Sweet Romance13 min read
He Came Back for My Red Sugar Tangyuan
ButterPicks14 views
I kept the old habit of making lists on whatever place was easiest: the notepad app, the sticky notes beside my desk, and the one person I had once used as a bookmarking pain in my life—Finley Matthews' WeChat.
"You're using his account like a to-do list?" Ursula laughed the first time I told her. She was on my sofa with a salad bowl and a broken heart wrapped like a burrito next to her.
"Someone needs to remember when to buy tampons," I said. "And when to go for my checkup. And what I cooked last Thursday."
"You could make a new account," Ursula said.
"I could," I said, "but then I'd have four accounts instead of three. This is easier."
"That's absurd," she said.
"Also efficient," I said.
She laughed again and then she cried again. Two years of being grown-ups meant she had become better at crying quietly and worse at getting over people.
Finley walked into my life the night I gave him the keys.
"You're not serious," Ursula said when I told her later.
"I was drunk," I repeated. "I remember slamming into the carpet and thinking, 'This rug will forgive me.'"
"I remember you on your back like a starfish," Ursula said.
"You remember the galaxy then," I said.
That night he came by with a package. There were pounding knocks and no answer. There was Finley fishing a brass key from his pocket as if it had always belonged to him.
"I almost tripped over her," he told me later, voice like honey and worry. "I had to drag her to bed."
"You did what any decent person would do," I said. "You carried someone who was passed out in the living room."
"Then you kept me," he said, with an odd look that was equal parts petulant and triumphant. "You didn't push me out."
I squinted at him. "I was drunk," I said. "I have no receipts for my actions."
He smiled like he had receipts. "I have proof," he said, and he picked up his phone.
"I don't want to see—"
"Look at my arm," he said. "I have your teeth marks."
He held up his forearm. There, pale and angry, were little crescent bruises.
"You're insane," I said, which was both true and unfair.
"Then explain other things," he said. He thumbed on his phone. "Listen."
A short audio played. My voice, buoyant and liquid with liquor, lilted, "Finley, a kiss."
Then a loud, ridiculous sound: "Kiss!"
"I—" I covered my face. "I don't remember that."
"You said it," he said. "And then you agreed to... to be with me."
"I didn't agree to anything," I insisted.
"You said you would 'take responsibility,'" he said, in a voice that made 'responsibility' sound like a very particular kind of promise.
I fought like a cat. I pressed his arm down like a makeshift judge and said, "No, no, no. This is wrong."
"Then explain," he said.
We made it official in the way people make things official when one of them is both ridiculous and persistent: I said a weak "fine" and he told the world that he had won.
After we started dating the relationship turned into a catalog of little expectations. He wanted me to act like the woman in his internet notes. He told me "a considerate girlfriend would buy a pink phone case." He suggested that "when a girlfriend sees a pair of bow socks, she should buy them for her boyfriend."
"You can't be that literal," I said.
"You make me dizzy," he said. "You give me no clues to grab onto."
"A clue?" I made a face. "Are we in an escape room?"
He took the accusation seriously and tried to find the instruction manual everyone else seemed to have. That made him pissy and earnest and even more present. It made me annoyed and soft in turns.
When he said, "Let's break up," I thought it would be quiet.
He blocked me. By the time my call screen said "blocked," I had already moved on to a strange relief. The silence tasted like air conditioning.
"Who blocks who first," Ursula said when I showed her my clever new use of the chat. "You turned his messages into your PMS tracker."
"It works," I told her. "I put 'Day 1, late.' 'Day 2, late.' 'Day 3, late.'"
On the day my period was a whole month late, my finger tapped the last entry in the "Finley Backup" chat: "Period has been delayed one month."
My thumb hovered for a frantic second and then I hit send. The message went out into the ghost of a chat where his name sat in my phone like a red exclamation. He was still blocked, technically, but his account liked this kind of drama.
Seconds later my screen chimed: "Finley released you."
I blinked. Then I swatted frantic to revoke the message, but the message had been sent, like a splinter slipped in a palm.
"How convenient," his message popped back: "So that means I need to take responsibility?"
That felt like an animal in my rib cage knocking to get out: alarm, anger, embarrassment.
I blocked him again with a single shake. But the universe did not accept my blocking as a full stop.
