Sweet Romance15 min read
He Kept My Letter, Then He Lost Me
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"I wrote it twice."
"You wrote a love letter and dropped it twice?" Eri Mueller's laugh was a little too loud for the quiet corridor.
"Once," I said. "I dropped it once. You don't have to point out my clumsiness to half the floor."
"Sorry." Eri smiled, then turned serious. "Who did you write it to, Lailah?"
"I—" My mouth went dry. "Dylan Flynn."
Eri blinked. "Dylan Flynn?"
"Yes." I hugged the envelope to my chest like it was the only brave thing I owned.
"You mean Dylan Flynn the basketball boy?" Johanna Frank poked her head around the door, curious like a cat. "The one with the stupidly tall jawline? The one every girl in the department watches like he's a sunrise?"
"That one." I felt my face warm. "I've liked him for two years."
"Two years?" Eri's eyebrows went up. "Why didn't you say anything?"
"I couldn't." I said it small. "So I wrote it."
"And you folded it like a...?"
"A mess," I admitted. "Pink paper, bad handwriting, and the worst part—I wrote the wrong signature."
"How do you write the wrong signature?" Johanna laughed, but it washed into a worried look.
"Because I meant to sign my name," I said, "but I put Felix Fernandes' name by accident."
"Eek." Eri hissed. "Felix is your best friend and he—"
"Is my best friend," I finished. "He doesn't know. He thinks I'm just his friend. He watches game highlights with me and borrows my notes. He's only ever been my good brother."
"Well," Johanna said, tilting her head, "this sounds like a campus novel. You should post it on the confession board. They'll eat it up."
"I didn't want that," I told them. "I wanted him to read it. But the letter slipped out of my hand on the way to the gym, and someone took it to the confession wall."
"Someone?" Eri's mouth curved. "Well, someone with wrong motives. Classic."
"I went to the confession wall later," I said. "It was there. My letter. The whole campus read it."
"You'll be embarrassed?"
I laughed, but it turned into a small, sad sound. "It got worse. I put Felix's name at the bottom. The note said, 'From Felix Fernandes,' because I... because I always sign his homework for him."
"That's so bad."
"It started rumors," I whispered. "They called it a ship. People called them pair names. Nobody looked at me. They looked at Felix."
"Felix?" Johanna frowned. "He looks exactly like he always does—calm, confused, and a bit like he wants to eat a sandwich."
"Yes," I said. "And he doesn't know."
"Why didn't you tell him?" Eri asked.
"Because I couldn't say it out loud." I pressed my palms to my cheeks and felt my pulse. "Because I was ashamed. Because everyone was watching."
"Don't cry," Johanna said now soft. "Come on. It's Saturday. Let's go to the gym. If Dylan is there, maybe—"
"If Dylan is there he will probably glare at Felix for stealing his imaginary girlfriend," Eri said.
We walked into the gym. The sound of bouncing balls filled the air like falling rain. Felix had his shirt off. The crowd cheered when someone sunk a three. My breath stopped.
Dylan stood in the middle of the circle like a sun. He moved slow, careless. He knocked a basketball and it rolled toward me. I reached to pick it up and accidentally bumped into him. I froze. He smelled like sweat and the cold metal of the gym's chain link.
"Watch where you're going," someone barked behind me.
"He has a girlfriend?" Dylan said suddenly. He looked over his shoulder at Felix, then at me, then raised a hand to flick smoke from an imaginary cigarette. He smiled.
"You have a boyfriend?" He asked me the way someone might ask if it was raining.
I swallowed. "I don't."
Dylan's hand moved quicker than I expected. He grabbed my chin gently, like he could twist the whole world with that motion, and his face leaned down until his lips were on my mouth.
It was quick, but it hit me like a bell.
"You're welcome," he said after he let go.
I wanted to say a thousand things. I wanted to say he had kissed me for the joke, for the paper shark he thought I was, for the rumor I didn't know how to stop. Instead, the words that came out were small and stupid.
"Why did you—?" I started.
"You wrote a love letter," he said. "And then someone put Felix's name on it. That was messy. That made people laugh. You almost made a fight. I fixed it."
"You fixed it by—?" I could feel my cheeks burning.
"By kissing you," Dylan answered like it was a lesson. "You looked like you needed it."
