Chapter One — When the World Quieted
They said I was too beautiful for a college lodge.
It was the kind of thing people said because they didn't know what else to say. They would tilt their heads, smile a little too long, and whisper it as if beauty were the only thing I had earned. I never corrected them. At nineteen, I learned early that it was easier to let other people decide what they saw than to labor over the details they ignored.
My hair fell in a dark curtain down my back, soft and thick and something I had inherited in spite of the rest of my life. My eyes — big, brown, honest — did the work of my face; they could make people stop mid-sentence and forget the joke they were telling. I dressed plainly for college: a knit sweater, jeans, the same battered sneakers I refused to throw away. But when the light caught me right, the girls on my floor would hush their conversations and glance, and the boys would find reasons to linger outside the kitchen.
I never wanted that attention. I wanted a desk with neat stacks of notes and a quiet corner in the library and a life that moved in hours and exams and small, manageable routines. My father had taught me to measure worth by work. When he fell ill last winter, that rule became my map. I learned to be practical in a hurry: which medicines were cheapest, how to spin a budget so the next clinic visit would not mean sleeping without dinner. That was the world I knew before James.
I remember the night I met him with the ridiculous clarity of someone who remembers the exact moment a life split into then and after. It was raining sideways, the kind of October rain that made the city smell like cold metal and wet stone. The lodge smelled of detergent and microwave meals, and Harzel — bless her loud heart — had disappeared into a late-night date with a DJ from the next town. I walked the long way to the main street because the library was closed and because I liked the sharp cold on my face; it felt honest.
I almost didn't see the car.
It should have been ordinary: a black sedan, headlights cutting through the mist. The lane had been slick with rain and the driver too impatient to slow down. He swerved and the world narrowed to the white flash of the bumper and the clatter of rain. I froze under the weight of it, textbook stupid. The car's window rolled down, a face leaned out — handsome, unimpressed — and the driver spat something before the car melted into the night.
I had taken two steps and the world tilted. A hand closed on my elbow like an anchor.
"Violet," a voice said. Low and unexpected. Not the voice of the driver, but from the shadow by the curb.
He was there like he had been carved out of midnight and breath, tall enough to make me tip my chin up to see him and broad enough that the raindrops slid off his coat without soaking. He was dressed in a coat that ate the rain, hair slicked back, the kind of face that looked like a photograph in a magazine — sharp cheekbones, a jaw that could cut glass, gray eyes that watched and catalogued and then decided.
He studied me for a moment as if he recognized something private, then, slower, he offered me his hand.
"I didn't expect to see you here," he said. The name he gave me was like an examination, precise and almost formal. "May I walk you back?"
I laughed then — small and embarrassed — because I hadn't expected anyone to know me, and because the absurdity of being rescued by a stranger in a coat felt like the start of a story. I shouldn't have let him. But I took his hand anyway.
His name was James Ivanovna. It sounded foreign when he said it, like an accent on the edge of a sentence. He hadn't introduced himself with business cards or pretense. He spoke the way men who had been given everything do: with certainty and without the need for the world to approve.
We walked in silence for a while, the rain spitting at our shoulders. He did not blend with the ordinary clatter of the street. Men in suits occasionally clustered in the doorways of late-night cafes and stood a little straighter when he passed, as if his presence was a command they could not refuse. There was an order to his world that the lodge and the library could not touch. He moved through it like a fish through water.
"You're far from home," he said finally.
"Home's messy," I replied, thinking suddenly of the stale air in my father's room and the smell of antiseptic. It was true in a way that made my throat tight. "Far from home is quieter."
He smiled then, a slight dip at the corner of his mouth that made my ribs ache. "I'm James," he offered again, as if naming himself anchored him to me. "If you ever need anything, Violet — anything at all — find me."
He gave me a card before he left. Heavy paper, black ink, his name printed in the kind of font salons used for invitations. A phone number. A promise that seemed to hum beneath the paper like an engine.
The next morning I told Harzel the story over instant coffee and stale muffins, and she laughed in the way she always did when a moment in my life tilted toward something dangerous.
"Of course he leaves a card," she said. "He sounds like trouble."
"But he rescued me," I said. Which felt like arguing with myself. Rescues had a certain mythology to them. When you grew up waiting for bills and hospital queues, anyone who stepped in to make the world less heavy looked holy.