That same evening he stood under my office building as if commuting had suddenly become performance art.
"Here," he said, pressing a thermos cup into my hand. "Drink this. Red sugar tangyuan. Hot."
"You are so extra," I said. "It's June."
"Small things," he said, smiling like he had a map of my body's weak spots. "This one's for our future child."
A bus passed. My colleagues glanced between us. I wanted to wave my hands and explain but my voice was a small thing trapped under a heavy lid.
"There's no child," I said.
"Not yet," he said. "But you said your period was late. You must tell me everything."
"You think you can make a baby by press statement?" I hissed.
"Then let's go to the hospital," he said, with the kind of calm that makes people follow.
At the clinic the doctor just peered, frowned, and said, "It's a hormonal imbalance, likely stress."
Finley narrowed his face as if a puzzle had been unexpectedly missing pieces.
"Stress because of what?" he asked me later, over the thermos that kept steam in its mouth.
"Because my life is messy," I said.
"Because I broke your bones of routine," he said in a voice that tasted new, not smug or theatrical.
It would have been easy to call him childish and leave him at the curb. It would have been easier to hang on to my independence like a flag. Instead, we did a small, ridiculous thing: he promised to try, and I promised not to be a tyrant about phone cases.
Ursula was our witness through those clumsy weeks. She came back to my house the night she found out Finley had shown up with his mother's old photos.
"Did you know he's been keeping a notebook?" she asked me.
"What notebook?"
She held up a paperback. "He told me he learned to be romantic from videos. He takes notes. Look."
"That's... an offense and a compliment," I said.
Finley had been watching little life-guides on how to treat someone. He had been copying lines and practicing pauses like an actor. That should have been part of his shame—performative love—but his notes also held little things: my favorite cookies, the exact way I like my tea, the year my father refused to go to a concert.
That was the first time he did something he'd never done for other people: he read those pages back to me, ashamed and proud. He read them like a prayer.
"I keep failing," he said. "They tell me to make you jealous. They tell me to stay away. But when I stay away, I miss you like hell."
"Congratulations," I said. "You read marketing material for relationships."
He smiled. "It led me here."
When he stopped being theatrical and started being exact, my chest loosened. There were small moments that made a clock in my throat click: once, in a drizzle, he took off his jacket and draped it over my shoulders.
"You'll catch a cold," he said.
"It's June," I protested.
"Your lips are pale." He didn't say it like a lecture. He said it like a recorded favorite.
He made other small, one-off rebellions of care that no one else had ever offered me. When I flinched at his hand on the small of my back in front of his parents, he kept it there and whispered, "This is mine."
"Don't claim me," I whispered back, but my voice had a tremor like a plugged-in wire.
Ursula knew the rhythm of our ridiculousness. "He can't help himself," she said, shuffling through my desk. "He loves the drama of a romantic movie."
"You're cruel and unfair," I said.
"You're the one who keeps giving him lines," she said.
I pushed her in a mock scandal and told her to leave.
Sometimes, though, Finley's "being romantic" went to the edge of manipulation. He had his little public performances: staging our pregnancy misunderstanding in front of my colleagues, whispering "our child" like a charm, bringing a coworker's daughter to dinner and handing the child to him as if to say, "Please rehearse."
"Why are you doing this?" I asked once when he had brought the child along and let the child call him "uncle" in a restaurant.
"Because I want to imagine," he said. "Because I want to practice until the feeling is natural."
"You practice feelings?" I laughed, then felt cold in the belly.
"You taught me how to make you feel safe," he said. "You show me what matters. I want to match that."
"Match it without acting," I said.
He tried. He stumbled. He would sometimes fall back into the old instructions and say the exact phrase a video told him: "A wise man must make his woman feel loved," and then he would look at me like a man learning a spell.
"You're doing magic wrong," I told him once.
"Magic," he said softly. "I don't know how to be less human and more honest."
There was a night my mother and father came by unannounced. They sat on my sofa. My father cleared his throat and said, "We only want you to be happy."
Finley stood like a man in a small theater who had not realized people were watching. He poured drinks and joked. He kissed my hand as if he were pledging something. My mother squeezed my wrist and said, "You two have a history. Take care."