Foster's laugh—or Felix's, I mean—bubbled beside me. "You want a rematch," Felix said, breathless. "Loser buys milk tea."
Dylan sighed and stretched. "I don't have time for childishness."
It would be a week of small bruises. A week where he was mean when I expected softness and soft when I expected to be burned. He started to stand near me in classes. He started to text me when the library closed. He would say one thing and do another. The world tasted like sugar and lemon and confusion.
"Are you okay?" Felix would ask, honest as a bell. "You look pale."
"I'm fine," I'd say.
He didn't know the truth. He didn't know I wrote the letter. He didn't know Dylan's smile when he told me, "You look cute when you lie."
Months went by. The letter incident turned into a rumor and then a meme. People joked that Felix had a secret fan. Dylan teased me like a cat plays with a trapped bird. Once he pressed a cigarette between his fingers and asked, "If someone else made a joke out of your heart, would you forgive them?"
"Depends on the joke," I said.
He smiled. "Hmm."
Then, like thunder after the quiet, something changed.
"Guess what I saw?" I texted Felix one evening. "A video."
"What video?"
"A video of Dylan and his friends. They were at a party. And they were talking about—"
"Talking about what?" His texts came fast.
"—about me. A bet. A bet about whether they could get me to fall in love with him. They laughed. They filmed themselves whispering it."
Felix read, then called. He couldn't hide the shock.
"Do you want me to come over?" he asked. "Should I bring peanut butter?"
"No, come empty. I need the courage."
He came anyway with a sandwich and a heavy heart. He stayed at my side when I watched the video again and again. Dylan laughed. A friend said, "Old bet, old fruit," and another recorded it while holding up their beer. Dylan said, "I can get any girl. We bet as a joke, right? It proves a point. She was cute, so I kissed her. I won."
Felix put his hand on my shoulder. It was warm and solid, like a table.
"You should tell him," Felix said.
"I did," I said. "I told him we should be together. And he did this."
"Then you have to make him feel it in public," Felix said. "In a real place. Where people can see his mask fall off."
He had that serious face. The one he used when he wanted to fix things that were wrong. It wasn’t dramatic. It was practical.
I kept the video for a few days. I thought about burning it, about letting it die in the shuttered corners of my phone. I thought about confronting Dylan directly. I thought about pretending nothing happened and waiting for the months of laughing to fade into forgetfulness.
"What if I lose something?" I asked Felix, trembling.
"What do you have to lose?" he said. "Your pride? If pride is all you stand on, then maybe it's better lost."
We planned the moment like a small war. The university had a welcome assembly in the main hall—an event attended by most students and faculty. Felix volunteered to book a projector and to have his friends ready. Johanna and Eri agreed to help. They knew I wanted justice without melodrama. They knew I wanted the truth to stand on stage like a single clean flag.
"Are you sure?" Felix asked me in the corridor. "This will be messy."
"I'm tired of being messy," I told him.
The day came. The hall filled with bodies and static chatter. Students scrolled their phones under the ceiling lights and professors flipped their notes the way they always did. Dylan arrived late, looking like a storm in good jeans.
He sat in the second row with his friends. He looked calm, like nothing would touch him.
I walked onto the stage with Felix at my side. The microphone felt heavy, like a tool you only use once.
"Lailah," the student union president called my name, surprise in his voice. He didn't know.
I smiled as if I had practiced this in the mirror a thousand times. "I need to say something," I said, and then pressed play.
The video filled the screen. Laughs rolled through the hall—at first soft, then sharp. People whooped at the loud bits. Then they fell quiet. Dylan's face on the projector was smug and confident. He stood up. The hall hummed, and I felt every eye stamp my name into the air like a seal.
"Is this a joke?" Dylan's voice carried, shocked like a thrown stone.
"Is it a joke?" I said, my voice even. "Because it looks like you were joking about making someone's feelings a game."
He crossed the space to the stage and reached for the microphone.
"This is private," he said. "You shouldn't show private conversations in public."
"Private?" I laughed, a small sharp sound. "You recorded it with your friends, they sent it to an app, and you posted it to the group. Private things don't get filmed and shared. Not with your voice. Not with the number I have as my shoulder to cry on."
