Sweet Romance14 min read
The Mousse, the Lie, and the Man Who Made My Heart
ButterPicks11 views
I kissed a rideshare driver.
"I kissed a rideshare driver," I told myself out loud the next morning when my phone exploded with comments.
"Where did you find such a model?" one friend wrote.
"Is he single?" another asked.
"Post more!" they begged.
I sat on my empty bed and stared at the ceiling. My head was foggy, my cheeks were sore from sleeping on my phone. I could not remember how I had gotten home. I remembered crying, I remembered a bar, and I remembered feeling small and foolish next to someone who should have been out of my reach.
I had been drinking because of Marshall.
"Marshall left," I had told the drink. "Marshall left and took our plans with him."
I had been an easy target for pity. I climbed into the closest car. I curled up. I pretended to sleep. I made a silly photo as a joke, shaping my face like I was stealing a kiss from the driver.
"Old things out, new things in. New boyfriend, please take care of me!" I posted the picture and laughed at my own boldness.
The driver stopped the car for a red light and didn't look back. He had a handsome face that looked like it had been edited by life to make other faces feel ordinary.
The next morning at the office, my feed was buzzing. "Which bar? Who is he?" They were teasing, excited. I scrolled, then I scrolled again, and my heart sank when I saw the rideshare cancellation notice still in my app: a complaint from a driver who had been waiting.
"You were not there!" he had typed. "What a waste."
What had I gotten into? I touched my hair and found it messy but intact. My phone was unharmed. I unease-danced from my bed to work like a guilty thief.
"Aliana, you are late," Joy hissed when I slipped into the meeting room. She waggled her eyebrows and then waved me into the circle.
There he stood at the front, introduced by the editor-in-chief: "This is our new editor."
My face surged hot. I knew that face. My fingers went cold.
"It's Zack Bridges," he said, and then, as if the universe had a sense of humor, he added quietly so only I heard, "You photographed me badly last night."
I wanted the floor to split open.
After the meeting Joy nudged me. "Aliana, your picture fits his face. Did you...?"
"I did not," I lied. My voice came out thin.
I tried to work. My hands moved but my head replayed the bar: his profile in the headlights, the casual slant of his mouth, the way he tucked hair behind his ear. I had liked this man in college and he had turned me down then—cold and polite—and that had stung for years like a bruise.
When the company chat announced "Zack Bridges (add me!)" the office erupted. Female colleagues clutched their phones and squealed.
"You still have his chat?" Joy whispered. "Add him, add him!"
I frowned. I had his chat already. I had forgotten I had it. He rarely posted. I deleted the picture and hoped that would bury it.
At lunch I kept stealing glances through the glass at his office. He had unobtrusive style now—gold-rimmed glasses, neat hair parted on the side. I remembered him as a short-haired student with a distant expression. Older had polished him. He was more than polished—he was dangerous.
That night I was in the elevator going home and he walked in. He hit B1 and didn't look at me.
"There's a thing you left in my car," he said suddenly.
My mouth opened. "What?"
He handed me a small sealed packet. I felt faint. "It's... a disposable glove," he said. "Not what I expected."
My face went flaming. I clutched the packet as if it might evaporate. "It was a glove," I blurted. "You—you must have thought—"
He fixed me with a cool glance and murmured, "Girls should keep some respect, you know."
"Respect?" I stammered. "I was drunk, I—"
"I remember you had three drinks," he said, as if it were simple math.
"Three?" I echoed. My knees nearly buckled. I hadn't told anyone how much I drank. "Were you in that bar too?"
"Coincidence," he said. "That's all."
I wanted an exit. When we reached the lobby, people spilled into the small elevator and a coworker bumped me into him. The glove slipped from my bag and fell to the floor in slow motion.
The room was still.
"This is a disposable glove!" I said loudly, trying to control the heat in my face.
Someone laughed. Someone whispered. My office had found the scene entertaining.
The next day the rumor began: "Aliana used her charms to hook the new editor." Joy smirked. "Fast and efficient, girl."
I tried to argue. I tried to explain. He listened with a face that had been carved of stone.
"You're damaging my reputation," I said softly. "Would you clear this? Please?"
He tilted his head. "You don't mind, you say. Why would I? It's only gossip."
I walked away humiliated. He hadn't defended me. I felt smaller than usual.
Over the next week I learned things. I learned that Zack was distant, clever, and precise in meetings. He praised my food feature idea and said it might heal a broken heart. He approved the piece and that rush of professional victory steadied me. My old editor had always refused; Zack made room.
My food feature was about a dessert creator I admired online, a man who made mousse and pastries but never showed his face. I had started as a small fan and sent him messages when he had stopped posting. He wrote back once: thank you. We kept a casual, comforting correspondence.
