Sweet Romance9 min read
Dating My Best Friend's Brother — The Yellow Duck Helmet
ButterPicks10 views
I never planned to be anyone's babysitter. I never planned to fall into ridiculous secrets either.
"You're sure he's okay with you staying?" Amaya asked over the phone, voice small and precise like she was making a grocery list.
"I'm fine," I said. "He'll be fine. He looks responsible."
"You promise?" she pushed.
"I promise," I said, soft because she sounded like she needed me to be soft. "Don't worry about him. Focus on your exam."
"Thank you, Sara." She breathed out. "Please watch Lincoln."
After she hung up, I stared at the message again—the one that told me I'd be the one keeping an eye on her brother during her two-week trip. I told myself it was nothing. Lincoln Lebedev was Amaya's brother, and Amaya trusted me. How hard could it be?
The first day I bumped into them in our campus grove.
"Of course she's here," Lincoln said, smiling in that harmless, sunlit way that made your gut go soft. He nudged the tall, neat boy beside him.
"Hi," the other boy said, polite and quiet. He gave me a small, careful smile.
"Just grabbing a spot for a sketch," I lied, pointing at my easel behind the trees. My heart did an odd little hop when Lincoln's smile wavered.
"One person? I'll keep her company," the other boy offered, but a friend tugged Lincoln's sleeve. The friend gave Lincoln a look that was equal parts teasing and urgent.
"Let's not bother Aya," Lincoln said quickly, "we have to go." He left in a rush, looking guilty in a way that felt accidental and adorable.
"Lincoln?" I called.
He stopped, back turned, then turned. "Did you need something?" He blinked, trying to be casual.
"You looked nervous. Everything okay?"
He shook his head, like he knew his face gave him away. My eyes dropped to the boy beside him — Yuki Roy. Quiet, neat. Campus rumor had it the groves were a lovers' spot. Two boys under the trees, a stolen look — my chest did a small jump.
Later, when I substituted in for a class, they sat in my lecture hall—together, back row, whispering. The whole time I taught, my eyes kept finding them. They leaned in, passed notes, and Lincoln stole his friend's notebook, flipping pens in that charming nervous way. The two of them glowed like they shared a secret.
"Are you watching them again?" I felt foolish when I caught myself watching.
"Maybe," I told myself. Then the class activity: I set up a fun classroom interactive point system. Names, nicknames, quick answers. The system picked two IDs at random.
"CloudBanquet," the screen read.
The room chuckled.
The second pick popped up instant: "CloudBanquetDog."
The class roared. Someone whistled. The back row went red. Lincoln and Yuki stood, both sheepish, both grinning.
"I'm CloudBanquet," Yuki said softly.
"And I'm CloudBanquetDog," Lincoln added, voice half joking.
I stared at the screen. It was ridiculous and sweet. I felt like someone had tossed glitter into my coffee.
This should have ended there. But trust me: college rumor is a small town multiplied by ten.
Next time I saw them, Lincoln's whole mood shifted. He fumbled, apologized, and tugged at me like I was his older sister by decree. "Aya—can I get water?" he'd asked after practice, grabbing the bottle as if it had been offered by fate.
"Are you bribing me?" I said, because of course I had to be flippant.
He poured the bottle between his lips without answering. His throat moved, and I remembered the first day I'd met him—the same candid, earnest boy who would call me "Aya-sister" until I told him to drop it.
"Come to dinner with me?" he asked later, all sudden and sheepish.
"Now?" I blinked.
"Yeah. You said you were on campus, I said—" He rummaged for courage. "Come on. Please?"
He kissed my cheek in a mock-peck when I teased him for sweetening his ask. Later, he sent me a text: "Movie this weekend? Please?"
"Okay," I replied, and the little floating heart I almost sent back stayed put in my fingers.
Then Tomas Vasquez came back.
Tomas was the kind of senior who smoked three coffees a day and solved problems like math was a hobby. We'd worked together on a research topic; he came back to stay on as a graduate mentor. He sat across from me during one lunch, all easy smiles and warm praise.
"You're doing excellent work, Sara," he said. "We should publish this."
"Thanks," I said. "I'll keep going."
Lincoln watched Tomas across the table like a storm cloud gathers. "Who was that?" he asked after Tomas left.
"An old friend and colleague," I said.
Lincoln's jaw hardened. "Is he your boyfriend?"
"What?" I laughed. "No. He's my colleague."
"You—ate lunch with him."
"Yes? It's called networking."
