Sweet Romance17 min read
Bed Photos, Turtle Gifts, and a Very Public Reckoning
ButterPicks14 views
"I bet you one month of your allowance," Mallory said, the light in her voice dangerous as champagne.
"Twenty minutes ago you said you were broke," I shot back, thumb hovering over the pay app. "Now you're betting my pocket money?"
"Not pocket money. One month of your allowance," Mallory repeated, grinning like she owned the world. Bianca and Francesca snorted across the table and the mahjong tiles clacked like gossip.
"I won't lose," I said, and lied.
"If you lose," Mallory leaned forward, voice soft as silk and twice as sharp, "I get your whole wall of limited bags."
I laughed out loud at the thought and then immediately stopped laughing. I looked at my hands, at the blank veneer of the little shelf where the most precious bags sat—rare, some even never made again. They were junk to the world, but they were my stupid, private trophies.
"Then what if I win?" I asked, because I needed a defense.
Mallory's expression went theatrical. "I have something special. My dad's men are building a little getaway off the coast—Woya Bogee Island. If I win, the island is yours."
"You're joking. You can't bet an island."
"I'm not joking."
"Then we both have ridiculous lives," Bianca teased. "Kaitlyn, you in for this?"
An ugly thrill crawled up my spine. "You're insane," I said, but my eyes shone.
"So let's raise the stakes," Mallory sang. "If you lose, all those bags go. If you win, the island. Simple."
I should have stopped there. I should have walked away and let Mallory parade across the skyline with a private island and a smug smile. Instead, I swallowed, and said, "Fine. But witness us, Isaac."
Isaac Harper—my cousin—shook his head at me and gave the slightest smile that always made me feel like a child propped under a magnifying glass. "Don't drag me into this," he warned.
"You'll pocket one of her bags," Mallory promised, tapping her phone. "Witnesses or it doesn't count."
"Fine," Isaac said.
We played. I lost. And then I tried to laugh about it while all my little treasures became a calculation: a pile of things, a wallful of evidence that I had once collected small spoonfuls of joy.
"One photo," Mallory said later, when everyone else left. "Just one bed photo of that cold mountain-hearted man—Everest Weber. Get it to me, and the island becomes real."
"Everest Weber?" I said. "He's an iceberg."
"Exactly," Francesca hissed. "Hard to conquer, harder to touch. The prize is sweeter."
I had never liked Everest Weber. He had been the kind of kid who solved math the way other kids breathed—effortless, infuriating, and with a tiny smile that made people forget their own faces. In college he had somehow become the man people whispered about: brilliant, ruthless in business, and impossible to read. I had had enough of being labeled a fool because I couldn't do a single trick question when he smirked and did it in five seconds. So I told myself, like a child daring a stray dog, "It’s just a photo."
"Just a photo," I told myself, like a small prayer.
The night I tried to get it, Club Meridian was loud and hot and scented with spilled liquor and vanity. I knocked my knee into an unstable ottoman and pretended to trip into his lap, because what else did I have? My plan was simple and dangerously childish: wait until he drank, follow him to the bathroom, snap one shot—just one—and vanish.
I tripped.
I landed on his feet, spilling someone's drink onto his shirt. The room froze for a heartbeat. Everest looked down at me with an expression that had always irritated me as a kid—an inscrutable brow and a quiet, slow patience.
"What are you doing?" he asked, and I tried to sound contrite.
"Sorry. I'm clumsy. I—" My last syllable was the sound of a trapped animal. I wanted to run, to hide—anything that would buy me the little island.
"Get up," Isaac hissed, embarassed, and nudged me away.
But fate had a sense of humor. Later someone left a low stool in the hall and I tripped again, hard. I fell right at Everest's feet, and people began to laugh. I felt small and stupid and, despite everything, lit by a flare of something like daring. He rose, cool as a statue, and his eyes traveled from my face to the wet stain on his shirt.
"You need help?" he asked, like he was reading an instruction manual.