When we finally booked the interview, the blogger surprised me with thoughtful notes and a precise plan. He was tuned to detail like an artist and trusted me with the story.
That week the company planned a welcome party for Zack at that same bar.
"I can't go," I told myself. I couldn't relive the drunk moment in public. The chief editor insisted. Money would be deducted if someone didn't show. I went.
I stuck to a corner, trying to be invisible. Men bought shots for Zack like he was a cameo at a gala. He accepted with a small smile.
"Aliana," my chief beamed. "You helped make this happen. Stay and celebrate."
I froze until my cheeks warmed. A man at the table laughed and said, "She drank the editor into the car last time, right?" and the table clattered like a small storm.
I said nothing. I sat and watched.
At one point everyone left for a round and I plotted my escape. My boss tapped my shoulder. "Aliana, drive Zack home. You two live in the same building."
What? I thought. I hadn't known that he lived nearby. He had never told me. The boss said, "You didn't drink, did you? So you're perfect for the job."
When the crowd drifted away and the lights dimmed, we found ourselves in the parking lot. I was awkward and careful.
"You're heavy," I said when he leaned on me.
"I am not heavy," he muttered.
I drove his car and he slept with his head on the console. He looked harmless and beautiful at rest. I couldn't help myself. I lifted his face and pressed my lips to his mouth for a fake kiss, and took a picture.
"My god," I breathed as I looked at the photo. "I finally did it."
He didn't sleep. He opened his eyes and a smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.
"You're making trouble," he said softly.
"You're drunk," I said, and realized too late that maybe he was not.
He watched me drive with a patience I hadn't expected. When I pulled into my garage and the car stopped, he sat up. "Thank you," he said. "And don't use that picture."
I got out fast and swore I would never let him see that photo. Then fate, cruel and punctual, put us in the same elevator again and he stepped in before the doors could close.
He looked at me and said, "You shouldn't make rumors."
"I didn't," I said, honest and small.
"I thought you were trying to ruin me," he said.
"Why would I want to ruin you?" I asked.
He looked away. "Because I'm not what people think."
Then the elevator stopped. The lights went out. Pumping black swallowed us.
"It stopped," someone cried.
"It will be okay," Zack said. "I will call for help."
He pressed the emergency button. His hands moved calmly. I had never seen him like that. In the dark my fear grew quick and raw. I stepped closer. "Can I hold you?" I heard myself say.
"No," he said bluntly, pushing me away as if my request was sharp.
"I wasn't—" I tried to explain, but then blackness took me and the elevator seemed to compress around my lungs.
I woke up in a hospital bed with an old security guard watching my door. "Took you long enough," he said. "You fainted in the elevator. We had to carry you out."
Zack had arranged for the guard to stay until I woke. He had been there earlier, busy in the office, doing important things. He didn't speak to me much in the following days, and I was left to stew in embarrassment.
Then I saw him in a hallway, talking politely with a woman whose clothes whispered of money and taste. The woman smiled at him like someone looking at a prize. My mind did the rest.
"She's the investor," a coworker whispered behind me like a knife. "She's wealthy and she keeps handsome young things. Maybe he is—"
I felt hollow. The suspicion came whole and hard. I told myself: so what? I make my money honestly. Beauty doesn't cost me anything.
The food feature went well. The magazine printed my piece and it sold more copies than we'd seen in two years. Our chief promised a bonus and a promotion. I was dizzy with good fortune.
The party to celebrate my success was at that same bar. I swore I would behave. I got caught up in the joy. We toasted. The chief handed me an envelope. "Aliana, salary up and a bonus," he said.
I clutched the money like a talisman. I drank. I laughed at my own boldness.
I sat down and saw Zack in a nearby shadow. I walked over like a fool and planted myself beside him. "You are expensive," I said, laughing, and slapped the cash on the table. "I'll buy you for one night."
He looked up, surprised. He smiled, faint and unreadable. "You are drunk," he said, but he did not leave.
I told him, loud and stupid with honest feelings, "I liked you in college. I still like you. You are a star over my head that I can't touch."
He didn't answer at first. Then he put his hand over mine.
"Come home with me," I said.
He carried me to his car and later, in his bed, he held me like he wanted me small and sweet. "You said you loved me," he murmured in the dark. "Do you mean it?"
"I do," I whispered, too tired to hold it back.
In the morning I woke up in a room that was not mine. Decorations were soft and kitchen smelled of pastries. I saw a photograph on the counter—an image of a mousse I had once watched in a video. I jumped toward the door to dress, but a voice called my name.
He appeared with wet hair and a towel. I choked on the wish to run.
"You said something last night," he said. "Did you mean it?"
"I- I don't remember everything," I lied.
"You said you liked me," he said quietly. "I liked you too."
Then he walked me to the kitchen and the world changed.
