Sweet Romance12 min read
A Quiet Break, A Loud Reckoning
ButterPicks13 views
I remember the campus in spring like a postcard. Trees were a riot of new green and the sky was clean as if someone had washed it. I was walking with Sawyer Benjamin, hand in hand, and the sunlight made his hair look like a halo.
"Did you hear?" a girl behind us said, loud enough to ricochet off the quad.
"What happened?" another answered, curious.
"A girl from Bio set herself on fire in the square," the first girl said, voice buzzing with the wrong sort of excitement.
"Why?" the other whispered.
"Some cult. Lost money, lost everything."
Sawyer squeezed my hand and I smiled at him, a small, private smile that felt fragile and safe.
"Don't be silly," he murmured. "Stop looking so serious."
"There's too many people," I said, and moved his face away with a nervous hand, which made him grin like a kid.
"You're blushing," he teased and tapped my nose. "We graduate soon. You don't need to be scared of everyone."
"I've still got my thesis," I lied. My draft had been sent to my advisor that morning.
Sawyer frowned a little. "You could finish later. Stay with me."
"I'm busy," I said, and the lie tasted cleaner cut than I expected.
We drifted into the dining hall. People were loud. Then Marie Beil and her friend emerged like a storm. Marie's eyes skewered everything.
"Sawyer!" she called, but her gaze didn't go to Sawyer alone. It went to me.
"Why are you still with her?" Marie demanded, and she spoke like someone handing out a verdict.
Sawyer stammered, "My mom set it up. I didn't—"
The exchange was petty, public, and childish, and the whole dining hall turned into a courtroom. People stared. I felt the heat of eyes on every inch of me. Sawyer tried to explain. Marie kept smirking.
"She's too old for you," Marie sneered. "You deserve better."
I felt no surge. Only a quiet bubble of relief. I stepped away. Sawyer grabbed my wrist.
"Don't be angry," he pleaded.
I looked at our hands and realized we had been holding onto something that didn't fit anymore.
"Let's break up," I said, simple and true. I let go of his hand and walked out.
I told my friends in the group chat. "I'm single," I typed, and let the words sit. Faye Dunlap messaged, playful and sharp: "Was the puppy too small?"
I laughed alone in the cafe and ate a jasmine Basque cheesecake that tasted like peace.
"You're making a drama," Sawyer called. "Give me another chance."
"We're not right," I said. "Don't contact me."
He was stunned. I kept the silence. For a while I felt like I had shed a heavy coat.
A week later, I went back to the department office to fetch a file for a friend. The elevator dinged and opened, and three men stepped out. One of them took up space like a crest: Kenneth Zaytsev. I froze because memories are stubborn. I had known him, once — a tall, steady figure in a life that felt like someone else's photograph.
"Are you okay?" a playful voice asked in my ear. It was Li—no, not that name. It was Ulrika Falk—not in the original but my friend from lab — actually I said nothing; the elevator filled with the sudden, thin air of other people's presence.
Kenneth stood aside, calm as if he belonged to every room. His eyes found mine. It felt like being seen after a long blackout.
"Don't faint," Li—Ulrika—teased. "Stay with us."
I walked away, breath short.
I put the past in a small, tidy box. Then my mother, Martha Bennett, called and said, "When are you coming home?"
"In a month," I told her. Her voice immediately turned businesslike. "It's time to find a husband, dear. You've been studying for years. Think about your future."
"I don't want to get married," I said.
"Don't be ridiculous," she scolded, and I put my phone down with the practiced calm of someone who had learned how to live under other people's lightning.
At home, the house smelled like soy and old arguments. My mother and father argued about another divorce, another round of the same old war. My mother said she would file, because she could not stand his wandering hands. I sat, small in that living room of huge things, and my step-brother, Maddox Mason, played with blocks and called me “sister.”
"You must come to dinner," my aunt insisted. "We want to set you up."
I nodded and packed a bag. In the small hometown air, memory drifted in and out of me like smoke. Kenneth was back in town too, visiting his mother, apparently. I learned that he had become a man who wore success like a quiet coat: sleek, careful, and chillingly sure.
