Sweet Romance10 min read
The 520 Slip, The Locked Erhu, and the Boss Who Stayed
ButterPicks14 views
I never planned to be the headline of my own little disaster on 520. I thought I'd be at home, scrolling through the same half-broken dating apps and entering the fifty-second lucky-draw with the same unlucky fingers. Instead, I stood in a crowded Western restaurant, wearing shoes that pinched, holding a crying-brand bag, and asked the wrong question to the wrong person.
"It's odd," I blurted before I could stop myself, "Carter, you haven't been married yet?"
Silence chilled the table.
Carter Orlov put his napkin down slowly. His gaze slid past me, landed on whoever else might laugh, and did not move. The man across from him smirked like he had heard the best joke of the night. People turned.
"Oh my God," I said to no one in particular. "I didn't mean— I meant—"
Carter's assistant, Lincoln Muller, coughed from the corner and then blinked. The smirk across the table turned into a laugh that spread like warm oil.
The world shrank into a three-second loop: my cheeks burning, my words slipping, my heart pretending it could disappear. I sat down hard in my chair as if I could melt into it.
"I am so mortified," I said later to my phone, when Elliana Stevens called to check on my survival. "Like, this is my life now."
"Tell me everything," she demanded, and I did. I told her about the fifty-two lucky-draws I lost, about my mother—Kathleen Buchanan—threatening to kick me out, about the man who wanted to lecture me about geopolitics and nuclear armament while I pretended to be interested.
"Just go home and regroup," Elliana advised. "Or—" she paused, a conspiratorial smile in her voice—"run and never come back."
"I can't," I said, "because I saw Carter Orlov and became the idiot. Also, my mom's watching my dating life like it's an Olympic sport."
When I stood to leave, humiliated and nicked inside, Carter did a thing no boss does in movies: he asked me to wait at the restaurant entrance and then said, "Get in my car. We'll go back together."
I was equal parts relieved and terrified. His suit fitted like it was measured for an aristocrat. Even his silence felt considered, heavy, like a well-made brick.
"Do you want me to drive?" I offered, desperate to be useful and smooth out the moment.
"Sit in front," he said.
"Okay." My voice sounded too loud in the closed car. Carter didn't say much as we drove; his hands kept a steady rhythm on the wheel. The man he had been dining with rode in the passenger seat, looking puzzled.
I tried, very carefully, to be small and invisible. But a new string of bad luck snapped: we ended up at the office. Carter said he had work. I thought it was a lie. He showed me the calendar invite—two overseas video conferences. It wasn't a lie. He switched to work mode as if scenes could be cut away like costumes.
"You're really going to make me stay?" I asked with panic.
He looked at me over the laptop light. "If you want to go, you can. But the building is going to be closed in a while. There's a case reported. You'll have to stay."
I wanted to cry. Instead, I fabricated the world's worst excuse: "My friend's cat is in labor. I have to go."
He raised a single eyebrow. "This is a strange emergency."
"I know, but—" I stopped and let the world close around me.
We were locked in. It was ridiculous and oddly intimate. He tossed me a file later and said, "Organize this."
"Why me?" I begged. "I'm not your assistant."
"You're already here," he said, deadly practical.
I stayed.
Days blurred into a strange, forced intimacy. We were an office pair with no labels, a boss and a hovering subordinate who kept getting dragged into his orbit. Carter unfurled bits of himself in stochastic threads: small kindnesses like a blanket when I shivered, a transfer of money—five hundred twenty dollars—slid across the screen with a dry message, "Spend it." He typed a note too, "gift, non-refundable," and I laughed until my eyes hurt.
We fell into rhythms: I made coffee, he worked late into the night. When I fell asleep on the sofa and tumbled to the floor in the midnight quiet, he checked me like I was a child and told me to sleep properly. When my period arrived with a vengeance, he brought a box of warmers, sat up until I fell asleep, and murmured, "I'm here."
There were things he never said, things I stitched awkwardly into my head. Once he called me "Hayden" in private, but it was softer than any other name he'd used for me. He teased me, "You're always so dramatic." He taught me how he liked his coffee: black and strong, like his noon meetings. He watched me watch trashy shows and, against every expectation, seemed to enjoy them too.
A flashback moment happened in my head often: a lecture hall years ago, the day I publicly shut down an ex—Devin Brewer—who had the audacity to try to coax his way back into my life. I slammed the doors then, and he deserved a public fall.