When we went to his parent's house, they pulled out a cracked phone and told stories. His mother had a clumsy way of discovering secrets like a cat: she turned up an old app and announced, "He had a secret chat in high school."
"That was me," I said before we could stop the tide.
Finley's mother paused with a fork in the air. "What?"
"I'm the one he used to chat with online," I said.
The room went quiet for a beat too long. Then his mother laughed and called him "sneaky." Finley turned red and made a joke. "I was dumb but honest," he said.
"You knew it was me?" I asked later, when we were alone.
"I did," he said, "but I wanted to be sure I was not chasing a ghost."
"You're infuriating," I said.
"I know," he said. He took my hand anyway, slow, earnest, as if the bond between us were a fragile glass we were both afraid to cling too hard.
My period finally came—red, stubborn, ordinary—after a month of us appearing and disappearing like two actors in an indie movie.
He made red sugar tangyuan for me, a bowl he declared "for our child's future habit." I glared and took the bowl. It was hot and sweet and honest. The gesture was small and private. I laughed until I cried, and he pretended that was all part of the plan.
"Are you sure you're not a schemer?" I asked.
"I scheme only to make you smile," he said.
Heartbeats came in small lurches after that. He broke his own rules first: once he canceled important plans to stay with me when I had a fever. Once he slipped his phone under my hand and the stubborn like-starved person he had been softened, "I turned the last comment into a pinned memory."
"Show me," I said.
He pressed play on a video where he had posted a comment months ago, bragging about a "test" of his plan. "It worked," he said. "But it led me to you."
It was impossible to punish him, given the odd mixture of guilt and joy the man carried. He had been childish and stubborn, but also clumsy and sincere. The great arcs in the videos he watched had taught him tactics, and he had used them at first like a recipe; later he learned seasoning.
"I thought if I controlled every scene," he said, "I could be sure we'd reach a good ending."
"Stories aren't written like that," I told him.
"Then help me write it," he said.
We moved slowly. Every public display of possession made me step back a little; every private care pull me forward a lot. He kept failing at the internet playbook and passing at being present.
There were three small moments—three times my heart thudded like an alarm bell—that I still remember like bright coins.
The first was when he laughed in the exact place he never laughed for anyone else. We were at his parents' small kitchen table, and his mother had told a story about him as a child. He blinked and then his mouth opened in a full, soft laugh.
"This is the laugh you never use on anyone else," I said.
He looked at me, surprised. "I guess I forgot it existed."
The second was the evening it poured and I had left my umbrella. He appeared with two umbrellas like he had reached into the weather and plucked me out.
"You're ridiculous," I said.
"Well, the weather was mean," he said.
He took off his coat and wrapped it around me. He did not look like an actor then. He looked like a person who had been practicing tenderness and finally stopped to use it.
The third was a small touch in his living room when we had been fighting about small things. He reached for my hand and didn't release it when I said, "This isn't right." He squeezed and said, "Stay."
"Why?" I asked.
"Because you make me better at being a man," he said. "Because I would rather be honest with you and fail than be perfect without you."
Our relationship shivered toward normalcy. He stopped practicing moves and started making choices. When he apologized, it wasn't for being human; it was for hurting me.
One Friday my intern, Hina, handed me a bouquet.
"Thank you for everything," she said, shy. "I learned a lot."
Hina's small smile made Finley puff with something like jealous pride. He wrapped his arm around me in a way that said, clearly and simply, "this is my person."
"You look cute with flowers," he said.
"You're obtuse," I said.
That evening we walked home. He brushed hair from my face and kissed my temple. "You smell like laundry soap," he murmured.
"That's because I am a functioning adult," I said.
"I like it," he said, and then kissed me like the end of every little doubt.
We weren't perfect. He still had a habit of invoking online wisdom in the strangest moments. Sometimes his lines came out rehearsed. Once, after a slight fight, he said, "I studied the lessons of courting. A wise man shows restraint." He sounded like a man who had read too many cliff notes.
"Just tell me how you feel," I said.
He looked at me like a man who had been waiting to be invited into a room he'd built out of awkward planks. "I like you," he said. "I like you without instructions."
We had kept our childish history, our small rituals, the keys, the nights of suspected forgery and the thermoses. But the thing that finally fell into place was honesty.
"Why did you do that 'blocked, released' thing?" I asked one night as we lay in the dark. "Was it a plan?"
