Sweet Romance13 min read
He kissed me like he’d been saving the words for years
ButterPicks15 views
I still remember the voice the first time he asked me out like a dare.
"Will you come with me?" Cruz asked, the rasp of his voice lazy and amused.
People laughed behind him.
"Qi—" someone started.
"Cut it out," Louis Serra called, grinning.
He pushed at Cruz's shoulder, and the joke turned into a dare and the dare landed on me.
"I'll go." I said it before my heart could tell me not to, and the room slipped sideways into something warm and dangerous.
Cruz smoked as he walked—he never needed a match, it seemed.
"Are you of age?" he asked, half-joking.
"I'm a sophomore," I said.
He only looked at me and smiled in a way that made my throat dry.
"Then come on," he said when he stubbed the cigarette.
We left to a chorus of catcalls and mock applause that made my ears burn.
At his door he tossed his keys on the shelf and said, "If you regret it, you can leave."
I reached up on my toes and kissed the corner of his mouth because I was braver then than I ever felt alone with him.
"Don't burn yourself," he murmured, distracted, pulling his hand away from the pack without breaking our small contact.
He laughed softly, an amused sound that lived in his bones.
"I didn't regret it," I whispered.
"You're in a hurry, aren't you?" he teased.
He let me stand at his kitchen counter while he smoked and watched me like someone remembering how sunlight looked.
"Do you like me?" he asked suddenly, leaning his arm against the wall so close that the tattoo along his ribs—Qiyao—peeked out when his shirt shifted.
"Yes," I admitted, and my face went hot.
"That's not in the rules," he said, thumb tracing the line of his own name as if he could read it back to me.
When dawn came, I found a student card on his coffee table and a sliver of distance between us.
"Add me," I said.
He didn't look at me when he scanned my phone.
"Fine," he said, with the kind of short softness that makes you want to keep talking to see if there's more.
We became a pair of gestures at first—small, deliberate things that meant more than the world would ever say.
He drove me home once and said, "Don't drink too much," like a boyfriend, then left like it meant nothing.
"You won't drink," I teased.
"You're the first," he said.
"To what?" I asked.
"To have me come out when people say my name," he said, and I wanted to melt into the seat.
At work in the tattoo shop later that day, my friend Genesis Griffin waved a phone at me.
"Did you know Cruz Bergmann took a girl out last night?" she said conspiratorially.
"Yes," I said.
"Congrats. Brave move." Genesis grinned.
They talked about his father and the word everyone used: killer.
"He saved someone and somehow the whole story turned into a headline about his father murdering someone," Genesis said.
"It was a mess then. It’s a mess now."
I shrugged. "People talk."
"You know his dad actually...?" Genesis trailed off.
"People said a lot of things," I said.
"And somehow Cruz was born with the tag stuck to his collar. People call him the son of a killer and leave it at that."
That line of gossip hung between us like a fog I couldn't clear. But loving someone isn't choosing their label—it is choosing the person inside the noise. I kept thinking of the tattoo on my ribs I had inked for myself the moment I knew him: his name, small and messy, right next to my heart.
"You aren't bothered by it?" Genesis asked flatly.
"It shouldn't matter," I said.
Genesis handed me a swab of antiseptic. "People are cruel. If you want to save yourself trouble—"
"I want him," I cut her off. "And I'm not saving myself anything."
Shortly after, Cruz's reputation got active oxygen thrown on it. Rumors about fights, about gang ties, about being the kind of person who stirred trouble—everything that fits a villain's profile. Someone filmed him grabbing a girl in the street to protect her, and the video loops became something else in other people's mouths. Antonia Warren's name began to orbit every whisper.
"Is it true?" a classmate asked the morning he came to our English lecture and lay volleys of whispers across the room like knives.
"Is he your boyfriend?" someone else shouted.
Cruz's voice when he spoke in front of the professor was the same low thing I'd come to memorize. "He's mine," he said, casual as breathing.
The classroom cracked into jokes and stares.
I wanted to leave with him but didn't know how to. I wanted him to say something but I didn't want to put the weight of my hope on his shoulder and have it snap.
"Stay," he murmured once, seeing me turn.
There were so many small moments that felt like proof: a cigarette offered when my nose ran from the cold; a hand covering mine when thunder rattled the windows; him buying me noodles and pretending he didn't care; him saying my name like an apology.
"You hang on to one person like a life raft?" Cruz asked one night, almost to himself.
"Yes."
"Good," he said, eyes softer than the world allowed.
Then things escalated.
A campus brawl—someone shouted 'fight' like a verdict—and suddenly I was in the middle of a rumor storm. Antonia Warren claimed she had seen Cruz organize it. The truth was muddier: the alley had no cameras, the boys who started it were drunk and ashamed. Antonia had the style and timing of someone who could make stories stick.
