Sweet Romance10 min read
My Ex, the Doctor, and the Flat Tire
ButterPicks12 views
I was listening to a voice message from a new flirt when I saw him: Oliver Stephens, my ex, behind a half screen in the clinic, white coat on, very composed.
"Where does it hurt?" he asked the patient with the same calm I remembered.
I swallowed. I had dressed for a date later, picked an outfit in my head, but I came to the clinic in sweatpants and no makeup because of errands. I hated feeling vulnerable.
"Should've worn heels," I told myself.
A nurse called, "Number sixty-nine, Caroline Diaz."
He looked up and our eyes met.
He was even more handsome now. The cheekbones, the jawline, the precise brows — everything polished and calm. He raised a brow and jutted his chin toward a chair as if to ask me to sit.
"What's wrong?" he asked, neutral, like a lecture ready to begin.
"Doctor," I said, working to sound light. "I... I can't... you know." I wanted to see his face.
He didn't blink. "Irregular schedule, poor diet. You sleep poorly, you sit when you could stand, you lie down when you could sit. No wonder."
The nurse blushed. He flashed that crooked smile I knew too well. He scribbled a prescription and told me to go to the pharmacy and come back after. I left the clinic and my voice messages unread. I wasn't going back.
That night I met Carter Feng at a cozy little bistro. He was like a hopeful puppy in a suit, eyes bright, hands a little too full of small nervous gestures.
"You've been here long?" I asked as I slipped into my heels.
"Not long." Carter blinked. "But I was hoping you'd arrive."
He was easy to tease. I enjoyed the game — the soft teasing, the little touches as I passed him a fork. I let the meeting run its slow course. Then, through the restaurant window, I saw Oliver across the street watching the door.
My heart did a foolish thing. He looked at me and the smell of old memories came back: dinners, late-night walks, the fight, the call that ended everything.
"Caroline?" Carter asked, smiling like I had not moved a centimeter.
"I'm fine," I lied. "Just tired."
When leaving, my heel caught in a grate. Oliver's voice drifted from a parked car: "Having trouble?"
I tried to be proud. "Can't you help?" I called.
He walked over, a cigarette in hand, eyes sleepy with something like amusement. He snapped the heel clean off and offered his trunk, where he had a pair of boots. He insisted on walking me to my door, and he pushed me against the frame with a familiarity that made my breath hitch.
"You should not be messing with kids," he said, voice low.
"Then mess with you," I shot back, trying to sound braver than I felt.
He kissed me before I could protest, and for a moment old things slipped back into place. I went to bed tangled in the past and the present, and when the phone rang in the morning, it was Carter — sweet, oblivious, innocent. I lied. "Emergency," I told him. "Meeting. Can't make it."
When I opened my eyes, the man beside me was asleep, breathing steady. The next morning he was gone and there was a small pile of medicines and a wink on the breakfast table. I did not tell Carter.
Weeks passed. I kept my life small: work, emails, the subway. People who used to flirt with me gave space. I kept thinking of Oliver in odd moments, the brief way he had slid back into my life and then vanished again.
Then Annabelle Hamilton got married. I was a bridesmaid, all silk and practiced smiles, and there he was among the groomsmen — Oliver in a navy suit that fit perfectly. He looked at the floor, then at me, avoiding catching my eye. My chest tightened.
"Are you okay?" Annabelle whispered while I held her bouquet.
"I'm fine," I lied.
A glass of champagne, applause, and someone bumped me. Oliver and I found ourselves framed on the wedding screen when the bride tossed her flowers. I caught them. He looked at me for a long second under the lights and then smiled like he had done something reckless.
After the wedding, messages came from friends. "You two should be together," they said. "He still looks at you."
I will not lie — I wanted to believe the world was on my side.
Then came the night I found him in the emergency ward after a car crash. He joked, "I survived, see?" when I burst into his room. He let me sit with him while he complained about the morphine and the nurses. He asked for an apple and I peeled it for him. For the first time in a long time, we were ordinary together.
But the ordinary ended when I saw him a week later with a woman walking out of the hospital hand-in-hand. The woman smiled into his shoulder like someone who had waited. My throat closed.
"I misread it," I told myself. I walked away. But the seed of anger had been planted.
I focused on work. I accepted a short survey trip out of town. The days away were clean, calm, and filled with new things. Returning home felt light. Then I found Oliver leaning against my front gate, eyes red as if he'd been crying.
"You waited?" I asked.
"I thought you'd moved," he said. He was tired and honest and the snow was falling around him like a cliché.
"Why are you here?" I wanted the truth.
"I wanted to explain," he said. "I thought I could tell you why I told you to go abroad. Why I left."
