Sweet Romance13 min read
"Hi" — The Small Mess That Changed Everything
ButterPicks12 views
"Hi."
I said it like it was the smallest thing in the world and turned away.
He looked up. Briggs Carson looked the way he always did when he caught me by surprise — half annoyed, half bored, and a little dangerous like a storm far away.
"Don't say hi like you're writing me a bill," he said. His voice cut clean through the hallway noise.
"I didn't know bills said hi," I shot back before I could stop myself.
He smiled a tiny, sharp smile. "Then you must owe me nothing."
Everyone laughed except me. I kept my face calm. Inside, my heart felt like it had tripped and landed in a puddle.
My name is Giselle Wolff. I am fourteen the day I landed back in the house that shadowed Briggs' life.
We were kids once. We were not friends. We were not enemies either — we occupied the awkward space of people who had handed each other grudges like trading cards and then outgrew the courage to throw them away.
Briggs' mother, Yolanda Durham, was the one who called my mother and asked a favor.
"Can Giselle stay with me for a few months?" she asked on the phone with the kind of voice that hides a bruise.
Sophie said yes. Sophie is my mother. She travels for work and leaves a string of goodbyes across the map.
So I came and lived under the same roof as Briggs, which is how the little things began: small wars, smaller truce lines, jokes left like traps and sweets left like flags.
"Eat whatever," Yolanda told me the first night. Her eyes were tired, but she smiled like someone setting a fragile vase down. "Make yourself at home."
I did.
"Don't wake me," Briggs told me from the couch at midnight when I was the mouse in the kitchen looking for chips. I froze. He was there. He had been there the whole time.
"Old mouse," he said. "You eat like a rodent."
"Old rodent," I answered, because what else could I do?
He came close. Up close he wasn't the sharp one. He was only a boy who knew how to hide his soft spots with sarcasm.
"Quiet," he warned and then, in a voice low enough that only I could hear, "don't make me laugh. I can't stand seeing you happy for no reason."
I laughed anyway.
That laugh is how the mess started.
Years back, when we were small, he and his friend Errol Dillon locked me in a room as a joke and then forgot me for hours. I got scared and left with a fever. I always thought of that as the day the world made a tiny crack in him and in me. He called me "fish" as a childish name. I called him worse things. We both kept score like children who forget how to let things go.
Days bled into schooldays. I watched him on the flagpole at dawn, shirt stubbornly white, eyes colder than the morning. He would fight at ceremonies. People respected him and feared him in the same breath. He never apologized for anything, not even for being born into a family that left him hollow sometimes.
Once his father showed up on our street with a baby in a carriage. Briggs spat words that would freeze any heart.
"Don't show up," he shouted. "Don't bring them to my life."
He called his father's family "a show." He said things that left his father speechless. I ate a slice of the birthday cake I had brought for him and watched candles die in the rain.
"Happy birthday," I said, handing him a piece.
"Nice gesture," he stone-faced, then he said, softer, "You shouldn't have."
"You didn't ask me not to," I told him.
He hated birthdays. He hated being remembered like a wound.
Later that week he caught me in the rain. My umbrella folded. I held the cake box in my hands and the rain in my nose and somewhere in the noise he appeared.
"You always come late," I cried. Rain masked my voice.
He sat beside me and took the box. "I know," he said. "But I'm here."
He smeared cake on my face. I smushed it back.
"You're a dog," I said with whipped cream in my hair.
"A dog that cleans up your mess," he said, and his smile was dangerous and kind all at once.
The next morning we both woke with fevers. Yolanda discovered us and panicked. She called an ambulance and dragged us to the hospital like two little things dropped in the middle of an adult problem.
They said I had a bad twist in my ankle. They told him to take it seriously. But when the nurse left the room, Briggs' face calmed. For a second I saw a boy who could be gentle.
"Don't cry in front of her," he said. "It annoys me."
I pretended it did. I pretended many things then.
After that, things changed in small ways that had the feel of important things. He would fix the electric box when it tripped. He would glare at the men who said nasty things about me. He would, once, hold my hand when I was terrified in a market because a shadow looked too close.
"You're weird," I told him. "You're weird and you don't know how to be nice."
"Being nice is tiring," he said. "And also dangerous."
Dangerous, because to be open is to be hurt.
We were young. We learned the rhythm of each other's breaths. There was teasing and the silence that sometimes cut sharper than the worst words.
