Sweet Romance12 min read
The Tulip on the Balcony
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I was packing a suitcase when Simon said he wanted me to stay.
His lashes were heavy like someone who'd been living half-awake, his face usually so composed suddenly pleading in a way I'd only seen in drunk men or boys who had nothing left to lose.
"Please," he said. "Don't go this time."
I had a toothbrush in my hand. The toothpaste cap clicked as I set it down.
"I have to leave, Simon," I said. "This trip was set weeks ago."
He stepped closer, the apartment shrinking around us.
"Ten more minutes," he begged. "Just stay. Talk to me."
I remembered a time when I had begged him the way he was begging me now, bent and ugly and miserable. I remembered how small I had made myself around him for eight years.
I didn't want to be small anymore.
1
I canceled every invitation on the last day of my trip and went to the old temple on the hill alone.
"Why would you go to a temple?" Corbin had asked on the phone like it was some theatrical plot point.
"Because I need quiet," I had said.
The temple smelled faintly of incense; the caretakers smiled at me the kind of way the morning sun smiles—soft, without expectation. I swept under the old cherry tree while the monks chanted.
I took off my shoes and bowed the way they taught us—three bows, three questions.
"Am I honest with myself?" I asked the empty air.
"Do I want to stay?" I asked.
"Who am I, without him?" I asked.
The answers didn't show up in big reveal. They arrived like thin rain that clears the dust on something you didn't know had been dirty.
When a caretaker asked me what I wished for, I surprised myself by answering plainly.
"To be all right," I said.
2
Corbin screamed.
"You finally did it, Isabelle!" he laughed on the phone so loud neighbors might have heard. "About time you stopped being an idiot!"
"Don't call me an idiot," I said. "I'm serious."
"Good," he said. "You meeting me for coffee later? I want an exclusive interview about how it feels to be free."
We met at the corner café we always went to; Corbin prodded like he was going to extract something valuable and confess managerial satisfaction.
"Come on," he said, leaning back. "Why now? After eight years? Are you sure you're not just mad because of—"
"Vivienne," I finished for him.
He made a face so dramatic the barista glanced over.
"She's always been a problem," Corbin said. "But really, you were never a backup. You were always the real thing. You deserve better."
I didn't say that I knew he was right. I didn't say my heart still ached like someone had pressed a hot iron to the same place for years. Instead, I slid a photo across the table.
"That's a white dress on my balcony," I said. "Hand-washed. Simon's fingerprints are usually the only ones on my balcony laundry."
Corbin's eyes narrowed. "He brought Vivienne to the families' meeting?"
"He did," I said. "Three of us at a table. Their shoulders touching. The dessert placed between us like a joke. He washed her dress with his hands, Corbin."
"It was a setup," Corbin said. "A public humiliating joke."
"He never thought it could hurt me like this," I said. "He thinks I'll always be there."
3
It hurt more than I expected to return and see the white dress still hanging on the balcony, its hem stained by interior light. I found a small box in my laundry basket that felt somehow foreign — a box for something rare and private.
"Isabelle?" he said from the doorway. He looked composed, like he'd practiced grief in front of a mirror.
"Why didn't you tell me she was invited to the family gathering?" I asked. I wanted to be furious. I wanted to scream. My voice found a calm edge instead.
He gave me a necklace in a turquoise box. "I thought you'd like it," he said. "I'm sorry about the other night. I should have done better."
"Why did you wash her dress?" I asked, because some questions refuse being folded into apology.
"She was upset," he said. "She'd had a rough day."
"When did you stop being careful about hurting me?" I asked.
He looked at the tip of my finger, where the skin had split from habit or something deeper. "I was wrong," he said. "I won't let it happen again."
I wanted to believe him. I walked away to the bathroom and shut the door.
I left that night with a suitcase I had packed quietly before dinner. I left him a life of notes and sticky reminders he no longer needed. I left a tulip on the windowsill.
4
A week later there was a dent on the sofa where he must have slept. I smelled his cologne on the armrest and felt nothing but relief.
When I told him I was moving out, he stood in the doorway holding grocery bags like he could make those things speak for him.
"Don't do this," he said. "Let's talk."
"It's over, Simon," I said. "We cannot pretend the dignity theft didn't happen."
He dropped the bags and came close.