"Sorry," I said again, because apologies cost nothing.
When he went to the bathroom to change, I peered through the crack in the door and my hands moved before my brain did. I took one step, one small decision, and peered.
There he was: the man who'd always seemed infuriatingly unreal—broad shoulders, a line of muscle beneath a loosened shirt, the small crescent of a collarbone. My heart hammered like I had run up a flight of stairs. I raised my phone with hands that trembled and took a few shots—terrible, furtive photos of the side of him, the back of his neck, an accidental close-up of his jaw.
Of course, I was discovered.
He cornered me in the doorway on the way out. He was bare-chested from the waist up, because men in club dramas always were, and his presence compressed my lungs.
"What do you think you're doing?" Everest's voice was low, not angry at first, curious, and then it shifted into something harder.
"I—" I had nothing.
He took my phone, thumbed at the gallery, and then did something I didn't expect. "Delete them," he said.
"Please," I begged, the word small and urgent.
Instead of deleting them, he scrolled and pressed—then put the phone in his pocket and dialed.
"Is this Lin...?" he said into the phone in a tone like a slow blade. "She's at Club Meridian? She was—"
My face fell. He had called someone I recognized—my father, Eduardo Lopez.
I wanted to run. Instead, I went home with a bruise on my ego and a week of house arrest that meant I had to pretend the loss of my bags was the worst thing that had ever happened.
And then I did the stupidest thing of all: I escaped.
At night I used the fire rope Isaac had taught me to tie weeks earlier when we mock-practiced climbing. I slid down from my second-floor window like a silly, stubborn climber. I walked until the lights of the city hummed like an invitation and stopped when I was too tired to think.
There he was—Everest's black SUV, license plate I recognized as familiar from boardroom columns. He watched me with an almost imperceptible smile. "Get in."
"No," I said.
"Get in," he repeated.
So I did. He drove me to a mall, to a pharmacy, to a fancy milk-tea shop where people paid for curated sweetness, and he listened to me talk about stupid things like lemon markets and absurd bets. He was brittle and scathing and then, oddly, he was gentle in a way that made my guard slip.
"Why do you talk to me like I'm a joke?" I demanded when he called my milk tea choice naïve.
"You're reckless," he said simply. "You look like you will fracture."
"That's dramatic."
"Maybe it's true."
We argued, we bought unnecessary milk tea that we posed with to get freebies, and he mocked my theory about sweet love and ten out of ten sweetness in a cup. "You are far too earnest," he said. "You would make a good animal."
"You would make a good man," I retorted, and we both scowled.
The night ended with him setting me up in a small apartment he used sometimes when meetings ran late. He told me a random code—0410—and it felt like a key from a private story. He left me a phone and a pink pair of slippers and a sentence that curled like a threat and a promise: "Don't open the door to strangers."
I slept on a couch that night and, when I woke, the world had shifted. Ever since that secret photo had traveled into private chats and then corrupted into something filthy, I had felt watched. But I never could have guessed how far the infection would spread.
The morning after, Mallory sold the photo.
There is money and then there is cruelty. Mallory saw a market of wealthy women with cruel curiosity and she priced our one small, blurred picture like a relic. She didn't stop at a private message; she auctioned it through private groups, whispered the idea of higher definition, of nakeder images, turning a stupid, accidental photo into a commodity that became bigger than us.
"I can't believe she would—" I texted Mallory. "You said the island—"
"Island is sold to you, I got the island," Mallory replied as though the world were a ledger and human dignity a line item. "You wanted the island. I delivered."
The photo leaked like blood through paper. It roared across private groups and greedy inboxes. Men and women I had only ever seen at charity luncheons and parties sent screenshots and asked to split the "collection." Gunner Bryan—the one who'd argued in the mahjong room and who'd suggested the bed-photo stunt—sold details for a few more favors. He was never courageous; he was profit.
"Why?" I cried into my pillow. "Why would you?"
"For a price," Gunner said over drinks, like a merchant explaining trade.