"You're sure?" I asked Louis Serra the next morning. He had been my quiet, steady friend—Cruz’s friend too.
"All we know is she was there," Louis said. "People talk. Some of them had knives. Some of them had nothing."
"But she said it on camera."
"So did a lot of people, Jaycee. Facts are easy to starve around."
I couldn't let him be eaten by a lie. I remember the way the administrators looked at Cruz—like they were holding a file of errors over his head. "We have to do something," I told myself, and for the first time I decided being brave didn't mean waiting for someone else to rescue me.
"You don't have to do this," Cruz warned when I told him I wanted to talk to teachers.
"Do you want me to stand by?" I fired back.
"I want you safe," he said.
"I don't want to leave you to be slandered while everybody nods like it's truth," I said.
I started gathering pieces—testimonies from kids who had seen what happened, a shaky clip from a bus CCTV that showed someone's silhouette, a friend who swore she saw Antonia whispering into the ear of Hank Davis, who'd been seen in the crowd that night wearing a hoodie and a bad smile.
"You're digging your own grave," someone sneered at me in the hall.
"If it's my grave, I’ll die for something truthful," I answered.
When the campus office wanted to sweep it under a rug, I took it to the police.
"Are you sure?" Louis asked, frowning.
"I'm sure," I said. "Let them investigate. If it's nothing, that's fine. If it's not—" I didn't finish, because fear was a small thing against a man I'd started to carry around in my chest like a secret glow.
Antonia seemed unbothered. She smiled like a woman untouched by the word 'consequence.' The university investigated; apparently now scandals needed deadlines. Meanwhile, campus thrums with the kind of cruelty that doesn't require proof—only an appetite.
"You did that?" Cruz asked later, raw and soft.
"Yes," I answered. "Because it was the right thing."
He looked at me like someone who had been walking in storm-swept streets and finally found shelter. "Why?"
"Because someone has to tell truth a story that people will listen to," I said.
Months of small events braided us together. There was the time we both stayed up to clean up the tattoo shop after a late shift.
"You're a terrible cleaner," he teased.
"You sound like a man who has never tried to scrub up after an ink spill," I shot back.
He laughed that quiet laugh and then kissed the top of my head like it mattered.
He trained my teammates for the upcoming tournament. He was a coach who taught with a scowl and an impossible softness. "You run like you mean it!" he barked, then at the end, when the girls collapsed on the grass, he sat beside me and said, "You okay?"
"Yes."
"You sure?" he asked, and I saw then that when Cruz asked, he was actually listening.
Antonia's storms came to a head in the worst way: she accused Cruz of organizing the men who came to the school that night. She said he had called them to start trouble. People who didn't know any better watched her performance and nodded. But I didn't let the performance stand.
I put together everything I had—records from the bus company that the men had been there before Cruz arrived on campus; testimony from a kid who said the men were there to confront someone else—and then I dug further. I found Hank Davis, who had always liked his jokes to be sharp and his problems to be other people's. He had been the one who encouraged the fight. He had a grudge against Cruz for an old alley scuffle. Antonia had used it like a match.
It took persistence. It took phone calls at odd hours. It took me standing in the rain on a street corner while Genesis sent messages and Louis tracked down people who were too scared. It took me learning how to stitch a truth together.
On the day we decided to expose them, I walked into the auditorium with the files and my heart banging like a drum. Cruz was there, arms folded, his face calm as stone. Antonia sat in the third row, two seats to the right, her smile made of nerves and the knowledge that she had a story no one dared question.
"Everyone, quiet," the dean said, not expecting what would unfold.
"Antonia," I said, and my voice trembled slightly. "You claimed Cruz organized the men at the alley that night."
She canted her head and smiled. "I did."
"You told a public narrative that criminalized a person without evidence." I tapped the phone in my hand. "Do you remember telling Hank Davis to make sure there were people at the alley to intimidate whoever Cruz might bring? Or telling him to bring a knife?"
There was a tensing—Antonia's jaw flexed. Someone near her gasped. Hank's face turned crimson. The room leaned in like a living thing.
Antonia's voice came out small and then sharper. "I said—no—you're lying. You don't have proof."
"I have the bus records," I said, "I have a video timestamp that shows the men were there before Cruz left practice. I have your messages to Hank. I have Hank's own admission." I clicked open a file and put the phone up. The chat logs scrolled and the timestamp glowed.