"We'll do another family meeting," he said. "I'll fix it."
"You'll fix it by washing someone else's dress?" I asked. "You think an apology can undo public humiliation?"
He looked like someone I didn't know. He said, "Please. Name one thing, Isabelle. Anything. I will do it."
I put my hand on my suitcase. "There was a box of—"
"—condoms?" he said, with a strange grin that made me feel my insides go cold.
"You explain to me what intimacy you think you are entitled to," I said. "You let your 'old friend' step across lines you swore you'd respect."
"I wasn't unfaithful," he said quickly. "It was nothing."
"Nothing," I echoed. "Your 'nothing' left me to explain myself to everyone. My parents left under their disappointment. My cake was thrown out. You expect 'nothing' to be an acceptable punch line?"
He didn't answer. He touched the tulip by the window as if to test whether it had roots.
"I am done being your safety net," I said. "We are done."
He begged in the doorway, "Isabelle, don't go."
"Too late," I said. "I already am."
5
Work swallowed me up for a while. Travel became motion-laundry where I reshuffled myself into new rooms so as not to think too much. Corbin posted fake congratulations on social and called every eccentric aunt to spread the rumor that I had finally left "that boy."
"He's gonna melt," Corbin said. "He doesn't know how to be without you."
"Maybe that's fine," I said into a pillow on a hotel bed. "Maybe he should."
At night I dreamed of our past like a film on repeat—how he shielded me from rain on the first night we met; how he misremembered my birthdays and memorized my coffee order; how he promised to stand by me on every anniversary and then one day chose to be elsewhere.
6
Winter closed in and I found a small apartment with a balcony. I bought a tulip pot I promised myself I'd keep alive. Each morning I watered it as if it were proof that I could sustain something.
Then one morning my phone buzzed. A text that said, "I'm outside." Simon's clockwork insistence had started. He came with messy hair and a tremor in his voice.
"Let me in," he said.
I opened the door. He stood there like a man who had tried to rebuild a house with his bare hands and failed.
"You look terrible," I said.
"So do you," he said. "I've been stupid. I can't stop thinking about you. I hate how I treated you."
"Why did you treat me like background?" I asked quietly.
He swallowed. "I was scared," he said. "I didn't know how to be the one they wanted me to be. I thought I could do both."
"You can't do both," I said.
He dropped a box—another present. "Marry me," he said, not as a joke but with a desperation that made my lungs clutch.
"I can't," I said, quietly.
He knelt. "I'll leave her," he promised. "I'll do anything."
"Did you leave her when you were with me?" I asked.
"No." His answer was a rope around his neck.
"Then your promise is hollow," I said. "I need different things. I need equality. I need to be someone's first instinct, not an afterthought."
He looked at me like he might break. "I love you."
"Prove it," I said.
7
He tried. He waited beneath my office windows, made lunches, knitted tiny pats of husbandry into my days—sticky notes on my desk, texts at midnight, a calendar entry for 'dinner with Isabelle' every week.
For a while it was almost tender. For a while I let him. For a while I let the coldness crack into a warmth that could be mistaken for beginning.
Then the rumor started—embarrassing, ugly whispers about what had happened the night of the family talk. I watched his hands fumble. I saw him put on the same tired acts.
One night I stayed late and came down to the street. He was waiting, olive coat wrapped tight, breath fogging in the streetlight.
"Let's walk," he said.
We walked and the winter air made my cheeks hurt. I stopped near a bridge and turned to him.
"Simon," I said. "We need to stop."
He stopped as if the ground had been removed from below him.
"Stop what?" he whispered.
"Stop pretending there's a last-minute rescue that erases years of being second," I said.
"Please," he said.
He had love to give, and yet he'd parceled it like a miser. I had given him eight years and the balance was not enough.
8 — The Public Unraveling
I never planned to make a scene. I don't like scenes. But there are moments when a quiet end is not enough to stitch a life back together. When your humiliation has been played out publicly, sometimes the healing requires a similarly public correction.
There was a charity gala—one of those winter fundraisers with twinkling lights and a guest list that included both our families and half the people who had seen us onstage and in private. Corbin called three days earlier and said, "He'll be there. Vivienne will be there."
"Why would they go?" I asked.
"Because he thinks showing up proves ownership," Corbin said. "He thinks he can absolve himself in a ballroom."