When the centennial came — the big school celebration with banners and a stage that would swallow seventeen-year-old dreams — our class wanted to perform a dance. I wanted to be on that stage more than anything else. My ankle had healed. My heart had past aches that felt like old photographs. I showed up at every rehearsal, every hour, and waited for the chance to shine.
"You're going on stage," Katie Feng said and tapped my shoulder. She had a way of looking like she already believed in everyone.
"Are you sure?" I asked.
She smiled. "You're sure."
But everything costs something. Briggs didn't want me to dance. "I don't want clumsy people on stage," he said once during practice, and I felt the air cut out of me.
"Am I clumsy?" I asked.
"Not in a way that matters," he said, and he walked away. His friend, Errol, laughed. The sound was mean and warm.
I practiced harder.
I practiced so much that my body learned the steps in my sleep. I tethered myself to the idea of the stage, because up there everything could be made right. I kept a tiny handwoven bracelet, ugly and bright, on my wrist. An old woman in the hospital garden had given it to me and said, "This will keep you lucky." She had also taught me to stitch names into red string. I wrote "Briggs" because it felt wrong and right at the same time.
One rainy night Errol and two other boys pushed us. Briggs grabbed the bike and pedaled like the road was the last path to safety. I held on with a grip that was more fear than bravery.
"Hold tight," he told me.
"I am holding," I said through a laugh that was close to a cry.
We almost crashed. I fell and twisted my ankle again. That moment changed something. If I hated him before, I hated the boys who chased us worse. Briggs picked me up and took me to the hospital.
"It's my fault," he said. "I should have slowed down."
"Don't," I told him, because I loved when his voice sounded small with guilt.
At the hospital, the doctor said, "No dancing for a while." My chest made a small empty noise.
"Then don't," Briggs said like a dare.
I wanted to be angry. Instead I leaned over and kissed the line of his jaw.
He seemed surprised. Then he pulled away.
"I don't know how to hold this," he muttered. "How to be close."
"Neither do I," I whispered. "We'll learn."
So we learned.
Months were small lessons. I wore the ugly red bracelet and he started to notice when I was cold. He made tea the evening I said I couldn't sleep. He slammed drawers when he was angry and then apologized with a single quiet look.
"You don't have to pretend with me," I said once, watching him fix a broken hinge.
He looked at me like I said something ridiculous. "I am not pretending," he said. "I am practicing not pretending."
"You're weird," I told him.
"Maybe," he said. "But I'm your kind of weird."
At school the drama of it all only grew. The centennial approached. We practiced. Our team fell into rhythm. The dance became a promise woven with muscle memory and sweat.
"You're really going to dance?" he asked the night before.
"I'm going to die," I said. "Probably."
"Don't," he ordered in that way he had. "Dance and live."
On stage the lights swallowed me whole. All I saw was the spot where the sun would catch my cheek. I felt Briggs' eyes on the crowd. I felt his hand once, a brush on my back to steady me through a tricky turn. I heard the hush and the breath of the audience. I moved until the music wound down.
When the curtain came, people clapped like a wave. My legs felt light and broken at once.
We had practiced a final move — a risky lift. The music held, I ran, and Briggs caught me steady, like a heart catching a breath.
"You're bright," he said, when the lights came up and the world returned. He used the word like it tasted odd on his tongue.
I surprised myself by saying, "I didn't do it for you."
"You did," he replied, and there it was — a quiet, irreverent truth.
After the show, something shifted. The hard edges in his face softened. He took me to the rooftop where the city smelled like cold rain and sugar.
"Why did you come tonight?" I asked.
He looked at me. "Because you said you'd catch a star for me," he said.
"I said that?"
"You did, in practice," he said. "You always promise big things."
"Well, did I catch one?"
"You did," he answered. "And then you threw it back in my face."
I laughed. He laughed with me. It felt like sunlight where before it had been only the small gray of the day.
After graduation came the first real test. Yolanda got sick and had to travel. Sophie called in tears and said she had an emergency. I stayed. Briggs stayed too, because he always had somewhere inside him that refused to let people go alone.
This is the part where I should tell you all the heartbreak and all the joy. I should tell you his father left and he said things on the street that made strangers look away. I should tell you that once he called me "annoying" and then pushed his forehead to mine and said, "I'm sorry."
I will tell both.