People in the crowd started to murmur. "Wait—" someone in the far corner gasped. Phones rose like a wave.
Dylan's mouth flattened. "You—" he tried to mask his shock with a grin. "You edited it. People splice things."
"Then tell me," I said. "Tell everyone here the truth."
He inhaled deep. The audience felt like a sphere pressing in.
"I didn't mean it like that," he said fast. "It was a stupid bet. We were young. We were—"
"That's exactly what it was," I cut in. "You declared me a prize. You used my kindness for amusement. You made me a game and expected me to like the rules."
"That's not true." He looked around at the students, at his friends, at me. "I like you. I said I liked you."
"You said it after you made a bet," I said. "Your voice is on the video. You said it like a punchline." I felt the room tilt. "You laughed when you called me little cabbage, when you joked about taste, when you called Felix my boyfriend like it was a joke. You made everyone watch that."
His face changed. First it was denial, thick and pale. Then annoyance—a quick spike. Then the air broke and the fear came out.
"It wasn't like that," he said, but there was no strength in it.
"Then say it now," I told him. "And mean every word. Say it in front of the people you used to get applause from."
He stepped closer. The crowd leaned like a single being.
"I like you, Lailah," he said. His voice cracked. "I do. It wasn't just a bet. I thought—"
"You thought what?" I asked. "That if you won, you'd own someone?"
"I didn't think—" His jaw opened. The word failed. "You can't understand how it felt."
"I understand this," I said. "I understand that your laughter made me the joke. I understand that when someone that tall leans down and takes a kiss, a small girl can think he means it."
Someone in the crowd started clapping. A soft slow clap that grew. It sounded like rain.
Dylan's face lost its color. "This is stupid," he said. "You twisted everything."
"You bet on me with your friends," Felix said from the front row, standing up. "You filmed it. You laughed. You said I had a 'good taste'—and you bragged about it."
The hall was loud now. Phones filmed phones. Heads turned. I had wanted a private single moment. Instead I had a crowd. It burned hot.
Dylan's expression shifted. First it was anger. Then confusion. Then a wet rawness crept in like an infection. He tried to laugh—then his laugh stopped. He moved as if to speak, then his throat worked. The microphone glimmered in his hand.
"This is not fair," he whispered. "You don't know what I felt when I kissed you. You—"
"You know what is fair?" I snapped. "That you stand here and listen to your voice over and over. That people watch you for once in your life without cheering. That you feel what it's like to be small when everyone you love is laughing."
"Don't—" he choked. "Don't make this a performance. I didn't mean—"
"Then apologize," I said. "Not to me alone. To the people you used as a sport. Say it in the hall."
He stared at me, and the silence wrapped around him like wet cotton.
Slowly, painfully, he opened his mouth. Words came, then stopped, like a weeping river trying to find a place to fall.
"I'm sorry," he said. It sounded thin.
"Say it louder."
"I'm sorry," he shouted. The voice surprised him.
Felix walked up then, came to the stage. People snapped photos. Teachers turned their heads. They watched the two most entangled people in the room—one who had been very small and one who had been very high—face the truth.
Dylan crumpled in front of them. His bravado had turned into something brittle. It began as a mask then fell like plaster.
"You bet on a woman like she was your trophy," I said. "Do you understand what you did?"
"Yes," he whispered. "I do. I was an idiot. I treated people like a joke."
"How does it feel to be watched?" someone in the back called.
"It feels heavy," Dylan said, quiet and raw. "It feels like a stone in my chest."
"You look nervous now," a girl nearby said. "Likes two," the crowd muttered. Someone laughed, but it was a different sound—the hard bark of someone who saw the joke collapse.
Dylan's friends shifted, several stepping back. Cameras rolled. I saw faces I knew—professors, student leaders—look at him in a new way. Not admiration, not the easy smile that followed a basket, but pity. Some turned their heads, mouths tight.
He tried to speak, then laughed a broken laugh. "Please," he said. "Please don't make me—"
"Do you want me to help you up?" I asked, voice softer.
"Yes," he said. He held his face like a child. Then he looked at Felix. "I—I'm sorry, man."
Felix didn't move. The room stood like a statue.
Dylan sagged to the floor of the stage, hands press on his head. People around him recorded with quiet faces. He kept muttering apologies that brushed by our ears but didn't settle.
