Sweet Romance11 min read
My Ex, a Police Car, and a Thousand Little Chances
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I hit a police car and then my life hit the only person who could still undo a hundred old hurts.
"Officer—" I started, voice trembling and useless, because my Beetle was small and my stomach was not.
"Refuse to settle privately." Foster Aguilar said it like a fact, like a verdict.
I looked up and saw him: the same sharp jaw, the same deep eyes. "Foster." I tried to smile. It came out thin.
Traffic had been a slow soup of horns. I was late, my heart drum-tight because Camilla had texted at the stupidest moment: "SIS, I NEED YOU. GET ME OUT." I forgot to silence my phone. I hit pause on the episode I was streaming, cursed, and drove into a knot of cars. Five minutes became an hour of inches. My phone buzzed on the passenger seat, I reached, my foot slipped, and—thump.
"Young lady, you dare hit a police car?" the officer at the driver side laughed.
"I'm so sorry—my friend—I'm trying to help her—I'll pay, I swear." I babbled, sincere to the bone.
The officer snorted. "We'll take a report. No private settlements."
A voice from the passenger side said, "Foster, are you almost done?" and then—my whole breath went missing.
"Foster?" I whispered.
He looked at me like he had looked at me once, the first time, under a hotel chandelier. "Sofia Chapman, you haven't improved your driving," he said, and the mouth quirked in a way I had not seen in years.
Camilla's voice on the phone turned into high-pitched panic and then a relief scream when she saw me. "Sofi! You came! Thank God!"
I mouthed to Foster, "Can you... please—" and tried the oldest trick in the book: a soft, pleading face.
He folded businesslike. "Official business. No private settlement. Come with me to the station."
"Come on," I tried again, "I can just transfer—"
"Come with me," he repeated.
My Beetle followed his cruiser like a stubborn pup. We arrived and people blinked at the spectacle: a woman caught in headlights of memory, a police cruiser parked under brighter fluorescent bulbs that made no one look pretty. I went into the small room with Foster and a wave of nausea.
"Name?" he asked.
"Sofia Chapman."
"Age?"
"Twenty-three."
"Single?" he paused and then, softer, "Yes." He had always been able to read me before I even decided to show him the page.
They took statements from me and from Camilla. They took a photograph for insurance. Foster slid a pen to me and said, "Sign." I signed. He slid the paper back and, almost casually, said, "I'll call you when the insurance decides the damage." Then he looked up, and something like a lock clicked soft and private between us.
"Foster." I used an endearment that's older than two exes should allow. "You should call, though. You know, later?"
He raised an eyebrow, the old playfully cruel edge: "Former girlfriend, I will be fair."
Everyone's heads turned. Camilla's jaw dropped in perfect entertainment. I bowed to the absurdity and played to the crowd. "I will wait for your call all night," I said in a babyish voice that made them genuinely believe I was pulling off the greatest theater of reconciliation.
Foster walked out first. He left the door open like a man who never intended to slam anything shut. I followed like a moon in his orbit.
After the station things calmed down, Camilla and I stepped into the cooling air. "You okay?" she asked. Her eyes were bright with mischief. "Girl, you made him deal with you in public—clap."
"Shut up." I threw my scarf over my face and laughed a little. "Let's eat. My treat."
She grabbed my arm like a life preserver. "Finally, we can celebrate your terrible decision-making."
We staggered to a late-night BBQ place and drank and watched small couples lick at each other's ears across steaming skewers. I couldn't help looking, and when I did Camilla hissed at me, "Don't. You're in the danger zone." I forgot all about danger; there was only a dull, flaring ache inside.
"This all reminded me," I told her between bites, "of the first time I met him."
"He is a walking billboard of danger and charm, right?" Camilla smirked.
I told the story: my birthday, the chandelier, the bookstore and the bus, the pickpocket on orientation day, and how he had stepped in like a hero with hands like the world had taught him discipline. "He saved me," I said. "And I fell—a lot."
"That's why you like him?" Camilla asked.
"I like him because he's 'both'—strong and attentive. He makes me feel small in the best possible way."
"Ugh, romantic tragedy. I'm buying you more beer."
We drank until the world slid into syrup. I fell into the man I thought I had let go of more times than I can count—literally fell into him, in a wonderful, stupid way that left me breathless and laughing and embarrassing myself. He was patient and firm and then, infuriatingly tender. He let me make a spectacle. He let me collapse into his chest like a tired cat.
"Are you coming home?" he asked that night as he carried me to his car.
"Depends," I slurred, "is it a date?"
He didn't answer. He just carried me like I was something fragile. He set me on his bed. Then he left me wrapped in warmth and an empty promise: "Rest."
Morning was a hostage of loud sunlight and a stranger's toothbrush and a note that said: "Porridge in the pot. Steam basket, buns. - Foster." I smiled and then my chest tightened when I saw a pile of papers in his hand: assessment for the car repairs.
"You transferred the money?" he asked when he came in half a minute later and found me in his kitchen.
"Yes," I said. "You're tiringly punctual."