Word reached Everest because the world is a small room of overlapping neighborhoods, and Everest's name was attached to a line of gossip that slid into the salt-and-sweat of public fascination.
When the scandal erupted—when private girls' chat became headline fodder—my life collapsed into hospital visits for my father, angry calls that made my parents fly home, and a thousand messages full of excitement or bile. I was the person everyone clicked on, and no one wanted to think of me as a person.
"You're a liar," my father said when he found me crying by his bedside. "You bring scandal to this family."
"You tried to help me," I told him, voice raw. "They took a stupid photo and sold it."
"What has he done?" he asked, eyes dull from fear.
"Everest?" I said.
"He should have stopped it," he said. "You are a girl. Men should not be—"
The conversation spiraled until Everest stood and said what the entire room needed like a bell striking stone. "I will take responsibility."
I blinked. My heart stuttered. This was not a theater line I expected him to speak. He surprised me and made everyone else in the room shift uneasily into reverence and suspicion.
"Responsible?" I shot back, voice small but venomous. "You mean arrangement. Forcing us to marry is the same as forcing me into a box."
"Not the politician’s fixation," he said. "I mean I'll fix the harm."
His meaning, then, unfolded like the slow closing of a safe. "I will buy back what was sold. I will find who trafficked it and make them accountable."
"Good luck with that," Gunner Bryan sniffed as if I had made a bargain and not suffered a theft.
But Everest didn't leave it. He moved in front of screens and inboxes and private groups like a tide. He used his resources to track the first leak and the seller. He traced the sale to Mallory Caruso, to a private chat where she had insisted she could monetize whatever I gave her. Mallory had been the friend who promised islands. She became the friend who signed me away.
I thought there would be quiet consequences; perhaps a few texts of apology and a deleted post. Instead Everest decided there would be public reckoning. He wanted more than apology; he wanted exposure.
"Public," he told me, voice flat. "They will see what greed looks like."
"Public?" I whispered. "You mean—"
"A gala," he said. "A place where every hand claps and every camera rolls."
The night we chose was a charity gala—silk dresses, the clink of crystal, cameras more numerous than stars. I wanted to hide. I wanted to crawl under the table and never surface. Everest was patient in ways that frightened me. He arranged a reveal where the money men would gather, where the women who had paid to see me would attend with their jewels and scandal-greased interest. He had bought a seat away from me, insisting I not be the one to stand and condemn to protect my image further. But he had also promised me: "You will not be humiliated."
The headline of the night was an enormous screen at the back of the ballroom. The event was a fundraiser for literacy and every person there thought they were just generous. They were not prepared for the show.
Everest stood, precisely when a violin bit into a high note, and took the microphone. He had the tilt of a man who did not like being reduced.
"Ladies and gentlemen," he said, and his voice folded around the chandeliers, "for three things people pay: art, charity, and gossip. Tonight we will close one market."
He clicked the remote, and the screen lit with a chat log I knew by heart. My name was written in someone else's typing fingers, again and again. Mallory's avatar, smug and glossy, blinked onto the screen.
"What's that?" Mallory laughed from a seat near the front, a thousand-dollar gown and an even more expensive malice. "Pity file—"
Everest didn't flinch. He clicked again. A crisp, clear video played that Mallory could not delete from the room's memory. It was not the half-formed, blurred shot she had sold. It was a recording of Mallory in a cafe, counting bills, laughing with Gunner Bryan as they discussed markets and price tiers and how to split proceeds. She spoke openly of buyers who would pay ten, fifteen, thirty thousand for the "original," the "HD," the "nude."
Mallory laughed, then faltered. She turned the charm on and tried to wriggle free. "I didn't—it's private," she protested, voice edged with the first cracks of fear.
"Private money doesn't make it honest," Everest replied.
He let the room watch the video until the laughter died and a different sound rose: the sharp keys of panic. The attendees were rich women in velvet and silk and banked rage. Their faces shifted from curiosity to moral outrage to hunger for spectacle. No one recorded the way they had planned to; now the room had the power to make a spectacle of Mallory.
