Age Gap13 min read
You Touched Me First — And I Never Let Go
"I don't want trouble," I said, and shoved him against the bathroom stall.
He smelled of cold coffee and cigarette smoke. He was tall and quiet and very, very solid. The men's room at the charity party was too small for the fans outside and too loud for the two of us inside. I twisted my coat around his shoulders like a cloak and pressed my palm to the back of his neck.
"Do you always hide in bathrooms?" I teased. "Or is tonight special?"
He didn't smile. He lowered his forehead against mine for a breath, and his voice was low when he said, "You touched me. Where did you touch me?"
I laughed. "Your waist. And your butt. For cover."
He didn't groan. He sounded amused, and that made me braver. "You gave me cover," I said. "And I saw that you were being cornered. So I saved you. Payback is dinner."
He let go of my wrist then, and the world outside the stall slammed back into place.
"Next time," he said, "don't pretend you're my girlfriend."
I stepped back so the stall door could close and left my coat on his shoulders. The scent of him stayed on the fabric like a quiet claim.
I am Arabella Durham. At twenty-two, people call me beautiful in a way that makes them forget sentences. I dance for a living and I live everywhere at once — theaters, rehearsal rooms, film sets overseas. My face and my silence make rumors because I won't fill in the empty spaces for other people.
He is Wells Pierce. At twenty-eight, he is the kind of surgeon people call a miracle. Youngest thoracic professor in the country. Calm like a pond nobody dares drop a stone into. He has hands that know bones like maps, and he moves like someone who has already counted all the risks.
We met by accident and by design. The fans outside the party thought they had me; they didn't have either of us.
"You're the actress," a nurse whispered the next afternoon when I walked into the chest clinic like I belonged there.
"I'm a dancer," I corrected. "And yes, my ribs hurt."
Wells was at the desk, sleeves rolled, fingers marking a patient's chart. He glanced up slow as a tide.
"Name?"
"Arabella Durham," I said. My voice was soft, almost bored.
He muttered something, then said, "I'll see you. Wait there."
He guided me into an exam cubicle and closed the curtain with the same care he used to close a sterile pack. He lifted my coat and pressed his fingertips along my ribs like he was reading braille.
"Does this hurt?" he asked.
"No," I said.
"Move down."
I moved. He moved. The air between us narrowed like a stage set. I asked him to press lower, and he did, and when his hand grazed the line of my sternum I felt something like an audience rush through my blood.
"I think you should see neurology," he said.
"How rude," I murmured. "I came here for chest complaints. Not career advice."
He wrote his note and slid the file back to me.
"Next."
My little performances have a way of turning into trouble. After that evening, everyone in the chest clinic whispered. Women sat straighter in the waiting room and men fumbled their coffee.
The second time I barged into his life, it was because a gang of men outside the hospital were loud and dangerous. They called him names: liar, monster, abuser. They called him for blood in a language that made people step aside. When they pushed toward the sliding door, I grabbed Wells's sleeve and pulled him behind the nearest bathroom door.
"You can't stay here," he said, calm like a river.
"Can," I said, and hugged him like I had a reason.
He let me. He hated that he felt my hands. He hated that he did not tell me to move. Later, when the men were hauled away empty-handed by a better-armed side of the hospital, he sent two quiet messages: to an old friend, to a list of names.
"Handle the one named Bear's son," he typed. "And the rest, keep an eye on them."
I learned two things. One: he didn't forget things. Two: when he decided to protect you, he did it quietly and efficiently.
"You are impossible," he told me once, when I insisted on bringing steaming dumplings to his office on the small night when he stayed late.
"I am your impossible debt," I said.
He looked at me like I was a problem to solve. "You look like trouble tonight," he said.
"I look like dinner," I corrected. "Eat."
He ate three dumplings and then hid the sauce bottle in his pocket. He had no patience for noise, but he let me be loud. He had no patience for nonsense, but he listened.
Weeks trembled into months like a slow melody. We had dinner once, then twice. I asked him silly questions — "What would you do if I broke my ankle on purpose?" — and he answered in a voice that was both dry and warm. He kept me safe from the men who wanted to cause a headline, from the reporters who wanted to stitch quotes together into a story, from the woman who once pushed me aside in a theater corridor.
"You like publicly quiet things," I said to him, watching his brow smooth in sleep.
