Sweet Romance13 min read
We Built Ourselves on Smoke and a Broken Spotlight
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I learned that a familiar hand on my shoulder could feel like a stranger's.
"Wyatt." I said his name like a warning.
He smelled of beer and warm leather, the air around him bleeding the night's noise. He staggered past the doorway and landed on my couch like a man who had nowhere else to fall.
"What is it?" he mumbled, eyes soft and clouded. He looked like the boy I'd carried home when we were twelve, but the voice was older, flattened by the bar.
"We should divorce." I held the sentence like a coin I had nothing else to trade with.
He blinked, lips parting. "Divorce?"
"Yes." I kept it short because the words felt like the only control I had left.
He leaned in as if the sentence could be softened by proximity. "Wife?" he slurred, and for a second his grin was childish and dangerous.
"No. We're done." I said it plainly.
He stared at me for a long minute, then closed his eyes and let sleep in. He breathed shallow, as if the world belonged to him only in slumber.
I dragged him to the bedroom when the couch started squeaking. He let me. He acted like someone made of soft clay who would never be hard enough to stand apart.
"Don't make me leave you," his breath pressed warm at my neck as I tucked him under the covers.
"Then don't give me reasons." I pulled the light off and let the dark swallow his silhouette.
I lay on my side and listened to the even sound of his breathing. I tried to remember the reasons that had added up over the years until a gulf opened between us: his unspoken priorities, the photo he posted, the choices he'd made.
He woke up only with the sunrise, pulling his hair and slipping into a different shirt, but he still felt like someone else's memory of a man.
"Morning," he said, careless and bright. He took the milk I had poured as if it had always been his.
"Wyatt." I forced myself to name him.
"Hmm?" He scrolled his phone like lines on a page.
"We're getting divorced."
He laughed—a small, startled thing. "You're cheating on me?"
"No."
"Do you have someone else?"
"No."
"Are you dying?" He tilted his head, eyes clouded with mock concern.
"Do I look like I have an illness?" I said, and the voice that came out of me surprised me with its sharpness.
"He's my husband," he said like it meant something absolute. "I won't let you."
He kissed my mouth before he left for work. It was the kind of kiss that left me colder than any rebuke.
I found his social media post that afternoon. He had posted a photo at the company gate: two smiles in a frame titled, "Ten years later." The caption read like an anniversary, like they had been waiting to become something again.
Olivia was back.
I had never liked the way she looked when she smiled at me. Olivia Alston was beauty in armor — beautiful, polished, and cruel at the edges. High school memories of her laughed at me now from a screen, like someone else’s amusement at an old bruise.
She had been a leader of a small, merciless group. They called attention to what I had tried to hide. They called me names. They pushed my books out the window. They turned my soft things into evidence against me.
I was clumsy with anger and weighty with humiliation. I had liked Wyatt then, quietly and with all the shame I could muster. When they put me on display, Wyatt laughed. He said, "You like me? Cute." He never stood up for me; he stood beside Olivia, because she matched him: wildness, attention, a kind of bright arrogance he wanted to bask in.
After they split, Wyatt darkened. He stared at the cigarette smoke like a map of things he wanted and could not have. When he finally spoke to me, it was casual, as if a game had slipped back into place.
"If you can get down to ninety pounds, I'll let you be my girlfriend," he said one summer night, leaving a scar behind his laugh.
I chased that laugh with hunger and exhaustion. The bargain I struck with myself fractured me: pills, starving days, a stomach that vowed revenge forever. I changed my body but not the echo in his eyes.
"Do you see any change?" I asked once, hopeful and stupid.
"A little thinner." He answered casually.
When he finally said my name and asked me to be his, I floated to it like I had reached for a buoy in a storm.
We married. We filled a small apartment with second-hand furniture and bright, false laughter. We built a life that looked tidy from the outside. We were competent at being people who had married: we ate, we slept, we kept appearances.
But things are not always what they appear. The balance between us was a superstition: a form of habit rather than love. We tolerated each other like weather.
The day I told him I wanted a divorce, he frowned and kissed me and promised to change. He also posted the picture with Olivia.
"Why did you post that?" I asked.
"It’s business," he said like a child hiding his hand in a jar of cookies. "Olivia can help with a big client."
"She was a bully."
"That was high school," he replied. "This is now. This is work."
I made an appointment with Chloe Sutton, a lawyer friend.
