Sweet Romance15 min read
He Charged Me for Kisses — Then He Climbed Twenty-Three Flights
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"I heard you're only with him for revenge."
"Who told you that?" I asked, lifting my chin. The cafeteria light made a glare on my phone screen; Cooper was grinning like he was enjoying a private joke.
"Valeria said it, obviously," he said.
"Valeria said a lot of things," I said. "Does that make it true?"
"You paid him to be your boyfriend," Cooper said. "She said you pay per hug."
"She is a terrible liar," I said, and then I laughed too hard, because anything quieter would have sounded like the truth. "Listen, I offered him three months. Hands-on, kisses included. If it worked out, great. If it didn't, we split up."
Cooper's laugh stopped. "Three months?"
"Three months," I repeated. "That was the deal."
"Why would Ellis—" Cooper began, and then he cut himself off. He knew the answer, the ugly truth behind why someone like Ellis would say yes. Money was there. It was a short life-saving bridge. I could say anything about why, but the fact was—my family ran out of cushion, and mouths to feed are ugly and simple.
I remember the first time I took the fruit basket. He opened the door with his forehead taped and the most blank face I had ever loved from a distance.
"Claire," he said. "You didn't have to."
"I brought mangoes," I said. "And papaya. And three different kinds of encouragement."
He accepted the basket. His fingers were dry and efficient. There was a stack of instant noodles on his desk. A "Help Wanted" page open on his laptop. The bank notification that chimed on his phone while we stood in the doorway was the sound that made me decide.
"How about this," I said. "Three months. You, me. Hand-hold, kiss, hug—payment each time. No cheating. If after three months it hasn't worked out, we split like strangers."
He looked at me like I had suggested we split an apple, like the idea was ordinary. "Okay," he said.
It should have felt wrong. It did feel wrong in a way that made my cheeks warm and my mouth dry. But then, I got a reason to be near him. To learn the little things that make a man like Ellis unwind. And if this was how I could buy a place at his elbow, a share of his mornings, then I would.
"Do we have rules?" I asked the first night we agreed.
"Pay first, then we negotiate," he said, deadpan, pulling his lip like a string.
"You are impossible," I said, offering a laugh like lemon. "Fine. One cheap kiss eligible at one transfer."
He paused. "Are you serious?"
"It is a transaction," I said. "A temporary one."
He shrugged and, for the first time, let a corner of his mouth lift in something like humor. "You're warped," he said. "But okay."
There was a point when it stopped feeling like a deal and started to feel like ordinary things. He would sit up at midnight, typing furiously, and I would curl against his back and feel the steady thrum of his breath. He began to keep a spare hoodie at my place. He helped me patch a broken USB port on my laptop. He paid attention to small disasters, like when I'd burn the porridge or whose turn it was to clean the cat litter.
"You're getting soft," Cooper told me when I texted him a picture of Ellis asleep on my couch, mouth slack, phone balanced on his chest.
"Soft?" I typed, then deleted and sent: "Complicated."
Ellis had been careful. He said he would not let his colleagues know. He said he would not blur the line between professional and personal. He was usually a man of tidy boundaries. But "not letting colleagues know" meant he would not hold my hand on the tram where his team might see us. It was a strange little world where kisses cost as much as a taxi ride.
"Can we just try a small one?" I asked, once, outside a movie theater, heart like a trapped bird.
He looked down, glanced at my phone when I thrust the transfer receipt at him, then bent and pressed his lips to mine as if testing a machine.
It was brief. Warm. Oddly tender for a transaction. "Paid," he said.
We kept the bargain. He would take only what we agreed. He would even scold me once for "exceeding terms."
"Three minutes," he said, after I lingered. "You have a quota."
"You're a monster," I said. He just smiled like the moon had leaned crooked.
The ex returned on a Tuesday, with airport sun in her hair and a reputation like perfume.
Valeria Beltran strolled back into Ellis’s life with a glossy suitcase and a soft, practiced sadness. She messaged me the first evening: "Can we talk? I think you deserve to see me."
"Why?" I asked, because Cooper had warned me. Valeria had that kind of smile that unpicked things. She was his first love.
"You took him when he was wounded," she said softly in the cafe, while I refused to meet her eyes. "You used money like a leash."
I swallowed. "He needed help."
