Sweet Romance11 min read
The GUCCI Belt, the Pink Card, and My Mentor’s Son
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I did something I swore I never would: I went to my mentor’s home to deliver New Year gifts and drank too much. I said to his face, “If I marry, I’ll marry a man like you.” I remember the words like a bad recording on repeat. I remember the slippery leather of a GUCCI belt in my hands when I woke up and—worse—when I opened my eyes, someone small and warm was curled against me, breathing softly, forehead cool against my chest.
“Who are you?” I yelled.
He blinked awake, voice crooked and alarmed. “Ow—”
I kicked him by reflex. He flinched, opened his eyes, and they were arresting—dark and fierce and somehow tender all at the same time.
“You kicked me,” he said, voice wet with the last of a dream.
“What the hell—” I scrambled up, fingers finding a belt by accident. I had a GUCCI belt in my hand. I had no memory past the dinner table, past a wine glass, past a ridiculous compliment, and now—this boy.
“Who kissed me and doesn’t even remember?” he said softly and bitterly.
My head thudded. “I—” I closed my eyes. I had blanks. Black holes of time. “I’m so sorry, I must have—drank. I don’t—”
“Susanne.” He said my name like it was an accusation and also like it belonged to him. “Susanne, can you put the belt down and talk like a human?”
He had the wrong name for me—my name was Susanne Lombardi—and when he said it slowly I realized: he knew my mentor. He lived here. I had slept in my mentor’s son’s room?
“Oh my God,” I whispered. “This is a mistake.”
“It’s not a mistake. It’s…weird.” He stared at the belt like it might bite. “And that belt is expensive.”
“Not my fault,” I mumbled. “I would never—listen, I would never hit anyone. You have to believe me.”
He looked at me as if weighing my soul. Then, more importantly, he sat up, wincing.
“You’re literally getting in my way of breathing. Help me out.”
We were tangled—my zip and his jacket had somehow locked. I froze at the simple ridiculousness. The two of us tore the garments apart, furious at our own clumsiness, and when my fingertips brushed his skin I felt a hot, idiotic pinch of shame.
“Don’t be mad. I’ll get you a glass of water.” I grabbed a glass. He watched me with the solemn patience of someone who had been let down too many times.
We walked into the hallway and met my mentor’s wife.
“Good morning, Susanne,” she said bright as a kettle. “You slept well? Did you need anything?”
“Fine, fine. I’m fine.” I answered too fast, cheeks hot.
She smiled at me like she could read me and was kind enough not to tell anyone. “Your mentor is out running. He’ll be back soon. Sit down and have some soup.”
I sat down and told myself to breathe. My hands shook. I kept thinking about the way the boy had looked—open, furious, a little wounded—and how my mouth kept tasting of burned wine and apology.
“He’s a sophomore?” I asked casually, trying to measure the awkwardness.
“Second year,” she said. “Lazy as anything. Always sleeping in.” She laughed, and I joined, though everything felt like theater.
I helped the housewife wrap dumplings, I smiled more than I meant to. My mind scrolled back to the night before: my mother had asked me to bring specialties—wine from home. My mentor had been polite and then sharp and then funny when the wine loosened him. “You’re too good a researcher for just one day off,” he’d said, and I’d said stupid things about marrying a man like him. He’d laughed; his wife had teased. My mentor’s son—the boy from the room—had been “out” last night, they’d said. Maybe that was the story. Maybe I walked into a wrong door. Maybe I—my throat closed.
The boy—Elijah Ellis—came down at last, jacket on and hair punked with blue tips. He moved like someone used to being taken for granted and yet surly enough to dare the world to care. His first words to me were, “Get up, eat.”
“I’m not hungry,” he said, but when his mother fussed he relented. He was brittle at first—orderly distance he pretended to keep from everyone—but when he glanced at me his eyes warmed like a sun coming up.
“Don’t be weird,” he muttered when I pretended not to stare. “And call me Elijah, not ‘you hunched over the couch like a guilty cat.’”
