Sweet Romance10 min read
The One Percent That Changed Everything
ButterPicks13 views
I remember the first time Eric Clarke walked into our campus like it was a scene on repeat.
"He looks unreal," one girl whispered the day he arrived.
"I know," I whispered back, but quietly, because whispering too loud felt like bragging about a secret.
I was Jade Kelley then, a student with a cheap notebook and a loud heart. I fell in love the old-fashioned way: waiting in the library for an "accidental" meeting, trying to appear calm and failing spectacularly.
"You okay?" he asked, the first time our worlds collided.
I answered with a stomp and a broken line, "I'm fine." I wasn't. A skirt slipped, I fell, and my chin met the marble with enough force to make time slow.
He reached for me. I remember his wristwatch catching the light and then cracking. My chin later healed, and so did the watch—after I paid for it. "It's fine," he said, smiling the kind of small smile that made excuses feel generous. "Don't worry about it."
"Your watch—" I started.
"Keep it as a reminder that life is messy," Eric said, and it hummed like a small betrayal in my chest.
"You could have refused to let me pay," I told my counselor the next week. "You could have said nothing."
Julia Davenport shook her head. "You should apologize properly. He lives like that, Jade. He will accept kindness."
So I cleaned his single dorm twice a week for two years. I swept, I dusted, I learned the rhythm of his life like a second heartbeat. I learned the names of his favorite pens, the exact way he liked his shirts folded, the time he would pause and look out of the window.
"You're so devoted," a friend said.
"I'm preparing," I told them. "For the day I can speak to him as more than a helper."
Years later, the universe gave me an office and the title I had wanted: his secretary. I could have balked at the smallness of the role. Instead I dug my hands into paperwork, learned the shorthand of his life, and made myself indispensable.
"Jade," he said the first month I worked there, handing me a thin folder, "you do your job well."
"Only because you let me," I said.
"That's a funny way to put it."
He never said otherwise.
One day in a meeting, he did something that slit open every held breath I had kept for him. With half the board watching, he asked, "I should get married soon. We have some options. Shareholders, what do you think?" Photographs flashed on the screen: smart women, private heirs, a bright young actress.
The room buzzed.
"Jade," Eric added, suddenly serious, suddenly close. "You are nearest me. You understand me. What's your take?"
My face burned hot. My hands found the edge of my seat like an anchor. "I'm not a shareholder," I said, and the words felt small. "My vote won't matter."
"Is that a request for shares?" he said without lifting his eyes.
"I—" I stopped and lied. "You should pick someone who benefits the company."
"Good," someone across the table said. "The actress has public value."
He smiled at me after the meeting, soft and small. "You will get shares," he said offhand. "One percent. For all your help. With conditions, of course."
I stared at the paper later and laughed into my pillow, because one percent was a fortune and also a leash: if I resigned, I lost it.
"Leave it to me," I told Kayla Christian, my roommate, that night. "If I can't be his wife, at least I'll have a sliver of what he built."
Kayla clapped. "You finally win, Jade. You finally win the world."
I bought gifts for the woman Eric chose to court, because that was my job: to build the bridge for him. I combed through her social feeds the way a spy combs maps. Linnea Harper—our national sweetheart—liked simple things, said she loved quiet scents and old songs.
"You're making all these arrangements," Kayla said. "Why are you so calm?"
"Because being calm is a survival skill," I said.
When Linnea fainted at their private meeting—an allergic reaction, the papers said—I felt a clutch of guilt and relief that tangled together. The hospital calls were short and panicked. Eric's driver told me the actress was fine, walking into the ER herself, but the headlines didn't sleep. "Engagement?" they asked. "Company merger of hearts and assets?"
"Control the narrative," Eric ordered when I called him. "Limit the leaks."
"I thought this would be a happy wave," I said. "Instead it's a storm."
"Do it," he said. "And stop playing the martyr. Your money is safe."
The night it happened—what we both called "the accident" and then refused to name properly—everything crooked.
"Close the door," Eric hissed.
"I won't be ordered around," I answered.
"Why are you here?" he snapped.
"Because I care," I said, and my voice was sharp as a needle.
He moved close in that unreal way he did; close enough that the world shrunk to the size of our breathing. "You care too much," he said. And then he kissed me.
I slapped him, once, hard. "You think that gives you the right?" I shouted.
"You don't know what you want," he said, and pulled me to him the second time with a force that made me black out at the edges. Later I would call it coercion. Later the word would be sharper than a blade. That night I used different words: shock, fear, and then a tired, collapsing surrender.