"He needed her, not you," Valeria said. "You paying for him? It will only ever be that—a price tag."
"You and I both know the truth," she said, the lie a silk thread. "He was with me first. You were the interloper."
I had to hold my coffee so it wouldn't shake in my hands. "What do you want, Valeria?"
"To be honest," she said. "To tell him that you...you're buying affection."
"I already told him exactly that," I said. "And he...he still said yes."
Valeria's eyes were cold for a second. "Men like him never really change. He'll use you while he needs you. Wait."
Her parting line mattered less than the rumor she left behind. She had always been good at theater. She would stage guilt and make others take seats in her auditorium.
Ellis was odd when she appeared. He would answer his phone and then stare at me without answering. He would return with a hollow in his mouth. Once, I followed him by accident and found him at a hotel door, helping Valeria with conflicting tears. My chest ached in a place I couldn't name.
That was when I decided the bargain might be ending for other reasons.
I didn't want to accuse him of betrayal. There were times he bundled me into blankets and said, "You look like you could use sleep." There were times when he kissed me in complete softness, like a mistake that had no ledger. There were times when he would climb twenty-three flights of stairs with food in his hands because a city-wide blackout meant the elevator stopped, and he insisted he would rather carry the food than wake anyone. He arrived at my door panting and smiling and slightly embarrassed at the domesticity of it.
"You climbed twenty-three flights?" I asked as we ate in the dim emergency light.
"I did," he said. "It took me twenty minutes."
"You're crazy," I said.
"Stubborn," he corrected. And then he asked, quietly: "Can we not talk about the money tonight?"
I leaned my head back. "Can we not talk about it ever?"
He pressed the heel of his hand to my hair. "Maybe."
But Valeria kept hovering. The day she posted the screenshot that said, "You will always be with me, right?" with the "him" replying "I will" — I saw red where my world had been soft. The conversation she showed was truncated, and everyone could choose how to fill the missing lines. The city filled them with rumor and spite.
Two things pushed me to break: the sight of Valeria hugging him outside a hotel and the way he didn't shut her down fully. The small voice at the back of my head, which had been whispering bargain terms more than love terms, said: "Three months."
I told him in the morning, "I think we should end this."
He ate a sandwich wordlessly. "Why?"
"You said three months," I said. "Our deal is up."
He blinked. "You said that?"
"Yes," I said. "And I'm tired of being an investment."
He didn't argue. He cleaned his plate. Sometimes it felt like the person across the table was carved from stone that had been warmed once.
I went out dancing that night with Cooper because I couldn't be in my own living room. We were drunk enough for me to feel brave. I was dancing and then someone shoved past and I collided with Ellis.
He didn't look pleased. He shoved a hand into his jacket and then swung his fist at Cooper, because Cooper had the audacity to be my friend on a night where Ellis had decided he was owner of unsaid things. Cooper went to the floor with a broken dignity and a spun cry.
"Are you crazy?" I hissed. "What are you doing?"
"You're protecting him," Ellis snarled, voice low and ugly. "Protecting him."
"This is my friend," I said, rising, the crowd around us buzzing.
"Get his things out," I told him the next morning. "We agreed to three months."
He moved slowly, like the kind of animal that has forgotten the exact shape of freedom. "I'm sorry," he said.
He left. The space he occupied in the apartment did not immediately close. The air was colder where he had brushed the cushions.
Two weeks later, I met Dashiell Nakamura at a blind date set up by a family friend. He was young, earnest, and small in a way that made my protectiveness flare. And he was kind. His entire world was charming in an easy way that did not cost anything. He took me to the supermarket like we were in a movie. He stole cotton candy from the top shelf, and I laughed. He offered to teach me swimming. He said I had the most honest laugh.
We weren't serious. But he was real.
Then I saw Ellis at the supermarket again, standing near the produce, and he was with Valeria. I panicked, irrational and loud, and we sat at neighboring tables in a restaurant he couldn't bear to share with me. Valeria's eyes were a cutting joke. She needed witnesses.
We had one fight that turned into the kind of messy because-I-care argument that leaves bruises you can't see. It happened on the street under sodium lamps. Dashiell was there, a hand finding mine, and Ellis gripped me like I had slipped through his fingers.