"And you messed up my shirt," he said, touching his sleeve with abstract offense.
"You were vomiting on my Beetle, that's an offense too."
He pretended to look offended but then nudged me with an elbow like we were children. "Pay my dry cleaning, okay?"
I used that strange day to let my guard down. He started to look like a man who had been busy carrying the world and put it down for a second. We fit around small routines: he had a ritual of steaming buns; I had a ritual of burning the first pot of porridge. We laughed.
"Do you still—" I started.
"Like me?" he finished. He had a way of finishing my questions that made me feel seen.
"I don't know." I admitted. "Do you?"
He looked at me, eyes smolder-soft. "Always."
Weeks passed and the city slid into a new rhythm for us. He came over when he could. He came home sometimes wounded, wiped down by twenty-four hour duty. He would sit at our small kitchen table with scars and grit and slip into home like the uniform came off and a man remains. We made dinner together. He taught me how to season a roast. I learned how to brace a sprained ego.
"Move in with me?" I asked more than once, because it was practical; it was also something like hope.
He said he couldn't—at first. He swore he'd always walk me home. "I will not risk you in my line of work," he said.
"You are not a risk on your own," I said. "You have me."
He would not answer. He would change the subject, or he would say, "I will be back soon. We'll talk about it later." There was always a later.
One night his mother, Matilde Briggs, came over. She had that kind of eyes that had learned to measure everything against the cost of loss. "You are good for him?" she asked me, not with hostility but with gravity. I told her I loved him. She narrowed her eyes like she weighed the word in the balance.
"Foster chose a dangerous path," she said softly. "I cannot ask him to stop, but I cannot promise he will always be safe. It aches to watch."
"I can handle pain," I told her. It was the bravest and stupidest thing I'd said.
Her lips trembled. "Then love him bravely." She took my hands as if transmitting permission.
We married. It was a small civil ceremony because life never gave us time for big affairs and both our families had complicated edges. My parents came, begrudging at first, then proud. My mom, Magdalena Chambers, cried through the vows. My father, Teodoro Keller, hugged Foster like a son by the end. "Take care," he said simply.
After the wedding, our life looked like small triumphs and heavy driftwood.
The city called Foster to border duty months later. He went on assignment chasing the men who had hurt his father. He came back with wounds that were not just scars but maps of nights spent on cold ground. One assignment led to another. The days tumbled; I learned to stitch his shirts and wrap his wounds. He tried to keep me away from the truth. I poked.
"Why are you doing this?" I asked him once in the kitchen, sleeves rolled, the smell of lemon and iodine hanging between us.
"Because if I don't chase them," he said quietly, "they keep hurting people. If I don't do it, who will?"
"Who will take care of us?"
He looked like he had never considered the selfishness of that question. "You will," he said, then, softer, "I will too."
Until the night the hospital took his name and our world shrank to a bed and a hand that did not move.
They called it a bad week of luck; I called it forever. On a mission, he was shot and rushed back in an ambulance that smelled of cold rubber and fear. The surgeon's face was a landscape of a hundred tiny tragedies. "He might lose more than blood," the doctor said. "There is a chance of paralysis. We need to operate."
I signed papers with hands that were not mine. I told myself not to think about the worst. I told Foster he could wake up and curse me and ask me a hundred difficult things. I told him I would be there. I sat in the waiting room and pressed my face into a sweater until the smell of him became a memory I could carry.
Three days later, he opened his eyes. They were afraid and trying to remember the world. "Sofia," he whispered. "After." He pressed my hand like an oath. "I can't promise I'm not broken. But I promise the remainder is yours."
"I don't want to rescue you," I said quietly. "I want to stay."
The recovery was a year of tiny victories. He learned to roll again, to sit, to stand. The city that had been his battlefield became a place he came home from. He took small jobs within the precinct to stay useful. I learned to lift his heels, to re-teach fingers that fought to hold a pen. His mother came to visit and we cooked together to keep something normal alive.
We married again without the paper—this time with neighbors, a nurse who had watched his progress, and a small friend who brought a cake that tasted of baby days. Our life settled like dust letting itself be loved. Love was not fireworks but repeated acts: waking early to shave, packing lunch in the dark, changing dressings in a kitchen that smelled of boiled rosemary.
Three years after the hospital, a child crawled into our life. We named him Raphael Liu. He had Foster's eyes, mine when he scrunched up his nose. Watching Foster with Raphael was watching a man return to himself: patient, rough, tender. Once, at a birthday party in the big old house of the family, Foster put a small police cap on our son's head. He laughed so loud I knew he had won something more precious than any award.
"Child of his father and mine," I said once, watching them chase each other in the yard.
Foster laughed and kissed the top of my head. "I am lucky."
"No," I said. "We are."
Even after all the near-breaks and the nights of hospital scents, there were people who remembered the other story: the one where parents tried to dissuade, where our love was something inconvenient. Once, when we were still fragile and new, my parents had stepped between us. They had thought they were protecting me from a life with too much risk. They had carried that weight like a shield and placed it in front of me. They did it with love, but love that had its own maps and measures.