“I didn’t sleep over your house on purpose, you know.” I snapped. “Please don’t bring my mentor into this.”
Elijah snorted like the world couldn’t be simpler. “His lab schedule is terrible. So are his jokes. So what? You said you like men like that last night, didn’t you?”
“You heard that?” I slammed a dumpling onto my plate.
“You were loud.” He leaned back, feet up, pick of teenage lordliness. “And you drove everyone to weird charm. You also, by the way, used my hoodie.”
“You’re not very grateful.” I flicked soy sauce at him.
He laughed, a sound like a bell with a nick in it. “You’re entertaining. Keep it that way.”
The hospital scene that followed the next day left me dizzy. Elijah claimed he had a fever later that morning, and we ended up at the clinic. The doctor on duty was—of all people—my ex, Nicholas Alvarez. He used to be my world: medical student, cold as glass, precise like a blade. He looked up, saw me, and his face blurred in an unexpected way.
“Susanne?” he asked, and there it was—the old name like a key. He was clinical, but his eyes searched. When he examined Elijah, his hands were professional. When he glanced at me, his voice clipped.
“Do you have any contact with high-risk populations?” he asked Elijah, like a thermal scanner for detail.
“No,” Elijah said flatly. Then he smiled lazily at me and said, “I only touched her.”
My insides combusted. The world shrank to the small square of the exam room. I managed a denial because what else could I do?
Nicholas wrote a note, took Elijah’s temperature, and, with a half-lifted eyebrow to me, said, “Make sure to rest.” The pity in his voice tasted like copper.
“You’re the worst ex,” I said later once we left, low enough he wouldn’t hear.
He only smoked and answered, “You left. I was busy.”
He had the old posture of the man who never expected to be questioned. He walked away from me like a man walking off a stage after applause he didn’t want.
That should have been the end of Nicholas Alvarez in my head. He was a cold man, a slow apology, a man who preferred formality to affection. But life is messy—he was the kind of person who had power in a hospital, who wore competence like armor, and people listened to armor.
Elijah moved in with me for a bit. My roommate had left campus for a research rotation, and Elijah simply announced: “You’re my sister now.” He took the couch, practiced cooking, mocked my guilty pleasures, and stole my chargers. He also defused me with teasing and slowly pulled me out of the shell I had built around myself. We started to play the same game late at night. He was ridiculously good. He called me “sis” with one breath and then read my face until my defenses collapsed.
When my old ex, Nicholas Alvarez, reappeared at my door one rainy night with flowers and an apology I didn’t expect, the room lurching between nostalgia and contempt. “Susanne, I know I was distant, but I—” He tried to outline a plan, his voice like a doctor reading a prognosis.
“You were distant,” I said. “You didn’t call, you delayed, you left me alone more nights than I can count.”
“I was busy—patients.” He gathered his hands, as if to put them somewhere. “I thought you would understand. I thought you knew I loved you.”
“I can’t make love live in tiny Practicalities, Nicholas.” I had patience enough for a few sentences, then I snapped. “I’m twenty-four, not a scrap of care to be folded into your schedule.”
He got louder and colder: “You’re dramatic.”
“You do this thing where you treat presence like a favor,” I fired back. “Do you know how that feels when your whole life is measured by when someone has time for you?”
Silence. He had no defense for his absence, for the small betrayals that accumulate into a canyon. Still he didn’t crumble. He tilted his head and said, “You should be grateful I came.”
Grateful. The word made bile rise in my throat. That night was the seed of what would become a reckoning.
A few nights later, at a hospital ceremony—an award night for young doctors—Nicholas chose that night to corner me in a hallway. He thought he could be grand, to proclaim understated love in a place full of witnesses who respected him. He cleared his throat, offered a small speech, and then said my name the way a man names the trophy he had claimed.
“You used to like fine things,” he said. “You always liked accomplishments.”
“And?” I asked.
“And now you’ve traded those standards for drama,” he said loudly.