"Don't be dumb," Ellis said to me, anger in his jaw. "You're letting him touch you for free."
I yanked my hand back. "What a surprising thing to say."
"Why are you with him?" Ellis asked, suddenly small. "If he cares, he would fight for you."
"He did fight," I said, voice shaking. "He did stomp into a club and hit someone for being rough with my friend. He did move out."
That night I went home with my head full of glass. I told Dashiell I was tired. He said, so softly, "If you want to run, I will teach you how to swim faster than him."
Then the rumors turned into a storm. Valeria went on with her show, posting and whispering, sewing threads of betrayal. It was not enough for her to say I had bought him; she wanted to prove I had stolen him. She started showing up at places we were, and then her old rich boyfriend left her publicly, and she wanted a place to land. She needed someone to blame.
I refused to be gaslit. The deal had been ugly and honest and small. But Valeria's lies were massive. I began to collect my own small truths like stones, and I stored them in my pocket.
"Why are you still defending him?" Cooper asked, once, while we sat among the cardboard boxes of my half-empty apartment.
"If I don't, I will lose myself in a story someone else wrote," I said.
That is when I planned the confrontation.
It was at a city charity fair where Valeria had volunteered at a makeup booth and then turned the job into a platform. A thousand people would be there: donors, volunteers, local press. Valeria expected applause. She had a smile ready.
"Just one chance," I told Cooper. "One moment when she's public and arrogant. I'll show what she's hiding."
"You're counting on receipts?" Cooper asked, eyes narrowing like a prosecutor.
"I have screenshots of her messages. I have proof she took money from a sponsor and funneled it. I have that hotel photo where she staged an embrace for the camera. And I have the logs that show Kevin—Valeria's ex—left her because she started playing games to get attention."
Cooper clapped his hands once. "Let's go bury her in her own costume."
On the afternoon of the fair, the hot sun made people speak louder. Valeria presided over a little stage as if she were queen. She gave a speech about "resilience" and "the cruelty of being judged," and cameras loved her. She waved. She smiled gently like a cat at a knitting circle.
"Claire Harrison!" she said, with that cold thinness. "So nice of you to join us."
I felt a thousand eyes on me. I walked up with Cooper and Dashiell at my side.
"You shouldn't be here," she tossed. "Do you know how tasteless—"
"I know more than you think," I said.
"And what is that?" she snapped, playing her hand like a woman who had always had an audience.
"I know how you used every hand that ever touched you to make a point," I said. "I know how you convinced people Ellis still belonged to you. I also know how you took donor money and redirected it to your own account in three separate transfers. Do you want to deny that?"
The room froze. Valeria's smile faltered. She put a hand to her throat like she had been slapped.
"What are you talking about?" she said. Her voice lost control. "That's a lie."
Cooper stepped forward, raising his phone with a loudspeaker app. "Play it," he said.
A volunteer handed me a microphone. I pressed the play button on an encrypted folder of messages and receipts I had compiled from the last months, the emails from sponsors, the transfer logs, the hotel's booking IDs. The audio ended up in the speakers. A voice—Valeria's—could be heard arranging times and amounts, asking to "cover up the extra," and saying, "Don't worry, we'll manage it."
Valeria's face went white. Her hands trembled. "That's doctored," she wailed.
"Is it doctored?" I asked, and I let the screen show the time stamps, the bank confirmations, the pixelated but clear screenshots of her texts, the hotel's receipt with a name matching her card.
"No," someone in the crowd said.
"That's my sponsor's accountant," another volunteer whispered. "Did she divert money?"
"It's showing three transfers," a man in a suit said. Phones came out. People started passing my phone around. The charity organizer stood as if the floor had opened. Valeria clutched her purse and shrank.
"Why would you do this?" she begged suddenly, looking at the crowd. "I was trying to make something—"
"You call stealing from the charity 'making something'?" I asked. "You call staging moments and buying attention 'artistry'?"
Valeria's bravado crumbled. Her eyes darted to the exit like a frightened animal. Someone near the front muttered that they'd seen her leave a donor's banquet drunk the night before. A volunteer called security. People started to take videos. Cameras reframed her into a different story: not a heroine, but a thief who found theater more useful than honesty.
She turned toward Ellis then, as if hoping he would step forward and defend her.