He told me about that night — the phone call I remembered as betrayal, the arranged pressure from parents, the rumor that had wronged me. He had held me responsible in his own heart and decided, wrongly, that he should push me away for my good.
"I couldn't stand watching you hurt here," he said. "It was cowardice, not wisdom."
I walked away, not sure whether to forgive him. I let him stay, because a breakfast on the table felt like a small truce.
Then the hospital hallway changed. A young woman, hair blown loose, rushed up like she owned the day and wrapped herself against him.
"I'm his girlfriend," she said sweetly when I came closer. "We just met. Sorry." She lifted her mask.
Chloe Flowers smiled at me like an apology and a claim. Oliver looked at me in a way I couldn't read. My throat tightened. I stepped back into the elevator and left.
That evening I went to the supermarket. Carter bumped into me between the aisles, carrying a cart full of groceries. He pushed my bags like he wanted to be helpful and possibly heroic.
"How are you?" he asked, simple and hopeful.
"I'm okay," I said.
We walked out and I found Oliver leaning by his car again. He called me over, earnest and slightly desperate.
"I've been doing stupid things," he confessed. "I've left things unclear. But I never stopped caring."
"Then stop being unclear," I said. "Be clear."
He looked like he wanted to answer but could only say, "I tried to protect you."
"Protect me from what? From the world? From himself? From telling the truth?" I asked.
He had no answer. I told myself that words now meant less than actions.
The turning point came months later at a charity gala where the city’s elite gathered. I wasn't planning to go, but Annabelle asked me to come as her guest. The room was glittering, chandeliers, applause. Oliver was across the ballroom. The man who had once been the source of my worst rumors — Vicente Gardner — was there too. He was a sponsor, polished and perfumed and surrounded by smiling faces.
"Isn't he the man in that photo that ruined you?" Annabelle whispered.
I felt my pulse quicken. Vicente had been the wealthy figure in the image people used to shame me with. He had never answered why he posted or why his people spread the lie. The rumor had cost me friends, respect, and quiet dignity.
I did not go in planning a spectacle, but I had been humiliated once. I had to see whether truth could be more than just private.
Halfway through the event, a hush fell as the award ceremony started. A former magazine editor took the stage — a woman who used to run a tabloid column. She had been paid to run salacious stories and she had a reputation for smearing people for profit.
"Ladies and gentlemen," she said into the microphone, "we have something to show."
A video flickered on the screen. It was a series of messages, bank transfers, texts. Vicente's name pulsed on the screen. The editor's voice was sharp.
"He funded a smear campaign," she said. "He hired a PR firm and paid a reporter a retainer to plant false photographs. He enjoyed watching her fall."
Vicente's face shifted from confusion to vanity to anger in a moment. The room murmured.
Oliver stepped up beside me. "I have more," he said quietly into the microphone. "I recorded calls where he instructs his people to make the narrative stick. He gave orders to manufacture the scandal."
The crowd leaned in. Vicente tried to smile. He failed.
"You're lying," Vicente said at first, the laugh brittle and too loud. Then he tried to laugh it off. Then he looked around for help.
"These are bank records," the editor said. "This is the contract. These are receipts."
Vicente's mask slipped. He went pale. "You can't— this is slander," he said. His voice got small.
"No," Oliver replied. "You can't buy the truth away."
The room no longer buzzed; it held its breath. People turned toward Vicente, toward the screen, toward me. His assistant stood frozen. A woman near the front covered her mouth.
Vicente's reactions were the real show. First disbelief: he blinked like someone who had been woken from sleep. Then anger: his lip curled and his jaw tightened. He denied it loudly and quickly, fingers pointed, voice rising.
"They're fabrications!" he shouted. "This is a setup!"
The crowd's expression changed to impatience. Someone shouted, "Show receipts!" Someone else pulled out a phone.
He tried to reclaim control. He launched into a practiced speech about reputation and law suits. He paused, then stumbled as Oliver produced message after message. Vicente's denial lost shape; his voice trimmed to a mutter.
Then his face dissolved into something raw.
"You're lying," Vicente said again, but now the edges began to fray.
"You hired them," Oliver said softly. "You enjoyed watching a woman fall. You thought no one would know."
There was a ripple of horror moving through the audience. People started to whisper, then a ripple of outrage — heads turning, brows knitting, cameras focusing. A dozen phones rose to film.
"Is this true?" a reporter asked plainly.
Vicente's eyes darted around, seeking allies. He saw pity in a few faces. He saw people who used to applaud him step away.
He took a step down from the stage, then another. The height that had supported him felt temporary.
He shifted from scorn to shock, to a foreign pleading. "I'm telling the truth," he said weakly. "I didn't mean—"
A woman at a table stood up and pointed. "You did," she said. "You bulldozed her life."
"It's not fair!" he gasped.
