Sweet Romance14 min read
One Hangover, One Week, and a Necklace I Wasn't Ready For
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The seatbelt dinged like a small alarm, and for a second I let myself think I could pretend nothing had happened. Then I remembered the hotel room, the strangers' laughter like distant thunder, and Everett's face two inches from mine when I woke up.
"Yesterday… did we…?" I asked, my voice a paper-thin whisper.
Everett Esposito blinked once, calm as always. "What, Maxine? Are you saying you're not going to take responsibility?"
My whole body folded inward. "Take responsibility? I—Everett, I drunk-texted a lot, I had too much. I'm so sorry. I didn't—" My words stumbled like children on the stairs.
He stretched and lifted a towel, wrapped it around himself with the practiced ease of a man who owned half the office towers in the city. "Pack me some clothes. We have a meeting in two hours."
"Right. Right, Everett." My mouth moved but my brain had shorted. The list of reasons I had to lose my job rushed over me—how could I face the office? How could I face the man I had somehow, accidentally, slept with?
I dug through the mess on the floor and came up with two buttonholes missing from his shirt. Perfect. I pressed it against my chest and felt both the shame and something like a secret spark.
"You're not going to fire me?" I asked later, when he had put on a new shirt and walked out into the morning like he left nothing behind.
He didn't look back. "Who said I was going to?"
I almost laughed, but it came out as a hiccup. "You mean… you're letting me go?"
"No." He said it like a statement of fact, the kind that would stop a sudden argument at a board meeting. "Take a week off. Rest."
"A week?" I couldn't keep the tremble out of my voice. "But—our project—"
"Done," he cut me off. "You go. I will handle the decisions."
I should have been elated. Instead, I felt like I had been dropped out of a plane and someone forgot to open the parachute. One night, one mistake, one week of quiet. What did he really mean?
My first morning of "rest" was a lie. I closed the shutters, turned the phone off, and slept until the house spun into silence. Dreamed strange things—an aisle of stained-glass windows and a man kneeling, a voice calling my name like a memory. I woke with my cheeks wet and a ridiculous smile I couldn't explain.
"Maxine, wake up. Hurry, there's a party at Jazz Loft. You have to come."
Cristina's voice was a whip-crack and a rope all at once. "Case Smirnov is back. Good drama."
"Case?" I froze. My history with Case was a careful museum of regrets. We had been something like lovers in college—he left to be Large and Famous—and I came home with a box of old letters and a heart that folded up and hid.
"You coming or not?" Cristina asked.
"I'll come for thirty minutes," I lied. "Then I have to go."
At Jazz Loft the door opened and the room shifted like a stage drop. I stepped in and immediately felt like an exhibit. Case was exactly as he had been in my memory: taller in person, smile practiced, the sort of man who made the air seem thinner when he walked in.
"Maxine." He moved toward me as if he had been rehearsing the moment. "You look… different."
"Older," I said, and it landed as a joke both of us pretended not to understand.
"Thank you for coming." He smiled and his hand slid to my wrist—not overly familiar but not distant either. "It's my birthday tonight."
"I know," I said. And my phone buzzed, a sharp interruption.
"It's Everett. He says he drank too much and wants you to pick him up." Parker Foster—my assistant and the only man I'd seen so soft since I started working in high towers—sounded like a man who had swallowed three nervous birds. "He says only you can make him come. Please come."
I told Case I had to go. "Happy birthday." I pushed free and left Jazz Loft with a long goodbye that felt shorter than it should.
When I arrived, it was worse than the message had hinted. Everett sat slumped on the sofa like someone who had misplaced his compass. Parker hovered with eyes I couldn't read.
"Everett." I knelt, breathless. "I'm here."
He looked up. His gaze sharpened like flint. "Maxine?"
"Yes, it's me." I smiled in a way that was both apology and plea. "You really don't remember?"
He reached for my face, soft as if he might break. "You're not Maxine."
"I am," I said, and recited everything I was sure would prove me: "You write with your left hand. You avoid cilantro. You hate carrot in salads. You prefer fish to pork unless it's duck. You never miss a ten a.m. call on Thursdays…"
Parker snorted and Everett actually laughed. "You know too much."
"Because I work for you," I said. "And because—"
He grabbed my face and pressed his forehead to mine. "You are Maxine." Then he let me go like he had burned himself. "Rest. I'm going to the office."
For the first time since I opened my eyes in that hotel room, something warm and dangerous tightened inside me.
I bought him shirts, since his collar had been ruined. I straightened the world he left behind and then fled to Cristina's apartment, planning to escape for a week like a thief-on-holiday.
Cristina's apartment turned out to be a nest. "You were supposed to be my discovery," she told me, dragging on a cigarette like a theatrical flourish. "Instead you gave me 'the show.'"
