Scumbag Romance 단편 소설 & Regret 소설

On my wedding day, my fiancé bailed. Sabina—his ex—had sent him a diary listing 77 things she'd done for him. Turns out she only dumped him because his family pushed her to. So, he ran back to her. While I was still reeling, Jacob—my fiancé's best friend—showed up. He got down on one knee, flashed a ring he'd clearly had ready, and said, "Yuna Auclair, I've liked you for a long time. Will you marry me?" I thought he was my person. But after the wedding, Jacob turned distant. Hot one second, ice-cold the next. Then I found a diary in his study. Just like the one Sabina had sent my ex. Page one hit like a truck: [Hurt Yuna Auclair seventy-seven times, and I'll break up with Gabriel and be with you.] Oh—and Gabriel? He was my ex.

My husband's first love posted a video on her social media. In the video, the two of them were passing a playing card with their lips. When the card fell, their lips met in a kiss. They didn't stop—lost in the moment, they kissed passionately for an entire minute. Her caption read: [Still the same clumsy piggy! PS: Steve's skills are as good as ever!] I quietly liked the post and left a comment: [Congrats.] The next second, my husband called, yelling at me furiously, "No other woman is as dramatic as you! I was just playing a game with Lanie. Why are you acting crazy again?" It was then that I realized seven years of love meant nothing. It was time for me to leave.

Three years ago, I suffered severe complications during childbirth and lost our baby, leaving my husband crying outside the delivery room. For three years, Carter Reynolds doted on me with boundless devotion. Yet the progress bar for my Childbearing System remained stuck at 99 percent, leading me to believe I would never complete my mission. On the third anniversary of our baby's death, I went to the cemetery and later decided on a whim to take a walk along the beach to clear my head. That was when a little boy suddenly ran right into my legs. "Hey buddy, where are your parents?" I asked softly. He scrambled up, shoved my hand away, and took off running. I followed him, but the moment I saw the scene ahead, the blood in my veins ran stone cold. In the shade of a palm tree, Carter lounged on a sunbed, smiling warmly as he caught the little boy who threw himself into his arms. "Daddy!" And the woman the little boy giggled at and called "Mommy" was my best friend. Beside her, my parents were entertaining the child with coconut water. "Come here, Leo. Let me hold you," said my mother. My dad took a sip of coconut water and let out a sigh. "Audrey must have gone to the cemetery again today. Ah, if she only knew that Leo is actually..." "Dad!" Carter interrupted, quickly clapping his hands over Leo's ears. "Audrey owes Vanessa this child." I dug my fingernails into my palms, blinking in disbelief. Suddenly, the cold, mechanical voice of the system resounded in my mind for the first time in years. "Detection confirmed: this is indeed the child you gave birth to three years ago. Your mission is complete. Would you like to exit this world?"

There's a rule in Pine Ridge—women are only allowed to leave the mountain seven times in their lives. If they aren't able to marry a foreigner who's not from Pine Ridge, they can only marry a local mountaineer and become a guardian of the mountain. Because of that, I've borrowed some cosmetics from my grandma seven times in a row. Every time, I'm often wearing my prettiest dress and waiting for the man, who has promised to whisk me away from Pine Ridge, to marry me. But despite having crossed the mountain and reached the same town seven times in a row, Joseph Kingsley is never there. In the village, the village chief, Arthur Langley, has a smoke pipe dangling from his lips. "This is your seventh time leaving Pine Ridge just to get your marriage registered. That director boyfriend of yours has gone over to the next village just to shoot more footage of the lass who has a really pretty smile. "Caroline, your boyfriend is already behaving like this. Why are you still waiting for him?" I clumsily pull out the phone Joseph has given me before keying in his number. The dial tone goes off three times before the call goes through. Only then does Joseph explain the truth to me. "When Gemma took us on a foraging trip, she got trapped by one of the bear traps in the mountain! You do realize that if a woman from Pine Ridge were to get crippled, no villager would want to marry her at all because she'd be a burden to them! "If I were to leave Gemma alone, her life would be ruined! This is the last time, Caroline! Once I ensure that Gemma's leg gets healed, I'll come marry you right away!" Joseph has been in Pine Ridge for four years so far. Throughout these years, I've hiked the mountain and braved the elements for him seven times in a row. But Gemma Watson keeps getting into trouble. Whenever that happens, Joseph will abandon me without hesitation. As I gaze at the phone, which shows that the call has gotten disconnected, I wipe away my tears quietly. There won't be a last time anymore. In three days, I will be marrying someone else.

