Sweet Romance12 min read
When We Woke Up in Each Other
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A shaft of sunlight woke me. I blinked, then froze.
"Why does my voice sound...different?" I whispered, and the sound made me jump—low, rough, unmistakably a man's voice.
"Brother, are you okay?" a small voice outside the door asked.
"Tova, go get your shoes on. I'm fine," I answered as calmly as a stranger-living-in-my-throat could.
"Brother?" she repeated and then the door clicked shut.
I forced myself out of bed and slammed into the doorframe. Pain blossomed on my forehead. My hand flew to the wound, then to the mirror.
The face in the glass was angled, solid; high cheekbones, a straight nose, a jaw like a sculpture. Broad shoulders filled the T-shirt. Eight-pack abs. One hundred and eighty-eight centimeters of someone else's life.
My heart skidded weirdly. "Ezekiel?" I said, though the name should have sounded impossible.
I tried to breathe like a normal person. My mouth worked. My hands trembled. I remembered last night in hazy shards: a party, truth-or-dare, whiskey, a dare to kiss a certain boy. I had gone looking for him—stumbling, loud, certain I would own the joke. I had kissed him. Someone had kissed me back. Then blank.
Now I was him.
"Brother, I'm hungry," Tova called, tugging at the sock she wore as a mitten.
I blinked and felt surreal: this boy's life had a sister small enough to be a handful. I dressed in Ezekiel's T-shirt and sweatpants, hoping my hands wouldn't look ridiculous holding a kid's lunchbox.
I learned details fast when survival demanded it.
"Who are you?" Tova asked, eyes huge as saucers when I picked up two eggs from a sparse fridge.
"Your brother," I said, and it came out smooth. That voice—low, steady—blocked something in me that wanted to scream.
At the bus stop the crowd pressed close. I carried Tova like she weighed half what she should. Men in suits smelled of office mornings. A red Maserati idled behind the bus as if the driver had nothing better to do than watch me try to be a grown man.
A figure slid from the Maserati and took Tova in an easy motion I suddenly recognized in memory: Ezekiel, the boy I'd kissed and embarrassed myself for. He wore a tracksuit, sunglasses, and an expression that fit the public idea of not being moved by anything.
"Get in," he said, lifting a child as if all his bones had the same calm as the outside.
My own hands clawed at his sleeve when the car door closed. "What did you do last night?" I demanded.
He touched the bruised place on my forehead, then took out a bandage. "You drank more than you remembered. I put you in a taxi. You woke up like this."
"Like this?" I laughed too loud. "You mean with your face in my mirror?"
He wasn't showy. He didn't preen. He passed the bandage into my hand like a small, practical mercy, then said, "No. I mean this—our bodies in the wrong places. You need to go to class."
"I can't ride a bicycle," I blurted.
He made me laugh despite the panic. "Then don't. I'll drive." The voice—his voice—had more patience than I expected.
It took me a day to understand the scale of what being Ezekiel meant. He was class president, top of his class, and everyone listened when he spoke. He had a life packed with obligations: part-time jobs, a sister, people who expected him to be quiet and dependable. My own life—luxury, family drivers, a curated image—suddenly felt ridiculous in his skinny jeans.
"Did you like that car you wrecked?" he asked, when I mentioned my father's newest present.
"Don't call it wrecked. It was...a learning experience," I said, tucking the word "Lamborghini" back into my throat.
He listened like a judge who'd already formed an opinion but wouldn't shout it. Then he said, "Come sit up front."
We sat together in lectures and I watched the world see Ezekiel as me: calm, impenetrable, almost clinical in his reserves. I watched him move through my old life with barely a flinch. And when the laughter around us grew to whispers—"Is she seeing someone else?"—I realized I had always seen him wrong. Or maybe I had never bothered to see him at all.
"Do you like it?" he asked one night when he had sat too long by the stove washing dishes I used to never see.
"Like what?" I answered.
"Like...this. Being needed. Being in a life that is not comfortable by accident."
"I don't know," I murmured. "I didn't know you had to work so hard."
"Most people don't," he said. "But I get by. We get by."
The more time I spent in his body, the less I wanted to leave him entirely. I learned to simmer rice, to fold small Tova socks into a neat stack, to carry groceries without grimacing. I learned that he was not one single frozen expression but a person who held tenderness in places I had never looked.