I will not let anyone tell the story of Devin Brewer in two sentences. He was arrogant, clever at gaslighting, and spent three months of an otherwise faithful relationship scrolling on the side. In the lecture hall, I had nothing to lose. I stood up, spoke my mind, and dragged truth into sunlight.
"Devin," I said, voice steady even though inside I was fighting to stay calm, "do you want to explain why my phone started getting calls from someone else's name three months into us being 'exclusive'?"
He laughed. "You don't get to make a scene."
"Then let's show the scene," I said. I pressed play on my phone.
A simple projection of messages filled the auditorium. Names. Times. His attempts at smoothing over guilt. The students who had once smiled indulgently at him grew quiet as the evidence unfolded like a film reel.
"Is this a joke?" Devin squeezed his eyes and went pale.
"No." I turned the phone so everyone could see. "You told me we were exclusive. You called it a future. But you had another."
The room divided into murmurs. His friends whispered. His reputation—a thing he had paraded like a flag—thinned, thread by thread. He reflexively tried to charm his way out. "It's complicated," he said. "There were misunderstandings."
A girl in the third row stood. "We saw him flirting at the café too." Hands pointed. Someone muttered they'd been ghosted by Devin during a group assignment.
"What about the semester project?" Professor Blaise Reynolds, who had once praised Devin's brilliance, asked coolly. "Do you intend to present anyone with those ethics?"
Devin's shrug had no armor now. I walked to the front row and reached up, handing the phone to the professor. "I'd like to present this as evidence," I said. "You can keep it on record if you want."
The auditorium buzzed. People began to take photos. A cluster of students recorded videos. The whispers turned into an audible chorus of disapproval. I saw the flush of embarrassment on his face, the way his smile thinned then cracked. He tried a last resort—shame-reversal. "She always dramatizes," he muttered, looking at me like I had ruined his life for fun.
"Oh, so now I'm the villain?" I asked, loud enough for the microphones to catch. "You're the one who lied. You made promises you didn't intend to keep. You played people."
The dean stepped in. "This is not a place for public shaming," he said, but even he could not deny the smell of truth in the air. The students' faces were a courthouse more eloquent than any judge.
Devin didn't just lose face. People who had once invited him to group projects now declined his calls. His presentation partners quietly formed a new group without him. An internship he had been counting on was withdrawn once the company checked references. The girl who had first laughed at my standing up to him stood by me, nodding; her later text to a mutual friend read, "Finally." Devin tried to protest, to flip the blame, but the room would not let his words stick. Dismissed by peers, cornered by evidence, he moved through his day like a boy who had been told a cruel truth: charisma without integrity is brittle.
This was the punishment I wanted to watch: not one of staged cruelty, but the public unmasking—slow, social, precise. The social network did the rest. Someone posted a clip. Comments churned. His high school buddies sent him curt texts. At the cafeteria, the barista who once flirted with him now avoided his table. His confident gait shrank into an uneven walk. Humiliation is not only private collapse, but the cold shoulder in the hallway, the empty seat in class, the small, cumulative exclusions that add up.
Devin cornered me later by the library. He tried to plead. "Hayden, it wasn't like that."
"Wasn't like what?" I said. "You said we had a future. You planned dates. You promised me you were done." I looked at him like he was a stranger. "You're the one who decided to be someone else."
He stumbled between honesty and excuses. "I'm sorry."
"Crying in private doesn't fix what you broke in public," I told him.
He left, shoulders hunched. People watched him go. A friend clapped slowly—not to mock, but to mark a ceremony of accountability. The campus had eaten him and left the bones: a reputation dissected under fluorescent lights. I felt no glee. I felt an exhausted relief, the lightness of someone who had finally finished a long, hard task.
Back in the office-lockdown, Carter noticed this side of me: the one who could stand up and not be broken by a man to be discarded. He watched me differently after that. "You did what you had to," he said quietly, like an observer who had seen enough to care.
Our relationship zigzagged between professional and personal. He was territorial in small ways—protective when I laughed too loudly, intentionally quiet when I needed to focus. He bought me things that were practical: a proper winter coat, an ergonomic chair, a necklace I had admired but refused to buy. He did it without flourish; the gifts were quiet and precise.
Still, the night of the mistake is the night people remember. We had been through weeks of closed doors and shared coffee mugs. We had carried each other's fatigue and a sort of mutual, hesitant watching. That night I celebrated the lifting of restrictions with beers we found in a forgotten office fridge. Somehow, I do not remember tripping the boundary between colleagues into something warmer, only waking up tangled in a half-remembered sleep and the shock of realizing I had fallen asleep on the bed with Carter's arm wrapped around me.
