finally. "I loved the idea of control. I thought that if I could steer the world, I'd never get hurt. That's selfish."
"You're sorry," I said.
"I am," he said. "And I don't want you to forgive me because it's easy. I want to earn it. If you'll let me."
I looked at the moon reflected in his eyes. "Earning it doesn't mean you get to be my owner," I said. "It means you respect me. It means you never hurt me again."
"I won't," he said.
We spent months rebuilding. It wasn't romantic in the movie way. It was quiet. I watched him take blame when appropriate. I learned he could be kind without strings. There were still nights I wanted to throttle him for being too cool, but then he'd show up with soup, or he'd fix my phone, or he'd stand up for me in meetings when my words were steamrolled. Those small things, piled together, began to change what resentment had carved inside me.
16.
And still, being in his orbit had its pleasures. He had his moments of warmth — the way he'd make me laugh at work, the small touches under a table, the way he learned the names of the pastries I loved. Once, during a board meeting, he slipped a note into my palm: "You won me over. For now." I wrote back, "Don't be dramatic." He smirked, and for a moment the old tension softened into something like safety.
But the story never quite smoothed the edges of the past. People remembered. The company adjusted. We adapted.
17.
Months later, in the quiet after the storm, we did something we hadn't planned. On a lazy Sunday, he asked me to come with him to the registry office.
"Drew," I said, surprised. "What about the plan we joked about? Is this—"
"Yes," he said. "I know it's sudden. But I've had a lot of time to think. I'm tired of being someone else. I want to be honest in the simplest terms."
He pulled out a small ring, plain and unassuming, and it took me a long second to register. The ring fit my finger. It was absurd and tender and utterly him. He smiled that crooked smile like a slipper in a doorway.
"I love you," he said.
I laughed, then cried in vertiginous waves. "I love you too," I said, because after a long, strange road, I did.
We registered quietly. There was no fanfare. Gloria wrapped me in a tight hug and told me, "You look very happy." My father, who had argued once at dinner, sloshed his wine and declared that this was the best plan he had ever seen.
I thought, as we walked out hand in hand, of the black button I'd once fished from his sofa — the one I'd held and thought of as an emblem of the night that had started everything. I slipped the little button into my pocket. It had been a small, silly thing that tied our strange beginning to the honest life we were trying to build.
18.
We were not perfect. We never became one of those couples where everything was easy. We argued about deadlines, about whose turn it was to do dishes, about who would pick up Cason from an after-work meeting when he had to catch a train. But our foundation was a harder, truer thing. We had been tested publicly. He had been forced to face himself in front of all the people who had loved his charisma and judged his games. He had been punished — publicly, palpably, painfully — and he had learned humility.
As for those at the company who had once joined his laughter, many came to apologize quietly. Some did not. Company gossip is like a river that never dries — it flows and sometimes becomes clear. I forgave some because forgiveness is softer than vengeance. I never pretended the wound had never happened.
And sometimes, late at night, I'd wake and find his hand on my ankle, thumb tracing the faint scars I kept from the night I fouled the bed's edge. We would both smile, a little crookedly, and the past would lie there like a map that we no longer needed to consult. We had found a route forward.
19.
The punishment had not been a spectacle of cruelty. It had been a moment when the world decided to stop pretending that jokes are harmless when they wound. It had been when the crowd that once applauded cheap tricks watched a man stand and recognize what he'd done.
In that hall where lights had shone, my words had been small but true. "Actions leave marks." They had. The marks were not only on my skin. They were on his conscience, on the way people looked at him, on the cost of learning a hard lesson. He paid, and he changed. That was a kind of justice that wasn't theatrical, but it was real.
20.
In the end it came down to small things: Drew making me tea the way I liked it, me slipping notes into his briefcase to remind him his mother had called, the way we both used the language we'd developed in private — little jokes that only we understood. The button stayed in my pocket for a long time, a tiny, blunt thing that reminded me how close I'd come to being someone else's punchline.
One night, when the rain had made the city smell like white paper and boiled tea, we lay in bed listening to the hiss of the faucet and the quiet of the city. I turned and kissed him, brief and sure.
"Did you ever think this would happen?" I whispered.
He made a noise that was half-laugh, half-sigh. "No," he said. "But I've always liked how impetuous you are."
"And I've always liked how infuriating you can be," I said.
He kissed me again, this time long enough that the rain forgot to be loud. "Don't ever change," he murmured.
"Only if you don't," I replied.
We both laughed. The little black button in my pocket felt warm through my jeans.
And for once, the past no longer felt like a weapon. It felt like a map — a winding, imperfect map — to where we had ended, together.
The End
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