"How do you know all this?" I once asked, too softly near a shared pillow.
"Because I grew up with it," Ezekiel answered. He told me—rare, slow truths: his father had been a criminal who left scars no one asked about; his mother died in childbirth; Tova had been born in the hardest night and he had kept going anyway.
"I kissed you last night," I admitted one morning, reckless and bored of keeping secrets. "Maybe that'll break the spell."
He looked at me, startled in a way that made his eyes look softer. "You kissed me?"
"Yes. I had no idea—" I stopped, because my memory might be wrong. "I thought—" I turned to look at him. His face gave nothing away. He said, "It didn't happen like that. You ran to me and passed out. I brought you home."
"I kissed him back," I said suddenly, impulsive. "Maybe I can kiss you again and—"
"Stop testing myths," he said, and then, without warming, leaned over and kissed me. Not the wild, drink-fueled press from the night before, but a deliberate, quiet thing that emptied the room of everything else.
I felt unreal, like a character in a film I hadn't auditioned for.
Days folded into routines. I took part-time shifts he had kept—two tutors after school, a late-night dishwasher gig—and my fingers learned the cold satisfaction of pay envelopes. I learned to ride a bus and to move with a chest that wasn't mine yet felt alarmingly familiar.
School lighting went through us without sympathy. I kept bumping into people who thought I was a different person entirely. My own friends whispered. Annika and Marina buzzed like bees around me, asking: "So? How is he?" Their words pressed against me with curiosity and something like praise.
"Ezekiel actually smiled at you," Marina said one afternoon, eyes glittering.
"Because he was eating," I muttered.
At a sports day, I failed at a five-kilometer run the way my body would have failed it. I collapsed at the finish line, breathless, cheeks burning. He crouched beside me and smoothed my hair with a gentleness that taught me a new tenderness.
"You're not used to this," he said, as if reading my life into a sentence.
"You're not used to high heels," I snapped back, half-teasing.
"True enough." He inclined his head, eyes unguarded. "But you have grit. That's not mine to take."
Once, a punch landed from someone who had presumed I belonged only to another life.
"Don't touch her," Ezekiel said. His voice was a flat line, then it snapped with force. A sharp slap split the air and reoriented the room. The boy who had hit me staggered away, red-faced. Ezekiel's hand hovered near my cheek as if he had forgotten his own strength. He took a breath, and softly said, "If anyone touches you again, they won't have a place in my classroom."
I felt a warmth I didn't have words for. It made me dizzy.
And then there was Alvaro Hansen.
He had been fixed in my life like a portrait on a wall—someone I was supposed to marry because arrangements were neat, and families expected tidy outcomes. I had learned to present and smile. He had learned to be distant and cold. When his car pulled up to the same university gate one afternoon with his polished sneer, I felt a cold knot of the old life tighten.
"Genevieve," he said, catching my father and me at breakfast, the voice that had always had a way of folding the room. "I hear you've been busy."
"My life won’t be rearranged because of gossip," I replied sharply. I had been practicing independence in Ezekiel's body, and the new steadiness surprised me.
He did not like it. Alvaro had always liked to command. When my refusal went beyond a polite shrug, he lashed out.
"You think you can embarrass me and get away with it?" he demanded one day in the courtyard, and he hit the edge of the table—then me—so hard my breath left my lungs in a small, humiliated sound.
"It wasn't you," Ezekiel said, voice a low blade. He stepped between us and, with a single controlled motion, gave Alvaro a slap that showed calm ownership. Alvaro, used to provoking, did not expect to be met with such steady force. He sputtered and tried to speak, then lunged, and Ezekiel's reaction was precise—an arm to block, a hand on his wrist, a look that made his face drop into something raw.
But Alvaro did not stop at the shove. He followed me to my father's party months later and delivered a tirade full of venom, a staged performance meant to humiliate in front of guests and cameras. He called me names, tore at my choices, accused me of unfaithfulness.
That night, the university hosted a public charity gala. I went with my father and—complicit, anxious—Ezekiel. Alvaro had maneuvered himself to the center: handsome, rehearsed, and ready with a speech that would humiliate me.
He had assumed power. He had assumed I could be bent.
I had to do something. I had to make the liar's theater stop.
