Sweet Romance15 min read
A Tree, a Broken Glass, and a Cold Tutor
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I had been keeping a quiet secret for four hundred and eighty-three days. I called him my moonlight because his handwriting shone on the paper like a small, steady light. I had never seen his face. I only ever found his replies tucked into a hollow under the old temple tree by the back gate.
"I found this funny, hopeful boy," I wrote once on a scrap and slid it into the hollow. "Who are you?"
He wrote back in a steady hand: "Someone who thinks you are braver than you know."
I learned his laugh in words, his kindness in ink. He said he could swim and he mentioned medicine once, casually, like listing a hobby. He said nothing else. We were pen pals by paper, by hollow trees and hush. My eyes were bad—a warning the doctor screamed into my life—and my family forbade screens and long reading. I had a thick bottle-bottom pair of glasses and a Nokia that could only call. The world was paper and paint and the soft scratch of a pen.
One late summer, when I could not bear the thought of losing even those small details to the dark, I decided to take the gamble. I signed up for the university everyone said he would go to. I told no one except my only friendly roommate.
"Do you have a photo? Or a name? A number?" Fiona Larson asked, sitting cross-legged on the bunk.
"No photo," I said. "No name. He told me he swims and he knows a little medicine. That's it."
"Who writes letters nowadays?" Fiona laughed.
"I do," I said. "And he answers."
Fiona laughed again, but she helped. She asked in corridors, nudged other students, smiled in that way that opens doors. We learned there was a swimming team and a class in medicine and a hundred boys who looked right from the back.
"Go to the pool," Fiona advised finally. "If he is on the swim team, you'll find him."
So I queued the pool like a small, nervous animal. I watched backs, shoulders, the sweep of wet hair. It should have been easy. It was not.
"Which one?" I muttered, leaning against the fence. "Which back is his?"
"You're fixated," Fiona said. "I'll ask the med students where they lecture."
She came back triumphantly.
"I found a second-year who matches your details," she said. "He has been out for a meet today, but I found a lecture hall where he might go."
I walked the wrong building. I stood frozen in a law lecture corridor until a cold voice said, "Move."
I jumped and stepped on someone's toe. I fell forward, arms and world toppling. A hand—large, cool—caught my wrist.
"Sorry," I mumbled. "I can't see well."
"Are you going to come in or not?" the hand's owner asked.
He smelled like mint. He had a black hoodie and hair that fell like a curtain. I felt, in that instant, stupid and small.
"I'm not in the medical department," he said flatly when I asked. "This is law."
"Thank you," I said too quickly, and he pushed the door open and slipped inside. I watched his back and thought, for no reason I could name, that the world felt colder and clearer at once.
A day or two later, my bad luck did what it always did: it escalated. I was waiting outside the boys' dorms, and a baseball-sized tennis ball knocked against a tree and dropped a netted thing on my head. I fell and my glasses—my only good lenses—hit the ground and cracked. The frame was fine, but the left lens had a fine spiderweb crack.
I groped the dark and someone else found my voice.
"Do you need help?" he asked.
I recognized the mint breath and the low voice.
"Cassius?" I asked the first name that came into mind, because for some reason that hoodie-and-mint boy already had a name in my head.
"Don't say my name like that," he said. "It's Cassius O'Brien." He sounded impatient. He sounded like he had no time for small, clumsy girls.
"Thank you," I said. "My left lens—it's broken."
He crouched, hands sure, and handed the cracked glasses back to me. "Get a new pair. Or don't go under trees."
"You're mean," I blurted.
He shrugged. "I'm not your guardian."
I walked away, glasses ringing with small grief, and my roommate laughed when she heard the story.
"Did you touch his chest?" Fiona said with dramatic interest.
"I might have been saved by it," I admitted. "But I didn't mean to."
"You are ridiculous," she said. "Still, he sounds exactly like the brooding type everyone gushed about on the forum. Cassius O'Brien? You lucked into a legend."
Weeks later the English teacher called me into her office with a sympathy I didn't deserve.
"Your placement test isn't enough," she said. "If you don't pass the English exam, you may have to take two more semesters."
"I can study," I said. "I can learn."
"Fine," she said. "Cassius is doing campus service hours. He can tutor you."
I nearly died. He shrugged when she asked.
"Fine," Cassius said. "I will help. One hundred hours."
