Sweet Romance14 min read
My Maserati, Five Million, and the Boy Who Pretended to Be Lost
ButterPicks12 views
I almost wish I could say the Maserati was at fault.
"I hit your car," I said into my phone, voice paper-thin, "I— I don't know what to do."
"Are you kidding me?" Laney's voice was equal parts shriek and laughter. "You crashed into a Maserati? Janessa, you're famous now."
"I am not famous. I'm terrified," I whispered, because the Maserati looked like a small black shark parked on the curb and my shared bicycle looked like a dented tin can that had given up on life. I had swung the handlebars in what felt like a heroic arc and the rear wheel clipped the Maserati's bumper. The sound was an ugly, metal sigh.
There was no owner in sight. I was halfway through dialing Laney for bail money when the driver's door opened and a woman in sunglasses stepped out like a scene from a movie.
"You called someone just now," she said, all velvet and thorns. "Your voice made me curious."
"Yes," I blurted, "I was calling—" I glanced at my phone. "—Laney. To beg her for money."
She lifted a manicured hand. "I don't want money. I want... you."
I thought she meant to sue me. "I can pay—"
"Five million," she said, and the world stilled.
"For the car?" I heard my own laugh before I could stop it. "I don't have five million."
She handed me a card. "Five million in this account. You will be my son's tutor."
"What?"
"You're a college student. That's acceptable." She smiled, a small, dangerous smile. "My son needs—structure. He is twenty-two. He will learn from you."
"You want me to tutor a twenty-two-year-old? Ma'am, I barely passed calculus."
"Good. Then you can learn together," she said, and I felt like a puppet in a play I hadn't read.
Her name was Evangeline Hassan. Her car had the kind of sheen that made people check their shoes. She wore sunglasses at night like an accessory to armor. She did not ask what I'd studied. She did not care. She only cared about that word: tutor.
"You'll start tomorrow," she said, pressing the card into my trembling hands. "And you will live here. It's safer."
I spent that night trying not to imagine the worst. I also counted to five million in my head and failed.
The boy they called Declan Mikhaylov opened the door to his room wearing pajama pants and a perfect kind of tired that felt unfair. He was tall. He was impossibly, badly proportioned in the best possible way. He had the kind of face that made people stop mid-sentence, like someone rewinding a camera to see if the picture had moved.
"You're the tutor?" he asked, like it was a fact like the weather.
"Yes," I said. "I'm Janessa."
He looked me over like a collector eyeing a new piece. "You look normal," he said.
"Thank you? I guess?"
He yawned as if sleep was an art form and tugged at the hem of his shirt. He had a shy, slow smile that seemed to belong to a child and the shoulders of someone else entirely. "I'm tired," he said. "Will you keep me company?"
I did what any reasonable, not-entirely-sane twenty-one-year-old would do: I stayed. I made tea. I pretended that counting real numbers was easier than counting the heartbeats that startled me when he leaned too close.
"Do you know quadratic equations?" I asked the first evening, trying to sound like a teacher.
"I don't," Declan said honestly. "Can you teach me?"
"I don't—" I searched for my dignity. "I can learn. With you."
He nodded like I had said something important. He had a face that gave off secrets like stray light.
One night, he fell asleep while I was counting through a textbook. His breathing eased. He blinked awake at two in the morning and looked at me with a frown like a small cloud.
"Would you... lie down?" he asked. "I get lonely."
I laughed at the absurdity of it, but he wasn't joking. He stood, and the shirt slipped entirely from his shoulders. He crossed to the bed, climbed in, and then patted the space beside him.
"Come on," he said. "You can talk to me."
"You're my student," I whispered. "I can't—"
"Come," he said again, like an invitation to a small crime. I slipped under the covers beside him, the paper-thin blanket between us. I told myself we were sleep coaches. I told myself I was being kind. He fell asleep like it was a practiced move.
"You're warm," he murmured in the dark.
"You are ridiculous," I whispered back, but my hand found his like it had always belonged there.
The next morning Evangeline barged into the room with a cup of milk and stopped cold. Her eyebrows did a little jump, then she closed the door and went on as if she'd seen nothing and everything at once. She later told me, when we sat in the vast kitchen and the sun made the marble glow, "It's best you sleep in the house. Too many people out there."
"Sleep here as Declan's house-mate?" I asked.
"Next to him. Safety." She smiled in a way that made the furniture bristle.
The truth—the accidental truth—was that Declan was not only convinced of being a big kid. There was a history written on him, a brokenness he hid under jokes, slow smiles, and the excuse of being tired.
"Mom says I had a fever when I was little," Declan told me one afternoon, hands around a mug. "It made something...different. But I feel things. I want to learn them."
"You can," I said, and somewhere under my own voice there was a fierceness I didn't know I owned. I wanted to teach. I wanted him to be seen as he actually was, not as a bucket filled with other people's pity.