First he brightened, with hope like a match testing the air. "I can explain." He tried to lean in, to speak, but he saw faces—phones recording, an auditorium full of people who had adored him now watching the unspooling of him.
The moment changed. His voice stripped. Pride slipped off him like water off a coat. He moved through the stages: arrogance, shock, defense, angry denial, then the breakdown. He first blamed the camera, then himself. "I didn't mean it," he said. "It was a joke. I love her. I love—" The sentence fell into a low indecipherable sound when he saw the crowd.
They saw him change—his shoulders collapsed, and for the first time he was not admired. He was small.
Someone started to clap slowly again, and the clapping turned to a murmur of disapproval. "You used her," someone said. "You laughed at her. You made a bet."
He looked up. Tears had begun to fall. They traced lines down to his jaw. The same people who followed him to every game watched him cry, some with faces of betrayal, others with the slight thrill of seeing a fallen star. Some whispered words I had heard before—"hypocrite," "show-off," "scumbag"—and the whispers struck like little stones.
He tried to speak, but couldn't. He mouthed words—"please," "forgive"—yet the crowd had already decided. Their mouths hardened. Phones continued to film. One boy stood up and recorded as he walked toward Dylan, then put the video live online. The hall buzzed.
Dylan's friends began to drift away. One by one they found seats or made excuses. Nobody stayed to defend him. He looked around like someone abandoned in a storm, then his face changed again. He dug his fingers into his hair, and his whole body shook.
I could see the shift happen in him clearly: the smug smirk dissolved, confusion took over, then denial, then the red flush of anger—"this is unfair,"—then finally collapse, a quiet tremble of the shoulders like someone who finally understood being watched from the other side.
"Please, stop," he said to no one and everyone.
People recorded. People whispered. Some applauded when he said he was sorry. Some called out for him to be punished academically—"expel him," someone said. A professor rose and demanded an explanation. The student union announced an emergency panel. I did not want him expelled, but I wanted him to feel the weight of what he'd done.
He tried to stand, but his legs were weak. He swallowed, his Adam's apple bobbing. "I—" He looked at me. "I'm sorry."
"Say it like you mean it," I said. My throat felt raw.
He did. His apology spilled out in a ragged line. But it couldn't wipe off the image of the smirking man on the projector who had said my name like a prize. The auditorium held its breath like a listener waiting for a final note. When the word "sorry" came, it was a small sound. The crowd gave him no mercy, only the law of social instant karma—public knowledge, public shame, public consequences.
He tried to pick at the edges of his fall. He said things like, "I was young," and "I was joking," but the words were thin paper against the wind.
Then he broke. In front of everyone he finally fell apart—not theatrically, but honestly. He pressed a hand to his mouth and then to the floor and sobbed. The sobs were not loud, but they were true. The crowd watched him convert his pride into sorrow. They watched him be a human who had harmed another. I felt something old settle into place. It was not revenge. It was the end of my trembling.
People recorded, people whispered, people took sides. A teacher declared an investigation. Others left the hall shaking their heads. The audience had witnessed a small public collapse.
Later that afternoon, when the echoes had settled into campus rumor, Dylan sat alone on the practice court. He had his face in his hands. The same people who used to flash smiles and callouts now crossed the street to avoid him. Some students pointed. Some posted the video online with cutting captions. A few stood in his vicinity, not to comfort, but to watch him unlearn his arrogance. His friends left him. His followers deserted him.
He had been exposed, demonstrated, and judged. He had been forced to watch his words and laughter become evidence. He had been given time to stare at himself in public and realize what he had used and lost. The crowd had been both witness and jury. For once, his fall was not shrouded in whispers. For once, his joke was the subject of the room.
In the weeks that followed, Dylan's life shrank. The group chats he'd been at the center of went quiet. People who once copied his practice drills deleted his posts. He kept apologizing, posting written pages of regret, showing up at counseling, and trying to explain how stupid he had been. He tried to fix the parts he could—he deleted videos, asked friends to take them down, tried to set up a meeting with student council to talk about consent and respect. He started to change, not overnight but in small visible steps.
Felix and I sat in the same café the day it all fell apart. He looked at me, a fast tenderness in his eyes.