We met again in my childhood neighborhood—he, walking into my mother's small noodle shop with an easy confidence that belonged to another era.
"It’s been a long time," he said.
"It has," I replied, watching his mother cry and hug him as if time could be smoothed over like a sheet.
Marie Beil and her mother still lingered in campus gossip, but I kept to myself. Kenneth and his friends lingered as well. There was a strange, musical rearrangement of us all. Kenneth offered practical kindness—he carried my sleeping brother, he held doors. He remembered my old pet name, the one my grandmother had used: "Dot."
"Dot," he said once, softly, and I felt the word tug at a string inside me.
"Don't call me that in public," I said, trying to shrug him off.
"Okay," he answered, but his voice said, "Only when it's just us."
We grew close because he was steady and because I had not known steadiness. He fixed my lock. He cooked. He said small things that sounded like a promise.
"Do you still want to be a doctoral student?" he asked one night over his simple cooking.
"I might work first," I lied again. I wanted to be honest, but the honesty felt sharp and dangerous.
He laughed lightly and said, "Then I'll bring you better food."
We were uncertain together. I had my work: a freelance assignment to pitch to a media company. I studied. I prepared for an interview at a large corporation—an opportunity that felt both like a ladder and a cage. I wanted the ladder for myself.
One evening, my friend Faye Dunlap came to me with a secret: she had been careless and now had a life inside her she hadn't planned for.
"I'm pregnant," she whispered.
"Who?" I asked, stunned.
"Marcus Arellano," she said. "He is going to be married."
The air left the room for a moment. We were young; everything seemed to press. Faye was resolute and terrified both, saying, "I scheduled a termination." But she hesitated.
"You don't have to decide now," I said, though my hands shook. We were the crowd that held each other like a raft. In the end, Marcus came and did the kind thing—he canceled his engagement and promised Faye he would stand with her. The scene was messy and real and public in private ways.
There were small triumphs. I passed the corporate exam and was called for interview. I worked late nights, sometimes staying up until dawn. Kenneth sometimes called, sometimes came, sometimes sat in silence beside me as if to keep me safe from the dark creeping in my head.
Then the campus rumor mill roared to life. Someone had taken a photo of me with a man—me laughing with my friends—and a headline slid across the feeds: "Campus Beauty and Her Rich Boyfriend." People judged in the same breath as they cheered. The comments dug like little knives.
"Who uploaded that?" Faye asked, alarmed.
"I don't know," I said, and for once I felt small.
I began to suspect that Marie Beil had something to do with the rumor. She had been cruel, and she carried a steady smirk like a shield. But accusing her without proof felt small too. I kept working, kept walking, and Kenneth stayed at the edges of my life like a tide.
The thing about small cruelties is that sometimes they collect into something large. On a day the campus was thick with sunlight and parents and pomp—graduation day—Marie Beil stood on a stage of her own: the annual alumni luncheon at the student center. She was invited as the mother of a "prospective match" for some local family; she had, over months, leaned into the kind of social climbing that sticks like burrs.
I had not planned anything. But the archives of cruelty have a nervous habit of opening in public.
"She humiliated me in the dining hall," I said to Faye. "She called me names."
"You should not let it slide," Faye said. "But confrontation is messy."
I walked into the alumni hall because I wanted to sit quietly and watch people—if only for the feeling of being ordinary for a few minutes. People were polishing their smiles and matching their manners to the menu.
And there she was: Marie, draped in new things, speaking with faux brightness to donors. She was flourishing at the expense of whatever was left of kindness.
She found me before I found her.
"You're here. How quaint," she said. Her voice was a headline.
"Marie," I said, quietly.
"You're looking well," she said, and smiled around the room.
"You called me old once," I said.
She blinked. "Excuse me?"
"At the dining hall," I continued. "You said I was too old for Sawyer. You made it public."
Her smile hardened. "That was your misunderstanding."
People around us turned their heads. The room tensed like a held breath. This was what I had wanted to avoid: a seizing public moment. But the room listened when voices grew loud.
"Everyone hears what they want," Marie said. "I didn't do anything."