His home was a small bakery studio strapped to the back of a house. The room smelled of butter and sugar. He wore black chef clothes and his hands moved with a grace I recognized from the videos I used to watch.
"You remember my mousse?" he asked. "That was me."
My heart stumbled. "You're Pablo Liang?" I whispered, because all at once the anonymous pastry genius I admired and the man I had been embarrassed in front of overlapped.
"No," he laughed. "Pablo Liang is not my name. It's the online name I used. People think it's a mystery. But yes—I'm the one who bakes. My mother watches those videos when I travel to see her. Her memory is failing."
He opened a door and there she lay, an old woman with a thin wrist and a look that drifted like fog.
"She calls my name when she's lucid," Zack said. "She forgets me, often, but when she remembers, it's the brightest thing."
My chest broke open in a new way. I saw him fold into tenderness and I understood the secret he had been hiding.
"I came to the magazine because my aunt asked me to help," he admitted. "She helped me start this little studio. People thought I was 'kept' by her, but that's impossible. She's my family. We all help each other."
"Your aunt?" I said, and at that moment Graciela Rice appeared at the top of the stairs, stylish, composed.
"Ah," she said with a smile that folded like leather. "You found my boy's little kitchen. Good. Your article is lovely. You did well."
I could feel the gossip softening into explanation. A stranger had become a man with obligations and love.
We tasted mousse. He served mine with a tiny red heart on top.
"It is for you," he said.
The heart seemed to pulse.
But the story was not only sweetness. Someone who had hurt me in the weeks before—Marshall Gordon, my ex—had been stirring the rumor mill, sending whispers and half-truths that made nights longer. He was a man I had trusted, a man who left me when his own plans drifted.
At the bar celebration, when I had money and nerves in equal measure, I had seen him across the room with another woman. He laughed too loudly. His hand found someone else's waist.
Earlier he had sent cruel texts in the middle of the breakup. He had called my grief melodrama. Now he paraded with a smirk.
I realized something then. I wasn't going to let him get away with the way he had ended things and the way he had turned my sadness into his entertainment.
That night, at the bar where everyone we knew swirled and drank, I decided to speak up.
I stood on a small stage where the DJ had left the mic. The lights thinned down and the chatter stilled. People recognized me from the magazine. They quieted.
"Can I say something?" I asked, the mic buzzing in my hand.
"Go on, Aliana!" someone shouted.
I looked at the crowd, at the glossy faces, at Zack watching from the shadows. I breathed. Marshall sat at a table near the back. His laugh rang like a bell.
"He left me," I said into the silence. "He left me without reason. He said I was too much. Then he smiled in public like he had never been cruel."
"Marshall," I called his name into that hush. He turned, surprised that I had pulled him into light. "Come up here."
He didn't want to. He rose slow, a practiced smile freezing as if a cold had caught him. He took the stairs and smiled at the cameras like a man who had never known regret.
I felt the room tilt. "Do you remember what you said to me?" I asked.
He said nothing.
"Do you remember the night we agreed to move in together?" I pressed. "Do you remember the ticket you bought for us? The apartment deposit? Or was it all a scene for you?"
The crowd made small noises. Phones turned like sunflowers. Someone shouted his name. Someone recorded.
"What is this?" Marshall croaked, offended and careful.
"Do you remember texting me last month: 'You are dramatic. Grow up.'?" I read it from a printed page I had kept. "Do you remember the messages where you told me I was not worth staying for?"
His face tightened. The smile became a mask.
"I loved you," I said plainly. "I worked nights to keep us afloat. I gave you my time, my money, my trust. And you left me like trash. You paraded without consequence."
He opened his mouth. "Aliana—"
"Then this week you sat with your new girl like nothing happened. You whispered with colleagues. You said my name in jokes. You played the innocent."
Someone in the crowd hissed. The lights brightened. The table of Marshall's friends shifted uncomfortably.
He tried to laugh through it. "You're making a scene," he said. "Why are you doing this?"
"Because people notice," I said. "And people like to hear the whole story. Not just the part where it's funny. Not just the part where the man gets to look like he never hurt a soul."
The cameras in phones grew like a sea.
Marshall's face flushed. He tried to charm the crowd. "Come on, Aliana, this is messy. Stop."
"Messy?" I said, pointing to his glass. "You broke what was clean. You broke trust like it was an empty cup."
Someone booed softly. A woman in a sequined dress pointed. "He cheated," she said.
"That's a lie," he protested, voice shaking.
I pulled out his messages—screenshots arranged like evidence. "He told me he had someone else," I said, and I read his words out loud: "I'm tired. I found someone better. It's over."
The bar was silent now. The DJ had stopped the music. Phones recorded. Faces leaned forward.
Marshall's expression went from annoyed to shocked.