Three years after my death, Logan Grant finally married the woman he'd always loved. To get revenge on her behalf, he had my father thrown in prison, drove my mother to jump to her death, and demanded that I get on my knees and beg for mercy. The problem was, Logan, I'd been dead for years. All that remained of me was a pile of dry bones. When my death certificate was finally placed before him, he lost his mind. He dug up my remains, cradled my bones in his arms, and sobbed as he begged me to forgive him.

Max Siegel loved me deeply and promised me the grandest wedding anyone had ever seen. However, just three days before the big day, everything changed. The custom-made wedding dress he'd ordered for me was given to his stepsister, Fawn Lewis, and instead, he handed me a pill—one that could erase memories. “Kate,” he said, “I don’t want to hurt you, but Fawn has just been diagnosed with terminal cancer. She doesn’t have long. Her last wish is to marry me. I can’t have her leave this world with regrets. “This pill will make you forget everything about us for a few days. But don’t worry. After the wedding is over, I’ll give you the antidote, and you’ll remember everything again. Then, I’ll give you the wedding you deserve.” His tone left no room for negotiation. Without hesitation, I took the pill and swallowed it. However, what he didn’t know was that I developed that drug myself, and there was no antidote. Three days from now, I would forget the man I loved most—him. And once that happens, there’s no turning back and no chance to start over.

My avoidant fiance refused to talk to me about anything. Every time we fought, he would put on his earphones and turn the volume all the way up. This time, we were arguing over laundry detergent again. He impatiently slammed the earphones on me. "Are you seriously going to do this again, Jessica? You fight because of bad photos. You start a fight because I didn't take out the trash in time, and you start fights because I forgot our anniversaries. And now I can't even choose which detergent I use?" I stared at the red mark on my thigh and the broken earphones on the ground. I saved up most of my salary for that. It was a present, but now he was using it to vent. Yet he had kept the laundry detergent his childhood friend gave him for six whole years. Every time an important date was coming up, he would use a bit of it to wash all his clothes. The sickly sweet scent of that detergent filled the room. I looked up and held back my tears. "Let's break up, Zack."

The day I agree to marry James Hunt, he is eager to announce our love to the whole world. Later, when I get pregnant, he even acquires a hospital so that I can rest easy and focus on the baby. But during a checkup in my sixth month, I overhear a chilling conversation. "Mr. Hunt, the baby's developing well, but it's too large. The delivery could put the mother's life at risk." James only laughs, cold and unbothered. "So what if she dies? I only married her to give me children." The smile on my face freezes, and it feels like I have been plunged into ice. His next words cut me even deeper. "She pushed Natasha into the water, and now Natasha can never have children. This is nothing but her retribution." The perfect happiness I think I have is nothing more than a lie. So, I quietly register at another hospital and schedule an abortion. James, I hope you live to regret this.

"Your Highness, are you really going to secretly take blood from Miss Jerryton's heart and treat Miss Mullery with it?" The elderly imperial physician's hand that held the dagger trembled. The candlelight reflected the cold sweat on his forehead. Arrisa Jerryton lay on the bed. Her thin body sank into the luxurious quilt, and her face was as white as the first snow of winter. Louis Xavier spoke in a tone colder than the snow outside the palace. "Yes. I already fed her anesthetic powder. She is in a coma and will not wake up. Hurry up."