"Why are you doing this?" she demanded as Everest walked toward the dais. For the first time, I saw her in public without her joker mask—the woman stripped down to a little human, palpable and mundane.
"Because you sold things that were not yours to trade," Everest said. "You traded a person."
"You're overreaching," Mallory cried, and the crowd shushed like a wave.
"I don't think so," he said coldly. "You do this in my city, you exploit my friend—"
"You—are you defending her?" Mallory laughed, but it was thin.
"Yes," Everest said. "Because people do not deserve to be bought."
He called out the auction prices, the chains of messages, and the names of the buyers. Cameras flicked and panned. The room's mood became a chorus, and the chorus turned on Mallory.
"Shame," someone called. "What a disgrace."
"Isn't that the woman who sold the image?" another asked, and people leaned in to hiss and record her like a specimen.
Mallory's face twisted through stages: smugness, confusion, denial, sharp anger, and finally an awful, shivering collapse. The cameras on long lenses focused on the glitter of a woman at the center of a moral storm.
"Turn it off! Turn it off!" Mallory yelled. "I didn't mean—"
"No," said a voice from the balcony—a tenor that belonged to a woman in a satin gown whose husband had been among the buyers. "You meant just exactly what you did."
People began to stand, one by one, like wood pushed over by wind. A chorus of women's voices started—some angry, some scornful, some vindictive. A phone flashed with a curious girl's smile and then another and another. The room smelled like perfume and the metallic tang of judgment.
Mallory's reaction moved exactly as provocation predicted.
First she smiled like a queen, proud at owning the moment. Then the smile caught in her throat as Everest clicked one more thing—the transaction records between Mallory and a private buyer where Gunner Bryan had arranged the sale. The table erupted.
"You sold her?" someone screamed. "You sold a woman?"
Gunner Bryan, who had styled himself as the neutral informant, sat too still. His face had been a mask of profit. Now it peeled into a mask of denial.
"No—" he stuttered. "I didn't—"
"Then explain this," Everest said, holding up a printout. He slid it across the lectern for everyone to see: timestamps, messages, the prices. The ballroom, the entire room that prided itself on keeping scandal private, had proof. Proof that they had been wheedled into buying humiliation like a commodity.
The crowd reaction was sharp and vocal. Someone near the flower arrangements stood and clapped slowly, deliberately. A clerk clicked a photo and posted it instantly with a savage caption. A chorus of phones recorded, then streamed, then amplified their own hunger.
Mallory's composure went from polished to shattered. She laughed like a trapped animal first, then spoke in fast breaths. "You can't—this is slander, it's private—"
"It's theft," Everest said. "And you profited from it."
Then the good, terrible part of public shaming began: the performance of collapse. Mallory's voice changed—fast courage to sudden shock. "No, no, no, this is—this isn't fair," she mouthed. She slapped her hand against her forehead, then smeared a glittering cheek. Someone honed a perfect sneer and waved it like a fan.
"No, this isn't fair," Gunner repeated, louder and now raw. "You have no idea—"
People closed in. A writer from an online journal stood up front and spoke with theatrical calm: "This is a cautionary tale. We applaud Mr. Weber for transparency." Her camera flash was a strobe that suggested verdicts yet to come.
Mallory began to denigrate herself with clumsily timed apology: "I—I'm sorry. I thought—" But her apologies were thin as tissue. She tried to bargain—"I'll return the money! I'll donate! I'll pay!"—then to deny: "I didn't—" and then to plead. The exact anatomy of guilt played itself out in front of faces that had been hungry for dish. At first Mallory's pleas worked like a wet rag on fire. They fanned the crowd's appetite.
Then she collapsed into panic.
"Don't touch me! I didn't mean—" she squealed.
No one touched her for long. A few were recording. Someone near the stage patted her arm in an awkward, performative show of pity. The crowd murmured and recorded and tweeted. Someone filmed Mallory sobbing into a napkin, and the napkin found its way onto a thousand phones.