I stepped up onto a small auxiliary stage set for student awards. Lights burned. Cameras flicked like a swarm of modern fireflies. Alvaro positioned himself at the microphone, ready to give me what he thought the world owed him—humiliation and applause.
"Genevieve Aldridge," Alvaro began in that slick tone, "is an example of—"
"Stop," Ezekiel's voice sliced. He had been at my side when I climbed the stairs. "Let him stop."
Alvaro smiled at the crowd. "Is this a show? Because—"
"Alvaro," I said, my voice thin but steady, "you are lying."
He laughed, contempt like perfume. "On what grounds?"
"On grounds you never expected." I reached into my pocket and pulled out my phone. "You hit me. You said the worst thing you could. I recorded it."
A ripple of shock skittered through the crowd.
Alvaro's face tightened. "You have no proof."
"Do you remember storming out screaming at the café?" I continued, and then I pressed play. The recorded audio—a stupid, brave thing—filled the room: Alvaro's anger, his names, the slap's harsh whisper. Men in suits blinked. Women gasped. The room leaned forward like a held breath.
Alvaro's smirk dissolved into a mask with cracks.
"You think this is theater?" he snarled. "You—"
"Hold on," Ezekiel said, and his hands moved like an unspoken judge. He tapped the screen, and one of the servers projected the audio onto a side monitor. The words scrolled as a transcript. "And if that is not enough," Ezekiel said softly, "we have witnesses."
A hush. Someone from the cafe arrived at the gala—Annika, cheeks flushed, Marina, phone raised. "I saw him," Annika said to the hosts. "He struck her."
"People saw," murmured others. A live feed of the earlier encounter, captured before Alvaro realized it might matter, flickered on another projector—a shaky phone video, but enough to show the altercation from a student’s angle.
Alvaro's eyes darted. "This is—"
"Public opinion has a memory," Ezekiel said. He was quiet; no performative fury, only a steady, cold clarity. "You chose to strike her. You chose to try to humiliate her. Now the witnesses are here."
Alvaro's face crumpled through stages. First irritation, then petulance, then disbelief, then rage. "You can't—" he choked.
"I can," Ezekiel answered. "Because this is not only about reputation. This is about behavior. You will apologize now. You will apologize publicly."
"Apologize?" Alvaro barked, as if the word were foreign.
"Yes," I said, my chest shaking but my spine straight. "You will apologize for laying hands on me and for trying to make me smaller in front of people."
A murmur swept the room. The gala's emcees glanced at each other like people who had been handed a crisis during a live broadcast.
Alvaro lunged toward the microphone; his hand trembled so visibly it betrayed rehearsed malice. "You're playing me," he spat. He looked at the cameras like a man used to having his narrative. "This is slander. I will—"
"Alvaro Hansen," Ezekiel said, and in those two syllables the man felt the crowd tilt away. "You will stand here and say to Genevieve Aldridge in front of everyone that you were wrong and that you are sorry."
For a second, Alvaro tried to regain his audience. He turned on a practiced charm, but it was threadbare now, seen through the projector of his own earlier hands.
He began to sputter denials, then a defense, then an attempt to shame me back. The audience's faces shifted from curiosity to thin boredom to indignation. Cameras zoomed in. Phones lifted. The gala went from staged charity to a live reckoning.
I watched Alvaro lose ground like a man unbuttoning his armor. He moved from anger to pleading to rage in quick, humiliating arcs. He was forced to repeat himself, and every repetition sounded smaller under the weight of witnesses and recorded proof.
Some people stood, cameras in hand. Others whispered, "He crossed the line." A woman near the stage muttered, "How dare he hit a woman." A man took out a phone and began streaming. Within minutes, the feed went viral.
Alvaro's final attempt was a shout: "My money will ruin you all!" It was a raw and desperate thing. The room did not flinch the way he expected. Instead, tuxedos rustled; tables emptied slowly as people took sides. No one applauded his theatrics.
I remember the contempt in his face when he finally realized the tide had turned. It hit him in waves—confusion, anger, and then the first signs of panic. He tried to pivot to legal threats, but words meant nothing when his reputation was already crumbling beneath the floodlight of evidence.
"Apologize," Ezekiel said again, quietness like a sentence.