"One hundred?" I repeated. "Is that how long tutorials are supposed to be?"
"Yes," he said. "One hundred hours."
He gave me a sheet that looked like a contract: times, rules. He sat at the front and said, "Write the words I say. Do not daydream. If you daydream, you will repeat what you missed."
"I'll try," I said.
It was the worst mercy I had ever accepted. The voice that told me I was wrong was the same one that taught me to make 'th' and 'sh' the right way. He had a faint smile in the corner of his mouth when he corrected me. He had a hand with long fingers that could tap a rhythm when he waited for the sound to sink in.
"Why are you so strict?" I asked once, angrily defending my wrong answer.
"Because you can't waste time," he said. "You can't afford to waste time."
It was the truth. When I wore my old cracked glasses, the world was a smear. When he taught me to make a sound, it coasted clean into my ears. He was sharp and cold, but not cruel.
"Why are you so... closed?" I asked one night after a long session. "You don't seem like the person who gives favors."
He didn't answer at first. He kept his eyes on the rain outside like it was a page he needed to study. "I don't ask for favors," Cassius said finally. "I don't like being weak in front of people."
"Then why are you helping me?" I pushed.
He lowered his voice. "You made me save your glasses from a gutter."
I laughed like it was a joke. "That sounds like a lame reason."
"It is a lame reason," he admitted.
I started to think he might be less unkind than he pretended. I started to think he might be exactly the kind of person who would give a friend an extra hour, then be glad to give, and then regret it internally when he wasted time worrying over them.
At the pool one evening, I saw him in a different light—literally. Cassius wasn't in the swim team; he had quit. But he watched from the stands like someone who had once loved something and had stepped away. He had the air of someone who kept his smile small, who let the world turn while he stayed in shadow.
By then I had found another reason to come to campus: work. My glasses needed money and I needed to earn it quick. I offered to work at a dumpling shop on the corner by the student gate. It was hard and honest and I loved the way cash in the palm became hopeful.
"Why are you doing this?" Fernando Williamson asked the first time he saw me behind the counter. He was rough, the sort who came from a house where money could be loud and temper louder. He was my stepbrother—my mother's other son's son—and he asked the questions that men like him asked.
"It's money," I said.
"Don't get caught mixing with the wrong people," he said.
"Who are the wrong people?" I asked.
"Anyone who makes trouble."
He left like it was no more of his business. I did not ask him to care about my glasses.
One night, someone pushed into the dumpling shop like a storm. Two men who had once threatened me on the street when I had been in the wrong place at the wrong time walked in, heavy with the heat of bad decisions and worse friends. They made jokes, rough and ugly. They called names. I felt the floor tilt.
"Where's that girl who talked to my friend?" one said, a voice like a dull knife.
"She is my family," another said, and I heard Cassius's voice behind them.
"Stay back," he said. "You make trouble, you leave."
He did not look like the same man who refused to swim. He moved like a blade, quick, controlled. The fight was a bad, quick blur of bodies and noise. When it was done the men lay scattered, curled where they had landed. People gathered. Phones came out like little suns and filmed and filmed.
"You shouldn't have done that," I whispered when the crowd thinned and the police had not yet come. "They could have hurt you."
"They tried to hurt you," Cassius said. He handed me my glasses, clean, unbroken this time. "Because you touched someone else's life."
I wanted to say thank you and instead said, "Why do you help me?"
"Because you're a walking accident who keeps getting into trouble," he said. "And because you asked me to help with English. That was my line."
I blinked. "You saved my glasses."
He was silent like he had been when he taught the 'th' sound. But now there was something else under it, something gentler.
"I won't take your money," he said the next day when he found the dumpling shop receipt. "Pay me back with progress."
"I will," I promised, though the promise tasted inadequate.
As the term went on, my world narrowed to lessons, dumplings, letters tucked under the tree, and the little pool of light Cassius left at the edge of my life. I learned to spell. I learned to feel less alone in the noisy lecture halls. I learned to see, bit by bit, with the new lenses he paid for.
Fate, though, finds ways to unpick the thread you hold.
One night I had followed a shadow that I thought might be my moonlight. I had no right—no right at all—to sneak into a dark gym—but curiosity had teeth and it bit. I followed a figure in black and hid in a cupboard while two people made a terrible, private scene out in the dark.