"It was both plan and panic," he said. "I thought if I could show you I could be missed, you'd realize we were missing each other."
"And did you miss me?" I asked.
He laughed like it was a secret and then he said, very simply, "Yes."
The day his mother told our story in the kitchen and then laughed about the old chat, I found a small peace. When she said, "He told me you were his online secret crush," I felt both red and oddly proud.
"You knew?" I asked Finley afterwards, in the tiny courtyard.
"I knew," he said, holding my hand. "But I needed you to see me without alarms."
"Is that it?" I asked.
"No," he said. He pulled me closer. "I needed you to see me trying."
I lifted my face up, and for once the world was a quiet, kind place. He held my face and said, "I like you not because I trained myself to like what you like. I like you because your laugh is a map I am still learning."
I told him once that I would not be owned.
"Of course not," he said. "I don't want to own you. I want to be invited."
"Then stay invited," I said.
He smiled, small and sharp. "I will keep asking."
Weeks later, when the red sugar tangyuan cooled in the bowl, when my mother and father asked questions that felt like blessings and annoyances, when Ursula plotted to tease me into public displays, I realized this: we had both been fearful of being obvious.
He had used other people's rules because he didn't know his own. I had used solitude because the world had taught me to trust myself before trusting anyone else. Together, we learned that honesty is the simplest thing and the hardest to do.
"Do you want to be with me because I once kissed you when you were drunk?" he asked, on a rainy afternoon when I had to admit I liked the way his hair smelled wet.
"No," I said. "I want to be with you because you've become someone who chooses me even when it's not patriotic or theatrical."
He laughed and kissed my palm. "So I'm sentenced to choose you?"
"You are," I said.
"I will," he said. "And I will mess up sometimes."
"That's allowed," I said. "Just apologize like you mean it."
"I will," he said. "And then I will try to be better."
People asked about how we fixed it. Friends wanted a single, shining moment of revelation. There was no single scene. There were many small ones—him refusing to let me walk home alone on a slippery night, him bringing soup when my throat hurt, him watching an old show I liked even though he pretended not to care. There were the three heartbeats, the hospital visit, the red sugar tangyuan, the pinned comment that had once been bravado and now was confession.
When I look back, I think the turning point was not the tangyuan nor the city rain nor the loud confession; it was the evenings we spent reading each other's stupid, private texts out loud and laughing until our chests ached. It was the afternoons when he practiced being kind and the mornings when I let myself rely on him for small things.
"Why did you stare at me like that the first day?" I asked once, on the sofa, when his face was close enough to read.
"Because I decided to try," he said. "Because being with you was better than being clever."
"That sounds like a love line," I said.
"It is," he shrugged. "Call it what you like."
And so we kept each other. He wasn't perfect. I wasn't either. We practiced mistakes and corrections like two mediocre musicians learning a duet. Sometimes we were off-key; sometimes we found a chord that was beautiful.
"Will you stay?" he asked one night, voice small like a coin dropped in a cup.
"I will stay," I said.
"And if I get ridiculous again?"
"Then I will make fun of you," I said. "And then I'll forgive you."
He kissed me like it was a contract. I kissed him back like it was an agreement. We folded our bad bits into the corners and let them become old newspapers—useful, then put away.
At last, the story that started with a key and a bruise ended with something ordinary: two people who had learned to be real.
"Do you remember your own rules?" I asked him once, making light of the old videos.
"Some of them," he said. "Mostly the ones that taught me to listen."
"Good," I said. "That's the most honest advice."
He smiled, and in that smile was a man who had stopped reading the cliff notes and started learning to write his own.
I kept using his WeChat as a calendar for a little while longer; sometimes convenience beats symbolism. But when I typed "red sugar tangyuan" into my list, it no longer felt like a thorn in my hand; it felt like a memory.
"I like our list," he said one evening, reading over my shoulder.
"Then stop arguing with the entries," I told him.
"Fine," he said. "I agree."
We laughed and he moved my hair away from my face. The light from the street lamp slid across our table. The thermos still had a hint of sweetness at the bottom.
"You were dramatic," I said.
"You were patient," he said.
"Deal," I said.
He kissed me, and the city hummed around us like an audience that finally forgave an improv show for a small, truthful ending.
The End
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