"It's not that," Lincoln protested. His face twisted, trying to be brave and failing. "You look at him—like that." He mimicked with an exaggerated eye-roll that nearly made me giggle.
I didn't take Tomas seriously. He was a mentor, a colleague. But Lincoln's little green flashes started to come more often. He’d follow me to class, sit nearby, then get suspicious when I laughed with another man. He had convinced himself I looked at every capable adult that way — and he'd decided to possess me before anything had happened.
"Don't you like me?" he demanded one evening, voice hollow like the campus streetlights.
"What?" I said.
"Do you like me?" He was all fury folded into youth. "Or do you like other men in my life?"
"I." I stalled, not sure what I meant.
"Answer."
"Lincoln, you know I care about you." I tried gentler words. "But—"
He stomped away like a drama I couldn't quite control. Then he was sulky instead of angry, then playful again. He oscillated like weather.
The truth was more ridiculous than want. One afternoon, Amaya called me, voice just a thread. "Tell me one thing: is he a one or a zero?" she asked.
"I don't know what you mean," I said.
"Is he straight or not?" she clarified, blunt as ever.
"Why would you ask—"
"That QR ID in class," she said. "Did you see?"
I confessed. And Amaya—who had always warned me to watch over her brother—went silent for longer than felt comfortable. Then she said, "If he likes boys, that's on him. Just—don't let him bring a boyfriend home without calling me."
"Okay." I wanted to be responsible. I had to be responsible. After all, Amaya had left the care of her brother to me.
But the universe loves irony. The more I tried to stay above it, the more tangled I became in his eyes.
"Come to the basketball game this afternoon," Lincoln demanded one day. He had that little injured pride now, the one that made him adorable.
"I can't, I have work," I said.
"You never come to my games," he muttered.
"Lincoln, I'm busy. I have a lab thing."
"You said you'd come." He turned away like someone cutting glass. I felt guilty. I went.
At the court, he played like someone lit from the inside. He made a three-pointer, then lifted his chin, proud as a kid with a single piece of candy. He looked over and caught my eye, grin wide. After the game, he came straight to me like a cat demanding pats.
"Why did you come?" he asked.
"I changed my mind," I said in the least convincing way possible.
"Told you so." He took a bow like the crowd belonged to him.
That night, a text from him: "Movie? For real this time."
"Yes," I wrote.
He didn't answer again for a while. Then he did: "I'll pick you up."
He showed up in a beetle-red, flashy but harmless car. He sat proud, like he had a secret. He drove like a child on an adventure, then made me breathe in while he sprayed fumes on purpose to make me laugh.
"You smelled bad!" I scolded later, wiping my face.
He grinned like victory. "You looked."
"Because you asked me to," I said, annoyed and pleased. He handed me a tiny yellow helmet with a bouncing duck spring.
"Safety first," he said.
"I am not wearing that," I said, but he insisted, and I let it sit on the seat until he put it on himself, ridiculous and triumphant. That's the image people would remember: Lincoln on my scooter with a tiny duck helmet that bobbed while he grinned like a possessed teddy bear.
The house incident was a comedy. Amaya returned earlier than planned. She dove into their kitchen like a tornado.
"Who is she? Who is she? Who took my car keys?" she demanded, arms akimbo and voice booming.
"Um—" Lincoln squealed. He had been the one to hide the keys, apparently, because he wanted attention. Amaya hauled him into a mock wrestling move.
"You're so dramatic," she scolded, but she was laughing, furious only in the way sisters are furious.
In the kitchen, Lincoln looked at me with those big pleading eyes. "Sara," he said at last, softer.
"Yes?" I asked.
He reached over, fingers clumsy on my waist, and before I could register, he kissed me. Quick, a peck that was a dare and a promise. Then he froze and pulled back like he'd jumped off a cliff.
"Amaya—" he called, and then the front door squealed open. Amaya looked at us, eyes wide, processing.
"What the—?" she yelled. Then she burst into laughter so strange and loud that it settled all the ridiculousness into a bright, acceptable place.
"You two," she said, half scolding, half amused. "You owe me twenty dumplings."
Our secret? It evaporated under the floodlights of Amaya's outrage and then her laughter. She interrogated us separately, played prosecutor and judge in a way that felt less criminal and more like a sister's acceptance. In surprising speed, she forgave us on condition that Lincoln stop hiding car keys and that I take care of her brother properly.
"Don't mess him up," she told me, which was a kind of blessing.
We hid in plain sight after that. Lincoln became braver. He marched me through campus as if we belonged to each other. He declared me his girlfriend to anyone who raised an eyebrow.