Antonia laughed, brittle. "You can't prove—"
Hank Davis's face split into a curse then into a fear that was too late. He tried to stand but the dean's eyes told him to sit. "I was trying to scare someone," Hank stammered, voice thin. "I didn't—"
"You told her to accuse Cruz," I said. "You told her to tell people Cruz brought them. You promised her attention. Is that what you're admitting?"
Hank's shoulders slumped. "I didn't think—" His voice died. His friends shifted like ants.
"You lied to get dirt," I continued, the voice finding its angle. "You used a man who can't defend himself publicly, you used a tragedy to make a gossip that sits better with people than the truth."
The air in the room moved, then snapped. Antonia stood, eyes flashing. "You have no right—" she began.
"I do," I said. "You spread a rumor that ruined a student's life. You are not the victim."
She tried to smile. "You can't—people will believe—"
"And we'll show them," Louis Serra said from the side, stepping forward with two more pieces of damning evidence: a recorded conversation and a delivery receipt that placed Hank downtown earlier that evening. Genesis held up a single, messy screenshot of messages between Hank and Antonia.
Antonia's face went pale. "You blackmail—" she spat.
"You're the one who used blackmail," I said. "You promised favors. You promised protection. You weaponized an injury."
The room went very quiet. Then the reactions started.
A girl near the back said, "She used me to spread it, too."
"She told me to whisper," a boy added.
Phones came out. People started to whisper and then to murmur and then to shout. The dean put up a hand to control the swell.
Antonia's composure cracked. She laughed once, high and brittle, and then she began to cry like anyone who has a script ripped out from under them—she changed the performance to pleading. "I didn't mean—" she sobbed. "You don't understand—"
People who had been on her side in the beginning turned their heads. I watched the way loyalty evaporated when it was clear who was telling the truth. Faces that had been ready to mock were now the ones pulling out their phones to record.
"Tell them what you told Hank," I said gently.
She looked at him as if he could save her. Hank had his head down. "I wanted to be seen," she gasped. "I wanted—" She sputtered for words that didn't fit.
She tried to deny details, then faltered when Louis produced a screenshot with her exact words. "Bring them. Make it look like he did it." Her mouth opened and closed around the truth.
"Antonia Warren, when you lied about Cruz Bergmann, you destroyed more than his reputation," the dean said, sounding tired and furious all at once. "You incited hatred. You will be suspended immediately. The police will review potential charges for false reporting."
Around us, the audience breathed as if freed. Some applauded, awkwardly, at the idea that a lie had been undone. Others hissed. Antonia tried to get out of her seat. Students pointed cameras. Some people who had been on her side stood silent, stunned at how quickly the ground beneath them had shifted.
Antonia's fall was a study in stages. First came denial—hands waving, voice bright—but it faded when everyone played a recording of her instructing Hank. Then came outrage, loud and red; she accused me of trapping her. Then came a brief, spiky lash of anger at Hank. Finally, she stopped resisting and the crumple began: she curled into herself, the bravado bled off until there was just a small, frightened person who'd never imagined a day like this.
The crowd's reaction was a slow, public unwinding. Some students jeered; others whispered in disgust; a couple of Cruz's old critics looked ashamed. Phones recorded, people who had laughed at Cruz's label now faced a woman who'd fed that label.
Hank's punishment took a different shape. He wasn't given time to perform the theatrical apology. The university called a disciplinary hearing. They suspended him. His friends started a quiet exile. A local paper ran a piece about campus responsibility and they traced Hank's other misdeeds—cheating, bullying, theft of a scholarship fund. His family tried to call him but the calls went to voicemail. Word traveled fast; an internship rescinded, a scholarship pulled—Hank experienced the social death Antonia had tried to manufacture for Cruz, but now, because of her, it was his turn.
Antonia was the public spectacle. Hank was the erasure. Both punished. Different arcs, same ruins.
At the end of that day, Cruz and I walked out into a sky so sharp it hurt. He didn't hug me at once. He looked at me, and there was something like gratitude and something else I couldn't name.
"Why did you do it?" he asked.
"Because it's the truth," I said.
He let out a breath that sounded like a laugh and a sob. "You did more than save me." He stared at the little tattoo peeking from under my shirt. "You put your name near mine," he said with a grin I recognized from the first week. "You idiot."
"Yes," I replied, heat rising in my cheeks but also a fierce calm. "Because I like you, Cruz."
He reached for my hand in front of all the people walking away from the auditorium. "You know I like you," he said. "I am not a good person, Jaycee. I'm not trying to sound like an apology—just a fact." He squeezed my hand as if to test reality. "But I'm trying."
We stitched ourselves back together slowly. He helped train the girls; he sat at the window while I taught a class of small children at the volunteer school and then he surprised the kids by bringing a whole bag of donated sneakers. I watched him in a thousand small acts. When he joked with the kids, when he sat with older neighbors and fixed a wobbly fence, the rumors shrank a little.