"Are you okay?" he asked.
"I think so." I let the answer be honest and small. "I feel something heavy lift."
"Good." He smiled, the kind of smile that wraps around a hurt and says we'll survive. "And if you want, I can kick him. Publicly."
I laughed because it was safe to—because the fierce feeling in me was not about vengeance anymore but about being seen.
His punishment had been a public unmasking. It had been messy. It had made him small. It taught him and everyone watching a lesson about playing with hearts for sport. The campus would be careful later; someone else might think twice before turning tenderness into a wager.
But punishments alone do not heal. They change the one who hurt and the one who watched. They leave space for something else to grow—if both choose it.
He would come back to me in time, sometimes. He would write essays about learning consent. He would try to volunteer and help with student panels. He would show up at Felix's workshops and be occasionally helpful. People would say he was paying penance.
I walked away that day with Felix and with the quiet knowledge that I deserved truth and that truth did not have to belong to a man who thought my heart an object.
The months that followed were quieter. Felix became more present in my life without the scaffolding of rumors. He texted about small things—milk tea, missed lectures, his grandmother's recipes. He was simple and kind.
Dylan tried to come back several times. He sent messages, then missed them with lame excuses. Once he stood outside my dorm with flowers so early winter. He said all the things—"I was an idiot," "I want to learn," "I want to try to be better." He cried when he asked me to give him "a chance to prove it."
I listened. I let him say it because he needed to say it. I kept my heart behind my teeth.
"Do you forgive him?" someone asked once.
"I don't hate him," I said. "I just won't let him make jokes with my feelings again."
That answer was not a cliff. It was a window.
Weeks after the public scene, someone uploaded a different clip of Dylan. In it, he was alone, hands shaking, reading the little pink letter I had once dropped on the floor. In the video he opened it and read a line aloud—"I liked you for two years."
His voice when he read mine changed. It was softer, like someone learning the pronunciation of a delicate flower. He kept the letter. Someone filmed him touching it like a relic. The footage went around the campus for reasons no one could explain—part confession, part humility.
I saw it the way a surgeon sees a scar—something that proves healing happened but also reminds you of the cut.
Time moved. People moved too. Felix and I kept our slow friendship, which grew into something warmer. He was patient in ways I had not known I needed.
"What if he comes back and says he never bet?" Felix asked once, when the cold had thinned.
"Then I will listen," I said. "Then I will make him feel that apology cannot be a currency. It must be action."
He nodded. "That seems fair."
He was my friend first. He stayed. When I wrote a new note at night—this time in safe handwriting—I folded it in a smaller envelope and slid it into my desk. The world left its marks on me. The envelopes were proof that I could be brave again.
Weeks later, in a quiet office, a professor told Dylan the university would impose community service and mandatory counseling. He read the letter that had once been his trophy and then his lesson. He started walking through the work—public talks on consent, listening sessions on how not to treat people like bait.
He lost followers. He gained humility. He learned, painfully, that fame could be a mirror.
The pink envelope stayed in his pocket for a long time.
Months later, months and months and slow healing, I walked across campus and saw him by the library. He didn't approach. He waited. I felt the old rush of the bell, then steadied myself. He looked up at me, eyes clear.
"Lailah," he said.
"Yes?"
"I'm not asking for anything," he said. "I just wanted to say I'm sorry again."
"Your actions already said a lot," I said.
He nodded. "I know."
The end of the school year came. I kept my small notebooks, the ones where I wrote and rewrote feelings. He kept his letter.
One night, late, I took out my math book and scribbled the character he once laughed at—the Chinese character for waves. I wrote, "lan" and I thought of how a small wave can become a wide sea, and how that sea could lift a lonely boat or drown someone else.
"I found your letter," he had once told me. "I kept it."
I put my pen down and smiled a little to myself. I had been brave enough to write it. He had been weak enough to file it under jokes. Now, both of us had learned something new.
"Be careful," Felix said later, sliding an extra scarf across my shoulders. "Men who fall from high places don't always get up with the same grace."
"I know," I said. "I'm not sure that's what I want. I only want what is honest."
He squeezed my fingers and we watched the lights of campus come alive. There was no grand ending in that moment, no large theatrical promise. There was only a small steady life that maybe, one day, would be enough.
The End
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