People gathered. His colleagues, the nurses, residents I’d met as a student—all looked on. He decided to make me small in front of them. He smiled and put a hand on my shoulder like he was showing a pet.
“Isn’t it strange,” he continued, “that someone who would throw themselves at a professor’s feet would then talk about experiments like they were prayers? Are you dating his son? Are you dating for advantage?”
The murmurs came like waves. I felt Elijah’s hand close around my wrist like a vice, but he let me go. The air became sharp with the kind of attention people give to a misstep. Nicholas looked up, pleased with his performance, like a man who had rehearsed a sting and got the sting he wanted. The group nodded. My cheeks burned.
In that hallway, the rules of the institution—decorum, professional distance—should have held. Instead, Nicholas’s performance built and then, by its very arrogance, set him up for a fall.
I cleared my throat softly. “You’re making things up,” I said. “You’re trying to hurt me because you can’t hold onto me with care. You left.” My voice steadied as if I built a small ladder of dignity under my feet.
He laughed. “You talk about dignity now? You were at his house last night.” He raised his glass. “Who are you to play saint? Who are you to come here and pretend—”
At that moment, something happened that changed everything. One of the nurses who had been watching—the soft-faced woman who had once tutored me in a lab and who had a ledger of hospital kindnesses in her head—stepped forward. “Nicholas,” she said. Her voice was soft but deadly. “Do you remember the patient you were supposed to see at nine? The charts show he was left waiting, you took the award instead. The family filed a complaint about delayed care this morning.”
Nicholas’s confident smile flickered. A murmur spread. Someone else, a tall intern, added, “He didn’t sign the shift chart. He left mid-shift to get a cigarette and an espresso. That night the ward nurse covered his rounds.”
“Bullshit,” Nicholas said, but his voice was thinner. He looked at the nurse, then at the intern, his armor finally showing the seams.
“You left your shift,” the nurse said calmly. “We covered you. People were hurt.” She did not shout; she simply placed the facts like knives on the table. The room inhaled. I watched his face change: from smug, to puzzled, to denial, to panic.
“Where’s your apology?” someone else said, and the echo of the question multiplied.
“Now, you see,” another resident chimed in, “we can’t have someone who abandons duty preaching about morals in public. We have rules. We have responsibilities.” A young doctor pulled up the shift log on his tablet and turned the screen toward the gathering. There it was in black and white: Nicholas Alvarez, signature missing, shift not covered, a note from the family complaining.
He went pale. He tried to speak but each sentence tumbled worse than the last. “That was… I had an emergency—”
“You left a patient,” the nurse cut him off, and the word 'patient' hung there heavy and unforgiving.
The group watched him unravel. Phones came out, not to record humiliation, but to record the statement he insisted on making. His colleagues asked gentle but firm questions: Who covered the shift? Why was the family upset? When did it begin? Each question was a hammer. The young intern who had been left with the extra load that night crossed his arms and said, “You left us to cover, Nick. We paid for your choices.”
"Nick"—the nickname he had used at social mixers—sounded suddenly too casual for the steepness of his fall.
The worst came when a nurse produced a composite of messages: texts showing him dodging calls, a voicemail where he promised to “make time” if he didn’t need to stay late. The timeline collapsed like a house of cards. Faces in the corridor shifted from curiosity to shock to a cold professional disappointment that felt like a verdict.
“Are you admitting you left a patient unattended?” asked a senior attending, calm and terrible.
Nicholas’s throat moved. He swallowed. For the first time I saw real fear. He tried the old armor: rationalize, minimize, assert control. It did not work. The crowd—colleagues, residents, nurses—turned from the man who had tried to shame me into a man who had to explain why he had abandoned his duty.
“You’re suspended pending review,” the attending announced finally. “And we will investigate the complaint. You know the process.”
“What?” Nicholas’s voice cracked, a raw sound. “You can’t—this is a mistake. I’ve worked—”
“You worked,” the attending said, “and sometimes we fail, and when we fail, we must answer. Leave.” The word was gentle and absolute.