One night his father came again. He had a bright smile that did not reach his eyes. Briggs hated the way his father could step into rooms like he paid the air a bill.
"You should meet your brother," his father said. The baby looked like a small moon in the carriage.
"I don't want to meet them," Briggs said. "I don't want you."
"Don't say that," his father said, surprised like someone who never had to be surprised.
"I mean it," Briggs answered. His hand shook like a bird.
I gave him a cake I had saved. "Happy not-a-birthday," I said.
He took it with a face that didn't move. Then he hugged the cake box to his chest like a small animal.
"Thank you," he said. "Thank you for remembering me when everyone else forgets."
The months threaded into a different life. I learned how to wash dishes without listening to his mutterings. He learned to unfurl his smile in private.
Then the worst thing happened. I got sick. We both got sick because of stupid small things — a rainstorm, a cake left out, a night where we thought we were invincible. We ended up in a ward together, noses red, voices low as bugs.
Yolanda fussed like mothers do. Sophie called us "kids" on the phone and then choked and cried a little.
"How are you feeling?" Briggs asked.
"Terrible," I said.
"Good," he said. "Me too."
I liked him when he was small and real like that.
The school laid out its final events. We finished our year with photos and plans. We promised we would be different people next year, or the same. We made plans — silly ones like traveling together, stupid ones like taking a class, touching ones like holding hands.
"You won't leave," I told him.
"I won't if you don't," he replied.
We fell into a rhythm: fights and sutures, candy and grudges, late-night talks and quiet silence. He taught me how to fix an old radio and I taught him the words to a song. He said he liked the way I hummed in the morning and I said I liked the way his hands were callused.
One summer night, the small peace all of us knew broke.
A man followed me at the store. He was the kind of man whose eyes do not wait for permission. He showed me something he shouldn't have and I ran. I ran like a small thing in a theater trying to catch light. Rain came and soaked my hair. I threw myself into the street and bumped into somebody hard.
"Stop," I gasped. It was Briggs.
"Come here," he ordered. He wrapped his jacket over me, palms steady like maps.
I cried; I held him like a lifeline.
"Why did you come?" I asked when my breath found shape again.
"I didn't like thinking which animal made you afraid," he said.
He walked me home under the umbrella he had taken from his friend Errol. He didn't leave me even to stand in the doorway. He stood on the street, like a lighthouse.
"Do you know how stupid you are?" I asked finally.
"Yes," he said. "And I'll be stupid as long as it's necessary."
Days later, on a roof overlooking the city, he did the thing everyone wants but rarely gets: he spoke with his whole face.
"I don't know where I'm going," he said. "I don't know where you will be. But if the world splits, if everything breaks — I'll find you."
"I don't want you to find me in a mess," I said.
"I don't want to find you at all," he whispered. "I want to stay."
"Stay where?"
"Here, with you," he said.
Lightning doesn't have words for the way my heart answered. I swallowed. "Stay," I said, with the thin courage of people who've learned to stake their chances on other people.
Time is small things sewn together. There were a thousand smaller moments: him making soup after I burned dinner, my hand slipping into his in a corridor, him bending to braid my hair in a mood I had never seen. Once, when I said I wanted to go away to a music program, he pushed my head gently and said, "Go see the big sky. Take the star. Bring it back."
I left for a month. The music program was bright and cruel. I learned songs that made my fingers sore. I missed him. I sent postcards that proved that I was alive and that the world didn't fall apart when he wasn't in the room.
He wrote back on back of a shopping receipt: "Don't die. Come home. Briggs." I put it in my pocket and read it until it smelled like him.
When I got back, he met me at the gate.
"You look older," he said, like a man who had measured me in months and found inches.
"I danced for the world," I told him.
"And?"
"And I didn't catch a star," I admitted. "I gave one away."
He laughed. The laugh made his eyes small and honest. He kissed my forehead like a promise.
"Good," he said. "Promised me only good things."
Senior year arrived like a storm that has waited its whole life to break.
We both had choices to make. He had offers to go to a school out of town. I had audition dates and a teacher who said I had talent. We didn't talk about the future like people talk about weather. We talked about it like people talk about armor. How do you give up a city and someone who taught you to stand up straight?
"Go," I told him. "I can come visit."
"No," he said. "You go. I'll build something to catch your return."
We promised to write. I promised to dance for him, every time the music needed a body. He promised to keep my house from falling down.