I wore a dress that had nothing to do with him. I chose shoes that didn't pinch when I walked. Corbin sat beside me like an accomplice and handed me a folded piece of paper.
"Promise me you'll let me do it," he said.
"If you want the world to see them for who they are, do it cleanly," I said. "No theatrics. Just the folder with proof."
We waited. A soft violin swelled and polite laughter floated across the chandeliers. Simon arrived just before dessert, hair slicked, shoulders squared, like the man who had practiced regret.
Vivienne walked in with the kind of smile written by advertisements for childhood friends reunited. She had always been on his arm, always pretending to be incidental.
I rose when Corbin touched my leg, paper in hand. I walked to the center of the room—the awkwardness of public attention rising like a tide—and I set the folder on the podium where donors were thanked.
"Thank you all for coming," I said. "This city does good work. I want to add something to this evening—something personal."
There were polite murmurs.
"I am Isabelle," I said. "I was in a long relationship with someone who loved me only until someone more convenient returned home."
Simon made a small sound like regret. Vivienne's face drained.
"I loved him for eight years," I said. "I stood in the rain and on stage and at the family meetings. I trusted him. I believed him."
The room got smaller around his shoulders. Simon's eyes found me, pleading.
"He introduced me to his family," I said. "He promised me a role in his life. But this year he allowed someone else to come between us — and made my humiliation a spectacle."
Vivienne shifted. A few guests turned to her. The host tried to steer back to the program, but Corbin, calm as a man with a cause, signaled the sound tech.
"Please play the recording," he said.
A hush fell. A voice came through the speakers—Vivienne's, laughing in a voice mail, and then Simon's voice: "She needs me. You know I can't just—"
Then texts displayed on the screens around the room: messages that showed plans, apologies that circled too late, invitations she had accepted and pretended were casual. There were photos of Simon hand-washing a dress with bubbles still clinging to the fabric. There were screenshots of messages where Vivienne wrote, "I liked that you were vulnerable. It makes me feel needed."
Someone gasped. A woman two tables over began to whisper that she'd suspected as much. Another man raised his eyebrows. Simon's cheeks hollowed.
Vivienne stood up, trying to smile. "Isabelle—" she began.
"Don't," I said. "Not here."
"I was the friend," Vivienne said. "You don't have to—"
"Friend?" I said. "Friends don't make a betrayal into a publicity stunt. Friends don't accept hand-washing on a balcony as 'comfort.' Friends don't stand between a woman and the only life she thought she had."
Vivienne's composure broke. The smile thinned and then folded. Her eyes widened, then narrowed, then filled with a small, hard panic. She reached for the nearest table, fingers scrabbling for the edge like a drowning person reaching for a buoy.
"You think you can humiliate me and then sit back as if nothing happened?" I said. "You think apologies sewn on to wristbands and donations are payment for being made ridiculous?"
People were leaning forward. Someone in the back rifled out a phone and began to record.
Simon stepped forward. "Please, everyone," he said, voice raw. "I made a mistake. I never meant—"
"You never meant to make me your priority," I said. "You meant to keep me on hold."
Another voice—Corbin's—took over, calm but cutting. "For the record: the night Isabelle's parents left the meeting upset, he chose to go with Vivienne. The candlelight dinner became a trio. He washed Vivienne's dress by hand. Isabelle cleaned up on her own."
The crowd began to murmur. A woman near the front, someone who had been at our family meeting, stood and nodded. "Yes," she said. "I remember wondering why the cake was left untouched."
Vivienne's face shifted through the stages of disbelief to denial to outrage. "You have no right," she snapped. "This is private."
"This became public the moment you made it into a show," I said. "You've had the luxury of being the lost childhood friend. You've fed off his guilt and your own craving for attention."
Vivienne's response cracked. "You don't understand the parts of my life that—"
"No, I think I do," I said. "You wanted to feel like the heroine again. You wanted to be wanted. You wanted a soft place to land."
There were people who shifted, who whispered that Vivienne had always been coaxing attention; others who clucked about how Simon had failed to fortify his relationship. A few doors began to open; the clack of heels on marble sounded like judgment.
Simon took Vivienne's hand like someone trying to catch a falling vase. "I can fix this," he said.