"They are in here together," I whispered into my own sleeve, because my breath made me deaf.
Inside the cupboard, the space was small and smelling of old leather. A dark shape sat across from me and a hand found my mouth before I could yell.
"Quiet," the hand said. "If you want to live, be quiet."
I whispered his name like a question. "Cassius?"
He had found me the instant the light went off. He had a way of moving so the world knew, as a fact, how close he lived to danger.
"What are you doing in a gym at midnight?" he hissed.
"I'm trying to find someone," I said. "My moonlight."
"You should never be here," he said. Then he did the thing that made my bones soft: he tucked my hair behind my ear and his breath smelled like mint and metal and something that could be called safety. He took my glasses off my nose, afraid I would see ugly things.
"Put these on my head," he instructed, and he put earphones in my ears and played the sound of sea waves like someone trying to offer a balm. "Don't listen."
Outside the lovers parted and left, and the gym lights flashed on, and the shame of what I had tried to see woke in me like a puking sunrise.
"You shouldn't have seen that," I sobbed when he let me go.
"Neither should I," Cassius said. He kissed me then, quick and gentle like a bandage. "Don't hate him. Hate the idea."
I ran away with new confusion like a heavy coat. That night my crush—my moonlight—stumbled down in my heart and cracked into something ugly. He was not what I had imagined.
I hated the double ache: that I had been deceived by an idea, and that a kiss had bound me like string to another boy who apparently could get sick at a moment's crumble.
Cassius became quieter, then gone. He stopped answering and then his messages were closed and then a week had no Cassius. I worried. I called a number I had and got a man's voice.
"Who are you?" the strange voice asked.
"I'm a student," I said. "Cassius's tutor partner. Is he well?"
"He's been to the hospital," the man said. "He has been ill. You should come if you worry."
I went. The apartment he had rented off-campus smelled of boiled noodles and medicine. He lay pale like a candle down to a thin wick.
"You're too kind," he rasped when I sat on the floor. "You shouldn't see me like this."
"I'm here," I said, truthful and foolish. "If you want anything—"
"Eat," he said. He could not force himself. So I fed him a small biscuit like a mother, and he accepted it like a child.
"Why did you go away?" I asked. "You didn't tell me."
He coughed, and there was weight in the cough that had nothing to do with lungs. "I had to work," he said. "And I have things. I don't want you to bother."
I sat through the night. We spoke small things. He told me his mother had a date that hurt him like grief and that sometimes the old pain came back and dragged him under. He let me touch the place above his clavicle, the place where his breath tried hardest to come.
"Why did you kiss me?" I asked at dawn, feeling shame and something like wanting.
"Because you cried," he said simply. "I couldn't stand it."
I did not understand how much of my life had become stitches on his sleeve. I realized I wanted to be the kind of person who could heal him. I realized, too, that I had been blinded twice: once by my eyes and once by a moonlight that did not exist.
I kept working at the dumpling shop. I saved and I paid back the debt in small clumsy wages. I kept my tutoring hours. My lessons hardened into something real. The sound of 'th' and 'sh' grew into music in my head. Cassius improved too, slightly; his face, once slack with illness, found a fragile line of recovery.
Then the case everyone whispered about at the detective agency turned loud enough to get its own radio. A rich student's name—Julio Guerin—rose like a boil. Girls from the city, missing, whispered about parties and a moneyed hand. The detective agency wanted someone who knew how to move without lights. They wanted me near the edges because I knew small things and because Cassius had worked for them; he owed the money and the agency gave him jobs.
"Will you do it?" the boss asked Cassius when he came in, thin and tired but alive.
"Yes," Cassius said. "For the money."
They wanted him to follow Julio Guerin and collect evidence about the chain of women and how they vanished. Julio was a gilded thing with a smile like a trap. People said he walked through life like he was owed the world. They were right.
Cassius worked the case like a man living on the edge of his rope. He took pictures, shadowed cars, and pieced together the names of women who had been at Julio's parties. He found a small network, a gray empire of favors and threats.
We—Cassius and I—found out things no girl should find out. There were messages that were sugar and poison, there were transactions that looked like flowers on the surface but were bribes in another language. A list. Addresses. A ledger in Julio Guerin's handwriting with names tied like birds to ages and fees. Cassius's photos were proof.