We studied math. We learned how to make a library of small triumphs. He would hum while copying down practice problems. He would hum and I would hum because there was something easy about the two of us being ordinary together.
But life, cruelly, loves drama.
"Evan," said a low voice during a family dinner. The man across from Evangeline—tall, sharp, with a patience like stone—looked at me with a flicker of disapproval. Enrique Contreras had the air of someone who trusted the arithmetic of status. He cleared his throat like a ruler.
"Declan," he said, "your...old flame is back."
"Whose?" Declan asked, as if the name would be dust in his mouth.
"Her name is Kristina," Enrique said. "She has returned. She is famous in all the wrong ways."
"Kristina Schmidt?" I heard it out loud and felt the room tilt. Of course there would be a name like Kristina. Of course something named like a storm would appear.
Evangeline shot her husband a look that said, polite, don't. Then she turned to Declan. "Ignore it. You're safe."
But the world did not leave well enough alone. Declan's father tried to bargain status and wealth like some men bargain for good weather. He believed in marriages arranged by balance sheets, not in love that smelled like paperbacks and late-night math.
"The family name must be kept," he told Declan one night, voice low. "Kristina is the kind of woman who brings the right things."
Declan folded his hands so tightly his knuckles looked like small mountains. "I don't care," he said softly. "I care about Janessa."
I almost fell out of my chair. I had been pretending to be ordinary for so long I forgot people like Declan actually risked things.
"You're my future wife," he told me once, in the quiet of a carousel ride he insisted we take in the rain. The carousel's paint was chipped. The horses smiled like they knew secrets. "I will wait until you're ready."
There are times when the world gives you a breath of air that could lift you. I held it and pretended not to cry.
Then a photo slid into my life like a knife.
A message from Enrique with a single image: Declan and Kristina, arms around each other, stumbling into a hotel at two in the morning. Declan's face blurred by flash. Kristina's hair shone like wet silk. The caption read: "He had a lapse."
I stared at that picture until my room blurred. I called him. He didn't pick up.
I found Declan two flights up from the lobby, leaning against a car, smoldering.
"I didn't do that," he said when I confronted him. "I didn't—"
"Then why is your father sending me this?" I asked, voice shaking with more than anger.
He looked at his own hands as if he could peel the lie off his skin. "Father wanted me to see how the world treats me. He hoped to trick me. He wanted me to doubt you."
"Did he—"
"He did worse," Declan said, voice a dry paper. "He made a story with Kristina. He paid her some money."
My world narrowed. "She took money from him?"
"She told him she loved him. She convinced him she deserved a dowry. My father wanted the match and he paid for her to be convincing."
"Which means?" I said, entirely aware of my fists, the way my teeth clenched in rhythms.
"It means she is not honest," Declan said. "But he still thinks she's right for me."
I wanted to scream until the sky shook. Instead, I drove to the place where Kristina would be: a charity gala glittering with evening gowns and credit cards in human form. I had no plan. I had a phone and a heart that would not be quiet.
I told Laney, who is a walking fire alarm. "I'll go with you," she said. "Wait—I will borrow a dress. We'll go sting a liar."
"I am not here to humiliate someone," I told her.
"Good. We'll do it elegantly," she said. "Like a funeral, but with more shoes."
We walked into the gala like two small hurricanes. Kristina was on stage, glass of champagne in hand, speaking to a crowd that loved the idea of miracles more than their details.
"Who is that?" a woman near me whispered.
"Kristina Schmidt," Laney whispered back. "Social butterfly, professional heartbreaker, some people say 'ambitious'."
I felt the anger like heat under my ribs and did something I would remember as reckless and wonderful. I walked to the stage, stepped up, and when the microphone passed me I took it.
"Hello," I said. The crowd indulged me. They had seen worse. "My name is Janessa Campos. I have something to share."
"Who's she?" someone hissed.
Kristina's smile didn't falter. "Janessa?" she said. "You're a guest, aren't you?"
"Yes. I'm also someone who knows the truth."
"About what?" Her voice was honey with a blade underneath.
"About Kristina's relationship with Enrique Contreras." I let the name hang. People loved drama the way they loved dessert. The online cameras angled in like vultures.
"Careful," Kristina said, her fingers tightening around the glass. "Accusations are rude."
"Tell that to your conscience," I said with a smile that tasted like iron. "We have receipts."
The room shifted. Someone took out a phone. Laney blinked tears of glee.
I had the messages Declan's father had sent me. I had images and bank transfers, receipts that smelled like betrayal. I stepped forward and laid them out on the stage like a public bouquet.
"Enrique paid Kristina to come back and pretend to 'love' his son," I said. "She accepted two million up front, and another escrow. She promised marriage and then sold that promise to the highest bidder."
Silence became an animal, keen and watchful.