Harzel hugged me that afternoon like she might squeeze my head clean from my body. "Don't get lost in pretty words, Vi," she warned. "Watch him. Men like that—"
"—they're lonely too," I said, because I couldn't help myself. I had seen the way the city cowered a half-beat when certain cars passed. I had seen men bow and women look away. But loneliness had always looked better in velvet. I wanted someone to choose me.
He chose me with the kind of precision that made me think of how my father used to mend torn coats — slowly, with insistence and a kind of tenderness that was almost mechanical. He bought me a coffee one evening at the little bakery by the university. He sent flowers to my dorm that smelled of something clean and foreign. He arrived at places it would have taken me three calls to find. When he spoke, things felt rearranged into a language that fit him perfectly.
He never bragged about what he did. He let the shape of it show: the car, the clean suits, the men who seemed to know him. Once, when I asked where he worked, he shrugged and said, "I help people get what they need." It was not an answer. It was a definition.
He never called me "beautiful" the way other men did. That word felt childish in his mouth. He would say instead, "You have hands that know how to fix things," or "You look as if you've learned to endure." Compliments like that made me feel seen for the wrong reasons and somehow deeper than I'd wanted. He told me he admired strength in small things. He admired that I worked part-time at a company because I was practical, because I could hold to the courses the rest of the world pushed past.
I started to tell him things I had never told anyone: the phone bills stacked on the bedside table, the medicine schedule on my fridge, the way my father's voice had thinned. He listened as if he was memorizing me.
He did not flirt. He did not flirt the way boys in the library did — clumsy, loud, hopeful. He watched, measured, then acted. The gifts were exquisite but not garish: an overcoat that fit like it had been made for my shoulders, a book of poems with his handwriting tucked between the pages. He was careful, almost reverent, about the way he held my hand. Around other people he was restrained; alone, he was adoring in a way that made my heart swoon and my judgment slip like thin ice.
I wanted to believe he could be the thing I had been waiting for since my father's illness taught me the cost of being alone. Love, I decided, could be a kind of rescue. I wanted to be rescued by him.
One night, not long after the rain, he kissed me in the hallway outside my floor. It wasn't in a flourish or a blaze of confession. It was a steady, insistent thing, the kind of kiss where you could feel a man's hands map out the shape of your back as if trying to learn where to hold you so nothing could fall through. I kissed him back because I wanted to, because the world had been too long without tenderness. It felt heavy and electric and right.
In the weeks that followed we settled into a rhythm. He arrived when he said he would. I went to work and to lectures and then to him. He bought me things and I let him. He watched me sleep sometimes and never moved a muscle, as if sleep were holy in the way I slept next to him. I told him about the job I had started at a small firm — a quiet role that paid just enough to keep the bills at bay. He nodded like he understood. "Keep working," he told me once, in a tone that made the verb into a benediction. "Don't stop because of me."
It should have been the easy beginning of a story where two broken things made a whole. Instead, the cracks were quiet and small and then everywhere.
The first time he raised his voice, it was about nothing: a missed message, a friend who had liked a picture of me online. He paced and said words like "careless" and "reckless" and watched how my face changed. He apologized later with such a private grief that I forgave him before my anger could harden. He always apologized. He would take my hand in his palms and tell me, "I am sorry, Violet. I never meant—" and then he would kiss me until my head spun and he would buy me something that smelled of money and of him. A watch once, heavy and cold when he slid it onto my wrist, the face catching the light and making me squint.
Harzel watched the pattern stitch itself across our days with the blunt love only a best friend has. She would come over and comment on his manner in a way I knew was meant to protect me. "He keeps you tight," she said once, handing me a cup of tea. "Like he's stapled you to his life."
"I like being stapled," I said, half joking, half pleading. The truth was uglier: I liked how being with him made me feel less hollow. I liked the way his presence seemed to rearrange the knives of worry in my chest into duller tools. The choices I made were not noble. They were survival dressed up in romance.
There were small things I learned about him that I didn't ask for. He didn't like my father's name being mentioned lightly. He preferred my phone off when we were together. He would occasionally frown at the messages I received and ask, "Who is this?" with no curiosity so much as ownership. The men in his orbit moved like shadows that scuttled when he laughed. Once, as I left his car after a dinner, one of them followed me a block and then stopped when he saw him look back. The men were always polite; I think they had been trained at a cost I did not fully understand.