"I like things that last," he answered.
I told myself not to fall. I failed.
"You always say no," he said one evening on the roof of his clinic where the city lights looked small. "You always test people."
"I like to see if they will still want me after," I said. "If they will stick."
He inhaled like he was learning how to hold the world. "And if they don't?"
"I move on," I said. "I always move on."
He made a sound that might have been a laugh. "You never will."
The games started as harmless dares and late-night jokes. I loved the game "ask a stranger for a favor" — I would pluck a man from a bar and ask for his ring, his name, his story. Wells watched, sometimes annoyed, sometimes amused. Once, in a neon bar in a city where I had gone to dance, I knelt in front of him and recited the most ridiculous thing: that he had interrupted my life and stolen the best lines out of my head. I had to keep my knees bent until he said a sentence back.
He accepted.
"I accept," he said. He reached out and touched my hair, a single light finger like a comma.
People who watch us say it is a scandal. People who don't watch us say it's obvious. I say it is a slow unmasking. Every time I tried to play at being adult, he would correct me gently — "You can't practice a life on stage and expect it to take you off it."
"But you can play doctor off-stage," I teased. "Fix me if I break."
He did. He unstitched the edges of my defenses one careful night at a time. He was impatient with the way people used my beauty as a weapon and amused with the way I used my body to rewrite every room I entered.
We met enemies, too. Franziska Lin was a dancer liked by men who wanted possession. She watched me like she kept a ledger of slights. Once she tried to blackmail me with a staged video, and I took it to the press room like a dessert set on a silver tray.
"You filmed me without my consent," I said into the microphone.
"She says you faked a fall," Franziska hissed when she saw me walk up to her.
"No," I said. "She says I fell to get attention. I fell because a man pushed me. Her video is edited."
Wells stood beside me when the manager tried to cut our mic. His jaw tightened for the first time I had seen. "Let her speak," he said.
He said it as if he owned the right phrase and refused to give it up. The room froze. People listened. Franziska's face color drained because she had not expected him to step in in my defense without a public reason.
Later, at a small charity dinner, I left my shoe in his car on purpose — a practiced accident. He turned it over under the streetlight. "You are incorrigible," he told me.
"I am a woman who knows what she wants," I said.
"You want me," he said, like a verdict.
"I want someone who will keep me," I answered.
He placed the shoe in the glove compartment as if it was an oath.
There were days when I hurt him without meaning to. I would flirt on stage or film roles would rewrite the parts of myself I presented to the world. He would watch, silent, and let me be bright and hot until he couldn't stand it anymore. Then he would come home like a proper hurt. Then he would come to the clinic and stitch himself into his work like a bandage.
One night, after a rehearsal that had gone wrong, an old accusation from a jealous ex surfaced. It leaked through a gossip account and into my messages. I could hear the siren of a social collapse. The comments were fast and mean. Franziska's tweets poked. An article called me dangerous.
I sat on the floor of my dressing room and wanted to scream. I called Wells. He asked exactly one question: "Are you hurt?"
"No," I said.
"Then I will see you tomorrow," he said.
He straightened the world around me from six cities away.
The day of the national gala, the organizers almost canceled my appearance. Franziska produced a forged video and sent it to the press. I walked onstage with my shoes unlaced and my heart triple-locked. The auditorium smelled like hot lamps.
"Arabella!" someone shouted.
I walked toward the microphone and saw Wells in the front row. He had not told me he would be there. He stood like a lighthouse in a storm, white and clear, and the room seemed to forget with him that the rumor existed.
"Wells," I mouthed. He nodded.
I sang the line to the audience like a confession. When the last note died, I did not bow. I turned to the camera and raised my hand to my chest.
"This is my truth," I said. "Everything else is noise."
The social account that had spun the video broke like glass. Editors called. The news anchors asked for transcripts. Franziska's people started to backpedal.
Later, in a narrow hospital hallway, she cornered me.
"You took my part," she spat. "You stole my chance."
"You tried to ruin me," I said. "And you nearly succeeded."
She lunged. I moved.
Wells forced between us and put his palm on her forehead like a judge.
"Stop it," he said. "You will apologize."
Her mouth opened. Then closed. She left with a sniff that sounded like broken loyalty.
"You didn't have to," I told him after she walked away.