Then, on a sudden impulse I could not explain later, I walked to the podium where a microphone stood—left untouched after the formal speeches—and I asked for a minute.
"May I have the mike?" I asked the crowd, and the room fell into an odd hush that only such places can hold.
"What's this about?" someone murmured.
I took the microphone.
"Thisplace is full of people who decide other people's worth by appearances," I said. "I was embarrassed and humiliated in the dining hall. A woman called me names, and people laughed. I don't think that was right."
Two sentences and the room leaned in. Marie's face changed from surprise to polished disdain to a flush of irritation. "Are you accusing me?" she snapped.
"I'm telling the truth," I said. "And I found out something else."
I had found something. In the weeks after the dining hall incident, a few people had mentioned that Marie had been seen at a private party where she had rewritten the script for two separate romance matches—arranging introductions, circulating rumors. She had been cozying up to a few influential donors, using gossip as currency.
The hall listened as I produced a single thing that mattered: an email chain — not mine to show, but given to me by someone who had watched. The chain showed Marie privately coaching a small group about how to present certain girls as less suitable, how to seed opinions at the right table, how to pass along a picture to a gossip page. It wasn't glamorous proof, but it showed pattern.
"This shows a method," I said. "She organizes shame."
The room hummed. People began checking their phones as whispers braided through the crowd. Marie's face went through a ballet of colors: first disbelief, then a flush of panic, then a deepening bright red as people around her opened the emails on their screens.
"You're lying!" she cried. Her voice bounced off chandeliers. "This is a setup!"
"No," said a donor, pushing his glasses up. "This is a chain from last month. Did you write this?"
There was no easy place for Marie to stand now. Her supporters froze; others had the look of someone who had been waiting for permission to act. People pulled out phones. Someone began recording.
"She coached this," I said. "She coordinated and spread a rumor. She's made a game of making others small."
Marie tried to laugh. Her laugh was thin and brittle.
"You don't get to be a queen of gossip and claim innocence when your hand is caught," someone near the tables said.
As the recordings spread, the room's atmosphere turned. A woman who had earlier greeted Marie now turned away; a man near the buffet made a show of covering his phone camera. The donors who had once nodded to Marie's flattery now asked for an account, confused and a little angry.
"How could you?" one of Marie's friends gasped.
"Why?" asked another voice, calm and cutting.
Marie started to sputter. "You don't understand. It's— it's nothing."
A few students who had been watching the hall's livestream began typing furiously, posting screenshots and snippets. The room, once carefully curated, was now a stage of the public unmasking.
People approached, one by one. An alum stood up, voice resonant, and said, "We expect better. We don't tolerate people who make others miserable for their own gain."
Marie retreated at first, then found herself surrounded by faces narrowed not with privacy but with judgment. "This is reputation-destruction," she said, pleading, but the microphone of proof had been passed around and recorded on dozens of devices. The witness count grew like tidewater.
She denied at first, then contradicted herself, then crumbled. Her voice broke as she mouthed denials that did not fit the documents on the screens.
"You can't just—" she began, then stopped as people recorded. Her friends muttered, then moved away. Phones clicked like a forest.
Marie tried to salvage dignity by calling for a private talk. "Please, let's not make this public."
But it was already public. The hall had turned into a chorus of small testimonies. People leaned forward, leaned away, whispered, and then the word "shame" moved through the room. It was a soft, terrible thing.
Her reaction evolved in front of everyone: first, the confident air collapsed into flustered outrage; then the outrage curdled into denial; denial dissolved into tears. She began to cry, and those tears were not tender; they carried the flavor of someone who had been caught manipulating the rules.
Phones recorded. Someone filmed as she paced, as she searched for allies. People who had seen her in the dining hall recalled that day; someone else spoke up and confirmed another small rumor. A journalist who had been at the luncheon quietly asked to speak on record.
"You engineered gossip to raise your social score," the journalist said, voice steady. "That harms people's mental health. Do you have anything to say?"
Marie stammered, "I— I was trying to—"
"To get attention by hurting others?" asked a faculty member.
