Cerita Pendek Melodramatic Romance & Novel Unattainable Love Marriage

On the day I went to the city hall with my girlfriend to get married, her first love, Martin Lennox, suddenly appeared. “Teddy’s getting old, and his kidneys are failing. The vet said he only has a few days left. You should pay him a visit.” Teddy was the dog they got together. I knew about it, so I said kindly, “After Olivia and I get married, I’ll send both of you to the vet.” However, Martin suddenly started crying. “Olivia, you know dogs can’t speak, but he kept crying when he looked at your photo. He really wants to see you.” Olivia also started crying. She flung my hand away and apologized before she left with Martin. She disappeared for three days. On the fourth day, she returned home and apologized to me. Then, she dragged me to the city hall. Unexpectedly, Martin showed up with Teddy’s dead body. “Olivia, is your marriage really that important that you left Teddy alone at the vet? He’s dead now, and you didn’t manage to accompany him before he crossed the rainbow bridge!” Olivia cried as she looked at me. “I’ll come back to you after I bury Teddy, alright? Wait for me.” I gestured. “Just go, we can have our wedding ceremony first before we get our marriage certificate.” On the day of our wedding, Olivia was waiting happily for me at home in her wedding dress. However, she did not know that I was not planning on turning up.

When my mother asked me who I wanted to marry, this time, I chose none of them. Instead, I decided to go to the Northwest and serve my country. In my previous life, both my childhood friend, once a captain, and my educated fiancé courted me. I had feelings for both. But while I was still struggling to decide who I wanted as my husband, both accidentally ingested something. In a dazed state, I spent a chaotic night. After that, my parents asked one of the men to marry me. On the wedding day, the first love in both their hearts, the woman they had always truly loved, found out the truth. Out of spite, she accepted a local thug’s proposal. After marrying him, she was forced to give birth to ten children, one after another, until she died tragically. After her death, both men grabbed me by the throat and asked, “Why did she have to die such a miserable death, while you’re still alive and well?” They strangled me to death. When I opened my eyes again, I was back to the day when my childhood friend and my fiancé had been drugged.

My younger brother and I depend on each other for survival. We are the renowned Bone-Suturing Masters of the frontier. I suture the bones of the dead, and he heals the lives of the living. Later on, he rescues the sixth princess, Susan Roth, amid the chaos of war. He helps her ascend to the throne as Queen, while he becomes the Prince Regent, wielding power over the entire court. Susan loves him deeply, so much so that she disregards her own health and risks her life to bear him a son. She even officially names him the Crown Prince. When the fighting at the frontier temporarily settles down, I return to the capital to attend the Crown Prince's coronation ceremony. I feel reassured when I see my younger brother standing at the height of power, his features calm and composed. I don't stay long and leave immediately for the borders after the coronation. On the journey back, I see a gnawed-on corpse at the bottom of a cliff I'm passing by. Instinctively, I take out my bone-suturing needles and hemp thread. Then I slowly gather the scattered bones and stitch the body back together. After finishing the last stitch, I gently turn the face over. The face is exactly the same as my younger brother's. The blood in my body freezes, as if I have fallen into an icy river. If he's the corpse at the bottom of the cliff… then who exactly is the person seated on the throne, commanding the kingdom?

My husband Marcus Ashford has severe social anxiety. In three years of marriage, he refused to meet a single one of my friends or family. Even our wedding was just the two of us, because he said a crowd would trigger a panic attack. Because it hurt me to see him like that, I put up with my parents' disappointment and my friends' confusion, made every excuse for him, and guarded his fragile little world with both hands. That changed tonight, when I stumbled onto the social media page of his first love, newly returned from overseas. In the photos, Marcus moved through the room with Chloe, working the toasts with total ease, laughing wide and unguarded. I opened the next live photo, and a snatch of conversation came out of it. "Marcus, isn't today your father-in-law's birthday too? You're not going to swing by?" Marcus answered as though it were nothing, "Going would just be pointless socializing. A waste of time. I'd rather stay here with Chloe." I went through those few photos over and over, more times than I could count, until my eyes were dry and stinging, and then I shut off the screen without a word. Then I called a lawyer and had the divorce papers drawn up. So his world was full of voices and noise after all. It simply refused to open for me, and for me alone. Fine. If the party wasn't mine, I wasn't going to keep forcing my way in.