"He's my boyfriend," he announced once when a familiar senior looked at me with an amused smile.
Tomas laughed and said, "Take good care of him."
"Always," I answered, because the promise felt right.
He loved to boast about being "young, strong, respectful" and then added, with a surprising tilt of seriousness, "Only you can see when I'm fragile." He meant it in a way that startled me—because underneath every charming quirk was a small, quiet loneliness. Raised abroad for years, he had the easy manner of someone who had to be polite to strangers and seldom had the chance to be truly seen. I saw it. I wanted to see it.
Then came the agricultural practical, a field trip to a patchwork of rice paddies outside town. I took a bus and found them there, a line of students cutting golden rice. Lincoln sat in a tractor like a kid in a throne, cap pulled low. Yuki moved among them, quiet and steady, combing his way through the day. The rural air smelled like summer and old earth. I wore a red dress, a foolish choice with all that mud.
"Careful," someone said and then laughed at my juxtaposition. An old yellow cow wandering curiously by my spot decided to give me more attention than any person had all day.
"Lincoln!" I called.
He tried to look nonchalant, then charged like a hero to shoo the cow away. He tripped on a field ridge, a small pratfall that turned my mouth into sudden laughter and my hands into immediate worry. He twisted his leg, but stubbornly hopped to stand.
"Our hero," I said as I helped him into the car, Amaya scolding him the whole way.
He texted me then, while the car rolled home. "Do you think I'm enough?"
"You're ridiculous," I typed. "But yes."
He replied quick: "So—date me?"
"I already am," I wrote back, and then felt like a thief for the way my chest fluttered.
A few days later, at graduation, his parents surprised everyone by returning. Lincoln's face lit up in a way that made me ache. That night, he walked me home and pulled me into the dark, where the campus lights blurred.
"You hold me so steady," he said, breath warm. "I want to hold you steady, too."
"What are you saying?" I asked, breathless.
He smiled like a boy finally telling the truth. He took out a small household booklet and a tiny ring box as if he had planned it all like a script.
"Marry me? Sara."
For a second I couldn't speak. "Lincoln—"
"I'm serious. I know I'm young. You're older—" He rushed on. "But I want to be the one to protect you. Please. Will you marry me?"
I laughed until it turned into a sob, partly from shock, partly from the sweetness. "You're ridiculous," I said.
"Yes, but I mean it," he insisted. "You're the one who finds my brittle parts and glues me back."
I let him dream while I thought.
We had been impossible from the start: me the careful older friend who was supposed to babysit, him the charming wreck who kept stealing my ease. We had turned a babysitting favor into a small, secret world with duck helmets and tractors, with Amaya's shifting expressions and Tomas's wry approval.
"Will you say yes?" He asked again, small and solemn.
I closed my eyes and pictured the little yellow duck like a ridiculous sentinel on the back of a scooter, watching over us. I pictured the tractor, the rice fields, Amaya's booming laugh, and Lincoln's earnest, sometimes silly heart.
"Yes," I said, finally. "Yes, Lincoln."
He nearly cried. He hugged me so hard I thought we'd break the thin air between us. In that hug I did not feel the social boundaries, the weirdness of dating a friend's brother, the small taboos. I felt instead like two people who had discovered a bright, private harbor — ridiculous, tender, and our own.
Afterward, when the world joked and stared and asked questions like it had a right to our life, we kept being plain. We argued about tiny things — whose clothes were whose, whether he could hide my keys ever again — and made up with popcorn and apologies. Amaya bragged about us like a proud captain.
"You're my favorite consequence," she told me once, passing a plate of dumplings.
"You're mine," I replied, and she stuck her tongue out at both of us.
On rainy nights, when Lincoln curled behind me and the duck helmet sat on the shelf like a talisman, I would whisper, "You were supposed to be under my care, you know."
"And you were supposed to keep him safe," Amaya would say, because sometimes a promise comes full circle.
We had started out trying to follow rules and ended up writing our own.
And if anyone asks what made me finally decide, I would say: the way he fed me water after practice like it was the most natural thing; the way he hid car keys only to bring his sister home; the tractors and the cow and the rice; and the ridiculous little yellow duck that bobbed its spring at anyone who questioned us.
When I tell the story now, I still laugh. We were absurd. We were careful. We were reckless in the best possible way.
"Do you regret it?" Lincoln asked one night, fingers threaded with mine.
"No," I said. "Only that I didn't say yes sooner."
He hugged me like it was the answer he'd been waiting for all along. The small duck on the shelf bobbed in the lamplight, ridiculous and triumphant — our private witness.
The End
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