Kristina's body language changed. At first she blinked, then she laughed. "This is slander," she said, holding the stage like it was a ship. "You have no proof."
"Proof?" I said. "You have a transfer from your personal account, timestamped. You have messages. You have photos. You have a video of you telling Enrique you were 'convinced' you'd stay if the asking price was met."
She made to take a step back. The crowd leaned forward like it was a feast.
"You're lying," Kristina hissed. "You're humiliating me."
"On the contrary," I said, "you're humiliated by your own receipts."
People in the room began to murmur. Phones lifted like fireflies. A man in a tailored suit muttered, "So she took two million? That's... a lot."
Kristina tried escalation. "You think flattering a man like that makes you better than me? You're a hired actress now? You think you own truth?"
The audience loved the theater of it. They did not love being tricked. A woman near the stage shouted, "I want to know how you can live with yourself taking money to sell a son!" and the sound spread like a contagion.
Kristina's face went through the stages: composed, shocked, pale, furious. At first she clutched her clutch bag like armor. "This is private," she said. "This is harassment."
"Exactly," I said. "Keeping the truth private hurts other people. You sold a man's money. You lied to a family. You took advantage."
Her denial became thinner. "I did my work," she snapped. "I didn't—"
"Did you promise to marry him?" someone in the crowd asked.
"No," she said, but her voice cracked.
"Then why accept money to be seen with him?" another voice demanded.
Kristina's eyes darted, hunting for allies. For a moment it looked like no one would join her. A few people began to clap, not because they liked me but because they liked a bad person being outed.
Kristina's face lost color. She made a last attempt at spin, a practiced smile, an appeal-to-sympathy move. "I have—" she began, then real self slipped through. "Everyone needs help sometimes."
A young woman in work boots stepped forward, eyes glittering, and said, "You took money from a man who thought he was buying a future for his son. That future—" She gestured toward the mezzanine where couples whispered— "is not yours to buy."
Kristina's shoulders sagged. The audience responded not with immediate cruelty but with the slow, crushing weight of people who had been fooled too many times.
She tried to leave the stage, but a reporter blocked her path, thrusting a microphone. "Why did you accept the money?" he asked.
"Because—" Kristina began. Her mouth moved but there was nothing to hold up the story. The room murmured. People took photos, recorded her expression, and shared it like an equation being solved live.
Finally, the last stage of the performance arrived: she began to beg. "Please," she said to the room. "Please, I didn't mean—"
The crowd's reaction was a mixture of scorn and spectacle. Some clapped; a few hissed. A woman in a sparkly gown mimed vomiting. A man in a bow tie shouted "Shame!" and someone else filmed Kristina's tremor with a steady hand.
She tried to plead with Evangeline, who was near the front, and Evangeline's face was unreadable. Evangeline looked at Kristina like someone sizing a troublesome painting.
"Two million," Evangeline said quietly so only Kristina could hear. "You took two million from my husband. You cannot buy respect with that."
Kristina's breathing became rapid. She pressed both hands to her temples. Then she made a mistake: she lunged for her handbag, perhaps to get a note, perhaps to clutch the last thing that belonged to her dignity.
A woman in the audience shouted, "Call security! She's a scammer!" The cry was not compassionate. No one wanted to be conned.
Security arrived and politely—because that's how rich people lose things—escorted Kristina off the stage. Phones filmed her, people whispered, and the room, which had come for soup and small talk, ended with a sense of justice done.
Kristina's punishment was not physical. It was worse in some ways: she had been stripped of the mystery that allows a con to work. Her name trended that night. People dug up more evidence. Her husband—who was, as it later turned out, a real man with a real life and a right to the truth—published a statement: "I did not know of these transactions. I stand with the family that was hurt."
Kristina's face, which had been a public mask, became a news story with comments under it. Her reputation bank account bled. Offers dried up. People who had once thought her clever turned away like bees that had lost their flower.
But she was not the only one who needed facing.
Coen Pinto, my ex, had been a small cruel person dressed in mediocre suits. He had laughed at me in a café the way men do when they want to prove an old point. Declan, who hated noise but loved small gestures, decided to teach Coen a lesson that would sting him in the same room he'd once used to belittle me.
We met at the café where I had spilled coffee on Coen's jacket years ago—the jacket had been rented then, but the memory was mine. Coen was there, flanked by colleagues who thought themselves witty. He smirked as I entered with Declan at my side.
"Janessa," he said loudly, "if you prefer rich men, at least buy your own cup of decaf. Do you know the price of taste?"
The room turned. It was the kind of small cruelty that's actually a thinness of soul.
Declan did something that surprised me: he smiled, slow and amused, and then leaned forward. "Coen," he said. "Do you remember Janessa spilling coffee on you? You called her clumsy in front of everyone. Tonight, I invited her to show me the charm you missed."