"Divorce is paperwork," Chloe said over coffee, tapping at her laptop with professional patience. "You can write a clean line, keep what's yours."
"He's not a villain," I said. "He's just... absent, and the thing he wants more than me is something I can't buy into."
"Sometimes people choose to climb," Chloe said. "Some climb by stepping on you."
I thought about her words like stones in my pocket.
At the hotel event Olivia organized, everyone congratulated Wyatt like she was a prize wrapped in industry charm. He smiled at her and the rest of the world. He smiled at the camera, at the potential contracts, at the way the room lit when he entered.
"I can't stand her," I told Chloe a week before the event.
"Then don't go," she advised.
But I went. We all went. I went because I wanted the story to have the chance of ending where it started—in the light of the people who had made us.
He found me in the crowd and presented me at the tables like a polished trophy.
"Elisabetta," he said, as if the syllable belonged to some other life.
"Don't do anything stupid," I whispered later when we stepped aside.
"Why would I do anything stupid?" he asked, and for once his voice was quiet enough to be sincere.
"Because you always do."
At the peak of the night, Olivia made a speech. She stood under the chandelier and told the room about ten-year reunions and old sparks. Everyone laughed and clinked their glasses. She spoke about unity and collaboration and how past acquaintances can power new deals.
"Ten years," Olivia said, smiling with a weaponized sweetness. "Isn't it time old stories become new beginnings?"
"So moving," a man behind me said.
"Yes," Wyatt murmured, and his hand found mine for a flicker.
The lights shifted. The technical team had been complaining about a rigging issue, a shadow on the back wall. The stage's big spotlights hummed like sleeping animals. A ladder clattered nearby.
"He said everything is secure," Cassidy Blair told me in a flat tone. Cassidy had been one of the few who had always been kind to me. Her face was a map of worry. "It's supposed to be."
"Are you sure?" I asked.
"Yes," she said because she needed something to hold.
A bright beam swung out and hit Olivia like a halo. She laughed, and the laughter seemed too practiced.
"Elisabetta," Wyatt said, suddenly frantic, grabbing my arm. "Get down."
The spotlight trembled. Something small and mechanical gave way.
Glass and frame sheared the light's support. A shower of broken metal and bulbs fell like winter in a theater.
Wyatt moved without thinking: he dove. He covered Olivia with his body, his arms an instinctive shield.
The light collapsed right where we had stood.
He bled. The smell was copper and raw.
"Call an ambulance!" someone screamed. Phones came out like flowers opening.
The room slowed into a horrific clarity. Olivia, half conscious, stared at the ceiling as if it had turned traitor. She was white at the edges, her mascara a broken river. People clustered, phones glowing, faces draining color. Some snapped pictures; others prayed.
Wyatt lay on the stage, his shirt soaked crimson. I had to fight down the urge to faint, to dissolve, to run. I pressed my hand to the wound because a wave of disbelief had stolen my ability to be rational.
"Stay with me," I whispered, and my voice sounded foreign.
He squeezed my hand weakly. "Don't leave," he breathed.
In the emergency room, machines stitched his silence into beeps. He drifted in and out of sleep and memory. The doctors worked like a choreographed orchestra, but one where the conductor had stepped out.
"He might not make it," a surgeon said quietly to the circle of people in the hallway. "He lost a lot of blood. It's severe."
I felt the world tilt.
At his bedside, he looked thinner, fragile like a paper man made brave by memory.
"Why did you run toward me?" I asked later as the anesthesia loosened its hold.
"I couldn't stand the thought of losing you because of me," he said. "I—" His breath hitched. "I chose badly."
"I don't know what I want," I said honestly. "I can't go back to everything."
He looked at me then like a boy who had finally been taught how to fold a proper promise.
"I picked my career," he said. "I thought I could keep you while climbing. I was wrong. I made choices that hurt you. I don't expect forgiveness."
"I won't live waiting," I said. "I won't be a placeholder."
He closed his eyes and leaned back, the bandages wrapping his broken story. I left the hospital room smelling of antiseptic and regret.
Three years later, fate has a perverse sense of humor. I became a teacher at the university where he gave a speech as a guest. He stood under the bright lights again, and my chest tightened with an old, odd energy.
"Is that him?" whispered a student near me.
"It is," Cassidy said from the audience. "He looks different."