A few rounds into the night, when Ethan Brooks set his glass on the table and suggested a reverse game of Never Have I Ever. The rules were simple. Everyone took turns naming something they'd done. Anyone who hadn't done it put a finger down. The first person to put all five fingers down had to take a dare chosen by everyone else at the table. So when Ethan grinned and said, "I've dated a Grant," I laughed and raised my hand too. "What do you know? So have I." The whole table cracked up. When it was Claire Howard's turn, she lazily swirled the drink in her glass. She glanced at me, then looked at Noah. "Last month, Noah and I celebrated our seventh wedding anniversary." My smile slowly faded. "Don't joke about that." But Leah Collins, sitting next to her, burst out laughing. "Who says she's joking? We were all there for that 'wedding' of theirs." Seven years. Noah and I had only been together for five years. And our real wedding was still nine days away. I turned to Noah on instinct. He had his head down, fiddling with his phone as if he hadn't heard a thing. But the screen was still open to his text thread with Claire, and at the very bottom was a kissing-face emoji she'd just sent. I ended up with the dare. Ethan egged me on to use Noah's phone to call the third number on his recent-calls list and put the call on speaker. A woman's voice came through the speaker, warm with laughter. "Babe, you left your underwear in my bathroom when you showered here yesterday. Are you coming by tonight to pick it up?" The room went dead silent. I knew that voice. Leah. The others didn't even look shocked. Each of them had a piece of Noah's past: flirty jokes they'd once shared with him and secrets only his friends were in on. Some of them had even slept with him. And I, the woman who was marrying him in nine days, was the outsider. "You all win this game," I said, looking at him. "But him? I don't want him anymore."

I was doing the laundry when another pair of lace panties slipped out of my husband's pants pocket. Before I could say a word, he raised an eyebrow and handed me a plastic vase. "Go on. Smash it." He acted as though it were perfectly natural. It was the same routine every time I caught him cheating over the past seven years. I looked around, and only then did I realize what he'd done. He'd replaced every breakable thing in our home with something made of plastic or stainless steel. He was used to my hysterical outbursts by now. He thought our marriage was just like all that plastic. No matter how hard I tried, I could never break it. But this time, I calmly put the vase back where it belonged. "Let's get a divorce."

After my family went bankrupt, my husband, Felix Skye, paid the price. The debt collectors drowned him in the river. To pay off the debt, I took a job at an underground casino as a human punching bag. Every punch I took earned me five dollars. Then one night, I was sent to deliver drinks to a private room. Through the crack in the door, I saw Felix, my husband who was supposed to be dead, sitting at the head of the table and slowly savoring a glass of fine red wine. "It's been more than three years since I last saw Avery. I wonder how she's doing." My supposedly bankrupt mother, Ivy Schotz, sat there dripping in gold and jewels. She sighed. "She'll just hide away and grieve for a few years. Once she's over it, she can remarry. "No matter what," Mom went on, "as long as she believes you're dead, you and Riley can finally live in peace." Riley Mackenzie was the daughter my mother had with her first love. Every face in that room was familiar, including my best friend and the very "enemies" who had supposedly killed Felix. It had all been an act from start to finish. The only thing real was the three years of hell I'd lived through. Holding twenty bottles of beer, I smiled and shook my head. Once I scraped together enough money for my coffin, they would all be free.

All because I opened a window to air out the room, my husband’s childhood sweetheart, Celine Ashcroft, caught a cold. In a fit of rage, my husband, Ronan Blackwood, had his men bind me and drag me down to the ice cellar despite my being five months pregnant. "Don’t think that just because you’re carrying my child, you can bully Celine. If even a single hair on her head is harmed, I’ll make you repay it a hundredfold!" Shivering violently from the cold, I knelt through tears, begging for forgiveness. I promised that from now on I would serve his precious sweetheart well to atone, that I would never again let her suffer even the slightest harm. He only gave a cold order to seal the cellar, saying I needed to be taught a lesson so it would be burned into my memory. A week later, when Celine finally recovered from her cold, he finally remembered me in the cellar. "Vesper, have you truly realized your mistake? As long as you agree to kneel and apologize to Celine immediately, I’ll spare you." What he didn’t know was that by then, I had already frozen stiff in that ice cellar. And the child he had treasured so dearly no longer showed even the faintest sign of life.