The elements of punishment assembled themselves like actors in a gallows play: the smugness giving way to shock, the shock morphing into denial, then into the silent quake of collapse, and finally begging—"Please," Mallory mouthed, while someone in gold earrings lifted a phone and posted her plea to a group that paid to watch humans fail.
Gunner was hardly spared. The moment the printout showed his role, he rose, hands in the air as though pleading for a reprieve in some courtroom. His voice folded through the room like paperwork.
"You can't do this," he said, voice pitching higher than before. "Really, you can't—"
"Do what?" Everest cut in. "Expose the exploitation?"
"No!" Gunner cried. "I—it's blown out of proportion. It was a misunderstanding."
He attempted to laugh it off, to carry on as if the room had simply misapprehended his ledger. He was, for five minutes, a man who thought he could buy immunity. Then someone pulled up a video of him boasting—earlier in the week—about his role in distributing "exclusive" assets. It was quick, short, and damning.
First he was arrogant. Then he grew pale. Then he tried to deny. Then he looked older. Then, finally, he fell to his knees.
"Please!" he begged, his hands folded in a childish manner. He had not bowed like that in my presence before; pride had fed him. Now his pride had been dissolved by footage and currency and the hungry faces of women who felt humiliated into power.
Around him, hands rose with phones. They recorded him like a relic. Someone near the head table laughed and then began to clap slowly—derisive applause that cut like paper.
"Get him out," someone said.
"Do you regret it?" a dozen voices asked in overlapping, sharp interrogatives.
Gunner's voice cracked. "Please—"
Mallory was worse. She pleaded with a desperation that was obscene. "Don't—don't ban me—I'll pay back—I'll do anything—"
"Anything?" a woman with perfect lipstick asked, voice like the film noir of the night. "Anything."
Mallory nodded in frantic shakes. "Yes, yes."
The room's reaction was a mix: a few people clapped; others recorded; some whispered about restitution; the more vengeful suggested legal steps and private naming and shaming with a corporate twist. Cameras flashed. The videos were already embedded into the feeds.
They had gone from predators to prey in a manner that felt like a transfer of power. It was exacting and public and relentless.
I watched the faces, felt the hum in the air, and realized that what had happened to me had been given meaning I hadn't intended. It was public, yes—but it was also a rare and ugly justice. They were forced to feel what it means to be seen as a product.
Mallory's final stage—when she fell to the floor, hands clutching at the hem of her dress as if it were a rope—was something no amount of money could have prepared her for. People drifted away like forgetful birds. Some whispered about exposure, about legal trouble. Someone clapped slowly and then, with a cruel flourish, stood and walked away. Laughter leaked into the edges of sound.
That night the internet burned with a different heat. The videos stuck to headlines, and the world took a step back and spoke with the vocabulary of righteous anger. Mallory's appointment with public humiliation lasted long enough for the cameras to eat at her ego, and she responded in the way any desperate person does: by averting their face and begging for the mercy of those they had exploited.
Gunner, in the meantime, crawled through the steps of public decline. He had risen with excessive confidence and then fell on a stage where people wanted to see a narrative complete. His public collapse followed the same arc: arrogance, shock, denial, collapse, then pleading. He crumpled like paper.
"Beg," people said, silently with their cameras. "Beg," the world echoed in posts and comments and the small digital thumbs that shaped shape.
I did not take joy in the sights. I felt a strange, hollow relief. Everest had been merciless—but not cruel. He had used the world's glare like a scalpel and sought, not to wound, but to close a wound that had been opened on me.
Afterward, Mallory was escorted out. Gunner was escorted out. They were both photographed, both pleading in the lobby, both stooped. The videos circulated for weeks. My inbox filled with offers and apologies and some vile compliments.
"It's done," Everest said to me later, his voice steadier than I'd ever heard it. "The source is out. The buyers were named. The image market is tainted."
"People will still whisper," I said.
"They might," he agreed. "But some things will no longer be purchasable."