We planned to expose him at a gala—Julio's charity ball—where he would smile in public, where the media would be there and where we could not be ignored. The detective agency had a team. Cassius wanted to turn his skill into a scalpel. He wanted to take Julio down, not with fists, but with light.
On the night of the gala, we had a plan and a projector and people who would not back down.
"You sure you want to do this tonight?" I asked Cassius, my voice small in a suit that felt too big.
"I am sure," he said. "I want him to fall where he used to dance."
We arrived. The ballroom was full. Cameras flashed like constellations. Julio walked through, suit turned to silk and arrogance. He laughed and shook hands like he was buying applause.
At ten sharp, the charity show ended and someone called for attention. The detectives dimmed the lights. Cassius stood at the side in the dark, and I stood with him holding his sleeve like a promise. The projector flickered like a heartbeat and then threw Julio's encryption ledger across the white drape.
The ledger was a slow splash on the wall: dates, names, numbers. Then came the recordings—Julio's voice on hidden mics, calm and cold. "She will go along," he said in one clip. "Make sure the cameras are off. Clean them up. We keep it tidy."
A hush like a bell fell. People who had been laughing now looked at each other. A woman in a glitter dress clutched her pearl necklace. Someone began to whisper and then to shout. The crowd bent forward as if to see further into the light.
Julio walked toward the stage as if toward a throne. His smile, for the first time that night, faltered.
"Who did this?" he demanded, loud enough to cut through the sound.
"You did," Cassius said from the back. "We have your ledger. We have your recordings. We have witnesses."
Julio laughed, easy and arrogant. "This is slander," he said. "I donate to clinics. I help women. I'm a pillar."
"Not tonight," Cassius said. "Tonight, you stand at that microphone and answer."
The room closed like a lung around him. Phones went up. Cameras whirred. The crowd recorded. A hundred witnesses, a hundred small bright bets against him.
Julio's reaction was a performance in stages. At first his face burned with a heat of belief that he could cajole the room back into adoration. He smiled and tossed his head. "This is ridiculous," he said, voice raised. "We are at a charity ball. This is libel."
Then his face went cold. He saw the recordings playing again—themselves impossible to deny. "Turn it off," his voice dropped. "You don't know what you're doing."
His assistants hurried and whispered. He tried to speak to the camera, to turn the language to charm, to say his hands only ever helped. He moved like a man trying to script forgiveness. He began to step forward, but the projector ran on, and the ledger pages turned.
An ugly silence unrolled. People had phones out. Someone yelled, "Shame!" A woman nearest began to cry. Guardians of the charity—men with ties to Julio—shifted uneasily. Journalists leaned forward, the smell of a scoop in their faces.
"Is this true?" a woman in the audience asked, voice small but with a needle of steel.
Julio's face changed as if a switch had flipped. He dropped from lion to pleading dog. "No, no," he said. "You have it wrong. Those were deals. Those were—consensual." He started to grin, but the grin looked empty now. "I have given so much. I have helped. You must understand."
"Save it," a woman said behind me. "You can't buy everything." She was a sister of one of Julio's victims. She was on the screen—smaller and then larger—and when she pointed there were gasps.
Julio's eyes twitched. He went from confident to furious, to denial, to flustered. He lunged to the microphone. "You can't—" he started.
Cassius stepped forward through the crowd like someone walking with a purpose.
"Stop," he said. "You will answer for this."
Julio's jaw worked. He sped through a denial that grew thinner and thinner. People were not on his side. A teenage intern began to livestream. The charity coordinator stood up and looked embarrassed and then resolute. A dozen women from the audience came forward and said simply, "We remember." Camera flashes hammered like rain.
And then the fall came. It started as a stumble. Julio tried to turn to his assistants for defense, but his words turned to a wet sound as if some inner cord snapped.
"No, no—this is slander," he said at first. "You can't—"
Then his voice cracked. "I didn't—" He looked smaller than his suit. He was used to power, and now power slid like water. The ledger splashed new names and new numbers like treachery.
He began to shake. He swallowed hard. "You don't—don't know—" He tried to laugh and could not.
The crowd, stunned, watched the mask break. His face went through the exact stages: arrogance, shock, denial, fury, crumbling, and then begging. He fell to his knees in the center of the ballroom with a sound that made people recoil. The knees took the satin and that terrible nice suit, and the room smelled suddenly of perfume and fear.