"Do you remember that night in the bar?" I asked once, folding laundry between our hands.
"Which night?" he murmured.
"The night you kissed me like you were afraid I'd go away."
He smiled, that crooked, dangerous smile. "You left your eyebrow kit in my car."
"That wasn't a line."
He kept his promise in odd ways. When I screwed up by getting jealous at a stupid thing, he simply said, "Stay," and that settled everything like a bandage.
We argued too. He had moments of sharpness where his bitterness slipped out—"Don't you see the world has labeled me?" he would ask—and I would tell him the truth like medicine: "Labels only last as long as people let them. We get to change them."
What saved us both, in the end, was not the grand gestures but the tiny mercies. A cup of tea made right. A hand that reached out in the night after a nightmare. A text at dawn: "Are you awake?" answered back with: "Yes, for you." The bar of ordinary things that become the architecture of a life.
There was the tournament where the women's team won, where Cruz coached like a man who had finally decided other people's trust mattered. He was proud and terrible and sideways humble when the trophy gleamed under the hot gym lights. He lifted his chin when reporters tried to shove the old label back into the headlines, and I watched the way he carried himself like someone who had learned the language of being needed.
We had a small fight about the tattoo on my ribs once.
"You really did it," he said, looking at the small neat letters that spelled his name, and a soft French word above it: amour.
"Yes," I said. "Why do you look at it like that?"
He swallowed. "Because you wrote love on your skin for me."
I rolled my eyes. "Because sometimes you are unbearable and sometimes you are luminous. I wanted both."
"Don't ruin me with your tenderness," he warned, but the warning was tender. He leaned forward and kissed me the way the world made sense: precise, certain, and a little reckless.
There were days when he would pack up his guitar and come to the shop and watch me work, leaning against the table like he owned the room. "I want to watch you do what you do," he'd say, and the world slowed because he looked like he meant it.
We kept learning the edges of each other. I learned his fear about his father, the restless nights he had as a child when the newspapers and the whispers crept into his bedroom. He learned to not flinch when I touched the tattoo and to let me trace letters along his ribs as if we rewrote the past small and tender.
Once during volunteer week after a hard day's work, a tremor struck the town—a fierce, stupid earthquake that made the floor seem to breathe. We were inside the volunteer house when the world threw itself out of alignment and the ceiling groaned.
"Run!" someone screamed.
Everything was fast and slow at the same time. Dust fell like bad weather, and chairs toppled. I felt a hand seize my wrist like an anchor. "Hold on." Cruz's voice was all angles. He pushed me, then drew me into the little triangular safety under a fallen beam. It was close, impossible, the kind of thing that makes your ribs ache from the wrongness of it.
We huddled there as the building wept gray and the world outside howled and people shouted for each other. I felt him shift next to me, his breath feathering across my ear.
"Are you okay?" he asked.
"I am," I lied, as if the word could make the tremor less real.
His fingers dug into my palm. "Don't move," he whispered. "I'm right here."
In the husk of that moment, with the room like an animal, I felt everything break open and then hold. The ambulance sirens were a long, wet sound. Later, when the doctors lifted debris and the lights in the hospital corridor were sterile, the image of him curled around me stayed like a small stubborn light.
After the quake, the campus rallied. People who had spat gossip turned up to help carry furniture. Antonia's face was small again in the crowd, not small in a good way—just a human shape that had fallen away from being arrogance. Hank Davis was gone, the price of his choices paid in the quiet of suspension letters and empty seats at gatherings.
Then came a day that felt like a small soft gift: Cruz took my hand in the sunlight and said, "Stay with me. Properly."
And I did. I chose a life built of late-night tuna noodles and morning coffee, of the tattoo I had hidden sometimes and shown sometimes like a promise. He chose to keep walking back from the edge and together we made a place where rumors couldn't reach us anymore, because we had put up our own sign: here lived two people who had decided the truth was worth more than noise.
We still had lunch with Louis and Genesis, and sometimes Antonia would be a cautionary tale in our whispers. But the largest arc was quieter—a slow, true thing. When people asked me if I ever regretted the chaos, I finally could look them in the eye.
"No," I said. "Because he caught me when the world loosened its grip. He keeps catching me."
One night, as rain pattered like a slow drum on the window, Cruz took my face in his hands and said, without any shuffle or fear, "You remember when we met?"
"Every stupid detail," I answered.
"Good," he said, and then he kissed me like he'd been keeping his words in a locked drawer for years. He kissed me like apology and promise and quiet revolution all pressed into one.
I kissed him back because that was our language now: messy, undeniable, and ours.
The End
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