I stared at him and understood, for the first time, the quiet patience that had made him useful and dangerous. He had intervened not because he thought love was owed, but because he could not stand to watch people be treated like products.
Over the weeks that followed came small, domestic acts of care that belied his public masculinity. He cleaned the small turtle—now named "Kaitlyn" by my drunken insistence when I first bought it—and put it in a tank. He lectured me once on responsibility and on being honest with my elders. He left me a phone and the keycode 0410 like a private joke. He taught me how to tie knots properly.
We had arguments. We had milk tea runs and silly fights about sweetness levels. We had long silences on the couch where his hand found mine and hesitated like someone deciding whether to claim a country.
Time, oddly, unraveled the worst parts. My parents, still wary, watched him on TV clips where he defended me publicly and his fierce, stubborn jaw softened into something else. In family rooms and on hospital beds, shocks and apologies were given and grudges softened into negotiation.
And once, in the late calm between the scandal and its fallout, I thought back to what I wanted: a stupid island and a safe life with my little line of bags. The island was not mine, but something better had happened. I had earned a bizarre kind of armor.
"Why did you do all that?" I asked Everest one night after we had argued about trivial things—like whether my bags were art or clutter.
He pulled a worn hoodie over his shoulders and leaned against the windowsill. In the light from the city his eyes were a strange blue, like something half-remembered.
"Because you are loud and brave and stupid and I don't like watching people break," he said. "Because I have a habit of making things right in the bluntest possible way."
"And me?"
"And you," he murmured, "are not a photograph."
We kissed, once, clumsy and immediate, like two people agreeing on a truce.
There are things I could tell you about us becoming something soft and safe: late-night cooking disasters, the way he made lemon-honey water until I laughed at his uneven measures, the tiny pink slippers in his hallway, the turtle named Kaitlyn who now followed the sun like an old philosopher. There are also things I cannot hide: that I still bristle when rich women laugh at my old pictures, that my father still flinches when someone mentions gossip, and that Mallory's fall became a lesson I would never forget.
As for Mallory and Gunner, their public moment had consequences beyond humiliation. Legal suits followed. Some buyers rescinded their purchases. Mallory signed away parts of her island profits to charities and to people she'd wronged; she went from a woman of swagger to a woman apologizing into a hundred lenses. Gunner lost clients and professional standing and, for a while, couldn't book a table at the restaurants he'd once frequented.
When the dust settled there was a strange peace—like a river after a storm where debris settled into dull patterns. Life returned to the dangerous but ordinary things. I got my pink slippers from his hallway and left them on the shoe rack. I kept the code 0410 in my head like a secret. I kept the turtle alive and checked its food each night.
Everest, in ways both small and enormous, continued to guard and to provoke. At times he said things that made me wrinkle my nose and at other times he did things—like arguing a fundraiser into donating funds to help people denied privacy—that made me think he was not only my unlikely savior but someone who believed privacy was a kind of currency that deserved protection.
When I look back now, months later, the scar of the leak has faded into a memory with a bright center where Everest stood like a shield. I still have my bags, not all, but enough to remember who I was before. My father is better and plans holidays again, his anger smoothed into concern.
I used to think the camera could take everything: my image, my dignity, even my life. Now I know cameras can be instruments of injustice—but in the right light, sometimes they can also be used to cut a rope that binds someone else.
"Do you ever regret it?" I asked Everest once. "Making them suffer like that?"
He shrugged, looking at the small turtle swimming lazily. "I regret things that break people. I don't regret making greedy people accountable."
I went to bed that night and wound a small watch, a souvenir from a charity auction, and listened as the quiet click ticked like something steady and true.
The turtle slept at the bottom of its tank. The pink slippers sat by the door. The code 0410 was folded into my phone lock. The lemon-honey jar in the kitchen had residue like a thin bright memory.
And when I closed my eyes I heard, faintly, the sound of a broken market being quietly closed, like someone turning a key.
The End
— Thank you for reading —