"You liar!" someone yelled.
He was human then, smaller than his posture had suggested. He stammered, "I—it's complicated."
"Complicated?" I repeated. "No. It's a simple word you use to excuse what you did."
"Stop!" Marshall begged. "This is humiliating."
"Humiliating?" I laughed, a short bright sound. "You should be ashamed."
He spun away toward the exit. The crowd rose like a tide. A man near the door blocked his path. "Tell them the truth," the man demanded. "Own your actions."
Marshall's face had gone pale. His friends shrank. People started whispering, sharing the screenshots, sharing the story.
"You want to be smug no more?" I asked. "Say you were wrong. Say you are sorry."
He broke. He lowered himself into the chair like a deflated man. He began to speak in small, urgent sentences. "I didn't mean— I didn't know— I am sorry."
"Sorry doesn't repair," someone said. "You broke her."
He looked around at the small audience forming. Mothers, interns, senior editors, strangers—someone recorded his face raw and unguarded.
"Marshall, promise to be better," I said slow. "Or don't promise. Just accept people will know."
He begged. He wanted to explain, to salvage his image. He fumbled his phone, allowed a hundred flashes of his ruin. Women in the crowd hissed. Men shifted their feet. Some clapped—some in support, some in mockery.
He sputtered, "Please, I'm sorry. Don't do this."
I felt a strange clarity. "Don't do this?" I echoed. "You did this. You did it to me."
He covered his face. The world was a mess of whispers. He tried to catch the people who had once coddled him. They pulled away.
Finally, he left the bar with a face that had lost its color. People followed with their phones. His fall looked public and final.
The punishment was not violent. It was not revenge in some theatrical sense. It was small and deep: a public taking back of dignity, his cozy image stripped. People would remember the way his smile had fallen. He tried to apologize later by messages and calls. I let most go unanswered. He appeared at work days later with a heavy, guilty expression. Colleagues averted their eyes.
He begged to be allowed to talk. He wanted our old arrangement back. I looked at him and felt sorry and strange and not soft enough to take him back. "You chose," I told him simply. "You chose the easy way out."
That was the moment his public life shifted. It wasn't police or jail. It was his own reflection in a hundred recordings. The world watched him trip. I watched him trip and felt my own heart right itself.
As for Zack, after that night in his kitchen and the revelation of his small studio, things changed in a gentler way. We bumped into each other, talked at the office, and then we made time for each other. He taught me the names of sugars and how to fold a mousse so it keeps air. He burned a finger and swore like a sailor. He laughed with me in the cramped kitchen, and he showed me tender things that had nothing to do with rumor.
"I didn't want people to think my work was bought," he told me one evening while we cleaned bowls. "The videos and the baking are honest labor. The rest, the gossip—it's cruel and misleading."
"Why didn't you tell me you did that?" I asked. "Why hide the videos?"
"I wanted it to be simple," he said. "I wanted a place where my mother could smile and not be watched."
We learned about each other's shame and pride. My embarrassment about the kiss and the photo softened into a joke we shared. "You are a terrible thief," he teased when I confessed how I'd staged the kiss.
He folded a small heart of chocolate and placed it on my mousse. "For honesty," he said.
The magazine feature did better than we dreamed. My promotion lasted and the bonus helped me move the little things that made life steadier. I learned to hold my head higher.
One afternoon, a week after the bar scene, Zack and I sat with my small piece of mousse. He leaned in and kissed me like he meant to keep the world from falling apart. "You won't believe this," he whispered.
"What?" I asked.
"I saved the wrapper from that night," he said and showed me a small, silly disposable glove packet. "And I kept that picture you deleted, the one you thought was shameful."
"You—" I froze.
"I didn't want you to be embarrassed," he said. "I wanted to make sure you knew I remembered things. I liked you before you knew how to be bold. I still like you."
We laughed then, a small burst, for the ridiculousness of our early days. My ex had been punished by the truth. Zack had proven he was more than a rumor. I had found ways to be brave in work and nonsense in love.
Later, when Graciela came by the studio and tasted a mousse with a tiny red heart on top, she clapped. "This is perfect," she said. "This is what family is."
Zack wrapped his arm around me. "You like it?"
"I love it," I said. "It's sweet, soft, and honest."
We sat under the pastry lights and tasted the small heart. It tasted like sugar and a promise.
At the end, when I closed my notebook and tucked the interview notes away, I looked at the tiny red heart on top of the mousse again. I thought about public moments and private truths. I thought about the way a rumor had tried to shape a life and how a tiny kitchen with a camera had saved one.
"Keep the heart," Zack said, and kissed my temple. "It's ours now."
The mousse melted on my tongue. I smiled, and the red heart looked like a small, clear secret on top of a life I had not expected to taste.
The End
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