We did not exchange promises in the dark.
In the morning he looked at me with a face like a sealed window. "If you leave, you give up the shares," he said. "If you stay, don't mention this to others."
"You cannot threaten me like that," I said.
"I can and I will," he said, as though I had asked him to measure my value.
I was shaking for a long time. I considered going to the police. I considered burning everything. I considered taking the one percent and running.
"I stayed," I say now, my voice steady, because people remember things differently by the time they tell them. "I stayed because I was afraid and because I hoped."
Around us, life moved: office gossip, shareholder dinners, the slow rearrangement of bodies and status.
Then Denis Nunes walked into my life—the clear, polite, unexpectedly gentle cousin Eric had never bragged about.
"You're Jade," he said the first time I met him. "I tried to get your number last night and failed. Sorry."
"It's fine," I said lightly, and I didn't know where his words would land.
He was soft and curious, and he treated me like a person instead of a color on Eric's map. He listened in a way that left room for my silence. His kindness puzzled me. It made me waver.
One evening he found me by a river when I had convinced myself I would leave.
"You look tired," he said.
"I am tired of loving a man who measures me in favors," I said. "I am tired of working until I am nothing but a shadow in his life."
He didn't offer to fix the world. He offered to be present. "I'll be here," he said simply. "If you want."
I didn't act on that promise. Instead I buried myself deeper into corporate tasks, kept the calendar tidy, and protected the brand like a nervous guardian.
Then the tide turned.
The wedding was a spectacle. Denis—kind, clear-sighted Denis—with Linnea on his arm, wearing a smile that made a thousand headlines throb. He had become the man the family wanted: polished, strategic, married to the public affection of a nation's sweetheart.
I watched from a quiet corner as Eric's face folded in ways I hadn't seen before: surprise, hurt, a thin line of regret. The family had fixed what they wanted fixed; their plan had been executed.
"Do you regret anything?" I asked Eric later, when people clapped and music faded.
"Yes," he said, and the word was small, like a moth's wing.
"Then say it," I said. "Say you've been cruel."
He did not. He shrugged and spoke of markets and percentages. "We are moving forward," he said. "You have your share."
I held a secret in my pocket that was bigger than the one percent on the paper. In the months that followed, I collected small things: texts, voice notes, a confession hidden in his cloud backup where he had not changed the label. I recorded meetings and saved whispered threats. I did not know then that my collection would become an instrument.
A year later I had a better plan than wistful hope. I called a meeting.
"All shareholders are present," Sterling Barbieri announced. "We will now open the floor."
There were cameras, of course. There were also people whose eyes watched like nets: legal counsel, board members, two journalists present for the quarterly. Eric sat with his back to the window, perfectly composed like a statue of money.
"Jade," he said, surprised. "What are you doing on the agenda?"
"I'm exercising my rights," I answered. "I have one percent. I have a real question."
He smiled a practiced smile. "Make it quick."
"Eric," I said, and I lengthened my voice until it carried across the polished room. "Did you coerce our private moment? Did you threaten me with the shares? Did you plan to use other people's lives as stairs to walk higher?"
He laughed a thin laugh. "This is ridiculous."
I had rehearsed this. "I have proof," I said, and played the first voice note. It was his voice, recorded months before, changing tones as he negotiated my loyalty like a transaction.
The room shifted. "Stop," someone muttered. "Turn it off."
I let it play. "You can deny a recording," I said into the microphone, "but you cannot deny a file."
Faces blurred. Cameras leaned in.
"That's illegal," he snapped. "You can't present that—"
"I can and I will," I said. "You told me to control narratives. You told me to keep silent. You told me to accept being bought. Here is your narrative." I played the next clip: his voice threatening to freeze my accounts if I dared leave. I played a third, where he discussed the wedding as a product.
"I loved you," Eric spat suddenly, the old, private ache cracking the formal shell. "I thought you were mine."
The room's murmur grew. Someone in the back began to take pictures. "You abused your position," a board member said, voice sharp. "You threatened an employee."
Eric's expression flickered—first arrogantly defiant, then shocked, then a denial that felt like a child trying to cover a broken vase.
"That's taken out of context," he said, touch of a plea in his voice. "We were—"
"We?" I repeated. "We who? You who renounces accountability with the flourish of a contract? We who trade people's privacy for profit?"
Denis stood then, slow, measured. "Enough," he said quietly, but when he spoke his words sounded like a judge's gavel. "This room is about trust. You've broken that."