I came home late one night to find another woman in the apartment I shared with my boyfriend, Alistair Westwood. She was wearing my silk slip, which barely covered her thighs. Barefoot, she pressed herself against him. His hand was wrapped around her bare waist. "Nika isn't feeling well, so I told her she could stay here for now." Nika peeked out from behind him. "I'm sorry. I didn't know this was your place." "Where is she going to sleep?" I demanded. "And why is she wearing my clothes?" Alistair frowned. "Nika is sick. Obviously, she'll sleep with me so I can look after her. Can't you just let this go for once?" "It's fine. I can sleep on the couch," Nika offered. Alistair cut her off at once. "No. You're too sick to sleep there." I stared at the two of them for a moment. Then I grabbed a pillow and a blanket. "I'll take the couch." As soon as the bedroom door closed, I opened my laptop and reached for an invitation on the table. Half an hour later, I typed my answer. By the next day, Alistair's company had lost one of its biggest partnerships.

I can hear what animals are thinking. Not even my husband, Corbin Whitmore, knows that secret. On our fifth anniversary, he gave me a limited-edition bag, pulled me close, and made me a promise. "From now on, I'll buy you one every year." For the past few years, he'd been swamped with work, while I'd been tied up at the animal rescue center. We hadn't even had time to celebrate our anniversaries. I thought he was just busy. I thought he still loved me. Then Banjo, the cat I'd had for seven years, jumped up on the dining table, stared at the bag, and spoke. "Mom, the lady with the red bracelet came again last night. "Every time she kisses Dad, Dad buys her a bag. "And her bracelet's missing a diamond." My heart sank. I'd given that bracelet to my cousin, Tamsin Weir. Just last month, she'd told me one of the diamonds had fallen out. When I looked up, Corbin smiled at me. "Do you like it?" I pushed down the chill in my chest and took the bag from him. "I love it." They wanted to use this bag to cover up their affair. Fine. I'd start with the bag and tear their lies apart, one by one.

On the fourth day after my son's death, I decided to secretly dissolve my military marriage with my husband. Before that, I had three days to settle everything for my son. On the first day, I tricked my husband into signing the cremation papers. On the second day, I went to the school and collected the textbooks my son would never get to use. On the third day, I cooked a table full of dishes and begged my husband to celebrate our son's last birthday. He agreed, but soon after claimed he had a mission. Instead, he spent the entire night setting off fireworks with his childhood sweetheart. That night, I cooked. Then, I sat alone before my son's photo and ate all my son's favorite foods. The next day, my husband returned, guilt flickering in his eyes as he handed me a brand-new backpack. He said it was a gift for our child's first day of school. But he didn't know—our child would never have a first day of school.

In our five years of marriage, I had given in to my husband, John, for a grand total of three times. The first time was during my pregnancy. He had taken his ex-girlfriend Stacy, who had once taken three bullets for him, back home and cared for her. When I became angry, he immediately sent her away once she recovered. The second time was after childbirth, when I was ready to return to work. To repay a favor, he gave the position I had worked years for to Stacy. He said it was so I could rest well. I looked at my son, who needed me, and I conceded. The third time was during our son’s birthday. In front of the entire company, he had announced that Stacy was his wife, all so she could establish herself in the company. I gave him two choices: divorce or send her away. Without hesitation, he chose the latter and immediately sent her abroad. The fourth time was when my father suddenly had a heart attack and urgently needed surgery. He disappeared again. I searched everywhere for him to cover the hospital expenses, and I finally discovered that he had gone to the airport to pick up a pregnant Stacy, who was returning to the country. Because of that, my father missed the best chance for treatment and died. I was done giving in. I disguised the divorce agreement as our son’s medical bill and tricked him into signing it. No compensation or apology would matter. I did not wish to have him near my son or myself again.