In one of those nervous nights, the night before we left for separate paths, we sat across a booth in a tiny diner and argued like the people who loved each other best.
"You're reckless," I said.
"And you're safe."
"You are a storm."
"And you're a lighthouse," he shot back.
We held hands. No words. The whole diner felt like a small boat on a large sea.
"Marry me when I'm older," he said suddenly.
"You're insane," I answered.
"Older?" he countered. "Yes. Me older. You, forever."
I laughed between breaths. "Deal," I said.
We kissed then, for a long time like it had been rehearsed for years. The city let us have it and the streetlight blinked like a witness.
Years passed like train stops. I moved cities for music. He went to school for engineering. We kept in touch. We missed birthdays and then made up with calls that would last hours. We sent pictures. He sent one of a building half-built with a written note: "This is for your stage." I cried in the middle of an airport once because of it.
We argued sometimes. Distance does a masterful job of teaching how to plead. Once he forgot an important audition date and I roared like a storm at him.
"You promised," I said.
He came and found me three days later with a small plane ticket and a ridiculous grin. "I forgot," he apologized, "but I remembered to show up."
I forgave him like I had been taught to — slowly and then fully.
Years later, I returned a guest at our high school's old hall where the centennial portrait had faded and the flags had changed. I came back on a tour, a performance that would take me to the same stage where I had felt the world tilt.
He was there in the audience this time, older, hands with a few scars — each one a map of the life he had built. He built a small theater center near the school. He had called it only once he was certain. He held my hand before we went in public, fingers now fit like a key.
"You're home," he said.
"Because of you," I answered.
On stage, light was a good friend. I moved and felt everything I knew made sense. He watched. At the end, as applause came like a tide, he stood before me and spoke with a voice that had lost none of its bite.
"You said you'd marry me when older," he said, binding my hand with a small red looping string.
"Don't be silly," I answered, though my mouth was soft.
"This time I am serious," he said. "Will you be mine? Not for a day or a year, but for every small thing that will come?"
I watched the people. I watched him with the face of the boy who had learned how to be steady. I saw the older, rough hands, the firm jaw. I remembered the nights he walked the rain with me and the mornings he fed me soup like a small king.
"Yes," I said. It was the single word I had been practicing in the mirror for years. It fit like a coin in a shadowed hand.
He kissed me then. People cheered. The world was a small and perfectly large place.
We married in a park that smelled like the first rain. Yolanda and Sophie both cried. They stood side by side like two women who had been through storms.
"This is how I wanted it," Briggs told me later, in a whisper that only I could hear. "Simple, honest."
"It is hard to be human," I said. "Thank you for being my partner."
He grinned crooked. "You always called me 'dog.'"
"Yes."
"And I will always be yours, however many names you give me."
We laughed. We were young, but older than the brash kids who fought about silly things. We had learned patience, the art of small mercies. We argued like cats and mended like people who patched ropes.
Years later, when we told our daughter the story of how we met, she would giggle at the part where we smeared cake on each other's faces.
"Who is the hero?" she would ask.
"We are both," we say, because hero is a messy word. We both stood in rain and kept each other from drowning. We both grew out of scars.
Sometimes she would tug at the small red bracelet on her wrist and ask what it meant.
"It kept you lucky," I would say. "But luck is not magic. Luck is people who choose to stay."
Briggs would ruffle her hair. "And people who clean up cake off faces. That's important too."
At night, when our daughter slept and the house was quiet, we would sit under a thin lamp and exchange small sentences like vows renewed.
"Remember the old woman?" I would say.
"She told you to stitch a name," he'd answer.
"You stole my bookmark."
"I gave it back."
The bracelet held its thread. It faded in color now, a little ugly and very precious. It had names stitched into it and tiny knots that reminded us of the times we held fast.
One day our daughter would grow and come home with a small problem. She would find us in the kitchen arguing over the salt.
"Will you help me?" she would ask.
We would both put down our spoons.
"Of course," we both say.
Love, I have learned, is not thunderous. It is the little acts: to bring tea, to fix a lock, to bake a bad cake and still put it in the middle of a rainstorm. It's saying "hi" and meaning it, coming late and staying longer.
"Hi," I say now, on mornings when the sun is small and everything smells like baking.
He looks up and smiles like the same storm.
"Hi," he answers. "Come here."
I go. I always do.
The End
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