"Is this a joke?" Coen said, flushing. "You're only with her for—" He paused, looking for a number to attach like a moral.
"For being honest?" Declan finished for him. "For being kind? No. For choosing her."
Coen bristled. He stood, voice rising. "Do you know who my parents are? Do you know my connections?"
Declan's hand slid from the table to the billfold on his cuff. With an elegance that stunned everyone, Declan placed a card on the table. It was a humble thing compared to the banknotes Coen loved to name-drop. Declan said, "Pay the bill, and apologize to Janessa. If you cannot do that, then you're not worth the company you're in."
Coen's allies shifted. One of them, a man used to being admired, nudged Coen and whispered that perhaps the evening could move on. But Coen had already lost his balance. He thrived on being the loudest voice in the room, and tonight the room's attention had been turned away from his clamor.
He stammered. "You are ridiculous. You bought a tutor. That's all."
The people at the café, who had watched the whole scene like a slow motion film, began to mutter. Declan's quiet stature was like a rock in a stream. Coen's words had the flakiness of old pastry.
"Leave," Declan said simply. "And don't speak of Janessa's worth again."
Coen left, red-faced, dignity leaking like coffee from a broken cup. The room applauded, not because they had taken a side, but because they enjoyed seeing the loud man reduce himself to smallness.
This was different from Kristina's punishment. Kristina lost fame and money because the world decided her trade was despicable. Coen lost face in a room that had once been fertile for him. Different hurts, both public, both fitting.
After both storms, Declan and I had a long, messy, quiet night. We walked on the beach in the late summer, sand cold beneath our feet.
"Did you ever doubt me?" I asked.
He hugged me so close the ocean shrank away. "I doubted everything but you," he said. "Sometimes people try to sell futures. I won't buy them. Not if you and I are here."
"Will you marry me properly?" I asked, a small laugh caught in my throat.
He turned my face up and kissed me like a pledge, like a promise. "Yes. When you're ready. I will wait. I already promised you."
We married with little fanfare. Evangeline organized the dress, because she loved the theater of romance but had learned something about letting people choose. Enrique came to the wedding with a hat in hand, and something like contrition in his eyes. He gave me an envelope—quiet this time, not an ultimatum—and said, "I'm sorry for the way I arranged things. I have been wrong."
Declan took my hand in front of a small room of people who had watched us become. Later, Evangeline and Enrique divorced in soft, ugly ways, but Evangeline was happier. She told me later that the scandal freed her from illusions and that the world smelled better after truth.
The road had bruises. There were nights when I couldn't bear the memory of someone telling me I wasn't worth the cost of a rose. There were reminders—in the reflection of a storefront, in a stranger's glance—but Declan had a way of making ordinary things feel like evidence of love.
"Do you remember when you first unraveled my shirt by accident?" I asked him once as we sat on our small balcony, laughing at the memory.
He smiled, eyes soft. "You were trying to show you could cook," he said, "and you knocked over a pot."
"You made me feel worthy," I said.
"You were always worthy," he corrected, but the way he said it made my heart do small flips: he had once thought me ordinary, had accused me of being not enough, and now he treasured me.
I think what I learned most—beyond that people can be cruel and that sometimes the world pays for illusions with other people's trust—is that kindness needs bravery. Sometimes bravery is telling a room the truth. Sometimes bravery is waiting for someone to become the person he can be.
Kristina's downfall was public enough to make tabloids and private enough to ruin fewer people than it could have. Coen's humiliation was a small, neat thing. What mattered was that the world tilted back toward honesty, if only a little.
Evangeline drove me to the edge of town one day and handed me a small, battered photo. It was of Declan as a chubby boy with a packet of spicy sticks in his hand.
"He's always liked simple things," she said. "He never stopped."
I pressed the picture to my chest. "Neither did you," I said.
She laughed and then cried, a noise that was both apology and celebration. "I hit you with my car on purpose," she confessed with a wink.
"You did," I agreed, because who else gives five million and makes you learn to love?
We kept learning. Declan learned to be brave, and I learned that bravery sometimes means letting people see the messy parts. We kept our vows small and true: to hold each other's hand when the carousel stopped, to laugh on the rides that made our stomachs drop, and to defend each other's dignity in public and private.
Sometimes, when I pass a Maserati, I look at it and smile. A foolish, grateful little smile for the way a crash can be the start of a road you would have never found otherwise. My life is a string of small moments—teaching quadratic formulas, holding a cold bottle of water to someone's forehead, making a morning coffee without spilling it on anyone's rented suit.
"Do you regret any of it?" Laney asked me once, months later, when we sat in our old café.
"No," I said. "Not even for a second."
"Even the crash?"
"Especially the crash," I said, and Declan kissed my fingers in agreement.
We had love, an imperfect family, and the truth told on a stage where a loud room learned to clap for honesty. That wasn't nothing.
The End
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