"Shut up," I said, but my lip curled in a smile.
That night I took a ticket to the Maldives. I told myself: a week away. A week to forget. The plane took off and Everett was suddenly an image in the corner of my mind like a photograph that would not fade.
"You're flying out?" Everett's voice surprised me in the exclusive lounge.
"I have a ticket," I answered. My throat felt dry. "But you—"
"I booked the same flight," he said.
Silence fell like a curtain.
"We're going together," he added.
I wanted to say no. I wanted to run. Instead, my heart admitted something it had hidden for years.
On the plane he spoke as if we were colleagues, making plans, asking where I wanted to sit, what I liked to eat. The ordinary care of it sounded like a date.
"Everett, why are you doing all this?" I finally asked as the plane settled above the clouds. "You have someone. You have—"
He took my hand. "Bring up bedtime and how he says 'baby' every time he calls. The man is charming. But family is complicated, Maxine."
I turned my head. "Baby?"
"You will meet him. Be calm."
When we landed in the Maldives, the world broke apart into blue shades and a heat that smelled of coconut and salt. My plan had been to flirt with freedom. His plan—if he had one—was a mystery wrapped in Armani.
"Everett, share a towel?" I asked, testing. Silly, childish, but my heart kept tripping in small ways.
He smiled, and I felt the room around us tilt. "Only if you promise not to call our vacation 'work.'"
"Promise," I said. He tucked the towel around his waist and looked like a painting of calm.
There are moments travelers collect—an unplanned umbrella, a sudden sunset. I collected small ones with Everett. He bought me mangoes, he insisted on two bathroom towels, he walked in front of me when we crossed the street. Once, when I shivered under the wind, he took off his blazer and draped it on my shoulders without saying a word.
"You're impossible," I murmured.
"Aren't I?" He answered with that quiet that made my blood loosen its knots.
At dinner, watching him laugh at a joke I did not make, I thought of the night in the hotel room. I tried to stitch that memory into something gentler. Maybe we were both drunk that night and both searching for something we had avoided in daylight. Maybe it didn't mean anything.
There were three moments there—the small ones that made the heart stupid.
First, at a breakfast on a terrace, he reached without thinking and covered the back of my hand with his. It was a tiny accident, but he didn't let go. He had never touched me like that at the office.
"Everett?" I whispered.
"Don't say anything." He only smiled like a sunbeam hiding behind clouds.
Second, one humid afternoon, a tray of drinks toppled and he stood up like a knight. He cleaned, apologized, and when our hands brushed he looked at me, and for the first time his eyes looked soft.
"You always keep things in order," I said.
"I like clean lines," he answered, but the corner of his mouth went up.
Third, late at night, after a thunder squall, he pressed his forehead to mine, only for a breath. "I like you awake," he said.
Those moments were the tiny silver notes that threaded through me. They were like breadcrumbs leading me somewhere and I kept picking them up.
We flew to Thailand next, and the city was a mosaic of street lights and spicy steam. At a small restaurant a game we did not expect unfolded. A server spun a wheel for "couples night."
"We're not—" I started, and Everett put his hand over mine on the table.
"Spin it," he said.
We laughed. The wheel stalled on a tiny fortune: "Share the ice cream to win two percent off the bill."
"Terrifying," I said, but we both leaned in. Eating the same spoon together felt like crossing a line. His mouth brushed mine as he licked the cone. I tried not to let my cheeks burn.
"You're one of a kind," a server said, grinning. "You two have chemistry."
"Thanks," Everett said, and his voice touched me more than any fireworks.
By then I had a plan: I would enjoy a week, return home, hand over a clean resignation letter, and keep the memory like a polished stone.
It did not work like that.
On the day we were to leave, someone in a pink shirt came running down the jetway calling, "Baby!" and wrapped his arms around Everett. The man was small, more fragile than I had imagined, and he spoke with a voice like a song.
Everett's face went still for two heartbeats and then a smile split it open. "Guillermo," he said. "This is Maxine."
Guillermo clung to Everett like a vine, holding on for a while. He asked the usual things with the simple curiosity of a child: "Did you have fun? Did you eat enough? Why didn't you call me?"
I watched as Everett answered with a warmth I had not seen directed at anyone else. At dinner later his mother, a woman named Galina Barbier, mentioned me with a bright sincerity that made my cheeks cool.
"You're very kind to our son," she said. "Thank you."
He smiled. "He adores his little routines. We worry when he breaks them."
That night I sat on the balcony and tried to reassemble my heart. My head whispered something dark: "He has someone. He is kind. You were a mistake." But the rest of me—the part that had felt his hand at breakfast and the brief, accidental kiss in Thailand—rebelled.