He had refined himself into a career machine. The world had learned his name. He spoke with polish; there was a distance now that made him almost mythic.
I listened. He spoke about ambition and the costs of leadership, but his words had an undercurrent like a river moving stones. He talked about opportunities, choices, and the small cruelties we inflict in the name of success.
When his speech ended, applause poured like a tide. Then, between a cluster of faces, his eyes caught mine.
"Elisabetta." He didn't make a show of it. He found me with the look of someone who had been scanning a horizon for a landmark.
His face went slack. He jumped from the stage and stumbled toward me. He wrapped me in an embrace so forceful it felt as if he wanted to break our history open and push the pieces together.
The spotlight overhead groaned again. The rigging — the same rigging, with the same cheap repair from three years before — trembled.
I moved aside. Cassidy reached for me, furious. "Get out," she hissed.
I didn't move fast enough.
Glass again. Metal again. The world became an avalanche of sound and light.
The rig fell.
This time, it was Olivia under it.
The room hit a new kind of silence. The same lights that had crowned her now lay like dead birds at her feet. People screamed. Phones flashed. Someone yelled for medics; others stood frozen like statues.
I remember standing there cold as if my warmth had been stolen, watching the scene unfold.
When the dust settled, Olivia was on the ground, limp and bloody. Wyatt pushed through the sea of people to her side. He cradled her like a man who had been brought to life by chaos.
"Get her help!" someone shouted.
A small, ugly chorus began in the crowd: reporters, witnesses, colleagues. They wanted answers. They wanted narrative.
"She used contact and manipulation to climb," I heard a voice say. "She bullied others in high school. People saw her humiliate classmates."
"That's enough," I called out before I knew what I was doing.
I stepped forward. Cameras turned. I felt like a different version of myself, older and less able to be ignored.
"People," I said, loud enough to push past the ring of murmurs, "this woman hurt people. She returned with the talons of the past gilded as kindness. Don't mistake the polish for truth."
A silence fell like a curtain.
Olivia looked at me with confusion and then—slowly—her face drained of color. She tried to pull herself up and then paused, breath shallow.
"You're lying," she spat. Her voice trembled. "You were jealous."
"Am I?" I answered. "I was stronger than your cruelties, and you never apologized. You left scars that are still visible."
"Apology?" she laughed, a brittle thing. "You think an apology helps when you're fragile? I did what I had to."
A young intern recorded it all. Older men muttered. Someone clapped, one single sharp sound that the crowd echoed.
"Why did you come back? For goodwill? For money? Who did you hurt to get here?" I asked.
"I did not hurt anyone!" she shrieked, her composure cracking. The crowd shifted, and the momentum changed; gossip turned into judgement.
"Look at her," someone said. "She stands under the light like it’s a crown. She made her world by stepping on people."
I could see the change—how her smile vanished and how her lips quivered. The woman who once towered over me in high school was now small and grasping.
"She told lies to our teachers," a voice from the back called. "She claimed others cheated, she accused girls of bringing notes in class, she turned us against each other."
The murmurs swelled into voices. Witnesses moved in—classmates I hadn't seen in years, now adult and less afraid.
"That's true," someone said. "I remember her throwing another girl's books out the window."
"She bribed the school representative," another added. "I was scared then. I say it now."
The circle tightened like a net. Olivia looked around like a hunted animal, her eyes seeking the same allies who now backed away.
She went from arrogant to tentative. "You don't understand," she tried. "I had to do this to survive."
"Survive?" Cassidy asked. "By breaking other people?"
She gasped, flailing for a defense. Her voice slid from indignation to terror. "You don't know me."
"But we do," Wyatt said, stepping forward, his voice a blade. "I know what you are capable of. You lied to me about your record. You used our reunion to push deals that only helped you. You orchestrated contacts and manufactured rumors."
The crowd was now fully awake. People recorded, posted, whispered. Olivia's face crumpled.
"You used your past as a way in," I continued. "You cajoled people with charm and left the rest to ruin."
She found a small patch of courage and snapped. "You are trying to ruin me."
"You're doing just that now," someone called. "You tried to ruin people before."
The change in her was not just shame. It was exposure: the bright, inescapable light of truth that has a habit of falling on those who hide in it.