The public punished him in the only way the room could: with exposure and mockery. The sponsor logos that had sat behind him on the stage suddenly felt like a trap. People took his picture and uploaded it. A social media frenzy began within minutes. A man who had been untouchable mumbled, then started to apologize, then tried to accuse the messenger of fabrication.
"Look at him," someone muttered. "He looks like a child."
A group of volunteers who worked with the charity walked up to the stage and, quietly, one after another, asked Vicente to step down from the committee. They spoke with measured voices, prepared statements. A woman in the audience read a contract clause aloud that revoked his privileges. The gala organizers had to act to preserve the event's integrity.
Vicente's face twisted. He moved through stages like a show: first arrogance, then disbelief, then denial, then fury, then helplessness. At one point he slammed his fist on the podium, which only made cameras shift toward his hands. Then the cameras found his phone, open to messages like "Confirm payment" and "Obfuscate timeline."
I watched him unravel. He tried to keep control, promising lawsuits and vengeance, but the room's energy had shifted. Where once he would have commanded whispers and influence, now people turned away. A few nearby guests started to clap — not in support, but in a stunned disbelief that someone could be so brazen.
"He ruined her life," someone said behind me, loud enough to be heard. "This was deliberate."
He went from "I didn't do it" to "I was set up" to "It's complicated." Finally, he begged for understanding, the last act of a man who could no longer manufacture the truth.
Security escorted him off the stage when clearly the sponsors had to protect their names. They did not push hard. The point was made.
We stood there, watching a man who had once sat above others sink into a smaller person. People filmed, people whispered, people pulled up evidence on their phones. He had lost the room, he lost the support. He had lost, in those public moments, the very illusions he'd paid to maintain.
Afterward, I felt something unwind inside me. I did not cheer. I did not gloat. I had wanted the truth to be known. I wanted the false story that had once made me into another woman's scandal to be stripped down.
Oliver came up beside me. "You okay?" he asked quietly.
"I am," I said. "I wanted the truth."
He looked at me like someone who had been holding his breath for too long. "We can keep going," he said. "But not like before. No more games."
The crowd dispersed like a tide. Vicente's supporters shrank back. The cameras moved on. People spoke in low tones, digesting.
That night the world felt sharper and cleaner. People began to send me small messages of regret, apology, "I'm sorry I believed them." They could not undo months of whispers, but the public change mattered.
Oliver and I did not end everything with a grand confessional. We did not kneel with promises. We met, slowly, with coffee and honest talk.
"You should never have been blamed," he said once, hands wrapped around a mug.
"People love a quick story," I replied. "They love villains and heroes."
"You're both," he said. "To me."
We had moments that made my heart jump: the way he removed his jacket and put it over my shoulders during a rainy shelter; the way he laughed, unguarded, at something foolish I said at three a.m.; the way he, usually tight-lipped at work, whispered concern when I worked until midnight.
"Stop acting like my doctor when we're at home," I joked.
"I treat you guilty of stealing my calm," he replied. "And I will convict you."
We moved slowly. I refused to be anyone's soft landing. I refused to let a man who had tried to spare me by pushing me away have the final say. He had been wrong and he was trying to be right now.
In the weeks after the gala, Vicente faded from headlines. Legal teams argued. The tabloids recalibrated. Some people never came back. Some apologies were hollow. But the important ones were true. Annabelle hugged me and said she had always believed me. Carter sent a text: "You okay?" and packed his own life with hope elsewhere. Chloe Flowers stopped showing up at the hospital. Oliver stopped pretending he was indifferent.
One cold evening I drove out with a trunk full of groceries, thinking about small things. I pulled into a parking lot to figure out dinner, and then — the sudden sickening sound.
I hit the brake and felt the car list. Tires hissed like a spilled breath.
I got out. A man was standing by a black coat and a flat gaze.
"Your tire's flat," he said.
It was Oliver. He had been passing by and saw me. He looked at the wheel, then at me, then smiled that crooked smile.
"Of course," I said. "Only you would show up for that."
He shrugged. "I make a habit of showing up when it counts."
He crouched to change the tire. The jacket he had put on my shoulders weeks ago hung over the seat. The night smelled like rain and cheap gas and something better: the truth, and the slow repair of two stubborn hearts.
"Will you ride with me?" he asked when the tire was fixed.
"I will," I said.
He reached for my hand like he always had, and this time, the hand met his without fear. The world was not perfect. People still whispered. I still had scars. But my tire was fixed, and someone had come to tell me — simply and plainly — that he could see the flat and could help.
"Thank you," I said.
"You're welcome," Oliver said, and then, quieter, "I mean it."
It was a small moment, nothing like a grand ending. But the flat tire and the man who told me about it would, for a long time, be mine.
The End
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