Alvaro swallowed hard. His defiance broke at the seams. The proud man who had slammed doors and bragged about control was now reduced to fumbling courage. "I—I'm sorry," he blurted, and it came out like someone having swallowed their pride.
The audience reaction was not unanimous mercy. Many hissed, some nodded approvingly. Phones recorded as the apology turned into stammering justifications. The narrative of the night—the man who had tried to own a woman's life, publicly and privately—was flipped in a single hour.
Afterwards, Alvaro fled. He left the gala in a staggered, embarrassingly public exit, cameras following like newspaper hounds. The social feed filled with clips of his meltdown and audio of his earlier slaps. He called people, begged for reputation salvage. People either hung up or posted the clips.
He lost invitations. Invitations to the charity board, to dinners, to a circle that had once accepted him. Sponsors pulled back. His friends—those who had loved proximity to his money—moved away as if a contagion had touched him. Some commentators mocked him mercilessly. A few sober columnists wrote about the cost of entitlement.
He tried to sue. He hired lawyers who advised damage control. The damage wasn't legal alone—it was theatrical. People had seen the act, had heard his words, and his arrogance became a spectacle.
I watched from beside Ezekiel as the room reorganized itself around truth. I felt strange relief. I didn't revel; a human being was humiliated. But I also felt the rightness of a crowd choosing not to accept abuse as a private thing anymore.
Alvaro's face, on the two weeks that followed, traveled from slight ruin to collapse. He sought the one person who had accepted him once—my father—and was frozen out. "He is not welcome here," my father told him into the phone, and Alvaro's voice cracked in a way I had never expected.
Ezekiel said little. Once, he squeezed my hand in the hallway and murmured, "You stood straight."
"With you," I corrected. "You showed everyone that I wasn't alone."
He only smiled. It was a small thing, and it belonged to both of us.
After the gala, the world felt different. I had expected shame and endless apologies. Instead, I found steadiness: Tova's cheek pressed against my shoulder, school assignments completed on time, honest pay for honest work. I found that being in someone else's life wasn't theft—it was the learning of new muscles: patience, practical care, and the weight of responsibility.
And then the impossible happened. One morning I woke and my fingers felt light. I slid out of bed and ran to the mirror expecting the same stranger. Instead, I saw my face—Genevieve—peering back. My mouth formed a laugh that was my own, not Ezekiel's. My hands found the pendant he had once worn and later given to me—the green of a small stone that had been his mother's. It hung against my skin like a promise.
He sat beside me in his apartment and, once I'd screamed a little and hugged him half-hysterically, said, "We have to tell them the truth."
We did. He launched his app publicly later, in a small auditorium. His success grew by slow, honest steps. He learned the language of investors and users and he taught himself to be visible in ways he had avoided.
We moved into a small apartment that felt like ours. My father, who had once judged with a showman's eye, finally nodded in approval. "You made your own life," he said, and I saw pride like a quiet light.
We had scars—mine from public humiliations and his from a childhood that was a map of survival. But we stitched them in the small hours: late-night tea, arguments about money that led to laughter, Tova's fierce hugs, and the way he would patch up a broken bike with silent patience.
On a shelf I kept the old photo from a birthday—three years ago, a simpler cake, a younger version of us. On the back Ezekiel had written in a small, careful hand: "May I walk with the one I love, every day after." I trace those letters sometimes and think about how strange and kind the world can be when two lives get tangled and, in the tangling, teach each other how to live.
We both learned to climb down. I learned to put my pride aside. He learned to take the center sometimes. We learned to be tender with small things—like teaching Tova to tie laces, or waiting for each other in the kitchen when the rice is almost ready.
Sometimes I still stand in front of a mirror and see him in my face—some stubborn line, a look—and I smile. He is not mine to keep, not wholly. He is Ezekiel. But we are, in the way people are who choose each other despite all the schedules and expectations, together.
When the green pendant warms under my collarbone, I remember his birthday with its tiny cake and the photo where a child smeared frosting on our cheeks. The memory is specific now: the candle's flicker, Tova's breathless whisper, his voice saying, "I liked you from the first day I saw you." I keep that like a talisman for the moments when I forget who I finally became.
And if anyone asks me how to become someone better—how to grow up overnight—I'll only shrug and hand them the small, heavy pendant and say, "Start by tying somebody's shoes."
The End
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