"Oh my God," I whispered as if naming it might undo it. "This is not my life."
He smiled, indulgent. "Can't sleep?" he asked.
"I went into the wrong bed." I scrambled to get up. "I'm so sorry. I will leave right now."
He caught my wrist gently and held me. "Stop. Breathe."
I was overcome with red-faced panic. I thought the world would collapse into laughter. Instead Carter did something unexpected: he said, "We were both alone. We both fell asleep. You'll keep your job, Hayden. Take a breath."
We returned to work. But the video that Carlson—or rather, Carter—had kept as a backup surfaced in a moment of my worst embarrassment. "You remember," he said later, cold and amused, "the night you fell asleep and kissed me like an amateur pirate."
I protested, angry at my own memory. He slid the phone toward me with a grin that was thirteen percent mischief and eighty-seven percent intention. The footage was messy. I was loud, affectionate, ridiculous. I wanted to delete it in my embarrassment, but Carter had a quiet way of owning things. He watched me as if I were a study.
"Delete it," I demanded, scrambling for dignity.
"No." He held the phone like a sovereign might hold a scepter. "This is insurance."
"Insurance?" My stomach dropped.
"If you insist, Hayden, you can run away," he said. His voice went soft. "Or you can stay—and be honest."
"I am honest," I said, voice small.
"Then stay." He stepped closer and said, "Be my girlfriend. Or don't. But if you stay, no games."
I laughed at the bluntness. "You're the world's worst blackmailer."
"No." He touched my forehead like he used to when I had a fever. "I'm the world's worst romantic."
It took me a breath to understand that his half-smile meant something honest. So I did what people do when they are tired of running: I let myself be small in someone's arms.
"Fine," I said. "I'll be your girlfriend. But only because you promise to stop buying medicines I don't like."
He leaned in and kissed me in a way that made my knees wobble—no digital cameras, no witnesses, just two people choosing to stay despite their messy histories.
The days after we agreed were strange and sweet. He asked me to post the 520 gift, as he had promised, and I did, with an awkward caption. He pretended to be possessive in public and gentle in private. He locked my battered erhu—the instrument I had flippantly learned as a child and then shoved away—into a small metal box he bought for no clear reason, calling it "sacred." He did not tell me the combination. I pretended not to mind.
We married, not because of any grand ultimatum, but because the shape of our lives had arranged themselves so neatly that it felt like the most natural progression. He bought a safe and locked my erhu inside it as if protecting me from my own nostalgia. I locked him in with my stubbornness and my loud laugh at two in the morning.
On the day we moved into our apartment, I found the safe key taped to the underside of the bed. That was his idea of humor. I laughed and unlocked it, and there was my old, battered erhu, smiling like a private joke.
Years later, when someone asked me about that night—the 520 night that started everything—I always told the truth.
"It was stupid," I'd say. "I asked an awkward question. I was embarrassed. But if that mistake had never happened, I would not have found Carter being so annoyingly kind. I would not have learned that kindness can be public and private at once."
He would only smile and kiss my temple, because he still held my cheek the way he had the first time he checked whether I was hurt after falling from the sofa.
We kept some rituals: every 520, he transferred me an amount that made me laugh. I posted the photos he instructed me to post. I let him buy an absurd number of gifts. He still locked things away in safes and gave me impossible keys. Once, when I wanted my erhu to play at our wedding, he took it out, tuned it, smiled like a conspirator, and said, "Play."
So I did. I played badly at first—fingers rusty—but I played for him and all the people who had once watched the lecture and seen a woman stand up and demand respect. I played for myself, for the girl who had had the courage to click send on proof, and then lived through the consequences.
In the end, love didn't fix all the embarrassments. I still blushed, and Carter still teased me about being dramatic. Devin moved on or away; I stopped trying to track. The punishment had been social, messy, public—and effective. It taught me the value of speaking up. For that, I am grateful.
And the erhu? It stayed in the safe for three months until Carter handed me the combination with a smile that said, This is for you. The safe had been his way of honoring something fragile and unpolished. The world is full of small ceremonies like that.
When we last celebrated 520, I set the alarm to buy another silly online lucky-draw. Carter watched me from the kitchen and rolled his eyes with affection.
"You still do this?" he asked.
"Always," I said.
He reached over and turned the dial on our little locked box—a gentle gesture, like turning a page. "Then keep losing," he said, "because I like buying the prizes."
I laughed and hugged him, my face warm and entirely mine.
The End
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