Eric's face went through stages: a flush of red, a hard tightening in his jaw, a sudden attempt to laugh as if to shrink the damage. "You are making me sound—" he began.
"Get off your chair," the oldest shareholder, Baxter Costa, called from near the window. "If these are the things you did, then you must answer."
He rose, and the room fell into a terrible order. Questions came in a cascade: "Did you threaten her with her own life savings? Did you manipulate company resources to protect your image? Did you plan to use the marriage as leverage?"
He tried to bluster. He tried to charm. He tried to cry. "You don't understand," he said once, voice cracking into something raw. "You are tearing my life apart."
"Your life is not more important than another's dignity," I said. "You chose to make people an accessory."
There were whispers: "He always looked so cold. I didn't expect this." "No one should be treated like that." A woman near the door covered her mouth and began to record on her phone. Someone else said, "Save it. We need minutes."
Eric's defenses crumbled like a wall in an earthquake. He went through the arc the rulebook predicted: arrogance, anger, denial, shock, then pleading. "Please," he begged finally, in a small, broken voice that did not suit a man who once sealed his decisions like a banker. "I didn't mean—"
"Meaning is irrelevant when you inflicted harm," I said, and it landed like a judge's sentence. The board voted for an immediate internal investigation. His authority was suspended pending review. The room rang with a kind of triumph that felt both cold and necessary.
Afterwards, in the hall where the press clustered like dark birds, he faced me with hollowed eyes. "Why would you do this?" he asked. "We were—"
"You tried to buy me," I said. "And then you used your life to frighten me into silence. I couldn't live under that shadow. I collected the truth. People deserve to know."
He bent his head. The cameras clicked. Members of the board murmured and shuffled like a sea. People who had once admired his tidy composure now looked away, aghast or amused. Some took photos of him in his broken state. He demanded apologies. He made pleas. People stepped back.
"You wanted a public spectacle," I said later, months in a private conversation with Denis, the man who had never lied to me. "You wanted this."
"I wanted you safe," he answered. "I wanted you to have power."
He took my hand then, simply and quietly, and squeezed.
Time rearranged after that. Eric lost significant control. He was forced to accept counseling. He had to stand in front of shareholders and tell the story in his own heavy voice. He apologized. He became smaller in the public eye, which was the kind of punishment that has teeth for a man built of image.
I watched him fail and then begin, clumsily, to try to be better. I am not a saint. I wanted a reckoning. I wanted accountability. I wanted all of us to be able to breathe without someone else's shadow suffocating us.
"Do you forgive him?" friends asked.
"I forgave the version of him that I wished he'd been," I said. "Forgiving is not forgetting."
Denis married Linnea in a way that belonged to the cleverness of families and the logic of alliances. Eric stepped down from certain posts he used to hold and took the harder path of repair.
People like headlines. People like dramatic endings. But we, the ones who live the days, know the truth: endings are messy, restorative, imperfect.
A year afterward, at the little farmhouse outside the city where my family now lives—built with money I quietly sent home—I sat with Eric on a porch that smelled like rain. He had come not as a titan but as a man with fewer titles and clearer eyes.
"Do you remember the watch?" he asked suddenly, holding a small box.
"It's stopped," I said.
"This one won't stop again."
He opened it. "You keep it," he said.
"Why?" I asked.
"Because you taught me what it's like to be human. Because you made me see my reflection and not like what I found."
We married not because I needed financial security nor because marriage fixed what had been done. We married because, after the public reckoning and private work, two flawed people decided to try again. I took his name at formal events, but I kept my small, stubborn independence: my one percent turned into a seat at the table.
"People will say a lot," Kayla warned before the vows. "They'll call it a redemption story, or worse."
"We have our truth," I told her. "That's enough."
There were awkward dinners. There were days when his old habits flicked, and I would pull back and remind him with a word or a look. There were long nights when I took the watch and wound it, listening to the tick like a heart regaining rhythm.
Denis and Linnea built a life in the public eye that fit them: a clean, bright joint of love and duty. He was good to her, and she to him. We all reshaped ourselves in ways no one expected.
The last time I opened the shareholders meeting, I sat tall and used my voice, and my one percent felt like an anthem.
"That's my story," I told a reporter once. "Not of being a victim, but of being someone who learned where to plant her foot and hold her ground."
A girl who once waited in a library to bump into a life now sat at the corner of a boardroom table and watched the world change itself, one small, stubborn decision at a time.
The End
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