Her defenses collapsed. She lowered her head, hands trembling, and asked, barely audible, "I'm— I'm sorry."
The apology hovered without weight. The crowd's reaction was the hard thing: a mixture of pity, shuttered sympathy, and a sharp relief. A few students clapped, not in joy but as a release. Some recorded the moment, speaking quietly into social feeds, thankful, angry, triumphant.
"You're fired from the alumni committee," the director announced bluntly, having learned of her behavior. The chair's voice carried like a gavel. "We cannot have this harm on our record."
Marie sagged. The arranged life she had been so carefully building folded like cheap fabric. She tried to reach out to an influential woman who had once praised her; the hand was not taken.
People filmed. People whispered. Some clapped. The field of witnesses swelled. Marie's face turned first red, then pale. She dropped to a chair and wept in a way that was messy and human and also the consequence of her deeds.
Her friends circled, but they did not hug. They kept distance, afraid of being stained. A few students stood, braver than their fear, and confronted her about the girls she had targeted. Marie's voice shrank beneath those complaints. The public's mood shifted from curiosity to a firm, moral judgment.
All of this lasted long enough to feel like a sentence.
Finally, when the room quieted, she stood shakily. "I made mistakes," she said. "I apologize."
"It won't undo what you did," someone answered. "But maybe you can start the work of making amends."
The cameras kept recording. Her face twitched through a thousand expressions: pride, panic, false composure, then genuine fear, and finally a strange, stunned grief. Around her, people murmured, some condemning, some reflective, some with a kind of cold satisfaction. The donors left in small knots, talking about trust and character.
The humiliation was dense and public. It held the shape of a lesson: mean words can be engineered, and engineered cruelty can be exposed. Marie's reaction moved from arrogance to trembling collapse, and the crowd's response was a chorus of those who would not let cruelty be currency.
After all of this, I walked out into the spring air, and a thin tremor of relief ran through me. The world had noticed. The wrong had been turned into a story not of my shame but of the consequences of doing harm.
That night people talked. Social feeds widened. Marie's life, so carefully arranged, had turned public in a way she could not control. Her fall was not brutal in the sense of violence. It was more clinical: documents, witnesses, and the exposure of a method.
I did not feel triumphant. I felt weary and a little raw. But there was also a sense of justice that was not suddenly sweet but rather necessary.
Kenneth texted me the next day: "Are you okay?"
"Yes," I replied. "Thank you."
He called instead and asked, "Do you want to come over? I cooked too much."
"Bring the extra napkins," I said. He laughed. "Are you mad that I exposed someone?" he asked.
"I didn't expose her," I corrected. "I told the truth."
We moved slowly after that. We shared dinners, small things: him cooking while I corrected a draft, him fixing a broken lamp while I scheduled interviews. He called me "Dot" at times and sometimes not. Our closeness felt like a room built out of careful tending rather than loud gestures.
Faye's relationship steadied. Marcus stayed and fought. My own job offers came and stalled and grew; I chose one that felt like a place to learn and live. I kept my guard for a while because the world had proved itself unpredictable.
One evening Kenneth took my hand as we left his mother's small shop. "I want to stand with you," he said.
"I don't need saving," I said.
"You don't," he answered, gentle and true. "But I'd like to be there."
"Okay," I said. "We can try."
We tried and we failed and we tried again. We argued about small things—space, time, work—and then made up over the kind of food that tasted better when someone else had cooked it. I let him in slowly, on my terms.
There were hard nights. There were triumphs. There were quiet mornings where we sat with tea and the small lantern at my door after a long day and listened to the clock.
The world kept moving. People behaved. People repented. Marie's life reassembled in quieter shapes. I learned to focus on my own map rather than be guided by others. The public punishment had been loud; it had been ugly in places, honest in others. It had left us all a little wiser.
When I think of that day now, I see the small lantern by our door, the one I had kept from childhood. It swung in the night breeze as Kenneth and I carried paper cups of tea and the city sounds rounded like a tide. We both paused and listened to the tiny, steady tick of a life that goes on.
"Dot," he said softly, using that little name as if it mattered.
I smiled and answered, "Yes."
The End
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