Ellis was there, standing near the food stall, ordinary in an ordinary sweater. For one terrible beat I thought—what if he saves her? What if he pretends the whole thing doesn't exist? Valeria looked up, waiting to be rescued.
Ellis did not move to her side.
"Help me," she said, voice shredding. "Don't let them—"
"No," he said. His voice was low and precise. "No, Valeria."
The crowd was sick with curiosity and a little delight. Cameras zoomed. The organizer whispered into her phone that she was a fraud, and the word "fraud" had the delicious weight of a verdict.
Valeria fell through a sequence of expressions—defiant, startled, then shrinking into disbelief. Her eyes widened as the volunteers and donors started to boo. People took photos like it was a sport. Her mouth went dry; her fingers clawed at the fabric of her dress. She tried to deny, to deflect, but the receipts were in my hand and on the stage and in the cloud and somehow the world had turned into a courtroom with me as prosecutor.
"I never thought you'd be this small," she said finally, voice breaking.
"Look at you," a woman in the crowd said. "You built a little kingdom of lies."
Valeria dropped to her knees then, not in repentance but because the knees gave before the face. A few people stepped back as if staining might spread. "I'm sorry," she whispered. "I'm so sorry."
But apology is thin air when money has been taken and reputations are torn. The charity manager announced she'd been suspended pending an audit. Security escorted her from the stage. People followed, muttering.
I felt sick and not entirely triumphant. Watching someone fall in public was a strange mirror; it showed me how easily anyone could be reduced to a headline.
Valeria's changing face had the arc the rule demanded: a queen dethroned. She had been triumphant—then stunned—then denying—then broken. People recorded, gossiped, and some clapped with the fierce relish of justice served.
From the back, someone shouted, "Shame!" Other voices booed. A volunteer came up and hugged me. "You did the right thing," she said.
Ellis stepped forward then. He didn't look triumphant; he looked weary. He stood beside me and said only, "I didn't know."
He said it to the volunteers, to the organizers, to the cameras. "I didn't know," he repeated so that the sentence could be measured.
Valeria's phone lit and chimed with messages from friends who were suddenly not friends. She was being exposed to a public that had once admired her. She tried to reach for him; he stepped away, not in cruelty but as someone refusing to be dragged.
"Why didn't you tell me sooner?" I asked him, voice low, feeling the night's heat and an ache I couldn't name.
"I thought I could handle it," he said. "I didn't want you to worry. And then—" he looked at his hands "—I lost track."
The crowd around us was loud with contradictions: calls for him to explain, for her to be punished; some people wanted to know if I was the mastermind; others wanted to see if Ellis had been complicit.
He raised his head. "I made a bad call," he said softly. "I stood too close to someone with a history of taking things—of owning people. I didn't stop her. I should have."
Valeria was led away with the humiliating soundtrack of clicking cameras and whispered condemnations. Security told her the police would need to talk to her.
As she vanished, people slowed their cameras and looked at him instead. For a second, the whole fair was a room where breath could be held and decisions watched. Ellis's face was open and ashamed; everyone could see the progression from complacency to regret.
The rulebook of small-town gossip was merciless. Valeria had been burned in public; people that had once whispered about me now whispered about her. The scale of justice had tipped in a way that made me feel guilty and oddly vindicated.
I walked off the stage and sat on the curb. Ellis sat beside me.
"I didn't want to hurt you," he said.
"You did," I said, and it wasn't a shout. "You made me a bet, and then you let someone else make the rules."
"I know," he said. "I know I've been awful. But I climbed twenty-three flights to bring you food once. I brought you a light when power went out. I paid attention to your pills. I remember you like other people forget."
"Do you?" I asked. "Do you remember the transfer receipts? Do you remember why you said yes?"
He didn't answer for a long time. "I said yes because I needed help," he said finally. "I didn't expect to like being near you."
"That's not the same as belong to me," I said.
"No," he said. "But it's the truth."
We were silent. In the city air there was the faint smell of fried sugar and something like judgment. People walked past us and muttered. A local blogger snapped a photo—of me and of him—then posted with the headline: "Charity Scandal: Love, Lies, and a Woman Who Paid for Kisses." The irony of a headline about buying and selling love when love had just been bought and sold in a thousand lesser ways struck me with a kind of nausea.