Olivia's public unraveling was not theatrical; it was painfully ordinary. Her composure dissolved into a sequence of gestures: a hand over her mouth, a nervous laugh that died, eyes darting for exits. When they found a seat, reporters circled. A woman in a red coat wept openly. Students whispered. The security team moved Olivia to a chair and gave her water that she shook from like a guilty thing.
The punishment was not a gavel or a sentence. It was the crowd itself, finally seeing what they had been fed as a miracle. Olivia's arrogance met the society she had used. The damage she had done—names called out, memories matched—was on display. Her reputation, once polished, had a crack like a fine vase fallen from a shelf.
She changed: the confident tilt of her chin fell, the practiced smile collapsed, the breath that had been arrogant now thinned into pleas.
"Please," she whispered to someone, not me. "Please don't ruin me."
But the room had already decided. Cameras kept rolling. People made notes. The injustice had been noted and now corrected by the most ancient mechanism we have: exposure.
Afterwards, people scattered. The company did damage control. Olivia issued a statement that read like a lecture in public relations: an apology that begged for terms. The board distanced themselves. A few clients who had admired her withdrew interest. She had wanted power and found, in its stead, solitude.
It was not spectacular in the way some tales promise. There was no dramatic fall from an office tower. There was instead the ordinary collapse: a revoked invitation, a chilled handshake, a private call that never returned. She sat alone the next day in a cafe, tormented by the echo of her own choices. People pointed. Someone took a photograph. She lowered her head and finally, for the first time in a long while, faced the quiet.
I left the event feeling hollow.
Wyatt recovered slowly from the stage accident. He became quieter, more aware of the weight of his choices. He would send me parcels—knitted gloves, a small dreamcatcher he had once given me when we first lived in the small apartment. The dreamcatcher had been a trivial thing, but it became a talisman for the life we had nearly kept.
"Thank you," I told him once when he came to the hospital again.
"For what?" he asked, his bandaged fingers pressing the string into my palm.
"For not dying for show," I said.
He blinked and then smiled, the old way, lopsided and honest. "I was foolish to think I could have both. I wanted the world to like me."
"You liked the world more than me," I said, not without bitterness.
He flinched. "I was wrong."
We did not fix everything. We did not pretend every wound was a lesson learned. But we paced the spaces between us like two people marking the distance to an island: careful, sometimes failing to find the bridge, sometimes walking away.
Later, at the university, when Wyatt came to speak again, the memory of the fallen light followed him like an echo. People watched him and whispered. He had climbed high, but his steps had left marks. I had been angry, and then scared, and then weary. When he recovered, he was not the man who would pawn his way through life without consequence. He had a sharper edge now—the shape of a person who knows the cost of things.
We did not remarry. We did not make a new life overnight. We found, in time, a language that was quieter.
"Do you miss it?" he asked once, in the hospital corridor, meaning the old life: the complacency, the ease, the way we had lived without noticing each other's absence.
"Sometimes," I said. "I miss not being so afraid."
He nodded. "I miss you."
The uniqueness of our story—of being wrapped in a life built from small cruelties and bigger omissions—was in the simple objects that kept returning: the dreamcatcher with feathers, the chipped mug he bought me at a thrift store, the hospital corridor light that glowed too bright.
"Don't wait," I told him one night. "I've already learned the cost of patience."
"I won't ask you to wait again," he said.
When I walk across campus now, I sometimes see him giving a lecture, watch the way he moves his hands, how he pauses for a joke. The past is a room with a locked door but a window I can open when I need to breathe the air that once belonged to both of us.
Once, at noon, I caught him at a bookstore and he handed me a wrapped package. He asked nothing. I unwrapped it slowly. A necklace lay within, delicate, quiet. He had bought it and then returned it and then bought it again because he could not decide whether a gift was a purchase or an apology.
"Keep it," he said.
I slid it on. The chain kissed my collarbone like a promise and not a trap.
We had built something, then we had dismantled it, and then we built new boundaries on different foundations. We were not a couple by the old rules, nor were we strangers. We were people with a shared history and different lives.
I kept the dreamcatcher in my office, feathers catching the air from the fan. When I closed my eyes at night, I sometimes hear the faint echo of a spotlight breaking or the rustle of a university corridor. I think of the day glass rained and of the confession he made in the hospital.
"Do not wait," I had said. I am still saying it to myself when I look in the mirror.
And when the light above my desk flickers, I touch the necklace and remember that some things are given, some are taken, and some are survived.
The End
— Thank you for reading —