When we returned home, the ordinary gravity pulled me back to daily life. Everett's parents visited, and his whole world shimmered with the soft sparkle of family compassion. At dinner, Guillermo snuggled into Everett like a child who had never grown up in some ways. He called Everett "baby" with a sweetness that somehow did not make me exactly jealous; it made my chest ache.
"Maxine," Everett said quietly one night, taking my hands and leading me into the hallway as if this were still a project report he wanted to consult. "I told my mother the truth."
"You told her what?"
"That you were more than an assistant in this trip," he said. "That I—" he stopped and drew a breath like someone preparing to leap. "I like you."
"I—" I couldn't speak. I had rehearsed a thousand replies. None fit.
He slid a small black box from his pocket and opened it. Inside lay a necklace—simple, a slim gold chain cradling a tiny charm.
"It's nothing extravagant," he said. "I saw it in an airport shop and thought of you."
"Everett, this is too much," I said, because I think that is what people say when they are afraid of what gifts are supposed to mean.
"We grew up different," he said. "But with you I saw something that felt like a calm urgency. I don't know how to ask this. I only know how to show up and be messy and still be here."
I wanted to flinch. I wanted to refuse. Instead, I let him put the chain around my neck and felt like a new coin minted.
That was when the world threatened to tilt again. The more he softened, the more the old rumor-mill began to spin. People at the office started whispering. Cristina told me that Case had said something cruel, that Barrett Camacho had been trying to use friendships to his advantage. Little bubbles of lies swelled up.
"Are you sure this is okay?" Cristina asked one morning, looking at my neck. "You know people talk."
"I do," I said. "I also know how Everett is with boundaries."
A week passed. I had thought a week would put everything on pause. But decisions press down like hands.
One evening, at a charity gala at the Jazz Loft—the same club where Case and I had met earlier in the story—everything spilled.
Barrett Camacho was there, smooth hair, practiced grin, the sort of man who used kindness like a currency. He was loud and smiling and leaned close to Cristina as if he had the right. She glowed, and I thought it was the kind of thing that should be simple.
It wasn't.
"Barrett," I heard someone say, and a hush cut like velvet. "Do you remember me?"
The room filled like a stage. People turned. Spotlights of attention pressed on even the smallest faces. I stepped forward because once you stand in the light, the only way is to move.
"Maxine?" Barrett blinked like someone caught mid-skip. He had either not expected to see me or had expected something else. "We were—"
"You told my friend you needed help fishing her out of loneliness," I said, keeping my voice steady. "You told her you'd never play, that you would be serious. You told her you'd be different."
His smile didn't change. "I'm a man who can change, Maxine."
"You also told at least three other women the exact same lines," I went on. "You booked flights, you bought gifts, you promised marriages to women who hadn't even been introduced to your friends. You asked my friend to get me to the club so you'd have an audience."
The room hummed. A table of investors turned. Cell phones came up like flowers opening.
Barrett tried to laugh it off. "Maxine, this is childish—"
"This is public," I said. "You used charm as leverage. You promised marriages to women you didn't love for the applause at your own parties. You used my friend as bait."
He took a step back, as if distance would make his words truer. "You're jealous. You were always jealous."
"Jealous of a man who sleeps with people he doesn't care for?" I asked. "No. I'm angry for the women you used."
There were shuffles of feet. Someone clapped with restrained anger. "Oh my God," a women near the bar breathed. "I dated him for four months."
Barrett's face lost color. "This is nonsense," he snapped. "Who is spreading this?"
"Parker." My assistant had come in with me and stood beside me. He was steady as a little rock. "You asked Cristina to lure Maxine. You offered her a favor in return."
A ripple passed through the crowd like a current. People whispered and took out their phones. In the space between two breaths, a man at a table brought up a photo.
It was a photo collage—screenshots of messages, receipts, a picture of Barrett with another woman on a rooftop. The bar's playlist blurred into the background like distant rain.
Barrett looked smaller. He opened his mouth and closed it, like a fish at the edge of a net. The audience was now no longer a blur but a chorus.
"You're pathetic," said a woman from the terrace, eyes hard.
Barrett's confidence faltered. He tried to salvage it with jokes, with bluster, but the room refused to accept the old script. "I didn't—" he said, and the voice came out thin. "They were all flings. It's not—"
"Flings you named as future husbands," I said, and the words landed. "Flings you promised to women. Flings you turned into bait."
His face changed in phases. First denial, sharp and defensive. "This is false," he said to no one in particular. Then shock when a woman at the table pulled out a series of messages. He squinted and shook his head, like a man who suddenly discovered the floor had moved under him.
He tried to laugh. "It's a misunderstanding."
"No," someone called. "It's not." A stranger stood, anger painted on her face. "You ruined my friend."