"Can you?" I asked, steady now. "Can you unring the bell of that night? Can you look my parents in the eye and tell them why you made them look at me like that?"
He couldn't. His face flushed and he sagged, a grown man stripped of a thousand small allowances.
Vivienne started to speak, then stopped as someone at a nearby table stood up and said, "I won't accept this behavior." That voice belonged to an aunt of mine who had been there in silence for years. She walked over and, with a gentle authority, said, "Apology's not currency in this hall. You have to return what you stole."
Vivienne's eyes filled, and then she tried to gather herself—wrongly, selfishly.
"I'm sorry," she said to the room, "if anyone was hurt."
There was a scatter of soft sounds—sympathy for a lost friend, approval for a woman standing up.
A man at the head table, who had seen it all, shook his head. "Trust is not a performance," he said. "You can stage friendships all you want. But you cannot stage honor."
Simon sank into a chair. The applause was not for me. It was a slow, polite clapping for civility, but around me people were whispering, some recording, some nodding like witnesses to a correction.
Vivienne left the room with the lightness of someone who believes she can walk away, but the door closed on her like a verdict. People gathered in little knots, discussing the incident with a tint of schadenfreude. Simon sat there, shell-shocked, while his peers looked at him the way one looks at a man who has missed his chance.
Afterwards, in the hallway, he found me.
"Isabelle," he said, "what was that?"
"It was a truth-telling," I said. "People needed to see that your 'mistake' had consequences."
He sank against the wall. "Don't make me out to be the villain," he whispered.
"You were not a hero," I said. "You were a complacent man who thought love was a default and not a responsibility."
People passing us stared. A woman pointed and said, "He looked so broken." Another snapped photographs. Corbin grinned like a man who had seen justice.
Simon pleaded. "Please. People have seen a partial thing. Please, let's talk out of the public eye."
"Out of the public eye, you were always better at hiding," I said. "This isn't about public shaming. This is about accountability. Your 'sorry' was not timed. If you wanted to save us, you should have chosen earlier."
He went home alone.
Vivienne later sent me a message that said, "You could have handled this differently." I saved it in a folder labeled "irony."
9 — Aftermath
There were consequences for both of them.
Simon lost the easy empathy of people who had once excused him. His colleagues, who had admired his composed demeanor, observed him more carefully. He went from being an object of easy assumptions to the subject of whispered reassessment. His mother called him many nights. Friends avoided him because his drama had become their uncomfortable dinner table anecdote. He tried to explain, and each explanation sounded like a scientist trying to repair a broken vase with glue.
Vivienne's social world narrowed. People who had once admired her poise began to avoid private dinners with her. Invitations dwindled. She found, perhaps for the first time, that attention can evaporate when you use it to hurt other people.
And me? I watched. I moved my tulip into brighter sun and learned that being noticed in the right way came from the small, stubborn work of caring for myself.
10
Simon persisted in small things. He made lunches and left them on my doormat like little peace offerings. He left notes on the elevator with quotes that weren't his. He tried to be present in the way people think presence looks.
"Why do you keep doing this?" I asked the night he showed up with a thermos of soup.
"For the same reason you said it was over," he said. "Because I couldn't be brave before."
I opened the thermos; it smelled like effort.
"Love isn't grammar you can rearrange," I said. "It's not a promise you can write in the margins after missing the test."
He bowed his head. "I know. But I also know what it's like to not want to lose you."
"Then don't lose the next person who trusts you," I said. "But you can't have me back because you finally learned your lesson."
He nodded, a small, painful surrender. "I understand."
Epilogue
I kept the tulip alive through spring and summer. It was a stubborn thing. Once, late at night, I caught myself touching the necklace he'd given me. It felt like glass—beautiful and cool and not mine.
He learned his lesson the hard way. People around him adjusted their trust. He tried to be better in small ways, but I had learned to value firsts. I would not be second again.
Sometimes he and I passed like ships in the harbor of the same city—polite nods, a small gift left in the hall for someone else's birthday. Sometimes Corbin posted photos where his caption was a soft, private compass: "She is fine."
At night, when the wind rustled the tulip's leaves, I would stand on the balcony and listen to the city breathe. I had lost, and I had found. The necklace stayed in a drawer. The tulip bent toward sunlight.
We had a history; we had endings. That was enough to let me begin.
The End
— Thank you for reading —