It was in that cost that the first bruise arrived — the kind that lives long in photographs and longer in memory.
We had argued about something small. College stress. A misunderstanding over a text. It was the kind of argument that should have dissolved with sleep. Instead, his jaw tightened and the disappointment in his voice sounded different, more like betrayal than frustration.
"You said you would come with me," he said. "You promised."
"I had a lecture," I answered, my voice small and tired.
He took my hand too hard. I remember the surprised shape my palm took under his grip, the way heat seemed to collect behind my eyes. He released me and then he did something so quick and sudden that I tumbled back against the wall. The world shrank then expanded with a sound like something breaking inside me.
He did not make a scene. There were no raised shouts or dramatic accusations. He steadied me as if that made everything better and then he pressed his lips to my temple and said, "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to scare you." His apology was immediate and terrible. He apologized the way powerful men apologize: with a soft voice and a promise that he could change the weather for me.
When I looked in the mirror the next morning there was a purple line blooming on my cheek. I pressed fingertip to bruised skin and felt an odd numbness — not pain, exactly, but the sharp metallic edge of reality: I had been held with a force that did not belong to comfort.
He bought me roses that day. Deep red ones that smelled like heat. He sat beside me on the couch under the light and stroked my hair in a way that made my scalp hum. "They look like you," he said. "Beautiful even when pain is near."
Harzel wanted to call the police. She wanted names and reports and consequences. She wanted the law to be a shield. But when we went to the precinct the officer took our statement and made sympathetic noises but offered empty procedures — forms, a waiting line, a suggestion to "separate for a while." The world, the kind that measured everything in forms and paperwork, did not move like the world he commanded. It folded politely around me and then kept its distance.
"Don't make rash decisions," the officer said kindly. "Men who love can lose control." The words had the varnish of concern and the thinness of complacency. I left the station with my hands in my pockets and the card he had given me burning warm as if it were a brand.
I wanted to leave him then. I thought of packing a bag and going to my father's house, of telling him everything and letting him decide the rest. But when I imagined James without me, his face narrowed into something I could not name without feeling small in my own life. The man who could break me also made the world larger in strange, terrible ways. He was the person who had said, the week before, "I would give everything to make you safe," and I believed him because I wanted to.
I told myself that bruises could be hidden. That apologies were bridges. That love might be a kind of pain I could learn to survive. That is the logic of someone in love with a storm: you stand at the window and tell yourself the thunder is proof of the world being alive.
At night I would lie awake and listen for the quiet that came after he left, the sound of the radiator clicking and Harzel's breathing down the hall, and I would count the ways I had made room for him. I would remember the look in his eyes when he watched me sleep and feel the pull between fear and the ache that had become a home.
The world kept going. Lectures started again. Medicine bills were still due. My father coughed over the phone and told me to bring the next prescription. Life, practical and insistent, demanded that I carry my bruises and my books in the same bag.
When the flowers wilted on my bedside table, Harzel put them into water and laughed at my silliness. "You're trouble," she said. "You've got a hurricane on your hands and you're learning to hold it like a pillow."
"I love him," I said, softly, as if love itself could explain the trouble.
Harzel's mouth flattened. "Love shouldn't hurt you like this," she said. "Promise me you'll tell me if it gets worse."
I promised because promises felt like a raft. I meant it then, and I meant it badly. Love and hurt braided themselves in my head until I could not see where one began and the other ended. I wanted to believe that his fierce devotion would undo the fear.
That night, when I went back to his apartment — because I always went back — he opened the door like nothing had happened. He held out a jacket for me and then drew me into the kind of embrace that felt like a confession.
"Stay," he said into my hair, and the word trembled with need. "Stay with me."
I stayed.🖤
Author's Note
This story is not just words on a page—it is drawn from real life.
Some names, places, and details have been changed for privacy, but the pain, the scars, and the lessons are real.
Bruises & Roses is about love, betrayal, survival, and the courage it takes to break free from chains we cannot see. It is my story, and maybe it could be yours, or someone you know.
I want readers to learn from this: love should never hurt. Love should not come with bruises, fear, or silence. If you see yourself in these pages, please know—you are not alone.
Thank you for reading, and I hope this book gives you strength, clarity, and a voice.
—🌹🖤🥺