On Valentine’s Day, my girlfriend Florence Higgins was rushed to the hospital after accidentally eating undercooked wild mushrooms. Half-conscious on the hospital bed, she murmured, “Michael… I owed you too much. If my family’s company hadn’t been on the brink of collapse, you wouldn’t have left, and I wouldn’t have ended up with Noah.” I am Noah Owens. As for Michael Connor, he was the love of her life. The one she cherished most during her youth. What she seemed to forget was that when her family’s company was about to collapse, Michael had been the first to walk away. During those seven years, I was the one who helped revive her company, the one who stayed by her side. I believed she might eventually have a change of heart, but I never expected her to abort our child for the sake of her first love. At that moment, I finally understood that you can’t force warmth where there is none.

I had been married to Derek for six years, and we had a three-year-old son. He was poor, earning only $2,000 a month, but I had no complaints; I took care of everything at home for him. After getting dinner on the table for the whole family, I finally had a minute to check my phone. A video popped up on my feed: a twenty-two-year-old girl from a rural area whose hands, roughened by years of hard labor, looked like they belonged to a sixty-two-year-old woman. I looked down at my own hands, just as worn and scarred, and stared at them blankly before tapping into the comments. I expected people to feel bad for her. However, to my surprise, the comments section was flooded with a single sentiment: "Why would anyone marry a penniless loser?" One of the top-liked comments came from a couple; in their photo, they were pictured holding hands—fingers tightly intertwined—with the girl sporting a massive diamond ring. The accompanying caption read: "A man who truly loves you would never bear to let you suffer." I felt a pang of envy. Given the choice, who wouldn't want a glamorous life? As I was about to close the app, I accidentally tapped on the couple's photo, enlarging it. In the background, previously too blurry to make out, was a face I recognized. It looked exactly like my husband, Derek Sterling. I froze, and almost against my will, I tapped into the account's profile. Post after post of lavish photos of them together flooded my screen. And then I saw him clearly. The scar above his brow, the one he got when a shelf fell on him while protecting me, was still plainly visible. It was my husband. It was Derek.

The cocktail hour had just ended when I picked up a video call in the bridal suite. It was Ethan, three years from now. By then, time‑travel tech had matured enough to let him contact me three years into the past. After enough specific details, I finally believed it. The man on the screen really was Ethan, three years older. I rubbed my aching ankle and pouted at him through the screen. "Ethan, smiling at all these guests is exhausting. But the second I remember I actually married you today, I'm happy all over again." "We're still happy three years from now, right?" He was leaning back against a headboard, and he didn't answer. His face was flat and unreadable. Then I heard it: a woman's voice from his end, low and breathy, asking to be kissed. I froze for a second, then covered my mouth and laughed. "Is that future me? In broad daylight? Get a room." Ethan turned the camera into the bed. My maid of honor was lying there, naked, sprawled across his chest. Her body was covered in hickeys. He looked straight at me as I started to break, and his voice didn't shift at all. "As soon as the reception ended, I told you I had a client meeting. I went to her room instead." "Jo, now you know what's coming. The guests haven't gone home yet. If you want a divorce tonight, you can have one. Up to you."

To help my "destitute" husband pay off his debts, I scavenged for scraps for five years. My son and I survived on expired canned food. That changed on my son's birthday. I saw him in a bespoke suit, spending millions to celebrate the birthday of the woman he truly loved. That was the moment I realized he was actually the most powerful billionaire on Wall Street. To please the love of his life, he let our child be injected with unknown drugs, leaving him on the brink of death. He even forced me to drain my own blood to save her son. Later, I became someone he could no longer reach. I linked arms with a man far more powerful than him and walked away. That once arrogant man ended up kneeling in the Arctic snow, clutching a photo I had burned, weeping like a stray dog.