"No," he said. "But I wanted to."
He was not the kind of man who took public credit. He was the kind who kept his hands professionally placed where they could fix things. But when he wanted to stand in the light with me, he did it without fuss. That felt like gold.
There were small quiet things, too. I taught his dog, a white husky too dignified for its size, to beg on command. He hated shows but loved the tiny ways I rearranged his life.
"Your donkey is louder than you," he said on a morning when the little grey donkey brayed across his garden gate.
"It calls me by name," I replied. "It is polite."
"You are a chaos I enjoy," he admitted.
"You enjoy me," I answered. "You may be in trouble."
"Then I'll be in trouble," he said simply.
We pulled at each other's edges like two magnets that sometimes rediscover their pull. He was older enough to be stern but young enough to be open. I was younger enough to be daring but stubborn as a rock.
The turning point came when the tabloids found a lie about Wells's family. An old legal case, he had been accused in whispers. His mother called him late at night, and for the first time I saw a crack in his armor.
"I won't let them take this from you," I told him.
"You don't get to rescue me," he said.
"Then I won't," I said. "I'll just stand with you."
At the press conference, he spoke in a voice that had taught students in lecture halls for years. He said things that made lawyers nervous and journalists quiet. He shut down the rumor with a single file and two carefully chosen sentences.
"False claims have consequences," he said. "I will not litigate my life in headlines."
That night his mother called to thank me. "You are his anchor," she said.
"Maybe," I answered. "Maybe he is my shore."
We both laughed like the whole world did not exist around the sound.
Months later, Wells took my hand in front of a pediatric unit he'd stayed late at. A child had been sick for weeks, and we watched the boy laugh for the first time when I made a ridiculous face.
"You're very good with children," he said, after I had left a printed playbill folded into the kid's palm.
"They're honest," I said. "And you deserve honest things."
He made a little sound and then said, "Would you come with me to a conference? To be seen at my side — not because I asked, but because you want to."
I thought of all the stages I had walked. I thought of the bathrooms and the mountains and the way his cigarette smoke hung like an old memory on his coat. I picked his fingers like I might pick a flower.
"I will stand by you," I said. "As an audience, as a critic, as your trouble."
He pressed his forehead to mine, a small, brave gesture. "As my partner," he said.
We had battles still. Franziska never stopped being a threat — she tried to cut my access to stages, to make my sponsors nervous. She hired people who followed me to shows and made a hastily produced "documentary" on my "dangerous persona." She even bribed a junior official at the dance academy to withdraw my teaching permit for a day. I found out because an old student wept and handed me a folded note.
"No one messes with my dancers," I told her when she cornered me in a corridor.
"Then fight," she said. "You think you can make Wells love you when everyone tells him not to?"
"I don't need permission to be loved," I told her. "And if someone tries to take him away, I will hold on."
That was not a threat. It was a promise. He heard it, too.
The final moment came at a hospital fundraiser when the academy announced an award for arts that protect children. Franziska arranged for a staged stunt: she planted a fake complaint about a commission I had taken, an accusation that implied I had taken funds and used them for private events.
There were cameras. There were murmurs. I could feel the room tilt like a ship in shallow water.
"Show them my accounts," Wells said quietly to one of his colleagues. "Bring up her bank records."
"That's not possible," someone said. "This is performance art."
Wells spread his fingers and made the deadest motion I've seen. "Do it."
The city is small enough that bank records are never simple, but his friend had the right clearance. The project was transparent. The complaints were filed from an anonymous account with a router traced back to Franziska's assistant. The video that had been slung across the web was cropped and captioned by accounts known to peddle scandal.
"Franziska staged an accusation," Wells announced when the projector flickered the verified files. He said it calmly, in a voice lined with clinical certainty. "She fabricated evidence."
There was a sound like the room exhaling. People shifted. Cameras whirred then suddenly switched off.
Franziska's face was a mixture of rage and collapse. She tried to speak and failed. Her agent pushed her into an exit that led nowhere but shame.
"How did you find it?" I asked Wells later when the city had gone quiet and I could drink tea in his living room.
"I work with information," he said. "And I did not want you to stand there and bleed."
"You bled," I said.
"I don't show scars," he said. "I hide them."
After that night the world seemed to forget we had ever been scandal enough to be the headline. It simply forgot the rumor and left the truth to settle.