Around him people whispered. Some shook their heads in disappointment. Others looked away, because the scene felt like a private collapse that the public had to witness. A resident—someone younger than him—stared hard and said, “You put your CV and words before patients. We don’t forgive that.”
Nicholas’s face went through stages: pride, confusion, outrage, then a slow sinking into humiliation. He seemed to try the old posture of denial, then a sliver of pleading—“I can explain”—and then finally—collapse. He saw that reputation is not a fortress but glass. The room watched him shrink. A woman in scrubs filmed him as he left, not maliciously, but because healthcare has memory and the record matters.
As he pushed through the double doors, I felt something in me relax. It was not triumph. It was relief. When power gets used to shame someone privately, the world sometimes flips and holds them to the same standards they preach. The onlookers’ reactions were not cruel: they were professional and moral. They demanded accountability.
After the event, whispers multiplied into a conversation: colleagues spoke of corners of hospital life where someone’s absence had ripple effects. People I’d only nodded to in hallways now looked at me with a softer gaze, like the kind that sees the small bruises people pretend aren’t there.
Elijah stayed by my side through all of it, silent and small in the corners, and stayed gentle. He clasped my hand afterwards like a promise. “You okay?” he asked.
“I am now,” I said.
He squeezed my fingers and smiled the quiet smile he kept for when he was certain about something. “Good. That’s what matters.”
That public punishment was not theatre. It was a correction. It taught me—us—that words wielded as weapons come with consequences, that an institution that values life cannot let the man who left one go on declaiming morality untouched. And for Nicholas, minutes of applause turned to hours of questions and then to the cold file of a formal complaint. He was stripped of a committee position and temporarily suspended pending review. His reputation chilled like metal left out in snow.
The days after that were easier. The lab resumed its odd rhythms, my mentor—Grayson Acosta—wrote to me and said, “Susanne, don’t let outside noise break you. Do your work and live your life. If it’s appropriate—if it’s kind—love need not be secret.” His words were awkward and warm in the way of someone who thought in data and had a clumsy heart.
Elijah and I navigated a ridiculous secret that became less secret every day. He introduced me as “Susanne” to his friends like a badge he wore with pleasure. He teased me mercilessly. He made me tea. He brought my ruined GUCCI belt to dinner one night as a joke and put a tiny pink card beside it. The card read, in his cramped childish script: “Ellis – Susanne admirer – Arise.” He had presented it like some private heraldry. I opened it, and my face turned the color of small panic. He winked and grabbed my hand.
We were young and awkward and wholly ridiculous. But the lesson of the corridor remained: when someone tried to diminish me, other people rose, and sometimes the right thing is loud and public and just.
Two years later, when I stand in a small kitchen brushing my teeth and Elijah sneaks up behind me to press a kiss on my neck, I will remember the pink card and the GUCCI belt and the hallway where a man who thought himself untouchable found out he was not. I will remember how people who are kind enough to step forward can make a small injustice into a lesson for everyone.
“What are you thinking?” Elijah asks, voice low.
“About protein gels and how I hate running late,” I say.
He laughs. “Liar.”
“Okay. About the belt,” I confess.
He grins, bold as ever. “And the card?”
I look at him and lift a shoulder. “It’s a terrible ink choice.”
He kisses my forehead like a benediction. “Still mine.”
I laugh. “Forever that smug.”
He squeezes my hand. “You said yes this morning and then reneged three times.”
“Only because you were smug.”
He kisses me again, this time for real, quick and sure.
Outside the lab, my name appears on the emails and on posters; inside, Elijah calls me “Sis” and also “Susanne” with equal devotion. It is messy, ridiculous, tender—all of it true. The pink card sits on my bookshelf between a battered lab notebook and a tiny porcelain cup. Sometimes I touch it the way you touch a light switch, like a small ritual. That reminder is mine: I was defended. I was seen. I was chosen.
The End
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