The crowd's noises crescendoed. Cameras clicked. Social media sprouted like firebrands. People recorded him, voices layered in a chorus of accusation and betrayal.
Barrett's jaw trembled. The bravado melted until he looked like a child caught in the rain. He tried to claim he would "make it right," that he would "do anything," but his words were lost in the tide of voices.
"Get him out," someone said. "I don't want to see him."
Barrett turned, the pride he always wore now foreign. His face went pale, then crumpled. For the first time he showed a split of the old mask: he panicked.
"No, please," he begged, voice cracking. "I can explain. I'll—I'll pay back. I'll—just—"
A chorus answered with derision and disgust. "We don't need money. We need honesty."
He fled into the coatroom like a man running from his own shadow. Outside the door people whispered. Phones buzzed. The gallery of witnesses pressed close enough to trace the shape of the disgrace.
When he attempted, later, to return and apologize sober, the club staff refused to let him in. The security guards explained that his presence made people uneasy. Photos of his messages trended before the night was done. He had no audience left, only the echo of everyone he had used.
Barrett's reaction changed in the course of one evening as if a mask had been stripped. He had been arrogant, then defensive, then pleading in a vicious loop. The witnesses—friends, strangers, staff—shifted from surprise to disgust, some even clapping when he left. The event became a punishment not of law but of social witness: his lies unrolled in public; his manipulations were mirrored back at him by every annoyed camera and angry voice.
When he at last stepped back into the night, he was alone in a way that bulging accounts and loud words never allow. People who once cheered him now turned away, and the applause he had wanted silently collapsed. That was the humiliation: public, complete, irreversible in the social currency that mattered to him.
It was the kind of ending that did not jail him, but it removed his stage.
After that night things shifted. Cristina and Barrett reconciled differently—on her terms—and Barbett's charms seemed brittle. Case watched from a distance, eyes slow and thoughtful.
And for me, the public scene had been a reminder: actions echo louder when they are shown to everyone. I had stood before a crowd and used my voice. It wasn't revenge. It was accountability.
Everett sat beside me afterward, his fingers finding mine like a practiced habit. "You did well," he said.
"I just told the truth."
"You made the room safer."
I looked at him. "You were proud?"
He smiled, small. "A little."
Weeks passed and the world found its new rhythms. In the office, people paused differently around us. There were whispers, of course, but also an odd sort of respect. When I walked in with Everett, heads turned less with gossip and more with something like acceptance—an acceptance I wasn't prepared for but oddly welcomed like warmth after rain.
Everett and I took steps that did not require grand speeches. He learned to laugh in private, and I learned to sit quietly in the warmth of that laughter. He still loved his routines; I still loved my work. We had complicated people around us—families, past lovers, fragile hearts—and somewhere between a misstep in a hotel and a necklace I did not expect, we found daily things to hold.
One evening, after an ordinary day of meetings and decisions, Everett and I stood by the window of his office. The city lights made a map of small fires below us.
"Do you regret that night?" he asked.
"I thought I would," I said, fingers catching on the chain at my throat. "But sitting here with you, holding a mango you bought me because you thought I'd like it… no."
He smiled, strange and soft. "Good. Neither do I."
We stood there until the cleaning staff came in and clicked off the lights, two silhouettes with the same small shadow. Outside, a taxi honked. A life ticked by like a tiny clock.
The week-off and a hungover mistake had led to a necklace and a thousand small seconds that changed me. The man who had been a distant figure in a sharp suit became the man who left his blazer on my shoulders when the wind cut a corner of the sea.
A few times, when the city sighed, people would look at us and guess wrong stories. Some would call our dynamic "convenient." Others would sulk about "how things had been." But we kept being complicated in honest ways—he clipped my tie in the morning like a joke, I reminded him about meetings like an old habit. Small acts. Real acts.
On a quiet Saturday, when the sun fell like a gold coin and the necklace warmed against my collarbone, Everett asked, softly, "How would you like to be responsible?"
I looked at him. The story had begun with a single awkward, drunken night. It had evolved into travel and laughter and revelations and a public shaming of a man who deserved it. Now it rested on a slice of something that looked like honesty.
"By being honest with you," I said. "By being myself, even when it's messy."
He nodded and kissed my forehead. "Then be mine. Carefully."
"Careful," I echoed, smiling.
His fingers brushed the chain at my neck, warming the metal with his touch. "No fireworks," he said. "Just mornings, mangoes, and the occasional stolen towel."
"That's fair," I said.
The necklace tingled against my skin, and the city hummed its ordinary song. I held onto the small thing at my throat, and the week felt not like an escape but like a bridge. I had started a week thinking I'd lose everything. Instead, I had learned how to keep it.
The End
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