We kept our odd routines. I dragged him to art exhibitions where he would pretend not to care and then point out a detail of carving no one else saw. He taught me how to tie surgical knots like I taught him how to lace pointe shoes.
"Your hands are precise," I said once.
"You dance like you are always in the operating room," he replied. "Everything measured."
We were not perfect. He would say "stay out of the spotlight" like a shield, and I would say "I live on it" like an armor. We learned how to bring those things together. He would defend me when I needed a fortress, and I would stand in the square with him when he demanded to be seen.
At the small cemetery on a blue winter day, with white-steepled snow on the firs, we went to put flowers on the grave of a friend of mine. I had been a child living abroad when my parents died. I had no sense of funerals beyond the ritual. He walked beside me, two steps back because that is how he kept me and two steps forward because that is how he moved when there was danger.
"I should have told you earlier," I said at the edge of the stone, the name carved like a hush.
"You didn't have to," he said. "You have me."
"I want you to know everything now," I said. I took his hand like a theater hand fits the stage rigging. "I want the real I, not the polished I. If you still want me, you must want the whole tide."
He wrapped his fingers around mine and squeezed. "I want the tide," he murmured.
That afternoon he did something public in a way that left people breathless. At a benefit dinner, he stood up in the middle of a speech and called my name like a verdict.
"Arabella," he said. "Come here."
I laughed and clapped, because he had never called me by my name in a crowd for anything but form. I walked to him through a corridor of clapping people and lights.
"You are ridiculous," I told him, smiling.
"You are my ridiculous," he said. "And I am tired of saying 'maybe' to everything. Will you be with me? Not because you are alone in the world, not because you need rescue, but because I want you beside me."
It was not the kind of public spectacle most women get. It was not even like the movies. He reached behind his jacket and produced a small velvet box.
"Will you marry me?" he said.
I laughed out loud. "You have terrible timing," I said.
He opened the box. Inside was a ring, simple and small, with a band that would not hinder hands. It was clinical in its beauty and perfect in its shape.
"Now please," he said. "Answer."
"Yes," I said. "Yes."
He slid the ring onto my finger, and it fit like a promise. The room broke into applause. I kissed him as the cameras blinked and the flashes wrote white like snow.
Days later, when things settled into the bizarre normality of our lives, we took the donkey to the garden and tied a small ribbon to its harness. The donkey brayed and the white husky danced. I wore a silk dress and he wore a suit that matched the color of his eyes.
"Do you regret being with me?" I asked later, when the night was quiet and the city sounded like someone humming.
"No," he said. He rubbed at my knuckles with his thumb. "You are loud and dangerous and the exact color of trouble I need."
I leaned into his shoulder where his heartbeat was a steady drum. "And you are the shore I will come back to."
He kissed the top of my head like he had found an answer. "Don't run too far."
"I won't," I promised.
We grew then into something simple and true. I taught at the academy and choreographed without apology. He kept operating and taught residents how to be human with their hands. Franziska faded into a cautionary tale that people recited when they wanted to be mean. The fans learned that I loved someone older, and they made room for it.
On our first anniversary, we went back to that tiny bathroom where we had hidden. He still smelled of coffee and smoke.
"I kept your coat," he said.
"I kept your warmth," I answered.
He reached into the pocket of the coat and took out the first thing he had ever given me — one of the dumplings I had left by accident — preserved in a ridiculous little tin.
"I kept this because it was yours," he said.
"I kept your number," I said. "In case I got lost."
He laughed then, a sound I had come to build my mornings on. "So you will always find your way back."
"I will," I said.
We had fought, been seen, been ashamed, and been forgiven. We had weathered rumors, rivalries, and pain. We had also learned to talk about the things that hurt, and to be brave in the small places that matter.
When I stand now on a stage and someone shouts the name Wells Pierce, I smile. I walk off the stage and find him in the wings, waiting like a harbor.
"Did you ever think this would be a shore?" I asked once, tapping his palm.
"No," he said. "But I like what we've built."
Outside, the little donkey brayed. I tied another ribbon on the harness for luck.
He wrapped his arm around me and said quietly, "I will always fight for you."
"I know," I said.
"And I'll always be older," he added.
"That's the point," I said. "Come home to me."
He did.
The End
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