"Please!" Julio cried, voice high and wet. "Please, I'm sorry! I'm sorry! You have to listen—I'll fix it. I'll pay. I'll pay you. Please—"
He reached out to cameras like a drowning man reaching for a rope. People moved back. Phones clicked. Some wept. Some recorded. Some stood and applauded—not for him, for the truth finally spilled out. I heard the tap of a thousand little shutters as journalists captured the moment.
Julio's assistants began to scatter. Men who had once slithered near him pulled coats and shuffled. One of them raised a hand and said sharply, "Get him up." But Julio could not get up. His trembling hands dug into plush and then he curled forward, a heap of suit.
"Police," someone hoarse from the back said. "We have recordings. We have witnesses."
A hush answered it like a bell. Men with authority—security, a blue-suited man—came forward and placed their hands on Julio's shoulders. He looked at them as if pleading for rescue, but the rescue wasn't for him anymore. Reporters circled, their microphones like hungry mouths.
Julio's reaction folded into pieces. He began to beg, to plead, to try versions—mercy, payment, bargaining—as if remorse were a product he could slide across a counter. "Please!" he said again and again, voice thin.
Around him, the crowd reacted in human fragments: shock, the whistle of anger, hands lifted to cover faces, phones raised in documentation, applause like an exclamation as one brave woman stood and spoke her truth. Cameras caught every tear, every twitch, every pleading lip.
Cassius watched, quietly, like someone who had given a wound to the world and waited for it to close.
When it was over, when security led Julio away under a carpet of shouts and testimony, he crawled to the edge of the crowd and sank to the floor, his knees scraped, the front of his shirt wet with sweat. He had gone from gilded to barer than any of the poor he'd ever scorned.
He begged. He tried to buy back humanity. He offered money. He offered apologies. He offered names. He staggered under the weight of exposure and the crowd made him small.
"Stay down," Cassius told me later that night as we watched the news replay the gala. "This was only the beginning."
"Why did you want him punished so publicly?" I asked him. "Couldn't it have been quieter?"
"Because the things he did were public," he said. "Because the world needed to see how polished evil can be."
He looked at me then with eyes that were not all cold. "You helped with the lead," he said. "You were brave."
"I was hiding in a cupboard," I said.
"That was brave too," Cassius said.
We went back to classes, to small days and simple treatments and tiny repairs. The ledger and the recordings were only a start. Julio still had lawyers. There were still tears and courtrooms. But the night of the galas, when a man who thought himself untouchable was stripped in front of a glittering crowd, taught me one thing:
People who do harm often wear beautiful suits. They will step forward in light and smile. But the truth is like a mirror; it has good habit of shattering glass.
"Will you be okay?" I asked Cassius one afternoon in the library, where the sun made dust into little stars.
He smiled, the smallest upturn of something, and handed me a book. "I will," he said. "And you—don't be afraid to take up space. Your moonlight may have been a ghost, but you've made light of your own."
I learned to look for smaller things after that. I still kept the letters in my drawer, but I learned that pen pals can be real people and real disappointment, and also real teachers. I learned that the boy who caught me more than once, who tutored and scolded and kissed me like a bandage, could be complicated, haunted, and generous in ways the world did not expect.
"Do you still like him?" Fiona asked once as we sat over dumplings.
"No," I said. "Not the moonlight I imagined."
"Then what?" she prodded.
"I like someone who chooses to stand up when the world is wrong," I said. "I like someone who will laugh at my bad pronunciation and carry my glasses. I like someone who is tired and still shows up."
She nodded and slapped my knee. "Good. You have taste."
One week after the gala Julio's name flashed across every channel and the police did their work. The city hummed. But in the small spaces—my tutor's tired smile, the dumpling shop's warm steam, the tree hollow at the back gate—things settled into something like hope.
"Promise me one thing," Cassius said that evening, as we walked under a sky that held only a smattering of stars.
"No promises," I said.
He laughed. "Fine. Then just—keep being brave."
I answered him the only way I ever had known how: with a letter. I slipped it into the tree hollow when the campus was quiet.
"Dear Moonlight," I wrote. "You taught me how to wish. Thank you."
Then I walked away, Cassius's hand finding mine without fanfare, without noise, and I let the night gather us like a quiet agreement.
The End
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