When my husband, Jared Hunt, receives a promotion that requires him to travel to Belmont, a big city, he submits a list of family members who will be traveling with him to the organization. He has submitted two names; the first one being our son, Jackson Hunt, and the second being a knowledgeable young woman, Sabrina Hayes. She's a friend who has traveled to the village with him in the first place. Life in the village is difficult. There's no way Jared will let Jackson suffer in the village. As for Sabrina, he has already given her his word to take her back to Belmont a long time ago. But when it comes to me, his actual wife, he thinks I should be gracious and offer the opportunity of traveling to Belmont to others. "It's completely useless for a country bumpkin like you to go to Belmont. Sabrina is very knowledgeable, so she's a more suitable candidate. Jackson and I will come back for you when an opportunity comes up in the future." As I listen to Jared's perfunctory explanation, I can feel my heart breaking. But what Jared doesn't know is that I'm not a country bumpkin despite having lived in the village longer than him. The truth is, I'm the talent that Belmont wants the most. The promotion that Jared cherishes the most is actually something that I don't want.

On the day I sold my house, my best friend asked me. “Aren’t you getting married soon? Why are you selling your new home?” I signed the transfer agreement and replied, “Because I’m breaking up with him.” We were supposed to buy a particular couch for our new home. Caleb Graham said he had not managed to snag it yet, so he asked me to wait a little longer. Then, I saw that very couch in Claire Silva’s Stories. She had specifically tagged Caleb. [It’s the one I’ve been waiting for so long! He still knows me so well!] In the comments section, Caleb simply replied, [Don’t mention it.] That was followed by a bunch of trivial chatter between the two of them. I stared at that Stories post for a long time. Then, I canceled the order for the matching pajamas. I scrolled back through my order history. I had ordered over a hundred packages. They were all for furnishing our new home. At first, Caleb would enthusiastically pick things out with me. Later on, he did not even bother to reply to my messages. It was because Claire, his first love, had gotten divorced. His attention toward me and our new home had shifted elsewhere. “If a buyer contacts us, I’ll let you know right away.” The real estate agent slid his business card across the table. I reached out to take it. Then, I cast one last glance at this place. ‘Caleb, I admit that I regret it,’ I thought. Seven years had passed, and I no longer wanted to build a home with him.

On the day the earthquake hits, my father, Collin Rimes, carries my injured little sister, Poppy Rimes, on his back, trekking about four miles through the mountains before finally reaching the emergency relief camp. His spine is bent low as he paces back and forth outside the command center in anxious hesitation before finally plastering a pleading, subservient smile on his face. "I'm looking for Captain Rubin. I'm his father-in-law. My little girl is injured. Could you please find a place for her?" The guard in camouflage frowns and heads inside to report. A moment later, Scotty Rubin's cold voice drifts out of the tent. "There are injured people everywhere waiting for help, from three-year-olds to 80-year-olds. Every one of them is just as desperate. But we follow protocol here. No special treatment." The smile on Dad's face freezes. Lost and helpless, he glances down at Poppy, who's drenched in cold sweat from the agonizing pain. His Adam's apple bobs, and he swallows the words he wants to say. Nodding emphatically, he hoists Poppy onto his back and shuffles to the side. "Yes, yes, of course. We should follow the rules. That's only right. Scotty is right." Seeing this, a sharp, suffocating pain stabs through my heart. But just as I'm about to speak up, I manage to get a peek at Scotty's phone lighting up on the desk. The latest message is to the woman he's never truly gotten over. "Don't worry, Mae. I've already arranged a private shelter for you. You and your family can all go there. There'll be hot meals, hot water, and dedicated doctors on standby." In that instant, I realize I'm the world's biggest joke. Well, since that's the case, I'll just set Scotty free.