My mother and father had convinced Foster to step away once—years ago. They thought it was kinder for a girl who wanted to live small to be spared the large costs of his life. He had obeyed them, not because he agreed but because there are loyalties that are heavier than love. He left with hands empty and a heart full of reasons why leaving was right.
That break had been a wound we spent years stitching. People like to say time heals all. Time did not heal; it scarred. We learned to carry those marks like medals. The bitterness and the grace belonged to us both.
At the one-year mark of our son's life, the big old house filled with family. The red cloth in the middle of the floor, the small toys, the bright cake. Foster's mother, Matilde, watched from a chair with a softness I had not seen before. My parents stood opposite her, the circle of our families forming a new shape that fit better than old scars.
The little boy crawled toward the police cap on the shelf, reached up and put it on in a lopsided crown. "He wants it," Foster said softly. He picked the child up, placed the cap properly, and our son giggled in a way that made the room melt.
"We're asking him to follow family," Matilde said to my parents later, in a voice that held only warmth now. "But not force. He will decide."
My father nodded, teary: "We know now. Love means letting go sometimes."
My mother hugged Matilde like two women who had been waiting for permission to forgive.
Foster had his faults. He could be stubborn, closed, and sometimes so careful about protecting everyone that he forgot protection could include asking for help. But the job had trained him to be steady. When the world wanted to be violent, he wanted to be steady.
"Do you ever regret following your father's path?" I asked once while we sat in the dark in our small living room, the child asleep against Foster's chest.
He pressed a kiss to my temple. "Only if it became an excuse to be absent from the people I love." He paused. "But I don't regret being who I am. The cost is high, but the reason is true."
We built a life out of those truths. We learned to ask for help. I learned to say, "Take this," when the world wanted him to carry too much. He learned to call when he was away and mean it.
One autumn afternoon when the light came through the window like honey, I took a breath and said, "We were eighteen when we thought love was easy."
He smiled. "We were wrong," he admitted. "But we were right to try."
We walked through the marketplace holding hands. Strangers would smile. "That's the hero," some would whisper, and I would laugh. I had a hero who had been wounded and who still fought. He said once, pulling me closer, "Heroes are people doing the hard small things." I believed him.
Years later, when Raphael toddled onto a tiny mat and picked up a wooden toy policeman, he looked at Foster and said in a voice that was all concentration and promise, "Papa, like you." Foster laughed until he cried, and I watched and thought of the young woman who had crashed into a police car once and, by misfortune and grace, had found the person who fixed her in ways both terrible and generous.
"Do you remember the first time I hit your car?" I asked one night as we sat with a baby asleep between us.
He took my hand and turned my palm over like something fragile and precious. "I was annoyed," he said. "Then I wasn't."
"Then what?"
"Then I realized life is just a series of tiny rescues," he said. "And we were meant to be rescuing each other."
"Do you still refuse private settlements?" I teased.
He grinned. "Depends who it's with," he said and kissed my knuckles.
We had been given a hundred small chances: a station desk, a porridge pot, a hospital lamp. They had been enough to build a life.
When the day came for our son's first birthday, the room hummed with warmth. People we had known only through halves of ourselves sat together, laughing, sharing stolen cookies. The little boy reached for the police cap again. Foster placed it on his head like he had placed it on his own years ago, and the hat sat crooked and perfect.
I pulled Foster close and whispered, "We did it."
He breathed me in and answered, "We did."
Outside the hall, the city continued to hurt and to heal. But inside, for one golden afternoon, there was peace. The small cap, the child's laugh, the echo of forgiveness—these were not the fireworks of impossible endings. They were something softer: the steady, stubborn work of two people who chose to stay.
"Promise me one thing?" I asked him later when the room had emptied and the sun had gone soft.
"Anything."
"If you ever want to stop—for real—tell me."
He looked at me, and I could see his lifetime of choices in his face. "I won't," he said simply. "But if I did, I'd tell you."
I smiled, because I had already lived the truth: I wanted him to be who he needed to be, even when that terrified me. He wanted me to be mine, even if the world asked us to be less. We answered the world's question not with a lawsuit or a contract but with the everyday proof of presence.
The little cap lay on the shelf by the door. Foster picked it up from time to time and smiled like someone who had found a small, stubborn treasure. I watched him and thought of the night I had driven badly and fate had steered me into a man who refused to leave.
"Do you remember when you told me, 'Refuse to settle privately'?" I asked one evening.
He kissed me and said, "I didn't expect the settlement to be a life."
"Then sign it," I teased. "Apply for parking privileges."
He laughed. "Signed, sealed, delivered," he said.
Outside, the city hummed on. Inside, the lamp gave off a warm pool of light. Foster's hand was in mine. Raphael's breath was a small bell. The world could demand large things, but we had learned to answer with small, steady ones. We had suffered and forgiven and built something that did not need to be heroic to be beautiful.
And when people asked, years later, "How did you two manage?" I would hand them a plate of cake and point to the police cap on the shelf. "We took a thousand little chances," I'd say. "And when we fell, we made sure to catch one another."
The End
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