That night, three months had ended for us in public, not with a quiet parting but with glass and cameras and the bright metallic smell of humiliation. Valeria's punishment had satisfied the crowd briefly. But somewhere in that crowd was the truth that punishments do not always heal.
Cooper texted: "You okay?"
I typed back: "No idea."
"Come over," he wrote. "Bring the cat."
I told Dashiell I needed a night with a friend. He said he would wait.
Ellis sat on the fire escape with his knees drawn up. He said in a voice that could be heard in the little space between us, "Don't leave me over this."
"Don't make me love the man who was your transaction," I said.
He looked at me like someone who had been caught trying to hold two doors at once. "I can't make that right."
"Then stop trying to be both things."
The next day, the city was smaller. The charity's donors called, the accountant called, Valeria's ex gave an interview describing their breakup as "a mess of illusions." Newspapers framed things as either mine or hers, never ours, never the odd middle place where all three of us had been.
There is a point in every story where the ledger asks to be balanced and no one is satisfied with the entries. For a while I thought revenge was what I wanted. Then I thought perhaps I wanted a man who would refuse to make a ledger of me.
Ellis came to my door one evening, pressing a small white box into my hands.
"What's this?" I asked.
"A watch," he said. "For timing things."
"Is this a metaphor?" I asked.
He shrugged. "I climbed twenty-three flights, Claire. I have a stupid way of showing I can be useful."
I opened the box. The watch was simple and it ticked like the emergency lamp had. It arrived with an apology letter folded like someone took time to cut out each regret.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I did not stand up. I was selfish and afraid. I let someone take advantage. But I'm here, and if you'll let me, I'll try to be better without calculating."
I looked up at him. "Do you want to be better for me or because you're ashamed?"
"Both," he said. "Is that allowed?"
I laughed, and it felt wet and ridiculous. "Not sure, but let's try."
We were careful. He stopped keeping a ledger aloud and began to do things because they were true. He started small: bringing tea when I had a headache, bringing pills when I didn't want to leave the bed, reminding me of deadlines like an absent-minded guardian.
There were three small moments that made the difference. The first was when he sent me a voice message at three in the morning to ask if I had taken my medicine. The second was when he cut a mango into the exact way I liked it and set it on my bedside table after I had cried over edits. The third was the time he climbed out onto the roof in the rain to rescue the cat we'd lost in a neighbor's tree, coming back soaked and triumphant and smelling like wet concrete and something like forgiveness.
"Do you still charge for kisses?" I asked him once, pretending not to care.
"No," he said. "But I will remind you of how expensive trust is."
One day, months after the charity scandal, Valeria's name showed up in the news as she was taken to court by the charity and, later, evaluated by a rehabilitation program for embezzlement. The city had its fill of spectacle; some people were sorry for her, some gleeful. I watched it all from the kitchen, Ellis leaning against the refrigerator, both of us watching the city decide what to do with the woman who had staged herself as a star and found the lights hazardous.
There was a lesson, bruised and simple, in public punishments. They don't always fix what was broken. They make sure someone stumbles on live stage. And sometimes that is all the justice we are given: a public fall with cameras and a small, terrible applause.
I held Ellis's hand as he signed a new lease, small and boring, under our names. He ran the contract's page with his finger as if the routine would make him a better man. The truth was, I wanted the ordinary more than I wanted vindication.
That night the power failed again. The emergency light flickered. We were two people with a shared lamp and a cat who thought the whole world belonged on the couch.
"You climbed twenty-three flights for me once," I said, voice soft.
"I will climb as many as you need," he said.
"Then don't charge me for the next one," I said.
He kissed me in the dim, fingers warm on my back. It wasn't a bargain. It wasn't a receipt. It was a slow, small thing like the pulse of a watch.
The emergency light hummed over us, a small steady halo. It had names and a plastic casing and the memory of a night where the city had been dark and he had made himself present. I kept it in the drawer after that—an odd souvenir.
If anyone asks me what happened between me and Ellis, I'll say a lot of things. I will say we made bad bargains and better choices. I will say people can be messy and sometimes cruel. I will say public punishments look satisfying, but they only carve deep lines in small hearts.
And if you ask whether I ever charged him for a kiss, I will only smile and reach for that emergency light, feeling the ridges of its plastic like a memory.
The End
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